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What are you currently playing?; What video game are you playing right now?
Topic Started: Dec 11 2013, 10:14 AM (143,594 Views)
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Episode four... some tough decisions. Didn't know what to make, but I hope I made the right decision. I know I failed along the line at one point, but I think that was inevitable. Keen to see how it ends.
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Derpstrom
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I've been playing the new Gauntlet the past few days. Managed to score a preview copy or three for Stevivor so two veterans and one Gauntlet noob Great arcade co-op fun but I think it will be a short lived experience. Not a lot going for it replay wise and, by yourself, it's kinda boring. The preview should go up in a few days but, if you're interested in the vid we did, here it is

Edited by Derpstrom, Sep 15 2014, 11:17 PM.
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Derpstrom
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Oooh the embargo's lifted for Flockers too so I may as well say I've been playing that as well.

If any of you are fans of the original Lemmings games you'd be absolutely nuts to miss out on theis. Only 60 levels long but it has a level of detail and "completeness" that makes it damn near perfect! Amazingly fun puzzle game.... providing you're a fan of that style of game (Krusty's Super Fun House, Lemmings, etc)
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I was interested in Flockers. What's it getting released on?
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Derpstrom
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PC, PS4 and XBO.

I have the Xbox One copy. Wasn't expecting to like the controls as I usually prefer these sorts of games with the mouse, it works really, really well though. Am recording the vid today so I can share if interested.
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jamesh
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Well Team17 also did the Lemmings games for PSP and PS3, which controlled okay too. The combination of zoom and the ability to assign a skill to one lemming while paused gave sufficient control to not feel like you were losing due to imprecise or slow inputs. If they managed it once, I'm not surprised they managed a second time.
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Derpstrom
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That's one thing I found kind of weird. You can't assign a skill or position clocks while the game is paused. It's no biggie as it just means you line up the curse then unpause-press X-re-pause but it's a strange thing to have to do.

I didn't realise Team 17 did those Lemmings games.

First rule of sheep club is... don't build stupid platforms that dump your sheep onto rotating blades!

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I hope this game never goes live and I can maintain my #1 spot!

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Things like this make me wonder how far all the other reviewers bothered to go before publishing their reviews :)

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Edited by Derpstrom, Sep 16 2014, 12:28 PM.
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jamesh
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That's a shame. Assigning a skill while paused was one of the things that made some of the harder levels feel achievable. I guess the other feature they had was the ability to highlight a lemming so you could then assign a skill to them without keeping the cursor hovering over them. If they kept that feature, that might be enough.
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Derpstrom
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When you mouse over a sheep they change color. You can also change the reticule to be either single sheep or wide "paint". Was fantastic when trying to give 50 sheep capes all at once :)

This game is so addictive! I'm at work and still thinking about the strategy I could change to save more sheep :)

Ok here's the vid if anyone's interested. Yet to add commentary but this gives a pretty good sample of the various things you can do. Nice that you can set sheep to block and then release them (rather than explode them)



And now I'll shutup about Flockers and Lemmings for a while
Edited by Derpstrom, Sep 16 2014, 01:37 PM.
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I finally decided to get into Watch Dogs. Unfortunately, it's not well-suited to the small screen of the Shield, so I'll have to play on the TV or PC.

I'm about an hour in and so far it's pretty bland. I hope the story picks up as the gameplay is pretty ordinary at this point.

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Derpstrom
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That's such a shame. It was a great concept but one I feared would be bogged down by "ticking all the AAA boxes" :(
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Derpstrom
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Last week I caved and bought Disney Infinity 2. Jingles glowing (and continued) recommendation coupled with the addition of Marvel and a $58 price tag were enough to win me over. Put a few hours in now and most of my perceived reasons for not purchasing in the first place seem to have come true.

If you can't be arsed reading the "tl;dr" version is: good game? Not really. Worth playing? Yep.

Gripe 1 - Play without limits. This slogan is plastered all over the box however, on the back of each box, there's a list of what characters can be used with what playsets. E.g. Spiderman can be used in the spiderman universe but not Gaurdians or Marvel. Old characters can't be used in the play sets at all and older play sets won't work on the new system! There are quite a lot of limits for a game that's meant to be letting me play without limits. Shitty for the kids too as, if they buy a character, they want to be able to play with it in something other than their own custom levels.

Gripe 2 - Gameplay. Playset was ok. Followed the tutorial and ended up in toybox (I think that's what it's called). Vehicles are floaty camera is awful and the first person view for ranged seems to have an interesting opinion of what to lock the reticule on to.. .evidently the thing you're pointing at is less important than the thing two metres to the right! The camera andle is, by far, the worst part. In close quarters it does that "camera snag" thing where you can't rotate the camera as it's caught on scenery. In boss fights there's no camera lock so you constaly have to adjkust whilst trying to attack with the face buttons. It just feels very slapped together. I was playing with my son and he didn't like it to the extent he asked if he could stop and go back to Ratchet & Clank instead! Indomniac's first R&C game controlled better, in his mind, than the current, high budget release of Disney's game! That's pretty bad! Esp as R&C controls pretty bad.

Gripe 3 - Navigation. Once in the toybox I was constalntly told by the narrator that I could do whatever I wanted. It was truly a game without limits... but I have to speak with one of the characters dotted around the place who will tell me what I can do and how I can do it. After you get thru all that you get an editor of sorts but it's pretty detailed. Not the freedom of play I'm come to expect from games like Minecraft which actually, for the most part, does let me do what I want. Anyway, once in here it's bloody hard to figure out how to get back to the play set. Then there's power discs. A tutorial to explain these things would be nice. Skylanders was simple; buy the game, buy a Skylander, put it on the portal and voila. It's in game.

Gripe 4 - Misinformation. Back in toy box I follow the bouncing red ball, get my blue crystal things and am told that I can purchase everything Disney Infinity has to offer from the store guy. Open up his shop and almost all his wares are locked. How do you unlock them? By purchasing power discs or playsets or characters. So I can't buy shit unless I spend real world money? And even after I've spent real world money I have to save up in game cash to unlock it in toybox?

Gripe 5 - Missions. Playsets are a nice idea but boil down to a big open area with missions on repeat. Just like stereotypical MMOs. Go to this location and either a)beat up bad guys/objects, b) carry citizens to a safe area c)escort quest (beat up more bad guys but whilst protecting something) or d) Defend the point. There are a couple of story missions which are more like levels but the bulk of the promised "hours of content" seems to be in repeating quests, levelling characters and collecting collectibles (which unlock things you can then purchase in toy box)

Gripe 6 - SHUT UP! When doing a quest there's nothing wore than an NPC that won't shut up and just repeats the same sound byte about "you need to press the button to proceed". In Infinity they do this with annoying frequency. Say I have a quest to travel to 5 map markers (spread all across the map of course) and turn of a machine (pucnh it until it stops). En route to the machine the NPC will usually say about 4 or 5 times that I need to go to the objkective and turn off the machine or some crap like "I don't know how to turn off these machines. Maybe you should try hitting the power source". It's just so frustrating

So my main gripe, I suppose, is that this game feels extremely average. It's a decent enough concept but, considering the budget they had and the quality of the games they rip off, I really expected something more polished. I doubt I'll play this after I'm done with the play sets. Then again I didn't buy this game for the level creator. My kids like that stuff but they won't bother either. It's nowhere near as intuitive as things like Minecraft and seems targetted aat the type of audience who spent hours or days making LBP levels.

On the flipside it's enjoyable and I love the charcters. Some are teribly OP (Thor) whilst others seem remarkably weak (Black Widow) but it's fun using all their moves from the movies and beating the snot out of Loki. I wonder if Hulk has his signature "slam the crap out of Loki" move. I didn't buy the CE so I don't know.

Enjoyable enough for $58 but nowhere near what I would consider a great game. Feels like a good concept slapped on in the blief people will just buy it because... it's Disney and Marvel! Which, coincidentally, is what I did. I doubt I'll do so again however.



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jamesh
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Sep 22 2014, 01:25 PM
Gripe 4 - Misinformation. Back in toy box I follow the bouncing red ball, get my blue crystal things and am told that I can purchase everything Disney Infinity has to offer from the store guy. Open up his shop and almost all his wares are locked. How do you unlock them? By purchasing power discs or playsets or characters. So I can't buy shit unless I spend real world money? And even after I've spent real world money I have to save up in game cash to unlock it in toybox?
Surely you would have known a game like this would be full of microtransactions needed to unlock content though (just like Skylanders)?
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Derpstrom
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Not really. In Skylanders you don't have it to the degree it is in Infinity. If you haven't got the statue it's not in game. In Disney Infinity it's all in game and pops up with a "you need to buy the blah blah statue" message so, if you don't have much content, there's a lot of trawling thru unavailable stuff to find the bits you can access.

Skylanders is also pretty basic. You can buy statues or DLC/Levels. The disc itself has a full campaign on it regardless of what you buy and there's always a starter pack available with enough Skylanders to finish the game. When you have bought a DLC statue you put it on the portal and the landscape of the hub world changes to give you passage to that. The DLC is integrated with the story.

Then Skylnders 2 comes out. All your Skylanders 1 figures work automatically and can level up to the new cap (15). The DLC/level statues don't work however that makes sense as they would be out of place, story wise, with the new story.

Skylanders 3 is the same again. You can use all characters from the previous 2, level them up, etc. but not levels. With each Skylanders game they introduce new Skylanders as well. In sKylanders 2 it was giants and in 3 it was Swap Force guys (mix top and bottoms of characters). They continually integrate the new puzzles into future games too so, in the third game there are areas and stuff you can get with giants if you have them, but they're not required.

Now to Disney. First buy character statues. You can also buy level statues and these disc things (Infinity 2 starter comes with 82 discs!!!). The game doesn't come with a campaign but has a creator hub mode. Has a bunch of tutorials and mini demos on how to use the world (not unlike NintendoLand). If you buy the starter pack you get three super heroes, 2 power discs and a play set.

Here's where I discern a difference. Each playset contains about 2-3 hours of content. A playset with two figures costs $40. Each playset has restrictions on who you can use in said playset. E.g. they don't want you using Star Lord in the Avengers or anything like that. I presume it's something to do with not wanting the worlds crossing over or something although that doesn't make sense as Marvel have certainly never had much issue. So you're character can only be used in certain playsets which is a restriction.

Furthermore any playsets from Infinity 1 don't work. This is fine as it's the same as Skylanders however it doesn't really make sense in this case as they're standalone levels. I can't see that it would have been a big stretch to enable you to play on the old engine (assuming 2.0 has a new one). Would certainly have made merketing sense as you'd encourage people to upgrade and not force them to have multiple portals for multiple versions. That's not a real gripe though as I can understand why they do it and it's exactly the same as most other games.

However they restrict the characters from Infinity 1 as well. So the only thing I can use them for is custom created levels done using the level editor. Part of what makes these games great for my kids is using the statues and being able to play as their favourite characters across the various games. They can do that with Skylanders but not with Infinity

How's that for way more info than you wanted?! Lol. Not sure why I feel so strongly about this. I guess it's because I feel it's a real missed opportunity and I was hoping my kids could enjoy that feeling they got when they first started Skylanders. Especially now they have a decent cast of characters my kids like (Marvel, Brave, Frozen, etc.)
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Now now, I really liked the first Disney Infinity a lot but haven't tried Disney Infinity 2.0 so can't say my recommendation for this is glowing. Granted as well I haven't played it in a bit though.
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