Video Games Thread

[Late]

Ugh. Just checked my holidays, and I've already used up all of my allowance. Thought I had about 3 days left, and was planning on using two of those to play with my new toy on Fri 22nd and Mon 25th.
And nobody's going to fall for it if I take a sickie just as the new console I've been telling them about comes out.

COD will be around and annualised for a long while yet. They'll have to come up with a new engine sooner or later, hopefully sooner, but while it keeps making fucktonnes of cash it makes sense to keep milking it as long as possible, from a financial standpoint - and it's going to keep making money as it is.
It helps that BF4 isn't getting the best reviews. A lack of competition makes it easier for Activision to be complacent.

Haven't played this year's instalment but I find I'm already looking forward to Treyarch's 2014 instalment. IW were the daddy for a long while but Treyarch's definitely come up with the better versions in recent years imo.

[Late]

Could this gen see the end of the franchise or will people continue to buy anything with the Call of Duty name on it..?

COD Ghosts is breaking sales records.
First game ever to break $1 billion in it's first 24 hours (breaking GTA:V's short-held record $800 million).

Not bad for a game that not only uses an old engine, and has reported framerate issues, but also apparently duplicates an entire section of MW2 in the early part of it's campaign mode. (Meh - nobody buys COD for it's single-player.)


sky news



EDIT - ah, looks like that's just a bit of Activision spin. They seem to be counting copies sent to retailers rather than copies sold. Weak.

[AVFCRoss]

God of War : Ascension makes that another milestone Platinum for me, number 60 now...

Great game, as you'd expect from a GoW game, it's not as good as GoW 3, imo, but some of the set pieces and boss battles are still some of the best you can see in any game series to date...It's quite a short game though, knocked off the whole story on hard difficulty in just over 13 hours and at least 2 of those hours was spent stuck on the various puzzles throughout.

Combat is still satisfyingly gory, boss battles are big and spectacular and the story ties up alot of loose ends nicely. Many of the game mechanics are unaltered...Still alot of QTE's, upgrading weapons/Kratos still works through collecting orbs and gorgon eyes/feathers and many of the enemies and weaponary are recycled from previous games.

Some people would be critical and call it stale, but if it isn't broken theres no reason to try and fix it, it doesn't effect the overall quality of the game and it works for games like FIFA and CoD every single year.

Platinum is super easy, little bit of end-game grinding needed for some trophies, but still a sub 20-hour Platinum.

[jman]

EDIT - ah, looks like that's just a bit of Activision spin. They seem to be counting copies sent to retailers rather than copies sold. Weak.

That's probably because they have 6 different SKUs this year instead of the usual 4.. I doubt very much that the game will sell as much as it previously has..

[Late]

Still considering buying a ps3 next year. They're cheap now, they'll be cheaper still next year - and there's a cracking and very cheap back-catalogue.
Probably wouldn't get many trophies - partly because I'm not into achievements, partly because each game would probably get less play than it deserves, what with it being a second/third machine and mainly older games. But in a quiet month in a toss up between getting one game on the xb1 or getting 5-10 games on the ps3 for the same price the ps3 seems an enticing option.

[harv]

Hmmm...an interesting rumour has been doing the rounds these last couple of days regarding Latte, the Wii U's GPU. Apparently it's supposed to be a 160:8:8 chip - 160 ALUs, 8 TMUs and 8 ROPs. This is unusual because only having 160 shaders is pretty low and because the number of ROPs is usually twice the number of TMUs. And the space on the die taken up by the ALUs is too big, they're almost twice the size that they should be.

Very strange, although it could point to the Wii U having an evolution of the TEV Unit.

[Late]

I also hear it has twice as many WTFs and STFUs as it has LOLs, which is quite unusual.

[harv]

Someone on Gaf has an interesting theory about it. He's speculating that perhaps Latte doesn't have any TMUs at all but has 8 TEV Units instead which would be insane. Doesn't explain the ALUs being so big though. Certainly a conundrum for a geek like me lol

[jman]

Worked out I've got 84 items to find (out of 683) in lost odyssey, which equates to about 5 hours gameplay based on my average of 16.6 items an hour... lol.. the sidequests are great, it's the last three dungeons (forgotten cave, temple of enlightenment, grand staff) I'm not looking forward to doing, should be finished by friday I reckon 

[larry]

Anyone got a good map for GTA, Jumps and spaceship parts?

[jman]

Late posted this link a few pages back - was the main one I used...

GTA Collectibles

[Late]

If you sign up to the  rockstargames social club and link it to your account there's a map that'll show the location of events, missions, ufo parts, letter fragments, etc - marked in yellow if you've done them and white if you haven't. The site also has lots of other stats etc. about your game performance. Definitely worth signing up imo.

If you've got the iFruit app on your ios or android device you can play with Franklin's dog, Chop, to make him like you more. If he likes you and you take him out with you when hunting collectibles he'll help, apparently. (I've not tried this - I had them all before the app came to android.)

I also used maps from here for jumps, and for bridges.
The maps are massive images (8192x8192 pixels) so if you're planning on printing them make sure you shrink them or have a ream of paper and a load of ink spare.


(Ah, I see Kieron provided that map link while I was typing ).

[Late]

Am I the only one thinking we should switch to having a separate thread for each game, rather than lumping virtually everything in this one?

Would make it a lot easier to find stuff - and means you can ignore any posts about games you're not interested in, if you want.

[jman]

Would be practical if we had more than 3 or 4 regular posters...  GTA 5 could of had its own thread because anyone in a sound mental state has owned or owns that game

[ancelotti]

Why on earth would you play GTA V when you can enjoy classics like Wii Party U and various iterations of Mario?