Single-player Video Games Thread

WITCHER 3 - epic world, nice score. at first Geralt’s movement is a little awkward, but the combat mechanics are quite well done so you get used to it. the world is so large and the side quests have so much depth to them that the main adventure often loses its momentum and doesn’t stand out all that much, aside from featuring a few interesting lead female characters. I guess you could say the world is so vast and interesting that the story fails to keep up - it’s not quite the intriguing central focus that one would expect from such an amazing world, but it’s not bad either.

  1. This is the area where I am now. @4:23 might be my favorite ambient track

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25h1bjZwPgs[/youtube]

  1. The city in the distance, Novigrad, is the largest and most detailed I’ve ever seen in a video game.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-1xO-R_JpA[/youtube]

Metroid prime is the best single player FPS. It is for science oriented minds.

COD is gay and its graphics make me nauseous.

I am posting this here for people who enjoy reading Satyr and playing video games (i.e. Arbiter, Trixie, etc.)

On the Genealogy of “Art Games”
by Alex Kierkegaard (a.k.a. icycalm)
culture.vg/features/art-theory/o … games.html

Here is an excerpt:

On Why Scoring Sucks and Those Who Defend It Are Aspies
imgur.com/a/q6BUr#0

This is one of his best essays.

I think Satyr is against video gaming, and I understand why, there are some good reasons to be against it that I know of from personal experience (namely, addiction and excessive gaming).

But, like Arc says, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

No seriously… I do think some games are like an amalgamation of different types of art put together into an interactive whole. They’re worth playing purely because of the depth of the story, characters, the world, amazing display of graphics, sounds, animations etc.
Then there are others that exist mainly to serve as sort of a temporary escape, a way to satiate some needs that cannot be satiated in real life. For example, lately I’ve been feeling this need to fuck shit up medieval style. So I play Dynasty Warriors 8, which allows me to do exactly that with its excellent and fluid combat system, and a vast array of different weapons, each with different combat animations. Not much depth to it story and character-wise, but it serves its purpose.

I can’t really say I’ve played much in the last couple of months. I only played Gothic 3, nothing else until I began DW8 some few days ago. I mostly have my mind set on other things now, it’s probably for the best too. Gothic 3 btw is amazing and I recommend it to all. It’s worth exploring just for its beautiful world and music, if nothing else. Just make sure to patch it up with latest community patches, and add the quest and content mods.

Addiction isn’t an argument against anything. You can be addicted to sex, does that mean you should be against sex? You can be addicted to pretty much anything, including philosophy, does that mean you should be against all activities, including philosophy?

That some people, perhaps even majority of them, should not play video games is not an argument against video games either.

One has to learn how to separate distinct threads, how to avoid mixing them. Blame what has to be blamed, be precise in your blame.

However, those with no interest in video games, who cannot enjoy them, will nonetheless continue to be imprecise in their blame. Nothing can be done about that other than to point out the apparent conflict of interests brought on by their lack of interest in video games.

All art is simulation, a replacement for life that is missing, and in this sense, escapism. Paintings, sculptures, music, novels, movies and video games all serve to satisfy the needs that cannot be satisfied in real life. There is nothing wrong about that per se.

The problem occurs when one consumes more than one really needs. This has nothing to do with art per se, but with the individual’s inability to control himself.

COD is garbage. Modern degradation in aesthetics.

Degraded from what?

Dungeon Keeper…so fun to be bad!

Back when FPS games were pleasing to the eye.

WCR4 was pretty great: getting it for the Vita impelled me to get it for the 360, too. I never thought I could be into rally games–i.e., no real-time opponents–, but actually this is better in many ways. In the meantime, however, I got a PS4. The PS4 still won’t have a Gran Turismo for quite some time, and I always liked the Forza series better, anyway; it even tempted me to get an Xbone instead and, later, as well as a PS4… I didn’t give in to the temptation, though.

Project CARS is great in many ways, but still not good enough for me. WRC5 was pretty bad (different developer than 4). DIRT Rally is now the best racing sim in my opinion. And, despite its flaws, I like Assetto Corsa better than Project CARS. Maybe I should do a short review on these games. Anyway, in most genres I mentioned in my previous post, there have not been any great new additions I have played yet–though Fallout 4 and the new Deus Ex are really great (Far Cry Primal seriously lacks guns).

Oops, almost forgot A Link Between Worlds! That may actually be the best top-down Zelda yet in my opinion. I also still want to get Rise of the Tomb Raider (on PS4 or 360) and Arkham Knight, and have preordered The Last Guardian. Far Cry 4 was only slightly less great than 3. Dishonored was great, too. Magrunner is a nice Portal-esque game, but Portal Stories: Mel is much better. Finally, Inside is a worthy sequel to Limbo–which means awesome.

The random game generator in Heroes Of Might & Magic III Complete with it’s selection options make this a long lasting challenge as far as strategy games are concerned. IV on up sucks.

My recommendation was for the original Dungeon Keeper, not the newfangled mobile app.

Since it’s considered a classic fps with rpg elements and forerunner to the Bioshock series, I gave System Shock 2 a spin. It did not disappoint. Great atmosphere and soundtrack, good, basic skill system, and excellent gunplay and mechanics. Tense, fast, survival horror fps in space. What’s not to like?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrdtlyUXPg[/youtube]

Also, Divinity: Original Sin is just about the perfect isometric rpg. Well realized and doesn’t hold your hand. Has a fantastic soundtrack, too.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiR4g0A-83s[/youtube]

Got RotTR, and it’s rotten. I just don’t really enjoy most of it. Too much Raider and too little Tomb: I like my Tomb Raider with as little combat as possible. It’s strange though, because I really liked the 2013 reboot whose sequel it is. Dunno if it’s me or the game. I have the same problem with Arkham Knight: I loved Asylum and City, but soon lost my interest in Knight. I had the same thing with Assassin’s Creed: I loved the first and especially the second game, but after that the series has never been able to get its hooks in me again. With Arkham Knight, the problem may be that the situations now feel contrived; with Assassin’s Creed, it was (among other things) that the first game had few combat mechanics and the second only gradually unfolded the many it had, but from the third game on, you immediately had all of them and I’d forgotten most of them; there was no tutorial. But there seems to be a pattern of me losing interest in third-person 3D action adventure games. I also canceled my order for The Last Guardian, even though I loved Shadow of the Colossus–because I don’t have too many moneys at the moment, and I didn’t want the same experience as with RotTR, for which I paid full price. Also, I still have Fallout 4 DLC, the finale of RotTR, much (most?) of Arkham Knight, and almost all of Dishonored 2 to play. Yes, I got Dishonored 2, including the digital remaster of 1, at a significant Black Friday discount. Anyway, I don’t think The Last Guardian will disappoint me, but it doesn’t hurt to postpone it. Unless I die before I get it. Then my life will have been seriously flawed. But at least I have a cat!

Metroid prime 1 and 2 is the best game ever made.

Its got a perfect blend of combat and puzzles.

I played a tomb raider demo once, wasnt as good as metroid prime, Tomb Raider’s atmosphere reminded me too much of a cheap B movie. James Bond and Indiana Jones were made as a deliberate mockery of B movies, and that is why they have a better atmosphere than actual B movies. The only B movies that are any good are movies with an urban setting.

The second reason the tomb raider franchise isn’t that good is because it doesn’t actually make you feel like a female. In Metroid prime you actually feel like a female. Tomb Raider is rather bland.

I played a top-down version of Tomb Raider but it was rather bland. The intro cutscene wasn’t even animated, just cardboard cutouts saying generic scripts. It somehow got a 4/5 rating but I don’t know why. The maps were bland and procedural looking, and the game had no substance felt like a chore. You could easily exploit AI by finding a ledge and jumping on it, then the enemies could not hurt you.

James Bond goldeneye was a good game but I were to make a remake I would add a trap system, because in the movies there are a lot of traps and not non-stop gun shooting like in the games. The James Bond goldeneye remake for the XBOX 360 was very bad, it was actually worse than the goldeneye remake for the Wii, which was more good than it was bad. The XBOX 360 goldeneye was bad because I played the demo and it had no puzzles, just repetitive call of duty style point A to Point B gameplay.

I agree that those two are some of the very best games ever made, and thereby deserve the hyperbolic/metaphorical title of “best game ever made”. (I never played 3 because I don’t like motion controls.) Donkey Kong Country Returns and Tropical Freeze are by the same developer, by the way. Especially the first of these is also the best game ever made in my opinion.

I like the setting of TR 1, which got a great remake as Tomb Raider Anniversary. That game and Underworld are actually the only old-school Tomb Raiders I really like (by “old-school” I mean “from before the 2013 reboot” here).

Well, Metroid Prime is first-person, maybe that has something to do with it. I wouldn’t know either way, as I’m “cis-gendered”, but I suppose on some gut level there seems to be something to what you say. Doesn’t impact the actual gameplay for me, though.

Yeah, I never played that spin-off. And in any case, to me Tomb Raider is about being alone (after all the enemies are dead) in a tomb or temple or the like and especially wall-scaling through it (I also loved this in Assassin’s Creed 2 and Prince of Persia Sands of Time, 2008, and The Forgotten Sands). Anniversary and Underworld even made shimmying fun by allowing you to go faster by tapping a button (meaning both interactivity and speeding up of what’s otherwise just lamely holding a direction). For some reason they took that out with the reboot…

I liked Goldeneye back in the day, especially the first level, but after Deus Ex I cannot go back to such unstealthy FPSes.

The top-down tomb raider didn’t have any wall climbing, or maybe it did I can’t remember. In any case it was lame.
The tomb raider demo I played was 3rd person and much better, still wasn’t that good though. The gunplay of it was very basic and plasticy. The atmosphere didn’t seem diverse, just jungle temples basically the whole game. If I can recall, the background music was very generic and subpar, like a generic B kiddie action movie like Incompetech music. (I wonder why they call it Incompetech?)

Goldeneye is a very stealthy game, not that realistic though. It takes 2 shots to alert outside enemies, not one. And the AI line of sight cannot see through windows or gates. Perfect Dark has better AI and stealth.
I played one of the older Dues Ex demos a while ago, I think I liked it but I never bought it. I don’t remember being amazed by it, just enjoying it a bit. Animations of it were md2-ey, didn’t have the depth of animations like Perfect Dark did. Non-interpolated animations work best in frantic games like Quake where you can’t really focus.

Mahjong and solitaire…

Glad to see SS2 get some love. Strife is also good if you want to go back to see what the Doom Engine can do. Deus Ex is still probably one of the best games ever made. Fallout 1.5 Ressurection was recently released in English and if you like Fallout it is an absolute must play. Morrowind is, of course, timeless.

Lately I’ve been really enjoying Crusader Kings 2. It taps into my love of history and my love of fucking shit up. It’s a great “story generator”.

Speaking of “story generators” I think 2D Dwarf Fortress is best Dwarf Fortress from a game perspective but I fucking love every new thing Toady does so 3D DF is also “fun” but it’s more fun to think about than actually play.

Speaking of “great games I no longer play” EVE isn’t the same since Vilerat died. I haven’t been able to get back into it since.