Raithe

It has been said by EM, that while the "basic tutorial level" is the section pre-jensen-augmentation, the first "proper" mission is also tutorial easy and laid out in a manner to guide people into proper DeusExy attitudes. And various comments have been made by the people who got to play the 3 hour demos that the highlight isn't as glaring if you're playing the game compared to how it jumps out at you if you're just watching someone else play.. So that's possibly a good thing for general immersion and other things in the game keeping your attention.. (and yes, I know that could just be the naive optimist in me..)

I think what threw me partly was the amount of time in each act.. It felt like I spent half the game in act 1.. and act 3 was barely felt.. And sure, I became the "Champion of Kirkwall" but I never really felt as if I was some central power role within the city. Just more the annoying wildcard that kept causing the people who were in power positions to do stuff. I enjoyed a lot of the game, but a chunk of it did disapoint me. The way Bio had made so much fuss about showing your character becoming this prominent character and effecting the city over the 10 years... Maybe that caused me to expect something that could never be, but .. yeah, wasn't expecting what we actually got.

There has been large amounts of cleaning things up and shifting things around.. in preperation for this alsation puppy in a short while.. Now the evenings in and I'm just having one of those spacey times where I can't really figure out what I'm in the mood to deal with or dabble in.

For such a brief example of gameplay and level design as that trailer shows.. there seems a lot of rage and distaste being shown. I don't know, I mean, I loved the original and still play it.. but I think some of you have really rose-tinted specs on about it. There were some levels in DE that the various combat vs sneak routes were that obvious. We have no real knowledge of how much more subtle it gets as the game progresses, and it kind of makes some sense that the first "real" mission will open up with a bit of spoon feeding to highlight what you should start looking for for all those people that never played the original. If you look at the various descriptions of how the rest of that level plays it , it looks like there are a lot of potential options and ways to deal with stuff. Until we actually get to see more of it, I'm withholding any firm opinion one way or the other.

And it isn't always easy to find people who can understand the same pop culture / nerd references that you sprinkle around naturally..and then wonder why people look at you strangely irl..

Hm, I played DA2 last weekend. I finished Homefront off in those few hours of Friday night.. but apart from that I've been missing a real gaming mood. I couldn't even get into Alpha Centauri for more then 10 minutes. And thats practically sacrilegious.

A super-specialised virus that Legion manages to come up with..

So the point of game 1 was that The Citadel was supposed to be on a timer..that would open a gate bringing every Reaper back into the middle of civilised space..allowing them to take out the central communications and then wipe out all life before reseeding it. Sovereign was left behind as a failsafe system.. and because the Citadel timer was scuppered by the Protheans..he went there to try to activate it all manually. So having the rest of the Reapers make their own way in because the "short-cut" was aborted still makes sense. And since it was humanity that basically stopped them that first time..they'd go directly to wipe out the annoying species before they worry about the others... So it's not as if it's entirely a bizarre concept.

What, you'd like 5 months of "squeeee!! this game is teh rox0r!!" type discussion ? Heh. Nah. But there does seem an awful lot more attempts at the total cynicism and "this is going to be utter crap" about pretty much all games to be released. There rarely seems to be weighted of "this i like, this i dont like" discussions. About the only way it could be worse was if Bio was releasing it. Then the arguments of "this is going to kill proper crpg" and "bio-bashing vs bio-fanworship" and appearances by Vol to make statements and inflame opinion...

Well there's been some mention that the health regen is something that's quite slow.. Also, there are several difficulty settings. The hardest of which is named "Deus Ex".

And now we've got another 5 months to go for the naysayers to let everyone now how horrible it is and utterly doomed any further attempts to bring back Deus Ex.. and the enthusiasts will vigerously defend it.. Thus creating many varied thread moments.. And thus it starts here..

hm. given some of the repetitive arguments that can spring up... the 2am answer that springs to mind is "intellectual masochism"

To be the voice of the hopeful optimist rather then the usual jaded cynic... All the game journalist previews of the opening sequence and first mission seemed to talk about the great background visuals and pretty things going on around you as you play...

That's too bad. It's not that they are particularly bad in and of themselves, but it's going to get real old real fast having to sit through them every time you do a takedown. One thing game developers don't quite seem to understand is that no matter how incredibly cool something is the first time, it becomes eye gouging a thousand repititions later. I think that's one of the reasons they've tried to make it context sensitive. It won't be the same takedown every time. Sensitive to where the opponent is, if he's sitting down, standing close to a wall, to a door, in the middle of a corridor.. if you're in front of them, behind them, to the side.. It's not a cutscene sequence. It's in-game, just switching to the 3rd person view exactly as it does when you go into cover/stealth sequences. I'm not sure exactly how well it'll stand up through the whole game..but it doesn't look that bad.

Got a vet's appointment for the cat on monday. The fact that he's suddenly started humping the daylights out of any orange plastic carrier bag seems a little strange. He doesn't care about bags from Tesco's..but those orange ones from Sainsbury's he goes nuts for.

If you do perform a takedown, you will go into a 3rd person view of it. They will be different as you do them depending on the context.. ie; objects around you and exactly where the opponent is. The key thing you control is whether it's going to be lethal or non... But yes, the 3rd person cutscene is always going to happen from whats been said.

I've heard that the multiplayer aspect is very good... but that's not something I've played around with yet. Especially as they were heavily pushing the single-player storyline aspect of it. I don't know, I just expected it to be a souped up style of Freedom Fighters. Or at least some elements of choice within it. Not such a linear, controlled event. So yes, a disapointment.

Just finished Homefront. Disapointing. Installed the game. Then steam spends 2 and a half hours updating it. Then the single player campaign is about 4 or 5 hours long. It feels like they're either expecting to send out dlc that push it on, or have a sequel ready to go... They pushed the whole "you'll make choices and see how being a resistance fighter effects the civilian population around you"... and bollocks. It's a straight, short first person shooter with no real choices in it. Just from point a to point b with some companions and shooting whatevers in the way. Storywise, its quite good. (I mean, yes, its by the writer of Red Dawn and Apocalypse Now). They really do make you feel the horror of whats going on. The background effects of an oppressed citizenship... the brutality and such. But that's all just.. background. It doens't really connect to you, just events going on around you. Even the set piece where you end up hiding in a mass grave. The shooter mechanics are pretty damn standard. Although they are brutal. A few hits and you will die. Which makes the checkpoint system really annoying at times. When you have to listen to the same few minutes of dialogue before walking in a doorway and getting shot repeatedly....

This almost tempts me to dig out the old Conan Rpg stuff.. Although the Complete Works of Conan has a nice pride of place in on my shelves. They are ripping yarns.

The shift between 1st person and 3rd person seems fairly fluid when they go back and forth between cover/stealth and not. .. and dang it, it's making me even more impatient for August release to arrive.

Caught Battlefield Los Angeles (the hollywood one, not the SyFy mockubuster version). Entertaining for what it was. Faithfully visited the tropes with enough panache to satisfy without being bad. Not a lot of bloody violence, but an awful lot of sudden death. Some quite nice moments of tension as they move from point A to point B.. and then the sudden burst of Alien attention and another member of the squad dies. Throw in a couple of the requisite "speech in the middle of combat / in the pause between combats" accompanied by heroic music to re-affirm the nature of Marines. But yes, if you enjoy that style of movie, it's firmly in the good watching category.

There are some great truths out there..

The Dalish seem to have a weird mix of irish and welsh accents (depending on which one you talk to). I guess Bio went with the "their elves, lets hammer home the gaelic influence..." Merril, for those who might have noticed it, has the fairly strong welsh accent. But then she's voiced by one of the key girls from Torchwood.

You could almost see Shephard turning up as a Lensman ... Not to say Doc Smith's writing was bad, personally I think the guys one of the founders of space opera sci-fi and was fairly brilliant (if you take into account the time when he was writing). But that's always been one of the key things about space opera. It's meant to be that slight touch of operatic sillyness thats about being fun and adventure exciting.

Okay.. Health and Safety run amok. A guy face down in a duck pond. Two police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck.. and none of the people would go into the pond to recover the guy.. they had to wait for the underwater specialists to get the body out for health and safety reasons. Along with the comment that "he wasn't moving so it was assumed he was already dead and there was no need to rush in to get him out." The duck pond at its maximum depth was about 3 foot. And the man in it was known to have had a brain injury that caused him to collapse at times. What on earth has happened to the emergency services?