Zylon
3621
Is the killer one of the characters you control?
Spoilers. Should answer any questions about the game’s plot.
Fair enough on the spoiler. Was just wondering as it seems like such a strong scene. But not much of an actual spoiler.
One of the reasons I enjoyed the Blade Runner game so much back in the day. You never quite knew what permutation of the story you would get.
Oooh… I wonder if that’s the kind of game we might see on Good Old Games.
Wendelius
Zylon
3624
In retrospect, I suppose the correct question to ask would have been-- Have the murders already occurred before the game begins?
If so, then the notion that the players’ actions would dictate the identity of killer strikes me as an entirely bizarre form of temporal Lamarckism.
pilonv1
3625
This was one of my favourites, the bit starting with the guy standing under the Hartlepool sign had me nearly in tears.
Think of it like the Clue movie.
Awesome review, totally enjoyed it.
wumpus
3629
This is the rare game he’s reviewed that I have played extensively.
I have to disagree that it’s a clone of Modern Warfare 2; it’s better than MW2 in every possible dimension, and by a significant amount.
I don’t know why he had such trouble with the mortar sequence; I did it on hard and medium only dying maybe once or twice, usually to enemies not to the mortars.
I guess you have to play multiplayer to grok the importance of destructability to the gameplay. It really does affect the strategy and change the way you interact with other players, so it’s quite significant. This is much less obvious in singleplayer, it’s true.
BWahahah! I’ve never played a FF game, but that review was genius.
I am exactly the same. Never played one, but this had me laughing out loud. Really enjoyed it.
That was really funny. So many hilarious visuals in that one too. My favorite was the red-headed character being from another planet and going off in a flying saucer.
While funny, I’m not sure many epic rpgs would do well if only played for 5 hours.
The first five hours of Chrono Trigger have you travel into the past, save a princess, travel back to the present, get arrested, break out of prison after fighting a tank, then fight mutants and killer robots in a post-apocalyptic future. You haven’t really gotten to the main storyline by that point, but it doesn’t really matter because everything else you’re doing is pretty freaking cool.
Which come to think of it is probably why Chrono Trigger is the only JRPG I’ve ever really liked.
Even a JRPG can and should do something interesting in the first five hours. The start of FF13 was pretty jarring after playing Resonance of Fate, which has no qualms about treating you like an intelligent human being who can figure out a combat system by exploring it yourself.
Still, there’s not much point in arguing about whether he gave it a fair shot. It was pretty obvious that he was going to hate the hell out of it, and everybody who clicked that link did so to see Yahtzee with bloody foam frothing from his lips. Paul Greengrass film projected onto a fat jogger’s tits!
Not a good attitude to have with respect to games if you want them to get better in general. Good games should be fun TO DO. JRPGs that take 20 hours just to hand you the reins to the combat system are trying to be fun IN RETROSPECT. Five hours is more time than I would give a random game to do something - anything - to hook me. To contrast, Dragon Age had me interested in its combat mechanics by the time the origin story I was playing ended and I was interested in the universe even before I started reading the massive gigantic humongous included encyclopedia of unnecessary text they built into the game. Pool of Radiance (the first one - not the one that makes your computer explode) showed me what I could do with my characters before I even got into the story of the game and got me interested in seeing what I could do with a combination of characters. I haven’t had the time to boot Final Fantasy XIII yet, but I will ONLY be making it all the way out to twenty hours, if I do make it that far, to get into the full depth and breadth of the combat systems based on the sufferance that I am willing to give the title out of a sense of brand loyalty that it has, frankly, started to exhaust at this point.
psu_13
3638
I don’t think anyone can disagree that the pacing in FF13 is a bit off. The question is whether you are willing to put up with it for the rest of whatever you think the game is doing for you.
FWIW, I found it much more tolerable to deal with the crappy pacing in FF13 than either of the Assassin’s Creed games or Dragon Age. YMMV.
But just because you can tolerate it does not mean that the pacing in FF13 is not kind of crappy. Anybody can see that.
I’m loving Giant Bomb’s Brad Shoemacher’s updates on FFXIII.
“I’m twenty hours in and I just hit a new tutorial.”
Jazar
3640
Saying the pacing of FF13 is “a bit off” is like saying the Titanic sailed into “a bit” of ice, or the Hindenburg got “a bit” burnt.
