Screenshot thread

[sser]

That looks like Elemental/Fallen Enchantress.

 

[Konjad]

^ Wot dat and also is it gud?

This guy is correct:

That looks like Elemental/Fallen Enchantress.

It's Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.

It's okay, fun to play and an improvement over War of Magic, but it still suffers from dumb AI and being easy (focus on warfare and ignore economy, make good units, roflstomp neighbours and take over their economy, continue until victory). It's still fun to play for a while, especially if you pre-set game to odds agains you, but gets boring after some time. Nonetheless, I recommend trying it out, especially since it currently costs $1

 

[Anthedon]

Arx Fatalis/Libertatis

Spoiler

 

[Gragt]

Snakes with tits.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Right way to deal with both women and snakes.
PS. why this statue have nipples? I know frenchies and their sexuality but still.

 

[ghostdog]

Let statues have their nipples, I say.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Spoiler

A game where you have american flags as bonus points. :patriot:

Awesome game. The kill counts are incredible, even for an arcade game.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[bozia2012]

Time for some more TSW:


The Facility - an old soviet bunker, somewhere in Transylvania:

Spoiler

Security systems still operational:

The mainframe:

Of course they had dug too deep:

 

[A horse of course]

Halo: The Master Chief Collection

I should get a medal for wrestling with the fucking awful screenshot system on this piece of shit. Taking screenshots is itself rather fiddly, and good luck getting half the shots to took to actually save. On top of this, if you want to actually share them to various places, you need an Xbox Live Gold subscription I lost all my Halo 1/2 screens and had to briefly jump back in and take a new batch, most of which ALSO failed to save or upload.

Anyway, visuals are all over the place in this series, as the original Halo is actually the Xbox 360 Anniversary remaster of the Xbox game given another coat of paint for this release. Halo 2 is the original Xbox title remastered for the first time as another anniversary edition. Halo 3 is virtually untouched from it's original release, pre-Halo Anniversary and pre-Halo: Reach, making it probably the ugliest entry in the series next to Halo 3: ODST (which is available as DLC but I recall being a cyncial, cash-grab piece of trash aside from the soundtrack). Halo 4 is probably the best looking out of the whole pack, as one of the final big-budget exclusives released for the Xbox 360, though it might be argued it achieves this by scaling down a little from Halo 3.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition - Remastered

I've always been a staunch defender of the original Halo, as I think it deserves credit for eschewing the idea of an FPS as an intrusively scripted cinematic shooting gallery and treating combat scenarios as distinct encounters rather than barriers to the next cutscene. I was a bit let down when I replayed it this time, perhaps because I was rushing a bit to reach Halo 4 and wasn't really interested in trying out different approaches to some of the more difficult open areas later in the game. Still a pretty good game compared to a lot of the garbage I play. The Library is still horribly boring, of course. Plus, I can't say I'm enthused by the redesigned Elites, which seem a bit softer or more rounded compared to the original models (which are actually available as an option in the campaign menu), bringing them in line with later titles. I miss that feeling of absolute desperation that Bungie carried into the game from the original Myth: The Fallen Lords, where there was a real sense of almost complete hopelessness and near-fatalism, that this really was the end of the line and yet it could somehow get progressively worse throughout the campaign. "Dust and Echoes" was a high point of the series. It's impossible to go back to that if you've played the sequels.

Spoiler

Halo 2 Anniversary Edition

I remember being blown away by the sequel when it came out, thinking there was no way the Xbox was capable of pushing such visuals (if I'd followed the press at the time, I'd know that it was actually massively downgraded compared to early showings). I'd say it did pretty much everything that a good sequel should do, with larger areas, lots of new enemies, vehicles and weapons, plus enchancements to the basic mechanics. Dual-wield was a cool little feature, but it was the ability to hijack and sabotage vehicles that really pushed the game over the edge for me, as it gave you far more options for dealing with the larger areas and enemies compared to Halo, where you pretty much had to either totally avoid or snipe a Wraith to death, or drive a manned warthog in circles for five minutes hoping you wouldn't crash and get hit by the plasma ball. There were cute little touches like the new Sentinel robots being able to pick up and smash vehicles, which I distinctly remember making me burst out laughing when it first happened to me in 2004, and the evolution of the Flood into enemies that could actually steal vehicles themselves was a bit of a shock. There are some things that you lose compared to the original - dual wield and the avalanche of new weapons essentially broke the singleplayer balance, whilst the various sniper enemies and the replacement of the Shielded Elites with hp-bloat Brutes completely ruined Legendary difficulty. It's difficult to maintain a sense of pacing when almost every second level feels like a climax, with three-way battles raging all over, explosions everywhere and vehicles zooming around. Gravemind, Uprising and High Charity were interminable even compared to the slog of The Libary in the original. What's more, the sense of mystery around the Covenant and the general Halo universe vanishes with the first cutscene, whilst the human environments were an extremely poor fit, even if they added some variety. I believe it was around this time they started churning out novels, eliminating the trademark secrecy surrounding Bungie games, where players would dig into every possible crevice of the game and the instruction manual in the hopes of finding clues.

One curious addition is the recreation of many of the original cutscenes with pre-rendered FMV by the famous Blur Studios, partly to add prologues that introduce characters from Halo 5. A lot of the characters have totally different designs to the original, most notable Miranda Keyes, who's gone from a 20/30-something waifu to a slightly manfaced 45-year-old. I guess it's based on the mocap actress or something.

Spoiler

Halo 3 HD

Damn, what a disappointment this game was. I actually ordered the Collector's Edition with the Cat Helmet and everything. My ex-gf was asking me why I looked so dejected afterwards The first thing that hit me when I first played Halo 3 was that the game looked pretty awful (remember that this was the first Halo title on the Xbox 360 and was released after Gears of War et al). The problem was that the engine and level of detail were meant to be scaled up to absolutely huge environments with almost a dozen vehicles active at a time and ground forces skirmishing between them. This was fantastic, and a natural progression of the series - unsurprisingly, the vehicle sections are great, and the Scarab battles are the highlight of the entire series. Yet we spend a large portion of the game fucking around in or near human settlements or the incredibly bland Flood environments, which fail to push the engine's limits - like using a Total War game as a base for a Company of Heroes-scale setting - and are just plain ugly in themselves. The pacing is even more unbelievably fucked up than Halo 2. The story is terrible and everyone in the game acts like a complete moron. The final boss was a bad joke and the jeep escape was a tired (and more poorly designed) nod to the original, signalling that they couldn't come up with anything better. The whole game reeks of laziness, like the frequent cutscenes that highlight the fact they used low-res 2d art because they couldn't be fucked to create a proper backdrop. Overall, 3 is undoubtedly the worst game in the series after ODST, though the Scarab battles make it worth playing anyway.

Spoiler

Halo 4 HD

I have to admit, I went into this with pretty low expectations, hearing about the incredibly sloppy move of bringing back most of the principals of the original trilogy, tying everything into the crappy novels, releasing on the 360 at the very end of its lifespan etc. I'd watch footage from here and there and it looked like the game was basically a corrdior shooter - if not quite at the level of actual "Pop-a-Mole" - and a couple of slightly more open areas to ram a vehicle around a bit. I was almost completely wrong. It's definitely a lot more condensed than Halo 2 or 3, (overall probably more open than the original Combat Evolved) but once you hit the half-way mark, the game starts to throw some massive areas at you here and there, with jetpacks, sniping roosts, and lots of vehicles. Very pleasant graphics (though I became slightly tired of the Green/Orange of certain environments), and though I thought Cortana looked almost chubby in preview footage, I can confirm she's an 8/10 waifu ingame. The Promethean death/teleportation effects looked great, and I enjoyed fighting the Knights as a new enemy. My major complaint with the Promethean enemies is that they never really introduced any new variants after the first couple of encounters, and the Covenant are just remodelled units from the original trilogy, so you end up fighting the same guys over and over for the rest of the game. Some of the Promethean-focused levels had shades of The Library in relation to both level design and environmental variety. A few of the new weapons seemed like complete shit, and I would've liked to have spent more time engaging in battles alongside the humans. There's also an irritating flying sequence near the end, whilst the final boss is literally just a (bugged) QTE, making for a pretty damp finale.

Even if the whole "Covenant Remnant/Promethean/UNSC" angle was woefully unimaginative, I enjoyed the slightly more personal narrative concerning MC and Cortana. It's nothing special, but a good angle to work (especially the references to Spartans being sociopaths, which I would've liked to have seen played up a bit). Overall I'd say it gave me faith in Halo 5, until I saw that Halo 5 is clearly based around 4-player co-op.

Spoiler

 

[TripJack]

 

[Anthedon]

Right way to deal with both women and snakes.
PS. why this statue have nipples? I know frenchies and their sexuality but still.

It's a statue of a vampire.

 

[spekkio]

Ban Ed123

 

[spekkio]

Or even better. Create a script which will replace every .png in Ed's posts with:

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

This is how Ed looks like after playing all Halo games in a row.

I've played two of them on PC and never understood the appeal. The first one was an ugly port made by Gearbox, with braindead enemies and mediocre weapon system. The second had more opened levels and the vehicles were the highmarks of the sequel. But it was still wonky console shooter. I hardly remember anything from both of them.

Don't forget Ed to do a Gears of War marathon, when the HD versions will come around .

 

[DraQ]

This is how Ed looks like after playing all Halo games in a row.

I've played two of them on PC and never understood the appeal. The first one was an ugly port made by Gearbox, with braindead enemies and mediocre weapon system. The second had more opened levels and the vehicles were the highmarks of the sequel. But it was still wonky console shooter. I hardly remember anything from both of them.

Don't forget Ed to do a Gears of War marathon, when the HD versions will come around .

I've never played any of the Halo games but from what I have picked up they feature quite competently made Sci-Fi universe.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I liekd Halo 1. It's a decent shooter

 

[A horse of course]

Don't forget Ed to do a Gears of War marathon, when the HD versions will come around .

I didn't particularly like the Gears of War (1-3) games, and the HD remaster of 1 looks...bizarre. Can't see myself going through them again.

 

[Riskbreaker]

This thread needs some more Arkane goodness.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

Spoiler

 

[bonescraper]

No. Fuck Source engine.

 

[Baron Dupek]

...said bonerscatman and launched Skyrim.exe with worse combat system but full of botox'n'silicon fueled waifus

 

[bonescraper]

You don't play Skyrim for combat.

 

[hoverdog]

You don't play Skyrim.

fixed.

 

[RK47]

Spoiler

A familiar cat appears...

A necromancer's lab to process Flesh Atronach's materials.

The waste disposal lake...

Stay fragrant, friends.

 

[bozia2012]

Update:

Spoiler

Yeah, I'm slow - it's all competitive though.