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I tried the demo and didn't even finish it. I found the game very boring. There's far too much of an emphasis on getting higher score (which, even when not in score attack, is what I hear effects your currency). Enemies are made laughably weak in comparison to your character, and the only way to impose a challenge is by playing the game as ridiculously as possible. I mean, I'm sure the higher difficulties make the game "harder," but it's highly unlikely they're going to make the enemy AI stop standing out in the open waiting for you to grab them and then fire your gun up their anus. What's more likely to happen is a scaling of damage to your character's health, which will only serve to make the game more insipid to play (I also hear the higher difficulty forces you to get more stylish kills, as upgrades are more expensive).

The game's method of scoring basically kills trying to play the game for survival and forces you to cycle through all the available stylish kills you know until you've milked as many points out of them as possible. This is absurdly tedious to me and makes the game overly methodical to play if you're aiming to play it the way the developers intended you to. For the same reasons, I find a lot of vertical shooters, particularly danmaku like Ikaruga, to basically put me to sleep when I'm playing. If I'm playing the game for survival, it's just not very fun, as it's clear the game was designed around score. If I play it for score, it becomes so overtly methodical that I just dislike it.

Considering these same guys did the "Duty Calls" trailer, I was expecting the game to be a lot less... "BORING" than this. At least AI in the games Duty Calls was making fun of would move around, hide behind cover and provide a challenge. In BulletStorm, they just stand there so you can press a series of buttons on them to get points. If you're going to be making fun of something for being boring, partially in order to hype your new game and cause controversy, at least have your game be a slight bit more exciting than what you're making fun of. Anyway, uh, I guess it does something different! And CliffyB won't shut the fuck up about it, so you know it's good!

Edit: I guess it's worth mentioning that I really enjoyed Painkiller and consider Doom and Doom II two of my favorite games. I by no means went in wanting to think this game was incredibly boring, nor do I dislike "old school" FPS's.

dude, like

do you ever feel like

maybe your lives are really just trapped "in the level geometry"

whoa

I wasn't immediately impressed, but I'm starting to like it a lot. It's very impressive on a lot of levels, and I think the thing that I like the most about it is that it barely copies older Contra games in any way and really sets out to make a name for itself. While it plays a fair bit different from any other Contra, it's still a really solid (if not excellent, I'll have to play it more, I've only beaten Rising mode with one character and barely touched arcade mode) run n gun game. I really didn't mind spending extra on the bonus characters, as the quality of the production values and obvious care that went into this game easily make it worth a premium price above other arcade titles.

I assume they wanted to launch the game at $20 or so with all the characters, and the DLC was their way of being able to get Microsoft to agree with it and appeal to a wider audience (while still getting that extra bit out of the big fan). The extra characters actually do add quite a bit to the game, too, and are well animated with a variety of upgrades for the "Rising" mode, so they're not just tacked on, by any means.

My biggest problem with the game is that the stages are like a BILLION YEARS LONG. Completing the game, start to finish, has got to take something like 2 or more hours (there are 8 stages), which is fucking absurd for a game like this. While each stage is genuinely packed to the brim with content, I feel like they really could have cut some of it out for better pacing. The boss battles also have health out the wazoo and can take a fucking ridiculous amount of time to kill (the final boss has silly health).

I mean, the game isn't poorly designed or anything, but there are a few platforming segments in most stages that could be cut in length and the bosses could have had their health reduced - the amount of pounding some of them can take nearly makes the game boring, especially if you're reduced to the default weapon (p.s. you will be the first few times on most of them, even if you're a Contra veteran).

The difficulty level is probably the highest Contra has ever seen and there's as much memorization and trial and error as there was in Shattered Soldier, combined with a lot of hectic challenge. I've been dying a pretty big amount (reminds me of when I was a kid), and it's mostly my own fault (and partially because Rising Mode makes you grind for some abilities you get off the bat in arcade mode). There are a few parts I've found a bit cheap, but for the most part, it's really well-designed.

My overall opinion is hard to say, but I want to repeat myself - it's really solid, and possibly excellent. At the very least, it's been worth my $20, and I think my opinion of it is only going to go up as I play it more. I'm considering Rising mode to be an elaborate "practice mode" for now, and it's going to likely keep me coming back for a long time before I max out my characters and get a lot of these achievements.

Just so you know, BC 60 gigs often go for more than new slims do on eBay. They're pretty valuable.

Plenty of Gradius, though.

Also, the Castlevania: Harmony of Despair stage based on this game is pretty fun.

In Wild ARMS 2, there are two characters that are both lizards (that are prominently featured in the game as recurring comic relief). One is named "Liz," and the other is named "Ard." It wasn't until I was on my second or third run of the game that I had someone point out to me their names formed "Lizard."

I was a very literal child, and didn't pick up on shit like this all of the time