Videogames: The Official Thread

[housesitter]

This new Silent Hill is just a mashup of the worst parts of Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition with a more unfair version of the silly chase sequences from the Wii game they did, also the new composer is about as bland as you'd expect for a guy who thinks it's a good idea to work with korn for an opening theme song (which I've managed to avoid so far, thankfully)

I had very low expectations anyway and I still really wanted to like this but man this is just fucking bad, excellent but glitchy visuals (except for the boring enemies) and unusable combat and Press A to Save Him/Press B to Kill Him morality

[housesitter]

ahahaahah

[iambic]

[jca]

journey just about killed me.

[Lahey]

I need reccomendations for XBOX live arcade games. Platformer I suppose or just something fun, maybe rpg.

[pablito]

Hey fuck off lahey

[Lahey]

don't you have some offs to fuck?

[glosstime]

smoke datura... nevery day?

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/immersion-walkthrough-datura/728097

[housesitter]

gonna rescind my initial take on the new Silent Hill

I'm probably just a fanboy but I can overlook the terrible combat and moral choice garbage as long as they keep making good puzzles and awesome nightmare sequences. Still would've been better with Akira Yamaoka composing but whatever, this is still my favorite video game franchise (not including the dumb movie).

[-☭-]

[Jeremy]

I guess CBS is acquiring Giant Bomb. I don't really read GameSpot or Giant Bomb much, but what a bizarre course of events. I was working there when CNET hired some sleazy guy from Dennis Publishing (makers of Maxim), whose goal was to make GameSpot sexier. Then they ousted Jeff Gerstmann after his Kane & Lynch review, fired the guy who had fired him shortly afterward, were acquired by CBS, got rid of the Dennis Publishing guy and the direction he was going to take the site in ... and now they're rehiring Gerstmann and Giant Bomb. Goofy.

Kinda cool that they chose to hire Carolyn Petit, a trans woman, as a reviewer though -- especially when she has video review facetime. Lots of gamer dudes whined.

Love the Bombcast. Very interesting turn of events.

Isn't this exactly what happened with the Washington Post dropping Weigel and then rehiring him with Slate which is the same publisher?

[Legion]

Exactly the same level of import as well.

Search is fucked so screw me if this has been posted, but you guys see this fan-made Wing Commander game based on the Freespace 2 engine? Available for free on Thursday, I guess.


http://wcsaga.com/

[housesitter]

http://www.twitter.com/cheats2000

[chairkicker]

that wing commander looks very cool

[chimp_]

played the shit out of wing commander on snes

lot of time spent flying between waypoints iirc

[chairkicker]

gonna rescind my initial take on the new Silent Hill

I'm probably just a fanboy but I can overlook the terrible combat and moral choice garbage as long as they keep making good puzzles and awesome nightmare sequences. Still would've been better with Akira Yamaoka composing but whatever, this is still my favorite video game franchise (not including the dumb movie).

i wanna play this. mostly for the puzzles and side stuff, but also for the hell of it. it's not a silent hill game, however, and what bothered me up to release is that vatra games would respond smugly to claims like this, suggesting fans needed to grow up and out of their preconceptions. then they put a fucking korn song into the game. when i say it's not a silent hill, i mean that silent hill is a place of deliberate contrasts, not simply endless decay and oddity. watching some of gamersyde's clips confirms that they just sort of threw everything at the wall, caring less about coherency than hitting the player with whatever derivative piece of horror they could find. still, those same clips have me interested in the exploration and relative openness of the town, which i respect and which at least validates a few of their claims.

game just seems like such the product of a team who reveled in the sordid details of the series and who favored silent hill 3's kind of storytelling, getting nothing more out of it than some 13 year old emo kid gets out of devil may cry. but these guys are 30 years old and they're riding the cottails of silent hill 2 as they do it. it doesn't mean that sh2 is crazy deep, symbolic gaming of the highest order - the line that some fanatics take. it means that it hit on something special. and as this strange and sprawling psychosexual fairytale it is unlike anything else.

[ifear]

gonna rescind my initial take on the new Silent Hill

I'm probably just a fanboy but I can overlook the terrible combat and moral choice garbage as long as they keep making good puzzles and awesome nightmare sequences. Still would've been better with Akira Yamaoka composing but whatever, this is still my favorite video game franchise (not including the dumb movie).

mother of fuck, what is it with people shitting on the movie? i thought it was an impressive attempt to carry across the tone and themes of the games despite the inevitable need for a more traditional narrative. looking forward to the sequel, but if that bitch isn't showing in two dimensions i'm pirating the fuck out of it. if god had meant films to be in 3d he wouldn't have given me myopia.

[ifear]

so fallout 3 is rather crushingly dull. still, only 30 more hours to go then i can get onto me2 or deus ex. basically anything that isn't this.
is new vegas better than this? is skyrim? if not, there's a couple more games i never need to play.

[housesitter]

still, those same clips have me interested in the exploration and relative openness of the town, which i respect and which at least validates a few of their claims.

The depth of the exploration suffers because of the openness, though

In previous titles, you'd stumble into a weird room with just some handgun bullets and a note about the town's history or a grocery list, but now they've even removed that little bit of icing. Maybe it's dorky to want more reading material, but I definitely preferred it over the stupid Alan Wake-style radios that appear everywhere (especially considering the fucking terrible tracklist for this game, "Born Free" and "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen" aside). Meanwhile the camera as a vehicle for hints has been eliminated in favor of action/RE4-cam and on-screen tutorials. At one point, you have to find a ladder to climb onto a roof, not because you have a reason to find a route to a hospital or other location on the map, but because that's the only way left to go.

There's one sidequest in the first major building once you actually get to the town where you (SPOILER) return stolen items to the ghosts of their former owners and the only reward is a couple of embarrassingly stock sound bites and a new outfit. Later there's a bank sidequest where you literally trigger an alarm, run up a staircase, fight a wave of enemies, run back downstairs to collect a bunch of bullets, return to another wave of enemies, and then you repeat this four times. No explanation, no context.

And the enemies are seriously fucking stupid.

[miss black america]

i thought the film was pretty enjoyable too but it was basically only good because it took key scenes and aspects from the games, like the camera angles from the beginning of sh1, and put them in a sequence of events that don't make a lot of sense

[jca]

so fallout 3 is rather crushingly dull. still, only 30 more hours to go then i can get onto me2 or deus ex. basically anything that isn't this.
is new vegas better than this? is skyrim? if not, there's a couple more games i never need to play.

i think the consensus is skyrim > nv > * > fo3

[ifear]

oh, cool.
wait, is that a rectum?

[chairkicker]

yeah, the enemies are godawful. it's the "let's put in whatever lopsided, screaming, grunge-soaked mess we can" standard of d-level horror. the rest of what you describe sounds pretty damning. i mean, i'll get something out exploring even their town of silent hill, but you're right on every contention. that's just lazy, terrible game design

[pierrot]

if you find fallout 3 that bad, NV wont be that much of an improvement. basically the same game with slightly more indepth quests/world dynamic but still a total gameplay snooze

[chairkicker]

yeah, for all the mods that go into bethesda's games, they'd be better off if someone could overhaul the basic mechanics. make moving through the world or firing a gun interesting at all and you have some of my attention

[jca]

might as well be !

[ifear]

it's not the gameplay i object to - the world is just dull beyond belief.
i was thinking of taking a break to play super meat boy, but i'm shitfaced already and only have the reflexes for a dull as fuck rpg

[pierrot]

yeah dont bother with NV. its even more barren and the AI is still laughable

[traced out]

new vegas is a much better rpg, better/more dynamic level design, quests, dialogue but the gameplay is still so bad

overall i enjoyed it though

[a-10 warthog champion]

Exactly the same level of import as well.

Search is fucked so screw me if this has been posted, but you guys see this fan-made Wing Commander game based on the Freespace 2 engine? Available for free on Thursday, I guess.


http://wcsaga.com/

i love space sims but have been pretty disappointed by everything that i've played post-XWA.

would rather have it be privateer-style (it isn't, right? i can't load the site at work), but looks cool.

i guess i could jump back into x3 too, but that shit seemed so buggy and impossible to play in the few hours i gave it.