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I just beat Bioshock 2 as well. I really enjoyed it. I played it pretty much back to back with the original, and just finished the sequel last night.

At first I was kinda dismayed by what they were doing to Andrew Ryan.

Ryan Amusements works great as a simple refresher for those who haven't played the original in a while. It's very simple and heavy handed. However, it didn't strike me as being the quality of propaganda and speech I'd expected from the charismatic Ryan. The weird angry voice was the worst part. That section needed to have more finesse, or a strong aspect of corruption of the innocent, but it just came off as a cheesy ride. That would have been fine for me, without Ryan's direct involvement. I guess overall I don't like what they did to Ryan in this game, especially against such a crazy opponent in Lamb.

I remember getting an audio log about this. The intent of Ryan Amusements

was to appeal to the children of Rapture hence the brunt imagery. Andrew is actually dismayed at its gaudiness but then realizes how effective the presentation is to the intended demographic.

I like how that level is later contrasted with Dionysus Park. Ryan Amusements is simple and has a particular agenda. Dionysus Park is chaotic with amusement being pursued for its own sake.

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I realise this is pretty late, but I finally got around to finishing Bionic Commando on the PS3 - and I can understand why I was so reluctant to do so. It really doesn't seem to like the player very much.

For starters, the swinging. The bionic arm is almost certainly the most fun part of the game, as it should be, but you fire it by hitting the left trigger, and release it by releasing the left trigger. In Heavy Rain terms, this makes perfect sense - the gripper isn't a grabbling hook but a hand, and you have to keep your finger tense to simulate the hand continuing to grip. However, in practice it means that any significant time spent swinging from anything results in the game turning into an arthritis simulator.

Then there's the odd momentum cancellation of the swinging. If you release at a particular point in your arc, you will shoot up and forwards. If you release a moment to either side of that point, you drop like a stone. In many parts of the game, dropping like a stone means falling into water, drowning and then having to experience a long, long load screen. There are also invisible walls, except instead of actual walls they are irradiated areas which kill you, often in mid-swing and without much warning. Where freedom of movement does exist, it is occasionally counterproductive - one section allows you to jump back accidentally to the previous section, with a deeply dull set of obstacles to negotiate again. The fact that the blue fog of radioactivity eerily resembles the blue smoke signalling weapons drops doesn't help much, either.

So, the deadly floor and radioactive walls and ceilings are a bit of a pain, but you have to limit the map - ultimately, this is a linear fighter, not a sandbox. But, really, a surprising amount of proper care and expense has gone into expressing hatred for the player.

First up, Mike Patton. He is not cheap, and has dedicated his considerable skills to making the perspective character a really unsympathetic douchebag. When he lectures another former bionic commando now turned terrorist about the consequences of violence (voiced by Andrea Zuckerman), it really highlights how he has been whooping and shouting "Nice one!" or "That had to hurt!" as he killed her allies. There's a difference between the player celebrating a good kill and the perspective character doing the same, I think - because to the perspective character these are still people, even if they're the bad guys, if the game is being played straight.

(Incidentally, the bad guys have the most remarkably impolite barks - basically, if you like being called names, this is worth getting.)

Except that the game isn't entirely played straight. Before one boss battle Patton smirks "Is that a really big health bar, or are you just pleased to see me?" - breaking the fourth wall for no purpose at all except to make a nob joke. At the same boss, your Cortana (voiced by Spike Spiegel) sometimes and apparently at random substitutes "fuck it" for "fight it" as your helpful boss battle instructions. Maybe by then the grim and grittiness was all getting a bit much for Grin, or they were starting to realise that things were getting out of hand, but it punches a hole straight through immersion - if RAD Spencer, Bionic Commando, knows he is in a video game, why is he bothering? If he doesn't, why is he acting like a teenager playing Halo on XBox Live?

Certainly after that the game starts to mess with your expectation of what a game ought to do, especially in the sense of be fun. The penultimate boss battle involves waiting for an invulnerable enemy to stop slowly circling you while shouting in a ridiculous fake accent and attack, dodging the attack and using a specific attack on him, about ten times in a row. The climactic battle is a set of QTEs. Said battle being against

your former Cortana, who has performed a totally inexplicable heel turn in order to get hold of an ultimate weapon for no clear reason

. It's just nonsensical. Although admittedly only as nonsensical as the two other bionic characters who appear only in cutscenes, or the late revelation that

your missing wife has had her brain transplanted into your bionic arm, and that this is the dark secret of the bionics programme - but that nobody ever made the connection that every single recipient of bionics had a friend or loved one go missing at the same time that they got their robot bits. At least your wife being your robot arm might explain why prolonged use of the grappling hook gives you a nasty case of wanker's claw.

.

It's a shame, because the music is atmospheric, the environments are very pretty, if a little repetitive, and it does very nicely convey the sense of the murdered city as both a tragic graveyard and an awesome playground for a man who has been in prison for five years. It's a great argument, I think, for the role of writers in games: I've loved games with bigger mechanical faults, but in this case the script and the plot twists were so alienating that I, and I think many reviewers at the time, just didn't feel warm enough towards it to give it a break.

Ahem. Long writeup of an old game.

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wow, Mike Patton was a voice in that game? That makes me sad.

Also, being instructed to 'fuck' a boss is a little disconcerting. If that's not what your minion meant, why is he telling you 'fuck it [give it up]' or something to that extent. That makes no damn sense.

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Battlefield Bad Company 2 complete. I can't get over how much more I liked this game than Modern Warfare 2. There are points that are much more irritating, design-wise. CoD6 had really refined it's interface, as it probably should have by that point. BC2 had a horrible grenade indicator that killed me more often than it saved me, all the dust from the explosions and destroyable cover made it so that half the time I couldn't see three feet in front of my face, and had this weird thing where when it loaded in a checkpoint the vision faded in after the rest of the game had finished loading. This meant that in one section 2/3s of the time time my save loaded with me just gaining control as an enemy sniper's kill shot penetrated my brain. That was fucking infuriating. Speaking of checkpoints, they were way too far apart. On several occasions, I lost 15 minutes or more of progress due to not hitting a checkpoint anywhere in there. Either have GOOD checkpoints, or allow quicksaves. While I'm talking about lost progress, there was one mission where I played for over an hour, rescued the guy I was trying to rescue, fled the scene on an ATV, and then was unable to get off the fucking ATV. Like, ever. I had to replay the entire mission in order to see the half second cutscene where my character gets off his fucking quad bike so that I could play the last half hour of it. Go PC gaming.

That's a lot of bitching for a game that I liked, but I really did enjoy that game a hell of a lot. The setpieces were great, especially the ending. The characters had so much more personality than CoD6, and the conspiracy thingy was much more believable as well. I loved the banter between my squadmates, and actually came to like them in that action-movie sort of way. I never gave a shit about anyone in CoD6, despite how much they tried. The destroyable cover and buildings were great, despite how much I wished on a couple of occasions that they'd put a "THE BUILDING YOU'RE TAKING COVER IN IS FUCKING COLLAPSING!!!" notification on screen. Getting crushed by a roof seems an anti-climactic way to die after all the shit I survived. Still, fantastic game as far as linear modern shooters go. I had way more fun than I thought I would going in, despite the frustrations that came along with the design. Recommended.

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wow, Mike Patton was a voice in that game? That makes me sad.

Also, being instructed to 'fuck' a boss is a little disconcerting. If that's not what your minion meant, why is he telling you 'fuck it [give it up]' or something to that extent. That makes no damn sense.

Mike Patton voices the perspective character, Nathan Spencer - in fact, the voice cast is really impressive, if odd: Stephen Blum, Fred Tatasciore, Gabrielle Charteris...

The "fuck it" dialogue seems to be an Easter Egg, of sorts. The standard dialogue is:

Minion: There's no way around. You'll have to fight it.

Spencer: My pleasure.

But sometimes you get:

Minion: There's no way around. You'll have to fuck it.

Spencer: Um...

But with the regular subtitles. I think that kind of messing around with the fourth wall worked nicely with Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which was a pretty loving reworking of Bionic Commando, but not as well in a quote-unquote realistic treatment.

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I have beaten Earthworm Jim HD and Metal Gear MSX version!

I'm putting my EWJ HD experience in the other thread, but I will say I enjoyed the Metal Gear MSX version much more than the NES one I played long ago.

It still amazes me how much of the earlier games plays more like an adventure in a way. The biggest problem is just knowing when to call people on codec and that there's almost no way to know when to call Jennifer to get the rocket launcher or the compass. I'm now starting Metal Gear 2 in my free time, and we'll see how well that works out. It's already looking to iron out some of the first games problems, having a large step up in better graphics, music, and animations.

Strangest thing is it seems like it's going to be exactly the same game as Metal Gear Solid, except 2D. I'm having Deja Vu already climbing into a vent, landing in a tank room, and talking to Master Millar.

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I definitely got the vibe that Solid was basically a remake+ (Think Evil Dead 2) of Metal Gear 2 on the MSX. I played the first one in the MGS3 subwhatever pack, but I don't think I beat the second one.

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Oh wow, I thought this was a stickied thread. Oh well.

Double post.

I beat Castle Crashers last night with a friend. This is not going to end here, since there are like 25 characters and a ton to get super addicted to for the next 2 years time, but I haven't had this much a co-op blast forever. I wish I could get my girlfriend to play, but I think she's afraid it will be too hard.

I like beat 'em ups sometimes, but I don't always go looking for them. The map screen, stats, money, items, and such are enough to keep me interested. I have been wanting to play this game for a long time now but I haven't gotten around to buying a 360 yet (feel like I gotta beat games on the systems I have first and all), and so the PSN release was worth the wait. Seems like there's some new additions but exactly what isn't known yet.

I loved all the characters, animations, bosses, and variety in the levels. Some stuff was very strange or just surprising. The obvious joke you think the end is going to build up to is not anything like you are predicting, trust me.

The only draw backs I think are, I feel compelled to earn everything for all characters, which will take time, but I wish the moves between characters varied a lot more. A lot of powers are just duplicates of other characters.

Really the best way to play is four players, as the game is super tough alone, even though you get less enemies. I liked the way you could just join someones team online and play a few levels and have a blast. I think there's mics, but those are lame, it's a lot more fun to do weird motions with your character in order to get other people to see secrets they missed or trying to help figure out how to get through parts.

So yeah, it's not really fully beaten, but I'm sure I get the idea. Good stuff.

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I've just, for the first time, finished off Sam and Max Season 1. I am a horrendous person.

On to 2 and 3.

Also, Baldur's Gate 2 again.

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Three endings of Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, including the happy one, although I only got it by throwing my fellow zombie survivors to the shambling wolves. It's really faithful to the original - even down to the presumably deliberate slightly off dialogue. Barring some graphical polish and the combo weapons, really very little has changed. The combo weapons themselves are fun, but either too useful or not useful enough - combining a bucket and a power drill to make a death hat is fun, but putting a hat on a zombie that kills it is actually less amusing than putting a hat on a zombie that doesn't kill it.

GAP advert douche Chuck Greene seems immediately less endearing than the burly and permanently bewildered Frank, although having him dress as a waitress remains disproportionately amusing. His dead-eyed Polar Express daughter promises to be a bit wearing over the course of a whole game, but maybe she won't have much of a role.

Something that seems to have carried over from Dead Rising, which I really do appreciate, is that it's hard - not that hard moment to moment, but hard to achieve even a consciously limited set of objectives. The limited save points are a nice stiffener - three feels fairer than one without ruining the game's rigour, when in DR1 a bad save could basically force you to restart the whole game from the beginning - but the real killer is the inexorable march of time. I really like Inafune's refusal to make the perfect game easy, or even achievable, for the average player. It nicely captures the Romero vibe - the zombies are pretty slow and weak, but they force a choice between fast and safe in every interaction with the playing space, whereas the real threat comes from humans - not just the mad or evil ones, but from human intransigency, stupidity, weakness and, on occasion, lousy pathfinding.

As a demo-you-pay-for, it's pretty successful, I think. After Fort Zombie I could do with some zipless zombie slaughter.

Edited by Denial

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... Dead Rising 2: Case Zero ...

I played through the free part of Case Zero last night. It brought back everything I enjoyed about Dead Rising and everything I found frustrating. Please don't stop the game every two minutes for a cutscene!

This is the style of zombie I like (sorry, L4D!), and Dead Rising does a great job of encouraging you to keep your distance from the hordes or risk being overwhelmed.

I almost never remember my dreams, but last night I had a zombie outbreak dream in which I combined implements of destruction on a workbench. I don't think I've had a game-related dream since the first Final Fantasy. In that, I crashed an airship into a swamp.

I'm on the fence about whether or not I want to buy Case Zero and Dead Rising 2. I got sick of

fighting the military in Overtime Mode

, so I guess I didn't "really" beat the first game. Dead Rising 2 looks great so far. It's a game I will absolutely love in part. I wonder if that's enough.

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Finally finished something, I had for a year(?) on loan from a friend Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

Took me about 19 hours to finish the game, I finished only one of the endings with the green alignment Xel'lotath.

Apparently I would need to finish it with the two other alignments to get a *real* ending, but I'm satisfied with just one ending. It's time to return this to my friend.

It was quite a nice game, graphically it's not really pushing everything that Gamecube got, but that was mostly because of the N64 roots that the game had.

It was quite a surprise to see that the game had top quality voice acting with the likes of David "Solid Snake" Hayter, Earl "LeChuck" Boen and Jennifer Hale. This is actually Hayter's only listed role outside of being Solid Snake in games.

The idea about the insanity meter was absolutely awesome, I don't think I've seen that in any other games that I've played.

Except Batman:Arkham Asylum's Batman going crazy scene

There were so many wtf moments because of the insanity creeping in that I was scared shitless sometimes because it all happened so quickly and suddenly.

Like when the game told it had deleted my savegames and threw really cleverly the blue screen of death once.

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Mass Effect 2, on the fence about it gameplay/game mechanics-wise, but damn if I wasn't drawn in to its story and characters while I was going through.

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Mass Effect 2, on the fence about it gameplay/game mechanics-wise, but damn if I wasn't drawn in to its story and characters while I was going through.

I'm playing this now, feels too shootery. Lately it has been "land on planet, shoot lots of bad guys and talk to mission objective character"

Sweet game though, the action is good, just not what I expected/wanted out of ME2.

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Just finished Aquaria. I found it weird after the last boss, it doesn't continue... the game ends and if you want to continue you have to use your last save before the boss. I had the assumption there would be some extra stuff you get after the boss... in fact... now that there isn't, I have no clue how to get past certain things or how to even complete the game fully :blink:

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There's actually a fair number of optional forms and bosses in Aquaria. Pretty sure GameFAQs or some good LP would show you where to find them. :tup:

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Oh wow, I thought this was a stickied thread. Oh well.

Double post.

I beat Castle Crashers last night with a friend. This is not going to end here, since there are like 25 characters and a ton to get super addicted to for the next 2 years time, but I haven't had this much a co-op blast forever. I wish I could get my girlfriend to play, but I think she's afraid it will be too hard.

I like beat 'em ups sometimes, but I don't always go looking for them. The map screen, stats, money, items, and such are enough to keep me interested. I have been wanting to play this game for a long time now but I haven't gotten around to buying a 360 yet (feel like I gotta beat games on the systems I have first and all), and so the PSN release was worth the wait. Seems like there's some new additions but exactly what isn't known yet.

I loved all the characters, animations, bosses, and variety in the levels. Some stuff was very strange or just surprising. The obvious joke you think the end is going to build up to is not anything like you are predicting, trust me.

The only draw backs I think are, I feel compelled to earn everything for all characters, which will take time, but I wish the moves between characters varied a lot more. A lot of powers are just duplicates of other characters.

Really the best way to play is four players, as the game is super tough alone, even though you get less enemies. I liked the way you could just join someones team online and play a few levels and have a blast. I think there's mics, but those are lame, it's a lot more fun to do weird motions with your character in order to get other people to see secrets they missed or trying to help figure out how to get through parts.

So yeah, it's not really fully beaten, but I'm sure I get the idea. Good stuff.

I've seen your psn status saying you've been playing Castlecrashers, but I've personally been having a heck of a time trying to get an online game going (all sorts of connections errors), you have any troubles on that front?

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Finished Assassin's Creed II. I loved it, but what a bummer: that ending. It really went off the deep end in the same way the last Indiana Jones movie did.

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I've seen your psn status saying you've been playing Castlecrashers, but I've personally been having a heck of a time trying to get an online game going (all sorts of connections errors), you have any troubles on that front?

I guess I should really message you through the PS3 box thingy. I made a thread here, but I don't know if any other Thumbs are playing: http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7419

I'm not really sure about the connection errors. It seems like when I play with my friend often times the invite says "game no longer exists," when he's still sitting on the initial game screen he created waiting for me. Usually we have to leave and try again, and eventually it works. It seems like accepting the invite as fast as you can helps but I could be talking out of my ass.

But if you want to play anytime in the evenings 7 PM or after central time, I've got more than enough characters I have to level up and it's very fun to pick up and play anywhere.

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Finished Assassin's Creed II. I loved it, but what a bummer: that ending. It really went off the deep end in the same way the last Indiana Jones movie did.

Oh God yes. It honestly ruins the game for me. Forgetting all the obvious shitty stuff, I found it super annoying when

you're in that fight scene when the credits are rolling. I catch up to the guy in the truck, and yet I can't do anything to him. WTF. He's a foot away from me. Gah.

video games.

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Oh God yes. It honestly ruins the game for me. Forgetting all the obvious shitty stuff, I found it super annoying when

you're in that fight scene when the credits are rolling. I catch up to the guy in the truck, and yet I can't do anything to him. WTF. He's a foot away from me. Gah.

video games.

I guess it comes down to what Chris was saying where they can't just make a game that takes place that long ago without wrapping it in cyberpunk nonsense. But, I wonder if that was also done to justify the fact that there's a HUD and you get instant retries when you die etc...It's hard to make a video game that takes place before electronic technology and not have the medium clash with the content. Mostly it's a matter of suspension of disbelief. I remember feeling very weird playing Red Dead Redemption multiplayer and being able to communicate with teammates who were not within my field of view over my headset, as though the characters had two-way radios or something. I think it has something to do with the fact that video games try so hard now to not feel like video games. No developer wants their game to have a HUD or anything that's not justified within the fiction and I guess maybe we're getting used to that as players.

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I finished the main quest in Dragon Quest IX... now I'm basically grinding for more lvls and grottos. Anyone else addicted to this game?

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Mafia 2. Man, fuck the haters. This game was rad. It wasn't fast-paced, but it didn't need to be. The

chapter set in prison

that people seem to be complaining about was great. It was slow, sure, but it played right into the game's biggest strengths. That is, setting the mood perfectly and making you role-play the character rather than just be "fuck around in an open world" guy. Also, anyone who has finished the first Mafia and thought that the ending was great needs to play the first part of chapter 14.

When I realized that I was being sent to recreate the post-credits cutscene and whack Tommy Angelo, I nearly crapped myself.

As there are only 15 chapters in the game, at that point you may as well finish it. The ending in this one is pretty poignant as well, but for different reasons than the end of Mafia was. All told, I'm really happy with the time I spent with this game and would happily recommend it to anyone who appreciates a brilliantly realized setting. I think I'll re-read RPS' Wot I Think to see which of their points I agree with, but the massive disappointment they registered is certainly a point of contention I have.

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