What an odd aspect of my personality: I took a small amount of satisfaction from reading that. I don’t know why I should, I have no personal stake in any of it, but there it is.
Which Alone in the Dark? There’s been a couple by now.
Well, the problem with horror games is that while gameplay is important, a lack of scares or at least atmosphere kind of destroys the point of having a horror game. System Shock 2 pulled off the horror aspect well, even if it wasn’t strictly horror per se. Doom 3, on the other hand, failed pretty badly. At least the part I played(The Demo, which is why I didn’t bother buying the actual game).
Though I also felt that FEAR mostly failed as a horror game as well, instead being a mostly generic, if competent, shooter with a few scattered moments of creepy.
Oh, I’m sure for a while they did intend to produce a game. That was before they switched engines God knows how many times and the release date kept slipping and expectations kept growing.
It’s long since gotten to the point that with a game that delayed, the gaming public was expecting something pretty damn awesome to make up for that wait. So awesome that it may be impossible for anyone(even Valve) to actually meet those expectations. And 3d Realms knew that.
I think that was what made Half Life 2 so great- it was neither “all zombie/monster swarm, all the time” nor “plodding, plodding, monster, plodding, plodding”.
In other words, they maintained a perfect balance between the intense scary gun battle stuff and the more cerebral, slower puzzle/exploration stuff.
One of my pet peeves is stages/areas with infinite enemies, which prevent the player from going back and exploring after battering all the baddies. The only part of HL2 which had that problem was the ant lion coastline, I think, and that was alright because you could always stay ahead of them in the car.
Sorry. I should have clarified. The one released for this generation of consoles. (Which is the fourth game, correct? Even though it doesn’t have a number. I never played the other 3.)
The storyline didn’t hook me. And I found it very frustrating the whole “you have to kill the demons with fire” thing. Not because the mechanic in itself was a bad idea. But after you knock the demon out, you can’t just drag their body and toss it into the fire. That’d make too much sense. No, you have to find yourself a chair. Position yourself just right to get the chair to catch on fire, and then hit the unconscious demon with the fiery chair. By this time, the demon has no doubt woken up, and you have to find your axe or other heavy object to beat him up with, because while fire is needed to kill them, a fiery chair can’t do enough damage for them to catch on fire while they are on their feet attacking you. So you have to drop your chair (or hit them with it which will instantly break it) and find your other weapon among all the other useless crap you can pick up, all the while the demon you defeated once already, but didn’t officially kill is wailing on you.
Oh, and the number of ignitable objects like chairs is limited. And once you burn one, it doesn’t take long before it goes out.
The mechanic is terrible. It’s almost easier to beat the demons into the fire (each time you hit them you push them back slightly) which causes them to catch on fire immediately. But it makes no sense that you can’t throw their “unconscious” bodies into the fire. If you can drag them over to the fire, you certainly should be able to toss them in.
Maybe if the story had gripped me from the beginning, I might have wanted to play this exercise in futility, but it didn’t, so I didn’t.
I totally agree. Despite not being horror game, it pulled off the aspects very well. Particularly in Ravenholm, which I still dread having to go through due to the fact it creeps me out. Though some of the later levels, when you’re in the dark, collapsed tunnels with Alyx and a lot of zombies are almost as bad(good?). There’s even one point where you find your way to (relative) safety after such a level and hear a zombie moan behind you. You spin around, ready to blow the zombies head off and see…Alyx. Who promptly says “Sorry”, with a little grin on her face.
And…here’s Yahtzee’s review of the game.
Warning: One of the most annoying videos I’ve ever tried to watch. I was scrambling for the top-right “X” after 40 seconds. Goddamn. Maybe sum it up for us, Rand?
I hated zeropunctuation at first, too. So, his gimmick is that he talks really fast, huh? But it’s actually genuinely funny and occasionally even insightful, more so at least than you’d expect from video game reviews, and this one was especially entertaining.
That was awesome.
Of the games Yahtzee’s reviewed that I’ve played, I’ve not known him to be wrong. Opinionated, yes, and a lot of times those opinions don’t match mine, but when he’s talking about the game itself, he’s always dead on target.
I kinda got off of Zero Punctuation a while back, but I think I might check it out for him describing a game that never came out.
'Kay. Not bad. Basically a parody describing how absolutely wonderful the new Duke Nukem Forever is. The absurdities are hillarious, but the cursing is still done in a gratuitous way implying that just saying thw words will make the audience laugh.
I don’t think you’d really lose anything by just reading a transcript, though. Problem is, nobody seems to do them any more.
That’s because transcription sucks donkey balls.
Besides, just saying profanity can be funny. Saying any words can be funny if you know how to deliver them, and Yahtzee’s got pretty good delivery.