Portal 2 Alive And Kicking
Grand Theft Auto V deserves accolades for its innovative triumvirate ofantiheroes, its many and varied missions, and the sprawling depiction ofLos Santos and the hillbilly outbacks. But to rip off what an eruditeauthor once said about Oakland, there is no 'there' there.
Jan 18, 2014 - Portal: Alive & Kicking is a full remake and re-imagining of Valve's hit experimental title - Portal. Using the visual capabilities of Portal 2, A&K.
I can'timagine any scenario in which a literary icon like Gertrude Stein wouldbe critiquing a video game, but that legendary putdown can also apply tothe Greater Los Santos Area. There is something missing in GTAV thatmakes the game less engaging than the sociopathic sandboxes of GTA: ViceCity and GTA: San Andreas, the two GTA games that will perpetually bemy measuring sticks for the franchise.What is missing most of all is a solid sense of place. Both Vice Cityand San Andreas reveled in nostalgia. Vice City reeked of the '80s, fromthe pitch-perfect radio stations to the Crockett and Tubbs lookalikesthat showed up in their Testarossas-er, Cheetahs-when you cranked yourwanted level to three stars. San Andreas evoked the early 1990s in asimilar way. San Andreas' theme was not as developed as Vice City's, butthe game still depicted a recognizable time and place in its grimcartoon look at Los Angeles-with sidelong glances at LA County, SanFrancisco, and Las Vegas-during the explosion of rap and the racialtension that saw a good chunk of SoCal go up in flames after the RodneyKing verdict.Both San Andreas and Vice City seemed like real places.Rockstar's biggest achievement in these games was in creating placesthat you wanted to visit. Vice City was most successful at this.
It's 'a full remake and re-imagining' of Portal 1 in Portal 2's fancier iteration of Source. Hopefully Alive and Kicking will do the same for Glados et al. 'Portal: Alive & Kicking is a full remake and re-imagining of Valve's hit experimental title - Portal. Using the visual capabilities of Portal 2, A&K will shove you back into the cold test chambers of Aperture Science to retell the original story of Chell and GLaDOS.
Ipractically moved to Vice City; I knew the streets by name and couldfind my way around there better than in the real world. This devotionspeaks to Vice City's power to invade my waking thoughts.
Long after thegame's release, I would go for long drives around town, listening tothe radio and indulging my inner hooligan in a rampage or three. Thesame is true of San Andreas, although the allure of the '80s themeusually won out before I got the San Andreas disc into the system.Rockstar hasn't forgotten how to do this sort of thing. I liked visitingthe faux West of Red Dead Redemption just as much as I did Vice City,and still load up the game to ride around the lonely prairie.GTAV,much like its immediate predecessor, GTAIV, is too almost-modern forits own good. While the setting is ostensibly today, the plot goes backto the 2008-2009 depths of the Great Recession. The story feels dated,and not in the good way of Vice City and San Andreas, which wereintentionally retro. Instead of thinking, 'Cool! That Exploder:Evacuator Part II movie commercial perfectly sums up how dumb actionmovies really were in 1986!'
You're thinking, 'Man, the developersstarted writing this stuff a long time ago.' Look beyond the jokey stuff, and you discover an unrelentingly bleak, black-hearted look at humanity.Notthat the economy is really a whole lot better today, of course. Butworries about the housing crisis, the implosion of Lehman Brothers, andthe bursting of the housing bubble in the US-all things that clearlymotivated a lot of the storyline in GTAV-are not exactly current. We'vemoved on to new economic meltdowns, like the stateside debt ceilingcrisis. Its critique of mainstream media is equally archaic; takingshots at reality television for being crass also isn't cutting-edgecomedy. Grand Theft Auto V was a clearly expensive game to make andobviously took a long time to develop, but a story that is onlycontemporary when work begins in earnest on a project of this magnitudeultimately looks dated.
It suffers from the curse of trying to be toocurrent.The triumvirate of protagonists represents the before, after, and way after of humanity.LosSantos, at least, is brilliantly realized, particularly as a technicalachievement. The city and the surrounding meth-producing rural environsform the most realistic depiction of a metropolitan area to ever grace agame. The whole burg lives and breathes, offering colorful slices oflife whether you're creeping through backyards in the dead of night orjust wandering down the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. I don'tthink I ever encountered any window dressing; all of the people seemedto be present in their own moments, not just there to serve as mypersonal backdrop.
But it's so damn big. I long for the simpler layoutsof Vice City and even the more sprawling San Andreas. You could get toknow them in a reasonable amount of time, which added to that easy senseof familiarity that turned them into real places in short order.Thisis the most personable GTA game, with a strong emphasis on the threelead characters that delves into their psyches (and even into your ownpsyche by the end of the storyline). That isn't always a good thing,especially when it comes to Trevor, who's probably the mostreprehensible dirtbag protagonist in the history of gaming, if noteverything. Still, I couldn't look away.
Trevor's most malevolent lineswere also some of the most hilarious in the game. He forms a vital partof the triumvirate of playable characters, which are a commentary onlife in 2008-era America. Trevor represents bottoming out, whileburned-out Michael is the guy who's got it all and is still up to hisneck in ennui (he's sort of Tommy Vercetti, 25 years later), andup-and-coming Franklin is the man on the rise who's eager to do anythingto make the money needed to be regarded as a success in Los Santos. Thethree are a before, after, and way after.Scripted missions are the best part of GTAV, especially the multipart heists.Thescript is brilliant, from the start with Franklin and his idiotic buddyLamar, through Michael's spoiled-brat family life, through Trevor'smeth-lab murders, through the multiple-choice endings. GTAV gets back tothe psychopathic comic strip best represented in the craziness of TommyVercetti in Vice City, but with more plot points and tightercharacterizations to hold the story together. This game hates everyoneand everything, expressing an unrelentingly bleak, black-hearted look athumanity, with even the few rays of sunlight bookended by atrocity.Trevor shows mercy on occasion, though the biggest act of charity heoffers in the entire game comes right after introducing a guy tocreative uses for a car battery and a monkey wrench.The appeal of exploring the map on your own has been diminished.Ifyou have a dark sense of humor, there are more laugh-out-loud momentshere than in all of the previous GTA games combined.
Being able toswitch between the members of this trio at will is a great mechanic thataccentuates the humor. Flipping over to see what Trevor is doing almostalways results in tuning in to pure insanity. My favorite such eventwas dropping in on him just as he was looming over a bikini-clad girl onVespucci Beach, while wearing nothing but a filthy muscle shirt andtighty whities, saying something about her licking his white bits. Suchmoments are likely scripted, given how this Walter White moment leddirectly into a mission opening where Trevor dropped his undies in frontof hapless Floyd, but it all seems organic when you're playing.Missionshave also been laid out almost perfectly, with loads of options as tohow you play them, especially when it comes to the big multipart heiststhat see you planning and executing jobs with the help of hiredoperatives.
Events get overly surreal at times, with the trio workingtogether to form something of a James Bond team adept at everything fromflying planes to scuba diving. Still, it's all incredibly captivating,and the game does everything at least reasonably well. Flying andlanding planes, for instance, still aren't fully enjoyable tasks, butthey've come a long way since San Andreas.Women have few roles to play in GTA V. Here's the most common.Unfortunately,the appeal of exploring the map on your own has been diminished.Attempts at free-form chaos inevitably had me switching back to thescripted stories and missions, which yielded far more entertainment.
Theonly thing I enjoyed about exploring was stumbling upon randomoccurrences, such as robberies, an apparent bus hijacking, and policeshootouts with other criminals. Yet even these great little touchespaled in comparison with the scripted missions, and core components ofthe game design have been tweaked to raise the profile of scripted storyat the cost of the open-world concept that has powered previous GTAs.You can still go gonzo in style, but it's not nearly as easy to explodein a random manner when the mood strikes you.One reasonthe zaniness feels so limited is that the police are extraordinarilygood at what they do and extremely aggressive. They arrive on the sceneof even one- and two-star wanted level incidents almost immediately, anda police chopper is quick to show up the moment you hit three stars.Police boats roar up quickly if you try to take to the waves, and copsshoot extremely well, to the point where they can tag you with bulletsfrom a good block away. Basic patrol cars accelerate almost as well asthe average Pegassi Infernus, and their drivers are expert at cuttingyou off and blocking you in. If you want to go on a satisfying tear, youneed to armor up, make sure you have loads of the best hardware thatAmmu-Nation carries, and have a zippy car nearby. Walking out of ahospital in a bad mood and going berserk with cathartic anger generallygets you wasted again in very short order.It'sa lot more fun to escape the cops by slamming a car into a Pay 'n'Spray booth at a hundred miles an hour than it is to cower in an alleyfor five minutes while the police gradually give up their pursuit.Youcan still go on rampages and evade the police, of course, but you haveto do it more realistically by switching cars, hiding in bushes, duckinginto somebody's backyard, hanging out in a parking garage, and soforth.
This is a more lifelike way of ditching the boys in blue, butit's not very entertaining, especially if you like the intensity ofone-man-stand firefights. The best way to eliminate a wanted level nowis to hide. I had the most success by driving off-road where the copscouldn't follow me very well. Then I just stuck the car in a gully andsat back until my wanted level vanished completely.Longgone are the days when you could clock six stars (the game now tops outat five stars), get the army after you, and still escape justice simplyby scraping into a Pay 'n' Spray a second ahead of the long arm of thelaw. Pay 'n' Spray shops have actually been pulled out of GTAV entirelyin favor of Los Santos Customs, which is more of a car modificationgarage than a ready way to escape the cops, since it's useless unlessyou've already lost your pursuers. Magic car paint in Vice City and SanAndreas may have been pretty ridiculous, but it was also a great gamemechanism that emphasized the catch-me-if-you-can excitement that madesandbox rampages so integral a part of the GTA experience. It's a lotmore fun to escape the cops by slamming a car into a Pay 'n' Spray boothat a hundred miles an hour than it is to cower in an alley for fiveminutes while the police gradually give up their pursuit.World-weary Michael is a memorable character who seems like a Behind the Music look at Tommy Vercetti, 25 years later.Thisis a considerably different style of game than either San Andreas orVice City, with more structure and less of that eyes-wide-open worldwhere the most fun was surveying the landscape and seeing what kind oftrouble you could get into.
This is a new GTA, one that is a great gameon its own terms, but also one that fails to capture the magic of thefreestyle adventures that set the tone for the series. I can't seemyself coming back to GTAV very often now that I've wrapped the mainstoryline, save to check out the expansions that Rockstar is undoubtedlyprepping for 2014, or to get into the multiplayer, if and when it livesup to its potential. Here, because the game's structure is so tight,done is done. That's typical of how I play games.
Portal 2 Alive And Kicking Back
But it isn't typicalof how I play GTA games. Tom Senior at 14:56 on 06 February 2014For those, like me, who only need the merest reason to play Portal again, keep an eye on.It's 'a full remake and re-imagining' of Portal 1 in Portal 2's fancieriteration of Source. The free mod that's been passed through the latestbatch of,and has the confident endorsement of Jeep Barnett, Valve designer andco-creator of the proto-Portal student project, Narbacular Drop. 'Everytile on every panel has been revisited with loving detail,' he writes.' Not only have the visuals been updated to match Portal 2, but theweaker puzzle cues have been improved.' The mod alsoincludes a new set of advanced maps based on Portal chambers 13-18, butwith 'all new puzzles and set in the 'Old Aperture' visual theme seen inPortal 2.' The adaptive soundtrack has been expanded and Portal'soriginal advanced maps have been recreated in the Portal 2's ruinedAperture aesthetic.
It looks a bit like this.' I was a bit skeptical about fan-make remakes of old games until I played.The act of recreation through the lens of intense fandom added dozensof loving touches that enhanced Valve's original vision for Half-Life.See also, which did a great job of capturing the magic of Thief.
Hopefully Alive and Kicking will do the same for Glados et al. Tom Senior at 14:05 on 06 February 2014Theyear is 2015. The twin capital ship combo of Star Citizen and Elite:Dangerous have warped on our hard drives and PC gamers now live almostexclusively in virtual cockpits, trading and killing one another in anera of interstellar gaming bliss.
Star Citizen now has a bigger budgetthan the British government and Elite: Dangerous is being used to train afuture generation of space pilots. The space games have arrived.Sorry,drifted off a bit there. I can't help but imagine a time when thesecrowdfunded monsters are finally finished and we'll be free from theteasing feed of trailers. Elite: Dangerous' latest example covers arecent multiplayer test that had backers defending capital ship fromwaves of enemies, and mugging asteroid harvesters in space.
Mmmm, that'sgood space.Ever since Mechwarrior I've loved cockpitsin games, especially ones that move HUD information into yoursurroundings. This video shows the player looking around the cockpit toaccess menu screens and target mining ship subsystems - set nerd alertto red! Looking around and manipulating a cockpit instills an immediatesense of place. You should feel as though you're a warm tin bubble ofbreathable air in an awful, freezing vacuum, wrestling with targetingcomputers to fry a pirate's engines before they close range.Oh, you wanted lasers?
It's got those, too.Thevideo's part of 'Alpha 2.0' multiplayer test, which offered up fourscenarios for backers to try including 'free-for-all melee', teamfights, 'co-operative defense of a crippled Federal battlecruiser' andan advanced 'Pirates and Bounty Hunters' mode which 'hints at the fluidchoices and roles players will experience on a much greater scale in thefinal game.' You can get in on the alpha, but look out for the huge £200 price tag. Phil Savage at 08:40 on 06 February 2014Eastereggs are a fine tradition in game development. From quickfirereferences to full hidden levels, these comedy vignettes provide surrealnon-sequiturs that reward the most thorough with an unexpected laugh.Jazzpunk is what happens when a game's every interaction leads to someform of easter egg.It's a first-person comedy adventureabout espionage and technology, although to describe it as such is tomisjudge the balance of comedy to adventure. Instead, picture the wordcomedy in block capitals, surrounded by flashing lights.
Also, imaginethe letter M has been formed from the outline of a pair of bum cheeks,and that they're mooning the word adventure. I didn't say its humour wasalways sophisticated.You play as Polyblank, a secretagent working out of Darlington Station.
Assigned various missions bythe agency's Director (think James Bond's M as scripted by Guy Ritchie),you're sent out to explore a world where cyberpunk and '60s spythrillers have collided into a retro alternate reality filled withrobots, cyborgs and Cold War paranoia.Exploreis the operative word. To focus exclusively on the missions would be tomiss out on the Jazzpunk's funniest moments, and also to cut out themajority of its three and a bit hour running time. There are objectives,and your path to them is blocked by the lightest of puzzling, but theynever feel like the main attraction. In old LucasArts point 'n clickadventures, the jokes were often a way to sooth the frustration ofsearching for a solution. In Jazzpunk, they're the reason to scour everyarea and interact with every object.The sheer amount ofcomedic asides is extraordinary. Whether it's minor characters offeringup computer puns, weird interactions from your rolling selection ofprops and gadgets, or surprising mini-games found in corners of the map,it seems as if every character and object is hiding something funny.It's a game where clicking on something as simple as a fruit bowl canlead to an unexpected encounter designed to make you laugh.Tonally,the most obvious inspiration is from the films of Zucker, Abrahams andZucker.
There are plenty of similarities to Airplane! Or Naked Gun, bothin the volume of jokes, and in the game's fondness for parody andirreverent fourth-wall breaking.Muchlike Blendo Games' Gravity Bone or Thirty Flights of Loving, Jazzpunkalso makes great use of editing to sell its theme.
Rather than being thefocus, though, these cinematic skits are rapid in their execution: adramatic flourish to announce your infiltration, or a split-screenmission briefing that efficiently sets the mood.Theappropriation of filmic techniques doesn't mean that the humour ispassive. Even the best modern comedy games, like Portal 2 or The StanleyParable, regularly fall back on simply delivering their lines. If thesecret to comedy is timing, it's easier to keep the player out of theequation. Jazzpunk is unusual in how often it lets you play inside thejoke. You're regularly asked to be an active participant, trusted tostretch or delay the punchline for as long as you like.Despiteits disparate and surreal collection of jokes, Jazzpunk is keptgrounded by the visual and audio design. It's a striking aesthetic - thethick black outline that surrounds each character gives the game acartoon sensibility. Because of this, even the strangest flights offancy feel in keeping with its style.
Not that it's afraid to break itsown rules. Throughout, certain NPCs are visualised as featureless blackfigures wearing white ties, which lets the player know that they'reunimportant and don't offer any possible interactions. Except for whenthey do.Thesoundtrack works equally hard to keep the game rooted in a particulartheme, by more closely tying the retro and cyberpunk influences intosomething cohesive. Each area of a level is tied to a specific track,and all of them take the form of repetitive electro beats played withanalogue synthesisers.All of this – the design, themusic, the jokes and the plot – combine to make a game that, despite allits absurdity, feels like a complete package. Not that any of it wouldmatter if it wasn't so consistently and refreshingly funny. While Ioccasionally encountered jokes that didn't work for me, it never souredthe experience.
Playing Jazzpunk, you always know that you're only a fewsteps away from something that will make you giggle.ThatJazzpunk so frequently caused me to laugh is a sign that it's a greatcomedy. That, days later, I'm still desperately fighting the urge toblurt out its best moments is a sign that it's a remarkable, unique andlasting one too.Details:Expect to pay: £12 / $15Release: February 7thDeveloper: Necrophone GamesPublisher: Adult Swim/Necrophone GamesMultiplayer: NoneLink. Tyler Wilde at 00:05 on 06 February 2014Thealpha packages—$60 and $100 Founder's Packs—don't buy a complete game,and Landmark hasn't been a very functional incomplete game until themost recent patch. But despite four days of server outages, crashes,bugs, and wiped data in the voxel building MMO, EverQuest Director ofDevelopment David Georgeson is optimistic about Landmark's first publicplay test, and even wishes it had started earlier.' Inhindsight, I kind of wish we’d been doing this a long time ago,'Georgeson tells me over the phone this morning. 'Our alpha is betterthan most betas I've been associated with. Yeah, there were some rockytimes in the beginning, but I’m telling you, I've seen games launch inworse shape.'
And again, despite the rough shape of Landmark over the weekend, the official forums andhave been populated with largely positive and supportive feedback—Ieven saw a player recommend that the dev team go to bed instead ofgetting the servers back up. According to Georgeson, a positiverelationship with players is all about transparency and understanding.' Theplayers are forgiving because humans like to know 'why,' and the gameindustry doesn't tell people 'why' very damn often,' he says. 'We justdon’t talk to people that way.
We’re so afraid that somebody’s going toget upset, or that they’re going to maybe quit, that we don’t want totell them all the reasons because we don't want to have fights online.' SOEPresident John Smedley was absolutely the champion of this idea. Hewas like, 'Wait, human beings are not like that.
If you tell themexactly what’s going on and they absolutely understand what’s going on,they can be your friends.' It’s not that they just know that we’reworking, or that we’re working hard, or that a patch is coming in fourhours. We’re telling them why we’re working on a feature, what exactlyhappened.' Aplayer creation I captured before the last loss of voxel data—thelatest patch should prevent any more building loss from now until thealpha ends.But outside of Landmarkand among the general PC gaming audience, paid alphas, such as thosenow on Steam Early Access, have been criticized as unethical. I askedGeorgeson how he responds to critics who say that charging $60 for anunfinished game is like charging players to be Q&A testers—somethingplayers should be paid for and not the other way around.' Itcracks me up,' says Georgeson, 'Because, sure, that’s one way to lookat it.
But the other way to look at it is—let’s say you were a huge BMWfan, and you had the opportunity to buy a pass that let you actually goin and sit with the car designers and make suggestions on the next carline. Would you pay for that? It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing.Yes they’re helping us hunt bugs, but that is not the point of alpha.Beta is bug hunt.
Alpha is feedback and commentary, and helping us tosteer the direction of the project. And the other fallacy, the otherargument people are putting out there, is ridiculous. That’s not whatwe’re doing.' I've been playing the Landmark alpha sinceit launched last Friday. Currently, it's limited to a simple set ofsystems—mine for resources and craft equipment to mine for betterresources, claim a plot of land, and use your resources to build—butthere are many more features to come, and Georgeson tells me that someof them will be implemented within the next month.Notmuch could be accomplished over the weekend, but last night's patch hasincreased stability and I can now play reliably.
With a plot of landclaimed on the newly opened third server, I'll have more detailedimpressions of Landmark's alpha up this week. So far, I don't recommendthat the casually interested buy in—any purchase right now is anexpression of enthusiasm—but I think it's safe to predict that bycombining elements of Minecraft and Starbound with SOE's MMO experience,Landmark will find plenty of players to fill its servers when it entersfree-to-play open beta. Emanuel Maiberg at 23:01 on 05 February 2014Atthe moment, there is no way for me to launch Hawken, which is a game Ilike a great deal, and probably my favorite free-to-play game yet. It'smaking the transition from a dedicated launcher to Steam, which is whereI'd prefer it live anyway, but developer Adhesive Games says that thetransition will take about a week at the most.Startingtoday, Adhesive will begin sending out codes to existing account holders(pilots, as they affectionately call us) to download Hawken from Steam,so check your spam folders.
If you don't have a Steam account, you'llneed to get one to keep playing. All existing pilots should receive aproduct code by February 11. If you don't get a code by then, you shouldsubmit a help ticket with the subject 'Missing Steam Code' at.Yourwill not lose any of the progress or items you purchased, and all newpurchases will be made through Steam. Adhesive will also publish patchnotes soon, but for now says that it made some pretty big changes to thegame, removing its consumable countermeasures (purchasable items) andtuning points, both for balancing reasons.If you haven'tplayed Hawken yet and plan to hop in now that it's on Steam, you'llhave to wait for the full 'February release' to create a new account.You can find out more about the move to Steam on.
In December, we reported that David De Martini, formerly of Electronic Arts, joined Oculus to head. This seems like the first result of that initiative. Good call, De Martini. As points out, PC Gamer thought it was the. It was developed by a team within CCP that supported Oculus during its Kickstarter campaign.We've been chomping at the bit for all things Oculus and VR for months now, following every little update, sorting out, often lauding the potential of the technology. But we haven't talked as much about games, let alone exclusives.We've heard developers from totalk about adding 'VR support' to games that would have existedotherwise, but we've yet to hear much about exclusives or launch titles.The Rift is going to need both of those if it hopes to catch on in ameaningful way.
Could this be the Rift's 'killer app?' Oculusalso announced that it's releasing the Oculus Latency Tester as opensource hardware. You can order the device from Oculus or build your own,then download the necessary software for free.
This, Oculus believes,will 'accelerate and improve virtual reality technology for everyone.' Finally,we'll probably hear more about Oculus-published and developed games inthe future, as the company said it's currently recruiting 3D artists,animators, and gameplay engineers to help build 'next-gen VR content.'
Well yeah actually they did. If you play the 'Art Therapy'course that has been added you will find that Glados, who lies all the time, initally lies about it being 50,000 in the future and then eventually comes clean and says that it has only ben a week or something like that.
And, in any event, all man made structures would eventually fall into a state of disrepair after about 5 years of non-occupation and would be in a severe state of compromise after about 20 years so after about 100 the structure would be non-existant. Originally posted by:They've obviously changed Cave and Wheatley, but they didn't do much in terms of the time passage. There are poster up in Aperture. Would paper have lated that long? Would anything have lasted that long? Then explain to me how can the old Aperture levels be in a relatively pristine condition after 50 (give or take) years abandoned.
How come all the electric conections are still working?If we're being realistic. How could Chell and Glados survive a fall of about 4kilometers?
Originally posted by:the condition of the building (and I am not talking about the abandoned testing tracks) could not possibly be that pristine after even 100 years as the steel in the frame of the building would be severely compromised by exposure to the elements. But this is a game so plot inaccuracies are excusable - to a certain extent.Apreture was still alive and kicking after GLaDOS was shut down. Lil robots going about doing their tasks etc, they would have kept the facility in top condition. The whole place was being run by robots after GLaDOS took over. One was even above ground after the 'killing' of GLaDOS (to drag you back down). They prolly went to the shops (lol) and whatnot, buying/scavanging what they need to keep Apreture running 'til the end of time. Test, test, test.
Thats all she lives for.e: though Apreture was underground, and top secret so maybe they had warehouses full of junk especially for the purpose of maintaining the facility.shrugs.