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STEAM Announcements & Updates 2014 II - The Definitive Edition

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N

nexen

Member
SalsaShark said:
hPwXyxUl.jpg


it mocks me
Click to expand...

Flick it. I just fixed one of my work monitors that way.

*individual results may vary.
 
S

Salsa

Member
Skyblue said:
Then replace the monitor then, doesn't Samsung have a 3 year warranty?
Click to expand...

called the place and they were like "uhh take it to service" even tho I bought it YESTERDAY (ie the place I use to buy stuff has like a week-long policy of "just bring it over and we'll give you another one" alongside the year warranty)

sent an email to serviceand im awaiting response, but I expect one of those "has to have 10 dead pixels in a 10cm radius" or some bullshit
 
L

Levyne

Banned
More_Badass said:
How was the first one?
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This is what I wrote up on it. I was pretty positive on the game, but note I have no history with Castlevania or God of War so...

Wow. I ended up enjoying this game. Quite a bit. I was so wishy washy when it went on sale awhile back that I was unsure I could convince myself to buy a game in a series I was entirely unfamiliar with. Sometimes good word of mouth goes a long way I suppose.

The combat is fast and fluid, and more importantly: varied. Even early on without a lot of the skills and combo modifiers unlocked yet, blocking, dodging, aerial attacks, grapples are all able to be utilized. Sometimes I feel I repeat myself a bit when it comes to combat systems but it is immensely important to me that they stay interesting throughout the course of the game. Nothing worse than having a game like Kingdom Hearts where the combat system can essentially boil down to a single button on your controller. This game will punish you if you don't vary up your attacks, try to get the enemies airborn, anything other than attack attack attack. Enemies having both blockable and unblockable attacks means you will have to learn to both block and dodge. It ends up becoming so addicting such that taking a hit to interrupt your combo and reset the meter ends up being rather demoralizing. The meter was a fantastic way of making every encounter interesting, since it meant even trash mobs would be approached with the goal of perfection in mind. On normal mode the majority of encounters were maybe a notch too easy, though at the end of the game the difficulty ramps up quite a bit. In the DLC chapters, you are asked to take on many sets of tough enemies without a checkpoint inbetween, and the final boss (both the story and the dlc) test whether you know when to attack, and when to pull back.

The puzzles are great from about the midpoint of the game on. Lots of variations to things you'd see in either a Zelda games, for instance. Many of them are creative and you never really see the same type of puzzle twice. Especially in late game and dlc, I found myself asking my brother for any ideas on 1 or 2 of them (but never the internet!...except once.)

My first main gripe of the game is the Uncharted style "platforming". This typically involves you moving from glowing ledge to glowing ledge in a straightforward fashion simply to move from one area to another. I understand the usefulness of implementing that as a traversal mode, but it just felt just it was overabundant. There are a few instances where the world opens up a bit and you're free to do a little bit more climbing around, looking for secrets and whatnot (or retrieving your gear, which gets stolen from you 4 too many times in this game), and these are the best uses of being able to climb and hookshot around.

My second main gripe is the abundance of QTEs. There are a lot of them. A lot a lot. It's not the worst use of them I've seen, but enough to make it a bit annoying. Luckily, they are often reserved as "eye candy". What I mean by that is typically you'll have your normal fight with the normal mechanics, and then either the finishing blow or stage-change will be executed with a QTE. I will admit that sometimes the eye candy looks nice, and it feels good to see Gabe rip apart whatever foe in whatever way the developer felt adequate.

Which reminds me of my last point. The art style of this game really sunk its teeth into me. I can't point to exactly what or why, but I love how this game looks, outside of the full motion cutscenes that is (which seem to incur a drop in framerate and overall quality). For being not much more than generic medieval fantasy, I was never really bored with enemy designs or environments. I took a fair number of screenshots simply because I really found myself wanting to share how good it looks. The bosses had some very interesting designs and not a recolor or re-skin to be seen.

The story is pretty light for most all of the first ten chapters or so. For someone who knew and still knows nothing or very little of Castlevania anything, this was a good thing. However, the last handful of chapters, especially the final confrontation of the main story, is like an info-dump of PLOT followed by a post credits video of more revelations. The DLC then goes to bridge the game ending and ending scene with more plot. None of it is particularily bad it just seemed like quite the tonal shift.

So, a great game, with great core gameplay marred by some lazy qtes and "platforming". Maybe Castlevania purists wouldn't enjoy it as much but I don't really have the frame of reference to make a comment on that. On its own merits, its a great game worth playing.
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Nabs

Nabs

Member
I guess Capcom is prepping a sale (either on Steam or another site). Lots of retail subs and "All DLC" subs in the registry.
 
S

Salsa

Member
I need to save up money to go to venezuela to be with this chick again

for the first time ever Steam directly contradicts my best interests

im scared

steam is the enemy
 
Stitch

Stitch

Gold Member
I don't understand why we still don't have Oniken keys. Love+ was in the same bundle and we got the keys immediately.

edit: ahaha DLC sale. Oh crapcom.
 
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