Erkki

Yeah, GTA trailers are like that. I think the first IV trailer was much better, though. I guess the trailer hints that there is some countryside around Los Santos to explore, but I doubt it'll have more than one city. Also, it'll be cool to see now how the city will differ from the previous 3D take. I never got the feel of the 2D cities in the first games and didn't associate the later 3D cities to them at all.

It didn't even seem that UC1-ish to me. But man, the Urban Warfare chapter and the following (which I'm in the middle of I think) are awesome!

And that's 5 AM GMT on 11th of November for people who don't memorize irrelevant TLA-s.

Just completed the Borneo chapter and I must say, the combat seems much better than in Drake's Fortune so far. And Easy mode is actually easy now (even a bit too easy maybe, was shocked to see bad guys miss me from really close). But maybe it gets harder later.

WUXGA!

Started playing it right after finishing the first Uncharted. Currently I'm in some museum courtyard with a fountain, but so far I'm already liking it A LOT more than the first game. In the first there were just so many jungles and places that looked almost the same. Of course, haven't gotten to any shooty bits yet so I'll see how I like that part, but from what I read in this thread, it has improved, but is still based on some rigid triggers which might work against you if you play in a non-intended way. Actually there was one bad guy in the escape from hanging train level, and he cried "He's alive!" or something like that when he saw me -- well, actually just before he could have possibly seen me, of course. Who did he shout it to? Yeah, I guess the enemies, spawning thereof, and their barks are still kind of dumb, probably. But I have a feeling I will enjoy this a lot more than the previous game. I kind of expected it to be the Heavy Rain of action/platformers*, but after reading this thread I guess it really isn't. I might turn it to Very Easy if combat gives me any trouble. * I mean that in the sense of being almost like an interactive movie without much challenge for most of the time, that can be played rather casually. Is it just me or are the colors a bit weird in the beach scene in the beginning? I turned up brightness a couple of notches, mayhap that is the cause.

Ok, charted it. I think I'll go Easy in the second game anyway, since what I expected from this series (perhaps falsely) was not a challenge but to watch a longish action/adventure movie where I occasionally push a button or aim at bad guys.

The only real problem was when enemies were coming from multiple directions or otherwise where you couldn't use cover. Because one scene from the beginning of the game (it was in the demo too) was like this, I never was sure if bad guys wouldn't come from behind and therefore was afraid to make my way forward from cover to cover where I would possibly be surrounded. So I usually stay back and run out of ammo, and when I HAD TO move forward to get ammo, that often did trigger some new guys appearing, sometimes from behind or side. In summary, what made it hard for me was that I couldn't figure out where I could stay in cover for the duration of the fight and was too pussy to keep pressing on.

I'm more than 2/3rds through the first game so I'll just soldier on until the end. Looking forward to playing the second one. If I found the combat in the first one too hard for my taste in Normal mode, should I go Easy in the second game?

It's fucking difficult getting music on my iPhone. Did I sync it with another computer? Oh, in that case we must DELETE ALL MUSIC ON THE PHONE before we can copy one additional song to it. I guess this might be my own stupidity, but at least some time ago I had a hard time finding a way to not sync the whole library and just copy individual songs/albums.

Switched to easy difficulty but not noticing much difference. The upriver part was especially hard, trying to dodge those barrels, keep the jetski straight and shoot the guys before they shoot me (and only seemed to take two or three shots for them to kill me near the end of that part).

Yeah, that is fucking stupid. Where are all these random people coming from? Or the cars that you can even see spawning right in the middle of a jungle. I just started playing it, says 4 hours and 48%. Combat is too hard and too present for my taste with the normal difficulty. Overall I like parts of it so far, and it's probably better than most games in its genre, but it also seems stupid in many ways and perhaps not my favourite type of game. Please tell me that Uncharted 2 gets better than this! That was the game that really brought attention to the series, I think. How is the mix of combat / other stuff in U2? And combat difficulty? Oh, and thanks to Toblix for sending me this game (and Uncharted 2) ages ago.

I'm a bit confused with the Riddick series. Dark Athena is the second game right, and at the same time a remake of the original?

Try the demo. I can't say as I'm not very picky about voice acting.

Finished it. Took me the whole weekend. It is good, but it is a bit lazy and shoddy. Everything the RPS Wot I Think said was right, except final moments being in German. They probably played a pre-release build. The only thing that was really off was the rolling credits, which indeed were partially in German, otherwise there were just a few badly translated words or sentences here and there. And the voice acting wasn't bad, but then I'm usually forgiving about voice acting. The missing elements they talked about are probably whole sequences of the story that are left out and explained in a few off-hand comments or even only implied. It isn't clear whether this is intentional or if they lacked development budget. Still, that doesn't really make it a bad game, it has many flaws but was enjoyable. The game is relatively lengthy by today's standards. At one point it seemed to be drawing near finish, but turned out that was only half-way or 2/3 through. But then the real ending seemed too come too abruptly, though. The final sequence really sucked. I would have expected at least some more puzzles, but it was just clicking on a couple of hot spots basically. I didn't like how the game was structured with regards of which characters you control. It seemed quite random: at one time you have 3 characters, then for a really long time you only control the annoying guy (who becomes slightly less annoying as time goes by though), then 2 characters for a short time etc. It might also be due to lack of budget/time, maybe they had more planned. Puzzles were mostly logical. Nothing too difficult, maybe on the same level as Sam & Max. There were several pixel hunting instances though, and it didn't help that they were at a place/time where you have A LOT of places open to you. Occasionally, there's also just a lot of stuff you can pick up and even partially solve some puzzles before you figure out why you need to. 3 of the pixel hunting instances made me peek into a walkthrough. And for some stupid reason, there's a short rhythm game puzzle. The game on the whole still gets a from me though, but you might want to wait for possible Christmas sales (don't know how likely that is). It was good to have a full length adventure game to play after a while.

That thing looks straight out of Half-Life 2.

Did you try the demo? I saw an occasional bad translation there. But I guess that part didn't get to all of their annoyances yet. Demo gets from me. I found they had changed the download link, now downloading at normal speed and hopefully will get to play the full game tomorrow.

Oh. My. God. That must be one of the most idiotic acts of game journalism ever commited. My hatred for IGN: renewed and amplified.

Yeah, I think I'm with Kingz on this one. If they really did it the hard way, they've just wasted weeks of their lives...

No, they are in the EU since 2004, but not in the eurozone. All money is artificial. I personally liked the EEK more (we joined the eurozone a year ago) because it was mostly paper. The smallest paper bill (2 kroons) was about 12 euro cents. Now the smallest bill is 5 euros, 40 times larger in value. So lots of fucking coins in our wallets. But I rarely use cash so it doesn't bug me too much.

I recently acquired Tales of Arabian Nights. Have played only a few games, but so far I really like it. I especially like that the rules are relatively simple. You move your character, have encounters, and decide what you try to do after you know who or what you encounter. Then one of over 2000 mini stories is selected to resolve the encounter, based on your choice of action and the encounter type from the Book of Tales. There are also skills, statuses, quests and treasures/items, which make it a bit more complex. What can make things kind of too complex is when you have lots of statuses (I had 7 in a recent game: Blessed, Respected, Married, Vizier, Lost, On Pilgrimage, Robe of Honor). These affect your movement and other things and can be hard to keep track of, as some of these cards also have rather lengthy texts. But alternate rules suggest limiting the active statuses to one, discarding previous ones. Haven't tried that. Anyway, the core rules are simple, and the mini stories are fun. It is probably best with more than 2 players as some negative statuses are over-amplified when there is just one 'other player'.

Hmm... that would be kind of cool, but on the other hand they'd have to compensate somehow, probably... and they already mostly leave a whole car width between two lanes so you can go through that narrow gap while only brushing the sides of other cars.

Actually I found that taking corners was a lot easier when using the hood-cam view. But it was inconvenient to use that view most of the time, so I rarely did.

To be more serious, I actually would hope that they come up with a story that is not about criminals fighting other criminals and causing havoc in cities, but since it's titled GTA, I suppose that's not going to happen. But at least they could maybe get someone else besides Dan Houser to do the story. I think he did better with Red Dead Redemption, but the GTA stories don't really have anywhere to go. They are made of the same components which can only be combined in different variations. Secondly, I hope that they find some way to get out of their current game structure. The one hot-spot triggered mission at a time structure is getting boring, and so is the way to trigger a retry -- by the cellphone after waking up in a hospital -- that is so unnecessary, how many times do you actually go and do something else when you wake up there? They should give up on the pseudo-realistic explanations to gamey stuff and maybe embrace gaminess more (just give me a fucking retry prompt). In case you just die while outside of a mission, the hospital makes more sense of course (they have to respawn you somewhere, so why not there). But then this goes against my suggestion to get rid of the current mission structure -- if it were more loose where would the retry points be? Anyway, I hope they find a way to figure it out, but I'll probably buy the game out of inertia no matter what they end up doing.

I hope it has fully simulated garbage trucks. And .