Topics

16

General Gaming - The Arcade / Mass Effect - Why changing narrative tone is bad.

« on: July 08, 2016, 11:11:57 AM »

EDIT: Was posted in what video games are you playing? but decided to move it because it didn't answer that question and was a rant.

Aaaaaand I remember why ME3 sucks. All that goddamn abstraction. First two games: great, subtle allegory; good, solid themes; grounded in science first then mythos. Third game: blatant religious symbolism everywhere, mythos heavy, leaves allegory for abstracts which has it's place in media but for portugals sake doesn't do any favours here whatsoever.

Completely changed the narrative tone in a series. Who does that?

The allegory in the first two was just the right balance of saying something without preaching it. The general messages are that everyone deserves a second chance, co-operation without losing individuality is great and all lives matter. Fine. As you all know I'm not hugely into this type of preachy thing but in ME it was at least really well disguised, it all fit into the lore and the character nicely, everything worked and I got subtly influenced into becoming a better human. It asked questions like 'is death better than being brainwashed?', 'what is self-determination?', 'how much can we interfere with nature?', 'how far should we push science?'. All those kinds of sci-fi classics that are asked and left for the person to make a choice. Unfortunately they just shy away from greatness with assigning a morality value to these choices but still, it tried and got closer to really asking you these questions than any other medium imo by forcing you to choose what you believe (or what the person you're playing believes) to advance the game.


ME3 just throws all that out the window. It drops the allegory and just preaches. Not only that but it preaches armadillo which goes against the themes of the first two: give up individuality for peace, pro-life bs, modifying humans is wrong etc. Then it gets abstract. The game is now about how the PC represents the prodigal son and the story is about how all along you've been guiding the universe either with severity or virtue (but nothing in between) to a utopia. Your guilt is depicted in dreams as running through a burning forest in slo-mo chasing after a child you saw die. I didn't give two armadillos about this kid. Spoke one line to him and all of a sudden apparently I'm supposed to care specifically about that kid rather than the other billions of people dying, including friends, during the course of the game? It's portugaling stupid.


That aside. Even possibly forgiving that, because I really hate that kind of armadillo when it's obvious so I'm biased against it, objectively the storytelling is worse. As I'll explain I guess. Because this post isn't long enough already.


The first two set up a Trek-like sci-fi epic so well. The first game created a universe, there was the pseudo-science hallmark of the genre, there were various humanoid and non-humanoid aliens, there was backstory narrative for the events happening during the timeframe of the game and there was a very solid lore/fictional history.


It created a perfect foundation from which to flesh out specifics of the current timeline, important events and how the universes peoples react on a more studied look in ME2. A lot of people criticise ME2 for not moving on the Shepard story but that's not the purpose of that game. The purpose is to create more personality for the current timeframe. At this moment in time in the ME universe while you're playing as Shepard: colonies are being founded, one race is gearing up for war, another is trying to consolidate, people are being experimented on by an organisation, loads of other armadillo. It runs the gamut of what's happening around this time. Again, it's more setup for an epic: it's building a framework so that the real meat of the story can be told without going over what is currently happening or what the universe is like.


Then the third game comes along with the story and the way it's told differs so greatly from the other two games that, style-wise, it's unrecognisable. It's not even that it doesn't use the foundation that's created, because it does. The backstory is told very briefly, very thinly in broad strokes, same with the tone of the universe: Krogan are brutish, Turians are militaristic (which on a racial level is accurate-ish but individually doesn't have to be the case at all). Great. But then a lot of the control over your characters personality is taken away, much fewer dialogue choices even when it's painfully obvious there really needed to be at least one other option. The story changes from specific arcs to an epic like it should but in doing so, loses so much of what made the first two games great. The player agency. Where previously there was choice in motivation now there is only choice in outcome which makes it feel so shallow.


So I get to the divisive ending which had much furore about it at the time. The abstract gets even more nauseating - only by the sacrifice of the prodigal son can there be utopia. And there are three options left to the player, literally a left, middle and right path. Left is control - shape the galaxy according to what you believe, middle is absolute peace at the cost of all individuality and right is destroy - break conventions to allow everyone to self-determine leaving the good with the bad and the threat that AI's will probably eventually wipe out organics. There's no room for motivation or finesse, there's the big sci-fi question - great but it's presented in such a way that leaves no room for context. How precisely is that control, am I god now? What does that even mean? Does this loss of individuality mean that everyone is exactly the same or is it more general, like everyone sharing DNA or something? And the first two options preclude any more games being set after these events.


Fortunately ME3 is still very much playable thanks to the great third person combat. But it's such a shame that what could have been the best single sci-fi story ever told fell short.

17

Game Reviews / Darkest Dungeon

« on: June 20, 2016, 02:12:42 AM »

I hope Orange Bison is okay with this. One PM and I'll take it down.


Every now and then gaming produces Lovecraftian horror. Darkest Dungeon may be the first to get it right. The game had been in early access since February 3^rd 2015 and was released January 19^th 2016, so there has been plenty of time to see what it’s about but for those of you that don’t know; Darkest Dungeon is a turn based strategic dungeon crawler. And for those of you that want to leave at the mention of ‘turn based’, wait a moment. Usually when I hear this genre being slated it’s because there is little to do moment-to-moment. Not so here, every animation plays quickly and the feedback on what just happened is instant. And that’s something very integral to the tension of this game, so many times it feels like all could be won or lost in just a single action.

(Really the guy with the shield should be on the frontline instead of the back, but RNG decided to surprise me)

If ever there was a game which built an entire narrative around mechanics, it would be Darkest Dungeon. What I mean by that is from the very moment you load it up, watch the intro and look at the menu, you’ll be able to ascertain something. This game looks like it’s going to be a challenge. Thankfully, it delivers.
With your party of four heroes you’ll be delving, room to room, into the depths of five dungeon settings each with presumably near unlimited randomly generated content before heading back to town, loot in tow. So far, so standard. What really makes it hard is that the deaths are permanent, pickups are scarce during missions, enemies can and will take all your health in one crit and drive your heroes insane. This is kind of unique to Darkest Dungeon, the insanity system. During dungeon delving your heroes will become more stressed due to enemy attacks and different objects that you can interact with during your dungeon delving.
As your intrepid heroes walk through the many dungeons, there will be objects on the floor, most of which contain loot but can give a severe penalty for being tampered with. To aid this seemingly bad trade of loot for insanity and disease; the right items bought in town to alleviate the danger. Not that the game tells you which (if any) of the seven items to use on a particular object.  Herein lies part of the progression in Darkest Dungeon. Not only do characters have weapons, armour and skills to upgrade but you try out different items on different objects and your knowledge of the game expands.
One last thing which sells this game as a difficult game is that there is no difficulty level. There is a New Game+ which is harder but the game needs to be beaten before that can be unlocked. Instead of Easy/Medium/Hard there are options that can be toggled on or off which make the experience more or less difficult such as your heroes getting more stressed the longer you take in a fight or enemies will do max damage on a crit instead of a damage multiplier.



This is a game that you can tell has been built from the mechanics upwards, the enemy types each have strengths and weaknesses with heroes compositions being strong or weak against the different variations. After each mission you’re rewarded with just enough tokens to upgrade the town a little and just enough money to try and cure an affliction or two. It gives the feeling like you’re catching up gradually until you get a run through one of the levels which everything just goes your way and you end up with a ton of loot and you can heal up all your heroes and get some breathing room.
If you can deal with the first few missions you may encounter a boss – these dungeons are like any other except that in one room there will be an encounter a fight significantly harder than anything else in the level. Usually boss fights will require you to see what the boss can do, retreat from the fight (unless by happenstance you managed to bring a good combo) and then come back again later with a party specifically designed to kill it.
 


 Unusually for a game with randomly generated elements Darkest Dungeon has a lot of hero classes and while they have a general role that may be in common with another class, each of the fifteen has a use or niche unlike the others. For example, the Leper and Man at Arms have roughly the same role as a frontline to take damage but while the Leper has some self-buffs and can attack the first two spaces, the Man at Arms has party wide buffs and has attacks that hit any of the first 3 spaces. Tacticians among you will find more than enough to experiment with to give many hours of entertainment trying to find the optimal combination for each encounter.




The aesthetic used is fantastic, very narrow but stylised colour palette with seemingly hand drawn artwork makes it a visually striking game. The animations are simple but convey what is happening at the time and they are quick and numerous enough that they don’t become repetitive. Assisting with setting the scene is the ever present narrator (Wayne June), murmuring unsettling developments and musing on your progress. It all fits in to give this game a wholly cohesive theme that any game regardless of budget can learn lessons from.

All that being said, if you’re not a fan of RNG making this both easier and more complicated or the game looks and feels too dark then fair enough: this won’t be a game for you. There are faults with how easy the game is during the mid-end of the game but the game is getting tweaks to difficulty fairly regularly.

Personally, I’ve loved every minute I’ve had with Darkest Dungeon but that aside it is a great example of how to do a turn based party vs party game and I’d be surprised if carbon copies didn’t crop up sometime in the future. Darkest Dungeon retails on steam at £18.99 or your regional equivalent.

Pros:
·    Great atmosphere, both sound and visuals.
·         Solid tactical gameplay.
·         Fantastic narration with mystery and horror.
·         Balances challenge and reward well.
·         Updated frequently since release.
Cons:
·         RNG can feel unfair.
·         Early game is punishing.
·         Late game is more of the early game.
 
Overall: 10/10 At the time of writing this is legitimately the best game in its genre because there isn’t another game like it at the moment. The closest I can think of is Legend of Grimrock, Might and Magic VIII, and X:COM but even then the difference is greater than the similarities.
 
Rob Mitchell

- smallerized photos by request : CG -

18

General Gaming - The Arcade / Space Hulk: Deathwing

« on: May 18, 2016, 01:31:39 AM »

Everyone here knows what Space Hulk is so there's no need to explain it.


http://www.spacehulk-deathwing.com/

This game (unlike the one released in 2014 and then re-released in 2015 with 1 years worth of patches to circumvent negative reviews) looks pretty portugaling sick.


Look at the gothic...ness of it! Very WH40k, looks like it plays like Vermintide, which is pretty awesome btw if you've played that.

19

General Chatter - The Boozer / What video games are you playing?

« on: May 10, 2016, 02:20:25 PM »

What are you playing at the moment?


I keep a few going at a time, Dawn of War: Soulstorm, Might and Magic VIII, Overwatch, beta stops today and Heroes of the Storm.

20

Marvel/DC / Marvel/DC hero comparison

« on: March 31, 2016, 06:07:33 PM »

Hero comparison DC/Marvel. I don't like these damn fandom wars people start but this is actually interesting. And the artwork is great.

http://imgur.com/gallery/bj097xw

21

Marvel/DC / Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

« on: March 26, 2016, 11:39:28 PM »

No spoilers in this post.

First off, the action was phenomenal. If you want to see spectacle and visual FX this movie has it in spades, possibly the best ever. Unfortunately, for me anyway, the movie did not deliver on a cohesive story and when the movie did try that it did so clumsily half the time. The film suffered from being too short, or trying to do too much too quickly. There are a lot of what seem to be either cut or perhaps purposefully fragmented scenes, if it's the former, I go back to it being too short and if the latter then I'd say it's bad editing/directing.



Ben Affleck as Batman and Wayne was fantastic in both roles. He must have bulked up a ton for this role and looks like he could very well go toe-to-toe with the man of steel, gadgets or no. His bat-suit is the best of any batman movie hands down and he used gadgets and weapons ton which is fair enough considering who he's up against but his stand-out scene is when he's fighting unarmed, Synder is just fantastic at making the fight scenes look like they really goddamn hurt. As far as character development goes for batman, I think they did great for the time the film spent on him. The opening scene does a fantastic job of setting up motivation for the movies premise which takes about 15 mins maybe. He has some weird scenes but I can't go into that without a spoiler tag.


Cavill once again plays a great Superman, no surprise there the guy is fantastic, and layers a lot more character on top of what he did in Man of Steel. Once again his morality is more ambiguous than the comics or other portrayals but it's just another direction to go with him, I don't mind it at all as I've never really liked pure white-knight characters anyway. But I understand that a lot of fans are still annoyed about that.


Jesse Eisenberg was horrendously miscast though. I think that his was the weakest performance by far, I wasn't a fan of how he portrays Lex it's almost like they wanted to cast someone as Joker but didn't want to be compared to the Nolan movies. He plays the character like he's moderately insane, a few ticks and thoughts getting out of control but with logical motivations and goals as opposed to Jokers wanton mayhem.


The other characters did fine, Amy Adams had a decent amount of screen time and did fine as an intrepid reporter, repeatedly moving the plot forwards and cluing the audience in on what's going on. Gal Gadot looked amazing as Wonder Woman, her scenes were brief but she's got screen presence but I could probably write a paragraph or two on her character despite this because you get a good sense of who her character is from the nuance.

However there are plot holes which are blindingly obvious, it's annoying because it seems like there's a lot of other material to play with rather than trying to shoehorn something which doesn't fit and doesn't quite make sense. Despite this, the amount of nuance in this film altogether is, in my opinion, highly underrated. There are so many visual and atmospheric clues in this film as to whats been going on in this DC universe. Snyder isn't a director known for light touches and fairly so, but he is good at painting a picture with very few strokes. It really, really pays to keep a sharp eye open or perhaps another viewing.


On the whole, I liked the movie but I'd really like to love it.

22

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Brussels Terror Attacks

« on: March 22, 2016, 12:04:53 PM »

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/22/471391497/what-we-know-terrorist-bombing-at-brussels-airport?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social


More terrorist BS and again it was muslims. And at least one of them was let through the border despite being inspected because we aren't taking a hard enough stance against them.

23

General Gaming - The Arcade / Games that could do with bugfixing/balancing/graphics overhaul!

« on: March 16, 2016, 11:20:49 PM »

Omerta - City of Gangsters could do with all of these. It's a great game at heart but the graphics are bad for when it was released (2013), the imbalances are kind of insane and random graphical glitches happen all the time and level breaking bugs happen only commonly. The expac seemed to exacerbate this for some reason.


Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2! New graphics would be nice but it look as you'd expect for a game of its age but the game is buggy as armadillo. Crashes on loading screens, quest dialogue out of place, quests not triggering properly, cutscenes not triggering properly, game not working well in fullscreen mode. Daaamn. Plus I'd really love a balancing of force power. Force push should do some good damage really to give LS players an option of going for consular without being gimped for spending points in wisdom :/


Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic! Same sort of problems and using old DnD ruleset means that finesse melee attacks aren't a thing unfortunately.


Satellite Reign! I've never seen a game launch with so many bugs (and I played Rome 2, Fallout 4 and XCOM 2 at launch). Quests don't always trigger and when they do they aren't always complete-able when they do, xp and money progress is so weird it's done over time so you're incentivised to stand around doing nothing until you get power enough to take on challenges instead of out-thinking or out-playing the game.


Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines! My favourite game is not without its share of bugs, fortunately Wesp5 has done a stellar job of squashing them but still. The graphics are dated nowadays and yeah some skills are near useless but that's part of the roleplaying, sometimes you want to roll a character that is good at things that come up rarely in the scope of the game.


Evil Genius! The Theme Hospital-esque game where you play the part of a campy villain and henchmen trying to build an evil lair to do evil things. However I literally can't complete the game because of how bad the bugs and balance is. I could deal with a really hard game or an average game that takes away mouse use but I can't deal with one that spikes to really hard AND takes away mouse use Still an enormously fun game and one I keep coming back to despite it being broken.


Freedom Force! One of my top 5 games but again not without problems. For one, a graphics overhaul would be lovely and the ability to play it on an OS later than Windows 7 would be great! The problem is that it doesn't work with dwm (desktop window manager) which is required always on for Windows 8+.


EDIT: Download the GoG .exe (on their forum free for download) if you have any other version and it works on later OS.

24

General Chatter - The Boozer / Web Shows

« on: March 05, 2016, 05:12:15 PM »

Could have sworn I made a thread about this before but I can't find it :/


Anyway I've been watching a lot of RollPlay on itmeJP's channel. He's got multiple RPG shows, Swan Song is Firefly-esque, Mirrorshades is Shadowrun, there's a couple of DnD ones, warhammer 40k, Star Wars, probably 6 or 7 others. The shows start slow for the most part but as the players get more comfortable it gets better and better.


So far I've seen Sagas of the Icelanders which is about Norwegians settling in Iceland and trials and tribulations associated.The Mirrorshades campaign I was obsessed with was absolutely fantastic, sad it's over but it ended so freakin well it tempers the anguish that it's gone. I also saw the Star Wars one, which is done over 2 days (8 episodes). Everyone was in cosplay and is very much a star wars short story by itself. The combat in that game is really well done too.

The one I'm currently watching (60 or so episodes in) is called West Marches which is typical DnD 5th. It has a load of people on it as opposed to Mirrorshades and Sagas using the same 4 people, which works well in the setting.

There's always a ton of energy and what looks like genuine excitement to play, people get into their roles. It's great, would recommend a lot.


Here's a link to all the shows: https://www.youtube.com/user/itmeJP/playlists

25

General Gaming - The Arcade / Yet another tedious gaming post by me. Thematic Mechanical Abstraction.

« on: March 05, 2016, 11:50:22 AM »

Thematic mechanical abstraction!


I believe youtuber John 'TB' Bain coined the phrase. What it refers to is taking a set of mechanics and slapping a different theme over the top. For example take the assassins creed mechanics and slap LotR over the top and you get Shadows of Mordor.


If anyone has a great idea to slap different skins over existing game mechanics I'd love to hear it


I like the idea of Jedi Knight themed Arkham City, detective work, fluid combat more in line with the prequals than the originals.


Also DnD themed XCOM for obvious reasons. The Mordheim PC game still isn't good unfortunately.

26

The Grand Tribunal / [RESOLVED] Let's see how this thing plays out. Ah yes I see how to rename thread

« on: February 27, 2016, 11:44:41 AM »

An image I posted was taken down on 26/02/2016 in the thread Funny Picture Thread by moderator Gmd. Reason given is section 4 of ToS - Spamming.


Under the definition I can't have been spamming because it would require intentionally antagonising another member or for personal gain. I could have gained nothing other than post count which clearly isn't the issue because part of the post is still there and I haven't obviously antagonised anyone because there hasn't been an angry response post which would be an indicator.


The post was not unsuitable for the thread, it was obviously a funny picture.
It wasn't political.
It wasn't unintelligible.
It was in English.
It was a single post.
I have never cared about post count as supported by my lack of participation in post-count-boosting forum games.
There was no malicious intent to incite flame/forum wars. Indeed, no replies to it were made other than a removal.
I wasn't advertising anything.
It wasn't parasitic.
It didn't contain a link to a product.

27

Marvel/DC / Deadpool

« on: February 13, 2016, 09:14:42 AM »

No spoilers here.

Saw this yesterday and I thought it was great. Humour was on point, the sex scene was particularly funny, watch for that if nothing else as well as the in-jokes if you like that sort of thing (jokes aimed at Ryan Reynolds, the green lantern and wolverine origins movies etc). The violence I was expecting to be a lot heavier than it was to be honest but there was perhaps only one scene that was bloody violence and the rest was comedic or too fast paced to really have an impact.


One of the things I found a little off-putting was the amount of visual noise on screen at times. Every now and then there was a scene where there was simply too much going on too fast to be able to really see all of it which made a couple of action segments a little harder to follow than I'd have liked.


Standout performances were Ed Skrein and Brianna Hildebrand. I can't really say Reynolds was a standout performance because I get the feeling he's just playing himself....So to speak. But he was enjoyable to watch regardless.

28

General Gaming - The Arcade / Really Bad Game Sequels

« on: February 01, 2016, 11:38:23 PM »

I've been playing through Max Payne 3 again. While I disliked it first time around for not being set in NY with Max chasing after some sort of femme fatale, I dislike it now because it's just an awful game.


The most obvious and inexcusable reason why it's bad is the level design. We all know that the slo-mo bullet time is the signature feature of Max Payne, apparently Rockstar's level designers don't. Bullet time is best used to complete multiple actions simultaneously which would be difficult to do at regular speed, these sorts of things include, multiple takedowns when in the open, dodging bullets and running for cover. Or all three at the same time. The levels provide almost no space to do these things, there is cover absolutely everywhere and the times where there isn't, it's scripted so that you take less damage and very conveniently the enemies take a lot more.


It's an example of bad level design which alone is enough to break a game. But being a die hard Max Payne fan, that would not have stopped me from loving it if it wasn't for them doing what seems to be ever more fashionable - ultra-seriousismness. The original MP games were set in a serious tone about a guy who's been dealt a really crappy hand. However the dialogue from Max himself while interacting with things made it obvious the devs weren't taking the game as a whole too seriously. There were instances of Max breaking the fourth wall, commenting on game mechanics and design for example in 2 there was a comment about how he was practically a new man (they got a different actor).


So not only was it a bad shooter but it was also a bad Max Payne game.

29

General Chatter - The Boozer / Speakers

« on: January 31, 2016, 12:27:59 PM »

Anyone know which are good? I've been looking at Logitech Z333 and Z623. I have budget for either but is there a huge difference? I prefer logitech because a) they're reliable, had my current ones for...7 years maybe? b) they look good on the desktop and c) they sound good with a decent amount of bass.


However I'm not so hung up on them I'd not switch brand with good reason.

30

Tabletop Games - The Game Room / Shadowrun 3E

« on: January 31, 2016, 10:48:49 AM »

I got a digital third edition of Shadowrun and have been going through it over about a week. Already being familiar with Shadowrun setting and to a very lesser extent, lore, it was pretty simple to understand. I did not expect this to tell the truth, so many people say it's overly complicated but hey, whatever.


The ruleset is very open to DM and player interpretation. Not to say that there aren't flat rules but when it comes to character creation you can have any skill or knowledge you like and it'll probably have a use at some point during a campaign. In shadowrun you roll against a target number for skill checks and so slightly related skills can provide a small reduction to the target number and the exact skill can provide larger reductions with specializations providing larger reductions still.


E.g. My mechanic has the repair skill specialized in drone repair, I'd get a small bonus to deactivating a cyberlimb due to it being mechanically related, I'd get a decent bonus to repairing a microwave and I'd get a large bonus to repairing a drone.


I don't know how standard that is for an RPG as I only played an early version of DnD and can't remember that being part of it.


Anyway the mechanics are sound and the setting is fantastic.


Here's the start of a playthrough of 1E but it's similar to 3E. 4 and 5E are noticeably different though.