Favourite computer games of all time. [2]

I wrote a whole reply to this and managed to lose it.

Basic summary is sounds cool, wonder if it feels the same once you get further in and what happened to your son? Is he food?

"What happened to your son? Is he food?"

I am appalled!

{{ I'll let you know Lance how the game goes as it progresses (non-spoilery but just if it becomes more of the same or if it can maintain the feel throughout) as to the son- thats actually probably the weakest part of the narrative. By which I mean it's meant to be what is driving you on but frankly you have so much more to do before you can even think of searching for him, building and defending your camp, scavaging for resources, exploring the island ect its very easy to forget all about your son.
The other reason for this is the intro scene on the plane is just you sitting on the plane with your son sleeping beside you then it crashes, then you see him taken, then you pass out and when you wake up you are on your own. Its not a lot to build a connection off, I dont even know what the kids voice sounds like and I cant even remember his name.
So in my roleplaying head my character figures the kids soup by now and  a set of decorative hats (the cannibals make hats out of body parts, did I mention that?) and has instead gone completely mad faced with tribes of cannibals trying to eat him ever night and has decided to outcannibal the cannibals. So when one does attack and Im forced to cave their head in with a club or axe I dismember the body and eat the buggers and use their bones to make stuf out of Having lost my mind and figured Im stuck on this island with these lunatics Im not only going to join them, I'm going to be the cannibals worst nightmare. Prey that bites back! }}

I'm even MORE appalled. To think we've come to this pass! Odo must be notified immediately.

That is sometimes the issue with these kind if games... there is so much to do that the urgency of any task can be lost.

You will probably end up eating the same cannibal that ate your son and be extension eating your own son.

What fun!

{{ I hadnt thought of that!

Short vid (only couple minutes) of me encountering my first natives early in the game.
These are the 'simplest' form of native, very animal like, dont tend to have tools more sophisticated than a bit of wood as a club. They can be quite wary, but are prone to making sudden attacks. Make a good meal though
They are a bit like neds, not to much trouble in ones and twos, but in groups can be trouble. }}

Make then in to fertiliser for some nice crops.

{{ Good idea! You can build a garden, bit of powdered calcium be good for it
10 mins of me swearing in a dark cave (caves are DARK in this game so I suggest full screen and a darkroom or you'll be mainly staring at your own reflection while I swear at it- which is a whole different crabbit app! }}

{{ Day 7 living with the cannibals- and I make a fatal error! What I should have done was go scavaging around for stuff to make a bow, I was planning on it but foolishly decided to make more defences for my small fort, unfortunately one day was not enough to do so, and late that afternoon as I was happily building some new walls, they turned up for a visit. And this time it wasnt just the feral animal ones. }}

Do you have to build the fort there or could you go fortify one of the caves (including installation of some lighting)?

{{ Dont think you can build inside the caves- plus they are always full of canniblas. But otherwise yeah you can build where you want pretty much. Lighting you can make stuff, you can make standing lights using just sticks and leaves, or once youve got a few cannibal skulls put them on poles and use the skull as the lamp holder. But light also attracts them to you. So double edged sword. }}

They shouldn't be full of cannibals if you stick some walls up and get the Elves to enchant the front door!

Are there ONLY baddies? No innocents you can rescue or find and get to guard your fort or help?

{{ well there is a mystery to uncover- what happened to other people whose camp sites you find, what happened to the rest of the passengers on the plane and your son. But far as I can tell no one survived. And the sense of being totally on your own and up against it and struggling to survive agians the odds is kind of the main mood and atmosphere of the game.
But if your feeling really lonely you can play coop. }} }}

Apparently tree houses are good for hiding in...

{{ From what I can tell, so far, the cannibals cant climb ropes for some reason (mercifully really). However they can jump up into trees and then jump from there, so best to chop all the trees around your choosen tree house down so they cant do that.
They can also climb on your structures, but rarely seem to (you'll note above they never try to follow me up the steps to the wall). Generally if they cant get to you easily they do what happened in above vid, they just wreck all your stuff and if you dont have ranged weapons to attack with, then from your treehouse, or on top of a wall, all you can do is watch as they destroy all your hard work }}

Yikes, pretty spooky in VR.

{{ Join Nagual and I making an arse of it in the Forest! }}

{{oh and apprecite the comment on the last vid Forest! And yes they are even scarier in vr!!! }}

{{{ So Ive been playing Fallout4 in VR.
And much to my surprise Ive been enjoying it. I say surprise because its a terrible Fallout game but treated as an on-rails narrative led story its pretty good.

So to clarify this a bit, Fallout games are traditionally rpgs full of choices and making your own way in the post apocalyptic world it presents. Normally you take on the role of a blank canvas, you fill in the character with yourself and the choices you make- are you good, bad? Friendly or mean? Help others or look out only for yourself ect.
Fallout 4 on all these points falls completely flat, you play as someone with a set backstory, a military history, a wife and child and a voice. That last part having a voiced protagonist is particularly harmful to a rpg game as you no longer choose who you are you are told who you are and what your motivations are and what you sound like. You cant put your own voice in there in your head because there is an actor doing your voice for you, and it kills the rpg side almost stone dead all on its own.
So why am I still enjoying it? Well if you treat is a linear action game set in an open world as opposed to an rpg set in an open world its works on that level quite well.

To give an example here is how my first few hours went- you start before the nukes fall in your home, everything you do here is on rails, and after you've interacted with x amount of things in your home a Vault-tech guy turns up to offer you a place in the Vault shelter in case the nukes fall. You have a limited four dialogue options to respond in conversation to this offer, far less than previous games, and here's the thing as the game needs you to go to the vault for the game to happen it doesn't actually matter what you choose to say, the story will railroad you anyway into going to the vault when the war starts. This is indicative of how the game works.

Once in the vault a series of events then play out which you just watch that set up the story and motivation for your character- to find your kidnapped son.
So you leave the vault into the ruined world 200 after the bombs fell, and the only viable route you can go, and which you are encouraged to go is back to your now ruined house and suburb. There you will find your Mr Handy robot still functioning who will then lead you about the nearby houses looking for supplies which introduces you to the combat and fills you in a bit to what has happened in the last 200 years. From there you are pointed in the direction of a nearby town.

Going there will take you past a location that will serve as your first 'home base' and get you a first companion, a dog that features in the games promo material, you can ignore the dog, but why would you and the game clearly doesn't want you to, so you take the dog on and continue on to the town.

Once there you meet a group called the Minute Men, and helping them introduces you to the games big thing- power armour and you get your own set- a really powerful thing given right off. They  in turn will then direct you to the main settlement in the area- Diamond City, and tell you they are going to the town you just left to set up there, which if you join them will introduce you to the settlement building element of the game, its other new big thing.
The other thing here is you can only help the Minute Men, there is no choice to join the raiders attacking them and you cant kill even if you try or want to the Minute Men, as they are marked by the game as unkillable as it needs them for the narrative. So choice be damned, you have to help out, have to get the power armour, whether you want it or not and whether you want to play as a tanked up soldier or not. Choice is largely an illusion.

So you eventually head off towards Diamond City to continue the search for your missing son. On route your pick up a radio distress signal coming from a police station, and going there will introduce you to one of the games main factions the Brotherhood of Steel, helping them will get you a powerful weapon and the offer to join their faction. Again you can ignore the signal and not bother, but all you do then is miss out on your intro to the Brotherhood and miss out on a cool weapon. This mission also introduces another main branch of the narrative the Synthetic humans, so again the game heavily points you towards doing it to further its narrative.

After this you head on towards Diamond City where outside you will meet a character who is important to the plot and will get you access to the city and point you in the direction of someone else important to the plot. And that's my first few hours in Fallout 4.

Now you can of course choose not to do any of this, you could from the start just go wandering off into the wilderness and ignore it all, but it makes for a poor game if you do as its very clear the game would rather you followed the bread crumbs it keeps giving you in order for certain events to occur and to introduce game concepts and important narrative elements to you. In effect its a completely linear game masquerading as an rpg.

And if you go into it expecting, as you might well do of a Fallout game, an rpg experience you are going to be very, very disappointed indeed. However if you just accept that your playing a linear narrative action game and just follow the bread crumbs as instructed its a fun VR experience in a post apocalyptic world. Its just not an rpg by any stretch of the imagination.

There are also a few technical issues, for a Bethsedia game nothing game breaking which is something from them, but I found that out in the wasteland my game ran perfectly fine, but once in Diamond City I had to turn down a lot of settings to get the frame rate back to acceptable.

Some things like dialogue options are a joke, not only because of the voiced protagonist but because it was designed clearly for consoles and a controller with only four options at any time on a wheel to respond with and most of the time at least 2 of those options will result in the exact same outcome anyway, sometimes all of them will. Part of the problem of it trying to pretend its still an rpg when it no longer is.

So to sum up, if you treat it as an on-rails narrative led adventure through the wastelands its a decent game you can have some fun with. If you treat it as a traditional Fallout rpg its awful however and fails on nearly every single rpg count. }}

{{ You may recall Ive talked about genius retro hippy llama loving Welsh mountain farm dwelling programmer Jeff Minter in the past, he who gave us Tempest 2000 and its variants as well as Space Giraffe, Gridrunner and Goatup among other notables.
His games all have certain things in common, they are throwbacks to the golden age of arcade machines of the 80's, they are tight as hell dominated entirely by the gameplay and the challenge, oh and completely insane psychedelic tourdeforces.

So I got hold of one of his few modern games I had not got round to yet, Polybius. At its most straightforward its a simple into the screen shootem up. You have a ship, some shields. You hold down the fire button and you dodge and shoot stuff. But like all Minter games its the gameplay that make it genius. In this case the gates you pass through, these bull horn shaped gates will unleash waves that destroy enemies and offer other rewards, but, and heres the snag, they also speed your ship up and hitting a load of them by levels end can mean youre hurtling through a madhouse of pixels, explosions, sounds and having your reflexes tested to the limit to dodge whats coming at you.
Now that other feature of Minter games, the assualt on the sense has probably never been greater than here. The soundtrack drives everything along pumping like a mad rave in your head in accompaniment to the particle effects, flashing lights, distortings of the screen and all manner of madness that is going on all around you.
If you are photosenstive run a mile from this game and do not under any circumstances play it in VR. You will have a fit within seconds.
I love a  Minter game, and to a degree Im used to his psychidelic visual style, but this? Oh Man, I honestly thought after playing for only fifteen minutes or so that my eyes were bleeding and melting down my face. Its a full on sensory assault, a hectic, mad, whirlwind of imagery, sound and colour done in a way only the mighty Jeff can do. And of course underpining it all is his trademark gameplay. You are given little to nothing in the way of instructions, you have to figure it out as you hurtle along, as is typical of his games just when you think you have it sussed he throws something new your way, and usually devious. But when it clicks and you are in the zone, its bliss. In normal mode its not as hard as other Minter games like Gridrunner either, my first game I got to lvl 10 without too much fuss.
Its available on ps and pc and can be played on both flatscreen or vr, and currently you can pick it up on Steam for a measely £5.19. So do yourself a favour and jump into the classic golden age of gaming with a modern veneer and introduce yourself to the mad llama filled world of Mr Minter. Just be prepared for a sensory assault unlike anything you will have been subjected to before.

The man himself Mr Minter playing the first 7 lvls of the games 50 lvls and explaining things as he goes. }}

{{ Got Red Dead Redemption 2 for my birthday. And far too early into it, especially story wise to comment other than to say its off to a very good start.
Rather one of the things which has struck me immediately is the world Rockstar has built is quite stunning. In a purely graphics level ( and I cant even run it at its max settings) its the sort of game that so good you dont notice whilst playing, it all kindof washes over you in the flow of action, and you kind of have to stop and take some screen shots (the game knows this and offers an ingame camera for this purpose, complete with filters should you desere them and other features) in order to truly appreciate how nice it all is, and how detailed a world it is.
So heres a bunch of snapshots Ive taken from the early part of the game that shows of the scale, and that Western vibe that they concoct so beautifully. }}

That's pretty amazing looking.

{{ Yeah its damn impressive, and not just the landscapes, although character models are not going for photorealistic they are detailed as hell, and because everything is motion captured everyone moves with a real weight and natural fluidity that really sells you on it. And character models are diverse, not noticed any duplicates yet, and not just in their appereance in how they dress, levels of cleanliness,you can genreally take a good stab at someones social standing purely on their looks and dress, all that detail is there too. And of course some very fine mutton chops and taches!

You have to walk into Saloons properly  



Taches and mutton chops!

}}

I loved the original RDR (and still enjoy revisiting it to this day-the undead nightmare expansion was great fun) and I'm almost tempted to get a PS4 just to play the sequel (well, I think it's actually a prequel, but you know what I mean) it looks amazing...

Rockstar certainly takes their time with projects, but the wait is worth it, quality over quantity...

I don't know it was through personal choice or bad luck, but I always felt the actor who voiced/motion captured John Marston should have had a bigger career...

{{ The level of detail they put in games is astonishing. And so far narratviely its pretty good for a prequel, fortunately Red Dead Redemption left a lot of gaps and untold stories regards Dutch's original gang, and John is in the gang, same voice actor playing a younger version, but he is not a main character so far over others in the gang. The character you play as, Arthur, is also well voiced but he lacks the charm of John's voice actor. But it sinteresting to see Dutch as leader, and almost father figure over this ragtag of characters with complex pasts.

Not sure about Rockstar going forward, thats most if not all the original Scottish team that started out as DMA Design gone now, with Dan Houser leaving,and some of the best US talent went too like Lazlow. Without those creative minds, and who scripted every GTA from 3 and both Red Dead Redemptions, I'm not sure Rockstar will still have its social and satirical bite, or as solid and impactful narratives. Or even that they will continue massive single player games over fast bucks on multiplayer and micro-transations. }}