Ben X
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Everything posted by Ben X
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I laughed out loud when Hop said,
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This is all reassuring, thanks everyone! I'm sure I'll find something to grumble about though. Speaking of which, that guy Mandalore who did the EYE video review that eot linked to a while back (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AScCVzENcjs) has done a fair few reviews of games I've played for this thread, and he's the opposite of me in that he puts a huge amount of effort into wrestling the best out of even the most obtuse or flawed games. Fun watches.
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Just to clarify, it wasn't 'nostalgia' that I didn't like about the show. As I said after watching the first season, "Stranger Things is well-made and pretty enjoyable but it really is a collection of tropes and 80s references (which I'm kind of over now) to the point where it does nothing original or unpredictable." Re. your spoilers:
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Oh yeah, swords. Another damn melee system with a timed-block mechanic. I only got the chance to try it once and I kind of managed it, so hopefully it won't be another irritating one. I played up to the point where I got DISHONORED and also imprisoned. The art design is great - painterly lighting, slightly caricatured character design, and an industrial England/mediterranean/Discworld-y feel to the setting. And by far the best video game rats I've ever seen - great models full of character that scamper about, sit up and look around, wash themselves, and when they run into a dark corner all you can see is their little white eyes glowing out at you. It's good at teaching you about the mechanics and setting in an integrated narrative way, too.
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Okay, I got to the point in Receiver where I'd managed to absorb a couple of tapes and shoot a couple of robots, but it's just a few too many challenging/irritating mechanics piled on top of each other. I was hoping for a Surgeon Simulator 2013 feel, this is more like Operation Flashpoint Extreme. I liked the idea more than the execution. Forum thread here: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7869-receiver Meanwhile, Jut and I had to give up on EYE for now. I don't know if anyone else has it and would like to set up a co-op server? Single-player-wise, it's onto Dishonored. I'm hoping that I enjoy this more than Thief et al - this is another of those games where I want to like it but I may not be able to get past some stuff. Looking Glass games, basically. I also feel like I might be a little RPG/immersive simmed out after DXHR - if I get the impression that taking a break for a bit in order to enjoy the game is required, I'll have to switch to Arkham City or Max Payne or something as a palate-cleanser.
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I gave both EYE and SS3 a bit of a try. EYE is indeed very complicated, and the best attempt at tutorials is a long list of badly-labeled, short silent videos you can watch. I have some stuff half-figured out, but I suspect I will indeed keep this to co-op only. Jut and I tried today already but it was rather difficult (of course) to get a co-op game going without looking into port forwarding and stuff, so we had to put it off for at least a few hours. Serious Sam 3 starts off rather slowly, feeling more like a sci-fi CoD game at first as you get a cutscene involving your helicopter full of dickhead marines (thankfully Sam has not gone full Nukem, although he quips more regularly and sounds more like a Muppet than I remember) getting shot down, then you make your way through the alleyways of war-torn Egypt as alien spaceships fly overhead and zap high-rise buildings to rubble in the distance. I guess this is designed to slowly acclimatise modern gamers to the Serious Sam style of FPS, slowly drawing them out of the corridors into bigger arenas and waves of enemies. It was great to turn a corner and see three dozen purple-topped dudes running at me. The graphics are nice enough, all of the enemies have been updated very faithfully. Now I'm into full-on SS gameplay, it feels pretty faithful too, although there seem to be a couple of new irritating enemy types, either acid-spitting ceiling bugs or long-range sniper type guys who are super-hard to hit. I think I'm finding it a bit harder too, though I may just be rusty. I've just hit a really tough part with a huge wave of bombheads, and after a fair few tries I decided I might put this on the co-op pile too, if anyone else has it! So, this means I'm going to move onto Receiver as my current single-player game.
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Just finished season 2, and I enjoyed it a lot more than the first. I think it's because it feels like it's built up its own mythology now and is working off that, rather than just copy-pasting a bunch of concepts and story beats together. It still references a ton of stuff but it doesn't straight up rip it off (well, a lot less anyway!). There are some different issues (season spoilers - ), and it is still very tropey (though I find this much more palatable than copy-pasting), but overall it's a lot stronger. I think I could recommend the series as a whole now, with the proviso of the first season's lack of identity.
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Modest Tech: The NX Generation (Nintendo Switch)
Ben X replied to dartmonkey's topic in Video Gaming
I love this gif because Tim is doing some pitch-perfect b-movie acting here -
Possible mnemonic (related to Homer's Odyssey,, not Mario's): one dude, two ships. Can anyone come up with a Mario-related one?
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I think if we've got Penny Marshall, those two are fine! Amy Heckerling. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Clueless and I Could Never Be Your Woman are great, and Heckerling also wrote the last two. (If you're into Bruce Willis Babies, she also did Look Who's Talking, but I watched that recently and ooof it does not stand up to my nostalgia.) The Wachowskis. I'm not as big a fan of their film output as a lot of people, but I loved Sense8 and Cloud Atlas. I will definitely watch anything they put out.
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I liked the look of Ragnarok from the trailer, but I wasn't a big fan of GotG and thought its sequel was even worse, so that made me a little less enthused for this...
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Yeah, I think it might be. I'll want to play at least some of that on my own, but maybe at some point I'll add it to the roster of co-op games and install Receiver too! (Uh, Receiver's not a co-op game, is it?)
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I played a few hours of DXMD. It looks great - the leap forward in 5 years is huge. The UI has been revamped, some changes for better, some for worse. Story is just as boring as the last one! I couldn't really be bothered to scrabble round in the opening hours of another DX game just to uninstall when the freebie ran out, though, so I'm moving on. Apart from anything else, my PC was struggling a little - it was pretty impressive when I got it at the end of 2012, but I guess I'll have to get used to turning settings down if I want to play games from, say, 2015 onwards... Moving onwards, I'm going to install both EYE and Serious Sam 3, so I can play the former as co-op and have the latter to play when no one's around. In case I forget due to jumping around a bit, here's what I posted about Rage elsewhere: (4 months later) So there you go. It's hard to find any post-mortems or anything of this game, it seems to have been forgotten about. But hey, we have two forum threads on it!
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Deus Ex Mankind Divided is free to play for the next 30ish hours on Steam! I think I'll have a little go on that while I can, though I'm not going to try to maximise my playtime as I imagine it'll be very similar to the game I just played for 37 hours and only quite liked.
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I think I might wait until all of them are out, then reread the original trilogy (and the other bits and pieces from the universe, if I can get them) before hitting these. Glad to hear it's good, though! I wonder if that BBC tv adaptation is still going to happen. Apparently it was supposed to be out this year but is still in pre-production.
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Re.the fan-film, I thought the premise was pretty good, and it was well-made, but yeah actual Jason is lame in it. I liked some of the hallucination stuff though, that felt fresh.
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Awesome, thanks, I'll take a look at all that and hit you up soon. I think I'll probably futz around with it a tiny bit myself first, but co-op'ing pretty much from the start sounds cool!
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Aaand I'm done. The last level was not only linear but also . Then a final boss fight which entailed moving behind cover to push a few buttons, then a final moral choice between revealing the conspiracy to the world or, um, killing yourself and a couple of the conspirators. Really disappointing. I also missed the chance to speak to two main characters before wrapping the game up because the game didn't mark them as secondary objectives. Though frankly, if it had, I possibly would have skipped them anyway as the writing in this game is as dull and long-winded as the previous ones, but without aliens and shit to pep it up. I enjoyed this game sporadically but it has a lot of flaws and really falls apart at the end. Forum thread Making of vid (also included with the game) vid - Comparing modernisations - DXHR vs Duke Nukem Forever by that guy whose videos we've linked a few times a light-hearted vid on the game that Jut linked to in another thread 2011 post-mortem interview There's also a video playlist of the dev commentary out there, but it's almost 9 hours in total! Next is E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. I think I'll play a little bit to get au fait with the systems then see if anyone (I know Jutranjo suggested it before) is around for co-op.
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Welcome back! Ironically, I remember you, oubliette!
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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.
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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...
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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.
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Movies that should not be in the lowest rating: Goodfellas, Jason X.
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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?
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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.