New Testingstan

Did someone say 'preorder'? Well let me tell about preorders.

Because Rhi and I preordered the Vergil's Downfall DLC for DmC, mainly because Rhi has a Vergil fetish, and I liked his playing style in DMC3 and had high-hopes it would hold over to the new game.

First off, the DLC release-date kept getting pushed back. First it was mid/end January, then mid February, finally early March. It turned out to be complete bullshit and Capcom was deliberately holding it back to compete with the release of GoW5.

This was found out when Capcom's brilliant team accidentally activated purchase codes for portions of Europe, resulting in a number of people getting the game before they could shut down purchasing, and spamming spoilers all over the internet.

Then release-date came, and apparently there was some issue with the preorder download codes. Which meant you could buy the DLC then and have it ready to play, but if you preordered with the intention of getting it before others, you were last in line to actually get the content you paid for up to half a year ago.

Then you find out that the DLC has decided to skip out on all that bothersome 'cutscene' business, and replace it with a bunch of comic-book panels that, while not terribly bad, just reek of a cheap cop-out.

Well played, Capcom, it seems you've taken the Sony approach to customer satisfaction.

I honestly don't understand the idea of pre-ordering DLC. If i'm going to pick up an actual physical copy of a game, I might pre-order it and go to the midnight release at the local gamestop for tournaments and pizza, but DLC?

Stofsk wrote:Although you raise an interesting issue, as kickstartered games are a kind of preorder. And I don't mind putting down money for those.

Kickstarter games generally come with a lot more stuff, and have the money going nearly directly to the developer (only about 15% taken by kickerstarter + amazon) compared to retail where the developer is lucky to get 15% of the retail price. Even Steam + publisher would be upward from +30% of the retail price.

For 'pre-orders', Kickstarter is an utter no brainer for developers.

Does anyone know if this is the last challenge weekend for Mass Effect 3? I wanted to do enough to get the commendations, but the briefing on the Bioware blog makes it seem like it's the last one

Anyone else playing Tomb Raider? I'm not done with it, but I wanted to hear what people think so far.

So I'm going through Revengeance and loving how challenging it is compared to most hack 'n slashers. Though my biggest disappointment so far? There's a whole mission set in Denver, but no recognizable landmarks at all. I wanted to fuck some shit up.

The amount of fanboys gushing over the new Simcity and willingness to forgive outright lies is kinda horrifying.

Maxis/EA has outright lied to people's faces that multiplayer is 100% required and that they "offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline" (ref), when a trivial debug hack turns off the requirement for online play. Sure you can't save, but that isn't related to computation.

But apparently calling that false advertising or missleading commentary is too much.

joviwan wrote:Anyone else playing Tomb Raider? I'm not done with it, but I wanted to hear what people think so far.

I want to play it. But I haven't got it yet.

xon wrote:The amount of fanboys gushing over the new Simcity and willingness to forgive outright lies is kinda horrifying.

This isn't surprising. A lot of people will swallow any lie they get told if it makes them feel better about themselves.

it's a huge bummer because the stuff they claimed it did was pretty cool and i was looking forward to it

thankfully i decided to wait and saved myself the pain

maybe after a year of patching (and maybe mods on the level of NAM) it can be as fantastic as SC4 is

I'm kinda curious about Tomb Raider too. I was more interested in it when it was still supposed to be a grim-gritty survival game instead of "Uncharted feat. Lara Croft", but it might still be worth picking up from a bargain bin or Steam sale. So how's the story and gameplay? I've heard there's a fairly jarring difference between cutscene Lara crying about violence and gameplay Lara massacring dozens of opponents, but how bad is it really?

In other news, I took up Ninja Gaiden again. There's something about the first one (well first modern one anyway) that didn't quite transfer over to the sequel. A lot less room for error makes the whole thing more rewarding I guess.

Minor spoilers ahoy.

The game certainly starts out bent towards 'grim survivalness' and doesn't shy away from putting Lara through a meat grinder to sell your frailty (the game literally starts with you being impaled on rebar, and makes you pull it out by button mashing).

As you get farther in, though, it gets progressively more 'tomb raidery', with decidedly bizarre travel routes using a series of increasingly unlikely traversal tools. Lara also slowly transforms from "frightened yet determined panic" to "screaming at the badguys as she chases them with a grenade launcher" (in context, this scene is delightful). Most of Lara's cut-scene 'discrepancies' are more because someone she likes is being massacred, not that there is a massacre.

I've been enjoying the narrative and character development. The story is patently bonkers, but still enjoyable to follow so far, though very obvious things are repeated ad nauseum by the entire cast.

The actual gameplay is pretty fun. The game controls well using KBAM (the only problem is QTEs, which the game is completely full of, but the problem is how they translated it to PC, not the QTEs themselves), it's got a cover system that doesn't involve any snapping, and the context sensitive stuff is really accurate. Shooting mans is a little awkward, but it's not game breakingly bad or anything.

So I'm pretty sure I'm not enjoying DMC. Has anyone played both it and Revengeance, and if so, is Revengeance any more good?

joviwan wrote:So I'm pretty sure I'm not enjoying DMC. Has anyone played both it and Revengeance, and if so, is Revengeance any more good?

Revengeance is more challenging, whether or not it's more good depends on what you're looking for. What don't you like about DMC?

It's not Bayonetta.

I haven't analyzed it more closely than that, yet, so my ability to be articulate here isn't terribly developed. Um.

Story isn't really engaging me, level design and boss fights are kind of 'meh', and the controls aren't really... responsive enough? That sounds a bit odd considering the controls are really responsive, how do I phrase this

In bayonetta, 100% of everything you do is mutable and can be stopped or replaced at any time with something else/with a danger roll

In DMC, a bunch of attacks and abilities 'commit', which makes combat more stiff and less flowing. Plus, button layout makes danger rolling awkward and obnoxious. Beyond that, it's not terribly innovative (which sounds asinine because I just said "it's not like this other game I played in the same genre"), so I see it as 'the same kind of thing, except a game that came before it did it better than this one does and it doesn't offer anything new."

You might not like Revengeance a whole lot more then. The plot is pretty superficial and the controls aren't as fluid as Bayonetta, but the game pokes a lot of fun at itself and manages to be a more enjoyable than DMC because of how silly it gets. Blocking in the game is a vital mechanic (unlike Bayonetta or DMC), but the camera can make things frustrating.

Zod wrote:You might not like Revengeance a whole lot more then. The plot is pretty superficial and the controls aren't as fluid as Bayonetta, but the game pokes a lot of fun at itself and manages to be a more enjoyable than DMC because of how silly it gets. Blocking in the game is a vital mechanic (unlike Bayonetta or DMC), but the camera can make things frustrating.

Poking fun at itself is good, and so is being silly.

Can Blocking be done at literally any moment? Bayonetta's danger-roll was a pretty primary feature of the combat system, and making it reward good timing and also 'completely at-will' made combat a lot more dynamic.

Well. You can try and block at any moment, but it's not automatic and a lot of it depends on timing. It's also hard to break a combo if you get started which can screw you over. As far as combat mechanics go it only has a few new features over most hack 'n slashers, but the humor is a really big saving point to the game. The piss poor tutorial and first boss can be challenging to deal with, though.

Thanks for the insight. I shall mull this information over.

One of my friends did a pretty rad thing:

Does she rescue Link?

Now the title makes sense!

I liked that game.

My god is DS' More Brain Training blooming awkward and Dr. Kawashimas' animated avatar is inviting a heafty punch. And my brain age results (in the region of pensioners) has left me depressed.

So, I went to have a look at the "Wasteland 2" website, and I'll be honest, I think I'm starting to get hyped for this project.

And even if it prove to not be that good, I think it still has a lot of potential to be a great piece of entertainment.


Also, from the vibe I get I would guess the publishers intend it to be relatively easy to mod. If it get enough of a community this should prove interesting.

RogueIce wrote:Does she rescue Link?

Yes!