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who is buying Beyond Earth

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~ I am tired of ze same old faces! Ze same old things!

I will eventually but, if the traditional Civ games are anything to go by, Beyond Earth won't get fully into its stride until it has had a few expansions.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Played through several things since my last post (being sick in bed the last week helped).

More horror, mostly.



Clock Tower - Creepy SNES game in which you control the slowest video game character ever with a little cursor that you move around the screen. The fact that all you can do when a little brat with giant pruning sheers starts chasing you, is slowly run and hide, is what makes the game feel like what real survival horror should be.

Splatterhouse - Pretty straightforward game. It's basically a run-of-the-mill arcade beat-em-up that gets by on excellent graphics and a distinctive (for 1988) design. I remembered it being harder than it was.

Silent Hill 2 - Was a little disappointed by this, overall. It starts out great with that fantastically oppressive apartment building. I started to feel let down a little by about the midpoint of the game when I realized they were introducing more subplots than they could ever hope to wrap up (which is only made worse by the end of the game when James keeps counter-factually declaring that he understands it all). Also, even though the atmosphere stays pretty rich throughout, the fact that not long after the plot starts meandering all over the place, you start to accumulate more ammo and health supplies than you know what to do with (since enemies can for the most part be easily avoided) takes away some. Maybe I should have played it on hard. Still a fun game, I just thought it was going to be something special at the start.

Fatal Frame (PS2) - I started playing this last night. Digging it so far, since it has sort of a Clock Tower vibe (little girl alone in a creepy mansion) along with a weird (for the genre) Pokemon Snap gameplay mechanic. I'll see how it goes.

Also had been playing a bit more of Radiant Silvergun (XBLA) before I got sick. It's amazing how much more addictive I find this shmup than any other that I've played, due to the simple addition of experience-level-ups that carry over from game to game. I'm thinking I might have to start a Steam account (or borrow my brother's Wii) so I can play Ikaruga.

Lucas Pope is the man who made Papers, Please. He is making a new game called Return of the Obra Dinn. And this morning he released a rough playable demo.



I won't get a chance to play it until I get home later, but obviously, I'm pretty giddy. P, P (and The Republia Times, available for free on his site) is enough to make me inherently interested in pretty much anything he decides to do going forward, and I love old school adventure games. And it's really interesting that he's doing it in literally two colors (not graysale: literally just black pixels and white pixels).



He's hinted a lot about some interesting mechanics that he says are touched on just a bit in the demo. It looked like they had something to do with hand movement.

The CEO of the game company I work for and I tend to play Civ on Thursday nights, and we will be getting this right out of the gate!

@Lines - I played Clock Tower, but I could have sworn I played in on PS1! Maybe I played a sequel or something...

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I think the PS1 version was a remake (there were also some sequels/spinoffs on that and later systems). If I can find a cheap used copy I'll give it a try.

any central timers hoppin' on Beyond Earth tonight? 11pm whoooooo

I saw the news about this yesterday too but haven't tried the demo yet. Have you had a chance?

I got the game as a gift, and will give it a shot at some point soon. Early word is tepid, at best. Taccy knows the series extremely well, and I think he is right about these games not coming into their own until X-pacs hit. Alas...it was gifted to me, so i shall play it!

Just as soon as I finish Divinity!

Yup. It only takes about 10-15 minutes. Thoughts:

1. The sound and voice acting are already both great. Very atmospheric and crisp.
2. The fluid reaching/grabbing mechanic is cool and immersive.
3. There's another mechanic that I don't want to spoil; it has a lot of potential, but it's not clear how it'll be utilized yet.
4. I think I wish the game had just a little more texture than literal black-and-white pixels. I feel like it's a cool idea, but that the game would feel similarly minimalist (but a lot more pleasant looking) if it utilized grays, too.
5. There's a very cool, artistically confident feeling throughout.

Very interested to see how it turns out.

My backlog's piling up to such an extent that I'm on the verge of developing some form of gaming constipation. Elite's taking 80%+ of my time and I've just had an invite to the Evolve closed Alpha - dunno if they'll get any meaningful info from me.

Deadly Premonition 90% off on Steam! That's £1.99/$2.49

There's a 50-50 chance that this is one of the best games you've ever played, as I genuinely think it is. Worth the risk at this price.

I grabbed it. 3 bucks? Come on!!!

You'll need DPFix - By default the game renders in 720p and looks pretty crappy. With DPFix you can specify any resolution you want (both internal and display) plus add AA, AF etc. Pretty essential and by the guy who 'fixed' Dark Souls PC.

Link

Not sure when I will install it, but I bought it and added it to me library!

If you can make it past the intro/tutorial (I didn't when I originally bought the game on 360 and traded it), which plays like a bad RE4 clone, you'll be ok. A Lynch fan like you should dig the story as long as you remember to check any cynicism at the door.

Been watching a bit of the Giant Bomb Extra Life stream and they're playing an early build of Salt and Sanctuary, something I've never heard of. It looks stunning - A hand drawn, 2D Souls game.



Fortunately it's only a launch PS4 exclusive.

Started playing Tomb Raider, which I bought for about $5 on sale at (I think) Tacitus' suggestion. Pretty good time so far, especially for the cost. Well-written, good sense of drama. A little linear, which was expected but was a mild bummer because it often looks wide open until you start poking around and realize there's not a lot of room to do so.

I read one reviewer who said that there was too much combat, and I'd definitely agree with that. Way too much. Not just in terms of gameplay, but in a way that creates some serious ludonarrative dissonance given that this is supposed to be the process that turns her into a survivor. Meanwhile she's killing dozens of people right before a cut scene where she steels herself to climb up a ladder.



It's a shame, because I think there's an awesome game underneath this, where the "optional" tombs are a bigger part of the game, where there's more acrobatic exploration and far less combat, and a more gradual buildup of skills. But I guess they wanted something more thrilling (I've yet to play Uncharted, but I glean that this is what it's like).

That sounds like a lot of complaining, but I actually like the game a fair bit, especially given how cheap it came.

I think it's a better game than any of the Uncharteds because the runny, jumpy, climby stuff is less stilted and there's not that awful wisecracking dialogue assaulting you at every turn. Towards the end of the game the amount of enemies just got stupidly large, almost to Dragon Age II degrees, and shooting wave after wave of refugees from the Russian pilot of Lost was no fun at all. I checked out.

I hope the sequel has more, y'know, tombs to raid and less of a desire to ape a popular franchise. Making Tombs optional was a cowardly move.

Tomb Raider Anniversary still holds up as an example of what I'd loved the reboot to have been. Freshen those mechanics up and get rid of the awful camera and it'd be a winner.

Geez, the number of enemies goes up?! I think I've already killed a hundred guys. And yeah, optional tombs in a game called Tomb Raider. Imeanreallynow.

But yeah, still a decent time. And as dumb as it sounds I do get a weird, small level of satisfaction from playing it and sort of daydreaming about what it could have been.

I might give the anniversary remake a try. I remember watching my brother play the original way back when, and it was a very quiet game most of the time. Combat came in fits and starts, but most of the game was just making your way around.