Posts by Taylor

A pseudo-intellectual film about an empty, rotten and obsolete location, whose biggest exposure to gamers was probably its homage in a console game.

This does seem like a bit of a strange decision and it'll be interesting to see what becomes of it. The solution they are implementing would have been harder for IW to implement than just sticking to dedicated servers, and I’m not sure how smooth party lobbies will be. The benefit of Live is that you can organise games while people are on the dashboard or playing something else.

I've had two crashes in this. One in the train, and one after

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finishing the rather long 3-sided gun fight in the temple towards (what I believe is) the end

. It's frozen now while I write this. I think, before this generation, the total number of game crashes I've had in a console game was one.

There's no doubting that it's fantastic, but focusing simply on how it plays only I think I had more fun playing the first one. Pretty much every other fight is a set-piece, which should be a good thing, but Uncharted still has a lot of trouble actually conveying what it expects the player to be doing. And if you are doing something different you die, so when this is so regular it's a bit of a problem. This is particularly evident in the rather ropey 'stealth' sections, but even in normal gun fights you can expect snipers, shotgun, and grenade launcher instant-kill enemies to spawn right up your arse if you didn't progress through the way the designer intended. And, like the original Uncharted, you never really know how far you can jump or drop, as it pretty much changes as the game sees fit. You can fall two inches onto a rooftop but if you're not supposed to go that way you die. Of all my deaths in Uncharted 2 98% of them were me being robbed.

But it still gets a nice healthy "fantastic" because when you are going with the flow and get momentum it is really amazing and each death has you just pop out a checkpoint so it's no big deal. The cutscenes, story, visuals, the entire package outside of that is amazing, so I'll shut up and go restart my PS3.

Edit: On the subject of this generation, I tried to play Brutal Legend after and the first thing it did was download a 256mb patch. Next we'll have to install console games on hard drives. Oh wait.

The Soundtrack is looking pretty awesome too. And here's the Music Director reading it while Tim solves a Rubiks Cube. Kind of old news, but I found out today and if it's in the thread I'm blind.

So, Charlie Brooker has decided to be even more awesome and do a show dedicated to games:

iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n1j8q (UK residents only)

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjFiTd2nmI4

It's the same style as his Screenwipe and Newswipe programmes, if you want to find more of him. It's nice to see someone on TV talking a lot of sense about the medium and, of course, calling touhou firework vomit.

Neither Seth or Gouken were god tier and I would guess they'll end up in the console release, they just want to keep them as bosses in the arcade. I also imagine a lot of the lower tier characters will be boosted as, with the exception of Vega, this is mostly the console exclusive characters that were seemingly made gimp on purpose -- because they would not get the benefit of location tests and other hardcore balance changes (ex: Sakura's medium doesn't cross up, Gen's reversal is not invincible, Fei Long's infinite was removed very sharpish, Rose is Rose, someone was saying Cammy has a kick that is minus frames on hit).

Juri has a timer super, I imagine this is an Install rather than a Custom Combo, though. The SFIV engine isn't really flexible enough to allow them anyway to be honest. No news on a guard bar being introduced and I will bet my left hat the multiple saving mechanic is letting you cancelling focus attacks into additional focus attacks on absorb. This would remove the problems with parries, make them easy to do, and if used on anything strong (like an ultra, though currently they all armour break) you will fill up your ultra bar in the progress. Since the entire point of ultras is to manufacture comebacks and That Evo Thing, it makes sense.

Hey, mister Dee Jay.

Edit: Apparently there is no arcade release. It's dead, Jim.

It's a disc release, but they say it won't be full price.

Edit: There is a BlazBlue update coming too, but I dare not bump the thread.

I’m interested by the taekwondo vampire. I hope some of the other rumours are true... Cody, Guy and Makoto would be awesome. The 'gief air 720 not so much.

That's vastly overstated. Manastones and enchants do have a chance to fail, but you get manastones every four mobs and an enchant from destroying any piece of unneeded gear. You will get the upgraded manastones for your best gear, of course, but that doesn't matter for basic content.

It's actually fairly difficult to get into enemy territory. A Rift will randomly appear allowing players to teleport through. So you'll get players pouring into an enemy zone in massive groups rather than the occasional ganking git. The neutral area (the Abyss) is different with controllable territory, which I think also gets attacked by mobs for the PvPvE element.

The combat is the same bar of abilities and timers system you see in most MMO's, which I prefer to AoC's system. As an Assassin I'm finding myself using a lot of skills and being quite reactive (especially compared to WoW). Nice little decisions like backstab actually working from the front but doing relatively no damage so you can't just spam it while spinning around (as in Lineage iirc), and evade skills are simply 100% for one ability rather than RNG for a duration.

Continuing the trend. Asmodian was here, Elyos is loser.

[Blocked Image: http://i38.tinypic.com/21m9ptv.jpg]

Did some accidental PvP today, a quest dumped me in Elyos' land up somewhere safe with the quest thinking I would teleport back. Instead I jumped off, glided down, landed in a circle of about 8 people, hit hide and ran away scared because they all said “??” as level. Then I realised they must all say that and looked for someone to hit. The guy I eventually opened on ran into mobs at my unexpected appearance on his spinal column but then, in true MMO style, I got clustered.

Quote from Skjalg

I might have come off a bit negative there, dont get me wrong; its a game worthy of the 50$ i payed for it, its just not... as good as wow.

I hear in Cataclysm you'll be able to raid with 2 people and every NPC will have its own faction to get exalted with.

Quote from thread

Realism

It's more like RvR than the instanced, cross-server battlegrounds of WoW.

I don't know what PvP is like and I would prefer three sides. But I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt for now, at the very least the classes and skills are better designed for PvP than most.

To be honest it has more in common with Lineage II or Dark Age of Camelot. I'm on Castor. Asmodian Assassin called Buster. I'm enjoying it so far but I'm trying not to play it too much... I'll probably have more to say when I get into the PvPvM Abyss.

Quote from Ginger Lord

Harley Quinn

Okay, I'll buy this.

From the gameplay footage (I can't view the editor footage atm) it looks like it uses the same system as WC3 only with smaller tiles. So your pathing and gameplay is all tiles but you can then distort this with a height map in the editor for sexy.

You basically depress clearings, raise "trees" and add noise at tile changes. Anything complicated looks silly in practice.

Colour me sceptical for now, the Warcraft 3 mapping community is practically built on ripping each other off.

I've been avoiding all their recent media releases. I know it's going to be awesome based on a couple of trailers and the previous game, want to avoid spoiling it

They call me the hiphopopotamus, my lyrics are bottomless.

Everyone knows EA did the port.

Quote from Buddy

I must admit that the day Valve became PS3 hater, i did too.

After the amazing Orange Box release I'm sure the feeling is mutual.