Duck and Cover

I'd put it somewhere murkily indistinct between The One True Deus Ex and Deus Ex - Sadly Not Invisible. With so many aspects of the current as of mid last year build simply absent or not functioning, it's too early to be certain. Obviously.

Alfalfa Protocol would have been a far better experience if they'd chopped out all the punchyshooty and instead had the entire thing be conversation/mind games/brinkmanship/espionage/smugness, IMO. The reactivity of the characters and narrative is, frankly, superb. It's everything in between that's underwhelming.

So, somewhere between Altrincham and Alpha Centauri. Fair enough.

Blargh wrote:Alfalfa Protocol would have been a far better experience if they'd chopped out all the punchyshooty and instead had the entire thing be conversation/mind games/brinkmanship/espionage/smugness, IMO.

Floor 13 + Masq? Or maybe just Masq, I never did manage to finish the fucker. Right you are though, any obsidianite person reading? Hello?


And since Obsidian's on the table, I'll confess to having played about 15 seconds of Dungeon Siege 3. Not much to say but what there IS to say is bad. Bad fixed 16x9 ratio. Bad 2 fixed zoom settings and nothing inbetween. Bad, no, atrocious controls. Runs well on old hardware tho.

My crapdar pinged as soon as I saw Dungeon Seige 3. I'm glad you've validated my pre-existing bias that I gathered using no factual information.

Honestly, I doubted even Obsidian could redeem Dungeon Siege. Mildly disappointing, regardless.

Concrete Banjo wrote:Altrincham

Ahahaha.

Alternative Histrionique wrote:Floor 13 + Masq

Sounds ducky.

Blargh wrote:Honestly, I doubted even Obsidian could redeem Dungeon Siege.

It's not even worth questioning. Too X-treme!

And you know, you have a glimmer of hope for Obsidian, you want them to succeed, but they've pigeonholed themselves as doing everybody else's sloppy seconds now. And they do a half-baked job of it as well.

NWN2, KOTOR2, FO3 2, now this... this...

You can tack on 15 more and make it the 15 final minutes that I'll be playing of Dungeon Siege 3.

First, the positive.
Art direction. DS is probably the blandest, most uninteresting game world and it's got a sort of personality now. It's still generic but it looks pretty damn good. Voice acting. All 3 characters I heard speak did so well and convincingly. No Alfafa but then I didn't get enough into it.

The negative.
Graphics. It looks good when in battle, but the game has pretensions to ARPG of the DA2/Witcher sort with 1 on 1 conversations every two gameplay minutes which make use of close up shots, revealing character models that wouldn't look good 10 years ago.
PC port. Yeah I knew it was multiplat going in, I didn't however expect to play a straight 360 port. I've mentioned the culprits already (2 cameras, forced widescreen, controls) and you can add menus, character leveling and loot to the bin. But the controls take the fucking cake. Diablo hit it the first time, DS2 hit it the last time round. Left click to walk, fight and interact and right click to rotate camera. That's it. DS3 however manages the laudable in completely fucking this up by making you attack with LMB (sort of like a flash shooter, point your cursor and click and the char'll fire in that direction), RMB to walk (so you'd better be prepared to walk where you're aiming to shoot and shoot where you're aiming to walk) A and D to rotate camera, W and S to walk forward/backward with much less precision than RMB, and the cherries on top of the cake, buttons E to interact (yes, instead of clicking on loot to pick it up, now you have to stand ON it so its name pops up and then press E to grab it) and motherfucking SPACE to BLOCK ATTACKS(?!?!?) Yes, you read that right. Apparently it's all the rage in dungeon crawlers nowadays. Nevermind that these usually rely on getting you assaulted by mobs to give you some sense of intensity AND that you have a party of your own, now you're expected to block attacks. Oh but don't mind the party, apparently you can't control them so that's sorted.

So Dungeon Siege 3 is a tranny of a game. Caught between the success (?) of Bioware's soap for teens and WoW's repetition for retards, with no genuine clue of what it wants to be. Add to that that the game's apparently short (heard 8-16 hours) and you got a good recipe for a serious C-list game of the year contender.

I'm not one to become a fan of anything or anyone whose job it is to sell me something, preferably if it cost them nothing to make and me a lot of money to pay for it, least of all game companies. However, if I was ever a fan of an unbankrupt one, that one'd be Obsidian. For all their "sloppy seconds" there's a lot of love for their craft, probably the best writing in games and NWN2, KOTOR2 and FONV all feel like white glove slaps in the face of their older, stronger, wealthier and severely overrated peers. These peers resent them, critics hate them, they have no fanbase and they have links to the people who made Fallout. They're likeable, at least to me, and I want them to succeed.

Dungeon Siege 3 is, however, insultingly bad. It's not insultingly bad because it is practically unplayable in PC form, no. It's insultingly bad because it manages the very, VERY hard feat of not even being a decent sequel to something as drab, unremarkable and inconsequential as Dungeon Siege 2.

And if you want to tell it gets better later, go hang yourself. Sure it hurts in the first 10 seconds, but it gets better later. And you supposedly orgasm too.

But, not to leave on a down note, here's the only decent thing about that arse-kissing hype-fest for nerd-tards they call E3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkFaZrvu8jw
I guess they still haven't fixed the retarded AI.

Jamestown: The Lost Colony

Perfect, charming little shmup. Sure it's got faults, the worst of which the small main campaign, (although you do get lots of small challenge levels) but for an indie bullet hell, it hardly gets any better than this.

And the soundtrack is well worth even twice the price. Seriously, we're talking better than AAA soundtrack on an indie game. Check it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCeBjTpF7ac
I'll eat someone's hat if Skyrim's theme manages to be half as impressive.

i was thinking about getting civ 4 but i played the first one a while a while ago and didnt like much about it. id like a game like rome: total war but more diplomacy and shit and more research.

id like to play more games probably. i have about 5 xbox games and the last pc game i got was either stalker or hitman 3, neither of which i finished. what do games look like now? can you smell them? can they dispense burgers through your cd tray? is there a game where i can drive a car around google earth?

BUT HAVE YOU FUCKED A SHE-ELF

Am I the only raging cunt here who could not fucking stand Witcher 2 combat?
Triss is a babe though.

TIME TRAVELLING POSTAGE

I AM FAIRLY CERTAIN THAT THE FAT WOMEN ARE DYKES SORRY TO BE THE BEARER OF DISAPPOINTMENT

Game haven't gotten much prettier, witcher 2 is probably the best looking I've seen in awhile but even then it's not much.

Anyways still playing witcher 2 on and off, I just banged a girl all in in it.

Stalagmite wrote:Am I the only raging cunt here who could not fucking stand Witcher 2 combat?

No. It's an unresponsive mess. Targetting is shit, multiple enemies is shit, blocking is shit, rolling everywhere is grating and I'll be damned if it doesn't fucking lag. And people thought Witcher 1 combat was bad, at least I could hit whatever was in front of me.

I really enjoyed Witcher 1 combat actually. It worked. The 'hate' there just seems like one of those bandwagon type of deals that any idiot would follow if it made them look part of the fucking hip gamer crowd. If you genuinely hated it, well, than your taste is worse than the taste of my ballsack (which you may in turn lick repeatedly).

I hate modern day gaming gonnamakeathreadaboutit

Stalagmite wrote:I hate modern day gaming gonnamakeathreadaboutit

Hahaha. A cunt indeed.

With the massive disappointment of DNF and everything else released in the last 10 years, I stumbled upon this bit of awesome called WGRealms. A bunch of these guys made a crazy combination of Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen, Heretic, Doom, and mixed in new weapons, powerups, weird magic powers and summoning stuff. Also the levels are the size of entire Duke3D episodes.

http://www.moddb.com/games/wgrealms-2

You don't need anything to play. Just shut up, download, unzip and double click the eduke32 launcher to play the fucking thing. If you don't like it then you're an asshole.

The Resident Evil remake on the Gamecube and 4 on the Wii. I found them on sale at a gamestop a while back. I forgot how fun the first one was.

Alice is Still Batshit isn't as horrible as I thought it would be. Even though by existing it entirely disregards the entire fucking point of the narrative of the original. Not a patch on Psychonauts, though. This is relevant because Psychonauts was specifically cited in preview hype-blather that I have deliberately misplaced as a MAJOR INSPIRATION for the Chinese sweatshop studio that created this MARVEL OF MODERN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.

Notables :

REALTIME HAIR PHYSICS AND SO MANY DRESSES YOU WILL FEEL LIKE A PRETTY PRETTY PRINCESS
Funky art/character/world design.
Platforming.
Superior platforming when compared to the original.

. . .

Shouldn't be notables:

Invisible walls. Everywhere.
Occasionally underwhelming level design.
Monotonous combat.
Inferior soundtrack to the original.
Platforming.
Mostly voice acting.
Inductee to the Top Seven most anticlimactic endings in vidya gaemz ever.

Gosh am I glad I wasn't waiting with my anticipation giddily baited for TEN YEARS. That would have been awful.