Nah, the other Myst games don't actually have you witness the changes first-hand, but like Myst you read about them or see the evidence of them. I don't know what compatibility issues you mean with Myst III - I ran it just fine with no issues. Same with IV and V and Uru.

Anyway, the Myst series is great, especially I, IV, and Uru.

Skyrim on PS3 says hello. And this is how Battlefield 4 looked on my friend's PS4 for a few months:



The difference is that when your game doesn't work on PC, you can fix it. When your game doesn't work on consoles, it ain't gonna work until the devs get around to patching it.

How on earth could you consider IV and Uru to be better than Exile and Riven? I'll admit that I was a huge Presto Studios fanboy back in the day and Riven was one of the first games I remember playing, so maybe that's what colored my opinion somewhat.

Anyone here played the Zork games that were the more Myst-inspired ones? Nemesis is bone chilling even to this day, and Grand Inquisitor is goddamn hilarious. You can pick them all up on GOG for pennies.

Oh don't worry, I have Reasons and Opinions. I don't really play Myst games for clever puzzles - I like the puzzles, but it's not an aspect I seriously consider when determining a game's quality, unless a puzzle is particularly good or particularly bad. Admittedly I'm not the best or most patient puzzle-solver, so my definition of good and bad might not be the same as someone who plays adventure games mostly for the puzzles. The main reason I play Myst games is for the story, and the exploration, the immersion in a world that has been (until just before the player's arrival, usually) inhabited for a long time, and the organic way puzzles have grown out of that. That's what set the original Myst apart from other adventure games at the time - the player is dropped onto this fantastic island without explanation, and must figure out what is going on and what needs to be done.

My issue with Riven (which I do still like, btw) is that it takes place almost entirely in just the one Age. It's a well-realized Age, they did a good job of making it inhabited and lived-in, but a big part of the series is travel between Ages and I think it misses out by not having more. Also, I remember the puzzles in this one being particularly fiendish. Also, compared to Myst I, IV, and Uru, it just didn't really leave nearly as much of an impression on me, cool though it was. For me it was more of an "absence of greatness" type thing, rather than anything particularly worth criticizing. I only played it the once though, so another run could convince me.

Myst III: Exile's problem is a bit more abstract. In short, I hate that the Ages in it were made to be puzzles in their own world. My favorite part about the best Myst games is just how lived-in the Ages feel. Even though they're usually incredibly inconvenient, perched on an island or whatever, the inhabitants have actually carved out a real life for themselves. Or, the Ages were created to fulfill a specific need - lots of that in Uru - be it food production or imprisonment or whatever. In short, you were exploring a real place made for a real purpose, in which people had lived or worked or studied for many years. In Exile, you essentially enter these places that were built to be puzzles and nothing else. They're neat I guess, but nowhere near as intriguing as any of the other Ages in any of the other games. III's story is very good, however, and Brad Dourif is great.

Now, to explain why I prefer IV and Uru - Myst IV: Revelation is great because it features the most well-realized Ages in the whole series. They feel the most "whole", especially the brothers' two ages and the starting one. Sirrus's especially is fascinating - you see years and years of his life carved into this ridiculously inhospitable floating crystal prison, and all the things he's done to pass the time. Carve statues, grow plants for food, eventually discover how to make circuits out of the crystal and power them with the ubiquitous lightning. All the Ages show a similar level of attention to detail - the atmosphere and graphics are just stunning. The story is great as well. The downside is each major Age has at least one puzzle that's just ridiculously challenging to the point of cheapness, and often timing-based - the monkey call puzzle in Achenar's Age, the crystal sound puzzle in Sirrus's. That's a black mark, but not enough to knock it out of the standings.

Uru on the other hand is almost entirely devoid of story, except for snippets here and there, but the Ages and atmosphere are just awe-inspiring. Also, the community is very cool, if you play online. It's perhaps the "purest" of all the Myst games, with no real "ending" to achieve, just a bunch of linked Ages to explore. Plus, you get your own Age which you can affect in small ways - a really cool idea which adds a lot to the fun of exploring the Ages, to acquire cool new things to add to your own Age.

I never actually played Uru. The main reason was because my computer at the time couldn't really handle anything in 3D that wasn't at least half made-up of sprites, but I also remember critics being displeased with it. That was at a time I actually thought critics knew what the fuck they were talking about . Never bothered with End of Ages either.

Wait a second, do you mean Myst IV: Revelation or Myst V: End of Ages? I played Revelation and I'm pretty sure that's what you've described above, but I don't really remember any of these games except Myst: Masterpiece Edition since I just replayed it a couple years ago.

Uh, yeah, I meant Revelation. I got the subtitles confused. End of Ages is cool, but it suffers a bit I think from introducing brand new mechanics and story concepts into the game right before ending the series forever - it has some great Ages, especially the astronomy one with a shitload of telescopes, but it would've worked better either keeping to the same formula of the first four games (prerendered graphics with FMV characters) or being the first in a new group of Myst games - story-wise it's a bit of a departure already, as it jumps ahead chronologically quite a bit and introduces a number of new characters and ideas. Instead it changes a bunch of old stuff, introduces a bunch of new stuff, then ends the series forever.

Let me put it this way: it's an excellent adventure game, a good Myst game, and a poor ending to the series.

Psh, how could anyone confuse "Revelation" with "End of Ages?" It's not like the world 'revelation' has been closely associated with the end of an age for centuries or anything.

The engine that powered End of Ages seemed really weird to me; like they were desperately trying to pander to new fans who disliked, uh, Myst-clone adventure games and also please classic fans with the 'slideshow' mode. And of course, they came up short for both.

Thoughts on REALMyst? lol. God, video games were weird back then.

Finally have the full hard on for Borderlands 2 like everyone else here. Randomly picked it up again and it clicked. I guess the PS4 version still doesn't look or run as well as the PC release, so it's nice to know my PC is still a little ahead. Runs like butter.

I think an issue I had was that I tried playing through this one with the new turret guy, when I did Roland in the first game. I mostly solo these too and so yeah, turrets and defensive play style gets a little boring. So on a whim I bought the Mechromancer when I started anew and holy shit. I blasted through the parts I had done in the past, which ended up not being much at all (was like around level 15 when I first played it and stopped).

Are all the DLC's good?

Technically it's easy to see this is an improvement over the first, to say the least. Plus Jack as a iconic villain is nice, I can't really remember much about the plot in the first at all.

I just finished up chapter 11, level 25. Think I just realized the bird guy is the sniper from the first game? lol

I would rank the DLC's this way:

Headhunter Packs < Sir Hammerlock's < Captain Scarlett's/Torgue's < Tiny Tina's.

I also just played the Digistruct Peak one for the first time and that one's alright. Not really essential playing at low levels but once you max out your character at level 72 and finish all the content on UVHM, Digistruct Peak is how you get more endgame mileage out of the game by unlocking the Overpower Levels. OP Levels basically let you play the game with enemies that are even higher level (up to ~80 at OP8) with higher level item drops, but you can't level up any more yourself so your health and skill points stay the same as at level 72. This adds another layer of strategizing and build maximization beyond what you needed to do to even play on UVHM in the first place. I just started this stuff but it seems pretty cool to me.

Anyway all of the DLC is varying levels of fun so if you can grab it when it's heavily discounted, go for it.

Like, uh, right now? lol

https://www.humblebundle.com/

20 hours already into Fallout 3 and it feels like I barely progressed, lol. So far I think New Vegas is way better, like most people I think. Quests are better, areas are more varied (how many fucking samey subway tunnels are there?) there seems to be more to do generally, and there are more often different ways to solve quests. And way less mandatory combat in New Vegas, which is good because holy shit the combat is as bad as ever. Is it just me or does F3 have super mutants and raiders everywhere? I installed a sprint mod to try and run past them but it's all but useless (the similar mod for F:NV worked way better, gonna have to hunt for a better mod...).

Oh yeah, it crashes wayyyy more often too. It crashes at least 3 times per play session, and I had to reload due to being stuck in geometry once today too. Bethesda's even worse than Obsidian for this...

He already owns the game, and $15 for all that DLC isn't that much of a steal.

How much am I missing without the Headhunter DLC? Because I bought the GOTY recently, and apparantly I was mistaken in thinking "GOTY" meant "including all DLC".

The Headhunter things weren't that cool. I mean, snag 'em if you're itching for more content but they're pretty short (about an hour a piece) and weren't quite as good as some of the other stuff writing-wise. Also there's no exclusive loot that I know of or anything. I grabbed them when they were on sale for like $0.80 each or something. Of the five the Son of Crawmerax one is definitely the best/most worthwhile of the five.

Thanks, sounds like I'll pass on that one. I probably won't do a second playthrough before I can convince my cheap friend to get the game for co-op anyway, so there's no rush to acquire the "full package".

The main use I found for the Headhunter packs was providing alternate methods to leveling up in TVHM and above, so you don't just end up doing the same sidequests each time through. I wouldn't pay full price for them, but at like 80 cents or whatever they were during the Steam sale, they're definitely worth it.

New game announced by Piranha Bytes (here comes the darkeningday salivating, I guess) and published by Nordic Games, a post-apocalyptic ARPG for PC/PC4/X1, will be revealed at Gamescom next month:

http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/2/8880675 ... nha-bytes-




Well, I hope the game turns out OK in the end because now my perception of it is forever tainted by the pretentious wank and stupid buzzwords.

Xenial, eh? That's a good one. Next time I need to put an X in an acronym I'll know where to turn. Xylophone really only fits so many places.

Oh my god, that acronym...
Xenial? Fucking seriously?

To be fair, the "we love it already" line came from their new publisher (Deep Silver's out forever now, thank gods), but PB have been pretentious motherfuckers since the runaway success of Gothic II. In the promo material they put together for Risen 3: "Like a carpenter with a hand-crafted piece of furniture, we put together the story, the characters and the landscape until it all fits and the player has the possibility to discover things all around the place. You can try out and find things that others might not."

Still, how many post-apocalyptic dark science fantasy action RPGs do we have? The answer: not enough.

What the world needs is a sequel to Call Of Cthulhu:Dark Corners of the Earth. That game did everything well (which I still own and plan to revisit soon).

^I wish. There was going to be two more games and there were even screenshots and a trailer for one of them (Call of Cthulhu: Destiny's End), but the studio went bankrupt, among other things. One can only dream now.

Just....no. The game did a lot of things well, it had some fantastic ideas and is easily one of the best Lovecraftian type games, but it has so many fucking problems I can't even list them all, even after a shitload of patches.

Instead of listing, I'll just tell you about one - near the end, there's a typical action movie "base is blowing up and you only have limited time to escape" scenario. I ran out as fast as I could - got crushed by falling rocks. Repeated, got crushed again. And again. Finally I had the route memorized like crazy, was hugging corners and such to get out as quickly as I possibly could, and I did succeed in making it a little farther, but kept dying. So, I looked up a solution. Was I doing something wrong? Was there some obvious button or escape hatch or something else I missed?

Nope, it turns out that, for some ridiculous reason, only during that final sequence, your graphics resolution affects your running speed. That's right, the in-game resolution somehow affects your in-game running speed during that sequence. I turned down my resolution to a wonderful 640x480, and got all the way out first try. That still stands as the most ludicrous bug in any game I've ever played.

That said, the game did do some amazing, amazing things. There's a certain sequence that I don't want to spoil (but for those who've played it's the bit with the Flying Polyps) that still stands as the best boss fight of any horror game I've ever played. So, for those who really like horror games and Lovecraftian themes, it's worth it - but be warned: you might lose your sanity.

I'm thinking on a ps4-high performance PC kind of game with no bugs. As a game, CoT was perfect to me; the story is total boss, the scenarios are excellent, the playability is great in the sense you're a simple man and no overpowered human and it's hard as hell.

One thing I like of certain games is that you don't have to depend too much on powerful weaponry/armor to go through it, as well as you need to think before acting and figuring how to do some things instead just killing everything and looting shit.

Think it would be a good idea for Harmonix to make an equivalent to the Rock Band series? There could be controllers for guitars (lead and rhythm), bass, drums, as well as vocals. It would have tons of songs from bands of all different genres, including heavy metal, thrash metal, death metal, black metal, doom metal, industrial metal, progressive metal, power metal, gothic metal, folk metal, avant garde metal, and all in between.

Polarizing horror games?! I'm all over that shit, where do I sign? I've heard of this game before but never got around to checking it out. I'm going to keep my eyes open and see if I can get it. Because if it's horror, few people played it and we can't settle on it being good or not, I fucking love it.

And speaking of horror, this pretty thing was brought to my attention. Hello, sexy.

DCotE is pretty nuts. Definitely a bit glitchy/buggy/awkward, but yeah probably the best atmosphere and tension/suspense of any Lovecraft game. The hotel sequence...

Hmmm. I don't remember it having too many crashes when I played it, which was after all the patches and DLC were out for it. You might want to look up your video card and see what the most stable drivers for Fallout 3 were reported to be if you haven't already. Often times later drivers will break older games; this happened to me with Bioshock multiple times.

I consider Fallout 3 to be inferior to NV in every way except:
1) Liam Neeson
2) The ending felt more conclusive and important somehow, though NV ended well too
3) I liked Broken Steel more than any of the F:NV DLC
4) Liam Neeson

Both games had exceptional soundtracks as well. Overall I will never play FO3 again but I don't regret my time with it.

Exceptional soundtrack? So far I've only heard shitty vintage songs on the radio and forgettable ambient music. It's the opposite of exceptional really.

Getting really sick of fighting super mutants over and over now... really dampens the excitement of finding a new location when it's nothing but more atrocious combat of the same enemy I've fought countless times already.

The ambient music in Fallout is great.

The new Fallout games have a soundtrack? I thought the intended way to play them was while listening to osdm.

After having pumped way way way too many hours into The Witcher 3, no matter how good the music is, no game over 30 hours can support an ultra-melodic soundtrack unless the score is like 10 hours long (see: Divinity: Original Sin). I thought the OSTs for Fallout 3 and NV (both composed by Inon Zur) did a great job of enhancing the desolate tone of the game while also not being pronounced enough to get on your nerves after hearing the same song 90 billion times.

But I agree on the vintage songs being exceedingly shitty except for the Billie Holiday tracks. Can't believe there was no Cab Calloway.

What kind of soundtrack would you prefer for giant, hundreds of hours games?

I don't know any other Lovecraftian game where you can actually feel that ominous and horrific atmosphere as in CoT. See that the game includes a sanity level (that you can't actually see in any bar or %, you can only perveive the heartbeat and breath when the guy is not doing well - hahaha- ), where if the player see/perceive too many perturbing things, loses its mind and die. While the game advances, the player starts to hallucinate, to shiver and mumble unintelligible things and the only way to stabilize yourself is with a shot of morphine (available in a ridiculously short supply, like twice in the entire game?).

Btw, I installed the game in my new laptop. I just started and I'm in the hotel. Oh, my Cthulhu, this shit has aged really well. Still perturbing.

*checks Steam* I have 64 hours for New Vegas. And I can tell you that other than other than Big Iron, I was getting so damn sick of hearing the radio songs, I honestly would have preferred no music at all. If I have to hear "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" one more time, I'm gonna get some of that evil karma... The ambient score worked fine for the most part but it was still really forgettable.

F3 seems to be less annoying with radio songs but again, just forgettable ambient. It's serviceable but nothing I'd call "good". Then again that's pretty much how I feel about just about every non-indie Western game except maybe Rayman Origins/Legends, lately.

The only games I have hundreds of hours with are the Souls games. They have no music except for intro/ending cut scenes and for bosses (and the occasional ambient background music in exceptional areas, such as Ash Lake or Yahar'gul pre-blood moon.... yet those two are most definitely NOT forgettable). And that's honestly perfect.

I remember the Souls games had music that reminded me of 1940s horror movie soundtracks. Which is to say: awesome! Cycling the music on/off is also a good way to deal with long games. DA:I did that but then everyone thought it was a bug...

I'm gonna go ahead and say that Mass Effect 2 has the perfect score for such a game. Seriously, all the music in that installment is highly memorable, and I think it's due to how Jack Wall and his team composed it in such a way that introduces subtle variations to the characters' motifs as the game progresses and their personalities open up. Keeps things interesting. Illusive Man's mesmerizing theme which gets more layered and tragic every time you see him is probably the best example of this. It also helps that the orchestral/electronic writing is top notch as well. My heart fucking melts every time I hear Tali's suite, and I never get tired of how Thane's suite slowly builds up into an epic climax at the bridge between the Dantius towers. Just awesome stuff. ME3's music, while cool, doesn't have this writing approach to it and mainly focuses on overly bombastic shit because of all the battles that are happening, making it much less captivating and memorable, and actually seemingly quite repetitive.

I don't know exactly how many hours I've put in ME2, but it should be around the same as ME3 (~800 hours) if we count modding.

Morrigan, get a mod that enables Fallout 1-2 music, please. It automatically makes the game 10x better. I'm glad NV (mostly) just recycled music from those games. The new scores to F3 and NV were boring to me.

Borderlands 2 is where it's at, surprisingly. I don't even like dubstep but it just fucking works when things get crazy. Jesper Kyd was easily the best thing to the early AssCreed's as well, one of the better new composers right now. Some of my BL2 favorites:

Deus Ex




My neighbors probably hated me when I was doing this boss earlier, holy fuck


Considering they have similar settings, the Borderlands' OST's absolutely destroy F3/NV's new music to me.

Wish I could agree, but I like ME1's OST the most myself, they kind of dropped that cool retro flavor the first game had. There was nothing quite like this in the sequels:

Oh, dear, this sounds like it was made for me, I really hope it delivers. Now to fit it into the budget...

I'm with Xeo on ME. The first game sounded like Vangelis b-sides from Blade Runner. The only track I really liked from ME2 was from a DLC. I can't remember any music from ME3, which probably doesn't bode well for it. I think they got some super spiffy Hollywood composer too, which almost never is a good augur of things to come.