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Dark Messiah is a bit dated these days but combat is still great fun.

VTM Bloodlines is one of the greatest 'unfinished' games ever made. The community patch sorts out the bugs but, as you say, the last third is a bit of a slog to play through. Troika (maybe my favourite ever developer) ran out of time and money and the game got released far too early.

One guy stayed on, unpaid, to code a patch for the most glaring bugs but they couldn't do anything beyond that. Shame.

EDIT - Still playing through Contradiction.

The game is hilariously awful at times - Rubbish acting, impenetrable UI and frequent lapses in basic logic - but it's great fun. The main character acts as though the only performances he's ever seen are by David Tennant at his twitchiest.

A magnificent, terrible throwback.

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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

Unfortunately, you guys have it all wrong.

It's a toss-up between the 3DO and Dreamcast for best.

Not the N-Gage?

Finished Contradiction!

If you fancy an old school FMV adventure game made by a bunch of drama students on a disused Midsomer Murders back-lot, badly ported to PC from a phone then it may very well be the game for you.

Nowhere near as good and boundary-pushing as Her Story but with a charm all its own.

Buy it. It's got Paul Darrow in it, fer gawd's sake!



Paul Melon-Effing Darrow!

Annoying-IGN-guy back with some apparently randomly-selected worlds in NMS...



Liking the simple payoffs of dangerous-non-earthlike worlds having higher rewards (rare items etc), the idea of scattered items/sites if they're done well, and the 'potential danger around the corner' seems a must. IE cave-diving, just passably fun if it's pretty with perilous drops etc. Cave diving, while wondering if the baby crabs you've seen have a big brother... and what it night sound like... much more fun

Good sound design will def help with that kinda stuff. Really hope you can hear a wide array of animal calls etc across the worlds (with each animal having a range of sounds for diff scenarios - snuffling through bushes, calling out to herd, raging at a threat etc).

We'll see how the 'GTA wanted stars' pan out. Could be fun in theory, especially if they included decent jump-pack downtime and a line-of-sight dynamics. (IE having to scurry from hiding spot to hiding spot once you're being hunted. Perhaps even burrowing a new exit from a cave? But with the risk that all your actions also cause noise...)

---EDIT---

Some nice lil tidbits buried in this vid from E3...



Day/night cycles def all operable (IE planetary rotation is all linked up, if you leave a station, land on a planet, wait, and then launch up again you won't find it nearby etc - so I'm guessing they're not in geostationary orbit), cloaking devices for ships, wanted stars including space pursuit at the highest level. And it seems you definitely can permanently affect the procedural world (vid), but only at key junctures like trading platforms it seems. (IE blown up rocks won't be recorded, but damage the trading post and that will be noted).

---EDIT 2---

Arg, dammit. Think my fear that the procedural stuff is going to be CPU-heavy might be true, going by this old vid. He definitely suggests it's the multi-core modern computing power that's made it possible. Hope my creaky old AMD counts as modern

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

Quick Contradiction update!

I've been chatting with a couple of the cast members and they seem a great bunch. Best of all, they get it.

First hour of playing I was laughing at the game, the rest of the time I was laughing with it. It's actually pretty darned good... if you can get past the menus. Literally.

More NMS's teasings...



Animal sounds will be procedural too apparently. Looking at the seemingly two-toned sexes on this world I'm wondering if they're gonna go all Iain M Banks and add bizarre triple sex scenarios too, or weird symbiotic species down the line. Would be cool if species and groups can interact in more than just the traditional earthly ways. Intelligent life too maybe? Little dinosaurs riding big mammals?

*EDIT* There's a nice bit on animal generation in the older 'behind the scenes' vid actually. They def have more outlandish / less-earthly builds ready. And different behaviours for smaller/larger animals etc. And they've also been emailed by excited exobiologists with fun info, which has influenced the game a touch

(It's also cool that the 'infinite' ship variants he touches on there apparently all handle slightly differently. [That's also the kinda thing that makes me worry that it can't possibly work, or be tested thoroughly, but I guess they could cap known instability parameters etc])

I'm still liking this voxel excavating thing. (As much as I shouldn't like the casino-ish response to getting occasional random rewards from digging, it will be interesting if we can drill down fairly far and find cave systems / mineral seams etc). Some of the textures look a bit meh at the angles but that's to be expected I guess.

Also some fun Reddit musings (img) on what procedural continents might look like towards the freaky alien core.

*EDIT* Oh god, I may have to start another thread

Well, it's over:



I stopped playing for awhile, during which they added all sorts of new stuff, but recently decided it was time to pick it back up and finish what I started. It's a moderately different game now (suddenly, hundreds of days into my run, I have to start worrying about bears and lower wolf populations), which wrenched up some of my expectations and survival routine, but I don't think it made a big difference.

I could've definitely survived another week--maybe a couple or more, with a little luck. But I was out of bullets and was down to my last bit of antibiotics. So I walked right up to this cuddly guy, who was the last thing I saw:



If I'd kept playing regularly way back when, I would've easily cracked the first page on the Steam leaderboard for this mode, and probably the top ten. But the game keeps growing in popularity, so I had to settle for 22nd:



It'll be nice to play it with that sense of wonder again, not just because I won't know what's where, but because they've added so much that I haven't had a chance to delve into. I've never tried to actually kill a bear (apparently it takes several really good shots), or craft the new bow and arrow (!), or even explore some of the new smaller areas they've created for transitioning between the larger ones. It'll be fun to do all that, and to get back to the fun, tense, immediate thrill of not knowing where your next meal is coming from, rather than the slow plodding of trying to prolong survival.

To date, I've played 107 hours of The Long Dark, tied with Civilization V for third among all my Steam games (Skyrim and Fallout 3 sit above it). It'll have third all to itself soon, and it deserves it. One of the most poignant games I've ever played. Still highly recommended.

Do you think you'll have as much fun when the game gets a 1.0 release?

That's stopped me putting time into loads of Early Access games, and buying them altogether now. I've got The Long Dark, Darkest Dungeon, Grim Dawn, Wreckfest, Nuclear Throne, Project Zomboid, Cosmonautica, Beseige and Starbound all sitting with very little time spent because I got bored of Broforce when it was still feature-poor.

Ok, in another heroic attempt to preserve the purity of the tab, I've dumped some NMS speculation in a separate thread. If you wish to watch half hour long vids by the Art Director then stroke the mysterious item below...

Knights of the Old Republic 2 has had a major update on Steam - Controller support, Workshop mod support, widescreen resolutions, achievements.

It's great seeing these out-of-the-blue patches for old games, especially one as wide ranging as this. Best of all, the restored content (and general fixing) mod is installable with one click through the Workshop. It's essential and turns a buggy, frustrating and unfinished game into nearly the classic it deserves to be.

Yeah, probably not. Just because it's so striking and different at first. I don't usually like Early Access, but in this case it seemed more than polished enough to be enjoyable already, but also lacking enough polish that it would be pretty different when all is said and done. Of course, I counteracted that second part by playing again and again with some of the major updates.

That said, I do wonder if it'll have enough survival features in the finished product that it actually loses something. The stark simplicity of the version I started playing was one of my favorite things about it. I like most of the tweaks, but it's not hard to imagine that going too far, and the finished game being better in some ways, but at the expense of losing some of what made me love it from the beginning.

I think you've just highlighted a problem inherent in Early Access - Developing a game in full view of a public (many of whom have already spent money on it) making suggestions constantly must be hard. "Add this" "Change that" etc etc

I've steered clear of being active in the communities of EA games apart from bug-reporting so I hope that any content The Long Dark gets between now and 1.0 is part of the developer's vision and not a well-meaning sop to existing fans.

I think that's another reason why No Man's Sky is getting some extra attention. It seems to be this little passion project punching above its weight by plugging away at a core auterish-y vision, and doing it fairly pleasingly. They've said they dodged doing a kickstarter so they could just focus on doing what they wanted. And they give off a vibe of being a bit too perfectionist-y to open it up to an Alpha. (Although I guess if the Playstation etc money hadn't come calling they might have had to). It's almost a novelty now for the more sizeable indie offering to not be one or the other though

Totally agree about Early Access. To that point, I've been encouraged by how candid the developers have been with player suggestions. They say "no" to a lot of ideas. They politely explain their reasoning, but they're usually pretty unambiguous when someone suggests something that's out of step with the vibe they're going for. It's arguably one of the more encouraging things I've seen about the game, which is a funny thing to say about devs shooting down player suggestions.

Agree about No Man's Sky. And I really do like this precedent of games getting attention more for ambition of concept and scope more than just budget or size. Though it's really easy to imagine people getting a bad taste in their mouth for similar ambitions in the future if No Man's Sky turns out to be a little too sandboxy for them (which seems a distinct possibility right now). I think it might be pretty great even so, but I also think there's a high probability that it's not quite what people hoped or expected, and that it sours them on these kinds of projects (ditto Sony, which might not be as quick to get behind something like this to the degree it has).

Talking of (very, and non capitalised) early access, I've enrolled in the Alpha of Rising Thunder.



Made by world spelling bee champion Seth Killian, one of the brains behind Street Fighter, it's supposed to be a fighting game that you can pick up and play without the memorising of complicated combo strings which puts most people to sleep off.

We'll see how that works out.

But don't they have a sort of easy-medium-difficult range you can choose in the beginning? I seem to remember my first walk-around in The Long Dark was with the checkbox marked where the animals wouldn't attack me. (Remember, I'm the chick who plays Minecraft on Peaceful.)

So, could you simply continue to choose a difficult level in order to keep the survival-type features harder to get/find? Or might that option only ever apply to how animals treat you and not, say, how available certain items are in-game?

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I don't think they had any difficulty setting when I started. But yes, there are three options now: animals that don't attack you, one where they do ("Normal" mode, basically, which is what I've always played), and "Stalker," with lots of very aggressive wild life (I forget if there's a corresponding decrease in resources).

But I wasn't really referring to difficulty when I said it might "lose something" with more survival features. I'm thinking more of simplicity and balance. When the game's hard because you have trouble figuring out what supplies to take with you and then you get caught in a blizzard, that's more exciting and interesting than dying because there are twice as many wolves running around, even if that might be, technically, more difficult.

Lots of aggressive enemies makes it feel like any other video game. Good for a challenge if the other modes get too easy, but the game really shines when it creates its jeopardy out of the confluence of all the different survival factors you have to balance against each other.

Ah, yes, that makes total sense. Yeah, it'd feel extremely different (and in my mind, better) if the struggle continued to be more about actually just surviving generally, with animal numbers staying more in line with what would be normal in nature.

Yeah hearing Devs say a firm no is often encouraging. Feature creep is definitely a bane of games, and it does speak to there being a tight overriding vision. It's normally offset a bit by good devs listening to balancing ideas etc that fit the vibe.

Will be interesting to see how long it works for Elite and their '10 year plan' though. Especially now they seem to have swerved off their roadmap with the new console-friendly arena module. Communities that have been used to writing 'design documents' in the early days can def turn sour when told no, or wait, for prolonged periods

Has anyone played 5 nights at Freddy's?

It's hard to tell from the videos, usually bc twitchers seem to be worried more about their own theatrics.

I never had a problem with Teddy Rux, but this shiz is creepy.