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Sly's St(r)eam Tombola Thread: Hitman Absolution


Sly Reflex
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Anomaly 2 is quite good. Wasn't really feeling it at the start, but now I have some better things to play with I am enjoying it. I'm a bit pissed off with it now because it just crashed to desktop after I spent ages killing stuff while invisible. It took forever to get rid of everything and then it crapped out. Rubbish. Now I know what that level entails I can change what I take in with me so that it'll be a bit more palatable.

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Man, the end of this game is so fucking difficult. Even on casual mode it's kicking my arse. It doesn't help that the thing that's killing me can't be outsmarted and you just need to kill it's billions of HP. It's kind of bullshit that it came this as the rest of the game I've really enjoyed.

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Done it!

Anomaly%20closed_zpsmhdibzrx.png

Despite some difficulty spikes, I really enjoyed that after the introduction of it was over. It's a nice spin on the desktop defence thing, although I wish you could have more units the further in you go, limiting it to 6 meant you couldn't work different combos without dropping necessity units.

The Bards Tale next.

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  • 5 years later...

Another thread necroed and brought back from the dead.

 

So as some you you might know, I do a bit of streaming. Wednesday and Saturday if you want to drop along and cheer me on.

 

The reason behind me streaming? I have a big fuck off backlog from all the stuff I've bought over the years and continue to buy and generally don't know what to play next. So I decided that streaming would be a nice way of working through this mountain of games.

 

How do I pick which game I will play next? Well since I am streaming, I play what people want to see, but I made a way to narrow it down so I'm not just playing whatever is big at the time. So what I did is I put all the games I am willing to give a go in a big spread sheet, and at certain points I sort the spreadsheet using a random formula which allows me to pick 6 games randomly. These 6 games are then put to the vote within my (well, me and @Rikzilla's) discord. Once a game is finished or abandoned, I start on the next game. If you want to join, the link is available via my streams, although I'm not forcing you, that game democracy is always going to happen if you take part or not.

 

"Sly" I hear you saying, "Isn't this a thinly veiled attempt to drive people towards your shit discord and low quality streams full of obscenity and impenetrable injokes?". Well, yes. And no at the same time.

 

See, we all have these backlogs. And maybe me getting forced into playing some shite I picked up in a Humble Bundle circa 2009 will make you dig down and play it as well, and maybe stimulate a bit of conversation on the forum for those older games we just missed out on. I'll be doing it anyway, so if you want to tag along here and there, you're more than welcome to, whether you're viewing, playing alongside or just observing from a distance. Whatever really.

Also this is a title card I use. It has all the games I managed to finish on stream, as well as some injokes.  If you can name them, you'll earn a rep from me.

offlinecard2508.png

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, I finished the story of The Division and will do a mop up for the last areas next stream. After that I'll be on Saints Row 3, which has won the community vote. A few streams in I'll draw the next 6 games to vote on.

 

The Division then? It's alright. Looks all sorts of amazing when the snow is coming down in the dark what with the lighting. Overall I don't think it's a great loot game though, it's pretty stingy with what it drops and I found myself having to buy important bits to plug holes that were way out levelled. Difficulty is all over the place because of this. Movement is sort of fucked as well, but I don't think this is an issue with the movement itself, rather the level topography that makes it more fucked than it should be Stuff where you clearly should be able to get on cover you can't, sometimes moving around cover while you're on it is fucked as well. Especially frustrating is where cover is next to each other, but because there's a slight step between the two, you have to get off cover to get back in cover, instead of there being some invisible gradient between them that allows you to transfer the gap.

 

Under scrutiny the story is pretty bad, although some of the motivations of the characters isn't bad. The Barrett stuff particularly sticks out as really poorly conceived, not a good look at all. I'm noticing this a lot with (older?) games, they try to make some political point but they fumble it so fucking hard it makes a mockery of the point they're trying to make. Fucking shit. Get better writers, Ubi. Your ineptitude here is disgusting.

 

Voice acting is similarly all over the shop in tone and quality. You can go from steeped in misery one line to attempted comedy in another. Some of it is unintentionally funny.

 

The AI is terrible. When it all works right, it's great mowing them down, but it does far too many errors and pulls a lot of bullshit to cover for it.  For a tactical cover shooter it really needs to be way better. It's so inconsistent and there's many occasions I had a good laugh at it. 

 

I think the most interesting part to this is how they clearly designed this game before MTX became a thing and how often you get cosmetic stuff. They retroactively crow barred paid for cosmetics in, because of course they did, this is Ubisoft we're talking about. It feels like a life time away that games were like this in the generous manner it spews clothes at you, especially given that Division 2 is tighter than a camels arse in a sandstorm, forcing you into using the lootbox mechanic to get you used to opening stuff.

 

Overall as a looter shooter it's alright. It's not the worst by a long shot, but by golly it's so far from the front of the pack it'd struggle to see them with a x12 scoped M1A.

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  • Sly Reflex changed the title to Sly's St(r)eam Tombola Thread: Saints Row: The Third

Didn't really know where to put this. Considered the The Saints Row Thread and the gaming shout thread, but I'm gonna go a little off tangent but on topic, or at least I hope to be. Anyway, if it needs moving, mods can move it, if not, grand.

 

So Saints Row 3 won the vote. I've had a few sessions on it on stream and by golly, there's a lot to talk about.

 

Before I go deeper into the game, I want to talk about web 2.0 stuff. So this game had a thing where you could create a character and share them via a official website. Which is great, if you want you can ping your character across from 3 to 4. Except the website for the game no longer exists, because the game is nearing 10 years old and the site is offline now, it's no longer possible to do this, at least with official means. So we lose a function that's not important, no big deal, right? Well actually yes.

 

See the fuckers flipped the switch to take the website down, but they didn't flip the switch to stop the game trying to contact it. The results in the game reaching out to do a handshake with the server to update all your criminal wrongdoings, but there's nothing there to shake with, so it gets left high and dry and lags the game. This happens approximately every 15 seconds. To say it gets old quick is an understatement. Luckily there's a work around, you can either play offline, or you can make a file on your PC that acts as the server, so the game is handshaking with itself. Pretty fucking annoying they couldn't go into the game and have a kill switch for this sort of stuff though, either as a full patch that just turns it off completely, or a dead mans hand that checks once and then if it can't update it just cancels all future handshakes. It's sorted now, but really there shouldn't be any of this stuff. 

 

Onto the game. Yeah, some of it has aged since it was lampooning a lot of culture at the time, the map (I'm unsure of where it's meant to be set) isn't great. The controls and stuff feel very budget-y, but because of that everything feels super responsive. Coming off the back of Division where everything is designed to be weighty and have some momentum to it, coming here and controlling your player character like you're moving a pointer with a mouse is kind of hilarious. Sometimes the animation of the character just can't keep up and it does the weird warping thing you see in animated films where shit starts moving fast so they take a bit of artistic license and blur the lines between what you are doing and what you're about to do.

 

One thing that I am noticing is this game is really super generous. Before I've talked about staggered rewards with Diablo and how you're always on the hook for the next thing since it's never that far away, and this is really true here. Missions are really short and often end abruptly, but for the most they're fun and that's what matters most. It's one of those games where you will do a mission that acts as an intro to something and then it just fills the map with that activity. The way this is structured is that you're constantly being bombarded, sometimes you'll be on your way to a mission and barrel through a side mission where you have for overtake turf or whatever, but since it's all so seamless it doesn't matter. It's just one rolling ball of chaos that tends to follow you about, and to e perfectly honest, this is the way it should be.

 

The immediacy and very lenient way the game allows you to take the piss helps the flow. You can take so much damage and generally move about at ridiculous intervals that the games not punishing if you get out of cover or get blown up. In fact when you get to am,point where you fail and you rag doll about it just adds to the fun. The game might give you a option to spawn to you vehicle or chopper, but why would you do this when you could skydive off the gangs skyscraper and then before you hit the ground kick through someones wind screen and steal their car? The way the AI reacts helps with the chaos as well, it's really stupid, but not in the Division way I explained before where you would play it just to make your life easier, but play it in a way because it's funny to see what it does. It's dumb as rocks, but because the games tone is so low and in the gutter it works. Stuff like taking cover behind an explosive barrel, or getting in one side of a car and getting outside the other to get in cover have been highlight. The game knows that it's not to be taken seriously and it a huge joke, and the way the enemies act plays into it perfectly.

 

Content wise. Holy fuck this game is a minefield. A lot of it was questionable at the time, but now in 2020? It'd be a very hard sell considering it spends all of its time in the gutter spunking all over its own face. From the very off of creating a character, there's a thing in there that could be considered blackface. I have no idea why anyone didn't question putting this in, While there's nothing that is a complete no no like that, the game is littered with things, especially pertaining to women being nothing but product to sell feels a bit off once the game has been turned off and you're thinking about it after. It's like watching a tv show from the 90's and wondering how they got away with the casual racism/homophobia.

 

On revisiting Saints Row, I'm really sad they didn't carry on with the games. I know they made Agents of Mayhem as well as painted themselves into a corner with the Saints Row IP by making you  super hero. I tried those and wasn't really into it, in fact I remember playing Gat out of Hell with Hendo and wanting to punch myself in the balls because it was so poor. The thing is, I'm not entirely sure they could make this now, much like Duke Nukem, it's sort of problematic to tune to todays audiences without maybe upsetting a lot of people.

 

I think if it was up to me I'd retcon the whole lot, bring in time travel and take the protagonist back to where it all started, but allow them to reference ALL of the things, all the taboo subjects that are no go now, all the glitches, all the mechanics brought back in on a drip feed. Take it back to being a rip off of GTA like it used to be, but over the course of the game it slowly gets back to what Saints Row would consider normal while self knowingly not crossing the line where it shouldn't be, but also crossing the line where it can because fuck it, this is Saints Row. Maybe even push it further, since there's 10 years of stuff to satirise and then maybe have the end game to be become the President by ousting the current bent as fuck President. I'd play that.

 

Be edgy, but be edgy for todays standards. Be the game that raises eyebrows.

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I was proper gutted with Agents Of Mayhem, it was such a massive let down. As much as I enjoyed Saints Row 4, the super power mechanic quickly made using cars completely redundant. 
 

I’m not sure what the team is up to now. But whatever they do next with Saints Row, i feel it has to go down the “what the fuck” road. Because Agents Of Mayhem didn’t, and that played a major part in its failure I felt.

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  • Sly Reflex changed the title to Sly's St(r)eam Tombola Thread: Hitman Absolution

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