Noyb

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Noyb

  2. Posted

    I'm waiting on getting an HDTV before starting GTA4. I'm currently idling on the fourth set of puzzles (the one past the airship) on Zak and Wiki, and have yet to pick up Professor Layton and Apollo Justice.

    I also spent a few idle weeks of gaming time making a small game called Apophenia, which generates a pretentious abstract art game of questionable symbolism given a title.

    Edit: Happy Birthdays! :clap:

  4. Posted

    We saw with Beyond Good & Evil that so many customers were extremely happy with the game. We had a different audience at that time. We had more core gamers than casual gamers than we have today. We think the game was probably a little too difficult for the general gamers at that time. We’re going to make it more accessible and make sure that it’s really done for the new generation that’s come into video games.

    The original wasn't that difficult, although the final boss took a few tries to get the pattern down. Maybe some of the difficulty comes from youngins not intuitively understanding the need for stealth? I remember not quite understanding why I couldn't beat the first *room* of Metal Gear Solid when I rented it as a kid, though I'm not sure if my case is typical.

    I still haven't beaten Rayman 2, which apparently sold loads. (Bloody late-game introduction of new gameplay mechanics used in the final boss fight. That rocket was so hard to control on a keyboard and I've since lost the game save.)

    I have to say invoking the word "casual" frightens me. Not like there's anything wrong with easy games as long as they can keep up a sense of wonder and imagination.

  5. Posted

    Wow, I'm late for this thread. I finally got a chance to play through the campaign (on hardened). I've got really mixed feelings toward all the scripting. When it works, it works well. The Chernobyl bit (up to the ferris wheel) was incredible. I loved that stealth mission, the pacing of the firefights and quiet bits. But when it fails... :shifty: It's like the game just breaks whatever characterization they were trying in the scripted bits when a General goes from an all-knowing badass to someone who can't shoot a guy three yards away, out of cover, and looking exclusively at me.

    Actually, part of that might be the monster closets. It's crazy when a firefight goes from a stalemate to a victory just because I walked a few feet forward without even firing a shot. Again, when it worked it was fun, but I kept noticing when the game wasn't clear on where it was trying to funnel me.

    After an hour of trying on the ferris wheel mission, I found the AI much less aggressive when I hid behind the bumper cars to the northeast. Go figure. :blink: There was also that bit where you have to hold a hill, then fight your way down it. Stumped me for a while halfway down the hill until I realized one path was constant firefights while another had no enemies, but the map was funneling me to the firefights.

    I guess the respawning makes a bit of sense in a certain light. :(

    Terrorists and Nazis reproduce asexually at an alarming rate. Your job as a soldier is to get close to them, since they are too ashamed to bud off their offspring in the presence of enemies.

    All said, it was a fun experience. They had some nice Half-Life style first person cinematics. Hmm... looking back at this post it seems like I only liked the campaign when I wasn't in control. Not entirely true, but I had fun. Looking forward to trying out the multiplayer.

  12. Posted

    Oh, jeez. I smell multiple scandals in the making with this game.

    First, Neversoft decided to "innovate" by adding in drums and vocals to Guitar Hero 4. However...

    A picture of the wireless Guitar Hero IV drum kit, located within the pages Game Informer magazine's June issue, reveals it to have three drum pads, two cymbal pads and a foot pedal. That gives the kit a higher number of inputs and a different physical arrangement than the Rock Band drum set, which has four drum pads and a foot pedal.

    So they added a drum pad and changed around the configuration to ensure that the existing Rock Band drumsets are incompatible. What. the. hell. Unlike the earlier guitar parts of Guitar Hero, Activision is the latecomer in drumming (comparing just the two brands, and not any earlier Bemani games which don't play into compatibility). Are they completely clouded by dreams of hefty markups on plastic instruments? :finger::frusty:

    I don't see GH4 offering that different an experience from Rock Band to justify buying a completely different set of peripherals *again*, especially since GH3 was an exercise in tedious masochism with repetitive songs, arbitrarily difficult notecharts, and unbalanced battle modes. Granted, they are trying something different with promises of song creation and sharing, but I really don't see that turning out well.

    Activision has to keep on the good side of the record companies to have them continue to give them rights to songs. When given any arbitrary filesharing system, users will inevitably gravitate towards submitting content they don't have the rights to (see: the internet). Activision doesn't want to get in trouble hosting and distributing rightless media files belonging to the big record companies, so that gives them two options. One: keep it peer-to-peer, making it difficult to actually find any good songs without going through the rigamarole of begging for a limited slot in someone's xbox live's friends list. Two: Keep it server-side, but completely regulated, which means Activision would keep employees to review all submitted songs for copyright infringement, slowing down the whole process, not to mention that this isn't taking quality of a notechart into account either.

  13. Posted

    Tried the demo. I love the instant restart and checkpoint system, but I don't have the patience for the subtlety the game requires to control the bike well. I'm a bigger fan of the surreal Elastomania, which while without constant checkpoints, is a bit more forgiving by giving you more control over your midair torque. That said, Trials seems really well done, and it feels possible to eventually master the controls. Just not to my personal taste.

    (Also hyping a game without even playing it? :shifty:)

  14. Posted

    So I saw Everyday Shooter, a synesthesia shmup formerly only for PSN is now on Steam. It's kinda like a guitar remix of Geometry Wars, but with a more balanced difficulty curve and more variety in both the gameplay and the music. I'm not normally a shoot-em-up fan (only shmup I ever beat was Operation Spacehog, a Gradius clone by the maker of Icy Tower. Seriously.) , but this game is damn fun so far. It's simple -- the graphics are sparse but functional, all you can do is move and fire in 8 directions -- but each level changes up the gameplay dynamics. I'll spoiler a few since discovering how they work is part of the fun.

    In the first level, certain enemies act as bombs, whose explosions can be briefly sustained by shooting them. Only enemies destroyed by these Every-Extend style explosion chains drop points used to gain extra lives. My favorite level so far (only survived to level 6) is the fifth one, where the game essentially plays an RTS against you. As a kicking electric guitar alternates between two different themes, engineers build and repair turrets up top while tanks and ground troops charge in from the bottom, eventually merging as the music picks up speed.

    It's got this great difficulty curve where you can go either for pure survival, or more skilled mastery of the level, with appropriate risk/reward, and you can use the points you accumulate in both the main game and single levels to buy extra lives and levels to practice independently to make the game easier. Unfortunately, there's no demo on Steam, but I'm happy with my impulse buy so far. And fair warning, I've only played it with my wired 360 gamepad so I'm not sure how well it plays with the keyboard.

  15. Posted

    Cool games. I saw the sheep one in a Jay Is Games competition a while back, but the other two are new to me.

    Drifts reminds me of an orisinal game. Relaxing, although like orisinal, extended play always makes me notice the shallow difficulty curve. I love the music and background, and the gameplay works well.

    It personally took me a bit of time before intuitively getting that my life was also tied to the green bubbles I picked up, so I was surprised the first few times I tried picking up a green bubble that was also touching a purple bubble. If you set a personal high score, the high score screen tells you that you need negative points to beat your personal best. I'm not a big fan of putting help screens in an animation, since each player would probably want to consume that information at his own pace. It went too slow for my tastes, but someone else might need more time.

    Twizzle was fun. Neat concept. I liked the gradual introduction of new elements, the instant restart times, and saving the life-ending parts for the latter portion of the game. I loved the painted art level transitions and general sense of polish. I liked how there is room for both logic and reaction time puzzles in the gameplay. I would have liked a level select screen instead of a simple new game/continue. Some of the latter puzzles were a little too simple to solve since the player is only confronted with one or two productive first moves.

    I'm not entirely sure the arrow keys were the best choice of controls, since I tend to think of them as straight x/y movement and not the slightly more abstract polar movement. Then again, you'd still be dealing with the relative positions of whatever different keys you'd choose, and choosing "up" as moving outward does reinforce that outward movement is important.

  19. Posted

    I liked MDK1's mix of action and sniping, although I don't remember playing much of it until I got annoyed by the *really* infrequent checkpoints. Only played MDK2 on a rental, but I remember enjoying what I played, wacky jetpack dog included. Earthworm Jim 1+2 I enjoyed for its sheer randomness, but Earthworm Jim 3d was just a piss-poor version of Mario 64.

  21. Posted

    Interesting article. Part of me would have liked to see this game made, but then again Douglas Adams wrote the amazing Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency while spurning Infocom. And the partial walkthrough of Bywater's plans sounded idiotic and random on all levels as opposed to the hilarious masochism of the original. Creating a non-intuitive first puzzle that screws the player over if actually solved? No thanks.

  23. Posted

    need extra battery charger?

    Yeah. The wireless controllers take AAs, but most get the play-and-charge kit so you can charge from the 360's USB ports. And the battery life on the controllers degrades fairly fast. Some of my launch window play-and-charge controllers are down to 2-4 hours of battery life.

    I'm curious, are PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Guitar Hero and Rock Band pretty much the same or is one better somehow? For example, do they have comparable number of downloadable songs and do the songs cost the same?

    I think the biggest difference in the platforms at the moment is guitar compatibility. As far as I remember, GH controllers are compatible with Rock Band on the 360 and not the PS3. RB controllers are not compatible with GH on either platform. Apart from the Halo theme for GH3, I think both platforms get the same songs for the same prices.

  24. Posted

    In a similar vein, there's I Wanna Be the Guy, which is like a mashup of all the old Nintendo games, only crueler. I like you guys too much to actually give you the link to such an evil, masochistic game, so here's the start of a youtube series where you can literally see the player start to go slowly insane. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ifS4BhrNmI

    Also, an interesting writeup/roundup on these "masocore" games. http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=11

  25. Posted

    That sounds so idiotic on so many levels. Did the EA pricesetters not understand currency conversion? I thought the business model for Rock Band would be to get as many packages out there, and then nickel-and-dime the consumers with some of the most tolerable DLC around. I've been having fun with Rock Band, but nowhere near $350 fun. Have EA responded at all to the community backlash yet?

    Edit: Found this post on the Rock Band forums by one of the developers.: http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42720