Microsoft putting a game on Steam. Pretty big news.  Smart on their part, that race is over, may as well position your games for hte most sales.

Other big news -- this PSN being down for a "few" days unscheduled.  Free is still worth it, hopefully they give PSN+ members apologetic token.

aspro said:

In other news, every time I read the comments section on another website I am thankful for the members of this place.  Ignorance is something not in large supply around here.

Shut up you newb! Leave the comments to teh hardcore gamerz.

Thanks for the Portal 2 shots.  Yeah, looks way better than the 360 version of the original (of course).  The art style kind of limits any sort of graphical improvement they can make.  I guess that's what the outside sequences will show off.

Agnates said:

The games look about the same visually. Not that you can tell with imageshack's downsizing...

Unless the PC version of Portal was magical they are not the same at all. Portal 2 looks far more smooth with a lot more happening on screen. Almost every area has something moving, the animation is beyond superb. Portal 2 always feels alive where Portal just felt like the same static room over and over.

Eternal Darkness was set in Rhode Island. Who sets a game in Rhode Island?

I doubt anyone who hasn't played both can see a big difference between the two sets of screenshots. Yeah, Portal 2 has more movement but it's mostly due to the setting differences, things have the same visual quality outside the nifty reconstructing tiles mechanisms, they're just different things. As for motion, the later rooms of Portal had a lot of that. Anyway, I was expecting more personally, it sounded like a substantial update but it's still obviously the same old Source and still obviously outdated. The foliage was nice too at first but then walking through dangling vines and having no reaction was lame. Various things like that betray the engine, as nice as it looks overall and in stills where you can't notice such. It's certainly more polished than the first game with more thought put into the aesthetics of each area, having more obvious shadows and what not, alongside half broken things, refracting shattered glass, etc, but it's more or less the same visual quality. So far.

IGN says new Nintendo possibly called Nintendo Stream?

Dvader said:

There is a thread about Last Guardian being delayed in the GGD at GS and many people (carnage and Solid) are talking about how its being delayed cause its a game that is trying to do something that has never been done before.

Uhhh... can someone here explain to me what they are talking about. Cause I have played a ton of games where you have big pet/monster/golem/animal thing that follows you around.

Yet when a Nintendo game is delayed its because its flawed and they're having problems with it.

Games thankfully tend to involve more than what you can fit into a single phrase downplaying what's bound to be some pretty involving interaction mechanics, so I'm confident that The Last Guardian will be fairly unique, just like Ico was, even though you could say "you have to save a girl" as in countless other games.

That said their reasoning for the delay is silly. Things just didnt' go according to plan and the game's not done.

Well they have shown little but it's apparent that you'll need to have the kid and the monster work together to solve environmental and other challenges which should be fairly tricky with only having direct control over the boy and having to use other means to direct the pet where needed. I can't think of many other games that do this except for that Majin game which was announced after the unveiling of The Last Guardian. Not exactly the same as, say, Panzer Dragoon, where despite having a "large monster" with you the gameplay's still just as in Space Harrier or After Burner or StarFox making the addition of the dragon a mere story device with few gameplay consequences. So you didn't like Ico, that didn't make its "save the girl" approach the same as in countless other "save the girl" games, it was a unique take on it. Just as Portal is a unique take on puzzle games even if it can be described as such. Shadow of the Colossus also had a unique take on boss fights, even if you could just call it that. Big monsters weren't anything new, big monsters done in that way however, were.