Berliner, will you shut this guy up?
Berliner, will you shut this guy up?
nathan smart!
http://www.nathansmart.com
I Sauce, you said you liked twilight princess and possibly Arkham Asylum, but seem to hate every other game on earth. What have been some other games you have played and liked?
And also, I thought Red Dead Revolver was pretty fun. Much better than Gun. But not as good as Samurai Western which flew under the radar but was actually the best westerny type ps2 game.
I don't know, I kind of agree with him.
I've been playing the second Bioshock, and I do remember the good things I liked about the first one. I mean, theoretically this game should be perfect for me; art deco atmosphere/old timey stuff, retro futurism, dystopian environments, etc. I am just annoyed at what seemed to be a very convenient plot in the first one, and that might extend to the second one, I don't know yet.
I'm at a part where the main character is in a kind of museum/theme park, and the way they designed the attractions to be objectivist propaganda is pretty awesome. It reminds me of another level in the first one that was really great and still stands out in my mind: that research place where the little girls were bonded with Big Daddies.
Last edited by Berliner; February 13, 2010 at 12:31 PM.
Winter is Coming: Summer 2011.
I might've been thinking of Gun. But I think both Gun and RDR got bad reviews iirc.Originally Posted by SlyBattery
Uh, I liked GTAIII and San Andreas both a lot, but I don't disagree that tagging 50 buildings and all that nonsense sounds like no fun. I guess it's just that you can do other things on your way to doing missions, or you can not do those things. I liked collecting stuff in GTA even though on paper I hate games that are all about collecting trophies and new clothes -- I think it's because I felt like there was so much variation in what you could do that I never got sick of one thing. It wasn't just a collecting game, it was a shooting/driving/whatever game that had collecting built into it.
Other games I've liked... I liked Super Mario Galaxy for what it was, but wished it had been more open -- I think an open Mario game would be amazing, because the gameplay is always so great.
Back in the day I loved the Tomb Raider games, which I thought Uncharted would be a descendent of, but Tomb Raider had real puzzles that required thought and it felt more open to me at the time. It wasn't actually open at all, but when you would enter a huge cavern or whatever it seemed like there were many places to go and you had to figure out the way to advance, whereas Uncharted always seemed more straightforward in its level design, like there was never a question of where you were meant to go because there was nowhere else to go. (Tomb Raider didn't have the same quality of dialogue as Uncharted, but to me it was more fun because you became immersed in playing it, and the cut-scenes were relatively infrequent -- when you got to one, you had earned the break from action that it was giving you.)
To boil all this down, I guess it just depends on whether the gameplay is fun and intuitive to me. Batman was really great because once I got comfortable with the controls they were second nature, and that let me feel like I was Batman. It was incredibly satisfying to grapple onto a ledge, or set a sonic batarang and detonate it when a guy walked close enough. A lot of my complaints about Uncharted could be leveled at Batman (why can't I grapple onto certain things?), but those shortcomings didn't bother me because I enjoyed playing the game so much. Uncharted suffered in my mind because the controls were not nearly as tight as Batman's, and thus playing it was less fun, and that made all the other shortcomings stand out.
I personally find wii controls imprecise. For casual games like Wii Sports it's fine, but Modern Warfare Reflex was absolute rubbish on the wii. I could control things SO much easier and more accurately with an analogue controller. There's a timed test mission in the beginning, and a good/average time on the 360 is about 25 seconds. On the wii, it was more like 30-40 seconds. The multiplayer, from what i could see, was MUCH slower paced.
I don't know, your controls complaint seems empty to me. Lack of intuitiveness just means you have to learn and adjust. One of the most rewarding things to me in a game is the sense of progression you get as you learn the controls. Maybe it's just because I grew up playing modern games so I'm used to the logic behind the controls.
Oh, and I also much prefer the 360's controller to the ps3's.
Of course, to each his own. I'm not trying to change anyone's ideas.
I'm a MAN, dammit!
My two favorite games last year were AA and AC2. The gameplaying mechanics were really well done, to a point where I couldn't play another game for a while without feeling that they were pretty bad in comparison. What has always annoyed me with some games like GTA is that a lot of it doesn't require you to be particularly skillful in the games. Sometimes an important boss will just fall off the roof of a building and die. In Arkham, you feel like you are using all of batman's skills in order to defeat the bad guys, and you feel very much in control of the situation. You can scan a room and choose the various options dispatching them. As a batman/badass simulator, it was great.
AC2 had that same feeling. You can sneak up behind them, throw knives at them from a distance, jump down from a building and slam a wristblade into their skulls, or engage in swordfights (the weakest part because you just defended and countered). My personal favorite thing to do was throwing down smoke bombs and stabbing everyone in the stomach while they were coughing.
Winter is Coming: Summer 2011.
I asked this when people were still playing, but what are people's opinion of that ending?
Winter is Coming: Summer 2011.
It sets up some interesting things for the sequel. At least, I think it might make it possible that there will be more than one ancestor who you will follow in the Animus, based upon where you are in the world at the time and what you want to discover in the past.
The ending was nice because it played with some fourth wall stuff, which is one of the reasons I love the Metal Gear games as much as I do.
The only downside to the ending? It felt a bit heavy handed since they basically dumped all they could on you in the end. Or at least lead up to it a bit more. For a long time, Ezio's story is not connected at all to this larger nature of things outside of the fact that there is a Piece of Eden floating about. Instead, there is this huge amount of backstory that is found when you hunt glyphs that helps drive the player towards the reveal at the end. Ideally, I would have liked to have seen a bit more implications in the actual story itself. There were some, but not many.
Starting BioShock tonight and couldn't be more excited. The girlfriend has been playing Dead Or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball.
By the way, ISOS, if you're really looking for good puzzles and a game that lets you figure them out in your own time, you might want to check out Braid. The puzzles in that game are insanely clever and really put to shame the lock and key puzzles from Zelda (and I say this as a fan of Twilight Princess).
You'll want to skip the story, though.
Bioshock 2 has really been fantastic. I'm now on the 5th 'level' and have been impressed repeatedly with how the individual stories within each section has developed. Much like Batman AA, I think this is a great game that hit at the perfect time to really strike a chord with me and make me appreciate it a lot more than I might otherwise.
I was at Best Buy today buying BioShock one and I almost didn't to buy the BioShock 2 collectors edition. A 180gram vinyl and art book, count me in. Hoping this flu lets me play through BioShock quickly.
I would agree that Braid was a very good and clever game. The story is practically noninclusive, what with the only 5 or so lines of dialogue in the whole game. But it had an interesting twist that I liked. Also its cheap, another bonus.
On another note, I played the demo for Heavy Rain and I know without a doubt if the game is more of that then I would love it. But that's because I don't mind playing games solely for the story. It was barely a game at all. Though it was fun to make the people do really socially awkward things. Like when that fbi agent goes to talk to the cops drinking coffee and they just stare at him as he awkwardly asks about the weather. Then to make him turn around, then look over his shoulder at them, then continue to walk away sad. Also, when that guy walks into that girls apartment and you can make the detective think "I need to go in there and help her," and then just having him leave is all sorts of hilarious to me.
Last edited by SlyBattery; February 14, 2010 at 11:35 AM.
For the record, I don't hate Braid's story as much as most people, but if pretentious game stories are a pet peeve of yours, I just can't imagine you'll get much of anything out of it.
The twist was kinda neat.
Wii controls are not good on most 3rd party games that are designed for other consoles -- making a game for PS3 or XB and then trying to "translate" it to the Wiimote is not a good idea and rarely, if ever, goes well. Those games should be played with controllers as their makers intended -- they're only ported to the (graphically-inferior) Wii in the first place because the Wii is the best-selling console and there's money to be made.
My point was that after playing the good Wii games (1st party stuff designed for the Wiimote) for three years, I had a heightened awareness of how artificial and arbitrary the controls in "traditional" video games are -- pushing a button to punch when you've been swinging your arm to punch is suddenly weird. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just interesting to me. I do feel that "hardcore" (for lack of a better term) games are better played on controllers, but I think that every game could learn something from the Wii (which is probably why Sony and Microsoft are developing Wiimote-styel controllers).
Separate from that issue is the thing I never fully overcame in Uncharted 2, which is that when you press a button to do something, the character animation takes slightly too long, giving the game a sluggish feeling. In Batman, when I grappled, I felt like I was actually grappling: I aim, press the button and the grappler fires. In Uncharted, I often felt like I was prompting the character to perform instead of directly controlling him (like when you press X to climb up from a ledge -- you press, and then he climbs, and you wait for him to finish before you can initiate your next move). I think this is just a timing thing, but it sort of encapsulates my philosophical problems with Uncharted: that feeling that I'm not able to become immersed in the game and just be the character, because the game is constantly reminding me that it's in control.
So, to counter your argument that you "just have to learn and adjust," with Batman, I learned the controls (which are pretty complicated) and then they became transparent to me -- I didn't think about them as I played (although I never fully got on board with the fight mechanics -- luckily that doesn't really matter in the story mode). With Uncharted, I never stopped being slightly annoyed by what I felt were flaws in the controls. I kept wanting it to be tighter, quicker and more responsive to my commands.
They are concentrating more on video capture technology, but I have a friend who writes for video game magazines who thinks this is a terrible trend, that consoles will stop focusing more important aspects of a game in order to concentrate on a what he thinks is a gimmick. Not necessarily my opinion, but I can understand his point.
Winter is Coming: Summer 2011.
Sorry to keep bringing Twilight Princess up, but I liked how they did it: the controls were mostly pretty standard (analog stick to move around, buttons to pick up items, open doors, etc), but the wiimote/nunchuck was used for sword-fighting and bow-and-arrow shooting. So you got a more direct and immersive sense of interactivity during combat, but you weren't limited to short-spurt, casual gaming (a big problem with wiimote games: you can't play for too long if you're standing up and swinging a stick around to play). Hopefully no one wants to map every aspect of gaming to literal body movement -- that's as dumb as a movie shot all in the 1st person to make you feel like you're experiencing the hero's plight -- but I think it's short-sighted to suggest that gaming has to stick to the same basic controller layout that has dominated consoles for the last 10-15 years.
I just wonder about the long term appeal of something that is radically different. Take Project Natal. It is amazing in its scope and I do think there are possibilities there but I am unsure how much of it will seem like a gimmick.
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