Where are my Satellite Guy's gamers at?

I just went to cancel Gamefly since the gift subscription I received for Christmas expires on 3/27. They make you confirm that you want to cancel several times before actually letting you do it. Finally one of the pages offered me another month of my 2 game plan for free.

This works out pretty well for me because it means I'll be able to get MLB the Show 16 and Quantum Break before my membership expires on 4/27. It might also work out for them because I could see myself paying for a single game plan for the month of May to get Uncharted 4.
 
So I just started playing Republique..

Ok I'll be honest I'm probably a half hour or so into this game and the first 20 minutes were mainly cut-scenes but so far I have seen enough things to make me cringe and want to talk about it.

If you have never heard of this game, don't worry because that's not surprising. Apparently this was a Kickstarter backed project (and how I know that? more on that later) that was originally meant for mobile devices which then was put on PC and then the PS4. It's an episodic game although at this point everything has been finished.

I won't get too much into plot because I only so know much, but apparently society has degenerated into a true police state with constant surveillance and government sponsored propaganda and mind watching, similar to what was in the book 1984 and every other story that ripped that one off. And you play that one character that did something wrong to piss off authorities but somehow your actions will likely lead to said authority coming down or at least getting really hurt. Its very clear that they're all about building this world up and getting you invested in it and immersing you with what it brings, but honestly this is one of the least immerse games I've played, to the point where a few minutes ago I just rolled my eyes and said, "I need a break from this."

As I said, the game was funded by Kickstarter. How do I know it was funded by Kickstarter? Because on 2 of the passports of guards I was scanning, next to their photos was a stamp that said "Kickstarter Backer." I'm not kidding. They apparently put backers into the damn game. And while I'm not against such a thing, and have had my name put in to things I've funded, never has it been something that has been put into gameplay and then told people that I was a backer. It COMPLETELY took me out of the game. Even worse was another part of the game where I did a pickpocket of a guard, who had a floppy disk. Now keep in mind even though I said this game is 1984-esque it actually takes place now, or at least in the not too distant future, so a floppy disk is already out of place. And when I examined the disk, it had a sticker of Shovel Knight, and the man who is helping you help the main character out then starts to say why he likes Shovel Knight so much. Not only that, but apparently ALL the discs are games that this character owns but were apparently stolen by mean co-workers and put on these floppy disks, so they include other games like The Banner Saga and Bastion.

Maybe I'm just overreacting and lord knows I enjoy meta humor like anyone else but when stuff like this happens and is thrown in my face it just loses all positive effectiveness. Stop reminding me that this is a game when you're trying to present a serious story. That stuff only works on things like Deadpool. Here it just comes off as cringe-worthy.

Still, I'm not going to give up immediately on the game, but so far between this and the rather strange gameplay (which I can't really comment on because of the short playtime) things better turn around soon because lord knows I have enough other stuff to play until Quantum Break arrives.
 
I heard good things about Republique but that was back when it was a mobile game. Standards are definitely higher when the port it to PC and console. I've had it on my Steam wishlist for a long time but I don't plan on buying it unless it's dirt cheap.
 
And then there’s Modern Warfare-esque matchmaking lobbies, which are fine provided there’s enough online playing the mode you like.On PC that was Team Deathmatch, and only Team Deathmatch. I got about two games of Warpath the entire weekend. It’s Battlefront all over again

This is where he completely lost me. I played 4-5 hours of the Doom Beta over the weekend. The only time I played Team Deathmatch during that entire period was when me and yourbeliefs played together Friday night. I spent the rest of my time playing the Warpath mode and I never had a problem finding a match quickly. I have a hard time believing he couldn't get a Warpath match unless he was playing in the mixed matchmaking queue. If he would have picked the Warpath matchmaking queue he would have had no trouble.

Also, they have said that there will be a server browser, it just wasn't part of the beta. I did see his problem about mouse movement feeling a little sluggish when I played the game Friday night. When I went back to it Saturday and turned Vsync off this completely fixed the problem for me. Vsync is great for campaigns but competitive CS:GO players turn it off for a reason. It creates additional input lag. There was a noticeable increase in mouse speed after I turned it off. Maybe Id should think about not turning that on by default in the final release.

I'm not saying there aren't things to criticize. For one, I didn't play the Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament games so I don't know how this stacks up to their multiplayer. I will say that I have more interest in the game now than I did before I played the beta. It didn't immediately click for me when we played it Friday night. As I got better at it and unlocked more weapons it grew on me.
 
Actually I was unable to get to any Warpath games. I played again on Sunday and either the matchmaking was messed up or no one was playing because I was sitting there and literally NO ONE would match up, but I was able to get into TDM no problem.

I agree with the sentiment though that, while the beta wasn't bad and if I end up getting the full version I'll definitely spend some time in MP, it just feels a bit off. It feels really weird to play a Doom game and not have access to at least 5 weapons at a time. Doom was the original "1 man army" game, more than Wolf 3D was. Then Quake 3 Arena came out and was a very fast, twitch reflex style shooter. Coming from the same company that made both of these games I think we were all expecting that this new Doom would continue this trend. Instead we got 2 weapon combat at a speed that, while not SLOW, is more akin to the original Doom than it is to Quake 3 Arena. I know it's hard for you to understand because you didn't play those games (Doom and Q3A) but there really isn't anything out there like those games anymore, or at least nothing that has reached real mainstream success. Whereas everything back in the day was a "Doom Clone" nowadays everything is a "CoD Clone" with 2 weapon rollouts, classes, leveling up, etc etc. Gone are the days of just "Kill everything" with no real record tracking or anything like that. I'm not saying it was necessarily all better like that, but it definitely had a nice charm. Still, I only played TDM for about 2 hours total so I'm not about to declare it crap with such a small sample size. After all, for YEARS I wasn't a fan of CoD multiplayer and would avoid it. It wasn't until I literally forced myself to play Black Ops for a few hours that it finally "clicked" with me. Hopefully the devs will take the feedback to heart and make the appropriate changes.

On a side note, PLEASE add Unreal Tournament 2004 to your wishlist and pick it up when it goes on sale (I'd recommend the GoG version because it has a lower asking price). It really is a great game. There's still some people playing but the bots are more than competent enough to put up a challenge. I remember playing it back in college and I can still fire it up every once in a while and have fun with it all over again.
 
That's really weird. I definitely played an hour or two of Warpath on both Saturday and Sunday with no issues finding games. I think there must have been a temporary matchmaking issue.
 
That's really weird. I definitely played an hour or two of Warpath on both Saturday and Sunday with no issues finding games. I think there must have been a temporary matchmaking issue.
Yeah, really weird that a beta would have some technical difficulties. :-p
 
So I've played a bit of Quantum Break and here's some early impressions.

Quantum Leap is about a guy who time travels to try and change the course of history. Oh sorry, I must have gotten my titles messed up, but this is ESSENTIALLY the plot. I don't want to go into too many specifics of the plot because honestly I'm about 3 hours into the game and it's still slowly revealing stuff to me, but all I'll append is that time itself is breaking down and some people are trying to fix it while others are simply preparing for the inevitable sh*t storm that comes with doing such things.

The gameplay is a 3rd person shooting style game that I feel can be best equated to the original Mass Effect, where you have standard guns as well as manipulation powers to give you an edge. It is in essence a cover based shooter, but not the refined version that we saw in Mass Effect 2. Instead it's that airy, something isn't quite right floaty combat that the first one had, where movement is difficult and firing outside of cover turns you into a bullet sponge where you pop out, take as much damage as you can, then go back to recover before repeating. Also, remember how in Mass Effect you had to upgrade your powers over the course of the game until you unlocked others, so by the time you're 3/4ths of the way through you feel like grand sorcerer with a gun? Well QD doesn't really have that. Powers are basically thrown at you at random spurts and before you're done with Act 2 you basically have acquired the ability to stop time, block bullets, dash into bullet time, fire balls of time energy that kill people, and also "paint" your enemies so you can see them better. You can still get upgrades by collecting pieces of light throughout the level (they're not called that but that's basically what they are) but all they do is just make those listed powers better with longer range or quicker cool down, as opposed to an actual evolution of the powers akin to what you'd see in a game like inFamous or Prototype. It just feels like too much too quickly.

And I'd be remiss to not mention the television show that accompanies the game. After every Act you're treated to about a 30 minute television show that basically tells the story of the big evil corporation that's apparently behind time screwing up. It does feel a little weird to be playing an action game and then reaching the end of the Act (which usually ends with a big crescendo) only to then play a short section where you have to make a decision, which will then influence some plot points and the show you watch. Of course the hook of this is that your decisions affect what happens, but from what I can tell it's more akin to TellTale games "decisions" where there may be some differences in characters and settings, but the overall plot and major players are not affected. Whether or not the changes are significant enough to merit a second playthrough have yet to be determined (and unfortunately you can't play concurrent games.) To get back to the show itself, it's pretty good. The writing and style are VERY reminiscent of the old 24 show, so if you were into that you'll likely be into this.

Overall I am enjoying my time with Quantic Dream Quantum Break. I've been a fan of Remedy's story heavy games for a while and so far this one hasn't disappointed. The game has undeniably high production values and they're used quite well IMO. The gameplay would have greatly benefited from copying the Mass Effect 2 style of Gears of War with magic system as opposed to the floaty ME1 system to make for a truly satisfying experience, but Remedy games at their core have usually put plot/story over gameplay. I'm definitely interested to see where the plot ends up.
 
I haven't been playing Quantum Break because my copy from Gamefly that was supposedly sent out on 4/4 still hasn't showed up on 4/12. Things like this are the reason I am no longer a paying customer of theirs after using the service for over a year.

It is completely normal for their shipping to take 5 business days each way for me. I am well past that point now. I reported a shipping problem when it didn't show up in yesterday's mail but of course they don't have any copies available in their inventory to send me another one now. My gift subscription ends on 4/27 and I'm starting to wonder if I will receive a copy and have time to finish it before then.

I can tell you that if the copy I reported as never showing up does finally get here I will not feel bad about keeping it at all. In the past when this has happened I have sent them back both copies of the game. At this point I am fed up enough with their service that I wouldn't mind getting a free copy of the game off them.
 
I finished Game of Thrones over the weekend. I won't go into too much detail because at this point you pretty much know what you are getting from a Telltale game. I think it was pretty good overall. I would definitely put it below Tales from the Borderlands and season 1 of The Walking Dead but I would say it is at least as good, if not better than the rest of the Telltale games.

I will say that I wasn't a fan of the art style in this game. I think Tales from the Borderlands and even the last gen games like TWD looked better than this. It is supposed to have kind of a watercolor painting vibe to it but it just didn't work for me.

There was also something weird going on with the characters. Most of the ones created just for this game looked fine. Some of the people brought in from the TV show, especially Cersei and Margaery were completely jarring whenever they were on screen. Strangely Tyrion and Ramsay didn't have that problem. It wasn't strictly a gender thing either because Jon Snow was somewhere in the middle and the original female characters created for this game looked fine.

In typical Telltale fashion the story telling was pretty good and the voice acting was great. If you are caught up on the TV show and like other Telltale games I definitely recommend playing this one. Unfortunately, I think the big licenses like GoT, TWD, Minecraft, Batman, and Marvel are going to prevent them from making more of my favorite Telltale series, Tales from the Borderlands.
 
I played a bunch of the new Hoops mode that got patched into Rocket League yesterday. I like it much better than the hockey mode they added a while back since this actually feels like a different game.

I'm having a lot of fun with it but it is much harder than the standard game modes. If you aren't good at controlling aerial hits you may as well not waste your time. This is important for both scoring and defense.

It's also 2v2 and in a much smaller arena with slightly different ball physics so switching back and forth between hoops and standard mode feels a little weird. I do think it's making me better at aerial plays in the regular mode though.
 
I finished Quantum Break yesterday. This one grew on me as I played. At the beginning I liked the characters and story but I wasn't a fan of the combat. I wasn't a fan of the powers you have at the beginning of the game so I mostly played this part as a standard 3rd person shooter. The ability to freeze a heavy enemy in time so you can light him up sounds cool until you realize that 5 other guys are still shooting you every time you stand up. The time shield made the difficulty trivial for almost the entire game but it wasn't fun to use. If you are getting close to dying all you have to do is pop the time shield and wait for your healing to kick in.

Instead of enjoying the gameplay I found myself just wanting to get through the combat so I could get back to the story and exploration. Later in the game you get 2 more powers that finally made the combat click for me. The first is the time blast. I'm not sure what this power has to do with time but it was the first time I felt like I was playing an inFamous style super hero game instead of a 3rd person shooter that isn't as good as Gears. This is basically just a charged blast that can take out a group of enemies.

The part where I really started to feel powerful was when I got the time dash power though. This allows you to freeze time for everyone else and sprint around the room. You will have a couple heavies and 3 other guys all firing at your location and closing in on you and then you use time dash and suddenly you are behind them while they are still shooting where they think you are in your original location. Then you fire off a time blast and pick off the last couple remaining guys with your gun. Once I could string these things together like this I started actually enjoying the combat instead of dreading it.

The world itself was great. I found myself wanting to explore and read all of the optional computer screens, tablets, and charts. I didn't do this because I wanted to 100% the collectibles. That's never been important to me in most video games. I did it because they were well written and really fleshed out the story and characters. They give you insight into why things happened and make many of the Monarch employees feel like people instead of mindless henchmen for an evil corporation.

Unfortunately the last boss fight left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was infuriatingly difficult and the first 4 or 5 times I died I couldn't even understand what happened or what I was supposed to do. I finally had to watch a youtube video to figure out how to avoid randomly dying. Even once I saw what I was supposed to do it took me another 4 or 5 times to pull it off. This was incredibly frustrating because they put the checkpoint before a cutscene just like every other somewhat difficult part in the game. This means that I had to watch the same cutscene about 10 times before I finally completed it. They do give you the option to skip cutscenes but the load times are so long that I'm pretty sure it actually took longer to do that than just watch the cutscene.

Overall, I did really like Quantum Break but it does have problems. Unfortunately it fell into the trap that so many games do of making a final boss fight that left me with a bad taste in my mouth instead of feeling good about the game.
 
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Nice to know I have an annoying boss fight to look forward to. I got into Act 5 last night but decided to quit as I'd played for over an hour. Maybe I'll finally finish it tonight so I can clear up my queue completely in time for Uncharted 4 and Doom 4.
 
Well I'm finished with Quantum Break...

I will say that overall Quantum Break is good and worth playing if you have a PC or Xbox One. The story is intriguing, the acting is good, and the action, while frustrating in certain places can be fun once you learn to take advantage of your powers.

Having said all that, I have to back up what king3pj said and second that the last boss fight is a steaming smelly pile of Monkey Crap. It's one of the cheapest, most cryptic boss fights ever. It's not as bad as something like Mortal Kombat 9 where you have to hope the tides shift in a certain way to win. Victory is definitely achievable without having to "cheat" the game, but that doesn't mean it's easy. You're fighting waves of tough bad guys, and while you're doing that you have to keep an eye out to make sure you don't die due to the boss's one hit kill mechanism that they constantly deploy. I fought the thing for nearly a half hour until I threw my controller down (not literally) and just looked up the ending on YouTube. And speaking of the ending, it sucks. It leaves a LOT of questions unanswered and sets up sequel bait. At least it wasn't as bad as Alan Wake where at the end you could be forgiven for not knowing what actually happened. Here's it's pretty cut and dry but there's numerous loose ends that the game didn't tie up for me. Maybe I didn't collect enough info collectibles, but I shouldn't have to do so to know what happened to all the major players in the game.

Next up for me is Uncharted 4 and Doom 4.
 
I just finished Uncharted 2 for the first time. I liked it but I still prefer the rebooted Tomb Raider over the Uncharted series so far but we'll see if Uncharted 3 can change that. Of course the more relevant comparison in 2016 will be between Rise of the Tomb Raider and Uncharted 4.
 
I can almost guarantee that uncharted 3 won't change your opinion. It's definitely weaker than 2 and the whole shipwreck section is one of the worst sequences in the history of gaming. It's not a bad game but 2 is superior in nearly every way.
 
I agree, I enjoyed 3 a lot, but I really liked 2. It is better. That said, I'm very excited for 4
 

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