Posts by Taylor

Quote from Campaignjunkie

But when I played The Path? There's no gameplay, so what do I do? Okay, I'll just click on random stuff... oh crap, did I just get my character raped? My god. What the hell just happened. Was that even my fault? But the game wanted me to get raped? But that's a stupid thing for a game to want. Can a game "want" me to do something in that way? How can the game blame me for making a choice I didn't know I was making?, etc. and I find all those questions "FUN" to think about, "meaningful and deep like a painting"

THE WORLD IS IN FLAMES

Clearly I must be imagining things.

I can't play this game for more than an hour without some major bug happening. Try to exit a house the same time as an NPC? Grats you're trapped inside forever.

I’ve got a bit further. I’m only level 11 or so in upgraded steel armour with two skyward weapons so nothing amazing. Spent most of this evening obtaining and upgrading a house just to stow away my dragon giblets (I assume I’ll need them for dragon armour or something). Lyria defaults to steel so all she gains from me is a hat and some weapons. Though she has a Fire Staff and for some reason likes to occasionally stop and fire it at nothing until I move to another area. She spent the whole of the last dungeon burning a cart at the entrance. Must remember to take that back.

Just finished enough Companion quests to join the Circle proper

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and became a you-know-what

. The NPC that joins you on the quest afterwards managed to set herself on fire somehow, blamed me, and started attacking me.

Is everyone else finding it hard just to click conversation options? It’s getting pretty ridiculous. It's in the middle, it's highlighted, I click square in the centre, and I get a completely different one.

Quote from Mazy

Oh and fuck review scores

Quote from Steppenwolf

It's easy to criticise them for single aspects of the game but i can't even comprehend what it must mean to script a game of this proportion and do all the artwork and optimizing for it. I don't think they have a development team twenty times bigger then your average action game yet they squeeze so much more content in.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, of course. But every script more complicated than populating an area with some bandits is ropey, and everyone in Skyrim is bipolar and with each sentence oscillates between calling you the new Jesus and a great big fucker.

Anyway, everytime I play a WRPG I try to play as a thief and get annoyed by stealth mechanics so this time I decided I'd just get a big magic axe and stick it in people, which works surprisingly well. Managed to forage together a bunch of materials to make a full improved armour set and take down a few pieces of big wildlife and another dragon (though I got stuck in the Mammoth and hacked my way out like he was an invisible Shub Niggurath). Saved it last night outside of the dungeon with the Horn of Jeff and looking forward to getting home.

Maybe. That quote is exactly why I couldn't play Gears or Bulletstorm, though.

The trouble with videogames isn't the violence. It's that most of the characters are dicks.

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If I had a penny for every time I've spent the opening moments of a game sitting in the back of a transport vehicle listening to a soldier called Vasquez repeatedly use the word "motherfucker", I'd have enough money to buy the Sesame Street game instead. And even that probably starts with Sergeant Grover warning Private Elmo that "Shit is about to get real".Every soldier in every game I've ever played is a dick. A dick that sounds like a 14-year-old boy reading dialogue discarded from an old-school Schwarzenegger action movie for displaying too much swagger. They seem like a bunch of try-hard bell-ends, desperate to highlight their gruff masculinity.

The only game that has the same mechanics as QTEs is Simon Says.

The purpose of QTEs was to make you feel like you are involved during a cutscene. But “press button now” does not actually make you feel like you are involved (and this is not how we play games), and looking for “press button now” prompts means you can’t really enjoy the cutscene. They don’t do anything but detract.

I think the environments look absolutely fine, although it wouldn’t kill to deviate from the desaturated, low-fantasy every now and then. The main problem graphically is the humanoid characters, animation and buggy scripted sections (so all scripted sections).

I was going to balance this with talk about how it improved on Oblivion and even I, a sceptic, really enjoyed it once I got into the open world. But I’ve just done five attempts to go to the mountain with the Greybeards (or w/e) only to have it crash so I'll do that when I'm less jaded.

While FF13 could've been a single page pullout with "go forwards and press X" on it, they are full of stupid stuff that requires a guide. I'm sure the Internets would figure it out eventually but it's purposely hidden.

I haven’t been following this because of Oblivion. I’ve no idea if I should buy this tomorrow for mega bucks.

Alone in the Dark let you skip entire chapters so it’s definitely a feature that exists, though the Super Mario Bros Wii version isn’t actually that bad as it’s not free.

The intention is to allow a player to see all the content and skip a section that’s too hard, but if they can’t do this section how will they be able to do the content afterwards? The game is just going to get harder! Skipping challenges is just going to prevent you from getting better.

It’s like when people play arcade games in MAME with infinite credits: they play for a bit, game over, continue, play a bit less, game over, continue, play for even less, game over, continue, etc. until they’re just going though the game in the window of invincibility after each restart. You end up having no fun at all to see all the content instead of manning up and learning the game.

The only exception to this is a badly balanced difficulty spike in the middle of the game, but you don’t design mechanics assuming you’re going to do a poor job in other areas! What these games really need is more encompassing difficulty levels to make sure everyone has the appropriate level of challenge.

Simplification

With this generation things regressed for a more casual, younger audience (not consoles, don’t you dare start). This is fine because it has got a lot of people into games, but now they are looking for something deeper and we need to start upping the ante once again, not just releasing more and more ‘streamlined’ games.

I think it’s interesting when my beloved mother comes to see me and inevitably shows off her latest Bejewelled clone on the iPad, because each time it’s deeper and more complex than the last one.

Another place you can see this cycle is fighting games with them building on each other, hitting critical limit and then resetting with Simple Fighter IV. Now a bunch of people are interested in the genre again and want to see the complexity layered on.

I’ll write more later, though another quick one is Checkpoints = Lazy Designers. One of the biggest sins this generation is designers using checkpoints to allow poor encounter design, misleading traversal, and general instant-death BS.

By the way, have you guys seen the mess over the Eurogamer review? Simon Parkin highlighted some reasonable problems with the game and gave it 8/10. 8/10 is a good score but the Internet blew up. It was all collated on NeoGAF but it looks like you need an account to read now, so have some Google Cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&c…5l670l1.3.1l5l0

Basically endless comments like

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Anyone who gives Uncharted 3 anything less than a 9.0 is nothing but a troll and deserves to be slapped.

And now Eurogamer have interviewed Richard Lemarchand (ND's lead game designer) about their scandalous eight out of ten review. This is mental.

Good post, Rick.

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Disclaimer of "it's a good game" is necessary, but I think the gameplay and story in Uncharted 3 is behind the other two games, and the set-pieces are behind Uncharted 2.

It was great the action sequences now had good camera work and signposting to get you through in the first play through (or near enough), they were really amazing, but they still haven’t applied anything like this to the stealth sections. I don’t think I’ve finished a single stealth section in an Uncharted game except the Museum in the second (aka. worst part of the entire series).

I thought the Ghost Rider dudes looked good but they basically were normal guys with a particle system on their grenades and a teleport (I’m behind you GG). The fight in the fountain was just me restarting until I could get to the Hammer.

Oh, and those grenade guys are so annoying because you’re gone in two and the first one staggers you out of cover, often to be shot by other guys. Most of the time once the grenade is fired that’s it, there’s nothing you can do retroactively to prevent being dead. Same goes for those shotgun guys, depending on where they spawn you often could not take off their hat in time. I know the whole philosophy of Uncharted is repeating a sequence until it goes correct enough that you hit a checkpoint but, y’know, that’s not good.

The story never really seemed to peak and the baddies never seemed to have a clear goal. The artefact seemed pretty useless for controlling the world. And the baddie in the suit took a bullet without being hurt and appeared to disappear into thin air? And he seemed to care too much that the old woman died? I guess it’s just unusual for the sidekick not to be a conniving bastard. Whatever, the main problem with the story is that you basically know exactly what's going to happen from the start.

Quote from madgernader

XD that sucks...Ive never had anything arrive that destroyed. was it from a private seller?

Nope, normal Amazon. But it works so I'll just play it then send it back when the replacement gets here.

Uncharted 3, Dark Souls and Disgaea 4 (which turned up in mint condition).

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/JBL0h.png]

Statistics screen said it took me 9 hours, 9 minutes and 54 seconds on hard.

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I was really surprised when the achievements started popping up.

I'm sure there there was a point last night where my tweekdeck was only this. I guess you're pretty current.

I've just started it. Maybe it's because I've got it on hard, but one thing I'm already liking over the previous games is the puzzles are actual puzzles. It's not Drake saying "I know these symbols!" and then PRESS SELECT TO SOLVE.

Edit: I got the impression this game was going to be worse than the second for Simon Says death avoiding sequences, where you don't do what the director wants and you fall an inch into still water and die, but most of these I've got through first time, which makes them feel much cooler.

It seems more buggy than the other games though? I'm seeing a lot of NPC's being tugged around the environment before they can even turn fully or touch the ground. And I've had two "blocker" script breaks I had to suicide to fix.