Dark Sector (Xbox 360, also available on PS3 and PC)
It's basically a third-person shooter, but guns are only of secondary focus. Your main arsenal is the Glaive, a bladed throwing weapon, and various powers. Once you get the aftertouch ability, which lets you control the thing in slow motion after throwing it, it's great fun to send it zooming in to decapitate enemies or chop their arms and legs off. You can even imbue it with electricity, fire, or ice by sending it through environmental objects like sparking control panels, fires, or, um, ice things, and then use it to solve puzzles or kill baddies spectacularly. You can also buy guns in a sewer from a sarcastic black market dealer, and they're useful for some things, but I always wanted to hoard ammo and rely on the Glaive when possible.
I don't really understand the story too well, some guy is trying to unleash an infection that turns people into crazed killing machines -- and you of course get infected near the beginning, supplying you with awesome powers like the aforementioned, and others. It's probably less than 10 hours long, so the combat doesn't have a chance to get stale. I'm going back on the now-unlocked Brutal difficulty after having beaten it once. I only paid about $10 for it and I would say I got my money's worth. If it sounds like something you might enjoy, look for it in the bargain bin sometime.
So, guys, how's Dragon Age? I'm torn between that, Fallout 3 GOTY, and the soon-to-be-released Left 4 Dead 2 as far as my next game purchase goes... although it may not be for awhile till I get any...
Continued playing Paper Mario last night until my eyes bled.
You talking about Super Paper Mario for Wii?
Quote:
I liked that one a lot better than the more traditional RPG ones for N64 and GameCube...
I haven't played any other version before. I prefer traditional Mario style to RPG, so it looks like I lucked out with this one. I bought it on impulse the same time I bought Mario Galaxies, and I've barely played Galaxies as I have been hooked on Paper since I started it. Played another hour or so tonight.
Yes out a full 2 weeks prior to the movie release.
Stunning graphics (XBox 360 version) and fairly long story line for a FPS game. It took me ~10 hours to complete the human story line and I'm now going back and playing the Na'vi story line.
I'm not sure how close the game follows the movie story line, but if anything it has made me want to see the movie even more. Pandora is a world with striking similarities to one of my favorite SciFi stories by Alan Dean Foster, Midworld. The plot of the movie closely parallels the novel as well.
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I'm working on Assassin's Creed II right now, it's really good. It has a lot more classic RPG elements than the first one.
I recently played the first one and liked it plenty, but it handled a little clunky. Sometimes Altair would refuse to climb up anymore even though there was clearly something to grab. Other times my fists would magically get pulled out mid-fight, and there's just no friggin' way you can bump the D-pad accidentally... did ACII solve these problems? I heard there will be some DLC in a few months.
Fallout 3 and Rome:Total War on the Desktop, and Dungeon Siege on the laptop when the wee one is sleeping in his bassinet.
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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'm working on Assassin's Creed II right now, it's really good. It has a lot more classic RPG elements than the first one.
I recently played the first one and liked it plenty, but it handled a little clunky. Sometimes Altair would refuse to climb up anymore even though there was clearly something to grab. Other times my fists would magically get pulled out mid-fight, and there's just no friggin' way you can bump the D-pad accidentally... did ACII solve these problems? I heard there will be some DLC in a few months.
I haven't had any problems with climbing so far, though occasionally Altaïr Ezio refuses to grab onto ledges as he's falling to his doom. I don't recall switching weapons accidentally on the first one, and I also haven't had that happen the second time around. Yep, two DLCs have been announced.
I was hoping to scrape together enough cash to pick up Dragon Age for my PC, but it looks like that will have to wait until the price drops. Plenty of other games I'd like to get right now, like Assassin's Creed II and Fallout 3, but no $.
I don't know if my expectations were too high or what, but every time I played it I found more things that didn't really click for me.
Then there was a certain "dungeon"
the mage tower
, where you slog through several stories of the exact same encounter in nearly every room (seriously, like 20+ times you fight the same shit). If I want to fight the same encounter 20+ times in one sitting, I can play Baldur's Gate. The first one.
Granted, at the end, they did add something a bit more interesting
(the fade stuff)
, but even that was repetitive with a side of tedious.
That was enough to make me put down the game, at least for a while. I don't honestly know when I'll be picking it back up.
And that's not by any means the only problem I had with it, but I'll save myself a lot of keystrokes and paste a good quote from someone I post with on another board who beat me to it:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Neobum, on teh FG
All I ever really ask of any game is that it's immersive and the more I play Dragon Age, the more issues I see. You can reconcile a lot of shortcomings by actively roleplaying but there are just certain moments that I really wish I hadn't had to experience. Perhaps the game needs patching but my encounter with the Dalish was schizophrenically inconsistent and annoying. There's this one (completely arbitrary) stand-alone sidequest which simply involves you exchanging a few words with two characters who practically stand next to each other. A mandatory NPC love-story. Now, I know I can't expect a game like this to not suffer from the Ghost Town phenomenon but it's moments like that one that just make me feel as if the game is not only not trying to hide it but actually has some strange perversion where it gets off on highlighting it.
Also, in what hype I've read about this thing, there's been a lot of praise for the whole moral system they've put in place. The idea, as I heard it, was that there game's not supposed to have the strictly good/evil dichotomy we're used to from stuff like the Baldur's Gate and KotOR series, but rather a more morally ambiguous presentation of the various issues, and solutions to the same, the player will face. Well, it is my humble opinion that all this moral ambiguity would be best off contracting a severe case of fiery death syndrome! Perhaps it's just me but a lot of the time I get the feeling that the game goes out of its way to put you between a rock and a hard spot. In and of itself this isn't necessarily a bad thing but when you're forced to live with the negative consequences of whatever compromise you decided to go with, the game seems to be outright mocking you by having that negative consequence be underlined and highlighted in coming dialogue and not giving you any satisfactory way of defending or justifying your standpoint. Admittedly, the need to justify your reasoning to NPCs is rather asinine but since my "reasoning" comes down to picking between dialogue options I didn't like in the first place, it feels a bit like the game is trying a bit too hard to make me feel like a douche. I mean, I see what the developers have tried to do here but whoever wrote this stuff just didn't do a good enough job to get away with it.
(snip)
...the game isn't bad. All I'm saying is that it just isn't that damned good. Which is a pity.
__________________ Father Helel, save us from the dark.
Eh, something came up while I was writing that and I only even got into half of what I was going to say, but I'm too lazy to do it now.
The only other thing I didn't really jump on that must be said is how disappointed I am with the dialog. The voice acting is fantastic (probably the best of any game that doesn't bear the name Metal Gear Solid), but the writing... oh ye gods, the writing.
I can deal with mediocre scripts, don't get me wrong - the aforementioned MGS has them in spades. But this is an RPG, and this was the game that was supposed to get it right.
I'll probably play it again. I'll probably even finish it, and I may even try some of the DLC for it at some point. But it's a disappointment, plain and simple. I guess I expected too much.
I wanted a 9.5+, game of the year, super awesome RPG that would hopefully revitalize my interest in the genre. It's hard to give this even a solid 8, and that's before I get into specific complaints about the PS3 port (which I had to get since this ancient ass computer had no chance of running it).
Now that I think of it, it's been a really long time since an RPG honestly wowed me. The last ones I even finished were Persona 3 and the Dragon Quest remakes for the DS.
For game of the year, I'd definitely go with AC2, even though Infamous isn't far off the mark. It would be a harder choice to make if Infamous weren't so damn short.
__________________ Father Helel, save us from the dark.
I may be a bit biased here, since I'm still working on AC II and I've played all the way through DA:O once (as a mage) and am halfway through two additional playthroughs (as a warrior and a rogue). Neither game is particularly innovative, they're just well polished offerings in their particular genres. Ultimately, I think it comes down to which genre you prefer, or are in the mood for. I guess part of my preference for DA:O is probably the fact that there is a shortage of good old school Western style CRPGs as of late. AC II is a good game on its own merits, but I've already played inFamous and Arkham Asylum this year, and I could have played Prototype had I had an itch for more games in the genre. If you only play one CRPG this year, DA:O is the obvious best choice. If you only play one...uh...what do you even call that style of open world climb/jump/fight game?...this year, I don't know if I'd recommend AC II or not. So far, I think Arkham Asylum is the better game, although AC II could still surprise me.
AC II addresses and improves nearly everything I didn't like about AC, a game I enjoyed despite its flaws, (the boring, repetitive, info-gathering quests are gone, the frustrating pre-assassination cutscenes are gone, the long soliloquies from dudes who are supposedly choking out their dying breaths, thanks to the impromptu crazy finger knife tracheotomies I've performed on them, are gone, I don't have to find seventeen million stupid flags any more, etc.), but it adds its own issues. The RPGish elements feel tacked on. The Animus is downplayed a bit, and gaming conventions that aren't justified by it have crept in. The game contains one of my pet peeves, in that you acquire money in game, but it's so easy to become filthy rich that it's irrelevant (DA:O, incidentally, has one of the better monetary systems in any recent game...your supply of cash is limited, and there are a lot of goodies to spend it on, so your spending decisions matter). Combat is, if anything, easier and more one dimensional than in the first game (and, after playing Arkham Asylum so recently, this is a big disappointment). The guards are exceedingly clueless and easy to escape from, as long as your notoriety is low enough. You spend a good bit of time with your madame friend learning a number of moves that you will seldom have cause to use (I can throw money on the ground to cause a diversion, distracting nearby guards so I can slip by...or, since combat is insultingly simple for anyone with opposable thumbs and it's an easy matter of tearing down a few wanted posters to get back to the point where patrols stop looking for me, I can just stab the guards in their stupid faces). While the annoying preludes to set piece assassinations are gone, most of the uniqueness of each kill seems to have gone with them, reducing most assassinations to "stab the dude that glows when you activate Eagle Vision, then run like hell".
Despite all that, I am having a hell of a time with the game. Leaping off a rooftop and burying my twin forearm blades in two hapless guards on the ground below will never get old, nor will killing a guard on the rooftop, picking up his body, and dropping it into a cluster of guards on the ground to watch them go nuts. My stomach still tightens a bit when I do a Leap of Faith off the top of a tower. The conspiracy theory story is enjoyably silly, and I dig the hidden bits of story in the Codex pages and the Truth glyphs. I laughed my ass off when my uncle proclaimed "It's a-me! Mario!" I was thrilled to discover I could play with Italian dialogue and English subtitles. I am still toying with the idea of doing a Let's Play for the where Ezio is a tour guide to the sites of Renaissance Italy. The last thing I want to do here is give anyone the impression that I do not think this is an excellent game.
DA:O has its issue too, of course:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Megatron
Then there was a certain "dungeon"
the mage tower
, where you slog through several stories of the exact same encounter in nearly every room (seriously, like 20+ times you fight the same shit). If I want to fight the same encounter 20+ times in one sitting, I can play Baldur's Gate. The first one.
Exaggerater!
There weren't that many, but I do take your point. There's a similar slog in
the "cleaning up the streets" quest in Denerim, where you consecutively fight half a dozen or so near identical groups consisting of a couple of blood mages and a pack of grunts and archers
, and I was certainly sick of that particular arrangement of enemies by the time I was through it. For the most part, though, I thought the fights were varied and challenging. I did think the difficulty curve was a little uneven. For example, in the Dwarven area there's a spider miniboss that kicked my ass repeatedly right before I breezed through the two (ostensibly more difficult) plot significant boss encounters in that area.
Quote:
Granted, at the end, they did add something a bit more interesting
(the fade stuff)
, but even that was repetitive with a side of tedious.
That was my least favorite part of the game. I hate it when games change things up like that in the middle. I was enjoying my tactical combat game. Don't make me stop playing that and play a freaking puzzle adventure before I can go back to the game I purchased. Hmmm...oddly enough, that's the point where I took a break from both of my replays to start up AC II...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Neobum, on teh FG
All I ever really ask of any game is that it's immersive and the more I play Dragon Age, the more issues I see. You can reconcile a lot of shortcomings by actively roleplaying but there are just certain moments that I really wish I hadn't had to experience. Perhaps the game needs patching but my encounter with the Dalish was schizophrenically inconsistent and annoying. There's this one (completely arbitrary) stand-alone sidequest which simply involves you exchanging a few words with two characters who practically stand next to each other. A mandatory NPC love-story. Now, I know I can't expect a game like this to not suffer from the Ghost Town phenomenon but it's moments like that one that just make me feel as if the game is not only not trying to hide it but actually has some strange perversion where it gets off on highlighting it.
Yah, that quest was silly but, first, it's not "mandatory" as the writer claims and, second, it's not as though DA:O is unique in having silly immersion breaking side quests. Name a CRPG that doesn't. It is a trope I'd like to see the end of, but I don't see it going anywhere any time soon. Side quests with no ties to the main plot are an easy way for developers to pad out the content in their games for those players with a lot of time to devote without making them too long for people whose time is more limited. To the game's credit, several of your party members will point out how idiotic it is to take time out from defeating the Blight in order to save kittens from trees and the like, and you actually take a relationship hit with them if you agree to help people with problems unrelated to your mission. Leading me to...
Quote:
Also, in what hype I've read about this thing, there's been a lot of praise for the whole moral system they've put in place. The idea, as I heard it, was that there game's not supposed to have the strictly good/evil dichotomy we're used to from stuff like the Baldur's Gate and KotOR series, but rather a more morally ambiguous presentation of the various issues, and solutions to the same, the player will face.
The thing I like about the consequences of player decisions in DA:O is that they aren't scored on a silly linear scale of morality as in, say, inFamous or KotOR. You don't get +2 Good Karma for agreeing to rescue kittens from trees, you get +2 to your relationship score with Leliana, because she's a bleeding heart who can't bear to see cute kittehs in trouble, -2 to your relationship score with Sten, because he's a practical warrior who thinks you're wasting time better spent stopping the End of the World, +2 to your relationship score with Alistair, because he's a chivalrous, if somewhat goofy, hero type, and -10 to your relationship score with Morrigan, because she is an insufferable bitch. In other words, it isn't a moral system at all, it's a relationship management system. Companions who like you are more effective in combat and have personal quests they will ask for help with. Companions who dislike you are less effective in combat and may turn on you.
I like managing relationships with my companions much more than I like managing my karma against a goofy scale of whatever the game designers decided was objectively moral and immoral. It's generally more immersive, it's easier to understand the reasons for the various gains and losses, it creates interesting decisions when a situation cannot be resolved to the satisfaction of all party members (my favorite: at the beginning of the Mages' Tower sequence, the only way not to take a relationship hit with Morrigan appears to be
fighting, and killing, Wynn when she offers to join your party if you'll help her rescue the mages in the tower
), it avoids wallbanger situations where you make what appears to clearly be the good choice only to find out that the developers, for whatever reason, disagree, and it makes the character and motivations of the various NPCs easier to understand. While I just called Morrigan an insufferable bitch, and while I have a tendency to inform no one in particular that Morrigan is an insufferable bitch every time I take a relationship hit with her, that's not actually the case, and she's not even what you'd typically call evil (although, there's a plot twist near the end that, damn...). If you pay attention to what pleases and displeases her, it turns out that she is extremely independent, respects power, disdains weakness, and can't stand the thought of anyone being caged, but at the same time is vain and seeks the approval she never got from her crazy witch mother (for those of you who have not played the game, her mother is literally a witch). In other words, she's a pseudo-medieval LOLbertarian. Ok, I guess that does make her an insufferable bitch (also, a textbook case of hilarious pandering in character design...I think her pseudo-medieval lingerie in the possible sex scene actually conceals more than her normal walking around clothes do). Anyway...
The system does have it's faults. In concept I like putting concrete consequences for ethical decisions into a game like this, but I am still waiting for the game in which the concept is implemented organically, rather than reduced to moving a number on a scale. I'm no longer making decisions in order to move my karma score in a particular direction so I can get the special karma powers that are only available to accomplished kitten rescuers or puppy murderers, but I'm not actually making decisions for plot or gameplay reasons either. Instead, I'm making decisions in order to move a relationship score with a particular party member in a particular direction, so I can get the combat bonus that comes from having a companion really like me, and possibly get that achievement (yes, like all Xbox owners, I am a total achievement whore) for sexing up certain party members. It's also fairly easy to cheese away most of the issue by swapping out party members. Take Alistair, Leliana, and Wynn into town, agree to save the kittens, then swap in Morrigan, Sten, etc., before actually heading out to rescue said kittens. This works in most situations, although some plot relevant decisions lead to the appropriate character bitching you out and giving you a relationship hit next time you make camp if they were not with you during the relevant scene.
Wow. That was longer than I intended.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
I was hoping to scrape together enough cash to pick up Dragon Age for my PC, but it looks like that will have to wait until the price drops. Plenty of other games I'd like to get right now, like Assassin's Creed II and Fallout 3, but no $.
You might want to keep an eye on Impulse. I got spam from them this morning claiming they were having a one day sale on Dragon Age, although looking at the site now, the sale doesn't appear to be there.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Re: Video Games - Watcha playin'?
Played another hour or so tonight.
where Ezio is a tour guide to the sites of Renaissance Italy. The last thing I want to do here is give anyone the impression that I do not think this is an excellent game.
Linear Mode
