lobotomy42
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Posts posted by lobotomy42
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Finished this today. In general, it was quite good. I loved the character dynamic, and the gameplay was "fine." Nothing memorable, but nothing ruinous, either. For all this game does well, though, there is one thing about Enslaved that gets my goat.
Enslaved should be the textbook example of How Not To End a Video Game.
After 13 chapters that essentially did everything they needed to, chapter 14 shows up and is just sort of there. "We need some kind of dramatic ending sequence," you can hear some producer say five weeks this game is supposed to be finished. "How about a second giant robot shows up and fights the giant robot you're in!"
"Well, ok," says the imaginary game designer, "I guess we can do that. Can it at least be a giant scorpion, though? We've kind of been going for an animal theme."
"Yeah, yeah, sure, as long as that Monkey dude says 'I will end you' right before the finish or something like that. They kids, they love that. Oh, and make sure you squeeze in a Dramatic Sacrifice by Beloved Secondary Character. People go apeshit for that. And it really drives home the gravitas, you know?"
Then, after a mostly-meaningless fight between you and the scorpion robot, the Epilogue pops up and suddenly control of the game seems to have been wrenched away and given to Very Pleased With Himself Lead Writer.
"You see, " begins the Lead Writer, "I've been very restrained about explaining the context behind my post-apolocalyptic setting here, wouldn't you agree? Sure, an Empire State Building here, some Images of Life Before there, etc., but I've resisted the urge to write reams and reams of exposition where I detail everything that has ever happened. Isn't that clever of me?"
"I suppose so," I say out loud, while my wife wonders who I'm talking to.
"And now that you've admired all my careful restraint and finished the game, wouldn't you like me to unleash all that exposition I've been holding back?" continues the Lead Writer.
"Actually, I'd be much more interested in seeing what Trip and Monk--" is as much as I'm able to get out before my imaginary writer takes the reins again.
"YOU SEE," says Lead Writer, "the slaves weren't really slaves at all! Because it's a simulation! The mechs force the humans to live fake 20th century lives in a computer simulation! What a clever twist, don't you think?"
"Isn't that just...I mean, you've seen the movie The Matrix, right?"
There is no reply. The epilogue ends, a Frenchie song plays over the credit sequence and I am unceremoniously dumped back at the main menu.
</scene>
But seriously folks, aside from that bit of the game, Enslaved was great.
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Just started playing recently, without really looking into it too much because I wanted everything to be a surprise. First thing that struck me, I was not expecting the game's tone to be so grim! Baldur's Gate was serious at times, but I remember a bit of winking at the camera too. PoE seems a lot more po-faced (Sorry). Although I haven't played much, so maybe there's a lot of humour and I just haven't got to it yet.
It does remind me of BG in a bunch of other ways, though, like how the difficulty wobbles a bit from area to area, or how at low levels bears will ruin your day. Despite my grumblings I'm loving the game so far, seems super cool. My character is an elven thief scholar, because.
I think that's the biggest difference between BG and PoE. It's hard to remember now, because it has embedded itself so firmly in our consciousness as an "epic" RPG, but Baldur's Gate (especially the first one) was almost more comedy than drama. If you read all the flavor text, talked to all the characters, etc., then it felt like a downright parody of RPG tropes. The journal entries, in particular, were written in this first-person sarcastic voice. BG2 tuned this way down and generally took itself a lot more seriously (like, moody teenager seriously, to be honest.)
I don't particularly mind the change -- PoE is much more, um, "Obsidian"-feeling than Bioware-feeling -- but I can see how some would.
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Yeah, I remember thinking when they announced the name that it sounded like some weird crossover game between Broken Sword and Dragon Age. I still think that. Oh well.
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Man, I can't wait to start this. All the Obsidian 2s are my favorites, BG2, much more than 1, NWN2, much more than 1 (especially the NWN2 expansions).
Nitpick: Although some Black Isle folks may have been involved, Obsidian didn't even exist at the time of Baldur's Gate 2. It was Bioware's baby.
But I agree: Kotor 2, Neverwinter Nights 2 (and especially the expansions) and even New Vegas ("Fallout3 2") were significant departures and improvements from their predecessors once you ignore the bugs.
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When? I'm honestly asking, because I don't remember them explicitly making that statement. They probably have, but talking about if they'll *ever* make a game for another platform is a bit different from actually talking about a platform and stating their immediate goals for it, which is to not just port games.
I'm not saying they won't *ever* port games to mobile.. But it seems like their current goal is to make new games specifically for smartphones.
The "never" statements are indeed a few years old, but as recently as last year they were still insisting they had no plans for developing original games for mobile. My guess is, once the mobile money starts pouring in, porting old games to smartphones will be too hard to resist. So when they say they're not doing ports, what they really mean is they're not doing ports this year.
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They've explicitly stated they're not doing straight-up ports of existing games.
They also explicitly stated they would never make mobile games.
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I'm just totally bummed out about this, for a couple of reasons.
One, it says to me that the writing is on the wall for home video game consoles and handhelds.
Two, it means Nintendo is backing out of an assurance they made really only a year or two ago that this would never, ever happen over Iwata's dead body. If they're already walking that statement back, it means they're losing control of their own business niche to a degree no one's anticipated. It means the Wii U isn't just another a GameCube - a small failure before the next big comeback - but that Nintendo is actually struggling to find a direction for the company to go in.
I'm usually the first to express skepticism at Nintendo's naysayers, but nothing about this situation looks good.
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Great episode! Maybe you guys play a lot more, or maybe you're just smarter than me, but you always notice connections between the cards and potential plays that never occur to me. It's really interesting to hear your take on the new IDs - I was convinced out of the gate that Argus Security would be super strong, but now I'm convinced it's mediocre. I just can't trust myself!
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Man, Grim Fandangooooooo
I was actually planning on NOT getting this game because I've played it so many times before that I feel like I've memorized huge chunks of dialogue and puzzles that would make replaying it not worth it.
But listening to you guys complain about it is making want to go through it all over again!
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Is anyone actually able to log in to Club Nintendo (US) at this point?
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Is it funny? I recall the Christmas DLC being...not so funny.
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I'm into the Los Angeles portion of the game now (that shouldn't be a spoiler, I think, since it's in the marketing materials.) It definitely gets more talky and less shooty as it goes on, but the game is seriously missing some narrative thrust. The major quest of Act 1 is
hook up some radio towers so we can find out what's going on
and the major quest of Act 2 seems to be
hook up some radio towers so we can find out what's going on
. The individual areas are interesting, and have some reasonably well-told small stories within the universe, but the overall narrative of the game does nothing to push you forward. It's not like good RPGs, where I feel like I'm betraying the mission a bit when I go off and do sidequests, it's more like they counted on their players to be so interested in sidequests that they don't bother giving you a reason to do anything, other than "oh, the next section is sort of that way."
I'm still having fun with it, and I appreciate their commitment to the world and the reactivity of your decisions. It just feels sometimes like they set up an interesting world with interesting characters and then left any actual story-telling plot work to the player's imagination.
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There's a lot of attention to detail so far in the world description. Backers get a special ability that just adds flavor text to the world, which is something I wouldn't mind if they just let everyone have (and that might be possible, because you just unlock it with a hidden conversation option you type in).
Shit, we do? I must have missed that KS update. Now I'm going to go back and look for it...
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I'm an hour or so in, it's pretty much exactly what I'd hoped for! Lots of opportunities to use non-combat skills.
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"Club Nintendo members who have achieved Platinum status between July 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014, have registered Nintendo 3DS hardware or software, and have opted in to receive emails from Club Nintendo will receive an email containing four download codes for the demo, according to Nintendo's press release."
I think I opted out of email, which probably disqualifies me. Boo!
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So I finally finished this, and
I agree with a lot of what's already been said. I stand my comment from earlier in this thread that this season felt quite unnecessary in comparison to Season One. ("Well, Walking Dead was a hit, guess we have to make more!" It works for Star Wars, but not for Casablanca) The episodes were disjointed, Clementine was illusion-breakingly competent for small child, and in general the characters came and went far too quickly for me to care dramatically about their deaths. By episode 3, I had already started to lose track of who was who, and when Luke mentioned that he was the only survivor left from his original group in episode 5, he was basically putting a giant "I'm about to die" hat on.
I disagree about Kenny being wrong repeatedly in this season. He's repeatedly proven *right* about a whole host of things, from the need to resist Carver & Co down to Arvo being untrustworthy. (Also, speaking of Arvo, did Telltale really have to borrow Hollywood's "untrustworthy Russians" trope? Lazy stereotyping in an otherwise smart series, IMHO) Just because Kenny is *blunt* about being right, everyone makes him about to be this sociopath, when really he's just an asshole, who calls the terrible world he's in like he sees it and doesn't see the need for being diplomatic. Even so, I killed Kenny in the end because Jane tricked me, the player, in addition to Kenny about the baby. Thinking about it makes his whole arc and appearance this season more frustrating, though. I was at peace with the fact that he died at the end of S1, then they miraculously bring him back to life, just so I can watch him break down to the point where I'm manipulated into killing him?
And what happened to Christa? What I thought was going to be a huge driving narrative push this season was basically dropped completely. Why does S2 leave her fate ambiguous if it's never going to mention it again? There was also potential here to draw parallels between Christa surviving, presumably at the expense of her child in Episode 1, and Rebecca's child surviving at the expense of her life, but the game never seemed to go there. Oh, and speaking of the baby...
The baby surviving while all these adults are fighting and complaining about lack of food was by far the most improbable part of this season. Newborns eat *constantly*, like every hour, and they scream when they don't get fed. But here in Walking Dead-land, this baby's mom dies after a day or two, and is carried around in the freezing cold by a bunch of people who seem to make no effort to feed her at all. Kenny and Jane hate each other so much that they just have to fight it out to the death, but the baby can be left in a truck in the freezing cold and be fine? Riiight. This tops even the part where Clementine is shot in the chest after while still recovering from hypothermia and survives, seemingly without any medical help at all.
I agree that it needed some puzzles, too, not because adventure games "need puzzles" but because it needed some spacer moments where the player could just take some time to *go do some stuff* instead of having another heated conversation.
I don't mean to be totally down on the series, I still think it has some great writing and fantastic beat moments, and Telltale is one of the best in the business, but I think this season needed some serious design changes. Clementine should not have been the PC, at least not so young. It raises too many narrative problems and draws comparisons to Season One. This season was mostly disappointing not because of the various missteps I stated above but because of the seeming missed opportunity. I think it would have been more satisfying if they'd just completely shifted focus to a different group and we'd seen a dynamic other than "Group tries to stick together but instead everyone slowly dies." (The DLC was actually pretty promising at this sort of direction, and then turned out to be almost a complete red herring in regards to Season Two.) I get it - in a world run with zombies, it's not the zombies who are a threat, it's the people. This is a strong theme and it worked well in S1, but christ this series needs something else to say or else it should not be. It's not that there aren't options: What does hope look like in this world? What does the future look like? Is there going to be a new society built that can accommodate for the existence of walkers? If not, how many people are left - the population of non-walkers must be dwindling by now. I would like to see a high-functioning group wrestle with the fact that, even if they do everything right, and kill all the walkers and *don't* have any major disasters or conflicts, they are all going to die from the simple inability to produce or find enough food. I hope Season Three moves in this direction.
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Man some of those Nintendo Directs are really awkward to watch. Those poor developers' faces look like they're being forced at gunpoint to demo the game.
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Didn't the latest Fire Emblem have like a bathhouse scene? Wonder if they'll include a bathing suit outfit for Lucina. Rut roh! (disclaimer: i have no idea if this happened i have never played fire emblem i just remember some bikini images being a big deal)
I believe it was a "beach mission" DLC.
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From the panel, it sounded like it was a requirement that the tank controls stay in as an option, but that they were also working with point and click man to support that.
I must have missed that. Thanks!
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I think you guys are being too cynical about the internet filter thing. Keeping your kids away from the seedier parts of the internet is something many parents would still like to do. The alternative would just be to remove web access entirely. I don't think content controls, even if they default to "on" and require a token credit card charge to remove, are particularly onerous.
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Thank god for the preservationist attitude. This is one game that does not need much changed. Honestly, I wish they'd keep the tank controls in, but I realize I'm in the minority on that one.
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The Wii U Sports Club is, surprisingly, worlds better than the Wii original. Totally remade to work with the Wii Remote+, and tennis at least plays *much* better as a result, to say nothing of the HD, online play, etc. And being able to rent the games is not a bad touch (if you know you're only going to use them for that one "Wii Sports party")
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How is that effect accomplished?
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Also try to monitor people's health constantly. In my experience, all of my characters will spend the majority of the fight at 100% health, but then suddenly start to drop incredibly fast once they start getting attacked. For the weaker bard-like characters, they can go out in just 2-3 hits. So once you see that health bar drop, poultice up immediately, because there's no mid-fight revive.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
in Video Gaming
Posted
I am only familiar with the wikipedia article on Journey to the West, but from what I can tell, the game's relationship to that story is mostly just borrowing a few of the more well-known motifs. Which is fine. I have no problem with that. I was just disappointed that a game that had done such a good job of being understated and letting things be implied rather than explicitly spoken suddenly decided to go into FULL EXPOSITION MODE at the last moment and explain away the universe in an incredibly uninteresting way. Honestly, the ending could have been stuck on any Standard Sci-fi Video Game, it had so little to do with what came before it.