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Man, that Dead Space 3 demo.

That is bad.

Dead Space 3 is bad.

The enemies are not as reactive, the cover system basically does not work and it is alongside ranged enemies that are awful, the game is really quite surprisingly ugly, and co-op always ruins horror. The new weapon crafting thing seems interesting, but it comes at a cost. (Universal ammo and some seriously dubious balance.)

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I read the other day that they felt they've mastered "horror" and have decided to change it up this time :/

“I think at this point we’ve mastered the art of doing closet scares,” said Khoury, “you know, necromorphs jumping out of vents, etc – and I think that’s why it will be interesting to go to Tau Volantis – to see how we’ve been able to use the blizzard with its sensory tricks.

“You can’t really see what’s ahead of you, there’s the snow that can, you know, hide some things. There’s also all the noise – the blizzard is actually really loud, and we’ve really played with these things to trick the player and create new kinds of horror.

“The ice planet that worried players at first because it’s an external environment, actually turns out to be one of our allies in terms of creating new ways to scare our players.”

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I didn't like the sound of what they were doing for 3, but i was at least expecting a competently made game, albeit one that i would find personally infuriating. (UNIVERSAL AMMO IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA.)

you know, but then you sit your ass behind a piece of cover for a woefully out of place bit of stop and pop, and it flat out doesn't work. No matter where i positioned Isaac, he was firing shots directly into the crates he was hiding behind.

I do not think, from this demo, that Dead Space 3 is a competent game. Even the things that they didn't change, things that were so perfectly nailed in the first two games, they seem noticeably worse here. The feel of the game is all wrong, it feels stilted.

It just looks so muddy and shitty too, they're focusing in real close on some seriously assy textures, these are kinds of things that never would have flown in the first two games.

Man, that demo sucked.

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Miasmata had a pretty cool ending that I was apparently too dim to see forming around me. I was so scared about what was going on that I never stopped and smelled the roses.

Play it, but relax and take your time reading all the notes you find (both on paper and elsewhere in the world.)

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I guess i just "finished" Anarchy Reigns, though i'm still playing the multiplayer. I have a few things to say about it, though i'm not sure it deserves its own thread. The only other person i've seen mention it here hated it.

I like it a lot, it's definitely a game with problems, but i think the things it does well are done very well. I think it's a riot online, when it's at its best, it comes off as a bigger and more advanced PowerStone.

The action is ridiculous and frantic, but i do feel like strategy shines through in the gameplay. I think it mechanically owes actually a little more to fighting games than to brawlers, and familiarity with bounces and juggles helps. (There's even a competent training mode to complete the fighting game vibe.) I mean, but really only in a very minimal sense, you really just need to know that launching somebody with a normal hit and following up with a super is better than opening with the super. Then you go do some normal combos to build up your super again, applying different combos to, for example, maybe result in knockbacks for spacing or pop-ups for juggles. There's also a burst attack in the game that miiight be too strong, and understanding how to use that and how to counter it is kind of essential to the game. (You can try and clash with it, but you can also counter-burst.)

I think the netcode is pretty good, though there's definitely latency-related ambiguities with hitboxes. Occasionally frustrating, but it works well most of the time, and it holds up well even in the big 16 player matches. There's actually a quite generous clash mechanic for near simultaneous hits that i'm pretty sure is being used to side-step the who-shot-first latency issue, and it comes across as a wise bit of design.

The match-making is kind of clunky, and there's just barely enough people playing online. I've had trouble finding groups for battle royale, the 16-player gametype, though mostly everything else works out. (There's also a proper bot match mode. While they aren't particularly challenging, they're smart enough to know how to play the gametypes, they even work fine for survival and deathball.)

The story mode is awful, I don't think it's even really worth talking about. You need to play it to unlock some things, but it's short. Compared to the breadth of content in the MP, it seems relatively clear that it wasn't the focus. (The characters can all be unlocked simply by playing the multiplayer, though there's a handful of perks you can only unlock in the story mode.)

It's probably the weakest game Platinum has put out, but i still really like it. It's 30 bucks too, Sega wants to move those copies very desperately. It's kind of hard to recommend to just anybody though, but if you think you're the kind of person this game is for, you'd probably be pretty happy with it.

Also, go turn the camera sensitivity up to ten, you won't have problems spinning around and locking onto people who sneak up behind you. (Aim speed for thrown objects and weapons is a different option, so that's not an issue.)

Well, I was getting a little worried as our tastes seemed to be way to similar. I was much more diplomatic about my feelings on Anarchy Reigns in the Podcast we did on Arcadian Rhythms. I haven't played Anarchy Reigns in a long time so if you are around and fancy doing a little multiplayer and showing me some of what I missed I would be interested in giving it a shot.

I think the single player should be touched on as to how terrible it is. Note that this will be what a lot of people play and it straight up, is terrible.

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I'm not sure what i could contribute to your understanding of the game. I had just kind of just been feeling my way through it, and i'm not sure how far i want to go with it. (I don't want to assume that you're starting from nothing, but you do understand as much that it's safer to setup up a killer attack with a normal hit, things like that, right?)

Just at a very basic level, I think the big thing is you have to assume everybody is trying to be an opportunistic back-stabbing asshole. If you fail to get a decisive kill and the opponent starts playing really evasively, it's sometimes best to just let them go. Drawing out a fight just opens you up for somebody else to swoop in.

There's also some very impressive combo videos that have been going up on youtube, if you want a glimpse of the more technical side of the game, but there doesn't seem to be much of a community out there talking about the game, i haven't seen any guides or anything yet.

Apparently the game also has some smallish issues with lag causing a few specific attacks to behave in unintended ways, as well as some loops and infinites.

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I finally beat King's Bounty: Armored Princess! The first time I played it, I didn't get it, cheated and ruined it, so I quit. But this time, I actually understood it better and got into it.

When I started the Wizard snobbery thread, I thought I hate bad wizards, but with this game I realized I didn't mind how weak you are at first if you can go from Rincewind to Gandalf The White. The game seems so well balanced and thought out in that aspect, just when I'm feeling useless, I always get a new troop or spell that changes everything.

In the end I had dragons and archdemons, due to the mobility and "tankness" and I was ridiculously powerful as a wizard. But my only main complaint (apart from me being stupid and not noticing that Crossworld was an expansion to this, so I should have played that) was that the best troops are level 5 and most spell don't affect them at all.

The world was pretty great, with each island having a theme, my favorite was the goblin island mostly for their look, although I kinda ignored most of the generic fantasy story with it's huge wall of text...

I hope the new game is just as good... and has more dragons in it, gotta have dragons! :3

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Sleeping Dogs - man, what a good game. The end was a little anticlimactic given the level of escalation throughout the game, but otherwise I was quite happy with the story. It helped that the mechanics were solid and a substantial iteration on the GTA-style of open world traversal (aka, not really "realistic" but certainly not Saint's Row or Just Cause). This game easily would have butted heads with ME3 as one of the best games I played from 2012.

Now, on to Darksiders 2!

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(UNIVERSAL AMMO IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA.)

The only sort-of exception I can think of is in Cave Story, which really didn't have universal ammo (the only ammo was for missiles), but it had a universal weapon upgrade system where the same drop would make the weapon you currently have equipped more powerful. I think that makes a lot of sense. If you want to have universal ammo drops, you should still allow the different weapons their own individual ammo, but maybe just say that an Ammo Point equals either one missile or twenty five machine gun bullets or something like that. Hmm. That's not a bad idea.

For some reason I've completely stopped playing games except for Middle Manager of Justice. I was having great fun with Whale Trail for a while but just sort of stopped playing for some reason. It's really damned fun though.

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Thomas Was Alone: Excellent writing and well-voiced narration made this game stand out as a super memorable experience. Being able to ascribe so much character to a bunch of rectangles jumping around shows that good writing can make even the most unlikely content feel compelling.

The puzzles themselves are fairly straightforward, nothing too brain twisting. They seem to just be there as something to do while the voice over serves out the narrative. I think I'll come away liking this more than games like Qube or Antichamber probably just because I'm a sucker for well told stories.

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Hm.. I thought there was a thread for Deponia, but couldn't find one, so posting here.

Completed Chaos on Deponia, and it was pretty much as good as the first game, except Rufus was more often annoying this time. I had to peek at a walkthrough a couple of times when the puzzles seemed to require rather inane solutions*, but I think overall the puzzles were better this time.

*

like the radio tower. You basically solve it all, and you climb it, and you still get hit by lightning. WTF. I spent a lot of time going back and forth, and then looked at a walkthrough to see that you have to use the transmitter on the radio tower before climbing up.

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I beat the first Crysis, of all things. God, never in my life have I had a game go from awesome to awful so fast. For half the game, you're the motherfucking Predator, but for the other half, you're Oscar Mike before that was even a thing. If I just distance myself from the frustration of fighting the aliens, it's actually kind of funny how bland the final act was: you have a general yelling in your ear constantly to defend the flight deck, disarm the reactor, shoot the hatch, etc. You don't even need your suit powers, except to punch doors on occasion and to run faster in order to keep the barks from looping. Just give me an empty field and some Koreans to murder, Crysis. You can keep your ice squids and your ominous forebodings for some other game.

Also, developers, even if you think your engine's sweet, try to exercise some restraint when planning the money shots. I'm sure Crytek would shed a tear if they saw how impassive I was when I watched the alien ship implode from the back of my VTOL. I was impressed the first dozen times, but when the whole damn game takes place at dawn, dusk, or high noon and everything's on fire, the spectacle wears thin.

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It's strange how I seem to be the only person who understands the logic of Deponia....

I beat my first Android game (not counting playing ScummVM games on it), Beastie Bay, it's Kairosoft's (Game Dev Story) Pokémon styled game where you also run an island resort. It's interesting how you have to go to other island and fight (and capture) monsters so the people their will visit your island as tourists. The monsters you capture harvest material on your island and if you meet certain conditions their house becomes a zoo tourists can visit. It's all about "civ" and nature stats which can upgrade nature or building areas.

I bothered me how quickly you run out of stuff to research for, and how resources that seem scarce all of the sudden you have way too many to use, even lumber (used for nearly everything) was too plentiful!

As for the combat? It's 3 vs 3, just so they wouldn't be too Pokémon-like, but you can only use one item per round which complicates things a lot. Still, once I got a rare and powerful monster it was relatively easy.

It does have a "pay to play" thing, but it's so unnecessary, you can pay real money for medals, but the game gives you medals for even few minutes you play, so you don't have to. it's a "free with ads", but the ads are so tiny I forget they are there.

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Spec Ops: The Line :tup:

Just completed this game. It's pretty much Uncharted with guns, including its flaws. I did like it even though the fighting was sometimes really annoying and I had to retry a part quite often. They varied the level design quite a bit, so it's not always messing around in a sandbox. But also some nice interiors of those insane Dubai hotels/buildings.

I liked the ending.

Instead of the usual boss battle it's just narrative.

And it has the usual binary ending that you can choose.

Not killing yourself opens up 2 additonal endings. You can die in the epilogue, or survive.

Anyway, I picked it up during a steam sale, and it was definitely worth the price. It is a rather short game, took me less than 7 hours to complete the single player campaign, and I was taking my time sightseeing and stuff.

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Oh crap... you're right.

It never occurred to me to simply surrender.

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Which is exactly why Spec Ops is a great game and why I think criticisms like the one Chris Remo has of it ("making the player feel ashamed about violence is just dumb because the whole game is violent") really miss the point. Spec Ops is not about making you feel bad for doing things it makes you do. Spec Ops is about narratives that make you choose violence.

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One thing that made me wonder.

At one point you can use some artillery thingy to level an area with white phosphor. And after the fact you find out you killed a bunch of civilians. did you actually have a choice here? Could you simply descent to the battlefield and battle it out? Obviously I used the phosphor.

There are other "dubious" choice points in the world (in order from meh, to damn):

You can choose to "save" the Gould guy. He dies either way. So not a biggy

You can choose to use the magnum to put the guy under the water truck out of his misery. Also not a biggy

Quite close to the end one of your team mates is killed by civilians. They sort of attack you. You can perform a melee attack on them. But you can also shoot at them. The latter gives you a cheevo.

And some point, you get to choose between shooting a soldier or civilian, both hanging from ropes. But there's a third option, shoot the snipers instead. I wonder how many would even consider the third option.

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One thing that made me wonder.

At one point you can use some artillery thingy to level an area with white phosphor. And after the fact you find out you killed a bunch of civilians. did you actually have a choice here? Could you simply descent to the battlefield and battle it out? Obviously I used the phosphor.

There are other "dubious" choice points in the world (in order from meh, to damn):

You can choose to "save" the Gould guy. He dies either way. So not a biggy

You can choose to use the magnum to put the guy under the water truck out of his misery. Also not a biggy

Quite close to the end one of your team mates is killed by civilians. They sort of attack you. You can perform a melee attack on them. But you can also shoot at them. The latter gives you a cheevo.

And some point, you get to choose between shooting a soldier or civilian, both hanging from ropes. But there's a third option, shoot the snipers instead. I wonder how many would even consider the third option.

Nope, the game shows you the horror of white phosphor and then FORCES you to use it, how else is the hero going to get PTSD?

I think the podcast told me hold to deal with the civilians, I just shot the air and they fled. The sniper thing was also mentioned in the podcast.

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There's a fourth choice in the sniper section:

Run past the snipers without shooting anyone.

 

And there's another choice in the crowd:

You can shoot into the air.

Also in that section, "the latter" isn't the thing that gives you a cheevo - you get a cheevo either way.

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Spec Ops: The Line :tup:

Just completed this game. It's pretty much Uncharted with guns, including its flaws. I did like it even though the fighting was sometimes really annoying and I had to retry a part quite often. They varied the level design quite a bit, so it's not always messing around in a sandbox. But also some nice interiors of those insane Dubai hotels/buildings.

I liked the ending.

Instead of the usual boss battle it's just narrative.

And it has the usual binary ending that you can choose.

Not killing yourself opens up 2 additonal endings. You can die in the epilogue, or survive.

Anyway, I picked it up during a steam sale, and it was definitely worth the price. It is a rather short game, took me less than 7 hours to complete the single player campaign, and I was taking my time sightseeing and stuff.

...Isn't Uncharted itself Uncharted with guns?

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...Isn't Uncharted itself Uncharted with guns?

No. Uncharted is like Spec Ops: The Line with treasures.

 

Also in that section, "the latter" isn't the thing that gives you a cheevo - you get a cheevo either way.

I shoved, and I didn't get a cheevo.

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Oh... I didn't notice that cheevo.I only noticed the cheevo that I didn't get. "A Line, Crossed" is the one you get when yo shoot people.

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Hey I just (yesterday) finished Spec Ops too. I got it because Zero Punctuation called it the game that most deserves to be played. I entered the game knowing that I'll be doing horrific things as a player (again because of the Zero Punctuation review) so when stuff started happening, I was expecting it, and it unfazed me, and I took almost nothing from the experience. Any opportunities for introspection was lost on me completely. I guess there's still plenty to appreciate at intellectual level, but I wish I had picked up the game knowing nothing about it and expecting another CoD clone (as Yahtzee did).

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