darthbator

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Posts posted by darthbator

  2. Posted

    Todays monster (1.8G) patch greatly improves the PC version.

    http://forums.2kgame...es-for-10-11-12

    There's a bunch of undocumented fixes in there too. Hardware cursor support is essential, for the first few days it felt like my mouse was stuck in the mud.

    I've been sitting around scanning for activity forever now.

    I finally feel like I'm geared up enough to assault the alien base!

    EDIT: So while that missions was easy the difficulty spikes HUGELY after that. The next UFO landing I got resulted in a complete wipe!

  3. Posted

    I'm not very in yet (I just beat the first "chapter" boss and moved out of that area) but I feel like the observation made on the thumbscast is spot on. It doesn't feel as intimate. I really feel like the art, presentation, and style have been "kicked up a notch" from the first game. To me the charm is really stronger then it ever has been before.

    Is it just me or does something about this feel oddly unfinished for a game that's been delayed so much? Stuff like not being able to change your difficulty from the menu systems seems oddly lacking. I'm also not the biggest fan of having to sign up for yet another account. I wish Ruinic had just purely used steamworks so I didn't have to deal with that (if there is a way to link them or something so I can stop signing in someone PLEASE let me know!).

  4. Posted

    I actually just finished spec ops earlier this week as well. Kraznor, did you get it in the cheap $5 deal that (I think it was) gamefly had the other week? I didn't think it was phenomenal but it was nice to see a game like that try really hard to have a meaningful story. It's one of the only games I've found to be mechanically mediocre but I've still persisted through due to narrative curiosity. After I finished I gave a listen to the following podcast and had a whole new appreciation for Spec Ops.

    http://www.gamespot....e-line-6386587/

    Not in a way that makes it great. Not even in a way that makes is succeed in a post-mortem kinda sense even. Just a respect for the kind of things they where trying to attempt in a video game. It's rare that a game is able to successfully reach outside of the realm of pure enjoyment and novelty to provide an introspective or communicative experience to the player. I don't think spec ops is one of those rare successes. I played the whole thing and listened to a podcast about it an I still don't think I clearly understand the message it wanted to get across. However they tried, and I'm down for unsuccessful attempts just because it's such a rarity in the medium.

    I especially like the way they attempted to create the Jacobs Ladder of video games inside the heart of darkness of video games. I also happen to love those sources.

  5. Posted

    is that trailer also somewhere on the internet? or just the walled garden called facebook

    It's counting down, still 9 days at this point. I'm sure it'll show up all over once it drops. Even if they don't want it to I don't think they'll be able to contain it (and really there's no reason 2K would want to).

  6. Posted

    I own probably a mind blowing amount of games I'll never play on steam. Those holiday sales are the worst (best)! When something I am interested in costs less then a sandwich it's really hard to say no. Or to convince yourself that you'll get to it some point later. It's interesting how people do that with bits and not physical games. I have almost no games still in their shrink but I have tons of steam games I've never even opened.

  7. Posted

    I thought it was fun, but it didn't measure up to the ambitious stuff Roberts was saying at the outset, which tarnished the game a bit (possibly to an unfair degree).

    Yeah I think that covers it pretty handily. I actually thought that freelancer was a decent game. It just wasn't the game they where talking about that got everyone so excited. I think the biggest mistake in freelancer was the mouse only controls. I think it's a cool option to up accessibility but stick jockying is really half the fun of these space flight sim games...

  9. Posted

    Maybe a little off topic but I think this push back into "retro" might explode in a lot of peoples faces :(

    But there's been a string of Kickstarter by people I otherwise respect which look like they are trying to make a game that their 15 year younger self could have designed.

    I'm not saying it's bad, but it makes me wonder if the game industry (or the community of game making people) somehow prevents growth and evolution.

    I think this hits really close to home to what the issue is. I think a lot of these people are just interested in revisiting the ideas they had 15 years ago with the ability to more clearly surface the core "ideas" or "themes" with today's technologies. I think the danger is that a lot of those beloved old generation games existed in a space where it was very difficult to use games as a communicative medium due to their technological infancy. Due to the primitive technology players filled in a lot of gaps with their imaginations or interpretations. And as most people know anything generated endogenously tends to have more value to a person. I think it will be really hard for a lot of "classic" designers to replicate their earlier successes unless they REALLY have the salt and have evolved with the medium.

  10. Posted

    That might very well be true. I can confess that my memories of the NES era mega man games are hazy at best (I've not revisited anything earlier then Mega Man X in my adult life) and I do think that by the time we arrive at X they've really found the sweet spot of what those games are (although I think they lost is pretty shortly after that). Different people different tastes and all that, but that's something I dislike about Mega Man throughout the series (which I generally enjoy). I don't like how when tackled in a particular order Mega Man games become something of a cake walk. You can view that as giving the player a kind of agency over difficulty based on the order in which they tackle the bosses but I just don't see it that way (why, idk because it doesn't feel that way to me?).

    Even viewed in the most positive way, as a kind of exploratory experience of finding enemies weaknesses, it's really only good to be milked once. I hate that I'm saying unkind stuff about Mega Man in like my 5th post... That can't be good form...

  12. Posted

    The PC interface feels VERY awkward. After about 6-8 hours I have completely normalized to it and don't really find it odd anymore but I can 100% empathize with anyone picking the game up for the first time. They really should have diverged the mouse and keyboard controls even further from the console variants. I'm sure there's a good reason they didn't. Maybe snapping into the pre firing stage (where aim% is finally shown) is maybe where that calculation is actually occurring.

    I'm sure the once modding kicks off unrestricted free aim of all weapons and mouse and keyboard interface tweaks will be among the first and most requested mods.

  13. Posted

    MegaMan gets a somehwat deserved bad rep from all the shitty sequels, because there have been a lot of shitty sequels, but the games that hit the mark are wonderful. Some of my favorite platformers, i'd say.

    Before I say this let me start by saying Mega Man X is among my top 10 (maybe 5) games of all time. However I think the mega man series in general suffers from a kind of specific nostalgia poison. People tend to remember it's non linear level structure, extremely tight core game play mechanics, diverse enemy and level designs, and it's power/weapon acquisition system. However people seem to often forget that if you didn't attack the bosses in the generally prescribed (and undisclosed) order they where almost impossible. This meant that unless you knew someone or bought a magazine (or read it at babbages) you ended up replaying lots of hard mega man levels only to get thoroughly whipped by the boss.

    Granted as the series went on it the inferred order was clearer due to the design of the bosses (or I was older and more observant). However that rather punishing trial and error game play remains on the initial playthrough. Megan Man has a kind of "path orthodoxy" that I think kind of makes it a poor example for game difficulty/balance. It is maybe the perfect example of the foresight example given earlier in this particular post. Mega Man games can be painfully difficult on your first run through. You don't know what order to tackle the bosses or how to handle the platforming challenges. However on your second go around the game become a joke. This is true of a lot of classic games (or as identified earlier all games really). However a HUGE part of Mega Man is finding that unchanging orthodox boss order, once discovered the games challenge rapidly dissolves.

  14. Posted

    I guess I'm kinda late to the party on this one but I really love BL2. For all it's problems (which are numerous, often inherited from it's predecessor, and enumerated in this thread pretty thoroughly) I really do think it's one of the best games I've played this year. For it's general pacing issues and a few painfully horrible characters I think borderlands hits a really amazing tone. I don't feel like this game is ever taking itself entirely seriously. In a time when this medium is turning a critical eye on itself and the messages it's content carries I think borderlands is a good example of how to set an acceptable kind of tone for a game where you're just going to shoot EVERYTHING. I really think this might be the best thing about the game in general. It creates a place that really encourages you to joyfully indulge in the carnival of violence they've created. Where none of the ridiculous elements they blend together really feel out of place. Of course this sniper rifle shoots bouncing rockets. Why wouldn't it?

    I'm amazed that they've done nothing to address the issue of disparate player levels in multiplayer. Recently I've had a lot of free time on my hands and I promptly sunk 50-60 hours into my assassin and blew passed almost all my friends in level. However we're also in a strange middle ground where I can't start a new character and really play with them either. I don't understand why more games (or any games?) don't implement some kind of "sandbagging" feature. Allowing me to join a friends game at a global penalty to stats and without experience gain or something (probably not an ideal solution but as good a jumping off point for design as any). As time goes on it seems like more and more games are moving to a persistent character model. It makes sense, people attach, it's an easy way to enable (shudder) micro transactions. That persistent avatar generally keeps people coming back. However more and more I find this isolates me in multiplayer or forces me to go WAY out of my way to coordinate with people. I think it's a real pertinent issue in almost all of these multiplayer focused persistent character games and I'm really surprised that none of the big AAA games in this category have addressed it in a significant way (D3, TL2, and BL2 I am lookin at you!).

  17. Posted

    Hi everybody!

    dr-nick1.jpg

    My name is David Bator and I am an aspiring indie game developer based out of Los Angeles (when does one actually become an indie developer? Is that something you even aspire to or are you one as soon as you start developing your own projects? Existential parenthetical!). I've been listening to the podcast since kickstarter brought it to my attention. I feel like it's the podcast I've always wanted! Following this mentality I figured this is probably the video game forum I have always wanted as well!!! (this is a game forum that isn't NeoGAF right?).

    I'm not really doing anything but procrastinating working on my own projects at the moment so you guys can likely find me on steam for some BL2/TL2/Dota2 (that's a lot of 2!).