Raff

Who's a moderator around here? I'm now deeply ashamed of my boring thread title.

Faked in that the player seems to follow Emily around from sequence to sequence past massive amounts of scripted material in an apparently fairly open world, which is not how a real player would behave and not a convincing way for an open world to present itself (if you wander off or backtrack, what would happen?). The way the player travels along the rail things follows no apparent logic. It's a nice dramatic concept for a film, but there's no indication of how on earth it could work in practice as a game mechanic. It's a demo of an unfinished game of course so they're allowed to fake things that aren't finished, but this demo presents things in a very unconvincing way. You very often see early videos of games with impractical things going on in them, that are very different when they actually come out. I'm not being at all controversial here. I like Bioshock and this will probably be a great game.

The monumental degree of clearly faked stuff in the demo just leaves me completely baffled as to what this game actually is in terms of freedom and scripting.

On CD-ROM!

Is it too late to switch to something else?

I sold this with a load of my late Gamecube games in a clearout years ago and I don't even have a sufficiently out of date TV that would support a GC at the moment. It doesn't seem to be very expensive on eBay though...I wonder if it runs OK on Dolphin.

It's been known about to some extent for a while and it seemed like good news when Arkane was aquired by Bethesda, but this is the first proper announcement.

The lack of a reload button was always really annoying in later levels because you'd often be using guns with massive (or tiny) capacity and massive reload times. On your way over to the next load of bugs you'd have to empty out your guns in order to reload so that you'd be fully prepared. I remember doing that dozens of times in bigger missions.

Perhaps not active reload, but the lack of any control in the Sandlot games did irritate me.

NBG have openly threatened a 'limited release' in the UK.

Presumably there are EDF fans here. Is anyone getting Insect Armageddon which is out (to some extent) in North America? For those unaware, EDF Insect Armageddon was developed by the makers of Matt Hazard rather than Sandlot in Japan who made the first 3 games. It's looked a bit poo in trailers but apparently is quite fun if rather different. Sandlot are supposedly making 'EDF 4' (and EDF 2 for PSP) so it might not be the end of the world.

I thought there was a thread but couldn't find it.

Vice City has the most appealing setting to me, San Andreas has the largest scope (mucking about outside a city can make a nice change). Probably whichever of those two looks best to you. I wouldn't bother with the old top-down ones, they were awsome at the time but the newer ones kept most of what was good and improved on it a lot. I've not played GTA3 since it was the hot shit but it was so cutting edge back then that I assume it has some flaws that won't do it any favours compared with VC onwards.

I'm sure I've seen people complain about this in cheapo DS games in the past. I bet quite a lot of games do it but it rarely gets any attention. The only reasonable theory I can come up with is that developers don't bother adding the function because Nintendo don't specifically require it. Or maybe they can use crappy cheaper memory that can't be completely wiped. Using this to deter reselling just doesn't make sense to me. 99.9% of people would will never know/care about it until they've already bought it used.

There was definitely a blue gem sitting there, in the bit where you chase Paula in the water.

Considering that this fits into the category of games in which you need to respond to an onscreen button prompt in order to hop off a small ledge which is otherwise blocked by an invisible wall, this is quite good fun. The general gameplay and feel is a lot better than comes across in videos. There's one really fucking stupid thing in this game that really winds me up. I don't play many linear things like this any more so maybe this won't stand out as much for other people, but I really get pissed off when I'm arbitrarily prevented from backtracking and can't check for stuff that I missed. This is made even worse when you're given multiple paths, since if you take the path that progresses rather than the one to the extra item, you can't go back. At one point I was in an area with a path leading off into the distance, and a ladder going up to a ledge. I picked the ladder, which turned out to lead to the next area and did not allow me to climb back down. Another point later on I spotted a blue gem (a major weapon upgrade) on the other side of a barrier composed of some foot high pieces of wood and a convenient invisible wall, it was in the previous now arbitrarily inaccessible area. Some video game level builders really must live on another planet. The music deserves mentioning, it's quality and often quite unconventional. I don't think I've played any of the guy's other games.

I just bought RDR for Xbox so prepare for the inevitable RDR PC announcement.

It's fo' real. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-22-trenched-delayed-in-europe

Delayed in Europe. Day ruined.

Also remember that the battery life is arse before you go and buy a first-gen 3DS.

Macarena of Time? Incredible.

A sega-published PC MMO from 2000, pretty mad. Never been aware of that before.