Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
No, that's usually the part where I ragequit.
I just consult a FAQ already and be done with it.
Sure, by my own rules I can't list it on my Backloggery as "completed", only "beaten". But whatever.
It depends. I don't mind doing it for that fucking Shakespeare puzzle in Silent Hill 3 but when it's something like a Rockstar game where pretty much everything's on the table and explained to you, it does kinda feel pretty bad.
Hidden packages.
(And in San Andreas, oysters, horseshoes, graffiti...)
Yeah but if you're actually looking for those then shame on you
I managed to find 99/100 hidden packages in Vice City by myself. I didn't even have the internet back then.
For the collectibles in San Andreas, I just downloaded maps and walkthroughs off the internet. I don't know who even has patience to look for those.
I tend to reserve it for hidden bonuses, and only then after I've been stuck there for hours at the least.
Just last night, I was looking for how to open a grate for a treasure in Tomb Raider and felt really, really stupid when I looked it up and realized the lever was in plain sight, and I'd swum past it several times looking for it because I suspected it was going to be a lever on some random wall.
I figure if I'm most of the way through the game and I've only had to look up one other secret so far (the chandelier in Croft Manor, which had almost no indication you could grapple it) I'm doing okay.
Been Halo 4'ing all day.
They killed Cortana.
I has a sad.
So, playing Assassin's Creed 3.
The American Revolution is a fun setting, but a fun setting doesn't necessarily make a good game. So far, everything feels very disjointed and some great opportunities have been missed. Like a lot of AAA games, AC3 also continues this obsession with providing a cinematic experience over one of emergent, consistent and clever gameplay. For instance, the combat system is still held back by the fact that you can simply wait for enemies to attack and counter them for an instant kill, endlessly. You'd think that they would have fixed that, introducing more depth to the core system, after -- how many is it? -- four, five entries? The firearms also kind of suck, which is partially the point. These are gunpowder muskets, not modern rifles, but it would be nice if they were a bit more intuitive to use, especially given that intuitive application is what makes guns so effective and what ensured their success from an economic point of view.
I mean, to use a gun at range (and this is the pivotal thing here), the crosshair has to be directly over the target enemy before the firing button actually does anything. There's this tightly wound control on error that feels synthetic and frustrating. If I'm holding a loaded rifle, I want to be able to raise and aim it in decent time and correct my aim afterwards, much like how an actual weapon is used. There's just this narrative disconnect between the way I understand the use of a weapon and the way firearms are implemented in this game, and the general sequence of firing rings more hollow than mid-90s FPS games. I get the impression that they wanted to impose the protagonist's skill on us, so firearms could only ever be fired with a target already acquired, but that just ties in to the lack of actual control I feel when playing this game.
To illustrate, this is generally what I do in a fight if I want to use a long arms firearm:
Mind you, the choice to use a gun is, on my part, purely thematic. Neither the rifles nor the handguns are worth a damn compared to the sword, and you might think I'd find this pleasing, but it's just kind of boring. In context of the era, I should be using the sword as weapon close in, or sometimes I should choose to charge with it rather than reloading. But the game makes the use of firearms so counterintuitive that I may as well run around with my sword the entire time.
Also, so far, the plot is so disjointed that I have only the vaguest idea what's going on. I keep getting teleported to different places with no relational clues as to where I am compared to where I was. Most of the character accents in the game sound blatantly like acting rather than people speaking, I have to put up with Desmond's plot and the whole early sequence on the ship was a massive wasted opportunity when it could have been an amazing excuse to make the first part of the game extremely local and intimate.
From a story perspective, character perspective and gameplay perspective, it's just not working for me. Given how good AC2 was, I have to wonder what went wrong, or whether AC2 and its (micro?) sequels were just lucky flukes. AC1 did, after all, suck quite a load in the core gameplay department and was as repetitive as anything could be.
I haven't played 3, but I consider Revelations to be absolute proof that Ubisoft has no idea why the series is any good.
Through a series of events, I ended up trying out a Wii U demo kiosk with my sister. A few basic notes:
R-r-r-r-r-r-roooooooooooooong
Really this is a decent point for me to drop the series. And that's what I'm going to do.
Thank you, guinea pigs. Your sacrifice is noted and your results will be kept in mind.
I got bored of AC before it was cool, man.
I should hope so. I would shudder to think a step down was possible.
And fuck, the bow has a ridiculously short range. Like three times it's game range would be reasonable.
Nintendo really needs to cave and allow voice chat. I mean I get that they want to preserve the kiddies' virgin ears, but at least make it a parental control setting or something. Most co-op games are a pain in the ass when you can't even communicate with your partner.
I'm not sure about that, but then again I might have picked up some bias via Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. The lack of voice or even text communication in the cooperative play of those games means that all communication occurs on a very observational, natural level. You express primarily by doing things, through play. And I'd say it works wonderfully in most cases.
But then again, potential bias at play.
It works terribly on most games, especially games which aren't primarily action games.
You can't plan, you can't say "Hey, I'm going to circle around him, keep him occupied".
It works on games where you can react based purely on what you observe, but even that's limited.
Yeah, I mean you look at something like World of Warcraft where there has to be a minimum level of communication just to do basic shit without dying horribly. I mean, I could radio-silence that stuff with my guild because we were already so used to working together (and we were all competent in the first place), and after a few pulls with a good group of strangers we could fall into a rhythm, but there was so, so much room to fuck up if people weren't on the same page. Like, if a pull went wonky, or if someone died and I was taking over their gimmick, I'd just tap the grave and let everyone know, and it might have been enough.
Something like Portal 2...sorta works with the pinging, but to explain your whole strategy for a room you kind of need to be able to work on more than the one step.
Honestly I rarely play games with a strong multiplayer component. And the two that I do--Halo 4 and Transformers War For Cybertron--I almost always mute, because they're games that require minimal strategy, and half the time, it's just people yelling "faggot" anyway. I might change that for the former when the dudebro crowd goes back to Call of Duty when the second Black Ops game comes out, we shall see.
The thing is that Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are partially strategy games anyway. Twitch skill can take you a certain way towards victory, but the most important factor is knowledge, especially of yourself and your adversaries. So a large part of cooperative play in those games is visually identifying the vague build of your allies and pulling weight in an area where they probably don't excel; if you have a large two-handed weapon, for instance, you probably want to act aggressively and stagger adversaries for your allies to clean up, or you might leave point duties to the most heavily-armoured ally. If your ally is a dedicated caster, you want to act primarily as a buffer between adversaries and your ally, controlling the situation so enemies remain directly ahead rather than being in flanking positions.
Of course, Dark Souls has a very strong relationship between a character's visual factors and their application in an engagement. Many games don't, so it's not possible to extract that information from observation alone. But the point is that with the correct game design elements in place, a lack of verbal or text communication can be entirely appropriate, although this certainly isn't the case for all or even that many games.
Unrelated: it kinda pisses me off that, as far as I know, the only products doing the Halo 4 double XP promotion are fucking Doritos and Mountain Dew.
Which are poison and toxin to me, respectively.
You couldn't like, throw in some Lays' or something? Something actually tasty?
Who eats while gaming anyway?
Depends on the kind of game; if I'm in for a bunch of non-interactive cutscenes or otherwise an experience that invites me to exit it while the game continues to run, then I might prepare a snack and/or a cup of tea. If the game is more organic or emergent, then I'm likely to go without as I'll be too busy playing the game.
I rarely play them either, but when I play games that have a strong multiplayer component (The Old Republic, in this case), whenever I get up to any tough multiplayer content, I start to wish for voice chat just so I can communicate at a decent speed.
"most games"
"games which aren't primarily action games"
"it works on games where you can react purely on what you observe"
It may work for Demon's Souls, and even some other games, but there's heaps and heaps of games where voice chat would support the multiplayer component of the game.
But something twitchy, requiring your hands on the controller at all times like Halo, or hell, any FPS?
I guess you could snack while you're in the lobby waiting to join a game or something, but that's generally not more than thirty seconds at most.
I remember going through a Subway footlong while tanking raids every once in a while. Sometimes in the middle of pulls. >_> Then again, I'm neurotically clean enough about eating that I keep the crumbs and stuff on the paper/foil/whatever.
I also remember taking a bathroom break in the middle of Maiden of Virtue and asking my roommate to just hit Q, E, and 3 a lot while I was in there, and the rest of the guys didn't notice.
Sadly my later job as a healer had less opportunities for that kind of shenanigans.
World of Warcraft and Halo are pretty different gaming experiences, though.
Halo, at least its multiplayer, is almost wholly a reflex and skill thing.
A lot of AAA games have a lot of downtime, though, wherein you're more an observer than a contributor.