Excellent show guy’s.

Pacing is critical for me, I find that if a game keeps leading me on for hours on end with little to no story I will put the game down and walk away (FFXII and FFXIII are in this category sadly). I just don’t have time to play a game for 4 hours straight to make any significant headway. A game that I have recently picked back up that has nailed pacing to a T is Enslaved. Action and platforming are split perfectly and I can pick the game up play 45 minutes and get a decent chunk of story from it before putting it back down again. Likeability of the characters doesn’t hurt either.

On the difficulty front, I’ve always been a normal guy. I just never saw the point of needlessly making the game harder for a few achievements/rewards and as Jeff said, there’s no point when you can just YouTube the extra cut scenes/bonuses at a later date.

When a game frustrates me I usually put it down and I rarely come back to it. Meat Boy is the exception to this as after the cool down I am usually able to complete the obstacle that flummoxed me for 40 minutes in less than 10 tries.

As for the DLC shenanigans it pains me that I actually considered buying Dragon Age 2 JUST for the preorder bonus goodies even though I haven’t finished DA:O. I am a sucker for that sort of thing and if it enhances the base game I find it very tempting to grab it and play it later. Collectors editions also play into this, I like the nicknacks but the in-game content is usually pretty cool.

LA Noire is probably the most disappointing culprit in this situation. In a game where story is everything they are cutting out parts piecemeal and giving them to different retailers?! I find that appalling. They are actually denying content from their customers because they didn’t preorder/buy the game at GameStop/Walmart. I don’t mind different costumes/guns/etc but this is too much.

Don’t get me wrong I will be preordering it GameStop as I have a good report with the manager/employee’s there and they typically give me preorder bonus cards even if I don’t preorder a game. But the Walmart bonus sounds intriguing, a car theft ring or something to that effect.

Bonuses should be bonuses and not critical to the game itself. Its sad to see things going that way.

Though I do appreciate the preorder bonus for Portal 2, $5 off is not too shabby

I didn’t hate TFU2 but I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the first one and the gameplay isn’t compelling enough to make me want to grind through the challenges like I did with the first. It all felt a bit “dumbed down” and I didn’t feel as “over-powered” as I did in the first one. It’s definitely a purchase I regret.

Enslaved though…Time for some crazy talk but Enslaved might very well be my game of the year at this point. I loved everything about it, except the unskippable cut scenes which I have to watch when I’m grinding through it to find every last tech orb. I know…GOTY? When Red Dead Redemption came out and…well…something else I’m forgetting but yeah…Enslaved is definitely 2010’s darling as far as I’m concerned. The ending, although a bit anemic didn’t bother me. I just didn’t want the game to end. They really could have fleshed out the relationship between Monkey and Trip more and made the transition from “You fuckin’ bitch, you enslaved me!” to “Hey, listen to me and I’ll take care of you.” a bit more slowly. I found myself caring about these characters despite the rushed and sloppy handling of their relationship. Enslaved was SO far off my radar and that might be why I loved it as much as I did but it really left me wanting more and I loved every minute of it.

@rocgaude I thoroughly enjoyed Darksiders. You’ll dig it.

I’m not blind to Enslaved’s flaws, I think it was a case of the right game at the right time for me. I wanted colorful and platform-y and relatively easy, and that’s what I got. Similar to why I’m enjoying Force Unleashed II right now, despite it’s lukewarm reviews.

@RocGaude I can see that happening with Enslaved. My modus operandi, perhaps to the detriment of the experience, is to play a few things at once. A night of something here, a night of something there. Granted, time being what it is these days, it makes for a disjointed affair…but if it wasn’t the case and I didn’t cleave Enslaved into chunks and throw it between sessions of RUSE or Argonauts, I probably wouldn’t have been so kind.

After perusing through the new “Art of Darksiders” book from Udon (288 pages of sexy), I was inspired to retry the Darksiders demo. That game is fucking metal. Into the queue it goes.

Also, I finished Enslaved. The more I played it, the less I liked it. The ending is fine if you get off on open-ended symbolic crap. Glad I played through it but wish it had been a flick as originally planned.

Regarding the glow-y bits in Enslaved: I agree that the real answer is to have an art style that clearly shows what’s grab-able and what’s not. Barring that, the only choice that Ninja Theory had was whether or not to highlight important spots.

If they hadn’t, the pacing of the game would have been completely thrown off by the player randomly jumping at stuff hoping Monkey would grab hold, and then the game loses the thing it’s best at: brisk pacing.

In the end, I think they made the right choice.

@RedSwirl Fair enough. I actually think Enslaved was the perfect “action game for busy people”. It didn’t mess about, you got through the game and BAM, if you weren’t satisfied with the actual mechanics, you’d be an idiot not to be satisfied with the real reason to play that – Trip and Monkey.

I can see how you’d be annoyed at the lack of platforming freedom, even in regards to basic ledges and channelling progression.

Oh, here’s a freebie that is refreshingly unrelated to Halloween. Super Crate Box. Since many are on a Meatboy high and the air is filled with the delightful stench of ye olde schoolery, this wonderful little game should fit the bill. Get crate requirement, finish level. Fight the horde. Download – http://bit.ly/clFQrB

@unmanneddrone Prince of Persia and Uncharted both managed to make ledges stick out purely through the art direction: by making them an appealing color or making them physically stick out. If a game actually needs to make the important stuff glitter for you to see it, it’s doing something wrong visually. That also goes for flashing what button I need to press everywhere all the time in a big banner that crosses the whole screen.

Maybe you could call Enslaved a platform/puzzle adventure game on rails, but whatever it was it missed a really good chance to land among my top games of the year.

As for other hand-holding games, for starters pretty much every game Ubisoft has published this generation (except maybe Assassin’s Creed II and Forgotten Sands). I also dislike it when games flash hints during loading screens. One other special example is BioShock. Even after I turned off the quest arrow, flashing items, and like 20 other assistances, I still felt like the flashy help menus and “GOAL” signs on the maps broke the sense of disbelief.

A game should not tell you what you need to do to progress, it should make it easy for you to figure that out. When I start a new game these days, the one thing I dread the most is the inevitable hour-long mandatory tutorial. I understand some people are slower than others, but you need to give us the option to skip or turn off those tutorials and put in more subtle, elegant instructions.

Before playing Enslaved I finished Kirby’s Epic Yarn and thought that game was a great example of how to do this right. The game is easy as hell, but it was still fun because nothing ever got in the way of me playing it. Its instructions were simple and elegantly embedded in the world, and there was always ample extra content for more skilled players.

@RedSwirl Really? You think you’d have fun jumping towards every single upright in parts of levels to find the pipes to climb? Enslaved never felt like it was a traditional 3D platformer at all, and the “hand holding” as you put it just helped keep the pace up. That’s my take, at least.

Also, could you list a few of these “hand holding” console games? I’m curious.

On Enslaved, I’ll just say that it’s a classic example of the hand-holding that I hate in today’s console games. I don’t see why it has to highlight ledges when Prince of Persia and Uncharted do just fine without that. I’d also have liked the opportunity to actually figure out some of the puzzles on my own. I wish I could carpet bomb all those loading screen hints that appear in every. damn. game these days.

Beautiful use of UE3 though.

Oh, and now I can finally start Enslaved.

I’m surprised people are so hot on Enslaved. It felt really janky in the demo. Does the finished game control better?

@rocgaude really? Why this particular game?

@feenwager Unless you’re susceptible to motion sickness.

Finished Enslaved. I’ll probably save my thoughts for the Squadcast, but suffice it to say that I think everyone here will enjoy it.

Also, here’s that Enslaved wallpaper I made:

http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=03yo352j4xerwtx&thumb=4

I’m on Chapter 11 of Enslaved, and I can say I’m as interested as ever to see where the plot winds up.

There are a few moments of frustration, with some of the hoverboarding, but overall a solid experience.

@beige Oh, talk about being spoiled! I’m kinda glad Castlevania doesn’t do much for me, outside of a strange love for Lament of Innocence (y’know, the PS2 era games you’re supposed to hate?!), because I’m loving the joyful level culmination of Enslaved (@angryjedi is still running the high court case against me for my disdain towards traditional fantasy thematics and tropes). But it’s true, Trip and Monkey are the stars. For me, they’re besting even the Uncharted mob because the oh-so-subtle interplay between the two. Trip is gorgeous; a real magnum opus for sublime digital femininity sans pandering or gratuity. Monkey puts pretty much every other brute to shame. What’s more, the nuance of silence between the two works as much as the dialogue does…and motivation is wonderfully realised. Enough gushing.

It does make one consider this a strange thematic kin of what the next Beyond Good & Evil could be, at least in terms of characterisation!

By the way, did anyone play Rise of the Argonauts? Liquid Entertainment’s flawed more-RPG-than-action gem? I recently nabbed it from Play-Asia for a measly fifteen dollars and the little I’ve played of it is great. Very much a @beige game, if I may so bold as to suggest it, with lots of quality dialogue and quite possibly the most amazing soundtrack I’ve heard in a while (composed by Tyler Bates, who also scored the 300 and Watchmen movies). Not particularly stunning in the graphics department, and has some backtracking issues which interrupt the pace somewhat, but a rich little RPG-lite that seemed to sink back to within Poseidon’s realm as quickly as it had surfaced.

Since you guys love Enslaved so goddamn much, Dead End Thrills just put up a gallery for it: http://deadendthrills.com/galleries/enslaved-odyssey-to-the-west/

As for me, the game will be arriving from GameFly this week… just in time for Vanquish and New Vegas. Oops.

@bowlisimo You know, I never thought I’d see A-10 Cuba! mentioned anywhere again! But then, if there’s any place it would occur, the squad barracks would be it. I think my favourite part of it was simply using the chase cam (as appallingly un-sim grognardian as that is!) and admiring those gorgeous flat-shaded polygonal machines dance about in the air. I had the demo for a long while before finding the full version, so for many months, it was a mess-about trying to drop bombs on the ships cruising through the harbour. Glorious game.

I’ve only played the console version of Il-2, but have a great admiration for the devs and the community around the PC release. Hence my excitement for Apache, those guys really do know how to make a good, meaty flight game.

@feenwager Just kicked off Enslaved last night. What a gorgeous, gorgeous game.

I’m on Chapter 8 of Enslaved, and I’m digging it. It’s got a wonky camera, which is ridiculous in 2010, but it doesn’t ruin the experience.

Essentially, it’s the Uncharted formula: beautiful world, cool setting, consequence-free platforming, broken up by combat and light puzzle solving. Games like that live and die on the characters and story, and Enslaved nails those two aspects.

@angryjedi Looking forward to reading your articles. I’ll give them a good going-over when I return to the homestead this weekend. And yeah, Enslaved should be a hoot. That’s the only thing that’s woeful about living where I do, I have to wait for a week or two after titles release to get my mitts on them, and the discussion is already underway and on the final stretch on the Squawk. A small price to pay, I suppose.

@beige. Yes. Enslaved – 360. I played the demo on both – PS3 first and felt “yeah this seems like a really good game but runs terribly”. On 360 I noticed an immediate difference not even 15 seconds in. I could instantly tell this is what I’m supposed to be running the game on. The full game is on my GameFly Que.

I didn’t bother with Darksiders because of how painfully generic it looks. How well does that game “rip off” the Zelda formula anyway? That’s probably my favorite “type” of game of all, but only because of the central focus on exploration. Does Darksiders carry that at all?

Anyway, still deep in Peace Walker epilogue content. Got a perfect score on the dating sim mini game, and now apparently Snake has to build his own Metal Gear in order to get the true ending.

I had the same Enslaved/Darksiders thought. Both are games that sort of snuck up on us and turned out to be really good. At least, the demo for Enslaved is good. I’ll have the full game waiting for me when I get home Friday.

Enslaved seems like the “new” Darksiders.

Gratuitous pimpage!

I wrote things about Enslaved, Motorstorm: Apocalypse and Dragon Age II. Go check ’em out! Please? Thanks. 🙂

@unmanneddrone: I think Enslaved is going to be a big deal once everyone play it. I got hands-on with it for a while at Eurogamer and watched the developer session, too. It’s fantastic, and I’m really looking forward to it, despite knowing literally nothing about it before the weekend just gone.

I immediately ordered Enslaved after playing the demo. That’s about all I can say, I liked it that much.

@zegolf I don’t know how it happened but your posting of Game Informer’s BioShock Infinite cover brought over a thousand hits to the Squawkbox. Crazy.

@beige That Enslaved review has me kind of excited. It just went straight to the top of my GameFly queue.

I was originally thinking about doing a different theme for the next show but after reading your rage about the Medal of Honor thing, maybe we should hit the “violence in games” topic instead. I feel pretty qualified about this topic and think that I can shed some light as to why EA did what they did.

Instead of not having any fun with Halo tonight I decided to try a few demos.

Hydrophobia seems decent, but it also seems like an HD PS2 game. Definitely a good call to release it at $15. As a piece of cheap-Fu it’s worth a look.

Enslaved is now on my radar. I thought the demo was fantastic. The whole vibe reminded me of Jak & Daxter, in a way. Comes out tuesday, I may grab it when I get back from Chicago.