Force Unleashed 2 Is Too Much

[Woodsey]

You complain that those bosses are too big yet a few weeks ago you praised shadow of the colossus. I see a little inconsistency in your ramblings.

You're missing the point.

He's saying that the barrage of awesome-o means that nothing actually stands out. You need to take it down to 5 for 10 to be impressive.

Large amounts of Shadow of the Colossus are spent wandering around on a horse not doing anything.

 

[EightGaugeHippo]

I dont think the Lucas had Realism in mind when they designed her Chewie...

 

[RobCoxxy]

You know what's sad about Force Unleashed 2? When I first heard about it was only a day or two before the street date. And honestly the first thing that went through my mind. "He's dead! TFU was supposed to be canon, how in god's name do you bring him back? Cloning? Jesus Jumped-up Christ, Lucas! ENOUGH WITH THE CLONES!"

Now we see the point of the whole cloning nonsense. Boba Fett is a clone, Starkiller is cloned and reborn. Lucas has introduced cloning as freaking retcon white-out. And when these new Star Wars films come out supposedly set thousands of years in the future. What? Emperor Palpatine? They cloned him?

*facepalm*

Anyway there's no possible way TFU could have been good. TFU was basically the Jedi Knight series cranked up to 11, so you know TFU2 was gonna be the same thing. And the story was gonna suck and... Yeah, no point in dragging this out.

You know what I miss? Dark Forces. You know the one star wars game that doesn't have any Jedi nonsense. Where you shoot stormtroopers with blaster rifles and throw thermal detonators at them? Seriously, that was a fun game. Why has the "non-Jedi" aspect of the Star Wars universe been so dismissed? Where are the stories about Han, Chewie, Lando, Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt?

Wait, don't do that Lucas. You'll just f**k it up.

Don't! HE'LL GET IDEAS.

And I miss Dark Forces/Jedi Knight.
Give me Kyle Katarn back, Lucas, you beardy weirdo.

 

[ExileNZ]

On the subject of good and bad endings though, who else thought the dark-side ending to Jedi Academy was far more interesting?

I'm still waiting for Jedi Knight 5: The Hunt for Jaden, where a beleagured Kyle Katarn gets back on his proverbial bike and hunts down the murderous shit that was his apprentice.
Now that's a game I would gladly buy.

 

[ExileNZ]

Anyone remembers Darth Nihilius from Kotor 2?

-SNIP-

Of course, things don't go that way. The PC not only gathers force sensitives - he trains them. And as Kreia recognises they will form the future Jedi - the council that we see in the Star Wars 1-3 movies - something more warlike and ready to act than the council we see in KoTOR 1. Nonetheless, Kreia's last words: the PC, whatever he is, is not a Jedi, nor a Sith, and that gives her hope.

Okay, so I just spoiled myself for a lot of KOTOR 2, but since I've already seen the (lackluster) ending I don't really care.

But from what you've described that's totally ripped off from Dune, with the Golden Path. Muad'dib didn't merely SEE the future, but by seeing it he actually CREATED it, thus robbing every living thing in the universe of free will or choice. It took 10,000 Idaho clones (oh look, clones! There they are again!) and a rebellion which Leto II aided in overthrowing himself, to break free of this prison.

 

[DarthYam]

I suspect that vader probably threw the fight. Fett does follow at the end and the dark apprentice doesn't get involved. in fairness, the clone wins partially due to dumb luck in the novelization.

 

[TheRocketeer]

I've always been bothered by this, definitely more than most people, and probably to an extent I can admit is unreasonable.

This is why I've never been able to get into Lovecraft. He has uncanny skill at writing, but at the end of the day the subject matter is the kind of thing 'that kid' no one hung out with in elementary school drew in his notebook when he should have been learning long division. I just can't take the supposedly hair-raising events of the books seriously while the threat is essentially a betentacled level-5 super-saiyan.

Give me a story where the stakes are as comparatively 'low' as the safety of someone's family or just getting through the day with something to eat, or even look forward to, and I'm hooked. Making something like that work takes talent, or at least more work, and watching a talented or dedicated artist at work is nearly always worthwhile.

 

[DarthYam]

one thing that's scary? The novelization used to promote the game is less wanked. The clone wins due to dumb luck (juno accidentally grazes vader, and the clone focuses his lightning into the small breach in vader's armour.) Though vader's taunts and the final line he gives are quite badass. it show's he's over wifey's death, and that he really has grown into the mold of sith.

 

[Therealgijoe]

You know what I miss? Dark Forces. You know the one star wars game that doesn't have any Jedi nonsense. Where you shoot stormtroopers with blaster rifles and throw thermal detonators at them? Seriously, that was a fun game. Why has the "non-Jedi" aspect of the Star Wars universe been so dismissed?

Hell yeah! A good Star Wars shooter would be welcome. Republic Commando tried to do that, but was bogged down with very linear gameplay (hallways and only hallways, were the form of transport) and repetitive combat sequences, whereas Dark Forces had nonlinear levels with linear objectives (run around a destroyed town until you can find the red key), and there weren't 4 enemy types. Republic Commando also tried too hard to make some Halo-esque multiplayer mode.

 

[Hyakunin Isshu]

(I already said this in "Zero Punctuation: Portal 2" But since my quotes mostly comes from this page, I'm C&P it here too)

To Ben Croshaw:

You don't care what I have to say about graphics, but, damn it, I'm going to try.

There is so many problems with you, Mr. Croshaw, but I'm just going to start with this one:

"Visual effects technology in both videogames and films have advanced to the point that what is put on screen is limited only by the director's imagination"

"Oh, for the days of the last console generation, when technology sat on the very agreeable fence between high-techitude and accessibility, when developers weren't so slow to ask themselves questions like "Strictly speaking do we really need a physics engine in a Championship Manager game? Is it so important that the league tables slide realistically down the screen?""

"Now, Last Crusade achieved this effect because it was a real stunt occurring in reality between real, physical objects, which is virtually impossible to fully simulate in pixel space because of the millions of factors you can't possibly predict, like the movements of the thousands of dust and grit particles that cloud up and get in Harrison Ford's face."

It seems you are trying to tell everyone that graphics in games will never get any better, and movie CGI can almost never be as good as the real thing, so it's pointless to even try. What an awful thing to tell people! We didn't get here by throwing up our hands and saying "too hard! we give up!" Technology *NEVER* works like that! You just want to go back to the "good OLD days".

And what the Hell is it with you calling it "pixels"? You sound like an old man who reviews movies then a gamer. Why didn't you call it CGI, or graphics, or polygons , like most of us do?

Let me get to the point: You say games are now "limited only by the director's imagination". That is complete nonsense! If that was true in anyway, then please show me this game, with no canned-animation or scripted sequence:

--In this photorealistic game, the Player is on top of a mountain looking down on a huge city. In the city, the Player sees 100,000 Cyborg Demon Ninjas, rampaging through the city, killing everyone in sight. On top of that, there is Giant Robots and motherships destroying all the buildings. The city itself can be dynamically destroyed; better then anything seen in both Red Faction or Minecraft (See the movie 2012). This photorealistic game is also a Open World game with real rooms in all the buildings, meaning, if I wanted to, I can hide in a fridge from all those CDNs in a apartment....--

Do you know any 360 or PS3 games like that? No, you don't. The only thing near to that, is Red Faction: Guerrilla, and even then, you can only destroy something that has 2 floors and 5 rooms. It's not like you can destroy something the size of Black Mesa or anything. In fact, some games can't even have more then 5 bad guys on the ground, because of bad programming, and or the way the game engine works. They get around it by using tricks, but I can always tell when they are using those tricks. And here's a big secret: programing gets much easier when computers are a lot more powerful. I'm a programmer, so I know what I'm talking about.

So please stop talking as if we hit the holy motherland, because we can barely have a photorealistic human in a room, much less an army of photorealistic humans destroying a city in a non scripted way.

For anyone thinks this can't happen in the next 5 to 10 years, think again:

Physic tech demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuWuTc5agVA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bKphYfUk-M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlcc9wJAzFQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grIVUDH4FIM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87qdmuOesRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsMjRmaJOqo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrb8PSpkhkQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwoJ-upjeKo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JrM4ujLY_A

real-time ray tracing and path tracing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbokPe4_-mY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyoHvNpuaK4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnXW0CitlIA


real-time in-game graphics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_YNR38H-kM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjXCae4Gu0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GckOkpeJ3BY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvI1l0nAd1c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GmrdHxpYxk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBJIpQsecB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THaam5mwIR8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i_mgF7Vas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZjzSQgBrg


I'll end this by saying, I know my words will fall on deaf ears, and if Mr. Croshaw ever sees this, he is just going to make fun of my bad grammer, and all my stupid links. Well, sorry for wanting to go to the future, but I can't live forever, and I can think of a million fun things in games, that you just can't do in this seventh generation of consoles. Sure, we have Portal and Mindcraft, but do you really want to wait 20 years on the seventh generation, hoping someone is going to make a super game to come-out, while playing Gears Of War 12, or Modern Warfare 7? Because even Ubisoft said they don't want to make anything new until the next-gen comes a calling:
http://scrawlfx.com/2011/04/ubisoft-ceo-industry-needs-new-consoles


And Mr. Croshaw? If you really want to try new and weird games, why don't you try all the Wii games you never played? Or all the games that came out in the 90s? Or all the indie games? Or the great iphone games? Or all the mods? Why do you *always* have to talk about the most popular games? Why not review Star Control 2? Why not? It's sad you openly lie to try to move the gaming industry your way. You say you want weirder games, but you only seem to enjoy shooters, and sometimes RPGs.

( P.S. You, Mr. Croshaw, give gamers everywhere a bad name.)

 

[sta697]

i completly agree with what you say,the emotion from seeing something comes from you imagining yourself in that situation.thats why i always suggest the japanese old boy if you want to see some action over those over the top big bugthet movies or possibly cronneberg

 

[FoolKiller]

Last Crusade achieved this effect because it was a real stunt occurring in reality between real, physical objects

I agree with this. This is why each successive Die Hard movie sucks. In the first one you could believe that John McClane could actually take out a handful of terrorists in the Nakatomi Towers. And he took serious lumps for it. He was battered, bruised, and bleeding all over the place. In contrast, the fourth movie has him taking out a Harrier jet in hand-to-fucking-plane combat. Bull-fucking-shit.

Look at that one bit in Force Unleashed 2 where you have to fight a giant monster the size of two velodromes, or at the start of God of War 3 when you fight an absolutely colossal man-horse-scorpion thing made of water and rocks. The sheer difference in size between the enemy and the player character was so massive as to be unquantifiable

And its a trap that has sucked in many games in the past few years. It used to be every once in a while you stumble upon some ridiculously large enemy and shit yourself thinking how are you going to survive the fight. The first God of War got away with it because there were only two real fights before Ares where you were blown up to match his size.

Unfortunately all this did was set a bar that they had to constantly try and one up. In the second game, you had to climb a titan. In the third, you climb titans AND have a half dozen fights with really oversized enemies. The worst part of this is that every other developer sees how it worked for Sony and end up trying to replicate the success by replicating the formula.

This habit of turning it up to 11 happens with every good idea in gaming. Remember QTEs anyone? I remember thinking how awesome and clever it was in Shenmue. Now (with the exception of Heavy Rain, because I like the interactive movie experience) I shudder every time they shove massive amounts of QTEs into a game.

 

[FoolKiller]

On "good" and "bad" endings - there's a PS1 game (available on PSN) called Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, which has two endings. Good endings has main character sacrificing himself and healing the world. Bad ending has him refusing the sacrifice and conquering the world, making him it's emperor. The kicker? Bad ending is canonical one.

In all fairness, it would be rather hard for it to be canonical if the player character dies. And lets leave it alone because it is a damn near perfect series.

 

[TheUnbeholden]

Yes, I said that. George Lucas by himself is a clueless fucking hack. He has some good ideas, but he hasn't the slightest idea what to do with them. His original 3 movies become the gold they did because he was constantly riddled by technical limitations and a team that constantly criticized his insanity. These people kept him in check. These people went away after the first 3 movies, and were substituted by brown nosing fucks who were afraid to tell Georgy "...Yeah, this is a bad idea". On top of that, the original Star Wars were such a colossal hit that George became the prodigal "golden boy" of movie making. Nobody dared criticize him, and he somehow got the idea that he owed it all to himself... And that he could write... And didn't really need anyone else...

To top it all off, Georgy went from "underdog" to "monopoly guy". He went from being the guy with ideas nobody gave a chance to, to one of the big boys that could do anything he wanted, no matter how stupid... He developed a taste for money, and lost his interest in artistic integrity and the like...

The result is what you see today: A creatively bankrupt franchise milking old whore.

To me, Star Wars is Episodes IV, V and VI. With maybe some room for Kyle Katarn and the Jedi Knight series, and the first KOTOR. Everything else I've personally relayed to the garbage bin of "half baked fanfic author masturbation".

and a taste for women to I hear... His wife is essentially the epitome of trophy wives.