Game you're playing. How far you are.

[SenisterDenister]

More like everyone at Gearbox kept acting like they had to so they wouldn't have to work on the actual game.

[Jeff]

just finished Hotline Miami (150% completion rate), best game of 1998 most def. super bueno soundtrack as well.

[Tofu Man]

SurCRYsing amount of meh from over on CRYville. So, how's numero 3? Does anyone even <strike>CRY</strike> care anymore?

Me, I's got Brütªl Dõôm. Cathartic.

[Kashluk]

Chewed through Telltale Games' The Walking Dead episodes 1-5, the so called "season 1".

Thumbs up: nice story, believable characters (especially Clementine, awesome child character), relatable situations / emotional connection to the game world.

Thumbs down: some stupid puzzles, and NO YOUR CHOICES DON'T MATTER in the long run - it's just an illusion, although at some points a pretty good one.

[SenisterDenister]

I'm hoping Telltale will learn from their mistakes as they're developing Season 2. I honestly think they were caught off guard with how popular it was, so they're much more prone to scrutiny since they've been cast into the public eye.

[Tofu Man]

Unless my memory is tricking me, I recall someone else on here (Blargh?) mentioning this Teleglitch game. A RPS article got me to try it and it's pretty fucking good. Hotline Miami meets 8-bit meets Doom meets Serious Sam meets Another World. No-nonsense gfx, tight controls, Miamiesque difficulty curve and the sfx! Guns don't go pop, they go "BLAM, bitch"! Bombs go "BO-motherfucking-OOOOOM!" Amazing what you can do with sound when you're not concerned with those headset-wearing twats. Sadly, rien de musique. And it's begging for some, too. I'm using this to plug the hole.

[rad resistance]

just finished Hotline Miami (150% completion rate), best game of 1998 most def. super bueno soundtrack as well.

Yeah the soundtrack was great! Best game soundtrack i've heard.

[Blargh]

Catching up on Borderlands 2 DLC . . . Phoned in would be an adequate summary. Gameplay is the same hoary old shite, the boss fights are awful, plentiful enemy reskins, the voicework and (invariably puerile) writing ranges from terrible to exceptional (MR. TORGUE is the standout, IMO), some decent music and art/world design. Loot is, naturally, identical, in that the drop rates for higher tier gear are miserable, and once you do manage to find something noteworthy it's approximately five to ten minutes away from being outclassed by random green garbage.

Oh, and 1-go-per-day 'raid bosses'. Between this and Gearbox's (what the fuck didn't go wrong with Colonial Marines, honestly) vigilant stance against gold key exploits, I can only conclude that they are staunch anti-funnists. CE, all hail.

Driftmoon is out. Had a lot of fun with Notrium quite a few years ago. Will probably snag it via GoG.

Also, 99 Levels to Hell, essentially a hybrid of Spelunky and 'metroid-vanias'. It's entertaining, if somewhat derivative.

After 20 years, UnReal World is now free. Sure am glad to not have bothered with one of those €40 lifetime licenses ! Still, it's probably (one of) the best way(s) to experience a bear or lynx teleporting into your log cabin and chewing your face off in the night. Also, starvation, frostbite, cannibalism, food poisoning and gangrene (?). Good times.

mistakes

The most egregious of which, that I hope they address : the complete absence of player agency.

Oh but it's how you react to the characters and circumstances . . .

What a load of unmitigated bollocks.

Teleglitch

It is a rather interesting experience (which I haven't mentioned here). Even tense, at times.

[Blargh]

hey guys so

so

it turns out that there are a heap of twine if games being written

some of them are kind of weird

[Tofu Man]

wat

[Tofu Man]

So, anyone try Torture Raider yet?

[Blargh]

Yes, (with the caveat that I'm only a couple of hours in, so far) the 'TressFX' almost melted my GPU.

PROPRIETRY RENDERING

Graphical factionalism aside, I find the usual cutscene/gameplay player character dichotomy to be in turn amusing/perplexing. Specifically, the way in which Lara seems to collect an astounding variety of horrible injuries whenever the game takes control away, yet is essentially untroubled by the numerous, untreated, burns, sprains, fractures, perforations, PTSD and internal bleeding once the interactive wolf arrowing returns. Cutscene Induced Extreme Clumsiness/Misfortune, though I'm sure the more familiar Cutscene Induced Idiocy will make a triumphant return. Eventually.

Characters and narrative seem, so far, thoroughly boilerplate. Suspected blatant foreshadowing of rampant treachery in the personage of Whitman. Gameplay is reminiscent of a less polished Uncharted. Better arrowplay, though that wouldn't be difficult. Voice acting is underwhelmingly average.

Will probably post a more refined impression later. Maybe.

Anyone want to take a bet on the time to youtube-deathreel-montage-for-purposes-of-degenerate-fuckhead-titillation ? I jest, it's almost certainly already online.

[Mad Max RW]

"with the caveat"

Why is this phrase being used so goddamn much on almost every fucking forum lately?

[Blargh]

I imagine it has something to do with receiving money whenever someone complains about its use.

Somehow, I completely forgot to mention the baffling decision to have QTEs with symbols representing the keys. Why yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see Lara's head crushed beneath a massive rock three times. A thrilling innovation.

[Tofu Man]

What a coincidence, I was just pondering that if the Romans had invented the internet, maybe caveat emptor would've meant "downloader, beware" instead. Or something along the lines of "let Blargh answer your fucking question before you get it, moron". But alas, the flesh is weak (hue) and thus I caved (huehue) and got it anyway.

Status report: 20 minutes in. I've alternated pressing right and left; I've developed tendinitis whilst listening to Lara moaning very loudly (and as a result, I'm pretty sure my neighbour now thinks I enjoy some manner of extreme porn); I've context-pressed F to kick the face of a guy that was trying to help (said guy is now dead; I'm sure Lara won't lose any sleep over it if only for the fact that he was ugly and as Hollywood has thought us, ugly people don't count- it's their fault for not settling for roles as extras); I've jumped a grand total of 6 times (and missed none despite my horrible platforming skills, I'm sure the *actual* Tomb Raider is now rolling in its grave. Or tomb. (huehuehue)); I've "solved" a "puzzle" ("solved" as in, activated my entirely unexplained Deus Ex pisswasser augment to make shit that I can context-active glow (or tinkle); "puzzle" as in, it puzzles me that they actually pay people to come up with this); and finally, lit a fire that was unexplainably already lit with a match from a big box that had MATCHES written on it in 80 font. You know what, wait, I didn't do that last one, a cutscene did it for me. All this took me about 6 minutes. The rest of it was spent watching cutscenes, watching Lara move without me pressing any buttons and fighting the urge to headbutt the keyboard.

Prognosis: Reserved. With a strong tendency towards "that last one with the tingling checkpoints every 5 steps was really great, in hindsight".
Eh. I'll try to muster some strength to play an additional 20 minutes but I reckon it'll be hard. On the plus side, I can leave it installed for whenever my future self with the mid-life crisis develops a taste for S&M. S, because death animations; M, because "gameplay".

[Blargh]

I maintain that mandatory gameplay tutorials will always be terrible. If only for assuming that each and every player is a contemptible cretin. And yes, the puzzles are poor. I fear that I'm beginning to arrive at the conclusion that the fellow who wanted to help actually wasn't trying to help Lara, but instead, the player, by convincing them (through opaque controls and repeated QTEs) to stop playing before it was Too Late.

Apparently Lara Croft is a preternaturally gifted fletcher/gunsmith. Case in point - she recently assembled a functional muzzle break for some dodgy WW2 era carbine out of (an abstraction of) fucking wolf bones and Edo period jewelry.

As I anticipated, the cutscene idiocy has arrived - most flagrant instance of script mandated paralysis thus far lead to a certain pilot having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day culminating in being run through with a machete (yes, I know) while Lara stood a few metres away, slack jawed, glassy eyed, when, if the player had been in control, a non-consensual cranial sky light would have been quickly and efficiently rendered unto said machete wielding goon.

I'm wearily confident that the co-pilot will meet a similarly :picard: fate.

Oh, spoilers.

In The Future - more words !

[Mad Max RW]

I imagine it has something to do with receiving money whenever someone complains about its use.
:

I believe it.

Anyway, last week I finally played the Chronicles of Riddick game and enjoyed it. Very nice big open level design, melee combat was good, shooting was OK, voice acting was very good, and the story was good enough to keep my attention. They did a great job at mixing things up to avoid repetition. I went into the game not knowing anything about the exo-suit/mech areas or Michael Rooker's involvement and I was pleasantly surprised. The graphics are very nice, though the Doom 3-like hard shadows is showing its age. One thing that surprised me the most is how well they handled the tutorial levels for the base game and the Dark Athena expansion. Very clever.

Right now I'm playing Waking Mars and loving it. You're an astronaut on Mars exploring a massive cave system for life and stuff. To open up passages you have to awaken areas by seeding the fertile spots with different animal/plant life. It's fun entering a large seemingly dead area then 15 minutes later it's filled with crazy shit you planted and is self-sustainingf. The funky rock crab things are the best. Voice acting is sometimes dopey. I still recommend it.

[Blargh]

TCoR - EfBB/AoDA is easily the best film inspired game I have experienced. Lovely visceral first person melee system, too. And engaging stealth !

Am looking forward to trying Waking Mars, it certainly looks as though it will be interesting.

Ahahaha, GoG has it's first stand alone DLC sale up (you can even buy it for yourself without owning the base game), for Omerta - City of Gangsters, no less : a character portrait, a weapon, and a (doubtlessly small) map. For $5. 'The greatest con of all time', a claim as bold as it is fatuous. Fucking Kalypso . . .

But I forgive them (GoG, that is), because they now have Blade of Darkness. Essentially a glorious proto Dark Souls/Die by the Sword hybrid.

But back to the travails of Croft - please to be indulging an exercise in visualisation : You've snuck up on a large (20+) group of unhinged, murderous cultists, amongst them is their leader, the one thing setting them above a bloodthirsty, directionless mob - they're about to incinerate a Dear Friend of yours ; you only have a few moments before Dear Friend becomes Dear Ashes, which weapon do you use to implement a rescue :

A recurve bow (with standard and incendiary arrows).
A pump action shotgun.
A pistol.
An assault rifle.

The bow ? With the arrows that aren't burning ? Correct ! Well done. You may continue to the awkward as fuck lose-your-weapons-and-jump-in-a-pool-of-liquified-corpses section. Don't worry, it will wash out.

And shortly before that there's the hostage impasse with Grim, Lara had plenty of time to kill the third mook (even with her bloody bow), but instead she stands and observes Grim barrel over the edge to his completely needless (yet reasonably metal) death.

BUT

BUT THE MELODRAMA

Compounding this, as there is no letterboxing, the game is awfully ambiguous concerning whether the player or the game is in control at any given moment.

Further, it suffers from an issue which was quite prevalent in Deus Ex - Human Revolution and Alpha Protocol, namely that while there are many completely optional tidbits of information for the player to hunt down and collect, the player avatar remains completely ignorant of details that would be known to them as a result : Jensen and the significance of his DNA, Thorton and a whole fucking heap of different plot threads (such as not even having the option to confront Mina about her being an NSA mole), and Lara and the exact reason the cultists are so interested in Sam. For the last, it's irrelevant that Lara firmly holds to her belief that the supernatural has no basis in reality, as the cultists clearly do believe. It doesn't matter that they might all be delusional, only what they do in the name of their convictions. Cue late game profoundly stupid hit-you-over-the-head-with-it 'epiphanies'. It seems extremely lazy to not have any flags in place to account for any additional information the player might have come by at that (or other) point(s). Doubt it would be that difficult for the AAA studios, either.

At least they (seem to) have dodged the 'a Nazi expedition built a weather control device and it's still functional' bullet. Nazis are a cancer on the writing of the industry.

Oh, and I was right about the poor, poor co-pilot. Maybe I shouldn't have been hunting down those GPS units . . .

[Tofu Man]

Unsurprisingly, the game gets a lot better after that opening debacle. For a second there, it even manages to actually look like a game. But then, like clockwork, it wrestles control out of the player's hand, slaps you on the wrist for trying to play it and leaves you worse off than you were 20 seconds ago. And this happens every fucking minute. Consider this sequence:

GET TO THE TOP OF THE RADIO ANTENNA!
-You zipline to the antenna
-cutscene
-you walk 3 steps towards the ladder
-cutscene
-you climb halfway up the ladder
-cutscene (in which, sure enough, the bottom half of the ladder breaks away)
-you finish climbing the ladder
-you take 3 steps towards the second ladder
-you climb 2 steps
-cutscene
-you finish climbing the ladder
-cutscene (in which Lara mounts the 3rd and final ladder)
-you climb 3 steps
-cutscene (to show you half the ladder is missing)
-QTE TIME!
-cutscene (Lara finishes climbing on her own)
-more cutscene
-TUNE THE RADIO! (yes, somehow I can't be trusted to climb 3 sets of ladders unattended but am supposed to tune the fucking radio myself by pressing left or right)
-cutscene (-I'm Lara! HALP! -Oh, hai! We heard your ship's distress signal but we can't find it (or the FUCKING ISLAND it ran aground into) even though GPS!! Signal us! -OK!)
(after this you inexplicably find yourself back down 2 sets of ladders, one of which was almost entirely broken off; but never you mind)

SEND A SIGNAL!
-jump up and coveniently zip out of the radio tower and straight into 2 fuel tanks and a shack
-find a striker in shack, turn a knob and light the fuel on fire
-cutscene (in which -get this- A FUCKING PLANE (yes, the same that needed a signal 1 minute ago) CRASHES ON TOP OF YOU; somehow it ends with Lara falling down the side of a mountain)
-NOW PRESS LEFT AND RIGHT TO DODGE THE DOZENS OF INEXPLICABLY PLACED VIETCONG LOG TRAPS! FUN TIEMS!

So yeah, all that for fucking naught. Somehow 2 guys off the plane manage to survive the crash only so they both die right in front of you, in cutscenes. One of them you could've saved if the game didn't decide for you that, once again, Lara was to remain perfectly still and not interfere whilst the crazy knives a hapless friend even though she is armed with 1) A bow; 2) An axe; 3) A gun; 4) A sub-machine gun; and is standing 5 feet away. Help him, you say?

gameplay tutorials

Hahaha. You know what's funny? It teaching you (5 or 6 hours into the game) to make a rope bridge. And then getting you to do it over and over and over... because if it's worth learning, it's worth doing 50 times in a fucking row.

Questions, so many questions... How is this playable with only one hand? (and it is, combat, movement... just try it) Why is that sequence with the mountainside cabins falling from Might & Magic: Dark something (the one from the Arkane of Skyrim fame) cut & pasted in its entirety? How did this limping fucker get all the way up here after he guilt tripped an 18 year old girl to fight through a horde of lunatics in order to climb the mountain and send the SOS?? Why oh why does Lara get to tell the player (I shit you not) "I can't do that here" when I once pressed the button to duck??? Why oh why the need for fucking japanese monsters to top off an already inscrutable plot?

Most importantly, though, anyone willing to turn off my cryogenic tube once games stop being (barely) interactive, aggravating and laughably over the top to the point of madness- movies and eventually go back to being games again?

[Blargh]

I like (and by like I mean do not like) the way in which they decided to mark the anchor points for rope arrowing. Very thoughtful of the denizens of Yamatai (or whoever) to wrap everything in remarkably durable rope, and to paint all the climbables white.

The optional tombs felt like an afterthought. Too short, too simplistic, an absence of horrible traps. And somehow the cultists had always arrived before, even the areas that were inaccessible, prior to Lara collecting the latest gadget du jour.

The ending sequence is a vivid cavalcade of retardation. Whitman turns up at the beach encampment, claiming a narrow escape from the cultists, Lara is rightfully suspicious, Reyes goes all NO FIGHTING ON MY WATCH - literally no reaction to trying to pop his head off with the shotgun - which, naturally, leads to Lara stalking off sulking and Whitman assisting in the kidnapping of Sam later on.

Afterward, when heading toward the monastry to crash the ritual, Lara just happens to run across Whitman and Mathias escorting Sam - they are unaware of her presence, she has a selection of nasty weapons, so, naturally, she does nothing.

I concede that it would be extremely anti-climactic for Lara to simply shoot them both and then guide Sam back down the mountain, so instead it is extremely contrived, extremely dumb.

It was quite amusing to massacre the vaunted Oni with modern firearms, their armour crumbling away like wet cake.

Decent graphics and art design, some striking (albeit linear) set pieces too.

That's about it.

I'll be very surprised if the DLC is anything but multiplayer content.