What was your worst buy this year? (and best non-buy)

Every weapon has different attacks for R1, R2, when 2-handing R1 and R2 and when running R1 and R2; play around with a bunch of different weapons and see how they feel. Try dual-wielding. Try parrying. Try backstabbing :)

My Most Regretted was Mists of Pandaria. Both Sula and I bought it, logged in once and never went back. I guess we really are finally done with WoW. CoD: BLOPS 2 is a close second: the maps are all too small, the community is awful, and the Hardcore playlist is anaemic (no Domination HC? WTF?).

Best Non-Buy...uh, I dunno; how do I tell if I didn't buy it?

Your expectations might be a little skewed. The combat certainly doesn't simulate fencing and it isn't really trying to be that detailed. It is slower paced than many other games but it's very deliberate with timing, forethought and move selection being extremely important and player reflexes being much less significant. Also the sheer variety in weapons and their different moves and timings make for a very different experience by just changing weapons. As with most things in the Souls games a cursory look won't actually tell you much, the game and it's mechanics are extremely deep.

Though I'm only at the beginning still, I can say that even just a few hours more of experience has shown me that it does get deeper. I was much the same as you in thinking they were crazy with their "deep combat" comments, but the game does reward you for learning the timing of your weapons and then learning the timing of your enemies. Between blocking, parrying, the timing of your swings and your opponents, dodging and kicking you have a surprising variety of movement and that's not taking into account the different weapons and their effects on game play as well. Each time you encounter a new enemy you have to learn how to counter it and how to find it's openings. Difficult enemies become easier once you know their tricks, and like I said, I'm really only at the third or so major area of the game and still very very early on here, but I'm finding a lot in there already.

Clearly you need to try a parry and riposte type character.

Well, it's not just fencing, but martial arts in general. Your moves are comically slow. Such that I find it mostly easy, except when my slow as mollases avatar (well, he rolls pretty quick!) telegraphs a haymaker (that's his quick attack) and then leaves himself widely out of position. I frequently have students who've never picked up a blade before be faster.

Similarly parrying has super awkward timing, such that you need to predictively do it ahead of time based upon your opponent's telegraph rather than reactively like a real parry.

Opponents telegraph all over the place, and so far the game is about memorizing their telegraphs. Rines, repeat. That's just so wrong. I watched some later boss battles on youtube and they're all:
1) Wait for their huge reach attack, which they happily telepgraph.
2) Roll to the side of it then hit them.
3) Repeat.

If you haven't yet memorized the telegraphs (presumably by dying to them) you tend to get plastered.


Now, I don't mean to bash what appears to be almost everyone's favorite game over the past several years, which is why I bring it up here rather than over in one of the many Dark Souls threads, but -- I think Dark Souls has mediocre melee mechanics that lend themselves to dull trial and error memorization, and frankly there are many better games (and no, I won't be baited into listing them).

The rest of the game sounds like it might be neat, but apparently that's slowly spooned out to you and I'm not sure I can stomach getting that far. Like I said I plan to try it again, but it's moved /way/ down my stack of gaming backlog.

And I now return you to the regularly scheduled programming, as I'll be baited no further into bashing Dark Souls here! ;-) No reason you can't enjoy what I don't.

You mean like the Sword and Shield the tutorial starts you out with? Yeah, never thought to try that. :-P

Why in god's name are you comparing anything in a game to real life? It's a game, it's not even attempting to simulate real melee combat so I'm not sure why you're looking for that and why you're knocking the game because it's not doing a good job of what you want it to do rather than what it's intending on doing, again I think your perception of what the combat offers is heavily skewed. There are rewards for acting reactively, namely bonus damage for interrupting enemy attacks. Also you clearly haven't experimented much with the combat as your post seems to imply that your character is dictating the weapon's movements, it's not, the weapon dictates the movements and their speed. If you want fast movements use a dagger or a piercing weapon. And yes much of the game is becoming familiar with your enemies and their surroundings.

Worst Buy: I Am Alive

Best Non-Buy: Scribblenauts

Stop discussing Dark Souls, you have your own forum for that!

(I'm going to end up buying this game over the Christmas sales, you know that right? The more you guys talk about it, the more curious I get despite knowing it won't be my cup of tea.)

Worst Buy: Probably the Vita, because I just don't play it that much. It's nice, but so far I've played Rayman and gotten to my "Mario Wall" where I just cannot progress because I suck at platforming too much, and I'm grinding away at Persona 3 Portable but I'm not sure why. I got the Uncharted game at launch but I still haven't started it.

Also the DDO expansion that added Forgotten Realms. My whole group preordered, even though we were all around 11th level and decided not to take the XP bonus they were giving out so we could get to the new content faster (we haven't seen all the old content, so why skip it?). The week after it came out the expansion went on sale for half what we paid. That was kind of a fuck you to everyone who pre-ordered.

Best Non-Buy: The Secret World. I love ARGs, and I was all excited in the ramp up to launch for this. The thing that kept me from going there was the subscription and the MMO stuff because I'm already playing an MMO and I really don't have time for two. Five months later, we've got the no-sub model and I used racked up credits on Amazon to pick up the client for nothing. Still haven't played it though.

Yea, I've learned through LOTRO that when it comes to Turbine, never pay full price for their things unless you really have to. It's going to go on sale, usually for half price and if it's like the last couple of LOTRO expansions, you won't be near the level of it anyways to start playing it day one of release.

Worst: I was really, super disappointed with Super Hexagon (PC). The controls are just awful. I love Terry Cavanagh's games usually, I love simple games, I love hard games, I love colors and I love hexagons. It was a no-brainer.

From Dust was just as bad, because I didn't notice it requires some sort of shitty ubisoft login system, so I didn't get to play it at all.

Best: Easily Hotline Miami. Definitely the best game I played this year.

Wel, I have to withdraw my vote for Dark Souls as my best non-buy of 2012. First of all because I bought it anyway, and second of all because I love it and can't stop playing it.

I'll change my vote to TERA, the MMO with the strange looking characters.

The Brad thread reminds me that Fallen Enchantress is my best non-buy of the year. I'm sure a group of wonderful people work for Stardock but I cannot in good conscience give money to a developer run by the guy who wrote those emails.

It's a damned shame, too, because ordinarily I'd be plunking down money without a second thought: a small developer employing people in an economically devastated part of the country, making a solid game with post-release support at a reasonable price? They have everything going for them except you-know-who, who is so odious even a guy like me -- who buys EA and Ubisoft games -- cannot bring himself to purchase their products.

I continue hoping for some sort of redemptive twist to this story because I like a happy ending as much as anyone. I fear that none is coming, however.

My worst buy was Anno 2070, because the tiny font that you can't change the size of gives me headaches trying to read. I'll revisit the game after I get a bigger monitor.

Wow, really? Really?? That's exciting! I'm looking forward to finally downloading it myself sometime in the next week or two. I forced myself to hold off on buying it because Christmas, and then (of course) nobody got it for me anyway.

Yes really. And I'm the worst gamer ever, so it can't be that hard. I mean, I die, I die a lot. But every time I learn from it, know what I did wrong. It's really a great game, I haven't even touched any of the other new games I've bought yet.
Actually, this morning I got up early just so I could quickly grind some souls to buy a storage chest and a repair kit. That's how much I like it...

Get it from Amazon, either it's still $15, or if that offer isn't up any more it's $18 after the New Year but you can use a $5 dollar code to make it $13.