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

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restarted GTA4 and just taking my time with it, chilling with Roman and just lounging around like a DIGITAL LIFE SIMULATOR because y'know, can't get a real life. But nah, it's good. Even though I've played through it countless times before, it's a solid game, and really cool. Kinda unbelievable how much of a step up from SA it was. Still one of the most believable in-game worlds around. Plus the choice of radio stations (reggae, jazz, fusion, new age, hip hop) is A++++
I like to think of it as a step down in a way. In terms of repetitiveness And less RPG elements.
GTA is not Dungeons And Dragons. Well rounded story and characters far outway gimmicks such as making fat people with afros. I enjoyed all that stuff in SA, but honestly, when you leave Los Santos, the story just goes all over the place as it tries to become Bad Boys. Plus there isn't really much to do in SA, it's all superficial detail and repetative GO AND FETCH stuff. I mean, it's a good game and still miles above the Saints Row stuff, but doesn't feel alive or really have that much depth in what it does. Though to be honest, that could mostly be due to the limitations of the consoles at the time.
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I'm playing SoulCalibur IV. I never played SoulCalibur before so I got my ass handed quite a few times, lol. I did manage to beat Story mode on hard. Tower of Lost Souls is a whole other beast though. For now I'm not really getting past floor 20. But, it's a fun game. And I love the Star Wars characters, especially Yoda.
 
For next month I plan to play Heavy Rain (since I missed out on that, and having played the demo I must say it's damn good). And also Naruto Shippuden Ninja Storm 3 since it's coming out next month and probably the best Naruto game yet.
Last Edit: February 24, 2013, 06:48:32 pm by The One
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I'm playing SoulCalibur IV. I never played SoulCalibur before so I got my ass handed quite a few times, lol. I did manage to beat Story mode on hard. Tower of Lost Souls is a whole other beast though. For now I'm not really getting past floor 20. But, it's a fun game. And I love the Star Wars characters, especially Yoda.
 
For next month I plan to play Heavy Rain (since I missed out on that, and having played the demo I must say it's damn good). And also Naruto Shippuden Ninja Storm 3 since it's coming out next month and probably the best Naruto game yet.
I hope you press X for Jason or you can press X for me it's all the same.
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I'm playing SoulCalibur IV. I never played SoulCalibur before so I got my ass handed quite a few times, lol. I did manage to beat Story mode on hard. Tower of Lost Souls is a whole other beast though. For now I'm not really getting past floor 20. But, it's a fun game. And I love the Star Wars characters, especially Yoda.
 
For next month I plan to play Heavy Rain (since I missed out on that, and having played the demo I must say it's damn good). And also Naruto Shippuden Ninja Storm 3 since it's coming out next month and probably the best Naruto game yet.
I hope you press X for Jason or you can press X for me it's all the same.
 
What?
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I'm playing SoulCalibur IV. I never played SoulCalibur before so I got my ass handed quite a few times, lol. I did manage to beat Story mode on hard. Tower of Lost Souls is a whole other beast though. For now I'm not really getting past floor 20. But, it's a fun game. And I love the Star Wars characters, especially Yoda.
 
For next month I plan to play Heavy Rain (since I missed out on that, and having played the demo I must say it's damn good). And also Naruto Shippuden Ninja Storm 3 since it's coming out next month and probably the best Naruto game yet.
I hope you press X for Jason or you can press X for me it's all the same.
 

 
What?
 
 

When you play Heavy Rain you will understand also my real name is Jason so it's was a inside joke.
Last Edit: February 24, 2013, 10:50:16 pm by DDay
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Halo: Reach. Decided halo 4's Spartan Ops were not worth it as they had literally no challenge to them since you endlessly respawn and they are just retreads of campaign sections.
 
I noticed that in Reach, 'Sprint' is a armor ability, meaning you can't have it and other armor abilities. Which is very silly but understandable since this is the Halo that introduced sprint to the series. Other than that I might like it better than Halo 4 thus far. It also lacks dual wielding which is unfortunate. IDK what weapons are available in multiplayer so I can't comment on how it ranks in the weapon variety department yet. And I might not get to if there is a lack of players for it as well. (though according to activity lists its still surviving)
 
 
 
From what I've been reading, Halo 3 multiplayer is basically dead. Which greatly saddens me. I really wish MS would pull out that stick its got up its ass and release Halo 3 onto PC. :disgust: Plus I bought ODST and never got around to trying the new maps. Mostly my fault but still, Halo 3's community would still be thriving if it was on PC. (namely Windows 7) Of course I've yet to try it but I sort of want to beat Reach first. But it seems fairly clear that it is dead.
 
I will admit, in all likely hood if they ever do release the latter Halos to PC they'll be on Windows 8. Which might as well be not releasing it on PC at all. :dry:
 
 
As for my commentary on Halo 4's story: (lotsa spoilers, it'd be fair to say that I really did not like it.)
 
Master Chief himself speaks more often but comes off as less wise or interesting for it rather than more. He says some very obvious things or even repeats what he hears from Cortana on a few occasions. And as I said, Cortana just says something directly related to the mission in a weirdly business like fashion or breaks down nearly to tears over how she's about to basically die. There is maybe 2 occasions when she's a bit lighter in tone. The dialogue is just meh. Actually, its worse because it tries too hard and falls short.
 
Also, she's apparently gotten virtual implants. Because her breasts are like DD's now.
 
EDIT: here I'll show you guys:

She goes from almost tough punk-rock-esque chick in CE to regular tough chick in 2 to moderate-chest-size crazy chick in 3 to big breasted waif in 4. AGHAGGACK
 
 
What have you done to my Halo story, 343? What have you done?
Last Edit: February 27, 2013, 05:23:22 am by Warped655
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Well tbh I never thought too deeply about the concept of experience authorship, and assumed most of the games that tipped on that side of the scale were games that oftentimes involved a character in his singular in a world that is basically nothing more than an empty canvas for crafting an experience with. I guess I always thought of authorship in terms of pure introspection rather than on the scale of a person's experience in relation to the entire world/setting around which that experience takes place (or even the world outside the one in which that experience takes place).
 
The one thing I felt remiss about while playing the game was involving that the only real option presented to me throughout the game was that of destruction. True that destruction was creatively placed, and it was a refreshing change to see puzzles purely in the perspective of where thinking only about how the spaces without stuff in it would solve my problem, rather than simply another type of puzzle that involves yet another variation on filling space with something (I would like to try exploring that very idea with the mechanics of Tetris, but like you mention earlier with the whole binary dynamic, it is very difficult for such a game to not turn out to be the exact same thing that Tetris already is). 
 
But the idea of stacking blocks on top of each other with the rope, no matter how creatively cut they might be, is too subject to the fickle mistress of accurate physics to ever accomplish anything that would even remotely qualify as "constructive". The whole time I was chasing down those godly undaroos I was thinking, "well if I commanded THAT ability, I could at least do some REAL playing with my freshly cut blocks, stacking them into arbitrary yet roughly balanced tower shapes like a child might" Maybe if he donned the pants himself and possibly upgraded his toolset with a glue-gun, it could open up the opportunity for a sequel where your character struggles with finding a constructive and useful place in a world where he could literally tear everything down and build it back up in any manner he so wished.
 
In short, maybe scribblenauts is a better example of that kind of balance (although one that might not be as good at what it is meant to do as people like to claim), but I am really in no position to philosophize on the matter. There are so many ways to explore so many aspects of the medium and it's potential, there really is not going to be a singular catch-all example of a game that monopolizes on every aspect of gaming that can be enjoyed. If there ever were, it could likely be the very last video game that ever needed to be made.
 
Worthwhile thinking about the idea negative/destructive tetris though. As with games in general, there are probably multiple approaches.
 
I had the same experience with stacking blocks. In some ways it was challenging, but in others it felt limiting - like operating the game world through one of those skill-tester cranes. Overall, the ability to upgrade your skillset over the course of the game would have been amazing. The game still had some really big high points, but could have been taken much further. Time availability on an indie budget, I guess.
 
Given that there are so many different possible approaches to both spatial games and games in general, it's valuable that games like this one are produced because they provide new aesthetic tools along with recombinations of old ones.
 
 
edit: bought The Cave then DQ8 arrived. never gonna get anything done at this rate.
Last Edit: February 27, 2013, 07:44:31 am by Biggles
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Replay all the Ratchet and Clank games

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EhfJ6WcCME&list=PLwvSqRk_LF-asmLkwC8Y4foO3yJkk3ou5
Last Edit: March 08, 2013, 07:23:02 am by DDay
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As for what I think of it thus far more specifically, I wonder if they have completely abandoned duel wielding. its looks to be so. Even though I disliked it in the very game that introduced (halo 2) it I felt that it really broadened the strategy of Halo 3 so I bet the game is weaker for it. Not that it isn't fun. It certainly is.
 
Yeah the lack of variety does hurt the game. I think 343 really did themselves in with this preset loadout system, it essentially traps everything at two tiers, the starting guns that have to be crazy balanced because they're starting weapons, and then the second level tier two stuff you can earn through kills. So unless you have one of the bonus guns getting you some easy points, the game grinds down to who can use the starting weapon the most efficiently, it's like you said, there's less breathing room for strategy. And many times, once relative skill with the predominant starting gun becomes established, it feels like moving through a race where you're all at constant speeds, constant relative positions, driving but going nowhere. There isn't a countermove/counterweapon that you can try, you just kind of trudge along.
 
I don't particularly feel that there is an opposition between those two qualities. Particularly, if you consider "mechanics" to their finest grained, they are a complex of human biocultural stuffs and computer software (itself material culture & technology). This is the same stuff that produces spatiality in games. As approaches, though, they might be distinct. A mechanical approach tends to be focused on more board-gamey macro design, whereas an approach focused on experience might focus on the aesthetic qualities of particular components (software and otherwise) of the game. There is also a literary approach, which treats games as a narrative text. I suspect that range of such approaches exist. In the sense that you may invest your time into one approach or the other & must manage conceptual conflicts between serving the needs of each, I guess that you could consider there being an opposition between them. But reconciliations and combined approaches are certainly possible, so by working at it, the seemingly opposed may meld into a third thing. For me, games are programs produced by doing work & cooperating. As software is such an astoundingly general thing, it naturally welcomes many different approaches.
 
Yes exactly, I don't think there's any opposition between immersive gaming and mechanics, where we might disagree (I don't know) is that I think immersive stuff simply won't exist until they have corresponding gameplay mechanics.
 
When I see a wall I can jump off of in Super Mario 64 I think that imbues it with a kind of potentiality, and that neither detracts nor sits separate from its aesthetic or immerisve value. In fact I think this is laying the ground work for certain kinds of emotions to occur. Moving a floating camera through a hallway in Mario 64 is I think very different than walking along with Mario down that same hallway. That hallway is made manifest beyond being a 3D shape because of Mario's abilities relative to it. I think this is the same reason why that Grandpa game struck a chord, pieces of the gameworld are willed into existence because of the players abilities relative to those parts of the landscape.
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I don't particularly feel that there is an opposition between those two qualities. Particularly, if you consider "mechanics" to their finest grained, they are a complex of human biocultural stuffs and computer software (itself material culture & technology). This is the same stuff that produces spatiality in games. As approaches, though, they might be distinct. A mechanical approach tends to be focused on more board-gamey macro design, whereas an approach focused on experience might focus on the aesthetic qualities of particular components (software and otherwise) of the game. There is also a literary approach, which treats games as a narrative text. I suspect that range of such approaches exist. In the sense that you may invest your time into one approach or the other & must manage conceptual conflicts between serving the needs of each, I guess that you could consider there being an opposition between them. But reconciliations and combined approaches are certainly possible, so by working at it, the seemingly opposed may meld into a third thing. For me, games are programs produced by doing work & cooperating. As software is such an astoundingly general thing, it naturally welcomes many different approaches.
 
Yes exactly, I don't think there's any opposition between immersive gaming and mechanics, where we might disagree (I don't know) is that I think immersive stuff simply won't exist until they have corresponding gameplay mechanics.
 
When I see a wall I can jump off of in Super Mario 64 I think that imbues it with a kind of potentiality, and that neither detracts nor sits separate from its aesthetic or immerisve value. In fact I think this is laying the ground work for certain kinds of emotions to occur. Moving a floating camera through a hallway in Mario 64 is I think very different than walking along with Mario down that same hallway. That hallway is made manifest beyond being a 3D shape because of Mario's abilities relative to it. I think this is the same reason why that Grandpa game struck a chord, pieces of the gameworld are willed into existence because of the players abilities relative to those parts of the landscape.
I think that we think roughly along the same lines, but my version is that "the player experience & culture can't exist without game software capable of producing it". The reason I'd phrase it that way is that I think immersive experience for an individual player is only one of many possible goals. The reason I say game software is that "mechanics" seem to have come to refer to one specific school of thought (drawing from board games and conventional wargames and rpgs) used to build the game software (including the text, pictures and other data embedded in it), whereas all vidja games involve a program and a computer and some i/o devices. Game components is also a suitable (and more general) word.
 
I definitely agree about the different manifestations of game objects relative to the player / player character's relation to it. One of my earliest mature (i.e. after high school) thoughts about game design was that we can understand games as being a flowing system of expanding and contracting potentialities & possibilities in the game space. But it was more of a hypothesis than a result. I had been trying to understand game design better by learning about graphic design and "potentiality"  was my immediate answer to the question "for game designers, what is whitespace?" But to find a way to use the idea for anything, it seemed necessary to figure out how software can cause people to perceive & grasp possibility and how we can understand these systems of possibility in a general sense.
 
Obviously it turned out to be an incredibly complicated topic in a whole heap of different ways but the partial conclusions I have come to are:
1. Game design doesn't exist except as planning for game construction. It's not really a thing in itself.
2. The production of software and the production in and of the surrounding culture are inseparable.
3. The 'potential' is roughly the same as a partial mental map of a space produced by the software.
4. The game space is a dialectic between the state-space of the game software and the player-community's understanding of it. Actually it's probably a bigger dialectic mess than that but I'll have a better idea when I've finished reading Lefebvre's book (The Production of Space) and maybe done some more math. That whole research trail is a big unresolved timesink.
5. That means that's it's not so simple as I initially thought it was (flow of potential / state-space around the player-character). It's not wholly determined by the player's abilities because the player's expectations, their limited information about the data and rules of the game, and the situation of the whole thing in a wider cultural web.
 
Idk if that's all entirely related to what you're talking about but I think we're in a similar region in terms of what we think. I can elaborate on why I think these things if you are interested in any of them, although how thought-out my opinions are varies.
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good game
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I did a controversial thing and did a video review of the new Tomb Raider. I put it on a new youtube account cos these (assuming i do more) aren't meant to be funny and exist on a lower level of stuff which is just me talking about crap. The account is called talkingabouter. Here is the video:
 
http://youtu.be/0F3RsMs7wpU
Last Edit: March 10, 2013, 06:09:22 pm by jamie
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that's a good video jamie but it's kind of weird seeing a funny and entertaining game review & and not have the guy doing it sound completely clueless about everything outside gaming. good work, would watch 1000 more
 
this is the only review of the game I've seen. my main reservation about it is still that they explicitly turned the character into A Girl by making her someone who is weak and clueless and who everyone doubts and needs some huge traumatic event forced upon her to explain why she's an adventurer in her later life and not a homemaker or whatever. like they replaced the tight clothes and everything with something that's way more sinister and gross. It's good that it appears they avoided metroid-level bullshit tho. I also don't really dig the lost/uncharted look
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i decided not to really talk about the quality of lara as a female image in that video because i really didn't feel as if i have much authority on it, but:
 
 
Quote
huge traumatic event forced upon her to explain why she's an adventurer in her later life
 
yeah, this is a very common thing in the media, they eventually do this to almost every female character with a lot of agency and it can be really insidious. in the case of this game, i think this is one of the lighter examples of that. lara is the one pushing for this excursion from the beginning, and while she wasn't expecting to fight for her life, it feels less like a traumatic thing that explains why she's 'wrong' than your typical superhero origin thing. it is there, though, there's no denying it.
 
i'd suggest you play it in particular, because i know you like the older games and actually you and a couple of others taking an interest in them is what even put them on my radar cos i had decided they weren't for me when i was 9 or something and stuck to that. i'd want to know what you think about what the game does with the character after you see the whole arc they put her through. i felt pretty satisfied with where they take her. one of the most common ways i've seen women being delegitimized in non-conformist portrayals is that they are essentially unhappy in their non-conformity. they aren't allowed to revel in whatever it is they do, and by the end of the game i'd say lara is fully ready to revel in some god danged adventure.
 
i really don't feel like this is an overtly creepy game. maybe i am desensitized to it, but while there is sadism in game, it didn't seem gendered to me. i didn't ruin everything about the game in that video but there is an area in this game which is one of the most gruesome i've ever seen. it begins with lara emerging from literally a pit of pure blood and goes from there. bits of bodies are lying hacked up all over the place, and you can kick them around as you walk. it's just gross shit like that, and the game really doesn't dwell too much on females going through pain or fear. This isn't The Suffering of Lara Croft.
 
maybe none of this was necessary, because in previous games lara is already the person she is at the end of this game, and this feels like a step back to people who are familiar with her original incarnation. putting her sex symbol status aside, mostly because i don't know how to handle it exactly, if on a character level lara was already there, then i can see how this might seem like a pointless look in the wrong direction. i haven't played those yet, i'll maybe report back when i have.
 
i feel like i could talk about this game for ages. dunno why. it left a good impression on me overall, even though there are all these obvious ways it could have been improved.
 
i might do a video about persona 4 next. or maybe something else. i wanted to do one on dragon quarter as well. also things that aren't video games. easy fun.
Last Edit: March 10, 2013, 08:47:49 pm by jamie
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before this I was going to skip it, but I think I'll check it out sooner or later. but yeah, as others have said better than myself, one of the main appeals of the old character is that they apparently never had the desire to explain why laura is how she is besides a) personal interest and conviction and b) some archetypal revenge or closure thing with her parents. and outside of visuals I don't ever remember them making a big point out of her being a woman, which I guess you could dismiss as cramming a male character in a sexualized female form, but I don't think that's the case with this character.
 
the reason I started playing tomb raider when I was a kid was because my sister was really into the games. so I never really had the chance to dismiss em as some substanceless sexual thing, which I don't think they are even without the spacechat nostalgia
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finished final fantasy v. played through most of it a long time ago but lost steam and never finished it. i have no idea why, well over a decade later, i decide to start a new game and finish it, but sometimes life is like that.
 
for some reason it was my intention to write something about this game, but probably everyone in the universe has an opinion about every possible angle of the series, so it feels kinda dumb even bothering at this point. it is a video game and i played it. do you really care what i think about final fantasy v?
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I am playing MGSR:R which I so far enjoy a lot. It feels like a melee Vanquish, which I loved, it's very Platinum, oil-slick, ludicrous, comic, joyous, challenging, shallow. Sometimes the shallow part bothers me but others the humour and the fact that it's probably better to just look at these titles in the context of being modern arcade games, makes me not really mind.
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Silly of me to ask about story in a modern MGS game, but is the story decent at all in MGSR? I played 4 and I did not think it was... great. :P
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I can't give you a good answer because I love the writing in the 4th Solid game second only to the 2nd. But it doesn't really have a story, no, besides posing a few cyborg-related questions, which I suppose is something. It's lacking a lot of its depth in that aspect in particular, though, compared the the main series. It's definitely an issue for me, just finding enough of a reason to keep slicing things into 1/16s.
Last Edit: March 11, 2013, 09:46:35 pm by superflat