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

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Professor Bear

Playing the original Elite on a BBC Micro or a ZX Spectrum emulator is a baffling experience for contemporary gamers more used to being walked through tutorials on how to play a game, so kudos to the makers of Elite Dangerous for replicating this experience perfectly on a game coming out on the current generation of consoles.  ED is impenetrable for a variety of reasons ranging from the tiny, tiny onscreen text to the poor gamepad controls (I don't think I've seen compulsory use of yaw/pitch/rotation controls in a flight game for over a decade), but on balance I would have to say its biggest problem is its lack of a decent tutorial, as it took me three hours to get through the second mission for the tutorial this had, and a good chunk of that was spent on Reddit forums reading how people with exactly the same questions and problems I had got around them - again: I had to go online to find out how to finish the game's tutorial.  After overshooting my destination for the umpteenth time (slowing down makes you speed up sometimes, for reasons not explained in-game), things started flashing and when I got out of my seat to put my head less than a foot from the screen so I could actually make out the microscopic update messages, it seemed I was being attacked somehow, but that was it for me and I quit the game, uninstalled the data, and sold the game on Ebay for a fiver, an act that feels less like a monetary transaction and more like passing on a cursed parchment that brings only misery.
A frustrating, joyless slog of a game.

Far Cry: New Dawn, on the other hand, is a hoot.  Instantly accessible and easy to play, you shoot your way through the jerk redneck inhabitants of a valley which by some fluke has managed to survive the bummer ending of Far Cry 5 in what is arguably this century's most accurate adaptation of Z For Zachariah.  It feels most like a stripped-down Fallout game, only with the RPG element disguised as a perk tree.  Good fun, looks fantastic, costs buttons to buy, doesn't outstay its welcome.

shaolin_monkey

Such a shame you didn't get on with Elite Dangerous. I loved it! The only reason I stopped playing it was my partner got absolutely sick of watching me endlessly zipping about the galaxy trying to scan Earth-type planets (lots of cash in stellar cartography, if you know where to look).

She likes watching me play games with some semblance of a story or narrative, and gets quite involved. Elite Dangerous is truly a 'make your own story', with little or no embedded narrative, just like the original. I love shit like that, but it's not a spectator sport.

radiator

QuotePlayed through My Friend Pedro on Switch over the last couple of days (it's probably only about 4hrs long) and had a blast. The controls are maybe a little too fiddly for what it is, meaning one moment you feel like a super invincible gun-kata badass and the next moment you're fumbling about trying to remember how to kick things (or at least that was the experience for me).

I had really been looking forward to My Friend Pedro, but found it quite a let down. It just doesn't quite succeed at what it's trying to do (I totally agree about the controls being a bit fiddly and all over the place) and the game as a whole feels a bit cheap and slightly rough around the edges. It has potential, but sorely lacks polish.

wedgeski

Quote from: shaolin_monkey on 12 August, 2019, 11:09:47 PM
Such a shame you didn't get on with Elite Dangerous. I loved it! The only reason I stopped playing it was my partner got absolutely sick of watching me endlessly zipping about the galaxy trying to scan Earth-type planets (lots of cash in stellar cartography, if you know where to look).

She likes watching me play games with some semblance of a story or narrative, and gets quite involved. Elite Dangerous is truly a 'make your own story', with little or no embedded narrative, just like the original. I love shit like that, but it's not a spectator sport.
I have a similar situation, therefore I could only play E:D when my wife was otherwise engaged. For a few weeks I was hooked, but when I started to get bored of hyperspace, it was all over. I'm the kind of gamer that likes to give his whole attention to the game; if I was the sort of player who was happy with YouTube or Netflix running on the second monitor, I imagine I'd still be playing E:D right now.  I still think it rates as one of the great games of the decade though.

Star Citizen, a game I've been part of since it was first announced, has similar ambitions and if it ever gets finished, it might be the thing that finally breaks me from WoW as my casual time killer. I just hope it doesn't have a similar proportion of dead time, or at the very least, gives us something to do in-game while the ship takes me from A to B.

shaolin_monkey

You're right - E:D is a hell of an achievement, but I totally feel you re jetting about from system to system.  There's a lot of downtime in the game.  And I'm just not good enough with the old pew-pew to make it as a bounty hunter.

That was probably the last game I dedicated a significant amount of time to.  Prior to that it was Horizons: New Dawn, which I absolutely adored - played it to completion, a rare feat for me.

Even RDR hasn't grabbed me like it has others.

Anyway, No Man's Sky has had a lot of tasty updates, and playing an hour here and there is fun - plus it is getting a MASSIVE update tomorrow - INCLUDING PSVR SUPPORT!!!  Oh yeah baby!!!

Keef Monkey

Don't generally play mobile games but just had a fun dabble with Gears Pop, good simple hooky gameplay.

GrudgeJohnDeed

I'd forgotten about that, should give it a go! I'm looking forward to the Gears Tactics game too, if it's Gears Xcom that sounds great.

Keef Monkey

Yeah the cover shooting seems so well suited to the XCOM style that if they do Tactics right I reckon it could be excellent.

Keef Monkey

Had an empty flat at the weekend so decided to batter through Man of Medan in a oner and really enjoyed it. The style and mechanics are very much like Until Dawn so if you like that you'll probably like this basically.

Almost got everyone out alive but got a character killed right near the end so was gutted! I think one of the things that grips me about these games is how any character can die at various points and the story will account for it and branch off, it means if I'm at all attached to a character there's a real sweaty palmed tension to it for me.

Took me around 5hrs-ish but I think playtimes will vary depending on how fast you mess things up! There's scope for replay which is nice, with the branching story and also a co-op mode that sounds quite elaborate and mental and doing it local or online seems to offer two really different multiplayer experiences which is interesting.

Part of a new horror anthology series and there's a trailer for the next installment included which looks like it's going a bit Wicker Man/Midsommar/Thistlebone which should be fun.

GordyM

Control. Overall I really enjoyed it but a lot of that is due to the story, atmosphere, style, world building etc. The gameplay mechanics on their own are a bit wonky at times but its worth it to immerse yourself in the game's world. You go from being a wee bit annoyed at the cover system to stopping to turn on a TV and being Creeped The F*** Out as two child puppets weep about their dead parents and then turn to look at you.
Check out my new comic Supermom: Expecting Trouble and see how a pregnant superhero tries to deal with the fact that the baby's father is her archnemesis. Free preview pack including 12 pages of art: http://www.mediafire.com/file/57986rnlgk0itfz/Supermom_Preview_Pack.pdf/file

Tiplodocus

ADVANCE WARS 2 on my Batman DS Lite has me addicted all over again.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

shaolin_monkey

Quote from: Tiplodocus on 11 September, 2019, 09:29:34 AM
ADVANCE WARS 2 on my Batman DS Lite has me addicted all over again.

I just sold a copy of that on eBay!

Keef Monkey

Beat Gears 5 at the weekend and loved it. I've always been a bit of a Gears nerd anyway so results may vary, but I found it to be probably the best campaign they've done and the refinements and larger changes to the flow and structure worked brilliantly. Also in 4K on the 1X it's very probably the best looking game I've ever seen, it's gorgeous.

My one complaint is some of the fights were pretty long and there weren't any mid-battle checkpoints, so dying late into a particularly tough fight could be a bit frustrating when you realized you were back to the start of it again. That said I've always relished the challenge of Gears on the higher difficulties and it's one of the few series I always go with Hard on a first play so I guess I got what I asked for! There is one boss fight that's truly rotten though, very long and tedious and with some cheap late-fight attacks that one-shot you. I swore at that a great deal, and my little brother just texted me to say he's having the same experience with it. It's a nasty hump to get over.

The multiplayer is also fantastically tight, we're having an absolute blast with the versus modes, and I very rarely get into that stuff in games. Gears has always been a bit of an exception for some reason (slightly slower pace than some twitchier shooters and a focus on co-operation make it way more engrossing for me than most multiplayer stuff).

Link Prime

Quote from: Keef Monkey on 02 September, 2019, 02:37:11 PM
Had an empty flat at the weekend so decided to batter through Man of Medan in a oner and really enjoyed it. The style and mechanics are very much like Until Dawn so if you like that you'll probably like this basically.


Sounds right up my street, Until Dawn was great to play as a couple, been looking for something similar.
It's pretty cheap on Amazon already, I guess due to the short playtime.

Keef Monkey

Yeah I haven't tried the couch co-op yet but have been playing it online with a friend (his first playthrough) and even that has been really interesting because things really aren't going the same way they did when I was playing solo! We're playing with no voice chat (for the online mode it seems like that would just get in the way because you're often separated and having different conversations and scenes etc.) so it's fun to catch up afterwards on what we each saw. The couch mode sounds great too and perfect couple gaming, looking forward to trying that.

Finished the Blair Witch game last night and while overall I enjoyed it and was pretty gripped, it didn't blow me away the way I'd hoped. Blair Witch stuff always scares the hell out of me so I expected it to really get under my skin, it did in places but I thought there was possibly too much narrative in there getting in the way of the chills. It felt like it was written very much like Bloober's other Layers of Fear series, and while I like it in those games it sort of made this feel a bit like a LoF game dressed up in some Blair Witch trappings at times.

Still spooked me good sometimes though, the scary Rustin Parr house from the movies obviously features and wandering round it reminded me of the last level of Condemned (one of my favourite horror levels of all time!), I liked that the mechanics and lore seemed to take on board what was added in the most recent sequel (which I liked a fair bit) and there's also one recurring mechanic that reminded me of one of my favourite parts of the fantastic [REC]2 (a movie I think any fan of found footage scares should watch because the first is a masterpiece and the second is a rare horror sequel that actually ups the ante with the scares intact).

Overall a decent horror game, but maybe not the classic I'd been hoping for.