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This is pretty great, as I too enjoyed Terry's threads on Transformers, glad to see someone taking a similar approach to a Let's Play. Though Killzone might not have been what I would have picked, it certainly fits the criteria for it, and I'll be interested to see where this goes. I'm fairly willing to actually buy into the idea that the games are deeper than most people realize. I myself only played a small bit of Killzone 2 and 3, barely making it past the first level in each, but I do own a Vita and have beaten Killzone Mercenary a couple times. And that game does support a lot of the ideas that you're positing about the Helghast and ISA being not-so-different from one another. If I had any possible way to record the footage I would definitely try but Sony really locked the Vita down in terms of what you can do with it without jailbreaking the hell out of it. Also not sure if this came up in the Star Wars: SotE thread but is there a particular reason why all your videos are unlisted on youtube? IBlameRoadSuess fucked around with this message at 22:15 on May 9, 2014 |
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May 9, 2014 21:51
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Blind Sally posted:The game timeline mentions at least one other colony planet (Gyre in the Altair system). If I were to seriously try and guess what made Helghan a chokepoint planet, it probably go something like this: Pretty much this. They are basically sitting on the only fuel source future trade/colony ships have in the closest star system to Earth's. And remember, in the Killzone universe, they don't have Faster-than-light travel.  It takes ships about ten years to get to Helghan/Vekta. (assuming there haven't been any more advancements in propulsion technology that would allow ships to go faster.) The reason Helghan is a chokepoint isn't because of the territory, it's because it's literally the only place to get fuel for several light-years. Sure you could try to move past them while not getting any fuel, but what are you gonna do when you run out, in the middle of nowhere, or on a collision course with a planet, or the star in the system you're in? And even if Helghan isn't the only place to get fuel, it's certainly the closest, and I would think that even after 10 years your tank might be running a little low. And remember, even if you're dealing with just trade ships, and not colony ships, these things are taking around ten years to get to Helghan, then ten years to get back, or maybe a couple more years to get where they're going. Unlike in something like Star Wars; traveling between planets isn't something you can just DO. You can't press a button and zoom into hyperspace and appear above Gyre for a cup of tea around lunch time. Traveling between planets in the Killzone universe still takes YEARS. Though again, all of this is assuming nothing else really happens to space flight technology between like 2059 and whenever the heck the games take place. Oh and you know that fleet the UCN is sending to forcibly take Helghan? The Helghan and Vektan leaders know they're coming, and they've got around ten years to prepare for them. Sure they've got the Heavy Cruisers, which are still probably going to be an issue, but if you have ten years to prepare, build the biggest loving gun you can possibly build and hope to god it doesn't explode. Of course, I'm speaking as someone who doesn't know how the timeline goes from here. Earth's forces could get there and just wreck the Helghan's poo poo, but considering what we're looking at, in game, I doubt they managed a complete recapturing of Helghan and Vekta. IBlameRoadSuess fucked around with this message at 15:25 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 15:21
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Blind Sally posted:Earth has got to be feeling pretty good right about now. After having sold the Alpha Centauri system to the Helghan Administration, they now have enough pretext to come in and take it back for themselves by force. Vekta belongs wholly to the UCN-managed ISA forces. WELP. So much for my prediction. v  vThe only explanations I can think of that fits "in universe" as to how the UCN's fleet got there so quickly is that they were actually already on their way and the entire "deliberating over what to do about Helghan" was just a farce/misinformation/an outright lie. OR the navy was constructed somewhere in between Alpha Centauri and Earth. OR the colony ships just move a lot slower than cruisers do, due to size/cargo. The fact that the ISA just straight up supports the UCN without a fight is a little weird. But I assume most of the people in command aren't very loyal to their home planet, but are more loyal to the command structure of the military, which I guess makes sense, kind of? The UCN really are kind of dicks honestly. "Hey we'll sell you this territory but you have to gimp your navy and not have any way of defending yourselves if we wanna go back on the deal. Okay? Okay." Though to be fair, the Helghans probably did get a little overzealous with their tariffs and such. But is that really a reason to curbstomp them into oblivion? The real question is who ACTUALLY blew up the space station. If there were already people living on the planet I might believe it was them, but if there was NOBODY down there at this point? I'm gonna say that it was the UCN who just straight up murdered a space station full of people because "taxes." Given this bit of information, it actually gives more meaning to why the Helghast decided to go after the ISA aside from just "Visari's an insane Mussolini-Hitler speech." The Helghast have a bone to pick with the ISA. They actively sided against them when they probably needed them the most. It's as though most of the colonies sided with the British against the revolutionaries in 1776. Would YOU forgive the people living the high life on a veritable Eden while you're stuck on a storm blasted shithole because of them? I wouldn't. I also kinda see why there isn't a game about the stuff that happens before the games. It's mostly boring politicking, some early colonization mishaps, then just a curbstomp from the UCN to the Helghan. (Why do I feel like by the end of this thread we'll have a  emote but with a Helghast face and flag?)Also;  and  The Eisenhower comparison holds up fairly well I think. IBlameRoadSuess fucked around with this message at 21:25 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 21:06
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pengun101 posted:also, stupid question , but, how different are the helghast from regular humans. I assume other then the messed up lungs and the complexion they arnt that different.  Pictured: ISA Ambassador Sepp Harkin and his wife (a Helghan woman named Valeria Harkin. Oddly enough, she's described by other Helghast as a "whore" either because she actually was one or because she married a Vektan.) So yeah, no real practical difference between Helghans and Vektans/any other humans. They're just pale and bald.
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May 12, 2014 16:12
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Blind Sally posted:Yeah, holy crap. It's still hard to believe that's a handheld game. I never thought the Vita would look so good. Mind you, Guerrilla are one of those devs who know how to squeeze the most out of a system. How'd you capture that image? It looks amazing. I just ripped it off the Killzone wiki on the page for Valeria Harkin. Not sure how that image was captured, perhaps someone streamed Mercenary to their PS3 and recorded from that? Or they just had a jailbroken Vita. It really is a good looking game for the Vita, there's some really beautiful moments that you see. For instance the opening level is set during the Helghast attack on Vekta, I think, and you see the Helghast cruisers flying around what would otherwise be a really beautiful city just under seige from a superior force.
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May 12, 2014 19:48
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Unreal_One posted:Why are y'all's videos set to link only, and more importantly, why don't you have playlists? Having to alt tab every 10 minutes to play the next video really cramps my style, brah. nine-gear crow posted:The initial idea we had was the LPs were supposed to be accessible only through Something Awful. Though I suppose it's kind of silly idea and is a little harder to justify now that SotE is up on the LP Archive for all to see. If there's a large public outcry for it, I'll make the videos public, but for now you can just chalk it up to "crow is kinda weird like that". Not sure you can make playlists with unlisted videos, but if you can, just make a playlist of it yourself? I tend to do that with LPs that have playlists that lag behind videos , or no playlists at all.
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May 13, 2014 04:35
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Crocodylus Pontifex posted:In regards to the screenshot from Killzone: Mercenary, you can take a screenshot in most Vita games by pressing start and the PS button at the same time. So it's probably taken from a normal Vita. Oh my god, really?  I've had a Vita for about a year and I didn't know this. If my Vita wasn't basically bricked due to a charging issue I might have considered doing a screenshot style run through of Mercenary. But sadly I can't even use my Vita, let alone play half a level of Mercenary.
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May 14, 2014 22:44
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Just caught up with this after spacing out around chapter 2's outro for a few months. And I'm glad to know this LP is still going. Interesting factoid, in one of the older videos you mention the explosive charges that persist through all the games and use sixaxis to activate in the PS3 games. In Killzone Mercenary they exist and you have to use touch screen controls to activate them. It's less annoying than it sounds and on the whole Mercenary's touch controls are unobtrusive. Honestly I don't like Killzone 1, even if on purpose, it's a bland boring muddy mess of a game that received too much hype for what it was. Which was a mediocre FPS with ambitions too high for the console it was on, and it really shows through in areas like the jungle. I appreciate the need to make it look washed out from a narrative perspective, but my god, they could have done it some other way than making the whole game look like a muddy pile of trash. The graphics themselves don't bother me, they're fairly standard PS2 fare, but just the combination of everything in the game makes every level just look like the slowest, most boring thing imaginable. Is the whole rest of the game like this or does it get better at some point?
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Oct 21, 2014 14:16
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I suppose my distaste for Killzone 1 comes from the only Killzone game I really played being Mercenary, and compared to this, it is SO GOOD. (It's honestly one of my favorite games on the Vita) They still give everything a bleak and war-torn atmosphere in that, but they use colors so much better, and hardly anything looks washed out like it does in this first one. Even on Helghan, the colors that are there are so much brighter and vivid. (Most of the colors on Helghan come from the brightly colored neon lights and holographic projections and such, so it makes some semblance of sense. Helghan itself is very washed out, but with color interspersed through more artificial means than on the paradise of Vekta.) I find the way they changed the ISA through the games to be a bit interesting, In this one they have a very standard military green look, but in the future games like Mercenary their big color is blue. Lots and lots of BLUE and WHITE everywhere. While the Helghast still have the orange/red and black, as a kind of counter to the ISA's coloring.
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Oct 21, 2014 16:04
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I wouldn't call Mercenary a system seller for the Vita, but honestly, if you have a Vita, there's no reason not to have it. My one complaint about the game is that it's a bit too short, but there's quite a bit of actual replayability due to the different contract missions which set challenges on the story missions (Go through the level with this gun, get 25 head shots with it and approach the objective in stealth, for instance) Unlike in KZ1, stealth is actually viable, if you approach it correctly, though it can be easy to get caught and screw it up, even using the "stealthy" guns, you're usually never hugely handicapped in a fight. Melee in Mercenary is also rather interesting. when you melee someone, it engages a sort of QTE where you swipe across the touch screen a few times according to prompts, and then the enemy dies. I'm fairly certain you're invincible during this, so it's not terribly risky to run up and punch dudes in the middle of combat, so long as you have an exit strategy. it's still probably a good idea just to shoot them though, and use melee as a sort of last resort. There's a whole ton of weapons in Mercenary as well, and it's easy to settle into a "preferred loadout", but it's actually rather fun to use the weapons you previously ignored and find they're all pretty useful, even the pistols are actually rather good.
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Oct 21, 2014 16:37
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So in the video you said that KZ: Mercenary is set far in the future of the KZ universe like Shadowfall, it's actually set all throughout the original trilogy. It starts just after the end of the first game, and runs through various points within the first three games, via month/year time jumps. (It even reuses some clips from the first three games and Liberation in its cutscenes, but  ) Considering you're a mercenary contractor in that it makes sense you wouldn't be on the ground throughout the whole war, just when the ISA
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Oct 27, 2014 19:22
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