Video Games Thread

[Late]

Thanks Kieran. Never noticed I had a message.

[harv]

I don't know why but for some reason I'm struggling with Easy Mode on Bayonetta 2. You've got 3 difficulty levels, same as the first game Climax 1 (Very Easy equivalent), Climax 2 (Easy equivalent) and Climax 3 (Normal equivalent).

With Platinum Games games I usually make the fatal mistake of starting on Normal, get my arse kicked and start again on Easy. This time I started on Climax 2 and am getting my arse kicked lmfao

The game is fantastic so far, they've pretty much fixed the problems that the first game had - no daft QTEs and less mini-games (although personally I loved the Space Harrier part!) - and just about everything is bigger and better than the original. The pacing of the game is phenomenal so far. I can see this winning a few GOTY awards.

They've got rid of the sepia-ish filter and have changed the film strip partially animated cutscenes with partially animated cutscenes on a clock face. I guess they had to lose the film strip idea because they got rid of the sepia look which gave the original a nice Noir-ish feel to it. Ideally I would have liked to have seen them go the whole hog and had the first game in black and white with interference between frames to give it a real authentic Noir look but the majority of people wouldn't appreciate it, a lot of people didn't appreciate or understand the Noir-ish design choices they made for the first game so going entirely Noir on the thing would have been a disaster lol

[ancelotti]

Played a few hours of COD:AW today and enjoyed it, despite sucking at it a bit  (think my K/D is around 0.95 atm). Can't say yet whether I like it as much as I did MW and MW2 but it's certainly an improvement on the last few iterations. I think having scorestreaks instead of killstreaks means more people play the objective. SMGs seem underpowered at the moment and sniping seems more difficult, so assault rifles and heavy weapons seem to the way forward.

The exo-suits are a lot of fun. It can get annoying in core modes as people can quickly exit the area with boost jumping after you've unloaded half a clip into them, but I mostly play hardcore modes so it's not so much of an issue. My early impressions of the game are good.

[jman]

Finished Defense Grid 2 last night.. bit disappointed by the end of it that they really didn't build on the first game much at all.. in some places they took features away.. such as flying enemies.. at the same time, the core game is still great.  Tried multiplayer and couldn't get a match up after 45 minutes.. great!

Several achievements left to get.. some will take a lot of time.. looking forward to doing 100 waves on the grinder type missions.. I love a good slog type mission however its too easy when you can rewind each wave.


My MCC order is currently being processing.. the price has gone down £5 since I pre-ordered it in June.. so Zavvi should honour their price promise...

But have just also pre-ordered Far Cry 4 from Zavvi too.. purposely haven't read anything about the game, but if it's as enjoyable as FC3 I'll be a happy boy!

[Late]

Finally got around to playing October's free game, Chariot. Meh. It's not completely awful but I'm not enjoying it much. Don't think I'll get very far before I give it up. Haven't yet tried November's game (Volgar the Viking, or something like that), and still haven't bought Defence Grid 2 - though I definitely will at some point.

Didn't want to buy any more games for a while as I'm a bit skint but couldn't resist Zoo Tycoon for £14.99 from Game.
Will probably arrive next week when I'm busy with Halo, so Zoo Tycoon will get pushed aside and forgotten about, but such is life. TBH I bought it more for the wife and kids. They don't game much, and the Kinect doesn't get used much in gaming, so this game might remedy both of those issues. Had my eye on it since day one but it's always been stupidly priced (around £45). Would have preferred it digital rather than disk but I anticipate being busy with Halo (which is digital) so won't really have to worry about switching disks all the time.

[jman]

I thought Chariot was a great little indie game - just wears you down after a while because its quite repetitive in nature.  I probably wouldn't of paid more than a fiver for it, but it lasted me about 15 hours I'd say.

I managed to find a multiplayer match on Defense Grid 2 last night and its quite unsatisfying.. I won the game easily by spamming loads of gun turrets.. but I wont be going back (I only did it for the chievo's).  I found a match on the co-op type mission but they cut out before the game was finished - again it wasn't great fun.. but I will have to go back to this one as I didn't get the achievements for it.  Getting 100 gold medals on any missions will take some time doing (think I have 25ish).. but there's no set difficulty rating on any of the achievements.. so they are all fairly easy to get.. but I do enjoy a challenging tower defense game.. so I'm going to replay the story at some point (try and understand the completely stupid story line) on harder difficulties.


I tried Volgarr the Viking out last night - what a bastard of a game.. its dead hard.. we are talking Ghosts 'n Goblins type hard and I say that because it is similar in nature to that game as well.. took me about 45 minutes just to do the first half of the first level lol.  I imagine loads of people will give up on this game before they even complete the first level - I don't blame them because it gets very very repetitive when you die all the time!

Good little find on Zoo Tycoon - I might snap that up as I wanted that as a launch game but decided it wasn't worth it - it wont get much play outside of MCC, Far Cry 4 though - so might wait until after Christmas (if it is still on offer).

[Late]

Play.com (rakuten) have an offer on, to promote their new website - a fiver off a ten pound spend.
I've just taken advantage to buy some xbox credit.
You could probably get one £10 voucher (costing £9.99) and add a filler item for a few pence if you can find one, to effectively get your xbox credit at 50% discount. I couldn't be arsed with that so just bought two £10 vouchers. Net result £20 of credit for £14.98.

Need to use code "SPEND10", which is good for new accounts only. If you did find a cheap filler item you could presumably use several different accounts to get loads of xbox credit for half price.

dealspwn

Shame they're posting the vouchers, rather than email. If they were instant I'd probably use them to buy DG2 tonight. But instead I'll get the vouchers at the same time as I get Zoo Tycoon and Halo MCC - so I'll probably just bung the credit on my account and leave it a few weeks before buying DG2.

There's a survey on xbox rewards this month, btw. 250 reward credits ain't worth much but it all adds up and I think it was only four questions.

[jman]

Nice one, was trying to do it with a guest account.. then I realised you needed to register - otherwise there is nowhere to put the code in.  Might use them for xmas prezzies since they will be physical copies!

[Late]

Turns out you need to spend a tenner with a single retailer to take advantage of the discount code (hukd), and this retailer (shopto) doesn't seem to have anything for only a quid or two. Cheapest I could see was a mario kart DS controller thing for about three quid - effectively meaning you're getting your credit for £8 plus some tat to throw in the bin, so that's not really a better deal than buying two £10 vouchers for £15. Unless you actually want a mario kart DS controller thing.

Shame they're selling the £10 vouchers for £9.99. Would be a fantastic deal if they sold them for a penny more. And it's not often you can say that.

[jman]

Quick delivery hey, ordered mine close to 4pm and received them the next day around 1pm.. think I'll keep one and give one away for a xmas pressy.  See you downloaded DG2 late.. I still haven't completed the DG Combined thingy achievements.. so if you feel like helping me out.. I usually put my multiplayer on to search whilst playing the campaign - I set all my options to Any/Any/Any.. I've gone whole hours without finding a match though 

Done a ton of easy gold medals the other day to boost my numbers in a bid to hit 100.. and currently playing through the story on Hard now.. and its certainly feels a lot tougher.. was going easy before I hit level 9 and then hit a racer wave on wave 10 which took me an hour or so to get past.. realised that laser weapons do work so much better against them than anything else, couldn't just spam gun turrets, love it!

[Late]

Yeah, can't argue with the delivery times for both my orders at the back end of last week. My Xbox credit arrived next day - together with the Zoo Tycoon game. Didn't expect either until Monday/Tuesday.
Love Defence Grid (screw you America - my autocorrect wants to spell it that way and I'm sick of arguing with it!) - especially those levels where you can affect the enemy's route with strategic placement of towers. I love making intricate and convoluted paths that mean the enemy has to take a ridiculously long route and passes all of my towers 2 or more times
Will try to sort you out with the multiplayer achievements some time, but I might not play again for a while. Currently playing Halo.
Damn but you forget how much graphics improve - until you hit the "select" button to switch graphics from Anniversary Edition to Classic.
4 achievements done. 446 more to go...

[jman]

Still haven't had my dispatch email from Zavvi for MCC yet.. so unsure if I will get it today or not.. I better do otherwise it will be the last piece of business I do with them considering I preordered in June.

450 achievements though.. wow.. that's gonna take some effort to 100% lol

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Got my dispatch email today... which probably means I wont get MCC until Thursday/Friday now... not happy, especially since I was charged at the pre-order price which was £5 higher than the price they eventually had on their website

Cancelled my Far Cry 4 pre-order I had with them and gone with GAME instead.. not using Zavvi anymore.. they can get fucked.

Its not too bad though.. my missus got me Civ : Beyond Earth for me biffday, so just about to play that for an hour or so.. graphics are pretty awesome!

[harv]

You should have known better than expecting a game delivered on launch day from Zavvi.

[jman]

I expected it to be dispatched before launch day at least!  I cant remember a time where that has happened before.. especially concerning a fairly big game release and the fact I pre-ordered months beforehand.  Even generic retailers like Asda/Tesco make some kind of effort to get pre-orders to you on time.

I've complained about the fact that I paid more than the price on their website.. and asked why it was only dispatched on launch day... if I don't get a decent reply, I'll make sure that when I get it, I'll return the item and get a full refund just to spite them 

[harv]

Have managed to get a shitload of Model Packs for FPS Creator so when I'm feeling up to it I'm going to do another online multiplayer game if you guys fancy giving it a go..?

Might use FPS Creator Reloaded instead though, it uses a new engine which performs a lot better and also lets you use explosive weapons.

Can't believe it was around 9 years since I did the last one We had a lot of fun with that last one.