Ben X

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Posts posted by Ben X

  1. Posted

    I finished the game. Unfortunately, the last section was a let-down, with an arena shootout with a bunch of ghosts then a two-way showdown. Considering this game works best when using a mix of cover and timing, and the showdown mechanics are frustrating as hell, this was not a good end section. Then it's revealed that Ben is actually Bob and you get a choice whether to kill him or not ("Revenge" or "Redemption"). I chose redemption, and it turns out that the young boy who's been listening to your story is Dwight Eisenhower and I tell him not to give into vengeance and bloodlust. Looking at a video of the Revenge choice: you get a showdown (a good reason in itself to choose peace) with Bob, you kill him, and the Dwight reveal is made - this time he leaves without learning a wholesome lesson. I'll let the historians here discuss which universe we're in.

     

    Game+ lets you play through again with all your gained skills and allows you to keep building them up, but does force you to stop for all the story bits. There's an arcade mode that lets you play through some of the levels, but starting off vanilla again, which wasn't that fun (also @Laco has insanely good high scores that I'll never beat!).

    So no perfect option, but I played almost the entire game again in game+ so I guess that's a good indicator of how enjoyable it is overall. It's telling that it takes two whole playthroughs to get completely levelled up, though, and even then I didn't feel like I'd had enough chances to use all my new stuff. The game could have done with racking XP up a lot sooner and then having a couple more towns to work through without lots of narrative interruptions near the end. I never got to throw someone's dynamite back at them! Still, despite a few that and a few other small issues (unusually for an FPS, the shotgun is pretty much useless and I barely touched it; boss fights are never fun), it's overall very satisfying to play and the storytelling has a lot of flair. Aside from more showy stuff like a spinning time-lapse sky or weather and vegetation changing with the narration as you walk through them, it also has some great atmosphere. Silas sings a song about death at one point as you walk through a valley; rain and lightning starts up and then a giant landslide tumbles past you, held in a freeze-frame as the level ends; the abandoned town falling apart and sunken at angles deep into the mud also acts as a nice reflection of Silas becoming a husk of a man, still seeking revenge while the 20th century rolls on and he gets ever older and more irrelevant, cars buzzing past him in the street and enemies wondering who the hell this old coot is.

     

    An accurate RPS review (which mentions this was released at a surprisingly low £12 price point)

    Forum thread

    Discussion in Idle Thumbs 135 (from around 18 minutes in)

    A couple of making-of videos, one from the writer and one more standard.

    And now I can finally finish watching Noah Caldwell-Gervais' video essay on the CoJ series!

     

    So, it's onto Rise Of The Triad. However, I'm pretty sure that I somehow gained the original ROTT on one of my online libraries, so I'm going to try to hunt that down first. I have like ten of them, and I can't remember what they all are, so there's a chance I have, like, five games sitting somewhere that I will never get to play! While I'm looking, I'll keep an eye out for any FPSes I own but missed off this list.

  3. Posted

    Oh yeah, all the actors were good, that's true. I got more of a Philip Seymour Hoffman vibe than a Harrison Ford one off young Han, but whatevs. I thought Clarke did a good job, can't really imagine another actor doing anything more with that role tbh.

     

    I agree with most of your spoiler stuff.

     

    Spoiler

     

    I didn't mind Maul being involved, though it was total sequel-set-up, didn't need to be there and just reminded me how pointless Clarke's character was in general.

    Yeah, those were some weird-faced wookies. I guess that's better than all wookies continuing to look like Chewie clones with different hair colours.

     

    I read it as Han making the right choice at the end of the train heist, it's just that Crimson Dawn or whatever (made me think of Asian Dawn from Die Hard every single time) is so scary that Woody was willing to risk almost certain death rather than disappoint them/him.

     

     

  4. Posted

    On 5/28/2018 at 3:13 PM, Merus said:
    • Deadpool 2 is basically what you'd expect after Deadpool 1; it's an R-rated superhero-themed comedy. Its plot works a little better than Deadpool 1's, it's not quite as fresh but lordy it's trying, and they've got a budget so they can have more than a couple of locations. I imagine you'll have the same reaction to it as you did to the first one. I got what I paid for. I would have liked it if they'd been a bit more ambitious than 'superhero movie but with some lampshade hanging' but then I'm basically always in the mood for satire and I'm not sure how far you could go with a satirical Deadpool before it stops working.

     

    I was disappointed. I thought the plot was really tight on the first one, here it's all over the place. And it has that comedy sequel problem of mainly just redoing a ton of jokes from the first one. Also, I was annoyed that

    they fridged Vanessa. Apparently there was a mid-credits scene where he brings her back to life using time-travel and stuff, but I missed that and besides it doesn't change the fact that the movie suffers for it.

     

  5. Posted

    Not sure if this film will generate enough discussion for an entire thread, seeing as apparently it's doing badly enough to lose Disney money (at the moment anyway; I guess they'll make it back eventually with blu-ray/VOD sales etc), but let's see...

     

    I didn't enjoy it. It felt like an episode of a tv show where they take one episode to give a character's entire backstory up to that point so they cram in every important life event and use a ton of shorthand. I really don't care how the Millennium Falcon got dirty or what personal significance those golden dice have to Han (especially since I never even noticed them in the OT, even if the new films seem to have decided they're an iconic prop) or what the exact details of that Kessel Run/parsec boast are. It also meant there was no real narrative structure and that I didn't care about most of the characters because there was no time to get to know any of them. Apart from all that, it was rather gloomy throughout (mood and visuals) and the action sequences were generally not very well directed.

     

    Merus said this:

     

    Quote

    Solo is basically a Star Wars film except nothing that's happening is as exciting as they think it is. It's not really a heist film in the way that Rogue One was a war film. It's like the prequel trilogy except with a decent script: you know where it's ending up, and it doesn't have the room to surprise with its characters or the inclination to tell its own story. (It also has this obsession with beating you over the head with call-forwards, so when they fuck with the continuity a little it's more of a bother than if they had been a little more independent.) I want these films to tell new stories and borrow Star Wars iconography, but Lucasfilm want to tell Star Wars stories that masquerade as something else and I think it's time I accept we want two very different things here.

     

     

  7. Posted

    I'm on the final level already, apparently. The levelling system only just recently kicked the game up a notch!  A bit of a shame really - it's one of those RPG-lite systems that, rather than create a few different play experiences, only really lets you enjoy the game for the second half and also forces you to level up stuff you don't care about in order to get to useful skills. Still, I'm really enjoying it for the most part - using all the little special powers in the right combination is really satisfying, and they have some cool levels like the steamer wreck half-sunk in a swamp, the tilted town or the turret sequence on a train-heist gone wrong where you rack up kills in slow-motion as burning dollar bills float past you. The narrative gags are still fun, too (though I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be blindingly obvious that Ben in the present-day saloon is the guy I've been looking for all through the flashbacks).

     

    There's a game+ mode, and I don't normally go for those but it might be fun to blast through the levels again with superpowers, as long as I don't have to stop every minute or so for the story again.

  8. Posted

    The storytelling and presentation is certainly fun - you're a bounty hunter telling tall tales to a group of saloon patrons, playing through them as you go. New pathways drop out of the sky, enemies change when you're challenged on the historical facts, and sometimes you'll die in an extravagant action-movie moment only for your narration to clarify that's what would have happened if you'd taken the wrong route, and a quick rewind to plonk you further back in the level with a new pathway appearing. The only issue I have with it really is that it can overshadow and break up the gameplay a little - it'd be nice if I could just get a long level to shoot through occasionally.

     

    There's a bunch of energetic editing razzmatazz too, with all the character name-slamming, split-screening, illustration-overlaying freeze-frames you could wish for. It has a kind of Borderlandsy feel to it, especially with a slight tinge of cell-shading and bloom to the in-game aesthetics. As per usual for a CoJ game, it looks nice enough without really blowing you away.

     

    The gunplay generally feels good, too. The old concentration mode is here and still fun, though perhaps not as generous as I'd like. A judicious use of that, cover and dynamite creates some great Western shootouts, especially with AI that hits a good balance between taking cover and getting reckless. It can sometimes feel a little fiddly, and the boss fights have been uniformly irritating so far, but overall it's really solid.

  9. Posted

    RPS make highly subjective lists, they're not really to be considered proper "Best Ever" lists. Disagree with you on HL2 though.

     

    I'm putting Blood Dragon aside at least for the moment. I just got to a bit where I have to wait for a slow elevator while running circles in a small room to dodge a dragon, then a turret sequence, then I have to drive a car through a series of tight corridors. I died getting shot at in the car while trying to do a three-point turn, and now I have to do the whole sequence over again.

     

    I might go back to it, but honestly probably not. I'm on the same page as Tycho here:

     

     

     

    There's some discussion that follows on from there. My one word for it would be 'muddy'. Just a big icon-filled map with some muddy objectives and muddy shooting, and a muddy aesthetic. The humour gets pretty worn after a short while, too - it's essentially Duke Nukem Forever.

     

    So, onto Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger. I hear good stuff about this, but I didn't love the first two (19th century-set) installments so I'm keeping my expectations low.

  13. Posted

    In more negative news, I've now finished Ash Vs Evil Dead season 3 (which is now the final season, as the show got cancelled). Overall, I wasn't a fan of the series. It occasionally had some stand-out great sequences (like JKO said, the fluid-based one in S3 was great), but I didn't like the sub-Supernatural lore-ification, I didn't like what they did with Ash (for some reason he's a racist lech now), I didn't really like any of the supporting characters and it overall just felt quite repetitive and unimaginative.

    I would have much preferred them to cobble together a few million and make a low-budget Evil Dead 4 that followed up on the original ending to AoD (or that treated both that ending and the theatrical ending as canon alternate universes and brought them together, as was the plan at one stage).

  14. Posted

    I was told the first three episodes are a bit of a slog, but I'm halfway through the first ep and enjoying it so far.

     

    I'm also enjoying the Netflix series The End Of The Fucking World, as recommended by @Spaff on the Double Fine Discord. 8x20min episodes, really easy to get into and a score by Graham Coxon.

  15. Posted

    The thing about the actor not being able to stop joking around sounds like nervousness/self-consciousness. Hopefully he got that out of the way in that first morning and will be better on subsequent days.

    I definitely wouldn't abandon close-ups. Remember this is a learning experience for you - push yourself to get better performances out of the actors. It sounds like maybe a good thing to try would be to encourage them to go as big as possible - again, perhaps they are self-conscious still and don't feel secure putting themselves out there and risking feeling silly. Once they've done a few big takes, get them to gradually take it down until you get around the right level. This may be completely the wrong technique for these two particular actors, though - you'll have to experiment and find out what works best for you all as a creative team!

  16. Posted

    Sequel announced. Bethesda publishing, Avalanche developing.

    I'm not as excited for the prospect of a Mad Max/Just Cause type game set in the Rage universe (which is pretty much Mad Max anyway) as I would be for an FPS that jettisoned all the RPG-lite crap but kept all the fun shooting and nice design.

     

    Here's what I posted as I played through the first one a few years ago:

     

    Spoiler

     

    I started playing it when I got my new PC just as a tester game, then got bored and left it. As I've just finished the HL1 expansions (OF was great, I put BS on hard because I was told it's ridiculously easy and had to give up) and Minerva mod (nothing special, difficulty not very well balanced), I thought I'd give it another try so I've deleted my saves and started a new game. It looks absolutely gorgeous, but what I remember about it from last time is finding the shooting imprecise and the RPG-lite elements irritating. I've stuck it on easy this time and am hoping to blast through it enjoying the scenery.

     

    Just got back into this, and Paul is right, this immediately gets better once you've picked up a couple of weapons. They should have had a few one-shot enemies at the start so as not to put the player off straight away. I'm really enjoying it now I'm used to all the systems (like, that you can buy ammo, which they're really stingy with otherwise) and possibly also because I've got it on easy! The RPG-lite stuff is still the least entertaining aspect, but it's not too cumbersome, I guess. I am enjoying getting to know the map layout.

    I just got to a bit where bandits have set up a blockade and I'm supposed to put some explosives on then leg it, but they've got a rocket launcher that's making it really annoying. I'll come back and try again later, which I'm looking forward to.

     

     

     

    Got this as soon as I tried again, it was just easily-snipable dudes. I've just got to Wellspring, though, and it's making me walk around talking to people and choosing clothes and shit.

     

    There are loads of hints on the loading screens that suggest I'll be getting into vehicle battles and having to upgrade my buggy and shit, which I really can't be bothered with either. It really should make those hints progress-related, there's loads of them that are completely irrelevant to me at the moment.

     

    (4 months later)

     

    I finally dragged myself back to this game and spent ages talking to people and getting through annoying car battles (you don't seem to be able to do anything about the turrets or explosive toy cars or incoming rockets, and the handling is crap), then finally got to a new shooty bit and it's immediately ace again.

     

     I've gritted my teeth and got through some races to soup up my car, so I can now just leg it past any bandits and not bother with any car fights. There's still a load of boring RPG in my FPS, though. It's "walk through confusingly laid-out hub, get mission from boring character, drive shitty-handling car to mission, do FUN SHOOTING interspersed with picking up bottles, drive back to hub, go to shop, sell bottles, buy ammo and ingredients, craft things with ingredients, repeat." It's shallow and dull fluff tacked onto a good-looking, fun shooter. If they'd used all the characters and locations in a Half-Life 2 structure it also would have been much better.

    The shooter sections are starting to wear a little thin too, though. I'm hoping I'm either near the end or some new stuff is going to get introduced (I just got to the subway town and am on the second mission there, fighting gearheads for the first time). It might not help that I'm only doing the main missions and I have it on Easy...

     

    Phew, finished. That ending was bizarrely anti-climactic, yeah. So strange to put your only massive boss (with glowing hit-points no less!) halfway through the game and have the final fight be against a handful of pretty much the most basic enemy. I don't think I'll ever bother with the DLC, I can't imagine it will have enough new stuff to make it worth my time.

    I'd love for there to be a mod of this game which HL2s it.

     

    Fuck, I just realised I never bothered firing the BFG rounds because the final level was so easy.

     

     

    (Sorry, @toblix, I went for this thread because it has more gameplay discussion, even though yours was there first.)

  22. Posted

    Blood Dragon is pretty fun so far. I like the Robocop/Terminator/Predator 80s VHS pastiche mixed with Sega Megadrive cutscene visuals, though they go on too long. And the gloopy laser fire  looks nice and Cameron-y. It also mocks tutorialising which was pretty funny, though again it went on too long and then the game actually spent half an hour tutorialising. Speaking of which, I'm already feeling a bit weighed down by all the systems - buying upgrades, freeing compounds, side-missions etc. I know this is the standard Ubisoft game now, but I was hoping for a little more Far Cry 1 and a little less Assassin's Creed. Never mind, I'll just blast around for for as long as it remains fun. I'm having a couple of Bioshock Infinite-type problems with the combat, actually - the weird health system and some poor enemy visibility (mostly due to the gloomy visual scheme), plus slightly floaty shooting. Some of this may be solved by being a bit more stealthy, though.

  24. Posted

    Finished. The ending was, as with most of the game, impressive while didactic and hollow. It was cool going to Rapture and then all those other places in quick succession, going through a looping series of doors, but my reaction to the story was finally "so what?"

     

    This is why Half Life 2 is heralded as great storytelling - it doesn't tell a story that would be good for a book or a movie or an RPG, it takes a pared down, tropey storyline and tells it mostly through the environment with the occasional fun vignette filled with believable characters. With BI, I barely had a handle on the story most of the time because so many layers of backstory and ongoing twists were being thrown at me, and yet at the same time certain points and themes got hammered over and over again.

     

    I couldn't find too much making-of stuff, but here's a review from RPS that mostly aligned with what I thought, though was a bit more forgiving of its flaws. I'd be interested to hear what others here thought of it, especially the themes and narrative.

     

    I'm going to skip Zeno Clash 2, as I'm unlikely to enjoy it that much judging from my experience with the first one, and I just want an FPS I can enjoy right now! I'm not convinced Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon will be it, but I suspect I'll at least be able to muck around in it if I get bored, and not feel so obliged to make it all the way through...