Video Games Megathread Number A Billion

[Inigima]

Is it worth playing today?

Nope, absolutely not.

[The Anti-Targ]

Oh yeah, forgot to say, there's going to be a sequel-oid to Demons's Souls (Same studio, same vibe/style, difference universe) and it'll be on both PS3 and 360. http://www.next-gen.biz/news/from-software-announces-project-dark

The cheery working title at the moment is Project Dark. There's a wee teaser video floating around the web somewhere.

Looking forward to the Ico + Shadow of the Colossus HD re-release, 2 games on one Blu-ray disc, soon. Gonna get the Sly collection (Sly 1, 2 and 3) all one one disc when it comes out too. The games totally passd me by when I had a PS2, but I hear they are up there with Ratchet & Clank / Jak and Daxter as among the best adventure platformers on the PS2.

[Alcibiades]

Woh. Gog has Descent 3 and it's expansion for 6 dollars. I'm going to bite on this. It'll be my first GOG purchase!

[Werthead]

You never saw any complaints about the difficulty of the mutants, Wert? I don't know if I believe that.

I saw plenty, I just never got them. They were annoying, but not game-breakingly so.

After dropping £30 on a game I usually don't give up playing it until it's done, certainly not when it starts getting a little bit tough.

I also thought Crysis was better, in many ways. The game was able to be completed, for one. The character, ie, the armor, was definitely memorable. Wert was right - it was a bit on rails.

The aliens, again, sucked. Crytek needs to figure out how to make their aliens/mutants less stupid, less difficult, and more fun. There's a reason why so many people played Halo - the enemies were aliens you remembered. Chrysis aliens... jesus Christ. Hopefully they figure it out for Crsysis 2.

The Covenant were not a very interesting enemy (the traditional response to which is, "They're better in the sequels!" and "They have a really cool culture as defined in the books!", neither of which really cuts it) in Halo 1. The Flood made me want to kill the person who created them at Bungie (not literally). Tons of people played Halo as it was the first FPS (or the first since GoldenEye) which really worked on console.

Different routes to take don't really mean much to me. I mean, ultimately, your going to the same place anyways. Far Cry 2 had a huge number of variables to take in, but it all amounted to next to nothing.

However, they do add to replayability. FEAR has no real reason to be replayed aside from the late-game plot revelations that turn everything on their head, making a second play-through in full knowledge of the plot interesting. Beyond that, not so much. I've completed FC1 six times and haven't done most of the levels the same way. FC2 destroys that by being mentally retarded: having to fight a bunch of bandits to get to the mission objective, then having to come back and fight the exact same bandits five minutes later because they've mysteriously come back from the dead.

I just do not understand your love for Far Cry, Wert. I suppose, just as you don't understand my love of FEAR. While the levels were a straight shot, you tout HL2, which was not much better in terms of level dynamics.

HL2 is definitely very much on rails and more artificially so than HL1, where the closed environments in an underground base made sense. HL2 didn't, as you were on streets, in the countryside and in public buildings for much of the game, so only having one way to go was odd. It did mean, however, that Valve could play to their strengths, such as crafting fine action set-pieces and creating compelling secondary characters, most importantly Alyx, the only FPS NPC ally I've never wanted to insta-gib with a rocket launcher.

As for those that hold up Bioshock as the leader, i could never get over the cartoonish aspects of the characters. Sure, it was a game that was dark as hell, but there was something wrong with it. Maybe it was the use of a tommy gun. I have no love for gangster style movies or weapons of that sort.

I never really got BioShock either. Way too easy, too repetitive and way too many regenerating enemies. That said, Mafia (not a FPS) had excellent combat in a gangster setting.

I'd also like to add, vehicles are often tacked on and useless in many of these games. HL2's vehicles were horrors, and Far Cry did little to make them actually feel real.

I agree, although FC's vehicles are actually useful in that some of the levels are so utterly vast that they are needed to complete them in less than several hours of hard hiking.

[Muttering Bill]

Here's an explanation of fishing I got from another forum:

The fishing is pretty badly explained but to finish the game you only have to fish the one time so don't let it ruin the game for you. Nier is a really interesting game, but I highly recommend skipping most of the side stuff. It's not necessary and while there are a few interesting sidequests, most is just fetch quests and gardening. The storyline stuff is great and quite varied, taking on genres such as action RPG, bullet hell shmup, isometric dungeon crawler, survival horror, dual joystick shooter and even text adventure. If you do finish the game, definitely play a new game + as there is a lot of added cutscenes and a different ending.

Long story short, Nier is the best and most underappreciated JRPG of the last few years and needs more love.

Werthead, as far as interesting FPS games on the horizon, Bulletstorm is a super over the top score based FPS from the makers of Painkiller that comes out in Feburary.

Thanks for the guide. It seems that I was fishing at the wrong beach. Dirty trick, telling me to go to the beach, but not the one that I'm standing right next to. And I have to press the stick downward...I was swing it all over trying to find the right way of it, but the "fish" would get away almost immediately. Come to think of it, the two times I caught something, I was holding downward. Ok.

Yeah, it seems like a pretty good game so far (except for the fishing). I'll likely finish it at least once. But now that I've got AC: Brotherhood, the only online game that I ever really enjoyed, there's going to be little time for other games. At least until I finish everything - but there is a lot to do. :)

[Arthmail]

You know the worst game for vehicles, although i'm pretty sure it was on online multiplayer only, was Joint Operations. I'm not sure which game we had, but some of those maps were retarded. The buzz was strong that the maps were huge and engaging, but that was not what i experienced.

I mean sure, the maps were big. And i did end up playing it for at least a couple of months. But man, you HAD to have a vehicle to get anywhere. And the helicopters were finicky, and the boats too big. There was an APC that could move across water, but its movement was slower than swimming. The best vehicle was the inflatible raft. Small, quick, and hard to spot.

Still, my buddy and i spent more time in transit than we did fucking shooting things. There was this one map, with islands, that took absolutely forever to travel across. So we choose one island, a smaller one, and waited there in ambush for anyone looking to come on. The island meant nothing, but we held it as a small kingdom, so we blasted the shit out of anyone coming onto the island. APCs, men, we'd usually kill eight or ten guys from ambush before we'd run critically low on ammo and get wiped out.

Then it was back to the dingy.

Wert, what would you rate as the worst FPS?

[WhiteHaven]

Prototype is pretty good actually. Only thing is the occasional difficulty spike. There are loads of side missions etc so you could play the game for quite some time. But I eventually got sick of them. Expect at least 20 hours gameplay.

I preferred Just Cause 2. Similar kind of game, but with much more terrain variety.

Okay. Thanks for the information. Just Cause 2 is somewhere here in my room - but I wanted to kick some zombie-ass first ;).

Pity that there isn't going to be a sequel.

[Arthmail]

I have to agree. Calling out Halo for having uninteresting enemies is odd. They were memorable. The grunts were amusing, the Hunters, when you first saw them, were a real bother. I think the entire game sold so solidly because they felt believable. And while initially the Flood did seem to detract from the game, they did add a certain flavour to the entire proceedings.

And they did get better in subseqent games, and books. Why? Because they were memorable. People enjoyed playing against them. The Halo universe expanded as it did because of elements like the Covenant. To say they were uninteresting is just plain bizarre. And any number of games that have been produced over the years, IF they get a sequal, usually expand on what could not be expanded upon in the first games.

Until you arrive with Halo:Reach, easily my favorite console FPS, and my second favorite FPS of all time. Third if Left4Dead bumps out Fear.

[Arthmail]

I won't lie, the flood was awful. Space zombies from hell that pop wasn't very interesting.

I think that what Halo got right was the art and aesthetics of the aliens: you had the Halo architecture itself, the Covenant was very colorful and their weapons easy to identify, and the humans soldiers looked like human soldiers.

But within the framework of the story, the reason for the Halo rings themselves, they made a great deal of sense. And shotgunning a combat form felt so damned solid.

[Arthmail]

Halo 3's flamethrower was even better!

But I won't lie, I was happy they weren't in Reach.

They did make Reach that much better. Besides, i've always LOVED killing covies, i mean fucking love.

[Merentha]

edit: nvm

[Werthead]

Wert, what would you rate as the worst FPS?

There's been a ton over the years. There was Unreal 2 and Pariah, which both just sucked. Far Cry 2 is pretty bad. There were a bunch of horrible Doom-clones back in the day.

But, once you've gone through those, there is only one possible choice:

IT BURNS!!!

[Jon AS]

DOW2 is really reminding me why RTS games tend to be the exception to my rule of playing games on the highest difficulty available. Man this is a slog. So I've got three fixed missions left: the final one, the Eldar Avatar (btw, who thought that an entire level filled with Fire Prisms followed by a boss who can one-shot almost everything, has insane hitpoints, summons ridiculously powerful reserves and can see infiltrated units was a good idea?!) and one other. On top of that various missions with a timer keep popping up, so I'd like to know: do these ever run out? Or is their only purpose to potentially deprive me of the advantages of Communication Arrays and Temples?

[Alcibiades]

Descent 3 had some really bad texture/color problems when I ran it on XP. Just beware that you might need to do some serious tweaking.

It was kind of a pain to get working. But, now its up and running and looking pretty good. To run it in widescreen at my native resolution, I had to be willing to accept a little bit of cropping. But that's ok for a 1999 game. I'm using my nvidia drivers to force a bit of extra filtering and AA to clean up the visuals a bit.

[Arthmail]

There's been a ton over the years. There was Unreal 2 and Pariah, which both just sucked. Far Cry 2 is pretty bad. There were a bunch of horrible Doom-clones back in the day.

But, once you've gone through those, there is only one possible choice:

IT BURNS!!!

The backlash against that game was so bad i never even bothered to play. I didn't find Pariah THAT bad, but it seemed like half a game for sure. I would have to vote Farcry 2 as the worst FPS ever. I mean, those checkpoints...so much potential lost. And there was simply NO way to avoid them without going miles and fucking miles out of your way.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

Or is their only purpose to potentially deprive me of the advantages of Communication Arrays and Temples?

Well, that and to be farmable.

[Jon AS]

Well, that and to be farmable.

I pick up about half a dozen "Master Crafted X" items with every mission, I think the unique items have long since been exhausted. So having beaten back the filthy Eldar xenos yesterday (Tarkus in Terminator armour with upgraded Tactical Advance did the trick in the end, but boy did it take a long time...) I just got the Last Stand left.

And then it's off to the expansion campaign!

[Cuchulain]

I won't lie, the flood was awful. Space zombies from hell that pop wasn't very interesting.

The flood always bothered me gameplay wise. Sometimes you could take one down in a single hit, while at other times (with the same weapon on the same type of flood enemy) they could take an inordinate amount of abuse. It felt very uneven. I often got the impression the game randomly failed to register hits on the flood enemies.

[Cuchulain]

Cuchulain,

Halo 3 had this the worst, I think. The big ones never seemed to die.

Yeah. For this reason, the penultimate mission (the one inside the infected spaceship/city) was a real pain in the ass.

[Stone-Made-Soft]

All Halo missions with The Flood are a real pain in the ass, especially when you only have Covenant weapons, which only damage The Flood slightly more than NERF guns.