Be Excellent To Each Other

Yay! I influencedey p[eoples!

lol, GamesTIM(!).

Liked the demo - the fighting is great fun.

I didn't like it but then I don't like beat-em-ups generally, so I guess this one's not for me.

The demo has downloaded! Whoop!

Ian play! Ian Smash!

I thought that this demo at least showed some potential to capture the gun-fu Hong Kong movies. The Batman fighting was ok (it's like Batman, init), and the shooting was solid enough, the free running seemed ok too and it all looked very nicely put together.

It didn't engorge mini me with blood, but it seemed harmless enough and might be quite decent fun.

What I did like though was running a hostage through the warehouse. I just thought this was the first time I'd seen this game mechanic. It was pretty cool. Anyway, I'm sure this is probably ace forgettable fun.

I'm still not buying. It got a six in Edge din'it.

Edge sez:

fighting good
driving lightweight like "a previous generation copy of Need for Speed"
Free-running ripped from Assassin's Creed but nowhere near as good or broad.
Shooting there just about.

Played this round at a mates on Friday.

Promising intro then Dullsville fighting tutorial and very linear play.

Won't be bothering.

The leg break in this has to be one of the most satisfying moves ever. My girlfriend just cheated on me, so I broke her leg.

I approve.

Yes, but what about the game?

It's probably the most effective delivery against a left-handed batsman, I agree.

I love this. It's properly brilliant fun. The only real annoyance in the game I've found is that it keeps taking my guns away, for no real reason.

And done. Properly brilliant game.

I have a borrow of Craster's copy, and it's fucking brilliant fun so far.

It could do with some more fighting moves when you're just blasting the button, but the counters are great, as is, like Cras says, the leg breaking.

Lulz:

A contender for "game of 2012", reckon. And now I'm looking at flights to Hong Kong.

You office is near Heathrow?

Although not for long

£14.99 on Steam this weekend.

Well worth the pennies. Some interesting-looking mods, too (I'd like to see one that ups the count of pedestrians and traffic).

Yeah for fifteen quid I'm tempted, but then again it'd just be yet another game in my Steam library that I'll never, ever play.

My free time quota these days basically allows for:

1) One game on the go (an hour or two per night).
2) One TV series on the go (one episode per night, as per Breaking Bad, maybe two on a non-school night).
3) That's about it, perhaps a bit of XBLA here and there and some late night weekend online slotting every couple of weeks.

Admittedly non-school nights are better than a school night, but there's still no point stacking a load of games up for some future utopia that'll never come where I can play games for hours and hours a day. (WHY WERE GAMES ALL SO SHIT WHEN I WAS A FUCKING TEENAGER AND I COULD PLAY THEM AD INFINITUM??? OH CRUEL FATE.)

I dread to think how much dead money is tied up in my Steam Library, games I've never played, or hardly ever played, and never will do again. It doesn't matter how cheap a game is, if you're never gonna play it, it's still a waste of cash.

This. Oh God, so much this.

Which is actually a good thing. Nay, an excellent thing! I've got more cheap, fantastic entertainment than I can cope with? My younger self despises me, the poor fucker.

Fucking gotten, for 50% off I can't resist. Thanks for the tip off!

Things what I did in this game:
Inspired by Craster, I broke a girl's leg when she cheated on me.
When I walked out of a clothes shop in my new threads and someone told me that I didn't look that good, I slammed a car door on his head. Six times.
A taxi driver wouldn't pick me up. I broke his leg.
The girls outside my shitty apartment never stopped talking. Bored of them, I grabbed one of them, smacked her head into the boot of my car, and then threw her into it. I drove her to a different district of HK, pulled her out of the boot and broke her arm. She was back before I was
A man bumped me with his umbrella. I broke his leg, and then beat his twitching body with his own umbrella.
Some loser told me that I "shouldn't be up here" when I was playing parkour on a sky-scraper. I mashed his head in an aircon intake.
Some nob told me I was no good at singing karaoke. Leg. Broken.

The other thing I liked doing was beating Craster's high scores, knowing he wouldn't be able to beat me back because I have his game

Two hours in and I like it. I'm surprised there isn't an option to play entirely in Cantonese, this discussion on the subject makes me laugh. I might show the game to my friend who was born in HK and see how much she can pick out if I ask her to translate the sweary pedestrians (I've remembered she complains of swearing too much already IRL). It doesn't make sense that the main characters are all speaking English to each other all the time.

This mod is pretty good, it makes everything very vivid and without any real FPS drop that I can see.

I can definitely see why people want to increase the traffic density: the city is far too quiet in terms of vehicular traffic and the roads are wide enough that you could cut through heavy traffic fairly easily.

Fighting is great fun, you have to resist the urge to fight fight fight and instead let them come to you. The brawl on the docks to steal the watches (very early on) was quite challenging and taught me this lesson the hard way. I enjoyed the pickpocket who distracts you with his sexy girlfriend, especially when he tried to ambush me on a rooftop and didn't expect me to just throw him and his two cronies off the roof.

The driving physics are somehow worse than those in Saint's Row 2, and the Wheelman-style 'barging' move is just ridiculous.

What's the leg break move? I haven't figured it out yet.

EDIT: Never mind. Aha!

Friend had a look at the game today.

Her observations:
-(repeatedly) it's not busy enough to be HK, there needs to be like ten times more traffic, bumper to bumper, even at 3am. You should not have the road to yourself to run around in like that.
-the minibuses are the wrong colour, the roof should be red (I explained that an early mission has you running a red minibus off the road)
-so you just live out some dream of being a man in the triads? (me: with a girlfriend who is a karaoke hostess) with more than one girlfriend?!
-ah, he's going for a 'massage'... (screen fades to black) WHAT? We don't get to see what happens? What's with this game?
-do you actually do police stuff or do you just go around starting fights and singing karaoke?
-it looks more like Chinatown here in Toronto than HK.

Yes, yes, now, I will barge past people and you tell me what they're angrily saying.

-(after running past an enemy gang) those Triad guys just said "let's get him!"
-(after knocking over a woman with a motorcycle) she just said "how are some people dead but you're still alive? - that's the best translation I can think of"
-(knocking a woman over) she said "hey, why are you pushing me?"
-(running through the night market) he said something about a show tonight?

End result: both disappointed by absence of promised swears. She expected a lot of very specific insults towards your family, instead it was all the usual 'what the?' complaints of GTA games, but in Cantonese. Also the city isn't right.

Other friend next to me: Yeah! I used to watch bad HK action movies too!
First friend: Sorry, HK isn't like that every day. No gunfights or kung fu on the streets. Sorry.

That would be a shit game though.

He's complaining about the lack of chavs runnin' on his dang roof.

The game is ridiculously quiet, though. You get into a chase with the police and the roads are completely empty except for you and the cops. It's boring.

I played around with traffic density on the PC version of GTAIV, and you hit an 'annoyance threshold' pretty quickly.

As much as it sounds like a cool idea to have 'proper traffic', the reality is that in a game where you need to be driving around quite a lot, the last thing in the world you want is anything like real traffic density.

I did set the density up to 100% a few times just for the sheer joy of blowing up entire interstates of traffic jams with a single grenade, but as soon as I went back to playing the game properly, I put it back down to 20%, which is what the 360/PS3 versions ran at.

Can't comment directly on Sleeping Dogs as I haven't played it, but I can imagine there's a potentially solid design decision in making the roads somewhat empty for chase sequences and suchlike.

I'd guess there's a balance between crammed and empty. And I'd imagine it would be quite easy to set dynamically according to how the player was finding the traffic.

Not that I would like such a system, but I'm surprised no such thing is implemented.

You complained bitterly about the random traffic in Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

This isn't a game where your success hinges entirely on a millisecond-perfect performance.

I don't think it'd make it any less annoying though.

Even with normal traffic density in GTAIV, being subject to random bad luck with traffic can get teeth-grindingly annoying, very quickly.

£10 on Steam today!

I may actually snaffle it and add it to my never-ending list of stuff to get round to playing one day.

This is very good indeedy. Surprisingly so, given its pedigree, chum.

This is a fun game with fun things in it that am fun.

Ha! It's just played me perfectly.

I

I should really give you this back, Cras.

Yup. Or send it on if someone else wants it.

*waves*

There you go.

I'll bring it to the quiz. I best get that DLC completed!

I swear someone just shouted "Craster!" to me while driving on the pavement. That clean drive record of yours rubs my face in the dirt every 20 seconds or so, you horrible ginger fiend.

Mwahahahahahaha! Man, I put far too much of my life into that.

Just popped the max, now on to the dulluck that I done bought last week. Fun game! Sits somewhere between Saints Row 1 and GTA4 in the wackiness stakes. I like the breadth of stuff to do, and the combat shits on anything GTAesque from a great height.

Dulluck was fun. I think the Nightmare in North Point pack was my favourite, just because it channelled the Big Trouble in Little China vibe quite well. Except with no Kurt Russell scenery chewing. I also enjoyed playing as a lowly traffic copice throwing around people urinating in public. Reminded me of Nottingham.

I've only just found out if you press X while on the map screen all the collectables show up on the main map...DOH.