[:plant:] The GFF Game Club [Now Playing: Max Payne] Now with less spoiler tags

I've heard tell of a lot of little nuances in this game that I never personally noticed when I was playing. This will be the perfect chance for me to try it again and make sure I play with my analytical hat on. (Count me in-- backloggery name: Skexis)

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Iago

Perhaps a new thread should be created for each game in a subforum?

I like this idea if it's not going to be too much trouble. I think it's going to be hard to divide each game into sections, though, so I think we might be better off just sticking to the final date and working on what we can until the date comes up. (Maybe for future games, the date can be in the thread title and we can edit it as we go.)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

OK, so here we are at the last day, so how did everyone get on? Who decided to give ICO a go and where did you get to? Did anyone not finish?

I had finished the game once before, so I didn't feel as bad about not finishing it this time. Like you, I had a problem first of all with playing it on my HDTV, where everything looked like it had been smeared with vaseline. I feel like an ass saying it, but the presentation really lost a lot in the years since I last played it.

What really turned me off more than anything else, though, was the camera. In a game that wants to build so much upon the relationship between the boy and the girl, I shouldn't have to mess with switching from "immersion mode" to "puzzle mode" every time a minor puzzle comes up. But that's exactly what I felt like I had to do.

It was horribly jarring and made it seem like I was constantly struggling with the camera to keep it where I wanted it to go. I broke immersion so many times over that I finally just put it down. I was willing to give the puzzles and the combat the benefit of the doubt, but ultimately I couldn't forgive the game for that awful cinematic camera. It works as a way to show the scope of the environments, but to me it constantly felt like it was either getting in the way of my focus on the boy and girl, or it was focusing too much on the environment and not enough on their place in the environment. There was no sense of how to get from here to there, in other words, without a lot of trial and error.

That being said, it's still a game I respect, even if I don't enjoy it.




As for Beyond Good & Evil: looking forward to it. The last full playthrough I had was when the game first came out, and I remember missing one animal because I had reached a point of no return. Not this time!

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Shin

I think I'll give this one a miss, I've never been a big fan of platformy adventure type games at the best of times so buying another one I'm unlikely to enjoy seems a bit silly. Having forced myself to play Ico for slightly longer than I could be arsed, I don't think subjecting myself to another game from my "Don't like" category would prove anything.

Here's hoping you pick something fun next time.

If it helps, I didn't like Ocarina of Time as much as everyone else seemed to at the time, but I still love BG&E. It's got a meditative quality about it that I find fascinating. I spent a lot of my time just looking for animals to photograph and objects to collect rather than doing the missions.

Course, the soundtrack is a big part of why I love it as well, I think. Enhances the mood so well.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

For anyone running BG&E on PC, and that's having the glitchy graphics problems, try disabling "HW Vertex Processing" in the advanced options.

Also, for anyone that's like me and needs a joypad for a third person adventure game, try out Joy2Key as a keyboard emulator for your joystick. You might have to mess with the joystick threshold under the "Others" tab so that you're not twitching around all over the place, but it works well for what it is.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

I don't think Army of Two's problem is stigma but more that it's such a bad game, slightly livened up by splitscreen co-op. You're still playing co-op of a fairly bad game, with more of the fun coming from interaction between the two of you, and not so much with the game. I imagine co-op over online with that game is a pretty empty experience.

Well, it's certainly less forgiving than something like Gears of War for going out on your own. Part of the fun is relegating different combat roles for you or your partner.

I wouldn't say the first one is bad unless you're just forced to play with the AI. The second one with AI is still not great, but better than the first.

It might be kinda cool to do more co-op games for game club, frankly. It would be like having a workout partner that pushes you to come to the gym. And it might make the game experience mean a little more having shared it with a friend.

That being said, I didn't play Ikaruga at all this month because I own it on gamecube, and I sold my gamecube/don't have a wii, so.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?