Be Excellent To Each Other

Certainly is, and it looks fucking awesome on the new PC - I didn't think it'd make that much of a difference with the aesthetic of the game, but jeebus.

Bring on Elite:D, that's all I can say.

Lveoly game! That last mission will stay with me for a long while.

I played the demo of Blood Dragon and thought it was an utter load of pish. I have FC3 to play and quite fancy it so I hope it's better than that.

I finished Blood Dragon last night. Like Dimrill says that last mission is somewhat special.

It does try a bit too hard at times but there's a lot more hits than misses. The carnage available from the get go is to be applauded.

Started playing this tonight; I've done two radio towers and bit hunting/crafting and finished the mushroom mission where you meet the amusingly wasted and creepy doctor guy.

I was struggling to enjoy it for the first hour or so because getting anything accomplished was a fucking nightmare. I ended up having to assault the first camp with the shittest gun in the world so got killed loads of times. And every time I tried to go somewhere or hunt something I'd get jumped by a random pack of animals/jeepful of fucking bad guys. So, yeah, very frustrating and not exactly a smooth introduction. Someone earlier in the thread talked about how it throws too much stuff at you in the beginning so it's a bit overwhelming and difficult to get into which I totally agree with.

Anyway, I've now got a better gun which is making the random encounters more fun (though there's still too damn many of them in my opinion) and I've got my first silenced weapon in the shape of the bow which will make the next camp takedown a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I think I'm going to enjoy it now it's started moving a bit; I'm considering spending a couple of hours hunting/crafting though and just getting all that shit out the way for a while because it is all a bit of a pointless restriction. Even more so when finding the animals you need can be a bit of a crapshoot. With that sorted out I can plunge into the game proper with enough stuff and capabilities under my belt to kick some ass. It's definitely not perfect and there are some mechanics rearing their head that I'm fairly sure are going to annoy me over time but I don't think any of it will spoil the experience.

I hit an interesting, and sanity saving, glitch last night when doing the mission where you infiltrate the radio boat thing and you've got to stealth everyone to death.

There are three key guys you need to kill and loot and I kept on getting one or maybe two before getting spotted and having the mission automatically restart, which was driving me mad. It turns out that right at the start when you get on the hanglider to drift down to the mission, if you push and hold up, which tilts the glider down, after a couple of seconds your character sort of 'warps' down to the beach. You end up around the place where you last killed a guy, even if that means starting inside one of the ship hulls.

So you begin the mission standing right beside a lootable corpse or two, sometimes even accompanied by the strangled scream of a dying guy as the glitch happens, as if you'd dive-bombed into him with the glider. You also get to keep any radio keys you'd looted in previous runs, although possibly the mission worked that way anyway, I couldn't tell. It was pretty bizarre but excellently times given that I was really struggling with the stealth stuff. Probably not helped by the fact that a few times, instead of throwing a slightly distracting stone, I'd hurl a much-more-distracting-than-I'd-intended grenade or molotov. Have I mentioned how confusing I find the controls?

In yer other news, hunting is really fucking irritating. Every time I was sneaking up to a herd of deer either some pirate cunt would start randomly shooting miles away and the fucking things would scatter. Or a pack of dogs would run in and just starting fucking everything up. In fact that dogs are absolutely the most annoying enemies in the whole game. Every time I'm just trying to make my way from one place to the next I'll hear some barking and know I'm about to get chewed on, and probably attract the attention of a roaming band of pirates into the bargain. Fucking stupid shitting things.

Actually the wildlife extract bloody revenge pretty often. Last night I easily killed a couple of pigs only to have a fucking komodo dragon sneak up out of the grass and start chewing on me. And, of course, shooting him attracted the attention of a nearby lion who murdered the shit out of me. Indeed I only pieced together what had happened after respawning and coming back to the same area to see the same cast still present; although kiting the fucking thing into some nearby pirates brought some satisfaction.

So the sheer amount of random encounters plus the hunting and crafting busy work continue to make the game a very uneven experience. The good bits are good but some of the stuff in between is a real pain in the dick. Once I get some upgrades and perks under my belt I imagine things will get better and I am still enjoying it but, yeah, hmmmm.

Just like real life.

Every time you exploit a glitch someone drowns a kitten.

"I'll chew ya fackin nuts off"

Holy shit there's a lot of game in this game. I'm just doing the last (I think) of the Buck quests, which have been great fun and a nice change of pace, and from peeking at the mission list in a walkthrough I'm not even half way through yet. Granted, I have done pretty much all the camps, side quests and crafting that I can at the moment, but the map for the second island shows more camps and radio towers and whatnot so there's still more to go there. Not to mention all the collectibles which I've barely even started with. Great fun though, once you get to a certain level of skill and crafting at least, and I'm genuinely having to force myself to turn the thing off at night and go to bed.

This reminds me I must finish Blood Dragon.

Also, Buck is excellent and I could listen to his nonsense all day. Generally speaking all the characters are well done in fact, both from a writing and a voice acting point of view. I've spent so much time just roaming the island doing side missions in silence that it always comes as a bit of a pleasant surprise when I hit a story mission and remember there's actual proper characters in interact with. The cliched stoner idiot guy aside I'm even enjoying the conversations with your man's friends and how you can see him changing through the lens of their interactions with him.