Video Games

Count Arioch the 28th · Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:53 pm

Question for the gallery: Has anyone tried out Batman: Arkham Asylum? I've heard good reviews but have yet been unable to rent a copy to try it out.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 11:39 pm

I've really enjoyed it. The combat system is pretty simple to control but is complex enough to be able to be awesome at it. The animations especially are great. The sneaking around is excellent, and I found myself often passing up chances to take goons down quickly and easily to take them down in the most awesome manner possible. And some of these ways are awesome. Its pretty linear but feels open enough to do what you want.

The setting is excellent: there is a real love of the Batman history, with the characters all being from the comics and animated series rather than the films, the voice actor of the animated series doing Batman (which is fucking awesome, especially when compared to Christian Bale) and Mark Hamill voicing the Joker (he also did the animated series Joker).

The atmosphere and art direction was great for the most part, with the talking between the goons amusing and interesting, and the various secret great for the "who the fuck is that?".

Unfortunately the big bads are pretty shit in general: Bane is pretty difficult at that stage of the game but boring, Szasz is really weak and Killer Croc is way too easy. I really disliked how Bane has been flanderised to make him larger, more dependant on venom and a complete retard, and while I can understand why Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy have been hyper-sexualised I don't have to like it. However the Scarecrow sections are brilliant, even if I dislike the character design change.

I really hated the end though. It was too cliche and stupid, completely counter to the character.

All in all, it is a really good game, made even better if you've read the comics. I would definitely recommend renting it.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 7:59 am

Koumei, I need you to go scream at your attorney general for me.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:58 am

Well I would, but:

1. I don't care enough - I was never going to play it,

and 2. just pirate it like everyone else.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:42 pm

You guys aren't allowed to have adult games? What, is your video game sales managed by WalMart (who refuses to stock anything not edited down unless it makes more money than they?)

-Crissa

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:09 pm

Crissa wrote:You guys aren't allowed to have adult games?

Basically yes.

I'm not sure exactly how the current situation came to be but I THINK it went like the following debacle.

1) No ratings on games. Conservative loons somewhere go "eeeeeeh!" no one sensible cares.

2) Game industry thinks pandering sounds cool. Creates voluntary rating system. Does not create adult category, presumably to further pander.

3) Rating system essentially adopted by our already draconian censorship legislation and bodies. The retain the missing adult category. Family First party says "Yay!", most people go "Eh?" tiny minority say "Where the fuck is my GTA?"

Anyway it's worth noting that Australia actually has some remarkably harsh censorship guidelines in general. Back in the 80s it was out dated shit from the bad old years and when Howard got in it was if anything encouraged rather than updated.

Highly conservative loons were appointed to those positions that mattered as opportunities became available.

I have read among other things some of the regulations in regards to broad casting. I said it before and I'll say it again while they mostly tend to use it to ban arty French films about coming of age stories that include teenage sex the regulation much more clearly applies in that almost every damn episode of stupid fucking cop show that deals with an endless parade of pedophiles should be banned.

By Australian censorship laws "Law And Order: Special Victims Unit" should basically be banned. Pretty much automatically and without in depth consideration. You only have to imply violence or sex toward a minor and a program is supposed to be "refused classification".

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 3:24 am

Koumei wrote:Well I would, but:

1. I don't care enough - I was never going to play it,

and 2. just pirate it like everyone else.

Pirating a steam distributed multiplayer only game is basically fail

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 5:09 am

Cthulhu: multiplayer only? Well there you go, the solution is to play a good game instead.

PhoneLobster wrote: By Australian censorship laws "Law And Order: Special Victims Unit" should basically be banned.

It should be banned anyway, on the grounds that it is shite.

Anyway, I continued playing Disgaea 2 a few days ago. I'm going to admit it: I'm pathetic, I can't bring myself to unlock the bad endings. Also, it's funny going through on even the second cycle, seeing the final boss and thinking "Oh, how cute, it's level 90! I remember being level... wait, no I don't."

Main team are all Level 250-ish, but I have a level 6,000+ catgirl and a level 9999 succubus for whenever I'm too lazy to play though a level properly. Currently working on bribing the senate into supporting me as opposed to having to beat them into submission every time (it's just like real politics!)

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 5:29 am

I'm screwing around at the end of FFX. I got all the Aeons, have a couple of the unlockable weapons unlocked.

I'm wondering if buffing Yuna up is going to come back and bite me in the ass. I vaguely remember having to fight the Aeons or something, when I was over at a friend's house and he played through the ending. This was pretty much right after the game came out, so I can't be sure.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 5:47 am

Koumei wrote:Cthulhu: multiplayer only? Well there you go, the solution is to play a good game instead.

Singleplayer games are almost universally worse than multiplayer. L4D has great tension and pacing, something which no other co-op horror game has ever managed.

Played SS2 co-op? It's hilarious.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 5:52 am

Nope, I haven't played SS2 multiplayer. I dislike people, and thus see anything that requires dealing with them as a serious drawback. That's what I like about previous-gen consoles: they didn't assume you'd hook them up to the Internet and play against dickheads all over the world. You vs. the machine, everyone else can get fucked.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 5:55 am

Maxus wrote:I'm screwing around at the end of FFX. I got all the Aeons, have a couple of the unlockable weapons unlocked.

I'm wondering if buffing Yuna up is going to come back and bite me in the ass. I vaguely remember having to fight the Aeons or something, when I was over at a friend's house and he played through the ending. This was pretty much right after the game came out, so I can't be sure.

You do face your Aeons in the final battle (with the stats you gave them), but my understanding is that at that point, the boss fight is really easy. According to the boss FAQ in front of me, you start with Reraise on your party members and can usually get through just using basic attacks on your Aeons. The boss after that is supposed to be easy so long as you cast Reflect on it to redirect its healing spells.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 7:48 am

Crissa wrote:You guys aren't allowed to have adult games? What, is your video game sales managed by WalMart (who refuses to stock anything not edited down unless it makes more money than they?)

-Crissa

We don't have an 18+ classification for games. To get one the federal attorney general and all the state attorney generals need to agree to create one. Unfortunately the drooling imbecile in SA refuses to agree to it. Hence Koumei having to go scream at him.

Normally I'd just pirate it, but multiplayer games aren't much good pirated.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:02 am

Anyway, it's another zombie game, right? Where the city is probably covered in an eerie haze and everyone you encounter wants to eat your brains?

Just grab a shotgun and roam the duststorm-covered streets, shooting anything that moves (they probably have swine flu anyway, and that == zombie). There, the live action version of survival horror. Deeply more satisfying.

Count Arioch the 28th · Wed Sep 23, 2009 2:43 pm

Maxus wrote:I'm screwing around at the end of FFX. I got all the Aeons, have a couple of the unlockable weapons unlocked.

I'm wondering if buffing Yuna up is going to come back and bite me in the ass. I vaguely remember having to fight the Aeons or something, when I was over at a friend's house and he played through the ending. This was pretty much right after the game came out, so I can't be sure.

Not really. Your Aeons have pretty buff overdrive attacks, but in all honesty they aren't worth much. A party of 3 will tear them to little bits.

And about unlocking the weapons? Get a gameshark when you get to Tidus. Trust me on that one. You have to run some sort of weird event where the controls are terrible and you can't get hit, oh and the computer is a cheating bastard, there's no promise that the second you get to the finish line you won't get hit by 3 birds in a row before you can react.

Sir Neil · Post by **Sir Neil** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 10:13 pm

Koumei wrote:I dislike people, and thus see anything that requires dealing with them as a serious drawback. That's what I like about previous-gen consoles: they didn't assume you'd hook them up to the Internet and play against dickheads all over the world. You vs. the machine, everyone else can get fucked.

You are the wind beneath my wings.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 10:27 pm

What I don't like is this focus on internet-based gaming.

Look, I don't want or need two PS3s and two TVs to play multiplayer Ghostbusters with my girlfriend. Headsets and computers and internet gaming is great, but so is sitting in the same damn room.

Focusing on a core group to the expense of other demographics only hurts your market.

-Crissa

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:47 pm

Keith said earlier that the videogame industry is starting to go under because of its inability to make profits.

Could someone elaborate for me? Because from what I see the X360/Wii/DS are making money. The Wii and DS in particular are making money hand over foot. It seems to me that the lesson is that making games people want to play is more important than production costs.

While I'm on the subject, anyone else feel that graphical enhancement is about to hit a ceiling? The increase in quality of graphics increased tremendously from Atari --> Nintendo --> SNES/Genesis --> PSX/N64 --> PSX2/GC/XBox... and the current generation seems like the smallest increase yet.

People are still making games for the Playstation 2 and some of them like Lego Batman look just as good as they do on Next-Gen consoles. For example, Paper Mario to Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door... huge improvement. TTYD to Super Paper Mario... not so much.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 12:07 am

I agree about the widespread online focus. That pisses me off about as much as games expecting you to have HD televisions.

I recently got Halo ODST and one of the things that frustrates me (as opposed to pissing me off and making me want a refund) is that the invasion game mode only supports two players on the one console. And that you can't see a lot of the details such as your ammo even on a 25" television, unless you have HD.

Oh, by the way, Halo ODST is fucked up. Game breakingly broken. I'd recommend not getting it for a while, or at least until they come up with a patch to make the thing playable.

The game is advertised as being about 10 hours long: way too long for one long session, especially on heroic or legendary. The game is set up with a nameless, faceless soldier going around a city hub, and being able to select flashback missions where you play as other soldiers. At one point you have a choice of 4-5 missions you can do. All well and good, up to the point where you want to take a break and turn off the Xbox.

Lets say you've done 5 missions and you're on the 6th mission. During this you save and quit. When you come back to play it you get reverted to the beginning of the current mission and it forgets that you've done the previous 5 missions, so it wants you to do them again. 2-4 hours wasted, and possibly messing up the storyline order.

Or lets say you have found that this is the case, and decide to save in the world hub so that it remembers how many you've done. When you resume the game (using the "Resume game" option on the main screen) it takes you all the way back to the beginning of the game. When I saw this happen I just turned the Xbox off and walked away.

This game does not store your progress when you "save" even though it tells you it does, and makes you play the whole game in one sitting.

And thats ignoring the glitches where items don't appear and sometimes doors don't open when they're scripted to so you can't actually complete the level.

While fun if you like the original Halo and containing some cool stuff (especially if you liked Firefly), this game is currently fundamentally broken and you should put off getting it until it gets fixed, if it ever does. I'll check for a patch every couple of days but I can't be bothered to play through the game in one sitting.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 12:08 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote: While I'm on the subject, anyone else feel that graphical enhancement is about to hit a ceiling? The increase in quality of graphics increased tremendously from Atari --> Nintendo --> SNES/Genesis --> PSX/N64 --> PSX2/GC/XBox... and the current generation seems like the smallest increase yet.

Yeah, the ceiling happens to be TV resolution.

One area PCs have always thrived is that monitors have so many more pixels than even the best HDTVs.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 1:00 am

My point is whether games now and in the future actually need that much extra resolution.

The Kirby Games pretty much hit a ceiling for graphics around Game Cube. The cartoony style that is integral to the game is not really helped by an upgrade. Same for Super Mario; he's pretty much at the height of graphical need right now. Super Mario Galaxy would not have looked that much worse in the GC/XBox/PS2 era.

The point I'm trying to make is whether the arms race for graphics has pretty much hit a wall for a lot of games. Graphics for games that demand a high level of realism like Call of Duty could get better, but the question is how much better? I think that in two more generations graphics are going to be as good as they're going to get.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 1:07 am

I was reading today about how the new ATI video card, the Radeon HD5870, would have been by itself a top 10 world supercomputer in 2003. So no, I don't think the graphics have hit a ceiling yet. There's lots of stuff that we want to do that we can't do, like hitting trees that aren't made out of adamantite in Grand Theft Auto.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 1:21 am

The video gaming industry's problems, especially PC ones, aren't a technological issue.

They are alienating and failing to satisfy their customer base. Just look at PC games, there are hardly any and those there are suck and are laced with DRM poison.

Remember my hate for Steam and how Total War screwed the pooch with a shitty steam release?

They've given up on fixing all the issues and even delivering all the game features advertised on the box (they seriously sold this thing saying it would have multiplayer campaign play facilitated by Steam, a feature it basically still lacks).

And they've announced the next game in the series, not an expansion, the next game. And it's like basically the same game with the same promises and STILL on steam.

You can go to like the biggest Total war communities on the net, and the thread on the new game is a fraction of the size of the older stuff. A total war announcment used to roll on into hundreds of pages of gushing pure wank. The community has just GONE. And what's left is mostly one off posts by community members saying "Thats it I'm done with this franchise".

Basically PC games are 4E D&D.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 2:17 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:My point is whether games now and in the future actually need that much extra resolution.

The Kirby Games pretty much hit a ceiling for graphics around Game Cube. The cartoony style that is integral to the game is not really helped by an upgrade. Same for Super Mario; he's pretty much at the height of graphical need right now. Super Mario Galaxy would not have looked that much worse in the GC/XBox/PS2 era.

The point I'm trying to make is whether the arms race for graphics has pretty much hit a wall for a lot of games. Graphics for games that demand a high level of realism like Call of Duty could get better, but the question is how much better? I think that in two more generations graphics are going to be as good as they're going to get.

I know someone who was going on about how pretty soon video game graphics will be photorealistic and how this will be awesome.

Sigh.

Here's my thing.

I like games with artistry to how they look. It's part of why I'm digging FFX right now--a lot of places and things are downright gorgeous. Shadow of the Colossus? It's blocky and a bit jerky and there's a ubiquitous flicker effect on my television and I absolutely loved how it looked and the landscape.

I'm also a longtime fan of the Paper Mario games. I've known people who called the graphics 'cheap', but I love the paper-thin aesthetic they work in, especially in Thousand-Year Door.

Hell, I even think games which strive for realism could be more creative. I greatly enjoyed the different visors in the Metroid Prime games; it was a nice change of pace to play a (mostly) realistic-looking game which had things like an infrared or echolocation vision mode.

I really don't care about graphic resolution. I like to see game companies do something with it, though.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 4:43 am

Game development never was a very profitable. Generally, they say for every game that hits the shelf, there's a thousand other games which never did. Then think how many shelf games are profitable.

With the increase in graphics and voices, game development becomes geometrically more expensive.

So yeah, many game companies aren't profitable. However, in the last ten years we've kinda overcome this by increasing the free to play market (more games succeed when still not hitting shelves) and casual market. More games are made for more different people. More money was spent on games at the retail level than all movies and television and music, combined.

However, with the recession - the industry was feeling it a couple years ago, actually - they try to focus on games they think are safe. So they produce licensed games which share the same mechanics as the most popular game for that platform and the same ad campaign for all platforms, even though the games are very different.

Which is why, for instance, the top 5 games for the Xbox sold basically to the same market, repeatedly. So we're left with focus on that market. It's an overall mistake, but there's no real way in our current capitalist system to encourage healthy markets.

-Crissa

PS: My PC resolution: 1152 x 768
My laptop: 1280 x 800
A new TV: 1920 x 1080