Flabyo wrote:If you replaced Batman and his allies with the Section 9 crew, and the Batmobile with a Tachikoma tank, you basically have the perfect Ghost in the Shell game here.
Get it done someone.
Seconded!
Actually, if Rocksteady are leaving Batman behind, give it to them. Not a high profile enough franchise for them, perhaps, but I'd actually like to see a Western developer take on GitS - see if they could embrace the more challenging themes.
I remember thinking something similar after Deus Ex: Human Revolution too.
Attempting to play Planetside 2 on PS4. Downloaded it the day it appeared, server unavailable. Same the next day. Yesterday there was a giant patch, spanning tens of Gb's over several download files. I thought that might fix it. Server available on second attempt. Created a character, joined a 2 minute queue. At the time of writing, that was 15 minutes ago. Apparently one minute left now...
As time is standing still, I'll mention another giant download where time has also stood still. PS+ Drive Club is finally here, and finally downloaded after competing with Planetside for bandwidth overnight. Despite losing all sound effects after one race, I'm mighty impressed by the game play. And the stunning, detailed visuals. Controls really well, the cars I've tried feel very differentiated from each other, and the tracks offer a lot of variety, especially when weather comes into play. I've even won a multiplayer race, which was as surprising as the multiplayer actually working at all. And after closing and restarting, the sound effects returned, and it's even better with engines and bangs and skidding noises! Note to self - next time it happens, do that immediately rather than put up with it for hours.
Back to Planetside 2, I did eventually get into a game, and it's not for me. Drove to an impressively giant battle and shot some stuff, but the graphics tearing and twitchy controls put me off. I'm just not into that kind of thing enough to persevere.
Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition finally arrived! It took a while to get here, since I had to import it to get a physical copy, but I feel like it was worth it. It's excellent.
So far I've gotten about half way through the original Nero and Dante story, and played the first few chapters of Vergil's story. Of course the base game is as great as it's ever been, but it seems revitalised to me somehow. Probably just because I'm more motivated to play it than I have been before. But I've been noticing little things I don't remember seeing or trying before, like secrets in levels, or certain ways to fight a boss. Right now I'm also just going through on the lowest difficulty because I just want to get through the game and see everything, as well as getting all the upgrades I can before going on to the harder modes.
Vergil feels surprisingly intuitive to control. I had an inkling he might be hard to get used to, since I've never played as him before in DMC3, and I always assumed he was supposed to be an advanced character. Looking at footage of how he played, it seemed to look like he played surprisingly similar to how he does in DmC (which I assume is just mostly copied from DMC3 too), but I wasn't so hot on how he felt to play there. I also thought the concentration mechanic might have been hard to get to grips with, but it's not at all. He feels fluid and quick and responsive, and the concentration mechanic creates an interesting and very different pace to the combat compared to Nero and Dante.
So yeah, thumbs up on everything so far. I've yet to try out Lady and Trish, but I think I might leave that until I finish Vergil.
I also noticed something odd about how the game appears to do save files. I haven't been able to investigate this fully, so I'm not totally sure on it. It's really not clear what save file you're loading from, and I was really worried I had accidentally wiped a load of progress today before I realised I hadn't. On the title screen you get a bunch of options that all say "Play as [character]", so you would assume that just selects that character to play as. From what I can tell, each of those are actually more like "Start new game", as when you select it you start from their intro, and your orbs etc. don't carry over from playing as other characters, although I've heard that's supposed to happen. Also if you select one character from the start menu you don't have access to the levels you unlocked playing as other characters if you change to them from the mission menu. So it looks like if I want my experience to carry over from my Nero/Dante game to Vergil I'll need to play those first few levels again on that file. Confusing. Oh, and as far as I can tell, there's no "save" option anywhere in the game either. It's all autosaves, and it does it pretty much any time you do anything. The wonders of the cloud, taking away consumer control. Gotta love it.
I've been playing and completely head over heels for Yoshi's Woolly World. I'm a bit hit and miss on the Kirby and Yoshi series of games but merging the woollen nature of Epic Yarn with Yoshi works a treat.
It controls superbly and has really clever level design. It's up there with the best on Wii U!
Finnaly getting into Massive Chalice I had to restart my first playthrough,guess what playing hard mode with Ironman mode without knowing anything about the game was a bad idea, but now I think I got the hang of things it has all the things I liked about X-COM and all I disliked and Im actually a bit torn on some of the enemies in this game(rupture,cradles) other than that Im kinda upset at the whole research system all goes too slow and you have to get every little thing you cant even adopt a baby without researching for 2 years and to speed up your research you have to use manpower which is scarse,for example I have a gay couple running one of the keeps they cant have children like the straight couples so they have to adopt the problem is that if I want to adopt any children for them I have to wait 2 years to find a kid 2 years where all other research is stopped for each kid!Compare that to the straight couple that breed like rabbits giving me more people to fight and use to speed up research so that's just one example how restricting this system is and not in a good way.
Lately I've had Dante's Inferno on the mind for some reason. It's a game I played before at release but never got on with too well. Never finished it and generally had a bad impression of it. But recently I've been having the urge to give it another go, so that's exactly what I've done.
So far I'm actually liking it. While it's mostly as I remember it, and there are quite a few things about it I'm not so crazy about, generally I think I've been too harsh on the game before. The combat is pretty fun. That said, it doesn't really have much depth to it. There isn't much variety in moves in terms of how you can affect combat, but there's enough there to avoid it getting monotonous. It feels good to control, and it's got a good pace to it between attacking and dodging and the like. The sound design is also pretty good. It's reminiscent of what I liked about the sound design in the first God of War that I felt was missing in the other games. The visual design is impressive too. I really like how they've created this twisted vision of Hell, with all the horrible creatures that would live there. The level of fidelity is obviously a little wanting, but it still manages to pull off what it's going for pretty well, with a nice smooth frame rate to boot. In a way it fits the horrible, grimy setting. Much like Dark Souls, minus the frame rate thing.
Lately I've had Dante's Inferno on the mind for some reason. It's a game I played before at release but never got on with too well. Never finished it and generally had a bad impression of it. But recently I've been having the urge to give it another go, so that's exactly what I've done.
So far I'm actually liking it. While it's mostly as I remember it, and there are quite a few things about it I'm not so crazy about, generally I think I've been too harsh on the game before. The combat is pretty fun. That said, it doesn't really have much depth to it. There isn't much variety in moves in terms of how you can affect combat, but there's enough there to avoid it getting monotonous. It feels good to control, and it's got a good pace to it between attacking and dodging and the like. The sound design is also pretty good. It's reminiscent of what I liked about the sound design in the first God of War that I felt was missing in the other games. The visual design is impressive too. I really like how they've created this twisted vision of Hell, with all the horrible creatures that would live there. The level of fidelity is obviously a little wanting, but it still manages to pull off what it's going for pretty well, with a nice smooth frame rate to boot. In a way it fits the horrible, grimy setting. Much like Dark Souls, minus the frame rate thing.
Played one of the GTA 5 heists in full over the weekend.
wow,
Rockstar really can make some amazing game set-pieces!
There was a lot of very tense moments, along with some phemoninal GTA moments (spending 5 minutes arguing over who should be driving the boat).
I can't believe I've been missing out!
RoboticMonk3y wrote:Rockstar really can make some amazing game set-pieces!
There was a lot of very tense moments, along with some phenomenal GTA moments (spending 5 minutes arguing over who should be driving the boat).
I can't believe I've been missing out!
Yeah, that was a whole bag of fun (I'll hopefully post the video of the boat shenanigans later in the week). My hope is that we'll see more heists added to the game as they really are quite impressive when played with a team on comms.
RoboticMonk3y wrote:Rockstar really can make some amazing game set-pieces!
There was a lot of very tense moments, along with some phenomenal GTA moments (spending 5 minutes arguing over who should be driving the boat).
I can't believe I've been missing out!
Yeah, that was a whole bag of fun (I'll hopefully post the video of the boat shenanigans later in the week). My hope is that we'll see more heists added to the game as they really are quite impressive when played with a team on comms.
I need to get back into GTA V, will do once I've 100% Arkham Knight. I've only done one heist and it was superb.
Just finished episode 3 of Tales from the Borderlands. This has become my second favorite Telltale series after Walking Dead Season 1. There are victories and defeats, the characters have to open themselves up to more than what they know in order to survive. Plus it's just downright funny. I'm playing on PS4 but I would play this again even on my PS3 just for a different take on the experience.
I've managed to get a couple of hours gaming in over the last few days. I returned to The Evil Within, determined to finish it off now. I'm up to Chapter 10, which is roughly two thirds through the game I think. The most recent patch has given you the option to turn off the letterbox giving you full screen visuals, which makes the game a lot more playable I think. It doesn't feel quite so claustrophobic or restricted now, and actually is making the game a lot more enjoyable.
But it does almost nothing we've not played before. At least twice already (three times if you played Origins too). The few new additions don't feel like they fit at all, they seem like they should be in a different game with a different hero. Batman is fear, Batman is the night. Here, Batman is a guy driving an anime style walking battle tank, and also flying across the city like Superman.
It feels like they've taken this series down the same blind alley Ubisoft took Assassin's Creed. They have a formula, and they're afraid to stray very far from it for fear of alienating the audience they've already built.
It feels like Assassin's Creed 3, they said it would be amazingly different from before, but it ended up being the same but with a new vehicle.
Arkham Knight sandwiched my holiday last week. Polished it off last night and I'm as underwhelmed as I was by Arkham City. It's a fine game, but I agree with Glen: I find the new mechanics uninteresting and there seems to be a powerful desire to add to, rather than to change/experiment with the structure and mechanics (much like AC, as Glen said).
The story has similar problems as City did in my eyes. There are some really nice psychological aspects, but these are not taken far enough for my liking.
I'll say no more here, but it's a shame that some promising ideas/themes weren't used more as a basis for the story than window dressing to a fairly standard one.
Bit of Her Story. Quite a bit of Splatoon. Some Threes.
Largely The Swapper on Wii U. Prefer playing it on the pad to the TV oddly?
Normally I'm pretty decent at puzzlers (only got stuck on both Portals about once) but I can't get my head round some of these levels at all. Taken longer to get 30 odd orbs than reviews tell me it takes to complete the game! Had to resort to a guide last night and was ashamed how simple a puzzle had beaten me. Bloody great game and atmosphere though, determined to beat it.
It's quite amazing how often The Swapper left me feeling daft for not having worked out a simple puzzle sooner. That said, many of them feel like you have to fudge the rules, rather than break or comply to them, in order to complete a puzzle.
Portal is a good comparison, as Valve do something similar. In that case, though, I thought it was much clearer when I found a solution that it was intended, whereas in The Swapper it felt like I was often bumbling my way through. Perhaps that's intentional, it certainly put me in the mind of someone (like the protagonist) who was just learning what this device is capable of as I went along.
So I finnaly managed to get my hands on Witcher 3 on PC for a good enough price I have been looking foward for awhile to play this and I gotta say my first impressions...arent very good,no that would be an understatement I actually cant think of the last time I had such an imediate overwhelming negative reaction to a game I was really excited to play like I had with Witcher 3 just now, first off the controls on PC immediatly rubbed me the wrong way I dont know why but I couldnt find key binding that worked for me I tried to make it like the witcher 2 bindings but that's not possible because they added a bunch of stuff for no good reason(Who wanted a jump button!?) so i was forced to switch to a controler because I was getting destroyed so now the game is playble at least,also I really like that I cared for this videogame series since the first game came out in 2007(the broken version full of problems might I add)carried my save file from that year until today only to see that it barely matters,at the start of witcher 2 I got a bunch of itens from my witcher 1 save(balanced for the beginning of that game) and confirmation that my decisions in witcher 1 mattered,but now I witcher 3 not do I start with nothing but I dont even know how I got from the ending of the second game to start of this one! It especially pissed me off when a country I helped save at the end of witcher 2 turned out to not exist anymore at witcher 3! So I went to look for what actually matters from what I did in previous games and it turns out almost nothing especially for the path I took in 2 but hey I didnt actually wanted to feel like my choices mattered anyway right?I mean I can understand why some things wouldnt factor in with a war going in the game and limitations to make the story work and all but c`mon this is just lazy what did they need this whole extra time for? getting the bloody hair physics down or programming a dinnamic beard growth? You know people say that you dont have to play the previous games to enjoy this one but I`d go one step further and say that this game was made with new players in mind because Im totally lost.
I cant begin to tell how bummed I am by this but most of my complains seem to be shackled to the previous games so hopefully once I get more into this game they`ll disappear and I really hope so because so far Witcher`s 2 CG intro is better then anything I played on this new game so far.
I've been playing a bit of hell divers on my vita in between trying to complete (and failing miserably! ) fire emblem awakening. Its a decent twin stick shooter with a heavy undertone of starship troopers, Diving for cover after deploying a turret stratagem never gets old!
So I played a little bit more of the witcher 3 got through the prologue and all and even though Im still pissed that many of my decisions and characters I met in witcher 2 dont deserve even a passing mention I have to admit that the game is pretty great,I got to grips with combat now and it has been pretty fun and challenging unfortunally you got enemy lvls now but I suppose that's there to make the Open World work,speaking of which the open world is probably the best part of the game It reminded me a bit of the open world in Red Dead Redemption but an evolution of that but the best part is how the world feels lived in it perfectly shows the efects of medievil warfare from occuping forces,burned villages,bandits on the roads, etc. Actually I think this might the best game to show war from the point of view of the common people yeah it's a medievil war set on a fantasy world but it rings true but like the riverlands in the Song of Ice and Fire books and in this case I think the Witcher 3 is a better representation of that just for the fact that you can walk through the world and see things at chance most of the time when you're on the way to your objectives much like real life. So yeah that has been by far my favorite part of the game in terms of the open world they knocked it out the park,storywise it's being pretty much what I expected nothing has surprised me yet but I like that they still took enough care to not make the Nilfgaardians the "empire of evil" so yeah Im getting into the game now but I really hope some familiar faces like Dandelion or Zoltan appear soon because I think the game is lacking abit without their presence.
Played and completed Thomas was Alone in preparation for the show we're doing in a few weeks time. My three word review would be (Simple,Charming,profound)
