Ben X
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Everything posted by Ben X
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I gave Project IGI a few minutes, but it seems to be a cheapo Tom Clancy thing and I don't really have any interest in it, especially with no autosave function. NEEEXT! (A more apologetic retrospective for that game, by Will Porter)
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I'm not enjoying NOLF. This game is actually pretty awful outside of the presentation. It turns out every level is a stealth section, and what's more, it's impossible not to set off the alarms. Mixed with the "no health regen per set of levels" rule, it makes the whole thing too difficult/boring. I've never had to check walkthroughs so much for any FPS, thanks to badly signposted/overly-guarded objectives, and I'm skipping every cutscene. And every cool idea is clumsily executed to the point of frustration. I've been micro-saving through levels for a while now and I've finally saved myself into a corner, so I'm going to give up. It's a shame because I really wanted to enjoy this game (and I put a fair bit of effort into getting it running!) but it's just not fun. I'm not only bored, I'm rather irritated by it. Hopefully NOLF 2 will prove more polished. EDIT: this bears similarities to my experience with Monolith's previous game, Shogo: great setting, fun cheesy presentation, unpolished gameplay. I don't have FEAR or AvP2, but I do have NOLF2, Tron 2.0 and Condemned. Hopefully the three remaining games from this dev on my list prove a little more satisfying. Here's a retrospective by John Walker that catches a few other positive things about the game that I forgot to mention because I was so BLOODY ANGRY.
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I'm enjoying NOLF. The missions have a fair amount of variety and really make you feel like you're in a 60s spy movie, and there are some great gags - the obnoxious yet deaf-blind US ambassador you have to protect from assassins, who is continually dodging bullets by dropping quarters then bending over to pick them up, and the ongoing 'cheesy pick-up line as pass-phrase' bit. Downside is that the briefing/training sections are pretty tedious - they really could be trimmed by 70% in most instances. I've just got to a stealth bit, unfortunately, and I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do. Seems I need to set off the alarm to get to a certain section, but that alerts all the guards and makes death inevitable. Annoying. I'm going to check a walkthrough.
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What to make of problematic elements in older films
Ben X replied to Erkki's topic in Movies & Television
What everyone is missing here is that if The Searchers didn't exist, we wouldn't have that rad bit in New Hope where Luke sees his uncle and aunt's skeletons. -
What to make of problematic elements in older films
Ben X replied to Erkki's topic in Movies & Television
How are people in this conversation defining "classic"? It's one of those words people tend to have their own meaning for... -
The GOTY edition apparently runs fine with 64bit OSes anyway, so it may just be that on the iso, dunno. Unfortunately, I never seem to have the correct Gold/GOTY/etc edition..!
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There is a widescreen patch for NOLF but a) it borks the weapon images, and sunglasses) I'm generally playing in original aspect. I think Deus Ex was 4:3 but I can't remember... I know NOLF has the occasional annoying stealth section (or is that just the sequel) but it's generally pretty standard FPS mechanics, isn't it? Shouldn't throw me too much.
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The colours! The bright bright colours!
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Now I've finally got my monitor situation sorted, I got back into Deus Ex. That is, I started playing it again for a very short while until I got to another bit (the heli-pad) where no matter how careful and patient I tried to be, the clunky stealth/combat combined with a nerfed player-character led me to brute-force my way through, which isn't entertaining. Then it started crashing, so I'm giving up on this. I just don't think I get on well with the Ion Storm ethos! So, it's onto No One Lives Forever, if I can get it to work... EDIT: Using this site's 64-bit installer fix, first of all: http://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2012/05/23/no-one-lives-forever/ EDIT2: bah, that got it to install, but it won't launch. The multiplayer will launch but not singleplayer! I'm going to try reinstalling but not bothering with the patches, if no luck there then I'll post a comment on that site and move onto the next game in the meantime. EDIT3: a closer look at the comments reveals that it's likely due to fucking copy protection bullshit and a no-cd patch will help. Unfortunately, the site seems rather vague about where to get one/how to use it. I assume it's technically naughty. EDIT4: ha, found one at dk.toastednet.org, copied it over the usual exe file and it works!
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Only three weeks of Halloween thread this year! Pretty good! I'll quote my out-of-season post in celebration:
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Marvel Netflix shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, etc.)
Ben X replied to SecretAsianMan's topic in Movies & Television
I enjoyed Jessica Jones all the way through, whereas I agree with Cordeos about Luke Cage (as I tweeted, "Luke Cage got boring about halfway through. Same problems as Daredevil - boring villains and too many episodes led to endless wheel-spinning"). -
I tried one more repair of my monitor and it made zero difference. So I went to Amazon and got a replacement. The new one works perfectly! Well done Amazon, and not-so-well done Samsung - although your warranty repair set-up is pretty good, you really should have just offered to replace once it was obvious you couldn't fix whatever it was you broke, rather than making me call you up every time.
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This is also being discussed in the Gaming thread for Firewatch (including Goldblum suggestions!)
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The damp issues in our rental flat have now moved on from mouldy wardrobes to an infestation of mould mites in the kitchen. Goodbye £100 worth of food, hello a Sunday spent bleaching everything ever.
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Can you even get region-free blu-ray players? I know when I got my region 2 player it turned out to be a much bigger mission even to get it to play region 1 DVDs than the simple "enter a 4-digit code" procedure of DVD players. I had to buy a magic remote and everything, and even then it didn't help with blu-rays...
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I plugged my desktop into my plasma telly and had zero problems...
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As I mentioned in the Life thread, I bought a wazzo new monitor recently, and have had loads of issues with it. First, it had a vertical line of dead pixels or something all the way down the screen. I sent it off to get repaired, then when it came back it was displaying colours really badly. Any time it tried to blend colours, it showed a big pixelly mess, it looked like a 90s FMV. So I sent it off again, and just got it back. But it has exactly the same problem. Here's what my laptop screen shows: and here's what my monitor shows when plugged into it via HDMI: It has the same issue when plugged into my desktop with a different cable. I've tried resetting the monitor settings with no results. Am I missing something here, or is my monitor just fucked? I want to make sure I'm not being an idiot before I ask for a refund.
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Oh come on, no-one else ever rates an episode thread until there's a rating-out-of-5 reference to be ruined?!
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Oh, I've been shooting my way through, don't worry..! In fact, I've been thinking more about it and I think that if the stealth was a little more transparent/forgiving, I might partake in that style of play more and that might in turn encourage me to sneak and investigate more in general.
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I've finally got a few more hours in on this - I'm now on the mole-people level. I'm kind of enjoying it, but it feels a bit clunky. I guess I feel like there's lots of cool stuff I'm supposed to be understanding or achieving but I'm missing lots of it. I managed to kill a load of hostages and then skip the canister mission simply because I didn't realise what I was doing, then I just kind of muscled my way through to the generator. I always feel like I'm getting half a clue, and I'm not sure if it'll actually help me or not. I feel like a map would really help out, so when someone tells me that to get to place A I need to go through place B, I can actually act on that rather than just bouncing around the level until I find a promising route. It pisses me off when tech nerd keeps talking about his blueprints and shit - how about you upload those into my cyber-brain so I know where everything is, genius?
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Yep, that's me.
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Yeah, I'll do that if it comes back with any issues this time.
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Aw, I was there a year ago but I've moved now. Say hi from me to Chris Fletcher at CUP if you meet him! If there aren't any Thumbs around, and you happen to be an indie dev, check out #cb2indies on Twitter - indie devs meet up once a week at the CB2 cafe either to chat or just get some work done in a different environment. It's often in the daytime, but they sometimes meet in the evenings too. (If you're not an indie dev, just knock out a Twine game - they're not fussy!)
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Ah, well I started it as practice while Cwine got up and running, then I accidentally spent so much of the jam time on it I didn't want to waste it so I finished it and stuck it into BHC! I only separated it out a couple of weeks ago (as per my update post above). The existence of it in BHC is tied to the story but there aren't actually any clues within it. Anyway, I'm in the process of making an incredibly indulgent and boring set of dev-play vids for them so you'll be able to hear the entire story in excruciating detail soon enough!
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In the comments for this article about some Obsidian artists making a Mos Eisley environment as a hobby, someone posted (I assume jokingly) in the comments, "Better than No Man's Sky!" It got memeified already!