Posts by Thrik

There are a certain few games I always replay every few years or so — just long enough for me to forget a lot of the dialogue/gameplay specifics.

• Monkey Island 1–3
• Grim Fandango
• Super Mario World
• Yoshi's Island
• Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes
• Metal Gear Solid 2–4
• Donkey Kong Country 1–3

A huge part of why I love Nintendo is that their games often let you scratch that nostalgia itch while still experiencing a new game. For example, Super Mario 3D World and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze are just an absolute god damned joy and will probably join my list of replay titles. Hopefully they'll re-release Super Mario Galaxy in HD too because that is such a nostalgia ride.

I agree, I've seen idiots and very rational, intelligent people alike voting both ways. It's just not as simple as you're an idiot for voting out, even though that wouldn't have been my choice. These are nonetheless some interesting albeit unsurprising observations:

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I must say that as someone who comes from a backwater town and who now lives in a multi-cultural city, it's impossible to not draw a link between the casual racism that permeates throughout that town and its huge sway towards voting to leave the EU.

I have no doubt that many of these leave votes were fuelled by xenophobia, racism, and/or frustration at not earning very much, none of which will be helped by leaving the EU. Of course a lot of fine citizens did vote leave for entirely sensible and rational reasons — but those people aren't the ones who tipped the scales.

Essentially, I think that we're leaving for entirely the wrong reasons, but the good news is that voters' motivations and what politicians decide to do with the country upon leaving are two entirely different things. My hope is that we'll be able to arrange a new set-up that retains free movement of workers and access to the common market — which would inevitably involve taking back on various EU laws much as Switzerland does — which even Brexit politicians are now starting to hint may be the case.

The holy grail would be a general election where we can vote in a party with a mandate to scrap Brexit, which I believe would override the referendum in terms of adhering to what the public wants. If Scotland is successful in stalling the referendum as it intends to, this is actually a (remote) possibility.

I really hope that free movement of workers somehow ends up being maintained, which I think is something that Switzerland has negotiated with the EU despite existing outside of it. For me that's one of the saddest parts of this whole thing because being able to easily live around the world without incurring huge expense and/or cost is a wonderful concept. It'd also be an entertaining blow to the segment of 'out' voters who are basically just a bit racist.

The way the zombies practically pour out of things in this game is absolutely excellent haha.

Yeah I do agree with some of what you're saying.

Overlapping functionality and over-complicated functionality do often cause me to just ignore some features, although part of me also likes the sheer novelty of — for example in Metal Gear Solid — being able to use different items such as empty magazines, balloons, making a noise, etc to achieve the same effect of distracting an enemy for a while. There are subtle but meaningful distinctions to how exactly you use these, but they do largely produce the same result.

I think a really important factor is that like you say the player isn't excessively powerful to the point of the game being devoid of challenge. I think that Dishonored did a really good job of keeping the game tricky despite the load of powers at my disposal largely because of the stealth element. Many powers would expose my position, so I had to sparingly use the less conspicuous stuff to creep around. If I was spotted, that's when the big guns would come out. That's actually how I played Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid too.

I guess that a lot of it comes down to self-impose player discipline. It's my personal experience and observation of others that even though you can just run and gun through games like the aforementioned, it's a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience to use stealth but when shit hits the fan segue into the more action-packed approach rather than just dying/giving up as older stealth games tended to enforce. Uncharted 2–4 actually use this formula to great effect.

I do enjoy seeing games playing around with these questions, along with how to keep games engaging in terms of storyline and progression in a world of increasingly open environments — something that can very easily cause a game to quickly grow boring once the initial rush of exploring the world wears off.

I do like the look of this a lot, but then I loved the original so that's no surprise. I get what you're saying Sentura about the powers but honestly I think you could apply that criticism to virtually any game that provides an open-ended approach to the gameplay. I'd say that it's a fairly necessary side-effect of not designing in a 'rock, paper, scissors' type way where problem A requires weapon/ability B.

Indeed, in most games you just get a big arsenal of weapons and I personally end up using a few favourites most of the time as per my preferred playing style. I found that I did the same thing in Dishonored — rarely using many of the powers — and in similar gameplay types such as Metal Gear Solid 5 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. For example in MGS5 you have many options for absolutely decimating an area using brute force, but many people will use the various more time-consuming but thrilling stealth options.

Maybe in some ways it's just not your type of game, and you prefer ones with a more controlled approach to the obstacles you encounter where each puzzle has a very specific solution. I saw you say similar stuff about the new Deus Ex too yet both these games' gameplay look superb to me.

It is graphically superb I must say. I love those rocket trail effects and such. The grappling hook thing reminds me of Tribes: Vengeance. I do agree that with the currently competitive market of arena shooters — particularly with domination by standout highly stylised titles like Overwatch — it's going to need a very prominent hook to draw people in.

Enjoy your storage man. Just part of the excellent deal that is MapCore.

Yeah I was hoping they'd go a bit more all-in with the choice of gender, complemented by plentiful outfit choices — that'd put it somewhere close to being more on par with other open-world RPGs. I'm a bit bored of a blonde git in a green (sometimes blue or red) tunic.

I'm optimistic that the NX version will look better. This is all running on a Wii U so unless Nintendo has suddenly decided to throw their usual artistic brilliance out the window I expect that greater hardware will bring it closer to what we saw in 2014 (skip to final minute):

kill me

I really hope they tighten up how the new Zelda looks... like, a lot. I appreciate the scale but even compared to last-gen games like Skyrim it's looking really plain in many areas and way short of the teaser shown a couple of years ago. Surprising considering that this is meant to be coming to Nintendo's next-gen NX. It's painfully obvious how fidelity and scale are holding back the gorgeous art direction in some places.

Oh it's definitely gone in a more Blizzard-esque art direction. The stylisation really does look like it could have come out of StarCraft. It looks beautiful though, I was never all that keen on the gritty and grimy look of the older games.

My expectation would be something like Tomb Raider or Zelda? Big hubs and dungeons but not completely open world.

I agree that a new IP would have made sense, I'm not sure how they're going to manage to have a world of co-existing mythologies in a way that doesn't seem awkward and weird. Maybe it's the demise of the Olympians and their world that gives rise to the Norse? It's a theme with a lot of potential though, maybe one that wouldn't have been green lit without a successful IP behind it.

The gameplay definitely needed to change though. While it was a superbly successful formula in its day, God of War 3 both perfected it and took it as far as it could go. After that game's insanity there was no real way to make things more epic or more interesting to play without completely rethinking it. They tried to do some new stuff with Ascension and it just felt a bit shit.

I hope they basically make this God of War: Game of Thrones.

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Looking absolutely splendid. Even though it's not even the same war I'm getting a weird sense of nostalgia about being able to get properly into a historical war game like this. Takes me back to the Day of Defeat glory days.

Yes definitely afraid of spoilers. Also this season has been pretty slow a lot of the time IMO, I've noticed that even at work we've been less excitedly discussing new episodes because there haven't been many 'JESUS CHRIST' moments (apart from Hodor obviously).

I don't think that this is any fault of the writing per se. I've seen some negative comments about it, but honestly having watched all six seasons for the first time in the last couple of months I'm not seeing much of a difference or drop in quality in season six. Also, a fair whack of the material in season six is still from the books, using storyline strands saved from the fourth and fifth books — and the broad strokes for the later books have been outlined by George for the writers to flesh out. I just think that there's a necessarily large amount of narration required to build the story up for some big events. In some ways it's the first half of The Two Towers.

This last few episodes sound like they're going to be pretty awesome though, based on the build-up so far and also their titles. Not to mention that the finale is going to be the longest yet, about 70 minutes. I think we're all dying to see some shit come Bolton's way.

OK so as a weird coincidence previewing was just added back in with the latest version. This is the first button in the editor.