Videogames: The Sequeling

[Ghostlydragon]

I've been rebuying all my wii and wii u games I sold when I needed the money. So far only Mercury meltdown revolution has arrived on wii and wind waker has arrived on wii u. Only started wind waker again earlier and its been so much fun. Although I hate sneaking around the forsaken fortress. I wish zelda wasn't focused on stealth at all but at least its pretty short.

[Werthead]

Man, A Criminal Past is an outstanding bit of Deus Ex. Relatively self-contained but not short by any measure, with a good 3-4 hours of content (maybe more if you don't just flip out during the riot and abandon stealth, as I did) and a nice bit of branching choices. There could have been a few more secondary missions, like Jensen collects quite a lot of loot from around the prison long before he gets access to the shop in the infirmary and it'd have been cool if Jensen could have set himself up as a prison supplier of contraband, but it's still a reasonable amount of content and, for once, the "you have no Praxis Points" thing makes perfect sense (your augs are disabled in the prison).

It's quite tough and flexes the old Deus Ex muscles more than any part of the franchise since the original, and it makes Human Revolution and Mankind Divided look really easy by comparison.

Not sure what to play next. I do have a hankering to replay the Dishonored games as well but should probably do a change of genre first for a bit.

Also, The Guardian has an interesting article on the video game market in China.

[Kalbear]

Holy crap do I suck at Old World. I've never been this bad at a Civ game in my life. 

[IlyaP]

10 hours ago, Werthead said:

Not sure what to play next. I do have a hankering to replay the Dishonored games as well but should probably do a change of genre first for a bit.

Dishonored 2 is great, but I think the first still tops it. And Death of the Outsider is an exercise in pain and frustration. 

[kungtotte]

I should have another crack at Dishonored 2, I played it up until you get to the mission where

Spoiler

You run around in some abandoned mansion and have a mask thing to transport you between timelines, and you have to puzzle your way through a maze using both timelines. That one annoyed the hell out of me so I took a break for a while, and now it's been like a year and a half...

I have a bad track record for actually finishing games though. I almost never do, the amount of played games to finished games in my Steam library is rivaled only by my ratio of played to never played.

[Soylent Brown]

I have Dishonored 2 in my library but haven't played it yet. Mostly enjoyed the first game, but didn't like how judgy it was with how it decides the ending.

I mean, most of the people I killed absolutely had it coming to them, I was a good boy Corvo. I didn't deserve the ending I got.

(The problem with these games is that if you mess up your stealth stuff, you have the whole level chasing you, so I like to murder everyone along the way, whether they've seen me or not. If you're a nice person, don't apply for that Stormtrooper job in the first place.)

[briantw]

12 hours ago, Soylent Brown said:

I have Dishonored 2 in my library but haven't played it yet. Mostly enjoyed the first game, but didn't like how judgy it was with how it decides the ending.

I mean, most of the people I killed absolutely had it coming to them, I was a good boy Corvo. I didn't deserve the ending I got.

(The problem with these games is that if you mess up your stealth stuff, you have the whole level chasing you, so I like to murder everyone along the way, whether they've seen me or not. If you're a nice person, don't apply for that Stormtrooper job in the first place.)

Isn't knocking them out functionally identical to killing them?  You have to hide the body either way.

[Werthead]

1 minute ago, briantw said:

Isn't knocking them out functionally identical to killing them?  You have to hide the body either way.

Not if you get the power that dissolves bodies you kill from stealth, so you don't have to worry about hiding the body.

If you hide the body poorly - i.e. just dump it on the ground in a grotty area - the person also gets killed by Dunwall's infamously psychotic rats and that gets blamed on you, so you have to be careful about where you put bodies (in lit areas - not on fire obviously - and an elevated surface if at all possible; it helps if you kill any random rats in the vicinity). Because of that, getting a true pacifist run on the game is extremely difficult.

Just fired up the original Dishonored again. Man, it's a fantastic game, even if the start where you get given tons of stuff by first an entire Rebel Alliance who set out to rescue you and then a demigod is a bit contrived. But hell, it gets you into the fun of the game pretty quickly.

Might check out the tabletop RPG as well, the game's setting remains quite unusual and interesting (in games, in books it has a few similarities to the works of China Mieville).

[Kalbear]

Dishonored is absolutely brilliant for the sole reason that they know certain powers and abilities can make the game trivial in one way or another and instead of preventing characters from exploiting it they just said fuck it and let you do those things. If you want to beat a level in 2 minutes because you can do a combination of teleport -> dash to get to a completely inaccessible area normally? Fine with them! It is one of the few games that absolutely rewards a player's choices and lets you do pretty much whatever you can. Even DX - the original - wasn't that free with things.

[briantw]

12 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Not if you get the power that dissolves bodies you kill from stealth, so you don't have to worry about hiding the body.

If you hide the body poorly - i.e. just dump it on the ground in a grotty area - the person also gets killed by Dunwall's infamously psychotic rats and that gets blamed on you, so you have to be careful about where you put bodies (in lit areas - not on fire obviously - and an elevated surface if at all possible; it helps if you kill any random rats in the vicinity). Because of that, getting a true pacifist run on the game is extremely difficult.

Just fired up the original Dishonored again. Man, it's a fantastic game, even if the start where you get given tons of stuff by first an entire Rebel Alliance who set out to rescue you and then a demigod is a bit contrived. But hell, it gets you into the fun of the game pretty quickly.

Might check out the tabletop RPG as well, the game's setting remains quite unusual and interesting (in games, in books it has a few similarities to the works of China Mieville).

As I recall, there were body bins pretty much everywhere in the game to make disposal pretty convenient.

And yeah I forgot about that disintegration power.  I avoided that one, as I was doing a pacifist run.

[IlyaP]

3 minutes ago, briantw said:

As I recall, there were body bins pretty much everywhere in the game to make disposal pretty convenient.

Yep. Accurate. 

I used them *a lot* in the first game, to stash bodies away to prevent the goddamn rats from getting to them. 

And the more you kill, the more rats there are in the city. It's, y'know thematic. And stuff.

[Werthead]

15 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

Dishonored is absolutely brilliant for the sole reason that they know certain powers and abilities can make the game trivial in one way or another and instead of preventing characters from exploiting it they just said fuck it and let you do those things. If you want to beat a level in 2 minutes because you can do a combination of teleport -> dash to get to a completely inaccessible area normally? Fine with them! It is one of the few games that absolutely rewards a player's choices and lets you do pretty much whatever you can. Even DX - the original - wasn't that free with things.

Yup. It's an outstanding game for that reason, as well as the art design and the strength of the story and setting.

Anyone have an advice on who to play in Dishonored 2? The Internet seems fairly unanimous that you should play Emily, just wanted to see if there was an alternate opinion.

[briantw]

24 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Yup. It's an outstanding game for that reason, as well as the art design and the strength of the story and setting.

Anyone have an advice on who to play in Dishonored 2? The Internet seems fairly unanimous that you should play Emily, just wanted to see if there was an alternate opinion.

The only thing I didn't like about playing as Emily is that the teleport power works differently.  You don't actually teleport as her, but rather get pulled from point A to point B.  It led to some tricky segments where I kept getting spotted when I teleported that weren't an issue playing as Corvo.  

From a narrative standpoint, Emily is the best choice. 

[Werthead]

This is cool. Someone loaded all of the Half-Life 2 levels together at once to see if they actually fitted together, and was surprised to find they did (the Water Hazard level does go back over itself, but that was the only issue). I know other people did this for the Episodes and the original Half-Life (and the Black Mesa remake) and found they all worked together as well.

[Fez]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yup. It's an outstanding game for that reason, as well as the art design and the strength of the story and setting.

Anyone have an advice on who to play in Dishonored 2? The Internet seems fairly unanimous that you should play Emily, just wanted to see if there was an alternate opinion.

I'm not sure if this is true, but I always got the sense that the game was originally designed for Emily to be the only protagonist. And then they added Corvo in when they got concerned that some players wouldn't want to play as a woman.

But the story just makes so much more sense to play as Emily.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Finished Resident Evil 0 Remastered (easy mode) and now maybe halfway through Resident Evil Remake. After that, Resident Evil 3 and 2 (the remakes).

Also started Mass Effect remastered, just been made a spectre. 
 

Maybe soon I’ll get round to actually playing a Ps5 game on thr console rather than remasters/remakes of previous generations

[Soylent Brown]

I played Resident Evil 0 on the Gamecube when it was first released and enjoyed it well enough, but I'm not sure how much the fixed camera would irritate me these days.

 

Finished Beyond: Two Souls yesterday, and have very little good to say about it. I guess the acting was decent, but the story was awful, the gameplay non-existent, and the camera incredibly annoying.

The timeline is all over the place so you find yourself being dumped into random situations with no idea what's going on and no prompt as to what you should do, so half the time you're reduced to just walking around rooms looking for something that you can interact with. Most interaction is super lame too - given that most is done using the right stick, which you also use to battle with the shitty camera, half of the time you accidentally activate the thing you're walking past whilst swearing at the game and trying to get a better angle.

There's a section in the game with horse-riding where the controls are so bad that I just gave up and let the game's loose autopilot guide me rather than trying to steer myself, and that really is 90% of the game - holding down one button and letting the game play itself while you have no fucking clue.

I guess this is what happens when you decide on a game mechanic and then build the entire story around it: you get a shitty game.

[IlyaP]

7 hours ago, Fez said:

I'm not sure if this is true, but I always got the sense that the game was originally designed for Emily to be the only protagonist. And then they added Corvo in when they got concerned that some players wouldn't want to play as a woman.

But the story just makes so much more sense to play as Emily.

Oh wow, REALLY? 

They added Corvo because they worried about someone playing a *woman*? 

Seriously? *Seriously?!*

[IlyaP]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yup. It's an outstanding game for that reason, as well as the art design and the strength of the story and setting.

Anyone have an advice on who to play in Dishonored 2? The Internet seems fairly unanimous that you should play Emily, just wanted to see if there was an alternate opinion.

I loved Stephen Russell's voice acting as Corvo. Such snark. Much cute. Very Garrett. 

But clearly it seems Emily was the ideal person to go with - which I DID wonder about while playing the game. So many of the plot points seemed so very Emily-centric. 

[kungtotte]

15 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Oh wow, REALLY? 

They added Corvo because they worried about someone playing a *woman*? 

Seriously? *Seriously?!*

People refused to play the Assault/Medic class in Battlefield 3 because it was a black character (which you could really only tell by the roughly 2 inches of skin showing between his sleeve and gloves when reloading), so nothing ever surprises me with how some gamers think.