What are you playing? [SPOILER TAGS PLEASE]

Started by Sabby, May 31, 2009, 12:45:35 PM

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Sabby

Maybe you'd prefer Gears 2? Its a much better game over all :)

Morrowclaw

I'm playing Red dead redemption and replaying Pokemon Sapphire.
Partly for the hell of it
Solely out of boredom
Mostly for the story

Inkidu

Quote from: Sabby on March 29, 2011, 04:14:36 AM
Maybe you'd prefer Gears 2? Its a much better game over all :)
Yeah, Gears 1 was like a tech demo. Still if you do play 2, prepare to still have next to nothing explained without having to pick up what are essentially bits of trash.
If you're searching the lines for a point, well you've probably missed it; there was never anything there in the first place.

Hemingway

Goddamn ... Crysis 2 is ... bad. I mean, not through-and-through. It does have its moments of glory, but honestly, at this point those serve only to point out what the game could have been.

The story ... I don't know where to start. I guess I should give them some points for effort, but the holes in the story put the sinking of the Titanic to shame. I have no hope it'll be salvaged at this point. Seen on its own, it's an adequate story that serves the purpose of giving you something to shoot at and somewhere to shoot it. It's a little better than "scientists open a portal to hell, demons flood the Earth", but ... no, come to think of it, that's pretty much it, only with aliens instead. It tries to make it interesting by ... well, let me put it this way. It's like the illegitimate child of Crysis and FEAR2. The similarities to FEAR2, I would go so far as to say, border on a rip-off. The characters didn't make Crysis a great game, but Prophet and Psycho, even Nomad, had more character than these cardboard cutouts. I may go into more detail once I get to the end of it. I expect it to be unpleasant.

I've already explained what's wrong with the gameplay, but one scene I just finished served as a harsh reminder. A scene that should have been full of marines dying around me while I brought down the giant alien war machine, I was instead alone, forced to scrounge the area for any explosives I could find, whilst hiding from an enemy whose weak spot is on his back, but who could see me even through stealth and so was nigh impossible to sneak up on. It took me about five minutes. Maybe I could've done it faster some other way, but ... well, I don't see how and that ... shouldn't really be necessary. I mean, it was just poor design.

To be fair, the part where, after fighting aliens for about a quarter of the game, you go back to fighting humans ( a mercilessly brief scene ), was pretty excellent. It was one of the few scenes where I actually felt more powerful than a regular grunt. In fact, most of the time, this Alcatraz guy seems completely weak and inept. The scenes in which you're writhing and crawling around, struggling to get up, are ... plentiful. It's like ... these things don't make the game bad, but it's so contrary to what you'd expect from a guy in a billion-dollar exoskeleton.

Wolfy

Wellt, I got a nice surprise...I trade in Dragon Age II, and got $34 for it.


So that let me Get SSFIV 3D, Crysis 2 (Limited Edition, too.) and Okami-Den. :D *dances happy dance* I got all I wanted. ^-^

Yorubi

DDO right nows. Having fun actually with it :)

Hemingway

*Headdesk.*

Finally, a twist in the game. Too little too late, I'm afraid, because ... ugh, they could've done so much with the transhumanist theme. But, no.

Sabby

Quote from: Inkidu on March 29, 2011, 04:06:28 PM
Yeah, Gears 1 was like a tech demo. Still if you do play 2, prepare to still have next to nothing explained without having to pick up what are essentially bits of trash.

GoW takes place on another planet.

If that was news to you, I'm not surprised =3 somewhere in the second game it clicked that "Wait, hang on... this isn't Earth?"

Wyrd

...

Gears of war is not on earth..?

NO!! IT CAN'T BE!!! MY LIFE!!! HAS ALL BEEN A LIE!!  *Rips GoW posters of the walls, throws game discs in the fire place.*
Ragtime Dandies!

Wolfy

Quote from: Sabby on March 29, 2011, 10:34:00 PM
GoW takes place on another planet.

If that was news to you, I'm not surprised =3 somewhere in the second game it clicked that "Wait, hang on... this isn't Earth?"

It's not? O-o

My life...HAS BEEN TORN ASUNDER!

o-o..it's true, though..it takes place on Planet Sera.

WTF man..I always thought it was earth.

Sabby

Clearly its a thinly veiled political statement on the war in Iraq :P

The COGS (AMERICA!) fights the Locusts (AL QUEADA!) for the Imulsion (OIL!) on a place that is like our own home, yet we prefer to think of it as alien (AFHGANISTAN!)

...plus the head honcho of the Locusts lives in a cave. Case. In. Point.

Wolfy

And so Gears 3 is going to open up with a big banner saying "Mission Accomplished", then pan out to show everyone turned to ash under it?



Also Sabby...I got Crysis 2...we should play some time...*winks* Though don't worry..I'll make sure to use my armor...

Sabby

I don't do armour... I kind of can't get pregnant :P

Sabby

Okay, there is one part of Crysis 2 I don't like... its lack of 'Halo Syndrome', or multiple enemy factions.

You fought Cell and Ceph, but Cell and Ceph weren't working together, so they would try and kill each other when they come together right? Yes and no... there were a few bits where it would happen, but it was so brief and the Ceph would usually come right after you and ignore the soldiers.

And with the way Ceph leap around and wall jump and such, I was starting to get a real Bioshock vibe. I was expecting to be facing some humans and then see a Ceph wall bounce and somersault in to grab one by his neck and toss him against a wall, blow another off of his feet, and then warble and sprint for the next group who start to unload at him.

Some simple AI tweaks and a few different animations, and it would have worked... but the AI is a joke :(

Halo and Bioshock have shown me that its not always best to be the centre of attention... sometimes I want to be a part of the chaos.

Wolfy

Quote from: Sabby on March 30, 2011, 12:16:18 AM
Okay, there is one part of Crysis 2 I don't like... its lack of 'Halo Syndrome', or multiple enemy factions.

You fought Cell and Ceph, but Cell and Ceph weren't working together, so they would try and kill each other when they come together right? Yes and no... there were a few bits where it would happen, but it was so brief and the Ceph would usually come right after you and ignore the soldiers.

And with the way Ceph leap around and wall jump and such, I was starting to get a real Bioshock vibe. I was expecting to be facing some humans and then see a Ceph wall bounce and somersault in to grab one by his neck and toss him against a wall, blow another off of his feet, and then warble and sprint for the next group who start to unload at him.

Some simple AI tweaks and a few different animations, and it would have worked... but the AI is a joke :(

Halo and Bioshock have shown me that its not always best to be the centre of attention... sometimes I want to be a part of the chaos.


Well I must agree, somewhat, though I'm not that far in...I have absolutely NO f*cking idea what the story is, other than I'm supposed to be saving some scientist guy.

But the multiplayer..my god. It's almost like....BEES. MY GOD.

Seriously though...I'm in love with the multiplayer, and I don't care who knows it.

Sabby

I didn't play the first Crysis, but I saw some Lets Play of it, and what I gathered was an alien ship of some kind had crashed on an island, the Koreans swarmed over it, then America took an interest and sent some covert ops in using Nano-Suits to see what the big deal was.

From the little I know, the alien tech you both are competing for gets up and starts murdering people.

Wolfy

Quote from: Sabby on March 30, 2011, 01:32:53 AM
I didn't play the first Crysis, but I saw some Lets Play of it, and what I gathered was an alien ship of some kind had crashed on an island, the Koreans swarmed over it, then America took an interest and sent some covert ops in using Nano-Suits to see what the big deal was.

From the little I know, the alien tech you both are competing for gets up and starts murdering people.

And then there's the Alien Virus, right?...O-o...

Sheesh, you'd think they would have the courtesy to include a nice review of what happened in Crysis, considering only 10 people sacrificed their soul to Satan to have a computer that could run the damn thing. >_>

Sabby

That virus wasn't in the first.
Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide
It was sent to the surface by the Ceph to weaken the planet for invasion. Plus the Ceph aren't even aliens, anyway... they come from the ocean. I guess they're pulling a Mass Effect, having the Ceph periodically wipe out the surface, but that doesn't make a lick of sense at all. The planet is too young for there to have been past cullings, and so this would have to be the first one. Even so, they must have evolved and lived at the deep ocean beds for the entirety of their long history, which may explain why they are mostly cybernetic (to survive in surface conditions) still, that doesn't explain why they want to take the surface...

Sabby

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide
On top of that, the strategy is about as fucking incompetent as every other invasion plot :/ all they did was wait until society collapsed from the strain of the outbreak and then came out of the water and started engaging us on equal terms

I swear, if aliens ever do invade us, it will be because we've insulted their intelligence with too many retarded invasion stories.

Geeklet

still playing Dragon Age 2 on my PC...

..though my gaming options have just become somewhat limited. Got the red ring of death on my 360. Just glad that it didn't happen two months later, because then the warranty on it would have expired.

Hemingway

Wolfy, allow me to disappoint you: that feeling you have of, "what does this have to do with the first game...?" ... yeah, it's not going away. It does try to explain it later on, but it makes so little sense, it feels like they weren't even trying. You have no idea what the story is? Yeah, that's because there isn't much to know.

It's a shame, because the story could've been so good and they could've done so much with it. Instead, they give us this generic plot with cardboard characters and a connection to the first game that is, at the very beast, incredibly weak.

So, Sabby. That's not exactly what happened. Nobody knew there were aliens on the islands, those were only discovered later on. And they were nothing like the aliens in Crysis 2. Secondly, the nano suits were not this big secret. In Crysis 2, soldiers act like they're scared of the suit, like they've never seen anything like it. In Crysis, there's a full-blown invasion, and while only the main characters have nano suits, it's not like they try to hide them from the other marines. Even the Koreans had them. Mark my words: they did not intend for the suits to have the story and purpose they have in Crysis 2. That was a badly mangled retcon.

Sabby

So you prefer the 'they're just awesome armour' explanation? Thats fine. I kind of liked what they did with the retcon though...

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide
I like that they were designed specifically to be symbiotic and take advantage of the Ceph's highly advanced spores. I'm not sure if the suit itself is what altars them or if the alien tissue adapts the suit on its own or if the deep layers were made to trick the spores into doing their magic, but regardless of how, it eventually turned Alcatraz/Prophet into a walking carrier of an anti-virus... same shit the Ceph used, only rolls reversed, harmless to humans, instantly fatal and body destroying to the Ceph when used with an amplifier.

This is just a personal thing for me, I've always loved stories where some kind of advanced foe has their own advantage turned against them, so altering their virus and using their own spore spires against them just hit me in all the right spots.

Wolfy

Well, I plan on finishing Single player...but what I plan to KEEP Crysis 2 for is the Multiplayer...I'm tired of CoD, and Crysis 2 is the perfect solution to that. >_>

Hemingway

#2673
Quote from: Sabby on March 30, 2011, 07:16:58 AM
So you prefer the 'they're just awesome armour' explanation? Thats fine. I kind of liked what they did with the retcon though...

I think they could've done a lot more with it, but changing it with little more than a hand wave, is not a good way of doing it. It's so blatantly obvious they weren't going for any sort of transhumanist theme in Crysis, and suddenly it's this philosophical treatise. A badly justified one riddled with plot holes.

Not to mention the number of games they rip off in the process.

Don't get me wrong. I want to stress that the story, in and of itself, is not bad. It's not good by any stretch of the imagination, but it wouldn't detract from the game, if not for the context of the first game. It's like if Gears of War 3 suddenly decided to throw a ton of biblical myth into the game, making the Locust caverns a literal hell, and they themselves demons with magical powers. It might have made for a good game, but not like that, out of the blue! Other than outright bad games, there are two things I hate to see; games that receive a lot more praise than they deserve, and games that waste all their potential.

Edit: I must reiterate what I said about Baldur's Gate. This game keeps throwing crap my way. Either strong NPCs appear out of nowhere and kill me good and dead, or I can't recruit a party member, or always something else. How can anyone argue this game is better than DA:O, unless they hate having fun?

Lirliel

Lrn 2 AD&D?

No seriously Hemingway, the real 'love' for a lot of people for Baldur's Gate comes from that it was the real, in a way not knocking any other titles here, deal in terms of western fantasy RPG's, here was a world already thoroughly constructed by the people at WOTC, populated with fan favorites (Why do you think Drizzt is in 'em) and telling a story of Rags to Riches. Well more like "Bhaal Child #451", to "Lone Survivor of Bhaal's Legacy", but you catch my drift.

I will however admit a few things, A. Going to a certain area to soon = Party Kill. B. "Why the fuck am I doing this?", moments in game which only picks up pace in the last act. C. The NEED and I stress this, to take a thief into every dungeon because Traps. Traps Everywhere. (And not the good kind ;))
"Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits."

"A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."