SomTervo

Very smart, but also sucks

My gf and I bought Revelations 2 Ep 1 on Sunday but didn't get a chance to play it. We're literally using it as co-op fuel. Any thoughts on how good it is from that standpoint? And is the combat RE6 or RE5? (Even though I get the controls are more RE6 arcadeyness).

I loaded up Assassin's Creed Unity last night and had an utter blast. The game has an almost unprecedented amount of content in it (most of which is excellent and non-filler) – I'm at probably 20 hours now and only just hit 50% completion. I've also been playing it with the HUD turned off and using a couple of control improvements. (If you want to know more see the AC thread). There are times where it's legitimately like an open world free-running MGS or Thief game. It's so great. And the deeper you get into gameplay, the harder it gets and the more emergent and sandboxey it gets. The first districts are 1-star difficulty, so enemies fall to your blade with ease and not much happens outside of missions. But when you get to the outer districts, which are 4/5 or 5/5 difficulty, enemies are seriously deadly, really good at chasing you, and loads of emergent stuff happens like big fights in streets which distract guards, lots of hiding places and gadgets interacting, lots of indoor and outdoor areas giving you good escape routes... Man it's so fucking good

I like that he's more of a blank slate. But as a character he's just vapid – though his brother was worse. To be honest, I'm not being fair. I only played like 2-3 hours of it. I'll buy it in full when it's cheaper (/re-released on PS4) and let you know what I think after a full playthrough. Last night I got sucked into AC Unity for another four hours straight. It was bloody brilliant. I'd recommend anyone playing the game, when there's still content left to complete, to: use R3 to turn the radar off and play the game exclusively without it. Only turn it on if you're really stuck for something to do and need a quick guide. Even hide it during missions – if you have a mission objective, there is always a subtle objective marker on screen so you don't get lost. (Previous ACs never had this so you'd be clueless as to where your next objective was.) If you're lost for something to do, bring up the map and set the waypoint for something you fancy. Following an on-screen waypoint and dealing with enemy encounters is 100x more fun when you aren't watching a minimap for all of your info. do every side quest/mission/event that pops up nearby. Don't miss a single one. Seriously most of the game's best missions are in the side content: Safehouse/Cafe Theatre missions, Assassin sidequests, red chests, murder myseries. The level design is always open and emergent and sandboxey in these – most of the story missions are very much on rails/limited, only a couple of them have held up to the game's best side-content imo. hold the L2 button for crouch instead of pressing it. For almost all of my time with Unity I was tapping L2 to toggle Arno into crouching. Turns out the devs hamfistedly tried to get the best of both worlds – tap the button and you toggle it, hold the button and you stay crouched until you let go. The latter option is infinitely more responsive and made stealth encounters much, much easier. The HUDless one is most important. It's seriously phenomenal playing the game without a HUD. It's often like open world free-running MGS or Thief when the HUD's off. And you can still be totally aware, using Eagle-vision, which becomes indispensable. On top of that, upgrades become far more useful as you're forced to rely on all your tools. Perhaps most importantly, you aren't constantly being nagged about your objective and your 'Synchronisation' objectives. Seriously, these are a good idea, but it often makes Assassin's Creed less fun for me when I'm being told, "Oh, you won't get 100% synchronisation unless you get two guys with a gadget you haven't unlocked yet!" or "don't touch the ground in this really tough bit and we'll give you that extra 25%!" Turn the HUD off and all these things melt away and you just end up having fun with the game and engaging with its mechanics. Incredible times when it grips you. In the later, more difficult missions, I was often getting spotted then having some of the most thrilling chase encounters I've ever had in a game. Sprawling chases which take me halfway across the district with something like 15 goons on my tail, screaming and occasionally managing to tag me with a bullet. I often ran out of medicine and had a last-life sort of intensity going on. Being spotted is dis-incentivised simply because you get overwhelmed so easily – and unlike in previous ACs, you will die and have to restart if you're up against more than four guys. So good. Can't wait to get back on it and solve some murder mysteriessss, foool.

Sounds like a pretty solid analogy. Ta for the thoughts, D

Heard good things about OatEoftL. Oat Eoftl. Gaiman seems to be in a pretty decent swing these days

Still on this. Just over halfway through. I'm surprised by a couple of things in the book. For one, how good it is, but in a kind of fly-on-the-wall, borederline dull way. He's really just reporting a load of stuff he saw during the Spanish Civil War and laying down some philosophy on it. From page to page it goes from riveting to 'um, okay, alright.' The other surprising thing is how much clumsy writing has crept in to the thing – every few pages there'll be a cluster of nasty repetition or poor phrasing. But on the whole, it's practically a masterpiece. The only novel I've read which really covers the humanity of murder and war, the soul of it. In a really harrowing way. If Blood Meridian ponders the meaning of war, For Whom The Bell Tolls ponders the effect of war. He captures really horrible details – like a man sobbing as two rebels suffocate him to death with a sheet. After that I'll be moving on to I loved Embassytown, and I'm pretty sure this is going to be great, from what I read of the first few pages.

I'm currently playing: It's fucking great. The deeper Metroidvania action adventure I've wanted for a long time. The combat feels like what Guacamelee should have been in terms of depth, the boss fights are better than Metroid's so far, the ceramic-style art is phenomenal, it has level and encounter design better than a lot of Castlevania, and I'm loving the Mark of the Ninja vibes I'm getting off it. For free on PS+ and cheap on Steam, peeps better be on this. You owe it to yourself to play Thief: Deadly Shadows, the third one. It's literally a classic. I prefer it to Half-Life 2 (and most other first person games for that matter). Phenomenal level design, wonderful graphics + style, great writing, brilliant mix of cool medieval-noir and horror, a pretty nice open city to explore, loads of great rival factions, etc. On a modern rig it also doesn't look far off a modern-day game. Pretty sure you can get it on the very cheap nowadays. PS I agree on the new Thief game. It's really good, especially the open world and side missions once they really open up near the end. Three or four of the campaign missions are terrible and nearly fuck the whole thing, but the other 6-7 + open world are good. I'm very interested in Suikoden – may go for it after P3FES Btw, MH, you should totally get on P3FES. It's a fairly slow starter (interesting but not engaging from the opening till about 10-15 hrs in), but once going it's utterly phenomenal. The modern anime stuff isn't too overt, either.

^Why I dislike most of Tarantino's output.^ Yeah, Reservoir Dogs and Django are my favourite of his, because they're the least... That Until That bit kinda ruined the vibe for the most part, but I still love Django. I definitely prefer it to KB Vol 2, but I think KB Vol 1 is a masterpiece of style which beats Django on those stakes but doesn't have a story anywhere near as good. This has me very, very interested. I sure hope it's still in cinemas. The Raid is so great

Yeah, it's incredible. Edit: it's globally critically acclaimed, even in China apparently where it's got a huge audience (?!), so I foresee a long, beautiful history for the thing. /edit We watched two more episodes yesterday – The Entire History of You (or whatever), and Be Right Back, or, Souls Resurrected via Social Media. By god they were both tough to watch, by utterly ingenious. So clever. So relentless. So uncompromising. Phenomenal. Did you find episode 3 a tough watch, viewing it as a couple? I watched it with the gf. For us, it reinforced how happy we are, but by god, it's ingenious how much it made us think about memory (especially social memory), problems with it, and how crazy things can get when people have conflicting recollections. Somehow it's all worse when you can just call up any memory at will and share it... Amazing. It's admirable how well they focus the lens of their story, too. Like they don't talk about criminology or entertainment or anything in that third episode, even though the true-memory technology would have massive ramifications on those. Instead they focus on the mundane, the day-to-day, the human relationships and moments which everyone experiences. Phenomenal. I'm actually writing a sci-fi/speculative fiction story for a deadline this Friday, and it's really affecting my work on it. [Adjective]. Sometimes I get too formulaic with these rave-posts, eh?

Some people seem to absolutely love it, but this appears to be for the story/milieux. A lot of people can't seem to get past the bog-standard, but shiny, gameplay. Which is totally fair enough. I'll enjoy it greatly at £25, then trade it in for roughly £30 credit towards The Phantom Pain. Basically I'll have £5 credit towards The Phantom Pain after enjoying The Order for free. Cool.

GF and I beat it last night. What a great game. One of the best written. The Director's Commentary seems fascinating, too. As with all classics, it sounds like when they were making it, it was being created fast-and-loose right up to the last minute. Re gameplay, I loved the controls and inventory system, although there were maybe 4-5 puzzles which didn't hit the mark. In fact they missed it entirely and almost made the game unbearably frustrating. Doing it with two people alleviated the frustration a lot. If one of us was annoyed the other would just take over and happen across the solution in no time. Basically out of some 200 or so puzzles, there are maybe four or five which have really unclear, unfairly specific trigger points. Like stand anywhere in a large room and Manny will do nothing, but find the right pixel to stand on and the right angle to look at, and he will look off at an object, which is the game's notification that there's something to interact with. Only these few times was this system problematic. On the whole it's great.

I really don't want to derail the topic but I wanted to comment on something: Isn't it funny how the /10 scale begins as a functional assessment of how well the game works as software, but that by the latter half of the scale it becomes about game design and/or story? Obviously things that don't work should get the lowest score possible. But it's funny we don't give low scores to things which are mechanically totally sound and work perfectly start-to-finish, but are dull. As it is: 1-4/10 = doesn't work 6-10/10 = is a really fun or rewarding game It's basically two separate scales anyway? Maybe that's why the whole issue arose? Wouldn't it work better to go like Option A (functionality): 1-4/10 = doesn't work 6-10/10 = works well (few bugs/glitches etc.) Option B (gameplay): 1-4/10 = isn't fun/dull gameplay mechanics 6-10/10 = is very fun/ great gameplay mechanics Option C (art): 1-4/10 = awful/derivative artwork (narrative, visual design) 6-10/10 = fantastic/original artwork (narrative, visual design) I guess if I ever started reviewing games again I'd try these three scales out as a combo? TL;DR: the way scales seem to work now is that one scale functions as half about technical capability and half about quality of gameplay, and they seem irreconcilable on the one /10 scale. Surely there's a better way? On-topic at last: I'm going to use this Very.com Groupon deal (£25 for £50 credit) to buy The Order physical, then trade it in for credit towards MGSV:TPP or something. Oh yes. The voucher deal is here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=995897&highlight=50+credit, UK users only Edit: Caveat is that Very can sometimes apparently be a bit of a pain to deal with (they're a women's catalogue and pull you into a credit agreement for this sort of deal. You'll pay the full £50 then get £25 back or whatever).

Yeah, I don't think Seinfeld is the be-all-end-all so far, but I'm only early in season 2, and I've heard 4 and 8 are where it's at anyway. It's enjoyable. Last night I finished watching the second episode of Black Mirror. Well, Mr Brooker. You old genius. You legend. You cutting, satirical wordsmith. Black Mirror is one of the best sci-fi/speculative fiction shows I've ever seen. Up there with Twilight Zone or Battlestar Galactica at it's best, sometimes exceeding even those. It's totally original and on par with seminal sci-fi writers like Dick, Asimov, or Clarke. That second episode was unbelievable. Such a brilliant criticism of celebrity culture, social media, entertainment culture, the prostitution of the "public", internet culture, office culture... The whole shebang. All totally taken to pieces within a fantastic story. Glad I came to it late so I've got seven episodes to watch. I'd happily rewatch a lot of them anyway.

Yes TN, yes Except for the use of the word "objective" Just don't go there

Aha derp! I assumed we were on the American January-December academic year. But it's actually an (even less sensical) April-March academic year? That explains it all. I thought i was six months in, in june. Turns out I'm only TWO months in, in june. Hurr

Yep, if you were asking if the game does have an "ink ribbon" system, TN – it doesn't. You can save infinitely. Except the minute or two lock-out that IDD astutely pointed out, which doesn't get in anyone's way.

Yeah, exactly! It's utterly bizarre that other games (eg Resi, Dead Space and Max Payne) didn't use this template. Heck, I'd even kill for games like GTA or RDR to have the option there. Just the option, y'know?

Sorry, could have been clearer Thief's Iron Man mode: - autosaves all the time, and you can manually save over this one save slot, so you don't lose progress if you quit. - if you quit the game, that's fine. The save game is still loadable. You can load the save back up and resume where you were at. - but if you lose the game (die, fail mission, or spotted), you get kicked back to main menu. The "Continue" option is still there, but the save's info text is now in red and it says "You lost the game with Iron Man mode turned on, so this save is now dead. Better luck next time!" You can't load it.

Well, it's a resource you have to manage as in there are only certain, often dangerous places you can do it. Yes, limited in quantity, not usability. The fact that enemies often roam the areas where a save point is adds a lot of strategy and beautiful tension. Personally, I'm a fan of the ink ribbon thing (it's just a game mechanic – embrace it, play carefully and it becomes fun to engage with) but I can totally appreciate why people wouldn't like that.

I'd agree with you if it weren't for Second Son and (the absence of) Knack totally throwing your prediction out of whack. But I wouldn't fully disagree either. It would be likely in terms of them wanting to promote Uncharted 4/other exclusives, though... I'm keen for TO: 1886 once it hits £10-15. I can even trade in Wolfenstein: NO for it and get it half price at that range.