Ben X

The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

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Hhahaha, yes, the Eagle Feather!

 

That bit in the Villa is the best bit for sure.

 

If you were able to tolerate that game - you will enjoy both other games much more. Just avoid The Cartel, that game is real disappointing after Bound in Blood.

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6 hours ago, eot said:

Ben vs shooters

 

Ah ha ha! Well, considering I made it all the way to the end of CoJ, I most definitely have more patience than that cat.

 

So yeah, finished. After the boss-fight there was another boulder pushing puzzle and an annoying final bit where it wants you to use your quick-draw mechanics rather than the usual ones, but doesn't tell you, so you have to sit through an unskippable 1 minute cutscene over and over to get back to the 2-second gap where you have control, until you figure it out. Call Of Juarez: Cool Ideas, Fluffed.

 

I'd love to play a tightened version of this game, hopefully Gunslinger is that game. The villa condensed down everything good about the game by sticking to the shooting and providing a relatively open, well-designed level. Other stuff I forgot to mention - jagging and pop-in are fairly heinous and the writing is pretty dreadful. Tropey but not in a fun way, and so long-winded and repetitive. The overlapping characters shtick was fun throughout, though, even if it was a cheap way to use a bunch of levels twice.

 

Alright, onto Bioshock! Excited for this. I know the big narrative twist already, but never mind. At least, I know the gist of it, so please don't go into any more detail than what I know:

 

turns out the Atlas guy is a baddy and has been leading you into doing stuff by saying "would you kindly", and it's all a clever commentary on how players interact with video games or something

 

ACTUALLY, in my (unsuccessful) search for features on CoJ, I noticed that Bound In Blood got a demo, so I think I'm going to download that from Steam first and have a go. Sounds like they've tweaked at least a couple of the mechanics from the original game, like bullet-time and quick-draws. (I also found out that the guy who plays Reverend Ray is Gul Dukat from DS9 and, more excitingly, the Mars security guy in Total Recall who shouts "THEY'RE ALL CONNECTED!" and has a brief pock-faced character actor stare-off with Michael Ironside.) UPDATE: looks a bit nicer though the Chrome Engine - which apparently was a bit controversial at one point for some reason - is now making shadows and heat shimmer look ugly. Has modern auto-regen health, confusing HUD damage-reports and the new cover mechanic and quick-draw mechanic are fiddly. Hope Gunslinger is better than this, frankly.

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Wow, Bioshock is fantastic. It gives the sensation of being overwhelmed by this bizarre, horrific city you've been plunged into - loads of visual effects, towering architecture and scripted moments of disaster - but doesn't actually overwhelm you with mechanics etc. Everything's been tutorialised really nicely and I'm already having fun with the RPG-lite stuff - using your plasmids in various ways, hacking security to friendly mode, exploring big non-linear multi-room spaces, crawling through air vents (although I'm annoyed I had to give up my fire plasmid before I realised there was another iced-over door I could have explored. Hopefully I'll get more slots and be able to come back). The presentation's great as well, from the art deco design to the unnerving enemies and the friendly-hacked drones that bob and buzz around you like something Alyx Vance might hack together out of a car engine and a ventilation fan.

 

Really the only thing I can complain about is that no matter how low I put the volume on everything else, I still can't hear Atlas' instructions if anything else is going on. A lot of games seem to have this issue, I've found. I always have to put music volume down to at most 40%. Even the old Lucasarts adventures did it.

 

EDIT: oh man, DOOM is free to play all weekend, I think I'm going to have to put Bioshock down for a few days to blast through that...

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Ah, nice one, thanks! I already got the classic version free on gog, but after I started this playthrough. Maybe I'll have a quick jaunt back in time to that one before I play the special edition...

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3 hours ago, Ben X said:

Really the only thing I can complain about is that no matter how low I put the volume on everything else, I still can't hear Atlas' instructions if anything else is going on. A lot of games seem to have this issue, I've found. I always have to put music volume down to at most 40%. Even the old Lucasarts adventures did it.

Are you sure nothing's fucked up in your audio setup, like in Windows or whatever? If Windows thinks you have 5.1 surround sound but you only have 2 speakers and it's piping all the dialogue through the center speaker that doesn't exist or whatever, that might explain that sort of thing. Although if this reaches back even to the old Lucasarts adventures then chances are it's not technical.

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I need to try BioShock again. I keep bouncing off of it (I think I've stupidly bought it on 3 different platforms), but it seems like exactly my kind of thing; I love Looking Glass stuff, and newer things in that milieu like Dishonored.

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Audio setup seems to be fine. A quick google shows that a few people had this with Bioshock. I'll just try turning the other stuff down to 1 and see if that helps!

 

Turns out DOOM was only the first two "campaigns" free over the weekend, which is pretty much what the demo gives you anyway, so that was a waste of time. Never mind, back to Bioshock all the sooner!

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Wow, the difficulty ramped right up as soon as the first Big Daddy appears! I don't know if there are any clever techniques for downing those guys, but it took me ages, especially with the stun move the first one was using. I finally used a combo of electro plasmid, machine gun, and running away. Thankfully the game has now introduced Adam so I've been able to open up a ton of plasmid slots. (I'm being nice to the Little Sisters - apart from geeing the Daddies on in fights, they haven't done anything to harm me.) Actually, that reminds me, I saw an area below me with a Little Sister in it and forgot to go back to it. I'm not sure I can remember where it is now, maybe near the interrogation room...

 

It's still great fun, though, and the vita chambers let you brute force your way through if you're really struggling. Really the only thing that's hampering my enjoyment is that things often get too hectic for me to plan cool uses of my plasmids, set up traps etc.

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5 minutes ago, Ben X said:

Really the only thing that's hampering my enjoyment is that things often get too hectic for me to plan cool uses of my plasmids, set up traps etc.

 

Because of the level design and some of the weapon/plasmid changes, this is something that I found a lot easier to do in Bioshock 2, which is what makes it a more enjoyable game to play for me.

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On 21/07/2017 at 7:25 PM, Ben X said:

Wow, the difficulty ramped right up as soon as the first Big Daddy appears! I don't know if there are any clever techniques for downing those guys, but it took me ages, especially with the stun move the first one was using. I finally used a combo of electro plasmid, machine gun, and running away. Thankfully the game has now introduced Adam so I've been able to open up a ton of plasmid slots. (I'm being nice to the Little Sisters - apart from geeing the Daddies on in fights, they haven't done anything to harm me.) Actually, that reminds me, I saw an area below me with a Little Sister in it and forgot to go back to it. I'm not sure I can remember where it is now, maybe near the interrogation room...

 

It's still great fun, though, and the vita chambers let you brute force your way through if you're really struggling. Really the only thing that's hampering my enjoyment is that things often get too hectic for me to plan cool uses of my plasmids, set up traps etc.

 

Yeah, I found that problem too - whilst I understood in theory what could be synergistic uses of plasmids and environment, when things actually kicked off, I was usually too busy to actually use any of them. (Plus, my Eve reserves never seemed quite enough to really splurge on things.)

(I'll also say that: brute forcing via Vita Chamber was basically how I killed any Big Daddies I dealt with. They're ridiculously tanky, and pretty fast moving when they can see you... In fact, to be fair, brute forcing via Vita Chamber was basically how I did quite a lot of BioShock, until I got bored of brute forcing via Vita Chamber and stopped playing!)

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Ok, thanks both, good to hear I'm not the only one!

 

I try to reload rather than vita chamber when I can because it pisses me off to lose all my Eve and health (if I died before losing it all because I didn't manage to heal), but yeah when you get a Big Daddy plus ten splicers and a couple of turrets it becomes necessary to Brute Vita!

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Big Daddies will eventually become less of a threat as you gain powers and weapon/ammo upgrades (the armor piercing rounds work great).  Towards the middle of the game I was setting traps and concocting plans to take them down, only for them to fall well before even half of what I had in mind could be executed.  They are super intimidating in the beginning though.

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I've got some armor-piercng rounds (although I'm not sure about the machine gun as the nomenclature there isn't as specific iirc), but they didn't do a hell of a lot of good. TK helped against the one who threw mines at me, and now I've got the hypnotising apples which at least allow me to get a free first shot in.

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You need quite a bit of ammo and weapon upgrades for them to really be useful against the big daddies so they probably aren't worth much to you now.  Early game is definitely all about the plasmids.  Mind controlling big daddies (once you get that plasmid there) is also super useful because not only do they become crazy powerful bodyguards, they'll also be very weak and easy to put down after the area is clear.

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Well, I'm still working my way through this, though I haven't spent tons of time on it. I was feeling a little under-powered for how far through the game I feel, but then I checked a walkthrough and it seems I'm only about a third of the way in. Mainly, I'm looking forward to opening up a ton more slots to put all my current plasmids in, especially the hacking ones to make that less risky. It's a shame that the Little Sisters are the only way to get Adam, they don't occur that often. Also, I'm sure I took one Big Daddy down who had an LS with him (her? Some of them are called Rosie, so I'm not sure if there's some lore I'm not privy to where they're actually female) but then once I'd killed him she was nowhere to be found. At least BDs are a bit easier to take down now, as long as I don't get cornered.

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16 hours ago, Ben X said:

Also, I'm sure I took one Big Daddy down who had an LS with him (her? Some of them are called Rosie, so I'm not sure if there's some lore I'm not privy to where they're actually female) but then once I'd killed him she was nowhere to be found.

 

The Rosies are a reference to Rosie the Riveter, which was an American icon during WWII that represented women who entered the work force to fill in for the men fighting in the war.  The Rosie big daddy is the one that's armed with a rivet gun, hence the name.

 

We_Can_Do_It!.jpg

 

(Technically the image doesn't depict Rosie the Riveter but it's the one that's often associated with the idea)

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Ah, of course, I know Rosie the Riveter, I should have put that together! In Time Gentleman Please we had a wartime female factory worker character called Rose, except she was named after the phrase "English rose" and based visually on another woman in that article, yellow cap and all:


40swoman.jpg

 

ss_06.png

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The difficulty spike with the Big Daddies appearing is really strange, especially because they respawn without little sisters in a few of the early areas when just messing with one will deplete a lot of your ammo and whatever else. 2 does not spike like this from what I remember. I was playing Bioshock without using vita chambers on hard for all the trophies and I was able to just kind of get them stuck in walls and hurt them, quick save, reload when it was bad, until I was able to destroy them without constantly backtracking to grab them and wait for them to get a little sister out of a vent (if one were available). For both Bioshocks the game becomes less difficult with the use of the camera. At least that's how I felt, the research points seemed to really make a difference. Then again you can rapid fire a lot of the research photos on one enemy pretty quickly for some enemies and max out your advantages against them.

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Yeah, I keep forgetting to take photos, but it's fun trying to get live shots before the splicer's ripping your face off. Houdinis are especially tricky.

 

The good thing about Big Daddies is that if they don't have a Lil Sis with them you can leave them alone and they just pad past you. I followed one around for a bit and he wandered over to a vent hole and started banging on it to try and call a LS to no avail. It was really cool.

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On 7/20/2017 at 11:10 PM, Trip Hazard said:

I thoroughly enjoyed that Shadow Warrior game, except for the boss battles, which I thoroughly hated

I second this. Shadow Warrior is fantastic. The boss battles sucked quite a bit.

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On 7/23/2017 at 7:58 PM, Ben X said:

Ok, thanks both, good to hear I'm not the only one!

 

I try to reload rather than vita chamber when I can because it pisses me off to lose all my Eve and health (if I died before losing it all because I didn't manage to heal), but yeah when you get a Big Daddy plus ten splicers and a couple of turrets it becomes necessary to Brute Vita!

 

Please note a lot of the Big Daddies are not supposed to be beaten until you have improved a bit. Daddies become a piece of cake in the latter half of the game.

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Yeah, I've got shock +2, armour-piercing bullets and frag grenades now, so it's a lot easier. Also I've realised I can check out their health bar before picking a fight.

 

I've been away from this for a little while. It's like a heavy drama film where I know once I'm in it I'll love it, but it's hard to get in the mood sometimes.

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6 hours ago, twmac said:

 

Please note a lot of the Big Daddies are not supposed to be beaten until you have improved a bit. Daddies become a piece of cake in the latter half of the game.

I was too afraid of not being able to backtrack so I forced my way to saving all of the little sisters in the first few areas while being a bit underpowered. However I forgot that I learned later you can literally backtrack to almost any area of that game. Your save file at the end takes forever if I recall. Like some 30 MB behemoth (well on my PS3 at least).

 

Bioshock 2 you can't go back. At least I'm pretty sure.

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