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Alteisen posted:Tales of the Abyss is a very strange JRPG, I have never played an RPG where every single party member and some supporting NPC's are such irredeemable assholes, and somehow the main character who for all intents and purposes is a literal machild, is the least rear end in a top hat of them all. Yeah, this is the funny thing. Everyone I asked prior to buying Abyss talked about how bad Luke was. What they failed to mention was how much worse everyone else was! With that said, Luke is still really loving bad.
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Aug 13, 2014 07:44
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Leal posted:Isn't there a legit bug in Sleeping Dogs where it played the same 3 songs all the time?
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Aug 13, 2014 09:22
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At the end of Sleeping Dogs, was anyone a bit gutted that Wei went back to being a cop? I kinda hoped that he would have gotten so deep that he'd decide to stay a Triad and, even when his cover had been blown, that Broken Nose Jiang would have accepted his loyalty over his deceit.
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Aug 13, 2014 09:35
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Alteisen posted:Tales of the Abyss is a very strange JRPG, I have never played an RPG where every single party member and some supporting NPC's are such irredeemable assholes, and somehow the main character who for all intents and purposes is a literal machild, is the least rear end in a top hat of them all. The main thing I remember from seeing my roommate play this when it came out was Fonons. Have they started talking about Fonons yet?
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Aug 13, 2014 10:25
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A weird thing about Sleeping Dogs' story is that quite a bit of time was passing through the story but the game was really bad about conveying that to the player.
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Aug 13, 2014 12:24
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muscles like this? posted:A weird thing about Sleeping Dogs' story is that quite a bit of time was passing through the story but the game was really bad about conveying that to the player. Passage of time is always a funny thing in open world games, because the player has the possibility to spend hours on side-quests and activities between the story missions. Arkham City is a good example of that since it's supposed to take place during an entire night, but it's easy to invest half a dozen hours just doing Riddler trophies. Batman really needs a cure for this illness!..... but as long as he doesn't step into Wonder City he'll be alright.
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Aug 13, 2014 13:16
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muscles like this? posted:A weird thing about Sleeping Dogs' story is that quite a bit of time was passing through the story but the game was really bad about conveying that to the player.
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Aug 13, 2014 15:28
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Pocket Billiards posted:I felt this way too, it wasn't an issue in San Andreas because you were travelling to different locations as the story progressed. I could probably go on for hours about why GTAIV is an awful, awful game, but since this is supposed to be the "poo poo things about good games" thread, this probably isn't the place.
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Aug 13, 2014 15:39
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DStecks posted:I could probably go on for hours about why GTAIV is an awful, awful game, but since this is supposed to be the "poo poo things about good games" thread, this probably isn't the place. There's nothing saying this thread is about good games, duder. 
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Aug 13, 2014 15:50
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Sardonik posted:Assassin's Creed 2 did this, and it did it hard, apparently nothing interesting happened between gameplay segments in Venice for like 8 whole years if I recall correctly. The thing AC2 did wrong is although it told you the year before every chapter, you had already forgotten what year the last chapter was so you had no idea how much time had really passed. Some of the gaps are only a few months, and some, like you said, are several years, but it's really hard to notice.
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Aug 13, 2014 15:59
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The other thing is that like 20 years pass between the start and end of the game but nobody really ages at all.
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Aug 13, 2014 16:14
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I've been playing AC2:Brotherhood and I just noticed by reading timestamps on emails in the real world with Desmond that he and the crew have been spending about a month in the villa, going through Ezio's memories. Definitely doesn't feel that long, that's for sure. At least the first game had you get out of the Animus from time to time to remind you that time is passing in the real world.
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Aug 13, 2014 16:24
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RyokoTK posted:There's nothing saying this thread is about good games, duder. I'll just give the highlights, trying to avoid the common criticisms (cell phone bugging from friends). 1) The game's missions are far too hard, and very rarely give the player a mid-mission checkpoint. Restarting a mission almost invariably means restarting it from the location of the mission-giver, not from where the mission actually begins, and often this is a considerable distance. On at least one occasion I had to completely redo a mission because I died on the drive home after completing the actual mission objectives. 2) Way too much content is hidden behind the missions, including large sections of the map, the annoyingness of which is exacerbated by the problems illustrated in point 1. There's nothing inherently wrong with walling off parts of an open world, but GTA IV doesn't have a very big game world to begin with. 3) Niko's story is poorly handled, as is his character in general. Open-world games work best when the player character's role in the world is clear: CJ is a gangbanger, Michael Townley is a bank robber, Trevor Phillips is a psychopath, Franklin Clinton is a car thief, Alex Mason is a terrorist, John Marston is an uwilling government assassin, etc. Niko Bellic is a taxi cab driver, and so his motivations for participating in crime are vague. His acts in the story missions all make sense in the context of what he wants, but during the freeplay, it makes no sense for him to be randomly carjacking people or doing any of the random crimes that GTA is fundamentally about. It's hard to get into the mind of Niko, since he just doesn't gel with GTA. 4) There's nothing to spend money on, and no way to reliably earn money besides missions. Anything you're likely to buy (clothes, food) costs a pittance, and all the high-end items are unattainably expensive. (I can't understand why there isn't a chop shop mechanic in the game, like what APB has. It would provide a way of making money that gels with the core gameplay concept of car theft.) 5) GTA IV is supposed to be a satire of the American Dream, and that's something that a GTA game could do really well, but GTA IV shoots itself in the foot immediately. There's basically two ways you can satirize the American Dream: A) it's hollow, or B) it's bullshit. A is the option very conducive to a GTA game, with the protagonist getting more and more money and more and more success, and finding that it hasn't solved his real problems at all, and even made them worse. That's a fantastic premise for a GTA game, and it is not what GTA IV does. The problem is that GTA IV always goes for the cheap, shallow criticism, and so within the first 10 minutes of the game, it's thrown down the gauntlet: the American Dream is bullshit, Roman lied about everything, Niko isn't any better off here than he was back home. The game makes its entire point before the first mission is over. Taking this angle immediately robs all momentum from the story, resulting in a game with a shambling, aimless pace. Things just sort of happen, and there's no really compelling dramatic hook for the player to get invested in. Contrast this with GTAV, a much tighter story, where everything happens because Michael desperately wants to be a good person, but he just isn't. That's a compelling narrative. 6) The carplay is really sloppy, and this is exacerbated by the entirety of the game taking place in a claustrophobic urban environment. Holding down the gas for any length of time gets you going faster than you ever want to, and it's impossible to corner at speed without using the handbrake, which is very difficult to use precisely. On a minor note, the car damage system is pretty wonky; it's almost impossible to drive anywhere without losing your hood. 7) It's way too easy to lose your wanted rating. Just drive in the same direction for a minute or two and you're practically guaranteed to escape. This and Point 6 are two places where GTAV massively improved on IV. 8) There's very little to actually do. GTA thrives on the dicking around, but in IV it just leans way too heavily on the players making their own fun, and puts almost no effort into giving them the tools to do that. The driving isn't very satisfying, the shooting isn't very satisfying, and it's hard to get creative when the whole game is a single environment. Again, GTAV is a significant improvement in this respect, with the random encounters and special off-limits areas both creating interesting things for players to do while aimlessly dicking around. GTAIV really suffers from a lack of aircraft, but it also feels like the play space is too small and constricted for aircraft to be all that interesting anyway.
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Aug 13, 2014 16:46
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muscles like this? posted:The other thing is that like 20 years pass between the start and end of the game but nobody really ages at all. This is more of a 'little thing' but Ezio's voice noticably deepens throughout. Talk to the architect at the villa near the end of the game to hear the difference as Ezio's 'buongiorno' is only recorded in his early voice.
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Aug 13, 2014 17:35
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No controller support for the PC version of Mass Effect 3.
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Aug 13, 2014 17:46
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Walton Simons posted:This is more of a 'little thing' but Ezio's voice noticably deepens throughout. Talk to the architect at the villa near the end of the game to hear the difference as Ezio's 'buongiorno' is only recorded in his early voice. This is super noticeable in Brotherhood, where you have flashback memories to before Ezio became an assassin, right after he became an assassin, and something like 2 years afterwards. His voice is noticeably different in all of them, especially the pre-assassin years.
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Aug 13, 2014 18:00
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The weird rear end Audio desync my 360 copy of Saint's Row IV. It just makes everything seem so sucky.
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Aug 13, 2014 20:28
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Every time I load my game in SRIV Keith David has to tell me about his plans to run as VP.
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Aug 13, 2014 21:02
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How can Rockstar make a scathing critique of the "American Dream" by putting the message in the most expensive video-games ever made? Imagine if Team America: World Police cost 150 million to make; does Satire even work in the hands of the richest party?
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Aug 13, 2014 21:19
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; Double-Post.
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Aug 13, 2014 21:42
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R* are bad at satire. Literally all of their jokes are "this modern/popular thing is stupid! Also, COCKS!"
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Aug 13, 2014 22:13
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Regarding time passing in Assassin's Creed games: I feel they should get some sort of free pass, since the structure of play is very divided between missions and free roaming, and even justified in-world. The Animus provides a story reason for Ezio dicking around in Rome, collecting flags, unlocking tombs and assassinating people.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:24
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spudsbuckley posted:R* are bad at satire. (That having been said, the idea that an expensive project can't be satirical is ridiculous hipster nonsense.) DStecks has a new favorite as of 22:47 on Aug 13, 2014 |
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Aug 13, 2014 22:41
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The Labyrinth Zone boss in Sonic the Hedgehog can gently caress right off. And there are no rings between the checkpoint and the boss. You have to do a series of very tough timed jumps and if the water catches up with you, which it will, it'll gently caress your jump up and you will probably die. poo poo boss.
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Aug 13, 2014 23:15
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Inspector Gesicht posted:How can Rockstar make a scathing critique of the "American Dream" by putting the message in the most expensive video-games ever made? Imagine if Team America: World Police cost 150 million to make; does Satire even work in the hands of the richest party? And they aren't even Americans!
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Aug 14, 2014 00:16
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spudsbuckley posted:R* are bad at satire. A hell of a lot of the satire too is "Hey people are really shallow. Did we get that point across yet?" Yes, I know people are shallow, if I wanted to be reminded of that fact I would go to the nearest area where people congregate and experience it.
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Aug 14, 2014 00:56
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What it all comes back to is cheap cynicism. That's really all the "satire" and "social commentary" of GTA is.
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Aug 14, 2014 01:11
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...of SCIENCE! posted:And they aren't even Americans! This reminds me of a TDTGD in GTAV. It's a pitch-perfect recreation of LA with fantastic local voice-actors...but they didn't bother getting an American to read over the script to take out all the Britishisms. More than once, characters refer to getting 'sacked' rather than 'fired,' use 'we've not' rather than 'we haven't,' and a whole bunch of text on the in-game internet uses British slang and mannerisms. Also the constant HA HA LOOK HOW MUCH AMERICA SUCKS gets really grating after a while.
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Aug 14, 2014 01:26
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ninjahedgehog posted:This reminds me of a TDTGD in GTAV. One of my favorite little moments in Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto is when the guys who made the game get chewed out by one of their voice actors while recording GTA: San Andreas because they had a 90s LA gangbanger using the word "rubbish". it's not as great as Masters of Doom but it's a pretty illuminating read in that it shows how a few rich young kids that idolized American hip-hop artists got lucky, hit it big, and then got old and rich enough for their fixation on imitating Hollywood to reach its logical conclusion with GTA IV and V.
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Aug 14, 2014 02:05
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Leal posted:A hell of a lot of the satire too is "Hey people are really shallow. Did we get that point across yet?" It's not just 'people are shallow'. It's more 'anybody who cares about literally anything ever is stupid for caring about it'. It's relentlessly nihilistic, in an extremely childish sort of way. It's like someone gave Holden Caulfeld and Tyler Durden a games studio.
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Aug 14, 2014 03:58
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Paper Diamonds posted:No controller support for the PC version of Mass Effect 3. None of Bioware's recent games have had controller support on the PC. Pretty sure the last one to have support was Jade Empire.
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Aug 14, 2014 04:29
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Ratoslov posted:It's not just 'people are shallow'. It's more 'anybody who cares about literally anything ever is stupid for caring about it'. It's relentlessly nihilistic, in an extremely childish sort of way. It's like someone gave Holden Caulfeld and Tyler Durden a games studio. I nearly got completely turned off from Red Dead Redemption after the opening sequence was a barrage of vintage GTA smug cynicism, but thank gently caress the rest of the game wasn't nearly so bad. I mean, it still had a similar tone, but in RDR it came off more as stymied optimism than cheap cynicism.
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Aug 14, 2014 04:53
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Paper Diamonds posted:No controller support for the PC version of Mass Effect 3. It's even worse than that. Not only was this a conscious decision on behalf of Ubisoft but on the pc version we are still hampered by controls that are obviously a from a port such as one button being use, revive and take cover. I can't even comprehend the incompetence that went into these decisions.
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Aug 14, 2014 05:18
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DStecks posted:I nearly got completely turned off from Red Dead Redemption after the opening sequence was a barrage of vintage GTA smug cynicism, but thank gently caress the rest of the game wasn't nearly so bad. I mean, it still had a similar tone, but in RDR it came off more as stymied optimism than cheap cynicism. Red Dead Redemption stands head and shoulders above the GTA games because the writing, while still pretty cynical and nihilistic, seemed like it came from a place of honest love for the setting and genre rather than spite. It's (part of) what makes Galaxy Quest a way better genre parody than Meet the Spartans.
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Aug 14, 2014 05:25
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ninjahedgehog posted:Red Dead Redemption stands head and shoulders above the GTA games because the writing, while still pretty cynical and nihilistic, seemed like it came from a place of honest love for the setting and genre rather than spite. Part of that is probably due to RDR having been developed in San Diego, whereas all the GTA games are made in Scotland. But yeah, Red Dead Redemption just has a lot more compassion for its characters than GTA ever has, and that's a lot of what makes up the tone of the game. It also helps that there's no radio in RDR, and so there's just nowhere for the quick-and-dirty cheap cynicism to go most of the time. What really stings about the shittiness of GTA's satire, though, is that every once in a while they hit on something that works, and it's really funny. I'm Rich from GTAIV was funny, because it was satirizing something legitimately silly in a way that was straight-faced instead of mugging-for-the-camera-winky-winky-this-is-lovely like GTA usually does in its attempt to satirize absolutely everything.
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Aug 14, 2014 05:35
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Yeah, RDR is a bleak game but it really does have love and care in what it does and it actually pulls across its themes well. It also really doesn't punch down in its satire like GTA tends to do all the time. Really Rockstar's main team just screams well off middle-aged white dudes that were hip once and are desperately trying to be that again and they act like petulant teenagers in their attempts.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:08
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ninjahedgehog posted:This reminds me of a TDTGD in GTAV. But yeah, how difficult is it really to get someone who is from the country the character is from to look over the script and pull out those dumb mistakes?
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Aug 14, 2014 06:24
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Bully is funnier than any GTA game.
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Aug 14, 2014 07:01
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ninjahedgehog posted:Red Dead Redemption stands head and shoulders above the GTA games because the writing, while still pretty cynical and nihilistic, seemed like it came from a place of honest love for the setting and genre rather than spite. For the first and third part of RDR. Mexico was pretty bleak at the end.
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Aug 14, 2014 08:13
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Celery Face posted:Bully is funnier than any GTA game. There's rumours of a new Rockstar title for 2015 and the rumour-mill seems to be set on Sequels. It also could be loving Agent, that would be the best.
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Aug 14, 2014 08:21
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