@Gelugon_baat: Funny you should mention that. The main reason why I played the heck out of Brigador was because I was so Armored Core, Battletech and Earthsiege-starved. :(

Brigador's plot is actually pretty simple. If you use the points earned by completing missions to buy the little codex-entry things, you can suss it out.

Years before the start of the game, the planet Novo Solo was under the control of the Solo Nobre Concern, a subsidiary of some mega-corporation with extrasolar colonial holdings of its own, like the RDA from Avatar. Some decades before, the SNC-controlled local administration was overthrown in a putsch by some Che Guevara-type revolutionary communist known only as "Great Leader", who isolated Novo Solo from the rest of the galaxy with an array of ground-based anti-orbital guns.

After he died without a proper successor to take his place, Novo Solo descended into chaos. Then, the SNC came knocking, wanting their planet back. You are a Brigador, a mercenary hired by the SNC to suppress the communist revolutionaries (Loyalists), rebel militiamen (Corvids), and other opportunistic interplanetary interlopers who seek to profit off the carnage (Spacers).

Are you enough of a douchebag to betray your own people, side with a creepy interplanetary megacorp for a quick buck, and level entire city blocks, mow down crowds of unarmed protesters, and stomp tent cities filled with homeless people into pulp in order to become one of the most heinous war criminals of all time? Then you might just be a Brigador.

I actually love this game's threadbare story for how amoral, dystopian, and utterly bleak and hopeless it is. There are no heroes, here. Only money and blood.

Even without reading ahead, I could tell that the ones on the left are the renders, and the ones on the right are real. The shadows in the images on the left lack hard contrast and variation. The grass occludes the tire of the car on the upper-right too realistically to be real-time-rendered. Also, in the renders on the left, the ambient radiosity lighting is not as pronounced, and the vehicles in the background are in the same locations in the day and night scenes. Nice try, though. Almost had me fooled.

@timoteo2k1 This game does require some strategy. I've got a 1.66 K/D ratio (kinda died a lot in the laggy melee deathmatches; this game's netcode is really, really horrible about making hand-to-hand fights fair), but I tend to do fairly well in PvP in this game. Most players don't. A huge number of them have 0.5 K/Ds. They die a LOT.

The most important thing to keep in mind while in Free Mode is that every white radar blip is a potential threat that must be kept at a safe distance, and certain actions - like trying to deliver a high-priority vehicle for Simeon - are almost guaranteed to draw unwanted attention from lots of players. You have to be crafty. Call in Lester and have him hide your blip. Drive through subway tunnels and canals and make quick turns into alleyways to throw off pursuit. After all, you can always plan your revenge later, when you swoop down with a Buzzard and strafe their vehicles, or snipe them with the Heavy Sniper from a rooftop nest.

I've had a lot of tense encounters with potentially hostile players turn into some real awesome moments of camaraderie. One dude held me at gunpoint once, and I used the salute emote to let him know I wasn't an enemy, and me and his two other friends rode our motorcycles through the LS river doing stunts on the canal walls. Another time, I'd just taken down a bounty target, and after we traded a few kills, he asked if we could work together, so I gave him my heavy sniper and even called in a tank for him.

The game's a little buggy, a bit grindy, has clunky controls and feels occasionally content-bare unless you count minigames, but I think it still has potential, especially if they keep adding/fixing stuff with patches and DLC.

@swyg I think what Hideo Kojima is trying to capture is that nostalgic allure held by James Bond girls. Old-school walking pinups, basically.

The problem is that we're in the 21st century, where that sort of thing is looked down upon.

The jets and helicopters in Battlefield have always been hard to fly. The VTOLs in BF2142? Easy. Everything else? Completely messed up. Way too realistic and not arcadey enough, especially when you consider how the on-foot shooting mechanics of the game are high-action stuff for the most part. It seems almost out of place to shoehorn a flight sim into a game like this.

If I recall correctly, the default settings have inverted pitch controls, so naturally, you get it backwards and take a nosedive unless you're used to it. A lot of the pro aircraft players in Battlefield actually have a joystick.

This is a welcome addition.

It's funny watching people hurling crap at each other like monkeys in a zoo each time the big names start rolling out their new hardware. I don't participate in the console war, myself.

Not only do I have a powerful gaming PC, I buy every console from each generation so I can enjoy all of the platform-exclusives.

@Hermes33 They're asking marketing analysts, who in turn use control groups who have about as much to do with gaming as the city council of Tulsa.

Congratulations, Peter Moore. You just lost another customer to Kickstarter. Bravo.

Microsoft doesn't understand why Steam is so popular and why their stance against used Xbox One games isn't. I'll explain why. It's because you can get like ten games for the price of one on Steam during their sales. That more than compensates for not having a physical copy to re-sell.

Microsoft doesn't want to go the digital-distribution-only route. They want you to pay full price for physical media, and then they want to dictate what you can do with it.

The word I would use for that particular stratagem is "dastardly".