Waiting for the "Whoops, we 'forgot' to remove it".

But players online who have hopped in already are reporting that the DLC’s main questline can be completed in about two to three hours

Seriously you greedy assholes?

Today’s game is some more Halo: Reach. With our new friend joining us we did some more games. Namely starting off with Capture the Flag on Blood Gulch. Me and one of my friends on my team managed to sneak in the back of the enemy base with the teleporter and grab the flag while they were distracted. We snuck around the top of the ridge and he covered me with the Sniper Rifle. It was a really profound moment of teamwork for me which is what makes me love this game so much. It felt like we were on the same wavelength for that brief time.

With Blood Gulch I also wanted to mention how I love the warm color pallet. Especially if you’re in the red team it’s like camouflage sort of.

I also was playing around with Dark table and made this edit to see what I could do with a JPEG (I normally work with RAWs in editing software). I don’t think editing will be standard for my posts, but I did want to share this one.

We also continued the campaign a little. We had more than 4 though, and initially I thought we could get upwards of 8 players through the Alpha Ring Mod, turns out though I was wrong (partly) and that’s only Local from what I understood, which is why we made the switch to multiplayer, so everyone could join.

Tomorrow I think I’m gonna sit down and try to play some more FF, as Halo I think after needing to reinstall needs some more config. Namely the AA seems a little worse than before. I don’t know if that’s an issue with the game or my setup though. I’ll have to look into it.

It's a grittier take than the recent Like a Dragon games, but I'm sure it'll still have bonkers mini-games.

How old were you and maybe most importantly was it worth it ?

Today’s game is Ghost of Tsushima. I was originally planning some more Final Fantasy 8, but I came down with something that made me sick and really wasn’t in the mood for a RPG with how much strategy it can involve sometimes. I’ve had this installed for a bit so I opted to play this instead. Its combat requires a lot less thinking and I already know the plot from borrowing it from my local library and playing it all in one week (seriously, Libraries are great).

The thing that was most memorable to me was this games grass (that and a few story moments). The game has really pretty grass physics that make me just want to sink into the grass and lay there. The color grading on the game also is gorgeous. The colors are like a sort of pale but vibrant shading that I’m in love with. It reminds me of early spring.

My favorite section of the game are these Hotsprings. They really were memorable to me my first playthrough years ago, and upon playing again I love the way the smoke sits on the water. I don’t know if it was a problem with the PC build but the shadows really seemed to dislike the water there though.

I made it as far as one mission because my controller (an old PS3 DualShock) doesn’t want to play nice with the game for some reason. So I can’t sprint. That leaves me only with walking which makes getting around a lot slower. I sunk some time into the mission where you’re hunting the Archer’s prodigy and then got off to try and fix the bug. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it fixed because it’s causing issues and I’d love to play this simultaneously with FF8.

What an utter dick.

Full post: Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) but the numbers I've heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry

To address some frequently asked questions:

• These are US and Canada productions. If you're wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere
• These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)

Today’s game is Halo Reach. I bought a friend a copy of the game while it’s on sale so he could join us for the campaign. So now we have a full 8 person roster for the campaign to pick from.

I’ve already talked about this game a lot, and I had a suggestion from someone to talk about things besides mechanics. And so far I don’t believe I’ve talked about the Art, both music and the design. So i chose to focus on that.

I’m a big fan of the art style with its soft and almost muted feel. It helps set it apart from Halo CE-3. The muted tone also really helps set the tone. It feels less bombastic than something like what Halo 3 is.

With Nightfall especially it makes everything kind of have this nice cool and dark tone while still being playable and not abhorrently dark. Plus i love the way things like the Jackal’s shield have a kind of soft glow to them.

Halo’s music is amazing too. It’s the first time a video game made me go “wow. This doesn’t feel like a side piece to a video game. It feels like its own thing”. It really makes it feel unique. Plus the way it’s not constantly playing helps keep it from getting old. Winter Contingency alone with the opening motif has definitely cemented it for me as one of my favorites.

Finally, I didn’t want to end off without talking a little about me messing around with my friends. This is Halo after all.

The entirety of the thing we kept killing eachother. It started when I got in a ghost and gut blown up by my friend who stole the wraith. In retaliation I air striked him and took the tank out. Our other friend joined in by running me down with a Ghost. This kept going until we quit and ended with a well placed sniper shot to a Forklift that killed all of us.

We (hopefully) will play some more tomorrow. I know I’ve played Reach a bunch but it’s one of my favorites and I love playing it. I do hope this playthrough doesn’t fall in the bin with the other games I’ve started and dropped.