Ben X

The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

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When I first played Outcast, I activated speed in the final boss and killed him in less than 5 seconds, then I reloaded and forced myself to play without speed because I felt like I robbed myself of the experience lol

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Been long time since I played, but I vaguely remember just abusing a lot of the hidden special attacks, because flipping at dudes looked cool when killing.  Plus some of those just straight up broke defenses and killed in rapid succession 

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Ok, speed plus jumping and slashing seems to do the trick a lot of the time. Not particularly interesting, but there you go. It still gets held up as the best sword-fighting system in games, so there must be stuff I'm missing.

 

The game got a bit ho-hum towards the end. There were some nice big vistas and Attack Of The Clones style battles going on, though, which was cool.

 

Overall, very much enjoyed this game, I just wish I could have got a bit more out of the saber combat.

 

I couldn't find any articles about this game - I guess people write about Outcast if they're going to choose a post-JKII game. In fact, this thread is ninth result for JKA postmortem!

 

Onto Dredd Vs Death. I'm looking forward to this, even though I suspect it's going to suck. I own this game thanks in part to generous Steam gem donations from forum members, which allowed me to sneak in a winning bid at the last moment! I haven't played it, but my memories of it from around release are: terrible Red Bull product placement, one gun with lots of functions, and a (unfulfilled, I think) dev promise that you could go explore inside all of the buildings in the distance.

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Quick impressions: good sense of scale and place, otherwise very clunky and quite ugly.

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I think I played this game... ? All I can remember is that you can arrest people and Dredd says "No parole."

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I played the demo of this for absolutely ages, just running around twatting perps around the head and setting hoodlums on fire. I seem to recall that if you shoot a gun from someone's hand, they'll surrender and you can cuff them... Or summarily execute them :D

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Yeah, so this evokes the world pretty well - the moment you walk past a window and see Mega City One sprawling out in front of you, the level design that effectively gives a sense of walking round a big city, the goofy dystopian civilians, billboards and announcements. It gets a bit cartoony for my taste, though - it feels like a Monolith game with all the bright colours and cheesy tutorials, and though I've not read much Dredd I'm used to seeing it in gritty black and white - and the engine is a little ugly.

 

The idea of arresting perps is intriguing, but the mechanic is irritating. If you disarm or wound a combatant, they'll present themselves for arrest. However, it's tricky to tell if they're at that point yet, so you often end up taking a few more bullets. Also, it's not safe to do your arrests until the area is clear as it locks you in for a few seconds, so it ends up feeling like you're mindlessly picking up collectibles.

 

Dredd himself is very slow to move, regularly getting stuck on the level geography. Likewise, his weapon only fires in short bursts and takes an age to reload or switch modes. When you're fighting against groups of fast-moving, leaping bullet-sponge vampires, it's not a good match.

 

Perhaps I'll get more into it as I go along, as I haven't been playing for long, but a quick google revealing a 3/10 review from Eurogamer suggests otherwise...

 

EDIT: further clunkiness: there's no quicksave key, so it's seven clicks each time I want to save; doors that inexplicably only unlock once all enemies are shot; hilariously borked ragdolling that sends enemies reeling and bouncing off walls for ten seconds after death (EDIT: contemporary reviews reveal this was an issue on release)

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Oof, this is dreadful. All the weapons are crap, all the enemies are irritating, I just had to go around arresting 30 NPCs and now I'm onto a zombies level (set in a shopping mall, no less). Groan.

 

Also, the Red Bull placement has suddenly appeared and it is insane. Cut-scenes have cans roll towards camera to take up the entire shot, levels are full of Red Bull crates and the logo is graffiti-ed liberally across the city.

 

I might push myself to have one last go, but Riddick is calling. I have Deus Ex 2 to play first, but judging from this thread so far, I probably won't enjoy it that much!

 

I'd like to see a Dredd mod in the Rage engine (idTech5 was it?) - fun shooting, grimier and more impressive visuals, and the arresting mechanic could be RPG-ified. Not sure if that engine could handle big Mega City One spaces, though.

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21 hours ago, Ben X said:

Ok, speed plus jumping and slashing seems to do the trick a lot of the time. Not particularly interesting, but there you go. It still gets held up as the best sword-fighting system in games, so there must be stuff I'm missing.

 

The game got a bit ho-hum towards the end. There were some nice big vistas and Attack Of The Clones style battles going on, though, which was cool.

 

Overall, very much enjoyed this game, I just wish I could have got a bit more out of the saber combat.

 

I couldn't find any articles about this game - I guess people write about Outcast if they're going to choose a post-JKII game. In fact, this thread is ninth result for JKA postmortem!

 

All the talk about JK2/JKA being the best sword-fighting usually refer to its multiplayer duels. I think I have this game installed still, so if you want to duel me, maybe add me on steam? I'm superhiero there if you're interested

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Thanks, but I already uninstalled it! Honestly, I think I'd just get frustrated by competitive multiplayer with any of these games so I'm not bothering with it. I'd love to do some co-op, at some point, though!

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We'll see. I did see some quotes from Warren Spector on the Wikipedia article regretting that they simplified the augments down, and I felt relieved to find out they did! I wonder if I'll need to find a hack for the notorious level load times...

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I think the load times are actually fine on modern systems, if you have a SSD even more so.

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I've quit Dredd and started on Deus Ex: Invisible War, and can confirm that it's 16 seconds per load time! Not awful, but not great. There is a fan patch here that claims to help it, but it also has a load of other stuff going on and is pretty new, so I'm a bit wary of using it just to try to save a few seconds here or there.

 

Anyway, I'm really enjoying it so far. The opening in your pokey little apartment is great - there's a basketball to muck about with, and a little window that looks out onto a cooing pigeon sitting on an air vent with yellow light occasionally sweeping over it. Windows really are a strong storytelling tool for the FPS designer, especially in these relatively early days. The opening levels work really well as a tutorial, the game looks lovely, and some stuff that bugged me about the first game seems to be reduced. However, I have just been told I could go see someone at the Silverlight Apartments but not where those apartments are, which tweaked at my Deus Ex frustration nerve...

 

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Turns out they were easy to find, so that was okay. I had a similar irritation with the 'kill the greasler to fix the fight' mission, where a) all the talk of putting bets on at various times and the greaslers seeming to have different nicknames was really muddled and sunglasses) I used what turned out to be a non-lethal weapon on it which apparently doesn't count and negated the mission. I possibly should have figured the latter out, though, I'll have to re-read the weapon description.

 

The missions are piling up already, it's cool that I've got lots to do, but with all the to-and-froing I could really use a fast-travel option, especially with the loading times.

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On 4/9/2017 at 5:53 AM, Ben X said:

Thanks, but I already uninstalled it! Honestly, I think I'd just get frustrated by competitive multiplayer with any of these games so I'm not bothering with it. I'd love to do some co-op, at some point, though!

It's been a super longtime, and I'd be surprised if a community existed still, but there was a rather polite dueling ruleset that people would just follow without it being enforced in game.  There was a bit more elegance to the duels, especially since force powers besides push/pull/jump were prohibited via gentleman's handshake.  Forced you to learn how to switch stances for the situation and which attacks to use. And kicking people in the face, a lot of that.

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I've got over worrying about missing stuff and am picking and choosing what I feel like doing. The design is absolutely gorgeous, it's like Strange Days the game. Lighting and physics really help the immersion too: knocking into a hanging light and seeing shadows swing back and forth is great, chucking boxes out of the way as you rummage through a dumpster feels really tactile. Lots of nice touches still, like cats and dogs hanging about and looking quite realistic - it's weird but these feel like a step forward, actually believable animals rather than rabid Dobermans leaping at your throat. And an awesome grey who follows you around spouting haikus, like a really pushy Vortigaunt. The voice-acting and philo-musings are still as robotic as the first game though - it's like they think any subjectivity or drama will sully the political commentary.

I'm starting to rack up the mods now. I'm glad they've streamlined it, but it still feels like there's not enough room to experiment with weapons, and the mods clash with each other. It feels more like a branching adventure game with no inventory and some shooting that's best avoided.

I had to resort to setting up a DXIW wallpaper for something less immersion-breaking to look at when it closes the program for a few seconds to load in a level (apparently they did this because they couldn't find a memory leak)

The missions are starting to feel a bit perfunctory now, like I'm just some errand boy not really getting on with the plot. But that might be because I've been playing for hours.

So, a few negatives, but overall I'm really enjoying this.

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I'm nearing the end now. It has started to feel like busywork, lots of random tasks and no real plot progression except for various organisations changing allegiances. It's all about as dramatic as Alex D's vocal patterns. The weapons and biomods are all still pretty underwhelming - I'd really like to be superpowered by this point but the RPG systems are too restrictive to allow it. Still, I can control all the robots now, which is cool. I'm looking forward to meeting JC, assuming that actually happens.

 

Here's a post-mortem of the original game, which i don't think I shared back when I was playing that one:

 

 

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You're right, I'd never betray my GDC Illuminati insider information like that.

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The Watch Out For Fireballs podcast did a playthrough of Invisible War last year. It was great to hear them take the game on its own terms and it's good to see that in this thread, too.

 

For all the pointless greasel fights and coffee espionage in this game, I really enjoyed the characters in Invisible War. Talking with NG Resonance and following my classmates as they followed different paths was interesting enough. I liked the conspiracy vibe of the first game but I liked hanging out with these people better.

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Sweet, thanks for the link! Yeah, NG Resonance is a really cool idea (a bimbo pop-star based chatbot hologram that turns out to be subtly siphoning information out of everyone who talks to it), although they have some really on-the-nose responses from Alex D to make sure the player understands what's going on. A lot of the writing in this is pretty ham-fisted and didactic, actually, but at least that fits well with the original.

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Bah, I was getting pretty far in this but it's crashing whenever I try to exit the Templar church, which is a necessary location to visit, so I'm having to give up on this. Possibly for the best as I scanned through a playthrough of the rest of the game and it doesn't seem to do much more. Pretty cool that it ends with JC Denton at the Statue Of Liberty though!

 

I've pretty much said everything about this game already - great design, some satisfying RPG stuff and non-linear design, but plateaus pretty quickly in terms of missions, story and weapons/mods.

 

So, onto Riddick!

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