ME4 I've only seen some videos so far, but female main character does look hilariously ugly.

Anyway, Blood Dragon wouldn't install so skipped ahead to Batman: Arkham Origins. As always good design, good story, average gameplay. No side missions worth a damn or DLC's. Nothing new to the franchise AT ALL. No point exploring the open world because there's nothing much to do. But I quite enjoyed this one anyway (except for Bane). Maybe my favourite so far because it was easy and simple. 7/10

Call of Duty: Black Ops II
Fuck these guys need to upgrade the engine on this thing. Great story though. I could totally see Black Ops being on the big screen as a huge blockbuster. Same old gameplay, lots of epicness, but the visuals are starting to date. 

Has anyone here played this? It's right up the alley of Quake level designers because most of it features marvelous architecture from Rome. I haven't played Crysis 3 yet, but these are the best graphics I've ever seen a game (keep in mind I'm yet to play anything from 2014 on). Of course I had everything turned up and it still ran okay. This CryEngine is fucking wonderful, it's a shame it didn't get licensed for more games. Instead it gets this, Crysis 3, then Crytek go almost bankrupt and now just waste all their talent on shitty fucking cellphone games. What a terrible waste. Oh there was that dinosaur game but it looks like ass (again proving they have great trouble making fun games). Meanwhile everyone else carries on with the old Unreal Engine 4, Valve with their updated Quake engine, COD with it's updated Quake 3 engine etc.

But yeah the environments in Ryse are fantastic, definitely the best looking water I've seen. It's starts out a bit average in level 1 (of 8) but gets better. Just a shame it's very linear, terrible FOV, clips everywhere. The story is also good but someone from the art and engine department forgot to tell the combat/gameplay people that they're supposed to be making a good game here, because the combat fucking sucks. Way worse than Arkham. It's basically a great big QTE game but without the prompts. No keyboard remapping but that doesn't really matter because movement during combat almost doesn't exist you're just hitting the push>attack>attack rinse and repeat, sometimes with a block added in. Very unresponsive, I'm just clicking the mouse like a madman. I had to put godmode on for half of it because it was so repetitive and actually not that easy at times, even though I'm apparently playing in recruit/story board mode. Another developer that doesn't know what "easy" actually means.

Crytek can make stunning looking games, and they got gameplay right with Crysis and Far Cry, which wasn't hard since there's 100s of FPS's that came before it to replicate, but they got it wrong - big time wrong - with Ryse. If only this was an open world RPG, think The Witcher, with freeflowing combat, and with these graphics. 

btw 6/10 (10/10 for art though, if you want to sit through 6 hours for some pretty environments)

http://www.newgamenetwork.com/images/uploads/gallery/Ryse/RyseE3_04.jpg 

iirc it was a different developer who made it. The series is back on form with Arkham Knight however, which was excellent! 

Blizzard finally release a widescreen patch for Broodwar and charge full price for it because REMASTERED?

Is this remastering the new big thing since all the possible sequels got made? 

Alien Arena yet another pile of utterly generic rehashed deathmatch TURD. Q3A Q2 and UT called and they want their aborted ass-baby back. 

Yeah, I would've been happy with just a widescreen patch.

However, this might cause me to break my blizzard boycott. Broodwar classic is now free and is compatible with the remaster. Remaster players can play with classic players, play on old maps, chat, etc. They've updated bnet and intergrated the two clients with one another. So that's cool.

SC1 is great and I'm happy that it appears to be getting proper treatment. Here's a pretty ok interview with the project producer. 

 

Some added features with no changes to core gameplay at all. Some new graphics look very good while so others look ehh, but it's not finished yet. 

Different to Battle Royale how??

Not that I'd touch it with a bargepole. 

PlayerUnknown started making BR mods for Arma 2 and DayZ, then moved to Arma 3, then worked with Sony on H1Z1 before making this.

It's by far my favourite incarnation of the KotH game mode. Even in its early access state it is leaps over any of his previous projects. 

 

Dead Space 3: gee, lot of average comments about this game and people saying it's just Gears of War. Rubbish. I probably enjoyed it the most. I love this setting, dark claustraphobic atmosphere-rich sci-fi and the last chapters in the alien setting - awesome!! In fact that last level with the planet being pulled into the moon as you fight on it is one of those "best levels of all time".

If people liked the older games being harder, why don't they just put the fucking difficulty up? I started on easy and there was still some tough sections even on easy. But then I realised I had a glitch that was giving me WAY more items out of those boxes, so by chapter 11 or 12 I was pretty much able to max out the rig and create any gun I wanted. So I put it up to normal because it was going to be too easy. The crafting system (once you get the hang of it) is fun, just a shame the military attachment is the only thing worth having.

For the last few chapters I ended up making a custom weapon that was even better out of parts I did legitimitely find (electricity based). The main difficulty in the game is actually just getting caught out in between reloading and the whole monsters spawning behind the player and trapping him in stupid QTEs. Oh and the mini games and on rails sections were pretty bad.

It's really a shame the industry slagged the game off for not being surivival focused enough, instead of just taking it for what it is.

metlslime are you still at Visceral Games? Dead Space 4 coming soon? :P 

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist - 7/10
Good fun shooter with some sneaky sneaky (because it's too easy to get overwhelmed if you just run in shooting). Good story, good visuals.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon - 6/10
The design was pretty shit, the bland neon blue/red theme did nothing for me. Other games have done this setting much better. The weapons are rubbish. Way too many flamer cunts which I hated in the main game. But then the ending was easy. There wasn't any cheesy 80s b-movie humour, DNF was funnier than this. Cutscenes and story boring. It was only a DLC but not far off the price of a full game, whereas this is under 5 hours. I think the idea could work well for a full game though, with full game budget and not cheaper DLC budget. Gearbox could pull it off. 

 

http://i.imgur.com/CikDraJ.jpg

Small game map iz small. 

It'll be really interesting to see just how open the game map really is in Prey. Apparently you just go spacewalk to anywhere you want with little restriction. That sounds so awesome but I imagine there will be some gating of some kind?

Anyway, seriously looking forward to playing it! 

Being one who bought Dead Space on release date, I was a bit dissappointed with the third entry. I did not like the chest high walls cover gameplay. I found dead space to be about dismemberment and having the odds stacked against you. Dead Space 2 was a happy mix but 3 ventured too far into action for my tastes.

However, I will say once you reach the snow planet it does get more interesting and back to some survival moments. I also enjoyed the side quests of investigating derelict ships along the way. There were certainly great improvements from the previous two.

I was fortunate to play through the game with a co-op buddy and they did have some interesting gimmicks with it. One was having strange visions only happen for one player. I recall my friend freaking out about toy soldiers marching on the floor and I was like :"What are you talking about man?".

It actually conveyed that I thought my buddy was going crazy! 

For me the best part of the game was the very first area where you can float around in space and travel to all the different derelicts and explore all those wrecks. I could easily play an entire game where you are a salvage person scouring an old space battlefield for anything of worth. That shit was great. 

Kona: I am still at visceral. I'm working on the star wars game they are developing.

(And for DS3 i definitely agree that exploring the ship graveyard is one of the high points of the game for me.) 

Sweet, hope it's a winner! I haven't played a really memorable Star Wars video game yet. Dark Forces was good, the two Force Unleashed games okay. Battlefront didn't seem to be single player, I gave it a shot for half an hour and deleted it. And for some stupid reason I skipped Knights of the Old Republic, which is the one I should have played, it sounds like it's a classic. 

Both Knights of The Old Republic games were great.