Murdoc

Yeah mass effect looked pretty slick and (personally) had a stronger art direction (Syd mead) but they have a very constrained and limited environments that sort of off set the huge space opera going on. So I started Dragon age up last night, yep, still Fugly in almost every way, but here we go: ****Possible Spoilers?***** Start 1. Import character creator, my 60 year old looking rogue, how had to be a human noble, but oh well, no biggy. Some 45 year old calls me his son... ok this is retarded. Quit Game. Start 2. Ok time to make a meat head Warrior, lets shoot for Brom's version of Conan... 30 minutes later... It kind of looks like a retarded version of Stallone, lets try an expression, I slid it to the last expression and literally laughed out loud, my character was sylvester Stallone, dressed up like a down syndrome Conan. So I get started, learning the inventory, decide to go without armor and run around in my underwear, yet no one seems to mind, I guess they just got used to me being a retard. Fighting and getting blood on me is pretty fun when not wearing clothing. So I play for 2 hours and once the game starts to pick up I pretty much decide I don't want to play a complete retard, so I'll try something else tonight. Since the human beginning is just so mundane, I think I'll go for a dwarf commoner rogue and see how that goes. So far, it's alright, it's a western rpg, it's got the Bioware feel to it all, but I know it's supposed to be this kind of throw back, but it really feels this thing was made in the Kotor 1 era. I never really dug the Witcher, but that game looked pretty slick compared to Dragon Age, it had the generic fantasy vibe to it, but the designs were a little more unique, graphics were a lot sharper, and they at least tried with some different systems. It just doesn't seem Dragon age flows well, and this might be what I want from a Blizzard game, but the Jrpgs(though I haven't played one in almost a decade) just seems to have a stronger production value and "editing" to it all... just too bad they have retarded characters and stories most of the time. edit: Oh another gripe with games like this, and I know they are just games so what can I expect, but for some reason the games like DA and FO3 they are presenting this world where you make a custom character, make choices, and carve a path for yourself, but the problem I find every time is if you don't carve the one path they want, then it'll ignore you, some of the gameplay mechanics may respond to you, but the characters and story mostly don't. again you can't tailor make a plot for someone, but older games such as Fallout 1 and I'd even say newer ones like Farcry 2 do in a lot of ways modern western RPGs dont. For example:

saving the world and going to the bordello to have sex with animals; thats all anyone should care about.

I'm a big fan of Futureshop, their Canadian counterpart, I can walk in, see shit on a shelf, and buy it. It's f@$%ing amazing. My only gripe is when they started putting Best Buys around, so now you have the same type of store, with the same stock, competing with each other with different prices. Also, they want to check my bag when I leave; is this an American thing? Because I tell the guy to piss off every time I go there and PURCHASE something, this is something unheard of and insulting to Canadians(or at least me, since Futureshop doesn't do it, nor does anywhere else)

Ok, most people probably already read this(I dunno) but one of the guys from penny arcade posted some backstory, he also says this may be spoiler(I really don't know how though) My knowledge of the game was "hey it's a generic fantasy looking world, marylin manson music?" And it ended right there until the thumbs talked about it and my back history of giving Bioware the benefit of the doubt. So when I read this it was all new and has gotten me more excited, its like they took a bit of Star Wars, maybe a little of reverse FF7ism and rolled with it. Again, this may be consinderd spoiler, I don't think so, I haven't used the spoiler tags, its just backstory on the world and magic.

Yeah SiN, that was the pitch I saw many years ago that got me excited, the game play at the time was like DeBlob as well, but you tie that in with the old concept art and they would have had more doller and love... now, I just dunno. Even if it's wii, they could have pushed the style. I do like old school Micky with the black eyes though, I appreciate them keeping that.

Where did you order it from? Might have to give them a try next time

And I'm sure it was, I was talking strictly comparing the visuals of todays standards, and Rayman 2 squeeks by on environemnt art because, regadless of limitations you can see their intentions and they were successful with what they had to work with. Mickey on the other hand, doesn't even seem to have those lofty intentions of tieing the elements together; thought their characters/facial animation is above what Rayman 2 was doing. Again, strictly comparing visuals without regard of dates.

So I'm backing up my stuff for a format and install of Win 7 today when I figured I'd save my lame duck character fromt he Dragon Age character creator when I noticed a glimmering hope of light.... The character file is a .chr; which 3dsmax can handle(tried it, it can't, so it must be their own .chr version) and it dawned on me that this is coming with mod tools to actually edit the game, even assets (I assume max will be able to handle it with their proper export tools or whatever) So now I am super excited since I wasn't really digging that character creation. I just wanted my character to be pushed a little more to have some exagerated characteristics so he doesn't looke like an NPC. So thought I'd share if anyone felt the same way, so yay, go PC.

At least those rayman 2 shots looked like they tried to create gradients(vertex paint?) to have depth and blends, which makes it mildly more appealing then Epic Mickey. sigh.

Ah, I see your point now, and yes, they are pure evil, that's why you kill them. But seriously, I think that's a lot of the problem with pretty much everything in the world, including real life. I don't mind the black and white contrast with out much thought in a few things though, Diablo being one of them and torchlight now.

Well, i think that's just a different game all together, I mean this genre is hack and slash, so it'd be hard to tell you to go negotiate the evil to relocating somewhere else. But, honestly, I'd love to see an adventure style game in this kind of universe where you couldn't possibly kill a legion of evil, but would have to use your wits to solve the crisis from town to town.

Ok, the thumbs were right, it's like a pretty basic version of Diablo, meaning, it's Diablo. The loot is pretty constant, which is cool, but I think it could be somewhere between Diablo 2 and where its at right now to hit a good balance of loot; maybe they will be a mod for it some time. But forgive me, because this is small and kind of crappy on my part, but playing the game, getting cool stuff, hearing the music, all my mind goes to every 3 seconds "I wish this looked like Diablo" A big part of games for me is art and atmosphere, and the art in Torchlight is well executed and it's one of the few games that does have a certain mood to it, but it's jsut a tad on the goofy side for me. All of this is fine, other then since D3's announcement I've gone back to Diablo 1 and 2 and all I can think about lately is wanting a game that takes that asthethic and just goes balls out with it. I love the old DnD idea Diablo had of light radius and just this dark, grim world to bring lightness to. With that said, since it's an open source engine and they are giving away the tools, assets aside, I wonder how hard it would be for a rendering programer to go in and add some post effects and such to tweak that. Also, thats not to say I am looking for that from Torchlight, it's just I'm really looking for a game with that, it would just be fun to have an omage map in Torchlight. I have a feeling I will be thinking the same thing with Diablo 3, as much as I really dig it's art direction, I'll have the same reaction most likely, but maybe it will be closer to the source.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/440/ If some of you don't own this already(why not?) it's on sale for $2.50 today, seriously, buy the damn thing for 2.50.

GTA doesn't really work anywhere except America to me, as the whole franchise seems really grounded in being a really well oiled satire on America culture. If they want to go rip on other peoples culture(which I don't think the housers are probably as adept at) they might as well make it a different series.

Interesting topic on the voice acting.... I don't think it took until 2009 to have convincing voice acting/natural dialog, but theres a lot of reasons the thumbs touched on and in my experiance it boils down to Talent. Not the talent of the voice actor, but the talent of the peopel directing them and the talent of the people writing the script. Most game companies have people like me writing a script, "I've heard people talk, I can write this s@#$" and then they get some animation director to direct the voice actors. Sometimes this can work and a lot of the time it can't, it all depends on the experiance and talent of the people organizing it. Rockstar's stuff stands out as probably some of the most natural dialog in a game and they have been doing it for years; they jsut have the people to make that stuff happen (and like Jake said) people care about. Earlier legacy of Kain's had great voice actors and a pretty convincing dialog script for the cheesy context it of what was going on... which had the same creative director as Uncharted 1 and 2; so just had to throw in that, because it could explain the awesomeness of Uncharted's dialog. Alternatively I have a good story about a game I worked on with just cringle worth dialog and performances, but it's more of a rant for when I get drunk. Ps: don't worry about length when theres so few episodes go, hell don't even edit them, give us a 5 hour cast of funny voices and intelligable noises.

"Your fingers are on the keyboard" - IGN.com about Torchlight Anyway, still listening, just hearing the guys talk about torchlight and the first bit is pretty funny with the quotes. @Floordje; I think I might check it out now that I live here; wonder if there enough of us for a thumbs meet/wake. Edit: Diablo2. I was without the internet for the first month and half this summer when I moved so I went to my old standby Diablo 2, I honestly never got very far in it, Act 3 always stopped me; so glad to see that was the worst of the content, that desert kicked my ass out just kind of crap content even if it was Diablo fun, and Act 3 didn't do much to help me either. I've seen my friends play the later levels and thats where I want to go. But its funny how you guys said you play the same build every time, because yeah, that's what I've been doing for a decade with that game... which might explain why I can't get passed certain parts, lol..

Yeah same here; ok it's not that those screens are aweful (though I will stills say the elements look random and don't fit together in a cohesive pleasent scene) Theres some good things too, the characters look rad, and they stuck with old timey mickey which is pretty awesome, but I'm just a tad disapointed, they had some killer concept art and the thought of an ink dripping mickey(the cover) walking around a torn disney universe is a pretty sweet idea.

Yeah, I think this wasn't the best level to showcase the Jockey, in theory, take any l4d1 map and the jockey would be feared, it's just this was a pretty tight level with not a lot of room for him to cause too much chaos. I love the fury of the trumpets when a horde comes, pretty cool. And multiple songs in the juke box = neat.

Played it. Machette is by far the most awesome thing about it along with a really distrubing gore system.(like a chest cavety getting blown apart and still very readable an inch from my face) Somethings in no order: Movement: Floating aiming and skatey walking feels a bit weird, I got kind of used to it until I looked at other players feet and it was basically we were on ice. Ai Director: Was there an upgrade here? Early L4D1's director was awesome before it was neutered, I didn't really see anything special with L4D2's system, other then it was unfinished as zombies appeared right before our eyes a lot. Characters: Better then I expected, but I think a lot of the humor was stripped out and didn't get a sense of why these characters are cool other then Coach... but I'm a Cutty fan, so that may have something to dow ith it. Voice stuff: Could be wrong, but it seems a lot more dynamic, in that I was playing coach and he refered to the seperate characters differently, or only talked to the chick, I'm not 100% sure. Special Infected: Spitter= win, awesome. Charger is neat. the Ai seemed broken on the demo though, they were all dumb as bricks, spawning a mile away and as far as I can tell hunters or anything couldn't use 90% of the roof tops. Smoker is just as useless as ever. Oh and getting incapped then a a spitter shows up with a pool of acid is pretty much death and going to be very awesome in versus. Daytime: eh... looks nice, but I really didn't get a good mood play out of it like I did pretty much every level of L4D1. Overall: Pretty cool, it's l4d, it has more content, it is more content, so I'm excited; but yeah, I'm not sure why this couldn't have been a paid expansion; but then again it is ia demo.

Well, yeah, thats a given. I love brutal legend, but yeah it doesn't stack up well against his other titles, but against other games, it doesn't pretty well in my books. Wow you liked Hl2 more then Hl1? I mean it was cool, but it hought Hl1 had so much more atmosphere that wasn't staged/forced feeling. Also, bullsharks, I forgot about those

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/debut-slideshow-epic-mickey/58279 I'll just refer to this as Epic Fail now, what I saw a long time ago was more like de-blob and was pretty cool, I guess they decided to remake everything to look pretty aweful. Aside from the low poly, no-shader and very unrendered look, the individual assets don't really come together very well to make an appealing scene. Maybe this is the crapy wii port and there will be an amazing 360 version?

Talking with more people about Brutal Legend and I'm really surprised how many people really hate this game. One of my friends basically tried it for ten minutes past the demo and threw it on ebay because he felt he was swindled with the demo. And yeah, the whole "what kind of game is this" thing was a bit weird, but I don't know how you can give someone a basic brawler and then say "hey look at theis entire fucking world to explore with multiple game types" and get pissed off by that. So yeah, I know the game didn't do everything amazingly well, but I really enjoyed what was there and hope they refine what they have on a sequel someday, but to outright hate the game, I don't get it. As for the DLC, yeah, maps do nothing for me, I'd pay for horse armor(paint jobs and shit) before I'd pay for a map I don't really need.... that doesn't make much sense does it? But more adventures would be awesome, but will never happen as it's expensive

I'm not saying the game is short, I just would have liked the story to be better, but yeah theres this huge world and I was kind of hoping for more adventures, a lot of that "second island" is very linear, or at least thats how I played it. But its probably best it left me wanting more, I think the last 20 hours of GTA I was like "UGH, just get me to the f@#$Ing end already"