I’ve only played for less than an hour, but
BallisticNG (Steam)
All I’ll say is that if you’re a fan of the WipeOut racing games, do yourself a favor and get this game immediately!
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I’m playing Tomb Raider Legend on my 360, I’ve bought the TR Collection on ebay which includes Legend, Anniversary and Underworld.
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Alright, so after some more time with it and getting my groove on, I’m softening up on Assassins’ Creed: Unity and starting to really like it. The combat is still abysmal and there’s no saving it, which is a huge detractor, and from what I know of the series it never gets back to its golden era in the Ezio trilogy, but the free-running is starting to feel more like it should now that I’ve gotten used to it. It still seems slow and it’s still so hard to get it to understand your commands when you want to climb or jump to a particular surface (an issue that can trace its lineage back to game 1), but the animation of it actually looks more realistic than what has come before, and I find that if I simply “watch” the free-running rather than “control” it, it seems to kinda work itself out on its own. And now that I’ve made it to open-air Paris, damn, this place is detailed and lively enough to be worthy of Arkham Knight and World of Assassination, and would have GTA saying WTF!
Having made my way to the playable character’s first official assassination assignment, I see how this entry in the series overall feels closest to what we get in the Hitman series. Unlike most AC games, where you only have to do one or two things to infiltrate a place if it’s a story beat, and then maybe have to do a few other things if you want full synchronization, but are still more or less just running up to the target, jumping on them and stabbing them in the neck, this very first mission gives you legit options that you don’t have to sacrifice synchronization for to ignore, but give a more cinematic conclusion to if you choose to follow them. For this mission, which I still haven’t completed because I keep restarting it to get it right, carrying my WoA perfectionism over to AC, the best way to get your target is to first kill the person he’s meeting (also an enemy so it’s not a needless murder), steal keys to the Cathedral of Norte Dame from a thief who stole them himself from a priest, use the keys to sneak into the cathedral near its upper level, sneak your way down to the first floor (you need to kill at least two guards from a hiding spot for synchronization), hide in the confession booth and wait for your target to enter the other side and start talking, spilling his secret dealings with other targets. Then, you stab him in the face through the confessional window, then escape without raising an alarm.
Now, other than killing 3 other NPCs (which are part of the story being told which is why they count toward synchronization, and the Assassins in this series being a bit more loose with collateral damage than Agent 47 is), doesn’t that sound almost exactly like a WoA mission, the Abiatti hit in particular? I’m even having fun replaying it over and over trying to get it just right. If the rest of the game has similar approaches to its missions, this may be the most fun AC game since the second.
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With Underworld (on the 360)… since you got them off of Ebay - were you not able to get the DLCs? Underneath the Ashes and Lara’s Shadow…? 
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Uhm… I haven’t tried the download code yet, idk.
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Finished Legend, very good game but sadly its poorly optimized for the 360. I’ve just started Anniversary and its so much better performance wise.
I haven’t played any of the Games after Angel of Darkness was such a letdown, and only had interest in the series when the Survivor Trilogy started. I’m glad i got back to play those games, Lara Croft is a certified bad bitch and i hope she’ll return to her roots in the next game.
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I Play Mortal Kombat X and 11.
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did you get the new dlc for sifu?
There’s a couple interesting parallels between James Gunn’s GOTG movies, Telltale’s GOTG game, and Eidos Montreal’s GOTG game…
Telltale and Eidos’ games both center around a macguffin/plot that can raise the dead.
Eidos had used Rainbow’s Since You’ve Been Gone before James did.
Telltale used Heart’s Crazy on You before James did.
The games take clear inspiration from James Gunn’s musical aspects of the characters/adventure.
James’ films have more of a backstory focus on Rocket overall, Eidos shows more of Drax’s backstory with his wife and daughter, and Telltale has a bit of a balance for all of the Guardians’ origins.
Eidos’ game is very fun so far (as I’m near the last few chapters of the game I think) and it’s had a really impressive cast of side-characters, really wacky and weirdly named people who are all from the comics in some way.
The differences in portrayal of characters between meduims is also very neat. Telltale’s Mantis is more in line with the film’s ditsy empath, whereas Eidos treats her as a mystical oracle. They also feature Adam Warlock, who in antithesis to the eventual GOTG 3’s bumbling himbo, is actually an alliteration-obsessed, vainglorious strong-man.
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Oh yeah, I finished a playthrough of Oxenfree a couple weeks ago and forgot to mention it. I just remembered a few things I wanted to say about it.
I love this game, it’s so good and perfectly spooky. But this game is a strange, interesting mix of many different ideas I hadn’t pinned down before. I’d call it mainly a Narrative, 2D Adventure game, with light platforming and choice-making.
The star of the show for this game is the voice-acting, for sure. The game’s art has a nice painted-over kind of style for the environments, and the characters are just little faceless humanoids, but you wouldn’t really get sucked into their performances as tiny animations play on screen. But the voices really, really enhance the experience. as I found myself imagining what their reactions might look like close up, in-the-action. They made great use of their budget and scope to capture that effect I’d say.
The choice-making coming from Telltale alums was a neat addition to this title, to make the narrative adventure be a bit more engaging if you’re puppeteering Alex’s thoughts about her friends and events around her throughout the game, but in some ways it feels like it doesn’t use its full potential.
There are quite a few moments that clearly are “this effect can be different on multiple playthroughs”, where you’re forced to choose between Path A or Path B, but overall the outcome is the same and there’s very little that’s different between the two. Save Ren or Save Clarissa, well, I’ve played the game like 4 times now and both scenarios happen the same no matter who you choose to save first, but maybe with a little different dialogue for each.
There was one quest in the game that had you pick who you wanted to accompany you to find something, which actually offered some great replayability, since you have different conversations with each character on your way there and there’s 3 to choose from! But this only happens once and is a bit disappointing overall.
There are also a couple smaller moments where normal dialogue choices get referenced later on, a character brings something up, but they seem so minor and inconsequential, since it’s such a tiny part of the game. I never really felt the urge to go back specifically so I could see what small dialogue changes based on what random thing I happen to choose for a conversation.
I think some of this could be remedied with the addition of a choice-tracker, that shows you what important bits of info you revealed or who you accompanied, to keep track of what choice-content you have or haven’t encountered, that makes the choices have a bit more importance rather than add extra flavour in the narrative.
The “extra sequel teasers” they spread throughout the game world with hidden radio signals are a cool addition to randomly have in an update recently, and I found myself stopping at every detour checking to see if X cliff face or Y dead end held a spot with a signal. It teases some really interesting stuff from some unnamed characters who you hear over the radio. Some group interested in tuning into the supernatural signal, possibly to bring someone back? The malicious cult of Ox2 probably. I didn’t find them all, that’s what I could gather from what I’d heard…
Night School was smart enough to use the same audio logs in multiple spots, to it’s easier to find some of this in the game without making it too difficult to find.
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Well that is because that is how both of them are supposed to be written. In the comics Adam Warlock is a genetically engineered super-being designed to take down Thanos with his rhyming and vanity foreshadowing The Magus, his superpowered evil side and Mantis is referred to as the “Celestial Madonna” while having lived a harsh life in post-withdrawal Vietnam as the daughter of an invading soldier (I forget if he was French or American) and a Vietnamese prostitute
Overall the Edios game is closer to the comics than the films.
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Right, wow, cool to know.
The Eidos game seems to have name drops and references for plenty of things I’m not aware of, its cool that they’ve put in so many comics references.
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