TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu

  1. Posted

    Random thoughts:

    Listening to this podcast while exercising is really hard. It makes me laugh too much.

    I think it might be slightly unfair to call Dishonored out for all the women wearing "skintight" clothes - the maid uniform is kind of clingy, but aside from that it's not like they're wearing catsuits. I too very much enjoyed the "nobody wears skirts or dresses" aesthetic, whether it was driven by rigging considerations or not, and I agree with Steve and... someone else about how Dishonored is very good about not using women as repositories for tits and asses that the game can show off. The women are just as developed and interesting as any of the men (although aside from "empress of everything" and "future empress of everything" they get stuck with the shit jobs [which of course is understandable given the game's setting]) and aside from the prostitutes they aren't dressed in ridiculous revealing clothing for the male gaze to leer at them. So that's good. And just to tie into the episode's other game, XCOM hilariously gives all the women smaller, lady sized guns. That's easily as ridiculous a concession to game technology as keeping the women out of skirts is.

    Someone mentioned that Bulletstorm was developed by Epic. Kind of - it was developed by People Can Fly, although Epic bought a majority share in them at some point and now owns them or whatever. I think Bulletstorm is criminally underrated and that People Can Fly in general don't get enough credit for the stuff they do, so I think it's good to get clear on that.

    Chris' distinction between puzzles and games, where crosswords are puzzles and chess is a game, is sort of funny because right next to the crossword in the newspaper you've got the little chess game, which is as much a puzzle as it is a game. I could write a few pages on definitional stuff and what is game but I'm not sure there's much of a point to it - I think Sean's point (I think it was Sean) about "just ask a kid if they are playing a game and that will pretty much tell you if it's a game" is more than accurate enough for everyone except philosophers.

    edit: I also just remembered that the Jimmy Stewart impersonations cracked me up. So, yeah. Those were great.

  2. Posted

    Can you really fault dishonored for not following such stringent requirements, made for another game?

    Nope.

    Well, I was enjoying this game up until I did the side mission to poison the bottle street gang's distillery. Now the game crashes every time I try to go back to the main hub for the mission I'm on, and I'm left with no recourse but to wait for a patch that may or may not come at all.

    Glad to see that Bethesda's reputation extends to games they publish as well as the ones they develop. They wouldn't want to be considered inconsistent, after all.

    This is literally one of two bugs I've heard about in the game. Dishonored is nowhere near as buggy as Fallout 3 or Oblivion or something like that. Hell, it's nowhere near as buggy as lots of non-Bethesda-published games, like XCOM.

  4. Posted

    Okay, I actually hadn't looked at what the achievement required, but if that's their ghost achievement then it's not really a "ghost" achievement. "Ghost" is stringent enough to require, like, closing any doors you open. Choking someone out is a huge no-no, unless they were already choking on a pretzel or something, in which case it's probably okay to speed the process up a bit as long as you don't leave any marks on the body.

  5. Posted

    How are all of the things you mentioned not possible in a stealth-only playthrough?

    Frenetic Pony mentioned "playing this game like a ghost," which is presumably a reference to a ghost playthrough, where you leave as little as possible changed. So, a ghost can't go around shooting people with sleep darts. A ghost has to never be spotted.

    The game definitely isn't designed for ghosting. There's an achievement for it but I think you have to really love ghosting or really love achievements to want to bother with that. Dishonored is amazing for a lot of reasons, and one of the biggest reasons is that your magic powers add some real variety to the systems driven gameplay that you get when guards are hunting you, and of course if you quickload whenever you are spotted you'll never see that neat emergent stuff happening.

  10. Posted

    Just got out of the sewers and am wandering around the safehouse distillery. I think I might be expecting The Wire-level macro plot from this game. How disappointed will I be? How much should I lower my expectations?

    The strengths of the game are very much in the world, its environmental storytelling, and the freedom and immersion that comes from wandering around the levels. The plot itself is hardly better than the plot in your average video game, which is to say, it's pretty bad.

  12. Posted

    Maybe there should be an 'Ironman-lite' mode; IIRC the Ironman mode in Jagged Alliance 2 only prevents you from saving during combat, but you're free to save at any point in between. It means that you still have to exercise caution with your tactical decisions, but a squad wipe based on a bad roll or button mis-press won't write-off your entire campaign.

    This mode already exists, it's called "don't save during combat." It is a bit easier, but there's one way in which it's harder than Ironman: you have to exercise willpower.

  13. Posted

    If you listened to some of the audio diaries from Lord Pendleton while you were at the Hound's Pit you'd get more background on the characters and understand why you'd choose that route. I'm not sure it's fair to blame a game for offering you an option (one which it doesn't force you to take) that doesn't seem sufficiently motivated when there's plenty of motivation hidden around.

    As for the whole "what if someone punished Corvo for all the guards he murdered," well, yes? So don't murder guards? The game gives you a choice, after all.

  14. Posted

    Well, that was super helpful and funny as fuck. I'm a poor piece of shit so I'm definitely going to be playing the old XCOM in lieu of the new one until BF at least. Thanks!

    Wellllllll as long as we're talking about me and saying that my video was helpful, here are parts 2 and 3:

    I am 2/3rds of the way through the song you linked, LaCabra, and it sounds nice.

  15. Posted

    So basically the best tip I can give in this game is don't quickload if you're spotted. I've seen some people elsewhere online complaining about how the game isn't very interesting for stealth players because you only have two real nonlethal options (choking and knockout darts) but 90% of the excitement in a stealth playthrough comes from trying to escape when a guard sees you. Blinking away, running frantically until you find a hiding space, possessing a rat, etc. leads to awesome moments, and if you just quickload every time you're spotted there's no reason to carry around all those health and spirit potions because you'll never need them, and you won't see much interesting emergent stuff happen.

  17. Posted

    Interesting that you'd say that without blink it lacks freedom of movement - I find that Corvo is extremely agile when it comes to climbing up things, he is able to possess animals/people to get around, including reaching other places via vents via rats, he can stop time and walk past guards, etc. Seems like you have quite a bit of mobility even apart from blinking.

    edit: and Orv beat me.

  20. Posted

    Yes to more Wing Commander-esque stuff, no to more Freelancer-esque stuff. We'll see. Since he was long gone before Freelancer came out, it's quite possible he wasn't responsible for any of the ickyness it did (mouse control only? Puh-leeeeze.). The time is long past for a great space sim though. Nothing has been a classic since Freespace 2, although we've had a steady drip feed of passable Eastern European efforts of replicating whatever it was that made TIE Fighter so amazing.

    I just want TIE Fighter.

  23. Posted

    Splinter Cell and Thief effectively had non-diegetic stealth indicators. Splinter Cell's is straight up non-diegetic and Thief's is a magical glowing stone that hovers in front of your face that might as well be a stealth meter. And I had wacky stealth things happen to me in Deus Ex all the time, so YMMV I suppose.

  24. Posted

    I'm not saying they did it wrong or something, I'm just saying I didn't like how it felt in the demo, at least. Having played X-COM, Jagged Alliance, Silent Storm, Frozen Synapse, and so on, and having had tons of fun with them, trying out the new XCOM felt overly limiting. "Board games have silly artificial rules" is exactly the point - the new XCOM feels much, much more like a board game than the previous X-COM, and more like a board game than other squad based tactical games. It's not just the movement mechanics that make it feel board game-esque; another huge change is that being "behind" a corner isn't actually behind the corner when it comes time for someone to shoot at you. That's an abstraction that works great in board games but that feels a little weird to me in XCOM.