That really doesn't need any further addendum. 

Actually reading it, I presume. 

I was considering Steam to be the top studio/publisher.

Yeah I'm not a fan of the real b-grade stuff either - I've seen tonnes of it, Guinea Pig and August Underground series for instance, but most of it is a fucking chore to watch. There are a few that are difficult to forget. Salo, Men behind the sun, a serbian film would be the best, but they all probably had more of a story/budget.

Anyway, back on topic, are there any games that have made killing innocent bystanders fun? I've never played GTA, but games like Dead Rising 2 weren't very good at this. More of a nuisance when they get in the way. 

was pretty good at it imho 

 

Alice: Madness Returns 7/10. Yeah good art style, but fuck the game drags on for too long with the same basic jumping puzzles throughout the entire thing. Also the early parts of the game are too difficult (I had great difficulty with one battle) compared to the later stages, which are piss easy. The upgraded weapons just shit on everything. Should have been a few hours shorter, and actually that last chapter was quite weak. Combat was a bit average too.

Tried The Haunted: Hells Reach, really cool levels and decent graphics, but it's just hordes charging at you for a set amount of time (survival mode I suppose you call that). I'm not playing an entire game in survival mode. That's worse than botmatches...

Which brings me to Brink. 6/10 at best. Man, I remember the videos of this and thinking how awesome it looked. Well sure it does look good, but what a shitty single player campaign. It's just botmatches with typical multiplayer tasks. Only the friendly bots are utterly useless cunts that never work as a team, and 10 mins of success can result in failure in 5 secs if your buddies decide to fuck off somewhere else instead of helping/healing you.

I had one where I'd been playing for 10 mins defending something (but much longer on previous tasks as well), got to 45s to go and I'm thinking sweet even if they started a hack, they couldn't get it done it 45 secs. I die, for the first time probably, and they start hacking. I then have 45 secs to get across the level, fail to make it, but the level doesn't finish, it goes into overtime and I'm still trying to get there in time because the hack is still going on! I fail to get there and have to start all over again. Where the hell were all the teammates, why do I have to do EVERYTHING MYSELF?

It clearly gets much harder as you level up. I ended up creating a new character so my levels were reset and just played the final few levels of each campaign, when it was still easy enough to succeed without being fucked over by almost impossible tasks. Like the missile hack. I put it on easy and still wasn't even close to completing it, on higher xp levels.

Might play cod mw3 next after these 3 disappointments :) 

If you haven't check out the first trailer on the steam page for Crawl : http://store.steampowered.com/app/293780

Trailer or not I will be trying it but man the trailer is awesome :D 

It's pretty fun coop, with a few friends, not so interesting alone (at least the version I played). 

Well Modern Warfare 3 was fun. I don't get all the hate these COD's get, this game has a 2.4 user score on Metacritic.

It's a linear military shooter, full of action, and it's really got no major flaws at doing this. The design and action, the combat and guns, it's all pretty much as good as anything else.

The story is a bit incohesive, the developers have gone back to respawning enemies until you reach waypoints, which turns this into a waypoint to waypoint game instead of actually shooting enemies. What else, the textures looked a bit low quality at times, I had to play with settings to get it looking better. The old quake engine needs an overhaul.

But it's just an annual game that Activision treat like any sports game that gets a new version every year - new story, new levels, but no new innovation. Seems like gamers just can't accept this.

8/10

Anyone played the newest COD yet? What's it like? I'm curious as to why they're calling it an action-adventure. COD is the opposite of an adventure game. 

 

"Seems like gamers just can't accept this."

Cos the game is DUNG. HTH. 

Nice style, excitingly boring premise
http://www.firewatchgame.com/ 

I really liked the ending of MW3, as well as the sandstorm level. The mp did have some decent ideas with the Strike Packages, but those were nullified by poor balance and Death Streaks.

I've completed the story for the latest CoD, and have 20 hours on the mp. What would you like me to elaborate on? 

I would appreciate if games on Steam had to meet an acceptable level of quality before being offered for sale or as 'Free to Play'. By quality, I don't mean theme or appearance; I mean that you can load it, play it and finish it without becoming Mr Fixit or scouring the Net seeking answers to things that could be in a readme.txt file.

I recently added 'Only If' to my library since the trailer looked kind of interesting. It wes free and the reviews were reasonably okay. It installed fine but what it was could only be considered a beta or a concept prototype by the game designer. There were no instructions or notes (text or pdf) which would be okay if you could find all that you needed to know in-game. It used the Unity engine key and mouse binding menu that let you select inputs but your selections were completely ignored. I had problems with contolling the game character and getting interactions to work. I'm stuck on a puzzle and I'm not sure if it's me or a bug. It will not allow me to resume a game that I quit. Considering that the game creator put a lot of work into this short game, is it asking too much that they also include a game instruction manual or text file considering that Steam is a very wide distribution method? When I looked for answers to such things as non-functioning keybindings, how to quit (ended up alt-tabing and killing the process), what functions were actually present in the game or even a basic gameplay guide; I found very little to no help.

Sure the game is free but so are many Quake maps. With Quake maps, I could go to review sites and find out quickly if they were worth playing. I thought Steam had a similar degree of quality screening and curation to some degree. Now I know better.

All I'm saying is that games on Steam should meet a minimum level of quality (in the QA sense - the games can still suck otherwise) or certain titles should be indicated as beta or alpha quality with no meaningful supporting documentation. If Steam doesn't want to do that QA screening, those who support getting their work on Steam should proactively provide notes to players to avoid poor reviews borne out of inadequate knowledge of the game or false expectations of game performance/stability/quality or level of completion.

Only If is not the only title that draws my comments but it is a great example of my gripes. 

Valve doesn't believe they need QA. They have customers, like you, who will report any issues. Which shows their ignorance as to QA's function - resolving issues before it can become one for the customer.

The curator aspect of Greenlight is basically a catch-all to decide as they wish. But yeah, they do need a basic check at least for functionality, and perhaps a request of developers for an instance of the game in the final hour of content, so that they can reasonably view the conclusion.

However, indie devs also have a lot to learn about packaging and messaging. Steam is not Dropbox, it is a platform of distribution, and putting your free game on it without basic polish is no different than getting it stocked on a shelf at Wal-Mart or such, placed next to the latest AAA titles. 

its cool! Still on sale on steam 

So how are the "rooms" in Ziggurat? My dubiousness about procedurally-put-together shooters is that the environments won't be that interesting to explore through or fight in. (And I saw a complaint about Ziggurat over on the SA forums that fit in that bucket.)

Obviously it could be that everything else about Z is fun enough to make up for any blandness or aimlessness in the environments... although for me that would have to be a LOT of fun-ness to counterbalance. :-) 

The rooms are pre-made but arranged randomly when you start the level. The environments are very simple and easy to navigate with little to no Z-axis fighting occuring apart from in a few rooms or if you have flying enemies attacking you.

The rooms are intentionally generic I think because you don't know what you will be fighting in there, and the enemy variety and combinations are what make ziggurat fun, along with your character build and weapons.

I was initially worried that the character build stuff was too shallow as there were only a few choices in the first game I played. However the system is quite interesting in that you can unlock new "cards" which are then added to the card pool that is randomly picked from when you level up or find reward crates in the maps. This slowly increases the build diversity as you play the game and has kept things very interesting on each new game.

You can unlock new playable characters in the same way. These characters have modifiers to certain stats or new traits that others are missing. One can move faster than others etc.

It really comes down to if you like random roguelike elements in your games. I think Ziggurat does it very well. The combat feels like Doom and the enenmies are very well designed in this regard also. They have great tells and you can avoid all their damage if you engage correctly.

The only thing I don't really like about the game is that the enemies visual design is all over the place and very silly in areas. For example there are giant carrots that chase you :P I think the game would feel cooler with a more concise design for all the enemies. 

Yeah I forgot to mention that sandstorm level in MW3, but you're right that was an awesome level. It reminded me of Heavy Rain from L4D, only not annoying. 

Just got a PS4 (my first console since the sega master system) only to realise I can't go and play all the console/ps exclusive games I missed because you can't play ps3 games on a ps4. Fucking what?

I can play PC games from the 80s on my current rig, yet I can't play anything prior to about 2013 for the playstation. Absurd. 

PS3's processor/architecture is supposed to be a development hell, it might have been too costly to integrate or emulate. PS3 can emulate PS1 and got emulation capabilities for PS2 later in it's lifecycle.
PS2 emulation is only for popular games iirc, the lower-level the emulation of the hardware the more precise but also orders of magnitude slower, more efficient higher-level emulation often need hacks for compatibility with some games. I guess Sony didn't want angry customers with their old obscure game having glitches.

But yeah, it's BS to the end user. 

it wasn't that bad. The Xbox/360 was easier since it didn't divide the memory allocation, and because you're building on one MS product to put it onto another. 

Ya feel the gentle slide of a greedy dick up your arse there Kona :D ?

Seriously what did you expect from Sony ?
You forgot what they pulled with the PS3 ? Linux, PS1 emulation... Features that were real quick to disappear.

At least they didn't claim this was going to be possible with the PS4 at any point. Right ? 

Do they use a serial key or something similar?

I found both and a expansion for PK on a second hand store for 1 euro, look almost as if they were new, but i can't find the key on them, and a videogame without a key has almost the same value as downloading it from Piratebay, so i am doubting about buying them, as i don't like to have a permanent reminder of a bad purchase in my home. 

They come from that era, so I would expect such.