Cordeos

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    1563

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Cordeos

  1. Posted

    14 minutes ago, Cbirdsong said:

    That's interesting. If they do release a second season packaged as DLC, you'll be able to do that on every mission going forward. 

    I think its specific for this mission, you don't get to start with a pistol and two pieces of equipment in this one. before you get to mastery 4 or 5 you don't even get a smuggled item.

    I actually used to play previous games like this, it requires a lot more improvisation which can be quite fun. My first play through of Hokkaido involved a lot of bumbling around, killing non-targets, hiding bodies and generally just exploring the map as much as possible. I killed 8 extra people and had a few close calls where I started melee just in time to stop someone shooting.

  2. Posted

    1 hour ago, thenexus6 said:

    I had a go on it earlier, its really awesome. Love the look and feel. Need to play more though

    I got to master level 15 last night. Hoping to get to 20 tonight. I really want the W2000 sniper rifle, even if they renamed it and don't have the suitcase version yet.

    Also master 20 unlocks your equipment slots which will make the level a lot easier/more fun to mess around in

  3. Posted

    5 hours ago, prettyunsmart said:

     

    Ahh. But there's no list I can just select it from so I don't need to remember how to type it out manually. Anyway.

      Hide contents

    I finished it with the yoga and heart crushing opportunities. Not being able to pick locks or find keycards really threw me off at first, but I eventually worked around it by jumping a guard walking around on a balcony by himself. I tried to use the computer system to off the guy in surgery but the AI brought him back to life. I never did figure out what outfit gets you into the AI's core.


    Also, I'm not crazy about the fact that the only way to pick locks in this level is to reach level 15 mastery in Colorado...but that's just me nitpicking at this point. I'm looking forward to jumping back in and trying out some different approaches.

     

    i found some of the hacking devices in a bathroom on the staff floor

  5. Posted

    37 minutes ago, Bjorn said:

    Victor Vran :tup:

     

    Diablo-like ARPG that depends on entirely gear and loot rather than classes to build a character.  It's really good, and we really liked it. 

     

    I don't have much else to say.  The story is typically dumb ARPG flair with a dash of Van Helsing thrown in.  I honestly think the balance of some weapon classes is badly broken, the game could use some more polish/tuning, but it was a ton of fun to put a bunch of hours into. 

    Its on sale right now on Steam

  7. Posted

    33 minutes ago, prettyunsmart said:

    First impressions of the level are that it's a pretty good one. I found it pretty tough at first, but once I got a hold of my first disguise, it was pretty easy to start moving things forward.

     

    I'd write more, but I don't know how to add spoiler tags since the look of the forums changed.

    Its the same as before [ spoiler ] and [ /spoiler ] without the spaces

  8. Posted

    1 hour ago, itsamoose said:

     

    Yes what China is doing is similar to what American companies have done, not the American government.  My point with that analogy is that in the west there is a firewall between private enterprise that doesn't exist in eastern countries like China and Russia.  That does raise some serious concerns and differences between who is responsible for the negative consequences of that kind of action.  African nations can and have kicked out western companies who step over the line, but it isn't possible to do this with China because the companies are effectively extensions of the government.  You can't kick out the company without also kicking out the government.

     

    On the other point I agree the US has had a number of interventionist failures around the world, but again this is the result of a lack of forethought more than anything.  I think and genuinely hope that is changing in the future, but I don't think it's fair to paint the entire thing as a wholly American endeavor or a wholly bad one.  We are constantly asked by the UN and other world powers to intervene, and sometimes for good reasons like the Ebola crisis and others, and in many of these cases other countries like Canada and the UK are involved as well.  It's easy to say that the someone like Saddam Hussein is preferable when we don't have to be the ones living under their rule.  Iraq and Afghanistan look like a mess now but let's not forget that as a result of these western actions girls are allowed to go to school and press freedom has become a reality.  I kind of hate this argument I'm making because it is fundamentally a lesser of two evils one, which really just means everyone is wrong, but I can't just see it as all bad.  Yes the west and the US in particular has had failures, but if you can find me another country that has had as much power as the US and has been as benevolent with it as it has I'll raise that flag.  Until then, I can't imagine a scenario where there is a perfect response to what are incredibly complicated political situations that lead to these kind of interventions.  I don't think there has ever been a time I history where cultural or governmental change didn't lead to a period of instability or at the very least uncertainty.

    Companies have tons of influence over our foreign policy and our government has made decisions on supporting or opposing governments based on their positions on nationalization of industry. Big reasons behind the coup in Iran and the support for rebels in Nicaragua were because of business interests. We are always far more willing to back a business friendly dictator over an elected left winger.

    My point is that there is never any discussion of all the problems we have created internationally and we are about to elect another president who wants to keep using all the failed tactics. We simply do not have a foreign policy establishment that considers the consequences of their actions. I think its extremely important that we consider the long term resentments and terrible prescient our drone war is creating. We are losing the war in Afghanistan after being there for 15 years and it is barely ever mentioned. The US doesn't seem to be learning from its mistakes and no one in power seems to care at all.

    Women being able to go to school in Iraq is great (even if we don't care about this happening in any of our Gulf Allies), but how many women and children are dead because of our unnecessary war there? How many are now refugees because we laid the ground work for ISIS? What will the long term consequences of the US backing corrupt, violent governments in Iraq and Saudi Arabia? How long will we support the proto-apartheid state Israel is becoming?

    P.S. Our NATO ally Turkey is currently the biggest jailer of journalists and has been for some time. Iraq also ranks as #2 for journalists getting murdered with no one punished so yeah, press freedom is going great there. Afghanistan is #6.

    https://www.cpj.org/reports/2016/10/impunity-index-getting-away-with-murder-killed-justice.php#index

  9. Posted

    7 hours ago, itsamoose said:

    I'm not entirely certain the Sanctions on Russia from the west are particularly effective given how the global economy works.  They still trade Freely with China in particular, but other countries as well, and since the sanctions hit Russia the war in eastern Ukraine has become more and more technologically advanced.  The Sanctions were designed it seems to get the Russian people to demand an end to the action, but this thinking seems to be the the product of western politicians and diplomats thinking about how they would influence a western populous.  While I can't say for certain what people in Russia actually think of the conflict, I don't think the same rules apply to a place where virtually all government media is controlled, conspiracy theories are often presented as fact, and even to the point of the administration preventing local artists from performing because they are critical of the Kremlin.  

     

    Generally though, while it's certainly true that the US has had a number of obvious failures of foreign policy that have lead to negative consequences around the globe, from my understanding of the various situations this is the result of thoughtlessness more so than any kind of directed effort to exert control.  For example China has invested a lot of money in Africa recently, and the deals go something like this.  First a Chinese bank agrees to lend an African nation some money at a favorable rate, and in return China gets exclusive rights to the natural resources of that country on the land that they are negotiating for.  So then that country hires a Chinese firm to come mine the resources, paid for with the money from a Chinese bank, and hires locals to fill in the low level positions while filling management with Chinese citizens.  All of the resources then go to China, even firms within that country have to purchase the resources dug up in their backyards from China.  They do tend to do quite a bit of good in those countries at the same time, like building airports and other facilities needed to process these jobs, but these countries are effectively giving up their material wealth for what is really an economic colonization.  In the West we tend to give out money on the basis of political change, which brings with it some instability.  While western intervention, whether military, economic or diplomatic does carry uncertainty with it by virtue of these changes, I don't think it's fair to equate that stability, largely born of unforeseen consequences, with the purposeful and deliberate exploitation practiced by countries like China and Russia.  The situation in eastern Ukraine and Crimea was a deliberate act by the Russian government to increase it's size and influence, US involvement in Libya on the other hand was a NATO operation aimed at ending human rights abuses with no follow through, which resulted in a power vacuum.

    First off what China is doing is what a lot of western companies have been doing for years. Many of the conflicts revolving around nationalization of companies stems from exploitative trade deals set up during the cold war.

    Secondly since World War II the US has been destabilizing many countries through direct invasions as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Lebanon and The Dominican Republic. We also have backed rebel groups in places like Nicaragua, Syria, Afghanistan and Cuba. As well as backing coups in Iran, Chile and Venezuela among others. This doesn't even cover all the repressive dictatorships we are still supporting. The US is currently bombing Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan with no real end in sight for any of those campaigns. At some point we have to accept that we are meddling all over the world and are not producing the desired results, my concern is that the next president is probably going to be someone who backed several operations that have gone extremely poorly and doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from them.

  11. Posted

    50 minutes ago, Erkki said:

    That viewpoint makes it seem like you think the US is or should be in total control of everything strategic that happens in the world. It's easy to connect some dots in hindsight, everything that happened before seems like a cause for what happened later.

    I don't think the US should be in control of everything obviously. I know every one of these situations was not 100% our fault, but we do not consider the long term consequences of our actions in the foreign policy realm. The Iraq war was 100% a war of choice and it has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and spawned a new international terrorist group. We are about to elect someone who voted for it and is advocating a no fly zone in Syria. This would put us in direct conflict with the Syrian government and/or Russia.

  12. Posted

    1 hour ago, Erkki said:

    Some days I think that it would be good for the west to start World War III and get it over with. How many decades can this soft response to continuing Russian aggression and disregard for humanist values last? On the other hand... maybe there really is a (relatively) peaceful solution, just letting their economy slowly bleed so they would be less and less capable of exercising their military power.

    Part of the problem is that the west only really cares about human values in the west. No one in Europe or the US really cares about it in Africa, Asia, the Middle East or South America. As bad as Russia is acting internationally the Iraq invasion and Libya intervention had far more destabilizing effects and these are rarely even discussed or debated.

    Almost all of the currently foreign policy crises America faces are to a large extent results of our own policies, we helped fund the mujaheddin in Afghanistan that became the Taliban who are currently re-conquering the country, we invaded and destabilized Iraq setting up the ground work for ISIS, we overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and put in a brutal dictator leading to the Iranian Revolution, we recommended economic shock therapy to Russia which allowed oligarchs like Putin to gain inordinate amounts of power as well as treating the country like a defeated enemy rather than a brother nation after the fall of the USSR. 

  13. Posted

    1 hour ago, brkl said:

    I haven't had energy to play the Colorado episode through yet. It's partly because I was busy, but mostly because it's just not the same when it's not in public. I'm worried Japan will be the same deal.

    The Japan level is taking place in a hospital so I think it will be more like the standard Hitman levels.

    I appear to be part of a minority that enjoyed Colorado. I like that they changed up the formula and made a more dangerous level. Once you get an initial disguise it acts mostly like every other level and has a lot of well done opportunities. There is also a bonkers easter egg that was a lot of fun to find and do.

  18. Posted

    I should say, I am constantly offended by most media I consume, so the act of embracing works I do not agree with politically is something I'm very well-practiced in. The racist, hetero-normative, ablist, transphobic, body shaming, misogynist, etc. etc. etc. world we all live in always shines through in some way and deciding that some movies are cool because the director probably didn't mean it and some movies are not because they are "rotten to the core" feels incredibly arbitrary and antithetical to actually having discussions about art.

     

    Also, if you want to talk about movies before the 70's (and most of it after the 70's, just to diminishing degrees) you have to already accept an insane white supremicist world view in which America doesn't include people of color, except to occasionally open the doors for the white main characters. You have to accept that gay people don't exist, except maybe as a winking prancing punchline. Just because a movie doesn't feature any people of color to be racist about doesn't mean it's not racist. In fact, that usually means it is. Erasure is a big deal.

    The recent examples of Ghost in the Shell and the Bruce Lee movie show how bad Hollywood still is on this and the backlash against Ghostbusters shows the problems with the viewing public. We have come a ways since the 70's but its painfully clear that we haven't gone nearly as far as we should.

  19. Posted

    On a totally different topic, I have been watching WestWorld. I can't decide how I fell about it. They are playing with interesting concepts of humanity and drawing the line between machine intelligence and real intelligence. I just hope the hinted at deeper mysteries don't suck. The cast is stellar, I really like Jeffrey Wright

  20. Posted

    Yeah, agreed. I don't think there's any such thing that everyone must watch, and there's plenty of stuff that's worth watching even though it's problematic, because as Patrick points out, if you only watch non-problematic stuff, you'll watch effectively nothing. In fact I don't think there's any level of racist/sexist/whatever content that would make something not worth watching if it has other merits, so long as there's some good reason for watching it. Adding racism/sexism/etc. makes the message shittier, and if you watch movies for their message then it will turn you off, but there's more to a movie than what it believes, and if you watch movies for other reasons, then those can be reasons to watch things that espouse shitty beliefs.

    You have to decide how much racism/sexism/bad plot/janky film making etc you are willing to tolerate. Its also a lot easier to spot these problems in older films since you are already outside the cultural context in which they were made. I do feel like there are a lot of those 'must watch' lists that gloss over some of the serious problems with older films. I would have liked to know how unsatisfying the plot of Citizen Kane was before watching the whole ponderous thing.

    I also think it matters if the director is still alive and benefits from you seeing it. I am kind of glad the new Birth of a Nation is getting bad reviews since I am much less conflicted about seeing it now. I think some of my issues stem from the film industry giving people like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski a pass. Their films are considered important, but they are bad people that I don't think we should be venerating. I think it gets easier to separate the work from the issues after some time and important figures have passed. 

  23. Posted

    I think what Chris experienced was just a bug. I remember when I used the phone two bellhops entered the room, and I just took them both out and that was that. Also I think once you use the phone that's it, you can't try and call hotel services again a second time, and if I'm remembering that correctly then the only way for the person who made that video to do that would have been to have deliberately sought out a bunch of unconscious/dead bodies, and relocated them back to the bathroom.

    I took out both bell hops and then had another come. I ended up hiding three bodies in the bathroom so a forth bellhop could come and fix the bed.

  24. Posted

    Final Hitman levels are a mixed group:

    Hitman Codename 47: infiltrate an asylum with a secret lab in the basement at one point a ton of your clones come at you.
    Hitman Silent Assassin: sneak around a church to take out a Russian mob boss.

    Hitman Contracts: escape from a SWAT team and take out a police inspector.

    Hitman Blood Money: Infiltrate the White House and assassinate the Vice President.

    Hitman Absolution: I only played this one once, it involved a lot of heavily armed guys on a helipad.

     

    Blood Money is easily my favorite final level, its hard because there are marines and secret service everywhere but can be done stealthily quite well. Excited to see what the Japan level is going to be like.

  25. Posted

    We've started playing Victor Vran over the last couple of days, and it's so good!  The voice actor for Geralt voices the protagonist, hence the title.  I hope this game gets the attention it deserves from ARPG fans, because it manages to freshen up the formula quite a bit (unless there are other games that do similar things).

     

    And it has local co-op now!  For fuck's sake devs, local co-op in ARPGs is the best, it should just be a stock feature now.  It continues to piss me off that the PC version of Diablo 3 hasn't gotten the console features like local. 

     

    Anyways, mechanically Vran is what you expect, an isometic monster horde killing simulator.  You have weapons, powers, etc.  Where it re-invents the wheel is that there are no classes.  None.  Your available powers are determined by your gear, and that's it.  Each weapon class gets 3 different attacks.  You can (eventually, all the extra slots are locked initially) have 2 weapons to swap back and forth on, giving access to 6 total attacks.  A lot of attacks have a variety of buffs or debuffs built into them, that synergize well with other players.  Then you get 2 "gem" slots, that give you access to magic powers, which can be offensive, defensive or buff oriented.  You get two usable item slots (heals, buffs, grenades).  You have one armor slot, that generally changes how you build up mana Overdrive or gives defensive bonuses.  And finally you get up to 5 Destiny card slots, which are passive buffs or add unique passive effects. 

     

    You can see where traditional classes could have been built out of all this gear, artificially limiting the tools a player has access to.  But by shifting traditional class based powers to gear, it lets players mix-n-match to design whatever it is they find most fun or effective.  It also means that you never find a rad piece of gear that has absolutely no value for your class and it means if you get bored with your build, changing it is as simple as swapping out your gear, you don't have to respec or start a new character.  I like it as a variation on class design in ARPGs a whole bunch. 

    How much looting and selling is there in the game, I often find the loot systems get really boring in games that don't let you send pets back to town to sell.

    The customizable class stuff sounds neat