The Videogames Tab

Funnily enough, I was listening to a podcast yesterday and one of the topics was - Is the South Park game the greatest ever licensed title? The only alternatives suggested were the two Riddick games.

Stuff like KOTOR didn't count, by the way, as it was more loosely based on the Star Wars films than The Stick Of Truth is on the TV show...

I'm firmly in the 'Love Dishonored to bits' camp. This might be of interest to you, Chris - Link.

Can't wait.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

My Steam backlog is getting kinda silly now, and it's the fault of bundles! Fortunately, the same games are starting to crop up again and again so the Pavlovian response in me is lessened whenever I get an email from Humble, Indiegala, Bundle Stars etc. I'd decided not to buy anything at all, no matter how cheap, until I'd made some headway with the backlog - The least I could do was sift out the utter trash from the 'Ach, I might get half an hour out of it' so I created a new library category entitled Sh*te...

Then Year Walk got released.

It's Swedish, it's gorgeous, it's unusual - Yep, Year Walk is the world's best exchange student!

Vidi:

I played through that (also an actual cartridge on an actual N64) a few months ago. Liked the palaces (always the best part of any Zelda game) and some of the sidequests and mini-games (Spider-houses, various racing and target-practice events, mainly), but by the end I was completely sick of the 3-days-then-reset dynamic and overall pretty happy to be done with the game, to be honest. Also played through and enjoyed Paper Mario on the ol' N64 semi-recently.

Still making my way slowly through Dragon Quest 8. Love it but find it a little unbalanced (kind of typical for the series as a whole. 9 was an exception, but I liked the story in that one less). I'm noticing this pattern where I get obsessed with grinding until I get burned out for a while, then go back to the game for the main quest/story a week or two later until I start to get obsessed with grinding and get burned out again. Most recently I got a little sick of it after I spent my lunch break calculating the probabilities of winning at Bingo in the Pickham casino, only to find out there's much more lucrative gambling once you unlock the Baccarat casino. Meanwhile spent too much time looking for Metal Slime Kings in the Dragon Graveyard. I'll get back to it in a couple weeks.

Also beat a really dastardly and addictive little Gameboy puzzle game called Kwirk! not too long ago.

Great game. Don't remember a lot of it but remember that it was a lot of fun.

I'm about 5 hours into South Park: The Stick of Truth, and it's pretty good. It's been a little easy so far, which I guess I expected, but I might have to bump up the difficulty (it's just on the default, "Normal," right now). I guess my style of playing sandbox or RPG games kind of necessitates it, since I like to explore and do lots of sidequests early on.

Anyway, very true to the show; looks like it, sounds like it. Feels very authentic, and I've laughed out loud more than once. Really nice mix of new content and nods to the show that fans will appreciate.

Yeah I played through on Normal setting and it was pretty easy except for a few Boss battles.

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#31 on SC's Top 100 Mofos list!!

Well, KOTOR was to me far more "Star Wars-ey" than the prequel movies, and one of my favorite RPGs besides. It recaptured what made the original trilogy good: the interesting characters, their interactions, the mixing of mysticism with sci-fi, the charm and humor of the dialogue... little crucial stuff like that which the prequel films sorely lacked for the most part.

Yeah, KOTOR is a classic and one of my favourite RPGs from that era (now that there's a mod to restore most of the content, KOTOR 2 is running it close) but I don't see it as a Franchise game in the way most are. Some haven't been bad - I remember quite liking the Bourne game, and the Godfather ones were passable GTA clones, same with Scarface. People still rave about the Riddick games but I've never been much of an FPS fan so never tried them.

My favourite Franchise/tie-in game (and I was reminded of it just last night when chatting with a mate about old TV programmes) is Yes Prime Minister on the Speccy.



This is the C64 version - The Speccy's was obviously far too cool for YouTube.

The original console wars: C64 v Spectrum

This is a surprise to no one. Any SC fan knows about it.

Ahhh, good old jrs.

The master of nearly current news.

Ah Skyrim, I've missed you. Now with added ENB...

Picking up Dark Souls 2 later today. Wish me luck, as I hear this game's a lot harder than the first.

I've only seen the rev3 review and it mentions the game being a bit easier/clearer in its pathing towards things too high for your level early on but it's a standard Souls experience thereafter. Not liking the arbitrary nature of the hit detection they picked up on though - Dark & Demons Souls were pretty fair in that respect - You died because you did something wrong, something you'll be able to do better. I'll wait a month for the PC release and hope there's a patch forthcoming.

I see Sessler's getting an awful lot of stick for loving Titanfall, once again proving that the internet is 90% arsehole. The Hivemind says to hate everything EA releases, even if it's good.

I think Sessler (and though a lot of his views aren't shared by me, I still really like him) is just a bit too wordy for some of the mouth breathers on YouTube.

Totally forgot to buy Titanfall before Lent. D'oh. See you all in 5-6 weeks.

I've given up bundles for Lent.

Dark Souls 2, you say? Why yes, I will play that...

Lent?

Glad I'm Wiccan!

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Wiccan? I've got one of their baskets.

I'm going to have to stop taking Skyrim screenshots - Don't worry, I'm not going to inflict any more on you. In the past, ENBs were lovely but they hurt performance so much that I never bothered actually playing with them on. I urge people to give the latest Skyrim one a try now though - It's a lot lighter on resources (solid 60fps everywhere now, Skyrim still on Ultra), is configurable via an in-game menu rather than trawling through ini files and actually helps sto crashes via the ENBoost settings.

I'm using the Realvision config but am going to give Phinix a try. The only thing I don't like about Realvision is that the enhabced colours take a lot of the harshness out of the scenery. Phinix looks a lot murkier.

Refresh my addled memory: which mods are you using to get that look?

I think I tried that once and had a lot of trouble with it, but I'm admittedly fuzzy.

Realvision ENB plus Skyrim HD (the 1k files are no less detailed than the 2k ones at 1080p and leave you a lot more headroom for other mods) basically. The WATER mod for the ... err ... water and that's about it as far as visual mods go.

You can get pretty spectacular effects with just the standard Skyrim textures + ENB though.

Gopher does some great tutorials on YouTube and ENB installation causes you to jump through a few more hoops than standard nexus mods. Give this a watch.



EDIT - It's always best to familiarise yourself with the mod author's installation instructions too, especially this one as he's updated it regularly and Gopher's video isn't brand new. The vid's good for showing what folders things go in though.

EDIT 2 - Forgot I was using Climates of Tamriel and Realistic Lighting Overhaul, although you'll need them to run the ENB config anyway as the author set it up with those mods in mind.

FINAL EDIT! - Looking at that video again, the current Realvision version is a LOT simpler to install. No more repackaging archives for example - It's all done for you. Just download the mod with NMM, choose your preformance options and install. navigate to your Data folder and run the installer in the Realvision subfolder, which will add the ENB config filesto the correct location (there's also a handy uninstaller bat file). You still need to visit the official ENB site for the dll though.

Well, whoever said that Dark Souls 2 is easier than the previous game probably wrote the review only after getting through the first big town area, which in all honesty is much easier to deal with than the intro levels in the previous game. It's basically an extended tutorial level without feeling like a tutorial, which I gladly welcomed, seeing as how the previous game didn't give you enough time to stop and learn before slamming a great-axe into your face. After you get through that first area, the game ascends from Hell, tells you "Great job getting through the tutorial. TIME TO DIE, MOFO!!!" And then proceeds to up the difficulty to tremendous levels. That's called pacing, something the first Dark Souls didn't have much of because it was so hellbent on wanting you dead that it failed to teach you how to play.