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I find the needless and almost constant switching of available guns completely baffling. Like, we went from an AK and sniper to a bullpup and uzi/mac-10 for ??? Did we just like, have those on us? Did we pick them up somewhere in the middle of the mission? And now we have some other kind of sighted assault rifle. Like, if we were procuring armament on-site a la 007 or Snake, ok, cool, I can get behind it, or switching guns to blend in with native troops on our infiltration/sabotage (??? I thought we were here to kill/capture an e: wow, what a loving garbage snipe, update on last page
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Apr 22, 2020 05:20
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Man I can't believe how cool this bad guy is. I can tell he's cool because every time he enters a room there's a slowmo close up of him and his sunglasses.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:51
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mercenarynuker posted:I find the needless and almost constant switching of available guns completely baffling. Like, we went from an AK and sniper to a bullpup and uzi/mac-10 for ??? Did we just like, have those on us? Did we pick them up somewhere in the middle of the mission? And now we have some other kind of sighted assault rifle. Like, if we were procuring armament on-site a la 007 or Snake, ok, cool, I can get behind it, or switching guns to blend in with native troops on our infiltration/sabotage (??? I thought we were here to kill/capture an Yeah, the senseless changing of weapons made no sense to me either, but the game makes no sense as a whole so you take it in stride. I think it was done so they could have a bullet point on the box about how many different guns there were in the game, and there are more than a few. You have to remember there was a multiplayer component to this game and so they needed a weapon roster there. I don't know what is really different per weapon, though, the game files tell you nothing about damage values, or at least I don't think it does. If someone wants to parse this poo poo out for me I will totally screw with numbers: code:Kibayasu posted:Man I can't believe how cool this bad guy is. I can tell he's cool because every time he enters a room there's a slowmo close up of him and his sunglasses. Frank is so dumb that the picture of the bad guy that showed his face and is also from the future (you'll see later) wasn't enough to recognize old pal Wesley Holden. Either that or the developers are lazy and bad at things.  Look at that, you can see everything but the top of his drat head and Frank couldn't figure out who it was.
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Apr 22, 2020 12:22
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It's nice to see that the jank reached even the configuration files the developers were using.code:AIWM[1] is probably splash damage effect considering that both the grenade and the shotgun have the value set as 1. A[0] - A[3] appear to define weapon ammo type and changing them around might be possible if no sanity checking is done elsewhere. AA[0] - AA[3] probably define max ammo count for each gun. There might be a folder called weapons in the game files that contains rest of the desired information.
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Apr 22, 2020 18:15
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 So what I THINK happened here is that between episode 7 and 8 I updated my computer and had to restart it. The game then took it upon itself to reset the video settings on my profile. And just the one thing to change it to windowed mode and 640x480 resolution. The game's settings file is divided into multiple segments and to get the desired windowed or fullscreen mode at startup and the resolution you want you need to have both the profile you are playing as and the overall game settings and the options settings to all align. Otherwise they default to the LOWEST settings of the three. I checked the file after recording this and the next episode and only my personal settings were changed. This is despite not having opened the settings file since it defaulted to a different resolution last time. This game is really interestingly programmed is what I'm saying.
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Apr 23, 2020 12:53
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 Short one today because I remember the next segment is episode length by itself and I was still stunned by what happened in the last episode. One thing about this game: The video cutscenes are CLEARLY recordings of what I have to think is model manipulation rather than CGI. Are you telling me that in the year 2004 you couldn't articulate the hand of the doctor while he, I guess, just smashes the keypad to activate the bomb? The cinematic before this had a ton of independent finger movement and it wasn't close up, they could have just obscured those hands, but instead they spent time rendering all these details when it was less noticeable. Again, effort is all over the place in this game; sometimes they really go all out for minor details and then forget things like putting subtitles in the cutscenes when no one is speaking whatever language you have the game set to. I looked at the video files themselves, nothing there, and I've turned on every subtitle option the game has, nothing. Who does that?
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Apr 24, 2020 21:39
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That was a very jarring transition into that cutscene. Bad guy didn't even have time to keel over and bam, cutscene time.
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Apr 25, 2020 02:00
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I feel like Mack (?) took a huge risk discharging his pistol into the enemy combatants skull at close range, especially as the cutscene seemed to imply that Ruiz's own head was directly in the exit trajectory
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Apr 25, 2020 05:50
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 By the end of this video we have caught up to the beginning of the game...sort of. I think there was some sort of snag between the story people and the level design people because from my memory we already saw all Syria (or Lebanon as some of the signs suggest) had, but instead we start getting into the difficult part of the game. There's nothing spectacular about the hospital or the cargo ship. It's mostly what I expect from this game now, go into a hallway, shoot the guy behind you, kill the five guys that spawn, lean around the corner and kill the guy waiting there. It is, for better or worse, the formula this game operates under. By the last level I will be begging for it to be a kinder formula when enemies have more than a couple objects to hide behind in a large and open space. They don't try to flank you or anything, but they will punish you for having even a pixel out of cover at any time. The caution that the last couple levels taught me are really paying off, though. The low death count is something I'm pretty proud of at this point. I make it seem a bit easier than it is just from the caution and pacing and all the dying I did before the LP. That doesn't make me immune to dumb decisions and I still make plenty, but it keeps those from being both stupid and deadly.
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Apr 28, 2020 12:42
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I'm only halfway through, but to be clear: We are HALO dropping onto a MOVING boat in the open ocean, at night, in the rain, loaded down with HIGH SPEED LOW DRAG SPEC OPS TIER 1 OPERATOR gear??? I call shenanigans
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Apr 29, 2020 01:26
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That was an interesting turn at the end. We've entered an alternate timeline, perhaps because the writers couldn't figure out how to get around the nuke going off at all.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:38
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mercenarynuker posted:I'm only halfway through, but to be clear: These cutscenes are incredibly ADHD in that someone just starts talking about how they should do something and then BAM, jump cut to it already happening. Of course the spec ops HALO loadout doesn't include anything to protect your eyes during the fall, that wouldn't be hardcore enough
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Apr 29, 2020 11:01
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Listen, we entered a goddamn parallel timeline and you guys are obsessing over the mechanics of a HALO drop onto a moving ship like it is a thing for Frank Hayden, Tralfamadorian. The man is literally not hindered by the concept of time. I dare you to continue to watch until we finish the Syria II missions and figure out what the gently caress is happening in this game. One of the things I absolutely do not understand fully about the game is who supplies the cannon fodder through the game. Is it the local army, or are there just a lot of mercenaries hanging around? It is just never addressed why some random terrorist has a giant army with military grade hardware just stationed wherever he goes.
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Apr 29, 2020 12:51
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"QUICK, WE NEED AIR SUPPORT" instantly cutting to "we are now back safe on the aircraft carrier" was amazing
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Apr 29, 2020 21:12
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Time travel nuke, duh.
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Apr 30, 2020 03:26
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 So I'm late releasing a video again, as per usual, but there is a good reason. I kept looking at the end of the last video thinking I missed something and there was like, a viable gap between where that video ended and where the game started. Then I watched the first video. Then I watched the end of the last. Then the start of the first. Yeah, no, this is a completely different reality from where the game started. I put a video together to prove it.: Frank Hayden has killed time, everyone. I mean, when you are an FPS protagonist death is no stop, Frank has just ascended to a new level and can now alter reality as needed. The hell.
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Apr 30, 2020 17:10
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In the first version of that cutscene he does say "Welcome to my nightmare." So maybe it's just him envisioning some kind of worst possible outcome that ended with the nuke detonating so he decided to actually use his brain in the real mission? That's a slightly more reasonable if kind of bullshit option over becoming unstuck from time with no indication of such a thing happening.
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Apr 30, 2020 23:22
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Captain Frank "Warcrimes" Hayden
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May 1, 2020 03:19
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It occurs to me that this game must have also been where Spec Ops The Line got the idea for its in media res/revisit helicopter opening sequence from as well.
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May 1, 2020 08:34
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Yeah, I figured this was deliberately a different version just for the hell of it, just missing the explicit "but what if things went differently" from a narrator. I see that Russian Science Lady wasn't in the first cutscene, so maybe she plays a pivotal role in how things turn out?
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May 1, 2020 09:39
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 Every episode moved a day to the right this week in terms of normal release times, even if they were all uploaded and ready to go in advance, so I figured just continue the trend here. In my opinion, this is where the real bullshit can start with this game. The APCs and tanks in this game are trivial opponents when you have RPG ammo. If you don't you are better off restarting the level because they are impossible to kill without rockets and you can't just run past them because they are load bearing enemies; if you don't kill them the level won't progress. Despite this, ammo is not really plentiful and enemies won't drop refills, so if you decide to have some fun the the RPG at the wrong time you may have to restart the mission just a little wiser and more pissed off than before. You will see why the RPG ammo situation is worth commenting on in a video down the line. Can I just also say that this game has some weird break points? The first part of this video was incredibly short for what it was, like the developers recognized that some players may find the APCs a tough enemy so didn't make you continue on much beyond that. Other times, especially once we get past the re-lived Syria levels (we're still like two huge chapters from done), you'll have these bullshit hard areas of the game chained together into one level. This includes the final boss, which is just part of the 30-40 minute final level. I spent two hours just replaying that level alone because of how brutal it can be, and then they slam a final boss at the end like it is a thing. Anyways, the reason the days all shifted this week is that I've been figuring out how to work a PS2 emulator initially with the thought of pulling this up to show the difference between the PC and console versions but instead (because I can't find a decent file for this) I may have found the game I'm LPing after this on my unofficial review of mid-2000's shooters that time forgot. Crazy Achmed posted:Yeah, I figured this was deliberately a different version just for the hell of it, just missing the explicit "but what if things went differently" from a narrator. I see that Russian Science Lady wasn't in the first cutscene, so maybe she plays a pivotal role in how things turn out? Russian Science Lady was in both cutscenes. My guess here is that there was supposed to be some sort of time gap between the end of the cutscene and the start of the first level that would allow for the levels we're playing now to slot in, but even that doesn't make any sense because these levels lead up to the exact same conclusion as the first level, like, unchanged in any way. Do not try to make sense of Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, they removed the word "Logic" from the design document on day one.
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May 2, 2020 17:03
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 So what does Frank accomplish by changing the timeline and starting the game by getting shot down and then having to spend like seven additional hours doing much more difficult stuff in Syria? Absolutely nothing. The bomb still goes off, all his friends are dead, and he finds out that the script writers don't know the difference between an Aircraft Carrier and a Freighter (that one is weird, watch the cutscene again if you have to). Thankfully, Frank decides this reality is good enough and we get to move the plot forward after this detour. I seriously have no idea what was supposed to be the point of this level besides they cooked up more generic middle east levels and just wanted to use them somewhere and so we get the split timeline. We're almost to the end, this game can't hurt me for much longer, even if it wants to.
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May 4, 2020 21:37
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Lazyfire posted:You know the funnier part is that it looks like she's wearing a form fitting sleeveless, stomach exposing wool sweater based on what the material looks like in the video. where do you even buy one of those? I knew there was something wrong with that sweater. Should have been more suspicious. OutofSight fucked around with this message at 22:48 on May 4, 2020 |
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May 4, 2020 22:44
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 Pictured above: me before, during and after every recording. There are some weirdly decent fake ads in the train station, the guy sleeping in the cupped palms that appears to be a housing service is good just on visuals. And this thing is great because you know it was from a development team happy hour. Oddly, the same detail and work didn't got into all the signage in the level. There is literally a single sign for destinations: Port d'Orleans. I didn't notice it until I was editing the video because I was focused on not dying to bullshit difficult enemies, but I scanned through the whole thing and it's the only place name in the entire subway. I'm not asking that the developers go and get the plans from the Paris metro system or anything, but would it have killed them to have a couple different locations on the signs? It's the kind of thing I've come to expect from the game: a thin veneer of effort that hides the overall shoddy work. Like, the glass breaking the AI does at one point in the nuclear facility level looks like a nice touch until you realize the AI can't see through glass, the game stops including it after that point and all other instances of enemies being behind glass expect the player to immediately shoot at the enemy and break it. If you don't, the facade falls off and you can see the game is jankier than expected. I'm not saying I could make a better game; there are a lot of skills and knowledge at play even for something this broken, but this was a full price title that came out post Halo, you can't make a shooter smaller and with fewer moving parts than that game and have it be more broke and look worse and expect it to be taken seriously.
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May 7, 2020 12:46
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I love those ads in "french subway" video-game land. Everything is very "artiste, n'est-ce pas ?" (and mostly has some model chick in it). Somehow reminds me of that one level in CoD : Infinite Warfare. That shopping center on the moon.
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May 7, 2020 15:54
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So we're fighting through the streets of Paris to stop a nuke from going off? I guess Battlefield 3 also borrowed some ideas.
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May 11, 2020 06:02
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Kibayasu posted:So we're fighting through the streets of Paris to stop a nuke from going off? I guess Battlefield 3 also borrowed some ideas. I somehow completely forgot to mention that entire thing. Like, it's similar to the point that the Paris metro is a thing in both; games both start in Media Res, first level is in the Middle East before moving to former Soviet territory. Nukes. Maybe this game is the Allstory of modern FPS titles. I planned on finishing the game this weekend and instead ended up hammering my head against the brick wall that is the end of this game. Video tomorrow and Friday and then hopefully wrapping up on Monday.
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May 12, 2020 17:07
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 I've full on started to lose track of the days at this point. I spaced and thought yesterday was Tuesday because actual Tuesday was such a blur I don't remember it. It's funny that the more I'm at this desk the less time I have for not work things. Anyway, this is the level where the game just gives up any concept of fairness and you start to see the problem with how the developers envisioned the health system. I'm constantly crawling around and stutter-leaning to try to not lose even a single point of health because you'll often go through two or three firefights before you can repair the damage from any single encounter. If enemies dropped health or you had more powerful weapons than the MP5 that would maybe not be so bad, but even the minimal enemy health drops we've seen stop materializing at this point in the game, so there's nothing you can do but try to endure. The next level adds the fun twist of not dropping much ammo for the main weapon, which means you will have to try to snipe and pistol down enemies that bounce wildly between remaining behind the same piece of cover and rushing you with no real pattern. To give you a heads up, I spent nearly an hour not beating that level.
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May 14, 2020 12:02
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You know what I just noticed? The "this door is locked" sound? I could swear that it showed up in the Thief series as well as part of the lockpicking.
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May 14, 2020 17:14
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I just watched the end of the last video and think I pulled a muscle rolling my eyes
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May 14, 2020 19:59
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Maybe avoid facial close-ups on your not-great character models, Shadow Ops. You know that cop Frank grabbed and then pointed menacingly at after crossing the barricade didn't even get to do or say anything. Frank just got to the front and grabbed the dude. You're an rear end in a top hat Frank.
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May 18, 2020 05:28
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Kibayasu posted:Maybe avoid facial close-ups on your not-great character models, Shadow Ops. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that the game always zooms in on a character's face if they are speaking. I wonder if the low native resolution and the crappy nature of their rerendered cutscenes just made it so that was the easiest way to tell who was talking. I was also wondering why Frank felt the cop that tried to stop him from jumping over a security barrier was worth threatening as he walked away. I think Frank has some anger issues to work through.
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May 18, 2020 12:04
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 So no progress is made today. We end the video the same place we started and not in a "I want a different reality" way. This level is balls hard. There are a few factors in why: the enemies at the end game are more apt to rush at you than in previous levels, so reloading and switching weapons is a tricky prospect. You backtrack for half the mission so there is a point you run out of health packs if you don't budget them. Enemies are stationed to shoot at you as soon as you cross certain lines and then crouch run to cover, meaning you get caught out with no cover if you don't know they are there and kill them first. There are some spots where I am fairly sure you are ALWAYS going to get hit for at least a couple points of health because of visibility and AI aimbotting. Ammo drops are more scarce here than in other parts of the game, so using the best weapon for the job isn't always possible and your backup weapon is a sniper rifle when there are exactly two spots where it is useful. Oh, and as a cruel joke the game hides a guy whose script doesn't activate until you go past him, so if you don't know he's there you are likely going to lose most or all of your health just as you are about to beat the level. The end game enemies do not let up from the full auto fire, so instead of losing three points of health in a burst fire you lose at least 20 in less than a second (I went frame by frame and that was what happened to me). Now, don't take all this as me wondering why the end of the game can't be easy, I just don't like bullshit artificial difficulty. Case in point: I have flashbangs instead of explosive grenades. Explosive grenades would make things easier when the enemies are huddled behind boxes, instead I take a ton of damage trying to lean and shoot because flashbangs are more likely to hit the player than the enemies half the time. Next time, we finish the game and get to watch the most frustrating (not hard) boss fight in FPS history.
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May 18, 2020 21:44
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It's really apparent that the enemies aren't really playing the game to the same rules as the player is. Not in the sense of aimbot, unlimited ammo or scripting/spawning bullshit, but on the fundamental level that while we have to be really careful about managing our hit points, the enemies really don't give a poo poo about personal safety and act as a hivemind. Any given enemy soldier's aim isn't to kill you, but instead to sacrifice themselves to whittle your health down gradually. Like, kamikaze pilots hoping to strike the bridge of a warship and take it down in one fell swoop, sure, but every single drat soldier in the enemy military using suicide tactics to deliver death by a thousand cuts is much more of a stretch for me, anyway.
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May 19, 2020 13:43
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I hope you aren't insulted by skipping the second half of that video  Up until now outside of some parts I could at least see someone trying to play this like it thinks you're supposed to but not that level.
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May 23, 2020 06:52
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 Kibayasu posted:I hope you aren't insulted by skipping the second half of that video Don't worry, the first 20 minutes of this video are more of the same, but this time I beat it and the end boss. The fact that there is a guy whose sole role is to hide behind some cover and shoot you in the back in the last area is one of the biggest gently caress You moments in the game and I can't believe it made it through testing. Anyway, the final boss makes no sense and is the most annoying fight of the game. Your expected to shoot the world's slowest RPG at them and score at least three hits. To this point we've only ever had to deal with essentially stationary land vehicles when using the RPG (those two times), so there is no frame of reference for making this poo poo work. It's more annoying than difficult as you can only carry so many rockets and the resupply spots may not regenerate in the time it takes you to climb back up and fire and then climb back down. This is a 40 minute video, but you can watch the last 15 and get the entire gist of that fight and hear my post-game thoughts. For some bizarre reason JJ Abrams gets a special thanks credit and I have no idea why. This game came out in 2004 so unless the team was inspired by Lost or Alias (or Felicity) it is really random to see that. Then again, the documentaries that came on the game disc definitely give the sense that the developers really bought into the video-games-are-art concept that was getting latched on to by a lot of people at the time. The problem is that the game revels in the big dumb action movie space in the cutscenes and then plays like a typical FPS. The colors are all grey and brown and the environments are uninspired. The characters are completely flat and 1 dimensional. If a character is completely interchangeable with another or can be killed off with zero consequence to anything they were probably not needed. Yuri dies and it does nothing. Frank's squad dies and it means nothing, Vlady or Uriel Rammstacht or whatever the gently caress his real name was (I have no idea where that second name came from) is introduced, never directly interacts with Frank even if they were supposed to have a history, dies in a nuclear blast. Why was the bomb on a count down in the first place? Why were they in Syria? Neither are explained. Maybe he was supposed to be selling the bomb to the Syrians? That may explain why the Syrian army forces attack you, or maybe it is because the US launched a full scale invasion. Why do people keep taking bombs set to detonate on their getaway helicopters? If you are GETTING AWAY from the bomb it makes more sense to LEAVE IT ELSEWHERE! The plot holes in this game are so wide you could send the carrier (sorry, freighter) we started the game on through them loving sideways and it still wouldn't be a close fit. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 00:52 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 16:21
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I think you uploaded the wrong video. You show your desktop at the start, and there's no commentary.
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May 23, 2020 16:42
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berryjon posted:I think you uploaded the wrong video. You show your desktop at the start, and there's no commentary. Thanks for the heads up, that should be fixed now. The reason this was late was because I did that exact same thing the other day and I guess I just re-uploaded the same file and thought I was good.
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May 24, 2020 00:54
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Pressing F to pay respects to Kate's black tactical scrunchy
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May 24, 2020 18:09
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This whole game is quite the trash fire. Press F to pay respects to anybody trying to make sense of the plot. Or, if you prefer, press F to pay respects to "Meth" Johnson who clearly must have directed the cutscenes. So one thing has been bugging me the whole time, Lazyfire - why do you wait until your health is really low before picking up a kit? Surely if a health pickup doesn't max you out, nothing is wasted. Or is there something like the automatic game difficulty adjustment bullshit that made all the enemies in Max Payne (I think it was Max Payne, anyway) one-shot you if you went for too many levels without taking enough damage?
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May 25, 2020 12:24
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