Be Excellent To Each Other

It's been out for very long, which means it's very slick and cheap. And still one of the best looking games around.

Haven't played Legend of Grimrock 1...bugger there's another two to add to the list.

LoG is a very different beast. It's an heir to Dungeon Master and Black Crypt and has lots of puzzles. Excellent ones (many inspired by Portal), in fact, and it's a much better game than its influences.

I'm generally 'over' point and click adventure games and have little time for the genre these days but The Charnel House Trilogy looks interesting and it's only a few quid and it's got bonus Jim Sterling so it's going on the wishlist.

I envision an alternative universe where point and click adventures are the most popular genre. There is no other genre more appropriate to tell a story, but unfortunately until recently these kind of adventures became stuck in a very conservative design.

I think there's huge potential in innovating the genre. Multiple solutions to puzzles, different endings, choices and consequences, a more dynamic pace....a game that implements these becomes immediately more interesting. "Life is Strange" is a nice start. Primordia is also another great one.

I used to love them when I was younger but now when I think about them I just imagine pixel hunting through an environment and then constantly listening to NPCs repeat themselves while you laboriously try different combinations of items against the current puzzle. I think you're right that there's a lurking possibility of innovation revitalising things and certainly, having just finished Tiny Thief, there's evidence of scope in the format if someone would do something with it on a decent scale. Life Is Strange is on my wishlist so I'm curious now to see what it does and I'll look at Primordia as well.

Moi aussi. I used to bloody love them. But I think part of the pleasure I derived from them was my childish enthusiasm for seeing what happens when you put two things together. It was a simple satisfaction that I could enjoy in some fantastically vivid and atmospheric worlds with great writing.

But as games have become more advanced and the potential for doing much more than x + y = this, I think point and click has suffered.

All games definitely shouldn't be the same, but I found going back to Grim Fandango on the Vita wasn't a fun experience. I felt bored - I simply wasn't enjoying the mechanics of it. And that's very sad.

Even more conservative point and clickers, like the ones from Daedalic, have hotspots to prevent pixel hunting. Other games, like the ones from Zombie Cow Studios, have so much funny lines from experimenting with the wrong combinations, that you kind even want to play it wrong.

I think Grim Fandango is terribly overrated, as it has lots of nonsensical and frustrating puzzles. It kind of bums that people are still stuck considering these classics as the best games of the genre (like the Richard Cobbett top25 whatever) and ignoring the current great games.

The Dream Machine is also amazing. One of the most beautiful games I've ever played.



You have to have some tolerance of teen cliches to fully enjoy life is strange, but even so is a big improvement on the Telltale formula.

Engadget currently have an article listing "Nine surrealist games" here. I've played, or am aware of, the majority there but the final couple sound interesting.

SURREALISTa is part game, part interactive exhibit of the work of an Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico and is available on a name-your-price basis.

The Tender Cut is, well: "The Tender Cut is a first person interactive installation/exploration adventure game inspired by the "Il etait une fois" scene from Luis Bunuel's movie "Un Chien Andalou". It invites the viewer/player to dive into a surreal atmosphere, sharing the character's experience." Pretentious, bizarre and completely free.

You are getting downloaded.

I'm shit at Racing games, and generally hate the idea of racing in general (F1 is such a waste of TV time) -- but for some reason (read: hype-train) I bought Dirt Rally. It's quite fun, but I'm absolutely shit at going around corners with any speed. (Though I managed to come 4th in two tournaments vs the computer)




Does anyone have it ? If so we can LEADERBOARD COMPETE.


Should I spend £200 on a steering wheel + pedals + stick because, y'know, that'll make me a PRO DRIVER that might actually be able to make it round a hair-pin without either ricochetting off of the walls or just doing it at 1mpg?

edit: dedicated thread!

Just downloaded the 'new' Wolfenstein game. I liked the first one and I've read that this isn't just a half ass so I'm hopeful it can draw me in like the original did

Also just downloading Project : Cars and again am hopeful about that. Currently playing GTAV.

I am downloading Project Cars at the moment, i'll tell you what it's like in 2 days time... bloody internet speeds...

VOTE GREENS FOR FASTER INTERNETS IN THE STICKS

Just installed Cars now. Will come back with my thoughts, but feel my system will struggle at 4k because apparently the Titan X has trouble with max settings at 1440p.

Edit. OK so it's installed and running. It automatically set itself to the highest settings sans the grass which I changed myself. Seems to run perfectly fine with no stuttering or input lag. I would run a benchmark but sadly FRAPS is stuck at 24 FPS and won't move and I know from experience it's certainly not running at that or I would feel it.

All seems OK, if a little samey. It feels and looks very similar to NFS : Shift. Whether it looks better? well I would imagine it does but due to it looking like NFS Shift it doesn't really seem any better to me.

Mind you I am from the NFS Underground camp so this game doesn't really offer an awful lot for me. I think I would have more fun with the new Dirt game.

I must admit, that rally game looks the business, but I don't have a wheel, and I don't think I'll get one, so I'm curious how well it will work with an Xbox 360 controller.

360 controller works perfectly

If anything it's better with a joypad than a wheel right now. There's apparently something wrong with the force-feedback in the game and it's completely weird. (This is all from youtube video and forum posts etc, I don't have a wheel myself).

I use an Xbox one pad just fine.

Started playing Wolfenstein The Old Blood last night. It's really good

I've got a confession - I've never played a TellTale Games game so I've had a go at The Walking Dead. And I love it!

They seem filled with little bugs (animation bugs mainly) and some irritating bits (fuck me Lee walks slowly) and some other irritating bits (unskippable repeating dialogue) but overal it has been pretty interesting.

Episodes 1-3 were really good (I've got all 5), although I thought episode 2 should have been later on in the series, and episode 4 has been pretty good but the new characters are less interesting or nuanced as the earlier characters.

Also, as a black lead character Lee has been fantastic. Great voice acting throughout and I've been playing him as I'd expect him to act in the circumstances. It's great stuff.

I've just started playing this and it's beautiful. Also, I almost cried at the opening bit. Fucking brill 'twaz.

Yeah, it's hella pretty. I'm looking forward to playing it sometime two years from now when it's cheap.

Turns out that Ori & The Blind Forest is a metroidvania game (seriously, I can't remember reading much about this at all except it being hard). Whilst Gueccameccamollymollymolly had personality Ori & The Blind Forest has charm.

Which makes me wonder: what did Metroid have? I should download one of them on the WiiU but I fear that after playing modern versions of these games that it'll only disappoint.

EDIT: Mind you, Symphony of the Night didn't; that was a reet cracking blast.

If you gave up on Gueccameccamollymollymolly as it was too hard you can expect to see about 2 hours of Ori & The Blind Forest.

You might see the spectacular set piece at the end of the first world but it is there when you've seen it for the twentieth time you might be wondering if this is for me.

Not me.

I like it hard.

Fnar fnar.

Yeah, I expect that. But I'll see it as far as I can for the sake of how pretty it apparently is. I'm basically donating money to cool indie game projects by buying it (whenever I do) and I have no problem with that.

I've done it. Thank god. Respect to the music peeps for making music that suited that section perfectly but wasn't ear drum stabbingly repetitive after the 30th listen.

The next section is really nice too with some gorgeous watery backgrounds (and joyous music again) that makes it feel that you've accomplished something.

This is a reet nice little game.

I had my eye on Her Story already after Jim Sterling covered it but it's good to see another source agree that it's a good game. The gist of it is that you piece together the story of a murder by searching a police database of tagged interview clips and using the stuff that comes back in one search to get clues for further trawling. So, mechanically not that interesting, but by all accounts the writing and acting is top notch and the way the story reveals itself organically depending on how you decide to proceed is compelling. The Jim Sterling review is here and here's a video of him playing a few minutes of it for flavour:

Castlevania: Mirror of Fate is terribly dull. Maybe because it was a 2d castlevania i was quite excited for it, but as it turns out, it's just a boring 3d fighting and platformer game that happens to be played in a 2d plane.

Pillars of Eternity was a big disappointment. Baldur's Gate 2 it isn't. At all. Besides, i think i spent half of the 40 hours running time looking at loading screens.

To be completely honest since Fallout 3 got boring nothing has excited me in gaming really. There have been a few gems (such as South Park) but for the most part I have found it incredibly hard to find motivation to play games when they're all the same or crap. I guess that's what happens when you get to sample genius, then have it cruelly ripped from you when 7 years has to pass.

So for right now I'm not really gaming much. Not such a bad thing, I mean it is summer after all and what a lovely summer it's shaping up to be. So I've got all of my hopes pinned on Fallout 4 and November. If that fails to grab me then I will probably stop gaming, especially on a PC. It's massive bulky equipment with savage upgrade costs. The best thing about Fallout 4 though is that I should have no issues with it performance wise @ 4k. Yeah, it looks a wee bit dated but I will take a higher framerate at 4k any day.

Ori & The Blind Forest: finished.

What a magnificent metroidvania game. I bloody loved every minute of that, even when I was getting smashed to bits.

Its certainly a looker but it sounds astonishing.

When these credits stop rolling I'll see how much percent of the game is done which, surely, will be an indication of how much fun I was having since I even went looking for optional stuff.

Here we are:

100%

Ok, I think the percentages are wrong.

Still, I spent 8 hours 22 minutes on it and got 11/12 green circles and 13/15 blue circles. And I didn't even need all the circles. BUT I WANTED THEM.

So that's 24 circles out of 27 circles = circle%

So in terms of percen for how good this game is I'm obliged to award it 88.88%.

All games should be measured this way.

This week's humble bundle is highly recommended.

Valdis Story is probably the most underrated metroidvania around, and The Dream Machine is brilliant.

I bought it for Tengami and Where Is My Heart.

On a not-related-to-Humble-Bundle note, I started up Wasteland 2 last night.

It has a live action introduction which I didn't like and then reams and reams of text. I wasn't impressed. And it had loads of buttons I didn't know what to press. Maybe I should've paid more attention to the text. Then travelling around the world map was just a big arrow a largely empty map. Then an X-Com style fight in an arena. I didn't know what I was doing and it was jarring cause I didn't know it was an turn based fighting thing. Maybe I should have read about it beforehand. I'll have to come back to this when I'm more in the mood I think.

Wasteland 2 is one of those cases where every reviewer liked it, but every time i read about is on forums and comments the sentiment is usually negative.

I want to play that someday, but Divinity: OS has the priority, and i still haven't finished Dark Souls 2 and Lords of Xulima.

The original game was something I played on the C64 , its using the 'bards tale' engine and one of the first post apocalyptic RPG's (along with Origin's Autoduel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland ... eo_game%29

A series of youtube videos of the C64 game :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvYcu5q ... 83&index=1

If you dont have any nostalgia for the first game then it will probably be quite a rough thing to get into - the kickstarter basically promised a similar game and thats what they delivered

I liked the first Wasteland, but i just can't get seem to get excited for this one. Also, the common complaint that it has too much text (and uninteresting at that) doesn't pull me in. Pillars of Eternity suffers from the same problem. It just drags on and on. "Show, not Tell" is something that these rpg designers totally ignore.

I really think the reason that it worked so well in the original Wasteland was that they were very much restricted in what they could fit into the machine - from memory it was 4 'sides' of a C64 so 4x170k in total for the whole game and they used some creative ways to fit more of the story in

From the wikipedia page

Speaking of Bard's Tale, a new one is lighting up Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/in ... ds-tale-iv

Yes, i had the Interplay collection from the mid 90's that besides Wasteland also had Dragon Wars which used the same system. The Crpgaddict (http://crpgaddict.blogspot.pt/) covered that quite well. I do remember reading that huge manual in the bathroom. So much that it got all moldy

I put The Magic Circle on my wishlist after seeing Jim Sterling play it for a while but it's good to see it get some more mainstream coverage there as well. The gist of it is that you're a QA tester playing a game that's in development hell. You're trying to work your way through the unfinished levels by manipulating the environment and enemies while also playing witness to the ongoing infighting that's led to the current state of affairs. So in part a game industry satire, but with some unique and interesting mechanics that mean it looks to stand on it's own as a game as well.

I finished my first season on Pcars the other day I'm now ready to drive the 250cc season.

Been playing lots of Borderlands with Mrs JC also and we're nearly finished the main story now, then it's onto the DLC.

Changing out two GPUs for one will hopefully allow me to play

Wolfenstein : The old blood because I've been itching to play that.

Oh and I got Batman for free. It's not bad at all really but it's buggy and a bit of a mess. At 4k though it really is one stunningly pretty mess

Cardhunter is brilliantly addicting. Anyone who feels bored should try this. It's got so much more depth.

addictive

Addicting is a real word and apparently appropriate in this sense. Though it does sound completely made up and makes me grind my teeth every time I see anyone use it.

ok

Isn't it American English?

Well it's been gaming all day for me. I've mainly been playing Metro 2033 : Redux as I never played it before. When the first one came out my GTX 470 was not really man enough to run it at any decent clip so I gave it a wide berth. Then, about two years back I played Metro Last Light and absolutely fell in love with it. The only thing is, a lot of Metro 2033 is actually in Last Light so it does all feel a bit samey right now. I'm hoping that it changes up a bit more as I get into the story more. I shouldn't have done it backward though, but what turned out to be a "let's just have a quick sneaky peak of the graphics" turned into an 8 day love affair Last Light really was a class act.

I also put in another couple of hours into Project Cars, but I can't say I really care for it. It's too simmy for me and I'm more of an arcadey sort of bloke when it comes to racers. I'm kinda hoping that NFS Underground or whatever the new one is called actually has some substance, instead of being like a protein shake like the last few.

I would guess that Metro will keep me busy for at least a few days though, though even in Spartan mode I'm still having issues finding sodding ammo.

There's a free demo for The Crew now, you could give that a try.

Yeah I may try it. Problem is it's UBIsoft and their stuff is horrible.