Ben X
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Everything posted by Ben X
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Ah, I see, cheers!
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Love freddiew. Is he linked with the McElroy's, though? Can't find anything connecting them...
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Huh. Maybe there was a vidscreen rather than the point of interest sign that would give you the same clues but via a video?
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Far Cry worked with no issues, which I'm happy about. I've only played a tiny bit, but it's fun so far. I'm not sure exactly what play style I'm supposed to aim for, as you can stealth your way up to bases but then everything's out in the open, so I guess it's geared towards surprise raids. I haven't checked to see if I need to patch the Steam version, but there are some further tweaks I can make with the Far Cry Configurator to draw distance and stuff. I remember Dan having to do that even back at release. I'm going to try to utterly max everything out, see what happens. For now it's not as gorgeous as I remember it looking, but it's already impressive in the amount of foliage and openness. It's really cool getting your objective marker, using binoculars to tag all the mercs, then plunging into the undergrowth and wading through rivers to sneak in from the side. This is another game with autosave only. It's probably necessary to stop the player from save-spamming their way through and to properly consider their approach, but it does also serve to discourage being too careful because crawling prone through the jungle takes a while and you don't want to do that every time! As for the gameplay change about halfway through, I remember it being really cool at first, with some great moments like realising the Trigens can jump across stairwells at you (which in fact I mentioned here, though I pretended it was me playing it, not Dan, for simplification), but the bigger bullet-sponge guys later on aren't so fun. I certainly don't expect to get to the end of this game!
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That was by Eidos or Core or whoever's follow-up to Tomb Raider iirc. I think the consensus was "quite good".
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Yeah, those are cool. It's also nice to have ladders that work properly. However, fuck this game. After getting through the RPG bit I had a melee boss battle (which was made especially frustrating by the borked block move), then a great long stealth section that was basically impossible to do without getting seen that I had to do on two bars of health because of the autosave system. Then the level looped round and I couldn't figure out where to go. I could have trekked through the whole thing again if that didn't involve going through another impossible stealth section which I managed on full health but is impossible on one bar. Basically: really nice atmosphere, but a load of really frustrating mechanics and not much to recommend it otherwise. Onto Far Cry. I haven't had a lot of luck getting this running previously, but I've got the Steam version, and I'm hoping that there have been enough official and fan patches by now that I can get it working. I loved the demo of this, loved watching Dan play it, and really enjoyed Crysis, so I'll be very happy if it runs nicely.
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Got past that guy, what bullshit that was. The crates aren't safe, there's nothing to tell you his back is his weak spot and it takes ages to get a good shot on him anyway. This game is a mix of impressive polish and attention to detail, and lots of fiddly mechanics and oversights: The shooting often feels a bit vague and unresponsive, but it can be fun. Now I've got my eyes shined so I can see in the dark, the stealthy bits are pleasingly binary - turn off a light switch, make sure your visibility has flipped to 0, take off your goggles and break some guards' necks. Due to the auto-save system (apparently quick-saves got removed for this version for some stupid reason), it's possible to dead-end yourself in a few places. The atmosphere is great, full of lovely visual and audio design, and the UI is really clever, your health points doubling up as your visibility meter and colour tints giving you extra feedback. It's varied, but this also includes trying its hand at DooM3 style mutant sections where you have to swap between flares and a shotgun, and the UI controls for that are far too fiddly for it to work. I like the missions that lead you through the FPS sections, they give it a sense of propulsion. However, I'm now in another RPG bit which would be fine if it didn't mostly consist of backtracking, characters who react to stuff you haven't done yet, and a sudden dump of missions with directions that are all far too vague (who the fuck are the blueskins?) or seemingly incorrect (the PPPs, whoever they are, aren't in rec area A like two separate missions insist). I do apparently have the option to fight my way up instead but, as every fight is a combination of long walks through the map to set them up and then some melee combat, I might check a walk-through to try and RPG my way out.
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Oooh, thanks for the reminder! I'll be heading down to Forbidden Planet to get the usual bag of adverts, then. I've just bought a tablet and signed up for my city library's online comic service, which has some sweet stuff in it. I've been reading the Back To The Future comics (terrible) and the Archie 2015 comics (really good fun, though it was a shame to see Fiona Staples go so early). I'm going to read Afterlife With Archie next. Then I seem to have read the rest of the good stuff, otherwise it's all Angry Birds and stuff.
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Ok, I've started playing through the Dark Athena version of Butcher Bay. It looks pretty nice, though it's got tons of post-processing (motion blur when you look around, bloom) which, judging by comparison videos, make it look worse than the 2004 version - really smudgy. I'm going to try to turn them off. I also had to turn anti-aliasing way down to stop the game running like crap, but I'm hoping if I take the post-processing off I can turn the AA back up. Apart from that, pretty slick presentation. The tutorial involves snapping your merc captor's neck then escaping down a convenient vent. It turns out to be Riddick dreaming while still cuffed up in the merc's ship, which was pretty funny. Then you get an on-rails walk into the prison, which is really nice and has a very similar feel to Arkham Asylum's intro a few years later. After some rather pointless super-linear RPG stuff and some very irritating melee combat, both of which admittedly help the prison feel of the game, I'm now sneaking about shooting guards. It's generally pretty fun and the atmosphere is great. Feels really grubby, and has lots of ace character actors like Michael Rooker and Joaquim De Almeida alongside name voice actors like John Di Maggio, and of course actors from the second movie including Diesel. I've got it on easy so I'm managing to get through the rather unrefined melee combat and stealth. However, I'm currently stuck in a locked room with a guard in a mech suit. Don't seem to be able to shoot him, can't find any clever way out. The elevator button doesn't seem to do anything, which I suspect may be a bug, so I'm going to consult a walkthrough. EDIT: apparently the mech suit has a weak spot on it's back, which you need to shoot from the safety of some high crates. I'd already tried out these methods with no success; I guess it's one of those puzzles that are okay until they're unfairly combined with combat.
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Cool, thanks!
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I had a quick Google in hopes of reading about this - a) I'm guessing you mean the Dwemer Puzzle Box (a Dwemer Puzzle Cube shows up in Skyrim, apparently); and sunglasses) I couldn't find much about it, what makes it a memorable epic journey?
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Off the top of my head there was a hallucination sequence where Ben took peyote and had to navigate through his vision, and a biker gang that lived on water or something.
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Ah, well actually Dan bought it and gave me the disc during a clear-out ages ago! (That's where a fair few of these have come from, actually.) However, as it's no longer available to buy and I do already have the disc version through legit means, which I'd be able to play if it weren't for bullshit DRM, I won't feel morally conflicted about taking you up on that if necessary. Thanks!
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That all looks very promising, glad you're still working on this!
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fffffuuuuuuuu
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It's proving difficult to get this running from the disc, possibly due to copy protection... Lots of patches and Nvidia muckabouts to try...
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Butcher Bay Directors Cut from disc. (EDIT: Apparently this just means the PC version of the original. Wikipedia says " Vivendi confirmed in July 2004 that a Windows port of Escape from Butcher Bay was in development, entitled "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay Director's Cut".[34] The game features a higher display resolution, additional cigarette packs, and new scenes where Riddick steals mechanized riot armor. It includes developer commentary which details the game's creation and design decisions.")
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Bah, I was getting pretty far in this but it's crashing whenever I try to exit the Templar church, which is a necessary location to visit, so I'm having to give up on this. Possibly for the best as I scanned through a playthrough of the rest of the game and it doesn't seem to do much more. Pretty cool that it ends with JC Denton at the Statue Of Liberty though! I've pretty much said everything about this game already - great design, some satisfying RPG stuff and non-linear design, but plateaus pretty quickly in terms of missions, story and weapons/mods. So, onto Riddick!
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According to Slack, Wizard Jam 5 will take place from Friday 2nd June to Sunday 18th June!
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Sweet, thanks for the link! Yeah, NG Resonance is a really cool idea (a bimbo pop-star based chatbot hologram that turns out to be subtly siphoning information out of everyone who talks to it), although they have some really on-the-nose responses from Alex D to make sure the player understands what's going on. A lot of the writing in this is pretty ham-fisted and didactic, actually, but at least that fits well with the original.
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Idle Thumbs 306: Nick Breckons: 1, Mackle: More
Ben X replied to Jake's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
People would occasionally email a different person with my name by mistake, and the guy was always really pissy about it; despite being able to see in the emails that I had given the correct address, he'd always just forward it to me with a "stop giving people my address". I made the stupid mistake of slagging him off on a forum while using the actual email addresses to illustrate. He must have ego-surfed or something because he then sent me an aggro reply that heavily implied he'd found the post. I also suddenly started receiving a ton of spam, so I'm pretty sure he signed me up to some shitty newsletters. I emailed an apology but pointed out that if he had just been civil in the first place none of this would have happened. We now very civilly forward emails onto each other on the rare occasion we receive the other Ben's mail! -
You're right, I'd never betray my GDC Illuminati insider information like that.
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I'm nearing the end now. It has started to feel like busywork, lots of random tasks and no real plot progression except for various organisations changing allegiances. It's all about as dramatic as Alex D's vocal patterns. The weapons and biomods are all still pretty underwhelming - I'd really like to be superpowered by this point but the RPG systems are too restrictive to allow it. Still, I can control all the robots now, which is cool. I'm looking forward to meeting JC, assuming that actually happens. Here's a post-mortem of the original game, which i don't think I shared back when I was playing that one:
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http://www.cracked.com/blog/a-one-minute-guide-to-fast-furious-series/