Ben X

Welcome back! Ironically, I remember you, oubliette!

Very good answers! Though the one to "are you a horror fan?" was a bit wordy I'd be interested to hear what you think of this recent fan film: EDIT: the stuff they say about the sequel to the 2009 film seems totally inaccurate. Apparently there was going to be a sequel in 2010 but that got cancelled. Then there was going to be another reboot this year, not a sequel (though seeing as there doesn't seem to be a single film journo on the planet who knows what 'reboot' actually means, this might be inaccurate), but it got cancelled as well. mother! took its release date but I find it unlikely that it was an either/or choice for the studio. Apparently it's rumoured that it was cancelled because Rings did badly.

I think I got given it at the start of the DLC with no ammo, but then there were some different types of sniper rifle right at the end that for some reason used different ammo, and I may have got confused and swapped them over That boss thing sounds cool, but I gave up on stealthing my way through an entire level at the start of the game! Also, I haven't bothered with getting CASIE, but is using it on the person here any different to those in the main game? I tried the typhoon on one boss (the woman) and it was useless, so I've been sticking to the heavy rifle. Even the laser rifle didn't seem to do anything in the most recent boss fight...

Wow, yeah, they really vary their episode lengths: 60/56/45/54/42/34/52/53/48/52. I think I heard ages ago that HBO shows could do that too due to there being no particular scheduling restraints or something. I agree, it would be great if more shows had the freedom to pick the correct length for an episode.

Movies that should not be in the lowest rating: Goodfellas, Jason X.

Well it made me swap my souped-up sniper rifle for a crappy vanilla one so I'm very annoyed. What kind of reactivity are you thinking of, though, @Jutranjo? I don't think I noticed anything particularly different, reactivity-wise... Anyway, I'm past it now, and there was another good level where I got to use all my stuff, then a boss fight which was a little annoying but fine, then a ton of linear stuff. I'm pretty much onto the last level now, according to a walkthrough I glanced at. I also happened to see that I'll get a chance to buy some more augs and that the Typhoon aug will come in useful for the next boss fight, which will be the first time in the game. The Typhoon shoots out a bunch of bullets in a 360 spread to an 8m radius. The problem is, if you've let enemies get that close to you, you're already fucked - the combat is simply not designed for you to get in those situations. They really should have made it shoot off a few homing rockets or something. Have you been playing much, @Kolzig?

Goddamn, this gets worse and worse. First I get sent to a guy for some weapons then it turns out he's going to charge me - the one thing I've been aiming to get out of this is a ton of cash I can spend in the game proper, so it grates that they took all my ammo away then made me buy more. Then I have to do a ton of backtracking across almost the entire level. This includes a large multi-level circular room which you have to go round half of, up some stairs, round half again, up some more stairs, round half of again (while avoiding bots and turrets) to get through, and TWO identical scanning points where you have to stand still for 30 seconds. So far: Ammo guy to morgue - through most of the level including the round room and the scan points Morgue back to ammo guy for a key - through most of the level including the round room and the scan points Back to the morgue - through most of the level including the round room and the scan points From the morgue to a lab - long-ass elevator ride From the lab back to the ammo guy - long-ass elevator ride, through most of the level including the round room and the scan points And I'm not even sure if I'm done yet! This is absolutely dreadful; if I'd purchased this as DLC I'd be annoyed enough; as I didn't purchase it and am still being forced to play through it to get the rest of my game, I'm fuming! (The only thing stopping me from giving up right now is that the level before this happened - Stowing Away - was very fun.) I don't think I've ever bought DLC, but if this is the general standard, no wonder Minerva's Den is regularly referred to as the best DLC ever.

£17million west London mansion goes on sale - but sellers will only accept Bitcoin as payment

This episode of Kevin Smith's podcast, where he interviews Megan Phelps-Roper (an ex-member of the Westboro Baptist Church) is really insightful: http://www.smodcast.com/channel/smodcast?audio=384 One interesting snippet: joining Twitter contributed a lot towards Megan questioning the WBC, partly because the character limit forced her to eschew the attention-grabbing insults and focus on the ideology, which in turn allowed her and others to understand and logically argue against the church's beliefs.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your spoiler there, but I'm certainly not going out of my way to level up again. I'm getting through this level as quickly as possible and expecting to be returned to the aug level I was at. If these aug kits I'm picking up are temporary, that's fine. (I was considering levelling up all the stuff I didn't have before just in case I was allowed to keep them, but that would have made the level much harder and wasn't guaranteed to work. It sounds like I made the right choice.) However they handle it, though, it's still a very bad design choice to depower the player almost completely at this stage of the game. Perhaps if they'd been more generous with early levelling up it would work better, but as it is I've spent most of the game frustrated at my lack of powers!

I got around 70-80% through the game and, as per usual, this is the point of the game where I'm starting to feel like a super-agent. I've got a laser-gun so I can finally take down the armoured enemies with relative ease, I can hack bots and turrets to kill enemies and I can fall long distances. I still can't sprint for more than 4 seconds, and if I run out of candy bars all my cloaking and take-down powers are useless, but I'm getting there. And then they pull the classic 'take away all your stuff' move. Suddenly I'm on a very linear level on a ship full of crates with no powers and having to save-scum through the exact stealth and platforming route laid out by the devs, kill by kill. All the weapons and augs I'd spent the whole game gathering and balancing are gone. They give a few aug points back to you and all your weapons but no ammo, so you're forced back to basics. There's a hint that if I get to a LIMB clinic I'll be able to go back to exactly what I had before, so if they do that straight after this level it won't be too bad, but will that be the case and will they give me all my ammo back too? It's an infuriating thing for the devs to do as I approach the end stretch of the game. I found out after a little research that this is in fact the poorly-received DLC that has been inserted into the middle of the Director's Cut. What a bone-headed decision. I probably wouldn't have minded if they'd given me all my stuff back - sure I'd be overpowered for this section, but it might have been a nice break in the game to just rip through a more Half-Life/Modern Warfare level without breaking a sweat. As it is I almost rage-uninstalled. If they don't get me back on track directly after this section, I still might.

Yeah. The game regularly has rooms full of boxes (be they lockers, sleeping pods or whatever) for you to laboriously go through looking for money (which you have to because some quests require you to pay up thousands of creds).

Hmmm, I'll try and be careful of spoilers as you're playing along, kolzig! I won't be talking much story though, so should be fine. I've got to the next city hub now, and have levelled up a bit. Because of my new augs and weaponry, the game is starting to feel more enjoyable - the firefights are more manageable and the cover-system is actually quite cool if you make sure to get yourself in a good position and use health regen and cover a lot. Some of the quests are okay, some are either dull or confusing. For one I'm on at the moment, I'm supposed to use a non-lethal takedown, but I can't actually figure out how to do one of those. Firstly, both my takedown modes are lethal, and secondly the option doesn't pop up when I sneak up behind him [EDIT: ah ha, ok, I think the issue was I didn't have enough battery power left for a takedown after cloaking into his apartment. Also apparently one of the takedowns is non-lethal, I'll have to take another look at that]. For another, it required me to hack a terminal in a place where I was guaranteed to get swarmed by enemies but acted as if I'd be sauntering out of the place. I'm going to finish off the secondary quests I've got open, then I think I'll stick to the story quests for a while. This is a problem I find with RPGs, or RPG elements - the best strategy is to push through all the boring secondary stuff at the start to get yourself powered up enough to enjoy the main game. It even leaks through to games like Psychonauts or Rage. The story is still pretty dull. I'm kind of waiting for a huge revelation to blow my mind, rather than the various strata of corporate espionage I'm working through now. The setting is kind of cool and detailed, but aside from the future-renaissance fashion and black/gold colour scheme it's the usual cyberpunk stuff. I'm getting pretty sick of clubs and brothels and strip-clubs. At least have a male pole-dancer or something if you're going to stick with the Duke Nukem settings! I think I'm enjoying the game overall? It has the classic Deus Ex problem of playing as a cool dude superhuman but never really feeling in control of the situation.

You could do it in Th1ef? I don't think I was ever aware of that. As I remember it, though, you couldn't see where you were on the map, so I always had trouble reconciling the hand-drawn maps with the actual levels and notes probably wouldn't have helped. It's one of those things that would be easy enough IRL but the disconnect of video games renders difficult. Another Deus Ex example is when they say "yeah, this dude lives on X street in the Y complex on the 4th floor", and irl you would be able to follow those instructions using prior world knowledge, shorthand notes, maps, street signs, GPS, asking strangers for directions, etc, but the relative low-fidelity of a game's visuals and world detail plus the level design often being geared towards aethetics over function and clarity makes what is an ostensibly simple task quite daunting. The cyborg trappings make this all the more galling, as putting all the hyperlinks, overlays and such in would absolutely fit with the UI and story. At least in Thief it's justified that you probably would only have a crappy bit of paper with some scrawlings on it (although I'm sure some creative UI design could minimise the dissonance).

I'm in Detroit now and it's opened up into a proper sprawling level now, which is cool. There are still the usual Deus Ex problems (which may be common to RPGs, I dunno), like feeling obliged to do a ton of rather dull secondary missions in order to rank up a bit, and being given tons of clues and information that I can never wrangle into a clear strategy. Honestly, what I'd like is a map with labels on it, possibly labels I can make myself when I find a point of interest, and a list of pertinent info I've found out from conversations, emails etc, ideally with each bit of info having a hyperlink to a map location if it mentions it (or let me create a hyperlink to one of my own POIs so it feels more like I'm putting the pieces together). It may be a little hand-holdy but I'd prefer it to having to scan through dozens of emails every time I want to remind myself of something, or having a pen and paper ready to note down the vague directions NPCs give me. I found a map of secret entrances and stuff in a detective's office that I snuck into, and I really wish Jensen's UI had scanned that and applied it to my overall map because I just could not contextualise it. The story and setting isn't half as interesting as Invisible War so far...

Playing through my FPSes, I wish more designers would 'protect me from myself'. As I mentioned in my thread, all too often the easiest path is to stick to shotgun/machine-gun depending on ammo, pistol if you're desperate. A lot of games give you all these fancy weapons and never encourage their use.

Sadly, normal usage is incorrect, as it is with 'reboot' and a ton of other neologisms. That definition just doesn't make sense, as I outlined above. The example the google definition (which comes from Oxford Dictionaries, apparently) gives - "we're given a retcon for Wilf's absence from Donna's wedding in ‘The Runaway Bride’: he had Spanish Flu" - illustrates why! As I said, if you use this definition, every piece of relayed information of a narrative is a ret-con.

I don't know who this Dan guy is, but I agree with him!

'Ret-con' is getting misused in the Blade Runner thread! Revealing something undisclosed in previous films is not a ret-con. The reveal at the end of Empire Strikes Back is not a ret-con. If that were the case, every piece of relayed information within a single film would be a ret-con! A ret-con is when the audience is asked to ignore a previously established fact, with no in-universe justification. So in Red Dwarf, where previously it was stated that Lister and Kochanski only spoke 15 words to each other in their lives, but in season 7 the writers bring her on as a regular character and decide that actually they had a full romantic relationship, that's a ret-con.

I gave Zeno Clash a little longer but have now quit. Great art design but rubbish everything else. Forum thread Contemporary review (as with a lot of these games, reviewers tend to forgive a lot for an interesting and well-realised setting) A piece on the art design/tech by the Dead End Thrills guy post-mortem Next: Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Director's Cut) I've played a little of this, and it's generally cool. It's got a Robocop vibe with a smattering of Blade Runner (and apparently there are some fairly overt references to the former in the game). It certainly has a lot of Deus Ex trappings: sombre cutscenes and growly monotonous voice-acting; nice art design that is let down a little by certain tech issues; the option of stealth or shooting, without either being top-notch mechanically; secondary objectives but a sense of missing out on them due to crappy maps and notes (this time there is a full, auto-updating level map - hooray! - but it doesn't help you with secondary objectives and it controls really badly). There's a cover-system now, but it's too underpowered to be very useful for stealth or shooting. I'm only on the first level, which feels relatively linear, so I expect the game will open up a bit soon and also let me start augmenting to help the gameplay along.

+1 Another good way to troll Google Maps would be to set up scale models in the right place, so it looks like there's a massive gothic castle in the distance of your suburban street shot, or whatever.

"If only those brains could tell of what happened there," thought the grandson of one of the brains, as he added the finishing touches to his latest online-toaster design. #tragictimeloops

Yeah, pretty bad trailer. I think most trailers are bad, but they probably always have been. Example of another problem with trailers: before the Mother! screening I saw at least three trailers that made me think "cool-looking film, but I feel like I've seen all of it now so not going to bother with it".

Another genre switch-up for the X-Men franchise: a teen horror type thing set around the Apocalypse point of the timeline:

Did you not think Deadpool felt fresh amongst all the other Marvel movies (ie MCU and non-MCU)? If Star Wars were attempting that breadth of tone across its movies it would probably go a long way to solving the fatigue people are feeling - as it is, they're getting rid of directors like Lord/Miller who try to do something like that. EDIT: I don't want to take this thread off-topic - we can always start a Marvel movies thread as we've only got the telly one - but it strikes me that with Deadpool alongside First Class, Days Of Future Past and Logan, Fox is the studio doing the most interesting stuff with their mega-franchise.