May all your inflatable women be strong and mighty during the toughest "life time" reruns. And may all your children's children reconsider stapling your cat to the wall.
Incredibly so, brutally so. It's the kind of game that really is not forgiving in the slightest, except, perhaps, in that you don't lose any items you gained since the last time you visited a checkpoint. That's the only bone that developers throw you, since they're more than content to throw you headfirst into battles where the margin of error is razor-thin and victory will require you to die at least 5 or 6 times.
Having said that, it's also a really, REALLY good game. The combat is deliberate and requires carefully-honed skills, even in battles against regular enemies. The game world is a dark fantasy nightmare, drawing on a kind of dark depressing that Tim Burton only WISHES his cartoonish visions could match. Massive castles and broken ruins dot this landscape, existing on a scale that is almost unimaginable. And the world itself is populate by undead souls damned to forever wander in this blighted existence, to say nothing of the nightmarish abominations that have oozed up from the deepest corners of Hell.
There are no bustling towns, no safe havens to take break from the despair of this world, only determined souls that have carved out a tiny niche for themselves and who will help you along your way...for a price. And that price is in souls, souls pulled from the corpses of slain enemies.
The game is all open from the start, barring some areas closed off behind locked doors. You're not led along by helpful markers or convenient quests. You being with a single directive: to find and ring two bells. One bell is up high and the other is in the depths of the earth. That's all the information you're given. So it's up to you to find your way, to determine whether you're going the right way or not. But it's easy enough to tell which is the right way and which is different: by counting how many times you die. It's actually quite easy to stumble upon a area populated by enemies that are far beyond your level and they'll dispatch you in single hit, but even the right way is far from safe. You'll die in Dark Souls, a lot, and the only way you'll get better is by continuing again and again.
Dark Souls is a top-tier Japanese RPG and one of the top RPGs of the past decade.
Basically its in the same universe as the alien franchise but the film is not going to be a direct precursor to alien 1979 , the Xenomorphs are not going to appear in this movie either, Instead its going to be centered around an ancient space faring race that seeded life across the milky way galaxy.
For a while, a lot of people were complaining that Nintendo was making way too many "casual" games. Well, this past year (and a half) has seen a crazy number of awesome titles from Nintendo wouldn't you say?
In the past year, I've played more games on my Wii than my 360 or PS3. It's been really nice to dust that thing off.
Further Super Mario 3D Land is amazing. I'm loving this game so far. It really shows off what the 3DS was meant for, using the 3D for more than just a gimic. Along those lines, I have noticed that this game as well as the 3DS has been selling out in a lot of stores this holiday season. I think the price drop coupled with some really nice NEW games has turned the 3DS sales around, but we'll only know when we see the numbers. The 3DS still has a number of flaws in the design, but I'm overlooking them right now to enjoy the awesome 3D Land.
I present to you an OFFICIAL timeline published in a Nintendo artbook overseen by Eiji Aonuma.
According to this, there are in fact 3 different timeline splits all coming from Ocarina of Time.
Further, this timeline is simply perfect. I can find no flaws in it. It incorporates every last detail we've been told by the official channels over the decades about the chronology, excepting the temporal hiccup that was the Zelda official web site in early 2000 (which no one took seriously anyway). Better yet, it puts the Oracle games and Link's Awakening in their proper place. It seems that the Oracle games took place after Link to the Past (using the same Link), and that same Link went on to do Link's Awakening (which was the original official statement on when that took place anyway). Then a "golden age" happens, followed by the "age of decline" with Zelda 1 and 2. That whole timeline from LTTP onward is the timeline where Link fails in his mission and Ganon is apparently imprisoned during a much more devastating massive war (the imprisoning war that LTTP mentions during the prologue). In fact I think that "failed in his mission" split happened at the exact moment Young Link entered the Temple of Time and grabbed the Master Sword. He was taken out of his world during that time, and I think that event would create a split where he never returned in one line (thus failing) and returned to defeat Ganon in the other, thus leading to the third where he was able to go back and prevent Ganon from coming to power to begin with.
I was confused about Four Swords Adventures for some time because it seemed odd that Ganon would come to power BEFORE OOT and be sealed in the sword with no explanation of how he escaped. Well, this explains it. Apparently when he died in Twilight Princess, he later got reincarnated along with Vaati years later, and that's where Four Swords + stands. For that matter, it explains why there is a dark world in that game. Majora's Mask of course takes place after OOT, though it doesn't mention that that whole game took place with Link travelling to an alternate reality. That's incidental though and doesn't affect the timeline.
Haha! It even notes where the "Tragedy of Princess Zelda the 1st" (described in the Zelda II manual) happens. Apparently that marked the end of the Golden Era, and so apparently during that time princesses stopped being named Zelda until that incident.
We really had a good run, didn't we? I mean, sure, we had our ups and downs, but things mostly went pretty good for the most part. We had our laughs and our cries, good friends came and went. But this is the end and it's time to say all our goodbyes.
Gungnir is the fourth major Dept. Heaven title from Sting, in its loose "series" of titles. The first three -- Riviera, Yggdra Union, and Knights in the Nightmare -- are all interesting, and mostly great (I have issues with Yggdra, but absolutely love the other two) games, and I've been a series fan ever since I first played Riviera, so this is just great news. Gungnir is a PSP only game, so far, so I was really thinking that we'd never see it. Well... we will. Now I've got another reason to be happy I got that PSP, for sure.
I've heard that Gungnir isn't as complex as some of Sting's other strategy games (Riviera is an RPG, but the other titles are strategy games), but hopefully it's as great as the better ones.
I am still unhappy that Yggdra's three spinoff games -- two on PSP, one on DS -- all are Japan-only titles, probably forever (sure, they're spinoffs of the weakest of the three games, but still, they look like they could be pretty good...), but this is fantastic, fantastic news. I'll be getting this for sure.
![[Image: alien-space-jockey-4469286qkxau.jpg?v=1]](http://s.excessif.com/mmdia/i/28/6/alien-space-jockey-4469286qkxau.jpg?v=1)
