What games have you been playing lately?

Robert ninja wrote: »

Played some Viewtiful Joe today but emulation didn't like more than 2 enemies so I had to quit it for now. Dissapointing since it was such a cool game from what I did play.

I think as a PC peasant we'll not see much of Hideki Kamiya's work, had a friend show me Okami ages back and I was wowed. I'm still hoping beyond hope that we'll get a Bayonetta port, but so many exclusives and console only games, it's painful. Scalebound looks great, but that's an Xbone exclusive.

And I just want Bayonetta

No retro consoles I'm afraid, my sister has the old PS1, Megadrive, etc. She's more the retro type.

So, I picked up Hatred at long last, and even knowing it was going to be terrible I still wanted to give it a go. Probably for the same reason I watched a few episodes of Highschool of the Dead, just to see how bad it was. I thought the game at least looked competent mechanically, and some of the features like destructable environments actually looked kinda cool, but the game is a mess. The stark black and white look of the game appears quite stylish at first, especially when broken up by flourishes of colour like explosions or lights from police cars, but once you get into it, it's less Sin City and more of a gray mess that actually interferes with gameplay than anything else. You can easily get stuck on objects in the game world that you didn't even notice because of how indistinct everything is, and how the various shades of gray just bleed into each other. All of this is compounded by seriously sluggish controls, the player character begins to move like a split-second after you press the keys, he lurches forward slowly at first before going full speed, and it's very noticable and sometimes it's hard to tell for a moment if you're stuck on the environment again or not. Maneuvering with WASD is pretty awful, so I tried using a controller, which was an improvement, but aiming was horrendously bad. Using keys and mouse vs. controller isn't so much an option of preference, it's a tradeoff between the least awful input and I'd rather be able to aim properly, so I needed that mouse.

Thematically the game is cringeworthy, there's no story, and you play a killer on a rampage. That's it. We all know what this game is; pure controversy bait, the developers knew exactly what they were doing with this, and yet apart from the distasteful subject matter, it's relatively tame, one might even say safe. It doesn't push any boundaries or break any taboos, it's no more gruesome than anything we haven't already seen in hundreds of other games, I can think of loads of things that are far more graphic than this. The controversy comes from the fact that the goal is to kill innocent civilians, it's in bad taste, yet never goes that bit further, it's edgy but still relatively safe. Let me explain what I mean when I say it's safe, you can't kill children in this game. I'm not saying that would've made the game any better, it certainly wouldn't, it's just something that I think really shows up the fact that the devs wanted to skirt controversy, but never be quite that controversial, edgy but not breaking any uncomfortable taboos. In spite of all of the allusions the devs are making, you cannot for example shoot up a school. You can kill children in other games, it's not advisable, but sometimes it's possible. You can kill child soldiers in Metal Gear Solid V. You'll fail your mission, but you can do it.

Without the controversy, I doubt the devs would have anything, it's laughable how incompetent this game is. You can preform "Executions" on people you've injured and it sometimes does this animation where your character kills the person by stabbing them, or breaking their neck or whatever, but while this animation is ongoing cops will stop shooting at you. You'll be there beating someone to death, while police circle around you or clip through you, patiently waiting for you to finish murdering someone before they resume firing. AI is terrible, civilians just run about a bit and barely try to escape from you, cops are just as bad except they run towards you and then they just kinda run around you. I went upstairs in a police station, they didn't try and follow me. There's no tactics involved, it's just run around shooting people, and it's not fun. This is a bad, bad game, and I feel sorry for anyone who bought this at full price. It's being packaged in cheap bundles now like the shovelware it is, which is where I got it, and even then I didn't really get my money's worth. I am glad I played it, even if it is just so I no longer have that particular itch to scratch. Don't expect to get more than a couple of hours out of it.

At least I got One Finger Death Punch to try out of that bundle, will report back on that.

Finished up DmC: Devil May Cry

That was a lot of fun

Sinking my teeth back into The Witcher again, I want to have 1 & 2 finished before getting 3, and I'm honestly itching to get 3. Good god have I been whoring it around though, all Geralt does is fight and ****, and I didn't get much fighting done this evening