Korax
-
Content count
1406 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Korax
-
-
I'm so close, but so tired...
-
I've got a gift copy that's been sitting in my inventory for a while now. Hit me up on Steam, etc: http://steamcommunity.com/id/lordkorax
EDIT: Copy claimed!
-
PHAEDRUS OUT
-
Prometheans become a degree more bullet-spongy on Legendary than the Covenant units, from my experience. Grunts still die with one headshot, Jackals still die after a staggering shot/headshot combo, and once their shields are down, Elites still take one headshot to down. The laser dogs will explode after a headshot, but the Knights and gyrocopter things take about twice as many hits to kill, even if you take out their shields. I started to have the same "Looks like I'm just going to be out of ammo" reaction that Chris did every time they showed up.
-
When I had the stranger up against the wall I purposely failed the prompt so I wouldn't strangle him to death in front of Clem. When Clem ended up killing him for me I felt like the biggest idiot.
Did anyone get Clementine to shoot Lee at the end? If so, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Maybe I missed a cue, but it wasn't clear to me whether I was just choking him into unconsciousness or actually strangling him to death, but at the moment, it didn't matter. I actually bared my teeth and muttered something to the effect of "You're going down, you motherfucker!" as I pounded on the button. I kept waiting for him to get up before we left the room, but he never did.
-
From about 0:40:
Love that movie so much.
-
Bioware talked about redesigning Ashley, but when I first saw it I laughed because all they had really done was change the shape of her nose slightly and let her hair down, like some sort of bad 90's teen movie. If she had only been wearing a pair of glasses in the first two games, the transformation would have been complete.
-
Yes! Share the despair with your friends and family, the perfect Thanksgiving gift! (I have no idea if you get gifts on Thanksgiving)
Only if it's the gift of awkward family moments and obesity! :rimshot:
My one complaint about episode 5:
The "desperate person in bed who shot himself rather than live in a world of zombies (bonus if it's two people holding hands) isn't this aftermath striking and poignant" is groan-inducingly cliche to me. I almost didn't believe it was happening.
Other than that, tears. One of the best games I've played of late. And worst. Fuck you guys.
-
I dunno, I just googled Cortana and I don't see a huge difference between the different games.
http://images.wikia....f_cortana-2.jpg
Halo 1-3 improved with fidelity, but kept the generally thin, high-cheekboned look to them. 4 makes her more noticeably rounded and curvy, including a much more round face. 1-3 also kept her "skin" more patterned and abstract with transparent circuitry through it, and 4 just makes it a solid texture, making it look much more like a nude woman in body paint or something. I can recognize who she's supposed to be just from general look, shape, and (mostly) voice, but she's definitely not Bungie's Cortana any more.
-
Cortana did weird me out a little, i don't understand why an AI would have dishevelled hair, a gap between her 2 front teeth, big droopy boobs and a huge blue Jay-lo butt. The gals swinging some big old hips. They've made one of the most realistic female body shapes i've seen in a game (albeit still a super voluptuous male fantasy) but she's a computer...
I guess the idea is supposed to be that cortana is more human than chief whos just an emotionless killer robot man. but why she naked? maybe she needs a firmware update
you see another AI in the intro to the coop stuff whos a fully clothed spitfire pilot
AI's in the Halo fiction choose their own appearance when visually manifesting. That makes it kind of feasible that the way she looks could change, but everything was tweaked just enough that my mind still refuses to fully believe that it's really Cortana. I think it was an odd choice considering how iconic of a character she has been throughout the series.
Also, for Sean & Jake's sake: The skulls in Halo 4 are all unlocked and available right from the beginning, and not hidden anywhere in the game. There's an option screen when selecting campaign levels that has all of them in it.
-
I was not at all surprised to hear JP's pitch come out of his mouth. I do think that the word "ace" needs to be somewhere in the title, though.
-
I forget the name of the control scheme, but I use the one that maps Sprint to X, Crouch to LS, Melee to B, Reload to RB, and Armor Ability to LB.
I use that one, too, and I believe it's Recon. Starting with Halo 3, they've switched up control schemes pretty much every game because of things like dual-wielding, equipment, and armor abilities, and I always have to switch to the one that I find is the closest to the original. I almost never have problems learning new control setups for all sorts of games, but when there's a series that I'm used to a specific style on, it's hard to adjust. I still sometimes sprint in Halo 4 when I mean to reload.
I start to have the Jake Problem in most stealth games, but after a minute or so of observing the patrol patterns and trying to plot out a course of action, my brain starts to get bored, says, "Fuck it, let's see if I can get to that part twenty feet away before a guard notices me" and I just bolt through the open space hoping for the best. This isn't so much of a problem in things like Deus Ex or Dishonored, though, because there are enough catwalks/vents/crawlspaces to allow me to be on the move fairly often without being seen. I got through both of those without raising alarms or killing anybody except targets/bosses with minimal quickloading.
-
Man, all these interviews/previews are making me want this game even more.
Also, Phaedrus.
-
The game repeatedly jumps the gun on trying to introduce proper names for things and ends up implying familiarity where there is none. I've seen some people get angry about the fact that Chief and Cortana seem to know more than the player about what is going on regarding the Didact, and... I mean, I know that universe pretty well, and Chief and Cortana do not know who the Didact is. (Unless we are to believe that Chief and Cortana actually wandered around Halo 3 reading all those Forerunner terminals, which do talk about the Didact.)
Further confusing things is that there are all these (really, really ugly) motion comic things that just burn through the insanely convoluted Forerunner history that has been built up in the novels. It's an important gesture the game makes, but you first have to unlock them by finding terminals in the game - fair enough, but then you have to exit the damn game and go to waypoint to watch them.
I'd have to go and read the Halo 3 terminal stuff again to be sure, but even if you assume that finding the terminals and learning those tidbits about the Librarian and the Didact are story canon, there's still nothing that explicitly links the pieces together.
And the Halo 4 terminals. Damn it. It was dumb and irritating to not be able to actually access them in-game and watch them without loading up Waypoint, and then it was maddening to see that they were a bunch of shitty motion comic bullshit.
I'm going to take the stance that at least it wasn't a shitty boss fight, which is definitely something Halo has flirted with disastrously. *Cough*Halo2*Cough*
They could have completely re-made the Halo 2 boss fight, shittiness and all, and I would have preferred it to what they actually did.
-
Lots of game site people were talking about how it seemed like 343 took to heart the whole "Heroic difficulty is how it's meant to be played" and rebalanced it so everything was harder. It took me about 6 hours soloing Normal, and about 8 soloing Legendary. I found it to be one of the easier games in the series.
Overall, I enjoyed it, but there are a few things that have bothered me.
343 seems to be so entrenched in the Halo lore that they sometimes forget when they have or haven't explained something. When the Didact shows up, he says something menacingly ambiguous and then takes off. Nobody gives any sort of explanation, but in the next level, everyone knows who he is and just starts referring to him by name. Similarly, during one of the more Covenant-focused levels, a new Covenant ship is introduced and referred to as "unidentified," but a couple parts later, characters just start calling it a "Lich" without any sort of prompting.
The addition of the Lich also sort of sums up my perception of 343's work on the game. Most of the other Covenant vehicles have names that are ghost-related: Ghost, Banshee, Spirit, Shade, Revenant, Wraith, Shadow, Spectre, Phantom. A lich is sort of a returned undead spirit, but it's not quite as ghost-y as all the others. It's like they recognized the pattern, but didn't pay quite enough attention to it to get it completely right.
And the ending:
FUCK QUICKTIME EVENTS. A lame boss fight or another driving-away-from-the-explody-thing sequence might have been a bit of a letdown, but it would have been infinitely better than "PRESS LEFT TRIGGER TO WIN." What irritates me even more is that there isn't anything else like it in the entire game, except for a brief QTE during the tutorial sequence. It's like they had the ending all planned out, realized that nothing else in the game (or franchise) was like it, and instead of figuring out that maybe it didn't fit, they said, "Oh, just add a bit into the tutorial so that players know what to do." You can also just hang from the edge of the light bridge or sit and stare at the primed nuke for an eternity because the only actual fail state for that sequence is missing the prompt to stick the Didact with a grenade.
-
Watching that again... did they swap child master chief with another identical looking child? The ol' switcheroo, eh Spartan Ops?
Yeah, part of the Spartan-II program was finding children with genetic adaptability to the consequent enhancement and cyborginizing, stealing them, and replacing them with flash-grown clones that would end up dying of "natural causes" soon after.
That skull reveal does happen in the game, but at that point, the Prometheans and their rad skulls are glowy blue, not orange.
As for other skulls, the Marathon gametype that Oddball became was called something like "Kill the Man with the Skull." In Halo: Reach, they added a multiplayer mode where killing someone would cause them to drop a skull that could be collected and returned to a scoring base, with the risk/reward that more skulls would give you exponential amounts of points, but if you got killed, all the skulls you collected would also pop out for others to collect, and there were flaming skulls all over the place. There was a similar mode in Tribes 2 with flags, and one with skulls in Quake 3 Team Arena.
-
I honestly didn't have a problem with that level like other people seemed to. All you need to do is
watch the policemen reading their papers and the guards in the halls. stealth gameplay 101: just watch and wait.
Except that the level isn't really that well designed/signposted. The intent is for you to head straight up (while avoiding the hospital personnel) and grab the keycard from the room on the upper left. Because the enemy vision areas are really ill-defined and there's no way to tell what doors are unlocked, I managed to work my way across the bottom, up the right side, through the middle area, and into the room right behind the card-lock door before finding out that it was locked. That wouldn't have been so bad if it had just let me do everything normally from there, but because I didn't actually grab the card and unlock the door, I couldn't progress. I don't even remember if you have to do anything other than exit at that point, so not being able to run right to the elevator is strange.
-
Don't know about the other versions, but the Steam one sort of has the soundtrack available in that all the music is just sitting in the base folder as OGG files. That said, as soon as I can pay money for the full soundtrack, I totally will.
I've finished the game a first time, and now I'm going back through with the owl mask to find all the hidden letters and scoop up the other masks I missed. Then I expect to spend time experimenting with the different masks and doing the high score thing. It's just so satisfying to find that perfect sequence and rack up a 12x combo.
-
... Half Life 1 let you just murder everyone...
Except that there were those very few NPC's that would give you a "Failed to properly utilize assets" game over screen because they needed to open a door or something for you. But you could still kill them after that, so, sort of averted?
-
Shotgun talk and XCOM reminded me of something that bothered me in early XCOM missions. I don't know if it's a bug or something, but when a soldier fires a conventional shotgun, you get the sound effect of the gun firing and immediately racking, after which the soldier goes through the animation of chambering the next shell, complete with properly-timed racking sound and ejecting shell. It annoyed me every time it happened, but then I started equipping everyone with laser and plasma rifles, so it sort of stopped. Also, I don't know about any of the other service branches, but with the exception of color, the Base Guy's sweater looks like the US Navy's uniform sweater, so I didn't think it was weird or out of place at all.
As for confusion during the first visit to the bar in Dishonored, I find it strange that you wouldn't know they were friendly. You're given a means to escape from prison by "friends." Once you're out of the prison and in the sewers, you get a trunk full of gear and another note saying "Here's some sweet weapons. Get through the sewers and there will be a guy named Sam waiting to bring you to us. - Mysterious Friends." You get through the sewers, meet Sam, who takes you to the Hound Pits, and gives you whatever exposition he does about it being the home base for a resistance movement as you pull up. I could see maybe being a bit suspicious at that point, but any assumption that they may be full-on enemies out to kill you tells me that you just weren't paying attention to anything that was happening up to that moment in the story.
-
I've had Scoops manning my shields for a few runs now.
-
I really like this game, to the point of doing a NG+ no alarms/no kills (aside from boss assassinations) run, but there are a couple of really disappointing things that are making it a hassle. On two different levels, restarting at a particular checkpoint has put me right in front of a guard, who immediately goes on alert. I can hit him with an upgraded smoke bomb quickly enough to keep him from sounding an alarm, but then the end-of-level scoring penalizes me for the alert. There are also tripwired traps introduced in the last few levels, but enemies aren't smart enough to avoid them, and then they get killed (not sure if that counts against you, score-wise, but I'm trying for no deaths at all). It's really aggravating to be sneaking around and suddenly have the "Indirect kill" notification pop up two or three times because enemies aren't programmed to avoid the traps that they ostensibly rigged up.
-
... a bit ostentatious.
-
One of the little things that I really like is how loading screens have call-outs if you have unspent character or skill points. When playing these kinds of games, It's quite common for me to forget that I leveled because it happened in the middle of a fight and I was too busy focusing on the battle to think about it. It still happens, but now I'm reminded about it a lot sooner than I would have been if I try to keep track of it myself.
Antichamber
in Video Gaming
Posted
Is that the one with the grid of lasers and a few blocks floating around in it? There's at least one other puzzle that will teach you the mechanic, but...
If you create a square/rectangular border out of cubes (on a wall or the floor or something), it will "grow" more cubes to fill in the shape. You can use the provided cubes to make however many more you need to block all the beams.
I like how the various mechanics are true throughout the entirety of the game, so even if you haven't necessarily been taught something, you can still figure it out through brute force experimentation as long as you have the right version of the brick gun. I spent a good twenty minutes messing around with the puzzle that locked me out of a gun upgrade, solved it with what I first thought was an exploit, and then found the simpler puzzle that was supposed to teach me how to do that very thing in order to solve it.
There's also a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in it. Not like Portal's Ratman dens, but rooms filled with concept art and design models. A decent chunk of the dead ends on that map are those sorts of things. I can't wait to get home after work to beat my head against those last few rooms.