A horse of course
Guest
Was recommened this game a year or so back but never got around to picking it up. It sounded p. good. An open-world psychological-horror? Crossed with a detective/adventure game? Crossed with survival horror? Like Alan Wake was supposed to be before it was "streamlined"? Inspired by Twin Peaks? Give me a moment whilst *FAPFAPFAPFAPFAP* Okay, so I hear the production values are a little low and the controls a little dated, but how bad could it be?
Pretty fucking bad. Graphics look like they're out of an upscaled PS2 port, which is still better than the hideous UE3 shit clogging up the 360. It's "inspired" by Twin Peaks in the sense it lifts entire scenes and characters pretty much ad verbatim. Music tracks with engrish-driven vocals and minor translation errors abound, as you'd expect from a Japanese game. None of these really matter - I was expecting as much. But the gameplay is so unrelentingly medieval I don't see how I can continue. When one says that the controls are "dated", what they really mean is that the developers havn't taken a single goddamn lesson from third-person games over the course of the past decade. They're clumsy and frustrating, the inventory/menu is counter-intuitive, and the protagonist holsters his weapon every five seconds unless you periodically switch to aiming mode. Even text and environmental interaction are handled like ye olde PS1 survival horror. Of the hour I played, 90% of it consisted of plodding along a series ofcorridors dirt paths and gunning down dozens of zombies ghosts infected whogivesashit with the handgun. Which has infinite ammo by default. The other 5% was stumbling across switches for gates and the red key a fuse box to activate a broken switch, and the final 5% cutscenes. After the tedium of killing something like two dozen zombies, I found a couple of black pools which continuously respawn enemies and cannot be destroyed. So I ran past them...straight into a quicktime event. "PRESS X NOT TO DIE" I press X, and get grabbed by a monstah, so I guess I was too slow? "WIGGLE YOUR ANALOG STICK FROM LEFT TO RIGHT SO AS NOT TO DIE" I wiggle the analog stick. Then I die.
That's right - the only innovations the developers have taken to heart are shitty quicktime events situated in the most frustrating places possible. I'm respawned right back at the start of the area, at which point I'm immediately attacked by zombies, who glitch out and disappear, causing the game (but not the 360 itself) to freeze up and screech audio distortions at me. Eventually I exit to the dashboard, load up the game...and find myself at the save point 20 minutes back from the quicktime event. Yeah, no. Check google, apparently once I get past this bit I start the "real" game. Then I check the reviews, which claim that these banal shit boring linear combat sequences take up most of the game. I shake my head with regret and turn off the power button. Even as a bit of a storyfag, I just can't justify forcing myself through such offensively backward gameplay.
It's like the developers suffer from the opposite problem to popamole kwans - they stubbornly refuse to progress in the field of game design regardless of how arbitrary the mechanics and how many other games have replaced them with superior alternatives since they were first introduced. Like Catherine (an overhyped generic puzzle/platformer with interesting art direction and a suprisingly mature and sophisticated story), DP is one of those games that's couragerous and daring in certain areas, but inexplicably remains shackled to the same mechanics that have been driving the genre since inception.
tl;dr I suck at a game and try to disguise my failures via incoherent theories of design
inb4 thread sucks, OP is a faggot
Pretty fucking bad. Graphics look like they're out of an upscaled PS2 port, which is still better than the hideous UE3 shit clogging up the 360. It's "inspired" by Twin Peaks in the sense it lifts entire scenes and characters pretty much ad verbatim. Music tracks with engrish-driven vocals and minor translation errors abound, as you'd expect from a Japanese game. None of these really matter - I was expecting as much. But the gameplay is so unrelentingly medieval I don't see how I can continue. When one says that the controls are "dated", what they really mean is that the developers havn't taken a single goddamn lesson from third-person games over the course of the past decade. They're clumsy and frustrating, the inventory/menu is counter-intuitive, and the protagonist holsters his weapon every five seconds unless you periodically switch to aiming mode. Even text and environmental interaction are handled like ye olde PS1 survival horror. Of the hour I played, 90% of it consisted of plodding along a series of
That's right - the only innovations the developers have taken to heart are shitty quicktime events situated in the most frustrating places possible. I'm respawned right back at the start of the area, at which point I'm immediately attacked by zombies, who glitch out and disappear, causing the game (but not the 360 itself) to freeze up and screech audio distortions at me. Eventually I exit to the dashboard, load up the game...and find myself at the save point 20 minutes back from the quicktime event. Yeah, no. Check google, apparently once I get past this bit I start the "real" game. Then I check the reviews, which claim that these banal shit boring linear combat sequences take up most of the game. I shake my head with regret and turn off the power button. Even as a bit of a storyfag, I just can't justify forcing myself through such offensively backward gameplay.
It's like the developers suffer from the opposite problem to popamole kwans - they stubbornly refuse to progress in the field of game design regardless of how arbitrary the mechanics and how many other games have replaced them with superior alternatives since they were first introduced. Like Catherine (an overhyped generic puzzle/platformer with interesting art direction and a suprisingly mature and sophisticated story), DP is one of those games that's couragerous and daring in certain areas, but inexplicably remains shackled to the same mechanics that have been driving the genre since inception.
tl;dr I suck at a game and try to disguise my failures via incoherent theories of design
inb4 thread sucks, OP is a faggot
That's like saying unpatched STALKER crashing all the time was a deliberate attempt to mimic the effects of anomalies, thus contributing to the atmosphere.
