Games!

For the talkin' of jibba jabba.
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Re: Games!

Post by Heretic »

Really? I heard it was the most amazing game right now. Even Metacritic users, who rated (trolling aside) MW3 2.5, gave it a 8.9.
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Re: Games!

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Well, it looks absolutely gorgeous. So that's a thing. But the story... The story is convoluted BS that thinks it's really clever. Near the end I completely disconnected from the narrative and began to be actively irritated by it. This might have something to do with the fact that you're at several points offered choices that gave me the illusion I had some modicum of influence over the plot's outcome... But nope, doesn't make a lick of difference, you're completely railroaded through a nonsensical ending that you have no influence over whatsoever. Basically the last ten minutes are a cinematic that only requires you to press 'f' to progress to a preordained ending -- and without spoiling anything, given its specific storyline and the heavy-handed way in which the narrative themes are handled, having a preordained ending at all is a cardinal sin all on its own.

I don't think I've ever uninstalled a game faster than this.
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Re: Games!

Post by Siege »

On a more positive note, I'm loving the hell out of the new Tombraider game. It's very cinematic but in a good way, for once the quicktime events don't bother me all that much, I love the characterwork and I love shooting fools through the head with arrows even more. The combat in this game is very, very satisfying; the puzzles are fun instead of frustrating; it looks great and it has a gazillion of pretty fun 'collect all the X' things in it that really awakened my inner magpie (even though it doesn't make much sense for a girl marooned on an island full of hostile crazypeople to obsess over collecting jade statues or lighting buddha statues all that much, to be honest). In terms of game-of-the-year crowing this beats the hell out of Bioshock for me.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
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Re: Games!

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This is amazing. I want it. Time to prostitute myself.
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Re: Games!

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IN THE GRIM DISTANT FUTURE YEAR OF 2007 THE APOCALYPSE

HAD

AN APOCALYPSE
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Re: Games!

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

Something that's hopefully relevant to a lot of people's interests here:

I ship Eino Ilmari Juutilainen x Lydia V. Litvyak.

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Re: Games!

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Oh hell yeah. :D
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Re: Games!

Post by Heretic »

Both Blood Dragon and Ace Combat Infinity both look really good.

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Re: Games!

Post by Mobius 1 »

Blood Dragon is such an incredibly fun game, but granted, that's mostly because they snuck into my room at night and scanned my brain to produce it. It's the only explanation.


ACI is all sorts of interesting to me, considering it's a F2P game with both online coops and a single player campaign. While throwing around all sorts of Strangereal mainstays - SkyEye, Stonehenge, the BigDamCarrier from 6 and various Ace squadrons from across the series - into the real world sounds cool, I get the feeling I'm not so much looking at a wild crossover or an HD real-world remake of the PS2 games so much as a hodgepodge collection of elements banking on fan nostalgia to get them to pick up the game. I've always dug the PS2 games' campaign storylines, so another campaign as awkward as, say, ACAH, would be a real shame.

I've also seen confirmation of the removal of Dogfight Mode from the game, most likely due to intense fan backlash. While ACAH suffered for pretty much making DFM it's one-gimmick-pony for the entirety of the campaign, making it another tool in the player's arsenal of tricks (like they did in the AC2 3DS remake, Assault Horion Legacy - a really pimping game) along with, say, the high-gee turn and allied support from AC6, it would probably go over a lot better.

Oh well. As long as there's an original soundtrack and Kobayashi keeps up the quality we've come to expect from him, I doubt I'll be too upset. Hell, I even really enjoyed ACAH's OST (GOTTA STAY FLY GOTTA STAY STRONG ACE READY ALL DAY LONG).



I've been playing Shadowrun Returns for about a week now, and I really have to recommend it. It's only twenty dollars and twelve hours long, though a second full-length campaign should be released as paid DLC sometime in late October. The game works mostly as an isometric point-and-click adventure, and I'm told the combat's pretty similar to XCOM or old-school Fallout.

That said, the real star of the game is the story - all the characters are fully realized, and the narration is pure noir wonderfulness. Moreover, the campaign escalates like mad - one second you're tracking down a serial killer, the next you're palling around with Shadowrun's movers and shakers and moving from a corporate raid to saving the entire city. It's fairly linear, though I get the feeling that the game's engine has some trouble handling open-world situations. The amount of wide-ranging character builds - decker, street samurai, shaman, mage, etc, encourages multiple playthroughs.

Side quests are few and far in between, and mostly involve short raid/dungeons/well, shadowruns for extra build points (karma) or money. One of the more interesting aspects of the game involves a decently large cast of runners you can hire as party members for your runs - allowing you to tailor around your character's strengths and weaknesses and giving SRR a real Ocean's Eleven feel at times.

That said, I don't really care, especially considering the game comes with a fully-equipped level editor. There's more than a few pieces of quality user generated-content out there, and there's only bound to be more when people get a better handle on the system and the editor. Really, for twenty bucks, the game's worth a look.
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Re: Games!

Post by Siege »

Shadowrun Returns looks pretty interessting. I might pick it up at some point. In another attempt to broaden my gaming horizons I've started playing Heroes of Might & Magic VI and, as is just and right and common, it's kicking my ass. There's a billion different abilities and thingmajigs to unlock and I don't know what any of them do. It gets very frustrating sometime (especially since there's more than a few 'lol you picked the wrong ability / waited too long / went left instead of right? That means you can't win this map! GG!' situations), but as a whole I'm enjoying it very much. I'm on like the third map of the first campaign and I'm 25 hours down the drain. That leaves only like six more campaigns. And three expansions. I think Shadowrun is going to have to wait a bit...
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

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Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
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Re: Games!

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Old news for everyone else, but over the last two months I finally got to play the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time. I enjoyed the games greatly and loved most of Mass Effect 3 (especially the Citadel DLC. I know the mood of it is a major shift from the rest of the game, but since it's very clearly a send-off to the trilogy crew it works well emotionally). The endings.... yeah, I think those comments attributed to Patrick Weekes were authentic, since it felt like someone mandating their "artistic vision" and not getting feedback that would've made it work a hell of a lot better.

And, as always, BioWare always seems to get the best VA talent (TOR is much the same).

Anyway, those are my brief, immediate thoughts.
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Re: Games!

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The Citadel DLC is pretty fantastic all the way around, and almost makes the ending bearable. The writing for the dialogue was fantastic and some of the best work Bioware has done, along with Tuchanka and the ending of Rannoch.
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Re: Games!

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Honestly, the Extended Cuts... while not what I wanted, they still work enough that, with the exception of Synthesis (which reminds me waaaay too much of the end of Beast Machines, which, oh, ALSO FUCKING SUCKED), I can see these endings as reasonable enough. But I'd love one thing.

If your reputation is high enough, if you made all of the right choices in the trilogy to truly unify the galaxy (kept both geth and quarians alive, cured the genophage with Wrex and Eve alive and had Thane be the one to fight Kai Leng on the Citadel so that Kirrahe survived and brought the STG over to you, saved the hanar homeworld with Kasumi loyal so that she and Jondaum Bau survive, kept all your squadmates save the one lost on Virmire alive, add others that you think work) and caused both Saren and the Illusive Man to commit suicide with rep check conversation choices, then Refusal goes a different way. Instead of just blankly telling the Catalyst off and dooming the races of your cycle to harvesting, Shepard can pull a Kirk and talk the Catalyst into simply shutting itself, and the Reapers, down. Shepard wins with his/her force of personality and power of persuasion, convincing this damaged, badly-programmed AI to self-terminate itself (and with it the Reapers) and save the galaxy without the damage to the Mass Relays or any of the questionable bits of the other choices.
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Re: Games!

Post by Mobius 1 »

Hell, dude, all I wanted was a nice ending cinematic that changed depending on what you brought into the final fight - like you see right before the different colors go off. Saved the Geth? Motherfucking Prime is doing airdrops! Got the Krogan in full gear? See them riding those alien ankylosaurs you saved. And so on. It would've been nice to see a visual representation of your actions throughout the series beyond EMS.

For me, Priority Earth was one big let down, with the only decent part being the section from when Harbinger hits you with the beam to you sitting down with Anderson.
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Re: Games!

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Oh yeah.... You do all that work to rally the galaxy and the most you get are mostly Human troopers save for the cutscenes of asari, turian, krogan, and salarian troops fighting the destroyer Reaper and, well, getting vaporized. Yeah, big freaking letdown.

I read the supposed words of Patrick Weekes on how Hudson and Walters froze everyone else out of the entire ending sequence. Despite the announcement it wasn't him, it rings too true to me, the entire sequence shows that it's the mandated vision of one or two minds (especially the Catalyst conversation). And the lack of showing the galaxy's forces united, instead we get bleak bullshit of "oh, half of Hammer didn't make it, oh we won't be getting the rest because they're too far away blah blah"..... it's almost like the people responsible saw the entire London battle as a chore for them, creatively, just some combat scenes to put in to please the fans so they could get to their "awesome" intellectual ending.

Destroy and Control both work, Synthesis sounds like some dime philosophy "third option" that the creator thought was really clever without thinking of the ramifications of it. Personally I always pick Destroy because I see one big flaw in both Control and Synthesis: The Reapers are still fucking there. Control has me gambling that the Shepard upload won't go nuts too or otherwise become a threat to everything Shepard knows and loves. Synthesis presumes the Reapers will be just magically turn away from all of the ideas that Sovereign and Harbinger expressed about the rest of life because "Oh, we're all magic blends now". No, to me, both of those endings leave the Reapers as a Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the galaxy. Destroy is the only feasible option (the Catalyst's insistence that OH WITHOUT REAPERS SYNTHETICS WILL DESTROY ALL ORGANICS makes me want to laugh in his face).
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Re: Games!

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Metal Gear Rising Revengence can go right to hell and stay there.
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Re: Games!

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:) What's wrong with it? I've never played it but all I've ever heard is that it's super fun.
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Re: Games!

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I imagine I wouldn't say that if I was actually good at the game. It's a hack n slash game featuring Raiden, the cyborg ninja from MGS2/4

Storywise, It's rather simple. Big bad mercenaries trying to inspire a big war for their own profits and also have a side line chopping out kids brains and stuffing them into VR training to be future cyborg mercenaries or something. Raiden disapproves of this and wants to stop it. There are vestigial stealth elements but it's basically chop up the baddies through out. It's over the top and the bosses make these speeches and it's basically has to tongue in cheek parody of MGS, which is not really the objectionable bit.

nd well, it's very difficult and unforgiving. A lot rests on your ability the dodge and parry which is difficult with multiple enemies and a kind of dodgy camera system so I've never managed to consistently master.

Never the less, I managed the reach the final boss before basicaly throwing in the towel. He has 200% health and attacks take maybe 5% of it away each time with a combo. He had area attacks, attacks that reduce the level size to a tiny scrap. A punch with more range than your sword and all these attacks do something like 25% (out of 140%) damage.

It's the final boss... put it's also such a mismatch and the difficult curve is so out of whack that it basically seems impossible.
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Re: Games!

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Ah that's too bad. It really isn't my cup of tea, I'm terrible at those kinds of twitchy block-and-counter systems, but the trailers always made it look super fun to play and I've been tempted to pick it up a few times. Guess I'll avoid it when it inevitably comes up at a sale again.
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Re: Games!

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain - actually good ones actually made by Hideo Kojima, involving the sneaky sneaky stuff - are also available on the PC?

With my new lappy toppy I look forward to eventually getting into the Dark Souls series. I've been watching lots of friends get their ass handed to them by the game and its become a meme amongst us... to the point where a few of us just utter Dark Soulsy-sounding grim phrases with that strange melancholic yet sort of bemused accent some characters have + the ominous laughter some of them do.
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Re: Games!

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Re: Games!

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

StarCraft is now free if you ever feel the urge to revisit it. Considering just how much of an influence it was on a lot of us, how can I not report this? (Of course, most of you may already be aware, but reminders never hurt.)

https://starcraft.com/en-us/articles/20674424
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Re: Games!

Post by Steve »

I'm experiencing Starcraft for the first time.

Also playing Stellaris. I've mostly played good or gray-style civs, but I'm tempted to use the new Hive Mind mechanics introduced in 1.5 to make an evil galaxy-consuming hive mind. I'm thinking I'll call them the Karlacks... ;)
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Re: Games!

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Any medium requirement FPS games y'all can recommend?
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Re: Games!

Post by Siege »

Overwatch is the only FPS I play at the moment, and it's buckets of fun. The current batch of CoD and Battlefield games bore the tears out of me. I heard good things about the last Doom game though, if twitch shooters are your thing, and there's a new Wolfenstein coming so that should be good.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
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