What games are you playing/looking forward to?

[Jon AS]

New topic because I might want to bitch about Far Cry 2 some more in the near future...

And from the last thread:

[quote name='Cocomaan']I don't know if anyone can agree with me on this, but is there a trend nowdays away from the proverbial "boss fight"? I can't remember the last game that had a good one. I still remember the boss fight in Dark Forces against the superstormtroopers or whatever they were. Or the fight against Demogorgon in Throne of Baal.

Maybe I'm wrong, but developers seem to be shying away from boss fights or making them totally anticlimactic.[/quote]

Well, the ending of [i]Crysis[/i] has you fighting a massive alien warmachine on the flight deck of a mostly devastated aircraft carrier. And just when it goes down, the [i]actual[/i] boss slowly rises from the water and turns out to be about as big as the ship itself. It's rather ridiculous, but it's also kinda cool.

[Week]

[quote name='Jon AS' post='1578586' date='Nov 5 2008, 10.01']New topic because I might want to bitch about Far Cry 2 some more in the near future...[/quote]I tried playing multiplayer. The game got stuck in a loading screen I couldn't do anything to get out of. Alt-tab, the windows key, ctrl-alt-delete. Nothing worked. Had to do a hard reboot. :( Fuck you Ubi.

[Slurktan]

[quote]I don't know if anyone can agree with me on this, but is there a trend nowdays away from the proverbial "boss fight"? I can't remember the last game that had a good one. I still remember the boss fight in Dark Forces against the superstormtroopers or whatever they were. Or the fight against Demogorgon in Throne of Baal.

Maybe I'm wrong, but developers seem to be shying away from boss fights or making them totally anticlimactic.[/quote]

I assume you are talking about FPS's only?

[Werthead]

[i]Half-Life[/i] and [i]Opposing Force[/i] had proper (if rather easy) boss fights, but HL2's was a bit crap (fighting two gunships whilst taking out a spinning singularity shield thing that doesn't fight back!). [i]Baldur's Gate[/i]'s was weak as well (I half fireballed and magic missiled Sarevok to death before he even got within melee range).

[i]Freespace 2[/i] probably has one of the best subversions of the boss fight ever:

SPOILER: Gods' Own Game

The Terran-Vasudan Alliance is confronted by the [i]Sathanas[/i], a Shivan superdestroyer which is so huge and powerful it could rape the Death Star and the [i]Executor[/i] to death and then swallow the entire Vorlon fleet for afters. Over the course of half a dozen missions, your squadron has to run constant raids and assaults on the ship, gradually wearing down it shields, taking out its beam cannons and flak guns until it finally gets taken down by your own flagship, the [i]Colossus[/i], which has to overload its weapons and almost blow itself to pieces to do it. You sit back with the relief and knowledge of a job well done.

And then [i]eighty[/i] more ships of the same class show up.

I also felt a bit cheated that you don't get to participate in the boss fight in [i]Oblivion[/i], but just watch Sean Bean do it instead.

Just remembered that [i]Serious Sam[/i] had a reasonably good boss fight. You end up fighting a demon who is, in scale terms in the game, about two miles tall. It was epic and went on for ages as you blasted away at him whilst he tore up an entire city.

[Shryke]

Boss fights have been steadily disappearing. Probably because Boss Fights are usually pretty dumb.

It's just "Learn the pattern, repeat 3/5/7/10 times and win."

They tend to go for "Boss Scenarios" these days.

Like "Take out wave after wave of guys" or "Survive this onslaught of enemies" or something of the like. Which works much better since it doesn't feel so disconnected from what you've been doing the rest of the game.


The "Boss" of HL2 for instance, isn't the 2 gunships at the end, it's the bigass showdown against like 5 Striders and an unlimited wave of guys right before you enter the Citadel. The rest is sort of a denouement.

[Week]

I miss Kefka. That was ridiculous and bad ass.

[Young Wolf]

Im seriously considering trading in my modded 360 to get a new one so I can play GoW2 online. Im itching for it...and some Halo3 on Live would be fun again as well.

[igoraki]

Elemental: War of Magic announced by Stardock.
This game should be spiritual successor of Master of Magic strategy classic from Simtex and MicroProse and since am big fan of fantasy tbs,am pretty excited about it, unfortunately game is scheduled for a february 2010 release.
[url="http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/elemental-war-of-magic/926527p1.html?RSSwhen2008-11-03_132500&RSSid=926527"]GameSpy info[/url]

[Shryke]

[quote name='Cocomaan' post='1578699' date='Nov 5 2008, 11.30']Yeah, that's what it's like most of the time. And you can do that pretty well, even. I think that a developer probably needs to come up with a new paradigm for boss fights to stick around. For instance, anyone who played it remembers their first fight against Psycho Mantis in MGS.[/quote]

There's already plenty of good ideas out there.

Republic Commando (one of the best FPSes of the past like 5 years) has a bunch of "Boss Fights" that are essentially HUGE firefights between you and your squad and dozens upon dozens of enemies. The end of the 2nd chapter is the best by far.


[quote]Well, we already went over the infinite rocket problem :P. I found the Ep2 final fight to be a lot more exciting. I personally think Valve should have made Striders vulnerable to everything, even small arms fire.[/quote]

I liked infinite rockets. Made the fights against bigass stuff more about skill and took out that whole "hoarding explosive ammo" shit most games suffer from.

I want to be encouraged to use my bigass weapons, not horde them against some potential future huge encounter where I'll need them, potentially.

[Jon AS]

[quote name='Cocomaan']I found the Ep2 final fight to be a lot more exciting.[/quote]

I'd made the mistake of glancing at the list of achievements shortly before I got to that, which meant I just [i]had[/i] to save every building. Needless to say this took some trying. And trying and trying...

But I generally agree that games have gotten easier. I almost never play on anything but highest difficulty anymore, something I wouldn't have dared back in the days of [i]Doom[/i].

[quote name='Shryke']Republic Commando (one of the best FPSes of the past like 5 years) has a bunch of "Boss Fights" that are essentially HUGE firefights between you and your squad and dozens upon dozens of enemies. The end of the 2nd chapter is the best by far.[/quote]

Well, can't have been all that memorable, because while I've played this game, I have no recollection of what you're talking about. ;)

But then the entire game took about four hours to complete...

[quote name='igoraki']Elemental: War of Magic announced by Stardock.
This game should be spiritual successor of Master of Magic strategy classic from Simtex and MicroProse[/quote]

This could be awesome!

[Week]

[quote name='Jon AS' post='1578751' date='Nov 5 2008, 12.29']But I generally agree that games have gotten easier. I almost never play on anything but highest difficulty anymore, something I wouldn't have dared back in the days of [i]Doom[/i].[/quote]What's frustrating is that increasing the difficulty usually either makes the enemies, essentially, cheat, and/or nerf your own health/firepower. We keep getting prettier and prettier games with shit AI.

[Slurktan]

Well Boss fights have been decreasing lately. FPS boss fights have always been shit to start with though so I don't miss it from them. The God of War games have nice boss fights, as does Resident Evil 4. Probably the best "boss" fights I've played were in [b]Shadow of the Colossus[/b] though.

[Shryke]

[quote name='Cocomaan' post='1578778' date='Nov 5 2008, 12.57']I have to disagree. It didn't take any skill, because you didn't have to worry about missing. You could just walk back over (under 100% I might add, especially after the field generators) and stock up to go out and miss some more.[/quote]

And then get gibbed eventually because while ROCKETS were infinite, health and armor were not.

[quote]Well, can't have been all that memorable, because while I've played this game, I have no recollection of what you're talking about. wink.gif

But then the entire game took about four hours to complete...[/quote]

That just proves you have no taste.

[Werthead]

The giant bollock monster in [i]Half-Life[/i] was probably the most difficult boss fight ever. Or rather I took one look at it, went "RARGH! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?" and kept backpedaling off the side of the planet (seriously don't they have health and safety on Xen?) before it could swing its pendulously glistening testicular sac into my head. Although it's funny if it connects, as you go flying about 100 feet, usually off the side of the planet.

[Paddy]

[quote name='Jon AS' post='1578751' date='Nov 5 2008, 17.29']But I generally agree that games have gotten easier. I almost never play on anything but highest difficulty anymore, something I wouldn't have dared back in the days of [i]Doom[/i].[/quote]
I was the same until CoD4, when the hardest difficulty just lead to frustration at the extremely difficult bits, playing them over and over until you randomly managed to do it.
Especially the ending of the Chernobyl level.

SPOILER: CoD4

In the end, the only way I was able to complete it was to go and hide behind the dodgems, waiting and shooting anyone who came around the corner. Even then, I had to repeat it a load of times until I got it. Grenades were a bitch.

Granted, this was on the 360. I'd be a lot better on the PC (I've now played 10hours of CoD4 on PC every week for a year).

Anyways, once I completed CoD4, the frustration led me to conclude that I should probably just play games on Normal, because Hard seems to increasingly just include more near-impossible situations which rely on luck, not skill to get through them.

[Anatole Kuragin]

Gears midnight release/tournament tomorrow. Whoever wants to frag it up circa 12:00 AM CST friday morning is welcome.

[Inigima]

Oh shit, Gears 2 is out tomorrow? I knew I should have gone to the store tonight. Oh well, not like I'll have any trouble getting a copy.

[Anatole Kuragin]

[quote name='Inigima' post='1579406' date='Nov 5 2008, 21.29']Oh shit, Gears 2 is out tomorrow?[/quote]

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammnnn right.

I'm already hallucinating that I'm hearing chainsaws.

[Vendetto]

Played Fable 2, not that great.
Played Fallout 3 FRICKING AWESOME
Waiting for Gears 2.
Waiting for Left 4 Dead.

[Ser Greguh]

JRPG fans, thoughts on [url="http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/thelastremnant/index.html?tag=result;title;0"]The Last Remnant[/url]? I haven't heard much hype about this one, but it sounds pretty cool and the screenshots that have been released so far look frickin' awesome. To be released on Nov 20.