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Comments
Ugh, any game (notably right now Deus Ex:HR) that requires an "Installing: Microsoft VC Redist Package" pop-up at first launch is taking FOREVER to finish it.
EDIT: Oh, wait, if I go to properties and "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" it works, but ONLY THAT ONE TIME.
Methinks it's not picking something up.
Thanks, for thief gold Glenn, and it seems to work without any work on my end so long as a go through steam, no patch needed.
Hm, good to know.
And you're welcome.
If someone can convince me to get Beyond Good and Evil very quickly, I might get that. Otherwise, never mind.
I did run into an issue. Trying to change the screen resolution to fit my screen exactly caused a crash. The fix was to update the ddfix.dll and ddfix.ini that was included in the steam installation.
edit
It also runs surprisingly well on my laptop. I'm debating forcing the max AA I can do and see how fast it is.
I've heard BG&E is very good. It's yet another game that is tempting on Steam but I'd rather play on console (even moreso in this case since it was originally a console game).
It's fine if you've got an Xbox for PC controller.
I did before my friend stole it. (I wonder if anyone here remembers that thread...)
Regardless, even if I did have one, given the choice between fifteen-inch screen and fifty-inch screen, I know which one I'm picking.
Daily Deals for July 20th:
Crysis 2 70% off
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Indie Bundle IX (Capsized, Jamestown, Revenge of the Titans, VVVVVV, Zeno Clash) 75% off
Current Community's Choice Winner:
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction 75% off
Current Community's Choice Vote:
Risen
Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga
Two Worlds II
Current Flash Deals:
Limbo 75% off
Far Cry 2 75% off
Crusader Kings II 75% off
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet 75% off
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet will have to wait.
I absolutely loathe this game and have made it clear on this forum before, which might have led you towards a wider assumption concerning its reception.
My major problem with the game is that it's a half-assed mashup of a bunch of stuff that just happens to be individually popular without consideration towards the results. It's a first-person zombie action game with MMORPG mechanics. It's kind of like that promiscuous person at every house party who only ever goes for the easiest catch there. I mean, sure, there's nothing wrong with getting around, nor anything wrong about aiming within one's means. But there's those things and then there's just a lack of effort or consideration.
In any case, the individual elements of the game cancel one-another out, preventing it from amounting to anything in its entirety. Zombies are supposed to be scary, right? But how can they be halfway scary when you can look at their title and it's colour-coded for their strength in relation to your level? And the game wants to do the limited resources thing of survival horror via item degradation, but you still end up with more stuff than you know what to do with. The MMO setup of the game sucks any remaining sense of reality out of it, distancing the player entirely from the desperation of survival on an island filled by zombies -- a direct violation of the first-person perspective, which is meant to bring players closer to an experience.
Ultimately, Dead Island is a self-defeating game that lacks any kind of conceptual cohesion, thought or passion. It's the dead end of the whole zombie pop culture fad, no pun intended. Zombies were great back when they were behemoths of untold HP values in Resident Evil, ammo was scarce and the player was eternally desperate for additional resources. As adversaries in action games where the player characters are well armed, equipped and psychologically empowered, they're challengeless, boring and just as deceased creatively as they are bodily.
It's the kind of game I'd give a 2 or 3 out of 10 -- technically competent for what it does, but without any creativity, fun, flow or even basic consideration of what makes a game work.
I hadn't actually seen that. I'm just going off of having watched my roommate play it for a few minutes.
I've never been entirely convinced that that's the case. Zombies actually seem more suited to power fantasies than to horror. It's for good reason that the scariest zombie stories don't have the zombies around very much; the other people are the only scary thing in a zombie apocalypse.
Probably also why they mostly show up in action games these days.
So it's pretty much the equivalent of a military shooter with vampire romance?
This sounds like a trope overdosed thing.
But it's more or less the original intent, right? The original black-and-white zombie films were based on xenophobia concerning African religion, and the general concept of a zombie was appropriated later as a representation of mindless, self-destructive consumer culture. There's also the fact that, psychologically, we find "off-human" more threatening than "inhuman", thus the Uncanny Valley effect. The focus has shifted over time, but I think it's fair to say that a zombie was at least originally meant to be threatening and, in general, works with threatening villains and antagonists are more interesting than those without.
More or less. Not quite as silly, though. Dead Island works by shooting for all the low-hanging fruit in context of gaming demographics. MMORPGs are popular, FPS games are popular, zombies are popular and so on. These demographics aren't necessarily opposed demographics like those for the military shooter and vampire romance are.
I mean, military shooters are mostly aimed at young male gamers, whereas the vampire romance genre is mostly aimed at young female filmgoers and readers. So for that effort to be successful, it has to overcome the challenge of capturing a transmedia audience as well as two broad demographics that are looking for entirely different kinds of content. It's pretty obvious that the people in it for military shooterisms would resent the vampire romance, and that the reverse would also be true.
In the case of Dead Island, though, you have some concepts of very broad appeal being combined within a much less diverse demographic.
@glennmagusharvey: Apparently it was something a video game publisher actually asked some developer to make.
Yeah, I can't remember who the publisher was or who the developer was, though. But the concept itself was too bizarre to forget, not to mention unsound both creatively and economically for reasons I pointed out above.
Well, sure, the zombie concept was created for horror, and may have even been suitable for it when it was new, but I don't think it works for horror now.
I thought the zombie concept's current application is humor.
Mostly by virtue of having run it so thoroughly into the ground that there's little else it can be effectively used for.
^^It's about 1/3 humor, 1/3 as a generic nonthreatening enemy for action games and 1/3 both.
They're fucking threatening in Dead Meets Lead.
Though that's mostly because there are so many of them and they have lots of hit points.
I just watched the trailer for that, and they seem to be even less threatening than average; there are just so damn many of them that they'll get you eventually.
Go check that game out. It's free now, because it wasn't commercially successful. You can get it on Desura.
Pretty difficult game.
I'm not saying you said it was easy.
I just think of it as an interesting case study in seeing what works and what doesn't. I don't like it very much, but I find it oddly intriguing.
One thing I don't exactly like is that they make it such that you have to pick up ammo to use other weapons. You have to start with your sword. Then again, this may be related to their wanting to make the game difficult.
never mind
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is going for $5 now. This is another of those "get it if you don't have it" ones. It's pretty much the best Deus Ex game yet released.
Oh hey, that was already on my wishlist.
TY for alerting me to that.
That's a whole level of threat on its own though. And there's a kind of horror itself in being surrounded, and being able to kill them easily enough, but there's just so many that they're slowly pressing in on you, slowly, slowly...