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Demitri_C

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Completed it myself this evening. Completely demented little gem. Looking forward to going back through it to try for the A grades (already got the 'true ending').

Yeah finished it the other day and then played through again to get all the masks and the proper ending. I just hope they release a tool to allow for user created levels, I need more!

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I've been putting a lot of time into Forza Horizon since I got it at the weekend. I played the demo and the full game is even better. I like the style they've gone for, even if it is a bit yuppy, but the music is good, the visuals are fantastic and the gameplay is typically good of Forza. I like the open-world element too, that driving isn't just about racing and there are other activities you can do out on the open road. I'm about halfway through and it's absolutely fantastic.

I picked up Just Cause 2 for about a tenner brand new the other day from Tesco. I know some of you guys here have raved about how good it was recently. My brother had the first game and although it looked great and had fun moments, it was ultimately a bit boring and repetitive. When I'm done on Forza I'll give it a go, although I still have Dishonored that I haven't really touched and I play Fifa 13 in between too. The there's college and everyday life which just get in the way of gaming.

That was my 2,000th post!

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Have ground Borderlands into dust, have nearly one of everything interesting except the pearlescents, but there's no challenge left. Started Dark Souls, not too far in yet, but I fear I'm already treating it like I did Demon's Souls, spending hours grinding to level up before bosses/new areas and obsessively searching for every piece of loot in the game, so I should get a ton of time out this one! A friend also started it today as well, but he hates taking games slowly, so he's insisting on doing a Deprived/caveman build on his first ever "Souls" game playthrough, which should be pretty hilarious to witness.

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Added another release to my in progress pile, Assassin's Creed 3.

Suffers like 2 with taking an absolute age to get going it seems (I've not actually started the game proper yet and I'm 4 hours in...) but the things that stand out for me at the moment are it's obvious pushing of what the 360 can do, it looks a little rough in places but that's to be expected now I think, and that fact that it appears to be massively rushed in places. There are loads of little things that just feel like they weren't thought through. Missions often have curious swifts in fail states, it's often not entirely clear what you're required to do or, perhaps worse, the specific criteria of how the game wants you to go about things. The opening... acts I guess, of the game have also felt thrown together, it hops around it's narrative in those opening hours making the whole shebang feel quite bizarrely disjointed. This has plagued all of the games to some degree but this one feels particularly oddly disjointed to me. I'm hopping that will all be forgotten when it really get's going but crikey, it's taking it's time. It's not helped by the story getting increasingly daft (which is saying something for this series).

Theres a load of potential there and I'm hoping, given a good session, I'll be singing it's praises in time.

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Assassin's Creed 3 is well on the way to killing any love I have for the series. It's a mess in so many ways.

I don't know whether I'm just not paying attention, or if the game expects you to know a lot about the American revolution, but it feels so disjointed. I'm playing it and seem to be bouncing around missions with little rhyme or reason. I recognise faces and names and places and some events, but there seems to be a distinct lack of joining the lot together, what's going on, why am I doing this or that. It isn't helped by the fact one minute you're in Boston, the next you've had a loading screen and you're in Philadelphia for a cutscene. It also spends an absolutely obscene amount of time getting going. You remember Assassin's Creed 2 took a while to get going? This makes that game look like it's full of get up and go. I'd estimate theres a good 6/7 hours in this before you even come close to feeling like the game has decided to let you get playing it proper.

It does an absolutely horrendous job of explaining many aspects of gameplay and often doesn't give you any idea of what is expected of you from mission to mission, which is a bit shit when this is a game that **** loves instant fail states (i.e. if you're spotted, go back unt do it again!). And then after another baffling switch of scenario it'll give you express instructions for daft things, such as 'Interact with door' (that's a verbatim example I had this afternoon). Gameplay systems it does go through pains to explain it does poorly. The new craft/trade/money making minigame thing has an explicit tutorial that apparently doesn't actually tell you all the aspects of the system. At times it actually tells you things that are wrong - early(ish - this is behind about 6 hours of pissing about) on you'll be given a task by Sam Adams where he will tell you to follow him to a printers. He then won't move. You have to lead him. He will then tell you he'll show you a tunnel system, follow him. He doesn't move, and neither does the objective marker that has been on your screen for the past minute. It's quite easy to assume the game is bust at this point - you would assume that your objective marker would change as your objective has changed, and you'd expect a character telling you to follow them, to lead you somewhere.

It suffers from the usual Assassin's Creed infuriating problems - the shonky issues with traversal where it will cock up and cause you to fail through no fault of your own mainly, and things like rubbish lip syncing. But it also riddled with bugs - silly stuff like clipping everywhere, models simply vanishing, spelling mistakes all over the place, a spoiler in a piece of reading material it gives you in the first hour... I had a particularly weird issue earlier where the camera simply would not allow me to pan up or down, which given that I was in what amounted to a forced stealth section where it was a complete necessity to be able to view the surroundings, meant I failed.

And so much of it feels passionless. The actual tasks it gives you are not that dissimilar from any other game in the series from 2 onwards, but they seem so dull. The game lacks the character that Ezio's best moments had - Connor is a damp squib (the game attempts a revelation early on that falls entirely flat and seems to be the only attempt at making the character interesting), the other characters feel danced around as historical figures that are worshipped as godlike in their native US. And the environments suffer terribly from the time period. Boston and New York are well realised but neither is exciting, neither has any interest and sadly, yes, they really lack the verticality this franchise has been marked by. The tallest building in Boston will see you climb to the top in 10 seconds, and there's not many buildings that challenge it for height. The Frontier areas, areas of wilderness with trees and animals, don't help. Again, they are pretty, but theres so little to do with them. You'll climb the same tree time and again if you search out viewpoints in the frontier, encounters with animals are largely pointless and predators attacks are just the same QTEs time and again.

The sci-fi storyline continues to make a game argument for it's being ditched entirely too. It's getting more and more daft and feeling more and more pointless. I'm not sure why no-one at Ubisoft has decided to quietly kill off the whole pretence and the whole thing doesn't add anything to the game - Desmond is an awful character, the concept is moronic (DNA holding historical memory?! Weird unexplained 'First Civilisation' aliens?) and the bits out of the Animus add nothing to the series at all. This time round you do some genuine missions as Desmond and they're um... shit. I've done 2 so far, the first was so laughably easy and boring that it was barely worth the effort, and the second was similar but with added instant fails with half the gameplay systems (hiding in groups particularly) turned off. Just sweep the lot under the carpet and pretend it didn't happen, and stick to a straight historical romp.

The games best moments are when you just wandering the environments doing the simple side tasks, and it's pretty and in some cases had obviously had money thrown at it but... well... it's just not great. It's a 7/10 game at best, and a clear indication that the series needs a break.

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Cheers for the review. I'll wait 12-15 months as they usually drop in price like a stone. I haven't started Brotherhood yet so I can wait.

Picked up Fallout 3 for a fiver. Enjoying it so far - especially sledgehammering bandits to death in slow motion.

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Think I have just about had my fill of Borderlands 2, I'll probably finish off the DLC and then put it away. Definitely had my monies worth though, 60+ hours of game and there is still a ton to do, my interest faded before the content was exhausted.

Really want to play Dishonoured and XCOM. Just poking around forums and people are still complaining about bugs in XCOM, so I'll wait on a patch for that. Just bought Dishonoured on Steam, it should have finished downloading by the time I get home from work tonight. :)

Never been a huge fan of the Assassins Creed series, but I do have to ask, is AC3 a "British people are word removeds" simulator? I'd boycott it on the strength of that if it is, but as I'm probably never going to play it anyway I guess it makes little difference to Ubisoft's finances. I'm still curious to know though.

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Dishonored is where I'll be heading back to once I polish of AC3. It's a compelling experience, I've only moved on as other things came up and the way I'm playing it (stealthy no kills) it requires patience and a time expenditure to play (the game in no way forces you to do that though, in the 10/12 hours I've put in) and probably arguably puts more temptation to you not to do that.

On the AC3 'Brits are evil' thing. Put it like this. I think I'm around sequence 8 IIRC, of 12 sequences if the achievements are accurate, and I've not come across a sympathetic British character. All of the major villains are British or Irish, it's replacement for guards are all redcoats, and it's only sop so far to not making out that Brits are word removeds is that occasionally what I guess are supposed to be American troops (bluecoats) will attack you. There hasn't been a single 'good' Brit, they're all portrayed as stereotypes of bad (the aloof gentryman, the thug, all round upper class bastard who may be slightly unhinged 'cos he's got messy sweaty hair and mad eyes, an Irishman who has knowledge of Natives and has betrayed them, etc etc). Unless there is a twist coming, or it's going to introduce a good Brit, the only way you can argue it isn't a British people are word removeds simulator is that the villains are Templars before they are Brits and only align with British interests as it is best for Templar interests. I fully expect them to chuck in a token Yank Templar soon enough.

It so far hasn't eally portrayed any Americans as bad that I can remember. It's made a couple look somewhat hypocritical or incompetent (Paul Revere's big moment in the Revolution is demoted to him being an 18th Century GPS system thanks to the game fudging you into every big moment it seems) but generally there's a tangible feeling of... pussy footing around them, putting them in scenes as window dressing almost sometimes, or as token supporting cast.

On XCOM, I dearly would like to play it, but I'm really unsure if it's for me. I've got the demo but stupidly I'm almost worried to play that even for some reason.

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Have they changed the engine on the WWe games recently or are they STILL using the one from the old smackdown games which was awful?

Last time I played one, which was probably WWE 11 or something, they were still using that engine, which was a significant step back from WWF No Mercy off of like, 2001. Collision engine on that was fantastic

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Another brief AC3 gripe.

You know in Brotherhood they added the... er... Brotherhood mechanic? And whilst it wasn't really that special it was kinda fun to just have a crew of assassins built up and send them off round the world and recruiting them was pretty much as hard as 'Hey, I saved you from those guys, you should be an assassin!'?

They've changed it. The system is still there but is absolutely pointless and chopped back. Which is lucky really becaue I have absolutely no **** idea how to recruit more assassins. I've done little missions which suggested they let you recruit people but... er... they didn't. I've been left Liberation missions which I think are to do with it but the Liberation missions um... appear not to have any mission at their location... And I swear the game hasn't told me how to recruit anyone. It's given me one guy in the course of the storyline but at the moment I can't even use him at all, and with just one guy you can't do any of the 'sending him off round the continent to do stuff'.

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Playing NFS: Most Wanted.

So fun. I don't usually play racing games but a couple of my mates got it and were nagging me to get it. The game looks decent visually and the gameplay itself is just fun.

Also like the aspect of competing against your friends through time trials and stuff even if they're not online at the same time.

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I think I'll be getting NFS: Most Wanted after I finish Forza Horizon which I'm having a lot of fun with at the moment.

I haven't played the final AC:2 installment yet, so I might pick that up if I can find it cheap before getting AC:3 although Chindie's descriptions of it confirms it still has some really annoyng issues with in my opinion have plagued the series as a whole. I thought the first AC was boring as shit. AC:2 was a lot better and I enjoyed it, but the franchise as a whole has never lived up to the hype for me. People absolutely love these games and I don't really know why. They're like a less fun Prince of Persia.

The pirate ship bit on AC:3 looks a lot of fun though.

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