Ben X

This is free to play on Steam for the weekend. I've played an hour or so and it's fucking terrible. Just a constant onslaught of menus and objectives and combat moves. If you have about six combat keys all with different results depending on if you tap or hold them, your combat is too complicated. I went from 'looking forward to killing some orcs' to 'do not give a shit about any of this' in about ten minutes.

You should try this thing called the Complete Mod!

That's what I said previously in a post from the megathread, which got relocated to the Ghostbusters thread. I just re-watched Season 1 to refresh before watching Season 2, and it turns out I'd not watched the last few episodes for some bizarre reason. Man, it gets even better. That was just an amazing season finale. Cannot WAIT to get into S2.

Would you say that the quality picks up in the second half of season 1? Seems like Nappi and I both lost enthusiasm around the same point...

After some discussion with Laco in PMs, taking into account their recommendations, critical reception and my previous experiences, I'm going to accept their generous offer of: Call of Juarez (15/09/06) TimeShift (30/10/07) Section 8 (01/09/09) Sniper: Ghost Warrior (29/06/10) Superhot (25/02/15) I'll have to jump back in time a few months for Juarez, but that's okay. (I'll also have to remove the 66% complete from the title! [EDIT: actually, I forgot to count the ones I'd already played, so I'm still pretty much at that %]) Thanks Laco, it's nice to know people are enjoying the thread!

Thanks, it was pretty clever of me to mention it!

Oh yeah, was that in the opening long take, where dialogue is matching the song? I could tell something clever was going on there but couldn't get a handle on it. I was just reading that editor interview Patrick linked to, and it made me think, what I'd love is a viewing mode for this film where they visualise all of this - so maybe there's a dot in the corner flashing with the beat, but every time an action hits the beat, instead of the dot there's a visual outline of that action.

This is a backlog-busting playthrough, so I'll only add a game if someone buys it for me or it becomes free!

I did notice occasionally that gun-shots or a person's hand-gestures while outlining a heist were timed to the music, so I'd like to watch it again looking out for that throughout.

Ha ha ha, that is so much better!

I've decided against Complete because all I want to do is patch bugs, not have new graphics, AI etc in there. (I do wish these fan total-overhauls had the option of picking what to mod and what to leave alone.) I'll keep going with this until it bugs out or I do. Unless I end up loving it and playing a large portion of it, I think I'll take the other two off this list, partly to avoid repetition and partly because they really are far more RPGs than FPSes, even more so than the Deus Exes, I think. However, if anyone's interested in risking a play-along, the games are all currently on sale on Steam (£5ish/$7ish for all three) and gog ($5 each except Clear Sky which is half that).

I've played a little bit of this, and one of my first thoughts was "uh oh, maybe i shouldn't have included RPGs in this play-through", because I was getting some Deus Ex niggles here, like super-hard combat and missions that seem to dead-end or at least expect me to take an extra step that I'm not aware of (like being told there's a backpack hidden at a certain location but getting there and not finding it - is it near that location? Did someone else get it because I was too slow? Am I supposed to find some other information first?). Also, there were some translucent circles on my map marking areas of interest, but when I died and reloaded they disappeared - I'm not sure if that's a bug or if I'm mistaken about how I triggered them. And there's some stuff on my UI that has not been explained, which I'll need to find the manual for, I think. So, rather confusing. However, it's also very intriguing and well presented. I've been eased into the world quite well on the whole, starting off at a mission/trade hub with a guy talking me through my PDA and giving me my first mission. It's also cool to wander around and encounter such a hostile setting - weird anomalies to be avoided, packs of wild dogs and boar, and NPCs wandering around doing their own thing. I actually wanted to wander around and do some side-missions, but the game seems to be pushing me along the main storyline, so I'm sticking with that at the moment (although it's also suddenly given me like three things at once, two of which seem to be the same thing though I'm not sure). Confusing.

I hadn't realised that the games were that different structurally.... Re. fixes, I'll have to look into a balance of patching bugs (which I'm happy to do) vs modding the gameplay/graphics (which I want to avoid)...

M. Night Shyamalan's latest. Got a very warm reception, which I think may have been slightly exaggerated through relief to see him making a solid thriller again. It's a little long, but full of enough cool and creepy moments to keep it bubbling along, and McAvoy is ace. I really really hope that it's revealed

Alright, I finished it. It definitely dragged towards the end, mainly thanks to some bullet-sponge mini-bosses and mildly irritating puzzle-based boss fights where you can't avoid getting shot at while you try to figure shit out. And yeah, it does get a little repetitive although a few more new things got dropped in, like the asteroids you can walk all the way around. In retrospect, I think the revival mini-game is a bit of a band-aid over the fact that you're going to die a lot because the level design and shooting don't really match up - there's not a lot of cover to use and yet the enemies are really tough, so it's easy to get pinned down in a corner or take a while to figure out from which direction you're getting shot at. The shooting was intermittently fun, though, and at least they did create that band-aid - I probably would have rage-quit pretty early on without it, but as it was I never got too stressed out. And it never gets old having a firefight on an anti-grav walkway and watching the enemies tumble upwards when you kill them. Story-wise, it continued to do some cool stuff. It felt very Valve quite often, especially when you're making your way upwards through the alien spire (which I think they may even have called the Citadel) while the female-voiced antagonist mocks you and moves level tiles around you to create new paths, or jumping in and out of vehicles to solve little puzzles (and this is aside from the orange and blue portals essentially identical to those in Valve's game from a year later). The female characters tick pretty much all the tropes - the damsel in distress, the sexualised exotic priestess, the bare-breasted alien mother with an HR Giger thing coming out of her stomach - and the damsel eventually gets melded with a monster which you have to defeat, at which point she begs you to kill her. Depending on how much credit you want to give the game, though, there's potentially some clever metaphor and foreshadowing going on, where Tommy's wish to 'rescue' Jen from their reservation and way of life to be assimilated by American culture (despite her telling him she doesn't want that) is mirrored as she is abducted and eventually turned into a monster by the alien race that comes in and literally takes their land away from them. The main antagonist is revealed to be an Uncle Tom figure, who assimilated with the aliens and wants Tommy to do the same. It's also really effective when the aliens start to invade the spirit realm - it's unexpected and feels like a real violation, and the ensuing extended firefight has Tommy screaming in anger as you mow down a wave of enemies. (There's also some ancient astronaut stuff which doesn't really fit in with all this but is cool nonetheless.) It definitely is style over substance but it's solid and interesting enough that it overcomes the rough edges. Brilliantly vitriolic retro-review from John Walker at RPS (I agree with all his criticisms tbh) A slightly more forgiving retrospective from Eurogamer A couple of Eurogamers have a playthrough (30 mins): My next game is Dark Messiah Might 'n Magic, which I've already played. Again, I'll paste some Size Five posts from when I played that: And here are allll the Thumbs threads, including some posts from me that echo my reaction above: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/4076-dark-messiah-demo https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/4467-dark-messiah/ https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/3805-dark-messiah And now onto STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. I'm worried that this will be way too hard/complicated for me and I'll give up quite early, as it's a game that sounds interesting and I'd like to enjoy. I've got the two sequels as well, and I'm not sure whether I'll bother with those if I bounce hard off this one. We'll see...

Tim Soret interview at Waypoint.

And this continues when The Transporter's storage container lorry chase pays extended homage to Raiders! (I'll assume it's not taking from Ben Hur as there's also a direct lift from Crusade and a supporting actor from Doom in the film.) Hopefully a fourth classic film will pay tribute to the Transporter in about 5 years from now.

I've watched 9 episodes now and I'm finding this fairly irritating - I'd probably have given up by now if my partner didn't enjoy it. I find a lot of the characters irritating and/or unpleasant, the storytelling is quite clunky and it's not really very funny. The musical numbers often feel underwhelming too - I think it's partly the writing (and I guess I can't expect too much when they're doing one or two every episode) and partly that they don't seem to have the budget/time for lots of camera moves and choreography so you often get a lot of flat, repetitive reaction shots and general staging. One thing my partner and I do agree on is that awful title sequence - we skip it every time! I really want to like this show; I'm hoping it'll tighten up before the end of the season.

Yeah, it's actually quite fun because you get a little shooting gallery. There's only been one instance when I've opted for quick-load instead, which was where I thought I had to do some precision platforming and kept falling to my death, so I just wanted to retry as quickly as possible (turned out it was a spirit-walk puzzle for which I needed some spirit ammo, so ironically I actually did need to kill myself and go through the mini-game).

I'm about halfway through and still very much enjoying it. It looks great and there's loads of attention to detail (enemies turning off anti-grav walkways while you're on them in a firefight, the idle animation on your weapon where a little eye stalk protudes and stares at you, using a severed alien hand to open doors, the broadcasts coming from Earth as people call in to a talk radio station with reports of weird stuff happening, your spirit animal attacking enemies so you can shoot them while they try to swipe it away) and some sweet environmental story-telling, like suddenly hearing "Barracuda" by Heart in the middle of this spaceship and then realising they've abducted the entirety of your bar, before grav-flipping into it for a fire-fight, or seeing an entire airliner get abducted (which the abandoned Prey 2 was planning to use as its protagonist's back-story). It's still currently throwing new stuff at me (ghost children! One-man shuttles you can fly about the place and tractor-beam massive objects around with! Using forcefields in a new way to chop a boss' gun-hand off and use it against it!), so currently I'm happy. It may be that it runs dry around here and the second half is utterly repetitive, we'll see.

Prey is really cool so far. The start is scary and exciting - you start off in a shitty bar, getting in a fight with the locals, then suddenly the power goes off, Blue Oyster Cult starts playing on the jukebox and everyone and everything is getting hoisted into a massive spaceship where fellow abductees quickly get gored by massive machinery. It's doing very well at creating an alien atmosphere - anti-grav paths, portals (which can lead to weird scale differences), massive, toxic-poo-spewing bumholes, weird weapons, not to mention the Cherokee spirit-walking layered on top - without overwhelming the player. Having said that, I do seem to have come afoul of some gravity-flipping and hit a dead end, so I'll have to reload an autosave and see if that's the case. EDIT: a couple of Prey threads from 11 years ago! And I just realised that as this is in DooM3's engine, I may be able to fiddle about with the graphics settings like I did with that game...

@SecretAsianMan are you going to replay it?

I've finished ii! It's actually pretty short, which is definitely a good thing without a lot more variety being introduced. Overall, once I switched to easy, I very much enjoyed this. Great atmosphere and attention to detail (your visor's wiper cleaning away bug splatter, wire-frames of targeted enemies showing through walls), and satisfying squad mechanics. It's actually made me want to re-watch the prequel trilogy, which is pretty damn impressive. I wish this had done better so we could have got the planned sequel, Imperial Commando. That would have been great, starting the game as a Republic commando on Kashyyyk to retrieve your fallen crewman when Order 66 is given and suddenly turning sides and taking down a load of wookies and jedi. Retrospectives here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/10/01/retrospective-republic-commando/ http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/retrospective-star-wars-republic-commando-article and part 2 of a dev commentary (parts 3 and 4 are also available, but part one got taken down because of the John Williams score, which I'm gutted about): NEXT: Prey

Yeah, I noticed the shields on my tactical display, but I hadn't quite figured out how they worked. I guess the deal is that you only lose health if your shields are at zero, so as long as you duck under cover before your shields go down, you're fine? The revive mechanic is also cool and has gotten me out of some jams, but to be honest I'd rather they just alleviated the difficulty a little instead because, along with bacta stations, reviving team-mates or waiting to get revived myself is where I spend a lot of game time. And yeah, now I'm used to just running in and immediately setting my guys up, it's a lot better. Although sometimes there aren't any POI for them, or there's a ceiling turret, which they just cannot handle. Those fucking Star Wars ceiling turrets have been the bane of this FPS play-through. Also the flying droids with lightning attack were stupidly overpowered on Normal setting, especially when I was on my own. I just cannot believe that they play-tested this and decided the difficulty levels were spot on. Basically, there's lots of cool stuff going on here but also a load of bullshit enemies, bad ammo balancing etc getting in the way of it.

I had to put this down to easy just to make it possible, and it's actually not too bad now, although I do spend a lot of time healing my squad mates and using health-recharging bacta stations which can make it feel like a slog. I'll be interested to hear how your replay goes if you pick it up, @SecretAsianMan