trailer for a Valve "non video game project" thursday night :E
Congrats on the release! Definitely looks great this time around. Great exploration of the combine stuff. Here is a link to the demo of my playthrough and here are some notes;
- I started playing with a 360 controller so I could play on my couch using the TV. When I got to the
attack helicopter spot, the game was unplayable. Once you run out of ammo with the rocket launcher and switch to another weapon, you can't switch back to the rocket launcher without a keyboard. This is likely a problem with HL2 as well.
Probably nothing you can fix, but figured I'd mention it.
- One of the first things you experience is a boat sound that has a short, annoying loop.
- Floating rock around the first path
- Rocks just beyond the door of the first building, door goes right through the rocks when opening. Vines on the wall there also extend past door, clips through when the door opens as well.
- The fog plane behaves strangely near the lighthouse, sometimes it works fine and other times it seems to be broken and you can clearly see where the water ends in the playable space.
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After leaving the lighthouse, the player gets fucked by a couple of combine that spawn 10 feet in front of them around the corner. This feels less like an ambush and more like a cheap trick.
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After returning to the house with the electricity puzzle, I got fucked with a checkpoint save right when two enemies were coming through a doorway in front of me. This resulted in several checkpoint reload deaths.
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There is a spot where the player has to climb some shit onto a pipe and go through a hole high up in the wall. There is the lambda symbol to say, "up here!", but even that is nearly in darkness.
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I got stuck and couldn't figure out what to do in the combine area after returning to a space where the player has to climb up an angled wall and then onto a collapsed bridge. The geometry was similarly colored and on similar angles, hard to notice.
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I also got stuck crossing under the traintrack, the ledge the player uses to leave almost looks too steep so I didn't consider it.
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Was another floating rock mesh after the player comes out from underground and crosses under a small bridge. It is off to the left, I can't remember where this falls in chronology.
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lol @ the pidgeon
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The part looking out the pidgeon/helicopter window was strange. I almost thought I was looking out into a huge cave, but it was the night sky?
- Cool end credits 
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I found 0/3 flowers
now it's 50% off on steam ($30)
gg y'all
congrats, i can't wait to see what you guys are cooking up down there! needs more EOT countdown calendar until august 6 
PSA - If you haven't picked up the game yet, amazon is selling Max Payne 3 steam codes for $40 this month. Could have sworn they were going for $30 a week ago, though. Also not sure if it is restricted to any countries, but worth a look.
i left Monolith in early June and started my new gig as World Designer at Bungie two weeks ago 
Rage quit Dragon's Dogma today and probably never coming back. The game is already not that good and I feel like I wasted $60, I was mostly trying to finish after investing about 8 hours. The final straw was getting a quest that had you run for miles (there is no fast travel) to talk to someone about some "important information", only to get there and hear "there is urgent news at the capital, you must return at once". Are you fucking kidding me!? What a huge waste of time.
Good stuff;
+ "Pawn" system. Each player is given one "Pawn" which is like an NPC assistant that levels up with you, and you can choose their class, outfit them with gear, and manage their skills. This pawn can be shared online with your friends, or with everyone. A player can also have two additional pawns in their party, which can be from friends you know, or just random people on XBL/PSN. Pawns can gain information from fighting enemies or quests, and if they have done the quest you are on in a different game, can even lead you to the location.
+ Dialogue system. As you walk through various parts of the environment, your pawns will comment on things around you. This can be pretty neat and make them feel like they kind of know where they are, rather than just an AI running around geometry. There are some issues like being at the bottom of a cliff and the pawn says "if we jump we could get a shortcut, or die" even though that should only play at the top of the cliff. If a pawn has information on tactics to take down an enemy or boss, it can be pretty helpful. The dialogue can also be pretty damn annoying since you hear the same stuff all the time. I have this as a plus because it is a pretty cool attempt and I haven't seen much like it.
+ Combat and climbing on shit. Certain character classes have the ability to grab onto and climb all over bosses like in Shadow of Colossus. This is pretty cool and you can climb directly to a bosses vulnerable spot and stab the hell out of their balls or whatever. One boss that was particularly cool had
gems at various points on their body that when destroyed, froze the boss in place for maybe 30 seconds
. There are weird instances where you are climbing on a boss and the system is so confused which way "up" is, you might as well jump off and try again.
The bad stuff;
- UI... this is really bad. Some times when you complete a quest, the screen is nearly 100% filled with different notification windows. Some of these have important information, but most of them will fade away before you can even read 1/4 of them. Doing anything in the menu is really slow like selling items, combining items, or equipping/unequipping items. For some reason you have very similar inventory screens on the BACK button and on the START button, but you can only equip/unequip items on the START menu. No way to sort anything by weight or function either, so even after investing a lot of time I was equally clueless when flipping through items. Most of the UI when selling items can also kick you out to the chat screen, so you will hear the same "What are you selling?" about 50 times during one session. Might be fitting for a game 10 years ago, but just embarrassing by now.
- Quest system. Probably one of the worst I have ever seen, more half of them I can't even figure out how to progress on. Each quest has a "show on map" but most of the time it just shows where you are on the map, not at all useful! Other times a quest will only be applicable at a certain time of day, but fail to mention that and the game only lets you sleep and progress to morning or night so to hell with waiting. Like the reason I quit, many quests also have you run 50 miles to get somewhere just to have you run all the way back.
- Combats and enemy population. Along the roads and stuff of the open worlds, enemies will respawn in the same spots every day or so, many of which can barely be avoided. These weren't all that fun to fight the first time, and just turn into a pain in the balls the 10th time you run past them. There are some things like enemies blowing horns to attract more enemies nearby that seem like a cool idea if the player stops them, but it just gets lost in the chaos of battle.
- Dialogue. This is the worst fantasy trash you might ever hear. T'was and T'is' until you want to turn off your speakers or set the dialogue in a different language just so you don't recognize it anymore. I've never heard more bloated dialogue that could deliver the same message and be 1/4 as long.
Picked up Payday: The Heist afterwards.. awesome! 
Looks pretty awesome, nice variety in there. I for one welcome our new clean overlords
wooot congrats!
Ridley Scott was 42 when he made Alien... not the same industry I know, but not all good stuff was made by young folks.
Finished up the first season of Sherlock the other day, pretty awesome show.
Since I just finished Deus Ex 3 and found it to be pretty awesome, I am hoping there will something about Thief 4... also sad to see there will be nothing about Last Guardian 
Started this last night with two buddies on campaign co-op... hugely disappointed so far. The game is super-on-rails linear, locked FOV stuff at times, tons of random fail conditions that suddenly turn on and off that make no sense. At times the duration of cutscenes are longer than the actual gameplay, and the cutscenes are just your uninteresting generic military banter that most of the time you can't even skip. The first cutscene literally has dialogue like, "John Smith has a information we need, blah blah blah lets go get him". I installed the game to my HD just like it recommended, and still on the weapon customization screen it can take ~3 seconds to display anything on each screen. The game feels much less like a tactical game and more like "do exactly what we tell you to do because we're telling you it's tactical or you will fail". The checkpoints are some of the most poorly placed before cutscenes, or before long drawn out sequences that you will agonizingly play over and over. This is especially bad for the room breaching sequences that go into slow motion that are cool once, and having to play them multiple times because someone fails for some obscure reason is infuriating.
I checked out the multiplayer skirmish mode (not sure what it's called exactly) which was also disappointing. Small maps where you overtake a defensive position, and then trying to hold the position against one wave of enemies at a time in what can be really bad defensive positions (various straight line pieces of cover that constantly have you getting shot in the back). Some of these areas also highlight how broken the game can be where I was up on some stairs on an elevated defense position, and the cover system prevented me from aiming anything lower than the height my player was at, so I was killed.
First impression; maybe worth a rental or borrow, not worth $60. I'm also just one guy, so if there's a demo or something check it out
Looking really great, really has a vibe of Condemned at times. I love the art direction as well. Beautiful and detailed without becoming too noisy. Nice animation touches too like placing a hand on the wall.
Well this is pretty awesome news...
Epic forms "Epic Baltimore" based on part of the BHG team;
Quote from Warbycreepy alien walking by like in SIGNS O_o
I probably saw this 2 or 3 times before i noticed. There's a nice bright spot to the right where your eyes are drawn, then the action is in the dark on the left. o_O looks pretty good though, clean visuals and nice atmosphere even if there was no real incentive to be scared. Could be more immersive and add more vulnerability if the player tumbled a bit when dropping off platforms. Not going on a realism rant, but seems like an easy opportunity.
[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/oCaXe.jpg]
Got a new PC and monitor (upgrade from laptop)! Cat was not included and temporary setup on kitchen table.
Case - Corsair Carbide 400R
Mobo - MSI Z77A-GD65
CPU - Intel it 3570k
Memory - DDR3 8GB 1600 Mhz Corsair XMS3
SSD - 120 GB Intel 330 Series
HDD - Hitachi 750 GB 7200 RPM
PSU - Antec HCG-750W
GPU - MSI N670GTX 2GB
DVD - ASUS 24x
Cool - Corsair H60 Liquid Cooling
Disappointed in the monitor (ASUS VE248H 24")... black levels are more like a gray, but otherwise it seems pretty crisp.
Finished the game last night as... I think a level 32 monk on normal. Pretty good overall, though I definitely felt the first two acts were superior to the last two. I also felt most of the bosses were jokes, this is especially sad considering the bosses in WoW are really well designed with multiple stages and tactics. With the party I played with (myself + two others) I was the only one to get a legendary item (something like a level 9 monk fist weapon) in act 1. Then we started again on nightmare. Difficulty wise, this is what I wish the game would have been like the first time around, shame on you, difficulty locks.
