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FPS NIGHTMARES

Started by Lemming, November 17, 2019, 12:23:16 PM

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Lemming

Quote from: Polymorphia on May 09, 2021, 02:17:33 AM
Oh, and as for best ending:
Spoiler alert
Helios, surely! Better a benevolent computer dictator than back to medieval times
[close]
. Ok, that ending is easier to get, but shush

The HELIOS option seems appealing at times, but I love how the game makes it ambiguous as to
Spoiler alert
how much of the merged entity will be JC, and how much will be HELIOS. Could end up with JC as a hands-off benevolent dictator solving all global problems, could end up with JC essentially dead and HELIOS running rampant with total control of the world.
[close]

I'm convinced the devs wanted you to pick the HELIOS option above all else, though - the game seems to gently nudge you towards choosing it. And on top of that, it makes the game's title make sense!

Quote from: AllisonSays on May 09, 2021, 08:33:53 AM
I did the Tong ending every time! I guess I see the problems with it but it seemed like the best way to generate actual change. Great game and a great review, thanks.

I knew someone would go for it! My best friend backs the Tong option too. Tong's elated
Spoiler alert
"we'll live in villages, JC!"
[close]
always sends a chill down my spine.

It's a great dilemma, though - three options and all of them have the potential to work or the potential to backfire unimaginably. One of the most genuinely complicated and tricky scenarios in any videogame that I can think of, up until New Vegas.

Quote from: popcorn on May 09, 2021, 10:45:37 AM
The "I now have full access to all your systems" line caused child me to absolutely shit himself.

Always loved "What are you looking for?", "Beth DuClare has been dissected and placed in cryogenic storage."

QuoteNaturally, per the argument I've rehashed 400 times already, 1) I like the fact that the plot doesn't branch and I think that 2) if it had meaningfully branched it would probably have resulted in a plot and characters everyone likes much less, because of the impact on development resources. I still find some of the open-ended design a bit irritating in that I occasionally missed stuff I fully intended to get to but it turns out it's too late, or I entered via the wrong entrance and triggered the wrong thing to happen, that kind of thing - I know a lot of people go along the spirit of just rolling with stuff like that but it does bug me a bit when it's like "this is not the outcome I wanted and I had no way of preventing it".

Agreed with what Zetetic said - the game didn't need branching, but there's other kinds of reactivity which the game could have displayed. The quality of the reactivity really fades fast after the UNATCO levels. Those early levels show a model that could have worked through the whole game - no matter what you actually do at UNATCO, you end up going on the same missions and seeing the same things, but just enough is changed that it really feels like the game is noting what you're doing and responding to you.

Jerzy Bondov

I couldn't believe it when the chief told me off for going in the ladies. How the fuck did he know that?! It's magic

St_Eddie

Quote from: Lemming on May 09, 2021, 01:32:13 AM
Alright, the debate is on. Which ending is the best? Anyone who picks Tracer Tong is out of their mind, so it's between merging with HELIOS and reinstating the Illuminati. No way to win, but I reluctantly go for Illuminati every time. No one should be a machine-god, surely? Especially not JC, he's a knobhead.

Well, I mean the clue's in the name; JC/Jesus Christ.  Besides, if my memory serves me correctly, that ending was deemed canonical for Invisible War.

madhair60

Deus Ex very good. Very well crafted. I never finished it, but I should. As Popcorn mentions, once you get the Dragon Tooth any combat becomes fairly trivial.

I think I used the lockpick glitch a fair amount, too; if memory serves you can start picking a lock (or using multitool), then pull up the inventory and wait, and it will only use one.

AllisonSays

I love the bit quite near the end where you need to rescue a scientist's ... daughter, I think ... from an old petrol station somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Agreed that the level design starts to get a wee bit more rote near the end but there's a lovely, creepy cyberpunk Americana William Gibson atmosphere in that one. It's also one of the missions I could never do without killing someone, cos she's in this wee bathroom stall or something and there's two of those horrible men with gun-suits on outside of it.

The Crumb

Adding to the Deus Ex love, the fact the game has actual interesting secrets that reward exploration is fantastic -
Spoiler alert
the early MJ12 lab in New York, Lucius DeBeers, Morpheus, the phone in Paris
[close]
. They're generally really interesting and quite creepy. I've played the game through so many times, but there's still probably stuff I'm missing.

Even if it doesn't make too much sense in story terms, I think the skill implementation for an FPS works about as well as it could. Guns don't magically do extra damage, and there's no Morrowind style projectiles passing through enemies due to RNG.

The terrible voice acting has also brought me a lot of joy, If you're going to do something badly, why not commit to absolute shit?

Ferris

Am I the only person here who has never played Deus Ex? Shit.

Video Game Fan 2000

The hotel part is one of my favorite parts in any game. I love the idea of a relatively realistic local with a ton of secrets, cyberpunk cliché like the MiBs and gunrunners, and the way the emergent gameplay worked with the process of breaking into the rooms to get necessary resources. Its the part of Deus Ex that didn't carry into the sequels.

The sequence break with Anna is great fun. Its rare for a moral choice thing in the game to actually you to break the logic/structure of the game to find a better solution.

Once you know its there you can have a laugh with it. I used to put LAMs all over the walls and crouch before starting the cut scene and blow them all to bejesus.

Also, proud Tong ender.

Mr Trumpet

Quote from: popcorn on May 09, 2021, 10:45:37 AM
Busting out of jail and eventually realising you're in Unatco HQ was fucking magical.

One of the most jaw-dropping story moments in gaming for me. And as for the big Robocop robots - once you max out the anti-missile augmentation you can stand in front of one of them and watch it blow itself up trying to shoot you. A bit of a cheesy exploit maybe but great fun.

I remember being on edge throughout the DuClare mansion bit, waiting for something to kick off.

And Deus Ex has some gloriously terrible line readings. My favourite is the homeless man in the Hong Kong canals who really tries his best to say "biomechanical augmentation" but the actor clearly hasn't the foggiest idea what these words in the script mean, let alone how to pronounce them.

I'm quite forgiving of Human Revolution, after playing Deus Ex 2 which is one of the most disappointing sequels i've ever experienced.

HELIOS ending for me. The alternatives are just two different ways of starting the cycle over, whereas HELIOS at least promises something new and the potential for something better (or much, much worse).

Gambrinus

Are there any good Deus Ex playthroughs on YouTube? Without hysterical racists screaming HEY GUYS HIT THAT LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.

Cold Meat Platter

Quote from: Gambrinus on May 10, 2021, 09:41:55 PM
Are there any good Deus Ex playthroughs on YouTube? Without hysterical racists screaming HEY GUYS HIT THAT LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.

This one by Bobbin Threadbare is one I've watched, he talks about the conspiracy and more general themes in separate sections at the end of each vid. Very soft spoken american dude.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9H-oYsI40xb7gcRVeZ9cTWamY7kWDPV9

Gambrinus

Cheers, I'll have a look at that later this week. I really enjoyed Deus Ex but never got to the end of it.

evilcommiedictator

Imagine all the people now talking about Deus Ex's ending looking up Human Revolution and Mankind Divided's canon ending for DX and then the endings you get to pick for those

Mr Trumpet

I actually have no idea how Human Revolution ends because I got stuck on the Namir boss fight. Made the wrong choice earlier in the game, had the wrong (non-lethal) gear. I had been playing on max difficulty but even dialling it down to the easiest mode I couldn't get past that point. What a shame, as JC Denton might say.

samadriel

Quote from: Lemming on May 09, 2021, 01:32:13 AMEven managed to carry Maggie Chow's unconscious body out of the exploding reactor room! How's that for dedication.
I carried every unconscious guard off of the tanker, because i realised they'd all die if they were still on it while it sunk.

QuoteAlright, the debate is on. Which ending is the best? Anyone who picks Tracer Tong is out of their mind, so it's between merging with HELIOS and reinstating the Illuminati. No way to win, but I reluctantly go for Illuminati every time. No one should be a machine-god, surely? Especially not JC, he's a knobhead.
My favourite ending is the Illuminati one; it's the least revolutionary, but it put a shiver up my spine, i just love it. Call me conservative, but as a type 1 diabetic who is also reliant on psychiatric meds, Tracer Tong's idea of blowing society back to the stone age sounds like a death sentence for people like me. Helios/JC is a cool idea, but the execution is a bit dull.

Lemming

Quote from: samadriel on May 12, 2021, 04:35:55 AM
My favourite ending is the Illuminati one; it's the least revolutionary, but it put a shiver up my spine, i just love it. Call me conservative, but as a type 1 diabetic who is also reliant on psychiatric meds, Tracer Tong's idea of blowing society back to the stone age sounds like a death sentence for people like me. Helios/JC is a cool idea, but the execution is a bit dull.

That's my thinking too, regarding the Tong ending. There's no way it wouldn't lead to mass deaths overnight, especially in a world where a significant chunk of people have nano-augmentations that can go completely fuckwards in all kinds of dramatic ways.

There's also the issue of Ambrosia distribution - in the Illuminati ending, JC oversees it, and in the HELIOS ending, presumably JC/HELIOS can administer the vaccine worldwide very quickly, but what happens in the Tong ending? The Grey Death just runs out of control, surely?

Cold Meat Platter

Quote from: Lemming on May 12, 2021, 12:32:12 PM
what happens in the Tong ending? The Grey Death just runs out of control, surely?

herd immunity

Shoulders?-Stomach!

QuoteAnd frankly I was surprised that JC and Paul were done by the same actor, but that's acting, innit.

I wish they'd told that to the 8 or so main voice actors hired for Skyrim.

Mr Trumpet

The Grey Death is an artificial nanotech plague manufactured, presumably, by those Universal Constructors. It's probably primed to deactivate itself after a certain amount of time, because its makers don't want to risk accidentally wiping out humanity if there's a problem with the Ambrosia supply.

Ferris

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on May 12, 2021, 02:20:06 PM
I wish they'd told that to the 8 or so main voice actors hired for Skyrim.

Criticism of skyrim?

BANNED.

Lemming

KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child won't seem to run on Windows 10, even with the use of a fan mod specifically designed to make it run on Win 10.

This is probably for the best, because, come on, it's an FPS game based on fucking KISS.

I'll keep fucking about with it, but in its absence the next review is probably going to be Crimson Skies.

Gambrinus

Quote from: Cold Meat Platter on May 10, 2021, 09:45:47 PM
This one by Bobbin Threadbare is one I've watched, he talks about the conspiracy and more general themes in separate sections at the end of each vid. Very soft spoken american dude.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9H-oYsI40xb7gcRVeZ9cTWamY7kWDPV9

Thanks for these, quite good so far.

Lemming

#1222
Crimson Skies (2000)





RELEASE DATE: 17th September, 2000

MUSIC: Fantastic soundtrack, but it's absolutely critical that you listen to the title theme. Seriously, please click here and listen to this, it's one of the best themes ever made for a videogame.

STORY: In an alternate 1930s, the USA broke apart after the Wall Street Crash. Zeppelins have become one of the foremost forms of transportation between the many independent nations that now exist where the USA once was, and as a result, gangs of Sky Pirates plague the airways.

WHEN YOU HIT THE GROUND, TELL THEM NATHAN ZACHARY SENT YOU!: The definition of FPS has now been stretched beyond all reason.

Look, you can change the view to the cockpit. It's an FPS game. 100%. I'm planning to go back and do Wing Commander at some point, and if that counts, this surely does. The screenshots were taken in third-person camera because it looks infinitely better.

Anyway, this is Crimson Skies, an aerial combat game where you get to fly around in cool planes getting into dogfights, doing barrel rolls and shooting everything to fuck.

Pretty much everything rides on how the controls work, and they work brilliantly. For what it's trying to do, the game strikes the perfect balance between simulation and action. Simulation-wise, you'll have to manually control your plane's engine speed, and there are "realistic" elements to the flying - you'll struggle to move upwards against gravity, obviously, and keeping your speed too low for too long can lead to the engine cutting out.

But the game never lets the flight sim aspect get in the way of the action. You can (and frequently must) pull off insane stunts, barrel rolls, loops, weaving in and out of enemy planes, spinning upside down during dogfights, all kinds of shit. The controls and game mechanics universally work with you, rather than against you, and it doesn't take long to get to grips with the way each plane handles, and learn to do the exact types of moves you want to do.

Because of this "let the player have fun" philosophy, the game gives you an occasional subtle helping hand. There's slight auto-aim during combat - nowhere near enough to remove player skill, but just enough to give you a suitable margin of error while firing. The game also gives you a small speed boost if you try to pull up quickly while very near the ground, giving you a little bit of an extra chance to avoid crashing. Again, it doesn't feel cheap, or like the game's trying to shield you from fucking things up - it's just enough of an acceptable twist in the player's favour to keep the game fun rather than frustrating, and it works fantastically.

Enemy AI is good, and they'll do what they can to throw you off or outfox you during a dogfight. Each plane has different ammo types, for both guns and missiles, and you'll need to learn which to use for the job at hand (higher caliber is literally always better, but the missions are fairly lengthy and issues of ammo conservation can arise).

So, the devs built a fantastic aerial combat simulator with a sort of "fun-first" focus. This is great, but even better is the story, setting and other stylistic things the game wraps the strong gameplay in.

You step into the role of notorious sky pirate Nathan Zachary. I don't know who the voice actor is, but he did a fucking incredible job. Zachary is such an absolute smug cunt, but is played with enough charisma and style that you want to shake his hand just as much as you want to punch him in his smarmy idiot face. He's a fairly compelling and enjoyable character, because while his crew tend towards being amoral, Zachary himself has a fairly clear sense of morality and tries to keep them in check, with one mission having him risk his own life to save a marooned civilian hospital ship from an opposing band of far more vicious pirates. He also gets a bit of a redemption arc over the course of the game, until eventually teaming up with the security forces (who hunted him down in the game's opening chapters) in order to try and save a lot of innocent lives. Zachary's crew are equally well-acted and enjoyable, as are his adversaries.

The setting is "dieselpunk", which, for anyone not keeping up with STUPID genre terms, is basically steampunk that takes place in the 1920s or 30s rather than the 19th Century. Thus, jazz blares out from every radio, the British Empire is still tightening its grip on the world, classic Hollywood is massive, and one of Zachary's best pals is Betty, who is basically every flapper stereotype at once.

The story is a joy to follow along with, and gives you plenty of genuinely heroic, altruistic moments amid all your morally-dodgy acts of piracy. To complement the story, missions have objectives, which are virtually always fun to carry out. Highlights include flying up alongside a British plane so that you can leap out onto its wing, climb inside and hijack it; matching the course and speed of a moving train so that your friend who's trapped aboard can climb onto the roof and leap up to a ladder dangling from your plane; sneaking into Hollywood by flying alongside a group of stunt pilots and joining them in an obstacle course; stealing an experimental plane from a guarded hangar; helping a disillusioned movie star to escape her contract by blasting the shit out of the entire studio, and a lot more. Every mission has memorable movie-like moments.

The tone is pretty much perfect throughout, consistently evoking a sense of fun and the kind of pulpy stuff you'd find in the old 30s radio dramas the game draws inspiration from. And nobody ever seems to actually die, no matter how intense combat gets. Post-mission newspaper reports tend to state how there were amazingly no deaths, even when you blow up a fucking oil refinery, and whenever Zachary or his gang shoot someone down, they always leap out by parachute, shake their fist, and give some "i'll get you next time" comment.

To give you another impression of the game's lighthearted tone, after each mission you often discover that you've inadvertently done some good - in one mission in Hollywood, a failed movie director has his career revitalised when he happens to capture footage of Zachary's battle against studio security forces. In another, Zachary's battle against the British air force ends up thwarting a planned British invasion of Hawaii.

The only real criticism I can come up with for the game is that the difficulty curve isn't entirely well thought out. Around the mid-game, there are some very difficult missions followed by trivial missions, which makes the progression feel a bit uneven, but you can use the Plane Construction feature to mitigate the difficulty a little by designing your own ideal plane that suits your playstyle. Getting through a mission is often just a matter of trying out the differnet planes you've built/collected to see which is best suited for the task.

There's one or two missions that are just fucking horseshit - in particular, one where you have to kidnap an enemy pirate leader. This is completely luck-based as the game gives you four locations to check and randomises which one he's in, and you get attacked by vastly superior enemies every time you get it wrong. There's also a mission where you have to spend like fifty hours following an annoying New York cabbie (who flies a yellow helicopter cab) around while he taunts you, and if you fail the rather difficult battle that ensues afterwards, you have to go through it all again. BULLSHIT

But all criticisms are minor. Crimson Skies is just enormous fun at the end of the day. Of all the aerial (or space) combat sims I've played, nothing quite hits all the right notes like Crimson Skies does. Worth noting how well it's aged, too - the graphics show their age here and there (especially with the draw distance) but it mainly looks good, and the controls are so smooth to this day. Even in some of the best games I've played in this thread, you can sort of feel how old they are and there's moments of clunkiness, but Crimson Skies plays just as well as if it were made today.

FINAL RATING: Fuck it, 5 Beloved Hounds out of 5.



THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A FATHER TED QUOTE:



Join me next time for Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force. Set phasers... to fun!!! (potentially)

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Gonna go with not an FPS (Though i also wouldn't have included Daggerfall).

druss

If Crimson Skies is an FPS you should go and do all the Tie Fighter and X-Wing games.

Or start a new thread, as they are clearly different genres.

Edit: This looks like I'm being a sarcy fuck, but I'd actually love to see you do a separate thread for these types of games.

Lemming

I think the contortions of logic to get to this point went something like:
"FPS games are games where you use guns or melee weapons in first person, like Doom, Quake and Half-Life" ->
"Deus Ex and System Shock must count even though they're not pure FPS games, and if Deus Ex counts, then Thief must count" ->
"If Thief and Deus Ex count, then Elder Scrolls games might as well count" ->
"Descent and Quarantine surely count (with Descent being listed on the trusty Wikipedia list), so we're including certain vehicular combat games" ->
"if Descent is an FPS, there's no reason that Wing Commander isn't" ->
"Crimson Skies is the same genre as Wing Commander"

If anyone else starts a genre thread like this one, I'd definitely advise doing the opposite of what I've done, by getting the definition down as tight as possible and making a relatively complete list of games to play before even starting. At the same time, some of the games I've found the most interesting and fun have been the ones which heavily stretch the definition of FPS (Quarantine, LSD Dream Emulator, Thief, Crimson Skies, etc).

There's a few more "is this an FPS or not" dilemmas up ahead - Arx Fatalis, Mirror's Edge and Portal, for example.

Next week's review: Gran Turismo 3

Really though, this sounds great, I remember seeing the name around a lot but assuming it would be a bit rubbish, looking forward to giving it a go.

madhair60

Not an FPS. barry, lock the thread.

St_Eddie

Quote from: Lemming on May 15, 2021, 03:17:23 PMThe story is a joy to follow along with, and gives you plenty of genuinely heroic, altruistic moments amid all your morally-dodgy acts of piracy. To complement the story, missions have objectives, which are virtually always fun to carry out. Highlights include flying up alongside a British plane so that you can leap out onto its wing, climb inside and hijack it; matching the course and speed of a moving train so that your friend who's trapped aboard can climb onto the roof and leap up to a ladder dangling from your plane; sneaking into Hollywood by flying alongside a group of stunt pilots and joining them in an obstacle course; stealing an experimental plane from a guarded hangar; helping a disillusioned movie star to escape her contract by blasting the shit out of the entire studio, and a lot more. Every mission has memorable movie-like moments.

Fucking sold!  I'm downloading the game as I type this.