Thrik

Haha. It's true, but then Valve's effect really isn't and never was HDR in the sense it's meant to mean — not sure why they even called it that. Maybe dynamic exposure or something would have been more appropriate.

I wouldn't go so far as to totally diss Valve's effect, because I also have more sensitive eyes than average and if I do the sunny-day-to-dark-room thing I also get a good few seconds of being pretty much unable to see anything in that room until my vision slowly adjusts — and even then I get lingering light burn. And while when I'm outdoors in the sun all my vision doesn't burn out to white, I am forced to squint even if I'm not looking at the sun. Don't how they'd emulate that in a game, though. It's definitely too exaggerated, though. You'll notice they sped the effect up considerably and made it more subtle in Team Fortress 2, which works much better.

Haha, oh I see that now. It looks like he literally used the Alyx model from the chapters, which I assume don't contain the special case facial animations used in the original game. Bit of a blunder. With issues like that present I'd be tempted to just not bother, which is sad as it must have taken him ages to do all that stuff.

I watched the video (I wouldn't if you've yet to play it) and the only particularly striking difference I noticed was the addition of HDR. Due to the way Source works he would have had to have gone through and manually determined the HDR settings for each and every area which is an enormous amount of work, but the results do look pretty Valve-standard. The only other thing I noticed was the weird Vortigaunt effect. Was that changed in the later chapters too, or has he randomly thrown that in?

Haha, yes I'd definitely have appreciated more racing. The tour bus sequences were cool, but it just made me hunger for a proper Mario Kart-esque rumble through the world — particularly due to the delightful assortment of weapons you can attach to your ride. The Fletus races were great too, although it'd have been better if you were also racing against the Kill Master, the Fire Baron, Mangus, the big-ass-grinder-thing, and Glottis. Golden material for DLC, of course.

I was looking on Wikipedia and apparently a sequel is confirmed, although that's literally all there is on the matter. It's going to take a serious game to beat Uncharted 2. Maybe the only place left to go is... space!!!!!

You big girls blouses. Also the best parts of HL2 come after Ravenholm so you really need to get that shit played. ;

Well, it's not like the guy didn't design elaborate weapons. It's obviously stretching the truth a bit to say he did it specifically for some assassin, but it's handled well.

What Da Vinci stuff? And what looked bad about it? He's certainly a prominent character in the game, but then so are many other historical figures such as religious leaders, city rulers, etc. This historical foundation extends to the actual cities too, which are based very heavily on the real deals and include many of their meticulously recreated landmarks. I really enjoy how they've grounded it so well in recorded history. Leonardo Da Vinci specifically works really well as an incidental friend and occasional engineer in the game — they handled his inclusion very well and in a pretty underplayed manner. Indeed, he's one of my favourite characters.

Interestingly, seconds before reading your post I noticed this in my RSS feeds: It's a (very well) fan-made video depicting Altair's initiation. Pretty impressive! And reminded me that the whole atmosphere and story of the original was definitely really awesome. Genuinely such a shame the gameplay didn't back it up (IMO) and cement its position as a true classic, whereas this time it does. I think it was a great move to take a more legendary approach to the Assassin heritage in the sequel though, as it means there's plenty for players of the original to appreciate but it doesn't get bogged down with being too dependant on knowing what happened.

Haha. With time I've really warmed to the characters. Ezio naturally grows up as you progress, and even the secondary modern world characters don't lame me out as much as they did now I have returned to them and discovered more about them. You might want to quickly read Wikipedia's summary of Assassins Creed 1's story like I did, though. Although the story is written in such a way that doesn't assume knowledge of it — the intro and Eden shit is explained in AS2 itself, and is meant to be cryptic as fuck — it does put things into more context.

I'd definitely fight on if I were you. The game's continuous ramping up of environmental awesomeness doesn't culminate at the snowy mountain sections, and off the top of my head I don't think there's really that much in the way of the Uncharted 1-esque battles you dislike (ie: some twat with a turret surrounded by billions of minions) after there. I have to say though, not sure I agree with your criticisms of stuff like the monestary section. I didn't find a single battle in the whole game anywhere nearly as annoying as some of the ones in the original, mostly due to there being more ways than 'gun through these guys' to approach them. For example, at the monestary section you're at I used stealth to get past most of those guys without raising an alert (which roughly quadruples the number of guys). By the time some dick did spot me I was pretty much at the turret guy, and then I used the wagon as cover and pushed it towards him until I was close enough to do him. Also, thanks to plenty of push-overable tables, melee moves, grenades, etc gunfights rarely end up like Uncharted 1's where you end up just exchanging shots from afar hoping they'll eventually fall. That only really happens if you try to play it like Uncharted 1. I wouldn't say something as snooty as "you're doing it wrong", but if you properly get into the stealth and melee stuff the game becomes way better IMO (I even evaded detection for most of the train section). This is why I'm so looking forward to playing it with the transquiliser gun, as then I can probably avoid the few times where I wasn't able to maintain stealth.

Haha, yeah I've been well fancying replaying UC2 too. I like the idea of playing through the whole thing with the tranquiliser gun, which I can do now I've finished it.

Having come out of Uncharted 2, I'd agree that the original is pretty rudimentary in many respects when it comes to gameplay — particularly with regards to variety. It's a bit like Assassin's Creed in that they had all these elements most of the way there, but they hadn't quite pushed it all together in a way that kicks absolute ass. Fortunately both Uncharted 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 rectify this. And both share a surprising number of action mechanics. And both of their main characters are voiced by the same guy. Holy shit!! However Uncharted 1 is still an awesome game, and if you like it the sequel should blow your mind.

Weirdly I can't actually remember the original's music at all, but the sequel does a very good job of signalling that kind of thing thanks to its (awesome) dynamic music. Try listening out more for that as the same kind of thing may be done in a more subtle manner. Or maybe it doesn't use music like that at all which would explain why I can't remember it.

I think the characters themselves are just a bit shit, anyway. I didn't really clock the voice acting as being bad, but that might be because I was distracted by wanting to put the database guy's head through his monitor. Fortunately the modern stuff is a minimal part of the game. It's getting to live in Renaissance Italy that makes the game really awesome for me, and thankfully I've not gone back to the modern world since plugging into the past (must be 12–15 hours in now). It almost seems like they shouldn't have bothered with the modern stuff because the game could easily stand up without it — but then I do like the awesome UI it justifies. And maybe it'll become more relevant later on. Or they could do an Assassin's Creed 1 and inch it forward to be continued in the next game. Also, I think I'm just under halfway through and fuck me this game is big. At first I thought it was a bit of a GTA4-style deal where it's just one large city unlocked a section at a time. Instead it's... considerably bigger. And unlike the original there's actually lots of fun stuff to do in them, with missions making imaginative GTA-esque use of the world.

You think so? I didn't have any issues with the voice acting, although it keeps weirding me out how the main character in the modern world — which is thankfully only seen for like 1% of the game — has the same voice as Uncharted's Drake (both actor and performance).

I can barely imagine it being playable with a keyboard/mouse to be honest. Third-person games generally control better with game pads in my experience, and Assassin's Creed 2 demands a lot from you when it comes to accurately navigating the environment. Button-wise you'd probably be OK as it uses context-sensitive triggers extensively (you'll have to train yourself to get used to this rather than having separate buttons bound to everything), however not having the directional fidelity of the analogue stick will cause problems. Not that you shouldn't get it on the PC, of course. However I'd be inclined to do what I did and get the Microsoft wireless receiver so you can connect a 360 pad to it.

God man, I was stuck on one earlier for like 45 minutes and it was only the sixth or some shit. Reminds me of adventure games where just one horrendous puzzle can do you in for ages, but similarly satisfying when you do crack it. And yes, this game is a tremendous accomplishment. While I didn't play the original to anywhere near the end, I did give it some considerable hours and it never really hooked me. I just didn't feel very invested in what was going on, and the gameplay didn't really do much for me. It felt like you had a good story, a great feat of technical engineering, and decent gameplay — but nothing holding it all together. ... which makes it remarkable how much I am enjoying this. It looks like they basically went through Grand Theft Auto and Fable 2 and worked out what makes those games so enjoyable. Particularly notable is the pillaging of the engaging way that GTA4 drives its story forward with rewardingly enjoyable cutscenes and intertwines loads of different characters, combined with how it reveals the world to you gradually. Or to put it another way, everything the game has to offer is revealed to you slowly in a very rewarding manner rather than being all thrown at you early on. I remember reading about one of the AS1 developers saying how they really regretted revealing all your targets and shit so early on in the original, and rightfully so. Doing it Fable 2 style and starting off with a naive 17-year-old twat who learns the ropes along with you is a much better way to go. Shit, it's great. Get it regardless of your AS1 opinion.

Okay, I finally started playing Assassin's Creed 2 about a week ago. Holy shiiiit... But no. Uncharted 2 is still my GOTY thus far, however this is an exceedingly close second — a judgement I never expected to make seeing as I thought the original was a bit shit.

Heh, the development schedule for TMI sounds mental. You should double that next time. ;

HL2 would definitely be up there, but I don't think I could call it my favourite of the whole decade. I'd put Beyond Good and Evil above it, for example.

Clearly 2010 would be a member of the 2010s and not the 2000s.

Wow, check this out: They have it running at 1080p through an emulator. While the frame rate is raped and various animations are wrecked, it's clearly so much more vivid and generally awesome when you haven't got jaggies assaulting your eyes all over the place. This pretty much renders my previous complaints about the use of 3D redundant. It's not really the 3D at all, it's the fact the console is so shit at rendering it on a HD TV.

I just played it through for the third time on EXTREME during this past couple of weeks, incidentally. And holy shit! It is surprising how much difference it makes. Whereas on normal and even hard you can kind of deal with being spotted by the enemy and just run away, on extreme it's totally unforgiving — very much like the previous games. As in a few shots and you're dead. So you're really forced into examining every potential action really carefully by surveying ahead, which takes me back to playing Commandos on the PC. It's really high stakes too because you can't do that CQC ground slam thing on extreme without alerting nearby enemies, inevitably resulting in death. I've had some of the tensest gaming moments ever while playing it on extreme. For example I took some guy out in the most fancy, awesome way ever, but then while getting out of there like a twat I made a loud footstep and someone downstairs heard. He came to look around, saw nothing dodgy, and began to walk away. Then my heart sank as I realised he'd see the corpse's legs poking from round the corner — so I immediately sprinted towards the bastard and just as he realised what was going on and went for his radio I grabbed him and threw him into the wall. The game has been full of awesome moments on extreme. If you ever replay it, make sure it's on extreme. Hard isn't a great deal different to normal, but fuck me on extreme their vision and hearing is basically on par with yours and the fact that it's so difficult to deal with alert situations really gets your adrenalin going and makes you feel like Jack Bauer when you successfully pull off a perfect panic move. I really like how MGS approaches difficulty. I replayed Twin Snakes, MGS2, and MGS3 before this and while they all do the obvious such as increase enemy damage, the way that the AI is improved and many things are subtly altered (enemies in unexpected places, less rations, certain items missing, etc) really makes it a whole new experience every time — with more emphasis on stealth.