The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

it seems part and parcel of the whole "high fantasy" (i.e. chicks in chainmail riding dragons) art thing, which is a pretty shitty legacy from which to build. that they managed to make it worse is something of an accomplishment. it's (marginally) tastefully worse, but still...i don't know if the euro version has different art elements or if there's actually any difference (i'm trying to avoid spoilers).

if it weren't for the cards it would merely be repetitive, but tasteful.

the dating sim aspects are at least heavily entwined in the plot and your character development for the most part, and you can skip a lot of it. and some of the townies play off the witcher as lothario thing in their throwaway phrases. (i.e. hide your daughters)

why sterile mutants would be such a hot commodity on the dating scene, well...i have no idea. women are odd.
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[Harveyjames]

It's also funny how when you get the cards, in the background you can see the slow-mo of the Witcher's sweaty, grunting face, which is the most unerotic thing since the Beastie Boy's video for Hey Ladies where you get a close up of Mike D's face in the throes of sexual ecstasy.

[Cycle]

SEPERATE WAYS seems to be RE4 without the bullshit! I's pretty cool how they have the main EPIC adventure thing, and this side story that has most of the good bits that can be finished in a few hours (I'm hoping) and also the MERCS arcade mode.
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[dessgeega]

furu furu park arrived. taito felt they needed a wii minigame collection and that their mawasunda / turn it around eye-pee would be perfect. it's not particularly good, but it's cute. it has lots of afros and taito homages, including minigames based on bubble bobble, arkanoid, kiki kaikai (!), rayforce (!), and cameltry. (one of the characters comments "why a camel?")
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[Intentionally Wrong]

I could have sworn I saw a link to Off-Road Velociraptor Safari on one of these forums, but now I can't find it. Anyway. It's out, and it's amazing. I just spent an hour and a half trying to throw raptors through a stack of crates using only an off-road jeep and a spiked ball & chain.

Unfortunately, I've discovered that by dragging behind me when I do a huge jump off the highest cliffs, I can crash my jeep so hard it closes my browser.

Still. Fun game.

EDIT: Oh, the Glorious Trainwrecks thread. Duh.

[Lasa]

Wow, Assassin's Creed has a terrible plot.

[dhex]

words can't express how much i wanted to see that be SUFI NINJA: THE GAME.
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[Ketch]

Global Defence Force on PS2. Is better than I expected it to be. Very tense at times, and plays how I hoped HL2 strider battles would play ie glorious full on chaos in a wide battle arena.

[ryan]

I got a 3DO in and have been giving it a go lately. Is the controller supposed to feel and respond like a fucking brick? I'm really hoping that the controller itself is not the problem and not every game feels so sluggish.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[ApM]

Well, every 3DO game feels sluggish, but it's not the controller's fault.

I'm trying to think of 3DO games that are vaguely playable. It's difficult. IIRC the Starblade port is pretty responsive. Also the port of Cannon Fodder has surprisingly smooth control; I was not expecting it to be any good at all without a mouse.

[ryan]

Hell. Killing Time feels like I'm walking in place. I know Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is supposed to be good on it, but I'm not seeing how given the uncomfortable directional. I actually received Starblade in the auction - I think I'll fire it up now. I recall the PC version being pretty fun way back when.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[dessgeega]

so i finished professor layton and the curious village last night, after three days of being stuck on what is essentially the final "boss" puzzle. i finally spent three of my coins unlocking the hints i needed to pass it.

i started playing the game because slut was so excited about it. and though it took me a while, i grew to like it a lot. it's essentially a giant puzzle box. the puzzles frequently pull the trick of appearing straightforward, but having a hidden logical twist that the player must discover to get through. many others seem at first glance like they're straight from the canon, but have an interesting spin that makes them fresh.

i loved the puzzles. i was less enamored with the point-and-click game world, which, although beautiful and with a great sense of character design, always feels like the shallowest puzzle box. characters come up to you on the street and say "HEY DOC, HOW'S ABOUT TRYING YOUR HAND AT THIS PUZZLE I JUST CAME UP WITH". it's so shamelessly artificial that i think i'd prefer an unadorned collection of puzzles.

speaking of being stuck, i've been stuck on perhaps the last puzzle i need to solve in the new sam & max episode. well, the last puzzle before the obligatory confrontation scene. the new sam & max games always adhere to the same structure of "find three quest objects to gain admittance to the final puzzle". this episode even more brazenly asks you to find three quest objects before being allowed to find three more quest objects before gaining admittance to the final puzzle.
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[Ketch]

[Mr Mustache]

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is a game I would have found refreshing were I the sort of person that was somehow invested in the genre.

Instead I found it tedious, generally ugly, got stuck near the end, and stopped playing, much to my girlfriend's relief.
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Straight up

[Harveyjames]

So I started playing through Half-Life 2 for the first time in earnest, although it's going to be a slog- I've already played the opening section and Ravenholm in a demo, and seen my Dad playing a lot of the rest, so there's no real sense of novelty here, and the game has already started to look creaky- after playing Portal and going through some of the developer's commentaries in TF2, it's obvious they've gotten a lot better at what they do since they made this game.

So far, I'm not really enjoying it as much as the first Half-Life! It seems kind of loose and unfocused, and I don't believe in City 17 as much as I believed in Black Mesa. I think the opening train ride in Half Life 1 had a lot to do with that. City 17 made me incredibly aware of how railroaded the player is when playing this game, since it opens in a plaza surrounded by buildings and yet the only route open to you is down a little side alley.

Also, it is awfully paced! Why shove the player into a sewer for the first chunk of the game? Admittedly placing the airboat after that was a good move, but then that goes on forever! I did enjoy taking out the helicopter in my boat, though. And I'm enjoying collecting the Lambda marks, a new additionfor the Xbox360 version.

So... in some ways the game lets me appreciate what Portal does well, since it is obvious what that game is about: making Portals. With this, though, it's like 'now I'm in a boat now I'm in a zombie village now I'm shooting guys now I'm running away blah blah blah'. I would struggle to tell someone what the 'essence' of Half Life 2 is.

I guess if you were to look at Portal as a 'manifesto' one of the best statements it makes is that games should know what the fuck they are about. From a gameplay perspective, Half-Life 2 is not really about anything! It's just a loose bag of ideas. The storytelling is the only omnipresent idea in there. Of course, it's easy to say this now I've played Portal, but it seems to me like Half Life 2 would have been better if it had focussed solely on the gravity gun.

[dessgeega]

i think you can tell that they wanted to, too. three quarters of half-life 2 is market demands.
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[Harveyjames]

How do you rate Episode 1 and 2? NO SPOILARZ

[dessgeega]

100% fanservice.
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[Harveyjames]

Boo.

I'm only playing through Half-Life 2 because I want to play the episodes. Is it worth me carrying on?

[dessgeega]

the last act of half-life 2 is as close as the game gets to the game they wanted to make.
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[Harveyjames]

That's the one where you're careering around the city with resistance troops fighting striders, right? That's what I always thought Half-Life 2 was going to be like in the first place, instead of 'Half-Life 1 but with Star Wars stormtroopers and you get to go in a boat.'

[Ketch]

Some thoughts on this
Half-Life 2 vs Doom 3. I bought Doom 3 as a stop gap,in many ways it is awful, simplistic AI, rubbish scripting, too many monsters jumping out from behind you. But I found that it did have intense combat you felt as though the enemies were tryIng to kill YOU. whereas in Half-Life 2 they seemed a bit ponderous. Even though the enemies brought out the big guns quite often, it was all scripted and the game felt like an adventure game at times. This was partly because of the defined armour / health of Gordon Freeman. It just wasn't as in your face as it could have been.
Not bad by any means, but as H.J says a bit of a random selection of sections. The main sticking point for me was the way it was so linear.
Hey ho, no big deal. I just preferred the drive, focus and increased horror of H-L1.

[Cycle]

I should really play Half-Life 2 sometime, huh.

[dessgeega]

[Harveyjames]

Cool, can't wait...

I'm reading through the Half-Life 2 art book. Here's my favorite part so far, regarding the concepts in Half-Life 1:

[Cycle]

What, I didn't find any of the enemies sexual or scary that's a good story, though.
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[Harveyjames]

I think these themes ended up permeating the overall design of the monsters in subtle ways. The opening on the headcrab zombie's chest looks a little like a toothed vagina. The headcrabs themselves try to fuck you in the face. There are a bunch of monsters with 'belly arms'. The queen headcrab, the Gonarch (probably a portmanteau of 'Gonad' and 'Matriarch') has one giant dangling egg-sac that the developers say is meant to resemble a testicle, which is its only weak spot.

Aliens designed to play on the male fear of homosexual rape are nothing new in science fiction, the most famous example of course being in the movie 'Alien'. I say 'of course' but that's kind of something that you either know or you don't, and if you've never heard it before it sounds ridiculous, but check Giger's original designs if you want proof! They're hella fixated on blowjobs!

[Cycle]

Yes, I know it's nothing new!

Oh hey, this is a good as place as any to post a movie from MICHIGAN: REPORT FROM HELL with the vagina monster. I GUESS SUDA 51 WAS PLAYING ON THE FEAR OF VAGINAS ALL GAMERS HAVE BECAUSE, YOU KNOW, WE' RE ALL VIRGINS. Would have been better if the mouth was vertical, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxs7HuJj5LY

Also features some amazing voice acting.
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[helicopterp]

[Harveyjames]

Hey there are pages from Marc Laidlaw's original script here, and they cut some lines from the Test Chamber sequence that jokingly inferred the Antimass Spectrometer might make Gordon Freeman sterile.

[Harveyjames]

Wow, Counter-Strike generates more internet traffic than the nation of Italy.

[Harveyjames]

[Cycle]

Actually this discussion reminds me of one I had with a friend once. You know in DooM 3 where you look down from a vent and see a zombie eating another zombie on the floor? Imagine how much creepier it would be if its head was lower and it looked like it was giving the zombie a blowjob! And you know those spider things? They could be like face huggers that aim lower... CROTCH HUGGERS.

Now that shit be scary, yo.
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[Harveyjames]

[Cycle]

Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is much more creepy than anything in The Shining!
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[Harveyjames]

There's a flash game called 'look out behind you hunter' where you're a shotgun-toting woodsman who has to shoot naked men who run at him. It controls sort of like resident evil, except obviously it's a lot scarier because the penalty for getting caught is a bumming. I think more media should completely ecshew metaphor and subtext and just explore primal human fears in a blunt, direct manner!

E.G. if Alien is playing on the male fear of homosexual rape for maximum scares, surely an even scarier movie would be a bunch of straight guys on a mining spaceship and then in transpires one of them, Colonel Schwartz (played by Ving Rhames) is a rapist. He suddenly just straight-up sticks his dick in the mouth of one of the guys over breakfast one morning and then runs away and hides in the air vents and shit and picks them off one by one. You wouldn't have to change a whole lot. I mean there's more reason for the cat to be there if there's a gay guy on board. You could even reinstate that deleted scene where they find one of the long lost crew members covered in white gunk, saying 'kill me'. Also you wouldn't have to rewrite the acid blood scenes, because he also has scary blood (AIDS).

[ryan]

[Cycle]

Really? Well, maybe it was rubbish... I only played the demo and it was like ten years ago. The demo was huge, though, and I remember being impressed with the locations and all that. Plus I loved the music in the first area.
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[aderack]

That picture would be amazing if it were drawn well.
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[Harveyjames]

I think it's amazing as it is.

FORBIDDEN FRUIT

He was nuts, that guy.

There is a lot more where that comes from, but you have to play the game to see it. It's a game I imade where you get to rifle through my housemate's shit. Enjoy! Ihttp://www.maudevintage.com/jamesharvey/chris/intro.htm

[Cycle]

so is that stem thing coming off the fruit supposed to look like a wang?
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[Harveyjames]

Yes. just in case you thought the big pair of tits was too subtle.

[Cycle]

hey whoa, i didn't even notice those
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[Harveyjames]

I might be misreading it, maybe it's a picture of Jar Jar Binks and those are his eyes.

[Harveyjames]

So anyway there was a concept artist working on Half Life 1 who was kind of retarded. All his concepts looked like something you'd draw when you were 15, with massive muscles and weird proportions and bubble writing, exclamation marks and sound effects written in like WHOOSH! ZZWIP!! and BAKOW! He's the guy responsible for the original 'Brian Blessed' beta Gordon Freeman design. He isn't listed in the credits of Half-Life 2, so I guess Valve decided to let him go, and with all the top-tier talent they hired for HL2, I guess you can see why.

Here is the thing: He was responsible for pretty much all the cool, amusing and fun design decisions in the first game! Not least the hornet gun, the snarks, and the alien soldier with the chompy mouth for a hand. Man, they made the wrong move there! That's kind of like Public Enemy letting Flavor Flav go, you're just left with a bunch of boring angry dudes in Malcom X hats.

[dessgeega]

i've started apollo justice.

there's a character named ORLY. fuck your btard localization staff, capcom.

what does it say about apollo justice's character designs that phoenix wright is still the most compelling character in the game?

also,

[Cycle]

Oh, I thought he was talking about Killing Time.

I assume he's talking about the 3DO port of DooM, dessycakes
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[dessgeega]

oh, okay. all this talk of returning doom confused me.
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[dhex]

[Harveyjames]