The Glade 4.0

You ***** ready? Droppin' on Oct. 4, IGN just put up their review:

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/119/1197278p1.html

I've heard it's hard, but I've always wanted to try a cooperative-oriented (maybe?) game where everything isn't laughably easy because you have a friend.

Great, I imagine that this game, too, will quickly make me its *****...

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Comes out tomorrow and I find myself really excited for the game this afternoon. Thinking about seeing if I can get a midnight release somewhere. Reviews so far are fantastic and it sounds like a perfect sequel to what Demon's Souls was.

Thinking I'm going to get it on the 360, since I don't see my PS3 connecting to PSN any time soon. I've heard reports of it not looking as good or lagging more at certain points, but the online is pretty important to me so I'll probably just deal with it.

Here are some links to the preorder bonuses, a map and a mini guide. Please don't link to these elsewhere

Map and Mini Guide

Wonder if the controls are as clunky as the first one...

Man, this game came out of nowhere! Gonna play through rage, then I think this will be the one to hold me over till skyrim (only a month).

SO MANY GOOD GAMES...

All of the reviews are saying the combat feels tight and fair. I thought the first one did, too, though. What did you find clunky?

A nice description of the world from another review I read

Note on play time: I noticed that the Joystiq review was written at 38 hours with the game still unbeaten.

Lives up to my expectations. Played about an hour and a half last night, got through the tutorial and I'm currently figuring out how to kill the first 5 enemies of the game... There's a giant skeleton that is getting enjoyment at destroying my face.

Leave the skeletons alone and go elsewhere imo. The way I'm going has enemies so much easier that I don't think the skeleton route is the first way to go.

Eh, they aren't really hard, it's just that my character is ill-suited to deal with them at the beginning. I can use a mace to stun the skeletons, but it's a lot slower than my dagger so I'm really trying to work on my riposte/parry/backstab timing and positioning.

Whatever the name it feels like a sequal....even down to the crystal lizards and dragon on the bridge. The mechanics almost make this feel easier than the first to me though.

I think I just realized why I like this game so much... It reminds me of the first time I played EQ, a feeling I thought I'd never get back. You move slow, you're scared to turn corners or open doors, you have no maps or even any real direction and the threat of death is always very real.

Love it.

Well, if that's what you want...

http://www.amnesiagame.com/

I have that, but it's not the same. DS has the multiplayer element to it.

How IS the multiplayer? The difficulty had me intrigued (I like Ninja Gaiden, to a point), but the promise of cooperation lured me in further.

As I understand it, players have the option of invading one anothers' game worlds as benevolent, friendly, murdering spirits, or douchey, unfriendly, murdering spirits.

That's pretty much how it plays out. You drop an item on the ground to summon a helper. Who you get help from is random! Though, if you plan with a friend and are in the same spot, hopefully you can both get into the same game. There's no verbal communication, and even being in a private chat will kick you into offline mode in the game. To communicate you either have to be on the phone, or use the built in emotes.

I read some fights actually require help to complete, but if you're playing offline I guess you get NPC help.

I beat the first real boss earlier tonight after about 30 runs of the level. Hard, but fun! The graphics in this game are fantastic, but it does slow down here and there during action moments (on 360 at least).

Bah, that's a shame. I really am looking for a challenging cooperative experience, though I'm hard-pressed to find someone to share it with. I mean, it sounds like it'd be fun and all, and I'd probably play it with a friend on an adjacent couch with his own console, but single-player immersion just doesn't do it anymore for me, heh.

I understand that fear pretty much does not exist within the universe of cooperative gaming, hence the lack of tangible allies in DS, but someday I shall find my immersive cooperative action title. For some reason, the idea of performing epic teamwork to bring down mighty foes gives me a massive hardon, though games like WoW can't cut it for me, being auto-attack RPGs.

Mayhaps I shall pick this up, but I'm thrown off by the idea of non-personal cooperation. Maybe I'll just have to cross my fingers real hard for Armored Core 5. I've yet to do a playthrough of AC4:4A with friends.

Because your massive mechaboner intimidates all of us and feeds our inadequacy issues.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that I've offered to start anew with ya'll for the sake of equality. >:(

For the uninformed: I really like AC4: 4A a lot, and so have played the damn thing into oblivion. 'T'was the only game with which I ever really did so. I am at the point where I randomly make silly and fun builds based around a theme, and then have loads of fun blowing sh*t up with them. Needless to say, cooperative play felt one-sided, so I needed to tone it down for the sake of my homies.

Why no for the PC?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I put in over 10 hours this weekend and still, all I wanna do is go home and play some more. Game is so hard but it's not "cheap" hard. Doesn't make me want to throw my controller, it just makes me want to figure out what's not working.

Cause it's a Japanese dev and **** the PC. Also, that is an abortion of a sentence.

It reminds me of EQ in a way. There's an excitement to exploring and knowing my doom could be around the corner.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

So I've looked into this game, and I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that I'd love it if it were more receptive of non-anonymous co-op (coop? Always wondered about that one). While I appreciate the mindset behind it--having cooperative play while still maintaining that feeling of being alone in a dark fantasy world--I feel like the opportunity for "epic" fun is wasted, even though "fun" might not be the right sort of word to use for a game like this. :p

It might be that I've been looking for a good hack'n'slasher to play with friends, and I haven't found anything that can quite scratch that itch. If only Dungeon Lords hadn't turned out to be a massive, steaming, heap of failure.

What say ye, fans of Dark Souls? Is the cooperative play best left as it is, or would FROM do well to make it more receptive to people who want to play together? I freely admit to loving FROM for the Armored Core series, and wanting to play this game as well, but the missed opportunity for a challenging cooperative experience with friends makes me sadface. I don't have the sort of time a game like Dark Souls demands, so I'd like to get the most out of it by mauling my way through the demon hordes with my comrades-in-arms.

I think that the method in which you play with people, in the setting of the game, is perfectly fine. I'm not bothered that you can't talk, etc. That said, I DO wish it was a little bit easier to actually connect to the person (friend) that you WANT to connect to. If they added a simple invite system, or even a "preference list", this game would easily be 10/10.

Right now it's 9/10.

I do feel that playing the entire game with a partner would be a disservice to yourself, though.