The Videogames Tab

Final Fantasy XV is coming to PC.

It's a 170GB download. One hundred and seventy.

For a boy-band simulator.

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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

Man, I was wasting away. First chicken dinner in what feels like an age!



I don't think I've ever felt a gaming rush quite like winning a PUBG round, especially when its done on a sliver of health against an opponent advancing towards me out of cover.

Explain this game please!?!

It looks a lot like H1Z1, but I don't understand why this game has blown up like it has.

Long answer: Successful Arma modder gets hired to make H1Z1's King of the Kill expansion; he then partners with a Korean developer to fully realise his dream - Battle Royale in game form, except that they find they can't license the Battle Royale name. Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is born.

The actual shooty-shooty gameplay is top notch - More user-friendly than a sim like Arma and more technical than a Call of Duty - and when you combine that with a brilliantly designed map and the randomness in loot spawns and parachute drops, it makes for a pretty compelling package, even if it is still technically in early access.

It is incredibly tense - Will this shack contain the gun I desperately need? Will it be barren? Will it contain a guy crouched in the corner with a shotgun trained at the doorway? You're tasked not only with being the last one standing, but also having to constantly be moving towards an ever decreasing circle on the map, with a huge wall of electro-death snapping at your heels - This means that, unless you're extremely lucky with where the circle lands each time, you're not going to find many people camping at one spot so the gameplay loop is: forage, move, shoot, move again.

I think that the luck inherent in the randomness of loot spawns evens the playing field somewhat - You can be an elite e-sportsperson who's only been able to find a handgun or Joe Average like me who's managed to scrounge an AK - and I've heard tales of people winning without firing a shot but that's very rare and massively fortunate. I only had 2 kills in that last match, and they were the final two people in the game. I was sure I'd be picked off as I didn't have top tier armour or a scope beyond a red dot, but experience has taught me to 'ride the circle' and only move when I have to.

The game is still pretty obviously unfinished - It's poorly optimised, the UI needs a lot of work and you'll find occasional bugs - but it's a ton of fun, and this is coming from someone who's never been into online competitive shooters. Not in the slightest.

After only a few months on sale, PUBG is already the most successful non-Valve game on Steam and that's a heck of an achievement.

Right, I'm working on my streaming set-up and will be giving PUBG a zeitgeist-riding crack at the weekend. Shadowplay really seems to have improved and I'm able to stream 720p/60 at pretty high game settings with no noticeable drop in performance. 1080p/60 is still really playable but the stream artifacts pretty badly at 60fps.

I'm now working on a way to see chat without involving a second monitor.

My Twitch handle is dave_tacitus (my full, god-given name, natch) so join me if you want to see some occasionally solid, frequently panicked and always Irish play!

I can't promise it'll be as action packed as this one featuring Waypoint's Austin Walker, Giant Bomb's Alex Navarro and Ireland's best games documentary maker's Danny O'Dwyer. It might be as sweary, but I doubt it.

Well damn but The Long Dark's reception has been pretty dour. Steam seems to feature a litany of downvotes since launch (with reviewers damning the storymode while expressing boredom with the years of sandbox mode they've had now...).

I see one glimmer of light for the future. All be it a selfish one...

Woot

Aww well, if we're doing video tales of derring do....

Just remember to hammer your mic levels. I tried before grabbing this the other day, but still got talked over by an NPC

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

For those interested in how Half Life Episide 3 could have ended.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comm...7J&sh=b6415aa3

I don't know if I can handle reading that...

RIP, Half-Life 3.

Never - 2017.

The perfect way to dampen the monumentally unreasonable levels of expectation for Half Life 3 would be to make sure something like this gets out in the open.

Valve can now spend the next decade working on Dota and card games (and Dota card games) whilst raking in squilions of bucks and letting their customers do the quality control for their store.

I finished Wolfenstein: The New Order the other day. It's decent, but I still wasn't overly enthused about it (probably doesn't help that I played the 2016 Doom first as it feels like it does a better job of refining the concepts on display here). It's a dependable meat-and-potatoes kind of FPS and I'll most likely end up playing The New Colossus when it drops, but yeah, I do wonder if I'm ever gonna play another game that actually hits me more than just being alright or good (maybe The Last of Us was the last one to actually do that, but before that...who knows).

As for what's next - I still don't want to go back to Andromeda. I might even end up playing through Prey first.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Whispers: Get VR, Get VR...

Obviously not a very helpful suggestion . And most of the gaming staples are still the same. But keep an eye on the tech prices over the next year. It's totally revitalised my love of gaming . Old school staples like racing sims are suddenly insane, ingenious devs are doing great things with it (Matrixing around in SuperHot etc), and even shoddy games with familiar mechanics can transport you in weird ways (see review at the end of this screed).

Oh yeah...

This is...interesting. Assuming the trailer is a fair representation of what we can expect from the game's graphics and such, I'd say it's going to be pretty outstanding.

3 games came out yesterday that I've been waiting a while for:

The Windjammers re-release, which is the original game (the best local co-op game ever made) with the addition of online multiplayer. It plays great but the online is borked.

Yakuza Kiwami - A re-imagining of the first PS2 Yakuza game for PS4 and PS3. Essentially it seems to use the same map and many of the same assets as Yakuza 0, which is fine to me as it's not a full price title. I shall probably play nothing else for a while.

Absolver - A Dark Souls-y 3D fighting game? The art looks amazing but I probably won't buy it until I'm finished with Yakuza Kiwami.

Probably.

Sooo, Destiny 2?

Destiny is a flawed game. Great to look at and great to play when you're doing the shooty stuff but with a monumentally dull story and quest system. The gameplay alone was enough for me to play through the initial campaign, but I didn't touch any of the expansions.

20 minutes with the beta last week convinced me that Destiny 2 was a safe bet, and what I've seen of the finished game only reinforces that feeling.

The world now feels alive - You've got actual npcs giving you quests and not a terminal, plus an antagonist that is immediately identifiable - and the story appears a LOT more fleshed out. The visuals and actual shooty stuff are as good as, if not better than, the first game's.



Destiny was always more of a Diablo style loot-driven action rpg rather than a campaign shooter like Halo but the rpg bits never felt convincing, something which made sense if the rumours about the game's development (basically the devs started again a year before launch) are true.

Destiny 2 is a lot more convincing and a lot less embarrassing to admit liking.

I bought it on PS4 purely because I had £20 PSN credit but played the beta on PC and it's a fantastic port. Recommended if you like shooting things and collecting ever rarer clothes.

Sightings (and sounds) of Macca are also much less frequent that in Destiny 1. Bonus!



Eugh...

They should rename it Lazarus...



The online game that died the worst (or at least the least deserving) horror death I've ever seen, literally down to like 8 forlorn guys max, despite a badass pedigree... may, may just have saved itself with its dying breaths...

Mirage: Arcane Warfare, currently free to own forever for the next 24hrs, then down to $10 from tomorrow on. The result?



It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it seems to be the old Chivalry crowd's cup of blood suddenly. (Which is all a bit ironic, as it seems half of them stayed away to punish the company for not giving them endless free stuff in Chiv previously. Salutary lesson, just not sure how you learn from it, or quite who to salute :/)

And dammit I paid £20 quid for it

Oh Yods... the book is still open on whether Fallout 4 will transition well to VR (some wildly varying and unreliable demo testimonies here...), but another promising contender just stepped into the ring...

Far lighter on subject matter than F4 of course, (and possibly of no value to you as I think you played through the original thoroughly), but still... It's a good fit for the kit, and Rockstar signalling intent is intriguing

I saw that. I got excited when I saw L.A. Noire stuff trending and figured it might be a sequel. Oh well.

The F4 VR stuff is both good and bad. If I heard it was kinda crappy and didn't add much, I could be done with the game sooner and not have to start rationalizing that sizable headseat purchase. Though it does feel like the tech is do for another significant price drop before too long.

Yeah I would expect the current tech to get another permanent price drop, but not for a fair while now. My guess would be closer to the arrival of the next gen (which seems to be slated to be at least a year away). In the meantime the Microsoft headsets look to be filling the cheaper-and-cheerfuller bracket, and are def aimed at a gaming market too. (Solid and accessible as they look I think some of their discomforts and downsides might build up over prolonged use though. Will be intriguing to see how they're received come Xmas time. EDIT: Although initial pricing is actually higher than forecast - not much below the Rift when including controllers it seems.)

Ach, makes sense for you to wait til well after F4's launch anyway, as that's you're main driver. Either way, it's Beth, jank is inevitable


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I am stumbling onto some intriguing puzzle / mystery / narrative games that may be up your street if you ever cross the VR threshold. They're still pretty short affairs at the mo, but if you do come over to the other side there might be a fair few waiting for you by that point . (There's definitely nothing of Witness complexity out there, but I figure Blow-type minds will be churning as we speak...)