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  1. TV and movies get separate threads for upcoming vs ones we've watched, so why not the same for video games? Here's a nice big article about a bunch of games scheduled to come out this year https://www.comingsoon.net/games/features/1257187-comingsoon-50-most-anticipated-video-games-of-2023 I still think it's funny Capcom remade RE4 before Code Veronica, and for me personally, I am looking forward to Silksong the most, even more than Tears of the Kingdom! Of course, an actual proper gameplay trailer for that could change things
  2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (~3 hours in) WOW. I am blown away by this game. Of course, my background with video gaming is that I played extensively from my childhood (80s) through college (graduated 2001), so on the NES, SNES, and N64 primarily. Since then I kept up on Nintendo systems (own a GC, Wii, Wii U, and now Switch) but played way less games for them than I ever did for the older systems. So I primarily love 8-bit and 16-bit era games, or rather I've primarily enjoyed side scrollers, platformers, RPGs, metroidvania, etc - pixel art based games, really - more so that 3D games (or course Nintendo knocked it out of the park with so many great 3D games like Mario 64, Zelda OOT, Mario Galaxy, Mario 3D Land, and who doesn't love Goldeneye and Perfect Dark). But now I see what advancements I've been missing in these recent generations! What I mean is, there's probably a lot about this game that people will recognize from I dunno, Xenoblade, GTA, Horizon, Skyrim, etc - all kinds of games I've never played at all. So maybe for me, this game is mind blowing than it would be to the people playing every AAA title on current gen consoles. But on the other hand, the entire world seems to be impressed with this game, so maybe Nintendo really did one-up the competition and put out something really special here. I love how the game opens with practically no cutscene, no prologue, no explantion, just a voice telling you to wake up, you wake up, and you're in control. I love how you go outside the cave and there's an old man, just like in the original Zelda game (the guy who get your first sword from). In fact, in many ways, I feel like this game is Miyamoto trying to kind of remake the original game, or rather the spirit of it - basically just waking up in Hyrule with no one to guide you, and you being able to just go out and explore..... and its great! I appreciate that while you can absolutely go anywhere and try anything at any time, the Old Man is there to send you on your first little quest, and after that, the next 3 Shrines that I think will unlock a lot more of the world (I've done the magnesis, bomb, and stasis shrines so far). But I get the feeling I could have done plenty of stuff already without even talking to him at all. One thing I love is that for example, after completing one shrine, I wanted to head out to another one I had seen on the top of the tower. On my way, I saw some smoke in the distance and figured I'd check it out. Turns out it was a camp set up by the Old Man, and he was a little ways off up a hill trying to hunt. That was when I learned you even could hunt in this game, which was great! I love how you have to cook food to survive, so far I've made too meals that were so bad, the art was pixellated out ( ) but also some mushroom and meat skewers. There must be a bajillion recipes you can make in this game. Another cool moment was when I was wandering and saw a tree and wondered if I could climb it; Turns out I could and there was a bird's nest on top with some eggs in it. Score! A little while later I was wandering and found some spicy peppers on the ground, and when I grabbed them the game told me they might warm me up. A little later I came across an area where it was snowing. When I wandered in, Link started shivering, you could see his breather, and I lost half a heart after a little bit from the cold. So I had an a-ha moment; I went back to the camp, threw one of the eggs in with some spicy pepper and voila, made me an omelette that would allow me to fight the cold for four minutes! So I want back, ate my omelette and set out to explore the snow (it was near that shrine I was trying to get to). Along the way I ran into an encampment of bokoblins I had to fight, and before long I realized I had less than I minute of cold fighting power to go! I headed towards the shrine but more bokoblins found me! They were firing arrows as I was trying to climb up a mountain and get over a ridge where it wasn't cold any more. I made it just in time and started scaling down a large rock wall and ended up on a little ledge where I get this giant steel hammer! Of course, when I went inside the shrine there there was another hammer inside anyway (it was the statis shrine), which kinda made me little find a little less special, but what can you do? This game is amazing, I thought about it all day while I was busy, and now I can finally get back to it. Time to get that last shrine and then hopefully the paraglider! Oh, one more thing: I just LOVE the LOOK of this game. I feel like I'm in a miyazaki movie sometimes! Not just because of the visuals, but the music too. And this game more than any Zelda I can remember (Keep in mind I haven't played any of the post-OOT ones except Link Between Worlds) has a pretty interesting SCI FI tint going on to it. I'm not sure what to feel about it yet; So far it seems well integrated, and also reminds me a bit of Miyazaki for some reason.... I'm sure as the game goes on, there will be more detail about the sci fi aspects (I guess I really mean the technology aspects). I guess its hard to rank a game 3 hours in when it'll probably take over 100 to beat, but damn, its goddamn amazing so far.
  3. Just ordered The Last of Us Remastered and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection for $15 and $20 respectively, both for PS4. Thank you slickdeals.
  4. Journey Music composed by Austin Wintory A Review of the soundtrack album by Mikko Ojala Journey is a 2012 video game from thatgamecompany that has also released such original titles as Flower, FlOw and Cloud, that offer highly unique and visually stunning concepts in gaming. The game is a highly audio-visual experience that blends typical adventure and platforming but places you into a world of where your character, a mysterious cloak wrapped and magical scarf wearing being travels through stunning landscapes, challenges and trials towards a mysterious mountaintop to realize his destiny. One of the oddities in this environment is the interaction with other players, who you encounter on the journey and can aid them but you cannot communicate with them in any way verbally, making for a strange new way of collaborating in a adventure gaming environment. The story is shrouded in mystery, the players allowed to piece together the myth and history of the world that surrounds them from the environment, murals, buildings and tapestries, all the while they perform their pilgrimage to reach the ever looming mountain and achieve their ultimate goal. Thatgamecompany brought in a talented young composer Austin Wintory to score his second collaboration with them after FlOw and he responded to the story and journey with a soundtrack that is both mesmerizingly melodic and ethereally evocative. Austin Wintory whose career has really started in the 2000's has scored a hefty number of films in these few years and also broken into game scoring, earning a whole slew of awards and nominations in his relatively short career thusfar. As he says in his bio on his website, he was introduced to film scores by Jerry Goldsmith's work in the 80's and ever since he has been pursuing a career in films scoring. From what I have heard from the composer I would gladly welcome him a big break in the near future, so convincing is his writing in Journey alone. Journey as a score blends worlds of ambient sound design and beautifully melodic and lyrical writing for orchestra and solo instruments into a fascinating whole, where the said incredients blend and ebb and flow in ethereal and powerfully evocative dance. Wintory's writing is mature, self assured and creative and, as it has become common in game scoring, takes its subject matter seriously much like a film, never downplaying to the medium. Game scoring has become a source of quality music and music making in the last decade and the possibilities of the cinematic qualities and style in games has allowed large dramatic scores to bloom in the genre, whether synthetic or orchestral or both. In Journey Wintory writes for electornics and a handful of soloists, among them Tina Guo (Cello), Rodney Wirtz (Viola) and Lisbeth Scott (vocals) and for a moderately sized symphonic (mainly string) ensemble, the score performed by the Macedonia Radio Symphonic Orchestra under the baton of Oleg Kontradenko, creating a varied and colorful tapestry of sound that envelopes and challenges and enthralls the listener with atmospheric and melodic soundscapes. Wintory treats the soloists as the focal point of the music, cello, flutes, viola and harp often presented with minimal accompaniment or over an ambient soundscape, lending a highly personal quality to the music,yet sometimes the soloists lead the orchestra in fascinating melodic explorations, perhaps the reflection of the idea of a lonely main character in a vast world. The feel of the music is ambivalent in that it does not, out of a conscious effort by the composer, seem to be from any specific culture or cultural area, but embraces a wide variety of music styles and ethnic musical traits. Some alto flute passages conjure with the solo cello images of Far East, yet the percussion and other melodic lines clearly point to another direction, Celtic or Middle-Eastern colorations appearing in the next track, no element becoming too dominating through the running time. This I take (as I have not played the game) mirrors the approach of the world which the main character inhabits and works well on the album as well, providing surprising mixes of colours and stylistics, keeping the listening experience fresh. Ambient textures Wintory uses become backdrops for the solo instruments and orchestral performance, keeping an element of mysticism, scope and ethereal wonder or peril firmly in the soundscape nearly throughout the album. Sometimes these slow, flowing, sparkling walls of sound somewhat dam the flow of the music or threaten to drown the organic elements but on the whole the synthetic material blends well to enhance the overall mood of the music, achieving a quasi spiritual and contemplative effect. Good examples of this are tracks like Temptations, Reclamation and several of the Confluence tracks (of which there are 6 in all). To balance the slower more ruminative moods there are several livelier lyrical tracks like the energetic the Road of Trials with its nearly Celtic pluckiness and sparklingly flowing blend of soloists and orchestra in the Threshold. The composer addresses the more serious threats and dangers on the journey by some impressively challenging modernistic ambience, percussion and string writings, like in the ominous Descent and especially in Nadir, where intensely furious layers of strings and percussion attack each other in a battle for supremacy, both frightening and powerful at the same time. And despite mentioning the word atmospheric quite often in the review I was impressed by the fact that the score exhibits a good ear for melody, the mystical, spiritual central theme of the game and soundtrack presented on soulful solo cello and husky alto flute directly on the first track Nascence, a vaguely exotic winding and yearning melody, well portraying the questing nature of the story, the searching mood captured in the wistful melodic line. After such a well rounded start Wintory anchors the music to a continuous yet often subtle development and variation of this main theme in various guises snippets and fragments through the album, the first few notes wafting through the dream-like soundscapes or string harmonies, the second track Call being a prime example of this, the union of ethereally ambient yet thematic approach. Even though Wintory wisely relies on a strong main theme and melody to carry the emotional weight, Wintory writes individual setpiece themes on several tracks, that seem to be woven from the same elegantly lyrical cloth as the main theme and provide exquisitely beautiful moments along the way, such as the Atonement, the already mentioned Threshold and The Road of Trials and he brings the score into a highly satisfying finale with the glowingly dramatic, poignant and almost bittersweet 7-minute meditation on the main theme in Apotheosis and ends the experience in a beatific solo voice and orchestral resolution in I Was Born for This with Lisbeth Scott lending her amazingly moving and rich voice for a prayer-like end credits song, the lyrics comprised of stanzas taken from many classic texts on legends of questing heroes sung in Latin, French, Old English and Japanese. Journey is a nuanced and highly colorful work, often arrestingly moody in one moment and hauntingly lyrical the next. While its thematic material is strong this music might not make an instant impression but rewards multiple listens if you allow for all the elements, moods and variations to sink in. The album forms a well balanced listening experience without forgetting to form a strong musical narrative along the way, the score charting a dramatic journey of its own through exotic and mystical musical landscapes. Some slight balancing issues between the organic and synthetic sound worlds aside Mr. Wintory has here created a truly impressive piece of work and I certainly look forward to hearing new music, in films or other media, from him in the future. A delightful surprise and for me one of the best scores of the year. 5/5 STARS Music composed, orchestrated and produced by Austin Wintory Featured soloists: Tina Guo: Cello Amy Tatum: Flute / Bass Flute Charissa Barger: Harp Rodney Wirtz: Viola Noah Gladstone: Serpent Sara Andon: Flute Vocal solos performed by Lisbeth Scott; text compiled by Jeremy Howard Beck Percussion and programming by Austin Wintory Orchestral performances by the Macedonia Radio Symphonic Orchestra Orchestra conducted by Oleg Kontradenko Orchestra contracted by Laurent Koppitz
  5. I played with a Nintendo 3DS for about 5 minutes in the mall yesterday. It was kinda cool! The guy at Gamestop let me use his personal one since they don't have a store model. He put some card with a Question Mark on it down on the counter then loaded up some game that I guess comes with it. It used the built-in camera to show me the counter on screen the - but where the Quest mark card was was now instead some targets that I had to shoot. To shoot them I literally moved the 3DS around until I was angled so that my shots could hit them. This was interesting because if I didn't move my head with it, the 3D effect would be lost. When when you are looking right on, the 3D was pretty good. After shooting targets for a while I shot a dragon until it was dead. Didn't get to play any "real" games but I thought it was pretty neat.
  6. Apparently the latest PSN firmware is banning the hackers. Anyway, this weekend I restarted Batman: AA. Still a freakin' classy piece of gaming arse.
  7. I know this was already briefly mentioned in the "last video game you played" thread, but I figured there was enough Monkey Island / Adventure game fans here that we'd generate enough discussion to warrant its own thread After a 9 year absence, the Monkey Island series is continuing!! Press release: http://www.lucasarts.com/company/vip/monke...ess_release.pdf So we have The Secret Of Monkey Island: The Special Edition coming out "sometime this summer" Official site: http://www.lucasarts.com/games/monkeyisland/ There's a great, lengthy video on that site showing lots of gameplay footage and screenshots. It looks like they VERY faithfully re-created the original game down to every detail, just with better graphics, music, and actual voices throughout. Ron Gilbert, Dominic Armato, and Jesse Harlin are interviewed, and it shows them recording new live music for the game! One cool feature the game will include is a button to on-the-fly switch back and forth between the original version and the new version! Then there's Tales From Monkey Island coming out as a 5 part series, the first of which arrives July 7th. The 5 episodes will be titled: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal The Siege of Spinner Cay Lair of the Leviathan The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood Rise of the Pirate God Official site, where you can pre-order it: http://www.telltalegames.com/monkeyisland IGN Article: http://wii.ign.com/articles/988/988570p1.html Adventuregames.com preview: http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,1024 Gamespot first look: http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6210602/tales...eneric_comments I can't F'ing wait! Now I REALLY need to replay the original games!
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