The Videogames Tab

Google Stadia launches tomorrow, folks. Here's what it's like.



Pre-launch experience obvs, but you get the general idea. It seems (and I'm only mid way through the video) okay? I guess? On the technical side anyway. The financial side, well...

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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

This Is: Star Citizen


(Orig here with audio)

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

Ok now this is a rumour I can get on board with...

Rumour: Valve is about to announce a VR game called Half-Life: Alyx

(One that proves or disproves itself in a day’s time )

That was quick! Woot



(Now to see if they play the headset exclusivity game!)

Half Life 3.0?

Half Life 2.5?

Half Life: The Beginnering?

Half Life: Virtual sh*t storm...

CONTROL
Post-ending, day 6, 13:18

I feel so lost without a mission. I have found 2 item containers that I have no idea how I missed until now. It's possible that they only appeared after certain triggers, as that seems to have been the case for a lot of collectible documents and level access points. Seems weird though, as nothing significant was in either. Oh well.

Some character dialogue has been added since completing the final mission and then again, randomly, the same character last night had 5 new topics to discuss. Entering some level end zones has also triggered a few minor character narrations. This is odd as in one hand it does encourage additional play to see if anything else is uncovered, but in the other hand there are no icon notifications that the character has anything new to say so that doesn't really encourage running the map for a few key NPCs that may or may not have anything new to yap about. While interesting to hear, it seems mostly an afterthought. There is chatter among the patrolling FBC guards that a primary character has gone missing in a particular area, but as far as I can tell through my exploration and online reading, that story line probably won't appear until new DLC is released.

Finally, aside from the few missions or side stories that a player might have missed, the game kind of restricts replay. My missions are complete and my skills are maxed, though I do still get to run around shooting whatever spawns, if anything. Also I do still get the random 20-minute Bureau Alters to kill or guard something. That's random and unending as far as I can tell, so there''s little chance to gain anything story wise doing them. As to the restriction of replay, all the bosses are dead and for what does still spawn well, they are considerably less intense than what once blocked my path. AND THE ASHTRAY MAZE IS AN AUTO-PORT TO THE END OF THAT LEVEL NOW!?!? I can't even replay that excellent area to try for timed runs against myself. That REALLY sucks and seems like an obvious missed opportunity there to keep players around or to even create some type of timed kill-rate leader board.

As to the current DLC, eh. $24 for the current "Isolation" stage plus the promise of tho additional expansion levels release date TBD is weak. Isolation is less a playing stage as it is just looking randomly for two audio tapes and then trying to find the player device to listen to them on while resting inside an isolation tank. It's very minimalist Japanese sci-poetry that has you talking to trees before they need to go and make love with each other, or you chasing coke machines and cleaning up dead bodies. This would have better been served as a post-credit easter egg hunt because right now (even with the knowledge of 2 coming levels), I'm kinda pissed having spent money on it. That, or they should have not released Isolation until the other two levels were at a release state.

IMO, of course.

Finally, I can't start a new game, else my current game sates will be overwritten. UGH!

Most of this negativity is probably just a manifestation of my withdrawal from the game. I hope. I just have no idea what to do with my console now. I feel as though I should probably burn it, or something, in respect to CONTROL. I doubt I'm going to find anything to top it. I've read that CONTROL is somehow a disconnected sequel to Alan Wake, a game I've not heard of until now. That and Quantum Break are now on my radar. Oops. Apparently neither are on the PS4. double dog doo-doo!!!

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

Jedi: Fallen Order, anyone?

Way back I really enjoyed the KotOR games and the random 2 others I picked up on PC. Jedi Academy and something else. All were great fun, though KotOR would feel too much on rails for me now.

This looks good though. EA makes me somewhat hesitant but have any of you been following the feedback or, by chance, tried it yet?

I know this is old news but I noticed Batman: Return to Arkham on the PSN for $20. Looks like it has both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City remastered. GREAT games if you're hurting for a third-person beat-em-up with mysteries to investigate. Those are perhaps the smoothest close-quarter combat games I've played both in ease of controls and animation transitions from move to move.

https://half-life.com/en/alyx

Sweeeet

I'd heard about the long-ranged hand magnetism, and it looks a good call off the bat. (Stuff like that feels like 'telepathy' in VR, and can be v slick). Can see it could make for some fun 2020 physics puzzle stuff.

Still deciding what I think of the Source 2 (?) look of things, but it ain't bad. And good hearing some of those voices again...

Lil, bit, psyched

Game is really good. It's like combination of Metroid Prime (backtracking, new abilities), Tomb Raider (climbing, tombs, puzzles, setpieces) and Dark Souls (combat, checkpoints, npc respawning). That's what I can say after around half of game. Playing on 3rd difficulty and having some challenge.

Not to be that obnoxious guy in the bunch, but based on your comments you might really like CONTROL!!!! I've only obsessed over it for the past 2 months or so here in this thread. Great fun. Your description of Fallen Order sounds remarkably similar.

Thanks for the post. I'm kinda thinking I've found my new fix for post-CONTROL withdrawal!

Booooo! not my Half-Life.

Though it does look pretty rad.

[cries inside]..........[and out]

...Pssst... WMR sets start at like $200...

(VR-ready PCs not so much :/)


But hey, if it turns out to be a classic it’ll still be around when VR becomes affordable!

They're giving us half a Half-Life halfway between the series' two halves.

Unfortunately, some folks need all the money they have for slightly more important matters, and I'm no exception. BUT, if I had $200 to spare I'd put that into upgrading my PC any day.

On a more serious note, I haven't really bothered with VR because A) I'm too lazy for VR games and B) my left hand's a keyboard and my right hand's a mouse. I hear most VR games aren't really geared toward people with my disability.

The price is lunatic (especially once you start upgrading your machine for smoother dimensions ). Buying in was a 2 year project for me, and it’s my one big house hobby / money hole to date. But it is slowly getting cheaper on the HMD front, so there’s that

You can totally play K/M for games like sims if you want, if you can touch type. I am part console controller though, so play that way for seated stuff. (Standing in ‘the middle’ of the game, being the ‘first person’, is still the peak experience for me though. The Rift hand controllers are super slick too. I don’t object when a game insists on seated sofa gaming for prolonged stuff though. Playing through the GTA V mod standing up would have bordered on evening cardio )

I re-rolled my character in The Outer Worlds.

It just wasn't grabbing me in the way I'd expected - Characters are great, in fact I'd go so far as to say that Parvati is one of my favourite party companions of all time. She's just so, well, human.

The rest of the writing seemed a bit too on the nose for me and the incidental inhabitants of the different worlds (I made it as far as the third one, first time round) were all singing of the 'we've been brainwashed by the corporation' hymn sheet. That said, the variation in npc responses to different player character archetypes is excellent. Maybe I just rolled a dull one?

I'm now high speech, high science and low combat. Let's see how this goes.

All in all it's good so far, but no Mass Effect or Fallout 3/NV.

Witcher III: Complete Set is back on sale on the PSN. $14.99 for the original game, all the DLC and the two expansions. That's not bad---if I can get into it. So far, that's not going so well. MOSTLY these are things that I believe I could adjust to with more game play but I'm not sure I want to invest much more into it. That's disappointing.

Cut scenes are great. Based on those few I've seen, I imagine the story will be good. My concerns are in combat controls, NPC dialogue, PoV, and a few minor glitchiness.

Controls will probably be easiest to overcome with a bit more practice, but even during the tutorial combat I could never seem to get my character to do anything useful. That may partly be a result of the constant instructional text pop-ups pausing the combat. I know it's necessary, but the method is distracting. I survived my first few encounters but I felt like my button set was upside down for what I'm used to with other games. I'll look into the setup tonight. Maybe I can customize that.

NPC dialogue feels very clunky. Choices are fine, but I half expected that my choices would change based on what I select and the NPC's narrative response. Like, say I have the options of:

1. What do you know about Apples?
2. Where are you from?
3. What is your name?

Select option 2, "Where are you from?" then prompts a decently-acted reply. Cool. The NPC says he is from some mystic land and is a traveler like me. Then alludes to more information. However, when I'm prompted to follow-up with another question I get the same options rather than drilling deeper into the originally selected topic. So it feels weird then to abruptly select option 1 to ask about a completely unrelated topic on apples. Too, I've noticed that I get additional responses with more information if I ask the same question twice. That is VERY strange, at least from my experience with other RPG type games.

This may evolve the deeper I get, but this is throwing me off a lot.

The point of view is a little overwhelming right now. This happens switching from one third-person game to another, sure. I've just put in two months of play with CONTROL, where the character takes up less screen real estate with a slightly wider field of view. I might be wrong on the second part, but I get a bit of vertigo walking around with this character. That could be from several smaller factors like environment textures, animations, turn speed, etc., and I'm trying to be mindful that this too may pass with a little more play time.

I hope so. It was a cheap purchase, so no biggie if I can't get into it. Just sucks with how much praise I've read about (here and from friends and family) to not be able to experience it.

Finally, I've noticed a lot of odd audio and animation jumps. I don't know how to describe it, but it seems to mostly occur during transitions from game play to NPC interactions and transitional animations (like riding into town /cut to close-up of dismounting). It is as if the animation cues start just before the dialogue audio has ended, then hiccups for half a second, then replays correctly. Or that the audio may play into the transition. It can be quite jarring.

I get that this is a 2015 title, but it did win Game of the Year and several other awards. I'm taken aback by this, at least with the introductory play, as I'm having a hard time squaring the accolades with what I'm experiencing so far.

First thing I'll say is to use the alternate movement setting, then bump the difficulty one notch above normal.

But yeah, the slickness of action games in general has improved a lot in the last 4 years and something like Witcher 3 might be a little tough to try for the first time in 2019.

Until Red Dead 2 came along, I'd say that the world CDPR made was the most convincing I'd ever seen in a game. I've not seen a proper rpg as complete (not played Disco Elysium yet) in terms of setting, story, character, mechanics since.

I've dabbled with the prior Witchers, and one strand throughout all of them has been just how clunky the introduction phases are. (They'd even jazzed up W2's version and I still found it fairly impenetrable )

Agree with Tatty's solutions for giving combat / magic / potions some bite in W3. (Although I'm firmly in the 'never more than meh' camp ultimately on on most of those systems. But could amuse myself for ages chopping bits off tree branches while on horseback, and unearthing lore for spells I'd never use )

I don't remember the dialogue trees being a big impediment, but possibly they got smoothed over by the meatier audio & narrative sections that start to kick in.

If you can roll with the 'roll and you've won' combat, and get to shoving your nose into the scenery and social un-niceties, you should find the main things that people champion in the game. They're mainly off in the underpasses and undergrowth