SuperBiasedMan

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Posts posted by SuperBiasedMan

  1. Posted

    For the sake of the low fidelity cartoony aspect, what do people think of the idea of transferring children to the more cartoony FPSes, like Team Fortress 2 or Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare.

    Would it help, do you think it would even work or would there be too much draw because "everyone plays Call of Duty", or would the stylised look actually put off the children, maybe they partly want to feel grown up with 'real' soldier fights.

     

    (full disclosure, I don't have kids. I'm just interested in throwing this into the discussion)

  2. Posted

    There's like 3 endings to Cave Story. If you managed to get to the hell ending without a guide, I'm impressed. You have to jump through some really esoteric hoops in order to get that ending that I never figured out on my first run. You can just finish the game without going to hell (even if you got to it) if you just keep going left after killing the core.

     

    It actually wasn't hell, just a cavern place that you get to after

     

    you build the rocket. I had gotten the Booster 2.0 because I got stuck at one point because I was meant to talk to someone that I hadn't, and in that spot it mentioned not to talk to Professor Booster if I wanted the better jets later, so I did not realising it affected the difficulty later.

     

    It wasn't terribly hard, but I was pretty bad at it to be honest.

  3. Posted

    Two things worth noting: Nintendo set aside something like 45 minutes for a Q&A about a 3DS game that won't be revealed until the show, which implies it's gonna' be something nuts; and I guess Miyamoto will apparently be revealing a new IP he's been working on. Intewesting.

     

    Luigi has gone rogue and kidnapped all the main cast. Mario, Peach, Bowser, Wario and Daisy are all trapped in his mansion's dungeon.

    Who can save them?

    He must step up and prove himself, the long time nemesis and forgotten cast member.

    Waluigi.

  4. Posted

    I can't seem to be able to offer to join their war

     

    I can't help you tactically, but if you go into the diplomacy menu and click the "Offer to Join War" choice, then hover over the section where you can send the request it should show you a list of conditions necessary for you to be able to send the offer, if that works maybe you can figure out what's blocking you from doing it.

     

     

     

    On an annoyed tangent, why must everyone hate my son? As soon as their beloved Irish Empress of Britannia dies of old age, everyone just rails on her son and declares 5 different wars against him. The poor boy :( I'm so close to the end of the period as well, just more years and I can export the save to start in EU IV with a big Irish Empire and slowly start to take France.

  5. Posted

    I'll just wait for it on playstation plus now :P kidding... Maybe

    I'd be interested in hearing how the game has grown, as I believe the original idea was quite a small project and they only asked for a modest backing it ended up getting like 400% what they asked for. I'd imagine it's become a lot more "game" then they originally envisioned

    What the hell does that even mean? I guess I mean they've added in "collect 100 hot dogs", which I hope to god they haven't

     

    I might be thinking of a different Kickstarter project, but I think they made a point of saying that they didn't want to make it a bigger project than they intended, they would instead put the money into refining the game and improve areas of quality but leave scope unchanged. I had a quick check and the campaign page lists no stretch goals, so I do think it was this one.

  6. Posted

    Ugh, the instant death spell had no business being in the game... All this is reminding me how much I get put off when a game will make you redo sections you've proven you can do, but happened to die in the next bit. Like when you reach the final boss, but lose and then still have to go through a floor of random encounters before you can try the boss again. That repetition's really not worth my time,

     

    I think that's why I'm ditching Cave Story. I didn't realise it was actually going to be a hard game for one, I just wanted a mildly quirky platformer. But then I also accidentally did something that made one area the version that's extra hard to traverse, and when I resorted to a guide for help I discovered I'd need to fight a boss right after going through the area that'd sap most of my health. So I think I'm leaving it, and just gonna watch the ending on youtube rather than throwing my little robot dude at the tunnel of spikes over and over again.

  7. Posted

    I ended up getting right up to the actually final not a fake out boss fight in non golden Persona 4 and it took me a few tries but I eventually beat it... 's first form and then discovered there was a whole new one. Given that I had occasionally been dieing in the dungeon leading up to the final fight I ditched it then to watch the ending on Youtube. (which was actually kind of pointless, it was a 10 minute wrap up thing containing just stuff I expected). I was particularly irritated with the fact that only the main character needs to die for it to be game over, and the fact that when an enemy hits an elemental weakness attacking one of your party they get an extra attack.

     

    Mostly though I was annoyed cause I liked the game overall, even a tweaked combat system would've been enjoyable, but the way it was I kept getting frustrated in a game where I didn't specifically want to be challenged, I basically wanted a visual novel with some gameplay between chapters really.

  9. Posted

    As iconic as his cap may be, Aiden himself isn't. He hasn't been in over 200 games since the early 80's, a majority of which are mechanically based around the act of jumping. It's not like the dev team somehow forgot to put in jumping and are nervously pulling at their collars hoping nobody will notice. They didn't think jumping was a necessary addition, and more than likely built the game world and systems while fully aware of it.

     

    I checked out at "same running animation as Assassin's Creed." WHAT? THOSE GOOD-FOR-NOTHING LAYABOUTS JUST REUSED A PERFECTLY SERVICEABLE ASSET THEY ALREADY HAD RATHER THAN SPEND THE TIME, MONEY, AND MANPOWER TO RECREATE IT? HARRUMPH!

     

    Well when it's a huge budget AAA game you would think that they want to make a new run animation cycle that is more fitting of Aiden's character.

     

    ...well unless he's the exact same character as those assassin guys I guess.

     

     

    EDIT:

     

    Steam just informed me that Watch_DogsTM - Conspiracy exists.

    "Unlock a standalone mind bending game mode in which cyborgs invaded Chicago. Track them and take them down!"

     

    I am very interested in this and how little sense it likely makes.

  10. Posted

    You get a chance to redo the mission if you fail, even if you are on Ironman (I'm like 99 percent sure about this and the wiki backs up my memory). 

    Yeah, this is what happens. I played on Ironman and it just endlessly repeats, that's what annoyed me after a whole game where my screw ups were permanent.

     

    Also kind of annoying is that once you reach a point in the sequence of events leading to the final mission you can no longer do anything to progress time other than going on the final mission. You can't stall and grind or anything if you just want to get a particular piece of equipment or level a character or wait until your star soldier recovers from an injury.

  11. Posted

    That video mostly just made me feel bad for everybody who worked on it and thought they were making the next massive game. I feel like they're just victims of the desire to have games be as big as they can be while still pushing graphics and technology further and further.

  13. Posted

    I should perhaps mention that I never finished the last mission. It feels completely incongruous to an ironman playthrough and has me right back in my old mindset - not a place I want to go. Did anyone else have this issue?

     

    I had this exact same issue, it seemed like an odd choice. And I don't remember was there even a reason that you only had 'one shot' to do it? Did you carry a special item on board that you'd lose if everyone died? I remember thinking at the time it would make sense to just have the team wiped out, and then you return to base, and you have to scramble your resources to try again, having lost your best soldiers. It'd be devastating send wave after wave of soldiers at it as your choice became more and more limited and your resources waned. What an ending that would be.

     

    Though I did finish the mission because I wanted to bear out the story of my team. I'm not sure if you named all your squad members, but I did and it was the first time naming characters in a game made me give a crap about them. So I wanted to see how they fared in the end.

     

     

    Mild spoilers about the 'story' of XCOM

    I was mostly playing along naming my soldiers after characters from things I liked that they mildly resembled. Chel, Shephard, Michael Scott, Hank Hill, Hank Schrader. But near the end I realised I hadn't used my name yet, so I just popped myself in as a new unassuming soldier. I tested myself along with any other low ranking soldier for psychic powers, turned out I did have the gift. Then right before the final stretch of missions, I lost all other psychic soldiers. I was the only one left who had the power to go into the final mission and stop the aliens. I was the most important team member for that final mission, as if I died then the mission was a failure. I was also the least experienced member on that team. It was my crack elite of surviving captains... and a rookie who got lucky with the gift. Few of the team survived, but that rookie gave his life to save the team and protect Earth.

     

    Damn, I haven't gone back to play Enemy Within yet, even though I own it but I've gotten myself all hyped up for it again. It is flat out the best roleplaying narrative experience I've had in a game.

  14. Posted

    What's funny, is that for all Nintendo attempts to explore alternative controllers, if the WiiU suddenly supported every little batshit controller that has ever been used for a Nintendo console, and devs could program for whatever controller they wanted, I would immediately consider it a must own gaming device. 

     

    NES-Power-Glove.jpg

  15. Posted

    I was... going to ask the same thing. I played ALL of that game, and I don't remember anything significantly sidequesty. There were rewards here and there for exploring a level thoroughly, but for the most part levels were just straightforward "do this thing please". Unless my memory is completely terrible.

     

    Which, well, let's be honest, it is.

     

    I do remember in one of the first quests where you're infiltrating some town place. There's a very obvious direct way to go with multiple paths, but if you go down a road to the side you can find an old woman in a house, and if you help get rid of some aggressive people banging on her door she asks you to go collect a macguffin. I can't remember if it's directly labelled as a side quest but it essentially is since it's a totally optional objective set.

  17. Posted

    Bethesda-developed games don't prevent you from murdering the innocent, but it certainly is disincentivized.

     

    As someone who played through Fallout New Vegas wiping out any settlement I came across, the disincentives aren't that powerful unless you really like the actual questing.

    I think the main downside was the realisation that I couldn't ever use power armor because I needed to do one of two specific quests but I had already killed the people that would let me do the relevant quests. Aside from that, I got way more loot and fun out of my self directed mission to destroy everyone. Because the quests I'd be set were more basic monotonous and less challenging than figuring out a strategy to take down every single person in a town.

     

    (technically that wasn't a Bethesda game, but from what I've seen I don't think the disincentives vary a lot)

     

    I should say, I didn't set out intending to kill everyone I met, but when I was in the starting town I was stealing everything I could find, but carefully. When no-one could see, but then random townspeople attacked me and called me a thief anyway. So I fought back, killed the townspeople. Turns out this made all of them attack me, so I killed them all. Gathered the loot and moved on to the next town. When I got there the talking and quests were already boring me, and a voice at the back of my head said "It was pretty easy to kill them all off last time..." so, thus continued the rampage. I recommend trying it, I think it makes for a better story.

     

    Both it and Sleeping Dogs definitely try to push the player in one way, but the problem is they want to let everything be viable, so they don't want to actively punish the player for things going wrong. I was particularly disappointed that at the end of Sleeping Dogs

     

    it doesn't matter one bit how shitty a cop you were, how many people you killed in revenge and how much blood is on your hands. Everyone is horrified that your boss killed the mobster that's kind of a nice guy and you liked and that he sparked conflict between the triads in order to make them fight and lose numbers. Your character has been literally ruthless in his bloodlust, other triad members often act surprised about how aggressive your character is when you win fights and you gun down hordes of people. But at the end is your handler that did things for selfish reasons people hate, and your protagonist who selflessly cared about people in the end is a good guy no matter what.

     

    I feel Dishonoured is a bit of a better example in that the world has serious consequences for you depending on the total killcount, but I didn't play enough of it to get a good idea whether the intended drawbacks worked out or not as proper disincentives. Just on paper though, I think the idea that your actions are worsening the world (and use this to inhibit gameplay so the player feels the drawback) is a better way to look at it than just that you get bonus points for not killing everyone.

  19. Posted

    Yeah, I don't doubt that there was someone in Ubisoft in charge of making a list of secrets that NPCs could have and someone else in Ubisoft in charge of designing a distraction mechanic, but they never once talked about it (or even crossed paths). It's just unfortunate, because 1) being trans* shouldn't be something of which to be ashamed, and 2) even if it were, we have articles like this one, where an  reporter helped drive a woman to suicide by writing a story about how she was a "fake" doctor and a "fake" woman.

     

    That story is exactly why I think a game could do a really good investigation into what actually results when you do spill people's secrets like this. Maybe you threaten it, but ultimately the person doesn't care, or finds acceptance when you reveal their secret. A real exploration of breaches in privacy would be fascinating...

     

     

    Yes I am aware I sound like Peter Molydeux.

  20. Posted

    Funny how two posts sort of highlight recurring problems I have with games.

     

    That was the norm back the day, same thing in Midtown Madness. Carmageddon was the game where you could run over people. Then GTA happened and it just became accepted as the new norm.

     

    It is disappointing how much of an open world game feels like it has to still retain of the original source for the archetype. To take a guess, you can rob peoples cars at will in Watch_Dogs even though it's way against the idea of the character and what actually makes sense. After all, shouldn't a hacker be a covert operative? Shouldn't your missions be concluded with you disappearing and blending in with a crowd rather than car chases where you make the police explode? But no, there's a concern that it would be seen as a downgrade from GTA so all that gets put in.

     

    There is too much content in video games.

     

    And this too, again because developers are worried that consumers just wont be happy with the length of their game. It's like a chef worrying that his soup portions are too small so he adds a litre of water, and then acts confused when the customer says it's too watery.

     

    I think it'd be naive of me to assume that few players would complain if Watch_Dogs was sorter and tighter. But surely even with a lot of the players who think that their main concern is a long broad experience, they must feel like the game is a let down even if they can't articulate why.

  21. Posted

    When self driving cars are more of a concept, will people still need licenses? I have a random luddite opposition to feeling uncomfortable about self driving cars because the concept sounds unsafe to me, even though I am aware that they could overall have less accidents than the alternative.

     

    About Watch_Dog's hype, I genuinely went through the period of "This looks really interesting, it's AAA but maybe it will be different to most AAA". And I lost that entirely coming up to release, particularly when I realised that it was meant to be an open world game and so it was inevitably going to collapse under its own weight by having to meet expectations of that style of game.

     

    I think the fact that it is a point that a bunch of people have thought 'this is something to be ashamed of' is the problem with it. It's similar to outing someone being gay as a thing that's something to be ashamed of.

     

    If that makes sense. The fact that it has become a point is the problem.

     

    I think the issue is that the designers added this mechanic and didn't think to question whether or not they should, or how this would play out. I think they just considered it as yet another item that one would want to keep private that the player could release. They were probably viewing in terms of general privacy rather than trying to consider that particular situation and what it meant for the individuals involved.

  25. Posted

    With 2 generations in a row of the big publishers pretty much ignoring every kind of input device other than controllers and sometimes KB/M, I think we're in a weird spot. The publishers don't make enough money to do anything but play it safe, so they're opting out of every kind of innovation other than 'graphical' and sometimes 'weird new pricing model'.

     

    I suspect that indies and a new breed of mid-tier developer are going to come along and do for motion controls, music games, and VR what the big publishers can't. If you guys happened to hear Jeff Gerstman on the bombcast this week talking about the state of AAA development and the new consoles, I think we're in for a very long generation. 

     

    Johann Sebastian Joust is a pretty good indicator of this, but the issue is how many people are willing to get the move controller for it? And, if it was instead programmed to work with any webcam and some smartphones, would the technology be buggy or detract from the experience? A big draw for people to consoles is the fact that there is no uncertainty of highly varied specs and results but they need significant numbers to justify the investment.