SomTervo

Amazing load of information on this in this NeoGAF thread. Highlights for me: I think this GIF sums it up nicely:

Great to meet you Drake - and in line with your namesake, I recommend going and checking the Uncharted 4 thread. Some megaton stuff just got announced. (Megaton imo at least). I'm personally loving the 'own thread introduction' innovation Edit: hah, read your first post closer and noticed the "not console gamer" part of it. My bad - ignore the Uncharted reference!

Bit of a necro, but I just started playing through the new Thief again. £13 on the PSN store is a fucking bargain for this game. It's not a masterpiece like Thief 2 or 3 - but what is? The new Thief is a really strong stealth game. AND, on-topic, there's an option when you start the game to choose Iron Man mode. I assumed this would be the same as Dead Space 2/3 or Max Payne 3's one-life mode, where you get no saves at all and if you quit the game you have to start again. Eg a speedrunning mode. But nope. Thief's mode saves as you go along, but if you die, it's game over. Turn on the 'Game over when spotted' setting, and it's game over if you're seen at all. And you can still save, leave, and return to the game at a later date. You properly only have one life. Really great, and really hardcore. It's a pity that some of the game's levels are painfully cheap and it has a very unfair boss later on - this practically makes Iron Man unwinnable. Still, great that they included the option.

Can anyone tell me why the PSN Plus January games aren't on the Store yet? The first Tuesday of the month has been and gone already. I want my Swapper and Infamous. Maybe they've pushed it to next Tuesday, Christmas and NY and all that, in which case fuck off Sony.

Need to look into that For Xmas i got all of the Sopranos - which ive watched a lot of but not in any order. High time. Anybody got any goo MST3K recommendations/faves? Too many to chiose from. Ive watched Laserblast, Final Justice, Santa Clause (wtf), Phantom Planet, and the start of Future War (need to finish)

I've discovered Mystery Science Theatre 3000. That's my next several hundred hours of free time gone

The underwater optional missions are are great, and some of the races. All the Strangers and Freaks were enjoyable except the Tow Truck ones. Who the fuck would ever consider that a good idea for something "fun" to do in a game? The remaster is very, very nice. Ive been playing it more recently. Lots of really nice improvements, and FPS mode is now properly playable after they added Deadzone and Acceleration settings under Controls. Itll be v cheap soon - and i recommend it. Also best soundtrack in the series with all the new ones in the remaster. Think I've said that before here Also Merry Xmas everyone!

IIRC if you rattle through the story missions in a oner it's like 5-6 hours? It's all the (excellent) side content which doubles the length. I was loving Rage a year or two ago but other stuff sidetracked me from finishing it. Seemed more than long enough though, like a really nice length. God i need to start a profile on that Backlog websitr

Yeah I guess that's the thing. It's a testament to good writing that Druckmann and Straley managed to create characters so specific and well rounded psychologically that we can actually disagree with them, their attitudes and actions, to the extent that we barely even understand them and feel emotionally bothered by it. I just finished Grounded mode, my 5th or 6th finish of the game, and I still saw new stuff throughout I never noticed before. For example, did anyone read the very last comic you find by the empty car chassis in the very last moments of the game? More generally, did anyone notice that the plot of the Savage Starlight comics (written in blurbs on the back) mirrors the game's, providing subtle thematic background and suggesting little things we wouldn't otherwise think of? I didn't twig this until now. Jesus, it's food for thought. Edit: also Grounded is phenomenal. It's like you don't really know how to play the game until you complete the game on this difficulty. It really forces you to learn every single inch of every single encounter. One pretty horrible aspect is that there are half as many checkpoints in Grounded as in Survivor and below. I died once at the very last fight of the very last level and got kicked back to the very beginning of it after you wake up... Was horrible. Like 20-25 mins lost. Really forces you to up your game. I 100% stealthed 5 or 6 encounters I didn't even know you could 100% stealth. And lots of little emergent things happen when you do so. The whole last level? You genuinely get better at The Last Of Us the more you play it, which is something people never associate with linear games like Naughty Dog's. It's very true of TLoU and Uncharted 2, though.

Both of those sound great. Keen on grabbing Hyperborea now Edit: I'm also very very much looking forward to my obligatory Xmas board game

Yeah BInfinite wasn't worth keeping installed for me so I never took on the Burial eps. Heard great things. BI just left a really bad taste in my mouth. Took something with unbelievable potential and shat all over most of it, mainly poor pacing for me

I'm about a quarter of the way through Dust. Maybe it's just because I know folk who worked on it, but it is exceeding my expectations massively. I'm loving it. Though I totally agree with your criticisms- the dialogue is flat-out bad, though the humour he manages to inject into a couple of the characters, and some of their voice actors, definitely raise the bar. Fidget could have been so, so irritating, but she's very much bearable due to the VA.

The 30FPS bit is weird. PS4 solid 60, 1080p

^that And GTA III's map was so groundbreaking in many ways. Such brilliant level design. VC felt like a huge step back to me, though I loved some things about it, like the interiors. See, I thought the gang warfare ruined the game. I hated being on one side of the map trying to do something, and then getting a notification that my territory was under attack. I also hated the forced reset halfway through the game. It was annoying as hell having to retake all the territory. Both of these aspects were very irritating, I concede that. It was the mechanic of gang warfare I liked - but the implementation was pretty half baked. I always 100%ed all of the territory before you get kicked out of town. By the time I had to go back later in the game I was rocking choppers all over the place so it was no biggy to do long distance travel. Seriously, when they finally implement the Chinatown Wars drug-dealing mechanic into a current console GTA instalment... I'll be in heaven. If GTA V had that, the game would be fixed. Would be, categorically, a masterpiece. Though I'm in a (presumably very small) group of people who thinks they should go far more hardcore with money in the new GTA games. I believe they should add bills/heavy costs for everything in the game, ala Dark Souls/real life. Eg every day at midnight you'll lose a bunch of money for daily food bills/housing/medical/taxes. This means if you don't do jobs or rob for money, you'll eventually go negative and start losing your items to the repo man. Go ahead and buy loads of property, sure, but you'll get taxed for having it every in-game day, and will have to pull off bigger jobs just to maintain yourself. Like there were no repercussions in San Andreas for buying all of the property and having save points everywhere, but it would be amazing if you got taxed more for bigger properties, and had to support them all by earning more. Manipulating stocks, doing bigger drug deals, and pulling off bigger jobs would all become a compelling necessity to support your virtual lifestyle. I'd like money in GTA to be a resource, not a glorified 'points' system which becomes meaningless after your first huge job. The best experiences I've had in GTA are in the first 3-5 hours of the game, when I need a silencer for my gun or full body armour, but don't quite have enough money to get it, so I have to go out and just find ways of making money off my own ingenuity. It's brilliant. I wish Rockstar would design the game so that money fluctuates a lot and you have to manage it more, and do more crazy jobs/take risks to make money to keep yourself afloat. This would mean you could keep playing the game forever, just maintaining yourself, getting more property, and having to do increasingly large heists/drug deals to keep it going. It would genuinely become a dynamic organised crime simulator.

^yeah My experience of VC was coloured by getting a horrible flu over the christmas I got it as a present. I just couldn't enjoy it. And ever since, when I've gone back it just feels like a poor clone of GTAIII with better music. I loved the colour of the world but didn't enjoy any of the missions. Then San Andreas... Los Santos alone could have been the whole game and still be insanely fun. The missions were better, mechanics like shooting and driving better, with skills added. I even remember my first moments of controlling CJ, turning him around and saying out loud "yeah this is way better than the last ones" which had that arcadey, almost platformer-like control to them. Claude/Tommy would insta-turn on the spot, have no momentum, etc. The gang warfare was brill. I found CJ and crue far more compelling than well-done stereotype whatsisname. Then there was the awe-inspiring experience of driving out into the countryside and finding little towns, the other cities, etc... I had never experienced a world that well designed and revelatory, even after open world classics like Morrowind. I replayed San An recently and while the world does feel a lot smaller, it still has the best level/world design out of any GTA imho Just an amazing adventure. It was so far above VC for me it's not even funny.

I think that's because people are having the completely wrong expectations for this one. Agreed. It's not going to be an overly complex game that focuses on details. I'm kind of thinking along the lines of Shadow of the Colossus in the sense that the colossi are the objectives and there were the trials at the end /the secret garden at the top of the tower. Other than that, there were a lot of landscapes and environments to explore with lizards and fruits to find. I'm imaging this will be structurally similar, just in terms of space travel on a far larger scale with the objectives being resource gathering and/or ship modifications. Excellent analogy, hit the nail on the head really- though I don't trust Hello Games to be as clever/subtle with their lore as Fumito Ueda.

Link broken and US only

If the gunfights even remotely approach the crack-by-crack tension of TLoU, then my eyebrow may twitch in interest. But to know that I'd probably have to buy the game. And i aint buying the game. QTE's can work, eg in God of War. Only if they're very cleverly integrated into general gameplay. Idk if that'll happen here

Glory hallelujah amen! No just no! III or San An or V. Never VC or IV

Fucking great game. Story's a bit of a wet fart, but farted very very well for the most part. Dodgy voice acting from a few people, terrible VA from one. It's long, probably 20 hours on average, and maybe 2-3 of those hours drag. Phenomenal stealth and the later scenarios vs the alien/survivors are absolutely incredible. Really deep, and apparently Survivor mode is great and replayable too. Fantastic. I was rushing through it so I could sell it - but I don't want to sell it anymore. If anyone has an even passing interest in Alien, aliens, sci-fi, Deus Ex/Thief/System Shock/Bioshock, RPGs, horror or hide and seek, they should play it. Above all else it's the greatest hide and seek simulator ever made.

Wouldn't be surprised, tbh!

That would be amazing, but I get the vibe that the weapons will be bespoke, just really really interesting. Ie Half-Life quality, hopefully an evolution of that ethos They haven't mentioned any crafting mechanic have they?

I feel you - and I should have opened my gambit by asking how much you'd played GTA V! When you get an opportunity, I thoroughly recommend it. Moreso than any of the other GTA games. I've got too many games, too, if I hadn't played it I'd be leaving this for a year at least. GTA V is close - close - to being something as good as The Sopranos, but playable. And you wouldn't get that effect from cursory sessions at a friend's place - you'd get this if you played the story mode for 4-5 hours. My girlfriend had the same opinion as you, re depth of writing, until I (gently) coerced her into properly playing a few of the missions in sequence, and she very quickly saw how clever and well written the thing is. She loves it now, and she used to be a full-blown GTA-basher. (She's an ITV journalist so knows a thing or two about writing/satire, too.) In short: there's a reason Edge magazine gave it a 10/10. (Though I suppose that doesn't mean as much as it used to.) I think the adjective puerile fits with the humour and writing in the ambient game world - as this has to be surface-value by definition, so you can briefly guffaw as you drive past a crude billboard at 80Mph. The real meat of the thing is in the story/campaign missions, which are a solid 15-20 hours of gameplay and writing, with lots of multiple dialogues and clever contextual writing you can miss. Edit: The thought of Stew Lee and Chubby Brown on a stage together makes me boke Two things which should never be within a hundred miles of each other. Never

I'm totally with you on the gameplay. I had major GTA fatigue with GTAIV. But I found GTA V's gameworld so compelling, and the blend of gameplay/cinema so spot-on that I really enjoyed it. That is something AC has never achieved, though Unity has been trying, what with the cutscene-into-gameplay transitions. (PS Unity is the best AC game yet I'd say, give it a try if you can find it on the cheap. Rights 6/10 huge faults I have with the series, though it intrudes 2-3 minor faults simultaneously.) I get the gist of what you're saying (re puerile), but imho GTA V transcends this quite often. Not all the time- a lot of the characters/pastiche's are very well-trodden now - but often enough. (This doesn't necessarily go for any of the earlier games.) GTA V travels into serious 'shades of grey' territory with many of its characters. Basically any scene with Trevor does this. He's a genius like the series has never seen (like videogame stories have never seen tbh), but also a psychopath with literally no inhibitions. He often drops brilliantly written insight which does delve deeper than the surface, and he calls it out other generic GTA characters (like you mentioned, eg G-men, entrepeneurs without morals, etc) on their superficialities and idiosyncrasies. A lot of the smaller jokes are juvenile as heck, but I laugh. There's a place for humour like that, and GTA puts it in the right place. (Opinions, opinions, opinions.) Edit: Rereading your last example there (bold)... I'm fairly certain there are a lot of examples like that in GTA. V at least. Lots of well-pointed irony and situations which are intelligently satirical. Eg Simeon calling his customers 'racist' to guilt them into buying cars, whilst he's exploiting Franklin and Lamar's race for cheap labour, and to convince people he's ethically and morally sound.