[CubaLibre]

[tacotaskforce]

[tiburon]

More random far cry 2 thoughts:

Everyone talks so fucking fast in this game

i spend 50% of my time trying to find a way to the diamonds/safehouse/objective
30% of my time getting killed by dudes in cars (i have since dropped the difficulty to normal)
20% of my time trying to find my car

the only gun worth anything is the sniper rifle

for being set in Africa there sure aren't a whole lot of Africans

this could have ++ potential if it had any narrative focus whatsoever. As it is, it's basically GTA: Africa City. or Assassin's Creed: Bushwhacking.
at least in GTA they gave you cars everywhere, and in AC you could blend in with the civilians. here everyone shoots at you on sight.


cut number of enemies in half, raise difficulty to hardcore, add civilians, and you might be on the way to something neat.


--

i do like your buddy dragging you out of battle when you die. those bits are well done. also like the fact that you have to manually cycle the bolt on the sniper by releasing LT to come out of scope.

the first time i accidentally knocked a barrel over and set fire to an entire outpost was pretty neat.



e: far cry 2 is "the truman show with guns"
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[Rud31]

The first thing I did in Red Dead Redemption was kill a Jackalope.
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[Felix]

having been defeated by La-Mulana, I decided to finish Vanquish.

it really gets unabashedly stupider toward the end! veering from semi-believable-yet-hackneyed kill robots plot to arguable parody to wait really is that it okay sure

anyhow, a fun time. it was a 5.5 hour game that should've been a 4.5 hour game, but I liked a lot of what it was doing, even if I can clearly see why no one really gave a damn at the end of the day.

[cake]

"Only the Polynesians would build a place like this in the middle of the jungle. Only the Polynesians would want to."

I spent all yesterday evening fighting an intractable 1000 year jungle war against Carthage in Civilization V. Then Rome launched an attack against my budding desert city of Passing Breeze and I went to bed. I ... I'm not sure what I want from this game. Well, I want everyone to leave me alone and let me build things in peace but that's what happened in the last game and it got a bit boring. So maybe I want the game to be just hard enough that I can suceed most of the time, but that seems a bit self-satisfying (is that really a bad thing?). I'm not interested in beating the computer, and playing against random humans means eating a series of humiliating losses. I enjoy the fiction of creating a civilization, but that's meaningless, and satisfying optimization is difficult when the events of the future are unknown.

I'm not really complaining, there's just something about this type of game - the frustration of losing and the ultimate pointlessness of success, compounded by the knowledge that in forums a few clicks away people are analyzing the game to a degree I could never match.

[Felix]

if you're interested and not already familiar, Civ4 has much less gradual busywork conflict -- the wars come infrequently, fast, and hard.

You might find the city management in Civ4 to have a bit too much overhead if you're used to Civ5 though.

[Jigsaw]

Been spending some more time with Shin Hokuto Musou. It's pretty fucking good!

Between the restructuring of the story mode, removal of essentially all grinding, and tweaks to the characters to make them more different from each other, as well as more fun to play, pretty much all of the problems I had with the first game have been addressed. I enjoyed the first game on account of being a huge Hokuto no Ken fan, but a significant amount of the time I spent with it was basically mashing Square while watching TV shows and hating myself... the grindy bits could get really bad, and at the end of the day the game was like 75% "grindy bits". I was mostly excited to get the sequel to get to play around with more characters, and see them revisit the story and do good on the things they skimped on in the first game, but I'm truly surprised by how much better the game is, and how much I'm enjoying it. If the games keep improving like this, I would be all fucking over Hokuto Musou 3.

So yeah, I know there was at least a handful of people here who played and enjoyed the first game, and I implore each and every one of you to check this game out. Unless you specifically enjoy replaying the same overly long level over and over again to make your character not completely worthless, I can't imagine you wouldn't like this game better than its predecessor. Would be really cool to get some online games in too, once someone else on this continent owns the game.

[tiburon]

[Rud31]

[ionustron]

Yeah FTL is kinda flawed sadly.

It's weird because I had a whole slew of consistent victories followed by 10 consecutive lost games where all drops and shops were just mismatches and not much could be done - on ships where I had won in previous games. If the first couple of sectors go badly you're pretty crippled for the rest and might as well restart. The problem is that you usually need item pairs to make a winning ship. So if you end up getting nothing but drones without the control bay for them or no burst capability for your pitiful starting guns, WELP! Ion weapons are all sorts of bad. They work but...ugh, it's like triple the time and micromanaging if you're stuck with them.

Invariably one of those solutions for the final battle is a shield bypassing strategy, either firebombs or a decent away team. Icing if you have both and sprinkles if you have even simple cloaking. It just makes the last fight a complete joke and it prolly shouldn't even be there so I have to agree with Cuba & others on that.

Wouldn't be bad if unlocking new classes wasn't up to high chance either.

What's also bizarre is that the runs that went the worst despite winning ended up having the highest scores and I don't know why.

[jamie]

[The King]

The Misadventures of Tron Bonne
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[luvcraft]

[tiburon]

done with far cry 2

I quit after having to replay an escort mission for the third time because there were no save points afterwards.
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[Rud31]

In RDR I went to cut up a boar. During the boar cutting cutscene my horse respawned a mile above ground immediately falling to it's death. I then started walking back to town only to encounter a sheriff chasing a man. I shot the man. The sheriff started to congratulate me before another boar plowed into him. I went to shoot the second boar when a pack of wolves jumped me. I ran and jumped off a cliff onto a moving train. I waited jumped off about a mile down. Immediately (the same?) pack of wolves attacked me. I shot some of them and the rest ran off. That's where I'm at right now.

Also holy shit the Mexico part fucking sucked.
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[Ronnoc]

Whoa, Xcom is really good. Got a bit of a weird learning curve, though. I lost a lot of people during the 'die in one shot' period, and haven't lost anyone since they leveled enough to die in two.

[special blend]

4 heroes of light continues to be super fun and addicting

great towns!
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[The King]

[ChairTax]

I still maintain that the best part of Red Dead Redemption is everything and anything related to completing the treasure maps cause it's the only thing that encourages you to engage with the environment and landscape in a way that isn't a-to-b mission to mission movement. When I think back on that game, my fondest memory is when, after having been in Mexico for a day or two, I decided to spend an hour or two looking for one particular treasure. It was night in the game and I'd just crested the ridge of a mesa. (I'd managed to blanket a few square miles since sundown.) The moon was mostly full, and the canyonlands below me were more or less illuminated. I pulled out my binoculars, spotted what looked like a pretty good geological approximation of what my treasure map showed, and I took my horse slowly down the ridge, carefully switchbacking till I'd reached the floor. From there, it was about a mile-long trot to the formation. (And, of course, the treasure.) This was after several hours of awful Mexico missions and the purity of "pay attention to your surroundings" was a revelation in the midst of moving from location to location blasting dudes.

Currently playing Burnout: Revenge on 360 and listening to SSION's "BENT" while doing so. Having an absolute blast. Also going through Gears of War with a friend in online coop. Act 2 was excellent and much better than Act 1.

[RobotRocker]

[parker]

[GcDiaz]

Played and finished Spec Ops: The Line.

Dare I call it "the cure for the common CoD"? I dare. It's a must-play.
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Let's bring sexy back!

[Rud31]

Tenkai Makyou 2 Manji Maru will go down as the fastest start to thisisboringimneverplayingthis of any game I've ever bought.

A PS2 port of a PCEngine CD game and oh man does it show. 3 frame animations.
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[The King]

I wanted to follow up Jumping Flash 2, so I loaded up Ghost in the Shell (the next game by the developers) and Robbit Mon Dieu (the next game in the series)

Robbit Mon Dieu is very pretty, and plays like the other games. I played the first level and will probably play through it.
edit: went back to this, after a few missions I decided the language barrier is just enough to push it down into nahhh territory. Skip.

Ghost in the Shell
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
This game is so fun. The tank just casually walks up walls and ceilings in a really fluid, wonderful way.
Was this the last game by Exact? They probably should be more acclaimed then they are; what wonderful game designers.
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[Loki Laufeyson]

that was by exact? it's so obvious in hindsight!

you should play geograph seal next, if you haven't already
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[Teflon]

I'm playing Sleeping Dogs.

It's got nice architecture for this kind of game. Buildings that feel like part of the space rather than impenetrable hollow boxes. It's entirely possible they just crammed the starting area full of wonderful nooks and crannies but I'm enjoying the town so far. I casually drove a moped up two flights of stairs onto a pedestrian bridge, across and then down the other side again. Next I plan to ride one through the night market.

That said fuck the watered-down(!) Arkham battle system. Waiting for dudes to glow is tedious and a terrible mechanic for a game that's like 1/3 brawler.

[glossolalia]

you can beat about 80% of ghost in the shell by never not shifting around randomly, but just moving through the world is awesome, it's the only game that ever made circle strafing fun. awesome soundtrack too

iirc exact co ltd was dissolved into sce japan after ghost in the shell. would be interesting (for someone else) to trace which members ended up working on what since then.

[Ronnoc]

[special blend]

[misadventurous]

[special blend]

how far are you? i was getting bored/annoyed with the combat but after the third or fourth boss the game began to demand more from me and so far i'm still digging it.
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[CubaLibre]

[The King]

finished Ghost in the Shell (ps1)
I really liked the timed sequences in this game, it always felt tense but reasonable.

The last boss fight is neat:spoiler: the timed freefall fight segment at the end.
Great way to close the game.
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[misadventurous]

[Zodar]

[GcDiaz]

[Dracko]

No, you're dealing with the sort of people who call other people "bros". No one who enjoys military themed shooters plays Spec Ops and thinks "gee, maybe shooting all these people is wrong" while the game rewards shotgun blasts to the chest and headshots with slow-motion flourishes.

As a cynical gambit to get the sort of people who sneer at cover shooters to play one and still feel like they're somehow cleverer than other people who play cover shooters, it's super successful. At saying anything of value, you've already acknowledged it's a failure.
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[CubaLibre]

Killing brown people sure is wrong, now have a blast in our epic multi.
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[BotageL]

I have no desire to play Spec Ops The Line because I've already played a b-grade cover shooter about being a horrible human being. It's called Dog Days and it's actually kind of subversive, rather than sitting the player down for a lecture about what a terrible person they are for playing it.
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[Brooks]

Bet there's no awesome desperate male nudity in Spec Ops either

Seriously that was a rare fist-in-the-air moment for my vidconning 2k12