What Are You Playing (Summer 2013)?

[Yoshi]

[Diff-chan]

I don't think RCR was made to appeal to lots of people.

It seems like it was made by an obsessive person who has spent too long on the internet. Better than making hair dolls I guess.

[Yoshi]

an obsessive person who has spent too long on the internet

I resemble that remark.

[Rumpy]

I fail to see a huge difference between Dead Space and RE. Pretty sure RE IV was quite a bit better on that front.

Dead Space came out around RE 5 and did just about everything better. For one, you can move AND shoot. That let many more cool battles happen. I always liked the buzzsaw gun. Shoot the blades for distance and then hold them in place for one on one and ammo conservation.

[YellerDog]

Couldn't say, I don't have any recent RE games to compare it to. On its own merits, it feels clunky. Maybe that gets better? Who knows.

[Joust Williams]

Dead Space is about the least clunky entry in the history of survival horror as people define it. Every other game is plagued with dumb shit that makes the game 'real'. [chris rock]Yeah, real dumb.[/chris rock]

[YellerDog]

Video Games.

I think fighting the same two monsters over and over in the first 30 minutes combined with the lack of a 180-turn-around is kinda bumming me out. The over the shoulder camera feels like you're running sideways. Too many tutorials, freaky uncanny valley video popups, next to no ammo on hard mode... this is not the most fun I've ever had in a survival horror game, sorry.

Still, gonna get my fifty cents worth out of this!

[MechDeus]

Racing roundup:

Wipeout 2048 - Pretty great, I don't have any real complaints about this game. Still not my favorite racing series but it's certainly not for quality reasons.

Ridge Racer: Unbounded - I don't even know what's going on here. Lots of great ideas but it seems like their design philosophy was, "Inconsistency." Some walls can be broken, some can't. Some parts of walls that jut out can be broken, some can't. Slamming the front of a car into a wall at 150 mph will sometimes make you wreck, sometimes it won't. Sometimes even if plowing into a wall full frontal at high speed won't make you crash, you can just slow down and graze the wall with a headlight to make your car explode. The cars have Need For Speed weight but Ridge Racer physics, so I can't do sudden 90 degree turns on a dime but it's somehow really easy to oversteer and do a 180. Cars have lifebars that prevent natural takedowns like Burnout has, but activating boost is an automatic takedown. Sometimes.

It feels like a farmed-out Burnout but not even in a Dominator kind of way where it's glitchy as fuck but still has a good underlying base. Better luck next time.

Split/Second - This game is fun. I almost had my hopes dashed thanks to the sloppy-as-fuck port job which tossed me into the tutorial before an options menu, giving me the wrong resolution, aspect ratio, graphical level, and wasn't even lined up properly on the screen. So I quit the race to fix all of that and find out the tutorial is now just gone forever, and even though this was a console game there's no button displays anywhere so everything is still labelled as enter and tab and button 1 and such like it's still 1998. There's also no way to adjust options mid-race, and the post-race displays go on forever and trying to quit out of them inexplicably restarts the previous race.

Getting past all the horrible UI problems that were apparently farmed out to a group of people that have never worked with a video game before, the actual racing is enjoyable and the triggers and takedowns are pretty great. I think other people on TNL have complained about the rubberband AI getting ridiculous in later races so I'm not looking forward to that, but at least for now I'm having a good time.

[Pineapple]

I always wanted to try Split/Second, it looks like a really fun game. Alas, I still haven't played a racer more entertaining than Burnout: Revenge.

[MechDeus]

Burnout Revenge is better, but SS is still pretty cheap on Amazon.