Noyb

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Noyb

  1. Posted

    So Microsoft did something really cool at GDC. They opened up the XNA creator's club, the independent gaming version of Xbox 360 development, to a larger audience. Apparently students (in certain countries) who can verify their educational status get a free membership to the creator's club, allowing them to upload their games to the 360 for other members to play. And the games that rise to the top through community voting get published to the arcade as a whole. Now as a gamer, I'm not too keen about the mass market tastes of the average xbox user being a major deciding factor, but this whole pathway seems much cooler than the closed off one Microsoft was using before.

    Microsoft also opened up some earlier XNA demos/games for free download. Quick comments:

    Culture: Circle weeds with flowers to kill them in a simulation of arboreal genocide. Neat art direction, but I stopped playing before finding out whether the difficulty curve got any steeper than the very shallow beginning. :tmeh:

    JellyCar: An Elastomania-type game about maneuvering a 2d gelatinous car through obstacle courses by being compressed and changing your size. Might be fun if the physics engine was tightened up, but it feels a bit too floaty now. :tmeh:

    Little Gamers: Only worth playing if you really like poking dead guys with sticks. Gameplay doesn't feel tight, and I didn't like how I couldn't seem to aim separately from movement. Feels like it should have been a mouse+keyboard game. :tdown:

    Proximity HD: Very fun multiplayer puzzle/strategy game. You place numbered tiles on a hex grid, capturing enemy tiles with lower numbers next to you, decreasing the strength of enemy tiles with equal or higher numbers by two, and increasing the strength of friendly tiles by two. Some fun strategy here, although I'm not quite sure whether the random number generator plays too large a part yet. :tup:

    Rocketball: Dodgeball with dodgy controls. Meh. :tdown:

    The Dishwasher: Very tight 2d action game. Highly recommended. :tup:

    TriLinea: Competitive non-turn-based match-3 game based on dominos. Might be more fun with mouse movement, since I have trouble placing tiles down accurately as quickly as some of the computer opponents. There's also some nonintuitive rules like placed tiles are stuck in place, but the other halves of matched tiles are affected by gravity. :tmeh:

  3. Posted

    Or like those firefly segments of Super Metroid, where the enemies are your light source and if you kill too many you can't see the platforms anymore.

    Also: duct tape. :tup:

    I wonder if the idea came out of Doom 3 criticisms. And I agree that calling it "Real World (Road) Rules" just makes those immersion-breaking moments like indestructible lamps stand out all the more.

  4. Posted

    Geometry Wars is fairly cheap on Steam and should be playable with a two stick controller. Overlord has support for a 360 controller, although it's not to everyone's taste. You can use a controller with Cave Story, one of the best indie action-adventure games of recent memory, kinda like Metroid but with more focus on action. And whatever games you can't play with the joystick, you should be able to emulate keyboard control with joy2key or similar programs.

  5. Posted

    So they're trying to protest Scientology attempting to "censor the Internet" by...effectively censoring Scientology websites by bringing them down through DDoS attacks? Are these the same people who protested Cooper Lawrence negatively portraying Mass Effect without playing it by negatively reviewing her book without reading it? Don't get me wrong, Scientology creeps the hell out of me and I'd hate to see any of my friends fall victim to their bunk, but you've got to see the irony in the protesters' actions.

  8. Posted

    Mine just Red Ring of Deathed. Froze after attempting to navigate Undertow's title screen, and never recovered, although I guess that's just the dying gasps of a launch console and not the actual cause. Time to submit myself to what hopefully isn't an endless cycle of repairs. And if they do replace the console, then the DRM means that I need to be online to access any previously purchased arcade games or DLC. :hmph:

  9. Posted

    And because of the digital chip age in which we live - "Mass Effect" can be customized to sodomize whatever, whoever, however, the game player wishes.

    With it's "over the net" capabilities virtual orgasmic rape is just the push of a button away.

    Why is it that pro-censorship types seem to have the filthiest imaginations? :erm:

  10. Posted

    I played it and enjoyed it. No idea what the "high brow wank fest" you're talking about is, but it had some fun moments, some mindfuck moments, and some really frustrating moments.

    I'll admit it had some of the better hand-to-hand combat of a first-person game I've yet seen, but the gunplay, with its erratic auto-aim, was pretty clunky. You are in first person the entire time, but actually see your body unlike Half-Life. In terms of storytelling and gameplay, Half-Life obviously blows this away. Some of the artifacts of focusing on your physical presence - such as laboriously animating picking up a gun, removing the cartridge, and placing it in your pocket, which requires THREE button presses - are neat touches at first, but get annoying. It is pretty neat, though, to get picked up by an enemy, knocked to the floor, and actually see your perspective pitch up facing the ceiling, seeing your torso lying on the floor.

    In terms of combat, it plays more like a fighting game than anything. Once you outgrow the guns, blocking becomes essential, and the game *will* punish you for failing to read enemies. I lost count of how many times I died the first time the game expected me to take on two enemies hand-to-hand at once. There are dramatic difficulty spikes: the aforementioned two normal enemies, a part where you have to fight two miniboss-like enemies at once, a later part where you have to fight two miniboss-like enemies who are backed up by 4 snipers, and this evil, evil, evil, evil room two scenes from the end which expects you to take on FIVE WAVES of enemies, each wave of which has roughly twice as many enemies as you're used to fighting, and can only conceivably be beaten by finding a cheap undocumented move in an online guide. It isn't an easy game by most standards, it does keep throwing in new twists to challenge you while simultaneously increasing your powers, with a few scenes giving you powers to kick ass where previously you were severely outmanned.

    The plot is... decent. Nothing too special, a bit cliché (oh noez, teh amnesiac has the power to save the world), but I still walked away as thinking it was decent for a Video game. I seem to remember the plot was one of the things that kept me playing till the end, probably because of a few ballsy decisions. I'm mainly thinking of the incredible mindfuck of the climax 2/3 of the way through the game. If you're thinking of playing the game, please don't read this spoiler, because it's a lot cooler if you don't see it coming. MASSIVE, MASSIVE SPOILER:

    The game acts like it's building towards a finale. You're chasing the big baddie through the enemy's homeworld, but pretty much everything that can go wrong does. Fighting the boss, he kicks your ass. Lying on the ground, the home troops announce that they're out of options and decide to nuke the place. A missile bearing the text "game over" crashes down (and I half expected to see the credits rolling in one of the most depressing Video game endings ever). When the explosion settles down, you awake in a machine in the lab that makes most of the beginning of the game and are told that everything up to that point was you remembering the past. When you step out of the machine... your HUD is gone. No health gauge. No targeting reticule. Just your character's hands. That floored me while playing. Like most things in the game, though, the moment of brilliance was quickly surpassed by frustration at trying to kill an annoying difficult room of enemies without having time to get accustomed to combat without the HUD.

    Worth playing for the experience, if you are able to dedicate the time to get over some of the clunky controls and occasionally frustrating fights.

  11. Posted

    Basically, it's very harsh about mistakes. If I don't get in imprenetrable cover within 2 seconds of combat starting, I'm dead. If I get hit by any biotic power, I'm dead. there's no margin for error. Gah!

    Yeah, if you know you're going to be fighting against a biotic, you really need to have someone on your team with the damping power. It disables the enemies biotic powers, which means no more being thrown to the floor at the beginning of the battle leaving you absolutely helpless while all the enemies proceed to aim directly for you. :shifty:

  12. Posted

    There's a strong narrative thread about the lead character being cursed(?) to live for 1,000 years, as punishment for something.
    What are the odds that curse will take a backseat to game over states when the ubiquitous RPG battle mechanic kicks in? Unless it's like Planescape: Torment. (Oh, crap. That's the game that I forgot to complete before canceling my Gametap account. Combat got annoying enough for me to shelve it, and forget about it until now. The story seemed very interesting, playing as an immortal protagonist, but I didn't get much farther than chasing a guy through some ruined building near the first town populated by enemies I wasn't strong enough to fight or skilled enough to evade.)

  13. Posted

    I haven't owned an HD-tv yet. Aside from a few isolated instances (tiny, blurry text in Dead Rising, difficulty seeing camouflaged enemies in Halo 3), it hasn't really affected my gameplay, although I get the same feeling as when I have an inferior PC graphics card: a bitterness at not being able to see the game as it's meant to be seen and at having to download hi-res textures that my hardware is incapable of displaying well.

    As for your problem, you might want to look into the tv's refresh rate? Maybe some reviews of that model to see if any gamers noted the same issues? :erm:

  15. Posted

    This game is so conflicting. Basically, Nachmir echoed most of my thoughts. I love the story and dialog, find the combat acceptable, but absolutely hate the inventory UI.

    The whole inventory system is absolutely terrible. It limits you to just 150 items total, including weapons, armor, and UPGRADES. You automatically pick up items from enemies you kill, so you reach that limit quickly and frequently in the game. Now, items harvested from enemies are in a sort of limbo before they go into your inventory, a menu you must navigate *before* you are able to do anything with your current items. If those limbo items push you over the tiny limit, then you must permanently destroy however many of the new, valuable items to drop you under the limit instead of being given the chance to dismantle your older, less valuable items.

    The other way to get rid of items is to sell them in the shop, but the shop UI is even worse. You can only sort items in one way: price, ascending. So you don't have any sort of sense of how many, say, shotguns you have, or whether you already have a better version of that regeneration upgrade without scrolling through the entire list. And the scrolling is slow, because the game decided to dedicate a quarter of the screen space to a 3d model of the BOX the item comes in, which must be loaded for each item. And, hell, they don't even have a confirmation prompt for buying or selling items, forcing you to sell or rebuy mistakes at a loss. Terrible, terrible, absolutely terrible. :shifty:

    All said, though, I would still be interested in another game in that world.

  16. Posted

    I felt the same way at that point, Thrik. I'm 84 stars in, and am now loving the game. That long stretch at the beginning did make me fear that all the levels would be that simple, but complexity and difficulty did come. Watch that video linked above about Luigi's purple coins if you don't believe me.

    The most striking design decision I see is the whole lives system. Nintendo does give them out like *candy*. You get an extra life for every 50 star pieces within a level (cumulative over lives) or 50 coins (not cumulative over lives, so only infrequently). Whenever you reach a tricky section, there almost always is an extra life that's not difficult to reach about 10 seconds in. You also get 5 lives from Peach after each system boss. In a 4-5 hour session, I racked up a net total of 53 lives, and that's just in standard gameplay without actively trying to earn them.

    What is weird, though, is that lives *reset* to 3 after quitting the game. The mostly linear mini-missions that make up each star encourage a casual approach -- playing through a few stars in each play sessions. However, resetting the lives encourages longer play sessions, but only slightly given how easy it is to accumulate lives. I wonder why Nintendo chose to include lives at all instead of popular infinite continues model -- which it essentially is. Throwback to the older games? Unnecessary justification of all the collectible doodads? Need of a reward for exploration that isn't another star?

  17. Posted

    Amazing, amazing game. So fun with four people. I just finished up the medium tour of drums, and am really liking getting used to a new plastic instrument. The guitar lines are easier than GH3, but for my skill level (beat GH1&2 on expert, didn't succeed/spend enough time on trying to 5-star a game, surrendered on GH3's eighth set on hard/seventh set on expert, never beat Jordan/TTFatF) that's perfectly fine. I'm doing terrible at vocals, although I'm not entirely sure whether it's my lack of absolute pitch control, some audiovisual desynching, or just not being familiar enough with the songs.

    Again, I have to say I'm in awe of both Miffy and Tommy. Nice job guys. Just...wow.

    Pity about all the hardware issues. A friend of mine had his bass pedal snap in half during a playthrough of the Metallica DLC on expert, and I have to send back my Rock Band guitar due to a defective strummer. Plus, I feel like a chump owning four guitar games (GH1/2 PS2, GH3 and RB 360), three guitars (GH1 PS2, wireless GH3 360, RB 360), and only being able to play co-op on ONE game (RB 360) because of the Harmonix/Red Octane squabbling.

    By the way, has anyone actually tested what signals both wired guitars send out? My laptop recognized the Rock Band guitar as a 360 controller. Do they send out the same signals for the same actions, which would mean there's some software blocks on unsupported peripherals, or does the RB guitar not hold to the same "standard" as the original? Also, Frets on Fire (a Guitar Hero PC clone) worked great with the RB guitar... while it worked, at least.

  19. Posted

    I felt about Loom the same way about Dreamfall. Loved the characters and story, although the gameplay itself was fairly straightforward. I do remember a couple of cool bits, though (all near the beginning afair):

    Opening the sky. Hiding the sheep. Figuring out that you could a song backwards to perform the inverse of a spell.

    It didn't really seem to deserve all the mocking in the later LucasArts games, although Bobbin Threadbare was admittedly a silly name. As for the piracy, I don't condone it (I own a secondhand CD, which includes an audio drama of the game) but damn if LucasArts nowadays doesn't want to sell its old adventure games to willing buyers or even acknowledge its past as a good storyteller.

  20. Posted

    I think that was me who had it in the backlog thread. The demo had a slow start, but was very fun. The demo has about 2 hours of gameplay, including a combat heavy-section and fun boss at the end that dispelled any doubts of this being a simple casual game. I really liked Derek Yu's older game Eternal Daughter (insane difficulty curve notwithstanding), and from the demo, this seems to be living up to my expectations. The art and music are absolutely lovely, and the mouse-oriented gameplay feels really smooth. Still, until I get caught up on all the other games, it's in the backlog.

  24. Posted

    In progress:

    Phoenix Wright 3 (last case, saving for a long flight)

    HL2 Episode 2 (up to the car part)

    Metroid Prime 3 (up to the heat beam, gave up for a bit b/c of spread-out savepoints)

    Guitar Hero 3 (Seventh set on expert is EVIL, EVIL, EVIL with the chord changes)

    Purchased but untouched: ;(

    Rock Band

    Mario Galaxy

    Mass Effect

    Zelda Phantom Hourglass

    Freedom Force 2

    Okami

    Killer 7

    Unpurchased, but want despite the long backlog: :frusty:

    Zack & Wiki

    Exit (Live Arcade)

    Aquaria (indie PC game, like 2d Metroidvania underwater)

  25. Posted

    The DRM-idiocy is even stupider than it sounds above. For example, I downloaded the *free* Halo mjolnir mix song for Guitar Hero 3 at a friend's house, on my account, and on my same hard drive. When I returned home, I couldn't play the *free* DLC that was downloaded on the same hard drive, same account, but different xbox unless I was online. Same thing for Space Giraffe, except that cost money. So apparently downloaded content is tied to the hard drive AND the box, and switching any one, even if you recover your account (where like steam, it can only be recovered onto one hardware at a time), requires you to be online to use what you already purchased or even downloaded for free. I guess their reasoning is that if it's tied to just a box, someone will have their friends download their games onto the box, then never go online again, but it's still ridiculously annoying for the legitimate user. :fart::finger: