Ben X

Wow, Bioshock is fantastic. It gives the sensation of being overwhelmed by this bizarre, horrific city you've been plunged into - loads of visual effects, towering architecture and scripted moments of disaster - but doesn't actually overwhelm you with mechanics etc. Everything's been tutorialised really nicely and I'm already having fun with the RPG-lite stuff - using your plasmids in various ways, hacking security to friendly mode, exploring big non-linear multi-room spaces, crawling through air vents (although I'm annoyed I had to give up my fire plasmid before I realised there was another iced-over door I could have explored. Hopefully I'll get more slots and be able to come back). The presentation's great as well, from the art deco design to the unnerving enemies and the friendly-hacked drones that bob and buzz around you like something Alyx Vance might hack together out of a car engine and a ventilation fan. Really the only thing I can complain about is that no matter how low I put the volume on everything else, I still can't hear Atlas' instructions if anything else is going on. A lot of games seem to have this issue, I've found. I always have to put music volume down to at most 40%. Even the old Lucasarts adventures did it. EDIT: oh man, DOOM is free to play all weekend, I think I'm going to have to put Bioshock down for a few days to blast through that...

Yes. No multiplayer. If this game is huuuugely successful, Dan will likely do a multiplayer/console/everything-else-people-have-been-asking-about remake/sequel.

Ah ha ha! Well, considering I made it all the way to the end of CoJ, I most definitely have more patience than that cat. So yeah, finished. After the boss-fight there was another boulder pushing puzzle and an annoying final bit where it wants you to use your quick-draw mechanics rather than the usual ones, but doesn't tell you, so you have to sit through an unskippable 1 minute cutscene over and over to get back to the 2-second gap where you have control, until you figure it out. Call Of Juarez: Cool Ideas, Fluffed. I'd love to play a tightened version of this game, hopefully Gunslinger is that game. The villa condensed down everything good about the game by sticking to the shooting and providing a relatively open, well-designed level. Other stuff I forgot to mention - jagging and pop-in are fairly heinous and the writing is pretty dreadful. Tropey but not in a fun way, and so long-winded and repetitive. The overlapping characters shtick was fun throughout, though, even if it was a cheap way to use a bunch of levels twice. Alright, onto Bioshock! Excited for this. I know the big narrative twist already, but never mind. At least, I know the gist of it, so please don't go into any more detail than what I know: ACTUALLY, in my (unsuccessful) search for features on CoJ, I noticed that Bound In Blood got a demo, so I think I'm going to download that from Steam first and have a go. Sounds like they've tweaked at least a couple of the mechanics from the original game, like bullet-time and quick-draws. (I also found out that the guy who plays Reverend Ray is Gul Dukat from DS9 and, more excitingly, the Mars security guy in Total Recall who shouts "THEY'RE ALL CONNECTED!" and has a brief pock-faced character actor stare-off with Michael Ironside.) UPDATE: looks a bit nicer though the Chrome Engine - which apparently was a bit controversial at one point for some reason - is now making shadows and heat shimmer look ugly. Has modern auto-regen health, confusing HUD damage-reports and the new cover mechanic and quick-draw mechanic are fiddly. Hope Gunslinger is better than this, frankly.

Ha ha, yeah, I saw that! (While I'm here, I'll tag @JaguarWong seeing as they mentioned looking forward to Kickmen previously)

So that eagle feather deal was the cliff-climbing bit twmac was referring to. The scale is effective, but the fact that it's about ten minutes of mantling (which is very slow and involves a constipated-sounding voice clip) and swinging on your whip (which is, surprise, fiddly). I then went through a load of boulder-pushing puzzles and a fucking temple filled with fucking booby-traps that require precision platforming (guess how easy that is in this game) and fucking swarms of poisonous fucking spiders that you have to whip to death. After that, the game started to show its potential - a pretty fun shootout in the treasure room, then an amazing section at the villain's villa where you're running around slow-mo killing bandits as you dive in and out of room, swap weapons and use a cannon to blast the door down. If the game had been more like this I would have loved it. Unfortunately, I'm now stuck in a boss fight where you have to chase this guy in between three little rooms filled with fiddly boxes, and try to get shots off at him while he chucks dynamite at you and seemingly uses teleport technology. Then it crashed. I'm very close to the end now, so I'm going to try and push through it tomorrow, but this boss may just induce a rage-quit.

I just saw War For The Planet Of The Apes and thought it was the least good reboot Apes so far (I love Rise and the original, and really liked Dawn) - it's just more of the same, but doesn't move the over-arching storyline on very much at all. The ape acting and CG is just absolutely stunning, though, and there are a few cool ideas in there, especially the donkeys.

Hmm, maybe need a spoiler tag on the thing that didn't happen, there...

Turns out the lock was on the other side of the train! I probably could have figured that out myself if I'd realised the logs also record what NPCs say to you - the cavalry dude did say it was on the right side. It might have been a previously closed-off path that confused me. Anyway, this game is really starting to take the piss. After another extended stealth sequence and another shitty melee sequence, I've now met up with an old Indian who has so far tasked me with killing three rabbits (which required a good five minutes of horse-riding over open terrain), putting out a fire (which required walking back and forth about five times to the river with a bucket, all to a thrilling countdown timer!) and now I've got to go climb a mountain to get an eagle feather. Tommy Tawodi never had to do this shit. The cut corners are starting to show as well, with re-used character models and, most cheekily of all, re-used levels as you take both characters through the same exact route, one after the other. Also there's far too much glitching and jagging for a game this recent, especially as I'm playing on Windows 7 and a PC that I bought in 2012.

I agree with all of that (and expected the same thing), except I like that the apes are the heroes in these movies. It's a lot more interesting than watching some hero humans fighting against them and losing. Also, even in the original (which I take these films to be a reimagining of anyway, not prequels - too much stuff doesn't line up) there were nice apes, it's just that the society was rather corrupt and brutal as a whole. I always inferred from the ending that humans fucked the planet up themselves and paved the way for apes. I haven't seen any of the original sequels, though, so I'm not starting a big canon lore debate here!

Sure is! I've got all the games on the list in the OP, spoiler tagged and in date order. I'm out of the mines (ugh, mine levels) and onto the train bit now, which is quite cool. I've just got to a bit where I'm supposed to shoot some lock off the train, but despite the objective marker I can't figure out where this bloody lock is.

That is interesting! I guess what Jake's referring to is that in the famous phrase used by Shakespeare, it's "hoist by his own petard", not "hoisted by his own petard". As mentioned here. I don't know if a linguist would tell us that was just Shakespeare being a special snowflake and everyone else back then said "hoisted".

Looks like this game's modus operandi is 'introduce a cool mechanic, make sure it doesn't work very well'. Lots of nice ideas here, like the showdown mechanic where you have to draw your gun, lean and fire, the bullet-time move and even some of the stealth stuff like lightning revealing you but thunder covering the sound of your whip. Unfortunately, they're all either a bit fiddly or just plain don't seem to work - that whip one especially. So far the atmosphere and general Western fun of kicking through a door then taking down two bandits at the same time with your dual pistols is just about making up for the sloppy execution though.

First episode (basically the tutorial) completed, and so far seems pretty cool. Looks nice enough (I'm playing the DX10 version!), there's some fun cheesy Western storytelling (though the start-to-blowjob-from-whore time was about 3 minutes) and the idea of playing a different character from the town in each episode is cool. Seems to be setting up some nice mechanics, too, with the double-handed set-up and the mantling and whipping handy for chases or finding good rooftop positions. Unfortunately, not everything seems to work too smoothly - whipping and even walking down cliffsides is far too tricky (I've already learnt to quicksave before every one of these), the run button doesn't seem to work, and there's platforming and fucking stealth mechanics (which also don't seem to work). If the player has died or hit a failstate twenty times in the tutorial, you're not teaching them properly or your game is janky. Hopefully it'll not insist on these being used too much...

Okay, big decision time. I'm classifying the STALKER games as RPGs and taking them off the menu. Not just because of this classification, but also because I'm finding it all too confusing and messy for me to want to push through endless tough encounters with large groups of enemies. I was getting better at them, working out tactics like using the crosshair/zoom function on the weapons, constantly hiding, using bandages if I get anywhere near 50% health, and trying to search each body as I come to it if safe. But I'd get through one of these fights, then get to the next story point which is just "help us kill all these people!" or "I don't have the information either, but this person just the other side of a bunch of enemies does!" again. Meanwhile, I'm getting told that I failed some mission I wasn't even aware of, or I'm wandering into a radiation zone and dying before I can even read the hint that tells me what's going on. Then the game crashed. I can see a lot of interesting stuff going here, but it is all hugely obfuscated. I think what I'll do is come back to them at some point, on Easy difficulty setting with the Complete mod installed. So, onto (or back in time to, in fact) Call Of Juarez!

Oh god, yes.

I just watched the documentary De Palma, and it did really make me want to do a watch-through of all his stuff as I haven't seen most of it, even though tons of it will likely be problematic/nonsense.

I was pretty close to Marc Laidlaw's plans: http://www.arcadeattack.co.uk/marc-laidlaw/ (sorry for the bump Roderick!)

I'm going to change the thread name to warn people of spoilers, unless everyone would prefer to tag their posts.

I really enjoyed JJ Abrams' directing on Alias, LOST, MI3 and Star Trek (and to a certain extent Force Awakens), but I won't get into that. Thanks for the article, it's very good. (I don't even think one needs this reading to appreciate , but there you go.) I recommend Cloverfield but bearing in mind it's a totally different movie and one that's only about as smart as one would expect. Also, some people hate found-footage movies, so be warned it is that.

This feels more like an endorsement than a movie recommendation, I guess because it never got released; Cracked put me onto this really interesting documentary about the making of Emperor's New Groove: https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersion Sting was initially hired to write a bunch of songs when the film had a different name, director, supporting actor etc, and as part of his contract his wife was allowed access to document the production. So even as Sting's role gets majorly reduced, the doc continues to give a pretty honest look at the sometimes painful Disney process where if the story isn't working they quickly replace anything and anyone to get it going.

Can't be bothered with a new thread for this, but saw Deadpool and really enjoyed it. The tone, structure and action were all surprisingly well-considered, and although the comedy wasn't particularly sharp, it was charming.

You should do it!

Thanks for the offer, eot, and the (anachronistic) review, aoania! I'll link back to it when I hit 2011/play EYE myself.

I know, don't worry If I'd bought it maybe I would have struggled through a bit longer, but as I only had a limited time with it... But yeah, my tolerances with certain stuff can be pretty low, although having said that I didn't have these issues with Assassins Creed 2 or Arkham Asylum, for example.

I am persnickety, but I wouldn't characterise my reaction to the game as that!