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Culturegasm: The Videogame Thread (January - March 2012)

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    •  
      CommentAuthorMorac
    • CommentTimeFeb 22nd 2012
     (10421.1)
    The first Mass Effect is pretty popular. $30 is about as cheap as you are likely to get without going to EBay. I personally like ME2 better (mostly on a mechanical front - the equipment setup in ME1 is a bit on the tedious side), but I'd still recommend playing through ME1 first for the story, and so you can have all of your decisions imported in to ME2.
    •  
      CommentAuthoroldhat
    • CommentTimeFeb 22nd 2012
     (10421.2)
    FOUND IT. Used at $24.

    Sorry folks, I'm one of those people who start looking for something casually, but once it becomes difficult it becomes a QUEST and online purchasing almost seems like giving up. I apparently have found the only copy in Toronto and will have it in my grubby hands ready to play tonight.
    • CommentAuthorFlabyo
    • CommentTimeFeb 22nd 2012
     (10421.3)
    @InvincibleM - I hope you're not suggesting piracy... there are several game devs on here who will give you a thorough tsk-ing and rolling of the eyes.

    Heh.
  4.  (10421.4)
    Dammitall, I have too many games to play already... But I AM getting a Vita if I can find one for a decent price in stores. I'm such a sucker for these things.

    I started playing "Outland" today. Downloadable title for the PS3 and (I think) 360. There's actually a title I could see doing really well on the Vita, from what I can tell. The graphics are neat, but more stylish than technically impressive... They pulled off Rayman Origins on the little thing, and so this one wouldn't be a problem at all.

    My only complaint, really, is that the game's environments and enemies feel kinda samey. Fighting is satisfying, and I love the Ikaruga-like switching between two colors that allow you to harm different-colored critters and absorb same-colored bullets. But you're kinda doing the same combos on the same set of enemies the whole way through so far. Hopefully it'll get more interesting as the difficulty ramps up, and they start to use the color-switching properly in combat.

    •  
      CommentAuthorIron Imp
    • CommentTimeFeb 22nd 2012
     (10421.5)
    @Old Hat

    Prepare for enjoyment - the Mass Effects are great titles. I don't think it's absolutely essential to have played the first one to enjoy the second, but as a game with a exceptionally strong narrative and well realized universe with tangible title-to-title consistency. It would be a bit like watching the Empire Strikes Back without having seen Star Wars - well enjoyable in it's own right, but lacking for the experience of the first. Unlike the respective future fantasy movies though, Mass Effect 1 is significantly shorter than ME2, play length wise... averaging about 15-25 hours, instead of 50-60+.

    I did most of my ME series exploration on the 360 and enjoyed the import save function, literally continuing your character's likeness, story decisions and minor benefits into the second title.
    •  
      CommentAuthortaphead
    • CommentTimeFeb 22nd 2012
     (10421.6)
    If you like anything that you enjoy, then you will probably find this palatable.



    (I think the term "joy puke" is now firmly lodged in my lexicon.)
  7.  (10421.7)
    @ taphead, I saw that yesterday. Now wants it. Much.


    Will
  8.  (10421.8)
    OUTLAND is pretty fun, i played through some of it at my friends place

    i was finally able to get EVILQUEST to download. holy balls, this is possibly the best $1 i have ever spent. do you like CRYSTALIS from the NES? well, merry christmas. its fucking awesome. you play the villain in this total fan-love-letter.
    •  
      CommentAuthorchiaslut
    • CommentTimeFeb 23rd 2012
     (10421.9)
    Borderlands 2! Joy Puke!

    I really enjoyed the hell out of the first Borderlands. The art style caught my eye or I might never have played it. I probably would have pegged it as "just another FPS" if it hadn't looked like a comic book to me. I had so much fun with it that I kept it and didn't trade it in and now the second one is coming out. Joy of joys!
    •  
      CommentAuthorAnoxia
    • CommentTimeFeb 23rd 2012
     (10421.10)
    I will also purchase the game of 'Gazillioner' guns. Because I need more explosions in my life, and WUB WUB's.

    Much love for Borderlands 2.
  11.  (10421.11)
    I already have Borderlands 2 on preorder for me and my best friend. It's that good, I'm buying it for someone else.
    •  
      CommentAuthorMorac
    • CommentTimeFeb 24th 2012
     (10421.12)
    I just picked up the Indie Alpha Bundle, which has a Dwarf Fortress clone that I am rather excited to play (the actual Dwarf Fortress has pretty much disappeared down the feature creep hole).

    Also, new Karst screenshots and info! Yay!

  13.  (10421.13)
    So yeah, I got a PS Vita with Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom. Yay, another fighting game to learn! It controls pretty well so far - the Vita's D-pad is excellent - but the game does suffer a bit from shortcuts being triggered too easily. For instance, Hulk's forward+medium cancel into a QFC special is incredibly hard to pull off, since the game registers the forward-to-QFC movement as "I wanna do a Shoryuken", and Hulk goes up instead of sideways.

    Also, the Vita's curiously awkward to get online. Or rather, it SEEMS to be... The Connection Test just wouldn't work for me, yet my system's online without any major issues now.
  14.  (10421.14)
    Yeah, on the Vita? BE EXTREMELY FUCKING CAREFUL ABOUT HOW YOU DO THE PSN ACCOUNT THING ON IT!

    It's way too easy to wind up with linking a new account to it, since it's vague about what it actually does when you do the PSN account thing. See, one of the the very first things the Vita asks of you is to do the PSN account signup... And even if you say you wanna set it later, it still won't let you do anything unless you set up a "trial" account. And then it seems to use that as a basis for a new account if you select the "use pre-existing account" option when you do finally get to a place where you have your old account info.

    Long story short, I may be out 400 kroners because I forgot that my PSN account was linked up to an older E-mail address of mine, rather than my current one. And I had to freaking format the whole system to make it sign up to said existing account.
  15.  (10421.15)
    Yeah, I got the Alpha Fund Bundle and played some Towns last night - rough around the edges, but the core is sold and it is super addictive.

    Haven't tried the other games yet, but paying the minimum for the bundle gives you Towns for about half what it usually costs to Alpha Fund it.
  16.  (10421.16)
    Played the Binary Domain demo last night. I hope I'm not the only one who thought it was about as bland as a game can get. Dull concept, dull characters, dull environment, dull gameplay. [rant] I'm so frikkin bored of 3rd person shooters with that cut&paste cover system. Even in titles where it's not the main focus of gameplay (LA Noir, Red Dead, Uncharted etc) I feel like wading through a tide of lamely-shoehorned-in-faceless-pointless-suicidal-enemies every few minutes of gameplay is a tithe I have to pay in order to be allowed to enjoy some otherwise incredible games. Seriously, am I just a mutant man born without testosterone, or do other people get tired of it too? [/rant]
    •  
      CommentAuthorMorac
    • CommentTimeFeb 26th 2012
     (10421.17)
    Dang, I had been hoping Binary Domain would be able to do something interesting. It did seem to have an interesting premise from the trailers I saw. I guess I'm not that surprised, though. The AAA industry does not seem to set the innovation bar very high these days.

    There are some games that can do the cover-based shooter gameplay pretty well (Gears of War, Mass Effect), for each one that does it well there are half a dozen that used it because it's the default play style for cinematic games these days. I wonder if some of the high end engines like Unreal and Crysis are building core tools around it? I haven't had a chance to mess with those (they're super expensive) but if there is a fair bit of low level support for that sort of gameplay, it might explain the dearth of similarly designed games we are seeing. It could just be corporate shenanigans, though.
  18.  (10421.18)
    To be fair, I only played 10 mins of it. There was something about it though - it didn't do anything poorly exactly, but it had this boiled-down mushy formula that actually made me feel a little revolted when I started thinking about it - teams of pumped up men with power armour and guns that looked like they'd been designed by sophisticated 12 year olds making quips at each other about the single female team member's ass, shooting waves of morally-it's-okay-because-they're-not-real-people robots in a series of streets with no more purpose than the backdrops in a Streets of Rage game. I don't normally react so strongly, and it's not like the game was particularly violent or chauvinistic (at least no more than a lot of the alternatives) but in the moment when I turned the game off I was thinking about how many people worked for god knows how many hours to get this thing created, and it left me with this disgusted feeling about the whole thing like a bad taste in my mouth. The sheer level of irrelevant banality that had been polished up into the functional package I was playing felt somehow sinister.

    EDIT: So much so that I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of ire that this game has produced in me. As if for a moment it was representative of everything shiny that actually has a foetid core. I'm probably just thinking about it too much.
    • CommentAuthorFlabyo
    • CommentTimeFeb 26th 2012
     (10421.19)
    The AAA industry *can't* set the bar high anymore, cause the price of failure is death of your company right now. So you have to go for something unambitious that will sell to as many people as possible. Take a risk? When you're having to spend $7 million minimum to actually look like you even belong on the current hardware? Not happening.

    We're lacking a game changing piece of tech or process. Something to make it cheaper to build those cutting edge visuals again. I think it's why most developers are dreading the next round of consoles. It's going to get even more expensive to chase the cutting edge.

    It'll change, it always does, but it's a deeply frustrating place to work right now.
    •  
      CommentAuthorVornaskotti
    • CommentTimeFeb 26th 2012 edited
     (10421.20)
    Paul:

    I know how you feel, I got the same kind of shitfit when I played Singularity. You've got this idea of Cold War era Soviets coming up with time travel, and what comes out in the other end is the world's blandest shooter that plays and sounds like Asylum-film version of Half-Life. The bad guy has a fucking facial scar and a glass eye... And yeah, there's a gravity gun, plucky female sidekick and the character doesn't say a word throughout the game...

    I'm just now having a slightly similar problem with The Darkness II. I really liked the first one, storywise, but the second one is leaving me rather cold. For the first time ever a game has made me roll my eyes because the violence is so sillily gratuitous. There are some bits that try to similar kinds of emotional bitchslaps as the first game, but they feel a bit reheated and ham-handed, and lose their effect against the background of sillily graphic violence. There is a twist of a sort in the game, but it's also a bit... well, stale.

    Spoiler space:
    The main character keeps waking up in a mental hospital, where all the other characters are patients or staff, and the protagonist doesn't know if that's the real world or not. Also, all the crazies are "I'm Napoleon" level silly-crazies.


    I'm 6-7 hours in to the game, so let's see if there are some interesting twists left. It indeed is a shame that triple-A games generally can't really take that many creative risks and try to do something totally different. Luckily there are exceptions out there, and also those games that take a tried and true recipe and just make it so good it's a joy to play.

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