Video Games – The Next Level

Topic

What are you playing?

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Wow. That doesn’t look good. Is it real? I can’t believe a console could produce smoke like that.

But if so, then I’m glad I went with the next-gen console that doesn’t explode in your living room.

Looking up the stories it indeed appears that these videos may be faked and all may not be as it seems. Hmmmmm.

how to get your Xbox Series X to blow up:

1) buy a vape
2) blow vape into bottom of Xbox
3) feel proud of the smoke you created
4) post to Twitter and profit

video via @XboxStudio 👇pic.twitter.com/RxLI62uxmg

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) November 11, 2020

Yep, it’s utter shite.

There seems to be a few of these doing the rounds from “fans” of the other side, such is their desire for “their” console to “win” that they’ll make up utter crap about the other console.

Sorry guys for being duped by fake news it looked to be reliable sources and I’ve seen it happen with similar electrical devices (PCs and my own satellite TV box).

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Dave, Ben

[Martin Smith]

The ping pong feature is legit though. Hopefully.

Can't believe this actually works!!

The secret Xbox Series X ping pong ball feature is real! pic.twitter.com/L4X8d3rFIz

— TmarTn (@TmarTn) November 11, 2020

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Martin Smith.

An exciting parcel arrived today, but I don’t know, it feels like there’s one key ingredient missing here.

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Ben, Todd

I’m playing Miles Morales on the PS4 – no point me upgrading to a PS5 because I’ve hardly used the PS4 since the original Spider-man game. Loving it so far – it’s very much more of the same, but Miles definitely has his own character, even down to the gangly way he web-swings. His finishing moves seem to have more variety too. This time the game is set around Christmas, so there’s snow on the ground, and New York looks much more lived in.

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Andrew, Ben, Dave

Good to hear. I won’t get to play it until Christmas as we’re saving the PS5 for then, but everything I’ve seen of it looks great.

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Ben

The Spidey game is what prompted me to get the PS4 so I’ll very likely grab the new game (even though I haven’t revisited the original since finishing it).

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Dave

I’ve been playing Mario’s Super Picross for the SNES lately. Well, for the Super Famicom, really. It’s Japanese, but there’s not much language involved. Once you know the rules of Picross (or nonograms as they’re also called), it’s largely irrelevant. Or so I thought. For each puzzle, you’re making a picture and often they’re easily recognisable – dog, clock, bank robber – but for others they’re just too obscure or abstract to get and I have to get out my phone and open Google Translate to work out what it’s meant to be. For one of the early ones I did, the picture was just a spiral. Maybe like an @ symbol, but not quite. I got Google Translate out and it just gave me a name in Japanese. So helpful. So I Lycosed that and it turns out to be some kind of Japanese mosquito repellent that’s sold in coils.   o maybe block picture puzzles aren’t quite the universal language I thought.

Beyond that, it’s a great game. Pretty simple really – there’s not much in the way of bells and whistles to add for a Picross game frankly. There are two types of puzzles: Mario’s ones time you with a countdown from 30 minutes or so (which is pretty generous) and you get a time penalty if you make a wrong move. Wario’s puzzles are slightly harder and count up from 0, with no penalty for incorrectly marking a panel (the flip-side to that being no way of knowing if you’ve made a mistake until you realise it yourself). The Wario mode is supposed to be the more challenging one, but I think I prefer it, not having the penalty for a stray mishit or mistake.

Martin Smith wrote:

The first season of Telltale’s Sam & Max is being remastered.

https://skunkapegames.com/samandmax/faq/

(There’s a video on another page of that site).

I don’t remember the original looking so rough, but it has been a while. I’d love to see a remastered version of the war song.

Very interested in this. Played and love the first two seasons on Xbox 360 and hoping to finally get a chance to play the third (which was only on PS3) of the remaster all of them.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, 25 hours in:

I’ve just finished the Kingmaker arc plus some settlement stuff and the game’s starting to fall apart badly.

The chase after Lady Whoever was weak, as was it’s resolution. The Leofrith boss fight only emphasised all the flaws of the combat / stamina system and the game’s refusal to explain it’s systems. Oh, it’s blue rune? Wait, what the hell does that mean? It devolved very quickly into dodge-hit-dodge-wait for stamina to rechage- repeat. Woefully unsatisfying and I made damn sure to kill him for it. And can the whole conversation-in-middle-of-boss-fight idea please die? It’s a pain in the arse to be having to read/listen to dialogue while in mid-fight.

They’ve changed stealth gretly but I’m not a fan of what they’ve done.  It sounds counter-intuitive to say it but by seeing everything in the preceding duo I was actually encouraged to be more stealthy because I could actually be so. By inhibiting that to the degree they’ve done here, they have pointed me away from stealth because I can’t see where everyone is but everyone has super eyesight and can see me. That and I hate L3 / R3 controls on general principle, they are the least reliable and most awful buttons to use and too many game designers love them.

Another element of the preceding games that encouraged me to be stealthy was having a finite number of enemies in each location but in the fortresses here? There is an infinite goon supply, you can’t do much in the way of stealth when the game is warping in new enemies. One really weird case was I took Tamworth, but after doing so? There’s still all these enemies in my fortress! So I start cleaning them out and that’s when I found that it cannot be done, it will just keep generating enemies – likely to “encourage” stealth, but it’s the crudest, most blunt force mechanic going. It wasn’t limited to fortresses either, took out a camp in a deserted forest – the amount of enemies that then showed up, out of nowhere, broke the game. It was incredibly dumb – within minutes there were 20-30 corpses, that whole forest area? Going to be very well fertilised!

The location puzzles, for treasure or curses? You hit Odin’s Sight, but that then obscures what you need to hit – that tiny, tiny, fractional, hard-to-see point that only goes red once you’re on it exactly with a bow. Talking of which, even full aim assist is a joke – the way it worked for the previous two? Enabled me to use and enjoy bows to a huge degree, now? Taken away and I use bows only when I have to. Back to its puzzles, the breakable walls can be very difficult to spot and there won’t be any way to break them to hand so the point is. Indicating what I can and can’t interact is pretty key but this game makes it much harder and it doesn’t work for me. Nor does the manual searching – not that that sin is limited to here, <i>Ghost of Tsuschima</i> loved it too and it was also crap there. I did try Fredrik’s tip, but then realised I was doing it right – all you get is a big, blue blob indicating general area for mission objective – I really want to BBQ that raven.

Combat is, I suppose just about functional covers it. You take on a Yeoman, you break their shield, you hit them, but you only get one hit before the shield is up – cue a boring repetition. The abilities? Seem far less compared to their predecessors and far harder to use. One that looked good, the arrow marking one, is timed – you have as long as your stamina bar lasts to mark targets. Problem is I don’t have that kind of fast, fine coordination so something that should have been cool no longer is because of a badly applied time limit. Do find them fiddly to use in open combat too. Previous game? Combining abilities with bows was brilliant but here both have been nerfed so scrap that. Also finding the execution sequences on gold enemies to be a pain as they mess up my camera angle and sense of direction.

The game’s two ace cards are: The world design is excellent and I enjoy looking around it. The difficulty can be rendered sufficiently easy that I can enjoy it despite all its blatant attempts to make it harder. These two cards are enough to keep me interested in a good game but I don’t expect, after 25 hours, for things to change. This is all the game has. There is a lot of content here true, but is it good content? Far less certain.

Skill trees? Kind of irritating it’s cloaked. Plus, even when you know what you want you have to get loads of stuff you don’t to get there and it’s hard to see the actual effect on gameplay of whatever extra points you get for whichever stat. Gear? Feels far, far too stripped back.

I can see the problems to which they thought they were supplying solutions, but I don’t think the solutions work. They collectively add up to a weaker game when compared to its predecessors and competitors.

All that said though, there are factors that only apply to me and without those the game may be far more enjoyable for others.

Quiet weekend so I played a fair bit of FC4 the last two nights – I’m not doing any side quests, just focusing on the missions needed to get to the end and have only 4 Outposts left to take, and then the big boss’s fortress. It’s still been a lot of fun (and I made some decisions this time that I haven’t in previous playthroughs that resulted in new missions), though I forgot how much I hate the trippy missions.

There’s one section in particular where you need to escape from a prison high in the mountains and there’s a demon-thing stalking the corridors – it’s really un-nerving; I feel anxious playing it – hate it! There’s also a whole series of missions where two British tourists in Kyrat repeatedly drug you against your will and you undertake psychedelic wild goose chases; hate those too! Luckily they aren’t necessary to progress the story.

 

I’ve only played Miles Morales for a few hours, but as I arrived at my next destination I got a message saying “are you sure you want to finish the story without spending more time powering up.” That was pretty damn brief! Don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of side quests to complete, bases to invade, and bonuses to find, but I’m sure there were way more set-pieces and supervillain boss-fights in the first Spider-man game. Anyway, I shall spend more time exploring before I complete the story, because I do have a lot of levelling up to do.

Yeah, they’ve been clear that the Miles Morales game is more of a short spinoff in the vein of Uncharted: Lost Legacy rather than a bona fide full-length sequel.

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Ben

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Todd

Sega Reveals Never-Before-Seen Concept Art For The Sonic Adventure Games And Sonic Heroes

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/11/sega_reveals_never-before-seen_concept_art_for_the_sonic_adventure_games_and_sonic_heroes

Undoubtedly the least dubious Sonic art I’ve ever seen on the net.

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Dave

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Bruce

Yay, my PS5 is on its way.  Now if the new router also turns up tomorrow….

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Todd

Ben wrote:

Yay, my PS5 is on its way.

Ditto.

Dave wrote:

An exciting parcel arrived today, but I don’t know, it feels like there’s one key ingredient missing here.

Ah, there it is.

Saving this until Christmas is going to be easy, right?

Right?

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Todd

Ask your kids.

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Todd

[Ben]

So far Ps5 is a bit shit.

No internet browser and very hard to find the free upgrade for Valhalla.

Just bagged the No Man’s Sky PS5 upgrade easily so UbiSoft have screwed up.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Ben.

Last week, Christel tells me she wants to get her nephew a PS5. She tried ordering a couple of times from Walmart but wasn’t having any luck. Every few hours they had a window to order online. I tried but but wasn’t successful. It saved the item so should it become available, I wouldn’t have to start all over. That came in very handy because on my second try, I got one! My wife and I were very surprised to get one. It is scheduled to be delivered on November 27.

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Dave

On more positive notes:

• Transferring games from external hard drive to PS5 is a lot faster. Previously you’d be looking at 25-30mins to transfer 40-50GB of game data, PS5 tends to do it in 10mins!
• I booted up Valhalla, PS4 but boosted by PS5, not the full PS5 version and even that is substantively different. Graphically, it gets an incredible boost and the loading speed is stupidly fast, but even more than this the feel of the game is so much better.
• So about that haptic feedback…. It is very, very clever but very hard to convey why it is to anyone who hasn’t had the experience of feeling it.
• Which is what I think this new generation will be about most of all – the feel and experience of gaming in a way that wasn’t possible before.

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Chris-S, Dave

Got into a boss fight redoing a level in TR3…

As with other boss fights, you die a few times, then you figure out the game pattern, figure out what you have to do on the controller, and eventually you win.

Similarly, I died a lot before I saw the pattern, had to jump sideways left and right while shooting. It was tricky but I got into the rhythm of it and now I am on the next level.

Exciting eh?

You still playing Tomb Raider 3? That game is older than my ex-girlfriend!

Overnight my PS5 decided to overheat within a minute of playing any PS5 or boosted PS4 fame. :(

Makes no sense as it worked fine yesterday for hours without any problems.

That’s a bugger.

Do you have it in a vertical position? If so, is it on the stand? I’ve seen some comments suggesting that placing it vertically but without the stand doesn’t lift it enough to let the air circulate around the bottom edges of the console for cooling purposes.

Vertical, with stand on – going to try and get a replacement from Amazon – it isn’t fixing itself, happens on every game, less than a minute – just don’t understsnd how it changed so drastically overnight.  All I can think of is whatever it has for cooling has instantly collapsed.

Good luck. Might be worth approaching Sony directly as well as Amazon in case they’re in a better position to offer a replacement.

It’s Sony or nothing, Amazon have no replacements – in a call queue.  Took a day off work too, looked so good last night and then….

Sorry Ben. That sucks.

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Ben

Some of the stuff I saw last on NMS PS5 was amazing – I didn’t even mind I’d accidentally lost a save with 14 more hours of play.

Plus, just playing a PS4 game on PS5 does boost it majorly, so yeah, sucks.

Have opted for a prescription of Destiny 2 on PS4, hopefully I have a working Ps5 for the Dec PS5 update for it.

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Dave

Anonymous wrote:

You still playing Tomb Raider 3?

Yes. It is a nice game that gives a good sense of adventure for me. However I am looking for a more modern game and I have tried to get into the latest TR games but they just don’t get to me. I heard some reviews of Assassins Creed.

Basically I played all the Arkham games, TR, and next is Avengers. If anyone has any good recommendations for modern adventure games that is most like the old TR games I would like to know…

I would recommend the Shadow of War and Shadow of Mordor games. They have a strategy element, kind of, on top of the adventuring, but any video reviews would do this better justice than what I am able to. Check them out.

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Al-x

OK, 1 hour and 20mins of being on hold but I got to talk to a human!

Have a case reference, they going to email to the account address, I then explain everything I covered by phone, likely to result in repair being required.

I suspect the person I was talking to has probably had nastier calls today, but hopefully my cynicism is unwarranted.

Changing tack, on the issue of storage and the capacity limits, the speed of transfer from even a standard non-SSD external hard drive is around 10mins.  That is vastly faster than internet download so long term I’ll likely have a set of 6-7 games in rotation on the main PS5, with a dedicated, nice fat multi-TB external drive for the PS5 games not in use.

Hopefully, by the time this is resolved, UbiSoft have also sorted out the Valhalla free PS5 upgrade issue.

For all that the small span I saw looked amazing, I have a vast PS4 backlog and, I think this is overdue, I should really play God of War on PS4 to appreciate the later changes.

 

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Ben wrote:

OK, 1 hour and 20mins of being on hold but I got to talk to a human! Have a case reference, they going to email to the account address, I then explain everything I covered by phone, likely to result in repair being required.

That’s good. Hope they sort it soon.

Ben wrote:

Changing tack, on the issue of storage and the capacity limits, the speed of transfer from even a standard non-SSD external hard drive is around 10mins.  That is vastly faster than internet download so long term I’ll likely have a set of 6-7 games in rotation on the main PS5, with a dedicated, nice fat multi-TB external drive for the PS5 games not in use.

I thought that PS5 save data could only be saved on internal and not external drives at the moment?

Ben wrote:

For all that the small span I saw looked amazing, I have a vast PS4 backlog and, I think this is overdue, I should really play God of War on PS4 to appreciate the later changes.

Yeah, aside from Miles Morales and Astro’s Playroom I’m going to be mainly playing PS4 games for a while (some of which will have proper PS5 upgrades and some of which will just have a boost).

To play a PS5 game it has to be on the system, but if I wanted to avoid deleting re-downloading a say 80GB file, moving an inactive or completed game to external storage does that and frees up space on the PS5.

Hopefully, I’ll get the email from Sony tomorrow, have a case ref too.

One better development is the new also arrived yesterday and is working so l’m able to return to Destiny 2.

As to game boost, don’t underestimate it.

Ben wrote:

To play a PS5 game it has to be on the system, but if I wanted to avoid deleting re-downloading a say 80GB file, moving an inactive or completed game to external storage does that and frees up space on the PS5.

Ah, got you.

Important PS tip – auto-game-update sounds cool, doesn’t it? Do not enable.  Ditto for auto-save-data-upload.  Reason is the system will try to do everything.  Add in an external 4TB hard drive and it can get very, very messy.

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Todd

Having a few issues with Miles Morales freezing on the PS4, meaning I have to power down and restart the game. I Googled it and it seems a common issue on both PS4 & 5 versions. It mainly happens when trying to clear out enemy bases, meaning you can’t complete the game. Hopefully Sony will patch it soon.

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Todd

After a 2 hour on hold chase call, got the email from PS5 Support and replied to it.

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Dave, Todd

I finished FC4 for a third time, loved it, and figured it was time to start FC: New Dawn, a follow-up to FC5, set in the same map with landscape changes and new characters.

So far I’m really enjoying it a lot more than FC5; the overall look of the game is a departure from previous ones and unlike any game I’ve played before. The pace is quicker than FC5, and it all just comes together in a nicer, more organised way so far – I got in on sale digitally for $20 or so and I think that was money well-spent already.

I haven’t been to a mall in months but would always prefer a physical copy not just for security, but also second hand they’re way cheaper.

Am I the only one who thinks the fact that you can copyright a building incredibly dumb?

https://www.ign.com/articles/spider-man-miles-morales-doesnt-have-the-chrysler-building-due-to-copyright-issues

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Martin Smith

I’ve made a renewed effort on Cuphead recently and I’m making good progress. It’s a tough game and each level/boss takes a lot of getting used to – I’m averaging half an hour or so to learn how to beat a level that only runs for a few minutes – but crucially it always feels fair and when you die it never feels like the game has done something cheap or underhand.

Plus I’m in love with the animation. This is basically the kind of game I dreamed about as a kid – simple, fun mechanics married to gorgeous visuals.

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Bruce

It’s a tough game but it’s incredibly satisfying. You’re going to love the level before the last boss (the one where you roll the dice).

Spoiler: You’re also going to hate it.

Anonymous wrote:

You’re going to love the level before the last boss (the one where you roll the dice). Spoiler: You’re also going to hate it.

This is the game in a nutshell.

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Dave wrote:

This is the game in a nutshell.

Perfect description of the level itself.

Steve Sensible wrote:

Am I the only one who thinks the fact that you can copyright a building incredibly dumb?

Not only is it dumb, it makes the new owners look like petty, money-grubbing bastards. Ownership of the design and blueprints are already protected so that someone cannot come along and build an exact replica of the Chrysler building (or any other building, for that matter). This new move just seems so selfish and arrogant.

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Todd, Steve Sensible

njerry wrote:

Not only is it dumb, it makes the new owners look like petty, money-grubbing bastards. Ownership of the design and blueprints are already protected so that someone cannot come along and build an exact replica of the Chrysler building (or any other building, for that matter). This new move just seems so selfish and arrogant.

Couldn’t agree more. It’s quite literally in the public domain.

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njerry

PS Support think that a totally inoperative cooling system can be fixed by their online guides – I’ve replied and said it doesn’t and it also doesn’t lead to a page where I can request repair / replacement, just a new ref and to call again – so going round in circles.

I’ve told them I tested it again this morning, after 2 days switched off, it still overheated in less than 5 mins so can they set up either repair or replacement, just say when and it’ll be packed and ready.

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Todd

Just keep pushing Ben.

I have a lot of experience with hardware support and the guys on the support team will have targets to find ‘soft’ solutions and not call out parts and replacements. They’ll insist on trying every solution first that doesn’t need an engineer or they’ll get marked down at work.

I had one where my TV decoder box actually had smoke billowing out of it and the lady on the end of the phone wanted me to plug it back in and try reboots and firmware uploads and it took some insistence that there was no way in hell I was plugging anything in that was on the verge of burning down my house.

Sometimes when I know what the issue is I just pretend I’m going through all the ‘soft’ steps.

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Martin Smith, Ben, Todd

Those tech support people constantly remind me of the Black Knight in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL: “It’s only a flesh wound.”

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garjones, Ben, Todd

Some progress – PS have agreed to a repair job, have sent them the info for it to be set up.

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Todd, Dave

And it’s been silent ever since.

Doing daily chasers on them.

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Todd

So I took advantage of Black Friday and got Avengers for half price, as well as the Jedi Fallen Order game and the Star Wars squadron game.

Not that I will play it all the time, but on some days when all the chores, errands, and other obligations are done, I will play them.

I was tempted by the Star Wars Squadrons game but haven’t checked it out yet – you’ll have to let us know how it is.

Fallen Order is one that I mean to get back to once we open the PS5.

Fallen Order gets better as it goes along.

I feel like I’d just got to the point where I was starting to enjoy it when my disc drive died. I think I was somewhere on Kashyssk Kashysshk the Wookie planet.

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Todd

Just make sure your PS5 works before making any plans.

I’ve had my Xbox 360 set-up this weekend and have been dicking around in some old games, mainly ones installed on its HDD. It’s been a tad weird really. I still think of the 360 as fairly modern, even though it was replaced, what, 7 years ago now? In fact, now the Series X is out, it’s technically retro by most standards. Using it feels sort of familiar and alien simultaneously, like going back to your secondary school (like when I went by mine back in February to go to a toy collector’s fair in the sports hall and so took the opportunity to wander around the empty campus). A lot of that alienation I think comes from having switched over to Sony for the next generation (as well as two Nintendo consoles since), but there’s a bit of ghost town feel to it. Partly because I’ve not hooked it up to the network, so all the ads and promos bits are empty (I wonder if they’d even show anything now?), as well as game data like covers for things in the library. But also because the last version of the dashboard they issued is a bit grim and moody compared to some of the earlier ones.

Going back to that 360 controller is fine though (once I cleaned the battery terminals enough for it to work, mind). It’s one of those controllers that you just instantly feel at home with, although I have found myself continually going to use a screenshot button that doesn’t exist. Given that, when the PS4 was announced, I dismissed the share button as pointless, I’m surprised how used I’ve gotten to virtual scrapbooking my playthroughs of games with it.

Anyway, game-wise, I actually cleared up some loose ends. Went back to Perfect Dark HD, which I had completed all of bar the last level, because it for some reason completely flummoxed me. Took a few attempts, but I did that. Also had some fun in multiplayer, but the layer of online options, even disabled and disconnected, makes it a bit of a faff compared to the N64 original. Still, the remaster job is good. It’s everything people wanted of the Goldeneye game that came out for the Wii and ended up trying to needlessly reinvent the wheel.

I’ve got a Magic the Gathering game that I was keen to have a go on, but for some reason it refuses to load with an internet connection, despite having a large offline component (if not entirely offline, given it’s not Magic Online). So that’s annoying. I guess it means it will be completely unplayable if the servers ever get turned off, but I suppose Microsoft’s continued use of Xbox Live and the backwards compatibility of Series X means that’s not going to happen for a while.

I ended up spending a bit of time with Quarrel, which is a little indie game that I’m amazed didn’t do better and hasn’t had any ports to other platforms (there was an iOS version but that doesn’t seem to be available any more). It’s a mix of Scrabble and Risk, with each battle between opposing territories played out by making anagrams from 8 letter words. The catch is, you’re limited in word length by the unit strength in your territory, giving a tactical edge on top of just the wordplay. I’d recommend people check it out, but I have no idea if Xbox Live Arcade still lets you buy things.

And then I ended up going back to GTA 4. I had an odd yearning the other day to just have a wander around it’s pseudo-Manhattan for a while. I’m not sure why, because I don’t ever really remember being wowed by its game world and revisiting it, it hasn’t aged brilliantly. A lot of that is inevitable; the low res textures plastered on windows and doors to give an illusion of reality for instance, and the poor draw distance really drive home that this game is of an entirely different generation to the present. But some of it felt rough at the time, like the weirdly dithered shadows. The game world is pretty small, but that’s not a problem, it’s as much as the game needs for New York and Jersey really. The surprising thing was just how empty that game world feels. Pseudo-Manhattan only has about six things in it for you to go to (at least available to me at the point my old save was at), and they’re not that interesting, frankly. Rhodes alone in RDR2 has as much to offer.

Comparisons to newer open world games perhaps aren’t entirely fair, but GTA IV really does suffers from them. Its controls and car handling were always shit, but the limitations of the clothings options feel really stifling compared to what RDR2 offers (or even compared to that from other 360 games, like the outfit systems in RDR1 and Sleeping Dogs) and the small variety of styles really shows why Saints Row was justified in taking the piss a bit in its early days (which ballooned into total nonsense). The worst thing though is its mission and check-pointing system, which is just cruel. I hadn’t finished the final mission of the game last time I spent time with it, so I decided to give that a go now. I’d forgotten though that when you fail a mission, the game just lets you carry on in the open world (or if you die, treats it like you’ve died same as you’d been dicking about freely). Whereas RDR2 will stop and give essentially a game over screen and give you the option of bailing or restarting, GTA IV just leaves you to it, offering only a text message to jump back to a checkpoint. But these checkpoints are pretty sparse – the final mission is a good 20 minutes long and made up of different several sections, but the only checkpoint is after the initial tedious driving section – and the game doesn’t reset your inventory when you use it. So if you used up a lot of ammo or body armour or health, you’re entirely stuffed and will likely have to reload your save entirely. It’s a frustrating thing, especially when combined with the fairly terrible combat (lousy, unhelpful lock on; almost imperceptible targeting reticule; guns that barely do any damage). I ended up resorting to cheats to refill my health and armour on repeat attempts just to save time and while that disabled achievements (although weirdly only the one for the mission, not the ones for finishing the story and getting over $500,000) I don’t feel bad about it because I was simply getting the game to do what it should have done anyway.

Anyway, after several attempts, I did finally manage to complete that final mission. I’d struggled with it before because there’s a jump you have to make off a ramp on a motorcycle and last time around, I tried that at least half a dozen times and every time it didn’t work. I’d floor the accelerator and the bike would either trip over the edge of the ramp or sail off into the river without triggering the next part of the mission or, one time, do a 360 backflip somehow. Tonight though, it worked every time. And while I managed to stuff up a few times after that part (including getting killed mere seconds from the end of the mission) I did finally manage to complete it. Which probably would have felt better and meant more if it hadn’t been 7 years or more since I last played any of the story, admittedly, but it’s another loose end tied up.

There’s still various stuff the game wants me to do – assassination missions, car heists, vigilante stuff – but I think I’ve had my fill. Liberty City is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. That said though, I would play a remaster of it that fixed a lot of those problems.

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Andrew

I haven’t played GTA4 in ages, and my X-Box is no longer connected to my TV so I’ll probably never bother, but I do recall enjoying it (it was the reason I bought the 360 in the first place, I think). GTA5 was an improvement, but not by massive margin (I’ve still played it through thrice). The version of GTA4 I had came with the two expansions, and I enjoyed both of those including the way they all link together.

I lost interest in my replay of RDR2 not long into it, so I”m fully into Far Cry: New Dawn now. It’s good, dumb fun. It flows a lot better than FC5 so far, and the weapon upgrade trees are pretty cool.  The game looks gorgeous, I love all the colourful flowers scattered over the landscape, and the outposts are much more challenging (in a good, fun way) than those in FC5, with some solid replayability in being able to re-capture them at increasing levels of difficulty.

Strong recommend.

I remember GTA4 being a bit of a disappointment, once you got past the upgraded graphics and big open world. Too much faffing with RPG style elements and not enough polish for the game mechanics.

Plus it just wasn’t that much fun – it had a much more serious vibe than GTA III, VC and San Andreas and lost some of that GTA appeal as a result. They rediscovered that with V.

[Martin Smith]

Dave wrote:

Plus it just wasn’t that much fun – it had a much more serious vibe than GTA III, VC and San Andreas and lost some of that GTA appeal as a result. They rediscovered that with V.

Yeah, I definitely remember that vibe too. Nico’s story is decent – and there is the usual strain of GTA satire in the radio stations – but it is very dour compared to the other games. I think my complaints about the wardrobe options is a synecdoche of that really. You can basically dress Nico as a cliche eastern European gangster, in suit or in some bland casual clothes. There are minor variations in that, but that’s it. And that works for the story and his character, but it’s not as fun as other open world games where there’s more pliability to the character for the player’s whims.

I never did get around to the DLC stories. They’re tempting, but given how badly the core engine has aged, I’m not sure it’d be worth it.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Martin Smith.

Martin Smith wrote:

I never did get around to the DLC stories. They’re tempting, but given how badly the core engine has aged, I’m not sure it’d be worth it.

Fair enough, I wouldn’t have sought them out, but they offered interesting new angles including a Sons of Anarchy style (I assume, haven’t seen the show) motorcycle gang.

I have to admit clothing options aren’t really something I care about (apart from for a laugh like in Saint’s Row 3) – I didn’t appreciate that in RDR2 you had to worry about being dressed warm enough in certain parts of the map.

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Martin Smith

I don’t think I bothered with the clothing option first time around, I just think if you’re going to have it, make it worthwhile. If you only want to let the player dress in a couple of different ways as the story intends, then just have the game change it without the player’s choice. If you want to let the player have free choice, actually give them substantive free choice. It’s sort of stuck in a halfway house.

The temperature stuff in RDR2 is a little fussy, I’ll agree, but I like the ability to fashion Arthur to who you want him to be through the huge wardrobe (and hair and facial hair options). I really appreciated that more after watching Andy on Outside Xbox’s live streams, where he really puts a lot of thought and effort into styling Arthur at the start of each stream depending on what he’s going to be doing.

In Praise Of Anti-Realism In Video Games

In Praise Of Anti-Realism In Video Games

A week of email silence + three chasers = another chaser sent tonight.

The weird thing is they’ve said they’ll repair it, I’ve sent them the info and…..zip.

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Todd

Two games I’ve bailed on this week, unfortunately:

Alpha Protocol – this is one of the main reasons I set up my 360 and I bought it (cheap, thankfully) recently on the recommendation of a friend way back when it first came out (2010 maybe?). It’s a spy/black ops game and I always remember him saying you could assassinate a target by having them sent dodgy cocaine. Knowing nothing else about the game, that seemed really cool, like that’s a whole wide possibility of things you can do and ways you can approach your missions.

In practice, not so much. It’s called “the espionage RPG” and is by Obsidian. There are RPG elements: you gain XP, level up, have skills you upgrade which grant abilities etc. Which is a decent concept, nothing wrong with that. The problem comes in the execution though. It’s just really not fun to play at all. It’s clear the game wants you to stealth through your missions and, despite not being a big stealth game fan, I tried that. But it’s almost impossible. The left stick sensitivity (which can’t be adjusted) is really high, so Mike, the player character, runs at the lightest touch, and I mean runs (there’s a spring button too, which seems overkill). You move more slowly when crouching, but it makes no tangible difference to your visibility. Nor does the cover system, because it’s largely broken. It rarely responds to you moving to cover, it rarely offers the “move between position” command, which is essential and it’s inconsistent in taking you in and out of crouch when you come in and out of cover. Worst of all though is that enemies can pretty much still see you when you’re in cover, so it’s all fruitless. Also not helped by Mike continually wandering off to left at random moments, which might be analogue stick drift, but I’ve not had that in any other game on the system with that controller. But that got me seen a couple of times when I was trying to be stealthy. The missions I did devolved into straight shooting everything that moves (even when I attempted to cover my track with the game’s spy gadgets).

But combat isn’t fun either, because of the stat system. To start off, you’re basically useless with a gun. The starting weapons all have low damage, huge recoil and high instability, meaning it’s impossible to be accurate and even when you hit something, you barely hurt them. Even when the game gives you tranq darts, which you’d think would be a non-lethal alternative good for stealth and letting you one-shot enemies, it doesn’t help. You have to hit people multiple times with those and get their health down to 0 still, it seems. Presumably, you’re supposed to upgrade your skills and equipment to improve all that and I get that idea. But when the base level of combat is so useless and frustrating, it doesn’t make me want to stick with it. Your best option turns out to be melee combat, as that’s where Mike seems to do the most consistent damage, but everything is so janky and graceless that it’s nothing to be relied on.

It’s a shame really, because the game has good ideas, offering the glimpse of repercussions for player choice. The end of the first mission I did, for instance, you capture an arms dealer. You can either arrest him, execute him or let him go to tail him and hope to track down the terrorists he sells to. I went for arrest and got rewarded with XP and a perk for following due process, but was told that intelligence gathering in the area would be limited in future. That and a like/dislike system with your handlers, based on how you talk to them, which can affect how they deal with you in-missions (with being liked not necessarily beneficial) seem pretty cool. But when the base game underpinning it is such a torture, I’m not sticking around to see it out.

 

Tooth and Tail – this is a real time strategy game for the PC and is… well, imagine mixing the French and Russian revolutions with Redwall and you’re most of the way there. It’s a cool concept (though some of the finer points of it don’t entirely make sense to me), but again falls down in the execution. One minor gripe I have is with the pixel art. I don’t normally mind pixel art at all but it only seems to be here because it’s an indie game and presumably it’s expected of them. It doesn’t provide much clarity in the battlefield though and everything would have been better with clearly drawn and animated graphics matching the menu graphics.

The real issue is the central mechanics. There are two main types of RTS. Resource based, where you’ve got a fairly omniscient view point, build bases, gather resources, command units etc, like Command and Conquer. The other is squad based, where you have a set group of characters, move them around, issues commands, again usually from an omniscient view point. Tooth and Tail sort of mixes the two but not in a good way. It’s a resource based model – the central element is the gristmill, around which you build farms to produce grain. This is then used to fund building spawn points for different units and things like turret emplacements. That seems fine. Trouble is, you don’t have that omniscient viewpoint and control. You directly control a general on the ground. If you want to do anything, you need to move your general there to do it, whether it be building something or directing an attack. That makes it almost impossible multitask. If your base is attacked while you’re off leading a sortie, you’re basically stuffed. There is a teleport style option “burrow” but it’s not particularly quick and smooth to use.

It also means a wonky control scheme, as you use the keyboard to move your general around. You can’t select stuff with the mouse, it’s only used to push the camera and for its buttons as shortcut commands, which means issuing granular controls to units is hectic, awkward thing that I could rarely achieve. Say you’ve led a unit of squirrels (cannon fodder) and a unit of weasels (mortar troops) towards the enemy. You need the weasels to attack a gun turret but want the squirrels out of the way. Instead of being able to quickly do that with a few simple mouse clicks, you have to lead the weasels directly to the gun turret, then lead the squirrels away, hoping the neither follows you when you do the other action. Technically the controls allow for that, with separate “guide all” and “guide unit” keys, but in the heat of battle, it never seemed to pan out. It’s also quite an uncomfortable control scheme and part of the reason I stopped playing was that I’d got muscle strain in my hand. I’d reassigned the keys several times to try and get something more comfortable (which probably didn’t help with learning them) but I think the main issue is that having to do WASD and a mouse continually and copious other keys to actually do stuff, can never really make for a comfortable control scheme.

Success, now have a Returns label, hopefully get it collected tomorrow.

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Todd, Dave

The PS5 has gone off to Sony and hopefully continues it’s bad, bad antics once it’s with them.

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Todd, Martin Smith

Glad it’s finally got sorted out. Hopefully you’ll get a repair or replacement soon.

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Ben

Saw that the new Worms game, Worms Rumble is free on PS Plus this month. So I eagerly downloaded it and the four of us grabbed a controller and booted it up… only to find that there’s no local multiplayer. At all. The idiots.

The move to online multiplayer has really been shit for people who might want to actually play with someone in the same room.

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Ben

Oh wow, no local? Damn that’s the most un-worms move ever… =/

I was gonna buy it but the gameplay didn’t convince me much… I mean, it’s fine, they can’t just re-do the same thing over and over, so it’s okay to try new things, but yeah, I don’t know if it’s gonna be succesful.

It can’t be that hard to engineer local multiplayer?

Ben wrote:

It can’t be that hard to engineer local multiplayer?

Because this incarnation of the game has shifted from turn-based combat to realtime, with everyone moving around at once, you’d have to have splitscreen to make it work. Guess they didn’t want the hassle of that.

It’s doubly annoying though because while my kids do play with friends online, the lack of any local multiplayer options means that they can’t both go on at once, and have to take it in turns. A bit annoying.

I might try and pick up an older version of Worms as I’m sure they’d love it.

Worms dropping turn based combat and going online multiplayer only is triggering a heavy “you’re ruining my childhood memories” reaction in me.

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Dave

They’ll be stopping you from editing the game files and subbing in your own sound effects next.

FC: New Dawn has been my obsession most evenings, and I’m just about at the last few missions. I have to say this is up there among my favourites; I’m already looking forward to starting it again when I’m done.

Dave wrote:

Because this incarnation of the game has shifted from turn-based combat to realtime, with everyone moving around at once, you’d have to have splitscreen to make it work. Guess they didn’t want the hassle of that.

Ah yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, I guess it’s okay… in the end there’s a bunch of “classic” worms games out there, so as an experiment it’s okay. I bought the last one which was very much in the classic vein and I didn’t really play it all that much… =/

Day 1:

Well, despite <b>Dragon’s Dogma </b>doing its best to get me to abandon it, I’m not quite at that point but it has made one hell of an attempt.

How? Well, you have a map that shows your party positions, but not the enemies. The enemy health bar only comes up when you are very close to them and there are noncombatents in the game so you can’t just go and kill everyone. The result of this is you end up with these highly enemy mobile enemies, unable to tell which is weaker or which should be your priority target and there’s no way to assess enemies ahead of combat or even see them coming, thus you can be wiped out by stronger enemies without warning.

It has an autosave system in name only, but it doesn’t work. Don’t trust it, save manually and often.

Some of the early quests are crappy fetch ones but one that sounds interesting is total arse. You’re supposed to catch a thief, but what you’re actually to do is knock the thief down and then grab him. If you don’t do this you can slash him up good, but he then gets up and legs it uninjured! You also get told the rest of your party is guarding the gate but if you don’t catch the thief? He legs it through the gate and your party do nothing! It’s not the only example of the game going for a dumb, opaque structure either. An early mandatory mission is escorting this slow, slow cart to a city. On the way there is rocks and a boulder to deal with, which I concluded I could do nothing about – turns out you can attack to destroy it. Counter-point: It’s a fucking boulder. The biggest WTF was at the halfway point where you get directed to this lever. You have a R2 ‘grab’ command, so that has to be it, right? Wrong. Instead you hit circle for ‘examine’ and then your character grabs the lever. Why do that? Why do that when there is an explicit, on screen at all times ‘grab’ command?

It can be good when it’s not drowning you in crap, in the belief that giving you clear information or explaining its systems well constitutes ‘hand-holding’ – no, it isn’t, that’s the bare minimum for a game. With clearer info it could be so much better. As it is, it has a neat line in world design, some OK systems, but it’s hellbent on self-sabotage.

Day 2:

Continues to be very reflective of day one.  The biggest problem is you can very easily end up getting slaughtered without warning because the game has decided to put these much stronger enemies in but you have no way of telling that at all.  It makes for a frustrating experience with little in the way of strategy being possible because you don’t have the info to do it.  And it can change from being very manageable to the total opposite very, very fast.

That said, getting some skills unlocked and active does improve things quite a bit, with the Pawns being reasonably smart:  At once point I went and impaled a hobgoblin and while I was twisting my blade around in its guts, my mages shot it to crap.

The world design remains one of its best cards, as, when you have a fair chance, or better, superiority, on enemies, the combat can be good – though a dodge move is warranted – you miss it quite a bit.

The day / night cycle is quite clever too, as it does the whole thing of different enemies being active at night time.  Not new, but it does incentivise getting the hell out of wherever you are before nightfall.  Some quite nice light effects at night too for an 8-year game.

Exploring Gran Soren was a lot of fun, quite neat that you can access the roofs and go jumping from rooftop to rooftop.

Dragon’s Dogma – Day 4 – aka Day of Holy Arse-Kicking

After all, nothing else really describes what happened here.  At this point I’m about 12 hours in, main characters are just past Level 20, skills are unlocked, gear upgraded…. Even so, I still was not expecting things to play out as they did tonight.  This was a couple of hours of my gang killing everything in sight, including a nigh-on near endless Direwolf pack, an Ogre they weren’t supposed to be able to take out, duffing up a Cyclops that had three health bars, with side orders of Snow Harpies, Goblins and Bandits to boot.

People do talk about the magic in the game and it is pretty cool, even in its starting limited form, but you equip a mage with one of the higher-level spells? Yeah, your mage suddenly has access to a battlefield tactical nuke.  You’ll be playing as a melee fighter, whacking a wolf when, out of nowhere, a massive icicle erupts from the ground or there’s a massive boom and before you go ‘WTF!?’, you realise that was one of your mages.  The spells are indeed bad-ass, as are the environmental effects you see them inflict.  At the same time, whacking a goblin in the head with a flaming sword that then sets it on fire never gets old.  In that Direwolf slaughter, I was seeing burnt wolves running around – they’d been blasted, burnt, but the fire yet they were charred.  There’s a crazy level of detail for an 8-year old game being represented in a 3-4 year old remaster.

So went back to do the Everfall quest, the one that 2-3 days ago made for a very unpleasant experience of everyone nearly getting killed, but this time? This time my gang was doing all the killing.  It cannot be denied that this was a very satisfying vengeance.  Often my jaw was on the floor at the sheer on-screen chaos.

After that, did a couple of other quests, accessed a new area, with the expected stronger, but not too strong enemies.  Got caught by night time so just waited it out, no there is no outside rest / camp points.  Now the game does have fast travel, but it’s very easy to miss because the item is placed in your stored items and the game never tells you it is there.  Now I have it? Will change the game greatly as I can start building a manual teleport network.  At the same time I’m starting to see how the gear, plus gear upgrades, and skills, with the various sub-categories, interlink to really boost a character while having the feeling I’m still on the surface of it all.

This is an old game, a remaster can only improve an 8-year old game so much but in its style, it manages to jump the years.  It clearly had that hook to get my interest past its brutal self-sabotage – some of which did come up in that massive Direwolf fight – sticking those nice pink enemy bars on enemies so they displayed from further away would really help.  But when you have the combat going well, it does feel quite chunky, quite kinetic and the graphic effects clearly help on that and are pretty impressive despite the age.

It’s interesting to note that Dark Souls came out in 2011, this game was 2012, but it feels like what a hybrid Japanese / Action RPG, by Capcom no less, influenced by Dark Souls, would turn out like.  It has a quite gritty fantasy world, not all the details are filled in, there’s a steep learning curve, but it has that x-factor to draw you back, despite it being a total bastard to you.

Yay, my PS5 is now with Sony.

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Dave, Todd

Ben wrote:

Yay, my PS5 is now with Sony.

That sound like a euphemism for it being dead.

“Don’t worry Ben – your PS5 is with Sony now.”

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Todd, Ben

Heheh… It’ll return as a Black PS5

“Playstation 5…. Rise.”

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Rocket, Todd, Dave