Portal 2

[SinbadEV]

Different strokes for different folks. Some games are meant to be experienced like movies, or like a season of a TV show. Each piece of content is unique, there's lots of acting and production values, and you work through it in about 11 hours - which is about the same length as a 13-episode TV season.

Other games include more gameplay content, but not actually more *content*. Just more stuff to work through.

I love the latter for multiplayer games, the former for singleplayer ones. Different strokes for different folks. For a single-player game, I want to get through it quickly and experience the story and trying everything new and fresh. For multiplayer, give me every possible permutation on your main principles.

Im sure it would be possible to include some sort of competition based mode of play in portal to extend its re-playability...
Maybe like an obstacle race....or i dont know...

Second portal gun with green and purple portals... compete to try to reach the end of the stages/frag opponents.

[Pxtl]

Now that portal is multiplayer hopefully we'll see a decent mod community experiment with creating some competitive game-play modes for the game. Even a simple Chu Chu Rocket style game of "try to get more floaty plasma balls to fly into my base than my opponents get into theirs" would be nice.

But either way, that kind of long-term re-playability is *not* in the box on the shelf.

[smoth]

Grind? Char's story took at least 10 hours in the first game. Power of bonds is a new missio, not just more of the same. And the achievements, nigga please, i don't care about those. Btw you can talk to me about brainless grind after you manage the zaku tank mission. Go play dw:g1 there at least 50 hours of story. Between the different characters. Seriously, amuro and char become friends, paptimus gets put into a whole new light. The complaint about less voice acting is more hillarious given the amount of characters and actual spoken lines which had to be done 2 times. It is probably as much If not more voice acting. Now it you want to compare a dialogue game darkmessiah for light discussion, or oh I dunno bioshock.

But we were talking hours of GAME if you just want to dick waggle about talking the ff with squal in it had more grinding than dw and probably more talk and less gameplay

[KaiserJ]

struggling to find any points in favor of buying this game

seems like a waste of money

[Gota]

37% in Utorrent....

[Pxtl]

@Smoth - I'm not trying to detract from Dynasty Warriors as a fun game - I'm just saying that the amount of actual gameplay *content* in most major games seems about the same. All that differs is how they stretch it out. Whether you see it all at once, whether you see it repeated over and over, or whether they just put a big vast open map that they force you to backtrack over to get to the next real (this is why I can't get into the Metroidvania-style games). Whether they have spoken dialogue or just have you click through text. Nothing is free - you get a longer game by giving things up.

Personally, for single-player games I prefer they maximize density at the expense of length. For multiplayer, I want the reverse.

I don't blame other players for having other priorities.

Portal is just a very high content-per-second game, which means that it's going to end fast. If it were longer, we wouldn't have as much coverage of well-written dialogue, excellent voice-acting, top-notch puzzles, etc.

The reverse-case are games that use procedurally generated content to give you the illusion of having new stuff every level and just grind you through an endless procession of identical equipment and monsters with slightly different stats. The Diablos and Disgaeas of the world.

This is especially true with puzzlers - there are only so many variations on a theme you can do before it feels repetitive. A long puzzler is generally a bad puzzler. World of Goo was similarly short-and-sweet.

Imho, the best approach is to make the game about 10 hours to see the end of the story, but then add a plotless set of epilogue missions that are there for pure challenge and let the player who really loves the game push through another act of heartbreakingly frustrating material that will give him an assload more gameplay if he really wants it. The Mario Galaxy approach (although imho they got the difficulty curve wrong in that one).

Obviously DWGundam isn't Nethack. I just mean you're seeing less of the developer effort per-second in DWGundam than you see in one of these movie-ish FPS games.

I don't think either of them are *wrong*, as long as they let you know upfront what you're in for.

[Machete234]

edit: Only co-op but Apparently there's going to be the option of people making there own levels (likely steam version only) so if they make that part good enough you could end up with the "nearly endless" number of levels you get in Little Big Planet... though hopefully fewer "ride" levels...

If they do that I might buy it in the future but if it doesnt have some replay value I dont see a point.
I mean making levels for source games is easy enough especially these generic ones in portal.

I agree 50Ôé¼ thats normal for a full price game and I payed less for stracraft2 (even though blizzards recommended price is 60Ôé¼ or something )
So just dl the skidrow release, there is allready a fix for the crashes too.

I will pick it up when its 20-30 euros and when there is modding and mapping so that you can play a lot of levels in coop.

As a general rule I dont buy singleplayer only games anymore or games that have inbuild self destruction mechanisms like no map&mod tools.

[Johannes]

But is the game any good?
I have a hard time believeing this will keep interesting throughout 10 or however many hours this would last. Seems like any corridor shooter except you do piss easy puzzles instead of shooting shit up. 1st Portal was ok novelty I guess but is there anything cool and new in this one, or just same gimmick stretched over a longer game?

[SwiftSpear]

No open talk of piracy please. It's against forum rules.

[Gota]

No open talk of piracy please. It's against forum rules.

Than please close down the BA subforum.

[SwiftSpear]

I'm not getting into that stupid argument. TA content has sorta kinda special status just because it just does. We're not looking to piss off every copyright holder there is by allowing this place to become a Warez exchange. Any more complaints about it and it'll be bans not warnings.

[Gota]

OK can i than complain about the moderation staff?XD

[SinbadEV]

OK can i than complain about the moderation staff?XD

I know that was meant sarcastically so I won't be the one to warn you officially for it... but don't be surprised if someone else does.

Given the intercontinental nature of our little community it's best to avoid discussing piracy in a way that even sounds in support of it let alone with specifics like which release has the best crack and where to find them.

We don't support piracy of Total Annihilation and it has been the "stance" of the moderation team to just give the extracted TA content the "benefit of the doubt" due to the fact that anyone playing the TA-derived mods could "reasonably" be expected to have access to an original TA disk.

That said, we should probably nip the discussion in the bud given that there is policy in place... We're getting close to Felonies 4,6, 11 and Misdemeanours 1,3 and maybe a few others here and there.

Now, I understand that some people download unlicensed copies of games etc. but this is not the forum to encourage this behaviour even implicitly* nor are we interested in discussion the apparent hypocrisy of this policy.

* Deffinitions 1:a and 1:b, opposite of "explicit"

[SinbadEV]

Grind? ... gameplay

Sorry, maybe I picked the wrong campaign because from what I saw it was just 30 minutes of killing the same 3 mechs/drones with the same attacks followed by barely-counting-as-plot intermission dialog... perhaps I'm not invested enough in the mythos to have given it the chance it deserved... if they ever get teleporters worked out to be cheap and practical you can bring your copy over to my place and show it to me.

Bring snacks.

[SinbadEV]

But is the game any good?
I have a hard time believeing this will keep interesting throughout 10 or however many hours this would last. Seems like any corridor shooter except you do piss easy puzzles instead of shooting shit up. 1st Portal was ok novelty I guess but is there anything cool and new in this one, or just same gimmick stretched over a longer game?

On the PS3 there is a super obvious and intrusive "loading" break when you move between "chunks"...

The first 15 of these "chunks" are "easy" if you have your brain wrapped around portals already, otherwise they act as a tutorial... fortunately if you know what you are doing they take only a minute or two to beat... this lead to a series of playing 2 minutes, waiting a minute, playing 5 minutes, waiting a minute, playing 10 minutes, waiting a minute but it's over quickly enough and you get to a point where there's new mechanics introduced and the puzzles get harder and the story line kicks in and there's more to do in each chunk so the load times stop being quite as annoying... I imagine that on a decent computer these load times would be unnoticeable from the beginning.

I'm currently at around the 7 hour mark and they just introduced a new mechanic for me to start having to take into account in solving puzzles... the cool thing is that when they introduce the first new mechanic they explain it expressly but by this point they just have a new thing and I have to figure out how it works from context.

In the co-op mode (haven't played, this is based on the trailer) there are two portal guns and therefore 2 sets of portal... I imagine this would definitely add a new dynamic to the gameplay... I should be playing some co-op with my brother-in-law this weekend if we can manage to get it working on more then one computer working at his house... so I'll let y'all know.

[Machete234]

Seems like any corridor shooter except you do piss easy puzzles instead of shooting shit up.

Youre too intelligent for life, end it!

[AF]

mmmm potatoes....

[knorke]

this lead to a series of playing 2 minutes, waiting a minute, playing 5 minutes, waiting a minute, playing 10 minutes

in 2011? where is teh progress?

[AF]

this lead to a series of playing 2 minutes, waiting a minute, playing 5 minutes, waiting a minute, playing 10 minutes

in 2011? where is teh progress?

Recent advances?!

[bobthedinosaur]

There was a billboard (portal 2 ad) on the road in the cow town of a town where I preside. I found it strange that video games have become an industry to invest in advertising as such.