manny_c44

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Posts posted by manny_c44

  5. Posted

    In America you can't even get a stand-alone New 3ds Roderick. And if you decide to buy a bundle? Do you think you can somehow order regular white face-plates, so you don't have a weird Animal Crossing 3ds? No, that is not allowed.

  6. Posted

    I didn't fund this time around-- an adventure game is relatively simple compared to a 3d action game (in terms of man hours needed for production). If somehow their combined funding does approach 20 million than it's possible, but I'm not sure how this is going to turn out at all.

  7. Posted

    Man I am always so, so far behind game releases. But a quick top three of games I actually played right when they were released this year:

     

    3. Box Boy 3DS, so far I have seen no mention of Box Boy on this thread. It is a puzzler created by Hal Laboratory (Nintendo). I would say it was 2015's Pushmo/Pullblox. Very simple to get into, totally slick as any HAL product is and doesn't overstay it's welcome.  I really couldn't put it down, check it out.

     

    2. ProjectCARS PC, also haven't seen this one mentioned. Usually I am not into racing games whatsoever but I got a new graphics card (GTX 970) and had a 30" monitor so I thought I had to get something shiny to test out on it. What a great racing simulation. This is probably the first racing simulation where my enjoyment came mostly from the cars' handling characteristics as opposed to making progress, competing with AI etc. Of all of my hours spent in ProjectCARS I would say 90% of it was spent in time trials with no opponents. Just driving the cars around some of these tracks is so much fun. I am not enough a racing nut that I would buy a steering wheel; even just through the controller it is great fun.

     

    1.MGSV PC- This will have to be 'game of the year' for me. Running it at full spec on a 30" monitor, a Hideo Kojima game! a simultaneous PC release! perfected open world MGS gameplay! The pacing was totally not metal gear and the story itself was rather thin, but the gameplay was glorious. I admit after I got the Part I ending I called it quits because I had already dropped so much time into the game (I just watched the rest on YouTube) but it is still my GOTY. The week of its release, despite working about 45 hrs that week in front of computer screen, I still opted to drop 35 hrs into Metal Gear. Sleep, eat, work, Metal Gear. For a whole week.  

  9. Posted

    I can confirm that you don't have to play any of the "replay" missions, or fully upgrade your base. Just do a major mission or side-op and return to the base, and another mission and return to the base. Returning to the base is the important part, in some cases you are pulled back automatically. But other times you explicitly have to go there to trigger a bit of story stuff.

     

    Thanks that's what I needed to know!

  12. Posted

    Another thing I love about MGS1 and Peacewalker was the incorporation of illustration into the game. That's something else that's been missing in the successive console releases. I mean, in Yoji Shinkawa you basically have one of the best concept artists/illustrators in the world.

     

    So in MGS1, the 3d graphics were simple but the actual illustrated elements (codec conversations as well as some cutscene stuff) were actually much better, as illustration, than anything in the following games. The art was good enough to give the entire game a sense of visual quality that it retains even to this day. Those Yoji Shinkawa drawings will not die the way the polygons of MGS4 and MGSV will die in a few years time. Even now MGS4 looks crude compared to MGSV.  The characters are stiff digital puppets wrapped in as much math as the processor could handle at the time, but taken purely as illustration, side by side with the concept art from that same game, they are lacking-- in a generation they will look primitive.

     

    So I'm thinking this is some of the Metal Gear Special Sauce that is lacking from MGSV: tightly planned sneaking action, wrapped in illustration, with the story beats in the background all of the time. And also in a way I enjoy how short the older games were as well, so you don't get the Civilization-guilt-complex while playing.

     

    My dream metal gear would be a game like the MGS2 prologue with codec and cutscenes all made by Shinkawa-- with a story more like MGS1. Even throw in some FMV.

     

    But all of the games are enjoyable in their own right; even one of my least favorite entries (MGS3) is considered great by other people, so the whole spectrum of games is appreciated.

     

    All this talk reminds me I have a huge Metal Gear Rex model I need to paint and assemble...

  13. Posted

    I couldn't disagree more...MGS1 did a lot of good stuff, but the combat was more in the tedious/frustrating pile than exciting.

     

    No no, the combat was definitely awkward but that was partly what I meant. It was exciting to even try to use a weapon because it was so risky. There was no satisfaction in actually firing the weapons because they were clunky (and the times that the game made you use them, like running all of those stairs in the tower while firing the FAMAS, those were admittedly low points) but there was a lot of excitement in deciding to use a weapon. It was always an 'oh shit this isn't going to work' moment, which is as it should be in a Tactical Espionage Action™ experience.

     

    The game was essentially about necessarily crawling, cowering in corners and tapping on walls to confuse tightly patterned guards and then silently taking them down for a precious ration.  All of the 'extra approaches' added on in other games, at an increasing rate from the second half of MGS2 onward, diluted the original's tight gameplay. They're not bad, though in many ways they feel like concessions to Western game design (which Kojima has now mastered), but they make the game less sneaky. 

     

    In a way MGSV feels like Kojima saying: "Ok, everyone who was griping about my awkward MGS mechanics/plot/progression-structure, here is the game you want" and it's great, but for people who want the tight, stripped down gameplay of MGS1 and MGS2 prologue it was really not necessary. He has preemptively made any future Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, or Hitman obsolete (throw the Rockstar games in there too, why not). But that's not what fans of MGS1/2p were really asking for.

  14. Posted

    Man MGS1 was incredible. Using a gun in that game was really exciting. It crossed into BS pretty hard sometimes but the game was pure-- the games became much better as gameplay systems but they progressively lost the purity. Just too many complex set pieces and too many expectations have transformed it over the years.

    MGSV is great, and I think it is the best open world game I have ever played, putting western games to shame, but MGS1 is actual metal gear.

    Have to keep comments short, I could rant about metal gear for pages.

  15. Posted

    I mean if you created vector art on a canvas of 256X256, perfect it, and then blow it up to ten times its original size it's not going to look perfect any more. Things that looked sharp and well formed at small scale well be disjointed and sloppy at a larger scale. If you start trying to make it look perfect at higher resolution then you are basically changing the original art substantially-- with different artists at a different time then the original game's production. If you are slavishly trying to maintain the original art then you just modify it as little as you can to preserve the original lines/vectors.

     

    This looks like they are sticking as close to the original as possible.

  18. Posted

    If they did anymore to the art then it would've effected the style. I mean just looking at it, I would sharpen some edges and make things look a bit more dimensional, but then it wouldn't be exactly the same as the original. It was designed fro low resolution and would need a redesign for higher resolution to look better, but then it wouldn't be the same game. 

  20. Posted

    I guess when it comes to game prices for me, considering the massive backlog, basically it boils down to "Do I wish to/can I afford to play through a substantial part of this on day one?" and if the answer is no,I  just wait until I can actually can play it and then get it, which for me usually means a year late.

     

    I did buy Alien Isolation, Metal Gear, and Project Cars on day one but it is very rare for me. I admit I have no time to play Firewatch right now. Maybe during the Christmass holyday. 

     

    My guess is that when I actually purchase Firewatch it will be between 15-20 clams.

  22. Posted

    Phantom Pain gameplay is so much more fulfilling than Ground Zeroes but it's hard to pin down why...I guess you can't really escape like you can in phantom pain. Even D Horse changes the dynamic enough to make the game feel 'free'. If Phantom Pain was as difficult as GZ there's no way I would've dumped so much time into it.

  23. Posted

    For the truck Fultoning mission the way I beat it (very easily)...

     

    I was able to use a decoy to draw away the skulls and finish the mission without an alert being triggered. I first dropped a decoy in the fork in the road where the convoy would pass through. I then used a phantom cigar until the convoy found the decoy (which also automatically triggered the skulls cutscene). There is a rock right there in the fork in the road, you are already hiding behind it when the skulls come out. Thow another decoy down the road a ways, pop out, fulton the truck and escape.

     

    I guess I would've gotten an S rank had I not used the phantom cigar.

     

    Also it runs on the Surface Pro on low settings, but still not sure if it is playable (practically speaking).