Ha, speaking of Zone of the Enders...
The demo for the ZOE2 remaster came out today, so as I was checking that out I just started clicking the share button to take shots, and made a weird little discovery (which I'm sure has been seen by others before, but I was unaware).
During close-range combos, Jehuty's arm "stretches" at the joint to about three times its normal size (you can see how the texture is blurrier than everything else on screen). Kind of an interesting detail, something done to exaggerate the action during those split-second animations I guess. Never would have seen it without being able to take my own shots.

http://oi66.tinypic.com/2im45g3.jpg
http://oi63.tinypic.com/16kq3px.jpg

Game looks gorgeous by the way, even in regular ol' 1080p. I don't have 4k or VR, but this thing is still spiffy enough to warrant another purchase from me.

Just discovered this band. Apparently they've been around 9-ish years, but somehow they've always escaped by notice.
Not everything is golden, but when I find something of theirs that I dig, I seem to really dig it.

This first one, it's mainly the tune of the chorus. Those sliding (or are they bending? Pitch-shifting?) guitar chords are fucking gorgeous. I can only dream of coming up with shit that sounds that groovy. Me being me, you'd think I'd be all about the heavier parts, but not as much here (though that stuff is still great).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb6tpT-KYks&t=0m28s

And this one I just love the slight gothic slant to it. Aside from that though, I really like how good the band is of doing these huge tonal shifts between verses and choruses. Good showcase for that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP93GId83as

So I caught the first episode of the new FLCL on tv... but I couldn't sit through more than about two minutes of it.
Not because it was bad, mind you. I just can't take watching this show in English. And being that the whole thing is premiering on Toonami, of course it was going to be in English. Thought I might be able to stomach it... but no, not so much. The animation was beautiful, and the Pillows music gave me a total boner, but the voices... nah.

Fucking bummer, because FLCL is a really special anime for me. One of the only anime I actually bothered to download fansubs of, waaaaaay back before it had appeared in the US yet (only other one I bothered doing that was with the Cowboy Bebop movie). Far enough back that I still get irritated when I see the title spelled out as "Fooly Cooly"; it's Furi Kuri goddammit. First watched it at a time when everything was going kind of shitty for me, but this show was just such a jolt of fun, positive energy, so to this day it remains pretty much the be-all, end-all "feel good" anime for me personally. Or close to it, at least.
So when I watch the new one, I want to watch it right , in Japanese with subs, as I did with the original. A bunch of annoying English VA trying to mimic the cadence and energy of the Japanese VA just makes my ears bleed.
So I guess I'll be waiting for the bluray or something. Feels like such a long damn wait. Seventeen years for me, man. Maybe eighteen by the time the bluray comes out.
That's a Shenmue-level wait.

Guess I'll just go watch the original for now and drown myself in nostalgic greatness.

Yeah, this is, uh... disappointing.
I'll just get out of the way that I hate that girl. HATE her. Jesus christ, that's gonna be one annoying-ass character to have around for a whole game.
Having Nero around is fine (I loved DMC4, screw the haters), but there's something about these modern graphics that bothers the hell out of me. Is it weird to say that I don't like how realistic the people look? There was always a very videogame-specific type of stylization to the characters in past generations, but now that the graphics are more realistic... I dunno, it just saps a bit of the likability away.
I've also never seen so many smug little shit-eating grins in one trailer before.
And the gameplay looks pretty meh.

And what the fuck kind of crappy music is that? What happened to the Zombie-influenced industrial freak-metal they always had before? That shit defined DMC before, but in this trailer they showcase some shitty electro-pop?
Ugh.

Have to say, I'm not the Assassin's Creed fan I used to be. Loved it up to Syndicate, but I still haven't tried Origins, and I really just don't care much at all about the overarching story of the whole thing anymore.
So with that said, I don't really give a shit that this is a new AC, so much as the fact that it's friggin ancient Greece , and it looks goddamn beautiful. Ancient Greece has always been a major point of appeal for me personally, so I'm digging what I see of this so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSw6JeHge1Y

I still need to play Mankind Divided. Loved Human Revolution. Not so much interested in Detroit.
Main thing about 2077 to me, looking at it now, is that unlike so many other games that claim to be "cyberpunk"... this actually does indeed look to be cyber punk .
I mean, the genre's name originally came from the fact that the stories tended to involve the dregs of society, the people on the lower rung... the punks. The criminals.
Shadowrun is one of the few that still gets that, and actually has you playing as those dregs.
Stuff like Deus Ex, meanwhile, always has you playing the law.
So it's good to see that a game taking its title from the name of the genre itself is actually sticking to the classic sensibility of it all. I love Deus Ex and Ghost in the Shell and all manner of stuff like that, sure, but sometimes it just makes more sense to focus on the lowlives.

Armored Core V.
Verdict Day is great, but it's basically an expansion to Armored Core V. It's better if you have your AC built and geared up from the beginning, as is the case with any of the expansions in the rest of the series, and for that you have to play V.

I don't think you're going to like any of them regardless, but since you already said you didn't like AC4, the next one to logically try would be V (since For Answer, likewise, is basically an expansion to 4).

If one wanted to get into the earliest games, I do have a suggestion.
Most will find that the PS1 (and most of the PS2) games have a bit of a strange control scheme by default, where the shoulder buttons control camera movement up and down. Luckily, a weird hallmark of the series is the fact that you can customize the controls completely , so I always switch all camera control to the right face buttons, with foreward, backward, and left and right strafing on the D-pad. Still takes some getting used to, but it moves it closer to dual-analog control. Much simpler and more intuitive.

Himuro was one of those old member who's been warned (under previous accounts) over and over again across several years to can it. He's one of those who tends to follow a pattern. The staff knew who he was and could have banned him on the spot, but in the interest of fairness he was left to continue in his new account. He seemed a bit more reserved, so why not?
But his basic patterns started to emerge once again, and the staff has seen where it eventually goes if left alone.
You really have nothing to worry about. This one is more a matter of him having an actual history of shitposting and obnoxiousness that has previously resulted in the forum being... shall we say, offputting . To phrase it mildly. The ban was based on that, and where we could see his current manner eventually leading to. It's just an old dance that nobody feels like going through again.

It looks fine, I guess. Alongside Henry and Raithos, I guess you could say I'm one of the resident AC-heads here, but for some reason this one isn't really hyping me up that much. I mean, don't get me wrong, it looks like it plays well enough and all, sure. But it's not really doing anything different, is it?
The AC series tended to be pretty similar between games from the PS1 era through the PS2 era, but then AC4 came about and they really did things differently; it was faster, more expansive, a little sleeker. It clearly felt very different from the previous games (and For Answer took things even further with it's giant bosses, making it almost like Shadow of the Colossus meets AC). Then with ACV, they changed it up again, making the world itself even more post-apocalyptic than ever and giving the AC's a slightly smaller stature and a slower, much more tank-like style of control. Basically, once the PS3 came along, From Software started making the differences between them much more pronounced and interesting. Which means that, looking forward toward Armored Core 6, it's completely reasonable to expect the next evolution of the whole thing. Another big change.
And this ain't it. Again, like I said, it looks fine and all. Nothing wrong with it that I can tell. I'm sure it'll be a good enough game and all that. But it's really just retreading everything the AC series has already done, rather than trying to actually be its own thing, or to be the next big thing.
I'll probably play it, sure (provided it appears on a platform I actually have). But saying that "the former AC team is just flat out making Armored Core 6" is a bit much.

It's funny, sometimes I feel like I may be just about the only one who's actively avoiding most scraps of info that we get on the game. For all the money I spent on the kickstarter (good god, did I really spend that much?! Most expensive game I've ever bought, that's for damn sure) I'd rather the whole thing be as fresh as possible for me.

That being said, that survey video is actually impressive as hell to me. I've seen a few comments about the facial animations being bad, or about some of the effects feeling a generation or two behind.
Most important thing to me?

It actually has the same vibe as the original games.

Shucks to any of that complaining; I hope the whole game looks just like this. I didn't think they'd be able to do it, but despite the graphics obviously being far more advanced than they were in the originals, the overall visual style and the quality of the animation is weirdly comparable to the first two games, in terms of personality.
My biggest fear when the game was announced was that there would be some kind of ugly discord in visual style between games, so that going directly from a playthrough of S2 to S3 would feel jarring and unnatural. Jumps between generations can often be that way. I was one of those that used to always say, even as generations moved on, that I really wouldn't even mind if they just made S3 with the same graphics engine as the originals, in the interest of keeping the whole series as "harmonious" as can be. Always figured "next-gen" graphics would hurt it.
But no, it seems like they've made it so that the jump will be as seamless as is reasonably possible.
Serious kudos on that. It's just a throwaway survey video, but still. Fills me with a bit of extra faith that things are going well.

Uh, yeah, it's not gonna be that big.
Compression of all files into the final game package is one of the very last things that happens in the development process. They haven't done it yet, so that 100gb figure is completely tentative.
I know that's already been said, but it feels like everyone is saying it with a hint of uncertainty for some reason.
So I'll just say it flat-out: a kickstarter-backed, halfway-indie, non-AAA budget game is not going to turn out to be the biggest burden on your hard drive of anything released this generation.

After finishing Wolfenstein 2, I got the urge to go back and try to finish Doom. Only got about three or four levels in before. Playing past that, it's crazy how intense the action gets later on. And it's kind of amazing how true it is to the spirit of the original, while still feeling fresh and modern as hell. Just such a fantastic FPS. I might be only about halfway through, I think, but I'm already way more hyped for the upcoming sequel now.

Also grabbed both Destroy All Humans games on a flash sale on PSN a few days ago. Been playing the first, and I'm weirdly blown away. I never really looked into the series before, but it's a helluva lot of fun so far. Also didn't realize it was made by Pandemic (the same now-defunct studio that made the Mercenaries games and The Saboteur). It's one of those series that I always saw on store shelves but never payed any attention to, so it's like a weird little revelation playing it now.

Got Earth Defense Force 4.1 on the Steam summer sale as well, so I've been playing a bit of that in co-op multiplayer with my brothers. Just good, dumb fun. My brothers had never played the series before, so they seem to be continually impressed by how expansive the levels are, and how big the scale is of some things. One of them played as an Air Raider yesterday and called in the Walking Fortress Balam (a giant robot, one of the main new additions to 4.1), and it was just a chorus of all of us on Discord going "Whooooaaaa, what the f..."

And a totally random thing, I started up Front Mission Evolved, since I never finished that back in the day. Had it on Steam as well. It's actually much, much better than I remember. Most Front Mission fans seem to absolutely hate it for the fact that it isn't a strategy game like the rest of the series. I personally never really hated it, but I was bothered that it was another one of those Japanese series outsourced to be made by a western company. I remember thinking, if anything, that it was just kind of unremarkable.
But booting it up now, it's actually pretty damn good, all things considered. Pretty basic third-person shooter, but the aesthetics are really nice, and the cutscenes are really well-animated and directed. Back when Segata Sanshiro used to post on here, I remember him basically likening it to a modern remake of Front Mission: Gun Hazard, and y'know what... that's not a bad comparison. I'm having fun with it now, so that's what matters.
Makes me itch even more for Left Behind, the upcoming stealth-action game set in the FM universe. My biggest disappointment with the recent E3 was simply that that wasn't shown at all.

I just ordered a book of Dick Dale guitar tabs, and I'm pretty sure this is in it. Always been one of my favorite tracks from him. Not like I'll be able to learn the whole thing out of a book, but it'll be fun to mess around with some of the basic licks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt0NCpSwPHY

Thanks for the recommendations, and keep them coming

Probably one of the most interesting and unique games I've played this gen is a little sleeper called Echo. It's stealth, and I'm not sure how you feel about that, but the mechanics are a good deal more individual than the genre usually aims for.
Basically the protagonist is trying to navigate her way through this strange sci-fi palace that seems to have scanned and created copies of her. As you make your way through an area, the palace takes note of what movements and actions you take -- running, ducking, jumping over things, opening doors, walking through water, shooting -- and begins to apply those actions to its copies. Essentially whatever you do, the copies learn to do as well, which means you can make things easier or harder on yourself depending on what actions you decide to utilize.
It's very odd and challenging, and as you can see the aesthetics are generally very unique and surreal as well. It's not horror necessarily, but there is a very unnerving quality to the whole thing.
I haven't finished it quite yet, but it still stands out to me as one of the best of the "unknown and underappreciated" this gen. It's definitely available on Steam and PS4 (I bought it for both). Not sure about the Xbox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG5Lh7Uu-EA

In the beginning of Shenmue II, did anyone else spend 499 yen out of 500 on buying up figurines before leaving the starting area?

It's not yen, is it? Been a while since I played, but I'm pretty sure he'd converted his money to HK dollars at the beginning of the game.

Also when I read the title for this topic, my first thought was actually Echigoya dying in the first Tenchu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTL4Nx_FJc4&t=2m35s
Yeah, I'm old.

Weirdest thing here: I tried the demo for Kiwami 2, and was thinking I was going to be ridiculously overcome with nostalgia and ear-to-ear grins... but it just didn't really happen. Seeing everything in the newest engine just doesn't really do it for me like I thought it would. Turns out the original PS2 character models are a big part of the charm for me, I guess.

Which got me to thinking how awesome it would be if they included the original models as alternate costumes (sort of like how the PS1 model of Snake was available in MGSV: Ground Zeroes), even if only as DLC or something.
Won't happen, but that still would have been amazing to see.