Videogames: The Sequeling

[Ghostlydragon]

1 hour ago, Soylent Brown said:

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.

Urgh that ranch area. That was too big. Missing a collectible right at the end and replaying the whole area to get it was ridiculous.

And I'm glad I played on ps4 so I could play in timeline order. It made it so much more bearable. Its still my least fave of the three with Detroit topping Heavy Rain.

[Soylent Brown]

1 minute ago, Ghostlydragon said:

Urgh that ranch area. That was too big. Missing a collectible right at the end and replaying the whole area to get it was ridiculous.

And I'm glad I played on ps4 so I could play in timeline order. It made it so much more bearable. Its still my least fave of the three with Detroit topping Heavy Rain.

There was an option to play it in order on PC too, but if I'm presented with a higgledy-piggledy story order as an option, I assume that's the way the game's creators want me to play.

[Werthead]

12 minutes ago, kungtotte said:

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.

One of the reasons Watch_Dogs 2 sold more slowly than the first game has been "blamed" on the fact the protagonist is a cool black dude rather than the first game's angry white loner. Though WD2 did eventually match the first game in sales and GTA: San Andreas (with a black protagonist) was the biggest-selling video game of the PS2 generation and GTAV (with one-third of its main cast being black) is not far off being the best-selling video game of all time, so I'm not 100% sure how reliable that is.

[kungtotte]

52 minutes ago, Werthead said:

One of the reasons Watch_Dogs 2 sold more slowly than the first game has been "blamed" on the fact the protagonist is a cool black dude rather than the first game's angry white loner. Though WD2 did eventually match the first game in sales and GTA: San Andreas (with a black protagonist) was the biggest-selling video game of the PS2 generation and GTAV (with one-third of its main cast being black) is not far off being the best-selling video game of all time, so I'm not 100% sure how reliable that is.

What I find especially amusing is the significant overlap in the Venn diagram of "people who refuse to play a character different from themselves" and "people who argue against people who wish to play characters similar to themselves".

[Fez]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

One of the reasons Watch_Dogs 2 sold more slowly than the first game has been "blamed" on the fact the protagonist is a cool black dude rather than the first game's angry white loner. Though WD2 did eventually match the first game in sales and GTA: San Andreas (with a black protagonist) was the biggest-selling video game of the PS2 generation and GTAV (with one-third of its main cast being black) is not far off being the best-selling video game of all time, so I'm not 100% sure how reliable that is.

Among the asshole gamers, I think gender is a bigger hangup than race. See just how angry they get at the idea of playing as a woman in time period games, since it "breaks historical realism." 

Although, maybe its more because there's been a bigger push for gender diversity than racial diversity in gaming so far; so it just comes up more.

[Kalbear]

8 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Oh wow, REALLY? 

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

Seriously? *Seriously?!*

No, not seriously. That's not accurate. 

[Gorn]

5 hours ago, Fez said:

Among the asshole gamers, I think gender is a bigger hangup than race. See just how angry they get at the idea of playing as a woman in time period games, since it "breaks historical realism." 

Although, maybe its more because there's been a bigger push for gender diversity than racial diversity in gaming so far; so it just comes up more.

My favorite were complaints about the presence of frontline female soldiers in Battlefield 5 (set in WWII), made by people apparently unaware that Eastern Front existed.

[Fez]

Well, I've beaten Mass Effect Andromeda. Albeit I probably skipped more than half the content. But I did all the "Allies and Relationships" missions and all the main stories on each planet, in addition to the main quest line, so I think I got a pretty good taste of everything. In the end, I think that's a completely solid 8/10 game. And its one that gets significantly better the deeper into it you go.

The final mission and ending is definitely an area where it seems like they looked at ME3 and took some real lessons learned to heart. The final mission is long, epic, and reflects your major choices from throughout the game. All the allies you made show up to help, both in cutscenes and as actual ally NPCs. It feels like a really good culmination of things. And then, after the ending, there's a fully playable epilogue where you can talk to your crew and a few other people, read a bunch of new emails, and get some DLC hooks that unfortunately never materialized. And then after the epilogue, all the major NPCs throughout the game have at least a few lines to acknowledge what you've done. And there's also at least 3 (maybe more, that's just the number I got) short, non-combat quests providing capstones to some of the emotional arcs of the game. All in all, it was almost 2 hours after I finished the last fight that I actually turned off the game. It was a really good note to end on.

Next up, after I get back from vacation I may turn to Monster Hunter Stories 2. Or possibly Cris Tales. I still need to get back to Scarlet Nexus to finish that up too.

[IlyaP]

On 7/20/2021 at 8:02 PM, kungtotte said:

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.

I don't...wait. I...but..what? That doesn't make any sense. I just...what? Why would...but...

*falls over twitching in confusion at humanity's bewildering antics*

[IlyaP]

16 hours ago, Kaligator said:

No, not seriously. That's not accurate. 

Anyone here able to provide more details around this? 

I would do the research myself, but I legitimately do not have any free time available to do so at all this week. 

[IlyaP]

16 hours ago, Gorn said:

My favorite were complaints about the presence of frontline female soldiers in Battlefield 5 (set in WWII), made by people apparently unaware that Eastern Front existed.

I can't say it any better than Jim Carrey. 
 

 

[RumHam]

Probably time for a new thread, but this new Battlefield editor mode looks awesome:

Maps from the old games, and you can make WWI soldiers fight off robot dogs and fighter jets. 

[Caligula_K3]

Playing Zelda: Skyward Sword HD. This game is so much better now that Fi doesn't show up every five seconds to tell you that keys can unlock doors and to repeat information that another NPC just told you.

I think they did a really nice job touching up the graphics and audio - the game looks so much better than what I remember on the Wii. And the quality of life changes are really, really, really appreciated.

[Ghostlydragon]

1 hour ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Playing Zelda: Skyward Sword HD. This game is so much better now that Fi doesn't show up every five seconds to tell you that keys can unlock doors and to repeat information that another NPC just told you.

I think they did a really nice job touching up the graphics and audio - the game looks so much better than what I remember on the Wii. And the quality of life changes are really, really, really appreciated.

What were they thinking doing that ten years ago?

[Caligula_K3]

1 hour ago, Ghostlydragon said:

What were they thinking doing that ten years ago?

It was Nintendo's Wii era, aka the height of their "let's turn your grandma into a gamer!" strategy. That meant that, even though the Wii had lots of great games, Skyward Sword included, Nintendo massively over-tutorialized their games and treated the player like a very dumb four year old. Thankfully they now seem to remember that gameplay and exploration make games fun.

But it's not all bad. That era also gave us this video, a modern classic:

 

[Werthead]

Paul Ruskay doing his normal sterling soundtrack work for Homeworld 3, so Blackbird/Gearbox decided to share two early tracks from the game, along with a whole bunch of concept art. The game isn't due until October/November 2022, so plenty of time for him to go really to town on it.

 

[A True Kaniggit]

Playing Hearts of Iron IV and one of the most random messages I’ve ever seen just popped up. 29 Jan. 1939. Out of nowhere. 
 

“Mexico declares war on the Netherlands”

Something is very wrong with this timeline. 
 

Edit: Ugh. This timeline is being reset.

[Corvinus85]

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Playing Hearts of Iron IV and one of the most random messages I’ve ever seen just popped up. 29 Jan. 1939. Out of nowhere. 
 

“Mexico declares war on the Netherlands”

Something is very wrong with this timeline. 
 

Edit: Ugh. This timeline is being reset.

Why? I hear Aruba is a nice place, the Mexicans must really want it.

[Werthead]

Finished Dishonored and had as grand a time as the first time around. I planned to play very differently, but obviously that failed and I defaulted to full stealth mode. I also didn't kill a single person in the whole game and was incredibly anal about making sure every body was secured somewhere rats couldn't get at them, and still didn't get the "clean hands" award, somehow. Frustrating.

Now doing the Knife of Dunwall/Bridgmore Witches expansions (which, combined, aren't far off the entire actual original game in size) and remembering why I wasn't keen on playing Daud again. His inability to locate bone charms or runes straight off the bat at the start of every level (he can only sense them in a certain range, unlike Corvo and the Magic Talking Heart of WTF) means I keep forgetting about them, so after 100%ing every single rune and charm in the original game, I keep finding myself missing out on loads of them in the DLC, which given you have less time and opportunity to level up Daud is quite frustrating.

Also, I found out today (!) whilst looking at an old review that you can point the Heart at every person in the game and it'll give you their potted life story (some players use that as a way of deciding if they should live or die), which I was completely unaware of. Sigh.

Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outersider lurking on the horizon.

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outersider lurking on the horizon.

If you thoguht the Daud DLC was frustrating, wait till you get to Death of the Outsider...