Alestorm Gamers

[Fratt]

Originally Posted by Scouse

Haha, fucking game. Man, Fallout 3' was a bit pants la.

I never really liked Fallout 3, because I didn't really liked Oblivion (Fallout 3 = Oblivion with laser beams btw ). The exploration & quests part were nice, but as an avid FPS player the combats disappointed me a lot.

Oh and forget what I said about AVP. It IS ace (well the demo)

[Yogge-Sothothe]

You're not really supposed to try and play it like an FPS, though. The VATS system is so much more versatile and fun to use, and you're going to win a hell of a lot more battles if you use it exclusively.

You Tube

[Isjungfrun]

Finally playing Dragon Age. fucking amazing.
I've made Alistair fall for me.

[HyperChris]

Originally Posted by Isjungfrun

Finally playing Dragon Age. fucking amazing.
I've made Alistair fall for me.

You're not a winner until you get an in-game foursome.

[Gyndawyr]

Im avoiding Dragonage Origins as a game that may be utterly boring, or may consume me, either way will be a bad idea

I spent much fewer hours on Fallout 3 than I did 1 & 2. I played Fallout (1) religiously :P back in those days you could sleep with the whores and in the following morning get information out of them if your charisma was high enough Modding Fallout 3 to be like the originals is FTW.

[ToastedOveries]

I played dragonage for 2 days solid, then stopped playing for some reason and have never touched it again, Its really repetitive for me, so much so the storyline fails to inspire me suffifiently enough to continue playing.

I much perfer free roaming like on Oblivion, which was amazing in my opinion. Looking forward to the 2nd assasins creed on the PC aswell.

[Yogge-Sothothe]

You Tube

I'd heard nothing of this until last night, but it looks like there's a new Fallout game coming out at the end of the year! There's no gameplay footage as yet, but still plenty to get excited about, given how successfully FO3 translated most of what was special about the first two games into 3D.

According to the Fallout Wiki, this game is going to have two main playable modes: 'Normal' and 'Hardcore'. Rather than indicating difficulty, these basically indicate the level of serious 'role playing' you'll be doing. 'Normal' will play out more or less like Fallout 3, but 'Hardcore' will introduce a greater emphasis on survival (drinking water and avoiding injury, etc, since Stimpak healing won't be instant), and inventory weight will play a greater role, with ammunition now counting towards the total. This is probably a bit too 'RPG' for my tastes, but I can certainly see the appeal; you'll have to plan your routes beyond deciding which weapons to take and whether or not you'll need armour reserves, for example. It's doing things 'properly', and could well enhance the game's bleak atmosphere (especially as you watch your character slowly die from radiation sickness and dehydration out in the middle of nowhere).

Also:

The story will continue some parts of the Fallout and Fallout 2 stories, but will not be related in any way to the one in Fallout 3.

Fallout: New Vegas will take place in 2280, 3 years after the events of Fallout 3 and 40 years after Fallout 2, making this installment set the farthest in the series. The New California Republic will play a major part in the story, in a three way struggle between the NCR, the Caesar's Legion slavers, and the local New Vegas populace.

[HyperChris]

It's got one of the guys responsible for Van Buren working on it, I believe? Which can only be a good thing.

[Yogge-Sothothe]

Anybody interested in a pair of DoDonPachi underoos? Only 50 bucks! (This is actually almost tempting to me, since the characters that emblazon the 'package' roughly translate to "ULTIMATE BURLY WEAPON".)

[Swabs]

I'm intrigued by the fact that the electricity is clearly still totally operational in Vegas. Could mean that Vegas is one of the last or the last surviving city civilization in the US, might be that the New California Republic want in on it.

[Yogge-Sothothe]

Wow, plenty of news today. There's a new Blaster Master game coming out on WiiWare! Looks totally badass (although the remixed music is a bit duff); here's hoping it plays more like the NES game than the bunkum Mega Drive effort.

[Yogge-Sothothe]

ART

[Gyndawyr]

Originally Posted by Yogge-Sothothe

Wow, plenty of news today. There's a new Blaster Master game coming out on WiiWare! Looks totally badass (although the remixed music is a bit duff); here's hoping it plays more like the NES game than the bunkum Mega Drive effort.

All impressions aside from the screenshots which aren't all that lead me to believe Blaster Master: Overdrive will be tragically rubbish. I've no experience with the original versions of the game, I'm simply judging it by the information given in your post/article, and the usual "lets remake a classic" experience being uhh.. Maybe it's just my pessimistic view and lack of information, of course. I'd have some hope that they did a good job of the remake.

What games are you looking forward to this year mateys?
My list is: Guild Wars 2, Supreme Commander 2, and a few other odd games that were delayed till sometime this year. Good luck with Deus Ex 3 also If that games out before christmas this year I'll eat a liqourish lace. And I hate the stuff, tastes like black death :P

[Yogge-Sothothe]

Nah, it seems you're at least partially correct. It was released in the US a few days ago, and initial impressions are that the level design is extremely repetetive and that it doesn't really do anything the original game doesn't. It's a shame, but I wouldn't say that's true of most revivals. Mega Man 9, R-Type Dimensions, Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Galaga Legions have all been fantastic, and RayStorm HD can't possibly go wrong.

[Gyndawyr]

Has anyone played sonic 4 yet?? My interpretation of that was.. ohh dear..
People have commended the idea of sega looking back on what made their games good in the past, but I still don't think they'll do a good job, and I don't own a console of this generation so I can't play it. PCs ftw.

Another thing, I got a problem, I'm trying to sell a media PC but I got a feeling the market on ebay is pretty poor at the moment. I was gonna build a media centre PC based on an intel atom and max it out for fun (2TB HDD, SSD, TV Card, Blu-Ray, 8 channel surround) that would have to sell for about £500 just to make my money back off of it, but the average price for an atom machine is about half that -_-. I'll probably end up sticking a 1TB drive & a regular optical drive in there to save money & see if I can sell it off without pwn HD space & Blu-Ray.

^^ Any ideas on how I'd sell the computer & get rich?? I want to buy a keytar if I raise enough with my efforts

[CliffBurton]

Originally Posted by Swabs

I'm intrigued by the fact that the electricity is clearly still totally operational in Vegas. Could mean that Vegas is one of the last or the last surviving city civilization in the US, might be that the New California Republic want in on it.

Might be that a game with no lights would be really dark.

[Yogge-Sothothe]

What bothers me about Sonic 4 is that it's episodic. If they're breaking it up into anything other than two halves, it's going to be a seriously expensive game (assuming each episode costs 800MSP) unless it's much longer than the first three, and even if it is, that's rarely a good thing in terms of level design.

[Yogge-Sothothe]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Yogge-Sothothe]

You Tube

You online FPS bampots should keep your eyes on this channel. It's a friend's new FPS wot he has done made with Jon Chang, and features music by that thar Matsubara from Mortalized.

[HyperChris]

That pic is somewhat gradian!

[Swabs]

Originally Posted by CliffBurton

Might be that a game with no lights would be really dark.

You shite.

"Vegas is up and running. It is not a ghost town. It still exists and thrives. There are casinos, and you can go down onto the Strip. It will have a very different feel from that standpoint."

[Yogge-Sothothe]

Microsoft's Shooting Festa thingy is happening now. Some highlights (from andriasang.com):

Deathsmiles 2 and Guwange to be released at some point this year.
Ketsui release date of 22/4, with 5pb handling the port.
AfterBurner Climax is apparently ace in your face, and is coming this spring.

[Gyndawyr]

I went to my uncle's house today to find him playing Heavy Rain. I can't play it myself, I play on PC and the previous homegame generations, but it helped me develop my first impressions of the game.

I appreciate how the female character (albeit is a reporter who breaks into houses and manipulates a forgetful elderly lady) is taken seriously in the game, her feminine features being similar to that of an anatomically normal human, for example.

I also appreciate how the seriousness of the game is more a step closer to producing actual works of gaming art rather than a step backward which seems all too common; I need not find examples of that.

Another thing is while I could begin talking about the randomness of the odd nude scenes, and fight scenes, they don't seem all that random in the sense of being mindlessly thrown in to get more videogame-penis girth. They thought somewhat before they put them in, and I appreciate that also.


There is however the subject of the plot. I know I walked in to begin with on one of the most pointless bits where it's hard to relate to the situation (where the reporter is extracting information from the elderly lady) and I'm not going to understand it too well if I walk in half way through, but the plot to me lacked credibility. Most videogames don't require it anyway, but Heavy Rain seemed to place much of the gameplay and emphasis on the plot and most of the situations occuring seemed somehow both erratic and linear.

Then there is the voice acting. In the game Shenmue, which this reminds me of, but with a much greater dependence on the 'thriller' plot, I set all the voices to Japanese. Sadly, I had to listen to the actors try as hard as they could to make their animated character look, sound and react like a human, in american english accents. I've definitely heard worse, but once again I feel great emphasis is placed on it when the only excuse I can think to commend it is "it's better than the other shit I've seen recently".

The graphics as a whole I could commend, as I feel it was graphically capable of being very entertaining and immersive. The characters while trying to be human did often spaz out into mechanical or polygon-esque cyborgs when ordered to turn around when their foot is stuck against the wall, but once again, compare the minor faults with that of the whole genre of videogames and there really is no crime in that. I'm also amused how there's a nude glitch posted on Kotaku.

The sound did not invade my ears, it fitted, and it added to each moment in a subtle way, and therefore I feel it should be appreciated. The controls were also nicely handled, generally anyway.

Last on my list is the gameplay. As much as they tried to make the movements, characters, graphics and everything else flow in the game, it still felt mechanical. They did right plenty of wrongs with the cinematic-esque videogames of the past, but the way the game appeared to play seemed to still have the same fundamental flaws.

Obvious clues as to what you've got to do next left me kind of bored.

Finding every piece of crap in the hospital miraculously reminded the old bitch of something back in her day did also.

Most of the options seemed to make no difference and/or were pointless, while the odd one was obviously going to make a major difference in the end result. At that point however, they make the best possible path unclear. They make it complex. Older cine-crappy games could not handle that. However, every option regardless of fucking obviousness felt linear to me, like it was intentionally teasing me by giving all options I didn't want to take.

In most games it doesn't give me the choice, this one should be commended for doing so. Not true, because if all I can do is choose to shoot myself in the foot one way or another, I'd rather it choose for me.

I would like to drink the poison so that I gain information about the whereabouts of my son, however I would also like to deviate by making sure I left a rather small portion of it in the vial, so that it appears I have taken the dose but perhaps added 20 minutes to my remaining lifespan. I would also like to take the vial with me rather than leave it on the table so I can be treated more easily from the poisoning. I would then like to self-instigate vommiting the moment I left, and find a vaccine pretty sharpish before looking for the boy. I'd like to find an improvised tube for the drowning boy to breathe through to save him from drowning. I could carry on all day about that probably, the point is in this dramatical setting the choices given to me I felt the best I could do was get ass-raped less severely.

I'd probably enjoy watching my uncle play modern warfare 2 more. I would rate Heavy Rain as performing some fundamentals beautifully, while others are still stuck in the shit, in general, a game I don't see myself enjoying, kind of like a game comprised entirely of angry, complex and yet linear Harvest Moon dialogue choices.

So the reason for my essay of a post is; Why am I apparently the only one who fails to appreciate this game? I know there's plenty wrong with me, but there's a foul smell coming from the game that I'm not too chuffed with, and it's guided me before at times, in the right direction.

(Also, there is this nerd who doesn't like it, but every game has bug-patch BS at some point nowadays; ---http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l66Yw7zhGRY--- .)

[PowerBlade]

I stopped playing WoW a while back, might begin again when Cataclysm comes out. Looks very cool imo

[Yogge-Sothothe]

You Tube

MM10 came out on the Wii yesterday, and it's fucking awesome. Gotta wait until the 31st if you're wanting the 360 version, though.