Ben X

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Posts posted by Ben X

  4. Posted

    Shall we make this the DCEU thread? I just caught up on a couple of these movies, so I'm going to make this the DCEU thread.

    So far:

     

    Man Of Steel: Some interesting elements drown in thoughtless action sequences

    Suicide Squad: Dreadful

    Batman V Superman: Not appallingly bad, just... perfunctory. Too glum and slow

    Wonder Woman: Mediocre at best. Meandering, with some obvious twists and so many walking tropes in place of characters. There are three villains and not one has any depth - come back Spider-Man 3 and Batman Returns, all is forgiven. I think this movie got cut a ton of slack for being a non-terrible DC movie - if it were a Marvel movie it'd be getting rated down with Thor 2.

    Justice League: Vapid. A series of character intros then a 2010-era video game character stealing a series of identical macguffins, then a big CG battle, the end. Batman looked less cool in this one - lots of shots when you catch him being a guy in a muscle suit doing some goofy pose - and Cyborg looked tacky as shit. A couple of good bits - bringing Supes back to life (the debate over it, the process, then him coming back all pissed off) and the Amazon chase to keep the cube away from Steppenwolf - but overall, crappy.

     

    And didn't they have a scene in Man Of Steel where Aquaman and Flash (and maybe others?) were imprisoned at a secret government facility? Are they just retconning that out of existence? Can't do that if you're trying to build a cinematic universe, DC!

     

    Coming up:

     

     

     

    Both of these look more promising to me. They may not turn out to be great, but hopefully they'll at least be fun. If Aquaman can be better than Green Lantern and at least as good as Chronicles Of Riddick, and Shazam isn't so wholly aimed at a tween audience as it seems, these will likely be the best DCEU films by a long shot.

  6. Posted

    I decided to trade most of my gems for a booster pack then unpack that plus my existing one and sell the resulting six cards (once Steam has waited for a week to approve my laptop or whatever). That'll only get me, like, 30p, and I'll have an annoying leftover pile of 200ish gems, but at least it's cleared my inventory up a bit. I just need to keep trading any new cards in for gems then, once I get to the lowest amount of gems I can get a booster pack for (600ish?), do the same again. Maybe I'll get it up to a quid some day and get a free game!

  8. Posted

    Thanks!

     

    Okay, one small final question to everyone. Through this process I've gained a lot of (often spoilerific, immersion-breaking) Steam cards, all of which I traded in for gems. So I now have 1,415 gems, along with a Broken Age booster pack containing three cards. Is there any process I can go through to turn these into actual store credit or free games? Or am I just going to have to hope that they do another gem-based auction sale at some point?

  9. Posted

    30 minutes ago, Henke said:

    So, what's the verdict? What's THE BEST FPS GAME? :D

     

    Hmm, let's see. Well, thanks to my having kept my list updated with colour-coding (and direct links to the first post discussing each game!), these are the ones I enjoyed most (spoilered for space):

     

    Spoiler

     

    DooMTM (10/12/93) 

    Quake (22/06/96)

    Half-Life (19/11/98)

    Gunman Chronicles (20/1/00) 

    Serious Sam: First Encounter (23/03/01) 

    Unreal II (03/02/03) 

    Jedi Academy (17/09/03) 

    Far Cry (23/03/04) 

    DooM3 (03/08/04) 

    Half-Life 2 + episodes (16/11/04) 

    Star Wars: Republic Commando (17/02/05) 

    Prey (11/07/06) 

    BioShock (21/08/07) 

    Portal (09/10/07) 

    TimeShift (30/10/07) 

    Crysis (13/11/07) 

    Left 4 Dead 2 (17/11/09)

    BioShock 2 (09/02/10) 

    BioShock 2: Minerva's Den (31/08/10)

    Portal 2 (19/04/11) 

    Call Of Juarez Gunslinger (21/05/13) 

    Superhot (25/02/15)

     

     

    Out of those, I'd boil it down to DooMTM, Quake, Half-Life, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, BioShock and Portal. Next I'll get rid of Far Cry (too many funnels and difficulty spikes), Bioshock (for the filler and the RPG rough edges) and Portal (not really a shooter). So that leaves the two id games and the two Half-Life games. It's tough, but I think the game I'd personally most want to replay is Half-Life 2, so I'll go with that one as the Official Objectively Best FPS Of All Time.

     

    EDIT: no worries, osmosich, we pretty much are ;)

  11. Posted

    Okay, as I suspected, I bounced off Strafe's roguelike/proc-gen stuff a little. I like the presentation, but I'm not having that much fun. So I'll keep it installed for a bit in case I want to dive back in, but I'm going to call this big FPS playthrough DONE.

     

    A couple of  middling reviews that I pretty much agree with.

     

    Thanks for all your interest and donations, everyone! I was tempted to do the same with all my unplayed adventure games but I'd probably get sick of them without swapping to other genres regularly, so I'm just going to play whatever I feel like for a while. It'll feel weird not keeping a travelogue here, but I guess I can post in game-specific threads for recent games and post my final opinions in the Games Completed thread for older ones where I would't want to necro-post.

  12. Posted

    Oh, wow, finished it already. That was short but sweet. I wouldn't have minded a couple more levels where it ramped things up somehow, but probably a good idea not to outstay its welcome. I really enjoyed the addition of 'hotswitching' - it was great fun to throw your weapon at someone, body-jump into them, grab that weapon out of midair then swing round and blast the enemy standing next to you. I really enjoyed all the story-telling as well, and they didn't pull that twist, thankfully.

     

    No real negatives at all! A couple of levels were a bit tough - like the elevator one - and it would have been nice to get replays without the text over them and the player movement smoothed out somehow, but that's about it. Apparently the VR version of this is great, I'd love to try that.

     

    Forum thread

     

    Last game now - Strafe. 

     

  13. Posted

    Just a little way into Superhot so far. Took me a bit longer to get the hang of it than the original gamejam version, but I'm really enjoying it now. It's basically an exercise of patience, always fighting the urge to just run! The visual style is really cool, though I am already thinking this would be really cool with lots of visual detail, watching people's (or monsters or whatever) expressions change in super slow-mo. I like the old-school hacker narrative bits too, very intriguing, and fun to snoop around in and find other little games. I'm guessing the twist is that this is all actually real and I just think I'm playing a game? That's a twist I've seen at least twice before though, so hopefully they come up with something different...

  14. Posted

    I got to a point where the autosaves were really pissing me off, so I knocked this down to the lowest difficulty setting and barrelled through it. I'm glad I did, because the rest of the game was pretty much just more Nazis and robots in grey corridors. The moon base was quite cool with all the laser guns and HAL-style vents, but it was still mainly grey corridors. It's telling that the dev team is made of a load of ex-Starbreeze people, who made Riddick. It's the same mix of ambition, polish, clunkiness and frustration. Outside of mechanics, one thing that really stuck out to me was how often they broke the immersion with perks and collectibles and what have you. In one cutscene, a character says "oh by the way, I found my cousin's journal. Here, you take it in case you fancy reading it." It's just completely irrelevant to the plot and yet for the rest of the game these loud notifications came up telling me I'd unlocked another page or something and really putting me off. The side-objectives reward you with gold items, which are meaningless trinkets, whenever you get to a new location it tells you "new concept art for this location unlocked!" which may as well scream "this is a video game level!" at you, and the excellent alt-history music is mainly experienced via the menu system which is a terrible waste. 

     

    Making of

    Post-mortem

    Forum thread

     

    I did put a game called Zigurrat on this list, but looking at it again, the dungeon crawler aspect of it seems strong enough that I can't be bothered. So it's down to the last two games on this list - if I get through them relatively quickly, this will only have taken me three years!

     

    Next up: Superhot

  15. Posted

    On 7/14/2018 at 8:21 AM, Henke said:

    [Annoying know-it-all nerd voice]Uuuuuhhhhhh ACTUALLY the original 1981 Wolfenstein game was one of the FIRST stealth games![/Annoying know-it-all nerd voice] 

     

    Ha ha, good point. Okay, it feels weird to me to be doing this in a Wolfenstein game..!

     

    Well, I've just reached the internment camp, and I hope @miffy495 is right about this game hitting its stride soon because so far it's a real slog. It's either getting funnelled through scripted sequences, boring hub levels where you have to go pick up bits of paper and lumps of concrete, or war-of-attrition shooting sections . The latest one involved standing in a side-room and shooting all the guys as they ran towards me, then shooting three big robots with my laser gun that needs about five recharges at the power-point per robot, then shooting a slightly bigger robot. The game may gesture towards immersive sim mechanics but it doesn't offer any alternative playstyles - stealth goes out of the window very quickly and there aren't any interesting weapons to play with. I even completed an optional goal of finding four toys, and all I got was an unlocked model! Who gives a shit about unlocking models?!

     

    What's more, while the visual fidelity is pretty good, the art design and story are both rendered rather dull by the plot point that the Nazis are using super-concrete to build everything. This not only makes for a boring story, it also makes for a very very grey game.

  16. Posted

    Which previous vid, the steamed hams one? That was a section of an interview, wasn't it?

     

    Cooking With Jeff is an ongoing thing? Huh, that''s not something I'd expect from FOD, but then I guess I haven't been on the actual site in a long time.

  17. Posted

    I'm confused: this is branded Funny Or Die, yet it seems like one big commercial for that supermarket and it's not even a sketch or anything. Do FOD make product-placement-centred cooking shows now?

  19. Posted

    On 6/16/2016 at 6:20 PM, Ben X said:

    The Incredibles 2 - will self-indulgently focus on its themes over its structure and therefore not be as satisfying as the original

     

    Well, I can't really claim that my guess was wholly correct, though there was some heavier-handed stating of themes and some issues with structure - mainly that it's essentially a re-run of the first movie, beat for beat, and that it's not really much fun when

    the Incredible parents get hypnotised

    . All the action sequences, acting and family dynamics are still great though. One final issue -

    no resolution with the Underminer!

  20. Posted

    Please find below the correct opinions on all five Jurassic Park movies:

     

    Jurassic Park - stone-cold classic

    Jurassic Park 2 - a few cool moments but mainly misjudged and messy.

    Jurassic Park 3 - if you accept that it's a much cheesier affair, this is actually very fun. Some great sequences and likeable characters. 

    Jurassic World - frustratingly dull and clumsy, from the direction through the script and score even down to the shitty new Amblin ident.

     

    Jurassic World 2 - [just saw this today so this is a bit lengthier] Not half as amateurish as the first JW, and it even has one legit great extended sequence (

     

    starting with meeting Blue all the way through the volcano exploding and then the escape from the island

    ), but once that is over, it moves to a big mansion for the rest of the movie and goes through all the same tired old beats over and over -

     

    meddling scientists, greedy suits who get their gruesome comeuppance, some associate of Hammond popping out of the woodwork (the one in this film is so similar to Hammond that I was pretty sure he was going to turn out to be a clone), getting saved from one dinosaur when it gets attacked by another, and just endlessly getting chased around small rooms getting snapped at through handy clutter by raptor-type dinos

    . The very ending was pretty sweet, though, even if it was pure sequel set-up.

     

     

    And now, because I can never hear the main theme without these stupid lyrics now, I will ruin it for all of you also:

     

     

  21. Posted

    I've played a little more of this, and it all feels rather loose. The shooting's okay, but I've been given like fifteen weapons options with no real idea of the difference between them. There's the immersive sim stuff plus the action stuff, but both of them feel rather undercooked, and I'm constantly bombarded with messages about perks and achievements and what have you. I got through the CoD/RTCW section at the start, and through the insane asylum. It's interesting that they're going this hard with the story, but I feel like a lot of beats get fudged. I'm often thinking "ah, I see what you were trying to do there". I did really like the scene where BJ is told that it's 1960, the war's over and the US surrendered (even if they did give away the twist earlier, plus unceremoniously cut to it at the top of the scene) - it's a convincing portrayal of confusion and panic .

     

    I've just got to a bit where I have to stealth around and clear out a section. While it's weird to be doing this in a Wolfenstein game, I'm still trying to embrace it, even if the clunky weapons system doesn't help matters.

  22. Posted

    Just got onto the second season of Into The Badlands, and I'm really enjoying it. It's an AMC show, set in post-apocalyptic America where they've reverted to a variation on late 19th century society, but with more martial arts. It looks great, the acting's all strong and the fight scenes are absolutely fantastic, probably the best of their kind I've ever seen on a tv show. They must have had a pretty massive budget to manage all the choreography and rehearsal to get them to that standard, (not to mention all the costumes and what have you).

  23. Posted

    12 hours later is probably too late, but I'd go for the quiet hiker. Second place would be the warehouse workers (assuming you could get access to a warehouse, and also acknowledging that the second half of it feels a bit tacked on - unless the twist is that he is now possessed by Baphomet!)

  24. Posted

    9 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

    The Mario Maker race was fun as always but holy crap the format for it was straight garbage.

     

    What didn't you like about the format?

     

    Congrats on getting a game in there, Henke!