New Testingstan

I'm looking forward to the aquaculture DLC release

Awww yeah soil PH levels and shit

But they have 20 licensed brands!!

I actually saw a father and son looking at a train simulator game in a game shop once, talking about how much they were looking forward to playing it

evilsoup wrote:I actually saw a father and son looking at a train simulator game in a game shop once, talking about how much they were looking forward to playing it

I bet their last name was Russell

So I decided to say "To Hell with it" and got Saints Row 4. I'm having a blast with it, but anyone who goes into it expecting something like Saints Row 2 is going to be sorely disappointed. As joviwan said, it's a superhero sandbox, not a crime sandbox.

You no longer have safehouses with garages, and can now just teleport vehicles directly to you, which I thought was a bit sad since I liked how getting around the city when you weren't near a safe house required jacking whichever vehicle you happened upon first, which could always result in shenanigans. But at the same time the ability to drive the cars and planes is pretty much a quaint anachronism, since you can run faster than the cars, run up vertical skyscrapers, leap giant distances, and then glide to your destination.

To compensate for cars being largely unnecessary for transportation, the radio can now be left on all the time, which for me consisted largely of leaving the Classical music station on since I wasn't too impressed by the selection for most of the other stations. That station does have some good moments with the posh British-accented alien overlord occasionally breaking up the music by reading excerpts from Pride and Prejudice or Romeo and Juliet (with the newslady from the previous games reading Juliet's dialogue).

The safehouses themselves are replaced by a spaceship that is half the Nebuchadnezzar from the Matrix and half the Normandy from Mass Effect. A main part of the Mass Effect comparison is that every homie there has a normal talk to option and a "romance" option (which, like most SR stuff, is really just making fun of the concept), so there is a goofy sex scene with every member of the crew except, appropriately enough, Keith David. NSFW and Spoilers

Overall, the game spends most of the time making fun of weird quirks in the Saints Row franchise (you can, for example, hang out with Shaundi from both SR2 and SR3, and the two different Shaundis absolutely hate each other), so it feels a bit like if Bioware turned their ME3 Citadel DLC into a full-length game. It can be a breath of fresh air if you think that video games these days are taking themselves too seriously.

Does it play pretty similarly to something like Prototype or is it a different style of superhero game?

Didn't play Prototype, so I can't say. It's pretty straightforward controls. The sprint button makes you run at super speed on the ground, glide when in the air, and run up walls when you are touching a building while not on the ground. You jump higher depending on how long you hold the jump button. Use different buttons to switch between active powers then press the use power button to use whichever active power you have selected. Still have a couple powers I haven't unlocked, so I don't know if those are different.

timmy wrote:

evilsoup wrote:I actually saw a father and son looking at a train simulator game in a game shop once, talking about how much they were looking forward to playing it

I bet their last name was Russell

I own the very first Train Simulator game.

Yeah, it doesn't mimic SR2 much, and it doesn't even mimic SR3 very much in tone or themes. It spends more time on character interactions with your homies for fluff and story (a lot of the game is a trip down Nostalgia Lane for the Boss and their crew, dealing with their personal demons. In a saints row kinda way, of course). The game doesn't have the dramatic tone or depth of SR2, but between homie interaction and audio-logs, I was fairly satisfied with the character focus.

(Also, calling up your homies to help you is great in this one, because they will often shoot the shit with each other while you're all running around murdering things.)

The radio stations are a bit bland this time around, it's true. K12 is definitely my favorite, but the classical music station takes a close second place, just for the BBEG being snobby over the radio.

It's true that Zinyak being a snob on the radio is a huge selling point for the classical station, but for me it also has the added bonus where a well timed Ode to Joy or Mars the Bringer of War is amazing.

Still, wish I could get the song libraries from 2 or 3, if only for Land Down Under, Flight of the Valkyries, and Power.

Can we talk about the Metal Gear Solid franchise and how it fails at story-telling ?

Go for it, I just can't participate beyond

RECESSIVE GENES

Oxymoron wrote:Can we talk about the Metal Gear Solid franchise and how it fails at story-telling ?

NOPE

Well, my only contact with the franchise so far is that Let's Play I've linked of Revengeance (which isn't over yet), and from the same guys the beginning of the Metal Gear Solid 3 game, and my gripe mostly is :

Fuck codec.

This is a really lazy way of telling a story through the medium (videogames).

Basically it's : "okay, here's an infodump on X (while we're in the middle of a mission)" "here's an infodump on Y (while we're in the middle of a mission)" "here's a philosophical conversation (while we're in the middle of a mission)" etc.

This is a hack job. This isn't effective storytelling. This isn't even story telling at all. This is basically the Stuart Slade approach to story-telling. It completely breaks pacing, and basically place 80% of the story outside of the actual game.

Plus, the cutscenes. Okay, most of them looks cool. But goddamn if I wanted to watch a movie I'd watch an actual movie not a fucking videogame.


It's, basically, the creators of that franchise seems like they understand nothing of the medium through which they are telling a story.


Now, don't get me wrong : the actual gameplay looks like it's really fun - albeit it also seems like either nothing is explained or when it is it's done in an obnoxious, immersion-breaking way ; but the way the story is told is not immersive at all, and if I were to play the game I'd probably miss more than half of it, by skipping codec calls or cinematics.


And the worst thing is... I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people out there who would try to defend that as good story-telling, and get angry and cry if the formula was changed.

there were rumours when MGS3 was being developed that you would have to find quiet places to talk on your codec, which to me would imply that it would happen in real-time
which would have been pretty cool
oh well

Metal Gear's story style is still very deeply tied to the traditional Japanese way of doing story telling in a game. Tons of Japanese games do the whole hours of scrolling through text boxes thing (just like a visual novel ) partially because that's what the technology would allow for back in the early days of games. Remember the first Metal Gear game was for an 8 bit computer so there sure as hell wasn't going to be any way of conveying story other than text or rudimentary cutscenes (like Ninja Gaiden). It's one of those things that so deeply ingrained into game design over there it still persists. This is partially true because it's cheaper than doing a full production like with what western developers do. Another thing that has been talked about by Japanese developers is how the culture over in Japan is very big on rules and structure. It's why turn based RPGs and strategy games are more popular over there than open world sandbox games. I see the whole codec and cutscene thing as being like that. Like hey it's time for story now and hey it's time for game now. It's kind of more ritualistic ya know?

http://www.1up.com/features/clash-cultures

You can read more here.

Also this is my personal theory, but I think with the Metal Gear games the story is treated as something you have to also invest in experiencing. Like they actually want you to go and seek it out and do whatever you can with constant codec calls. After that you can just play the game without bothering with the story. I'm on my third playthrough of Metal Gear Rising and I'm just skipping the story and focusing on the game. I did really like the story though and I think the game would have been much poorer without it.

Oxymoron wrote:Well, my only contact with the franchise so far is that Let's Play I've linked of Revengeance (which isn't over yet), and from the same guys the beginning of the Metal Gear Solid 3 game

I hate to say it but this is literally not the right way to actually experience Metal Gear

Like it's not a game that you can effectively experience the story by watching. Despite the jokes about all its cutscenes it is a franchise that really has to be played. Like, for example, in Metal Gear Solid, Snake is regularly confronted with the pain of having killed people ... but Snake never kills anyone in cutscenes. It is entirely down to the player how true Liquid's statement about 'you loving all the killing' is.

It's the same thing in all the games, basically. So much of the Codec is just down to player discretion or discovering things through experimentation. Much of the franchise's punch comes seeing where the game intersects with the story. I mean this is a franchise where you can't save your game without having a discussion about relationships or learn about cheesy b-movies.

all let's plays are worthless

Well, I've never owned a playstation, so...

PS2s are like £20, and that would let you play all the MGS games that are worth playing
alternatively:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear ... Collection

there's always this madness

I enjoy the games because they are very difficult to play, at least to me. They always make my heart pump with excitement and rage from failure. MGS4 was fun as hell.

I'm pretty sure i've seen combo boxes of MGS 2 & 3 for the Xbox 360 at the local gamestop-equivalent. Maybe even MGS 4, I'm no sure.