I think we can all praise Bioware for abandoning the old, simplistic models of character interaction in Baldur's Gate II and so on, and instead representing the intricate and complicated relationship between your character and the NPCs by an integer number.
I like Dragon Age a great deal. It's one of the best games they've ever made. I adore Morrigan (she's a wonderful insufferable bitch, and you can basically recover any loss of rep with her by bringing her shinies).
It's also got a terribly clunky engine, some....curious...combat mechanics.... and I really don't like the way it encourages you to swap party members in and out for relationship purposes.
Looking forward to seeing how the story ends.
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
Looks like Crispy Gamer, my review site of choice, agrees with Megatron about AC II being a better game than DA: O, but also agrees with me about Arkham Asylum being a better game than AC II. I think that means the universe is going to explode or something.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Tons of iPhone stuff, lately. I can get 5-10 iPhone games for the price of one DS game, more like 20 for the price of a PC game. Some of them are pretty cool.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
There weren't that many, but I do take your point.
Oh, there absolutely were. That place was 4 or 5 stories tall and had at least 5-8 rooms on each floor, all but maybe one or two with the same encounter. I might have even been a bit generous.
As for the relationship stuff, I do think the idea was decent, but the execution could have been a lot better. I'm also just flat out disappointed with the writing, and the fact that so many of the choices are "be supportive" or "be an absolute cock" with little to no middle ground. In just the short time I've spent on it, I'd say at least half of the interactions didn't have an option I was actually satisfied with, so I had to go with something that just didn't really fit how I wanted to play the game.
I know they can't do everything, but, like I said before, I think my expectations were just too high, and the hype certainly didn't help.
Oh, and regarding Arkham Asylum, I tend to avoid movie/comic license games like the plague, but the more I read, the more I'm starting to think I should give it a try.
__________________ Father Helel, save us from the dark.
Don't let that stop you. It's plenty fun as a single player game, enough to justify getting it, imo.
I'm thinking about it, but I'm honestly getting tired of Nintendo's constant underachieving. I understand the Wii is an inferior console, but it seems like they're not really trying, except when it comes to gimmicky bullshit with the controller.
For example, I heard that you have to wiggle the controller to pick up power-ups in this game, which is rather stupid. They put in the effort to shoehorn in some sort of controller motion gimmick, but they couldn't make the game playable online, thus limiting multiplayer only to people who want to fork out a buttload of cash for extra remotes? Fuck you, Nintendo. Seriously.
...and this is coming from someone who was 100% "GO WII" only two years ago.
__________________ Father Helel, save us from the dark.
Oh, and regarding Arkham Asylum, I tend to avoid movie/comic license games like the plague, but the more I read, the more I'm starting to think I should give it a try.
You should. Superhero games pretty uniformly suck, but this is one of the few that gets it right. I think the fact that they weren't forced to tie the game into the plot of a particular movie helped a lot. The one and only bad thing I have to say about that game is that the boss fights get pretty repetitive, thanks to overusing a particular gimmick, but the rest of the game is a thing of beauty. You know how awesome it is to make Ezio dive off a roof and impale some poor sap with his hidden blade? Making Batman swoop down off of his perch and string some thug up is even better.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
I'm playing Saints Row. It's basically Grand Theft Auto, I guess. I haven't played much of any GTA game other than IV, so I can only compare it to that. It's not as dark/dramatic nor as technically polished, but it has some cool features that I would miss if I went back to playing GTA. The ability to recruit homies from your gang on the fly (by pressing a button when near them) comes in handy, and the ability to create custom playlists out of any song in the game, and have it play in and out of cars, is a welcome feature. That said, the music selection isn't quite up to the GTA IV standard, but there are a bunch of songs I like. I really like the fact that I can save cars in a garage, which I know was in previous GTAs, but I'm not sure if it works exactly the same. If a car from your garage gets destroyed or lost, it will still be available to you after you pay to have it fixed. And you can customize cars extensively with rims, spoilers, exhaust, roof and hood variants, and other things.
There are tons of minigames to complete, I think over 200 levels of various types. Besides the obvious racing, car collecting, hitman targets, etc. The more interesting ones are Snatch, where you must steal prostitutes from a rival pimp; Escort, where you're hired to drive a hooker around while she services well-known clients in the back. You need to evade the paparazzi and fulfill any requests the client may have, such as catching some airtime or whatever. There are 10 types of games in total, plus some collectibles. Besides all these activities, there are 3 gangs to slowly but surely wipe off the map by completing the main storyline(s).
The game is pretty fun if you like sandbox games, but can be obnoxiously difficult in a few places. Right now I'm stuck on the final mission for the one gang, where you need to chase down a guy driving a semi pulling a trailer full of cars. You must shoot the cars until they explode to cause enough damage to detach the rig, and then shoot the cab itself to kill the driver. All the while, the bastard is throwing pipe bombs at you, you're dodging the other traffic (running into a big rig does massive damage), and trying to fend off endless pursuit from the other gang cars. And they're all magically keeping up with you despite your car being much, much faster than the garbage they're driving. Believe me, the whole thing's complete bullshit.
The controls are not very well thought out which makes shooting from a car more difficult than it has to be. In GTA IV the gun was mapped to LB on the Xbox 360, with RT driving. Granted, it was a little tough to steer and shoot but that's how it should be, right? In Saints Row, the default scheme is to accelerate with the A button and shoot with the right trigger. Now let me tell you, you need to use the right analog stick at all times because the camera cannot be trusted. So using the A button while driving at any speed is out of the question. Luckily you can switch to a different scheme which uses A to shoot and RT to drive, but this just means you can't shoot. The bumpers perform the completely useless function of turning the camera 90 degrees while you hold them; not once did this ever come in handy. The homie system mostly takes care of this problem since they will fire at any enemies, but there are situations where you don't have any or you just need to drive and shoot, and the controls make it more frustrating than it should be.
Other than that, the game can be a little on the glitchy side. Thankfully I haven't run into anything catastrophic yet but my game has frozen once. I've heard horror stories about the road or your car disappearing, causing death (and the problem cropping up often enough that the save file was not possible to finish, like every time during a mission, or something); I've seen both glitches but they seemed to be entirely cosmetic for me.
I have the prequels City Life and City Life 2008. They're pretty good. Harder to manage than Sim City due to the different classes of people living there and cultural tensions and shit. Power is a breeze though and you don't seem to have to worry about water. Gets tedious after a while though, like Sim City 4.
Steam has Arkham Asylum available in an Eidos pack for $US49.99. You get AA, two Tomb Raiders, three Hitmans, two Battlestations, two Deus Ex's (just in case there's anyone on the planet that hasn't played the original) and an assortment of other games. Nineteen games for $50.
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Don't pray in my school and I won't think in your church.
I've found it to be sometimes. You build a network of cities, you've filled the maps corner to corner, you're raking in several hundred thousand a month. There's nothing to do but watch it grow. Tedium.
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Don't pray in my school and I won't think in your church.
A risk-like game on iPhone, also angband. So much angband. I got a new netbook, and 90% of what it does is angband.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
I got the Kingdom Hearts game for the DS. So far it's pretty similar to the other Kingdom Hearts games, as far as gameplay, but it's more episodic which is slightly annoying. Also at the end of the last game you have lots of movement abilities... then you start a new one and all you can do is run and jump and you feel all slow and dumb.
I also got Wii Sports Resort.
And I plan on getting the new Legend of Zelda for the DS sometime in the very near future.
I was gonna get into ADOM, until I found out that save files could not survive being loaded on a display with a different number of rows and columns.
That made me distrust the code too much to try to get into it.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
...I thought number of rows and columns in the command prompt was determined by the program launching it (therefore launching ADOM would always create a window with the same number of rows and columns...)
Guess that's incorrect.
I don't get how that would make you distrust the code, though. How so?
__________________ Father Helel, save us from the dark.
I'm playing Sega Bass Fishing on the Wii. the fish hate me.
__________________
A Tachyon walks out of a bar.
A Tachyon walks into a bar.
The bartender says" Hey, We don't serve your kind"
The Tachyon says" OK" and turns to leave.
...I thought number of rows and columns in the command prompt was determined by the program launching it (therefore launching ADOM would always create a window with the same number of rows and columns...)
I'm not a Windows user. So I play games on various machines with various different sizes of windows.
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I don't get how that would make you distrust the code, though. How so?
Would you trust a car if the manual said "by the way, once someone of a given weight has driven this car, anyone of a different weight driving it will cause the transmission to sieze up"?
There is no reason for which the size of the window used to display the game should have any impact on what is saved. If it does, Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong.
I'd rather have access to the source, and so on... The guy seems pretty clever and all that, but the closed source thing makes it hard for me to have confidence in the game, and that's a sufficiently glaring bug to just leave buggy that I don't trust the rest of it.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
I'm not a Windows user. So I play games on various machines with various different sizes of windows.
Ah, that makes sense.
Quote:
Would you trust a car if the manual said "by the way, once someone of a given weight has driven this car, anyone of a different weight driving it will cause the transmission to sieze up"?
Valid point, but I mean, we're talking about a free video game here, not something you pay for.
Quote:
There is no reason for which the size of the window used to display the game should have any impact on what is saved. If it does, Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong.
I'd rather have access to the source, and so on... The guy seems pretty clever and all that, but the closed source thing makes it hard for me to have confidence in the game, and that's a sufficiently glaring bug to just leave buggy that I don't trust the rest of it.
Again, that makes sense, but I feel like I'm missing your point somewhere. I mean, do you just hate bugs in general, or are you actually suspecting that there's something malicious in there? (If so, you may be a bit too paranoid, just sayin'...)
Hell, I was under the impression that the source was closed because access to the source would potentially hand people every secret in the game, and he wants people to figure it out for themselves.
I'll admit I don't know anywhere near as much about this stuff as you, though. Am I missing something?
__________________ Father Helel, save us from the dark.
Re: Video Games - Watcha playin'?
Linear Mode
