Ben X

Okay, I'm still breezing through this on Normal. It's fun, but not really very challenging so far. I wonder whether, as this is known as the actiony spinoff of the first game, they intentionally lowered the difficulty. Another niggle is that the tagging isn't as helpful as I remember it being in Far Cry - your radar is a lot smaller, I think. This seems different from Crysis too, again possibly they're encouraging you to run into firefights rather than be all stealthy. I think I'll take the action approach and also try to do stupid stuff like speed up to someone then turn my strength up and punch them to oblivion or throw a turtle at them real hard.

Ah, ok, so it's that the invisibility barely depletes if you're stood still. Also, I've already found the weapon modding stuff and it's relatively simple actually. In fact, I'm going to start again on medium/normal, because I'm waltzing through this at the mo, and that's not really the best way to play Crysis/Far Cry (for the originals, anyway).

After struggling with the third level, I decided to take the tutorial's initial advice and set the difficulty to 'new to FPSes', which rankles a little, but better that than be killed by a grenade with less than a second's warning every two minutes. And, uh, I finished it already. Surprisingly short, and that's including a load of 'follow the NPC' or siege or truck-turret sections filling it out. Speaking of which, it doubles down on FPS tropes as well as 24-style cheesiness pretty quickly. The banter and scenarios get progressively sillier as well; at one point your Captain tells you a playable story from his past (back when he was a 'leftenant', as the subtitles spell it for the Brit characters - not that I should be surprised, as they also spell 'heh heh' as 'hehe') where he shot the main villain's arm off, like this is Shadow Of Mordor or something. The shooter mechanics themselves are pretty solid (except for those stupid grenades) and the AI's impressive, but frankly it's nothing I wasn't doing in TimeShift before I got my powers. It's not a bad game, but I'm surprised at how average it turned out to be. An insanely generous/rose-tinted retrospective (I agree that the Middle East street levels had good level design, though, with just a little bit of non-linearity to all the firefights and routes) Post-mortem interview Post-mortem I've previously played Crysis, and I'm skipping STALKER Clear Sky for reasons previously detailed (as with SoC, I will hopefully at some point play this through on Easy with a ton of mods and a more RPG mindset). Here's what I posted about Crysis at the time, on another forum: ...two years later... [it is pointed out to me that the suit powers recharge a lot faster when you're not moving] So it's onto Crysis Warhead. I've heard that it's basically the best bits of the first game distilled, which is great but I hope they do a full tutorial again, because I barely figured out all the weapon-modding, suit powers and general controls at the time of playing the first game, never mind three years later! I'm almost tempted to give at least some of the original a play again for that reason, plus maybe the fun story overlaps, but I'll resist.

What I also found funny about that was that Oh, I finished and yeah, it's okay.

I've just finished episode 6. It definitely picked up in episode 3, I haven't thought much of the fight scenes in most of these shows except Jessica Jones (I prefer the solid wall-crashing action to the post-Oldboy long takes where you can see the misses), but that was great and there have been a few good ones since then. It is still taking twice as long to do anything as it should, though - still all the meaningless conversations and piece-shuffling - and Weaver hasn't had much to do.

Interesting contrasts in this game so far. On a micro level, it's not as good-looking as I expected - mainly the textures - but the scale is very impressive, with tons of AI, vehicles and scripted events, and a massive showy 'tram-ride' (i.e. an on-rails level where you can look around a bit to take in the sights but that's it, a la the opening of Half-Life). Tone-wise, there's the silly Tom Clancy-ish SAS section to start, with cockney banter and bombastic orchestral score as you run through a sinking ship (the tilting ship is at this point a common FPS trope), but then the aforementioned tram-ride which is brutal - you're a Middle Eastern president, getting dragged through the streets then tied to a post and shot in the face - and the US marine section, again in the Middle East, which feels very real and suffocating. As for gameplay, it's pretty hard - I had to retry the tutorial about 5 times just to get a recommendation of normal difficulty, there's no quicksave, and I'm constantly getting blown up by grenades or shot without warning - and yet you go through large sections by simply following your squad. I generally feel like someone who joined the army by mistake and is blundering through warzones surviving by sheer fluke. Two levels in, a very immersive experience, but for all the linearity a rather fitful game.

Okay, shot at the glowy blue things a few times and finished the game. It was great fun, but it's a shame the fun and invention of the mechanics didn't extend to the setting or story. The opening sequence was quite tantalising, with a lot more sci-fi and the mad scientist villain who apparently insisted on big cheesy neon letters spelling his name out across buildings. Apparently the game was delayed and rehauled multiple times through development; it seems from this brief vid like they swapped meatheaded clunkiness for silent po-facedness at one point when it came to story, which was probably an improvement but not by much. (Also some tank-destroying action there that I never saw.) More stuff: A 2007 Gamasutra dev interview A 2008 Gamasutra postmortem A mention in a 'celebration of 7/10 games' RPS article Contemporary review which I agree with on pretty much all points One of those article mentions that the setting got changed "from steampunk to a much more mass-market gritty 'destroyed beauty' type of thing". Another reveals that there were three separate sets of voice-acting recorded, one of the discarded ones starring Dennis Quaid and Michael Ironside! Niggles aside, really satisfying and fun game. A shame this didn't do better and get a sequel that really made good on its promise. Okay, onto Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare!

I'm finally on the end of game baddy, although I did need to check a walkthrough to discover that - I'm on a rooftop a fair distance away from the evil robot spider thing and figured it was just background detail! I say finally, because the game did eventually start to drag a little towards the end. The flamethrower weapon kept things entertaining for a while, and there were some cool piston things to avoid with slow-mo, but the settings started to get a bit dull (especially the switch-maze factory and air hangar levels, getting shouted at by an incredibly naggy rebel commander every three seconds) and almost no new enemies have been introduced. It's a shame they went with WWII with a bit of steampunk thrown in, the game would have been much improved with some more inventive backdrops - perhaps something a bit more NOLFy or even some wildly different time-periods (maybe they were saving those for a sequel). It did seem like they were moving towards an interesting plot twist where the victorious rebel forces turn out to be arseholes and you have to defeat them as well, but it doesn't look like there'll be time for that. I'm tempted to give it a little try on the hard setting once I complete it, see if it takes away the radar or anything like that.

Got to rush, but still enjoying this. They're just managing to keep it from going stale with new baddies (jetpack baddies! Timesuit baddies who are terrifying!), weapons and some sniping and turret sections etc According to a walkthrough (which I haven't had to use yet), I'm halfway through.

I pretty much gave up on Iron Fist after this. To prep for Defenders, I re-watched Jessica Jones (still great, and I noticed this time that taking the red pill turns Will Simpson into a raging dickhead - clever!) and watched the final episodes of the other three. Now I've watched the first two episodes of Defenders and I shouldn't be surprised but it is another painfully slow one. First episode was . Second episode was . Full of pointless scenes and circular conversations, there's just no flair or excitement here. It finally had some nice , but this is 25% of the season done already! Get a move on! The first Avengers movie had already got its team together and had them capture the villain then lose him again in the amount of minutes you've had so far!

Yes, I mentally applauded that choice! I got the good ending. I decided at the initial Little Sister choice that they hadn't shown sufficient monstrosity for me to be mean so I saved her (they'd egged the Big Daddies on to hurt me but that was it), then she turned all lovely and "thanks mister!" and my moral choice to save the rest was made. I did kill the theatre dude though, as he'd been sending enemies at me. Timeshift is really fun so far! Storywise, it's 'future evil scientist has gone back in time and is taking over the world, you go back to stop him', so it's war-torn alt-1949 with mechs and stuff stomping around. It's very Half-Life 2, down to the megalomaniacal scientist broadcasting creepy messages over tannoy. (Except hilariously, he not only has named everything after himself - KroneKorps, Krone train station, Krone soda probably - but he's also voiced by someone who sounds very much like Maurice LeMarche to the point where it feels like The Brain has finally taken over the world. Hopefully a Rob Paulsen soundalike will show up at some point shouting "NARF".) Feels very derivative but looks very nice. It's also very linear, but it doesn't really matter because your time-suit powers make every encounter feel like a puzzle. You can slow, pause or reverse time, and it's really well balanced so you have to choose your powers and weapons carefully to take out a room of grunts, snipers, turret dudes and tanks. There are also some cool environmental puzzles like pausing time to stop electricity flow or walk on water, or rewinding time to reverse the destruction of a bridge for long enough to get over it. The nice graphics and really solid AI and ragdoll physics make it very satisfying to slow-mo run into a group of enemies, bung a grenade at them and as they slowly pirouette through the air grab the remaining guy's weapon off him and wait for time to spring back before blasting him.

Okay, so turns out I didn't have to do anything special with the Adam, they were just warning me the endgame was coming up. I got my max levels up and got through it pretty much fine - a couple of little sisters were taken down though :'( Although it was cool to be a Big Daddy with a Little Sister running around with you and calling you Mr Bubbles, it actually didn't make any mechanical difference except for reduced damage. So the end of the game went: scavenger hunt, escort mission, boss fight. As everyone says, it really does turn into filler after Ryan dies. Really though, it felt like there were bits of filler throughout. This game totally could have been about half the length. But in general, just so much cool stuff going on and the art design was great all the way through. Thumbs forum thread Idle Thumbs editorial And the subsequent thread Objective review Thumbs forum thread Good to see that it wasn't just me who found chunks of Rapture and character backstory to be lacking. Making-of RPS interview with Ken Levine Making-of Eurogamer article Making-of interview videos from the deluxe edition DVD: So, next would be Portal but I've already played that a ton. Here are a few brief comments I made elsewhere when playing it: There's not much to say that everyone else hasn't experienced already. It's awesome, and reminds me of Half-Life1 in the environments and the storytelling through them. Got to the sentry bots, which are hilarious and terrifying at the same time. I'm finding it very easy so far, though, tutorial level easiness, and it feels like I'm almost done. Brilliant game. It deffo got harder, and the fire bit onwards was all just amazing. The only minor gripes I'd have would be re-use of certain assets (the graffiti, basically - that's the one thing that shouldn't get repeated. I know it's a tiny thing, but surely it would have taken them five minutes to do the same texture with slightly different writing?) and the fact that I didn't get the chance to do quite as many cool actiony things with the portals as I would have liked (using them to bounce up a series of towering platforms, or portalling the ground from beneath a sentrybot so it falls into another one were so cool). Thumbs forum Portal thread Making-of/post-mortem by the devs And a fun quote from Eric Wolpaw: So it's now onto TimeShift! I'd never even heard of this before Laco gifted it to me, so I have zero preconceptions.

Ah ha ha, oops! EDIT: I found one more LS to harvest but am still getting a "it will be very difficult to survive without more Adam" warning. I can't find this other fucking Daddy. One more try then I'm just going to see how far I can get without it. I still don't know what I'm supposed to be doing with the Adam. What if I'd gathered it all then spent it before leaving the level?

Ha, yeah, the RPG problem. Well, I've become a Big Daddy now, which is cool, though it took a lot of scavenger hunting. I've got a Little Sister waiting to go to the next level with me, but a warning came up that I need to harvest more Adam before moving on. I don't know how much, or whether I'm supposed to use it at the Gatherer's Gardens to level up before I move on, and it's a pain in the tits trying to find a Big Daddy in this level. I've found one, but I'm already sick of wandering around looking for stuff in this place. I'm kind of tempted to just move on and if I hit a dead end so be it. I'm going to take a break now anyway as the game has exhausted me; when I come back maybe I'll do a thorough search and get the other two sisters then just level up my health and eve max levels before heading forward.

I just read a (very short) RPS 'have you played?' retrospective where they mentioned that the end boss is disappointingly simple and easy. On the one hand, a shame they didn't do something really clever; on the other, a relief to hear!

Also, like someone else said, all the enemies get increased health at the same time! Thankfully, I've now cured myself and got everything back. I'm now in the bit where your equipped plasmid keeps changing and you can't flip it back, which is actually quite interesting. Seems from walkthroughs like I don't have too long left now, just a couple more sections then the end boss. I've got a lot less thorough now in checking every inch of the maps, so hopefully I can just steam through. I'm also hoping the next batch of antidote will super-power me finally.

Half Life 3 would have you playing as Alyx, with G-Man as your snarky, ever-present NPC companion. It did feel weirdly cathartic reading the Epistle, even though it didn't really tell us anything we couldn't have guessed or didn't know already: grieving for Eli, they go find the Borealis in Antartica, fight Combine forces and (as with the first two main games) get a big trippy, mechanics-changing bit at the end before being put in stasis.

I played a bit more since then, so I've now had the Would You Kindly revelation and gone through the Little Sisters room. The revelation with Ryan was fantastic, the only issue really was that I didn't know who Fontaine was, due to a combination of audio sometimes getting drowned out and a lot of exposition being done by boring audio logs. When this game is showing, it's wonderful; when it's telling, not so much. I think the reasons the game is starting to feel like it's dragging are: It's promised me Ryan a few times now, and once I finally get to him he's replaced The stuff discussed earlier about the game not really allowing me to set traps etc The fact that it's so stingy with upgrades. Empowering me a lot more with stuff like hacking, combat and supplies would freshen up the mechanics a bit. Instead, Fontaine actually just reduced my max health!

This game is too damn long!

There's also "Logan Noir" now. At least this was a special feature on the main blu-ray rather than some money-grabbing extra release (though it has been shown theatrically and the Prince Charles is showing it on Sep 29th/Oct 1st). I hope this doesn't become a fad for studios cynically looking to lend their action movies some extra prestige; it's starting to feel tacky already.

Now you need to watch the anime and replay the game!

Oh shit, it's spreading and the time-gap is closing!

Is there an episode of Star Trek where someone gets stuck in a time-loop, doomed to repeat the same forum post once every three years or so?

I do really enjoy BTILC but it can drag. I think the main problem is that they go into the baddy's lair, have a few adventures then leave and go back home for a bit before starting over again! If Carpenter had kept them in there once they're in, it would immediately trim about ten minutes off the film and probably feel like it trimmed 25...