Topic: What are you playing? (Read 140672 times)

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i remember when we were at that baseball game years ago you told me that a videogame gave you an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS and i'm pretty sure you said it was unlimited saga, which was part of that ridiculous series of games, but that was a long time ago and i don't actually remember.
That reminds me we were once talking about making a GAME that's in an existential crisis. At least I remember talking about that once but I can't remember exactly what the idea was or how that would manifest itself.
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The whole game "Eternal Sonata" already did that. As cutesy and shit as it is, it was a pretty nice LEAP FORWARD in narrative to have the whole thing set in Chopin's dying brain, with him constantly telling the other characters that their whole world was bullshit.

Ends a little suddenly though, with him just turning around and attacking everyone for kind of no reason.
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Saga frontier was a postmodern game
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Need for Speed: Underground.

Fun racing, terrible, cringe-worthy characters/voice acting

I'm surprised  how much I like customizing my car. I may post a screenie here at some point.
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I just got Folklore in the mail, I'm gonna start it after work, supposed to be fairly decent?
yes coulombs are "germaine", did you learn that word at talk like a dick school?
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The whole game "Eternal Sonata" already did that. As cutesy and shit as it is, it was a pretty nice LEAP FORWARD in narrative to have the whole thing set in Chopin's dying brain, with him constantly telling the other characters that their whole world was bullshit.

Ends a little suddenly though, with him just turning around and attacking everyone for kind of no reason.

is that game any good? the chopin thing seemed really interesting but then it looked like a fucking anime so I started thinking twice about it. That and tales of vesperia or some shit like that.
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going to be loading up fallout new vegas tomorrow, once i finish taking the GRE
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picked up this game bastion off of xbla. as far as non-studio, mostly indie games go, it's pretty good stuff. found it to be the sort of game that i liked a bit more while i was playing it than i did in retrospect, but it did a lot with very little and had some worthwhile moments. can't say i regret dropping $15 on it, really.

i guess the noteworthy thing about the game is the story, really, as it was a pretty major factor of the game and brought everything together pretty well. i wouldn't call it earth-shattering stuff, but it was generally a good way of presenting the story dynamically and was mostly well-written. doesn't get too repetitive, which was a pleasant surprise. kinda over-the-top with some dude doing his best ron perlman WAR NEVER CHANGES, but it's a lot better than it probably should be considering the actor was just some dude they knew apparently. still, i can't get over the feeling that the way this method of storytelling physically works in this game is really a novelty more than anything else. it felt like an overwhelming amount of the dialogue is really purely game-centric stuff, the narrator talking about the stuff the player character is doing rather than making a real shot at storytelling. granted, it legitimizes the game part and makes it part of the story in a way, but i don't think it really adds to the story itself most of the time. MOST OF THE TIME is the key part of that sentence, as there are some very brief moments where it adds considerably to the depth of the experience, giving greater meaning to the otherwise unimportant things you're doing, but i don't think they did enough of that. i guess that's why i'm quick to call it a novelty more than a purely effective method of storytelling. the sheer content is pretty matter-of-fact and doesn't really add in any real way to the drama of what's happening most of the time. talking more about the types of birds you're killing, dropping lines of uninteresting backstory, or making some smug remark when you fall off a ledge rather than trying to further dramatic elements that were present in the story and what the character was doing. disappointing choice, really. while it's a good method of game storytelling, i don't think they've come anywhere close to getting the most out of it.

being a little picky here i guess, but the game is a little pretentious like that. pretty good experience on the whole, though, particularly if you have a tolerance/interest in a gravelly narrator in the ron perlman/tom waits mold, and possess the ability to listen to and enjoy it for south of a dozen hours. the rest of the game is standard fare stuff, more or less. comes together well, but i can't say i was singularly blown away by anything in it. i like seeing games(particularly indie games) with a major story emphasis, and that's really the biggest thing i can say about it.
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is that game any good? the chopin thing seemed really interesting but then it looked like a fucking anime so I started thinking twice about it. That and tales of vesperia or some shit like that.

no good
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Yeah it sucks. The battle system I liked but for some reason the main character isn't chopin but a 14 year old girl. Also puns. Everything is puns.
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is that game any good? the chopin thing seemed really interesting but then it looked like a fucking anime so I started thinking twice about it. That and tales of vesperia or some shit like that.

Yeah, aside from the ending it's really great apparently. Like my other half played it pretty intensively for a while. It has great characters, a pretty decent plot (although one admittedly based around mixing existential angst with MERCANTILE POLITICS), and history lessons about Chopin mixed in! Plus Chopin's battle quotes are pretty great.

Farren if you like RPGs then I'd definitely suggest it. Don't be put off by the anime style - suikoden is anime style and that series fucking rocks too.

I'd give it a go Farren as you can get it cheaply now. It's one of the most beautiful things I've seen on the Xbox 360 too.

PS: Also there's a reason the "main character" (which she isn't; the game has multiple main characters) is a 14 year old girl - she's essential due to being a mirror of Chopin's real life sister. Plus she plays a really large role in the climax of the game AND in explaining a lot of the existential shit. Not ALL of it as it's still pretty random, but even so.
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Oh, a complaint that IS often made about it is linearity though. Like yeah, the backgrounds and settings are so beautiful, but you aren't allowed to run off into the distance to explore like a CRPG (which most RPGs seem to be nowadays). You're stuck to a path with only minor variations for getting treasure and shit.

There's one secret dungeon though, and a kind of NEW GAME PLUS, so I guess it balances out. Plus it stops the game being too long, but if you are ADVENTUREJUNKIE and used to like Morrowind/Oblivion/Fallout/Might and Magic series/Wizardry then you may have cause for complaint
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if it looks, sounds and acts like a fart...
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playing through quake 1 right now and i'm having a hard time describing why i like it so much, apart from the totally unique and grim universe that it's set in (technological ruin, body horror, eldritch evil all blended together in a way that doesn't take itself too seriously).


i think part of it is the space that it inhabits, and its role as the first big, truly 3D game.  i love the hub world that you work through, i love the messages to the player that are almost like a dungeon master letting you know that a door has opened somewhere, and i love the fact that it's almost like there were no rules for 3D FPSes at that point so the devs were more free to experiment w/ gameplay.  i also like the fact that there's very limited scripting (just monster closets, maybe? and stuff like gimmicky bosses) so you actually have to use your imagination.  you come into a room with blood stained rectangles arranged in a ritualistic way, and you think "oh, this is some evil alter" instead of watching a cutscene where bad guy 1 tells bad guy 2 "this is our evil alter, NEVER TOUCH THE SWITCH IN THE BACK".


the weapons are evenly balanced, and there's reasons to use all of them.  the levels are strangely desolate, in terms of props, which makes the game design more... primal, i guess?  everything is a simple shape, and that makes it seem even more brutal and rough-hewn. 


every level reminds me how much i wish modern fpses would stop trying to be like cheap action movies
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I'm glad someone's playing through Quake so long after the fact. Most people gloss over it in favor of other FPSes because Quake was mostly known as a multiplayer game. It's too bad you missed out on that, it was the first truly large online game community in my view.

To me the most iconic thing about the game is the lighting. The shadows cast by the light sources in the levels were precompiled into the files, which meant they could do actual super realistic shadows without a very large performance hit, which was truly groundbreaking and a huge step up the simple lighting in Doom clones.
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If their was a global, all encompassing online server browser for every online game ever made, Quake would still have plenty of players. as would most older games, games that get worse review scores, ETC.

Anyway. I played through much of Quake 1, on hard in fact. But there were a few rough edges gameplay-wise that actually got to me a bit. I unfortunately lost my save file and I don't remember specifically where I left off at.

I liked Quake 2 a lot as well. Plan on starting that up at some point on completing it.

At the moment though. I recently beat NFS: Underground and Now I'm starting up NFS: Underground 2. Which its mush better. Namely that the driving is a bit more realistic, which I've thus far preferred. It's a lot easier than the original as far as I can tell though, and drifting seems a bit less intuitive.
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I have been playing Deus Ex 3. It's pretty much identical to the leaked preview from a few months ago in the starting area, just less buggy and a bit more polished. I'm enjoying it, will probably enjoy it a lot more when I'm not playing through content I've already done.

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This is why I didn't download the leak.
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I've been playing Deus Ex Human Revolution. At times, it almost feels like they're pulling a Metal Gear Solid 2, just making near identical situations to the first game in terms of both content and pacing - but since the original Deus Ex was one of my favorite games of all time, that isn't a hanging offense.

My main problem with it is that since my computer isn't quite burly enough to run it, I'm playing it on a console which means... loading.... that ....loading.... it takes a while..... loading..... to load. I count about twenty five seconds for it to load a saved game, which is frustrating to me. In the first two, I'd always throw down a quick save when I wanted to try exploring/doing something stupid just to see if it would work. Now, it takes almost half a minute between saves... so, I'm sort of being forced into playing it a little safer and having to work through mistakes. This may be the first game I actually cave in for and install to my 360.
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My main problem with it is that since my computer isn't quite burly enough to run it, I'm playing it on a console which means... loading.... that ....loading.... it takes a while..... loading..... to load. I count about twenty five seconds for it to load a saved game, which is frustrating to me. In the first two, I'd always throw down a quick save when I wanted to try exploring/doing something stupid just to see if it would work. Now, it takes almost half a minute between saves... so, I'm sort of being forced into playing it a little safer and having to work through mistakes. This may be the first game I actually cave in for and install to my 360.
It's actually like that on PC too.