Halloween Season Gaming

[Toonces]

@ Bison,
If you don't want to drop a ton of money, Clive Barker's Undying is on GoG.  I bought it a while back, but haven't tried it yet.  However, I played a bit of it when it was relatively new and I remember it as a pretty scary game with the lights turned down and some headphones on.

You might want to check a few Youtube videos first and see if it fits the bill.

Hmmm, looks kind of dated now...

[-budd-]

 Speaking of spooky games,anybody play RE6?....Any good?  it's 75% off today only..... on steam
http://store.steampowered.com/app/221040/

[Gusington]

Clive Barker's Undying is a classic. Love that game.

[Nefaro]

Clive Barker's Undying is a classic. Love that game.

I loaded the GOG version up on my Win7 notebook and it runs great for the most part.  Although it occasionally starts slowly panning my view downward until I hit ESC and go into the menu return.  Weird.  And spooo-ooky??  :P

[Gusington]

^Yes! Both weird and spooky.

[-budd-]

anybody ever get the high res pack from that italian site for undying? I signed up for the site but never got a confirmation email, so couldn't download the file. If anyone has it, i'd like to get the file from them.

[Nefaro]

anybody ever get the high res pack from that italian site for undying? I signed up for the site but never got a confirmation email, so couldn't download the file. If anyone has it, i'd like to get the file from them.

I'd like to have it, too, but it looks like that mod may be lost to us now.  ???

[-budd-]

anyone try to join the site? i tried twice, but no joy.

[CptHowdy]

not spooky but currently playing as the undead in Doms4!!

[JasonPratt]

Not (really) spooky, but I've finally gotten around to playing the Tomb Raider reboot.

The back of my brain apparently wants to be playing a WW1 flying MMO however, because I spent several hours last night dreaming about that.  ???

[Gusington]

How are you finding the new Dominions and Tomb Raider? Good stuff?

[CptHowdy]

How are you finding the new Dominions and Tomb Raider? Good stuff?

I like dom4 so far. it gives me that one more turn feeling. I skip watching the battles for the most part so if there are new graphics for units, I don't see them! cant wait til they get some MP going.

[Nefaro]

The back of my brain apparently wants to be playing a WW1 flying MMO however, because I spent several hours last night dreaming about that.  ???

I daydream of flying in Rise of Flight every day.  Gonna wait until I get the new PC built and all my damned  DRM activations on my old rig sorted ( & other such nightmares) before diving back into anything big.  :)  But ooooh am I giddy thinking about flying in ROF, every time.  ;D

[Gusington]

Tks Howdy.

[JasonPratt]

How are you finding the new Dominions and Tomb Raider? Good stuff?

I haven't tried Dom4 yet, as I'm prudently waiting for internal improvements. :)

The new Tomb Raider is... a lot like someone thought the TV show Lost would make a great Lara Croft origin story. Take that as you wish.

There are special hair graphics called "TressFX" which are bugged; I went back to "normal" hair so I wouldn't be distracted by stray shards vibrating randomly on her neck.

I absolutely hate the visual effect where the 'camera' following along behind Lara bobs and weaves in random ways, like this is supposed to be a movie being filmed on handheld high-def. It's also practically the only visual effect that can't be turned off, so far as I can tell.  >:( The water splashing on the 'lens' of the 'camera' is almost as annoying but is more tolerable because it happens more rarely instead of ALL THE DAMN TIME. I don't usually get sick watching jerky-cam shot movies, but this quickly makes me nauseous. The rapid strobe effects thrown into the game at strange intervals are apparently designed to weed out epilepsy from the human race by natural selection. The opening load screens BEFORE THE PRE-CREDIT LOGOS feature artificial signal sharding that serves only to worry the player that the graphics card is burning out. A lot of pointless and counter-productive flash has gone into the visual design is what I'm saying. Due to some kind of weird engine dis-optimization, "Ultimate" graphic setting goes to 24hz instead of 50 or 60; which not only causes the graphics to look less polished but also causes stuttering and jumpiness, especially during the cut scenes, and sent my awesome computer's framerate diving into an average of 24.5fps. I mean the 24hz setting did; experimentally setting it at 60 even with everything else turned up to the max (except for the stupid Tressfx) clocked a very respectable 60fps! (Obviously the code was written to take the refresh rate rather literally as a lock.  ::) )

On the other hand, when the graphics aren't spazzing out, they do look great. :) I especially like how all the cutscenes are not only rendered in-engine (which is usual nowadays) but rendered on-the-fly, which becomes obvious when Lara is set to one of her alternate outfits. By contrast, Arkham City's major cut-scenes, although rendered in-engine, are only pre-rendered, so if I'm playing the new game plus with the Batman Beyond suit the major cutscenes never show that but only the standard Arkham games suit (great though that is. I'll note in fairness that some of the game plot scenes are rendered on the fly.)

How's the gameplay? I'm using an XBox360 pad, and I kind of wish I was using a mouse, as precision shooting would be a lot easier, but I decided to keep the pad since my getting more skilled at manipulating the game engine rather parallels the plot of Lara slowly learning to be a competent fighter. I'm not the first person to have observed that there's a somewhat jarring disjunction between how she usually behaves in gameplay (sometimes in human ways with collapses on the ground after a hard jump, and heavy breathing during runs, but usually as hard core as any combat heavy 3PS game) and how she comes across in the cut-scenes with a girlish mid-teen-sounding voice and an overwhelmed demeanor. The latter makes sense in the story (sort of -- she's already a doctor of archaeology after all), the former scales up awfully quickly after a harrowing opening ten minutes or so. The game itself lampshades this in dialogue: her mentor Roth, from whom she'll clearly be getting her signature two-pistol fighting rig later, upon learning that she had to kill someone already, sympathizes with, "That couldn't have been easy." To which she replies that it was frighteningly easy. I'll give the game props for showing the initial traumatic adjustments though.

In fact, the game is so brutal to Lara that it almost verges past survival horror (though it's never really that) into torture porn; certainly far past the point where anyone else would have just been killed or crippled into helplessness. At least the game tries to show her ordeals hurt, physically, mentally and emotionally, and are tough to get past; many games wouldn't have bothered. I also like how the game's motto for Lara is "I can do this" (or occasionally "You can do this.") A subtle touch in some areas is that once Lara finishes the plot there the weather tends to improve.

Is it like previous TRs? Superficially. The tropes are there, but the attempts at gritty realism go so far as to be distracting not only in themselves but in calling attention to the "magical realism" typical (and typically necessary) in games. Most of the game also has LITTLE OR NOTHING to do with classic Tomb Raider goals of finding this or that awe-inspiring lost achievement. If it wasn't for her occasional remarks in relation to random experience-point items she finds and the overarching island plot, the game (and its overarching plot) literally could have been about any random or most other established characters. I do like the overarching plot elements borrowed from ancient Japanese mythology details, but again it's like the most kick-ass Lost season imaginable. Part of me also wishes the designers would remake the King Kong tie-in game; I've played that on the PS2, and it played like a dog and looked ugly as sin but was a great atmospheric survival horror title (peppered with hulk-out moments when the perspective switches to Kong kicking all the ass.  ;D )

So in conclusion, although I haven't finished the game yet (and I'm not sure how far I am from the end after over 10 hours, but certainly more than halfway), my main impression is that I'm considering looking around for the PC version of the Kong game to see if it looks and plays better. With a somewhat distant secondary impression that I ought to get around to playing the souped-up PS3 editions of the modern TR trilogy, too.