posted October 09, 2008 03:58 PM            

It's been a while since I posted... but I have been lurking. I recently went over 50 pages worth of my posts.... soon to be all the posts.... and figured out the Silent Line was my favorite version of the Armored Core Series. There are not many that lurk around here anymore, at least not that I know of, but tell me if I am wrong if Silent Line did not seem to be the best of the series.

All that being said it is kind of funny that on page 50 Silent line seemed to be the AC focus.... and that was in 2003.... and even not if you look over the few cores posted seem to be the same. I believe AC has fallen to the same malady that most gaming has fallen to. Lack of innovation and fear of trying something new.

::gives a moment of silence::

It is no wonder that Hardcore ran it's course so long ago.

This is my first and only AC site. There are many out there but this one was in my honest opinion the best for various reasons. A lot of people feel the tides.... My thoughts are that everyone that still deserves the title Raven should center on one website instead of being spread across all creation. So.... do I move on or continue to plunk around in these games? That remains to be seen.

Something that used to be around was a place to post for hopes of getting a plave in Hardcore. If anyone has a link to that old thread I would appreciate a e-mail or simply posting it in here. I suppose the way I think of this place is memory lane for almost all the old Ravens.... and no matter what everyone always likes to go back home.

posted October 17, 2008 03:29 AM            

Personally I think what destroyed AC post-Silent Line was horrible gameplay changes and not so much lack of innovation...well maybe we should just call it "horrible innovation choices" on the delevopers side :P. I didn't mind the fact that we were using the same part set all the way from AC3 to Last Raven; for me there were enough new parts in each game (excluding the black hole of AC that is Ninebreaker) to keep me interested. Of course from the point of view of a more casual player that may have been a turn-off. No no, the killer came for me when they tried to inject 'realism' with Nexus all the way to Last Raven. That effectively killed the super-fast, arcade paced gameplay that I enjoyed. Sure with the new limitations on heat and other things it was really interesting to design ACs, but that's about it. I just didn't like the feel of the gameplay changes, and I think a lot of other people didn't either :[

I remember waiting for Nexus to come out and drooling over screenshots of the new parts. Incidentally another killer was probably all of the hype that the AC community put into Nexus. I was expecting it to have similar gameplay mechanics that Silent Line and every other AC game before it...and I think that originally that was the plan. But then not too long before the release of the Japanese version of the game, I remember reading this thread about all of the new gameplay mechanics and the new heat system, mathmatical equation chagnes, etc etc. The original poster of the thread (I believe it was Tekka) put a lot of emphasis on the new heat system and how it will make your AC it's bitch. He wasn't far from the truth. I was sort of worried at that point that Nexus wouldn't live up to any of the hype...as we're all aware of, that usually spells disaster for a game. I don't remember hearing all that much complaining about the new gameplay mechanics from the importers, which isn't that surprising. Most of the serious AC gearheads will tell you that new parts are the biggest draw in new AC releases, so I'd say that a lot of the guys who got Nexus before the rest of us did were too enthralled with the new parts to really have time to critique and complain about the half-assed gameplay mechanics. I was still really stoked to get my hands on a US version of the game just because of that same reason.

Then I get finally get my copy...and at first glance it's not so bad; it's pretty much what I thought I would expect after playing it for a few hours. I play it more, unlock some new parts, go AC design crazy, and then it sorta hits me. This isn't as fun as it used to be...flying around in my AC, I mean. Why is does the game feel to limited and congested? It just doesn't feel as free and fast as Silent Line. So by this point I and probably the rest of the AC community is hoping that the next release will address all of the issues of the presently released AC game (if you haven't noticed already, there's a trend here; hype up the new game, get it and play it, have fun for a while, notice X things wrong, look to the upcoming new game for fixing, get the new game and some of them are fixed but not all of them, disappointment and boredom ensues). Of course this was Ninebreak and I thought, at the time, that bringing back Nineball from the old PS1 games with the newer parts was wicked awesome. Unfortunately I don't think Ninebreaker was as hyped as Nexus or any other AC game for that matter because it featured a severe lack of new parts and no back-story or missions. I pretty much despise Ninebreaker to this day; it barely touches any of the awful gameplay mechanics and bad part balancing from Nexus, it had a measly number of new parts (though I will say that I really enjoyed most of the new parts), and the so-called 'training missions' are so full of bull**** I don't even want to talk about them. Basically I think Ninebreaker was a very poor attempt by FROM to squeeze as much money from the AC community as possible by only having to give us 1/4 of a game...thus why I call Ninebreaker "The Blackhole of Armored Core games." I will admit that with Last Raven it seems that they tried to make a conscience effort to bring back some aspects of the awesome gameplay mechanics from the older (better) AC games of the past. I thoroughly enjoyed Last Raven and occasionally I'll still play it. But it should be noted that I didn't play it as hard as I did with every other AC game I've played; I didn't rush out to find a hidden parts list and an all S-rank mission guide so I could obliterate the game. I still haven't to this day completely unlocked everything, and I think that's partly due to the near collapse of the AC community due to the damage done from Nexus to Ninebreaker.

Armored Core 4 isn't that much better in my opinion, but it has a different set of issues altogether. It feels pretty fast, which I like, but some gameplay mechanics totally change the way the game is played (QB, for instance...your pretty much QBing all the time). Though I will give it some slack because it's a first-generation AC game for the new consoles and as such it doesn't have a whole lot to live up to. I haven't gotten a chance to try AC4A yet, but I'm hoping they have fixed some of the issues from AC4 in it.

Of course when it really gets down to it, all of the above is purely opinion; my opinion :P. I think it may be the majorities opinion, but I can't really say that for sure. I've been out of the AC loop for so long now that I don't even know what the community thinks anymore, but that doesn't matter to me. I'll continue playing SL until my hands fall off