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http://uk.pc.ign.com/dor/objects/3880/duke-nukem-forever/images/duke-nukem-forever-20081218042325717.html?page=mediaFull
I just hope they dont get cold feet ad pull it again.... Very good Russian humour. I'd cite from the site, but you'll really have to read for yourself. I laughed.
This is the same MG tower but the soldier is equipped with a missile launcher instead of machinegun. The soldier is also given a piece of bacon for greezing the barrel and a bottle of whiskey for cleaning the aiming optics. If you have ever been in the army, you will find this funny. http://btanks.sourceforge.net/blog/about-game/enemies-and-monsters/ Mines are effective equally against troops and vehicles. They have winning appearance, and are easy to install and use.
Five fully equipped troops are frozen and GZIPped into standard rectangular bricks. Before refrigeration, each trooper is prepared using special hormons and steroids, and can be used in action after quick microwave-aided defreezing. Shipped in two versions with machine guns and handheld rocket launchers. Boomerang rocket is an accidental modification of the homing missile that has been found after beta drivers were installed from a damaged CD argh. I'll stop now, because I have to compile it. It's been a couple of months since I've played a full game, having kept myself busy with Half-Life mods. Most of which were fairly average, but of course the engine was designed in 1996. I read a review for Vietcong which mentioned the game being only marginally better looking than the high-definition updated Half-Life. So, as usual, I wasn't expecting much, but Vietcong definitely delivered. The visuals were great, albeit outdated by todays standards. But compared to it's competitiors of the time; Medal Of Honor and Call Of Duty, Vietcong looks just as good. But it's hard to compare because most of the battles in Vietcong take place in lush jungle and bush.
The waterfalls, rivers, rotting trees and bush everywhere creates an atmosphere I have not yet played in game. The levels were also quite big, some of which you can easily get lost in. Although there is a fairly linear path, you often need your teammates to guide you through because it doesn't always look linear. Which brings us to another aspect that Vietcong suceeded at compared to most other first person shooters - team mates. You team mates don't really get in your, they don't get stuck or lost, the aren't complete idiots that run into bullets. Your pointman also shows you the way, although at a snails pace. You don't have to wait for them, they won't hold up your progression, but if they are around in a gunfight it's certainly helpful. There are a couple of levels where you're fighting with another team charging up a hilll towards some ruins full of Vietcongs, so you've got at least a dozen team mates charging up with up - a neat feeling. The game does have some flaws though. The biggest being limited quicksaves. You can only use quicksave five times on normal difficulty - and with the instant deathtraps and when a single bullet can slash your health in half, you need unlimited quicksaves. Fortunately, you can get unlimited quicksaves on easy difficulty. But easy was actually still very fun, certainly not so easy that you can play with your eyes closed. The other annoying thing was the limited amount of ammunition and weapons you can carry. One handgun, and one normal gun, but often you have to drop your weapons and pick up an enemies gun because you've run out of ammo. Actually picking up ammo is a timely matter, as is making countless radio calls in the middle of battle. Vietcong was not a long game, probably ten hours max. But maybe it just felt short because I was having so much fun with it. Everything is very realistic, even killing your enemies as you need to hit them pretty well or they'll recover and keep shooting. Great graphics for 2003 and fun gameplay means I'm looking forward to playing the official addon pack and sequel. It's a pity the creators, Pterodon & Illusion Softworks, haven't done much else in this genre. But, how will this hold up against Men Of Valor, the only other successful Vietnam-based game released a year later... is like the best coop game ever. I doubt there are still any servers up, but I used to play online on the hardcore servers and it was totally ace. Probably on par with left 4 dead, just not as polished.
Hidden and Dangerous 2 Sabre Squadron has nice coop too, if anyone fancies revisiting old classic games with their mates to play coop. try being a radio man in vietcong... you actually have to use the map when calling in an airstrike, and as the map isn't full of detail and markers showing where stuff is, it's not impossible to miss the enemy completely or even blow yourself and team up. A neat touch.
http://www.foddy.net/Evacuation.html
Unfortunately, some of hte random levels are stupidly easy, but you can move on quickly to a harder one. Kek, lovely. And tasteful.
May I suggest here tho JPL; http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=porn&btnG=Google+Search&meta= Played the dawn of war 2 beta on steam?
I loved CoH. so I have high expectations for this game, please tell me its not shiiite :( Only played 2 really short matches, in which I was thoroughly thrashed. Not really sure at all what to make of it tbh. It's a lot different from Dawn of War, but I haven't played enough to know whether it's good or not. Haven't figured out how to play, and there's no real tutorial, so I'll prolly need to play a lot to figure it out.
Okay so I just played through Firestarter, an old 2004 Russian FPS. Oh and Vondur was a level designer on it, lol. Vondur I bet you did that big Empire level with the hole in the middle? That was my favourite of the game.
The levels were all really good, it looked as good as Doom4, albeit a little more cartoony and not as good lighting. The gameplay was also all pretty good, monsters entertaining, weapons decent. This would have made a pretty good multiplayer game actually. But it seemed to be marketed as a single player game - which is a bit disappointing. You play in 16 arena's, where various parts get unlocked as you kill more baddies. Much like my Chanthood Quake map, actually. I reckon it could have shown a lot of promise of being a good shooter if only there were proper, linear single player levels rather than deathmatch arenas. Oh and no quicksave is lame. Okay so what game shall I play next from 2005?
I've never played a Tom Clancy game, are these any good? Are they action games or just strategy crap? I'm thinking one of the below games: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (2006) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lockdown (2005) but I have got it and I didnt mind the last one I played (Pandora Tomorrow).
Never liked the Rainbow Six series. Currently playing PoP: Two Thrones, this series is just a whole lot of fun. I've got it downloaded but haven't had chance to play it yet.
Apparently you need a GamesForWindows account. What is G4W? A mailing list, DRM, some other wankery? The demo is coming from Steam, why do I have to fuck around with other 'helpful' systems? Will post once I've had a look at it. Its not so bad. It solves problems like the dates on savegames getting fucked up. You might get an online gamerscore or whatever.
GTA4 uses it, I dont really mind. Its not so hard to fix it up. I've only ever recieved one email from them I think and that was on signup. I think more and more games will use it, probably anti-piracy measures..... So I've got to play the game between two slices of DRM bread.
Fuck it. I don't mind Steam, and I probably wouldn't mind Windows whatever either, but both together is too much of a ballache for me - it's not like I don't have other stuff to play. When are the high up fuckwits going to realise that you need to make it as easy as possible for the customers to buy your product. GamesForWindows + Steam = sale -1 GTA4 is rediculous!
G4W, Rockstar Games Social Club, Sigh..... Atleats you dont NEED Steam for DoW2 (do you?) I didn't buy GTA4 either.
DOW2 I can buy in hard copy, but if I have to do that just to circumvent their DRM systems (considering I'll probably have to find a nocd patch anyway) then I'm not feeling like a valued customer. I just mentioned being a valued customer and hacking a game in the same sentence. I can say something like that because it's my ~$50 you want me to part with. Today the British government (a) decided 3 strikes was unenforceable and, more importantly, (b) suggested increasing ISP's prices to cover a mandatory fee to 're-imburse' the music industry for users piracy.
I think this legally obliges me to steal media now... http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5586761.ece
If my blurred rambling didn't make sense. Heavy weekend ;p I got it - the three strikes thing threw me because it was introduced when I was outside blighty.
The music industry has long being going down the tubes since they want to hang onto hard formats - that being the only way they can squeeze a profit. How much longer are cd's going to be a viable format? And if you can fit thousands of songs onto most other forms of media then hard formats become obsolete. Not much to do with the topic, or pirating music, but; http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/16/valve-pirates-are-underserved-customers Criminalising your customers a bad idea? It's mind-numbing how slow most of the industry CEO's are, considering games are supposed to be the new media. there seems (to me, anyway) to be a downward spiral at the moment where more people are pirating because of stricter drm
a couple of flash games with boiled-down "coop" puzzles. you control multiple entities, toggle between them, and solve puzzles.
http://lightforce.freestuff.gr/threesome.php http://www.kongregate.com/games/sebby_man/two-rooms Don't think it requires such a top of the line pc, it ran very well with all settings maxed, but my vid card is pretty new.
My girlfreind's netbook will run it on Medium:
9300 M GS (8400 equiv) 256 dedicated Vista (!) 2Gb DDR2 667 5400rpm HDD Atom 270 (1.6Ghz) Runs OK, occasional mild stuttering, but y'know - it's a Netbook! Brilliant game. I run 1920x1200 on an 8800GTS on High! :) Buy it...... running on high settings on my laptop (2ghz core 2 duo, mobile 8600gt, 2gb ram, XP) at 1280x800, getting a good 30fps.
Off topic-ing a bit more, my personal favourite media industry tactic is using download statistics as a lost profit model.
This means that every time an album is downloaded, they count it as an (~)15$ loss of earnings that can be written off against profits to avoid paying tax. ie, for every album downloaded the publishing company makes ~1$ in taxes they don't have to pay. Whether the downloader would have bought the album or not, the publisher makes money (and the artist gets screwed). You're joking. Big business are such scum. Maybe someone will get a chance to give G.W.B. a bullet now.
<Loosen collar> Fallout 3 does look amazing :>.. saw it briefly on a 360. I played Industri/Tenebrae for the first time too. Nice looking Q1 engine. pretty cool, liked it better than the second one (combat is heaps less frustrating) and although some of the puzzle design is a bit tired in spots, very satisfying on the whole.
the "Goldeneye : Source" team released beta3 of their mod this/last week, and its fucking awesome.
Anyone who had some serious GE64 matches in their time wont be able to help raising a smile here, its a very faithful recreation of the multiplayer experience. http://goldeneyesource.net/ Around 500mb for the Beta3 client, and worth every second it takes to download imo :) Eye of the storm for HL2 Episode 2
http://eots.half-life2.cz/english.php Is part 1 of a single player episode that has very high quality standards, its still downloading here so I can't give a more accurate description but the screenshots look niiiiice IGN score of 8.3. The video review does a good job of showing what's improved from FEAR - mainly the gripes I had about repetitive environments and gameplay are primarily fixed, and it does look a lot better than FEAR did.
Anyone else on the fence about this one? http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/bejeweled.aspx
This is the most awesome UI mod ever! Its bejeweled that we all know and love, and you can play it in WoW while waiting for your raid to form or while you are flying around. Even better, it has a high scores list that is populated by everyone in your guild that has the addon, also it adds a Bejeweled profession that you can "skill up" by getting combos and special jewels etc, it also has achievements and challenges that also add to your bejeweled skill rating. I mentioned it in guild chat today and now practically everyone has it :) Great fun i kept trying to get people gkicked if they didn't turn off the stupid skillup notice in guild chat, but my guild leader is too nice. :P
So I bought FEAR2. The game took about 7.7 hours on hard mode to finish. I think I can sum up FEAR2 using two other popular games.
FEAR 2 = CoD4 + Doom3 If you liked both of those games then F2 will be good for you, perhaps when the price falls a little bit. There is an amazing level of polish in this game, but not much else. There is no innovation to speak of, just cliche that looks really good. Your weapons are pistol, shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifle, uber weapon, nail gun, laser, rocket launcher, flamethrower, 4 types of grenades, and your feet. Your enemies are soldier with machine gun, soldier with shotgun, soldier with flamethrower, soldier with shotgun, soldier with flamethrower, soldier with machine gun, soldier with sniper rifle, soldier with machine gun, soldier with shotgun, soldier with machine gun... you get the idea. The new monsters (which are pretty cool) are few and far between. The game could have really benefited from more of those crazy weird deformed humans or undead zombie puppeteer things, or at least more non-soldier enemies. Monster dogs, monster ghosts, monster... something. Combat is like FEAR. Nothing new really that I can tell. Story is like FEAR. Nothing new really. There are some parts where they switch up the combat, like "this part is about sniping" or "this part is about a giant mech," but it's still just shooting stuff a lot with slowmo. It feels good and solid, but it's just same old stuff. Anyhoo -> FEAR2 = CoD4 + Doom3. If you liked FEAR then you will like this game. It's basically FEAR 2.0, not really FEAR 2. High level of polish/detail, no evidence of innovation. Environments are more varied than FEAR's. I would rate it about 70-75%, which is good, but not amazing, because let's face it, it isn't amazing. P.S. The game isn't scary, it's predictable. P.P.S. Not enough hallucinatory levels. At least Doom3 had Hell half-way through. Just fighting through Alma's demon-realm would've been a nice change of pace and would have made an interesting multiplayer map to boot. I almost felt like I should have replayed Max Payne again prior to playing through Max Payne 2. While the story can easily stand on its own, it would have been good to get an idea of the recurring characters; Max, Mona Sax, Woden. But Max Payne 2 is already a six year old game. Replaying the original would be going back another two years to very dated graphics. Nevertheless, Max Payne 2 is a good looking game. There are no big set-pieces or memorable levels. You may include the Funhouse as a memorable level, as it hasn't been done before in my playing experience. However having to play through the same level on three different occasions gets old very fast.
While there were no set-pieces, the game still looked good with oodles of detail scattered throughout the levels. The entire game takes place in a John Woo style film noir world. It's always dark and raining, the city is run-down. If you love film noir, you'll love Max Payne 2. It's not just the design of the levels but the story is heavily told throughout the game. I haven't seen the Max Payne movie, but I'm sure the story told in this game could be made into a full movie. Gameplay was good even with just the one difficulty setting. After playing through the first two levels I was soon tired of Max's head always in the view of the target. I just knew throughout the entire game I would grow tired of this, and wished it was first person. So, I did a search. Somebody had created a first person mod, and I restarted the game and played it all in first person view. I think it was more enjoyable actually, as you can aim at enemies much easier. The trade off is your line of vision isn't quite as good. But even so, the difficulty level was well balanced. The game increases the difficulty depending on how well your playing. The most difficult parts I found were when your having to escort or protect another character in the game. Including playing as the sexy Mona Sax trying to protect Max. However these were equally the more frustrating parts of the game. Overall May Payne 2 was a great game, with fantastic story telling, good design and fun gameplay. It could have had more spectacular levels, but what was here fit in well with the film noir setting. Also not a long game; I finished it in three long sittings. No more than 10 hours. but the holographic HUD is a cool idea. I heard it was a lot like doom 3 in 3rd person however, so I may wait until it hits the bargain bucket :)
But please, it's extremely try hard film noir at best :)
I always presumed the try-hard was tongue-in-cheek, although it wasn't particularly witty or funny. I tried replaying Max Payne 2 recently, but on the PS2 this time. Had a lot less fun than before, I mainly blame the controls, oh and the FUCKING LACK OF QUICKSAVE/LOAD OR ANY TYPE OF SLIGHTLY CONVENIENT SAVE SYSTEM. I especially love being taken back several chapters of the game when I die, silly me for expecting a single autosave thoughout the whole game. I need to lie down. yeah the developers were pretty lazy, there's even a few levels where you play through multiple times like that stupid fkn funhouse. but yeah... 3 hours on a first play through sounds a little low to me too. i guess if you skipped all the cinematics that would take an hour or two off.
Looking back Max Payne 2 is still one of the best stories I ever played. Gotta play it again.
3 hours is a joke but maybe Zwiffle is so zwofflish that he zwuffled right through it. I still haven't bought it though, cough. But I bought GTA:San Andreas and that piece of shit just does not end. So I guess I am even with the gaming industry dickheads. I found this one really nice (but have to admit that I do not remember if I completed it, oops). If you like "post-nuclear" feeling, check it out: http://paranoia.level-design.ru/index_eng.htm
Nice review site: http://spmapcorner.blogspot.com/search/label/Half-Life i've never play it before and i must say it impressed me a lot, what the beautiful game :)
I'm using the steam version of half life, but not the source version. Not sure if downloading mods/editing will be a pain in the ass to set up - anyone have any experience there?
no problems here with the non source version. Some older mods though dont work with 1.08 updates onwards.
Pulsar I didn't think it was gold yet? Looks awesome though, a bit of a RTCW ripoff, but who cares if it looks good and is fun.
i wonder why no one tells anything about it, it's about a week in retail. my pc is too old to run it
I got the demo at work. It doesn't run all that well, and the PC here is fairly decent. It was running well on a coworker's PC, and looked pretty much like Painkiller in WW1. Fight zombie Germans, ghosts, use two weapons at a time, run around a lot, etc.
Is now an open beta, for anyone that missed the news. The site is totally swamped at the moment so I would leave it a while before trying to register if your interested :)
pretty frustrating right now though, with the queue to get onto the page. Had to go through it once to register, once after downloading the plugin, and now i'm in the queue again after i tried to go fullscreen in firefox and it completely fucked up and wouldn't let me quit.
Hopefully will get to play within the hour! offline play: worked fine, Q3 is still fun!
online play: good, good, lag, lag, BSOD Might wait a few days and try again... Anyone know if there are any sites with Half life tutorials or mapping resources still active? 69th parallel seems to be dead. Handy Vandal is really hit and miss...
Did Valve ERC disappear too? Interlopers is source engine only, my bad!
But if you are mapping in Source, you should already have bookmarked Interlopers, signed up to their forums and read everything there :) They are like the func_msgboard of Source engine games. I just wanted to try and make a little HL Episode. It was the first game I ever mapped for and I never finished anything I started with it. So it's more of a nostalgia trip than anything else.
John Carmack:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3946/building_quake_live_carmack_speaks.php?page=5 So, in the couple months after launch, we will be putting together, more or less, a subscription option that allows players, for a very nominal fee -- something around like the $4.99 price point -- to also probably do other things, but the core functionality will be to allow players to, through the very elegant interface they have on the website, run their own game servers. So in the end, they really want to resell a 10 year old game that only consists of a multiplayer mode. Isn't this pretty sad? It's a good game and all, but shouldn't they be doing something groundbreaking instead? Hello Mr. Negative,
I find QuakeLive pretty great. The matchmaking works fine and I have never had as much fun with Quake 3. Maybe if you did not take that quote completely out of context, you would notice that he talks about paying for running custom servers. The game is fucking free, isn't this pretty nice? how's it running for you? Every game I play ends up lagging and freezing up. Sometimes it fixes itself and goes back to playing normally (and usually freezes again later) and sometimes I get proper system crashes and BSODs.
Really affecting my enjoyment of the game... when it's running nicely I have a lot of fun. I'm running it on firefox 3, have tried fullscreen and windowed, playing on european servers, UK servers if I can find them. Yeah - everything maxed out, looks great, 60hz, sometimes I lose the server, the stats seem to be disabled at the moment.... other than that its fine! Oh - it has a freind finder and tried to accept a request from the Negke and that didnt seem to work.
Maybe if you did not take that quote completely out of context, you would notice that he talks about paying for running custom servers.
I did. The game is fucking free, isn't this pretty nice? Apparently not, which was the whole point of my post. I consider running your own server a vital part of the package. Playing on id's servers is "free" if you don't consider looking at ads ingame (and serving as part of the community that they are in fact selling, thereby effectively working for them, unpaid) some kind of price. Mr. Negative, heh. If being "positive" is another way of saying that someone is being stupid enough to eat all the shit that people toss at him, then yes, I'm proudly negative. Quake 2 is effectively free, since you can play online with just the demo and latest patch, and I'm pretty sure it lets you run a server and has no ingame ads O_o
But sssh, don't tell. I must be doing something wrong then... I was hoping it was just early-days jitters, and it would sort itself out. Will look into it.
Do you really think it being multiplayer only is part of the problem? I really prefer to see multiplayer or singleplayer only game where they focus on one of those parts instead of adding a half-assed version of one of the modes that takes away resources from the main component only to score an extra bullet point on the box.
Anyway it doesn't seem to run very well for me as it is now and although I can see some value being added by the site with friends/stats/matchmaking old Q3 would probably offer a more enjoyable experience currently. [is qlive free?] Apparently not, which was the whole point of my post. I consider running your own server a vital part of the package.
Just read the article, from what I can see, you aren't allowed to run your own server, you are in fact buying time on their servers with your $5. He claims this represents good value relative to normal server rental costs, but I have no experience there, so who knows. Playing on id's servers is "free" if you don't consider looking at ads ingame (and serving as part of the community that they are in fact selling, thereby effectively working for them, unpaid) some kind of price. Well, this is the premise of ad-supported games I guess, it is what it is. It's free in the monetary sense, but you pay for it by having your eyeballs bombarded with special offers on herbal viagra pills. The game content is degraded, and you can choose to make that sacrifice if you wish. The exciting thing here is that because so many people are cheapskates (hi) those servers are going to be rammed. The advertising is quite subtle and not degrading the game in any way for me. Just think of it as random image on the wall (muh_bad but without jesus).
And since I consider QuakeLive more like a "free service" instead of a free game I am totally fine with it. I really hope id can monetise it so it does not vanish in a year. "Don't Look Back" -- like a cross between Pitfall and Another World (AKA Out of This World.) Fun enough to play to the end.
quite decent, its better that you have the option of going stealth or assault rather than forcing you to go one way (which still happens every now and then but at least not all the time).
wasnt used to seeing so much aliasing, for some reason the game turns off AA (even if you force it through desktop) if you select HDR rendering. graphics were decent otherwise without being anything awe inspiring. did get a bit repetitive towards the end. overall, good. Is chaos theory on the UE3 engine? If so then that would explain the lack of AA. There is some technical reason why UE3 cannot do AA on anything but DX10 hardware but I can't remember what it was.
I have not actually played any of the Splinter Cell games, as I find stealth frustrating in 90% of games (was great in Deus Ex tho), but if the sequels give you more freedom of choice then I might have to check them out. not sure, but I think so.
as for the stealth, Chaos theory is no actioner in the normal sense but compared to the other Splinter Cells, the amount of action that could be used was welcome. After purchasing a used copy of this game 3 years ago (!), I finally finished it. Overall, the story was interesting but the game was just a bit too difficult. There were a few things, though, that I really appreciated:
1) The mansion hub - while "won't budge" could get a little annoying, I liked the giant haunted house theme and would love to see it implemented in a Quake mod/map pack. 2) The "finish him" animations - it was neat to see how the various baddies dispatched you in Undying, even if it was often awkward and you couldn't fast forward through it :( 3) Creature diversity - from the gypsy terrorists to the giant floating heads with arms, there was a good variety of enemies with just the right amount of evil mixed in. I would like to see someone implement a comprehensive collection of prehistoric monsters in Quake like the base baddies in Quoth (e.g., cavemen with melee and long-distance attacks, dinosaurs, man-eating vegetation, etc.). That is all. Now I hope to start playing my used copy of Wheel of Time! It's one of the good games.
I found that the last 'autumn' section jarred a bit with the rest, but was a great style anyway. The skeletons were the only misjudged bit - infinitely respawning enemies is ALWAYS a bad idea. save for a few tech errors (czg has a great post on them earlier).
Wheel of Time is good fun too, great atmosphere like Undying. i'm also reading the books right now and WoT game should NEVER have been a shooter. :\
i guess cause shooters were all the rage back then, but it would (and still could) make a great rpg. i'm eager to see how dragon age plays. BTW, you can 'kill' the skeletons for good with the Invoke spell (or some other spell if I named the wrong one).
http://www.playnileonline.com/
This is browser game that is free to play and involves building a city and trading materials and goods with other players in order to upgrade your own city status. Its quite an addictive little thing, perfect for switching to and managing your city for a few minutes every couple of hours to keep things ticking over, just the kind of thing you might want if you are bored at work :) Try it out if resource management / trading games are you sort of thing! http://www.runtimeterror.com/play/rombo/
Its a 3D flash first person action game (some might even say shooter, if you consider casting fireballs as shooting :-P). It took me a while to make (now i know why many 2.5D games used prerendered art instead of hand drawn sprites :-P), although i didn't worked on it all the time (mostly a side project). Currently there are only five levels, although each level has something new to show (otherwise i could have done much more levels but they would be too 'same'). Btw, there is a dopefish hidden somewhere. http://gimme.badsectoracula.com/rombodope.png Can you find it? :-) Any comments would be appreciated :-) AH! Before i press the Submit button... do not forget to read the instructions (they're below the story)! Also if you're using firefox, due to a bug i'm trying to squish, do not press the right button or you'll hang your browser! hey, cool. Nice old-schoolness. Kind of like if they tried to make Heretic using the wolfenstein engine.
Aye, good article.
The Killzone 2 review linked from the article is scary though. Fairly happy review with 80% score and over 60 pages of Anonymous and profanity filterd abuse... throughly enjoyed it, probably the best of the military shooters I've come across.
Nice big levels, good autosave system coupled with well pulled off no health bar gameplay, varied missions and squad members that feel like squad members. Linear but importantly has a few routes available whenever there is a fairfight so that there is no bottlenecks. Hell, I didn't remember how good it was.. fucking good map.. To play again without any doubts :D
along with the plutonia experiment or what ever :O
//doom3 should have been doom4 on PC :P ////damn i should play Final Doom again :S Final Doom is a compilation of the best Doom maps ever, and TNT Evilution / Plutonia Experiment has been included "as is" in the pack... And if you have any interest of replaying it separately on your PC (as I do with Doom Legacy engine) you can download the Doom wads here: http://doom4ever.free.fr/ in the wads section ;)
Enjoy !! Was right - World of Goo is pretty good. It is just an extended flash game, but with more depth, better story and artwork.
$20 is a bit steep for what you get, nut I'm having fun with it. Fallout: New Vegas - apparently a new game, not a sequel to Fallout 3 but more like a contemporary kind of thing. Coming out next year or so.
Who else is excited? http://kotaku.com/5219584/new-fallout-announced Haven't played ANY of the previous Fallouts - so many games, so little time. $50 is a price I try to pay once or twice a year as well.
you can make your characters intelligence so low that when they speak its just Sloth-like sounds?
The DLC is free to all owners of Left 4 Dead and introduces a new multiplayer game mode entitled, Survival, plus two complete campaigns for Versus Mode.
No mention of any new coop stuff = pointless = count me out. yeah, although it's more like "me help you" instead of "sure, i'll help you out."
and some NPCs mock you which is pretty funny. http://www.l4d.com/blog/
You can't be counted out unless you never connect to the internet to play. There's a rumour that the HDR testmap (lighthouse) might be one of the Survival maps, though don't know how valid that is. Okay, maybe I'm not understanding Survival mode, is it coop then??
I'd rather just have new campaigns / a new weapon / a new special. Is basicly a never ending finale event like the ending area of each campaign. The idea is to survive (duh) as long as you can against endless zombies and specials.
I did hear a rumour that Valve were working on a flamethrower for L4D, which would be great :D Also, I would love some sort of heavy melee weapon that you could replace pistols with perhaps, like a fire axe or sledge hammer, im sure that could be fun ;) It's like the DMSP player mod but co-op Sham.
Still got all the hectic teamplay you enjoy from campaign, but without all that hassle of walking through a level (yes, I agree that it's inferior to a new campaign, but still, probably be good for a laugh or 6) The sound of new specials - the Screamer that was cut was basically a cross between the Boomer and the witch but there's alot of scope for other designs.
Not a fan of the weapon suggestions so far - an instant fire weapon negates the molotov's clunkiness. It was left clunky for a reason and adding the ability to instantly flame stuff introduces a whole new range of mechanics. Could be done I spose. Melee would be fun, but I doubt they'll go for it. I suspect they'll keep the zombies as the melee creatures. It's the cool thing to do right now - 1st person everything - but I'm not yet convinced. Have yet to play Zeno Clash though. How about a disposable rocket launcher? Not a Quake rocket launcher but a real one. I mean kneel down to fire, shrapnel pinging off etc. A tank stopper. Another one might be claymores - cover yourselves but if you don't let your team-mates know then you're fucked. The other thing that could be an interesting new mechanic is non-combatants. You have to get them to the safe house but they're useless bots without guns. Not too sure about a rocket launcher, even if it is real world inspired. It would make me feel too powerful against the zombies, and something would be lost as a result. Its scary when you look at a huge horde running at you and "shit, I've only got this fucking peashooter?" :)
Claymores could be a very cool addition indeed, or any kind of "home made" booby traps that you can set down like that. "useless bots without guns".. Please die in a fire!!!!!! =) The only good I can see coming from such an idea would be if you could blindfold them, tell them to scream and run away from you, thereby attracting a ton of zombies to them while you slip past. Roofles may be had. Maybe a full length dress mirror would be a cool "weapon" ;) A RL as a single shot LAW type weapon which has a big delay to fire - it'd be useless against a horde unless you wanted to turn your team into pate.
Just got the image of a curling smoke trail and a tank being quartered in a spray of intestines. Hm, maybe bodyguard scenarios are a shitty idea. But different scenarios / missions could be good - go find a car battery and come back to the safe house, for example. this is how the game looks like
http://sliderpoint.com/images/ts086_s4.jpg 6MB to download, we are GMT+1 icq 259689233 feel free to join us meltslime or just shuttafucka. it may LOOK like game for little kids but it IS the most addictive online game ever. (runs on XP with no problems)
But most everyone in my office has it - the guys who made it are a splinter dev team from ours, and we're still pretty friendly.
I haven't played it yet (credit card maxed for the month) but the general first impressions sound good and visually its interesting - an acid trip inside the Sorcery books (original inspiration). Well worth the $20.
I'm still not convinced that first person camera is the best way to represent melee, but when the mechanics are so well balanced it doesn't really matter. The things that impress so far are the melee, storyline and visuals. The melee system is simple yet has a nice range of options to exploit. The gun sections make a nice break from the fisticuffs - sniping at animals or mercenaries. The shooting mechanics are not as polished as the melee (less tactics) but they're not the focus of the gameplay. Usually the better option against groups is to throw the weapon away and start brawling, which is oddly realistic, although the ranged weapon damage isn't so much. It's apparently pretty short but that's represented by the price. Interesting game. Well, I bought a copy of Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead recently (terrible distractions from mapping I know), and although I am slowly trudging through both games, for some reason I found myself strangely drawn back to Fallout 3! Despite the fact that I already completed the game (well the stroy mode anyway) first time through, it is such a brilliant game and has sooooooooo much replayability that I just couldnt resist.
Having already done about 70-80% of what is in there I am able to plan my tatics a bit better. Here I am at level 4, with the alien blaster hunting deathclaws for XP. I refuse to use any drugs this time round, and also I am going to persue the route of melee weapons expert! And I know that I could probably play it again in the future, except I will see what happens when I take the entirely evil route! :DDD For those who havent for whatever reason, this game is truly the best game of '08, and well worth a look! And yes, I think its better than Oblivion, which I didnt like at all... I have a mental block with Fallout3
and its very playable but somehow it feels not as good as the first. Maybe because its *too* similar, almost feels like an expansion than a new game.
kotor 2 was rushed a lot. probably why it doesn't have a real ending and has so much unused assets still in the game. (you can download mods that add these unused assets back into the game, if you're interested)
Extremely slow - haven't played it but apparently you need 6 hours uninterrupted to get the best out of it.
gets better, even addictive, from the middle to the end. The end levels get a bit tedious though. Overall pretty good, but definitely lacked polish.
and its one the worst AA rendered games I've seen, so many jagged lines even with 8xAA in which most games look great.
finally around to playing it.
Effectively a less polished but entertaining in its own way of D3 with moments of spoogeworthy graphics and a well executed if over oppressive theme. same comments as above for the whole thing except that there are lots of moments of spoogeworthy graphics, especially in the levels inside the nexus area. Insane amounts of detail in some of those bits without seeming too cluttered as UT2KXX does (well from screenshots anyway)
did anyone else completely miss this news last year?
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=957 That's all I can find on it, apparently id software were developing a game with id tech 5 for 18 months, which they abandoned because they felt it was rehashing Doom 3. Anyone got any more information? I remember that. Based on what I remember thinking I heard about it, I think they made a good decision to cancel it. Wasn't that big a deal to me anyway.
For some odd reason, my 9800 GTX does not like the demo, and will, after a few minutes, turn everything into seemingly 8-bit colors and freeze.
Having said that, what I did play of it was boring, and it doesn't seem like it will hold my attention for long. Of course, Peggle as well did not hold my attention either. Just those kinds of games I suppose. really want to try the demo, but can't really justify it right now, being in the middle of finals. Damn you PopCap, with your games so full of PopCrack, ho ho ho etc.
DUN-DUN DUN-DUN . . . DAH DAH
DUN-DUN DUN-DUN . . . DAH DAH DUN-DUN DUN-DUN . . . DAH DAH DUN-DUN DUN-DUN . . . DAH DAH DUN-DUN DUN-DUN . . . DAH DAH DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUUN-DUN-DUN DAH DAH fab game, although after this and q4, I'm oppressive teched out :)
Someone mentioned ages ago the fact that you cant die, I thought the spirit levels were pretty much the same punishment wise as reloading from where you die (ie if you are used to autosaving, no real difference). Holy crap, that looks killer! Great environments!! And I loved ICO to death so this is a day one purchase for me. Awesome, awesome...
One of the best games ever; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ico
that's big news! Looks exactly halfway between ICO and SOTC. This is probably years away isn't it :(
If you control the Hippogriff or the kid.
. . . and why the kid's art style looks completely different from the rest of the game. Haha, I saw the shots on kotaku earlier and specifically thought: Daz will literally jizz his pants at this, so hard he may die.
hm is there a way to beat the boss? and the sea thing is.. weird. i even got the poor little guy to the end, but he just died. I question the reward system :)
I thought they were trying to play on the conventional gamer expectations... the lack of a 'win' state, or clearly defined goals. The early section seems intentionally arbitrary - what are these things i'm picking up? Who are those guys I'm killing and why?
On the other hand, while the execution is good in one way (pixel-art, music, movement in section 1), the gameplay in the underwater area is hugely boring and frustrating. Inverted steering with annoying inertia in the dark + flashlight pointing the other way to where you're going, oh boy. Intentional, maybe. Irritating, yes. Payoff, no. I wish less pixel art platform games tried to be clever and arty and just gave me situations where I can rescue Princess Peach/My gay lover Tails from King Koopa/Dr. Robotnik. Inverted steering with annoying inertia in the dark + flashlight pointing the other way to where you're going, oh boy. Intentional, maybe. Irritating, yes. Payoff, no.
Exactly. I like the idea, it should just have been executed better. There's some form of communication missing. The little hints you give the player. Discovering that you can Persuadertronize the fishes didn't feel rewarding, because i was wandering around for minutes until i finally got it, and then immediately knew i had to wander round even longer to find all of them. Also, there was no feedback if they were helping at all or were just a gimmick. Finding some weird green thing that i had no idea what it was supposed to do didn't feel rewarding. just random. I still don't really get what happened ;-) Now rebellion dont sit very well with me, after the masterpiece that was avp they have made shite (unless you can prove me wrong).
But, the shots from avpr look fucking fantastic so far, so im slyly crossing my fingers that they are going to return to the greatness that was AvP. I don't think ive ever played such a suspenseful and atmospheric game since (hmm actually, perhaps the penumbra games) and the moments of sheer terror when an alien pulls your face off! Good, good times. This AND Colonial Marines, my god im in heaven... I just hope the cornbread is good Man I got a baaaaaaaad feelin' about the fact that they might can Colonial Marines.
Release a bloody classic shooter already, some company...... !!! i agree with the criticism that the middle section is a bit too tedious for what it is. I thought the overall presentation was great, and the twist ending and stuff was cool, the only real problem is that specific twist has been done to fucking death in movies, tv shows, books, etc. etc. etc. for decades or maybe centuries. It's basically An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge in video game form. But like i said, done well.
nice weapons, cool enemies, decent gameplay.
But the engine is a bit unpolished (hello plasticness) and the level design could have been more inspiring given the setting, lots of detail but not all that interesting detail. Gameplay is fun but unfortunately very repetitive too given the timeshift powers and the fact that you can die in like 2 sec if you try and play this like a normal shooter. I liked the auto regeneration but some armor would have been good too even if they had to tinker with other stuff for balance. for the first time, what the great game.
in the credit menu there is a name Warren Marshall, is it you Willem? A few in the office have it, sometimes L4D is on backburner, but they basically say it{s like Survivor mode but with more varieties of zombies. And much longer load times.
Didn{t catch my attention, tbh, seeing as it seems I already own it, inside L4D. a Ancient Roam arena where space-cowboys and waist-land warriors have chainsaw-jousts on the backs of dinosaurs and ginormous scorpions and other ultra-violent sports to the beat}s of Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Fear, but i know it will just end up being a disappointing zombie game
Try typing on a spanish keyboard when you've no time.
It doesn't look special TBH, just reminds me of that Q1 map where you have to watch over your comrade's tomb. I forget the name. "in the credit menu there is a name Warren Marshall, is it you Willem?"
Yep, that was the first big game I ever worked on! I got it for very cheap and got it because one of my favorite mappers Kew Jervis worked on it.
I agree, it was a great game - tons of atmosphere. I really liked Shadar Loggoth and those basement halls full of traps. The multiplayer was kind of interesting at the time too, but it never really picked up. Was lots of interesting tricks to do with the spells, like shooting a position switch spell just as your throwing yourself in lava with a fire resist rune.
Bal
Oh yes, the WoT multiplayer was incredible - and I don't use that word too lightly. I think that it was too complex for people at the time, however. It came out right around the UT/Quake3 timeframe so all anyone wanted to do was blast each other with rocket launchers. Having to think about 20 ter'angreal and their various interactions was too much work I think. WoT was one of those games where if you got a bunch of guys together who really knew the ter'angreals and how to use them it was an absolute blast. We had some killer deathmatches around the office during development. Yeah I was quite sad it died out fairly fast, I had some great games on it, even on the demo before the full game came out. Was fun just having hundreds of homing stuff flying around, you're never sure how a battle is gonna turn out, depending on who has the most counters.
Yep, that was the first big game I ever worked on!
And arguably the best. Fsck Gears3 or whatever you're doing atm, get Epic to acquire the license for a remake tbh... nitin
I was there during the very early pre-production work but I left for Epic before any real work got done. So, no, I don't have any levels in there. 8 March 2009 headline on his quake page at www.worch.com says he is looking for testers.
All this Mass Effect 2 E3 preview business is making me want to go back through and play it again. Eeeffffffffff
played through it once on PC, it was a fantastic experience! The combat was a tad crap but the story and characters more than made up for it.
Really looking forward to the sequel! Hmm and the bioware MMO too actually! :P always with aliens, zombies and trying to make it like real life and the like;
don't they have anything original for new first person shooters? But those ideas get cancelled when marketing comes back - saleability of content unknown, saleability of zombies 70%.
It's important to remember that execs don't give a shit what the game is about, only that it sells. And that producers tend to have their balls surgically removed upon signing their employment contract. Guys, it's Aliens vs Predator. The characters aren't really open to interpretation.
I disagree - I would actually love to see some bold variations of the Predator and Aliens we all know. The idea of the alien has tons of potential already because of the face-hugger breeding through different organisms thing, and, well, I'm sure there are a fuck ton of ways to spice up the Predator. They don't all have to be clones of the first one. Established franchises don't really need to be messed with, IMO. If you want to go all freaky experimental, create a new IP.
Where you are a face hugger. or a baby. first level starts in some dudes intestines.
Oh, and I hope they digitally insert Arnold Schwarz into the game. Or at least Danny Glover. All the best franchises constantly evolve (this is a statement I'm pulling out of my ass, but just play along.)
Terminator introduces newer and better terminators each movie, etc etc. Star Wars constantly adds new things, different ways to fight with light sabers, aliens, etc etc. Hell, Quake is a COMPLETELY NEW GAME each and every iteration. And Quake 4 = Doom 3, so that counts as a new game. For a species as technologically advanced as the Predators to have cloaking technology, laser targeting shoulder cannons,and arm-band nukes, they sure as hell could have a ton of different, interesting gadgets with which to battle, more interesting armor, etc. A warrior-centric society where each Predator tries to display his (or her?) own trophies and badges of honor, etc, has a ton of room to evolve. Firstly I LOVE Aliens. What a fantastic movie! I really hope they dont can Aliens: Colonial Marines, because I would love a game like that - set in the Aliens universe, likely to stay with the established themes of my fave movie!
Without bringing a predator into the equation at all, as a games designer (creature artiste or whatever) you could have so much fun with the Aliens species (the Alien/Aliens/Alien3 and maybe (just maybe) Alien Resurrection). You could have all types of Aliens! It begs the question - do aliens favour humans/humanoids as hosts or were they just using them because that's all there was? What if aliens made it to earth - you could have snake aliens, bull aliens, dog aliens, cat aliens, tiger, lions, elephants, horses, sharks, you name it! Imagine if aliens made it to a planet with dinosaur like creatures on it? I dont personally feel offended by the idea of any of these, a movie would be fucking scary as could a game. But making the predalien out of AvP2 Requiem have dreadlocks was a TERRIBLE idea. Really. If the artwork is done true to the style of Giger/Camerons alien, and the space marines are bad-assed enough then it would work. Its a shame that the imagination has been taken out of the aliens franchise. It was a franchise which originally was about imagination. Its the stuff schoolboy's dreams are made of (quite literally) and TBH I think the only thing which has been capitalised and perverted in a worse manner is probably the bible! or something. Think about it in terms of "what we know about the alien". What did we know about the alien by the end of Alien3? Facehuggers impregnate large animals (always mammals? or large creatures?) which then "hatch" into aliens which although have a recognisable form do inherit many features from their hosts. Acid for blood Inner jaws Queens Intelligent agressive behaviour Blah blah blah..... I mean you could have countless different scenarios with different hosts and environments! But the recent stories have all seemed completely cliched, the aliens havent been allowed to be anything other than "human" aliens and "predator" aliens, so as not to break the "iconic" laws of marketing, the posters, the glyphs, the hardware. Rotten tomatoes!!!!!!!! I'm thinking specifically of the series Aliens: Colonial Marines, there were a shit fuck ton of different aliens. Somehow there was a water planet and there were like squid aliens and whale aliens, which, as I remember, totally scared the crap out of me as a kid (mainly because of my fear of the wide empty ocean + unknown oceanic life combined with aliens.)
Also: if you can find it, check out the Aliens: Colonial Marines trailer for the Nintendo DS. They have crazy kinds of aliens in that game it looks like. There was a scene of a 30-foot giant alien who just picked up marines like ragdolls. Looked like fun. http://www.dukenostalgia.com/Kscope/Aliens/Images/toys.JPG
You can probably find a better picture of these toys, but yeah, I had (have, actually) the Mantis Alien. How a face hugger impregnated a mantis, I'll never know. Should Be A Player Mode where you are a face hugger. or a baby. first level starts in some dudes intestines.
This was actually in the original alien vs predator game. First level you were a face-hugger, second level a chest-burster. Dunno if doing it again would be too much of a retread... variety is great, its good to kill things that look different from each other, gives personality and makes for a well rounded experience
Timeshift - quite good, I liked it a bit more than Nitin, solid feel to the combat, good but not great shooter.
WOT - great game, might have said this before. A fantasy classic. It didn't inspire me to read the books but it was atmospheric, stylish, distinctive, and interesting gameplay. AVPwotever - looks good still. Hm. So you can't release a large DLC because of the Xbox limit, so you have to make it an entirely new game, justifying the expense by adding HDR and the phong shading from TF2.
Does look like it'll be good though, but basically torpedoes the previous version. "Valve employees decide which game gets made"
Wtf is that supposed to mean? I know what they want us to think; that there's some kind of democratic system in place. I cant even get this game to install. google tells me its physx related but I dont even have physx installed.
what the hell EA? http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/994/994129p1.html
I hope this is true! I know that I'm making myself succeptible for a severe dressing down about how its a console game and not designed for the PC, but I dont think I would have any problems with the controls. I for one would definately buy it! UE3 engine games always run very well on PCs with half decent processors, just ashame theres no anti-aliasing, but thats no big deal really..... Bait.
But yeah, probably. The thing is, I run into jerks like that all the time so my natural compulsion is to take it at face value. Surely you've seen enough of my posts to take _nothing_ I say seriously?
Don't make me posts the photo of my GoW case held up in front of a screen with func on again (I would do one with the GoW2 case, but I completed it co-op at a friends and holding up someone else's copy wouldn't really prove the 'I buy games' point). But yeh, it was a mixture of showing inertia how to bait, a throw back to previous piracy conversations (including the hissy-quit one that led to the afore mentioned photo) and a minor commentary on one of the main reasons for delayed PC releases. This isn't just flame bait, it's Marks & Spencer's Organic Meta-textual Flame Bait. (reference lost on all non-UK residents deprived of M&Ss food pr0n) Altho part of me is tempted to get a list of every game Willem's ever worked on and pirate them all on principle (the principle of humour, but still ;)
It would not have any more impact to anything in this world than if you clapped your hands and shouted "harrharrharr!". That's what many don't get about some individuals personal reasons to pirate stuff.
Interesting point.
If he lends me the game so I can complete it on my own is that as bad as d/l-ing it? (Not that I will, one of the best bits of GoW1/2 imo is the co-op, gotta love the madcap american football esque gameplay the res adds) i can't believe you played through gow2 at a friends without buying it.
I know, I was all "nonentity has friends?!" ZING! OH NO SHE DIDN'T i was joking, again.
iirc from a legal pov it's fine to lend the game away. In Germany, anyways. If there was no copy protection we would even be allowed to copy it for close friends and family members. But breaking copy protection is illegal, so...
Elder Scrolls 3, 4 and Call of Cthulhu on Steam for pretty affordable prices.
Must... resist... Fuck it I'm buying them. Is a buggy port.
If you can't get away from the Shoggoth then you need to lower your screen resolution = higher running speed. hexen mod
http://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/starship.zip Pretty cool if you can get over the idea of a medieval themed spaceship. Our HHexen GL is busted though %< I still have a copy of Half-Life 2 on steam that I can give away for free to anyone with a steam account.
Let me know if you want it! but added value services like starting a custom tournament, league, or the like would cost a small amount of money.
They've actually gone insane after WoW. mentioned WoW as an example, where "value added services" like server transfers are paid for, but "you can get the full experience of Battle.net with all the features just from buying the box." Well, that and the fucking subscription fee. The WoW profit model is one of the most unethical things in gaming, the fact that they seem to be trying to work out how to convert it to more traditional genres scares the hell out of me... And yeh, no LAN support. As far as I can tell if I want to host my own game with (local) friends I have to connect to battle.net, pay blizzard for the 'privilege' of creating a game then get the people sat in the same room to connect to me via blizzards own servers (yeh, I get it's not going to be stupid enough to proxy the entire game, but still, that's hassle). Only other option is to steal a cracked, non-battle.net version of the game just to play on LAN. And forcing your customers to turn to crime is ofc an excellent business model... it looks exactly like SC1 gameplay with new graphics?
I never really did get on with Blizzards strategy games, I much preferred Relic's offerings over theirs any day, company of heroes is still my favourite RTS game, though I have not tried DoW2 yet as my pc is crap! Blizzards strategy games upto and including warcraft3 seem to be more about what order to build units in and then just swarming your enemy, and that just has never been fun for me at all. I must say StarCraft is pretty damn addictive. It was the first RTS I ever played, and the one I played the most. AoE2 however felt the best. If I could get an RTS that combined the economy of AoE2 with the micro/macro of StarCraft on a DoW battlefield, I think I just might be in heaven.
But damn I can't wait to play the hell out of this game.
aannd, that's why they can get away with it. aannd, that's why they can get away with it.
But that doesn't justify it in the slightest, if anything it makes it worse But that doesn't justify it in the slightest, if anything it makes it worse
it's fair game if you can pull it off and make money off it. it's not about ethics, it's about money and the fact is that people want to play this game so much, they'll be willing to spend an extra whatever $ to do so. btw, i wasn't trying to single you out, Bal. your comment just provided a stating point. i mean, i get it. i understand the sentiment behind it. but if a person is willing to pay, than it's not bad business because the net profit is positive. if this pissed people off enough to not buy it such that those net profits are negative, well... my point isn't that people are stupid to pay extra money, but that their willingness to pay means that the game is worth the extra money to play.
something's worth is determined by how much people want to sacrifice for it. if the subscription fee goes through and people agree to pay, it just means your take on how much the game is worth doesn't coincide with everyone else. i personally don't think the game is worth the extra money, but i don't think the game is worth 50-60$ (or whatever it's price will be) either, so i will not be purchasing it. :) To be honest, I don't feel like I'm paying extra money... yet.
The LAN thing isn't an issue for me, I don't play LAN, or when I do it's at work and we are all connected anyways. The three games issue will become one if the 2 next games aren't priced as expansions, and if they aren't nothing is forcing me to buy them. I played the hell out of Warcraft3, but never bought the expansion for instance. There has been NO talk of subscription for Battlenet (for SC2 anyways) at the moment, I seriously doubt they will go that route. ... is so 2003, seriously. You are buying a maintained and constantly developed and evolving service, not a static game.
You are buying a maintained and constantly developed and evolving service, not a static game
And if we were actually discussing an MMO game that might almost be approaching a valid point... But EVE Online has some of the best stories I think I've ever seen in an MMO.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/100/1002527p1.html i always felt that eve had hit on something quite good. while it doesn't appeal to as many people as wow, having never played eve, it seems to me as if the developers can take a much more 'hands off' approach. blizzard is constantly working with the next expansion in the pipeline because WoW is content driven whereas eve gives the player more of a framework to work with and pits players against each other.
a game that could apply eve's model but also break into the casual market like wow could be amazing. the important thing here would be to make sure people know that it's the players who write the story, not the devs. So anyone played this?
It's really good, very fun gameplay, single player and coop. Playing alone is a great platformer, mastering the characters is lots of fun. Playing coop with 2 other people (on the same machine, no online coop =( ) turns it into more of a Little Big Planet experience, with lots of silly physics. The game is really pretty too (just the 2D character art is a bit average). which includes sonic3, sonic and knuckles, and sonic3 & knuckles are the only other games i really play besides quake
could be good aye, but this lame ass trailer shows nothing. oh wait... multiplayer only, and no gravity. damn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP0FuiScbh4&NR=1
This is the game I am dumping WOW for, I am in the closed beta and the game is ace. Don't want to set aside an allotment of time to play them, trust me. You're going to waste lots of time playing with the physics, experimenting with different ways to kill enemies, looking at pretty stuff and driving like a prick.
Make sure to play ep2 as well. dont have ep2 yet, have had hl2 and ep1 sitting around for ages since sleepwalker kindly gifted them to me.
unfortunately, I thought that might be the case (wasting lots of time doing various stuff) from what I had read, but I just dont have that time right now. maybe I'll put it off till the end of the year when i get some time off and am not overseas. hey, a kindred spirit! :P
i've played up to the first level in the blight (after the first trip into the Ways) so far and i would say the game is consistent up to that point, so if you're not liking it now, i'm not sure you'll like it later either. also, i only noticed later on, but the videos don't play for some reason, so i missed out on a lot of the story (and there's a fair amount of it told in those videos). so if they aren't showing up for you, make sure to check them out in /WheelOfTime/Movies for me, i'm only playing because i like WoT. Good to know... I haven't read the novels, only gave it a try because people here said it was good.
I'm in the second level, somewhere in the White Tower. The videos do play, but they always take some 30 seconds to load, because they are opened externally (wtf). If they don't work for you, it's most likely a Quicktime issue. I played it to the finish many many years ago. Have no desire to ever do so again, though I have fired it up expressly for Shadar Logoth once or twice in the intervening years.
Yep, the first 1/3 is good. It goes downhill the further you play I thought, so if your still not enjoying it, don't bother continuing. It was good for it's time.
So after which level exactly does it stop feeling mediocre and boring?
- The same could be said about Quake. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnmfMQBIbw
Though I hope the glow doesn't make it too easy for the survivors in the end. I believe the first one has that glow as well. Do you mean the effect where you see team mates through walls?
Yeah being able to see your team mates trough walls has always been in...
Damn I can't wait to play it! Hmm, I guess I should play it more often. :P
But there's no such effect for items, is there? ...but do I have to have all those messages on the screen and all those 'buddies' getting in the way. I just want to kill things, I don't need to be clever about it!
Those hints can be disabled, they're meant to be help for beginners. Some people do leave them on though, because it's a clearer cue that something happened to your teammates than the sounds/other HUD indicators.
...well that's me sold then :)
Axe looks well brutal. Incendiary shotgun looks good for lighting up Zombies for others to shoot. You can't play L4D without buddies, be they real people or bots. Any random special infected is capable of incapacitating you, and someone needs to be there to free you.
The 2 new infected look good, they will stop people stacking up in corners when a swarm comes. Actually in an interview they said that will probably be tweaked. Killing the charger with one frying pan hit looks weird.
And they might change the rules based on how you're playing. Players vs Players could never have 1 hit kills but Players vs AI might...
Boomers die from 1 bullet no matter what mode you're in. The charger is pretty big looking to go instantly into ragdoll after being hit by a frying pan.
Is great stuff! =)
Been playing loads recently, and this mod really doe's turn the game into something special. + Tons more guns, ammo types, armours and items + Tons of new mutants (some are scary as hell) + Fixed campaign levels that let you keep on playing after you "complete" the game. + Numerous tweaks and fixes all over the place, which make the game better and much more atmospheric. Give it a whirl if you have not tried it! It's still bastard hard in some places, but its nice to play a game that genuinely challenges you for a change =) i LOVE stalker but the god damn thing never runs for long before crashing. it's just evil. :(
the mod that made me die at the first few dog thingies at the first armor place because i fired about 50 shots at them and only got 3 down because they were so tough and seemed to respawn? I think it was. Never even started it again after that experience.
I didn't find OL much harder than vanilla Stalker to be honest. Sure you're not confusing it with the Invasion mod or some other of those?
Looks like a well achieved Q3 porting
http://www.darksalvation.com/trailer.html what struck me as funny is that the trailer has some clips with some seriously BAD particle effects. i can't even tell what it is supposed to be. you see these big blobs spawn in without fading or growing-- they just pop in, fly upward and then pop out (again, no fading or anything, just *pop*). if they couldn't even be assed to get rid of that or at least make it look 50% less shitty, what does that say about the quality of the rest of the pack? :P
I like the textures.... And it's single player quake3, right? That hasn't been attempted as far as I know since... The Dark Conjunction (shudder).
Yes, they smell bad and are dirty and since they're shown in the promo video they're shitty public emissions.
Looks like a design weak team - if particle fx are weak then don't use them. Q3 has a very nice shader system that could replace all those particle attempts with much nicer looking stuff. Although they also have one shifter texture in there that's just round red circles. My $ limit is exceeded for the month.
Good thing really, There's alot of other games I need to play. And going through Soulstorm with the Sisters of Battle isn't easy, so that's still got some mileage in it. Haven't played mp since I bought it yet (played the beta a bit) but yeah sure, I'll give it a go if some people are interested.
New L4D campaign coming from Valve "Crash Course" that fills the gap between No Mercy and Death Toll. Sounds pretty cool, can't wait for it.
Well I've never actually played it, but watching these L4D videos, I'm really not impressed by this game. Looks like Serious Sam style gameplay but without the awesome level design from SS2.
Well anyway, i'm just posting about FraggingFree, the doom3 roe mod? Any of you guys played it? I just played through it all over the last few days. Fkn hell, what a professional mod. To be honest the level design shits all over id's levels, and the new monsters (albeit some already released previously) and weapons shit all over ROE. Just a shame it's WAY too insanely fkn hard. If it weren't so hard, and maybe a smidgen longer with less spawning monsters in the same areas over and over, this could easily be a second official mission pack. Still, the best (albeit short) experience I've had with Doom3 mods/maps is still Shamblers Castle :) http://ged.ax.pl/~tomkh/exp_en.htm#gamehide
A great simple HARD game where you have to sneak past security cameras. check this out:
http://doom3.filefront.com/file/doom_reborn_modificado;102063 Try this one instead: http://doom3.filefront.com/file/;66871
I'd also like to give Zhunter a try next time I install Doom 3. New Rage screenshots: http://www.psu.com/forums/showthread.php?s=33785e077f821168ed0ae6cbdb92ab92&p=4457603#post4457603 http://www.tigsource.com/articles/2009/05/09/all-our-friends-are-dead
it's fun trust me, he told me about it just last night/early morning as seen in post #2744 :)
actually it seems like that website doesn't save your stats when you quit. the same game is on Kongregate and that site usually saves it: http://www.kongregate.com/games/CasualCollective/the-space-game-missions tried it again.
Seems like i ran into some sort of issue last time -- i know there were several ghost-like dogs/wolves protecting the first 'perfected suit', that were basically unstoppable. They're gone now, and everything seems to work fine. Doesn't seem to be any harder than normal stalker so far, if you don't count some insta-deaths by anomalies etc. Certainly not demanding historical correctness from such a game, but seeing a bunch of 1990+ D-Mark bills on a table made me laugh.
A FPS!!!! A proper one!! I've read a lot of comments on the net about the graphics being shit. But they dont look shit to me, IDTech4 is pretty sweet graphics IMO. Im more interested in just playing the game anyway!
A copious amount of fun to be had, just love to go kill them Natzis. Now, all we need is an SDK...
It's pretty much a remake of RTCW with better graphics. Many familar locations (thematically) and similar gameplay. There's some mild non-linearity, you can move through a maze-like town and take missions. The hidden items, gold and documents, are actually helpful this time, as they let you buy weapon upgrades at blackmarket vendors. Then there's some magic medallion which is reminiscent of other games (Prey's spirit walk comes to mind).
I guess if you enjoyed RTCW, you'll like this one too, but don't expect the reinvention of the wheel or anything. either there's a lot of trickery or they've reworked how idtech4 does lighting cause wolfenstein looks really good compared to q4/d3.
...that sounds alright to me. I liked RTCW, solid fun shooter.
How does it run compared to D3/Q4?? Its got pretty staple action. Then theres "The Veil" which combines the parralel dimension of Prey with the slow-down-time element of FEAR.
The weapons feel good, and you get to upgrade them! Er, what Negke said basically. The graphics looks fine - nothing too flash for 2009, but well designed none-the-less. The feel of the game is pretty much "Scripted action shooter, no non-sense gameplay, movie style". Would be suitable for 12-14 y/o boys :DDD How does it run compared to D3/Q4??
Very good. I could run it in full detail without performance drops. Though I could imagine machines not meeting the requirements may choke (however slightly) in some areas, for instance the underground base. I'd say if you could run Q4 smoothly, you should be able to play this one, too. I'm actually enjoying this game (Wolfenstein) more and more as I play it through. TBH the fact that the "press" (IGN etc) are giving it 70 - 80 percent I think is rubbish. This game is pretty good!
I personally would have it atleast mid eighties for a score. It takes IdTech4 and uses it to the max! Just because its not as graphically rich as say crysis or Far Cry 2 doesnt meen its no good - I would say that the design of this game is superior to those games in every way. What the game does which other IdTech4 games havent done is non-linearity. I mean its not quite Fallout 3 here, but you really can pick your missions, find other secret missions and side missions. There are also loads of secret stashes of gold and "tombes" which are used to upgrade your weapons and "veil powers" respectively. And once you have upgraded, if you gont like it you can actually down-grade your weapon and get your gold back! The combat is more than sufficient. Im playing on hard(bring 'em on) difficulty, and it as expected - fairly intense in places. Certainly keeping me entertained. I can definately see myself trying again on very hard (the hardest) setting, and trying to find all of the secrets. The environments are varied, and some of the level design is excellent. Anyone get to "the Farm" yet? Without spoiling the game for anyone, there is a fantastic map around that point of the game..... What astounds me about it is as you are exploring the central hub of the game, you keep finding door after door, secret opening after secret opening, passages, secret routes across the rooftops and suchlike. Very rich in exploration. Overall I would say this is an excellent game, well worth a shot! :D 0-30% should be bad. But the gaming press can't hear you say it because they're busy with that publisher cock.
"Hardware intensive" products. You end up with people buying new cards just so, for example, they can see DirectX 10.1 on about 1 game.
Or a completely linear game like Warhead that requires uber-powerful GPU's etc. Its a conspiracy of marketing! hm, so, i need the key from borov for the lab (the two part key thingie, no idea), but he isn't there :(
Any idea what to do? Is a fucking genius. Fourth time I've been back to WoG, which is pretty much a record for me and modern games.
So while y'all have been playing the new wolf, I decided to dust off ye olde rtcw and have a spin. And I was wondering, how does the difficulty compare between old wolf and new wolf? Because dealing with lopers and uber soldats is a bitch.
Also, I think that the "Veil" might be based on the "Vril," which is a sort-of real occult concept associated with nazi conspiracy theories. The head bob is absolutely vile, it feels like you're playing in mud, the weirdo random effects are cool, the city looks bland at first but is cool, and Caroline Becker would properly get her udders munched on.
Ricky & negke, so far, up to entering Dig, it's a piece of piss on Normal skill. Does the difficulty increase a lot or should I restart on Hard as it's a bit "meh" at the moment. If there was quick-saving I'd have done so already but I'm a bit worried about facing some stupid bit where I have to replay the same 15 minutes from the last checkpoint until my eyes prolapse.... Im playing on hard. I died often in a couple of places, but mostly its been plain sailing. I think I'll re-play on the hardest setting when I've finished.
That's my main concern. I want a bit more of a challenge, the gamestyle seems to suit it, but I just know there will be a few situations that you have to replay over and over to get right, and that will blow cock w/out quicksaving.
No, it's autosave only. Not a big deal, usually there're enough save spots around. I never had to replay large chunks.
The headbob is nice, rEaLiSm! Besides, it potentially makes low framerates less obvious. I also definitely recommend playing on hard - it's still not overly or frustratingly difficult, especially with all the weapon and veil upgrades. The only areas that might be tricky - in the sense that they possibly require a few attemps - are the scripted horde/arena fights, but there's only a couple of them. Been enjoying this game a fair bit, definately worth the 29,90 eur price.
The original Crysis had bored me to tears within the first 30-45 minutes, but Warhead seems a fair bit more action-packed. Some people have been complaining that Warhead is too short, but I am not sure if this is a really valid complaint: I think I am starting to close in to the end of the game and I am at roughly 9-10 hours of playtime so far, if I actually went to properly explore every place I've been to, I would easily add 2-3 hours on top of this. The game engine seems to have received a slight tune-up in comparison to the original Crysis: I am playing the game on a C2D E6600 2,4 Ghz, 4gb ram, 8800GTS, Win7 system and I am able to achieve very playable framerates at 1680x1050 with some half of the settings at 5/5 and the other half at 4/5. This is obviously without AA, because enabling high amounts of AA will utterly rape any rig except something like i7 920 with a GTX295. However, the game definately does look good: This is from my rig/settings: http://jago.pp.fi/images/games/crysis/Warhead0001.jpg http://jago.pp.fi/images/games/crysis/Warhead0006.jpg The game also ships with an MP component as well as an editor capable of making full-fledged SP or MP maps. The MP component (called Crysis Wars) is a mixed bag: some of the maps are pretty bland and generally crap, while some other maps are really great fun. Yes, an enjoyable game after all. The final fight was a bit annoying, though. Unfortunately, I never really got to appreciate the heavier weapons fully until the last mission. Probably because with all the upgrades, the MPs are so accurate even at long distance. Focusing on upgrading them would be something for another play-through some other time.
Restarted on Hard, played until completing Dig then Warehouse. I've got used to the pukebob now (although it is shit, as is FOV 45 or whatever the fuck you're forced to play in) and am rather enjoying it. Fun gameplay, good style, the Veil certain adds something - I think it looks great when you do it in the town. I like the hub base and the exploratory feel so far. Also runs well so far. Unlike your bloody character.
A short, simple and rather difficult and well made platformer. Clean 3 colour pixel graphics, neat music, made me say "fuck!" out loud an awful lot. Worth a try.
http://askiisoft.com/ download is http://www.askiisoft.com/download.php?id=1
41% in. It's really good. Great blend of style, action, and lots of neat but not overwhelming enhancements. Caverns map is one of the coolest indoor maps I've played in a long time, and it ran really smoothly. Only real flaw is the movement feel / headbob, although a greater variety of enemy would be good.
'Parrently some guy called "Matt Breit" got credited for additional help or something, and some guy called "Tim Elek" worked on it too.
I for one enjoyed it, and will probably re-play it some time, on the hardest skill. Pretty tricky (for me) on hard at the end. Postal 2 for linux via download. Worthit ?
http://store03.prostores.com/servlet/runningwithscissors/the-Downloadable-Games--dsh--LINUX/Categories Some of his other reviews were a lot more cutting, but that is total fucking genius, a work of reviewing art. Very very good :D
one of the only websites I check every week without fail. The DNF anti-review is one of the best things of all the things.
Found this for a tenner with free delivery on Play.com and after being totally sucked into the demo there was no choice!
its fantastic fun, simple to pick up and play but deep enough to hold your interest, plus the amount of user mods for it is insane (not that I've tried any of them yet). if you have never heard of the thing before, its basicly a sandbox medieval conquest game. You start out with a horse and a sword and can basicly do whatever you want after that, you can loot and pillage villages, form your own private army or go work for any of the kingdoms in the game. The mechanics are similar in a way to the Might & Magic games, you have the standard "god" view, looking down onto the landscape, where you can trek your avatar anywhere you want, visit a few towns/castles etc and find a mission or two, at the same time the enemy kingdoms avatars are doing exactly the same thing. There are also wandering bands of mercenaries, looters, deserters that make for nice experience for new players. The best part of it all is when you go into a fight, and you take direct control of your avatar and fight the enemy, with your entire army next to you. its just epic, and fantastic fun. Somehow it all runs at 60+ fps even on my oldish rig, though it certainly isn't a looker the graphics are definitely good enough. Even fights with 50+ units on each side run at 60fps! The demo is on steam, go check it out! http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/510390
ride your bicycle through a giant sheet of paper filled with diagrams. Gets harder the farther you go. (there is an end, evetually.) You mean legally or illegally?
Legally I'm not sure, but I'd check steam, they have loads of Lucas Arts shiz nao (not on my own machine atm so can't login and check if this is the case), failing that try amazon or ebay. Illegally I would be hesitant to link to any warez sites, let alone directly to a download link, but I'm sure if you're looking for a place to acquire backups of software you've lost the discs for then this article would probably be a good place to start; http://torrentfreak.com/25-great-pirate-bay-alternatives-090822/ (RIJ nazi funded, profiteering, arrogant arse wipes (Raped In Jail in case you were wondering)) Anyone tried one of them? Are they any good?
Like http://www.l4dmaps.com/details.php?file=33 or http://l4dmaps.com/details.php?file=70 Where is the #tf campaign? pretty sure I already asked this and then forgot, but does anyone know where I could download or order a real copy of grim fandango?
"unreal deal" for 16eur on steam: Unreal Gold, UT99: GOTY, UT2004, UT3
You can get Tales of Monkey Island for "free" (e-mail address) today: http://www.telltalegames.com/playlikeapirate
a flash platformer with a cool art style, and some quality learn-by-dying gameplay:
http://www.dampgnat.com/icycle (it is finishable, i finished it) seems to be getting slashdotted/metafiltered/something last few days. I couldn't get in on two days ago, but yesterday it worked. Might have to come back later.
I didn't big that link up enough:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754 It's a shift style game but much better with a decent story, artwork and sound. Gameplay is the fairly standard puzzle / platformer, but hits the spot for the frustration to I'll just finish this level balence. The user made levels are surprisingly good as well. have there been any good action rpg games lately? something played from third person and not a diablo click-fest? sp, ofc.
Fallout3 maybe?
Risen is coming out next week (that's from the guys who made the Gothic games), wonder how that will turn out. i wasn't very impressed with fallout 3. i just really hate the oblivion engine but i knew what i was getting into when i got it-- i just really wanted it for the post-ap theme.
i'll keep an eye out for risen, but i don't know if i'll be able to find pirates of the caribbean. I really liked Mass Effect. It had this cool 80s dark sci fi vibe. The music was bad ass. The story is also pretty good, and promises to weave a fairly complex tale when the 2nd and 3rd ones come out.
was indeed very good! I would recommend it in a heartbeat if you have enjoyed any of Bioware's other games.
I still recommend Mount & Blade to anyone with a pulse, it might not be a fully fledged rpg, but its close enough, and the battles are just epic =) i've played ME, and yeah, it was quite good. :)
i see mount and blade has a trial version, so i'll take a look :) played a bit of mount and blade. it's ok, i guess, although i tend to like to play magic characters, it's still nice to see a game with no magic at all.
my beef with the game is that it's generic, but that's to be expected with a sandbox game. it's also pretty hard. that or i'm doing it wrong. i took a quest to train up some dudes in a village. unfortunately, all the villagers i trained got killed in the ensuing battle and the village was sacked. after that, i ran into a roaming group of dudes who kicked my ass and took me prisoner. so after loosing my horse and some of my stuff, i did some crappy courier quests for a bit of dough and picked up a fast horse and a spear which seems to work a lot better than the axe i started with. it's still pretty hard to connect with enemies though. it is quite hard to start out in the game, the best advice I could give it put 2 or 3 points into leadership on your main character as fast as you can, so that you can get an average size army together, even if it is composed of villagers with butter-knives!
Once you have the numbers, the packs of bandits and deserters will stop attacking you, and will actually start running from you on the world map, this allows you to pick your battles and give you the edge. Also, its worth finding some hero characters pretty quick. Check taverns in all the major cities, these characters level up like your character does, and you can equip them and assign skill points in the same way also. You will want to find a good doctor hero, with points in the 3 "healing" skills. Another nice hero to find (or sculpt an existing hero to fit) is a trainer, if you have a hero with the training skill (higher is better!) then they will train anyone in your army and they will gain experience every day even if you don't engage in combat. is my favourite part of Mount&Blade! At the weekend I had to defend my castle against 800 Nord scumbags, with only 179 defenders.
It was a shooting gallery, my 85 max level Rhodok Sharpshooters took out most of the nords before they got to the top of the ladders, and then my Spearmen impaled anyone that dared reach the top =) There was a brief period of panic when a Nord Lord appeared at the top of the wall in full plate and managed to carve a small hole through the spearmen defending it, thereby letting a small stream of Nord troops into the castle. They proceeded to take names from a fair few of my sharpshooters before my spearmen cleared them up. At the end of the day, a raiding party of 8 Nord Lords was sent packing, and I kept my shiny castle for another day! yeah, i got the hang of it a little more. after i got about 20 guys with me i was pretty much left alone except for sea pirates everywhere on the coast areas.
i just dont think the game is for me though. the more guys i get, the less the battles are about me. eventually, i'd just let my guys attack and run around on my horse charging larger packs of enemies going after my guys to break them up a bit. also, speaking of heroes, i picked up a doctor type and to my annoyance, i couldn't tell her to stay out of fights, so she'd end up knocked out after almost all the fights. :P if a party member is going to be a stat bag, give me the option to leave it on the side. :P Mount and Gayde looks kinda interesting from the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTUVfmE2ViQ , might have to trial the trial.
But I love it, its just *fun* to play.
The great thing about the trial is that its the full game, the only restriction is that you can only play until your character gets to level 8, then if you decide the buy the game you can just enter the key and keep playing with the same character. If you enjoyed the Gothic games, it's more of the same (without any of the bugs of Gothic3, haven't had a single crash or stupid gameplay bug yet).
Oldschool combat and gameplay that isn't for everyone I guess, but great exploration, and very beautiful in it's own way. The characters are kind of bland, but the weather effects, day cycle, and general atmosphere feel really nice. I recommend. Just finished Wolfenstein, and well, I think the best part was seeing Lunaran's name in the credits. Plus some other names of people I've heard about. The game itself wasn't disappointing, because I sort of expected it not to be really good, and it met my expectations. I would probably recommend FEAR 2 over this, if you had to choose a decent-but-not-amazing supernatural CoD clone.
If you liked the freespace games, have a look at this http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/10/13/naumachia-space-warfare/
wow, that looks great!
after freespace 2 came out, it felt like space combat games just dried up. the only thing i remember was the x games (x2 and x3 were after freespace, i think) but they were a little weird because although the game was heavily focused on combat, the ui didn't provide the tools to really make it enjoyable like the freespace games did. this naumachia though looks to have a very nice interface and a responsive feel (as much as you can tell from a video). The world feels very real in those videos. Nicely done. A lot of space games have a sort of detached sense to them but that feels great...
Thanks for the tip, Baldur. Reading the reviews....convincing world....pretty graphics....lots of exploration....shoddy combat. So basically it is the real Gothic 4 then, with less bugs. Well that suits me fine, I can get it and kiss goodbye to the winter months.
What? Risen is better than Oblivion... :)
All Gothic games were better than Oblivion actually, and I liked Oblivion. oblivion has a really generic feel to it.
risen (only going on the demo here) has a more 'intricate' feel to it (as did all the gothic games). the environment is very detailed and stuff feels a lot more hand-placed than oblivion did. oblivion had some cool spots, but for the most part, it looked pretty similar. (the oblivion mods that add in modified areas look amazing though, but i'm judging the game itself, not the mods) risen combat is kind of annoying though. i was never a fan of the gothic combat either though and prefer the more mobile/non-animation-constricted combat of oblivion. I third that motion 8>
The array of corny zombie and plant characters is a hoot : Zombie pole vaulters, those that burrow underground spin around and head in the wrong direction, and all sorts of exploding plants. Lots of corny head popping action. It might actually be more fun to watch than play though. Site has videos and a demo. http://www.popcap.com/extras/pvz/ Demo is out http://www.gamershell.com/news_85852.html
Not tried it yet myself as my net connection is slooooooow Looks as thrilling and revolutionary as the others. But hey, I'd be up for playing it coop!
Yeah I've bought the game, and played the demo, just haven't found the time to play through it yet, but I'm really looking forward to it.
Eufloria is out on steam (previously called Dyson) it's this weird minimalistic asteroid conquering RTS, and it's made by Borsato, the q1 mapper, so go buy it.
Prerendered.
The specials are looking good - that video shows the Spitter, Charger and Jockey, but it'd be nice to see another for the heavy (Tank / Witch) class. The Charger apparantly is downgraded so as not to be part of that group, which begs the question. nice demo, beautiful artwork. Great character to the animations. Looks like an awesome childrens picture book.
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Played the demo and the last couple of puzzles at a friend's (from the bomb defuse onwards). Absolutely beautiful game, waiting 'til I have some spare dollar to buy it, like said it's made by 7 self funded indie developers, can't really steal that shit even using the 'moral'* justifications of piracy.
*Disclaimer: I'm using apostrophes to highlight a lack of commentary on the validity of such arguments, merely stating their existence (the old 'men in suits getting the majority of the money due to owning the distribution/production' shit). I don't wish to start _another_ piracy flame session. "I don't wish to start _another_ piracy flame session."
Then don't bring it up. It's intellectually dishonest to get to state your opinion on something and then say you don't want to start a discussion. to be precise, he wasn't bringing it up. He was just using it to emphasize the greatness of it by describing his emotions/thoughts. That's about the same as if one of us others says "it's so worth the $$". That doesn't really bring up the question if capitalism is right unless you look at it funny for a while ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHppPp0Nj_U
Is till think Colonial Marines is a better concept, but I must admit this looks goooood If you wanted TF2 but were too broke to get it before, now's your chance as it is only $2.49 for a limited time.
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=3014 hell yes, the trailer reminds me so much of the original AvP game that rebellion did. That was such a fantastic game!
Really looking forward to this! Diablo with modded graphics. Even the town music is "heavily inspired" by the Tristram theme.
Still loving it. If Torchlight gets released in a sexy box it will be the first game since fucking S.T.A.Lhas encountered a problem I will buy. It is a bit too WoWish for my taste, I would like a proper inventory, diablo-ish character screen and icons for the spells(?). The font is kinda hard to read (at least in 800x600). And sometimes there is just a bit much effects. I prefer high detail "epic" like Diablo but well played just 2 hours non-stop.
What do you mean by proper inventory? YOu mean where objects take up various space?
I'm happy they ditched that, I hated playing tetris with my items in diablo2, and diablo 3 has gone with the 1-slot-per-item technique too if you check the videos. diablo 3 has gone with the 1-slot-per-item technique too if you check the videos
AFAIK they ditched that and went back to tetris. It is possible to retain the idea of items taking different space within an inventory without having to worry about tetris.
The simplest, but not very practical way, is just to make the inventory 1-dimensional. That way all packings are optimal, and there is nothing to worry about. Nobody really wants to have to scroll down a very tall inventory which is only one box wide though, so a better interface to that inventory would be needed The idea I just had was to take that 1 dimensional representation of the inventory, and then just have it snake up and down the screen. That way you can render the whole thing in a square area, but the areas that items occupy sometimes bend around corners. You might have to work a little harder to display icons for the items within their space, which could be tall and thin, or irregularly shaped at a corner. Perhaps a tileable texture which conveys item type would fill the space in background. Then an icon could float to fit in the tallest continuous space the item occupies. Since you're always guaranteed ceil(item_size/2) height, even on a corner, you could still have that icon as fixed height. Yeah, I like actually seeing the items in the inventory. The 1 slot just makes it harder to see what is what. :)
I forgot to say that Normal mode is really really easy. I guess I should have started harder but now I don't want to start again. Very hard is alot funner yeah, normal was boring. =\
Preach, well, you can always go for a weight system otherwise... but I like that even less I think. It's a flash game fairly similar to "escape the room" type flash puzzle games, but now you're trying to disassemble a radio:
http://gam.ebb.jp/kaitai1.html Did not make any sense to me, the dismantle radio puzzle, turned the various dials and nothing happened, no visual clues about what is going on. I usually dismantle stuff with a screwdriver! :P
ok that was cool, but what confused me was the wording, the icon in the top right said 'back' which really mean't, turn the radio around and look at the back. The word back usually means go backwards in a menu or an option. Oh well
It's basically Gothic 2 with better graphics. And since I'm a G1/2 fanboy, I totally enjoyed the hell out of this game. Awesome atmosphere, I had a great time.
There's a demo, too. Just spent about 2 or 3 hours playing this through to the end, and its a great little game!
Its pure Diablo, with a new lick of (very colourful) paint. It brings back some fond memories for me of slashing through Diablo 2. + Runs great even on my shitbag of a pc, I could even turn on AA! + Doesn't pretend to be anything more than a clickfest dungeon crawler, and thats cool with me. + The dog is a great idea, you can send it back to town with all your vendor trash and it will sell it all for you, so you can carry on killing things :) - Voice "acting" is appallingly bad! Kinda made me laugh though. - As others said, its easy as pie even on normal skill, I should have played on hard. PLAY ON HARD! - I cared less about the quests in this game than I do in WoW. Half the time I would just be content to kill things, and when a quest item popped up it was just a nice perk :P Very tempted to buy the full version of this, I think I'll try out the other 2 classes 1st though, the mage was good fun however! It just makes another fun game?
Most of the Torchlight guys are the original developers of Diablo1 from Blizzard North, so they can do whatever they want with this type of game as far as I'm concerned. I'm almost done playing through on Very Hard with an Alchemist, and I've had a blast, just good old hack-n-slash fun, if you like Diablo like games it's definitely worth it (cheap too). The pet sounds like a carbon copy from Fate - sending it to sell stuff, transforming it with fish.
Doesn't seem as soulless as Fate was, doesn't tempt me enough to waste any of my precious free time.
I feel so ripped off. The most recent necros map I played was so similar to the previous necros map I played. I mean I liked the last one and I really like this one too, but fuck, the style and setting and other things are so similar it's almost like it's made by the same guy or something.
I know I've been wanting a new necros map for years and I've been grumbling about how no other maps come close to how awesome that last one was but come on, I mean this new one is so cheap it might as well be free so if I'm paying that much surely I shouldn't get exactly what I want and expect? About Fate yeah, the lead designer on Torchlight was the designer of Fate, so those similarities aren't so surprising either.
THe last Fribbles map sucked anyway.
What was the last Fribbles map BTW?? Also, Risen, see my post in L4D2 thread. um... what? you are comparing a commercial, separate game, to maps designed to be played all in the same game that are free?
that argument might have been valid if if this was fate2 i suppose, and even there it would be a stretch. Just making the point that the similarities are not surprising given the heritage of the developers, and their intentions... and it's precisely what the target audience wants anyway.
my initial reaction was *because* it was designed by the same team. (hence why i mentioned fate and not diablo).
meh, i guess fate just wasn't very visible and so no one remembers it while everyone remembers the last doom or quake game. I remember Fate well... even though I only played it for a very short time. (ijed hit it on the head, it was just a bit soulless..)
Torchlight is the good version of Fate, for sure. p.s. sorry necros, that wasn't really directed at you by the way, just kinda sick of the silly comments in general about how Torchlight is a "rip off" of Diablo/2/Fate. (Mostly elsewhere, not here). Simple 2D-block-physics flash puzzle game, doesn't take to long to finish, good variety of puzzles.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/EvgenyKarataev/wake-up-the-box From the depths choadliness. Just tried the demo briefly. It is more Gothic 3/4 than Gothic3/4. It's bloody identical except a little bit prettier and a lot murkier. Hmmm. I like what happens if you try to go out to see at the start.
One thing I really liked about G3 was the 3 very distinct areas, and the 3 distinct races, especially the Orcs. Not sure if Risen is going to deliver in that way?? This was mentioned a while back in this thread, and after trying the demo, I ponied up the $20 for the full version, and got around to finishing it last night.
This is certainly one of the best (and maybe THE best) puzzle game I've ever played. It has great depth and fun from simple gameplay mechanics, an excellent variety of puzzles and thinking challenges, humor, emotion, fantastic sound and music, and one of the coolest art styles I've seen in a while. Some parts took me a bit of pondering to get through, but I managed to beat the whole thing with no hints and no online poking about, and I'm mildly proud of that, because parts of it were pretty challenging. If anyone is on the fence on this after trying the demo, the full game is better, and I highly recommend it. http://machinarium.net/demo/ I had to use a walkthrough to get through the demo, although that is partly because I didn't know the game mechanics.
Lovely style, but puzzle games leave me cold. Risen, no the game area is smaller than Gothic 3, but it's alot more focused, there's always stuff to do. It's the only thing Gothic 3 has over it really.
So, yay or nay? The game is apparently great, but how is the editor? Are we likely to see a fuckton of usermade highquality content for DAO as there was for NWN?
I'm on the fence about it, only because there's a sales pitch for DLC built into the game universe itself, which leaves kind of an off-putting taste in my mouth...
I hope that's just sort of fucked up, and not actually showing "the future of marketing!" or some shit. :( Also: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/6/ Uhuh. Exactly more Painkiller, no more and no less.
The soul collecting / demon mechanism still rocks though. I've sank about 8 hours into it so far
+ No frills action rpg, run around and kill hordes of stuff, pick up loot, carry on. + The dog/cat companion is great, he helps you kill stuff and you can load him up with items to run off and sell for you so you can carry on killing things and taking their stuff(tm). + Meaty spells and abilities, everything feels very powerful, when you shoot beams of fire at people you can feel it burning them =) - Story is quite dull, no real interest in it for me. - Quests feel tacked on as an afterthought, usually I pick them up and forget about them, then when I get a "quest complete" message im pleasantly surprised :) - The game is starting a feel like a bit of an xp grind. The motivation for going out and clearing a dungeon is to get xp and loot, and thats about it. There are no real high end goals beyond that. Perhaps if you could collect some sort of tokens from rare enemies to buy better gear it would be an added incentive to carry on playing. But as it stands its quite shallow in the end. - No multiplayer/online play. Aparently they are making a free-to-play MMO which could work out very nicely, but I do notice the absence of multiplayer here. If you liked Diablo / Titan Quest / etc.. you will probably love this :) its good fun and you cant go wrong for this budget price! OK, I broke down and bought this yesterday and played for a few hours. Verdict: if you liked Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, you need to get this NOW.
EVERYONE STOP TEMPTING ME YOU FUCKERS
Because I CAN'T get it now, I don't have enough time to get another epic, massive RPG. I have too many games to beat as it is. I have too much stuff to do. I just don't have the god damn time for an awesome BioWare RPG. SO GET OUT OF MY HEAD AND STOP TEMPTING ME YOU GOD DAMN SUCCUBI OF VIDEOGAMES I don't get it, I was looking at some benchmarks, and with my current CPU (an old 2,4 Ghz E6600) and a 5870, the benchmarks say Dragon Age is supposed to be heavily CPU-bound and run at ~26 fps. Thing is, 5870 is retardedly strong and MY gpu is an old 8800gts, yet my computer runs the game at 30+ fps at 1680x1050 everything on HIGH, I am yet to see a single slowdown anywhere. This was a really pleasant surprise.
On a sidenote, I am 8h 44min into the game and I am merely at 9% complete. And I am not even doing EVERY quest (I am going to leave that for the 2nd playthrough). Really puts into perspective the fucking ripofs the game market is full of, where a game is being sold for 60euro and the entire fucking thing lasts for like 8-10 hours total. your comments bode well for me. i've been thinking of picking this up lately, but i've heard some goofy stuff about it like how DLC is built into the game itself such that NPCs will actually tell you to go buy DLC so you can do their quest or something.
can you put down some more comments when you've got furthur in please? :) I've heard some complaints that a few NPCs kind of "break immersion" by suggesting you obtain "premium content" to continue. I wouldn't know, I got the Deluxe version which already includes all the DLC. Deluxe edition was a mere 5 euro more than the bare game on STEAM and the 2 included quest areas offer roughly 4 hours worth of content, so it was a no-brainer.
Really puts into perspective the fucking ripofs the game market is full of, where a game is being sold for 60euro and the entire fucking thing lasts for like 8-10 hours total.
If a game is worth it's money or not is hardly price divided by play time! Any potential rip-off factor has far more to do with the vast majority of games being uninteresting dribble :P Anyone playing League of Legends? (dota clone by the people who made dota. 'tis good fun. and free. kinda.)
funny how people complain about playtime, when Quake was released and people made the quake done quick videos, no-one complained about price/playtime then =)
I do think that MW2 is overpriced, but not because its short, because its more expensive than everything else :) Its an obvious moneygrab by the publisher. I've not played it yet, but if its anything like modern warfare 1 it will be fantastic, MW1 is also very short, but I've replayed it more times than I've replayed half-life 2 because its just so damn fun. Also, I like commas, a lot! For me, if I get 6-8 hours out of a game and those hours are fun, I got my money's worth. I don't want 40-80 hour epic conquests anymore - I don't have the time. :)
And it's just not feasible these days, honestly. Content takes too long to create and unless you're going to do a sandbox game it's very difficult to create endless reams of content like in the old days without crunching for years on end. And it's just not feasible these days, honestly.
Yet, somehow, Bioware and Bethesda seem to be able to do this consistently ;) It took me a month to first play through Quake. I had to look up and ask about both bosses. Probably around 20-30 hours in total.
"Yet, somehow, Bioware and Bethesda seem to be able to do this consistently ;)"
Yeah. Sandbox and/or highly repetitive environments. Those factors make it possible. :) What I'm saying is that you can't have stuff like the levels in Gears of War 2 last for 40 hours of gameplay. There's just not enough man power to create unique stuff that will occupy the player for that long.
I SAID STOP!! FFS I JUST SPENT $170 ON MY CAT'S TRIP TO THE VET I DON'T HAVE THE MONEY FOR DRAGON AGE! OR THE TIME! STOP SEDUCING ME!!
yeah that new painkiller expansion sure got awful reviews. could it really be that bad?
i'm not keen on huge games either, i don't have time for 30 hours+. 10 hours is fine. once i get to the 10 hour mark i find myself looking at the level list just to see how many levels are left. it becomes a drag. did someone say fallout3 is like 200 hours long? FUCK THAT! give me quake 20 times over. there's too many games out there to waste that amount of time on a single game, running through the same environments over and over again. to put off getting dragon age, i started playing quake4 again.
i like it a lot more now than when i played it the first time, for some reason. the whole first segment (from the start up to when the mcc lands) is great. gameplay is fluid and continuous. radio chatter really conveys the sense that the war is more than just you. my favourite parts are when you're backtracking through an area but from a different path (you're on these catwalk things) and then some new guys are charging in through the original path through the area and they get ambushed by strogg, but the strogg don't see you. it was really satisfying to blow them away and feel like you're helping someone else out even though they're just npcs. if anyone's interested, apparently, they released some of the music in the game: http://machinarium.net/blog/data/bonus_ep/machinarium_soundtrack_bonus_ep.zip
Apparently you can get the
I shall "take one for the team". There's no pretending it's going to be anything other tha dreadful, is there??
There's no pretending it's going to be anything other tha dreadful, is there??
It is beyond dreadful. A proper low-quality Q3A mod, real Cranky Steve territory. Not even worth reading these last 3 posts about it let alone considering following links to the game. Seems a shame, since there's obviously alot of work gone into it.
http://www.darksalvation.com/screenshots.html Saying we flamed it isn't really going to help is it? ;p
(But yeh, we ripped those shots on here a while back. Can't see it playing any better...) how far did you get shambler? i got to the first crystal, and then what? there's nowhere to go, am i missing something? haha lame so far. the intro was fkn shit, wtf was happening? and no save in the demo - not impressed. pretty cool textures and style though so i'm willing to give the full game a try if i can pirate a copy of it :D
You press the button down below by the grate, this opens the door above. You then go into a lurid red box room with some lava and moving platforms. Lose some health to the lava because it's indistinguishable from the floor, then jump down onto a rock below with some health on it. Realise there's no way to get back up to the moving platforms, quit, and uninstall in disgust.
I think they pirated some textures too, someone said that. The voices are awful, lame Prey (etc) ripoff. Is it normal that I see no viewmodels? I use Wine...
I think they pirated some textures too, someone said that
i'm reminded of that limbo of the lost game... was it ever explained how on earth so many assets from other (very popular) games made it in there? it just seems unfathomable that no one noticed. Okay finally had some time to play a few games recently, for the first time since February. I gave Machinarium a shot. I got stuck about 1/3 in, trying to use the oil thingy to get the dogs attention so I could catch him. Looked cool, but the puzzles are too hard for a dumass like me.
Dark Salvation demo. Gave up after the second room, the red one where you have to jump across the moving platforms, hit a button to open the door, then run back before the door closes. Does it get any more 90s than this? Pretty lame for a demo, which should feature some of the best parts of the game if you want people to buy it. Instead they have moving platform puzzles with no monsters. wtf. And I played COD and COD:UO. Reviews below... Released 1.5 years after Medal Of Honor and on the same engine and almost the same settings, it's easy to draw comparisons between the two. Most players seem to prefer Call Of Duty, and I agree, but only by a small margin.
In fact, they could almost be the same epic long game, there's not much difference. The level design is good, but not particularly fantastic. The levels are fairly standard fare; either cross-country with some average looking greenery, or destroyed towns. The highlight is the final level and the level which takes place at a dam that you have to sabotage. Ultimately, the level design is an improvement over Medal of Honor, as there were no downright boring levels as MOH had. The gameplay is all enjoyable, again the same as you would expect from this genre. High speed guns mixed with plenty of sniping means you won't get sick of the gameplay. What makes COD unique is that 90% of the game your fighting alongside computer controlled teammates. Fortunately, they're not complete morons and don't get in your way. They also don't take over the game and leave you with nothing to kill. It stills feels like your playing your own mission, but with a little help and company here and there. It was certainly a unique and satisfying feature. The major problem with COD was it's length. I played the entire game within a day; in two sittings, and could easily have done in one sitting. This is a very short game, perhaps around seven hours. For a full game, this just doesn't cut it. I complained about MOH being so short, but this COD is much shorter. At least there is an addon pack which I'll be playing next. So overall, Call Of Duty was a blast. Good level design, fun gameplay, not overly difficult or frustrating in any way. It's certainly the best WW2 based game thus far, despite the short length. Released a year after the original game, comes Grey Matter's expansion pack for the hugely popular Call Of Duty. And in most ways, it improved on what Infinity Ward did with the full game.
For a start, United Offensive, while being fairly short for even an expansion pack, was still almost as long as the full game. I estimated UO to be about 5-6 hours, with the full Call Of Duty game being 7-8. And that was my main criticism of Call Of Duty, that it being too short. The other area Grey Matter have improved upon, despite still using the same engine and game, is level design. The levels in UO are a smidgen more impressive this time round. They feel more epic, especially examples like the lighthouse level. The only let down was the final Russian leg of UO looked exactly the same as the original game. They could easily have seamlessly integrated into part of the full game's Russian leg. The other major difference between COD and COD:UO is the gameplay. UO features much more frantic action, with hordes of enemies running you down. Some of the battles just feel MUCH bigger. And in the process, hard as well. In some cases a little too hard. The sniper rifles with zoom features weren't used much in UO and you'll really miss them. At least in my run through I never picked them up much, if at all. Instead I stuck with the same few guns throughout the entire pack, which did get a little numbing by the end. COD:UO is an improvement over COD. Slightly more epic levels and gameplay, a decent length when compared to the original game. But very much more of the same, just slightly better. Looking forward to what's next on my list for 2004 games I missed... Farcry, Medal of Honor 2, Painkiller, Chronicles of Riddick, Halflife2. Might play Riddick next I think... high expectations on this one :)
far cry and riddick are great, havent played HL@ yet. Which would make us the only 2 gamers alive who havent :)
And painkiller is fun too. Dont forget to check out Dark Messiah out of the older games too. Somewhat clever platformer that requires you to re-arrange the sections of a level so that you can create a route to the goal.
http://web.student.chalmers.se/groups/idp09-7/flashgame/ I finished it, my least favorite were the samey-looking maze levels, but even then they were pretty well designed. My favorite were the more wide-open levels. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have any level numbers, so it's hard to discuss individual levels. When you get to the really hard 8-screen maze, that's the last level. this kind of thing could possibly be built in doom3... shit, after i beat this thing, i may give it a shot :x
i made a map that was essentially the cube movie, with automatic script driven cube movements. i guess the only real limitation is you wouldn't get the sort of 'birds eye view' you get when you swap between slide mode and platformer mode. any puzzles done in a 3d way would have to be simpler, i'd guess, and you'd only be able to control the section you were currently in (it'd be complex to be able to control other sections with the current implementation of the guis and gui scripts)
the alternative would be to keep the automatic section movement scripts and let guis control the paths they would take (ie: you can switch the automatic movement from going left to going right instead) These sorts of puzzles cry out for the ability to "optimize" your solution. If the game kept track of your # of screens visited (each repeat visit counts), then you could try to find the ideal solution.
I think that this scoring system would be more beneficial to a time-based system, since the ideal time requires first finding the ideal route (from above), and then once that interesting problem is solved, all that remains is flawlessly pressing keys on the keyboard. The physics and choices when manevering in this world are not interesting enough to make optimizing your character movements sound like fun to me. Actually, what would be really cool is seeing a faint line trace the entire route you took, so you can watch the spaghetti areas where you got lost or caught in a loop. to the game than just puzzle block shifting. I liked the first couple of levels because you get the whole shifting pieces around but after that, just the same old thing over and over. It feels like a good start but 30 levels without any new direction is too much.
One game mechanic I did like was you can fall through tiles, stop fall, shift blocks and carry on falling. Also the art style looked temporary to me, especially as it was not obvious which tiles linked together, should of used a pattern or symbol on the edges to show which tiles matched together. If I was making it, I would have made the tiles meet edge to edge, with a transparent green border between them if they match, and a solid red if they didn't (or you were at the edge of the map). It would make some of the manoeuvres around edges of tiles easier to manage at least, and as a bonus makes it explicit that the tiles match.
I didn't mind that it was difficult to tell which borders matched, but i really only needed two or three levels where that was the main challenge, rather than 50% of the levels. The open levels where it was more about figuring out what jumps were possible were more my taste.
The problem, which you see especially in the 3x3 grid levels, is that sliding block puzzles are kind of tedious, and with a grid that large you do a lot of sliding (especially with trial and error.) 4x4 would have been intolerable. Particularly irritating in the last level where in many cases you couldn't work out by eye which blocks did connect, so you had to shuffle them all around the 3x3 square, and then if they didn't, try out another. On earlier levels, it was quite satisfying to work backwards through a chain of tiles. "The key is there, and you can only get to it from the right...that tile is the only one that connects it from the left...I need to drop down on it....so I want to move to this tile!".
But I agree that the best puzzles were the ones where you had to make big leaps of faith, switching tiles in mid jump etc. Can you do that thing like in portal where you reach terminal velocity by lining up the portals vertically - constantly falling between two tiles? Imagine if you could rotate the tiles and do portal-style flinging! I played through the first eight (ten? dunno...) levels and sort of enjoyed it, but it got old kind of quickly and I wasn't really having enough fun to continue. Seemed pretty easy, but granted, it was early-on.
I've been playing Protector III for the last few nights, and finally finished it last night. It's similar to many tower-defense type games, but with quite a bit more depth and continuity than some (and some of the levels are quite difficult). Very addictive!! (At least it was for me.) http://www.kongregate.com/games/undefined/protector-iii It *will* remember your progress, so no need to do it all in one go (assuming you were that crazy anyway--it took me quite a few hours to finish it...) Although difficulty seems odd and inconsistent. Some of the "medium" difficulty maps took me a lot of work to figure out, and some "hard" maps I got on the first try. And I beat the final uber-map on the first try too. Go figure...
I heard they were switching payment models to really suck customers dry with those microtransactions but other than that it was fun.
After so many positive reviews I was really looking for to Butcher Bay. Typically the big-sceen to computer-screen, film to game adaption doesn't work very well. So it's easy to assume it would have been a flop. But in fact it was a very favourably received underdog.
Nevertheless, it was with it's flaws; but perhaps my expectations were too high. Comparing the graphics to other 2004 releases like Doom 3, it wasn't quite as flash. The level design the majority of the time was good, but nothing really stood out. There were few fantastic set pieces. However, there weren't supposed to be. The game takes place entirely in a prison, mostly underground. You fight from the typical bland prison on the surface, to underground caverns, more high secure prisons, guards quarters and more. However, it is slightly disappointing that the entire game takes place in one prison. We never really get a huge variety in gaming environments. Overall, however, the design and graphics definitely live up to 2004 standards. The gameplay was mostly good, depending on your gameplay preferences. Personally, I'm not one for the Thief style of gameplay. That is, sneaking around in shadows avoiding enemies. I'm also not one for having to complete tedious little tasks to proceed further into the game. EFBB features far too much of this. What I come for is pure action, and probably only 50% of the game features this. The tasks are boring, especially since the parts of the game that require tasks are some of the more bland looking areas. What action we do get in EFBB, you get limited with just a few different weapons, and probably less than ten enemies to use them on, all with rather poor AI. Not a lot of variety, but it still throws up a decent challenge and fun on the most part. The other problem wih EFBB is it's short campaign. Although I'm starting to get used to this after Call Of Duty and it's mission pack were both equally as short. Are games becoming shorter because of the extended detail gamers require in every facet of the game? I finished EFBB within one day. In three sittings to be exact, but I could have done it in one sitting. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd want another five hours trapsing around Butcher Bay anyway. It would have to at least introduce a new environment. So overall, despite this sound like a negative review, the game actually was very good. Exceptional design and graphics, although not quite up to Doom 3, not far off it! And decent gameplay when you actually get to fight. Very much recommended. I only regret I didn't play the enhanced version released with Dark Athena. PS. the game was a nightmare to setup and featured two game stopping crashes. It required an Open GL fix and latest EU patch, along with someone elses save games for me to continue. Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is up next on my list. I hope it looks better than the first Call of Duty. Screenies look better anyway.
BTW anyone played Overlord 2 yet? The graphics look so cute!!! I think it looked about the same, but its still fun.
I was a big fan of riddick, probably because it was different to your regular FPS at the time and parts of it just looked damn cool. You should read your reviews before posting them - you often start a paragraph by stating something, then spend the remainder of the paragraph contradicting that statement. Example:
"The gameplay was mostly good" Or above that "Comparing the graphics to other 2004 releases like Doom 3, it wasn't quite as flash" vs "Overall, however, the design and graphics definitely live up to 2004 standards". What is it? Was it not as flash as other 2004 games, or did it indeed live up to those standards? Maybe my English isn't good enough, but I can't make out what you are trying to say with that review. haha i know dude i was contradicting myself a bit. what i meant was it wasn't as good as doom3, and maybe halflife2 and thief3. but it was better than everything other than those 3 i think (not that i played everything).
the reason why i do these reviews is actually so that in 10 years when i decide to play these games again, i'll know what to expect, so they tend to talk about all the negative stuff even when something is 'mostly good'. oh and i can't be bothered proofreading it anyway Alright. Now we can discuss why you think that Doom 3 and Half Life 2 are in the same league - I'd say that HL2 > D3!
yeah for me graphics are easily the most important thing. i find it weird how all these top reviewers like gamespot and ign never even mention "level design" and architecture and stuff like that. and all their screenshots never feature the actual level design - it's always some stupid action shot.
but anyway, i can't argue hl2 vs doom3 because i'm yet to play hl2. doom3 had great potential, the engine is a winner (i'm guessing better than hl2's engine), but ruined by the corridor style levels. in terms of detailing, doom3 had WAY more detail in it's design than Riddick did. and the lighting was better. i'm assuming in terms of level design that hl2 > d3, won't know for sure till i play it. HL2 Ep2 was pretty awesome, amd the best of the three parts IMO. Ep1 has some awesome bits, as does HL2. We dont go to Ravenholm.
Neither topped Half Life 1, just for epicness and the setting (the grand-canyon backdrop in HL1 really added to the feeling of scale, and immersion). Whe is that Black Mesa mod coming out for HL2? But no - I think that Doom3 was good for graphics, but the gameplay does suck compared to Half Life 2. Doom3's gameplay didn't suck, exactly. it only sucked because there was no variation in it.
it's not like the gameplay couldn't handle something like the grand canyon map from HL1, but that no one on the d3 team made one. :S Harcore shootin'! Like the original prequels in that respect. One of my favourite games.
But the Half Life series had a more involved story aimed at a more mature audience, more puzzle solving and exploration, much more varied gameplay on the whole. Better AI/combat too. Two different things altogether really. Although they do have many parrallels. A bit like whiskey and beer :D yeah there wasn't enough variation in gameplay, but the biggest issue for me was the running speed. made the game way too fkn slow. any d3 mods i now play with it increased a bit. much more fun. although i've played them all now anyway. shamblers castle is a must play for d3!
actually i'm not saving up hl2 for xmas... i'll probably play it in a couple years, haha. once i've had a run of a few bad games and need something good, it'll be time for hl2. how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat? Doom 3 was so frustrating for me.
So much untapped potential. I hated those squid armed dudes, and there were like 2 cacodemons in the whole game. also, the expansion pack was shit. And had no squid arms in the first.
The cacodemons were a joke though. Literally funny. 100% programmer game design; drunk on technology that nobody really gives a flying fuck about. So much potential in that leaked beta . . . But the Half Life series had a more involved story aimed at a more mature audience
That's probably why there's scientist father figures and large breasted women with robot pets at the center of it. Serious drama, guys! If HL2 had more boobs I'd probably give in to Steam. After all my room moisture would go up several degrees so a little more steam would not hurt.
I deleted a post because I thought it was the whisky talking.
I realise it's the whisky still talking now and I was just being a pussy: Alyx' arse was nicer than her tits. You're talking about the traitor bitch in a white poloneck I felt like smacking with the crowbar even before I knew she was a traitor.
That's probably why there's scientist father figures and large breasted women with robot pets at the center of it. Serious drama, guys!
Holy shit my dad is a scientist too, how unrealistic! Also, good job on also picking on one of the least sexualised female characters in mainstream video games. That stupid Alyx and her big tits! So big they went all the way back round to being small. I guess you never played Doom 3. This is the plot of Doom 3. Drink every time there's a cliche. Wait, actually, punch yourself in the balls. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28pjq_doom-3-intro_videogames i remember being seriously impressed when the camera moved away from the monitor and you could see that the gui was part of the game world.
it wasn't just the unified lighting that was cool about doom3. i know in-game guis are old hat nowadays, but i still think it's pretty awesome. I think the doom 3 engine still does the best in-game GUI's, at least I have not seen anything better in any other competing engines.
to be fair, i seriously hate that delay where your gun has to come back up after you leave a gui. if there's a gui in your LoS when you're fighting something and your crosshair passes over it, you get locked out of firing for a second or so...
Great great fun: http://armorgames.com/play/3614/crush-the-castle
I got weird looks because I laughed so much. Try this one if you have half an hour to spare:
http://jayisgames.com/cgdc6/?gameID=9 I played through both of them just now and enjoyed every minute. Nice finds! The second one is especially cool--pixel abstraction as art...
I played through this the other night, and had a lot of fun (although my patience wore thin on the bonus levels): http://www.kongregate.com/games/TheGameHomepage/red-remover Very cool idea: http://giantsparrow.com/games/swan/
I remember someone linking this. I didn't like it, because it became incredibly boring and hurt my eyes.
For 20 euro it was a really solid purchase.
For 10 euro it was a steal. For 5 euro you have to be retarded to not buy it. I just wasted 14 hours on it. I played Fate as well a few years ago, and this is a serious evolution.
Annoying how all the dungeons are one still though, apart from the Hatch quests. Would have been nice to have the metamap a bit more developed. Lockdown certainly wasn't next on my list of games to play, but I'm yet to play a tactical shooter, or any of the Tom Clancy titles. So, I was curious about what kind of games they actually are.
Lockdown is a tactical shooter; which I always assumed would require a lot of tactics rather than run-and-shoot gameplay. I don't know if this was just a bad example of a tactical shooter or not, but it just seemed like another realistic shooter to me. There were no tactics to speak of, apart from pressing the space bar every so often to get your team mates to catch up. The main difference in gameplay between other shooters, is that you get a limited amount of ammo on each mission, so you need to make your hits count. Anything below 20% accuracy and you'll end up running out and have to resort to the useless handgun (thankfully I never had to). For me, this means constantly pearing around corners with my zoom scope and sniping enemies in the face. There's not much running into the room guns-first, because a couple hits and your dead. It's much more meticulous and strategic in the way you shoot enemies. Unfortunately, the enemy AI was useless. You can quite easily snipe out a room of enemies from the door frame without them even shooting at you. And when they do, they'll often then just run off. Your team mates AI is decent - they don't get in your way and certainly don't rush in. They usually only ended up with a few kills each after each mission, compared to my 60-80 kills. So your still a one-man-army, with just your friends along as company you might as well say. Just the way I like it. Hostage AI was a problem though. On one level they refused to move at all and I had to restart. They also had a tendency to stupidly run ahead of you right into enemy fire. Another problem were the weapons. You get to pick from around fifteen weapons which one you want to go on the mission with. Yes, you only get one. I played with the same rapid fire rifle with scope for the entire game. With such a limit on ammo, I saw no point in using a machine gun, and shotguns would be far too short range. It would be nice to have had a couple guns to switch between. On the other hand, it did take some focus off looking for ammo and health during the levels. The graphics of the game looked good. The textures and lighting were consistently great. The levels were well designed in most areas, with just some of the design looking a little bland. Nevertheless, this is supposed to be realistic, so real buildings aren't necessarily laced with intricate detail. Despite the realism achieved in the design, it still looks very good most of the time; helped along by the good textures and lighting. Overall, Lockdown really isn't that different from your other realistic shooters. The only tactic is your approach in hitting your enemy in the head before he sees you. Therefore I enjoyed all several hours of Lockdown. So yeah, with Rainbow Six Vegas 1+2 on Unreal Engine 3, that outta look real fkn good. Look forward to them.
What's the gameplay in the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series like? Any tactics or pretty similar to Lockdown? PS... I don't want tactics at all. The less I have to think during a game, the better. I do enough thinking for work. I did get a couple from the Splinter Cell series, but the trailers/reviews look a little too much like Thief (ala creeping around in fkn shadows) which, unless the design is fantastic like Thief 3 was, then it's not worth trudging through. rainbox six was tactical/strategic because you had to lay waypoints for your other teams before you played the missions.
easily the worst in the series (that I have played anyway). For a start, its very short, there's 6 maps that are admittedly gigantic and very open but I'm sure better players than me could knock this off in 4-5 hours (it took me double that).
Secondly, its ridiculously frustrating, you will be trotting along merrily with full health and some sniper will take you out instantly or you will get ripped to shreds by someone with a heavy machinegun. I died a lot. Now the game does have a reasonable quicksave system that is checkpoint orientated and any objectives you complete stay completed upon death, but it repopulates enemies to keep it challenging. The problem is a lot of those repopulated enemies ensure that you pretty much have to play most the map again even though some objectives have been completed as otherwise they ambush you. So it gets annoying very quickly. As for the looks, I wasnt that impressed in that department either. There's a shift to the UE3 engine and while the maps are gigantic, very open ended, and very detailed, they are not memorable at all and look pretty generic. Overall, maybe 6/10. Painkiller is a game where you either love it, or hate it. Developed by a new studio from Poland, People Can Fly, Painkiller is one hell of a debut. I'm reviewing both Painkiller and the expansion pack Battle Out Of Hell, which is basically more of the original game.
It features the same kind of gameplay as Serious Sam, but it looks a lot better than not only 2001's Serious Sam, but also 2005's Serious Sam II. Although not by much, as Serious Sam II was a spectacular looking game. The difference is Painkiller is much darker with levels taking place in cemeteries, cathedrals, asylums, castles, palaces, monasteries, an orphanase and even a very twisted and unique version of hell. In fact the entire game takes place in Purgatory (though why there is a funpark or Leningrad in purgatory I don't understand). This is where Painkiller really shines; the levels look fantastic. Released early 2004, Painkiller hails above just about everything from 2004 and previous. With the exception of perhaps Farcry and Halflife II (neither of which I've played so I can't confirm), Painkiller is the best looking first person shooter up until 2005. This mostly comes down to a great looking engine, great gaming effects and flawless textures. The set-peices and architecture is all fantastic, however the game is let down slightly by its lack of vertical gameplay. The same problem Serious Sam had, the levels are all too flat. There's very little vertical variation (apart from the insanely vertical climb that was Stone Pit in the mission pack). Which means all the gameplay is in huge flat areas. The other major flaw in the gameplay is it's focus on checkpoint type gameplay. You enter a room, a door behind you appears out of nowhere trapping you in, and you fight through hordes of enemies until the doors open. Enter the next area and the same tactic applies. The entire game runs like this, and it becomes one mindless battle after another. Fortunately, after battling through way too many realistic shooters lately, I was eager for some high-paced gaming action. But this can get old after a while. It also doesn't help that just about every enemy in the game requires 1-2 hits from the shotty and seems like the same enemy as the last just with a slightly different close-range weapon or projectile. There's very little enemy variation. Even so, there's more variation here compared to a realistic shooter that features the same human enemies throughout the entire game. The models all look great. While some are a little silly (puking or burping at you as an attack), they aren't as cartoony and out of place as Serious Sam's enemies. There were plenty of great weapons to use, absolutely tonnes of ammo for them all. The game on normal difficulty really wasn't that hard at all, but does force you to replay at higher difficulties in order to unlock the secret levels (bad idea People Can fly!). Alternatively you can download Powermad and unlock them anyway, but all three hidden levels were pretty short. The BOOH hidden level was just a poor boss fight. A lot of players won't like the repetitive arena style horde combat, but I enjoyed it. With fantastic design which is completely different on every single level (there are 24 in Painkiller and 10 in BOOH) makes Painkiller one of my favourite games. Pity about the sequels... Think I'll hold off on playing Far Cry next as I've got a few duds on my list to play for a while...
Although Republic Commando got a decent IGN score, in the video reviews I've looked at the game design look like ass. Apart from Quake 4 and Prey, the fps games from 2005 and 2006 all look a bit average. Star Wars - Republic Commando (2005) - 79% Vietcong 2 (2005) - 60% Project: Snowblind (2005) - 7.7 Second Sight (2005) - 71% Area 51 (2005) - 6.9 Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) Pariah (2005) - 6.3 Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) - 84% was quite fun actually. Not a fps though.
And if you have low expectations, Unreal 2 is quite fun too. Mostly. yeah i played unreal 2 when it came out (one of the only games i played between 2002-2007). i actually thought it was pretty good, couldn't really understand all the bad press it got.
what's next on your list nitin? you seem to be playing catchup like me. and then CoD 4. That's all I have left I think before I can go restocking :)
oh and Splinter Cell - Double Agent. It's ok for a COD game, I guess. Looks great and impressive motion capturing. In the long shot, gameplay seems kind of dull, though. On rails and stuff. The airport mission wasn't such a big deal really - how is shooting civilians more disturbing than killing hundreds of armed enemies?
Lol at the Russians. Always waging wars... Played night vision mode, it's pretty cool, and less headachening.
Another game down for the holidays, this one relatively a mystery to me. My little expectations were pointing towards another bland Star Wars game with the same old setting, mixed in with more of this 'tactical strategy' I explored in Rainbow Six.
The game ended up, in fact, being quite a good looking shooter with enjoyable gameplay; but not without its flaws. The highest points for SWRC go to the level design. You battle through three episodes - Geonosis, Assault Ship and Kashyyyk. I won't pretend to be familiar with these places, or the entire Star Wars story for that matter, as I'm definitely not a Star Wars fan (and yes I've seen all six). Geonosis is some desert world, while the Assault Ship episode all takes place within a ship that you must regain control of, and is ultimately the dullest of the episodes. Kashyyyk is a world inhabited by Wookies, as you attempt to rescue a Wookie leader. The highlights were the rooms built out of huge wooden trees. It wasn't as good as Serious Sam II's attempt on the giant tree village, but everything still looked good as there was a decent mix of outdoor terrain and indoors. Design was packed with detail and the Unreal Engine 2 was put to good use. The only niggle with design is that some of the levels and rooms became a little repetitive. Overall it reminded me of Halo. Similar design settings; only looking much, much better. The gameplay was a mixed bag. Overall it was fun with your three team members improving the experience. They weren't stupid, but certainly lacked the skill of a multiplayer bot. They worked best when placed behind a structure and instructed to use grenades or the sniper rifle. The tactics with your soldiers were all fairly easy. Tell them to charge in, hold back, open a door, sit behind something and snipe. When they die you or another soldier can revive them, and when your own player dies you can also be revived. I found this to be much more enjoyable than having to reload. Your ultimate death comes when you're all killed and there's no one left to revive any of the team. A lot of the enemies in SWRC can take some firepower, so you definitely need all of your team members. Unfortunately the gameplay can be frustrating at times. There's one particular enemy that flies overhead which is far too hard and can take your entire team out in 30 seconds, while some of the other enemies such as the Super Droid or Spider Boss become a real bore as your all blasting away for an eternity. The Droids, which are weak and hopeless, end up being the most enjoyable enemy. But overall most of them aren't that fun to fight and there's not a huge variety in enemies as it is. What is there, has fairly average AI. A few times the gameplay suddenly got extremely difficult with just too much thrown at you at once alongside endless replicating machines which you need to shut down. This is the other major problem with gameplay. Throughout the game your tasked with turning off these endlessly enemy-spawning replicators. It takes 20 seconds to shut one down, and after doing it 50 times it just gets mind-numbing. I can understand their inclusion to spice up gameplay a little, but in the end they became tedious and annoying. The final problem which spoiled gameplay, was the abysmal collection of weapons. You get the Quake2-cloned blaster, a machine gun which annoyingly shoots sideways and takes quite a few levels before you get used to it. The sniper rifle aka Quake 2 railgun which never has enough ammo. Your fourth weapon is a grenade launcher I think; but I'm unsure since I only used it a couple of times due to it only carrying four grenades at once and not wanting to waste them. The fifth weapon varies depending on what episode your in. The shotgun in episode 2 is decent, but all your alternatives in the final episode are junk. Even worse, the final level didn't seem to have ammo for any of the weapons I had. If a mod was created that removed most of the replicators and gave us much improved weapons and perhaps tweaked some of the monsters, then STRC would become a great game. As it is, it's just a good game; thumbs up but little re-playability. But since I was expecting much worse, I'm fairly satisfied. MegaMan 10 wooo!!!
Just recently beat Mega Man 9 (within the last month or so?) and I'm so ready for MM10! lol Yeah the ZX games were fucking tough. Apparently Capcom is releasing a MMZero collection in Japan soon. Want.
bland art and the performance is slow, but the puzzles are kind of clever:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Komix/grayscale anyone been watching Brink? the setting looks pretty cool and the 'smart' movement thing looks quite interesting.
I am highly anticipating Brink - I hope the multiplayer will be as fun as I think it will be. I'm not sure about the Smart system, not because it doesn't look good, but because I'm not sure how necessary it is. I think it's mainly for console players, and well, I will not be playing it on console.
I think the smart system is there to allow you to navigate the environment with ease and coolness, not necessarily specifically for console players. I mean, wtf, console games have had jump and duck buttons forever.
That said, it will take a very careful implementation to make it work. I don't want to go vaulting over something when I meant to get into cover and other situations like that. have been in games for years, what about the cover system in GoW anyone! I remember Crysis being littered with AI smart objects (how I hated placing the damn things everywhere and then testing them), to jump over walls, special cover / best facing direction, retreat/backup positions and even idle stuff like pissing or smoking! Personally I dont see this as anything new, just very good marketing hype.
Internally it's the same stuff we've all been doing for years.
It's like the 'AI Director' from L4D - entity randomisation I first worked with in Lazarus Q2, so a good few years ago now. Granted they've improved it a bit with route randomisation as well, though It'dve been nice if there were more than 2-3 distinct routes in the game. Never heard of Brink - I go to google. yeah brink looks pretty sweet! almost too intense. i hope there's a good linear single player campaign though, not just a bunch of bots thrown into an arena.
It looks pretty nice - seems that L4D has opened up the coop FPS side.
Not a WOW player so that whole stage passed me by really. If Brink works out the way I kind of hope it will, it might replace TF2 as my go-to FPS. But then it does have coop, but it can't really compete with zombies imo, so L4D2 will still be my go-to coop game.
Okay so I wasn't really expecting much besides a Diablo clone, and I was right. But it's a lot more fun than I anticipated. They added a lot of fun features, like being able to load up your pet with gear and then sending them back to town to sell it while you continue to battle it out in the dungeon. That was pretty cool.
A lot of stuff seems to have been streamlined, and there is simply tons of loot. Very fast, light on story, lots of different angles to the game to keep it fresh. But yeah, basically I would think of this as Diablo 2.5. I WANT, YET I HAVEN'T FINISHED THE 5 MILLION GAMES I ALREADY NEED TO PLAY. YES I KNOW I'M TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
<cardo> Bl1tz, wanna go start a games dev company called cockfuck productions?
<Vigil> Assfuck Gangbang Interactive <cardo> teet juice designs <ShambIer> how about Shitcunt Software Ltd? <cardo> these are all pretty amazing <cardo> Lucid Labia games <ShambIer> I Fucking Take It Up The Shitter Daily Until It Bleeds <ShambIer> + Software Interactive (tm) <cardo> oh right.. was wondering where u were going with that <ShambIer> it's a catchy name for many things <@rebb> will you be making chess simulators ? <ShambIer> ROFL!!! <cardo> yeh <ShambIer> rebb is teh winnar <cardo> the ingeneuity will be in the piece designs <@rebb> Dildo Chess <ShambIer> which will be life size models of CZG's darkest fantasies <ShambIer> made all too real in glorious 3D <cardo> giant cock to gaping chasm 4 Yeah, that's about how I remember IRC. Looks to be every bit as valuable today as the day I stopped logging in.
You know I think the public would be pretty eager to buy anything from a company called Assfuck Gangbang Interactive
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B_ONTVI8k4&NR=1
Some impressive names! Adam Baldwin! Now I have to buy this game =) NO STOP
YOU GUYS ALREADY GOT ME TO BUY DRAGON AGE AND I STILL HAVEN'T BEATEN IT DON'T MAKE ME BUY MASS EFFECT 2 PLEEEAASSSEEEE I've finally figured it out - I don't like games without endings. I'm there playing Torchlight or Sins of a Solar Empire or Spore building more and more shit, trying to stave off the suspicion that I'm completely wasting my time and stopped enjoying the game days or weeks earlier.
Replay value is fine, but don't ask me to make stuff inside your game unless it something to do with game externals. Thing is I know I have to keep playing Torchlight for a while now because I was stupid enough to buy it even though I already got bored of fate and by the dev's own admission they only repackaged old concepts to get enough money to make a Torchlight MMO. Next time something comes along promising endless worlds or user created content (only complete idiots will think that of any use - I want to lay good levels designed for fun play thank you) I'm going to smile and nod and beat it to a pulp with a half brick. When did infinite = enjoyable. Quake does end though - totals and time screen.
Once you've chopped your way out of Shub's guts going back and doing it again is up to you. There's no 'play from the start again and you get slightly better stuff' lure. it's the lures I don't like.
I'll happily play L4D2 until, well, they release L4D3 because I'm playing it for fun, not grinding for loot or XP. Well that just seems like you don't find loot or XP fun; Others do. SO essentially you just don't like RPGs? Or at least RPGs that don't really have a definite ending?
I'd put Spore or Sins in the same category. You build stuff. Next time you might see a slightly different permutation of the environment / situation so you are lured into playing again.
Until after X playthroughs you can't be bothered anymore and finally drop the game, feeling like a dunce for having bought it and wasted your time. But that's me. One these sorts of systems will finally live up to the complexity that they need to be for me to find this type of design entertaining. So I guess I'm complaining about a few different things, but stuff being made as 'endless' in whatever way is the closest I can put my finger on. I'm having the same problem with torch light.
It was also a huge problem for me with plants vs zombies - once you finish the challenges there is the zen garden, and that big tree etc - but nothing to ACCOMPLISH. Wrote a review, for those who may be interested. Haven't reviewed a game in a while, but plan to do them a little more often than before.
http://taw.duke4.net/2010/01/game-reviews/borderlands/ This is pretty cool. All kinds of classic 80s/90s games on multiple platforms. Requires Java.
DOS: http://dosdose.com C64: http://c64s.com NES: http://nintendo8.com Gameboy: http://gbemul.com Sega MS: http://mastersystem8.com Absolutely sick deal, you can get Psychonauts for a quid on steam right now, go go go!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/3830/ I lost my copy, can't wait to finish it finally... It's out, #tf is going crazy over it, and yet there's nothing here.
In short, it feels like enjoying a very good meal, only your chair isn't as comfortable as you'd like, and it keeps reminding you of it every once in a while. If you rebind your keys, the tutorial and tips aren't changed, the key for springting and taking cover is stupidly combined, there's no way to access your journal or codex directly. Other than that, pretty much everything is improved from the first game. Combat is overhauled now so cover actually matters, combining different powers with shooting is a valid way to play, the graphics and the environments are a hundred times more interesting, and there seems to be much more unique content. I suppose they're still using the Unreal engine, but this time around they're actually utiziling its features. The only problem really is the somewhat clunky character animation, especially after seeing Modern Warfare and Steam games in action. Mordin the commando/scientist/doctor is among the funniest Bioware characters since HK in Knights of the Old Republic. Michael Hogan, Martin Sheen and Michael Dorn were the voices I immediately recognized. I just have too much damn palladium. springting and taking cover is stupidly combined
Like Gears of War then? Mass Effect bored me when I played it. There was this one bit where my squad all got into a really big elevator and it showed the whole trip down the shaft (lol) then when I got to the bottom and opened the door I got a loading screen. Very bad. (yes, the new one!)
Multiplayer demo, you can be any of the 3 races and play deathmatch on 1 map. I had such high hopes for this, but alas I am very sad to report that it is return of the fucking console shooter port. - Movement is wooden, feels like you are sliding along the floor rather than walking/running. - Someone can run up behind you, press "e" and instakill you, there is nothing you can do about this. Yes you read that right - there really is an "I WIN!" button in this game. - The predator starts off with his wristblades, and thats it. Your other weapons are scattered around the level as pickups. This felt wrong to me =) Its the same as marine, you start with a pulse rifle and pickup other weapons as you find them, this is more acceptable. - The level, is a corridor maze... There is 1 central room and then...Corridors! And the old fps staple.. Crates! - It uses the same sort of match-making as modern warfare 2. Also, it took 15 minutes (no lie) of "searching for game..." before I actually got into one. + Textures and models are ace, especially the alien hive textures. + Marine motion tracker & pulse rifle feel very good. + It runs at 30-60fps, even on my oldman pc. I guess this is the 1 thing I can thank the PS3/360 for =) I'll give the single-player demo a whirl for sure if there is one, but multiplayer is a joke. I am very sad now :( Awww man, I was really looking forward to the multiplayer... =(
Will check it out this evening. I just tried the demo, and I dont think I hate it as much as DaZ.
The graphics are very nice indeed, it runs pretty good on this mid-level PC (9800GT), the level is a bit more than room - corridor - room. There are storgae rooms, office type lab bits, large atrium areas and cool hive bits. There are vehicles and stuff, there are crates too but they look smart. The movement - well I tried the Marine, and it's no worse than Doom 3 or the first half of Quake 4. The predator starts off with his wristblades, and thats it. Your other weapons are scattered around the level as pickups. This felt wrong to me =) I must admit that I only played for 5 mins (heh) and in that time I got killed by a Predator atleast three times just because he was cloaked and killed me with the wristblades. Cant wait to get home from work and try this on my home PC with the volume a bit louder ;) Dunno - I think that it felt pretty good, very atmospheric. And the animations are also sweet :) (I'm probably bias, but I dont feel like Im being dishonest, whatever) The predator starts off with his wristblades, and thats it. Your other weapons are scattered around the level as pickups. This felt wrong to me =)
The above paragraph was meant to be in white in the previous post, I was quoting from Daz's post. Cool top-down shooter, kind of like SmashTV with inventory management and more nonlinearity.
http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/static/robokill2/robokill2.swf Heh, it's so messy. Nobody knows how it works and it's basically 'press all buttons at once and hope for the best'. It's also laggy as hell and might take ages to find a server. SP demo plz.
Fuck off game/movie industry for their new 'sequels without numbers' paradigm. As if we didn't know the same shit has been done years ago...
I actually kind of like it, refreshing to have some alternate gameplay to just shooting. Playing the alien and predator is pretty fun, you have to read the keyboard binds to understand all you can do, like jumping up to high places etc.
My main problem is the laggy servers cause of silly p2p multiplayer (fixed in full game apparently), and the super clunky UI in the menus (thank you consoles). I got lucky finding servers, never waited so much, probably have negke, rebb and RickyT to thank for that, as having a few initial players with you must help getting the game started faster. Looking forward to the full game. PS: negke is just jealous cause I beat him three times in a row. Was great as well. Buying the game unlocked around 25% more content, which is a nice business approach (freemium) and one worth supporting.
Btw. Steam has removed the demo from all German accounts (stealthily as always). Now there's some confusion in various forums whether it'll be even possible to activate and play the full game (retail import or gift) from here. I was under the impression that MP was tied to the Steam network, so that would make it suck even more.
We'll see how turns out. If they fuck German customers over once again, I'll happily warez the game for the short SP part. Why there's no riot police uncommon infected in the German version of L4D2 - also why the achievement 'kill one of each special infected' doesn't include them.
Oversensorship, but not as bad as Australia. I thought Germany banned Wolfenstein because it was such a horrible piece of shit, but it was just because they failed to remove some Swastikas :(
for Friction who gifted me Half-Life 2. Yes, I installed Steam (in Wine...). :(
Also, haha. Once there is a censorship/control mechanism, you can be assured that it will be used against you sooner or later. that the game was refused classification in Germany and banned, so steam will not let German players download/play it.
Sega/Rebellion also said (I think) that they will not be making a toned down version for Germany. :( sucks They are incouraging piracy. I mean people will just go in search of a "cracked" copy, who cant play it because its banned in there country
After trying to place a bucket on Barney's head, peeking at Alyx' butt and getting driven over by a train with my fat bbox, I just have been levitated against a ceiling and crushed from the weight of the world. Well, one bug in the 10 maps I played in these 45 minutes is not too bad.
I played this far several times already so it was very boring and annoying not to be able to skip the damn scripted sequences. So my grumpyness is over the top. I am looking forward to playing more. Is it me or is the "action music" not really fitting the theme? meant to play it over christmas but computer broke down. Pushed back to Easter now.
I just wonder why Steam doesn't add a proper age verification system to allow people to buy such games. Probably a gray area still, but then again, it's not so much different from imports (which are legal). Hell, they're losing so much money as they now can't charge exaggerated Euro prices from a not-so-small de.market.
I think a gifted copy will still work (like L4D2). Though a few people mentioned that, in the case of Saint's Row 2, it actually didn't. Spirit: Cut back on the Steam/Valve hater attitude and you'll be able to appreciate the game more. ;) Well, and once you're through the canal section... The Ravenholm and the uprising bits are pretty cool. +1 vote for piracy.
+2 votes for trying to change the stupid german rules, but that's a bit harder for the average gamer. If they've figured out how to sell good games for a measly $2 US then they're awesome.
That we have to put up with bullshit enforced upon them by whatever country we happen to be then the blame isn't difficult to direct. For example a friend bought Psychonaughts but the credit card charge was more than the cost of the game. I remember when they brought Steam to the Russian market (link please) and basically said 'there's only alot of piracy there because they can't get hold of the game legally'. That boatcarwhatever sequence was painful. Please tell me there are no more vehicle sections or at least none as stupid as this one. The physics puzzles feel very forced, out of place in a "realistic" game. Grenades love to bounce from corners that are not in their way.
Gorgeous textures and brushwork. Spirit: Agreed. Especially about the physics puzzles. But do remember: in 2004 physics was a "new" thing.
There's an equally long car sequence later on, but it's slightly better than the hovercraft one.
See here for reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slRsexrhbG8 I just played the boat part again and I thought it was awesome.
what was it that bothered you so much ( other than the lame floating barrel puzzle)? i like the boat section, especially how the sun slowly goes down as you play so that it's nighttime when you reach the base.
also, the section half way through where you escape into these leaky tunnels and the chopper flies away. the whole chopper chase is very loud but that one section with the physics puzzle is really really quite and moody. very cool audio contrast. it's not a subtle effect, but i love it every time it's done in a game. Finally got through the whole awful car stuff. Reminded me of the bad things in GTA:SA. The locked animation when exiting the car is ugly, consoleritis for crosshair centering?
Zombies and the other stuff in Ravenholm were utterly disgusting. The parts with the shaking rain gutters somewhat comedic. Felt like Painkiller there. Oh, another broken road tanker! Oh, more broken cars! Oh, another abandoned building with enemies in it! Oh, I am on a bridge and pressing a button. Oh, another gunship. I was expecting it earlier because there was that rocket chest. I died out of nowhere after avoiding the train on the bridge by simply driving backwards into safety. Before I managed to get the car sideways between railing and train, I had 6hp left but the game killed me. Fuck it! I also died once because I was adventurous enough to attempt a dive into the water, well, midair fade to black. So far HL2 seems like a Halo to me. Is it really the age or is it just a not-so-great game after all. I found it extremely boring and without any immersion so far. Super random encounters with enemies in a big empty landscape. Oh, tunnel, "loading"! No clue why I am driving around there, I think I am trying to find someone. Or I am running away. "No clue why I am driving around there, I think I am trying to find someone. Or I am running away."
Maybe you're not enjoying it because you're not paying attention? Ah, I forgot that the game crashed hard right after the Ravenholm church and that I had to use a cheat to unlock the next chapter. Savegames were corrupt and the alternative was to replay Ravenholm. So I missed why I am in the car. Now that I come to think about it, well, that's why I have no clue.
Overall I felt HL2 was a decent game but I thought it was incredibly over hyped and over rated. My main complaint was the very gimmicky and often-copied Gravity Gun. I did not find it very appealing tbh - all the driving stuff was sort of meh to me too.
Loved Ravenholm though, that bit was awesome. StarCraft 2 beta supposedly launches towards the end of the month. Anyone else excited?? Even remotely in the niblets?
I thought it was a fun, gimmicky FPS. Every chapter featured some gameplay gimmick, several of these built on previous ones (e.g. hovercraft -> dune buggy.) I thought this was nice, kept things interesting. I also liked most of the locales, especially the prison level and some of the industrial stuff.
The game has flaws and some maps are kind of weak, but overall i never got bored. super gravity gun as the end to hl2: let down
super gravity gun as the into to ep1: surprisingly fun. not sure if it's just because i already understood how it worked by that point in ep1, but it seemed more satisfying to progress from the super gravity gun to normal weapons than the other way around. Going from complex gameplay to simple felt wrong - from simple to complex much better.
Simple as in the range of options available. ~~~ for megaman ~~~
I managed to get through the car sequence and to some buddies. Right there we got ambushed by dropships. Are those invincible? I shot 3 rockets in one and it did not crash. Then I got killed by some clipping bug on the lighthouse (where I had to rocket down a gunship for the 3rd(?) time in the last 30 game minutes. Then came the part where I must not touch the sand because antlions will spawn (with screen shake and a grumbling sound!). I got through the first part alright but then felt down in that little area where the houses are. A fuckton of antlions spawned and hit me from everywhere while I was trying to cover my ass and run into a building. These things feel like slowdown-mechanisms more than anything (right now). I then hit the button and that stomping thing was enabled. Ok, that is kinda cool, earlier I thought those things were generators. I assumed the beach was safe now and was killed by antlions that spawned as soon as I stepped onto the sand. That uber-antlion fight was stupid. I ran from it, got bumped into the back, then realised someone else was shooting at it. So I ran closer to the gunner and the thing followed me. Then it got stuck and did not attack me anymore, sheepishly loosing health and finally dying (its animations reminded me of the Droles in Quoth, no way to tell if it is dying right now or not). Ok, so now I can attract and "command" antlions. Ooook, that's gonna show the enemy. I guess there will be some puzzle where I have to use them. Might be that I played too many "next gen" shooters in the meantime, but those enemies with their glowing headlights and no faces feel really stupid and clichee. One thing I have to mention is that the cliffside and also that part on the bridge earlier really impressed my vertigo sense (?). That rarely happens in games but always feels kinda cool. Like "Oh my god, I'm gonna fall down!!" I am not sure how much of it is plain uneasyness and unfamiliarity with the controls/movement. Or even dreading loading times (which seems a good thing as it makes me dive into the game some more). Now I am at that Nova Prospect beach where the enemy built silly short-range bunkers. I mean wtf, are they there as antlion shooting range or what. The guns are very uneffective (or the enemy guys have 5 layers of fat...) so what are they doing there. The antlions proved to be very useless and more of a distraction here. It felt like there were new ones randomly spawned for me. I approached the next loading trigger (I can smell those) and let it rest for now. The crossbow is a lot less fun than the one in HL1. (The arrow looks like a lava stick?) The projectile is affected by gravity like a czg, you cannot even shoot straight for 100m and it flies very slow too. Weapon changing takes ages. I should see if there is at least a cvar to make switching instant. Oh, kudos to Valve to keep the good id order of "mouse up -> previous and mouse down -> next". Today's session was much more fun. Feels like a FPS now. Open and a bit like Titan Quest though (tree, hill, grass, enemy horde, crates, goto 10). I hope there will be good old close combat, restricted indoors short-story driven gaming later.
all of it. there wasn't a single part that didn't work for me. but then that probably had something to do with it being the only fps of last decade i actually played so i don't really have anything to compare it with :)
if i HAD to pick one criticism i'd share with you spirit it would be the sand generator type machines. they seemed to have no purpose; i too assumed they would activate some sort of electricity current that would stop any nearby antlions from rising; felt quite miffed when they didn't. but i get the feeling the crashing/random death bugs you've experienced have dented your enjoyment of it to the point where every negative aspect seems worse than what it would have been :P Haha yes. I've been super negative about the game right from the damn speedboat sequence onwards.
Yesterday I went through Nova Prospect. Used godmode at the "defend 4 entrances with 3 turrets that get constantly knocked over" moment after dying 10 times. A lot of the gameplay was waiting for a shitload of antlions to run and die. I took a turret with me as long as I could, that was kinda nice. Could someone fill me in on the story. Why was the black guy in that combine thing? That "plot twist" with the woman in white was totally unpredictable... I expected her to betray "us" right after her first sentences in the game. Bah, silly clichee. Got crushed by the moving castle... err citadel because I got stuck in debris. And then I spent a long time to stack crates in the high elevator shaft (where dog falls down later) just to fall into the loading screen and not damaging me at all. Puzzles feel awfully gimmicky, just out of place in a world that tries to hard to seem realistic. Also the "that old puzzle but this time with this marginal difference" parts (disabling the force fields by taking out the plug, shooting the plug, throwing a grenade around (fucking stupid physics btw)) are bleh. It crashed again (corrupting the savegame) so I need to build up some motivation. How much of the game is left, I just got the squad? PS: The one death I described earlie (being levitated and crushed) actually was one of those things that hang on ceilings. There is no visual hint that it grabbed you nor a sound, pfff. "Could someone fill me in on the story. Why was the black guy in that combine thing? "
I spirit, you seem to be experiencing an inordinate amount of bugs and crashes... my first play through, i think the game crashed once after a particularly long play session (probably due to memory fragmentation, i didn't have much ram in those days) and maybe got stuck once or twice (and then i just noclipped quickly to get unstuck).
it's hard for me to take your posts seriously because it seems like you're just making shit up. :P The barnacle has a clearly visible tentacle and it does sucking sounds when it grabs you. If you didn't see/hear them, you probably might want to consider not playing HL2 through Wine.
After C&C 1 and 2, EA has now released Tiberian Sun as freeware. Nice move.
http://www.commandandconquer.com/classic recent thread from Gentoo forums:
So it's been a couple of years after Epic promised a Linux port. They still maintain one is coming. My question is, why TF are they lying? It's not coming and hasn't been coming. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-815875.html The natives are getting restless. Yeah, the others are busy playing ETQW.
I think the moaning is because it's seen as vapourware. When id says there will be a Linux port, there usually is one, otherwise they don't say so. GG Ubisoft for heralding a new era of fucking with regular customers for zero gain. Ass ass in screed indeed. What's next? requiring people who bought the game to go to the nearest game store to be able to play it there...?
Finished HL2 the other day. Can't be arsed to write much more. The NPCs were stupid and annoying, saying "sorry" and blocking you all the time. The zickzacking part before that fancy house with the generators felt oh so artificial. Striders seemed only to go down if I shot them, not the NPCs. Elevator up the citadel was kinda cool. Long train ride inside not. Nor the "wait for the elevator and defend that place" sequence. Beardy guy's omnipresence such a silly 1984/THX1138/etc clichee.
Ending is a kick in the balls. The best moment was when Judith and Eli sat there (after the Doctor escaped, again, what a fucking bad clichee scene...) giving each other bedroom eyes until Eli looked at me with an apologethic "fuck off, i know she is desperate but i am too" face. Anyways, thanks to Friction for gifting me the game. If anyone wants the Steam account just raise your hand. The episodes are just more of the like, is that correct? You ain't missing anything if you never played HL2. Unless you like b-stories, 5 enemy types, lots of ingame "cutscenes", boats, cars, boats, scripted sequences and an anti-climax ending.
"Striders seemed only to go down if I shot them, not the NPCs."
That's kind of the point. You're playing the game, not watching it. :) You were the only person who had never played HL2, and probably the only person who didn't like it ;).
For me works the same as a great film, whenever I play it, it still after all this time holds my interest and is still fun. Quake is the only other game that has been able to do this for me, so that is my 2p =)
... was very innovative at its time... and for sure it a very good game...
However, like "old" games, it is deprecated compared to new ones... though... aren't we playing/mapping/discussing a very old game here ? Is a good game. You can only even describe it as 'average' if you only play excellent, top notch games.
Ones graded on a real 0-100 scale and not a games journalism one of 60-100. I think the criticism of B movie storyline is a bit problematic.
I mean, I feel like it's pretty difficult to have a very popular, 3d ACTION SHOOTER without incorporating ACTION movie style aspects. Which shooter games can you think of with stories that are NOT heavily influenced by the stereotypical action/sci fi cliches? I actually feel like the HL universe is giving into many of these in the later episodes to a greater degree than previously, but I also think that most of that has to do with the fact that a resolution is actually being formulated. I think I've said before that I just hope it doesn't end up like Xfiles/Lost etc. - shows that kept things very intersting using tension and ambiguity and open endedness, but kind of turned brittle and ridiculous by the end, IMHO. Even if the series does give in to sci fi stereotypes, I think that those cliches have worth. Many things that seem cliche or corny etc started off as cocnepts original and effective to inspire way too many imitators, which kill the idea by regurgitating it without enough new being added. The difference is that first person video games can allow you to experience those moments in a more direct and intimate fashion than many movies. I think this is the kernel that makes them more involving... someone finish that thought for me - I have to go... Also the game came out a pretty long time ago. SO some of the things that it "redid" first have been made into cliches all over again. I have to say that I've been replaying it myself, and DOOM 3, as well. And I think HL2 has aged WAY better! Spirit / other Linux users, how well does Steam / HL2 / L4D etc run under Wine? I have had mixed experiences... so I haven't really been eager to install that. I'm probably not a very avid gamer these days. I try to manage my time, too :-P
Besides, I'm in Germany, and I hear Steam is very cooperative with the German ministry of censorship. Apparently there's a good number of people who successfully play L4D with Wine. At least according to some statements I've read. Then again, considering how many glitches Spirit seems to have had in HL2, which is the same engine, it might be tricky on some machines.
As for the censorship. A large number of games aren't available to German users in the Steam store (IP block) and some that are, like L4D for example, only come in cut versions (no gore etc) if bought over Steam. However, in most cases games or keys bought in other regions can be gifted/registered at a German account and give you a fully functional uncut version. So if you know someone from abroad or simply buy a retail from amazon uk, everything's fine. http://appdb.winehq.org/
For me HL2 crashed almost as often as I was killed if you count kaputte savegames that crash too. Apart from that it was alright. Severe slowdowns sometimes. Using Steam is a huge pain in the ass. Shit is going down.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3533/ "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations" Started people going crazy on the forums, recap : -Portal gets surprise update yesterday afternoon -People see new mystery achievement -People play and see the radio in the beginning room now has a green light -Carry it around and notice it makes strange broadcast interference noises in certain places -Locate and place all 26 of these mystery radios for achievement -Smart people yank wav files out of game content folders and run them through steganography programs -Produces 26 weird cryptic image files in a numbered sequence -Some dude runs the number string through an md5 hash translator and gets a landline number -Internet traces it to Kirkland, WA (near Valve HQ) -People find out its not a phone/fax line but a data line hosting a BBS and telnet it -Use a clue from one of the files to figure out the BBS user/password login info -End up with a bunch of weird ASCII artwork -We're trying to figure out wtf it means I love Valve. Cool game with some fantastic level design in places and mediocre in others, the main problem being that some areas just didn't seem 'up to snuff' compared to others. Some of the jumping puzzles just didn't work the way I thought and I had to try them again and again to get the right spacing/timing while others that seemed really tough were very easy.
Story was wonky, not very exciting, cliche, didn't feel like I did anything and not really sure what happened at the end. Did the bad guy get his or what? Still unclear to me, but it's my understanding Mirror's Edge was planned as a trilogy - correct? Also the cartoon cutscenes were balls, didn't really fit in imo. Dante's Inferno also had bad cartoon cutscenes but much worse. Why do they these things to games? Gameplay was fun for the most part. Running and jumping on stuff is fun. The combat was sparse thankfully but got really tedious when they introduced the all-melee fights. Not sure exactly why, though, it didn't seem to fit. Also felt like they straddled the fence on the actual shooting - felt too light that they probably shouldn't have included it imo, just added more running away/disarming type stuff. Faith doesn't seem the shooty type. Visuals were great - awesome 'impression' of a city instead of it being an actual city. I don't care what dictator is running things, a city is not going to be all bright color-coded sterile hallways and rooftops. Still though, fucking amazing style that I'm sure would've been great to play with had there been a level editor (is there one?) Also some of the layouts were top notch and very Quakey imo. Having a sterile metropolis means you can do all kinds of weird spirey things and twisty layouts and still be believable to a degree. Top notch for the most part. Good length too - I felt it was a bit short but only by about maybe half an hour. The story progression kind of went limp after a while (you rescue your sister, watch a cut scene, then whoa she's kidnapped again (WHAT THE EFF?) so a longer length maybe would've meant another impotent rescue plot and ANOTHER kidnapping plot afterward, sooooooo I'll let it slide. Cool game, worth the $6 I paid for it during the Steam sale. Actually looking into it you can hack the UT3 editor to work with Mirror's Edge, but I'm unsure what's all involved. Might give it a spin.
Yeah I think it's still one of the best looking games around.
I really don't understand why they had those shitty 2D cartoons spread throughout the game, the 3D is so gorgeous, they should have just stuck to that. Valve has changed the ending to Portal, mega spoiler ahead :
http://www.xfire.com/video/2393cf/ Woo! I don't really see the trouble, it's not like they changed anything, they just added a bit on.
They could have as easily just added it to the start of whatever comes next and it wouldn't have bothered anyone, but this works nicely as a teaser. I think it's smart. Oh well, it's quite an okay game (SP) - I enjoyed it. Needless to say, it suffers from the obvious flaws most modern FPS have: MSD. Visually great, even though I could 'only' play it on DirectX 9. Cool finishing moves.
A game like this would benefit from at least some nonlinearity in its map design. After all, what's more scary than seemingly being lost in a dark base while chased by aliens? There are six maps in total which you play through in different ways and directions, and with slight changes, depending on the species. While it was done well, they could have done more here. I wished the campaigns were longer, especially the Alien campaign which was very cool. Considering this fact and the overall playtime, I wonder why it has such a huge filesize. Good controls, although the melee combat takes some practice. I thought the Predator weapons are a bit of a let-down: I hardly every used the proximity mines; the spear feels silly because it doesn't have to be picked up again after a throw. Story-wise it was nothing special and the way it was told, the audio diary collectables in particular, was kind of lame for the most part. I'm tired of being guided through a game over a radio. Also, ffs why Tenenbaum again..? The marine AI is stupid and poorly done. You can kill one unnoticed while others stand right next to him. They don't even become alerted when they discover fallen buddies. I haven't tried MP yet. Have to mentally prepare for being smashed by Bal. The thing about mapping for Mirror's Edge is that the lighting utility used on the maps to give them the distinctive HDR look is not shipped with the game, so you CAN map for it, but you will have real trouble matching the style of the original game.
Apparently though, some people have managed to cook up some custom shaders that make custom maps look very close to how they are supposed to look when processed by the proprietary lighting tool. Another gotcha is actually playing custom content in Mirror's Edge. There is no actual menu to select and play any custom usermade content, so what actually has to be done is this: 1) Backup a timetrial map of your chosing 2) Save your map under the same name as the timetrial map, essentially replacing it 3) Launch the game and load the timetrial map via the menu, which now will obviously launch your map instead. OK, I was looking forwards to this game since pretty much when it was announced (although I actually got very worried for a while because I figured it meant that they had scrapped Colonial Marines).
I agree with all of Negkes observations pretty much. I have only played through the Marine episode, and I did that in two sittings (!). I must admit though that the marine episode was great fun, mainly because of the quality of the maps and overall immersion, and the A.I. of the aliens, which was very good indeed, you could tell it was the sme crew that made the original AvP PC game about 10 years ago (fuck has it really been that long!?). Aliens use the darkness to there advantage, even when it is the AI, they will scirt across dark patches on the cieling and then come up behind you. They dont make much noise, only deep growling, the weird elephant-pig sound they make when they get shot in Aliens, the other sounds being very subtle. So yeah - make sure you have a clean pair of trousers handy! There are also parts when you get attacked by many aliens at once which is very retro-doom style gameplay, you really get a cool sense of awesomeness as they are closing in on you from all angles........ Scripted sequences worked well for me, and although the voice acting could possibly have been better (I read someone complaining about that somewhere) I felt that it was very engaging nonetheless. The weapons felt good - just like the movie Aliens. I also like the hive environment because of the way the aliens would hide in the walls and you wouldnt see them until they began to move - some walls had so much detail on that you wouldnt spot them until they had spotted you. Also there are some parts in the walls which look like an alien is sitting there, and when you get closer you see it is just a part of the hive. Very gigeresque :) But yeah - im a bit of an aliens fanboi..... http://www.bluesnews.com/screenshots/games/crysis2/20100304/
Definitely time so start saving for that pc upgrade =) Maybe not, as they are aiming for a console release this time. The PC version will probably still be quite scalable, but it should run on most modern machines.
nitin: Min specs: 3.4 ghz, 1 gb ram, 256mb DX9 card.
Ricky: I thought the Aliens were too slow. Unlike in the other games, they didn't really dash towards you, but rather circle you, attack, then retreat a few steps. Much like a cat toying with a mouse (in this sense, the remark by the scientist in the Alien tutorial fits). A clear concession to the console players. Another one is the facehugger grab if you have more than 1/3 health. In the game's predecessors, once a facehugger jumped at you, you were done for; here, they aren't much of a threat. This doesn't mean there were no difficult situations, though. if thats min specs. Although I have a 9800GTX, might cover for lack of cpu power somewhat.
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Intel Processor - Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz AMD Processor - Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ Nvidia Graphics Card - Geforce 8800 GTS ATI Graphics Card - Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB RAM Memory - 2 GB Hard Disk Space - 10 GB Direct X - 9 ========================== Blindly staring at a CPU clockrate doesn't work these days, as a modern 2,66 Ghz i5 CPU or similar will be more than twice as fast as an old 3 Ghz Pentium 4. Its on steam.
It does suffer from some consolitis in the control scheme, but really that is the only downer I can think of right now. This game is *FUN* Its been a very long time since I laughed with glee as I caused absolutely ridiculous amounts of destruction in a game... I guess this is kinda like gta3 on steroids mixed with far cry & Indiana Jones (!?), if that makes any sense. You are basicly a vigilante guy with lots of guns, a parachute and a high tech long range lasso that can grapple onto just about anything, helicopters, cars, buildings, people, anything. You can also use this grapple to stick objects and enemies to other objects, with hilarious results. For instance you can tether an enemy to a gas canister, then shoot the canister making it fly away with the guy still attached =) The demo gives you a complete sandbox area of the game a few miles wide and has a 30 minute time limit before you have to start from the beginning again, but what a fun 30 minutes it is! The demo, and the game, require directx 10 so its Vista/Windows 7 only, no XP support. It looks gorgeous but requires a fairly decent pc to run it with everything on. Give it a try! Some student game, apparently a few of the guys were picked up by Valve to work on Portal2, not so surprising considering the gameplay they have. Fun little FPS puzzle game.
https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&download=1506 Human Revolution runs on a proprietary engine and is played from a first-person perspective, though it pops into third-person for certain attacks and taking cover.
aww that looks awesome.
I've been loving their in-game videos too - they really look to have made a lot of original decisions with the gameplay, and completely thought through every aspect of the game. I was reading a feature on the sound design in Brink, and the lead audio dude was talking about the shotgun sound, and how he'd been tweaking it his whole career - 10 years or so. He was talking about using samples of lions roaring for the blast sound, because the animalistic quality gave an innate fear response. Just an example - I just love it when people take things that seriously. Speaking of R.U.S.E (or Ruse), open beta is available on Steam. World War II RTS game with... ruses, a focus on strategy instead of tactics, and plenty of factions. Even lets you play as Italians and French.
(Trying to avoid spoilers as best as I can!)
I completed this late last week, but held off posting about it until now to try and be a little more objective about the game. With that said though, I'm going to start off by saying that this is easily the best game I have played in the last 3 years or so! Where to start... The most important part of any rpg game for me are the characters and the story, and ME2 nails both of these things perfectly. It is engaging from the very first moment you start the game, and only gets better the further in you progress. The game revolves around you being hired by some shady characters to stop a new threat to the galaxy that no-one else appears to be lifting a finger to stop. You spend most of the game searching the galaxy for a crack team of people to lead on a suicide mission to stop this new threat. Finding these people, persuading them to join you and then gaining their trust forms most of the game content. The missions you undertake with these characters are the highlight of the game, every single one has a deep and rounded story surrounding them, and your actions can make or break them in very real ways. Combat is handled much better than the original game also, it feels more like gears of war than elder scrolls, with an over the shoulder camera, cover system and gratuitous violence. Different enemies have different defences that require different tactics to take down, some enemies have shielding while others simply have heavy armour, some have both, and your squads abilities may not work against enemies who have a certain type of defence active. Some things are a bit annoying though, for example the planet scanning minigame (scan planets to find minerals that you can use to research new tech) gets boring very fast, and must be done to fully upgrade your equipment. I suppose I should mention that the game is gorgeous to look at =) I can't be sure but it feels like a heavily modified UE3. Special mention must go to the cinematic effects for conversations and cutscenes, things like depth of field and film grain are used excellently to give everything a cinematic quality. The character models and especially the animations are fantastic in every regard. Even the lens flares are the best I have ever seen in a game =) I find myself thinking of battlestar galactica as a good analogy, in the trailers you see all the action and space combat and the show looks cool, but you end up appreciating the character stories and plot developments so much more. For me at least I really felt attached to the characters by the end of the game, and I actually gave a shit what happened to them, they weren't some dumb game characters any more. There is so much more to this game, but I cant be arsed to write any more, suffice to say that I recommend it to everyone that reads this post. This is a fantastic galaxy to get lost in! I am playing Thief 2 now and love it. Halfway through the second mission at the moment.
I see a few people on steam have this, how is it? Worth getting???
Also, how scalable in the engine? Can you turn stuff off to make it run smooth on an older pc? I have a 2ghz athlon X2 with a nvidia 9600gt and I'm doubting I will be able to get a decent framerate out of it! Finished through the third (or was it still the second) mission. So much fun to find secrets and loot. Next is the mission where I enter the city watch. Yikes!
Jesus! Who's stupid idea was it that when you are hurt your screen is covered in blood so you cannot see to take cover and the freakin indicator of which way enemy fire is coming at you is red as well!?! grrrr >:(
damage indicators that actually make it near-impossible to fight back along with "realistic headbobbing" are some of the stupidest things in games these days. I don't know about you folks, but when I run down the hall, my head isn't doing any owl-like movements.
Is motion blur. 'It's more realistic' they cry. 'It's a fucking game' the rest of us say.
Engine programmers drunk on how awesome they are. That's nice to know they encouraged you to do that. If you do plan to play custom maps, you'll need something like DarkLoader/GarretLoader (no unzipping the FM files) if you don't already know. TTLG forums should have all the info you need to run FMs - I plan to type up simple guides on my site one day.
I've been neglecting my site lately though... plan to get back to it. Have more Thief/Quake reviews to do afterall. What a disappointment! I expected something like Stalker, but it's actually just another stupid and ugly console game.
Thematically, it feels like the Fallout 3 subway tunnels + DC ruins but without the freedom. Hardly any game I've played exhibits MSD better than this one, as nothing about it stands out in any way - it felt pointless and uninteresting with mostly unspectacular and confined levels, linear and boring scripted gameplay, average graphics, and few light quicktime events. I couldn't care less about the story - a nuclear apocalypse with four types of mutants vs. communists vs. Nazis vs. bandits, and in the end everything blows up... or something. Often there aren't even smooth level transitions. Gameplay allows for brute or stealth approaches, but it doesn't really matter in the end. Did someone say it was to have RPG elements? Sure.. if the ability to buy weapons and ammo constitutes an RPG already. A couple of nice gimmicks, like the watch (gasmask timer) showing the actual system time :P, or a section where you have to carry a child on your shoulders which slows down your view/movement. Apparently it's based on a novel? Lots of wasted potential then. Bottom line: a fairly bad game and a waste of time in my view. Not recommended. The SDK needs to come out.
Unless all the excuses we've been seeing so far are just that, excuses and the real reason for not releasing the SDK is that the publisher would likely no longer be capable to charge stupid amounts of money for DLC. "Is motion blur. 'It's more realistic' they cry. 'It's a fucking game' the rest of us say.
Engine programmers drunk on how awesome they are." "Depth of field. Or... let's entirely forget how the eye works." Seriously, why work on graphics technology at all? You guys are fucking retarded. :) If you don't want that stuff you have an option - keep playing Quake. I felt the motion blur in Crysis was awesome, its the best ive seen in a game to date.
Mass Effect 2 uses DoF to its advantage also, it really enhances the presentation of the story cutscenes and the dialogue camera angles. Honestly, I think DoF in games is mimicking the DoF of camera lenses rather than the human eye. Its quite exciting really, graphics technology is getting to the point where if you squint it does look real. Its things like animation and floating objects that give it away, rather than the graphics themselves being nowhere near realistic. I remember watching a video of some game on youtube a few months ago, and as the video quality was 480 maximum, it hid some of the giveaway details and it really did look real, it was some racing game I forget which one. I think that was the first time I genuinely thought to myself "that looks totally real" when looking at game footage. Err, this kind of meandered off topic :P And as an aid to those who want to go off on these ridiculous rants in the future
yeah, motion blur and DoF and other stuff of that nature is more about simulating a real camera as opposed to an eyeball which isn't a bad thing by any means. besides, motion blur goes a long way towards hiding lower framerates.
i really liked the DoF effects in crysis and farcry 2. It's the coders who introduce it. The artists work constantly to marginalise the effects since the coders don't want to remove them.
Spose it depends on the quality of the effect. Or maybe I'm just retarded. I like motion blur on tf2, don't know why. Sometimes I'll just zig the camera around as fast as I can to look at it. Seriously.
DoF is I like a lot of graphical innovations in games, but it's really how the stuff is used. Some examples of just rampant over-use of features I think DOF is ok when used sparingly. It can be quite useful to simulate somekind of atmospheric haziness in the distance, or coupled with distance fog to get some nice silhouettes against the sky.
Mass Effect 2 uses DoF to its advantage also, it really enhances the presentation of the story cutscenes and the dialogue camera angles.
Honestly, I think DoF in games is mimicking the DoF of camera lenses rather than the human eye. And when it's used in cutscenes, it works brilliantly, because that's exactly where we're used to seeing such effects. When there's a barrel of a gun stuck in the middle of your screen and your eyes wander around, it feels wrong and distracting. Seriously, why work on graphics technology at all? You guys are fucking retarded. :) If you don't want that stuff you have an option - keep playing Quake. When there's a barrel of a gun stuck in the middle of your screen and your eyes wander around, it feels wrong and distracting.
100% agree, it certainly has its place. I assume your talking about Crysis & to an extent Stalker : Clear sky, which are both at fault here. At the end of the day its down to common fucking sense, which is seems some developers leave behind. All that time and money could've been spent on improving better aspects of the game. For example. I don't agree with this, I think that having cutting edge visuals is a very important part of the game. It helps with immersion, characterisation, and stops the player thinking "lol this looks like ass" when they start it up for the first time (always a plus!). Stalker : SOC for example would have been a much worse game if they had not pushed the visuals as much as they did. The experience of exploring through all those ruined buildings with the lightning flashing in from outside, and rain pouring through holes is simply unmatched in anything that has come after it (including its sequels). Graphics that support it are great, but most of the time the player doesn't know the difference between graphical feature X or Y - unless they've spent a lot of cash on a fancy new graphics card and need to justify the expense.
I'm not making any friends here am I? "It's the coders who introduce it. The artists work constantly to marginalise the effects since the coders don't want to remove them. "
Doesn't that seem counter productive? Are you trying to make ugly looking games? "All that time and money could've been spent on improving better aspects of the game. For example."
Graphics programmers don't work on AI or gameplay code "I Play Games For Gameplay"
Yes, yes, we all do. However, good gameplay doesn't have to look like a game from 1997 does it? shit slinging and point scoring going on here there is a valid argument on both sides.
I personally am up for all of the eyecandy in the world times a million and I am prepared to pay for a system to actually be able to run it. But a game which uses all of these things to succesfully assimilate a good style has to incorporate these technologies in a balanced fashion. They have to run optimally as well as be present and deliver a visually pleasing/functional effect. STALKER CS/CoP both use DoF a lot, but it doesnt look realistic, it just looks fuzzy and blurry. I personally would prefer a more subtle realistic effect. However running such an effect at an opptimal speed would probably require a rediculous amount of horsepower. So what do the developers do? Do they remove the effect altogether? or do they leave it in and try and find the balance the best they can? Worrying about who is more responsible from within the ranks and departments of a development studio is just silly and a completely unrealistic perspective to talk about from the average consumer's point of view. Often times these effects aren't used in the pursuit of realism (which is a mistake that many people make) but instead they are used to achieve a look that the art director is looking for. Most games are highly stylized and very few are actually going for "real world realism".
100% agree, it certainly has its place. I assume your talking about Crysis & to an extent Stalker : Clear sky, which are both at fault here. At the end of the day its down to common fucking sense, which is seems some developers leave behind.
Modern Warfares, really. Never played Stalker, only seen Crysis in action, and only for about five minutes. There are options to turn off most of the extra visual effects, so everybody's happy, I suppose. I don't agree with this, I think that having cutting edge visuals is a very important part of the game. It helps with immersion, characterisation, and stops the player thinking "lol this looks like ass" when they start it up for the first time (always a plus!). Cutting edge visual effects does not equal distracting and annoying visual effects. See also Willem's point about bad art direction. Graphics programmers don't work on AI or gameplay code What else can the money be spent on if not graphics programmers? Yes, yes, we all do. However, good gameplay doesn't have to look like a game from 1997 does it? I'll get me coat. Im not questioning your correctness in any way when I say that the average consumer's opinion of what style looks good is entirely their own opinion, and cannot be argued as right or wrong because it is a reflection as much of themself as it is of the art they are critiquing.
If someone on a forum starts critiscising a visual effect which they see in games and then broadly critiscising a whole sector of a whole industry then I guess it is safe to assume that they didnt like the styles that they saw in place. Should an artist give a fuck about one person's opinion? Fuck NO! That's what art is all about. The person doesnt get to have any influence over future creations but in turn simply has the choice to not play the game, or avoid the studio, or even avoid the publisher or whatever. I think that depth of field is good in cutscenes but it must be carried out with diligance in an in-game situation so as not to mess with the player's ability to perform well in the game (can see the enemies which are far away/close because they are too blurry for example). I mean if on a turret or something, with enemies appearing an a certain place, at a certain range then fine. If the effect works when the player chooses to look down the barrel of their weapon, but can lower the weapon and shoot with no depth of field - also fine..... etc "What else can the money be spent on if not graphics programmers? "
Companies not investing in keeping up with current technology are really shooting long odds at being successful. People can talk about Quake all they want (in relation to the "gameplay over graphics" dribble) but that game was absolutely cutting edge when it came out. The graphics were off the chart amazing and the graphics technology was beyond what anyone had ever seen. "I'll get me coat." Hey, you may like games from 1997 and, honestly, you're in luck because there are tons of them! Knock yourself out. But to expect modern day companies to still produce games at that graphical level is ludicrous. But to expect modern day companies to still produce games at that graphical level is ludicrous.
this seems to be a wild, fabricated assumption of yours purely based on your knowledge of people's game preferences here. you're the only person who actually brought quake into the argument :| "this seems to be a wild, fabricated assumption of yours purely based on your knowledge of people's game preferences here. you're the only person who actually brought quake into the argument :|"
Then it's unclear what people want. They don't want new visual effects but they also don't want old style graphics? They don't want progress but also want progress? So what do they want? Willem, the "damage feedback" in UT3 is one of the worst offenders ever in this department. I had to manually edit some
Any kind of competitive online play with it enabled is completely impossible. As soon as you start getting hit by the Linkgun or Minigun, your view goes so red and so shaky, fighting back is a near-impossibility. This did work in GoW (althought IMO it should've been a bit toned down there as well), but in UT3 it was absurdly overdone. That doesn't seem to be what's being discussed. That could have been done with 1997 tech - all it requires is alpha blending. It might be a bad design decision but it's not related to the messages I'm getting from this thread.
They don't want new visual effects but they also don't want old style graphics?
the messages i'm getting relate to specific graphical features that adversely affect gameplay or enjoyment (more because of shoddy implementation rather than by design), not graphical advances as a whole. then there is obviously the matter of subjectivity. everyone likes games to look good, but not everyone has the same opinion of what looks good and what doesn't (case in point: motion blur), and it seems you're calling people 'fucking retarded' for having differing personal tastes... My understanding of the argument is : "Many new advancements in graphical technologies are used poorly and thus should not be developed."
If this is basically the case (I'm probably leaving out details) then it's false, because even if you develop some really obscure graphics tech, if it can be applied in a cool way then it's good. Maybe not worth the cost on the GPU to render it if it's really expensive, but the point is how the tech is used really. I dont think its so much that they dont want new visual effects as much as they dont want new visual effects which they dont like.
So let them turn them off where possible! Or dont, screw 'em. "then there is obviously the matter of subjectivity. everyone likes games to look good, but not everyone has the same opinion of what looks good and what doesn't (case in point: motion blur), and it seems you're calling people 'fucking retarded' for having differing personal tastes..."
Really? That "fucking retarded" can be regarded as hyperbole, something this board normally excels in. Now it's an issue? Please. Well it seems you're perfectly set to defend your corner - it's not a discussion but an argument since you have no intention of changing your thinking.
My original point was that games don't need to look incredible in order for people to like them. A lot of companies get caught up in a technology race, always wanting the best graphics, which seems kind of pointless really. I'd say there is a reasonable lower limit of graphical fidelity, but the eye candy effects for me (and I'd guess for most others) are just fluff, additional to the game. No big deal if left out. Looking at reviews the graphics are factored in as 1 piece of the total score, amongst 4-5 others. When they mention 'has graphical feature X' it tends to sum up months of work in a single sentence, since there's not a lot interesting to say about said feature. Each to their own though. Some responses: Doesn't that seem counter productive? Are you trying to make ugly looking games? Yes it does. But I work in a team and it takes time to convince people that other ways can be better. As long as the game doesn't look like utter shit or completely out of date I couldn't care how it looks. That's not my concern. Then it's unclear what people want. If there was an easy answer to that we'd all be millionaires. Yes, yes, we all do. However, good gameplay doesn't have to look like a game from 1997 does it? Minimum level of graphic quality Vs. cosmetic graphical features again. "Well it seems you're perfectly set to defend your corner - it's not a discussion but an argument since you have no intention of changing your thinking."
I take some offense to this if only because it's pretty clear that you won't be changing your mind either. You are hard locked into your argument. "I'd say there is a reasonable lower limit of graphical fidelity, but the eye candy effects for me (and I'd guess for most others) are just fluff, additional to the game." This the divide, I guess. They are not always fluff and often provide feedback and immersion to players. That they are sometimes done poorly doesn't mean they aren't useful. If that's the summary, then some of you people need to get way better at wording your complaints. :)
I did change my stance from 'all that stuff is shit' to 'most of that stuff is shit'.
---- I distrust immersion in relation to graphical effects because there's no way that graphical effects can heighten immersion beyond a certain point. At the end of the day it's some guy sat in an armchair playing the game with a controller. If you're going for pure immersion then Wii / Natal motion control, lawnmower man helmets and Tron leotards are the future. Feedback is different though and where such effects can be great. I forget the game it was, but it gave the player a buzzing sound in their speakers and motion blur over the entire screen when a grenade went off nearby. That was great. I think most modern war games do that. I know Battlefield : Bad Company does and I THINK Modern Warfare 2 did
I'm wanting special graphical effects to be used for special game play events.
I don't resent having pretty stuff to look at, but unless they reinforce the interaction then they belong more animation than games. I'm wanting special graphical effects to be used for special game play events.
Red Orchestra the multiplayer WW2 FPS does this pretty well. Machinegun fire actually suppresses players, as in you get loud sound effects as the bullets whiz by, and your screen gets blurry. It's harder to do anything, so you're more likely to keep yourself in cover, i.e. suppressed. Visual effects with an actual, nice gameplay function. Who would've though? I was playing bad company 2 at a friends yesterday, and the audio effect when something explodes near you is truly fantastic. Rather than some horrid high pitched wailing sound that kills your ears (hello stalker, hl2, etc) they decided to transform the audio to sound like the record volume is way to high, what you get is this awesome KAWOOOOSH and what can only be described as some distorted Roland TB303 acid line as the explosive goes off.
I actually enjoyed getting blown up in that game, just so I could hear it again =) played modern warfare 2 on a friend's ps3. we played coop missions and aside from sucking because i couldn't aim, i thought it looked amazing and it was a lot of fun.
my favourite is the mission where one of you is in a helicopter equiped with a minigun with explosive ammo and you have to escort the other guy who is on the ground getting swarmed by tons of guys. ^_^ I like the covert snow one a lot. It's just really good fun coordinating/timing your sniper take downs and dropping a group of 4 enemies in 1 1/2 seconds
http://angryhosting-east.mirror.waffleimages.com/files/a6/a6f054fdce140ff35dd475fbcc5ffbdcb5255717.png
That's from the Cave Story WiiWare port which, according to http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3282952 they fucked up. Apparently on sale for $30 on steam this week, and also some info about new game modes coming along with The Passing
http://kotaku.com/5500325/left-4-dead-2s-the-passing-brings-new-game-modes-plural It's actually $25 until Thursday. A good deal for those who don't have it yet, but deep in their heart know they want it (cough* Drew, Mac guys ;)).
I hope this means the release of The Passing is due soon. At first they said March, now it's "spring". "and its all just a misunderstanding... "
It's also a lesson in that people need to start using less hyperbole and just say what they mean. If you start out with an extreme position, it's inevitably going to cause confusion. not gonna happen, haha!
my computer is like 2 steps above a scientific calculator. besides, I spend too much time as it is fucking around with quake - any more distractions and I might as well just drop out. not sure if this goes here or the religion thread:
http://www.molleindustria.org/runjesusrun/run_jesus_run.html ...have, or can grab me any screenshots from the PS2/PC game, Shadows of Memories? Preferably a minimum size of 800x600. I'd like them for a review (and credit will be given) but I don't want to use stuff from sites like Mobygames with watermarks or have the tools to do so (I have the PS2 version)
Thanks. although it does sound like a lot of work for a few screenshots, if someone on func already has the game installed.
I'd help you out, but I don't have it, and I don't know which emulators would be good, since like you, I own a ps2. good luck though! Didn't think about emulation, I'll look into it. It will deffinitely be more useful if I need other PS2 screenshots at a later date. Thanks.
...scratch that. Too much fussing around to get it working. I really don't have the time trying to figure it all out. =/
Spooge, spooge and spooge some more.
I totally like this game a lot. Havent finished it yet, but so far it has been awesome. I find the graphics to be ground breaking. The DirectX 11 advanced features include "advanced DOF" and "tesselation". I have turned the advanced DOF off mainly because it comes with a serious performance hit and totally brings my 5850 to its knees, even when overclocked. Which is rediculous really. I think I would need two GTX480s to run this game maxed out. The game still has DOF effects. Just less exaggerated. The lighting is awesome, with ambient occlusion on parralax mapped textures and all other bells and whistles. The underground parts are very well done, just an awesome style - everything looks old, rustly and broken, the sound effects are scary, the AI is fast and really ugly (ugly as in scary-looking), some very freakish monsters ranging from mutated rats and dogs and stuff to wierd semi-humanoid things, some with wings. One level has "lurkers" - with their own network of tunnels interweaved with the players hull. Fast little buggers - you often cant get a shot and have to watch them run back into their hole, knowing that they will soon be back to try and get you again. The most impressive effect is the motion blur applied to only things which are moving - much more realistic than the Crysis style "motion blur which is applied to everything like you are stoned out on mushrooms or something". This effect combined with the speed of the monsters makes for quite a startling introduction to the game. I found it so far often scary, and sometimes frustrating. There was one particular occasion where I died about 20 times trying to get past a guardpost and mobile turret on an underground railway (the Metro I guess - duh) manned by Nazis. Wasnt really expecting to meet Nazis when I bought the game. I eventually managed to get past the post without using quicksave (dont know if the game has quicksave, havent had to use it AT ALL). The game uses frequent checkpoints throughout all of the levels, with a menu-accessible load point at the start of every level. So if you realy get stuck you can just load a couple of minutes back. I havent had much problems though, dieing hasnt been a problem really excepty for the area with the Nazis. I hit this nasty combat bottleneck at the top of this staircase..... The game is very much scripted and on a rail, not really an RPG at all, though you can collect currency (in the form of military grade ammo) which can be saved up to buy guns or ammo. Stock non-currency ammo can also be exchanged for currency-grade ammo too, so if you are frugel with your cuirrency you can afford to buy some pretty neat gus at a couple of points in the game. Thats about as far as the RPG elements go, though. Which is fair enough really considering that this is the game for a novel, with you playing the lead character. There are plenty of quick time events and scripted sequences, but im enjoying the story, and the combat is scary and immersive. Overall I would say that this is one of the most realistic-looking games I have ever played, one of the most system hungry and definately one of the most cinematic. Tried a few matches via the Steam free weekend thing and boy am I glad I persuaded myself to not spend any money on this when it originally came out, the game is worth perhaps 30$, but 60$, are you serious? 50$ during a Steam sale, the sale price still being more expensive than Bad Company 2 normal price??
The game looks cool and runs very fast on my rig, the various aerial vehicles and stuff are pretty ace too, but what the hell is up with this retarded CS style gameplay? Even in QuakeWorld, that is notorious for it's very fast combat and movement speed, you have a reasonable chance of fighting back and/or escaping an enemy. The game heavily favors campers and you die within 0.5 seconds from basically any weapon, so the only thing that matters is who opens fire first. What retard thought this was a good formula for gameplay? Combined with milking for DLC, no dedicated servers and no modding, this is a definite no-buy for me. It's sad, but people LIKE this kind of gameplay (one shot-one kill). Try to avoid Hardcore servers (most are unfortunatly), it's a tad better when you actually have time to fight back... still, I'm happy I didn't buy it.
Not even worth $30 in my view. I didn't care for the MP, but the SP part was fairly disappointing. For the hype and the exaggerated price anyway.
Was ok, wasn't as 'intense' as I was led to believe even though there were some cool ideas in there. MWF2 (MW2 is Mech Warrior 2, not Modern WarFare 2) does not interest me in the least. I bought Bad Company 2 though, because it was on sale for $20 and I've heard good things, but I was not impressed with it at all, and it's supposed to be considered a MWF2 killer or something.
Do I recall you were complaining about Metro 2033? I finished it now and it was a bit short really, but not that short.
I don't think it was me, but I was probably in #tf when someone else was complaining about it. Shambler maybe?
OK, after spending 5+ hours playing the multiplayer trial, I actually have take back most of the negative things I've said.
It's problems are that it's way too spammy (though seemingly less so in the Hardcore gametypes) and I still dont like the weapons too much and having the publisher have the capability to effectively pull the plug on the multiplayer portion of the game is retarded. Those thing aside, the game is extremely polished and well done. It also runs very very well and the game types are fun. Is it worth a 60 euro normal price purchase for me? Nope. Is it worth the 51 euro weekend sale price? Undecided, leaning towards "probably still not". However, I looked around and managed to find a local finnish online gamestore selling the PC version for 38 euro. THAT was a buy. Good game. Totally had me hooked, spent like ~18-20 hours on it this weekend and beat it in under 30 hours total. Probably not going to do a 2nd play through, Friction agrees it's a good time.
You can't seduce every member of your crew though and have a huge inter-species orgy. So it doesn't get a perfect score from me. :( But it ran so extremely poorly (bad port apparently) that it was pretty much unplayable for me. It also seemed to be a game in the same vein as SW:KOTOR, which I didn't enjoy, so I quit and uninstalled ME quickly.
Pathologic: Semi-RPG that takes place in a worn-down town that is plagued by a mysterious virus to which you have to find a cure. I thought the game would offer a nice bleak atmosphere and a certain degree of strangeness. Unfortunately, it didn't grab me at all. The graphics are dated, but the actual problem is the lack of variety - most houses look alike and the inside of every single shop uses the same mesh (and shopkeeper npc). What really put me off, though, were the dialogues. The first mission has you investigate a series of murders and naturally involves talking to witnesses and related npcs. However, the dialogue options as well as the npcs' replies are so weird and sometimes seem only vaguely related. It almost seems as if you're listening (reading actually, for it's not fully vocalized) to a conversation where every other sentence is missing or something.
In consequence, the game didn't generate any desire to continue playing after some two hours. The Void: This is a sort-of adventure game (actually, it doesn't really fit clearly into a single category) with an interesting premise. You die and end up in the Void, some sort of limbo where everything depends on colors. You interact with the world through it, by drawing gylphs on the screen (think Black & White), and use it as health by filling your hearts with it. There are different colors and each one has a special property, e.g. azure makes you faster, crimson stronger, gold makes donating color to objects or npcs cost less, and so on. It has to be collected from the levels, can be grown on trees and harvested in mines. Then there are the Sisters which you have to resurrect by donating certain colors so they help you, and their evil counterparts, the Keepers or Guardians, cenobite-like creatures roaming the Void. First you have to fulfill a couple of tasks to be accepted by the Keepers and eventually have to choose a side, join the Sisters and fight the Keepers or vice versa. The game is kind of strange, and pretty hard. It seems to require you to restart a couple of times until you've figured out how it works. For example, at one point I needed to donate color to a Sister, but since I was out of gold, it was impossible to give her enough of the color she needed, but I couldn't get more gold, either, because all my trees were empty. Didn't want to restart and replay a good two hours, so I cheated. In the end, even though the game is oddly compelling in a way, I lost interest. It wasn't always clear enough what I had to do (and how). I would have loved to fight one of the Keepers, as they look pretty cool. It seems I'm turning into Spd when it comes to games... :) i know aye, ya bunch of slackers. with work & gf, i don't even have time to play a single q1 map, let alone an entire game. i'm getting behind again :(
The opening of the "On their own accord" mission is so epic it quite easily ranks as one of my top moments in gaming. Watch in fullscreen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DRE9blQAvA&hd=1
I beat the single player of Bad Company 2 yesterday (on easy mode mind you.)
The good: Absolutely the most gorgeous environments I've ever seen. Simply breath taking, ginormous maps filled with foliage and awesome terrain, this game engine should be used for the next Elder Scrolls game. Seriously, the best I've seen in a game. The bad: Lots of stuff - dust is so prevalent in the game it frequently blocks off the rest of the environment because it's so thick. You end up not being able to see to the enemies who are shooting at you even though they can apparently see you through the dust crystal clear. And those enemies are really accurate, which is annoying. Also, the game is really over the top. And well I could go on, but it's not really bad, it's just that the game was hyped up to be amazing, and it's on. Multiplayer also not my cup of tea, but I admit I haven't spent too much time on it. If you like the Quake Wars style of multiplayer, there you go. Yeah that part is great, the guy in that video kinda rushed through it all though, when I was playing I kinda took my time coming out of the bunker at the beginning and music just started to swell as I saw the broken monument, it was perfect timing =)
Theres another frankly awesome opening scene later on, but I won't ruin it =) Having just recently purchased and played through Modern Warfare 2, I decided to go back and buy MW1 as well, it's downloading on Steam right now. Since MW1 has an SDK out, are there any good custom singleplayer maps worth checking out once I've finished the SP campaign?
I won't love it because I won't be getting Alan Wake. I am not going to buy a 360 when I already have a PS3.
Having now played through the SP campaigns of both (first MW2, then MW1) as well as having played multiplayer of both as well, I thought I'd comment and compare the games. First of all, both games are definately worth playing and you should own at least one of them, which one however, depends on your personal taste for things.
System requirements for both are surprisingly light: a 3-4 year old rig should have no problems running MW1 completely maxed out and a 1-2 year old rig can absolutely run a maxed out MW2. Singleplayer-wise, both games overall, offer an EXTREMELY polished gaming experience. The developer must've spent really retarded amount of manhours making things look and feel just right, my hat goes off to these guys. MW1 definately has a more believable story and MW2's story has a few large holes in it and is generally rather crazy, as someone else put it pretty well: "24 post-season4 crazy". Both games follow a similar formula of: some heavy action missions, some stealth/sniping missions and sometimes you get to use some really heavy fucking guns. While generally, I am a big hater of these things in other games and usually consider them an unneeded gimmick, the occasional gun/vehicle parts in the MW games are fun, done right and contribute to the overall immersion in the game world. Some of the oldtimers probably know that I am a big sucker for games that offer a "cinematic experience" with strong atmosphere and build-up of emotions during gameplay. In this regard, MW2 wins over MW1. I had to look up the names of individual people who had worked on several set pieces of MW2, because to put it all together so well is nothing short of genius. Yes, some of these moments were actually kind of cheap if you go deep into analyzing them, but they WORKED, worked well and that's what matters. Multiplayer-wise, it's again a question of preference. The problems of MW2 related to the lack of dedicated servers are well documented. Most of the time it works very well, but if several games in a row the host leaves the game and you have to wait 15-20 seconds until the game moves to another host (and sometimes fail) it can get rather frustrating. Additionally, giving the publisher an actual killswitch capability to completely turn off the multiplayer portion of the game IS retarded. You can find Quake servers and players today, over 14 years since the game's release and will probably continue to be able to do so in another 6. Do you really think Activision will be keeping up the Matchmaking service for MW2 for 20 years? Who are you kidding, it probably will be gone in 10. The original XBOX Live was shut down just a few days ago, it was 9 years old. You will no longer be able to play any XBOX1 games online ever gain. MW1 has dedicated servers so it's not going to dissapear anytime soon (or ever). On another hand, MW1 uses Punkbuster for it's cheater protection, which while probably works alright for most people, causes a lot of hassle for others. Over the years it has evolved to be really picky regarding what software running in the background it considers a cheat, resulting in you sometimes getting kicked from servers for no obvious reason. Again, this doesn't happen too often, but when it does, it can be rather annoying. Comparing multiplayer gameplay, MW2 offers a more arcade style of gameplay compared to MW1. There is more running, more big bangs and more grenade/etc spam. MW2 also offers a more varied set of different gameplay modes. MW1 on another hand, since it has an SDK available (yes, it's COD4Radiant actually) offers custom maps, obviously giving the player more choice in this regard. If you've read this far, you definately have way too much free time on your hands, I definately did, since I actually wrote this :) People keep saying this particular level, the Opera House, was pretty scary, or that the whole game has a pretty threatening atmosphere. I actually agree. You're conceptually in Venice here, but it's not really Venice. The sky is black. The windows are black. Actually, the windows seem to be painted on, which means this isn't Venice at all. It is some dark, fake, ultraviolent scary place that is largely inexplicable. The ambient sounds are frightening. The opera house is apparently abandoned, and doesn't really resemble any opera house that you've ever seen, except in nightmares. Also, in this old engine, there is a sort of fog-of-war effect where everything beyond your visual range just fades to black. This was especially nasty in some of the underwater levels, where you have to swim long distances (the levels are rather big for such an old game), and the water around you faded to black - you couldn't see the surface.
There is also often this feeling that you're all alone - there are no NPCs, which you would expect in a city like Venice, there are only pretty brutal enemies. They are thugs, but they seem totally mindless. They attack you without any sign of alertness, they are like mindless killers. Not many of them, though, so for a lot of the game, you *are* all alone in places that aren't what they seem. Pretty deadly traps, too, and nasty death animations. Lots of diving involved, too, so there is always the fear of drowning in those dark, watery areas. There is also inexplicable stuff like breakaway floors that just float in the middle of nowhere, a whole level where you travel through a sunken ship (and the ceiling is the floor), and a lot more of this sort of stuff. Just weird. I found it quite stunning back then, and still do. Just hit upon this video walkthrough of the Opera House on 'tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BR7zQlrWlY&NR=1 I already posted the famous multi-trap gauntlet from the same game (Great Wall level) elsewhere. Here it is again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_dP53CPuk0 By the way, I never knew the great wall had T-Rexes. T-Rexes stomping towards you out of the darkness of some gigantic dark cave, wanting to kill you. Tromp, tromp, tromp! I thought there were only little spiders there!! I want my money back! These pants were expensive! The darkness... And this is "The Deck", one of the sunken ship levels... and again, it looks not really like a sunken ship. More like large parts of a ship in some incredible cave. The fog of war thing is pretty visible here. Hey, that guy has a flame thrower... burn, Lara, burn. Crumple, whimper, suffer, die. She dies in pretty horrible ways - no simple falling over yelling. There must be a dozen or more death animations. You actually hear bones breaking when she falls, you watch her suffocate while drowning, and a number of other unpleasant things. Not here, luckily. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2md6GHyrK_w&feature=related The whole game is pretty great, it involves this rather moody, at times downright weird level design, the often seemingly fragile surroundings that strangely contrast with the gloomy feel, quite a lot of shooting for a TR game, vehicles (boat and snowmobile), ominous monks that turn on you with their kung-fu crap should you be stupid enough to hurt them, and a really rather large dragon. The challenge mainly comes from the fear of falling, and fear of drowning. Plus the traps, and the enemies. The main thing about this game is the oppressive atmosphere, though. The lighting is primitive in a way that creates an almost eerie effect. Plus the ubiquitous darkness. There is even a sort of void level, The Floating Islands. You have to jump across screaming green blocks floating in blackness to get from one floating temple to another, while some statues come to life and attack you. Yeah, right. Why are there floating cages in China? What were they smoking? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj8AEjjS9g8 The game ends (if you found the secret level, which is reached by beating the "end" level on a timer) by Lara shooting the player for watching her in the shower. "Don't you think you've seen enough?" *BLAM* A protagonist who shoots the player, breaking the magical bond of immersion because she wants to take a shower. Yeah. What's not to love? One more thought about the level names. There is stuff like "40 Fathoms". Hmm, that sounds like a lot of water... and if you know diving in TR, with the constant fear of drowning, and the sheer darkness, and the pretty nasty sight of your in-game avatar suffocating and struggling against the inevitable because YOU messed up again, player! A game chock full of weirdness. And dying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMwk-TsY58 with how you describe the atmosphere. That's pretty much how it felt to me. I don't agree that it's a good game though ;-)
if they have the same artists as they did for painkiller, i'm sure the looks will be top-notch. now, if they only hire at least 1 level designer...
Nice abstract design! http://i.imgur.com/yuVe2.png
I'm using Chrome as well and no problems. Latest flash etc?
It's a single-screen platformer where the level gets modified as you progress through it (no screen change), lasting about 5 minutes to play through. Some neat little ideas, but the controls are a bit naff. Direct2Drive.com is in their 4th week of their month long gaming sale-a-bonanza, and this week looks pretty good. Mass Effect 1 + 2 bundle for $35, Aion for $25 (any good, Jago?), Fallout 3 for $15, etc.
Nice little sweep of games. Anyone know if Sacred 2 or Divinity 2 are worth their sale price? Or Civ 4 Complete Collection for $10? Fuck, whatever, I'll probably get em anyway. sacred 2 is fun for mindless killing. there's a story, but you really don't need to pay attention to enjoy the game.
there are a lot of ways to develop each class, so there's a lot of replayability. Worked for me, pretty good fun, I evicted the fuck out of that bitch.
Minus a million points for the bit where you have to hit the globes in order, covering the whole length of the level only to have pressed them in the wrong order. Also, there is not way of telling what the correct order is. I didn't like it much either. In retrospect i realized your worst case (if you're clever about which order you attempt to hit the globes) is to have to make the trip down and back up 3 times (if you keep guessing wrong) but still, i agree that that was a bit too tedious.
http://www.nitrome.com/games/rustyard/
http://www.nitrome.com/games/finalninjazero/ http://www.casualcollective.com/#games/The_Space_Game http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754 http://armorgames.com/play/1871/totem-destroyer http://www.unoriginal.co.uk/n-game.html http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html http://www.foddy.net/Evacuation.html http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/bloxorz http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/boom_bot_2 http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/civiballs_2 http://www.blitzgamer.com/play/strategy/10000486/crush-the-castle-2.html http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/cursor10/ http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/deanimator http://www.flasharcadegamessite.com/23351-Entangled-Game.html http://www.feedthehead.net/ http://www.playauditorium.com/ http://armorgames.com/play/2675/phage-wars http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/maverick http://armorgames.com/play/2153/aether http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/launchpad/launchball/ http://fantasticcontraption.com/ http://www.eyezmaze.com/eyezblog_en/blog/2005/09/grow_cube.html Some of these have already been posted here. Awesome pay what you want offer:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/The-Humble-Indie-Bundle Zwiffle: Aion is great for the first 26-27 levels, until it turns into a grindfest of an epic proportions, which gets progressively worse with each level. NCSoft also has non-existing "customer support" whose sole reason for being there seems to be to insult the remaining paying customers.
to be precise, you can't pay less than $0.01. Or negative amounts of money, for that matter.
Of course, that also means you NEED an account at one of their pay thingies, which are mostly evil or very US centric (or is theresome way to let amazon.de handle the transaction?). What am I gonna doooooo!? > grindfest of an epic proportions, which gets progressively worse with each level
isn't that why you play these games? Is it true that Aion uses the Cryengine? If my scraping is correct the pack is currently doing $135 per minute. That's 8000 dollars per hour. Pretty good for some "old" indie games, eh?
isn't that why you play these games?
No, a well-made MMO masks the grind with a lot of things and makes it as subtle as possible. Is it true that Aion uses the Cryengine? Yes. Since I'm pretty much a non-gamer these days and not been too much into RTS I guess I won't play it in the end - but it does seem to be a game with some interesting concepts!
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/achron-the-rts-where-time-keeps-on-slipping.ars http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/2010/05/10/phenomenon-32-released/
First impression: nice atmosphere, way too hard. For me, anyways ;-) died maybe 20 times in the first 3 levels. Nice one, way to go. Five games for one dollar! (nah, I payed more) Though wtf at the $1000+ donations.
...but that one just confuses the fuck out of me. I think there's something in the branching/coding explanation/instructions that I'm just not understanding.
The interface is abysmal, but the game is pretty engrossing once you get into it. I've done all but the last two rows.
Got stuck on Androids for a while, but eventually found three solutions (one extremely slow, one flaky hack, and one that's actually good). minesweeper RGB hybrid --
http://www.hojamaka.com/game/mamono_sweeper/ Each "mine" is actually an enemy level 1-5. When you start, you can safely kill only level 1 enemies; if you click on a higher-level enemy, you will take damage. After killing some enemies, you level up and can kill level 2 enemies, etc. Normal minesweeper controls, and press A or D to flag a square. Liked it. I was still confused for a couple of minutes, despite your description, due to general stupidity. All round a nice twist on the old formula.
http://www.locomalito.com/juegos_hydorah.php (it's a win32 exe, not flash)
It's an old-school side scrolling shooter, a la Gradius and R-Type. The website seems to be hosed right now, but i played it a little last night, it's pretty nice. I've only beaten the first level so far. Though, i wish i had a gamepad, arrow keys don't work well for twitchy 2D games for me, for some reason. couldn't open the page, A mandatory extension policy in the request is not accepted by the server for this resource. ?
i guess the site is still down, like you said in your post one line below where i stopped reading to make my own post. -_-
Well that Hydrorah game is pretty unforgiving. 3 attempts, got partway through the second level by my last try. I never really played these sorts of games a lot though.
Well that Hydrorah game is pretty unforgiving. 3 attempts, got partway through the second level by my last try. I never really played these sorts of games a lot though.
Well that Hydrorah game is pretty unforgiving. 3 attempts, got partway through the second level by my last try. I never really played these sorts of games a lot though.
Is there an equivalent thread for console games hiding somewhere? 'The Console Gaming Thread' seems suspiciously short. I want to talk about Uncharted 2!
shambler split off console games a while ago, so it's shorter because it's not as old.
I kind of wonder if we should merge them though, the categories are not that distinct (since there's things like flash games, iphone games, etc.) Plus games often get released on both console and PC. Last post in the console games thread was by ijed on 2009/09/04! Perhaps if the general 'Other Games Thread' was on the front page most of the time there'd be a bit more console chat.
Although I sold my xbox last week :P I have fond memories of the original games on the Amiga. Good fun, especially in coop mode.
However, the new remake feels like sort of a let-down. It's very similar to Shadowgrounds in terms of looks (slightly better maybe) and gameplay. I don't mind the aliens aren't Giger-style, but there's something else missing. Despite the explosions and rubble the first level seemed sterile, no real atmosphere and generic combat. I got lost, too. The first mission is a massive switch hunt all through the level and wasn't always clear to me where to go next (despite the radar marker). To top it off, the controls are absolutely terrible (with keyboard/mouse anyway). Not a great game, though not totally bad, either. I guess the fact that I played SG semi-recently added to my disappointment in a way. Multiplayer should be good, on Steam and all. (This kind of got me a little concerned about that Syndicate remake. Hope at least that lives up to my expectations) http://www.nitrome.com/games/faultline/
Cool platformer with a unique game mechanic where you can fold the level in order to traverse it Vaguely related to portal, but in no way derivative of it. multiplayer mouse insanity with bad physics and no cooperation, which makes it moar fun.
http://transformice.com/en/ChargeurTransformice.swf Only if we DOS, Windows, DirectX9/10/11, Linux, Mac, Gameboy, Xbox, PS3, Wee, shambler is a moron threads too.
Splitting the consoles from this was a stupid idea in the first place. Banning Shambler and Spirit into a single thread so they can't post anywhere else, and coming back six months later to see which one's still alive.
We thought about implementing a very funny ban feature for the Cube boards, which basically muted a user. He could write and post and use the board like normal, but noone but them would be able to see their postings. I think we eventually decided against it, but I would have loved to see it in action.
Reddit and other sites do it. Huge pain in the ass if you fall into the bucket while being actually innocent.
Transformice got linked on Kotaku.
Transformice is down. Tried it before it died tho and seemed pretty fun/crazy/troll'd EXTRA COPIES ARE NOT GIVEN IN MOST CASES. ONLY TITLES PURCHASED IN SPECIAL PROMOTIONS AS OUTLINED BELOW ARE ELIGIBLE FOR GIFTABLE EXTRA COPIES.
Sorry for asking Steam. It seems I am only a lowly customer, and the big DLC load that you feel necessary to deposit in my anus is what befits my status. Does anyone else here prefer Impulse? Or basically another other downloadable platform. Since when has treating your customers like shit been a marketing strategy. Sorry for posting this here. But getting onto the steam support forum shite is incredibly complicated. For good reason it seems. I just had to vent. What did you buy a pack thinking you could gift the games you already had to other people? Apparently only Valve games do that, cause other publishers refuse.
I <3 Steam, so much good cheap games on it these days. Yeah, Valve can't control what limitations other publishers put on their games. They can only do what they're allowed to do.
In any case I'm buying licenses. What happened to the additional ones?
If I'd bought the games in physical form then I'd expect to have the additional copies in hand. 'Sorry sir but I can see from the sales history that you've already bought this game, so I can't give you this extra copy - company policy'. Reading the terms and conditions its down to Steam - they can, but don't want to apart from for Valve games. Maybe I'm being naive. I quite agree that there should at least be a clearer warning when buying duplicates, that you aren't getting any extra copies.
It's unfortunate they don't do it for all games, but to be honest, I'm not really surprised. Games are cheap enough on Steam already in my opinion, you can pretty much always wait a few months and get games at 50% off and stuff (except for a few specific publishers *cough*activision*cough*). Companies are behaving like dicks. It needs to stop.
It wouldn't hurt if they were reigned in just a bit. Not fully socialized, but reigned in a bit. Meaning, slightly more rights for the consumer, and a couple slaps on the wrist of companies. It's coming though. Slowly, but it is coming. Let's start by giving every consumer the right to make up to 5 copies of something he bought, for personal, noncommercial use. Customers must also naturally have the right to resell their DVDs or whatever. This should naturally also go for electronic media, ie games on Steam. This must be enforced politically. Finally, copy protection has to go; it is ridiculous that I can't legally watch a DVD on Linux, even after I paid for it. It is unjustified if something I bought is still somehow controlled by someone else. That is against the idea of the free market. Naturally, it must be legally ensured that I am the sole owner of a DVD I bought. Not the copyright, but the right to do with this DVD what I want, ie sell it, make a normal amount of copies for personal uses, install those on my own computers etc. We need to go back to a reasonable, relaxed, normal look at these things. And if someone thinks I'm a socialist or whatever, I beg your pardon, it is the companies who are acting like commies by taking away my freedom. Monopolies are evil, mmkay. Trying to establish control over something that you have just *sold* is crazy. In effect, they'd like you to give them money, but not get any say in what you do with the product you just bought. so it's half a year later and i haven't played dragon age yet.
can anyone who has chime in now that the dust has settled? is it worth playing and how does it hold up to other rpgs like neverwinter nights? I really couldn't get into it. I played a few hours, but there was just too much boring bla-bla, I didn't care for the characters at all, and the combat was uninteresting.
Lots of people love it though, so who knows. I much prefererd Mass Effect 2 myself. ME2 completely failed to make me want to play it and when dragon age finally came out, i had lost interest in it. :P
still, i've been replaying nwn1 and now on nwn2. i'm just in a fantasy mood lately, for some reason. :) i remember reading one review of dragon age that was positively gushing all over the place. i think some of the spittle got on my keyboard. the author went so far as to say it was a modern day baldur's gate. nearly all the reviews i've read have been like this, so either this game is insanely good beyond realistic expectancies or everyone's a fanboy/girl. :P Just when I didn't have enough DRM. Now I remember why I didn't buy DOW2 when it came out.
Loved both ME2 (beat it in a weekend basically) and Dragon Age, but yeah the combat in Dragon Age got stale and repetitive really quickly. ME2 had the bonus of being a shooter as well as rpg, but it took me about 2x as long to beat Dragon Age as it did to beat ME2. Enjoyed both of them quite a bit, but both were pretty different from each other.
Except I have not completed Dragon Age yet, where-as ive beaten mass effect twice and am on my 3rd play through atm! ME2 just suits my tastes better than DA, but Dragon age certainly has its epic moments.
I'm really looking forwards to bioware's MMO :o (I played the xbox version but since people have already talked about it in here, posting here.)
So I just finished Dead Space. Game clock time: about 11.5 hours (I don't think this includes the times where I died.) It's a pretty cool game overall, with solid core mechanics, and while it's certainly full of horror and sci-fi game cliches as Lunaran complained previously, I think the good execution (and the fact that it's actually fun) makes up for that. Pros: * Suspense is good, the tensest rooms/hallways were the ones where nothing actually happens because there's always a sense that something could happen. They set up early on for example, that a certain type of ventilation panel is often a place where monsters bust through. And then they put these panels in practically every room, so you are always nervous around them. I don't think i was ever really "shocked" by an attack, but since the NPCs are dangerous I was certainly nervous about being attacked. * Combat works well, it's survival horror so you don't have a lot of ammo, the enemies are generally pretty lethal, and the damage system gives you something tactical to do while you're shooting at enemies -- since limbs (and occasionally other body parts) are the vulnerable bits, you spend your time trying to take careful, effective shots rather than just unloading into the guy's chest. Kind of like going for a headshot in most games, but with more variety. And the limbs are always moving in weird ways. Enemies that lose limbs keep coming but with alternate animations. * Flashlight on gun, so you can actually see what you're shooting (and can't see when you're reloading, for extra tension) * No on-screen UI; all UI was integrated into the world (ammo count on gun, player health displayed on character's suit, etc.) * Zero-g gameplay is cool, you can't fly, so instead you leap from walkable surface to walkable surface (your magnetic boots grab on when you land) The maze-like layouts they create for some of these areas is pretty cool. And nice and disorienting. * "Stasis" and "telekinesis" powers were used well, they build some nice puzzles and environmental obstacles around them, plus they are integrated into combat well. * Boss fights were well-built and challenging, but not frustrating (there were only like 2 or 3, but they worked.) * Enemy design was good, they're all pretty different in terms of appearance and function. And some of them are pretty creepy. * Great environment art execution, really does a good job of creating the standard scifi/horror setting with a high level of detail and polish (mostly.) * Sound/music was pretty cinematic and effective. Cons: * Too many NPCs sending me on constant small errands. I'd like fewer objectives that take longer to complete. Later in the game it gets better, though. * A couple of annoying sections where you have to shoot asteroids and other stuff using a giant space canon. Not really bad, but didn't feel like it fit into the game that well, and it wasn't easy. I think if you put something that different into a game, you should make it sort of easy since it doesn't use the standard game skillset. * Store mechanic where you buy ammo/health at specific kiosks throughout the game -- while it works as a game mechanic, it doesn't really fit the fiction of "i'm the last one alive in a disaster area." But it did serve the goal of giving the player a chance to get what resources they need. * The storyline didn't really connect with me; they had plenty of twists and revelations, but for some reason i didn't get into the main emotional hook of the game, which was supposed to be the main character trying to locate his girlfriend among the few survivors of the ship. * Weapons -- there were only a few weapons that really felt good, most of the others felt kind of weak. Of course it's survival horror, but in fact the plasma cutter (the starting pistol) was one of the good weapons because you could tell how to be effective with it. It was the "bigger" weapons like the pulse rifle which just felt ineffective and useless. Probably due to player expectations about how devastating those weapons should be. * Text logs and some other UI was pretty much unreadable on my SDTV. I guess developers just assume that all xbox owners have an HDTV? Humbug! just got this game, started to play on my shitty tiny 10 year old tv. just got into it and i'm liking it a lot so far, but yeah, i have to get REALLY close to the screen to read anything.
Project Offset has been canceled.
http://kotaku.com/5577979/intels-project-offset-game-cancelled Now we'll never get to play with its editor. was 40 cdn at the local futureshop so i decided to grab it. this is like the first new game i've played in ages. since like bioshock i think.
i was preparing myself to have to deal with activations or whatever the heck they do these days, but i didn't have to do any of them. aside from putting in the serial code at install and having the cd in the drive to play and when the cd thing starts to piss me off, it should be easy to fix that later. i've only played a few hours so far-- just enough to get through the 'origins' aka prologue for the mage class (i picked a human). i think by far the best thing about this game is the third person 'exploration mode' camera is actually good and useful. i can't imagine how people played nwn2 in 3rd person and i hated how mechanical the movement felt in kotor. i guess it would be best to say the camera and movement feel a lot like WoW. which really means the camera moves around quickly and precisely and movement is almost as responsive as quake. you don't strafe around, of course; when you press back, you character turns and runs towards the camera which neatly avoids having to have a super complex animation system and works very well. (my mage isn't a slipgater, afterall). i'm sure everyone is aware that bioware finally ditched the dungeons and dragons system in favour of a more action oriented magic system. movement takes a larger role now which makes it feel a lot cooler. so far, i have yet to see any of the subtle spells have any effect (i took one that supposedly imposes penalties to a target for attacking and such, but i still seem to get hit anyway). aside from that spell, i took the obvious frost spell that can freeze or slow down attackers and a life drain spell for direct damage and healing. the cooldowns a rather long though, and there's no spell to spam whilst waiting for better spells to become available. resorting to the auto-attack 'staff bolts' are weak but i think some of these problems will go away when i get some party members that need to be healed and more damage spells that can be fit into a rotation to make sure there's always one available. as far as i can tell, levels come fairly often and new spells come at 2 per level. the game alludes to unlocking two specialist classes (i guess like prestige classes in nwn) at level 7 and 14, so assuming you can get a decent amount of levels over 14, that's a lot of spells. i'm concerned i might run out of quickslot buttons (my warlock on WoW made use of nearly every key on my keyboard for all it's spells and i had to manually click some of them too) but we'll see. as for the story and rpg stuff, the origin segment gave me one choice and made it so i had to do other quests anyway, but it's a prologue so i can't really fault it too much. i can honestly say i was surprised at the ending of it though, i really wasn't expecting it, which is a pleasant change for most story based games where you see stuff coming from a mile away and plot hints are delivered with a sledge hammer. anyway, i'll probably post more about this later when i've played some of the proper game. First game i've played in six months, and to be honest the realistic war shooters are starting to get repetitive, and I'm only up to Medal Of Honor 2 so far!
The problem is that it felt just like Vietcong, with improved graphics having been released 1.5 years later, but with fewer set pieces. Much of MODPA felt like extremely linear corridors of jungle. Move from one little village with a few huts thrown in, through some tight jungle paths to the next village. The graphics, of course, were better than its predecessar MOD:Allied Assault and the mission packs, but with the repetitive design and lack of memorable levels, it doesn't stand out as a great looking game to buy against other releases in 2004. Having said that, the Tarawa Beach sections (which probably made up 1/4 of the game), were definitely the highlight in atmosphere. They were a big improvement on the intense but bland Omaha Beach sections of MODAA. The sad thing is, however, that the average design is still MODPA's strong point, because the gameplay was full of flaws. At the forefront, for me, were the atrocious weapons. Of course you can only handle two at a time, and normally you don't get much of a selection. There are a few good weapons in the game, but you rarely get to use them because unless your enemies are carrying the same weapon, you'll soon run out of ammo. What I was left with for the majority of the game were slow reloading, slow firing and extrememly inaccurate broomsticks. The rifle, for instance; there's a one second pause between firing, and a three second pause while reloading. You can point the thing perfectly at an opponents head, and still somehow miss. You can stand almost point blank and fire one into his chest... watch him stumble, then get back up again like nothing happened. There's no such thing as a headshot in MODPA, because the weapons are just too unreliable to even attempt it. Gameplay is also very unbalanced in terms of difficulty. In playing on medium (although i'm well above medium in skill) I normally don't have much trouble getting through a game. But at times some of the fights were ridiculous, and forced god mode. The turret machine gunners are far too difficult to kill without being mowed down by bullets within seconds of revealing yourself. And no matter how well hidden you were, they always seem to find you almost instantly. There's a few times where you've got 2/3 machine gunners at once. Problem is your guns are hopeless at long range and you can't even see the enemy manning the gun to even aim at him. He could be standing on either side of the gun. Tarawa Beach, as well, was far too difficult with poor weaponry and not enough ammo. In one jungle scene, your given a sniper riple (for the only time in the entire game) with one bullet to take out four enemies hiding high up in trees. I'd already run out of bullets with my other gun, so what's a man to do? God mode, noclipping up to the tree top and bashing them with my gun was the only solution. Let's not forget the section where your forced to man a plane, supposedly whilst drunk since the handling of the plane is rubbish. They inverted the up/down of the mouse aiming for the plane section, so when you finally return to two legs, your aiming ability is corrupted as your moving the mouse down to look up! This entire plane section was painstakingly frustrating and boring, and should never have made the cut in a first person shooter. So my overall thoughts; average design and average gameplay, thanks to some inconsistencies in difficult and useless weapons, makes MODPA a far inferior game to the original. I hope MOD: Airborne makes up for it in 2007, but from what I've heard already, I might have to wait till the fourth MOD in 2010 for a good game again. Medal of Honor 4 looks pretty good though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v6lKPY1gAM Supposed to be released Oct 2010 I only liked the jungle bits myself. Airborne is even suckier btw, way too ridiculous gameplay wise and uninspired design.
I preferrred COD2 to both these. Bit like a cheapo Deus Ex. Doesn't look too bad in trailers. English translation is appalling tho.
Apparently everyone and their mother are trying to get this at the moment, so the dl rate is pretty bad.
If the game is fun, let's get some coop games going. Yeah, 47k/sec for the win :P
Looks fun though, screenshots and vids remind me a lot of Shadowgrounds which is awesome! Fairly unoriginal story (biological weapon experiment gone wrong, you're the virus mutant overdude), but a fun game after all. Sort of a cross between Oni and Mirror's Edge, with DBZ- and Matrix-like physics bending. Awesome gore.
The game basically consists of jumping and runing through a sandbox Manhattan on a constant kill frenzy, leaving an insane bodycount behind (after each mission you get a statistic about civilian/military/infected losses and destructions costs). Lots of combos and upgrades which can be bought with the EP points gained from free-roam wreaking havoc, story missions of average quality, and timed events like speedrunning, gliding, combat scenarios, and collectibles. Fast gameplay with smooth movement/navigation. Not the greatest and most sophisticated game in the world, but a fun blast nevertheless. Well worth the $15 (Steam summer sale). I don't care if it's a japanese anime looking arcade game, I want to play this on PC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiQKZTLq2jI
Quite nice for a free game. Too bad it only has a single campaign so far. So, go mappers!
Fairly easy with a 3+ team. The parasites in the fourth level are evil, though. Probably pretty challenging on hard skill and above. As an fyi, if people have not looked into it.
It uses a tile based mapping system whereby you create a seperate map for each tile and then you can either snap them all together yourself or use the games in-built map generator. Looks very easy to do, and you can use the pre-existing "official" tiles you simply generate your own new map if you are getting bored with the single campaign. More info : http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Alien_Swarm You can also mix and match. You can stamp the prefabs together and when you're basically happy, open the merged map in Hammer and customize the hell out of it.
i've actually been thinking of trying to make a map this way... built a couple of corridors, corners and outer walls for rooms that all snap together.
you could make something pretty big that way at the risk of it being boring, i guess... I actually tried that with Left for Dead 2 since Hammer supports instances. I made a bunch of standard sized rooms and hallways and tried to piece together an office building. It kinda worked but I got itchy to customize it very quickly after I started and it sort of fell apart. But I think the idea is sound...
I made something like that for quake years ago - it requires a custom engine like dp so that statically* rotated bsp objects work. It was posted at qexpo
http://qexpo.quakedev.com/booth.php?id=32&page=113 The way it works is that a single bsp file contains a 'set' of tiles. Each tile is an individual bsp entity with entry points marked in the entity's fields. The progs then generates maps from these tiles each time you load the map. It obviously doesn't create the most exciting maps known to man, but I think the caverns map actually looks quite good. Anyway, I'm sure I've posted about it before, but you know how it is when you did something first... *ie SOLID_BSP entities which have an angle set, but no avelocity. automating it would be cool too, but i just meant like make a bunch of func_groups and CnP them yourself.
as willem said, i think the hardest part would be resisting the urge to start customizing at least until you're done. :P watched a few prototype gameplay videos on youtube. looks like you start in a street then randomly walk down more streets back and forth until all the innocent people are dead. absolutely no linearity, variance in gameplay or even a point. am i wrong?
people were raving on about this game, but seeing it in actual it looks crap. Almost feels like they created the environment and then just tacked on a few missions and game modes. But it's still fun - I enjoyed indulging in an excessive killing spree.
Watched a few Quake gameplay videos on YouTube. Looks like you start in a hallway and then randomly run down other hallways and go through rooms shooting monsters and finding keys with no variance or point whatsoever. Am I wrong?
(sorry, had to be done) The point is to have fun while randomly running down hallways to shoot monsters and find keys [and find secrets, health, ammo, places to walk where you're not supposed to and go 'he he he' at the author of the map because you're/you've doing/found something that they did not intend for you to do/find].
feel free to add me if fancy a few games, I am a total starcraft scrub though :)
name : bughunt character code : 292 I've got to around half way in the single player campaign (I think) and I've dabbled a little in the multiplayer so I guess its time to offer some 1st impressions.
On the single player: They really pushed the boat out here, each and every mission has a unique mechanic involved in it that forces you to play differently and use different tactics. New units and explained a drip-fed into your pool as you complete missions and you have plenty of time to experiment and practice with them. Also, the between mission story elements came as a complete surprise to me. I think the best example I can think of to explain it would be the planet surface "point and click" interface of Freelancer. You can click on items and characters in the environment and get a cutscene or some funny news broadcast on the tv or whatever. You can also research unit upgrades, hire mercenary forces to fight for you and further enhance specific units in the armoury. Its also polished to high heaven, very impressed! On Multiplayer : Now I am a total starcraft scrub, I have no idea about build orders, micro/macro management or actions per minute, so I expected to get well and truly pasted in multiplayer, but Blizzard added a really great system whereby you play 5 "performance analysing" matches and then the game will put you in a bracket of other players with the same skill level as you. From what I can tell it works very, very well. When you learn to play better and start beating everyone in your bracket the game will move you up to the next bracket, and so on. Great stuff. Other shizzle : The interface and menu's are fucking fantastic, really. "Challenge missions" to improve your multiplayer skills. When you load the game up, you only need to click twice to start a multiplayer game, its really streamlined. It also runs fairly well on my shitpile of a pc, which I am very thankful for :) So, err. Yeah I guess I'm liking it so far. Yeah, it's nice, I've obviously played the beta quite a bit already, we should up for some coop later Daz, I could teach you some tricks. :D
The singleplayer is really well made, but what the hell, the characters and story is like the ultimate cliche in science fiction, it hurts to hear the dialogue sometimes. Fortunatly it's beautifully made. Missions : yeah, they're fun and interesting. Just played the train-robbing one last night, it was pretty tough, just barely made it. I played it the wrong way (like a base-building mission) and so I got 0 of the achievements. I'm currently in Plat, but should def. be in Diamond, just gotta work my way there I guess.
Yeah I think you can't be placed in Diamond directly after the placement matches.
I haven't done them myselves, too busy with the solo stuff, but if it's anything like the beta I should end up in Plat league I think. Oh yeah. I was able to befriend a BugHunt and saw him online, but when I said howdy there was no reply, so I'm sure whether it was Daz or not.
I can't add you to my friends, so it's doubtful.
How do you befriend someone without his code anyways? Don't recall seeing any messages from you :(
I thought USA & Europe players were separated anyhow? Thought I might give SC2 a go. Looks kinda fun from the videos I watched of it.
Just one small question.... WHY THE CUNTING BOLLOX AM I EXPECTED TO PAY 45 FUCKING QUID TO DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE FUCKING BATTLENET SITE WHEN THEY DON'T HAVE TO PAY ANY FUCKING SHIPPING, BOX, ART, SHOP PROFIT ETC ETC COSTS SHOULDN'T IT BE CUNTING CHEAPER OR WHAT, DO THEY WANT ME TO GIVE THEM THE MONEY OR JUST THINK THEY'RE A BUNCH OF GREEDY CUNTS AND FUCK THE WHOLE THING OFF??? 45 fucking quid!! In the age of digital distribution!! Fucking comedy ha-de-fucking-ha. Where's a bricks and mortar shop then?? Yeah but I want to try it now before my ADD interest wanes. Wish I'd known about Tesco though.
Paid for the fucking thing, and it's been shit ever since then. 1. Terrible download speeds. 2. Completely raped the rest of my connection forcing a restart. 3. On restarting, it wouldn't let me continue the download as it was an invalid account. 4. Support link was broken and the page didn't exist. Fucking GG Blizzard, what a bunch of cunts. Called their billing and account support to cancel my account and download.
"Sorry due to high number of callers all our operators are busy and we cannot accept any more callers into the queue, please try again later". I hope everyone in this company dies a miserable and painful death very soon. Bler I could have given you a trial code so you could try before you buy. Also, yeah, the Blizzard downloader is full of shit, you're likely better off just buying a boxed copy.
Also, the game is $60 in US, because Activision knows that people will buy a PC game for $60 when it's MW2 or SC2 or WoW or whatever other franchise they depend on. Finally got through. Estimated 15 min wait time is up to 23 mins and counting CUNTS CUNTS CUNTS.
I have been attempting to download and play Starcraft 2. Due to the extremely slow download speeds and how badly the Battlenet downloader interferes with my connection, I need to cancel my account and get a refund - I *may* then purchase a physical copy of SC2. I am attempting to contact Blizzard on the phone support number. After numerous attempts where I couldn't even get in the call queue, I got in a queue with a 15 min waiting time. After 29 mins, the phone cut off and I was not able to speak to someone.
Please cancel my account and refund my SC2 order (order number *******) immediately, and then call me immediately on 0********* to confirm this. When this happens then I may consider purchasing Blizzard products in future. I am a Shambler and there are huge cojones beneath my fur!
Now, imagine you want to play your legit copy of SC2 20 years from now. I hope you get your money back, but only after more assraping from Blizzard, which you can then relate here! ;-)
In 20 years, you have to appear in person, are chained to a console controller and filmed the whole time while a Blizzard paramedic stands by in case you starve or dehydrate (except in the US).
Also, is there not a torrent or some such for the SC2 installer that would mean you could circumvent the ridiculously bad blizzard downloader?
In fact, I believe the warez release by RELOADED is actually the legit installer but with cracked patches/.exe to avoid registration/battle.net.
Altho I may be wrong, I care not for RTS Razor1911 said their release would work like a legit copy if you enter a legit key, at least that's how I understand it.
P.S. Owners of legit game keys may use our keytro in just the same way in order to prolong their offline activation period indefinitely Reloaded is nuked for borked singleplayer. Scotch Eggs remain within your reach. Always a calming thought.
The above solution mentioned by Spirit seems the best idea. What is the purpose of the 2nd video card? I hope you're not planning on trying to have both your HD5850 and 8800GT in at the same time!
Sounds like a great setup, the only thing I'd really want to mention is the RAM - that CPU and motherboard supports triple channel RAM so to get the most out of it you'll want a kit with 3 DIMMs, 6gb is probably the best option (2+2+2).
You'll also want to be sure that power supply will be adequete, particularly if you intend to have multiple drives and video cards either now or later. (It may very well be, I don't know, but it'd be worth hitting one of those online calculators to see if you can get an idea of the power draw you'll expect to see with that.) I'm also curious about the 2nd video card, are you intending to have more than 2 monitors? Got 2 pci slots, so might as well fill em both? I figured they'd both combine to help with gaming... or does it not work like that? If you only have 2 for a second monitor, then I won't bother.
I thought 6gb ram might be an overkill, but if you think it's much better then i'll go with that. Calculated out at 430w, so I guess the 600w will be okay, just. Thats almost exactly the same rig as I would buy!
Have you got a nice Air cooler? For overclocking your CPU to >4Ghz??? Should be fairly easy with that motherboard. I wouldnt bother with the 8800. I tried putting one in my rig as a dedicated PhysX card, but it was really just a pain in the neck to get the drivers working properly, and then it turned out that for the game I wanted to use the PhysX stuff, it was impossible to use both cards (Metro 2033). The Radeon 5850 is a seriously speedy card, I would know, I have one!!! I was thinking of buying another, but since all of the games I play run maxed out, there would really be no point. RAM thing: The socket 1366 motherboards are deigned for using DDR3 RAM in TRIPLE CHANNEL mode, which means you're gonna need 3 DIMMS instead of two. I would buy a nice 6Gb kit (3x2Gb) instead of crippling the motherboard by forcing it to work in dual-channel mode. :D The thing about 2 video cards working in tandem is that they should both be the same card - and they definitely should both be either Nvidia or ATI, but not cross-brand baloney (balogna gives me a spelling error, weird.) The HD5850 is pretty rock solid, so you shouldn't need 2, but if you plan on getting a 2nd one, make sure your mobo supports Crossfire, and you might want to double/triple check that you'll have the space in your case to support both cards.
The 5850 will slaughter anything released now and even within the next couple of years I'd imagine. As Zwiffle says, if you're doing any kind of Crossfire or SLI thing with multiple cards, they must be the same make and model and almost everybody says it's usually better to get the best single card you can afford anyway.
Almost all video cards come with dual DVI or at the very least a 2nd VGA connector. In other words any card you could buy would support 2 monitors anyway. You only need more cards if you want to do some kind of whacky triple or quadruple monitor setup. if that's the case, i'd most definitely drop the the extra video card in favour of more ram. i've found with 3gb of ram, i'm quite often running low and need to step down game settings. remember that w7 is a modern os and requires a lot of memory to function.
with 6g, you'd probably be set on ram for a good long while. Yeah, don't get stuck in the hole I am in atm, 2 ram slots on my motherboard died (its 5 years old) so now im running win7 on 1gb of memory :P
To be fair, stuff still works, but it can take an age to do things. Go for the 6b matched set of sticks, there are some nice deals around from the top manufacturers! sweet, thanks guys! definitely won't bother with 2 video cards then, and i'll get the triple memory pack.
i'm always behind in gaming anyway - it'll probably be another few years before i actually catch up and start playing the 2010 releases, by which time this one will be ancient. i can finally play hl2 and quake4 maxed out though yay Crysis Warhead maxed out too.
Also the Radeon 5850 overclocks really well, infact the Catalyst Control Center that comes with the ATI drivers allows you to raise the core clock speed a bit, out of the box. You can use "AMD GPU Clock Tool", (a different free util) to really overclock them. And they can take like 15-20% without breaking a sweat. Also: Borderlands is really very very cool. Far too addictive, and a lot more playable than I thought it was gonna be. The way that Co-op play works is really cool too - basically you just "invite" friends to join your singleplayer mission. All XP earned and items picked up whilst playing in your game, they get to keep. Character development works really well here too, seems to be endless leveling up. Even the AI is good. Rather than the hardware thread http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=21824&start=626
Blizzard non-customer non-support: Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, we will be unable to provide you with a refund for your StarCraft II license. Any queries, please contact: Legal Department Blizzard Entertainment Europe Billing Support TSA 60 001 78143 Velizy Villacoublay Cedex France Shambler: That is not acceptable. I have not taken possession of the game (I only managed to download 200 meg before finding the Battlenet Downloader utterly intolerable). I paid the full price for the game before finding out it was unsuitable to get it via Battlenet. I do not expect to have to jump through hoops and be writing to people in France to have a perfectly normal action of returning a game and getting a refund. Given that Blizzard is very familiar with online gaming, there must be some simple way to delete my account, cancel my download (and prevent any attempts to re-download it via that purchase) and refund my money. If whomever this email reaches is unable to deal with this issue, please pass it on to your superior and get them to call me on 0********** or 0*********. I expect to receive proper customer service from Customer Service, and my chance of being a Blizzard customer ever again (including buying a physical copy of SC2 as I had previously intended) depends on that. Is there any other area of a media purchase industry that takes this attitude to refunds?? If so, I haven't encountered it in my life previously. Isn't regulated at all, so a lot of the time the providers will just shit on the customer if it suits them. It usually does.
I can condense what their reply was into something more honest: 'This is our policy so fuck off, you're not getting anything. If you think you're big and clever enough try fighting with our legal team in France.' I suspect the phone number will have you jump through more hoops until you can find an English speaker who will basically reword the above and invite you to declare a civil action (whilst making a slam dunk action). I had a similar experience with Steam recently. I might make a huge and previously highly undesirable break from tradition, and make my next downloadable content something I don't actually pay for....
That's a shame Shamb :( I've never used the blizzard downloader for anything besides WoW patches so I can't really comment on it.
is it not possible to leave the download running overnight or something while you are not using the pc? if it works the same as the WoW patcher you should be able to stop and start the download process without having to start from the beginning again every time. Are the execs either idiots, or is the intention to criminalise and alienate their customer base.
Stupid question. Well....consistent with the quality of my experience trying to get this game, when I stop the downloader and restart it, it claims it can't continue as the download is not authorised, and I have to go to the Battlenet site to log in (or rather discover that obviously I'm still logged in so the fuckign download IS authorised) and start from there, albeit at the same place (200meg / 7gig before I gave up).
Anyway due to how appalling there customer service is (I think I was trying to get this sorted for 2 hours on Tue evening), there is no way in hell I want the game, I want my money back. Where's my money mother fucker?? IF I'd phoned up customer service, got in a queue for 10 mins, and they'd sorted out it as you'd expect any decent company to do, then I'd have gone out and bought the game on disc that evening.... More like Bordomlands. The graphic style is cool but the game lacks atmosphere. It's like driving through samey liveless wastelands levels doing seemingly pointless quests for random NPCs and killing the same few types of respawning enemies over and over. There's no point to exploration either, because all there is to find are lockers and caches with money, ammo, or one of the hundreds of different weapons with small differences in stats that have you stop all the time to compare them to the ones you're carrying. Every now and then there's an annoying boss fight, too.
I kept playing because I always hoped there would come something interesting at some point. Haven't tried coop yet - Ricky ignored my chat requests... I agree with you about borderlands EXCEPT for the graphic style being cool. I am vehemently against it - the style is quite and ugly and imo definitely a step back from their more realistic style they had before.
I think the style is cool, at least they're trying something different. Some of the env work looks quite nice.
As for the game itself, it's ok. It's much better when playing with 3 friends obviously. I like picking up random loot, but there's not enough diversity, like in Diablo, where it works better because of all the different armor pieces etc. Don't Look Back. The gameplay is pretty run-of-the-mill platforming (enjoyable still) but the atmosphere is excellent.
I think metl posted it a few hundred posts ago(?) but it's good enough to be reiterated. My letter to Blizzard today. Hmmm.
You know if their customer support weren't so fucking useless, I'd be playing a bought physical copy already. Bluesnews gave the heads up on a new DX10 renderer for the original Unreal engine and its games, I re-installed Deus Ex to give it a try and its fantastic.
Its completely faithful to the look of the original Unreal engine, no mucking around with new shaders or anything like that, it does support things like HDR but you can turn if off if you don't want it. You can also use AA and AF etc and it works flawlessly (with deus ex at least). Obviously as its DX10, you need windows Vista or Win7. It fully supports Deus Ex, Unreal 1, Unreal Tournament, and Rune so far. Page with info : http://www.kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/ Download : http://www.kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/files/d3d10drv-v21.zip You also need the very latest version of direct X, linky : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en&Hash=j0Zh1cSQXtbknX9RwKYa55NxhcjvXOd3%2b%2b5WaCJmoRLPkJ6dydzdeuTo9Ii0Zxv0iCFWsqUmFMKPIKV008JDDg%3d%3d And you also need some visual c++ runtimes 2010 update, linky : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a7b7a05e-6de6-4d3a-a423-37bf0912db84 I had forgotten how awesome DX was, im really enjoying playing through it again :) There's also an inofficial patch 227, with new renderers, lots of fixes, Linux and OpenGL support:
http://www.oldunreal.com/oldunrealpatches.html You have a license, so why dont you stop whining and just "aquire" a copy via a torrent or something?
for those without dx9, there are unofficial d3d and opengl renderers available that are quite an improvement performance and feature wise.
someone mention Bioshock Infinite?? The trailer looks cool. I like the way they are doing it as a spiritual sequel to Bioshock (which I still haven't played, waiting to upgrade first).
Yeh, I think I forgot to mention it on here, but it looks awesome. An actual BioShock sequel rather than the farmed-out cash-in that was BioShock 2.
I am so going to preorder as soon as it is available. Bioshock is one of my favorite 'new' franchises, just simply fantastic. I would very much like to petition them for inclusion of level editor with this game, it's a fucking shame neither Bioshock nor Bioshock 2 had one.
Do want. Oh, and could a mod please change the name of this thread to 'other games' please. It just seems to make sense.
Rage = PC game.
Bioshock = PC game. 3500 posts in its not worth changing the name of the thread. Just my 10 english pennies. It was for all systems until Shambler decided to split.
Deus Ex 3 gameplay; http://kotaku.com/5612092/your-first-look-at-deus-ex-gameplay
The hell is he dragging the body with at 0:47? But other than that, I'm fully hyped about this game. About time there was a proper sequel. Deus Ex 3 looks sweet. Like the yellow color scheme, but hope they don't use it everywhere in the game.
I does look very neat indeed, im replaying Deus Ex 1 at the moment and loving every minute of it, I just hope this 3rd one will be better than the lol-fest that was DX2. I heard its possible to complete dx3 without killing anyone (though you wouldnt know it from that trailer) and the story and characters seem decent enough.
A with Shambler, I need one hell of a pc upgrade before I even think about getting it though! I purchased Deus Ex with the intention of enjoying some old school awesome that I missed out on, but unfortunately the program doesn't seem to want to work with my dx11 vid card and 64 bit system. I am not happy with that.
Any one got an answer/work around? Wasn't there some post about a new unreal engine build a few days ago? Would that solve the problem?
Offical sequel was just announced. GSC plans for a multiplatform release which I am sceptical of, but w00t all the same :)
http://www.bluesnews.com/s/113116/stalker-2-announced Quiet you. Apart from anything else, Carmack said there would be a iPhone game using Rage tech/universe out before Rage. Then iRage would be out at some point after console/PC release.
Also, the 13/9/11 is the US date apparently. EU has to wait 2 days; http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c71692/media/image/201008/php11isoUIMG_0007-W800.jpg Bastids. 14 Aug 2010
Velizy Villac FR Debit Card Refund - Battle.Net Starc 44.99 Now off to buy 45 quids worth of curry and fuck that SC2 shit.... I just kept emailing them, telling them it wasn't acceptable and I expected better customer service, and I wrote a letter to their French dept as suggested - although I got an email saying they'd refund me before that letter would have arrived, AFAIK.
Anyone know how much truth there is to this?
http://www.omega-level.net/2010/08/13/press-start-duke-nukem-forever-aint-got-time-to-die/ I heard rumors about the same thing, except replace Gearbox by Epic, Valve or id. All I can say is that it's a rumor. Would be great if it were true though.
I'm sure I'm not the only Torchlight 'fan' (okay, it's not my favorite game but it is a good bit of fun) and I'm sure it'll tide Diablo fans over until D3 comes out.
http://kotaku.com/5615698/torchlight-ii-reminds-us-why-it-has-returned keep the faith
I read the few last posts and had the mental image of Doom4 being about a religious war with the Taliban fighting Cyberdemons
there's a way to run unreal with the UT engine, but the guides i've seen always say you need to have UT installed first.
but you end up copying all the Unreal files over anyway. i have the Unreal cd but don't own UT, so i was wondering if there was a way to, instead of copying Unreal content into UT, to copy the UT engine to Unreal (assuming i could find an upload with just the UT engine of course). i only ask because i've tried to play unreal again with the DX10 renderer plugin, but there's like this really weird mouse lag that makes the game unplayable. i was hoping the UT engine fixed that, since it was more recent. If you get this:
http://www.oldunreal.com/oldunrealpatches.html Effectively you have the UT equivalent renderers (well actually they are improved UT renderers but same thing). IS this what you are after? Argh I had forgotten just how fucking awesome this game is!
After all these years, it still has one of the most intelligent plot-lines I've seen in a game, its not scared of being complex and the characters are all very nice shades of grey as opposed to the typical "good guy - bad guy, or guy with a chip on his shoulder" you find in pretty much every modern game. I'm on the final level/mission right now if I remember correctly, and I really don't know who I want to help/trust. A lot of games that give you this sort of choice at the end are very binary, to be the good guy help A, to be the bad guy help B, etc. All the choices I have discovered so far are,again, very grey in that regard, and it really comes down to what your own personal views are. I'm hoping that the game won't fall into some horrid contrived ending where it doesn't really matter what you decide to do, its been so long since I played it I really can't remember. (No Spoilers!!) Staff position is full of unpaid overtime and job insecurity? As opposed to freelancing?
StarCraft 2, still great. http://www.bluesnews.com/s/113597/bulletstorm-trailer
Enviroments and scenes look amazing. Gameplay looks moronic but kinda fun. Seems to be running at about 0.5 FPS in that clip though. I just can't get excited about it. Looks pretty damn stupid tbh. Yeh, great, it's pretty, but so's everything these days. And the gameplay/style/that horrible voice over all screams AWESOME/HUGE MONSTER/LOWEST FUCKING DENOMINATOR.
Wake me when Deus Ex 3 comes out. The FFXIV "Open Beta"/demo is coming out soon (not today as originally scheduled due to bugs.) Anyone else interested in FFXIV besides myself? I'm unsure, I've heard bad things about the beta but I'd at least like to give it a try.
Minecraft is awesome, let me show you! :)
yes bad graphics are bad, but they have a certain charm to them. http://daz.quaddicted.com/images/temp/mc1.jpg My little house, that I made by cutting down trees and mining rocks. I also dug up some sand and smelted it into glass to make the windows. I had to gather some more wood and some coal to make the torches. http://daz.quaddicted.com/images/temp/mc2.jpg The beginnings of Castle Daz! Lots of mining was done to come up with the rock to make the walls. Its snowing here so everything is white, but you can gather the snow and throw it at things! :P http://daz.quaddicted.com/images/temp/mc3.jpg My house from the outside. The large watch tower at the top is so that I can fire my bow at enemies on the outside. There is a large chest full of arrows at the top just in case I run out :) http://daz.quaddicted.com/images/temp/mc4.jpg My castle from the top of the cliff behind it. Lots of torches around so I don't get any enemies spawning inside it at night! http://daz.quaddicted.com/images/temp/mc5.jpg I was digging down fairly deep below my castle when I found this underground stream, I mined through a block and suddenly all this water came into my tunnel and I nearly drowned :P You can re-direct the flow of water by building blocks around it. http://daz.quaddicted.com/images/temp/mc6.jpg Crafting a new mining pick, to create items you have to "draw" the item you want using the correct materials in the crafting square. There are absolutely tons of crafting recipes and you have to discover them for yourself. So its basicly a sandbox building game, you start the game with nothing and go from there. There is a full day-night cycle and at night in areas that are not illuminated by torches (or lava) enemies can spawn and kill you.
You get resources by destroying certain block types to gain there raw materials, and then craft those materials into usable items. The deeper you mine, the better materials you will find, for instance diamond can only be found at the very bottom of the world but is the best crafting material. You can make for instance a diamond mining pick that will last for a very long time and destroy rock blocks very fast. There are all sorts of ways you can interact with the world also, for instance by harvesting tree leaves you have a chance for a tree sapling to drop. if you plant this sapling in an area with water and sunlight a new tree will grow there eventually and you can keep your wood resources near infinite by doing this. You can also create fields and grow your own food to regain health, or simply kill animals and take there meat and cook it to regain health that way. The high level materials can be gained by combining different low level materials. for example to make glass you need to collect sand blocks with your spade, then smelt the sand into glass using your furnace (made with stone blocks). You have to harvest wood to place into the furnace first so that there is something to create heat to smelt the sand. Bleh, im totally addicted! :) Finally a warning, if you suffer from any kind of ocd you might want to skip this one! there was another block-based game where you could build your own structures and choose textures (and dig holes-- it even had a fluid engine where if you dug a tunnel and hit water, it would fill up).
that game didn't have any gameplay mechanics though, no monsters or resource management. So I was mining in the cliff above my house, my house made of wood, when I happened upon a steam of lava.
Hilarity ensues... http://daz.quaddicted.com/images/temp/mc7.jpg and Necros, I believe the 1st version of minecraft was simply a building simulator with no inventory management or crafting or enemies. The new alpha versions have all that good stuff :) It looks great though, despite the Valve style pay to playtest thing. Do you get access to all subsequent versions?
Daz, did you rebuild on top of the smoking ruins? if you pay for it now its only 10 euro's. It will be 20 once its finished. You do get access to all updates + expansions for free if you get it now.
I did manage to eventually put the fires out by running to my well with about 8 buckets and filling them with water. The trouble was that I had to stem the flow of lava first :P eventually most of the wooden walls were gone and I had a nice layer of snow on my stone floor :P all is rebuilt now and I managed to swipe some buckets of lava for my next home addition, a moat of lava! :) Tested it last night, it's been a long time I was looking for playing it...
More comments to come when I'll have finished the game :) Yeah I bought it a while back (should play again for the new stuff, but I'm afraid of wasting too much time with it again).
It's fun, I made a really high tower of solitude, once it was done I just stood at the top with my pile of useless gold, not knowing what to do more. :) Looking forward to some kind of multiplayer with this mode. So... either it's really being made/finished by Gearbox or it's an amazingly good joke.
Either way hilarious. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/03/controversial-long-awaited-duke-nukem-forever-will-finally-be-released/
Shit... now I need to hurry up with rubicon 2 or else DNF might come out first! Not surprised about DNF, and I can't say I'm all that excited about it anymore. I'll get it, I'll play it, but the hype is just too far gone for me.
Rubicon 2, on the other hand posting this as a reminder to myself to play it some day:
http://decay.half-lifecreations.com/ I tried the demo today.. I need to go to the shops tomorrow to pick up some new pants :P
Its great, and a pretty natural evolution from the Penumbra games. interesting anyway: http://research.cs.queensu.ca/Parallel/QuantumChess/ChessApplet2/ChessGame.html
1. Pieces randomly choose their type when you click on them once, then you click again to move (or if no legal moves are available, your turn is over.) 2. once a piece type is determined, it won't go back to a question mark until it lands on a black square. 3. you have to actually capture the king to win, rather than just mating. http://thelettervsixtim.es/
Posted previously, but it was $15 which is pretty outlandish for a (nice) flash game. $5 seems reasonable. (Also on Steam apparently) The computer always gets the right pieces and all i get are peasants.
Maybe it would be intersting if there were specific rules that decide what piece you get. The world is not entirely evile;
http://kotaku.com/5633629/minecraft-creator-hiring-help-working-on-new-game good twitch platformer with a grappling hook. I've only made it to level 43 so far:
http://armorgames.com/play/6586/give-up-robot Yeh, tis cool, very GlaDOS on acid vibe to it, altho the jump response is slightly annoying at time (you have to release all keys to jump again, so I kept running off ledges).
And strangely played it, returned to post and found I'd got to exactly the same point. I think it's 'cos that run left/right on the elevator through a death maze in level 42 is so taxing that a break is needed. Nice game, reached the last level (50), it's hard.
Also finished VVVVVV yesterday, fun game, but hardcore as well. So, can anyone recommend any other tutorial sites for SC2 editor besides SC2Mapster?
NYARGH!
Got to level 50. Brain melted before I managed to complete it. I can do the first (easy bit). I can land the hookshot onto the spinner from the right point to land on the dissolving platforms. I can even re-hook onto the 1x1 moving block. Then I swing face first into the top or bottom of the (first of three) pixel perfect gates. Every. Single. Time. Also, pretty things; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YHFmLh0y6A The interviewer is piss annoying and there's too much of his face, but what you can see of the game itself looks interesting. Metroid/Ikaruga gameplay combined with a Tron/SotC fusion aethestic. Bastion looks very lovely too, altho I may have already mentioned this... the interviewer does not now how to talk into a microphone, he's popping his p's and all the other shit that annoys the hell out of people, the jerk.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AhnarisStarcraft
He does commentaries mainly but is also a fairly well known sc2 mapper. He had 2 videos currently detailing the basics of the editor (which you probably wont need to watch, it really is the basics) but will release more very soon detailing the script editors and etc etc, recommended :) Nobody listed this yet?
http://zarat.us/tra/offline-games/eversion.html A cutesy platformer with a few dark secrets. After not having played any games for a very long time, I found I had a long forgoten Steam account with HL2 available. I have just spent 19 hours playing it again and what great fun.
Fortunately, I have the memory of a goldfish so remebered very little of it - it was just like playing a new game. Think I might try a few more; not sure I want to play Quake anymore. Get yourself the orange box too if you enjoyed HL2, more of the game/story, plus portal/tf2...
Seconding this. Portal is incredible. I just replayed it again (+ advanced levels) in preparation for testing a buddy's beta level, got re-hooked and am now making my way through the "least-portals" challenges. Sooo cool. Fortunately, I have the memory of a goldfish so remebered very little of it - it was just like playing a new game. Hahaha, this is me. I can replay a game from a few years back, and it's almost like playing something new sometimes. Hooray, early onset of senility. Hahaha, this is me. I can replay a game from a few years back, and it's almost like playing something new sometimes. Hooray, early onset of senility.
me too, but i find there are some games that i can replay and other i just can't. for example, i got back into deus ex easily, but got bored of unreal. It's been a real chore for me to finish it...and I still have to play the expansion pack. Joy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyH-51KrJdk
7 minutes of completely linear on-rails (literally) interactive movie scripted events, 1 minute of actual gameplay. Still, the setting looks awesome. i was about to write something similar regarding the amount of gameplay. It's actually 30 secs at 3:30 and a minute or so (if you are generous regarding what's actually gameplay) after 6:00
They had the same thing for Bioshock 1, and it still turned out not too linear.
The game isn't coming out before 2012, so I'm guessing this is more of an intentions mockup. I actually just finished bioshock (on xbox - sorry shambler)last night, and just watched the trailer for infinite this morning.
Flash platformer where your mouse cursor can distort the play field in order to progress.
http://www.casualcollective.com/#games/Push Mixed feelings. Graphics are good, even though the trees could have been higher quality (I recommend disabling the vegetation fading option). Performance seems okay on my mid-range machine - not entirely smooth on max settings, but definitely playable. On the other hand, there's not much going on and there are no huge areas in the demo, so I'm not sure.
Hard to tell if the gameplay holds true to the Gothic series. The demo doesn't show that much. Though, admittedly, with 1-2 hours its playtime is surprisingly long for a demo these days. My initial impression (and fear) is that the game is quite consolized. For example, it's impossible to climb or jump over certain stuff, you can't swim in water (=death), there's 'safety clipping' and I think I read somewhere that there isn't going to be a huge open world but several levels, which the demo island would support. Having just played through The Witcher, this would be quite a disappointment. Combat isn't too original apparently. Not as dull as G3, but still pretty much button-mashing. The skilling system seems to be different from the predecessors - basic skills don't require teachers anymore. Another thing I that think is unnecessarily reducing immersion is a fade-to-black effect every time you start a conversation. Shambler fap potential: ~3.5/5 I'm still going to get the full game, but... dunno. Nothing beats G1 and 2 (which I've also replayed recently). Risen 2 is in the works, too. I've been playing this a bit too after a friend at work suggested we try playing it together. It's absolutely the most addictive thing I ever touched (except my penis... but that's not a pc game) and I have already sunk hours and hours into first playing it single player and experiencing the survival aspect, and now multi player, and getting more time to build stuff. I'm still playing in survival, so I need to mine the materials I build with, but there is currently a bug that makes everything invincible, so I needn't worry about monsters attacking at night.
Anyway, I'm kind of surprised more people here aren't talking about it, since it seems like exactly the kind of game that would get mappers hooked. The graphics and feel of the lighting are even a little like Quake. I{m looking to make an office server for it.
It{s stupidly addictive. I clicked on an empty save game by accident and ended up playing in a brand new world for a good half hour. Now for the showing off: I{ve got a tower of despair which floats free of the terrain, being accessed via bridge and gets wider the higher up it goes. It{s got about fifteen rooms, and is getting close to the clouds. It has an obsidian obelisk, loads of glass windows and a wall of gold over the double doors. It has an escape tunnel to my mining camp (an underground tower) and a causeway to my beachside cabana of doom. Anyway, I'm kind of surprised more people here aren't talking about it, since it seems like exactly the kind of game that would get mappers hooked.
I think actually, mappers already have an (arguably better) outlet for their world-building impulses, so they might be less excited by it. As soon as i started building something serious I stopped and thought, "hmm, this would be easier in radiant." I like the survival and mining/crafting aspect more than the building. I mean, I like the building too, but it wouldn't be enough to hook me (and wasn't the first time I tried a few months back, in multiplaer).
I have a flying tower as well, I access it with a ladder, and to leave it I have a waterfall coming from my interior pool that reaches all the way to the bottom (alternativelly, I've discovered that just jumping off info the water, few hundred meters below works fine too :). I'm looking forward to him adding more gameplay. Monsters, special dungeons etc. I already found a few special rooms with spawning zombies, and chests, that was nice. I stoped playing though, cause Civilisation V is out... civ 5 looks amazing and i like some of the gameplay changes they've made like forcing only 1 unit per tile instead of being able to infinitely stack them.
sounds like it'll simulate how armies can eat the land dry or something. Haven't found any yet - though I saw a minepedia entry describing them.
Interior pool? Damn, that beats me then. Can you swim up the waterfall as well? Yeah I only found 2 special rooms in my playtime, usually while wandering around natural mines, sometimes you'll hear the noise of many zombies, try to dig around towards the noise and you may find one (the ones I found were always totally closed in otherwise, so you have to dig to get in).
And no unfortunatly I can't swim up the waterfall, I could but it's so slow, and my tower is so high that it would take 10 minutes. I also have a glass tower of lava along my tower, so I can see it from far away even during the night. Maybe I'll try some CivV MP later. Seems kind of long though, not sure if it's the kind of game I like multiplayer. Can you save the game to continue later? And yeah it's a great game, the one army per hex rule is a good change. I stole your idea about the water lifts - they look very cool but it's faster to walk up (breathing would be a problem as well).
An indoor pool got me thinking about an indoor farm though - hydroponic. Not least because I finally found a secret room (about ten minutes after reading your post) with two chests and a spider-spawner. The chests had bread and wheat and stuff in them. Very frustrating that I fell into lava about three minutes later and lost it all, including the 'mossy cobblestone' the room had been made out of. But, I finally figured out how to remove lava with water, and I suspect that I can make one of these obsidian factories, although to date trying to pick up lava I've only managed to incinerate myself. Need more diamond to make some decent tools as well... And, I finally broke through the cloud layer - just building the walls now. Wonder if the clouds will still appear, just clipping through the tower like a floating carpet.
Should probably be making a speedmap. Hopefully they mean the start of a proper dungeon generator - that'd be cool.
For the next new enemies the slimes sound good, almost like multi-part Shoggoth'. So I tried Obsidian farming.
Unfortunately I tried it inside the tower, where the floors at least were made of wood - burnt the lot. I think it must have been sparks from the lava since the thing was inside a stone trough. Then the water from my hydroponic farm got everywhere. http://www.4shared.com/photo/EiRikq78/burnthatmotherdown.html The white thing is a cloud. The other 'day' I found a creeper inside the tower as well, that knocked all the pictures off the walls. Must remember to close the doors. And put doors on the water lifts, just in case. awesome :)
My latest travels involve a boat! I made a little port with a jetty and a couple of boats and have been sailing up and down the coast and jumping down every hole I found along the way. What a fantastic little game! Heh, you're story reminds me this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnjSWPxJxNs The fireplace in my home is surrounded by rocks, was really careful when making it (same for my glass tower of lava, which pools down to the glass ceiling of my main room, procuring some nice lighting). That cheers me up, as I lay my stone floors :)
I've got a tower of lava as well, which joins my moat of lava - great for frying the bad guys. and I was all FINE I'll buy it. Err, it's quite addictive, it somehow appears to be nighttime now.
My achievements are pretty lame so far though. I created a glorious small wooden shed with one window. I created a retarded cobblestone house that zombies like to hang out in. Took me about 3 hours to spot the iron ore. Got repeatedly killed by what appears to be a small Optimus Prime carrying a crossbow. I dominate the sheep though. And pigs. Wasn't loving it at the start though, due to installing/server/launcher woes, general lack of explanation of how you do fucking anything, and graphics being so basic you have to guess what things are. Is that a pile of string? A table? Fuck it's attacking me. I look forward to wasting many more hours of my prime years on this though. I love the feeling of feeling (almost) safe in your house with all your torches at night, venturing in from the danger of the dark, with possibly useful objects and large stone blocks in your backpack. P.S. Someone get Aardappel to port it to Cube please. Thanks. All that stuff he had in his house must have taken ages to get hold of - I've been playing for quite a while and have only one book block.
Kona, if you enjoy having free time then for the love of god don't install it. We've just started our office server, downside being that humans can't receive damage. Apparently that's in the works for some time this week though. You think all that stuff in the mouse must have taken time?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGkkyKZVzug&feature=player_embedded Pretty cool some of the things people are making!
Not sure if pigs grazing in the middle of your computer chip is a good thing, lol That video doesn't show the crater it leaves at the point of impact - its about the size of the first house you make.
Greetings folks!
Pardon me if this is the inappropriate thread to raise such speculation, however from my eye it had no suitable home in the others. I've just finished ripping and tearing through Ratloop's Malice TC for Quake, an exceptional addon in my eye without getting into an extensive analysis of why this is so. The question I wish to raise is did the development team neglect to include a source kit to allow users to create their own levels, or did they simply not want others to do so? As I must say the only diminishing factor for me was the length of Malice. I wish it were more extensive! And it is a shame no custom maps were made for it. Ether: They put a devkit on the long-defunct Malice website. Here is the file: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/misc/maldvkit.zip
Spirit: Have you played Half-Life Decay yet? If not, let's try to play it together. Thing is, it appears to be a a sort of coop mod (straight port from the PS2 version or something); playing in SP is stupid because one has to control both characters - there is no AI control. Or at least so it seems. Welcome to CITY514, sister of city17.
After a good lunch at your favorite restaurant on the main, you and your friends decide to cross the street and have a beer at the stripclub. You can easily see the mood of the staff that aren't satisfied to work there by hearing what they're saying. Feel all the action of a real stripclub by yourself! Oh by the way, if you see Nancy can you say hi to her for me? ;) get it here: http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/146061 ENJOY! QMD Sacrifice related
http://kotaku.com/5656397/the-sacrifice-is-out-and-left-4-dead-is-ridiculously-cheap Asaki I'm looking at you, but you're not looking back, because you don't visit func. I finally finished Unreal -- kind of long and meh, if you ask me -- and was wondering if I should even bother with the Return to Na Pali mission pack.
Also, I have been playing Rune lately and am totally digging it :) If I remember right, the expansion was a bit poo?
There are some very high quality custom map packs/episodes out there that are probably better! but Tower of Shrakitha comes to mind as does Tim Jervis' Illhaven
Here are my recommendations:
Attacked The Elder Hexephet Illhaven Saga The Landing Liberation of Na Pali One Day Shamu Quest Shinigami Level Pack 1 Spantobi: Unexpected Threat Tarmation: The Tiradium Sublimation Tarmation 2: A Rude Awakening The Tower of Shrakith'a Valley of Alshar You can find all of the above (with reviews) at unrealsp.org. I'm not sure if you would like them or not as you've stated that you didn't enjoy the original much, but still... Is it possible to play these maps with Unreal Tournament ? Or do I need something "different" like Quake vs Quake 2 (note I am not really an Unreal expert :P) ?
Hexephet and One Day are both great packs too.
JPL, you can play most of these in UT with the Oldskool mod but some of them are Unreal only due to some coding issues (I think Liberation of Na Pali is one of those). But if you have UT and want to try some good mappacks : Operation Na Pali 7 Bullets Xidia Gold Ortican Project Zephon Project Xenome It's interesting to see the progression in these games:
Robot Wants Kitty is practically a proof of concept with its bare-bones artwork and a relatively small game world, but establishes the basic "metroidvania" game progression. http://jayisgames.com/games/robot-wants-kitty/ Robot Wants Puppy makes the art a little better, adds bosses, more interesting enemies, and a really cool kitten-based combat system. The only weak part is the over-reliance on keys, i think -- the whole point of this genre is using abilities rather than locked doors to gate the player. http://jayisgames.com/games/robot-wants-puppy/ Robot Wants Fishy really brings the polish; the world design is more interesting, the art is better, tbe bosses are better. Introduce health points (in this case a shield good for one hit) and upgradeable items. http://jayisgames.com/games/robot-wants-puppy/ The last in the series, Robot Wants Ice Cream is on the verge of getting away from the roots a bit, but is still solid if you like the previous games. There's a crazy amount of pickups in this game since everything gets upgraded multiple times, and they probably should have been color coded, but it's still good. Now you have three hit points and can aquire energy tanks to power your special abilities. Progression requires more thought and exploration than before, but not in a bad way. http://jayisgames.com/games/robot-wants-ice-cream/ Mixed feelings. By itself, it's not a bad game. Polished, bug-free, (mostly) nice graphics and some cool-looking areas. However, as a sequel to the Gothic series I'm afraid it is.
It was a obviously developed as a console game, and should work very well there (minus the reduced graphic detail maybe). As a PC game, it falls short on many levels - it ultimately ends up being a linear action game with watered-down RPG elements. Everything that was great or unique about its predecessors is neglected or left out, for example skill upgrades, alchemy and forging don't require trainers and workshops, friendly NPCs can't be attacked and the AI doesn't infight, you can steal everything and nobody cares, no sleeping, heavily simplified magic system etc. Exploration is hardly possible in the more or less confined 'levels' (seamless transition between the areas but blocked until the corresponding point in the main quest line). Needless to say, it's impossible to climb or jump up larger rocks and other structures. There are some semi-hidden chests here and there, and a few optional console-style "Find 30 hiddem items" quests, but that's it. At least it's possible to turn off the radar and quest markers. Relatively low number of side quests, though this makes sense given the small scale of the areas. Combat isn't very sophisticated and it's easy, even on hard difficulty (which I played on). Ok, to be fair, I used the Inferno spell a lot, especially in the samey dungeons later on. The story is kind of silly. Felt somewhat random, not as epic as in the other games. They could have filled the holes a little better. One does meet all the main characters and all the monsters from the Gothic universe, but in the end, I think this game would have been better off as a standalone RPG. That way, the bar wouldn't have been so high and people probably less critical. Bottom line, a good game (mainly for non-PC platforms), but a bad sequel. I did enjoy the ~22 hours (except for the two hours I wasted running around confused and clueless in the city before and during that asshole quest where one has to find stuff to destroy the magic barrier :P), but still I have to lower my inital SFP rating to ~2-2.5 / 5 I agree with most of that negke.
Suprisingly the first area (around the tavern) felt the most interesting to explore, then as you go things seem to be more and more linear, and I had very little interest in exploring. Also, what the hell is up with the teleporter stones that only work in pairs? That was stupid. It almost feels like you could take the island, open it up completely, and make a new game out of it, that would be more faithful to the Gothic series. Risen was more of a Gothic4 in my opinion really. Not on the PC, but I play MW2, L4D 1/2, Bioshock 2, Nazi Zombies, Borderlands, &c on Xbox live when I have time. Gamertag is BetterThanUNIX.
Sorry for going off topic. Anyone try any of these yet?
http://www.ripten.com/2010/10/24/five-essential-pc-mods-for-fallout-new-vegas/ They all look pretty obvious I'm not quite sure why Obsidian didn't already to these for the game? While I enjoyed the original Vietcong, released in 2003, the follow-up two years later was very lacklustre. It almost felt more like an expansion pack than a sequel.
The graphics were exactly the same and hadn't upgraded at all in two years. This definitely wasn't helped by the majority of the game being set in urban environments and towns. What made the original so great was it's lush jungle atmosphere, but that's missing here until the last 1/4 of the game. The game is split into two parts (in theory), which a US campaign which is all urban based, followed by a VC campaign where your now a Vietnamese Soldier. Unfortunately the VC campain only takes a couple of hours, while the US campaign is around 5-6 hours. It all adds up to a well under 10 hour game, which feels like the developed pushed it out in an unfinished state. The final battle at the end of the VC campaign was just another battle, no epic finale at all. The game just suddenly ends. I wouldn't be surprised if the VC campaign was supposed to be much longer but, for whatever reason, it was never finished. Gameplay is similar to the original Vietcong except this time you have limited saves and some of the enemies can be very frustrating. There are countless times you'll see the enemies' head sticking out behind something, but your hopeless weapons just aren't capable of an accurate headshot. He'll hop up and somehow you still can't hit him. Your spray of bullets seem to be so inaccurate. The best line of attack is to sprint up to your targets or flank around and catch them face-to-face rather than trying to pick them off from a distance. Overall, graphics that are dated for late 2005, ho-hum level designs and unpolished gameplay make Vietcong 2 are very average game. Perhaps it's a good thing that it's so short; that way you can play through it all on a rainy Sunday. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that mod. Was on the team for a while until I got hired at HH cuz I ran out of time and the team sort of fell apart, which I've been told was not the first time it happened. They had a sort of weird set up on how to do things, so
98% downloaded :) :) :)
Been waiting for 8 hours for this to download :( 220KB/s is too slow. Looking forwards to seeing what the new shooting style is like (you can now look down the barrel of your weapons, yay!). It has ironsights. Now that you mentioned it, I realize FO3 didn't have them.
I haven't reached New Vegas yet, but I'm close. The game is pretty much like FO3 in terms of everything. Especially in the field of BROWN and LACK OF CONTRAST. Samey ugly wastelands. Some enemies are harder, giant radscorpions and deathclaws in particular. I guess this is where the new crafting/ammo creating system comes in handy, though I haven't bothered with it yet. Typical FO3-style quests; the faction standing seems to be more sensitive now, which is probably a good thing. If you liked the original, you'll enjoy this one, too. It's basically an addon, albeit large (and priced like a full game). I found that I could always only play it for some two at a time before getting too bored, and sometimes skipped through whole dialogues just to get the quests not caring about the story. Decent adaptation of the Shadow of the Colossus concept to a 2d platforming engine. Kill giant sky serpents while climing around on them and hopefully not falling off.
http://www.nitrome.com/games/skyserpents/ Project: Snowblind was originally supposed to be the third Deus Ex game. However since Deus Ex 2 didn't do well enough commercially, Project: Snowblind became it's own universe.
You play the role of a soldier who, after being injured in war, is surgically enhanced with a number of pointless powers. One of the biggest problems with this game, that I found, is that I struggled to get my head around all the powers, weapons, alternate fires and general rubbish used to improve your assault. Give me a shotgun and machine gun and i'll be happy. And that's basically how I played the game, switching to the plasma gun and lightning gun (don't know what the actual names were but they're very similar to Quake 3) later in the game. It boggles the mind how a console gamer could come to grips with all the shortcuts for this game when I strugged to remember everything on the keyboard. You also have a railgun and rocket launcher, both of which I chose to save for boss battles. In the end, there was only one boss battle a few levels from the finish. The actual final two levels were difficult overall for the only reason that you have such limited ammo (and I never realised the vehicles have insanely destructive guns). In fact throughout the entire game ammo is very tight, probably because I was sticking too much to the same weapons. Project: Snowblind has no difficulty settings, a fairly big flaw and from what I recall the first action shooter I've played without them. Nevertheless, the game was fairly good at getting the difficulty just right. It's hard at times, but often it's because you don't have ammo for the right weapon. I probably died several times during the game, half of which I was able to resurrect myself using an item acquired for this purpose (there's plenty littered around). The other major flaw in the game is no quicksaving. Instead in most levels you get 1-2 checkpoints; which are basically rooms with a computer where you can save progress. It wasn't until the last 1/3 of the game that I realised you could return to the checkpoint and resave again. It's a silly and pointless idea, they should have either done quicksaving or automatic (magic) checkpoints. The enemies are all fairly similar, just carrying different weapons or shielding. There are some robots which take a bit of firepower and dish out a lot of damage, but they're slow and can easily be bought down by keeping cover. The design of the game is fairly average for a 2005 release, although it was only February 2005 that it went gold. It was also intended for Xbox and PS2, so this may explain some of the average looks. But i'd expect better. None of the levels are fairly big, there are very few set pieces and instead of lot of corridor-room-corridor designs. Doom3's corridors look a lot better than Project: Snowblind's corridors. The game was criticised for being too short, but coming off a 6-8 hour walk in Vietcong 2, Project: Snowblind isn't too bad. Perhaps just under the 10 hours. Crystal Dynamics aren't known for their first person shooter PC action games, so it's a good start. Pity they've done nothing since except overflow the market with Lara Croft games. By the way what's Second Sight like? Are the graphics complete shit? I'm thinking of playing it next.
Also curious about Bet On Soldier: Blood Sport (also 2005). Otherwise my list of next games to play run like this: Second Sight (2005) - 70% Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) - 76% Area 51 (2005) - 78% Peter Jackson's King Kong - 78% Quake 4 (2005) - 81% Call of Duty 2 - 87% Resident Evil 4 (3rd person) - 76% F.E.A.R. - 89% Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (2005) - 88% Atmospheric too. Good AI.
R.E. 4 is meant to be good but I haven't played it. Felt it was pretty stale and uneventful.
RE4 was pretty good though, provided you can stand quick time events. So I could play Garry's Mod and Left4Dead2 but I've been running into a problem; when I go to start either of these games it shows the loading screen (in l4d2's case it shows the Valve and introduction movies before the load screen) sits for a bit (my guess is it's loading at this point) but then the screen flashes and the game goes away, no errors, nothing running on the backhand. So naturally I; FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-'ed
and looked for a fix, I checked the Steam forums in various places but found them to be a clutter of whining, bitching, questions with obvious answers, and questions on trivial things, but most of all- to be pages of no value or help to me. At this point I have tried the following quick cures to no avail; restarting, using 'verify integrity of game cache' under properties -local files, de-fragmenting and optimizing drive (least my computer feels more sound). Also, I receive a window when trying to run L4D2 abut having an "unknown video card" which I have this profoundly strong feeling that this is not good, and as i can't upgrade at the moment I'm trying to suffice with what I have. So now I'm asking here for help, because I've noticed some if not most of you use steam and play these games (at least L4D2) and have encounterd various problems. [ps ur smartes peoples on internets :}] It sounds like a drivers problem if the games crash after the loading video.. are your drivers up to date? L4D2 should run on pretty old cards - I played L4D1 on an ATI 9600.
Completely donald ducked the game. The steam forums are next to useless, but sounds like Eric has the fix with updating the drivers if not then complain on the forum all the same, sooner or later it should be fixed.
Recently in Vs games we've all ended up on the infected side, watching the bots cowering in the safe room. Like batman and robin with another robin instead of batman. had to wade through shit to find that i needed to start the game with these command line arguments;
-autoconfig -safe -dxlevel 80 i'm not sure which one did it but w/e, l4d2 still dos net work but shits to that i got garry's mod Very nice game. Simple ideas - great result!
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/puzzle/osmos/index.html http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/ ... and some of the stages can get tough, at least for me. The levels where everything is static and large are neat figuring out how to outgrow everything else, though probably the easiest ones out of the lot.
Anyone have it ? I'm getting mine for PC, but hasn't been shipped yet (grr!) so no telling when I'll end up getting it.
Cool easter egg games though not really my type of game, but the campaign is spectacle to the max and it's generally very cinematic and exciting, and HOLY SHIT I'M DRIVING A CAR NOW oh okay i've jumped out and stabbed a russian in the tit AND NOW I'M ON A BIKE and i've got to shoot down a nuke? With a crossbow? THE PRESIDENT IS ON FIRE!! What the fuck is happening? I think I've been double crossed. By myself?
Whoever wrote this game deserves some camomile and a nice sit down. How can I tell my best buddy that I don't want to "experience" Black Ops? I don't like this hyped-up war celebration and rails hordes gameplay.
I already don't play Starcraft II with him. Partially because I would not buy it with all its DRM. But also because I just don't care about it. I'd play some older games (Red Alert, Dawn of War, Dark Reign) any day though. Is definitely not the end-all-be-all of games, but for console fps mp I'm having trouble finding anything as good. The only other mp games I really play on the 360 is tf2, borderlands and some bioshock 2. On the tere are a ton of fps mp games that can competently compete with it for my attention.
is supposed to start with 'on the pc there'. Still not completely used to the droid's sw keyboard.
Pro tip: Don't do all the side quests before even entering The Strip. Better to be one step before the end instead of having to do all the additional main quests after having lost interest.
Is this like the new EVE Online? Anyone heard about this? Coming out November 25th, so
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/11/10/perpetuum-win-30-day-timecodes-launch/ fun but absolutely devouring my school projects.
Pro just fucking around blowing shit up and zip lining away is awesome. Cons repetitive when it comes to missions/ cut scenes. Cannot kill hookers. Haven't played the older COD games, but:
COD: MW - good singleplayer, absolutely spectacular multiplayer COD: MW2 - better singleplayer than MW1, way worse multiplayer than MW1 As for Black Ops, I am going to wait and see how the game turns out once they release a few more patches for it and once the price drops down a bit. I had so much fun with this =) its almost scary how great this game is!
That grapple hook provides endless hilarity! if you have not tried this game out, go and snag it! neutral, i can brutally murder hookers any day of the week, why would I want to do it in a game? Gamers don't want the daily grind, they want true escapism. I've raped 3 dozen times this week, and now you want me do do it in my spare time, when i'm supposed to be unwinding? It's complete bullshit.
Games allow you a bigger wardrobe and you don't feel self-conscious whilst murdering the hooker with a massive Mexican hat on.
hat-wearing simulation games are really where the future of the medium is headed IMO. TF2 is making some great advances at the moment, really groundbreaking stuff!
Just recently finished it and like it a lot more than I did Unreal -- even with its boring start levels. Overall, I really enjoyed the different environments, assorted weaponry and rune powers, and odd touches like eating lizards for health and riding flying beetles. The change to godhood seemed a little tacked on but, all in all, it was a very satisfying romp.
Play it now! I am playing Rune every now and then. Unfortunately the Linux version is pretty buggy and things are sometimes vanishing (like entities in Quake ;) ).
Apart from that it is quite fun. The underwater levels with the crabs were really annoying though. Now I am stuck at some castle thing with a broken bridge over lava and a rope just outside my jumping range. No idea how to progress. ...is an amazing TC for Oblivion. I just started playing last night and am thoroughly impressed. I'm still in the first semi-tutorial area so am not allowed to roam as I please quite yet, but I'm having more fun than I did with stock Oblivion.
(I thought it had been mentioned here, but I did a search and couldn't find anything?) To quote from another forum: What is Nehrim? Nehrim is a total conversion modification for TES: Oblivion made by a group of hardcore Germans that have gained fame by making high quality mods and TCs for Morrowind and Fallout 3. They've gotten better over time and Nehrim is quite possibly the peak of their abilities right now. It is literally a whole new game for you to explore and play - for free. How does it work into Oblivion? It doesn't. It's a total conversion. When you install it, you will be required to have an install of Oblivion on your computer and it will steal whatever it needs from your installation to its own installation. This game is an entirely new world that has nothing to do with The Elder Scrolls universe, Oblivion, or anything else for that matter. It has its own lore and backgrounds Why should I download and play it? What makes Nehrim special is that the dev team packed the game world with so much detail and content that you couldn't possibly be bored no matter what direction you pick to walk in. This means that those copy n' paste dungeons with little to no life that were in the original Oblivion are gone and replaced with hand crafted shit. Everywhere. And it's gorgeous. These guys are good and have incredibly high standards of polish to their mods and Nehrim's the peak of that. 4 years of development, bitches! They somehow managed to shove 56 German professional voice actors into a studio and had the goddamned patience to lip synch it all afterwards. I don't speak German, but it sure sounds good to my English ears! The game's level mechanics are static and not leveled like Oblivion's. Everything in the game is hand crafted and placed from the equipment to the monsters to the trees. There are zones in the game where you should be and zones where you shouldn't be based on your level, but the game won't stop you from going there anyway for the most part. If you're level 15 in a level 3 area, you'll destroy everything. If you're level 3 in a level 15 area you'll get bent over and raped. Make sure you follow the install instructions, especially if you have Steam, or shit will blow up. Torrent: http://www.sureai.de/download/nehrim/NehrimInstall_1.0.7.5_EN.exe.torrent Download links: http://www.nehrim.de/dataEV.html Pics and more info: http://www.nehrim.de/ that sounds really cool. i haven't played oblivion in years for all the things that are supposed to be fixed in this TC... i'll see about taking this for a spin on the weekend. :)
thanks The prologue bit (before you reach the abbey) has some inviso-walls and (slightly lame at times) kill triggers to keep you from wandering in the wrong direction once you exit the initial underground area. Supposedly that goes away once you're allowed to play as you will, and isn't really representative of the rest of the game.
i don't think that'll bother me too much.
tbh, i felt oblivion could have used a little more railroading. i just hope that the game's quests will point me to the next higher level area when appropriate like WoW since this TC uses static levels instead of leveled lists like the original oblivion. They tell you a suggested level range as you're entering a new area (e.g. 7-14) and you may need to play more or less cautiously, depending on where you currently fall in that range.
I spent a while tonight screwing around in a 7-14 area, even though I'm just level 4, and it was doable, even though I had to be very careful, and cheese things a few times (e.g. beat three tough bandits by running backwards down the road constantly healing myself while taking the occasional swing at whoever was in the lead). Apparently it's safer to travel during the day and stick to the roads...
only played an hour or so last night. very high quality everything.
the voice acting really is good and it's really too bad i can't understand what they are saying and have to read subtitles. it's professional level stuff. Hey, there are some pretty good steam sales going on.
Anyone recommend Metro 2033 for $10? Also, anyone interested in a Lead and Gold gift pack for $20? (10 copies of the game! Wowowowowowo!) I have no idea if its fun or not. I wouldn't recommend Metro 2033 even if it was down to $1...
But yeah, some good sales indeed. The indie game packs were especially cool, but I resisted the temptation, because I'm sure in the end I wouldn't play all of them anyway, or only briefly... Metro 2033 - I enjoyed it, the gfx are good, loads of scripting. Good atmosphere, you will enjoy the firstrun for sure. The monsters are pretty cool. But it doesn't have much replayability
You'll get bored soon enough. Remember the repetitive oblivion gate levels that from a certain point on you finish by speedrunning straight to the crystal?
is awesome, get it!
Not for the weak though, hardcore platforming action. Also, play with a pad. now i'm replaying oblivion. -_-
Why? I'm having more fun with Nehrim than I remember having with Oblivion, by far. Just hit level seven and am farting around in...Elohim(sp?), the really big city, and regularly getting in way over my head in crypts and sewers, etc. and having to run for it. Nothing is awesome like getting attacked by a swarm of 20 or 30 little, tiny, midget (child?) skeletons. I'm probably going to head back to a lower-level area once I complete the one quest I have in this city. It's just too high-difficulty for me currently. Oh, and I just bought what I *think* is a forever-lit torch; there's no tooltip or anything, but "Eterna Torch" seems pretty obvious (and pretty cool). well, it started out initially to just test out performance.
for some reason, nehrim runs really really poorly. i can maintain ~60 fps in oblivion with distant *everything and max view range, but nehrim just chugs along at 10 or sometimes even less fps. what kind of machine do you have, pjw? i'm running on a core2duo 6300 which is pretty old these days, 3gb ram and a gefore gts 250. i guess it's more along the lines that i'd like to play nehrim, but oblivion will do instead. I'm running 64-bit Win7 on an Intel i5 2.66 with 8 gigs of ram and a geforce 9800. There are places it chugs slightly, but I haven't had any significant problems (other than two lock-ups and pretty common crashes on exit, which I get with Oblivion too).
Apparently there's one forest that's pretty bad, and most people have to turn off distant land while they're in there (no biggie, since you can't see it anyway). Maybe just try turning down your settings and making sure shadows are simple/off, no self-shadow, all that good stuff? You really are missing out... :( yeah, i've since noticed there are additional settings only available in the launcher that don't appear in the game. so i've got it running a little better now but the game looks fairly shitty. it's still pretty decent-- this is oblivion after all, but yeah, i have no shadows on (except canopy shadows, because with that off, forests look retarded).
it's really a great TC. all the areas look great with hand placed stuff. you know those oblivion mods that modify boring areas and make them much fancier and unique, it feels like that for most of the areas in nehrim. one of the things i've noticed though is that the TC hurts by not having some kind of ui system to show mob levels. yeah, the first instinct is to cry out 'it's intrusive and unrealistic!' but think about it for a minute: if you stumble onto a bear in the wilderness (heh.. yeah ok...) you'd be able to gauge it's relative strength by how large it is and how fast it seems to be moving. in WoW, for example, most mobs of the same type all look the same. they might be slightly bigger or darker, but that's it. telling me 'this mob is level 15' gets around the graphical limitation to give me information i should be able to figure out. but in oblivion, you have generic looking mobs of varying strengths with no way of knowing their power until you fight them. sure, you might learn 'diseased wolf' is weaker than 'rabid wolf' but the mob text only shows up when it's about 2 feet away from you. as a sort of band-aid, they included this ranged spell that will pop up a little dialog box telling me the level and hp of the mob i hit. but it's a rather clunky mechanic to use. but ok, i can understand that the oblivion engine has absolutely no way to display mob level in an easy way. which i guess brings me to the actual thing i'd have prefered: simply marking down the level range of each zone on the map. it'd look ugly, but it would have simplified things a lot more and let me plan out where i was going to go. for now, i have to stumble into a zone and only then read the zone text. so far, i haven't found a map mod with visible level ranges so i'm still stumbling around. :P but yeah, aside from those minor problems, the TC is still awesome. :) Flash adventure game, seems a bit like Samorost.
http://www.alchemiagame.com which i guess brings me to the actual thing i'd have prefered: simply marking down the level range of each zone on the map.
but...my immersion!!1! (Yeah, agreed, that would probably work better than the semi-trial-and-error approach.) "we're going for a minimalist design approach" = we suck at design so our game will look shit.
i don't see anything in common with halo in that game (which is a good thing anyway since halo is rubbish), they're obviously just trying to get attention by making that claim. Who said that?
I can read minds and Kona meant that they are going for a plain color minimal style because they are incapable of doing "better" textures. The game looks pretty bad in every aspect though. Zwiffle, stop reading Kotaku already. Well they said it in their trailer.
Minimalism can be good in other media, such as graphic design or art. In games though, you'd have to have fantastic architecture to pull it off. Like Nunuk's Geometry Competition where you can only use 10 textures. In the case of this game though, there was no architecture, just flat walls and some blocky terrain. I liked the GUI though. I disagree, you could say Mirror's Edge and Portal go with a minimalist approach to environement art, and those are both great looking games.
Not every game has to be Gears of War. Usually video games released to coincide with a movie release are very average. However in this case, Peter Jackson's King Kong from 2005 is a fairly good action game.
I say fairly good instead of great due to one major problem in the game - playing as Kong. While most reviewers liked that you could play as King Kong, I cringed everytime I was forced to attempt to control the beast. Playing from third person perspective, the controls for Kong are terrible. Especially in cramped quarters, the camera angle will suddenly jump from behind Kong to in front of him, meaning you have to press the backwards key instead of forwards. On top of this, fighting other giant beasts as Kong is nothing but a chore in mashing the keyboard as fast as you can hoping he'll actually do something. Then when he's grabbed a beast to perform his fatality, you've got to pound on the 'grab' key as fast as you can to kill it. Terrible. Fortunately, playing as Kong only takes up about 20% of the game. The rest is played as Jack as he repeatedly tries to get his love interest back. But that's not perfect either because you only get one gun at a time and limited amounts of ammo. At times your forced to play with spears that you find. Sure it makes the gameplay frantic and intense, but I'd rather take a leisurely stroll through paradise and admire the scenery without having to spear giant dinosaurs. The best thing about Peter Jackson's King Kong, and it's saving grace, is the level design. Although the engine looks slightly dated with pixelated 2D vegatation, the actual level design is great. Almost all of the game takes place on the island (apart from two awful city levels at the end) and there is enough variety in the texturing and scenery that it never gets old. The highlight for me was climbing up to the highest peak of the island, where Kong was sleeping. Atmospheric effects such as the lighting and fog look excellent and capture the creepy, mysterious fantasy island from the movie perfectly. So while the gameplay was slightly held back with some annoying challenges, in particular playing as Kong, the atmosphere and design of the fantasy island made up for it for me. Add cheats for unlimited ammo and a level skip for every Kong level, and this is a very good game. Maybe i'll take a break from action shooters and try a pretty adventure puzzle game.
Anyone played The Whispered World? Looks cute. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWfqNyfHUP4 I had a blast playing as Kong.
Agree with the level design comments though, I remember it beign very good. reread my comments from before, I seemed to have the complete opposite take on controls and camera use :)
Haha I know, I read your comments on it yesterday Nitin. Both IGN and Gamespot didn't seem to have too much of a problem either. One of them said the camera was a bit clunky, the other said they loved playing as Kong and wished there was more. Different strokes I guess...
I played TWW. It's a nicely drawn adventure game. The English voice of the protagonist is a little annoying, though (compared to the German original). The puzzles are mostly fairly easy and the playing field limited (several levels so to speak), just like many modern adventures. There are some logic puzzles, too. Some of which I found to be quite annoying. I stopped playing when reaching a certain one where I had to rearrange a mosaic by moving the pieces around using the one free spot in-between in order to form a crest.
I'm surprised there aren't more comic-style adventures these days. They seem easy enough to make with the proper artists. MI3 was cool, too. I mean now that the initially interfering OMG 3D! era is over. but just got myself Witcher enhanced edition, Crysis, Crysis Warhead and Stalker - Shadow of Cehrnobyl for $AU30.
Bring on christmas holidays. Good move. Crysis and Warhead are GREAT games! Regardless of what anyone says, they are a real blast, certainly on the firstruns. STALKER SOC is great too, really gritty and atmospheric.
The witcher - well I didnt play that one (yet), so I cant comment, but I have heard some good comments from other people about it :) It's an enjoyable game by and large, but I thought it also dragged on quite a bit at times. And I found its semi-linearity unncessary, maybe even a bit of an an immersion killer. You can't revisit previous regions (not an open world), and there are silly console-like barriers in the levels to make them feel larger, like small fences or rocks you can't jump over and are forced to run all the way around them. At what were they thinking when making that totally retarded mouseclick combat system?
I never had a problem with it myself, at least, it sure feels more involved than simply mashing the attack key until an enemy is down. If you rush the next attack, you'll only break the combo and risk getting yourself hurt. And I liked that aspect since it works great with multiple opponents circled around you. It's not perfect, but it works for me.
i like the sword combat system in witcher.
it's similar to gothic 2 which, incidentally, i found far superior to gothic 3. you've got to time your attacks and in the heat of battle, this is what makes it a challenge. i wish more games would do this instead of just favouring button mashing. also, i like that there are the different styles of attack for different types of monsters. it's not a very deep system, but it does make it a little more interesting. i never finished this game as i borrowed it off a friend but i've been thinking of picking up the enhanced edition for myself. my only gripe is that the over the shoulder camera is sometimes a little strange... usually it doesn't bob much but sometimes (randomly?) the camera will start to bob alot which is distracting. i think there's a mod out there that gets rid of that though, which would be great. why would you put view bob on a !3RD! person camera? 0.o It's basically like a quick time event: click the mouse at the right moment. In this sense, it's indeed better than Gothic 3 which is just click the mouse as fast or as consistently as possible (or at least hit the enemy before he can). Gothic 2 is different insofar as it allows for some variation (left, right, up) as well as blocking.
The ideal combat mode would require the player to both attack and block the enemy on the right side (dynamically), e.g. strike left when the enemy is blocking to the right, and counter his attacks accordingly. Has anyone tried Two Worlds 2, yet? I thought the first one was too flawed in comparison to other RPGs to be enjoyable, but maybe they've fixed the most glaring shortcommings.
yeah that's what I figured, 4 games for under $AU30 is a steal and I remembered readin positive comments about them too.
Might also finally fit in HL2 plus eps 1 and 2 in the holidays too :) Controls can be a bit clumsy, but apart from that I love this game. Good level design, very immersive, magic button which tells you which way to go is useful.
I dunno, the game is meat and potatos. The monsters are quite scary, the graphics are good, there are some good puzzles. The music is good. The guns feel good, and you can upgrade them. If you try hard to explore you find more useful stuff, things like that add to the experience. For me the game is like Resident Evil but with less bull. One thing about STALKER - I would recommend installing the Oblivion Lost mod. You dont need to install it, but it does improve the game a lot, without altering the feel of it too much. There are some things which the dev team removed just before release (which are still in the game data files!) like monsters, and O.L. puts them back in, basically. And it makes the guns more accurate, and whenever there is a "blowout" O.L. makes the effects a l00t cooler ;)
I just bougt the id super pack on steam, which comes with doom 3. Anyone know of any good mods besides the dark mod and the new hexen mod?
for the first time, and I'm loving it! Absolutely awesome game, almost as good as the second part. I recommend installing the mouselook patch though.
There are, surprisingly, quite a number of really high quality doom3 packs. Not necessarily mods, but just level packs and episodes.
Can't remember which ones (I played probably a good 50 releases for d3). Check here for some: http://doom3.filefront.com/files/Doom_III/Maps/Single_Player/;4340?sort=downloads&order_in=desc&limit=100&descriptions_in=0&summary_in=0#files i don't think it's that surprising actually. the colossal amount of work required must weed out all but the most diehard mappers/modders.
it sure weeded me out. ^_^; Yeah it must have aye. I mean there's some shitters in the bunch, but I would have thought Doom3 mapping would be fkn hard. And yet there's probably a good 20 high quality releases.
Perhaps it's the opposite and the great engine and ability to build a box room then throw in all sorts of prefabs makes it quite easy to map for. One thing I did notice - 95% of custom map releases follow the exact same indoor lab bullshit of Doom3. No one much branched out to other themes. Necros does that mean you scrapped your d3 map? You bastard I was looking forward to that! That's because the game's resources allow for nothing else. If you were to make something entirely different, you'd also have to be a good texture artist and a proficient modeller. And I take it the number of available custom texture sets is limited - not least because everything other than base style looks odd at best in that engine.
is Stalker SOC meant to run like total shit or is there some performance tweak I cant find?
GTX465 that's had no issues with anything else so far, including CoD MW1 and 2, but maybe this is a real resource hog? Did you install all of the gazillion of official patches?
This is probably a driver conflict. SOC ran fine on my old card, but I could never get the addon to work. It was always slow and unstable. No problems on the new card. Perhaps there's an older driver version or some hotfix/workaround that can make it work for you. 1.0005 or something.
Will look into drivers, havent had to so far for anything else. Witcher runs fine on max, will install Crysis/Warhead tomorrow to see how that fares. http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/action/stalker/download_6169713.html
Useful if it works for you. Also make sure you patch STALKER. Are idtech4. Is that not basically true? They run good on old systems. I mean they are well made games, but they dont have bump-mapping or super hi-res textures or anything.
You should be able to run Crysis on very high with a GTX465, or Crysis Warhead on Enthusiast settings, and get 30fps :) will look at it again tomorrow. But will install Crysis first to see what performance I get there.
Witcher runs great though. Started out as idTech3! (after some more reading), but by now it is very heavily modified, to the point where it is a seperate engine in its own right.
IW's engine is alright, but when Treyarch gets it for their games they tend to butcher things and break things that used to work, and just turn it into an awful series of unfortunate events. Makes me nervous when Treyarch releases 'tools' for Blops (whatever that means.)
MW1/MW2 run great on my crappy nvidia 7600GT. Sadly, blops performance sucks on my system, not worth playing until I upgrade.
Bullets don't kill people. Just play mw2 or a real FPS like q3,nexuiz/xonotic, oa, aa, &c.
Just attempted to play Second Sight (2004). It's a third person game, although you have a first person view as well, but none of controls work from first person, which is retarded.
I got to the third level and decided it was too crap to continue with. First game I've ever quit so early. The level design was from the 90s, the gameplay was slow and annoying. Too much fucking around just to fire your gun. Let alone fucking around with all your stupid psychic abilities. Movement was butchered. And what's worse is the constant alarms that go off as soon as a scientist sees you. Pass. Area 51 next I think, if I can install it. http://www.humblebundle.com/ numero 2
Even the free downloadable version of Area 51 (with advertising) failed to install. Guess i'll have to torrent it. In the meantime, I played Quake 4...
With Quake and Quake 2 being my two favourite games of all time, and will unlikely ever be beaten, it would be hard for me not to have high hopes for Quake 4. It didn't make much difference that id Software had dropped the job into the talented Raven Software's mits. Heretic, Hexen, Soldier of Fortune, Star Trek Voyager and all their sequels; these were all solid, professional and, most importantly, fun games. So Raven taking over the Quake duties is almost as good as id doing it themselves. And as it turned out, Quake 4 felt like a superior game to Doom 3. While Doom 3 took place almost entirely inside tight futuristic bases, unfortunately Quake 4 didn't try to re-invent the wheel here and is almost exactly the same. The only difference is there are more outdoor areas and the level design is a little better. Everything is easier to see, there's much more variety in design, although it's still only the 'base' style, so expecting Painkiller level of variety will leave disappointed. While there aren't huge awe-inspiring set-pieces, it's all solidly good looking. Sadly, the id Tech 4 engine just doesn't seem capable of doing huge, sprawling areas. So Raven are stuck with a corridor crawl similar to Doom 3. Having said that there are some big outdoors areas, but they are lacking in detail. The three biggest levels are the vehicle-based ones. And these copped a lot of flack from players suggesting they ruin the game. As it turned out, only 3 in 33 levels are vehicle based, and one of them is only several minutes long. In all, a maximum of 10% of the game would be vehicle based. While the engine is restricted, the way it does lighting looks fantastic, especially when your team-mates have their flashlights on and they're cast all over the inner depths darkened base. So it's a shame there have been very few games using id Tech 4, just Prey, Quake Wars and Wolfenstein following. Gameplay in Quake 4 was all solid. The enemies had plenty of variety and all looked fantastic. It's just disappointing that they weren't more closely related to Quake 2. The Berserker, Gunner and a few others were there, but not recognisable from Quake 2. Different attacks, speeds and difficulty means they're basically new enemies. Iron Maiden was a little more obvious, but again apart from being female, could be a completely different enemy. Arguably the more fearsome of Quake 2, the Gladiator, makes a return in Quake 4. But he's quite different; slower with a railgun that seems easier to avoid. So while there weren't many similarities, in some respects and homage aside, it's probably a good thing because the Quake 2 enemies were very basic in their attacks compared to Quake 4. This isn't 1998 anymore. Most of the weapons make a return. The Machine Gun is much better, there's no Double Shotgun but the Single Shotgun packs enough of a punch to play almost the entire game through just with these two weapons. The Hyper Blaster, now your fourth weapons, is a good switch up as it packs a punch but also has plenty of ammo. Grenade Launcher, Railgun, Lightning Gun are all very similar to Quake 2. The Rocket Launcher is a little faster but requires reloading, meaning I didn't use it much. The new gun is the Nailgun, which is very fast paced but I didn't find it to be particularly effective compared to the Machine Gun/Shotgun combination. I played on medium difficulty and it was fairly spot on. The first half of the game was fairly easy and it was a long time before I died, but the second half steadily got tougher with some great boss battles to finish the game off. So overall I really liked Quake 4. It did feel like another Raven game; very similar in level design to their others, but that's a minor criticism because all their games look good. And with id Tech 4, great! While it doesn't live up to the groundbreaking prequels, it's great to have a solid, fun, return to Stroggos. With slightly better level design and much more fast-paced gameplay, I preferred it over Doom 3. BTW any good quake4 single players maps/mods out there? I've got:
cold_steel q2base q4spubilitus Use_Destruction-1.2 strombine None of them look too promising though. Certainly doesn't have the community Doom 3 got. Ubilitus is pretty good, I recently played it.
q2base, is it that thing where you can play through q2's first map in q4? I recommend playing q2 instead. doom3 has quite a few large caliber mods going, yeah... with q4, people seem to have focused on the multiplayer, which failed, ironically. just idle musing... but it always seems like SP/MP seems to divide the playerbase creating content with the result that you just get less of each.
...for the extensive review, [Kona]--it was fun to read.
Q4 was the first game I worked on at Raven, and I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's probably the idtech4 game I enjoyed the most compared to the other two I've played (Doom3 & Prey)
Sadly, the id Tech 4 engine just doesn't seem capable of doing huge, sprawling areas.
ETQW. Corridor shooters aren't inherently bad. A well done corridor shooter can still be a nice game. As it turned out, only 3 in 33 levels are vehicle based, and one of them is only several minutes long. In all, a maximum of 10% of the game would be vehicle based. I think the main problem is that these disrupt the flow of the classic FPS parts of the game. It's like, "OK player, I want you to drive a hovertank now, and you will comply". That kills the flow. Pretty sure it's more levels with vehicles as well, if you count the rail shooting vehicle levels (vehicle MG while you're being chauffeured around). The Rocket Launcher is a little faster but requires reloading, meaning I didn't use it much. True, although the game is overall slower than q2, and you get an upgrade that lets you shoot three rockets in a row, or something like that. Matter of taste I guess. The new gun is the Nailgun, which is very fast paced but I didn't find it to be particularly effective compared to the Machine Gun/Shotgun combination. I found the nailgun's alternate fire mode very useful against flying enemies, like Heavy Hovertanks. Also used it against normal tanks and maidens when I was low on health. The game has grown on me since I first played it, especially for a lack of other 'solid' id-style FPS games to play. It seems that FPS which are merely 'solid' get sneered at for being not creative enough, but they turn out being hard to top. Concerning the level design, yes it is super linear, which isn't the worst thing for a pure shooter, but upon closer inspection the levels try to impress with a large scale, but details cluster around the most likely route the player is going to take... and I would have liked a lot more items scattered around the many empty corners. Doom 3 does the latter thing very well. You're always rewarded for going off track in Doom 3, not so much in Q4. I do like the enemies and weapons in Q4 for the most part, especially the tacticals with their variety of gear are nice. My main objection is that the mandatory vehicle lessons, rail shooting and pointlessly running around on a spaceship kills the flow of the game. The best stretches are those where you're mostly alone and where the gameplay is classic corridor crawling, like the stretch from the medical labs across the dispersal and waste processing stuff. I liked the walker mission, btw. A walker is somehow more FPS-like than a tank. I wish there were more walkers scattered around the game, but optional. As it is, it's a one trick pony that the player has to grudgingly use, instead of a cool addon that players can use whenever they feel like it. The walker could have featured in a boss battle, a la 'Alien'. ok, enough text. but every time I saw an outdoor area with a vehicle I wanted to throw myself out my window, they were bad :(
The indoor shooty stuff was excellent though, and I will never forget being turned into a Strogg, that was really well done :) Vehicle sections and cooperative multiplayer are killing shooters. Every fucking modern game has to have them, no matter the cost.
The cost usually being gameplay. I don't want to play with shitty AI that tries to be clever - the best they can do is stay the fuck out of the way and let me play the game. I don't want complex shit; there are plenty of RTS games where I can get that. Who mandated that all shooters have to be like fucking Halo? I don't want to play with shitty AI that tries to be clever - the best they can do is stay the fuck out of the way and let me play the game. I don't want complex shit; there are plenty of RTS games where I can get that.
And this, too. It's because of tards like PC Gamer that give it a 70% just because it isn't different enough. They demand shitty Halo vehicles, and teammates (halflife might have been the cause of that thanks to Barney), and all sorts of other RTS or RPG crap when all I want is a fun shooter. Thank god it didn't have bullet time.
I actually quite like linear games. I don't get lost then and know i'm always on the correct path. I'm yet to play a real sandbox game... the thought of veering off course and ending up 10mins in the wrong direction scares me. But yeah Q4 was VERY linear. They could have had a little more exploration. Actually some outdoor terrain levels would have been nice too, there were some nice ones in Q2 and the mission packs (beginning of The Reckoning was cool). From the "How the fuck did I miss this?" files: I just learned Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is coming out in november '11. Teaser trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGMOMkACtn4 Now, I'm one of Oblivion's biggest fans, having sunk at least 500 hours into it (seriously), so you can imagine the amount of frosty white spooge clinging to my monitor and keyboard after I heard this news. I'm aware of Oblivion's faults. The levelling system is illogical, counter-intuitive, and just plain shite. The melee combat is about as deep as a spilled drink. The character animation is some of the worst I've seen in a commercial title. None of that stopped me from coming back to the game time and time again like the abused little whore that I am. i'm replaying oblivion now too which meant i was very excited when i heard about skyrim. :o
i actually started by playing nehrim, but frankly, i prefer the completely unstructured gameplay of oblivion more. so yeah, here's hoping skyrim will have decent animation and more fluid player movement. (movement in oblivion is like a preview camera in a 3d editor). You should try Nehrim (see my post 3805). It's really pretty amazing, and I'm actually enjoying it more than I did Oblivion...
Re: Skyrim, if they just fix the horrid world-levels-with-you horseshit from Oblivion, I'll be satisfied. If they add back in some of the variation and downright weirdness in the world that was present in Morrowind, make the lockpicking and persuade mini-games a bit less braindead and more challenging, and add back in a few things that they removed (e.g. mark/recall, levitation, greater armor/weapon variety, etc.) then I'll actually be excited. looking back, i seem to remember i liked morrowind a lot more than oblivion. i'm sure some of that is because it was the first time i had ever played such an open ended game, but it's more than just that.
morrowind's world felt much more mysterious for some reason and the ruins you could explore (dwemer and daedric) seemed cooler and more distictive. there was also the fact that for most of the game, you never have to travel east of the red mountain, so there was this feeling of awe that you hadn't even explored that area yet. oblivion has ayleid, caves and forts and only the ayleid ruins are fun to explore for me. they usually have some small amount of button pushing and sometimes even puzzles. they also tend to loop back in clever ways. caves tend to feel like long slogs and forts just look very boring with a few exceptions. also, a lot of parts of the map seem to be unused (or nearly so). the mountainous area in the north east and southwestern forests are very sparsely populated with dungeons. as for lock picking, i thought it was fairly well done, but i disliked how the game paused while you did it. it would be unreasonable for the gameworld to continue though, because the lockpicking minigame does take a while to do. as a compromise, a lockpicking minigame that is shorter so it can work in realtime would be much appreciated. i didn't really like morrowind's RNG lockpicking. it was realtime, but as braindead as oblivion's persuasion system. Also interested in Skyrim here. I pretty much like all of the Elder Scrolls main titles so far, from Arena to Oblivion. They each have their own pros/cons but I like them for what they are. I only wish Daggerfall didn't seem so unfinished.
Skyrim is definitely up there in my waiting list. Yeah, the rating of any game is supposed to go from 0% to 100%, not 60 to 100.
At the same time its very frustrating when someone reviews your game who doesn't like gametype X in question - if you've made a golf game and the reviewer wants to play an RPG then you'll get a bad score. Basically 99.9% of the gaming press is worthless as an informative tool, word of mouth being much better. Or word of forum etc. I hear what you're saying with lineal games, but the best games always give the impression of nonlinearity, even if they're stuck on the rails - HL2 for example. Nobody tried the roguelike? at work for about 3 minutes.
I went through the tutorial, or at least the first level, and then I got killed by a level 9 goat. pjw - Yeah that Nehrim thing looks interesting. I may have to check it out sometime.
Worth noting also, for all the fun I had with Oblivion, I really didn't like Fallout 3 much at all. I played it and completed the main quest (which took a shamefully short amount of time), and had absolutely no desire to play any more of it. I think it was mostly to do with the setting - I found the ubiquitous grey barren wasteland just boring visually, and I'm no fan of 1950's chic either. Also, I thought "VATS" took all the tension and excitement out of combat, and you soon learn that shooting manually isn't really an option either (way too ineffective). I really liked Fallout 3, and I probablgy prefer New Vegas over Oblivion. The writing is alot more interesting, and there's generally more stuff to do.
I very rarely used VATS, even while playing on the hardest difficulty. Really looking forward to Skyrim. You're supposed to die on the goat.
I'm bored of it now, it lacks texture to be a great game. It's not bad though. Having just played through Quake 4, which was released six months after Area 51 in 2005, it'll be easy to draw comparisons in that both themes are modern base.
Quake 4 received it's share of undue criticism, with an aggregate score of 81% on gamerankings.com. Area 51, meanwhile, scored an aggregate of 78% so only marginally behind, but both IGN and Gamespot both rated Area 51 as better than Quake 4. Nevertheless, it seems to be a fairly obscure title on the PC despite many positive reviews. I asy obscure, because it was eventually released for free (with advertising). But that version crashed on install for me, and I couldn't find a second-hand version to purchase. Even then it took two torrent versions before I finally got a working copy. The PS2 version was thought to be the best FPS ever at the time, although that's not saying much. This led me to go in expecting a gem of a game. Unfortunately, my expectations were not met. From the design perspective; both the power of the engine and the level design, Quake 4 eats Area 51 for breakfast. Some of the earlier Area 51 levels look quite bland. Since the entire game takes place in an under Area 51, I guess the designers were trying to maintain some realism in the design. With realism comes bland, futuristic walls and textures. Later in the game levels start to get more variety with the peak being the alien world and UFO ships. However, while the engine is capable of something great, the level design doesn't ever reach awe-inspiring. Good, but not great. The mess of a story was a bit hard to understand. Near the end of the game I wasn't sure if I was still in Area 51, the alien world, or who the bad guy even was! David Duchovny's monotone mumbling didn't help at all. He really should stick to acting. And Marilyn Manson was a waste of money; I could have voiced the characters better. At the end of the day, you won't be playing Area 51 for it's story anyway. Your playing for the action... Action which was fairly fun and fast all the way through. The dual-weilding of weapons is fantastic and doubles your fire-power. Having two shotguns go off in quick succession, blowing your enemies away, was a great feeling. However when your down to just one weapon at a time, they feel a bit weak. Unfortunately, it took me most of the game before I realised that the BBG, a powerful gun in it's own right, is self-regenerating. Along with this, you get the half-man/half-mutant idea also done in Quake 4, where you can transform into mutant and use it's abilities. Every kill you make while in mutant-mode gives you health back. Area 51 definitely does this idea better than Quake 4 and makes it mean something with the gameplay. In Quake 4 you wouldn't know the difference. Provided you don't overuse the BBG, Area 51 is still quite a challenging game. Now to the cons: the biggest problem with Area 51 is, firstly, no quicksave. You're forced to use 1-3 checkpoints through each level. Fortunately they're usually in useful places so you don't have to do much replaying, but I still loathe the idea of no quicksave in a fast paced FPS. Perhaps developers think if your forced to replay much of the game then it'll extend the overall playtime. Even so, it's still only barely a 10 hour game. And secondly, the game would come to a crashing halt at the end of almost every level for me (with a total of 18 levels). With no quicksave, i'd have to replay from the previous checkpoint only for it to crash again. I was forced to use someone elses saved games in order to load each level. However it wasn't such a big deal compared to most games, because your ammo and health in Area 51 are often 100% anyway. So overall, Area 51 is definitely a decent game to play alongside the best of 2005. Just don't expect anything groundbreaking. How do the SMB leaderboards work? Or how to make sense of them - 0, 100, 101 and so on. And why are you so good.
And why did MS drop gameport support in Win7... Managed to get my hands on this on Steam when it finally became available to UK/EU and finished it last night. Keeping it brief, it was an amazing and enjoyable game. It's like it took many elements from various other games and combined them into a solid title, while having its own distinguished feel. Combat felt right and the visuals have a nice presentation.
Still need to gather my thoughts however, considered giving it a full review while I'm still inspired for it. Hmm. Bioshock 1
Just Cause 2 Left for Dead 2 Half Life 2 Episode Two from the Steam Sale later tongiht, any other recommendations for good bargains? What do you not have?
Just Cause 2 is similar to Red Faction: Guerilla, which is a ton of fun if you have the physics card to support it (or good dx10 card.) I would say if you are interested and it's ~$10 or less then pick it up! for $15 looks like one of the better specials today, even if you're just interested in the SP. It's short but ultra polished and really fun IMHO.
actually I'll list post 2005 games I have :
The Witcher EE Call of Duty MW Call of Duty MW2 Call of Duty WoW Crysis Crysis Warhead Stalker SoC Question: If I get L4D2, is there any point in getting L4D1? I prefer L4D2 - more weapons, better effects, much better gore. But if you like the game and want more then get L4D1 too. They are both great.
There's a pack of both games I think - you lose money buying L4D1 alone now.
Well reccomend it as well, you also get a lot of additional content in the form of free DLC and the game is maintained - very polished gameplay. If it's on sale for $5, grab it. The question whether to get both became more valid when they ported the first L4D campaign to L4D2, so the first game is kind of reduced to three individual campaigns.
Also be sure not to get the Low Violence versions if you're buying from Australia!!! at the moment. Grabbed 2, will consider grabbing 1 before sale ends.
negke, cant seem to avoid the low-violence versions for Aus (no R rating for games) but have googled a couple of hacks which supposedly work. Not a very good game IMO. Very poor plot, game dynamics are "blow up a building and grab these random pieces of metal as 'salvage'".
I think they were aiming at 9-11 y/o boys with that game. Installed, played and completed today. Fun game, lovely art and level design and good parkour mechanics. I also loved sliding along the floor to pick up a gun and firing it an enemy during the later stages, really made gunfights more interesting.
Though three specicif spots really annoyed the hell out of me as they didn't seem to 'work' as intended. Example, during the last segment of the Jack-knife level. There were three pipes I had to jump between, but Faith would never jump for the last one as she should do causing a painful death. Did this everytime, and only got lucky when she decided to 'glitch' onto the bottom and managed to climb up. The other two problem areas were also similar unresponsive situations, one I succeeded by screwing up with a double 180 key tap. Ironic. Mass Effects 1 + 2 on sale on Steam for $10.00 each. If you haven't picked these up, pick them up, they are amazing. I beat Mass Effect 2 basically in a weekend, this game was so damn good. Remember it is fundamentally an RPG and secondarily a shooter, but man were these games good.
That sucks, a lot. The violence and gore in L4D2 is very good, proper 18-rated zombie carnage. Hope the hacks work.
for $9.99 each (a;though you cant still get 1 for that price).
But picked up Batman Arkhan Asylum today.for $7.50. Tried to play Resident Evil 4. Needs a tonne of mods to make it decent on PC, including mouse support. But there was no way of customising the mouse buttons (I use mouse buttons for forward and back), so I won't be playing this fuckin game.
Such simple things to fuck up on. halfway through The Witcher and great game really.
Only gripes so far: Combat system seems a bit shit at first but you get used to it and its no less daft than others I've seen in the genre, in fact the varying combat styles and different skill moves work quite well in large group combats. It does feel a little easy though, playing on medium but dont seem to die or feel threatened all that often. Everything else: first rate. I use mouse buttons for forward and back
I thought I was the only person in the world who does this. Every time someone finds out (or, God forbid, tries to do something in-game while my config is running), they look at me like I just declared my love for eating dirt, or that I regularly speak with aliens or whatever craziness... I can't think of anything else that works better than the mouse buttons for forward/back. I think Shambler does it that way too.
Just playing through Brothers In Arms Road to Hill 30. Fuck this game is ass. I'll still finish it I guess... I used to have a similar config myself. But at some point I got tired of always having to customize the controls when starting a new game, so I switched to the default one. Haven't regreted it a single moment ever since.
I was never really into Quakeworld or Netquake, and when I played Quake before HL1 I would have used the arrow keys for movement etc. But the Half-Life 1 tutorial, that's how I learned my current style of playing.
No one here probably cares about a review for a crappy 2005 game, but I make a point of mini-reviewing every game I play, just for my own record.
Now that i've played this, I guess Aliens: Colonial Marines isn't going to be my kind of game either when it's released next year. Oh well. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 REVIEW This is probably the least enjoyable first person shooter i've played since Halo. Which isn't something I would have expected coming from a studio like Gearbox Software; although they were involved in the PC version of Halo. However their Half-Life expansion packs were both excellent. I'm probably biased, because what I really want is one-man-army style gameplay. I don't really want to have to use strategic war tactics with my teammates in order to defeat the enemy. The idea in BIA is to have one team firing on the enemy while you (and another team) flank them to catch them off guard. This gets boring pretty quick, and in the end I just got tired of having to use these tactics. Unfortunately if you don't, it's a very difficult game. Even on easy skill setting you can't play the entire game as you would any other first person shooter. The enemy will mow you down with bullets in no time. The other problem is that there's no quicksave. Now a few checkpoints per level aren't too bad in some shooters. But when you have a realistic shooter where a few shots could kill you and there's no way to replenish your health, it's very frustrating to have to go back several minutes to a previous checkpoint. What's worse is your health meter is useless. Eventually after a certain amount of shots it'll go red, then after a certain amount more you'll die. It should have been an exact progressive meter, not an inconsistent colour change. To add to the frustration your teammates are quite useless. On a few levels they managed to get themselves killed by mortar attacks within minutes of the level starting. If I didn't micro-manage them, they'd walk directly into a machine gun and be dead in seconds. Gearbox made the weapons more realistic than standard shooters. That means you can be standing point-blank in front of your enemy and still somehow miss them. The aiming is designed to be imperfect. I simply found it frustrating rather than a good realistic feature. And finally we come to the level design and graphics which, again, are a big let down. The levels are all very flat, decorated with bland buildings/houses and fields. The textures are all uninspiring and drab. The only memorable parts of the game were defending a couple of good looking churches. Overall, the design is not up to the standards of Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, while the gameplay was a nice try for something different, but for me it got frustrating by the end. Not yet Ricky... my playlist for the remaining 2005 games looks like this:
Battlefield 2 Call of Duty 2 F.E.A.R. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory So it's not far away :) Then I can move on to about a dozen 2006 games I missed, which, apart from maybe Gears Of War, all look ho hum. I guess 2006 was a bad year for PC shooters. Gears of War 1 is, imo, pretty bleh.
Gears of War 2 improves on it a lot. More varied enemies, more weapons (and the weapons that were already in are tweaked) and more imaginative locations etc. Real shame it's not on the PC, and that it is clearly still designed to be played in coop. Single player the game is twice as hard and quite infuriating in places. It is also still horrifically embarressing to play though... the stylisation and dialogue are so cringeworthy. Simple rule: You can't have a meaningful story about war and death, and have chainsaws. It just doesn't work. i learned on Descent, where you need two more movement keys easily accessible (and space feels shitty for anything but single pressees), so my setup was wasd but shifted to the right so that my thumb could rest on the alt key (usually ijkl). Switched to 8uio for more keys a few years ago, though...
finally played through it today. loved it. pretty much knew what to expect from the gameplay but it was the narrative that impressed me the most.. from the dark humour, sarcasm and mind games to the eventual descent into madness, GLaDOS was a fantastically developed character, and the end credits were just plain awesome
the only letdown was that i was hoping it would tie in with the HL2 story a little more closely and provide more insight into aperture sciences and what happened with the borealis. it's a completely different game though at the end of the day so i probably shouldn't have expected too much... although i did notice the aperture vs. black mesa slideshow projecting in one of the conference rooms, which was a nice touch Plus Bioshock 1 & 2. I've played through the Bioshocks, Portal, and the Left 4 Deads on the 360. So many games to play..
Hopefully cs:s/q3 will replace CoD:BO for me in terms of a mp fps I play regularly, I'm really starting to hate duty.
Installed Battlefield 2. Turns out it's single player is just capture the flag style botmatches. Fuck that.
So I played through Chaos Theory instead. Review: I am, first and foremost, a fan of action-oriented shooters. Not stealth. However I can tolerate it. I played through Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, and it was one of the most memorable games I've ever played. The Chronicles of Riddick also had it's fair share of stealth. Just as long as there's a good story and atmospheric design to go with the game, then I can tolerate stealth. Now Thief 3 definitely had an enthralling story and it's graphics, with great level designs and lighting, were excellent. Which meant I could put up with the sometimes frustrating gameplay. Chaos Theory, on the other hand, was weak the in the storyline and the design sometimes looked a bit bland. However the actual stealth gameplay was a fair bit more enjoyable. Probably 90% of the enemies I ended up taking out; by means of strangling them unconcious, hitting them in the head or a gun shot. So it meant I wasn't going back and forth creeping around enemies. The actual gunfights in Chaos Theory were frustrating though. If you only have one enemy to hit then you have no problems, but taking on two or three is a problem because your weapons are very useless. Same enemies seem to take quite a lot of bullets before they finally die, and you simply don't have that many bullets to begin with. I guess it's designed this way so that you use your guns as little as possible. However I would have preferred more accurate weapons, but perhaps less ammunition. In the graphics area, Chaos Theory's lighting looks great. There's high contrast throughout and some great lighting effects. But you would expect this from a stealth game where shadows are an important element. The level design, however, could have been better. For most of the game it looked decent, but considering you move at snails pace and there's only ten levels, which are all fairly small, they could have focused on a lot more detail or set pieces. I mean they do all look good, but I could have designed these levels all single-handedly in six months. Ubisoft is one of the biggest game studios in the world. They had a dozen level designers working on the game. So, I'd expect the level design to be amazing, not just decent. The story is supposedly a big part of the game as your chasing terrorists in a plot to launch Korea and USA to war. However it was convoluted, boring and confusing. The story fell flat. The only positive here was the often amusing humour of the main character. So what is the best thing about Chaos Theory? The soundtrack, composed by Amon Tobin. Overall Chaos Theory has no replay value for me. By the end of the game, which was a good ten hours, I was getting bored with it. Not helped by having to repeat the entire last level after because a killed one of the enemies, not realising I needed him for a retinal scan. The game has a few of these gameplay bugs that should have been ironed out in testing. Another time a scripted sequence never triggered, meaning I was completely stuck. If you like stealth games though, it's fairly enjoyable. You mention enjoying Thief 3, ever played the first two? Not going to get in any 'superior' debates, just wondering out of interest is all.
Nah quakis, I tried to play the first one when it first came out. Didn't like the gameplay much. I found the gameplay in Thief 3 a little frustrating as well, there's just a little too much shadow crawling. It'd be better if you could more successfully take enemies out like you could in Splinter Cell. But I loved the level design and story of T3, which is what made it memorable to me. The older 2 wouldn't look as good, so I wouldn't go back to them now. There needs to be more games in the style of T3, instead of realistic settings all the time.
First two Thief games are probably the most immersive and enjoyable games I've played so far. Such a rich setting with so much background and detail, the non-linear(ish) approach in each mission. Some few years ago when I almost finished up Thief 2, I was getting upset that this will be pretty much it, until I discovered all the fan missions that have been released (and continue to).
As for Thief 3? I absolutely cannot say anything about it (besides clunky movement) since the game crashes too often to get a good session out it, which kinda sucks as I want to actually play through it. proved good. Also picked up Batman:AA and Far Cry 2. Now need time to play all these, Wich is about 70% complete I think.
As for L4D2, managed to get hack around Low Violence but only for Single Player, not online play :( What's your Steam name OR poke someone to get you into the Func Steam group so we can get some L4D2 games going.
Just play through each campaign in SP, that should be enough to get into it. Then you're basically ready to shoot Shambler in the back or vice versa.
Is it n_gul-something ;) ?
L4D is frantic. Just get on a server and start playing. Rules: Dont shoot eachother. You can vote abusers off. People dont mind a couple of accidents though.... Stick together. If someone goes off on their own for example, a person should try and keep close to them, 2 by 2 if you see what I mean, but really you are better off as a unit of 4. Right Mouse Button to push zombies back (when trying to reload for example) is invaluable, and used all of the time. It will also get special infected off of a person sometimes. Set a Tank special infected on fire where possible. Conserve health - when you are going to die (get knocked over too many times) the screen will go black and white. This is a good time to use medikits if they are sparse. Even if it means hobbling around slowly for a while. If you know you are gonna get owned by zombies then save the health. Dont startle the witches unless you know you can kill them. Which you dont. Keep the flashlights off. If a witch is in a bottleneck area then go past her one at a time. If she startsn to sound more agited then wait for her to calm down before the next person. I think I added you. Send me an invite for a L4D2 game if I'm online, if im not busy I still play that game, love it! steam name is nitin77, alternatively email is n_gulati at hotmail dot com (which seems to be how ricky found it).
Thought I did. Looking at it now and there's not much to set up, unless I'm missing something.
After 30 hours of playing, a few comments:
Like the others said, this is really impressive. The world is huge, the design excellent and very detailed, the voice acting superb. The fact they hired professional voice actors already accounts for a lot. I can understand how (if) you keep from playing it through as it must be annoying to play such a game with subtitles only. I haven't played any Oblivion mods before, but I did play many Gothic1/2 mods - which were good, sometimes great, but none of them had such a high level of quality as Nehrim. I like how they beefed up some of Oblivion's core systems, like for example how you now get Learn points when leveling up (or reading certain skill books) and can use them to advance your skills at certain teachers, like in Gothic. However, it's very expensive. There are also plants that grant permanent boni, and spell runes to discover, which teach you powerful spells without requiring a teacher (and gold). A problem, or at least a little downside, is that there seem to be only few quests in relation to the huge size of the world. In Oblivion, you can enter a new village or town and be sure to find at least one side quest. In Nehrim, there are good side quests too, but it seems to focus more on the (apparently long) main quest. So often you pass through settlements which are nice to look at, but don't offer any interaction apart from merchants. And, related to that and the size of the map, you often have to travel enormous distances from the start of your quest to the destination and back. It doesn't help that quick travel is disabled - though I agree it makes sense. You can teleport to certain locations of you find someone who can teach you the corresponding spell, but even then it still requires a teleportation crystal (which you can buy or find), so you can't teleport at your leasure unless you're rich and well-stocked. I'm not sure if the fact that I chose to play with a Half-Aetherna affects the gameplay in this sense and results in a reduced number of side quest offerings - as that race is disliked or despised by many humans and they often don't want to talk to me. Can any of you other verify? I assume, however, this is not the case and they would just give another reply to other races while still not offering any more interaction. In Oblivion, regular NPCs could at least be talked to for generic information. While most of the environments are impressive, more individual and unique than in Oblivion with its many duplicate levels, some feel too stretched-out. For instance, the underground journey to the dwarven city, as cool as it was, became tedious after a while. Not because there were so many enemies, but because they were fairly strong and the way was so long. As a result of this, huge size vs. seemingly low number of side quests, it feels like I'm beginning to lose interest (already started to noclip around), so I'm going to focus on the main quest now. And yes, all the additional details and more open outside environments have a huge impact on the performance, indeed. The Oblivion engine never scaled well, but in Nehrim it's sometimes extreme. I had to switch back to XP as on Win7 some areas just slowed the game down to a crawl (on high settings anyway). So it might not be much fun if your machine specs are only just above Oblivion's standard requirements.
Yeah I've been playing it too (same, around 30 hours in), and I agree with most of what you say.
All in all it's a great mod, I highly recommend it for fans of Elder Scrolls and Gothic games, and also, don't be put off by the very boring, linear and slow introduction, once you're out in the world you can really go wherever you want. I hated the the lack of fast travel at first, but it does make sense, and I'm rich now, so cash to buy teleport crystals is no longer a problem (the easiest way to become rich, like in Oblivion, is to make lots of potions, and sell them). Yeah it does feel strange to enter a village, and no one will have some silly side-quest for you to do, that's a bit disappointing. But the dungeons are diverse enough that just exploring them for loot is nice, better than in Oblivion where everything feels the same. really liked this, cant wait for Witcher 2.
I hope the sequel has a bit more monster variety though. Witch 1 had plenty but more big cool creatures are needed :) Also played Modern Warfare 1 for about 2 sittings, maybe 6 hours in total. I think I'm upto the last level, ridiculously short game although its probably because its exteremely polished. But FFS, the first 3 levels or so ar every annoying considering you cant do anything but what you're meant to do and only in one way. Thankfully, once they drop you in more normal levels, you have freedom to roam and kill your enemies as you please, not some scripted one way bullshit. supposed to be gothic4? how did i miss that? :S
is that any good? maybe a little more stable and efficient than gothic3? Is skipable really, get Risen instead if you want more Gothic in my opinion (or play Nehrim :).
i'm clearly the exception here because after playing nehrim for a few hours, i went back and played oblivion for about 2 or 3 weeks. :P :P
but thanks for the tip re: risen. :) So I splashed out on a new pc for Christmas and am buying a bunch of games that would not run well on my old rig at all, I just wanted to check in with your guys that I'm not missing anything awesome!
Just Cause 2 Mass effect 2 Dragon Age : origins Dead Space Star craft 2 Assassins Creed Modern Warfare 2 That's what I've played so far, ones I'm not too sure about: Bad Company 2 Fallout 3 / Vegas Assassins Creed 2 Witcher Anything I missed that needs to be checked out? I'm not too into strategy or racing games! Bad Company 2 was like a Modern Warfare game - some of the levels were huge and breath taking though. Really over the top action/story, etc
Fo3/Vegas are good if you like ugly open world RPGs with a lot of exploration and content. AC2 is like AC1 with a bit more stuff from what I understand - I hated AC1 so I skipped it other than what I've heard from people at work. Witcher I heard was good, weird combat though. Rogue Trooper is one of the lesser-known shooters of 2006. Although it was third-person, this is still your typical action shooter. And when your in cramped spaces the camera reverts almost to first-person anyway.
So your setting is nothing new; the galactic other-worlds which look remarkably like earth, as seen in everything from Unreal II to Halo. There are 12 levels which take you from bases, more bases, mountains, cities. There are, unfortunately, two 'rails' levels, but they aren't as bad as some games. The design and graphics are a little average for 2006. I've seen much better. There's nothing breathtaking here, but having said that it's not poor either. The design is simply adequate. Linear, lacking detail, but enough variety and decent enough to keep you satisfied throughout the game. The gameplay is a mixed bag. Rebellion tried to do things differently here by giving you a live 'shop' you can purchase from at any time during gameplay. So there's not ammo or health scattered around the levels. Instead your have to find scrap, which somehow is turned into cash which you can use to purchase ammo, health, upgrades to your weapons. It's not exactly realistic, but neither is a pumped blue-skinned trooper with demon eyes as your main character. The problem with this system is that your forced to search for scrap in order to purchase enough ammo and health to stay alive. You can't complete a level, especially in the later stages, without purchasing. It also breaks up the flow of the game when your forced to purchase more health right in the middle of a firefight when your near death. Ultimately, I threw on an unlimited ammo cheat (and stuck to the weaker weapons throughout the game) so I didn't have to bother with the constant 'search for scrap... purchase ammo' rubbish. Ultimately the gameplay is a good challenge. Enemies are all the same, but weapons are fairly decent and the game never gets frustrating or too easy. Again, just like the design, the game is just getting by at being fun, but nothing memorable. The only problem with gameplay is often you'll be firing at enemies and for whatever odd reason, they just won't die. Not because they're invincible, but because apparently your not in a position where you can shoot them. When you've got an enemy well within sight, your crosshairs go red. But many times you can clearly see you've got them in sight, there are little obstacles, and yet the crosshairs won't go red and therefore you can pile hundreds of bullets into their heads and they won't die. One minor niggle in an otherwise fairly decent game. Decent because you don't go in expecting greatness with a game based on a 2000AD comic (sorry folks but Judge Dredd is horrid) from a studio that hasn't released anything worth playing since 1999's Aliens vs Predator. BTW Daz, here's my list of 2009/2010 games to play. I haven't played any yet (still working on 2005 so it'll be a few years before I even get to these ones). The score is an accumulative score from www.gamerankings.com, so it's fairly accurate. Also note I really only play single player actions/shooters.
2010========================================================================= Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 - ??? Oddbox (pc port unreleased) Sniper: Ghost Warrior - 54% (by City Interactive) James Bond 007: Blood Stone - 62% Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days (3rd person) - 63% Aliens vs. Predator (2010) - 68% Lost Planet 2 (3rd person) - 68% The Ball - 73% Medal of Honor - 75% Transformers: War for Cybertron - 75% Dead Rising 2 - 75% (action/survivor horror) Mafia II - 76% Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands - 78% Singularity - 78% Call of Duty: Black Ops - 79% Metro 2033 - 81% Darksiders - 82% Assassin's Creed II - 83% Just Cause 2 - 85% Bioshock2 - 87% Amnesia: The Dark Descent [Puzzle/Survival/Horror] - 88% Mass Effect 2 - 95% (action rpg) 2009========================================================================= Code of Honor 3: Desperate Measures (by City Interactive) - ??? Painkiller: Resurrection [Standalone Expansion Pack] - ??? ShellShock 2: Blood Trails - 41% Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition - (3rd person) - 61% NecroVisioN - 64% Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason - 69% Section 8 - 70% Killing Floor - 72% Shattered Horizon 73% Wolfenstein - 74% Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising - 75% Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood - 79% F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin - 79% X-Men Origins: Wolverine (3rd person) - 79% Ghostbusters: The Video Game (3rd person) - 80% The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena - 81% S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat - 82% Borderlands 82% Red Faction: Guerrilla (3rd person) - 85% Resident Evil 5 (3rd person) - 86% Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - 87% Left 4 Dead 2 - 89% Batman: Arkham Asylum (3rd person) - 93% see above, I really enjoyed Witcher.
You may as well get CoD: World at War and Crysis/Warhead too. How does black ops get a higher score than the ball? Black ops was bleh on the 360, nothing new. At all. Treyarch also royally destroyed mp. At leaat the ball was different.
Because Call of Duty is a big fanboy franchise like Halo, regardless of whether it's an actually immersive, well designed game. According to reviewers, Call of Duty Modern Warfare is the 2nd best fps of 2009, behind LFD2. I think most of the review sites just copy whatever score the big guns gave it.
I already have SC2! I got it from Tesco remember =)
friend me - darren.weekes@gmail.com I got to low silver league before I stopped playing, but I would be up for some games! Thanks for that list Kona, I will start working my way through it! Oh yeah lol.
It won't let me type in an email address as I've got gaybook disabled. Gimme your name / id instead yo. Shambler 946 Just finished the game. Truly epic stuff! I've never played user-generated content of such an incredibly (and consistently) high quality. This could easily be a commercial addon. Sure, there are a few glitches, and the fairly frequent crashes were a bit annoying, but it was bearable after all.
I contanstly wet my pants with all the detailed and well-thought areas, castles, dungeons. Some of them alone already warrant giving this a try. There are not only medieval-themed environments like in Oblivion, but also otherwordly and plainly weird ones. The story is quite cool once it picks up. Surpringly philosophical. As I've already said earlier, nicely varied quests. I liked how they make proper use of the physics. For instance, in quite a few cases you have to manually drag objects around instead of the usual pickup->autoinsert behavior the game normally has. Or stack crates to reach higher ground and so forth. It has a few puzzles (none too difficult, which I wasn't unhappy about), stealth moments, timed events. So the developers definitely tried to expand the scope of the original game. And successfully so, for the most part. I also loved how they put little details here and there, be it corpses or skeletons and corresponding items placed in such a way that the player can imagine what those persons were doing or how they lived/died, or notes and diaries, and other 'personal' stuff. There are many new books like about the story of the world and all, like in Oblivion. I didn't read them, but the effort put into this is admirable The design of caverns, dungeons and temples make exploration now actually rewarding, as each of them has at least one special item or nice location (vista), or even enemy, to discover; unlike Oblivion that didn't only ues the small number of underground levels a dozen times over, but also had most of them only contain useless junk for loot. Finally there are many easter eggs and little nods (not only the developers' mugshots on the wanted posters). I discovered Sven's secret electro danceclub, a Cube tribute, and even the SureAI bunker with its Killer-Chicken. :D Took me a good 50 hours. If one was to explore the map exhaustively for every dungeon and special item, i.e. do the Kinn, it would certainly add another 10 hours of gameplay. So basically like a full game. Anyway, excellent stuff - one could even go so far as to call it a monumental effort by this small team. Highly recommended if you're into Oblivion. Btw. I'm not being paid for this. ;) geez, i feel i should give this another chance. :S it felt really hard when i played it though...
like i had no money and stuff was kicking my ass. :P maybe it was cause i played as a rogue character. if i made a regular fighter it would probably be easier. Two things:
a) Make sure that you're in an area that's right for your level--the game gives you a suggested range, and can be tough at times (especially at the beginning), even if you stay within suggested areas. b) Don't be afraid to turn the difficulty down. I played with it set at 25 for a while, when things got kind of tough, and I think I only have it back up to the 40-ish range now. Like negke said, it's just a fantastic game to explore and enjoy, and you shouldn't let difficulty issues stand in the way of that. There are many new books like about the story of the world and all, like in Oblivion. I didn't read them, but the effort put into this is admirable Some of the books I've read have been really, really astonishingly good, considering that this is a fan effort, and that they had to be translated from the German. I'm amazed. If I can remember, the next time I play I'll see if I can pick out an especially good one and grab a few screenies or something. I played on standard difficulty. Never occurred to me I could have just lowered it a little... :S
Yeah, that's what I meant by slow start. I started to enjoy it more once I got reasonably powerful in combat and especially magic. c) Don't make the same 'mistake' as I did and hoard potions and scrolls thinking they're too valuable and might come in handy later. Use them right away. There are so many of them lying around everywhere. I ended up having a shitload of them in my inventory and only realized they would have made my life much easier when I didn't need them anymore. Magic gems, too. Likewise, I only got to appreciate alchemy towards the end. Also use the skill trainers early on. The higher your character level, the more expensive each training point becomes. But they can make for more solid start. I think what helped me a lot was that I found a fairly powerful weapon early on. There's some good stuff in the dungeons. The headhunter quests are good for money. But I think the real deal is, as usual, collecting all kinds of junk and loot (weapons and armor in particular) and load them off at merchants. You guys are really tempting me to play Nehrim earlier than I plan to. I'm trying to hold off though so I can catch up on some neglected games; especially on Steam - what's the use in buying games during previous sales if I don't even play them? ;_;
Just a quick extra review of the sequel, Earned In Blood. Released just six months later, this really should have been as a cheaper addon pack or downloadable content. There is nothing new, no upgrades to design or gameplay.
Some of the levels are perhaps slightly better looking, but they're still the same bland, horizontal designs from part one. The gameplay, unfortunately, is much harder this time around. Again with no way to regenerate your health or quicksave, the only way to play this game is meticulously, slowly and reloading from checkpoints a lot. It's very difficult even when you use the flanking idea behind the game because unfortunately your teammates' AI is hopeless a lot of the time. The weapons are all still just as inaccurate as part one, adding to the frustration. Below average graphics and gameplay that's unbalanced make this a very skippable game. Better late than never =)
I've just started chapter 3 (so no spoilers please!) and from what I can tell this is doom 3 in 3rd person, but with a much more engrossing storyline and less corny dialogue. The environments are pure sci-fi spaceship pornography and look fantastic, and special mention must go to the ambient sounds and general sound effects, just as in doom 3, they are fantastic and really add to the creepy vibe. Gameplay seems to tick all of the boxes of doom 3 also, and unfortunately that also means monsters spawning out of "closets" and appearing behind you. The idea of shooting off body parts for a faster kill is novel and fairly enjoyable however. Where it differs from doom 3 is in the quasi-rpg system it employs with your inventory, you have to pick up med kits and ammo are use them sparingly, as well as collect money and new item schematics that you can create and purchase in the various shops strewn about the maps. You can also find items that allow you to upgrade your space suit and weapons. Controls (for the pc version at least) feel very clunky, special mention goes to the awful mouse look speed, even with it set to max the screen crawls along when you swing the mouse across the pad :P I imagine a gamepad works better but I have not tried it. Overall though I am enjoying it so far, the sexy as hell environments and creepy atmosphere are keeping me going nicely :) Monolith has been responsible for some good underrated games. NOLF and its sequel are two of the most underrated first-person shooters in my opinion. I skipped their previous shooter, Contact J.A.C.K. due to below average reviews, but F.E.A.R. is another great release from the Washington based studio.
F.E.A.R. was met with a fairly positive reception, suprising consider the industries' criticism of games that bring nothing new to the table. And indeed F.E.A.R. really doesn't bring anything new. In fact, for pure single-player focused first-person shooters (which excuses Splinter Cel and Battlefield 2), F.E.A.R. is the top rated of 2005. Ahead of Call Of Duty and even Quake 4. But it's not without it's issues. The biggest issue is the lack of finesse in the level design. Now the Lithtech engine, developed in-studio by Monolith, is a great engine. In fact the version of the engine (Jupiter EX) used in F.E.A.R. is still being used in shooters in 2011. The problem with F.E.A.R. is that it failed miserably on using the engines potential. Sure, they made good use of lighting as this is a definite strong point in the game. Although not as amazing looking as Doom 3, Quake 4 or Splinter Cell; it's not far off. Where F.E.A.R. lacks is, firstly in the texturing. Textures are plain, drab and dominantly grey throughout the game. Follow this up with abysmal level design. Constantly throughout the game you'll be walking through plain four-brush corridors with a scattering of prefabs such as barrells and pipes. Follow this up with a room, then another corridor or two leading to the next room. All the while looking horribly unfinished in the detailing department. There are no complex angles, no extravagent architecture. This is level design 101, to the point where you could take just about any level in the game, for instance one of the far too many office levels, put some drab brown wood textures in there, and suddenly it's a warehouse complex. As mentioned each room has a couple of routes to get in and out. The upside is enemies can also use either route to attack, so it's sets up for good gameplay. However it gets repetitive very fast and confusing because it sometimes feels very maze-like. Where F.E.A.R. excels is in it's gameplay. We deal with human opponents almost exclusively. Some take more damage than others, some have different weapons. But the AI is all the same; and that is fairly good. Not perfect, but good enough to provide a decent and fun challenge. I played the game on medium and it's fairly perfect. I always had plenty of shotgun ammo, plenty of health packs in reserve, which is how I like it. The weapons all felt great. The shotgun and machine gun are your main weapons, with enough space to carry only one other weapon which alternates depending on what you find in each level. It was slightly disappointing that you can only carry three weapons, but that's a minor niggle as the shotgun is great fun. There could have been a few different enemies. Sure you have turrets, both ceiling-mounted and flying; both of which were very annoying and didn't enhance gameplay at all. Some kind of ghost also makes an appearance occasionally, but these are far too underwhelming. Some sort of challenging ninja enemy, complete with invisibility and very fast manoeuvres makes very few appearances, unfortunately. The story, which I won't go in to, had a fairly solid premise. Unfortunately there was little storytelling and very few cut scenes throughout the game. Most of the backstory was told through laptops which were too long and boring to sit and listen to throughout the game. Monolith should have put a lot more effort into telling their story. Overall, F.E.A.R. is a fun romp for around 10 hours, with a successful engine but sadly let down by old skool level design which may have been great for a late-90's/early-2000's game, but in 2005 looks too bland compared to the level of detail of, for instance, Doom 3. Phew, finished it without strokes or nightmares. A genuinely creepy game. And that through fairly simple means. Most importantly the lack of weapons. Like I said somewhere else, a game can have the scariest-looking monsters, but it leaves me absolutely unaffected if I have anything to defend myself. So I had quite a few adrenaline rushes here. There aren't too many monster encounters after all (and only a single type), but it's all about the anticipation - and that's most effective here. If you encounter one, you have to run or hide - and hope it doesn't spot you.
Needless to say the darkness plays an important rule, too. A nice touch is that your eyes adapt to the darkness after a moment, but it's imparative to light candles and torches, or use your lantern, in most levels in order to keep your sanity. The reaction of the player character to prolonged exposure to darkness or scary situations does the rest. I found it really adds to the tension if you hear him shiver and the heart rate go up, and so on. Also what some people might consider cheap scares, like sudden frightful sound effects, or a gush of wind blowing a door open or some candles out. The puzzles are okay. Mostly adventure-grade stuff of finding and combining items. Nothing to difficult or overly confusing. Nice though because they make for an uneasy feeling as one has to spend more time in such eerie areas. Story is a bit so-an-so. Does the job, has good elements but also somewhat questionable ones. Classic reverse telling, through scattered diary entries and flashbacks; it felt appropriate at times and not so much at others. There are three endings, though I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't read it somewhere. Thief was always a fantastic game for horror. You're already tense and used to hiding due to the stealth mechanics. When they introduce monsters, it ratchets up a notch perfectly. A human is scary, a zombie that you know is immune to half your gear and will only be stunned by the other half is terrifying :p
The Cradle in Thief 3 is mentioned often but it does deserve the acclaim it gets. I usually don't find games scary, in fact most horror games are hilarious (hi resident evil) As a result from what I've seen of Amnesia I'll probably give it a go. Yeah The Cradle was one of the scariest parts to a game i've played. A bit repetitive but the going back in time thing was very well done.
Phew, finished it without strokes or nightmares.
this sentence alone makes me interested. sadly, well done horror games creep me the fuck out and i usually can never get to the end. i barely finished doom3 and that had predictable scares. yes. i'm a wuss. :P with Amnesia then. It is genuinely scary if you play it the way it is supposed to be played (alone, in a dark room, with headphones on). I haven't finished it myself (yet), but what I have played was excellent because it is scary as shit, yet it is not too hard. Usually scary games are also very hard, but Amnesia has a very good balance (for me).
SleepwalkR: Indeed. The actual challenge is not to chicken out. ;)
Something I forgot to mention. I liked how the game has you interact with the physics more than usual. What I mean is you don't simply click doors and drawers open, but you basically have to hold them and do the proper motion with the mouse (swing or pull). And you can't easily pick up heavier objects. Some stuff can be carried around in your hand; with other things, like bed frames or big stones, you have to grab them and use the movement keys to slowly and awkwardly drag them. Imagine being threatened by a monster and in panic trying to move a heavy bed in front of a door to keep the monster from entering. Or like in Dead Space where you have to shake the mouse in order to free from a monster's stranglehold. Or in some GTA game where armwrestling requires you to do the same. Not to mention the countless classic games, e.g. sports-type, that require button-mashing. It's kind of stupid and back then it annoyed me, but if you think about it, the idea isn't so bad. It can make for a more interactive experience.
I think someone posted an article about this, but I can't remember where is was. Something I forgot to mention. I liked how the game has you interact with the physics more than usual. What I mean is you don't simply click doors and drawers open, but you basically have to hold them and do the proper motion with the mouse (swing or pull). And you can't easily pick up heavier objects. Some stuff can be carried around in your hand; with other things, like bed frames or big stones, you have to grab them and use the movement keys to slowly and awkwardly drag them. Imagine being threatened by a monster and in panic trying to move a heavy bed in front of a door to keep the monster from entering.
i like mechanics like this. i remember playing fahrenheit/indigo had this great mechanic for dialog trees. normally, you get like a list of 2 to 5 things you can say and the game just pauses while you pick what you want. you can spend a minute thinking about it. but in fahrenheit there was a timer of about 5 to 10 seconds depending on difficulty but also how quickly the other character was supposed to answer... and if you answer slowly, the other characters would pick up on it. on top of that, you had to make a semi complex mouse movement which, when you're being drilled by a cop can be pretty difficult. it actually made navigating dialog trees tense. it only came out in 2009! Unless you're talking about Riddick - Butcher Bay which I highly recommend.
Nope, according to direct2drive I bought it on 9.14.09 but I just forgot I had it.
I apparently also have STALKER. Wow, another sci-fi first person shooter. Having just completed Rogue Trooper and talking about how similar it is to every other sci-fi shooter from Halo to Unreal 2, Pariah is identical again.
According to the story you're transporting an infected prisoner when your shot down by scavengers into a wasteland that was once Earth. If this game is supposed to take place in wastelands, then the designers failed miserably. Instead we have a mix of outdoor terrain and enemy bases. The Unreal Engine 2.5 looks like it's starting to date in Pariah; there are other games with much better graphics. The level design is a real mix; the indoor areas are often nicely detailed, high-tech and look quite good. The terrain is also fairly decent looking, but doesn't have anywhere near the crisp detail of Far Cry. However some of the bigger buildings can feel quite blocky, especially from the outside. The gameplay is a little weaker than the design. Unfortunately it's another checkpoint system game so no quicksaves. I didn't have to replay too much of the game because of this, but it does force me to play very carefully. The two end battles were too difficult and long considering you have no quicksave. As were the on-rails sections which included a couple of vehicle levels and train levels; all of which were terrible. Perhaps it was my configuration, but the vehicles were steered using the mouselook instead of left/right keys. So if you want to go left, move your mouse left. This meant trying to shoot enemies from the vehicle was extremely difficult, and forget about attempting reverse. The first train level just seemed to go on forever; repetitive wouldn't be a strong enough word. While the other had you completing a massive jump, which I failed the first two times because I didn't use the quickrun key, only to find the game didn't bother to add a checkpoint before this jump so I ended up playing half of this level 3-4 times over. Once was already too much. Your enemies aren't too bad, they do provide a bit of challenge and fun. They are, naturally, all the same humans. Little variation apart from a slightly different human model/skin and different weapons and health. What spoilt the gameplay a little were the poor weapons. The shotgun was useless, the machine gun seemed to spray bullets all over the place and lacked power. Your also have a plasma gun which you're forced to use quite a lot since most of the ammo pickups are for this gun. It's not a fun gun... the firing is slow and at an annoying angle which takes some getting used to. I guess it should be said that I liked this game enough to play it almost all in one sitting (just one coffee and cake break). That being said, it must have only been a 5-6 hour game. Overall, average gameplay and design/environments that we've all seen before; only pick up this game if you really love the sci-fi/base theme. Digital Extremes' next release, Warpath, was originally a sequel to Pariah hence many similarities. But due to Pariah being a commercial flop, it was turned into a different game. However it was an even bigger flop than Pariah. Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is really kind of like an old school action/adventure/puzzle arcade game with modern day graphics and scale.
Loving it so far. I went back once I got to the final boss to find all the secrets in the game.
It was great, but the combat got repetitive and the bosses felt kind of lame, but every thing else was ace. I have to say so far I've liked the boss combats in this because each one is different and most of them are not frustrating at all.
BB and I ended up picking up DA so will post comments when I eventually get to it.
Finished Batman though, turned out to be shorter than I thought. Final boss was indeed a bit lame but now I'm going back to get all the secrets and try out the challenge modes. Excellent fun! http://peanutgallerygames.com/games/pond/
pOnd, a one-button zen relaxation game that celebrates the simple beauty of the natural world. Enjoy the pleasant sights and sounds and breathe in nature as you journey deep into the woods. It's only a few minutes long, and kind of a different experience. If you try it, please don't spoil any of the fine details in this thread; let people really sink into the game and notice them on their own. I reckon the version of Riddick Butcher Bay that comes with Dark Athena looks shitter than the original version.
Nice looking game, but too much boring stealth in it for me. And the stealth wasn't done that well.
I know it was considered a underrated classic, but I just thought it was a decent game, but maybe not as good as some had made it out to be. It was the best looking game before Doom 3 got released. The combat/gameplay was (for the time) linear, safe and fulfilling. It had cool mechs at the end (oops, spoiler apology) and the gimmick of a fighting arena was memorable, and a welcome change in tempo. My 2c.
Think I've written this before but anyway... mediocre action, mediocre hand-to-hand combat, mediocre stealth but mixed in just the right way and presented well enough to offer a really good overall experience.
I agree. I liked it. It wasn't amazing but it worked well, looked good, and had the right feel for the setting.
completely different to what I thought it would be (which was a shooter). The gameplay vibe is like Undying though (a game which I cant run on W7 unfortunately).
Either do one or the other consequently, as you'll only get the Good ending if you free every single one of them.
I wanted to buy it a while ago and it had vanished.
Yes, it is on Steam. But I'm poor so will continue playing RMQ instead. nitin: Armor-piercing bullets or grenades. Electro plasmid helps too.
necros: Yes, but it's basically the Bad ending with a slightly different text. Call of Duty 2 is, at the time of it's release in October 2003, the best war shooter to date. It's not quite the best shooter of 2005. Quake 4 is my pick with F.E.A.R. slightly ahead as well. But being third best of the year in a shooter sub-genre dominated by bland level design and repetitive gameplay, is a good accomplishment.
Call Of Duty 2 proves that the realistic level design required for war shooters doesn't have to be ugly and uninspiring. It's miles ahead of 2005's other contenders including Vietcong 2 and Brothers In Arms. While the original Call Of Duty was okay in the design department, particularly for 2003, it wasn't amazing. Call Of Duty 2 doesn't look amazing either, but it's the consitency that counts. There's variety in design from Moscow and Stalingrad, Egypt, Libya, Germany and even the expected Omaha beach raid. The highlight for me was running up a giant French hill with mortars and machine gunners mowing you down from above. So overall, the design and levels were consistently sprawled with debris, destroyed houses; everything to make them look like they've been part of a war. And importantly, there's plenty of vertical movement instead of huge flat levels. Having said that the design looked good throughout, it was the gameplay that is COD3's main feature. You can only carry two weapons at a time, although once you have an automatic that's all you need. There's no healthbar and in fact no health pickups at all. Instead, at least in medium difficulty, it takes around 4-5 shots to kill you. If you get shot once or twice, you can duck down and your health will regenerate in a few seconds. It ends up being a great way to manage health as you'll still die plenty but also have many close calls where your on the verge of death but manage to somehow find cover and survive. Unfortunately the game uses checkpoints instead of quicksave, but there's several per level, all at good saving points. Enemies are all the same, just with different weapons. However machine gunners, tanks and other vehicles help to break up the action. You also have plenty of objectives per level, from clearing out buildings, disabling tanks, destroying obects. The game is only several hours long but never gets dull. The action is constantly full-on and intense. Played on medium difficulty, Steam says I beat it in 6 hours, so the campaign is retardedly short. I guess I would boil it down to :
Think Wolfenstein with more linear, traditional levels, trying to emulate Half-Life somewhat but fails ultimately. Story is nonsensical really (but what time travel paradox story isn't?) The powers you get are binary and boring. The weapons are kind of dull feeling, but the Grenade Launcher weapon has a cool alternate mode, it launches a controllable grenade that you can roll around at will like you're controlling a balled up Samus. The Seeker is okay, very gimmicky but fun for a bit. Monster design is generally very good, they look fuckin rad, but the combat is just boring. There was one monster they used (by my count) a total of twice, which is a shame, it was one of the best looking monsters in the game. Seriously, try to find some art of this game, Raven's art team rocks. Level design was detailed, but very corridory and ultimately stale. Apparently Russians SUCK at building dependable stair cases because EVERY FUCKING STAIR CASE IS BROKEN in this game. I don't know how many times they use the 'oh no stair case to lower area is broken, I guess you're trapped once you walk off the edge' trick in the game. Soooo ummmmm I would say it's similar to Fear 2 - stale design, pretty graphics. Highly polished but unoriginal. 6 hour campaign with many flaws in game design, but plays very well in those few areas where the game just 'clicks.' I would avoid it unless you can get it for $10-$20 or so? Otherwise there are better games out there. First 2/3rds were pretty good, felt like the old 1998 game, with updated graphics, but still not really up to 2006 standards. Level design was a bit bland. It felt more like a really good Halflife mod.
Unfortunately the last 3rd was utter shit. Level design turned to custard and the gameplay was pretty much impossible without reloading 10 times for every second enemy (the ones with chainguns). The enemies are far more powerful than you are, and have instant hit. I had to god mode it, and even then the ammo was spread thin. Apparently some patch fixes the difficulty a little, not that I could find a downloadable version - it's only available through steam. It would have been nice if there were a full Sin 2 instead of these episodes. Sure it'd be a financial flop and the reviewers would rubbish it for being too old skool, but I like old skool. But I think the guys are Ritual themselves may have been too old skool to do a successful game. Hence why they never did another sin episode and they all moved on to other companies. those god damn chaingunners. it was mostly those guys alone that brought the game down for me. still, i would have bought for additional episodes. it was still fun, despite the difficulty problems.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/42910
This is brilliant =) Real shame there is no multiplayer in the demo! You basicly have a "recipe book" of spell effects that you can choose up to 5 of at any time to create a spell to use. Shield & Earth makes a row of mountains in front of you, but if you use Shield + Earth + Fire you get Volcanoes! There must be thousands of different combinations you can do, I keep finding new ones all the time =) Give it a shot, its only 260mb! that magic system sounds very cool. i'd love to see it more often. iirc, arx fatalis had a system like this. it was even more involved because you had to 'draw' the spell out on the screen to cast it.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.
Tried to get a emulator for it but none work apparently because of the various insanity interface tricks - deleting saved game, flies crawling on screen etc. Good Lovecraft styled RPG with a lot of different content and rock paper scissors style. A while ago, stopped about 30 minutes -60 minutes in. I should pick that up again, but I'm afraid after 3 years I won't remember what's going on.
Apparently Russians SUCK at building dependable stair cases because EVERY FUCKING STAIR CASE IS BROKEN in this game.
Hahaha, awesome. Thanks for the review, I was interested in this game. Was. I can live with corridor shooters being corridor-y, but they have to be good at what they do (ie killing monsters). I posted in general abuse the other day about my new tf2 server*. It now has sourcemod running on it, so you can vote for maps and whatnot. It's set up for 8v8 atm, i still have to see how the server it's running on handles the load.
*the ip is 208.111.39.111. Alright, we'll have to figure out when a good time.to play is.
On another note, I bought monday night combat, garry's mod, greed corp, and dead space yesterday. We have a tf2 server up. C'mon #tf TF2!
But if we don't have enough people I'll QuakeLIVE with you. I'll be available on tuesdays at 21:00 EST for tf2. Other days there's no gaurantee I'll be able to play. If i'm on and anyone wants to play, just invite me and head over to where ever you are.
playing right now, btw. pretty good game but the strong thematic concept actually made it a bit repetitive in terms of both gameplay and visuals after a while.
Was wishing for cooler set piece designs and different enemies after about 2/3 of the way through. Only just realized how many improperly aligned textures the maps have, floor trims in particular. Yeah, it sounds aspie, but still pretty lame how they don't even care for keeping a constant level of visual quality which wouldn't have been hard to maintain. The former custom maps are affected in particular. Sure, blah, gameplay++...
Also, they ported many arenas from ra3map1 - except for the best one of the map. I never understood why that whole map was so popular after all. Probably because most players were too lazy or dumb (no, "pro") to switch. Some of the later maps were much better. So what's the 'best' doom src port? I've seen some with silly things like md2/3 support, but are there any that stay 'true' to doom? Sorry if I'm being too vague.
prboom/glboom are very faithful.
If you want a crosshair, mouselook, auto-run etc, use zdoom or gzdoom. jdoom can be stripped of all that model/texture junk but it can't run larger maps from stuff like Speed of Doom or Plutonia 2. I use zdoom myself, and prboom for viewing demos :) i use zdoom. it can be set to look exactly like the original but at the same time giving you proper mouse look and with tons of engine extensions. it's also very popular so almost all custom maps that have extra extensions are either designed for zdoom or have been fixed up to run in it.
I use zdoom when I play Doom engine games. Also, JDuke I think it's called if you have a hankering for Duke3D updated engine.
Though in some respect it's really the DP of Doom. And there're debates on how "faithful" and how good a standard port it is (just like, or even more so than with DP). It has a few compatibility issues/differences which alter the game experience in some cases, like infinitely tall actors (or rather the lack thereof) and other things.
I guess it's okay to use as long as a map's text file doesn't explicitly state it as incompatible. about zdoom vs DP...
when i started thinking about it, i couldn't really explain why i prefer zdoom over more faithful doom ports and why i prefer fitzquake over DP. Have you played much of Strife Necros? I completed it a while back. It's got a weird proto-Deus Ex feel to me :p
Technically jDoom plays Hexen and Heretic too. In fact I believe the guy originally made the engine for heretic. i totally loved strife when it first came out. it had a lot of depth for that era. a good story and consistent quality throughout. it still was easy to get lost as almost all games were in that day, though.
still, it's one of the games i go back to every once in a while. i still like it. :) Yeah I'll probably play it again, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, even though it is so primitive. The main thing I remember is the first town having that nice 'you're an outcast watch what you do' vibe, and then somewhat later on when you find that Robot libuary thing. The sound in that room is awesome :D
I also enjoyed the limit stealth stuff, wish it was more developed :E I use prboom, it has mouse look and openGL rendering by the way. Nice fast simple port with a lot of optional funkiness. ZDoom felt too sluggish to me. Tries to be everything all at once.
There are good Hexen and Heretic ports here: http://hhexen.sourceforge.net/ Awesome 33kHz sound pack for Doom: http://perkristian.net/game_doom-sfx.shtml Bioshock - It didn't sit well with me in the beginning, especially the combat. Grew on me though.
Very well designed game, I enjoy this type of deep game, but I still think that the combat suffered. There are some good enemies like the spider splicers, but the weapons - core of any FPS - just feel underpowered / not satisfying to use in the end. I like the tommy gun though. And Bioshock is a pretty standard corridor shooter FPS when it comes down to it, rather comparable to Doom 3 in fact, and the layouts aren't really that innovative. Still, it is OK as a corridor shooter, gameplay wise. I like the whole random crap they added to it, like vending machines, security bots and the plasmids, of which I ended up using only a few (Incinerate tends to get the job done vs splicers). I wish it had a convincing shotgun though. There is a lack of ammo as well that must be compensated for by using plasmids (again Incinerate burns splicer health away quickly). I underused plasmids in the beginning and thus had a pretty hard time. More varied enemies later on would have been nice, instead they just really ramped up the health of the common splicer to the point where they just wouldn't die unless you constantly used napalm etc. on them. Underwhelmed by the whole Big Daddy / Little Sister thing. I rescued all of them, golden boy that I am. :-/ It looks like I have to play BS 2 now. ------ Yesterday I also finished Crysis: Technically awesome game, as everybody and their dog knows, fantastic jungle environments, awesome alien ship zero-G environment, crappy final level that is an aircraft carrier where you're constantly ordered to go from A to B and back pointlessly. Gameplay wise... I loved Far Cry. FC is really without a doubt a motherfucker of an FPS game. It is half jungle island, and half doomlike indoor bunker shooting. With monsters, I might add. Now here they took Far Cry, removed the bunker indoor aspect, changed the monsters to aliens, and gave the player a "nanosuit" that turns you invisible etc. so it gets a lot easier to sneak up on people than it was in FC. That's really the main thing the suit does, although there is a strength mode so developers can toss idiotic little challenges at you, and a speed mode. Golly. Whereas the protagonist of Far Cry took an anarchistic "Die Hard" underdog approach to the game, in Crysis you're a US special forces guy in a special forces scifi suit and among a hitech scifi war of the US against the North Koreans, obviously. Crysis takes itself a lot more seriously than Far Cry did. It is much more of a scifi war simulation. It's somewhat stale, even though they pile on tanks and aircraft for you to drive (the latter is not optional, and sucks balls). Then the game starts to shine when the aliens are introduced. Their lair is an awesome experience, and the bastards are fun to fight, so for a moment it turns into more of a cool shooter game instead of a predator headshot fest - but sadly, it's over too soon. There's just one level where you really get to fight a lot of aliens - not counting the final carrier level, which is just prescripted stalinist level design nonsense that has you running around like a lab rat pressing buttons. So, the game shines in certain moments, but sadly it's not allowed to go down that route. Killing aliens with a shotgun was the most fun I had in Crysis - only time I used that weapon, too. Kinda sad, except for the legions of console kids who love headshotting people while cloaked - more power to them. Awfully cliched writing and voice acting btw (military squad antics). I much preferred the anarchistic underdog approach of Far Cry to the routined warfare of Crysis. It looks sooooo pretty though. I found I pretty much stuck to wrench + electric bolt for most the game except where enemies were immune to lightning and Big Daddies. For the latter, I almost exclusively used grenades and heat seeking RPGs.
So yeah, I also found that the game did not encourage using of different weapons/plasmid combos. What did you think of the design gb? Like I said above, very strong conceptually but like the gameplay, it did get repetitive because of that strong concept. Because I used all kinds of different ammo and weapsons in bioshock, even more so in bioshock 2.
Also use ZDoom. Check out the Chocolate Doom port, it might be what you're after which seems to stick closely to classic Doom.
"Grow Cannon" -- http://www.eyezmaze.com/eyezblog_en/blog/2011/01/grow_cannon.html
I replayed it after I got my new pc, and the part where you are driving the tank and the mountain on the horizon starts falling apart, revealing the alien structure left my jaw on the floor. It's probably the most visually impressive scene I've seen in a game, the sense of scale is absolutely spot on.
I totally agree about the alien levels, it starts off fantastically with that zero-G mission and then descends into linear scripted arsecracks for the rest of the game. A real shame as I was enjoying it immensely until that point. Dead Space! Loved it! I had kind of written it off as a Doom 3 clone with some quirks but overall I enjoyed it very much. The boss fights in particular were fantastic, no confusion or frustration involved, which is pretty rare when you are talking about boss fights if you ask me =) Again this is another sexy, sexy game. Visual presentation is pretty much flawless throughout and it ran at 60fps on my 9600gt =) I strongly recommend it! Sequel just released too, will pick it up for sure. Semi non-linear, claustrophobia, find stuff and upgrade yourself, scary monsters.
What did you think of the design gb? Like I said above, very strong conceptually but like the gameplay, it did get repetitive because of that strong concept.
Well, there are some things that stick out, like the fisheries/docks level and the smuggler level, and also the Hephaestus core level I guess (which almost reminded me of Quake 2 or something like that). The Apollo Square level is also different from the rest (and pretty oppressive, like some areas of Berlin right after the reunification, ie grey, ruined, worn down and riddled with bullet holes in all its massiveness), so there is some diversity. It's just I tended to spend a lot of time in levels like Fort Frolic which does the art deco shop front thing to the extreme. There are also sub-levels like the tavern, the wine cellar, the aviary (sp?), and the entire Arcadia thing that are pretty unique... Crysis tank mission: Yeah, that was pretty nice and the area is indeed sandbox like (not all of them are), best thing about it was I could choose how much tank driving I wanted to do and when I wanted to continue on foot. Good use of vehicles (why oh why is the later flying mission not optional). Crumbling mountain - that was massive, yeah :-D The mine level is also good, so is the village one. Looks more fun than the new mp maps for black ops. Srsly. The only reason to buy the map pack is the new zombie map, that is awesome.
yes. seriously, those screenshots looked awesome.
Also, cannot wait to play dead space 2, my balls are hurting just thinking about it. Soon, very soon. The bullets do no damage and the most effective weapon is your foot.
And, on the Ps3 at least, the reload and fire triggers seem inverted. I was constantly getting into place and then reloading frantically on the enemy. It seems a curious design for the an FPS - making the shooting feel, well, weak. That wasn't my experience on the 360. I only played through the demo with the first gun, still need to try out the pistol thing and chain gun. Overall I liked it though. The only thing that was weird about it was that there's no jumping like zqf said and the animation for looking down the sight was incredibly fast.
I liked the demo, the lack of jumping was off putting but 'if you don't need it, don't add it in.'
I did like the game-play, it was pretty wacky and innovative. I plan on getting it when I have some extra $$ and game-play bandwidth. I desperately home it comes with a level editor. DO WANT LEVEL EDITOR. Felt to me like the lack of jumping was because Gears has made them so lazy about keeping the player within the corridor of gameplay :P I did enjoy Gears 2 but it has plenty of moments where you can't move across a stupid two foot high wall which feels rather frustrating.
Really though imo just means there will be a lack of possible variety in geometry and gameplay generally :E Can't judge the gameplay via a gamepad though, just led to frustration when trying to land trick shots. I was laughing really hard at that, until I realised that it was done by the guys behind SUPER MANLY AND REAL GEARS OF WAAAAAAARRRRR
Yea, coming from the Studio that brought you Dom's wife and 'oh dear he's wearing a helmet, bet he's got a long future' they can't really call out CoD :E
It's like James Cameron calling out Roland Emmerich for making films that are too overwrought. The call of duty games used to be good, before reyarch and iw went apeshit over mp, and killed the sp experience. Now instead of having good sp, they have shitty sp and shitty mp. Gears had alright sp and meh mp (lol ima shoot u while hiding behind dis wall lol).
I don't really agree. I really enjoyed GoW and CoD4 / MW2 single player. Very polished and fun. Sure they have some preposterous scenario's in them but most "action" games and films do.
I saw a bunch of rage about the whole EMP thing in MW2 and how it was so unrealistic, but that part of the game was awesome to play! Running down streets dodging falling helicopters and planes was pretty epic in my opinion, I think people just need to relax and have fun with games like this, they take them way to seriously :) Now if Deux Ex Human Revolution turns out to have a bunch of this completely crazy stuff in it, sure it will be dumb and crappy because Deus Ex is a completely differnt kind of game where you are meant to really care about the characters and the world, and when something completely dumb happens its jarring as hell. Not so much in call of duty! Played the 1st 2 episodes, so just getting started, if the game length is similar to that of the 1st.
I really appreciate the silent protagonist ala HL and Dead Space 1, so I'm not entirely sure I'm sold on Isaac having a personality. So far though it's been fine - he doesn't have too many one liners, and he's fairly low key. Generally not a big deal, although it occaisionally irks me. Girlfriend/delusions - These seem somewhat meh to me - the instances I've experienced are somewhat random, and not very scary or spooky compared to the necromorphs, or even the more subtle treatment offfered in the first game. Still early though, and I think it could pan out easily into something great... Gameplay - still very early. But so far, it has been great! the variety of combats, enemies and random semi boss fights and setpieces have been rad, and I have a feeling that it's going to get much more intense! Generally finding the scariness level to be less than I remember experiencing with the original, but that is largely due to more comfort with necromorphs etc - it still makes me very uncomfortable in parts, in a good way. Looks wise, this game is amazing so far. The environments are so detailed, and the few setpieces I've run into have been really cool, especially the 15 minutes leading up to the end of episode 2. I don't know, I suck at reviews, hahaha! But yeah, loving it, having a good time with the new telikinesis abilities, and finding the flow to be pretty consistently great. worth every penny. firstly,
my first two points above sound somewhat negative, which is pretty misleading. I guess they would just be concerns - not even criticisms, really. Isaac remains unintrusive and yet more fleshed out, and his more developed characteristics, including his delusions, are becoming more interesting as the game goes on. I'm further along now, and much more is being introduced, it just gets better and better - I love this game! might be the best looking game I've ever played, definitely the best looking that comes to mind! I feel like the first little bit, though not bad by any means, is less awesome than the sections I've been (slowly, hesitantly) working my way through the last while. My girlfriend cannot be in the same room while I play it now - nightmares. Yeah good solid game so far, I'm at around chapter 7, and really enjoying it. Very happy the changed the zero-g gameplay, floating around in space is quite fun.
I'm almost dissapointed that most of the marketing on it is about how gory and violent it is, those things aren't what make it a good game. It's so silly to have to stomp on corpses to get items, if you keep bashing space he'll go into a stomping frenzy and start saying "FUCK!" etc, makes me laugh. agreed, that's one area that is unequivocally better all around. I just finished playing what I suppose, at this point, is the main Zero-G setpiece, and it is underscoring the 'best looking game' thing for me.
There have been a couple areas where I felt like the game didn't quite do it for me, though, settings wise. An article in The Mirror said something about parts feeling like 'bioshock in space' and while on the one hand that's reductive, I think I get where he's coming from. Eg in bioshock, I felt like the gardens area with the markets etc was pretty interesting - it made sense that it was there - but it seemed a bit off, and thematically, it just felt a little bit too much like a novelty, an attempt to diversify the environment at the expense of some cohesion. Maybe that's just me?... I felt somewhat similar about a small portion of this game, though it was quite brief. I agree that the gore and violence is less what this one is about compared to the 1st - it's definitely less of a survival horror and more of an actiony shooter thing (technical term, don't worry about it). Not that there's anything wrong with that. Seems like the marketing worked though, hahaha! I definitely got a bioshock vibe in a few areas, especially the shops as you mentioned, and the school. Also the area with the bird cages, where you hear/read voice captions of some dead guy, that felt very bioshock-ish.
That's not a bad thing though. looks like I should have picked up Dead Space in the steam sale then. The screenshots didnt inspire me at the time.
I love the game so far; I've only played the first fourteen levels, but the controls suck. I'm buying a wireless xbox controller for my laptop later. Also, I can't wait for the level editor to come out. ^.^
Headfirst Productions created this game and then started a couple of sequels before going into liquidation and closing down. So Call Of Cthulhu is the only game we'll ever see from them, which is a shame because this showed a lot of professionalism for a first title.
It's by no means perfect, the gameplay is quite flawed. But where Call Of Cthulhu shines (metaphorically, certainly not literally!) is in it's atmosphere and environments. The engine is decent but obviously won't give id tech or unreal engine a for their money. The level designs are adequate with just enough detail. But the atmosphere itself is very well realised for the Lovecraft universe. The journey takes you through the town of Innsmouth, represented in dark, claustrophobia complete with sea monsters and dangerous cultist. You'll sneak and fight your way through buildings, factories and a refinery before the game takes a turn and places you on a coast guard ship, completed with a massive attack from the giant Dagon. You wash up Devil's Reef and end the game in an epic but unfortunately confusing chapter through underground (and underwater) caves and temples. So the game and story feel like a Lovecraft creation. They fit well, as does the constant reminder of otherworldy creatures stalking you. Where Call Of Cthulhu fails is it's gameplay. And at least for me, it failed miserably. I was hoping for something more action and fun. The first half of the game is spent in stealth mode. But the stealth is unsophisticated and holds nothing on the Thief or Splinter Cell series'. You eventually get some weapons and play the rest of the game with a mix of stealth and firepower. Unfortunately the enemies pack a punch and can hurt your health quite quickly. Combine this with unlimited spawns in some instances and very limited health/ammo and Call Of Cthulhu is a challenging game. That alone is fine; that's how Headfirst Productions intended it. But then comes the biggest issue - this is a challenging stealth based game with NO QUICKSAVE! Instead you get poorly placed checkpoints. A number of times you'll be forced to play long periods multiple times due to difficult encounters or even badly placed instant death traps. While this game make look a few years dated in 2006, it's atmosphere is pulled off well. But it could have been an infinitely more popular game, in my opinion, if they took a more action-oriented approach and ditched the stealth completely by the second or third level. Add in a proper quicksave, some better weapons and some puzzles that were a bit clearer. As it is now, the only reason to play this game is for the dark atmosphere and interesting story, and that's not enough. You know, that free comic WW2 multiplayer browser game.
It's a bit weird. Or at least I don't get it. There seem to be two objectives: either one team has to capture all control points in a level, or frag the enemies often enough, to win. There are three player classes, soldiers, commandos and gunners - each with special abilities. A bit like TF soldiers, spies, and, well, vehicle guys I guess. Most levels feature vehicles such as jeeps, tanks and planes, in which several people can ride. You get XP points from kills and completing objectives, Hero Points which you use to upgrade your character's skills, and so-called Valor Points which can be used to buy stuff like weapons, equipment and eyecandy in the store. Downside is, those bought items only last for one or three days. Unlimited access can only be gained through buying them with BF points which have to be purchased with actual money ('premium' feature, expensive). Not a game that I would play for a longer period of time, but might be fun every now and then with familiar people. If you want to give it a try, add me to your friends list. Let's be lame noobs together! Just finished this game. Took me solid 9:30 to complete it. Smooth gameplay and shiny visuals. Awesome game. I even have an urge to replay it on another difficulty and with other weapons.
I decided to finish Dead Space 1, cuz I didn't finish it. And met the reason why I stopped playing it. Mouse controls. They feel totally different from DS2: mouse movement is with some delay and with some acceleration/deceleration, which makes character controlling much slower. Especially in aim mode, mouse becomes even slower... What's up with that? Anyone know how to fix mouse there? I'd love to make it as responsive as in DS2. The slow response with the mouse is a major thing that ticked me off in the first Dead Space. Felt like syrup sometimes and trying to be accurate was tricky. Interesting to note that it works better in the sequel.
IIRC, each team has 500 or whatever tickets. When someone dies, his team loses a ticket. Tickets also automatically decrease when one team holds more control points than the other.
Make sure vsync is off, other than that there's not much you can do (i had problems with that too).
Another thing that should help, in the "settings.txt" file (with XP it's located in: "username\Local Settings\Application Data\Electronic Arts\Dead Space", I don't know about Vista/Win7, though), you can set the value of "Control.MouseSensitivity" greater than "1.00000000"
This looks like a nice different FPS http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2011/02/purity.html
http://ie.ign.com/videos/2011/02/16/dead-island-announcement-trailer
I think that looks pretty awesome. Yeah it does look cool. Fortunately not just a L4D clone, it's more a melee based survival/horror with rpg thrown in.
Been in development for 5-6 years, but is apparently coming in 2011. And they've stopped development on Chrome 2 and Warhound, so I guess the entire team at Techland is working on this now (and Call of Juarez 3). I'm looking forward to Alice 2
http://au.ign.com/videos/2011/02/15/alice-madness-returns-cinematic-teaser-trailer?objectid=14323745 Quite average. Feels like something's missing.
It's polished and looks good (despite the inherited UT3 ugliness), some areas even have great architecture. Gameplay is acceptable, I guess, but not really my cup of tea. Melee with frequent grapple/platformer bits - kind of gets old quickly. I'm seven hours in and have only completed one third of it (unless the hidden items and Riddler puzzles count towards that too)... usually I complain if games are too short. Now I'm sighing because I'm not further. I loved Arkham Asylum - the combat was a bit stale yeah, felt too much like that really bad Prince of Persia game. The exploration and story though I loved - really top notch. Character design was cool, and the Scarecrow bits were awesome.
If they can improve the combat + bosses for Arkham City I will be delighted, but I think negke will feel the game is 5x as long :( (because it is.) Tried to play Lost Planet: Colonies. Can't bind any key that isn't a number or letter, ie comma, full stop, forward slash. How the fuck can I play this game without comma and full stop for side stepping? What a total load of shit and complete fuck up from Capcom. Total favouritism towards evil consoles. Glad I torrented it instead of wasting my money buying it.
loved the bosses excpet the last one.
Oh and negke, the percent completed is misleading, it includes all serets etc. SO much fun finding them all! And the extras from each secret are pretty additive to the experience.
It actually took a fair bit of effort to find this game. No second hand version, the Ubersoldier website is dead. Even two pirated versions wouldn't work. I eventually merged the two pirated versions into one working game; albeit with a bug in that the last two levels had no textures. Getting the game to run in fullscreen mode also took some playing around.
Now to the game itself; it was developed by a Russian developer named Burut. They would normally be enough to stear well clear of this game. But I persevered - the screenshots looked good. The reviewers had panned the game based on no multiplayer, poor voice acting and high system requirements. Yes the voice acting is poor, very poor! But some poor voice acting is hardly going to ruin an entire game. If it looks good and is fun to play, voice acting is pretty low on the list of what makes a classic gaming experience. Lack of multiplayer. Does every single game in existence require multiplayer? I for one haven't played a game online since around 1997. Multiplayer does nothing for me. The system requirements for Ubersoldier do seem quite high. The loading times between levels are about ten seconds; too high in my opinion. However any moderately priced computer after 2007 should run the game without any noticeable slowdown or drop in framerates. It's really just the load times that take a while. This game is slightly underrated and should have got a better rep, because the gameplay and design is all pretty good. The weapons are standard WWII fare, but at least feel powerful and mow down enemies quick enough. Your enemies are all the same, just with different weapons. Some can really pack a punch and drop you fast, however every second enemy drops a 10% healthkit. So while there are some tough fights, the abundance of ammo and health mean once you've made it through the tough ones the pressure is over as your restock. This isn't to say you can run in, guns blasting. You still need to carefully duck around corners to pick enemies off one-by-one. Overall the game play is fun, although a little repetitive. Certainly no different from all your other war shooters. The gaming engine and level design are both up to the par for 2006. The level design is, of course, better than FEAR. Certainly not amazing or awe-inspiring, but varied enough with just enough detail to make each level look decent. This is just your standard shooter. The settings are different from the realism depicted in Call of Duty and Brothers In Arms. It almost feels more like a modern sci-fi game rather than 1940s Germany. But if you need to play every generic first person shooter, as long as it's fun and looks decent, then pick up Ubersoldier from the bargain bin. The loading times between levels are about ten seconds
holy crap, dude... i remember playing some games where it'd take almost a minute to load a level. 10 seconds is fast. like greased lightning. travelling through a really conductive material. The majority have shitty loading times since programming is always the busiest department since they're the most expensive in wages.
Theres a scale for games - made for love and made for money, those too far on the money side of the scale will always have shitty loading times and badly polished gameplay. 10 seconds is good I reckon. Kona, what got you to hunt that game down? And yeah, fuck multiplayer. It a big lump of dev that should go into the core. Unfortunately its also a mandatory bullet point, like vehicle sections or RPG elements - irrespective of the game you're making. A change to indie... Is a problem based on inherent architecture. The system is most likely full of odds and sods originally made for other games.
Well, I haven't played any game beyond mid-2006. My rig, which was a pretty expensive one in mid-2007, loads most games pretty quickly. Probably won't with the latest games.
But yeah 10secs isn't too bad, but what made it annoying was that's for quicksaves as well. Usually a game has a long initial loading of a level, but once it's running if you do quicksaves it's very quick (within a few secs). Whereas in Ubersoldier there didn't seem to be any caching so it's like your loading the entire level again from scratch for everyone quicksave. ijed... I wanted to hunt Ubersoldier down because looking at all the other releases in 2006, there's fuck all in the way of generic pure shooters. Here's my to play list for 2006: Dark Messiah (action rpg) - 74% F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point (2006) - 75% Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (2006) - 80% Hitman: Blood Money - 82% (Stealth) Condemned: Criminal Origins - 82% (survival horror) Prey (2006) - 83% Rainbow Six: Vegas (2006) - 84% Gears of War (3rd person) - 87% Prey and FEAR are the only mindless first person shooters from what I can tell. And Gears of War if you count third person, but the PC port of that is rare so I imagine it'll be a bad port. Think I'll play Dark Messiah next. The last fantasy I played was Enclave from 2002, and that was awesome. There needs to be more mindless fantasy's instead of 200 hour RPGs. i've noticed that about saving in some games.
some games get away with like sub 5mb files. i've even seen some sub 1mb. and then there's some that save like a 30-40mb file and take, as you said, 10 seconds or so to do it. which on the surface, doesn't really make sense. there's obviously something going on that makes it take that long, but i have no idea what. :\ great game, i love how they start with a basic mechanic and introduce something new in each level. Hopefully they will ramp up the complexity and mix different elements more and more in the later levels. (only on level 9 so far.)
it seems theres new mechanics all the time and they keep riffing on the old ones as well. Meaning it just gets more and more difficult.
Kona: Souns like a history of games thing. Over ten seconds for a quicksave means theres nothing going into RAM, it is reloading everything ie broken. http://www.gametrailers.com/video/cinematic-trailer-dead-island/710652
Higher res, no age filter, and cos Bal said it was "meh" :P "Theres a scale for games - made for love and made for money, those too far on the money side of the scale will always have shitty loading times and badly polished gameplay. "
So a load time over 10 seconds = the team didn't give a shit what they were making? :P I am 3 hours into chrono-trigger. What a great game! Really glad I gave it a chance with the boring beginning.
Effort to make a game, if your heart's not in it then its a lacklustre result.
Making the game load properly, have a decent frontend, be bug free and without flaws in the gameplay logic are all things that happen when the team is motivated, and pride motivates better than cash. I'm merely doubting that long load times = shit design, or shit game, or uninterested coders :p
Technical issues can just be unavoidable, no matter how much people try. It's unfair to say that a technical problem shows some kind of character weakness in the team that made it. I'd leave that judgement down to uninspiring gameplay. Crysis has its fair share of bugs (the physics mainly) and pretty long load times. But I wouldn't say that Crytek didn't inject creativity and love into the game. Actually the further back you go the more examples pop up. I don't know whether this shows that technical standards are getting better or that I just don't like modern games as much. But as an example: Thief 1 and 2. *awful* UIs, kinda buggy in places, dodgy engine. But Looking Glass weren't a team you could call money driven :P Sometimes its just bad luck, or bad management - 'that sounds like a great way to make a game! It's not, we tried it. Do it anyway.'
And the endless tug of war between producers, IP holders and dev teams. Being inexperienced as well affects things - though I place less credence in this since it just means they weren't putting in the extra hours to get it right. Spose what I was trying to say is that a lack of overall care usually tells a lot about the dev team more than anything else. I have a copy of portal that I got when i preordered portal 2, and since i already own another copy, i can give the new one away.
So, who wants it? You can't really measure load times as a sign of quality, you just can't.
I could go out and buy a SSD today, and suddenly any shit game is good cos it loads in 3 seconds? Really? Crysis is a great example, it takes a buttload of time to load, but I would say Crytek poured their souls into it like they do with all their titles, there's just a lot of stuff to load for each map. If a game takes forever to load a map for no conceivable reason then sure something is wrong, but you would have to go on a case by case basis, I don't think blanket statements work here or are fair. I haven't played Portal (or HL2 for that matter).
Portal looks like ugly box rooms. I'll give it a shot one day though. yes, portal is ugly box rooms. that said, it's somewhat necessary for the puzzles and it's a consistent theme of the game.
:p
The test chambers are boxxy, but it's the puzzles and GLaDOS' personality that really make portal a fun game. The rooms are boxy, but I wouldn't say the are ugly. It's minimalist and fits with the rest of the game, they are believable, nothing ever seemed ugly to me as I played it.
Portal 2 looks gorgeous. much appreciated. I might finally play it. Although I still havent played HL 2, and sleepy gifted me that years ago :)
Is a massive temptation.
Portal1 is well worth the effort, it last about an hour and is very well realised. Yeah I know, I was being more general in the statement. Good games generally have a level of polish to them that bad games don't - and thats on art/design/tech.
Underworld is pretty cool, though be warned the flame effects in the first level for some reason brings my framerate to a slow crawl. This is weird because it is literally just some small corridors, whereas later it renders huge, open, magnificent, gorgeous vistas without a hitch. Just so you know and don't dismiss it on the first level.
Actually Tomb Raider Anniversary is my favourite of the reboots, because it has that same great underemphasis on combat as the original did. http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=23795&start=3177
each to their own though, i absolutely love it and me asking then as well. hahaha.
I loved it when I played it, feel pretty good about it now. Liked episode 1 quite a bit, enjoyed episode 2 less for some reason I forget, and dislike the way the story is going. Prefer HL1. and dislike the way the story is going.
yes, i feel this way too. i really do not like the direction that ep2 hints at (nor ep2 in a general sense). hl2 for me was always about urban maps. for me, the parts that i enjoyed the least in hl2/ep1/ep2 were the maps that were NOT city17. hl2 starts with city17 followed by a very cool extended chase sequence as you exit the city. you stumble on all these great locales-- post-ap shanty towns in drainage canals, rebel outposts, just plain abandoned areas you know no one's visited in years... all these great urban areas like out of an urban exploration blog. i guess that's why i liked ep1 so much-- it's entirely in city17. ep2 seemed like the beginning of an downward spiral as city17 is wiped off the map. some cool parts in the mill/mine, but then we get boring caves. then we get a bit more factory type stuff, then the long drive through hillsides and the final battle takes place in kind of boring looking mountainous region. ep2 ends and seems to point us to the antarctic or whatever where that ship is. so it looks like, either ep3 will have us spend a bit of time out in the country before we somehow get to that ship, or we'll just be teleported there and spend the entire episode there. which... i dunno, isn't really all that appealing to me. Be disappointed if theres another wanky super weapon ending to round it off.
Lots of environments stick out for me - city17 (metro right at the start especially), prison, beach / coastal, sandlion beach road and so on. The best bits were probably the industrial sections though. I thought Episode 2 lacked 'filler'. It felt like short set pieces bolted together with not enough simple run and gun to rattle through
yeah I think filler is a very good thing :E Also those ant-lion caves were seriously too long, and Alyx just got irritating. EVERY time the player does something, she stops just short of kissing your pecker. Enough with the NPC 'OMG you're AMAZING!!' shit, I'm not four. Oh and the car was way better than the buggy but then they don't let you enjoy it. In Highway 17 you had stretches you could bomb down, areas to explore at your leisure etc. In Ep2, alyx + the tighter design + that stupid beeping supplies thing meant you couldn't just chill out in the same way, you're constantly getting little pokes from the game to stop, go this way etc (yeah I know you can ignore it but I just wish it wasn't there). i did actually prefer ep2 to ep1 but i can agree about the lack of filler. and to some extent the antlion caves, which got a little tiresome after a while. but the finale was probably the most fun i've had playing any shooter game ever, and i generally loved the forest/mountain settings throughout, especially the setpieces like the falling bridge, that massive wide shot of a destroyed city 17 or when you see the armies advancing to white forest in the distance. loved the vortigaunt/gman twists in the story too and looking forward to where things are headed
ep1 was good but it pretty much felt like 'more of the same' and i was kinda relieved to finally escape the city at the end; any more and it would have dragged a bit i have a feeling ep3 (if it ever comes) is going to be much bigger. i am so booking a few days off work and queuing outside GAME at midnight XD i was never a *massive* fan of HL1... still liked it but could never see why such a huge fuss was made about it. tried replaying it after HL2 and found the gameplay much more frustrating in several places. and the story felt kind of random until this site helped tie it in. never got round to checking out opposing force or blue shift though, annoyingly as i have as part of the generation pack but have lost my cd key :( Oh and the car was way better than the buggy but then they don't let you enjoy it. In Highway 17 you had stretches you could bomb down, areas to explore at your leisure etc. In Ep2, alyx + the tighter design + that stupid beeping supplies thing meant you couldn't just chill out in the same way, you're constantly getting little pokes from the game to stop, go this way etc (yeah I know you can ignore it but I just wish it wasn't there).
YES. that's it, right on. it was too... i can't believe i'm saying this about a shooter, but too fast paced. i would have preferred a more leisurely pacing with some more optional areas to drive around and just explore. the coastal driving section in hl was one of my favourite parts of the game. i just love that concept that you're driving along this long road and stumbling on abandoned house after abandoned house. i could totally play a unit where it's just driving from one encounter to another and maybe you pick up some gas here, or a part to fix your vehicle there, and each stop has some kind of sad or disturbing story to it. totally like a 'slice of life' of like mad max 2 or something. if anyone remembers when i posted those venice hl2 shots... i was really hoping to do just that, but i'm just not very proficient at WC3.3 and also hl2 scripting is kind of goofy. :P ep1 was good but it pretty much felt like 'more of the same' and i was kinda relieved to finally escape the city at the end; any more and it would have dragged a bit i guess i'm just a huge sucker for post-ap settings. i love run down, destroyed city stuff. and not just freshly wrecked stuff like in a ww2 game. i could have an ep1 that was twice the length. one part of ep1 that stands out for me, really in just capturing the whole atmosphere, was that tiny area right after going up the rickety lift after being mobbed by tons of zombies. it's this dusty room with junk strewn all over the floor and the crank for the door is broken. gman/vort aspect of the story was one of the parts that bothered me most.
things could definitely go in a bad, tacky direction. X-files style, where the attempts to tie up some of the ambiguity (which made the show) really are lame/gay/unsatisfying. I am somewhat hoping that rage might be like that.
yeah, all the promo stuff i've seen of it definitely points in that direction. but.... it's iD. they are fully capable of fucking it up. :P i was very happy when i heard they were ditching that 'dark' game. I just remembered the Gnome achievement, and how the fucking thing had no friction with the car - so every time you turned it'd go flying out the door, even during the helicopter chase.
Insult to injury, the gnome fell out of the shuttle at the end somehow so didn't get the achievement. Refused to go back to a quicksave as well :I "However I am finding Crysis to be even better. Great graphics, even better gameplay."
Once you're fighting the aliens it gets pretty damn boring. But fighting the human enemies is great fun. I probably replayed all of those missions five odd times just fucking about approaching them in different ways. wow, their new terrain engine looks crazy good. anyone else catch that floating terrain? :D
i only hope all of the terrain looks as hand-crafted as those quick shots. Anyone else care to speculate? Would make sense with the merger with id Software. And the GFX look awesome, soooo...... 2+2= ?
Bsps don't look like a good idea with that kind of level design. I wonder how they render the world. Hmmmm.
More like Bullshitstorm.
Visually it's great. The theme is a nice weird blend of familiar environments and sci-fi/other planet stuff. There are good designs in the levels, although they're also somewhat busy visually. Models and effects look cool, too. The skillshot system is fun and makes for some novelty. Unfortuantely, that's about it already. Apart from these things, it's just another stupid consolified game that reduces the player to almost spaz-grade. In other words, extremely linear and scripted with no freedom whatsoever. I was annoyed how blatantly it was even done. Everything is clipped off - but not in a subtle way; it seems it was done by a retard. You can't fall off ledges - in many cases you can't even go near them! Invisible walls everywhere, placed generously far from the actual objects they need to clip off. Even bushes and spaces between crates. And of course all the in-your-face stuff like interaction hints, autosaves, quicktime-like parts, semi-autoaim etc. Leash and skillshots are fun, but more often than not the fights are very much geared towards certain tricks and tactics. The story is silly and there's a number of "what did just happen?" events, the dialogue is super-dumb, but no one expects much from such a game anyway, so that's okay. At any rate, playing this makes the COD4 mock teaser appear in a different light. When I watched it, it seemed to imply COD is another boring linear shooter (which it is), whereas Bulletstorm was some sort of badass oldschool shooter that doesn't take itself as seriously. However, while the latter is true, the game is actually pretty much exactly the same as COD4, only with a different theme and a bit more comicy with the skillshot gore (which isn't a good thing). So, bottom line: not recommended unless you're one of those hopeless console FPS players, or find the game in a cheap sale somewhere. [I complain about linearity every time, but case I haven't mentioned it elsewhere: of course I don't expect totally nonlinear games. But ffs it's not so hard to make linear games FEEL a little less linear by adding a couple of additional rooms and corridors and, I don't know, balconies maybe, on the route from A to B. I guess, a good example for that is Bioshock. Often the levels in such games look they would easily support a bit more freedom. Lots of wasted potential.] It's not a bad game as such. Polished and well presented. But I'm disappointed because it's different from what I expected and/since it follows a common trend of game design I dislike.
insane mountain climbing film set in pre-wwII germany. Crazy stuff and I'm amazed at how the pulled off the visuals, did not look like much CGI at all.
And that's exactly what the ending was. Every game that uses the unreal engine doesn't need to be a damn trilogy.
Imo, bulletstorm was mediocre, at best. Bummer, I also had high hopes for this one. I figured even though Epic was publishing it, since it was developed by someone else it might at least be good. I am a sad gamer :( But at least I can spend that $60 on my student loans. Hurray debt!
Yeah I had really high hopes for it at first, but my expectations kept dropping at each new silly marketing commericals and gameplay trailers that were released...
Went from "instant pre-order" to "meh, maybe when it's on sale on Steam", and considering what I've been hearing, I'm happy I decied not to pick it up right away... From the demo. Bad level design added to the mix?
Didn't really follow it or build up any hopes though. Saw the video, which was retarded since they were obviously making fun of console games in general (including themselves!) and wasting money on poor viral marketing rather than making the game better. The mechanics just weren't sharp enough, for me. Coming from People Can Fly it should have been better. Seems the publisher transition wasn't kind. Also, just realised the acronym for it is 'BS' - so they can spend all that on a marketing campaign and nobody in marketing held up a hand on that one? Yeah after playing the demo the marketing angle that it's bucking so many trends in modern shooters is pretty laughable. Felt just like Gears but in first person. The only reason you can't jump is because they are incredibly lazy about how they'll guide the player and such, and remove any chance of more variety (even Painkiller had elements of exploration via secret hunting etc).
Also I was hoping for more avoiding damage via maneuverability, but it seemed more about hiding behind a wall and sucking your thumb like CoD. If it's different in the full game, then christ, bad demo guys. Never followed the game myself, had some minor interest as it was nearing release, but nothing more than a 'could be interesting?' thought. My attention was more so grabbed from Duty Calls, but from what I read above... what a way to shoot yourself in the foot. Still might check the demo out just to see for myself.
I'm rather cynical concerning upcoming games, rarely ever follow them and jump on the hype train. At least then when a title blows my mind it really does. STALKER and Dead Space come to mind having no prior knowledge except from an excerpt or two about how 'good' they were. Whim purchases. Saw the Skyrim official trailer, and I've been following TES so far I might as well keep my eyes open for the sequels. After Morrowind and Oblivion, I even hunted down copies of Arena/Daggerfall and enjoy them just as much. Not holding my breath for Skyrim either though, I'll find out how it fares once released and check the comments. I've simply grown tired of hype and high expectations, because it usually results in disappointment. The only game I can consider 'looking forward to' is The Witcher 2 and that's only because I immensely enjoyed the first. tl;dr version: blaargh. has anyone played this purely in SP? is it good?
from what i've read, it's rpg stats + shooting, so i'm thinking, similar to fallout3? price has dropped for this so i was wondering if it's worth getting. Weapons have random stats and whatnot, there's supposed to be over thirteen million combinations.
someone did an in-depth review of it on here, and felt it was super repetetive. could be mistaken though.
Kinda sucks. Overhyped by fox. The main problem with it IMHO is that it grow old very fast. You get to a silly level once and you're done. And a soon as you get into a multiplayer game, it impacts on your status in the singleplayer world. The whole thing is based upon behavours of environments as you progress, the guns are like stats sheets with randomised values and according randomised appearences. It gets to be too clinical. I had fun with it for a couple of weeks maybe :D
I play borderlands in singleplayer for about 20 (?) minutes before dropping it. Ugly, boring as shit, lame game play, awkward feeling. I heard it might be better in coop, but I haven't tried it to find out. But then, I would probably just play L4D2 in coop if I were going to coop a game anyway.
I was actually really excited about Borderlands from previews and whatnot and then they revealed their new art style - and I immediately lost interest in it. It still sold well enough to warrant a look, but what I saw I did not like at all.
Though I have a particular disdain for cell shading in most everything. the vanilla game with no dlc, quite fun if your having a drought of games to play. It IS fairly repetitive but the shooting mechanics are solid and some of the rarer beefier weapons are very satisfying to use (im looking at you, revolver with a chance to cause explosions!).
I imagine its a lot more fun in coop, but the single player kept me interested long enough to finish it :) I might as well post about this one I uploaded a few days back for those interested;
http://taw.duke4.net/2011/02/game-reviews/vvvvvv/ I liked it, kind of felt like a Diablo FPS almost, and the visuals were nice and refreshing, but yeah, best played in coop of course.
And yeah VVVVVV is awesome. borderlands sounds like my kind of game, i think. :)
even if it only lasts a few weeks, that's worth the current price (30 CDN). i went to were grils lather school jackets and tell them to call me at this number 8579142.
Borderlands was a blast, one of the few games in the past couple of years that I really spent the time to explore every nook of every level. It's fun both SP and coop, give it another shot Zwiffle. The beginning *is* kind of slow and boring but it picks up.
Anyone else having trouble creating an account so they can..you know, PLAY THE FRIKKIN' GAME? =)
its been stuck on the "creating account" message for 10 minutes now and there is no way to cancel it, w00t Crytek :P Yeah, got in myself a few minutes ago.
I like it! Its modern warfare 2 with super powers thrown in =) Everything feels really beefy, which is great. Suit powers are actually useful and I found that I was using all of the available modes and moves. The ground stomp thing is hilarious if you can get one off in a group of enemies. It suffers from slight consolitis however, the fov feels very narrow, and the "Press start to continue" message when you first get to the menu is a little disconcerting =) I had to up the mouse speed a fair way also, but the game itself is fine. Only other annoyance I had was that the graphics options menu is a complete joke. You have 3 preset options, "Gamer", "Advanced" and "Hardcore". There are no slider bars or drop down menu's for various effects, frankly from Crytek I expected there to be a buttload of graphics options... :P Saying that though, I threw it on Hardcore and the game ran at a steady 60fps, and it doe's look very pretty. All in all, colour me impressed by these first impressions. However they do need to add more graphics customization options! Returning to a previous Crytek game, Crysis keeps crashing on what presumably is the final section, when the Admiral nukes the island, it always crashes during that cutscene. Have just upgraded to V1.2 and it does the same...
Actually apart from the boss combat I thought they were pretty cool...
Fixed, was a DX10 problem. in too many levels you have to sit around just waiting too much and maybe it would be good if you were forced to think more carefully by somehow punishing the player for letting the wrong color pixel in the wrong cup.
not having an eraser made it more challenging I thought -- some of the later puzzles require some thinking about which order to fill the cups (since filling one cup might require blocking off another one.)
There was one level I found annoying, might have been the last one, where the level spirals around and you have a single grain of sugar. Even when you understand the concept you have to repeat it way too many times to complete the level. Would be interesting to see a "best time" feature on some of the levels, I could see ways i could have been more efficient but wasn't motivated to replay them. A time to beat might have helped. that the thinking part was usually very quick and then waiting for the cups to fill was very slow, it didn't feel very Zen to me just annoying. Maybe a fast-forward button would work ok.
Liked the idea. I also liked the fact you couldn't really out right fail it, you could just keep going at it until you finished it. Was a lot more relaxing for that.
But it should have had a score element, so you could aim to do it perfectly if you wanted. It's been a while since i've been able to play a fantasy-based action game, first person in particular. It's a welcome change from all the war and sci-fi shooters of 2005/2006.
Now typically i'll play a game in a few sittings over just as many days. However, 85% of the way through Dark Messiah the power went and everything around me hit the floor. An earthquake hit of epic proportions, causing upwards of 15 billion in damage and, tragically, hundreds of lives lost in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. My computer survived and it was 1.5 weeks before I resumed the game (I had no power for a week), by which time I'd started to forget the first part. Nonetheless it is a fairly lengthy game; none of this 5-7 hours rubbish some of the top developers have been spitting in our laps. Dark Messiah is at least 10 hours long. The highlight of the game is the level design, as you'd expect with it's setting. Villages, mountains, temples... it's all standard fantasy but it looks fantastic. Unfortunately the game is let down by it's gameplay. You're forced to use a more strategic approach at times by kicking enemies into spikes, fire or off cliffs. This is clumsy and frustrating, but taking on enemies in a swordfight is just as bad. Often enemies will wipe half your health off in one swoop, while you try to do a silly combo-move and completely miss through no fault of your own. Most fights you need to pull off a combo in order to kill an enemy because simply hitting the attack key repeatedly is took weak and you'll die after a few enemies. Ultimately, having to hold keys and use other keys to pull of these combos is annoying and slows down the action. Most enemies have slightly too much health and should go down quicker. There are a number of enemies in the game that just aren't worth fighting, such as zombies who have huge amounts of health and are very lethal. You're better off running past them and a game should never promote skipping action because it's too hard. Having said that, the last 1/4 of the game is an exception as you FINALLY get given some decent weaponry. Either that or it took most of the game to master the combat effectively. The RPG elements are strong, as you'll need to do many upgrades throughout the game and you can go various ways; strength, magic, archery, stealth. I chose the strength route and barely used the spells throughout until the last few levels. The spells were mostly uninspiring projectile attacks and easy to miss the enemy anyway. For the explorer, there are plenty of secrets and health throughout the levels, but i'm not a big secret area scourer. Nonetheless I saved plenty of health vials which ultimately went unused as the final battle was easier than expected. The game might have been slightly more fun had I used the health vials more freely or if it was automatically added to your health instead or letting you horde it. Overall Dark Messiah is a great looking game, but the gameplay is for the more experienced players. Some of the enemies could have done with some tweaking to make the game more action-packed instead of a reload rampage. Still, it's great to get an action-oriented fantasy game as there are very few around. (don't think it's been posted?) First one was great, second one is also quite good :
http://games.adultswim.com/give-up-robot-2-online-game.html If you like rhythm games, BIT.TRIP.RUNNER is pretty awesome, very cool minimalistic visuals and music. It's pretty friggin hard though, be warned.
(it's around 7 euros on Steam.) Yeah for me it's back to normal Nitin. Got a bit of an insurance claim to sort though. But the city is a bit fucked. CBD could be closed for almost a year, and they're still finding bodies almost 2 weeks later. At least on the east side of town you won't find a street anywhere that hasn't been effected, either by liquifaction or cracking.
how for out of Christchurch are you then? Sounds like a reasonable distance out of the main city.
Well the epicentre was Lyttelton and i'm about halfway between town and Lyttelton I guess, so I was a lot closer to it. The problem with the main city and why it got his so much harder is all the old buildings that aren't earthquake proof. I doubt there's any churches in Christchurch that weren't damaged.
That and the few blocks around where I live must have better grounding and are fairly modern homes (inside 20 yrs old) so my house didn't get very damaged compared to other houses that were much further away from the epicentre. Are you in NZ nitin? I read that Christchurch has had it worse because the earthquake's waves were reflected on some mountain which caused interferences below the city. Those interferences meant that in certain spots, waves would add and become huge where in other spots, waves would cancel each other out.
At least that's the theory why the town was damaged more than in the last quake, even though the last quake was nominally much stronger (Richter scale is logarithmic). Since this game got to the steam finally, it took my attention and i loved it instantly after playing the demo.
What an amazing game! It's not your typical puzzle where u move blocks or whatnot, which gets boring after 1st level. This one is some sort of chemical simulator with a lot of ways to solve the puzzles, and puzzles are really mindbending. It could take a day to solve something, and I just started it and playing on moderately easy levels. But what a joy I'm experiencing when finally I come with solution how to synth certain molecula! I feel like a real engineer at this moment :) Also, i like graphics of the game, it's minimal and clean and good for the eye. The music is also a great supporter for the game, proper ambient is always welcome. Highly recommended for the nerds around :) I haven't been playing many games lately, but because a friend recommended Bulletstorm, and partially because I loved Painkiller, I decided to buy it on Steam.
First of all, I felt like smashing my fist through my pc screen after discovering that despite being a game I bought on Steam, it requires the awful Games For Windows Live to run. Why on earth EA or Valve think it's acceptable to use two different services just to play the single player portion of one game is beyond me, but I was so pissed off I ended up firing off an email to Gabe Newell (which I doubt he will reply to, but it felt good to take action!) The game itself was, in short, a little dissapointing. Whilst it has great graphics and extremely extravagant set pieces, the weapons and action didn't really feel quite as good as I had expected. It seemed that despite progression being generally quite easy, I was doing a lot of killing with a machine gun from long range, which was not really all that much fun. Later on in the game, I was rewarded with a few nice weapons, such as the awesome drill gun, but aside from a few of the secondary charge shot modes, the other weapons didn't really feel as meaty as I remember the guns in Painkiller feeling. It really seemed like I had to pummel most enemies for quite a while before they went down, unless I knocked them into some dangerous environmental trap - which generally rewarded me with the satisfaction of instant death and desctruction I so expected of this game. However, For the last third of the game, there are a lot of mutants running around that can only be killed by shooting glowing red parts on their body. When you kill them this way, they instantly gib into a big red cloud of gore, leaving a huge splatter on the environment. This was fun. These guys were also extremely easy to kill using the drill gun that appears on one of the later missions. In fact, any occasion where making an enemy explode, melt, evaporate or become impaled was a ton of fun, but somehow it seemed that I spent a lot of time walking around very pretty (but empty) environments or trying to snipe enemies with a machine gun because it was the best weapon for the job if I wanted to stay alive. The game's skill shot system was a cool idea, but I didn't really have much fun with it, and I didn't like how all the skill shots seemed to be set in stone - you can't really create your own combinations that the game will recognise. Every skill shot you get is like a micro achievement; Although you get it every time you kill any enemy in a prescribed manner, not just the first time. Using points you get from performing skill shots, you can buy ammo and weapon upgrades from pods scattered around the environment. It was kind of weird to be able to go to what is basically a shop and buy ammo during a battle, but this aspect of the system was ok in practice, and I didn't feel it was getting in the way. One thing I noticed about the levels is that there are a huge number of massive, extremely cool looking and detailed areas that are basically unused for gameplay purposes. There is a lot of story in the game, and many areas where you just walk around listening to the (admittedly entertaining) banter between your character and the other three main characters who accompany you through the game. I was quite surprised by this because I had expected little to no story. Although the story is very simple, it worked to immerse me more into the world and connect me to the main characters, because by the end of the game, I hated the main villain, General Serrano, about as much as he did. SPOILER ALERT! This is where the game lost me though. The ending is hugely fucking annoying. You want so badly to kill this piece of shit general and the game nearly gives you the chance, but then something EXTREMELY irritating and predictable happens in a cutscene where you have no control, whilst you are left screaming at the main character, telling him to do the job properly and kill the motherfucker by firing 50 bullets into his face, only to have him ignore your requests and later regret his lack of thoroughness on the next level and in the final cutscene. Sequel? Fuck you. I'm not paying another $50 just to do what I should have been able to do at the end of the first game. END SPOILER I still haven't played the challenge mode or multiplayer, but the single payer was decent but somewhat lacking in the level of destruction I was hoping for. The ending was bullshit. Or did the bots who accompany you kill absolutely nothing the entire game? That's what it felt like for me. I dontwremember them killing a single damn mutant.
Released for consoles in 2005 and for the PC in 2006, Condemned: Criminal Origins is the next game from Monolith following F.E.A.R. Now Monolith has made some good games; Blood was good for it's time, No One Lives Forever and the sequel were underrated classics. But unfortunately it seems their designers are still stuck in the old skool style of level design. The problem that hindered F.E.A.R.; it's bland boxy level design, returns with Condemned. In fact, the level design in both games could quite easily swap places and you wouldn't know the difference. F.E.A.R. had slightly more open levels to account for fast shooting enemies, while Condemned's is more condensed and cramped. However it's still the same room with two corridors connecting to the next room. It's maze-like, repetitive and is almost a series of box rooms littered with debris. It certainly doesn't feature the kind of detail you'd get from Doom 3.
There's really nothing in this game that stands out as looking great. Perhaps the final level taking place in a decayed apple orchard at night was a highlight, but it still lacked detail and was extremely linear. It sounds better than it was. Basically Monolith followed the same pattern as F.E.A.R. in creating a game with supernatural flashbacks throughout; the scares are all the same. In fact, you could almost say this is the same game just with a different story and melee combat instead of guns. So while F.E.A.R. lost brownie points in the design section, it made them up with it's fun gameplay. The same can not be said for Condemned, which is melee based combat using random weapons such as crowbars, 2x4's, axes. Now I've played good melee based games; Heretic II and Rune got it right. Condemned swings but misses, because it's too basic. The game comes down to a block-swing-step back process, or if you're taser is charged, which almost always is, then it's taser-swing-run back to wait for taser to recharge. It's just not that fun. There should have been some combos or powerhits of some kind. I complained about the combos in Dark Messiah, but at least it had them. Their drawback was the awkward key presses in trying to perform them. Condemned's gameplay is just too simple and becomes repetitive very fast. Which leaves the storyline; which is flawed just like the rest of the game. The main premise is cliched but acceptable; a serial killer takes your gun and kills some cops which you are blamed for so on the run you go to capture him. As it turns out, he's been killing other serial killers. But then some whole supernatural plot comes into it with civillians turning insane, birds brains exploding, odd flashbacks and mysterious creatures popping in and out of existence (one of which you fight at the end). By the end of the game NONE of this is explained! Admittedly it does all get explained in the sequel but it just leaves the first game confusing. If you loved F.E.A.R., not minding the average level design and love survival horror games then Condemned: Criminal Origins is worth playing the once. Otherwise, it's a skippable title. Here's a handy little config ui to edit your gfx settings in the Crysis 2 demo, it's only really useful for editing the fov.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1776333 Bioware released a high-resolution texture pack for the pc version of DA2, which is released, err in a matter of hours I guess :)
http://social.bioware.com/page/da2-patches Seen a few screenshots and the jump in environment texture quality is very noticeable, well worth it! But they recommend a gfx card with 1gb of memory on it. Tried to play Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter1. Gosh Grin just dont' have a fkn clue do they. It's a great looking game, but no quicksave and rare checkpoints in what is already quite a hard game, even on easy, means it is completely unplayable unless your absolutely desperate for a FPS. I quit after 1 level.
It's no wonder they declared bankruptcy. Next. Enjoyable. An average degree of consolization, but about on par with The Witcher. The positive thing is that unlike Witcher, the 'levels' are larger and often more open. Some nicely designed environments (especially the island in chapter 2 is awesome, with medieval Chinese temples/buildings in the jungle and a dark twisted canyon like the Barrens from Morrowind). Others are more average, but overall the game looks good.
Controls are somewhat dodgy in parts. Still okay. Horse controls are shit though. The looting system is a bit ambiguous as you can only pick up everything the enemy had. This means you can run over a fallen group and quickly tab space to get it, which is nice, but on the other had it will also clutter your inventory with all kinds of useless items like weak weapons which you then have to disassemble or put down individually (or sell). Too much action (too many monsters) in parts which got tedious after a while - especially the swamps which reminded me strongly of their counterparts in Witcher = shitloads of zombies spawning all the time. Combat is mostly button mashing and using special attacks. At least that's what I found to be most effective. It's also possible to block and do effective counterattacks. I'm a bit ashamed to admit I didn't understand the magic system so I played the game as an oldschool warrior. It's not so hard in theory - one has to create spells by stacking cards of several classes and effects, and it's possible to experiment with the combinations in order to create the best spell for each situation. But I somehow didn't get the hang of it immediately and then lost interest as my other skills became more developed. While not required, one can approach each battle in the optimal way by varying weapons and spells according to the enemies. Many of them have certain weaknesses to some attacks and are resistant to others (e.g. blades vs blunt weapons). Progression is linear insofar as the parts of the world only unlock when the player reaches a new chapter in the main quest line. Basically a bunch of islands that become accessible by teleporters. Exploration is somewhat limited but possible, at least in the first two chapters of five. Some smaller sections of the islands become accessible with some of the side quests of which there are fairly many in relation to the main quest and suitably varied. Some side quests also introduce new enemies. It's easy to get lost in the side quests at first and kind of forget what the story or the purpose of your main mission was. It picks up after a while. Or maybe because I just refrained from taking more side quests from the bullentin boards. At one point I bought a boat and sailed to one of the remote islands around the main ones only to find what looked to me like a tribe of nasty canibal-like people (regular enemies in a later section) which chased me off again and I had to leave my boat behind, heh. Later found out there's nothing there to be found, except XP if you kill them. But still a nice detail. Bottom line: I'd say if you liked the Witcher (for this game seems to be most apt for comparison), you'll likely enjoy this one too. It feels like it does the compromise between console and PC better than most of the other games in this genre. Playtime: 20-23 hours, up to 30 with full exploration/100%ing. new teaser for Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l--b8kA7y1c
Gameplay video coming tomorrow. Looks very stylish indeed. Would be interested to see how the gameplay / content pans out. Not so keen on the restricted cockpit view though.
Nice find. Seriously check out the graphics of Hawken for real:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm7gEDhrPfk&feature=player_embedded#at=16 Fuck me those grpahics are awesome (spooged all over Hawken's bosom) I'm sure it will only work with the Steel Batallion controller: http://operatorchan.org/vg/arch/src/vg22196_sb%20complete%202.jpg
Remarkable. Yahtzee's opinion is exactly what I concluded from playing the demo :E
An oldschool shooter forced through a mangle of modern shooters and being at least partially compromised because of it. interesting environment art... the consistently random construction of all the buildings makes me wonder if they auto-generated the buildings from a bunch of prefab parts. Either way it's an cool style.
just started this, why is this even the same franchise? completely different game. to early to tell if its good.
Decent Zelda-like dungeon game from the Eye Maze guy. Some clever puzzles.
http://jayisgames.com/games/dwarf-complete/ Again. From Wiki:
Far Cry 2 has been officially released by Ubisoft, although it was not developed by Crytek, but by Ubisoft's Montreal studio Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as FC2) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2. Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, however the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay... Various factions and vehicles are featured; enemies include human mercenaries, but sci-fi creatures such as the Trigens from Far Cry are not featured.[12] Furthermore, the player's feral abilities introduced in Far Cry Instincts and its expansions do not return in Far Cry 2. Far Cry 2 abandons the science fiction aspects of its predecessor in favor of a more realistic setting. The protagonist of previous Far Cry games, Jack Carver, is not featured in this game. Ubisoft has developed a new engine specifically for Far Cry 2, called Dunia... The Dunia engine was built specifically for Far Cry 2 by Ubisoft Montreal development team. Only 2 or 3 percent of the original CryEngine code is re-used, according to Michiel Verheijdt, Senior Product Manager for Ubisoft Netherlands. So, as is blindingly obvious, it has slightly less than FUCK ALL to do with Far Cry, and just makes Ubisoft look like a bunch of dicks for trying to cash in on the franchise, whilst Crytek go ahead and make the true FC2 and do a much better job of it. Probably had a pretty nice game built, until the publishers came along and said 'scrap 50% of what you've done and slap the FC2 name on it'.
I think the gameplay looks pretty cool actually, more interesting than some random call-of-duty copy anyways. Kinda feels like Tribes a bit, what with all the jetpacking around.
It isn't such a bad game in my opinion, great fun as a sandbox where you just mess around with the AI behavior. But yeah, it's nothing like Farcry.
I really didn't like FC2, really one bit at all. There seems to be some serious streaming issues with content, and I lag noticeably bad when sprinting or driving through the world (it occurs every few seconds.) Changing settings does not help at all, and my computer specs blow consoles out of the water.
As far as the story, it's pretty damn lame. You start off with Malaria, yeah! The sprint distance seems like less than five meters. The whole system on finding diamonds is so borked, I ran around for a few minutes when trying to find the first one. I didn't understand anything in the game. What's worse is the fact it is an open ended game with no quick saving. This wouldn't be as frustrating, if the game didn't crash after about an hour of playing it. 2/10 stars for FC2. Classic example of how game studios are at least eleven times better at making games than publishers. I didn't give it just one star because I bought it in a Steam pack for $3, so I had suspicion of the quality. Crysis 2, on the other hand, seems quite promising. I'm not a big fan of invisibility being totally ruined with the addition of thermal vision. Hopefully there will be some way to hide your heat signature, at least for the most part. I liked FC2 quite a bit for what it was - I didn't have streaming problems (even on my older PC) and I thought the combat was a lot of fun if not a bit frustrating at times when I couldn't make out the shapes in dark shadows.
My main complaints were that driving everywhere got stale pretty fast, and that the voice acting was bad (as someone pointed out, I can't remember who, it was probably for compression reasons.) The weapons felt great though, some of the best feeling weapons in any game I've ever played, from the sounds to the damage to reloading, even to them breaking in the middle of a god damn fire fight - they just felt great. The diamonds thing was basically a hot/cold game, I found a bunch of them but didn't have much incentive to find all of them. The story wasn't really all that bad, it didn't have the CoD kind of crazy conspiracy spin to it, it felt much more grounded. Basically - gun smugglers are bad, mercs are bad, and both help to destroy stability and innocent lives. Felt much more grounded than CoD games, despite being an action flick style game. I thought it was ok, was pretty fun for the random AI shenanigans, and the companions could be quite silly.
It'll still be Human Head developing the game, with just Zenimax taking over publishing rights. I'd imagine it mustn't be too far from gold... the first game took 4-5yrs once Human Head took over and Prey 2 has been under development for probably 4 yrs now. Human Head has nothing else in development, so one can only assume they've been working on it since 2006. I just hope they don't put off the release with all those other shooters coming in 2011 from Bethesda.
Prey began it's long development life in 1995, a decade before it's final release. Just as they did with Duke Nukem Forever, 3D Realms stumbled around changing development teams and the game but, ultimately, weren't able to build a game engine to support the portal technology.
The idea was to have portals (ie teleporters) that can be opened and closed throughout the game. 3D Realms spent a number of years on the engine before it was finally put on hold, indefinitely, in 1999. Which was a great shame as the videos, screenshots and E3 presentations released in 1997/98 had many fans excited, including me. Prey was one of those games that I long awaited, just like Duke Nukem Forever. Unfortunately they both became vaporware. It wasn't until 2002 that the project was resumed, although not announced officially. However this time round 3D Realms retired the idea of using their own engine and started again using idTech 4, with the game actually being created by Human Head Studios, authors of the classic third-person Rune. And in 2006 Prey was finally released. Ironic that eventually outsourcing Duke Nukem Forever to Gearbox Software was the only way 3D Realms' other, more famous vaporware game would ever get released as well. Back to Prey, somehow through this mess of a development timeline, Prey turned out to be a great game. It didn't feature design that was new as both Doom 3 and Quake 4, the only two other games to have used idTech4 up to 2006, featured very similar sci-fi themes. Doom 3 was slightly darker, Quake 4 was slightly more military themed. Prey took the theme in more of an alien, surreal direction, but ultimately sci-fi is sci-fi. However it looks just as good as Doom 3 and Quake 4 ever did, so it's another great looking entry into the shooter market. The entire game takes place within a huge living sphere floating in space. But most of the level design is based around human-sized rooms and corridors. There are some much bigger open areas which you can fly around in using your little spacesuit. Unfortunately, just like every other shooter that forces the obligatory on-rails/vehicle levels, these flying levels are far too common. After the first couple of levels featuring flying I was hoping that would be the end of it. I was sadly wrong. They're not frustrating, in fact the flying mechanics were fairly solid. But I hated Descent, so I was always going to sigh when Prey takes me off my feet. Prey also features portals, as per the original idea of the game from the 1990's. However portals are nothing new come 2006. Sure they can open and close and it's a good way to insert more enemies into the action, but they're not a big selling point. What is a lot more unique is the change of gravity. Using special pathways you can literally walk vertically around the four walls of a room. You can reverse the gravity of a room just by shooting a trigger. On top of this you have spirit walk, where you can leave your body as a spirit and still interact with the environment. These are some intriguing, fresh features that form the basis for many puzzles throughout Prey. Do I like puzzles? No, not at all. So the constant gravity changes and puzzle solving didn't really have me jumping with excitement. In fact the brightly lit gravity pathways did get a little ugly and repetitive as the game wore on. The actual action in the game was all solid. The weapons are slightly different to your standard shooter stock, so it made for some interesting gameplay. The game should have been quite a difficult game, however a unique approach was made regarding dying. Instead of relying on quicksaves or checkpoints, you instead enter a short shooting game which after 20 seconds returns you to where you died with your health returned. This means you can't really die in Prey. Quicksaving is completely unnecessary and sometimes there's little point to avoid losing health. You might as well just die and get your health replenished. The boss battles in particular become a complete joke when you keep respawning and the boss still has the same health. I can understand the idea behind it; they wanted to remove replaying large sections and constant quicksaves/quickloads, but they made it far too easy to not try at all in the game. There's no incentive to not dying, other than your own ego. However with it being an easy game, it's also replayable as you can jump into any part of the game and have a blast (providing it's not a flying level!). There's no lengthy storytelling or slow parts to the gameplay. Prey is certainly not a perfect game; the flying and puzzles get old, the regenerating (no dying) system was a mistake, but the action is solid and design great throughout. Possibly the best shooter of 2006. I really enjoyed Prey but I played it through once or twice then became bored with it. It had LOADs of stuff in it which was awesome:
Portals Cool physics/gravity Shrink the player and put them on a mini-planet Boss fights!!! A plot (sortof) Spirit-walking Puzzles Reasonable (for the time) AI 'Cause it was IdTech4 it ran smooth! All of what Kona said really. good game.
There was a boredom factor for me as well though. Maybe it was just too linear. Not much choice for the player; you're pretty much led from A to B and that's it. If you replay it, you're again led from A to B in the same manner. I like the leech gun, that was a pretty cool concept. Would have liked a lot more of the Native American stuff and more character development. There was a series of spiritual tests announced, but they never came. The death game became boring fast; I prefer checkpoints with optional quickloading. A lot of cool scenes in the game like the school bus. It didn't always come together very well; it felt like cool bits strung together instead of a cohesive theme. Wtf were those little girls doing in there. Their backstory was totally lost on me. It was like "you're swarmed by creepy little girls now because the designer fancied it" and next level, the little girls were gone again. What the... It also suffered from darkness like Doom3 and Quake 4. Plus, I didn't like Jen. I'm supposed to save a girlfriend who just screams all the time? :-/ They should have given Jen a gun and allowed the player to play as her for a while, exploring a different area of the sphere. Weapons look very underwhelming, shotgun in particular. I hope that's only SOME of the weapons.
Yeah Jen has got to be the ugliest princess that needs saving in any game ever. Her head was far too wide for the face. Even Princess Toadstool is hotter. I'd rather have screwed the mutant mother bitch at the end, at least she had her tits out already.
elastomania for sailors: http://bloboats.blobtrox.net/
quite enjoyable so far.
movement is about on par with modern shooters, fairly slow. it's the unreal engine so movement and direction changes are crisp and responsive. for some reason, you can jump about 3 meters in the air. alien planet so low gravity? i dunno, it's weird but actually necessary because most places where you are required to jump are quite far. this also means that there's a LOT of clipping going on to stop you from leaving the map. fov is very small, but you can change it back to 90. visual are gorgeous. it's not crysis 2, but it's not trying to be. it's like madmax with world of warcraft art style. if the character models had solid coloured textures, you might mistake them for team fortress 2. pretty repetitive with enemies though. there's bandits and animals somewhat like fiends and birds. there are many variations of bandits though, and each type is quite distinctive and much more than just a reskin. you rarely have to look at the name of the mob to tell what kind it is. append: i just remembered there were these worms that you had to shoot in the eye to kill and the second area i just entered had these slug things that remind me of the film "Tremors". so maybe things are looking up for monster variety. as far as i can tell, the core gameplay is identical for all 4 player characters. you can use any gun you want, contrary to what the instruction booklet and character descriptions imply. the only thing is some of the talents you pick up later via talent points (1 per level after level 5) only boost certain weapon types, but it's not like you can't use any weapon if you wanted to. as for the 'role playing' aspect, it's really just 'stat buiding' ala diablo. it's even less than that, really. you get the aforementioned talent points to spend but there are no traditional rpg stats like str, dex and con. there's a simple 'learn by doing' system for the weapons. the more kills you get with a certain weapon, the more you go up in weapon skill levels and you start to accrue tiny bonuses like +2% damage or +5% reduced reload time or somesuch. finally, each character only gets a single special ability. hunter gets a pet bird that you can send out to beat on guys. it's effective, but goofy. i'm not a huge fan of 'pets'. i like to kill my own stuff. soldier gets a turret you can plop down that also can give you ammo and does a decent job of killing stuff. this guy feels like he was built specifically for coop and so feels somewhat... i dunno, out of sorts in solo. 'siren' (talk about unhelpful class name) spawns an explosion then turns invisible and then spawns another explosion when reappearing. this is more useful than it sounds. you can use the explosions to knock out groups of enemies more accurately than grenades and also very helpful for running away if stumble on some mob 10 levels higher than you. berserker is... well, you punch stuff insanely hard and you heal and become invulnerable. i didn't use this guy very long. i hate meleeing in a shooter and this kind of thing is boring to me. so yeah, the differentiation between the classes is a lot more subtle than their visual differentiation. anyway, will see how it goes in the second area... Certain classes did better with different guns. Soldiers did good with automatics, sirens did good with snipers (? maybe), etc. I may be talking out of my rear, though. Check the wiki.
Also, i wouldn't say the art style is like WoW, at all really, their both cartoony, but it pretty much ends there. I forget what the name of the art style used in borderlands is, i know warsow uses the same style, though. you need to look at the textures and the way they are made. you'll see the similarities with wow's texture art.
the game could have worked just as well without the comic book black outline effect. the textures are that strong. and yeah, like i said, you can use any gun, but some classes' talents only boost one damage type (for example, soldier has one that boosts only shotguns). siren's talents are more generalized as many boost her actual ability, and others boost elemental procs (+fire, +acid, +electricity) which are present on all types of weapons. I bought the zombie island and mad moxxie dlc and haven't even played them yet. :(
If we can get some coop going on I might join in. I didn't like the sp at all but maybe coop is better.
And came back saying that the demo was real time
Maybe that will be a new game. They said it hasn't gone past a tech demo, but Gears of war was originally just a tech demo and then turned into a full game.
Yeah the system they ran it on had 3 GTX580's... ffs. However if you started a game now, it wouldn't be ready for a couple years anyway, by which time GTX580's will be cheap. And they did say it'd be fine on just 1 GTX580. I wouldn't mind if that was their next game, at least it's better than realistic war shooters. son yeah its enjoyable in a sandbox kind of way (not my thing generally) but it gets pretty repetitive too IMHO. Although the plains of Africa look great, I would love for a change of environment sometime soon.
nice lighting and fog and sweat, but it looks like just another game where you headshot people and fight giant robots to me.
I think the detailed violence in some recent games (Crysis 2 breaking necks, anyone) is really a bit over the top. Games do not get automatically better when guts drop on the floor, brains hit the wall or jaws are ripped off. It's pretty cheap actually. Apart from that, gameplay plz? And if there was a jab at Brink in there, I'm just going to say I'm 300% more likely to buy Brink. Yeah if I remember right this video was to show off the new dx11 support in UE3, and I believe they have added the dx11 effects into UDK now also, although I could be mistaken.
Sure doe's look great though, lol about the 3x GTX 580's however... Maybe in another 5-6 years we will see games that actually look like that, its not like id or crytek are making gpu-melting engines any more :P I'll be honest. I love the way that Doom baddies turn into mush. I dont think Quake ever managed to succesfully reproduce that. What I dont like is over-large QTE-style anims which take too long (AVP anyone?)
Violence is satisfying, but when you get to God of War levels, you have to start feeling your hobby is just a bit fucked up :P
It has to be the end of a range.
A Quake example: Gibbing is rarely seen and can be difficult to do since you're not supposed to be quadrocketing shamblers or rocketing grunts. So its 'rare' that you see the bits and pieces fly although theres still the standard death sequence. With cutom maps and veteran players who save their rockets for this sort of thing this doesn't make much of a difference - gibbing has become frequent. My point is that gibbing isn't constant. You can barely go a single fight without some monster losing its organs in GoW. Which completely takes the satisfaction out of it. It's not the goreporn I like, but achieving something. If thats tied into splattering a monster across the wall then so be it. Interesting one. Has to fit the subject matter, theme, atmosphere and tone of the game IMO.
L4D2 is the goriest game I've played and it is pretty bloody gory - blood, limbs, innards and hacked up corpses fly everywhere. It's grim but great, cos it's zombies, so it feels appropriate. Worth it's 18 rating tho. Funnily enough, playing Bioshock recently, I found Ryan's death scene in that, although much much less gory, to be far more traumatic due to the way it was presented. One of the harshest things I've seen in a game. nice lighting and fog and sweat, but it looks like just another game where you headshot people and fight giant robots to me.
What about the innovative cigarette-butt-enrages-enemies aggro management mechanic? It works on guys with helmets, and giant robots! Looked like it would be a cool game right up to the point where he showed 'teh super powers lol'
oooh dark stealthy potential Deus Ex type... oh no, just beating shit up, oh well. But why am I complaining about a tech demo About 25ish hours into it at the moment, really enjoying it so far.
it's definitely more hack n slash compared to the first one, you can literally kill about 8 enemies with 1 move if you get the right positioning and timing. All classes and abilities are meaty as hell, the combat in general is awesome, much better than the original. Story etc is good too, I was worried that having the game centered on 1 city would make it repetitive and to some extent that is true, but there is a lot of diversity in how you interact with various organisations and people in the city, that it stays fresh. I can already see im going to replay the game at least twice just to see what happens when you align with different people. Some things do stick out however, all of the dungeon levels seem to be made of a very small amount of tile sets and get repetitive fairly quickly, from a visual standpoint. Reading a few internet forums you would think that this was the worst game ever though, I don't really understand that, I'm having a real blast here and its definitely on an even footing with the original in terms of quality. I would say the demo doesn't help much as it showed a fairly bland portion of the game (ie, the beginning). It doe's take a while to get going and get you immersed into the world, but by the end of the first year I was hooked :) From a performance standpoint, im running in dx11 on high settings with 4x antiailasing on a gtx460 and its a smooth 60fps for 90% of the time, dropping to perhaps 40 or so in the really hectic battles, perfectly fine in my book, though I have heard people having trouble in dx11 mode with freezes and poor frame rates. So basicly, internet is over-reacting imo, this is a great game and I'm looking forward to replaying it many times probably! I was unable to play the first F.E.A.R. expansion pack because my version of F.E.A.R. refuses to update, and the pack won't run unless it's an updated version. So it's a throwaway. However the second expansion pack for F.E.A.R., strangely titled Perseus Mandate, runs standalone so I could play it. That's not necessarily a good thing though. Clearly, I got the booby prize because Perseus Mandate received below average reviews, deservedly so.
There's very little story and what is there doesn't make much sense and gives you no reason to care at all about what's happening. This is action, pure and simple. And in this respect the action is just as good as the original game with some tough new enemies. But it is a fair bit more difficult, especially the last level. Not impossible by any means, but while I rarely used the bullettime feature in F.E.A.R., this time you need it for basically every single firefight. If not every single enemy even. So you do have to play much more meticulously and carefully. I did constantly have maximum health packs in my arsenal for almost all of the game, even at the end, so it's not frustratingly hard. Where Perseus Mandate falls down, and I mean falls hard, is in it's presentation. Now the level design in F.E.A.R. was bland, boxy and very uninspiring. But Perseus Mandate takes this to a new level; this sort of design should never have gone past the 90's. Here we have box rooms littered with debris, box corridors littered with debris, large bland areas that look like they're only at the layout/concept stage. I don't understand how level designers this slack can be hired to work on a retail game. Even I, single handedly, could have made all the levels throughout this entire game at a much higher standard than what was released. What were these designers doing between F.E.A.R. being released in 2005 and this ugly box game in 2007. So, unfortunately, the game won't live up to 2007 standards at all. And the engine is looking dated with average models and lighting. The game is still fun all the way through, but that's because Monolith already built a great set of enemies and gameplay structure. TimeGate haven't done much but fill their bland levels with this fun gameplay. Not really worth it unless you don't care what games look like, and sadly looking at the top review sites that make no mention of how bad these levels look, that's probably a large percentage of players. I was never able to patch F.E.A.R. with the installer either but you can open the installer with 7-zip and extract the files and patch it that way. It's a little confusing as there are duplicate files but I think I just used the larger of the duplicates and it worked fine and allowed EP to install.
I don't understand how level designers this slack can be hired to work on a retail game *waves* Glad you thought it was fun at least :) I will not argue that Perseus Mandate looks pretty bland in terms of the levels' art. I still think it has some of the funnest combat of any game I've made levels for. While I don't want to make excuses for a bad looking game, there are reasons why it looks bad beyond just lack of talent or effort. The majority of good Quake SP maps probably have a longer development cycle than this entire game. :) Yeah totally Blitz... there's a number of reasons why the levels could have looked bland, it's definitely not always the level designers fault if they're simply not given the necessary amount of time to spend on the game. In fact 5-6 level designers surely wouldn't all be lacking. Or have an art director that doesn't value quality and detailed build and thinks all you need to do is fill it with prefabs. I mean, look at the amount of top review site that never make any mention of level design... they don't seem to differentiate between level design and the 'graphics'.
There was some decent looking stuff in Perseus... it definitely wasn't as mazey as the original game. But what I preferred were the underground bits, the part with the old underground subway (was it a subway? can't remember now), actually any section that wasn't warehouse or buildings like FEAR. The spooky bits were decent. What other games have you worked on Blitz? > I mean, look at the amount of top review site that never make any mention of level design... they don't seem to differentiate between level design and the 'graphics'.
This. at most companies the level designer doesn't do environment art anyway -- that's a separate job. Not sure how monolith did it but something to consider when saying the "level design looked bland."
I got it on sale for $20 or so. Still haven't played it. SO I can't help you. Dunno why I'm even typing this.
My point is that gibbing isn't constant. You can barely go a single fight without some monster losing its organs in GoW. Which completely takes the satisfaction out of it.
Freaky, I was thinking about this very thing today. One of the things I like about Quake's gibletudinality is the fact that it almost feels like a sort of skill-based finishing move - i.e. you can't gib corpses - that would completely cheapen the whole experience; you have to hit a live monster with just the right amount of damage at the right time to get those crisp, chunky treats. I mean, the feeling of gibbing a Hellknight with the double-barrelled shotgun is a wonderful, precious thing for me. It also stops you from picking up anything the enemy drops on death as a downside. Managing to gib a Shambler is awesome.
i often find myself setting up opportunities to gib. 3 rockets will kill a fiend, but 2 rockets, some shells and one more rocket is just particle spray fun!
yeah... it's easy to gib grunts with the SSG, i find the skill is in making sure you don't gib, therefore get the backpack :)
But a game where you got extra bonus for gibbing would be cool, and create a nice incentive across all enemies to do the more "skillful" death. It also stops you from picking up anything the enemy drops on death as a downside.
Find that annoy tbh. Given that a lot of Quake maps (especially on skill 2) try to be really tight with ammo, it makes accidentally gibbing something rather annoying. Same goes for Doom's random health chances. It screws up ammo balance, so whilst it might be neat for atmosphere, mechanically it isn't so great. Yeah it's pretty insane. Clip from a projectile can be bugger all to insane :(
But even small differences can be infuriating. If you vary health or damage just slightly then try to have a highly tuned bit of combat you get screwed over, because neither you nor the player can 100% rely on time/shots taken to kill something, which throws things off. You could say random is more exciting or tense but in this case it just means you've no idea if a given area would even be possible. Speaking of randomness in games, ever played the original Robotron? That game is a text book example of being an insanely hard unpredictable bitch. But in a good way most of the time :P wait, are you talking about player weapons? iirc, they are pretty consistent. the RL has some random element to it, but shotguns and such always seemed to take the same number of shots to kill things.
Either really, but in doom it's mainly incoming damage, but your own weapons can be somewhat random too, though happily not nearly as much :)
Bloody fantastic game. Thoroughly enjoyed it. My biggest complaints were :
1.) The bad clipping all over the place. As previously said, it sucks running into an invisible wall or something. Felt they could have/should have done a better job with that. 2.) Ishi is a dick. I hated him more than Sarrano. Such a jerk, how come I got stuck with him instead of either of the other start guys? Other than that, I didn't find it bad that I could gib people easily, because for me the hard part was getting the trick shots. Gibbing in Quake became trick shots in Bulletstorm. There were several I didn't get in my playthrough of the sp. Felt some enemies weren't used enough (the giant mutant dudes you push towards some enviro hazard) and the mutated spider things were used Weapons + alt fire were pretty refreshing from the normal weapons imo. Some of them are kind of normal, but the rest are fairly innovative and change up the normal weapon progression pistol -> shotgun -> machine gun -> grenade -> rocket or whatever. They feel pretty good. All in all, totally worth the $49 I got it for from the D2D sale. Maybe worth $60, depends on the mp which I haven't played. Would really like to see a UDK for it though, please please please! I still don't get while trick shots were a finite set. It would have been a lot more fun if i could use the chain grenade gun on somethings feet, use the whip to throw him in air, hit him with the harpoon thingy and the watch him explode. The only problem would be naming that kind of stuff, but the names don't really matter; just give me the points. :p
Also, as said before, it was *way* too linear. I should have waited until the price went down to buy it. Yeah the linearity was kind of a let down too - I really wanted to explore some of the skyboxes. Like when you're going up the dam, and you see this beach area that leads into cliffs, I just wanted to go down there and explore. It could have greatly benefited from more exploration similar to BioShock - add some secrets here and there that I can look for.
Also, while I didn't miss the jump function the more I played, it did feel awkward in places where you would think you can just drop down but instead you have to press R or something similar. looks like a lot of fun to me. Way more enjoyable than Far Cry 2 which I might have to put on the back burner.
I should have waited until the price went down to buy it.
i've been doing this exclusively now and i've been enjoying games a lot more in general. i don't exactly know why, but i just don't feel that games are worth 60$ anymore. i'm not sure if that's just me being stingy (which it might) or if it's because i don't find games in general that much fun anymore (which also could be it). take borderlands for example, while i enjoy it overall, there are some things about it that would probably annoy me a great deal but at 15$, i find that i can ignore it and just focus on the good stuff. i just don't feel that games are worth 60$ anymore.
I kinda feel the same. I have a feeling that although they might be technically feature packed, no mods or custom content is a real killer. That and I feel that the more realistic theme and visuals games go for these days mean that they are less open for custom content anyway. Possibly I'm just getting older and more annoying. :E Especially not the stupid bullshit they try to sell that's actually the same games we've been playing for years only with slightly different paint; only difference is the hype and brand names which makes for the prices.
In the end, the only games that are really worth the money are RPGs, or generally games with a long playtime. /rant I don't pay for games at all any more. Very rarely I'll pick something up if I know I'll be playing it a lot, but always as part of a bundle or discount price.
No, I don't pirate stuff either. It's just that modern games, on the whole, are shit. Recently I've been playing Quake, Zsnes and Desktop Dungeons. Granted, Zsnes (does this count as piracy still?) is very hit and miss and it does get kind of sad to have the rose tinted spectacles smashed, but its still fun. Need to get myself a snes gamepad though. havent paid more than $10 for a game in a while.
To be honest, I dont have that much playing time anyway so by the time I would eventually play something, it would have been out long enough for a price drop. Therefore, silly to buy it when it first comes out in my circusmtances. There's too many average games to pay $60. They aren't worth it. Take Hitman: Blood Money.
Started playing this yesterday, i've just passed the 4th level and it's crashed and since it won't do saved games if you restart the game, it means I have to play the whole level again. I don't think so. Anyway it's supposed to be a stealth game but I put it on rookie (so I could have unlimited quicksaves) and played it as a shooter. Unfortunately that means shooting someone, then hiding in a corner as 90% of the enemies in the level all come running for you. Then the rest of the level is wandering around doing some stupid task, usually assassinating someone who's hiding or, in some cases once your cover is blown, completely fucking disappears meaning you have to play the entire level again. The game looks good so far, but the gameplay sucks ass, big time. Thank god I torrented it instead of paying, because it's not really worth my precious time in finishing it. ...So you're saying that a stealth game has shitty gameplay if you play it like a shooter?
I would probably say the same thing about Thief. It'd be hard to play Thief as a normal shooter, you'd get your ass handed to you. But in Hitman your given the option of going stealth or just going in shooter mode. Now I wouldn't mind if I was forced to do stealth, but don't give me the option to go in shooting everything in sight, when it's so poorly done. If you did restrict yourself to stealth ONLY in Hitman, then it might be okay.
It has other problems too, like reloading or saving the game takes several clicks through menu's, having to slowly load profiles everytime you start, the death sequence takes 30 seconds which you can't even escape out of and have to sit through it, the mouse aiming is strange - it's actually hard to aim at someone in this game, the sensitive is weird, like gradual or something. Oh and the walk speed is ludicrously slow. Thief and Splinter Cell are great stealth games. Even Call of Cthulhu had it's moment. But Hitman is a miss imo. What are the controls like on the PC version? Just fps controls?
Cause on a console the whole hold-run thing was fucking horrible. it's still downloading :P
But for the same price as a pint of beer, I won't really be complaining if it's like that ;) That game was AMAZING fun. Such a good game. The controls were fine - everything about that game oozed quality. Def a must buy for this cheap.
So its loaded with Securom and games for windows live, sigh.
I can't even play it because securom says my steam-provided game key is invalid, and a quick browse on the forums seems to show that many others have the same issue. Securom, punishing the innocent, 1 game at a time :P In Prey 2, a source close to the game tells Kotaku, players will take on the role of a federal air marshal who is aboard the commercial airliner seen crashing in the spaceship early on in the original game. Prey 2 takes place during the same time frame as the original, but with this different perspective, we're told.
Prey:Warhead? Who makes these choices? Source: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=24283&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a They call it 'high level thinking' which means not considering the outcomes of any of the decisions you make.
Hmmm but the first game already setup the plot/location for the sequel. They're just going to completely ignore that? Idiots.
Anyway here's another review... i'm only 5 yrs behind in gaming now, so my reviews might start being a bit more interesting :P So i'm moving on to the 2007 releases. I've skipped 2006's Gears Of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas - I'll play them on my new computer. So, starting at the bottom of 2007's shooters was Hour Of Victory. Installed okay, but upon loading there's no menu. Probably a good thing anyway as the game got awful reviews.
So next on my list is Infernal from Metropolis Software, a game developer i've never heard of and who was bought out by CD Projekt (The Witcher) a year later. So I guess this is their one and only title. Now Infernal received fairly average to harsh reviews with an aggregate of 60% on GameRankings.com. However, it was actually a pretty decent game so if this is an indication of the 'worst' of 2007, with 19 other action games on my list that ranked higher, then 2007 is shaping up to the best year for PC action games ever (up until 2007 of course). Where Infernal received flak was it's short length, repetitive gameplay and not pushing the boundaries. Honestly, those 19 shooters that ranked higher - did they all push the boundaries of gaming? I seriously doubt it. I'll quite happily take a solid, good looking game with fun gameplay that does nothing to evolve gaming. I might have played this type of game a dozen times already, but that's the kind of game I enjoy. Infernal's level design is good, but often it just feels like you're in a huge room with a maze of small walls and walkways to navigate through. Sure it's better than the corridor-room-corridor of F.E.A.R., but there's still massive room for improvement. We do get a bit a variety in the levels; there five missions going through a monastery, refinery, steelworks, a massive ship and the mountain-based satellite centre. Now what hides the lacking level design is the great looking engine. Everything has a glossed over feeling and the lighting in particular is very well done. The gameplay is a little weaker and took some criticism from critics, but it was still fun all the way through. Infernal leans more towards the higher difficulty rather than being an easy game. You can tap your movement keys twice to do an invisible roll to avoid fire, and without this the game would be very difficult. It's an addition that sped up gameplay a lot and is well done. What slows the game down to a halt is the way you have to hold Enter to strip your dead enemies of health and ammo. It takes a few seconds each time, which you need to do on probably 75% of the dead bodies in this game. It ends up being a strategy of killing everything, then slowly raping the dead bodies of health/ammo for a couple of minutes before moving to the next section. It absolutely kills the flow of action in the game. On top of that, the game is perhaps in the 5-7 hour zone. It's NOT a long game. I won't go into the story as it's the typical cliched rubbish with a hot chick teaming up with you. Same of the one liners were good though. Overall Infernal is a good game and certainly worth playing. It won't be the best of 2007, but certainly deserves better than a 6 out of 10. Decided to give it another go, this time with the "Complete" mod (graphical overhaul, bug fixes, other stuff). Looks a whole lot better than the original game, but hell if you don't have a fast machine...
Originally I wanted to play SoC, inspired by all the recent tragic events and a macabre sense of end times nostalgia, but then (as always) remembered certain 'workout' situations from the game, like the entire first level and the garbage bandits, which put me off a little. So it's the third installment now, which last time I lost interest in upon reaching the city. Probably missed the best part of it. Anyway, bottom line, if anyone's about to replay Stalker, be sure to give the Complete mods a try. Oh, and I've finally played FEAR - mostly for cultural capital, not actual interest. A very boring game, no idea why I even bothered to finish it. I didn't care about the story, and the 'horror' elements were lame to say the least. Like people in this thread mentioned, the game lacks variation. The levels are very monotone in style and the enemies/encounters don't offer anying special, either.
The level design issn't all as bad as people in this thread claimed, though - but yeah, it does lack variation and unique setpieces, and indeed feels unnecessarily mazey and corridory in many places. However, I liked how most maps have a slightly nonlinear route to the goal, even though the gameplay doesn't faciliate stealh approaches or anything. On the other hand, I can see how this must have been annoying for many people as the potential for getting lost is definitely there, especially considering how samey everything looks. Because the lack of any risk, challenge or consequence to anything you did in the game was a pretty big blight on the original, I felt.
Where to start, I guess the obvious thing to say is that its awesome and that you should buy it ;) Also, for those wondering about performance, I could run the game on my gtx460 at the "extreme" setting and had no problems.
The single player is great fun, there are a few key differences from Crysis however, the most plainly obvious for me was that there isn't so much exploration any more. In Crysis you could explore the map in any direction but only certain areas had any actual gameplay in them. In Crysis 2 you are directed through the maps in a linear fashion but each area provides many different routes and ways to get through it. In each area the game just lets you tackle it however you wish, and gives you a bunch of toys to play with. Cars can be kicked at things and off ledges, explosive barrels can be hurled, and just about any solid object can be moved around as you see fit. It's a playground of carnage and its fantastic :) Guns! They all feel great to use, really meaty and the customization from the first game is still there to modify your weapons on the fly. A new feature is the ability to customize your actual nanosuit with upgrades also, such as bullet deflection, threat tracers, proximity alarms, reduced energy usage for modes and an awesome "air stomp" that will take out multiple enemies if you aim it right ;) Story is serviceable for the most part, there are a few WTF moments but its mostly enjoyable, and its presented very very well, always from first person. There is some slight retconning from the first game but nothing major. A few characters from the first game seem to have gone missing without any explanation however :P The one thing that is kind of a letdown however is the enemy AI, far too many times they will remain stationary and not attack, or get stuck in some sort of animation loop bugginess. It also has the ability to amaze however, some of the alien enemies will jump from floor to wall to ledge to another wall then slam you in the face and its very very impressive indeed. I've been playing the MP also, not really enough to offer a decent opinion but I'm liking it so far, its very similar to call of duty but with added nansuit powers to mix up the gameplay a bit. One final thing I'll add, I really love the sense of movement the new cryengine manages to convey with its motion blur. 99% of games I've seen motion blur in seem to apply it to the entire screen no matter what is moving and what isn't. In Crysis 2 motion blur is applied to objects relative to their movement speed as viewed by your player camera. The effect is fantastic and really sells the visuals. Screenshots (Could be spoilery! You have been warned!) http://steamcommunity.com/id/darrenweekes/screenshots?tab=public&showdate=1&filter=app_99830 One of the best-looking games as of late. The engine feels a bit like an updated version of UT3, but without the restriction to brown and blurry.
Performance is great indeed. Though unfortunately it's still pretty much unplayable for me thanks to the random system lockups. Hope there'll be an update soon that addresses this issue. It's a bit unfortunate the game itself turned out to be this consolized, though on the other hand this was to be expected. At least it's not CoD-level. Also quite easy (even on Hard), enemies go down quickly and the assault rifles have an insane accuracy. Perhaps difficulty romps up later on. It seems the lockups don't occur if I set the game to match the desktop resolution and run it in windowed mode.
Well, it did allow me to play through the bridge and the lab rat map in one go, but then it crashed in the next map.
The graphics card is new, but there must be an incompatibility issue with some other component. Possibly the PSU - it does suffice spec-wise (780W, 4 +12V rails with 20A each), but it might be faulty still. Using it, I had the MB and my former 9600 GT die just like that. Fucking hardware geek shit. I should probably file a support ticket with Nvidia. 99% of games I've seen motion blur in seem to apply it to the entire screen no matter what is moving and what isn't.
I've noticed this in some of the games I am now trying (ie post 2007) and it annoys the hell out of me. What a crap feature. Crysis 2... only played the multiplayer so far and there were a number of things that turned me off. I don't like the intense motion blur for example. I also don't like the "consoleness" of it compared to the original Crysis.
From what I've seen, they took the same approach as in Warhead, ie simplifying and linearizing, and updated the engine (with Crytek, "updating the engine" means "dusting the competition" needless to say). I guess the singleplayer will still be good though, it's Crytek and they have a bunch of super talented people there. It would surprise me if it sucked. I'm not finished with the original Crysis yet (meaning I very actively make stuff for it) and so I'm fine with not playing C2 right now. I'm sure Crytek's level designers can't do much wrong though and the weapons etc. were already beefy in the first game. Sounds like Cryengine is still full of bugs though. there is no word from Crytek about the Sandbox editor yet, only that they want to do something like UDK.
I hope it doesn't become "pay to map". It doe's have quite a few bugs unfortunately at the moment, which can make it very frustrating to actually find a game!
Sometimes a lobby will fill to capacity but the match will not start, forcing everyone to find a new game server. There is quite a lot of disconnection happening (to me at least), and the server browser is a bit meh (wtf, no refresh??!). That said, once you manage to actually find a decent server that will launch games and won't kick you, the gameplay is pretty fun. my pro tip : armour mode takes a second or so to become fully active, so if you hit the armour key *after* you start getting shot it's probably too late ;) In fact thats probably my only gripe with the MP. Were all wearing these super nanosuits but still it only takes 2 or 3 decent hits to drop us, or 1 headshot it seems :P armour mode helps a lot but like I mentioned you basicly need to be in that mode all the time and its terrible as a reactive ability. Gb, try playing with "r_MotionBlurShutterSpeed" console variable, might be able to tone it down a bit for mp. rock-climing game, it's like playing twister on your keyboard. I just played a couple times, haven't gotten past 4.8m:
http://www.foddy.net/GIRP.html (from the makers of QWOP) The over view shot reminds of the "islands" map from Far Cry, where there were 5 or 6 small to medium sized islands on the map and each one had a small objective on it, you were spawned on a boat and basicly told "there are 5 things you need to do, go do them however you want".
Definitely my favourite FC map from the retail game. The Assault level from Crysis follows a similar formula but isn't as open. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, it looks fun from a gameplay perspective :) OK I've put about 8 hours in and I can say that I'm getting a feel for it.
Crysis 2 is a very pretty game. It lacks some of the pizzaz of Crysis and Crysis warhead in some areas, mainly on relief mapping on textures from what I can tell. But the finesse of the visuals is still there, in a way it is better. The animations of some of the aliens is jaw dropping, as are some of the set pieces. The gameplay doesn't actually feel particularly like a console port at all, I found the game to run very smooth and the controls have been responsive. Unlike fallout 3 or Assasins Creed for example. The main giveaway is the lack of any quicksave that I can find. This means that the game runs on a checkpoint system. There is some degree of open-endedness apparently, usually alternative routes become apparent. The checkpoint system can be annoying, but most of the sections are quite fun to play. I went for the middle tier of difficulty. The AI is generally OK, it could be a little harder, but some of the behavioural stuff the AI does is cool nonetheless, and the animations and the way the motion blur works together quite nicely IMO. Y one criticism is that all of the human AI seems to have the same voice, which is a bit annoying. The score is a bit annoying aswell, but sometimes it is cool. There is a lot of big spectacular orchestral movie score music, and sometimes I think this is too much and detracts from the atmosphere of the game. You can turn it down/off though.... I found a utility which allows you to adjust all of the graphics options in a similar way to the original Crysis but the presets all look fine I guess. I think Im gonna play again for a while now..... Hah, awesome, I'm a huge fan of QWOP (played it so much with collegues) this one looks great as well, reached 7m!
i managed to get to 15 or 17 m in my last attempt... it's actually not as hard as QWOP in that regard... you can actually make discernable progress in a few tries.
I'm wanting to reinstall Far Cry for a while now, in a way it's more entertaining than the Crysis series. More anarchistic and less americanized ("Go! Go! Go!").
then i hit what seemed like a dead end, and it was too late to go back down and take the other route (water was too high.) the seagull is a bastard.
This game looks pretty funny :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TM5x72fk6o&feature=player_embedded DM gameplay looks suitable MEH, but the style and enviroments still look ace. Definitely interested.
I think the gameplay looks fun, feels a bit like tribes, lots of jumping around and stuff, I like.
looks fucking awesome.
I really, really hope they're NOT using insta-hit weapons but simulate ultra fast (but not insta!) projectiles. Would fit the feeling well, I think. there's a LOT of detail in that map... i wonder how many people they have working on that.
with the focus on detail these days, i'm surprised we don't see more computer generated greebles. There isn't so much specific detail, it's all pretty modular, and there are barely any normal maps at all, which makes things so much faster to make.
And to answer the question, 9 people total, 9 months. 9 people for 9 months on what exactly? just that map, or the entire game?
game looks okay. not sure if i will like the flying part of it. the level looks a bit repetitive especially in it's colour scheme. there's not much contrast in both lighting and textures. still, lots of nice details :) Well, 9 months on at least all that's in that video (obviously UDK is the base though), they seem to have more stuff done though.
Not sure if metl already linked this little game, seems he would have already found and beat it:
http://armorgames.com/play/10912/space-is-key Also, digging the music. http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
A game for Bal... Chron-trigger was great so far but now it turned into a boss fight after boss fight chore. I guess I am near thyroid end but then I thought so for quite a while already. Currently just regained the epoch and entered the ocean city with it. No spoilers please, I am just randomly sharing my frustration since that's hip.
And the GFX are good. The Alien AI is just as good as the AI from AvP (original), if not better. Some of the 'story' is a bit lame, and some of it is just plain dumb. But for a couple of days worth of fun, $10 is a good price! My 2c.
I bought AvP, played it for about 15 minutes, and never picked it up again. I would say avoid it, but if there's a demo go ahead and try it.
Puzzle game where you need to figure out how to play, and how to win:
http://ded.increpare.com/~locus/nawnco/ Once you win, see if you can figure out an efficient strategy for winning. Looks like there are a shitload of other games and misc. apps on the author's page here: http://www.increpare.com/
If you don't have these games, $5 is super worth it. These are probably my favorite 'modern' FPS games. They are fantastic.
Is there any singleplayer FPS that has maps like Quake has? Semi- but definitely non-realistic abstract maps with hints at reality but overall making no sense at all. Following no realistic themes (Quake 2, Painkiller do that for example), no story to speak of. Environments that are just gameplay.
Also, err. Ummm.
Fuck knows. There might be more. Some of the 3PS / Fantasy stuff is more like that. FAKK2, Enclave, that sort of shizzle. are of you UK folk able to please buy Bioshock 2 as a gift it for me?
Can paypal funds over later. On Steam (AU), it's $12.49 which isnt much but hey if I cant get if for $5 why not. Profile name - n_gulati so request open to US people too.
And no havent played Portal yet. Still making my way through Far Cry 2. Is there any singleplayer FPS that has maps like Quake has? Semi- but definitely non-realistic abstract maps with hints at reality but overall making no sense at all. Following no realistic themes (Quake 2, Painkiller do that for example), no story to speak of. Environments that are just gameplay.
Well, in terms of combat they do things very differently to your typical FPS, but I'm rather fond of the Metroid Prime games. MP3 was built for the Wii; MP1 and MP2 were made for Gamecube but now have slightly updated versions available on the Wii. It's all about the environment with these games, to the point that combat often gets completely sidelined to make way for long stretches of first-person platform/puzzle gameplay in really bleak/tranquil/crazy alien environments. Because they are wierd and alien, the environments are generally pretty abstract. They are also pretty hardcore games mostly because of quite a few grindingly frustrating "brick wall" boss combats, but if you can stomach those without throwing your console out the window you will be rewarded with some pretty cool and unique shooter/platformer/puzzler gameplay. There's nothing else really like those games to be honest. I still think MP1 is the best, and certainly has the most atmospheric and remote feeling; a real sense of being completely isolated on a forgotten alien world. I mentioned painkiller as an example that is not what I am looking for. First of all it is very 2D, secondly the levels follow distinct themes and iirc are rather realistic and last but not least the combat is horde stupidity. The same applies to serious sam (maybe not the second one? That one felt more like a console rails shooter when I played the demo.)
Portal is not a fps. It is a first person puzzle game. some third person games are really more like it. I thought of tomb raider too (hey gb!) but that game has realistically themed levels. Alice is more like it (actually seeing the new Alice's gameplay made me think of this question). I look for fps though. prey I tried the demo once and it turned me off. isn't the rest of the game some quake2/4/doom3ish alien environments? will check out the new wolfenstein! playing metroid x(?) on the gba was an amazing experience. abstraction and gameplay-oriented layout is obvious though as it is a 2d platformer. unfortunately I got stuck at some stupid boss fight and lost interest. Quake and games like metroid have a lot of similarities (which many people overlook) and one could make great fresh Quake thing if orienting on metroid's game design patterns. talking about 2d here but from what I heard/saw so far of the 3d ones they managed to transport them well. gotta try playing them or at least watch play videos. this really could be more like Quake. probably still following an overall theme though. thanks! #func_qmap cross-continental gay gaming love in!
Also. The new WOFLMAOSTein was cool but not arbitrary. I think it is well worth playing, lots of nice details. Enemies get a bit boring but that's all really. I need to look at my games box later... Is a PITA. First, run in compatibility mode for vista (the sp1/sp2 versions didn't work for me), and make sure stereo mixing is enable if you have a mic (it's funny because bioshock doesn't use a.fucking mic).
unfortunately not. But we get shafted quite often (eg content locked L4D2).
jt, I ran Bioshock 1 fine on windows 7 without any dicking around. I suffered the exact same problem with you on Bioshock. Same solutions too. Bioshock 2 installed and runs perfectly though, so they must have learned something.......
And deleted my save game data, i was only at the Medical Pavilion, but that was enough for me to uninstall it and install bioshock 2. Now, I'm experiencing the wonders of Games for Windows Live. I'm at my third sequential update. This is retarded.
Sucks
Once you have your account and client set up properly, it's not too bad (apart from being completely unnecessary) - I remember having real problems getting it working for GTA4 when I first got that. Same thing - seems to just update and fail over and over. I think the solution was to un-install Game for Windows Live and then go onto the microsoft website and download the latest client. Although with GTA4 I had to fuck around with VCC and I have extra copies of TF2, Amnesia, Audio Surf and Super Meat Boy if anyone would like a copy on Steam.
Alpha Prime, developed by European studio Black Element Software with their own engine, is another of the lower ranked 2007 action titles with a 59% aggregate. However in some ways that's quite a generous score.
I'll start with what's good about Alpha Prime; the looks. Both the engine and level design look good, well up to 2007 standards. It's your typical corridor shooter with very few outdoor areas, but there's plenty of details and nicely built indoor areas, akin to Doom 3 and Quake 4. The story received some criticism, but I thought it actually wasn't that bad. How it was told was the problem, as there's no cinematics so everything is told over radio. Which brings me to the first major issue; the sound. On Vista and Windows 7 the sound does not work correctly. Apparently a patch is supposed to fix it, and putting the sound on low quality improves thing, but it's still very buggy. Most of the talking throughout the game doesn't work, you simply don't hear it and instead have to rely on reading the subtitles. There are likely to be many other sounds throughout the game which I never heard because of this glitch. Apparently it has something to do with the game not supporting Direct X 10. What ruins Alpha Prime completely is the gameplay. There's not enough ammo, there's not enough health. The enemies are all hitscan so if you jump out in the open you'll go from 100% health to dead in about 3 seconds. Now this would be okay if you want to play the game more carefully like you would a war shooter. However the weapons aren't built for that! The shotgun is useless at almost any range, the machine gun has too much recoil and sprays bullets all over the place. The flamethrower is useless unless your a few metres away from the enemy. The sniper rifle is the only effective weapon, but there's little ammo for it. Even with an unlimited ammo cheat, the game is still too hard on normal and it turns into a save/reload chore. I played through to the end as the level design was decent, but the gameplay is too frustrating to be any fun at all and not worth the budget price of a few dollars. I wouldn't mind taking a look at Super Meat Boy myself, especially after finishing VVVVVV some while ago. Another difficult platformer game could is always a fun challenge.
Battlefield 3 is looking incredible. Probably not my kind of game, but Frostbite 2 looks to be a beast. The quick shots at the end of the trailer look especially badass.
http://vimeo.com/22333934 1080p 60fps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zw8SmsovJc 720p that does look good. seems like a ton of voice acting too.
wish we could see more interesting shooters though. i'm so tired of war games. i just don't understand how they keep selling. Graphics and environments look awesomely well done. Style of game and stuff looks as boring as usual.
Yeah the graphics are awesome, the battles are quite epic. Love the building falling down at the end. Shame it'll be way too hard with no quicksave and bullshit tactics to get in the way. Although in that demo there was no ordering of teammates, and he seemed to be fuckin invincible with the amount of times he got shot. maybe battlefield is becoming more like your normal fps.
Maybe this will be the first battlefield game with a passable single player portion?
Though it doe's look quite bland in places, that melee fight with an enemy, is that just a cut-scene or do you have a say in what happens? But really, who cares about the single player in a Battlefield game? :) Say in what happens? I'm guessing if you mess up you'll start over at the last checkpoint to do it until you succeed. There's only ever one way to play these games. BF:BC2's SP is plagued with invisible walls and 'you're leaving the combat zone'. Boring experience.
so what are people's thoughts on this mechanic. I have to say I think it has great potential (probably the only Far Cry 2 mechanic I'm enjoying), adds a bit of unpredictability into the mix, yet something you (or the mapper) can control to an extent.
Of course it needs visible degradation to be fair. I disliked weapons that broke. It gave me incentive to get the higher quality weapons, but every single time that a weapon I used broke in a gun fight, I was a severe disadvantage through no fault of my own. And it really sucks that if you're far from somewhere to buy a gun, in the middle of a mission, you're stuck with other shitty guns that are likely to break too. It was very frustrating imo.
I think the idea is good, but its implementation into games has been rather poor thus far.
Stalker is a great example, your weapon will just suddenly stop working and you are pretty much boned at that point. What if your weapon perhaps lost rate of fire as the condition got worse, bullets travel less quickly and do less damage with lack of repair. Maybe you have no way to repair your weapon before a fight, but you would know before the fight happened that your weapon will be less effective and could plan accordingly. Complete weapon failure should only happen when the weapon is completely fucked! Yeah maybe a warning or something - 'weapon degredation: minimal damage' etc would be better than just having a weapon break apart in your hands.
perhaps something like the damage HUD in the mechwarrior games, where parts of the mech would turn from green through orange to red and black when they fell off :)
Just something visual that you can check to see the condition of your equipment and any negative side effects from the lack of repair would be very welcome. Right now its like you are playing a lottery every time you fire your weapon when its below 100%. it jams a few times (ie need to press reload a few times to unjam) and visibly gets worn down.
So when it eventually stops working, its not that much of a surprise. weapon degradation didn't bother me at all in FC2. in fact, i liked it as it gets the whole scavenger vibe going and you sort of get into a routine where you regularly go swap out your guns at the shop.
stalker bothered me. mostly because unique weapons degraded. you'd get the uber rifle of awesomeness and then it'd be gone with no way to replace it except with an inferior normal gun. thankfully, there's a mod that removes weapon degradation from uniques. mind, i wouldn't have cared if you could repair your gun. i mean, we're playing a character who spends weeks at a time out in the wilds and apparently never heard of cleaning out firearms?? as long as there's a good warning that the thing is going to fail, i don't mind very much. it's when the weapon just disintegrates in your hands and you're left holding little dust piles that it's dumb. STALKER never bothered me much, though honestly speaking I barely noticed it at all.
System Shock 2's however added a lot to the tension, especially if you're not well versed in firearms and repairing. Didn't mind it here much either since otherwise, it would feel like I can shoot without a care in the world besides ammo. Would lose that survival aspect and tension. Generally speaking, it works if it fits. Wouldn't be fun to have paper quality guns in something like Quake or such for example. Horror shooters work though, or things like FC2 and Fallout (haven't played the former) because of the scavenging aspects. How fast does a gun degrade in reality?
I think the stalker mechanic is actually nice, because it encourages hunting for better gear. And as i remember the special guns weren't that much better than their normal variants, were they? Maybe a mechanic that simulates dirt/water/humidity for on the weapons would make much more sense. weapons do not degrade to the point of not working if you keep them clean and dry. To avoid random malfunctions which are frustrating for the player, the game would have to include a "clean and dry weapon" action so that the weapon remains usable during fights. But that sounds like a chore. We already have to reload, now we also have to maintain the weapon? Why not also add actions for "take a piss / shit", "eat", "drink" etc. to keep the character's health?
It's a shit idea if you think about it. But then, most realism enhancing concepts are shit in games. Your gun collects dusts over time when walking, more when swimming, when lying down in mud, etc. That in itself is not bad and can just be cleaned, but if you shoot while dirty, your weapon degrades.
Might make sense in a game like stalker. I think it can be ok in more RPG-ish type games, like I didn't mind it at all in Fallout 3. You obviously need some kind of system to repair them, or to slow down the damage.
but like Necros, I enjoyed this mechanic the way Far Cry 2 implemented it. But it's not for faced paced action shooters. Although, again, creatively used, it forces players into weapons they wouldn't otherwise use which could be an interesting tactic even in a quake map.
Forcing players to choose underused weapons is an interesting side effect. But in Quake, you can do that by intentionally leaving weapons out or giving them to the player late in the map. Guns & Ammo for Quake 2 was a DM map that forced the player to use the Chaingun and Railgun, and it was a ton of fun!
Aside from my personal opinion, which is that guns in games in which you're supposed to be some sort of world-saving-super-soldier/fighter/etc. should be reliable, consistent and accurate...period.
My real world experience (purely anecdotal and by no means, approaching or pretending to be knowledgeable on a professional level) is that most games get guns mostly wrong. I have an M1 30 cal. that traveled through terrible times in terrible places in the Pacific theater as well as a 30-06 Mauser action LR that spent a load of time in the wilds of Eastern Europe, it too went through harsh times. Both were carried by the same man who to my utter surprise passed them on to me. I've used both weapons extensively for hunting, sport and varmint shooting over the past 30 years in all kinds of climates and conditions (make that 20 years, ammo has been way too costly for those two the last 10 years)and they are terrifyingly accurate. I wouldn't even claim to be much of a shooter but when I put the sights on a target within a reasonable distance and have reasonable muscle/breathing control, that target gets hit practically every time. I define "reasonable distance" as about 100 yards with iron sights. Most action in modern games that I've played is closer up than that. This topic is why I've generally hated/disliked the Brothers In Arms games and most others of that ilk. One other recent worst or the worst example would be the two Resistance games, rubber-band and or water guns have more consistency and accuracy than those designed into the games (hyperbole much?). I couldn't believe they were from the same folks that made the bounty of amazing weapons in all of the Ratchet & Clank games. Don't get me started on bullet-sponge enemies, I'm looking at you Gears games. sleep: you seem like you're posting under the impression we're talking about quake? i don't think anyone here is suggesting we should have weapon degradation in any kind of all out action shooter.
but i really do think that it adds stuff to rpg games especially. quakis mentioned SS2 and i agree that it's really awesome in there. i think the guns degraded a little too fast, but when i modded the gameplay, i only ever decreased the rate by a small amount. it's part of the game-- finding a maintenance module so you can prolong the life of your gun for a few more shots or playing the repair minigame when a monster could stumble around the corner and attack you while you're still trying to fix your gun. another thing about it is you don't get too attached to your guns. take stalker-- you basically just toss a gun when it stops working and i think that's ok. the availability of guns is very high unless you're in one of the mutant labs (and even then, soldiers always show up after you beat the mutants so you replenish your guns and ammo from them). i think weapon degradation adds a lot to the right kinds of games. i'd say it's down to testing to see if it is good or not, really. nothing added more to the tension in FC2 than hiding in some bushes or a busted building while i knew there were 3 or 4 guys searching for me, and i look at my gun model and it's all beaten down and scrathed. 'shit, will my gun hold out long enough to get those last guys?!' Those games are a different beast I guess. I thought you were talking about action shooters. So I take it all back. Except what I said about the French ;-).
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/18/preview-prey-2/
It's gone full Blade Runner on us. Boner. Some footage of a full level from Rage, can't believe I missed this :P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XGo5BnfU2Y&feature=player_embedded I'd take a 10 hour corridor shooter over a 200 hour RPG any day. Looks like I won't care much for Prey 2 :(
Rage is looking a lot better in that video than the gun showcase one we saw before. The environments look rather nice too.
Sounds cool to me. Much better than more Prey, I think the reviewer has that spot on. I also think the old D3 engine will suit that sort of atmosphere and gameplay well, rather than hampering it.
Rage Looks great, really liking the atmosphere and style and stuff, and some proper monsters as well. Weapons are still meh but that trailer has me more than convinced. looks excellent concept art wise and I dig the player speed which is faster than usual for a modern shooter.
After almost a decade Epic Games finally created a new franchise to add to Unreal. Unfortunately, it only lasted one game before they moved exclusively to the Xbox, but I'm glad we got at least one single-player game in Gears of War. Obviously Unreal was a classic, but Unreal II was critically disappointing, so Epic really had to create something special, in my opinion, to live up to their grand reputation. Did they suceed? Probably not, but try telling that to the Xbox crowd.
This seems to be becoming a common trend in each game I review - it looks good. In this case, fantastic. As to be expected from Unreal Engine 3, the environments are chocka full of detail with backgrounds of epic proportions. Too many games turn into claustraphobic corridor crawls missing any kind of grand, imposing environment. Not true with Gears of War, as there are some massive looking levels. This is, of course, just part of scenery because the very linear path you follow is quite tight and small. There's very little exploration or wandering off course. Basically Gears does share those simularities with corridor shooters, but at least you've got some large scale eye candy around you. In fact, while this is a sci-fi shooter, the level design felt almost fantasy-like much of the time. Fantasy-Sci Fi perhaps? The one negative of the art and design is that everything is very dull and BROWN. Where's the colour in this world? Now there are some other nitpicks with this game, some of which are more personal that general. No quicksaving is present; always a bad thing. Only two main weapons at a time, a nasty gremlin copied from Halo I assume, which developers really need to stop doing because I hate having to play through a game with the same couple of weapons. Sure I could pick up another weapon, but why bother if they're not as good or only suit certain situations? Instead I equipped myself with a machine gun and a... machine gun. Oh such variety! There's also almost no story. Sure you've got your mission, you've got regular team-mates who spit some quick funny lines. But what is this war and who am I fighting? There's no backstory at all. Would it really have been too hard to make a two minute intro on what the hell this game is about, like a lead up to how this war first begun? It wasn't until I finished the game and Wiki'd the plots to the sequels that I realised it wasn't supposed to be earth! The difficulty was just right for me on casual, as I don't need too much of a challenge. Only a few instances did I have to reload the same checkpoint more than twice. However for the less skilled players, there needs to be an easy difficulty. Some could say this game is a little difficult. The gameplay throughout Gears was consistently fun with enough variety in battles and bosses. In fact some of these enemies I really liked, especially the Boomer and Beserker. It's been a long time since I came upon a semi-boss I hated so much as the Beserker. However I think the lack of quicksave contributes towards that feeling, as I know if she gets me I have to start all over. And while that means you really fear her, it's also damn frustrating when you do have to start the battle again. So, 2006 comes down to Prey vs Gears of War for action shooter of the year. And I've got to give it to Gears because, while it doesn't do anything new, Prey's antigravity and portal ideas became ugly and irritating after a while. Gears at heart is just another action-shooter, like I said with nothing new, but it does it to a very high standard with great looking design and fun gameplay. It's a shame Epic decided to shit on the PC crowd and go make Xbox only sequels, especially considering it's the PC crwod that made them what they are today. Hey, any Brit care to gift me the game (I'd payal the money in advance)? I pre-ordered it from Amazon uk, but costs 1 EUR!!!!!!! more and I'd only receive it in two weeks.
agree on the prey2 change. when i think back on the idtech4 games, i have fond memories of d3 scaring the shit out of me and the clean polished look of q4 with more varied locales.
prey... i have absolutely no feelings for at all. there was just nothing all that interesting about it beyond gimmicks (portals, gravity change and spirit walk). a new direction is a good idea because more of the same would have sucked. skyrim and rage.. holy shit. daz, that video you linked shows rage off MUCH better. obviously heavily scripted for the purpose of the demo, it still looks fantastic. i only hope all the maps look as good as that deadcity one. looks like a slightly roomier kowloon. couldn't really seem to work up to giving a shit about 'shouts' or dragons in the skyrim video, but that's never really been what elder scrolls games are about anyway-- i just want to go and explore that world because it looks awesome. :) rage looks a bit overexposed and dull/grey to me. level design looks awesome though. good to see it's more standard shooter. i can't be bothered with driving crap.
i just hope getting in and out of the vehicle will be very fast.
i hope you basically just disappear/reappear or at most do a hl2 'camera moves into position' thing. a thing that drove (heh) me crazy in borderlands is the extended entry/exit animation. you can't move at all during, nor can you cancel midway. hl2 doesn't bother me at all, even though it has an 'animation' (with the camera) because you can start driving before the 'animation' is complete. so yeah, comes back to the age all 'responsiveness' thing. Was a daft idea in the first place really. ID just trying to shoehorn something different in to show they can do different stuff.
BUT it has potential to be absolutely fine. Will it revolutionise the game and elevate it from a good/great shooter into a cutting edge example of game design?? Of course not. Could it be a fun addition that adds some variety and scenic/action interest just like HL2/FC/Crysis?? Very probably. Overexposed, blah! How many people were moaning that D3 was too dark?? Rage (looks cool)
Duke Nukem Forever (should be fine) Bioshock Infinite (looks cool) Prey 2 (sounds good) Deus Ex 3 (maybe) Battlefield 3 (boring but pretty) Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (pretty timesink) Any others? This game is awesome, despite the aging Source engine, the levels look great and the designs are very refreshing.
The writing is really funny, wasn't expecting I'd laugh so much playing this, I'm loving it. Best singleplayer I've played in a long time for now, looking forward to trying out COOP this weekend. I'm a bit sad they removed the challenges, loved those in Portal one, wouldn't be suprised if they were released later on as a probable (free) DLC. I also wish there were less loading screens between sections (it's ok with the elevators, less so when you're actually walking down a hallway), even though the loading is very quick, it kinda breaks up the pacing sometimes, feels like this should have dissapeared from games by now. Again, this is probably a syndrome of the aging Source engine. <3 Valve <3
Since I got the Golden Potato, Valve gifted me ALL THEIR GAMES, and for the ones I already had (90% of them pretty much, heh), I got a giftable copy of the game instead (including even Portal 2). No one can say Valve doesn't treat it's fans well. :D Alice 2, Rage and DNF for me. DNF well at the top of the list. It'll probably disappoint a little, and just be a typical sci-fi shooter, but it's the memories i'll have of the original Duke 3D, and getting to see the old monsters and guns again at 2011 quality that has me excited. It's not just a fun shooter, it's homage to one of the first great fps'. At least I hope it will be.
By getting all the potatoes yeah, it wasn't always easy, but most of them are quick to get. I admit there are a few times when it felt a bit like a grind, but I mostly had fun. Most of those games are at least ok (and some are quite good), and it was just fun jumping around the ARG wiki site and IRC to figure out the easiest and fastest ways to get the potatoes, felt like a treasure hunt.
It's funny some think Rage is overexposed, while carmack posts "Sometimes I want to put window tint on the artists and designer’s monitors to get them to build brighter levels" on his twitter.
For another 3 hours, then I have marching orders for another hour (dog), then some procrastinating for another hour, but after that im game :D Murderer.
But I picked up GTA4 + the expansions in the sale last week.
Been playing The Lost and Damned stuff. I have to say that so far it is a lot more entertaining than the GTA4 plot. There just seems to be much more racing around shooting stuff, and the characters and plot are a lot darker. And there have been no stupid nonsense missions yet either. Even the first couple of missions have a lot of action in them. Daz AA rocks. AC should be plenty amazing - it's supposed to be 5x as big or thereabouts and you start off with the gadgets you got from AA. It's on my radar.
GLADOS is taunting the player. I just got over excited is all, it wasn't aimed at you.
Have you played Portal 1? I could imagine P2's story and maybe a few of the initial puzzle to be a bit confusing for those who don't know the background.
And I went to bed this morning at aroun 3 or 4am, and it was the beginning of chapter 8, so no major problems here. I have to say that the game is exqusite.
I played P1 but I never quite finished it..... I had it on the Orange Box on the 360, and I got so far into it then I got stuck. Then I stopped playing it and never finished it.
Im finding the sequel is more fun due to less confusion and also having a couple of 'freinds' to talk to...... Hmmmm...I was expecting more from that to be honest. With the exception of the Doom 3 tentacle guy (lol wut) - id have only really shown combat against piss-weak melee attackers that run suicidally at the player in a straight line, and usually die before getting within 20m of him.
It would be the equivalent of pimping Elder Scrolls V by only releasing videos of the player beating off slightly over-grown rats in sewers, and nothing else. I still haven't finished it yet, classes have ben getting in the way. It's a lot longer than portal, even with just the single player campaign. Cave Johnson is my hero.
Great game - good ending. Loved it. Was a little short, either that or im very clever.......
I have nine hours played on steam. It's a puzzle game, not an rpg. You're not going to get 25 hours or more play time out of it. I need to play the coop campaign, anyone else want to?
I got a little over 8 hours from the SP alone, still need to do coop and I'm anxious for the actual SDK to be released.
an hour and a half, tops? I didn't remember the puzzles that well AND I'm an idiot.
I haven't played Portal 2 yet, but doesn't 9 hours sound like an appropriate length for that sort of game? I can't see it being something that would benefit from a more-than 10 hour playtime. But I also went for the achievements and replayed certains bits (and sometimes the wrong ones). It's definitely and conceivable longer than P1, though 1.5 hours seems too extremely fast. This game is also nicely varied with old and new test chnmbers and different industrial bits inbetween. Plus it still looks very good even on the aging Source engine; some quite epic scenes or areas.
I agree the writing is great and the puzzles much fun. Some had me stumped for a while but when seemed actually easy after I had figured them out. Nice secrets and extra puzzles, e.g. the rat-man's dens and the chamber monitors. Too bad discovering all the dens wasn't an achievement - sometimes a 1/12 counter would have given me extra satisfaction in a trigger_secret way. The Borealis dock is a nice little hint at the HL series and of course the few implicit and explicit Black Mesa references. The year prints on the old test chambers felt a bit 'off' maybe (although they were also nice to establish a sense of historic/scientific development or something, along with the modernization of the equipment) - is it really supposed to mean they had a portal gun back in the 50s? Or at least 70s? i guessed my time wrong. Short though. Very short. But pretty much the right length for what it was.
I got through the SP portion of the game in about 8 hours at my regular pace and was entirely satisfied with the experience.
So I'm downloading l4d2 campaigns, are there any i should take special intrest in? Right now i have Satan's Little Helper, Overkill, Haunted Forest, Precinct 84, Tour of Terror, I Hate Mountains, Dead Series, and Open Road.
Dead before dawn 2
dam it levillage 3 deathaboard 2 helms deep reborn (hilarious survival map) Dead before dawn 2 is particularly awesome, you'll probably recognise the setting from a certain film remake ;) helms deep reborn haha, is it really helms deep? kind of makes me want to get the l4d series! but i know i'd only play it a few times on single player. :P
its a full size helms deep, you start on the long wall down one side, and zombies just stream at you from the horizon :) There are a few miniguns and pickups along the wall to help. Eventually the wall explodes and you eventually fall back into the keep and fight there for a bit.
Very entertaining stuff :) First off, this is a review of an enhanced version of Far Cry with the 64bit patch applied. This gives better textures and graphics, apparently. It's also played using a quicksave mod, so there's no replaying checkpoints over and over again.
Now, I'm not sure how good this game would have looked unpatched on a 2004 spec computer, as there's no way you could run it at maximum settings. However on a brand new 2011 spec computer built specifically for gaming, this game can run happily with maximum quality and resolution. There was one point in the game, in front of a boat in one of the first levels, where it ground to an almost complete halt. Not sure why it did it there, but the rest of the game ran smoothly. Now Far Cry was a hugely popular game from a brand new gaming studio, Crytek, based in Germany. It's not often that a new startup releases a game of this quality using their own engine. It's a fairly amazing feat, especially compared to most of the games Germany puts out. However as amazing as Far Cry looks for a 2004 release, I do have to bring it back to earth as there are other weaknesses in this game. But I'll talk about the graphics first. Now Far Cry is the first so-called sandbox game i've played. Games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honr and Vietcong had some sandbox elements where you weren't stuck on an absolutely obvious linear path, but even Far Cry isn't as open as I was expecting. There's still 20 levels which you can only play one at a time. You can't decide to return to the island from the first level at the end of the game. And many of these levels are quite linear, especially the indoor ones. There's a few where you can pick a path across an island, but your destination is always the same. Of course this is kind of a good thing for me, because I don't mind some linearity so I know where I'm supposed to be going. The outdoor levels all look amazing. No game I've played up until 2004 (and for a couple years following Far Cry) comes close to the huge scale and tropical beauty of Far Cry. No other shooter comes close to the awe-inspring scenic scenes, as you climb a mountain and can look back at the ocean and cliffs you just climbed. It's truely epic. Unfortunately this quality isn't carried through to the indoor levels. Ships, catacomb, factories, bases... everything indoor sets the par back to average. In fact every time an indoor level interrupted my enjoyment, all I could think about was getting back to the lush jungle in, hopefully, the next level. The indoors are just plain, lacking detail and you really see that the CryEngine doesn't come close to id Tech 4 or Unreal Engine 2+ at close-up visual eye candy. What it does well is huge sprawling levels. But everything does look a little cartoony and unrealistic, not helped by the average CryEngine lighting.
What Far Cry also fails at is a story. You're thrust into a game after an epileptic low quality intro apparently trying to save an oddly clothed women with some random person helping you on the phone. Perhaps I was supposed to read the readme to get an idea of the plot, but as you start the game you have no idea who you're supposed to be or why your trying to save the girl. And none of that really changes throughout the game. Ultimately, the story is an afterthought. Other weaknesses are the models. The Trigen look like they came from a 90's shooters, even the human models look average. Now, I played Far Cry on medium difficulty with a quicksave, which in same cases I used enough to make it worthwhile. I imagine this game, in it's later stages, would have become very frustrating with limited checkpoints. A couple times my quicksave corrupted and I had to use checkpoints. One of which took me back almost 10 minutes of gameplay. So playing this game with checkpoints, I repeat, would have been painful. In particular the last level where you'll get obliterated in a couple of seonds by enemies which are too far away for you to shoot if you have the wrong weapons (which I did). So I threw god mode on, ran out into the open where I could actually see the enemy because once they get too far away the engine doesn't render the characters even though they're still shooting at you, which itself is another major flaw in the game. And with god mode on slaughtered everyone as quick as possible and kept notice of how many times I would have died without god mode (a handy feature of this particular cheat). 130 times was the answer, which is ridiculous with no quick save. So overall the last couple of levels were very poorly done, but overall the gameplay was all standard realistic shooter type action. Not too difficult, in fact quite easy for the first half of the game. Apart from driving sections because Crytek failed miserably at providing a usuable vehicle. So for 2004, Far Cry is one of the best games and renders non-linear outdoor areas like no other game before it. It's worth playing just for this. In all other aspects (gameplay, indoor levels, story), it's just another shooter. yeah agree with this.
the quality of the game always seemed to take a nose dive when you went indoors. also, i recall getting frustrated very early on about not being able to save and got THAT fixed really quickly. my favourite map is the one where you have to blow up 3 or 4 islands but you're basically just dropped into the ocean on a little rubber dingy and told: do it. it really showed off the whole non-linear aspect and is probably the reason why i remember that particular one out of the whole game 6 years later. the ending is totally stupid though. that bit where you sort of get chased through this goofy open terrain where everything is on fire and then that huge open silo type place was just insanely hard. Yeah the level with 4 little islands is easily the best. I don't know why they didn't have more levels like this one.
I like the indoors in Far Cry, gameplay wise, although they remind me more of Tomb Raider (or a number of console games' indoor parts) than Quake. I wish Crysis had more indoor type stuff actually.
It's no Doom 3, true. Brushwork in the Cryengine games is extremely limited, the Solid tool is really crude compared to something like Radiant. But the indoor layouts were between OK and enjoyable. "Bunker" might be my favourite level, actually. "Treehouse" was great, as well as "Rebellion". Lights are super expensive in Cryengine for some reason, more so than in Doom 3. I guess it was really built for sunlight and atmospheric effects etc. instead of proper indoor lighting. Vehicles I found adequate. I like the main character because he is not a super soldier, but a boat rental guy in a Hawaiian shirt with a Die Hard attitude (that was his yacht they blew up in the intro, I find that quite humourous actually). I want more Jack Carver games. Then again, I seem to have a different taste sometimes. i loved this aspect of the game. it felt like you were john maclain die hardin' it up. really badass. like playing riddick.
Anyone up for it? Preferably one who hasn't finished the coop campaign yet (as apparently most people in func_group already have).
I also wouldn't mind some L4D again... necros, are you on Steam btw? Or do you only play WoW. I'd like to try but haven't got time until later this week. My special copy is supposed work.
i'm on steam, but i don't have any of the games you guys are playing like l4d/2 or portal2. the email i use for steam is my old email necros at rogers dot com.
i haven't played wow in a couple of years though. stopped a few months after wotlk and cataclysm didn't manage to convince me to start paying again. For those of you complaining that zerg is hard to use, I have some news for you.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/h29u6/starcraft_2_race_win_percentages/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/h29u6/starcraft_2_race_win_percentages/ They are the weakest race according to these stats. So maybe that's not news, since we all knew this anyway. Maybe they did a typical fear-driven over-nerf on them. "Oh no, people always complained about zerg, let's nerf them a little more just to make sure".
-> over-nerf. Couldn't make it yesterday, but I'll be out of internet from tomorrow on. At least for a couple of days until I've decided which of the UMTS dongle prepaid deals I'll let myself being ripped off by.
I say yay. I thoroughly enjoyed it despite its flaws. If you like a strong story driven game and exploring/uncovering a pretty huge world you'll probably like it too. Be warned, that combat can get stale near the end, since they essentially just start throwing larger and larger numbers of fodder your way instead of spicing up the combat, and some classes (mage *cough*) are totally broken at later levels as well.
Took me ~60 hours to get through the game on just ONE class, there are like 6 different openings to play based on what race/sex you pick iirc, so there's a bit of replayability there as well. Ever played Baldur's Gate? Similar to that. It's mostly a top-down style micro-management semi-turnbased affair. Combat happens real time among all your characters, which you control simultaneously, but you can pause combat at any time with spacebar to issue commands or assess the situation. I myself paused a LOT to make sure my rogues were in the right places for back stabbing and that my warrior guy was taking the damage and that my mage was casting the right spells. I think you can configure their behaviors to what you like, but I find that cumbersome.
It's more strategic on your end, but on the enemies' part they just have a ton of weaker bad guys to slay, and every once in a while they'll throw in a giant ogre monster or an enemy mage or something. Ever played Baldur's Gate? Similar to that.
except only in a general sense. the classes play a lot more like MMO games, which, i firmly believe, is a good thing here. I myself paused a LOT to make sure my rogues were in the right places for back stabbing and that my warrior guy was taking the damage and that my mage was casting the right spells. I think you can configure their behaviors to what you like, but I find that cumbersome. one of the best things about this game is the AI. more specifically, the way you control the AI. you don't just tell yours guys to attack or stand still. you set up priority systems for how they should behave. so, for example: for your mages, you can tell them to heal your tank when his health falls below 50% for the first order. then the next order can be to heal anyone else when they fall below 30%. then the third can be to just autoattack whatever you are attacking. so it would check order1 first, then 2, then 3. then for your tank, you can tell them to use area effect taunt skill when surrounded by more than 2 enemies, to attack the one with the lowest health, and so on and so forth. the only thing that really requires player input is rogues for backstabbing. sadly, the AI does not control positioning at all. once you move them into position, they're fine, but if the mob moves, you'll have to reposition them. for mages, you can usually just leave them to the AI almost entirely, and just switch to them every once in a while when you need to use a heavy nuke or a CC spell. warriors can basically be left alone unless you're trying to do something very specific. it's the rogues that require the most baby sitting. the one problem with it is that you get more 'command slots' by spending skill points to get them, but i feel this is not right. you shouldn't have to spend in-game skill points to influence the gameplay mechanics. thankfully, there's a simple mod that unlocks the AI command points and gives even more 'if checks'. uh, so yeah, i guess i'm firmly in the 'yay' category. :P Tried to play Soldier of Fortune Payback, despite the bad reviews. It wouldn't install on my old computer, but new computer installs fine. Framerate is probably under 5, but the patch fixes that. What the patch doesn't fix is the void which is supposed to be a sky, strange textures and my bullets going right through enemies as if they're invisible.
What a fkn piece of shit. Should of torrented it instead of buying it. tell you what, for the time deprived, that sounds far too daunting to commit to. I might pass I think.
Check metacritic's user ratings for dragon age 2. The critics are all 82% aggregate or something, the users (of which there's 1000's of reviews/votes) are like all 0 and 1's out of 10. It's complete shit apparently.
I'm not too far into Dragon Age 2, but so far I like it. They gave it the Mass Effect 2 treatment, in such that they streamlined the game quite a bit. You level up all your characters, but you only really outfit Hawke. Combat is a lot faster and more actionish, which is a big change from the first one. I mean they really just kind of throw 20-30 guys at you for combat. Be prepared to have 1 or 2 healers in your party.
The visual style is also a lot different from the first one. I think it looks refreshing, but I can see how people might not like it. The biggest complaint I've seen is that the dungeons are repetitive and recycled. I have not yet experienced this, as I'm only maybe 6 hours or so into the game. So far I don't think it's a bad game, a lot of the changes make sense to me. The story is alright too. I have yet to encounter the 'meat' of the game because I've been busy with other things. I definitely don't think 0s or 1s are warranted, and are probably just fanboys who are upset with the changes. Imo is a totally overrated and shitty way to see if a game is good.
User ratings in particular can just be gang fucked by the minority but very vocal entitled pc gamers. It happened to dragon age 2. It happened to portal 2 at release because it had that "don't turn off your console" message when you saved or something. I wouldn't give the user ratings much credit at all to be honest. Really, if I want to know if a game is good, I'll just ask about it right here :) another level preview from Rage : http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/05/05/confirmed-rage-is-a-first-person-shooter/#more-58626
Nice doors :) Rage looks good. I mean, that gameplay doesn't look revolutionary, but it looks reaaaaaally good imo. I love when the guy comes up and kicks the turret away. Cool stuff.
that looks really cool. i like that you can carry around gadgets that are more than just ammo or health kits. the remote control car is a bit gimicky, but the turret and spider machine look fun to use.
ME2 is 10$ atm on steam. (ME1 is 5$). wasn't really interested in the sequel but for that low price i feel tempted...
also, if anyone else was hesistating... I love Mass Effect, both of em. They are seriously awesome games. If you like losing yourself in a sci-fi space opera universe with BioWare's typical emphasis on story and character development, these games are really awesome.
The first game is way more complicated than the 2nd one, but the 2nd one's streamlined character development allows you to get back to playing much more quickly. I was able to beat the 2nd one in about 30 hours by bulldogging through the game. Those prices are fantastic - really worth it. I get the impression Rage will work. Still think the weapon models look awful but it looks a solid shooter.
i went ahead and got it. 10$, even if i only play half of the game i won't feel bad.
still, i really like the whole level up stuff, weighing the choice between a bunch of abilities and stuff. i liked being in the level up screen for a minute or two. :P Over both games you could probably spend 100 hours if you get everything, but really both games can be beaten fairly quickly for open worldish RPGs.
for once they didnt shaft us with the prices in Aus.
Graphics look decent from screenies, what engine is this? A game specific one or some variation on Id or Unreal tech? for dragon age? or are you talking about mass effect?
dragon age is a new (or heavily modified version of the nwn2) engine. mass effect is the newest unreal tech. wow, i didn't even know there was a third deus ex coming out until i saw the add in the steam start up thing. -_- i'm so out of touch with the game industry these days!
and it is off putting but I hope more of it is actual gameplay and less cinematics.
yeah, the intro cinematic is stupidly long.
and then you play for 5 seconds, and the game laughs at you and makes you watch MORE cinematics. it's just... i dunno. is this because it's made for consoles? what the heck happened to bioware. after some dicking around, you can fix fov to non-stupid values but it really fucks up in-game cinematics (the cinematics don't reset the fov from the user setting) so you get like zoomed out cinematics and sometimes there's some kind of near-clipping on the camera. so yeah... you need to make another keybind to reset to default fov, which you need to hit before starting conversations.
but that does nothing for conversations that are triggered automatically. it's just sad that bioware somehow managed to fuck this up. oh, and the best part is that the honestly man... who sits there and thinks of this shit. That's a pretty fair response to some of the moronic decisions in various games (fixed bad fov, no key-remapping, limited graphics settings, no quicksaves, etc etc) that are so utterly and completely in your motherfucking face blindingly obvious to everyone that the mind just boggles how any developer could possibly consider it a valid (let alone good) idea to hamper their customers in such a way.
I'll concede that there are too many cutscenes in the first area of ME2, but stick with it - it's one of the best games of the last 5 or 6 years in my opinion :)
Necros, wow I had never even noticed the fov, and I've finished the game 3 times. Also, on a different topic. Anyone else pre-ordered / will buy Brink when its released? With the drop-in drop-out single player could be a laugh to group up for some manshoots. Necros, wow I had never even noticed the fov, and I've finished the game 3 times.
the default non-action fov seems to be 70, which is bearable. it's the 'gun mode' fov that's the worst. and it's usually where you're concentrating the most on the screen. the fov seems to shrink to maybe 55 or 60 in 'gun mode' and then when you 'aim' it shrinks further to 40ish. i can only play ME2 in short 1/2 to 1 hour intervals... the super low FOV (especially when you're in 'gun mode') gives me headaches. :( so yeah, it's not just me being a dick, this kind of thing actually prevents me from playing. i may have to accept broken cinematic cameras in order to get to the end of this. i was on the fence with getting dragon age 2, but this is the kind of shit that makes me stay away from modern games. :( also, this is the third game where you can't skip the company splash videos (the others being Borderlands and Bioshock). this is like the new thing now where you have to go and delete the intro videos. oh but it gets better. you know those loading screen videos? pretty nice right? keep you entertained while the next map loads? guess what-- if the loading finishes before the video is done, you have to wait for the end of the video! if you delete the loading videos, you can usually speed up loading times by a lot (for small maps like the normandy). fucking ridiculous. i'm sure some guy on the team worked real hard to minimize loading times, and then some other asshole put in the forced loading videos. XD I guess i'm either blind or lucky because I never seem to notice fov in games unless I read somewhere that it is very low in that particular title in which case I will look for it :)
For instance, I got about 30 hours clocked in bad company 2 multiplayer before I read on some website that the default fov is 55 or something, I increased it and it feels a lot better now! Would have been left at the default value without even thinking about it if I had not read that article :P I guess i'm either blind or lucky because I never seem to notice fov in games unless I read somewhere that it is very low in that particular title in which case I will look for it :)
not ragging on you or anything, but obviously this is why companies get away with it. :( that and it's probably a lot less obvious on a tv screen sitting a couple of meters away. the thing that's just weird about it all is that normally low FOV is used to speed up framerate. but the unreal 3 engine is insanely fast. it's not like this kind of thing is needed. The last time a low FOV actually bothered me so much was in Borderlands which actually made me feel sick and get headaches after playing it. I had no idea that BF:BC2's was as low as 55 though, I honestly barely even noticed it since I've played for hours at a time and not get bothered by it...
except in borderlands, you can just bind a key to change FOV and, while the engine will sometimes reset it to default (when you get out of the cars), it doesn't fuck anything up.
i just bound the fov setting to my move forward key, the as soon as i walked, it would switch back. but ME2 is the opposite: the fov sticks no matter what. i would be perfectly fine if the fov reset to default after a cinematic. :\ I did actually notice the fov in borderlands, it felt extremely low but I was too lazy to fix it :P
Quakis, I believe the fov in bc2 (and Crysis 2) is based on "vertical fov" rather than horizontal, so 55 isn't actually as low as it sounds, but still low enough to distract for sure. There is actually a website you can go to that will do the math to convert a desired horizontal fov into the needed vertical fov number. Have to google it though I can't find the link atm :P Also, for BRINK people, http://thebrink.tv/ is going live in approx 1hr 30 mins from this post and will be shoutcasting brink tournament games for most the evening im guessing, so if you want to see what the game is like on pc you might find it interesting! cos I cant seem to find a straight answer.
32 bit vs 64 bit, any noticeable differences? Seem unfavorable. Can anyone attest?
http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/brink/critic-reviews Yeah, yeah, metacritic, I know. I was expecting more around like 80-85% average, but 72% seems surprisingly low. I think that the 64bit does have a further detail distance or something, but not so you'd notice. The 32bit version was proven to be faster than the 64bit version, so I use 32 :)
I didn't play it, but the entire TF2 competitive community before it came out was all 'OMG this is going to be amazing, TF2 is dead now' and then a day after it came out all said in unison 'wow this is total shit, back to TF2'.
i've realized something interesting.
often, the term RPG is abused in that a game is mostly just about stats. leveling up and assigning stat points, getting new weapons and armor for more stats... ME2 has gone in the opposite direction. they've pretty much removed stats. i guess this makes it more a true RPG than say Diablo, but then again, we're mostly left with a shooter with dialog trees. i guess it's more action-packed this way, but i'm not sure i like the super dumbed down RPGs direction. is it much of an improvement/upgrade over the standard version? Currently $7.49 at Steam for 1 and 2.
then realize the games are actually pretty stupid and not nearly as fun as they were when playing them the first time back then.
so unless they have changed gameplay in the HD version, I'm still up for it provided the upgrade is actually worth it
Can't believe I never posted about this:
http://www.frogatto.com/ Frogatto & Friends is an old-school 2D platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog. It's a big adventure with all the classic fun - you fight monsters, collect coins, talk to people, and buy new stuff. It is free and open-source and of fantastic quality. Played 2 hours of Portal 2 coop yesterday and am super disappointed. Boring puzzles, no story to think of, loading extra double plus. Part of the frustation surely was playing on half a tv screen (left/right, ugh) and with a ps3 controller. But still, even more disappointing than the sp game for me so far, maybe because it is just more of the bad aspects.
I think you're the only person who found the puzzles boring. You must über smrt or something.
Hey guys. I was working on Steel Storm game for last few months, and now at last it's released. It's old-school top-down view shooter, made with Darkplaces engine. Some pictures of the maps I've made for it:
http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ss_skycrusade_06.jpg http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ss_fly_for_004.png http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ss_thearena_03.jpg http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ss_stronghold_03.jpg http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ss_coldstones_01.jpg http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ss_hive_06.jpg More on my blog: http://shadowsdomain.wordpress.com/ Steel Storm at Steam :) : http://store.steampowered.com/app/96200/ Haven't played it in a while. I preordered episode 2 a long time ago. Maybe i'll finish it this week. :p
I played the first episode (demo?) a while ago. The levels looked cool. The gameplay was okay but it kind of got stale after some time. I died in the presumably last level after foolishly testing if it was possible to jump/fall down the cliff, and then didn't feel like restarting from the beginning. It's a nice little indie game, but doesn't interest me enough to pay for it. Originally I thought it was a classic spaceship shooter taking place in the air, not only just above ground.
After about 9 hours played.
It really is a team based game, moreso than any other shooter I can think of, if you go running off you are just going to die over and over and over until you learn to stick with your team mates! Maps are gorgeous! Some real nice architecture and very clean lines. Presentation in general is A+. Special mention to the sound too, really really nice. Gameplay on pub servers can be mixed, if you get a server full of Call of duty players then it will suck bad. The game really shines when you actually work as a team and if you can find a server with players than lean to teamplay then favourite it quickly :) I would say if you and a few friends want to try brink then go for it, if you play together and coordinate its a fantastic shooter, if you buy it just for yourself or dont know anyone else that plays you might walk away bitter. Parkour stuff is pretty neat and works well. Smart button is not cruise control for cool as people were worried about that. You navigate faster by pressing smart key at the right time, holding it down works but you will navigate slower. Anyone else play this? It's a DotA based game (made by the creators of the original DotA for warcraft 3 iirc). I forgot how much i liked this gameplay.
I play LoL. It's very fun, but like any DotA game it's stupidly frustrating how easy the game can snowball into one team's favour. I also hate the random idiots who make up it's community so much that I basically never play it except with my normal crew of friends who all got into it together.
I bounce between HoN and LoL tbh. Really hope Valve does a good job taking the best bits of both (LoL's meta game/better ui/slight reduction in agi/ad carry reliance vs HoN's item design/couriers/greater risk&reward/denying) and creates a sick game out of it. And doesn't just use all the DotA champs like HoN.
But yeh, as Scamp says, you're kinda forced to play it with a set group of people (or at least 2 or 3 you know) due to the ability for 1 person to ruin a game, both in terms of balance and with the gutter level communication prevalant in both communities. http://www.shacknews.com/article/68470/dead-island-preview-1
Can't really complain can you?? Will be interesting to see how they make it scary given it mostly looks fairly bright. if you buy a game like Quake or Half Life on steam, I take it you lost the cd tracks. Or do the steam versions still allow for that somehow?
re-installed and am enjoying very much so far - but really surprised by the occaisonally clunky framerates on my computer, which runs other, newer games just fine.
Any good levels/mods etc to download, besides duct tape? There is that quake one, right? That looks pretty awesome. http://www.gametrailers.com/video/to-kill-dead-island/714103
So, Left 4 Far Crysis 2 really. Sold! Don't like the look of the wobbly movement tho. Resurrection of Evil is about the best set of addon levels for D3. Try these also:
http://www.bja-design.de/lostfacility.htm http://www.bja-design.de/genetic.htm http://doom3.filefront.com/file/Omega_Research_Facility;80168 There's more good stuff in the Filefront D3 section. don't call it gameplay trailer if there's a cut every five seconds. That way you can't get a good impression of the gameplay at all.
There are numerous nice amateur P6C adventures based on AGS. Well worth checking out - there's a list on adventuregamestudio.co.uk.
Apart from Yahtzee's John DeFoe series I posted about some time ago, I can for instance recommend The Infinity String (medium length, scifi setting), The Apprentice 1 and 2 (short, medieval/fantasy), and A Tale Of Two Kingdoms (medium, medieval/fantasy). ATOTK is especially cool because there are optional side quests, many puzzles have multiple solutions and there are several endings depending on how you solved them, all of which fairly unusual for an adventure game. ...that is definitely not a sequel to Far Cry in any shape nor form especially not developers, engine, spirit, characters, protagonist, enemies, weapons, settings, theme or goddamn anything.
Anyway, I like the following things about it: + Looks great in almost all ways. + Setting (including characters and scenery) is refreshing. + Atmosphere is strong and holistic and enhances setting (including music and weather). + Gameplay works adequately well. + Plentiful gameplay touches (vehicles, collisions, buddy rescues, wound healing, diamond finding, weapon degradation) enhance the gameplay rather than detract. + Blowing things up is very cool. Things I don't like: - Too many Caucasians. - Can't take multiple missions at once. - Takes a while to get places. - Too much jungle not enough desert. - Fighting enemies in foliage is annoying. - Despite being Africa it's not bloody bright enough. - I keep forgetting to save. Overall I'm really rather liking it. The pros are all stronger than the cons. "Can't take multiple missions at once."
This is one of my main gripes (85% done), apart from the missions being repetitive as well. As for saving, same here, althought he buddy rescues address that issue most of the time. I wish it had better graphics, but this looks pretty bad ass
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jJrUY27O0Y&feature=youtu.be Frozen Synapse
Spent an instructive hour or 3 playing it last night having gone halves on it with a friend (ingenius sales scheme they've got going, means it's a very reasonable price but they sell 2 at a time. Although, it does mean you always have someone to play your first few multiplayer games with, generally useful for learning the game). Thoroughly enjoying it. The multiplayer is highly strategic, both in light and dark modes (light = always see your opponent's men, dark = gotta have LoS), in light mode is surprisingly chess like, in that you're having to plan your moves several turns in advance as well as predict all your opponents since it lacks the element of surprise. Dark mode is tense, action packed and surprisingly fast for a turn based game (each game generally only lasting half a dozen turns before everyone is dead) and has some beautifully gripping moments (my personal favourite being when both my opponent and I had a shotgunner crouched either side of a box without line of sight of the other, leading to a game of guess work as to which way (if at all) they were moving to try and get the drop without being blasted in order to win the match). Singleplayer, I'm only a handful of missions in (5th or 6th iirc), but so far there's a good variety of different mission types (I've only played elimination multiplayer, but I believe a lot of these are variantions of the other multiplayer modes, which bodes well) and the procedurally generated levels means that replays of the same mission continue to require planning and thought, rather than just memorising patrol patterns. Oh, and the plot is very nicely done, little cheesey at times, but mostly well written and with lots of detail to immerse yourself in. Yeh, it's good. If you like strategy, especially smaller, squad sized strategy then I thoroughly reccommend it. Just make sure you have a friend to split the two copies with (all giftable on steam, so I'm sure y'all can work something out if needed). It looks very interesting will pick it up for sure. Also, the soundtrack is fantastic! Reminds me of Deus Ex and UT'99!
Email notifcations mean the game can effectively be "played by email"
Nice! Shame they do not have a proper Linux version. UT'99!
It reminded me much more of UT2004, personally. Especially the "The Plan" track sounds like taken straight from some ut2004 typical snow-themed bombing run map. (Now to play the game itself...) Played Apprentice 1 (deluxe)
Very well made, nice characters and humour, too bad I was only able to solve about half the puzzles myself. They're very far fetched, albeit logical. And of course there's one of those fucking door timing tricks in there... and it's even harder to guess / react properly than usually. I had to look twice in the guide: first for skimming over it to see that there's a door trick needed and then again after failing to get it right even with knowing the basic trick :( Was a fun little game nonetheless, and very nice graphics/sound/voice http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNumNLsf1kI&feature=player_embedded
fuuuuuuuuuuuu! Today is a good day :) But my mind is imagining something akin to AvP 1999 crossed with l4d and is having nerdgasm's :)
Hmmm that's possibly the worst trailer i've ever seen. It's a video of msdos and a logo.
That being said, i'm sure it's going to be an awesome game!!! Tried to play Clive Barker's Jericho. Only got a little over 1/4 in before it came to a game stopping halt, with no way of skipping levels. So that's the end of that.
Gameplay was repetitive, switching characters was awkward to do a a lottery on the who the hell you select and when you selected them you've got no idea which of the FIVE attack keys works for them. Running around reviving cunts because their AI is shit is boring. Design and engine looked decent, as did the story, but very linear and no wow-factor set pieces, as usual. Oh and poor checkpoints and no ability to set mouse buttons is a console joke. I did it anyway through the config file (and it worked) but then screwed up some of the other keys and mini-games (which themselves were beyond stupid). Clive Barker should have actually played this fucking game, because it's arse compared to Undying. yeah, i didn't really enjoy that game much either. it looks really cool but plays poorly.
ai is poor and, as you said, you spend most of the time reviving team mates. there are a fair amount of monsters that require you to shoot 'weak spots'. and the ai is basically incapable of doing so, so it's basically you alone vs a group of monsters. very frustrating. you pass through some areas that might look cool, but they are nowhere near as impressive as painkiller, a game that was released 3 years earlier and used only dx8 (iirc??). the mapping is just very dull. With a team of what, nine guys I think, doing SP would be a very bad idea given the standard they've set themselves.
So... perfectly timed for my getting a new machine. The definitely not leaked by the producers, not in anyway an extended demo that has increased demand for the game. Terrible piracy, not amazing viral publicisity/massive pre-order booster that's going to get someone a bonus.
OH MY GOD IT'S AMAZING! I admit nothing. But oh my god it's amazing. Proper successor. All the MSD stuff people were worried about works really well (the augemented reality style outlines, the health regen) and avoids falling into the CoD action movie style. So much choice is bewildering and much save/load/replay inducing. Beautifully involving, intriquing characters, well done dialogue system, brilliantly in depth upgrade/experience system, jaw dropping and varied animator's demo reel, slick and non-cumbersome cover system, incredibly well implemented non-linearity. I could go on, but I want to explore every nook and corner of the first hub. Again. This time with different abilities. Definitely don't suggest you play it. Or pre-order it today (I did do that). Drew: If you're refering to the one I posted screenshots of a long time ago - that one never got finished.
Zwiffle: I'd say wait until it drops to 6-8. Bal determined nntt was talking about the Deus Ex leak. That's the only thing that makes sense in the context.
And by leak, it's the press demo that was sent out to all the journalists last month, so the first 15-20% of the game (rather than a full leak) and various clues point to it coming direct from Eidos/Squnix
Trailer http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-prey-2/714556
DNF Demo - Yeah it's pretty fun, I take issue with a couple of the changes like your melee isn't your boot anymore, and you only carry two weapons at a time. You hold down E to pick up a weapon, which I guess is standard for console shooters but feels cumbersome on PC. Pretty much every weapon is in the demo - pistol, shottie, ripper, rpg, shrink ray, devastator, and in place of freeze ray there's a rail gun. They feel alright, the explosions are toned down a LOT from DN3D. So the RPG won't kill you in one hit at close range it feels like. There was a weird depth of field thing going on, either that or I'm just super blind. I will have to change that. The levels in the demo were pretty fun overall, a bit slower than Duke 3D with a lot of the modern fps changes (regen health, if you like/hate that thing, it didn't bother me much since it just lets you keep pace without getting 'stuck' because of low health.) If they release an SDK this could be a pretty spectacular game. Seems worth $50, I'll be holding off due to overwhelming # of games I already have to play though. Between that and the Tomb Raider trailer, it's been a day for pre-rendered advertising. Very cool pre-rendered advertising, but still, would love some gameplay footage.
Not tried the DNF demo (no BL2/D4E pre-orders), but I was quite looking forward to it based on what I'd seen, nice antidote to the more serious modern shooters. Although the weapon carry limits worrys me (I actually quite like regenerative health, it makes as much sense as health packs and is more _fun_ (assuming it's not OTT)) Oh, and ever since I read a preview a while back, really like the concept of Prey 2. If it's implemented/designed well could be a great game (ofc, I'm a sucker for blade runner style future cities and hunting down contract targets).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ui6j35YDbU&feature=player_embedded
LOL I love the Quayola Quayons! Favorite part of the trailer, which is saying something, as it rocked imo. i just noticed that rage seems to have the same weird 'tunnel vision' black faded corners that mass effect has... wtf is up with that? is it some kind of console thing? bad enough we're running at lower FOVs now, but we're also dimming out the corners?
like playing the game with horse blinders. Trailer was great :) I'm starting to really look forward to it.
I've noticed the darkened edges in a lot of shooters recently, most notable in l4d2 developer commentaries they said they added it as it forces the players vision to the center of the screen where the action is. Tbh I wouldn't have noticed it in that Rage trailer had you not pointed it out, so I guess that means it's doing it's job ;) Other thoughts on DNF demo
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/03/duke-nukem-forever-demo-review/#more-61056 He actually makes a lot of valid points. Some things I didn't know from my playthrough - like someone mentioned you run out of breath after running for 3 seconds. That does seem kind of lame. If there is an SDK, I expect maps that force health kits, infinite run, etc. as it forces the players vision to the center of the screen where the action is.
oh jesus. well, if the engine is modifiable, i'll be removing that shit... -_- Rage trailer looks awesome. Although there's a lot of fucking around changing weapon type. Supposedly that's more because it was a weapons showcase rather than normal gameplay.
DNF... only 2 weapons at once? FUCKING COCKS. That means i'll be carrying a shotgun and machine gun throughout the entire game and there's no point playing with any other weapon. Apparently no one at work liked the DNF demo, but we showcased on XBox. The XBox apparently has shit controls, like it was hard to aim and whatnot. I didn't have any problems like that on the PC with my good old mouse.
They also had poor AI, the pig cops would just run up to the player and stand in front of Duke. I didn't have that problem on PC, but then again I was able to aim at the fuckers and take them out pretty quickly. It looks like that although I accept the faults in the game, other people are less forgiving. why the fuck don't they market mice for consoles??
you could totally hold the controller in one hand and mouse with the other. they have friggen guitars and drumkits but no mice. Hmm playing the demo again with a more critical eye, I think DNF is probably not all that good. That's based just off this demo, which admittedly is pretty bad and may not be indicative of the whole game.
The depth of field is very obnoxious in this game. It makes the majority of what's on screen look blurry. At first I thought I was just going more blind than I already am, but no, Duke apparently needs to get prescription sunglasses. The AI is in fact pretty bad. I just didn't notice because I killed the enemies quickly, but they are very basic and don't show any signs of intelligence that I can tell. This might be okay, but at least pig cops in Duke3d would go prone every once in a while. These pig-men (they can't be called pigcops, because really they're just pig men in blue, ripped pants) just run at you guns blazing. Sometimes they're stationed at a chaingun, but that's more of a scripting thing than an AI thing I think. The other enemies are some weird bug things, which are annoying to shoot and I think are meant to take the place of the ooze monsters. They are pretty shit. They are not fun, they are just 'filler' enemies as far as I can tell. They are accompanied by baby octabrains, which The last enemy is a gun ship, which drops off some pig cops on a ledge, then when you kill those it comes in a shoots you. This is the most telling part of the demo. You HAVE to hide from this thing behind cover, darting out to lock on with your RPG, then duck back into cover. You can't strafe to avoid rockets like a pro, you can't use anything else but the RPG. This fight is fucking SHIT BORING SHIT. If you run out of ammo you go back to the conveniently (?) placed ammo crate, stock up, then shoot some more. It's also very generic looking. If you don't hide behind cover, you will not win. This is not the Duke I knew. I think the Rock, Paper, Shotgun article got it right when they said Duke is a wimp, because he kind of is in this one. OH yeah, when you kill it, the wing falls and makes a ramp up the small ledge, so you can now progress. Pretty ho-hum kind of stuff. Sooooo yeah, I think I was hit by nostalgia early on when I first played the demo, hearing that sweet Duke theme song just brought back fond memories. I told Vondur it would probably be okay as a $50 purchase, but really based off the demo with a critical eye, it probably isn't. $20 maybe, but not $50. never thought of that but it would be fucking wonderful. I love shooters but hardly play any on consoles for that reason.
Wonderful? I think instead of supplying mice for consoles so people could play FPS better, it would be a more logic step to stop making FPS games for consoles. Plus they wouldn't have to be so dumbed down then.
The DC actually had a mouse and a keyboard. I got the latter when I bought mine on ebay. Don't know what the big deal behind those. Quake 3 could be played with it and I guess that unbalanced many online matches. And there are some weird typing games ("Typing of the Dead", a zombie spelling/typing trainer or something similarly wtf). Far Cry 2 finally, took longer than expected because I had to take breaks due to the repetitive nature. Good fun but needed more variety.
Portal is next. I wish this thing had taken off :E
I could deal with playing with reduced keyboard space as long as you have a fecking mouse :( WTF were they playing with keyboard only via a cordless keyboard in a different fucking building??
Looks okay tho, exploding bodies are cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead
"The word is stonger than the sword" taken too seriously... yeah, basically the sort of thing i was thinking about there.
just a portable pad you can sit on your lap or the coffee table or whatever. they're porting most of these games to pc anyway, so mouse support is going to be in there from the start. for things like xbox, where (i think?) you can plug in any usb device, it should just be there as an option by default! you should be able to use your regular mouse even, no need for anything special. Tried to play Shadowrun, some multiplayer based (but with single player bot matches) fps from 2007. Played 2 maps and decided i'd rather go take a shit then play it again.
Gameplay was crap, the game looked crap, don't know what the critics/reviewers are on about saying it looks good. It looks shit. Quake3 looked better. Next (which I believe is going to be Hellgate: London... my first attempt at an RPG). Was crap, btw. The company that started it was bought not too long ago and the new peeps are trying to fix it so it's not so much suck, though.
hgl is fine. there's a memory leak bug that was never fixed, iirc. if you have a lot of ram it probably won't bother you though. i have only 3gb and i never had any problems when i played it again, although i did when i only had 1gb.
i do recommend you take a look at the aforementioned peeps's work on the SP mod. basically adds in some missing stuff from multiplayer and other improvements. Well ultimately it doesn't matter, because it appears to be yet another game where you can't remap the mouse buttons. I've never used WASD & i'm not going to start now. Don't know why these developers just assume everyone on earth uses WASD and is fine with the mouse buttons being set to whatever they think they should be (shoot in this case).
you can change movement keys to whatever you want, and you can change the button to shoot to whatever you want.
just go in the controls menu. you can also drag/drop any ability into the mouse 1/2 buttons to use, and remove shoot completely, if your class doesn't use it much. (evokers/summoners tend to rely mostly on their powers, and rarely need to shoot except to break crates or to finish off a mob). Are we both talking about Hellgate London here? There' no shoot in the controls menu, supposedly because it can't be changed, and when I click on any other function and try to rebind it, clicking mouse buttons 1 or 2 does nothing, it won't accept it. Only mouse button 3 and the scroller it accepts, and all keyboard keys.
Unless they fixed it in an update, but I doubt it... Portal.
Good game but design was a little too basic for my liking. And a bit short. But good original game. well, you should always update your games, regardless. that's just good practice.
anyway, i was wrong about shoot though, sorry. you can't change mouse 1 and 2, those are always action buttons. you can bind jump to mouse 4 or 5 (if you have a mouse with the extra buttons on the side) if you want a mouse button for jump, otherwise, spacebar is a decent one (and what i use). you can bind your active slots to whatever you want though. for example, my active slots 1-6 are bound to number 1 - 6, slot7 and slot8 are mouse4 and mouse 5, slot9 and 10 are q and e. etc... and if you want to assign a skill/spell to your mouse1/2, just click and drag the icon (ingame) in your skill menu onto the icon on the left and right sides of the screen. for example, my evoker has mouse1 as spectral lash and mouse2 as firestorm because they're both spells that need to be aimed while being held down. other spells like arcane shield, which are one shots, i assign to keyboard keys. unless you are finding the game really hard, i recommend putting elite mode on. the game is too easy on normal mode.
i dunno, i just figured it was to stop newbies from getting destroyed, but it's not like elite mode is a huge leap in difficulty either.
there's more modes after you beat the game (nightmare i think?) where it is pretty nuts though. isn't this par for these kinds of games? to get you to replay and all that. sort of the same as achievements 'oh, you beat the game, so now you can play it again, only harder. :D' I meant where the prototypes of games are usually much more hardcore than what gets released, and then things get simplified, a lot in the case of consoles.
It's not so much upping the difficulty level, but rather changing the basic game rules. The one we're doing now is a top down shooter with some melee, and, indeed, unlocks a harder difficulty once you complete the game on hard. This reminds me of the 'realsim' mode in L4D - where some features of the first concept survived, like the witch killing in a single hit. Granted the zombie health is stupid in that mode though. ah ok. and yeah, that sounds like a possibility. the game is fairly tame on normal difficulty. you only encounter the more interesting monsters on elite. you also get better loot though, which makes it totally worth playing on the harder difficulty.
how many people finished Portal in one sitting? Just curious, I did but only because I was fooled as to how long Test Chamber 19 was :)
The first time i finished portal it took me about 6 hours, the last time i finished it it took about 3.5 hours.
says 3 Hours for me all up. It felt longer though, I would have guessed 4.5-5.
How long is Portal 2 comparably? Is a lot longer. Took me about 8 hours for the first play through, just in single player, i haven't finished coop yet. Definitely worth the $44.99 i paid for it.
haven't played coop - Negke and I keep not being on at the same time to do so - but SP alone is, in my opinion, worth the money. It isn't as long as many other SP campaigns, but is of consistently high quality. I loved it dearly.
replay of portal took me about 3 hrs, last time. But I've played it 3 times now... I asked a few people about p2coop but it hasn't worked out yet. I didn't want to pry and annoy them with frequent chat inquiries. If anyone wants to play this (not the whole coop campaign in one go, just a few levels/chapters at a time), message me if you see me online.
Time zones are a problem. Usually the only way for us/US to play is when it's evening my time and around noon or early afternoon yours. I initially started playing this game, got to episode 2 (out of 5) and hit a game-ending bug. Up until that point it had been a confusing, challenging mess. After a short break trying a couple of other games, both of which I quit even sooner than Jericho, I decided to return and give it another shot (having found a fix for the bug) because too many games lately i'm having to not finish due to major glitches. And i'm glad I did resume - it actually turned out to be a very refreshing and memorable game.
Now I remember Clive Barker's first game; Undying, fondly. Sure it's really only his name and story attached, he isn't actually directing any of the gameplay since he doesn't even play games. But it had a great, spooky setting and was a really chilling game. Not to mention under-rated by the critics. So Jericho comes along six years later, again with average reviews with a 61% aggregate. Great looking screenshots so perhaps this one is under-rated as well? No. What it does well, it does very well, but it falls flat in too many other areas, which i'll cover below. Firstly what makes Jericho very unique is that you can play with any of six characters throughout the game whenever you want - all of which have their own weapons and abilities (powers). And it's even part of the story that you're playing through the soul of a dead soldier that is able to possess the other characters. So it's not just an explained part of the game. The problem here is that swapping between characters is very messy. On top of that you have five attack keys (two for weapons, one melee and two for your supernatural abilities). Only the supernatural abilities are added as the game goes on. So every time you switch to a character you're having to remember what their attacks are. You'll get halfway through the game before you start to figure out who your preferred characters are. For me it was Delgado with the chaingun, Black with her sniper rifle and Church with her sword. Once you do, things start to get a bit easier. Nevertheless the characters are all worthy of some use throughout the game and are quite well-balanced. If I were to play through again I'd probably try to use some of the other characters more as well, as they all have interesting attacks. And then there's the storyline, a very unique plot in which you travel through time to stop The FirstBorn, a creature God created prior to Adam and Eve that wants to escape from it's hell and destroy mankind. Fairly epic and well told throughout the game, only to abruptly end in one of the weakest game endings ever. Very odd considering Clive Barker is the writer. I can only assume it was left this way to leave room for a sequel, which will probably never happen now. The atmosphere in Jericho is very unique because you get to play through some very unique settings such a Sumeria and the Tower of Babel, Rome 38AD, The Crusaders 1213AD. The other two episodes that start the game are Al-Khali, which appears to be some old middle eastern setting and WWII. And it's these first two episodes that let the game down slightly as they' look nowhere near as good as the last three episodes. The engine itself is standard 2007 with all the bells and whistles you'd expect. Playing on a 2011 spec gaming PC, everything was happy to be on full without any framerate drop. Now the problem with the level design is that it's very, very linear. You're on a tight path throughout the entire game, with no deviation, and this path itself just feels like one open outdoor corridor scattered with rocks and barricades after another. The outdoor areas get repetitive very quickly. The game also suffers a similar fate as Gears Of War; there's just not enough colour. Everything is very desaturated and drab. However there are some good set pieces every now and again, and despite the extreme linearity and drab colour palette, their is always plenty of detail on screen. You won't find bland cube rooms here like F.E.A.R. had. With the engines lighting abilities, the game does look quite good.
The difficulty level is the main issue. Too often you're madly running to each team-mate reviving them after they died for whatever stupid reason. Their AI is abysmal. In some situations you need to shoot enemies, usually mini-bosses, in certain places to kill them. Your team-mates just don't understand this concept, nor do they try to retreat to avoid explosions. I eventually threw on the 'fast health regeneration' cheat, which made the game much easier (too easy in fact as I only died 4-5 times after that), but replaying from checkpoints over and over again because of useless team-mates is not my idea of fun. Furthermore, there's no easy way to reconfigure the mouse buttons without hacking the config file. Which in turn, for me, broke my movement keys in relation to these little mini-games, where you have to press one of the movement keys in a certain order to proceed. Without any keys responding, I had to skip past each and everyone of those mini-games. And most of them were terrible anyway. So overall we have a memorable storyline and setting, great set of different characters you can play with and a decent looking game. The linearity is extreme, but the difficulty level and having to replay from checkpoints ruins the game. It's only saving grace is putting a cheat on, pumping up the difficulty slightly and we've got a much better game. But I never did, mainly cause of the reviews being so mediocre.
Drew: Cool, I'll try to be there. Though we'll have to see if it works - my internet speed is limited to 7k/s until Saturday. :(
Ricky: There's a demo. Gave it a try back then and it totally put me off. I think it was there that I really became aware (and got to hate) forced quicktime events.
Some of the better flash games I've played in the last couple months:
Realm of the Mad God -- a stripped-down MMO roguelike where you pretty much just shoot monsters and collect loot. Unlock player classes as you play. Free except you can spend real money to buy perks (I never have, and never will.) Soul Brother -- a nice puzzle-platformer where your ghost can inhabit different bodies (each with different capabilities) to get past obstacles. Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars -- a pitch-perfect retro arcade game. Also has a sort of Flesh Gordon/Barbarella vibe. Upbot Goes Up -- a solid puzzle game with some challenging levels. I have beaten them all except #31. did any of you guys ever play this game back in the 90s?
it had like no graphics beyond a few little icons and ran as a windowed application in win3.1 very deep and complex 4x game. had hours of fun on that thing. Need for speed : the run
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a4X90w7YT0&feature=feedu I have such fond memories of the original need for speed underground, to see the series reduced to that is just..well... :( soooo... quicktime event driven completely linear gta ripoff? wut?
what happened to racing for money and upgrading your car and such. i loved that in nfs underground. This sounds absolutely astounding. WHY NO PC???
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/06/09/e3-2011-dust-514s-realtime-integration-with-eve-online/ Lets do this dance!
What impressed you from the show this year? My top picks would have to be battlefield 3 and Skyrim, with an honourable mention of Dust 514, ccp are batshit crazy to try something like that but it sounds very, very interesting! "WHY NO PC" qft zwiffle, I was sad :( can't say I was so impressed by the single player portion they showed. After seeing New York beautifully realised in Crysis 2, mw3 looks absolutely terrible in comparison.
Waiting for some multiplayer details too I guess! Yeah, the sp footage was less than thrilling. Although, I'd be willing to conjecture that 90% of the people who play duty could not care less about it's sp. :p
Looks pretty promising http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLHtqI8CEDo
Being down on the battlefield in warhammer 40k universe sounds right up my alley. Graphics look so-so.
Coloured lighting effects look like ass. 3rd person perspective looks awful and pointlessly detrimental. Gameplay looks quite decent tho. Good:
Arkham City. Battlefield 3. Bioshock Infinite. From Dust. Prey 2. Bad: Tomb Raider (I really hope that that was just the intro/tutorial level and not entirely indicative of the overall game. I want this to be good). Mass Effect 3. NFS: The Run. MW3. Stuff I liked the trailer for but not sure how much I'll like the game (or 'Ugly' for sake of consistency): Farcry 3 (have I ever told you the definition of insanity?). Brothers in Arms 4. Special award for 'wtf is the point and how/why is it even being made': Halo 4. I also really liked that game with original IP. You know. That one. Finally getting around to this, about 1/3 of the way in I think.
Nice game but way too much driving/boating till now. If I counted all the times every game I've ever played has crashed, it still wouldn't add up to Timeshift's. This thing crashed probably every 2-3 minutes. It wasn't a game stopping crash, more a graphics crash and it would spit me to the desktop. But the game would still run so I'd just have to alt-tab back in.
During installation it gave me errors that my drivers are out of date and need updating. My drivers are approximately five years newer than this game, so there's no way they're out of date. What it really wants is for me to backdate my drivers to probably something from 2007 for it to be compatible. That's not happening; so I'm forced to play with the desktop popping up every few minutes. That being said, the fact that I still persevered and finished this game while thoroughly enjoying it, must mean even more than normal. Indeed TimeShift could be considered slightly under-rated when you look at it's many mixed and average reviews. What I'd compare it to most is F.E.A.R. Sure it's missing the dark horror scares and a story, but the gameplay is very similar. While in F.E.A.R. you're forced to use bullet-time constantly during combat, TimeShift takes bullet-time one step further and turns it into proper time control. You can slow time down, completely pause time or, at some points during the game, reverse time - which is very, very cool. To balance things out from being too easy, your ability requires recharging so you can't just use it constantly. But you do need it all through the game in order to survive. The gameplay is fun and well-balanced, although the enemies and weapons could have done with some more variety. On the other side of board, the 'looks' of the game hold up well. And this respect it completely demoralises F.E.A.R. The art direction, textures, level design all look great. The engine is well up to 2007 standards; not the best around, but adequate enough. There's also enough variety in settings that it never becomes repetitive. You battle through the usual military sci-fi settings with a bit of snow and outdoor areas thrown it, capped on either end by a city setting. All good looking with the occasional set-piece. Overall a good looking game, decent gameplay. It's just a shame it runs so poorly with it's constant crashing. My main issue with ME3 is that it appears to be a Halo game.
"We fight or we die! That's the plan". S'okay - I've been playing it. It's actually kinda cool and fun. It has great environmental effects.
Timeshift was a decent, solid game. Had no issues with crashing though. I played it during xmas last year, it had been sitting on my shelf for years and decided to give it a spin after Singularity. I thoroughly enjoyed it despite some of the quirks here and there.
Talking about crashing, anyone here getting problems with BF:BC2? It get several random crashes whether its hangs the PC and need to reboot, or it'll CTD without any errors. Othertimes during gameplay the performance will drop considerably out of nowhere. (And I even have everyone on low just to get optimal results during MP...) I checked the official forums and it seems there are many who also suffer from this. As a result I probably won't even bother with BF3 if this isn't looked at, doesn't guarantee BF3 will perform any better... Could be an overheating issue perhaps, with sudden degradation of performance could be a symptom of a hardware piece throttling itself to avoid exploding :) Could explain the system hangs etc also.
Lots of screaming. However, the game could be good. It's... novel.
TR's gameplay mechanics are solid gold at the core (no pun intended), but it doesn't always shine :-/ The only "new" TR game I'd totally recommend is Anniversary. But then that's a remake. Lose the quicktime events though, Crystal. And I fucking hope I can BIND JUMP TO A MOUSE BUTTON THIS TIME. YOU KNOW THAT THING THEY HAVE ON PCs. seems like the whole trend of bigger teams for fancier graphics and such just means publishers get more weight when it comes to design decisions. :(
I must be an idiot, can find the page etc but nowhere can I see a link do download/purchase/add.
Drew, thanks for the tip. I mean torrent :p. I was just informed by a friend that alice: madness returns comes with a code to download the first game on whatever platform you buy it for. Nifty. I'm getting it for thw 360, i don't have the hd space for the game.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/340/
Minerva series is by far my favourite hl2 sp release. Research & Development is also fantastic but is far more puzzle and environment themed. yeah I can get to that page but how do I add it??
Downloaded a heap of HL2, Doom 3, Quake 4 and Crysis custom stuff. Will see how they turn out. it's quite short, and while it's a nice little coffee break sized map, it's not nearly as fun/impressive as you might think.
nitin: lost coast isn't just showing up in your 'all games' list? it's free and comes with hl2, so it should already be on the list and you should just be able to click and install it.
for me, it's right under ep2. i don't think you can download it outside of steam. there've been at least a couple of good doom3 releases here on func. check the news archive for them.
You could try the stuff in this list as a reference;
http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/ yeah I found that and have downloaded almost all of the maps/packs listed there. Hopefully the standards are high.
played human error last night.
very cool concept and storytelling. new assets (npc models, voice acting(!), props). usually fairly high quality. some are slightly goofy though. mapping is so so. some areas had very poor performance (this is source engine which usually has no problems running on my machine, so it seemed like they forgot to vis the map or something) and some areas are pretty mazelike. i also think they based this map on a real place, so there are a lot of really long corridors that lead to dead ends (where all the doors are locked) which just makes things more confusing. i'll play some more tonight. thanks again for that link! This was originally intended to be an unnofficial fan-made mod for Painkiller. And it that respect, it's pretty amazing. That was until DreamCatcher allowed the developers to turn it into a full stand-alone game. If that meant sequel then in that respect, it's doesn't live up to sequel expectations - considering the content it's still just an addon - a double-sized expansion pack.
It's still the same engine and same gameplay - nothing has really changed since the first game. Many of the same enemies make a return, along with some new ones, some new weapons and 16 new levels. The only big problem with Overdose is that the gameplay isn't very balanced. For instance you get to the third (final) episode, and the first two levels are probably the easiest in the entire game. Then the next level is the hardest in the entire Painkiller franchise (in my opinion) minus boss levels. The first couple of episodes you would often be forced to switch to whatever weapon has enough ammo, then when that's out switch to whatever you have left! In other words ammo is in short supply. Of course I never ran out, but I was also often forced to use weapons I didn't really like. And the weapons are another problem in Overdose; they're all fairly average. The Bonegun (Shotgun) and Crossbow are great, but the rest are not very inspiring to use. The weapons are all very similar in damage, rather than the old-skool style of shooters where you get more powerful weapons as you go. There are lots of new enemies, in fact almost every level has a new enemy set, much like the original. And this of course is fantastic that they can not only create 16 completely unique settings most with their own set of enemies. However, the enemies actual attacks are all fairly similar. Many of them probably have the same attack, just with a new model. 90% can be taken down in two or less shots with the Bonegun. Which makes them fairly repetitive. The engine might be a few years old now, but because each level is nicely detailed and so creative, the game ends up looking good and (only just) up to 2007 standards. Let's just say the engine has aged as poorly as, say, 2004's F.E.A.R.. There's a lot of imagination put into Overdose and the level design is almost up to the same high standards as the original - which is a decent feat considering this was originally just a mod. End of the day, however, this isn't a mod anymore. It's marketed and priced as a full game. And as a full game it does nothing different to the original. The gameplay is slightly more unbalanced, the enemies are repetitive and the level design isn't quite as good as the original. I was always a big fan of the original It's only worth playing if you can find it cheap, and don't go in expecting a true sequel. Two expansions packs down - two to go - at least DreamCatcher really supports it's community! i like your reviews, but one thing bugs me:
You seem to be using the term "quality level design" as an equivalent to "polished visual geometry", which is really, really wrong, imho. If somebody else reads this and starts using the term that way... Evil EA bosses will never even have the chance to understand what level design is and will start using it as a marketing term instead. Please, at least refer to the visual qualities of level design, if not switching terminology completely. Thanks for the nice reviews! Glad you enjoy the reviews! Eventually I'll have reviewed just about every decent FPS from around 2003 and up. I actually put them all on my website... direct link here http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/othergames.php
And yep when I refer to 'level design' i'm talking about the visual geometry, which I suppose to those mainstream critics their 'level design' means something different. My reviews certainly aren't supposed to be compared to 'pro' reviews - I actually do them for myself, so that when I decide to play an old-skool game in 20 years time, I can read my reviews and know exactly what was wrong with each one. ...If you liked Overdose, I suggest you play Supernatural. It is a standalone conversion custom made up of a mix of Overdose and Resurrection levels and weapons. It's so much better than the originals. I played it to death last winter and imo it takes Overdose levels where they really belong.
Lots of secrets (one of the really fun things of Painkiller) are added, Tarot cards conditions are a bit more balanced and hard (not too much) and the majority of levels are VERY atmospheric, if a little bit straightforward(but hey, open level design seems to be dead in 2011, right?). I'd love to have some opinions from people hanging around here on this mod... don't know about mainstream critics, but the term refers to the more technical aspects of making levels-- monster placement, layout and flow and sometimes small amounts of scripting. it has little to do with visuals at all.
real life shit got really real the other day - co-worker's dad died in a car crash, so had to pull a double shift. Then some other shit... soon Negke - we'll make this happen, and it will be glorious.
So are the levels exactly the same as in Overdose/Resurrection just played differently, ie different monster placement and order? Or have they actually changed the design of them?
So who creates the geometry, structures, architecture in a video game level if it's not the level designer? I understand that artists do the texturing and will draw up certain set pieces, but it's still the level designer that ultimately builds the structures in the level, isn't it?
not really. at least, not in the games you're playing, so AAA or at least near that level. it's very compartmentalized.
from what i understand, the old school doom/quake mapper who does everything except making textures (and as far back as doom/quake days, they did their own textures too) doesn't exist anymore. when you've got a team of a hundred+, you'd rather higher a guy who's downright awesome at textures than someone who's average at everything i guess. min-maxing in a corporate setting. :P In most companies, you have level designers who take care mostly of the gameplay aspects of the levels, layout, item placement, scripting sometimes, etc. Then you have level artists, who actually build the visuals and structures, most of the time using pre-made assets made by environment/prop artists.
These three jobs kind of overlap weirdly and/or blend together depending on the company, but yeah nowadays it's rare for level designers to actually do much visual creation. Yes, same architecture, new gameplay.
That means new Tarot conditions, monster placement, loads of secrets and some minor route change. With the weapons being a mix of PK, OD and Hellgun Mod. I saw your comments on there too silent hehe. Sounds cool, although i should probably get Resurrection and play through that first, then play Supernatural :)
I loved it.
Well, not all of the time, but imo it's well worth playing. And I even started writing a walkthrough with some annotations about some serious design flaws you encounter ingame, when/if you get to playing it and want to share some thoughts, drop me a mail. I'd be interested in knowing what you think, given your mapping experience. Me, I just installed resurrection+redemption. Don't have high hopes, but I'm diving in tonight. That could be pretty sweet, although I'm not holding my breath just yet. Here's hoping that if they do go forward with this though, that they also bring back a touch of old-school gameplay.
If it ever happens, it'll be like Quake 4 is to Quake 2. And it'll be linear and scripted and with a story and dumb NPCs. And fiends will have ears and shamblers mullets and there won't be tarbabies and no secret areas and no wizmet1_2.
That's all fine, as long as there are tools released with it.
Why, you ask? Well, that's a stupid question. If you preorder you get Dungeon Siege 1 and 2 as well - is this a good deal? Would anyone else spend $50 for all 3 Dungeon Sieges, or is my obsessive-compulsive gaming traits taking over?
Carmack seems up for it
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/17/quake-v-like-quake-1/ instead, I hope they come up with something original and exciting for a change. Come on, revisiting the Quake world can only be a disappointment for hardcore fans like us. Look at what they have done with Doom!
Release Rage and it's SDK god damn it... looks like there might be some fun enemies and weaponry in that thing, and damn I want a fucking current gen FPS that is also fun to map for (or even has tools to begin with) :p
id has long ceased to be a company where another Quake could be done well. Don't get excited, it'll just be a cash grab that will rape your memory of a good game.
I think Rage looks pretty cool tbh, albeit not entirely original. It is at least original IP for iD. And will (I assume) have an SDK. Unlike Deus Ex 3 :(
And I dunno. I like the idea of a more modern update of the Quake universe. I know, gameplay wise it won't be Quake (that'd be more painkiller than any iD game you're ever going to see), too much publisher control and market awareness to release something like that. But a scripted, storied version of Q1 with pretty graphics. I'd still take that over yet more modern/near future/WW2 warfare or yet-another-dystopia (and I like post apocalyptic dystopia). Just remember. It won't be Quake. But it might be something good. Why would you want that? There's already 4 call of duties, another one on the way (looking forward to that, actually), and then there's battlefield and socom, which are both duty-esque. What would duty-ifying quake bring? Quickscoping shamblers? That kind of sounds fun but i think you get my point.
It will be violent. And cool. I predict that it will remain authentic. The fighting will be old-school. God I want something like STALKER but with better voice-acting and more scope. And cooler combat (passes out....)****/* (hic)
I SAID COME IN. DON'T STAND THERE.
but quake5 is so far into the future, it's not even worth worrying about right now. and rage looks like it'll be pretty cool at least. Rage will be at least cool and/or somehow nifty. The vids online at least show that some of the weapons don't suck, and imo the enemies were pretty cool.
Soap, bring down that chopper!
Soap, get the c4! Soap, hold still while I open the door for you! Soap, grasp the unfathomable reaches of your futility in the wake of what lies between the feeble mind and ever dying stars! Soap, escort the VIP! That aside, I am moderately interested in Rage, the weapon selection looks rather satisfying (mind-control bolts + self-gibbing and turrets). +1 internets for Scarecrow :)
While I certainly hold no hope that Quake 5 would play like the Quake we all know and love, I am certainly interested to see the environments and general aesthetic re-imagined with modern technology. I think something like ziggurat vertigo in a state of the art engine with some crazy local gravity physics would be an awesome level. Shamblers with actual fur! ;) Rage is actually looking better and better with each level playthrough they release. The Wellspring level playthrough was the one that got me really excited for it in particular, the movement and weapons have that signature id feel to them, meaty and with real weight. Has anyone seen or heard anything about the editor for Rage? Is it the same deal as in doom 3 where the editor is within the game itself? What about working with megatextures? Has anyone seen or heard anything about the editor for Rage? Is it the same deal as in doom 3 where the editor is within the game itself? What about working with megatextures?
i recall seeing a video of this in action. essentially it's the same as d3-- the engine is the editor. megatexture was i think basically just painted on in the editor, so like you'd look at the terrain, pick your brush and go. also, you could import bitmaps to paint a repeating pattern or something? It will be violent. And cool. I predict that it will remain authentic. The fighting will be old-school. God I want something like STALKER but with better voice-acting and more scope. And cooler combat (passes out....)****/* (hic)
If their remake of Quake 1 contains any human voices I will personally throttle everybody at ID. Is Brandon James still working at id? If so, there's still hope for a properly Quake Q5.
What would duty-ifying quake bring? Quickscoping shamblers? I have a hunch that Doom 4 will be more or less this. Is Brandon James still working at id? If so, there's still hope for a properly Quake Q5.
nope , afaik he's at splash damage or human head whatever I'm buying way more this year than usual:
Portal 2 Terraria Skyrim Torchlight 2 Deus Ex Human Revolution Duke Nukem Forever (ok, so it's not awesome, but whatever) Alice Rage Minecraft (bought alpha last year, but out of beta this year) Bioshock Infinity (also 11.11.11?) Normally it seems I only have one or two titles to look forward to and also end up buying a bunch of stuff that I kind of sorta wanted in the end of year sales, but there's a lot I'm buying at full price this year. They also aren't all pc games, but it seems like the definitive version of all games will be pc at least. Indeed.
I'd be happy with them trying to revisit Quake in some form. Sure it wouldn't be as good as a true remake of Quake, but I liked Doom3 and I liked Quake2 and aside from the ultra-linearity I thought the latter was a pretty good Q2 remake. A Quake 1 reboot would be amazing even if it wasn't as good as the original game. I'm sure we'd all love to see what today's id could make of Quake's Lovecraftian world with their current tech. Just thinking about how it could look gives me a boner and makes me want to do some mapping.
I just hope to God that whatever they do, it doesn't become too heavily inspired by modern shooters with all their pseudo-realistic bullshit (slow movement, 2 weapon limit... story) "and ultra scripted tunnel levels with rigid objectives" to list of things I hope id do not do with any potential Quake reboot. Hopefully Rage is going to demonstrate id's skill in nonlinearity (fingers crossed) and Doom 4 is going to show off their ability to take the gameplay back to the old skool (I heard they wanted to make it less of a horror and more of a shooter, but that was ages ago and I'm sure they probably changed their mind a hundred times since then.)
just finished this, pretty impressive really. Some of the setpieces are jawdropping. And for a WW2 shooter, I liked the feel.
Got some strange lag in some levels, no idea why as he rest of the game ran smoothly. I'm optimistic about a remade Quake1.
Not sure why though since the id of today seems to put little emphasis on design, or have the general chaos that existed in 1996 when Quake1 formed. It'd be nice to be surprised, but I have bad memories of what was done with the rather nice Doom3 engine and initial concepts. Sounded like they're were just talking about it and nothing was firm, so it could be 10 years before they decide to do a remake. Or maybe they'll decide there's more money in Rage 2 instead.
Even if the gameplay isn't like Quake, I'd just love to see the gothic, medival lovecraftian worlds in a modern engine. It'd no doubt look fkn awesome. And making Quake more story-driven I don't think would be a bad thing. Mindcrime's movie was great. this: "Even if the gameplay isn't like Quake, I'd just love to see the gothic, medival lovecraftian worlds in a modern engine. It'd no doubt look fkn awesome."
If they could bring that bleak feel of the Lovecraftian universe as well as bringing to life some of the insane creatures Lovecraft imagined I don't think I would be too upset if the gameplay wasn't 100% authentic. Having said that, I would like it if the game had a story that was coop compatible and didn't add too many contrivances that stop you having fun (speed running, rocket jumping etc.). It would be really great if the main game was coop compatible. Then again, Rage is doing separate coop missions based on the main game levels I think - maybe that would be fine, but I am longing to play Quake coop again. Just bought this and played it for about an hour and a half.
So far I'm loving the absolutely gorgeous artwork throughout the game. It might not have arse-mapping and parallax gonad tessellation, but the artwork is sumptuous - particularly the environments, which are incredibly alive with detail and colour. The gameplay seems pretty much like the original game, but with more modern sensibilities such as enemy targeting and extremely forgiving platforming (triple jump with floating.) I quite like how easy it is so far. POSSIBLE SPOILER Currently I've managed to reach the first eye-pot enemy, but I don't know how I am meant to defeat him. I can dodge his attacks and hit him forever, but I don't know what I'm meant to do to beat him. Surely I don't have to just keep clicking left mouse and hitting shift for 30 minutes? You need to hit him in the eye with the pepper grinder. Just aim+shoot and circle strafe around him. When he goes into his pain animations hit him with the vorpal knife. Shouldn't take long.
Yeh, shoot and then stab. Then fight 3 of them and a giant baby head monster and various smaller slimes at once (combat starts getting a bit trickier from that point on basically, you'll quickly develop a love/hate attitude to the targetting system).
And yes. It looks wonderful. Even the 'weaker' bits like the starter areas to each chapter are pretty. Oh, and without spoiling too much, the in between chapter bits are a very nice touch. Will discuss more, but waiting till I actually finish it and letting the Q1 remake chat die down a little first. Also, special mention to Alice's hair. Just sit on a steam vent and watch it... <@Sundaybler> so
<@Sundaybler> alice <@Sundaybler> no shadows <@Sundaybler> uber low-res textures <@Sundaybler> wtf is that all about? There's shadows, and even on the 360 th textures aren't über low, though they can look like that for a second while they're being loaded.
but I wasn't even using the pepper grinder up until Vondur told me how useful it is for taking out the eyepots. I'd basically forgotten about it. Also, the eyepot seemed to be taking damage so I assumed it was a boss or something.
I've now gotten up to the part where the Mad Hatter is back up and running again, but my PC has been playing up lately and I couldn't get it started today, so I haven't played any further. I'm guessing it's quite short. There are some quite relentless combats in the factory levels. I quite enjoyed that. Lots of platforming and nice interesting paths around the levels instead of just A-B make it feel like a game from 10 years ago, gameplay-wise. That's no bad thing though :) Humorous games. The first Overlord has a lot of variety concerning the locations you visit and offers a puzzle/strategy-like feel to the different scenarios. There's also several optional areas to visit and makes the world feel more open which is missing from Overlord 2. The second game mostly focuses more on the action side, which can get a bit tiresome when fighting against the Empire. Didn't have as much fun with it as the first but it's still a good game.
sort of a mini review for cardo:
22:37 megmn: cardo imho fc2 is pretty shitty cardo: how so? 22:39 megmn: cardo the generated missions are so generic 22:40 megmn: cardo and there's not much else there megmn: even though there ARE a few mildly interesting locations on the map, they're just all the same regarding gameplay/setting megmn: cardo like, you come to the cool location but there's nothing there but the same random buddies that you meet around every corner megmn: and everything else on the map is boring megmn: cardo it's totally NOT like stalker, where it's simply aawesome to discover new areas 22:44 cardo: i never played stalker either megmn: cardo and everything in the gamedesign puts emphasis on the genericity of it megmn: like the weapon decay megmn: you cannot find a good weapon megmn: you have to do generic missions for the weapons dealer and then buy them cardo: and that's good or bad? megmn: cars are totally generic 22:45 megmn: they are around everywhere, so you just don't really bother megmn: i think there's a cool looking buggy in a few places, but ultimately it's not any different megmn: etc rebb: you also get attacked by at least one jeep-patrol on every mission megmn: yep megmn: all convoys are exactly the same all the time 22:46 megmn: there are outposts at every 2nd corner which repopulate after a while, and all are basically the same megmn: then there are generic save houses that are also the same 22:47 megmn: sometimes they are in a cool location, but it doesn't matter, because once you cleaned up the three guys at a house, there never will be any other enemies there (so leveldesign really doesn't matter) megmn: also, level design from a gameplay pov is meh megmn: it basically feels like diablo at lvl 80 22:48 megmn: you've seen everything, you always do the same shit megmn: but contrary to diablo, there are no rewards as far as i can see 22:44 cardo: i never played stalker either
Cardo! WTF! Don't know what else to say... :P I grabbed fc2 when it was on sale on steam, played about 8 hours then got pretty bored. I basicly agree with Megaman, by far the most irritating thing for me was that whenever you got a mission, the objective always seemed to be on the other side of the fucking map. It's the most ham fisted and annoying way to get you to travel I have ever seen. Last year I played 2005's Area 51 by Midway Studios. It was a decent effort for 2005 which led to expectations for Blacksite that it could only be even better. Strangely, despite the title this isn't related to the first game at all. It's a complete standalone title and mostly a different setting. Not for the better and expectations were not met.
Firstly the game runs Unreal Engine 3, so it's going to be hard to make a game that doesn't look good. For sure it looks good - levels are occassionally well-detailed, although sometimes it can get bland. Textures and art is average and there aren't very many set-pieces. The layout is very linear. The main pro is that the settings are a little different to a lot of recent shooters - you spend a lot of time in the American desert where Area 51 is located. Large canyons and roads, deserted caravan parks and a massive Area 51 base. The highlight of the game for me was battling a giant octopus-like creature on top of a bridge while your helicopter circles around it with you firing furiously to take it out. Other helicopters are doing the same. I normally hate on-rails levels, but this was very epic, possibly the best on-rails battle to date. Of course once you get to control vehicles it's the normal bad-handling rubbish. So overall the game is helped a lot by the Unreal Engine 3 and some of the different settings, but overall from a purely artistic viewpoint, it looks pretty average for 2007. Gameplay is where Blacksite really struggles though. You only get two weapons at once, of which there's only really one weapon you'll use throughout the entire game because the rest are rubbish (apart from the mandatory rocket launcher battles); and that's your standard machine gun. You'll also spend most of your time zooming in and attempting headshots, because there's no quicksave and checkpoints don't appear very often. I only actually died in the game a few times on the middle difficulty (which they call hard). Even the final episode of three levels I didn't die at all. The final boss is possibly the easiest final boss in the history of shooters. What I'm getting at is that Blacksite is a fairly easy game. This isn't helped by enemies that just stand around getting shot at, which will be by you not your team-mates since their AI is just as bad. Just one main weapon, checkpoints and only 4-5 different regular enemies (not including bosses) make this a game you won't be playing for it's gameplay. Nor will you play it for it's visuals unless you're running out of shooters. Perhaps in this respect the very short length of around six hours is a good thing. Rating: 6.5/10 No mention of 'level design' this time :D
Turns out the constant freezing of Timeshift wasn't the game, because Blacksite did exactly the same thing. It's the old "display driver has stopped responding and has recovered" error message that happens every couple mins, something which 1000's of other have had issues with and it could be just about anything causing it. Any of you guys had this error before? Spent a day trying to solve it then eventually took my GTX560 out (which is only a few months old) and put my old 8800GT in and the problem went away - no more crashing on those games. So I guess my card is faulty. Gonna take it back tomorrow and demand at worst, a new one, and at best something that ISN'T Nvidia. Probably the Radeon 6870 would be the equivalent. I've had a lot of luck with the Radeon cards lately, for once on the performance scale AMD and NVidia are totally evenly matched.
45% through, really enjoying it. Megman is entirely correct about it's repetitiveness and Daz is entirely correct about tedious travelling across the map.
But it's still a good game... The atmosphere is good and the graphics especially at sunrise and sunset are great. The setting is strong and quite different to other FPSs I've played. The combat is decent and well balanced. The way vehicles and stuff work is functional. I like little touches like being able to look at the map and look behind when you're driving and really fuck your driving up ;). Blowing things up is great fun too. The combat IS fun, I like the fires etc and the explosions feel really good, it's just there is way to much "filler" between them. There really is no reason to go and explore the world because there is really only 5 things you will find.
- Checkpoint guarded by dudes. - Dude in a vehicle. - Assassinate some dude mission. - Unlock new weapons mission. - Diamonds! While that sounds reasonable, it feels very very predictable after a while. Every time I see another vehicle on the road, I KNOW it will attack me if I get to close, every time I approach a checkpoint I KNOW it will have a few angry dudes there. There is just no variation at all. I think if there were friendly checkpoints or friendly vehicle drivers that would help a good deal, certainly break up the encounters better. I do love the bolt action sniper rifle they have in there, it feels very satisfying to use! True.
I think more variety in enemies / NPCs would definitely work better with the atmosphere. The "this is a covert mission so our dudes will attack you too" is a pretty lame excuse for the world being full of hostiles. Wandering into friendly bases or established conflicts would be much better. But it's the flaws that make diamonds sparkle.
Sorry, that was a bit gay. But it's true. I can spend hours hapilly bouncing around Far Cry 2 in a jeep from one repetitive mission to the other. Some people find the relentlessly hostile AI tiresome and unrealistic, but I find it adds to a constant feeling of tension in the world. On top of that, I might get paralysed by malaria or have one of my weapons jam on me during a firefight, but it's oh-so-satisfying to survive something like that! It's a game of mini-games really, but the player has to be imaginative enough to find them. I always enjoy sniping a guy from 100 yards away and then see if I can sprint after him and finish him off with the machette before he can equip his pistol. It's also pretty fun to sneak right in to the center of a large shanty town and then unleash hell to see how long you can last. That's just the nature of sandbox games really. If you want something different around every corner you need to play something more on a rail like Biocock or Gears of Poor. I think games like Stalker and the elder scrolls series do open world much better than fc2. Stalker in particular as you never know what your going to find around the next corner, even if you've been to an area 100 times before, the 101st time there could be a bloodsucker hiding in a mundane corner that rips your face off when you least expect it. Or a gang of stalkers fighting off a wave of mutants that you never saw happen before. It's random and unpredictable and that is what makes it work.
I guess that is the key thing that fc2 is lacking, the unpredictable and random element of it's open world. The checkpoints are always in the same place, guarded by the same npc's. Nothing ever changes. Even something as simple as enemy patrols wandering from village to village would spice it up some, as you would never be sure when or where you would encounter them. Add friendly patrols also and perhaps some sort of war for territory and it starts to get a lot more interesting! Maybe it's a limitation of the console hardware, keeping track of all these different elements in an open world certainly isn't cheap on the hardware side I would imagine. Maybe Far cry 3 will improve things in this regard, who knows :) I bought it in a Steam sale a couple of years back but I got bored after an hour and haven't touched it since. Maybe it's just one of those slow burners that you have to play for a while to get in to it, but the early weapons were unsatisfying and there wasn't a beautiful landscape to hold my attention in the meantime. I'll give it another try sometime.
As for Elder Scrolls, Morrowind is probably my all time favourite sandbox game because it does break the mould in terms of variety. Then they made Oblivion and it all felt a bit too LOTR for my tastes. I guess the other major SandBox game to mention would be GTA, of which I had the most fun in GTA 3 because once again you had to make your own fun. These days it's all about pretend girlfriends and horribly scripted set pieces. Dull dull dull. Accessibility and pacing are two of the numerous faults that stalker had. It's a curious game for me as the combat when you get right down to it is fairly boring, you basicly hide behind a wall and peek out and shoot the guy looking at you. Or just run backwards while shooting wildly and hoping for the best against mutants :)
Where it scores its biggest win though is the exploration and atmosphere, and the random unscripted elements. I swear I've never been so thoroughly absorbed into a game like I am with stalker, when its dark and storming, and i'm creeping around some barren russian facility with no idea what I'm going to find around the corner. it's pure gaming gold to me :) Not to mention that abandoned industrial buildings are like architectural pornography to me, I'm sure that helps it's case ;) But I guess not everyone feels the same way. GTA and Just Cause 2 (I guess) go about the open world differently I think as they give you a lot of tools to play with and make your own fun, as you said. That's probably another area where far cry 2 falls short perhaps, but I guess it wasn't the focus of the game to create a playground. Starting fire's that set off chain reactions around enemy camps is always fun though :) Makes we wonder if the strong focus on story, setting and companions in Fc2 hurt it's open world design somewhat. It's hard to give the player some fun toys to play with when your dealing with some fairy serious and current topics regarding Africa. Usually I'm not a fan of realism shooter and slow gameplay where you crouch around, run from cover to cover and aim with iron sights, but it Stalker I totally enjoyed it. The atmosphere and the desolate style are great. It even let me not care about the glitches.
FC2... already forgot about it. But what you say sounds about right. Good looks, but generic gameplay that fun in the beginning but gets tedious after a while. I probably posted about it somewhere in this thread. The first game (shadow of chernobyl) is even better if you install the oblivion lost mod. It just nicely tweaks a lot of things like the gun-handling, and fices a lot of the broken story stuff that was in the game.
I loved all three of the Stalker games. It is a game which I often think about playing over and over (though I never do) just because I am convinced that there was a lot of stuff and exploring which I didnt manage to do the first time round. had a mixed feeling about that one. on the one side there's fantastic atmosphere and sense of place, those abandoned industrial buildings made me want to explore them because i just enjoyed wandering thru them. and nights were very moody. but on the other hand the gameplay was not my cup of tea. combat is slow and hard, quests (apart from the main line) were boring and repetitive, so after 1/3 of the game i focused on the main quest only.
i'm sure the game has found a plenty of true fans. Solved my game freezing issues by turning my GTX560 clock speed from it's factory 900 to 800. Thanks Gigabyte.
The best multiplayer hat simulator of all time, is completely free to play now on Steam. Those silly ignorant fools who have never gotten around to playing it should do so now.
Meet the Medic
http://www.teamfortress.com/uberupdate/ I thought with all kiddies who play it, especially now that it's free....
Okay, admittedly I haven't played it for ages, so no idea really. Thanks for the tips. I appears lowering it a little does solve the issues with Crysis 2. Will have to play for a bit to be sure. Anyone got some savegames so I don't have to start from the beginnging? DAZ??? I think I got as far as that research facility with the big 'aquarium window' in the hall.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33279452/SaveGames.rar
I think these are the right files, put them in C:\Users\**name**\Saved Games\Crysis2\SaveGames Not sure what level that was so ive got savegames for all levels :) i finished on for entar's terrain mapping thingy, but i just don't have any energy for another one.
http://armorgames.com/play/2407/karoshi-suicide-salaryman
Puzzle platformer with some clever puzzles, that escalate in unexpected ways. Just finished Duke Nukem 3D. What a fantastic diverse and fun game. I love how in pretty much each level you blow up shortcuts all throughout the map. And the subtle jokes like a pig cop standing besides a pack of donuts. The sounds and effects give a great feeling of power.
The "suck it down" lines from those flying fatties felt out of place, no other monster talked iirc. i thought it was obvious based on the facts that (1) it wasn't posted in the DNF thread and (2) he wrote 'Duke Nukem 3D'
You're my hero. Lowering the clock speed to 580 I could play Crysis 2 without any freezes. I wonder what this means - a glitch in the card, insufficient or unbalanced PSU, some incompatibility?
Im talking rubbish. The NVidia Cards have more stable drivers, and in a lot of games they give more stable framerates. For example on Crysis my 5850 gives avg. 28-29 fps, and a GTX 460 will give 24-25 fps, but the NVidia card will only deviate by +/- 2-3 fps, whereas the Radeon card will sometimes go as low as 19, but it will go higher sometimes too, like 32-33 fps. So the NVidia card give a more stable framerate (and a more fluid gaming experience) even though it has slightly less raw power.
The Radeon 6-series and the NVidia 5-series are very close performance wise, which is maybe why NVidia have been a little over zealous with the clock speeds. Yeah it's weird aye... my card shouldn't be overclocked, i've never done anything with it. But on Timeshift and Blacksite it would start freezing after 10mins and Crysis in about 30secs even on medium settings. I tried tonnes of things to try and fix it that people had mentioned (of course no one mentioned clock speed) and was on the verge of taking the card back to the shop, then as a quick last resort turned the clock speed down 100 and it completely fixed everything. Crysis on very high without any problems at all. Why a card should be a complete piece of freezing shit at factory clock speed then run perfectly by lowering it 10% I don't know. They must have just had it too high, but then the temp was fine on it even at slow fan speed. My PSU is new and 700w so should be plenty.
In older games, even Far Cry, it doesn't freeze at all. But then I can get my old card an 8800GT and it's able to run Timeshift/Blacksite without any freezing when the 560 can't at factory speeds. Oh and Crysis with max settings and natural mod looks pretty fkn sweet! Shame about the gameplay. I'll do a review in a day or 2 once i'm finished. Ah Crysis, my beautiful shiny brand new toy which, doesn't work very well. At it's release regarded as the best graphics in a game ever. For this review I should state the I played Crysis (for the first time) with everything set to Very High and with the Natural Mod added for that extra eye candy. So this is Crysis at it's very optimum.
Firstly I'm not sure how much of a difference the Natural Mod makes. But loading the first level without it looked good, then reloading with Natural Mod looked absolutely awful. All colour was gone, there was little contrast and it was quite hard to see. However the first level starts at night and, apparently, Natural Mod works best during day. I'm sure it does, because once the day finally shone bright ten minutes later it indeed looked fantastic. But enough about the Natural Mod. Being that it's only been a few months since my first playthrough of FarCry, I'll be heavily comparing the two. Sure they're three years of development time apart, but Crysis could quite easily be considered FarCry2. The settings and gameplay are the same. FarCry took outdoor design to whole new level. The island paradise setting was fantastic. But FarCry had it's flaws. The first of which was that for a game famous for it's beautiful scenery, there were far too many bland, ugly indoor levels. The outdoors levels were more memorable because there simply weren't enough. Crysis fixes this problem with only 2 out of 11 levels taking place indoors. The first of which, Core, is the inside of an alien mountain where a spanner is thrown in the works by making it zero gravity. And the indoor areas are quite huge anyway. The other is Reckoning, the final level on a ship with it's claustrophobic corridors. But at least it also has an epic battle on the deck. Ignore the brief but painful flying level Ascension and you've got 8 sprawling, unique, scenic adventures around this huge island. Beaches, jungles, a military port, a mining complex (with just a little indoor action), snowy winter lands; it all combines to make one fantastic gaming setting. The problem is there are fewer set pieces here that in FarCry. Or fewer moments of awe. What I believe is the cause is that Crysis is much flatter than FarCry. There's not enough height to the game. In the predecessor there were moments where you'd be standing mountaintop gazing upon valleys and beaches below. The rope bridge, the hand glider, the lighthouse. Crysis just doesn't have this. Sure there's a few scenes such as Awakening, where a giant distant mountain is falling apart before your eyes. Or Assault where you're looking out across a bay to an enemy base under assault. Sure the graphics in Crysis are a big step up from FarCry, but these moments of awe, the truly memorable levels are lacking. Instead there's a lot of flat battles from village to village. But that's only one small nitpick on a game that looks utterly amazing. This engine is capable of breathtaking scale as well as extraordinary detail on every piece of plant life. Crytek have sensibly added quicksave to Crysis, another bad decision in FarCry. And the one thing that nearly ruined FarCry for me was the difficulty by the end of the game. Crysis isn't so bad. It does still have issues with it's final battle as it can be very frustrating when projectiles are constantly raining down on you and you can't even see where it's all coming from. But that's more an issue of a certain enemy in the game, the aliens, which I'll get into next. Gameplay. And this is what I'm talking about when I say my shiny new toy doesn't work very well. This isn't the kind of game like Painkiller: Overdose or Timeshift where you can run through blasting those Korean bastards back to... Korea (Koreans are your human enemy in Crysis). Crysis is strategic. Typical gameplay scenario: creep around in the bushes until you get close enough to the next enemy village. Draw their attention, perhaps spray a few bullets then run like hell back to some cover and wait for said enemy to wander over. Kill a couple, then sprint further away to more cover before you're ass up in blood. Crysis human enemies take you down VERY fast, and you're usually outnumbered. It's not so much a hugely difficult game, you've just got to play very carefully and strategically. Sorry Crytek, but that just isn't that fun. And to poke a stick further into the wound, you're weapons are lackluster. The machine guns, even with zoom scope pointing directly at a Koreans head, are extremely unreliable at doing a proper headshot. No headshots in a strategy game? Bad call. The shotgun is decent, but not always useful since these are outdoor levels. Apart from handguns and rocket launchers saved for blowing up vehicles and 'copters, that's really all you get for fighting humans - both ridiculously bound to the same god damn key of which you can only carry two weapons at a time! You get to some cooler weapons later on such as the minigun, gauss gun (a big ass shotgun) and the infinite ammo alien weapon - but again they're all bound to the same key so you have to get rid of your fall back weapons the shotty and machine gun.
Now to the alien section of the game. I know this review is getting long, but it's an important game in the history shooters so I want to go in-depth. The Core takes you to an alien base built within the mountain and earth. It looks amazing. In fact it's the creepiest, most unique alien level I think i've ever played. Then the aliens turn up and ruin it. They look good - large floating octopus type aliens. But their attacks can be a little annoying. I do give Crytek props for changing it up though. It was a great twist to the game to give it some variety and differentiate from all the other realistic war shooters ala MOH and COD... neither of which come close the visual feast of Crysis. The snow level that came next was brilliant, and scary. However fighting octo-aliens inside a cramped battleship was not good. And the octo-alien is what i'm talking about in the last battle as I'm trying to concentrate on shooting the fat mothership while these bastard aliens just keep shooting at me and I can barely follow them in the sky since they move so fast. Nevertheless, I'm glad the aliens did make their presence known because it did make the game more memorable; both from a storyline and gameplay perspective because another few levels of insane-strategy play against human enemies would not have won me over. Still, it's a love hate thing with the aliens for most players. Okay so let's wrap this up. Crysis is a fantastic looking game. The Crytek engine is one of the best around, and certainly the best i've seen at doing outdoor scenery. There are players around who think this games' graphics are overrated. But for 2007, at least with everything maxed out, Crysis looks at the top of it's game. It's a shame that, just like FarCry, the gameplay isn't as polished. Inaccurate weapons and weapons limits, tough enemies and average aliens combine to make this a game that you won't be playing for it's gameplay. No, this is a game for the players that eat up beautiful environments and graphics. At least for a while because Crysis is quite a short game. I'm one of those players, so for me Crysis is a great game. Rating: 8.5/10 Absolutely wrong. Gameplay is the highlight of Crysis.
You don't have to play it sneaky; this is just the first impression that you get. Once you get more used to the game, and to the suit powers, you can go all out and absolutely annihilate enemies. You can fight groups of aliens out in the open with a shotgun. You can mow down an entire group with a vehicle mounted MG. You can cloak in the middle of your enemies. This is something that only comes with time though. The assault rifles aren't inaccurate at all; you just have to go prone and/or use strength mode. Did you try the sleep darts? The aliens are awesome IMO, as are the scenes where you have to defend some point against a horde of them. Intense stuff. You can't play this like Quake, but it is one hell of a great shooter game. Rest assured though that my first impression was the same as yours; I thought it was a stealth game because I found myself using the cloak mode so much. But it really isn't that kind of game. I agree about the 3D-ness of Far Cry and that it's lacking in Crysis. It is pretty flat, true. Give it a replay in a couple months. The main power I used with the suit was speed. Didn't find the rest anywhere near as useful. The shield was okay but you end up too damn slow. The invisibility thing I actually didn't use all that much. Maybe 5 times the whole time. Speed was awesome though. I didn't use strength much as I figured it only related to fist fights not weapons. Or does it actually make all weapons more powerful? That's cool if it does!
I didn't go prone much either, but i'll try that more if it makes the weapons more accurate. I didn't find them accurate otherwise, I don't know many times I repeatedly shot cunts in the head only to find them still standing. I eventually ditched the submachine gun to return to the FY-71 because the recoil was so bad. But anyway I've got all the custom maps and mods to play through next, so I'll get more used to it. Playing Crysis through once isn't really enough to know everything about the gameplay - it's a pretty short game. Wow almost all 6 pages of Crysis mods on moddb.com are dead.
Any good Crysis single players maps or mods out there to play? I'd recommened checking out www.crymod.com for such stuff, but their downloads section is no longer up right now (updating) Might be worth browsing the forums.
If you like adventure/puzzle, The Call of the Fireflies mod isn't bad. Wrote a review for it here. The Worry of Newport is another, Moddb I found Crysis 2 had refined a lot of the gameplay stuff, they made the suit-powers easier to maximise their use aswell. And I installed the DirectX11 patch and Hires texture patch (both official patches) yesterday, and there are still crusty stains in my pants. Like W0W!
So have either of you guys played Crysis Warhead yet? I find Warhead to be better than Crysis because of better graphics and more intense battles. And Psycho is a little more charsimatic than Nomad. Far Cry - excellent
Crysis - more excellent Crysis Warhead - installed but not started Crysis 2 - waiting for price to come down The crysis 2 sandbox editor is being released today, which is why Crymod.com is down for maintenance I think.
\o/ I enjoyed Warhead but it did feel like a much more "standard" fps, it lacked a lot of the grandeur and open feel of Crysis. A few of the levels felt downright linear in my opinion, and some of the turret sections were tedious. It doe's have some great moments though, the frozen sea area was very cool.
I'm on my 5th (!) playthrough of Crysis 2 now that the dx11 stuff is out, this game is like crack, it's so fucking good! http://www.mycrysis.com/download/Crysis_2_ModSDK_1.0.exe
The site is getting hammered so just use that link :) I replayed this per Spirit's recommendation. Last time was 15 years ago and I didn't really like it then. This time around I totally enjoyed it, however, and agree with his verdict.
The levels are not very large, but there's lots of potential for exploration and nonlinear progression. Often the way to proceed is not immediately clear, but then you find a way by blowing up a wall or using the jetpack. This was probably all intented but it made me feel smart. Most of the levels have an insane number of secrets, both marked (=with message/stats, sometimes up to 10) and unmarked, and the way you can create shortcuts and make the map more interconnected by blowing stuff up is pretty cool. Apparently there's TNT in the flame extinguishers. I now see how this game allows for lots of excellent custom maps. I now see how this game allows for lots of excellent custom maps
The best thing about mapping for Duke3D though is the varied and diverse texture set, and the insane number of ways in which you can use them, then throw in some palette changes and spritework. Best vanilla assets I've worked with so far. and on top of that, building basic areas is simple like doom. just trace some lines out and boom you've got all kinds of shaped rooms and corridors.
Including ones that break the laws of physics. Or at least utilise more dimensions than the usual 3.
Though as usual the Euro prices/discounts are unfair compared to the other currencies and for Germans many games are unavailable.
I'd love to get the id Super Pack this time. And I'm so going to approach someone of you for another 'gift' deal... ;) And also the commentator guy looks remarkably like czg.
http://www.gamespot.com/shows/now-playing/?event=now_playing_torchlight_ii20110629 czg are you him??? Several hundred maybe? Depends on if you actually beat it and explore.You can beat the main quest pretty easily, but everything else is going to take you quite a while.
I've been wondering the same thing nitin. I don't want to play it if it's 200 hours - I get sick of a game after 10 hours normally.
This game is a lot of fun exploring. There's a ton of stuff to do. It's not like the same thing for 20 hours - there really is a huge variety of things to do in the game.
it really depends on what kind of gamer you are. if you stick to the main quest, i think it's over in a few hours. 10 maybe? if you do a few side quests, it can stretch to 15-20ish.
it's only if you start downloading mods and really exploring the entire map that you start to look at 50-100+ hours. otoh, some of the best moments in the game for me was while exploring. sometimes without even a quest as a goal. just bought the fastest horse and started in a direction. :P also, there's this great zombie mod that simulates a zombie apocalypse, complete with towns slowly becoming infected and spreading to other towns. the cool thing is that no matter what happens, you can just reset the mod and have everything back to normal when you get bored of it, without loosing your game. I think I'll play it causally and if I like it, we will see :)
Am I correct in remembering a couple of recommended mods? necros, I played it 100 hours without any mods (except for a few UI enhancements), I must be weird. :)
So is Kinn. But yes, a game like Oblivion takes time, especially if you explore every inch of. This is weird, because there are many duplicate areas (dungeons, caverns, Oblivion realms) that become boring to visit after a while.
An excellent and highly recommendable mod that was posted here some time ago is Nehrim. I haven't followed Skyrim or watched any trailers, but I'm up for it too. Also, Risen 2 is due at the end of the year. Nehrim was nice, and I'm really looking forward to Risen 2, yar! Especially after the disappointment that was Gothic 4.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/30/maximum-mod-crysis-2-editor-released/
I think I will be purchasing Crysis 2 if it goes on sale I've been messing with it and its very very similar to sandbox2 for the first crysis.
A nice thing Crytek did is include the maps for most (if not all) the single player, so you can see how they made it. Very handy! Out of extreme boredom I'm replaying this, as my copy of Madness Returns hasn't arrived yet. The levels are pretty crude, the Q3 engine obviously wasn't used to its fullest potential. Then again, okay 11 years ago and target specs... The chess castle levels, however, are awesome. Love the theme/style. I so hope I'll get to do my ever-imagined b/w abstract map some time...
Finally got around to playing this and I enjoyed them immensely. Game generally 'feels' so right and smooth both visually and with combat, just like it did during Singularity for me. The mech sections were neat and I loved how you're not exactly forced to use it. One hatred I have for games is forced vehicle and turret sections. Unfortunately, this has a couple of turret segments, but they're very spread out. What makes these annoying (on Hard) is the inability to defend yourself other than being quick, kinda gets old repeating this segment several times just to get through it. I'd prefer them to be optional. As for the levels, I adored the first location with all the modern architecture and design going on. There tends to be a lot of underground stuff, ruined cities areas and levels which drag out a specific theme for some time - but I didn't exactly get bored either. The DLC isn't too bad, more of the same in a few different locations and also remained a good romp.
Now I'm tempted to grab Fear 3. fakk is q3 but also has extra stuff, i think for model animation. i think it used md4 skeletal animation that was present in q3a, but not used.
Speaking of q3 engined games, did anyone ever buy the full version of Dark Salvation? http://www.darksalvation.com/index2.html
I remember the demo being shit, but it might be an ok game. wow it is too. 6 months ago they were still charging for the digital version. guess no one was buying it. looks like i'll play it at some stage then :)
Downloaded it and found the first level is the same as the old demo, which was too hard to finish. You need to bunnyhop to get through the first door in time, then in the next room a misplaced jump send you back to the start of the level because there's no quicksave or autosave, and back to the fucked up bunnyhop room. Both rooms of which looked like utter shit. I'd have thought they would have fixed this after the demo.
I wonder if anyone on earth has actually completed this game, apart from the guys who made it. Just played Call of the Fireflies for Crysis which had cool puzzles. Proper puzzles like those = good. Bunnyhopping onto platforms = shit. If the first level is this bad, and the intro was the worst i've ever seen, then this is probably the shittiest FPS ever made. Despite the cool gothic look. Hopefully another nice full mod in the vein of Nehrim :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoTFPoAjTq4&feature=player_embedded Hopefully for them (and me :D) they can release it before Skyrim. Oh nice there will be an English version!! Not only do I need to play Nehrim but I also need to FINISH Oblivion, and also play through Morrowind.
That looks nice! And I haven't even got around to Nehrim yet which I've been planning to. Brings back the feeling of Morrowind to Oblivion, especially with the Dwemer ruins. I should reinstall Oblivion ASAP. Keeping my eyes on this.
and also play through Morrowind.
even to this day, i still have better memories of morrowind than oblivion. Drew, I'd visit http://tenfourmaps.telefragged.com/php/main.php
Can't think of anywhere else that still lists Q2. Or even try my site on this page: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/ratings/quake2.php This has a list of most Q2SP maps worth playing, but the links could be outdated now. I downloaded R1Q2 because the regular engine does not work on windows 7, apparently. It seems that it's sp only though. Am I wrong there? Any reccomendations for alternative engines? What is the fitzquake of Q2?
And for that matter, what is the fitz of Hexen 2? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1HU_Wc7k2o&feature=player_embedded
Lots of new footage, especially of environments. I'm getting quite excited now :) Some of those areas looks drop dead gorgeous Yeah I saw that, October can't come soon enough. But I'm sure I won't have beaten the SHIT FUCK TON of games I need to play atm, but Rage really is on my top 5 list right now. Only a month before Skyrim...
but, like the vanilla variant, it is not working with vista... probably just my computer skills again.
anyone know if you can make steam automatically launch a sourceport instead of vanilla? It's much nicer than having a desktop brimming with icons. I'm probably thinking back to Planetside with the rose tinted spectacles of +4 nostalgia ;)
But it was really quite something back in the day, like battlefield only with hundreds per side. If SOE don't balls up this sequel it could be something quite special! I would recommend an xbox pad for darksiders however, the combat feels a lot better when using a pad to control it (one of the few games I feel comfortable saying that about!).
To be fair I only used the kb controls for a few minutes so maybe they are not so bad :) Have fun with stalker :), SOC is awesome, clear sky not so much, and COP is awesome also. I think the first one is my favourite, so many good moments I remember having, one of the most atmospheric games I have ever played. Yeah so Planetside 2 seems to be a direct remake of Planetside with some new mechanics to fix broken things from the first one like generated missions.
Looks like it might be a diversion from the general meh-ness of games/first person shooters:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/07/08/bioshock-infinite-footage/ While I'm not a 100% sold on the art style it still seems a lot more interesting than all the generic stuff being pumped out. (oh, and that rage stuff looked pretty nice too) yeah I have a gamepad I've been meaning to try but havent yet found a game I preferred it on. Will give it a go.
Just played through the Cold Stream beta campaign in l4d2, and it was pretty damn good for the most part. HDR was very nice in some spots. The last level was kinda bleh, mostly because the bots weren't doing much, the nav mesh probably isn't done or something.
There should be a l4d icon. run like dogs??
The gfx look good but not that good compared to other games which run fine. It's been out for a while, but I'm finally getting around to playing this, and it's really pretty fantastic, and I'm sad that it got shitty enough reviews that it looks like there's not going to be a sequel.
You're "the new guy" at the titular ultra-secret government agency, and you're first sent to Saudi Arabia to investigate stolen missiles, and then, when that's resolved, sort of, you have three safehouses in Taipei, Rome, and Moscow from which you can take a number of missions in any order you wish as you progress through the game, level up skills, and try to get to the truth behind a fairly complex plot and and broad cast of trustworthy (or not-so) individuals. Good stuff: -various ways to approach gameplay, depending on your specializations. Great feeling of progression as you increase your skills. -various plot twists and aspects of the game that you may or may not ever even see with one playthrough, depending on the choices you make. -very good VO (for games anyway), and an interesting dialogue system wherein you select the general "tone" of your response and see how it plays out. -combat is fun and generally pretty forgiving, if not groundbreaking. -the levels look good (UE3). Not-So-Good Stuff: -pretty iffy UI; you can tell this was made for a console first. (Which actually makes a few of the mini-games significantly easier on PC). Speaking of poor conversions... -quite poor job of handling keybindings and suchlike, to the point where if a key does multiple things, it will sometimes only rebind *some* of those things, and you have to figure out what proper (default) key to use on others. There's even one tutorial where you are specifically told what (WRONG) keys to use. I had to go look up online what the right ones were. :( If you're going to play on PC, be prepared to get really pissed at the hacking minigame until you figure out wtf. Highly recommended. I haven't finished it yet, but I probably will today/tonight. finally got l4d and l4d2. playing through, SP style since everyone else out there has beaten it a billion times and is on to difficult mode by now, I'm sure. only two campaigns in, but I think I'm fully addicted.So far I've completely avoided all witches because I'm absolutely terrified of what dealing with them might entail. no spoilers please - just sayin.
The only thing is that the bots seem a little too good at times for me. And NEVER use explosives, ever. I grabbed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. off the bargain rack on a whim. So far I'm somewhat under impressed, I got the idea that everybody hyped this game so much, but it really isn't very interesting.
The atmosphere is sort of nice, but right now bandits are respawning all over the map, faster than I can loot their corpses, and I just run out of ammo. Apparently it's not possible to "clear out" a level, which diminishes the feeling of achievement. I don't like the bleeding/bandage crap either. Nor the fact that you have to eat in this game. Clicking on a sausage is neither very fun nor very engrossing. And having to use the inventory screen to equip another weapon is just horrible (say you're under fire and run out of ammo, do you want to fuss around with the inventory while they take pot shots at you?). Same for the carrying limit and the fact you simply cannot move when you're burdened. How are you gonna move the loot to the trader when you can't carry it? I also forget to save, and in this game you have to save all the time. Can't stand shooters without checkpoints anymore, all the manual saving breaks the immersion for me. NPCs are faceless and forgettable. So are most of the "quests". You help an NPC by giving him a medpack, he becomes your friend, and a minute later he lets himself be killed by bandits (NPC AI is pretty bad, the stalkers just sit there and let themselves be shot). The radioactivity feels like a gimmick. Hey, you have to drink vodka to cross the next 5 meters of the map! OK... Some gaudy items in the game as well, just like in RE4. Dog's tail? All right... it tells me that some of those things can be used to create anti-radiation medicine, but I apparently can't do that myself. Or at least I haven't found out how. Just atmosphere? The overall production value seems to be on an indie developer level. The weapon animations suck. The UI is seriously flawed (the inventory, argh...) The NPC dialogues are largely uninteresting. "Flawed brilliance"? Maybe... it's hard to trace the brilliance, though. Somewhat reminescent of Mount & Blade in that respect, only M&B was less flawed and more brilliant. I might continue to dabble in it, but I'll also be honest and say I found even Bioshock more entertaining, despite its entire gimmicky linear art-deco adventure-ness. http://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-soc-oblivion-lost-2010
I enjoyed vanilla STALKER, but there are problems. I mean the game isn't Quake or Painkiller. It's gritty, realistic and unforgiving. BUT it get's irritating. Install Oblivion Lost Mod! Just try it, it's great. It 'fixes' STALKER. Was chuggy on my Radeon card, because of the ridiculously hi-res textures. This version might be better:
http://stalker.filefront.com/file/Oblivion_Lost_22_for_1005;93039 That publishers shouldn't release games in an un-finished state, I know this. I was really annoyed when Stalker Clear Sky came out because it was full of CTDs and even BSODs and was aloms unplayable.
But the Oblivion Lost mod is nonetheless good :) I feel Stalker is one of those kind of games, if you can't get immersed in the world then you probably won\t enjoy it nearly as much. I love the game (vanilla) and a while back replayed some with the Oblivion Lost mod. Very atmospheric and tense. The feeling of hiding out in an abandoned complex during night or a blowout, then suddenly I can hear a creature or bandits taking shelter. Whether or not I should fight. Managing my ammo, food and other supplies. Or even hanging out by the fire with other NPCs while one plays his guitar, and minutes later we all get attacked and fighting alongside them. It honestly all felt like a big survival adventure where everything is out to get me. It's that kind of game I can immerse myself and just play it how I see fit. And because its unpredictable what happens and how many places change, it's worth going back for other loot and possibly getting mauled by a Bloodsucker since these places are never always left empty.
I have yet to play CS and CoP though. and no one answered my question :)
Is it just my system or does this game (in all its iterations) run like balls? Stalker is a wierd one. I played it first time back on a (burning out) Radeon 9800 and ran perfectly fine. Upon upgrading my card, it ran like garbage and crashed everytime I stepped outdoors at the start. It wasn't until I got an extra gig of ram would it run well again. So I couldn't really say, perhaps the latter...
STALKER Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat will run slow if you set all or even most of the graphics options to maximum. Clear Sky was one of the first DX10.1 (one of the only infact) games, and CoP was one of the first DX11 games. But IIRC all of the games will downscal to a DirectX 8 level. So try lowering some settings.
And what are your specs? you're trying to force the game into patterns (quake, diablo, etc.) you know. You won't have any fun that way.
Also stalker is a game that needs to be explored (e.g. dog feet). it's not super fast like source, for example, but source is a lot simpler engine.
on a 1.8ghz cpu + nvidia gts250 it runs great, but obviously that's overkill for what the game SHOULD run at. that said, when i first played it with recommended specs, it ran fairly poorly and i had to set it to basically run in dx8 mode. it's still one of my all time favourite games. the atmosphere and feelings it invokes are good enough that i can pardon the miserable ai, stupid voice acting, retarded excuses for quests and occasional crashes. playing morrowind again actually, and i've found the lack of any voice acting does not bother me one bit. Haven't tried Stalker, but the discussion is reminding me of Thief 3. I forgave the dodgy game structure, small levels and buggy feel for the fantastic atmosphere, which I very rarely do Assassin's Creed is an example where the gameplay just pissed me off too much. Really tried to like that sucker but no. Perhaps it's better on the PC...
is it weird that http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=39255 makes me want to play oblivion again? :P
i'll have to sort of nehrim's installation because it seems to interfere with oblivion... Hah, that looks like an awesome mod, I'll resist reinstalling Oblivion to try it though.
Kind of reminds me of Recettear, a jap style RPG where you manage an item shop selling items to adventurers http://store.steampowered.com/app/70400/ AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4 GHz with 4gb ram and gtx 465.
Not super fast but can play most games at 1920*1080 at max settings including Crysis. What settings in particular should I turn down? All the stalker games generally don't run as well as you might expect from your pc, I guess some things about the engine are a little rough around the edges :)
In Clear Sky and COP they have an option to enable SSAO, turn that off and you've instantly saved yourself about 10-15fps for an almost unnoticeable visual quality loss. After that, the 2nd most draining thing is the fully dynamic lighting, though it's a real shame to turn this off as it provides so much atmosphere (lightning w000000). Iirc there is a "dynamic lighting distance" slider so try messing with that instead. Give this a read too http://www.tweakguides.com/ClearSky_1.html COP uses the same graphics technology as ClearSky so this should apply to that game also, apart from the new dx11 stuff in COP ofc :) http://www.tweakguides.com/images/ClearSky_SSAO.gif
just fyi :) The visual difference is not noticeable in gameplay and it can really kill fps especially on older cards. I think this one is about guns.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STZ7UuA5ynY&feature=player_embedded
wait what? rage is coming out this year? I assumed it would come out in some indeterminate future... maybe i need a new PC.
I thought it was out October 4th, 2011, but the date on the video was October 7th, 2011. Either way, yeah, it's coming out roughly a month before Skyrim.
Rage is looking more like a corridor shooter in that video. Where's the wow factor?
If Tim's favourite weapon is a boomerang style blade, that's not saying much for the other weapons. Went back to another of my forever-unfinished games.
This time I knew what to expect, so used a gamepad from the start (no mouse support Capcom?!). Still, my PSX-style controller doesn't support all functions of the original gamecube one. Oh well. No analog support either. Anyway, on to the actual game. I remember being underimpressed with this when I first played it (probably due to the PC port issues and the slightly crappy combat controls). However, after reading some FAQs I can make better use of the game's combat system now (like leg shots and kicking). It's actually enjoyable after all. Combat and enemy design are the highlights. Good "gun feeling". Aiming is still too slow and cumbersome - Leon takes ages to turn left and right. I feel that as far as 3rd person combat is concerned, the latest Tomb Raider games offer a lot better aiming and shooting while moving (impossible in RE4). However, RE has the edge in enemy design and the locational damage system. It's debateable if locational damage really adds much to a 3rd person game with sucky aiming, though. Inventory is OK since it actually pauses the game and the overall number of items in the game is thankfully limited. Matter of practice. UI is also OK. The quicktime events are really, really crappy, especially in the PC version. It's sometimes unclear which buttons are which. The whole escort type gameplay is well done; interaction with the escorted character is well thought out. She is pretty annoying, though; her excessive screaming "Heeeeelp!" is reminescent of Jen from Prey, another damsel in distress that I found highly annoying. The sequence where you control the weaponless Ashley was just superfluous in my opinion (let's not talk about the slider puzzle - that was horrible). Who wants to control a defenseless 15 year old girl in a game that is otherwise about brutal combat? Every time she got abducted, I welcomed it because it let me concentrate on combat. At least once she was out of hearing distance. There are not many sounds more irritating than a woman's high-pitched screams for "heeeelp". Don't they realize that it really doesn't help? The game looks, in part, shitty on PC (low-res textures and UI, very ugly and generally almost non-existant menu system). Overall the atmosphere and especially the enemy design mostly makes up for it though. A slightly "meh" experience, but the gameplay and storytelling keeps it together. The environment design was enjoyable in the village part. Unfortunately, the castle that I've almost finished was mostly a linear corridor shooter with pillared walls and flat floors and ceilings. Almost simplistic. The hedge labyrinth that you're supposedly "never leaving alive" is ridiculously simple. Admittedly, labyrinths usually aren't good for gameplay. The sewer with the insect creatures was surprisingly short. The castle also really suffers from low-res textures and cookie-cutter corridor design. The NPCs are pretty good in this game, even Ashley (apart from the "Heeeelp, Leon!" part). I look forward to playing Ada (and killing Saddler). Let's hope it gets better again. The NPCs are pretty good in this game, even Ashley (apart from the "Heeeelp, Leon!" part). I look forward to playing Ada (and killing Saddler).
Soon there will be a Quake Injector(tm) like tool for Source maps (mostly HL and HL2 I presume) from planetphillip.com
http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/maptap-beta-testers-required-again/ This makes me wonder if and how well the Injector works with a Steam installation of Quake. Can anybody share that information?
@MegaMan, That's because I didn't know about Injector until after I started working on the MapTap idea.
The idea really is nothing special or unique at all. ;)
I wish more games had tools like this, especially Doom. The steam installation of Quake is literally the same as any other installation, it's just in steam's directory (on windows, C:\Program Files\ Steam\ steamapps\ common\ quake\) rather than wherever else one might put it. I don't use Quake injector (sorry), but I would assume as long as the end user specifies the directory Quake is in in Quake injector, there wouldn't be any problem.
gb:
Well, Black Mesa Source surely is. :-) By the way, I have not seen any input from you on my question about mod categories. Why not do something useful instead of whining? gb:
Well, Black Mesa Source surely is. :-) By the way, I have not seen any input from you on my question about mod categories. Why not do something useful instead of whining? Flash puzzle games that plays with the figure/ground ambiguity.
http://jayisgames.com/games/gap-monsters/ There went a couple of hours.
I got to the end with four skips left (having used one). Pretty cool. The third Soldier of Fortune game was developed by Cauldron, instead of Raven Software who did the previous two. The original 2000 game was great; a purely fun action-packed shooter. The sequel in 2002 was still a good game, though not quite as good as the first. So why hand the game over to Cauldron? Well the surprise sleeper Chaser from 2003 was a good, long game developed by Cauldron using their own engine. This same engine is used in Payback, a game released four years after Chaser, so they must have made some hefty upgrades to the engine.
Ironically, that's the only redeeming factor for Payback - the fact that the game doesn't look too bad. The engine has all the usual bells and whistles you'd expect to 'pretty' it up. Of course, what game post-2007 doesn't at least have decent looking graphics. There's actually only 14 levels in this game, most of which aren't even big. You could probably rush through the entire game in a couple hours. For me it would have been about five hours game time, which is very poor. However each level is a new setting, from jungle and cliff settings, farming villages, middle eastern outposts, even a hotel brothel before finishing in an awfully designed car parking garage and nightclub. Some levels look poor, but others are fairly well polished. In particular the outdoor jungle levels. Unfortunately, the game doesn't hold a bean to Crysis, released the same month. Their outdoor capabilities and size, level of detail and realism are not even comparable. Payback doesn't look bad at all, but it's only average for 2007. And that's the highlight. The low point of Payback is just about everything else. Poor checkpoints with no quicksave, jumpy controls and unrealistic movement, especially when firing weapons. Inconsistent difficulty where often you'll breeze through a level, only for some enemy to suddenly take a potshot from out of nowhere and drop you instantly without any chance of survival. There were a few times when I had to take on the same enemy several times over because he'd blow my head off within a micro-second of eye contact. The boss fights, which are all too common, are simply the same enemy you face throughout the entire game just with insane amounts of health added on. The standard fare enemy are all the same, just with a different weapon and model. They unrealistically drop dead with a mere fraction of bullet spray in their general direction. Their heads pop like balloons and limbs just fall over the floor. There's no sense of power or enjoyment when your weakest gun unrealistically mows through an opponent like that. Blowing off limbs used to be fun, back Payback has lost that somehow. Then you get the sniper scope weapons which only hit enemies 50% of the time. The rest the bullet just vanishes and misses it's target, despite pointing clearly at the enemies eyeball. The biggest problem with Payback was the insane bug where enemies are invisible to bullets. Yes, the bullets just go straight through them as if they're not there. This happens with probably 15% of the enemies in this game... by the time you realise it's another invincible enemy you're dead and replaying from the last checkpoint. This time in god mode or you have no chance of moving forward. It quite often happens with enemies that are on higher ground to you. But it's a ridiculous bug that ruins the already bad gameplay. Overall okay visuals for 2007 but the levels are small, extremely linear with clipping all around you. The screenshots make the game look better than it actually is. Then again, it's hard to judge any games' visuals as that great after you play Crysis. The gameplay is easy for most of the game until you get hit by a pot shot, but the invincible enemies bug ruins this one. Not really worth the playtime or money, but at least it doesn't go for too long. Rating: 5.0/10 http://youtu.be/r7b_GEDlH9c
Could be interesting, the developer says they are going after a "doom, quake, painkiller" style shooter. could be cool i guess? not much to see in those half second clips in between the bleeding guy.
since the trend these days is to remake old games, i really wouldn't mind seeing a straight up simple shooter but i don't know if i would really enjoy more painkiller gameplay as even that was worse than doom slaughter maps. so yeah, more doom/quake, less painkiller. otoh, if they mean they're making the maps LOOK like painkiller, than i'm totally behind that! If it actually allows you to avoid damage via fast movement and has level design beyond Serious Sam's basic arenas or PK's corridors then it could be interesting.
Without that it doesn't have the essence of old iD shooters. Wait for demo I guess :) Yeah, i'm waiting to hear what people say about it before I dive in on that one, I heard from a few sources that it's quite buggy atm (sadface) but that patches are incoming.
Did anyone pick this up? Thoughts? :D Needs more screenshake and flashing lights. I can just about see what is going on in a couple of frames.
Looks like a combination of the blandest bits of Deus Ex Human Consolisation and Bulletshitstorm, remade in a modded HL1 engine.
Demo should be incoming soon, will wait for that first, looks pretty weirdo otherwise... Shambler describes it well. :D
fuck off world of goo
Haha... it gets pretty infuriating, but when you beat the fucker it's ok again. I'm up to the epilogue trying to build an f-ing impossible bridge. Game's got lots of style. $70.00
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/11027/ Too bad I already own hehe yeah, but that reminds me... has any one tried brink out? as it as good as it seemed way back when it was previewed?
i wonder... will this actually be a proper game from id this time? trailers seem to indicate it's more than just a tech demo this time!
between this and skyrim, Q4 is gonna be packed! But buggy as fuck. It's a rushed console port.
The game itself is very good, lots of atmosphere and generally cool stuff going on, for a fan of Lovecraft. One particular bug is when you're running away from (something) and depending on your graphics settings, you running speed may be 50% of the normal - resulting in death on every attempt. Over bugs come in the form of AI glitches when sneaking through innsmouth - even though that sequence in itself is great. Not quite better than Amnesia or Eternal Darkness, but worth a look. http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-stanley-parable/
A HL2 mod, interesting experiment, worth giving a try. Not reading anything about it before playing helps appreciate it I'm sure, so don't. will check out the hl2 mod later!
in the meanwhile.. it only took about 6x as much ram as the minimum requirements ask for and many many community patch interations, but gothic3 runs perfectly at highest settings on 6gb ram + nvidia gts250 1gb. maybe i can finally beat this damn game. i've had it lying around collecting dust for years, because i've never been able to actually run the damn thing. -_- at 1920*1080 with 16xAA and 16xFSAA. Bloody hell this looks amazing!!
And so far its tremendous fun too. Could easily be one of the best games ever if it keeps up. Yeah I've been playing a lot of Crysis mods and maps lately, working my way through them all, and there's some really good ones. In some ways a lot of them have better gameplay that the actual game. Either that or I'm just getting used to it more.
Re Call of Cthulhu - read my review drew. On my website or in the archives of this thread. the way it lets you switch between stealth and action modes, without forcing it on you and leaving it completely in your hands, is very very cool.
Crysis is cool, the warhead standalone expansion is pretty badass also. Though it doe's feature some annoying turret sections. Worth sticking with it though.
Crysis 2 did the suit powers much better imo, so much easier to use and you can do things like use stealth and speed at the same time, though it drains your energy much faster as a trade-off. I never really understood the complaint that C2 dumbed down the suit powers, if anything they are better than ever and each mode is always useful in every situation. i'm only about 1/3 through the ones i downloaded (about 4gb worth).
try these ones, the brackets are rating out of 5. 4 and above is definitely worth playing, 3.5 is so-so. you'll have to look on filefront or moddb for them though. theharbour [4] fcfort [4.5] (can't destroy AAA guns at end?) crysissingleplayerpanama [3.5] (no ending) coldmountain [4] 2011_04_29_Oasis [3.5-4] CallOfTheFireflies_v2 [4] 2011_05_21_Uncharted_SC [3.5] (got majorly lost) vulcanassaultv2 [3.5] 1 should be crap, 2 below average, 3 good, 4 excellent and 5 amazing. 0.5 increments to add further adjectives :)
I quite like reviews that don't bother with some score at all but just give it in words. It's not hard to say 'crap'. :p
A rating is good to get an overall average opinion, but anything more than the five star system is pretty meaningless. I rate 2.5 as average. So anything below that is deleted.
5 = amazing 4 and 4.5 = great, definitely worth keeping. 3.5 = just good. playable just the once unless you're really bored, or at had a flaw which prevented it from getting a 4 (ie no ending or getting lost). 2.5 to 3 = average so it's debatable whether you'd play a level on that score. not worth keeping. 2 = crap. not worth finishing. 1 = utter crap. rare, i've never rated anything that low because i'm not silly enough to download it in the first place, let alone keep it. agree but if you have ratings, they should mean something. Part of the problem with most commercial game reviews, I dont think I've seen anything scored less than 80!
kona, yeah I thought thats what you meant but describing 3.5 as so-so gives the impression that its not really worth bothering with. anyway, enough semantics from me. http://eseanews.com/index.php?s=news&d=comments&id=9969
Valve's CoD? Based on this report, it sounds like it will give CoD/BF3 a run for their money. A really good RTS at the moment. Hopefully without too many tech requirements.
Got DOW2 and can run that on min spec. Age of Empires Online comes out on the 16th - free to play with some caveats. Micro transactions to unlock some restricted civ gear, certain gameplay modes, etc etc, but at least it's free to try out.
Age of Empires is one of the best RTS brands out there, btw. Not as pro-gamery as SC or SC2, but still a very solid RTS. I've heard StarCraft 2 is quite good...
Can run it on a cheap laptop on min settings with no problems. Finished it. Ending was pretty good especially since I managed to jump out of the penultimate "boss" "arena" and not fight any of the mercs.
Good game overall. Graphics setting atmosphere gameplay mechanics and all the extras all very good. Let down by being too repetitive, too long travelling across map, and too few friendly npcs outside towns. If it was tightened up it could have been a classic. Next on the list: Dead Space 2, Crysis Warhead, Bulletstorm. Next to buy: Crysis 2, Alice 2, Singularity. Maybe Bioshock 2 or AVP3. But then Rage will interfere with all of that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCWycw6PFhw
Same feeling as being a Star Wars fan watching the prequels. Sometimes you wanna get up and scream, and you wanna curse and you want your entrance back, but you will still watch them. And you will grudgingly buy the special edition DVD set. That's how I felt playing this. whenever I try and get back into fc2, I take a mission and look at the map, see its on the other side of the fucking world and just quit :P
Which is a shame, because the shooting and stuff is really fun. I played the demo of the first one, and that was it :P
I always thought it was just an excuse for gamer pervs with watch some t&a, if I want to watch t&a I'll go to cardo's house. Only recently I've been getting into platformers/adventure games more (arkham asylum, darksiders, etc) so might look back at some TR games, anyone got recommendations for the best one of the series? short breakdown:
TR1-TR4 are all good, but keyboard-only controls and really dated graphics. Challenge comes mainly from lining up for jumps on a block-based terrain and puzzles/traps. TR: Legend was the relaunch by a different dev with WASD controls, nice looks, and sort of a James Bond movie feeling. TR: Anniversary was a (very good IMO) remake of TR1. Pretty challenging platformer. TR: Underworld is like a cross of the last 2. I'd get any of the last three unless you're hardcore. Don't dismiss them as all tits, they're actually good games if you can get past that. Very glad the only series I'm condemned as a fanboy to buy are Doom and Quake. And they barely release any games so it's quite easy :p
Started playing this cos my geek gamer girl told me to. She's too scared to play it herself.
Anyway. It's Doom3 bit with horrible control feel and perspective. Kinda. Okay the setting and the monsters and omg scariness are really well done. It's very stylish. But I wish more of the challenge came from errr scary monsters and less from wrestling with the annoying inconsistent and generally counterintuitive controls. Mandatory aim mode, no jump, no crouch, some things you can do in aim mode, some things you can't, non-bindable weapon switching blah blah. It's like they tried to make it scary by being a bugger to control, which they don't really need to as the rest of it works really well... Up to Part 3 so far anyway... Really fond memories of the original, for me it did dark sci-fi way better than doom 3. I never really had any issues with the first one but I haven't played the 2nd yet, need to pick it up!
But im reserving all my gaming time for DX:HR (not long now!) my god that game looks fucking amazing! is a very good game imo. i was playing it every day for about 3 months. tho i haven't finished the single player campaign because most of time i just play 2x2 or 4x4 on battlenet. my only complaint is that battlenet is separated by regions and if you want to play in another region you have to buy a game (account) of that region.
Get on #tf, plenty of us on there annoy the rest of the channel by wittering on about it all the time.
Is my mouse not working or are you looking straight up?
Is sound broken or is it supposed to crack and pop? ARE MY EYES BROKEN? Nah, just kidding. There's a bit more actually, like 5
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/jibpy/dota_2_screenshots_leaked/ Missed that one :)
Looks very tf2 in art style. Maybe they have even given each hero their own character traits like tf2, tf2 makes me laugh out loud most of the time when I die, I can imagine that is only a plus in a genre like moba where serious ragequits are the norm :P Very solid game. One of the brownest/greyest FPS I've ever played, but it's appropriate given the post-apocalyptic Russian snow scape/metro scape. Enough variety in game play so that it doesn't get boring, and some very intense scripted scenes and game play moments. It's not perfect by any means, but it's a very solid FPS with some genuinely tense moments, fairly compelling story and intriguing level design in most spots.
One negative is that it's frickin hard. I played normal, but ended up retrying many of the levels over and over because I just wasn't doing something right. Ammo is a premium in this game, I frequently found myself very low on ammo, sometimes resorting to melee when I had to. I'm not sure if that's really a negative, since it upped the tension a whole lot, which probably helped the atmosphere. Gas mask/filter management is something that also adds to the tension. Your mask can break on the surface or you can run out of filters, either one is deadly. Your flashlight loses juice the more you use it so you have to take the time to charge it in between, or even during fights. Looking forward to Last Light now that I've played through Metro 2033. I've been putting off playing Rainbox Six: Vegas for quite a while. These sorts of realistic tactical shooters just don't win me over. They all feature the same weapons - basically a machine gun. The enemies are all the same with similar health levels and drop with a headshot. The levels are always realistic real life settings. Still, Vegas somehow has an aggregate score of 84% of Game Rankings, slightly below what is arguably 2006's action game of the year Gears of War. The latter deserved that title, Vegas doesn't.
I can't say much about the gameplay beyond what I said above. There are various weapons in this game; all act and feel exactly the same. Sure you can put on a silencer or change the rate of fire. Sure you can use a shotgun instead. But the most effective is rapid fire with a sniper scope. You have several different versions of the same gun in this game. They're supposed to be completely different guns, they look different and have specific names. I'm not a gun expert but they just didn't feel any different at all. You'll also never run out of ammo as every single enemy drops almost full ammo. The enemies, like above, are all exactly the same. As you progress some of them have slightly more armour, but it didn't make much difference to the difficulty. The first level plays exactly the same as the last level. That's not to say that there aren't any challenging situations in this game. The enemies have pretty decent AI and use cover a lot, as well as flanking you. They also take you down fast, so if you walk out into the open and have missed an enemy, you'll likely die. There were a few frustrating sections in fact, made frustrating because of no quicksave. Most of the game was fine but there were 4-5 times where I had to replay from a checkpoint at least a few times, which was very annoying. One scene in particular where your team mate hacks a computer while a dozen enemies attack from both directions. It took me 4-5 attempts ON GOD MODE to complete. It's the only time I needed god mode, so the rest of the game is balanced well enough. There is a lack of any kind of end battle though. You beat the main antagonist with ease then expect a helicopter fight (how original) only for everything to suddenly end with "to be continued". There were some unique features in the game that I really liked. The ability to 'snake cam' under doors to see what's on the other side, then assign your team mates to throw a grenade in while you attack from another entrance. This was effective and fun! As was when you're blinded by a smoke grenade and have to revert to infrared. Your team mates are adequate and useful at times clearing rooms out and usually not getting in the way. The plot is simple and boring; hunt down the terrorists who have attacked Las Vegas and finish them off at the Nevada Dam before they launch a bomb. I don't know who I was playing as or anything about my team mates. Then at the end one of my team mates turns out to be the bad guy. I'm assuming he was a team mate because he had on the same military clothing, but beyond that it could have been any random character. Story scores a C at best. Now Vegas should look good; it used Unreal Engine 3.0. The only other game in 2006 that uses Unreal Engine 3 was Gear of War, which looked MUCH better than Vegas. Tweaking the game to look better wasn't an option, apart from blurring, shadows and something about long range rendering which put the game to an unplayable crawl in large areas. For some reason, the textures look really bad, like they were only limited colour gifs. They were very grainy instead of smooth. Perhaps the lighting had something to do with this, as it was very dull and lacked contrast. At one point I was supposed to be in a pitch dark room, but it was still only 70% black. In hindsight perhaps turning the brightness down may have helped, but this was the default setting so why should I have to change it? The entire game, a bit like Gears of War, looks very muddy and desaturated. Almost like the lighting creates a dirty fog over everything. It certainly isn't crisp and clear like Crysis.
The levels also never acheived greatness. There were a few neat set peices such as looking out across Las Vegas on top of a casino tower, Dante's Casino which is still under construction and the Nevada Dam at the end. Some of the casino's look really cool and life like, but overall there's a lot of corridor-room-corridor-room. And with weak texturing and lighting, Vegas isn't a great looking game. That's about how you can sum up Vegas; good but not great. In some ways it's replayable because everything is professional enough. It's clear it's not built by an indy studio on a budget with major bugs. But the gameplay is the same old Rainbox Six tactical shooter with no variety, an empty storyline and the levels don't look too different to your local casino; perhaps with a slight architectural upgrade. Rating: 7.0/10 In hindsight perhaps turning the brightness down may have helped, but this was the default setting so why should I have to change it?
Seriously? I think in the gun porn genre Vegas was pretty enjoyable. I remember liking it when playing it, but can't really recall what happened during the game, or what I enjoyed. I had fun with the game at first, but I got very bored with it quickly - as I did with Borderlands I was playing around the same time, perhaps even more so - and it then felt like a chore to get through. Filtering through an inventory full of items every five minutes trying to pick out what is worth keeping or selling got tiresome fast too. It wasn't the game for me.
Was a nice game, but yeah the loot didn't feel quite right for some reason, still felt Diablo2 and Titan Quest were better.
Still really looking forward to Torchlight 2 though. ....but I agree that perhaps the loot system was off - I usually get really into just trawling dungeons looking for some awesome item, but in Torchlight for some reason I just didn't care. Gave up before I got too far unfortunately.
I'm really liking it so far, the gameplay is nice and smooth (best with a gamepad in my opinion), the atmosphere, visuals and music are great.
There are quite a few weapons to unlock and upgrade, with challenges etc. The story is told by a narrator as you play, which is pretty weird, but works quite nicely (and the guy has a great voice). i think this game will be great, but personally, i wouldn't mind a less epic story line. playing as the great saviour in morrowind and oblivion is actually getting kind of boring. :P
it'd be cool to be more of a local hero or something. don't really know how to express this, actually. a hero, just not the hero of the entire world. I'm really liking it so far. I chose to play a berserker, and have a dog for my pet. trying to find this library had been daunting though.
like in fallout 2.
pretty much. or even fallout1. sure, your mission is important to vault 13, but it was a local problem and no one else really gives a shit. but in oblivion... you're going around closing oblivion gates and kicking a huge demon's ass... but sure, i'll swim around in the lake and kill some fish for you, old random guy. skyrim just looks like more of the same. one guy facing insanely powerful evil guys and coming out on top. like every other rpg these days, it seems. which just makes it weird when, for example, a shop keeper is charging you top price for gear so you can go save his ass fighting the big bad about to blow up his shop. "Hey dude, I'm gonna go save the world! Give me that shit free!"
"Yeah okay, sure you are you ol' wino, go back to smoking your hash." "Yo yeah, I'm like, the chosen one and shit, and I'm gonna like, totally beat down this demon guy but, err, could you lend me a sword? Oh, and you'll need to give me a few months to train up."
Aliens are always funny to defeat... I played the first Alien on Ps in 2D, and it was already great... I can't wait to play this game...
Wait.. I will certainly have to upgrade my computer... :( http://www.grimdawn.com/ looks awesome!
played the demo last night, holy fuckballs it's amazing! Very, very satisfying combat - meaty as hell! And the executions and footstomp just fill me with glee every time I use them.
Fucking brilliant. Should also mention, Relic did a great job with the pc version, supports like 6 different aspect ratio's, you can disable the windows key (heh) and lots of control options (you can disable mouse smoothing etc). So I want Space Marine for some #tf coop fun - who all is getting it on PC and who is getting it on Xbox? I would prefer PC I would think, but if enough people get it on Xbox then I may have to get it for that.
oh crap! www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=12674 (deus ex h r)
spoiler warning for the comments. Sorry Lara, but i'm going to rip you a new asshole. Through a review of course, rather than literally. Perhaps i'm just the wrong sort of gamer to be playing jumping puzzle games. Perhaps I should stick to shooters only. But I played it, so I'm going to review it.
Anniversary is the eighth game in the franchise, hot off the heels of Tomb Raider: Legend, both developed by Crystal Dynamics who have taken over the franchise. They went on to release another Tomb Raider game in 2008, then Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light which is more action-oriented than puzzle and our now working on a complete reboot of the franchise with 2012's Tomb Raider, yet to be released. All previous games up until 2006 were developed by Core Design. I played one of the early ones, I'm pretty sure the original Tomb Raider 1 from 1996 or it's sequel. I don't think I ever finished it, so it can't have been a great game, but I do remember some awesome looking scenes. Anniversary is a remake of Tomb Raider 1. Same story, same levels but obviously beefed up, same puzzles. You can definitely tell too, because the cliched 90's style of gameplay is present, such as find the key to open the door. Numerous levels in Anniversary have you trekking around hunting for, in essence, keys to continue your merry way. It's not ground-breaking material here, and i'm surprised the franchise doesn't get a harder time on it's simple old school puzzles. What makes Anniversary and probably the entire Tomb Raider series fun, is the scaling and jumping your way through the levels. Getting to great heights and backflipping over to an almost hidden crevice behind you, all way above the ground. It's all very cool. Cool, but not exactly realistic. For instance in the third episode you spend three huge levels getting through this obstacle course to get the artifact, then Lara simply strolls out of the room through it's back exit, which doesn't even have a door, to her motorbike waiting 20 metres away. Why didn't she go that way in the first place? Who made all these strange obstacle courses and how exactly are the bad guys getting through them? It's all a little unrealistic. The levels all look pretty good. Critics suggested Legend looked much better, which is a shame. Sequels should get better as technology progresses, but it is still the same engine. Sometimes it does feel like corridor-room-corridor, but the settings help to make the environments look great; Peru, Greece, Egypt and the Lost Island. All typical Tomb Raider themes. However it doesn't have much grand outdoor beauty or detail. In comparison to Crysis and it's outdoor scenery, Anniversary looks years older. In fact King Kong wow'ed me more than this game. The Crystal Dynamics engine definitely isn't the best looking from 2007, but it does cut the mustard at least. Now to what really irked me off with Anniversary, if the above wasn't enough already; four things. Firstly the combat system. It's rubbish. Fighting animals is not fun at all. They constantly knock you over and you're swearing at Lara to get the hell up so you can attempt to resume the fight. You can shoot blindly, hold a key to auto-aim, which is unreliable at best, or go into shooting mode where it zooms in on Lara and you get a target, but you can't move. It's terrible! Just give me a normal target, none of this auto-aim bull. Lara also moves extremely slowly. I was forced to use a high speed cheat to speed her movements up. Especially when you're having to repeat puzzles over and over again. I also put god-mode on too, because after the first episode I was WAY over the awful combat and just wanted to focus on the jumping.
Which brings me to number two; frustration factor with some of the jumping puzzles. 90% of the game is fine, but there's just a few jumping parts where it doesn't seem to work well, especially using the grapple hook. One such jump with a grapple I probably repeated 30-40 times before I finally managed it. Another I tried a good 20 times before I managed to fluke it. It's not fun getting through 15 jumps only to miss the last one and repeat all over again. Number three; checkpoints. This game features the most idiotic checkpoint system I've ever encountered. If you run over a checkpoint spot you've previously been to, it'll save overtop of your existing checkpoint. To explain how this is a bad thing take the T-Rex level as an example. I'm at the pit unsure how to proceed so I backtrack incase I missed something, suddenly falling down a slope and back into the T-Rex arena, which I'd already completed previously. And a new checkpoint saves, overwriting my last one. Now I have to spend ten minutes climbing out of the arena all over again just to get back to the top of the slope where I previously was. However, you can do manual saves at checkpoints. It doesn't save your currently location, just the previous checkpoint again. I was doing this regularly so I decided to go back to my previous manual save, which just happened to be right at the beginning of the T-Rex fight. Checkpoint. What?! Another checkpoint just got saved overtop of my previous one? Now I have to fight the T-Rex all over again and climb out of the arena because of this terrible checkpoint system. Which brings me to the last point... The boss fights. There's four of them and in order to complete them you need to do bullet time. Bullet time is supposedly easy, you get the enemy infuriated and when they charge at you simply press a movement key and roll at the same time. I probably tried this over 100 times, not once EVER did it work. I have no idea why not, others seem to do it with ease, but it just wouldn't work when I tried it. It meant the first two boss fights weren't possible without cheats. The last two, in the final level of the game, weren't possible at all, even with cheats. Ridiculous. So overall what did I think of Tomb Raider Anniversary? Well the levels all looked pretty good. Not groundbreaking and won't be on any best-of lists in 2007 for it's design, but good enough. And while the puzzles and jumping dynamics were good for most of the game, there were some really frustrating points, not helped by terrible boss battles and no quick-save. Not to be forgotten rubbish fight scenes. I wouldn't play any other Tomb Raider games unless I knew it was going to look utterly amazing, so Legend and Underworld off my list. I don't like to be frustrated, hence a low score for Lara, and some vaseline. Rating: 5.0/10 Oh save yourself the frustration. I played some Call of Juarez demo recently and it was a horrible experience.
Oh bugger. Well it can't be worse than fucking tomb raider jumping shit so i'll give it a go and review it even if I give up. I'm not once to quit easily though.
After nuff dicking around including having to disable NVidia AA just so it would run, I gave it a brief whirl.
Well. You can fully rebind controls and it doesn't control like complete dick. That is quite a welcome surprise. There is some partial dickness from clunky running and consolisedly out-of-control melee. The over-the-shoulder 3rd person is as pointless as ever, in fact 3rd person at all in this spoils both the control and immersion, but whatever it's tolerable. It definitely does what it says and no more. In some ways I could take it or leave it.....BUT then again, it's got bomb squigs (so cute!), the jump pack stomp attack is awesome, and the prospect of coop, well yeah count me in for that ;) Still not sure there is any coop, no word of it on the steam page (normally it has a small COOP button the side when there is).
i heard that they would release a coop version for pc after the release or someting like that
Looks like Portal. Like, a ripoff, not necessarily thematically.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6330911/quantum-conundrum-puzzling-pc-ps3-360?tag=updates%3Beditor%3Ball%3Btitle%3B3 Took Portal, applied a fresh coat of paint, sold as different game. You can see the game play looks pretty much untouched - the portal mechanic replaced with dimension-shifting, but the same puzzle solving things of place crate on button, open door, planes that objects can't go through, lasers that power other objects, etc.
In other words, it's Portal, sans portals. i guess, but that's what most games are anyway?
all of id's games are basically the exact same shooter, with even the same types of guns. but at least with the puzzle solving genre, it's pretty much unexplored, so it'll feel a lot more fresh. I don't know, the game play doesn't seem to expand outside of Portal territory. Slowing down time is nothing new or particularly innovative, fluffy world just means you can pick up heavy things.
Portals though were pretty mind bending and very adaptable. This doesn't seem like a bad game, just like a watered down version of Portal. i guess, but that's what most games are anyway? Sure, but Doom 2 wasn't called "Hell Quest" and sold as a different game. This is just too similar to Portal in core game design. It seems like one of those Chinese games that blatantly copies a successful game and sells it off as their own. A few years ago, I was part of the Dare to be Digital competition, in which students are locked in a room for 8 weeks and told to make a game.
We based our game on one mechanic - a gun that could give objects magnetic charge. Shoot one robot with positive charge, and another with negative charge and they'd swoop towards each other and explode in the middle. some posters from the game that explain the gameplay and a screenshot We decided it was to be a first-person action-puzzle game, and began the design process. Now, after early testing, it turned out solving puzzles in three dimensions is difficult and confusing. It needs to be extremely clear what you can interact with and how. In game terms this means that the non-interactable game environment has to be fairly nondescript, and the interesting stuff has to stand out. In Portal, this meant pristine lab environments, color coding the portals, drawing lines from buttons to doors, and so on. It's a real abstraction of an environment to suit the gameplay, and it's extremely functional. When we came to develop our visual style, we realised that the 1950s aesthetic we were planned needed to be scaled back. There's no room for potted plants, secretaries desks and typewriters in the areas where the physical gameplay is occurring (although, like portal 2, you can put them in areas without puzzles), and when gameplay gets serious, you can't have distracting colours and patterns covering the walls. We decided that if a static object was to be magnetizable, it'd be bright yellow and chrome. These objects needed to be everywhere, so they became the fans and vents of the ventilation system. Part of the gameplay involved combining objects of the same size to make a bigger object, so these sizes were also colour coded (small = purple, medium = green, large = orange). We also found that our expansive multi-stage puzzles fell apart in practise unless they were rigidly compartmentalized. Thus, we started putting in doors that blocked progress until each puzzle section was completed. The environment needed to become arbitrary, homogenous, it was the only way that these odd environment elements made sense. Where portal had decided on a famously-meta interpretation of a lab environment, we went for a factory on security lockdown, and hoped the player would suspend their disbelief. The moral of the story is - by the end of the day we had something that on a surface level shared many similarities to Portal, despite arriving at each design decision from first principles. It's a testament to the design of their game. To share a familiar quote "Perfection in design is not achieved when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." and that's why Portal 1 is held in such high esteem. When we were nearing the end of our development, we realised the similarities of our game, and had to make a strange decision. Would we take steps to distance ourselves from Portal, knowing that it meant taking the 'wrong' decision in gameplay terms? We seriously considered moving the game to 3rd-person even though it would make it harder to solve some of the puzzles. The magnetic charge was shown by objects glowing red or blue, as that's what we and players expected - but portal had blue and orange portals. Should we change it to glowing white and black? We decided not to, and I'm glad we didn't, and although we went on to win the audience vote, we perhaps deservedly had our share of criticism for the similarities. In conclusion, I'd defend the developer of this game, because a lot of the re-trodden ground is likely done so because it is the 'right' choice in response to a gameplay problem. There may be creative solutions out there to avoid similarities, and perhaps it's worth looking for them, of course. It's certainly the case that producing a first-person action puzzler funnels you down a certain path, where the similarities are much more peculiar than the similarities when making a Gears/CoD clone. I also bristle at your suggestion, Zwiffle, that gameplay is "untouched" when the Portal developer swapped out the core mechanic. You have to design completely new gameplay, and a completely new set of puzzles! It's not easy to create a satisfying puzzle dynamic with a nice difficulty curve in the FPS environment, and if she succeeds in making a compelling game with her new mechanic, then it wasn't easy, it's a great achievement. thanks for posting that, starbuck. i love reading about the design process like that. very interesting!
You have to design completely new gameplay, and a completely new set of puzzles!
That's kind of what I'm getting at. you misunderstand me - I just don't like the reaction that this stuff is there because of easiness or laziness. I'm saying that regardless, she STILL HAS TO create a whole game's worth of puzzles, with a difficulty arc and all that hard stuff. I don't disagree that she's borrowing from her back-catalogue of mechanics, but as my lengthy novel asserted, some of these tropes are very natural and useful for this form of game, and a lot of the design decisions seem almost inevitable.
aka the new cs from valve going into beta somewhen
http://uk.ign.com/videos/2011/08/25/counter-strike-global-offensive-video-preview?show=HD Actually Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a very good remake of one of the absolutely best ever classic games of all time, the original Tomb Raider.
It features modern FPS-like controls and flawlessly working 3rd person camera, very nimble platforming, the classic 90s feeling of being isolated in another world, uncompromising difficulty, and at times awe inspiring level design, all the while respecting the original and its mechanics. This is why you have oldschool puzzles, traps and key finding, and it's just doing its job as a remake. The grappling hook is an absolutely awesome addition to the game. It creates entirely new challenges for the player and adds variation to old ones. And this is what Tomb Raider is about, actually: brutal, murderous challenges, acrobatics and traps. It was too hard? It is supposed to be hard. TRA will absolutely make you want to smash your monitor at times. In this, it is true to the originals, which is its damn job as a remake. Lara moves slowly? Perhaps, but it's not really an FPS, and the enemies are very fast, especially lions, panthers and the like, and they are trying to grab and tackle you. Yes, lions run faster than Lara. This is simply part of the challenge. Once you get the controls down, combat is actually very fun. You do have to use the grapple in some boss fights, this is a staple carried over from Legend. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSX_8zdu_zM The over-the-shoulder free-aiming mode isn't for combat, it is for puzzles, hence why you can't move. There is that puzzle where you have to shoot lights on and off to make constellations, and the shootable ropes that make the statue fall down in Croft Manor or the bridges that reveal secret grapple points when demolished. Not looking like Crysis? Well, TRA is largely an indoor game, since it's a remake of a 1996 title. Tomb Raiders are generally indoor games. It is rubbish that Legend looks better. Underworld looks better, though it's noticeably still the same engine. TRA is indeed the hardest of the "new" TR titles; in this way, it's just an uncompromising remake of the old ones. If failing to do a grapple run 20 times makes you hate it so much you never come back, then TR isn't for you. It's a common trait of the franchise, and it's why hardcore fans love it. Why would you want an easy platformer. The multiple wallrun thing in the great pyramid level is indeed fucking hard, yes. And the timers are generally short in the game. But it's totally beatable without cheating just by using the game's standard controls and Lara's possible moves to their full extent. People are doing it for sport on youtube, so it must be doable. It's also the second to last level, so it should be OK to be difficult. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXj7hMmjUNE I don't know what you did with the T-rex checkpoint - the checkpoints in this game always worked brilliantly for me. Probably bad luck. You didn't mention the awesome secrets, which at times are much, much harder to get than some of the grapple-wallruns and are actually unique archaeological artifacts. As for the traps - they're simple but effective. Simple elements like crushers and rotating blades create the challenge, you can't get more hardcore than that. The grapple adds an additional timing element. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2tgFOIAo2Y I guess it's the same as many things - you like it, or you don't. It's not a bad game at all though; as a remake, it is just perfect. If the game it's remaking wasn't up your alley in the first place, you can't really blame the remake. Cursing at the monitor is expected and socially acceptable when playing Tomb Raider. Early on, you could impale Lara or kill her off in a myriad of ways to vent your frustration, sadly this has been restricted and the most painful deaths were removed due to political correctness I guess :-) but that registration put me off
http://www.daretobedigital.com/FreeFullDownloadableGames/PlayFreeComputerGames/ Although your core argument still holds, it increases my gut feeling that puzzle games suck. ;-)
Nah I wasn't expecting a shooter, I'd played the original so knew it was jumping puzzles. I think I was just hoping the combat might have improved from the original, but for players that liked that it was quite hard then it'll be fine.
And for players that like doing this over and over until they get it right, they won't find the game as frustrating as I did. I can understand that plenty of players won't mind it - afterall before the quicksave came along in gaming, games were all about repeating it over and over again. I'm just one of the ones that hates doing things any more than twice. Re grapple hook, yeah that was a great addition. The grapple puzzles were quite cool, although they were some of the harder ones actually (the 2 puzzles I had trouble with were both wall run grapple ones). Re secrets. I'm not a secrets person, I never bother with them. Just wanted to get through the damn game tbh lol. I didn't mention in my review, but by the end of the game I was really quite over it. It's one game that after 8 hours I'd had enough. I watched the last 10mins of gameplay that I missed on youtube and thought, I really can't be bothered with those boss fights. Back to shooters yay :D And yeah it is mostly indoors so they couldn't really have too many big vast Crysis'ish outdoors areas. But they could have made it a bit more epic I guess. The scenes that WERE outdoors looked pretty bland compared to Crysis. I guess I will give Underworld a shot though, especially if the puzzles are so cunty and it looks better. I'd probably slag it off when I review it though haha. But I'm sure plenty of ppl will disagree with my review above, it's a fairly popular franchise so i'm probably a smaller minority of those who didn't like it much. I'm not defending TR anniversary. I can't I've not played it.
Buuuuut you are comparing the graphics of a game originally designed for the PSP and PS2 to a game that is considered the benchmark of PC melting graphical detail. I didn't misunderstand you, I think perhaps I didn't clarify myself that well. I don't think it was laziness - I think Portal was a successful design that she probably either felt she could improve upon or provide a quality variation of it.
But, I just don't think this is it. Portal was interesting not because you picked up blocks and set them down, but because Portals were mind bending. What I've seen from QC is very underwhelming. You still pick up and put down blocks, but nothing in the game is mind bending *yet*. It seems to me to be a step back from Portal. Again, not that it's going to be a bad game, but it just isn't nearly as interesting or innovative as Portal was, and doesn't seem to want to differentiate itself at all/that much. I guess not everyone keeps up with video game deals, so I thought I would post this.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1631538 thanks for the link, zwif. yeah, i don't usually keep up with games. i will drop in to the steam store every once in a while, but rarely try to stay up to date consistently, so i appreciate these heads-up on good deals. :)
That's why it gets compared to Crysis, because up till 2007 Crysis is the benchmark of graphical awesome. I'll probably compare most games' graphics to it if they attempt outdoors.
And why not? They're released both in 2007 for probably the same price. Crystal Dynamics just didn't make an awesome enough engine to clean up Crytek's. Sure it's probably a shitload better performing, but 4-5 years on I have no problems running either game maxed out. Don't know, haven't played anything beyond 2007. I'm hoping Far Cry 2 or Crysis Warhead might have looked even better?
So in the last 5 years, is Metro the only game that looks better than Crysis? Fuck I hope not. It really depends what you mean by "looks better" Crysis excels at doing realistic outdoors, but otherwise the designs in it are pretty bland in my opinion.
To me Mirror's Edge looks better than Crysis, because I feel design is more important than just trying to reach realistic quality graphics (which is fine really). I'd even still say Team Fortress 2 looks better than Crysis, and even Portal 2 at some points, despite that engine being super dated. But yeah - Crysis really held the benchmark for 'sexy graphics engine' for a long time because I guess in layman's terms developers didnt want to use the new tech because it didn't run so good on consoles.
As for the styling and art of level design and games design in general in other games - yeah, there are a bunch of games with sexy graphics just because the designers and artists have done a really good job, even with an older engine. What I men about Metro is that it runs worse than Crysis cause of the rediculous level of detail. Metro was probably the first game which came out running slower than crysis. I think the STALKER games have pretty advanced graphics engines and you need a hefty rig to run them maxed out. It means thinking in ways you wouldn't normally think, or thinking of something you thought impossible as possible.
The distinction you're trying to make, but I see lots of reactions to games based off too-little information to form a complete opinion - not necessarily what I think you're doing.
My point of view comes from the developer side as opposed to the player side, and I think it's bit unfair to judge a game based on a preview. I'd assume a designer who came up with Portal probably wouldn't just rehash it without the portals. In my experience such a designer wouldn't have gotten to a position of being able to make Portal in the first place. Random selection of Ludum Dare #21 games being played. NSFW commentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVCj2kyOf1E
A lot of players seem to be torn on Call Of Juarez - some think it's great while many hate it. GameRankings had it at 75% aggregate from critics which is a pretty decent score, so I went in thinking the game might be a dud. Critics are often wrong. In this case though, Call Of Juarez is quite a decent game. It has some flaws which everyone agrees on, but it's something a little different in a shooter genre over saturated with sci-fi and war themes.
It's been a long time since I played something western themed. Probably Gunman Chronicles from 2000, which started life as a Half-Life mod. That itself was a good, under-rated game. There was another western themed shooter released a few years before Call Of Juarez, but it didn't get a good reception. What makes this game good and enjoyable is the fact that it's fresh and different. Sci-fi, war, fantasy, realistic cities; they've all been done over and over again. But this western theme is a rarity and in this case it actually looks pretty good. The engine and graphics are passable and capable of some very large outdoor areas, which look good. Not at a Crysis level of detail and beauty, but pretty enough. It only starts to struggle when you look across the plains or get in areas quite high so you can far distances - the mountains end up looking extremely plain and under-detailed. Also at times some of the terrain can be a too blocky and unrealistic looking, but that's fairly minor. The game doesn't ALWAYS look good. While the beginning takes place around a little western town and lots of thick bush, you then move to a more open landscape with hills and mineshafts, and it looks bad. Really bad. I guess this engine can't do night time scenes well, but the levels look poorly design with hardly any detail and bland hills everywhere. It's ugly. But the game picks up again as you return to daytime settings. The story is a highlight of Call Of Juarez. You play as two characters, alternating for each of the 15 levels (or episodes). The first is a boy named Billy on the run after being blamed for the murder of his parents, the second is a former outlaw turned reverend named Ray who's on the boys trail to bring him to justice. So the game switches between the Billy who is faster and more agile to the gun slinging bloodthirsty Reverend Ray. Ray's levels are all great - you can play with two guns at once, usually pistols in left and right hands and can fire them both at the same time. Then you get rifles and shotguns at your disposal. Ammunition and health are plentiful but the game is still a good blast as enemies can take you down quickly if they're carrying good weapons. You need to make shots accurate and it's very satisfying when you headshots. Without a headshot you can shoot an enemy up to several times before you get a deadly hit. Unfortunately, Billy's stealth levels aren't nearly as fun, and the game got a hounding in reviews because of this. It's a little surprising because Thief and Splinter Cell were so popular, even Chronicles of Riddick which started off with stealth then went to action in the second half. So why does everyone rubbish Call Of Juarez's stealth sections so much? They were boring as hell, but most stealth games are to me so it's nothing new. Billy does get to do some gun slinging or bow & arrow killing-fun, but it's mostly about creeping around or climbing things for him. This brings me to a major problem in the version I had of this game; the rope climbing is extremely buggy. There was once section where I needed to use my whip as a rope to climb a tree. Due to some bug in the game this wouldn't work at all. It just wouldn't allow me to attach my whip to the tree. I was completely stuck and it was a game ender, without getting a level unlock cheat so I could skip to the next level. Sadly this was probably the longest level in the game. Furthermore the updates wouldn't work so I couldn't apply any fixes. There's also a DirectX 10 upgrade which improves the game, but this wouldn't work for me as it's only available for US versions of the game. But everything still looks fine even without the upgrade. So overall I think Call Of Juarez is worthy of a play through the once, at least for it's action parts. Even though the stealthy, jumping Billy sections are a bit of a drag. The game looks good, the action is fun, it's not in the elite shooters of 2007, but for a bargain bin price I'd recommend it. Copy of email I sent to Microsoft and EA...
I recently bought the Bulletstorm game. After I installed it and attempted to play it, I had the following problems: 1. I was given no option to play just single player and was forced to sign into Windows Live DESPITE the first screen saying a Live account was needed for multi player (not single player). 2. Despite Windows Live obviously being somehow fundamental to this game, the game did not pick up that I was already signed in to Windows Live via Messenger, thus forcing a tedious signing in process: 3. It took me a few goes to recall my password, each time I had to wait for it to "download profile" and then return to the start, rather than simply informing me of an invalid password when I typed it. 4. Despite ticking the "log in automatically" tickbox, this was NOT applied so I had to retype my details every log in time, of which there were many: 5. After finally signing in, I was forced to apply an auto-update. After this downloaded, I was told to exit the game to apply it, BUT there was no option to exit the game (only the same start screen about logging in) so I had to Ctrl-Alt-Delete to close it. 6. After the Windows Live update applied (with no pop-up indicating it was complete) I had to restart the game, go through the unskippable splash screens AGAIN and sign in AGAIN. 7. After this the update was VERY slow to apply in game (several minutes). Then I was forced to exit the game via Ctrl-Alt-Delete (again no proper exit option). 8. After the update installing in Windows and having to restart for the 3rd time and log in AGAIN, I was forced to create another profile on the XBox site. Firstly I don't own and will never own an XBox, and secondly this profile sign in came with marketing email options pre-selected. Given all I was trying to do was to play a game I had just purchased, having to avoid getting spam advertising email as part of the whole tedious rigmarole was not welcome. 9. After creating this account (which didn't give any obvious confirmation I'd created it) and thankfully not having to restart a 4th time, I then had to log in / download profile yet again. This meant that a game I bought in 2 minutes, installed in 5 minutes, and should have been able to start playing in 30 seconds, took me 30 minutes to get started. 10. Finally there was no email contact for PC Games with Windows Live on the Xbox Live site nor the main Microsoft site, and the staff on the XBox Live phone support tried to get me to discuss the problem rather than just telling me the email address. In response I want to know the following things: > Why was I forced to sign in to Windows Live for single player?? > Why, if Windows Live was ""necessary"", was there no integration with my current Messenger sign in?? > Why was the signing in / password validation process so slow and cumbersome?? > Why were there no options to exit when I was told to?? > Why was the whole process made so bloody long-winded for a paying customer to play the game they've just purchased?? Ah was fun getting Windows Live working with Dirt 2. Same issue. You have to spend ages loading the game up, watch all their unskippable intro shit, make it update and quit again, MULTIPLE TIMES to fully update it. No single download for microsoft no sir.
And after all this shit it still doesn't save your progress remotely, so when I switched PCs I forgot to copy an up to date save and thus lost about 15 hours of progress. Thankfully doing it all before meant Arkham Asylum wasn't such a pain in the arse. 30mins is a pretty normal install time for me once you've found all the patches to apply and then found actual working no-dvd cracks without getting a cunting virus. i never use steam though. that microsoft signing in process is ridiculous though.
Steam has been good to me, automatic updates, no hassles etc. Only thing that bothers me is the checking and reinstalling of DirectX components every time a new game is installed. Although they explained this a few mths ago, there surely is a betetr option around.
Windlows Live, which I've only had to use for Arkham Asylum, is a pain. AFAIK, it only saves games per user id and has no other function in SP. On one of the live screens you can just scroll down and select an option 'play without logging in'.
The screen itself doesn't look scrollable, and the windows people don't make any mention of which one it is or how to access it, although they allude to its existence. Figured it out with DOW2. by getting a mac. Now just have to solve the no-games-to-play problem. Zwiffle please elaborate on your bees-based murder method, sounds quite pleasant.
The worst of annoying DRM shall happen to Zwiffle for keeping reading and linking to the fucking Gawker media websites.
Last game i recall being true survival horror must be Call of Cthulhu: Dark corners of the Earth, Penumbra series and Amnesia...
I want to say Dead Space 1 and 2, but those have significantly more action in them, to be considered pure survival horror games... Are there any obscure examples out there that should be known Did what it said on the tin. Fun gameplay, good weapons, pretty enviroments. Well, as Yahtzee so aptly put it - pretty skyboxes. Probably the least immersive game I've ever played, what with the neanderthal dialogue, pre-school plot, uber-on-rails-interactive-cartoon progress, lack of jumping, clipped everything. But the controls and weapons and gore and explosions and kicking the shit out of enemy, as juvenile as it was, was pretty good fun (especially with the stupid dickskill notifications turned off). Very limited as a game, but good to dip into for a bit of easy action.
Tried to give Splinter Cell Double Agent a shot. Mouse buttons can't be bound unless through the confusing config files, which then somehow breaks almost all my config even though I only changed 4 keys. I can't even quit the game without ctrl-alt-del. The loading takes forever, i'm forced to put up with a crappy low quality video every time the menu comes up, and the whole menu GUI looks like shit as well. And on top of that the first 30secs of the game looks like ugly shit and far too dark.
I'm skipping this crap game, it's already wasted an hour of my life. see my post, I played it all the way through and found it to be very disappointing.
Conviction looks more action packed (but also more consoley) though. Couldn't see your post on Double Agent, nitin. But anyway I'm now playing MOH Airborne instead, and put it on easy difficulty since you said you died alot and I have no inclination at all to play from checkpoints with repopulated enemies. The checkpoints are way too far apart!
Agree with what you said about it so far, 2 levels completed. I guess i'm 1/3 done already! I'll probably give conviction a try - surely they would have fixed the key config issues by then. must not have posted my comments on Double Agent here. Anyway, found it to be a very annoying game with subpar level design.
Reviewed a Minecraft mod, The Aether, for anyone interested. http://taw.duke4.net/2011/09/minecraft/the-aether/
looks like minecraft has a new shading system? surprisingly, it makes a huge difference, even though it's still just cubes. very cool.
yeah, they seem to have added some sort of ambient occlusion system, i've been seeing it in screenshots for a while now. (still not playing it myself)
... and 1.8 is going to have a newer lighting system, better day and night transitions and coloured lights.
Medal of Honor: Airborne is the pefect example of a game that could have been great, but was left stumbling over it's own feet in an unfinished product. I can only assume it's because Activision's Call Of Duty was jumping ahead of them in the WWII shooter market. The last MOH effort in 2004, Pacific Assault, was an average game and since then Activision released a successful Call Of Duty 2 in 2006 and was set to release Call Of Duty 3 in time for the 2007 christmas.
So EA release Airborne; their third PC game in the franchise, a game that really needed another year of development in my opinion. Only then it'd be competing against the likes of Far Cry 2, Mass Effect, Left 4 Dead 2 and another Call Of Duty title. Airborne is what happens when you make something half-assed. In my opinion EA LA shouldn't be given the MOH franchise to develop in future. Pacific Assault was a disappointment and too short. The original MOH was created by 2015 Inc, not EA. And what happened to 2015? Most went on to create a new studio named Infinity Ward, developers of the Call Of Duty franchise. That being said, EA actually started this game in 2004, giving them three years to make it. How on earth they could have spent three years creating six levels is beyond me. Perhaps they only had a single level designer and the rest were there to make coffee? Has building a single level evolved so much that it takes around 10 level designers six months to create a single level? Enough about the politics and developmento of modern games, because I really don't know, and on to what is bad about Airborne from a gamers perspective. The most prominent problem being that the game is only about five hours long. As I said above, only six levels and while they are large, there should be twice that many for a full priced game. There are some epic moments, this is Unreal Engine 3 afterall. The final level is a great finale on a huge war tower full of AA's and the like to destroy. Walk to the partly destroyed outer-edges of the tower you can look out over a bomb-ravaged city. It's absolutely epic and probably one of the best levels of 2007 for any action game. Although the inside of the tower doesn't look all that good at all. The other levels look almost as great too, but they are all very similar looking European towns full of debris and destruction. And none of them can catch that imposing feeling you get from the tower; of being just small dot in a huge city. Some of the levels aren't really as big as they really appear when you're parachuting down either. Overall I'd give the design an 8/10. The job was half-done with UE3, but the levels all look good and are well constructed. There's no story whatsoever. All I can tell you is the players name is Travis (spelt Travers because that's cooler) and it's WWII. There are cutscenes before each mission explaining the objectives, which are both boring and skippable.
The combat also needed work. The weapons just don't feel right. You can put a few shots into an enemy and he stays there as if he wasn't even hit. Couple more and suddenly he dies. It feels as if my first few shots went right through him. Headshots are difficult to achieve because the movement is jerky and the recoil on guns just throws you upwards and it takes a second to even realise what you're aiming at. What I mean by jerky is if you've got someone down your sights, you move slightly to the left and it jumps a foot. There's not a smooth transition, so there's times where an enemy will be impossible to shoot (unless you physically move the player) because the sights jump from one side of him to the other! It feels like stop-motion animation; not good at all EA. If I'm firing at close-range at an opponent, it shouldn't take several shots before he suddenly just drops, without any proper death animation or blood. Many times you'll shoot him again because you're not actually sure if he's dead or not. The guns have a weak fire-rate, they sound weak, and none of them were really enjoyable to use. The shotgun is maybe the exception, but who uses a close range shotgun for long range combat? The enemies themselves were just standard humans with different guns and average AI. Nothing new here, but even then they could be fun if the weapons had been tweaked properly. There is one big thumbs up for Airborne that I absolutely loved - jumping from the airplane! Each level I had to demand the girlfriend to watch me jump on the big screen because it's just SO DAMN COOL! She's not interested in the slightest, but I had to show someone! It was brilliant. However, the checkpoint system was sketchy as hell. Provided you don't die much you'll be fine (and as such I played on easy as I hate checkpoints), or if you die just after a checkpoint. In Airborne you go back to the last checkpoint of objectives, so if you've completed 5 of 10 objectives then you'll still have those completed. You return to the parachuting-in mode (which makes no sense at all from a realistic viewpoint) but you can almost land right where you died. The problem is the map gets partly re-populated and you seem to restart with the weapons you started the level with, or at least you lose all you're ammo. I didn't die enough times to figure it out, but for instance I died in the tower level and parachuted back down with many enemies re-spawned. Only this time I'm given my original two weapons back with barely any ammo in them, instead of having the machine gun I previously had with full ammo in it. Why on earth would you restart a checkpoint but lose your ammo and have the enemies respawn?! Who the hell makes these decisions at EA LA? Oh well, this game could have been the best MOH yet. It need the checkpoint system fixed (quicksaves anyone?), the weapons properly tweaked, at least some sort of story rather than random missions, and most importantly MORE LEVELS! As it is, it feels like an expansion pack to a bigger game. It feels like a series of objective-based deathmatches with little point. I still liked it; perhaps I've been a bit harsh on the game because of all the games in I've played from 2007 so far, this is one of the few I'd actually play a second time. It just could have been much better with a bit more work. Rating: 7.0/10 Finally got around to playing this badboy. Just finished the Ishimura section, so far so awesome!
I really must point out that the environments are beautiful, like the first one in the series this is sci-fi pornography at it's best. There is so much detail absolutely everywhere, I've stopped playing at times and just smiled at the screen almost in disbelief at what I was seeing. That doe's not happen often! :) As a sequel its more refinement rather than innovation, everything just feels/looks/sounds better than before. There are no new mechanics (that I've seen just yet) but the original mechanics have been polished up and enhanced, so you now have total freedom to fly around in zero-G sections, and I've seem some gameplay involving thrusters that you can attach to things and fire off to move them around. Curious decision to remake Isaac into a fully voiced character, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, it doesn't get in the way at all, its just different :) I suppose it's easier to show his mental state when you can hear him getting six shades of fucked up. I think so far the other characters have been quite weak, and in general im feeling slightly more disconnected from the story than in the first game, the station commander for example, I have no idea what he wants or what his motivations are, I just know he doesn't like me very much. I thought the intro was worse than the first game also, it didn't really set the scene too well, which is perhaps why i'm feeling disconnected. The Dead Space 1 intro was fantastic, it introduced all the crew, the Ishimura and setup the story very nicely whilst looking awesome. I can't even really remember what happened in the intro for DS2, I remember running through some corridors with a straight jacket on, not having a clue wtf was going on :) So to round this thing off, DS2 is great and you should get it :) And if you haven't played DS1 you should get that also. Having not played any FPS games for a couple of years (including Quake), I have just done 15 minutes of Hard Reset. Great architecture, Blade Runner all over, yet gameplay just like Quake or Quake2: monsters, blow things up, secret areas etc, and nothing complicated (yet!). I might play some more tomorrow.
Yeah trailer looked kinda good. I don't like the futuristic sci-fi setting much, but it looked good in Hard Reset. Funny they only announced the game a couple months before it's release I think... talk about bad marketing.
Thanks for the heads up, downloading now. Wasn't super=impressed with the trailer, huge weapons and too much fancy lighting, but will be keen to give it a try.
How many of those 17 minutes are waiting for the stupid menu system to dick around back and forth with it's "novelty wears off and boredom sets in in about 30 seconds" graphic????
So it's like a 2006 era Daikatana meets Blade Runner, with naff hints of Bulletstorm. Uh huh. Kinda fun tho. The city above you is rather cool.
...and it was Syndicate as everyone thought.
At least I assume our Norwegian friend has mapped for it. fucking adjustable fov in the pc version ffs! ;)
Screens look interesting, hoping you can level city blocks like in syndicate wars <3 czg just tell the other "artists" to piss off, and that you're making the levels from start to finish. I won't have it any other way :D
Populous becomes a first person shooter?! WTF? Why bother even wasting the Populous franchise name, just call it something different ffs. I never liked the Populous games, and if I saw the name "populous" in a video game store I'll completely overlook it thinking it's another god game. Next they'll be making a Need 4 Speed war shooter.
Digital Extremes is well known for it's hand in the Unreal franchise, particularly the multiplayer games Unreal Tournament. By 2005 they developed their own new IP; Pariah, which was an average game at best. Warpath followed a year later and I didn't have the heart to play it since Pariah was a skippable title and Warpath was critically received as even worse.
So it's not a far stretch to assume their next IP; Dark Sector, might fail as well. It's an early-2008 game although it didn't get a PC port until 2009. Fortunately Digital Extremes have developed their own engine for Dark Sector instead of re-using the aging Unreal Engine 2.5, or at least aging in their hands. The engine, named Evolution, does a pretty good job of making the game look appealing. My only complaint is that they went way overboard on the post-processing and visual effects. The amount of blurring on anything that isn't direcly in the centre of the screen and up close, is ridiculous. But the lighting all looks good. It looks about what you'd expect for a 2007/2008 gaming engine with all the visual effects hammed up to the max. Very, very similar looking to Infernal. The art is also satisfying with tonnes of details on the textures throughout the game. Most of the levels look solidly good all throughout the game; there's nothing dull here. But there's also nothing awe-inspiring. The levels are all tight and claustraphoic, with a slow walking speed so you don't really notice that between each level load there's really only a few rooms sometimes. It's a corridor crawler basically, although with plenty of outdoor areas as well, they're still very linear and tight with random, unrealistic barriers used for cover everyone. There's no treking off the beaten path for exploration in Dark Sector, so expect linearity at it's hardcore. The gameplay is where Dark Sector fails for me. Crystal Dynamics introduced a variety of unique features into the game, most notable the spinning blade you launch at enemies while holding a handgun in your left hand. So you can shoot and blade at the same time, which is great for a while. The first half of the game has you up against humans with guns; nothing different to every other shooter, but at least it's fun. Then a little past halfway they change into the infected, which are basically Doom 3 Imp's that fire yellow or blue crap at you. Two good shots from this fast projectile stuff and your dead. The health is regenerating but once the screen goes red it's several painstaking seconds before your health has returned to normal. Furthermore the infected are launched at you in spawns of 3, 4, 5 at a time and as soon as they're dead more keep spawning. As you get further into the game and different types of monsters are introduced, they have more and more health to the point where you need to hit one four or five times with the blade to kill it. Four or five times?! I might as well be using saucer than a hardcore three-edged blade! This all wouldn't be so bad if there were quicksaves, but of course Crystal Dynamics doesn't care about PC standards, they're all about consoles, so you'll be replaying many of the checkpoints two or three times till you get through. It feels like sometimes getting through a fight is more luck than skill in Dark Sector. If you just happen to run the wrong way and there's an infected imp spoofing you, and you miss the powerhit, then you won't get away because the damn player moves too slowly. It's a lot easier if you're able to use your guns and blade 50/50, but there's not quite enough ammo for that, so you'll spend a lot of time hiding behind cover picking things off slowly. Most of the game isn't too bad, but it's just some scenes where you have monsters spawning over and over again and it can get quite overwhelming in the later stages. What they need to do to fix it was make the blade FAR more powerful. Sure you can do a more lethal hit if you hold the blade key down and release it at the perfect time, but it's hard to get the timing right so you'll only get the powerhit 40-50% of the time. The blade should have been an awesome weapon of destruction ripping through enemies. Along with a faster player and perhaps less reliance on the Gear Of War-ripoff cover gameplay and a faster regenerating health system, and Dark Sector would have been a much more enjoyable game. Either that or include a damn difficulty selection instead of just one difficulty. And the boss battles were some of the worst I've ever played without any quicksaving or checkpoints during the battles - they're hardly worth wasting your time on without putting a cheat on to get through it. Overall a good looking game, despite there not being anything too epic, but the gameplay could have been a lot more fun but just became monotonous and annoying by the last quarter of the game. Rating: 6.0/10 Kona becomes someone without an irony meter?! WTF? Why bother even wasting time going on SomethingAwful, just stick to a serious gaming news site ffs.
Still it's existence as an FPS shooter seems to annoy some fanbois, so I might buy it for that alone.
You won't be so smug when Quake is remade as a third person cover based gears knock off. Okay Fallout worked very well as an FPS, but a more strategic game with the squad elements and stuff of Syndicate? I dunno... too many games are getting sucked through either being first person or third person shooters. I love shooters, but I don't want quite the volume of them that we now have :E OH haha was that a joke? I thought it might have been but it wasn't april! Didn't notice what site I was on. What a douche! lol
With the changes made with Fallout, X-COM and Syndicate in FPS over the years, even I almost fell for it.
Not that I found Fallout 3 bad. I've enjoyed it and the game surpassed my expectations. Never played the first Fallout until the third got announced and that was an interesting experience. XCOM just looks underwhelming. Never played the UFO Defense either until sometime before this new game's announcement. And I love the hell out of it. Very atmospheric and the turned-based strategy aspects are refreshing, including all the management and taking care of your troops while out on the field. Syndicate? I have fond memories of Syndicate Wars on the PSX many years ago, despite being terrible at the game. But another FPS? Why bother even wasting time going on SomethingAwful, just stick to a serious gaming news site ffs.
Is this sarcasm? Because, well... First I'll cover John Woo, acclaimed Hong Kong action movie director who is behind Stranglehold. Now I've seen most of his top movies; Hard Boiled, The Killer, Bullet In The Head, Police Story, and his western movies Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off. I like a good action movie or a good crime/drama, but none of his movies have been very memorable for me. In fact I can barely remember a thing about Hard Boiled, and it's only been a couple years since I saw it! Stranglehold is the video game sequel to Hard Boiled. I'm not sure that it really features much of the plot, it's really just the same guy (Tequila, voiced/played by Chow Yun-Fat) in a completely different story.
The story in Stranglehold follows Tequila as he tries to get his long lost love and child back from a gang, who are using them to blackmail another gang. So Tequila sides with both gangs at some stage in order to get his family back. The story is okay - plenty of action movie cliches and rather predictable, but at least there is a story going on with cut-scenes throughout. I would have hoped the game would have featured something a little more interesting coming from John Woo; I could have thought up this plot in five minutes, but a game with a good story is rare. But the player model looks just like Chow Yun-Fat, which is great. The gameplay in Stranglehold is straight-up action mixed with Timeshift and Max Payne. Bullet-time is important and used constantly during battle. There is a cover system, but it's not necessary, thank god, but jumping is missing. You also have special abilities which build up over time as you kill bad guys - simple health boosts, precise slow motion sniping, a fury mode where you can't be hurt and don't lose ammo and a spinning attack. They were good little features, in particular the sniping and fury were very helpful during boss fights. But I ended up using the health boost the most. Weapons are all okay. You have only two weapon slots so I mostly stuck with the few machine guns and pistols. You do go through ammo quick and have to switch weapons often, but there are plenty around. Only the shotgun I didn't like - it was a bit useless unless at very close range. Overall the combat was fun and quite constant. Sometimes it felt a bit Painkiller-esque as you seem to enter one arena and have a set number of spawning enemies before you can continue to the next arena, but other parts of the game were more flowing so Midway didn't overdo the arena feel. Nor did they make the common mistake of endless spawns until the player moves forward - I really hate games that do that. Stranglehold does feature a checkpoint system, so marks down for that as always. But it's not so bad here as the game won't have you dying over and over. I played on the lowest skill setting because I hate checkpoint replays, so I only died several times during the game at the most (mostly boss fights), but it wasn't stupidly easy either. There was still some challenge and strategic gameplay involved. The final level was suitably tough. Stranglehold uses Unreal Engine 3.0, so it's no surprise that the game looks good. Unfortunately Midway really struggle with the structure of the levels from an aesthetic viewpoint, instead relying on lots of debris and detail instead of fantastic open levels. The levels are often very small and tight. When I got to the Slums level it started out with a great looking scene over a run-down city, but before I knew it the level had turned into trekking through tiny rooms, sewers and corridors. You also get to play through a museum, a penthouse building, a massive restaurant, even the Hong Kong marketplace, but while they all look really good, they're also quite small. Only the Tai O island opens up a little, filled with wooden huts and walkways through the island bays. Strangehold may not do islands as pretty as Crysis or restaurants and casinos as impressive as Rainbow 6, but there's nothing to really complain about with the design. The only major bug forced me to change the resolution every time I started the game or I'd just get a black screen. A minor annoyance though since I completed the game almost in a single sitting. Usually after playing a game I know exactly what it did wrong and what to complain about. But in Stranglehold, to be honest, there's nothing really that bad here. It's just a good, action-packed game to add to the collection. Decent design, fun gameplay. Perhaps it's only big flaw is it's very short length and only seven levels. Rating: 7.5/10 First I'll cover John Woo, acclaimed Hong Kong action movie director who is behind Stranglehold. Now I've seen most of his top movies; Hard Boiled, The Killer, Bullet In The Head, Police Story, and his western movies Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off. I like a good action movie or a good crime/drama, but none of his movies have been very memorable for me. In fact I can barely remember a thing about Hard Boiled, and it's only been a couple years since I saw it! Stranglehold is the video game sequel to Hard Boiled. I'm not sure that it really features much of the plot, it's really just the same guy (Tequila, voiced/played by Chow Yun-Fat) in a completely different story.
The story in Stranglehold follows Tequila as he tries to get his long lost love and child back from a gang, who are using them to blackmail another gang. So Tequila sides with both gangs at some stage in order to get his family back. The story is okay - plenty of action movie cliches and rather predictable, but at least there is a story going on with cut-scenes throughout. I would have hoped the game would have featured something a little more interesting coming from John Woo; I could have thought up this plot in five minutes, but a game with a good story is rare. But the player model looks just like Chow Yun-Fat, which is great. The gameplay in Stranglehold is straight-up action mixed with Timeshift and Max Payne. Bullet-time is important and used constantly during battle. There is a cover system, but it's not necessary, thank god, but jumping is missing. You also have special abilities which build up over time as you kill bad guys - simple health boosts, precise slow motion sniping, a fury mode where you can't be hurt and don't lose ammo and a spinning attack. They were good little features, in particular the sniping and fury were very helpful during boss fights. But I ended up using the health boost the most. Weapons are all okay. You have only two weapon slots so I mostly stuck with the few machine guns and pistols. You do go through ammo quick and have to switch weapons often, but there are plenty around. Only the shotgun I didn't like - it was a bit useless unless at very close range. Overall the combat was fun and quite constant. Sometimes it felt a bit Painkiller-esque as you seem to enter one arena and have a set number of spawning enemies before you can continue to the next arena, but other parts of the game were more flowing so Midway didn't overdo the arena feel. Nor did they make the common mistake of endless spawns until the player moves forward - I really hate games that do that. Stranglehold does feature a checkpoint system, so marks down for that as always. But it's not so bad here as the game won't have you dying over and over. I played on the lowest skill setting because I hate checkpoint replays, so I only died several times during the game at the most (mostly boss fights), but it wasn't stupidly easy either. There was still some challenge and strategic gameplay involved. The final level was suitably tough. Stranglehold uses Unreal Engine 3.0, so it's no surprise that the game looks good. Unfortunately Midway really struggle with the structure of the levels from an aesthetic viewpoint, instead relying on lots of debris and detail instead of fantastic open levels. The levels are often very small and tight. When I got to the Slums level it started out with a great looking scene over a run-down city, but before I knew it the level had turned into trekking through tiny rooms, sewers and corridors. You also get to play through a museum, a penthouse building, a massive restaurant, even the Hong Kong marketplace, but while they all look really good, they're also quite small. Only the Tai O island opens up a little, filled with wooden huts and walkways through the island bays. Strangehold may not do islands as pretty as Crysis or restaurants and casinos as impressive as Rainbow 6, but there's nothing to really complain about with the design. The only major bug forced me to change the resolution every time I started the game or I'd just get a black screen. A minor annoyance though since I completed the game almost in a single sitting. Usually after playing a game I know exactly what it did wrong and what to complain about. But in Stranglehold, to be honest, there's nothing really that bad here. It's just a good, action-packed game to add to the collection. Decent design, fun gameplay. Perhaps it's only big flaw is it's very short length and only seven levels. Rating: 7.5/10 diablo 3's drm already affected me and i wont buy it. where i live, internet is kind of weird. while the connections are stable, the problem lies on summer. strong winds and thunderstorms make it into a nice place to live, sure, but in turn the power goes out for hours.
whenever i see the shadows of the glowing eye of the universe standing besides the weak, shimmering toe nails of humanity, i wonder why, and only why, i haven't yet seen with my own two ears out of my rotten teeth. p.s - i'll probably buy diablo3 anyway, but i dont know, a game with always online drm doesnt deserve any sales. the end i forgot to say, i'm actually way more exited about torchlight 2 than diablo3. and when i wrote that i'll buy d3, i mean in battlechest form. like i did with diablo2 and the original starcraft [which i dont like at all! hehe].
the end 2 as zwiffle said, its a haiku. not gibberish, since those are my childhood memories. so be brave little ones. be brave *cries
anyway, do you guys know of a not so great but not so bad, but crappy games? the past few months i played You Are Empty which was loads of fun, but not a game i'd recommend to people. but i really liked. i'm also playing through boiling point which is insanely awesome. but buggy. but awesome. should i just keep going with these titles and try the other ones like vivisector, maybe ubersoldier and such? yeah, was gonna say, the second part of your post is wild, man. shimmering toe nails of humanity, indeed! :P
i've never been super interested in top down dungeon crawlers. i might have picked up the game for fun, but the drm stuff is a major turnoff. while i'm sure i'm in the minority, there are going to be other lost sales like mine. and you just know some haxor is going to get it running flawlessly in SP mode without an internet connection in a week or so. :P Diablo3 to me is not exciting in the least. Torchlight 2 looks like a blast to play though. Even comes with an editor and whatnot. And it will be like $20-$30 iirc. I will gladly give those guys my money.
You can also edit your own items so you can make whatever you want, if I recall correctly on that aspect too.
I'll buy and play both, as well as Grim Dawn.
Torchlight was nice, but it was no Diablo 2 really. It was a smaller team, a new franchise, an indy dev, and cost significantly less than Diablo 2 did when it came out. Not nearly as ground breaking obv, coming out years after Diablo2, but I still think it was quite innovative and stream lined a lot of things. The only problems it had were no MP and was a bit easy, which I think TL2 fixes.
runic said this year, but i don't think they ever gave a solid release date, or even hinted at one, except that [i think] they said something like "pretty sure it will be out this year". i hope so, the game looks wicked, and i want it now.
and Bal reminded me of Grim Dawn! i had completely forgotten about that one. will buy the normal edition once i stop being such a cheap bitch. :) Yeah I try to get the obscure European/russian shooters as well. Ubersoldier is actually worth playing, I reviewed it here: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/ubersoldier.php
I couldn't get a working version of Ubersoldier 2, but it actually looks a lot worse than the first one. Different developers too, which might explain why. It was originally a completely different game, then I think IC or some publisher came along and renamed it Ubersoldier 2 to get more sales. I skipped You Are Empty - mainly because I couldn't find a version of it. Were the graphics good? Skipped Boiling Point and Vivisector - they're probably getting too old now. Vids of Boiling Point make the graphics look pre-2000s. Anything pre 2007 that isn't mainstream, probably looks like arse. You should try Red Ocean (2007), it looks okay in vids but I haven't got it yet. Can't find a version to buy, but it's floating around on the file storage sites. Search google for Red Ocean full. Actually, I might play this in the next week if the pirated versions work :P You could also try The Stalin Subway: Red Veil (2008). And, I've made a list of City Interactive shooters, with their ranking on gamerankings.com and comments on whether to get it. Most of their games use the Chrome (Call of Juarez) or Lithtech (Fear) engines, so they can't be that bad... They use a lot of shadows to hide a lack of detail. I made comments on which ones I was going to get, the first being SAS. Haven't played any yet. Code of Honor: The French Foreign Legion (2007) - 41.5% (Chrome engine) (skip, bad graphics) Battlestrike: Force Of Resistance (2008) - 50% (Chrome engine) (skip, bad graphics) Code of Honor 2: Conspiracy Island (2008) - 34% (Lithtech engine) (skip, bad scores) Sniper - Art of Victory (2008) - 37% (Chrome) (skip, bad gameplay) SAS: Secure Tomorrow (2008) - 57% (GET, Lithtech) The Royal Marines Commando (2008) - ? (Lithtech) (unsure, can't find any reviews) Operation Thunderstorm (2008) - ? (Lithtech) (unsure, can't find any reviews) Armed Forces Corp. (2009) - ? (Lithtech) (skip, no reviews but apparently bad graphics) Battlestrike: Force of Resistance 2 / Battlestrike: Shadow of Stalingrad (2009) - ? (Lithtech) (skip, dark and bad graphics) Code of Honor 3: Desperate Measures (2009) - ? (Lithtech) (GET) Alcatraz (2010) - ? (unsure, graphics look bad) Sniper: Ghost Warrior (2010) - 56% (GET) Terrorist Takedown 3 (2010) - ? (GET) Also you could probably try Warpath (2005), the sequel to Pariah, which was actually a bit shit but might be worth playing if your desperate. It's Chrome again I think. I skipped it. Oh and check my website above there's reviews from other games in 2006/2007 you might have missed. Well I've already downloaded, played and reviewed Red Ocean...
Red Ocean is as close to a Quake 2 mission pack with an enhanced graphics engine as you are going to get in 2007. I liken it to a mission pack because that's really all this game is, or feels like. It's seven levels long, so Red Ocean will only take about five hours. I played through the entire game in a single sitting. The levels are basically corridors and rooms of various sizes, all of which looks pretty similar. There's no outdoors, no non-linear exploration, no set-pieces. It's just cookie cutter old skool game design from the late 90's. It's hard to tell what the engine is capable of, because the levels are so short and cramped. There's a few expected post-processing effects such as blurring and the lighting is okay, but nothing that special that doesn't exist in any other top shooter for the few years before Red Ocean's 2007 release. The gameplay is also very old skool with similar enemies just with different guns. There are some positives about old skool though - quicksaving for one, but you also get to carry and use a full arsenal of weapons. I used every single weapon in the game quite often, and they're all fairly fun to use. Sure they have their problems; they're quite slow and even the machine guns fire rounds too slow, almost as if they're projectile weapons. But I was still quite satisfied to get to use all the weapons, instead of so many modern games limiting you to carrying a couple of weapons at a time - which of course you only ever carry the most useful ones. And the shotgun in Red Ocean is actually really fun to use! The enemy A.I. is thick as shit. Half-Life had better A.I. than this ten years ago. But the enemy fire can do some damage quite quickly, so the game is challenging at times. The problem with the difficulty progression is that the first level is probably the hardest of all when you've only got the useless handgun. Once you have a full range of weapons halfway through the game things start to get a little easier. One thing I really have to criticise is that selling point of this game; namely the water, is non-existant. There's maybe two sections in the entire game where you go underwater, which only last for thirty seconds. That's it. The rest of the game is completely dry. The artists and designers couldn't even design some underwater ocean views in this supposedly underwater military complex. At least they could have thrown in a window with an underwater skybox behind it! As it is, the base could be in the Nevada desert or anywhere on earth. It would still be the same ugly corridor crawler. Red Ocean is not really a game you'd expect to pay money for in 2007. It's only mission pack length and the gameplay and level design belongs in the 90's and early 2000's. Having said that, I quite enjoy going back and playing the old custom missions for Quake II, and this is basically what Red Ocean is; just with a slightly better engine and no Strogg. If you can track down a free version online (it's not hard with a google search), it's only a 215mb download (cut scenes not included though) so give it a shot if your bored and with an open mind you might actually enjoy it. I did! If you're against piracy, then skip it, it's not worth paying anything for. Rating: 4.5/10 thanks for the list. i knew some of these from when i was looking for other games. will try to get them later, as they are quite cheap on amazon [through people that sell on amazon that is], at least the ones that are on sale.
you are empty looks like a game from 2004 or maybe 2002. it looks good to me, so i don't mind it. though some of the enemies are quite ridiculous looking. then there are a few moments like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Gsna9zlVE the voice is not in sync, but it doesnt bother me though. yet the more the dude talks, the more weird it gets. its all just gibberish! :D the levels have a lot of little details and are nicely made too. no shaders or anything, so if the dudes wanted a bump on the walls, then it was done by hand. the movement is slow, running only adds like 10% more speed to the movement. and if you fall from the second floor to the first floor, you die. the physics sometimes can behave in weird ways. i remember bumping into a table and the objects slowly flew into the ceiling never to be seen again [something similar happened on the demo of chernobyl terrorist attack, but with dead bodies but it ended with the game crashing] the game is linear as hell, but i found it fun to play through. and the levels are varied so its not so repetetive i think. and it feels like you are actually going from one place to another. maybe i'm being too nice to it. one thing though, the game has some weird graphical bugs when i tried to play it again on my new pc. i played it on my old one and it played without issues, but on win7 64bit the floors & ceilings are displayed as black glitchy textures and sometimes objects blink like crazy. i dont know if its the ati drivers or maybe windows itself. i wish my notebook could handle it though, but it runs it at 2fps :( when i played the game on my old pc though, the game felt solid without any weirdness. the aiming was weird as its expected on these games, but nothing really bad i thought. i had no slowdowns or crashes. except for the floating objects thing, no glitches that i remember, well except trying to play it now :( some others games i found that i dont know if you heard of. never tried these, and i have never seen them anywhere to buy online, except for gamersgate.com: they're alive! xenus 2: white gold [sequel to boiling point, looks to be much better than the first one. open world action rpg madness]. the precursors [weird, funky sci-fi game, similar to xenus in a way i guess] chernobyl terrorist attack [its from january this year, but the demo gave was enough to say no to it]. only seen it on amazon's downloadable game service for $19usd. but there is a demo and that was all i needed. instinct [uses the same engine used on you are empty, so it might have the same issues on win7 or with a ati card, whichever is causing the problems]. sellers through amazon sell it very cheap, and the local supermakerket had it for like $8usd. i never saw it again. its funny how the supermarket has lots of rare pc games, and a massive shelf for them, yet the big electronic stores have a small stand with lots of popcap styled games crap. since this is becoming too big of a reply i'll stop. ...the gameplay on you are empty is as basic as it gets. shoot dudes, get key, open door, do some simple platforming [walking on catwalks type of stuff] kill dudes, enter room, listen dude talk, kill more dudes, etc.
but i'm really interested in getting a gamersgate account and buying xenus2, precursors & they're alive. if i had the money to spend & they were cheap, i would go for it! :) Actually hadn't heard of They're Alive, Instinct or Chernobyl Terrorist Attack. Apparently they're all garbage, but Chernobyl MIGHT be okay. I'm adding it to my list anyway. Speaking of which, here's my list of games to play, most of which i'll eventually review as well :D
http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/gamestoget.php Despite it's size, it's not exhaustive. There's still stuff missing, in particular probably some good hack n slash and rpg's. It's almost all 3rd or 1st person action games on this list, order set by gamerankings.com's aggregate scores for each game. 2011 definitely isn't complete - I've just put on the big popular releases so far. I'm still working on playing through my 2007 list - which i've almost finished hence why I left 2007 off. Reviews are all on my site anyway for the 2007 games. Playing Stalker now which i'll probably finish today and review. reading your reviews and that list made me realize... i'm not really considered a gamer any more.
makes me a little sad. :( and here we got a bot probing different hotlink mechanisms, interesting
Here's my review of Stalker:SOC: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/stalker.php
It's quite long so I won't post it here, but some of you may be interested in reading it. Don't read if you loved Stalker though, because I clearly didn't. In fact it fucked me off more than any other game I can think of, even more than Tomb Raider. Could of been great, but too many things needed fixing, even after the patches and Stalker Complete 2009. There certainly are many bugs and shortcomings, but beneath that it's still a unique game.
Your review sounds to me like you were playing it somewhat wrong and you also based your verdict on some aspects introduced by the Complete mod (e.g. darker night, food, possibly gun/enemy accuracy and weight). I mean wrong in terms of maybe not patiently enough - "stalking" enemies pays off here, or even sneaking past them, a perfectly valid tactic in this game, which you criticized however; skipping sidequests where you could have gotten money or valuable items. There are very good weapons to be found or bought, so there's really no need to use the weak ones until the end. I'm actually surprised you seemed to have missed them entirely, or if not, at least failed to get deal with the ammo situation. In the beginning the game is fairly hard with the poor pistols and shotguns, but as soon as one gets a rifle dropping enemies is much more bearable. All the Monolith soldiers have badass ones and some of zombified stalkers you meet in the bunkers, too. Does the Complete mod remove the timelimit/blowout in the outide NPP level? Because that one sure was annoying in the original game. The weight limit is proper RPG/realism element. Clearly annoying if you have to drop stuff, but there's still plenty of room for a few good guns. Though I think your not having found the right ones possibly added to your frustration with the limit space (due to the need to carry more weak ones). Finally, while the game is certainly sandboxy, I don't really agree to the term "true sandbox", because not only is the game world made up of seperate (albeit interconnected) levels, it's also, as you wrote yourself, linearized by the fact that certain areas/levels are not accessible right away. Debatable, I guess. Go play Oblivion! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewwtznVkSxA&feature=player_embedded
Looks like Deus Ex-ish mixed with Fear style melee combat. The text is really, really small :(
Still your website looks great, loads of pics etc, but that text is really, really small.. Thank god for zoom ;) I didn't find the stealth or sneaking past people really worked. Enemies would randomly spot me, and even at night in pitch dark with the flashlight off they'd see me, although maybe Complete 2009 mod had something to do with that. But I didn't really treat it like a survival/horror, which is what it's supposed to be. What exactly does that mean in Stalker though anyway - really slow, meticulous combat?
The timelimit on the NPP level was still there. Although I just sprinted through it and only killed several enemies, and got there in half the time. I did take a dozen quickloads though, and a couple feeds as I kept running out of energy as I hadn't eaten. I'm yet to play a proper RPG, but the RPG elements, in theory, were finein Stalker so maybe I can play some now. Might go back to Oblivion, but it might be getting a bit dated, but Fallout 3 is a definite play. just got done playing oblivion yet again. as long as you can pick up a mod that replaces the absolutely terrible npc faces that come with the original game, it still looks quite good, considering it's age.
i've played it maybe 6 or 7 times now (not always completing it) and i still find new dungeons, which is what call bang for your buck. o.0 i wonder if skyrim can cram as much content as oblivion... I think they said they had like 300 hours of gameplay in there, give or take a 100. After a while, they just lost count. But something like 100 unique dungeons to explore, on top of the overworld (or underneath I guess.) So my guess is probably.
oh wow, that sounds great. honestly, i haven't been paying all that much attention to it other than what i read here, so i guess i wasn't expecting much.
but yeah, that sounds like it'll be a lot of fun, and something you can come back to later. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EOlzCrVFvs&feature=player_embedded#!
You know what would make this video a lot better? If Randy Pitchford would shut the fuck up. Looks pretty awesome, but definitely nowhere near as good as that last Rage gameplay vid. I hope they're going to do something about the blood splatter, it looks 2D.
But looking at Gearbox' track record with pc releases, this will be some locked at 55 fov, console ported mess :(
Which makes me really sad because I've been itching for this game for a long time. Looks repulsively consolized but that might be the ghastly uber-slow controlling of a console controller. Mmmm look left and right OR up and down but not both at once.
Bloody great and addictive. Have started way too many games, my god is it hard.
Yes, it is. I played it for a few hours whilst in a null state and din't get bored.
Then I thought afterwards 'meh I just paid for a flash game with a stupid difficulty spike in the middle' then I played it again and realised the randomisation had been working against me and got a lot of ranged attack powerups like triple shot, multi shot and so on. In any case, stock piling for the later levels is very difficult (and have you learned the tarot yet?) but I notice steam just updated the game... Well worth the price. And if you missed this then you should play it as well: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754 Yes, I know I linked it before. But coming across little Steven confirmed my suspicion. The update has new configurations of items.
So if the orginal randomisation base was 100x100 I don't want to know what it is now. Because that's probably the time in seconds I'll lose to it. and I always take the mystery pills.
Definitely so much luck involved in how difficult your game ends up... I've had some crazy fortunate draws - maxing out damage and speed by the 2nd level, or getting the cat head that gives you 9 lives. I balance that out by not knowing what the fuck i'm doing though - i didn't understand the room where you exchange HP for items for a while, and ended up with one heart (one!) but 9 lives in the bank. How useful. Only fought mom once so far, and lost with her at 5% health or something. Stupid mom. I thought it was great, until I realised I was stripping myself of health for picking it up - it makes peeps and that big pile of meat boss very difficult.
Peeps is the most annoying though. And cupids arrow has to be the best upgrade, especially against the worm boss. What's your new email, your uni one is down - congratulations in order :) ? I don't think I ever got Cupid's Arrow! What does that do?
Haha, well it's a over a year since I graduated, so maybe keep the cork in the champagne for now! A back-dated thank-you for the congratulations though! Email is now: jonmiles1 AT gmail.com It makes you fall in love. It is a most wondrous precious feeling that makes you feel alive. Every living day will be a blessing. Warm sunshine in the early morning will be but a imitation of her glistening hair. A tweeting nightingale just outside your window will remind you of her luscious voice. Her eyes like twinkling stars, her sunspots like the milkyway in the beautiful dark night sky in the desert. You will feel like you could lift the whole earth with your massive raging boner.
Pretty hard indeed. I've yet to figure out what the items do and how to switch them (no rtfm). Seems like a fun game, but then again, could've been cheaper.
Anyone played Trauma? thanks Spirit, that clears everything up!
negke: If it goes in your inventory then it has some always-on effect, some affect stats, one poisons enemies that touch you, and at least a couple summon little flying dudes that shoot things for you. If it's in the action slot then you have to press space, but it's usually easy to see what that does. Tarot cards are mysterious and you have to remember what they do, pills are always random. No RTFM required, I think you're supposed to not know what the fuck is going on most of the time. not at all. If you die at a high level the best recourse I've found has been to cry myself to sleep.
The action item can only be swapped by finding a new one on the floor, there's no inventory management.
Hierophant - 2 blue hearts
Hermit - warp to shop Death - kill everything or do damage to bosses Devil - power up shot damage for single room Moon - teleport to the hidden room in the dungeon Magician - Make shots homing for one room Lovers - 2 red hearts Fool - random teleport Tower - spam bombs (that explode) everywhere in the room Judgement - spawn a key, bomb and a heart Temperance - Spawn a blood bank (hearts for cash) Chariot - teleport... Wheel of fortune - spawn a gambling machine Hanged man - fly for one room Strength - +1 heart, bump stats I'm missing a load that I can't remember. Also, bomb the machines - makes them drop a random amount of stuff. For the little kid who wants money, you should always pay up, since he tends to give you stuff that'd be very expensive otherwise like the compass and map. If an item's price in the shop is red then thats a special low price. Cupid's arrow goes through enemies to hit those behind. To kill mom I think the best strategy is stay next to the door and fire sideways, moving when the foot comes down. If you kill a boss without taking damage then a devil room will open, where you can trade heart containers for very strong powerups. It is possible to kill yourself by trading in all your hearts. Every dungeon has a single hidden room which is accessed by bombs, usually. It tends to contain cash. Arcades are great, but only waste your health or cash if you've got a surplus. The best is just to bomb all three machines (including the guy) and collect all the stuff that's dropped. Is off -
the chariot gives you unicorn ramming power. The fool returns you to the start room. Not getting hit by a boss doesn't open the door to the devil's room - not sure what is the mechanic there. I played the original 1999 Unreal Tournament plenty, although only ever against bots, and enjoyed it a lot. The weapons were all very fun, levels looked great. However lacking a proper single player mode I skipped it's sequels UT2003 and UT2004, before returning to UT3 released in 2007.
UT3 was advertised as having a proper single player mode, much more than it's predecessors. Unfortunately the single player mode is really just a series of bot matches; covering typical deathmatch, Capture The Flag and Warfare gameplay modes. I played on the lower difficulty levels to avoid much replay. This made the deathmatches laughably easy - even the 1 on 1 final battle I won 20-4 on my first play through. But it's the deathmatches I enjoy most, and often it's team-based 4 on 4, for instance. However I was playing on lower difficulties, so they should have been fairly easy. The Capture The Flag levels were quite often easy, but there were a few where vehicles are involved that were a bit of a challenge, and then one huge levels in particular (Sandstorm) that was extremely difficult. But overall the CTF levels aren't very exciting. I find myself just running like hell in most of them, trying to avoid detection. Only twice in the entire game did a team-mate manage to capture a flag. They're completely useless. In most cases I was better off continuing to the enemies' zone and just stand around waiting for my team-mate to inevitably drop the flag so I could take over the run. But it's the Warfare levels that throw the game completely out of balance. In these levels you have stations that you take control of in order, until you get to the enemies main station and destroy it. The opposing side is trying to do the same to you. Some of these levels were very easy, completing them in just a couple of minutes. But then there were others that were really, really difficult. It seemed to depend too much on whether or not your team-mates were being imbeciles. The Torlan Warfare level, which was number 15 out of 41, for me, was by far the hardest level in the entire game. My team-mates just seemed to dick around and do nothing. Even when taking over all stations, I couldn't even GET to the final station to even attempt to destroy it, while my team-mates were plonking around at the start still. A bonus card (which do a few things like reducing the opponents enemy count) was a necessity on this one. Then on the other hand you get to the penultimate level, Warfare again, and it's done in under five minutes. So what I'm getting at is that the levels are wildly out of balance, with some that are too easy and the odd one that's too hard for where it's placed in the list. And that's all this game really is - a list of levels one after another, some of which are poorly repeated. There's a story going on about some war and the character you're playing wants revenge on the cliche hot chick who nearly killed him. But the story is a boring and didn't enhance the experience much at all. The weapons are all the standard Unreal ones; all very fun to use. UT3 uses, obviously, Unreal Engine 3. It looks great as expected with some awesome looking backgrounds and setpieces. There's a tonne of variety in the different settings including temples, space stations, market gardens and many outdoors levels. I guess it's hard base a proper single player game around so many different settings, but I really wish more developers would put this much variety and fantastic looking environments into their games. Either that or perhaps Epic should make a proper, non-console biased, single player game like the original Unreal. That being said, the looks are fairly identical to Gears Of War. The character models might as well have been pulled directly from GOW, while the textures and environments all have that similar muddy colour palette and blurry post processing effects. If you didn't really like the looks of GOW, you better skip UT3. The final hurdle in UT3 to mention, from a single player perspective, is that the game isn't very long. Assuming almost every level you complete successfully on your first try, you'll be through it in five hours. I'm going to judge this as a single player experience, as I don't play online, and as such because it's all bot play it does probably warrant replays so you can get a better look at some of the levels. However, it is JUST bot play, which gets repetitive fast. On top of that some of the levels (CTF and Warfare) I didn't enjoy that much. In fact I cringed every time a Warfare level came up. UT3 might look fantastic, but it's not a proper single player experience, so not really recommended. Do you guys know of any good single player mods out there? There's a fkn shitload of mods, so I guess i'll go through them to figure out what is fun for single player, even if it's against bots.
To replace my crappy list of Binding items and their effects:
http://ninjanerdstech.com/2011/09/the-binding-of-isaac-items-list/ I've just noclipped/flown through all the non-campaign levels and Titan Pack levels, and realised just how good UT3 looks. In fact, I'll go so far as to say it's the best looking game ever made up until November 2007 (excusing Bioshock and COD4 as I'm yet to play them).
It's quite disappointing that a game that looks this good was wasted on multiplayer only with no proper single player. imo UT3 uses too much post processing to add colour leading to everything looking washed out. You turn the PP down and it looks very gray.
Skies are jaw drawing though. :E so what do you think about 'amnesia - the dark descent' i started to play it in may and still couldn't finish
Loved Amnesia, one of the few horror games that felt tense, especially when being chased. Very atmospheric too. Had a good experience with it.
So scary one is reluctant to even start it up.
yeah, i was actually talked out of playing because of that. :S There are some hilarious youtube videos of people freaking the fuck out over that game, it really does seem to get under your skin!
yeah, i've seen some. the youtube videos of the game even managed to put me on edge.
seriously, you have to really enjoy being flat out terrified to play a game like that. o.o fuck yeah that sounds awesome. i love a really scary horror that makes me have trouble sleeping cos i'm scared still lol. hopefully amnesia has that effect. on the other hand, I thought the 1st episode of penumbra was a bit average and not scary at all.
Dino Run SE is free right now. Dumb but fun.
http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorunse/ Although the vfx were a bit rough.
The DLC is also good, and disturbing in a slightly different way. Get some eye, ear, brain and taste bleach ready before viewing this footage of Cave Story 3D: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRrTEeA_hko
It is higher resolution and 3D thus better. Just finished it
Visuals : A+, the game looks fantastic, loved the use of different primary colours in environments. Lighting in particular is extremely high quality, using very high resolution lightmaps and radiosity, it really makes the levels come alive. It's what kept me playing really, to see the next environment! Gameplay : The running and jumping stuff is excellent, reminded me of Brink's parkour system but it feels better here, some areas were a little frustrating to figure out how to get through them but the game never relies on precision jumping and movement too heavily which is a good thing from my perspective. There were a couple of areas where it was tough to get the character to do the correct jump however and failing this usually led to my death by falling. Lucky the checkpoints are fairly well placed. The combat is where it gets quite frustrating however, there are lots of melee moves you can do to take out enemies, or disarm them and use their weapons. But it never gets above mediocre. The guns feel pretty bad overall and these combat areas are the worst parts of the game, luckily they are not the main focus. Really enjoyed it overall, would recommend it if you haven't tried it out yet. Screenshots - http://steamcommunity.com/id/darrenweekes/screenshots?tab=public&showdate=1&filter=shortcut_179 agreed on Cave Story... they really did themselves no favours by showing the comparison shots - the 2d art was so much clearer and the environments were much more understandable.
I guess they've done the market research, but I would have thought that the Cave Story license would have been best served by keeping things as they were - the only people that know it are people that sought out pseudo-8bit indie platformers in the internet. btw you linked to a Die Antwoord video, here's the Cave Story trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uas-5yDc70k <Chillingbler> so
<Chillingbler> syndicate <Chillingbler> childish rip-off of deus ex in box rooms <Chillingbler> although again playing on a console controller is so utterly slow and awful you really can't tell Could be fun though. The outside bit looked pretty and combat could be fun on a PC. Although it looks better in motion compared to screenshots, the game loses its visual charm by turning it into 3D like that. Could you imagine VVVVVV given a similar treatment? I feel it's part of the experience, not just something being there. It also had more atmosphere in general and I loved that about it, especially the latter Labrynth sections. Not keen on the new Egg Corridor soundtrack either, especially the beginning.
Looks okay. The rooms look a bit Half-Life1'ish and boxy, but outdoors looked okay.
Having to disable forcefields on enemies (those flying things) before I can shoot them will be a pain, and all those icons cluttering up the screen in the middle of a firefight will annoy me. I'll still play it though. Here's my Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (2007) Review
http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/kaneandlynch.php 6.0/10 if you can't be bothered reading it. Rumors are going around that Doom4 might be having some trouble because of Rage's poor launch... Hope this isn't true.
http://kotaku.com/5851953/doom-4-indefinitely-postponed-following-rages-disappointing-launch Of bull to me.
"Company wide meetings" don't decide anything - it's not a democracy. They're only to inform the staff of what management wants them to know. "Poor Reviews" also don't mean a thing, it's sales and market research that decide what a company does. Doom4 was on a shaky peg the moment it was put on the "back burner" - that is production speak for "a few dead weights are keeping it ticking over until we have something better for them to do". Sales for Rage won't be clear for months, and I doubt how well it does, or doesn't has anything to do with if Doom4 gets made. Rage is a new IP, Doom known to every gamer alive already. Stare into my coffee and make a prediction -
Doom4 will be made under a modified Rage engine. ... otherwise it will take another 7 years to come out !
Besides, what's not to like about the RAGE engine ? OK, it needed a bit of patching, but it wors great now, doesn't it ? I would prefer Rage2 to Doom4, but equally I would be interested to see what they would do with Doom4 in terms of fixing a few nagging issues with Doom3 (slow pace, monster closets, dark and permanently indoors).
From what I hear they were forced to rush the release of Rage, which is why it had to be patched a few times at the start. That said, due dates are never a surprise, so the team isn't blameless.
How about Doom4 being more like Doom2 than Doom3? That seems like a logical step under the Rage engine. that was the direction they were going (Re: the Doom2 thing). Certainly hope so. Seems like a great engine for a stylised, handpainted look, something a bit more fun than straight-up id techno-realistic too-many-pipes-on-this-panel affair. Mix that with some classic Doom / Painkiller gameplay, run-n-gun, horde combat and you've got a bloody great time IMO.
Carmack, 2008:
One of the things that I come to in my limited contributions to the whole Doom 4 design process is, it has to still be you beating down the bad guys. It has to be a triumph of heavy weaponry over demonic forces in some way, and you have to be blowing demons all to hell around you, and it's a more positive side of things there. Brad Hawkins (voice actor), 2009: I do know we are dealing with a post war/post apocalyptic event that civilians and military are fighting for their survival. Spirit, 2011: Fuck Gawker! I'd say the future is looking pretty bright. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/21/what-do-you-want-from-doom-4/
Also, someone linked their concept video of what it could look like, looks pretty fucking amazing if you ask me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sQFx_e_0jc Galactic Civilization 2 Ultimate Edition and Impulse - anyone here play this game, and if so, is Impulse any good? It's gamestop's Steam competitor, and it's $20 on that platform. I really want it, not sure if it's worth dealing with Impulse though. I might just pay for it then download a torrent so I don't have a guilty conscience. Only other place I saw it was a boxed copy on Amazon for like $70 after s&h (which might be worth it if it comes with an awesome manual.)
Is pretty good - I always found it more stable than Steam and more user friendly.
Just a shame it doesn't get the big releases as much. As expected the Arcania addon is shit. It's like the last part of the main game, where you had to endure constant battles with little story, except even worse as there's neither nice.environments nor good combat.
So after hack'n'slaying through hordes of creatures in unimaginative caves, dungeons and ruins for rougly an hour, I got bored and uninstalled. This addon is a very lame attempt at cashing in some more (especially if you followed the lawsuit revolving around it) and another nail in the coffin of the Gothic series. Pretty much like Forsaken Gods. Poor bastards who paid for this. Forthcoming / future FPS / 3PS action games to look forward to:
So far we've got: Bioshock Infinite Prey 2 Aliens: Colonial Marines Mass Effect 3 Syndicate The Darkness 2 Far Cry 3 http://www.tothegame.com/gamebrowse.asp?sort=title&letter=all&page=1&sortdir=asc&platform=pc&category=4&status=upcoming&territory=eu&image.x=44&image.y=8 does not show any more of note....hmmm.... (Skyrim and Risen 2 if you are Bal, HOTS if you are a SC2 whore) I didn't know they were making that. By the looks of the shots, it looks really amazing, and might actually be a sequel to Far Cry (unlike Far Cry 2, which was a completely unrelated game).
No it's not, it's a sequel-ish to FC2, from the looks of things. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaGSSrp49uc
I just looked at the screen shots and saw tropical island with a white guy with a Hawaiian shirt, and thought "that looks like FC".
Waiting for Deus Ex Human Choadalution to arrive, so I fancied some simple shooter action and felt it was time to give GOW1 another go, having got vaguely used to horrible consolised over the shoulder cover system bollox in the space marine demo. It is an....interesting experience.
Pros: + It looks pretty cool for the time, still looks good today. + The squad system works pretty well. + Flanking enemies is quite fun. Cons: - Everything is in a shade of grey. - Squad members are generally stupid and go down easily. - You can revive them but can't be revived yourself. - The checkpoints are sometimes too spaced and there is no manual save. - Some checkpoints are right as unskippable cutscenes start, forcing tedious reviews. - Unskippable intro clips/logos. - Far too many cutscenes, all the bloody time and spoiling immersion. - The characters and dialogue are completely awful. - There is no context for how it starts. - The health indicator is in possibly the worst position ever, right where it gets completely obscured by gunfire and right where you're trying to look through the hud. - The enemy look almost identical to your squad members (and have little character regardless). - The gameplay is super-repetitive. - The cover fighting is very artificial with concrete shit everywhere. - The shotgun is completely useless given the gameplay when you get it. - Running controls are awful: lag before running, change in perspective, awful lack of turning, awful headbob. - Can't vault/mantle obstacles without going into cover first. Basically it's striking me as a clear and objective bad game. How was it ever popular again?? You forgot to mention the number of sequences which are designed around having two players, which in single player practically mock you via the pathetic partner AI.
I love Epic, but I can't stand their design at all. Gears of War is a disgustingly horrible game. It's just terrible design wrapped in ugly looking meat-robots.
I liked GOW1, pity they went cuntsoles only for the sequels. Didn't like the cover system bullshit and concrete blocks everywhere, but the game looked great for 2006, despite grey and brown everywhere.
That titan or whatever it's called boss is a CUNT. - Both your squad and the enemy models have irritatingly juvenile proportions.
- Picking up items is slow and tedious. - The blood is daft cartoonised nonsense. havent played it yet but isnt one of the lighting options really important to how it looks? Ie without it, the game looks monotonal and drab and very different if you turn it on?
Also, finally finished Episode One, more of the same really, not as epic as the original game but very enjoyable nonetheless. I just played Portal for the 1st time. First 18 levels I felt were a bit uninspired... left me wondering why this game is one of the most popular of all time, but the last level is awesome and makes it a great mini-game - although the puzzles are never really that difficult throughout. Pretty cool though.
I.e. I turned the whole game off, uninstalled it and binned the CD. Not out of frustration or anger, just the simple purging of shit :D
It's too bad you uninstalled it as I was going to recommend you open a map in the editor and see how bad GoW really looks without color correction.
what should I get? I'm thinking 2 5 dollar games. Not sure I can actually handle Amnesia. Thinking Bioshock 2... is it embarassing to consider Terraria? seems like it would be an INCREDIBLE time waster.
Bioshock 2 is great, I bought a 4 pack for like $15 and just gave them out to people because it was a great game imo.
I only ended up with Dead Island because it was the only game I wanted that I didn't have. i'm trying to play amnesia right now.
a couple of hours in so far, but had to stop after a pretty close run in with a monster. sound effects in this game are really really well done. unbelievably atmospheric game. http://www.teamfortress.com/
Unfortunatly I won't be here this weekend to play it. :( Horror adventure seems more fitting. There's no action or survival gameplay except for occasional fleeing or hiding from monters. The rest is puzzles and exploration.
is not available in Germany. Can someone buy it and gift it to me? I'd paypal the money right away.
I hated the lifeguard guy, annoying voice/acting. Make sure not to let your weapons degrade below 50%.
Completed this today. Anyone who likes adventure games should take a look at this. I recommend it.
<@rebb> hm wonder if this works http://bf3blog.com/forum/topic/how-to-make-origin-stay-away-from-the-rest-of-your-computer
I know some people preferred EP 1, but I thought it was exceptional. Set pieces like the opening level when the portal causes the train/bridge to collapse were amazing! Some very nice fights too.
Valve have a very good grasp on what makes FPSs tick IMHO. Is pretty awesome!
It boils down to a tower defence game mixed with 3d person action combat. There are 2 phases to the gameplay, you start a wave in build mode and can setup defences and upgrade your towers using mana as a currency (which is spawned in finite amounts from chests and can also be picked up from killed enemies). Then once you are happy with your setup you start the combat phase where trains of mobs try to reach various nodes on the map and destroy the crystals located there. In the combat phase you still have complete control of your character and can attack enemies and repair/upgrade and place new towers as you gain mana. There are 4 classes all with different towers and attacks/special abilities. They combo together really nicely and the game supports up to 4 players at the same time. It also gets brutally difficult on the harder game modes, there is a lot of strategy involved in setting up a good defence and protecting your crystals. It's all around well made fun, theres a demo available on steam so check it out :D I figured you guys here would get a kick out of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU (I couldn't find a better thread to post this in so I'm sorry that it's off-topic) Well, while the trailer doesn't really get me pumped up for a new GTA (maybe I'm jaded) it looks a lot more enjoyable than GTA4.
http://kotaku.com/5855541/grand-theft-auto-vs-first-official-trailer Seems pretty colorful, similar to Vice City/San Andreas, which I enjoy more than the drab GTA 4. I've never finished one of those games, tbh, but they are super fun. Probably my favourite game to borrow from a friend and play when really fucked up.
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/platoon/2832655241053871886/
if you have the game, apply and I'll accept all you guys :) Logo is a bit lol, if anyone can come up with something better feel free! SAS: Secure Tomorrow is the first City Interactive title I've decided to try, having received mixed (but not bad) reviews from Gamespot and IGN. Not sure what game they were playing, but SAS was barely worth the $10 I paid for it.
The game is so short you'll be done in under 3 hours. You start in a prison, followed by a building complex then a snowy base in Greenland. In most games, that would be three levels but City Interactive spreads it out across 10 levels. It's basically just F.E.A.R. inspired room-corridor-room design. Even the outdoor snow levels are just a series of medium sized outdoor areas connected by snowy passageways (corridors). There's no great detail, no setpieces whatsover or even mildly interesting environment backgrounds. Compared to other 2008 games, SAS will be a big let-down, as it looks about as good as games released five years ago. In fact if this was released in 2003/2004 it would have been quite popular, apart from the length. The engine is a little better than the art, being the Jupiter EX from Lithtech that powered F.E.A.R. and Condemned. But by 2008 this engine is a few years old and hasn't aged well. Ultimately if you liked the look of F.E.A.R., then SAS is more of the same. Just a little worse. The gameplay has you fighting terrorists with two comrades. Unfortunately they are a beefy source of frustration, constantly getting in your way. They run into rooms gung hoe because they're invicible, but they're also really bad shots and often will just stand around not shooting and often facing towards you while there's enemies RIGHT BEHIND THEM. Perhaps it's a good thing, otherwise they'd complete the entire game for you. You get some variety with plenty of weapons, although they're all very similar machine guns, but all fairly fun. The enemies have mixed AI, sometimes retreating to cover. But overall it's quite an easy game. I probably only died a few times on medium difficulty, mostly due to being reckless. Sometimes you need to be careful and lean around corners using cover, while you can also run into a room blasting. It's the kind of gameplay I enjoy. So overall, below average design and extremely short length, but it's generally kind of fun. If you can find it for under $10 and have absolutely nothing else to play, then it's perhaps worth a few hours of your time. Rating: 4.5/10 Nice little stealth platformer, fun music and graphics as well, and free!
http://www.stealthbastard.com/#about http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/conflict-deniedops.php
6.0/10. Now that I'm up to 2008 (saving 2007s Bioshock and COD4 for later) I'm reviewing some more less popular and obscure stuff. Next up will probably be The Precursors. Dedicated servers that might as well not exist because you can't gain any exp/unlocks when playing on them (you have to use P2P matchmaking)?
Locked down fov 65? In an FPS? On PC? Is this a joke? They probably have a re-hashed version of the COD3 engine still. Which I thought was idTech4, (remember this from when CODBLOPS came out) but apparently it stems from idTech 3 (!).
Get with the now, COD. But yeah, that aside - 65?!?!?! That's like looking at life through a tiny hole in a box that you wear on your head. To be fair, the dedicated servers allow you to play how you want. Once you unlock everything, who cares? You can still play with friends or play on a server with regular people like you can in TF2.
And the fov doesn't need to be that wide, the maps are fucking tiny. Especially after playing BF3, in which Caspian Border could probably fit all the MW3 maps inside of it. Now I'm not trying to defend it, but I don't think those are terribly important issues. City Interactive is a budget shooter warehouse of a developer. Their 2008 lineup includes Operation Thunderstorm, SAS: Secure Tomorrow, Battlestrike: Force Of Resistance, Code of Honor 2, Sniper - Art of Victory and The Royal Marines Commando. I've already reviewed SAS and I'll be playing Royal Marines next. The others I'm skipping; the quality is variable.
Operation Thunderstorm started badly. To sum it up in one sentence and punchline, this game would have been good... if it was RELEASED IN THE 1990's! Although as the game progressed (quickly) some of the levels get better than the first couple. But the graphics here aren't great. As crappy as SAS looked with it's 2004 F.E.A.R. engine, this game is actually a little worse, although it's using the same engine. It's cramped, nothing but endless corridors and small winding rooms and at times is quite maze-like, saved only by it's small on-screen map and forward arrow highlight where to go. But ignoring the bad graphics, I actually had a lot of fun in this game. The enemies are all the same, even the two bosses appear to be just normal enemies with a different skin. They go down quick. Once you get a few good guns and start walking around with your scope out, it's a blast. A great, old skool shooter feel with no story, just picking off enemies over and over. You can't expect perfection with a game that's only 2gb installed, and it's over in well under three hours. City Interactive should probably just give this game out for free now as a digital download to garner attention for their future titles, but if you can find a copy to download then it's probably more fun than wasting two hours watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster. It's not really worth any money though. Rating: 4.5/10 I tried hard to get The Precursors, but all online versions seem to be the same infected install that just brings up a black screen and nothing else. Shame, it looked like it had potential. Anyone got the precusors.exe file? That's the one that seems to be infected.
Might have been mentioned already. You all know The Humble Bundle, but there's also Indie Royale, another place for cheap indie game bundles that offers a new pack every fortnight.
No interest in the game but skimmed through this and it seemed vaguely interesting
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/nov/10/modern-warfare-3-internet-hatred The Indie Royale pack and was underwhelmed. The Ben there Dan that series is good if you hadn't played it and night sky is interesting, but the others kind of meh.
That's the problem with looking out for new games all the time, when these bundles come out you've already played their best games ad infinitum. Voxatron by the way lacks a game design. Nice engine. Gaming press realises people don't like to be fed juicy wholesome chuds?
Whinging about something being terrible is a hobby for many repressed internetters though. I'm initially going to review the first five episodes of this game, ignoring the last episode. I'll get to that later. Legendary was a game I was really looking forward to in 2008 from Spark Unlimited. Then reviews came; IGN a 2.5/10, Gamespot 3.5/10, Eurogamer 2/10. The game was completely rubbished and, as such, barely sold. How could this happen when the graphics and monsters all looked so great in the promo material? Clearly, Spark hadn't paid the top review sites enough for positive reviews because this is the single most under-rated game I've ever played. In fact until the final episode I was looking at scoring it at least a 7/10. Same as what I recently scored STALKER, although I enjoyed Legendary much more.
Legendary isn't revolutionary. It's an old skool shooter, with no unique bells and whistles. You do get type of special ability in your arm (named Animus) that you can use anytime to push enemies away or heal yourself. You charge it up by collecting monsters' souls. And it's a great little idea, but not really enough to get brownie points. Spark needed to give upgrades during the game and have this arm do a bit more. Most of the gameplay is spent with two weapons, mostly machine guns that get more powerful through the game and a shotgun. They're both very effective and great to play with - Spark were spot on with the weapons, and there's tonnes of ammo through the game. Probably too much. There aren't a lot of monsters in this game, it really could have done with some more, but all those that are used are good. Werewolves and humans are the most common, with werewolves really fun to fight. There are also Minotaurs and Griffins that look fantastic, but aren't in the game enough times sadly. They do take a lot to take down so perhaps Spark considered them more mini-bosses. But I would have had them in the game a little more often with less health. Their behind the scenes videos of bosses and monsters look amazing, such as Golem, a giant beast as tall as a building completely made up of cars and debris lifted all around you. Or the Kraken, a huge water monster with tentacles sprawling into the sky. And they were both really impressive once you go up against them. IGN complained that the monsters are all random, although they clearly didn't pay any attention to the story because it's all explained. Besides, Painkiller and Serious Sam had completely random enemies and didn't take themselves too seriously. Legendary does take itself a bit more seriously and features quite an interesting storyline. The game begins with Pandora's Box being opened and Griffin's attacking New York. You're on foot running through the debris and chaos as people and cars are lifted all around you. Then the giant Golem appears. It's an absolutely epic beginning to a game, one of the best starts I've played. It felt like your latest cgi-rich blockbuster. After mulling around in the underground of Ney York, which was quite creepy, the third episode takes you to an English Cathedral with an old town built around as you join your team-mates in trying to reach a hidden laboratory. Then you return to the British Headquarters as it's under attack from Griffins and Werewolves, before returning to New York. All the levels look great and you can tell it's the Unreal Engine 3 with it's heavy post processing and dirty colours. I've played much worse looking UE3 based games. 85% of the way through this game and I simply cannot understand why this game got panned. The gameplay is fun, the story is interesting, the graphics and settings all look great. The typical problems of no quicksave exist, but this is a console focused game so typical console-crap is to be expected. It does have mouse movement issues, being very jumpy. So jumpy in fact the game gave me motion sickness a while after I turned it off. But nothing major - it's a simple shooter that does nothing new but provides a fun experience. THEN, you get to episode six and it falls apart. The Kraken boss, right before episode six, I tried so many damn times and was a very frustrating trial and error boss. Cheats are needed. Then right as episode six starts I get constant floods of yellow light and can't see a thing when I use my ability or get struck by a werewolf. I play on with god mode enabled and make damn sure not to get hit by anything. Then the final level has an elevator that you fall through on the PC version. And it's not just a bug some people get - EVERY PC version has this bug. No patch. Game cannot be finished. There is an easy workaround in the config settings, but that's not the point. Clearly Spark didn't bother to do a single playthrough of this game on the PC, and a really simply patch would have fixed it. Overall, I'd probably give the game 7.5 without the final episode bugs. Rating: 7.5 without bugs, otherwise 6.0/10 And a review of The Royal Marines Commando (2008) http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/royal_marines_commando.php
Pretty shit, 4.5/10. Your reviews and website are very professional-looking, but if I was to give one piece of constructive criticism, it would be to increase the size of the font you use for your body text. It's soooo tiny!! I had to (OMG) zoom in! ;)
Then reviews came; IGN a 2.5/10, Gamespot 3.5/10, Eurogamer 2/10
WOW really? I have to go check myself. The game must be unplayable ugly buggy turd from an unknown developer from Poland to score anything below 5. You would think so. I didn't read Gamespot or Eurogamers reviews, but the IGN one just said it was generic and average, did nothing new, but wasn't particularly buggy. So the rating is completely random. The problem with those big sites is 1 person does the review. They need to have multiple opinions because clearly that 1 person shouldn't be playing old skool shooters and reviewing them.
You would think so. I didn't read Gamespot or Eurogamers reviews, but the IGN one just said it was generic and average, did nothing new, but wasn't particularly buggy. So the rating is completely random. The problem with those big sites is 1 person does the review. They need to have multiple opinions because clearly that 1 person shouldn't be playing old skool shooters and reviewing them.
You would think so. I didn't read Gamespot or Eurogamers reviews, but the IGN one just said it was generic and average, did nothing new, but wasn't particularly buggy. So the rating is completely random. The problem with those big sites is 1 person does the review. They need to have multiple opinions because clearly that 1 person shouldn't be playing old skool shooters and reviewing them.
You would think so. I didn't read Gamespot or Eurogamers reviews, but the IGN one just said it was generic and average, did nothing new, but wasn't particularly buggy. So the rating is completely random. The problem with those big sites is 1 person does the review. They need to have multiple opinions because clearly that 1 person shouldn't be playing old skool shooters and reviewing them.
You wouldn't think so. I read the Gamespot and Eurogamers reviews, and the IGN one just said it was awesome and groundbreaking, did everything new, but was completely buggy. So the rating is bang on. The brilliance of those big sites is lots of people do the reviews. They don't need to have solo opinions because clearly that review group should be playing nu-skool shooters and reviewing them.
Starcraft 2 is $30 until November 28th from the Blizzard Store if anyone is interested and doesn't have it.
For anyone interested, I did two more reviews for Secret Service (4.5/10): http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/secret_service.php
and Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty (6.5/10): http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/turning_point.php Am probably gonna play History Civil War and Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway next. Both i'm expecting to suck shit. Shit am I the only one that reads this read?
Reviewed Brother's In Arms: Hell's Highway http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/biahh.php 6.5/10 yeah, for most games, price is the barrier for me, but i haven't gotten skyrim because my productivity will plummet into negative values and i'll probably somehow start undoing things i've accomplished. :P
I recently got my hands on Terraria because it was super cheap on Steam and... well, nuff said. Goodbye productivity.
i bought ubersoldier [the first one] from amazon [$3! free shipping too] and i got it last saturday.
so i installed it on my desktop [win7.64bit] and everything seemed to go ok until i was asked to restart. so i did and then i got a windows system restore screen. which was very strange. so once i did get to windows, the ubersoldier folder was empty! so i installed the game on my netbook [winxp] and again, no issues. restarted and nothing bad happened, but this time i cant activate. i'm asked to put the disc on the drive and activate it online, and after 2 or 3 minutes i get a error screen. i can input a key, but there is no serial key on the manual [the screen says it should be on one of the discs, but nothing]. so i did some deep cleaning on my desktop and my notebook [from any left other drm junk] and now i'm going to download it from whatever site i can if it on. apart from bioshock, this is the worst problem i had with drm. not even games for windows gave me any issues. the bioshock problem was similar, couldn't activate it or verify on the first try, but the second time it worked. i'm not mad i lost $3, btu i'm kinda annoyed now i have to get it the illegal way to play it. all for a cheap game that might end up being crappy & buggy. :) that this is why we should have drm free games! seriously, online activations are the most evil shit ever created by publishers.
Bought the two Crusader titles during the sales on gog.com! I already own them with the collection big box, but this way was less hassle to install them again. And they're fun games aside from the clunky controls.
Also grabbed Descent 1 & 2 from there, first time giving those a spin. Literally. Can get disorientating since I'm not used to that amount of movement. I did get annoyed with Descent 2 though once booting it up, with it's obnoxiously loud metal track suddenly being pierced through my ears while I was on my headset at the time... can't even turn the volume for it down in the settings :/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/12/10/on-the-importance-of-s-t-a-l-k-e-r/
I agree with this so much. I had only discovered STALKER semi-recently, but it is one of the best games I ever played, and it tops all FPS I ever played, too. I especially agree about the cultural observations. Crappy games get made mainly because their designers have no cultural background to draw from, and this is part of the reason why STALKER was so good. It drew from a strong background. yeah, GoG is pretty awesome because they provide all the stuff like dosbox or whatever haxoring is needed to run the game right from the download.
also, i'll probably remember "get out of here, stalker" until the day i die. :P it's really really unfortunate stalker had some many technical issues at launch as well as being constantly pushed back on it's release date. otoh, i'd say this is a good example of game, who's dev team overreached, and managed to make something truly interesting out of it despite the problems. I'm pretty sure you can turn down the volume in the settings. Did you try the faithful new Engine d2x-rebirth?
I actually tried those engines recently and they work like a charm. The music volume wouldn't decrease at all when running through dosbox (gog's setup) but the music is different here compared to what I hear when using the port, perhaps MIDI, which is much nicer. I'm guessing the gog setup uses CD audio? From what I've heard, I honestly don't like it, too obnoxiously loud and heavy for my tastes.
for descent 2, it's preferable as there are only 4 midi songs for the whole game (not counting intro and credits). :(
shame too, cause the midi music is really good. Since you are on a mission to play mediocre or underrated shooters, have you tried Damnation? Its another game that looked interesting in previews, but got completely trashed by the reviews and gamer public.
Ok here's a review of White Gold: War in Paradise (aka Xenus II), which is an open-world action/rpg.
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/xenus_white_gold.php It was pretty good for the first 10 hours, but I got bored after that. 5.5/10. Probably worth playing for those into RPGs. Lightmill: Yep I know the one you mean. It actually looked pretty good in youtube videos. I haven't played it... i'm still working on 2008 games and it's released in 2009. But I'm definitely gonna play it next year sometime. Reviews by the big websites are completely pointless. The major part of their income is ad revenue, so if a game doesn't have adverts with them, then its not in their interest to give it a favourable review.
Peer reviews (like Kona's) are great, and moreover trusted by everyone. It's why viral marketing keeps on coming back - nobody trusts the standard channels. Just reading Masters of Doom, and how shareware came about. Basically faith was placed in the end users, whereas today the only thing a publisher wants to put into an end user is some kind of money tap. I have a copy of The Ball that I can gift on steam, does anyone want it, or maybe even have something to trade for it?
Review for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Shit: Vegas 2
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/rainbow6vegas2.php 6.5/10. Score says it all, it's an average looking game with identical gameplay to the first. http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/precursors.php
The Precursors review. Sci-fi RPG/FPS from 2009. Not as good as White Gold and just ends suddenly. 5/10 I ended up finishing White Gold though, and put the score up to 6.5/10. Quite a cool game. I'm playing History Channel's Civil War now. It sucks. Well that sucked arse. Review of The History Channel: Civil War - Secret Missions
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/civil_war_secret_missions.php 4/10. Enjoyed that one. Nice cyberpunk theme, cool weapons, fast gameplay. But it was a little too short imo. It's good to see that old school shooters still exist in 2011.
In between coding, odd games of Civ 5 and getting nicely drunk I'm currently undertaking a masochistic session of playing any old shooter I can get my hands on. Feel like writing some stuff on all of them but not sure if I can be arsed.
Played so far (in no particular order): > The classic Raven games (apart from heretic 2) > Kingpin > Star Trek: Elite Force > Blood > Redneck Rampage > Strife > Exumed (or Powerslave, lawl) for about three minutes, it's controls are crippled, all you need to know. Still to play: > Chasm > Blood 2 > No One Lives for Ever 1 and 2 > Witchhaven (possibly, not sure if I'll bother) currently playing: After an afternoon of fiddling to get the damn thing to not crash with every level load...... Daikatana :p Please point out any games I haven't mentioned apart from the obvious shit like Wolf or Duke. Although I have played the Duke Carribean add on... ooh yeah. You can also go for AvP Classic, Clive Barker's Undying, RtCW, Serious Sam, Shogo: MAD, SoF I/II and The Wheel of Time.
wheel of time is a great game, though i reached a later level that had no "ammo" and i was stuck without any way to defeat the enemies. the game has [or had, its been too long since i played it] amazing levels. funky scenery and the maps are just fun as hell too. i never cared for the books it was based on, but i loved the game back then.
chasm</bold> is a game i only bought because the demo [first level of the game] had this room at the very start with an open window, and a piece of paper on a table was moving because of the wind! i played a few levels and its a weird mix of wolf3d [how the engine is, in a way. more like rott i guess] and quake [art style]. dont know what else to say about it. these dudes made cryostasis, which i really like. witchaven games are weird. i played the first one and i got stuck on map 11 or map 12 i think. you sometimes get spells to open locked doors, and i used them all and i couldnt find a key to open a certain door to progress. but its not a horrible game, its just boring. the movement, jumping, fighting is weird. but i remember not being able to play more than one level a day or so. the game itself is too boring if you play it for to long, but fun enough if you go at it in small chunks. its been too long since i played this one, so it might just be a horrible game. my brother has both games and he says the second one is better, but i never played it. techwar is another capstone game, and while i never played it, my brother showed me the game a bunch of times and it looked crappy. but some maps had interesting details. it look stupid enough to play it through until it either crashed or it becomes boring. i remember having lots of fun with a game called Last Rites. the gameplay was very doomy. was about some special forces dudes going into a city and killing zombies and stuff. i think the game came out in 1998? i dont have it anymore, but i once tried downloading it and i lost the link, but its out there and if i remember right, its not that bad. its bad, but fun. or maybe just plain bad. http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/last-rites dark forces was fun too. never played the sequels, or have any interest in them [or even star wars], but the first one had some interesting levels. though a lot of times i would be running through the maps finding what to do next. another lucasart game is outlaws. fun game, but if you play it too much it gets boring. nice cutscenes though :) there's also a game called Erradicator, that was first and third person. i believe you could change the view to whatever you want, but i might be wrong. i only played the demo back in 1997, and don't remember much other than it had slopes. and it looked funky. and cybermage! but i never played it. always wanted to try it. looks like a funky 90's fps with a cyberpunk setting. and maybe some rpg stuff? looks like a straight action game in youtube videos. cyclones is a raven game. i have it. never finished it, but it has funky stuff like using keypads with menus to open doors and stuff... i think, its been too long. but i remember the aiming being weird. like you can move the cursor independent from the character's movement. or something weird like that. and if you want to play wolf3d, i say go with spear of destiny. better levels and more insane that the first. that's all i can think of right now. if you can, then play the coop campaigns of NOLF. best coop experience ever.
Before you play too many dull games, lay System Shock 2. It's a sci-fi survival horror RPG/FPS and it is really deep and very moody. It is complex like Deus-Ex but a lot harder. Resources need to be managed well and you need to think about your upgrades. It has a great story and is bizarre. I consider it to be in my top 10 of truly great games. You might want to read the readme to edit a file to disable respawn - I did that.
I gave up on several in your list - still have the original CDs and manuals. Yech. Another FPS I bailed on was Marine Sharpshooter. Another title that was good but hard and I stopped at a rescue mission because it was too hard is Vietcong. I also have the VC expansion called Fist Alpha. Never even loaded it. I've played SS2 multiple times, even managed to get the coop working once which was fantastic. Still one of the best games ever even if it hasn't aged so well graphically.
Yeah I didn't add I've already played through the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games. Undying I'd totally forgotten about, man that game was fun. I know I've got the CD somewhere too! Guh. Shogo I know a friend of mine quite likes, should give that a poke too. @Necros - yeah Strife is cool. Feels a bit like a proto-Deus Ex imo...way before it's time, which is a great shame. It would be a fun game to expand on, adding better stealth elements and evening out the rather dodgy weapon design. Oh and make the maps less confusing :( I think I'm going to end up splitting this lot into 'justly forgotten' and 'should be remembered' lists :p
PS I'm onto the second episode of Daikatana, and I can't stop giggling. This game is like someone wanted to make a 'how not to make a professional FPS' example that's fifty times bigger than it should be. Everything from the weapons to the levels to feel and general design decisions are just so appalling I'm getting quite a lot of fun out of it. It's like a Mystery Science Theater episode in game form. eps 2 and 3 of Daikatana were good werent they?
Another vote for Undying and WoT, both of which I'm pissed about since I ant run them on win7. the bethesda terminator games ruled too. i had massive amounts of fun with the future shock demo and later with the full version as well.
if no one wants to read my wall of text, these are the games i mentioned chasm [only if curious] tekwar [for the lolz?] wheel of time [i say play it] dark forces outlaws [play 1 or 2 levels a day, too much too boring] witchaven [only if curious] cyclones [weird aiming but fun] erradicator cybermage [never played it, but looks funky] last rites [doomy zombies with friendly bots] Seriously, 2,5d shooters era was the best. There are no past-Quake games that are as good as Doom, Blood or Duke as a plain no-bullshit FPS.
Anything of late (and not so late) that claims to be 'old-school' shooter is a primitivised fps with dull flat arenas for levels that looks like a step backwards from Doom of 93. I guess Wolf3d is their standard for old-school. eps 2 and 3 of Daikatana were good werent they
Well so far in ep2 the architecture and scale got more interesting but the actual layouts turned into Hexen 2... so not really. Also so far the only well implemented weapon is the discus, and the monsters are pretty hilarious. For all the talk of quantity of different monsters, Romero seemed to forget that Doom/Quake have a huge degree of variety in attack forms/health/speed. Only reenforces my feeling that it's a good job he didn't get his way with Quake, because if this is the kind of mess we'd have ended up with when his 'design is law' runs riot, holy shit. Okay the iD team might have implemented it with actual bite rather than making everything in the game feel soggy and bland but the overall...urgh. imo iD are very good at making an FPS that *feels* right, much more so than Epic or other devs. Even as much as I dislike Doom 3, it still feels solid and weighty. Rage was the same. It's quite remarkable how crisp and solid Quake feels compared to other shooters of the time, and other than the graphics is the main reason I think the game was so great, and has aged so well. The only game in this huge group that I actually kept going back into to replay is Blood. Very flawed game but also really great fun. Much better than Duke 3D :) i'm sure i've romanticized this a bit, but i've always felt the early iD team was as good as they were because of the conflict between carmack's focused and methodical personality and romero's nearly random and crazy ideas.
but maybe it was in spite of that. :P everyone's bushing the blood 2 ? saying its kinda shitty and all that jizm , but i found its pretty spectacular .
Was fun at first but it got too repetitious and predictable after awhile. It did have its moments though.
Glados is the facility, it wouldn't have been Portal without her, but thats where the "2" comes in.
It feels like they copped out. Anything around post-2003 isn't really old skool, imo. If it looks and feels old skool, then it's just a bit shit.
Undying just gets in there. It's long and unique, has a story... it's a game i'll still remember in 30 years time. Definitely must-play. Blood I played through maybe 1/4 of it and decided it was shit and deleted it forever. WOT is a good looking game... though I think it went a bit down in quality in the second half Daikatana was bad enough after a few levels - that got deleted. Gunman Chronicles I liked... it was a Halflife mod but released as a full standalone game. Definitely play SOF1/2, NOLF1/2 and RTCW - they're all classics. There's also FAKK2, Alice, Rune if you want include third person. Speaking of 3rd person action btw, remember that melee action\hack&slash game Blade of Darkness with awfully bland environments and pretty cool fighting system and hardcore difficulty? Probably not, because it wasn't any successful...
Now PS3 hit Dark\Demos Souls is pretty much a remake of it, it even inherited dull looks of the original ;) Who doesn't remember Blade Of Darkness?? Fairly good summary, the fighting system was great even though it was bloody hard. Good lighting compensated for the average environments. I liked it a lot once I got used to it.
Have to pop in here...gotta agree on the awesomeness of 2.5d shooters
Coming back on the mention of Cybermage : played it ages ago - controls are a little funky, disregard the first sewer level. But once your used to the controls and past the first level your in for a good time. Its a comic book adaptation with the author involved in the game creation. Blood, all time favorite, there are still some very good levels/episodes being released. Kona... "Blood I played through maybe 1/4 of it and decided it was shit and deleted it forever.
*flame*flame*flame* You did not decide it was "shit", you didn't like it, the game sure is not "shit"! It shits all over you rather. Yeah, there :P On another note, anyone else grab Section8:prejudice in the steam sale ?
I am surprised this game got so little attention post release...gfwl maybe, but its a pretty good tribes/quake wars hybrid thingy, beats the pants off BF3 for me. True, the worst being the build engine mouse control, bmouse.exe helps a bit but yeah...whatever happened to transfusion ?
I just discovered it: looks like a nice puzzle game..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iABxhj0ExA0#! Review of Turok (2008)
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/turok.php I really enjoyed it! 8/10. "Everything seems murky and drab, with fog drenched over everything." God yeah the Turok series has always had a thing, nay, a fetish with fog :P In fairness for performance reasons but now it probably just has to be there to "be" Turok.
This will be a fairly short review of the past two hours that I just wasted playing Serious Sam 3.
Take everything that was good about Serious Sam, throw it away and release. That's how Serious Sam 3 was made. When the most fun thing about your game is the sound the protagonist makes when pulling the head of a common spider enemy then you know you are doing something wrong. When your players spend more time wandering around and getting lost in your maze-like levels than they do fighting enemies, then you know that you probably need to making a few changes here and there. We kept thinking it was going to get better, but it didn't. Maybe it does 3 hours in? 4 hours in? Not worth any more of my time to find out. And since when was Serious Sam about story? Why the fuck are there cutscenes? Shit. Yeah the start is really meh, it does get better 3 or 4 hours in actually, but even then it's still not as good as the previous entries. :(
Haven't finished it, but there were a few pretty cool fights. All the dust smoke that appears when you shoot at stuff is annoying cause it blocks the view so much. Also the new enemies soldiers with hitscan weapons suck, especially considering they aren't brightly colored like the other monsters so they blend into the environment and are hard to spot. Thanks for posting that review of cybermage, it looks really crazy from those screenshot. Also, that cyberpunkreview.com site is pretty intense :) I've got some film recommendations from them that look exciting (Ghost in the Shell)
you are in for a treat! I can also recommend Patlabor. akira is way to fucked up and weird for my taste.
They got a shitload of criticism and arguments all the way through the dev process and after the release, compared to which the negative reactions to RMQ seem mild. But, indeed, there are quite a few similarities between the two. And naturally, in Doom there are strong "newschool" and "oldschool" factions which clash when it comes to the question of what the game can be vs. what it should be.
I enjoyed KDIZD, but I can see where the critics are coming from. The levels are indeed often a little over-reinterpreted and -expanded, and the large number of new monsters as well as the unnecessarily high difficulty can easily put players off. Yeah, the mod has some serious skill balancing issues, because the guy who finished the levels gameplay-wise is a hardcore player who didn't put enough consideration on properly implementing difficulty settings. There are indeed several occasions where you need to find all six keys to proceed or exit the level.
Not entirely sure but I think the rights might be stuck in limbo after the publisher went bankrupt during development of the sequel.
Didn't know that any info was released but apparently this piece of concept art was: http://www.gamespot.com/enclave-ii/images/227770/ http://www.johnliberto.com/
I did all of Enclave by myself! Gameplay perfectly matches the visuals. Mad satisfying weapon impacts on the bad dudes.
Love the textures and the general colour scheme, and they nailed the retro-doom-neon style, very coherent, in a crazy sort of way. There's some good money to be made with this I reckon. anyone played? It looks so good, but I'm not even an RPG guy, and almost borderline-casual, so I'm worried it will just be too much for me.
@Drew, I played non stop for 2 months before Christmas. It is the only game I have destroyed a PS3 controller out of frustration because of how the game treats you. If you can imagine every possible cheap, retro game trick imaginable, the game has them all and then even more! Every level is harder than the last, there is no easy part.
It is a game that punishes the player for being in the wrong place, taking on too many mobs and not playing carefully. (running through the levels are bad). It also has a lot of permanent consequences to your actions which can truly fuck with your save game, which you only have 1 per character. Once you treat every encounter with caution, then the game is easier to understand. All mobs have set patterns, it is just a matter of time to learn them all and exploit their weaknesses. The environment is equally as dangerous as the mobs, plenty of places to fall and die and plenty of invisible stuff (you need to discover the pain yourself) Some boss fights are horrible one shot mechanics, that if you are in the wrong place, you die. Most bosses have a trick and some even have defined waves and patterns. My personal favourite was the spider boss but the variety and style is amazing and you even get AI help on most of them (if you want, your choice) The RPG elements are really strong with the usual overdoes of stats, levels and even special guilds you can join. There is also the chance that some idiot will invade your game and try to kill you while you are fighting mobs (totally sucks but some people love it). You can also get people to help you with bosses which is awesome. (co-op at its best) I have completed the game twice and eventually stopped on my third play through once I got all the weapons and items. There is a really cool crafting system that exists but I highly recommend you check out the wiki because mistakes in crafting can cost you dearly. Even thou it has so many negative components it really shines on its combat depth and richness of its environments. It is not a game for the fainthearted and extremely frustrating to play without the help of the wiki. thanks for that in-depth response! Definitely giving me a push to get this apparently amazing/horrible game!
thanks for that in-depth response! Definitely giving me a push to get this apparently amazing/horrible game!
thanks for that in-depth response! Definitely giving me a push to avoid it like the fucking plague. Sounds awful.
I should add that Dark\Demon Souls games are only for the people who absolutely love repetition and replaying same parts for n-th time.
I'm quite surprised our most-casual-quaker Sock loves them :) Not sure why you'd want a PC port, the game doesn't need mouse or better resolution and there wouldn't be mod tools for it either. Long review for a long game: Saints Row 2 from 2008
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/saints_row2.php 6.5/10. Fun but a bit ugly. PC petition : http://kotaku.com/5875833/the-dark-souls-pc-petition-has-namco-bandais-attention
Dark Souls can certainly have repetition if you die a lot because death can screw with your progress badly. In fact the previous title "Demons Souls' was worse! It did not have checkpoint (bonfires) and if you died you came back with half health! The game is about using the death mechanic to make you understand your actions better, living with the consequences of what you do in game, about planning your strategies better and probably the number one reason the rush of beating the odds and being triumphant over hordes of enemies without dying! The game hits all the right buttons for me, medieval environment, melee weapons, magic system, deep combat mechanics, RPG elements, crafting system and very clever level design. A friend from work recommended the previous game to me and I was hooked on Demons Souls for a long time (200+ hrs) and have probably spent the same amount of time in Dark Souls as well. I even added a ton of stuff to the latest game wiki because I wanted to pay back for all the help it gave me in the past. I would highly recommend anyone who likes a challenge to try the game, just don't expect it to be forgiving or give you an easy time. It has hard rules to learn and probably some of the best boss fights. There are certainly dark sides to the game and most of it centers around the multiplayer aspects. Let me tell you a funny story Me and a couple of friends got together one evening to fight a boss in Demons Souls. It was the Tower Knight which is very tough to solo as a melee class. (I have solo'd the boss once but it was a bitch of a fight) If you are interested - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyOa9_jNnEw) You also have to fight past a tons of enemies just to get to the boss without dying! Co-op works like if the host of the game dies, everyone dies and the host has to be in human form which means other players can invade your co-op game! We were about half way through the pre-boss mob fights when we got invaded. Some guy shows up in crazy crafted gear and a special spear. Surprise, surprise he kills us all really easily. We were just learning the game and had not done very much crafting or collecting of items at this point so it was really one sided. The kicker was we lost all our souls (game money) and could not even repair our gear! Need souls to repair stuff. Our gear was broken because the invader had a specially crafted spear that degrades all items gradually to zero per hit. Our co-op fun ended quickly that night and we had to go back to earlier parts of the game to collect resources. Eventually we got past the boss and carried on, but it highlights how much punishment death can mean in the game. with the source port out, has a port or maybe a patch been made to run it on widescreen or something? i believe there was a config file mama one could do, but i'm lazy. LAZY!
i thought i asked here, did some google search and i got stuff about the original dooms instead. i did something like this a year or two ago, maybe from the same website
http://www.widescreengaming.net/wiki/Doom_3 but the problem i had was that the game would reset itself everytime i started it. so i was hoping someone had already made a patch to just have it normal. the problem is that my desktop monitor always stretches non-widescreen stuff, and i have to change that manually with the montiro's menu settings, its not something i can do by going to the graphic cards settings. its crap like that. just thought someone here might have known though. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOOOAN9e9w
According to this trailer, they are taking their time with this one :) Which is prob a good thing... Frontlines: Fuel of War review
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/frontlines_fuel_of_war.php A yawnable and done-to-death already kind of game, how many times in games do I have to invade some middle eastern shithole? 6.5/10. Might review Rise of the Argonauts next, something different. And Tomb Raider Underworld review
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/tomb_raider_underworld.php 7.5/10 http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/4325959/Systems_Changes-1_19_2012#blog
very interesting post on changes in diablo 3. oh if only that game was not drmd to such disgusting levels. remember how you could "spawn" install diablo 1? So there is a hawken closed beta, you can sign up for it at http://playhawken.com. It looks like I need to get three people to sign up so they will 'reserve my callsign.' Use this link if you want to sign up please.
Reviewed Rise of the Argonauts (2008)
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/rise_of_the_argonauts.php 5.5/10. Could have been good but they fudged the PC port. Nice little story and design. Cube World looks fun http://wollay.blogspot.com/
if you were interested in this but didn't want to shell out the cash (ie, like me) then this video of the game is probably what you are after. 45 minutes long, no annoying commentary etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUgaWnIYKq8 Fuck me, its beautiful. A very beautiful experience for sure, but I wish they would have done something different with the huge blobs of text! Maybe smaller blocks, fading between sections, some thought on how to present the text on the screen so it feels more gradual. Besides the subtitle nitpick the journey is amazing and I loved the use of the strong saturated lighting in the caves, gorgeous!
i remember playing this for free? it didn't have all those high-res textures though, but it was still very cool.
the youtube video isn't a full appreciation of the mod either as the story kind of changes a bit depending on what you do in the map, iirc. That leaked Doom 4 stuff: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?cloebtyeq4u34ud (the 4 music tracks from earlier)
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?wjsy8ixf6lvwm2b (176 images) Does not look like classic Doom at all but another game with NPCs and all that crap. RemakeDoom? Man, I love id but I think they're done. They stopped evolving around Quake2 and it's just getting dismal now. I hope that's not Doom4. I hope.
To be clear, programming and tech wise they are still on top of their game. Carmack is the man.
Design wise, they're a burned out husk. A destroyed, demon-invaded Earth seems better than a dreary space base, but what I really want is a vast, otherworldly gothic hellscape. If Doom 4 doesn't spend a significant amount of time in "proper" hell, I will be annoyed. And I hope the new vision of Hell is better than that silly mess of randomly stacked bricks we got in Doom 3.
@Willem, if ID are a burnt out husk for design, who nowadays is evolving?
This question is also for everyone, who are the design masters? Which companies are doing new stuff with FPS design that is evolving? Who are creating 'must-play' FPS games? if ID are a burnt out husk for design, who nowadays is evolving?
Well, in the world of shooters, Valve tends to innovate in some significant way with each new game of theirs (not counting sequels). That's about it, off the top of my head. That's not to say other companies aren't also making awesome shooters, but I've never played one outside of a valve game that's made me say "wow, that's an important step for the genre!" I did not mean this question as a flame war/troll thing, it was a genuine question to everyone. I have seen two people in the last couple of weeks refer to ID as 'lost' on design, but they did not say why?
I think the hardest part of any shooter nowadays is pacing, trying to vary what people do and how they interact with the story and environment. I do agree that Valve are amazing for this reason. I think it is because they want to tell a story with their game, it is not about the tech. I did not mean this question as a flame war/troll thing
That's cool, I know you didn't - I was just implying that my reply might have been a bit trolly, with my seeming disregard for anything non-valve. Tbh, I think publishers carry a lot of the blame because CoD is so irritatingly successful that "make it like CoD" seems to be something of a mantra amongst the suits, stifling a lot of potential innovation in a straitjacket of boring Coddiness. I should probably play Rage at some point - though judging by Willem's comment, I assume it's pretty underwhelming?
It's weird. The shooting sections are, naturally, awesome. The bits in between are a little lacking. The vehicular combat is good. The game just lacks loads of RPG stuff. The LD is visually amazing, and the gameplay is tight. But it doesn't give you the 'OMG THIS IS COOL' effect, only the visuals.
Definitely worth playing though. As for id's design going downhill, well I disagree. I mean trying to think of the last years best games: Skyrim BFBC2 and BF3 Both titles don't really bring anything new either. The Authority.
The Resistance. The Wasteland. I rest my case in the chest cavity of this burnt out husk. Well, if you were in a post apocalyptic wasteland, would you call the authority
games are still too young, and growth from tech is still insanely fast.
if ever the point is reached where there are no more meaningful improvements in graphics, than maybe the industry can finally settle down and get back to making games. the graphical quality of AAA titles needs to be attainable at low cost in order for gameplay quality to go up. right now, it just costs too much to make a AAA game such that no one (beyond the designers i guess) is willing to make anything interesting. it's the same kind of thing with why we keep getting film reboots-- the investor dudes would rather put their money on a film when they can see how the original did than on some completely unknown quantity. ie: "Make it like CoD". What's the gameplay like? To be honest, the evil faction in a game could be called "Alan Titchmarsh's Band of Merry Haberdashers" and I wouldn't give two hoots if the game was otherwise good.
The main problem I had with Rage was that the environments were so static, there is essentially zero interaction with the environment barring the odd door or two.
While the visuals are seriously impressive, the interaction is seriously antiquated, Half-Life 2 laughs and takes a sly piss on Rage in this regard, and it hurts the game imo. As a straight up shooter, Rage is great! Controls are slick and responsive and the combat is meaty and satisfying. The engineering stuff was a nice quirk and for the most part is very useful. If I carry on with the half-life 2 comparison, the Authority is basicly the Combine but less cool and nefarious. The lack of engaging story also hurts here also, I just wanted to fight more dudes and when a cutscene or driving section happened I just wanted it to end :) has some really nice shooter elements in super static environments, with fun weapons and ammo types that actually are fun to fiddle with, generally.
Racing is meh - super easy, except for the derby type shit, which is sort of a pain/randomish it seemed to me. Story is as blah as explained above. Not that it matters. carrying the HL2 comparison further, Authority HQ is like the end of HL2 but even more of a letdown. Definitely worth it, but I'd have preferred an undiluted, concise, derivative shooter - something it could have been. have to agree now that I think of it with Daz - the HL2 driving is so much better and immersive despite being much older tech etc. Another thing that got my goat was how often you'd warp from place to place. the sense of continuity - of sheer unmediated embodiment - which HL2 achieves is not present here. along with the not fully formed, fractured story and not fully formed, fractured gameplay modes this not fully formed, fractured sense of embodying a character lets the game down. play this instead http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=16551 A lot of generic dross in there but the actual proper in-game shots look cool. Looks very much like Doom3 meets RAGE meets a bit of HL2. Semi-apocalpytic Earth under seige from Doom demons?? Sounds ace to me :)
For some reason I was under the impression they would make game with more oldschool gameplay. However, this would probably require or benefit from a more comicy style of enemies, which in turn would need more comicy environments, unlike the 'realistic' high quality stuff in the shots.
Probably best not to expect too much. Rage was fun, but it wasn't really that much fun to make me want another game in that style. I really liked it. Controls were good, gameplay was fun, graphics were excellent as was the atmosphere in many places. I'd happily have more RAGE....if it included Doom monsters ;)
"What's the gameplay like? To be honest, the evil faction in a game could be called "Alan Titchmarsh's Band of Merry Haberdashers" and I wouldn't give two hoots if the game was otherwise good."
Yeah, it's sort of a top down problem. If they can't even be bothered to come up with decent names for factions, what are the chances the rest of the game is good? Think it over. Just like RemakeQuake, the name is as irrelevant as the views of people who take the names too seriously.
Fast movement speed and dodging projectiles as opposed to cover-based hitscan combat.
The leaked stuff clearly shows a push for a rather realistic style, with the characters properly proportioned and wisely steering well clear of the silly big-boots-and-tiny-heads space marines cliche.
What this means for the demons though, I have no idea. I have to admit i kinda hated the cheesy cyborg components on monsters in doom 3 (it didn't matter in classic doom because the suspenson of disbelief was so much higher). I can only assume the idea was that the demons had somehow possessed and "demonised" UAC technology to explain these cyborg bits. If the demons do use or are combined with some sort of machinery/technology, I hope it's of an eldritch style that looks like it was forged in the fires of Hell, and not just like some bloody plasma gun fresh off a Mixom production line. Projecting the Doom 3 idea to the "current-day-ish" tone implied in the shots, I guess the equivalent would be seeing an Imp strutting about with an AK47, at which point I think I'll nod sagely, turn the xbox off, put the disc back in its box, and go outside or something. To be honest I have no idea what point I am trying to make with this post. It's quite the turd really, as posts go. U played them? MP that is. Fucking fun games.
A little. I appreciate that "best game" is subjective. Personally I wouldn't put a battlefield game in the top ten of a list of new releases I'd play in a given month*, let alone a year. * I should mention that I only play at most one, possibly two new games a month. Is Danny Trejo a character in Doom4, or are they just modelling one of the characters off of him. Can't be a coincidence to look that similar.
I'm a bit disappointed. Lighting looks like shit, but maybe it's not lit properly yet. But why in the blue hell does id think we need another earth city under attack game? We have millions of them already. I do hope at least a good portion of the game is in hell or something similar or gothicy. Enough with the post-apocalyptic stuff, id just fkn did it with Rage. Maybe they're re-using tonnes of assets? If it speeds up the long development cycle Rage took, then that'll be fine. about the post-apocalyptic stuff in general. Too many of these city ruin/wasteland/shanty themes lately, I've personally got sick of seeing them since they get visually stale after a while, seeing rubble here, rubble there, broken building here, more rubble here. Been avoiding such games for a while.
Rage seemed like it suffered from design-by-committee. "The Authority" is a name everyone can agree on. It sucks, but it gets the job done. You say: come up with a better name? Well the point is that something more unique isn't going to make you go "WOW what a great name", but something with character means at least someone is directing the ship. At least someone who has a say in the matter might have a strong opinion or vision in how the game should be.
I'm generalising of course. Holden Caulfield could have been called Jack Strongfists and Catcher in the Rye could probably have survived it. Rage however has an overall sense of blandness that makes "The Authority" seem symptomatic of a bigger problem. Perhaps it's a criticism of Tim Willits as creative director. To be honest, I never thought of id as creative geniuses, they were just in love with games. In Doom and Quake, you can see them taking chances, doing what excited them. So they liked listening to metal, playing D&D, watching Aliens films, reading Lovecraft? It's all in there. Like playing pranks? "Well now you have to defeat me, John Romero!" Maybe it's that Tim Willits is just a sensible guy. Rock solid level designer, but never with the ability to go full wildcard (and sometimes full retard) as did Romero or Tom Hall. Maybe its that they used to be young guns full of passion and now they're middle aged men who have to worry about market penetration and 9 figure development costs. Great. Now I've made myself sad. Agree with most of that.
There's a pretty good paralell here though - The Authority Vs The Combine. A ton of thought goes into Valve's games as Kinn says, and its this love of their craft that is making them money hand over fist. The mark of a good game is when you can tell the developers had fun making it. Maybe its that they used to be young guns full of passion and now they're middle aged men who have to worry about market penetration and 9 figure development costs.
Those images have nothing to do with what you're gonna see in Doom4. When we officially show things you'll see awesome
Reviewed Quantum of Solace (2008)http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/quantum_of_solace.php
6.5/10 typical average-ness. Next. I thought they were going to release downloadable content for the game. Or was that just the boring sewer monsters thingy ?
Good post, Starbuck #5599. "Maybe They Know Names Don't Actually Matter Much."
It's indicative of the care and skill of the designers. If they can't (or won't) come up with creative names for the factions in their games, how deeply thought out is the rest of it? It's one of the tools you can use to measure how much the designers actually cared. Gears has the Locust. Half-Life has the Combine. Good names help to cement your world and get the player to buy into it. You can't argue that id didn't try because every dev video they released had at least 2 people telling the camera how awesome the story was and how deep the world went. They cared. They just couldn't do it. For the reasons Willem states.
Why bother thinking up cool enemies or balancing them properly if you can't be bothered to name them. Naming things gives them a narrative. Without that they're cardboard cutouts. I'd say the individually they definitely could do it, but as a corporate entity they couldn't. Seems to sumup what everyone thinks of id nowadays. Meaning what, Spirit? You point is either that the names were bad then too (which I don't agree with) or that a 15+ year old game is a good benchmark of how a modern game should behave (which I also don't agree with).
Or something else? I'm going to suggest that coming up with interesting/evocative/unique names for things in a video game is not rocket science. I'm sure a QA intern could generate a page full of names more interesting than "The Authority" if they were asked.
So what's my point? My point is that if you've got the nouse to bang out a half-decent game (which id have) then I'm pretty sure they're capable of coming up with a semi-interesting name for a baddie if they wanted to. Ergo, the assumption that the blandness of the names somehow reflects upon the quality of the gameplay design, is a flawed one. There must be some deliberate reason for the bland names. Perhaps a nod to a sort of schlocky good guy/bad guy Wild West sort of vibe? Where keeping labels simple is part of the charm? Why call someone "The Bollock Mulcher" when you can call him "Bob" and let his bollock-mulching actions speak for him? Convened the 'naming of things and places' meeting.
This is comitee design at its worst - I bet the design team had tons of backstory, names and so on that was never approved. It was left effectively blank because production don't care about story (in an FPS at least), they care about milestones. It'd be nice / generous to believe it was a sly poke at video games conventions, but given the context of the game... nah. Spirit, try and think before posting your retarded flamebait. Are you suggesting that Quake and Doom weren't evocative narratives? I don't mean text printed on a screen (even though they had that as well) but interesting stories, starting with the names. As simple as some of it was, I don't think anyone on this board didn't have their imagination captured by what was presented in Q1 at the very least. I don't know, maybe I am too detached from how the industry works. But I do not see how the story/setting relates too much to the gameplay.
ijed: I was suggesting that id games are not necessarily too focused on the story or names. On the other hand Doom 3 and Quake 4 their last games so I might have been a bit blind. I absolutely agree that Rage was hurt by the bad narrative. But there are many games where the gameplay is shit but the story nice and vice-versa so I think any "if that one aspect was terrible then you can see how the rest must be shit" is just wrong. "I don't know, maybe I am too detached from how the industry works. But I do not see how the story/setting relates too much to the gameplay."
Immersion in the game world? That directly affects my enjoyment of a game. Rage doesn't draw me in because I'm confronted with "The Authority" and "The Resistance", and I'm immediately reminded that, "Oh, right, nobody gave a shit about the world". You guys should get this game, it's great and it doesn't have any stupid names in it!
Awesome little puzzle-platformer, one of the best I've played in a while. Guess I should link to the game...
http://store.steampowered.com/app/205690/ All this chat reminded me of this semi-controversial Gamasutra interview with Todd H. and Andy Chang, titled "Creative Intent"
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6500/the_creative_intent_of_rage.php Controversial because many people thought the interviewer was being rude and asking questions he shouldn't. Obviously that's bollocks and the interview is really quite tame. At least he holds the guys lightly to some of the shit they say, and tries to find out if there was any thought behind their creative decisions. Re: the world: no, it doesn't look like they really thought about that. In fact, while i think they answered the broader gameplay questions okay, Todd and Andy didn't really represent a game with a real artistic direction or intent. It's apocalyptic because the tech can do it. It's orange because pop culture / why not. The bandits make sculptures and art because I don't know. These baddies have a British accent because gosh that's cool. Because I feel bad about sounding so negative, just it's a shame because there's some really awesome creative work in the game, for example some of the character designs are fantastic imo. Clearly there were people working on Rage who were passionate and hold degrees in kicking ass, but overall the end result didn't reflect that.
It sounds like I'm advocating RPG features in all games, or dialog trees or whatever - not at all.
All devs care about their work, even when in a company that doesn't, and there's always a ton of backstories and thought that goes into each game, just almost none of it that those in charge want to let out of the door. As the big companies turn their focus from AAA to smaller games, episodic content and so on it'd be nice if the creative stranglehold was loosened a bit as well. Telling the story through the game is what I was driving at before - immersion.
'Collect 10 goblin pelts' tells me a story about dev laziness / managerial dictatorship, not the world. Just playing through Bioshock for the first time now, and the theme is precise and well conceived. Everything in the world feels like it belongs there. "Dead City in RAGE was more immersive than anything in any previous ID game."
Dead City was definitely cool! It also has a proper name and was built up as a scary place in the game before you went. Immersion doesn't just happen, people. :) City 17! Gordon! Dog! With names so bland, it's obvious that Valve didn't give a shit about Half Life 2!
Never mind. I forgot how obstinate this board can be. Fuck.
I apologize for questioning the almighty id. Gordon!
It's definitely a lot less bland than, say, Jack, though. When I see that name pop up too often as the main protagonist's name in games (or even film), I just feel sad that they couldn't just flip through a baby name book or do a simple google search to find a more interesting alternative. Whether you were kidding or serious, it's still something I just had to mention regarding this subject...
I take your point about the realism/immersion factor being a little lacking because of lame ass naming of stuff. And the incoherency of the travel element.
But (IMO) the environments and AI were great! I just mean that the 'shooting sections' seemed fast and fun to play. The guns felt good. "Indeed. You fit in well here."
Right. Look, I see now in hindsight that arguing this sort of thing on a message board filled with people who love and adore a 16 year old shooter was probably a mistake. In that design context, yes, names and world cohesion and that sort of thing are basically irrelevant. I get that now, sorry. Ricky's post sums it up. World was pretty and guns felt good. That's the benchmark, OK. But the thing is, on the other hand, if you intend on finding alledged immersion-breakers such as names and start looking around, you can find them everywhere in one way or another.
You do have a point - but it doesn't exclude the possibility that other people may be well immersed regardless of such things, maybe even appreciate the simple, to-the-point hooks that such stereotype names suggest. From a personal viewpoint, I enjoyed Rage about as much as I enjoyed Duke Nukem Forever.
Spent 15-20 hours on them roughly. Skyrim - 130hrs Battlefeild Bad Company 2 - 200hrs or something. Left 4 Dead - 150hrs maybe. UT3 - played that quite a lot too I guess. GOW (1) - must have spent 60 or 70 hours on that on the 360 when it came out. But yeah - world was pretty and guns felt good, like Quake (very incoherent immersion but great graphics and gameplay), and Doom (for it's time) - great graphics and gameplay, but not much of a backstory either. Not to say that the fact that the stories were lacking is a good thing, it isn't, but did I enjoy them - YES! Metro 2033 is another example. It had all three factors - great graphics, good gameplay and a very cohesive and immersive backstory/theme. But did I play it loads? NO! not really. I dunno, it just seemed a little stressful and dingy. I fully agree with you about Rage on most levels. TBH the English wasteland punk enemies from Rage were just downright terrible! Fake English accents yelling 'Wankahh!' at me all the time. Felt good to shoot the annoying little bastards in the face, just to shut them up. But the visuals in Rage were great. Just not when you were up-close. Then they looked pixelated. I hope Doom 4 is better. From the look of some of those leaked screenshots, it possibly could be. But hopefully they wont fill the game with annoying cockney enemies that yell 'Wankahh!' all the time. I'd rather go and play dynamic, squad based games of the uber-pretty BFBC2. Now that is fun. And immersive. And the backstory kinda sucks (WWIII - ruskies v yanks). But it's really fun. Yeah, it's sort of a top down problem. If they can't even be bothered to come up with decent names for factions, what are the chances the rest of the game is good? Think it over.
I take issue with the logic that 'bland names = designers don't care.' That's just shitty logic. Feel however you want about Rage, I don't think anyone here gives a shit about that, but that kind of thinking just doesn't make sense. The names may not be interesting (perhaps they were interesting to id) but imo they fit the wasteland extremely well. They are short, to the point, and they accurately describe the faction in question. Sure, that may be less interesting, but it better fits in with a wasteland scenario. When someone says 'the Authority' you can get a pretty good idea right away about who they are - that kind of thing fits in well in a place where danger is around every corner. So if the names are uninteresting, fine, I'm not arguing that, I'm arguing against your terrible, terrible logic. Reviewed Call of Duty 4. Pretty cool game, but a bit overrated with all the "game of the year" awards. Crysis was better.
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/call_of_duty4_modern_warfare.php 8.5/10 Shrek racing game, our speed boost pickup was called ROCKET PANTS.
The publisher took it upon themselves to rename it to "fairy dust". Know where the awesome is there.
But hey, the industry got rid of distributors quite efficiently, it shouldn't take long to bin the large publishing firms that cause this committee design shite. The indy and garage developers are taking a non-marginal slice of the pie, and growing, as quickly as the big boys are laying off 00's of staff. I've just finished this.
What a bad game. I can not remember ever having played a game in which I did not die once. Well, I did one time when I went too far from the objective. The game decided to kill me, out of the blue. I actually tried it again and got killed the same way. All the fights are more or less the same. Get behind something and shoot at the bad guys from behind there. There is absolutely no need to upgrade your weapons, the normal pistol could get you true the whole game. At one time I was supposed to activate 2, ehm, things in the map. There were lots of enemies around. I just ignored them and pushed the buttons and that triggered a cutscene. If you look at the game stripped to the core basics, you are left with mostly random shooting bits in very very simple made maps. The maps look nice (decent anyway...), but you can only walk as far as the invisible walls allow you to. The playable part of the maps are so bad that they wouldn't even be rated on Quaddicted. Often it's just hallways surrounded by inaccessible map areas. The sidemissions are the dumbest thing I've ever seen in games. You walk in the Citadel and overhear people talking about stuff they want. That stuff you can get from doing planet scanning, a part of the game most doable after smoking some cannabis sativa. If you already did all the planet scanning thing, you don't have to search for anything anymore and just collect your reward from the people with the red squares around there head. And then there is the interaction part. Maybe it's got something to do with my being Dutch and not having a degree in English, but it looks very much open to interpretation. I can't recall a specific moment in 3, but I've got one from 2: At one point an alien spoke to me about a spider queen I released in the 1st game. One of the options was to say: "Tell her to be good". I choose that one. I thought it was a nice thing to say but my character made it into a warning ! And then there is the love aspect in the game. I chose to save the games being a faithful and a not cheating partner to the blue girl. Sure, she was nice to me for the pre-endgame battle, but before that she used to greet me by saying "Shepard", or "Nice to see you". That's fucking love for you And then there is the ending. It is so mindbogglingly stupid that I regret not only playing part 3, but the whole series. But the point I'm trying to make is this: The game gets stupidly great reviews from almost all the gaming media. One of the best games ever, they dare say. The reviews I've seen on the internet say more about the state of our planet then about Mass Effect's, I'm afraid My score, for what it's worth 04/10 Got very bored very quickly, and never played it again. But the character you play in the game is annoying, the shooting is *ahem* CRAP, and the LD is frustrating.
So yeah - nice to see an honest review of the game, from someone who shares my opinion of it:) Most people rave about the series - I wasn't impressed either.
Weak gameplay that's disconnected from any sense of purpose. I suppose if I didn't know how to read then the story (ie. cutscenes) would have been interesting. One of the few games I'll never finish. I mean 'honest' as in the reviewer was being honest when he wrote the review.
As opposed to writing a good review because that is what he was paid to do. You know, so that the game sells, all of those people who we're thinking of buying the game read a 'good' review of the game, then they go and buy a copy. I can't comment on the true validity of the review because I have never played Mass Effect 3, and I probably never will. I love the first two Mass Effect games. Not for gameplay, but for overall ambience. They did a really good job of making it feel like a scifi universe.
But making gameplay 'fun' has never been what Bioware was about, they were about a big game with lots of story. They are crap at balancing games, they suck at AI, and they tend not to innovate or 'fix' their problems. Even as far back as Kotor, the gameplay wasn't exactly fun, but very generic and tedious. They can't balance games worth crap either, they tend to be either very difficult or very easy, rarely does it feel like a good challenge. As much as I would like to, I probably won't get Mass Effect 3. :( :( :( That was the odd thing for me - you'd think making the interactive part worthwhile would have been the focus.
I was introduced to Bioware on ME1 - I'll probably avoid their other games on general principals. Seems like they do the types of games I don't like to play. Not any particular genre though - I quite like RPGs. I really can't understand the crazy backlash that is going on with fans of Mass Effect. It was never about combat, shooting, scanning or squad tactics. The game was all about story and immersion in the game universe. Why would anyone expect the game play to be ground breaking? Last time I checked, the encounter design was box rooms with cover and dumb AI. You run in, shoot, take cover and eventually kill stuff.
I always thought of ME as something that is trying to push the envelope on story. It wants to make the player care about what they say and do (storywise and some actions). With the introduction of the ship crew emotional involvement I assumed players wanted a space opera. The fan review reaction to ME reminds me of someone reading a book and then getting upset because the book has no pictures and it should do, because all books have pictures nowadays! ;) I'm not a fan of Bioware-flavored "RPGs", and this one confirms it once again. Too linear and restricted, tedious combat, and I'm not overly impressed with the levels so far. Of course, this is only the first impression after some three hours, maybe it's getting better later on, but I doubt I'm going to play much further. Bioware seems to be a love or hate thing - if you enjoy one game, you'll probably like the others, too; if not, don't bother.
Can't say much about the story, I'm not super excited about it. Is it possible that the stories and twists in each game are quite similar? I agree about the dialogue options - I hate it when games give you some option and then lets the character say something totally different. Sock: More like this: a book that's said to be an excellent piece of fine literature which then has silly pictures in it, and people getting upset about it are being told to ignore them (and that it's their own fault they aren't enjoying it if they can't or won't just ignore them). I don't think anyone expects the gameplay to be ground breaking, just good, which it isn't. It copies Gears of War (which imho had boring shooter mechanics at best) and slaps an RPG-lite leveling system onto it. Now, that's all fine and dandy, but they could've done a better job balancing gameplay or making the combat a little less repetitive. It doesn't have to be revolutionary - say what you will about Rage, but it was very polished and felt great, but wasn't revolutionary by any means. There's really no reason the same couldn't have been done with Mass Effect.
I would say, for the book analogy, that it's more like here's a book, and there's this chapter of the book that's included with the book you bought, but only if you pay extra for that chapter. If I bought the book, shouldn't I get all the chapters already? "I mean 'honest' as in the reviewer was being honest when he wrote the review.
As opposed to writing a good review because that is what he was paid to do. You know, so that the game sells, all of those people who we're thinking of buying the game read a 'good' review of the game, then they go and buy a copy. I can't comment on the true validity of the review because I have never played Mass Effect 3, and I probably never will." But What leads you to believe that Ron is writing from the heart and, say, IGN is only writing good things because they're being paid to? Liking Ron's review because it says what you want it to say is fine - but you need to admit it. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zze1wpwVl7c
Has the potential to be fucking epic imo. Arkane Studios (dark messiah might and magic) + Viktor Antonov (hl2 art director) + Harvey Smith (deus ex designer) + Sandbox assassination game set in a steampunk city = wet pants. Why would Ron come on a Quake forum, and Troll ME3, if he did in fact like ME3? That doesn't make sense either. Are you trying to tell me that it would make more sense for Ron to come on a forum and lie about his own opinions? Why would he do that?
I base my assumptions on the following things: 1 - There was a lot of good hype on the mainstream websites about Mass Effect so I went out and bought a copy, only to discover that the game was an excruciatingly tedious and boring game full of characters that we're either ridiculous, un-likeable or both. Having been playing Crysis before hand I was also disappointed by the poor visuals and level design of Mass Effect. I remember in the game there is a part near the beginning where you land an a planet only to discover that the planet looks dull, and you can't travel around it because the whole mission is heavily scripted and completely on a rail. I also noticed that the combat was poor, I was basically encouraged to squat behind walls and crates all of the time. Which is dull. I also remember in another part of the game, there was a VERY tall elevator shaft, with an elevator inside it. You cannot see out of the elevator once you are inside it. But to use the elevator you have no choice but to watch the entire journey from the corner of the elevator. Well there's three minutes of my life I will never get back. 2 - Ron is claiming that he found similar issues to be present in ME3. The review for ME3 is also good on the mainstream websites. I don't like watching the TV. I don't like Star Trek. ME is a bit like Star Trek. And playing ME1 for me was on par with watching Star Trek. Which I find to be dull and boring. IGN, Fox and the teams of directors employed at the studio where Mass Effect and it's sequels we're born are examples of evil capitalist scum, which will kill art and video games in order to make sure that they make the fastest buck. Ron is some guy who I don't know who posted his opinions on a forum. I know who I would trust. Neither of them. I would trust my own intuition. The same intuition that made me decide to stop playing GoW2 in the large underground tunnels section because I found it to be dull and boring, and the characters made me feel as though I was insulting my own intelligence by continuing. And that was one of the last times I played a game on my XBox 360. Though I diverge, for that is another heart warming tale, which I will conserve for another post, some other time. "IGN, Fox and the teams of directors employed at the studio where Mass Effect and it's sequels we're born are examples of evil capitalist scum, which will kill art and video games in order to make sure that they make the fastest buck."
OK, whatever you say. Discussion isn't possible with this sort of hate in the way. Thanks for the reply! Just flicked through that with sound off but from your description and faith in it, I agree. Could be very cool. GFX are a bit Bioshock in graphical quality as well as style, but definitely has potential.
I know that such strong words are a lot to handle, even for you. How a discussion can continue with all of the curse-words I keep using, god only knows.
Anyway, that's my honest opinion, I can honestly say that I honestly think that IGN are a bunch of dis-honest fuckers who are sat around with their dicks in their hands, feeling all 'important' when actually they are just slaves to a big money making system. I went through a phase of trusting IGN and was disappointed by them many times. I read their review of the new Star Wars MMO, and in the first couple of paragraphs the reviewer explained how the training element of the game was rubbish, and that the 'battles in space' parts of the game we're also rubbish. Yet the game score was still displayed - 9.5 out of 10. Then there was all of the hype with Far Cry 2. But that was a very boring and repetitive game to. Eventually I start to read the website and just think - 'Yeah - you guys are either stupid, or you are taking bribes for some of these scores'. Fox - OK, well there's a company which totally ruined the Aliens franchise. Nice work Fox, way to go - why not take all of the cool stuff out of Alien movies, and replace it with cheap from-a-can nonsense, slap a PG13 rating on it so that you get the best box-office windfall. Cause that all the fans care about, surely. I get it, Ricky, thanks. Like I said, there's no real discussion to be had if you've already decided that professional reviewers are evil scum bags out for the almighty dollar. I get that. And that's fine, that's your opinion - but it leaves no room for discussion so we're done with this, yes?
And this goes without saying but your tastes are running fairly orthogonal to most other gamers I know. Even shooter fans. Mass Effect and Far Cry are well loved in every other circle I run in. So there's that...
But yeah - ME series being good - so the official line is that "That's the word on the street". All the hip folks back home really love the ME series. Yeah. Well it's not for me. And I tried to like Far Cry 2, I really did. But it was so repetitive, and the fast travel system was still tedious. By the end I just didn't have the energy for it.
I'm just a random gamer discussing my opinions of the mainstream gaming media. And a mainstream game. And yes, I have a narrow opinion, who doesn't. I know what I like, and I like what I know. You don't seem to be able to handle my harsh criticisms of said mainstream gaming entities, is that because you have a vested interest in them? Me? I don't care what you say about media outlets or whatever. Rant away. My issue was with your calling one review honest and others not, without having any knowledge of their motivations OR even having played the game yourself.
That's all. Dishonored looks great. Steampunk = awesome. Long as I can just shoot shit up instead of listening through keyholes to random conversations. Lots of whores in it as well, which is always a plus. I'm glad Arkane are doing it, it's about time they did something new - it's been 6 years since their last game Dark Messiah.
are the rpg elements in ME3 further simplified from ME2? that was one of my major problems with ME2. :(
actually, i should probably say stats/class stuff as opposed to RPG.
i like setting up characters and builds. :) Willem, we have < q > </ q > tags, would be awesome if you could use them. Searching for the closing " when skimming over posts sucks.
If this board used standard tags, I might care. As it is, if I can't remember what to use I don't. :)
Note, I am not using the nerd sense of the word "standard". I'm using it more in the "what most people are used to" sense.
But yes, mirroring BBCode would make the codes more likely to get used. Also, adding buttons to insert them would help as well. But this really has nothing to do with PC Games, so... I'm not surprised Mass Effect's combat is getting a bad rap on a Quake board - it's doing things that are quite the opposite to what a hardcore Quake player would find interesting (I'm generalising, but I've heard so many people on this board share the same views about cover-based combat, that I think it's a fair generalisation).
Personally I really liked (nearly loved) Mass Effect 1, as I got an very atmospheric and engrossing space opera. I enjoyed the combat, but I enjoy a very wide range of combat mechanics, so I'm quite easily pleased. Haven't played 2 or 3 yet. is not an rpg at all. i think of it as an action game with lots of dialogue. but the mechanics are a lot like, say the batman games. you get xp, buy points for that skill you like and move on.
dragon age on the other hand, thats an rpg. the first on i mean, haven't played the second one. and while it is linear like mass effect, i really think it was done in a much, much better way. but i love the mass effect games. i love the atmosphere and the looks of it, funky sci-fi stuff and even cyberpunk sometimes. but i agree, the games are linear and the combat is very simple, cover based stuff. i wish there was more exploration, but strangely i don't mind the linearity of it. even choices are not really an issue because its something that just happens. i wish it was more like, say the witcher, which i think its the only game that does choices really well. haven't played the third yet. will wait for a price drop. not enough $$ to buy new games these days. somehow i feel this post is useless, but i'm posting it anyway. :) I was just having a poop when I realised that naming argument about Rage was full of shit. Remember those movies with the Empire and the Rebellion?
I'm not sure about the Rage argument (I haven't seen it in context), but in general names are super important and will always influence your perception of things. (The degree to which it does, and your awareness of it, will differ between people and scenarios, but it will always colour your perception and there is nothing you can do about it).
If it doesn't matter, why not just name everything in a generic and functional fashion? Who cares, right? Might as well call your items weapon1, weapon2, weapon3, etc. How about your skills? You've unlocked ability 1! Wow. Can't wait till I get ability 4! You were slain by melee1. Oh no. You picked up 5 units of ammo for weapon 6. Yeah! Gonna go rock the house in coop with RemoteClient4! FUCK YEAH! 'You picked up four 5.56m Jacketed Hollow Point rounds for your M24A SOCOM X-4F Elite ranger 4.4344443434 27n gunwank carbine.'
No the names do matter, but they aren't the big deal being made of them. If the Authority had been introduced properly, had some proper backstory and a build up of threat it would have been a sore point but easily forgotten. The fact they weren't means that the name now stands out, because it's the ONLY thing we know about them. Half-Life 2 and the Combine had a mystery about it that was interesting, and you encountered a lot of their activities, so the boring name didn't mean anything because it was drowned out by the other stuff. Given the same company gave us the 'Strogg', I'm not sure I care about basic names in games. At least it allows us to avoid having to read about the shimbogs and their leader flobblewobble's involvement in the yuktuk wars of timblemin-minor against the savage tribe rrr-thuk-rgggrg. Because that's the shit we'd end up with. The Combine is actually a good name. A combine, used in farming, is a great metaphor for what they did to Earth. Someone put some thought into that and it works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester Also, there's the aliens and humans working together in combination angle. Quick Mercenaries 2 review. Bit of a shit game, 5/10. I was expecting a short, cool, fps. Got an open world, third person RPG/shooter reminiscent of Saints Row 2, only worse.
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/mercenaries2.php some old propaganda and propaganda posters referred to nazi forces as a giant combine tearing up the earth, if I recall correctly. Art depicted a giant combine with a swastika instead of the rotating blades churning up the countryside.
Thanks to Spirit, the DICK, I'm kind of replaying it again (the "portable" version). So great. People usually credit SS2, but the first one has more atmosphere imo. Maybe because of the low res textures and sprites. Quite nonlinear and explorative gameplay, even secret doors and areas. And with the pistols you can even rapid-fire like in HL if your trigger/mousefinger allows it. Just cleared the medical deck - didn't remember there were so many reinforcement mutants.
The standard controls take some getting used to, but it can (and should) be set to play like Doom. Spirit: I found out that E enables mouselook. It's a good idea to check out the reference card, although some standard key are remapped in the WASD config. crosspostin' from rub2 thread.
Than said: By the way, this is perhaps warrant for discussion in itself, but are there any modern games that have this kind of level design (or design similar to typical Quake maps)? I can't think of a single game, but I haven't played that many recently; SS3, Duke, Bulletstorm and Rage are about the only shooters I played recently, and none of them had particularly interesting level layouts or vertical maps. Level design seems really dumbed down these days, or has very different objectives at least. It's a shame but I think the sad truth of the matter is that the majority of the games-buying public nowadays have the attention spans of gnats (can't really say that in a way that doesn't sound snobbish - I appreciate there are a lot of nice people who play games who simply have limited time and just want some quick, easy, turn-your-brain-off action), and the more opportunities you give the player to be off the beaten track, the more likely it is they get lost, confused or whatever - even if only briefly - but it makes them respond less favourably to the game. Back in the "good old days", gamers I think were a hell of a lot geekier and more patient and more interested in exploring sadistic maze-like levels. These gamers are still around of course; they're us! But sadly us wrinkly grey old farts now make up only a small fraction of the market base, and it's no longer financially viable to make games for us any more. (normal Kinn disclaimers apply; the above is likely to contain random splatterings of bullshit/hyperbole which you may ignore as appropriate/to taste). Got to disagree, a lot of old games were badly designed and there were not that many to choose from. So we all endured the repetitive nature of 'old' game design. Fighting awkward control scheme's, obtuse UI layouts and getting lost because the designers believed in mind reading are not reasons to celebrate, but simply rose tinted glasses of a time when we were young and did not know otherwise.
Not all new games are shallow in depth or detail and there are plenty to find but everyone man and his dog is making games nowadays and finding stuff is a lot harder. Games nowadays are easier to pick up and play and cater towards certain groups of people better. I am sure there will be some weird backlash to current game design eventually and we will go retro again! :) was more about why I think games such as shooters have gone largely from non-linear to linear, rather than from badly-designed to well-designed.
I fully agree that a lot of old games had terrible level design, and even I avoided them. I couldn't stomach more than I think 2 levels of Hexen II, for example. it's funny - i hate getting lost, but I love non-linear level design. My favourite levels in any sort of game are the ones where you have multiple objectives/routes from the start, and you can visit them in any order. Even if the choice of which one to tackle first is not a meaningful choice, I still love the feeling of freedom it gives. I suppose I am exactly the sort of audience for games that give you a map - go wherever the hell you want, but here's a map so you never get lost.
Having multiple paths cost development / testing time which ultimately cost money. I remember working on a certain game and we wanted several paths through a level, it would have been so cool. We were told no because it would have meant extra time for QA to test it, extra time for Art to create additional assets and coders were not happy because it meant a larger file size (DVDs are not endless space apparently!)
Even after all those arguments we were told no from the publisher! Choice is an awesome concept but it costs time and not every developer / publisher can afford it. I am sure if you speak to any developer about extra routes, choice, non-linear play and most will agree it is awesome but nowadays games are too complex to create / make even without the extra stuff. That is not to say all games are linear, some still exist but they are rare. ...Which leads me to a question.
What do people think about the objective arrow system used in games like Oblivion and Skyrim - where you have little direction indicators at the top of the screen telling you where to head, letting the designer just plonk you in any environment and know you won't get lost. The reason I ask is this: would I be chased into the night with pitchforks and shovels if I was to make a Quake level that was basically "press X buttons in the level lol", but was really non-linear/free-roaming and it used some sort of objective arrow system? (i don't know yet what this would be, whether it's something floating in front of player to appear as if it's on his HUD (yuk), or something a bit more subtle - maybe some sort of texture with arrows on that you find on walls or floors in junctions, but the arrow(s) can change to point in different directions depending on your objective(s)). Is this an awful idea? maybe some sort of texture with arrows on that you find on walls or floors in junctions, but the arrow(s) can change to point in different directions depending on your objective(s))
I think the dm456sp by negke did exactly that, and it was okay (aka not overly coercive (then again how the fuck is an arrow not ever coercive?)). i think the issue here is that you only want arrows when the player gets lost, and the player's realisation that he's lost generally comes when he gets to a junction and thinks "which bloody corridor do I go down to get back to the sodding GK door?" If I identified some important junctions and placed dynamic arrows there, I guess it could work.
dynamic arrows
What if the arrows were written on wheels, and you could actually see some of them hiprotate when you press a button?? kinn: just try it and see how it goes.
i'd argue it might be better if you could work these "arrows" into the map itself... so like a visible building with something like lightning or flames or something to communicate that that place is important somehow. For some reason I did not care about the pacman dot trail in Fable 2 or the markers on the map / compass in Skyrim. I just wanted to get to the location and do what I was suppose to do, fight, find loot and have fun.
If you want to be clever then build your anti-getting-lost system with good art. Like have runes that change to obvious directions after a timer when the player is in an area. I am always disappointed with Quake levels that have arrows pointing somewhere because the design is saying go a different direction. This is a classic thing to do in SP design btw, player enters area, timer starts, then hints start to appear in the environment or HUD. I would suggest decals and cool shader effects then I remembered it was Q1, but you could be clever with movers or sound. You could also use lights. As the level progresses, you could turn off some fill lights in specific corridors where you don't want the payer to go anymore. Nothing major, but we naturally gravitate towards areas with more light in them so it might be subtle enough to work...
@Kinn, I know I probably made you run to the hills with my crazy email about textures but have you decided what art style you are going with? It will ultimately help with your method of trying to give the player directions.
This is a classic thing to do in SP design btw, player enters area, timer starts, then hints start to appear in the environment or HUD. I would suggest decals and cool shader effects then I remembered it was Q1, but you could be clever with movers or sound.
that's interesting... a progressive hint system. I'd put in an arrow or some kind of primitive radar for the UI, as being obvious is a lesser evil to the player getting totally lost. You can still make the directions fairly vague, but just make sure the player has some idea of their progress (ie how many things they have left to collect/activate etc) and general hints on where to go.
I really think Serious Sam 3 has some great levels in it, surprisingly intricate with cool fights, but it really needed Painkiller's arrow to tell you where to go because arenas could be so big with lots of buildings and after fighting for ten minutes you lost track of where you entered and where you were supposed to go. Also generally as graphics get more detailed I find games are getting less and less effective at pointing out where to go through architectural or lighting cues (though this could also just be that they've stopped trying and just put a UI marker in. I reckon L4D did very well in giving general hints as to where to go through lighting, but not making it too obvious so progress wasn't instant and in fire-fights you could still loose your sense of location. Rage had some cool levels and some dull ones. The level in the abandoned brewery where you climbed all around the vats and fought mutants climbing up the walls was fun I though :E I always think it's a bad sign when you're looking for the way to proceed, find a corridor or jump or something, and find out it's actually a secret :p
What if the arrows were written on wheels, and you could actually see some of them hiprotate when you press a button??
very cool idea :} I really like this actually. i'd argue it might be better if you could work these "arrows" into the map itself... so like a visible building with something like lightning or flames or something to communicate that that place is important somehow. Interesting but the first part of one of my maps has 3 objectives active at once (do in any order) and they are all in indoor locations... If you want to be clever then build your anti-getting-lost system with good art. one requirement is that it might need to support multiple objectives e.g. (if you go this way or this way, there's stuff, but not this way). Hmmm...multiple "arrows" pointing down different corridors... You could also use lights Probably not feasible as all light comes from gothy flames - still could do a "flames go out" setpiece for something though - tbh i can't remember a gothy map that's done that... @Kinn, I know I probably made you run to the hills with my crazy email about textures but have you decided what art style you are going with? I haven't recieved any emails...bdwooding - at - gmail.com ? As for the art style, the whole episode is old and damp and earthy in the good old medieval gothic style. Here's an example of a typical area (please ignore any wip suckiness and lack of texture variation): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61424391/Quake%20Stuff/abbey08.jpg Some nice screenshots and a video about the art. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/19/be-honoured-lots-of-dishonored-screenshots/
In my original post I was more bemoaning the lack of really 3d spaces and reuse of area by having routes that loop back multiple times through the same area - something common in Quake maps, but less so in more modern games. Perhaps the best example of underusing the structure of a level I can think of is Bullet Storm. That game had so many epic areas and so much time was obviously spent on the environment art, but the gameplay was little more than walk into room, kill a bunch of shit and proceed to the next room. In addition, the gameplay was very flat - it was a fun game, however.
When you look at Quake levels (even the stock id levels) they are full of verticality and passing again through the same areas from multiple angles. This doesn't seem to be terribly common in more recent games, but there are sometimes levels where you are forced into a small environment (a house, boat etc.) for a prolonged period and thus the environment is better exploited. Given how much time and resources are spent on decorating areas, it doesn't seem like a great use of those resources to just make one long environment, but better to actually design the level in a way that takes progression back through existing areas in a way that makes sense. There are a few reasons I can think for avoiding intricately interwoven levels: *vertical areas are more difficult for console players to handle due to the often reduced field of view and slow speed of rotating the view on a controller. *it might not make sense in the game's story, whereas a Quake level has no real story and designers tend to just do stuff because it's cool or fun. *many modern games have a real world setting, which somewhat limits the scope for complex level layouts as designers want to keep their levels feeling realistic and functional. Anyway, more examples of modern games with interesting level design would be nice. I certainly wouldn't hate you for employing a "find X buttons to open exit" style of design! I remember being impressed a long time ago by a speedmap Lunaran made that has exactly that kind of gameplay. I think it was basically a DM map with lots of grunts and some buttons, but it played well (and looked quite nice considering how quickly it was made.)
My current map is a similar kind of design, but actually the progression is fairly linear at the moment. You have to find 5 sacred tomes and read them and the order is not important, but actually, the design of the level kind of forces the player into a linear route :/ Maybe I should try and free it up a little. The hard rain campaign in L4D2 is one of the more interesting level designs I've seen in a recent game (although it's not too fresh now and I can't play new releases on this machine). The map is a there and back fetching mission, but two things combine to make it interesting.
Firstly the level floods between going out and coming back, so returning by the original path becomes a slow trudge through water. At the same time different combinations of one-way drops make it so that the shortest route back is quite different to the shortest path forward.* It's all really clever and I recommend you grab a chance to have a look at it. *The one way drops are also an interesting feature for the versus gameplay, as separating members of the survivor team is often the best way to deal damage on them. The one-way drops give you a chokepoint for your attacks, but they aren't irreversible - which is good for balance. If your teammate is caught in front of a one-way drop you've taken, you can go back and save them by taking the intended route for the other direction's journey. Still, the loop takes time so there's usually a good amount of damage as reward for the play. was wondering the very same thing.
Guess I might check out the latest Wolfenstein and perhaps that other Raven game with the time travel. Are they worth playing? I am an idiot
Spirit linked an old post in another thread, I was multitasking and forgot that it was an old post and then replied to it :) Yes, L4D2 has some cool level design. Hard Rain is very memorable indeed. Perhaps the best example of underusing the structure of a level I can think of is Bullet Storm. That game had so many epic areas and so much time was obviously spent on the environment art, but the gameplay was little more than walk into room, kill a bunch of shit and proceed to the next room. In addition, the gameplay was very flat - it was a fun game, however.
Not played bullstorm but iirc Painkiller was exactly like this (epic impressive environment art dressing up essentially a series of huge box rooms), from the same developer incidently. The interesting thing with Painkiller is that the developers were clearly Quake fans, with the general feel of the movement, secrets, trick jumping and all that Quakey stuff, yet they decided not to use any of the level design principles that worked so well in Quake. In many ways the game felt to me as if the levels had been built from scratch by artists with absolutely no communication from the designers as to what gameplay was going to take place in them. There are a few reasons I can think for avoiding intricately interwoven levels One argument that was presented to me by an artist was that if you have a big open area, the most environmental detail can be focused around the playable space, and built with a certain direction of movement in mind, and the background stuff can be largely optimised as the player won't get close to it. If you take the same large area but you make the playable space occupy a greater % of the overall space (e.g. you allow the room to be traversed in different ways at different times), then the average density of detail required goes right up. Personally I think that decent design can make that a fairly weak argument but it is food for thought. I remember working on an action platformer a few years back where the lead artist was trying to convince us to use a God of War-style fixed camera so that all they had to worry about was essentially two back walls and a floor :) We went with a proper "look anywhere" 3rd person camera thankfully. I certainly wouldn't hate you for employing a "find X buttons to open exit" style of design!
Cheers! At least I know one person will play it then :} Maybe I should try and free it up a little. I think it can make for a more rewarding experience both for the player and the mapper - It's funny, making a level that's very non-linear gives me a wierd sense of nerdy glee, as if I'm crafting a real functional place, rather than piecing together a predictable script. One worry though is that the encounter design could suffer, as I need to accomodate the fact that the player infil points and order in which he encounters monsters is going to be pretty damn unpredictable for the most part... Thanks!
Tbh, I didn't intend to pimp this early (as you can tell from the unaligned textures and stuff) :} The new Deus Ex had some good level design, always fairly open with lots of vertical action and choices, obviously a deus ex with linear levels wouldn't really be deus ex though.
Also Bioshock (1&2) both had fairly non-linear levels that felt comparable to some quake levels. I get bored of over-linear FPS and rarely finish or even play them nowadays... Do players actually notice if light does not have a realistic source? I don't (unless it is a really bright spotlight and the game/map's narrative is realistic.
Kinn: that looks amazing. did I tell you that you and czg should team up? because you and czg should team up. I tell you! I agree modern games would benefit from more (vertical) interconnectivity. It probably depends on the type of game (or its goal), though, e.g. not applicable to or desired in those countless games that are just long series of setpieces.
As for nonlinearity, however, let's face it: people are always quick to criticize modern FPS for their extreme linear design, and rightly so, but as soon as they come across a nonlinear section themselves, even long-time Quake players in a Quake level, it often boils down to getting lost and confused. And then it's all the mapper's fault for not making the right route obvious enough. Think back when you first played the game, though - didn't feeling lost in those strange and hostile environments actually add to the game experience, the atmosphere? Of course, back then combat skills and FPS mechanics weren't as well-trained as today, so it may be possible that players today are more easily bored and thus have a "decreased willingness" to explore, which could be linked back to the expectations of an average gamer nowadays and the question why modern FPS are what they are. Nice post, negke.
We find that a lot. If we give players choices of routes, they get angry because they don't know which one is the "right" one. If we only give them one route, they complain about lack of exploration. It kinda sucks, to be honest... What I usually do is deliberately take the "wrong" route (if it's clear which one leads on and which one is a dead end) or go in the opposite direction just to have explored everything.
I just thought about situations where the explorable space is restricted by obstacles, closed doors, or clip walls (sometimes areas that actually ARE interconnected), and the worst possible thing a designer can do: a "leaving the mission area" kill/restart trigger. This made an awkwardly appropriate allegory pop up in my head: it's like walking your dog, but pulling him away from stuff as soon as he intends to sniff on them - for the walk is not about his personal enjoyment, the sole purpose is for him to take a dump. So... when that's done you can actually turn around go back home. I only played through Dead Space late last year so it's fairly fresh in my mind. I'm sure it has been discussed here, but it seems relevant to the current discussion, so:
One of the best features of the game was the little help system which would draw a path to the target on the ground. At any point you could press the relevant button and see where to go, but the path would fade out after a few seconds. Since it wasn't "always on" it eliminated one of the major negative aspects of some other navigational aids (i.e. when you're too busy watching the sparkly shit or the HUD arrow to actually look at the environment and soak up the atmosphere). Of course, what I would often do (and what I'm sure everybody would do!) is press the button to discover the "correct" path, turn around and go in the opposite direction to find all the secrets and explore... then go back to the main route again. It's not perfect, but it allowed some degree of choice and exploration while still ensuring that the player could never really get lost. A pretty good compromise which allowed for at least a little non-linearity while eliminating potential confusion and frustration. Since it was player activated and temporary you only used it when you needed it, but you could go forth with the confidence that you both know where you're going and that you didn't leave anything behind. That was a nice mechanic. The second one sort of took the fun out of it a bit by allowing you to look for different map elements like stores, work benches and so on.
Playing Bioshock2 now - which is a pretty good game (fuck the gaming press!) and has a simialr sort of compass to many games. Combined with the map it allows you to hunt down everything, which I think most players seem to enjoy doing, at least when the core mechanics are fun. When people say non-linear I get the feeling that they mean not closed in. CZG07b for example is completely linear, with a few offshoots for secrets. It does not feel linear though since you revisit several areas at different heights and coming from different directions. Compare it with the word examples of corridor design which allows for little to no exploration. And usually has 100's of identical doors, some of which you're allowed to open, some not. Oh, and clip walls across otherwise open terrain. Those are great. http://hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2006-07-17 i was just thinking that i actually hate it more when i choose the RIGHT route because that means i have to backtrack so i can go explore everything. :P
I don't think that being linear and making the route obvious are mutually exclusive. It's possible to do the latter without locking yourself into the former - just look at the id1 maps for a good example. They're littered with little arrows hinting "go this way", when you find a key you're normally dropped to the door that needs it very soon after (it's often on a ledge or ramp above the door, even). You're still free to explore, you can get yourself wonderfully lost as much as you want, but you can always find where you need to be quickly enough.
about the id levels (eps 1, 2 and 3 at least) are that they are all small enough so that even if you are totally lost, a quick wander will generally always lead you back to somewhere that orientates you. Also, I find each area is pretty good at being distinct and recognisable.
Episode 4 is by far the weakest in this regard as the maps have lots of corridors that kinda look the same. Is probably old news, but yet another indie roguelike is making fame:
http://spelunkyworld.com/ Been laid up with flu and playing this. Terrible, yet oddly compelling design. That must be some flu indeed.
I'll agree some things are unintuitive, or plain out frustrating, but just about everything can be mastered over time. And that's pretty much the point of anything that claims to have roguelike elements, right? I'm a student of games design... when things are unintuitive or frustrating it seems to go against everying I've been learning all this time.
But its a lot of fun, hope they do well with the port. Rules are made to be broken, once you know them. Spelunky would be half as interesting if it was more intuitive and user friendly, it's one of the strong points of roguelikes, even recent ones (see Binding of Isaac).
Much preferred The Binding tbh. The design felt like it was on my (the player's) side more. I ended up 100% on that one.
A lot of playtesting has gone into Spelunky, but it seems many things are just, well, broke. Maybe I haven't played far enough, but why are the shortcut tunnels not on the main screen? I can see the arguments for them off to one side, but none of them doesn't boil down to 'frustrate the player' at its core. Intuitive and user friendly don't have to be the pariahs of games design. Granted that most designers that focus on these don't really like the game they're making, and it comes out in how it plays. There must exist a bridge between Garage and Indie design, just a case of figuring it out. Not ignoring the Roguelike element, but thats just a description of a format, and one that's inherently friendly to small dev teams since its not necessary to spend all that time building full levels. I get the unpredictable, it's something that goes right through the game. Sometimes a flying rock will hurt you, sometimes not. Sometimes the ledge grab doesn't work on certain ledges, identical to the rest.
There's lots in there where I'm not sure if its bugs, or intended behaviour. 'bomb in a chest' is the worst thing in the game. Or maybe its the control scheme in general. Even though it sounds like I hate the game it is compelling - I'm still playing it at any rate. Just don't buy into the argument that roguelike = broken so much. But it depends how 'broken' is quantified. I suspect they'll struggle on XBLA, although it'd be nice to see them do well. @Daz, quiet a lot of games play better with controllers plugged into a PC, they were designed and tested that way.
I have Asscreed on the PC, and it TOTALLY needs a controller. It's the only game which I have which NEEDS one. The controls are silly. Spacebar makes you run forwards (WTF?!).
Like Crackdown. Ever play that? Almost impossible without a controller I'm sure. I have a mate who plays Skyrim on his PC with a controller (XBox360), and he loves it. I played a large chunk of AssCreed 2 on a PS3. It has some of the worse controls I've ever used.
I was quite shocked after the amount of hype that went on and on about it's cool movement system and stuff. I didn't realise it would involve holding three buttons at once and giving up camera control. Yeah, don't let me control the camera right when I need to see where the hell I'm going. And I so wanted to get into it because the actual atmosphere of wandering around a town is really cool :( rFactor car sim, real tracks, real cars, formulas, GTs, 100MB basic game engine, 300MB each car, 50MB per circuit, 1MB program to connect. my favourite ATM are F458 Macau street circuit, F1_2006 Jerez/Korea, GP2_2010 Singapore night street circuit. icq/qip contact 259689233
I prefer controllers for everything, including FPS's (and I know saying that will make a lot of you back slowly away from me, feeling the walls for an exit whilst making sure not to break eye contact). It's a comfort thing for me.
If FitzQuake had support for the 360 controller, I would be on that shizzle. You're not alone. I love controllers for almost any games on my PC. When games don't support my 360 controller, I sigh in disappointment.
I wanted my controller to work when I got Super Meat Boy. That's about it. I don't see how people can play on controllers when a good mouse/keyboard setup is available (especially when it comes to shooter), but then I've been largely a PC gamer since I was 4-5 years old so that may have something to do with it.
Decades of mouse and keyboard use have ruined my shoulder/wrist so the less I need to use that combo, the better.
Mouse and keyboard are good for FPS with guns, but for anything else it really depends. For most games playing with a controller is nice, for strategy games and such I like playing with my Wacom tablet when that's supported, much easier on the wrist and more natural.
Same here Willem, I have to take a good weeks break in between playing games so my mouse wrist can recover again. Keyboard one is fine, it's just the damn mouse that fucks it up.
Do controllers not effect RSI as badly as the mouse? They don't for me. Using a mouse is definitely my trigger action. I can use a controller or an art tablet all day, no worries.
Thanks. Yeah, I've purchased several hundred dollars worth of devices, pads and gadgets over the years. I also get a deep tissue massage once a month. It's a lifetime commitment of maintenance at this point...
It's the kind of thing you can't tell other people to prevent it because they won't listen. The whole, "Sit up straights, arms at 90 degrees, shoulders relaxed, etc" advice sounds horrible but it really would help. But nobody wants to hear that That kind of stuff is horrible, I stopped using a mouse for work a few years back and it's done so much good to my hands, so now I try to be careful with the rest, but it's not easy.
Out of curiosity, are you in your 30s or 40s Willem? Wow, I thought I was the only old timer around these parts, turned 43 at the beginning of this year. :)
A couple of the older designers at work use those vertical mice because of their wrist problems, similar to this:
http://img.directindustry.com/images_di/photo-m2/joystick-mouse-388854.jpg I hope that never happens to me, but I'm already creaky and falling apart. And haven't noticed any real aches and pains yet, but 5-10 years ago I could go out partying 10 hours, sleep for fifteen minutes and go into work fresh as a daisy.
Nowadays it takes me a week to recover from a handful of hours party. And no chance 2-3-4 days in a row. The unfortunate thing is, it isn't something where you start to feel something and then you correct it. If you feel it, you've got it, and you're into management mode.
I wish you all luck! But don't kid yourself into thinking that you don't feel anything so you must be OK Sorry to be a wet blanket. :P Just trying to help... It's not a problem until it is. I got RSI quite bad several years ago (i'm 32 now) to the point that I had to use a cold flannel on my wrist, but I started using the mouse in my other hand occasionally and just managed it better and it got better again. Tried one of those big flat mouses where you're hold hand sits on it, but it was annoying and slow to use.
Then a few years ago I went self-employed so I don't have to work so hard on the computer. But about 7-12 mnths ago it started getting worse and hasn't improved since. I haven't got the pins and needles at night so much, so I know it can still get much worse than it is now. And it will... probably have to give up gaming in a year or 2, or at least do maybe 1 game a month rather than a few a month. Willem what do you find works best for it? What kind of mouse do you use/any wrist pad for it? Oh by the way I reviewed STALKER Clear Sky. Didn't really enjoy it, it just pissed me off. It seemed to be quite popular on this forum so you guys might not agree. 6/10.
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/stalker_clear_sky.php Also tried Silent Hill Homecoming, but it crashed alot, especially when alt-tabbing, the combat absolutely sucked assholes and it wouldn't accept my key config. Trying to change it in the menu only accepted some of the changes. Fucked up console port that I quit not far in. Next on my list is either Assassins Creed or Devil May Cry 4 :) Kona
I tend to favor the Logitech MX518 mouse - the one that looks bullet riddled. Primarily because it's light and that puts less strain on my hand moving it around but it still feels good button/wheel wise. Wireless mice are right the hell out as the batteries make them instant torture devices. I don't use pads or gel strips or whatever. Those don't tend to work for me at all. What I found last week, actually, is this hand glove thing: http://www.amazon.com/Imak-Computer-Glove-EACH/dp/B000FEVWU8/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1333101559&sr=8-15 And THIS actually seems to work for me. I can rest my wrist on the padded part and it feels pretty good. Doesn't help my shoulder but I'll take what I can get. :) As I said before, I also get a deep tissue/trigger point massage once a month as a maintenance thing. She works out all the knots in my back/shoulders/neck and tries to reset me for another month. Sorry to hear about your troubles. Mine doesn't sound as bad as yours but that might be because I've found a maintenance routine that helps keep it under control somewhat. Good luck! Oh yeah, and if things get really bad I'll wrap my wrist in a cold pack while I watch TV at night. That tends to bring down the inflammation enough that the next day feels better.
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/trackballs/devices/wireless-trackball-m570
Need to get a new one though... Yeah, I tried one of those but keeping my hand/arm stationary all day actually seems to do more harm than good.
Those gloves are gold. I used them a couple years back when my wrists began to act up. I also bought a trackball and a magic trackpad and cycle between them and the mouse. Haven't had too many problems since then, but then I'm a programmer, so I don't use the mouse too much anyway.
I have had various problems with the use of the mouse but luckily it never reached the point of no return. As much as sitting up straight and different mouse types help, I found switching around my routine helped the most. I would make it a habit to stretch, use different apps, get up from my desk and walking around, making coffee, etc.
Tried the vertical mice. They work for awhile but I think my problems are addressed differently. They don't work all that well for me.
im the other way around. i get cramps with controllers as opposed to keyboard/mouse. specially the xbox one that's asymmetrical compared to the ps3 one. i only have a ps3 at home, but whenever i go to my brother's place and play with it, i get cramps like after 30min or something.
Fallout for zero money at http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/fallout for 2 days
I bought the classic series pack when it was on Steam sale not long ago. Haven't played it back in the day - what a miss! I'm totally enjoying the games. Already played through FO1, and I'm close to beating FO2 (on normal) now. Nice games, I like the theme, the humor and all the little extras the player can discover.
Also good to finally learn some background information on things they picked up in FO3 and NV. Quite faithful to the originals in many areas apparently. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-04-05-john-romero-details-plans-for-mmo-ish-pc-shooter
Or something. I wish him the best of luck. I like his views on FPS gaming style and I hope with the lessons learned from DKT he could make it a great game. GL HF. If it re-uses a Daikatana base, it could turn into something cool. Daikatana concept was really interesting, just a shame it turned to shit too early..
As shambler said + I want to see another Romero FPS ! Still fun, but boy has this series been dumbed down. The first few at least left it upto you to figure out some of the puzzles, not so here, the clue is always staring you right in the face.
Some nice visuals and setpieces though. maybe it will do as well as his last company that was making an MMO of his design...
http://kotaku.com/5383644/romeros-slipgate-ironworks-hammered-down-mmo-project-still-on Give it a shot, it is surprisingly good.
Fast like I like it, not one of those plodding crawl'n'headshot from 3 miles pansy-fests. Proper full paid for game quality. Similar to Neotokyo for HL2 if you tried that, but faster. Tons of luvely GITS influence, always a plus. Yeah you have to gain points and levels by playing to unlock new gear (you can easily unlock items for 1 day) or use money to unlock stuff early BUT the basic weapon and gear you are given is very adequate, have no probs reaching top 3 in Kills, Caps for CTF/KOTH/DOM, Assists etc even when server is full of guys having poured in over 60 hours already. Only played one game, so far movement feels a bit awkward. There's like a slight delay if you want to change direction or something like that - peculiar. And I don't think the models loaded all the way, the game seemed a tad blurry in spots. Was pretty good though, if a bit laggy.
I had none of those probs, for the Lag did you try another master server ?
A funy thing though, not sure if its coming from my PC or the game but some resolutions give slightly less responsive controls (even though it would be a lower res) Try a couple diff 16: 16:10 resoltuions see if it helps. I can't stand games with laggy mouse/keyboard response, would of noticed, so its def coming from your side. Reviewed Assassin's Creed. Gave it a 6/10. Great visuals but the combat and gameplay is complete shit. I don't know how this is so popular.
Are the sequels any good? http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/assassins_creed.php It would normally classify as a mediocre generic sci-fi shooter. But the fact that EA's intention was to milk more money from the 'franchise' and being dicks with pathetic attempts at justifying the switch of genres and design goals can only lead to one verdict: the game sucks.
Sure, it had czg's name in the credits, but it also used a Skrillex track, TWICE. I turned off VSync (I hate it) and the controls feel better, but movement is still not as clean feeling as I'd like. The controls also don't feel as responsive as I'm used to, a few times I went into iron sights, pressed left mouse to fire and
It also takes a while for all the assets to stream in appropriately, and a few times I played a match with blurry assets. Respawning can also be jarring if the game is trying to load assets when you spawn, and can slow down the game. I'm not saying it's a bad game, because it's quite good, and pretty fun overall, but it doesn't feel as polished as CoD or that other one I forget the name of that Friction plays a lot. Battlefield, that's it. You get tons of unlockables. That's kind of cool, but the problem is that you get a ton of 1-day,2-day,3-day limited items, which kind of sucks because they just go away after a while. You can purchase permanent versions through in-game currency which you accumulate very slowly or you can spend real $$ for "Zen" and just get items that way. The biggest problem is that by level 5 you just have a shit ton of clutter and you're not really sure wtf to do since you have so much useless, time limited stuff in your inventory. I spent a couple minutes buggering about trying to figure out how to customize my avatar, but then gave up because I just can't be arsed. The whole system feels very cluttered and messy atm. The levels are really bland. They are not as enthralling as Deus Ex's world. That isn't to say they're ugly or anything, they're pretty gorgeous, but they're just dark and generic feeling. They could use better lighting techniques for highlighting important areas and keeping them separate from hazardous ones. There are some paths that I first didn't recognize due to poor lighting, as well as some hazardous drops (that highrise map, for example.) tldr - The game is fun, it's good, I have a lot of little problems that are mostly nitpicky. Doesn't feel as good or polished as a CoD or Battlefield, but I think it will get there over time. You can purchase permanent versions of the equipment with the ingame experience, no money needed. You failed to see the option to unlock permanently when in the purchase menu.
Think you rig is maybe not up to it ? Streaming of assets lasts 1-2 seconds for me and done, and its a what was good 3 years ago pc. Oh yeah, you did turn off DirectX 11 and all the useless depth of field, blur and whatnot bullcrappery right ? :P DirectX 11 is a bit broken in the game I think. I like the maps, the assets very GITS, again are COD and battlefield levels that interesting ? For games based in semi "reality"... tldr : I think zwiffle is having a few issues, the game is amazingly polished to me - admitted I turned a lot of fluff off. Oh and I can be bothered to observe and think 30 seconds to figure out an interface which helps... Oh noes EA is an evil big corporation blah blah no facts just feelings, never mind that syndicate had probably been in development for at least as long as deus ex:hr and so on.
I'm sure it doesn't have the same feeling as the old syndicate but what about talking about the game own it's own. Haven't seen much discussion about it here (maybe I missed it?). It wasn't released on Steam + didn't hear much good about it + there was no PC demo = couldn't be bothered to care, instead of probably buying it on day one just cause czg worked on it.
I mentioned that you can get permanent versions, read my post again.
Like I said, it's polished, but just not as polished as CoD or Battlefield. Maps in those games 'feel' like their own levels, whereas in BLR the maps are very generic feeling. They don't really 'identify' well. Even DX:HR's levels were very charismatic and felt vibrant. Also, the only thing I turned off was VSync, which was responsible for the laggy mouse I was feeling. Everything else stayed on, which is fine. The only real technical problem I have is assets taking a while to load (or maybe the asset itself was just lo-poly and looked bad?) and occasional frame drags when I respawn. Otherwise, the game runs fine. The interface isn't hard to figure out, that wasn't the problem. THe problem was you just get a lot messy stuff filling up your inventory. It's cluttered and cumbersome to look through. Read my post again. Because keyboard gaming is starting to drive me nuts these days. Not reliable or responsive enough. When I want to JUMP, I dont want to stand there like a dolt.
/rant ps; various keyboards, same deal over the years... :( Sounds like it depends on software/hardware?
Different topic: Rock of Ages. It's fun, but small. Seems like the multiplayer would be fun. Could have had some more out there items to place as well. Apparently there's DLC on the horizon. Maybe all the keyboards I've used just hate having so many keys pressed at once.
Was getting my butt kicked in boss battles from Ys: Oath in Felghana because of the this. Switched to 360 controller and that has already made a massive difference in the accuracy of movements. Some games are definitely more suited toward controllers. You're right Zwiffle mea culpa I seem to have skipped a line in your post on the zen/in game currency.
Sounds exactly the same as C1 and C2. Looks exactly like a cross between C1 and C2....but fucking cool: http://www.bluesnews.com/screenshots/games/crysis3/20120416/
yeah, that'd be a nice change from the constant mad max post-ap stuff we've been seeing.
i mean, i like the evile desert wasteland thing, but i think a really beautiful and peaceful (until monsters try to eat you) setting could be awesome. Fact is, in a game like Spelunky you just can't trust people. The best example came in a two-player game, where a mate responded to the presence of a bat with the immortal words "I'll take care of this." He went to whip it, missed and hit me, got bitten, panicked and dropped a bomb on my stunned body, got bitten again and impaled himself on some spikes as I was blasted to smithereens. On the game over screen, you could see the bat still nipping away at his corpse.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-20-spelunky-preview-going-deeper-and-deeper http://www.bluesnews.com/s/131787/crysis-3-trailer
Exactly more of the same but the setting looks great to me. Gameplay is incomprehensible in the trailer tho. I hope they up the ammo limits after Crysis 2 that was my main annoyance with that game.
They removed your pistol slot and then halved total ammo capacity :( but the game sounds like it could be cool if they are going for more of the open jungle type gameplay of the first game but with a slightly less monotonous environment.
Reviewed Raven Squad from 2008.
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/raven_squad_operation_hidden_dagger.php Very average shooter, 5.5/10. Probably fuck all people have played it since sites like IGN gave it a 2/10. Given your appetite for obscure and possibly horrible FPS's, have you played or reviewed Marine Sharpshooter? I bought it on impulse (very rare for me) seven years ago or so. For me this was a $20 case of buyer's remorse as I didn't even tolerate it for more than 2 minutes off the start in a dark camp getting shot by unseen enemies that I was trying to spot over a huge and overly bright HUD. Just curious as to whether or not it ever got any better.
Possibly horrible, lol. Nah I passed on Marine Sharpshooter. There was a bunch of them actually, I was possibly going to get Marine Sharpshooter 4, but the screenshots looked really bad, even for 2008, and even for me. There's plenty better (but still horrible) Russian shooters to play ahead of it.
I just tried to play Steam Slug, a German shooter that looks very similar to Painkiller gameplay-wise. Except it's all in steam punk 90s style level design. Couldn't re-map the mouse buttons though, and I don't use wasd. Looks like I'm playing Dreamkiller next http://www.gamespot.com/dreamkiller/videos/dreamkiller-alice-trailer-6232743/ And now I've finished Dreamkiller :P
Review http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/dreamkiller.php 5.5/10. Wasn't that bad, but only if you liked Painkiller and want more of it. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/04/30/wrack-doesnt-ruin-doom-hopefully/
Reminds of RetroBlazer quite a bit. Looks like it has really REALLY boring level design.
A lot of developers seem to confuse "old-skool" with "crap". I honestly couldn't watch much of the video. The fight with those large robots after they hit the red button almost put me asleep. I've never seen such a dull shotgun before. The lack of feedback/flnching or such from the mentioned fight and later doesn't exactly help either.
Many people do seem to miss the point with this 'old skool' thing with FPS. Just because the game doesn't play like COD and you run around in various square rooms fighting enemies like in the 90s doesn't mean it's 'like Doom' and going to be fun. It's the level layouts (and then design) which tend to fall short. :/ most "old skool shooters" made these days tend to be arena shooters with waves of dumb enemies. The level design is dull and generic typically.
I never really understand why this is, if you look at the real old-skool shooter games, ie. most of the older id games, they are nothing of the sort. Either these developers are incredibly lazy or incredibly uninspired. Wracked will have it's own level editor on release however, it looks very similar to worldcraft. Just fyi. shit level design, even shitter enemies and combat. cell shading as always looks kind of cool, but it's only hiding a pretty shitty game. that needs a lot more work.
when, for the love of god, are developers going to stop putting fucking spiders in their levels? Daikatana should have permanently ended developers love affair with insects. "Feel" is the hardest thing to nail in a game. They have the basic mechanics - fast movement, guns, enemies, pick ups - but it doesn't have any feel. There's no kick. It's all very sterile and meh...
Looks so bland and not fun. As Willem points out, the weapons seem to lack oomph. The shotgun looked like it was spraying buckshot everywhere but killing enemies regardless of the awful spread. Plus it had a crappy sound (youtube video fault maybe?) and animation.
Daikatana might have had crappy little spiders, but it actually had some fucking awesome weapons. Shotcycler was the best shotgun ever. The RL was pretty nice in dkt too. Don't really remember the other weapons because I deleted the game after a bug with the shitty "AI" "helpers" prevented me from finishing a level. Also, if you're going to throw 200 crappy mechanical spiders at me, give me some explosives, not a lame sword. Among us, we could probably make a nice old skool fps, but Quake already exists so I'm not sure there is much point. What was the last really good old skool fps anyone played that isn't Quake? Painkiller was pretty oldschool.
Also: A lot of developers seem to confuse "old-skool" with "crap". Yes. "No, no, it's supposed to be shit, it's oldschool!" Defines old school as a lot of these developers seem to want to emulate. But instead they emulate the dearth of shit Doom clones that came afterwards and nobody wanted.
Some modern developers seem to think that oldschool means that they just threw the game together, that they didn't work hard for months on end and impose crunch of themselves (before that term was coined) in order to make a great game.
So they do a half-arsed job without any soul or proper balancing, then slap the name old school on it when all it deserves is 'poor'. "Oldschool" is used quite freely in certain contexts, as if the term was a definte concept, while in reality it closely relates to feelings of nostalgia, which differ from person to person and over time. If there was a new game that's 100% like Doom, it might still not get the same love and everything, simply because it's judged from a different context (now vs. 17 years in retrospect). I was actually going to make a discussion thread about this topic for some time...
And I'm not going to attempt to define it because I don't think you can. I think most FPS's stopped being oldskool after Half-Life 1 - suddenly it was all about coherent stories, and a coherent progression through a convincing environment. A lot of the abstract and arcadey elements seemed to vanish. Yeah, you had stuff like Painkiller that ignored all that, but Painkiller sadly forgot to add any interesting gameplay.
I enjoyed Painkiller, but as a game, Serious Sam is far, far better. Serious Sam doesn't have the level design complexity of Doom or Quake, either, but it does have even greater monster variety and uses that variety well, and becomes it's own game.
Really the level design and variety is a key thing always missed. I think a lot of people, especially in reviews, haven't actually played Doom, or played it years and years ago and don't actually remember what it's really like. Having said this, comparing the default maps of Doom to Quake's maps or modern user made wads like Scythe or Speed of Doom is pretty amazing. You see how unfocused and tedious a lot of Doom maps were, and how refined the craft has become :) PS The idea that 'arena combat' is oldschool is pretty funny really, because that's exactly what a modern shooter level does. Stick you in a fixed area and spawn stuff for you to kill, move to next area, repeat.
DNF felt a little old skool to me, in that the gameplay was not really all that complicated by the awful plot, and it really seemed that it was an anything goes kind of game. Almough many of the levels were super generic, there were a few gems in there such as the one set in the fast food restaurant where you are shrunk down and have to navigate many obstacles for whatever reason...
Then again, due to its ridiculous development, I think DNF also showed the difference between pre and post half-life fps games, since it seemed like they started off as a classic shooter with a few crazy elements, then later toned things down and tried to match what hl and later hl2 had done. I id make a new Quake, I doubt it will lack a story or obviously linear levels, but I hope id at least look at why we are still making levels for it 16 (argh!) years on. Finally played Bioshock and rated it 9/10. Pretty lenient because the gameplay got a bit shit in the second half of the game.
Review here: http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/bioshock.php Looks like Crysis is my game of the year for 2007 now that I've played everything. So apparently the first three "DLC" for Risen 2 are already included in the game --> and can be unlocked by a simple cheat code! While the pirate clothes are usable just like that, Steelbeard's treasure isle and the Stormisle expansion will lack the corresponding dialogue voiceovers, but they're still fully playable with subtitles. The only actual downloadable part is the dialogue files.
On the one hand, this is a case worthy of outrage similiar to the ME3 controversy, but on the other hand it's also quite a lol. I'd like to think PB did it on purpose as a sort of retort to this dick move by Deep Silver. :D Most DLC's are already inside the game and unlocked when you buy them. It's how games are made. Downloadable Content typically isn't, because games are built in a modular form and the publishers only want to pay once.
Also, making genuine DLC incurs greater costs from Microsoft / Sony. Forget the acronym and the orginal meaning of it, Bal. Bonus content (or the majority of it, anyway) for add-on packs and extra 'DLC' is often included with the assets for the original version of the game, as ijed says.
The nerd rage that ensues when gamers get wind of it is always at least vaguely amusing, but it's getting a little tired nowadays due to sheer repetition. I'm always completely astonished that the indignant spankers getting up in arms about it completely ignore the business aspects of it and can only repeat ITS ON THE DISK SO I ALREAdY PAID FOR IT again and again, like a toddler having a tantrum. I remember rumours, playing the Quake 1 demo, that the other 3 episodes were unlockable if you just had a certain "hack." Lol, as if the other episodes and extra monsters etc were included in the quake demo - why bloat the demo DL size especially in those days.
That said there is absolutely a psychological difference between "I'll sell you this cookie jar," and "well technically you already have the cookie jar, but I'll sell you a key to get into it." The latter pisses people off, I don't understand how you don't understand that Frib. People's calculation of winning, losing, and especially "having a right" or "getting screwed" are not necessarily rational. Seriously, don't give them data they can't unlock and then offer to sell them the key, it's douchey - sorry for thinking like a caveman about it heh. I know from my experience on Gears that this is not entirely true. Generally, we're working on DLC content after the game ships. Are there recent examples of companies having shipped DLC content on the original game disc?
I do understand, and you're right from an absolute perspective about the psychology behind it... but seriously, after the initial outrage, why can't people just take a step back and actually think about it?
- Buying the physical disc doesn't mean you 'own' what's on it. You're paying for the advertised content and set of features, and gaining the right to use them only in the ways set out in the EULA. I'm not saying I necessarily approve of these practices, but that's the terms and conditions that we're agreeing to when we purchase the games. - Further to the above, just because it's on the disc (or in the initial download) doesn't mean you paid for it. The extra content cost extra money to develop, and the developer/publisher wears that cost under the assumption that they can recoup (and hopefully profit) via the 'DLC' fees. - It costs a lot of money to deploy a patch or update on services such as Xbox Live. Not a trivial amount, either.. it's enough that even the big boys hesitate because the cost could cut heavily into profits or even cause them to lose money. This is why the Xbox version of TF2 didn't get all the free incremental updates that the PC version did, if you recall. For this reason, bundling the extra content on the dics makes a lot of sense. - Sometimes having the extra content is done in part for the convenience of the users. A recent example was one of the Street Fighter games, where all of the extra characters (which were to be sold as 'DLC' later on) were on the disc in part to allow players to join servers and play against those characters (rather than being locked out of the game entirely, or having to download the content just to get in the game). - Not everyone has fast/cheap/always on internet. You don't have to be a developer to understand these things, the average gamer that follows the news could connect the dots (and to their credit, they often do). I think Mass Effect 3 and Street Fighter X Tekken were the big ones causing a kerfuffle recently.
http://au.gamespot.com/news/on-disc-dlc-an-ugly-truth-says-gears-of-war-designer-6370601 That was my point, and why I used both DLC and the phrase downloadable content in the same post.
The reality has little to do with the name. Willem, I work almost exclusively on full DLC games - only done a single disc game and hopefully won't be doing more. But we usually develop the content paralell to the game, and include it in the same package. With the advent of freemium and live teams (as in, big publishers are realising they're losing a serious amount of market share), this'll be set to change soon as well. Just bought the game on steam ($9.99), and now I can't stop playing it. Also purchased Jamestown and Legend of Grimlock. Played those for a short while too.
yeah it looks cute aye. i might go back and play it one day.
legend of grimrock looks a bit shit. Is an excellent game.
The amount of variety and humour in there WITHOUT including BS driving sections or even parts that just feel broken or like a cop out, is amazing. A fantastic little survival horror-ish game by Jasper Byrne. Looks gorgeous and has some of the best audio work I've heard in a video game. Qba'g gnxr vg ng snpr inyhr.
http://www.lonesurvivor.co.uk/ http://gamersushi.com/2012/05/10/emergent-gameplay-and-persistent-worlds-the-day-z-interview/
I love the idea of this! It's a real shame I don't own Arma2 or I would probably end up playing this mod all night :) skyrim is 20$ off this weekend on steam... picked it up finally, but i'm not sure when i'll get to play it. o.o
I just got Alan Wake from GOG.com. I considered buying it in Steam's midweek madness sale but didn't make up my mind in time, then two days later GoG does an even better price with bonus content and absolutely no DRM! Bargain.
I'm underwhelmed by the gameplay, but it's a beautifully crafted world to "explore". I use the term explore loosely as there doesn't seem to be a lot of freedom. So far I'd give it 6/10, but I've only played for forty minutes or so. http://www.callofduty.com/uk/en/blackops2/videos/reveal
Why did no-one tell me this? Looks typical COD garbage from the trailer and I suspect the atmosphere and gameplay will be mostly the utter puerile drivel that COD has become famous for, but the....war machines do look well cool in it....that might even tempt me. Finally! Someone has had the vision to do a futuristic war game. I certainly can't recall any first person shooters in recent memory with sci-fi suits and gadgets, or indeed vehicles!
Yeah at least they're trying a slightly different setting, and putting horse riding in.
But... "what happens when someone steals the keys?" Seriously? That trailer is pretty fuckin cheesy. Oh and it shouldn't be called Black Ops. That's just a cash-in. I just thought the near future thing was a fair bit cooler than modern....warfare.
Edited down a bunch of video I captured during the recent stress test for GW2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuliFPFfpMM
The video is pve gameplay using the Guardian class. The game in short : Fucking amazing :) You can currently get Duke Nukem for free on your iPhone. Controls are pretty much impossible to use it seems though. Try switching to dual-stick mode if you want half a chance though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6HgC6Exs0U
I played a little bit of the original PS back in the day, this sequel looks like it going to blow everything out of the water, wow :) This time the thief http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE7m2RZOej0 shooting, and stabbing.
Torchlight 2 - Beta Update: Upcoming Weekend Stress Test
http://www.torchlight2game.com/news/2012/05/17/beta-update-upcoming-weekend-stress-test/ Path of Exile is doing regular open beta weekends apparently. I missed them all so far... :( http://www.pathofexile.com/ I'm in the Chinese city and while the sky above is very cool I seem to be wondering around a lot of small streets and box rooms, and my kill count is approx 1 pwnage per half hour of playing. Endless talking and getting lost otherwise.
Does the fun and excitement happen soon?? I've managed to collect 7 different guns (with modifications) and 3 types of grenade because it isn't an action game.
What leads you to believe that Deus Ex is an action game? The presence of guns? Guns are one path through the game but that's the not the point - you have other choices and options. Talking is part of it, sneaking another, hacking another.
If you're expecting thrill-a-second gun play, you made a poor decision. That's either sarcasm or an honest admission
Free russian "2D arcade platformer" to keep an eye on and play as soon as it has been translated: http://iichantra.ru/
Is an action a game.
It says so right here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/28050/ TBF it has guns and bad guys, and you can run and jump and shoot stuff. Sounds like an action game to me. Just saying. I mean Crysis is an action game, but you can play through a lot of that using stealth and stealth alone.... I haven't played it yet either :D
So as per usual, I'm talking about shit which I know nothing about r. o. f. l. I think the defining thing about Deus Ex, the thing that makes it fantastic, is that it is whatever game you want it to be.
I'm playing dx:hr again at the moment and I decided to go through as a social/hacking/stealth master this time around, I just got to China without killing anyone and it's been just as fun as my first time through where I was some kind of blood crazed madman :) I am trying to be a blood crazed madman. Unless I start shooting police and civilians, there really isn't much option (earlier missions were better, at least there was an option there).
Also I have done turds with more personality than "Jensen". The protagonist of the new Deus Ex puts me the fuck right off.
Havent tried it yet even though there is no greter Cyberpunk fan than I. Why does it have to be a macho moody puurdy groomedy beard shite head, why not something truly cyberpunk - gender bent/less ? Because thats taking risks and fuck that. Prolly just gonna replay a jazzed up version of the original Deus Ex instead...when I have time... which is prolly not for quite a long while. TBH I don't think any game would benefit from gender bending purely for the sake of taking a risk. Deus Ex has a story to tell (it's quite good -- no novel, but still a lot better than most action RPG's) and it would be derailed if you started throwing in questions about Jensen's sexuality or gender because that drastically effects relationships with other characters. It's only really possible to do that sort of thing in a more sandboxy RPG like Mass Effect, and such a gameplay approach would surely have ruined some of Deus Ex's excellently balanced level design by diluting the developer's sense of focus.
Deus Ex may not tick all of the traditional cyberpunk boxes, but then cyberpunk isn't as "edgy" and "underground" a concept as it once was, so perhaps it's good that people are changing it up a bit. As for whether Deus Ex is an action game or not /rambling It seems the servers are going to shutdown at the end of the month (may 31st 2012) and if you have not tried the game yet, it might be a good time to try before the servers go offline. They have also turned all the worlds to white difficulty which makes the game slightly easier. After playing dark souls I had forgotten how hard the original was, crazy boss fights but an amazing game for melee combat systems.
Mean that the game can't be played after the server are offline?
Never tried any of the series tbh, though a lot of people have recommended them. The game is certainly better with online server elements (co-op, world messages, world status) The game can be played offline, but maybe harder if you don't know what you are doing.
When you connect to the servers the world status (black-grey-white) is reset to the server average which can help with difficulty of the game. It is very easy to end up with pure black world if the player dies a lot. When you kill a boss the world shifts towards white (this is the only event when this happens) Certain places and events only unlock when the world is a certain colour. If you want to see the game, I highly recommend you try it before May 31st, the worlds are set to white (easier) and there is a lot of players around to co-op with. Because another legendary trilogy I never played is on sale: Thief.
The first 3 games for 15 USD. very interesting Podcast about diablo from rogue like people: http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2012/05/episode-35-diablo.html
only some small good thoughts actually, overall it was shallow diablo hate by people who did not seem to like them :/
I only listened to the start a bit, but none of them have played Diablo 3 at all (just one the beta, and that really doesn't count for much), and most of them haven't played much of the two other games either, so...
The one big thing that was a new consideration for me was that Diablo (at least 2 and 3) have no real goal. Your goal is to +1 your stats. A normal person will not come to a real end/finish. Actually I guess even if you are level 99/60 you do not "win" the game, correct?
And also how death is irrelevant. Made me think how different games handle death/failure differently and how one reacts to it. Eg in a rogue-like it is happening every other hour, no big deal, you probably learned something new; your next play is fresh and unique. In a FPS you reload and you have to replay (renavigate/re-aim) the last X minutes. In Diablo, if you die, it is usually because you did not +1 enough beforehand. So the solution is to grind/farm (oh god, I am talking like some annoying nerd). (Apart from finding out what immunities/resistances an enemy has in Diablo 1.) To a degree you can learn patterns for some enemies, but handling those is often still bound to your stats. Skill is pretty much irrelevant, it is persistence and time-investment that makes you a good Diablo player. Earlier when playing I noticed how in Diablo 3, if you focused any monster and hold your left button, you can move the pointer anywhere and it will still be targetting the monster. Even if said monster teleports. Ugh! So diablo 3 prettymuch boils down to squishing that mouse button down and waiting for the game to happen/progress? And then for your button subduing you may get an extra reward of a few $ to be made in the auction house...
Diablo 3 seems a funny kind of thing to me, some more business model than game went into it I think... or how Diablo3 became the antithesis of what it orignally was/the PC game culture it represented.
No moddability, always online, no lan etc. Does none of that count to what made it the game it was ? Moddability was never a big thing for Diablo as far as I remember.
And yeah in normal you can pretty much run through really easily, but on the harder difficulties you actually need to play the game. It's not an amazing game as far as gameplay goes, but it's still ok. Yes ok modability no but Blizzard was built on LAN. But this is the same old crap as with starcraft 2 nothing new then.
Good to know there is some gameplay to it then but still, tying in a real money auction house is bound to fuck around with balance and the game spirit, the stakes are changed. Now heres possibly some good news on the Cyberpunk gaming front : http://www.rpgsite.net/news/1706-teaser-image-for-new-cd-projekt-red-game-revealed Projekt Red doing a Cyberpunk RPG. This could be great :) I would add though although modability was not a big thing at the start it definately is now, Median XL, Hellfire etc for Diablo 1 and 2 are well popular mods. And this will never happen with Diablo 3 seeing how tight Blizzard are clenching their anuses around it.
I totally agree that it's very sad that modding is dying. It's not just Blizzard though, services like Onlive or other game-streaming things are the logical next step, and they will completely kill any kind of modding. :(
For the real money auction house, I hate that kind of stuff. But if they didn't do it, the chinese would do it behind their back and keep all the money. As a company it makes sense that they'd set it up themselves instead. Hope CD Projekt Reds cyberpunk game is nice yeah. The Witcher worked well because they had a great well written fantasy story to build from, hopefully they have an equivalent for this new universe. does anyone know how to get the dragon tooth in deux ex (1) without using hacking stuff? i am playing as gunslinger and will not pick or hack anything. the glass that protects it is unbreakable. i could not find the computer's login details yet.
Ah, kind guesswork. There was a message about mchow's old password being Tai-Fun. I found another message where she stated Tai-Fun and Insurgent being her favourite books. Silly unsafe passwords.
You would not want it to extend accidentally without having the space for it. Same thing as pants, really.
The only answer you need:
My Computer > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Gears Of War > Uninstall No offence to Willem (who I'm sure did cool stuff that was swamped by the crushing mediocrity of the game overall), but as far as I can remember, it's the only game I've tried and uninstalled after a few hours. Hey, that's cool. There were several million other people who DID enjoy it, so it worked out in the end. ;)
...more or less people than those who enjoy Britney Spears and Hollyoaks??
Or maybe exactly the same people! Don't get me wrong, Epic have done some brilliant things with Unreal and UTx and their engines. But GOW1 was truly dire. Hmmm what the hell is Fortnite all about then?? I really liked GOW and disappointed they didn't bring the sequels to PC. Sure I'm well and truly over cover-shooters so I wouldn't enjoy the sequels as much. GOW was so popular because everyone wasn't sick of cover-shooting at that point. But GOW was one of the best looking games of the year it was released (2006?).
In seriousness, if you don't like GoW, that's fine. If you think it's "dire", great. I think you're hilariously wrong. So ain't we both content? :)
No one is content when you keep using that arrogant smug smile at the end of every single post of yours.
if Shambler is allowed to give an opinion why is Willem smug for having his own?
So far I'm liking it, nothing groundbreaking but wasnt expecting it to be. Awesome musician. What's not to like? He's like one of the most versatile and talented producers ever. Anyone who says it's 'just noise' is probably deaf, or a Westlife fan. Fuck Westlife. Fuck them right in the Hay-hole.
I really hope you have an actual cane that you shake in the air when you say these things. That's what's happening in mind, anyway.
Er, riiiiiiiight. Whatever that is supposed to mean.
GoW is probably better than Unreal. I will give it that much. Really - if I had to pick GoW or Unreal I would play GoW. For the gameplay. And the GFX. For Shambler to listen to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVzuoc3Tah0 If anything would get Shambler interested, it would be the song that hooked me:
Skrillex - KILL EVERYBODY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21aifX0lZY Because it was the first thing that sprang to mind when I heard it.
Wait what...? I thought Skrillex was a large series of tutorials for using synthesisers. ie not something any person actually listens to, unless they're off their face on ecstasy?
Shiiiit Every thirty seconds in a given song you can see he found another little knob on his control desk to fiddle with
GOW better gameplay than Unreal?? Have you been smoking dog turd rollies?? GOW hardly had gameplay at all.
As for Skrillex, as someone who has been seriously into dance music for a long time, he is an appalling embarassment to the electric music genre (no his overblown childish screeching is nothing to do with dubstep at all). Ricky no offence or anything but your taste is in your ass. Yeah, what the hell Shambler. What kind of loser are you? Next you will say that you dont like Lady Gaga, Rebecca Black or Game of Thrones even though EVERYONE DOES! Bet you *hate* Jar-Jar Binks too. Stop having an opinion, seriously.
As for dubstep, IM kick Skrillex ass anytime at that! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0DTHEQgses He can have an opinion, sure. He just needs to accept that it's about 15 years out of date. :)
And him having an opinion doesn't mean he can't be mocked for said opinion. Especially when it's hilariously wrong. Unreal might be from 1998 but it looked magnificent for that time. I think it was the first PC game that genuinely looked good.
We're down to people are spouting ridiculous crap so they deserve to be trolled.
Oh, and before I forget Any Unreal (except for Unreal 2) > GOW (which isn't as bad as Shamb says, but still).
Music > Skrillex This is not my opinion, it is the Truth. You guys should go play some Binding of Isaac Wrath of the Lamb, it's better then all your silly games with'em polygons and such (and its music is awesome). the truth is that people have different taste, popularity is a measure for popularity and willem is holier-than-you :)
now, back to games? playing deus ex without using multitools, lockpicks or hacking is fun! it would not nearly as much fun if I could not save and reload quickly. the plasma gun is pretty useless though, I am currently waiting for the next mg to pick up. just visited the universal constructor and I got 4 augmentation containers in water basins in front me. if I dive down I get killed by electrocution. guess i will have to leave them there. found a couple of new routes already. and the running and jumping augmentation is great fun. I like how Spirit always blames me in these things. Was I the one who rudely declared GoW was "dire", which was nothing but a pure troll move? No.
Was I then the one to further troll by declaring that "Willem likes Skrillex"? No. Who was that? Oh wait, it was you! Nice. Back to games indeed. :P~~~~~ Anyhoo, if you do have GoW questions nitin I'm happy to answer. Maybe shoot me an email instead of posting here though, if you want to keep the noise ratio down.
now, back to games?
Some 200-odd posts ago I banged the drum for Lone Survivor, and I'll do it again since it very much deserves it. Watch the trailer, and if it seems like just another zombie game to you, then buy it immediately just to find out how much more there is to it. The most defining feature aka the soundwork will scare you, then soothe you, and get you pumped for the next round of dark corridors. The soundtrack is very eclectic and not just a bunch of pseudo-NIN droning. The pixel-plus aesthetic is fantastic, the game looks like a living mosaic, the screenshots don't really do it justice. It's very charming despite (or because) of the 160x120 or whatever the hell low resolution. And if you don't care about all the other aspects i.e. NPCs, sidequests, keeping your character in good mental shape, then know that there are lots of wretched abominations to deal with... and there's a gun. Neither was saying Unreal / UTx / Epic engines being brilliant.
Game Of Thrones is great tbh. Sometimes fantasy for the masses (like LOTR films) can be done really well. Now then. Witcher 2 - watching t'bird play it....is it going to make sense at any point?? He just needs to accept that it's about 15 years out of date.
Yup all opinions are rendered null and void if they were held by people in the past. Just so we can be sure about this, at what point in the past do they become invalidated? Is it a year, or a decade, or five minutes? :) And I've never listened to dance music, or 'real' dubstep.
First of all Gears of War is better than Unreal in many ways - it has better graphics (in real-time), better animation, better engine, bigger, badder maps - it's more immersive. IMO. Which is valid, because it's mine, and it's an opinion. I do not require your validation on that, and any attempts to in-validate my opinion will be ignored because I know who I am, and I know what my opinion is. Secondly 'dub-step' is a beat, not a style of music. I never said Skrillex was dubstep (though he does have some songs which are dubstep). I like Skrillex's tunes. And so do a lot of other people, though that is irrelevant to me, I only listen to it because I like it. I have listened to most of his tunes, and really like almost all of them. The ironic thing is that Full-flex is probably the most commercial-sounding song he has, and is the one with the most air play AFAIK. It's also one of my least-favourite Skrillex tune. I frankly couldn't give a flying fuck if Shambler likes Skrillex, I'll wager he hasn't listened to very much of it, because I think that technically and artistically it is superior to a lot of the crap that is going around. The dude is like 25 years old or something, he has already produced so much [good] music! Started off in a metal band too, BTW. I haven't heard of anyone shake up the world music scene as much as he has since Cobain. I mean everyone has heard of him, or heard some of his tunes. And it seems that people either really like it, or really hate it. Which is a sure sign of amazing music, if I ever heard it. I think that what he has done is really clever. He plays some very sophiticated-sounding or just generally off-the-wall 'verses' and then powerhouses into his choruses with utter, utter filth. Gets old grannys bopping to really hard music. Which is good. Skrillex is not cheesy, but has subtle humour. People who don't like the sound can atleast admit that it's well-done. I mean srsly - get a life. THAT, my friends, is all. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvx5QM8nrZA Willem: For the record. You seem to enjoy feeling superior to the often critical discussion that this message board features. Since your "I am so much above you" attitude annoys me I troll back. :)
Ricky: You listed things that GoW do better but did not mention anything that defines the game itself. Is it a better game? --------------------- There is a new Humble bundle and they finally got back to exciting games: Bastion, Amnesia, Psychonauts, Limbo, and Sword & Sworcery As usual, all on Windows, Linux and Mac. http://www.humblebundle.com/ Hope I can just download the binary for those, already bought them on steam.
jt_: Wait! Apparently they lied and it is just Wine for Limbo at least. I'll post when I know more. Since I already bought it...
I did play Unreal back in the day, on a P166MMX :)
I enjoyed it, but I just think that GoW was a deeper richer game. Mainly because in ten years gaming had moved forwards with more technology for richer games. Correct I didn't read that gibberish. "I think GOW was a deeper richer game" justifies my decision not to.
P.S. HTH nitin :) just listened to the few skrillix songs posted in this thread. honestly it doesn't seem that bad to me, although if that's his best songs, it doesn't put my in any hurry to download his albums.
however the songs did seem to have some cool beats and a bit of rhythm going on, which is a lot more than can be said about a lot of rock and metal these days which is just constant noise. they'd probably sound good in a pool bar with not so much dancing going on but just some cool grimey electronic stuff. "Yeah, sorry dude
These days. I do frequent and brutally honest cleanses of my music folder these days.
My opinion: I think Skrillex is mediocre. I also think the hardcore anti Skrillex stuff is unnecessary as the hardcore fandom. That being said, the only hardcore Skrillex fan I know used to be a hardcore nickelback fan. Perhaps instead of being the Cobain of Re HIB: Just started playing bastion now and I am blown away by how much I'm loving it already! Wasn't sure I'd be a fan of the art style but in game it is actually pretty damn charming. Totally not ready for Dark Descent though. I think I had a small stroke. Lol Willem that's about right
"sorry skrillax your music is ok, but not enough to spend the time in my precious life downloading it for free" Does nobody have standards anymore? Is this the sort of trolling that is expected to get responses these days? I mean
Who me? I don't really troll tbh, just speak my mind.
I personally don't believe in paying for music. Not when I've spent 100s of hours creating Quake levels and gave them out for free, so why does some little bitch named Rihanna for example, who's already many times a millionaire, think she deserves $30 of my hard earned money for one of her albums that she's already made millions on, and probably threw together in a few weeks. Do I earn millions of dollars with a few hours work? NO. I can understand with the smaller bands that haven't made it big, but anyone who's big makes loads of cash for concerts - which I do pay for if they actually ever come to my country - and from people who do buy their music either on itunes or cd. My money is far more valuable to me than it is to Rihanna so she can buy another pair of $100k shoes to wear once. So why should she have it just because she made some songs? And let's be honest, most of the mainstream artists these days don't write or produce their own music. They get it given to them on a plate. And even if they did, guys like Skrillax prove that it's really not that hard to make music. I'm 100% certain I could make better music than most of what's out there today, with the necessary tools and experience - but that's wasn't my chosen profession. It's really NOT that hard to make music. Ultimately, most artists don't actually deserve all the money they get just because they made some cool songs. I put just as much effort as they do into my own professional, and I don't charge millions for it. $30 for a cd is a ripoff, and I won't pay that much for any album ever again unless it's someone I really, really respect (Amon Tobin, Boards Of Canada). So that's my little rant about why I don't pay for music and don't believe I should :D with the necessary tools and experience - but that's wasn't my chosen profession. It's really NOT that hard to make music.
Yeah I think the same thing everytime I listen to Jimi Hendrix. Totally unimpressive, just give me ten years of daily practice and bleeding fingers. Oh, and a life-time of turmoil and family strife to channel into my music. Also during lunch just now I played some Limbo and god it owns so much.
Perhaps the best industrially-themed game ever made! hehe well not so much Hendrix. I guess there are plenty of artists that have spent years practising on instruments that don't deserve to get pirated.
I'm thinking more computer based production rather than actually playing a musical instrument, because that's actually mostly what I listen to. Electronic genres, hiphop. But much of the top 40 stuff these days isn't a typical band. A producer made their song. Maybe I'm wrong and there's more bands out there in the mainstream. He's not going to benefit from any of the money.
If his family didn't sell his rights, then maybe they would? If not it would be the record label that gets rich of that 40 years dead dude Hence why I wouldn't reinstall GOW if someone forced me at gunpoint, would rather listen to 5 minutes of chronic diarrhoea than a Skrillex track, and definitely pay for all the artist music I get because I believe that people deserve payment for the effort they put in to that media.
was just pondering the whole Skrillex v GoW v Unreal v Me v Shambler v Willem BS.
Quite funny really. although it didnt really fan as much as it should have. Maybe you guys have lost your trolling skills.
Ricky is trolling or just an imbecile.
Willem isn't he's just irate and misguided. I was just honestly trying to help, Nitin! I've had time to play lots of "Other PC Games" while you've been having this silly discussion, I win once again!
Starforge. I guess this is what happens when Minecraft has its way with Halo or something? Really interesting looking procedurally generated fps/sandbox thing.
I did vidyuz yo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZccMtpenqxI the player pain sound is hilarious. :D
i've been wondering how long it would take until someone made a sandbox randomly generated game. i agree about minecraft, btw. making stuff was fun, but the combat didn't really do it for me. thanks for that video. :) Now featuring Braid and Super Meat Boy... hey, don't wander off, yeah those are included in every bundle, but what's also in is the extraordinary Lone Survivor!!
http://www.humblebundle.com/ So the game will be given to everyone who bought HIB V before today as thanks for early adoption, regardless of what they paid - which means close to 400,000 people will already be guaranteed a copy!
http://superflatgames.com/wordpress/?p=841 Here's a Prince of Persia (2008) review
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/prince_of_persia.php 6/10. Shitty combat and jumping, but it's a great looking game. Ubisofts done some really overated games in 07/08 (Assassin's Creed, Vegas 2). I hope I'm not disappointed by Far Cry 2. Willem, how much involvement did you have with the Belly of the Beast levels? IMHO, the first set of levels with real atmosphere and they have a Shadar Logoth vibe to them (strange connection but thats what I felt).
...and has the guy who designed the controls on the buggy thing in Gears 2 been forbidden from ever designing controls again?
is now available on Steam for a reasonable price.
Getting it cos the original version doesnt work with Win7. Hope WoT makes it someday too. Quake scene tidbit: FrikaC is responsible for this new release. it has some bugfixes and polish from what I know. and the soundtrack is included. you can blame me for it being in ogg vorbis.
Just got back from spending five weeks in Vietnam doing serious work stuff (much as I would have liked to have spent that time playing games and arguing about fucking Skrillax and Gears of War).
Actually - on topic, I did play some games over there! Video game shops in Hanoi are hilarious - there are entire streets where every shop is selling pirated games burnt onto discs. It's just how they roll over there. You buy a dodgy chipped console, and pick up a shitload of dodgy games for about a dollar each (I think I bought about 50 of 'em at once) In fact, I don't think it would be possible to buy a legitimate game in Vietnam even if I wanted to. I played Gears of War 2 and 3 that way (split screen) with my mate (can't go online on these hooky consoles) and it was a blast! Shambler you are wrong. I've only finished 3 out of 5 Acts so far and it is a flawed game, but I've liked it. I will say this, its worth playing just for Act 3, very atmospheric and cool.
Why is "Other PC Games" in quotes anyway? Are they alleged games?
Because when I made this fucking thread it was 'Other Games', and included console games like normal rational designers might discuss. But then Shambler the Tyrannical Cocklord decided that the glorious PC race was somehow suffering by hearing that people enjoyed anything on 360 or PS3. Did you get a chance to go out and about?
Yes absolutely. I saw a lot of Hanoi (which was where I was staying). I friggin love the Old Quarter, and met so many cool people there :) As well as doing some daytrips to areas near Hanoi (ancient villages, Ninh Binh etc.), I also spent an awesome weekend on a boat in Halong Bay. During some downtime I managed to do a bit of flying around and I spent some time in the coastal cities of Hue and Hoi An (Hoi An at night is stunning), and I even flew over to Laos to spend the better part of a week chillaxing in Luang Prabang. Sadly I didn't get to see Saigon or any of the rest of the South, but that's for another time I guess. In fact I loved the country so much, I'm currently figuring out a way to stay in 'Nam in a more permanent capacity. My partner in this game business thingy I'm doing lives in Hanoi, so it would make sense for us to be in the same place. Are you from around that neck of the woods? no I'm from Australia but did visit Vietnam and Cambodia for a holiday a few years back so was just curious as to whether you got about or not and what you checked out.
I much preferred Hanoi to Saigon personally, actually most of the north to the south, but that shouldnt stop you from checking it out. Halong Bay was definitely cool, did you get to see the floating villages? And Kayak in that amazing looking water with all those limestone islands? If you do go back, I highly recommend a few days up in Sapa, great little place easily accessible by train from Hanoi. Also, I didnt get to Laos but you should alos go to Cambodia if possible, by boat along the Mekon (6 hrs) from Chau Doc to Phenom Pheng would be my recommendation, beats the bus anyday! Yeah, I did kayaking in Halong Bay, under the caves and stuff, and swimming - we got a really basic boat that didn't have a working shower, so in the morning instead of rolling out of bed and onto the deck, I climbed out the window from the bed and just fell into the sea. It was the perfect way to wake up. And yeah, the floating villages were cool, we had dinner in one of them.
I meant to do Sapa, but I was a bit pressed for time at that point, and the 8.5-hour overnight train sounded a bit gruelling. Definately next time though :} Cambodia and Thailand are definately on my list too. Finally finished playing Fear and it's first expansion (I played it a tiny bit way back when but never actually sat down and played the whole thing).
I'm having a really hard time thinking of another game that squanders so much potential, and gives such an intense feeling that the developers didn't truly understand what they were making or for that matter what made it fun. combat was fun, rest was meh? That's how I remember it anyway.
Kinn, great story! ALso, the train ride is not bad, except that the carriages are designed for midgets so you dont get much sleep really. finished and I liked it, despite numerous frustrating fights because all the combat in the game is based around the cover mode. I think it would have been better if ti was mixed up a bit with standard shooter combat and cover combat.
Looks wise its obviously quite detailed but apart from Chapter 3, none of it felt memorable. I think its because every nook and cranny and area is equally detailed, lessening the impact of set piece visuals a fair bit. Any config files I can edit to allow Mouse1 rebinding?? Or are Pirahana Bytes going deliberately for the "no chance of sale" option??
Reviewed 3 of City Interactive's 2009 shooters
Code of Honor 3: Desperate Measures 5.5/10 http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/code_of_honor3_desperate_measures.php Battlestrike: Shadow Of Stalingrad 4/10 http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/battlestrike_shadow_of_stalingrad.php Armed Forces Corp 4/10 http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/armed_forces_corp.php Bit of a chore, but all 3 games only added up to about 6-7 hours of gameplay. shittest performance ever. Tried a number of different settings but I barely get 5 FPS no matter what.
What specs? I was tempted to get it the other day on Steam but I hesitated because my machine is about 3 years old now. What are you working with?
A short free horror game in the vein of Amnesia and Penumbra. You have to find eight manuscript pages scattered throughout a dark forest while being chased by a mysterious man.
The official website http://www.parsecproductions.net is down at the moment, but the download links still work: PC Mac (~55MB) NECROS, GO PLAY THIS!!!!!! The link reminded me I should replay Yahtzee's Chzo series - which is somewhat Lone Survivorish btw.
Premise sounds a lot like this game, which was actually very cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ELRv06sa-c
GTX 465 and AMD Phenom II X$ 965 3.40 GHz with 4 GB ram.
Like yours, not exactly new but this is the first game I have had this much trouble with. 5 FPS is ridiculous. Anyone got this? And if so, can you check to see if you can rebind keys as follows:
Forward: L Mouse Backward: R Mouse Attack 1: # Attack 2: [ And in general rebind all keys?? Ta, X and I'm not downloading 11gb of game to check :D But off the top of my head, you can rebind keys. I used a 360 pad though, much easier to play that way!
You know, google and stuff :)
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/50738/can-you-rebind-the-movement-keys + Alice is cool.
+ The enemies are cool. + The environments are cool. + The jumping and dodging effects are cool. + The shrink mode and hiccuping are cool. + The lack of penalty for falling off things is very good. - The worst example of consolitis I've seen. - The umbrella bug sucks. - The controls feel like ass, the mouse speed is fucked randomly changes all the time (maybe something to do with strafing (which is also fucked) but I can't find a consistent cause) - The aiming mode that removes true 3PS is horrible. - The focus mode that removes and semblence of a control perspective is even more horrible. - The auto-saves are sometimes in utterly moronic positions. - No normal saves. - The section where you go into a retarded side-on perspective (why? truly awful), run through lots of crushing fist things, then have to fight lots of enemy in a tight space, with the autosave BEFORE the side-scrolling crushing bit is possibly the worst section of gameplay I've encountered in a game. - Completely on rails with spoonfed progression. Basically it is a pretty, stylish, shell of a game surrounding a rotten core of terribly- ported, scarcely QA-tested console turd where the charming effects and amusing enemy are drowned in a seething diarrhoeic mass of broken controls, broken autosaves, and general obtuseness. Is Tomb Raider Legends any good? just found it in a random pile of games left behind by an ex-housemate :p
its insanely awesome. the game is a straight console port. no mouse pointer on menus, so you either use the wads keys or the arrows to move and choose the options.
steam has a demo, so i say try it. before playing though, there is an option to configure controls & settings. going there is a must because otherwise you'll get xbox controller icons for inputs instead of keyboard ones. you can also get change fov and the keys themselves and etc etc. the game itself is a third person cover shooter, and its done pretty well. what i really liked is that, while it has those concrete barriers most third person cover games have, this one doesn't have them on every single fucking level. levels are linear, but fun and done well. i thought the shooting itself felt really good. controls just like gears, spacebar to run & take cover. sometimes its used as a "action" key, though F is more of the use key but whatever. console games are weird as shit. you can issue commands to your team mates, but its not a must. there are times when they'll comment on something or ask you a question and you'll have to answer and their friendship level will rise or lower depending on how you answered them. if they hate you, giving them the command to give you cover will be ignore and such. the story is very good. i really liked it. some people say its b-movie good, but i find that kind of a bad comparison. its just a good game. very japanese [made by sega], and its crazy as fuck, and funny, and serious. its one of those games that doesn't take itself too seriously [unlike most western made shooters] so its fun and crazy. wont go into details about the story because i am too shit to explain it, but watch the trailers and you'll get an idea. i think knowing the basics will be enough. i did that and i found myself getting into it more. think of it as a a mix of blade runner & battlestar galactica [robots being human like & so on]. there are insane set pieces, and really fun boss fights. while they are the usual "shoot glowing part" i didn't it find it annoying or boring. there are a few "turret" scenes, not really in a turret, but in a moving car shooting dudes out the window during a chase. even these parts i had fun, usually i hate them or i just want them to be over soon. i had no issues with it technically, except for a fps drops when i killed a boss and particles everywhere slowed it down to like 5fps, but lasted like 3/5 seconds. right now its $9.99usd on amazon.com. maybe wait for the steam summer sale to grab it if you live outside the us. took me around 12 hours to finish it. the length felt just right. not too long, not too short. i saw this trailer a few months ago - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPakeDy5mKc - and i got interested, then tried the demo and i was sold. i drank three large 32oz coffees so i am hyper as hell right now, hopefully it wont make the text too annoying. scarcely QA-tested console turd
I notice testers tend to get a lot of flak for problems still present in games, whether its a bad console port or bugs. What if these people are doing their job, yet the ones in charge are simply not fixing them for whatever reason? (Time/Cost) Just something that has been on my mind recently. Obviously the complaint is about the overall combination of the testing, the attention paid to testing feedback, and the fixes made on the basis of that feedback - or lack of any of those aspects.
In this case I presume the PC port wasn't tested at all. I wasn't pointing fingers at you specifically, it's just a thing I've noticed all over the web and that quote was an excuse to post my thoughts :p
It is a fair point. Who knows where the fault lies, all we can do is make a general point and hope those responsible are wracked with guilt and shame.
Read a few articles about how a lot of QA departments in studios are treated like complete shit, ie not considered 'proper' employees, kept in seperate buildings and stuff.
and that is: whoever gets blamed for a game's shortcomings, will always pass that blame onto someone else.
Internally, the blame will be energetically punted up and down the chain of command, and sideways into other departments - until it ultimately runs out of momentum and rolls quietly towards the direction of the publishers. The devs - now with their hands washed of it - get to their feet, pat each other on the backs, and happily start the next project - where they proceed to either make the same mistakes all over again, or a bunch of entirely new mistakes. Often both. (Whatever the case, it's never QA's fault though). Reviewed Darkest Of Days from 2009.
6.5/10, definitely under-rated with a 51% on metacritic. http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/darkest_of_days.php Was really looking forward to it, but it turned out to be shit. Seriously, fuck that game. Glad I didn't buy it full price - seems almost everything on Steam gets a 50% discount after 2-3 months on sale, and I'm sick of buying full price. Managed to beat it, but it was a real trial to get through for the following reasons:
Rockstar thought they were making a fucking film. Rockstar are usually pretty good at putting a good story into their games whilst keeping the player in control most of the time. Here I was in control about 30% of the time if you ignore all the time I spent replaying the same sections because I died. Far too many cutscenes, far too many times when the controls are removed from you just to show a little fucking animation when it could have easily been part of the gameplay, and to make matters worse, you can't skip cutscenes half the time, or at least it seems rather inconsistent. The gameplay is worse than Max Payne 2. I loved Max Payne 2, which felt to me like Remedy had taken the things people didn't like about the first game, and improved them no end, whilst adding layers of polish to everything else too. Rockstar clearly knew the source material well, as the gameplay doesn't stray far from the original, aside from the addition of cover (not very well implemented, however), but the things they removed, such as molotovs and grenades, spoil the game somewhat. It's the most on-rails game I've played in ages. There is almost no freedom whatsoever. There are locked doors everywhere, and those that aren't usually get locked by some kind of mischievous door locking goblin after you pass through them in a fairly non-subtle way. Other scenes just kill you or your partner the instant you go to some area rockstar didn't want you to go to, which makes the game feel like they put up invisible walls everywhere. Maybe I'm just super shit, but it's really frustrating. Enemies are constantly popping out from corners you don't expect and chipping away at your health, and death comes quickly even if you are turtling. Dying is annoying because there is almost always some little cutscene at the checkpoint that you must watch before you can get back into the action. If you die a lot, the game restarts you with more painkillers and ammo, which is nice. I wouldn't have finished it if it didn't. Sometimes enemies die really easily, sometimes they just keep getting up. They definitely go down sooner if you shoot them in the head, but sometimes it seems like they are wearing layered helmets, because they just don't stay down. It feels shit when that happens. Again, could be that I'm just shit. The game keeps auto selecting the pistol. The pistol is a really useful weapon, but you don't want to use it ALL the time. Usually when you come out of a cutscene, even a small one, the game has switched your weapon to the pistol. If you haven't noticed it can be really bloody annoying. Why they did this I don't know, but it seems like a shit design choice. Bullet time isn't really any fun any more. Just feels slow and shit. There are some scripted events using bullet time that are kind of cool, but I think I would have been happy just playing normal speed. Bullet time does make the game easier though, so I used it a fair bit in the sections where I was dying a lot. There is some kind of shitty full screen visual effect going on throughout the entire game that you can't disable. It's a kind of colour shift thing that I guess is meant to emphasise Max's whisky and pain killer addled world. It gets annoying pretty damn quick. The camera work in the cutscenes is often really over the top too. It seems a bit buggy. Sometimes you can't easily pick up weapons, sometimes shit floats in the air, sometimes bad guys spaz out and sometimes the camera sucks and you can't see where you are aiming because Max blocks the crosshair. It's not too bad I guess, but there were a few things that spoiled my "enjoyment" somewhat. I already wasted over 10 hours of my life playing the game, so I will stop wasting more on it and wrap up my little mini rant with don't bother unless you are a big Max Payne fan and want to follow the story. I AM a big Max Payne fan and I simply don't consider this related to "my" Max Payne at all.
Sounds like a lot of issues that are oh-too-familiar with modern gaming. Lots of really fucking bloody obvious issues that would have been so easy to fix/avoid/not bloody put in in the first place, but games devs seems to have a habit of deliberately fucking things up when it would actually be easier not to do so.
Autosave points just before lengthy cutscenes = games devs should be ground down into dog food. Autosave points just before lengthy cutscenes
I'm astounded that this still gets done. I mean, people have complained about this kind of thing since the dawn of cutscenes. "Autosave points just before lengthy cutscenes"
This is usually done for several reasons :- * The cinematic devteam want to have a save / spawnpoint close to where the cinematic is for testing and tweaking. * Often the skip function for cinematic's is never added (or very late in development) because (often) the director wants the players to watch every cinematic. Think about the devs for a minute, they have to watch these things as well, except 100s of times! * Cinematics cost a lot of time and resources to create and some people feel the players should see them all! Crazy attitude That is a list of why cutscenes should NOT be added to a game imo :)
If players want to skip the cinematics, then the cinematics are either boring or the game has failed to make the player care for the story in any way. Funny that (imo) some of the best games with the best stories had no cutscenes. Half-Life series etc. Funny that (imo) some of the best games with the best stories had no cutscenes. Half-Life series etc.
Which makes me wonder: if they are so good, why are not most games like this? I get annoyed when, after sitting through all the loading logos, I then get the game logo with a "press any key" to get to the menu. WTF is the point of this? I know what game I'm playing, just put the logo on the menu! Which it usually is as well anyway. Then if I want to quit the game I get taken back to "press any key" to get to the menu so I can quit!
It's like turning on your television and you get a "press any button" before you're allowed to watch anything. No one would buy that tv. I then get the game logo with a "press any key" to get to the menu. WTF is the point of this?
Yup, another head scratcher for me. It's just one more extra click for nothing. There are a lot of bizarre common practice things in games these days. I just don't understand what they accomplish other than mild annoyance. This is a technical requirement from both microsoft and sony. They won't let a game pass certification without it.
Why they want it like that I don't know. Also; Christ, that is the most insignificant fucking pointless detail ever to whine about. Haha yeah but it's just so pointless. At least with a save before a cutscene it's there so they can jam their cutscenes down your throat. It's done for a reason.
Anyway, review of Devil May Cry 4 (which was pretty bad at it's "press any key" and menu design, and overuse of cutscenes). But I enjoyed it 7/10. http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/devil_may_cry4.php I bet there's a really subtle reason behind that. Like it confirms that the player actually does have a controller connected or something, on account of user testing having shown that this was something people did on a surprisingly frequent basis.
But for crying out loud remove it from the PC version of a game. A = Time it takes to whinge on an internet forum about the "press any key screen".
B = Time it takes to actually press the fucking key. Anyone wanna guesstimate what A/B equals? I can't believe what I'm reading. Are people here actually defending a useless start screen? Something that serves no purpose in a pc game other than adding another layer between you and the part of the game that you actually play.
And, Kinn, in your equation, B should read like this: B = Time it takes to actually press the fucking key * time it takes for the useless start screen to load * number of times you play the game * number of games you play that have a useless start screen. Are people here actually defending a useless start screen?
If someone complains, someone will defend, I guess. It must be like an internet rule or something. Ah the days of old Playstation games where loading menus took fucking ages, so those extra title screens were just there to piss you off when you left the room to make a cup of tea or something.
These days, far far more things to whine about than that shit. I just got back to playing some Hard Reset and holy shit you move so fucking slowly. Feels like you're waist deep in water. And you can sprint for about a second at a time (and the speed boost is shit). Pretty game though. Get a trainer that has a sprint cheat ZQF. It might be cheating, but it'll make the game more fun. I can't stand slow walking games.
make it non-skippable first time through if you want players to see the hard work and money, make it skippable for repeat attempts.
had this feature, except it seemed to work for some cutscenes but not others. No idea why.
what if players don't actually give a shit about your fucking story?
I actually liked the Max Payne story (well, it was ok), but in other games I have not given a rat's ass about the story and couldn't skip the cutscenes. I don't give a shit about the work that went into them, I just want to play the game. If there is some important info in the cutscene, then maybe it's ok to stop me from skipping it the first time, but I'm paying to play the game, not watch cutscenes, so any artificial restrictions on skipping cutscenes (non-technical, such as loading in the background) should be removed. scroll up to read how I played hl2 and how their method of story telling is fucking stupid (to me).
This an old game that was re-released as a WiiWare title, and now has a proper PC release.
It's an old school metroid-vania style platformer, very hard and unforgiving, it's pretty good. Anyone who likes those type of games should check it out. http://playism-games.com/games/lamulana/ RPS review : http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/16/it-belongs-on-a-pc-la-mulana-remake/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RockPaperShotgun+%28Rock%2C+Paper%2C+Shotgun%29&utm_content=Netvibes http://www.moddb.com/mods/nightmare-house-2
This was released in 2010 but I missed it. Holy shit it's good! Very high quality production value, great atmosphere and good pacing. The final confrontation is brilliant. It'll take you around 3+ hours to finish, I enjoyed every minute. Finished Hard Reset. There is a lot wrong with the game, but it has nugget of awesomeness that you need to learn to tap and then it becomes a really rather unique feeling game. It promotes rapid weapon switching, weapon combos and crowd control over pure dodging or cover use (though it does still have a lot of both).
A bit like Fear in that I could natter endlessly about all the cool stuff the game has as well as really bizarre or annoying design choices. Hard Reset pushes an FPS into even more classic arcade territory, and in fact I think doesn't go far enough. It also has surprisingly oldschool level design. Though it doesn't place enemies in specific positions so much, it does have linear but interconnected environments that flow around, and you feel like each space has interesting geometry and you get to see each area from multiple angles. Basically, love it or hate it game in the end. I had to play through it once to realise what weapons were worth buying and using and what to not waste points on (fuck RPG upgrade paths, especially when you limit my choices early on anyway). After that, second play through, ton of fun. PS it's had some free DLC so the game is much longer than it was at release. Someone told me where the original ending was and I got why people complained it was so short cause damn, sudden final boss out of nowhere.
Apparently, Samuel 'Kaiser' Villarreal wasn't so happy with his and others' work on the older Doom 64 TC, Absolution, so he went ahead and coded a custom Doom Engine from scratch for emulating the physics of the 64 port as closely as possible. Even though there are still a few graphical glitches here and there, it looks like he accomplished what he had set out to do. Now it's possible to play Midway's Doom II sequel in its entirety in hi-res and with mouselook support. I didn't know that this game was much more than a port - it comes with it's own megawad and uses all new assets, i.e. new sprites, textures, sound, music and all. Starts off a little slow but progressively gets better. The most striking thing is that it has a very different atmosphere than the source game, mostly owing to a bleaker texture set, gloomy colored lighting and the ambient score. I'm halfway through the pack and enjoying it immensely. Definitely recommended.
Get the 'Kex Engine' at from Kaiser's website and find yourself a rom of Doom 64 (which is needed for creating an IWAD from): http://doom64ex.wordpress.com Oh, and don't worry about the screenshots on the Media page - you can toggle bilinear filtering off. Yup it's definately a problem with the level design. Although it's flow is better it's still very similar to Serious Sam or Painkiller.
You'll get the odd area with some monsters placed on a higher platform sniping at you or something but usually it's just a flat room with obstacles. It's particularly jarring when you're surrounded by so many tall buildings (or so high up you can't see the ground) but you never look up except to gaze at the skybox. I never would have thought it'd be possible to make a game about shooting robots with big guns mind numbingly boring, but the Hard Reset guys really pulled out all the stops to achieve it. Based on the demo, at least -- maybe they're saving the best for last, but I'm not paying to find out.
Yeah until you get some weapon upgrades the game is pretty bloody tedious, and without the weapons to play with the game is so dull compared to, say, Serious Sam, which is fun when given just a shotgun.
In fact the hardest part of the game on high difficulty is probably level three or so, as it's the combination of tough enemies and few weapon upgrades, which is stupid. It is a pretty crap video though, but I was having such shit luck trying to record something more interesting as my PC just collapsed with fraps + bigger fights :p I like twitch shooters, but Warsow just looks a little TOO fast to me. Dizzying.
Hard Reset looks okay. Level design looked average. I'd play it still. Is it just me or is there a major lack of shooters and actions games on the PC so far this year? I might make a list... Well that was 4 hours wasted lol. I updated my list of games to play:
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/gamestoget.php Goes by year, worst to best as rated on metacritic. 2012 does indeed look pathetic so far. Even if the number of play-worthy releases doubles, it still won't be close to 2011 amount. Was 2011 the best year for PC gaming? What's also interesting is the severe lack of first person shooters, and even third person. They're barely coming out now, not helped when critics give great games like Rage an average score. The vast majority of PC games seem to be strategy and adventure. Who the hell plays all these strategy games? Oh and these are almost all first or third person. I don't play platformers or top down Anyone ever play that?
The trailer looks kinda mint. 25% off on Steam. I'm semi-tempted. All these new Painkiller games are really just DLC's and expansion packs. At least the new one is only $10 on Steam. Although I wouldn't pay that, it doesn't look good enough for any money when it's only got 5 levels (and 4000 enemies wtf).
There's a Painkiller remake in progress too. The guys behind Necrovision are making it. Fuck knows why, all the crap Painkiller since the original must have ruined that franchise by now. I loved Fallout 3. 9.5/10.
Here's a review of the game, all DLC's and some worthwhile mods mentioned. http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/fallout3_goty.php I've just noticed that Rogue Trooper on your review list does not have a release month attached to it. It is April of 2006.
Looks cool. Not really into sonic type platformers though. Too 90s.
But if they did a fps without that twist idea between dark/light - awesome!!!! http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/576713578096390435/24BE86AE8ED9F85125FFFB234C705CB71DA1F14C/
It's really pretty crazy just how much better this game can look after you tweak the shit out of it with mods and by butchering the hidden NVIDIA profile settings, compared to the utter mess that is the state of "as shipped by developer". http://sharpenyouraxes.com/
Dead Island mod turned into a game. Two environment screenshots look very nice. Long way off of course. looks awesome. 2 screenshots and a basic blog for a website isn't a huge start, but could be good if it's finished, one day
And this:
http://www.bethblog.com/2012/07/13/a-look-at-dishonoreds-many-ui-options/ Means I will definitely buy it, for that reason alone. Cause you like Dutch menus? God, that looks painful. I bet it will be just as awkward to use as the Rage one.
Here's a review of Damnation: http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/damnation.php
Not as bad as it's made out, I gave a 6/10. Bit of chore in the end though. Anyone played Lord of the Rings: Conquest? I started the first level (training failed because it wouldn't allow me to pass the combo test), seemed to be pretty shitty gameplay where I died three times - the last time being because the enemies wouldn't move through the fucking door and I couldn't kill them due to a weird invisible wall, and suddenly it says I've failed the mission. No checkpoints and having to start the entire level over each time as well, so I guess it's a fucking shitty game. Might try again in god mode, the levels looked pretty cool. Been playing lots of Fallout 3 mods as well. Cube and Orion's game definitely worth playing. Lots of crap that doesn't work though. I've still got several more of the top ones to try. I really want to play http://www.nullpointer.co.uk/content/in-ruins/
Obviously no one played LOTR Conquest then, lol.
Here's a review of Avatar: http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/avatar.php Pretty good actually, 7.5/10. Bit easy and a bit boring after 20 hours. Visuals are awesome though (modified CryEngine). Two years back when commenting on BL1 in this thread, I called it Bordomlands and criticized a perceived pointlessness of it all. However, I now realize I had just played it 'wrong'. It's was on singleplayer, but these games are focused on coop and that's where they shine.
I played through the whole of BL2 on coop with le Bal and rebb, rather excessively even, and it was a lot of fun, very enjoyable. It felt like good oldschool FPS action with strong Rage vibe in places, mixed with a crazy WoW-type of looting and item stats mess. The graphics are cool, fairly crisp and a unique touch to the style, which is important, because otherwise many levels would look like the same old ugly brown from other shooters. Story, characters and humor are cheesy and dumb, but - and that's a major difference between my two BL experiences - on coop it doesn't matter. Most of the time, we didn't even care for any specifics as long as we had stuff to shoot. I regret not having had a chance to play BL1 the same way - it surely would have left a much different impression. This time, however, it seemed like a right place/right time situation, because it's new and we were all psyched for it. Can't underestimate the value of a good coop team, which wouldn't be possible or be as much fun with random strangers. So GG guys and see you for True Vault Hunter Mode.. ugh :D http://f1classic.your-talk.com/t11616p315-screenies-ready-to-go
lets drive online, icq/qip 259689233 Haven't played so much yet, but it's looking really good so far.
But I dunno for you Shambler, if I remember correctly you couldn't get into Deus Ex right? Cause it's a bit similar. Yeah of course I got into Deus Ex, I just got a bit bored in Shanghai when there wasn't enough MURDERATION for my chosen gameplay path.
I meant Deus Ex in general really. The first and third game are quite different, but the gameplay type is definitely fairly similar.
Shambler, well Dishonored is a bit like that, you can play fairly violent, or go more slowly and stealthy. I haven't come across so much town-type quests stuff like in Shanghai in DXHR thought, feels more like lots of action missions with minimal story development in between, but I've only played ~2 hours. Game rocks.
There are tons of people to talk to, books to read, and storyline to uncover, if you want to, or you can just head to the next level and murder everything in your way. I knew it looked nice from screenshots but holy fuckballs there is some seriously impressive visual design going on here. They absolutely nailed the London look. The levels are absolutely gigantic too, after 6 hours of play I've only assassinated 1 target, and spent the rest of the time just exploring around the place collecting all the things. Shit's good. I don't understand all the whining about Dishonored's texture resolution, it looks fine to me (it's not crazy detailed, but it gets the job done).
Is this a bug or something? The textures look super-low res....the rest of the gfx are fine, lighting is good etc...
From what I saw of the game, the seemingly lower-res textures look like they're actually part of its style. A slightly surreal semi-realism vibe or something like that.
If it bothers you, see if forcing 16xAF in your nvidia/ATI control panel improves the visuals to your liking. much faster game loading , that lost episode gameplay reminds that old classic doom
a bit bright though, not sure about new pda interface After beating it on normal and instantly starting a new "Classic Ironman" game (essentially hard difficulty, and only 1 save that is automatically updated whenever you do anything, so no rewinds!) it's very easy to recommend this. I've been utterly hooked since my first play session :)
It's not perfect. There are lots of nagging bugs with things like camera views, geometry popping etc and a lot of the base management menu's suffer from consolitis, but the core turn based strategy gameplay is extremely well put together and the game has that deadly "just one more mission" impulse that has you lose all track of time... Path of Exile act 3 screenshot! http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/gen/image/YTozOntpOjA7aTowO2k6/MjthOjI6e3M6MjoiaWQi/O2k6MjY1O3M6NDoic2l6/ZSI7czo0OiJvcmlnIjt9/aToxO2k6NDt9/1712aa4a86/act3_screenshot6.jpg
Can't recommend this highly enough if you felt let down by Diablo 3. I really really liked COD: Modern Warfare (in fact I think it's easily one of top3 FPS games ever made), but I have been really dissapointed with MW2 and MW3 (each one while very enjoyable in SP, got progressively worse in MP). This made me steer clear of Black Ops when it originally came out about 2 years ago.
Being curious about Black Ops 2 (coming out in 3 weeks), I finally broke down and bought the original Black Ops on the cheap. Boy am I glad I did. The single player is standard ridiculously over-the-top crazy COD fare (which I very much love), but goddamn they didn't fuck up the MP in this one! It's actually really really good and lives up to the high standards set by MW1. From earlier in this thread:
HOLY SHIT I'M DRIVING A CAR NOW oh okay i've jumped out and stabbed a russian in the tit AND NOW I'M ON A BIKE and i've got to shoot down a nuke? With a crossbow? THE PRESIDENT IS ON FIRE!! What the fuck is happening? I think I've been double crossed. By myself? *slaps table repeatedly*
// Involuntary non-verbal communication from a man sat completely alone. ...if they used a different name maybe they wouldn't get spotted?
(You guessed it, I'm bored) http://f1classic.your-talk.com/t11616p375-screenies-ready-to-go
forgot reg last time, login is petrolhead secrettoken pages 24, 25, 26 my screenshots Cool trailer from Outlast, survival horror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x3oJQ6uUA8&feature=g-high-u What happens to game devs when cocaine fries their brains dead: http://www.theastronauts.com/2012/11/why-we-need-to-kill-gameplay-to-make-better-games/
I think the point he was trying to make is actually similar to the classic rule of: before you make a game, you need to make a toy; i.e. something that's fun to fuck around with freely, but then you layer the gamey stuff (challenge/goals/contraints etc.) on top of that.
He just forgot to add the second part I think. Or maybe he just really likes cutscenes. I dunno. What he is advocating for is 'interactive stories', which I think is fine in the realm of entertainment media and I'm sure there is a market for who want that sort of thing... just don't try and call it a game if you want to push the gameplay to the side.
Legend of Dungeon
Check this kickstarter shit out. Pixel art rogue-like, but it's got swanky normal-maps and lighting. Looks rad. anyone wants a dota2 beta key? i don't care for it, but i got one.
i'll send you an email if you have it written on your account. Is a high quality HL2-EP2 mod that you definitely want to have a look at if you like "The Thing".
Very much a horror puzzle/exploration game, only played about an hour of it and its excellent. Very creepy with tense moments. No combat so far but never say never. http://www.moddb.com/mods/black-snow/ here's the key if anyone wants it. being dota2, you need steam to activate it.
VVQXJ-DIKHN-WF0D2 The textures still suck asstacularly. But that's about it.....the rest rocks so far.
They've blended what Crysis etc did so well with making gameplay fun, with some of the stuff that worked in Deus Ex (but not so anally retentive) - dump you in a mission with a million paths through it, give you lots of toys to play with (including movement options on the fly) and let you get on with it. It's the polar opposite of the ghastly interactive turd hand-holding military-shouting bore-a-thons of COD - actually allowing a player to PLAY a game and making most of the options fairly natural to do so. Blink is bloody awesome and one of the most fun things in FPS gaming for a long time. Aside from that it does exactly what it promises on the tin (of pickled hagfish). Just watch the Youtube videos and play the damn thing. Seeing rogues mentionned just wanna bring to attention for anyone that missed it DoomRL is available with puuurdy tiles since Feb this year : http://doom.chaosforge.org/
Man this is some old shit :)
Oh man those logs are still around. Hilarious stuff indeed On topic Hawken is cool, Blacklight Retribution is even better. Cool stuff all this. No time to play much though. Path of Exile act 3 screenshot http://www.pathofexile.com/public/chris/LunarisTemple.jpg
although who knows when I'll play them.
Mark of the Ninja Driver San Fransisco Fallout New Vegas Darksiders II The Witcher II Batman Arkham City I just finished Darksiders 2 the other day. I preferred the original in just about every way. It's not a bad game but has a lot of excess baggage and takes forever to get going. It felt like the first 15 hours (!!!?) were the tutorial.
Arkham City is next. Started it the other day and I'm totally hooked. Fantastic so far. I have a few problems with the combat system, mainly because I suck at using gamepads and usually am not quick enough to press buttons (im looking at the pad to see where the buttons are lol) before getting hit :P started Mark of the Ninja, quite cool and there is nothign really wrong with it but I have rediscovered that stealth games arent really my cup of tea (will be interesting to see how I find Sock's ITS mod).
Love the art style and atmospehere though. played it a bit on a friend's ps3. Didn't like it at all, because it's such a new-style xbox-kid game, with sequences, big boobs, no challenge gameplay, dumbed-down controls, etc. Win all fights by pressing just triangle (I heard it gets 'harder' later).
also, ham. They will be the death of my newly acquired credit. So far, I've bought Hard Reset, Skyrim + DLC, Serious Sam Gold Pack, Serious Sam 3 BFE, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution + DLC. Hopefully nothing else that's good goes on sale.
I've got a growing list of games I'll probably never play.
Like it's a service I'm paying for :( I just picked up FTL, Hotline Miami, Rage expansion, Home, Awesomenauts, and preordered Company of Heroes2. Got some gaming to do!
Only played FTL so far, I love roguelikes, and this also reminds me of another favorite Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (and it's followup Weird Worlds), which was designed by Iikka Keranen. CoH2 is what I'm mostly looking forward to (when it comes out). The first was my favorite RTS game for a long time, because it made cover and supply lines relevant again like old turn based wargames. Also, cuz I like cool tank battles. Seriously this game is really well made, and looks beautiful. The combat is fun, the island is fun to explore. The guns feel good, the RPG elements are well executed. There are loads of different types of animals running around, and they feel like a good challenge to hunt. Flying around on hang gliders is wicked-awesome. I was tearing my hair out for ages because of the random crashing, but I found a great fix that works. So if anyone else is having the problem of CTDs, BSODs or hard-locks, here is a link to the fix (it's dead easy)(The first one):
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/739489-PC-Win7-8-vista-Solutions-gt-Far-Cry3-Has-Stopped-Responding A friend of mine told me about the DLC for DS and I bought it for the PS3. I think only this game could get away with hiding the DLC half way through the game and making it unlockable by doing unrelated tasks on opposite sides of the world! It took me ages to complete all of the prerequisites and then actually find the entrance!
The DLC is part of a patch (1.07) which you unlock which is a bit sneaky because I did not want to patch the game. As always the developer has nerfed items to try and balance the MP which is stupid because most MP players know all the tricks (low level runs, item swapping) already. One interesting idea they have done is take an existing part of the world and create a reason (background story) to go back in time so they can re-use the existing assets! Most of the landscape is taken from the original game but they have added slightly modified new monsters. The boss fights are crazy hard, especially the first one to even start the DLC content. Luckily the first boss is right next to a bonfire so when you die (20 million times) you don't have far to run back. Some of the later bosses are similar to Demons Souls which is nice because some boss formats do work really. They even allow existing items (Dragon Slumber ring) to work properly and do not mysteriously make them not work because it interferes with some of the boss mechanics. As always DS really shines with the boss fights and how they set up all the different stages so that each boss feels different. (I know from personal experience that boss fights can often take the same amount of time to create as an actual level!) The way they visually defined all of the different moves so if you are observant you will know what move is coming next, makes the fight satisfying because it feels like you are learning new tricks. One thing that is such a cool feature of DS is the ability to cut various parts of bosses off (during the fight) and claim them as new weapons. Working out how to do that is often tricky and actually coaxing the boss into certain move types to get access to body area can be frustrating and very difficult. Overall a nice addition to the DS universe (especially the background story) and the extra items you find are very cool because they can be upgraded to a much higher standard than the original one's. Got both Weird Worlds and FTL... they're both like crack, and have stopped me playing other games.
FTL is slightly better than Weird Worlds - I think for the greater sense of purpose. Both would benefit from expanded missions though. http://www.piratehearts.com/blog/games/you-have-to-win-the-game/ is a really nice free (of cost) platform in CRT style.
I bought Killing Floor (omg yes I payed for a game) ages ago already. Now its unplayable due to bug with German nogore pussyversion which I am bound to my Steam account being Germany localized. Zeds are invisible.
Cock. Wanted to get some Coop action on last W/E Even without a bug I hate the shit out of no gore versions. Any other DE residents get around this somehow on Steam ? This works on my German Steam account ?
Maybe I should create a UK steam account from UK VPN with bollocks UK address. A game purchased on a German or Australian IP will be a cut/low violence version (if there is one), even if you install it from elsewhere. If you get a game from another country/IP or as a gift from someone in a non-restricted region, it'll be uncut regardless of which country you're in.
As for Killing Floor, apparently there's a trick you can give a try: open the game's config file in the corresponding Steam folder and add bdevgoreoverride=True in the [Engine.Engine] section. Awesome thanks Negke the bdevgoreoverride=True works lovely.
Also found a working clot only mutator. Hordes of easy fickle rotten flesh to mow down gleefully! New game from Dustforce guys sounds pretty interesting, sounds like a speedrunning game.
http://hitboxteam.com/mystery-and-mastery but let's see. I sense failure: The one screenshot they're showing is a box room with no vertical variation :-). Also, "Reach the top of a tower" doesn't seem to be interesting... even to me.
The previous game sure demanded some dexterity to play right, so making something good like this seems up their alley.
And the visual style looks good, a bit of a Zelda Windwaker feel. I wonder if they will add occulus rift support!
speaking of which, is anyone planning to get one early? They have announced developer versions for people who DIDN'T sponsor the kickstarter will be available to pre-order soon. http://www.oculusvr.com/ Anyone planning on doing a Quake port? :) :) ;) so I guess it will be $300 or less.
Seems fairly reasonable. If they can get it down further I will definitely get one, but even at $300 I'm probably in assuming there is reasonable game support (or if someone does a port of Quake) and it's easy to dev for. <Chillaxingbler> dragonborn dlc out next month whoot woot
<Chillaxingbler> new area to explore Hi I need some advice. I want a game to play on my laptop when I'm away from my desktop.
I've got a fairly basic / small laptop and I generally don't like the keyboard / small mouse with it, so I need something that is not too twitchy / super-fine-control based, i.e. probably not a normal action FPS. I was thinking something like an older RPG or slower strategy game. Not sure what really. Fantasy/sci-fi definitely. No side-scrollers or boring real-world-sims. Any ideas?? Mark of the Ninja, really liked it once I got the hang of the stealth mechanics. Cool story, cool atmosphere and nice non linear gameplay.
How powerful is the lappy?
Will it run XCom? Have you layed XCom - I liked it, but it's turn-based which makes life easier if you have a slighly less powerful rig I guess.... I'd recommend XCom to anyone who hasn't yet played it. Fallout 1 & 2 - could have potential.
XCom - similarly, could have potential. Was wondering about Diablo3, Dungeon Siege (2), or similar? Grimrock looks like shit. Gothics maybe too control-based. Computer is i3 2.27GHz / 3 GB Ram / integrated graphics 128 Mb - 1 Gb memory. is totally I game I would recommend on a laptop. Its very replayable and would run on a calculator these days.
Torchlight 2 is optimized for laptop use I believe, and is a pretty fun game. Willl look into it....Torchlight2 sounds good to me, I remember looking at that.
What else? Ultima8 sounds a bit old? Prefer less mouse usage than more tbh. FTL - not twitchy at all but a solid roguelike space captain thing. http://www.ftlgame.com/
Here's a point and click adventure: http://www.sizefivegames.com/games/ben-there-dan-that/ Give Hotline Miami a try if you've got a mouse. Grimrock is pretty good actually. Need to see if they've released any new content since I last played. And there's always minecraft, if building scale models of monuments out of matchsticks is your thing. Sounds like it's become more interesting and adventury in recent times though. Minecraft can be fun if you set yourself limits to how you play. Like survive 5 nights without building a shelter or simply just keep walking east and see how long you can survive without building shelter or hiding up poles! Obviously if you die, then game over
Forgot to mention, needs to be offline-compatible.
What are the chances of me being able to install steam on my laptop with the same account and run it offline?? Hmmm?? FTL and Minecraft don't appeal. http://www.puppygames.net/
http://www.introversion.co.uk/ and there's always GOG.com Steam should be able to run anything in offline mode. I haven't had any trouble with it anyway. Play Path of Exile's Open Beta on Jan 23.
Path of Exile will enter Open Beta on January 23, 2013. This is also when the last ever character wipe occurs! Path of Exile is an online Action RPG being developed by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand. Created by a group of hardcore gamers, Path of Exile was designed with an emphasis on character customisation, a strong item economy and deep game systems. View the new trailer here! ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDFO4E5OKSE ) The Open Beta version of the game (patch 0.10.0) introduces hundreds of changes including Path of Exile's third act - the City of Sarn. Act III includes 8 new tilesets, 18 completely new monster types and over 90 monster variations. When the Open Beta starts, all characters will be reverted back to level 1 so that it's a fresh playing field. After that point, we will never wipe characters or items again. In April 2012 we launched a crowdfunding campaign on our website where users can purchase Supporter Packs with prices ranging from $10 to $1000. So far the community has contributed US$2.2m to the development of the game. This support has allowed us to grow our team and to polish Act III to a level we are very proud of. Thank you so much for the generous support! We'd love to encourage you to join us for the Open Beta of Path of Exile. You've already got an account (the email address is the one that this email was sent to), so just download the game client from www.pathofexile.com and join us on January 23! Last chance to buy Kiwi Supporter Packs. The Closed Beta "Kiwi" packs are only available for a few more days! If you'd like to receive an exclusive Kiwi bird pet, a Closed Beta supporter forum title or the best value option for designing a custom Unique Item, now is your last chance! We're changing how our supporter packs work once we enter Open Beta, and the existing ones are only available until then. We've put together a YouTube video explaining what each pack entitles you to. We'd like to thank our community for their continued support - it's helping us grow Path of Exile into the game we've always wanted to play ourselves. What is exciting to look forward to?? Preferably in the FPS/3PS/RPG/RTS genres...
Crysis 3 (?) Bioshock Infinite SC2: Heart Of The Swarm Skyrim: Dragonborn DLC Dishonoured: unnamed DLCs Dead Space 3 Tomb Raider reboot??? Googling reveals a lot of turd and not that many others?? I played the last Tomb Raider game and was very pleasantly surprised. It was one of the few games which I finished, and it was great fun. So I'm most excited about the new Tomb Raider game.
Real-world warfare games don't count i.e. the glut of Modern Shitefuck: Bolloxfield 4 etc etc....except since COH is RTS then that's fine. I did try the original COH and it seemed okay but I doubt it will drag me away from HOTS...
Old school RPG, fantasy, easy controls, ability to pause anytime during combat and issue orders by pressing Space (BG style):
Drakensang: The Dark Eye. Great game IMO, more fairytale like than grimey and dirty, but well made. Don't confuse with Drakensang Online which is a MMO. The original Drakensang is a singleplayer RPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate, only in 3D. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (not technically a Tomb Raider title, more a sort of isometric puzzle offshoot that generally got relatively good marks). Both of those have demos. Also coming: Amnesia - A Machine for Pigs, Aliens- Colonial Marines (probably best not to expect much), GTA 5
Aliens : CM
Survarium Metro : last light Bioshock Infinite Batman Arkham xxx (whatever it will be) Half-L.. oh who am I kidding. Aliens:CM will probably end up being very disappointing for me because it looks like a very standard CoD style fps set in the Aliens universe rather than a tactical squad based based fps. We will see I guess. The "press X to survive alien attack" bullshit can fuck right off... meh. Survarium and Metro are obvious choices. More tasty post-disaster soviet wastelands to explore :) Metro 2033 had its share of issues but it was one hell of an atmospheric game. Bioshock infinite just looks fun. The combat reminds me of quake quite a lot. Lots of fast movement and broad range of weapons. I'm hoping for a new Batman game, Arkham city was excellent however I think I enjoyed Asylum slightly more. Hard to say why, probably a better story in the 2nd half. Half-Li...hahahahahahahah yeah right. ...it looked like ass in the trailer.
Ooooh Metro looked cool in the trailer I saw and 2033 sounded pretty good, nice choice. Totally reminds me of Quake. It's like Q1.5 almost. I hope Irrational got clearance from iD or have a good anti-plagarism lawyer.
DAFUK??? Forgot about that...
This looks to be right up your alley Shambler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqInYNEfV3E "We're not just fighting for the human race, we're fighting for the title of baddest motherfuckers in the galaxy - that's a fight I intend to win"
The writers probably take Starship Troopers and the Colbert report at face value. is it just me or do the graphics look pretty dated in that video? it looks a lot like chronicles of riddick.
Thanks for the recommendations. Played 6 hours or so of Torchlight 2 on various train journeys this weekend, definitely helped to pass the time. The style of the game definitely suits the laptop (even though I had to turn graphics settings down and my craptop doesn't allow anti-aliasing on it JAGGY YUCK), lots of dicking around with inventories, simple left and right clicking (my tiny mouse is a bit annoying tho), and classicly addictive time-sink RPG bollox. As far as the game goes, it's nothing special, mostly standard stuff (although as an Engineer with a fucking big cannon and a pet bulldog, it does have some character), but good at what it does, and pretty much exactly the sort of thing I was after (albeit a bit cartoony).
Yeah I thought the graphics looked a bit dated as well. Could be just the low quality trailer and the fact the whole thing is fast paced action scenes. Show some motherfucker scenery from the planet. It better not be all steel corridors.
Gearbox though, so must be good. it looks like i have five copies of dota 2 to give away, if anyone wants a copy post here, etc etc.
Like typical xbox stuff. The graphics are a bit dated, but more than that the animation looks pretty crude..
The aliens in the films move like lightning fast mercury, here they look more like stop motion. The marines as well look pretty wooden. The formula for the gameplay has been done quite a bit, (in the same series, and by others like Natural Selection)so should be pretty solid. Was just about to post that Daz, damn right, it looks very cool, the whole style and theme is really intriguing. Even tho it looks scripted to fuckery....could just be the trailer tho. Either way....excited.
the scriptedness is a major turn off for me also.
I have friends who love that kind of stuff, I just feel like a rat in some experiment. You know, like daily life... I quite liked the scripted sequence in the first one where that guy challenges to break your conditioning, but you don't.
Nicely illustrated a plot point, and without any quicktime in sight. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-06-screenshots-of-next-gen-rpg-the-witcher-3
/me sets bloom from 250% to 10% those were nice... except the sheep look like they were from Hexen2 with some normal maps stuck onto them.
I know it's passe to whine about bloom and lens flare but it's hard to resist in this case. Post processing has finally gone full retard, they've put anamorphic flares on a fantasy setting RPG. That town looks like a fucking Rihanna video.
I'd like to have an opinion on the engine / art assets but I literally can't see either. but the other two look better.
I quite liked Witcher 1 looks wise, havent seen 2 but this looks too candyesque. http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/440090/RTSs_arent_dying_Theyre_waiting
Two fallacies in this: Firstly confuses graphical design with gameplay design and doesn't distinguish between the two for the main points. Secondly fails to realise that beyond a certain point graphics are relatively irrelevant in RTSes because you can't play the game zoomed in enough to see them, nor slowly enough to see them. You need a broad viewpoint and quick playing speed to play the game. SC2's graphics are often excellent but there's no time to see their true quality when you're actually playing. Future of RTS I dunno. Innovative gameplay ideas, strong themes, mixing with other genres. The article buys in completely with the technology arms race ideals - you splash out on brand new hardware and need games that push the new technology, to justify spending the money in the first place.
I like RTS games a lot, and the more macro format experimented with by Relic in DOW2 was pretty cool. I think they went overboard on the RPG stuff and storytelling - it was nice I suppose, but untenable as a long term venture. Something like that but more stripped down (no FMV story, RPG mechanics made optional), with a campaign generator and, maybe, an editor, would be the mutts nuts. We have done everything we can within 2 GB of memory and 2 cores
That is literally the most ignorant thing I have ever read. In large-scale RTS, clarity is by far the most important aspect of graphics. Being able to identify a individual unit as realistic is hugely secondary to being able to identify which units are yours, what type they are, and what they're doing. Functionality is far more important to the art style than graphical realism.
For most cases, isometric (blah, axonometric) projection is better than having a vanishing point when most of the action takes place in a 2d plane. Sorry if that seems quaint, but it's true. Planetary Annihilation is a great example of when a regular 3d perspective is the right choice. The combat is 3d, you can run all the way round a planet and launch bombs from the moon. 2d wouldn't work. Congrats to them on developing such a clear and attractive visual style also. It really grinds my gears when MORE REALISTIC GRAFIXX and BIGGAR SCOPE AND MORE TANKS are accepted as non-retarded premises for making the best RTS. What interesting tactical depth do you uncover by making a player struggle to spin a thousand plates at once? Of course that cube pig is going to act like a fucking idiot, and it's not jarring at all. They can mate (whilst being of undetermined gender) and babies appear, and you can hit them and they turn into pork chops, but if a guard doesn't recognise you in Skyrim and their dialog tree gets repetitive, it sucks because that guard looks 90% like an actual human. We used to hang out bro! Don't you remember when I teabagged that dragon? I do agree with MOAR TANKS!
Or preferably BIGGGER TANKS! I'm a total gfx whore but RTS is one genre where you can't appreciate MOAR GFX per se....although you can appreciate certain aspects (worlds, themes, art direction)....and there will be aspects of graphic realism that can be appreciated at super-fast-blink-n-you-miss-it speeds... I did write that and think... um, MOAR/BIGGAR TANKS sounds pretty sweet actually. To clarify, I mean, commanding a increasingly huge number of units isn't of itself good.
been playing this for a evening or two and it comes with a massive gold star of recommendation from me. I might even award the Captain Janeway hat of general space game achievement.
It's quite like Star Control, if you remember that. You captain a ship with a few crew members, and warp jump from point to point on a little map of a sector until you get to the exit. Graphics are super basic, basically a top down view of your ship, and maybe a top down view of an enemy ship if there's one about. Sounds pretty lame I'm sure, but the gameplay is balls-out fun. You command your little crewmates to man the shield room, or the weapons room, and when the baddies turn up you can board them with teleporters, or disrupt their shields and target life support. You can breach the hull and send in firebombs that kill the crew, or escape by light jump if you're losing the battle. Tactics so far seem really adaptive, and do a fantastic job of making you think like a real ships captain. There's a lot of scavenging of scrap and using that to build upgrades to your ship, building new rooms, trading to get new crewmembers and weapons, or robot drones that can repair your ship or board another. The roguelike element works pretty nicely, as the game is short but very hard. It's a great time to try out different approaches, and luck of the draw of what items you pick up has created a pretty unique set of playthroughs. I suck at this game though, and expect I will for a while. When I do get a small victory and have lead my ship well though, I feel like an absolute badass. Sometimes I pretend I'm Cap'n Reynolds from Firefly. And then I get an erection. In space no one can hear you cream your pants. We have done everything we can within 2 GB of memory and 2 cores
That is literally the most ignorant thing I have ever read. I think I've got some sort of waxy mental build up which blocks such internet shit from registering in the forebrain now. I guess it's a trailer? Anyway SOE added the ability to hide your hud + weapon in the latest patch which makes this game ridiculously filmable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtZA_Ge8_A And I liked it!
It taste like cherry chapstick. Seriously, though: No wonder this game gets such poor ratings. The graphics are fairly dated, but that's not even the problem. It's a mediocre military/sci-fi shooter that has Alien models instead of soldiers, typical generic gameplay and a ridiculously bad AI. It would probably pass as one of those games, but it since it takes on the Alien franchise and thus carries a lot of baggage, invoking expectations which it fails to satisfy, it has to be judged on different terms.
The strength of the Alien theme, the idea of facing a superior species, uncompromising and extemely deadly, is reduced to absurdity. Here, they are slow and weak fragbait that you can push away and QTE to death. Or maybe just walk past if the AI decides not to notice you. And what about the acid blood? Admittedly, the other Alien FPS games, especially the latest AvP, weren't particularly masterpieces either, but this one manages to set the bar to the lowest possible point. I didn't expect much, especially after that dumbass trailer, and was ready to blame it all on contemporary console bollocks/decline of the industry blahetc, but this game doesn't even seem to live 'up' to that standard. A proper Alien game needs the tension and suspense of being alone in a dark maze-like sci-fi environment under constant pressure; always having to be 200% aware of the surroundings and a single fuckup means instant death. Perhaps something along the lines of a blend between Stalker and Amnesia. Unlikely to happen, though. This one was okay. No improvement over DS2, but not worse, either. It probably could have used more variation in the environments. Apart from that I don't really have any negative impressions or complaints - though neither do I remember any part of it as special or outstanding. Gameplay was fun in parts and mostly routine. The game seems to lack one or more clearly distinguishable or definite 'highlights'. At least it concluded the story (unfortunately still with a backdoor for sequels).
Making some levels optional missions was a good choice considering the overall picture. Those levels reminded me of the side missions in Rage, they consist basically of grinding for loot and a few bits of background story. Surprisingly long play time overall. So metl, which levels did you work on? There were a couple of Rubiconish areas!? I built prologue and chapters 14-15 start to finish, but i also did the LD block for 10, 11, 12, 16, and parts of 17 & 18, but those levels were handed off to other LDs after that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_588812&feature=iv&src_vid=3z2qVebxlUo&v=6lGXDM3LGnk
I still can't believe that a developer did this, it looks like all the dynamic lights and lots of the decals were removed from the final game. Maybe it was some performance pass because it was a multi-platform release. The demo looks amazing, the final game is worse! Now there's talk of an 8GB patch. That's crazy - the game is only 6.8GB or something. Still - maybe it will put a bunch of things back in that have apparently been stripped.
I must admit that Sock's video shocked me a little. You don't really notice that stuff but when you see it side by side you realise what you're missing. It's like they accidentally gave everybody else the WiiU version, and just canned the PC version completely. And now they apparently are cannign the Wii version completely. maybe they decided to not to risk falling into the doom3 trap where everyone hated how dark it was. the demo was much darker.
hadley's hope was completely ruined though. I would guess it's performance / multi-platform woes. I think it's common to run your tradeshow demos on a beast of a PC and sort out the performance later. The art looks damn good, bring on the next console generation and hopefully the rendering / post-processing will stop letting the side down.
So I don't play any modern shooters; here's some firsrt impressions.
Too many mechanics, some good most not, diluting each other. Sprint buttons suck. The bullet storm style melee insta-kill button is meh. Especially when there's a satisfying weapon (hammer) that does the same job. Iron sights make it harder to aim. Enemy design is varied, some are great... but again they threw in a generic shotgun trooper who could be from any game for no particular reason. The bigger an enemy is the better it's AI needs to be - not the case here :[ Where are the hordes? Spiders are cool, although the larger version is made pointless by the melee instakill. Despite all the niggles the game isn't broken, just has rough edges and seems to have lost some of its soul (hordes). Still the core mechanics feel good, and there's plenty of variety in the things to shoot at. Hordes are back, all is forgiven.
The melee mechanic now makes sense although sprint is still meh. aka Dead Space 3.
Only about 2 hours in so far but daaaaamn son dis shit is off da hook yo. Etc etc. The weapon system is just fucking awesome. Seriously whoever designed that needs to be given the videogame equivalent of an oscar. So many hilarious combinations and I'm sure I'll unlock more as I get further in. Gameplay wise it's pretty much standard DS so far. Don't think I've seen anything particularly new added there, aside from the weapon system. It's the constant tense atmosphere that really makes the game shine, it's done so brilliantly just like the other two titles in the series. There are moments of horror but mostly it's a slow burning dread that permeates just about activity in the game. Pressing a button in this game is scary, haha. So far things seem super easy on normal difficulty. I've got health kits, ammo and stasis packs coming out of my arse and can craft 300x more if needed at the work benches. I think I really should have picked hard! I decided against it as I'm quite slow playing with a 360 pad, but in hindsight I think I would have been just fine. Tip for you lot! :) Now go map Quake metl :) Visceral Games just need to make an Aliens 3rd person survival horror game and I'll be in heaven.
even if it is, that's still a flimsy reason not to develop for the pc since you can plug any usb controller into one.
Online shooters are evolving, even for the PC.
Look at Blacklight, Planetside and Natural Selection 2. All better than Halo, all modern shooters, all on the PC, all played by skilled players with keyboards and mice. The dude is obviously high on glue. He probably owns an iPhone..... ...a fucking bellend. It's demeaning to even consider replying to someone who is so self-evidently wrong, but Far Cry 3, Crysis 2, Rage, Dishonoured, Deus Ex, MW3, BLOPS2, BF3, TF2, Quakelive, etc etc DAFUCK.
So they made Halo shit and dumbed down and consolised, well done. Fucking choads. Mouse and kb is still the proper control system. http://xkcd.com/386/
rage and quakelive are commercial failures. and the others are consolised games anyways. As Spiney suggests, what he's really saying is "we lose money on PC".
But crediting your customers with intelligence is a no-no; they only care about teh awesome, not facts. Considering he's pitching the comment to XBLA trolls, I spose that's fair enough. Just makes him sound like a high on glue Seriously.
Last time I looked those games we're doing pretty well. Fuck controllers! Have console versions, but if you play with a controller on the PC version, you're gonna die.
is there some way to increase the amount of terangreal to carry with you?
For example there are only 30 or something that lavaballs things you can hold to your inventory the same time, picking up additional lavaballs it's a waste of ammo and the monsters are fecking brutal Yeah, I really did not enjoy that game. Unreal bot AI monsters + weak weapons + low health...
Loved the maps, but had to cheat my way through it. :S Heh, the book was so naff and cheesy (I only read the first one), it kind of put me off trying that game.
The multiplayer on it was super fun though, there was so much fun tricks to do with the different powers, for instance you could throw yourself in lava, and shoot a switch-place thingy in mid flight to take an opponents place, so they'd suddenfly find themselves drowning in lava.
Wish I could play some more of it, was quite original and different from your regular multiplayer FPS. The single player seemed fairly average though yeah, like the books. Great game, good gameplay, cool environments, cool atmosphere, was really nice to have a proper fantasy "shooter" at the time (still a rare breed).
No problems with the gameplay on normal skill either. some of the maps made that game, Shadar Logoth is still one of my favorite settings in a game (think Willem was responsible for it too).
First few maps are a bit meh though from memory. LOLOLwhoamIkidding.
No chance of that. Does look prettier than usual tho. Even tho the marine shuffling screen fuck does make me want to barf my coffee up. The tie fighter (?) bird made me laugh - tap and it starts blasting the scenery with lasers.
Willem sometime ago about WOT; he's the man behind that game. Level design is pretty sick. The most inspiring i've seen to any game
yeah the first time I played Shadar Logoth (that's the blue town right) in the demo was awesome. fantastic for it's time and something i'll probably always remember.
it was a few years later I got to play the full game, must have been around 2000/2001, but the levels in the game got a bit blander as it went on. a bit hard too, i had to cheat i think. Probably best to wait until the game is out for a while - SimCity Day 1
So, got this as a gift from someone with a duplicate.
A lot of fun. Possibly the first game where I preferred using the controller to the keyboard/mouse. The levels look nice and have good level design, with some nice logic puzzles to solve midst the shooting stuff. The enemies aren't so great - their AI is pretty weak and they're a bit samey so far, will see if this picks up. The good point here is that (playing on hard) it feels challenging and yet fair. Doing something stupid kills me pretty quickly, but doesn't leave me feeling cheated. So the overall gameplay is pretty good. The nice thing about the game is that its not trying to be ten different games at once. It's just a straight forward top down shooter/puzzler. There are upgrades and extras, but I haven't bothered with those and don't feel like I need to yet. The secondary weapons are kind of tacked on as well - I kill almost everything with the spear. Will have to try the coop mode. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but it's refreshingly unpretentious. You were right, it's just a big dumb shooty shoot knife knife game, and that's fine.
I wish this was true, I have been waiting for a very long time.
Looking forward to that, hope they stay true to the Thief gameplay.
It must have been rough for them when the Dishonored marketing started up, and then when it came out, definitely seems like they were going in a similar direction in some aspects of design etc. Maybe when they realize everyone pirates the game just so they don't have to deal with the stupid DRM.
Well, there's your awnser :P Unfortunately there will always an influx of younger customers who don't know any better. It's kind of depressing really... soon it'll all be old hags complaining about this kind of stuff while the younger generation unknowingly embraces it. Digital distribution is only accelerating the process.
When companies realise that in this day and age, internet use is a rarity and very few people are connected to it, let alone with permanent cable/broadband/DSL.
Yup that's "2", I'm behind the times.
Pros: + Graphics are good. + Cityscape well done, if empty. + Gameplay works well as usual in CryX series. + Fog / hazy effects particularly good, and enhance atmosphere. Cons: - Extremely consolised as follows: - Linear levels boring. - Too few options to explore around - City setting is less interesting than island stuff, less involvment too. - Suit voice is very annoying. - Tactical options on HUD are silly handing-it-on-a-plate nonsense. - Too broken up with cutscenes, intermissions, transmissions, etc. - Lots of things to pick up and fuck all you can do with them. - Otherwise limited and haphazard interactions i.e. can only shoot half the lights, can't shoot infected, etc etc. Hmmm. The suit specialization mechanic is like the worst gameplay idea ever. I don't get why they build an entire game around such a dull gimmick.
because you could do whatever you wanted in whichever mode you preferred.
Definitely a great gameplay mechanic. Even if it becomes a bit easy to rely on cloak.
The suit works almost as well in Crysis2. Power (Speed/Jump) is used automatically by default, Cloak and Armour are toggleable. Armour is a nice effect. Heat-vision also uses suit energy. Doesn't feel quite a slick switching between the 3 main ones but it's still good. Crysis 2+3 were streamlined for consoles. Easier controls (controller), combined suit powers, smaller levels (memory footprint), less AI (slower processor)
The Metacritic ratings for 2 and 3 are lower, but I think that is partly to do with franchise fatigue. Crytek are quoted as saying they think 3 is their best version. Personally I preferred the raw level design of the first game. One thing that is always consistent with Crysis is that it looks really beautiful. I enjoyed Crysis 2 quite a bit, a solid shooter and had some nice flow during the firefights. And the aliens weren't frustrating to fight against unlike the first Crysis. Sure it's not nearly as open ended as once was, but they still offered a number of choices in the large arenas. Until you find out the cloak makes things way too easy of course! Crysis 2 felt less like a corridor shooter than other titles and the aliens made combat refreshing, since I'm not just shooting humans 99% of the game.
Then again, I don't expect much from the FPS genre anymore these days. I really enjoyed 2 & 3.
If you go in expecting more Crysis 1 (Which of course is reasonable!) then it's probably disappointing. But as a stand alone game I think it is just fine. Of course there is stuff in there I dislike (most of which Shambler covered) but the moment to moment shooter combat and the way the levels are laid out are quite excellent. There is always a different approach you can try and it's very simple to completely change up your play style in the middle of a firefight. I personally never really understood all the remarks about the "freedom" the first game allowed you. Sure you could come at a base from any direction, but if you decided to pick a direction and start walking, you very quickly find yourself in an un-authored wilderness with absolutely nothing to do. I agree that some (if not most) areas in C2 funnel you into them from a specific direction at the start but you always have the option to cloak and essentially pick where you want to engage. I also truly prefer the implementation of the suit in C2, it's effortless to get into the mode that you need and making strength/speed modes automatic is a great idea. While I do miss the super-speed from C1 I think everything else was handled much better. The Seth 'soldiers' are really cool, IMO they look smarter and scarier than the robotic enemies from Crysis (which looked like the sentinels from the Matrix). And Crysis isn't really less linear than Crysis 2.
No offense but you need to think more before offering opinions.
Crysis is a LOT less linear than C2, that's a simple fact. C1 had more open levels with more directions you could play through them and approach targets and objectives. Whether that's a problem or not is a different matter but that's how it is. More: + Aliens are pretty cool and a good challenge. - Chopping between different locations with no sense of continuity really sucks. Have to agree with mega, wish they'dd just improved upon Far Cry -- which is also rather so-so at times.
Crysis universe feels really bland to me. Far Cry was outright silly but at least it was somewhat original in it's weird way... etc etc, blah Maybe if you could use a suit power for more than 2 seconds it could be fun. Having to crouch behind a tree waiting for your battery to reload every 10 seconds gets boring fast. It's a bit like having to switch to the flashlight in Doom3 because you can't see shit 50% of the time. Any more works of art to bash? :P Brilliant games. Rare combinations of looking damn cool and getting the gameplay to work and flow smoothly. Suit energy running low is all part of it.
is that it kind of feels like "oh, here, we consolified the game, but you can choose what we consolify!".
Or maybe i'm just really disgusted by the way modern games often make you ridiculously powerful in a shitty, super hero way. I think that's something that's commonly misunderstood: I don't want to be the hero of the game, i want that my decisions/actions make me the hero. Just let my gameplay actions speak for themselves. In the same way a hardcore quake player rips you apart when you join the server. And the suit gives you super hero status, for free, for a limited time. Everything i do with it is just because of the free super power. that just feels bad, and nothing like hitting triple air rockets (in q3, because rockets are fucking slow there). And don't do it in the story, please. I can't stand that shit. That was probably the best thing about max payne, he wasn't the hero in the story. He just did ridiculous things during the gameplay. Of course they fucked it all up because they portrayed him in such a 16-year-old "wow that's a cool guy!" way, but yeah. WTF are you talking about?!?! Smables?!?!!
Non-Linear: GTA T.E.S. Fallout Far Cry 2 and 3 Dead Island S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Linear: Crysis/Warhead Crysis 2 Crysis 3 Far Cry (1) I'm sorry to burst your bubble but they are linear as fuck. Some of the areas are pretty big, but the game is certainly linear. You have to complete the objectives in a linear order, you cannot go back to areas you have already been to once you have left an area. I mean Crysis is no less linear than CoD games for example. I mean Crysis is no less linear than CoD games for example.
Balderdash. "Linearity" is not a binary property. You have to talk about the granularity-of-the-linearity'ity, and I think everyone can agree that in terms of mission/story-progressionity, Crysis is linear in the sense that CoD is linear, but when you look at lower levels of granular titty - e.g. consider a typical combat setpiece in either of those games - it's obvious that Crysis gives you more options, more space to navigate, just more ways of slicing that particular sausage than CoD does. On some level.
But Crysis 2 has massive areas too, that you can approach the objective from multiple angles. I just don't see how Crysis 2 is more linear than Crysis 1. I think the cityscape just throws more vertical walls at you. It compensates with z-axis up to a point. You also can't sneak through bushes all the time which give cover even in a fairly open environment.
Maybe I need to replay the games before being too judgemental. But they're just not my cup of tea I'm afraid. Pretty though, no denying that. Nitin has a point, there's different levels of granularity. Having a long corridor with baddies jumping out at you is different from having a square with buildings you can clear in a different order. Likewise you can have linear levels but a non-linear overworld, etc...
C1 you play through the levels in a linear order, but the levels themselves are relatively non-linear.
C2 you play through the levels in a linear order, and the levels themselves are fairly linear (due to small size and city landscape). Maybe the "massive areas" appear later on in the game though... As in most levels have a couple of parallel paths that do pretty much the same thing...
Also had a great moment when I nearly got jumped by a Seph on a rooftop and got alerted by his shadow from the evening sun and shot the fucker in the face before he buttraped me....don't thnk I've had such a good demonstration of the possible gameplay benefits of a pure graphical enhancement before... Some of the alien fights are pretty fucking hard....in the Central Station Walker boss fight I felt anything but a god-like superhuman.
Ugh, that was probably the most frustrating part for me too. Forgot how many times I died there... That, exactly that.
There might be a challenge or 2 but I hate games where your super kinda overpowered superhero. It just feels like a whole setup to offer cheap easy thrills - which are great and probably work well enough if your new to gamers / a young kid but it really makes it feel like a total waste of time playing the game. No challenge, or artificial moments of simple challenge which boils down to a little timing. Hardly any skill input, just like following a formula to advance to the next "scene". It has to be wrong if I don't feel like i got any better at the game. To me the fun of playing games is always somehow getting better at it personally - that is what allows to match the increased difficulty coming up, a failure to improve becomes a failure to progress without cheating. And thats fine, thats what we call a GAME. Games are to be won or lost. Not just won and thats it. OMG that makes me think fuck Prey so hard for its death/respawn system. I puked a little at that. If you want something else may I suggest a movie ? And if you cant take the defeat then cheat. Please don't just make all games feel like they are on a constant cheat mode just to not irk some dysfunctional people... /rant over It was a bit too much IMO, compared to elsewhere. The second Walker you fight in a better arena with only 2-3 Seph appearing through the fight, compared to the "fuckloads" in the station. Switching from zoomed in RL to zoomed out machine gun at the same time as switching on and off armour mode to let it recharge enough and dodging while it recharges, jesus.
Just FYI this kinda negates Killes point above, not as an argument but the suit is not OP in the last half of the game.
Its not really hard, try the previous title Demons Souls if you want to play a hard game that constantly punishes you! Dark Souls has lots of new mechanics to forgive mistakes. I still play Dark Souls, I rarely play games much after completing them, but the first half of the game is just so good and the boss battles are awesome.
i have both dark souls and demons souls for the PS3 still in their cellophane. Never did get around to playing them. :{
Play Demon Souls first, the second game Dark Souls is easier. You should hurry up because part of the enjoyment of the games is the co-op aspect for boss fights and the servers will not be around forever!
Dark Souls is hard, but it is hard in a way that is totally possible to master.
You'll probably get fucked up by a balder knight the first time you meet one, but after a while you handle them easily. Not because you're necessarily stronger, but because you know how they work. Because they'll still fuck you up if you make a mistake. I haven't played it that much to be honest, just about to go to gaping dragon on my first playthrough, but so far there has been nothing that has been really unfair to me. I lost about 4000 souls right before gargoyles because I got invaded by some prick in a top hat, that's the most unfair thing so far. I have been watching a Let's Play alongside, so I kinda know what I can expect. I know how the game goes and what I should be doing, and I don't really mind having that "spoiled" for me, because I'm mostly here for one thing: The level/world design is just A M A Z I N G! Just stop and look for a moment how Firelink Shrine goes into Undead Burg, how that loops back and forth on itself, how you get up on the ramparts, where the drake bridge connects to the burg (even just the tiny detour on the bridge with the rats is brilliant!) and then to the Parish, and then how the Parish is literally sitting on top of Firelink Shrine... And how the lower Undead Burg is intertwined with upper, and where the Capra Demon and Depths entrance fits in, and how Darkroot Forest winds around the moonlight butterfly bridge, and the tower with the dead blacksmith butts up against the burg, going to Sen's Fortress and realizing where Anor Londo is and how the entire world is sort of terraced like that... And all of this just flows together completely naturally and seamless, I could go on and on gushing about the Dark Souls world. My biggest wish for my "career" is getting to work on something even half so grossly incandescent with excellence as Dark Souls! OK I really wanna try Dark Souls now.
Guess i must of passed a Steam sale or 2 for Dark Souls but still. Hadnt payed too too much attention but the more I look... The design of the world is good but the actual combat mechanic is what Dark Souls is good for. The way each weapon works and how combat can evolve with different tactics is awesome.
There are plenty of different enemies and they all have key features which makes them deadly if you screw up and make a mistake. The best feature for me is the boss battles because they have phases, good attacks and have unique areas which makes them interesting to fight. The RPG elements of weapon upgrades, special boss items and stats is fantastic because it gives you so much to play with. One other key feature, your actions have consequences, the world changes based on what you do and if you are idiot and try to kill everything then your game experience will reflect that play style. I'm way underpowered to kill him, so for now Firelink is off limits for me :(
Just went into Open beta http://www.warframe.com/
It's a fairly old-skool style 3rd person ARPG with randomly generated levels using tilesets. It's made by Digital Extremes and there is certainly a dose of Unreal Tournament style movement and combat feel while playing the game. I've been having a blast with this in the last week or so and recommend it very much. You can pay the merchant in the bell tower to remove your sins and it will de-aggro Lautrec.
The first time I played the game I accidentally hit Laurentius too hard when I freed him, so I thought I had to kill him (then I found out about the sin guy after I did the whole playthrough without access to the pyromancy spells). I did enjoy it. By the end, the consolised hand-holding, disjointed progress, gung-ho vocals and tedious immersion-buggering map scenes were annoying me far more than the linearity - but were in turn well compensated for by the gameplay, reasonable diversity, graphics, and spectacle of the city. Sure it is so much COD-like I could feel by brain rotting each time I played it, but as a shooter it's pretty fine and I'm definitely going to get C3.
Continuing with Space Marine... The clunky controls and utterly on-rails progress (it's like a FPS side-scroller as far as lack of interaction with the cool backgrounds) are still annoying, the visceral combat and excellent level of violence are still good, more so now I've got the Melta too. Play Demon Souls first, the second game Dark Souls is easier. You should hurry up because part of the enjoyment of the games is the co-op aspect for boss fights and the servers will not be around forever!
Hmmm. So the predecessor is even more brutal and unforgiving than the sequel? Mgah. Is the first game a match for the second in terms of quality? Or will it be a bit like playing a lesser game? I'd be tempted to leap straight into the second game to get the full wow factor. I guess it's a bit like why I could never really be bothered with Skyrim after playing hundreds of hours of Oblivion. I mean Skyrim was good, but all that time spent in Oblivion completely took the "wow" factor out of Skyrim for me, and I never did play more than a few hours of it :( The first game "Demon's Souls" is brutal! It certainly not a lesser game but more a rough diamond with raw game mechanics. You will need way more patience to play the first game than the second.
Key differences of first game: * No checkpoints, no bonfires, if you die then the whole level resets and you are back to the beginning of the level. * Levels are self contained, no streaming, you teleport to each level. * When you die your health is halved. You need to use Stone of Ephemeral Eyes (These are rare items) to gain human form. * Each world has a Tendency scale of white (easy) to black (crazy hard) and plenty of levels of grey in between. When you die this meter goes towards black, so the world gets tougher. Certain events only happen at white or black levels. Summary: When you die the game gets harder! * If you attack ANY NPC in the game they are hostile until next game+. There is no way to reset them to be friendly. * There is a one NPC that has some really cool items and if he dies early it can affect how you upgrade certain weapons. * It is extremely easy to screw up a whole game and have to rely on game+ to reset events. * The levels can be occupied with dark shades and they are extremely dangerous and tough. * Most boss fights in the first game are tough and unforgiving. Plus you often have to fight through a whole level to get to them without dying first. (example - Tower Knight) If you play the second game first you will dislike the first game because it is tougher and more challenging. I found Dark Souls easier (especially up to Sen's Fortress) but I poured 200+ hours into the first game and think the second game was toned down. (especially after all the patches) The Online WIKI is a must read for the first game especially if you want to upgrade items. Thanks for the info.
So, if I'm reading you right, the game was designed by an insane masochist who was probably locked up in a small dungeon for his entire childhood with nothing but an old Nintendo and a copy of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts. Hmmm, as much as this sounds like something that I would probably have had a crack at 5 years ago, these days I don't know if I can afford to sink much time into that sort of gaming commitment any more :( I think it's more that as I age, I tolerate frustrating games less and less. I find a lot more fun in romping through Tomb Raider than banging my head against a wall in Dark Souls.
Nothing against that game, it's not my thing anymore. I'd rather tour content than retry the same encounter over and over. The game is tough, it does not pander to modern gaming conventions and is clearly not designed for everyone. It is extremely easy to forget playing many modern games because they are too busy rushing (on rail shooter) you to the end instead of being a challenge.
Is the game for masochists? Games with high learning curves are rewarding in different ways. There are no safety nets, no easy skill levels, it is designed for players who understand risk and reward strategies. The game unlocks as you learn, what you learn actually matters and Dark Souls is similar but toned down instead. I know what you mean. I don't have the patience for losing anymore - I think modern games design has spoiled me.
Not a bad thing necessarily, and there are many casual games which are predicated on constantly losing - temple run + clones, trails, angry birds etc etc. The problem happens when designers try and avoid killing the player at all. I see this a lot and it always mystifies me. If there's no lose condition then victory is meaningless, and you just made a bowl of porridge, not a game worth playing. Many games also took advantage of the Game Over to do cool stuff; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnA_6I4y0_0 I can enjoy an insanely tough game if the design is so good that I want to keep playing it. For something as tough as Demon's Souls, I would say the game would have to be like crack cocaine in order for me to not just get frustrated with it.
To be honest, I can't remember the last game I played like that, but I know I have been in situations where I'm so into a game that the ludicrous difficulty doesn't bother me. In general, I guess I fall somewhere in the middle. I tend to hate the modern "knife-through-butter" school of game design, where giving the player "an experience" seems to take priority over giving the player any sort of meaningful challenge. On the other hand, I am so bloody busy in general that I don't get more than a few hours a week of actual "playing games for fun" time, so any game I do pick up probably shouldn't batter me with too many brick wall situtions... Dark Souls 2 will be "more straightforward and more understandable" than its predecessor, as a pair of new directors take over the series.
If Dark Souls 2 is going to be more straightforward and more understandable then it will be the death of the franchise for me. If I want to play generic stuff I can easily find endless Marine/Soldier games for that. Dark Souls is good because it is a memorable game experience, painful at times but rewarding.
sock
I'll give you that modern games are generally too easy. They are films in disguise, really, with the barest amount of player interaction and thinking they can get away with and still be called a game. Gears is as guilty of this as any other franchise. I think we hold the players hand way too much... Because some devlopers want to make cinematic games, and they don't want to be constrained by their own game systems. QTE allows you to make any old "epic moment" you want, and not worry that there is no system for players doing the activity depicted in the cinematic. Just throw a button prompt halfway through your scripted movie so players think they are still playing a game.
Right, and most are completely pointless. If you don't hit the button, the game doesn't adapt or change to reflect that result. No, you just get to start watching the cut scene again and try to do it right this time. It's busy work.
i'm happy with easier games and the way games are now. games that are too hard just piss me off, i don't have time to replay shit over and over because it's too hard.
dark souls sounds off-putting so maybe i'll just put cheats on when i do eventually play it. Like Dragon's Lair started the trend.
Justification of technology, reducing the interactivity of the game as a side effect. Things like Heavy Rain are sort of justifying the genre I suppose, but I don't have the patience to play it for more than 30 seconds. I'm with the rest of you old-timers RE: having no time for games, and pining for my lost childhood.
For me, difficulty isn't a problem though. I like the idea of rock-hard roguelikes. A massive 30 hour campaign is daunting, but 90 minutes and then either winning or starting a new game isn't. I haven't played Dark/Demon's Souls, but if it's possible to sabotage a playthrough of a full-length game by angering an NPC, then it's not my cup of tea. bit expensive for me to get right now but screenies seem to support what czg said above re design. Will definitely put it on the list to get.
Hmm wondering if I should play Dark Souls on Xbox360 or PC...
PC : graphics better ok. Xbox360 : couch, large screen. As the game is recommended to be played with gamepad...which I dont really like... Anyone played it through with mouse keyboard ? Besides graphics PC has no other extra features right ? Mouse and Keyboard is very possible, i finished the game with it ( not started NewGame+ yet ).
You do need a mod to improve the mouse movement and some other things though : http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~petska/ The PC Version has the Artorias of the Abyss DLC ( new areas, enemies, bosses etc ) already included which i believe you have to buy separately on consoles. Ever since I discovered this shared virtual world I've been into it like Dracula into a throat.
Sure, it hoovers up memory and the graphics are relatively pants compared with modern games, but the people and building tools are quite nice. Sometimes they're sane. Mind you, I spend more time as a DJ on there than a builder. I've got a project on but the scripting is making me bonkers. (Here's a pic demonstrating some old building I did a few months ago, as well as referencing the DJ business.) Yours from the unfashionable end of the Interwebs, Martien Pontecorvo, Precipitate Flood & Maku Ibn-Selat Why would we need viagra when quake already makes our dicks harder than damascus steel?
just finished this lengthy game (17 hrs). at first it was hard to get used to good old xenomorphs again, but after a while the game started to go smooth. very detailed and atmospheric levels, proper no less epic ending and of course curved corridors by metlslime.
recommending this game! + Ruined forgeworld background is good
+ All weapons useful, satisfying and characterful (apart from GL) + Bomb squigs very cute, Bloodletters very cool + Violence is great- lots of blood and flying bodies + Very true to 40k universe + Intense gameplay, requiring a good mix of aggression and caution. + Progress and missions pretty smooth and natural. - Very clunky controls and running screenshake annoying. - Utterly on-rails progress (it's like a FPS side-scroller as far as lack of interaction with the cool backgrounds) - No interaction with anything nearby either. - Graphics strictly previous generation and quite bland. - Checkpoints often before cutscenes / a long way before tough fights - Save points at boss battle so bad I didn't complete the game - Voices boring and Ork voices grating. SHPAACE MURINE! spaaaaace marrrine! SPACE MARINE! SHPAACE MURINE! spaaaaace marrrine! SPACE MARINE! SHPAACE MURINE! spaaaaace marrrine! SPACE MARINE! SHPAACE MURINE! spaaaaace marrrine! SPACE MARINE! SHPAACE MURINE! spaaaaace marrrine! SPACE MARINE! SHPAACE MURINE! spaaaaace marrrine! SPACE MARINE! SHPAACE MURINE! spaaaaace marrrine! SPACE MARINE!
I agree though Shambler. Amazing melee combat all the way through, but aside from that and the 40k licence its a pretty bland 3PS. I think. The core mechanics look excellent, I saw people running through it at the office.
Tempted to grab a copy, but only just freed myself from Shad'o (indie tower defence, looks like viva pinata, good overall, but then again I have no defence against TD). But for now going to sip my triple distilled jamesons and read. What was I talking about again? we got an argument here at work regarding dead space, what engine it uses? some people say it uses frostbyte, is it so? i always thought it uses its own. please clear this super important matter :)
it does not use frostbite. It uses its own engine which Visceral developed over the years, and goes back at least as far as the first Godfather game.
sure does look good. I didn't like most of the gameplay in BF3 SP though... maybe i should write a full review here.
The same engine as battlefield 3?? Surely they've added some features... lighting in particular looks really impressive.
yeah, I'm sure it's been evolved somewhat. Plus if you get more experienced with the same tech you can do better work with it.
This made me giggle a little.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/27/battlefield-4-prattle-feed-all-the-new-news/ It's impossible to think anything other than: it's a multiplayer game! Why aren't you showing us that? What is this for?
When metlslime said BF4 has a SP campaign I laughed, no one really cares because it will just play like CoD, but with different graphics. The BF franchise has always been about the MP experience, EA certainly like to shoot themselves in the foot that looks awesome, epic cinematic sequences.
so is it just bf 3 and 4 that have proper single player? i think i tried to play one of the original ones, bf1 maybe and the sp was shit. just felt like a bot game. BF4 looks indeed awesome: I am just wondering whether SP campaign will really be good or not... and I definitively need a new computer :P
has always been a bit of a joke. I don't know why DICE keep on doing it, it must take so many resources to get the game to look that good and it's all wasted on a single player campaign that no one really cares about. It's battlefield for fucks sake!
BF3 sp was utterly beautiful, and utterly shit. More scripted and on rails than call of duty (if thats actually possible). At least from what I can tell from that footage there is at least some choice put into bf4 as you can order your squad to suppress the enemy while you flank around. Or tell the helicopter to attack etc. But really, if they put all this crazy effort they are using for single player into making the multiplayer better then they could probably create something fantastic. Why can't I hold onto the side of buildings while a helicopter explodes below me in MP? Wouldn't experiences like that be worth 1000x more in a multiplayer environment where its totally unscripted? Only Battlefield game I ever played was 2.
I bought it on Steam for 2 bucks but they gave me an invalid serial number making online play impossible I also found out EA customer support is just as nonexistant as people told me -- classic case of the circular blame-it-on-the-next-guy. Maybe it's better now, at least I hope so. I only liked the smaller maps anyway. Too much walking around 90% of the time and getting sniped from 10 miles away 10% of the time on the larger maps :'( Actually I played the first one with some friends back in 2004 or so. But it's so slow. Most of the time spent moving around rather than fighting. I was into UT2004 Onslaught at the time, which is like a night and day difference in those regards. Guess I prefer MP to be as chaotic and spammy as possible for whatever reason. I'm not even sure If I actually like FPS games as a genre, playing Quake with a good chasecam mod feels just as good to me. To me it's more about hurdling projectiles at each-other and dodging stuff. That's very different from pop and stop kind of games like Counterstrike. So I'm not even sure if the first person perspective is the defining factor here. The ability to dodge weapon fire makes a huge difference. It seems more as if FPS and 3PS should be split into 'projectile shooter' and 'hitscan shooter' or something among those lines. I kind of like to think of it as Romero-fps and post-Romero-fps in historical terms. Altough that might be giving a little too much credit :P Not that this post should be yet another one of those 'the good old days' kind of things, but I feel like that difference is very fundamental and not recognized enough in mainstream reviews. Looks very pretty outside. Destructible stuff looks cool.
Gameplay looked boring and skipped through most of it. No sale. I'm a few hours into Bioshock: Infinite, and have been creaming my pants to an infinite degree. I think... it's my favourite game..? Ever?
Weapons: yes. Powers, yes. Setting, yes. Artwork, yes. Soundtrack, yes. Yes. How to make Spirit quit a game and delete it after 5 minutes:
* Constantly change camera angles (skipping the axis) * Have one cutscene animation after each fight * Have one cutscene animation after for health refresh * Change camera when the player does some special action (anything that is not just walking) * Make all those camera changes not ignore/reset the mouse camera control * Randomly change the angle after aforementioned animations and have the player run into a wall awesome. design and art looks incredible, but I suppose it doesn't really show much from the engine, apart from size and detail.
but I suppose it doesn't really show much from the engine
I dunno, it looks like it's prerendered. No jaggies in sight, great reflections. Motionblur is very convincing. UE4 has an amazing realtime lighting system (voxel cone tracing). gaaaaammmmeeeepplllaaayyyy.
(seriously tho, if anyone has evidence that the "next generation" of tentpole action games aren't just going to be even shorter, even dumber versions of what we have now, I'm all ears...) Close-up quick time events where you see sweat running down the named protagonist's face, blood on his bulky armor and slow motion death cameras that rotate closely around models.
We can't sell engines based on gameplay videos. How would that work? Here's an innovative and amazing game idea! It
:) That said, here's a video showing what you can do with the new Kismet system in UE4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IReehyN6iCc Damn nice looking movie engine there, too bad Unreal Engine won't be used to make games anymore.
:P We can't sell engines based on gameplay videos. How would that work? Here's an innovative and amazing game idea! It
Completely disagree. As a designer, I want to see what possibilities the new technology provides for player interaction with the world. I want to see what sort of awesome physics is possible. I want to see new possibilities for dynamic environments and procedurally generated content, to name just a couple of things. All that demo showed me is improvements in real-time rendering in a cinematic sequence. That kismet system looked wicked cool tho, for non-programmers to make some game logic I guess. Gameplay does not sell games, visuals and brand names sells games. People love pretty screenshots, full cinematic cut scenes. Obviously there are exceptions like retro/pixel art but they have to still look good (yes there is bad pixel art).
If you make a game which does not have the latest bling or a tried and tested brand name then it will be a huge mountain to climb to get anyone interested. People love shiny stuff! "All that demo showed me is improvements in real-time rendering in a cinematic sequence."
Right, and that's what we're offering you. The potential for top end visuals with a great tools pipeline and a fantastic scripting system in the Kismet/Blueprint features. The gameplay is up to you. Spiney said it really. Lighting looks spectacular and everything looks super smooth, no jaggies, no sharp stencil shadows. Looks completely pre-rendered. It's achieving that weird x-factor where I can't work out how it's being rendered. Uncanny valley here we come! There are exciting times afoot with the next-gen consoles round the corner methinks.
yes it does. The game industry just lost all the customers that actually cared for it years ago?
His point is more that sex sells. You can't attract customers with gameplay. You can, however, attract them with great graphics. Then once you have their attention, you can show them your gameplay.
it totally doesn't work for me that way. I never would watch graphics-/cinematic-only trailers if i wouldn't actually be doing CG for a living.
Gameplay videos actually attract my attention. If there's something E3-like, I watch gameplay videos, as well as the top 5% of the graphics only stuff (but i would never buy those) it totally doesn't work for me that way. I never would watch graphics-/cinematic-only trailers if i wouldn't actually be doing CG for a living.
They would for me if they weren't filled to the brink with Hollywood cliches presented as pubescent power fantasies... Besides what has been already said is how fulfilling and rewarding succeeding feels in this game. After finally getting past area XYZ or killing boss ABC, its not like "oh well, okay" like I feel in most other games, it's more like "HOLY FUCKING SHIT YEAH BITCH" and literally almost jumping from joy.
As long as it works for enough other people who care more about eye candy than they do about the graphics. Come on, this is obvious. Also, I think Willem was saying that they're trying to sell their engine more than they're trying to sell their games.
Graphics are important. People chase the next big thing in computer graphics. If you are making a game, then regardless of what you want the gameplay to be like, you want the graphics the be good. You also want the tools to be good. So this video shows that both the graphics and tools for the engine are awesome. Seems like a win-win to me.
SleepwalkR
Right now, yes, because we're not promoting a game. :) We're an engine provider as well as a game studio so this demo is to get people interested in licensing the engine. Which everyone should! It only seems right... all I see in those videos is a trillion dollar artist budget. I'm not at all familiar with the unreal technology (is it still called that?), but..
Where are the new rendering techniques? Where are the "simple art" test cases that show the pros and cons, where are the performance breakdowns? Where are the awesome features your engine has that nobody else has? Voxel cone tracing maybe? But where are the details of what is actually implemented there? When does it break down? How does it handle near-field? I heard there are problems with that... in the original paper. What about your implementation? If I would have to make a decision about spending a lot of money on engines, those would be what I want to base my decision on. All I see in most engine videos is more particles, more deferred lights, more post processing, etc., and of course, lots of artists. Those don't come with the engine, I heard =) Maybe that's my academic view, and that's because I see the papers a long time before an actual product uses that stuff. Maybe managers just buy stuff, because they don't even know what engine vs artist means. Or it isn't even about them, it's about the public that in turn buys everything with unreal engine "because it just has to look as good as the tech video". oh, and i didn't even watch it, just the graph ui advertisment. :-) okay, i just did. the glossy reflections look indeed nice, but there does seem to be only one type of glossy material (puddles/wet) that actually uses it. Why's that? What else is there? Nice volumetric lighting, but not enough time and bad video compression to actually see what the problems with it are. Or how fake it is. Then... there's lots of particles, lights, artist budget :-) How many "VPLs" are actually hand-placed? Model/Animation of the main character with dread locks looks really bad (the joints?!), but I'm not sure if that's just artist fuck-up (but how did it pass QA then, if it was easily fixable? See the problem?) What shadowing there is looks really nice, but some stuff doesn't seem to cast any. And it's all really pretty. what's your code quality, how easy is it to modify stuff, plug my own stuff into it, what abstractions are there... I'd like a video about that =)
I expected some nice honest advertisement but that natural and spontaneous infomercial made me cringe. So much bullshit bingo phrases. I swear I was able to do what I want and let the creative energy flow into the code and leverage the intuitive interface and feel unleashed with that FPS creator thing that was advertised in magazines in 1996. You can be a game designer too! But only with this new product. Not any of the competitors. It is so new and innovative!
It's a marketing video, yes, but look at what's being shown. That's no bullshit. Shane created all of that stuff entirely on his own and he knows nothing about coding. He's an artist, through and through, and he's making games entirely on his own in UE4.
They did release some paper last year:
http://eat3d.com/blog/metalliandy/siggraph-2012-technology-behind-unreal-engine-4-elemental-demo Also some walkthrough of the editor and some tech info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8 And yes, million dollar art budgets and such. I totally agree. I also tend to get more excited about NPR and innovative art direction nowadays. Nevertheless, impressive stuff. One thing I wish would get solved once and for all in this generation is transparency. Come on, those "engine ads" are actually aimed at general public to support the brand and make the "build with WHATERVER tech #" a selling point for the gamers. And execs too of course.
Cryengine Flow Graph > Kismet all day btw. "Cryengine Flow Graph > Kismet all day btw. "
Have you played with UE4 Kismet/Blueprints yet? It's a LARGE step up from UE3. I've always loved the Unreal Editor, the kismet system shown is really impressive. It's great to see that Shane still works at Epic, he seemed to drop off the radar somehow. Remember the days when the guys making the games were really at a kind of celeb status? Not really like that so much these days (except for guys like Carmack or Miyamoto).
Remember the days when the guys making the games were really at a kind of celeb status?
Haha, I remember the nineties too. It's great until they try to make you their bitch though, then it all ends in tears. the ad markets exactly what it says (engine) but you guys want it to market something else (game).
That would be when Epic pimps the next GoW or Unreal?? All your where is the gameplay comments would be valid then. I just read the Epic Siggraph 2012 paper. I understood some of those words. Actually really awesome reading though, thanks Spiney.
The voxel cone nonsense seems mad cool. I thought this video by Cyril Crassin (the author of the original paper) does a great job of demonstrating it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fAsg_xNzhcQ http://maverick.inria.fr/Publications/2011/CNSGE11b/GIVoxels-pg2011-authors.pdf this is a paper :-)
Nice slides nonetheless, i didn't know they had a siggraph talk. .. pdf is electronic format, till you print it, then it becomes paper...
/you ignorant !! Wait, what? Out of all the hundreds games that use UE3 only 2 Epics own titles have editor/custom map suport?
Quick google couldn't find much relevant info. Does it have much to do with everyone selling DLCs instead of letting users make their own mods or what. Yeah, it's kind of depressing...
I know there's workarounds for UDK that work with some titles, but nothing official. Now make a cyberpunk Skyrim in the video setting, with Crytek-esque gameplay.
Thanks!!! Very cool roguelike with story and stuff: http://teleglitch.com/
Awesome! It's like a top-down Doom/Quake with perma-death and crafting!
Definitely recommend playing, I saw it on TIGSource ages ago! Thanks for posting that! It is like an amalgamation of all things I love about gaming. You made my day.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/152511-unreal-engine-4-looks-much-better-on-the-pc-compared-to-the-ps4
This one reminds me a lot Lord of The Ring: a mix in between Sauron and Balrog >E This one is interesting too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO2rM-l-vdQ Note that it is not image synthesis, but really Unreal engine 4. Nevertheless, it is precised that the engine run 4 times slower that normal speed, exploiting 100% of GTX680 processing capabilities. Hence, to run the game with its full power, it would need four GTX680 to get a real time playable demo After small calculation it means "basically" and roughly just 12 Terra Flops a 14 billions of transistors... just a "small" GFX setup wow, teleglitch ironically has really nice graphics. i really like the visibility system they implemented.
One thing for sure, compared to the System Shock and Thief series, Quake is really newbie friendly to install.
Yeah, I have always liked the
The melee combat in teleglitch is seriously pissing me off. It is super hard to aim and apparently you have to actually hit the drunk monsters with your 2 pixel end of arm?
Aren't PAKs essentially folders that cannot directly be accessed by the OS? The distinction always eluded me somewhat. I've never seen the big win in it to be frank. It's just as messy and complex, just hidden in a custom format.
@Spirit: Yeah, melee is near impossible. I think it is not supposed to be used at all. By level 3 monsters are already attacking in swarms, so it is best to form a Trinailgun as soon as possible and use it as the fallback weapon instead of that puny knife (since you can also produce nails by scavenging).
@Spiney: Fair point. It might be a personal thing but I like What was great was the day I discovered that the Quake3 PAK files were ZIP format. Blew my mind... You can open them in any standard ZIP file editor.
The overwriting can still be done by simply renaming the folder PAK2 etc. But I can certainly see why some people would prefer it. I think the difference is purely psychological.
File system access is relatively slow; pak and other such formats allow you to open one file handle with the OS and then just read different chunks out of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YPQRE57hNQ
Other than the tiny player-to-level scale, this looks like the dog's bollocks. That looks surprisingly fun.
I love how they kept those floating circular platforms, they make no sense at all in that warehouse level, who would use antigrav platforms where you can just have normal stairs, that's great. :) ROTT is the first game I mapped for, plenty of fond memories from it. i like how you pick out the floating platforms as what's unrealistic. To me that entire level looks like any deathmatch map with industrial-themed textures with arbitrarily placed bridges and jump-pads and i had to go re-watch the video to see that it was even intended to look like a warehouse :)
Apart from from tidiness and easy managability, having all files in containers speeds up access (no defragmentation) and (de)installation. Copying/moving a large number of individual files takes considerably longer than the same amount of data in few container files.
Yeah I agree, I just picked out the floating platforms because they were an important part of the original ROTT (you could only create any kind of vertical gameplay by placing them).
Honestly the level itself (layout, design, etc.) is pretty generic and doesn't look very good as far as deathmatch levels go, those random diagonal bridges made me cringe... with 1997 brushwork and layouts is not a good look. It looks like a retexturing project. Gameplay looks nicely oldschool though.
Meh. There's a very nice deal on Amazon.com today (and only today): All Borderlands 2 diginal codes are off 67% - unfortunately only available to US customers. If some charitable Americano reads this, go buy me two keys for the BL2 Season Pass, would you ($9.99 each)? I can pay you back in USD or BSP. :>
And while you're at it, go grab the game for yourself, it's a lot of fun in coop. A valid criticism here is that the map layouts do actually look like pimply 1997 box-map arse.
Nothing to do with the "art". I mean, really - the layout for the first map in that video is about as primitive and ugly as you can get. Scale is totally wrong, it looks like a shitty Quake1 engine putting way too many 'realistic' shaders on flat geometry, and even 'old school' gameplay wasn't '1 hit kills constantly'. Not to mention the level design is a shitty gimmick map that were played out even when RotT was new.
Sorry, making an 'old school' game doesn't mean 'make absolute shit'. you can buy games from Amazon even if oyu are outside of the US by putting in a fake US delivery address.
As what you are buying is digital, there is no issue with delivery obviously. never had that requirement when I bought from Australia, I've always just put in a US shipping address.
Shipping != billing. Those digital items are not available for people outside the US. It even says so on the page. I tried to buy the code myself, but to no avail. Physical items are another thing, they typically work fine.
Or do you mean you registered a credit card with a fake US address? You can also easily patch by simply adding new higher numbered files without having to overwrite older versions (needs more space of course). Quake 3 used that.
In-file filesystems can also be tailored to your needs and do not care about the filesystem they are on. Eg you might be on a case-insensitive filesystem but inside your archive you can be. You can compress them. You could encrypt them (half-assed). Big files still fragment btw. Back to Teleglitch. The line of sight effect looks great but since I know how it works, I always see how it works and it became super distracting. :( Second try (after first perma-death of course). Currently at the beginning of level 5. Detector comes handy to get ready for the upcoming swarms. Powerlegs make a great difference too. I only wish there was a button for unloading the ammo out of the scavenged weapons.
My bad. It seems that picking up any weapon and dropping it back unloads the ammo that comes with it - handy! This little gem of a game gets harder, tenser and more enjoyable as the player progresses deeper into the installation. Great stuff, I don't remember being this thrilled with a PC game in a long time.
yes fake US address (using one of those fake web address generators) entered as shipping address works fine for me. If it is not working for you, you could try ticking "billing address same as shipping address" to see if that works maybe.
Transaction goes through fine on my Australian credit card and no issues in downloading it because there is no physical shipping to my fake address. Google amazon digital downloads outside US, quite a few links on different ways of doing it. Teleglitch is done (the stats screen tells that it took 362mins)
"We made this game because we were missing the jitters and hardcore fun feeling that we grew to love years ago, playing games like Doom, Quake and various roguelikes. Because stuff like this is so rare nowadays, we decided to make it ourselves, and fill the empty space in our hearts with pixels, blood, zombies, robots and dark corridors."
MOTHERFUCKING FUCK YEAH FUCK ALREADY!!!! And erc "I could have never imagined that such a lo-fi game would be this atmospheric and heart-pounding." -You have now learnt tha the "fi" has fuckall to do with atmosphere and excitement. Absolutely fuck all. I knew that already, growing up with a 2600. I guess my astonishment comes from the fact that I haven't experienced any of the deliberately retro-styled games of this day and age (apart from Cladun on PSP).
Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story Cave Story
No, I haven't. :/ It seems that you can't recommend it enough though. Looks like a Metroidvania, that's a big incentive - thanks, Spirit. Any others? Has anyone tried Lone Survivor, by the way? Looks interesting and stylish. I'm always up for survival horror.
If you play it, make sure to not play the later released "+" one. It is like a bad Quake remake/model/sound thing from all what I have seen.
Cave Story is one of the best games I know and it's free! Don't spoil yourself reading, just play it and have fun. Best with a gamepad! Some neat retro style games that don't cost a penny!
You Have To Win The Game http://www.piratehearts.com/blog/games/you-have-to-win-the-game/ Maldita Castilla http://www.locomalito.com/maldita_castilla.php http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digital-eel/infinite-space-3-sea-of-stars
I loved the previous games, and FTL had some of the same feeling of exploration. Many thanks! These two look great too, will try them in the near future. I remember playing 8bit killer from Locomalito guys, that was beautiful.
You maybe heard of Hotline Miami. Don't Miss that.
If you feel like some Roguelike I highly recommend DoomRL, thats a Doom based Roguelike, with tiles now. Pineapple Smash Crew seems like fun, did not get to play it much but what I did was cool. Killes, thanks for the recommendations, another sweet-looking two (Hotline Miami and PSC). I'll give them a try. I've had a round or two in DoomRL, back when it was ASCII based. It surely looks more compelling now.
Another one worth trying if you haven't: The Binding of Isaac. Quite fun and addictive (ask onetrueijed about it).
473 hours and counting. I planned on quitting once I hit the 400.0 mark but old habits die hard.
is veritably amazing. So is Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf, though in a different way.
Thanks guys. I'll add The Binding of Isaac and KDFW to my list. I plan on taking the ones with shorter campaigns first. Currently playing Cave Story (for the first time) and replaying Harmony of Dissonance on PSP (through a GBA emulator which works surprisingly perfect). Also had half an hour with Metroid: Zero Mission (via the same emulator).
Isaac: 521 Hours, but I stopped playing some time ago.
Indie games not already mentioned; Weird Worlds is indeed a great space exploration roguelike, it's nice to see they're working on the third version. Another space explorer roguelike I can recommend is Faster Than Light. Spelunky - an oldie but a goodie. Platformer roguelike player rape. Desktop Dungeons - haven't looked at this in quite some time, but a limited space dungeon crawl roguelike where exploration regenerates you. Cthulhu Saves the World - breath of fire style RPG. And I'm probably forgetting many more. Any idea how simular Metroid: Zero Mission is to Metroid: Fusion? Because I loved that (until some boss that made my emulator crawl).
Metroid Fusion is a lot more linear and directed, until the very end when you get to explore freely for some time.
There is an annoying NPC that you are forced to talk to inbetween setpieces. Other than that the gameplay is still the same old good stuff, and there are some cool environments. i liked zero mission more, fusion forced too much linearity onto the player. But fusion is still pretty good in other respects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3LGb8EwhTU
FUCKKKK!!! FUCKKK!!! oh my shit!! This is absolutely the best thing I've ever seen, including vaginas and the bugatti veyron. That shit is fuuuuuuucked up.
Looks good though. But how come Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon has nothing to do with fucking teenagers and cheesy mexican drug barons? It's like a TC, rather than DLC..... hope that doesnt mess up their sales. Really hope they get rewarded for being this wildcard.
Metro 2033 was a flawed but brilliant game with an awesome atmosphere. Very much looking forward to Last Light.
Shame about the stupid DLC nonsense from 4A Games though. They put the "nightmare mode" difficulty behind a DLC pay wall, and considering it's "the way the game was designed to be played" that's a pretty dick move :/ I'm expecting modders to unlock it for everyone pretty fast however :) I haven't played any Metro games either, but that sure looks sweet! And Stalker is on my fav games of all time list.
Then I think you need to play Metro 2033. Very similar atmosphere but a much more directed experience (read : linear levels rather than open world-ish that stalker had).
Metro was nice, but after playing Stalker, and reading a bit of the Metro book, it really makes you wish it was a bit more open-ended.
Still better than any silly CoD solo campaign. Will probably get the new one myself, looks nice. Ranger Hardcore is the way to go if you want to tackle Metro 2033 the best possible way. No HUD, scarce resources and bullets hurt like a bitch. I played it like this on my first playthrough and had a blast.
this is what a DOS prompt would look like if it were a horror game
http://www.datatragedy.com/wipmoabd/ If you have a copy of DUKE3D.GRP somewhere in a long forgotten directory on your hard drive. DNF is out.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/duke-nukem-forever what games are the best for showing it off nowadays? First person to say Crysis 1 gets a pint of nanobots down the japs-eye
Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, Witcher 2, Bulletstorm, Metro, Modded Skyrim, Modded GTA4... all different engines
The thing that always bugged me about it was the purely flat ambient light. Made everything look fake. The SSAO just made it worse. There was also plenty of pop-in, weird looking clouds and strange noisy shadow filtering. The skin shading was also really weird looking, it looked like subtly backlit wax from all angles somehow. And all the hard surfaces have this plastic sheen to them. When Doom3 did it everyone complained about it, seems by 2007 everyone just got used to it.
Maybe if the art direction wasn't so bloody generic it could have worked. Crysis 2 was like being locked up inside a Michael Bay flick with the visuals. Latest Crysis really improved in all those areas, tough it all still looks abnormally slick to me. Meh, screw realism, boring... Battlefield 4 isn't out yet... right? I imagine BF 3 would be a good bet though. I think Witcher, Skyrim, modded GTA 4 are all pretty solid choices too.
Hmm, nothing in there really sets my heart on fire though. Blame the current console generation, but PC graphics aren't really moving forward very fast are they?? What Spiney said...
But if you just want to see photo-realistic pixels patterns in realtime, rthdribl is my choice, until we get photon mapping in realtime. http://youtu.be/9k-N49P5N1I
uncludes download link. my issue with it is that's it's really hard to make up foreground from background But yeah, it's hard to distinguish what's solid and what's not. The gunshots are hard to see as well, and they made a mistake when going through doors - they shouldn't move where your character is on the screen after going through them.
It's a bit odd as well - it looks like most of the work done was on converting the Q2 assets. Why not just make a game? Maybe I'm being too cynical. Judging from the videos the guy is mostly a coder and he generally takes other game stuff to test/show off his engine.
http://openxcom.org/index.php/2013/05/its-finally-here-version-0-9/
OpenXCom 0.9 (fully playable) I hope it is ok to post in this thread as it is available for not only Windows but also MacOS, Linux, OpenBSD, Haiku and some consoles (handheld!). Well, I bought this during the Steam weekend special at half off. I was expecting to really not like it. I generally find 3rd person games to be awkward and difficult to control. I was right about that, but I ended up actually enjoying most of the game.
The QTE parts of the game can have serious problems on the PC. During QTE "combat" sequences the game often would not respond to the keyboard "button mashing". I also experienced loss of mouse control in several "escape" sequences. I found out that these problems mostly went away by temporarily using lower video settings and turning v-sync off. Unfortunately I didn't find out about this work-around until toward the end of the game. The environments are very nice. The level design, texturing, etc. are all top notch. The models and animation are some of the best I've seen in a game of this type. For once Lara's chest is actually pretty normal. The storyline was good as were the puzzle parts and overall the game was interesting enough to keep me playing almost non-stop for days and actually continuing all the way to the very end. I ended up at 91% completion overall (I gave up on trying to find all the exploration type items about halfway through). I played on normal difficulty for almost the entire game. If it wasn't for the control issues I'd rated it 9 out of 10 stars easy. Even though those issues only occur in a few short parts of the game, it causes a lot of frustration and really detracts from the overall experience. and its fucking amazing. A bit on the easy side I suppose but fuck is it beautiful and well thought out and expansive. HL was my 1st love and this rekindles the flames and then some. If you have even a passing interest and a copy of HL on your computer, check it out.
Hopefully, unlike me, you'll have the time to absorb it in long sittings, instead of 30 minute chunks. Fuck. not like the old days. So far (1/3 the way through), I actually agree with Ricky about this, gasp.
QTEs are utterly irredeemably awful. Oft-changing and randomly fixed camera perspective is very poor. Constant switching between controlling Lara and just watching Lara is pointless nonsense. ^^^ all of the above are immersion-breaking bollox. BUT: Graphics, lighting, and effects are superb, environments and atmosphere are very good, characters are very well done, Lara in particular is portrayed convincingly, the progression in intriguing, and the actual combat gameplay is fair, slick and pretty good fun (and shows how good the game could have been if they hadn't spoiled it with QTE shite). Like Ricky all of those aspects are strong enough to keep me playing it despite the clear (and deliberate) control flaws. Actually, I'm the Rick that made Castle of Oblivion and Well of Wishes and Polygon Base for Quake (I made a few Doom 2 maps also). I'm still working (off and on) to finish a re-make of Well of Wishes.
I think Tomb Raider may end up as Game of the Year. It would be really nice if they'd patch it to fix the QTE "combat" buttons bug and the occasional issues with mouse control. Some of the escape sequences where you have to run across floors and bridges, which are crumbling and falling away beneath you, are really hard to get past when you can't turn with the mouse. The annoying QTE and buggy sequences probably only added up to 15 minutes or less of play time, compared to maybe 40 hours total, that's not too much of an issue considering how much I enjoyed the rest of the game. I think I probably played through too fast. I may wait a few weeks and give it another go. Overall I had a lot of fun. The "Shipwrecked Beach" and "Mountain Village" areas are awesome levels full of tons of exploration. Shot from The Witness (the new game from Jonathan Blow of Braid fame)
http://the-witness.net/news/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Shannon_01.jpg prettyyyy And a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Brd0F7rlXCI Wow. Might be the best looking game I've ever seen. Looks great. Though I think the vegetation looks too different a style to the rest of the scene? Color palette is somewhat garish at times (not unlike braid). But yeah, really good looking for the most part.
Looks great, and the music makes you want to see the video again.
It's giving me lots of ideas for mapping. looks cute. like the music. hope it's on pc.
but I'd rather kill shit than solve maze puzzles. reminds me of a happier myst. The nice thing about puzzle games is they're easy to make. With Quake you just open radiant and fuck around with triggers and moving stuff. You don't even need player models or a hud.
A decade after my second playthrough, I have beaten System Shock 2 for the third time. I'm glad to say that it is still one of my favourite PC games. I installed Kolya's SS2 Tool which includes map fixes as well as a custom engine (NewDark) that comes with D3D9, supports modern systems, adds a bunch of subtle features and most importantly, works flawlessly. On top of that, top-notch third-party graphical enhancements really made the game shine - seriously, I have never been a fan of so called hi-res textures stuck on top of low-poly maps and haven't used any for Quake to this day, but the ones available for SS2 are much better than any I have seen. The following shots, which are mostly from Deck 5, demonstrate these packages (alongside a hint of bloom):
* SHTUP (object/decal-based textures) * FourHundred (brush-based textures) * Vurt's Space Textures (skies -- not shown) * Vurt's Goo (new models for organics -- not shown) * Vurt's Water (v5.1 with EnvMap) * Tacticool (new models for Navy weapons -- two out of five shown) * Eldron PsiAmp (new model for PsiAmp -- not shown) 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 Also used ADaoB, a bug-fixing pack that also rebalances the game mechanics. Didn't installed Rebirth, since I don't think it follows the style as well as the above packs. All of them are definitely recommended, they will make the game run much smoother and look much sharper while staying true to the original feel and look. Here's a handy link: SS2 Newbie Modding Guide Shadow Warrior remake. Cool. Although looking back on gameplay vids now on the original, god it looks awful. Did it have any story? Pretty sure I played it, but don't remember it looking so crap. Funny how those old games look better in your head than in reality. Not sure why they're bothering with a remake, other than a recognizable IP, but how many people that played that oh... 20 years ago, when it wasn't a popular game then, will still be gamers now. Apart from func locals.
I just noticed System Shock 2 is on Steam with a one week special price of $6.99
I seem to remember playing it a long time ago but I know I never bought it. Maybe it was a demo or something. I might have to pick it up off Steam. but that trailer was pretty stupid. and must have cost a tonne - how much does it cost to license that song?
#6591
After Braid, I'm just gonna shut up and let him take my moneys. However I would have liked to have seen a hint of what the real gameplay is all about in that trailer. Blow has stated that there is more to the game than these mazes, in response to concerns from players; to Blow, "the point is the magic that happens in the player's mind when he understands the subtle things that the mazes are saying - because the mazes aren't just puzzles, they are lines of communication that aggregate, become more complex and eventually say surprising things".[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_%282013_video_game%29 There had better be some substance behind that statement and I hope it's not just a load of pretentious hot air. Tried a bit of this the other day. Seems kinda dull so far.
Far Cry - exploring epic island environment = cool. Crysis 1 - same island environment BUT a Nanosuit = cool. Far Cry 2 - exploring African environment with semi-real atmosphere and politics = cool. Crysis 2 - same Nanosuit BUT with a ruined city environment = cool. Far Cry 3 - exactly the same island enviroment as FC1 and C1, exactly the same atmosphere and politics as FC2 = boring?? Maybe it gets better but at the first proper fight I couldn't help thinking "I probably spent a total of 50 hours doing EXACTLY this in three previous xxxCRYxxx games". Maybe it's also bad timing because the whole island vibe and graphics pale into insignificance compared to Tomb Raider... I do like the people's accents though and the main bad guy seems intriguingly demented. Just broke the wallet and splashed out on this bad boy.
Liking it in a lot of ways, and although the permadeath is starting to grate, the random levels take the edge of the annoyance just enough to keep me playing. Could have done without the edgy "faeces and sanitary towels" theme though. A save current game feature. Not to break the roguelike permadeath, but just to allow you to pause a game session that can last a few hours once you've unlocked all the extra levels.
Did you get the Wrath of the Lamb expansion with it? not yet.
Another thing that annoys me is that it seems to be very poorly coded, with tremendous slowdown issues for what is a simple 2d sprite game. Might be something to do with the fact that it is made in Flash, but I have seen very complex Flash stuff before that doesn't have these problems. Haha, seems like a good idea for a mash up.
http://www.moddb.com/games/isomer/ it seems to be very poorly coded
There are literally moments in the game where items have opposite effects than intended because the coder can't reliably substract by a negative number. Good on you not getting Wrath yet, its biggest strength is that initial "this is like some crazy bootleg ROM hack" reaction after getting acclimatized with the old game. Yeah never really got into Isaac because of the slowdowns. And the theme too, actually (although I would have loved it in 1994).
Definitely.
And yeah, the slowdown is flash... but could have been avoided - other flash games have much more efficient flow. Roll on HTML5. Finally got around to playing this.
(Note - I'm playing it on the Xbox, but if I posted in the "console games" thread, no-one would read it, so I'm posting here.) Thoughts. Not sure how far through I am (just killed a huge plant monster boss), but I do like the skillshot mechanics and being rewarded for using your environment and whatnot to kill enemies. That stuff's really really great. Spending your points to buy basic ammo is pretty naff though. Environments look very nice and Unreal Enginey - if I was to nitpick I could say that I think everything is maybe a bit too homogeneously busy and noisy - making it sometimes difficult to figure out what's important and what's not. I pretty much don't like everything else though. The worst is the character dialogue - every single line spoken is just about the most obnoxious shit that has ever assaulted my eardrums, and the 14-year old that wrote it needs to stand in the corner for a good long while (for like, say, forever). It honestly makes Gears of Wars' dialogue sound like Shakespeare. Environments and encounters are super linear, which incidently is a hilarious "fuck you" to the paying customers that were suckered in by that CoD piss-take video the developers produced before this game was released, as it has exactly the same over-reliance on linearity, invisible walls, on-rails shit, QTEs, and scripted events that CoD does. Most of the time you will find yourself in an insanely detailed and huge environment but one where you are constrained to a ludicrously narrow and linear navigable space. In short, People Can Fly: Fuck you and the cock you rode in on. (I'm pretty sure that's actually a piece of authentic Bulletstorm dialogue, if not, it's close enough). Bought this on my wife's ipad for the nostalgia. I'd forgotten that the original game came with a notebook and that you need to use it :-) I'm surprised how much I remember given that I first played it over 18 years ago now (aaaaaaaaa) and haven't replayed it for
I don't like the controls on the ipad much and I couldn't recommend it for any other reason than the nostalgia... I must say actually that being about 2-3 years behind the times when it comes to playing the latest releases is wonderful because it means I get absolutely fantastic deals on everything.
Thats pretty awesome, perfect game for the format if controls are good. Reviews are good for now it seems.
I got a free iPad and am getting the full hit of the apple money machine. Am I right that negative reviews and scores in the App Store aren't even shown?
Frozen synapse. The only bad thing about it is that I was working on a game design just like it :/
Seriously thanks for the recommendation, FS is excellent, one of the most compelling games I've played in years.
Well made, intelligent and with very clear win/loss conditions. And people getting shot. After deliberating for an eternity over whether I should start with Dark Souls or Demon's Souls, I eventually settled on the fairly arbitrary choice of Dark Souls.
I've only really started playing it I guess, so all I've seen is the game up to the Taurus Demon in Undead Burg. (I haven't killed him yet). Too early for me to have much of an opinion of the game yet, but holy shit the levels are awesomely built. Gameplay wise, just to put things into perspective, the only way I managed to beat the boss in the fucking tutorial level, was to consult an online strategy guide which suggested that I should remove all of my armour and fight the boss naked, which will allow me to move around at a half-decent pace so that I could actually dodge his attacks and get into a position to launch my own. Years of playing the usual knife-through-butter tripe has not prepared me psychologically for this game :( I really, really, don't want to have to cheese my way through this game by wiki'ing every little thing - has anyone here played through it normally, you know, just by themselves? *raises hand*
I played DS when it first came out and there was no wiki! I imagine you have patched it which makes even easier! :P I played until the next boss after Taurus Demon before I gave up. Fighting the standard enemies was quite fun but the bosses had me raging at my screen. Fuck that I play games to have fun :)
I agree though about the level design and visuals, Undead Burg was a beautiful location, the scale is fucking epic. Just use a guide and a wiki and look at youtubes and don't worry about spoiling yourself, because it's hard enough even WITH those.
I played DS when it first came out and there was no wiki! I imagine you have patched it which makes even easier! :P
So, if the game was originally an 11/10 on the "fuckshitpissarsebollocks, this is colon-crucifyingly hard" scale, would you say it is about a 10.9/10 after the patch? :P Fuck that I play games to have fun :) Yeah, before I played this game, I sort of meditated for a bit and tried to promise myself that no matter how retardedly hard it gets, I will remain calm. In other words, I went in to this game basically saying to myself "I am going to die horribly over and over again, and that's ok". It kind of works - dying doesn't surprise me or bother me anymore. I'm yet to find "the fun" in this game, I think, but at least I am currently at peace with how much I suck at this, which is half the battle I guess. Also, not sure if it's related but irl, I've started developing this strange urge to buy a latex catsuit and ballgag/nipple clamps... Just use a guide and a wiki and look at youtubes and don't worry about spoiling yourself, because it's hard enough even WITH those. Ok, this makes me feel slightly better. And also slightly more worried. And a little bit hornier. So, if the game was originally an 11/10 on the "fuckshitpissarsebollocks, this is colon-crucifyingly hard" scale, would you say it is about a 10.9/10 after the patch? :P
When the game first came out it was rushed, there was lots of things broken which made it unnecessarily difficult. For a start the vendors were extremely limited in what they could sell, you had to travel to the right vendor to buy stuff which got annoying because of travel distance. The game is still tough but the rough edges have been smoothed out! The boss fights are designed to be something that you learn by trial and error and lots of death. It certainly not an ideal way to learn something in game but this is very much the design mentality of the game, "bash head against brick wall until it cracks". You can get help from various NPCs (new thing for DS) or other players and I highly recommend it. The first boss fight in the game is designed to teach the player one vital strategy, the jump down attack. It certainly could have been setup better but it is something that is useful later on. DS is certainly not a game for everyone and to be honest, it should not be changed for the masses who like things easier/fun. It is designed to be hard so players can have fun with the extra challenge. When you die from a black knight for the first time, you will remember what they look like and be wary of them next time, encounters in DS are memorable. If you are looking to walk through the game on rails (aka COD style) then this is certainly not the game to play. Get Solaire to help you when you get to the Parish. You'll know where.
The game ultimately gets easier because you improve as a player, figuring out the systems, weapons, enemies etc.
People are finishing this game without leveling up once, or speedrunning it in under an hour without using glitches. DS2 will be interesting when it comes out, no Wikis for a ( short ) while ;) When you die from a black knight for the first time, you will remember what they look like and be wary of them next time
Haha, yeah I found that black knight in Undead Burg: "Oh, this guy looks a bit different to the usual zombi-OH I'M DEAD AGAIN" Why not include skill settings? Hah, well there was a story a while back where the "director" of the game was quoted as saying "I am thinking about whether I should prepare another difficulty that everyone can complete". But then after those comments, the hardcore fanbase went apeshit, moaning that the existence of an easier mode would ruin the artistic integrity of the game or something, and the director guy ended up backtracking over his comments, claiming it was a "mistranslation" or some bollocks. http://metro.co.uk/2012/09/05/miyazaki-backtracks-over-dark-souls-difficultly-level-566203/ Why not include skill settings?
There is, they are called NG+ If you thought the game was difficult first time through, try 2nd or 3rd time. Bosses do different move combos, everything does more damage and you have to collect more powerful items to survive. In all seriousness skill levels is a thing of the 90's and most developer hate them because they are something that has to be rushed in at the end (crush time+ anyone) and often difficult to balance because enemies are tweaked up till the game is shipped. The developers were also quoted as saying Dark Souls 2 would be "more understandable" and "more accessible" than Dark Souls, but again after a huge fan backlash they backtracked and apologised, assuring them that it would be just as hard as before.
There is, they are called NG+
That's not really the same thing though - that just means the game gets harder each time you complete it. We're talking about "skill settings" in the old traditional sense. "But then after those comments, the hardcore fanbase went apeshit, moaning that the existence of an easier mode would ruin the artistic integrity of the game or something"
I'm not quite sure how much of a spectacular fucking bellend you have to be to somehow contrive to have your own gaming experience """ruined""" by the existence of an easier skill setting that you aren't using, but I suspect that level of extreme retardation is right up there with COD fanboiz. Ignoring such idiocy, I've heard very good things about the design in the game, so surely from a dev's perspective (and anyone with a functioning brain) it would make a lot of sense to put the effort into incorporating some skill settings so normal players would buy and be able to enjoy it, rather than the smug elite of masochistic boredom freaks*?? (* Not saying that sock, czg, etc are those, unless of course they whined to the devs too, in which case, they are) I can see where DS is coming from with regards to difficulty, it is a game designed by a different culture. When I went to Tokyo it felt like I was on another planet and the same could be said of DS, its designed for a certain audience and it is not the west. Sure people from the west have played it but the real player base is in Japan and that is how they love their games. Crazy hard difficulties, grinding to get to the right level for area/boss fights and obscure storylines.
Personally I would have never touched the game, I do like games to be accessible and not punishing but I was convinced by a friend at work and it became something to laugh about over coffee breaks. (various ways to die in game) The game is getting easier for sure, DS is easier than Demons Souls and I suspect DS2 will be easier again. @Shambler, I never write to developers or sign stupid online petitions for games. Having been a developer I respect the way a game is designed and if I don't like something I just don't play it! Is literally my favourite game of the last decade. It's the only game (other than fez) that I have 100% of the achievements on my 360.
I think some of the boss fights could have been adjusted to be easier (4 kings and O&S can be frustratingly tough). But personally I like the idea of a game whose difficulty is a barrier for achievement farmers and videogame tourists. Regarding looking online for hints, there is a large community that has surrounded the game because of the games difficulty. I would never have followed players like EpicNameBro or RedRosie if the game was easy. This is uniquely dark souls and I love it. " But personally I like the idea of a game whose difficulty is a barrier for achievement farmers and videogame tourists."
It's kind of tricky, Demon Souls does get attention because of it's difficulty, it's what people talk about, it creates stories to share with friends etc. That wouldn't necessarily exist if there was an easy mode that many people would default to after having died 2 or 3 times on normal.
I almost wonder if it would be as popular (even financially) without the difficulty to set it apart from all the other games (of course, the difficulty isn't the only thing it has going for it, many other aspects of the game are quite brilliant, but still). I do agree that I'd like there to be an easier mode. As much as I love the game, I stopped playing it after a while cause it was taking too much time/deaths, and reading guides and watching youtube vids to figure out how to play a game doesn't really interest me. Still, great game (from what I've played of it anyways). "Because we don't want to let muggles into our elite community" So, anyway this raises an interesting point, which is that the concept of "you have to learn from the community in order to be able to play this game", seems to have been built in to the design of the game to a certain extent:
The game is littered with user-written graffiti which is supposed to allow players to warn each other of things and share tips, but I only ever seem to comes across useless messages like "yay, I made it!" or "I can't take this any more", or malicious messages like "jump down here", which of course sends you plummeting to your death. It's a very interesting feature, but I'd question whether in practice it is actually effective at fulfilling what it was intended to do. Ultimately, is a game - that shuts out people who don't want to spend half their time reading strategy guides on the internet - something that really deserves the praise it is getting? If DS was not difficult then it would have died a long time ago. The high skill level is part of the game, adding an easy mode would kill it. Some people like stuff that is a challenge, this is not some elitist view either.
A friend of mine use to do downhill mountain bike racing, it was nuts. Racing down through woods at high speed, one mistake and it could be fatal. I certainly did not call him an elitist because he rode a bike different to me. Sure you will get people bragging and boasting about how they completed DS but that is part of the draw of the game. User messages are certainly an interesting idea but most people are jerks when it comes to being helpful in DS and you are better off ignoring them. The idea of people wanting to help others is a noble ideal but I have never found any sign useful. There are signs put down by the developer and in Demon's Soul's you can vote on the signs which are helpful so they stand out from the background noise. I think you are limited to 5 per game or something like that, otherwise people would spam the world with pointless graffiti. Probably the most useful thing in Demon's Soul's was seeing the ghosts of other players dying. You could find pools of blood lying around that if you touched them showed how someone died recently. It was really spooky seeing ghosts of players running past you, it felt like all of the player worlds were fractured and bleeding into each other. Ultimately, is a game - that shuts out people who don't want to spend half their time reading strategy guides on the internet - something that really deserves the praise it is getting?
DS gets attention because it is different, people wanting the game to be like everything else because they find it too hard is selfish. I found super meat boy really hard and frustrating but I certainly don't want it to change because I want an easy mode. Part of the fun of DS is the community involvement with video and wiki information, it feels cool to research strategies and find information about hidden items. Sure there are people who don't have the time to play DS but there are plenty of other games to try. People wanting the game to be too hard because they don't want it to be like everything else is selfish.
> If DS was not difficult then it would have died a long time ago. The high skill level is part of the game, adding an easy mode would kill it. DS could still BE difficult. But also have an easy option because the difficulty is only part of it... As Le Bal says "many other aspects of the game are quite brilliant". I do agree with Bal's and your point about the difficulty maintaining interest and longetivity of the game and community. But if the normal uber-difficulty was very clearly highlighted as the real, genuine, true, authentic way to play DS, and there were also skill settings as "tourist" options, that sense of community over the default game could still exist. "A friend of mine use to do downhill mountain bike racing, it was nuts. Racing down through woods at high speed, one mistake and it could be fatal. I certainly did not call him an elitist because he rode a bike different to me."
But you could ride a different bike. And if the game is the bike that doesnt make any sense. Anyway, havent played the game but this discussion does make me want to check it out. I don't want to go into it too much, but I pretty much agree with EpicNameBro with his reasoning -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDI1oHutLe0 I think some games suffer for catering to different skill levels. Dark Souls would definitely not be as good if it was easy, completing the game (or even getting past a boss or area) yields a huge sense of achievement. It would be very forgettable if it was scalable in the same way as Skyrim, for example. I have no problem with easy games, not in the least, but Dark Souls had a very tight design goal and it definitely delivered an unforgettable experience (for better or worse depending on your experience). Just FYI, I don't feel like I am a great player at all. But completing such a tough game (because it only has one difficulty) fills me with joy. I don't feel ashamed to say that it's not for everyone, if that makes me an elitist then so be it. Gave up on Dark Souls, and am now playing Demon's Souls instead. 4 hours in and so far (at least) it seems to be much more accessible and more fun than Dark Souls was. I always seem to be making progress and I don't keep dying all the time. Also, I friggin love the hub in Demon's; it means I'm not stuck in the same place all the time.
Moral of the story: learning curves are good things to put in games, yo. Go to undead burg first...
It's not entirely obvious where the easiest path is, it's bit of a dick-move it seems but once you are very confident with the game then you can visit harder areas before hitting the intended "start area". For instance I got butt kicked by the graveyard skellys, and I didn't even get far into the catacombs. But now I usually hit drakes valley before undead burg to collect some nice early goodies, and if I'm feeling fruity I will try the catacombs or blight-town before doing the gargoyle fight. I found Demon's Souls to be harder than Dark Souls, but I agree that it feels like you're achieving more due to the nature of the hub. TL; DW.
> completing the game (or even getting past a boss or area) yields a huge sense of achievement. Which it would if it was on the default "horrendous" skill, even if other skills were available. > But completing such a tough game (because it only has one difficulty) fills me with joy. Ditto. How would the availability of other skills reduce that achievement? > It would be very forgettable if it was scalable in the same way as Skyrim, for example. Again, how?? None of this explains how the availability of other skills would change the experience you had on the default skill. And if that bloke did it in 40 minutes of blah, please summarise. Comparably, I play all Quake maps on Hard skill, and often get satisfaction from playing them well and getting through them first time. The fact that Easy and Normal skills exist does not change that enjoyment whatsoever. Talking of which, less attempts to justify DS, and more maps, please :D that I'm being an elitist in this instance.
There's added value in the achievement if you have managed to complete something that someone else has not. Now I understand you're saying "well you just put up the difficulty if you want it to be harder", but conversely if you buy a game and you can't do it you just bump it down to easy mode and win. You can't do this in Dark Souls and thus the value of completing the game is higher because there is no easy-mode option as a crutch. Because of the notorious difficulty of the game, that is not simply an option to change at your whim, the game is less forgettable. I don't need to justify the game, it's perfectly fine if you disagree with me. I'm happy to be labelled as an elitist, I don't want noobs in mah game ;) you probably wont see me making a map for a while since with my new job and the fact that I'm buggering off to turkey in a weeks time (for 2 weeks) I wont even be near a pc :P
That and I spent so long making that base map that I have mappers block with my blue map (that was already started)... Well I thought FESP1 sucked because obviously Hard/Nightmare skill is the only mode to play it on and it's st0000pid that n00bs can cheese through the map on Easy "skill" and ruin the experience for themselves AND me!
(sorry, bored of going round in circles, just gonna take the piss now ;)) does indeed suck... worst map ever. I actually made the new revision easier on normal and easy. I should have made the hard version spawn like 30 shamblers in the final room.
This game is pretty cool, it's about going on a date with your girlfriend, quite experimental, you should seriously all give it a try :
http://paperdino.com/games/save-the-date/ Hotline Miami
What a disappointing game. At first I thought it would be ace, but then it turned out to be just 4 or 5 music tracks, boring story, extremely frustrating "try 1000 times" boss fights. Aiming is hard. A good game I guess but fuck it. Hotline Miami is one of the best games I've played. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and there are like 20-30 tracks (I know, I bought the soundtrack).
The games difficulty is one of the best aspects, also I love the twitch gameplay. I am stuck at the car boss and it is zero fun because I simply die after seconds if I am not immediately crushed by the car.
Maybe there is more music later? So far I had very few songs (great ones though). is on Steam special for $6, I'm wondering if it's worth getting even though it's pretty old.
I've already played Fallout3, Oblivion, Skyrim and New Vegas. I played FO3 all the way to the end, but in general have never really enjoyed the main quest line of these games and pretty much just ignore it. I basically just like exploring the world and doing quests. There's a plethora of mods, a real mess if you're not familiar with the nooks and crannies. An excellent (automated) mod package I can recommend is Morrowind Overhaul. I re-played the game with version 2 some time ago. It looks gorgeous, although it also puts quite a bit of strain on the machine the more you max out the visuals. It's not only graphical, I think, but also includes some script fixes.
Spirit: aw, you're like a little puppy. As soons as the level starts, run to the room on the left for cover. You can pick off the enemies from there. I did that and always ran out of ammo. And since I could not hit the molotov guy from there I thought it was a wrong approach.
piece of piss. took me a single go.
Neg is right, you jump to the left and just blast away. The game does have a couple of difficulty spikes, I love the helmet parts. wtf did I buy..
Proteus Artsy-fartsy critic thing. r_drawflat, cl_*speed 50, sensitivity 0.01 and acceleration. Does not seem to have any gameplay elements. Accessing the menu requires you to hold esc for several seconds to see a "YOUR EYES ARE CLOSING YOU ARE SO IMMERSED" animation but not too long because then it quits right away. isn't piece of piss, exactly. Like I seriously doubt most people survive that 1st go.
But far from unbeatable. Just keep at it! I did beat it earlier and was pretty pissed that the objective was not killing the molotov guy but just two groups of enemies.
Then I got to the capital sin of gaming, the hospital section where the view spins around and the player character randomly shambles and stops moving. Fuck that. Reminds me of that rmq demo poison(?) part where I got nauseous from the distortion. Blargh... On the upside, finally new music. Killing helmet proved the hardest fight for me, I didn't enjoy it at all (and it took me like a million go's to do).
Everything after that wasn't bad though, thoroughly loved it. (cuntrarian?)
All in how it's utilized, I'd say - and there are of course a lot of ways to go wrong. Poison effect shit *can*be done well though - eg Yoshi's Island. I know it's sounds weird from a call in the dark from someone who's lost in DeusEx in the Canal-Road and can't pass the automobile accident.
It breaks me up to loose all JCDenton's code and cheat for the next level. It depends where you are in the story, at a certain point the story will progress and the automobile accident will clear by itself and you can get past it.
What is your current objective? There's 2 Versalife missions; in the first you need to obtain a employee pass and go through the main entrance elevator (near the market and lucky money iirc). Once you done that and talked to Tong, etc... the road blocks should be lifted and you can plummet into the sewer entrance in the back of the tunnel.
Been a while since I played so my memory is kinda hazy :P Oh, and if you finish the game you can always try The Nameless Mod: http://thenamelessmod.com/real/ It's pretty awesome haha. ... for those interested.
Project 2027: http://project2027.com/en/#/ Neat mod but can be tough. Plan to review this eventually... Nihilum: http://www.moddb.com/mods/nihilum This seems to be a recent release I noticed by chance. Haven't played it yet though. @DaZ - I kept turning and saving untill my saved games were up.
@spiney - I've talked to Tong, but when I try to return to the Canal-Road, Gordon Quick stands in the way, although I shoot out all my ammu on him. It looks as a kind of block-up in the game Fine textures in the mod. I'm still a MonsterVodoo2 user, makes playing Unreal like games a joy. Haha, that's awesome. I used to have a voodoo3 but threw it out, now I kind of regret not having it for building a retro gaming device.
There's also modernized renderers for UE1: http://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/ http://kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/ Both work well for me, they can give you the glide look under DX and OGL. Quakis: I'll check those out sometime. Kind of in the mood for giving DX another twirl (happens every once a year or 2 lol). This looks fresh...
http://www.spacechemthegame.com/ I still have the Pentium Pro computer that I bought in 1996 just so I could play Quake. I put a 3Dfx card in it right after I bought it.
I later upgraded to a 3Dfx II, and... I still have the box that the 3Dfx II came in, and... inside that box is the original 3Dfx card. The Pentium Pro still works fine, I turn it on a couple of times a year just to check. It has a 2.5 GB drive and 32 megs of RAM :) The screenshots on kentie.net illustrate the wild feeling VodooII delivered me the Unreal game more than twelve years ago.
The fine ligtning with halo glow, reflections and fog boosted up the game in an outrageous way. It may be said the clarity of the screen was scattered by the pixel melting, but I still concern it as a great profit. There have gone long shiftings of directX before those effects were obtainable. If I had Vista I would try out that GL-score on DND3D and Rune, they look quiet spectulair. i was thinking of picking up metro last light, but looking at the minimum specs for it has me a little worried...
i'm fine for cpu, ram, etc... but it has the nvidia 250gts listed as minimum.. which is what I have. anyone here playing the game: what video card are you guys using vs how well does it play? Up to Chapter 5.
The controls are broken as fuck just like in Dead Space 2. Use overrides aim mode for collecting items and opening doors, but not for using the bench nor control panels. Any tutorial introducing a new action requires holding aim to use despite almost all actions working with aim toggle on otherwise. A few random things don't work with aim toggle for no reason. Quick stasis doesn't work in aim mode despite quick health working. The mouse feel is horrible and swingy especially in aim mode. The health bar is obscured most of the time in close combat despite the cruciality of quick health. Basically one of the main ways I get through combats is focusing a lot on the keyboard and what to press, rather than actually aiming and moving. This is of course the polar opposite of what a natural and transparent control system should be like. The other issue is that apparently (I read in a few comments on Blues etc) there are loads of resources and ammo and health in the game. So far I have found the resources to be more scarce than pretty much any other game I've played. This is including playing carefully, using stasis a lot, not wasting ammo and hunting in every bloody area I can find. This is the other main way I get through combat, by cheesing the fuck out of it by running away and waiting for stasis to recharge. But... It looks great, the detail is excellent, the sci-fi style is done very well, the ship graveyard is splendid, and it's intriguing enough for me to put up with the seemingly deliberate control bullshit and keep playing. I'm back playing games again! Haven't actually had time to play anything since last year. Anyway I played COD: World at War and Necrovision. Anyone played Necrovision? I really liked it, the design and art in second half really feels like an id game. Combat was good fun.
Reviewed them both http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/call_of_duty_world_at_war.php (7.5/10) and http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/necrovision.php (8/10) Oh, I tried to play The Witcher too. Turns out you can't remap the mouse buttons and most the keys. Fuck that infuriates me. Same with the sequel I think (anyone tried?).
Anyone looked into the possibility of playing an Xbox or PS with mouse/keyboard? Too many games are coming out for consoles and not PC, I might have to get a console, but I sure as fuck aren't playing without my mouse/kb. though they say it's easy to play FPS with the controller on xbox360, I would surely prefer to take down baddies with mouse and keyboard.
I don't think so, the majority of current console constituency has been raised with twin stick shooters.
It's actually not that bad once you get used to it... there's far bigger problems with console fps (z-axis? never heard of it! the new patch allows you to raise your fov to a whopping 30! I heard you like health management so it now regenerates at twice the rate!) There's a few Wii fps games which work surprisingly well with the Wii controller, though it takes some getting used to (and the controller is still lacking in reliable tracking regardless) I am playing this on PS3 right now, but posting here since supposedly the PC version is even better. DO GET THIS GAME. It's stupidly good. Some very amazing level design. Also the first Tomb Raider game in over a decade that actually got me interested.
the ld in this One is quite amazing, if Not to say briliant. yes!
evryone should at least live it a try. Indie dev Lunar Software just released a new trailer for Routine, a SS2 style space exploration/horror game. LOOKS SICK! Permadeath btw :)))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAcAd1fUiy8 is too "ouch, I'm so emotional and helpless" for my taste.
Old Lara was a kickass rich British sexually confident adventurer. Apparently that is not a role that's accepted for women in Western society anymore. We have become too touch feely for that. All Crystal Dynamics TRs have great level design, btw. I'd almost go so far as to say, "all TRs have good level design". Looks awesome. They seem to be fans of Dark Souls at that developer so they definitely have good taste in games.
I didn't think you liked hard games DaZ? Thanks for posting that. As you've stated, it looks (and sounds) sick - definitely one to look forward to.
New Lara is too "ouch, I'm so emotional and helpless" for my taste.
That's kinda the point, this game is a prequel/reboot which is timeline-wise Lara's first actual expedition ever, so she is very green. That being said, Lara gradually stops being so afraid and emotional about 1/4 into the game as she gets accustomed with the situation she has to deal with. You can change the game client resolution as you would in any other game, but the resolution of the internal renderer is locked. To unlock it use: http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?tag=dsfix
but I still dont understand why that decision would be made by the game developers. Why allow client resolution changes if the renderer is locked? Thats like zooming.
I don't know about DS, but many games nowadays decouple world drawing from gui drawing. That way the gui is always crisp even when you don't have the power to do full high res. I like that feature a lot.
Not saying locking the world renderer is a good thing tho. The PC port of DS is ridulously lazy one. In case you havent noticed, in-game hints only include XBOX button suggestions even if you don't actually use a controller.
On a sidenote, you should play the game with a controller, even on a PC, it plays much better that way. In the case of Dark Souls it is pretty much straight up a bad port. The devs admitted that they didn't have any experience with PC dev and this was a hack job.
Thankfully DSFix exists though and takes like 15 mins to set up. Horrible, near-unwatchable headbob. And mandatory perma-death is a mandatory non-purchase, of course. Atmosphere looked good tho.
Agree re headbob and atmosphere. Hope the headbob is adjustable and the atmosphere is consistent. Not sure re perma-death. Could be effective in a horror setting, but depending on overall difficulty and etc might be a deal breaker. Thanks for the heads up
Perma-death is a gameplay feature for sure, it's a space opera rogue-like. The game is different each time you play according to dev interviews.
headbob is probably adjustable, it's UE3 so there will be a config option at the very least. Probably worth a punt if there's a demo. from the ground up with perma-death in mind. You can "complete" the game in 3 hours if you get a lucky run and just zoom around the place. There is a ton of stuff to explore and discover though.
it is somewhat random as well so each playthrough will be different. As for the headbob, I believe that trailer was recorded using the Oculus Rift which probably accentuates the head movements a bit, no idea what it looks like on kb+m. Super excited for this game though :) Just released an update to my L4D2 survival / scavenge map Cornered. You can grab it on Steam Workshop http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=125035039
Moving pixels if you want them : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdmR5fZikq0 shame I have pretty much retired from anything except quake until I get a new machine next year :(
Well, in case anyone was interested in knowing if Cryostasis (6/10) or Star Wars The Force Unleashed (7.5/10) are any good, I reviewed them...
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/index.php They were alright. Just keeps on getting better.
Playing with a gamepad and hacking away at the skinner box grind of levelling up. Two things that bug me - reusing enemy sprites and the pathetic downward attack. speaking of rogueish things, I kinda like killing time with Pixel Dungeon (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.watabou.pixeldungeon
It is in steady development so you get new features all the time. It is very luck/random dependent in terms of drops which kinda sucks. It is very rewarding when you get good items though so that is fun. Will give it a try, sometime...
RL is more like ghouls and ghosts than anything else. I know there are some Isaac fans here, have you guys seen this? Competitive Binding of Isaac League Racing, 2 players racing to reach Mom's Heart first, best of three.
Pretty nice to watch, players obviously need to know the subtleties of the game quite well. http://boilr.org/ http://www.youtube.com/mrcrumps2 FifthElephant, yeah owlboy looks gorgeous, lets hope the gameplay lives up to the visuals. Got an early access code for reviewing purposes, but let me sum it up with a moment from this morning:
I rocket jumped into a secret area to gather bonus items and health pickups. The entire time I was running about as fast as your average car, in the default FOV of 90. Since Steam is being a piece of shit I have been playing some System Shock 2 today. The user interface is so awkward and melee fighting reminds me of melee in Thief (in a bad way). Apart from that it is fantastic so far.
I guess for the HUD scaling I need to use SS2Tool? I could not find an actual description of it, what else does it do? Finally played the original Dead Space and reviewed here http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/dead_space.php
8.5/10 And also Terminator Salvation, pretty shit game 5.5/10. http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/terminator_salvation.php I know this is wanky and annoying and I'm sorry but http://www.angryflower.com/itsits.gif
If that had said hl3 I'd be running around with my hands on my head, but meh, l4d3. Guess it'll be alright :P
There was a Valve office tour for some dota2 cunts.
Haha did I do the its/it's typo? It's just too much effort proofreading back and fixing all the its and whats typos :D
I never played the SNES game nor the pen and paper RPG of Shadowrun, but I'm having great fun with this so far. I backed the Kickstarter campaign last year on a whim, and it came out last week. The game world, being quintessential cyberpunk + magic, feels accessible and familiar, yet vast. The battle system reminds me somewhat of Final Fantasy Tactics, although perhaps there are better examples. The graphics are colorful, and tile based, so I think you can mashup the tiles used in the game levels to make new levels.
Which leads to the really cool part, the level editor is included with the game, and apparently does everything; graphics layout, scripting, conversations, etc. There's already people recreating pen n' paper Shadowrun campaigns in the game (released through Steam Workshop). Just like ye olde Quake, what we do with the game will likely outlast what the developers built. Right now on my first playthrough, I chose an Ogre Street Samurai, a rather straightforward character that runs up to his enemies and whacks them with a machete and always tries to choose the most hardbitten noir-ish responses in conversation trees. Although being nice to people seems to grant extra karma points to spend on skills, so there is that. Next run I imagine I'll play as an Elf Mage or somesuch and just hire the muscle. System Shock 2 Spoilers:
Shit, I am in hydroponics and dropped one of the vials in a seemingly safe place because my inventory was full. Now it is gone. I tried looking for it in the desk I originally found it in but no avail. Did I just screw myself with a stopping bug? Scaleform sucks so hard. Might be good to use on a console but it makes me rage in Rage with mouse focus requiring clicks and all that shit. i don't remember items despawning. have you checked back where you found it, maybe it respawned there.
otherwise... yeah. there's no way to get more. also, while searching, i found this: http://www.visualwalkthroughs.com/systemshock2/hydroponics1/45.jpg I loved the research aspect and moving chemicals into one room for a one stop shop for researching... i may have to pull this game up again some time.... the room over the left shoulder from the pic is where I found the vial and I put it right on the floor in the middle of that pic. :)
apparently there are more vials hidden than needed so i guess I am fine. really weird how it vanished though. some other item I dropped in that room is still there. the story telling and level design are top notch! The vail has got to be where you have left it, as long as you saved after dropping it. SS2 saves all item drops - I remember piling an inventory full back in Engineering entrance, all the stuff was still there even before the endgame.
I'm glad to hear you're enjoying the game. Is out on steam today for 14USD. I would have bought it if the coop wasn't local only.
What's there seems to be a basic port of the XBOX game from 2012. Finished the other night. I had a moment of utter mind-fracturing SHOCK when the boss combat was actually fair, obvious and reasonably timed, instead of a gruelling unsaveable incomprehensible gimmick-fest of tedium that DS2's boss fight and most of the stupid QTEs in DS3 would have me believe. I mean sure it was crap and devoid of any horror BUT it was actually playable, which was nice.
The game....good in most places, great in a few places, terrible in some. Any QTEs and boss combats were stupid, awful, and removed any sense of horror and atmosphere. The minor puzzles were pretty similarly pointless. The controls were as ugly and awkward as before. BUT the overall game progressed pretty smoothly, the non-gimmick combat was mostly good, sometimes properly tense (sometimes first-time-death imba). The variety of settings this time was great, and some of those had a lot of character - floating around the ship graveyard was spectacular, and the bleak atmosphere of the abandoned ice planet was very well done. The gritty sci-fi details were excellent throughout. A bit like Tomb Raider in a way - looks great, atmosphere is great, gameplay is mostly good, but the deliberate addition of bad controls and bad QTEs lets it down a bit. Still recommended tho. Metro: Last Light (just started)
Bioshock Infinite (just installed) Crysis 3 (just mail-ordered) (Uninstalled FC3 as it was FC2 gameplay in FC1/Cry1 setting, didn't inspire.) Any other modern games I should try?? I have spare Steam keys for Mirror's Edge and Dead Space. Anyone interested who hasn't played any of them, yet?
It's a key that you need to activate in Steam. I sent it to the email address in your profile. Have fun!
In other news, Amnesia - A Machine for Pigs is finally released on 10 September! necros rejoice! I liked the first one but my interest waned when I discovered this tactic:
1. Monster appears 2. Run to the nearest corner 3. Stick your head in it 4. Leave the pc, go get a glass of water or something 5. Continue playing I completely ruined it for myself I know, but I can't help taking advantage of an exploit. Wasn't a fan of Dear Esther either, and apparently those two developers teamed up for AMFP. Esther was just a shoddy HL2 mod, for me at least. Having said all that, Machine is still tempting... Bit of shit trailer, just some dude walking around in pitch dark almost, and nothing actually happening. Doom3 looked better than this.
A lot of the game actually. But yeah, the game play shown in that one is pretty staid.
But bear in mind if your expectations are for an atypical FPS then you'd be disappointed anyway. What its strong on are the storytelling, environment design and raw fear. just some dude walking around in pitch dark almost
That IS the game. There's no fighting of any kind. There's also your character crying, shivering, moving like a slug and breathing heavily for no apparent reason :P
I still plan on playing it, and the first Amnesia that I haven't played yet. I just hope they're better than the Penumbra's.
Feels very much P2W...
I don't get all this upgrady crap... I never liked RPG's to begin with, and it's EVERYWHERE. Really makes me wish ingame advertising worked out so there was some other F2P model... Mirror's Edge -- I liked it a lot. It's a first-person parkour puzzle game. The puzzles are cool. The environments are cool. The art style is cool. They have some shooting but manage to balance it so shooting is not the ultimate solution to most problems. The story is good enough, but not critical to enjoying the game. The cinematics are kind of budget, but are few enough and don't drag on.
definitely worth playing Mirrors Edge. Super awesome art style and parkour stuff.
The actual shooting is actually quite bad unfortunately, luckily its not the focus and doesn't go on for too long. I haven't played FEAR 2 but I enjoyed the original quite a lot from what I remember. started playing mirror's edge. (as usual, i'm behind with games... )
interesting game that suffers from some weaknesses. the main weakness is that the game isn't able to be as abstract as it needs to be the way portal can since it is supposed to be taking place in a real city. but the thing with this game is that it wants you to run fast and react, but that usually the paths through the level take some time and planning (and some trial and error) so i end up feeling like a chump as i bumble along missing jumps (and falling to my death a lot) and stopping and staring around, trying to figure out how to get to where i want to be. still, it's nice to see first person games that are different. er... when i say it can't be as abstract as it needs to be, what i mean is that it can't be as explicit about what can be mantled, climbed, jumped, etc...
the 'runner vision', where bits of geometry that you can interact with in some way lights up as red is ok, but because it's only a short range effect, you can't actually use it to plan a route whereas in portal, everything is explicitly marked in some way and you can see exactly what you need to do before opening a single portal. also, it's possible i just suck. i've never been very good at twitch games. There is a set of standard moves in the game which the architecture is pretty much tuned to. With practice it's possible to judge what moves are possible where.
Yeah, the goal is to optimize your route/s through each level. I find combat is also pretty cool in ME, I haven't seen so many games that allow you to disarm opponents with martial arts moves and pick up their weapon including the ammo left in the magazine. This is handled pretty well. very great game IMO even if it suffers a little from being mostly linear. The route options are kinda limited and it is very scripted. More game modes might have helped, such as hiding bags for other players to find. There is a set of standard moves in the game which the architecture is pretty much tuned to. With practice it's possible to judge what moves are possible where.
There is and i'm starting to recognize it a bit more, but the more advanced (and fun!) moves such as multiple wall running are rarely explicitly pointed out, so I end up missing them and don't really practice it. I find combat is also pretty cool in ME i haven't really explored combat at all! usually I just run away. the few times where i've been forced to fight, i just treat it like a normal shooter and easily finish npcs without needing more than the first gun i grab. but i don't do it unless i need to because killing the npcs feels strangely wrong in this game even though they are faceless evil dudes trying to kill me. I've got an FTL one as well, but I tried plugging it into steam to see what'd happen and nothing did. Not sure if that makes it invalid or not.
Mark of the Ninja is just as good as everyone's being saying. These bundles... I have too many unplayed games in my steam list. I've just stopped buying them. FTL is something I genuinely wanna play though.
System Shock 2 is really hard to get back into after 3 weeks without. The maps are terrible. I just found out that you can press N to leave markers though. Died shortly after because my fingers missed the reload button and I panicked.
This game is so damn much ahead of HL in having a coherent, tight atmosphere and story. HL had more vista and diversity though so that might be better. Spirit's average game impression: http://i.imgur.com/1YrIG.jpg%3C/span%3E
Spiney: Got an email address? If non-public, send me one. FTL is a bit disappointing, so many good reviews for a straightforward grinding and leveling game? I dunno... art is also kind of a mess.
I did pour half a day into it, so thanks for the key :P Giving Amnesia another try. yes, it looks boring to me too. i don't know why everyone likes it. there's nothing to it, you jump go from random encounter to random encounter until the game forces itself to completion.
well, it is very roguelike, is it not? totally random with discreet combat events.
but i don't like roguelikes either. :) I don't get why people like Quake either, all you do is maneuver a pawn around a layout and click on enemy pawns endlessly... and the layouts and positions are the same every time!
I thought it was great, the gameplay is original, and the rogue-like elements work well. Each playthrough is quite different, and using different ships makes for even more diversity.
I like rogue-likes though. BTW Spelunky is awesome. I value the aesthetic qualities from maps in Quake far more than the replayability of FTL. Obviously, I would love endless streams of maps in Quake, but if the choice was between hand-crafted maps and endless random ones that were like Oblige maps, then it's not a choice at all.
yep I pay quake more for the level design and admiring what you guys build, rather than the gameplay.
I liked it once I tried to complete the quests of unlocking the additional ships. It got boring once I got them all though. And some were pretty frustrating to get - the crystal one for example.
I liked the game, but it could have done with more written content and stronger linked events to make it more interesting. I think Quake still has some of the best fps gameplay to date, well except for the base parts perhaps, the soldiers just don't compare to the other monsters. Especially with Quoth the game is just awesome imo.
FTL: It does have some qualities though, and it's quite difficult. I've gotten to the end a dozen times (on easy, haha), but beating the boss feels impossible. I found that if you want to stand a chance in the later levels you just need to fight constantly in order to keep monetizing. And sometimes you just die in silly ways, like an enemy using multiple ion weapons on your shields in the midst of a supernova. I also lost 6 of my 7 person crew once because I forgot to close my hull doors between 2 jumps. Apparently the air sound stops playing when you do that, and I was wondering why my oxygen level kept dropping, haha. All in all though, I feel I'd rather play something like Masters of Orion instead. The rebel fleet pursuit feels kind of forced and the game starts repeating itself very quickly. Games that rely purely on leveling for macro progression just don't do it for me. The clever RPGs are the ones that manage to sidestep that, make enough room for skill and alternate playing styles. I tried to unlock the pacifist achievement, but there's just no way I can get enough scrap to upgrade my defenses and FTL that way. Those things just make the game feel more shallow than it should be. Is the worst in the game, after a few plays you'll unlock b type variants and new ships just by getting through, or near enough. Check out the conditions on the achievements page.
It does lean towards learning more than leveling, but the learning curve is pretty steep. Probably my best ship yet.
Hope it stands a chance. I'm gonna read up some strategies, don't wanna screw it up. Permadeath really sucks sometimes :P very large pic: http://i3.minus.com/ibvUV5w2r8xtmI.jpg Mmm, to me FTL is a lot more about learning than leveling. Sure your ship gets stronger through one playthrough, but only if you've learned from your past mistakes. There are a lot of interesting strats to consider, and choosing a good plan depending on the first loot you come across (weapons, boarding, cloaking, etc.) Knowing when to pay for upgrades and on what requires experience.
Yeah of course sometimes the dice-roll will give you a really shit playthrough that is impossible to win, but even that's quite fun for me. Even if you seem to be doing well, you never know when the game will throw something unmanageable at you, makes for good stories to tell. Much of this also applies to Spelunky, go play it it's a great game! I'm starting to come around a bit on the game. Maybe I was too soon to judge it and label it as a grinding game. I still think all the 90% ratings are a bit ridiculous though. But that might have to do with the stupid rating psychology those sites employ nowadays (8 is a C and 7 is essentially an F+, retarded).
Doesn't exist in a game with permadeath!
A godlike run will see you getting hold of at least one utility item, like the scrap collector arm. Lasers suck unless they have shield penetration, at which point they become the most powerful weapon in the game - they need to cause more 'damage per room' than the enemy has shields, so a tier 2 laser and a emp gun (or whatever the disabling blue weapon is called) will allow you to quickly tear most opponents to bits, although at later levels you'll need extra oomph from drones or something to burn out the shields. Oh, and that's per room, so make sure the red lines crosses as man rooms as possible. Drone combat can be used, but to be effective you need a boarding drone, but even this is neutralized if the enemy has a single defensive drone. The best tactic overall is beaming a bunch of boarders over and knocking the crap out of their crew and systems - this lowers their offensive and defensive abilities, and if you take the ship whole (kill all the crew) then it's worth more scrap. It is however extremely ease to lose your entire boarding party if you fuck up and destroy the enemy ship or allow it to FTL jump with them aboard, so make sure to watch the charge up meter for that and deactivate automated retire as relevant. My favourite tactic was to use fire weapons, but this is pretty difficult as well. Fire weapons destroy their systems, deplete oxygen and confuse the enemy crew ai, and leave their ship intact. I managed to get the achievement for igniting the entire enemy ship (I think it was on the massive mantis cruiser as well) so that shows how sadistic I was when playing. Bastion is an awesome game and everyone should play it. I never made it past the first few screens of Limbo because it's fucking boring.
Although I liked bastion I kind of just stopped playing fairly early on.
Limbo is great. A Dark Souls 2 preview is hinting that the developer may have returned to Demon's Soul's gameplay mechanics! :P
According to the developers, playing as undead/hollow is no longer as beneficial as it was before. Other players can now invade your game when you're undead/hollow where they couldn't in the previous game. Consecutive deaths also lead to a penalty of decreased max HP with a penalty of up to 50% of your original HP. I always thought the low HP was a good mechanic of the original and I was disappointed when it was removed from Dark Souls. If you haven't tried the f2p game Warframe yet (you should, it's ace) now is YOUR CHANCE! (OMG)
Simply sign up using this referral link (IMPORTANT OMGLOL) and we will both get most awesome things! https://warframe.com/signup?referrerId=513e320b1a4d80a639000001 Daz's Func account has been hacked and the above link is a spam trojen keylogger virus backdoor. Don't click!
I would like to try out Bastion and Limbo. Thanks for your generosity!
I would like to try out Bastion and Limbo. Thanks for your generosity!
My email address is kingold#foxmail.com, with # to be replaced by @ for obvious reasons. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Dishonored Haven't done much of anything the last couple of months except play these two games. Dishonored is absolutely beautifully done. You can play both these games stealthily, and I'd never played that style before and it sort of hooked me. I actually played through Dishonored a second time just to get the Clean Hands and Ghost achievements. Then I played all the DLC for both games. I guess I'm done for now, maybe I can get back to Quake mapping. Also really enjoyed Metro Last Light recently. Gameplay is good fun and atmosphere and graphics and details are top notch.
Part way through Crysis 3, really liking it. Same old gameplay but much more interesting settings than C2, ruined city is stunning. Also Psycho is pretty funny. Played and reviewed a couple 2009 games -
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (8/10) http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/call_of_juarez_bound_in_blood.php and Mini Ninjas (6.5/10) http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/mini_ninjas.php Mini Ninjas is probably a little bit overrated, but them I'm not a 10yo so it's probably not intended for me, but COJ was actually really good, much better than the first game. Tiggit is an open source game launcher and installer.
Our mission: to help you find all the awesome indie games that exist 'hidden' around the internet. Tiggit is a desktop app that installs and launches games with one click. It is sort of like an open source Steam clone, but much simpler and currently with only freeware games and demos. Features: - Contains over 500 freeware games (and a few demos) - New games added continuously - No account or registration required http://tiggit.net/ That's cool. I've been kind of interested in checking out indie games but it's difficult to find quality stuff that's also is in a genre I like.
anyone here a fan of the x games? currently downloading albion prelude from steam... i remember not really liking the flying and combat in x2, but the sandbox aspects of it were a lot of fun.
Just reading Konas review of Necrovision. Did not know it went past WW1 setting into demonic, neat I was enjoying it, should still have saves and all.
BTW Kona the review link is wrong, it links to Call of Duty review. Got to the review by manually inputting I guess I'm in a similar boat. I love the idea of the X series but whenever I download and give it another shot the snails pace of progression at the start and the absolutely horrid, convoluted and non user friendly ui makes me delete it again :P
If it was easier to get into then I would probably give it a go, but the learning curve is just too much for me I guess. I loved Freelancer because it gave me the same feeling of the X series but it was much, much simpler. I never played any of this series. I seem to remember having trouble getting the BioShock demo to run. That plus GFWL and DRM, and I just gave up.
There's a 2K games special on Steam this weekend. BioShock 1 and 2 for $4.99 each, Infinite for $13.59 Worth it? been playing for a few hours today. combat seems a lot better than I remember it. there is less weapon clutter (no more alpha, beta, gamma variants of the same weapon) and overall ship types and weapons seem more focused.
i seem to be doing fairly well so far, having captured a couple of ships and sold them for almost a million credits. i was able to pick up a transport ship and used remote commands to do some trading while i went out and blew up some pirates and such. the UI is as bad as I remember it from x2 though, so no argument there. i wish the UI was more like eve or wow, with proper windows that you could move around and switch focus between. the x3 UI windows just feel very old fashioned. there needs to be more information on the main screen too, such as target listing. that info is available in the map, but i'd rather it was always displayed so you could switch targets more easily. re: pace, i think capturing ships is the fastest way to start off. the starter ship you get with the default argon start is good but don't use those HEPT guns that are on it as they use your power up like crazy and kill really fast (but you miss more because the projectiles move slow). if you can keep hitting a target with the low damage weapons you can force them to bail out. then just command the ship to dock at a shipyard and make easy money. Yes, Bioshock 1 and 2 are great (even though BS2 is basically the same as 1 with new levels). They don't use GFWL on Steam.
Thanks Killes. Yeah I enjoyed it, especially the second half.
Been trying to play something new this weekend. Tried America's Army 3. Didn't realise it's just a bunch of lame training missions. Graphics are utter shit. I did the first level and couldn't hit the targets, not because I'm a fkn noob but because the giant ironsight so so unreliable, waves around everywhere and jumps on the mere movement of the mouse instead of being smooth. FUCKING DELETE. Then tried Overlord II. Mint design, the tower looks so fucking cool, why can't there be some good third/first person games like this with proper combat, but Overlord II combat was shit, from what I could play. Lame melee button smash then all these stupid minions covering the screen screen that are supposed to kill for you. Unfortunately I couldn't play it, one of the moves you need to use through the game is bugged (basically my minions won't return to me) so it's impossible to complete the first level. I only managed to play a few levels using someone elses saves, but I'd missed too much to continue. Probably a good thing, I can't be bothered to play a game with pretty below average gameplay just for the graphics for almost 15 hours. Now installed Section 8. I'll review this one, as I will complete it, but it's just a botmatch for 3 hours across 8 levels. Waste of money so I'll have to get something else to play this week. Just as well my list of games to play is almost 200 long, and doesn't include any 2013 or console games yet :P and were suddenly silent.
RIP Thief, you were beautiful. Apart from the top right main paragraph which sounds like dick. Still mostly sounds like a medieval / victorian Deus Ex which is fine.
but I don't know how they can get Thief so wrong.
No hammerites? No pagans? An emphasis on combat? Linear maps? Easier game? Removal of all slang and accents? Rope arrows are limited to pre-set points? It goes on and on. I'm disgusted. The new Thief game is not aimed at original fans, it is designed for a new generation of console players. Most new players have not played or even heard of the original series, it is pretty much a clean slate.
why call it thief?
Because of marketing and brand awareness. The game developer and marketing department are often separate entities with different goals for a game. The reboot of Syndicate is a classic example of building on an existing brand name but going in a different direction to the original. They can just call it fucking
Thief: Next Generation Thief 2013 ThiAf Thief: Unlike Thief Casual Thief Thief for consoles or anything like that. Words are free! But I guess alienating old fans is irrelevant. This strategy is supposed to succeed. If you are relying on the strength of a brand then you use the strengths and core aspects of said brand in the game.
Syndicate was an abomination. Deus Ex HR was pretty good in my opinion, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for Thief. Obviously it'll be quite "modernized", but it still might end up being a good game.
The thing is the old-time fans of Thief think this game is going to be a turd and most of the profane audience think this is some kind of edgy Dishonored knock off. Most of the reviewers also seem to think the game is meh at best. I honestly highly doubt this game will be successful.
yeah, but there's not that many old-time thief fans in the grand scheme of things.
the biggest problem is getting someone to give you money to develop your game. if you throw a title that has made money in the past at them, they are more likely the green-light it. that's why you see all those 'reboots' of old films. my only problem is that it just sounds like more lowest common denominator fare, but that is the price you pay when you go AAA. (hey, that rimes!) thief is a niche market game. not everyone likes stealth, especially those that played the originals and will like it more because of nostalgia. sounds like they're trying to get out of that niche to make more money from the console gamers. I don't know if it's the right choice, could be... the modern console gamer is a fucktard, afterall.
but I seem to remember the old thief having a great story (well, thief3 that is) so I don't know what they're going on about saying this isn't 1998 anymore and games need a story. Well I'll defs play it, but I won't be eagerly awaiting it. I'm certain they won't be able to top Thief3.
Anyway, played a couple more games this week. Section 8: fucking 3 hours of crappy bot matches. 5.0/10 Then Bionic Commando - great game, 8.5/10. Reviewed here http://etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/bionic_commando.php By the way, is GTA4 worth playing? I forgot about it, but just watching over some reviews of it, it looks pretty poor graphics. Definitely hasn't aged well for a 2008 game. Although it is a city, and there's only so good a modern city can actually look. I'm not sure I need to sit through a 30 movie/game filled with meaningless minigames when there's plenty other RPG's since then. Unless it's had some good graphic enhancement mods. Actually re gta4, sounds like everyone on metacritic says the pc version is a buggy mess. Good, I can cross that off my list I didn't really want to play it anyway haha
It's a good game, I enjoyed it at least. Doesn't seem overly buggy to me and it looks fine on PC (plus there are graphics mods). I think most people are probably just biased in their evaluation due to the DRM and not so much because of actual shortcomings of the game itself. If this type of game is your thing, it's well worth a try. If you're more into tight-packed action games with no leeway inbetween, skip it.
During the Steam Summer sale I almost picked it up, but a couple people I know said it ran awful on PC unless you have a really good system, far beyond it's recommended specs.
I have it on 360 anyway, and grew tired of it quickly. I'm not sure what it was, but something about it missed what made the GTA3 line of games so fun to just dick around in. Haven't gotten GTAV yet, not sure how that compares. The main story is OK, the main character becomes irritating after a while. I've been playing the Lost and Damned DLC, that is more like it :)
TBH GTA4 seems to run nicely these days, I guess the drivers have improved since it came out. And the performance thing - it really is highly scale-able. The console counterpart graphics are about equal to medium/low settings on the PC, the PC version has higher-res textures, bigger draw distance potential and a highly enhanced lighting option. I would recommend it, don't dismiss it. It's true there were a lot of bugs when it released. But it runs fine now. I've got an i5 2500K and a 5850, and it runs FINE. :) One of the best games I've ever played. Very happy I got it on sale from Steam for $4.99
I'm beginning to think it's a little too long though. Also, I had a heck of a time getting it to actually run on my PC. Took about an hour of googling and fiddling around with software. Apparently, BioShock has problems with various sound setups. In my case it turned out that the driver built into Windows 7 for the VIA sound chip on my PC's motherboard won't work. Why? I don't know, I've never had any other game have this problem. BioShock refuses to start. I had to install the VIA driver and even then it was necessary to change an obscure recording setting (Stereo Mix) before the game would run. Weird. Excellent game though. Is great, but the games get progressively worse with each new version. The best critique I heard of infinite was from penny arcade's extra credits, a video called in service to the brand.
Interested in this:
http://candybox2.net/ Is great, but the games get progressively worse with each new version.
Then it's probably good that I only bought 1&2 for $4.99 each and avoided Infinite for the $15 or whatever it was on sale for. I haven't played much of anything but Quake, Fallout 3 and New Vegas for the last several years, so I'm a bit behind on games and I don't like to pay more than $10 for older stuff. I did buy Far Cry 3 for $20 a couple of months ago. What a rip off. That game kind of sucked. I quit about halfway through. Is still good I suppose, but I wouldn't play it twice.
The best bit for me was the story... And I still think that the first game had a better story / presentation of it. Would you kindly play through to the end and post your opinion? Tried to play Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising today. What a load of crap that is. Quit after 1.5 levels. I don't like tactical shooters, but even then would have put up with it if it had a quicksave and the zoom worked. Can't play without zoom though since enemies kill you with a single bullet from a kilometer away.
I liked Bioshock's design, but the gameplay wasn't that great. Not being able to die ruined it. Yes, excellent game, but I found the combat subsystem a little messy. Id software still does better combat, no matter what you think about Rage etc.
It just isn't very tight, there is a lot of setting people on fire and other pseudo magic crap that just distracts from the shooting, which in itself is unsatisfying. The guns don't really have enough oomph to them. The game also gets a little linear towards the end. I'm not a fan of the ending. There could have been a greater variety of Splicers for my taste, I've seen their old GDD where they had stuff like lobster mutants. I would have liked to see those. Cool plot augmentations like the Saturnine could have been much more interesting. Sadly stuff like that (as well as the smugglers) remained footnotes in favour of an endless stream of the same Splicers, just with more health. If your game has things like Incinerate 2 and Incinerate 3, just to deal with progressively higher hitpoint versions of the same enemies, then I'd say that is broken design. It is much better to introduce new, more dangerous types of enemies later in the game such as Vores, Hellknights and Tarbabies in Quake or Hellknights and Mancubi in Doom 3. Bioshock got a bit samey after the first couple levels. Awesome setting though. Everything in Bioshock looks like it's made out of 'foam doll' material.
That puts me off so hard :/ could never get around how garish the art looks. It might sound strange but that really kills the experience for me. http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ has to be one of the dumbest yet addicting "games" I know. What an idiotic concept. It's really just about making a number go faster. Interesting.
I did something like that once. It's fun to experiment with frustration on purpose in a games design.
I agree that the end isn't all that great. I really don't like end bosses that much anyway. The last part before Fontaine is pretty annoying actually. Having to wear the big daddy suit, which highly restricts your vision, followed by the little sister escort part had me just about ready to quit at that point. I still haven't finished off Fontaine, but I do have a save game at that point.
Probably tells you something about human nature... :/
hehe do you guys have the antimatter condenser yet? not sure what the point is once you've got everything though....
Is awesome.
http://www.freelives.net/ The alpha demo is free and playable in the web browser. I used a game pad. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut is released. They have made many improvements to the original game. All DLC has been integrated into the main story. Changes to boss fights and maps were made to add alternate completion options using stealth mode and hacking (yay stealth).
If you already own the original game and the DLC, it's only $4.99 This is easily one of the top 10 games I've ever played, I don't think I can resist for just five bucks. If you never played the original you can get this version for just $19.99, which I think is a great deal. Been waiting for this one. Original was great but a little rough around the edges sometime.
Full price is $20 but you get 50% off if you already have the original game and another 25% off if you already have "The Missing Link" DLC
Pretty damn awesome F2P Diablo 2 style hack n slash. The skill tree will make your head explode.
I made a Terrafusion guild because why the fuck not, currently only me and Scampie in it so add us and we can invite you :) My ign is "swordymcstab" Cool I'll jump in as well, I have lots of high level characters from the beta days, need to completely respec them to make them as strong as before. :)
The game is a bit slow to start, but it gets better the more you play, the different possible builds are quite amazing, and alow completely different play styles. What classes / builds are you? And what would be a good compliment to what you've got??
I have one of each class at level 60+, so whatever. :D
But I'll probably start a Scion, which is the only I don't have (since she's new). Honestly builds are more important than classes, you can make a strong full melee archer for instance, everything is possible. By archer I meant Ranger of course (which is supposedly the "archer" class), but there are even some close range archer builds with certain skills that make you deal alot more damage close up.
The skill and gem system allows for some really fun combinations (which is what makes it better than D3 for me). For example a common Ranger build is to use Lightning Arrow (which hits 1 target and spreads to 3 extra mobs) linked to Lesser Multiple Projectiles (shoot 3 arrows instead of 1) linked to Chain (each projectile passes over to another target) linked to Life Gain on Hit (each time you hit an enemy you gain a fixed ammount of health, 20hp for example) linked to Blood Magic (spells use health instead of mana). This means that each time you shoot you lose quite a bit of life to cast your spell, but it fires 3 arrows that potentially stack up on 24 mobs and make you gain 24 x 20hp (which means you can cast your Lightning Arrow continuously, as you'll be making more health than it costs you to cast it). That's just an example, here are some other weird builds : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9WiIxJqpLM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHO-Gmi83BE (this last one is pretty funny, but gives you a headache quite fast). http://store.steampowered.com/app/239350/
Bal and I have been competiting in it's Daily Challenge for awhile now. Honestly one of my favorite games in a long time. You guys need to get Mercenary Kings, Super House of Dead Ninjas... also it's not on sale but definitely grab Nuclear Throne too. :)
They look like games to the quality of what you'd get on a Sega or Nintenda 25 years ago. What is PC gaming coming to? :(
Combat looks twitchy as f*ck! I dig!
http://youtu.be/wu9w5P_7apA ^_^
I like the mechanics more than D2; Flask system is more interesting and the more selective item modification is less annoying. Except everyone is quiet and no-one answers when I join now, cunts. Could have really done with some help in the catacombs last night.
Is there any way to control how the colour of a gem socket is changed when you use the chromatic orb on it?? Wasted so many of those fuckers trying to get an optimal gem set-up. As we told you on IRC yesterday right before you left, ignoring us, no, Chromatic Orbs is always random.
BUT, items have a tendency to have more slots of their color (for example, a strength item will more likely get red slots when you apply a Chromatic Orb on it, dexterity green, intelligence blue). It's still possible to basically have any combination of slots on any item, but obviously getting 4 green slots on a strength item is gonna require a whole lot of Chromatic Orbs, whereas getting 4 red slots will be fairly quick. So if you're having trouble getting the right color setup, maybe you need to try to get that combination of colors on another piece of equipment that will more easily fit to what you want, sometimes it's not really possible, that's part of the difficulty of crafting. Fuck you very much, I had gone well to bed before anyone answered.
And thank you very much for that answer, useful to know. What are dex / int items in Armour?? Dex = evasion bonus, Int = energy shield bonus? Yeah, you can also see it by the required stats for items, for example an evasion/energy shield item will usually require you to have a certain amount of Dex and Int to equip it.
What kind of build are you using on your ranger?
I'm trying this: http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgIBr-ubjQgu7YMZjgBe037EogX5GwEZ_v7Io4qbJjIBshnPeu967g4j9u_wWkhW-vzFZ6CHdkp93Q2QCluvTioppbZBapPV7cAP0k2-p-pizZjexkMxG8heE4TvdO1672BLBS1AoJ65YSEaVWSjNug6UjJ-Aeefy6cwFHFBqt-_-Ov3MnKpfNmsqiftGS7Uj7nd8i_vDudSVElfP_ZIjM9QUFhjxtgV8DpYBH6HGfe-FCBQR_Pd-WO95loaEuHZYVcNkc4a29wVp9Q= but i'm finding my damage is getting pretty low halfway through act 3 normal. how's your survivability vs damage? I never re-speced my Ranger after the reset when the game came out, so I don't have a functional one at the moment, but I was using something similar (Pretty much the exact same keystones), and it worked out pretty well. What gem setup are you using?
If you're still in normal, you don't need to take Iron Reflexes, Iron Grip and Unwavering Stance too early, they are mostly interesting at higher levels. Your focus should be on getting to Resolute Technique (usually brings your DPS up if you weren't playing with crit gear) and Blood Magic (no more Mana problems), and lots of health nodes. Also, don't bother with Endurance Charge nodes until you see you can already maintain 3 easily with your gear/gem setup. Have a level 25 Witch (reserved for coop with a friend) which is purely spell based. Also have a Templar I recently started currently around level 15. Though I must admit the latter has been more fun to play, using a mixture of melee and spells is a little more engaging.
Level 21 Templar and counting... :P Won't be long till I surpass my Witch at this rate.
For AoE, i'm using Split Arrow + Lesser Multiple Projectiles + Life Gain on Hit.
Single Target is Burning Arrow + Faster Projectiles + Added Cold Damage I also use Fire Trap and Poison Arrow clouds for extra damage. I just got blood magic so it'll be another 4 levels before I get resolute technique. I haven't done any testing but it's just a feeling that it takes longer to burn down mobs, even normal ones. This could just be the difficulty ramping up as i near the end of act 3 though. My weapon isn't very good though, just a 22-64 damage level 32 bow (i'm 37). I used mostly Lightning Arrow on my ranger, with lesser multiple projectiles, but Split Arrow is strong if you're going for more of a physical damage build.
Are you sure Fork is adding much? Chain is better sometimes if you have that, otherwise you could try adding some damage buff instead, or Pierce. If you are going for more physical damage, Frenzy is pretty good as a single target skill, with Faster Attacks, it builds up Frenzy charges which will buff all your attacks, so even vs a group you can shoot a few Frenzy shots regularly to keep your frenzy charges up (that's 15% more attack speed). But yeah, things get tough at the end of Act 3, you need to start finding or crafting better items. Fork is kind of funny because sometimes it'll ricochet in just the right way and deal tons of damage and other times it'll do nothing.
I will probably swap out for pierce (I haven't found chain yet). Lightning Arrow (and frost) seem to be very mana hungry, but I haven't tried them yet since I got blood magic. It seems to do less damage though, but my current bow is a +phys bow with no elemental damage at all. I keep the other ones leveled up though so I can always swap if I get some +elemental damage items. As for single target, I kind of like the woosh and particle effects of the flame arrows.... ^_^ also I have a hard time keeping frenzy stacked while kiting, keeping poison clouds and fire traps up. I really should try it again though since most of my damage is physical. Reviewed a few games lately.
Mirrors Edge 7.0 http://etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/mirrors_edge.php Crysis Warhead 8.5/10 http://etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/crysis_warhead.php Far Cry 2 7.5/10 http://etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/crysis_warhead.php Who's played Alone in the Dark? Any good? oops correct link to fc2 is http://etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2013/far_cry2.php
Slightly tangential but I find Leap Slam a very useful gem, not so much for attacking but for getting to power totems easier and also for taking shortcuts across the scenery. HTH.
My 2hander Dualist in Hardcore beat most of Act2 by using Leap Slam for damage.
The dualist is great when he Leap Slams, because he does a little spin move in the air while doing it so it looks like he's this dancer in armor with a giant sword leaping around stepping on enemy's toes until they die. http://www.twitch.tv/redbullesports/b/482370792?t=3h38m
Red Bull semi-finals, Scarlett vs. Bomber, BO3, game 3, tied 1:1. Knife-edge game with a brilliant finish, exactly why SC2 is still such a great e-sport 3 years in. Dark Souls is 6$ on steam. Picked it up since I figure if it's too hard/annoying, it's not much of a loss. :P
Dunno when I'll actually play it though. I still have Rage from last week's sale that I haven't even played once. Just started playing L4D1, I've only done one mission so far but um... does it get better looking? I read the graphics are slightly dated, but damn, this game looks like around 2004 standards, quite similar to FEAR.
It's just dark corridor box maps. The sewers section was utterly pathetic. If it doesn't get better, then probably apart from Cauldron HQ and City Interactives games, it'd be the shittiest looking action game of 2008 lol. Gameplay is fun, but I can see it getting old real quick if there's only 4 different enemies. Hopefully there's some good user made content, although the engine seems just as much to blame. I suppose they're still using the upgraded Quake engine. Haven't played it in a while, but I thought it looked fine at the time, it doesn't have any silly over-the-top eye-candy like some other games, but it does what it needs to do just right. Oh and L4D2 has some of the best atmospheric levels in any FPS (Hard Rain campaign).
By the way, if you're playing alone you're really not doing it right, single-player L4D is kind of boring, 4 player coop or versus mode is where it really shines. The amount of times I got kicked or insulted for absolutely no reason...
(Killing Floor is more fun anyway) Yeah I meant playing with friends obviously.
Never liked Killing Floor much, it was ok but pales in comparison with L4D for me. The whole campaign aspect of L4D is really nice (Hard Rain in L4D2 is so good), and the versus is one of the most original FPS team vs team variant out there (but it can get very competitive = lots of dickheads). We actually set up LAN parties for L4D1.
I think the reload times and power of the weapons was made too xbox friendly for the sequel, but it was still good. Best played with people you know really, the AI can be pretty shite at times - their navmesh system is a joke. Not sure why they opted for something so deprecated; we investigated here (back in the day) and google showed up handful other methods for doing it that are far more robust. L4D doesn't have graphical flash, it has hordes of zombies. And it's awesome.
Although, the additions in L4D2 are enough for me to recommend skipping L4D1. The new enemies and weapons make the game feel more It's a good game still.
I remember the No Mercy campaign from the first one being very good. And yeah, Hard Rain obviously wins in the second one. Here's where I used to get user content from: http://www.l4dmaps.com/ It's hit and miss though, many custom levels are stupidly difficult. Can't remember the names of any of the good ones just now. You also need to install some custom content support thing through steam to play the stuff. Finished it. I started to look through custom maps but it looks like all the good ones (what few there are some of them look like someone threw up on the screen) were converted to l4d2 anyway.
Did a review but no one much will agree with me, haha, 8/10 being generous. Also reviewed X-Blades: 5/10, Wolverine: 7.5/10 and Ghostbusters 7.5/10. ....and she likes a fuckton of particle and smoke effects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RURQSR788Dg Not sure which I prefer in the final comparison shots to be honest... That back when Quake was being developed the z-buffer was being described as a low-tech means of doing hidden surface removal, while nowadays we do all kinds of absurd stuff inside of it.
Re Bailey, yeah the final comparison just seems to be an overkill of effects, I can't shit except sparks/light/smoke.
Really liked them and was lucky enough to play them regularly with real life friends. The only flaw is the aural pollution aspect. The sounds are all extremely annoying and it's a constant barrage of weird ass zombie groans, stupid music firing to alert you of specific enemies or situations- I always found the aural aspect of it "cacodemonic". Just very annoying sounds and musics rapid firing constantly. Does anybody here understand what I'm talking about?
L4D has the same issues like all of their other games. Lack of individualist playstyles. You're forced to stick to your team, there's no room for splitting up and try new coop strategies from a distance. Same with TF2, I like exhausting the possibilities and trying new ways of doing thing but I'm forced in the same cookiecutter templates with another slight variation on the shotgun. There's no room for creativity, you just stick to your team and do the same routine over and over again. Same with Half Life, the level designs are inventive, the puzzles are a great addition and it's great with economy of gameplay. But you play it a second time and everything is already so predictable you can't be bothered. I really enjoy the production values, but apart from that... meh
I really don't get why most people like their games so much, I got this friend that's hooked on TF2 and play together with her and I can tell she's having fun, but all the while I'm just sitting there hoping it'll finally click for me. And I've logged 150 hours on it so it's not like I didn't try, hah. For L4D I agree on the coop a bit, once you've done the campaign once, they aren't as interesting to re-do.
It does become more interesting when changing your playgroup, different people play differently. If you role-play a bit, or just try goofing around it's usually quite fun. Nothing is forcing you to always play the same way, I've had quite a few situations where I've left the group and tried to do something on my own, even if you fuckup and get caught, it's fun to see how the rest of the group will react, leave you to your stupid bravery, or try to save you. Where it really shines for me is the Versus mode with proper teams, the trap setups you have to prepare as an infected team are really interesting, and nothing like it exists in any other FPS. For TF2 I just don't know what to say, to me there's no other multiplayer FPS worth playing these days. It's funny, the different classes offer lots of different play-styles, and it has some great maps... Again playing on the right server / with the right people helps. Vs was the first version of the game finished, and the version the dev team played to balance the gameplay.
Which is why its the best version of the game to play... Apparently anyway. "Re Bailey, yeah the final comparison just seems to be an overkill of effects, I can't shit except sparks/light/smoke."
Well, it's a demo designed to show off the power of the graphics engine. So the fact that the effects are heavy handed shouldn't surprise. Is this scampie's map for Race The Sun in this total biscuit video? Starts at 8.56
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4hb3XRuSUM I used to work with Aaron San Flippo (1/2 the dev team of that game, the other half being his brother) at Raven, and made that 'map' for the game just after it was released (before the Steam release).
The game has a pretty simple editor where you take basic geometic shapes and put them together into objects which can have some basic scripting, and then you arrange the objects into several large 'patterns' that the game can then string together into it's levels. You can define how early or late a pattern can be spawned too (so you can many simpler patterns for early in the game, or more difficult patterns for later), and also global lighting and sky colors. As far as the game goes, it's a pretty straight forward deal, you move left or right to avoid objects and collect score and powerups. The random seed for generating the levels changes each day, so there are daily highscores to compete with. It's fun, but nothing that's going to set the world on fire. Fun game - on sale on Steam today, I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, I would recommend it :) The gameplay is good in the sense that you can move fast (like in Quake), and there are lots of character upgrades, weapon upgrades, and different combos that you can do with the sword.
There are some good boss-fights too. Started the game, in the first 30 minutes of game spent about 20 minutes in cut-scenes (with skipping 3/4) and wandering about with no fight, fuck it, really does not inspire for more effort into it but maybe that changes ?
Actually I have not played Farcry Red Dragon due to that inane intro/tutorial, that is seriously bad. Seriously after the load times, helicopter gunning I dont have the patience to complete it and its fucking checkpoint shit... Need to find console command to skip it or something
It gets better! You have to explore quite a lot - there are lots of hidden areas and easter eggs.
And yeah - it picks up pace as you get through it. is aces, the annoying as shit tutorial is a piss take of annoying tutorials. It would be nice if it was skippable though. ;)
Its not even a funny, or fun, or good, or serve any purpose. I think my kindergarten schoolmates had better humor. Fucking pisses me off I dont want to have to sit through these idiots idea of "funny" 30 minutes before I get to fucking play the game....
If they had maybe the narrator standing nearby and you could blow his brains out within 1 minute of the tutorial as a way to skip it then it might of been slighhhhtly funny.... I've been wanking around for 6 months about rebuilding my website, always putting it off because it's a few days work. But I finally did it: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/
Same old content, but more focused on game reviews now. It's even responsive now (most of it). Got this on sale since I heard some good stuff about it on here.
I like it. It's semi stealth/action shooter but you can play either way for the most part. I'm not sure how far you can take the action part as combat is somewhat hard and stealth is pretty easy. Beautiful looking game, reminds me of Thief 3 but I see touches of Dark Messiah which Arkane made before which was also a pretty good game. Haven't finished it yet, so can't say much more, but yeah, it's half price and I think worth it if you are interested in this kind of game. U got Blink yet? Best gameplay feature ever, and yes makes action very feasible.
HL2-level graphics, but the art and style is nice. Very cool game really. Yeah Blink is a lot of fun and very easy to use. Personally love blinking up just behind an enemy, taking them down, grabbing their body and blinking back. Really stealth ninja feeling ability!
I also really like how the mana system works in this game. Your abilities consume mana, but it recharges quickly (2-3 seconds) but if you use another ability before it recharges, wherever your mana was at that point becomes the new maximum. This happens until your maximum is so low you can't use an ability and you need to drink a potion which restores your maximum mana to it's true maximum. This lets you use your abilities as much as you want if you have time to wait but also puts a cap on overuse/spamming abilities. I also like that you can mantle up on surfaces, even while jumping/falling. Finally an FPS that makes the character not feel like a useless slob who can't climb over a fence. This is easily one of my top ten games ever. One of the very few that I've actually played through more than once (just so I could get the "Clean Hands" and "Ghost" achievements). I also liked the fact that there were no Boss fights, just "get in and get it done" missions with lots of freedom in how you do it.
Agree with all of the above. Definitely an FPS gameplay highlight of the last decade, and a clear and cutting riposte to the tedious on-rails hand-held "interactive" movie "games" around.
Damn xmas is good for catching up on games. So far since the start of December I've played L4D, Alone in the Dark, Chronicles of Riddick, Fear 2, Zeno Clash, Dragon Age: Origins + all the DLC's, Prototype, Red Faction: Guerilla and Resident Evil 5, + a bunch of adventure games. And all reviewed on my site.
Dragon Age was definitely the best of the bunch, Fear2 a distant second. This actually looks pretty damn funky for you Portal fanatics etc:
http://www.bluesnews.com/s/148038/first-person-puzzle-game-concept-trailer Graphics look fuckin boss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meNE4CPtnCo#t=85 Pretty previous-gen graphics tbh. Like the idea of going back a step in the gameplay theme though.
Doesn't mean it's bad. I think all GFX look pretty great these days and even prev-gen stuff is good. It's not what looks inspiring about that game tho.....the return to suitable survival horror is it's selling point.
The graphics seems pretty intentional. It's a throwback to the Alien low-fi sci-fi look so it's only going to look SO good. One video said they've added screen effects to make it appear old and chunky, even. I think they have a definite art style and I like that they're pushing it rather than playing the losing game of chasing photo realism.
Seems like it'd work best as a short play rogue like with situations, exploration and permadeath, rather than a scripted story you just play once.
But maybe I'm just biased. Seems like it'd work best as a short play rogue like with situations, exploration and permadeath, rather than a scripted story you just play once.
But maybe I'm just biased. Cool another Aliens game. I haven't even played the last 2 yet. But hopefully they make it very atmospheric and creepy... not overdo the action. More like surival horror but without being a cunt about it. That's what Alien/s should really be, I think.
I wrote a review of the recent Shadow Warrior for TruePCGaming. http://truepcgaming.com/2014/01/10/tpg-second-look-shadow-warrior-2013-review/
Seems like it'd work best as a short play rogue like with situations, exploration and permadeath, rather than a scripted story you just play once.
You just described Routine perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaZqV0o7EW4 yeah sock that looks great. you know, I kinda wish I had more time in life, I think I'd seriously consider making my own indie game. It'd be first person, mix of a shooter and puzzle-adventure, maybe in a fantasy type setting. But with some unique aspects to it. Probably with the source engine because it's easy, although it's not the prettiest. and sell it on steam.
was just looking at idtech5 games today and see Brendon Chung is making his own game with it. He used to make Quake2 levels before going off and creating standalone titles with id's engines. his levels weren't even that great. You should do your own game sock, you definitely have the artistic talent. your last couple of levels in a modern engine would be great. Started to think more about it... anyone looked into Unity engine? http://unity3d.com/
Looks pretty great, full AAA graphics and capabilities. In fact on the games list I recognise of those developers names - Ninja Theory (DMC, Heavenly Sword), Obsidian Entertainment (New Vegas). It does cost ($1500 all up or $75 a month but there's also a free version), but it looks like you can just about create your own game without any actual hard coding, what with all the assets (1000s) available. There's even full gaming kits for FPS or RPG's so the game structure is already built. 3D models for instance, there's 5000 you can purchase, mostly well under $100. You could purchase an entire games worth of creatures and characters for easily under a $1000. Which is what I'd do. ie check this out, fully animated, only $10 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/13626 Then I'd just need to hire a freelance coder or team up to do all the AI, but all the levels I'd build myself. Unfortunately I can't be fucked learning a 3D modelling program to build all the levels, gave 3dsmax a go and hated it, though maya looks way better. But just don't have the time but if I were 18 instead of 33, I'd do it, it would be such an awesome opportunity to build your own game (though if I was young 18 I couldn't afford any of the tools anyway). Yeah just browsed all the threads on here that mention it and see you use it, and Kinn's building a game in it. How's your game going Kinn?
I have priveliged information about [Unity's] corporate structure that morally compels me to avoid it.
to be frank, they are thieves, spies, and saboteurs. in keeping with stereotypes of 1980s movies about corporations. but, game engines. Well, our financial situation went tits in a quite hilarious way pretty quickly, so I've been making stuff for a proper company again to pay the bills.
Not for long though! I'm leaving the industry for good in six weeks, in order to manage a small music festival with my bro', and (more importantly) arse about with Quake again :} Unity is the dog's danglies though. I'll make a proper post about what I've made so far in it (at some point). Well, our financial situation went tits in a quite hilarious way pretty quickly, so I've been making stuff for a proper company again to pay the bills.
Snap! Is a powerful engine that removes most of the barriers at beginner and intermediate level.
Once you start trying to push it to do things it wasn't designed for it gets more complex. Manually writing shaders is also a pain in the arse, but has the benefit that you don't have to precache anything. There is a package that allows you to generate shaders as well. the amount of packages and stuff available is pretty impressive - there's tools to do most stuff that might cross your mind. And it's multiplatform, including all major consoles, devices and web browser. You dudes gave me some decent ideas before. I ended up playing quite a bit of Torchlight 2 which was fun. I did have issues with steam's offline mode, game updates, and a load of other shit and I think eventually the game simply couldn't update nor start, and I ended up uninstalling it and steam in frustration.
So....I need similar advice to last time: Low-ish spec (or scalable), easy to control RPG / RTS / action games, NOT totally old-skool, and ideally NOT requiring Steam nor any other online system. I had a brief look at Drakensang which might be an option. I'm open to other ideas.... And not at all funny.
Now you've got the hilarity out of your systems, sensible suggestions please. Currently thinking about Drakensang and Dragon Age, so would welcome sci-fi-esque or strategy-esque to contrast with that. I think Xcom might not run at all, and Fallout2 etc too dated for my tastes. you haven't played any of the Dragon Age games?
I'd start with that. not sure it's really a laptop game though, maybe too complex for laptop. Seems pretty good so far, very pretty, with turn+grid based combat.
XCom is a really good game if you can run it yeah. Path Of Exile is online only and I've played it through.
T'bird reassures me Dragon Age is not too intense to play so it might be okay. Banner is not my style at all, sorry. Magika looks fine, definitely suitable, although yet more iso-metric-ish fantasy RPG and I did plenty of that in TL2 and POE. Pretty sure my laptop is below the minimum specs for Xcom. Dragon Age.
Might get Drakensang and maybe XCom, gotta check my stats first. Any thoughts on: Ground Control 2 , Supreme Commander , Homeworld , Overlord 2?? not played it but many consider it a classic. I didn't like supreme commander because in order to control the insane army sizes you have to zoom out to a point where all the units become little icons on the map.
Overlord 2 is a fun game, but less than the first. If you like being an evil bastard then it's for you. Homeworld is a classic but it's very difficult, be warned.
Concerning Dragon Age, I think it is one of the worst RPGs I have ever played. Hated everything about it. i played overlord2 for about half an hour, got not one but two game stopping bugs. cool graphics but i wasn't enjoying it that much, so deleted it.
Daz : "I didn't like supreme commander because in order to control the insane army sizes you have to zoom out to a point where all the units become little icons on the map. "
Wtf ? That was the beast feature/gui find of SupCom. How else do you want it - ant sized dots ? Sure it worked great! But I wanted to see death robots blasting the shit out of each other, not icons slowly moving across a map and disappearing :)
Just my personal preference. Ahh I remember an epic shield and nuke SupCom match, soooo pretty, such destruction (don't fucking shibe)
It's in Open Beta now for NA, next few days Euro will also have access.
http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/ I'm Scampie#1743 on NA if anyone wants to add me, I've been playing the beta way too much for the last few months Rediscovered Lavalanche: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59596
Anyone like the 3rd Stalker, Call of Pripyat?
I've been trying to play it but it just won't work, constantly crashes and won't load saved games. I'm amazed that a company could put out a game that just doesn't run, I thought they would have learnt from the first two games. I have 190+ hours on Call of Pripyat and the game works flawlessly. It is by far the most stable and bug-free Stalker game.
yeah i tried cop complete. seemed to crash constantly with that as well, shame because 'complete' made the game look much better as well - it looked pretty sweet.
The moddb rating doesn't lie and they are usually rather nice with mods. Complete is total garbage and will make your game crash, corrupt your saves and introduce horrendous bugs everywhere. It also uses completely outdated versions of third-party mods like AtmosFear or Absolute Nature that are plagued with issues, issues that have been fixed with subsequent versions. You can make your game look really really good without having to download Complete, and thank god for that.
The base game should work by default, however. There is no reason why it shouldn't, and the game is perfectly fine vanilla compared to Shadow of Chernobyl and especially Clear Sky. Call of Pripyat is a very stable game compared to the other two and I never had any issues with it. The only times the game crashed or behaved in a weird way were always because of various mods that are usually less stable (but still a lot more than Complete for some weird reason :rolleyes:). If you get a crash there is usually an error window called BugTrap saying X-Ray Engine 1.6 has crashed. If you see that, an error log will be copied to the clipboard automatically, so open notepad and paste its contents. This will usually tell you what's wrong. hmmm maybe I'll reinstall it. it did crash before I installed complete, but I did manage to play for a good half hour then put complete on and can't really get 10 minutes out of it. perhaps complete is still causing issues even though it's uninstalled. Yep the x-ray engine 1.6 is the error I get, although the forums seem to be littered with users getting the same error. there's a lot.
one user said it works fine on xp but on win7/8 the issues start. but anyway, i'm on l4d2 now so i'll get back to COP it in a week or 2. I just remembered that there is a microsoft update that messes up DX10/11 games including Call of Pripyat. Do you have MS Update KB2670838 by any chance? If yes you could try uninstalling it and try again if it changes anything.
http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/spacehulkdeathwing/1090/preview.html
Will this be the game that gets 40K FPS right?? Skacky isn't that your studio?? Also: http://news.xbox.com/2014/01/games-microsoft-studios-gears-of-war Epic have got rid of Gears Of Wank thank fuck. Maybe they can concentrate on making great games with their great engines like they used to, instead of pure shite. Keep the console bullshit out of this thread!!!
Yeah the death of of epic games some years ago was a shame, when they started doing console only games. maybe if they create a new ip it'll force them to have to support pcs as well. if it weren't for pcs they'd never exist.
i guess it means gears stays xbox only though with microshit. I used to work there, yes. There wasn't plans for a WH40k FPS yet when I left though. I'm curious to see how will this turn out.
Kona
I installed CoP with the Complete mod and had trouble with crashes on startup. The fix for me involved tinkering with the texture quality slider (I think I read that it should be 75% or less to be stable). I also think that the grass detail setting can cause problems due to memory. I'm not on the gaming machine so I can't look it up but there is a file that stores user config data. What I did was lower graphics settings until it worked and made a copy of that file. Then I would increase the settings until it would fail and iterated settings until I could get good graphics without crashing by deleting that file and letting it get recreated again with lower settings. Sorry for the vague description but I wanted to give you some hope that it does run. Apparently, it's also good to delete a cache of files also near the user file location to refresh the startup. I only played long enough to confirm that it ran. I can't comment on how good the game is from personal experience. I am sorry, I didn't know that later Gears Of War were console-only, I only played the first one on PC for a few hours before giving up as it was so awful (the only time I've ever had to do that). However even if the franchise and acquisition are purely console-related, I would still hope that Epic could return to being relevant/glorious as PC developers.
Bear with me here... I'm mostly an FPS/3PS player, but I've tried a little bit of other genres:
I've tried definitive modern RTS - Starcraft 2 I've tried definitive modern iso-RPG - Path Of Exile, Torchlight 2 I've installed definitive modern turn-based strat - XCom I'm running low on games to play, so I am wondering what other genres I could dabble in?? Ruling out any sport games, side-scrollers or racing games as I would rather switch off the PC and stare at the wall, what other modern (not after 2D pixelly shit sorry) classics could people recommend?? Space strategy? Empire building? Survival? Give me ideas please. AAAAAAA perfectly acceptable too.... No Spelunky here. All PC games I have played and enjoyed
http://store.steampowered.com/app/244870/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/221640/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/248820/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/239070/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/218820/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/230700/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/241600/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/234390/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/253350/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/219190/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/227580/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/200900/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/41210/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/33680/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/215670/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/113020/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/105800/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/231160/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/70300/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/ The only one out of that batch that looks beyond a teenagers college project is The Swapper, that looks alright actually.
What about mods? I'm currently playing through the 100s of l4d2 mods, many of decent quality. Though not so great if you want something different because they're all the same. Terarria
http://www.terraria.org/ 2D minecraft, but with guns, epic bossfights and much more evil creatures. High on the kiddie-retro-pixel scale, great gameplay. Teleglitch http://diemore.teleglitch.com/ Roguelike with a bit of a Quake base vibe. High on the retro pixel scale. If there are any fans of RTCW and Wolfenstein here, then I recommend give Ubersoldier 1 and 2 a try. Even Wolfenstein 2009 copied the shield ability that the player's character have, and Burut should feel proud.
I should have specified 3D only...and definitely NO retro-pixel games. But...
Bastion - more RPG? Bit bright and cheerful for me. Swapper - this looks kinda nice actually for a 2D thing. Might be tempted for the style alone. Natural Selection - more FPS? MP only, no sale. Hammerfight - sorry fighting games have no appeal. Sins Of A Solar Empire - yes, forgot to mention, I bought that for my laptop. Any others in that style? it's a shame natural selection 2 is multiplayer only, because the graphics look pretty sweet. perhaps one day they can incorporate single player.
Isn't a kids game, and is well written. The art does give it stupid fall off world through hole you didn't see syndrome though. Recommended.
Has a training mode which you play on your own.
But seriously - if you have an internet connection, PLAY IT! Believe me I am tempted but I would ideally like something that would actually work out of the box, and if it's going to be a true 3PS RPG, then I want to be able to use my customary controls for it. Which according to a panel of experts, I can't.
Dark Souls at most needs one easy to set up Mod ( DSFix ) if you want to use Controller only. If you want to use Mouse/KB you need DSMFix on top of that. Both are pretty easy to set up.
In Mouse/KB Mode you get a Key Settings Menu ingame - not sure if you also get this with a Controller though as i only ever played it with Mouse/KB. If not, there are some controller emulators that people seem to be suggesting a lot ( x360ce and MotionJoy ), which have custom key config support. So 2 mods needed. And Le Bal tried to rebind keys to something near my config and it didn't work.
No gamepad games please, ta. AND NO FUCKING 2D GAMES THANKS. Since you liked Skyrim, never thought of trying something like Fallout New Vegas? It's pretty much Skyrim with guns (not as pretty, but better writing).
Yes sorry missed that in IRC last night. I did try Fallout 3 and it kept crashing as I was being born. I should try it again and see if it magically works - it is a good choice (although as an FPS RPG, not something new to me).
Nehrim just looks like more RPG, even if it might be good.
GlovePie could be an option but it is a lot more dicking around, I am lazy and used to just installing and playing games ;). Actually I'd be up for another modern classic ground-based RTS if anyone has any ideas?? I'm tired of L4D2 mods already, they're all the fucking same, so I reinstalled Stalker COP. This time didn't touch the settings or install complete, and haven't had a single crash, yay!
Been playing for the last few hours and I seem to be almost to the point of entering pripyat (just need a suit)... which appears to be well into the game already, over halfway? I haven't done many side quests yet, only a few, so i think i'll have to go back and do some. I haven't even found a single artifact or lootpack yet, the whole place seems empty. No interesting places to explore, no cool items yet (some fancy shotgun is the best i've got so far from a bandit leader). The graphics aren't very good either, doesn't seem to be any improvement since the original (which looked better with complete) so COP appears worse out of the box. I'm going to try this mod: http://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-hd-project1 Looks like it does a pretty good job of improving the looks, just gotta wait for the 7gb download! Stalker COP:
Finding artifacts works differently from the first stalker game. They aren't simply scattered around the countryside. Your detector actually is good for something, and it's worth buying (or looting) the best detector you can afford. There are stashes hidden everywhere in the world, but unlike the first game they are not in containers and usually not even marked. You have to search buildings and structures from top to bottom. The side quests are most of the game in Stalker COP, unlike the first one. You should try Absolute Nature 3.1 (or 3 Lite if you don't want additional vegetation) and Absolute Structures with AtmosFear 3 if you want eye-candy. This HD mod has some really weird textures and is unfinished afaik.
I'm almost certain you need to start a new game with AtmosFear 3 however. 0. Ask someone on Steam/IRC who you know has played it on PC with Mods.
Seriously whats this GFWL Install/Uninstall stuff, i don't recall ever having to touch that. I needed to do that shit with GFWL otherwise the game wouldn't launch. I have never encountered Shambler's other issues though.
I got Dark Souls and gave up on it after 5 minutes of just trying to start a god damn game. That UI is unforgivable.
is an absolutely brilliant 2d beat 'em up, megaman, metroidvania-ish, kind of rpg platformer thingy game... with a really great soundtrack.
Get on it! Sad to hear your having so many issues :(
I didn't follow any guides. I just downloaded dsfix and edited the I already had a G4WL account that I used for some other games so that wasn't really a problem. I never tried to run the game in offline mode (and I would suggest that for dark souls, running online makes the game better in a lot of ways. Summoning/invading etc only works when you are online obviously and is a pretty cool mechanic). I can't talk about using kb+mouse to control the game. Honestly every single article/comment/guide I read about the pc controls just said PAD OR GTFO and I have to agree. It is a fucking awful port. Dreadful in fact and ticks all the boxes for "stay the fuck away". If the game wasn't as captivating as it is then I would have never even touched it. good job that I have my consoles to play it on. I'm glad I did because it's one of my favourite games of all time, probably in the top 3.
People in the office were playing it on PC and was thinking I'd get around to it sooner or later. Guess not.
Dark Souls is a console game, it is designed for the PS3 and the controls are perfect for the controller. Trying to use a mouse/keyboard is unwise with this game. I would highly recommend to attach a controller to the PC port, the game is good because the controller scheme is well thought out and implemented, it is worth learning.
After seeing the Daz derpathon through Dark Souls and that DS2 is coming out soon I decided to break my usual habit and try a pure magic character build and it was awesome. Once you get the crystal spells from Logan and a couple of good rings it is possible to create a pure glass canon mage build that can easily one shot any mob (including giants / large demons) and make mince meat of most bosses. I tried the new DLC content and really did not like it compared to the original. Most fights are melee only and the difficulty level is extremely high compared to the original, but the story for the new area is brilliant. It is all entirely irrelevant to me now. Tried, failed, ignored.
Except: *IF* DS2 works out of the box, I will give it a try. As per Derpz, it still intrigues me. I really enjoyed the balance of DS1, after you get the hang of the game it really feels perfectly tuned.
I played Dark Souls 2 last year at a convention and it was rock solid in comparison. You can get staggered out of defence quite a lot easier, the swings take a lot more stamina too. The whole thing feels slowed down and tougher. Now I hear if you crank up your agility it feels a bit more like DS1. Graphically it's greatly improved from the last game. I hope gameplay has been tweaked by the time it's released. k I've finished call or pripyat. Actually despite giving the impression that I was significantly into the game, i had nowhere near enough cash to buy the seva suit or get buddies to get to pripyat so I had to go back and do a tonne of side quests anyway. So I did probably about 40% of the side quests overall. But in the end didn't need to do so many because the end was fucking easy.
I might see if there's any big mods for it (with new levels). glad I reinstalled it though, it was worth a playthrough. necros if you do want to play stalker, i'd say go for the third one, it's the most polished. actually, here's my thoughts here: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/index.php/game-reviews/2009-reviews/item/stalker-call-of-pripyat You could only play on static lighting? Shame. The game looks tons better with the highest lighting settings. The engine has it's problems though. Crashes and most annoyingly the poor level streaming. I read a interview with the engine designer saying how it was his biggest mistake and didn't have the time and resources to correct it, his next engine running Metro 2033 is supposed to have really good level streaming. I haven't played that yet though.
One thing I liked about the design in CoP was that the world was much more concentric and hublike, compared to SoC where you often had to do long and dull walks to get to places. Might have been an engine limit at the time? I never played Clear Sky, since it's supposed to be sub par. The ending is pretty easy, yeah. Compared to Shadow of Chernobyl where it literally is hell on earth. Actually I don't think I finished it, running out of anti rad in the last part is pretty much a death sentence. Clear Sky ending was the hardest I think...I only watched it in youtube because the game crashed a couple levels before the end and wouldn't let me continue, but I remember thinking that looked fucking hard.
just torrent it if you can't buy it anywhere anymore, it's not like GSC are around to get the profits. the steam version is buggy i believe. I didn't notice any drm shit with my install. Restarted Hotline Miami and OH LOOK I MANAGE TO FORGET JUST HOW FUCKING FRUSTRATING THE BOSSFIGHTS ARE.
Those of you planning on playing any of the STALKER games should absolutely play them with the Complete mods (available for every title in the series). They greatly enhance the game's visuals and fix tons of bugs and crashes.
Also, play on easy. I usually play games on hard but STALKER has a terrible combat system. It's all about the atmosphere anyway. Don't, and only play on Master. That difficulty level makes all the weapons extremely lethal, both for you and for your enemies. No bullet sponges.
definitely complete for the first two. but it wouldn't work for the third game I had to completely reinstall the game. but yeah it does greatly improve the visuals.
I actually did play on easy for the last game haha, but it was actually a little bit too easy. maybe easy/normal for the first two, and normal/hard for the third. I think they got the difficulty levels sorted better for pripyat. Not sure why one would play that rather than Quake.....but they seem to have done a very neat job of it!
just a few notes about my life with stalker mods
shadow of chernobyl complete works fine, but there are way better mods now. complete looks like an ugly unwanted child in comprison with autumn aurora 2. i'm not exaggerating. also complete is just too easy and the game economy is too benevolent. not a chalange at all. another alternative is shadow of chernobyl mod pack 2013, especially the beta version that uses photorealistic zone 2 textures. imho autumn aurora 2 is better - increased foliage draw distance makes all the difference. still hoping l.u.r.k will see the daylight eventually.. aa2 needs version 1.0006, mod pack 2013 1.0005. clear sky i have something called radioactive edition - CS and CoP pack - and CS complete doesn't work for me. game crashes every 5 minutes when i reach garbage/broken scripts etc... no go for me. i tried mystery mod /graphics overhaul only/ + some smaler mods /sleeping bag.../ and i was ok. graphics of mystery mod is realy realy impressive. there is also mod pack 2013 for clear sky combining mystery + complete/cs remix/absolute nature/guns form misery etc... unlike vanila complete it is stable /at least for me/ and graphics is even better than mystery. ghost land mod is still unfinished, but it looks like a ultimate clear sky mod and i put a lot of faith in it. call of pripyat complete mod looks fine, but it completely broken for me /tested with the above-mentioned radioactive edition/. i was unable to finish quests, game repeatedly crashed... i would say it's not worth it. even the unmoded game is fine and hd project moves graphics to the next level. alternative is misery mod. be prepared for high difficulity and a lot of new game mechanics. it's hardcore and definitely not for stalker beginers. visually it's stunning. jakub Only scrubs play on anything but Master difficulty.
Jokes aside, for someone first venturing into Stalker, I would recommend starting with Shadow of Chernobyl as it introduces the player to all aspects of gameplay, story, and setting, letting the player settle in, while Call of Pripyat kinda just throws you into the gameworld without explaining much. The game is still pretty unforgiving though, so if you're totally new to Stalker you should probably start playing on Stalker difficulty. Also, in my opinion, it's the overall better game, aside from the bugs, some of which are gamebreaking - I wouldn't recommend a mod like Complete (or any other graphical enhancement mods) on a first playthrough as these often mess with the sound- and graphical effects to such a degree that much of the eerie atmosphere from the vanilla game vanishes. One of the stronger points of SoC vs CoP is the atmosphere of the surroundings and the general sense of mystery regarding the Zone, which I'd say is one of the most important factors in making the game feel so unique. Therefore I'd rather recommend a mod like the Zone Reclamation Project, which only aims to fix glitches and annoyances, while keeping the atmosphere of the original game intact. I haven't tried it myself though so I can't personally vouch for it, but it's supposed to do what it sets out to do well. Regarding why I think the original game is better; the atmosphere, as mentioned, is very unique - on my first playthrough I had such a weak system I had to play on low visuals, with static lighting, but I was still amazed by the level of immersion, although playing on high graphics would probably be preferable, as the lighting does have a lot to say for the overall mood of the game. The story and the lore (such as entries in the player character's PDA one can read), as well as the sound design, contributes to making the zone feel mysterious, oppressive... which is further enhanced by the often brutal, unforgiving gameplay. The gameworld also often feels alive, with the things you come across alluding to being part of a bigger picture and serving some kind of twisted purpose. I think this is also reflected in the way the story and overall game progression unfolds, with things getting progressively more brutal, surreal and nightmarish, it kinda reminds me of Apocalypse Now in some regards. The gameplay also contributes to the world feeling oppressive, as you can't actually repair any equipment, so you often have to discard whatever you're carrying and pick up something from the ground just to survive. This becomes especially apparent near the end of the game, where it really feels like the world around you only wants to see you dead. Call of Pripyat, on the other hand, has an extremely boring and predictable story (and the story in the original game did a lot for the game's sense of mystery), and the three major areas the player travels through feel kind of like carnivals - there are these "attractions" or "hotspots" where one can find clusters of anomalies, enemy hideouts and such, while the rest of the zone is overall quite empty. This makes travelling from one "attraction" to another quite boring, and making the gameworld feel more constructed and arcade-like.
On the other hand, it is much more stable than the original game, with very little in the way of bugs and glitches, and nearly no gamebreaking ones. One can easily play the vanilla game, no mods, and not have to worry about crashes and the like (although I'd recommend a fov fix as the default fov is at like 65 or something equally horrid). It has many gameplay features not found in the original, such as making looking for artifacts harder and more worthwhile (in SoC they are just scattered across the ground), stashes being properly hidden, sidequests that span over time and maps, as well as being able to repair and upgrade equipment - this last one probably contributes to the game feeling less unforgiving, but it also makes it a bit easier, again making the gameworld feel less oppressive. Now you may think I hate CoP, but I actually don't, I think it's a great game, both on its own and as a Stalker game - it's just when comparing it to the original game I have to favor the original, as the atmosphere and overall impression of that game had a much bigger impact on me, and CoP felt more predictable. Both are well worth playing though. I think the perfect Stalker game would combine the best parts of SoC and CoP, too bad we won't ever see Stalker 2. For second playthroughs of the games, I recommend http://www.moddb.com/mods/old-good-stalker-evolution for Shadow of Chernobyl, and Sigerous Mod 1.7 for Call of Pripyat. Both of these keep much of the atmosphere and overall feel of the vanilla games intact while adding stuff like more missions, weapons, items, and characters, without adding a lot of unnecessary shit like so many other mods do - I believe later versions of Sigerous Mod also do this, which is why I recommend 1.7. Regarding OGSE, the only thing I didn't like was that the ambient music is disabled, which kinda ruins the atmosphere. This is supposedly easily fixed by messing with some config file, but I have no idea how as googling didn't help me get much wiser. Clear Sky can easily be skipped. Thanks for the comments on the various STALKER mods. I'm always looking forward to playing those games and while I've loved the Complete mods, I'd like to try out something different the next time I give the games a playthrough. Autumn Aurora has been on my ModDB tracking list for a good while now, might give it a try next.
One thing I hate is having to constantly tinker with the backpack and its effect on stamina. There's so much walking in the game that there should be infinite sprint rather than the irritating system they have now. Too bad both Stalker Evolution & Aurora are for the first game only. I was planning on going through CS & CoP next since SHoC is the last one I played and I've played it twice already whileas I've played the other two just once.
there is infinite sprint in stalker - you just need correct artifacts. two moonlites and you can sprint forever :-).
It's a great mod with fantastic visuals and sounds while keeping the stalker atmosphere intact. Definitely recommended!
That's a usefully detailed and informative view of the various versions of Stalker.
PITY IT'S ALL ENTIRELY FUCKING IRRELEVANT BECAUSE ALTHOUGH THE GAME JUST ABOUT MANAGES TO LOAD AFTER 5 DAYS, ATTEMPTING TO CHANGE ANY SETTINGS WHATSOEVER IN THE MENU CAUSES A BLACK SCREEN CRASH EVERY FUCKING TIME WITHOUT EXCEPTION. DID I JUST SPEND A TENNER TO SPEND MORE TIME EDITING THE FUCKING USER.LTX FILE THAN PLAYING THE CUNTING GAME?? NO I DID FUCKING NOT. BROKEN PILE OF SHIT. P.S. If anyone has a reliable fix for this then feel free to help me out. Only took me an hour to fix. Turning off compatability mode for Steam fixed it. Of course I expected to have to fuck around removing registry settings to get a 2007 game with multiple patches to work. Cunts.
Looking over the features for the Zone Reclamation mod, I think you'd actually be wise to install that if this is your first playthrough. Sounds like it can make the experience much better by removing most of the annoyances from the vanilla game.
Two Moonlight artifacts and I was able to sprint from the helicopter crash site near the mercs, almost completely back to the Trader in Cordon. I had to pause just before the railroad.
Yeah that's gonna be practically the fourth STALKER game. All their cockteasing only makes the wait more anguishing.
That looks great, I'd pay for it if they were charging. I hope it's treated like a whole new chapter/game, or a reboot, and not just a remake of Stalkers' early build. Looks like it's almost ready to be released too.
Chivalry, the original, is awesome. If I had more time, I'd play it more. I have the new one and have tried it, it seems pretty good. Of course, I would like it to be faster and more Rune-ish; I'd also like the gameplay and level design to be more vertical; but overall it's awesome, especially large online team battles (deathmatch or assault). The map "Ruins" that came with the original is a gigantic and gorgeous ruined medieval middle-eastern city; so obviously I'm going to like that.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/12352/
Well worth checking out. It's good fun especially in coop mode. Maybe even for biased poor-taste wankwads like Shambler! >:) This is a fantastic concept for a Kinect game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9GU9XRTYAc
Cool. Actually just started playing Borderlands1 today. Not that impressed so far though, I'm up to lvl 12 except almost everything I've got left to do (main quest and optional quests) are all lvl 14+ so not too sure what I'm supposed to do, just drive around running the same respawning enemies over and over until I've levelled up enough or grin and bare and hope I survive doing the quests that I'm not at an appropriate lvl to do yet. Very lame.
I can see the design getting old soon too if it doesn't change it up somehow. Solo can get quite boring and feel pointless after a while. Additionally, the first game has quite a few issues which were addressed in BL2 which makes the sequel a smoother experience overall. I recommend getting one or two buddies to join to make it worthwhile (because playing with random strangers often sucks).
Admittedly the graphic style is something that may put off certain people. It's possible to disable the black outlines with an ini tweak to make it look a little bit less comicy perhaps. I don't mind it though. It's pretty fun in coop. But like Mikko said, I can't escape the feeling of 'pointlessness'. It doesn't actually feel like you're working towards something.
The weapons feel really weak, even the stronger ones, which is kind of weird since the weapons are supposed to be the game's primary focus. <Scumbler> wtf
<Scumbler> sorry excuse me <Scumbler> http://youtu.be/S9gHK8R53kM?t=14m40s <Scumbler> is that what hearthstone gameplay actually looks like? <Scumbler> Hearthstone is a collectible card game that revolves around turn-based online 1vs1 matches between two opponents, <Scumbler> seriously <Scumbler> are you fucking kidding me?? <Scumbler> this is the latest bullshit everyone is playing? <Scumbler> people got computers that can show such immersive worlds, stunning gfx, diverse gameplay and enthralling experience, and people are playing something that looks like a real world card game with a fancy board in the background????? <Scumbler> FFS <Scumbler> i've stumbled into a parallel universe that actually makes console gaming look like a valid alternative <@Friction> hey, it's a fun game, really <Scumbler> well......but.........wha.....!!!!! <czg> welcome the desert of the real Scumbler * Scumbler splutterly indignantly! <Scumbler> FUN? FUCK YOU * Scumbler agrees with czg and graphics really means nothing, with so many indie games being retro styled I can't remember the last time I played a game which looked like it couldn't have been made 5 years ago.
Because it looks fun as hell, but will probably get my arse kicked severely. Never played a CCG before.
Shambler is an idiot
"hurr, games are only good if they are the latest 3d graphix!!!!" Quake is a full 3d world with fast-paced violent gameplay and although the engine is dated the designs people do in stunning maps are great. It's a good use of a computer.
i'm sick and tired of the retro look. i never really liked '8 bit' graphics and now it seems like everyone does that. boring.
Watching porn is also a good use of a computer.
I hate this retro 8-bit phase. If i wanted to play games that looked like this, I'd dig out my old Commodore or Atari in then feel fucking sick because the motion on those games is fucked up. WTF is the point of having a $3000 computer when everyones playing online card games and 8bit side-scrollers? But at least indie games are keeping the PC market alive. I think it's more of an opportunity cost thing, content creation is a huge timesink. Lofi just seems more managable for small teams that don't want to do dev cycles of several years. In terms of markting it might be difficult to sit in between 'new and shiny' and 'old and authentic'.
Well, that's my theory at least. I think it's more of an opportunity cost thing, content creation is a huge timesink. Lofi just seems more managable for small teams that don't want to do dev cycles of several years.
This is what always appealed to me about Quake modding. Take QWTF, one of the most influential mods of all time. In under a year of development they added all nine classes, and then issued balance patches for another 9 months. In contrast, it took 8 years of development to create Black Mesa Source, a recreation of a game that literally everyone has already played 15 years ago, to a standard that was only cutting edge when they started. Quake is about the level that you can create a mod in a reasonable timescale, non-professionally, with a small team. really is a personal preference thing for the gamer. You also find that the games come out quicker, usually are more playable (I suppose its easy to tweak a simple game), and are a hell of a lot cheaper for the end user.
I'm a big fan of cheap low-tech games. My favourite games in the last few years wouldn't have been out of place in the 90's. I hate this retro 8-bit phase.
It is mostly about cost, making anything with modern day tech is so expensive and such a huge time sink. People don't even play the same game much anymore, why waste so much time making art assets for something that will be played and thrown away within days/weeks. Retro graphics are perfect for small development teams. NPR rendering can sometimes be more expensive than realistic stuff, with realistic stuff you can take advantage of photosourcing, and 3D scan technology.
There's plenty of NPR stuff out there, just probably not what you mean by it... For instance all the Blizzard-art-like games. I'm quite happy with "within the last decade" tech.
Like Necros, I'm not so keen on faux-nostalgia pre-1990 tech. I do consider Blizzard-art to be NPR, though that's still quite resource intensive. Take a game like Darksiders, I'm sure that's almost as much work as a Gears Of War (then again, GOW is pretty ridiculous when it comes to detailed artwork).
I'm thinking more about games like Mad World, Journey, Wind Waker, Okami, Sound Shapes, Viewtiful Joe, Jet Grind Radio... Ugh, why are these all console titles? :( I'm sure a lot of those actually are quite a bit of work, not mentioning R&D. But just saying, switching art styles might unlock faster workflows. Like Necros, I'm not so keen on faux-nostalgia pre-1990 tech. But is it always nostalgia? I'm not so sure. Thing is, sometimes they do it so well it blows 90's stuff out of the water. Games like Retro City Rampage or Frogatto have levels of artwork that are almost nonexistent in 90's era games. I'm sure there's some nostalgia involved there. But there's also games that take the limitations to heart and make them an integral part of their philosophy. Back in the nineties everyone was busy trying to overcome these limitations. A game like Sword and Sorcery or Fez with their less-is-more minimalist art philosophy would never have existed in the nineties, I don't think those examples can be called nostalgic at all. There's also the aspect of tradition. I'm sure many of the guys making these things consider themselves part of a pixel art tradition that's worth preserving. In the same way I'm sure many of the people here think Quake's gameplay and atmosphere is something that's worth preserving. "Why are these all console titles?"
Because japan seems the only place where you can make big non-realistic games, and they mostly make console games. And most of those games you mentioned are still really difficult to make yeah... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460250988/darkest-dungeon-by-red-hook-studios
Feels a bit like some boards games like Space Hulk and such. And most of those games you mentioned are still really difficult to make yeah...
Yeah, I mean it's all relative. Still a lot of work regardless. I guess it's hard to tell without going through the process, I just assume the asset creation process is less intensive. But there's always unexpected snags you bump into with each new workflow. Oh another JP game: C21 online New game from the original L4D guys, same kind of idea as the versus in L4D, 4 humans players vs 1 big evolving monster player, could be fun maybe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrZlEqMzLU Yeah so far it looks like PVP only, but still seems like it could be fun in the same way as L4D, even if you don't like PVP as much.
Does look pretty good. The mechanics sound much cleaner and more refined than other 4-coop games.
Haha, I've had that idea for a long time. It's not revolutionary but I've never seen anyone do it? Will keep my eye on it. Graphics look nice (except for those dark halos around certain stuff?).
I like the idea that the main character is so low to the ground and can sneak though small cracks / vents in the world. Nice touch that he is at the right height to take stuff off NPCs belts! :P
I like the idea that the main character is a goblin to provide one tiny thing that is different to the Thief series.
Does look nice tho. I would expect killing to be an encouraged activity in Styx, whereas Thief should be done without murder. IMO
But yeah, it's pretty much Thief with a goblin, I'm ok with this. Any new top down shooters coming out?
I know about TBoI:Rebirth and HellDivers. BTW I finished Borderlands today. Despite my moaning a week ago, it actually picked up a lot after that and became a pretty cool game. 8.5/10 and reviewed on my webby site.
I'll play the DLC's next week, then next on the list Dark Void and Darksiders I think, both of which look good. Dungeon Keeper is free for the next 48 hours, DK2 is 75% off!
This is apparently a good graphical mod for it as well. I have not tested it myself though. KeeperFX isn't just a graphical mod, it's a complete re-writing of the game that makes it a lot more stable and fixes imbalanced stuff.
Had never really played any of the Civ series before, (I know, I know) started Civ V last night around 9PM, and the next time I looked up it was 2AM. God damn is that an engrossing game.
I just came here to ask which Civ game is presumably the best? I was totally hooked on the first two, haven't touched them in the past 10 years.
Nice synchronicity!
I'm told that Civ 4 is the best by people that know the series but 5 is thoroughly enjoyable so far. preferred div 5 myself. they did away with unit stacking so you can't just have one giant army on a single tile going around wiping everything out. hex grid also provides more options than squares.
I read the AI is kind of retarded in 5 tho.
Is that true? I might try 3 for starters, where I left of. I have to wonder how indicative of the actual game this is and how open it really is. Also despite garratt not being acted by Stephen Russell the guy they are using is making his best impression of the original actor. This begs the question "why use a different voice if he's going to impersonate the original?"
http://youtu.be/3_2cAbijZVc Atmosphere looks stunning. Gameplay seems to be a mixture of Dishonoured and weirdly right-next-to-people stealing stuff. Control looks a bit meh but that's partly due to console controller use and also that quick move thing could be bad or just okay.
I've never played a Thief game. There's stealth mechanics in lots of games, and every game seems to do it in pretty much the exact same way shown in that video. So I'm just wondering what the unique selling points are?
Thief is known for its very strict stealth and the fact that Garrett, the protag, has no super powers and is absolutely shitty at combat so he has to hide in the darkness as much as possible to avoid getting spotted. The AI is dated by now but it's still more intelligent than a good chunk of the games you see on the market today. Levels are huge, highly non-linear and can be tackled in any way you can imagine. The maps you're provided with are often vague (in Thief 1 only, Thief 2 made the mistake of detailing everything), encouraging you to case the places and scout around as much as possible.
But it's not just about gameplay. You have games like Deus Ex that do a lot of things, but in the end all the things they do are either average or good, but never great. Thief focuses exclusively on a single aspect and pulls it off brilliantly. It also has killer lore, great voice acting with memorable characters, super thick atmosphere and a brilliant artistic direction. Seriously, go play it now, you will not regret it. Forget about the very dated visuals, the atmosphere alone will grab you by the balls (of by the ovaries for the ladies). Thief was the first first-person stealth game and that it pioneered pretty much all of the mechanics you see in subsequent stealth games, and it's by far still the best. Other games don't even come close except Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory with its very tight mechanics as well, but its level design is way too linear.
One thing I really liked about Thief was it was rigid in it's rule set. If you knew the rules, you could exploit them or get screwed over, but you always knew it was fair.
The light gem was the best example. If that gem was black, a guard could be 2 inches from your face and WILL NOT SEE YOU. That's a pact the game makes with you, and it never breaks it. Don't move and they won't spot you. Period. I loved that. It felt honest and when you got busted, it was your own fault for not being careful enough. Completely. I really dislike when games teach you something and then, haha, surprise! they take it away for some arbitrary reason for a boss fight or whatever.
Solid, repeatable, and dependable mechanics are the core foundation of a game. Should I play first?
BTW: Galactic Princess (looks like FTL on crack) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/19027642/galactic-princess?ref=discovery Thief Gold is absolutely incredible IMO.
I wasn't massively keen on Thief 2, not a big fan of the Mechanists at all. I really enjoyed Thief 3 though, Shalebridge Cradle was awesome. t3 looks great and great story. t1/t2 might be getting a bit visually too dated to enjoy, if it was me. but i suppose you're not playing for the graphics.
This is the best POV adventure game I've played in a long time, even though it can be buggy with Windows 7 & 8.
Got this couple of weeks ago. Much smoother gameplay than Shadow of Chernobyl and the new way of detecting anomalies and the way stashes are done is more interesting and fun.
No crashes either. I think it's unfair to judge a game's stability based on how it plays with mods. It's completely stable as stock. Thief Gold, HD textures - anyone tried it that is familiar with original look ? Total desecration or well done ?
http://www.moddb.com/mods/thief-gold-hd-texture-mod If it's anything like other HD texture mods in games, I'm sure it'll just be a load of garish programmer art, made in FilterForge or something.
A lot of the thief textures were already photosourced in most instances, so it's not going to ruin the aesthetic compared to quake (where most of the textures were hand painted)
They look nice, but high res textures on low res geometry is always a bit jarring imo. Plus you can already see misalignment in the screenshots and so on.
If you haven't already, check out Dracula: The Path of the Dragon. That game sure offers some in-depth, head scratching puzzles that actually require referencing notes and files you gather along the journey, piecing together information presented in the area and less guessing what the developer intended. I personally enjoyed this one a ton. Knowledge of the previous two games in the series is not required and this being the strongest title of the trilogy.
I found the earlier games in the series had more interesting visuals, but I agree on the gameplay of that title. There was also a short, but attratctive title from called 1953: KGB Unleashed
Nice timing, Thief Gold is available for free at https://www.thiefmodcompetition.com/
Surprised no one mentioned this yet, but a pre-order of the new Wolfenstein game grants you access to the Doom 4 beta:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-19-doom-4-is-alive-pre-order-wolfenstein-the-new-order-to-get-in-the-beta More about the Thief contest here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ref_=tsm_1_tw_s_vg_n19o3z&docId=1001928521
So would In the Shadows count as a mod "based upon the videogame franchise Thief"? If sock remixed some of his ItS promo videos a bit, for category 1 of the contest, I'll bet he could be a contendah! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJQ06wMVhCc
But the monsters look fucking cool, some of them at least. ...post utter bullshit like this:
http://i.imgur.com/om7LJLQ.jpg Waaaaay to sabotage any validity in your whining. 1. Don't indicate what T2 level that is so the comparison could between a much later T2 level and the FIRST T4 level. 2. Base the T4 map off a demo play through VIDEO that will obviously not indicate the full possibilities available. 3. Assume that all unexplored areas are dead-ends and dismiss them with a ? 4. Don't draw the different levels in the jewelers despite the video clearly showing different levels and rooms and pretend it's all just a box. If anyone knows what utterly cuntly imbecile did this hysterical bullshit, please point them out so I can call them a cunt personally. fuck that must have taken hours, who would bother going to all that trouble. go play a game instead.
I thought it must be japanese/asian with that amazing narrator but focus interactive is... french?
Also it makes me sad to see the extreme gender stereotypes with real masculine fighting men and a couple sex doll women thrown in for them to have something to play with. u mad?
Also, rpg bollox - yeah I lolled at the ridiculous narrator too (I can just imagine him throwing his hands up in the air and going "but what does this meeannnn?" after every sentence. Blow-up doll female characters aren't going away in RPGs any time soon, not when the primary audience is basically sexually frustrated males. At my last place we looked at the analytics for purchasable characters. There was a pretty obvious correlation between number of IAPs and how much like a wank fantasy the character looked.
Morals and responsibility don't really exist in this industry to the extent you'd like. That level from Thief 2 is the second level in the game.
By the way that level is fucking short and linear. Also Thi4f is getting the trashing it deserves. It's not a good Thief game and it's not even a good game on its own, period. Not everyone has jumped on the hip and trendy bashing bandwagon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJS1yCSKlhs Offtopic, as I predicted I've played the borderlands dlc's and Dark Void. Reviewed it, 6.5/10, bit shit, it turns into a halo/gears of war type third person game with terrible jetpacking/flight sim garbage.
The Borderlands DLC's are good though for those that haven't played them, especially Zombie Island and Claptrap Revolution. started to watch until realising he spends 10 whole fucking minutes in the game menu. argh just let me see the game.
He did explain from 2:35 that this is what he does in his videos and you can skip to the gameplay using the annotation link provided?
shacky
I'm watching the video Shambler posted and it looks fucking awesome What am I missing that you're seeing? willem
He does say later in the video that it has smaller levels, has relatively preset gameplay style paths and less freeform gameplay, and that there is little enemy variety.... Bloke
Bloke with Hammer Walking Dead Bloke Lass Guard Bloke Bloke in Cloak A subtle variety of Other Blokes Thief2 added the machines, which I really liked a lot. They had a weak spot you could hit with water arrows that added another layer.
Thief also had undead, right? had undead, other keeper types, hammerites, pagans, weird enemy types like burricks, ghosts, walking machine things, one of the characters was a big fat weird witch thing (called the hag)
That variety wasnt massive but it is even less so in the new games. The game looks ok actually, much better than expected. Plus anyone watching the Total Biscuit video and expecting him to not mess about in the options in the beginning doesn't understand that it's a pc gaming channel which focuses on pc specific options. No-one is going to feck about with options in a console game because who really cares? The pc platform scales, so options are a huge part of the experience. "The AI is stupid as fuck, worse than in the originals, and can either be omniscient of oblivious, but there is no middle ground. Is it too much to ask for a better AI 16 years after the first game?"
Any specifics on this? "stupid as fuck" doesn't tell me much. What do they do that's wrong? That's pretty funny. I was crying with laughter at around 15mins when he gets to the final level and that scene where he dies and has a rampage over it.
I just don't understand why developers are still doing QTE's in games. Are many developers these days not real gamers? I just don't understand why developers are still doing QTE's in games. Are many developers these days not real gamers?
Isn't it a cost thing? Must cheaper to make a cinematic that requires you to hit a few buttons to decide which of the 2 ending clips play rather than coding up some monster attacks and getting it tested. Too desperately try-hard for me. Inflection and expressions nearly cringed me to death.
Are many developers these days not real gamers?
Developers themselves are, but it's rare that the people in charge play games. Time constraints. Nobody really WANTS to use QTEs but the game is behind and we're not going to ship on time and
That's a great review. I found myself agreeing almost 100% with it.
The learning WALL at the start of the game is what put me off the first time I tried the game. I didn't have a clue how the game worked. When I played it on stream I took the time to read the wiki and ov. chat helped a lot too and it turned into a fantastic game and one of my favourite 3rd person action games ever. Pumped for DS2 QTE exists because it lets you script a fantasy of player interaction that you can't possibly do as regular gameplay.
Done well and sparingly, it's not the most terrible thing to happen in games... but it's been overdone to death by now and more often than not it's in lieu of gameplay instead of supplementing it. Concerning AI:
- They seem to be oblivious to everything that's above their heads, even if you're in broad daylight. - They lose your trail very easily. - At one point I replicated something I saw on a stream: I fought a guard in the brothel mission next to a courtesan and a client, and both of them didn't care at all. What's worse is that the guards downstairs didn't hear a thing. In the originals even the tiniest disturbance could make the whole houseguard come after you. Played through Darksiders now (and reviewed it). Pretty cool game, 8/10. Wicked characters, story, epic large design. Just the puzzles ruined it a bit. Shame the studio closed down because they were capable of doing some really great games.
getting all giddy about how this game is like old school fps games. As someone who plays old school fps games all the time I have to think that maybe a lot of journalists play so many of these shitty new games they have forgotten what an old school fps game feels like to play.
It's sad really. Tower of guns looks ok but it's a procedurally first person bullet hell game. It has more in common with ikaruga than doom. I think after Half-Life came out everyone's memory of what games were like before that kind of warped into this image of "they didn't know any of the rules we have now so everything must have been shit and we just didn't know it." Rather than inhabit a world where it was okay for the level designer to directly use the level to interact with the player, apparently all anyone remembers Doom actually doing is seal you in a giant thoughtless arena, lock the doors, and spawn guys until it was time to open the doors again and let you into the next, bigger arena.
Did Doom *ever* actually do that, even once? Quake only did it once IIRC, in that long slow elevator ride to hell (so it didn't even have locked doors, just a natural timer). Doom, and by extension, Quake didn't just define the genre because they were first.
Old == Bad to the lazy minded, whereas comparing most modern games, in terms of content and creativity to in games from the 90's is pretty depressing. Games have taken a serious downturn since they went mass market; the industry is still incredibly immature in this respect. A good comparison is film. Studios will gamble billions of dollars on a production, and sometimes they lose. Games studios wouldn't dare take such a risk, and with the cash cow of casual gaming they don't have to. The small publisher / lone developer ('indie' is a misnomer) scene keeps struggling on, producing the majority of the genuinely creative content. If games like Doom are misrepresented by the slack jawed gaming press then that's a shame - the young whipasnapper developers of tomorrow are growing up on such poor journalism. "Did Doom *ever* actually do that, even once?"
It did at least once. There's an exit trick where you go to press the button and, oops, floor drops out - combat bowl! Lun: you may be on to something there. I keep seeing people referring to older FPS games as 'arcade shooters'... and I think they actually think that Doom and such were 3d versions of Robotron or SmashTV
It did at least once. There's an exit trick where you go to press the button and, oops, floor drops out - combat bowl!
Yeah, I had that one in mind, but it signals itself as a trap (it's too early for the exit and you're carrying unused keys) and you're free to just dash across the room and leave by the escape route so I held off on mentioning it. It isn't really an arena with rounds of monsters, just a nasty 270-degree ambush. "Let's lock the player in a big room and just spawn guys for a while" is like the level designer throwing up his hands and admitting he can't think of anything. They have environments and combat encounters, and never shall the two meet.
similarities in the expectation of the player in ToG to dodge fire to survive. But the similarity to Doom ends there. Doom has nice level design and you feel like you're exploring as you progress due to the branching nature of the levels. Quake usually has this exploration element in a lot of its maps where you can deviate from "the path".
As soon as someone mentions a game feeling like a classic game, for example painkiller, I always get annoyed because for me the level design is always lacking in those games. I think the "getting locked in and killing predetermined number of guys" is a boring mechanic usually. It can be done well though, like in Sock's maps where he mixes up the enemy types along with having the neat traps to play with. "A good comparison is film. Studios will gamble billions of dollars on a production, and sometimes they lose.
Games studios wouldn't dare take such a risk, and with the cash cow of casual gaming they don't have to." Don't know if I fully agree with this, at least if we're talking about Hollywood, because that is one thing I feel both mass/casual AAA gaming and movies have in common - never daring to try anything new and just recycling the same old safe crap in the form of sequels, prequels, remakes and whatever else. Another comparison between movies and games is that flashy stuff sells more than actual content, even with productions that are supposedly "critically acclaimed", like Gravity - real pretty to look at, but not much more depth apart from that. Same goes for alot of overhyped games. As soon as someone mentions a game feeling like a classic game, for example painkiller, I always get annoyed because for me the level design is always lacking in those games. I think the "getting locked in and killing predetermined number of guys" is a boring mechanic usually.
Nail + head. I dont mind barriers as long as they make sense. As a designer it can be a real slog to make intricate levels without them conforming to the flow of the level, however it's also poor to constrain your gameplay too much because you want to make something that is fun to replay.
The reason why Doom and Quake are nice to play is that you can approach the levels differently each time if you like, this is especially true for Quake as the rocket/grenade jumping allows for lots of very creative routes. who gives a shit about a light showing you subconsciously where to go next, when most games still can't even get the basic gameplay right (fun)?
Immediately, as the door closes behind you, enemies appear all around each chamber.
I am no longer listening. Yeah, sounds boring if that's all the game is. But this pattern can be sparingly put to good use, can't it? I'm thinking of the horde of zendar, sock used this at least twice (the cathedral, and the final fight before the exit unlocks) - imo it was a significant part of the gameplay - and the map was pretty universally loved. In Daz's videos, he's recently pointed out several points in Q1 maps where a fight is boring because the best strategy is to wait at the entrance to an arena and snipe enemies, rather than going in. I wasn't about to put one of these locking arenas in a q1 map or anything :P 1) I'm pretty sure the final monster-deathmatch was not why Zendar was loved.
2) The solution to a player standing in a doorway shooting all the enemies is not to wait until he goes through it to spawn them and then arbitrarily block backward progression. That's a forced fix; a level design hack. Ideas:
1. Put a quad or other powerful weapons in the middle of the room. Players want the power, they will run in and grab it. Quad also has the built-in timer as an incentive to do as much damage as fast as possible, rather than being slow and cautious. 2. Create a space inside the arena that is tactically better than the entry point. For example, the player enters the room through a low tight hallway which all of the ogres in the arena can easily target. That hallway would be death and it's much easier to move into the larger central space and dodge grenades that way, than sit in a trench and have 10 grenades all bouncing around you. 3. This might be almost the same as the locked door, but have the player drop down into a space from above. This makes backtracking impossible until they find a new way out of the arena. What makes this different than locking the door behind you is you know and choose to go through the point of no return, rather than it being a cheap surprise. 4. Built fun close encounter combat instead of filling your big open spaces with toy soldiers.
Metl's Idea 1 is an instant "oh whoopie, how exciting... :|" to me. 3 can be ok if done well. 2 sounds good! 2. Create a space inside the arena that is tactically better than the entry point.
E.g. Backspawn tarbabies behind the player, yay! It's actually a hard problem because the doorway is the safest spot in the room. It's a funnel, you're protected from all threats and can easily scoot to the side when you need to reload or whatever.
You'll be hard pressed to give me a better vantage point than the door to the arena. Unless I'm low on ammo and HAVE to enter the arena to get more but even then Back spawning isn't the answer because that's pretty much universally loathed and considered cheap. "This might be almost the same as the locked door, but have the player drop down into a space from above. This makes backtracking impossible until they find a new way out of the arena. What makes this different than locking the door behind you is you know and choose to go through the point of no return, rather than it being a cheap surprise." This is usually a good solution although it's also pretty obvious these days. There were several times in RAGE I saw a drop down and saved immediately - you KNOW there's an ambush waiting just beyond that invisible trigger brush on the floor. But Left for Dead and Uncharted developers have talked about this tactic. L4D has a name for it but I can't recall right now Players tend to avoid this by instinct and look for alternative routes. The bastards.
5. Place a trap in the corridor before the doorway - once the player sees the monsters they're unwilling to backpedal into a nailshooter or pit of death. 6. Place a big, obvious button in the middle of the room - when it's pressed, the fight starts. But, number 1 wins. Behaviour depends on the player though. I surely do not hide in a safe place to snipe enemies, where would that be fun.
Sure, everyone is different. But most players will try to conserve health and ammo - and the doorway is the best place to do that from.
- Don't have doorways
Build organic spaces that aren't conceptually divided by corridors and thresholds, and there's never a doorway for the player to stand in. He's just always somewhere where there are knights in front and ogres above and scrags circling, but still entirely controls the pace of his own progression. Dropdowns, lifts that don't go back down again, wind tunnels, and other one-way means of spitting you into a room do all function the same way as back-locking the door. They represent a designer using his power as "guy who built the place" to remove the player's power to turn around and leave a situation he doesn't feel ready for or in adequate control of.
Any time you leverage that omnipotent designer power, you have to be very measured in how much force you apply. Sometimes it's okay, like when you know better than the player does (since you're the only one who understands the next room) that he's ready for it and doesn't need to backpedal and you've decided it's a good time for a panic beat. Using that power now and then to spike the pacing is okay - relying on it just wears the player down. Eliminating optimal but un-fun choices like sniping from a safe spot (like the door) is also a good time to use the power, but the rules still apply. When you do it with architecture that has that backblocking effect as a natural outcome (the dropdown, the lift) you're playing a little more fair, and also not being quite so naked in your intrusion on the experience. func_plats don't go back down if you stay on them - players already know that. If you can't fly back up through a hole, that's the game world doing that, and players understand why. Doors don't always suddenly lock - someone did that. Rendering the optimal un-fun choice non-optimal by moving some brushes, shifting where you put the ogres, and changing the nature of the cover just a little bit is a lot more subtle, and leads to a much smoother experience since you're encouraging the player to choose to dive into that room rather than forcing him to. BWWEEEEP BWWEEEEEPPP BWEEEEPPP TURN AROUND YOU ARE LEAVING THE COMBAT ZONE BWWEEEEP BWWEEEEEPPP BWEEEEPPP
"Build organic spaces that aren't conceptually divided by corridors and thresholds, and there's never a doorway for the player to stand in. He's just always somewhere where there are knights in front and ogres above and scrags circling, but still entirely controls the pace of his own progression."
I was speaking more generally. If you're going to get specific about Quake or Doom, then sure. My point being that it's a different challenge with a game like Half-Life or Left 4 dead, which are set in the modern world.
5. Place a trap in the corridor before the doorway - once the player sees the monsters they're unwilling to backpedal into a nailshooter or pit of death.
Another good one. It doesn't have to be a literal trap, just a hazard that you can only navigate slowly and carefully, and therefore can't just backpedal through at full speed. awesome, thanks everyone - this is a goldmine of ideas!
interesting point that a vertical fall-off is another variant of the same basic pattern. In zendar, I really enjoyed the func_illusionary window that you can jump through down into a room where you're ambushed by a fiend. This is an optional side area, though, so the ambush didn't feel cheap - and you get a bunch of rewards for finding that area and surviving the trap. IMHO Quake is about traps, ambushes and locked areas, if you take that away you are left with just a standard FPS game. In Quake the environment is trying to kill you, with crushers, spike shooters and large pits of lava/slime. Quake is about the fear and dread of what is around you in all directions and being thrown into difficult situations.
I think it is perfectly fine to have locked areas if the visual language is right, single items on Indiana style plinths, floors covered in blood where traps trigger or dark ominous holes in walls around powerful items to collect. Creating visual clues for the observant player is all part of the charm of the setup. "Knowing where the trap is - is half the battle won" The key to designing good ambush areas is there should be plenty of cover (destructible or moving), multiple routes around the space and it should be obvious where all supplies are or going to be. Ideally a player should be allowed to explore the area first, let the player feel the moment, the silence before the storm. Eric said: I'm thinking of the horde of Zendar, sock used this at least twice (the cathedral, and the final fight before the exit unlocks) @Eric, The Cathedral is just a trigger on the alter, the doors do not lock, the player can move around the room and even exit out to the central hub if they want. I saw plenty of demo's where players did this. I originally had the doors lock but I felt it was unfair, so I did something different. I had all the monsters ready in the room (up high on balconies, which the player can access early) and let the player explore the room before anything happens. The final fight is the ONLY locked area in the map, but it is very large with all the monsters spawning from specific locations. There is even a side area with supplies that the player can go to if they don't want to move around the central hub. All of the monsters are setup to wake up on sight of the player (not other monsters) and there are counters on all waves to allow the player to control the pace of the fight. I think the "locked in" final fight in Zendar works because the player knows this area already, they have passed through it several times and understand where everything is. The environment is a known quantity, the only thing that has changed is not knowing where the waves of encounters are going to initially spawn. Locking players into confined areas is a good game mechanic if used sparely and with good supporting visual language. Traps and ambushes are the life blood of Quake and IMHO think it would be unwise to ignore this fact if creating new maps. Just counted, Antediluvian has 6 drop-downs and 5 wind tunnels. Total: 11! And almost all of them drop you into a place with immediately-alerted monsters. Does this make it a masterpiece or the worst map of all time? (Strangely, no self-locking doors.)
You could combine the drop-down and trapped-retreat-route to create a soft obstacle. Have a series of short drops, like little cliff face things, where you can jump back up each time, but you can't just walk back up like steps. That way it's slow to retreat and requires some concentration to pull off, but you maintain two-way flow through the level to return for ammo or health. Obviously this is much less effective if the enemies at the bottom are melee-based, as you can escape them in a single jump.
Needs sources and it should really be re-worded into an actual article. The wiki is supposed to be licensed GFDL as much as possible. Copypasting other people's posts is not "legal".
Just playing Mass Effect for the first time. Gee, I haven't seen this much lack of detail on everything since 2004. Nice sunsets and colours, but I thought by 2008 we were beyond 4 brushes making up a corridor. And what's with the combat, the weapons are complete shit.
Halfway through so I'll post a review when I'm done. Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-flight-of-the-birdman-flappy-bird-creator-dong-nguyen-speaks-out-20140311 Indeed. Can't have been raking in that much though if he decided to shut something down that was netting $50k a day, just because he didn't like the negative emails.
That wiould depend on how many days he netted 50K, and for how long the revenues will continue from the installed base he still has.
Oh, and 'that much' depends on what you are used to. For a po' boy from Hanoi, it is probably not much at all. More power to his elbow. I think he made enough money that he didn't mind taking the game down to avoid more vitriol and drama.
i really don't get it. someone showed it to me, i tapped once, hit the first pipe and died and gave his phone back thinking that was the stupidest thing i ever saw.
picked this up on a whim. not bad so far after a couple of hours. it's mainly about the combat and 4 man party system and is a bit thin on story and world exploration but I don't mind. Combat is what I'm doing for 95% of the game anyway, so it's good that it's interesting.
it's a bit slow in that you need to check the abilities of each and every new monster you face because some of them can be surprisingly dangerous if you're not ready for them. don't bother trying to play without pausing... Was great. Really slick and well executed. Properly tactical and thoughtful. Some niggles like lack of info early on and repetitive missions later on, but definitely converted me to the option of turn-based games.
I just discovered SC2 arcade is free to play with the SC2 started edition.
Its weird it has not made more noise no ? A bit like when Valve gave out Alien Swarm for free, that kinda farted out, not many players, not many mods based on it... Maybe I am wrong and theres tons of SC2 Arcade players and mods around, I haven't logged in and checked it out yet, can't see shit from Blizzard/Battlenet websites asided for a few featured mods. There does seem to be all that much about various Arcade mods out there... Hoping to find some fun casual survival coop maps a la SC1 Starship Troopers etc Anyone know how to disable / reduce it? I've googled for thief / 4 / iv / head bob / headbob / headbobbing , looked at the main tweak guides, had a look in the ini files and tinkered with the defaultcamera.ini , but no success....
Ta. X This game is great, most realistic WW2 flight simulator ever!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmv5ZiMQWt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iomc1P7HaX8
This is what we're going to get? Holy fuck, this just ruined my childhood! I remember playing Roller coaster tycoon when I was a kid! God dammit... cant be turned off or turned down.
I'm ok with this to be honest because I think it really fits the tone of the game and is pretty funny. But it should probably have been an option. Anyone have this working, by any chance?
http://www.zoorace.com Trailer: http://youtu.be/e_MOX99ltoY Ah ye fucks simply get an emulator and play the original roller coaster tycoons on ya devices. Dosbox works great btw you know ?
There was a 'speedrun' of it at the last AGDQ during the Awful Games section.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXQT_LtwDPw I guess that confirms the game is as glitchy as it looks. Looks like a fun bad game for parties, I'm just concerned it won't run on every second computer.
for me, it is very much a technical issue. i don't give a crap about game design when it comes to things like this. when i leave the game, it should save my progress. saving progress for me is basic functionality.
i've seen some drivel about how not being able to save serves some gameplay function while i was looking for a hack or config change to enable saving; it was completely irrelevant. Yeah, game designs that rely on no saving are always hindered by it. I play a lot of rogue likes and roguelites, and it always seems they just couldn't be arsed doing a proper save system as opposed to following some higher design aesthetic.
I think saving and pausing should be standard by now. Even roguelikes should have saving IMO. I guess this is a design decision for the most part, if saving exists then I bet you could cheat your way to victory (just copy/paste save files so you dont lose progress if you die).
isn't there a checkpoint like every 2 minutes in that game? How much progress did you really lose by quitting in the middle of a combat?
7376: Roguelikes are a very niche game, catering to a specific gamer. I don't play roguelikes because I can't stand not being able to save, but that's ok because a roguelike is not my niche.
Bioshock Infinite annoys me because it is a AAA game aimed at (supposedly?) a wide range of gamers and that's what I expected of it. 7377: I must have bad luck then because I was going about 30 minutes between checkpoints. Also, the checkpoint save is hard to see because it's just this little spinny thing in the corner of the screen. Obviously this is to make it unintrusive, but because of the way the save system works, it should actually be the complete opposite to clearly let you know the game saved and you are free to quit. As it was, I missed that it had saved twice, and each time it was 10-15 minutes past that point when I tried to quit so I kept playing the extra 10-15 minutes to get to the next. Even though I dislike it, I thought FTL hit a good balance between the two extremes with the autosave when quitting and this is what I would expect at the least from a game aimed at the masses. There is a difference between not being able to save/suspsend your progress and the "quick save before each door" style of thing, I'd hope...
what are we moaning about here? The lack of a "save anywhere" quicksave in Bioshock Infinite? (I've never played that game).
i can play a game without quick saving, as long as progress is saved when i quit.
this is why i was saying FTL works well because you can't save during play and reload if you die, but when you leave the game, it saves your progress and you can do that at any time. there's nothing forcing you to continue playing (other than that you want to of course). bioshock has nothing. if you quit you lose all progress from the last checkpoint you hit which may or may not be a while ago. to be clear, i'm not overly angry about it, but it does have the odd effect of making me not want to play because i know i might not have enough to make any progress. I agree that being able to save before every door feels a bit like cheating. (I do it all the time regardless)
Maybe saving should be integral to the game's design rather than something that gets tacked on to let the player quit anytime he/she wants? I think the ideal system might be to not have manual saves at all but just have the game save automatically after each 'challenge' bit. On higher difficulties the saves should be less frequent etc. The game wouldn't let you load individual saves but have a tree of playthroughs. You could start a 'new game' in each branch of the tree, similar to selecting a chapter in HL2 for example, just with more levels of granularity. Oh, and I haven't played Bioshock. bioshock has nothing. if you quit you lose all progress from the last checkpoint you hit which may or may not be a while ago.
But that's how all checkpoint games work, right? If you don't reach a new checkpoint before quitting, well...tough titty? Yeah, if that's the way it works, and checkpoints are too far apart I agree it's shit design.
Checkpoints were indeed too far apart in BInf. Partly this is because the nature of the game encouraged certain player types (me) to squirrel around for a while within a given area, exploring and looking for consumables to hoover up.
To add insult to injury, that's the only game I've had technical issues with... it was a random crasher. I'm still glad I worked my way through it, but at least having a save-on quit option would have been great. (P.S. obviously not the only game I've EVER had issues with, but the only one on my current game system that I've had for several years now. Frustrating.)
yeah if you haven't played it can seem kind of of a silly complaint but it's not just a straight up shooter. there is a lot of detailed areas to explore so while a checkpoint may only be 10 minutes away, for myself it can be 30 to 45 minutes depending on how much time i spend exploring and picking up items and such.
restarting from a checkpoint means having to go back and pick up everything again which is just tedious and has nothing to do with gameplay. i've been lucky so far and haven't gotten any crashes, but i've heard there are some bugs too and since you can't have more than 1 save, you can get to a point where a bug is present in your save game and you can't revert to an earlier save. it saves frequently, there's a lot of checkpoints and if you exit in an area you will pick up at that exact point the next time you boot up... although the lack of a pause function is a bit annoying it makes sense as the game is actually perpetually online.
there's a big difference though. dark souls is celebrated for it's extreme difficulty and the save system is a given for this type of game.
bioshock infinite is not marketed as that type of game yet it has the same hardcore saving scheme. that aspect in Dark Souls is explicable and contributes to the project. I get it, and it has conditioned me as a player.
I felt similar to Necros. Along with other issues I had with the game, there were definitely times when I was frustrated, where my immersion was hindered, and where my interest in progressing was at least partially undercut by the situation. excellent story, not that great of a game (but not bad either).
still don't know why i can't save whenever i want as the game isn't even that difficult and if you do die, you just respawn a short distance away. in fact, it would be harder to reload a save than it would be to just continue playing because you can just zerg an area down by repeatedly charging if you suck that much. (yes, i am still stuck on this, it's just needlessly annoying!) miniboss monsters have weak spots, but i usually just opted to use explosives on them or i couldn't tell when i was actually hitting the weak spot? i know i scored a few solid hits with the hand cannon on handyman weak spots, but they didn't seem to react? this needed more visual feedback (or if there was feedback, it needed to be highlighted more the first time). also, hand cannon is my favourite gun ever. feel like clint eastwood with that thing. really liked how the limitations of the medium are used to highlight the story. really hate how the limitations of the game are taken to an extreme because of the story, but can forgive it because the story was worth it. i can tell they spent a lot of time coding elizabeth, but it wasn't enough. some really silly stuff still happens like booker delivering this very dramatic line and elizabeth replying with 'i found some money!' with a big bright smile. she's also on an extremely short leash and routinely teleports all over the place. otoh, elizabeth is extremely dynamic (unlike hl2 alyx which is mainly the illusion of dynamic) so maybe i'm just being too hard on irrational. playing again on hard now... want to see the story from a different perspective. Agree completely re saving/zerging technique (I sucked at bioshock infinite for some reason).
I'd be interested in hearing more re limitations of medium highlighting story, and exacerbation of said limitations due to narrative prioritization. funny aside to that: i started getting really self-conscious about which side of twin symmetrical hallways i entered an atrium through. there are two paths but they both take you into the atrium.
!!SPOILERS!!
I'd be interested in hearing more re limitations of medium highlighting story, and exacerbation of said limitations due to narrative prioritization. Fate/Determinism is a huge theme in this game and it is done better than it could have been in any other medium. Games are an interactive medium and by forcing the player down a single path, you make the player feel determinism more than any book or movie could ever hope to do. You are forced to play Booker as he moves through the game towards his inevitable demise. The choices don't matter in the game, but they matter to you because you made them. They just happen to have the same outcomes. Something I noticed in my second playthrough is that the key you give Elizabeth when you first meet her have the same Bird and Cage icons on them. When she takes the key in her hands, she spins it around in her fingers and you see the bird and cage flip back and forth. The second time I got to the brooch scene, I didn't want to pick at all. (fyi: I picked the cage on my first playthrough because I felt the bird was the obvious choice. this was before I understood what was going on.) The FPS genre itself is about shooting things. That is the point of them. In a Quake map, I try to dress it up a bit with maybe some puzzles or nice scenery but at the end of the day, players are loading the map up to blow up some fiends. In Infinite, it is the only really meaningful way the player has of interacting with the world. In this way the game forces the player to 'role play' Booker's character who we know is no stranger to a little bit of the old ultra violence. With most shooters set in realistic worlds, the body counts you might accrue towards the end of the game are usually ridiculous, but here it actually makes sense. On the flip side, it feels like Irrational used determinism as an excuse not to bother with choice and to cut costs and development time as is the trend with basically everything out there these days. Even if my choices ultimately don't mean anything, I still like to have that illusion in a game, to feel like I can influence the outcome a bit. As for the shooty bits, as I said, the narrative is dictating that Booker really only has one response to any situation, ultra violence. There's no talking your way through anything, there's no stealthy non-violent solutions. Inevitably, the npcs will start shooting at you and you will need to take them out. The skyhook executions are kind of the punctuation to the whole thing: they are a very efficient way of taking out enemies, but oddly enough a bit too brutal for me. I actually stopped using them later on. If you listen, you can hear a musical stinger every time you get a skyhook kill or headshot, but the stinger isn't celebratory or triumphant like you pulled off a great kill in any way and sounds like it belongs in a horror film hinting that you are the villain. Or at least... that's what I see when I play. :) Sums up everything I didn't like about the game but couldn't put my finger on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzkS0mt3B50 Not sure if I already posted it... the fucked up voice was annoying...
anyway, I agree completely with the first half of that video. I didn't even mention it because it's so stupid. Especially how Booker just eats everything he sees even right out of the trash. wtf. Re: the violence though, I disagree with what's being said in the video. It's why you die at the end; Booker is a villain. You are a monster roaming through the streets of the city gunning down everyone. That's why I said it actually makes sense in this game. At the start you still believe you're the hero. It's a good point though. I'd say more about the resolution but spoilers.
Maybe the fix would have been simple. As soon as you start eating out of dumpsters or stealing the people should have run in horror, realising that you are the one. Or even just when you enter an area brandishing a gun. For the enemies I sort of suspect they just went out of scope (or passion?) and didn't add more types. There were lots of versions of 'guy with a gun' but that's not very interesting. The game would have been a lot more entertaining if it had featured more steampunk style enemies - robots, guys in loading suits, guys flying with gyro copters etc. any reasonable image search on deviant art would produce more engaging enemy designs. The handyman was cool, but yeah he should have reacted to being hit in the red ball. Was that even a weak point? The patriots as well I just bombed. Instead we got the same enemies from bioshock1. I was confused by the firemen and crow guys. The turret was especially disappointing. It felt like going to a restaurant (slightly cheaper) and being served reheated leavings. The story and it's presentation is excellent though. I don't play many AAA games so maybe I'm blinkered, but I can't think of a better story in another game. On that note, here's a bioshock 1 thing... http://www.pentadact.com/2009-04-15-ending-bioshock/ yeah monster design was boring as hell. crows were somewhat interesting, firemen less so.
but crows can be easily taken care of, just throw a fire or lightning trap at your feet and wait. crow eventually tries to teleport behind you and triggers the trap. done. patriots are supposed to have a weakpoint on their backs (the gears) but i never figured out how to get a clear shot at their backs to exploit it. lightning shock stun doesn't last long enough and they can turn quickly enough to always stay facing you. turrets were just boring. usually just shock stun them and a couple of shotgun blasts. nothing interesting there. there's also some funny tethering going on in the AI such that they will refuse to follow you too far from their spawn points. you can easily exploit this because you can duck in and out of cover and the AI will just stand out in the open as it repeatedly tries to run at you, then decide to pull back. come to think of it, there should just have been one enemy of each vigor type.
the charge, bullet shield or force pull effects could have made interesting enemies. I agree with most of what was said here.
- World and story were engaging - Elizabeth character well done - But there were serious tone-breaking moments where she'd find out some super heavy information about her past, then 2 seconds later "I can pick that lock for you!" cheerfully. - Rich, interesting world, but the only way I can interact with it is shooting and looting. I don't mind shooting but this game world made me want to inhabit it in a richer way. Sure my character is a violent guy but my desires as a player don't align with that. I don't have a proposal for what should have been there instead; I don't think this should be a pure adventure game either. This points to a general problem with AAA video games; we don't have a lot of good game mechanics that aren't centered around violence. I like violence but it limits the types of stories, worlds, and protagonists you can have. - Looting system isn't supported by the fiction of the world or the character. why is Booker DeWitt digging through trash cans for hot dogs and spare change? Why don't the NPCs react when I do that? Contrast with The Last Of Us where the looting/crafting system directly feeds back into the world's fiction (a blasted ruin where people are scraping to survive.) I'm also pretty tire of searching my surroundings for tiny trinkets in every game. It's not a bad design tool to have things in the world for players to find, but a lot of games have polished it down to meaningless, unrewarding abstraction. In The Last Of Us maybe it was better because I usually needed a specific type of loot to craft something I needed. (But even in there I got pretty tired of mashing the X button around every medicine cabinet and supply room. Fewer, more valuable loot objects would have been an improvement in both games, I think.) - In addition, the clever idea of having 8-10 reusable furniture pieces that have looting animations built in probably saved a ton of production time. But this had a negative impact for gameplay because: Typically you use collection systems to encourage the player to slow down and look at the expensive environment art you created. However, the loot almost always is in the same 10 props so you end up only looking at those boring desks and dressers instead of the unique statues and murals and grand ceilings and so on that are actually a pleasure to look at. Contrast Beyond Good and Evil, where your collection goals are about photographing unique creatures, so your incentive is to find and look at the unique content that the game has to offer, instead of looking past the unique content to find the most reused, bland content. - Looking at the combat in isolation -- I felt that it was acceptable combat except that there wasn't anything really interesting about it. The more challenging it got the more tedious/annoying it felt to me. Bosses felt like bullet sponges. I didn't develop a lot of tactics. Each gun had strengths and weaknesses so that part did work for me. Halfway through they introduce red "Vox Populi" versions of each gun which had no clear gameplay advantage to me (and you'd have to start over on upgrading them.) Vigors were interesting but I never figured out how to swich between them (i.e. once I got #3, it seemed that I lost #1 forever.) Since some of the vigors weren't that useful to my play style, it meant that i would lose something useful and get nothing in return for a while, and therefore I would just revert to using my guns. - My one negative comment about the story was there seemed to be too many big revelations piled up at the end, without time in between for me to process them. I think there should have been a little more space between each big reveal so that I could get used to the ramifications of it, before laying another one on me. Vigors are accessed with 1 to 8 keys. There's also a pause + circular menu command but i never used it.
ah, so i was missing out on something. It seemed odd that i couldn't get to the older vigors but i never bothered to read the manual.
^^^ played xbox 360 version btw. yeah, the new system was better than bioshock because you could actually choose the right vigor for the right situation. sadly we got the 2 weapons only system.
the alternate gun versions have slightly different stats, the vox machine gun fires slower but does more damage and seems to have higher accuracy. the vox 'carbine' shoots 3 bullets in a row and does more damage, but seemed to be for slightly closer range... the fact the upgrades are reset however makes it silly because by this point in the game, you may already have almost all the upgrades on the weapons you like the most. New thing from Epic
http://youtu.be/2At-C-SokiI worth playing? i was recommended it based on how i liked bioshock infinite, but i usually try to stay well away from war/army shooters.
Whose video I posted before loved it. They did a double video feature on how awesome it was.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjaBsuXWJJ8 They say they try not to spoil it in video 1... Total Biscuit rambles on about FTL mods and unfair gameplay;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEJgk7oZe6w&list=UUy1Ms_5qBTawC-k7PVjHXKQ Just some games I've recently played (and reviewed) all from 2010:
Transformers: War for Cybertron: 8.5/10 - awesome level design, but if you don't care about design, maybe it's only a 7.5 or 8/10. Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions: 6/10 Alpha Protocol: 7.5/10 - a bit underrated, it's a good RPG. Mass Effect as a spy/espionage game. Sniper: Ghost Warrior: 7/10 - actually pretty good looking game, almost equal to Battlefield BC2/CODMW2, which is suprising coming from City Interactive but the gameplay is very specific and not as good. Mass Effect 2: 9.5/10 - obviously everyone here would have played this. Lost Planet 2: 6.5/10 Gonna start on Dragon Age Awakening tomorrow. Early reports on Blues News indicate it's another fucking disaster as a failed PC port. Here endeth the news.
I currently play Dark Souls 1 and I'm quite enjoying it. Looking forward to trying 2 when the time comes.
I recommend you give it another try, it's worth it. And I mean in a sensible way, not a "square block into round hole"-retard type of approach like earlier. ds2fix: http://blog.metaclassofnil.com
Broken port isn't a valid PC game. Actually, why the fuck did I mention it on here anyway, should have been in the console thread.
https://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/call-of-duty--advanced-warfare-will-blow-stuff-up-on-november-4-170436537.html
As usual looks really good.. I am just wondering what it will really be ingame.. :/ Looks like homoerotic mega-scripted SHIT. Massive waste of good graphics and cool machinery.
If anyone is interested, I've gone and reviewed/rated all the l4d2 campaigns. Read here: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/index.php/reviews/left-4-dead-2-campaigns
It's a long, took a 4-5 months and I'm sick to fucking hell of l4d2 now. But there's some decent campaigns near the top. l4dmaps.com is just too generous with it's ratings, where most are given 9+/10 and too many gimmick campaigns are rated higher than they should be. Sir, You Are Being Hunted Hits V1.0
http://www.big-robot.com/2014/05/01/huzzah-sir-you-are-being-hunted-hits-v1-0/ Available for 17USD at the moment, anyone played it already? I don't want to spent money without first having played a demo (which might be available in some weeks). I have not, watched a bit of BaerTaffy play it, and it's not really the type of game I would go for. One of the many 'survival/collection' type games that are popular lately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH-FwFwiztg Woot, finished Dark Souls yesterday. Great game, I enjoyed it a lot.
It's clearly not for everyone, though. An action RPG (but not of the horde variety) with little to no meaningful NPC interaction. This put me off initially, but after watching it a bit on Daz.tv, I decided to give it a proper try. Everyone always goes on about it being so difficult, and it certainly isn't a walk in the park, but I found the combat to be fair for the most part. It's a learning experience really, where you figure out each enemy and situation and adapt accordingly. Eventually it becomes very rewarding and it feels like a real achievement (unlike other games that hand the victory to you with little effort). The gameplay and difficulty of the encounters is certainly interesting as it seems to vary alot between players. Depending on their individual skills, character builds and equipment, everyone has a different experience. For example, many people consider Ornstein & Smough the toughest boss fight in the game, but I didn't have any problems - beat them on the third attempt (second even, if you discount the one where I stumbled into the arena by accident). Other bosses went down on the first try even. But then there were some that gave me quite a hard time, e.g. that goddamn Demon Firesage. Of course, everything seems easy after having beaten it. Funny enough, the minions caused me more trouble and deaths than the actual bosses. The combat itself felt very satisfying once I had figured it out. Guess I was lucky to find the Black Knight Sword early on which is pretty legit to say the least, and I ended up using it for most of the game. The game's design is very nice. Some good layouts and interconnectivity. It's not apparent at first, but after having travelled through all the areas, one realizes how they all connect and create a big whole. I especially liked how one can often see certain areas in the distance, places that you thought to be far away, but then turn out to be quite close except for their entrances. I have mixed feelings about the obscurity of certain things - meaning that apparently it's encouraged to look things up on the wiki to have an easier time. This did help me get through more smoothly (as well as asking poor rebb all kinds of silly questions), but at times it almost felt like cheating. Occasionally there were things I think I never would have discovered on my own. Then again, figuring everything out by yourself in such a harsh environment would have been to much for an individual player anyway - I suppose this is where the online aspect comes into play, e.g. messages and summoning. I played in offline mode, however. On a technical note, even though everyone always says how bad a console port this is, it ran pretty well for me after some initial hitches. Lots of crashes at first while playing around with dsfix (no problems without, though), coupled with an extremely long loading time when starting the game. At some point I installed more RAM and suddenly the game didn't crash anymore even on high detail settings, although I don't know if this is even related. I can see how these kinds of technical problems can put people off. Though, on the other hand, one may consider this the first boss fight! Anyway, glad to have played this and I recommend anyone interested to give it a try no matter the obstacles. Nice review neg. I don't really consider looking stuff up as cheating when it comes to RPG's, there's just so much to explore in some of them and decent equipment can be difficult to find... some developers probably expect a bit of sharing of information and strategies. Researching stuff online is just part of the fun of rpgs, imo.
I was happy to gaze dreamily at Polge, but then Willem dropped into the frame.
This sounds like it is a combination of passion project, and effective promotional tool of UE4. I am hopeful. Translocator, Enforcers, 3 Domination spots please.
Or I guess I could just go on to the appropriate forums where Willem and Polge will be. Yet another crushingly boring step back for Epic. Okay so they are going to one-up QuakeLive just as effectively as UT outclassed Q3A, but it would have been nice for things to have progressed a little bit in the last 15 years / 4 incarnations of UT.
UT3(4) in a new engine?? I'd need to find a really shade of paint to watch dry to top that. will be exciting if they went back to what made the game was so good in the first place. Bold designs in levels and themes, this means bright colours, sky scrapers, space ships and floating levels in space, ancient temples and cathedrals. Robots, vampires, army guys and aliens. Exciting variety of music, techno, drum and bass, rock music, trance.
It has to be bold, it has to be bright, it has to be beautiful. If it fails on any of these points, if it is a brown boring mess like UT3 then it will fall flat on its face. Hard. "but then Willem dropped into the frame."
My sincere apologies. There really should have been a warning on the screen or something... Technically there was a warning, I didn't have the tab up until they announced you, then I went and looked. I should have specified that my dreamy gaze merely changed targets.
I posted a few threads on the forums, but they got lost among debates of Lightning Gun versus Sniper Rifle. I say have both. I prefer the original UT over everything else but I'm sure the series can accommodate both.
They literally just announced the game, I don't understand how you can judge what they are doing when they haven't written a single line of code yet :P
I am hopeful! I would love to see something similar to UT99 in terms of player speed and map/mode variety as I feel like ut2k3/2k4 was a little bit too fast. It'll be an interesting project to follow for sure. Which person on the livestream was Willem? I didn't recognise your name! Good to see they have some fps and UT veteran developers on the team. Warren Marshall, he has the awesome facial hair. Comes in later in, and sits down in David's seat for a bit.
He kinda looks like an older, taller version of Daz?! Even the names match for the most part! Conspiracy theories inbound.
Also, anyone not liking what we're doing
And that sounds like lip service, I know, but this is our new direction. Open and transparent. Thought UT3 was pretty well conceived. Dispite some flaws, which caused more flak than they warranted. Hope 'community involvement' won't result in too many kooks, because you know at the end of the day they're still going to whine for it not being a carbon copy of their fav entry in the series.
Still, a new UT is the best videogame news I've heard in recent years. Willem get them to make a single player campaign pls, thank you. I have no interest in deathmatch with other random players around the globe that'll just kick my ass because they play it 24/7. Even COD/BF have SP campaigns as well as multiplayer.
It's been almost a decade since Epic made a SP game for PC, since they decided that PC gamers don't deserve the GOW franchise anymore. It's UT game, so if anything, it'll have some simple bot campaign/tournament like in Q3A, nothing more. I guess few people care about this, most want a solid deathmatch experience with good balance and varied game modes. Those who do care about SP will look elsewhere.
Bots are a must, of course, and hopefully the AI can be made good, as this is something all MP games have shortcomings. I know this is never going to happen, but imagine there would be a SP campaign using the DM levels in the same way that the DMC episodes work... ;) It's a community project - anything can happen. :) If someone makes an SP mode like that and we like what they did, there's no reason that couldn't be part of it.
It's a different mentality this time around. It's not about what Epic wants or decides Of course I can judge what they've announced. They've announced a new UT, I am judging the concept of a new UT. If it somehow turns out to be something radically different from UT/2/3/4 then my judgement will of course have been bollox but equally the announcement of it as a UT game will have been bollox.
I will grant that the focus on customer/player involvment every step of the way IS something new. Unfortunately I don't see high hopes for that as it seems a slightly ludicrous task wading through the hordes of fanbois, trolls, teenagers, hasbeens, and general imbeciles that will infest forums and keep spewing out counter-productive opinions like little manure spreaders. I suspect the effect would be designing a game by committee, where the committee is a bunch of ADD homo fucktardus who can barely walk upright. I suspect more strongly the end result will be Epic wisely ignoring 90% of the bollox they are faced with and making something they know will be reliably good i.e. errrrr UT.... Obviously I say this as someone who adored Unreal, loved UT (and thought it suitably trounced Q3A at it's own game), but is getting slightly bored of Epic doing something so similar after 4 incarnations of the game. God those tomb raider 2013 youtubes make it look like total hollywood wank. Listening to Lara pant on like some pussy actress really peeved me off. After a quick glance it seems to get lots of good reviews too !?
Just playing through lara croft and the guardian of time at the moment, okay for a topdown arcade shooter kind of thing. not much of a story though, just gameplay.
The problem is no other version of UT or Q3A for that matter ever really got a decent single player mod. Not a proper one. Which is surprising, I thought someone out there would have attempted a SP mod. Simply because the game included all the assets from Unreal. Hell, one of the last and best things released for UT was Operation Na Pali.
http://liandri.beyondunreal.com/Unreal_Tournament#Single-player_Campaign_Mods Totally recommend "The Last Fortress" for UTSP. fantastic level; http://taw.duke4.net/2011/04/ut99/the-last-fortress/
On that note, if anyone haven't played an oldie called "Tower of Shrakith'a" from '99 for regular Unreal, I also highly recommend it; http://taw.duke4.net/2012/04/unreal/tower-of-shrakitha/ Xidia
7 Bullets Operation Na Pali The Odyssey The Landing Gryphon Revisited Those are the must haves. Unfortunately I don't see high hopes for that as it seems a slightly ludicrous task wading through the hordes of fanbois, trolls, teenagers, hasbeens, and general imbeciles that will infest forums and keep spewing out counter-productive opinions like little manure spreaders.
who would we be talking about now then Let's be clear, if there is one thing Shambler is NOT is a teenager.
The rest of that all applies though. I already suggested and seriously as to this UT open development idea : why not conduct it more like a closed beta test, as in a simple selection based on 1 to 3 question interview to filter out the trash before letting them in to the forums, active participation etc.
I was hoping to get into meaty discussion as to what sort of multiplayer focused FPS it should be, rather than just a remake of someone's favorite UT, or a weird hodge-podge of them, but immediately things got really thick with petty arguments (not even bad ones, just petty) about things which haven't been been necessarily scoped in as a factor yet.
Before you decide on Machinegun vs Enforcer, the role of double jump, Lightning Gun vs Sniper Rifle, or which maps should be ported, it helps to have an idea for what sort of spaces you want the fights to occupy, and if the focus is more towards 1v1, FFA, TDM, or very generalist. What are the times to kill? How significant of a role should item timing have? What is the general tone of the game? One of the aspects of UT that is often overlooked are the silly but highly orignal maps.
UT2 had a low signal to noise ration in the mapping department, UT3 on the other hand took itself a little too seriously. Right, Deathmatch is the first game type. It's simple, we know it, and it irons out a lot of issues
is the bread and butter of the series. If you get DM to feel good then that's half the battle.
Yes but what form of deathmatch? 1v1? FFA? TDM? All deathmatch communicates is that the scoring method is tied to kills rather than some other metric.
DM is a simple game type that lets you refine everything from weapon balance to player movement to environment scale. It's a good starting point.
... wow... not sure this will land onto PC...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3YHlZwEeFA for DM-player :) they talk about the most basic things in video games as if they're some new amazing feature that no one else has done, like... trees.
...they mention the trees while talking about that map of the map-pack because it's a new environment for the game, and they have gameplay importance because much of the infantry game is about wall-running and parkour.
+ great levels
+ superb atmosphere + very beautiful + a great platform for future mods + huge world to explore - but it's very empty - the AI is utterly abysmal - almost no A-life (wildlife and wandering stalkers) - terrible story with equally terrible writing - all the labs save X14 are plain bad, X16 and X7 being the worst offenders by a landslide - full of bugs and crash prone - horrid in-game cutscenes made in an engine that definitely wasn't made for that I'm quite sad to say this, but you should avoid it for now. Cryengine-powered Victorian-age horror-themed 3rd-person L4D clone??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt1n5ZkZReQ Sign me up! I'll add it to the pile of co-op victorian age l4d clones coming out this year ;)
Vigil Games working on this one though so it should be pretty good! And it's cryengine so it's automatically better than the rest. Zombies though? So unoriginal. Just make them slightly different, something supernatural but not a dead person coming out of the ground and suddenly you won't get so many "l4d clone" labels, and opens up a lot more possibilities for enemy types.
I guess the point is to cash in on l4d fans. Sniper Elite 2 is free RIGHT NOW on steam!
Grab it while it's free! http://store.steampowered.com/app/63380/ (today only) If you printed out half a dozen screenshots, I wouldn't even shit on them, not even post-curry diarrhoea. Which is incidentally what the game looks like.
I play retro games cause they're fun, not because I want to be kooky or weird.
Hell, anyone on a forum dedicated to a 17 year old shoot 'em saying retro style games need to die is being a little weird ;) Except with modern engines / textures / effects / mapping quality Quake looks about 12 years old and those fucking 240 x 160 resolution side-scrolling bollox look about 32 years old.
I couldn't care less about retro-for-retro's sake but it looks like a solid classic platformer.
The saving system sucks nuns' ass.
The unavoidable scripted scenes rape your scrotum like an underage bitch. But damn, I loved it. And Shambler's right. All the way. Maybe. I was pointing out, in my own way, how little sense shit like this makes:
"The saving system sucks nuns' ass. The unavoidable scripted scenes rape your scrotum like an underage bitch. " ...but I see things along those lines all the time on english speaking forums. So I thought I'd give it a spin.
I'm sure you got what I meant, though... I think we're in agreement. Let's table this for now and move to the next action item on the agenda...
Batman: Arkham Asylum: great, 9/10. I guess everyones already played this anyway.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II: 6.5/10. Combat can be fun, everything else is dog shit. Lucasarts should be ashamed. Metro 2033: 8.5/10. Most dark-atmospheric game I've played, great. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: 7.5/10. Great looking levels, good combat, but some real annoying shit like fixed cameras, invisible walls, platforming/puzzles and terrible movement/keboard lag. Probably would have been 8.5/10 without that stuff. Might be 8/10 on consoles since that's really what it's designed for. Looks like Tron Evolution is next on my list, which is really gonna suck, then Bioshock 2. As best as I remember, Batman pretty much sucked due to its stupid control scheme. It was probably fine for those playing on consoles or with a controller, but terrible for mouse and keyboard. I only paid like $4 for it, so I didn't feel that bad about deleting it.
I thought Metro 2033 was very good. Some parts (like the ending) were a bit weak, but overall it was fun to play. I was watching a play through of the new Wolfenstein on youtube and I doubt those people will be getting much of my money. Maybe when it's under $10 on Steam. At least it's not a 3rd person game. I thought the controls played just fine once you got used to them.
And yes, the Batman games are fucking EXCELLENT. The problem was that many "moves" required pressing a button in addition to a direction and couldn't be remapped to a single key press.
This is probably fine on a controller where you have a bunch of buttons in a small area which are easily found by feel. It didn't work so well for me on a regular keyboard when I also had to use one hand to aim with the mouse. I gave it a fair try, but eventually just gave up since, some "boss" fights were nearly impossible. Without the "boss" fights it would have been doable, but then without them there's not much there. "Boss" fights are a game mechanic that should have been left in the 90s anyway. Unfortunately it seems that "cut scenes" are becoming the new thing. Reading [Kona]'s review of Castlevania made me think of what frustrated me so much in Prince of Persia - Sands of Time. I don't understand why character movement has to be relative to camera position. It would make more sense that character movement is referenced to the player model's torso (right, left, forward, back, etc.) That way you can maintain precise movement which is so important in these movement focused games and even if the camera is whipping around, you still know that the prince will move to his left and not the camera's left when you hit the move-left key. Simple eh? Mathematically, it should be easy to program this.
Just my beef. Without the camera fighting the player as they attempt a tricky move to avoid instant death, these types of games would become a lot more fun and fun sells. I played this game a while back called "Dishonored". I thought it was pretty good. I think it may have won a couple of awards. I don't recall any "boss" fights. So it appears it can be done.
There is also Deus Ex: Human Revolution, while it did have a few "boss" fights, it had this awesome "boss" fight ender weapon called the Typhoon. Two or three shots and the annoying "boss" fight was over and done with and you could get on with playing the game. Yeah Batman wasn't too bad, but Prince of Persia and Castlevania - those are two games whose controls did not translate to PC at all well. POP just has too many keys for the left hand to press at once, which is okay on a controller with much smaller buttons.
I have played all the PoP games and the 2 of the Batman ones on PC, number of times I got frustrated with controls wasnt too bad. Number of times I got frustrated with crappy camera was much more.
I just got my hands on Fez... Haha. The game reboot is gobsmacking.
Anyway, i dont know if this news means much Fez studio Polytron is back from the brink Nothing about the guy from all the here say.
But from seeing his game design he needs a partner to make him more angry at the "player" and less at the commentators. Or just to wake the fuck up. Fez is one of the best games released in the last few years. I would judge the man by his work rather than shit journalists write about him.
It kind of pisses me off how little effort goes into retro games on steam. Some games get really great treatment, like Duke 3d and Shadow Warrior, and some games are crappy dosbox affairs like Heretic and Hexen.
Also why does Doom on Xbox live support 4 player splitscreen co-op but the PC version doesn't? Le sigh. Touching and somewhat unique. Recommended for people who also liked Dear Esther. Not recommend for average dumbass Steam imbeciles.
I thought it was nice. I think he could have used a better engine and done a lot more with it. I can only imagine how much haggling and head-to-desk slamming was required to get that content into and working nicely with Source.
Dude was actually working on porting it to Unity: http://www.littlelostpoly.co.uk/
i'm not sure if any release will ever come of that though. I get anal when Gone Home is classified as a video game (it's not a video game) and especially when it gets comparisons with Myst. Other than that it's okay.
The controls. They were too precise and games orientated for what he was trying to present. They should have been much more fluid and simple as opposed to the basic HL2 controls.
Also, it just wasn't engaging enough for me. If you're going to tell an interactive story then use the strengths of the medium to your advantage, and I feel they failed at that. Walking around to hear the next piece of exposition felt like a chore. Not that it should have been ungamified completely, but it could have been done a lot better than what was basically a buggy interactive postcard. "This is the engine, what can I do with it?"
Should have been: "This is what I want to do, let's make the engine fit" THAT'S the game that Barnak got his rage on because it wasn't as good as Quake? It's nothing like Quake nor is it trying to be like Quake
Holy hell - the Fez unfolded cube puzzle was a bit tough. I though about looking for a missing Hexomino , but there are way more than 11 of those. Still enjoying it though, and overall difficulty of puzzles seems reasonable.
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&boardid=1&threadid=152780
Pleasedontfuckthisuppleasedontfuckthisuppleasedont........! Is Blue still running it? I lost touch with that site
bluesnews has looked the same for years and blue never sold it. the great part is that the news archive is completely intact
The old tech keeps getting used in new ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOg0BhlIvyQ&feature=share&list=UU2FGv_ILFowWU9tvYMSVm4g wow, that's pretty crazy that it's the doom2 engine.
for these kinds of high tech mods, i wonder how that impacts the mapping, specifically the speed and simplicity which is what I like the most about doom mapping. It was okay, but not as good as I expected based on the reviews.
One level, the final "boss" glitched on me 3 times in a row. Due to their garbage autosave system, I had to try replaying from the beginning of the level 3 times. I finally gave up and downloaded a save game for the start of the next level. Whoever made that save game had less money and worse weapons than I had. I was not happy about that, but it didn't matter much in the long run. They at least fixed that annoying gas mask game mechanic. Filters were plentiful (I finished with about 60 minutes worth left)and Artyom finally figured out out to wipe the front clean so he could see better. Unfortunately he apparently cannot swim, which shouldn't have been much of a problem except that even on just slightly rolling terrain, rain puddles in Moscow are 10 feet deep. It took me about 22 hours to finish, so it was well worth the $6 I paid. Been playing through the original Unreal lately, first time in a decade probably.
It has some cool environments, (or at least ideas for environments/concepts, often poorly realized due to the tech) but holy crap the level design is bad. Just now I'm at Dasa Pass Cellars. There's a room where you enter and bars close behind you, and there's a Titan and endlessly spawning Kralls. How do you exit? On the pillar in the middle of the room there is a stone sticking out slightly. Pushing this reveals a staircase up to a catwalk, from there you can drop down to a niche and push a tiny button that opens the bars again. You better discover this quickly before you waste 30 mins pew-pewing away at the endless stream of fuckers. After this you come to a pool of water with a culvert leading out of it, blocked by iron bars. Best go around and look for a way to open them right? Wrong, just jump into the pool and one of the bars are snapped off at the bottom. Just swim through. So good. In the same area, you enter a room with a barred exit to one side, and again bars close behind you and endless Kralls spawn. How do you get out of this one? YOU JUST FUCKING WALK UP TO THE BARRED EXIT BECAUSE THESE BARS ARE ACTUALLY DOORS. Fuck you Myscha the Sled Dog. Don't get me started on the fucking Sunspire. Five floors of identical fucking rooms and corridors, some of them are even labled the same. I get nauseous just thinking about it. To actually find the exit you have to find a switch in the pitch blackness under a balcony, this summons a lift in the adjoining room. There's a whole lot of "Pull Lever => What The Fuck Did That Do => A Door Opened In The House Across The Street" in this game. I'm all for game environments being puzzles to solve, but these are less puzzles and more completely random events you have to perform in a certain order. And there are places where a button is a toggle button, but you don't know that, so you might accidentally hit it twice and reset whatever it triggered, so you'll run around the whole level wondering what the fuck just happened. (Nothing!) Fuck the spiders! The mosquitos and frogs in Daikatana were pure joy compared to these fuckers, they can survive a fucking rocket in the thorax! Vile! And tentacles! They're the second enemy you meet in the game, and they still fucking wreck me even now that I'm fully armored up! Fuck every enemy dodging the instant you press the trigger on a non-hitscan weapon! Fuck those assholes that are sometimes armed with Eightballs. Every time there's a sci-fi level the level designers seem to lose their mind and go full Daikatana for the looks. Pulsating shit, rainbow lights and fucking terrible brushwork everywhere. ISV Kran is a turd of a level. It's like Baby's First Quake Level circa 1996 but with purple, green and hot pink in every corner. i haete th1s gmae!11!! Because I just progressed like 3 minutes and ANOTHER room where you're locked in and endless waves spawn.
EXCEPT this time they're actually not endless and you just have to hang around a while and kill stuff. What the fuck! I gave up playing it after wandering round in circles in that fucking tower for ages.
I missed the game the first time round and played it halfway through before realising 'I got better stuff to do'. The game is very front-loaded - the experience gets worse the longer you play it. That's why games have gotten progressively shorter over the years. Or, at least, one of the reasons. Nobody finishes a 40 hour shooter so the developer doesn't care that much about the later content and it's a bit of a spiral.
A tight, contained 6-10 hour experience can be polished and cared for start to finish. I always thought it was because in recent years they seem to devote most of their effort to cut scenes and quick time events instead of creating user playable content.
Or, chasing the visuals.
It costs more and more to keep up with the imaginary standard of AAA quality, so you have to reduce spending elsewhere. Cut scenes / QTE are a symptom of this - you've got loads of nice looking art, now show it off. But you already downsized design, so what's an easy way? These rising costs and the emergence of tablet gaming (eg. Candy Crush) have seriously reduced AAA's slice of the pie. I suspect that visuals have plateaued as well. Realistically, games aren't going to look significantly better than anything previously created at this point. Sweeping statements like 'nobody finishes...' tend to be uttered as a justification - surprised to hear you say it Willem. 'Nobody will get this far so let's not bother doing it properly' is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're making 40 hour FPS games then you've already made a big steaming decision all over the meeting room floor.
Ha ha I have 644 hours played on Skyrim. Apparently I spent 40 hours playing Bioshock Infinite, 105 hours on Deus Ex: HR, 123 hours on Dishonored and that lying bastard Steam claims I've spent almost 900 hours playing Fallout New Vegas.
He beat bioshock infinite in one sitting, took about 9 hours.
Well, I finished Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 in just 9 hours, never played it again and will never buy another Call of Duty game.
On the other hand, big games with interesting places like Bioshock Infinite, I tend to waste a lot of time just poking around and exploring. Fallout New Vegas, I've never actually finished, but I've played it on multiple characters up to the level cap, doing the majority of quests and visiting most locations. I put 180 hrs into skyrim and both expansion, found every locale (244 i think?) and beat all main quests and expansions.
I think I beat MW2 in 4-5 hours. The game is tiny. Bioshock1, which IMO is far better than Infinite, took about 10-12 hours. mmmm, I like that game. On the other hand, big games with interesting places, I tend to waste a lot of time just poking around and exploring.
My gaming modus operandi! Even better if there are optional things to kill/collect in the areas you poke around in. Most FPSes I play for AT LEAST 1.5 times as long as the general status quo of how long most people say they are, and at least 2-3 times as long as the whining twats who always bleat on about "OMG xxxx is such a shit single player game I completed it in 6 hours" whatfuckingever like I care if you semi-speedran it and now feel short-changed you piece of DICK. Some of Unreal was a bit long winded but it made up for it being being fucking awesome. Bluff Eversmoking was fairly late in the game right? Took me about 2 hours for that one level and it was 2 hours of great gaming. Fuck you all. "I always thought it was because in recent years they seem to devote most of their effort to cut scenes and quick time events instead of creating user playable content."
That's certainly another theory! Maybe I need to try Unreal again? I tried it like 3 times but frankly it just bored me. I feel like I need to like it because I really fucking love UT...
it was great at the time IMO.
I think it's something that I cannot honestly judge objectively now because I have such a deep nostalgic love for it. I mean, I got the game at the same time as I got a voodoo 2... the damn thing blew my mind from start to finish. Recently started playing the latest Tomb Raider for the first time because of the high praise it tends to get. Unfortunately I'm close to skipping this one because it's plagued with those insta-death QTE sequences. They're simply no fun for me and sour everything else about the game, despite the platforming/exploration being quite fun. :(
So I've been playing Witcher 2 instead (on Hard difficulty). Had a rough start figuring out group combat but now have a blast everytime I jump into it. Until the QTEs... but not nearly as hair tearing. It's sad because I absolutely loved both Shenmue titles, stuffed with QTE sequences... but at least not every failed QTE meant game-over though. There should always be a "just show me the video version" option for QTEs. Seriously, they suck.
The first time I played Tomb Raider I had a lot of trouble with the QTEs. There seems to be some issues on the PC with certain video settings or something. The buttons simply don't respond. The second time I played, it wasn't so bad for whatever reason. I highly recommend sticking with it. I absolutely hate 3rd person shooters, yet I would rank Tomb Raider 2013 as one of the best games I've ever played. Bluff Eversmoking is some fine video gaming in and of itself. Love that map.
BlOps2 took me only 8 hours, but then I discovered I got an ending I didn't like, and realized the game had 16 different endings. So that made me appreciate it a little bit more. That and I liked the ability to configure my abilities and inventory before every level. I actually did "finish" Fallout New Vegas. Got my character to the base game max level, did most of the quests in each area, and completed the primary story arc for the NCR. Got 86 hours of that game, slow start but I really enjoyed it. Quakis it is worth persisting. The QTEs are fucking pointless shit (and very obviously so, god knows how they got left in), BUT they do get sparser later in the game and the pure atmosphere / spectacle more than compensates for them.
havent played it for a while but it was one of the great games, and some of the community maps/packs (albeit mostly needing UT) were of staggering quality.
Been Playing this game called
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem:_Avenging_Angel It's like a cross between Quake II and Undying and it's pretty good. It's on Isozone, and it runs on Win 7 using wndmode. http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Requiem:_Avenging_Angel Great game. Received it on a CD when I purchased an ATI Radeon card for my old Macintosh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Cop:_LAPD I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I've spent probably half of the last two days playing maps I made for Doom almost 20 years ago and it's hard to believe how well that game has held up.
As soon as the Quake map I'm working on is done, I may have to go back to Doom mapping for a bit. Any old Mac users remember Swoop by Ambrosia Software? Such a fun game. I still have an old Power Mac 8500 running Mac OS 9.2.2 and it's always a blast to set it up and play this for a few hours.
Played lots of Ambrosia games back in the day though. Barrack, Apeiron, Bubble Trouble, the Escape Velocities....
actually looks enjoyable in this video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPK1r_igqk I like the building your own fort aspect of the game a lot. So yep Tron Evolution did massively suck. 6.0/10. Not much more to say, they even fucked up the score.
Bioshock 2 - 9/10. Better than the original game. The gameplay was just more polished with better weapons and while the graphics were similar, there were more underwater vistas instead of just darkness everytime you look out a window. But overall not that different to the first game just more of the same. Venetica - 7/10. Possibly even more. Just a pretty average RPG/adventure game. Graphics are a little dated, it's definitely not AAA, but also very much worth playing through. Pretty addictive 15-20 hrs. Next on my list is either The Ball, Two Worlds II or MOH. I think after I've reviewed everything from 2010 I'll stop doing these reviews - when I started there were only several games a year, 2010 there's 40, 2011 I've got a list of almost 70 games to play. Fuck reviewing all that, it'll be a chore just playing half of them. A review of a really bad game is just as useful as one of a good game. Maybe even better. It helps me to avoid wasting money.
Yes, but then Kona has to buy and play shit games just so you can avoid them. Sounds like a great deal for Kona. :)
I was kind of assuming the game was already purchased. I wouldn't waste much time on reviewing a bad game either. Just say "this one sucked, move along".
Yeah I could just do the ones that I think are really underrated. The hidden gems.
Buy over 60 games in 1 year? Screw that, I only buy the good ones, or the big ones like rpgs unless steam has a good deal going. The shit ones I torrent anyway, most of them just aren't worth the money they ask, even 5 years after release the publishers still think they're worth $20+. Nope. Sorry Willem I know you hate pirating hehe. Games have gotten pretty bad in recent years, at least from my perspective. So I tend to rely on Steam specials a lot also. I think the most I've paid for a game in the last 3 years was $20 for Tomb Raider 2013 (might have been $25).
I don't like much of what's been released lately so I just stick with old favorites and only try newer stuff when it's cheap enough that I don't worry about wasting the money if I end up not liking it enough to play (like Batman). It's actually quite good to be a few years behind and not playing a game on release. Gives it time for mods to come out, patches to fix shit, and the price to come down. I've never paid full brand new retail price for a game.
Anyway this weekend I played: The Ball - 6.5/10. Looks great but puzzles get boring really quick. Decided not to finish it even. Medal of Honor - 8/10. Pretty good, nice realistic setting, good combat. I miss FPS's. Short though at only about 6 hrs. Good deal for anyone that missed this great game. Steam has a Quakecon weekend special get Dishonored for only $4.99
There are many other id/Bethesda games on sale also. Dishonored is worth it just for the chance to study how when you make a game focused on gameplay and giving the player gameplay options, it turns out to be bloody good fun.
Extremely fun combat, plenty of options, many non-linear missions, lots of exploration and an engaging story. Was way better than Bioshock Infinite, though it felt that there was more spooging over that game.
That guy has some great reviews. I watched about a dozen last night and found that I generally agreed with him about everything. It's nice to find good reviews about older games.
I was thinkng to buy the new Thief game, then I watched his review. In the end it all just falls on it's ass, and it's a damn shame. Guess I'll wait until it's a $4.99 special on Steam. Just started playing... it's odd to get used to, but is growing on me. A measured dodge and attack combat system that I don't yet understand, plus a whole load of differing mechanics that feel well amalgamated into a whole.
http://www.gamespot.com/videos/quick-look-abyss-odyssey/2300-6420268/ It's $15USD on steam right now. I missed the sale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_130415645&feature=iv&src_vid=Nnj5TfywMNk&v=49Vw1cYTOeQ
Thief + Tomb Raider + playing as a proper sneaky looking Gobbo?? Sold. Two Worlds II (2010) 8.5
Only a 65% aggregate, wtf?! This is a solid 8 minimum imo. Great RPG, awesome depth with the weapon upgrade combinations and spell making. Decent story and graphics. The main game was about 15 hours for me, but then add in the huge DLC and it's another 5-10 hours. Gotta get the velvet edition so you get both. Mass Effect 2 was certainly the best action RPG of 2010, but Two Worlds II was next, ahead of Awakenings, then Gothic 4, Alpha Protocol, and Venetica. I'm still to play New Vegas though so that might steal the #3 spot. Global Ops: Commando Libya (2011) 5.0 UE3 but really budget and pretty shit. The Cursed Crusade (2011) 4.5 Starts off fucking horribly with an insane amount of cutscenes, but most of the game is actually pretty decent. Sadly it goes on a few hours too long with the linear level never realy changing much and gets shit again by the end. Oh and it suddenly ends as if they ran out of money. No boss, no conclusion to the story. It just ends out of nowhere. I don't plan to review these on my site. I might play Risen1 soon. I was going to skip it because it sounds too difficult, but maybe I'll try it. I'll just have to grind hardout and play on easy. Anyone here like or dislike it?
Actually Angry Joe gives is a 3/10, and besides that it looks absolutely shit in the videos. Guess I'll skip it still.
Only a complete bellend would rate Risen 3/10. It's definitely a great game, look above in this thread to see what we wrote about it. Better than TW2 imo. When I first played it, it pretty much felt like a "Gothic II with better graphics" (although some aspects have devolved as well). I would give it at least 8/10. At the very least, you should give it a try for a couple of hours and decide then.
Yeah I saw you and Bal liked it. But then even if Angry Joe was wrong about it, the videos of gameplay show some pretty bad looking graphics. I need good graphics.
Didn't Angry Joe review the 360 version, which turned out to be an ugly looking, horrible and shoddy port?
iirc anyway, it's been a while. <Stirfrybler> finished wolfenstein
<Stirfrybler> not bad, quite stylish, quite good characters <Stirfrybler> difficulty level was all over the place <Stirfrybler> 1/3 almost empty, 1/3 spot on fun, 1/3 near impossible <Stirfrybler> also jumped from place to place so quick it kinda lost the sense of progression <cardo> wolf 3d yeah? good job
<Vigil> bler welcome to 20 years ago <Vigil> but glad you're catching up <cardo> 22 years ago! <cardo> time to play this now Stirfrybler - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo4HXRtXknI <Asaki2> That's not Spear of Destiny. <Vigil> bler have you heard about this other FPS called Doom? <Vigil> it's like the spiritual sequel to Wolfenstein What's wrong with Fallout3? I thought it was a great game. Not perfect, but so much quantity and hours to waste. That was rare for a FPS in 2008 to be over 10 hours long.
By the way I just finished Call of Juarez: The Cartel. Really not as bad as is made out. I guess everyone was expecting an open world western, but they got a linear cop thriller based in modern mexico. I enjoyed the story and characters. Just normal shooter gameplay but the guns were a bit shit.
About 6.5/10, maybe 7 if I'm feeling generous. Oh and Battle: Los Angeles - 4.5/10. Could have been okay but this is a full game lasting, literally, 55 minutes. It's still $10 on steam! Have to agree on Fallout 3. I've put in well in excess of 200 hours on the Fallout series (Fallout 3 and New Vegas combined), and I'm looking getting the itch for another play through soon. Just wonderful games. SO much to explore and find. And so many different character paths...
Fallout 3 is an utter failure on every imaginable level. It has a completely shit storyline with almost no choice and consequence, an ugly and buggy engine (I can't believe they're still using it), almost none of the humour present in the earlier games (especially FO2), shit writing, abysmal gameplay and the fact that Van Buren got canned for this terrible game makes me really mad.
The worst offender has to be gameplay though. The fact that there is ZERO player skill involved in an FPS is a cardinal sin. Everything is determined with dice rolls and character skills. This does NOT work in an FPS. At all. The fact that I'm very good at aiming, aim for the head and yet won't even hit my target because of some shit skill not high enough is maddening (and it's worse if that backfires). And despite its good setting, writing and all New Vegas still has the same crap. VATS makes the game even slower and you almost have to use it every time if you even want to hit something. Now VATS was in FO1 and 2 but that isn't an issue in a isometric game, however in an FPS it's the absolute worst thing you could think of. Also RPGCodex recently made a Top 70 RPGs poll where members could allocate 25 points for any RPG they wanted. While New Vegas got pretty high in the poll (too high in my opinion even if it's a definite improvement over FO3 in every domain except gameplay and engine), Fallout 3 did not receive a SINGLE vote, not even to allocate 1 point.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9453 Alpha Protocol ahead of Dragon Age: Origins and The Witcher 2 with Mass Effect 2 not even on the list? wtf. Don't agree with that poll.
When I play a first-person game, with guns even, I expect to be able to hit stuff with my weapons relying solely on my player skills. If I have to abide by dice rolls and character skills or go through some terrible system that has no place in a first person game then I'm sorry but the decision to make it a first person game was terrible and whoever was in charge of that should think twice next time.
Fallout 3 hater! I love the game. It is what it is. It's not a shooter per-sey. It's an RPG. But I think, despite your attempts to discredit the reputation of Fallout 3, that it's a game with a lot of fans. And I'm one of them.
It's an RPG but it's still a shit RPG. No choice & consequence, no way to have fun with the systems and with abysmal replay value. Fallout 3 is loved by people who have never touched the originals, just like people who love Thi4f. May I remind you people that Fallout 1 is the game in which you can finish the two main quests without ever meeting the villain and can even drive him to suicide instead of fighting him. You can kill everyone in Fallout 1 and 2 and still finish the game. You can play a character so stupid no one will talk to you and people will laugh at you, or some will try to enlsave you. You can join slavers and some people will shoot you on sight while others will welcome you with their arms open. Kill children and you'll get your ass handed to you by most people, and those who don't want to slit your throat will damage your reputation in other ways. You have almost none of that in FO3.
Fallout 3 is an utter failure on every imaginable level. It has a completely shit storyline with almost no choice and consequence, an ugly and buggy engine (I can't believe they're still using it), almost none of the humour present in the earlier games (especially FO2), shit writing, abysmal gameplay and the fact that Van Buren got canned for this terrible game makes me really mad.
Where do you start with a statement like this.... utter failure on every imaginable level Er, OK, so multiple Game of the Year awards don't count for anything. completely shit storyline with almost no choice and consequence The storyline seemed OK to me, quite rich really, and there are loads of choices and consequences (blow up Megaton, let the Ghouls into that tower, be evil, be good, become a slaver, liberate the enslaved, off the top of my head...) an ugly and buggy engine PS3 user maybe? Seemed OK to me, I mean it was buggy at times, but they managed to get the Capital Wasteland onto an XBox, which is an achievement really... almost none of the humour present in the earlier games There is a lot of humor though..... shit writing, abysmal gameplay and the fact that Van Buren got canned for this terrible game makes me really mad. Subjective, subjective, irrelevant. That Fallout 1 and 2 were crappy isometric games, and Fallout 3 is fully 3D?!??!
"Dude none of these games are a PATCH on Space Invaders!!! Old skool FTW y'all!!!" I don't even
Quake sucks because it doesn't have a skill tree. See how that's silly? Fallout is about the world and the side quests and your characters progression. The main storyline is something you can do when you get bored of the rest of the game. The first thing I do when I emerge from the vault is pick a random direction and start walking. I'm not even going to reply to Ricky since he doesn't even understand or try to understand what I'm trying to say, but whatever.
Willem: I use that against the game because you could do the quests in the earlier Fallout games in any order you liked, and they all had meaningful impacts on the storyline and your character and his/her reputation! You could visit cities in any order you liked as well, just pick a direction on the map and go ahead until your find something, do quests and see what happens. The fact that this disappeared in Fallout 3 is just another evidence of its failure to understand what made Fallout great, but that's the case with all Bethesda titles after Morrowind. And I don't see why you're using Quake and skill trees. That's completely irrelevant. Quake isn't an RPG and never prentended to be one. Fallout 3 was meant to be the successor of one of the most sprawling and complex RPGs ever designed and it utterly failed. It failed at continuing to be an isometric hardcore RPG for that small hardcore fanbase.
But it succeeded in creating a much bigger fanbase, bringing in so many more gamers that prefer first-person over overhead isometric, and more action. The sales stats don't lie - Fallout 3 sold more copies than all 4 previous Fallout games combined (includes the spinoffs). New Vegas set new sales records for Bethesda. You could say they went "commercial" with F3, but it certainly worked for them. I also don't think the viewing type (isometric vs fp) should dictate what the gameplay should be. Why shouldn't a dice-roll type combat system be in a first person game? Just because it hasn't happened previously? I love that most RPG's these days are not isometric - that's what put me off most RPG's in the past. I think F3 is probably in the top 20 games of the last 20 years, simply for breaking down some genre barriers. " I use that against the game because you could do the quests in the earlier Fallout games in any order you liked, and they all had meaningful impacts on the storyline and your character and his/her reputation!"
The reputation thing, sure, that's also in Fallout 3. Can you give an example where the quests had a meaningful impact on the main storyline in the old Fallouts? I don't remember a lot of that beyond some basic dialog changes - which the new games do as well. "You could visit cities in any order you liked as well, just pick a direction on the map and go ahead until your find something, do quests and see what happens. The fact that this disappeared in Fallout 3 is just another evidence of its failure to understand what made Fallout great," That's exactly what I do whenever I play the game. I think the core issue is you don't like the switch to FPS or something and are justifying it by saying that the game design changed too much or something. I see little difference between the modern fallouts and the old ones. They are, essentially, the same games just from a different camera position. The most obvious quest that has a deep impact on the storyline is the water chip problem. If you decide to join the water merchants and reveal the location of Vault 13 to them, they'll get a stock of water to the Vault that will give you more time to get the chip, but on the other hand the Master will be aware of the location of the Vault and will send his supermutants way faster. If you're not aware of this the Vault can get destroyed.
Another one is still regarding the chip in the Necropolis, if you steal the chip without repairing the Ghouls' water pump beforehand they'll turn hostile and want to kill you even if you freed them from the supermutants above. If you join the Khans in Fallout 1 your reputation goes to the ground and you obviously won't be able to be on friendly terms with Shady Sands. I think Killian in Junkcity doesn't even want to speak to you if you do that. If you optimize the power plant in Gecko in Fallout 2, Gecko and NCR will be on good terms but Vault City will hate your guts more than usual, and they'll send troops to destroy Gecko. If you destroy the Shi Emperor in San Francisco everyone will hate you and you'll have to kill them. This makes the game obviously much harder. However if you do the contrary, that is to kill AHS-9 you get lots of good rep and lots of experience. Basically if you help the Hubologists most people will hate you, which makes acquiring the boat to get to the Enclave oilrig harder. The FPS switch is indeed an issue because the system doesn't work for me at all, as I've already explained. I'm far from being the only one complaining about this. The gameplay is way too rigid and random, which doesn't work in a first-person perspective. Even in System Shock 2, that had character skills, you could kill stuff with weapons you had almost no stats for. It was hard but it was definitely easier than in Fallout 3. Seriously, not being able to score a headshot when I'm at close range is utterly ridiculous. I'm out of my depth now and will bow out. Your encyclopedic knowledge of the original Fallout games has overpowered me. :)
I can continue to argue against someone with who has a clearly better grasp of the topic than I do, or I can bow out. I know internet tradition dictates that I start calling him names and swearing, but I'm opting for a different way. :)
I still love Fallout 3 and I think it's one of the best games ever created. Yeah, I said it. But I don't remember the quests by heart or their outcomes and effects and I can't spend the time to go dig it all up so I'm out! Good convincing argument dude. I'd left Fallout 3 New Vegas to one side, but I'm definitely going to start playing it now :)
I loved New Vegas, the writing was excelent, and it had great exploration. Fallout 3 was ok.
I agree with most of what skacky says, but the size of the world and exploration is enough to make me enjoy those games more than most FPS anyways. I really think the "S" needs to left off of there when discussing Fallout. It's first person, yes, but a shooter it ain't... And expecting it to play like a shooter is going to lead to frustration.
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Although ugly, Fallout 3 and NV are great games. Admittedly, the karma system doesn't work nearly as strongly as 'hard-coded' consequences (even though there are some of them as well), and it seems to be biased towards the good side - relatively easy to become a 'good' character; some effort required to become 'bad'.
It's an FPS but that doesn't mean it necessarily has to work on player skill alone. This is where the RPG elements come into play, so you do have to spend some points into your shooting tree in order to make better hits. A sensible system in this context, imo - similar to fantasy RPGs where you need to improve your sword skills. otp: We get it, you don't like Willem. However, interpreting every single one of his posts in the most negative way possible just to have an opportunity for a personal attack actually makes you look like the cunt here. I haven't played New Vegas (even though I own it... Steam Sales...), but I remember thinking FO3 wasn't bad when taken on it's own merits. I don't think it is the greatest game ever made, and likely won't ever replay it, but it was decent.
But it's not Fallout or Fallout2, which are games I adore and have played several times. I own it as well, and played about 30 minutes.
Didn't grab me... I should probably give it another try. Comooooonn dude. Seriously. You aren't half getting your panties in a bunch.
You're just not making any sense. Let me help to articulate some of your shit a bit better, so i can get my head round this more easily: Skacky:Fallout 3 is an utter failure on every imaginable level. This is bullshite. The game is horrendously successful. As a game. You're spouting RPG-nerd hubris, which seems strange. RPG-nerd hubris. If your statement had read: As a pure RPG, Fallout 3 is an utter failure on every imaginable level. A game being successful doesn't cause all of the people who like the game to become 'hipster idiots' - it is also possible that the game had its own merits. You then go on to say that the game has no choice & consequence, which is NOT TRUE. It has an abundance of choice and consequence. I know, I have experienced much of this myself. Now when you go and LIE about a game, it's kind of hard for me to 'understand or try to understand what you're trying to say', because I know that it's BULLSHIT. You then go on to say: 'you could do the quests in the earlier Fallout games in any order you liked, and they all had meaningful impacts on the storyline and your character and his/her reputation! You could visit cities in any order you liked as well, just pick a direction on the map and go ahead until your find something, do quests and see what happens. The fact that THIS DISAPPEARED IN FALLOUT 3 is just another evidence of its' I have capitalized the part which is a complete FUCKING LIE. If that part had read 'there was less of this in Fallout 3' then I would find it easier to understand or try to understand what you'r trying to say. But as it stands I'm having trouble understanding it because it's BULLSHIT. You're exaggerating to the point of it being literally bullshit. Do ya get me? Give me an example of a quest that has real choice & consequence in FO3 then. I don't recall any.
I'm not the only one who thinks this and NV actually puts C&C back in which is why it's the superior game out of the two (that and the writing is way better seeing as Obsidian aren't hacks at that). Oh! Oh! I remember one
Well there's the whole situation with the Ghouls & Tenpenny Tower
The android mission Blowing up Megaton The launch codes side quest The Vampires The way that you get around the overseer in Vault 101 The situation with the slavers and how that relates to little big town and little lamplight These are just off the top of my head. TBH I know that there are about double the amount of ending possibilities in the early games than in Fallout 3. But that's with text-based dialogue, in an ancient isometric game. Skyrim is pretty full-on too, but I'm going to guess you're not keen on T.E.S. games either, probably think that they were all shit after Morrowind, I'm guessing. Heard that POV before too... >TBH I know that there are about double the amount of ending possibilities in the early games than in Fallout 3. But that's with text-based dialogue, in an ancient isometric game.
Yeah that was mostly what I wanted to explain. Fallout 1 & 2 were very very rich when it came to that stuff and I really disliked how rigid Fallout 3 was in that regard. Arcanum is another game I really like for that as well, as it manages to have even more options than Fallout (but its combat system is real crap, worse than Planescape Torment's imo). New Vegas actively reintroduced that though which is a definite improvement. By the way these 'ancient isometric games' are making a comeback. You have at least three such games in development right now (two by Fargo & co and one by Avellone & co; Wasteland 2 and Torment, and Pillars of Eternity). And then you have Divinity: Original Sin which was released recently. I never exactly liked the TES games to be honest. Arena is a chore to play, Daggerfall has cool dungeons but is too big and empty for its own good, Morrowind is excellent though, great great game, Oblivion is rather bad and Skyrim manages to be worse. The biggest issue I have with these last two is level scaling that makes all encounters incredibly boring. And the dungeons in Skyrim are a joke. When it comes to RPGs I'm much more focused on mechanics than anything else. If mechanics are bad the game will be bad, simple as that. Mechanics in FO3 are bad, game is bad, end of story. On the subject of level scaling: take a game like Gothic for example, or even Fallout, where you can go everywhere you want. You'll get absolutely destroyed most of the time by enemies that are far tougher than you if you're not prepared or not skilled enough, and even if you know these monsters are here you'll still get killed. That doesn't really happen in Oblivion and Skyrim since enemies have more or less the same experience level as you. That makes fights so boring since there's no satisfaction when you're victorious, whereas killing some Deathclaw in FO1 when you have some shit equipment makes you feel like a god. IDK, as my introduction to the Fallout universe, Fallout 3 felt like a pretty immersive experience and I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed using V.A.T.S and I also enjoyed shooting in real-time. You can only really shoot well in real time once you've leveled your shooting skills up though. I enjoyed New Vegas too, though to me Fallout 3 felt like it had more scope, just more 'randomness'. Not much in it though, TBH. I loved them both.
I have Fallout 2 but I couldn't get into it. One of my palls visited me though, and he played through a large chunk of it in front of me. It seemed more interesting once he had accessed a few locations (don't ask me where). I probably wouldn't have played Fallout 3 much if it had been a 2D/isometric game. I'm just a slut for 3D and eyecandy I guess. I fancy playing through Fallout 3 and becoming an evil overlord type. I know that you can do a load of different stuff if you choose to be evil. I've never been a massive RPG fan really, but I did enjoy the newer Fallout games, and Skyrim. T.E.S never really appealed to me either. I guess I appreciate the whole experience of being immersed into a world with high production value and believable voice acting combined with acceptable facial animation etc etc. I guess I appreciate the whole experience of being immersed into a world with high production value and believable voice acting combined with acceptable facial animation etc etc.
This is certainly a trait of modern gaming, giving the player so much visual detail that it is overwhelming. Often this leads to little chance for the player to create their own experience or story which is an important fact of RPG, your own experience is what you remember. This is why older games are still so popular because they have gaps for the player to use their imagination and create back story. Eye candy rich environment may be sweet and exciting at first but there is often little for the players imagination to add afterwards. I showed a screenshot of a map I am working on to a friend this morning and there was three monsters infront of an altar. Without me having to explain anything he had his own story of what was going on. He drew from the rough strokes in the scene and filled in the blanks. but your argument against skacky's is basically, because it's popular/sold well, it must be good?
"What do I want to get from life?"
My argument against Skackys (seeing as you're keen on being a troll and bringing this up again with such an rediculous quip as the one above) is basically that the game might not have such a complex RPG story tree as FO1 & 2, but it isn't "an utter failure on every imaginable level". To say such a thing is to insult the taste of all of the people who enjoyed the game. I mean I'm kind of speachless really. I don't want to get into this again. Some people don't like Fallout 3. Boo fucking hoo. I haven't got a problem with people not liking the game. I just think that personally I don't see the game as a failure, I enjoyed it. It has a lot of merit. It was greatly succesful. . . . . . . . . I just thought that his arguments were on the right lines, but grossly exaggerated to the point of not being true. Like saying an utter failure on every imaginable level, and [several features] completely dissappeared from the game when they didn't. But in truth FUCK YOU Nitin. Go and troll someone else. I'm not in the mood for this bullshit. And ALSO: All this stuff about games having an 'overwhelming' level of detail. Well I wasn't overwhelmed by it. By this bizarre logic, the best game out there would be.......... I like games that exist. I suppose that this type of stuff is to be expected from a developer. The one who actually does imagine the game, and then goes on the create their idea. It's a bit like when a drummer says 'I've got an idea for a song'. NO. NO YOU HAVEN'T GOT AN IDEA FOR A SONG YOU MUPPET!!! so it's fine that people dont like the game but its not fine to call it a complete failure because "To say such a thing is to insult the taste of all of the people who enjoyed the game".
Right, got it, not "exaggerated" at all. And yes thanks for pointing out again that it was greatly successful. To paraphrase you: Some people love Fallout 3. Boo fucking hoo. complete failure != multple awards and loads of fans
If it was a complete failure then it wouldn't have got the acolades that it did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_3#Awards http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1073664/awards http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/links/fallout3-awards.php a complete failure on EVERY LEVEL *repeated bangs head against table* I haven't got a problem with anyone not liking the game. I haven't. I'm just pointing out that it's not fair to say it was a complete failure on EVERY LEVEL because it blatantly wasn't. I mean everyone has their own opinions about what makes a good video game. But the general concensus about Fallout 3 was that it was indeed a 'good' game. You both went into a game with different expectations, some of which were met and some not.
I will go a bit further in what maybe pisses some people off about the treatment a series like Fallout and many other classics get.
See a small studio makes an enormously expansive and lovingly crafted game with a "small" team and and budget. Cult status is attained, the guys made more than just a game in the end, people feel it, theres a part of their soul in it, and its because they really wanted to and tried for the love of it all. A labor of love as Fallout is aptly often described... Financial success is of course primordial, they have to eat and pay the bills, it is prayed for but they know it very well chances are good it will work out if they do give it their best and know that they are an experienced team that knows that the fuck they are doing. Now a large studio/publisher combo comes in to it, having picked up the rights to the game. They have a way larger pool of talent and infintely deeper pockets... There is no goddamn GOOD reason they cannot achieve what was achieved by a "lesser" team/budget. NONE. So why, why is there LESS with MORE ??? They could not pay for a few more team members, they could not extend development time a bit more, they emptied their personal bank accounts like the crazy motherfuckers that put every piece of themselves in the original? Yeah fucking right. It could of been much better, if it had been taken on and directed by a team/company that really cares and is passionate in delivering THE BEST they possibly humanly can. But not its the nature of the type of company that took the franchise over AT ALL. All crucial decision affecting the game and the teams ability to deliver their best is in the hands of people that really do not give a steaming SHIT about the game, the culture, in ANY way. They see numbers, they see shareholder meetings. They see their paycheck. An army of suited cunts walking a rope between not going over the negative feedback/hype tipping point with the public and getting the most money out of the least investement. Thats all there is to the job to them, absolutely all of it, nothing about the franchise matters otherwise. And justifying this shit with "but it made good sales so they win stfu you are wrong" is just CRAP. Thats how one bends down and accepts the mediocre. The fuckign EMBRACE of mediocre shit is repugnant. Justifying greed driven undeperformance does nothing good for our cultural achievements. Yeah its OK, yeah its actually fun to play through in some ways - but its far from all it could have been without loosing what it does have goign for it. And that is not ok. Its a pisstake. We're still talking about this?
Killes is wrong btw, I'd explain why but I'm typing this on my phone while drinking a beer by the pool. Since this dead horse is already a pile of pulp, I just want to address a small point that was brought up in this discussion.
IMO, awards and accolades a piece of work receives (games, film, music) cannot reliably be used as an indicator of its quality. I've seen many a pile-o-shit receive praise, while worthy works have only a cult following. Also, just play the games you like and enjoy them. If you like a game that is tailored to the mainstream audience that doesn't mean you're a cretin. If you like artsy, esoteric ejaculate that doesn't mean you're some sort of ultra-sophisticated intellectual. And, if you want to play an RPG, just play Morrowind :P "but its far from all it could have been"
Well, I'm yet to play a game in my life that was perfect, and couldn't have been better. Every game out there 'could be more'. I haven't played skyrim yet though :D BTW guys it's fun to discuss these older games. Just don't get too hot about it, it's just a discussion. Don't take anything too personally. Looks great. I'll be picking up 2033 Redux for sure. Dunno about Last Last Redux as it looks like less has changed with it.
um... i was going to get the originals. I can't tell if it would be worth getting the new version or not since I'd be playing it on a PC anyway... and my hardware really isn't all that great.
The before/afters in the video are probably comparing shitty console version to the redux, not the maxed out pc version of the original which looked a lot better. looks like everything being brighter is a major difference as well, instead of caked in shadow.
I'll probably play it but it's a shame they couldn't build some new levels into it. the odd extra room or secret isn't enough to excite me. Nor is a couple new gameplay modes like "survival". By the way has anyone played Afterlife Insanity? It's quite similar to Metro, mostly underground in dark cramped areas. Pretty fantastic design, probably on par with Metro actually.
Gameplay isn't as good as Metro. The first 2/3rds consist of melee whacking shit, which is pretty basic and too challenging. But the last third gets quite a bit more challenging and definitely feels like survival horror with fuck all ammo and enemies that will drop you very quickly. Probably the only negative is the unresponsive controls, most times I died was because I was trying to run but the characters was still swinging the axe around and shit like that. It's really an underated game, if you love Metro then Afterlife is really worth playing. It was originally intended to be a STALKER clone, so that gives an idea of the sort of environment. And it's only $5 http://store.steampowered.com/app/224420/ 7/10 Played The First Templar as well this week. 6/10. Not that bad, just your average templar setting and story.
I'd say get the new version. I played LL on a non-uber machine and it did look great (i.e. nice gfx combined with really good use of them), and I think the addition of that to 2033 will be well worth it (didn't play 2033 but will get this for sure).
but i saw single-player role play contests for it, where you had to create a character with e.g. < 3 intelligence and then tell your story as you played it. I played some fo3, but from the few hours i put into it that game didn't leave a similar expression at all. It felt like oblivion in a new look.
What is the overall point of that article? It's well written, but all I can get out of it is that it's not worth being an indie developer these days...
Since we were discussing Fallout, I just finished New Vegas. I spent about 50 hours on it, including all 4 DLC's. It still just about all the same issues as Fallout3, it's really just more of the same. The graphics haven't dated too well, they're a bit average for 2010. That was with sweetfx, nmc's high res textures, nevada skies (which was awesome) installed.
The gehanna (from a dlc) was still way overpowered which rendered just about every gun inferior. The second boss (ncr one) went down so fast I didn't even see him. But there's a lot of time spent outside of combat just doing random shit like fetch quests. What saves it are the 4 dlc's (well, 3 of them - dead money I hated). The 4th DLC is fantastic and better than anything in New Vegas or Fallout3. The nuked landscape and more linear progression was great. It's a shame the actual game didn't end with this, because it was much harder than the actual ending. 3 random fucking Deathclaws on a bridge was harder than the NV ending. But it is better than Fallout3 just because you don't have to spend hours and hours traversing a maze like subway system. Being that I've sunk 50 hours into it and i'm still not sick of it, must mean it's about a 9/10. Gotta find some new quest mods now. Fuck this is too hard. Anyone know of any dlc type new vegas mods? I don't want random quests in the same areas of new vegas - if I wanted to do that I'd keep playing all the official quests I skipped. I also don't want just a bunch of new sheds, stores and dungeons filling the same areas.
I want new main quests in new areas. Suggestions? The Big Empty was the best DLC because penis toes.
I didn't really like the last DLC for the exact reason you liked it, thought it was too linear. The Big MT was good but I felt like it was just a bit too all over the place. I was just going from one fetch-quest job to the next with no proper progress. The giant roboscorpion and evil robots were good though, and the credits scene of all the appliances was great.
But the horrid weather conditions of and bombed environment I loved in Lonesome Road. I don't know if I just had a run of shit weather being generated by Nevada Skies or it was like that standard, but there were no nice sunny days in LR. If they whole game was linear it would have been a bit shit, but 5 hours out of 50 was a nice change to know where I'm heading... towards the proper endgame. necros: Dunno, but I found the "people who give you $1 are not worth your time" aspect interesting.
Nice article about Tomb Raider http://caraellison.tumblr.com/post/94915454500/completed-the-latest-tomb-raider-for-the-third-time YEah. When i played TR1 , i should as hell did a lot of running away, and the game *did* have great tension/atmosphere.
(Well - fucking fininshed Fez with help of a hundred cheat pages 189%. I'll be damned if i'm gonna set my system clock to cheat any frigging game. Glad i perservered towards the end. Those lightning and rain maps had the nicest atmosphere of any of them). Spirit: I guess it depends on how much of that 1$ you're getting. If it's like iTunes (at least from what I understand), the cut the distributor is taking might make that 1$ small.
Also, does Steam work by paying per sale? Even when they sell at a reduced price? That's actually kind of lame. I had assumed that Steam was buying a license to sell the product or something. Anyway, I find all that drama very tiresome... Anyway, anyway, Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light are 75% off on Steam... I think I'm just going to pick these up instead of waiting for the redux. Love or hate?
http://www.moddb.com/mods/new-vision Also, R.E. Metro Redux - isn't that just a mod that brings PC quality to console fanbois? and I am not usually a fan of such mods but since Deus Ex was supposed to be realistic it makes sense to update in this way.
Have to agree with fifth, for a "real environment" type of old FPS HD textures help but its important to have ALL the texes on the same level and not a mish mash
I don't see how the pretend realism of Deus Ex is different from Quake and how that makes putting high-res textures on low-poly walls any more beautiful.
Guess its personal but by example this http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/10/9009/Shot3.3.jpg first the mood of the game better than any HD q1 tex pack fits q1 for me
Maybe its the amount of textures used to represent real world "props" on simple geometry that helps it make sense. Borderlands 2 is currently free to play on Steam until Sunday.
Anyone up for some mindless coop fun? Gas mask filters... what a bizarre gameplay choice in a linear game.
Anyone given that a try ? From Zeno Clash / Rock of ages dev.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/255070/ It's has a lot of interesting mechanics, hit and miss.
But it also has some bugs (probably mostly fixed by now) and some dodgy mechanics - like being able to hit each other in coop. Which makes no sense! Why aren't the enemies hitting each other!? It's one 2D fighter convention they shouldn't have broken. If anything I should be able to combine my attacks with my friend's. If you're used to button mashing it'll take some adjustment since its a slower pace, more rhythm type game, timing the attacks being tricky at first. Not for everyone and hard to recommend, but I'm glad I bought it. If that doesn't clear up the indecision then nothing will.
It's a quirky game which does more things right than wrong. Heheh cheers Ijed :)
The style looks cool, I am planning on trying this Coop. I see they patched in a friendly fire option. They seem to be actively patching it which is cool. A little late to the party on this one but holy shit talk about a good game nearly ruined by annoying platforming. I can't remember the last time a game pissed me off this much.
Super Time Force Ultra is awesome and everyone should go play it.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/250700#scrollTop=0 http://youtu.be/nOIzR5dpOYo
Just saw this at PAX and it looked really good. Kinda like a sci-fi Legend of Grimrock with a JRPG combat system I can see how some people wouldn't like it, but it really depends on what you are expecting.
To be clear, this is not in any way like Stalker other than it has the same post-ap feel. This is a linear, heavily story driven game with some light rpg-like elements (purchasing weapons, minor inventory). Also, my only complaint with this game is the gas mask filter mechanic... it's pretty weird. 1. The counter on the HUD is the number of filters you have, but this is completely useless. Ignore it. 2. The time on your watch is how much time in total you have left with all your filters 3. You do not need to replace filters, they automagically get used in sequence 4. Only the filters you buy from the first two shops in the game have their full duration on them. 5. Filters found in the world have random durations on them (can be as short as maybe 10 seconds I think, it's hard to tell). 6. After the first two shops, you can NOT buy filters for the rest of the game. With all the above: when you are on the surface, the temptation (at least for me) is to look around and absorb the level... don't. You can make the level unbeatable by running out of filters before you can get back below ground. If you're really stuck, you can take the mask off for a bit and put it back on after a bit (you can live for maybe 20 seconds without it?) but the instant you put it back on, the timer is reset so you can take it off again. I had to do that in the first level because I was looking around and ran out of time...... The Forest
http://survivetheforest.com/trailers/ Watch trailer 1 first (bottom of the page. Really great look, grounded in realism. So when it gets weird its actually a shock. Generally fantastic visual design and some beautiful details. From the About page: The Forest is an open world survival horror game currently in development for PC. Build, explore, survive in this terrifying first person survival horror simulator. The world Enter a living, breathing forest with changing weather patterns, plants that grow and die. Tides that roll in and out with the day/night cycle. Below ground explore a vast network of caves and underground lakes. Complete player freedom Chop down trees to build a camp, or start a fire to keep warm. Scavenge food to keep yourself from starving. Find and plant seeds to grow food. Build a small shelter or a large ocean side fortress. decorate your home with found items. Lay traps and defenses to keep a safe perimeter. Gameplay Explore and build during the day. Defend your base at night. Craft weapons and tools.Bunker down during the evening or bring the fight directly to the enemy. Fight or Hide Use stealth to evade enemies, or engage them directly with crude weapons built from sticks and stones. A new type of open world, survival horror experience Defend yourself against a clan of genetic mutant enemies that have beliefs, families and morals and that appear almost human. For PC and Oculus Rift - Alpha Version Coming May 30 2014 i've seen let's plays on youtube...
concept looks kind of cool, but the monsters seem to have a hard time pathfinding around the areas. i'm waiting for the long dark, myself... great example of how Early Access can ruin a game.
Great concept, nice gfx. Full of unfinished features, bugs, terrible performance and lack of stuff to do. I'm waiting to pick it up when it's "done" :) well... early access lets me see other people play it without me having to pay or waste time trying it myself.
youtube "let's plays" are like the best way to preview a game! The Swapper owns. It is about 5 hours long, which seems the right length for a puzzle game, unless you want to find all the secrets.
My review of it on Steam literally only says "scary rocks :(" which is fair, as I do remember the rocks being scary. Oooh nice handmade graphics, a bit like The Neverhood? That was an old classic puzzler which unfortunately no one has ever tried to do since, from what I've seen.
BTW I've finally finished playing Fallout New Vegas. only tried a few mods. Project Brazil is completely overrated and just an ugly unfinished vault quest. Might be good when parts 2 and 3 are done, if ever, but at the moment it's pretty boring.
But Beyond Boulder Dome was awesome. As good as the official DLC's. http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/46907 Anyway back to the real world of playing full titles in a single sitting, played James Bond Blood Stone today in 6 hours. Nice game, like everyone says Splinter Cell with better environments, slightly more forgiving combat (in other words less stealth), boring story, linear levels. 7/10. are definitely unique and good (in the same way quake's graphics are) but I would still call them lo-fi to temper someone's expectations.
I've been playing The Swapper throughout the last night. As of now, it looks like it'll be another favourite indie sci-fi game of mine after Waking Mars.
weird controls? 20 degree fov? insanely slow movement? i'm so glad i didn't pay full price for this. is this worth muddling through? it's really awkward just playing the intro.
That definitely seems to be my take on it. I got this funky 'widescreen fix' memory editing hack utility so I was able to increase the FOV to more normal levels, but all the menus are very very awkward to navigate and the game doesn't pause while you're doing it so you can get attacked while struggling to get an item.
don't get me wrong, that is an AWESOME mechanic. I loved it in system shock 2, for example. But not when the UI is working against you. :( I don't have a console and am not willing to take the time to learn how to play with a gamepad (I'm absolutely terrible at shooters with gamepads).
It's ok though. I can stand not playing it as I only got it as part of that EA bundle from a while back. Use a gamepad for platformers.
You'd have to be some sort of degenerate savage to use a gamepad for FPS. I try to use the input type the game was made for. And avoid FPS games that were made for gamepad.
nice level design, but broken pc controls (at least for me) and yeah the slow movement is pretty bad. it's not really as good as made out.
maybe the sequel fixes some of that, but i haven't played it yet. I've been playing SS2 instead. :) Haven't played it in like 10 years, so I've forgotten enough I don't mind that I know the story.
Turning off V-Sync in-game and then forcing it on through the NVidia Control Panel for it (alongside Triple Buffering) helps improving the mouse control. Appearently the game is locked at 30FPS with its own V-Sync on, whereas NVidia CP locks it at 60FPS which is a definitive improvement for mouselook smoothness. As a side note, this workaround is for 1 only, 2 is much better in this sense.
I adjusted the maximum sensivity of my mouse and game became really fun. It is too slow to rotate without it.
...remains on my personal short list of favorite games and I don't see it getting bumped.
It's a hard game and can be punishing on resources and some of the battles but where it won me over was on atmosphere (which was really helped by the sound design) and the depth of gameplay for its time. The story and premise kept you interested and it did this without breaking immersion like other games that take over movement control or have cutscenes. Like Deus-Ex, I think it's one of those games that when people talk about it, it gets reinstalled and played by others who have and have not played it. I'm playing on hard and not really finding it hard at all actually... I'm playing as Navy but aiming for maxed out standard weapons (haven't gotten 6 yet, but I do have the perfect condition rifle sitting in a chemical storeroom waiting for me).
So I'm using Pistols and Shotguns for now and between those two, I have no shortage of ammo. Probably because I have a high hack skill so I can open all the locked boxes I find. Mind you, I'm still on deck 4 of the Von Braun. As I recall, it does get a little tighter as you near the end of the game. Thanks erc, that does seem to help. At least, aiming mode mouse seems smoother now with less 'deadzone'.
I'm glad to hear that. Personally I prefer 1 over 2 in terms of atmosphere since the original feels much more dreadful than the sequel. So it's kind of relieving that the mouse control can be made better with a little tweaking.
As for Shock 2, Navy with Standard Weaps, Hacking, and a little bit of every Tech skill is the best way to go. Be sure to keep and eye on that Condition 10 AR (and your AP ammo) since it'll most likely be your weapon of choice towards the end of the game. SS2 was not nearly as strong as an RPG as Deus Ex was towards the end. It falls into that trap where the RPG stuff is fun for most of the game, but the end just turns into a FPS that's dragging an RPG system along behind it. If you didn't spec into a character that was a standard FPS tankbro, the design just isn't going to support your choices any longer.
No RPG is "perfect," and they'll all have paths that are more or less optimum, but SS2's ever-widening diversion between 'more' and 'less' was much more imperfect than most. Yeah, I definitely remember that about SS2. The ending isn't bad or anything, but it feels like more and more of the core of the game is being removed as it gets more and more linear and single minded in its purpose.
But even Deus Ex was like that. Less maybe, in that you could choose how you were going to end, but it was still very much on rails. But even Deus Ex was like that. Less maybe, in that you could choose how you were going to end, but it was still very much on rails.
I'm gonna waffle a lot about Deus Ex here. Obviously there can't be anything much better than a choice of a few endings in a game where you have NCPs, dialog to record and triggers that need to be set up. What I liked about the setup of the Deus Ex ending was how you had the characters from the earlier parts of the game acting as advocates for the choices. For me, it meant that I went with Tracer Tong's advice because Tong's section of the game was the bit I enjoyed the most - I trusted his character. There were lots of things across the game that built up to subtly affect this section: if you didn't save Paul then his bit of dialog isn't there to affect your decision (but if you did then you probably valued what he had to say). If you did a lot of poking about in Morgan Everett's base, you found things that undermine his trustworthiness - and if you found Morpheus, his conversation largely advocated the Helios ending. The important thing here was that all these things that influence a player's decisions come out of the way they played the rest of the game - which secrets they found, which bits they enjoyed, what judgements they drew of the characters etc. It made the ending, in a Role Playing sense, a proper culmination of what came before, rather than just the point events stop. Ok, in practice it didn't work that well in Deus Ex, there was the flavour there, but not strongly enough that every player and every playthrough felt like that. But if you could take the concept of a free choice of endings, yet where the narrative you wove through the game makes one of them clearly compelling, and turn the implementation up to 10, that would be awesome. I was really just responding about that feeling you get in any RPG or RPG-like game as you near the end. Bits of pieces of the game that made it feel special disappear as things wind down to the finale and it tends to give these games a downer feel.
The actual choice of endings in DX wasn't very meaningful, because it's not like everyone didn't just quicksave before they chose, check out all three, and then decide in retrospect which one was their favorite.
The "boss" in DX was a big super-room full of crazy tests and mech spiders and James Woods suspended in a big hamster ball preparing to ascend. That's cool. Even if you didn't just spec totally into pistols and healing you could still finish the game, all three ways. Your choices were never ever invalidated. (I recall a particular level in a cemetery that ended with an MJ12 ambush being particularly impossible if you were going for a no-violence playthrough, and there were other moments in the game like that too, but it's much better than the way SS2 just turned into a pure hallway shooter at the end.) Even if you decided to test the bounds of the experience by doing something like going rogue and murdering a fellow agent at an opportune time (and the game gives you several) JC always has some explanation for it. The game never apologized for any option it left open to the player.
Necros I didn't play the first one BUT I played both the second and third ones. The controls are bolloxed and counter-intuitive but I believe they are better in 2 and 3 than in 1. At any rate, although they frustrated me, the style / immersion / sci-fi+horror of 2 and 3 was definitely enough for me to keep playing despite the controls, so I would recommend those two.
and I think 2 is the best, with the original coming 2nd. The third has the best opening area but gets pretty boring once you go the planet imo.
Reflex Kickstarter is up: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/191095869/reflex
Hard to read text-as-images, ffs, why? Particle, bloom and colored lighting overload, ffs, why? Sorry but the text is so shitty to read that I did not actually bother to read it. I love the project and wish you guys all the luck, but uuuuuhhgh?!? Just finished playing Duke Nukem Forever. Damn, this really isn't that bad. 54% on metacritic, wtf. It was as low as 48% a couple years ago. Gosh gamers, in general, are tossers.
I actually think most of the people complaining about the game probably quit about 2 hours in, because all the complaints seem to be from the beginning. Fantastic weapons and enemies, albeit no much different to d3d but certainly more creative than any other game I've played in quite some time. Once post-processing was turned off (which looked fucking terrible) the graphics were okay. Better than Fallout New Vegas. Some levels were a bit shit and linear, but most of the time it was decent. There was some interesting gimmicky stuff, I can't remember the last time I played as a tiny person. Ever? At least that was pretty original. Everyone went on and fucking on about the really bad humour. By the end of the game I was actually starting to miss it - it felt more like a generic action game with little character. Most of the one liners and jokes were in the first hour of the game. The twins getting alien raped really wasn't that big of a deal. I also think everyones expectations were just too high, so they ripped on it. If the game was named something completely different and not associated with Duke, it would be a cult favourite. I've played most of the games with a lower rating than Dnf in 2011, and they just don't compare. I did find the inconsistent gameplay annoying though - spawns of enemies followed by 10 mins of nothing, rinse and repeat. It needed more combat. Also the 2 weapon thing was completely fucked. Ended up just sticking with the ripper for most of the game because of fear of running out of ammo if I used other weapons. 7.5/10 and it included a 4 hour long single player campaign that is apparently better than the original game.
also, it does totally look just like Quake3, but with actual development and new features which are not cockamamie. Sounds a-okay to me.
I was never into UT so Toxikk (awful name) and the new UT don't interest me, but if this came out I'd be tempted to map for it. (or pitch some LD contract work to electro harf harf) I guess in video game world $400k isn't much when millions are spent on AAA's.
$400k is the equivalent of 13 years of full time work in a below average job. Plus any profit they might get from sales is all on top. Actually, looks like there's 3 guys from aussie on the project, and assuming they're not college grads and wouldn't be working at the pizza joint the avg salary over here is about $50k for 20s/30s I guess. So for 3 guys at $400k spread, that's the equivalent of 2.5-3 years full time employment. Are these guys really going to putting 3 years full time into this??? Not only that, but the core gameplay looks like it's pretty much all done already! The main thing needed now is art and assets. I guess it's no different to most kickstarters though - I often think kickstarter projects are just being greedy fuckers for something they'd probably be doing as a hobby anyway. Oh I was also going to rant on about the speed of the movement, it just feels like a "look how fast we can play because we're elite" kind of bull. I'd get motion sickness after 10 mins of it. Q3 and UT were never that fast were they?
"The main thing needed now is art and assets"
Yeah, but that's where all the time and money goes on games. :) The code is relatively cheap in comparison. yeah who the fuck do these guys think they are it's like they want to make video games for a living or something lol smh
that look interesting or unique. In fact, indie games usually take more creative risks, because they can afford to, right?
I do understand that this is a hobbyist Quake 3 style shooter though, and should probably learn to manage my expectations better. I just don't know if I can handle any more robot men with flashy lights and torn capes that flutter in the wind. Looks like Unity Test-Maps in some places, but it's the inner values that count ;)
Some areas look shit but some others are really well made (Canyon of Titan is awesome for example). It's a very good game, highly recommended. I've been playing for about 33 hours and I'm not even done with what I guess is the first main task.
But you know Evil Within is going to continue the retarded story traditions of Resident Evil.
Kind of academic since I on't have the hardware or surplus cash to play either. Been playing this for a couple of evenings so far, it's really good IMO. Very atmospheric, decent voice acting, gets the whole suspense horror feel down to a T. The graphics are very stylish and it feels next gen, even though it runs nice and smoothly. The AI is actually good, seems unpredictable. You cannot jump though, but whatever, jumping is overrated LOL. Anyone else played it yet?
I was interested in Alien Isolation, until I found out the alien is invulnerable. Such things reduce it to just being an obstacle course in my mind. Sure, an obstacle course that pursues you, but its me vs worldspawn, not me vs an alien.
Yeah it is three guys, but they've all done hard time in the gaming industry (I make it sound like a prison - and I feel like I escaped a prison in leaving it, so hey). As for the art, well that is entirely Electro's field, and I've seen him do a lot of amazing things in a short amount of time before. He seems to have an excellent workflow going on. Also, I've played Reflex. It feels better than Q3A, but in the same vein. This is very much a project of people who loved Q3A and CPMA, making a new game.
And yeah, thankfully it is nothing like TOXIKK. The first few maps are the worst part. I played those, quit, came back a year later, hit Resume, and had a good time for the most part. It puts a very weak foot first, which can kill any game regardless of expectations, anticipation, or quality.
I actually made a terrible video about customizing DNF, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3tFPeaXBlQ which is basically a reminder to enable four weapon inventories, bind keys to each of the four slots, rebind pipebomb, and increase FOV. After I did that, the game played a lot faster. Rather than go on about DNF here, I already wrote something a while back about it: http://scar3crow.com/2013/03/hail-to-the-king-long-live-the-duke/ (It isn't just shameless self-promotion, the blog is partially an archive of things about video games I find myself having to say often, so now I can just paste a link instead of typing another 500-3k words). "I was interested in Alien Isolation, until I found out the alien is invulnerable. Such things reduce it to just being an obstacle course in my mind. Sure, an obstacle course that pursues you, but its me vs worldspawn, not me vs an alien."
It's more true to the lore, however. Humans shouldn't prevent any real resistance to an alien. It's a super predator. That said, I think you get stuff later in the game to scare it away temporarily (aka fire) but I don't think you ever kill it. Since there's only one that would sort of make the game a little sterile. I think it just irks me because in the movies, yeah, the aliens are incredibly powerful - but humans with ingenuity do still eventually kill them in some form. It isn't part of the lore that they are invulnerable, it is part of the lore that they are skilled hunters, they have terrain advantages, and wounding them is exceptionally dangerous.
Make wounding it risk damaging components, injuring or angering the NPCs, and causing it to flee. Wounding it makes you a loose cannon to the others nearby, rather than some sort of guardian. I don't know, I understand these things take a lot of effort - but making it invulnerable feels like a debug hook got left on, and it isn't like they spared themselves effort in the setting. It just seems like an undermining of what I understand to be an excellent job on the environment. Well, it's the entire hook for the game
Nowhere did I say anything about easily. I even cited systems where attacking it was itself risky - not just in it striking back, but impacting the stability of your location as well as your standing with others. This is the opposite of easy. I'm not advocating an action game, but rather a game where more actions have more impact.
Sure, remove that word then. I don't want to nitpick every little thing here.
Basically, my point is that attacking/hurting the alien compromises the gameplay they were striving for. That's all. It isn't nitpicking, it is a primary element of the subject being discussed. The game has combat. It has weapons. It has killable entities that want to kill you.
And it has an unkillable entity that has a corporeal form in a lore that firmly establishes their mortality, and goes into detail as to the components of such therein. If the game they wanted to make involves an unkillable central opponent, when everyone else can be killed, then they shouldn't have gone with the franchise where the primary nemesis is mortal. It might compromise what they were striving for, but they chose the wrong scenario if that was their goal. Something ethereal, or dealing with hallucinations would be better suited to those goals. Not Alien. Alien Isolation again, purely because I heard that there isn't a fucking NASCAR TRACK IN THERE!!! WTF?!!!
And the guy from IGN gave it a 5.8 / 10 score, one of the reasons he cited was that 'the AI is too unpredictable'. What an idiot. scar3crow: It most certainly is NOT a shooter. Sure you get a few guns, but you don't get much ammo, and the game really isn't about shooting stuff. It's about out-smarting aliens (and droids, and other humans) and surviving. So don't compare it to a shooter, just because it has a gun in it. If you could shoot the alien dead, the game would be over in a short period of time. Go play Colonial Marines! the last line was low man. No-one should ever have to play Colonial Marines. I know. I tried.
I never said anything about it being a shooter. Just that if the game has corporeal enemies you can kill with weapons, who can kill you with weapons, and that if it takes place in a lore where a particular enemy is corporeal and killable, then that enemy should be corporeal and killable. I said nothing regarding the availability of such opportunities, the ease of it, the feasibility of it. Merely that it be a technical possibility. Or, you can make a game in a lore that matches your intended design.
Does it have enemies you can kill? The only thing I heard about was androids or something, and even then you were burning them
It's got humans who may try and kill you, with handguns, which you can kill with blunt objects from what I've seen. It also has crafting of items including making things with blasting caps. There are also active gas lines which do very large blasts of fire. I'm sure there are plenty of heavy machinery that operate on hydraulics which could be triggered. It is a very lethal environment, to anything.
"It's got humans who may try and kill you, with handguns, which you can kill with blunt objects from what I've seen."
Huh, I haven't seen that or read about it at all. If that's in there, it's weird you wouldn't ever get a gun... (Yes you do get guns, there are 2 or 3 types I know of so far, and yes, you can shoot people and androids, and the Alien.....)
Yes. I was going back and forth back and forth because the Alien was always on my path and I'm too much of a wuss. :p
Looks great, just watched Daz' Stream from the corner of my eye while doing other stuff.
It's like if the Doom3 artists got involved with a design team. About 15 hours in to this on my stream. Holy fuck balls it's great!
Seriously one of the most graphically impressive games I have ever seen on any platform. Everything is so richly detailed and the smoke / steam / fire / gas effects are in another league from anything else I've seen. Gameplay wise it is just as polished. The game varies things up enough to stay interesting (playing the same hide and seek gameplay with the Alien for 20 hours would get very dull) and while there is always an underlying dread permeating the entire game the actual horror is very well paced out. The Alien itself is truly terrifying. Even when it's not in your field of vision you can HEAR it moving around in the air ducts above you at almost all times. When it does appear in your view it is instant pant shitting time. Special mention has to go to it's tail physics. The tail is dragged along behind the Alien with full physics so it will knock things over, be pulled over objects and around corners. it's fucking great. Ok I'm gushing now :P Seriously I'm loving it. The only issue I've had with it so far is that some objectives are not as clearly marked on the automap as I would like which led to some confusion at times as to what I should be doing. I only started using the map at around about mission 4. Before that I navigated by exploration/memory.
*gets nervous, dives into nearest locker...* this is not a fun game, but it is a good game. worth getting if you're looking for something more from a shooter.
http://www.bluesnews.com/s/155836/hatred-announced
Could not wipe the stupid evil grin off my face during that trailer. A true return to Postal 1 form! It is interesting how removing a "justification" for killing people in a video game suddenly turns it into disgusting to people.
-Collateral innocent civilian damage in middle eastern wargame, or GTA, or whatev : OK -Innocent civilians without any reason or purpose: disgusting But that game still looks like garbage and people who buy it should go on some watch list.
The main difference between this piece of garbage that is Hatred and GTA is that the former FORCES you to kill innocents while in GTA, or any other open-ended game where you can kill people, you DECIDE to kill them.
You are free to stand around and not kill the people Skacky :P
Its not a psychedelic drug designed by the secret services designed to send you on a killing spree. Its a game. By the way the visuals don't look like garbage. The mental content is garbage, though, toal trash. Which is the point, just as it is in garbage trashy mean spirited horror movies and music. Just as many grindcore metal albums and whatnot are about raping and ripping apart the innocent for the fun of it... Not sure they deserve money for the game though that is true. Who says it has to be bought to be played though? :D Since it's up to the player what it does.
Call of Duty though? Battlefield? Indefensible! Putting justification in quotes doesn't invalidate it. Saying "Killes" doesn't make you not Killes.
Most games operate in a realm of willing combatants. Everyone, or nearly everyone, involved is armed in some form, and is an aggressor. When they are not, the game punishes certain behaviors - taking off health or a life count, summoning enforcers of some sort, a Karma system, or docking payment received for the task because you complicated it. In pretty much every scenario where you've got unarmed individuals present, it is for the purpose of the setting: cities have people in them, especially when things are just getting started in a big event. They are there the same reason there are restaurants, even though your character doesn't need to eat. They can be killed because it is a matter of congruency with user input ("What do these guns shoot, bad-guy only bullets?") and the risk of that has more benefits than a barren city in the game design. I'm not a fan of GTA actually because it doesn't seem to have any Good or Honorable paths (I may be mistaken in this, I also don't like the controls so I'd still likely avoid it). In Doom you are the good guy fighting aggressive willing armed combatants. In Quake you are the good guy fighting aggressive willing armed combatants. In modern military games you are usually the good guy fighting aggressive willing armed combatants, except in cases of changing perspective for dramatic effect - and usually this is lampooned as hamfisted and lame. In Blood, you are not the good guy, but you are seeking justifiable vengeance against very bad guys for the death of your wife and friends - none of which were good guys, but it still appeals to the rights of self-defense and the responsibility therein of a partner and friend. All of these are for the sake of the thrill of competition, of resource management, of exploration, of drama and big stories, of witnessing grand events safely from your home. They aren't for the sake of killing, and the gore isn't for the sake of violence alone. Those are feedback systems, I like getting a kill in a game because it meant I outsmarted the AI, the mapper, or another player. I appreciate violence when it accurately reflects the activity and serves as a feedback mechanism, much in the same way I appreciate soft shadows with hard contact points - it draws you in all the more for the rest of the game's values. (It pulls me out when a military shooter does little puffs of blood for combat, it is dehumanizing to me). So yes, there is a difference. In the same way that there is a difference between shooting someone on a whim and shooting someone when attacked, or when they are going to attack another. You don't hand wave those differences aside by using quotation marks. Having just finished playing spec ops, I feel that game addresses the stupidity of Call of Duty and Battlefield quite well. :)
My ATAT Walker regularly trampled the innocent barbie tea party into a blood drenched holocaust.
Is anyone here really emotionally immature enough not to be able to make the distinction between real and not real? Is this not the blinkered hubris that drives the 'Games Cause Violence And Are Against God' crowd? You might find the contents of Game A or Book B or music C objectionable, and luckily the remedy is simple - ignore them. The Hatred game play looks tedious to me. "luckily the remedy is simple - ignore them. "
That's actually a little flawed. If you just ignore something that offends you and you don't tell the author WHY you didn't buy it, then your silence may be sending the wrong message. Maybe you didn't like the art direction. Maybe you didn't like that it wasn't on Steam. Maybe you wanted more gore. Maybe you really wanted to have an option to rape someone WHILE shotgunning someone else in the face. Maybe you wanted multiplayer. Maybe "The content offended me" isn't the automatic message that a creator receives when you don't buy their product. It helps to speak up. Which is what forums like this are for :]
However, I imagine there will be enough Internet Drama around the game that it will actually increase the game visibility, which isn't something I'd like to promote by posting elsewhere. My opinion of the game is that I'm more offended by the mindlessness than the violence. It looks bad, I don't think they deserve to do well so will avoid talking about it any more. But maybe there is more life in the conversation of talking about talking about it. I guess this game offends me because it looks boring? Do you just walk around killing for as long as you can? Is that really the entirety of the gameplay?
man can handle. I can appreciate the thrill of being 'bad', and thus I have time for some games that plumb these depths. There is a line though. Some games are on the other side of that line. I heard about a Japanese game where the player had to rape young girls, for example.
I'll throw it out there though - as an atheist of sorts, I don't believe in your divine morality, I believe that if there is a god it's the god of 'self'. Sentience itself is something we all have, and it is both everything and nothing at the same time. It's also the thing that allows us to relate in any way to the idea of gods. I am going somewhere with this.... Black humor! Unless you are prepared to trust yourself to make your own moral decisions you might find the idea of being the bad guy, watching digital people being hurt because of your actions to be frightening on some level. Or as something to be avoided. But there is humor in inappropriateness. I can sometimes 'get it'. But we all have our own limits. 1. Please don't make assumptions about my views on games I haven't even played.
2. Scarecrow said it best. 3. What's an "atheist of sorts"? Thanks for pointing out our collective moral hypocrisy. Good to see that there are people smart enough to recognize it and to make us aware of it.
It looks boring... but there are probably other mechanics that aren't shown in the demo because game mechanics clearly aren't the selling point of this game.
The press haven't had a really appropriate game to show footage of during their stories about how video games are intended to warp your children into psychopaths for a while now, I think this is a positive thing for journalism
SleepwalkR : You said the game looks disgusting. Well it is.
Beyond that I did not assume anything from you. I am commenting on the general indignation in reactions. Scar3crow "All of these are for the sake of the thrill of competition, of resource management, of exploration, of drama and big stories, of witnessing grand events safely from your home." I think these descriptors can be applied to the Hatred dudes killing spree. "They aren't for the sake of killing, and the gore isn't for the sake of violence alone. Those are feedback systems, I like getting a kill in a game because it meant I outsmarted the AI, the mapper, or another player. " -I don't know why it is assumed Hatred would be a simple walk in the park mowing down resistanceless civilians a la Carmageddon. Postal1 was fucking hard. -If that were the games idea they could dispense with it all and just put you in a room to execute civilians, or maybe Auschwitz or North Korean camp simulator 2015 or something. "In modern military games you are usually the good guy fighting aggressive willing armed combatants, except in cases of changing perspective for dramatic effect - and usually this is lampooned as hamfisted and lame. " You are American Scar3crow right ? I think that is enough said. Or maybe not. If you can convince yourself your virtual armys invasion of the country is "good and holy" I think someone could convince themselves virtual Hatred dudes spree is good and holy too. We could also make him lie about motives to justify a murderous intrusion into other peoples lives. Or set up a true background story It would be easy to introduce a narrative in Hatred for this. Lets say his wife was a black woman lynched by this towns mob, and his retarded or simply different kid was mercilessly bullied at school and pushed to suicide, the bank repossessed his home, medial care was cruelly denied ultimately due to greed, letting his mental issues spin out of control - Not that by now people think he needs mental issues to be extremely pissed off. We can pile on that story and bring out the violins till a tear runs down your cheek for this guy before he goes on his spree. I think its fascinating how at this time in point there is none of these justifications put forth. Fascinating is what it is bringing out in people. Maybe there is a backstory in the game. Maybe there is none. Doesn't matter right now for the debates. In the end of it all - any moral "justifications" for killing and severe violences are plain and simply TOXIC and you are just fucking wrong not to perceive that and to go on some crusade about this game or form of violence being worse than an another. Fucking. Hypocrite. Live your life right, play and make whatever the fuck you want to matter how depraved. I believe its an outlet for our seriously fucked natures. It belongs best in a virtual world. This is where we need to compartmentalize the bad, not in the real world as you see it done. And that is what you are doing playing Doom, Cod, Battlefield, whatever the fuck. Telling yourself otherwise, that you are a "better" creature than another, PFAH! Its how you behave that matters. Going holier than thou on people in this way scar3crow...just no mate. I couldn't play SOF cos of the kills... Always preferred the decidedly unreal worlds of Doom and DNF. Jesus Doom 1 was amazing.
I believe its an outlet for our seriously fucked natures. It's a bloody funny thing alright. I reckon the phenomena is very similar to swearing... so maybe we can solve that one first :) It seems to have as much depth as a puddle.
I tend to drop games pretty quickly if they can't hold my interest. Others, I'll play ad-infinitum if they can. The central design seems to be chase people around spraying bullets, probably with the occasional opposition that will throw a few back your way. Top down games are all about behaviour patterns, the more you have, the better the game. A top down game can also be polished, well balanced, look nice and so on, but if you're light on behavior types then that's your watermark of how engaging your game can be - no higher. In the video a grand total of 1 is shown as far as I can see. And after you spend your budget on execution cinematics, there's not going to be much time for polish either. I think we are on the same page :)
I was trying to say the lack of depth might come about because of the central concept and so the two are linked, in response to your initial post that you didnt like the trailer because it looked 'boring' as opposed to 'disgusting'. Sorry but http://cursors.io/ (don't click if you don't have an hour or maybe even two)
Didn't read any posts, but "whatever" is a fairly generous reply to the trailer, even "meh" is a more passionate response than I actually feel.
https://www.change.org/p/ign-have-ryan-mccaffrey-admit-most-people-will-like-the-alien-isolation-game-just-not-him-otherwise-have-him-never-review-a-game-again
As an Englishman, and a scholar. Ohterwise, it's LOL. I still don't get how you can have a single person writing and scoring a game on big sites like IGN. Everyone has different preferences.
Who gives a piece of flying monkey poop? Just don't follow reviews of him if you disagree. Subjective reviews are awesome.
Does it matter that much anymore? With metacritic, it's easier to see a single review relative to everything else.
Her cleavage was insignificant though.
I mean, exactly, that's the sad thing about videos like that. This is what hexen2 looks like: http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/cronos/hexen02.jpg
I tried it a bit, but the gameplay felt quite flat. You pretty much just spend your time circle strafing around groups of mobs, and the weapons I used didn't feel very satisfying.
Kind of reminded me stuff Dungeon Defenders or Orcs Must Die, but without the Tower Defense aspect. I agree with Bal.
The levels were pretty boring too. Art is pretty and high quality, however generic. The geometry is sparse and samey. The game is a rouge-like FPS. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to either very well, or very much... not a whole lot of content or richness in any of its components. Great basis for a more enriched and focused game, though. Maybe Ziggurat II is where it's at! Just like Wolfenstein : The New Order is a Doom clone because they both have 1st person and you shoot stuff.
I mean a squad of four go rampaging through various wastelands shooting waves of enemies for loot. They use a range of vehicles too and the focus is mainly on online coop. Sounds like Borderlands to me. The GFX in Destiny looks cartoony enough too...... Just saying.
Ziggurat looks okay, I just hope it has some linearity and doesn't just spawn hordes at you in one room, rinse and repeat, like Painkiller. I don't remember Heretic/Hexen being that lazy.
It's free, and it's really fun. I'm really getting addicted to it.
I wasn't really interested in that, until I saw footage of it at 60fps without the letterboxing, and running at a sane FOV. Then it was a matter of appreciating some nice idtech5 decorative work.
Also apparently Prey 2 was canceled. Surprise the game made by one of the few studios that didn't let themselves get bought by Bethesda who worked for them, was taken from them, and languished elsewhere. It's not so much a conspiracy theory, more a "I just don't quite trust those guys."
looks great, i've been following it on tigsource for a while. I like that 128k macintosh art style.
Horrible -45 FOV
Horrible wobbly movement and swaying controls Horrible spinny mouse combat Horrible hold this press that repeatedly interaction bollox. Basically consolisation at it's most pointless and cumbersome. But it's kinda gory and creepy and I like that it doesn't really explain WTF is going on. Kinda makes me want to know what it all means. The cutscene after the intro level is pretty cool too. Still waiting to see if I can get a review code for this.
Word from TotalBiscuit is the port is very good, tons of options to tweak your perf, launches with an FOV slider that goes up to (only) 90, support for borderless windowed mode for streaming. Also word from him is that the multiplayer is a "ruddy good time" and the customization is nice (I like that you can redeem the random drops for XP if you don't want them - gives meaning to the drops for those who care nothing about such). Watched a few videos on YT, the game is very different on PC v console. Console players, it looks like CoD but sometimes they will double jump and air dash out of harm's way, or to cross over a building to save time. PC players are doing crazy air ballet with each other. Console players are sticking to bullets. Many PC players are using the EM1 (a beam weapon that functions a lot like the lightning gun, but has an overheating mechanic instead of ammo). Just curious to see how differently the same game can be played, across playerbases. (These comparisons are based off of videos of average to extremely good players on both PC and console). BUT IT'S STILL GOING TO FELCH PUSTELENT GOAT ASS JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER FUCKING COD.
I dunno, I just finished playing COD Black Ops and it was pretty good. Still feels a bit of an ADHD Michael Bay game where half the levels are just crazy action and shit blowing up everywhere, which is quite annoying. But the levels looked good, gameplay was fun, story was decent, albeit predictable. I just fucking hated the voice acting though. Plus Treyarch have returned to doing infinite spawning unless you reach a waypoint. By the final level I wasn't even bothering to kill anyone, just reach waypoints. Infinity Ward did away with this shit in MW2, but I guess Treyarch still need to be slapped around a bit before they'll learn.
Also too many rails and vehicle levels. Anyway, it was more focused that MW2, which was just random shit all over the place with a nonsensical story. So I probably liked it better than MW2. I guess I've still go MW3, BO2 and Ghosts before I can play Advanced Warfare. The Lord of the Rings: War in the North
7.0/10. Just a nice lotr fantasy setting, good story that runs alongside the main story, cool enemies. Probably best as a co-op game, I played as the ranger before realising halfway through that the ranger is shit and had to swap to the dwarf, which took a while to build up my gear again because it was all ranger only. Only really bad thing was it's so goddamn linear with invisible clipping everywhere. Ruins the experience. The developers were taken over by Monolith who now have created Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which seems to be really popular. I guess they improved a lot since 2011... Homefront 7.5/10. Pretty fun shooter, definitely for COD fans. Love the setting/story. The levels where you quietly invade an enemy gang encampment, and the football stadium, are probably two of the best of 2011. Operation Flashpoint: Red River Tried this for about 1-2 hours. Died from something tiny (probably tripped on a rock or an enemy from 30kms away sniped me) and the game put me back like half an hour. Fuck that. Couldn't find the motivation to replay all that again so quit. It seems like a pretty boring and ugly game though. Painkiller: Redemption 4.5/10. Not much to say here, it's shit. Ghosts and AW are separate universes, so you don't need to play them in a particular order.
BO2's campaign is curious. It has 16 different endings, based on 4 threads resolving each with 4 possibilities - but none tied to some dumb Karma system or any equivalent. Just normal gameplay moments that have a persistent effect. Fun fact with BO2, you can fail a campaign level - it just changes what NPCs will be where in the story and what becomes of them. I decided to buy Advanced Warfare, played 75 minutes of the mp. So far, I am very pleased. Bombastic, fun, responsive, fast. It can be played slow, but it can also go very quickly and smart employment of such will let you outplay people in a more dominant position. Flanking and dodging are a very active part of the combat now, which makes shotgun gameplay particularly enjoyable. Also had fun with the EM1, said lightning-ish gun from my previous post. You need to draw first, but it is great for catching fast movers unaware. Burn them down. (And use Peripherals so their death markers don't appear for their teammates). I worked on War in the North, glad you mostly liked it. It is definitely meant to be played co-op
A slight correction on your post -- Snowblind, the primary developer on WitN wasn't taken over by Monolith. Monolith and Snowblind were both bought by Warner Bros. Monolith in 2006 and Snowblind in 2009 so now they kinda share resources across the teams. Yeah Blitz it was a good game, probably not as popular as it should have been. I felt like I needed more once it was done, I've got all this great gear but it's over, I want more!! Normally most games I'm over it after 5-7 hrs.
Probably if it had been an open sandbox game like most of the big RPG's of 2010+, it may have been more popular. RPG gamers like to muck around doing random stuff. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 7.0/10
Not a bad game really, good mix of guns and hack n slash. Bit too linear and started to drag a bit by the end. It's a lot like Transformers: War for Cybertron. I'm playing through the third Assassin's Creed now. *sigh* what a chore. Let's get this shit done with because Fable 3 is next on my list :) I have 0.4 hours on Steam for AC1. Most of that time was me trying to quit, because it was a ~7 step process to exit the game without killing the thread manually.
ac1 was hot garbage. the combat was just a mess and too frustrating. ac2 was a big improvement, but mostly if you like a story in your games. the gameplay wasn't really all that fun. pretty though.
ac3 I'm only an hour in. they seem to have just assumed I played ac2 because there's barely any tutorials. the puzzle section as desmond with his tightpants gf was quite cool. i'll see if I can get a few hours in today. I hope they haven't put the difficulty up though since ac2, as it was pretty good in that respect (and no difficulty selection, thanks ubisoft for assuming every gamer is the same). "ac3 I'm only an hour in. they seem to have just assumed I played ac2 because there's barely any tutorials."
?? The first 6 hours or so is basically one long tutorial. they haven't given any instructions on combat yet, other than button mash. although there appear to be combat tutorials in the menu, so maybe I'm supposed to do those. i'll just wing it though. pickpocketing not mentioned. walking in groups to stay hidden not mentioned. hiding in hay or wooden things...
maybe they're still getting to those points. doesn't matter I remember them all from II. finishing brotherhood. it was pretty good, better than asII, although the designers were a bit lazy in setting the entire game pretty much in one city.
what ruined it was the last 2 sequences (about 1.5hrs). utter garbage, frustrating gameplay that made all the rpg building you'd previously done completely irrelevant. I might play Revelations next. has anyone tried memory of a broken dimension? played an old demo from 2012(?) I found on a steam forum... seemed cool, but i don't know how long you can keep a game going with the gameplay that's in there.
Yeah. The aesthetic is really cool but it needs more stuff to do. Ezra (the guy working on it) is doing it by himself so I imagine it still might be a while before it's done. But I played it at an offsite PAX event and it is really cool for what it is. Seems like the core mechanic so far is akin to that scene in the Last Crusade where Indy crosses the "invisible" bridge
It's up on Steam Greenlight http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=305638565 with a recent-ish trailer. Looks a bit less abstract, but no less intriguing.
I am excited about it! I played that this summer at Siggraph, and it was still pretty far from being done, but quite interesting.
The dev was a cool guy, but he didn't seem 100% sure on what direction he was taking with it at the time. in theory, so in the witcher 2, but you need to go to GoG 7 times after waiting 24 hours each time before you can get it...
has anyone played tropico 3? or any tropico I guess..? I was thinking about trying it out as it seems like a nice mix between simcity and civ5.
is a lot of fun. At least the single player is, I didn't really try the sandbox mode too much. They don't really explain what's going on in Tropico 3, you just kind of figure it out. Tropico 4 has a more robust tutorial, Tropico 5 too.
It seems like a much more relaxed, casual SimCity. Plus, building roads is super fun, I find it very cathartic. Also, it's hilarious. I wouldn't mind the newer tropicos, but I've heard you basically have to shell out more than you pay for the actual game in DLC in order to get most of the interesting stuff.
You might be able to snatch up Tropico 4 & all its DLC for a decent price during the upcoming Steam sales if you're willing to hold on. I always see those games on sale.
Speaking of which!
Tropico 4 Collectors Bundle (with DLC) 85% off on Steam this week; http://store.steampowered.com/sub/19282/ Gosh Assassin's Creed is a cunt on your wrist when you have to hold down 3 keys just about all game long for movement, 10-15hrs of holding down 3 keys. Fuck. Couldn't play Revelations after that, so I tried a few other games...
Hydrophobia Prophecy - 6.0. Cheap indie game, pretty good but only 3 hours long. Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad - 5/10 complete trash, dont' how this has a 76% aggregate. You play most levels 4 times over, mostly defence-style at that. Gave up on easy because I got stuck on 1 level that become very hard, but for most of the game you can pretty much just stand around waiting for timers to run out since you never seem to die unless the game decides you can die on this round. Fable III - 7.5. Not bad, but I was expecting a bit better. Nice scenery and all that. Way too easy for an RPG though. By the time I got to double-magic-spells I was just standing still and charging the alt-magic-attack. Just kills everything and you hardly need to move. Think I used 1 health pack in the whole game. Also RPG elements are pretty basic - I collected 2 weapons the entire game, 1 extra gun, and 3-4 magic upgrades. But guns/melee are irrelevant with the overpowered magic attachs. Treasure chests were full of junk, money was irrelevant because there were really no shops. Worst thing was the character interaction, the most awkward, childish shit I've ever seen in a game. However I did enjoy about 2/3rds through when you leave the main island, it gets a bit more exciting exploring Aurora, meeting black slime dude, and there's a few good side quests. "The Game" side quest must be one of the best side quests in any game ever. By the way in case anyone is interested here's a list of hte rest of my 2011 games to play. Some good stuff in there, especially some epic rpgs I can't wait for (divinity, rage, dragons age 2, witcher 2, deus ex, skyrim... damn). Ordered by metacritic's rating.
Trine 2 The Haunted: Hells Reach - 51% Brink - 70% [steamworks] Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga - 72% Serious Sam 3: BFE - 72% [steamworks] Hard Reset: Extended Edition - 73% F.E.A.R. 3 - 74% [steamworks] Red Faction: Armageddon - 75% [steamworks] PayDay: The Heist - 76% [steamworks] Alice: Madness Returns - 76% Rage - 79% [steamworks] Section 8: Prejudice - 79% Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - 79% [steamworks] Assassin's Creed: Revelations - 80% Dead Island - 81% [steamworks] Bulletstorm - 82% Dragon Age II - 82% (rpg) [purchased] L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition - 84% Torchlight 2? - 84% [steamworks] Saints Row: The Third - 85% [steamworks] Crysis 2 - 86% Dead Space 2 - 86% Bastion - 87% [action rpg] The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - 87% Battlefield 3 - 89% Deus Ex Human Revolution - 90% [steamworks] Batman: Arkham City - 91% The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 94% (rpg) [steamworks] Portal 2 - 95% [steamworks] Alice: Madness Returns - 76%
- terrible consolisation and bad controls, great art style and cool atmosphere Rage - 79% [steamworks] - Good game all round, solid gameplay despite driving bits, and some very cool scenes. Ends too abruptly. Bulletstorm - 82% - Minorly fun but stupid and juvenile, characters might appeal to pre-teens Crysis 2 - 86% - Crysis of Duty, on rails interactive movie but quite stylish. Dead Space 2 - 86% - terrible consolisation and bad controls, cool sci-fi style and great atmosphere Deus Ex Human Revolution - 90% [steamworks] - Very good, strong style, does exactly what it promises. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 94% (rpg) - Excellent. Vast scale, beauty and exploration compensate for any gameplay and balance flaws. HTH. When Shambler says Rage ends abruptly, he means "There is a button, and when you press it, you get the achievement for beating the game and a cutscene plays." It is incredibly jarring.
I liked Rage, I also really disliked a lot of it... Just give me 8-10 hours of the Dead City, the vaults, the various hideouts, with guns, ammo, and turrets I can set down. Because I loved the way shooting felt, and how the enemies integrated canned animations with pathfinding. I guess my Rage review would be shortly "What it does right, it does amazingly. What it doesn't, is mediocre and in the way." I just love that RAGE was dripping with the standard id design sense. "Oh, there's a 5 foot drop down here that I can't get back from
I liked Rage, quite a bit. I just wish it ran decently on my AMD card. I also wish the level tools ran well and came out earlier than they did.
Oh well :( Yeah, that was a LONG lag time before the tools appeared. Which I guess contributed to the near zero community involvement with Rage.
I somehow got the impression that the tool was more of a visualizer that let you modify entities only, not world geometry, or create new spaces. I have no idea as to if that is accurate at all, or where I got said idea.
But still, pulse rounds in the shotgun? Makes those Authority soldiers pirouette as their head disintegrates. No really, they do a little pirouette when decapitated, and the pulse rounds are one-shot kills to the head for them. It has lots of little Very Satisfying Things to it, enough to where I frown all the more at the minigames, the driving, the time killed in the towns - the fact that there are two big towns, neither of which being much more than a distant place you have to travel to. http://store.steampowered.com/app/276810/
Looks kinda neat to me. Watch the gameplay video. It seems to work pretty well, it doesn't look too restrictive or clunky. The setting etc all look good too. Yeah looks awesome, but if it's a turn-based tactical game, then all the screenshots/videos must be cinematics only right? Pity, it would look awesome as third/first person :D
Nope watch the videos, it's not exactly cutting edge GFX but they are very respectable and no cinematic bits in the turns.
http://www.twitch.tv/focushomeinteractive/b/590892631#/focushomeinteractive/b/590892631
Have only skipped through as the buffering is slow as fuck but definitely looks promising. Freedom of movement plus style of city, especially. ...During the steam sale today. Sure am going to have fun on them.
Review of Deathwish for Blood by gggmanlives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4Fotgr5e3k&feature=youtube_gdata Played it a few months ago, it really is worth checking out as he says I remember the original Blood got a bit long winded and seemed to drag on a bit too much toward the end, but it was still a solid and fun game.
Blood is my #3 shooter, after Quake and Doom. I hope to give this mod a go, though I'm not big on the Brutal difficulty mentality, and didn't care for how the game adjusted enemy health and damage with the difficulty, along with placement and count.
Decided to go back and play The Witcher and really enjoyed it, about an 8/10. Only things wrong with it were the combat, which is a simplified QTE, and I found it lacked some character building. A good RPG should have lots of different weapons, armor, items, but I was still using the same swords throughout 75% of the game. And there was no armor. Plus the upgrades you get really aren't that flash - the magic system is disappointing, I just concentrated on upgrading the fire attach and none others, but it still sucked by the end of the game. Story was great though.
Serious Sam 3. ugh. what happened. This is just SS1 in an updated engine and some shitty city levels added. I spent the first 20 mins in google trying to find out why the quality and textures were so bad and how to fix it, but realised in the end that there's nothing to fix, it's how it was intended. The first half of the game sucks balls. The second half gets a bit better when it just starts copying SS1, but it still feels like you're just fighting the same limited enemies over and over again. The last level was the worst, with almost 2000 enemies slowly released at you in a line set within basically really large corridors. A slog if there ever was one. Then the boss battle was really easy. Also the underground levels are so badly designed, they feel like a crappy halflife mod. SS2 was a really great game, but Croteam seem to have really slipped in SS3 - both in ambition, design and the engine. The weapons and enemies are pretty cool and powerful, but there needed to be more of both. 6/10 http://cdn.eidosinteractive.com/mtl/marketing/Community/Blog/DAWN/DAWN_ENGINE_inengine_screen_1.jpg
Interesting, if this is really an ingame screenshot from next Deus Ex screenshot. That really looks like something very much more interesting than the boatload of other "purty" engines around. I don't see what in that screenshot can be attributed to engine tech. It just looks like interesting environment art that you could do in any modern engine.
There's a lot of polygons, there's a lot of light sources, though nothing is casting a shadow, and the bloom effect is fairly tight which is good. Cool shot, yeah some painterly aspects are nice, hopefully it's an artistic choice on the textures and not bullshot.
None of it looks impossible in any modern engine anyways, I just hope this means they're really working on another Deux Ex! In the completely opposite graphic direction, I finally got Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet and it is awesome from the first moment onwards.
Yeah the style is nice, and it's fun at first, but I felt it got repetitive quite fast, it's no Super Metroid... :D
Still, nice game. Whatever.
For me personally, as an oft-accused AAA-GFX whore, I think games in the last few years such as Metro LL, Tomb Raider, Thief 4, Evil Within, (FC4 presumably) have got to such a great stage with graphics (and the use of those in terms of art direction etc) that I really don't have a lot of desire for improvement, and where I do it's mostly just fixing glitches and harmonising graphical quality throughout a scene. It feels like things have got to the stage where it's a fairly level playing field with graphics, many games are "awesome enough" graphically, and what games actually do with that is becoming more important. Of course a Deus Ex that continues and improves DX1/HR gameplay and immersion would fit that bill. If you directly fuse Dead Island, Far Cry 3/4 and Mirror's Edge...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOSgulJ8Fso Lots of drama, lots of "wait and see what the actual game is like". I'm sure everybody here's probably played this by now but it's really really good. Fantastic art, fantastic characters, well written dialogue, tons of exploration. It's basically everything you could want if you're a fan of sci-fi and a fan of RPGs.
Haven't played the third, but I felt the second improved on the first in most ways. It left behind some of the more nitty gritty rpg stats but also removed the more boring driving around looking for random crap on boring terrain genned worlds.
Buggy game play. I tried the third, and if I'd had the collateral to invest maybe I'd have been happy after some time.
But then, other things happened. My free time has become so limited, outside of titles I am reviewing, I only really play Quake or Doom now.
Deux Ex and Thief are definitely gameplay games. Deus Ex just happens to also have a great story. No idea about Thief, I never got far in it. System Shock 2 has somewhat clunkier gameplay but I still really enjoyed it. It is more story though I guess. I should really restart it, last winter(?) I lost interest near the end I think.
Thief 1 (and 2) has some of the tightest gameplay around, and the immersion is still unmatched even if games like STALKER or more recently Alien: Isolation come close. There's a reason why it is regarded as one of the best games of all time (and it's also my favorite game. Yes, before Quake).
Also if you want to play System Shock 2, try the first one beforehand. It's old and stuff but that game was way ahead of its time, and its predecessors Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 are still some of the best CRPGs out there with outstanding atmosphere. Thief 1's story is basic but the way it is presented is really great. The background is huge as well, with tons of optional flavor texts scattered in the levels. Thief 2's is a bit too grand for its own good and falls flat near the end, sadly. It's still very well written though.
I thought ME1 had too many issues across the board that needed fine tuning, but ME2 was an awesome game. Must be one of the best releases in the last decade. What made it so good for me was the character and story immersion. Doing all the missions to get your allies (gotta have the dlcs too), and then figuring out how to keep them alive in the end sequences. Felt more like a movie and I was part of it.
I haven't played ME3 yet. Yeah if I were to go back I'd play all the rpgs that I missed, I never really got into them much back then. ie System Shock 1/2. Deux Ex and Thief are definitely gameplay games. Deus Ex just happens to also have typical generic generation x-files conspiracy WOTEVER story.
FTFY etc x I'm as big a fan of Quake and it's peers as anyone, but there are still a lot of great games in recent years - including for mechanics/systems and immersion. HL2, Bioshock / Infinite, Far Cry, Crysis / Warhead, Dishonoured, Left4Dead / 2 all spring to mind. Point me at one game with a story you could not describe as generic if you tried hard.
I meant the branching and depth though. (description from the website)
a thoughtful, exploration focused survival simulation set in the Northern wilderness in the aftermath of a global disaster. Brave the elements and other survivors, hunt for supplies, explore the world, uncover the mystery, answer the question: How far will you go to survive? It's not officially out yet, so I'm playing the early-access sandbox feature. There's no story, you wake up in the Northern Canadian wilderness and need to survive the cold, not starve, and NOT get eaten by a wolf for as long as possible. Attempt 1 I wake up in an icy valley. The wind is blowing hard. I wander aimlessly around before realising I'm getting dangerously cold. Trying to find shelter somewhere. I find a spot where the rock wall shelters me from the wind, and try to start my campfire. Only problem is I have no wood. I forage for an hour or two, and return with some nice cedar. By this point my condition is deteriorating, but I'm ready to start my fire. It lights! It's burning nicely. Unfortunately I started the fire at my feet and now I'm on fire. I'm burning to death. I'm dead. Attempt 2 I wake up and can immediately hear a wolf howling. I go to investigate. I am eaten by a wolf. Attempt 3 I wake up and wander around. I can see what looks like a dam in the distance. I get closer and yes, it's a disused hydro-plant. I hear a wolf howl. I run towards the entrance to the plant, having now learned of the high mortality rate when being eaten by a wolf. Inside! A little warmer too. It's dark in here so I light a flare. Creepy. I look through filing cabinets and boxes. I find some light medical gear, some chocolate bars, a can of pork and beans, a hatchet, and random odds and ends. Excitingly I find a nice kerosene lamp and a big barrel of kerosene to refill it. I put out my flare and light the lamp. I start to explore the plant, ending up in a big room where all the serious hydro-machinery thingy majigs are. There's a dead frozen body. I go through his pockets and steal his granola bar and a bottle of water. Feel a little weird eating this. I eat it. I head out into the cold, and find a half eaten frozen elk in the woods nearby. I chop off some frozen flesh with the hatchet and head back inside. I find some warm boots and put them on, and put down my bedroll by a fire barrel in the big machinery room. I guess I'm staying the night, it must be 9pm now. I light the fire-barrel, and cook my frozen elk on it. I wash it down with a refreshing can of summit soda and go to sleep on my bedroll. Wake up in the morning and I'm thirsty. Time to drink some dead-guy water. I think it's time to go exploring! I head out into the wild, where anything can happen, and man and nature live as one. I am eaten by a wolf. Attempt 4 Attempt 4 and I'll skip the detail, but I woke near a frozen lake, investigated the cabins and found some sweet gear: a peacoat, a rifle, some military rations. Kept on round the lake and found a camp hut, I guess where the park rangers would have hung out. This is an actual awesome home, with camp stoves, beds, all sorts. I found a proper winter parka too. Then I explored further and found a derailed train, and a trappers hut. Lots of good hunting gear in there. Looking forward to continuing this adventure, while adhering to rule one of survival: do NOT be eaten by a wolf. So last night I replayed Doom's e1m1 on up through e1m5, stopping at 6 when I realized the time. Ultraviolence of course.
The action is obviously so much easier on keyboard + mouse, since it was balanced for keyboard only, but it is still very fun. It seems every fight just about has some form of mini-objective to it, be it an item in the midst of the monsters, or an explosive barrel a few monsters into the pack, tempting you to concentrate your fire on specific individuals to reach the barrel. It managed to give me a lot of grinning moments, where things just Worked Out and made me feel like a badass without giving me too much power. Granted, finding almost all of the secrets resulted in a pretty continual stream of health, armor, and ammo. I really liked how each level had at least one "unnecessary" area. There was always more to the level than reaching the exit, and it changed up the level in one form or another. E1M1, finding the blue armor early dropped down the walls in the level, exposing you to long range gunfights. E1M2 had the side maze which got darker and strobier as you went into it, terminating in two different secret areas, one of which allowed you to snipe the penultimate battle. E1M3 opens with that great view of the slime pit which just screams "Surely they did something wit that", and they did, but it isn't part of the golden path. E1M3 also has a yellow keycard inside of a secret, and a yellow door inside of another secret... I love that, I love that the game world is more than "Show the player things, make sure they see all the things." I just really enjoyed how everything connected, one battle would guide you into another, items encouraged you along a path, investigating a side area or peering out a window would give you a new goal. The game isn't just finding the exit necessarily. Also, that AI. It is such a nice amount of minimal, I actually got startled by a pinky. I knew one was still alive, I caught a glimpse earlier because of how they roam about, not always bee-lining. So I pursued into the area, killed it, and turned around to one staring me in the face just about to bite. Turns out two were still alive, but I never saw them at the same time. Makes me want to play more of it tonight, honestly. And that was all extremely rambling. This just in: Doom is a good game.
No but seriously, Doom is still awesome and everyone should play it like once a year. Plus some of the new Doom mods/engines are pretty damn amazing as well. I keep meaning to look at what the Doom community has been up to.
Interesting about the extra areas. Big business games don't do normally side routes or secret levels because they're not cost effective. Terms like cost effective don't have any place in game design, yet, there they are. To play the other side of that, time not spent creating areas that 99% of players won't see is more time spent polishing areas that they will.
As levels moved beyond drawing a few line segments and assigning a texture, it got more and more expensive to add extra areas. Even id was hit by this
The format change has a lot to do with it. It's a lot more work for both the designer and the engine to produce all that 'true 3d' rather than the 1.5D that Doom used.
And the id1 levels did have plenty of areas that '99% of people' ((which I hear a lot and seems to lack the second half of the sentence - 99% of people who buy into the product during first week of sales)) there was an entire secret level in each episode, for example, and various other mapping doodles scattered about that had no real functionality. When you think about it, most secrets are the same thing, but justified by that secret counter going up. Modern day, those cool areas would be replaced by a cupboard that you need a code to open or some crap :> Development time is inherently development costs, so yeah, these things are literally more expensive. I do recall some interview with Romero where he spoke of how Quake is different in terms of ambushes and such simply because it takes more work to build one than in Doom. In Doom you can draw 3 lines off of the hallway, draw another inside of that, Make Sector twice, declare the thinner one a door, tie it to a linedef in the hall, put monsters in it. When you know the editor, that is such an incredibly quick thing. You also don't have to worry about the Z placement of anything, just keep monsters and items away from the walls.
Granted, negative brushes like in UnrealEd would be okay here - place, subtract, add a barrier, tie it to a trigger volume... and in theory one could do a "snap to floor, adjust by bbox" logic in an editor so you could more easily toss items and monsters in... But in my experience tool dev is always scoped to "Does it work well enough to complete a release?" I will say that Quake does have a lot of "nonsense" areas compared with contemporary games though, multiple paths to get things done, or water routes underneath the level. We all get a chuckle at videos like "If Quake Were Made Today", but those are obviously simplistic. No, if Quake were made today the player would be too heavy to swim, making water a decorative surface - and thus a barrier. No taking the side routes through e1m2, that is just to look nice. (e1m4 would be cut completely). I know the main routes are more polished, but I do find there to be a rate of diminishing returns on polish. I'm fine with cost effective concerns in game design, I just wish they would find another method than golden path hallways with nicely polished details that are effectively depictions of more interesting places than what I am currently playing. I like experiencing things in a manner other than having it being placed before me on a plate. And from this, I get the increase in pseudo-sandboxes, procedural systems, and XP unlock systems. It allows a slow trickle of content, it is more controllable, and it allows for reuse of content. Which really adds up monetarily when you think of the cost behind a new monster or a new room for any major release. I get it. I just... don't like it, and thus I go and play more Quake and Doom and other such games, because ultimately, they are doing a better job of amusing me as a gamer. "I like experiencing things in a manner other than having it being placed before me on a plate. "
As games get more realistic, more details are necessary. That's the cycle. You can't call your game realistic if the world is devoid of the details that your brain expects to find. Something abstract - like Quake levels - can be whatever you like. The brain doesn't have expectations other than the basic laws of physics apply. No taking the side routes through e1m2, that is just to look nice. (e1m4 would be cut completely).
This is a profoundly depressing thought. One interesting thing I've observed regarding this when working with idTech5:
The designers have to explicitly define the areas the player can walk to so that the megatexture can be optimized and areas that are far away receives less resolution than up close areas. The consequence of this is that it's often cheaper (for the disc size) to open up the sides of the walkable corridor and have a huge-ass vista there instead of just walls. So having grand open halls and outdoors areas, but just being able to walk around in a narrow corridor in the middle is the best thing for the game tech-wise. The illusion of openness, but in reality highly linear. Fortunately, we're seeing more titles play with non-realistic approaches to world rendering, so there may be room for more tools that support a faster brain:screen transition for level design. Straining for realism is a good technical goal, but it certainly isn't a defining trait intrinsic to FPS design.
I think maybe the solution is not to lower the detail but to update the level design tools. Instead of level designers laying in every mesh by hand, we need tools to lay in
"Add a closet here", and you drop in some sort of room prefab that you can tweak settings on. In the editor, it's just a box. In the game, it's a randomized closet generated procedurally from prefabs. I dunno I'm always in favor of more tool development, especially as someone who hasn't made any tools =D
But yeah, materials for surfaces so you graybox an area, defining it with tags for materials, and then sub tag an area so it inherits the earlier ones and adds a few more. Say a bathroom/pool area tile bit that has some dirty grout, with cracks that widen to vines growing out, and then some of the tiles are broken with holes showing utility pipes behind it. But for the mapper this is a few brushes and tags. An aside within that: I loved the illogical never-going-to-see-much-like-it-in-real-life places like Ziggurat Vertigo. Take me to strange new places, not normal places plus aliens/zombies. I completely agree - toolsets have by and large only evolved in a linear fashion, while asset fidelity and complexity has increased exponentially. Hell, the Rage SDK is a pretty version of Radiant.
I think there will be some amount of concession to fidelity, and that's OK. There are several artistically valid ways of representing a world and characters that don't involve subsurface scattering. I was present for a Q/A at Quakecon for the launch of ET:QW, and there was an obligatory question about modding tools. The answer was essentially "Yes, the tools are available, just remember that uncompressed megatextures will weigh in at about 30 to 40 gigabytes". This is a huge leap in demands for enthusiasts, compared to drawing a box on a screen and hitting a button. I seem to remember some dev video for the Snowdrop engine (for The Division) where the designer can specify a very primitive shape for the building and then the editor/engine will populate all the walls with windows / fire escapes / details etc and create doors and shop fronts at the bottom of the shape. It was very cool and I believe all the details are set with scripts so it is user controllable.
Daz - Yes! That's a good example. Assassins Creed does this as well for quickly building streets in Paris. There are possibilities here for the future...
My brain is SCREAMING at me to try something like this for Quake but the reality gnome who lives in my head is reminding me that this will lead to leaks that the level designer has zero chance of finding or fixing since they won't be working with the compile version of the map in the editor
That would be fun
That actually sounds like a little project one could do to learn UE4.
Just need a special blueprint to count fish twice... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQog9lkyH8k
A Skyrim TC by the same people who made Nehrim, among other things. I'm properly hyped. And to this day I still haven't checked out Nehrim despite being on my todo list since forever. I did start their Morrowind project Arktwend a bazllion years back and forgot to continue it...
There's so many damn good project releases for different games it's difficult to keep up with them all! hm... that's cool, but you can already play strife in the vavoom engine, so... yeah, not sure if there's really any point paying for that. unless you don't have the original strife, of course.
it's one of my favourite games, so if you've never played it, i'd heartily recommend it. it was really quite ground breaking at the time it was released, with lots of fully voiced dialog, inventory, weapon mods and even some story branching, not to mention a really great atmosphere and cool level design. Going back and playing Doom1/2 in Doomsday, and started looking for all the wads I've missed out on. I don't know what 'hub' site exists for Doom mapping, but I've found
http://www.doomworld.com/10years/bestwads/2001.php and http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_notable_WADs so far. As for bigger projects, Brutal Doom looks like a ton of fun and so does that Total Chaos thing. Apparently the Doom discussion is over, but saw this on rps fpr those who want more Doom:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/12/16/cacowards-2014-doom-awards/ Apparently the Doom discussion is over, but saw this on rps fpr those who want more Doom:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/12/16/cacowards-2014-doom-awards/ Yeah, it went boring fairly fast. Seems like a very short game in any case. I think it progressed too quickly, one cannot really get familiar with new stuff because it is only used for short parts. Boss fights can be tricky and right now I got stuck in the electricity part which was super annoying. Then I accidentally started a new game and apparently my previous state got lost. Fuck that. Not convinced to start anew, it was not that good. So much potential! :(
Most anything Doom can be found at Doomworld or the ZDoom forums. Once in a while other sites leech content from them, but usually with a week delay or such.
I still feel like a noob at Doomworld though, despite having gone there since 99, because I've only been going there since 99. I also have no idea when it was started, I just saw the link in a I love it when a I often refer others to these resources for Doom custom content.
List of Notable Wads @ Doomwiki.org 100 Wads of All Time: 1994 - 2003 @ Doomworld The Annual Cacowards: 2004 - Current @ Doomworld One Man's Journey Through Doom - Indepth, well written reviews of Doom Engine wads I also occasionally review Doom content on my site if that interests you; http://taw.duke4.net/ p.s. nitpick; when referring to the Doom wiki, I recommend sticking to Doomwiki.org and ignoring the 'defunct' Wikia version. Seems to be a nice first person puzzle game, made by the guys from Serious Sam, and written by the dude who wrote for The Swapper and FTL.
It's quite pretty at times as well, I recommend it for those who like these kinds of things. http://store.steampowered.com/app/257510/ I like what happened with the Hatred Greenlight back and forth there.
I was incredulous at that being removed, and Gabe proved to truly have a clear mind on this. I hope the responsible for the removal was spanked silly. But so is censorship, and removing Hatred from Greenlight really was just a form of censorship.
Back about Doom for those getting into the community content a very good place to start is the Cacowards, Doomworld's annual best of the year :
http://www.doomworld.com/cacowards/ Zwiffle you have no idea if its lame. Seriously we only have a shocker trailer for now, no clue as to anything else, story or not etc.
I bet if it wasn't in the books the dev team will be trying to make more out of it now than a simple sandbox NPC slaughter by now to shut people up :D Or it is the game is lame in any case just because its about rampaging...? That is was censorship is not the point I don't think. It was more that such a large and powerful entity in gaming such as Steam gets to off the bat make decisions like that regardless of what the gaming community concerned wants. Gabe understood this. If its not wanted it will get voted off Greenlight. As long as the content isn't plain illegal according to local laws then... Removing it from Greenlight was a bit stupid, refusing to have it up on Steam thought would not be censorship, it's their store and they can do whatever they want with it. You don't go to a music shop and cry censorship if they don't have some random CD you're looking for.
Game still looks stupid anyways. :) Blah blah censorship blah blah WHATEVER. Bal is completely correct it's not censorship at all and more than WHSmiths not stocking hardcore porn on the top shelf is not censorship.
Valve was right in the first place, the game looks a pile of pointless puerile attention-grabbing shit specifically to appeal to angsty teenage morons, it should have been removed and stayed removed on the grounds of quality control if nothing else. IIRC trailers are supposed to promote a game, highlight it's qualities, and generate interest??
Well the Hatred trailer certainly did that. It highlighted it well as looking like a complete turd - although the only interested in generated from me beyond the intial eye-rolling "meh" was a mild amused interest when it was Redlighted. Too much trying to rant about a game that is just below the threshold of giving a shit, too little coffee.
"You don't go to a music shop and cry censorship if they don't have some random CD you're looking for. "
No, but you WOULD cry if they had it and then dropped it and told you they refused to carry it. I wouldn't. I WOULD think "Ah balls, they stopped stocking it (for obvious reasons), I'll have to go elsewhere".
File under rocket science etc etc. Eh, easy to say that. In reality, I imagine you'd complain or at least ask them what the hell was going on.
I'm not saying people shouldn't complain, let them complain, that's what humans do best, just calling it censorship to me seems completely over-dramatic. The game would still come out, there would still be plenty of places online to buy it, honestly these kinds of stories are pretty much more marketing for them at this point.
It's not so clear if Valve want to really curate what goes on Steam or not, but if they do that's their right, it's their platform. Talos Principle is still cool by the way, you guys should go buy that instead! "Valve was right in the first place, the game looks a pile of pointless puerile attention-grabbing shit specifically to appeal to angsty teenage morons, it should have been removed and stayed removed on the grounds of quality control if nothing else. "
For me this game appeals in the same way over the top trashy gorefest slaughter horror movies do. It is to me hand in hand with that heavy metal/trashy horror movie culture. Like it or don't this culture has been around a fair while and its staying. I can give you a host of movies in faaaar worse taste than this game. Its niche and its not your niche. It therefore sure is not for you or any other unconcerned pundits to decide if this game should be canned, not sold, not made or whatever! Seriously there will always be other people that find what you are into, whatever it is, just as fucking offensive. There goes the mob again. I agree with Bal though this is nothing to do with censorship. Censorship is something else. Whatever this was with Steam was not about "censorship". Gabe has values, Greenlight is about giving gaming communities of all sorts a place to show their interest in a game and show their desire to see it published. And specifically Shambler, I thought you were a bit cleverer than that : "Valve was right in the first place....on the grounds of quality control if nothing else." So because of the perceived QUALITY of the game ? As in graphics, mechanics, etc ? Those were good grounds ?? Then they have a good couple 100 games to take down from Greenlight and you fucking know it you ponce. Greenlight is about giving the quality control decisions to the public, removing it from the company that cannot understand diversity of what the whole gaming public wants. Or rather, the lack of any quality in the concept.
Oooooh look an attention grabbing deliberately provocative take on "murder simulators". HOW EXCITING. HOW CUTTING-EDGE. HOW THOUGHT-PROVOKINGLY AVANT-GARDE. Not. Offensive? Only in the stupidity and juvenility of that concept. It's embarassingly beggy. WHY DOES IT NEED TO BE AVANT GARDE OR ANYTHING AT ALL ?? you ponce.
On a more serious note you are seeing way too much into it Shambler I dont think its trying to be edgy goddamnit. Its just fucking misanthropic fun! Jesus the devs never pretended any kind of "smartness" to what they are doing... Just STUPID VILE NASTY FUN! FUCK YEAH!!! Taken from the very reputable source, Wikipedia:
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions. I don't really want to turn this into a thing. I see removing Hatred as a soft censorship mainly because it was removed due to the content being "objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect." In other words, someone at Valve didn't like it, so they pulled it. I'm not saying they can't or don't have the right as a company to police their platform, they most certainly do, just that this practice bothers me. There are plenty of over-the-top, violent, gory games which haven't been pulled, so pulling Hatred seemed like a weird move. The thing with the trashy horror movie comparison is the makers don't go to the top studios like Disney or WB to put it out. The real trashy ones, I'm thinking gore and torture horror here, probably just get put up on the internet and are self-published or some really small b-movie publisher. Hatred will need to do the same, or put more effort into the quality of the game because I didn't see anything interesting in their trailer other than the claim of a controversial idea.
Personally I don't like torture porn like Hotel, I find that hard to stomach myself, heh, that's that and not really relevant :P
Kona you are right they self publish or use niche publishers. Hatred is doing just that. I don't understand your point really, did they reach out to a top studio ? Greenlight is one of those things for games with small audiences/limited concepts as well as grander and deeper designs. Its the whole point of greenlight - nevermind the game, if the public is there they will vote it up and it will get distributed on Steam (again as long as the game is legal) It is #1 on Greenlight. It was directly #7 before any of the greenlight removal/re-adding publicity. That people cannot stomach that there are people desiring a game like this...all the while playing countless military shooters and whatnot...simply ridiculous and very very hypocritical. "Let me kill kill kill but hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" disgusting and truly a way more dangerous mindset than simple lunatic slaughter. I want to play it to virtually kill in a more honest way - honest in its revelry in our savage violent murderous natures. Its refreshing really, you know, to be truthful ? Really there is nothing sicker than people pretending there is a morally excusable sort of killing and slaughter... I was considering Steam to be the top studio/publisher.
Yeah I'm not a fan of the real b-grade stuff either - I've seen tonnes of it, Guinea Pig and August Underground series for instance, but most of it is a fucking chore to watch. There are a few that are difficult to forget. Salo, Men behind the sun, a serbian film would be the best, but they all probably had more of a story/budget. Anyway, back on topic, are there any games that have made killing innocent bystanders fun? I've never played GTA, but games like Dead Rising 2 weren't very good at this. More of a nuisance when they get in the way. Alice: Madness Returns 7/10. Yeah good art style, but fuck the game drags on for too long with the same basic jumping puzzles throughout the entire thing. Also the early parts of the game are too difficult (I had great difficulty with one battle) compared to the later stages, which are piss easy. The upgraded weapons just shit on everything. Should have been a few hours shorter, and actually that last chapter was quite weak. Combat was a bit average too.
Tried The Haunted: Hells Reach, really cool levels and decent graphics, but it's just hordes charging at you for a set amount of time (survival mode I suppose you call that). I'm not playing an entire game in survival mode. That's worse than botmatches... Which brings me to Brink. 6/10 at best. Man, I remember the videos of this and thinking how awesome it looked. Well sure it does look good, but what a shitty single player campaign. It's just botmatches with typical multiplayer tasks. Only the friendly bots are utterly useless cunts that never work as a team, and 10 mins of success can result in failure in 5 secs if your buddies decide to fuck off somewhere else instead of helping/healing you. I had one where I'd been playing for 10 mins defending something (but much longer on previous tasks as well), got to 45s to go and I'm thinking sweet even if they started a hack, they couldn't get it done it 45 secs. I die, for the first time probably, and they start hacking. I then have 45 secs to get across the level, fail to make it, but the level doesn't finish, it goes into overtime and I'm still trying to get there in time because the hack is still going on! I fail to get there and have to start all over again. Where the hell were all the teammates, why do I have to do EVERYTHING MYSELF? It clearly gets much harder as you level up. I ended up creating a new character so my levels were reset and just played the final few levels of each campaign, when it was still easy enough to succeed without being fucked over by almost impossible tasks. Like the missile hack. I put it on easy and still wasn't even close to completing it, on higher xp levels. Might play cod mw3 next after these 3 disappointments :) If you haven't check out the first trailer on the steam page for Crawl : http://store.steampowered.com/app/293780
Trailer or not I will be trying it but man the trailer is awesome :D It's pretty fun coop, with a few friends, not so interesting alone (at least the version I played).
Well Modern Warfare 3 was fun. I don't get all the hate these COD's get, this game has a 2.4 user score on Metacritic.
It's a linear military shooter, full of action, and it's really got no major flaws at doing this. The design and action, the combat and guns, it's all pretty much as good as anything else. The story is a bit incohesive, the developers have gone back to respawning enemies until you reach waypoints, which turns this into a waypoint to waypoint game instead of actually shooting enemies. What else, the textures looked a bit low quality at times, I had to play with settings to get it looking better. The old quake engine needs an overhaul. But it's just an annual game that Activision treat like any sports game that gets a new version every year - new story, new levels, but no new innovation. Seems like gamers just can't accept this. 8/10 Anyone played the newest COD yet? What's it like? I'm curious as to why they're calling it an action-adventure. COD is the opposite of an adventure game. Nice style, excitingly boring premise
http://www.firewatchgame.com/ I really liked the ending of MW3, as well as the sandstorm level. The mp did have some decent ideas with the Strike Packages, but those were nullified by poor balance and Death Streaks.
I've completed the story for the latest CoD, and have 20 hours on the mp. What would you like me to elaborate on? I would appreciate if games on Steam had to meet an acceptable level of quality before being offered for sale or as 'Free to Play'. By quality, I don't mean theme or appearance; I mean that you can load it, play it and finish it without becoming Mr Fixit or scouring the Net seeking answers to things that could be in a readme.txt file.
I recently added 'Only If' to my library since the trailer looked kind of interesting. It wes free and the reviews were reasonably okay. It installed fine but what it was could only be considered a beta or a concept prototype by the game designer. There were no instructions or notes (text or pdf) which would be okay if you could find all that you needed to know in-game. It used the Unity engine key and mouse binding menu that let you select inputs but your selections were completely ignored. I had problems with contolling the game character and getting interactions to work. I'm stuck on a puzzle and I'm not sure if it's me or a bug. It will not allow me to resume a game that I quit. Considering that the game creator put a lot of work into this short game, is it asking too much that they also include a game instruction manual or text file considering that Steam is a very wide distribution method? When I looked for answers to such things as non-functioning keybindings, how to quit (ended up alt-tabing and killing the process), what functions were actually present in the game or even a basic gameplay guide; I found very little to no help. Sure the game is free but so are many Quake maps. With Quake maps, I could go to review sites and find out quickly if they were worth playing. I thought Steam had a similar degree of quality screening and curation to some degree. Now I know better. All I'm saying is that games on Steam should meet a minimum level of quality (in the QA sense - the games can still suck otherwise) or certain titles should be indicated as beta or alpha quality with no meaningful supporting documentation. If Steam doesn't want to do that QA screening, those who support getting their work on Steam should proactively provide notes to players to avoid poor reviews borne out of inadequate knowledge of the game or false expectations of game performance/stability/quality or level of completion. Only If is not the only title that draws my comments but it is a great example of my gripes. Valve doesn't believe they need QA. They have customers, like you, who will report any issues. Which shows their ignorance as to QA's function - resolving issues before it can become one for the customer.
The curator aspect of Greenlight is basically a catch-all to decide as they wish. But yeah, they do need a basic check at least for functionality, and perhaps a request of developers for an instance of the game in the final hour of content, so that they can reasonably view the conclusion. However, indie devs also have a lot to learn about packaging and messaging. Steam is not Dropbox, it is a platform of distribution, and putting your free game on it without basic polish is no different than getting it stocked on a shelf at Wal-Mart or such, placed next to the latest AAA titles. So how are the "rooms" in Ziggurat? My dubiousness about procedurally-put-together shooters is that the environments won't be that interesting to explore through or fight in. (And I saw a complaint about Ziggurat over on the SA forums that fit in that bucket.)
Obviously it could be that everything else about Z is fun enough to make up for any blandness or aimlessness in the environments... although for me that would have to be a LOT of fun-ness to counterbalance. :-) The rooms are pre-made but arranged randomly when you start the level. The environments are very simple and easy to navigate with little to no Z-axis fighting occuring apart from in a few rooms or if you have flying enemies attacking you.
The rooms are intentionally generic I think because you don't know what you will be fighting in there, and the enemy variety and combinations are what make ziggurat fun, along with your character build and weapons. I was initially worried that the character build stuff was too shallow as there were only a few choices in the first game I played. However the system is quite interesting in that you can unlock new "cards" which are then added to the card pool that is randomly picked from when you level up or find reward crates in the maps. This slowly increases the build diversity as you play the game and has kept things very interesting on each new game. You can unlock new playable characters in the same way. These characters have modifiers to certain stats or new traits that others are missing. One can move faster than others etc. It really comes down to if you like random roguelike elements in your games. I think Ziggurat does it very well. The combat feels like Doom and the enenmies are very well designed in this regard also. They have great tells and you can avoid all their damage if you engage correctly. The only thing I don't really like about the game is that the enemies visual design is all over the place and very silly in areas. For example there are giant carrots that chase you :P I think the game would feel cooler with a more concise design for all the enemies. Yeah I forgot to mention that sandstorm level in MW3, but you're right that was an awesome level. It reminded me of Heavy Rain from L4D, only not annoying.
Just got a PS4 (my first console since the sega master system) only to realise I can't go and play all the console/ps exclusive games I missed because you can't play ps3 games on a ps4. Fucking what?
I can play PC games from the 80s on my current rig, yet I can't play anything prior to about 2013 for the playstation. Absurd. PS3's processor/architecture is supposed to be a development hell, it might have been too costly to integrate or emulate. PS3 can emulate PS1 and got emulation capabilities for PS2 later in it's lifecycle.
PS2 emulation is only for popular games iirc, the lower-level the emulation of the hardware the more precise but also orders of magnitude slower, more efficient higher-level emulation often need hacks for compatibility with some games. I guess Sony didn't want angry customers with their old obscure game having glitches. But yeah, it's BS to the end user. it wasn't that bad. The Xbox/360 was easier since it didn't divide the memory allocation, and because you're building on one MS product to put it onto another.
Ya feel the gentle slide of a greedy dick up your arse there Kona :D ?
Seriously what did you expect from Sony ? You forgot what they pulled with the PS3 ? Linux, PS1 emulation... Features that were real quick to disappear. At least they didn't claim this was going to be possible with the PS4 at any point. Right ? Do they use a serial key or something similar?
I found both and a expansion for PK on a second hand store for 1 euro, look almost as if they were new, but i can't find the key on them, and a videogame without a key has almost the same value as downloading it from Piratebay, so i am doubting about buying them, as i don't like to have a permanent reminder of a bad purchase in my home. http://imgur.com/a/InefF neat :D
Wrapping up my AW review, and beginning the slow descent into Dark Souls - as I rarely get to game for more than 10 minutes at a time, sessions will probably be few and far between. Got 30 minutes last night at a cost of sleep.
Bulletstorm yesterday. Cool game actually. Some of the lines, while juvenile, are pretty fucking funny. Especially when general sarrano shows up. Pussyzilla and the part where a big ugly miniboss shows up and grayson says to trishka "hey trishka, your boyfriend's here" really cracked me up. Then a plank hits it in the head and he falls into the lava while you just stand and watch.
The developer did a much better job at this type of game than serious sam 3 and dnf. Combat all pretty good, the levels looked fantastic, some of the best and biggest set pieces at the time (feb 2011) that had ever been done. Only thing wrong was the extremely linear progression and ridiculous clipping everywhere. But really it's no different to many games like COD. It's a shame Bulletstorm was a massive flop, there are far worse games that have multiple sequels. I picked it up on steam a few months ago for next to no money with 0 expectations and enjoyed the shit out of it.
I've played through Bulletstorm twice now and really love it. It didn't get the love it really deserved and I think the humor and language were what held it back.
I think BulletStorm could have greatly benefited from a more sandboxy/open-ended approach. There were some really amazing vistas I wish I could have gone to and run around, but invisible walls blocked my path :(
Even if it was more Borderlandsy in its approach but kept its combat system would've been awesome. I was thinking the same in comparing it to Borderlands while playing, Zwiffle. If only it had the Borderlands sandbox, I'm sure they could have still progressed the story the same but added more to it. I guess that kind of game is much more time consuming to create though.
There was humour in it??
Ummmm okay then. Also what Zwiffle said. The combat was fun though. It's almost like the opposite of a polished turd - a gleaming solid core, drenched in an overwhelming amount of diarrhoea. Would be mildly amusing par for the course if said in #terrafusion.
Between a couple of charismaless bellends in a game, meh. Left 4 Assassin's Island? Or Dying Creed? You decide:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rusp3PRC-UA 90 minutes of gameplay, TBH after watching 9 mins of gameplay I'm pretty sold on it. Looks like it does what it says on the tin. Anyone here play Divinity II and it's expansion? I just got finished it and really enjoyed it. A good proper RPG with everything you want. Not the best around the time it was released, but worth playing. It was released in 2009 but updated in 2011 and merged with the expansion. Not quite as good as Dragon Age and Two Worlds II, and The Witcher had a better story as well, but probably better than the other fantasy rpg's around 2008-2010.
Only thing that really annoyed me was a lack of direction for quests, you really need a walkthrough for some parts. The expansion is like a full game, 10+ hours, except I found there's just a few too many quests within the same pretty small area that takes up the whole game. Boss battle I could have done with my eyes shut I was so powerful, but then that's the satisfaction of rpgs isn't it. Pretty easy 8/10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3ixYWswJ1M
For the love of God vondurp, please force them to have fully rebindable controls! Cos well-controllable 3rd person like they are describing sounds good (i.e. kinda normal combat controls rather than targetted)
One of the best Kickstarter trailers in a while.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/strafegame/strafe Hopefully the game is fun! Like it will be as utterly terrible as every other pseudo-old-skool shooter failure of recent years.
The trailer is pretty neat though. I'm sure the mainstream gaming press will like it! Yeah, cool trailer but that sort of game is super hard to actually get right. Many have tried and failed...
definitely had to be shared on the quakeguy blog, Also the secret level which is like wolf3d in a luftrausers palette is awesome!
Yeah, dunno about 1996 - that Strafe game looks to me (and I'm sure plays) more like a game from mid-2000s, but with an annoyingly self-aware "look! pixels!" aesthetic.
Unimpressed. I checked out their website before, good to see their kickstarter is up and running. Hope they actually finish, I'd be interested in it definitely.
The kickstarter video was too awesome. Intentionally recalls stuff like this:
http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/videogames-are-bad-for-you-according-to.html also, when I saw "randomly generated levels" in that video I thought "ah, great, no thinking level designers involved."
Heh, that's great. It also reminded me that words like "toughest" and "challenge", which were all over game ads in the 90s, are words that you will never see in modern game advertising*.
*Dark Souls is maybe the one exception. That is actually a very cool trailer. Got to laugh when they have concept art vs reality side-by-side and the concept art looks 100 times better than in-game.
Randomly generated levels... no thanks. You see it a lot in indie games actually. It's usually a keyword for 'Our levels are a bunch of instant deathspikes everywhere'
Anyway, Strafe looks like it could be okish in a mindless fun way, but it won't be some second coming of Quake. Certainly not with level design that is likely going to be a bunch of generic Doom rooms stuck together via algorithm. Leave that stuff for the dungeon crawlers please :( It sounds like the toughest challenge to make a roguelike FPS.
Good luck to them. It sounds like the toughest challenge to make a roguelike FPS.
Indeed, I was playing Binding of Isaac and thought how cool that would be in Quake. But then you start thinking how to put those things together, it really isn't trivial. Ziggurat is just a series of box rooms though, it's a good example of why it's harder to do rogue-like in FPS.
Oh my fucking god I am dying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHbpdKiInn8 This looks very very excellent, and the trailer is just perfect :) trailer is cool, game might work, too little enemy variety and I would rate monster design a big round ZERO for the moment. Monsters are important in this sort of game so I hope they will fix the design issue
I've been following it for a while and have hope. It seems to be a compromise between various styles. The levels are randomized, but the chunks are designed by people who are explicitly level designers, from what I can tell. The individual chunks have randomization in terms of what portions are connectors, ambushes, or secrets.
The weapon and monster design are far from exciting, but from what I've gathered the weapons they've shown are just "default" ones. And the bestiary at present is just for the first section of the game, on the space ship. I'm partially interested because of the technical challenge in making interesting spaces with procedural generation, and having a gore system with splats, dripping, and what not where things don't expire. Including shell/bullet casings. I'm just glad to see something that is focusing on mechanics, and isn't taking a dump on old IPs in the process. Hm! I might have been too quick to dismiss. I guess random generation isn't necessarily design copout, because it depends on what's randomized and what isn't, but given the glut of roguelikes lately it seemed the likeliest case.
Their composer did an update on the KS.
"I found my old Quake disk and remembered how amazing and creepy that soundtrack was. It's become my go to when I take a break from working on STRAFE. I think it's been working it's way into what I write for STRAFE and we all couldn't be happier..." "15 SECONDS of amazing gameplay". And a lot of wandering around talking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz_i7vMsqnA Looks kinda cool. The geese look fucking brilliant. Anyone who liked Spacechem, or who likes puzzles and building things, should go buy Infinifactory and then try (and fail) to beat my scores.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/300570 https://t.co/zmMSuDpNqJ Doom e1m1 starting area procedurally generated in GLSL
what does procedurally generated mean in this context? the textures are described using noise functions?
Looking at the code, that's exactly what it does.
Also it uses some generated code to define sectors and stuff, so it's running some sort of raycasting engine on the GPU. Pretty cool, but whyyy!? same reason as this:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/09/hacker-exploits-printer-web-interface-to-install-run-doom/ "because" actually that guy does make a point about how unsecure the printer is, but still, he didn't need Doom to make his point. I think Doom in that context clearly demonstrates how that security flaw allows you to get the printer to do many things it wasn't intended to do. That and it was probably a handy thing for him to try and implement. And/or just a Doom fan.
But they did make Gawker suffer a seven figure loss.
Edited down some due to deaths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48GlqcTDqzc&feature=youtu.be
It looks like they are specifically not trying to make a Doom or Quake clone, but rather that they're making their own game and they love Doom and Quake. More verticality than I anticipated, I love neutralizing acid with blood, as well as just throwing explosive barrels instead of grenades. Has a dash of Killing Floor to it as well. The gun needs to be bigger and animate more - it's a bit too small and static - there are still areas of the screen which the gun model doesn't completely obscure during its reload animations, and that needs to be addressed.
Also, those in-helmet hud elements are too subtle - they should take up at least 80% of the screen space imo. looks cool but the scale of the game seems weird, like either the dude you play is too big or the levels are a bit too small.
Got whiplash watching that.
I mean it looks fun. Don't think it will be mindblowing, but decent for several hours before I move on to Quake again. I chuckle at the satire, but the gun actually dips out of view when reloading... It is also rather stable when firing. Way too much movement in general though.
watched for a few mins. not my thing.
1. looks like a duke nukem mod 2. even at that some of the level design is pretty uninspiring - big flat walls. the first section was too small for the character. if you're going for this style of limited graphics, you really need to push the boundaries in the level design, imo. like what ppl have done with doom and quake. even minecraft. 3. screen at times felt like there was just so much shit going on everywhere (enemies, projectiles, explosions), at one point I couldn't even see what he was firing at. are those projectile animations finished? 4. firing of weapons and hitting the target didn't seem realistic enough, like there wasn't enough impact to indicate it was a real weapon hitting a creature. felt very weak. 5. computers mining, a 100% accurate solar system? wtf who cares about that shit! your going to the effort of making little bitcoin mining animations and accurate solar systems, how about instead making it the prettiest start map they can do, get some scale into it. 5. computers mining, a 100% accurate solar system? wtf who cares about that shit!
This sort of stuff is actually quite common amongst people who think ~*Procedural*~ levels are a better idea than just slamming a load together by hand. 1 and 2 - it's a procedural game, no fixed levels, but it would be interesting to see larger cells.
3 - agreed to an extent. 4 - yup. 5 - everything they said there was a joke, they also spoke of how proud they were of their photorealistic rendering. After watching that Strafe video with its crazy owlneck damage feedback, I had to do a quick mock-up of what it's actually suggesting is going on:
http://youtu.be/xVsqaDOsG_M I just finished the Shadows of Cronos for Hexen. About 1.5-2 hours worth of gameplay in there. I rather enjoyed it, and honestly felt that it was better than the original Hexen while still feeling complete with the game world. The puzzles are a little less oblique, and usually had me going "Oh, right. I'm dumb." if they took me any noteworthy amount of time. I did wander for a while because I didn't realize I had a gem in my inventory which would unlock a door.
I played on the second highest difficulty as a Warrior and found it largely easy, though not slow. Just... well stocked. Come the final fight I had 3 Dark Servants and didn't even use them. If you enjoyed any aspect of Hexen, try this out, it is pretty much just a consolidated and better version of the original game. http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/68969-hexen-shadows-of-cronos/ Going with the pig icon in recognition of the Porkulator. I enjoyed Heretic more than Hexen to be honest. Hexen 2 was a bit crap but Heretic 2 was great.
Just played the WAD and I got stuck and lost... classic 1994 problems. Seriously no idea how to do this pack. I think the opinion on the whole series is pretty similar, with a few people who prefer Heretic over Hexen. I've never played Heretic 2, and not spent much time in Hexen 2, as even when it was new, it just didn't feel... quality.
Where are you? I only got stuck in the first level, before the hub, and near the end of the hub (because I neglected to look through my inventory for a while, as I was playing it like Quake). One thing that has been in my mind recently is the idea of "compressed" games. Basically mod/map packs that scale down the scope of the game, going for a 1-4 hour experience instead of an 8-16 hour one. Quake2 was my initial idea for it, since that game has a lot of content, but also a lot of padding, and the quality drops sporadically without having much to hold your attention. Hexen2 seems like another good subject for the notion.
The notion that had matured the most in my mind was a "Doom in Doom2", basically a 12 map wad that went through the same arc as the original 3 episodes of Doom, but using the Doom2 items and monsters, expanding the gameplay in general. Inferno feels pretty hellish, but it had just a whole lot of cacodemons... Arch Viles, Mancubi, and Pain Elementals seem more fitting inhabitants of Mt Erebus and Limbo. I love the big hat and long cloak sorcerer look (like orco or the black mage from FF)... this game looks neato -
http://bn05.tumblr.com/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/strafegame/strafe/posts/1136891
Free playable demo of Strafe. Fixed level, meant for speed running. Gives a taste of the gameplay. The owl head is very strong when dealing with acid, but the mechanic of spilling blood over acid to neutralize it is fun. Trailers look great, but I have read a lot of complaints about the game... I am just wondering whether those are fair, and whether the game is worth its price
Any insights ? Saw a gameplay video, looked 100% like a UTx mod, wouldn't even waste time watching another video since then, hth.
Looked like they took L4D, stripped it down to Players vs Tank, and tried to make a game around it. I'm all for asymmetric gameplay, but I don't think it looks like it has legs to keep me interested for any length of time.
People seemed to mostly complain about how the game is designed to be a paid DLC catalyst, which publisher/developers both denied. Haven't played it, but my hearsay accretion is that it seems fun for a day, and as soon as you run out of things to unlock you find yourself with nothing to care about.
Makes sense with all the above. http://store.steampowered.com/app/253510/
Anyone tried this demo? I just played it. It seems very true to the Warmachine world, the Warjacks are cool as is the Warcaster control. But it's a bit previous-gen, the camera is quite buggy, the selection is fiddly, and Warmachine vs. Warmachine combat seems very grindy... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m83WSfDlDFk
Imagine if there was a similar thing with Quake where 3 other players play as the monsters, that'd be fun :) Needs more atmosphere-focused, style-over-substance, side-scroller puzzle games like it needs a fat di....hang on, that does look really stylish and well-done...
Retrofuturistic 1960s themed creepyness, style looks niceeee
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/28/we-happy-few-trailer/#more-273313 Hard Reset: Extended Edition - 7.0. Alright but all a bit samey. Starting to forget it now actually, and I only played it a month ago.
Dead Island - 7.5. Clearly not built for solo play, with cinematics that show your team mates even though your not playing with them! The last 20% of the game became too hard for solo (due to escort missions) and really cunted me off. I had to get a trainer to continue. Enemies that skill up as you do makes it pointless bothering to gain xp. Melee was done fairly well though. Kind of like a melee borderlands but without the large scale. PayDay: The Heist - Played the first level. Rubbish, with no point to even bother killing enemies because they just keep respawing. Looked average so I deleted it. F.E.A.R. 3 - 7.5. Fun old style fps, but definitely weaker than Fear2. Shit all weapons (and only 2 at a time), limited enemy types, linear as hell levels. But still fun if that's what your into. A few tough battles too (not the final boss though). Looks great, love the art style and subtle touches at humour. Coming May 2015? Damn not much time to do marketing for it and build up anticipation, are some of these marketing companies run by monkeys?
Is best when it's not years away. A few months to save and the hype is strong with little room for disappointment.
i haven't played a "new order" yet.
but this one is looking promising. Kinda remind me the 2009 wolf just looked the video but without the sound, what are they talking about? My steam review:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/czg/recommended/265690/ damn, that's disappointing. i really like that visual style or solid colours with just lighting and geometry... the video made it look pretty cool.
I played Dead Space 2 this week, great game 9/10 I think. A bit linear but it seems most people overlook this since the rest is so good. Only negative is I found most of the more powerful weapons to be a bit shit. Definitely fixed the fucked controls of ds1.
Also played Batman 2 (Arkham City), pretty cool, 8.5/10. But really no different to the first game, just more of the same. Having to remember all the combo's and pissing around with all the gadgets gets a bit old after a while. I played the main game which was about 10 hrs, add Catwomen's DLC but by the Robin DLC I was over it and quit 30mins in. I'd had enough of those zapper cunts. Not the kind of game I could keep playing for 100 hours. Awesome design though, looks great in dx11. I'm on to Portal 2 now, only up to chapter 3 but I see this is an 8hr game... boy this might be a drag if it doesn't change up fast. It's just the same old puzzles from Portal1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrKxAHJ7qU
Just a old game review - Quarantine. The guy is hilarious though :D huhhh.. that game looks cool, but i can see why i didn't do better judging by the problems the dude mentions.
also, he is hilarious. i usually hate weirdo youtube people, but his anger is awesome. I only got to the end of chapter 7 in Portal 2, I couldn't take it any more, it's a bit too long. I see on youtube the rest of the puzzles looked annoying as fuck. I don't get the response this game got, it's not THAT great. Kind of boring, dating engine, puzzles just for the sake of puzzles unlike proper adventure/puzzle games that have a purpose. Oh and the loadtimes! Load times out of the 90s!
Also I couldn't take the crashing anymore, not sure if it's something wrong with my computer but the further I got the more it crashed, to the point it was crashing every 30sec. Probably not normal for Portal 2 to crash so much, but everything hardware-wise seems to be okay, temps all good, memory fine. No other games are crashing. Was I did like - the characters were great, though the story itself doesn't really have a satisfying summary. I did like the huge scale minimalist design, very moody and atmospheric. It suits this game, but you can tell the engine isn't really good enough for modern levels of detail. I wonder if this why Valve has been so quiet in recent years? L4D1/2 looked dated, but that wasn't really their game anyway, they just created a bunch of new levels for Turtle Rock's HL2 mod, and called it L4D2. Portal was the same, it's just Nuclear Monkey's game Narbacular Drop, but Valve hired them and recreated it as Portal. Portal 2 is just a bigger version of Portal 1. Dota 2 wasn't their IP either. All their multiplayer things like CS and TF are based on user-made mods. Has Valve itself done anything original since 1998's Half-Life? I don't think they really have. I wonder how much the fact that they know their engine is out-of-date and has been for about a decade now, plays into that? Too busy with Steam perhaps. Every game steals the ideas of previous games - at least Valve actually hires the makers of the game they rip off!
they've done something to the hl2 engine. i get crashes in all hl2 engine games a lot. that or 20 second freezes.
Stupid idea for a game. One of the key elements to making something enjoyable is the idea that "Play is safe" (stealing this idea from Chris Crawford). If you can't experiment, try things out, learn from mistakes without irreversibly losing opportunity to continue doing so... you won't be having much fun playing, because you've driven out the essence of what 'play' is.
Games with permadeath can be punishing, but that's still fine because they are often made so that you will see what mistakes you made, learn new things about the game, and slowly progress as a player in conquering the challenge. It's still 'safe' when you die because all you've lost is time, but have gained knowledge about the game for next time (and modern games have unlockable things you might collect each play). You still get to try things out and attempt to create a mental model of how to better play the game in your head. Just imagine how fun mapping would be if you could only compile a If you die do you have to buy the game again? Re-register an account?
I'm sure there's something worth taking the piss out of here, but I don't really know what... Just reading that article, there's two facets to the game really - the "players" - one of which you can only get to be once, ever - and the "audience" - which I assume you can participate in as often as you like.
Being in the "audience" seems to be an interactive experience, and the audience appears to have some control over the fate of the "players", so really, for the majority of the people, being in the audience, is "the game". It actually sounds like there's probably some pretty good ideas there. It's not a videogame in the traditional sense, more of a spectator sport.
Clever idea, but not something I'd be interested in. But the internet tells me I'm a minority. One of the key elements to making something enjoyable is the idea that "Play is safe" (stealing this idea from Chris Crawford). If you can't experiment, try things out, learn from mistakes without irreversibly losing opportunity to continue doing so...
this is silly bro there's quite a lot of value in intentionally seeing what an experience is like if you violate The Rules with an open mind. If developers can't experiment, try things out Permadeath is a much more tense experience, with a much higher degree of player investment, because loss is so great. But, you can still always start over. Why shouldn't one game exist for the express purpose of taking that a step further? The point of this game is that it isn't safe. If you want to experiment and learn this game, you do it really really carefully. You really feel the stress of threats, the total exhilaration of escaping something by the skin of your teeth, and the gutting loss when it's all over. It's not flawed because you only play it once, because that's what makes the experience. Any player who goes into this particular game wanting to rely on multiple playthroughs for their experimentation, then gets mad when they lose access to the game, didn't play it right. You get more out of a game if you're willing to play it on the game's terms. The game design would have to be impeccable for this to work. The player needs to be shown the rules, explicitly, the visual language needs to be crisp and precise an unerring, the AI needs to be flawless, etc.
If you're going to give me one life, forever, you as the designer are taking on a lot of responsibility. Seems dubious. For example, see DaZ's video where Barney gets rekt by the strider corpse simply becase DaZ bumped into it. Game over. Sorry you wasted your money, lol!
If you're going to give me one life, forever, you as the designer are taking on a lot of responsibility.
Adr1ft does look very cool. Sort of like a zero-g version of Routine.
Fuck I can't wait for Routine! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaZqV0o7EW4 it's basically a game show, it seems like the main entertainment is for the audience, which is large and can repeatedly watch it, rather than the player base, which is small and only plays it once.
How many times do you get to play on Jeopardy after losing the first time? I can see the appeal and potential for players getting very intense highs from the danger presented. I just think it sounds like a gimmick that will quickly lose appeal when the only way to play to win is to slowly and carefully take no chances. Of course, there will be plenty of YOLO players, and I guess that has a certain appeal too, if for only the briefest moment.
I suppose the real game is in being the 'audience' who gets sadistic thrills toying with the live players. They actually will feed off the careful players by throwing curveballs at them... it's the YOLOs that will become boring quite quickly for the audience, they don't live long enough to really turn the screws on them. Maybe I was a bit too hasty judging with "DA RULES", still unsure the game will have longevity, but I guess there is some enjoyment to be had there, and we'll see how it pans out. Now that I think about it, I'm getting excited.
OK, what if you built in a feature where it recorded your run to video with easy one-click publishing to YouTube. Then the early YOLO players would dive in, fail, and everyone would watch their videos to get ideas about what to do and what NOT to do. Then more people play, more videos get posted, with the idea that the first person who completes the game wins some mega prize. The viral potential of that is staggering... What's the experience like for the one lets-player who gets really, really far?
A crowd effort to beat a game where everyone can contribute once with their failure towards community success.
Ya, neat experiment, or more same as some crowd sourced real life / digital crossover mystery. Eg. NIN ran one of those for one of his new albums I believe. Amongst others. Looks like nice realistic graphics and sound effects. I like the lack of music. Makes it quite atmospheric.
Shame the trailer is so melodramatic. Come on dude, it's just a friggin hallway, walk through it already and stop peeking around corners and gazing at irrelevant signs just to drag things out. Yeah, those things on the monitor. All graphy, like Excel. On a whim I installed Crysis 2 since I've had it since launch. It looked at my old system, was impressed because Crysis 2 is also now old and set everything to max.
It looks terrible. Now once in a while there will be a well composed scene, but all in all, it looks like a mess of minlit models and particle spawners (and they spawn clipping into the ground with the wrong shape for where they are emitting from). It is just funny how quickly an Awesome Looking Game can look poor to me. Some things just don't age well. Oh and the game itself is boring. Movement is bleh, the input latency on jumping keeps you in an anchored mindset, the enemies are boring to fight, and their AI is sloppy. First guy I fought lost sight of me when I was standing less than a foot in front of him. He didn't go from Attacking to Searching, he went from Attacking to Idle. Gun lowered, neutral pose, just shifting his weight. On multiple times I've seen enemies jitter within about a foot space as they repeatedly 180. Also, the AI barks don't match the scenarios... Well that was incoherent. Sadly no, because I played it on the eggs box three-hundred-and-sixty.
The game made me angry because the new episode was just a frankenstein of random rooms and corridors copied from the original levels and slapped together in a different way, the wankers. I replayed Q2 the other day, and started playing D3 (after figuring out settings so it wasn't 800x600 and autodetecting 'low quality' graphics...)
god help me. hitscan. hitscan everywhere The Z-sec and chaingun commandos were such obnoxious enemies. Partially because of the doubling effect when you take damage. Though I also hated that the chaingun commando's chaingun had no spinup, but mine did.
Q2 did have a ton of hitscan, but they took longer to transition into firing, like in Doom, so you could do something about it often. http://www.absention-game.com/
UE4 indie game, set in a nice lake house, but there's some scaryness that comes and kills you. You relive the same day again and again Groundhog Day style, and try to survive. Looks sexy, monster looks awful. Pre-alpha though. I decided to replay Half-Life after years (might be a decade by now). It is still such a fantastic game and well worth all the praise. I did not remember so many secrets/optional places. The flow is great, although I remember it feeling much slower when I first played it, probably because I could not aim nor move and "used" everything. Played up to the introduction of the military for now.
Especially the sounds, their use and the environmental effects are impressive. I would even say, they are a huge part of the atmosphere. The "seamless" world still feels great, probably better nowadays when loading times are just single seconds. I started up Unreal for the first time since the 90s, the other week. Using the unofficial 227 patch, it runs a dream now on a modern computer, and you can re-enable the original sounds.
It's pretty great, although you kind of have to grit your teeth through a lot of the incredibly obscure level progression "90s charm" that the game suffered from. I remember back in the day I thought nothing of walking down to HMV and picking up one of those game guide books to help me through when I got stuck. How times change, hehe. Can't argue with that. More DX:HR done equally well would get my vote.
Main character still has the personality of a turnip though. ... looked graphically excellent but I was hoping to hear a musical score that was as good as those for the previous Deus-Ex titles. I thought the DX-HR soundtrack was very fitting for a dystopian near-future vision and the excellent Icarus theme (if I got that right) was in the trailer for it. I like when games have musical scores that feel like they were crafted to contribute to the game's character instead of going with something that could be part of any big budget Hollywood action flick.
I thought the DX-HR music was great, and it's the same composer on the new project (Micheal Mccann), so I'm optimistic.
I care, a lot. Especially for the 15 seconds before I find the audio settings and turn it down to 20%.
"Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 deploys players into a dark, twisted future where a new breed of Black Ops soldier emerges and the lines are blurred between our own humanity and the technology we created to stay ahead, in a world where cutting-edge military robotics define warfare. With three unique game modes: Campaign, Multiplayer and Zombies, providing fans with the deepest and most ambitious Call of Duty ever"
They must be trolling by now... My Facebook feed was lit up with Black Ops 3 love yesterday and I don't want to be a dick but
They're unique from each other.
It also has thirty unique weapons! For very narrow values of 'unique.' You're onto something there, even if you were just trying to be glib. If you pay attention to the marketing copy of CoD games, they only talk within the scope of the franchise. They don't care if other games have done X feature or used Y tech, they care if a CoD game has. CoD has a distinct player base in games, namely, they have a lot of players who don't otherwise play games. They have the metrics on this and know that their primary competitor is themselves. They need each release to be different enough from previous ones to justify a purchase, but not so different that it doesn't appeal to their unique column of players, the ones who only play their game.
This is part of why other companies, especially EA, are so silly in trying to make a CoD Killer. How do you convince people who typically don't play Other Games, to play Your Other Game which doesn't look that different from what they've already got, but it is on untested grounds? As one YouTuber put it, the CoD Killer is the game that is nothing like it but appeals to CoD players. Minecraft thus far is the only thing which has posed a threat. Now as for "unique weapons", that depends on the goal you have in implementing weapons. I wrote this almost two years ago, but it still applies: http://scar3crow.com/2013/04/am-gun-will-travel/ Now, I wouldn't call myself "excited" for Black Ops 3. But I will keep an eye on it, because Black Ops 2 was by far the strongest entry in the franchise, and this is the first time that development team has had a three year cycle to work with. It will still be Call of Duty, with all the faults that implies, but I've always found it interesting to observe how these teams balance the demands for change and the requirement of familiarity. I will say though, if you play Black Ops 2's multiplayer for a few hours, and you don't feel the difference between the weapons - to the extent that you develop particular favorites, and find your play style adjusting to them - then I would argue that CoD is actually too involved for you. It isn't a good game, but it is, when on point, a game about focused differences and applying them correctly. I would love to know how the game modes of Campaign Multiplayer and Zombies are radically different to all the other previous CODs that includes Campaign Multiplayer and Zombies (the latter in DLC), and how the cutting-edge military robotics are a huge conceptual progression over the previous COD:AW's cutting-edge military robotics.
Basically, they are cocks. As would I, since Treyarch has developed a good track record for this. Black Ops 2 in particular was noteworthy for its branching storyline which shifted between the 2020s, and the 1980s. Sixteen different endings, many of which are seeded by non-obvious events, with levels that you can fail and have the game continue (there is one particular chase sequence... yeah, you want to catch him, he can actually get away, and it makes a big difference in the end). There are the RTS side missions where you instruct multiple squads on routes to take in order to flank enemies and secure safehouses, with the ability to possess any of them. Their addition of numerous side areas and unique items per level were enjoyable, as well as the easter eggs, and the level unique deaths. I liked that because I performed well enough to earn the trust of the Chinese in one mission, that I got air cover from them in another mission to take out snipers. I liked that my failure to veer far enough left to avoid a burst gas pipeline, in a mission where I had chosen to drive, resulted in a friendly NPC's face getting disfigured, and that being brought up in later missions. I liked that I played through the campaign like mister badass, and got... the worst possible ending because I didn't take it seriously. I sowed the seeds of a very bad conclusion.
I liked the fact that in Black Ops 2 they rebuilt the entire class creation system around a card game mechanic (supposedly they developed actual card games in-house, and had employees play them - the most popular one became the structure for class building), eschewing the franchise's tradition of 1 Primary, 1 Secondary, 3 Perks, 1 Lethal Throwable, 1 Tactical Equipment. I liked their replacement of killstreaks with scorestreaks, meaning that you no longer begrudged an assist, that destroying enemy equipment had a longer term payoff, that capturing flags - especially taking one by force because it had additive bonuses - was a lucrative activity. That kills from rewards were worth fewer points, so you bypassed the issue of rewards feeding into rewards. I liked their inclusion of meaningful non-violent equipment to assist teammates and stymie enemies. Was it a perfect game? Hardly. It was a 5.5-6/10 in my book, but it changed up a lot, and continually shifted the expectations of CoD players toward meaningful changes, while still anchored to the CoD base gameplay. I'm not a Zombies player, I liked it in World at War when it was a stinger at the end credits, with a rather spooky tone and a dash of camp, but they took it in a weird camp-comic direction that I don't enjoy, so I've not bothered with it. As for the cutting-edge military robotics, well, Black Ops 2 went the route of a national defense being reliant on drones, but becoming vulnerable to what was essentially DDOSing to gain control, through the breakthrough of major computing power. Ghosts went into the subject of developing a singular super weapon, which was of such power that once successfully taken, was able to lay waste to much of America in short order, leaving it vulnerable. Advanced Warfare focused on technology as it could improve personal mobility without a vehicle, as well as awareness and a dash of augmented reality visualization. The leaked marketing materials for Black Ops 3 suggests that they are going the route of further individual integration with technology. The classic science fiction dilemma of blurred lines between the technology and the person. But this is speculation. The only real stipulation here is that phrase "unique", which would be better replaced by "distinct". Each CoD is generally three games. You've got the campaign by the main studio on that release, the cooperative function (be it Spec Ops, Zombies, or Extinction) by another team in that studio, receiving assistance, and Multiplayer which is generally designed in-house, cooperating with the themes and tone of the campaign, with maps provided largely by third party studios, typically Raven and Nerve. So yeah, distinct would be much more appropriate. But who knows, maybe Treyarch is going to pull another Black Ops 2 where they shift up major chunks of the formula. It certainly paid dividends in 2012. Finished Half-Life. It got worse towards the end and while I had thought everyone was shitting on Xen for no good reason, Xen *is* shit. Ugly as hell, changing gameplay and the boss fight is just annoying. I managed to throw a grenade in there, killing it and i died in the same moment so the outro played with me laying on my side, that was good. The teleporter puzzle in the reactor right before Xen was just annoying as well. I like the G-Man much more than its HL2 version.
Overall a damn good game with an anti-climatic ending (regardless of your final choice). I played the whole game without ever seeing my HUD which somehow felt interesting. Wasn't a problem until Xen (no more health machines to fill up/know I am full). Quicksaving is a great thing and due to many death traps you really need to employ it. HL also silently autosaves at new levels which are not big, so even noobs should have no troubles. Not sure if my experience with FPS or improved spatial awareness, er, higher resolution and higher framerate are the reason, but the game was much easier than I remembered. Especially "seeing" how to progress. A major part was that I now actually understood what NPCs and signs were saying, back then my engrish was not good. Compared to HL2 the "in-game cutscenes" were *very* much not annoying as they were short. Now, what is the sign on G-Man's briefcase? is the logo for Black Mesa Research Facility. Doesn't make too much sense from a story perspective really as I always considered him to be an antagonist.
You're right about HL, the xen levels were a pain (and they're long too). You shouldn't have had no HUD throughout the game, that's probably a bug. The HUD was just cut off because I was playing in a virtual desktop with Wine and was too lazy to resize it. I considered it a challenge and it made it more fun imo.
Change of scenery, change of pace, godlike atmosphere, properly alien and hostile, and overall it's just a lot of fun.
trying to remember my original impressions of half life.
- hitscan enemies pissed me off - hated how much health the army dudes had, i remember turning on god mode, walking point black and emptying almost an entire clip from the smg before an army guy died, and thinking it was absolutely ridiculous - liked how it felt like some long journey from start to finish, the passage of time shown with varying outdoor sunlight. - got lost several times due to 90's mazelike map design. that's it for now... Headshots do matter indeed. One revolver round or crossbow bolt to the head takes down any soldier. But otherwise they do feel spongy and unsatisfying to fight. It's rather incongruent because of how much effort went into the big alien soldiers with their armor plates, including that gap in the spine for a bolt to hit.
I can understand being spongy on torso shots as a basis of armor, but they also have helmets, so really face and neck shots should matter more, skull shots less - and the beret bearing ones could've been better armed or had better aim, but would have taken tons of damage from any head shot. The soldiers were definitely the PR focus, but they needed more attention in the actual mechanics. i think at the time, i didn't know headshots did extra damage. up till then, i had only played games like quake where it was just a hitbox.
I've always aimed for the head in games if there was mouselook. I sometimes aim for the head in Quake, even though I know it does nothing - granted, I did play a metric ton of TF back when it was fun.
But I had also played a lot of Unreal before HL came out, a game I find to be massively superior, and since it focused more on 1v1 fights with high health monsters, and did have hit location, prioritizing headshots could end the fight a lot faster, so it was really ingrained into me come 6 months later. I was also conditioned by that awesome SiN demo. I played these games in the order above and found Half-life to be the superior of the two. Story-wise, at least.
Story, Half-Life is...
Now moving beyond story and into the things which video games can do separately from other art forms: Unreal's AI, alien world, sense of wonder and exploration, unique weapons, and the most empathetic NPC this side of an RPG... I got a lot more out of Unreal than HL. The story wasn't astounding, but it also wasn't hammering me over the head with it. Like that time HL makes you plainly walk into an ambush so they can turn out the lights and take your guns away to pad the content feed. Half Life being the prototype for the current day "interactive movie" form of games, Unreal being a great example of the oldskool lose yourself in this world and explore type of game (that wasnt a sandbox).
I tried playing Unreal several times in the past and always got bored/annoyed. The weapons feel much less than HLs and the enemies' float skating is ridiculous. The world felt very sterile and plain.
I disagree on the notion that HL is the prototype of interactive movie games. It is a linear game, that is true, but it has only one cutscene when you have no control over the character (when you are dragged by the two soldiers to the trash compactor). All the other story exposition cutscenes or scripted sequences still allow the player to be in absolute control, something that almost never happens in interactive movie games nowadays (see Bioshock Infinite for instance). In any case I'd argue that CoD 1 is a lot more to blame than HL, and I see HL more like a continuation of System Shock 1 without the sim elements with a pinch of Quake thrown in.
"All the other story exposition cutscenes or scripted sequences still allow the player to be in absolute control, something that almost never happens in interactive movie games nowadays"
I think that gets a little overstated IMO You can look around freely at these four walls. Oh The thing with HL's scripted sequences is that the devs encourage you to look at them, but they don't force you to do so. You can completely ignore what's happening if you want. Current games, on the other hand, force you to look at them by locking your view/immobilizing you because it took devs hours and hours to make these sequences.
Yeah, that's true and it's also illustrative of how Half-Life benefited from a thin plot. If you missed one of the interactive scenes or something someone said, it didn't really matter. Or, more precisely, the designers didn't mind.
These days, designers often see themselves as master story tellers and therefore want to make sure you hear and see every detail of the web they're weaving for alpha bravo kilo squad in uzkatstan or where ever. The reality is, nobody care. :) So is pretty much anything. The value is in the execution, not the story. The story is just a catalyst for the experience.
as in different formats like books and films can have better than C grade stories.
But yeah I agree execution can cover up simplicity and unorignality in a format like a game. Also my comment wasnt directed at Half Life's story but your point about designers thinking they are master storyellers. Sure the story is nothing special, but the presentation is very nice. It reminded me of a lot of the environmental effects in Duke 3D but now in actual 3D. Eg the grenade thrown in your face as you crawl through a pipe or the air shaft being shot to pieces. The events are short and fun, not OMG SO EPIC!!!! DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING! AVATAR SAYS OMG TOO!!
I think what makes it better than "modern games" is that the scripted sequences are very short and to the point (ignoring the intro). Also no cringe-worthy things or actions the avatar does iirc. Pretty much the only thing like that is the weapon animation with the bugs? These days, designers often see themselves as master story tellers and therefore want to make sure you hear and see every detail of the web they're weaving for alpha bravo kilo squad in uzkatstan or where ever.
Agree completely. They also see themselves as master directors, and it's important that you lose control during these sequences because they really really really want to frame the action like this and cut dramatically here. To be fair, framing and camera cuts are basically free. If you can create a feeling of dread with good camera work, you're better off than if you tried to create it through palpable emotional tone in a room full of characters, visibly and audibly frightened, glancing with worry at each other, etc, even if the latter is much better for grounding the player in the world. then of course you have the risk that as Dr. Manchester is giving his dramatic monologue about whatever, the player spends the entire scene trying to balance a trashbin on his head, but you've lost those players anyway. is just a sub-game... Also I feel like in a lot of modern shooters that I'm not THE guy. If I'm playing a game I want to be the hero of my own damn fantasy world.
In my experience designers want to make a game.
The expensive bauble of FMV littered throughout a game is usually mandated by production and the client. No level or game designer is going to wake up one day and say 'I really want to stick a tedious couple of minutes in the middle of my game today!' After it's been done, they are the ones who enable the trashcan on head feature to mess about with the animation department's painstakingly constructed scene and productions pricetag justification feature. "In my experience designers want to make a game. "
Some want to make movies. They SAY they want to make games but, really That's true. There are many self deceivers.
But they tend not to last long and the games they work on are bad, so who cares. Maybe those unlucky enough to have paid for the game. But if you don't take the time to read a couple of reviews before an expensive purchase then you've only yourself to blame. I've come around to the Carmack sentiment.
"Stories in games are like stories in porn - everbody expects one to be there but nobody really cares about it" Which seems ridiculous at first glance - everyone has played loads of games where the story was pivotal and had real meaning and blah blah blah. But you play a game for the play. The only good story in a game is one told through the mechanics of play. Bastion comes to mind as a good (if slightly overkill) example. Bastion wasn't my type of game because at one point I realised I was collecting maguffins and not pieces of the plot anymore.
"But they tend not to last long and the games they work on are bad, so who cares. "
*cough*Kojima*cough* Heh... Lets be honest, Kojima lasted bloody ages... and the games were good despite the ridiculously long cutscenes.
http://phoboslab.org/xibalba/
Cute little WebGL Wolf3D-ish FPS. Five levels, takes about 30 mins to play through. First level is a bit boring. I like the tree enemies. Borrows some quake textures, and if I squint right it looks like some quake 3 and doom 3 textures as well. Hard to tell with so low res though. Quite a few games I loved had cutscenes. They always felt like a reward, and if they were actually good, they didn't bug me at all. I've seen some amazing cutscenes.
I think it's a matter of taking a good hard look at your list of cutscenes and turning them into interactive ingame things wherever possible - leaving control to the player, and making the rest of them convey crucial, meaningful information at least in an entertaining way. Personally I have nothing against not being THE GUY in games, I like steering protagonists around like in Mass Effect equally much. Heck, I play as female characters regularly despite being straight male because I like steroid beefcake space marines even less. I guess it's how likeable the protagonist is, and how much reason he/she has for being himself/herself, that makes the difference. I find talking protagonists quite charming. It's just hard to avoid cutscenes in some cases. Dialogue for instance - if the player makes the conscious effort to initiate dialogue with some NPC, you can assume they really want that conversation, and thus disallowing them to do the thrashbin thing for the duration of the dialogue isn't really such a big difference. The player stated their intent when they approached that NPC. If the cutscene can be ended by pressing ESC I don't see the big problem - in that case it's just optional bonus content, and are you gonna bitch about that? It's a bit like in a classroom - sometimes you gotta be able to stop them throwing paper balls around, if you want to keep it at a certain niveau, else you can just designate it Garry's Mod and give the teacher a week off and every pupil gets a book of matches. Hooray. You now have a base level game about anarchy and destruction. But there are some games that aren't that kind of game, don't advertise themselves as that kind of game, and that is OK. Different games for different people. Sometimes you want to show how something affects the protagonist without words, or specific meaningful interactions of the protagonist with other characters, and that's perhaps not possible if the player is allowed to set shit on fire while the scene tries to happen. If you declare things like this unreasonable in games, you rule out an entire class of games. The Carmack quote about porn is in my mind one of the dumbest things anyone has ever said. He is basically comparing games to porn without batting an eyelash. Says a lot about his idea of his own games. Incidentally, Carmack is a big mechanics guy - maybe that limited mindset explains why he finds games and porn so comparable. Yep, you can compare mechanics to mechanics but games are not necessarily just about mechanics. Reducing everything about video games to mechanics - mechanics are king - especially with the whole move to massively multiplayer stuff (mechanics are even more king) is a newfangled thing I don't like. It is a mindset that is too much like an engineer's for my liking and not enough like an author's or an artist's. This is not just an issue in games - it's a social issue where mechanics and everything you can test and measure are deemed most worthy and desirable, and where the individual or the consumer is seen as the center of the world. The consumer is king, don't take power away from the consumer. Bow to his will. It should be the privilege of an artist - of a human - to ignore that, really. The world is big enough for games with cutscenes. Sure, it's a difficult thing to tell a story well in a videogame, and it can be done better. But I'll take a game that tells a good story in an imperfect way over a massively multiplayer online jerkfest with shitstorms if a shotgun delay is changed from 0.2 to 0.3 ANY FUCKING DAY. That's just me. Feel free to disagree. Reminds me of http://www.locomalito.com/8bit_killer.php
"Reducing everything about video games to mechanics - mechanics are king "
Now I barely play any games these days but my view is that mechanics (as in game-mechanics) is often neglected (at least in AAA titles) as opposed to (often B/C-) story and primarily graphics. Even Carmack doesn't seem to hold game mechanics that high having said such things as more realistic graphics makes it look weird to move fast (doom 3) implying graphics got to decide his game mechanics. If they had really cared about game mechanics first I'm sure they could have come up with some justification for whatever choices they could have made in a future sci-fi world full of demons. Awesome, just what I needed after finding that Perforce shit the bed and I lost a couple of days of work.
I suppose rubbernecking the farcical trainwreck of PR spooge and outright lies that accompanies rehashing exactly the same shite every fucking release provides a tiny bit of entertainment, but that doesn't really justify the existence of this retarded series nor the odious fuckwits who write this utter bollox.
Final boss sucks.
Is it possible to avoid his fist slam attack or is it an automatic health loss? I think he slams his fists down only in the corners, and when he does the punch his fists together attack it goes in a wave away from his face, so you just run through when it's clear. Don't think I ever got hit once by him, it's just a puzzle boss as far as I remember it...
To avoid the bit where he swipes his fists across once, even hiding behind them. It seems his RNG just decides to take 20 health of you every now and then.
Sometimes the smaller games are nice, I don't the 5 hours of entertainment a run through the latest COD provides. Better than the thought of installing the next rpg which I'm going to slog through for 30+ hours and may not even enjoy it that much.
I hate puzzle bosses.
But finally killed it. I didn't realise I could sprint. Then I didn't realise to shoot it while it was angry. Scraped through on 2HP. Impact looks pretty interesting. Yeah, missed that, too, but i gave up way earlier because it was no fun at all.
Does exactly what it says on the tin.
Exactly the same style as WOFL:TNO? - tick! Yet more WOFL after dozens of reboots? - tick! Flaming Nazi zombies dropping from the sky? TICK! Good fun straight up shooter action in cool environments? - tick. Still has a few niggles - masses of hitscan enemies, some artificial arenas, lots of invisible walls - but it seems well worth the pleasing budget release price. I think I'm enjoying it more than TNO, less farting around with the rebel base and NPCs, more exploding heads. Runs smooth and controls very smooth with nobob 1 (which fucks the scope though). Part 1 is just more Bioshock / Infinite set in Rapture, but quite tough and frustrating, okay if you're a fan but didn't grab me much.
Part 2 playing as Elizabeth is much better and both recaptures the weirdness and atmosphere that makes the games intriguing and has refreshing and suitable stealthier gameplay. It has more exposition that purports to tie up the Rapture / Columbia storylines, TBH I still didn't understand it but there's plenty enough coolness and creepiness to make it worthwhile. 60% on GoG... never even heard of this game. Can anyone who's played it let me know if it's good? Looks like a kind of action rpg?
"Fantastic 3rd person action game with great combat and puzzles! PC version is not a great port so make sure you have a pad!"
-Daz's recommendation on Steam (I own both DS and DS2, and have installed them... but never actually played them... fucking Steam Sales) I have no idea how other pads work. I never tried kb+m but I heard it was bad. Like... Dark Souls on kb+m bad :) But ymmv.
I've played it through twice, and it is not a short game! Really fun to play. Funnily enough, the first one is far superior to the second imo. They added a bunch of annoying and unnecessary crap to DS2 to turn it more into a diablo style loot grind/upgrade fest which really annoyed me. first one is worth playing. haven't played the second. I did a full review a while back: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/index.php/game-reviews/2010-reviews/item/darksiders
8.5/10 if you quit the last 2 chapters as they're not worth playing. If you do pick it up on pc, you will need to force AA / AF in your graphics control panel for the game as it doesn't do either by default and there are no in game options for that stuff.
bad pc port :) thanks guys, I will give it a shot... haven't played a game in ages and I wanted to try something a little different from my usual tastes.
It appears the English version is done and the whole thing is available in a director's cut edition. An incredibly well-done fan adventure, recommended to anyone who enjoys classic point&click adventures. Oh, and it's free, of course.
http://www.mckracken.net/cms/directorscut.html/?change_lang=1 I'm not one to usually pay much attention to pre-rendered game trailers, but this one is really pretty classy, and so faithful to the Witcher universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiukIzzZD9E Pretty excited about this game, hope I'm not dissapointed! yeah.... they've been pushing that game a _lot_ for months, but it really does look like it will be awesome.
I'm not as excited as I normally would be though, cause my PC is not even close to modern these days. :S Played an hour so far...
Not bad, I don't really get the story that much, mainly because I'm not really paying attention. Luckily it's not that important and it's still fun without needing to know any of what's happening. Controls are fine. Using mouse and keyboard, had to disconnect my gamepad though as there was some weird bug where the camera was stuck looking down and you can't just switch control devices in the game. If you have a controller connected and the game detects it, it will just use it. You need to quit, unplug the device and reload. Pretty lame, but whatever, it works now. At first I treated this like a button mashing game, but the larger enemies actually do require you to dodge out of the way and wait for the right time to attack. Interesting so far, don't know if that kind of thing will remain interesting for the whole game or not. Also, you can buy new abilities and such but I already got some for free. There are a lot of abilities, so I haven't actually gotten any new ones yet... Still getting used to the 5 or 6? I have already. Graphics are nice, it actually runs almost perfectly on my 4 year old hardware. There is a big difference between hopeful and optimistic. I'm hopeful.
Revenant looks cool though. From someone that was at the private showing there it sounds like Doom4 is going to be in the vein of Brutal Doom.
Maybe they will attempt the grand plan...see Valiant megawad thread. No I must not get my hopes up so high. But hopeful is the word yes. My optimism is well dead vis-a-vis games from major studios Now to wait till June 14th... I just noticed that in #8340 I posted the wrong URL.
Correct URL should be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3UpX1CMEMQ It's a cool teaser but man
In my eagerness to see more of the upcoming new DOOM, I searched and found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hot1aQJTw8 It is said to be the teaser for the old in-development sequel to Doom3 (a reboot of Doom 1), before they scrapped it and decided to do another reboot of Doom 1. The graphic is good, but the overall atmosphere is too Half-Life-2-ish, and not apocalyptic enough. The brings new meaning the word "teaser". I couldn't even have a wank in that time it's over so fast.
A Fallout game where everything isn't the same uniform shade of greeney grey/brown.
I think it's too colorful for Fallout. It's always been a world of despair and decay. Wasteland is not a nice a colorful place. I think it's too colorful for Fallout. It's always been a world of despair and decay. Wasteland is not a nice a colorful place.
Dunno, to me it just felt like that annoying "desaturate everything and make it brown" full-screen color-grading that every early xbox 360 game did. I prefer my post-apocalypse to look like this: http://i.imgur.com/yoVGSgB.jpg i actually was expecting that instead of the other...
wonder if it'll be on sale on GoG for the summer thing. A few games I've played recently, metacritic score then my score (out of 10).
Dragon Age II - 82% / 8.5 I Am Alive - 66% / 5.0 Would have been higher, but got too difficult near the end. Cool atmosphere though. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City - 48% / 5.5 Kind of similar to above, it got bad reviews but the actual shooting wasn't too bad. But stupid final battle had me rage quitting. 007 Legends - 40% / 6.0 Nowhere near as bad as made out, just a fun shooter. Nothing amazing but it's no 4/10. Bastion - 87% / 5.5 Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 - 55% / 7.0 Decent game, main complaint was too linear but so was Bastion and everyone loves that. Does sniping well, and damn this game looks good in the crytek engine. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - 87% / 8.5 Well they fixed the shitty combat from w1, made it look heaps better (better than Dragon Age II as well). Still could be a few improvements... the ending sort of came out of nowhere, and some of the rpg aspects were pretty basic, I must have only used a few swords in the game, hardly any upgrades, didn't do any crafting or potions because I didn't need to, didn't spend about a dozen skill points, didn't put hours into finding the best equipment and matching armor sets because there didn't seem to be much exploration to do. I spent 2 days doing the prologue, chapter 1 and 2, then chapter 3 is over in just a couple hours, suddenly it's the finish and the boss battle is optional! Also quite linear despite it appearing open, most of the quests and side quests come in the order the game wants them to, with little room for exploration with clipping everywhere. Witcher 1 just felt bigger, with less linearity. Still a great game though. Looks really nice graphically.
I tried F3: NV, but it felt a bit clunky, and I got a bit put off by the annoying "desaturate everything and make it brown" full-screen color-grading. This looks better. Yay it works!
Got refunded Stronghold Crusader 2 even though I had purchased it months ago. The part I am pleased about is the grounds I put forward for requesting refund worked : "cannot co-op the game locally over LAN at home without purchasing another copy, no interest in purchasing an extra copy for this, no interest in playing it solo either" Awesome. <@Vondur> all doom talks aside, i'd say that dishonored 2 trailer blew my mind alright
<@Vondur> can't wait! that trailer looks brilliant. I loved the original too, despite being the least stealthy person in the world.
That it could work both ways. I think this trailer has got it just right...
Looks spot-on, demo expediency aside (double turns, low HPs etc etc). Yeah. I like the new enemy stuff, I like the awareness zone, I like the reinforcement drops, I like the melee inclusion (the exposure vs effectiveness of Kinetic Punch was always an interesting balance).
Looks just like the trailer I watched of it in 2007.
I like how since they started working on that game, the entire Playstation 3 development cycle came and went. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh-iX2bxOjI
Graphics look amazing, apart from the stupid black haze/bars around characters n stuff. Style looks amazing, apart from the environments being a bit too busy and over-detailed. Gameplay looks good, apart from distracting 3rd person cover mode and ammo counter right by reticle. "You will notice we support multiple ammunition types in Deus Ex Mankind Divided"
-"ooooooooooooohhhhhh....aaaaaaaaaaahhhhh" SHUT THE FUCK UP And Denton the macho willyhead hasn't gotten a shave or a proper haircut since. Still some kinda wanna be italian tough-guy/emo crossover aberration... I know they paid consultants a few 1000's $ to come up with a character that speaks to their lowest common demonitor fucktard consoel audience and it puts me right the fuck off the Deus Ex sequels I can't imagine any gamer in existence finds him and remotely interesting or engaging character, you're absolutely right he would reek of "designed by committee" if someone so bland and wooden would be capable of something as stimulating as reeking. I bet even the creators cringe at how utterly dull and pointless he is. DX:HR was pretty damn good despite him, given it's mostly 1st person, although with all the relentless cut-scene/conversation-cam bullshit they have to throw into the games these days, you do have to see the fucking turnip occasionally.
"I know they paid consultants a few 1000's $..."
Haha no, this doesn't happen. It's more like lots of iteration and diverging opinions, you're reading too much into it. (But yeah I agree, he's super bland and uninteresting, fortunately the rest of the game is good!) Graphics look amazing, apart from the stupid black haze/bars around characters n stuff.
Yeah, the black haze is probably because they've applied SSAO with a trowel, and it often looks stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_space_ambient_occlusion My god they can keep those opinions Bal...
I've even looked for a mod to reskin the little shit. To no avail. Denton/Jensen who cares I figured since season 5 of the GOT is done, I better go and play the game that was released in 2012. It's an okay RPG, 6.5/10.
Story is really good, even if the bad guy is pretty obvious from the early going. But at least it's no "save the entire world from a demon lord" bullshit that most fantasy RPG's recycle. Probably about 20 hours long and I didn't tire of playing it at all. But apart from story, it's mostly average everywhere else, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The only real negative is the shitty visuals. The graphics are crap for 2012, level design is outdated. It's certainly no Assassin's Creed in having a "real" feeling city. But the upgrades and abilities were all good enough. Overall just nice to see a bit of history prior to the tv series. Has anyone played Telltale Games GOT series? I'll get that next year, though I'd much rather have an action RPG over an adventure game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ45LTOwiwg
Thoughts? Setting doesn't appeal much and unnatural double-jumping looks silly, but apart from that looks pretty fun? SW remake was really fun to play comparing to modern shooters. I think SW2 can be almost the same game as SW1 was, tho it had a really great melee combat system. I think we'll see it soon.
I hope it can evolve. Assassin's Creed: Revelations - 6.0/10
Same bullshit as the previous 3 games. Fuck, I can't believe there's another 5 of these I've got to play just to catch up. Talk about oversaturated with gameplay that has well and truly gotten old by the time the third game was over. The only reason to keep playing is seeing how the main story arc goes and the visuals. But even this time the visuals lacked any set pieces and was usually just a maze of streets and buildings where you've got no idea where you are apart from following the waypoint. I guess the only reason people still buy these games and it hasn't bcome the joke that COD is, is because there aren't masses of imitators and Ubisoft buys all it's positive reviews. Also tried to play Painkiller: Recurring Evil, but quit after the second level because it's utter garbage made by people who don't have an announce of creativity in them. Currently download the proper sequel/remake though, so that might be better. Of course Steam says it needs a small update of only 10gb, that'll finish my monthly bandwidth off. shadow warrior 2:
-shit setting -shit voice acting of lo wang -the remake this game is a sequel of sucked so much balls pro: good violence and action, better than what was shown in doom4..... a lot better in fact. I hope the gun damage will not be as retarded as the shitty original remake (revolver not killing base human grunt with a shot to the head I probably won't play it because I really, REALLY, really fucking hated the first remake I just hope weapons are actually decent in the sequel, because compared to the fun-as-hell overpowered katana they sucked ass for the most part.
Looks like they might be doing a marketing push like they did with 3, where smaller devs released a Serious Sam RPG and sidescroller.
I haven't played games for along time and as I'm bloody old, I thought I would give the new Wolfie Oldie Bloodie a try.
Playing on wuss and I've still died a dozen times. Still, it looks quite pretty, and stabbing people in the neck with the pipes is kind of different. Just about to get the cable car down to the village (I think). Does it get any different from here on? Apart from myself and Mike, does anyone else play on easy? I quite often do these days, haha.
I find there's not much of a difference between between easy and normal anyway, easy actually isn't that easy and some games I struggle to see how a newbie gamer could possibly get through it. It's not like I'm a useless gamer. I often play on easy. I just want to see the content and the storyline. The combat is really just filler for me.
I often play on easy. I just want to see the content and the storyline. The combat is really just filler for me.
That's interesting, because I feel the opposite way. Modern games tend to be highly derivative and the "I've seen this all before in game X/Y/Z"-factor means that content alone rarely holds my interest. The only reason I'd play a game these days is if there's a meaty but satisfying challenge in there for me to get my chompers around. As a 3D artist, "seeing the content" means research to me as well as aesthetics.
I just don't play games for the challenge. I don't enjoy that kind of challenge. I play them for the experiences. Which I suppose is why I enjoy games like Fallout much more than COD. Heh, and I realize now that's probably why my Quake levels are usually dinged for lacking monsters
"Dear Marjorie,
So I caught the cable car and was so busy looking at the scenery that I got shot in the head by the nazi bastards in the other cable car. Was that really necessary, I wondered?" I liked the swooping fighter planes, I llked the scale of the vista, and I liked the first bit of cave work after I found my way out of the submerged cable car after it crashed (boy, can I hold my breath for a long time!) I had to stop playing after the first couple of flying things at the cave entrance as my tea was on the table. just started playing this (on PS4, free game this month)... actually having quite a bit of fun with it. The level design is excellent.
Indeed, looks rather good. TRON vibe without being anything like TRON? Pity they couldn't get the blinking cursor to sync with the kick drum though :)
Don't spend you first easy earnings of 20/30k credits on loadout cards or trading-up. Just don't. That huge boost soon ends. Save up for a merc or two instead. Equipment cases are dropped/earned frequently enough. Also worth noting is that any loadouts beyond Bronze are just cosmetic afaik - so don't panic too much if you see silver/gold/cobalt loadouts on other players.
Only put in 35+ hours myself so far. Mostly main Fragger and Aura. Saving up for Bushwhacker atm. Painkiller: Hell & Damnation - 6.0
Just a remake of the original game, hardly any different just better graphics, obviously. Some levels removed, some of which were shit, some not so much. A tonne of DLC levels but most were just bad. Average game, I think my memories of the original PK are a little rose tinted, by todays standards it's pretty average. Sniper Elite V2 - 6.0 Nowhere near as good as Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 despite much better critic reviews. Just an okay game, not triple A, hardly a sniper game as well. A sniper game shouldn't involve being a bullet sponge and countless enemies in every direction. Dear Esther - 6.0 About an hour of walking forwards listening to gibberish, but in some beautifully atmospheric and detailed levels. If only all games had this amount of detail. Reminds me a lot of New Zealand actually. Alas, it can hardly be considered a game, and there's plenty of mods that have had far more work put into them without commercialising it. Any of you play Binary Domain? I just got finished it. Pathetically crap start with shitty swimming and cliches, but the game gets better as it goes. It surprises me the amount of developers that don't understand you should start with a bang, if the worst parts of the game are the start, how do you expect players to continue? It's why artists jam all the singles into the first half of the album, or why movies always open with a big action or sex scene.
Although it also gets easier as it goes, so with the absolute plethora of bosses, the first one or two are probably the most difficult and the last one easiest. Also graphics are average. But great sci-fi robot future story, heaps (too many) custscenes, and once the guns get some upgrades it's very fun. 7.5/10 So... most times when I play a multiplayer FPS game these days, Dirty Bomb included, this is how I often feel... :(
I finished this.
Overall, I really liked it. The layout, the battles, the details were all great. But I felt a little let down by the ending. I hadn't realised that I was at the final boss-fight and simply sat in a doorway and blasted him with everything. He could not reach me and I not recall taking any damage throughout the whole scene. Even at the beginning of the end cut-scene I had still not realised that it was over - they were talking about a 'bigger' monster so I thought that there was another boss to come. And then they rolled the credits. Best design bits for me were the caves and tunnels. I also appreciated the detail in the workshops and kitchens. This was plain old 'kill everything' and don't think too much about strategy; nice. I might try another - is The New Order similar do you know? Just being picky, but if I am in a scene and I can see that I can jump down to somewhere or jump up to somewhere, I find it quite annoying that the mapper has clipped that area to stop me doing so. That even applied to getting behind some buildings where there was clearly enough space but I was clipped out.
If you don't want to me to go there don't make it 'look' as though I can. Other than that I can't fault the design of the sets. Saints Row: The Third - 8/10. I was really not looking forward to playing this, the first game was enough of a chore to get through. But SR3 is much better in most areas. Most notably it doesn't look like shit, you don't have to play through hours of retarded minigames, it's not far too long. It really does the overdone action game so well, the main character (for me a women in both games because I always play the chick if I have the choice) is the biggest badass female game character I can think of.
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier - 7/10 It's just battlefield but a bit more of a slow pace. More stealth, more sniping. And less fantastic visuals because a few of the levels look pretty average. The engine itself looks good though, but goddamn the thing has some issues. I've had to quit about 4 times just to recover memory because the framerate became unplayable. But overall fairly fun realistic fps in the usual modern war settings. Don't upgrade to Windows 10, honey.
Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts Games that come pre-installed on Windows 7 will be removed as part of installing the Windows 10 upgrade. An update for Ziggurat is out with new characters, perks, enemies and other things.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/308420/discussions/0/535152276586294216/ Ziggurat is fun to play... The mechanics are there for a decent authored game too. It would be super sweet if there was an editor. :)
Very nice free game:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/253030/ Simple game but nicely made unlocking upgrades as you go, chasing the sunset. Normally don't like infinite runner games, but this has a lot of charm. It was only free for yesterday! They were celebrating the iOS release by making the Steam version free for a day.
It was made by a friend of mine who I worked with at Raven. They have a world editor in the game! I made one with pink bunnies early in the game's life It's very nicely made, not my usual type of game but I'm quite liking it.
Looks like I saw the news late but still managed to d/l within the window of opportunity. problem with painkiller remake was less enemies and completely fucked hitboxes, making it a piece of shit.
I didn't care much about the missing levels Do you like Point and Click adventure games? Do you like gritty sci-fi? Do you like really creepy gritty sci-fi? Do you like stunning isometric visuals? Do you like Mark Morgan? If yes, then you'll love STASIS. I have completed the backer beta (took me 6 good hours) and I can't wait until the final game hits release at the end of the month.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/380150/ http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ is worth reading. About the lost spirit of the.original zelda game.
It's a long old read, so here's the tl:dr version:
"I liked thing as child. New thing isn't same as my nostalgic childhood memory of original thing, therefore it sucks". You're welcome. Dunno if point and click isometric adventures are my thing but that looks like it could convince me - very strong gritty style in the shots.
Very interesting stuff. Good on them. Also, lighting looks really good and the armour looks incredible.
not sure spending 1000s of hours on sword movement was the best choice of time given that the visuals of the game look decent, but certainly not the best of upcoming games. cryengine should be pretty capable.
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_D48PCFshHg/maxresdefault.jpg I won't say no to a new IP rpg though :D Looks more interesting than the gameplay... I get the impression they get stuck on realism, which should be a source of inspiration but not a limitation.
Not saying knights should be able to fly or leap tall buildings in a single bound, but the combat itself seems to be very static. The fighters just come together to whack each other after which they break apart. Compare the game's combat dynamism to this scene: https://youtu.be/7L8ByreRfUo?t=70 Granted, it's the opposite extreme - everyone makes sure to hit each other's sword as much as possible and the SFX guy is having a field day, but they're also moving around a hell of a lot more. It'd be cool to see them go a bit more gamey. And see some gore... Just got finished DX:HR. Not as good as I was expecting actually. Maybe I'm spoiled having just played Rage. Well actually I did play Alan Wake in between but didn't enjoy that much (6.5/10). But coming in to Deus Ex, the 4th highest rated game of 2011 after Skyrim (duh), Portal 2 (very, very overrated, I couldn't even be arsed to finish it) and Arkham City, I was kind of expecting it to look a little better than it did. Extreme post processing, making everything blurry and glowing to hide a lack of detail. Cramped alleyways, dull grey corridors, there were only a few moments of visual awe, mainly from skyboxes. Most of the skyboxes were bad, like you could see jpg compression all over them. Only the last mission had some sense of scale to it, the rest was just small cramped areas. Enough of Detroit already!!!
It was far from a sci-fi Assassin's Creed in visual standards, to be honest. Considering the game has a fairly small area (and loads between areas?!) it should have looked even better than AC or Arkham City. The combat was okay, once I unlocked the cloaking I enjoyed it more. Cloaking and double-melee takedowns were certainly the way to play. The guns were pretty useless, apart from the shotgun I never seemed to have ammo for anything anyway. I think I really only used the handgun for headshots and the shotgun for closeup, I took a tonne of ammo for my upgraded heavy rifle in for the boss battle, and all I got was 3 robots to take out? People go on about no boss battle in Rage, but at least what it did have was a challenge, the DX finale was not challenging at all. In fact the entire last mission of DX was piss easy, where's all the shit to shoot? By far, for me, the police station at the start was the hardest part because I fucked it up and had them all on alert. Oh and taking out the bartender then having an entire club of assholes trying to rape me in the toilets as I crouch in the corner with a shotgun. The story was decent, the stealth was kind of fun, and I don't normally like stealth much. But the cloak made it fun. I didn't like sometimes how you could kill 1 dude away from the others and suddenly the entire base is on alert. The hacking got annoying pretty quick, I eventually just found a wiki full of all the codes so I didn't have to do that anymore. It did rpg upgrades pretty well, but by the end all of what I needed I had, so I had about a dozen praxis kits with nothing to really use them on. Needed more upgrade options. 8/10? Almost 8.5/10, but not quite. I think if this game was named something other than Deus Ex, it wouldn't be as well received as it was. It's one of those games that if you like it, you're in the elite pc gamer club (COD being the opposite). Just my thoughts on it :D Made sense to play this after DXHR, since they're very similar styles. Syndicate clearly had better graphics and visuals, kind of wish DXHR was more on this level. Also the actual combat was more intense, more of a classic shooter.
Those breaching things could have been good but it really just felt tacked on and a bit half assed. It was easier just to run up and melee kill the enemies than wank around with breaching. Quite big battles at times where they stick you in a room and the enemies just keep on coming without much time for recovery. It can be relentless. Though I said fuck it to the final boss and didn't bother completing that. Where it went wrong was firstly being named Syndicate, since none of the fans wanted a generic console shooter. There was no story. It was very linear. The bloom and lighting. That bloom was so bad it was offensive, whoever thought it was a good idea to drown a game in so much lighting bloom should be fired. It almost ruins the game. There were times I couldn't even see the enemies because there was too much shit shining in my face. Worst lighting ever. But excusing that it looked nice, some of the levels I really liked, particularly the industrial part. Overall it felt kind of old skoolish with it's gameplay. 7.5/10 Oh I played Of Orcs and Men as well. 7/10. Nice visuals, good story and characters, as an rpg it was a bit basic and faaaar too linear and clipped. Combat also got tiring very quick. The first 1/5 of the game was easily the most difficult, with it getting easier as you level up.
Not as good as the developers last release Game of Thrones. Oh I played Of Orcs and Men as well. 7/10. Nice visuals, good story and characters, as an rpg it was a bit basic and faaaar too linear and clipped. Combat also got tiring very quick. The first 1/5 of the game was easily the most difficult, with it getting easier as you level up.
Not as good as the developers last release Game of Thrones. Mad Max
32 GB disk space required !!! This is getting out of hand. Fortunately, being based on a movie almost guarantees there will be no need to buy it :) For those who are interested, the Black Ops 3 PC beta is going on right now. Apparently if you already owned #2 you got in. I discovered it in my Steam account this morning, started the 13gb DL.
Thx Scarecrow I didn't know about that! Pretty sure I own Blops2, I'll look for it when I get home.
mad max game looks like poop next to the last movie... weak ass explosions and melee combat with people standing around and watching waiting for their turn.
graphics are too boring and ugly. mad max doesn't look like bane and doesn't look like mel. NNNNNNNNNEXT!!!! Viking: Battle for Asgard 5/10.
Fucking shit, I ragequit. Even with godmode and 1-hit kills on, I couldn't even hit anything or move because so many enemies were on screen hitting me at once interrupting my swings. I can't even block because it just goes into a constant blocking sequence. Eventually they'd all just whack me off a cliff. Infinitely spawning, of course. Complete utter shit. Nice idea and open areas for 2008 though. Transformers: Fall of Cybertron 8/10. High Moon certainly know how to make a good Transformers game. Their 2010 one was surprising great, their 2012 game is just as good. It's not a surprise they were brought in to help with COD and Destiny, they pull off some awesome set pieces and action sequences, and do sci-fi visual detail like not many other developers can. Chapter 3 where you're controlling the skyscraper sized Metroplex is one of those holy shit moments in gaming. Only problems are it's linearity, lack of keyboard reconfig and the story is all over the place as they try to get in as many playable characters as they can. Being a movie franchise game that usually has pretty shit titles probably didn't help the marketing. didn't realize this was coming out in Sept.
I hope the player character vo that was in the first trailer was simply for the trailer and wont be present in the game :/ I'm really looking forward to Routine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qj8g-bG_5c
Giants 2 anyone?? Presumably the pre-2000 graphics and detailing will be fixed. Giants was pretty damn fun, maybe this could work.... With the exception of quake map jams and the game I contracted on earlier this year, I have yet to purchase or play any game at all in 2015.
But I'm kind of intrigued by Dropsy. 2015 wasn't a good year for games, at least for me. I think the only games I bought that cost over $5 were Wolfenstein and Shadowrun Hong Kong, both of which I enjoyed.
I did buy a handful of older games from GOG that I'd been wanting to try, but couldn't really get interested in most of them. None were more than $3, so no problem. I sure hope Fallout 4 saves the year for me. Just the Steam games I've played and enjoyed this from this year:
Snakebird Axiom Verge Ori and The Blind Forest 868-HACK Crypt of the NecroDancer Cities: Skylines Kalimba Still Early Access, but own: Darkest Dungeon Besiege Not 2015, but I played them a lot this year: Hexcells Infinite Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (expansion in Oct!) Broken Age (The second half came out this year) Nuclear Throne (Early Access) Path of Exile (Got an expansion this year) (that's saying nothing of the tons of crazy amazing tiny/smaller games on itch.io or that have been made in game jams this year.)
And as far as big AAA games, I haven't played many this year, but the Witcher 3 was awesome.
Sure, all of the above, but I was commenting more on my slow disconnection from gaming, not on what 2015 has been like.
Because nothing comes out in the last quarter of the year.
I've been enjoying Blizzard's continued series of Diablo 3 patches, which I call "Oh God, Oh God, We're Sorry, You Were Right, We Were Wrong, Forget About Jay Wilson, He Can't Hurt You Anymore". Still nowhere near the original Diablo, but it's a lot more fun of a slashy action game than before. Star Wars is a BIT meh, but this looks like a superb representation of it. The style and vibes of the snow stuff is ace.
But... MP only can suck my dome inside out. That is all. Next! When I said 2015 wasn't a good year for games, I did qualify it by adding "at least for me".
There are some types of games I rarely even consider trying. Pretty much any 3rd person shooter/fighting game falls in that category, or any game that can be described as being "roguelike". Amnesia: The Dark Descent is free for the next 24hrs on Steam. Horror game, believe it was what started the current trend of first person horror games, and most weren't as good as it.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/57300/ Picked up the game after reading your post. I doubt I will play it through though, as I am usually too scared to finish horror games.
One of my favorite games ever.
Don't miss this one. But be warned, it's not for weak hearts. Cryostasis did the horror atmosphere quite well too, I actually remember that more than I remember Amnesia. But Amnesia had better gameplay.
Alan Wake has a good horror atmosphere too, and better gameplay than both, and doesn't feel like a budget indie game. I'm yet to find a survival/horror game I'd classify as great, though. I lost interest when I figured out that whenever a monster appeared you just stuck your head in a corner until it went away.
The original design docs for it had weapons in - I really hope they include guns in SOMA, I reckon they'd do a great job with them. I can imagine a situation where you fire your plasma rifle as a last resort and all hell breaks loose, enemies closing in from all sides and that was the only charge the weapon had... I would rather have minimal and ineffectual weaponry to fight back with in last resorts and carefully assessed situations, rather than no weaponry at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvOZEj6VaiE
Great footage, the 2nd go with Joe checking out all the animations, looks amazing, this is the PC game portrayal of the Warhammer world we've been waiting for!! i'm completely laid up with some kind of bronchial murderflu so I caved to a random impulse and bought Rimworld
it feels like a game about watering a houseplant and making sure it gets lots of sun and still watching it slowly turn yellow and lose colonists until you give up and chuck it I decided to be scummy on my last colony and kept hitting 'randomize' until I got a good spread of people with strong, non-overlapping skills and no useless nobles. when I landed them the game decided that one should be a 77 year old with dementia that made him prone to just going off his nut and wandering in the trees regularly, and another (the only one with medical or research skills) should be nearly blind in both eyes. \o/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/375950/
(also watering the snail that walks around the pot) (btw get well soon!) ...is currently free (On the house) on Origin for those that are interested. Grab it while you can.
Skacky posted the trailer and links from the Early Access shizzle, you lot approved, and now I'm the only one who's tried the full release??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFZVXG0g40Q Anyway, I like it. The context is generic, the story is meaningless, and the gameplay and missions are quite repetitive....BUT it looks good, the atmosphere is really nice, the music is good, it controls very well (restrictive camera aside) and the gameplay and squad management are well functional. It doesn't really captivate me but it is quite moreish. P.S. Never played Syndicate, no idea about any comparisons with that. Its great how they have to wear neon to infiltrate in that universe. If they wore nondescript clothing then they'd stand out like a sore thumb.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a story driven first person mystery/puzzle game.
I've played through it twice. First through the Unreal 3 engine where the game was fresh to me and then again through the Unreal 4 engine with the redux release (separate and stand alone.) In the second play through, I knew all the mechanics and game tasks. I liked it very much for the same reasons that everyone who likes it, liked it. The first communication the game makes to the player is that their hand is not held and they're essentially on their own with respect to what they do in the game world and with the game mechanics. I think this is fine for the first element (figuring out what to do in the game world) but a very, very bad and lazy choice for the second (you have to figure out the game mechanics.) Most of the mechanics are intuitive except for the ability to use your psychic vision to 'see' the location of items you need to complete some of the puzzles. If you're like me, you completely miss out on this function because you didn't notice it and end up doing those sort of grid/pixle hunts that are the worst part of traditional adventure games. If you're sort of lucky, you might stumble upon a 'vision' of the item by experimentation but then wonder why it doesn't always work. The exact use of this feature is shown in a 12 minute developer commentary video on YouTube which unfortunately spoils some of the game. If you're interested in the game and know very little about it, here's my spoiler-free gift to you. When you come upon the floating 'Investigate' text and after the parade of words go by, you are left with swirling words indicating the object name followed by a question mark (for example Scissors?). Keep the swirling text in view and slowly look about and turn until the swirling settles and when the word turns yellow this means you are pointed in the direction of the lost object. While the word is yellow (can't be white) activate the use key and you'll see through a psychic portal the object in situ - the view even orbits the object making it easy to locate. How many people do you think figured this out on their own and at what point in the game? TVoEC is really a great game but I lost out on some enjoyment due to a lack of knowledge on how all the mechanics worked. I think a simple tutorial (could be separate and disconnected from the main game) showing all the mechanics, which are not many, would serve both the player and the publisher because of more satisfaction. TVoET had a satisfying ending that wrapped things up completely. That said, I hope the developer, The Astronauts, create another such game which I know I would enjoy more knowing that the mystery would be in the game world and not in hidden gameplay mechanics. http://www.pulsarthegame.com/
accidently discovered this in steam store. Total Biscuit has released a whopping video on this game and it looks awesome -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5YkM5Gkz5w Very useful video that. Don't agree that the engine looks amazing, but the game itself looks like it works very well.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/dawn-of-darkness1
Anyone played through this ? Missed it somehow... I liked that one a lot. Much slower than your regular Quake, yet pretty atmospheric. Go for it if you're into Hexen and its sequel.
Now that I looked into it, that ModDB page offers an updated release which I never heard of until now. I was talking about the older release that is dubbed as Episode 1 on the same page. Must check the new one.
play hunters moon its q3 single player game on gzdoom engine (opengl zdoom)
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=30942 So, anyone else play this? I just spent 50 hours on it. I think it must have just got skipped with all the Skyrim jizzing, but between 2005-2012 I think it's as good as any other fantasy RPG release. Up with The Witcher 1+2, Dragon Age 1+2 and Two Worlds. I haven't played Skyrim though - need to wait for a couple weeks holiday for that.
Amalur definitely has the best combat of all those games, finally getting it right for an RPG instead of pausing turn-based rubbish. It's also long, I think something 120 side missions, and they're not fetch quests, there's only several of those. In fact there might be too many side quests, as I got to about 40 hours in I just decided I need ignore all sidequests, do the two DLC's, both of which were fantastic, then proceed with the last few main quests. So I probably skipped about 20 hours of sidequests and heaps of unexplored areas. The play area itself is huge, and proper sandbox where you could walk almost right to the end of the game from the beginning, except you'd get slaughtered. Tonnes of weapons/armour (too much). Also the levels and set pieces are awesome. Anyway it's not perfect, the main story is completely forgettable. I didn't even know wtf was going on half the time. It doesn't have the character depth of Dragon Age. Also you'll probably end up just spamming the same few special abilities. I played a sorceror for once instead of tank, which was fun. The game kind of lets you split between play types so I was 50/50 mage/warrior. Oh the final battle was probably pretty easy, easiest boss in the game. 9/10 is apparently a game about cooking for a familiar looking dark lord:
https://twitter.com/brandonnn/status/649447517093015552 Monsters/graphics look great, but the big empty infinite void (ie lack of level design) is a big turn off for me.
Maybe there is something a bit Quakey about the visuals, but gameplay-wise I'm not really seeing it - looks more like a first-person bullet hell or something.
I would love that soundtrack in a Quake level though. Yeah it does look like a first person bullet hell. You never know what might happen with the development. Also, I thought I would despise Ziggurat but I put a lot of hours into the game and had a ton of fun. We'll see how it turns out.
has more of a doom feel than a quake feel. But i agree, i would like to see that gameplay put into actual levels (even though they would probably need to be very open in style to support the horde style of gameplay.
I just tried to run my old Escape From Butcher's Bay on Windows 7 64 bits. It crashed after the initial credits screen. Tried to patch it to 1.1, it says "old file not found". I was hoping to mod it using Ogier. This game is very close to what I wanted for a project.
czg Does your workmates know how to solve it? I'm really pushing my memory here but I had the original Butcher Bay on my Vista machine and had to do something special to get it to work. I had a legit copy on disk but I think I ended up getting a no-CD crack executable because of SecoROM compatibility issues.
I later bought the Riddick combo on disk which has both Butcher Bay and Escape from Athena. I put it on a Win 7 X64 machine and it ran. It claimed a graphics update but I thought the older version looked better. Yes, my copy is an original 5 CD from ~2005, that's why it doesn't work. Nobody seem to be selling it anymore. The Athena game is US$14 and dollar is too expensive right now for me.
Just out of curiosity, whats the gain in building mods for games that no one on the planet has installed anymore? It's just a lot of work for no one to play.
Wasn't gonna say anything myself, but I thought it looked terrible. Minimalist is something, but completely empty void is just lazy.
The gain is make my game a total conversion of an already tried and true starting point. Also, what about other planets?
A standalone version would work. But the requirement of having whatever pre 2005 game you pick that doesn't have any community behind it, means you could spends 100s of hours creating something that maybe 10 people will play.
Lol, almost exactly what I thought when I read that. Though for me and Quake mapping it's probably more like 1000s of hours and 100 people.
If anyone wonders why you map/mod for [old game] really your answer should be this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaqxAEx46Zk Otherwise, lol. Riddick EFBB was very close to what I planned for my game. Amran's topic about Ogier editor made me take another look at that game and consider modding it. But it does look abandoned, unfortunately. That's a shame.
How many downloads do the most popular Q1 releases get these days? Does it get to over 100? I remember even 15 years ago it might have only been a few hundred, but if it was a really popular bigger release it could break into 1000-2000. Like a top episode/mod.
I must admit, I haven't even played quake myself in probably a year. Shit just builds up in my "to play" folder and I'll get through it all sometime. But triple A games are just getting too pretty. Speaking of which Darksiders II..... So I just got finished playing Darksiders II, which was a real slog in the end, it's too long. Enough with the puzzles, enough with every battle having 1 mini-boss, then another 2 mini-bosses, then a medium-boss... all with no checkpoints. Then you step into another room and oh it's time for the proper boss boss.
But the point I wanted to make is the game is pretty, and I found myself thinking many times that if Quake was remade as a late prev-gen game ie. 2012, this is probably what it would look like. It has the dark, hellish gothic land down pretty well, huge epic structures. Only the wizard and metal themes aren't so strong. But hell, gothic, medieval, it's pretty much Quake. 7/10 The Darksiders art style just
Mapjam6 was downloaded from Quaddicted around 160 times in August+September. However, this isn't a clear indicator, since the file linked to in the original release thread is hosted on Quaketastic and should have generated far more downloads in the same time span.
I'm sure Spirit can offer more insight and better examples. Did you play the sequel too Warren? That looked even better. Maybe the first half wasn't so Quakey in the forge, that was a bit fantasy islandy, but the later levels once shit got dark, like Samael's fortress, that was wicked.
Kona - I primarily played the second one, sorry. BUt it's all basically the same art style.
There's also the new game, Battle Chasers, that was Kickstarted that has a lot of the same team and art style going for it... http://www.gog.com/game/sublevel_zero
http://store.steampowered.com/app/327880 Sublevel Zero is a a six-degrees-of-freedom shooter with roguelike elements. It is inspired by Descent in several ways. Check out a gameplay stream with a dev guest from the GOG Twitch channel at http://twitch.tv/gogcom (No direct VOD link yet, since the stream is going on at the time I post this.) already bought it. It's nice, very much like descent.
difficulty spikes pretty steep after the first level. http://www.twitch.tv/gogcom/v/19713407
It's about two hours of gameplay and chatting with the developer. That's kinda long, but you can just listen to the talk once you've seen how the game looks and plays like. I linked this here for people who are interested in the indie game development aspect. I don't know if they're going to highlight the recording and keep it for later. If not, it'll be gone after a couple of weeks. I am also playing this (about 70% done I think). As Warren says above, love the art style. Game is also decent fun but gameplay itself is nothing that special.
Just finished SOMA, 13 hours although I suspect most people will do it in less. It's a pretty captivating 13 hours though. Runs out of steam a bit at the end and the two main plotlines don't seem to relate much to each other (anyone whose played it care to elaborate on WAU vs ARK (with spoiler warnings)??) BUT aside from that it's really good throughout. Atmosphere, gfx and sound are top notch, it's very vibey especially underwater, and the story is fairly gripping.
From what I can gather the Wau was just another attempt at preserving humanity - a parallel project to the Ark. The undead scientist intended it to keep people alive, but the criteria for 'life' as seen by the Wau was stupidly open ended, resulting in the monsters you're escaping from the entire time plus all those gigery people/machine mashups on the bunks towards the end. That was what it did to healthy people to keep them alive without food, whilst the monsters were partially recovered people with only fragments of organic, or wholly machine parts to work with - or just scans it stole from the pilot seats / black boxes. Which is why the dead scientist ultimately wanted to destroy it. Although wanting to then kill you and then him getting mashed by that worm thing was hammy and pointless.
That's my interpretation anyway. I enjoyed the story but found the gameplay very patchy. Lots of level design was really poorly done; far too many case of 'wait until monster looks over there'. There was pathing that id1 has better. Also lots of dead ends without any real point to them. The infamous sunken ship sequence for example - it's almost like it wasn't playtested. The monster would teleport around when it got stuck, often glitching you to death. The way forward in one bit was a ladder you could easily walk past to hit a series of dead ends. There was a dead end beyond the reactor area for no other reason than to confuse you. If someone posted that map layout here we'd consider it a beginner's effort. BUT! Despite all my gripes I'm glad I paid full price instead of waiting for the inevitable Halloween price drop. The story and ambiance are great and I want to see them continue making games. In terms of narrative in games they made most AAA titles look idiotic. I read the top user review on Steam, which seems to spoil major plot details in the second paragraph. Serves me right I guess, but argh...
So, don't read any steam user reviews of SOMA! I watched half of Daz's stream and then bought it - kicking myself the whole time for watching so much X(
<spoilers>
I got that much about the WAU, yeah. But... Who was the dead scientist? Is he actually physically real? Why did he in particular want the WAU dead? Surely if the remains of humanity are getting ARKed into orbit, it's fair enough to leave Pathos II to the WAU? Why does the choice of killing / not killing the WAU have no effect on the remainder of the game nor the ending? (This is one of my main criticisms with the ending, yes I did play it both ways and nothing changes). Why does Simon not realise that there will be "two" of him once he transfers to the ARK? Why does Catherine not give him an option to suicide tied into the launch switch? (This is my other more minor gripe with the ending, it could have been given a bit more depth). How is the guy in Delta who went crazy tied into the WAU and stuff? </spoilers> To me it felt like there were two concurrent plots going on: Simon waking up on Pathos II, discovering Catherine and what had happened to the global world, and trying to help with the ARK, AND then the story of what had happened to the base, the disaster that befell it in particular, and the mess the WAU had created. And those two plots didn't really conjoin meaningfully at the end as I expected... Having said all that, the other 95% of the game I really enjoyed, I didn't have any problem with the sunken ship, I thought that bit was quite gripping (I like the escher-esque stairs) and actually had me shaking a bit as I finally escaped the WAU creature. I've seen people critising the slow and linear underwater sections, I thought they were a highlight of the game, beautiful and mesmerising. It is fair to say it's not really a game and there's not really much gameplay. It is an interactive movie game that I usually decry, but that's usually because it's shallow generic toss like Call Of Wankfare 18. In this case as you say the narrative and themes piss all over most other games, to me it felt like a slow, dark sci-fi film with me being in control of the protagonist. I also thought the technical aspects of the game (graphics, sound, and physical design) worked pretty flawlessly to create the atmosphere. I often get slagged off for being a GFX whore with modern games, but this is a good example of why modern GFX can make a difference. The dead scientist was the guy who led the Wau research effort, I think. It seems that when he went into the trench and saw how the Wau was mutating the creatures he decided to kill it.
The scientist being real or not... my theory is he was a ghost. Not in the traditional sense, but something more like an afterimage stored on the various base servers which can project itself into what passes for Simon's brain. This came to mind because the containment tank was physically empty and just had those Fight Club style technicolour flashes while you explore the base. I was disappointed that there wasn't a further reveal that he'd somehow latched onto to either Simon or Catherine's hardware in order to journey into the trench. As to killing the Wau or not; there are lots of other decisions which had no impact on the game - do you delete the copy of yourself? Or kill Simon2 before he wakes up to realise he's been abandoned? Even the multiple choice questions about your experience. I don't mind these so much though, they add a bit of depth to the game and make you engage with what is going on in a different way. For example - deleting your file could have affected if you'd even be able to get a copy on the Ark, and then maybe Catherine would survive (cos why not). Killing Simon2, or not, could have had you do some solo coop activity later on to unlock an area so that Simon3 could continue in an easier way or even allow you to sacrifice Simon2 so that 3 can get past a monster without having to do something more complicated. Not killing the Wau could have been a major deal on the rest of the play - if you kill it, no more monsters, but the base systems begin to die. These branches in the story could have been awesome, but would probably have delayed production another year. The main character was pretty dumb overall. His whining about the situation was constant (although to be fair, he's on the bottom of the sea and surrounded by monsters). He's so well acted and written though that I suspect that he was willfully not understanding that each time he went to a new body it was a copy. The Ark/Wau story overall I liked. Both projects were intended to save humanity, but both fail. Then through the malfunction of the Wau project, Simon is produced and the Ark project eventually succeeds. I've criticized the game a lot for its play. But if it was bad then I wouldn't bother. With a few small tweaks it could have been much more potent an experience. Then again, most people tell me I'm missing the point and it's an interactive story, not a game. But I'm still not convinced the two are mutually exclusive. Simon's other micro-decisions only either affected "him" or a singular entity in the world. The WAU decision implied that it would affect a lot more (i.e. the gameworld as a whole), and it would have been nice to see some evidence of that.
I liked his panicked rant at the end. Also some of Catherine's chat cracked me up, she seemed all too comfortable with her situation. Religion wasn't mentioned in the story, probably because it's a bad idea to go around kicking wasps nest, but I bet Catherine was a Buddhist.
The Buddhists I know are all annoyingly calm and unfazed by anything, and my reaction to their calm demeanor probably sounds a lot like Simon's rant sometimes XD While bathurst was on I went through and made a list of all the 2013 games I'll play. If anyone is interested, in case you missed something, here's the list: www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/2013toplay.htm
These are all freelook games, no isometric top-down stuff. They're all action games, or survival, adventure, stealth etc but they all pretty much fall under action. No racing, sims, strategy, oh there probably are a couple of platformers but only very good ones. And they're all single player. Metacritic pc rank next to each one. There's not really any puzzle adventures in there yet, I'll do those later, plus work out if any mmo is worth playing that year. Of the list itself, 2013 was a decent year actually. Just as much to play in 2013 as 2012, though the indie games are growing in volume, they're not at an AAA level yet. Quite excited to play Rise of the Triad, I didn't even realise that had a remake. There's a massive lack of rpg's though, particularly fantasy rpgs. There's none. Every year prior usually at least a couple good ones. At the top of the ranking Bioshock 3 will be good, the rest not so much. I don't care much for GTA or Asscreed or the 90s looking indie adventures like Gone Home or The Stanley Parable. Definitely doesn't have the great releases 2012 had. So this got such a high ranking from media because it was made by Rockstar, and everyone will spooge their pants over a Rockstar game because of GTA, much like they do with Bungie. or maybe the publisher buys reviews I don't know.
It's just a standard third person cover shooter. Bullet-time is reduced to being a waste of time and you're better off going into cover and doing the bobble head thing. Diving with bullet time is ludicrous as you flap around on the floor like a fish trying to get back up. The enemies are bullet sponges that require headshots, but that's okay with a mouse. Not sure how consolers would have done it. Story is good, graphics and art is great, although it is extremely linear. The Favela levels were fantastic, visually. Not quite as exciting as when COD did the Favelas, but close. Combat is really no different from any other third person cover shooter that ranks in the 70's/100. EXCEPT MP3 has goddam unskippable cutscenes every 20 secs. I can't even open a door on my own without a cutscene doing it for me. Then it countlessly puts me into said room, with door locked shut, and I'm behind the flimsiest cover it could find with either my guns all taken off me except the handgun, or I've still got my guns but it's the handgun equipped. The end of the game was seriously stupid as every 30sec cutscene would put me back to the handgun which had no ammo because no enemies carried handguns! I ragequit the last level. Watching the moron Max idiotically diving around while getting shot to pieces and not going into cover when I pressed the cover key was enough for me... perhaps 1 chapter too long. 7.5/10 In the last few months I've bought several good games I haven't played in years and some old, but new to me, games cheaply enough to not feel bad if/when I don't like them.
Today's purchase (less than $10): F.E.A.R. Dungeon Keeper UT 2004 Gemini Rue is a decent enough service and the games are reasonably priced. However I prefer the features that steam has and the steam releases tend to be less reliant on DOS Box (which I hate with a vengeance).
Is there some other way to run really old DOS games on Windows 7 or newer without DOS Box?
It seems much better than actually running DOS with special boot disks just for games like we did back in the early 90s. One thing I don't like about GOG is their install program brings a bit too much junk with it. I'd much rather just have a zip file I could unpack and run. I don't like stuff mucking around in the registry for no reason, so with GOG I usually create a restore point then just revert after installing the game. Followed by cleaning the unnecessary crap out of the game folder. Steam smells just a little too much like spyware to me, I keep it shut down as much as possible. An interesting fact is that many games sold on Steam don't actually need it to run. The new Shadowrun series and Fallout 3 for example. what junk? i thought it was basically a self extracting zip file.
what registry keys are being added other than the ones that the game originally required to run? It varies from game to game. I couldn't tell you exactly because I move stuff out of the games folder a few files at a time and check if it still runs. Once I get it down to the minimum number of files, I delete all the unnecessary stuff.
It's not that it's a lot of stuff really, maybe 10-15 files. The GoG uninstaller, some icons, a zip file with jpegs (probably used by the uninstaller), That kind of stuff. I really don't have much need for an uninstaller. Usually gameuxinstallhelper.dll is included. It has something to do with Games for Windows I think, useless to me. Part of why this stuff irritates me is that I reinstall Windows frequently and I prefer things to more or less run from whatever folder on whatever drive I put them and not be tied to a particular Windows install. Games that put their saves in weird locations really annoy me. http://store.steampowered.com/app/360950/
Descent 1, 2 and 3 really captivated my imagination as a kid, they're still compelling, really. This could be sweet That has got to be the cheesiest trailer I've seen in a looooong time.
ALPHA ZULU VICTOR COME AROUND ON HIS 6 AND BREAK COVER ON MY GO. IMMA SPRAY MILITARY LINGO IN YOUR FACE EVEN THO I SOUND LIKE A 12 YEAR OLD. BUY MY GAME! Descent is cool. This trailer wasn't :( Well that's not quite fair. It's capable of doing cool things but the level of skill required seemed much higher and not worth the effort.
Was Descent's tech mostly 'you can make cube portals, and attach them to other cube portals, and only X can be seen at once' or something like that? Never seen an editor for the game, just remember reading once that it was a very basic portal rendering engine, which is how it did '3d' while really still only being a bunch of 2D shapes data-wise.
I don't know about portals, but all levels were made of 6-sided cubic volumes, joined by empty coincident faces, which I guess were treated as portals. They could be skewed, tapered, and twisted however you wanted, but your only option was to add a cube. Not many hexagonal rooms in Descent.
It was very much 3D, though, there were no 2.5D shenanigans. Nice, only looks like a 10 year old game now. At least the environments have some sort of theme and interest, but Unreal 4 tech my ARSE.
Just because it's UE4 does not mean it has to look like a modern game. That's just the tools that they used to get the job done.
I think he means since it's UE4 it should probably look better than it does. Seriously, UE4 does most of the heavy lifting
I hope the game will have sweet credits music so I can pour a bowl of cheerios and rock out in my whitey tighties at my desk...
For those watching DaZ stream Rebel Galaxy and want to listen to the awesome soundtrack outside the game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSkh6g5ksvc I'm not real sure how I managed to overlook it when it came out. I guess I was too much into LotRO at that time. As a $2.49 GoG special it was certainly money well spent.
It's not a short game at all, I probably took 50-60 hours to complete it. I know a few times I was at it 8 hours or more non-stop and it never crashed once. Very weird story, even after finishing it I only halfway understand what was going on. Good fun though, and entertaining. It does store its saved games in a weird place. Why do so many games do that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yljd3M1bTLk
Mad Max meets Rage meets Riddick? Style and GFX look amazing. Combat looks meh. Thoughts? https://community.treyarch.com/community/treyarch/blog/2015/11/02/modding-mapping-tools-coming-to-black-ops-3-pc-in-2016
Modding tools for BlOps3 next spring. http://www.gog.com/promo/fall_sale_classic_shooters_bundle_51115
There's a 48-hour sale of "Bethesda shooters," which are the classic Id games from Wolfenstein 3D to the 2002 Return to Castle Wolfenstein; including Doom I, II and Final Doom; and Quake I, II and III. The individual games in the bundle are also on sale for some time. I posted this here in case anyone wants to pass the info on, and not so much thinking anyone here doesn't already own the ones they want to own. The way GOG packages some of these games for installation is not ideal, but you can always inform people about the freely available engine source ports and such things. At least GOG doesn't do DRM. It pains me that they call several id games and one Gray Matter/Nerve game created and released over a decade before the Zenimax acquisition "Bethesda Shooters".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EgQtRRAF8M&t=76 Jumps to the beginning of the interesting bits. The guy is hyperbolic and obnoxious, but this is a cool map, at least in a neato skybox sort of way. Ever since Prey I've desperately wanted to work on a gravity-flipping multiplayer game (CoD + Prey gravity shit basically), and for a second I thought you would be able to run up the walls. Somewhat disappointed, but Blops 3 pre-loading :)~ Had a blast with the open beta, first CoD game I've been excited to play since like MW2 or the original Blops.
For all we know, the map might flip at some point. Ghosts and AW both had major map changes in response to player behaviors or time. He just wandered around for a minute with no one else there.
It feels like COD is tired of COD and wants to do something else. Zombies, flying islands, exo-suits, etc. :P Doesn't it?
If that's the case it got tired of itself back in CoD2/3. 4 changed the setting, introduced perks and streaks. 5 introduced zombies, 6 exploded the customization. 7 added bots, theater mode, and lots of gadgets. 8 added player archetypes that changed your reward systems. 9 added a 16 possible endings campaign (4x4 results) and revised the class creation system and the scoring loop. 10 experimented with a rather different resource allocation structure, had space combat, and a lot of different level changing events in the multiplayer. 11 added sci-fi weapons, special abilities, air dashing (which could make for some very wide spectrum gun fights as if you used it well, you could repeatedly significantly relocate in any direction during one fight). 12 kept the verticality of 11 but emphasizes flanking with the wall running, adds player characters with special abilities and weapons to the mp, and adds a New Game+ that tells a different story in a different theme from the base campaign.
They change it a lot, every time. But people see iron sights and bullets, so they consider it identical. But there is a reason people prefer one particular CoD to another, and why they do check out the latest: Because they are different. They've always been different. The most similar ones are 4 and 5. And that was when zombies were added. And that's enough. I see it's been spat out today, that is some cause for non-celebration and mild dismay, followed by getting back to worthwhile games.
4 gets a ton of praise. I personally think it's one of the weakest entries. They relied on the setting change to carry the campaign, so only the multiplayer had mechanic shifts. Curiously it seems to be the exception for most people who vocally dislike the franchise.
Can we just declare 'Hunters Moon' to be a spammer at this point? No one is interested in this shitty Q3 mod.
The mix of nearly impossible to kill boss fights and nearly impossible to die vehicle missions was ridiculous. Some of the boss fights had so much stuff going on that they became completely random, and the regenerating health in the vehicle missions made those missions incredibly easy.
Also, the on-rails mission where we gotta destroy a lot of turrets while the vehicle incessantly shakes and turns around to make it impossible for us to aim made me just give up and enable god mode. That point gave me so much rage I'd like to strangle and punch the vehicle's driver and tell him to stop the vehicle so I can aim. In practice, our own driver was the real enemy in that mission. Also the running speed is slower than Quake 1's walking speed, and the ending was poor. But at least the stroggfication scene was awesome. Quake 4 would have been perfect if it wasn't for these problems. There's a lot of great stuff in the game. Already declared as a troll, but yeah has earnt spammer too. Mostly on the count of the gameplay videos being so dire that they are just as irrelevant to this forum as Gucci handbags and fake Rolexes...
"Hunter's Moon is the fake Louis Vuitton handbag of mods - made by 12-year olds in a basement from stolen materials, it might look like a game from a distance but as soon as you put it under any sort of scrutiny it just falls apart at the seams."
It's been years since I played it, but from what I remember I'd have to agree about the vehicle on rails levels. Probably the boss fights too. I probably went god-mode for those after a couple of attempts, but then I pretty much dislike all boss fights for being too tedious.
In between all that, I remember it as being pretty good. I still have it in my Games folder, maybe I should give it another play sometime. They've made some very odd decisions with those graphics. The cryobeds are the strangest thing of all. The originals were flat textures that were clearly trying to represent some sort of tube/tunnel that you would lie down in, but it seems like the artist in the remake thought it was just supposed to be some sort of flat circular mesh/window thing?
I'll stick to the original thank you!
Now I might be interested if someone remade System Shock 2 if maybe it vaguely looked like this fan made short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEQReLZJXJQ Like 2004 graphical quality with 1994 design quality??
Not a strong look in this day and age. They've made some very odd decisions with those graphics. The cryobeds are the strangest thing of all. The originals were flat textures that were clearly trying to represent some sort of tube/tunnel that you would lie down in, but it seems like the artist in the remake thought it was just supposed to be some sort of flat circular mesh/window thing?
Wow. To try to remake the textures so accurately and then misinterpreting them so fundamentally is both hilarious and quite sad :/ I was looking for a video of the first level to show OTP that in context the idea that it's a stained glass window is ridiculous. I couldn't find a video that didn't also have the intro cutscene so I settle down to watch it, and it turns out it is some sort of stained-glassy-window-terminal thing afterall:
https://youtu.be/Jffl4PNT8JY?t=99 I still don't like the new graphics though. :P A HD texture pack with neon lighting!
I hope they also reduce the amount of reading you have to do and add microtransactions so that you can pay a bit extra to skip the boring walking around and jump ahead to the action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gw9fJGKvcc
It's like the worst thing ever, but worse. 3rd person rocket arena with classes - I'd rather play a paint-drying sim. kinda reminds me of Gigantic.
Paragon looks ok... but then again I said that about Doom 4 originally and look how thats turned out.
The third person aspect really puts me off.
The visuals look pretty clean though, as usual. Of all these new multiplayer MOBA games, Overwatch still seems like the best of the lot. Yes do look very nice. A good engine wasted, yet again.
The current MOBA / team-DM trend can suck my balls. Who is actually going to play all these things (OW, GG, BB etc)?? Considering I spent a couple hundred hours playing Team Fortress 2, I could definitely see myself getting into one of these if they are any good. Definitely want to take Overwatch for a spin for now, as it's FPS.
Yeah, who is going to be playing more than one tho?? There seems to be a real glut of games that I'd expect players to be dedicated to just one of them....
It's the usual follow the leader thing
players would one day have to do a Zerstoerer with one of Tronyn's maps and sacrifice themselves.
Yeah. Which is kinda understandable with games that people might buy more than one of, i.e. SP games that you'll play for 20 hours and then move on, or simple DM games that you'll dick around in for 20 hours and then move on. But for timesink / skill-developing games, it seems a weird thing to saturate the market with. It happened with MMOs, were any of them at all successful apart from WOW and Guild Wars?? It happened with semi-real war shooters, did anyone play anything apart from Battlefield and COD??
People will play Overwatch because it's been the most spammed, maybe dabble in one more of the others as well, and the rest will sink without trace. Probably. Every developer believes that THEIR timesink skill developing game is gonna be the one that develops an unshakeable following that they can turn into a hat store six years down the road.
Someone made the great point once that Blizzard has never been an innovator, just a great executor. Warcraft didn't invent RTS games, Everquest had been out long before WoW, and Diablo wasn't the first dungeon crawler. They just polished the shit out of their versions of existing genres. Something great can still emerge from all these "follow the leader" games.
Now that it's getting closer to xmas hopefully I can play some more games. Starting with Assassin's Creed 3. Yay another Ass Creed game, more of the same. The story is probably the best yet though. It had more direction... you have your 5 bad guys from the beginning. More emotion. Despite Connor being an ugly tool. Whereas previous games you sort of just went aimlessly from one bad dude to the next, with the plot going it random directions with random characters, till shit wraps up.
Well the last game involving both Altair and Ezio was pretty good, I suppose. Gameplay was more of the same. Not enough combat, too many cutscenes. I feel like the series gets easier with each game (which is good because the first game was far too hard). This one is a bit dumbed down. Not much to do other than the main linear storyline. I didn't do any levelling, no assassin training, no purchasing zones or take overs. No rooftop climbing at all, there's no point since you get raped straight away whereas walking the streets is fine. It was just the main plot really. So probably weaker gameplay and less to do, but I didn't mind because I'm really only playing it for the story and visuals, certainly not it's crappy gameplay. Speaking of visuals, they're starting to look a bit dated in this game. Not the best for 2012, but not bad either. Kind of cool setting, although I really don't give a flying fuck about American civil wars watching dickheads all standing in a line getting shot. Right so that's 5 Ass Creed games down... 5 to go. I don't see how they can possibly drag this story out for another 5 games+. Juno's out... time to save the world... why would we return to the animus? More pointless random artifacts to find I suppose. System Shock 3 has been revealed as well as a System Shock remake by a separate developer.
There are people from the long defunct Looking Glass Studios working on SS3. That would be amazing if Ken Levine was working on it too. After the surprisingly disappointing Bioshock Infinite, I would love to see Ken return to his roots and revisit the System Shock universe. Please, PLEASE don't suck. You can have Doom 4, just give me System Shock! Well that's cool. I hope it is done in a modern engine, with as much true-to-SS atmosphere they can cram in. I never actually played SS but I like the idea of it.
They should mention in that reveal article that the piece of turd screenshit is from the SS remake... i enjoyed it more than portal 2. story was more engaging, lasted longer, level design was usually pretty good, but a few levels definitely felt phoned in. overall, well worth the sale price (15 CAD) i paid for it.
Yeah, I thought it was one of the best games of last year... likely will grab the expansion after christmas.
new XCOM 2 trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0qHZG1-rEg
RPS Preview : http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/12/10/xcom-2-preview/
60 Mins of xcom2 gameplay on youtube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwHPhQXavPA Xcom 2 hands on with Beaglerush : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9vG-N0ILB0 part 2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT_0gsOmsQE The game named "Giants: Citizen Kabuto" is free for grab today at "http://www.gog.com/game/giants_citizen_kabuto"!
So, before the offer expires, get it while you can! Video intro to the game:"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvxDF83apCQ" It's DRM free, though you do need a GOG account (registration is free) to do the claiming. Also, these days, at "https://www.origin.com/en-nl/store/free-games/on-the-house", you can get a free copy of "Jade Empire". Same story with regard to account registration, Origin in this case. Thanks for the heads up.
I went to GoG to get the freebie and saw they also had the STALKER series on special (at a pretty low price for once), so I got that while I was there. And then added TIE Fighter for $5. Plenty more good stuff on sale there, but those should keep me busy until next year. Inspired by classic arcade games and 1990s First Person Shooters. Devil Daggers is a fast-paced shooter that pits you against hordes of demons as you struggle to survive as long as you can. Compete for precious seconds with friends or global leaderboards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50-OT83O9qY Art and sound are absolutely incredible! However, at the end of the day it's a score attack game with no level design :( Ah yes.
"Just like playing* those oldskool** 90s FPS games*** that you loved!" *disclaimer: gameplay may not necessarily take place in actual environments. **disclaimer: "oldskool" is taken in this instance to just mean pixellated textures and low-resolution display. ***disclaimer: "game" may actually be mostly procedurally generated. it's a bit of a shame that it's so basic. Such lovely enemy design is really crying out for some good level design.
It wouldn't surprise me if it was another rogue-like style game and the levels are fitted together like ziggurat from preselected rooms. Post yours...
(In approx order) Hopefully next year... Dishonoured 2 XCom 2 Deus Ex Mankind Divided Doom 4 a patched version of Mordheim (if it fixes AI, balance, etc) Total Warhammer Battlefleet Gothic Armada Rise Of The Tomb Raider In the far future... Cyberpunk 2077 Battletech game Dreadnoughts (if single player) (very unhyped for Battleborn, Overwatch, Paragon and anything else like that) ah shamb if you've got time to research all these upcoming games and remember them (the only one in that list I know anything about is d4) then you may be missing out on some good current games.
for instance, my next play is going to be Ride to Hell: Retribution, scored an impressive 16% on metacritic. screenshots look good so it can't be missed :D I quite like playing some of the shitty budget action games because they're all short. the longer 20+hr RPG AAA's just take a bit too much out of your everyday life to get through. Amount of research varies between zero and not very much.
Part of the reason for posting on here is to get others to research for me ;) My most played during the last few years were DX:HR, Dishonored, Tomb Raider 2013, and XCom.
The sequels to those will be what I'm waiting for. I did play Fallout 3 and New Vegas a lot also. I wonder if it has a first person view (other pic tends to suggest 3rd person.) Pics look great and compelling. I've buried a lot of time into Fallout 3 so Shambler's link really interested me.
All of their other games were 3rd person, so this one is most likely going to be the same. IMO better than 1st person for games like this.
So anyway it's the Christmas season which means I can usually find some time to play a game or two that I've been meaning to for a while. Next on the list was Diablo 3 (PC). I dabbled in Diablo 2 a few years back and liked it, although I only played a little into Act 2, so I'm nowhere near being one of these min-maxing poopsockers that the game seems designed to cater for.
Anyway, so playing Diablo 3, I'm sort of most of the way through Act 1 thinking "this is a bit easy" as I'm basically just walking through one-shotting pretty much everything. I don't need to use any attack or ability other than my secondary attack and the mana bar seems to refill itself faster than I can actually deplete it. A quick google assures me that this is actually quite normal and at some point during Act 2 I should expect to start to take damage. Okaaaayyyy.... So I keep playing and start ploughing through Act 2 in much the same way. The game is not getting harder, but actually easier and easier, so I google again and learn that I can increase the difficulty level. I increase the difficulty to the highest it will allow me to ("expert" apparently) and continue playing. No difference. Still instagibbing virtually every enemy that appears, even those yellow-aura boss-type chaps that show up even now and then. So I'm starting to think that early on I stumbled into a brutal positive feedback loop where I picked up some decent gear which allowed me to kill stuff better, which levelled me up faster, which allowed me to kill even faster, which levelled me up even faster etc etc, so my player's power trajectory is on a much steeper gradient than the game's, if you get what I'm saying. For a moment I considered purposely gimping myself by wearing shit gear, using crap skills and whatnot but then realised that would pretty much make the entire game pointless (i.e. without the mechanics of getting constantly better gear, there isn't really much of a game). I'm not sure when it occured to me, but I realised at some point that every boss, even the act end bosses, were instagibbing as soon as they appeared, without me actually attacking them. Before, I was under the impression that my player was doing insane damage with the secondary attack - and that was true; the damage was insane - but there also seemed to be something else at work here. Sure enough, every boss would instantly explode the second it became vulnerable to damage, without me even needing to touch it or attack in in any way. Narrowing down what was doing this, I found that the culprit was a ring that dropped somewhere in Act 1 called the Nagelring. This ring caused up to four little goblin creatures to follow you around and act as little suicide bombers, running up to enemies and exploding. I had to go into the Diablo Wiki to even figure out what damage they were doing and it turns out that each goblin (and there are up to four of these at any one time remember) - I shit you not - explodes dealing 10,000% the damage that your character does. So that's why I finished the game in a few short hours instagibbing every boss including fucking Diablo himself. Also my character was doing mad damage even without those suicide bombers, but whatever. I guess what I'm saying is: why the fuck does a ring like that even exist and why does it drop in Act 1? Even if you chopped a zero off the end of the damage amount it would still probably be an instant "win the game" button, except it's not even a button because you don't even have to consciously press it, it's just active all the time. This game is stupid as shit. diablo 3 lives in adventure mode: nephalem rifts, greater rifts, bounties, etc. all in torment x and higher difficulties. store mode is boring ;)
we can rift together if you will, my id is vondur#2148. hahaha, the fucking nagelring is crazy. the fact that it dropped for you so early, well, you're supposed to feel lucky.
the difficulty curves in D3 are aaaaall over the place, so I acknowledge that what I'm saying is daft, but like vondur said, the 'torment' levels of difficulty really just don't give a shit if they're even possible for you, so it becomes a matter of using seemingly broken things like the nagelring to even be able to survive. I had a monk where I found some special combination of items that buffed a certain power (exploding palm) in a particular way that if I use it just right everything on screen just explodes, and I still hit a nearly impossible wall on torment 6. that's where that ring belongs. there's so much distance between the lowest and the max difficulty that if you happen to get that lucky 0.000001% drop early enough it has the potential to have come from some crazy other dimension where the monsters have literally millions of times more hitpoints. not the most optimal thing to occur when you're getting a first impression of the game, though. So that's why Vondur is asking me to play with him - he wants the precious.
So anyway turns out I can't enter the Torment difficulties until I level my character up to 60 (I'm level 43 right now). Ironically, the chance of me bothering to go back to the game to grind that shit out is probably about the same as the drop chance of the Nagelring. D3 has a shit story, dialog, and is horribly generic... but I always felt it kinda of got worse as they 'balanced' it and made it so you always get class specific goodies and often they are tailored to your stats, and difficulty is simply a setting you can change at will rather than anew replay through the game...
The old giantic spike of difficulty that was inferno difficulty on release was the first time the game seriously made you care about all the horseshit they put on rare and elite monsters, and made you actually care about making trade offs from your damage abilities to defensive ones so you could actually survive, and you had to grind up gold and do runs to try and get good items to progress... that first month of Diablo3 was the most memorable to me precisely because it was so goddamn hard to make any progress. lol no, asking just to have company, that nagelring is good of course but there are better items ;) i've reached greater rift 60 on two toons this last season. so, bastically i can boost u and u can enter the adventure mode world of legenary farm to build perfect build.
d3 currently is to make seasonal progress (season lasts about 4 months), complete all season journey tasks and gather top build, this is what i'm doing right now and enjoying it. since if you wanna achieve higher greater rifts you have to max every stat possible. @scampie, yea old d3 was totally unfriendly, i'm glad they fixed it. better late than never. Diablo3 started as a massive turd, and they've done a 180 on so many of their big decisions that it has turned into a solid hack'n'slash, and it seems much of this was in timing with the departure of Jay "Fuck That Loser/I Should've Stayed As a Mapper At Monolith" Wilson.
It's not a brilliant game, but I find it enjoyable now to just thrash some things from time to time, and appreciate that they've done one paid expansion, one free small expansion, and are working on another free small expansion, and have quietly added dozens of new micro-quests that you can bump into, so there are still new experiences. Normal is Easy, as in, the bottom of the difficulty choices. I have a character I played entirely one handed on Easy when my daughter was born, because I could hold her while playing (pet oriented Witch Doctor). I currently play on Torment 2, though I do just fine in 3 but my damage is low enough that some fights feel like a chore at times, so that is still a bit of a grind. Yeah earlier versions of the game were brutal, but this one can be as well, they just expanded their spectrum to offer a truly casual experience as well. I like it now, even if the story is completely dumb. Aye, I was jesting of course. I'll give you a shout if/when I can be arsed to reach the required character level / expansion pack purchases that qualify me to follow you into battle.
Is Diablo3 worth playing for the graphics and design? Or is it like many top down games, just a game where you look at a bunch of cobblestones and transparent walls?
Just finished playing borderlands2 which was fantastic, that has a very unique art style and just generally fantastic design everywhere. Plus it has just about every setting you could think of, even fantasy with dragons and dwarves in the last dlc. I imagine the skills and looting is similar to B2 though, just with hack n slash combat. I think D3 is gorgeous
If you're in to pre-2010 graphics, blurry textures, limited zoom options etc.
Try the demo. It looks nice enough, lighting and style are nice, but it is quite underwhelming. Then get Path Of Exile instead. Man, I really disagree. Diablo 3 has some of the most solid art direction and execution I've seen in years. But to each his own...
Solid art direction, that's for sure, but it's still Blizzard art direction, which can get a bit tired at times now.
But yeah Diablo 3 looks overall better than Path of Exile, but Path of Exile is such a better "Diablo" game... :) Diablo 3 does suffer more from the flashy-multicolored-lights during fights and such though, I like games which manage to not become rainbows when 3 or 4 spells are on screen at the same time (there aren't many though...) Looks incredible if you are looking for painterly textures and slightly stylised architecture, which just happens to be what tickles my ptarmigan.
And Shambler is quite simply: https://youtu.be/McAeQiLmEYU Yes I've been tossing between D3 and Path of Exile. Maybe I'll get the latter. Anyway here's some recent games I've played
Alien Rage (City Interactive) - 52% - 7.5/10 This is why I play the badly rated games. If you want something with a 90s type of gameplay, Alien Rage is perfect. I guess it got hammered because #1 it's City Interactive, #2 a lot of people can't accept that it's JUST an action based fps in pretty sci-fi environments, and #3 it's too hard for them. It is a hard game. Even on easiest settings (which is called Challenging) it's about a normal games hard difficulty. Enemies are tough, especially the grenade cunts, and they rush and flank you fast. It reminds me of those Assassin whores in Halflife. So often your left cowering in a corner, scoped with the only usable weapon in the game (machinegun) aiming for there heads. You pretty much need to make headshots to take enemies down, and do it fast. The boss battles are right fuckers though. I ended up just godmoding half of them, the rest I put on unlimited ammo to make ammo collection no longer a concern. Because I'm not that good a gamer anyway and don't like tough games. But this was a fun kind of tough, because you usually do make it through a fight. There's upgrades, but I didn't unlock any until about the last1.5hrs of the game, which then made the last couple of levels much easier. In fact the lass boss was probably the easiest in the game. Oh and the design is fantastic. I haven't played Mass Effect 3 or Dead Space 3, this is only the second game I've played from 2013, but it's easily the best looking sci-fi setting game I've played. CI owned the Unreal Engine in this. However, it is mostly walkways, corridors, and rooms with a door that closes behind you. Not too different to Doom 3. But the graphics and level of detail is pretty impressive. Ride to Hell: Retribution - 16% Only played about a half hour, realised half of it is on-rails motorcycle rides with QTE's, the rest are bare handed fights based on QTE's. Graphics crap, story crap, voice acting and script done by 13 years olds. Developers should be embarrassed with this. Assassin's Creed III: Liberation - 64% - 6/10 Just more Asscreed. Came out the same years as AC3, but more difficult with lots of "don't get detected" missions. Less than 10 hrs, obviously more budget than the main games because less work is put into the environments, but still fairly enjoyable, for what it is. This must be my 5th AC game now. I don't really enjoy the gameplay much it's just always the same thing, but the graphics and story is always decent, and the only reason I keep playing them. Deadpool - 63% - 6/10 Really hilarious, although anyone that hated DNF should hate this as well, because it's all the same kind of humour. But it's just average hack n slash combat with a bit of rubbish shooting. I must have upgraded my skills poorly or something, because I found some sections to be quite difficult. Taking on 5 Mr Sinister clones at once at the end, for instance, would have taken me like 20mins. Then I look on youtube and find others cleaning them up in about 30 secs. WTF. Some of the design looked good, such a Deaths underground and all the floating bits of Genosha, but then other parts looked really, really shit, and I found myself wondering how this was the same studio that made the last 2 Transformers games. But anyway, worth playing for the laugh, I guess. "with lots of "don't get detected" missions"
God, those missions always chap my ass. I hate that shit, especially since the stealth system is so god awful. are 90% of your game's mechanics geared specifically toward not being detected?
yes -> do stealth missions. no -> don't do stealth missions. I don't really see Path of Exile and Diablo 3 to be in competition, Path of Exile is more along the lines of Diablo 2, and Diablo 3 is more along the lines of Serious Sam meets Golden Axe. They share a common mechanical lineage, but 3 is a big departure from that, and into something more casual.
Both games look good to me as well, though the animations in PoE are a bit stiff for my tastes. Well I got hyped by....
Alien Rage (City Interactive) - 52% - 7.5/10 This is why I play the badly rated games. If you want something with a 90s type of gameplay, Alien Rage is perfect. I guess it got hammered because #1 it's City Interactive, #2 a lot of people can't accept that it's JUST an action based fps in pretty sci-fi environments, and #3 it's too hard for them. And since there was actual demo, I could be bothered to try it. Yup, perfect 90s style gameplay, as defined by: Nauseating headbob (with extra bonus headbob for sprinting (which the "toggle on/off" option doesn't work for, and crouching too)! Being able carry a whole two weapons at once! No health bar, little damage level indication, and regenerating health! Jumping that doesn't even allow you to get over ankle-high crates! Cover-based combat! Hitscan enemy everywhere! Invisible barriers even more everywhere! Completely linear with not even the slightest side-room and no interaction! Constant instructions from the navigator! Nice big glowing indicators to show you the next 30m of linear platform you're herded down at the one area of wall you can actually jump up (using your use key of course)! Door opening animations measured in minutes! Environments that are so drenches in fancy lights and over-detailed textures you can't actually make out any design! TRULY IT IS LIKE QUAKE, Q2, AND UNREAL HAD A GIANT ULTRA-FPS BABY. a ring that dropped somewhere in Act 1 called the Nagelring.
hahaha, the fucking nagelring is crazy. the fact that it dropped for you so early, well, you're supposed to feel lucky. You bellends. Couldn't even finish the demo without this happening: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--xB6dy3HWEA/Vn7Fc6LNvlI/AAAAAAAAAew/4nKJoiHwA0w/s1600/vondurbrokeit.jpg <@Shambler> holy fuck those fat little goblins look like i'd imagine kinn
<@Shambler> no wonder he found it <@Shambler> okay <@Shambler> just salvaged the ring <@Shambler> that is broken as fuck! combat where attacks can't be avoided without staying out of view by standing behind something and not moving (ie boring combat), as opposed to movement based combat where speed is your armor and you're safest not remaining in any one spot for too long (ie fun combat).
Oy, that Nagelring... I've got two maxed out characters with over 100 paragon levels, and one of every other class between levels 15 and 40. Never seen that ring once. The Fallen Lunatic summon sounds very useful.
Kona has a few underrated games on his site, Like Timeshift and Ubersoldier.
And Kona, you should keep doing the reviews on your site instead of here. Timeshift was pretty cool. As was Singularity. I don't mind reading Kona's stuff, this was the first game I haven't heard of that I tried, tho....
Decide the D3 demo was pretty nice after all. Bought a full copy of the game, cleared my stash, deleted my old character, started a new character on next skill up. Did all the demo level stuff again, kept going, all good fun, until...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6CPIXYxxsl4/VoAIUOkGWSI/AAAAAAAAAfA/UhCMuHMQ_T4/s1600/kinnbrokeit.jpg FFS. Oh yeah you've got to overlook all those things about it Sham, haha. It's got all the modern game trademarks that you mentioned. I meant more just the furiosity of the combat and these tough fast enemies coming at you felt like 90s combat. It's sort of cover based, you can't run around at full speed. But also it's not full cover based, you don't press a button to cling to cover and peak up with the aim key, like Gears of War. So not a full cover-shooter. Also, you've usually got to backtrack as your fighting, you can't stay in one cover for long or they'll reach you.
Yhe1 I stopped doing the reviews for 2 reasons:
1. nobody reads reviews anymore, especially ones on my little site. People go to youtube and watch reviews (I'm guilty of that myself) or use metacritic. 2. there are way too many games being released each year now. When I started to review games about 2002, I only had 2 actions games for the entire year to review. Even 2005 only had 14 actions games. Nowadays, there's anywhere between 50-100 games per year I could review. I barely have time to play them all, let alone write reviews. Everyone has a different opinion on what they like, and I realise the type of game I like might be different to the masses. Everyones different so one players opinion doesn't mean a whole lot. Also, I'm no writer. Also just got playing 2013's star trek game. Appears to have been diarrhea'd all over because one of the developers put up a fake review, so all the childish gamers gave it 0's.
Average 3rd person coop shooter, linear, annoying minigames (but are mostly skipable), 5-yr old engine. Only worth playing if you're a trekkie, which I am, as it feels a bit like a big scale episode where Spock and Kirk version 2 single-handedly save the galaxy from giant lizards (seriously). 6/10. The actual combat was fairly decent in it's style, and you're right a good challenge.
As for catching up on released games, just play the good ones! Having said that it is quite useful having someone to bring hidden gems to our attention... What I find by playing every action game that has a single player mode, is the poorer games are often better than expected, while the good ones are often not as good as what they're made out to be.
Damn, what a missed opportunity. I was reading an interview on Eurogamer I think it was with Randy and they were trying to get out of him what went wrong. All he could talk about is that he loves the game (and also loves DNF), makes excuses about the media being wrong, and that he wouldn't take back the 10-15mill in losses developing the game because he got to meet Syd Mead (apparently designed some Aliens stuff) and got to personally play with some of the original props. God, what a tool. He wouldn't admit a single thing wrong with the game and when the interviewer tried to bring it up, claims he can't remember that part.
Apparently Sega wanted it to be just like COD but in the Aliens universe, but they didn't do that. Who knows, it might have been better if they did. At least COD has some pretty epic scenes in most of their games. Anyway, I give it about a 7/10, which is a lot better than the 4.5/10 on Metacritic. I think most users were just expecting too much, they went in with huge hopes because of Borderlands 2 being an amazing game. How awesome would it have been if we had a game with the scope of Borderlands 2, but in the Aliens universe? That's more like how I would have made the game, except without all the damn looting. Then bring in some stealth bits, like Deus-Ex, make fewer enemies in the game, slower pace, more horror like (Metro 2033, Stalker, Dead Space). Make it a proper open world game, with a size like Kingdoms Of Amalur but you just can't travel everywhere straight away because it's too dangerous. I'm not sure how you'd handle different enemies; you can't have a 30-50 hour action RPG with just 2 or 3 Xeno's. Are there other species or races in Aliens ? Perhaps it could take place over multiple worlds like Mass Effect. Anyway, the game itself was a standard, linear FPS. The developers assumed you just got done watching the movies, because a lot of the story didn't make much sense to me since I haven't watched Alien/Aliens in decades. The weapons were average until I read halfway through the game you can actually open a menu and change your arsenal, and once upgraded quite fun near the end. It started to feel more like Borderlands weapons with the long range accuracy and scopes. The game starts off not really that good, inside the spaceship. I wonder how many players quit too soon. Once on the planet the visuals get interesting, but I think the big alien ship was a missed opportunity full of corridors. The graphics didn't seem that great to me, Gearbox obviously didn't make the engine as pretty as CI did with Alien Rage, but they didn't have some nice outdoor areas. Later in the game you end up playing three levels you'd already gone through, which was really cheap. Limited budget or something? With the amount of content they made for B2 with the DLC's as well, I mean fuck the final DLC was almost as big as this game. Oh and one big failure in the game was checkpoints, they were just put in the silliest of places, and often far apart. Really just one big missed opportunity and Randy can't admit that. Rebellion's AVP wasn't any better though. Also played Risen 2. I might post about that tomorrow, what a total fuckup that was. Late to the party, I know, I don't care.
Obviously I'm still correct that the GFX are technically inferior to Path Of Exile, textures, lighting, zoom level etc. And Bal is right that POE does ARPG uber-geeking gameplay better. BUT. Actually D3 is really nice. Although the style is a bit more cartoony and low-res, it does a hell of a lot with the atmosphere, backgrounds, and setting, it actually feels more like a proper place than a game place, and some of the areas are just damn cool. The expansion pack might be my favourite so far: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zm31z1oGKOc/VoZV1bY9efI/AAAAAAAAAfQ/w9Iknnm2nRk/s1600/diablo3kindapretty.jpg As people said above, gameplay in the main game is supercasual, even without using gems and shields there doesn't seem to be a way to get an actual challenge in the main game, however it is quite nice being just to waltz through it using just mouse and leaving other hand for wanking to cow scat pron. Story is terrible and generic but at least it is comprehensible compared to POE. Destructible items in environment are cool. I spend more time exploding crates carts and altars than actual enemy. So, errr, yeah. Blizzard found no shortage of opportunities to make the world feel big and sweeping despite having the camera pointed down at the ground the whole time.
You do find yourself on the edge of quite a lot of chasms and valleys though. http://luniney.neocities.org/SuperMarioReMaker/
It's pretty damned impressive, I have the Wii-u version and this does decent job of recreating the experience. It's not as polished but it's worth having a go of. Read a good review of it on the Codex. It's an isometric CRPG with pretty kickass art (the good kind of pixel art) and a cool story. Played for an hour and so far I like it. I died horribly to some wolves and goblins.
Only downside is that combat is in real time (with pause on specific actions) which I think doesn't really work too well unless your game is Diablo. I would've preferred turn based but eh, to each their own. Skacky, it's pretty and pixelated, but I don't think it's pixel art:
http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 I like this kind of art anyway. This might interest a few here.
Coop arcadey claustrophobic marines vs aliens roguelike fps (yes, random levels). Got a decent bit of space hulk vibe. Its pretty simple, effective and fun. Could just as well be a top down arcade game but the FPS perspective suits the vibe well. Currently being developed, there is a demo on the website but I hear pretty outdated as to current Early Access version. http://store.steampowered.com/app/357330/ Well worth it. Boss fights are boring as fuck, rest of it is great. A few neat tweaks and some really nice settings (possibly the most "someone make that in Quake FFS" ones), everything a mission pack should be (boss difficulty spikes aside).
Complete Spack Hulk clone done in a 1998 engine with no level design set in the pitch black?? SOLD!
The idea might be decent but it doesn't look at all inspiring. I hate the way people are still saying "procedurally generated levels" as if it's a badge of honour, and not just indicative of a program that bolts together a bunch of L and T shapes into shit-tastic and repetitive Wolfenstein 3D levels.
Astroneer is showing off the "vast amount of environments" you can explore, by showing little astro-man running through a series of the exact same environment over and over but with a different color fog each time:
https://twitter.com/astroneergame/status/678295654553161729 but the metaball hill generator probably has slightly different parameters every time too It depends on how its done though. Ideally the person who makes the segments should be the one to code the system as well, for best results.
How granular it is basically means how much level design is in the game. And if you don't have sub environments then just go home. Minecraft realised that early on with biomes. The idea of many indies seems to be that by doing procedural you save yourself time on level design, when in fact, it takes a lot more effort. Unless it's crap of course. Really it depends on what game you're making and how dedicated you are to that, rather than the fuzzy concept of 'infinite levels!' which tends to result in a load of samey guff nobody wants to explore because they keep recognising the segments. Shamb yeah, its only any good if you like arcade action games and roguelikes a la Binding of Isaac...with the claustropobic FPS space hulk/alien shtick. (I'm not saying its anywhere near Binding of Isaac in action roguelike awesomeness...)
#8785 If anyone claims random generated levels like a badge they are fucktarded. Maybe when someone works a good one out using deep learning that might be something interesting in itself. They serve a purpose for certain type of games, roguelikes being one where it is the nature of most of them. the fuzzy concept of 'infinite levels!' which tends to result in a load of samey guff nobody wants to explore because they keep recognising the segments.
Spelunky HD was shit for this. Isaac has: 1) tons more variety in room designs 2) rare (1/1000) designs 3) entire batches of new designs added periodically Really though, Minecraft is a level editor with a resource-gathering metagame and wandering monsters. The random environments are appropriate in this case because the game is all about the building and gathering.
Imagine if you couldn't modify the environment in Minecraft? Maybe it's the building block size that makes it work. Minecraft is working at a much more granular level than the previously mentioned L and T shaped areas being snapped together.
"Infinite levels" yah, its marketing speak. You know in 95% of the cases its gonna be samey who cares stuff.
In a roguelike I couldnt give a crap. The point is just to change things up to make sure you are not getting a predictable playthrough - the point being in getting good at a roguelike of this type is you are supposed to be getting good at dealing with any situation thrown up and not getting good at predicting what is coming. I think so at least. A newb will win an occasional favorable random seed, a skilled player will win in 80% of the seeds thrown at him. I don't mind procedural level design as long as the gameplay is there. Many of my favourite games in the last few years have used some procedural systems.
Really curious to see how the random generation in Gibhard (http://www.gibhard.com/) will work, most of the screenshots he's posted look like proper levels, I guess it's probably pre-made rooms like Isaac or something. I guess it's probably pre-made rooms like Isaac or something.
Which at best will feel like those infinitely dreary sections in Halo 1 where you just kept finding yourself in the same prefabbed rooms and corridors with the only variation being the position of crates and other freely placeable props. It might be ok for some, but I feel it's not quite my tempo. I honestly don't believe procedural levels will work with first person shooters, which is why I'm quite wary of projects like Strafe and Gibhard (Gibhard is kinda old too, was showcased on Mapcore a few years ago).
Random prefabs slapped together will probably never be as thorough and well thought out as a level with a proper layout. You end up knowing regular levels by heart after a while, but at least they stay consistent all the time (when they're well designed, that is). a hybrid - maybe for like a horror game of some kind. Central parts are designed by hand, but outdoor areas connecting the central parts are randomly generated so each time you play there's something different about it. If it worked, I could see it being applied to something like L4D or Vermintide to help keep the game from getting stale.
Here's a couple screenshots of a new build engine game by 3d realms just as a palette cleanser.
http://quakeguy.tumblr.com/post/136978460682/did-you-know-that-3d-realms-are-working-on-another I'm more excited for that than I am for Bombshell. Which isn't really saying much, but it's unexpected!
plus you can use the cube of whatever to take the legendary (orange) power off the nagelring and apply it to yourself, so you can then wear both rings in that set and still shit out an endless stream of suicide bomber goblins
Never played Super Mario Maker, but the GameMaker 8 made homage to the Wii title is fun. Nintendo has already graced the creators with a C&D order, but the demo was already let loose on the net so its still out there.
well it's still on my hard drive, I downloaded it as soon as I saw it. This was always going to be the outcome.
One new area in act 5, areas in acts 3 and 1 have been expanded with new content.
"Nagelring - Level required for this to drop has been raised from 11 to 40" Shamblers reported to be most affected by this news. Oh and you can buy another stash tab, bunch of Crusader skills got replaced, big focus on Thorns, +XP% gain is nerfed post level 70, and a bunch more things: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/19998542/patch-240-now-live-1-12-2016 Do followers spawn goblins with rings? I tried with Puzzle Ring the other day and it didn't work on the follower.
Lots of little tweaks in that update sound good.
I wish the Keywarden update had happened before I spent 56 attempts trying to get Act2 key ;) yes all rings works with followers as intended
also bler, go check greyhollow island, it's there from today. The Royal Chambers was cool, got a legendary shield around Lachdanan, but with no attributes for some reason. Checked out the island, but Battlenet disconnected me, so I stopped there.
Lots of incremental improvements that I'm enjoying. im out of games to play any good suggestions? Same here. I just finished the STALKER series and played FEAR back before the holidays, and can't find anything new worth playing. Has Kerbal Space Program been updated lately? Maybe I'll start a new career... Dishonoured, XCom Enemy Within, SOMA, Satellite Reign, Styx, Vermintide, plus Fallout4, Witcher3, Alien Isolation, Metro2033/LL Redux to name a few.
Dishonoured, XCom Enemy Within, SOMA, Satellite Reign, Styx, Vermintide, plus Fallout4, Witcher3, Alien Isolation, Metro2033/LL Redux to name a few. I've already played some of those. Not Fallout4 and Witcher3 though, but they are too much for my computer and still too expensive. I didn't like Alien Isolation at all, I gave up after about 3 hrs and just watched somebody's play through on YouTube to see what I missed. Nothing much apparently. I just replayed XCom, maybe the The Metro games would be worth another play. SOMA, Satellite Reign, Styx, and Vermintide don't really seem like my kind of games, but I'll look again. Apparently I just don't like horror themed or 3rd person games in general. SOMA is definitely worth it IMO. It's an interactive movie with mostly only token gameplay BUT the atmosphere and style are great, it's genuinely intriguing, has a good story (apart from a botched pre-ending) and elicites a surprisingly array of emotions.
Satellite Reign is a bit shallow and repetitive but has a strong style, slick GFX, and good ambient music, if you're in a cyberpunk mood it's worth it. Styx is proper stealth style if you like that sort of thing. Vermintide you really need the right people online with you, but negke is always keen for folks to join in and I'd do a bit more too. It's hard but has a strong character to it. what kind of games do you like? shooting or pr0n games? or something in between? it all depends on what you like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyN-Nl-SaDA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG_G5I_d72Q Plenty of gameplay snippets in those videos. Vehicular desert themed RTS prequel to Homeworld. Friction is hyped for it, I am curious but more reserved: <Shambler> the gfx and attention to detail look good, but it suffers from the same "can't appreciate any of that zoomed out and in the intensity of rts combat" that almost all rtses suffer from <Shambler> also maybe a bit desert heavy.... What do people think?? vehicle designs are fucking ace, but the actual game looks pretty meh.
I was much more interested when this was called "Shipbreakers" and wasn't an official Homeworld licensed game. You would go out into the desert and salvage huge wreckage of space ships while fighting other ai / players doing the same thing. No idea how much of those ideas survived the transfer to Homeworld. This is what Shipbreakers became? Was pretty excited about that, but this doesn't really look like what I was hoping for at all.
I'm curious about what you guys are seeing now that looks any different from the Shipbreakers teasers.
I remember seeing trailers where it wasn't even really an RTS. Here it just looks like any other RTS really, which maybe is fine.
To be honest I didn't know what I was hoping for, but the atmosphere of the original art and such seems kind of missing here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf3zx_P2vHo
Didn't watch with sound. 1:50 - 2:05 looks great for an RTS. Also in any experience of RTS I've had, if you spent 15 seconds zoomed in like that instead of doing recceing map checking unit building army management etc etc, you'd automatically lose. Welcome to what
https://www.google.com/search?q=askew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-mXN3akTPU
Full Release is... right now! waiting on download while I hype. sooo.... how many are playing that? i've seen a lot of hype about it, but I can't decide if I'd like it..... anybody have comments on it?
On my list for a long time as it struggled through various milestones.
Lovecraft JRPG where the debuffs on your dudes are things like 'insanity'. 20% off until 2 Feb and I just bought it. Darkest Dungeon is dope as heck. One of the few games I bought in Early Access; wasn't disappointed with it at all, and it's been improving a ton through the year or so.
It's a game about delving through dungeons with a party of 4 characters, and getting into turn based battles where character positions matter a lot. You not only suffer damage in battle and exploration, but also stress and must manage it as best you can. Individual characters will permanently die, but you can recruit a large roster so your game is not over simply because your party is wiped. The eventual goal is to gain enough levels and items for a party to be able to brave the darkest dungeon itself! Here's a LetsPlay video from BaerTaffy playing the tutorial + a first mission from it's initial release... the mechanics are mostly the same, so it's still a pretty good showing of what the game is all about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF1uhwxh8tk I put about 12 hours into DD when it first came out in early access and enjoyed my time with it a lot.
It's similar to xcom in structure in that you must manage a home base (town) and upgrade it over time with resources you find in the dungeons. Also similar to xcom, you have a roster of characters with different classes and stats that you must manage and equip and form effective squads with. Super slick presentation and awesome lovecraftian thick atmosphere. It'll make you cry though. That guy you leveled the fuck up and spent loads of resources on to get them into fighting shape? Yeah they just went insane and had a heart attack GG! Such is life...in the Darkest Dungeon. great game, enjoying its severity, complexity and proper atmosphere. also narrator (Wayne June) rocks.
apparently yes because it popped up telling me all my saves were moved to steam cloud when I first started the full release version.
ARPG with a slightly different theme to normal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjS5It7alo As far as I can tell it is rendered completely unplayable by continuous screen shaking, unless you are both stoned and have a year's supply of anti-nausea tablets. You aren't kidding
Maybe it's supposed to feel like handheld camera.
I didn't think it's too much though. Actually it looks like a nice game. I was looking forward to this game since it was from The Farm 51, who impressed me with Necrovision. But then they fucked up the sequel, and then did a shit remake of Painkiller.
Anyway it's a part shooter, part adventure/puzzle game. The puzzles are all pretty dumbed down, nothing like the complexity of Tomb Raider. The shooting is kind of poor. Great graphics though, it's funny how even the shit studios manage to create fucking sweet looking games. UE3 of course. 6/10 These guys have a good game in them yet - 2016's The Technomancer might be it. Of Orcs and Men was decent, great story but just a bit extreme-linear and lacked polish ie. not tiple A.
Mars: War Logs is a light action rpg, about 10 hours long, a bit of red faction: guerrilla meets deus ex: hr in design. But there's far too much back-and-forth over the same areas tight, cramped areas. The combat starts out okay, gets difficult in the middle, but the last chapter (of 3) gets easy again as you finally get the upgrades to make the game more enjoyable (mage type upgrades). But yeah just a poor mans RPG, graphics aren't that good. Nice to see a unique franchise, but combat needs work and the entire sandbox world needed to be far bigger. 6/10 Wtf is with the name, I thought it was going to be one of those lame console story-based adventure games that critics spooge over.
But no it's an third person action. Clearly inspired by Assassin's Creed with lots of climbing gameplay and melee fighting, and just the overall presentation and style. The dream sequences are a total copy of AC's animus sequences, but that's not necessarily bad. That, plus meets Mirror's Edge (design not freeflow running). The combat was fun for a while, but about the halfway point became a complete cuntfuck. I've got it on "easy", which is referred to as "Script Kiddies" who just want to enjoy the story. Clearly, these developers have no fucking clue how to implement a skill setting, because I got fed up with so many enemies being thrown at me, all punch-sponges, all interrupting my combos and requiring very specific and time-consuming ways to kill. It's main feature is building your own combo combinations, but combo's are usually impossible to pull off completely because you're constantly interrupted. But with god mode on I was able to just enjoy the game again. The combat needed work, just like Mars: War Logs. Hmmm, when's the last time I played a game that got melee combat right? It's been a while. The story is great, and really unique. I could see this being a movie actually, something similar to Minority Report or Inception. Except you're going into people's memories and changing them. That was a cool part of the game, you have to rewind their memory and figure out what items to modify in order to change the outcome. In fact this game really has some cool ideas, and unique! Critics seem to have completely overlooked all of it though, which is odd since they're always wanting something "different", which is a hard thing to do these days. This game did it, and no one gave a shit. This game shines in the design and graphics as well. UE3 again, and again looks fucking awesome. It's a sci-fi futuristic neo-france, with equal mix of old slums mixed with futurisic buildings, mixed with cathedrals. It's a wee bit linear but otherwise really nice to look at. At this point I'm playing it just for story and visuals (still got about 1 hour left). Shame they fucked up the combat, but I guess if you don't mind hard melee combat, you'll like it. 7/10 Finished it about a month ago. It started up making me hate its combat system and ended up making me say that the game was a very good experience and worth playing.
The elements that stand out are visuals and story. Both are extremely well done and even made me think of re-playing the game to enjoy them one more time. The gameplay is the weak point though. Both climbing and combat are boring and uninspiring. Climbing sections don't evolve throughout the game - you always have an arrow that shows you where to jump, that imho ruins all the experience. Exploration elements that reward you with power-ups don't help much to overall poor climbing sections. The combat is frustrating for the first time but becomes easy closer to the end when you get used to combos. I ended up using only the longest possible combo (played on normal). But using the same combo all over againg is pretty boring. Overall I can say that it's a good game and worth playing to see the beauty of neo-paris and enjoy the awesome story of Remember Me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnKog-0hkOg&ed2f26df2d9c416fbddddd2330a778c6=vttgftbk-vtgvgfgf
The vibe of this looks kinda cool. I have heard that those "certain files" can secretly activate chips in your monitor and turn it into a sort of webcam that watches you and sends images of you to particular...connoisseurs of such things.
They're likely just covering their asses because they aren't 100% sure that their uninstaller gets everything on the way out the door.
It's basically covering up laziness rather than something malicious. I'll wait until it's actually released to be sure, but I don't think inclusion of the denuvo thing will turn out to be a rumor. I certainly won't buy the game new at full price if denuvo is included.
Current collection:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NsrKthZqsws/Vqie99pws-I/AAAAAAAAAgA/Ulr3SavOd34/s1600/nagel.jpg 1 with boon for neph rifts, one with lightning for grifts, 1 each for the 3 followers, and 3 spare for, errr, fun. Have they Changed the game so every single enemy has a 1 in 3 chance of dropping a Nagelring (sometimes two of them), now?
that's quite the collection. why don't you dust them? also what's up with those little yellow and green stars on item icons? i don't have it enabled, probly something new since the last patch?
I wish they dropped puzzle rings at the same rate. Or unity, I've been after a 2nd fucking unity for ages.
You can craft Nagelrings by upgrading yellow rings in the cube, not that I was actively trying to. Von, orange and green stars are just legendary and set respectively, you nub ;). I enabled a lot of info in settings, that might be it. BTW see that I got Hellfire and green gem on weapon, like u said. Just got a 9th via blood shards (11th in total counting the two I salvaged after Kinn said they were broken). Still no unity nor 5th puzzle ring.
ya just didn't know they added those stars to the UI.
and pro move by adding proper gem to weapon, i see u storming greater rifts now ;) and i've built insanely tough wizard, doing grifts 62-65 on him ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t13GKrC0Nc8
Kona, you like CCC on-rails shooters with vomituous headbob, did you play the first version of this?? I have vague recollections of an unimpressive demo but I might be mis-remembering... They're vague because it's a pretty unmemorable game, barely above average 7/10. I think it had too many arenas combat situations and lame reptitive enemies. Linear design, but the
graphics were pretty good. Sequel trailer looks cool though. Guns and big ass sword = yes please. Sunless Sea is having a free weekend on Steam. Recommend checking it out, bought it during the holiday sale and need to play a lot more of it... Apparently can get repetitive when you die often, but I'm still alive in my playthrough and enjoying it.
i really like sunless sea, but i found the simple 'click this with a % chance' mechanic to be tiring after a while.
having played darkest dungeon, i was thinking yesterday it would be cool if you took your crew on missions with similar mechanics. Anyone else playing this? I'm a few hours in and having a great time. Absolutely incredible environment art... i'm struggling to think of any game that looks better than this.
It's excellent in it's environments, use of first person perspective, and use of a single simple mechanic for it's puzzles over the entire game. It's a large island of puzzles with no hand holding or narrative, and a ton of shit to find. As long as you aren't completely turned off by the idea of a game that is mostly wandering around solving line puzzles, it's fucking fantastic and can be hard to trying explain why without ruining anything.
I meant to also say... about 20 hours in atm, believe I completed all the main goals, just secret hunting now mostly.
Looks ok.... But just on Windows.
I bought "Back to Bed", which is a cute little puzzler with Escher / Dali ispired artwork. Hmmmm - but only 30 levels apparently, but i got it for $3 on special. http://store.steampowered.com/app/308040/ Milkstone, who made Ziggurat, have a new game in Early Access. It is a side-scrolling action RPG called Pharaonic. After enjoying Ziggurat quite a lot, I'm curious to see what they've made in a different genre.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/386080 This post shows what is currently done and what is unfinished. http://steamcommunity.com/app/386080/discussions/1/458607518208421890/ This video shows the combat gameplay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys_k_N62uPw Yeah does look good.
But does have it a point to anything, like, a story or explain why you're there, some progression? Or is just mindless wandering and solving puzzle? Finished the main game yesterday (still plenty of secrets to hunt down), it's really good, Steam says it took me a bit less than 20h.
I'm really happy with the difficulty level, lots of people complain that it's too hard, but I found it just right. Kona, it will feel like mindlessly wandering and solving puzzles for most of the game, if you want some kind of story in it you'll really have to dig deep down into the hard secret stuff. The progression is basically only you slowly expanding your comprehension of how different puzzle mechanics function. Oh and it's very pretty. I'm on the fifth level "The Cruncher".
When I enter the large second hall all enemies are on different height. I can't shoot them as my aim is straight on. There's no way for +mlook in Doom2. How does this work? Using a joystick in stead of a keyboard? Doom 2 has vertical autoaim, so just line them up horizontally.
You might want to also try the ZDoom engine as it lets you look up and down a bit, which is cosmetic, but makes it feels less shite when you come to it from Quake. My favorite doom source port is http://zandronum.com/
Modern doom ports all have mouse look and the ability to disable autoaim. In Brutal Doom you'll even have to aim verticallly and there also are headshots :D I'd also suggest zandronum because it comes with doomseeker which in turn comes with wadseeker. This combination makes for hours of crazy fun. Doomseeker is a multiplayer server browser (there are always people playing) and wadseeker is a tool that autodownloads wads/mods when you want to connect to a server that has things that you don't. I've discovered some crazy mods this way (Big round bagels hunting down marines ?!?). However I have the most fun on these massive coop maps where 10+ players face off against hordes of enemies. Yeah Doom 2 works perfectly fine without vertical mouselook, however it can also be fun with it (and maybe less disorienting if you're used to Quake). One thing I'd say about mouselook is that in ZDoom there is some weird warping when you look up and down. If that makes you uncomfortable then GZDoom is a better choice -- it handles vertical mouselook as well as (for example) Quake does.
Some people really badmouth GZDoom for having texture-filtering and odd lighting. That's true for its default settings, but you can go into the menus and set "Doom" style sector lighting, and turn off texture filtering. It's still not *exactly* the same as Doom but it's pretty close, and good enough if you really want to be able to vertical-mouselook without getting barfy from the world warping. (All that being said, I'm kind of on a mouselook-less Doom kick these days, using Crispy Doom or Doom Retro.) I'm on lower ground and I can't see a way to shoot the imps up.
No need to aim up, just shoot them and the bullets will go up... Also try not using the super shotgun for that kind of distance.
If I aim straight foreward the white bullit flash ends upon 16 units under the imps. So I get killed every time because I can't shoot the same height.
Indeed it is 2D, but in the video it is aiming up and down, so how does they do it? Damn, I'd have used GZDoom for my recent playthru rather than ZDoom if I knew it didn't have the lookwarp.
The options menus is fairly extensive, a quick perusal will dismiss most complaints.
This was played with gzdoom. It doesn't look 100% vanilla but it's not nearly as bad as its detractors make it out to be. The mouselook is good. Turning and mouselook speed are a bit weird, though. You may need to drop the latter a hair if it feels off. improved PerK's smooth animations (this version is tweaked for compatibility with the following mod)
minor sprite fixing project I finally got to playing Dark Souls 1.
+pros Amazing level design. The interconnectivity, although you have to watch youtube videos for some parts to figure out how it's connected, is fantastic. Some of the areas of Dark Souls are so fucking huge you just gotta stand and look. First entering Anor Londo, Ash Lake, Blighttown Swamps... awesome. Monster design, visually these were some crazy looking enemies. Some looked fantastic, creepy. The bosses in particular. Probably the giant flying horse thing was the coolest, and the big ass butterfly boss. Best bosses in a video game ever? (visually). The way the RPG upgrading worked was all pretty good. The right amount of weapons and armour, no inventory limit, nice way of upgrading your skills and weapons. That was all pretty good. +cons Shambler I notice you gave up on installing this a couple years ago. Well, you gave up early, GFWL was the easy part. Downloading and trying to setup all the unintuitive mods, changing the awkward controls (glovepie required), finding that alt-tab freezes the game so you have to play in windowed mode but that only works for a while until suddenly the cursor jumps in front of the game and makes it unplayable so you have to restart. The PC port is a piece of shit. This is a game for a small niche set of players. The type that don't want to have a friendly game of tennis with their buddy, they'd rather have a match with Roger Federer and repeat the match over and over again until they beat him by learning all his moves and countering them the perfect way. All the while your playing with barbed wire wrapped around your feet. It's a game for people that enjoy being tortured because they know when the torture is over, it'll give them a huge sense of satisfaction. I am not one of those people. I think the difficulty possibly hurt the game because while it does have an avid cult fanbase that rate the game very highly, and even gaming reviewers give it great scores, this is a small fanbase and the average gamer would never continue to the finish of this game. All the praise that's heaped on is by this cult fanbase. Even if you play almost every part of it, it's only about a 25 hour game but the average main story playtime is 50hrs. That's because you have to replay so much of it. For me, the #1 issue is the checkpoints. A DS fan will argue that the checkpoints are perfect, but fuck that they're terrible. This is what made the game so frustrating for me. While you may die a lot, I can live with that. What I can't live with is repeating up to half an hour of gameplay getting back to where I was with all the enemies respawned. I think in the first 7-8 hours of the game I'd only found 3-4 checkpoints. Everytime I fell off a ledge in fucking Bighttown it was a 10 min sprint from Undead Parish > Lower Undead Burg > The Depths > Blighttown (with godmode on of course because there's no fucking way I'm repeating all that again). Maybe 40% of this game is running from checkpoints after you've died. That's no good. Also the checkpoints are often hard to find, or hidden. I have to consult the walkthrough just to find the damn things. I think part of the difficulty is due to the PC controls. Not only are they just not suited to kb/m, but they're really, extremely unresponsive. In a game where response time is everything. Sometimes I'd be mashing the roll key and I counted three times before it would actually roll. I'd still be doing my swinging animation meanwhile the enemy has already ran around me and is hitting me from behind before the controls can react, and now I'm on the floor in an incredibly slow fallen over routine. Maybe this is why the PC version is so difficult, and the console version doesn't suffer from the unresponsive controls so much. Maybe no one ever actually plays the PC version, except me. As such, I godmoded most of the game. Even then it was still a challenge not to fall off ledges. The Lost Izalith boss would be in the my top 20 worst bosses ever. And I still had to use equipment properly because I'm not going to spend an eternity wacking at enemies because I'm using useless weapons. Also, the game engine is dated. Get up too close to textures and they look a bit shit at times, very bland details and straight box corridors. But that's pretty minor because the scale of the world is mostly fantastic and there's a lot of architectural detail. Finally... a fantasy RPG with no story, just some tiny lore you have to really dig in to (apparently), to figure out? No map also becomes a real pain in the ass. I got lost a number of times, and often had to consult a walkthrough. The lack of a map (and waypoints and mission objectives) are all part of the "challenge". The developer trying to annoy the fuck out of the player is also part of the challenge. Shit I hit the character limit...
Overall I can't help but think that perhaps this franchise could have been even bigger if it was a bit more accessible to the general gamer. Looking at sales figures, it did 3mill. Dragon Age Origins did 4.75mill. Skyrim... 19mill. It sold okay. But how many gamers were put off by it, because Darks Souls 2 didn't do as well. Who's even heard of their next game, Bloodborne? I'd only recommend to gamers that like a really tough game and have many hours to sink into it. You said "Who's even heard of their next game, Bloodborne?"
Uh... everyone? And it sold 2mil (which is quite good for a platform exclusive, higher than expected anyways). It's good that there are still people making niche games. I use godmode and cheats myself in a lot of games. Haven't done it in dark souls though, but that would have made things so much easier.
The things I did react to though: You used walkthroughs, but still missed the bonfire in the depths. The blighttown bonfire is pretty early and easy to find as well. And somehow your shortest route to blighttown was from the parish? WTF? The bonfire above the blacksmith or the one after the dragon bridge? Either is a wtf. Shortest route into the depths is IIRC from firelink through the waterway. Mashing roll during a swing won't make you roll any sooner. Doing anything commits you to that action until it completes, and the entirety of the gameplay revolves around knowing when it is safe to go in for an attack and when to time your dodges and blocks. I agree it's a shitty PC port though, and I've never tried playing with m+kb, only with a xbox controller which works perfectly. There is not much of a plot related to the actual actions of the player no, but there is a world lore and metanarrative to go with it that is so completely brilliantly genius it staggers the mind, and makes me sad that it is unlikely to ever be topped. And Bloodborne fucking owns bones! It and Dark Souls are two of the best games ever made. Bloodborne is literally third person Quake with melee weapons. I hadn't really heard of Bloodborne, but it might just be because it was platform exclusive, might have missed it and skipped over news on it. Yeah I noticed sales on it were pretty good considering it's just the 1 platform.
Re The bonfires, the 1 above the blacksmith was the parish one I was referring to. Never found one in the depths :( I might have just skimmed some parts of the walkthrough, I think in the depths I was just fumbling around in the sewers until I just happened to find the right path. But yeah actually, shit, the very early one at undead burg would have saved me maybe half my trip. Ah well, I only had to do it maybe 4 times till I finally youtubed where the first blighttown one was (almost blind jumping off a cliff). Still there were other ones that were probably worse, ie. New Londo Ruins with no bonfires at all. Re controls, I look on youtube gameplay and it just seems so much faster and more responsive than I found. Ah well. I don't see axe swinging animation still going on while the enemy is already on the other side of the room having a picnic. It's not Risen 2 levels though. Re Lore yeah I heard it was pretty awesome, it's kind of a shame they didn't really get that into the game a bit more though. All I really got from the game is I had to ring a couple bells, defeat some boss, and they were some really cool sounding places. Re cheats, I hate to godmode but I still really enjoyed Dark Souls. I got to experience the whole fantastic atmosphere and design without the frustration. I don't mind doing the odd thing in a tougher game like no reload/recoil, faster movement, maybe even a bit of extra xp or cash to start out with. Godmode is better for a final boss that's cunting me off, but hell in DS every enemy is a boss. Did you like DS2 as much as DS1? I've been reading it's not as good. Graphics barely look upgraded but I haven't watched too many videos yet. Exactly what I was thinking. During my playthrough I couldn't help thinking about how much I wanted to blitz through yharnam w/ a shotgun and RL
New Londo and the run to 4 Kings without any bonfire is awful yeah, I agree there. There are shortcuts so you can just drop down and run past the darkwraiths, but coming all the way from Firelink each time is a pain.
You don't have to jump off a cliff for the blighttown one, but that's the fastest route. You come across it eventually playing the normal way. There are a few bonfires which are hidden in a shitty way, like all the ones behind fake walls, but for the most part you find them naturally, especially if you read messages. Did you max out your equip load? How much equipment you're carrying determines how fast you move. Keep it under 25% for superfast, 50% for decent speed, and I don't know if there's one at 75% because above 50% you're so slow it's not even funny. I did not enjoy DS2 as much. Mostly because the world design was nowhere near as well thought out and interesting, but also because their approach to gameplay seemed to be to make things difficult by just throwing tons of shit at you at the same time. I stopped playing when they redid the bell gargoyles fight, except this time there are even more gargoyles! Yay! Sure, I can do that:
Shambler I notice you gave up on installing this a couple years ago. Well, you gave up early, GFWL was the easy part. Downloading and trying to setup all the unintuitive mods, changing the awkward controls (glovepie required), That was it. Fast forward a couple of years and I could finally fully delete it off Steam. "Bloodborne Is Literally Third Person Quake..." I'm with Kona on this one, I'd like to see an actual PC version of these games, combined with actual skill settings and actual saving (feel free to put it hidden in the menus as "Noob mode ur so ghey u can't cope with Souls" so that all the macho bullshitters who have spent 200 hours reloading from distant checkpoints to learn the minutiae of yet another boss combat can wave their virtual dicks around and laugh the the gamers who actually want to enjoy it) so that more people can play it... (Kinda like XCom EW did with a bunch of skill settings, it didn't force you onto Ironman or rookie randomisation or what else, it allowed the player to ramp it up as much as they want). About PC controls. Pretty much every game on PC is a console port, apart from MMOs and some indies, right?
I recently started playing Skyrim on PC because my 360 has just about had its chips and I can't be bothered buying a new console for a while. The first thing that struck me about PC Skyrim was just how terrible it was using mouse and keyboard - the interface is horrific - your mouse never clicks on the right HUD element, and navigating it is a nightmare. In game, having all my fingers scrunched up on WASD, and then having to play Twister with my fingers constantly to hit E, R, Alt etc all the fucking time in the middle of combat is horrific. Luckily I have a 360 controller for my PC and as soon as I plugged it in and started using that, the controls were an absolute breeze. Player arrives to investigate hostile force, turns out to be interdimensional cosmic horror aliens.
Oppressive, gothic horror environments. Darkbeasts, Paarl, Cleric Beast, Amelia = Shamblers. Amateur hunters in streets of Yharnam = grunts and enforcers. Hostile hunters = other players in DM. Church hunters = knights and hellknights. Snakes = crawling scrags? (uuh?) Werewolves and beasts = fiends. Church executioners = ogres?? They shoot grenades in the DLC. Winter lanterns = spawns because you react with terror and screaming whenever they appear. Fistable pigs = our own dear Mr Shambler. I certainly do NOT think the hardcore checkpoint reload boss-fest aspect of Souls should be removed or no longer be the default. People like that, fine, sobeit, that should be the Souls standard. There should just be a noob mode as an additional option.
Kinn, no problem with Skyrim controls for me, worked perfectly on PC. Very much like fantasy Quake in places, especially Dwemer ruins. I'm glad you switched to a pad. The keyboard and mouse controls are terrible. It's OK to shit on dark souls, games are subjective.
It's a game you talk about with friends,discuss strats and share knowledge. Like the good old days. Playing it blind would make the game unnecessarily hard to the point of being bad. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to play a console port, use a controller. I don't know why you'd do anything else. That's what it was designed for.
Luckily I have a 360 controller for my PC and as soon as I plugged it in and started using that, the controls were an absolute breeze.
Oh I forgot the most important part: I can now recline comfortably in my chair, and don't have to awkwardly hunch over my keyboard as I slowly morph into Quasimodo. Note to self: write that FreePIE script for Quake that I keep telling myself I'm gonna do...
The default PC game controls almost always are set up assuming WASD is movement. I hate WASD. They don't line up straight and they're surrounded by other keys.
I push the keyboard to my left and use the arrow keys for movement. Then I set R.Shft, R.Ctrl, Num.4,1,0, as needed (crouch, jump, use, whatever). Games that don't allow full control over key re-mapping really piss me off. I agree with you about custom key mapping. PC Games that dont have this feature are shooting themselves in the foot.
Although I disagree with you about WASD for precisely the reasons you stated as a negative... the reason WASD is best is *because* it's surrounded by keys. :P Well, it's not like the arrow keys are lonely. Their arrangement and slight isolation from the nearby keys make it hard to hit something else when moving around, and the other keys are close enough to reach easily. I guess it's just something I've gotten used to over the years.
Most often R Shft is run, R Ctrl is crouch/sneak/duck, Num 1 is use, Num 0 is jump. Right/left mouse - Walk forward/backward
,/. - Strafe left/right M - Use Space - Fire Right alt - Jump Then I sorted my shit out and started using WASD because I figured out if literally all games came preconfigured that way it was probably for a good reason, and I've never looked back. wow czg, that is kind of odd...
I think the only thing I ever did that might be odd is have inverted mouse look. I don't use it any more, no idea why I started or stopped. You're pressing and holding the right shift/control keys with
I hardly ever use the pinky. I shift over and use the ring finger while driving with just the index finger. I guess that's a bit awkward, but you don't have to run or crouch that often really. For games that don't have a toggle for those functions (i.e. sneak/unsneak)it can get to be a bit of a pain at times.
Shambler I haven't done any real looking around but I assume there are mods for Dark Souls that add quicksave, make combat easier etc. Others might know something about this.
Thought I was alone. I push the KB to the left and use cursor keys for movement and nearby keys for common functions. By tactile feel, I can position my hand. Using WASD is useless to me because if my hand drifts off position... I prefer not to have to look at the KB and prefer to operate the controls by feel.
Which is not to say my method is any better than WASD. What I'd like to say is that every PC game should have fully configurable keys and mouse buttons. The lack of keybinding really stole away a bunch of my enjoyment of the game Cradle and in Fear 2, you can't assign the del key to anything and I rely on it for Aim Down Sights. I used to use arrow keys too!
I don't anymore. Wasd was a little annoying at first because, as you say, the hand tends to wander out of position, but I got used to it... I'm of the opinion that if you're going to play a console port, use a controller.
That's the story of how I bought xbox gamepad: I bought and installed steam vesion of Dark Souls, installed mods that my DS fan friend had told me, launched the game, started a new campaign, saw the hints for pad buttons not for keyboard, decided to look at key bindings, pressed esc to open menu, nothing happened, pressed it one more time, nothing happened, pressed random keys on keyboard, started to panic, didn't know how to quit the game, pressed ctrl+shift+esc and terminated the process, went out and bought xbox controller. I decided to get used to new controller before playing DS, played other games with it. When I got brave enough to try DS once more (with controller this time) the game showed me and error and didn't want to launch. Uninstalled it from my steam library. Mouse inverted ofc
Forward - LMB Backward - RMB Left - I Right - P Run - R-Ctrl Jump - R-Shift Crouch - O Reload - U Fire - # Alt Fire or Aim - [ Aim or Alt Fire - ] Melee or whatever - Left Arrow Use - Enter or Space Next weapon - MWheel down Previous weapon - MWheel up etc. 95% of games accept this. 4% are fussy about the fire button but can be bound to something nearby. 1% was fucking hopeless for binding anything and that 1% was DS. Couldn't even get close to it with DS.
I think Alice Madness returns forced me to put fire or alt-fire as something else. And I'm pretty sure there was some underwater action game demo that was a dick about that too. Skyrim was fine of course. Lol u scrubs. The Dark Souls installation process is supposed to be challenging. It's designed that way, which is good because it weeds out lame noobs like you. Yes your system will crash many times before you succeed, but it's specifically and expertly crafted to be like that otherwise you'll never understand the many steps and subtle nuances required to master the installation process, which is actually designed to reward the skilled and resourceful, and punish all the little babbies who think they can just click on a "play" button in Steam and launch the game lol.
As such, I godmoded most of the game.
What a waste of a good game, probably the saddest thing I have read here in a long while. God mode will reduced the game to a museum visit, staring at scenery while drifting through the crowds. Through great struggle comes great reward This is what Dark Souls is about, its a journey, a hostile land to explore and most of all its designed to be challenge. If your heart does not race or hands shake with adrenaline then you are playing it wrong. The story is fantastic! Need NG+ to understand the alternative ending. You got to question NPCs, piece together comments and keep exploring for answers. Its certainly no PDA, pretty logbook or boring NPC dialogues, its a tale you have piece together like a true detective! :P And then you realize how the act of you and other people actually playing the game ties in to the story and it's a whole new level of narrative and I get goosebumps.
And then you realize how the act of you and other people actually playing the game ties in to the story and it's a whole new level of narrative and I get goosebumps
OMG YES! The whole connection between everyone playing the game, the messages, the eternal circle of events, are you the beginning or the end!?! its just so perfect! :D Necros, there's no official godmode, but on gamecopyworld the trainer named
Dark.Souls_Prepare.To.Die.Edition.v1.0.Plus.22.Trainer-FLiNG works good, no malware warning either and for once all the cheats actually do something instead of just crashing the game. You just have to make sure you don't have F or numpad keys bound to anything in-game or you'll set it off. czg I still use your old setup Forward - LMB Backward - RMB Left - , Right - . RShift- Fire But probably half the games I play I'll also have WASD setup so I can switch. Because holding down LMB for 50 hours will kill my wrist, so whenever not in combat I switch back to using WASD. It probably is the best way to kb because of the amount of keys around it, but despite a few years of practise I'm still better in my old config. I think the earliest PC FPS' must have had this setup, maybe Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny, and I've just stuck with that ever since. Anyway back to DS... fuck so that's why I was never as fast in the second half of the game! I dumped all the heavy armour and just put on light shit. The menu made no mention of any key to drop items, or ever warned me of a limit, so I assumed there was no limit. I probably didn't notice because I used the stone armour for a while, and I probably went over the limit during that little excursion so when I dumped that overweight pos I didn't really notice that I wasn't as fast anymore, or assumed it was the weapon/shield. That explains Crouch - ! .
On a QUERTY that wouldn't make sense because it's about as far from the arrow keys as you can get. I used "Enter" for "use" a lot in the past, but some games are picky about rebinding that particular key, so I switched to numpad 1. It actually seems a bit easier to reach for me. It's not about how much you're carrying, you can carry as much crap as you want, but rather just what you've got equipped.
There's an "equip load" in the stats, shown as a fraction of max equip load. As such, I godmoded most of the game.
What a waste of a good game, probably the saddest thing I have read here in a long while. God mode will reduced the game to a museum visit, staring at scenery while drifting through the crowds. Actually, it lets people who don't have that much time to waste actually see the ending to a product they purchased. To be fair, it's not the game's fault I don't enjoy playing without cheating. I assumed all the hype about the difficulty was just hype and not real so I figured I'd be able to muddle through it, but this game demands way too much effort on my part to actually enjoy. It's just a chore to play and a game should never be a chore. But now that I know what these games are actually like, I haven't purchased any since then because those games are clearly not for me. What in the actual fuck?!
Sounds like it's optimized for a laptop; using this layout your right hand can do the left/right/fire keys (I bet that '/' is change weapon, jump or something similar) and your left can handle fwd/back on the touchpad. The thing is even with godmode there's still plenty to enjoy in dark souls without the high challenge - notably the visual design. It might be less interesting to the gamer that plays for combat and doesn't give a damn about what the game looks like, but everyone here would value the design of a game just as much.
Re keys, seems to make sense for me haha Forward = LMB Backward =- RMB Left = , Right = . RShift = Fire RCTRL = secondary fire or melee Enter = use / = crouch alt = run space = jump l = reload m = zoom (n is usually cycle zoom) [ & ] = cycle weapons ; & ' = end up being additional attack or power keys if needed, depending on game. All your standard RPG menu keys are already around there (J, I, K, O, P) so I don't have to lift my hand to reach them like WASD would require. The only disadvantage is having to get to the number keys for selecting weapon, but most modern games rely less on having all weapons available anyway, since consoles don't have that many keys. and the positions of the two damn windows keys are a waste of space. Maybe need a keyboard without those. ps. glovepie fixes enter being unbindable in some games. God mode is for any stupid part of a game that the developers were too stupid to know was stupid.
To be fair, it's not the game's fault I don't enjoy playing without cheating. I assumed all the hype about the difficulty was just hype and not real so I figured I'd be able to muddle through it, but this game demands way too much effort on my part to actually enjoy. It's just a chore to play and a game should never be a chore.
This is indeed very true, DS is certainly not for everyone. God mode to check the level design is understandable because it is good, though the fear and anxiety of exploring is also part of the DS package. I think DarkSouls has parallels with a MMORG and time spent leveling. If you hate the grind then DarkSouls will be annoying from the first death. They are calling it a spiritual successor to Descent. It's currently in development and on Kickstarter.
http://playoverload.com/ Some prototype gameplay can be seen here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KeDbKD7ei4 Lighting and effects look decent.
Rest looks so characterless and themeless. Same with Descent too, the games never seem to give a strong sense of what and where you are. and are making... decent?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/revivalprod/overload-the-ultimate-six-degree-of-freedom-shoote It's interesting that the levels are being made the same away the were back in 95... yeah if there was an actual game behind that monster design demo then I might give an Eartha Kitt. As it stands though, errrr.....
Lots of nice designs, sound and art... gameplay is robotron in first person.
If you think you're getting Doom or Quake then you're going to be really disappointed. If you're expecting an endless arcade shooter with a high score table then it's pretty much that. For those who have the game, you can click the eyeball symbol on the high-score page and watch a demo of that run.
Watch the top demo. The game is far more nightmarish than doom or quake IMO. This game is frustrating as fuck.
Graphics: 8/10 Sound: 6/10 Gameplay: 1/10 LevelDesign: 0/10 Overall: 3.75/10 I like the puzzle designs, and it does a good job of slowly teaching you how to play it while making the learning part of the challenge instead of an insulting tutorial. Also, there are a number of good moments where you think about the puzzles in an area one way, and then discover something that makes you re-evaluate everything previous in a new light.
I also like the environment art, not only is it often pretty, but I especially like the player's flow through the spaces. There are lots of nice feeling paths that lead you to a good reveal, it feels great going past things and through things with good parallax. And the way routes branch, loop back, view the same space from a higher vantage point, etc. are all good. Yeah the island is a great feat of level design, which is especially hard to pull off right for open-ended areas like that.
Great game overall. Reading Kona's comments about Dark Souls kind of applies to me in a way. Part way through playing SOMA, I decided to install and activate the Wuss mod (appropriately named); not because I was scared but because I was way more interested in exploring the environments and digging through various items to flesh in the story then I was in dealing with enemies. I loved the underwater base settings but lacked the patience to wait out the enemies who interferred with what I wanted the most out of this game. Yes, I spoiled SOMA but ended up enjoying it a lot more afterwards and I would play it again, Wuss mode on, just to take it all in again.
And if I'm not corrupt enough on SOMA, I'm playing Outlast with edited ini files to slow the enemies right down. Without cheats, I'd abandon this game as the darkness and scarcity of batteries for the night vision makes it enough of a challenge for my limited patience. As is, I'm not minding the game too much. Not as good as Amnesia, A Machine for Pigs, because it is so hard to see, but it has a similar vibe. Not sure if it is age, been-there-done-that combat grinding fatigue or the fact that I find walking sims or less combat intensive open world games (Fallout 3, Oblivion, STALKER series) or immersive puzzlers (Talos, Portal, Swapper) to be more interesting and less likely to be abandoned.What I've enjoyed most in games is immersion and exploration and the ability to progress withion my deteriorating capanilities. Getting mad at a game because I'm not skilled or committed enough making it seem like work is not how I want to use my limited time. SOMA had incredibly frustrating level design.
The monsters typically roamed on a very simple path (like, 2 point, 4 at the most) and teleported if they got stuck. The visuals, atmosphere, story and themes were amazing. But discussing it at the office I ended up drawing the levels on a whiteboard and redesigning them :P SOMA is a really annoying title because everytime I read it I assume it's an acronym for something (like DOTA) and spend time trying to work out what the fuck game you're talking about before remembering, oh, that's just what it's called.
Stupid crap title. I've enjoyed two movies on this, Her and Ex-Machina.
Even more so, I've enjoyed three games on this subject. What they all had in common was a background sense of melancholy but these three each had a unique flavour. Also, the player is required to mine information if they want the most complete story, otherwise big holes can be left behind: SOMA - Good horror, decent voice acting but the lead character was not likable. They did a nice job of filling out the story. Addresses the concept of transference vs copying. Soundtrack suits the game tension but is not contemplative. The Talos Principle - This one is my favorite in dealing with the subject. Brilliant voice acting; but then again, there's only two voices - one the God voice, the other in audio logs. This Gordon Freeman approach actually makes the lead character feel more like you, the player, especially since you can make some dialog tree choices that are personal. In this game, there is no transference; rather consciousness is imbued to machines artificially. Getting the most story requires opening up bonus areas and searching and exploring every computer terminal you can find. Not doing so will leave out some very important explanations. The music is contemplative and the game just has this rich vibe of wonder and wistfullness that makes it great. The DLC, Road to Gehenna, is also worth playing for its original take on social interactions between these AIs. Cradle - I really liked the art style of this game and how it feels like interactive speculative fiction. Mining for story items takes more effort then the other two games and if it wasn't for seeing some Steam achievements, there's a pile of documents scattered on the grounds that would go unread and they are worth reading. It deals with transference. The soundtrack is contemplative. The voice acting is okay but the lead character is not that likable. Not quite congruent to these three but I have to mention it is The Swapper which features intelligent rocks. The Swapper is also a melancholy story and is rich in atmosphere. I've decided that watching "Let's Play" videos is one of the absolute best things YouTube is good for. 15-20 minutes of watching someone else play a game is usually all it takes to know if I'd like it or not. It has saved me money and lot of wasted time. It has also introduced me to games that I otherwise wouldn't have given a second look which actually turned out to be very enjoyable.
I didn't really notice that. It was pretty rudimentary and was vastly outweighed by the exploration, scenery-gawping, and story-telling. I agree though that the latter aspects are the very good highlights of the game, although I didn't mind the gameplay at all and the tension / scare value was pretty good in places.
When I said the game gets insane... it does get insane...
I can barely make it past the first few waves - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSoRbNs9bDk The weapons seem really unsatisfying from the video
Loud booming weapons in games are horrible, I want to hear the rest of the game, not my weapons
/imho My point being that the weapons have to sound cool to get me to want to use them.
I never said take over the sound system and drown everything else out. Talking about SOMA, and also about sound design: SOMA had bloody great sound design. HTH.
can somebody explain to me why it uses the "aggroing mobs" concept so evangelically? It makes sense in a game like dark souls, but... from watching let's plays, in xcom2 this totally destroys the immersion and also a lot of the fun -- enemies are basically cannon fodder, because you basically just try to aggro them in a way so you can clear up the situation in the first turn.
Imho this almost makes the game a puzzle game. Reveal puzzle, carefully figure out moves to solve puzzle, repeat. No "world", ai, aliens or anything. In many cases you won't be able to aggro them at the right time, for instance you weren't able to scout right and your last character will reveal a group, that will then have a full turn to shoot at you.
Also the missions with a turn limit won't aglow you to scout so carefully, you'll often be in situations where you can't wipe out a group in one turn. "Reveal puzzle, carefully figure out moves to solve puzzle, repeat."
I mean, yeah, that's the game :) http://www.twitch.tv/gogcom will have a release stream for Superhot in 3 hours. It's not officially announced on GOG yet, but they've been hinting about the stream enough to make me almost certain that this will be the game.
You can check from this link when the stream will be in your local time. It's the only release stream on Thursday. http://j.mp/streaming_schedule They often have dev guests on release streams, so they could get one (or two) for this stream too. Superhot is a single-player FPS where time only moves when you do. It looks like it could be good fun. It's being released today on Steam, GOG and maybe a couple of other places. http://www.superhotgame.com Yeah, I want to grab it and I wishlisted it on Steam but there's no price listed yet
The release stream is postponed until tomorrow. Probably. It's not happening today at least.
Sorry for the false alarm. Total Biscuit video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJVrquYvGRA It was supposed to be released today. There's still some today left in Poland, so I dunno if it's delayed or not. SuperHot is fun so far
Does it run as badly for you as for me?
I had to reduce everything so that combat wasn't dropping frames all over the place. It's still jerky as fuck in the replays though. Even so, the story is great so far, and the puzzle combat (can't remember the proper word for it) is entertaining, much more than similar games like Frozen Synapse. http://callofcthulhu-game.com/ just released their first 2 screenshots.
I mean, it looks nice. Not much else to say right now. "RPG-Investigation game with psychological horror and stealth mechanics"
Interesting. Hopefully it's not boring which a lot of investigation and/or surival-horror games suffer from. It just crossed over into "fuck this bullshit" territory for me. I just don't have the patience anymore, apparently...
Not sure if this is the same ones who did the Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth game.
It was ok. Console game with a buggy PC port. I remember it was impossible to escape the Shoggoth unless you lowered your screen resolution (to TV / console levels) so that it ran at 30 FPS and you could actually outrun the thing. Okay watching him play it, it actually looks pretty interesting - very tactical.
Also looks pretty frustrating tho... But the payoff when you get it just right is great.
It's a great concept, well executed on the design side but technically weak. Having said that I'm the only one having hardware issues. I bought after biscuit said 'nueromanceresque' and was very happy when this turned out to be true. Pain about the replays being so jerky, I guess one could turn mouse sensitivity right down to counter that
Otherwise I like it.
The simple pure thing going on is cool, I could also see the concept used in a more complex game. I know bullet time in FPS sucks but I think if it is applied in the vein of the player being a GITS/Syndicate cyborg agent with many abilities to tactically manage it would be cool, all with the same level of challenge/puzzle superhot gives. I have my mouse speed in Quake pretty much maxed.
I care that it drops in frame per second so much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvjXk4nPUC4
What fucking ever. When are they going to do a NEW Far Cry game rather than a reskinned FC2/3/4/etc?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVvXv1Z6EY8
They have a free demo to try on their website. http://www.factorio.com/ I really like the pixelart. Don't know about the price though. Inner Chains: https://youtu.be/Qgh4MMof5Ws
FPS with Gothic / Lovecraftian environments? What a time to be alive... "Ok, with this density of art we can only afford to create x square metres of playable space, but we want the game to last at least five hours, so I guess that means the player movement speed needs to be..."
*gets out calculator* I'd put up with that movement speed for that art style, TBH. As long as it's not super-linear on-rails.
the art looks great, the 1 gun shown looks like it feels terrible.
With that movement speed it could play like a 1st person dead space, but they still need to make the guns feel good and the enemies animate better. Great to see this type of art in a game. I hope the stellar visuals don't become a crutch. The gameplay appears underwhelming and the name is kinda meh. Definitely keeping tabs on this, though.
There a new Strafe 1996 Video!! Strafe 1996 will come 2017
http://store.steampowered.com/app/442780 Played for about 4 hours today. Really enjoying it. It's very much a castlevania style game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npvZhXtu5Wc The OSGE mod adds a ton of content, mechanics and graphical improvements to the original Stalker : ShoC and also is stand alone, so if you somehow never grabbed a Stalker game before, this is highly recommended!
http://www.moddb.com/mods/old-good-stalker-evolution More mirrors and a torrent if required : http://forum.ogse.ru/viewtopic.php?f=121&t=2710#p5941043 Been looking forward to this for some time, 0692 is one of the best mods I've played for any of the Stalker games, and this should be even better. Curious that it's standalone though, maybe they have some sort of deal with GSC?
I started streaming it, but i wasn't very successful finding the goddamn first artifact.
Also, all in all it seemed quite unpolished. I'm aware that it's quite cynical to call something that's released 5 years after the original release "unpolished". Watch how I die at the end of the video to see what I mean. I also died before while trotting along the guy who wanted to introduce me to his village, because the guys from his village shot me down without warning.
I wasn't impressed when I saw some screenshots some time ago. I gotta say, after seeing it in motion with sound it seems pretty awesome.
It's interesting seeing such a faithful reproduction. It really is a remaster rather than a reenvisioning. Thank god for that - I don't think that many people got to enjoy the original, this gives newer players a chance to tackle it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL2RhY2vJes
the channel has some interesting little dev tidbits too. Bought, downloaded, installed.
Tried to change mouse button bindings, game wouldn't allow it (despite the decade-old Gothic3 allowing this). Emailed support. They suggested using AutoHotKey. Installed Autohotkey and created and ran a file to rebind mouse buttons. Game froze because I couldn't replicate the onscreen instructions in the intro. Tried to stop Autohotkey file running and couldn't because I'd rebound mouse buttons. Had to power restart computer to stop it. Uninstalled and permanently deleted Risen 3 from Steam. GG WP. I played the original Risen just recently even though it was a third person game, because I got it cheap on GOG. It turned out to be pretty good. From what I read though, the rest of the series did not seem worth playing.
but if you are messing with AHK, it is a good idea in cases like this to always add extra bind that reverts your binds.
I learned that the hard way when steam had that crappy clicker-event I was too lazy to search for and learn how to use existing clickers. I've found glovepie to be the best for rebinding. I did have autohotkey at some stage, but dumped it, probably confusing as fuck to setup. Anyway, Gp gets used for pretty much every game I play now, they all fuck up keyboard rebindings. You can easily just alt-tab out and click the stop button to turn it off.
Re risen 3, I hear the combat is exactly the same as risen 2, which was just plain broken, so you're not missing much. However Risen 3 developers actually telling you to use autohotkey - essentially a hack program to try and bring features into a game that should come with those features already - is pretty funny. Collossal wankstains. Maybe I could get it to work with Glovepie but if they didn't want to spend any time getting their game to work properly then I don't want to spend any time playing it.
If a game's target platform is not the PC, then the PC version will always be a sloppy, half-functional mess.
There, I've saved you some money. aka open world cthulhu mystery simulator
Here's a blog on how they are creating a Lovecraftian city http://frogwares.com/urban-planning-lovecraftian-horror-first-steps/ Misc news on the title : http://frogwares.com/sinking-city-news/ I love the premise, and the concept art is nice. However I haven't played anything by this developer before (They did the Sherlock games but I've never seen them) so the hype train isn't fuelled yet. Is the first image an actual screenie?? Style looks promising for sure. Would be nice to know playable perspective and some gameplay mechanics too.
Space Station 13, anyone else here far enough on the aspie spectrum to have tried it ? :D
I get to live my fantasy of being a Space Janitor a la Roger Wilco. More excited for this trailer than the actual game
http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/256662353/movie480.webm?t=1459371611 Plugged in to my 4k TV, looks awesome!
The sound and music are equally as good -- if not better. That layout mimics the kinda hook-shape my mother's hands have become in her old age.
...comes from grappling with too much horse cock over the years??
No, really.
If negke wants to copy the irc chat from yesterday I explained how this config is a piece of piss. Why is spirit so intimately familiar with what animal anus looks like??
Hmmm... oh n/m On the subject of DS3:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/374320/#app_reviews_hash Approx 25% people are reporting it as broken-as-fuck PC release?? Basically how all highly anticipated games go on Steam reviews for about the first week or two.
Although some releases seem to have more technical issues than some (XCom and Arkham thingy spring to mind too?).
I tested your config in ds3. You can't rebind the mouse buttons to movement. But it looked like everything else was ok.
strange style choice. I suppose it worked for Blood Dragon, STRAFE and Kung Fury. Gotta cash in on those 'I existed in the 80's' internet points.
The cinematic trailer is rad, though. So contrary to popular belief I started playing DS3. Daz was a bit over-optimistic with "ur keybindings will work apart from mouse button movement" - I got GlovePIE to remap the mouse controls but none of the buttons around [ ] ' # etc will be accepted no matter what they're rebound to, so I've had to sift everything a few keys to the left which is kinda annoying but it is playable and actually good practise for getting a laptop as I'd need to be over to the left anyway. So yeah I can play the fucking thing.
The fact the menus and everything still keep the controller buttons is a fucking disgrace. Don't any of the devs actually own PCs?? So far it runs pretty well on a i3 / 6gb / GTX660 2gb. A bit slow loading up some scenes but I'm getting 30-40 fps constant. This is on Medium....but it still looks amazing on that. This is why it's worth persisting through all the bollox, I'm, I dunno, 4 bonfires in and the scenery is stunning. Yay. Anyway. Took me about 6 goes to get past the first boss. The first bonfire is about 15 seconds dash before that so that's not too stupid. I found it a lot easier without the target lock on, I think I got lucky with the 2nd phase tho. Then I found the shrine and levelled up and ended up in a fucking spectacular castle and went one way past loads of goons and there was a fucking enormous dragon that suddenly torched everything in sight so fuck that homie so I went another way and one of the goons spontaneously erupted into some black oozing cockslug monster and fuck that too so I went back to the dragon and it was still there so I went back to the shrine and explored around and there was some fucking nobber with a katana that killed me instantly so fuck him too and I went back to the slugcock goon and killed him before he, errr, erected and got a longbow I can't fucking use so back to the dragon and realised I could get past him and then a knight killed me and then.....stuff. You get the picture. Don't any of the devs actually own PCs??
They would be developing on PCs that have controllers plugged into the PCs. Checked out Dark Messiah of Might and Magic again recently, pretty neat. Why has this kind of thing not taken on more ? First person melee dungeon crawling is awesome with a half decent combat system.
Good news is it seems Techland is getting back to working on Hellraid. https://twitter.com/romero/status/722903267735240705
Romero and Adrian Carmack, back together on something dark and violent which uses keyboard and mouse. The Return - our saviors ?
FifthElephant - I have Vermintide and quickly got disappointed - its a reskinned Left 4 Dead :( I love coop but somehow I hate the whole Left 4 Dead type of thing. Its so formulaic in the end, poison dude, grabby dude rinse and repeat rinse and repeat. Very arcadey in that sense I guess, which I also occasionally like for coffee break coop games, but there it doesn't really work for me. Yes really good game and pity there isn't more of it.
L4D2 was awesome of course. Verminitide good but not as much fun and quite unforgiving. Killes if you can dig 3PS fantasy too try Enclave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qiia9r6Rrk
What do we thing?? Graphics look great. Setting looks cool. Monsters look entertaining. Combat looks kinda ass?? Pure-batman style and I think the camera perspective would piss me off... Looks like Treyarch is going to make good on the Black Ops 3 mod tools, they're doing a closed test of the tools now. Community members are showing little things they've thrown together in the past few days. Not seen any editor shots yet, but presumably it's all still an updated Radiant.
And posted slightly prematurely, someone has posted more thorough thoughts here: http://mappersunited.com/index.php?/topic/297-alpha-modtools-first-impression-features/
I hope it doesn't turn out to be some kickstarter bollocks.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nightworkgames/blackroom-a-new-fps-from-romero-and-carmack?token=07458251 But considering the team it's hard to feel let down. Exciting none the less as I know the thing will be funded in no time.
"FROM ROMERO & CARMACK" is really pissing me off. It's so obviously to make people think it's that Carmack.
Which is funny, because, if it was John, it wouldn't mean as much to me. I'd love if he were involved, seriously, but Adrian being a part of this has a lot more impact for me.
Also, liking that all of the maps are by Romero. Even more so liking that the theme is basically an excuse for mappers to make what they want and put gameplay in it. The layouts you can glimpse in the trailer definitely jive with his vague claims back in December that e1m8b was a dry run for something new. e1m8b wasn't flawless, but I'd love a UE4 powered game packed with maps like that. That video did sound promising. Decent premise to allow for some good experimentation and diversity within the SP game.
Twitch doesn't resolve on the work connection... Isn't blocked, I see something different for that. Probably just something needed that is closed off. Oh well. I hope it goes on YouTube later.
"Are you going to make us your bitch again?"
"How about we just make you all a game." Hehe He wants to make 10 hours of singleplayer content in ~2.5 years. Asking for $700k of funds. I doubt they are going to just be 2 guys and a musician, so they'll need to hire on some others. That figure works out to $93k a year for 3 devs, $70k/year for 4, $56k/year for 5... $56k a year is roughly what an entry-level artist or designer might get for salary at a AAA company. $70k is roughly what a year or so experienced programmer might make. So not terrible figures, but seems like a tight budget for the content they want to make. Obviously they are hoping to exceed their asking figure.
Let's not even talk about the unknown costs of the various partners of their kickstarter campaign. If each level is a 30 min experience, that's 20 levels. He's given himself and an artist 1.5 months a piece to make them given their schedule. Even if their levels are an hour of gameplay and they instead spend 3 months on each of them... Again, this seems really tight if they're making the game in UE4. Plus, 6 planned multiplayer levels? And who is doing the gameplay programming, Romero alongside his other duties? Is Adrian making all the character art, animation, AND environment art? Effects and shaders too? Are they really attempting to do singleplayer AND multiplayer, the needs of each are vastly different beasts in 2016? Even with some hires, this seems like a lot of work, and sounds like a recipe for burnout. Basically, it sounds a bit much for the time, budget, and manpower they've given themselves. And let's not forget that Romero has over-promised and under-estimated in the past, most visibly in Daikatana, but even in the last 10 years he's announced 2 separate FPS games that never came to anything, which he had venture capitalists funding. I'd like to see some gameplay or something of substance shown before having more confidence in him. He's talked a lot about his ideas in their trailer, but any designer can talk about ideas and dreams until the cows come home... Proof is in the pudding, as they say. There's a lot of handwaving and 'interesting and unique' said, but let's SEE some of that please. the open-endedness and gameplay focus seems promising. I think something like this would need a certain amount of self awareness to not come off as cheesy.
I'm guessing the Kickstarter is only part of it. I would imagine they have other sources of capital.
Thanks for that, I am also waiting for something with a bit more substance before I pledge.
True, and he could be self-funding a bit. Funny thing about co-creating Doom and Quake is swimming in dollars. But wish he'd disclose some of that if he is.
really interesting.
What about the level design is the biggest time-sink in your opinion? If he had decided do do this in something comparable to quake instead of UE4 would the schedule seem more doable? "I am designing all the levels" probably just means he is mostly giving a bunch of sketches and notes to a team of level monkeys working under him.
The Kickstarter is just like Kingdome Come: Deliverance's. Test the waters and if it gets funded then the project will receive external funding on top of it.
The level design itself isn't too bad, no matter the engine. It's simply the time to make it look nice and unique in the engine which takes a lot of time.
UE4 implies a high resolution of environment models and textures. Quake you can get away with a flat BSP wall with a 64x64 brick texture. UE4 that still works, but the brick is maybe a 512x512 bump mapped displacement material with several layers you generated from a hi poly model, and you have various environmental detail models as well alongside that to really sell it. It depends on their style of course how detailed things are, but it's a lot of work! On the stream he said the $700k is a measure of interest for the external funding groups. If the KS hits that, they will come in with a larger figure. It is not the development budget, just the amount to trigger the investors and to fund the beginning of development. He did mention that the moment they hit $700k, they get to work on proper dev.
blackroom thread: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61313
Anyone remember this? Team-based ship vs. ship space combat in pretty cool settings. Some developer gameplay videos were posted a while ago, it looked quite intriguing to me.
Here's some latest footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPtL7Ye_jmM BUT, is it just multiplayer only?? A quick look on the website reveals this: WILL DREADNOUGHT HAVE A SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN? Absolutely! Dreadnought will have a single player campaign mode that allows players to explore the galaxy and engage in legendary space battles against the best captains the solar system has to offer. This EPIC space adventure features the writing of legendary comic book writer Dan Abnett (Guardians of the Galaxy, Warhammer 40K) whose narrative ties the campaign together and brings the Dreadnought universe to life. The full single player campaign may be released at a later time. So.... Basically they are going to release a specialist and esoteric team-based MP game into a market that is already saturated with easier to get into and more identifiable team-based MP games with loads more on the horizon, the game is going to bomb like fuck, and SP will never get released, right?? Right. Err Spacehulk Deathwing l4d2 in space etc etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kub5vOaT0V8
Looks actually not bad That looks freakin sweet. I really do appreciate the designs of the Warhammer universe but I really have little to no interest in tabletop gaming.
kinda neat how the suit is approached more like a mechwarrior.
I had a friend who wasn't interested in gaming but absolutely loved the warhammer books. The things he'd describe were always so much cooler than anything warhammer related I've seen. I'd tell him "you know, there are warhammer board and video games and they're pretty popular" but he didn't really care. Hearing him talk about the books made me want to pick em up. Looks great though I hope its not too l4d2-ish.
Am I alone in finding the l4d genre totally meh ? I'm not sure why it bores me, something about the arena like setup, or how formulaic or forced it feels. Maybe because its just not doable alone without teammates due to the very mechanics of the enemies makes it feel too "set up for coop" for it to be fun. I prefer coop games that just increase enemy count and starve resources for coop challenge I think. That looks spot-fucking-on. Personally don't like the fucking headbob but everything else looks like Space Hulk FPS done right.
Killes: Yes, yes you are. Maybe because its just not doable alone without teammates due to the very mechanics of the enemies makes it feel too "set up for coop" for it to be fun.
This is the core idea of L4D. You have to play it with actual teammates for it to be fun. You have to cooperate. Otherwise or with bots it doesn't work very well. Why you would rate a coop game on how well it plays without other humans is beyond me, to be honest. L4D/2 played very well with bots, I think that's how I did it first. More fun with coop tho.
I get it yeah Sleepwalkr.
I think that very fact is part of the problem for me: it is setup as more of a party game from the ground up. Actually I feel the same with Alien Swarm, maybe its just the random respawning swarms instead of the fixed challenge/enemy path to overcome. I dont know how to express it but the spawning swarms thing makes the feel of the mission quite different to me. And I was not rating it on how well it plays with other humans, just trying to pinpoint what turns me off about the game even when played with mates. I played it with friends and yeah, after 15 min I was just "meh" about it. I really like coop-ing with buddies in games like quake1 quake2 doom and the likes, setting the difficulty level high, when possible setting up aliases to drop/share ammo etc to strengthen the coop aspect. But with L4D/2 or Vermintide or Alien Swarm I do not feel 1/10th of the fun of that for some reason. Also that is a proper fucking gameplay trailer. It doesn't show much but it actually shows gameplay, the hud, what it would actually bloody be like to play. More devs / pubs should do that as "gameplay" trailers....
This is pretty hilarous : https://youtu.be/NJj1Q8kBGog?t=137
:) That actually made my long-dormant Warhammer40K penis stand to attention. Aesthetically that is just bang-on.
I tapped out of that series around CoD4 I think. It was all just shooty army men tango roger foxtrot back then - so, it's all robots and aliens and shit now?
It's had robots to some degree since MW3, when they introduced manually controlled robots with weapons to break hard defenses. Then BlOps2 added drones and more ai powered things. It has been trending in the direction of more and more scifi, with some straight up shooting gluing it all together.
Now if you touch on the coop side of the franchise... It's all aliens, giant frankenstein monsters, pulp fiction heroes, 1950s ray guns, nazi zombies, hell hounds, and subterranean wild west ghost towns... So who knows what the coop on this one will look like - or if it was sacrificed to work on that CoD4 remaster. Sick trailer, love how it's choreographed.
Also, Imperial Knights! Liked DOW. Really liked DOW2 and how the took a different direction. Hyped for this. Finally, a lot of good GW stuff on the horizon (Battlefleet is getting a decent reaction, Total Warhammer, Deathwing). Sorry I can't stop lolling at how hard the image at 1:33 was brought to us by Beksinski.
Then again Games Workshop have basically built an empire out of literally plagiarising every work of fantasy out there. Kinn you're a tit
And SpaceCod end of trailer rofl "preorder spaceblabla and you get cod4 remastered so we make sure we sell this crap." er, it looks pretty cool, I've been meaning to check out the beta (I think it's been extended until the 10th?).
Overwatch seems more compelling to me than Battleborn. Overwatch certainly has that undeniable bliz sheen and polish, visually anyway. I didn't want to buy it, played beta and now I want to buy it. Polished, fast and fun. Reminds of TF a lot.
Here's 10 mins of fast-paced, visceral, violent Shadow Warrior 2 gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIikukPw9f4
On paper this sounds good. But it leaves me completely cold - Painkiller with an oriental theme. Nothing about it grabs me (apart from the weather effects and localised damage) and the amount of effects and garbage on screen is annoying. Also in the same ballpark where I played the beta with friends with no plans on buying it. Now we all want to buy it as it was a blast.
They really do have something there. $40 for the PC version is nice as well! Yeah, overwatch played beta and actually had fun somehow. The amount of polish and smoothness to it all, should be the minimum any AAA studio aims for.
Not important but I hate the characters style though (visually, not gameplay wise), you can see every tumblr youth demographic pandered to with each character...*shudder*...but of course brilliant $$$ sense from bliz...oh god it makes me think of sense8 somehow, anyone tried watching that shite ? Those the cringiest attempts at humour i've ever heard. Is it some kind of satirical meta-comedy where the joke is how unfunny the jokes are? One of the quips was "You want to hear something funny? You're full of holes!"
Was the original that painful? Aside from that it leaves me cold somehow too... I think it's mostly how unsolid everything feels, weapons just don't feel physical enough, shotguns fire fairy dust, when you hit monsters numbers fly out of them. Character design gets a solid 0/10 from me too. Completely unmemorable, they've just thrown everything at the wall and nothing has stuck. Environments actually look very pretty and varied! Really nice grass in particular. Some of the interiors seem very empty and unlived in though. Strange, I feel like on paper this could have been quite good but it's really missed the mark! Environments actually look very pretty and varied! Really nice grass in particular. Some of the interiors seem very empty and unlived in though.
Yeah, they look very pretty. However, I feel they're a bit too busy for this type of game. Both the enemies and environments aren't very readable and just kinda messy. Also, peel back the paint and it seems the combat is pretty average. I finally got around to playing Diablo 3 and it really ended up being a mixed bag for me.
Firstly, the visuals are stellar. Sure, it was all pretty generic but it was executed well and I really enjoyed looking at it throughout the game. The sound was great too. Overall, the presentation was very nice. The story, for me, was hugely disappointing and, at times, cringy. I have a fondness for the judaeo-christian mythos and I was hoping for something with a bit of meat, maybe even something along the lines of Alighieri, Milton or even Blake. Really, it ended up being shallow archetypes of good and evil. Leah (oh god) was a waste of a character from the beginning. Her life and death were meaningless and her personality was cliched tiresome. Instead of her being diablo's daughter and eventually being possessed by him, I would have preferred her as actually being diablo in disguise. If they made the character likeable and integral, diablo's eventual reveal could have been epic. You would grieve the loss of a character you've grown attached to, carry the guilt of assisting in the destruction of the world and feel the betrayal of diablo, supplying you with a personal vendetta against him to carry the final act. The way they handled it in the game was just so, so lame. Cutscenes looked great though! I found the gameplay to be just so-so. A major problem is that it wasn't hard enough, they won't let you go past expert until you've played the game... if they're gonna do that they need to make expert challenging. I died twice, and not because I'm gosu, it was really just too easy. So, that really hurt the gameplay. Loot, abilities, and really everything else were completely undermined by that. The game simply devolved into sitting back and spamming. Lame! In the end, wanting to see more of the visuals is what carried the game. The story sucked and the gameplay was grindy at best. In my mind, if visuals are carrying your game, you've got a bad game. in summary: visuals 9/10 story 3/10 gameplay 5/10 overall 6/10 Glad I waited and picked this up for $20, not even going to bother with the expansion. I enjoyed both Torchlight I & II more than this. You wanted a story? There was one? There were cut-scenes and shit, I dunno if I can recall a single one.
I agree about the gameplay, main game is too easy. Get the ROS expansion, it is much harder especially bosses, and very damn cool graphically. Diablo 3 was probably the easiest game I've ever played (even after yanking it up to the highest difficulty it would allow me to first time round). People say in that annoying smug tone "Oh, the game doesn't even start until you reach character level (X)", but before I can get to that point I've already completed it once and seen all the content during the "Babby's first playthrough" phase of the game. I might give a shit if I felt that there was a big chunk of the game left to discover after that, but I really can't be bothered to trudge through the same stuff again just to try to find some challenge. Played it, completed it, shelved it.
They really should have just made all of the difficulty tiers available all of the time. I really can't be bothered to trudge through the same stuff again just to try to find some challenge
no kidding. replayability: you're doing wrong. Diablo 3 was surely a disappointing experience. So much so that I haven't bothered with Reaper of Souls and probably won't.
Yeah you can one-hit-kill every single enemy and boss in the game when wearing just one of them on your character, yet the game drops nagelrings like sweeties, right from the very start. Even without that thing though it would still be a very easy game.
People say in that annoying smug tone "Oh, the game doesn't even start until you reach character level (X)"
Try Reaching Higher Grifts? like 60, 70, 80? this is where diablo 3 currently. Seriously though you fuds, get ROS. The design and style is some of the best in the game (if not the best), you start with your D3 end-game character (with or without the numerous nagelrings you kept / dropped), and it's harder overall. BTW, I liked D3. I'd rather have a game too easy than too hard. What it lacked in challenge it made up for in being able to actually get through it. Yeah my point is that it should be possible to set the difficulty to a meaningful challenge on the first play through. A person should not have to keep playing through and completing the storyline of a game, over and over again just so they can grind their character up to a point where the game unlocks a higher difficulty level. At that point, I've seen it and I'm bored of it.
It's one of the oddest and stupidest design decisions I've seen in my time, and I have seen some shit, yo. Once you've completed the game you have to do very little grinding to play on harder difficulties.
Positively gets my attention level 100% higher than Doom.
I'm in the process of beating the first on the hardest level and it's really good fun. Dumb and entertaining. What's not to love? https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/87784-ancient-aliens-a-megawad-for-boom/
Played through the first episode of this. Haven't played through any Doom in years besides Sgt Mark's Brutal Doom map pack and this honestly destroys that. The level design is never confusing and the atmosphere is just as compelling as the one you experience the first time opening up Quake 3 Arena. Highly HIGHLY recommended for anyone whose played through all the recent Quake maps and wants a new challenge. Warning it's VERY HARD I tried playing that shit. They should have just used the Q3 engine for it and not tried to insert Q3 things into the Doom engine, as the physics dont mesh well at all. I also could not get any textures to load. Meh/10
"Was the original that painful? "
yeah, oh yeah. I really hated the first shadow warrior remake from the first moment. Horrible humor, visual design and gameplay. Horrible annoying voice on the main character Awesome, I wonder if it's dedicated to me. Murphys Law suggests it's probably the worst game of all time.
I agree that the humor and voice acting suck whale spleen, but the gameplay is solid (apart from some melee enemies being able to hit you from longer range than they should) and the first area is gorgeous.
I found it was most enjoyable with voices and subtitles off. Seriously, you'd think people would have learned after DNF to not take a 3d realms title and say "what if we made this halfway between serious and over-the-top tasteless, to the point where it's not funny but still embarrassing to show your Asian friends?" It was okay in the original game in an excentric-chinese-swordmaster tongue-in-cheek sort of way. The new ones try to pick up on the humorous tradition, but instead of making the main character "likeable silly", they made him stupidly annoying. It's over the top and mostly unfunny, feeling like it's aimed at 12 year-olds. Kind of like the writing in Bulletstorm.
The gameplay wasn't all bad; mostly arena-based though and the levels were linear. Which is a shame considering the original game allowed for some nice exploration.
The new ones try to pick up on the humorous tradition, but instead of making the main character "likeable silly", they made him stupidly annoying. It's over the top and mostly unfunny, feeling like it's aimed at 12 year-olds.
Just like Duke Nukem Forever, then. Awful. So why was this one panned anyways? I just played through the space section and it was fucking phenomenal.
Cod people are weird with anything that's not just the standard military stuff. Check out the like bar on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeF3UTkCoxY lmao. for the next few days. This is the dlc with all the near future stuff https://www.origin.com/en-gb/store/buy/battlefield-4/pc-download/addon/battlefield-4-final-stand
Is anyone else here a massive phaggot for the Samorost/Machinarium games?
In case you didn't know Samorost 3 is out: http://samorost3.net/ Look at that style. Unnnngghhhhhh. It was panned in actual because of technical problems undermining it on PC, the initial MP balance was off (took far too much work to unlock basic things that were quickly within reach in earlier games - they patched this, but didn't apply it retroactively, so they just lost those players), people had acclimated to weaker weapons in the franchise so this one's MP felt "melty" with how quickly you could die, and the levels on the whole were a little bit bigger on average, with more vertical elements, which combined with a few inventory decisions made camping much more viable than it had been in a while.
I've not heard any actual serious complaints about the campaign, I thought it was pretty good, with some really great moments. Linear as all get out, but largely in situations where that isn't a huge problem. I did love the space fight sequences, the underwater bit was actually kind of creepy, the dog wasn't overused, and when you get a hold of the super weapon near the end? I found that rather satisfying. Now, that's not to say it is worth $60... I got a review copy... I might still play its MP once in a while if that patch had applied retroactively. But yeah, the sp is pretty good for that sort of game. Get this game. This is basically a mix of Super Metroid, Dark Souls and Castlevania. And it is totally bloody amazing.
It's Dark Souls with just one dimension removed, but oh god do I hate that character design. Looks cool apart from that.
This is basically a mix of Super Metroid, Dark Souls and Castlevania
It's more a mix of Dark Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls, tbh. I'm not hugely fond of the aesthetic of salt and sanctuary.
The game doesn't look appealing to me and castlevania and dark souls are two of my favourite games is such a lovely crafted one. I really love the previous two.
Thx Kinn for the reminder! To all others, go get it! Salt and whatnot, good, but no DS vibe in any way to me. Hail 2D and handpainting! That art style is a very a poor imitation of Braid.
Who the fuck imitates Braid in 2016? Braid had a very well-designed and cohesive art style.
However, I prefer my 2D games to be proper limited palette pixel art at 240p resolution with a realistic-looking CRT scanlines effect. That is the pinnacle for me. Nothing else comes close imo. https://www.gog.com/news/introducing_gog_connect
This offer allows you to add games you own on Steam to your GOG inventory. It is available for specific titles only and the offers might only appear for a limited time. Still, it'll allow you to get extra digital copies for free. The current list of games on the page linked above is not quite complete. I could transfer Braid over to my GOG acct, but I don't see it listed on the page. You'll get the list of current offers if you link your Steam acct to the GOG one and use the actual service. Some of them said they're valid for five more days when I did that just a while ago. This is just a heads up for people who use both and don't follow GOG news regularly. The games that are offered this way depend entirely on the publishers allowing it, I believe. Does Shovel Knight have such awesome metal soundtrack in-game? https://www.gog.com/game/shovel_knight
Due to exceedingly high demand this may take up to several days, please check back later. Thank you for your patience.
but yeah, this'll be great (when it works) to finally get some stuff off of crappy steam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUEqFPniOeg
For Balbler. Something unique about the style... reminds me of the GoT intro somewhat. yeah looks alright, could do with some colour, but otherwise looks pretty good. trolls, mechs and dinosaurs wtf. RPC? role playing car? oh, role playing chat. Doesn't look like a game where you just chat.
But the gameplay looks laughably bad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuXqIYnGE0 There's a 48 hour giveaway of the classic System Shock 2 on GOG. You have to redeem it via the free GOG Galaxy client, which they want to stress test this way.
The offer is on the front page of https://www.gog.com/ right now. I kinda think everyone here has it already, but you never know. Anyone else extremely pumped for this game? I loved the original Deus Ex, and Ubisoft did a pretty good job with Human Revolution and answered many player's complaints regarding the boss combats with the director's cut.
With Mankind Divided, I'm expecting more player choice and other improvements from what was learned making the first game. On top of that, I just found out about a new game mode that sounds like an extra game on the side: http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/6/8/11846876/deus-ex-mankind-divided-takes-a-new-direction But as it goes with any new game, I am not going to overly hype anything. Deus Ex: HR was one of my favorite games at the time and I played for hundreds of hours with different types of play throughs. Got so far to go through the game with zero augmentations/knockdowns/detection.
Here is to hoping! ..For the heads up. Still have a CD copy somewhere, but it was worth booting up Windows just to grab a digital copy.
Why not eh? It's somewhere on the hype list. HR did a great job of salvaging DX after IW (and adding a distinctive style, and unfortunately the most boring protagonist in the history of gaming, they should have had QuakeGuy instead of Bellend Jensen Dullardfuckwhit), MD looks promising too. GFX look a bit busy, combat looks a bit MTV-glitzy hypu mega-kill, but overall it still looks good.
Quake Champions trailer: https://youtu.be/sa-6fQyNkZo
The game will feature a "diverse character of warriors" with unique attributes and skills. Well, fuck. We Overwatch now, boys. Also will be outsourced to Saber Interactive. I know, it's impossible appeal at same time for Q1 fans, strogg fans (Q2/Q4) and mp players (Q3/QLive) but this is just something completely out of this world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwbutTQ8Yow Titanfall2 with proper single player?? I can imagine the gameplay progress being a bit meh / on rails, but the theme still looks cool enough.
Dishonoured 2 - LOADS of stuff starting here:
https://youtu.be/Z_1mzhRQSsM?t=1h48m35s Looks ace. HYPU! https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/06/14/phoenix-point-new-xcom-julian-gollop/
This sounds well cool. I get the impression, looking at stuff that is out this year, coming out soon, or in development, that PC gaming is really very not dead indeed.
Shambler
It would take you... 324 continuous hours 13 days,12 hours,26 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library IN THIS TIME YOU COULD... Watch the entire series of Friends 3 times Fucking LOL. Thank god I've got some steam games to play. Throw in 16 hours of SC2 LOTV too... 5139 continuous hours
214 days,3 hours,47 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library IN THIS TIME YOU COULD... Travel to the moon 50 times Watch the entire Star Trek: The Original Series 78 times Watch the entirety of Star Trek (all TV shows and movies) 8 times Watch the Tenth Doctor's (the best Doctor) series' 134 times Listen to Free Bird 34,265 times Write 7 NaNoWriMo novels :| /derail i like how for some reason he's left the ripped doom 3 models the same except for the hellknight, where he's randomly stretched and scaled just the legs to make it look like some sort of weird tall cartoon bunny rabbit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Jfg_Y0m_E&feature=youtu.be
Looks like it does a lot of things right, including the style, graphics, interpretation of 40K universe into a proper ARPG, destructible environments, kill moves, etc. Also looks fairly dull and uninspiring. Ticks all the boxes except the "Wow!" one. Awwww, it even has the diablo red health orb on the hud, bless their little cotton socks ^_^
Humble Bundle is giving out Limbo for free. It's an indie platformer. You can get a Steam key, too.
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/limbo I didn't spot any info about how long the offer is good. Grab a copy if the aesthetic of the game and the idea of puzzle-platformers agree with you. It ended quickly after I posted the above message. No more free giveaway. Apologies for not updating earlier.
If you don't know yet, Origin these days is giving away Nox through "On the House", and Ubisoft is giving away "Prince of Persia: Sand of Time" at "club.ubi.com"
Installation of their respective clients is required. It's finished and about to be released!
http://sureai.net/?lang=en It's a professional Skyrim TC by the same develeopers who made Nehrim for Oblivion and some Morrowind campaigns.
https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&boardid=1&threadid=172761 well??? Someone try it and report back....
Holy Giger and Cronenberg: https://youtu.be/MvBo_rKleNw
My body is ready to be scared / disgusted. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4q95zd/the_technomancer_review_thread/
Seems like it is a collection of good ideas but together in a very bad way :( I watched Cohh play it for a few hours on his stream and it has some pretty glaring issues. He said he won't go back to it after 3 hours played... I stumbled across Furi in my Steam recommendations some time ago. The game's visuals are interesting and it has an amazing soundtrack, but I'm not yet sold on the gameplay. It ended up on my wishlist for later consideration.
http://www.pcgamer.com/furi-review/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/423230/ This track though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ5gtInauiI The thought of a HD remake doesn't appeal to me. I still play the chex3.wad from time to time. It's much in the same way I prefer Doom 1 & 2 over everything after it in the franchise. Nostalgia is strong and feel an HD remake won't capture that magic.
Anybody else looking forward to Dishonored 2?
(Fingers crossed that they don't screw it up) I'll probably need to build a new PC for it, which is no big deal since my current game computer has developed some strange problems. If I had to choose, I'd have to say Dishonored is my favorite game of all time. It's kind of funny, because I didn't realize I liked stealth games until I played it. And yet Dishonored is very light and rather barebones in the stealth department, so I'm hoping Dishonored 2 will have a more robust system like the Thief games (not counting Thi4f) or at the very least harder stealth.
Yeah, the enemy's tendency to never look up made stealth mode pretty easy as long as you could get above them (which was most of the time), and you didn't mind occasionally reloading a quicksave.
i've got a question about your Thief contribution
is there any particular reason that you decide to stick to T1 instead of T2 ps looking forward for your upcoming TG project Fuck yes. Didn't you see Daz or my responses to the D2 videos on this thread??
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/173263/life-is-strange-episode-1-going-free
Probably the best semi-angsty semi-soppy story-driven teenage college girl sim around?? No srsly. I watched the bird play some of this and it seems very well done in it's genre....really quite emotional in places. Off to play more DOOM soon, personally. I just prefer TG over T2 for a few reason:
- Better atmosphere - Better textures (in the artistic sense) - All in all it's the better game to me Also I already have access to all the resources used in TG that I would have to import if I was mapping for T2. Also yeah I'm hyped for Dishonored 2. picked it up for -80% off or something a while back and only just got around to playing it. Never played any of the MGS games before but damn, this is great.
I have absolutely NO IDEA wtf is going on with the story, it's utterly bat shit mental. But the game play is refined as fuck and very satisfying. It reminds me of XCOM in that you have a persistent base building aspect and a tactical combat element where you can use all the stuff you have researched to fuck people up. I'd say if you love sandbox stealth games with a persistent base building aspect then definitely take a solid look at this game. I'm having a blast with it. Note that I'm playing on pc with a xb1 controller. Can't comment on what it feels like to play with a kb/m. Yeah not a good idea picking MGS5 as your first entry in the series, both for story and gameplay reasons.
I know I'm going to repeat what has already been said here but I played through all 5 acts of Diable 3 (I have the ROS expansion.) I had it on my machine for quite a while before commiting to a game.
As with Diablo 2, I started the game on Normal expecting relative dominance against the mass enemies but having reason to fear bosses (for me Duriel, the D2 Act 2 boss, killed me numerous times and was the hardest in the whole game with Diable second.) I admit that a mix of cowardace and laziness kept me from bumping up the difficulty with my Demon Hunter and it felt like I had a cheat code on because I plowed through everything without ever dying. Maybe Blizzard should have called Normal Easy and Hard Normal or something that would result in a peceived challenge on par with Diablo 2 which felt right for me. I did enjoy the game. It looks great and sounds great (the music seemed better in Act 1 then the others.) I actually like the extra colours and glitter and the interface seemed good. Unlimited potions and town portals were nice but brought a slight sense of guilt since they carried no cost or inventory burden. D3 felt less grindy then D2 but that could have been the speed with which I made it though in light of no resistance. D2 had a better story but the D3 story was okay if a bit cliched. The D2 story is hard to beat - three brothers - 3 prime evils - hard to top that. I did get my Nagelring but it happened post Act 5 while doing bounties for the sake of reaching level 70. I did bump up to Hard but I may have to go up another notch or two before I actually have to pay attention to my health globe. Naybe I'll get an itch in a year or so (I did like repeating D2) and I'll use my existing Demon hunter to redo the campaign but with proper peril. Note that I'm playing on pc with a xb1 controller.
I've considered buying one because some games require pressing multiple controller buttons at once to perform certain actions. This can be awkward and if not impossible to do playing the PC port on a keyboard. Bad thing is, you usually don't find this out until after you buy the game. Was hyped for it then it turned to be rather disappointing.
However, I can appreciate the second half of Act III as it was a visual splendor to play through! Diablo II will always be the king for me. Amazing stuff! If you enjoyed Skyrim and Nehrim, there's no way around this mod. Quite huge and well-designed world (three+ climate zones) with lots of exploration, good story and entertaining quests. Also professional voice acting. This could easily be a DLC or a game of its own. Naturally, there are bugs and shortcomings that require some patience at times, but for a noncommercial release, that's all forgiven. Took my time with it, some 60 hours or so.
The English version is scheduled for release in August. 8 GB download. Highly recommended. Bunch of screenshots: http://bit.ly/2aFfZ50
....of shit, pointless, class-based teamplay MP / MOBA shooters that are all the fucking same that no-one is going to play...
Overwatch Paragon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3miMIZvNWoI Battleborn Lawbreakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwedep1Jt1Y Quake Chumpions if ever released (hopefully not) Any more?? Definitely a lot of entries attempting to make it big but I will have to say Overwatch is an enjoyable "sit and play" for a few hours game with friends.
That I'd touch it with a fucking bargepole of course. But it got there first in the current batch.
Yeah, I didn't even know Lawbreakers was a thing until I saw it on the Game Grave.
Paragon seems to be a more boring version. Overwatch has approach-ability, and has charming characters. Poor Battleborn seems like it could have some merit as it has multiplayer PvE but its release was overshadowed by Blizzard's next big hit. Who knows about Quake Champions, I am sure there will be some pull to influence micro transactions of some sort. I'll stick with OG Quake! Diablo 3 - Viking Version!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPwGstCELas Looks generic as fuck, but the gfx look really nice and the theme might well be appealing... Latest Trailer
Giger/Beksinski inspired FPS. Neat flesh gun (not the giger variety) at the 2:20 mark, reminiscent of PREY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjEeDz51pHE
Looks spot on. Graphics decent already. Animations and effects are cool. Functionality with initiative, movement commands etc look great. Mechwarrior meets XCom? Sold. I'm a little nervous about that "Eliminate Enemy Units 0/5" and "Destroy Reinforcements 0/4" thing. Kinda removes any element of surprise, perhaps even suggests segmentation or compartmentalization of mission design? Also, I don't like how the enemy reinforcements just spring up in the middle of the map instead of having to enter the map from the edges. Does the player even have the option of scouting those areas in advance and camp their spawn points? What would happen then?
I hope they don't bring the kind of mission design qualities they've shown here into the full game because it seems rigid and predictable. I'd prefer mission design that's more organic and free-flowing, like MechCommander 1's. Mission structure does not seem that exciting yet. But the core gameplay seems work very nicely.
I really liked MechCommander2, never played 1 tho. Right. Fucking. Now.
http://metroid2remake.blogspot.fr/2016/08/am2r-10-released.html http://store.steampowered.com/app/363680/
Anyone playing this?? It's okay. UI and functionality is good, graphics are good with the usual caveat that you have to play so zoomed out you can't see fuck all. The worst thing by far is that although there is a proper plot progression going on, the actual game missions are all pure and simple 1v1 vs AI skirmishes, right down to randomly generated sections of space. Really lets it down. Gonna keep playing tho. That was fast...lol.
The future of AM2R As you may know already, AM2R received DMCA notices in all the download hosts, and some parts of this blog. AM2R is floating around the torrent sites and it run seamlessly under WINE. It is very well made.
Yeah I grabbed it soon as I heard about it, I didn't think Nintendo would let that slide. They are very protective of their stuff. It's pretty great so far though, I would've definitely paid some amount of money for this as a download title.
I think that Overwatch is basically proof that Blizzard are gods of making lowpoly stuff look ridiculously good.
I wouldn't really call Overwatch lowpoly, but it's just proof that they are great designers and know how to create good looking yet well optimized games.
Maybe this will interest you : http://polycount.com/discussion/170394/technical-study-overwatch-image-heavy I've been telling everyone ever since I first heard about the game, that No Man's Sky is just going to be another Spore. Turns out I was pretty much bang on.
Kinn, the first thing that came to mind when I saw no man's sky was spore :P
If it is anything like spore, it should be interesting for the first couple hours at least. Looks like a $10 game to me. Maybe. It really doesn't look like something I'd want to play at all.
Procedurally generated content is the biggest snake oil bullshit the games industry has ever seen.
There's a time and a place for it of course (minecraft uses it well) but 99% of the time, it just leads to crap. The trick is to search your soul and ask yourself whether those games are good because of proc gen or good in spite of proc gen.
Good games with proc gen -
Nuclear Throne Super House of Dead Ninjas Ziggurat Diablo Spelunky (already mentioned of course) Super Hexagon (although the concept is pretty simple) Teleglitch Worms Minecraft (obvs)
Rogue Legacy Sublevel Zero Race the Sun Megabyte Punch Downwell Darkest Dungeon Is Procedural and an excellent game as well.
It's like Isaac but not bloated and broken. Enter the Gungeon, I have this. It's ok. The starting guns are lame.
It's all well and good having a game with a billion guns but when you start with a pea shooter every time it gets boring as hell. I have never really fancied playing Isaac. I probably have it on my steam pile of shame too. + Dwarf Fortress
Otherwise I'm also interested in the way Ultima Ratio Regum is approaching procedural generation. Still waiting for its v0.8 release before trying it. Played it yesterday with friends. It's a really cool game. Dark and creepy, the sound and the atmosphere are very well done. It's most interesting when you are playing with 3 friends with skype or TS, though it's really hard to survive with a team of low level survivors. Playing as killer is fun too, but it looses all its creepy charm then.
I didn't see much game there. Dark micro-levels drenched in gore, a few things wandering past, and not much else....
...looks gorgeous. And scary. That monster at 4'20" seems straight out of a Clive Barker movie.
If you remember a couple of months ago, GOG inaugurated a service where you can redeem certain games from them if you already own them on Steam. They had a few games up for a while and then the thing went quiet. They just put up a few new games for a duration of a week (6 days remaining as of this writing).
They're the old versions 1 to 3 of Master of Orion, a classic 4X game series. This coincides with the release of the new MoO. This was just a little heads up in case people followed the service for a while and then gave up. It's looking like the offers are going to be pretty rare and over quickly, making it easy to miss them. But they're still keeping it alive at least. The last time it got overloaded quickly and took a long time to process some requests. With fewer games on offer this time this probably shouldn't happen. I'm not at that excited about the new MoO myself. I'll have to check it out some time, because I did love these types of games back in the day. The only thing that'd make me actually excited would be a faithful remake of the old Master of Magic, but that's a pipe dream. And, I guess Civ VI could turn out decent. https://www.gog.com/connect It's just a wild guess on my part, but they might make a similar offer for the older games in the Witcher series when this one comes out. http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/6/12106196/the-witcher-3-game-of-the-year-edition I just found out that the Bioshock series of games have been "Remastered" and will be free if you already own the originals.
Supposedly they will be automatically available on Steam next week if you have those versions. Some hoops to jump through if not. https://blog.2k.com/news/en-bioshock-the-collection-pc-upgrades Never played the original as it looked a bit grey and clunky, but then played Last Light and really enjoyed it, so got the revamped M2033 Redux when it came out and have been playing it recently.
It's pretty much like Last Light i.e. really rather good. Combat and controls are a bit clunky (trying to track the fucking mutants when they are attacking you is a bit like trying to swat a swarm of wasps with your cock whilst someone shines a strobelight in your face) and there sometimes feels like a mission/story/gameplay disparity, but other than that there's a lot of captivating stuff about this game. Graphics are good, world design is well done, the NPCs are entertaining and the atmosphere is spot on. It's some bleakly post-apocalyptically RUSSIAN, like Last Light I wonder if it is actually a real-life documentary. Good stuff. It was always fun in the Metro games to step off a very slight slope into what should have been a few inches of water only to immediately plunge into the abyss.
I always assumed it was due to the abrupt transition from walking to swimming causing the player's POV to switch almost instantly from 5 feet above to 1 foot below the water line.
Maybe that's a glitch or just the way they decided to program it. They were pretty good games regardless. A lot like the STALKER series where the good stuff was more than enough to offset the weird design choices. Never played the Redux but I have played the original when it was optimized to all hell.
Free is too expensive. The video gives a good taste of the game, UT2k16 wants it's game back. No bargepole long enough for that toss.
I downloaded it cuz free. I don't really play multiplayer much these days, though. When I do it's UT99 and I'm either way better than everyone else on the server, or I get destroyed. No in-between.
Looks neat, I am wondering if they are actually using the Quake engine -
http://www.pcgamer.com/brutal-new-fps-mixes-hexen-doom-and-quake/ Looks... interesting. I've never been a huge fan of levels based around "real" locations, but it does look like a good romp based on the trailer.
Some parts of it really do look quite quake-like, don't they? The only thing that makes me doubt that idea is the player movement. I can't say i've ever seen anything quake1-based do that much with the player controller before, although that hardly means it's impossible... Maybe it's more quake2 based, or something. the ability to do flips in the air is pretty cool, though it didn't seem like the guy was in the air long enough to use it much. if you have a rocket launcher and more air time, you could use thse jump pads to clean up a crowd of enemies before you land, which could be pretty cool. The arcade tank game Assault had a thing like that.
https://youtu.be/vrG9ZRrSrT8?t=55 It looks pretty neat, wish the gameplay snippets were longer though. The dual-wielded shotguns are giving me Marathon flashbacks. (I really wish those games held up better these days.)
I might have to play them again. I bought them cheap on Steam a couple of years ago, but only played through once. They're not perfect and some things were very annoying, but overall pretty good.
I started playing the first one but quickly put it down because fighting waves of those annoying, badly-designed melee enemies that were all over the start of the game was not really fun for me. Plus I didn't didn't like exploring the settled areas very much. I should give it another chance, though, if everyone seems to like it. I've heard Last Light is better.
STALKER is one I've had for a while but haven't got around to. Thing is I have two other lengthy RPGs I really want to play (namely Pathologic and d-d-Dark Souls), so it may take me a bit. Fucking listen and pay attention next time. Proper good modern FPS games, for the atmosphere and style especially (yes the melee monsters are chaotic and frustrating, but there's more to it than those).
Also that Dusk game looks fucking awful. Retro = too lazy / cheap to use a decent engine and using nostalgia as an excuse to churn out utter fucking dogshit. then it probably would be retro inspired. Hell, I make Quake maps for funsies, and making a really detailed game is time-consuming and therefore costly. It's not lazy to make low-fi assets, it's economic.
Also that Dusk game looks fucking awful. Retro = too lazy / cheap to use a decent engine and using nostalgia as an excuse to churn out utter fucking dogshit.
It's got nothing to do with using (or not) a decent engine. They are probably using Unity or something (I wouldn't even be surprised if they are using Unreal) But yes it's obviously a lot cheaper to make art assets that look like they came from 1996 instead of 2016. Dusk looks awful because the art is just shit. It doesn't look as good as games like Quake or Hexen, because those games had talented artists behind them. Good artists can create amazing-looking retro games and the low polycount / pixel density does not have to be a barrier to how stylish/awesome you can make a game look. Dusk looks like shit next to quake and that's inexcusable to me. It looks like shit next to doom.
the gameplay seems fun though According to someone in YouTube who said to have tested an early version of the game, Dusk is made in Unity.
The sad truth is, most people who makes "retro style" games don't truly care about retro technology. They act (I'm judging their actions, not their words) as if "retro style" was a purely deliberate artistic expression, but it isn't. I was googling for opinions about such stuff lately, and I agree with these: "good" low poly, it's the kind that hides it's polygons well and doesn't look low poly unless you look really hard. Dusk doesn't even try to fit this criteria. It's funny because new techniques could greatly enhance stuff like this game, that mouth I assume is a flat texture made to be viewed from the camera's angle but with current tech we could fake a low poly flat textured mouth and make it appear to have depth making it look consistent from any angle. we could even make it so that the edges of a model appear to be unailiased but match the texture resolution making characters appear to be 3d pixel art in a sense. You will never see indies do anything like this. Pseudo-polygon and pseudo-voxel textures, through something like relief mapping. This could be really cool to see, indeed. And requires thinking outside of the box, which people can't do when they define the "box" as an end in itself and not as a starting point. Retro hardware was just a platform, a starting point, its constraints didn't dictate style choices despite of limiting the variety of tools that could be used. The styles developed back then were almost always the results of artists exploring the technical possibilities; they were results of exploration, not of mere deliberation. And this exploration, this act of discovering new possibilities, is what made them charming. There will be a shift soon in the indie community to make low poly games. But careful what you wish for. A long time ago, making an indie 2D title was absolutely fine, but then more and more devs started to do it, a lot of devs just started to do it out of lazyness, not respecting the graphical style or having a set artstyle in mind when approaching 2D pixel art, resulting in both the 2D pixel art indie level to fall to miserable depths in terms of quality, and at the same time a massive kneejerk reaction against all 2D indie games by [...] in part the general public itself. As more and more indie devs gravitate towards low poly in the future, you will see the same exact progression: -A couple of main titles that become the posterchild for low poly modern indie games. -Tons of titles will try to copy that. -Many indie devs will start making low poly games out of lazyness. -The market will be flooded with low poly indie games. [...] -The average person will start to associate indie games with low poly and start to dislike them in general. -The next visual approach will become big and the cycle will start over again. Screencap this, you'll have plenty of threads to post it in the coming years. Sadly, I also see this coming. This is why I'm not too enthusiastic about my own retro game development. The public is already getting burned by "retro style" games that ends up being more like a parody than a homage. There's no way to be successful offering something of which the audience have already got a bad taste in their mouths. I've got a lot more respect for low-fi indie games that don't try to compare themselves to something else. Games like Pid, which despite being not excellent in visuals or technology, managed to think outside of the box and push its possibilities in an amazing way that truly fascinated me. Or games like Sonic Robo Blast 2, which paid homage to the Sonic franchise by exploring new possibilities, rather than just remixing what had already been done. Well unfortunately, there are very few artists in any given industry. Swathes of uninspired copycats are bound to pop up every time someone does something fresh, and will continue to do so for as long as there's money in the equation.
Retro = too lazy / cheap to use a decent engine and using nostalgia as an excuse to churn out utter fucking dogshit.
Them's fighin' words. But I agree that awful art direction / lack of any fucking direction is as big a problem as retro-for-the-sake-of-retro.
Come on. It's not great-looking for sure, but it's still easier on the eyes than Heretic. The color palette in *that* game is eye-gouging.
What is referenced now as "retro" was at the time cutting edge AAA that pushed hardware to its limits and made for awesome screenshots that people couldn't believe. And it was largely done by amazingly skilled artists, not programmers keeping their team small.
Regardless of the resolution, detail, and technology you use, you need a consistent art direction. Once you enter the world of the game, it should feel like it is made of the same Stuff (this was one of the initial selling points of Doom 3's lighting, it was a unified lighting model between the world and actors within it). I'd wager Torchlight 2 as it looks today will look just as good to me in a decade. To me it's not as much about a horrible palette or crappy models/textures as it is about that weird perspective on the weapons in the player view, something I haven't seen since Half-Life 1. It looked like shit then and it looks like shit now.
That's what happens when they draw a realistically proportioned gun with a quake-style FOV. Quake's guns are fat and stumpy to avoid this problem
BloodCM is complete up to episode 4. I think the last time it was posted here ep.4 was still beta. Put bind "mouse2" "gamefunc_Special_Fire" in bcm settings.cfg for altfire. get eduke32 here.
Duke Nukem 3D 20th anniversary will be out soon. It has new levels by levelord and allen blum as well as other stuff. the AO in some of the shots seems weird. IMO, the coolest thing is this new build engine game coming out. It's referred to as the "bombshell prequel", I don't think that's the actual title though. Screens: 1, 2, 3, 4. It's being developed by interceptor along with voidpoint. Really intrigued and excited to see a sprite-based (build engine, no less!) retro fps by a real team. Maybe the spammers just hate "other PC games". I can understand that, Quake is the one true game after all. But is this really the best way to take out their anger at this thread's existence? really?
Got Devil Daggers via Humble Bundle. Kinda addictive, I like the design and the gameplay is exactly what I expected from how it was advertised. I can see why people would want "proper levels" but criticizing the game for not being a level-based FPS is a little like criticizing a bullet hell game for not being an open world space combat sim. Difficulty ramps up pretty quickly but I think it works in the game's favor. It remains to be seen how much staying power it will have for me (particularly considering I'm not a competitive gamer at all) but I recommend it if you don't expect the game to be something it's not.
Wow, I just took a peek at the specs, they're insane for a 20-year-old game! Is the HRP included or what?!
I've been playing a bit of devil daggers lately too. It almost does have levels, in the sense that there's no RNG in the game. Spawners etc. show up at the same time every time you play. Despite knowing this and working on ways to beat them, I still only ever seem to make it to about a minute or less a life :(
It's not unusual for enhanced editions to use community content, some modders have even worked on the games. I'm just wondering what they did to Duke to have those specs.
The specs are pretty high...
On a possibly related note: Does AO and bloom really make the gfx more palatable? They did this with strife, too. I find it strange. "On a possibly related note: Does AO and bloom really make the gfx more palatable?"
Au contraire. Bad taste. Any of you buttes played this?? Alien world walking sim. Gameplay and controls are pretty functional, the survival aspects are fine. The weather and stuff is pretty. But the rocks - which make up a lot of scenery - are kinda arse-ugly (haven't really evolved past Unreal 1) and the alien mythology is utterly uninteresting. Still it's enough to keep playing...
* Shambler slaps cardo around a bit with a large trout
<Shambler> cardo <Shambler> okay <Shambler> i will give solus project something <Shambler> that cloud......thing is well fucking cool <cardo> hehe <cardo> very Lost <cardo> that was the thinking behind a lot of inspiration in the game * Shambler slaps cardo around a bit with a large trout <Shambler> okay <Shambler> the fucking DOLLS * Shambler brb - mopping up a chairful of piss <Shambler> jesus shitburgers <cardo> they just want to be loved <Shambler> waaaaaaahhhhtttt I got lured in by the Steam store vids and put it on the wishlist and got it fairly cheap. I was drawn to the sense of lonely abandonment on a distant world. Same reason I bought Lonely Planet - hermity space walker with a melencholic story.
I have played a bit of Solus - seems not quite as pretty as the vids made it seem but I'm not far into it. Really liked the tornado effect - very suitably huge and scary. Being a bit too obsessed with exploring everywhere, I found the rock jumping and getting soaked and cold trying to find secrets and journals a bit frustrating but my impatience and compulsion is part of that problem. Not all progression is intuitive but I did make some progress. A big prop for this game is that Hourances seems to have a big role in its design and he did fabulous level design work for some of the best SP Unreal Tournament projects - his work is beautiful and very atmospheric. I have been sidetracked onto other games for now but I plan to return to Solus. Maybe I should just focus on progression and survival and get to the end and then do a completionist effort on a second playthough instead of pouting in the wet and giving up because my calories are used up. not quite as pretty as the vids made it seem but I'm not far into it. Really liked the tornado effect - very suitably huge and scary. Being a bit too obsessed with exploring everywhere, I found the rock jumping and getting soaked and cold trying to find secrets and journals a bit frustrating
Maybe I should just focus on progression and survival and get to the end Yup. How I've been feeling about it. There has been enough cool stuff to keep going tho. I think it's better just to progress rather than trying to jump behind every sodding hexagonal rock. I think a big issue is that it is, IMO, not quite stunning nor intriguing enough for a walking simulator. Compared to, say, playing through Dark Souls 3 which had enough truly amazing scenes and a gripping overall atmosphere. It's good, and some of the effects are great, but I think games without combat need to have pretty strong hooks (another example being SOMA which had a strong atmosphere, great sound design, and a fairly captivating setting/story). Still, worth a look I think. Some pretty good Quake mapping inspiration later on (3 key temple map jam anyone?) I sure fucking hope that Shambler, DaZ and the rest of you sons o' bitches are getting on this game -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6hSES1tlt0 Need my fix since you all stopped playing Vermintide! I'm currently playing Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine. Good game.
Unfortunately I never played "board" version of the Space Hulk. I'm gonna be on that like I was on Negke's mum for 2 hours the other night.
Does look fucking spot on as a Space Hulk L4D2 FPS.... Combat looks confusing as fuck but apart from that. Some really cool environments in that video too....nice variety and spectacle given you're on Hulks. Please have a Cyclone launcher too....:D while it looks cool enough I'm just not convinced yet.
The game can't even hold 60fps in the official promotional trailer. That worries me quite a bit about performance, for starters! So yeah, step up pre-order guinea pigs! Except your virility probably won't last long, so after the four missions you'll call it finished and uninstall.
Vermintide was hard tho. Hard as my cock when, well, you know Nekgette Snr and all that. I completed it, got 25 hours, that's enough. Maybe Space Hulk Sperminator will be more of the same, maybe it will be gentler like L4D2, we shall see.
Daz, I didn't hold 60 FPS in a lot of Doom4 and it still ran fine overall. Chugging at 45 in places, whatever. But yeah no pre-orders tho. Squad is fine, its coop, fine.
Mix in some class based stuff, sure why not ? A long time ago I played "squad" like coop in Doom and Quake1/2 by voluntarily redistributing ammo amongs players so one has all the instahit ranged ammo, other has explosives etc. Took some fucking around with binds/mods etc but it worked. Silly geeky RP Coop stuff basically, I get the point of it. But why the mob system ? The eternal artificial generated mobs ai director thing is what irks me, it always feels wrong to me, since the first L4D up to Vermintide etc. Styx 2....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_ZKlcNI9FU Styx was decent but a bit repetitive, this looks a worthy enough sequel for sure - more options, crisper graphics, cool scenery. Looks interesting. Decent otherworldly vibe.
Let's say for a second that Quake got the DOOM 2016 treatment. I could imagine the visuals and otherworldly atmosphere of that place fitting very nicely into a re-imagined E4 themed area. Oh man! I can't wait for that!
Loved the first, but as Shambler said it suffered from some tired design. http://store.steampowered.com/app/414700/
I didn't get very far in this.....brrrrrrr...... Lighting is great. What little of it there is to alleviate the fear. If you are curious about the soon to be released Shadow Warrior 2, there will be a multiplayer stream on Twitch GOGcom channel in a few hours. (I'm not so keen on it personally, but I'll give watching the stream a chance.)
The Teamup page accessible via http://j.mp/streaming_schedule should show the time in your time zone. They are planning to have a four player co-op session. The game will come out on Steam and GOG in about five days. The Twitch GOGcom channel is here http://www.twitch.tv/gogcom I am one of those who were extremely disappointed at the initial utterly generic single player trailers of this year's COD. I am currently playing the PS4 open beta however and finding the multiplayer admittedly fantastic. I am really loving the level design and the overall stylistic choices they've made this time around. I also like how they have toned down player movement from Advanced Warfare (I skipped BO3) down to sane levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4sSqAqGnaU
Bring it on, just about done with Brutal Dooms campaign, good timing. Played very little of it, seems like more of the same which is fine by me.....but goddamutherfucka it looks so good. Snow and ice effects jeez.
I liked Tomb Raider 2013 a lot. If not for Denuvo, I'd have bought this one by now.
Great game, a more polished and fine tuned of the reboot. I had loads of fun exploring all of the places and great cinematic work...you'll enjoy yourself!
$7.99 No DRM
A lot of others that look interesting also. Did anybody play Saboteur? Oh, and coincidentally, Blood: One Unit Whole Blood $2.39 Got me a nice full cart. I really like that game and its predecessor, too. It's the perfect balance of action and puzzle / platforming. It could be a bit more challenging (not the combat, but the puzzles), but they nailed the exploration part.
I remember always having been a fan of the atmosphere in Kingpin. NOT the thug element per se, but more the level design, ambient sounds and especially the lighting. So...
I found a copy in my Linux distro that I must have been playing around with in Wine and, I transferred it to my Win7 partition and found myself once again back in Poisonville!!! OFC only after editing the configs, patching the game officially, no-cd check and resolution corrections. /rant WOW, what horrible game AI we had to suffer back then :( The choices they made for weapons and enemy AI seriously sucked bawwws! I know I'm not the best playa but damn, wtf give me a silencer IF... once I shoot EVERYONE comes to me! OR... the grenade, almost totally USELESS! The second I pull the trigger to stealthily "lob" a grenade, I'm out of sight btw, the AI comes to me thus making the grenade use useless also. AND, it doesn't go off if it hits them(I get this)! BUT, they also know to dodge it even further if I shoot it at them again!!! I won't even talk about the that stupid ass flamethrower :( /rant over I found a MOD(Rags 2 Riches) on MODDB but once I installed it, due to its having a new gamex86.dll, it made my save incompatible. I'm gonna finish it stock and then maybe later try that, as it is supposed to "correct" some of the AI and gameplay woes. At least I still enjoy the atmosphere :) I haven't played Kingpin yet. I bought a strategy/economic simulator game at the same time called Anno 1503 that kept me occupied for over a week. Yesterday I bought Crysis because it was cheap, so of course was up till 2 am.
A few months back I wanted Crysis bad, but after reading about it I was put off. The DRM, optimizations etc.
This looks awesome(GOG version for 7.99) but I have limited internet right now :( How is it? Hold up well for it's age? "How is it? Hold up well for it's age? "
It kept me up till 2 am last night and it was the first thing I did this morning. Just played 5 hours nonstop and finally took a break. No DRM or other nonsense, just install and run. I had Internet disconnected at the time and it didn't complain. It's already patched to v1.21, comes with everything. Settings are to maximum, it runs smooth and looks really nice (8GB Core i5-3570 GTX 550 Ti). Very rarely there's a split second pause, I guess when it loads something off disk, but I put it on a spinner, not on one of my SSDs, so I can't really complain. I was happy to see there's no checkpoint only system like FarCry. It has proper saves as a PC game should with a quicksave hotkey. Here is a gentle reminder to people on the fence. The GOG release discount of 60% lasts until "November 3, 12:59 PM UTC."
https://www.gog.com/news/release_crysisr_and_crysis_warheadr So, if $8 vs. $20 makes a difference, you still have a few days to think about if it's worth either of those to you. I already own something like three copies of Crysis 1... Something tells me like buying it again, even if it is from a great site like GoG, is a bit much...
But that DRM-free goodness... It's telling to the game's quality that I'm even considering it. Such a shame the sequels weren't anywhere near it in terms of gameplay. I'm farther into the game and it's not so good. Reminds me of FarCry, but worse.
An entire mission of wandering around in zero gravity with little idea of what to do or where to go. Everything it accomplished as far as story could have been done in 5 minutes. A horrible flying mission in a vtol with such poor control response that it had me convinced my keyboard had stopped working. Then it locked up just as I finally completed it. Five times in a row. After that, I get to an aircraft carrier. There's a ridiculous bullet sponge boss spider thing that I believe is the absolute worst, most tedious thing to kill I've ever seen in a game. And now the game locks up like one out of every three times when loading saves. Oh, and there's a wonderful game mechanic where if you get hit by the spider thing's freeze ray, you have to sit there frozen for 45-60 seconds before the game starts the reload process. One more thing, the game frequently forgets you have a missile launcher. You can't switch to it until you find another one and it tells you that you already have one. Only then you can switch to it. This morning a third of my playing time has been spent using up ammo, a third frozen, and a third restarting the game. I know the actual end is near, so I may just call it over at this point. Was great. Good focus on gameplay mechanics, as well as looking great. Can't remember any of those issues, Rick??
Rick found the second half of the game :(
My advice for a good time with Crysis is to only play the first few levels. Try out some mods, etc. Just don't play anything involving aliens! I did say it reminded me of FarCry. The good thing is, just as with FarCry, the first part alone is well worth the price.
To be fair, the missions on the island probably took me 20 hrs or more, considering the exploring and such, while the parts I didn't like probably count for less than a hour or so. That is, if I could play the final missions without dying/freezing/restarting. The game was great right up until killing the KPA General, after that it was all downhill. #9539 @Pritchard
Really ? You don't think you are maybe simply entitled to go and download a torrent of the GOG release instead no ?After buying the game let alone once, but three times ? It should of been DRM shite free from the start, you are damn well fucking entitled to a DRM free version for free ffs. A bit OT but it just boggles my mind. Yeah, I'm entitled to a warez copy I guess :p I just didn't really want to say it because I wasn't sure how people felt about piracy on this site.
In any case, I've got enough on my plate with other games right now that although it was momentarily tempting, I can't be bothered to actually go out and download it for myself. How could you be certain such a copy of the game hadn't been tampered with. It could contain malware, ransomeware, etc. No way I'd take a risk like that for just a few bucks.
On the other hand, once a publisher releases a DRM free version of a game that once had it, they should be required to allow those who purchased the earlier version a DRM free upgrade. Shambler, you should watch some of the trailers. There's quite a lot more variety in the level design than shown in the vid above.
For example this trailer from 3 years ago (3 years... jesus!!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAcAd1fUiy8 Rick
You are completely right about the free DRM free update though. So I took a chance on this after seeing very positive reviews and hearing about the fantastic campaign and...it's true!
The campaign, while short (5 hours? 6 if you explore and collect shit) is fucking fantastic. There is way more love poured into this than anyone really expected I think. Every mission has a new mechanic or game play style thrown at you and the variation keeps everything feeling fantastic and avoids becoming stale. I didn't play Titanfall 1 beyond the demo or trial that they did, so I cannot really say what is new or added to the multiplayer but I'm having a blast regardless. I'm super picky about what shooters I play online these days because 90% of them end in me yelling obscenities at my monitor and uninstalling the game pretty quickly, but TF2 avoids this. It has some great game modes such as Bounty Hunt where you get cash for killing enemy ai and players and then have to deposit it at banks when they become active. It's a great mode with a fantastic ebb and flow where you frantically get kills to amass cash and then carefully deposit it while trying not to get killed (die and you lose 50% of your cash). I suppose I'm still in the honeymoon period with the MP as I've only played 6 hours or so of it but I'm really enjoying it. A nice bonus is that there is no season pass or paid dlc, free updates forever :D So yeah, shits good yo How could you be certain such a copy of the game hadn't been tampered with. It could contain malware, ransomeware, etc. No way I'd take a risk like that for just a few bucks.
How can you be sure with any software? ...while you lot were wanking over BF1 or some retro-pixellated side-scroller bullshit.
GOG has a sale until November 13. They currently have pretty decent discounts for the older Unreal and FEAR games, and the not so old Metro games. Other interesting or classic games may get deals too during the sale.
Some of these discounts may go away in a few hours. If this sale is like the previous ones, they will show up again before it is over. So, check again on November 13 before the end of the sale. https://www.gog.com/news/make_way_for_the_monstrous_fall_sale http://iron-harvest.com/
No useful details but fuck me the style of the mechs look so cool. Tentative HYPU. The concept art is great. Here is more work by the artist behind those lovely pictures.
http://jakubrozalski.artstation.com/ They've got art direction covered. Hopefully we will see details about the gameplay and design soon. Nice! Looks like some kind of uchrony a la Crimson Skies with mechs instead of planes (speaking of, I miss that game badly!). Interest piqued.
If you own Metro 2033 Redux on Steam, you can get it on GOG free this week via GOG Connect. A few other games are available too. It says the offers are available for 5 days as of this writing.
https://www.gog.com/connect I think I may get The Witcher for $1.49 just to have a non Steam version. I might even play it again.
Other than turn-based, I don't like 3rd person games much, but I remember that one as being pretty good. F.E.A.R. Platinum for $2.49 is a good deal. It doesn't go on sale often. The two addons are only average, but the original game was excellent and worth the price alone.
Partway through Titanfall2 SP. It's a quite haphazard and gimmicky (i.e. some of the levels are obviously set-up training / preparation for MP, sometimes the progression skips weirdly ahead).
But.... It looks stunning, the lighting/fog/background effects etc etc are some of the best I've ever seen, it seems to run great maxed out on a 970M, the large scale scenery is spectacular and varied (some inside bits are a bit dull), the gameplay mechanics are good fun (and pretty interesting in the less artificial places) with enough variety from pilot and mech, and having the titan as your friend is nice. As far as modern interactive-movie COD-shooter AAAAAA+ hype games go....it seems pretty damn fun to me. Titanfall 2 SP is great yah. Just for my personal tastes, it automatically gets some demerits as an FPS for having weapons that are (almost) just all about being hitscan bullet-hoses, but the movement is funtimes and I really like the way that different missions each have a different new "gimmick" mechanic to put a twist on how the basic mechanics interact.
(Some podcast I heard recently claimed that Respawn had an internal game jam where multiple small groups each tried to figure out how to do a fun Titanfall SP campaign. In the end, instead of picking one idea to go ahead with, they used almost all of the ideas and just put them into different missions. No idea how true that actually is but it feels right.) There's not much of your classic swiss-cheese map exploring, but a lot of different ways to bounce around inside a given space. So there are significant things about it that are not terribly Quake-y but I enjoy it in other aspects. One of the best SP shooter campaigns in years I think. It's a shame the SP is so short in length, but on the other hand I guess there's no wasted padding. 1. DiRT 3 Complete Edition
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/dirt-3-complete-edition-free-game 2. Far Cry® 3: Blood Dragon https://club.ubisoft.com/en-GB/ubi30 3. Dungeon Keeper https://www.origin.com/irl/en-us/store/free-games/on-the-house Apparently you saw this a bit too late. Sorry for that, but nothing I can do to help.
Let me tell you about
What is Call of Misery? Well, it's Call of Chernobyl with many gameplay / visual / sound features ported from famous Misery mod for Call of Pripyat what was released about 2 weeks ago. Call of Chernobyl - new separate game what requires Call of Pripyat for legal reasons and features 32 maps from all 3 games (including underground ones), correctly working a-life and focuses on freeplay (there's still story option with basic Shadow of Chernobyl plot if you want some kind of end goal and ending). I didn't like original Misery that much because same 3 maps from Call of Pripyat get old very fast (even if they are big), but with much more massive world Misery mechanics have more breathing room I think. Also fact what Call of Chernobyl maps are properly populated and are relatively bug free unlike piece of shit Lost Alpha. So, tl;dr lots of hurr durr survival in beginning and emergent gameplay for dozens of hours, stalker is still not ded in 2016 You need: 1. Call of Chernobyl 1.4.12 (3.02gb) http://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/downloads/call-of-chernobyl-1412-full 2. Call of Chernobyl patch 1.4.14 (few mb) http://www.moddb.com/company/team-epic/downloads/coc-1414-patch 3. Call of Misery 0.9 (1.79gb) and it's updates 0.92-0.925 http://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/addons/call-of-misery-full-version-09 4. Call of Misery 0.971 (few kb) and English translation http://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/addons/english-trans-call-of-misery-b092 (yeah, yeah, dl all these separate patches are pain in butt, so if you don't wanna deal with wait maybe it's good idea to wait 1.0 release) Gameplay video so you can decide if all the hassle worth it or not: https://youtu.be/r8kqrSGg-e4 I played the original Misery and was also not a fan. I loved the oppressive type of gameplay but it had a ton of quirks that made progress just not enjoyable.
Now this Call of Misery for SoC sounds extremely interesting and gives me yet another excuse to replay this gem! Thanks for sharing. I've owned kf2 for a long time now, but I gave up playing it because it sucked at that point (crappy netcode especially if I remember correctly). Might have to give it another go now that it's out...
L4D is a coop game with zombies following a linear path from the start to the end of a map, with the occasional siege from zombies.
Killing Floor is a coop game with zombies in which you have to survive a number of waves on an open, interconnected map. They're not the same. But possibly, reading the first few word of each sentence, there are a few small similarities at least. Dickbutt.
http://www.pcgamer.com/minidoom-is-a-free-sidescrolling-tribute-to-the-original-doom/
It's apparently a "very short parody game," but even if you don't care to play it at all, you should watch the trailer in the article. The 2D sprite versions of iconic Doom monsters, objects and textures are pretty well done. cute monsters. Nice little project.
They need to get a new trailer with someone less awful playing though, painful to watch! Looked a bit meh at first but got a lot more appealling throughout.
The voice acting is spectacularly terrible. I hope there's an option to disable that. Melee combat also looks rubbish. Everything else looks good. I like the psychic powers and the quick spin-up on the assault cannon. The gameplay was a bit unspectacular apart from the 'stealers crawling down the pillar, that was cool. Still hyped tho. amazing how far we come, i remember the original.... visuals were doom quality. Now i'm watching this super high poly reboot and i'm not even impressed. Art quality isn't high, and voice acting is unintentionally hilarious:
"I am the angel of death" says the terminator, voiced by Gareth from a call center in Slough. The melee always looked incomprehensible....and I surprisingly really liked the corridor bit at the end.
The problem with that 2d doom tribute thingy is that on the one hand they have put all that effort into nice crunchy pixel art, but then they contradict it with all that blurry glowy stuff on the missiles and explosions. It's a bit of a schoolboy error :/
Speaking of Space Hulk, I've just stumbled inadvertently on this pretty awesome cosplay:
http://i.imgur.com/9QNBVd8.jpg The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games on Gog.com are on sale at 60% off. The sale lasts for five more days with plenty of other offers too.
https://www.gog.com/news/the_black_friday_sale_is_here From those pics, the level-of-detail of the assets is all over the bloody place. Not sure why one would make the floor (the part of the level consistently closest to the player) have the lowest res texture in the game....
Don't know what you mean Kinn....
http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/533320/ss_2678f86d38f7edf059b071362e98b018ad8ec849.1920x1080.jpg?t=1479931605 This game seems like a joke thats not really hitting its mark. Looks like you don't know what to satirise so have gone for everything and nothing. The 80s effect and voiceover on the trailer help it have a tiny bit of character but then the gameplay and the screenshots look fuckin gash mountain also are you using that combination of fonts just to piss off graphic designers because it's working
It just looks like a load of random Unity asset store models mixed up with a bunch of sprites stolen from other games; thrown together with about as much care and awareness as a drunk teenager getting caught wanking into his sister's laundry at 3am after a crap night out at Razzle's.
Full alpha demo playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNpl9ax0CS8
I got the creeps just watching this vid. If the whole game is like that, I'm gonna love it! Going for the subtle, restrained style of survival horror, nice.
I do hope there is a level set in a gigantic dead baby's anal cavity that is simultaneously being raped by a demonic Hitler's cock wrapped in razor wire. This playthrough goes into more depth, if that's what you really need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYw7aijShTc
they really do need to reel it in over at Agony HQ. Amazing how unscary scary shit is when it's all you can see.
yeah to be fair Gash Mountain was my favourite ride at Disneyland until they shut it down :(
how unscary scary shit is
To me this game seems more about being creepy than scary. @Shambler Thanks for the link. Just tried to watch the video linked by Shambler. Had to stop about 3 minutes in because of the non-stop barrage of words coming out of the youtuber's mouth.
Menus:
Clicking on another windows program whilst game is loading causes load to freeze, then attempting to close game causes crash. Shortcut icon didn't download. No loading percentage indicator on initial screen. "Auto-Config" a bit unclear, should have clearer name. Can't adjust squad members talking volume. Rebinding number keys doesn't always show up right (7 showed up as 8) Doesn't save game difficulty and headbob setting. Key binding menu gives an "Unbound Keys" warning even when all actions have a bind. Also "Unbound Keys" is not informative. Talk isn't given as a bindable option. Server list: No loading percentage indicator on server list. Server list doesn't save password / not full flags. Those flags also don't auto-apply to current server search. Can't order server list by top tabs. Player quantity goes off screen. Ping bar not helpful, number would be better. Server name bar far too large as it's the least useful information. Server location would be useful. Regular disconnects from server. In game: Fellow Terminator's timing meters for hacking / closing doors etc small and hard to see. Centre of crosshair often jerks down and right slightly. Command wheel is very awkward with mouse control, doesn't move smoothly - inverting mouse seems to affect this and it shouldn't! Should be able to escape the tactical menu using the same button that activates it. Melee button should auto-exit zoom. Dying whilst in zoom results in camera following battle brothers still in zoom mode. There may be more. All this would be fine assuming they have 6 months or so of testing / bug-fixing / refining... Have requested a refund and will wait for post-release patches. Too long, too many cutscenes and conversations, too much lore no-one gives a shit about because Protoss are so fucking DULL.
Gameplay is alright and missions are varied enough but would be much better as a mission pack / DLC size rather than full game. I'm sure Heart Of The Swarm was shorter and tighter, or at least just more fun cos Kerrigan + Zerg etc. Got part way through the last mission (apart from the fucking epilogue which pushes it into 25 mission territory) and uninstalled. Blah. Still got a lot of money's worth out of WOL and HOTS. https://www.gog.com/game/neverwinter_nights_diamond_edition
It lasts for 46 hours. Get it when you can if you are into RPG. Prey gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Ofcp8Pp_U
They don't even hide it xD (from 2:24): https://i.imgur.com/3YFmdBZ.png Jago welcome to last month when the cool kids were still playing it.
Scampie / nameless troll / speedy / whoever, welcome to last night when people were interested in that: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=50858&start=38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8ijUKQK14s
Some improvements: Voices fixed, HUD graphics clearer and smoother, overall GFX look a bit nicer, lightning strike looks better. Stealers are much easier to see which is good. Hybrids seem nerfed, assault Terms seem massively buffed (or invincible AI in SP?). Crosshair still does the weird twitchy thing. This gives me more hope compared to the beta although there are numerous niggles that aren't shown in the video. You bought it through Gamesplanet and according to their website you do have access to the beta.
Looks cool but in what the hell alternate universe does any of that look "1996"? More like 2000-ish at least.
Looks dire. More like 1994-ish in 3D, minus anything that could be described as "art direction" or "atmosphere". Retro for the sake of bragging about being retro.
dunno. people who remember what 1996 looked like probably aren't really the target demo anyway.
I've been keeping tabs on this game since the KS launched. TBH, it doesn't seem interesting to me nor am I too keen on it's marketing and general presentation. actually, it kinda rubs me the wrong way. That said, I genuinely hope they succeed and I'm rooting for them. A couple unknowns launch a successful KS, have a gameplan and seemingly follow through AND get picked up by a decent publisher... that's pretty damn cool IMO. That's a lot of time, sacrfice and hard work. Kudos to them! Journos who act like town criers yelling STRAFE is 1996 again have never played Quake nor Duke nor any other FPS from that year.
Anyway, the vast majority of so-called "retro" games just make "whatever", but then they put chunky pixel textures on their 10,000 poly monsters and wahey! Retro!!. Also, why not throw in some 80s-era ZX Spectrum-esque chiptunes, and then do an 80s Grindhouse theme for the trailers, because that makes about as much fucking sense as the rest of it! 1996 still counts as the 80s right?
/triggered The subject of contemporary "retro" games is one that is very near and dear to my heart. Allow me to bloviate:
It seems, to some devs (and consumers), that all of retro gaming can be encapsulated by pixelated art and chiptunes. Because of this sort of shallow approach, many proclaimed modern "retro" games end up being mere caricatures or parodies of their source material. This can be pretty off-putting to fans of authentic retro games. IMO, it would be beneficial to approach developing a retro game is if you are actually developing in that era. Define your technical limitations and design in reference to those. One of the things that makes old games so charming are the creative and interesting ways developers conveyed the game world due to the technical limitations of the time. In modern times, it's easy to lose sight of that wander outside of what is appropriate for the game you are making. You end up with, as kinn said, highpoly models with gobs of animation frames bathed in dynamic lights amid a fury of particle physics usually without any sort of real direction. That simply isn't retro (aesthetically speaking), and probably won't have that retro soul (not as a consequence of visuals, but of the general approach I just outlined). I think an overlooked skill is restraint. Every aspect of the game should serve gameplay, if it doesn't there's a good chance it should be axed. Things that are blatantly light years beyond the era of game you are trying to make should probably be reexamined. This is just, like, my opinion, man. in recent times is Shovel Knight. The only thing modern was that it was in a 16:9 resolution, everything else felt pretty much perfect.
It still irks me that DD was "just" a score attack game. Everything about it was amazing except the game mode :P
Yeah I was super stoked for Devil Daggers hoping it might have had some levels in it.
The enemy design was superb. I've just been made aware of this 2D side shooter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWOx0rNTr8
Looks fun! The name alone is a marvel of poetry... https://club.ubisoft.com/en-GB/ubi30
Ubi 30th Anniversary Giveaway continues. In December they bring us Assassin's Creed III for free! Good spot. It seems horror / gore / gothic is one of the next big things??
This, like the other ones, doesn't quite hit the mark in that trailer. Great style and theme, boring path following. The last 5 seconds of actual gameplay don't really show a tactical shooter either. But it's a cool style and as next big things go....a hell of a lot better than many other choices. Sandbox world.
Randomly generated missions. Randomly generated maps from tilesets (that looked particularly dull when they were re-arranging the same damn times in 10 different ways). No, I don't want 100s of hours like that. That's why I really enjoyed D3 single player campaign, did a few rifts for the lulz, and haven't touched it since. Give me an interesting, tight, stylish, spectacular SP campaign instead and the 100 hours of repetition can fuck off. "Procedurally generated" just translates to "much shitter than anything hand-crafted and in any case once you've seen one map you've seen them all".
I agree, which is why I posted without comment. I think visually it looks pretty decent and the design is still good but I would prefer something hand crafted.
isn't always a bad thing. I haven't played Diablo 3 but PG did add some replayability value to the first two games. I spent countless hours of fun in these games back in the day and I'm not sure I would have played them more than once or twice if they had fixed levels.
Already got it actually, it's Dirt 3 that I missed the other day. Oh well, I heard the Rayman game was good. Most of the others I already have.
1. Dark Souls 3 (just the best dark fantasy vibe ever, mesmerising)
2. DOOM 4 (a very reassuring blend of old skool and new skool) 3= Titanfall 2 (short, linear, and gamey but great fun and great gfx) 3= Rise Of The Tomb Raider (like the first reboot but better, just really good all round) 5. Homeworld Deserts Of Kharak (stylish and refreshingly streamlined RTS) 6. Battlefleet Gothic Armada (pure repetitive 40k geekery, but moreish and satisfying) Haven't got round to playing Dishonoured 2, Deus Ex MD, Total Warhammer, nor XCom2 all of which could be on the list... Been a great year for gaming overall. it took me 3 reloads of the site to log in and grab that pack. Uplay itself crashed 2 times when trying to update. Still updating.
@Mugwump
Hi, if you are still interested in Dirt3, I have got an extra copy that can be given away. Last time when Humble Bundle was giving it away, I grabbed a copy, but later when trying to activate it at Steam, I was reminded that I have already got it in my Steam Library, upon which I remembered that I had got it in a previous Humble Bundle. So, dear Mugwump, if you care, just write down your E-mail address and I will send the activation code to you. Hopefully the code still works. My Friend, I am extremely sorry for letting you down again.
Upon checking the code page, I was confronted by this message: "...The redemption deadline is November 19th, 2016 at 10:00 AM Pacific. You have 0 days left!" And the code itself is no longer visible! Can't tell you how awful I feel about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9jf-0DeWD0
Old video, shows lots of gameplay though. Obviously a terrible player and pre-pre-pre-minus-alpha build but, well, it is what it is. Sometimes one will be in the mood for an utterly bog-standard iso-RPG set in a snowy world, and this might be it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HnY1VHeLSA
A squad based FPS using the Marathon 2 engine. you control a squad of marines and wipe out extremist groups. bought this in the bargin bin for $10 back in ~1999. The intro song is by a band named Death. Years later I was at a used media store and found a CD by a band named Death. Bought it based soley on the name and album cover. The game had somewhat escaped my memory so i was pleasantly surprised when the intro to Damage Inc came up on my recently purchased CD. I really think this game was ahead of its time. You choose a squad of marines from like 8 or so guys. they each have their own stats and dialogue. I always chose Metal and Banzai as a kid. You can give them orders like "Search and Destroy", which along with the title "Damage Inc", is another Metallica reference. This Tweet from Nightdive Studios says their remastered version of the 90s FPS Turok now has a level editor and Steam Workshop integration. That's good of them.
https://twitter.com/NightdiveStudio/status/811998017725173760 Disclaimer: I've never played Turok. Those who did play it back in the day might like the remaster and the ability to make maps though. ah, i remember turok
played it in '99 and some time after that i lost the cd ages ago... i remember bridges, lots of rope bridges ; for some reason Claim the free racing game "Grid" at
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/grid-free-game This is a time limited offer that will expire in 1 day and 17 hours. http://store.steampowered.com/app/495720/
Anyone played this? Just bought it in Steam Winter Sale and found it quite a pleasant retro FPS game. A review: http://www.bagogames.com/intrude-review/ It's as boring as it looks. Not sure why these retro fps devs opt to emulate wolfenstien 3d rather than, say, doom.
A sci-fi Dark Souls type of game, looks neat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88iUrWaORE4 I can just picture the meeting where that game was conceived: A bunch of producers sat around a large table, looking around blankly at each other for an hour. Occasionally one of them looked off into the distance thoughtfully, then opened his mouth as if to say something, but then sighed and had another sip of his coffee instead. Eventually it was lunchtime, and yet still not a word had been said. One producer - the hungriest-looking and most eager to be the first one down the pub - finally broke the silence. "Fuck it, let's just do Dark Souls but with robots".
Ha ha, yeah, though to be fair the same can be said for a vast majority of the games out there. If id hadn't copied Maze War, we wouldn't have had the masterpieces that are Doom, Doom II and Quake...
And The Surge still looks cool. Quite. Whilst I'll never stop indulging in the relentless floccinaucinihilipilification of "clone" games, I'll admit that id's decision to do a Maze War knockoff may have led to one or two good things further down the line.
So, I had to google that and much to my surprise, it is a real word! I thought it was raxacoricofallapatorian or something.
What a worthy successor to limbo. Just finished playing through yesterday and I was even more impressed than I thought I would be. If any of y'all haven't picked that up with the winter sale yet, you should.
I was about to post these exact same 3 words earlier when my phone's battery went kaput...
As for the answer, maybe because there's no dilemma about Quake? It is the best FPS ever, after all, and I even may dare say the best game, period. Two flaws:
1) All paths should lead to Dark Souls. 2) Dark Souls does not even exist on this fekin rat king. with a fantastic art direction. The end was quite tough, though, and I needed a walkthrough to finish it.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/mega-city-one/news/mega-city-one-released
v1.0 of this SP campaign for HL2:E2 is finally released! I suppose it will interest at least some of you guys. "Mass Effect 2" is being offered for free at
https://www.origin.com/hkg/en-us/store/free-games/on-the-house Started playing Salt and Sancutary from the Steam xmas sale and I have to say it is pretty good! Obviously directly inspired by Dark Souls, but the game takes the good (and some bad) from the series and produces this original 2D experience. Dumbed down controls as it should be considering the lost of the 3rd dimension.
I have no problem if someone uses the Souls formula in this way...unlike the dumb cousin with pretty snow gusts that is Lords of the Fallen. http://store.steampowered.com/app/219990/
Seems to be exactly in between Diablo 3 and Path Of Exile. All the completely generic ARPG cliches that you want, plus it looks really really nice for the perspective. Thoughts? I always enjoy the generic ARPG. I purchased Victor Vran and recently played through the first two games of the Van Helsing ARPG series. I recommend Helsing but I would also suggest going for the "Final Cut" edition.
I have Grim Dawn in my wishlist as it does look appealing. Maybe I'll grab it the next time it is on sale. With homeworld 1 & 2 remastered along with Victor Vran. For an unknown hack and slash it's fun enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZf6khoZQsc
Still not super keen on the Bioshock-esque art deco of the station, but goddamn the enemies look cool. ...it's getting marked as spam. No-one wants to sit through 10 mins of random r-drawflat UT FFA just to hear someone waffle on about a hypothetical game they're making without actually seeing or reading any useful information at all.
https://youtu.be/ln_plWALAoI?t=2m13s
Pillars Of Eternity 2. Very little gameplay shown but it has the best water I've seen in an isometric game! PoE is an isometric RPG like Baldur's gate and Ice Wind Dale...etc.
I only created my character in PoE, I really owe it to myself to continue! agreed on the Art-Deco space station. Really not working for me. Draws really obvious comparisons to Bioshock, which was good because it was original and executed really well, and this is neither.
The enemies look good though, and it looks like there's a range of approaches you can take, with some excellent physical gameplay. This game called Immortal Redneck could turn out to be not bad. It's doing well on Greenlight.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=834223670 <Shambler> i have been playing too much grim dawn
<Shambler> best looking semi-iso arpg around i reckon <Shambler> 10000% pure fantasy rpg cliche but it plays fun and the details are great <Shambler> it's grittier than diablo3, but not random generated tile maps like path of exile, it's a good in between Dark Souls clone in a blandly industrial sci-fi setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbZ6NrXJUu0 - style of one for Friction maybe??
If you don't believe me that grim Dawn looks really nice:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197971710064/screenshots/?appid=219990 Very coherent graphics and particularly nice foliage, water, and fog. Best of D3 + POE styles together imo. Kickstarter starts on 21st February! Stay tuned!!!
Is there anyway to ANTI-Kickstart something, like donate lots of cash to stop it getting made?? Thats a confusing bag of emotions. Superbly executed aesthetic, some of the environment art, and the glitchy effects are wonderful. Hope a language barrier is responsible for some of the words though, that floopy disk shit for example, strong facepalm levels of cringe.
Wanted to have a cool futuristic vibe to immerse myself in. Hmmm. Doesn't help that it's not very immersive so far. All the cyber-aspects and conspiracy-doodahs are so generic, cliched and try-hard it makes me cringe rather than be captivated. And once again Jensen is the dullest, most wooden, tedious and utterly unengaging protagonist ever to spoil a PC game. I wouldn't mind if he was a personality-free blank slate so you could imagine him being more like you.....but he has anti-personality, an embarrassingly obviously designed-by-committee cut-and-paste "edgy" "gruff" "slick but gritty" collection of utter dullness that sucks all life out of any interactions like a grey hole.
Also it has the worst ambient occlusion since Far Cry 3, the black fudge around objects is so bad it looks inadvertantly cel-shaded, then again it looks bland and flat with the AO off. Why not have a bloody setting for it?? http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=874467266 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=874466963 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=874466927 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=874466833 Ugh. The stuff in strong lighting looks okay although people's faces are more HL2 era than DX4. It's also rather clunky in the way it plays. Mantling recentres the camera so abruptly you get whiplash, and the game loves throwing you into 3rd person for anything it damn well wants, or into a hudless lock screen - completely with screen blacking out before and after - for any relevant chit chat. Smoothly in control it is NOT. Still....will keep trying. The Prague city seems okay so far. The AO makes me think the developers were nostalgic for the late 2000s/early 2010s.
I've never been able to get that far into a deus ex game. Furthest I managed was getting up to the Missing Link content in HR, which pissed me off and made me quit by taking all my gear. I should probably try that again someday... I remember getting pretty far in The Nameless Mod back in the day though. Which is pretty weird, since I never visited PDX while it was a thing and the mod was one giant in-joke... ...really did what it promised. One of the best of it's era.
DX2 I skipped. DX3 was good. This one I'm not getting on with so much. The weapon and mod menus seem extra clunky too - can't use the same key to enter and exit them?? Still I'm sure it will be fun enough in the end....but despite a lot of flaws maybe. "All the cyber-aspects and conspiracy-doodahs are so generic, cliched... the dullest, most wooden, tedious and utterly unengaging protagonist..."
Sounds like the first Deus Ex tbh. I mean it's a great game, obviously, but having grown up reading cyberpunk novels and staying up late to listen to Art Bell, by the time I got around to playing it it was hard for me to be impressed with the story in particular. had no idea the AO was that intense though. Agree it looks very cartoony which i didn't think was the look they were going for in a game like this.
And even from the trailers, the protagonist is a fucking design-by-committee plank and it completely puts me off the game Still looks sweet. They did a good job of recreating SHODAN's voice.
On that note, I've had blue balls since the announcement of SS3. Can I, like, get a trailer or something? Even just a screenshot... or even just part of one. Anything. Please. The best of the 3 recent ARPGs IMO. It balances out the grit and depth of Path Of Exile with the fun and spectacle of Diablo 3, and presents it in the most attractive package of the trio. 65 hours, I got a few side mission things left to do. There's also some one shot D3-rift-style hardcore dungeons I'll be doing my best to avoid.
Good to know, it makes me interested in trying, but
Does it has the same huge amount of bugs and, is it as extremely linear as Titan Quest? There was some guys from the team on the Titan Quest fan forums till far after the studio closed and they started with Grim Dawn, and also there is some parts of Titan Quest's mods used on Grim Dawn so i know they at least know the people's complaints, but maybe they didn't fix those issues in this new game. Bugs....it has giant spiders in?? I can't recall any bugs, only a slight slowdown in some of the biggest combats, this might be something to do with designing my char to have 200 effects/retaliations going off with any attack / damage taken.
Thanks.
On the other side, to explain things out, then: Titan Quest is their previous videogame and very similar to this from what i can see. The problem is that it had several annoying bugs, that even after several patches they put, an official expansion and many fanpatches there were still several left. The most annoying ones had to do with performance problems no matter how good the hardware was and random stuttering and only after the fanpatches it could be played well enough. They were still a bit around even after that, but they were hard to notice. The game itself was decent, a bit better than the Sacred series, highlighting that it was modable, so there was some good custom campaigns, like this one (be careful of the file size), there is no other i can get to. I was very excited for a remake with Night Dive at the helm but the more if I see of the game, the worse it looks. This looks/feels nothing like System Shock. Nothing they've shown so far, except SHODAN and the Tri-Optimum sigil, tells me this is System Shock.
You will say I'm superficial or pulling my asscrack hair, but the simple fact of changing the music from a rocking Cyberpunk techno-industrial soundtrack to a generic cinematic/horror soundtrack COMPLETELY and UTTERLY changes the game's identity. Such a small change on the surface has drastically altered the game. I also heavily dislike the inclusion of RPG systems in a game that didn't need it. I love System Shock 2 with its hilariously broken and imbalanced RPG systems, but System Shock is an excellent game as it is. System Shock is a Cyberpunk horror dungeon crawler with rocking music, not a generic sci-fi space station horror RPG with cinematic music. I seriously think they don't understand it. Also, take a listen. System Shock's theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CalFsdE4tA&list=PLF2E2D1B4832DCE95 System Shock Remake's theme: https://soundcloud.com/nightdivestudios/main-title I don't pretend to be a supreme authority on System Shock, but I certainly would NOT be taking this direction if I were the project lead. I'd try to stick as close to possible to the original's heavy Cyberpunk aesthetic and try to hire Greg LoPiccolo for the soundtrack again, with Eric Brosius at the helm of the sound department. Well no, actually. It DID look like System Shock when it was still running under Unity. http://i.imgur.com/1M04dPz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/xY9IqCf.jpg And I mean it has Chris Avellone writing new stuff for it and Robb Waters, the art director on the original, working on it. But that Unreal 4 video? Looks like any other sci-fi shovelware game you see on Greenlight. This, unnecessary RPG systems and cinematic soundtrack to 'enhance' the horror aspect while completely misunderstanding what the original's tone was makes me incredibly wary of it, and honestly disappointed by the turn of events. Really feels like I dodged a bullet by not backing this, and I'm not the only one. If you're done spunk-baptising Grim Dawn, now may be a good opportunity to give Dark Souls another try - a new mouse fix has been released which apparently works much better than older solutions: http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/862-dark-souls-mouse-fix/
Features * True raw mouse input without controller emulation * No additional smoothing or acceleration * Flexible options such as individual horizontal and vertical sensitivities for camera movement and bow aiming * Allows any action to be bound to any mouse button, the mouse wheel or keyboard key * UI Auto Cursor mode that enables and disables the cursor whether a menu is open or not * Improved target switching * Includes a GUI for easy configuration * Compatible with DSFix Nah thanks I got loads more games to play. Also I got burnt once wasting a few hours trying to get DS to work, that's enough already. But cheers anyway.
Okay I got into it properly.
Still clunky as fuck with the constant jarring jumps to 3rd person anims, the super long-winded dealings with merchants (click on merchant, listen to their intro, choose to buy, only THEN go into their sales computer, then reverse the whole fucking procedure to leave - WHY NOT JUST HAVE ONE FUCKING CLICK TO ACCESS THE COMPUTER ONCE YOU'VE INTRODUCED YOURSELF TO THE MERCHANT THE FIRST TIME), and the totally broken mouse rebinds that means that if mouse is bound to movement, it still applies as movement inside inventory menus, so that whenever you try to left/right click on an item, it moves up/down to an adjacent item, so inventory and augment functions require endless juggling to get the right items selected - this didn't happen in DX3 so why fucking break it now?? Anyway.... The good stuff, in order: 1. It's a giant secret-collecting sim. There's a ridiculous amount to explore and almost every little nook and cranny rewards you with some loot or progressive information. I spent over 24 hours in the first two smallish maps, I reckon you could do the main quest parts in 2 hours in sidequests in 4 hours, the rest has just been exploring around and I didn't get bored and hardly retraced my steps apart from trying a lot to thoroughly raid the bank. 2. There's a lot more cool details and designs in the city than it first appears. I was initially underwhelmed by the graphics, once I got used to the mediocre face quality and turned the awful AO off, it looks okay, but the more you look around the more is appealing. The Palisade bank is a case in point, some real nice use of very square designs and polished textures. 3. The blend of old and new is done pretty well. Pretty standard old city buildings that are slowly being crowded by slick near future developments. Quite a good extrapolation of how it actually happens today and kinda captures the vibe of new money and tech coming into an old culture. 4. The people you meet have some character. Not quite enough to compensate for Plank O' Jensen's anti-character, but some of them are fairly entertaining in a grumpy Eastern European / spazzed out post-gen-X sort of way. 5. See 1. Though I think they're misguided with their System Shock remake by changing the game far too much.
Okay....
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=879057910 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=879058051 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=879059675 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=879060039 Possible spoilers for mid-game aesthetic, although not story. Industrial spunkfest. No it wouldn't. System Shock is not a decent game, it's a masterpiece and a milestone in gaming. I dare say it's one of the most important games ever made. It's a game that was way, way ahead of its time both in terms of narration in a first person game as well as technology and gameplay mechanics everybody takes for granted nowadays.
Without System Shock (and by extension Ultima Underworld 1 and 2), there would be no immersive games like Deus Ex, Bioshock or more recently Dishonored and Arkane's Prey. The legacy of System Shock is found in almost every game that came afterwards, despite the game doing a bit timidly at the time, overshadowed by Doom 2 and other simpler FPS (not a pejorative in this context ofc). A remake of such a game being only 'decent' would be plain unacceptable. The fact that people are still not aware of how and why System Shock or any other very important title is so important is because there is next to zero gaming history and historians curating it. There's nothing like a film or literature history for games.
Here's a very interesting article written by Felipe Pepe on the matter: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150211/236041/The_Ministry_of_Hype_The_danger_of_letting_the_gaming_industry_curate_its_own_history.php Never played SS myself. And if the remake is decent, I am going to accept the fuck out of it.
:p A bit over dramatic don't you think?
I mean, if one great piece of artistic work is never created that doesn't shut down human creativity in the slightest. Now, all this reboot/remaster/remake shit that's happening, that can have an affect that is chilling. It doesn't shut down human creativity, but all these games I named are direct descendants of System Shock and Ultima Underworld. Even Wolfenstein 3d and Doom are descendants of Ultima Underworld, because Carmack thought he could do a better engine than Looking Glass' in less time.
Never have I been so apathetic about a game carrying the "quake" label. Well, maybe other than Quake Wars - I think my give-a-shit-o-meter was actually reading negative on that one.
But Quake Champions seems incredibly meh, and this is coming from someone who's played a fair share of both QuakeWorld and Quake Live. The art direction just seems incredibly bland and uninspired, some elements look like they were pulled straight from a different game (weapon models from UT, Clutch player model from Reflex) and others look completely out of place in a Quake game (Sorlag looks more like something you'd encounter in an Elder Scrolls game). And I'm not a fan of the whole abilities aspect, why try to revive Quake with a game that goes against one of the fundamental draws of the series? I'd rather just play Overwatch (which I do), which is an entirely different game and doesn't try to be Quake or any arena fps.
Pass. id and God-Mode Games.
I'm not super hopeful about it, but there was never any chance they would (or should) just clone Quake Live with new graphics. If they want to tweak it a bit with some gameplay differences between the character models, whatevs. I'll be interested to see if or how that works out. I never played SS either. I would have if I knew it was this amazing piece of history in gaming, but it kind of just flew under the radar for me while I was playing more standard shooters like Doom, Hexen, Heretic, ROTT, Dark Forces.
That new trailer looks just like a standard survival horror indie game. The voice is nice but over the top. The design just looks like copy/pasted corridors. The combat looks awful. It's not even clear when you hit the enemy, they're just standing there button mashing. Although, I didn't mind that main theme after listening to it as a comparison to the old one https://soundcloud.com/nightdivestudios/main-title That's pretty sweet. I'd rather have that over my game then some thrashing techno giving me a headache. Maybe I'm getting old. First person shooters according to wikipedia
2005: 44 2013: 20 2014: 7 2015: 5 2016: 9 Damn, did FPS's die a horrible death at the end of 2013? CHAMPIONS
WILL RISE I am so hyped, it looks amazing! Jokes. Really is quite horrifically bland. I guess this was to be expected so at least the letdown levels are equally average. 2012: 20 Q1SP maps
2013: 18 Q1SP maps 2014: 52 Q1SP maps 2015: 64 Q1SP maps 2016: 61 Q1SP maps 2017: 33 Q1SP maps so far Speed maps, re-releases (unless they were significant changes), RMQ demo 3, some of Gotshun's "tribute" maps, and Nait's joke maps from the Screenshots & Betas thread.
The fact that people are still not aware of how and why System Shock or any other very important title is so important is because there is next to zero gaming history and historians curating it. There's nothing like a film or literature history for games.
So true. Would be a great discipline and I'm sure there will be something like this soon enough. Only issue is how to make a living doing it. I to like RetroAhoy on Youtube for this very reason. They did a great piece on Quake. https://www.youtube.com/user/XboxAhoy Somewhere I do not understand on a business perspective how IP owners do not have a responsible for the preservation of the good will to the IP ?
Shit out desperate me too crap like Quake Champions and you are causing a serious future loss on the next installment of the IP. Customers get disillusioned or the IP just becomes diluted - just another whatever goes - with no massive guaranteed good will and buyer base trusting in the products quality due to where the bar was set with previous iterations of the IP. Thats from a business perspective. Another perspective is shitting on "art" or other achievements in such a way is just not a cool legacy - in other words what the fuck are they doing with their lives :D ? Goes for System Shock, GITS movie remake, Quake Champions, etc etc ad nauseam... Possibly Kinn, since 3 years or so though it is the pefect opportunity to give power back to such IP's - see Doom4 - the next one will sell well again because an honest effort was made and rewarded with it - it allows
1 - lovers of the original IP to get friendly with modern versions of the IP 2 - newcomers that want to get on board the Doom "legend" to actually find substance to the whole hoo-ha about the grand old legendary Doom without dismissing it as "old farts have no clue" These help build a healthy devoted customer base for the next installment imho "Somewhere I do not understand on a business perspective how IP owners do not have a responsible for the preservation of the good will to the IP ? "
Yup. None of us understand. The men in suits in offices and boardrooms at Bethesda DO understand. They might not get it right all the time but there will be reasons from a business / cold hard profit perspective to not preserve good will to the IP. The market is a lot bigger than fans of the original (let alone "fans of the original who will get offended by a remake/reuse they personally don't like"), and that's what they have their beady dollar eyes on. Having said that Doom4 was great and Quake Chumpions looks like dogshit on a stick *shrug*. The multiplayer/co-op genre seems very saturated and competitive at the moment. I'm skeptical that Quake Champions will be able to stand out and compete in a substantial way. I feel like revisiting the IP's roots would have a better chance of strengthening the brand. Imagine: a Bloobourne-esque FPS under the Quake banner. I find this more appealing than yet another cookie-cutter arena shooter. Of course, I'm just talking out of my ass. I poo-poo'd several aspects of Doom4 before it launched and ended up happily eating my words. I hope this is the case with Quake Champions, though I'm pretty skeptical so far.
Generally speaking, you don't want an IP to be dormant for too long. The big strength of it is the inherent reduction in marketing cost. Quake Champions keeps "Quake" as a term in the general awareness of gamers, even if they never play it, so any future action with the same name within a certain time frame requires less heavy lifting from marketing. Even sub-par or bad releases can bring this benefit, so long as it isn't a 100% crap show. Get another thing with "Quake" on it out now, if it has any redeeming value and can eventually break even, it preserves the IP value for a future project, and maintains the Zenimax umbrella.
I'll try it, if it is good, I will enjoy it, if not, well, I already have Reflex, and of course, Quake. I'm an MP fan. Not too excited about what I am seeing of Champions but will reserve judgement until I actually have a chance to play it. Q3A felt great. Movement speed and all that, micro-moments etc. Weapon balance was great. Doom4 was a sweet surprise. MP sucked so I am hoping they are going to fix that with Champions.
I am not concerned that Champions is a hero-based game. That's a marketing decision based on the success of Overwatch. Tim Willits has stated you will be able to play your own style and I take that to mean the heroes are more like preset loadouts. So I am not worried. This is going to work fine for the game. In Q3A I am more of a rocket launcher player with the railgun as my second most used weapon. Shotgun third and then whatever else works. But I have friends that use other tactics. Out of the gate it seems they are embracing eSports so that's a welcome addition. I don't play much of Quake Live but I prefer Q3A with bots or on a LAN - that's just me. I'm no pro player. I would have liked to see a Lovecraftian SP/MP Quake with new tech but that's not what Quake means to the suits and people who remain at id. Would dislike Doom(2016)
I only played the demo, and speedruns of it are great. But the main campaign seems so lacking. You basically have some dialogue, then a lifeless area until you hit an "arena" where you fight a specified 11(?) monsters at a time with a new one replacing the last one you killed until the final count is reached. This you simply repeat over and over... with BOSS fights thrown in that are just about the same. And the look of the game... I mean seriously, it's Darkplaces with over the top colored lighting and they sure couldn't get the fire animation right... it looks copy and pasted everywhere. I just couldn't take it seriously, the ammmo popping out like a pez dispenser from the monsters after glory kills was just so hellarious. Like gaming entertainment for a 10 year old. Who knows, maybe when they reboot it again in 2036 I'll find it more appealing, hehe You can't seriously sit there with a straight face and describe Doom that way. I suppose in Quake you walk through brown monotone levels killing one or two enemies at a time until you hit an arbitrary exit trigger?
Yeah, Quake sounds shit too when you describe it like that. If you are wanting to play a more accurate remake of System Shock, I will refer you to Citadel (not finished yet): https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=6977.new#new
http://www.indiedb.com/games/citadel Please rest your hopes on that project, it looks great if I do say so myself. "The men in suits in offices and boardrooms at Bethesda DO understand. They might not get it right all the time but there will be reasons from a business / cold hard profit perspective to not preserve good will to the IP."
This good will to IP stuff I mentioned was not referring to the hardcore fan marketbut the larger market. The "brand" is a strong arguments for sales amongst mass market. BUT this only applies to very very few IPs, who has NOT heard of Doom across the whole potential market? Or Mario same, Nintendo knows to value this. If they shit the games under the brand the belief will turn to the original is overrated crap to people who just heard of the name and did not experience it - and this kills the brand. Even if you're right - more right than the guys in charge of this - you're changing the goalposts there. Also:
"The "brand" is a strong arguments for sales amongst mass market." Maybe, maybe not. I expect someone, somewhere has looked into the importance of the Quake brand to the mass market compared to all the other ways to suck money out of the plebs, and decided that either they can afford to shit on it, or they can't and that QCrap won't damage it anyway. And.... "I feel like revisiting the IP's roots would have a better chance of strengthening the brand. Imagine: a Bloobourne-esque FPS under the Quake banner. I find this more appealing than yet another cookie-cutter arena shooter. " Of course, this is what we all personally want and have been wanting for decades. Again some grey men who have never even seen Quake but have seen a fuckload of market analysis will be deciding on brand importance vs. quick sales vs. development time of a complex SP FPS vs. marketing feasibility vs. etc etc. What WE want means jack shit. Finally: "Quake" to the general public these days means Q3A or Quake Live rather than Q1. Think on that when you're talking about brands. TL,DR: Yes we are all morally right in wanting the Quake brand to continue via a true successor to Quake. But that's not what the Quake brand and it's marketability means to the people making the decisions. Has anyone considered that maybe id and "the suits" in fact do think they are doing the right thing with the IP (with quake chumpions) from an artistic perspective? I mean let's be honest here, the vast majority of people associate "Quake" with deathmatch, e-sports etc. They think that's what most of the audience want and they are probably completely correct.
They tried to give the singleplayer aspect an identity with the Strogg stuff, but turns out all that stuff is actually really lame and generic and people quite rightly didn't buy enough copies of Q4 anyway. This forum consists of about the only people left in the world for whom "quake" means skulking about in a brown castle shooting midget knights in the face. Yeah visually that works for me I guess. Might just buy it to fly around and look at the levels but that's about it.
Yeah I'm aware of this project. Wasn't it started on Darkplaces too? Kinda interested to see how it'll turn out.
Kinn, yeah, I think it's most likely that guys at id are excited about making a cool Quake multiplayer game.
I'm acquainted with the design lead-- worked with him a bit (remotely, over email) and had some other chats -- he's always seemed like a fan of the series, someone who tried hard to make Quake Live work out, and not incidentally someone who would also like to see another singleplayer Quake someday. Maybe there are "suits" farther up the chain who are cackling over plans to shit out a sub-par game, but eh I just don't enjoy the process of assuming the worst and then getting upset about my assumptions. I also don't enjoy jumping into the middle of a pitchfork mob on the forums, so sometimes I keep that opinion to myself. But, you asked. :-) i think that video looks better than the last one. I think if you manage expectations and think of it as a cheesy revamp of Q3A, I could see it being a bit of fun. Gameplay feel looks very similar at least. I always thought Q3A was aesthetically a bit of an unsuccessful hodge-podge, though the engine was graphically impressive for the time. This is higher fidelity of course, but not cutting edge, and the aesthetic is just as average.
Is this free-to-play? I forget. If so will definitely give it a go. Can't see myself paying real money for it as it stands to be honest. Latest reports are that it is free to play as Quake Ranger only, or a one-time cost to be able to play as anyone.
I like the movement speeds we're seeing on the monitors here:
https://www.facebook.com/Radeon/videos/1676632082630122/ Ya, I started out using Darkplaces. What can I say, I've been playing Quake since I was 5, but System Shock since I was 4. Why not mix the two, so I thought.
"I think if you manage expectations and think of it as a cheesy revamp of Q3A"
Those ARE my expectations. I.e. utterly bollox. Utterly bollox for a AAA release or as compared to a artfully reimagined Quake, certainly. But, quake 3 was kinda fun, if it's basically q3 remastered for free and not buggy like quake live, won't kick it outta bed yet.
I think the levels look great to be honest and more interesting than the new Doom. I would like to see single player levels in that type of setting!
Regarding the new doom, I never got around to playing it. I was always skeptical about the health and ammo and armor regenerating mechanic it has. ANy good level designer here has played it and can confirm if it destroys all the challenge as I suspect? Challenge was good in some places, fun was good in many places, overall game was great.
Yeah some of the art in Quake Cuntpions looks cool, all that gothic shit. Completely wasted in a fast MP game though. Really good overall despite underwhelming first appearances. More of the same but I liked it a lot. Lots of small scale exploring and some nice details and styles in it, and the world had a fairly convincing feel as these things go (AI aside). I got used to the clunky interface and moronic hole-where-a-protagonist-should-have-been.
I would have liked to have more....in-depth exploration in the Swiss Alps and London areas, to balance out the vast amount of time you spent in relatively small Prague areas. Those two sections felt a bit detached but had a lot of promise (like the end scene of the Alps, wanted more of that!). Golem City did the non-Prague stuff best as it felt a pretty rich environment you saw lots of. A break from Jan 2016 to March 2017 not playing a single video game is torture, although this thread probably doesn't miss my 7.5/10s.
I'm finally catching up on all the q1sps from the last 2+ years. Surprisingly, my gameplay skills don't completely suck after that break, I'm just as average as I always was, as I consistently screw up double-sg Shambler fights every friggin time. Played a couple of good games recently that were released for free to PSN folks. Luckily they're on Steam too.
Disc Jam - Kind of like tennis mixed with Frisbee. Super addictive and it's got that easy to get into but hard to master vibe. 5/5 Letter Quest: Grims Journey Remastered - Spent loads of hours playing this simple spelling game. It's got RPG elements and interesting gameplay mechanics. Definitely worth checking out! 4/5 Wassup next??
ME4?? Seen a lot of Cohh playing it, looks pretty cool, he acknowledges the animation issues, but the rest of it looks good - the exploration and planets especially. Not sure about lots of dialogue tho. Styx2?? Looks very much more of the same, but some cooler designs. The first one was good but a bit dry, not sure how hyped I am. Vikings Of Midgard?? More utterly generic ARPG stuff, but looks okay. Hmmmmm mmmmmm.....what do you guysh think? Loved Styx even if they re-used levels to extend gameplay. Haven't seen anything of Styx 2 except for a few screenshots but if it's in any way improved itself over the original then definite purchase for me.
Strafe was delayed to the 9th May. It was going to come on March 26. It was a kickstarter project. Coincidence?
Not in my book didn't get it...
Played the early version of the game and it had some weird scale issue on the maps and I think some of the gameplay does need tweaking. I'm more excited for Dusk and GibHard tbh at this point. I guess you really want to mean it when you shoot? Or is there some kind of keyboard out there that lets you type # without a modifier key?
God damnit it happened again. I was referring to #8967 which was linked.
I think people are waging a covert war to try and convince me that message deletion should be a thing... has the # but doesn't have a \.
You don't realise how important the \ is until it's missing. Thankfully the later version of the same keyboard has it now (das keyboard). Decided to make some time to game again this year after a dry 2016. So far this fortnight digging into my 2013 crates
The Stanley Parable - metatric: 88% , my score: 6/10 I give it a 6 for trying something different and very amusing/entertaining narration, well written. But let's be honest, this is an interactive movie with little point, dated Valve graphics and a bunch of corridors. Slender: The Arrival - 65% no score because I quit after 2 of 5 levels Piece of crap. Slender Man scared the fuck out of me a couple times, that's the only good thing about this game. Having to start that second level over and over again with randomly generated locations and almost random deaths was enough for me. I watched the rest on youtube and am glad I didn't continue. Resident Evil 6 - 69% - 7/10 Really not too bad. Good story the way it has 4 campaigns telling the story from each perspective. Unfortunately, replaying the same levels up to 3 times is not so good. Good graphics though. 20-25 hours is long for linear game like this, though. Far Cry 3 - 88% - 9/10 If this was the first sandbox RPG FPS I played, I'd love it. But it's not, we've seen the island setting before in FPSs Crysis and Far Cry 1. We've seen Ubisoft bring RPG into it with Far Cry 2. So now we're just going back to island. Which we've seen before with Dead Island and White Gold. But is that such a bad thing? There's not many themes that haven't been done already in some game. Far Cry 2 gameplay in Far Cry 1 setting, why not? Also some of the FC2 issues have been fixed (respawning enemies every five minutes which ruined the game for me). Plus a little easier. Would have been great with more side quests that are even remotely interesting and worth doing, but even so I spent about 20 hours on it so that's full value, when you compare a COD campaign is about 5 hours. I might play Blood Dragon next. Looks like they should have made this a full game. Then I don't know, maybe force myself through another Batman game (Arkham Origins). Well Blood Dragon is one of the good ones afaik. Didn't you try it? Arkham 3 I can't really miss because Batman. Those Arkham games are worth playing for the design, they all look great. Usually good stories too, and you get to battle just about every villain DC ever created, they cram them all in there. It's just a shame the gameplay sucks ass.
Trying to think what was around in 2013. Can't even remember.
Looking at my steam list, between 2013 and 2016: Dark Souls 3, SOMA, Dishonoured / 2, DX:MD, Titanfall 2, Doom 4, TR2013, ROTR, Bioshock Infinite, Metros Reduxes, Styx, Alien Isolation, WOFL TNO / TOB, would all be worth checking out in the action-ish genres. Tried Mass Effect 4 / Andromeda / whatever the fuck it is. Was pretty hype after watching Cohh play some.
No problem with the animations / faces. Eyes a bit glassy, whatever. Shits given, none. Graphics look real nice overall except face lighting is bland. All else was good. Game is....I really don't know. Never played ME before but I know the premise. ME4 sets it up nicely for a fresh start, fresh protagonist. But....I just don't like it. It's so clunky, so complicated, and the combat is frustrating as waxing balls with inadequate ball wax. Controls are like trying to stir soup with a spoon attached to a telegraph pole via a string of condoms. No less than 4 view points - normal, scanning, combat, zoomed in. No less than 5 extra movement actions - run, walk, jump, boost, mantle. This is symptomatic of the whole game. The amount of extra stuff (collecting, researching, developing, selling, deconstructing, mining, scanning planets, going between the 4 vehicles / bases, upgrading your character, your team mates, your vehicle, all the other customisations) could easily be a full game++ in it's own right. UI is equally clunky. So much going on. Combat is tough as fuck. Mobs make Dark Souls 3 look like Quake on Normal skill. Apart from one shot ranged weapons, don't think DS3 had those?? Too frustrating. Uninstalled. http://reworkedgames.eu/the-last-of-us-pc-download/
I wonder if it works, or just a bigass virus. It is supposed to be the greatest game of all time for Playstation (with Uncharted) so I wouldn't mind giving it a go. Just cbf learning how to use my PS4 (what a waste of $500 that ended up being). Whoa Kona what a strange site and it looks fishy as all hell too.
If you brave the risk, let us know how it works because I would like to try Silent Hill Downpour on the PC (Even if the game was bleh) ME4 I've only seen some videos so far, but female main character does look hilariously ugly.
Anyway, Blood Dragon wouldn't install so skipped ahead to Batman: Arkham Origins. As always good design, good story, average gameplay. No side missions worth a damn or DLC's. Nothing new to the franchise AT ALL. No point exploring the open world because there's nothing much to do. But I quite enjoyed this one anyway (except for Bane). Maybe my favourite so far because it was easy and simple. 7/10 Call of Duty: Black Ops II Fuck these guys need to upgrade the engine on this thing. Great story though. I could totally see Black Ops being on the big screen as a huge blockbuster. Same old gameplay, lots of epicness, but the visuals are starting to date. Has anyone here played this? It's right up the alley of Quake level designers because most of it features marvelous architecture from Rome. I haven't played Crysis 3 yet, but these are the best graphics I've ever seen a game (keep in mind I'm yet to play anything from 2014 on). Of course I had everything turned up and it still ran okay. This CryEngine is fucking wonderful, it's a shame it didn't get licensed for more games. Instead it gets this, Crysis 3, then Crytek go almost bankrupt and now just waste all their talent on shitty fucking cellphone games. What a terrible waste. Oh there was that dinosaur game but it looks like ass (again proving they have great trouble making fun games). Meanwhile everyone else carries on with the old Unreal Engine 4, Valve with their updated Quake engine, COD with it's updated Quake 3 engine etc.
But yeah the environments in Ryse are fantastic, definitely the best looking water I've seen. It's starts out a bit average in level 1 (of 8) but gets better. Just a shame it's very linear, terrible FOV, clips everywhere. The story is also good but someone from the art and engine department forgot to tell the combat/gameplay people that they're supposed to be making a good game here, because the combat fucking sucks. Way worse than Arkham. It's basically a great big QTE game but without the prompts. No keyboard remapping but that doesn't really matter because movement during combat almost doesn't exist you're just hitting the push>attack>attack rinse and repeat, sometimes with a block added in. Very unresponsive, I'm just clicking the mouse like a madman. I had to put godmode on for half of it because it was so repetitive and actually not that easy at times, even though I'm apparently playing in recruit/story board mode. Another developer that doesn't know what "easy" actually means. Crytek can make stunning looking games, and they got gameplay right with Crysis and Far Cry, which wasn't hard since there's 100s of FPS's that came before it to replicate, but they got it wrong - big time wrong - with Ryse. If only this was an open world RPG, think The Witcher, with freeflowing combat, and with these graphics. btw 6/10 (10/10 for art though, if you want to sit through 6 hours for some pretty environments)
http://www.newgamenetwork.com/images/uploads/gallery/Ryse/RyseE3_04.jpg iirc it was a different developer who made it. The series is back on form with Arkham Knight however, which was excellent!
Blizzard finally release a widescreen patch for Broodwar and charge full price for it because REMASTERED?
Is this remastering the new big thing since all the possible sequels got made? Alien Arena yet another pile of utterly generic rehashed deathmatch TURD. Q3A Q2 and UT called and they want their aborted ass-baby back.
Yeah, I would've been happy with just a widescreen patch.
However, this might cause me to break my blizzard boycott. Broodwar classic is now free and is compatible with the remaster. Remaster players can play with classic players, play on old maps, chat, etc. They've updated bnet and intergrated the two clients with one another. So that's cool. SC1 is great and I'm happy that it appears to be getting proper treatment. Here's a pretty ok interview with the project producer. Some added features with no changes to core gameplay at all. Some new graphics look very good while so others look ehh, but it's not finished yet.
Different to Battle Royale how??
Not that I'd touch it with a bargepole. PlayerUnknown started making BR mods for Arma 2 and DayZ, then moved to Arma 3, then worked with Sony on H1Z1 before making this.
It's by far my favourite incarnation of the KotH game mode. Even in its early access state it is leaps over any of his previous projects. Dead Space 3: gee, lot of average comments about this game and people saying it's just Gears of War. Rubbish. I probably enjoyed it the most. I love this setting, dark claustraphobic atmosphere-rich sci-fi and the last chapters in the alien setting - awesome!! In fact that last level with the planet being pulled into the moon as you fight on it is one of those "best levels of all time".
If people liked the older games being harder, why don't they just put the fucking difficulty up? I started on easy and there was still some tough sections even on easy. But then I realised I had a glitch that was giving me WAY more items out of those boxes, so by chapter 11 or 12 I was pretty much able to max out the rig and create any gun I wanted. So I put it up to normal because it was going to be too easy. The crafting system (once you get the hang of it) is fun, just a shame the military attachment is the only thing worth having. For the last few chapters I ended up making a custom weapon that was even better out of parts I did legitimitely find (electricity based). The main difficulty in the game is actually just getting caught out in between reloading and the whole monsters spawning behind the player and trapping him in stupid QTEs. Oh and the mini games and on rails sections were pretty bad. It's really a shame the industry slagged the game off for not being surivival focused enough, instead of just taking it for what it is. metlslime are you still at Visceral Games? Dead Space 4 coming soon? :P Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist - 7/10
Good fun shooter with some sneaky sneaky (because it's too easy to get overwhelmed if you just run in shooting). Good story, good visuals. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon - 6/10 The design was pretty shit, the bland neon blue/red theme did nothing for me. Other games have done this setting much better. The weapons are rubbish. Way too many flamer cunts which I hated in the main game. But then the ending was easy. There wasn't any cheesy 80s b-movie humour, DNF was funnier than this. Cutscenes and story boring. It was only a DLC but not far off the price of a full game, whereas this is under 5 hours. I think the idea could work well for a full game though, with full game budget and not cheaper DLC budget. Gearbox could pull it off. It'll be really interesting to see just how open the game map really is in Prey. Apparently you just go spacewalk to anywhere you want with little restriction. That sounds so awesome but I imagine there will be some gating of some kind?
Anyway, seriously looking forward to playing it! Being one who bought Dead Space on release date, I was a bit dissappointed with the third entry. I did not like the chest high walls cover gameplay. I found dead space to be about dismemberment and having the odds stacked against you. Dead Space 2 was a happy mix but 3 ventured too far into action for my tastes.
However, I will say once you reach the snow planet it does get more interesting and back to some survival moments. I also enjoyed the side quests of investigating derelict ships along the way. There were certainly great improvements from the previous two. I was fortunate to play through the game with a co-op buddy and they did have some interesting gimmicks with it. One was having strange visions only happen for one player. I recall my friend freaking out about toy soldiers marching on the floor and I was like :"What are you talking about man?". It actually conveyed that I thought my buddy was going crazy! For me the best part of the game was the very first area where you can float around in space and travel to all the different derelicts and explore all those wrecks. I could easily play an entire game where you are a salvage person scouring an old space battlefield for anything of worth. That shit was great.
Kona: I am still at visceral. I'm working on the star wars game they are developing.
(And for DS3 i definitely agree that exploring the ship graveyard is one of the high points of the game for me.) Sweet, hope it's a winner! I haven't played a really memorable Star Wars video game yet. Dark Forces was good, the two Force Unleashed games okay. Battlefront didn't seem to be single player, I gave it a shot for half an hour and deleted it. And for some stupid reason I skipped Knights of the Old Republic, which is the one I should have played, it sounds like it's a classic.
Dark Souls clone in extremely boring engineering setting??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMrGQ9J0lVs One for Fric maybe.... I'm all for Souls style games but this one does nothing for me at all. Their last game didn't grab me either (the medieval style Souls game, forget the name).
Will read some reviews for sure, but i'm staying cautious. I played the Dead Space 3 DLC - good stuff. Could easily have been the beginning of the DS4 with its story. Anyway some other games:
Gone Home Most overrated game in recent memory, 86% on metacritic. In fact it's not a game, it's a journal fetchquest house simulator (which looks crap at that, but it is Unity after all). The journals add up to about five minutes of cheesy narration about a lesbian meeting someone. I wonder if it was two males if this game would have got the same rave reviews. There's something up with the critics love for this game. Trying to be really PC, pro-feminism or something. The game can be completed in 45 seconds ffs. 4.5/10 The Wolf Among Us Typical Telltale Games interactive story. No puzzles really, just follow the story along making some choices along the way, which don't really make a huge difference to the outcome. But I enjoyed it. Makes Gone Home look like a 10 year old stick figure drawing and this is a Picasso. Better than the Walking Dead ones they did just because that second season of TWD had such a despressing outcome. Not too different to the tv series I suppose. Based on some comic, but pretty much Once Upon a Time tv series in a darker noir setting - I don't imagine too many males watch that (I get forced to because of the gf). 7/10 Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Again, more emotional story than Gone Home even without any spoken word. Great art, simple puzzles, I enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy having to constantly hold down keys all the time, it's murder on your thumbs. But everything else in the game is good. Still only a 7.5/10 for me because it's just not my kind of game. Dead Island Riptide A game obviously not tested in solo mode, because there are parts in this game that are damn hard by yourself. It's obvious it's intended for up to 4 player co op. The survival sections are awful. However it's a nice sandbox island setting, good graphics. It gets complaints about being no improvement over the first Dead Island, but most franchises don't change much with sequels. It's a new setting and story. That's all COD or Assassins Creed ever get. The last 1/3 of the game became very fun as I finally crafted some better weapons (maybe I should have done that sooner) and had a fucking blast with an electrified katana and weapons laced with fire and poison. Big miniboss cunts that are near impossible when first encounter become a piece of cake as I'd shotgun them with poison, they'd sit their puking their guts out while I headshot the fuck out of them. 8/10 for the last half, just a shame the first half ruins it, but I guess if you like a difficult game it's okay, or grind all the side quests which I didn't really do. Perhaps I could have found that katana sooner if I did. There's trainers for those surivival missions though :D Call of Juarez: Gunslinger More from Techland (behind Dead Island). The Call of Juarez franchise has been a bit dead, although I always enjoy them because I love a FPS. The last one was rubbished so it probably didn't help sales for Gunslinger. But, it's actually the best in the franchise and has had an overhaul. Completely new story and characters and no longer trying to be like other games or trying to be bigger than Techland can really do. Now they've just gone for a simple, linear FPS, and it rocks. Graphics are Borderlands style, every level looks great. Gunplay is fun, the guns are meaty - shotgun feels good but most of the time you'll be going for headshots with the dual wield pistols or rifle. Bullet time works. The story is great and creative as the whole game is narrated, and often pulls you straight out of a gunfight to change things up. While the story was a bit all over the place and I wish there was a bit more humour, the way the game is told is one of the most creative I've seen in a game. It's similar to that Dungeons and Dragons quest (was it a DLC) that was in some game a few years ago (might have been Dragon Age) where the dudes keep changing the quest. I played it all in one sitting (about 6 hours) - doesn't need to be longer though. 8/10 I mean if the sister was up in the attic dead, and it became some sort of suicide awareness message, it might have meant more imo.
...that he went into politics because he heard that's the way to get a "mandate"
Their last game was Lords of the Fallen. I enjoyed it. Felt solid enough, although too short/not enough world to explore while at the same time providing a ton of different gear in short succession. Almost like they ran ran out of time designing the world and just dropped all the player content in.
Bit of a DS-flavored snack. No idea about The Surge. The setting does indeed look fairly boring, but then again, I only ever saw material from the starting area. Will probably give it a try at some point. It is ridiculous how many Assassin's Creed games there are. They're alongside COD and the many annual sports titles as the cheapest cashcows in gaming. I've played 1, 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, 3, Liberation. They should have wrapped the series up with the end of Desmond. Now they're just spewing them out every year and they don't even have any kind of main story arc, at least with the next one I've played: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
It is the best so far though. Lots of sailing around, although I did get a bit sick of that and the shitty handling of your ship. Way too many "follow without getting caught" and "eavesdrop" missions. I'd be happy if they just did away with those completely. Needed a bit more exploring (I know it's an open world with lots of things to do, but none were proper side quests). I miss some of the times you'd go "dungeon crawling" in the earlier games. But it was a nice change of pace to have a proper open world and the ship stuff. Good story again (as always), just a shame the main thing with the ancients is not relevant anymore but perhaps they'll figure out how to continue the main story arc in the next lot of games. I've still got the next 3 games to get through. More of the same I'm sure. Then they skipped a year and the next one based in Egypt might be out by end of year. The two DLC's were nice as well. One was only 40 minutes, the other about 3 hours. You can't have a sci-fi game without guns. It would just be weird if it was all melee. I'll definitely play it though. If the developers are big fans of Dark Souls, then it stands to reason that the things they liked about DS would be the same as everyone else, so they would have replicated those in their game. It's due out next month.
Am I the only one who can't stand graphics without proper, readjusting tone-mapping? It's awesome if the whole screen is below 30% brightness and you can't see shit. Bah.
(The Surge is a good example) It looks like I'm insulting poor path0gen in the Quake Champions thread because of or thanks to that.
It looks like I'm insulting poor path0gen in the Quake Champions thread because of or thanks to that.
I just checked, and lolled heartily. Julian Gollop is making a new turn based strategy / tactics game called Phoenix Point and the crowdfunding (hold yer groan) is here : https://www.fig.co/campaigns/phoenix-point
The ideas sound cool, and it really looks like the grand strategy layer will be pretty complex with not only aliens to worry about but all the different human factions as well. Yes please sir. Welcome to last year Daz http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=50858&start=34
free The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/ars-and-gog-two-great-tastes-that-go-great-together/ "free The Witcher: Enhanced Edition"
Thanks for the info. Got my copy this morning. I already had it on Steam, but Steam gives me an icky feeling. It's funny how Dead Space 3 ended up with a fairly average response from critics - yet Tomb Raider ended up being game of the year contender. But yet when you look at the gameplay, they're actually very similar games.
I think it's because Dead Space 3 people had high expectations for a tough, gritty survival game, but it ended up being more action-oriented. While TR has much lower expectations of being lame jumping sequences and complicated puzzles that make no sense in the real world but hey it's Tomb Raider, with a pair of tits and short shorts. Which to be honest since the first couple of games really only suits a niche market. TR1's popularity wasn't over it's puzzles anyway. Instead we get an survival-action game. Both third person shooters with long periods of non-action. Climbing sequences in TR while zero-grav sequences in DS3. An equal amount of simple puzzles - TR usually with fire or weight, DS3 with the force. Slow walk speed, an importance on where you hit the enemy - TR the head, DS3 the limbs. Similar amounts of using cover (yawn) and QTE's (yawn!!!). TR ends up a bit different with the bow and arrow which I stuck with all game long because it was so satisfying to hit fiery head shots, but I always had ammo for the guns. DS3 was far more difficult though, imo. Both have weapon and skill upgrading (what game doesn't lately?). The layouts were very similar, both a little bit of exploration and backtracking over previous areas, but overall you're always heading for the same destination. Graphics on par, I loved both tbh. Stories, well sure TR had the better story, it was almost horror the way it started out. Obviously one is island, the other sci-fi. But I'm looking past where they're set. Anyone else find the two quite similar? Same score from me 8.5/10. Well time to take a step down... Saints Row 4 next :\ I mean sure, third person shooters with survival horror elements, mostly linear level flow with small hub areas along the way, upradable weapons. Puzzles. And gratuitous Uncharted-style QTEs.
Rick seriously ?
Never had any trouble. Trusted uploaders, scan tools and some common sense and you are safe. Now some of the shit we have seen packaged under the guise of DRM though.... I do not understand the thrashing against these convenient DRM free, often portable, versions of the games for paying customers... Who's bitch are you? PC gamers become a second class citizen. Making someone drop $60 for a chance to play and then having to request a refund as opposed to a demo is silly. I'm not one to boycott game studios but thought I'd clarify.
The funny thing is - if it's been developed on PC then just how much effort would there be required to make a demo? They're idiots. My thinking here is that the 2 hour time limit of playtime in steam games need to be brought front and center for users.
Let's say you buy Prey. You play the game and decide it's really not for you, but ooops you've played 2.5 hours therefore no refund for you. Steam needs to actively tell players that are approaching the 2 hour cut off so that they may stop playing and get a refund, or continue and accept that the game is worth their time and money. With something like this in place, all games released on steam technically have a demo in place with no further work required by the developers. The next step would be to allow everyone to download and play any game for 2 hours without even paying and then being asked for payment when the 2 hour gate is reached. Yeah if Steam had a delayed-payment process that way, then that would make for an OK demo approximation -- although for some game types, the first 2 hours of gameplay aren't a great substitute for a slice that is specifically crafted as a demo.
It would really screw over short games though, unless Steam allowed developers to opt out of the delayed-payment model for individual games. Steam needs to actively tell players that are approaching the 2 hour cut off so that they may stop playing and get a refund.
That's a good idea. The next step would be to allow everyone to download and play any game for 2 hours without even paying and then being asked for payment when the 2 hour gate is reached. I feel a little weird about this one, but I'm not sure why. Maybe this could be an opt-in for devs. With the abundance of reviewers and 'let's players' on youtube, demos seem almost obsolete. With 10 minutes of research one could determine if a particular game will suit them or not with reasonable accuracy. If a developer can't be arsed to make a PC demo, then we're talking about a developer who can't be arsed about a lot of things.
This studio has a perfect track record and are actually dedicated to their craft. I give more credence to what they say than some other AAA studio. Arkane also has put a third of Dishonored 2, one of the very best games by far to come out in the past decade, for free, with compatible saves and all. I can't think of any other big studio that does anything remotely like this. We're talking about 7-8 hours worth of gameplay here.
Also like #9925 says, making a demo is very taxing. I know it since we made one for EYE and it took us a very long time. The problem with a "free for two hours" scheme is that it can really hurt smaller games. For instance, according to steam I played both Quake mission packs in 3 hours each - it's not inconceivable for someone to beat them in less than 2.
There are a lot of smaller games out there that people buy and enjoy. The developers currently enjoy the freedom to sell their game, and gamers don't particularly mind paying for such games. I'm sure that smaller/shorter games like that are hit pretty hard already by refunds from frugal customers. But similarly, there are plenty of customers who either appreciate the developer's effort enough to support them or are too lazy to bother with requesting a refund when they finish the game. But if players never had to commit any money to play the game in the first place, only those with copious amounts of spare cash would ever bother to actually pay for these games. Given that almost all (if not all) of these titles are "indie" titles created by up-and-coming devs, it seems a shame to hurt them and their market so drastically... In other news, it's interesting to see that people are still complaining about the lack of demo versions. It's <current year>, not 2005. Demos usually end up being these weirdly paced, Frankensteined snippets of the game, so I don't think they're a good way to judge whether you'll like the full game. They might be a good way to see if you like the mechanics, the "feel", etc. but they are usually not a good metric for whether the end product is worth your money.
There are so many review sites and places for end users to write reviews that I don't think it's that hard to figure out via word of mouth whether a game will be up your alley or if it's a buggy piece of shit or whatever. Daz's idea is cool but like Killes says above, there could be (and there have been) some games that have amazing first hours that then kinda fizzle out. The boycott, which might not be entirely serious, is NOT about not having a demo, it's about the LIE that Steam refunds are equivalent to a demo, and the pandering to consoles for a game the devs describe as a "PC game".
Judging by the copious negative reviews, people who were excited by the marketing feel mislead by the actual gameplay. $20 is no big deal and I was excited to play this but now I am going to watch a few "let's plays" before buying.
Firstly, congrats to the devs for shipping a first game. Seeing others without prior experience simply finishing a game is inspiring.
That said, I would have to agree with the negative reviews. Personally, I expected strafe to be what it is and I think others did too. I hope the team is able to turn the negative feedback into positive changes. We shall see! I feel bad because I would have liked for this game to be good.
I'm still holding out for Gibhard to be good since it seems to have got a lot of the gameplay elements correct. I also feel like Dusk will probably be a better game too. Most of the issues with Strafe could be patched out tbh. Being that the guy behind Strafe even remembers the original game, he must be around our ages 30's and 40's. He must have been an avid gamer in the 90s so he'd have been gaming for a good 20 years at least. He must like his twitch shooters from that era. So I'm reading over these steam reviews and it sounds like the game completely misses the mark everywhere. Even looking at it, all I see is flying colours of jizz all over the screen. Roguelike design. Chokepoint combat. Low ammo, almost no health and enemies that rush you the minute the second starts. Looks like the best thing about is the box cover art.
It just amazes me that he and many indie developers fuck this most basic shit up, when trying to recreate 90s styled action games. I'm not surprised by those reviews. The game's marketing was awesome, but that's because the project author has a degree in marketing/video editing (something along those lines; it's in his resume, which I saw long ago).
The public made a mistake in believing that great moviemaking skills would translate into great game development skills. The public always make this mistake, which is why honest trailers can't compete. Developers are almost obligated to bullshit their audience nowadays, which is kinda depressing. The influence of current gen trends is very strong. People expect randomisation to extend longevity, they also expect being able to upgrade shit, shops etc...
I think it hurts a game such as this that were very much known for exceptional and fiendish level design. The positive reviews doesn't sound much better either.
The negative reviews I've seen doesn't sound like they're from internet trolls. If the negative reviews are getting more upvotes, that may well be because the negative opinions about the game are stronger, despite being in the minority - certainly stronger than positive reviews that ends with "Is it worth $19.96? Honestly, no." In the few times I've tried developing indie games, sometimes I've noticed that people were going too easy on me. People like to root for the underdog, and they get afraid of giving negative opinions because indie developers aren't perceived as faceless corporations, but as regular people. People take everything too personally, and they also expect others to take everything too personally. I've had to actively search for opinions on websites that I never visited before to find raw, unfiltered negative opinions about the projects I was developing. And most of them made sense, despite of how harsh they were. Doom 4 also got a ton of negative reviews early on, because of its multiplayer. Afterwards, the public realized that its true strength is in singleplayer; the multiplayer audience went to play other games, and the singleplayer audience got stronger. This is normal. Every product at launch sells mostly because of expectations, and expectations are usually inaccurate. Also, it's hard to blame the public for their inaccurate expectations when Strafe advertises itself as a 1996 FPS, even going as far as using the strafe1996.com URL for their website. Yooo so steam says I have 28 hours played so here we go :
Absolutely buy this game, but wait until the first large official patch comes out. It fixes some nasty bugs that can cause save corruption. I'm not gonna go into detail, but I feel very confident in saying that this is an excellent spiritual sequel to System Shock 2 that does so many things right that its easy to forgive a few shortcomings. The game really is a single giant level (the space station) and gives you a ton of freedom in how you explore it. It's amazing how the layout starts to coalesce in your mind after a time, and all the proportions fit. I can already see me playing a 2nd time through with totally different skills just to see what areas I can get to in a different order etc. Great stuff. Small things like the fact that every human on the station is a real person who has (or had) a function on the crew. You can track any individual from a security console and go find them (alive or dead). This doesn't sound like a big deal but as you go through the game you are reading all these emails and audiologs etc and you start to piece together this giant jigaw puzzle of what everyone on the station was doing before the game started. It all starts to fit together and you can then form a better opinion of both yourself and others and act accordingly. The GLOO gun is cool as shit. In fact, most of the guns are good. Err yeah, this actually got long. Game is good. Definitely buy it. Wait for patch. Bye. GOG is giving away Eador: Genesis, a turn-based fantasy strategy game, for free. As of this writing the offer is good for 29 hours.
https://www.gog.com/game/eador_genesis Good post. Does the boxy clean art deco space station style actually get remotely appealing at any point?
The Deco stuff is used mostly for the flashy parts of the station ie the main lobby, the arboretum, crew quarters etc. There are a lot of parts that are more basic sci-fi and feel kinda like the international Space Station on steroids.
I mean, the deco style is still there in these sections, but it is much more subdued. For example here is the shuttle bay (no spoilers) http://imgur.com/deiu8bL I doubt I'd play it even if it was free. It just doesn't look like a game I'd find enjoyable.
Almost always if "roguelike" or "procedurally generated" appears in a game description, I immediately move on. From that video, Strafe's visual effects and aesthetics are good. There's plenty of little touches, and the UI and the HUD are nice.
However, enemy design is poor (including their aesthetics), combat encounter design is poor, sound fx design is poor, and the levels are too blocky. The enemies reminds me of the ones in Sauerbraten, with their poor rithm and floaty movement. The Wolfenstein 3D engine only allowed square angles. Doom's maps were explicitly designed to use lots of non-square angles, to showcase Doom's superior technology. Strafe tries to give the impression of being inspired by Doom, but its level design has much more in common with Wolfenstein 3D, using square angles everywhere. Also, Strafe's lighting is too uniform. This may be a limitation of the random generation of levels. It's disappointing to see people comparing Strafe to Quake (which is an actual 1996 game), when Quake's lighting is all about moody settings with strongly varied lighting that gives its levels a very deep atmosphere. My list to improve Strafe would be: - Complete replacement of enemies, using new ones designed & coded from scratch. - More sound effects, to give better feedback. - Handcrafted levels Pretty sure it was procedural from the get-go. The thing with the Icarus levels though is that they're obviously the first to have been created, have been left as is and are by far the worst levels in the game. The rest of the levels are slightly better but not by much at all. Ironic for a supposedly old-school shooter to fail the Romero rule of designing your first levels last.
Unless they completely redesign the game from the ground up. Not gonna happen.
Lower than that by a pretty good margin.
Anyway, lesson to scrappy indie devs trying to make a shooter: unless you're well versed and accomplished in the ways of level design (see: Gibhard) don't assume procedural generation is going to solve all your problems. It's as if level design is actually an important position that you should hire people with experience (even if it's mod experience) to do... No offence to the devs but that's good. We can forget about it and move swiftly on, with a footnote that making your OMG SO PSEUDO-RETRO FAST PACED OMGZOR fps into a pile of arse is a good warning note for others not to do it.
then you wont see a good return in quality.
I thought Strafe would have turned out better. Clearly there are lot of issues. I really hope Gibhard turns out well, it's doing some of the same things with level generation but hopefully it has better algorithms and AI (other stuff like lighting already looks better than Strafe). Dusk should, in theory, be the best of all the bunch since it will have properly authored levels. Weird, didn't they get 180k from kickstarter? I'm pretty sure the team was like 2-4 people before devolver got involved.
is on final sale at 90% off most places because of it being made "no longer available for sale" due to music licensing issues.
It doesn't really sound as if it's a game I'd like, but for $3 I may go ahead and grab a copy from GOG. If not for the fact that Die Hard is one of my favorite movies, that might have slipped right past me.
Can anybody answer this question?
If a game download code bought from Amazon, Newegg, etc. (anywhere but Steam) states: "Steam account required for game activation and installation." After the game is installed and activated, can it be played without Steam either running or even installed on the computer? If anyone has personal experience of this I'd like to know. Otherwise I'll probably just have to perform a $60 experiment. If you need Steam to activate/install then Steam must be running to play it. You can use Steam in offline mode at the very least.
If you try to run the game's exe straight from the directory, it will just launch Steam. However, some games only use Steam merely as a platform for buying and downloading, but can be run and played without the Steam client. Witcher 3, for instance.
That's why I am wondering. It is an AAA title, but the game would not be bought through Steam.
The sentence I quoted is exactly what is stated everywhere I've seen the game being sold, and it does not say that Steam is needed to play the game. Of course, it's not like game companies have never lied before. It's really too new to buy now anyway, as it's still selling for full price and it's not worth that much really. There is apparently a cracked version though. Maybe when the price drops to something reasonable, I'll buy it and just play that. In my experience, if you buy or unlock a code via Steam it will need to be running when you launch the game. Have not done this in a while but every Amazon Digital game I have purchased works this way. This may have changed but I doubt it.
I watched 3 seconds and then puked on esc.
In case of any spam markers, I'm refering to #9983 I f quake was just absolutely the biggest piece of shit and it wasnt like quake
I like how the Carmack "endorsement" quote isn't about the game itself, but about Javascript / WebGL.
"C# is fucking awesome!"
"I played this with an amazing graphics card!" "Some of the operating systems that support this game are great!" ....it's fast-paced! And retro! And there's no cover-based stuff! And weapons! And movement! And.........
I know I'll be preaching to the choir here, but the problem with this stuff is that games in 1996 weren't trying to be "1996 style" games. They were trying to look as impressive and convincing as they could under technological constraints.
Part of what made Quake and Doom so successful was that they found an art style that looked good even when it was blocky. Rather than trying to be realistic (which wasn't practical) or cartoony (which wasn't appropriate), I like to think of it as going for a "comic book" style. Doom is more of a gleefully violent comic book, while Quake is a bit more of a gloomy, gritty Vertigo comic book, but it's stylised. Thinking that the squares are the thing which make the look of mid 90s games is missing the wood for the trees. What's worse, it's then used to excuse any amount of sloppiness or laziness in the art of these pretenders. The JS game was pretty neat, but ofc it was just a prototype.
Is this even from the same devs or just blatant rip-off? Phenomenal environment art, some of the most impressive stuff I've seen in a long time. No gameplay to speak of. Desperately needs an options menu (basic things like fov and mouse sensitivity are broken).
If you liked Dear Esther or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter but felt it needed more Beksinski, you might want to pick this up after they patch in fundamental usability. Yeah it was obviously made by a bunch of artists who don't have a scooby-doo about gameplay design.
Watched a video of it for a bit. Looks noice at least. Doom is more of a gleefully violent comic book
With huge guts! By the way, your comic book analogy as a whole is great. 2d dark souls.
- hard as fuck - they're doing all the same mistakes that DS was doing, so sometimes stuff is really intransparent - not sure if the DS gameplay translates to 2D well - buttons are different from DS, which is really irritating My let's play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXbqeVRGtzQ
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/180982/grim-dawn-sells-1m-copies - humble store or something?? I dunno. Just get it.
Saints Row IV - 6.5/10
Worse than the last couple, only redeeming factor is it is quite funny and story interesting in b-movie Matrix ripoff sort of way. That stealth pisstake is one of the most amusing levels in a game I can remember, real Austin Power sort of humour. Roddy Piper 'They Live' homage was great too. As a game though (it's combat, the superpowers, the recycled city from the last game) it's a friggin mess. Shadow Warrior 2013 - 7/10 I wasn't expecting this to be quite as average as it is as it seemed to get good comments. Maybe it's because I've played every Painkiller game/addon and even clones like Dream Killer (and Serious Sam). But all I see in this game is Painkiller. Terrible flat level design, door closes behind you and enemies spawn in. Most just 1-hit fodder as you button mash. It's 100% Painkiller but with a sword and fewer creative environments. This is no old skool FPS at all. Good graphics at times though. Sequel looks pretty good. I can play Skyrim every day for 3 weeks, I pick up this and it's killing my wrist in just a few hours. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West - 7.5/10 Really not too bad for a 2010 ps3 game remastered in 2013 for pc. Borderlands inspired post-apoc wasteland, quite nice environments, though linear. Camera angles and constant cutscenes get annoying by the end. Picks up in the second half with a third character and you discover the developers can actually write humour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUAXvkjcJjU Pity they couldn't make the first half as good. Missed opportunity with character building. I was expecting some relationship building slave falls for hot owner and vice versa, but beyond constant instructions they barely spoke for the whole 7-8 hours of the game. They probably spoke more to Pisgy. DMC5 next, another high paced wrist killer I'd imagine. Well when you take out strategy, side scrollers and platformers, top down isometric stuff, it doesn't leave a lot of actual good games. I've got Dishonored coming up though, you love that right?
This is you: http://i.imgur.com/4nl5qqp.png
Sorry, I'm afraid you're not even remotely close, unlike the distance between your tonsils and Shambler's ejaculating cock, which is currently measured in nanometers.
" I've got Dishonored coming up though, you love that right? "
Dishonored is one of my favorites, but only when played in stealth mode. The COD community certainly is full of complete morons. Probably the bottom feeders of the gaming community. 2.1 user score on Metacritic. I'm not even sure why. It just seems to be because it wasn't quite as good as 2012s Black Ops II. Mainly it was easier to camp in MP, higher specs so slow wi-fi had issues and it required 6gm RAM, wtf I've got 16gb and could easily have purchased 32gb if any game needed it, if you can't afford 6gb of RAM then you probably should be focusing on getting a fucking job rather than sitting around play COD.
No FOV slider (really, a game deserves all these 0/10s because it has no FOV slider? The FOV in game is fine as is). From campaign perspective I was impressed. Still only 4-5 hours long, but do people really want to play a 20 hour COD campaign? Hell no. Not when you've also got Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 and Killzone the same year. The story definitely wasn't as good as BPII but the rest was just as good, and graphics themselves were far superior to BPII. It appears to have used a much higher version of the IW engine (BPII on v3, Ghosts on v5) and the results show. Of course, regulars players seem to prefer a lower spec game with shit graphics vs a higher spec game with amazing graphics. The levels were great, some of the best I've played. Great space levels (although not the best, Deep Space 3 had it there) Best city flooding level Best underwater level by far! The train level was good, the aircraft carrier sinking, there was a building one where it collapsed a plane crash followed by a sweet looking jungle level. Fucking epic blockbuster action scenarios. A few action parts just went over the top silly (the car chase ones). But COD does these action setpieces better than any other game, period. Totally new story in a future WW (which the good guys have practically lost), and obviously set up for future sequels. Sadly that probably won't happen with the reaction it got. 8/10 Also played Devil May Cry, I thought I'll get that custard outta the way before I play something longer (Dishonored, Metro, GTA5, Mass Effect 3 all coming up on my list). Nice gameplay and melee combat, but the rest is pretty average. Dante is completely ruined, turned into a dumb teenage boy. His moral choices in the game are actually wrong (you're going to save the chick over the entire human race, and then at the end you'd rather kill your teammate/brother than let him help civilisation recover... dafuq?)
The awesome fantasy horror world of the last DMC is replaced with a pretty shit looking city, with far too much post-processing and blurry texture effects over everything. The game does have some really creative ideas, though. The boss fights look cool, some nice level ideas such as the upside-down city. I hated requiring gold orbs to resume gameplay otherwise it's game over and start the level again. Probably because I'm not that good at this fast-paced gameplay. Even story-mode I died enough times lol. 6.5/10 http://store.steampowered.com/app/355790/Styx_Shards_of_Darkness/
And game on sale. Hurrah for demos! But in this case it didn't grab me. Too much exactly more of the same, and the 4th wall breaking bs is, well, bs. |
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