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Started by Keef Monkey, 11 June, 2011, 09:35:35 AM

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Keef Monkey

If anyone drifted away from The Walking Dead games, the 4 episode Final Season just wrapped up and it's easily been the best it's ever been. Really, really good, and a shame that so much awful industry news surrounded it because it really redeems the series after what I found a pretty dull few seasons. This stands alongside the first season as a really cool thing and does it all justice in some very touching ways. 

GrudgeJohnDeed

Yeah I only played the first series of TWD, I liked the story but I kind of lost interest in telltale games in general shortly after, hearing along the way that the rest of the TWD was a step down didn't help.  Nice to hear it ends on a high though!

Keef Monkey

Yeah, I'd definitely recommend jumping back in, even if it's just for the last season. There's obviously returning characters and things that carry forward, but not as much as you might imagine so should be easy to get back into!

Just finished Mirror's Edge Catalyst (the sequel) and have the same sort of feelings about it as I did the first game. The fundamentals are so solid and fantastic that it's baffling that they haven't managed to spin that into a decent game yet. The flow of running is the joy of it, but the design seems to constantly want to undermine that by adding truly terrible forced combat arena sections and using the environment to disrupt that flow and stop the good times in their tracks.

It's frustrating, because I really want to love them, but every time I start to it's like they sabotage themselves to stop that happening. Most of the negative feedback about the first game was down to there being combat, and instead of learning from that they've doubled down on it and thrown in a ton of it. It's mad.

If it was just plain bad I probably would have packed it in and moved onto something else, but I really wanted them to make good on that solid gold core they have! Maybe one day they'll make one that does it justice.

MacabreMagpie

Clementine is easily my favourite character across TWD universe. I hope she never turns up on the show.

Looking forward to diving into the last season, I've been waiting for it all to be done so I can binge.

Definitely Not Mister Pops

There's a Rebellion sale on Steam at the minute. I just got Dredd V Death for less than £2 and Rogue Trooper for a fiver
You may quote me on that.

Keef Monkey

Quote from: Mister Pops on 11 April, 2019, 11:13:06 PM
There's a Rebellion sale on Steam at the minute. I just got Dredd V Death for less than £2 and Rogue Trooper for a fiver

Eyeing up the first Sniper Elite, it's under £2 and the only one I haven't played!

Theblazeuk

I'm playing Resident Evil 7, with my shiny new graphics card. In the dark, with my headphones up.

The guinea pigs rustling around in the corner of my office are probably the most frightening part of the game. Or when the dog comes in to see where I am...

Anyway. Lovely game, closest thing to Alien Isolation I've ever played.

Professor Bear

On a retro rampage checking out old games to make sure they work okay before flogging them and the ones that jump out - for reasons good or bad - are
Medal Of Honor: Rising Sun - a lot of effort went into a game that plays like an absolute pig.  Some really exciting setpieces like the Pearl Harbour sequence are wasted on a PS1-level shooter with disastrous control lagging.
SEGA and Sonic All Star Racing - it adds a drift mechanic, but it's otherwise just Mario Kart with characters that don't suck ass.  Really fun and enjoyable and then the Super Monkey Ball levels happen and ruin everything.
Wet - third person jumpy-shooter featuring a "dil-ibb-urr-at-lee" oversexualised main character based on actor Eliza Douchebag.  Was thinking "okay this might at least pass the time for an hour or two" but then walked off a ledge accidentally and died and the restart was way the hell back near the start of the level and I literally could not face playing through it again, and this was like level 2 or something.  Basically if Lollipop Chainsaw or Bayonetta were dreadful, they would be this game.
Aliens: Colonial Marines - holy fuck this is terrible.  I thought maybe people had just overreacted to it back in the day because the game mechanics weren't up there with online multiplayer shooters in terms of ease of play, but this is actually aggressively bad, buggy, and frustrating to the point that some of it is genuinely baffling why it was designed the way it was.
Aliens Vs Predator - I had an old save on the PS3 HDD so just picked up where I left off with no issues.  Despite the prominence of the melee mechanic in the control layout and the ability to turn a flashlight on or off instead of being able to crouch, this was easy to play and get into even without a tutorial walkthrough, which is just amazing considering that it's three years older than Colonial Marines and came out during the early days of this generation of consoles.  It's so easy to play that it actually works against it a little, as I breezed through the marine campaign in less than an hour, but it has this weird thing I don't recall in an Aliens game and which I can't quite put my finger on... I think it's... yes, I think I've heard of this, it's called "enjoyment".
Rayman: Origins - God I hate 2d platformers, but as 2d platformers go, this is actually alright.  Well-designed levels reward second playthroughs, and the graphics are really nice.
Rumble Roses - Western wrestling games like the Smackdown/Raw branded WWE series featured "bra and panty" matches where the aim was to forcefully strip your opponent and clearly someone in Japan thought they could get a slice of that female exploitation action, and yet this game - built explicitly around buxom Amazon bikers mud-wrestling with cheerleaders - is still nowhere near as troubling or sleazy as the family-friendly WWE games, featuring as it does plenty of eye-candy female characters, but nothing that is as genuinely misogynistic as the WWE games' spanking matches - yes they actually had a game where you had to spank women.  It has a simplistic fight mechanic where you can work your way through the ludicrous soap operatics of the main storylines by pounding only two buttons, which sounds like it isn't very involving or complicated - it isn't - but it is fun and lacking in the frustrations typical of the increasingly-convoluted control schemes of American wrestling games.  Younger relatives lapped this one up, and it's a shame it never got a re-release on a contemporary console.

Keef Monkey

Played through the original Sonic The Hedgehog over the weekend and bloody hell I've lost the skills for that! Think I have less trouble with Sekiro.

Thankfully the Xbox version has save states so managed to persevere, not sure how we ever got through that stuff back in the day getting papped back to the start of the game when that last life is lost! Always hits me when I go back to Sonic how few of the levels are actually geared towards speed, there are so many slow finicky platforming bits.

radiator

Baba is You

Game is Good

Brain is Melt

Keef Monkey

Really want to try that, looks like a proper brain buster though.

Been working through some stuff on the half-finished pile, so over the Easter break finished off these -

Battlefield V - I'm not a big Battlefield guy (this was a freebie or I wouldn't have bothered) but this definitely felt like the weakest campaign I've played in one, and pretty buggy to boot. Highlight was the snowy skiing chapter.

Metro Exodus - I love the Metro games, but they're pretty rough diamonds and this is definitely that too. Swung back and forth between loving it and really strongly disliking it at times (like when it saves you with no health, no medpacks and no ammo and then expects you to do something very fiddly and annoying - looking at you Weird Sewer Snake Things). For all the open world elements I think I liked it most when it went back to linear basics and sent you down some atmospheric tunnels. It really won me over by the end though, the last chunk is fantastic. Reckon I'll enjoy it more on a replay, as has been the case with 2033 and Last Light.

Also played the latest couple of DLC's for Shadow of The Tomb Raider which had some fun well-designed tombs, and the Spider-Man DLC episodes which I found to be a bit too much of that game for me. Loved the campaign, but by the end of these I'd really gone off fighting guys and just found it pretty tiresome sadly.

My favourite bit of gaming over the Easter weekend though was finally beating Lady Butterfly in Sekiro, without her even managing to summon her ghostie friends - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDyz07XUNwk&t=2s

Was incredibly thrilling to finally nail it, and I put the pad down at 4am shaking and feeling a little unwell because I'd been so tense. Was so relieved because I'd hit that point where I really don't think I would have quit and gone to bed until it was done! It's an amazing game, but very intensely tough like that, and I'm now fighting a flaming bull which feels a lot less fair than everything up to that point - for the first time I feel like it's the camera and controls that are killing me rather than my reflexes, so will see if this is the boss that finally breaks me.

JamesC

Axiom Verge.
I'm loving this. It plays something like a more casual version of Super Metroid. I'm only about 20% into the game though, so it may get more challenging as it goes along.

Burnout Paradise Remastered.
Is good fun. It does the open-world-racer thing more successfuly than any other game I've played but, having said that, I far prefer a racer with a distinct, well designed track or route (I want to race, not navigate).
I'd love another arcade racer like 2012's Hot Pursuit but no one seems to want to make one.

GrudgeJohnDeed

I played through Darksiders 3 and Crackdown 3 recently, two fantastic and confoundingly underrated games.

Darksiders 3 adopts some concepts popularised with the Souls games, bonfires and levelling and general toughness, whilst very much keeping its own identity to become my favourite in the series. The level design is great, the puzzles to solve and powers needed to explore are fun and well integrated into the character, combat is methodical and satisfying, and it all looks and sounds fantastic. I still think about the 20-second melancholy leitmotif that could make Fury picking her nose seem epic. Its problems are a basic story (it was already a daft soap opera) and the very occasional rough edge technically, both down to budget I bet, but it's water off a duck's back when the game is so good. They put the money where it was needed.

Crackdown 3 is Crackdown 1 turned up to 11, but CD1 for my money was a very good game. More powers, more scale, more guns, more destruction, more intensity, as a fan I couldn't really ask for more. Hunting orbs is still fun and as addictive as crack, and the progression as you leap higher, hit harder, dash further and ultimately own the city is extremely satisfying. The crazy physics are back as well as you drive up the sides of buildings and punch enemies 300 feet out to sea, and they had me and my co-op partner laughing like drains all the way through. I also think it looks jaw-dropping!! It has that chunky, stylised look that I guess some people don't like, but it in no way looks rough up close and it helps them achieve the crazy scale and draw distance you see, all dripping in dazzling lights and building-sized holograms. Even the atmospheric effects like the fog hanging around coastal areas have a neon glow to them. Maybe Rebellion could partner with Sumo to help them make MC1 if they ever do! For me this was all down-sampled to non-HDR 1080p too. I can only imagine what it looks like on a top of the range 4k HDR OLED.

I played through a couple of SNES games too, R-Type III and Operation Logic Bomb: The Ultimate Search & Destroy (as my friend said, a hell of a name :D).

R-Type III was great! I'm not much of a shmup guy but I resolved to make myself play through some of the big guns, and I'm glad I started. Tough as old boots like! It's only 6 levels but it kicked my arse for a couple of hours a night for at least week before I finally fired my force orb thing rearwards into the Bydo mastermind's gob, sending him back through his portal whence he came. There's more depth than I realised to the combat, with you being able to detach the force orb and have it move freely but still shoot on your behalf, along with different weapon types and ship types and more. I never really mastered it, I won't be attempting the advanced mode you unlock when you beat it, but it was unadulterated oldschool fun and I was suprised how much I got into the soundtrack. I found it quite strange - theres some chilled, funky licks as you race to save the last of humanity from space-faring genetic horrors, but I love that when the music pulls in its own direction and add a new dimension (no pun intended).

Operation Logic Bomb is good, its a top-down shooter a la Chaos Engine with some really cool gadgets and weapons to use and other neat touches. Theres a ricochet weapon that lets you shoot enemies round corners (it'd be a must in a Dredd top-down shooter, was it in DvsZ?), directional claymore mines and a hologram of yourself that attracts attention. It's also not that hard at all, I like a challenge of course but I also like a game that has been balanced to make sure you're often progressing without being toooo easy and its always a pleasant surprise to find in games of this vintage! Outside of the awesome intro and underwhelming Castlevania-style outro, the story is told in CCTV footage you find, which is also a cool touch for an old game! We're still doing this today in games like Dead Space, it works great. Theres no dialogue here really, the vids are like little plays as we see the inter-dimensional enemies invade the base and interfere with the technology and kill and harvest the humans and androids. In one scene you see some androids fight the boss you will soon fight yourself and you see its weakspot and which weapons he is weak to, clever. All in all well worth a punt but you will fire through it fast!

Keef Monkey

Absolutely agree on Crackdown 3, had a great time with that game! I do think they over-promised early on with the cloud destruction tech demos, and it meant when it came out people maybe just couldn't get past that it wasn't the revolutionary thing it was once touted as. Instead it's just a very good Crackdown game and that was good enough for me.

Also your mention of Chaos Engine has me wanting to dig out my Armiga emulator and give that a run now!

GrudgeJohnDeed

Quote from: Keef Monkey on 24 April, 2019, 10:05:32 AM
Absolutely agree on Crackdown 3, had a great time with that game! I do think they over-promised early on with the cloud destruction tech demos, and it meant when it came out people maybe just couldn't get past that it wasn't the revolutionary thing it was once touted as. Instead it's just a very good Crackdown game and that was good enough for me.

Also your mention of Chaos Engine has me wanting to dig out my Armiga emulator and give that a run now!

It's top isn't it. Yeah you could be right there, such a shame as they're cheating themselves out of enjoying a great game nonetheless. I do remember when the cloud destruction feature was first shown off and feeling that it'd be absolutely awesome if it was in the campaign, I love destruction like in Bad Company etc and there's not enough of it in games. But ever since they said it was multiplayer-only (must be years ago now) that aspect of the game has been off my radar really and I was just looking forward to a next-gen Crackdown game. They also pretty much separated the two modes into individual games, campaign and multiplayer having their own downloads and achievement lists, I bet they were trying to get the campaign clear of the multiplayer stink-bomb.


I second that, dig out the Amiga emulator! Speaking of Bitmap Brothers I fired up Gods on SNES for a little bit the other day, yikes that game is hard. Stuff just flies at you at 100 mph, it's often not clear how to avoid it :D