toblix

Oh, excuse me, is this the gaming in-jokes thread?

They should do the thing they do in Japanese hentai porn games where you hold a button to speed up the dialogue.

Of course! I'll just scan it for you!

Kill Screen is great.

I'm assuming they're doing the variation within the various parts of the city rather than between different zones. So I expect various types of architecture, people, streets, music, etc. within Rome. It makes sense both from a design perspective and from a realism perspective.

I'm astounded. I've never played a football game before – or football – so I didn't really know what to expect. One thing I was certain of, though, was that this was a game for the masses. This was supposed to be pick-up-and-playable, and with this being the 11th in the series, they'd have to have absolutely perfected the art of easing newcomers into the action. There'd be tutorials, training stuff, probably a whole football school thing where you learn everything from basic controls and techniques to the advanced dribbling tactics of whoever is the best football player currently. Basically, I was expecting a football Chessmaster. New paragraph, because this is where it turns out I was completely wrong. It's actually looking more like you're supposed to start at Fifa 1, and by the time you get to 11 you're more or less a pro at everything. This has to be the most ridiculously inapproachable game ever. There's basically two options: Play football or look at a huge fucking list of button combinations for stuff I have never heard about. Seriously, this makes the most ridiculously complex PC flight sim look like a Facebook game. There's no introductory mode where the game compliments you on getting simple stuff right, like being able to keep the ball for five seconds. There's just the deep end with celebrity commentator Martin Tyler berates you for being "booked". It's fun, but it appears to require a huge initial time investment.

Sorry! I did a search – really! – but I must have missed it. To be fair, though, that thread is incorrectly named. I totally see what you mean. I feel I could go for some more right now, but expect to become tired with it after a few hours, but then just put it down and come back later. Hopefully by getting it sooner rather than later I'll be able to try the multiplayer while it's still being played.

Grippage explained it to me last night, and it sounded absolutely ridiculous. I'm in!

Midtown Madness 2, which took place in London and San Francisco, was a great game. It was funny though, how, even if you were going only moderately fast, the jumping animations would be too slow, so nobody ever really managed to dodge your car, and you just drove through them mid-leap. I also remember it not bothering me that much.

This is really fun but holy shit the minimap is terrible. As a shortcut for buying an repairing buildings it's all right, but have you tried using it... as an actual map? You know, for navigation? It's useless, it's shit. This is the worst thing!! The map doesn't look like the actual place! It's like they made the mini-maps really early on and didn't update then when they changed the actual locations. The terrain, roads and landmarks are incorrect. Imagine a map of Paris that has just some random lines and a cartoony Eiffel Tower model in the upper right corner. That's how terrible it is! And just when you thought I couldn't possibly come up with more shit about the mini-map, I'll leave you with this fucking gem of multimillion dollar game design: it doesn't even show where you are on the map. Anyway, I'm buying property like nobody's business, and the cash comes rolling on back.

It thought it was

That's disappointing. Really breaks the illusion of any sort of storyline.

Fun fact: that is a real thing.

So, can I keep doing the same storylets over and over? I just finished one, and it appeared in my list again.

Don't get me wrong, they've dressed it all up to be consistent with the fiction. The menu is the sanctuary, and the submenus (weapon, clothing, money, etc.) are connected rooms. Instead of selecting things you walk up to the mannequin or weapons rack and use it. I'm sure it sounded like a great idea.

I've played this for about five hours now, and it was very familiar right away. It's clearly the same engine, with some minor tweaks like DOF (the terrible kind that everyone uses that only blurs inside the model). The new menu-less interface is just terrible, terrible shit. Someone obviously came up with the idea that, if they didn't have menus, the player would be more engrossed and things would feel more natural. The solution, they found, was to have the player walk around on top of the menu, as if that's better. That you have to press start, walk over to the map and click A twice just to see an awful, almost useless minimap is a horrible step backwards from Fable 2, and I don't even remember what they did in that, but it couldn't've been as terrible as this. Also, the sound delay when playing lute is just idiotic and breaks what could've been a fun little minigame. Still, it's beatiful, all the locations beg to be explored, the combat is not bad, and the voices are as well done as always. I really like the competitive stuff and achievement progress popping up all the time (so much for no GUI...) Being regularly reminded that Marek's had 2 sexual encounters really makes me want to one-up him. Also, a weird thing happened whilst I was making pies. A guy from my friend list popped up and started shooting lightning everywhere. There was this voice chat thing that transmitted all the dialogue from his game over to me, which created a weird echo, making me fail at pie-making. I was happy to see there are no ridiculous achievements requiring me to do some lame job for hours on end.

Just finished Dreamweb, a game I've wanted to play ever since reading a review in some Amiga magazine back in the day. Though the user interface is clunky and dated, the game is still a great little adventure. The graphics are sweet, everything's beautiful pixel-art. There are lots of sweet death animations (pixel gore is great!) and a dark cyberpunk feel, with bright neon arclights, rainy cyberstreets, etc.

Holy crap, I was sure this thread was spam. It must be the text density and the inconspicuous link. Also, it was a little rambling. What is this, and why do I have to give it my Twitter or Facebooks?

Did you try running it in 32bit XP, either through VirtualBox or the built-in XP mode?

I'd say he looked very much like Andy Serkis.

When people ask me – and they sometimes do – what console I'd choose if I had to choose one and only one I've always responded with the Xbox 360 because that's my default gaming console. If games are cross-platform, they're always better on the 360, and the only reason to go with the PS3 would be the Bluray player. But I've forgotten the platform exclusives – the system sellers. For PS3 there's Little Big Planet (and soon the possibly even more brilliant sequel) and the Uncharted games, which are all really good, and probably some more I've overlooked (Deamons' Soul(s?)?). But what games are only available on Microsoft's console? The only one I can think of is Crackdown, and I'm not even sure that is platform exclusive. I could google it, but you know. Has Microsoft been worse at securing exclusivity deals than Sony this generation? It seems they're all about limited exclusivity (GTA IV, lots of DLC), not the real thing. Should I have been recommending the PS3 all this time?

Well not I definitely don't feel like buying it.

Doesn't work for me. It accepts the code, but the price doesn't change.

OMG EVERYONE BUY THIS!!!! I just finished it and this is a fantastic, great game of good quality and fun. Just like Metro 2033, it came out of nowhere and turned out to be awesome: I played it on normal and was able to finish it without rage quitting, which earns it the coveted Not Suddenly Frustratingly Impossible Award Powered by Mountain Dew™ It has, from start to end, the very best cut-scenes I've ever seen. There's some wonky graphics stuff in them but the character animation and the dialogue is just incredible. From now on there should be a mandatory requirement that everyone should have to play this before being allowed to touch a game cut-scene. The landing code scene was pure comedy gold, which makes this the first non-comedy game to make me laugh by being great. It's fun: There's jumping around huge, collapsing shit; there's an interesting combat system that doesn't get boring, is always challenging, feels natural and gives a great sense of mastery; there's a skill tree thing where you spend points to improve your man by getting more health, shield, new moves, etc. It's beautiful: the environments are impressively detailed – I really got the Half-Life 2 feeling a lot of places where there's this huge, destroyed city and even though it's tightly controlled and barred off, it feels like a real, huge place. I give the sound a 7.8/10

I just visit the forums every ten minutes or so, and then click on each thread.