PixlBit

Man, it's been a bummer for horror games lately. I think I'm going to play some Silent Hill HD Collection and Corpse Party while I wait for Dead Space 3.

Actually, I'd say this is proof positive that Silent Hill needs to be developed in-house again. I know Team Silent is long gone, but maybe they could contract out some people from Grasshopper to work with a new Konami team. And by Grasshopper I mean Yamaoka. 

And I'm one of the few people that actually liked Homecoming. 

Yeah, it's one of those weird Japanese marketing phrases. I mean *spoiler alert* but everyone that Asura is pissed at gets what's coming to them. Anything else is just gravy in my opinion.

I was fine with the ending. There's one dangling plot thread that they tease after you beat the game, but I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything at all. Hopefully these new episodes have new enemies instead of recycling assets from the main game.

Even though G1 is the series that holds the most emotion for me, Beast Wars is by far the best Transformers cartoon. Beast Machines can go to hell though.

Now, you're a young whippersnapper, so you probably can't appreciate this as much as I can, what with Transformers G1 being an integral part of my childhood. That trailer is amazing! Combiners, the Ark, and was that Unicron for a split second???

Not happy about Grimlock being in T-rex mode if this takes place before the exodus from Cybertron. He should be a badass tank like in the comics.

Also: those Lost Episode titles are so Japanese it makes me weep with joy.

More Asura's Wrath? Sign me the hell up! I'll probably wait until everything is out, buy it in one shot, and replay the game from the beginning with all the new stuff in there. The only thing that could make this DLC better would be the addition of a theme song to the game and a way to play the game with Ryu and Akuma skins.

To be fair Esteban, Konami had some great games through the PSX and PS2 days as well. I remember being at E3 and Konami was always one of the major booths, showing amazing trailers to amazing games that weren't titled Metal Gear. This generation has been rough on them, as it has for so many Japanese developers. I don't know what drugs Kojima Productions is on to make something as amazing as MGS 4, but whatever it is, Konami needs to distribute it to the rest of the company.

And let's not forget that during this generation Konami worked with some Western devs for some good results, like Contra 4 and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

What they need to do is leverage their classic IPs in the proper setting, while trying to make some new and interesting ones, as well. Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania (the Iga designed ones) are best suited to PSN and XBLA, while stuff like Metal Gear and Silent Hill still belong on the big consoles. Working with existing IPs has also been successful for them-as the company started sliding, YuGiOh kept them going. So they need to look into that more often, as well.

I'd say your problems with Metal Gear Solid may just be a generational thing. I played the first MGS all the way through in Japanese before playing the U.S. version, and other than a couple places where people tell you over the codec what to do, I didn't have any problems. I enjoy games that don't tell you explicitly what to do or where to go next. The triumph and fun of that first MGS was figuring out what you could do and how you could exploit the enemies with your weapons, items, and environment. It's a shame that the experience didn't hold up for you, but if you played Twin Snakes there are some problems that happened when they tried to adapt MGS 2 game mechanics into MGS 1 level design.

Whenever someone dismisses the RE tank controls as garbage I grit my teeth. The controls of those early Resident Evil (and other survival horror) games were perfect for the time. Here's the thing: those games were built around preset camera angles that would vary wildly from room to room, and sometimes even in the same room. But you can navigate them with ease, because no matter how your character is facing on screen, you know that pressing "up" on the D-pad will always move you forward, and "down" will always back you up. I can run around the first Resident Evil effortlessly.

The counter to this is the first Fatal Frame. Great game, but it gave analog control while keeping preset camera angles. So what happens is you'll be moving your character forward, but then the camera angle changes in such a drastic way that the direction you were moving the stick in is now moving your character backwards, towards the spot where the angle changes. By the time you correct yourself you've hit the camera switch again. This can happen over and over.

Tank controls are obsolete now, because even horror games use a fully controllable camera for the most part. Sections of Silent Hill Downpour try to bring in some nostalgia with some rooms that have preset camera angles, and these sections control like garbage.

Rant off, lol.