Only one guy, that is a that guy. Only 30 mins more of waiting. I'm also getting a Jigglypuff for Judith. Most of the guys here, I recognized from the preorder GameStop line. They are chill and we are having good convos.
I love the looks from normal city commuters as they walk by, staring at dudes playing on their DS's. I, sadly, forgot to unpack mine.
As for Splatoon, preordered that digital copy. I'm mainly here for the 3 pack for it.
Just beat it last night (sans the vaporous Xen levels that will never exist at this rate)
It feels really fresh.
The problem with the game, if any, is that because it looks so good I think in my brain some features of modern shooters, but it's still very much old school Half Life. So like enemies are pretty smart, also stealth doesn't work on them much at all. As soon as the action starts, they KNOW where you are. Same with exploration: some things that in a modern game would DEFINITELY be some kind of secret place with a reward or at least a bonus or objective, are literally just an empty room because in the real building there might well be a building there so why not? In a few cases there's a Glock mag for your trouble.
I would love to see the HL expansions done up this way, but looks like those projects are going nowhere fast so it may be a race between Blue Shift remade and Half Life 3 proper.
It's an Economic Real-time Strategy game, based on competing for 13 different resources on Mars. The Goal is to buy out rival companies by buying all their stock up. You earn cash by gathering base resources (or buying them off the market) to make more advanced resources - which can all be used for buildings and HQ upgrades, - selling resources offworld, and manipulating the market in your favor through market tactics or direct Black Market attacks (EMPing a group of buildings, blowing up the resources being mined under a tile, or just outright blowing individual buildings up). It's pretty fast-paced, too; games typically take 20 minutes, maybe 30 if you're paying with 8 people.
It's early access atm, though, and the $40 price tag is pretty pricey for what it is. I'm having a ton of fun with it, though.
Starting to learn Distant Worlds: Unverise after getting it for 30 dollars (usually 60) It's a crazy big 4x game but so far the most interesting thing is your empire has the state and private economies. So while you control the state economy the private one pretty much does what it wants as long as you don't take everything over. Fascinating that no other game has thought about this aspect.
I started playing Dragon Quest IX on DS. I have a ton of DS games, and this is one of only 3 that I've never finished. Of the other two games: one is a Final Fantasy remake, the other is Ghost Trick, which I put about 3 hours into but wasn't quite feeling it. I appreciate what Ghost Trick was trying to do, but the pace was so slow I kept wanting to yell "let me get to some damn puzzle solving!" I'll go back to it someday.
So now I'm playing a JRPG instead? Doesn't make sense but DQIX is more engaging. God knows if I'll get through it, but I'll keep chipping away 20 minutes at a time and see if I wind up completing it. I had a few hours on a plane to give me the jump start I needed.
On the 3DS free-to-play front, Pokemon Rumble World is officially bullshit and has almost no redeeming qualities. Pokemon Shuffle I'm much more warm on. It's still just another match-3 game, but it does not have a big "no more progress unless you pay $ or engage in the grind of all grinds" wall like Rumble World does.
Yeah, howlongtobeat.com puts it as 60 hours main story, 500 hours if you try to do everything.
When Nintendo shut-down wifi services for the original DS, a good chunk of DQIX content did go with it, but I don't know how much, in terms of hours. They had a daily sidequest download, as well as a shop that would rotate super-rare materials for the crafting service. Now, all of those quests are unobtainable, and it's incredibly hard to craft the highest-level stuff. There is also their primitive version of streetpassing, which unlocks entire dungeons.
It still seems like the main game is intact, but that 500 hour number is likely not so high anymore. My goal is to beat the main game, only do side stuff when I stumble into it, and move on.
Imagine how different things could have been if you could even pictochat over the internet on the original DS. Nintendo don't do the obvious things. They do the bare minimum to appear innovative.
Nintendo are the lame. They're a few mistakes away from being another Sega IMO.
What will happen to the DS library when the Nintendo NX comes around?
What will happen to the DS library when the Nintendo NX comes around?
If the pattern continues, it will be backwards compatible with 3DS games, but not DS games. People who still keep their old consoles and cartridges will be able to play those games. So will everyone else thanks to emulation, but not with 3D, touch screens, etc. They will also sell those old games on the virtual console.
Nintendo makes plenty of lame moves due to their signature characteristic, not caring (or learning from) what others are doing. They're a long way from pulling a Sega, though. They are very well structured, financially, with $10B in the bank.
They know that their secret sauce, and their incredible stock of characters, gives them the chance to pull up out of any stretch of failure, even an entire generation's worth. The moment they start making short-sighted moves, though, their advantage evaporates.
Only one guy, that is a that guy. Only 30 mins more of waiting. I'm also getting a Jigglypuff for Judith. Most of the guys here, I recognized from the preorder GameStop line. They are chill and we are having good convos.
I love the looks from normal city commuters as they walk by, staring at dudes playing on their DS's. I, sadly, forgot to unpack mine.
As for Splatoon, preordered that digital copy. I'm mainly here for the 3 pack for it.
How is it? I think this might put me over the line into getting a Wii U, especially since Best Buy has a $300 bundle with the deluxe version.
Got stuck into a little Hatred. I've only played a few hours or so, while hanging out with a friend who bought it, and combining that with his impressions, from a few hours of play(no exact figure) so keep that in mind. Maybe it turns brilliant at the end, I dunno. I don't think I care to.
Also, this gets long, because chatting about it over a few beers with a mate through the evening gave me a fair bit of time to hammer out my thoughts. Also I'm just long winded, deal with it I guess.
But, frankly...It's pretty abysmal.
It delivers violence, but it's hardly shocking or transgressive in doing so. The execution cutscenes are mostly pretty milquetoast, compared to what I was expecting from the hype. I'm sorry, Hatred, but I've been playing games since I was knee-high - when it comes to depicting violence to shock, gold star for trying, but you need to put in a little more effort.
I could very easily put this game down, go pick up mortal combat, and go punch someone in the crotch so hard it throws them into the air, while getting a gory, full-colour close-up x-ray of their testicles exploding on your knuckles, before giving them a ground-and-pound that rips off their face as blood, chunks of flesh and bone fly about with every hit. And you want to shock me with stabbing a guy a bunch, throat-slitting that would pass in an M15 rated game, stomping on his head, or shoot him a few times? You'll have to work harder than that, kiddo.
Especially if you're going to show me the same shit a thousand times, it just gets boring, something I have to wait through so I can continue with actual gameplay.
I would say it's difficult, but that implies intention - it's not difficult, it's just fucking broken. Enemies from offscreen with hard-to-spot tracers on screen for an eyeblink just invisibly destroying you, getting stuck on objects, less than responsive controls, getting stuck on the world geometry, random invisible barriers, and bugs-a-plenty. It's not difficult - it's just poorly made. It would be frustrating, if the AI wasn't completely, laughably stupid.
And worse than all that - it's boring. The Gameplay is utterly fucking boring. The shooting feels weightless and unsatisfying, the enemies don't really feel like a legitimate threat(at least, so much as the game's poor design), the aiming is finicky, movement is passable at a charitable best, and it's mindless repetition from start to finish. If it wasn't for all the carry-on from the developers, I'd have assumed it was some sort of meta-commentary about crappy games and the people that force themselves to play them for one reason or another. Unfortunately it's not, it's just shit. To not be entirely negative, some of the physics gubbins are pretty cool(when they work), and some of the ideas could be good, with a little spit and polish.
Sound is pretty alright, decent enough ambient sounds, weapons sound a little tinny and hollow, not the worst, but still not particularly satisfying. The voice acting is surprisingly decent compared to the quality of the rest of the game, but not great.
Mumbles Growlypants, though, is hilarious - not intentionally, it's like all of his dialog was written by an edgy teenager fed a steady diet of really bad 90s comics and "My Immortal" style fanfiction.
Except, they don't have the balls to do anything truly offensive, so they just mumble about how Stacey at school is a cunt, but not too loud just in case someone hears them, and feeling very pleased with themselves because they said "cunt" and they know that's like the nuclear option of swears. Before writing some bad teenage poetry about how sad and angry they are, and the world sucks, and they just wish everyone would like just totally die.
I've honestly seen better writing in Uwe Boll movies. In fact, I'd rather watch an Uwe boll movie than play this game. Fuck it, I'd rather be IN an Uwe Boll movie for free, than play this game any more.
I'll give Mumbles some credit, though, he still managed to inject more character and charm into it than Cassie Cage from Mortal Combat. Thoroughly average performance from Ashley Burch there, who sounded like she'd rather be getting a root canal, and seemed to only have two emotions, "none", and "none, but louder." But that's beside the point.
Graphics are actually not atrocious, when it's lit up and the colour bleeds in, and explosions are really quite nice. But man, that black and white filter - it just makes everything kind of bleed together into a mass of grey. Sure, it makes the colours pop out nicely, but it also makes your character, enemies, objects, everything just blend together into a bland, indistinguishable mess. Admittedly, this is less of a problem in some environments than others, but I did find myself randomly firing my weapon at times just to find my character from the muzzle flare. In short, they range from "present" to "Pretty alright", when you can see them, but still not so good.
This should tell you something - I'm praising competence. That's how bad this game is - to find something positive to say, I have to give praise because they reached what should be a minimum standard.
Short list of everything else - Bland environments, weak level design, bland weapons, bland everything. It's so thoroughly boring that it's not even worth elaborating on.
To boil it down - Hatred is just bad, in almost every way, from every angle, and at any particular point, and at any conceivable resolution. It's just a festival of boredom and incompetence that people will buy because it's controversial and "edgy", not because it has any worth, then try very hard to convince themselves they didn't waste their money.
There are a few spots of competency and almost cleverness, but they're few, far between and I suspect only seem competent and almost clever because of the aggressively mediocre blandness that surrounds them.
It doesn't even achieve what it set out to achieve, which according to the developer is a response to trends in gaming about political correctness, politeness, vivid color, and games as art. It makes no commentary on political correctness, nor is it particularly politically incorrect. It's just violent, to no end or purpose, which isn't interesting or particularly offensive. Same goes for politeness - it's not really particularly commenting or responding to politeness, it just mutters cunt a few times and looks very pleased with itself. Ditto colour(Actually, in a stroke of irony, I kind of like their sparing use of vivid colour, it could have been a brilliant aesthetic if it wasn't so poorly done) and games as art.
Maybe, if it was a meta-commentary on how idiots will buy goddamned near anything if you pander hard enough in your marketing, I'd believe it. But it's not. That's the saddest thing - this was a genuine effort, and someone's standards are so low that they're proud enough of it to release it to the world for actual money.
Worst of all, it's not a hot mess. A Hot mess can be interesting, or inadvertently fun by breaking in entertaining ways, or just being so bad it's good. As a whole, the nicest thing I can say about it is that as a first outing from a new developer, it definitely is a thing that exists. This is just a bland, incompetent cash grab made to sucker chumps out of their coin by pretending to hit hot-button issues and then failing, and wouldn't be worth it if you got it for free.
If you own it, and you didn't - my sincerest sympathies.
I got to level 60 on Alto's Adventure, and the three tasks needed to complete it are super hard. Waaaaay more difficult than anything so far. I wondered if it was worth trying to beat the level if the following levels keep getting more difficult.
So I googled how many levels Alto's Adventure has. Turns out.... 60 levels in total! Cool.
This game is, by far, the best endless runner I've played. It also has one of the best ever concepts of levels and progressing through them. Each level has three tasks to complete. You'll have completed many of them in other runs on other levels previously, but those don't count. You know you can do them though. And other levels are things you've not tried before, or didn't even know were possible, so you are encouraged to try new tricks and improve different stats.
That said, those last three tasks on level 60 are pretty crazy.
Finished up with The Talos Principle. I thought it was a fucking great game and I really enjoyed the story and figuring out what lead to the events leading up to the game. The puzzles were great, some were quite difficult, others were trivial but most hit the spot where it took a bit of messing around to work out what needed to be done. Really what holds this game together is the story, like Portal, a puzzle game needs a strong story to make it compelling. The Talos Principle also delves a little bit further into philosophy than other games. I would recommend this only if you enjoy reading and piecing together a story rather than it being forced upon you.
I tried playing This War of Mine seems to be quite depressing and mostly a crafting / base camp making game which I don't really enjoy too much of. I like the pencil art style.
Normally I have a rule against buying games for over $10, but exceptions are made. This sale's exception was Sonic Generations -- which I already had on the PS3, but I have since sold both the PS3 and the game, and between sales there were many times I wish I'd had that game to replay. So, at %50 off, I got it. It's even more amazing than I remembered. I'm gonna try to %100 it.
Ori and the Blind Forest Holy shit game developers make more games with intros, tutorials, stories and art-styles like this. Whoever is in charge of the Microsoft Studios games is doing an amazing job. This games is easily better than much larger (big release) titles. The way the story, intro and tutorial melds from the intro through the first few stages is excellent.
Game of Thrones - Telltale Game Fun to play around in this universe, making the decisions in this game feels more impactful than The Walking Dead episodes. I really enjoyed having to play multiple roles. Still not a fan of quick time events.
Alien Isolation Tried playing this game on a small 13" screen laptop but this game really requires a bigger screen and nice headphones or surround speaker system to do it justice. Incredibly faithful to the Alien universe and really makes the player feel powerless in many situations. All your enemies are deadly. It feels a bit of a slow burn but I'll stick with it.
Comments
I love the looks from normal city commuters as they walk by, staring at dudes playing on their DS's. I, sadly, forgot to unpack mine.
As for Splatoon, preordered that digital copy. I'm mainly here for the 3 pack for it.
Just beat it last night (sans the vaporous Xen levels that will never exist at this rate)
It feels really fresh.
The problem with the game, if any, is that because it looks so good I think in my brain some features of modern shooters, but it's still very much old school Half Life. So like enemies are pretty smart, also stealth doesn't work on them much at all. As soon as the action starts, they KNOW where you are. Same with exploration: some things that in a modern game would DEFINITELY be some kind of secret place with a reward or at least a bonus or objective, are literally just an empty room because in the real building there might well be a building there so why not? In a few cases there's a Glock mag for your trouble.
I would love to see the HL expansions done up this way, but looks like those projects are going nowhere fast so it may be a race between Blue Shift remade and Half Life 3 proper.
It's an Economic Real-time Strategy game, based on competing for 13 different resources on Mars. The Goal is to buy out rival companies by buying all their stock up. You earn cash by gathering base resources (or buying them off the market) to make more advanced resources - which can all be used for buildings and HQ upgrades, - selling resources offworld, and manipulating the market in your favor through market tactics or direct Black Market attacks (EMPing a group of buildings, blowing up the resources being mined under a tile, or just outright blowing individual buildings up). It's pretty fast-paced, too; games typically take 20 minutes, maybe 30 if you're paying with 8 people.
It's early access atm, though, and the $40 price tag is pretty pricey for what it is. I'm having a ton of fun with it, though.
So now I'm playing a JRPG instead? Doesn't make sense but DQIX is more engaging. God knows if I'll get through it, but I'll keep chipping away 20 minutes at a time and see if I wind up completing it. I had a few hours on a plane to give me the jump start I needed.
On the 3DS free-to-play front, Pokemon Rumble World is officially bullshit and has almost no redeeming qualities. Pokemon Shuffle I'm much more warm on. It's still just another match-3 game, but it does not have a big "no more progress unless you pay $ or engage in the grind of all grinds" wall like Rumble World does.
When Nintendo shut-down wifi services for the original DS, a good chunk of DQIX content did go with it, but I don't know how much, in terms of hours. They had a daily sidequest download, as well as a shop that would rotate super-rare materials for the crafting service. Now, all of those quests are unobtainable, and it's incredibly hard to craft the highest-level stuff. There is also their primitive version of streetpassing, which unlocks entire dungeons.
It still seems like the main game is intact, but that 500 hour number is likely not so high anymore. My goal is to beat the main game, only do side stuff when I stumble into it, and move on.
Nintendo are the lame. They're a few mistakes away from being another Sega IMO.
What will happen to the DS library when the Nintendo NX comes around?
They know that their secret sauce, and their incredible stock of characters, gives them the chance to pull up out of any stretch of failure, even an entire generation's worth. The moment they start making short-sighted moves, though, their advantage evaporates.
I will probably get it sooner rather than later. I have $15 in expiring Toys R Us rewards and nothing to spend them on.
Also, this gets long, because chatting about it over a few beers with a mate through the evening gave me a fair bit of time to hammer out my thoughts. Also I'm just long winded, deal with it I guess.
But, frankly...It's pretty abysmal.
It delivers violence, but it's hardly shocking or transgressive in doing so. The execution cutscenes are mostly pretty milquetoast, compared to what I was expecting from the hype. I'm sorry, Hatred, but I've been playing games since I was knee-high - when it comes to depicting violence to shock, gold star for trying, but you need to put in a little more effort.
I could very easily put this game down, go pick up mortal combat, and go punch someone in the crotch so hard it throws them into the air, while getting a gory, full-colour close-up x-ray of their testicles exploding on your knuckles, before giving them a ground-and-pound that rips off their face as blood, chunks of flesh and bone fly about with every hit. And you want to shock me with stabbing a guy a bunch, throat-slitting that would pass in an M15 rated game, stomping on his head, or shoot him a few times? You'll have to work harder than that, kiddo.
Especially if you're going to show me the same shit a thousand times, it just gets boring, something I have to wait through so I can continue with actual gameplay.
I would say it's difficult, but that implies intention - it's not difficult, it's just fucking broken. Enemies from offscreen with hard-to-spot tracers on screen for an eyeblink just invisibly destroying you, getting stuck on objects, less than responsive controls, getting stuck on the world geometry, random invisible barriers, and bugs-a-plenty. It's not difficult - it's just poorly made. It would be frustrating, if the AI wasn't completely, laughably stupid.
And worse than all that - it's boring. The Gameplay is utterly fucking boring. The shooting feels weightless and unsatisfying, the enemies don't really feel like a legitimate threat(at least, so much as the game's poor design), the aiming is finicky, movement is passable at a charitable best, and it's mindless repetition from start to finish. If it wasn't for all the carry-on from the developers, I'd have assumed it was some sort of meta-commentary about crappy games and the people that force themselves to play them for one reason or another. Unfortunately it's not, it's just shit. To not be entirely negative, some of the physics gubbins are pretty cool(when they work), and some of the ideas could be good, with a little spit and polish.
Sound is pretty alright, decent enough ambient sounds, weapons sound a little tinny and hollow, not the worst, but still not particularly satisfying. The voice acting is surprisingly decent compared to the quality of the rest of the game, but not great.
Mumbles Growlypants, though, is hilarious - not intentionally, it's like all of his dialog was written by an edgy teenager fed a steady diet of really bad 90s comics and "My Immortal" style fanfiction.
Except, they don't have the balls to do anything truly offensive, so they just mumble about how Stacey at school is a cunt, but not too loud just in case someone hears them, and feeling very pleased with themselves because they said "cunt" and they know that's like the nuclear option of swears. Before writing some bad teenage poetry about how sad and angry they are, and the world sucks, and they just wish everyone would like just totally die.
I've honestly seen better writing in Uwe Boll movies. In fact, I'd rather watch an Uwe boll movie than play this game. Fuck it, I'd rather be IN an Uwe Boll movie for free, than play this game any more.
I'll give Mumbles some credit, though, he still managed to inject more character and charm into it than Cassie Cage from Mortal Combat. Thoroughly average performance from Ashley Burch there, who sounded like she'd rather be getting a root canal, and seemed to only have two emotions, "none", and "none, but louder." But that's beside the point.
Graphics are actually not atrocious, when it's lit up and the colour bleeds in, and explosions are really quite nice. But man, that black and white filter - it just makes everything kind of bleed together into a mass of grey. Sure, it makes the colours pop out nicely, but it also makes your character, enemies, objects, everything just blend together into a bland, indistinguishable mess. Admittedly, this is less of a problem in some environments than others, but I did find myself randomly firing my weapon at times just to find my character from the muzzle flare. In short, they range from "present" to "Pretty alright", when you can see them, but still not so good.
This should tell you something - I'm praising competence. That's how bad this game is - to find something positive to say, I have to give praise because they reached what should be a minimum standard.
Short list of everything else - Bland environments, weak level design, bland weapons, bland everything. It's so thoroughly boring that it's not even worth elaborating on.
To boil it down - Hatred is just bad, in almost every way, from every angle, and at any particular point, and at any conceivable resolution. It's just a festival of boredom and incompetence that people will buy because it's controversial and "edgy", not because it has any worth, then try very hard to convince themselves they didn't waste their money.
There are a few spots of competency and almost cleverness, but they're few, far between and I suspect only seem competent and almost clever because of the aggressively mediocre blandness that surrounds them.
It doesn't even achieve what it set out to achieve, which according to the developer is a response to trends in gaming about political correctness, politeness, vivid color, and games as art. It makes no commentary on political correctness, nor is it particularly politically incorrect. It's just violent, to no end or purpose, which isn't interesting or particularly offensive. Same goes for politeness - it's not really particularly commenting or responding to politeness, it just mutters cunt a few times and looks very pleased with itself. Ditto colour(Actually, in a stroke of irony, I kind of like their sparing use of vivid colour, it could have been a brilliant aesthetic if it wasn't so poorly done) and games as art.
Maybe, if it was a meta-commentary on how idiots will buy goddamned near anything if you pander hard enough in your marketing, I'd believe it. But it's not. That's the saddest thing - this was a genuine effort, and someone's standards are so low that they're proud enough of it to release it to the world for actual money.
Worst of all, it's not a hot mess. A Hot mess can be interesting, or inadvertently fun by breaking in entertaining ways, or just being so bad it's good. As a whole, the nicest thing I can say about it is that as a first outing from a new developer, it definitely is a thing that exists. This is just a bland, incompetent cash grab made to sucker chumps out of their coin by pretending to hit hot-button issues and then failing, and wouldn't be worth it if you got it for free.
If you own it, and you didn't - my sincerest sympathies.
So I googled how many levels Alto's Adventure has. Turns out.... 60 levels in total! Cool.
This game is, by far, the best endless runner I've played. It also has one of the best ever concepts of levels and progressing through them. Each level has three tasks to complete. You'll have completed many of them in other runs on other levels previously, but those don't count. You know you can do them though. And other levels are things you've not tried before, or didn't even know were possible, so you are encouraged to try new tricks and improve different stats.
That said, those last three tasks on level 60 are pretty crazy.
Best one I've seen so far.
EDIT: NNID is Ikatono if anyone wants to add me.
Really what holds this game together is the story, like Portal, a puzzle game needs a strong story to make it compelling. The Talos Principle also delves a little bit further into philosophy than other games.
I would recommend this only if you enjoy reading and piecing together a story rather than it being forced upon you.
I tried playing This War of Mine seems to be quite depressing and mostly a crafting / base camp making game which I don't really enjoy too much of. I like the pencil art style.
Holy shit game developers make more games with intros, tutorials, stories and art-styles like this.
Whoever is in charge of the Microsoft Studios games is doing an amazing job.
This games is easily better than much larger (big release) titles.
The way the story, intro and tutorial melds from the intro through the first few stages is excellent.
Game of Thrones - Telltale Game
Fun to play around in this universe, making the decisions in this game feels more impactful than The Walking Dead episodes. I really enjoyed having to play multiple roles. Still not a fan of quick time events.
Alien Isolation
Tried playing this game on a small 13" screen laptop but this game really requires a bigger screen and nice headphones or surround speaker system to do it justice. Incredibly faithful to the Alien universe and really makes the player feel powerless in many situations. All your enemies are deadly. It feels a bit of a slow burn but I'll stick with it.