joe the janitor said:
First of all, I didn't get the impression at all that you where "having a go at" me. As a matter of fact, I'm really happy to finally get some feedback on this but I do have some counterpoints...
I don't subscribe to the idea that I should have to "fill in the blanks." If you're going to tell a dramatic story, I need to have some sort of invested interest in what's going on and I can't have that if you don't tell me what's going on, especially when it's the catalyst that starts the entire story. Even worse in the girl. One second he's holding her hostage to protect himself and the next he commits suicide because she died. If she was that important he wouldn't have been using her as a meat-shield in the first place.
As for the guns, I always fire in short controlled bursts as you can see when I am shooting at the guy in cover with the exposed arm from approximately 6 feet away. As for the knockdown thing, your point about proximity makes sense but I still think it's a stupid game mechanic.
I agree that I didn't talk about the story enough it was partially because I was afraid of spoilers but I was also running low on time. (I don't want my reviews running much longer then 10 mins)
kouriichi said:
realism =/= good.
It doesn't make it bad either, but just saying it's "realistic" doesn't excuse it not being fun.
Same goes for the style being "artistic". I am all for game developers trying new things, but not if it get's in the way of me enjoying the game and that's exactly what the shaky-cam and lens glare did to me. If they had just toned it down about %50, it probably wouldn't have bothered me.
The sprinting at 4:29 was on purpose to show the way the camera wobbles ad as I say in the review, getting knocked down at that part is a scripted event anyway. I had a part earlier where I had done it where you are chasing him across a rooftop (this is actually when the game is teaching you how to sprint) but I had to cut that part because I forgot to have my profile set to Busy and one of my friend got online right at that time.
Also, Kayne said he was going to go talk to the guy. Now I know that in gangster talk, "talk to" doesn't necessarily mean "talk to" but I didn't get the impression that it was a big enough deal to warrant opening fire with a fully automatic weapon as soon as the guy bursts through the door, especially with the bosses daughter in the room.
As for your points about my problem being my play-style a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was trying to highlight certain things (such as the sprinting part that you mentioned). As I said, this wasn't my first play through and I was several levels in before I started dieing too ,but here I was too busy trying to figure out what to say and showing specific things and it got me killed a lot.
Lastly, I actually tried to have a bit of background noise but, in the program I was using, when I adjusted the volume even to just a hair above 0 it was still too loud so I had to get rid of it completely. I need to try and figure out how to fix that.
Avaholic03 said:
Frequently saying "ummmm" is quite distracting.
Yea, you should have heard the unedited version. I would have edited those out too but I somehow missed them and by the time I realized it was already rendered and I didn't want to wait another two hours for it to render.
As or the review seeming incomplete, to be honest I feel the same way. The main problem was my own stupidity. I had rented the game and beaten it a week before but due to computer problems (that I could have fixed sooner but didn't) I couldn't capture anything. So I had to rent the game again a week later and to be honest I just didn't want to play the damn thing again.
Anyway, thanks to all of you for the feedback. I was worried this was going to be another dead review like my last two and I was really starting to get frustrated so I'm really glad to hear from you guys, even if it was just to tear me to shreds.