Off Topic Productions

Jonas wrote:To have the point of impossibility arrive 90% through the game so I would have to put another 40 hours or so into it for a do-over is just not acceptable game design!

Yeah, that is not very good design.

Jonas wrote:I must have attempted to beat Brayko upwards of 30-40 times, failing each attempt. I even had other people swing by and try to take him out for me, and none of them could manage it.

I find this really weird, because as I remember it, Brayko was one of the easier bosses. iirc you can also poison his cocaine so he kills himself after he goes to 80% if you have decent reputation with the crazy guy.

Although I think I pretty much always maxed my pistol/assault rifle skill each time through the game, so that might very well be why.

Yeah, pistols are so overpowered you can simply one-shot Brayko.

Spiking cocaine is indeed possible if you did Tokyo (IIRC). Should still be doable to go there if stuck. It definitely makes it more easy.
And I would figure stealth would allow you an easy time. Just stealth stealth stealth and take health away bit by bit.
The slow, tedious and boring way, but that's stealth.

Its been a while since I played though, and never actually did a stealth run myself, since I don't got the patience and stuff for that

Just finished Alpha Protocol for, what, the 5th time? Fuck...

It's definitely a flawed gem. There are a few pretty big problems, the difficulty being the big one. The game is horribly balanced, it either seems to be ridiculously easy or impossibly difficult at various times. The bosses aren't great (although they're not flat out god awful like in DX:HR), they could've been so much better. I wish I could've actually used martial arts properly against them, but it only seems to work in combination with a gun. The closest I could get to a full on hand-to-hand battle was with Championchik, and even then I had to use chain shot (!) on him once or twice.

The thing that really pissed me off, however, was how guns are fucking useless at close range. It's X-COM bullshit right here, where the bullets seem to fire at everything but the Halbech fuckturd that's 8 inches away from Michael Thorton. It's ridiculous and just not at all acceptable.

Back to playing TNM again. Goat City music really reminds me of Spyro.

Jaedar wrote:as I remember it, Brayko was one of the easier bosses

Not with my character build he wasn't. Which actually added insult to injury, because I'd managed to beat two legendary super spies in Rome and Taiwan, and the guy who ended up handing me my ass was some stupid street punk party boy. Jason Bourne would've eviscerated Brayko with his bare fucking hands

iirc you can also poison his cocaine so he kills himself after he goes to 80% if you have decent reputation with the crazy guy.

Yeah except I'd spent my money on other things before that option came up, so I couldn't afford it when it was time to prepare for Brayko.

Although I think I pretty much always maxed my pistol/assault rifle skill each time through the game, so that might very well be why.

My "mistake" was to focus on stealth and martial arts. It worked splendidly in regular gameplay, and in fact was the main reason I found the game entertaining (I got in a few gunfights and they were pretty disappointing because of the bland weapon feel). Sadly stealth is worth nothing against the bosses, and they're all frickin' balanced to be super tough in hand-to-hand combat.

YeomanTheCastle wrote:Back to playing TNM again. Goat City music really reminds me of Spyro.

There were a couple of TNM tracks that I remember reminding me of Spyro. Damn I loved those games. *Runs off to find PS1.*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxIxcYMykrw

Best Spyro track by far

Cybernetic pig wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxIxcYMykrw

Best Spyro track by far

This one from the third game was my favourite. Fucking nostalgia; it hurts so bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkiR1-NIT-M

Playing Splinter Cell: Blacklist. It may be my favourite Splinter Cell game so far. Too bad the story is so clichéd and the characters are so amazingly boring.

Jonas wrote:Playing Splinter Cell: Blacklist. It may be my favourite Splinter Cell game so far. Too bad the story is so clichéd and the characters are so amazingly boring.

Any new super-cool moves Sam gets to perform?

All the animations are new, I think, but overall Blacklist is essentially a (quite successful so far) marriage of the old stuff from Chaos Theory and Double Agent with the new stuff from Conviction. So from Conviction it has the mark and execute, the fast and semi-automated cover switching, the faster climbing and general increased mobility, and the diverse arsenal, but it also brings back the traditional stealth and the gadgets and the nonlethal options from the old games. It plays a lot like a slicker, faster Chaos Theory, partially because they ditched the Man On The Run plot and went back to the globetrotting mission-based super-commando plot.

That said, they have added mobile executes and takedowns so you can mark enemies and then execute them while running through the room or take down an enemy while running past him. It's quite cool.

Jonas wrote:All the animations are new, I think, but overall Blacklist is essentially a (quite successful so far) marriage of the old stuff from Chaos Theory and Double Agent with the new stuff from Conviction. So from Conviction it has the mark and execute, the fast and semi-automated cover switching, the faster climbing and general increased mobility, and the diverse arsenal, but it also brings back the traditional stealth and the gadgets and the nonlethal options from the old games. It plays a lot like a slicker, faster Chaos Theory, partially because they ditched the Man On The Run plot and went back to the globetrotting mission-based super-commando plot.

That said, they have added mobile executes and takedowns so you can mark enemies and then execute them while running through the room or take down an enemy while running past him. It's quite cool.

Cheers Jonas. It does sound like the gameplay is entertaining even if the story is a bit "tepid". I'll grab it when I can afford to.

Found the time to play a bit of Deus Ex: The Fall today. It's a fairly depressing experience. Not because it's a bad game as such, but it's obviously a mere shadow of Human Revolution, powerfully hampered in both design, setting, and aesthetics by the relative weakness of the iPad hardware. It also went from being a stealth action game to just a hard core stealth game where discovery means irrevocable death because the AI is really good at flanking and I need a lot of time to line up my shots with the virtual joystick. All the time I play it I'm sort of enjoying myself (until the shitty touch controls get me killed again), but I look at the cramped and maze-like Costa Rica setting and wonder what it might have been like if this were a real game.

I thought Squeenix were meant to be cutting back on these pathetic mobile spinoffs.

Did you? Because my impression is they're going all-in for mobile platforms after the successive financial failures of their last three AAA productions.

Plus, apparently they just registered "Deus Ex Universe" as a trademark. Doesn't bode super well, does it?

Jonas wrote:Plus, apparently they just registered "Deus Ex Universe" as a trademark. Doesn't bode super well, does it?

I can't decide if I think that means they're making an mmo or a facebook game. Or which would be worse. Rather academic, since it will almost certainly be terrible either way(p<0.05).