SomTervo

Well hello there. I'm back again. Graduation time sure is a timesink. I need to talk to someone about the ending to this game. Christ almighty. Anyone have any thoughts? Also, yes, the length of it is just perfect. I played it over a series of days, and like with Red Dead Redemption and Uncharted 2, I kept thinking it was going to end, but it kept going... Yet at the same time, you kinda know when it's about to ramp up. That final hour is just pure pace. Pure not-wanting-to-know-what-happens. How many strong singleplayer experiences do we get these days which are 15+ hours long? I think it took me about 17 hours on Hard mode, exploring almost every nook and cranny. This game is a real treat, a piece of absolute gold in this generally desolate market, and I think it's one of the best things I've ever experienced.

Daylight missions are fine because, yknow, it can still be dark in places in the daytime. I can think of a whole bunch of daylight missions from stealth games that are great. I always heard that the Xbox gen version of Double Agent was far superior to the 360 gen one. And I never played it. Only played the 360 one, and it was relatively enjoyable but so flawed. Think I might have to source a cheap copy of DA for the Xbox and give it a try. On light/dark stealth stuff these days, Mark of the Ninja is totes where it's at. Such a good game. Ghosting it currently.

I'm up for it but will be away in wales, consoleless, for a week D:

Idk, man. I felt like i'd learnt my lesson too. Double Agent was such a flawed game, and while I enjoyed Conviction, it wasn't what I wanted from the series, so I was resolved to not buy Blacklist. But Blacklist's gameplay looks better than DA and Conviction put together. I think this'll be the first one since Chaos Theory that'll actually be worth buying. DA and Conviction were definitely just rents. We've still got many a month to wait anyway, so let's see what happens.

I've been getting into Uncharted 3's messy, if very fun indeed, multiplayer recently. kenshi_ryden is the ID pretty sure i've posted here before, but i should be online quite a lot in coming weeks, as a single game of uncharted provides a perfect break time between bouts of dissertation writing.

And oh, oh, oh Spy vs. Mercenary is returning? OH OH OH

Yeah, the problem with Conviction was that you could play it by being 100% stealthy, but when you gave in to the fast-paced 'kill everyone' mentality, it actually shone. The story mode was incredible for this- doing well taking bad guys out felt brilliant. The problem was that the game was tiny. If it had been twice the length, it would have been a far better game. It is pretty stupid. Initially I wasn't wholly bothered: it looked like they were taking the game such a different direction that a different voiceover was pretty much fair enough. But the more I see the more it looks like it is indeed gonna be more old school Splinter Cell'ey, in which case... Why the hell a new voice? It's basically a new character. Even if they kept the name of the series, kept everything but rebooted it with a new protagonist- that would be fine. The Bourne Legacy did it, and did it remarkably well. It keeps the universe consistent and doesn't break all the immersion with fans. If Ironside's Sam Fisher was a background character who you encountered at some point, well that would be swell. If the new guy got his own quirks and character development, that'd be refreshing for the series, too. Heck, this is a great idea! Frustrating.

Back at E3, Splinter Cell Blacklist sure looked awful. It looked even further removed from the high-tech stealth espionage of the earlier Splinter Cell games than Conviction, which was a good game, if not very stealthy. It was basically 24: The Game. Blacklist showed Sam Fisher, now somehow younger and more generic, shooting ass and taking names. The level displayed looked relatively linear. The areas looked small. There was a bit where he called in an orbital strike to destroy a bloody anti-air site. Compared to Chaos Theory's comparable scene, the difference was stark; in Blacklist, we see Sam highlight the anti-air vehicle, request the strike, then sit back as everything exploded and everyone died. In Chaos Theory, one had to creep into the bunker beneath the missile holding, into a claustrophobic command room, evade two commanders in this space, hack a computer to make the missile's chassis open up, then creep back upstairs- getting more and more visible in the dawn sunlight creeping up from the horizon, and deactivate the missile's targeting system- all in the 4-5 minutes before the missile would fire off. Blacklist had none of that subtlety. It all looked so weak. Enter this video. IDK how many of you have seen it, but it sure paints a different picture to what we saw at E3 (as the annoying voice over guy says). A video I haven't linked here showed a playthrough of the anti-air missile level, where Sam didn't actually get spotted and didn't kill anyone. It showed that air-striking the anti-air vehicle was optional. He could stealth it. The video below elaborates further- skip to about 30-40 seconds in, and the guy will start telling us things. - You get points at the end of a level - you get points for action stuff, exploding guys, shooting guys - you get points for 'predator' behaviour; killing/ marking and executing people, without being spotted - most importantly, for every patrol evaded, you get points towards a 'ghost' score. The game will now reward you for not being spotted, getting through whole levels without being seen or killing anyone. Just like Chaos Theory. The level design also looks pretty goddamn open a lot of the time. Check it out. I'm getting more and more sold, as much as I hate the mass-appeal aethetic of the game: EDIT: It's actually around 1:10 or so that he gets to the stealthy stuff. Also hiding bodies is back! Yaaay! I still find it hard to believe they removed that from Conviction. The London bit also looks wonderfully, wonderfully like Chaos Theory. With the rain and poly bump mapping and darkness and evading guys on rooftops. Mmmmmm.

Anybody see this newer gameplay trailer? Holy shit. Holy fuck. It's like... Proper survival horror stealth shit. Pretty limited resources, near-pitch black environment, dangerous enemies to proceed past via stealth/ evasion with combat as a last resort, etc. etc. Read a preview in Edge which says, apparently, the early stage infected are pretty much like regular run-of-the-mill "running" zombies. They'll see you, come at you. Second stage infected have the fungus bursting out of their face/ eyes- they can't see. Will locate you by sound (hence Joel's creeping in the video below). Third stage infected are full blown fungus heads, and locate you via clicking, like the sonar bats use. They're colloquially referred to as 'clickers'. Sounds and looks great. I'm hoping for some joel + ellie vs. human antagonists vs. infected battles. Or just human NPC vs. infected faceoffs. That's something Uncharted almost never had, and is one of my favourite things in games in general. Battles between different NPC factions. Feels really immersive and emergent.

Ditto. Tbh I'm mostly enjoying AC3 now that I've finished the story. Enjoying it for the emergent world/ freedom more than the narrative. Just free roaming the incredible gameworld, partaking of the insane amount of side-content they added, is so good. There's so much to do, it's like the whole story mode doubled over, but you take it at your own sweet pace. It feels like if they had cut down on the narrative quite a bit, i.e. decided to tell the entire series, from AC1 onwards, from only within the Animus, with the extra-Animus stuff being just voiceover/ occasional cutscene, the series would have fared far better. AC3's gameplay mechanics are incredible, but stretched so thinly over the narrative that they feel empty a lot of the time. If the story wasn't so overly ambitious and thus bloated, it would have been a far greater game.

Yeah, that's rough as fuck. I was thinking, your flying fortress would have to go really, really high to feel nasty effects of underpressurization. Columbia it is!

Pfft, don't quote Sealab as a legit piece of evidence. (On topic: idk who to agree with more. So air pressure is obv the biggest ish for underwater depth, whereas maintaining structural integrity while afloat is the biggest ish for a floating fortress. Fuel is an ish for both, the floating fortress probably more so, has to move etc. But isn't air pressure still an issue for the floating fortress? I imagine technically an underwater city would be easier to make structurally/ economically- but practically probably the more difficult of the two. You'd have to piecemeal pressurize and build and pressurize and build for fucking years to construct it. Whereas a flying thing you just build and take off. I think they're both obviously pretty unrealistic at this point, so I'm just going for "what if we did have the means in the first place" approach. )

Yeah, it had all sorts of weird issues. Mine was mostly with the storytelling, it was just flawed. Could have been explained so much better. They were obviously running out of time/ money. It was still definitely one of the best AC endings. AC1's ending is, imho, one of the worst endings in game/ storytelling history. What a fuckin' joke.

Lol my bad dude, I was skimming away, didn't notice that. Eager to get to the content of your post, so missed the spoiler-warning preamble. I usually make it obvious if I'm going to just write out a spoiler warning, give the phrase its own paragraph or embolden it or some shit. And yeah you can do it manually with [ spoiler] and [/spoiler ]. Easiest way. Same with [ b] and [/b] for bold or [ i] and [/i ] for italics.

The historical representation is incredible. It's actually why I enjoy the side missions more than the main missions (except for the very historical ones) because basically it means you get: moments of pure historical fiction which is really engaging, but then for the most part it just feels like you're experiencing that era as it actually was. Or as close as we can get atm. Just standing around in the cities is a pretty remarkable experience. I'mma show my gf this game at some point, she loves history an' that, and she hasn't looked at a videogame in years- it'll blow her mind. Plus she's fascinated by the Middle East- may show her AC1. Cheers for the heads up. I've already done a lot of the Homesteader missions, I quite enjoyed them. Didn't seem to have much of a bearing on anything though, it didn't even give much heads up that they had level'ed.

The fuck... Yeah that's insane. A lot more effort than it's worth: the only thing it is really worth for is, indeed, ship upgrades, which is what I want to do it for. Only way to make that amount of money. P.S. How the hell do I 'level up' artisan or carpenter guys or whatever? I've not looked at that at all. There doesn't seem to be any way of doing it.

Finished the story. Problematic. The last act of the game was clearly crammed in. So many plot holes and stupid connections and just... broken bits of storytelling. Still overall story is decent, if it doesn't really resolve. Better game than story. @Mister Jack: I actually found the side missions infinitely more fun than the story missions, which get worse as it goes on imho. I love almanac pages, liberating the cities, etc. etc. Just because the gameworld is absolutely incredible. The Black Creek region is just fucking stunning in the summertime daytime. And the Fort in there is brilliant. Some of the side mission things are still just shit though. And the underground corridor stuff? Totally superfluous. They could have removed all of that and added more stuff/ improved the actual goddamn gameworld/ missions. Waste of effort. Tragic. And can someone (W&S) please explain to me how the hell I get ship transport for trading? Do I just do more ship missions? Or what? That system is so badly explained. I've finished everything and still don't get how to do goods trading, getting more homesteader specialist people, or whatever they're called. Don't get none of it. Flawed.

I'd say it's usually specific lines of dialogue, like the one I quoted, and that's cliché right? Although I guess they subscribe to a lot of tropes in their works, too. Often subvert them with a bit of humour, in Uncharted's case at least. Hopefully Last of Us will be a bit more original. Hennig's a smart lady.

Can you spoiler tag spoiler shit plz bro? Always wanted to play this, haven't fixed my DS up yet (lost the battery charger cable/plug).

Twee is def an English English phrase. Means like very upbeat and quirky and, in the case of music, high-register. A bit cheesy.

I'm afraid FDS, I gotta say that was pretty classic Hottie pastiche behaviour. Should'a picked up on it! Yeah man, I remember what the Songbird is all about, just not what his name is. Ty. It's on page 4. It's very close to image 3 of the optional covers just minus Elizabeth. Ah, good shout. Don't like it. Prefer #3 up there.

Yeah looking pretty sweet. There's still no evidence whatsoever as to how the close-quarters-combat system will work though, and people are throwing around judgements? I love how Naughty Dog are now masters at capturing utter cliché's, yet making them their own. Making them sound absolutely original. 'It all comes down to that girl' or whatever. Such, such a generic phrase now, but their characterization and VA is so good it sounds fresh and believable. Amy Hennig is in charge of this one, too, yeah? Pro.

Just finishing an essay on: Goddamn great book. Based in a fictional Indian city after an industrial disaster based on the Bhopal disaster (look it up if you ain't heard of it, one of the worst industrial disasters in history, utterly fucked up), it's about a kid who's back is deformed by the disaster from a young age so he has to walk on all fours. Called Animal. All about living in poverty and post-colonial subjugation, about activism and direct action and politics of the developing world under the hand of the Western capitalist world. Also, it's fucking funny, horrific, tragic, intelligent and entertaining. Highly recommended. Really easy to read and compelling, too, despite the intelligent subtext as noted above. Animal's narrative voice is just amazing. Apparently Sinha wrote twelve drafts of it.