toxicitizen

Fuck you, Strangelove! I was coming here so sure I was going to be the first one to have finished it! But yeah, not a bad game but definitely a shitty entry in the series. The best thing about it is the story and even that starts out strong but ends up losing most of its momentum and becoming as much of a mess as the previous games. At its peak, it's seriously fucking good. But it's all downhill from that point on. The ending is also very anticlimactic. Also, I enjoyed it and will keep playing it until I've done everything but I'm really glad I only paid 25$ for it. Oh and I'm sure you'll all be shocked to hear that the title turns out to be utterly fucking retarded as the game has absolutely fuck all to do with Arkham. What's annoying is a few weeks ago I remember reading an interview and one of the devs got asked about that and he was being all mysterious "Oh, you'll have to play the game to find out!" and strongly hinted that yes there would be something. Like, fuck you and fuck your bullshit, asshole. This was a fucking cash-in on the name and you fucking knew it.

I was drinking beer with friends about a week ago and one of them put this on. I wasn't paying attention at first but then I did a double take when I actually looked at the guys in the video. I knew of the band by name before but I had never actually checked them out. The song got stuck in my head and now I've been listening to it pretty much nonstop since that night.

Xbox 360 controller emulator for when games only recognize the official 360 pad. You run it, have it detect your generic controller and it generates some .dll files to put in a game's directory.

It's what I also use now. It was a bit tricky to set up the first time but now my PC sees my DS3 as an official 360 pad. I don't even need to use x360ce anymore. Even the PS button works. It's great.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, they must have reused a ton of assets because otherwise there would have been no point in setting it there at all. But it does look different enough that sometimes I'll have to notice a specific building or landscape detail before I'll go "Oh, okay, that's where I am."

Oh yeah, there's definitely been a lot of times where my combos broke because either a ground takedown didn't connect or he just didn't jump to the enemy when it seemed like he should've. It's kinda frustrating when you're trying to pull off a combat challenge and you know for a fact that what you just did would've worked in Arkham City.

And that right there is my biggest issue with Origins' story (which I'm otherwise enjoying quite a bit). The previous games worked so well in part because of how they acknowledged the established lore and universe and just rolled along with it. They weren't going out of their way to tell you who these villains were, they let you play catch up. There were a few characters like Zsasz and Deadshot that I didn't even know about before playing the first two games. That alone made it easier to accept when they strayed from the canon. The last thing this series needed was to distance itself from the established lore by trying to give its own origin spin. It takes the already shaky premise of "the longest night of Batman's career" from the first two games and just stretches it to the point of unbelievability.

It's two islands linked by a bridge and one of them is the area that becomes Arkham City. So it's half reused (with some slight changes) but the new island is the smaller or the two.

I know I've seen people complaining about the combat a lot. One theory I've seen is that they made the enemies faster without adjusting for counters and such. I don't know, there are times when I feel like something's kinda off, tbh. I'll miss a single counter and my rhythm will get so fucked I won't be able to recover at all and I'll just keep getting hit until I die. Then again, that's probably just because I'm playing on hard right away and I'm not used to the new enemy types yet. I'm having pretty mixed feelings on the game. The story is pretty good so far and the cutscenes are great. I can't help but be bugged by Joker's new voice but I have to admit Troy Baker did a pretty damn good job with the character. But overall, I feel like the game in general is just poorly designed, at least in comparison to AC. These guys certainly aren't on the same level as Rocksteady. The world feels too restrained. Too many places you can't grapnel to. The line-launcher being replaced by that shitty wire thing that only works in specific places. Sometimes my grapnel won't want to go to places it should and other times it'll show up in a way that makes me think I'll head up but then it fires way the fuck to the side and I end up flying off in the opposite direction I intended. I'm enjoying it a lot. A shitty game in this series is still a pretty good game. But after this one, I'm not sure I'll be interested in playing another non-Rocksteady game. It's just not the same.

Yeah, the Freeze fight was pretty much one of the greatest boss fights ever. Forgot about that one and I don't think the Deathstroke fight is anywhere near that good. But I still think it was way more fun than Clayface or Solomon Grundy or pretty much any boss from the first game. Ugh, wish I didn't have so much homework that's due in soon. Haven't had a chance to play much yesterday and now I just wanna say fuck it and play all day. Also, have any of you guys run into the Burnley comms tower bug? People have reported not being able to climb into the vent so they get stuck in the room. Went to check it out yesterday and it happened to me too.

Not true. You can just blindly mash the punch button and that won't amount to much. But you're not limited to waiting for the counter prompts. I'm playing on hard so maybe it wasn't an issue on normal, but I failed a few times before I managed to beat him and once I realized you can use the batclaw to open him up the fight got significantly easier. I mean, it's not like I can't see how the fight might superficially seem like an elongated QTE, but I was willing to cut it some slack since it's not just random prompts, it actually relies on skills you develop from playing the game.

I dunno, felt more like a fight than a QTE to me.

Wow. Rude.

You're stupid.

Haven't paid much attention to those yet. I probably should. I did the same thing with Arkham City the first time around. I ignored all the combat-related Riddler challenges and only did them once I was done with the campaign, so I ended up missing out on some pretty useful moves. Like the batclaw slam :/ Also, I love how each encounter is ranked like in DmC or Bayonetta. Kinda motivates you to try and perform better.

But that's the heart of the PC gaming experience! All about dat tweaking, man. Seriously, though, that and immediately going into a cutscene on first launch BEFORE you're even allowed to get your settings right. Like, seriously, just get me a damn menu. Or if you absolutely MUST fire up into your precious fucking cutscene, then at least have a fucking launcher or something. Otherwise it just starts the game off on the wrong foot. Max Payne 3 was guilty of this. And it booted into some weird-ass resolution by default, too.

Uh, was looking for the Arkham Origins thread only to realize this had all happened in the Arkham City thread. I'm surprised Dean hasn't taken the mod axe to it yet. Anyway, been playing a bit and wrote first impressions in currently playing but I wanted to add a few things and didn't want to start spamming that thread. Looks like this game finally does boss fights right! I'm not spoilering since he was all over the marketing so this really isn't a spoiler. I fought Deathstroke last night and it was kind of awesome. It actually feels like a fight true to the combat mechanics rather than the usual gimmicky find-the-pattern nonsense. Color me impressed. It was actually damn fun. The new detective stuff is pretty sweet, too. It plays essentially the same as before (look around for clues and hold button to scan) but the crime reconstitutions look pretty awesome. Oh and, if anyone else runs into the same issue I did, I managed to fix the sluggish performance in cutscenes. Just gotta go in the BmEngine.ini file to disable DX11 and activate DX10. Locks you out of some advanced geometry and shadow settings but I'd rather that than the performance hit. Also, in the Steam game properties, set launch option "-nostartupmovies" without the quotes. I usually don't bother but holy shit there's a lot of splash screens when you fire up this game. Even worse than AC.

So I'm a couple of hours into Arkham Origins. So far, it's pretty much more of the same. It plays and feels exactly like Arkham City. It looks a lot better, though. I think it's the lighting. It gives the game a more vibrant look somehow. It's too early to comment on the story or side-quests (although if you were disappointed by the seeming lack of Riddler challenges, well, they're replaced by something... quite similar). So far, I'm enjoying it but something feels slightly off. Can't quite put my finger on what it is yet. Other than that, the PC version runs well enough. I'm getting occasional framerate dips but that was also the case with Arkham City so I'm not too surprised there. The biggest performance issue I have, and this confuses the hell out of me, is with the pre-rendered cutscenes, of all fucking things. This game seems to have quite a bit of those and, while they look pretty cool, they just struggle to stay above 10fps. So they're choppy as hell and it causes the audio to go out of sync. I kinda feel like that might be a problem with the game itself because, seriously, how the hell could my rig possibly be able to handle the gameplay but not fucking pre-rendered cutscenes? Oh and you can finally adjust the graphical settings from within the game!

Yeah, definitely. I think the problem I had was mostly with how the game constantly reminds you about the story, whether it's someone saying something over your comms or just the hourly countdown to whatever the big evil plan was called. I don't remember the games you mention doing anything like that. They just let you go about your business in peace. But I'm certainly not trying to argue that Asylum is better. Just playing devil's advocate as to why some people might think so. Anyway, earlier I realized I had forgotten to play DmC's Vergil's Downfall DLC, so I figured that was a good enough way to kill a couple hours while I wait for Arkham Origins to unlock at midnight. It's... kinda bad. I mean, playing as Vergil is always awesome but his moveset feels kinda limited compared to Dante's. The enemies aren't all that varied and the levels are all like to the shittier ones from the main game. And, for some reason, Vergil can't double jump so all that floating rocks platforming becomes kind of annoying fast. It takes place after the ending of DmC but really doesn't add anything to the story. I also can't help but feel like it was rushed. Instead of having in-engine cutscenes like the main game, they're all done in a more abstract animation style. It looks cool but, again, it really doesn't add anything. And there's a few times where there's actually some in-engine stuff, which makes it feel more like they were rushed to release it so they had to put them together quickly. If you absolutely must play it, wait for a sale. Otherwise, by all means skip it.

Well, it's a design fault in the sense that the story and gameplay are kinda working against each other. But I get what you're saying and I agree to an extent. I just feel like AC took it to an extreme. They wrote a story that would've been better served by a more linear and focused game like Asylum, without taking the open-world into account. I mean, I'm not usually one to play a game and be bothered by so-called ludonarrative dissonance. But when I first played AC, I did feel like I was doing it wrong whenever I wasn't heading to the next story objective. And it's kind of exacerbated by the way the game constantly pokes you all "Hey. Hey! There's that story mission you're not heading to. You should do that. Now would be good." I don't remember feeling that kind of pressure in games like GTA or Sleeping Dogs or whatever else but it was really noticeable in AC.

See, that's the thing. Arkham City is kind of at odds with itself. I agree that overall it's the superior game, regardless of story. The gameplay is refined in every aspect imaginable and it's just full of shit to do. I sunk 60+ hours in it and I still haven't done everything. But on my very first playthrough, I remember how the story kinda conflicted with its open-world nature. You want to explore but you keep getting this pressure to move on to the next main story objective. So it's a superior game but it suffers from its design not being as focused and cohesive, at least on a first playthrough. I'm with you there. I enjoyed the ending and all the twists and turns that led to it. It pales in comparison to stuff like Hush or The Long Halloween but who cares. Different mediums.

Gone Home. I liked it but I'm glad I waited for a sale. This just isn't worth 20$. One slightly ridiculous complaint: Also, like I said in currently playing, I've been replaying Arkham Asylum in anticipation of Origins. I know I've said before that Arkham City didn't feel much bigger than Asylum but I guess I had just never played them so close together. Asylum is ridiculously smaller than I remembered, both in terms of the map and the content. I mean, the map itself isn't that much smaller but there's a lot less stuff in it, especially in the outside areas, so it feels kind of empty. The main story is somewhat the same length but it only took me 2 evenings to both beat the campaign and do all the Riddler challenges. Then today, it only took me another 2-3 hours to beat all the challenge rooms. So it only took me like 14ish hours to 100% the game and get all the achievements. Getting those last few achievements was so satisfying, though. Back when it first came out, I could never get the damn gold medal on that last combat challenge, so I never got the platinum trophy. I guess playing so much Arkham City over the summer paid off because it was kind of easy now. I am the Bat.

Replaying Arkham Asylum both in anticipation of Arkham Origins and because the removal of GFWL/addition of Steam achievements is a good enough excuse for me to do so. The gameplay is obviously a bit rougher than I remembered but I still think it's more focused and well-paced than Arkham City. This series has probably been the games I've replayed the most this gen. This is at least my fourth time replaying AA at this point and I'm just not getting sick of it. I'll probably take a break from it to play Gone Home tonight, though. Also kinda tempted to fire up DX:HR Director's Cut just because why the fuck not.

This one unlocked late last night so I grabbed it before heading to bed. 5$ since I already owned the base game and the Missing Link DLC. It's not really an "upgrade", though. It's a separate library entry. So now I have the base game, the standalone Missing Link and this one in my Steam library. That's kind of annoying but eh, I'll just add the obsolete ones in some hidden category and forget about them. Been wanting to play this one since launch but felt 20$ was way overpriced. It's currently 50% off as Midweek Madness, which is the price I was waiting for. Looking forward to finally play it.