New & Upcoming game discussion.

[UntamedLoli]

NCSoft makes a better Diablo than Blizzard does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P_TRND70AM

[Falchion]

Well, HK, what did u expect? They're ASIANS, their unlaziness makes us Westerns be put to shame!

Maybe we need someone to face slap us, say 'Back to work bum-ass' and make us give back a reason for pride.

[DrumsofWar]

I'd say it's less the Asian thing and more that NCSoft has been fine-tuning their MMO formula longer than any other company out there (plus they got to wait for D3 to see how that game played in order to lift some more ideas). Their previous Lineage games were OK MMOs but this looks like it might be a very good action RPG.

The ranged class later on in the video actually looks more badass.

Also for Mesk, Fucking with Skyrim .ini.

[Vetraeus]

I love how the bodies in that video just dematerialize as they are hit.

[mark_009_vn]

The games I usually plays are either as old as Tetris or made by Russians, most of them are either hard core simulators or semi-hard core RTTs. I just completely stayed away from modern day games as a whole. Why? Because the gaming market is now filled with AMERIKAN made media, which usually consist of nothing more than bastardized clones of Carl on Duty: Money Welfare or being a very bad sequel, Money Welfare is by far the only game in the Capitalist market right now to have so much haft asses sequels that the tittle "baby 8 billion" will be given to it next year and be renamed to "Call of Duty 8 billion" to be honest.

I mean really, really man, the fact that StarCocks v2.0: Wangs of Puberty has a built in, fully integrated Butt Scratching mode to help Casuals feels even more Casual winning against Insane AI by massing nothing but unupgraded Hellions out of singular Factory, I wouldn't be more surprise when the most critically acclaimed game of all time in the near future will be called 'It's Japanese! When Moustached Virgins attacks!".

That to be said, play Stalker or something (No Mesk, it's not a game that gives you Harpies). Stalker is by far the only FPS past 2007 that is actually addicting and replayable. It is also the only game I've known so far that have the best atmosphere design concepts, which has became my general source of understanding on atmosphere in general. The game's atmosphere design; which is to be implemented directly to the core Gameplay/Graphic, Sound/Story telling mechanics instead of simply just being slapped together in the last minute like how one would treat a pony; is only matching by contemporary Eastern European games such as Cryostatis and The Void.

Ace Combat: Casual Lardfare.
At first glance it seems to be the same ol Ace Combat we love, but it seems the casual market has hit Japan in the horse.

This is why you should have played LOCK ON instead. Guaranteed casual free!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FUge6ghaIo

[IskatuMesk]

So, here's some extended opinions of Skyrim after playing for much longer. I'll try to avoid any spoilers but I will be talking briefly about dragons.


Graphics;

One of the things that really concerned me coming from Oblivion was that Bethesda were going to half-ass the animations. And they did. Okay, the hair is annoying and the low-resness of a console port gnaws on me, but the animations really were avoidable. They're better than Oblivion but not by much. After coming from a lot of foreign MMO's, the animations in this game really come off as rigid and lazy. Not all of them are terrible, but combat animations, especially FPView and the sequence kills, really detract from the experience. Throw in animations like saber cats and bears and it really goes downhill.


Post processing and particle blending serve Skyrim well in many regions, attaining a respectable level of quality despite lacking high-rez textures.


I sincerely hope this game is moddable. Not Oblivion "argh my face what is this doing" moddable, but actually realistic to make TC's in.

Combat;

To me, the game's about combat. All RPG's are about combat. Sure, there's exploration and story, but I don't go into these games for the story. If I do that, I'll be disappointed. I'd rather wander around looking for the next big thing to fight. Unfortunately, combat doesn't really seem to have gone anywhere since Oblivion. Melee combat lacks any and all depth present in even the simplest action RPG's. Which is odd, because it's a console port, and consoles favor ARPG's better than PC's do. I am not sure why melee combat is restricted to positional and "power" trigger attacks, and doesn't have any form of non-passive interaction.... but it doesn't. This doesn't give level/monster designers much room in designing fights.

This makes fights fall into one of two categories for me: Curb stomps, or reverse curb stomps. The difficulty of the game wildly changes at the flip of a dime. I'm playing on the default difficulty, because I remember dying a lot to imps in Oblivion. In Skyrim, I regularly 1shot most enemies I come across. Then, enemies 1 or 2shot me. Just like that. The game supposedly has an autolevelling system similar to Oblivion, but I get the impression some monsters, particularly minibosses and dragons, don't autolevel. Dragons are easy, but more on those later. The minibosses I encounter are usually Undead of various nature. The lengths I have to go through to kill them are long, painful, and involve abusing the archaic AI engine.

Now, onto Dragons. As the primary combat feature of the game, I expected a lot more from dragons. Every dragon I have yet encountered flies around on a wild, erratic path with horribly unrealistic turning radius/speed, breathing fire that does, at best, moderate damage. No spells, no Shouts, no special abilities. They seem to only be able to land on pre-determined waypoints and at specific intervals; they're heavily scripted. This makes them easy for me to kill, because all I have to do is sprint when they breathe, take no damage, then hit them when they land. I am using dated armor and their melee attacks hardly scratch me. A few whacks, they fly up, I run around, they land, they die.

According to HKS this is a little different for casters, which comes as a surprise seeing as he's been telling me about how horribly broken Sparks is. Sparks is a channelled spell, one you can apparently "spam" to achieve insane damage rates at no mana cost (think about beam ticking in sc2). Despite this he apparently runs out of mana too fast to kill them easily.

I guess ARPG's have spoiled my taste for combat, as I have always enjoyed the fighter-esque depth out of that genre, something Skyrim seems sorely lacking in. But I guess that's what mods are for, as apparently some mods for Oblivion heavily altered the combat system.

Sounds;

I have encountered a few bad bits of voice acting but nothing particularly atrocious yet. I guess what stands out to me the most is that they only had a handful of voice actors doing all of the voices in the game. Half of the guards sound like Arnold. This is a bit comical, but it breaks the mood immediately.

All of the SFX are pretty decent except for one colossal exception - the sequence kill sound. It is very bad. It is so atrociously bad that, when combined with the poor animations and silly camera, I usually throw up when I hear it. It is low frequency and so out of place, I really cannot fathom the unimaginable internism that inspired them to release with it still in the game.

Gameplay;

I guess the overall appeal of Oblivion, Skyrim, and the other Elder Scrolls games is the open world nature. However, I always found Oblivion to be lacking so much in the way of finding anything worthwhile that I grew very bored of it very fast. Skyrim offers much better gameplay in this regard, but I am starting to feel the repetition of the design at work.

Encounters are scattered on the map in grid sort of formation and follow a fairly basic formula. Enter dungeon, punch guys, maybe solve a generic puzzle to open a door, kill more guys, open box and find nothing of particular value. This may or may not involve 1-2 hours of me shooting a guy with my low bow skill behind a rock because he 1shots me if he gets close or not. I think what I enjoy most about these areas is the subtle details.

Spoiler

A puzzle has you solve it non-obviously by referring to a book noted in a Negromancer's journal. The book makes mention of animals, and these animals are the order of the blocks you must arrange to open the door. The game does not tell you this, like most Western games do, and so it took me a while to figure out that the answer was not obvious and I had to actually pay attention.

From the Dwarven Gundam factories to underwater castles, the environments of Skyrim are not so repetitive as the design behind them and offer unique experiences each time. This to me is the greatest success of Skyrim, in that they've managed to make me play it for almost two-days nonstop and not feel bitter. What game has succeeded in this for so many years? I wouldn't give it the 96/100 meta critic rating those pantywaists on Steam gave it due to the interface bugs, animations and console portyness, but I would rate this leagues above everything Blizzard has released post-brood war combined.


I don't think that Dragons are actually random. I think they spawn based on location and based on a script. This is because Dragons do leash, and always seem to appear away from towns and quest areas. I've killed probably about half a dozen various dragons now. I hope they start actually attacking towns soon. I want to see some dudes get stabbed. Other monsters, like bears, vampires, and the like, do seem to be random. And, yes, they do level/gear scale with you, so now I am starting to encounter random guys with elven/dwarven gear at level 22, though the vast majority of preplaced bandits still use fur stuff.

According to HKS, the world actually adapts to you clearing out dungeons. I haven't witnessed it for myself, but this is supposedly one of the big features of the world engine I was not aware of - it generates quests and changes regions you've already been to so you always have new stuff to punch. I only encountered one dungeon where guys were fighting each other, and I don't know if it was random or not. The thought of a truly persistent world at work does tingle my modder's crundle.

Story;

I won't comment on the main story much because I have not done a lot of story-related things so far.

The game tries to breadcrumb you into the sidelines in discreet and subtle ways. It is not like most Western games that stole from the Diablo 2/WoW casual concept of LOL CLICK ON ME TO RECEIVE QUEST. You can receive quests from rumormongering, general dialogue, watching two guys argue/punch each other, reading books can breadcrumb here and there, and almost all of it is really subtle. This is where the true development time of Skyrim no doubt went into - the colossal amount of dialogue and voice acting that went into all of the random junk happening around you. The AI is still really weird, though, like my broad doing the magical chairs with a single... chair...

Oh, yeah. Your campanions can permanently die. My first wench got bent over by a stack of Conjurers. Casters in this game, holy hell are they retarded. I die most often to casters, because it's harder to cheese the really strong ones. I usually have to gratuitously abuse any and all world traps that are available, because they do insane bonus damage to NPC's. I am... the Bear Trap Samurai.

Overall, Skyrim exceeded my expectations. It's one of the few times where I felt like I was playing a real game and not some indie trash like Starcraft 2. It has a lot of rough spots, so if you're on the fence about it, I'd say wait for a patch or two and some mods to roll out. There's already a mod out that changes the DDS compression some intern mangled the faces with.







Ah, time for another semi-review. I was starting an LP a short time ago before depression slapped me up and I stopped working on all of my video material, probably for a long time. This one is for The Ball. It's a UDK indie title, and I bought it when it was on sale because the guys who made it were pretty open about their world and provided a lot of tutorial material. I'm all for supporting those kinds of guys. Unfortunately, their game really doesn't stand up to those standards.

Alright, so The Ball is a puzzle game. This immediately spelled doom for me, because I hate puzzles. But I thought I'd suck it up, turn on fraps, and give it a try. It wasn't the puzzly nature that really struck me, though. It was the sheer, unabridled laziness.

The world environment has next to NO NORMAL MAPPING. IN A UDK TITLE. WHAT THE FUCK. Okay, maybe Blizzard's interns are too asphyxiated from gfraizer's rod stuck up their ass and in their throat, but there is seriously no excuse to not have normal mapping in 2011 in an engine like Unreal 3. No. Excuse. At. All. Throw on extremely obvious UV/tiling issues on the same damn rock texture they used across much of the game and you may or may not start becoming mishappy.



Yes, that is what should be a streak of oil. No, I don't know why Ropar is trying to eat it.

If you look past the many and immense graphical shortcomings, the gameplay can surprise rod you sometimes as well. Take, for example, the unexpected exploding balls that fall on your head if you place a block in the wrong place. They don't make a sound and their particle effects are so atrociously awful that you may not even know what the hell happened in the first place. They are instant death, so pucker up for a 5 minute walk back to the puzzle room again because level design is hard.

I discovered my first bug 5 feet into the game - if you rub against rocks you vibrate wildly and make a barely-audible grunting noise. Speaking of grunting noises, I hope whoever did the voice acting for their random dialogue was beaten with a colossal hunk of hardened lard.

I'm sure there's more things I forgot to rant about in both Skyrim and The Ball, but I guess you'll just have to wait for the videos.

/e

I've started to see dragons in small towns, now. They tend to die fairly easily to guards, though.

fairy significant spoiler

I've also become a Werewolf and I may or may not have accidentally executed a large portion of Whiterun because I thought I was using a Shout and not transform. Oh well. None of them were very cute anyways. Now I can add some corpses to my other junk heaps in the town.

[High_Zealot]

Just wait until you see two blood dragons. I got lucky and they were in one of the towns but it was still pretty tough.

[IskatuMesk]

I just noticed that some bodies, particularly dragons, seem to actually decay and vanish rather quickly. This is most upsetting, because the dragon parts are so damn heavy and I've been trying to ferry them to my love shack in Whiterun. Blah.

And now that SR3 is out that will probably be the last of Skyrim I see for a while.

/e

Ah yes, I forgot about posting this.

Ascherzon: so I put a sword on a platter

Ascherzon: okay, it's offset
Ascherzon: some intern maybe fucked up an attachment point
Ascherzon: but it gets stranger
Ascherzon: I come back to that place later

Ascherzon: it has MOVED
Ascherzon: and now

Ascherzon: it moved FURTHER

/e 2

Okay, whose braindead idea was it to not have local character saving in Saints Row 3? I mean, really? I cannot locally save or update a custom character? Are you KIDDING ME?! Please tell me I am missing some kind of option here..

Oh, yeah. No freeroam. What the HELL.

And steam crundled the pre-order junk.

[IskatuMesk]

I was gonna write a big review about Saint's Row: The Third but I think all of my thoughts could be summed up in a single, low-res image pulled from one of my fraps files.

[Mucky]

...Is that a sawblade in between two tires?

[Lavarinth]

Better yet, I love that paint job.

[IskatuMesk]

Alright. Here's some more rant material for you.

Saint's Row: The Third. I hope I don't ever see anyone here hating on mocap ever again. I swear most of this was mocapped given by the huge credits list and it is above and beyond one of the smoothest animating games I've seen in recent years. This was animation done right.

The voice acting was pretty damn solid, too. Not only did they manage to capture the Japanese game show deal really, really well, but even the various voices for your player character seem to all be around the same level of quality.

Now, the weapon sfx definitely could have used some love. They were definitely a weak point in SR2 and they're still the weakest link in SR3. This is unfortunate because all of the other sfx is pretty good. They just sound so... underwhelming. I do intend to rip out the SFX asap (aka when I feel any good to see if it's even possible), so I'll soon find out if that's the engineer's fault or the game's fault.

The game's OST is only 8 fucking tracks. What the hell. Meanwhile the game rip numbers something like 700-900 tracks. Seriously, this game has a shitton of music, and not just radio stations. The score ranges from rock/metal-ish to electronic and while it's not traditionally my style of music it's actually pretty decent and I'll probably throw one up as mp3 of the week. I can't say much though because apparently they outsourced the living fuck out of this game, if you go by the ludicrously long credits.

SR3 is kind of an interesting game. Think of it as GTA4, but it went down the route of humor and pop references as opposed to the genericness of GTA4. However, don't get me wrong, this isn't the shoehorned sigh-inducing references that Blizzard built Warcraft off of (which even, as I recently discovered, owes its art style entirely to Blackthorne, including the Orcs). Instead of just throwing junk in, though, they actually picked and chose what to put in, and made it work. Zombies? Check. Ridiculous cinematics? Check. Furries? The thing is here, this stuff actually had effort put into it.

Saint's Row: The Third comes as highly recommended. The bugs and shit I displayed in XXE all counts as plusses, although a few truly severe desyncs did slow us down a bit. I get the feeling they never tested co-op at all, but surprisingly the desyncs weren't wholly destructive to the game (HKS might claim otherwise seeing as I was perpetually tazering his "corpse", whereas on his screen he was just getting stunned over and over and over for no apparent reason while trying to stay alive vs a gang). For some retarded reason THQ is their publisher, and in this day and age it makes no sense to even have publishers around anymore. They're just lard waiting to get scraped off the rim of the bucket and thrown back in. Parasites.

The Old Republic. That new Star Wars MMO that's coming out. Yeah, that one that Bioware, the lords of shoehorning, are making. It sucks. No, really. The graphics scarcely escape WoW level. The sound effects are pretty decent but it's clear they had almost no direction with the voice acting. This is a little depressing because voice acting was one of Bioware's only remaining strengths before this. Not making it any easier on them is their stupid dialogue system and how it just picks and chooses bits of dialogue to string together as oppose to actually changing your dialogue.

TOR tries to be another "Bioware RPG" while being an MMO. It doesn't work. Plainly. I'm not a fan of Bioware RPG's and I'm not a huge fan of MMO's, and I despise Star Wars, but I was willing to give this a chance until it forced HKS and I over and over into our own instances for conversations even though it has a "multiplayer conversation" system. Wait, I thought this was a pay-to-play MMO? No, it's a pay-to-play Star Wars: Mass Effect with WoW gameplay, it seems.

If WoW got one thing right it was the controls. The feel of your character. TOR tries to copy this and fails miserably. Not to mention the game is hideously desynced. If another player, aka your party member, drops from a cliff, he proceeds to stand there running in place for several seconds. The user interface flat out STOPS WORKING COMPLETELY for BOTH OF US, apparently a long-standing bug! This game is nearly ready for release, and core, fundamental shit is scarcely presentable as alpha.

Once you look past the bugs, the awkward mishmash the dialogue gives you, the misleading dialogue options, the really generic storytelling, it's just another WoW clone looking to steal some of Blizzard's moldy pie before the industry grows stale enough where people will actually have to make real RPG's again. What do you know, another mediocre Bioware game. They should have stuck to NWN.

Skyrim.

At first one is astonished at how so much content can be in one game. Then you realize that they achieve this by copying the same designs over and over again. Remember that claw "puzzle" they showed in a video? So far we've counted five dungeons that reuse that exact same thing. Then you've got the pillar turning puzzles, which are basically the same thing. I personally have ran into at least 4-5 of those.

Skyrim really begins to show its laziness once you really start scraping past the hype and the surface of the game. On its own it's decent, but when you actually play it for a while and see what's going on, it starts to become eerie how poorly this game was actually tested.

The balancing is horrific. I'm playing on normal difficulty. Normally that means 1shotting bandits, but I regularly get fucked. up. by random noname monsters because either the autoleveling, a bag of dicks all on its own, isn't leveling them and they are some stupidly high level, or it's jacking them way too high. Since magicka is crippled rather heavily in this game, it is encouraged to abuse the fuck out of untested game mechanics to give yourself any hope of actually being a real caster. I'm at a stage in the game where dragons are pretty much as threatening as the average bandit, but fuck if I run into a Pyromancer who 2shots me with rapid-fire fireballs because he has infinite mana and his stats are getting autolevelled in ways players can't. You heard me right, dragons suck.

Dragons are one of the most poorly executed things in all of Skyrim, I feel. Yes, the game is lacking a huge quantity of QA testing, they gutted every single utility spell from the old games, and the autolevel bs reeks of lazy design, but it's dragons that really stand out to me, personally. Watching the gameplay videos pre-release I couldn't help but feel how awful they looked. The rigid flying, the simple fire/frostbreath and nothing else for casting, the fact that guards don't get massacred. You'd think dragons were supposed to be threatening or something, but they aren't. Three guards can easily topple a dragon, or a single horse if he's feeling brave. Given how easily I can randomly get destroyed by undead with tens of thousands of health, I'm repeatedly astonished by just how harmless dragons are. They do have an execution move they might use, but that's all they really got going in their favor, especially since they might just fuck off into the atmosphere for no reason at all. Yes, in 1.2 they managed to break the game more than fix it. Such a minor patch and they caused dragons to fly straight up into the galaxy and totally break resistances. Standard Bethesda fair, I suppose.

I'm sure HKS would love to share his experiences regarding companions and their idiotic AI, but personally I can't use companions because only your attacks will kill them, and I happen to hit things behind me with my mace, so my first companion somehow managed to die to me a mile away and I really can't bring any more along without potentially losing them. Which sucks, because I drop dragons left and right and their scales use a lot of inventory. In fact, dragons have started not even handing out their souls anymore. A bug they supposedly just fixed. Oops.

Oh, yeah. Casting. Whoever designed this casting system needs a boot to the groin. Seriously. I have to spam soul trap on a dead corpse over and over to level it? Because summons only give experience if you summon them IN COMBAT? And rarely at that. Nevermind the fact they cost most of my mana pool, reveal me from stealth (because lizards in full plate with glowing hands can move around in front of you and not be seen, re: XXE), and plain suck. I can 1shot my own summon accidentally. Atronarchs are awful. Just awful. Raise dead is nice, if I could ever RAISE ANYTHING because they all autolevel out of scale of my spells immediately.

The talent system is retardedly designed. I'm just using a mod to bypass the prerequisite garbage now. It's that terrible. I shouldn't need an unarmed fighting talent just to get armor related shit. I'm already unkillable in brawls and points are at a premium with the level cap. Let's ignore the fact they gutted everything like acrobatics because casuals don't even know how to walk in the first place and we'd be racist if we included it. What about healing, though? I've been healing myself in combat for the entire game and hardly even level 36 or whatever in Restoration. Spells don't scale with levels, they just keep sucking more and more as health and damage for everything else flails wildly out of control, so that heal gets spammed a lot. Actually, just about every second fight with Draugr or bandits clad in fur capable of tearing through Legendary Ebony and Glass I go through 10-20 potions worth of mana on healing. Bethesda still hasn't escaped the trap of scaling vs not scaling, something even Blizzard gets right most of the time now.

This is the fundamental problem associated with automatically leveling everything in the game when you SHOULD just design around free-roaming instead of lazing your way past it. Where's the big challenges? The big dragons, the demons, the things a high-level player should be fighting? I'm tired of fur-clad bandits wrecking my Legendary armor like I was naked. Give me some big foes worthy of actually kicking my ass. Ah, but that's not the way the game is designed... I need Daedra hearts for my Daedric armor and there's not even any gates to hell to plunder. It seems I will have to find the rare vendor that sells them or butcher bandit conjurers until they drop them.

The in-combat mana regeneration shit should not have left MMO's. Regeneration is so awful as it is I don't know why they felt the need to nerf it so much. Maybe they thought it would remove the usefulness of potions. Nevermind the fact that enemies drop your entire health pool of 300+ HP in single attacks on normal difficulty, I doubt potions would get excluded if you decided to make casting viable without being forced to enchant 100% cost reduction on everything. In either case, I shouldn't need to stand in a town casting Soul Trap on a dead guard for an entire hour just to get Conjuration to start levelling.

As cool as being a werewolf is I actually am starting to think it doesn't scale with level. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that sliver of health my melee damage does to bandits is getting smaller and smaller over time. So, the one thing that should have autolevelled either isn't levelling very well or at all.

Meh. I guess mods will "fix" most of this, probably what Bethesda was counting on. I'm counting on them gutting the toolkit or holding it back for console sales. Skyrim's decent, but once you look past the hype it really is just as lazy as everything else out there. I know I've missed a lot of things to rant about, but I'll get to them eventually.

TOR takes the cake for laziness, though. I mean, what the hell.

[UntamedLoli]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-470PsAJ_Dg

[Falchion]

Saint's Row: The Third. I hope I don't ever see anyone here hating on mocap ever again. I swear most of this was mocapped given by the huge credits list and it is above and beyond one of the smoothest animating games I've seen in recent years. This was animation done right.

Man, I don't complain on it. And that's because Killzone 2 and 3 were MADE on it.

[IskatuMesk]

As you may or may not remember, I've stated my desire to do Devil May Cry LP's. I actually bought both DMC3/4 on Steam a while back for this very purpose. As I would discover first-hand, though, 3 is a horrible port. Like, really bad. Like, the video goes dead very fast into the game because it's running some extremely badly made virtualized junk that doesn't like anything past XP and even then it's roulette if you get the shaft or not. Not an uncommon bug. Waste of 15 bucks that was. I'll have to pirate a ps2 iso and emulate it if I want to have any hope of being able to play 3. Frapsing emulators doesn't work well. Maybe I can find an actual ps2 dvd to buy and capture card it? Unlikely. Awesome.

So, enter recent days, where I wanted to scope out 4 for my next run project despite the objections of my peers. Well, as I would discover, the console portiness in 4 is better but not by much. I wondered why the game has no audio options - because you can only access the audio options under the "New Game" menu and not the options menu. My intern senses tingled violently when starting a new game there was an option for "Automatic" with the choices "On" or "Off". Automated what? Lard injections? Intern slapping? Rodding? I may never know. Confusion turned to rage almost immediately.

You cannot bind keys to the mouse. At all. All of the attacks and stuff default to keys like K and I. Oddly enough the menus support the mouse fine, leagues better than Skyrim that's for sure. Okay. Well, I wanted to see if the gamepad menu for some reason magically let me use mouse buttons. Oops. I can't leave this menu now. Because it's probably waiting for gamepad key input. Alt+F4 it is.

I think I'll have to wait to get my ps3 controller emulation drivers rolling again before I can try this game. I can tell you it doesn't look anything like the anime, though. But the anime is all I know about DMC so I expect to be confused as hell anyways. I don't know when that will be, but probably not before 2012.

So, out of 2011, the best games of the year I played were probably Saint's Row: The Third and Alice: Madness Returns. I don't think I've played a native PC title at all this year, except for Starcraft 2. Diablo 3 is kind of like a mobile app port, so it doesn't count.

SR3 I already went over, while Alice is something I haven't spoken much about other than my other review thread. So, I figured I'd throw in some opinions on it since I started verifying my LP.

Alice is a God of War clone like so many others. It's also a console port, clearly, but it's Unreal 3 so you get some degree of ini options over it. Like so many other God of War clones, it's very cloney. Very familiar setup here. Third person, free camera (yay), combat, moving around ect. Since it's a console port it's extremely linear, but the level design is a step ahead of most ARPG's by a long shot. I'd actually say it's the first game with real level design I've played in a very long time. Not that the level design is particularly amazing, because it's a console port and insert babble about hardware limitations here, but it's still pretty decent.

Actually, it's kind of funny that Alice makes it into such high regards, because I actually walked into this expecting something wholly different. I am not familiar with wonderland or any of the source material this came from, but even so it was a very unique experience. I was expecting more violence and such and left disappointed, but the art and sounds were incredibly well done. The underwater, palace and asian inspired levels in particular were extremely well done imo. In fact the Asian zone is probably one of the best console-based level designs I have yet seen in gaming purely in looks and audio alone.

The gameplay for Alice has its strong points and weak points. The weak points include the lock-on system which is necessary for some enemies and is extremely clunky, and the switching from melee to ranged weapons is very abrupt and clunky. The LP itself may not accurately convey just how horrible the locking system is so I'll put it in words.

When you caps lock to focus an enemy aka lock on it like in Darksiders, you can no longer run and all of your movement is using your target as an axis and your camera is focused on it. This is a hugely abrupt change. The main enemy that requires this is one of the strongest enemies in the game and appears semi-often. I probably died more times in this matchup than in every other fight in the game combined, largely in part due to this stupid fucking focus system. The reason it's required is because you can ONLY BLOCK WHILE LOCKED and you NEED TO BLOCK TO DEFLECT HIS FIREBALLS TO MAKE HIM VULNERABLE AND NOT DIE TO HIS SHOTGUN ATTACK. It is such a fundamentally horrible design decision to restrict blocking to these controls. Maybe they are easier for some other people, or easier on a console, but to me this control system was nothing short of enraging. It limits your maneuverability and abruptly changes your controls - usually means death on nightmare in most fights. Make blocking available in either stance and the problems melt away immediately.

The strong points are pretty much everything else. I came into Alice walking away from Dante's Inferno which features some of the worst balancing and level design I've yet experienced in this genre, so Alice was very much a refreshing experience in that I could play on the hardest difficulty and end up blaming myself for the majority of my deaths. Some fights I had to attempt many times due to circumstances, though, or because I was exhausted/playing poorly.

Alice owes a lot of its fight design to monster synergy and reflexes. I would say the combat is even more refined than God of War itself, especially 1/2. It's more responsive. Not quite as twitchy as Dante's Inferno, but very well balanced. I would say the combat in Alice is probably amongst the strongest of the genre I've played thus far other than the major gripes with the locking, which I hate in general (re: Darksiders) and the way you switch into ranged from melee and how it throws your camera around and prevents you from attacking for a time.

The story in Alice wasn't particularly unexpected, I had it figured out about halfway through but the execution was reasonably well done given the limitations of consoles. The game switches between ingame graphics and a sort of 2d "drawn" art style, which suits it reasonably well.

I felt that the voice acting in some parts needed more emotion or emotion at all, but given that the game is extremely British it could be because I am Canadian and don't see the expressions quite the same way. Overall, though, the prose is very British and suits itself reasonably well.

The music is nothing particularly amazing, but it does fit with the theme and stands out above most Western soundtracks. Between the ambient sounds and the music the game does manage to establish a pretty good atmosphere, although I felt the first half of the last zone was kind of poorly done overall. The second zone, the underwater zone, has some of the best sound work I have seen this year in terms of mood.

I can't immediately recall offhand any significant bugs I encountered, but the AI in the game is extremely abusable as it's incapable of traversing any nature of cliffs or gaps, something abundant in the level design, and something I abundantly abused in many otherwise difficult fights. Some of the minigames, in particular the head rolling thing in the last zone, come off as very rushed and poorly thought out, and detract from the main game. But they are usually short enough that they are only minorly detrimental to the game as a whole.

Alice comes as recommended for those who are fans of games in this genre. It comes on sale on Steam every now and then, and I imagine this December will be no different. I believe I clocked in 16-20 hours in total, which is unfortunately very long for a modern game. I would also recommend to play this game on Nightmare although there was one fight in particular I did turn down the difficulty for; it was one of the bonus stages in zone 2 I think, which had some ridiculously insane odds stacked against me. If you do decide to try it you'd do well to search around for some ini configurations to improve the game's graphics a bit, such as shadows. It's an Unreal game, so this pretty much comes with the business.



Well, since this thread has become kind of a conglomoration of my reviews, here's some copy-pasta from my mini review thread.

PC

Darksiders
Genre - Action RPG
Recommended
Playtime - 20 hours
Plot summary - You're War, a horsieman that gets rubbed the wrong way and stabs some pigeons + demons to work shit out.

Darksiders is a taste of puzzling with a strong hint of God of War. Voice acting and sound work is top notch with graphics matching those of modern PC titles. It is a console port, however, and is subject to unusual controls and issues derived from lazy porting.

Alice: Madness Returns
Genre - Action RPG
Recommended
Playtime - 16 hours
Plot summary - I have never ever seen Wonderland before but apparently Alice is some crazy broad and is now going crazy.

This is an Action RPG in the vein of Darksiders and God of War. It suffers from a considerably clunky locking system and some exceptionally irritating checkpoints, but otherwise is actually quite solid. The voice acting is fairly decent and even the platforming was only slightly irritating even though I despise platforming. It is a console port, so the graphics aren't really amazing, but the sound work makes up for this. Definitely recommended.

Hunted: Demon's Forge
Genre - Action RPG
Decent
Playtime - 18 hours
Plot summary - I'm still figuring this one out. I think it has to do with BETRAYAL, LOVE, POLITICS, and DRAGONS.

Hunted is a game oriented around co-op but many of the things in it really bring into question the amount of effort put into testing. It's a console port, and the interface is amongst the worst of them all. On top of that, it uses gamespy of all things. HKS and I had to use Battle.LAN just to get an online game going at all. Yeah, LAN! You don't really want chat channels, do you?

My video review of this game will go much more in-depth, but basically - decent graphics and sound, repedetive gameplay, annoying checkpoints in some locations, good length, hilarious bugs, no effort in porting or genuinely supporting co-op (didn't even give us intro cinematic or tutorial level in co-op). It's a decent game but it deserved another few months of content put into it. It also deserved to be a native PC title.

Alien vs Predator 3
Genre - FPS
Terrible
Playtime - 6-7 hours
Plot summary - Some weird cyborg guy finds a planet with random pred tech on it and stupid confusing shit happens as a result.

Another console port. This game's wacky AI, hideously lazy sound and music work, oddly accents decently done graphics. At the end of the day I am left wondering how the fuck this made it to beta. Oh, yeah, and it's a console port. ...

Dungeon Siege 3
Genre - No idea?
Disgusting
Playtime - ?
Plot summary - Insert random cliche bs here

This game is the mother of all console ports. WASD is terrible. A and D control the camera, not your character, and mouse movement is just flat out irritating. The interface has mandatory animations for every part, and there are many parts, with big puffy casual-friendly buttons. From what I played before I ragequit, I found the gameplay to be a fairly tremendous step backwards from Dungeon Siege 2, a feat I did not think was possible. No, copying cookie-cutter MMO quest grinding that dumps money and items on you is not gameplay. Fuck you.

Duke Nukem Forever
Genre - FPS
Terrible
Playtime - 5 hours?
Plot summary - 12 years and all I got was this shitty console port.

Another console port. This game doesn't even deserve a review, but here it is: even Halo is better than this game.

Magicka
Genre - Action RPG
wat
Playtime: ~7 hours at most
Plot summary - BLEIGH

The premise of the game is decent, but the advertised "thousands of spells" are more like a few dozen spells. What will catch you by the balls is how retardedly buggy this game is. Indie developers take it upon themselves to use the "indie developer" tag as an excuse to avoid QA, and it shows. Magicka gave us a plethora of issues, ranging from desyncing to lag to flat out repeated crashing and breaking the gamestate. The game for the most part is extremely easy in multiplayer, while supposedly quite difficult in SP - a result of no balance testing whatsoever.

It's the players that make this game, not the developers. If you've got fun players, it will be enjoyable. If not, it won't be. Even then our patience was tested. The game would have been quite a strong title if it wasn't for the shortness and horrific crashing.

I don't know how games this buggy make it past Alpha. I really don't. The Blizzard motto "if it compiles, it's gold!" must apply.

Starcraft 2
Genre - RTS
Terrible
Playtime: ~20 hours, depends if you're bad like I am, if not then quicker.
Plot summary: Raynor reunites with his long lost love, Kerrigan, despite the lack of such a connection in Brood War. Terrans expand like unholy locust and meanwhile Tassadar ascends and the DARK VOICE makes comical one-liners as he smears shit all over our hopes and dreams.

Sc2 is a trainwreck. Nothing about it makes the slightest shred of sense and the production quality reminds me of Command & Conquer 3. Those five interns hired for sc2 took 7 years to recycle wc3 and take a shit all over it.

The only redeeming quality of SC2 is that you can hunt down Ricky like a herring in a steam bath and stab him over and over again.

Bulletstorm
Genre - FPS
Decent-recommended
Playtime - 6-7 hours
Plot summary - Guys get rubbed wrong way by general and seek revenge.

This is one of the best shooters I've ever played. Not because of the gameplay - it's nothing new, much less the rest of the shooters seen in the last decade - but because it's witty and well put together. Bulletstorm runs on the U3 engine and flows beautifully. The controls are snappy and responsive as a result. Their whole revolutionary "skillshot" system is overshadowed massively by the game's good points. Mechanically, the game feels like an Unreal 3 mod. Not as much as that horrible trainwreck called Killing Floor, it's considerably more polished, but at the same time it's a decent break from "super realistic" shooters that ultimately fail horribly in realism. Looking at you, Modern Warfare 1+2!

The dialogue in this game is great. The voices for the characters are perfect. Weapon sounds are nice. Music is okay. The game's a console port, so the graphics aren't really taking advantage of the engine. But the experience provided by the dialogue and plot is more than worth the time invested into this game.

My biggest gripe overall with these games is they're too short. I just get into it and, bam, it's done. Just like that. I'm glad I didn't drop $60 into it, because $10 an hour would buy me the most expensive Canadian hooker in town.

Front Mission Evolved
Genre - TPS
Terrible
Playtime - 6-8 hours
Plot summary - Watch Gundam 00. Now you've seen FME's plot, but with actual effort placed into it.

FME feels like an Americanized Gundam 00 with about a week's worth of work placed into the gameplay. It is terrible. The multiplayer is practically unplayable with the desyncing we experienced (shown in XXE 3). The weapons in the campaign are grossly unbalanced and certain things are not very obvious and can make gameplay almost impossible in the right (or wrong) circumstances. Meanwhile, the sniper rifle remains insanely overpowered compared to most of the other weapons. If I switched away from the sniper rifles I immediately became overwhelmed with how much health enemies had. Switch to sniper rifle, ez pz. The infantry missions are so laughably easy I opted to beat most of them with only melee attacks using a rocket launcher. In gundam mode your allies do ZERO DAMAGE to enemies and are utterly useless outside of being indestructible. Good thing enemies focus on you instead!

Most of the boss fights are retardedly irritating except for the last two, the first of which requires actual effort to beat and the second just takes a bit of patience. The ones before that are just retarded.

Just terrible. People told me it was terrible. I didn't listen.

Playstation 3


Viking: Battle for Asgard
Genre - FPS
Painfully Bad
Playtime - 15ish hours iirc
Plot summary - Stab demigods and gods with permanently bloodied swords.

Viking had a colossal amount of potential and pretty much fucked it up in ways only Western developers could fuck up a game. The combat system is solid but there are next to no enemy varieties. The voice acting leaves you confused and the SFX are casually ripped from Blizzard's library of commercial cds, while the graphics suffer from some nature of blur filter. Viking pulls off several things quite well, such as battles and controls, but seems to have never even underwent a single playtesting, as insanely blatant and game-breaking bugs/oversights seem to have made it into release. Oops! Better fire those interns, Bill!

Most of my playtime was spent being mad or lost or both.

Killzone 2
Genre - FPS
Decent
Playtime - 6-7 hours
Plot summary - Invade a planet and kill nazis with fire and lightning

Killzone 2 was, until killzone 3, the most graphically beautiful game I had ever played. The only games rivaling it would be Heavenly Sword, God of War 3, and Unreal 3 stuff. Crysis and co don't compare to the setting and style set forth by Killzone 2. It does have its problems, however, mostly related to the unresponsiveness of controls. This doesn't make the campaign that much less enjoyable, which has its fare share of decent voice acting and superb sound work. Some areas in the campaign needed some monkey work to get around, but this was playing in a screen area 1/5 my monitor size.

Unfortunately, the game is short. Real short. Shooters just don't have lengthy campaigns anymore, each trying their own luck at trying to steal the CS/Halo market. Much like the onslaught of MMO's, Killzone 2 is one of those games that piggybacks everyone else in design decisions, restricting most of the game's weapons and abilities to "unlockables" in multiplayer. There does happen to be a bot skirmish, but it doesn't have any functionality even comparable to "modern" bot support, seen in Perfect Dark and Timesplitters 3, but most notably Perfect Dark.

It just seems to me that single player content gets massively shafted a bit too much.

Killzone 3
Genre - FPS
Decent
Playtime - 6-7 hours
Plot summary - Invade a planet and kill nazis with more fire and lightning

Killzone 3 seems a bit rushed plot-wise. Avoiding spoilering the game, there's a lot of things that just up fuck what out of nowhere and suddenly the game entirely changes. What bothers me most about KZ3 is that none of the characters seem to have their old voice actors. They all sound entirely different. This is incredibly jarring. Killzone's creators seemed like they wanted to make big cinematics but they felt too pressured to hasten them and make them play out super fast. This is jarring and completely ruins potential opportunities for memorable cinematic experiences. Also, a lot of the dialogue doesn't match the subtitles.

The controls are snappier and the game plays more smoothly. In KZ2 you could only have your pistol and a rifle or launcher. In 3 you can have the pistol, a "medium" weapon like a shotgun or rifle, + a heavy weapon like a launcher or a RADIATION GUN. KZ3 has one particularly annoying rail event but otherwise plays out fairly smoothly. The graphics improve admirably on the precedent set by KZ2 and as far as I'm concerned are currently the best in the industry outside of the UDK demo map.

The sound effects take an entirely different direction but turn out quite well. Unfortunately, with my headphones, the whole surround sound effect began to give me a headache by the time I was done playing. Again, the game felt too short and, again, the skirmish mode lacks customization value.

Was it decent? Yes. Was it worth the $70 I paid for it? No, not really.

Dante's Inferno
Genre - God of War clone
wat
Playtime - 8ish or so hours (need to check)
Plot summary - try to save your whore of a girlfriend from lucifer's seductive black cock

Dante's Inferno seems innocently inviting enough at first - A more violent/creepy God of War (according to the pre-rendered CGI I had seen previously, I was genuinely expecting to be offended and/or disturbed by this game) with a few different mechanics and a new world thrown in. I was, however, to be disappointed.

The art direction in Dante's Inferno visibly suffers as the developers skipped as much on texture depth and detail as possible, supposedly because they were having issues keeping the framerates up. I just assume they're bad at programming and had to compensate for it by axing the game's graphics. It still looks decent enough to pass as a ps3 title, but falters when challenged by most of the games I would consider to be graphically appealing. It's enough to get by and the world is pretty enough I suppose (on my low-rez preview window anyways).

Virtually NONE of the pre-rendered cinematics I had seen on youtube appear to have made it into the actual game, though! What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

The sound design is quite good. As the level design is incredibly simple and to the point, it often relies exclusively on audio to give the sense of scale and immersion. This it does quite well, and the voice acting is enough to carry it along.

Where Dante's Inferno truly stumbles is the gameplay. The incredible repeditiveness of the fights, which wildly swing in difficulty from stupidly easy to nearly impossible with a single difficulty change, makes the game more of a chore. The game also uses a fixed camera, much like God of War does, but unlike God of War this makes several areas a little annoying to navigate. The autosave doesn't save after fights, so if you happen to fall to your death like I did several times, prepare for another 5-10 minute fight on normal difficulty.

To elaborate on the difficulty changes, they dramatically increase the damage enemies do. Dramatically as in, from what I could see, anywhere from 6x to 10x damage bonus. The difficulties don't seem to change the health of most monsters except for bosses. The last boss in his final phase was virtually impossible for me to defeat on normal difficulty because of how much health he had.

The smaller monsters have an extremely fast undodgable attack that they tend to reserve for the moment you move out of block. It's so fast that you can attempt to attack out of block and still get hit. The bigger monsters have an unavoidable unblockable instant knockback they use when you're attacking them, usually interrupting your attack and sending you into hit recovery. Their power attack 1shots you if it hits you in the air, but on normal it scarcely moves your health bar. The penis wenches were extremely irritating to fight on hard, but trivial on normal.

This game seems to be extremely poorly balanced and poorly thought out in general. I would have rated it much higher if it wasn't for the sheer rage I endured through button hammering mechanics and the aggravating trash fights, irritating camera and idiotic autosave layout.

Other

Earthbound
Genre - RPG
Highly Recommended
Playtime - 20+ hours
Plot summary - You're a prophesized young boy who needs to knock up some blondes, pull flies out of flaming meteorites, wrestle bears to death with your bear hands, battle psychotic puke piles and bludgeon gundams with your penis. It doesn't get any better than this.

Earthbound is a classic. It suffers from some of the PRNG issues that many older games suffer from, which made my LP exceedingly more and more painful as time went on due to repeatedly shitty HP rolls, but I also played like a dumbfuck and missed half the items in the game. As much as some things in this game made me mad, it's more about me being extremely narrow-sighted and impatient. Earthbound is still amongst my top games of all time, unchallenged by most post-2000 titles.