Ben X

The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

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I have to admit I'm a little bummed you won't get to see the rest of Butcher Bay, but oh well.

 

Far Cry is a cool game too. I think I like it the most out of Crytek's games. Even the bits that people rag on I find quite enjoyable.

 

On 2017-05-04 at 5:33 PM, Ben X said:

I don't think I've seen any sign of that so far. I think they've shot me through some tents but that may be intentional...

 

Anyway, I'm really enjoying this. There are the occasional annoying moments when it forces you into a shitty situation, but by and large the 'take any approach' style works really well. I'm currently stuck trying to hit an exceptionally tough camp, so I've put it down for a while to recharge my patience levels.

 

It looks especially lovely now I've tweaked the advanced settings a bit more. Birds flock in the distance while hoverflies buzz past your nose, and it's really well-designed so everywhere you look you get a striking view. Also, the cheesy 80s acting from Jack and the mercs is brilliant.

Which difficulty are you playing on? Far Cry is known for being quite challenging even on the default difficulty. The game keeps escalating, and it's not a short campaign either. It can be a bit glitchy, but it's possible to quick save through the console btw.

 

I've only played through this game once, and I was cocky enough to pick the 'realistic' setting. It's by far the most difficult shooter campaign I've played, I think it took me over 40 hours to finish. It was interesting though, because there are some truly fiercesome enemies and at some point it starts to resemble a survival horror game more than anything else. You're running around with rocket launchers and assault rifles, yet you still feel disempowered.

 

I don't want to jinx it but I'd be very surprised if you finished it :P in some ways it's a test of how much bullshit you can put up with. When you think it couldn't possibly get any worse, it does, time and time again haha. It's pretty lovable for that actually. Man I want to replay this game some time.

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Sorry about Butcher's Bay - I did try! Was there any good stuff coming up?

 

I'm playing Far Cry on normal, and currently finding it tough but manageable. Like I said above, I don't expect to finish this game because I know it gets stupidly hard towards the end. I've encountered a few Trigens now and it's actually a nice change of pace. You go from hunting mercs in the jungle to firefights with them in big maintenance bunkers to monsters leaping at you in science facility corridors. It's gone from a Lost vibe to a Jurassic Park vibe.

 

I've been itching to get back to it, which I haven't had with a game for while!

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There is one memorable part of the game later. You get captured one more time right as you're about to make your escape, and get put in this cryo sleep facility where they wake you up one minute per day for 'exercise', then put you to sleep. It's a bit unsettling actually, because it will take you several days to figure out how to get out of there even though it's only a few minutes of gameplay. You're playing a pretty bad person, but even so the whole thing feels really inhumane.

 

As for the trigens, I kinda like them too actually. Well, I think they're dumb looking, but a lot of people seem to think they ruin the game and I don't.

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That does sound interesting, thanks for describing!

 

Far Cry is getting very tough now, the Fat Boys have shown up amongst other things. Judging from a walkthrough, I'm only on mission 11 out of 20. I'm definitely not going to make it to the end!

 

In fact, I'm actually not sure how much of this I'll continue on for. It's regularly turning into a corridor shooter now, and now the trigens are outside it's not so stealthy there either. I wouldn't mind but they are really tough - you could often get face to face with a merc or two and scrape through, but get within 20 feet of a trigen and you're toast. I think I might need to adjust my play style to be more cautious, and try to shoot trigens from as far away as possible!

 

I do have the night goggles now, though, which introduce a nice new mechanic to the game thanks to the draining battery - balancing keeping them on to spot any trigens running around, with keeping them off to recharge for as long as you dare.

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I remember mission 11, it's outdoors at night yeah? You're right, that is around the time where they start going a bit nuts with the mutants. That level in particular has a lot of Fat Boys since it does the whole Forget about Freeman thing of the military being overrun. Even as someone who likes the game I'd say you've seen most of the best of what it has to offer. I will say that mission 14 was one of the most memorable levels for me, but it's not above and beyond some of the good early levels. There is also some masochistic fun in seeing the absurd scenarios they concoct towards the end.

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Uhh, it's the one where you first see the gun-toting trigens. You come out into this big square fort thing where there's a big battle. I legged it out of there and found a glider, which I used to get all the way to a beach. I have to make my way up a path but there's a fair few trigens. It's pretty tough and the latest save-game is at the glider so I have to fly that down each time; I've only had a couple of tries at it.

 

It's garnered a lot of goodwill with me, so I'm going to stick at it, but I do get the feeling that you're right about me having seen the best of it already.

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On 5/10/2017 at 9:29 PM, eot said:

I will say that mission 14 was one of the most memorable levels for me

 

I'm on mission 14 now, the one where you start on a dinghy, get onto a small island and pick up some explosives then have to blow some comm towers up. It's definitely nice to be back out in the open air fighting mercs, but so far it's not particularly different to any of the other outdoor levels...

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Mission 14 was pretty cool thanks to the layout that has three towers on a group of small islands and lets you go at it however you want. My tactic of choice is to snipe the gunner and pilot off a boat, then drive it past shore mowing down all the landlubbers. Unfortunately, it ends with a bullshit bossfight that requires you to shoot a helicopter six times with nowhere to hide on a boat that is sinking. It is incredibly difficult, especially because it requires pinpoint accuracy and speed with the rocket launcher, which lends itself to neither of those things. I finally got past it and returned to awesome outdoor shooting around some old temple ruins, hiding behind big Aztec heads and stuff. But now I'm in the temple and it's turned back into a really tough corridor shooter. It's not going to take much for me to give up on this game now - that boss-fight almost had me - but I'm still enjoying it enough to keep going.

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On 2017-05-19 at 6:53 PM, Ben X said:

 

I'm on mission 14 now, the one where you start on a dinghy, get onto a small island and pick up some explosives then have to blow some comm towers up. It's definitely nice to be back out in the open air fighting mercs, but so far it's not particularly different to any of the other outdoor levels...

I didn't mean to imply it was dramatically better than anything else in the game, but it was a level that I still remember quite well ~10 years later. I enjoyed the openness of it. Sure, a lot of the levels are quite open, but I think that one takes it further. I also have soft spot for sniping.

 

edit: oh you just updated haha :) yeah the Heli fight is dumb, and there's more where that came from.

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@eot Did you just coincidentally reply a few seconds after I did? If so, see my latest post - the openness of that level was really cool.

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You should, it's still awesome. Remember to use the advanced options to knock the graphics up if you do.

 

I've just got to an on-rails bit where Sexy Bikini Lady drives a jeep and I shoot the gun, except it's the hardest one I've ever played. Even on a run where I do really well and take down every enemy vehicle really quickly, I still get killed very easily. I think this may be my cue to quit. However, I'm taking a break from FPSes for a couple of weeks, so I might leave this installed and see if I somehow breeze through this section when I return to it. If not, it'll be onto Painkiller.

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As someone who loved Painkiller when it first came out and has revisited it recently, I think the gameplay holds up really well. The story, not so much (and the CG cutscenes didn't even look great at the time). Everything done with the series after the first game+expansion has been bad, being developed by other studios under the auspices of the rightsholders. They even managed to donk the HD remaster by making it a story reboot that didn't include about half of the levels from the expanded first game.

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I have Painkiller Black Edition, which Wikipedia says "combines the Battle Out of Hell expansion with the original game".

 

As for multiplayer, I'm not really interested in competitive, but if there's a co-op mode I might be up for it once I've got into the game...

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16 hours ago, Korax said:

As someone who loved Painkiller when it first came out and has revisited it recently, I think the gameplay holds up really well. The story, not so much (and the CG cutscenes didn't even look great at the time). Everything done with the series after the first game+expansion has been bad, being developed by other studios under the auspices of the rightsholders. They even managed to donk the HD remaster by making it a story reboot that didn't include about half of the levels from the expanded first game.

I never finished Painkiller (because it's also brutally hard, and because the cutscenes were sapping my will to live), but this is all accurate to my memory. Great gameplay (including some metagameplay stuff on top of the levels themselves) and some great setpieces, terrible terrible plot and CGI (on multiple levels).

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I remember thinking it was weird that Painkiller had a pro gaming scene around it. I think it's what Fatal1ty or whatever his name is played for a while.

 

I mean, it was a solid as fuck shooter, but aesthetically it felt like such an awkward knockoff of other stuff with a ridiculous rude 'tude thing going on.

 

edit: I just looked in my steam library and apparently I have 

 

xEFbuBC.png

 

Like, what even are all of these?

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9 minutes ago, Salacious Snake said:

I just looked in my steam library and apparently I have 

 

xEFbuBC.png

 

Like, what even are all of these?

 

I like the one attempt to extend the "painkiller" theme with "overdose," but then there are two quasi-religious subtitles and one "black" because black is the new black.

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I couldn't be bothered to try that Far Cry level again, so I moved onto Painkiller and played the first level. In summary for Far Cry, though: still awesome, even the trigens are a nice change of pace, but whenever it forces you to do a particular thing a particular way, it sucks (which I suspect is why a lot of people don't like the trigens, as they generally appear in the corridor sections - except for John Walker who pretends not to like them despite not having played that far).

 

Painkiller is kind of Serious Sam with an Undying/Marilyn Manson filter. The soundscape especially is unrelenting - constant chanting and spooky noises and gunfire and howls and RAWK. It keeps up the horror tradition of trying to have scary menus. I like the enemy designs - I got creeped out by the old hags the first time I saw one - and all the death effects are quite nice.

 

I might need to find the manual to understand the weapons because there are already a couple of fire modes I don't understand...

 

I'm now away for a week and then I might be either trying to do something for the jam, or taking some more time away for family health stuff, so I'm not sure when I'll get back to this. Nice to have a palette-cleansingly dumb blaster to look forward to though!

 

[Notification for @Jutranjo as requested!]

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I played Painkiller Overdose for the first time this year and found the weapons and enemy animations for getting hit/dying completely baffling.

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Man, this is all based on playing on Painkiller when it came out, but at the time it was just a revelation to me. (I have no memory of any cut scenes, I'm good like that.)

 

Simple mechanical stuff, but the decision to refill health and ammo at the checkpoints which are placed fairly comfortably makes it possible to really throw yourself into the maniacal hell-splatter the combat is try to evoke. Preserve nothing, go all in all the time. It's just brilliant, and the towering bosses blew my younger mind. I never played the Serious Sam games which I think did the huge boss thing first?

 

That stake thrower was one of the most satisfying weapons I remember using in a FPS. 

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46 minutes ago, Ben X said:

I might need to find the manual to understand the weapons because there are already a couple of fire modes I don't understand...

 

Every weapon has a primary and secondary fire, and the secondaries aren't really related (or sometimes obvious) in any way. The Painkiller (your basic melee weapon) is probably the one that needs the most explanation. Primary just spins the blades around, chopping at enemies as you would expect. Secondary fires the folded blades. It can be used to either directly hit an enemy or it can be stuck into a surface. When stuck, pointing your view at the projectile forms a damaging energy beam from it to you, allowing you to sort of slice through crowds. Also, if you're holding primary, you can hit secondary to send the spinning blades flying.

 

The shotgun has a freeze blast, the stake launcher is also a grenade launcher, there's a combination rocket launcher/minigun, and a weird lightning gun shuriken thrower. Oh, tip for the stake launcher that I just remembered: you have to compensate for the projectile drop, but if the stake is airborne long enough, it catches fire, doing more damage when it hits.

 

Aside from still being really fun, Painkiller is notable to me because it was among the first games to use Havok Physics, and it was the first game I played with a weapon that would pin ragdolls to walls.

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1 hour ago, Korax said:

Secondary fires the folded blades. It can be used to either directly hit an enemy or it can be stuck into a surface. When stuck, pointing your view at the projectile forms a damaging energy beam from it to you, allowing you to sort of slice through crowds. Also, if you're holding primary, you can hit secondary to send the spinning blades flying.

 

The shotgun has a freeze blast

 

Aside from still being really fun, Painkiller is notable to me because it was among the first games to use Havok Physics, and it was the first game I played with a weapon that would pin ragdolls to walls.

 

Yeah, these were the things I needed to look up, as I couldn't figure out what was happening with the Painkiller secondary, and the shotgun freeze blast doesn't seem to affect any enemies.

 

I primarily remember Painkiller for pinning rag-dolls, and massive bosses (though I haven't played it myself before).

 

Oh, and I forgot to say the opening cut-scene was fine, apart from being a bit oblique; it pretty much matches Far Cry's in quality (except for that game's opening one which is an amazing mix of time-bending, camera-wheeling and abstract nightmare montage).

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