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I'm watching Menace II Society. Have you seen this? Have you? What did you think of it? Did you like it? Do you think that I like it, or don't like it? What do you reckon? Like? Not like? What about you? do you like it? Or not? No? or yes?
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Nice try ringers, but the answer is no: I did not like it. But I was drunk, so maybe that clouded my judgement.
Anyway, this thread is bout new games, not urban drama movies. I have been plying Borderlands for around six hours on my own, and it seems fine, although I suspect that it kind of needs to be done via co-op for it to really shine. It looks and sounds great, and the play style is as smooth as fluid as it could be, which is sort of amazing considering all the rpg elements that are built into the character progression. Your character has a personal tech tree that you spend your xp on, and killing things / completing quests generally earns you xp and money. You can use the money at vending machines dotted around the desert to buy shields, ammo, health, grenades, and guns.
As I said, six hours into it and it's definitely a shooter with rpg elements rather than the other way around, making almost the opposite of Fallout 3. Emphasis isn't placed on exploration or decision making, but instead running / driving through large mapped areas gunning the fuck out of everything and collecting xp + cash. It's all done with a jokey tone, and has a kind of 'beyond thunderdrome' wasteland setting, kind of like 'desert punk' maybe, where everything is grimy and knackered and recycled, and society is a pre-industrial system of post-modern tribes. It's not set on Earth though, and doesn't have any relation to the actual world. It seems to be unconcerned with commenting on things (not that this is a bad thing).
I don't know. I think it seems fine but I'm already getting slightly bored of the battles, because they seem to be all exactly the same, and all unavoidable. It's just an endless tide of enemies, with no sense of growing tension or clear story.
quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Tweaked my settings a bit and got to less than a tenth off your time Misc. I'm now #2
I reckon I can beat you by a reasonable amount.
As far as I remember, I loaded the default setup for that car on that track, dropped the brake pressure to about 97% and upped the steering lock to 22°. I tend to fuck things up if I do too much tweaking, due to severe lack of knowledge.
It's interesting to hear your opinions of my lap - you're dead right on all counts, I reckon. I find hairpins the most challenging part of any track. Perhaps I need to adjust my FOV.
Which view do you drive from? I find the helmet cam too restrictive as the view of the track only takes up about a third of the screen vertically. So I use the central view that shows the bonnet and wheels.
Good luck with your laps. I hope you'll knock a few hundred milliseconds off my time, and give me some challenge.
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personally it feels a little like the point of killing enemies is so you can get better weapons so you can get better at killing enemies, so you can get better weapons etc and there seems to be something fundamentally hollow in that. I suppose that the combat just isn't varied or interesting enough for me. You don't get the paper/scissors/stone weapons strategy of something like COD or Halo, where you have to try and manage which guns you carry and which ammo you conserve. It doesn't feel like that has been built into it, which is weird. The constant 'loot' collection means that you spend half your time trying to decide which weapons to keep and which to discard, but that gets tiring after a while. Personally I just want a bunch of guns that'll do the job, and it's annoying to have to keep examining the stats of every new gun you find (because they're generated on the fly) trying to work out if you should keep it or not.
Lol, you're right though, and I'll certainly carry on playing. It's supposedly a long old game that I'm probably only just starting.
quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Tweaked my settings a bit and got to less than a tenth off your time Misc. I'm now #2
I reckon I can beat you by a reasonable amount.
As far as I remember, I loaded the default setup for that car on that track, dropped the brake pressure to about 97% and upped the steering lock to 22°. I tend to fuck things up if I do too much tweaking, due to severe lack of knowledge.
It's interesting to hear your opinions of my lap - you're dead right on all counts, I reckon. I find hairpins the most challenging part of any track. Perhaps I need to adjust my FOV.
Which view do you drive from? I find the helmet cam too restrictive as the view of the track only takes up about a third of the screen vertically. So I use the central view that shows the bonnet and wheels.
Good luck with your laps. I hope you'll knock a few hundred milliseconds off my time, and give me some challenge.
I loaded the setup for that car/track combo. I left the steering and brake pressure as they were. I moved the brake bias towards the front by an extra 2%, took some pressure out of the rear tyres, and reduced the amount of differential lock by 5% on power and coast to get rid of some of the oversteer at the corner exit.
I also put the fuel level down to as low as I could get away with while still being about to do a few laps.
I use the helmet view. I didn't like it at first but I got used to it and I find the centre view a bit annoying
Why not download my ghost and have a look at my lines?
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Why not download my ghost and have a look at my lines?
I will. I'll also try some of your setup tweaks to see if they help me.
Sad as it sounds, I actually can't wait to get home tonight and start doing some laps.
It's your turn to choose the next car/track combo. Bear in mind that I've only really driven the Caterhams so far, so you'll easily be able to kick my arse in anything else.
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Well I'm a fan of the Aston Martin DBR9. Not sure what track yet. Maybe Monza would be a fun challenge because it's so fast.
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Have you seen the ads for the new *Race On, which updates cars and tracks to 2008, and gives you STCC, International Formula Masters, Cadillac CTS-V, Dodge Challenger SRT8, Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Charger SRT8, plus a few extra tracks.
Personally, I'm not too interested in the muscle cars, and £25 seems a lot considering I paid £15 for GTR:Evo + Race 07.
I'd kill to get a decent street spec Lotus Elise in that game though...
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Yeah I saw the adverts on Steam. I'll probably get it at some point in the future but at the moment I'm keeping my money tight for Forza. I can't imagine that I'll be spending too much time playing anything other than Forza after Friday.
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quote:Originally posted by Kanye West: Forza 3 though is just there to tide me over until the real game of the year comes out.
Are you talking about a game on PS3?
I'm really tempted by Borderlands as it seems to be exactly the type of game that I would absolutely love, but unfortunately I don't seem to get a chance to play games at all in the evenings at the moment which is when I'd want to be doing multiplayer really.
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My copy of Forza 3 is being dispatched this morning, apparently. Gamestation are making sure they're all sent out before the postal strike.
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Didn't get around to racing last night, mainly because I couldn't resist a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum that was sitting in the window of a pawn shop with a humble price tag of £19.99.
This game looks amazing - I was genuinely surprised when I realised the FMV had ended and I now had control of Batman. The voice acting is superb - especially Mark Hamill's suitably unhinged Joker.
I haven't played a huge amount yet, but there are already some interesting gameplay ideas that make this game stand out from other third-person action games.
I'll talk about the bad points because to try and cover all that's good about it would take forever:
I don't like the in-car view. The camera is fixed so you can't look around the interior, and there's a lack of good driver animation; the driver's hands don't move when shifting gears for instance. I'm also not sure that the interior of the car changes with upgrades you make to the car.
I was hoping for some slightly better destructable scenery - when you ram into a tyre wall at 150mph you'd expect it to move. Being able to knock cones around is ok but that's been in racing games for like, ever. Gran Turismo 5 for instance will have tyre walls which split apart and send tyres across the track when you hit them.
The car damage modelling is pretty basic. Doesn't seem any better than the first two games really. Graphics in general aren't really all that impressive. Some of the environments are noticeably better looking than Forza 2, but the car models don't really look any better and the lights on cars still look rubbish. There's also a lack of tyre smoke which I'm guessing is down to the fact the graphics are already approaching the limit of what the x360 is capable of so they've had to limit particle effects.
For all the talk of advanced physics and tyre deformation modelling etc, I don't think the handling really seems significantly better than Forza 2. I honestly don't think you'd notice the improved physics if they hadn't been pointed out to you.
There are too many 'tracks' which are just variations of individual circuits. There's a lot of fuss made about how there are so many tracks in the game, but I don't think there are that many at all. The 'rally' tracks are like, 10 'stages' on one long track so I feel a bit jewed that 20 odd of the tracks that the game claims to have, are really just 2 tracks. It's also a bit of a shame there aren't more varied environments and surfaces on which to race. There's no offroad racing and I've not experienced any weather effects or different times of day yet. These may be in the game though, I might just not have come across them yet.
The AI is not especially good for some reason. There are some tracks early on where the AI cars take certain corners so slowly that if you're approaching at speed you're almost guaranteed to hit one of them while trying to scrub off speed. This was a bit of a problem in the old Forza games too. Things like chicanes and tight S bends really seem to flummox the AI and it feels a little bit broken. It's fine on faster tracks, but on the tighter ones it can be a bit frustrating. I have it on the hardest AI setting as well so I'd hate to think how bad it would be on the easy setting.
But despite these niggly issues, it's still a brilliant racing game. I'm just not sure it's really delivering on the hype, and Turn 10 have been a bit 'inventive' when talking about the amazing features of the game.
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quote:Originally posted by Kanye West: presumably you've already read what I wrote about the game on this very thread a week ago.
No, sorry, I was so preoccupied with Forza at the time I didn't bother reading anything which wasn't directly related to motorsport. But now I think I'm prepared to take an interest in other games again.
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Well, I've started a soldier, got to level 11 and decided that I probably should have made a hunter and am considering restarting.
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