thepaulhoey

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Posts posted by thepaulhoey

  1. Posted

    I just couldn't get into Hollow Knight, I wasn't enjoying the combat early in the game and felt like I had to fight a lot of enemies to farm energy. I read that it improves when you get the dodge mechanic, but I just refunded before the 2 hour mark as a game that didn't clock with me. A shame as I usually enjoy Metroidvanias.

  3. Posted

    Uncharted: The Lost Legacy :tmeh:

    I was fairly underwhelmed with this. It wasn't bad, but it didn't get me excited much at all. I don't think it ever really goes beyond being some good DLC for Uncharted 4, and it's kinda on Naughty Dog for bigging it up a bit more than they should have. It takes the highlight features of Uncharted 4(free roaming vehicle section, grapple hook, climbing spike) and incorporates them without adding anything or much to them. The vehicle section is probably the stand out part for me, but much of it is a retread of what we did in Uncharted 4 and like the game in general it starts to drag. Once you get past that part it's a very du jour affair as far as Uncharted goes and it's not long until you're in combat arenas and linear action set pieces which are probably awesome when they play out perfectly but come off a bit silly when you're rubbish and crashing your jeep into trees as you try to pursue the bad guys. 

     

    The story is fine but it's Uncharted on autopilot and it follows the typical beats so much that at this stage it just feels incredibly lazy. I do think that the game jumped the shark a bit when

    Spoiler

    you're going after the train to stop the bad guy setting off a bomb that will kill thousands of people.

     

    Still absolutely strikingly beautiful though, I'm still constantly in awe of how good the world looks from a technical and creative point of view.

     

    Alan Wake's American Nightmare :tup:

    I'm a bit late on this one, I would have been less late only for last year the game stopped launching when I was mid way through it. I decided to see if it was working after trying desperately one more to like Quantum Break(still not very good) and it works now! Hurrah!  Anyway, the pastiche is what puts this from OK to good for me, the gameplay is nothing interesting and while this add-on does improve a lot on what Alan Wake set out it's still nothing to write home about. It's looking a bit dated now but all the details in the game make me enjoy it so much more, the radios to listen to and Mr. Scratch taunting you on TVs. It's also so Americana and I'm a sucker for that stuff. It's very short, I finished it in under 4 hours but it's a fun 4 hours.

  4. Posted

    On the whole BioShock 1 v 2 discussion, I think the first game is the one that will always be remembered better and for very good reason, it's what brought us Rapture. Probably the most imaginative and creative location in games and even including other mediums it's still up there in terms of how well realised it was. That impact is an incredibly important part of the game that just can't be ignored and it's what gives it the edge over BioShock 2. Ignoring that impact I think BioShock 2 is a better game, the combat works far far better and while it does devolve into chaos more often that I'd like it's never as bad as the first game and it feels more restrained in just beefing up regular splicers and does a good job of introducing different enemies. The story is about on par with the first in that it never quite lives up to its potential and the best part of it is the side stories you're finding out about through the tapes left behind and the state a room has been left in. I think BioShock 2 is the opposite of the first in terms of pacing where it takes too long to get going but once it does it goes at a satisfying clip while the first starts out so strong and turns into a trudge come the end. BioShock 2 has the advantage of hindsight and I think the developers did a great job of looking at what worked and what didn't and improving so much. But still, BioShock was so impactful at the time and a real benchmark of where games could go(which they didn't really unfortunately) that it's the one I'd recommend if someone can only play one of them.

     

    On the subject of multiplayer games, when you get to Left 4 Dead 2 we should play that online, get 8 people if we can for some versus. It also includes all the campaigns from the first game. I was quite the fan of it...

     

    Capture.PNG

  9. Posted

    Crysis 3 is an improvement over 2 but I still wouldn't say I enjoyed it. I never made it to the end of either of them. Crysis 2 is one of the most disappointing sequels I've ever played.

     

    My memory is a bit hazy on Warhead but I felt it cut out a lot of the slower parts of the first Crysis but if those are parts that you enjoyed I can understand you not liking it as much. I don't recall feeling like I was forced into more action with it though.

  10. Posted

    Post Ryan meeting it's generally agreed the game just isn't as good and it starts to drag. Lots of what you're doing feels a bit like filler.

     

    Olympus Heights and Apollo Square are really interesting areas I think as far as the World goes but it's definitely the stage where the gameplay starts to suffer due to video game things. (The reduced health as you mentioned and so on)

  12. Posted

    I played 5 or so hours over the weekend. The update improves the game, but I think it's still a game that has such fundamental issues that are just being cosmetically hidden by these updates. Take the new mission system for instance, the missions are terrible because they have nothing to work with. Go to a planet and shoot some creatures, or scan them, or blow up a random building in the middle of an empty expanse with no enemies or challenge. Collect 250 of something and go to a trade depot. That's it, so a mission system might sound cool in a blurb and when you're picking them up they sound interesting, but once you get to the meat of it you get bored after you've done the 5 lame types of mission. I only did as many as I did to raise my standing to get to the end of a slightly more interesting quest line, but one that was pretty similar in terms of what I had to do(fly to different places, build a thing, repeat 3 times, do quests to raise your standing, learn 3 new words etc.). There was no substance to it and when the game crashed I didn't care to go back to it.

     

    I'd go into more detail if I had time, but to quickly cover another couple of annoyances: Base building takes forever and is a massive slog of farming materials. Missions and quests can be even more frustrating when the goal is constantly on a toxic planet that you can survive on for 2 minutes before having to rush back to your ship.

  13. Posted

    From what I've seen of the feature so far it just works with anyone, and as to whether or not it ruins the vibe, it depends on how often you encounter someone. I'd want it to be every few hours rather than all the time.

  16. Posted

    The note I took after watching Finding Dory last year: "A soulless cash in that adds nothing to the characters and has an incredibly lazy script. Didn't feel like I was watching a Pixar movie."

     

    To add to that, I'd say it makes the first movie worse by contaminating my memory of the characters by making them all worse. I got into an argument with a guy at my friends wedding over how it was one of the worst movies released last year but just got a pass for the merit of the first film. His counter argument of "Who doesn't want to see more of those characters!" perfectly proved my point. I've forgotten most of the film at this stage but I remember really hating it and struggling to stay to the end.

  17. Posted

    I guess what I'm saying is that I don't feel like the group of apes at the end of the movie wanted humans gone, they wanted to coexist. Whereas another Ape army could have given context for there being another large group who did and that's what led to enslavement etc. Anyway, the canon of these is definitely murky and not something I'd try to make a lot of sense of. They are probably better off left as their own reboot thing.

     

    On the humans destroying themselves bit, it's again another thing that I'm all for but it was just really poorly done in this movie.

  18. Posted

    Saw it last night and I agree(especially on the Ape CG). I didn't think it was a good conclusion. I'll put my thoughts in spoilers.

     

    So first up I expected the other army to wind up being an army of similarly intelligent apes(felt like the lame comedy talking money was laying the seeds for that) who were there to finish off the humans, but they turned out to be a pointless human army and have very little impact. It wasn't interesting that it was another human army and they were there for all of 10 minutes, we didn't even know any of them. It was a really poor payoff. As I mentioned, the lame comedy ape was lame, felt really out of place in this film. Woody Harrellson wound up not having a lot to do and his character wasn't as interesting as he had the potential to be and his arc was really obvious. My main problem is that the apes were the good guys way too much, I don't see how they go from what they are in the end of this to the guys ruling the planet who enslave mankind in the future. Given the title and the previous film I expected more of a brutal war. :/

  19. Posted

    I really enjoyed this film, so much so that I went to see it a second time to pay more attention to the little details. I love how the scenes play along with the soundtrack, but it never feels over used or relied upon. I felt that the balance was just right. The story isn't the most interesting but it was enough to keep me engaged. It's definitely got that Edgar Wright re-watch factor. Spoiler related to that below:

     

     

    For instance early in the movie when he's watching TV it pretty much spells out the scene late in the film when he gets out of the car to take on Buddy.

  20. Posted

    By far the best runs for me are the ones where the runner or someone on the couch is explaining what's going on and what's so interesting/special about what they're doing(like BotW or the Mario relay). I forget the run but there was one where they'd just say "oh he got blah blah blah skip" but never explain what it is or why I should care. I tune out of those fast.

  22. Posted

    10 hours ago, juv3nal said:

    am I crazy or did they used to post to their youtube channel almost the same day/within 24 hours? there's nothing up as of yet.

     

    You're not crazy.

  24. Posted

    I didn't get this into a state where it's worth releasing. We're having a heatwave here and I didn't want to spend it sitting indoors programming, so I got a lot less done this weekend. I got the basic systems in and working, did some code rewriting to make it easier to implement the various systems and features I want but there wasn't time to get them implemented. As it stands there's a very basic simulation of a ship where chefs cook food and people eat and so on but that's about it.

     

    I'll keep working on the project as I still like the idea, it'll just take some time to add to it enough.

  25. Posted

    I haven't had a lot of time to work on this, I refined some of the "simulations", they're very simplistic(someone eating depletes food resource, someone working in the kitchen increases it). I have time this weekend so I'm going to focus on creating a scenario where there's a saboteur on the ship and you have to identify and isolate that person then deal with them.