Video Games Thread

[jman]

Downloaded Sonic Mania last night - best gaming decision I've made for a while - a brilliant mash-up of all the best sonic games melded into one - felt very nostalgic playing it and its got loads of cool new stuff to do in it.. far better than the Sonic 4 episodic shit.  One of the bosses I've met so far makes you play Dr. Robotniks Mean Bean Machine against them lol.

I still hate Chemical Zone though

[jman]

Sonic Mania has been great fun to play, pretty much finished with it now, some of the (completely newer) levels which were completely reimagined based on levels in previous games were a bit dull compared to some of the levels which were rehashed and altered.  Casino zone and Starlight zone were probably my favourite levels from all sonic games, so disappointed that the related levels in sonic mania were reimagined in full - they just weren't as fun.  Would of been good to perhaps of included sonic spinball in some way too because that was a pretty awesome game.  Still, would purchase again even with this knowledge,  best Sonic game since sonic 2!

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I never really got into Sonic for some reason, no idea why. Same with 2D Mario too. Maybe because they're both in 2D?

Mind you, I have to play 3D Mario games in short doses because that character annoys the FUCK out of me. There's only so many 'woo hoos' and 'whee-hees' that I can stand before I want to throw something at my telly

Talking of old 3D games someone has done a VR Mod of Quake II which I'm going to have to try out at some point.

I've got so many games to play at the moment that it's ridiculous, and I just pre-ordered Arktika.1 from the developers of the Metro franchise yesterday. Got a few quid off by pre-ordering, it only cost me £19.99. I still haven't completed Killing Floor Incursion yet or any of the other games I've bought recently. My VR libraries both on Oculus Home and on Steam have LOADS of games to play. Keep on meaning to go back to Alien Isolation VR and Doom 3 BFG VR too.

Oculus/Facebook have REALLY been knocking stuff out of the proverbial park with their game releases. Hopefully they're going to announce another $250m fund for developers again during Oculus Connect 4 next month because I need 3 or 4 grand to be able to have my game for sale and give all of the proceeds to cancer research (that's assuming that I ever finish it!).

The crates for my game are coming along nicely I think. I've now added an emissive channel to the texture which lights up the red light and screen display on the crates. Here's the Medium Storage Crate:



I'm having trouble with the text on the screen which is a pain in the arse, it looks great at 4K but you can't read it at 1K and there's no way I'll be able to have 4K textures in my game without it running at 3 or 4fps lol

[jman]

Pre-ordered Cuphead - looks like a beautiful little game - doubt it will have much replay factor without a coop partner though but love the look of it.

Been playing through Ghost Recon Wildlands in the last couple of weeks - trying to get it finished before Wolfenstein hits later this month - its got good gameplay - but only in fits and bursts - it gets very repetitive quite quickly - would be great to play with friends, but no split screen and cant play cross-platform (i.e. xbox/pc) means I won't be playing it online at all.

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The Wolfenstein games are excellent. Only played the first two but they were VERY good. The only thing better than killing Nazis and killing zombies is killing Nazi zombies

FPS games are one of my favourites, particularly scary FPS games. Have never been much of a fan of online multiplayer though, I'd rather play multiplayer on a LAN like we used to do at lunch when I was working at Eidos. I just have a problem with online chat, much better on a LAN so you can talk to each other in person rather than with mics. Way too many annoying kids about playing online too.

I much prefer single player games myself tbh.

[Late]

I don't play all that many of the games with gold (partly because I've already played the decent ones) but today I downloaded and played "Gone Home" on the day it became available.

What a bag of shite. Don't bother, people.

Looks and feels like it's going to be a horror, but it's just horrific, instead.
It's some interactive story about angsty teenagers. I play games to get away from that shit... :/

[jman]

Be sure to watch out for that one lol.

Cuphead's great - but not worth £16ish.. I've already finished it on Normal - it's a beautiful game and reminiscent of vintage Disney cartoons - but there's just not enough variety or longevity to warrant £16 for me - I think you'd get better value out of Sonic Mania personally.  Cuphead is fairly tough in comparison to games these days - but its certainly not impossible - I liked that part of it.

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Has Cuphead only just released? Fucking hell, that was in development for YEARS.

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Arktika.1 is releasing in a week's time (a week tomorrow at 6pm!). From 4A Games, the developers that do the Metro franchise. It uses node teleportation as a game mechanic which is a little disappointing but it looks like that's going to bring an element of strategy into the firefights which MIGHT be cool if they do it well enough. Anything post-apocalyptic gets an immediate thumbs-up from me and the Metro games in particular are VERY well done imo.

Going to be interesting to see how long a playthrough of it is going to be, it's only 30 quid so we could be looking at 4 or 5 hours I think.

I'm aiming for 4 or 5 hours for my game and am thinking of having it priced at £9.99 or maybe £10.99.

Going to start work on a few asteroids tomorrow if I get the chance, I've still got to sort out my boxes after moving back in yesterday after some work has been done on my flat. Doesn't look too bad tbh but I'm not getting the double glazing sorted out until a month or two later because the landlord 'can't afford it at the moment'. Bollocks to that. He's getting around £3500 per month in rent on these 4 flats in total and he's he's spent fuck all on my flat since I moved in 17 years ago

And the builders didn't actually finish what they were supposed to do either, fucking cowboys.

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Well bugger all work on my flat has been done since I last posted. I've sent the knob head at the letting agents 3 texts and 2 emails. No response. Told him in my last email that I'm going to have a shower tonight and flood the flat downstairs if he hasn't had the work done. I haven't had a shower since I got back a week and a half ago. I've been washing in a big bowl of water but enough is enough!

I tried out Arktika.1 last night and it's pretty good. By 4A Games, the developers of the Metro games. There's a few issues with it but not game breaking - the 'floor' where you drop items is lower than the floor level that the controllers reach so you can't pick things up but whenever you drop a gun it automatically reappears on your back. The intro is a bit weird but worked okay for me because I'm a short arse. You're being driven in a vehicle by Viktoria, who's quite a hornbat, and the way they've done things is like this: she's sitting down and you're standing up so you don't have a seat. Works great if you're 5'6" like me because everything looks okay, but taller people have said that their heads are clipping through the top of the vehicle lol

The scale of your hands is also a little off, but I've put this down as being by design. You're wearing gloves and it's bloody freezing so it makes sense that you're wearing a bloody great big pair of gloves tbh.

I like the feel and handling of the two weapons I've used so far. They're on holsters on your back. There's a revolver and a handgun. The revolver is reloaded by flicking the gun left to open the bullet chamber and it fills with ammo and you then flick it back upright to fire. The handgun is reloaded by snapping it down to your waist. The best thing about the guns so far is the rumble, makes firing and reloading them REALLY good and satisfying.

Just done the first level so far and it was pretty good, the first boss was a bloomin great big robot that had gone wonky. These things are designed to kill bandits and these mutant type things but someone has sabotaged it to kill ANY living thing. Including me lol. The best thing about VR is the boss fights, they're actually INTIMIDATING because of their size combined with them moving at 90fps. A couple of them in Wilson's Heart were quite scary at times, and I'm normally great with scary games too. Like all VR stuff it's something you don't quite 'get' until you experience it for yourself but I'm pretty sure that both the PS5 and Xbox Two will have VR goodness out of the box so you'll begin to realise what I've been raving about this last year or so.

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So much for me not spending any more money on video games lol

The Oculus Store has a Flash Sale for Halloween, 15 games with good discounts. I already had 11/15 that I bought before the sale and one of the 15 has had piss poor reviews so far so I bought 3 - Drop Dead, Duck Season and Don't Knock Twice.

All on my credit card...I'll worry about paying for them later lmfao 

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Doh! Wasn't a Halloween Flash Sale, it was a Friday 13th Flash Sale

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Just played Drop Dead for half an hour and got halfway through it so there's not a great deal of content but that goes for just about every on-rails/lightgun game. The replayability is all in the Leaderboards. Makes me wish that Sega would get off their arses and port ALL of the House Of The Dead games. Mind you, they probably don't want to do that because the movement in these sort of games might be uncomfortable for some people. Drop Dead has a Comfort Mode that (I think) teleports you rather than wheels you along a track.

Any game involving a weapon is so much better in VR using the Touch controllers, same as the Wii remote for the Wii years ago. Much better accuracy is possible.

Halfway through Drop Dead did become a bit hectic and I even died once on the last level I played (7/15) so it might be a challenge to complete the whole game without dying. There's also a load of props that you get points for shooting too like crows, bottles and pumpkins so they're good for earning bonus points.

[jman]

Playing South Park : Fractured But Whole - great game, plays very much like Stick of Truth which I thought was great too.  There's a new mini-game that you play right at the start of the game where you have to get your character to do a poo on a toilet lol - think there's an achievement for doing a poo on every toilet in the game and each toilet has its own difficulty

Went to the church and Father Maxi said I had to face my demons, locks you in a cupboard and then two paedophile priests turn up trying to convince your character that they are just in your imagination and you eventually have to fight them when they try touching you.. one of the priests attack moves was to pull out some anal beads which he then starting to flog himself with before charging you down.. so funny lol

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