Half Life 2 Fan Movie: Singularity Collapse
A ridiculously well done fan movie for half life 2. Acting is so-so for a lot of it, but you can tell they really spent a lot of time (and money?) on this.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVeSA9xkufQ[/youtube]
The Troll Hunter Movie
Trailer for the Norwegian movie “The Troll Hunter”.
Actually looks pretty neat. I’d like to see it.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLEo7H9tqSM[/youtube]
11 Minutes of Dead Island Footage
Looks interesting. A bit of a different take on the whole zombie thing. Not so sure if the whole fatigue mechanic will work or not, never really had a game yet which said “you are too tired to do anything and helpless” and thought “wow this sure is great and fun”, so time will tell I guess, but definitely looks interesting.
Really Late Game Reviews: Risen
Finished Risen the other day, so figured I’d do one of these and maybe save people some potential disappointment.
Game took about 36 hours to finish doing pretty much everything possible in a single playthrough. Considering this was another relatively cheap Steam sale purchase, not a bad deal at that length.
The graphics often seem to be drooled over, but I’m not sure why exactly. The scenery is quite nice. Overall no complaints about the landscapes and backdrops and such (although people have actually made mods to make improvements: http://kamrades.com/en/index.php?m=games), but the people all look really odd. It’s like, the models are really simple and kind of clumsy, big round heads, club feet and such, but then they are covered with these really detailed and trying to be realistic/gritty skins, which creates this weird effect where you have this round-headed hero who kind of looks like the guy on the box art if he doubled his weight and possibly had a birth defect.
The game has great music, although it was wildly inappropriate at times as a lot of the “wandering the countryside” music sounded a whole lot like “OMG SOMETHING BITING YOUR FACE OFF” music at certain points, which ended up with me suddenly jumping at a drum beat and swinging around wildly looking for whatever horror was trying to eat me when there was nothing around for miles. This was made all the worse because some of the enemies really blended in with the scenery well, and you didn’t realize they were there until you stepped on them and they repaid you by gnawing on your spleen.
At around 2m35s in this video you get an idea of the type of sudden change in theme of the music. This is just the general wandering around tralala music.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmlxb0o4hI8#t=2m35s[/youtube]
The music for some specific areas is even worse in terms of the whole messing up the tone thing:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AozHZDEuRhw[/youtube]
Dialogue and script are actually okay overall. The combat is difficult as rumored, until you realize that magic and the crossbow are king and cannot be blocked unlike 99% of your melee attacks and weapons. The physics seem to weird out sometimes where corpses would fly across the map when I shot them with the crossbow or go sliding around so I had to chase a corpse to loot it. Physics also affected the jumping and climbing which was clunky. The game also seemed to be struggling with how realistic it wanted to be with annoying “realistic” stuff like some of the things below or being able to take a bath, and then silly unrealistic stuff like taking a bath fully clothed in your armor and with your sword still on. Also some weird camera angles, where you have cutscenes with someone talking who is not on screen.
There is also an annoying tendency, which I can only assume is intended to stretch out the playtime or just a horrendous oversight, for the NPCs to be using various crafting and other things at the exact moment you want to use them. Crafting a sword has 4 steps, use the forge, use the anvil, use the water trough, use the sharpening wheel, but the npc blacksmiths will be using whichever of those items when you need it, and you will have to wait. Then when you finally get to use it, and finish, they will be using the next item you want, because for some reason the NPCs take a LOT longer to do the same stuff as you. And for some stupid reason, you can interrupt them, but they don’t stop using it until they are done. There is no option to just talk to them and say “hey, get out of my way, I’m the PC here!”.
So overall the game was a fairly mediocre RPG with some annoying bits to start, then it started to get tiring at the end. I only managed to finish it because I was pretty sure there wasn’t that much left to the game when I started to get bored of it, but they could probably easily chop 10 hours out of it and do no real harm. After awhile, a lot of the stuff started to feel like it was intentionally put in just to make the game drag out and have a longer playthrough time.
On top of that the endgame, final boss fight and ending were all terrible, making what would have been an okay, if not fantastic, gaming experience, into something that left me feeling cheated and regretful.
(More spoilerrific specific complaints below!!!!!)
Display spoilers
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2PaduvpYPA[/youtube]
TF2 Adds Replay Feature
TF2 had another one of their great free updates (http://www.teamfortress.com/replayupdate/) with tons more hats for me to lust after clearing out much of the stocked up refined metal in the TF2 economy with a newly added bonus for early crafters where they get a numbered version of the item if they are one of the first 100 to craft it (the item is still numbered in backpack viewers and such even if it is crafted after the first 100, but only 1-100 show up in game apparently, I got 4 really terrible hats attempting it some random crafts :( ).
Valve also added a “Replay” feature where players can receive a demo of their last life from the server.
It’s a neat feature overall. Seems like it basically uses the old Source TV system and constantly records a demo on the server and players can then receive a snippet of these server-side demos for their last life (or seemingly the last life up to the point they pushed the replay key).
Unfortunately a lot of game service providers don’t allow or charge extra for the feature, and it’s lag-inducing on a lot of the servers it is on (Problems with Linux in particular as noted here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1875130).
Played around with it a bit and it takes awhile to convert the videos at full settings (on an i7 950 3.2 ghz with 12gb ram on Win 7 64 bit). A 4 minute or so video I just left running overnight when I went to bed.
Also in typically evil promotional Valve fashion, they have an event tied to the whole thing to promote the new feature. The Saxxy Awards, where players can submit videos in various categories for a pseudo Academy Awards type of thing.
http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/
Here’s a few samples.
This is a 2-3 year old video made using the old system and trying to prevent insane processing times etc. Fairly horrible quality.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxOcPogXC74[/youtube]
Then the much nicer and smoother looking results of the new Replay feature.
Short farting about as Huntsmen sniper on CP_Fastlane video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgh7hf3OhKI[/youtube]
Somewhat longer (4 minutes) video playing demo on PL_Thundermountain (this was the one it took overnight to convert).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo0H3KKXIU0[/youtube]
And my crowning achievements and possible submissions for the Saxxy Awards Failure category.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob7-uCRf0Mk[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im6RguLIwwU[/youtube]