Actually, I learned something today (shameless South Park pitch), after playing and enjoying the living shit out of Lair, I decided that from this moment on, I will not listen to reviews at all. That's not to say that I based buying a game on them before. I've been pretty good about wasting money on bad games that I hyped for myself... Beast Wars Transmetals on PS1, anyone? But Moreso than ever, I will be ignoring what reviewers say. I almost didn't buy Lair, and now I can't stop playing it. Well now I can because of Heavenly, but I'll go back to it later. I promise that they will find something wrong with Folklore, and even Ratchet and Clank, but I already put my five bucks in for both of them. If anything, failiure or not, at least I am getting games that aren't adhearing to the FPS genre that seems to be over-populating.
I agree that they will find reasons to pan Folklore. But I was sold after the demo. Beautiful graphics, nice music and fun as hell gameplay. The use of the six axis is subtle and intuitive and doesn't feel forced. The mechanic makes sence for what you are doing on screen.
I'll agree that reviews aren't everything. Though I am glad I decided to read the reviews of Lair before buying. I like the six axis for some things, but I hate it for flight controls. That ruined Lair for me. Reviewers also love all thing GTA. I think the GTA franchise is worthless. The most mind numbling boring pointless games ever made. I hate them.
I hated them too and have voided them in Warhawk like the plague. But since I started playing lair, I ended up loving the controls, though the learning curve tends to be high. But now that I love controlling it like that, I went back and played Warhawk with them. While I still prefer the joystick on warhawk, I know I can fly with the controller and aim the guns with the joystick which is a nice advantage. Not for everyone, but it's a cool new dimension.
If you could select motion controls for flying and analog for driving I would more inclined to try them on Warhawk. But since it is all or nothing I haven't bothered. Still love that game though. Supposedly they were fixing some of the stat and game joining issues this morning. I just hope the make a party feature soon.
Holy cow!! The level where you use Kai and have to protect Nariko's dad is awesome. I don't think I've enjoyed any video game sequence as much as that. Took me two tries to complete but it was cool as hell. I love controlling the arrows via bullet time with motion controls.
yeah, took me a while to get the hang of the arrows but its pretty cool guiding arrows through flames and into explosive barrels, quality. i'm on chapter 4 now and so far i'd give the game 7 maybe 8 out of 10. But the framerate is irritating, there are moments when its fine and the game looks great, but its constantly jumping, and considering how long the game was in development i find it almost inexcusable. the gfx are amazing though, the scale of some of the levels is incredible, as well as the textures n shit. Also i caused a bug somehow when fighting that snake bitch, the camera got stuck facing a wall, and i couldn't see the wave attacks coming and i couldn't counter them. Died shortly afterwards... other than these 2 things i'd say the game was quite good. The missions with Kai can get annoying because she has no close range attack but the sniping is good fun.
man i love this game got it last night and ive beat it twice. i just had to see what hell was like you know? i like going back thru and trying to get all the sybols filled on kai missions its a pain. but her missions are so much fun. ok this i dont get the reviewers at ign said there were some hard bounce puzzles that where more pure luck now i never seen ne of this ne time you had to bounce a hat it wasnt more than two times and if u cant hit it well you shouldnt be paid to review and play games. just MHO i love this game i never seemed to get ne framrate hiccups but i do wish it was longer for me a solid 9/10
Hehehe, I shot Shen (Naruko's dad) on purpose to see what would happen... And did any of you guys try using projectiles to take out troops that you are supposed to fight later?? Hahah, in the level where you are trying to break into the prison with Naruko, where you jump up the walls to open the two panels that open the main gate.. One you dispose of the troops, you go into a room where you pull a lever to open half the gate, then you throw a shield across a long way to open the way to get to the next area (to do the same). But when you see the cinematic to the gate opening, there are some guys standing there. So I went back and grab some of the swords left behind by the troops and flub them across the way and killed a few, but the funniest one was throwing a shield and it bouncing from one to the other like a pinball game. By the time I got there, there was only one guy left to fight. I know this is a long post, but also, the first time you play as Kia and you are walking towards the building across the long bridge. If you shoot right when you start and control your arrow off the bridge and then back towards the building (through the window) you can start shooting the unsuspecting guards before they know they you're even out there. I love experimenting with this game. Oh, and I dont know if this will help you guys with the framerate, but I took my PS3 down to 720p. The games still look great, and the framerate looks a lot better (especially on Lair). Lair runs amazing on 480p, but it looks nasty graphically, so 720 is a nice tradeoff. By the way, are the cinematics real-time on this game? I mean I know for a fact that they use the in game models and that the amazing Naruko at the game's selection screen is RT, but are the rest of the cinemas? If so they are the best human renditions I have ever seen.
I'm not sure about the cinematics being real time. I mean, the models cast shadows on themselves. I'm not sure that's something that can be done real time. Then again, I have seen framerate drops during some of the cinematics. There would be no reason for that to happen if it was just playing a video file. Not sure. We need Twin Twist to analyse this game. As for 720p, the game box only says it supports 720p. Is there a setting on the PS3 to upconvert 720p games to 1080p? Another thing I noticed is that if I have downloads configured to background download from the PS Store I see framerate problems while playing HS. This makes sense to me because HS uses the hard drive extensively and downloading stuff at the same time could cause multitasking issues that could slow the framerate.
Shadows can definitely be cast on characters (by their own limbs and hairs), but the result is that shimmering that you see. I've seen it before on Silent Hill 3 and 4. And actually there are some extremely minor signs of aliasing in the cinematics, not to mention that when Kai is aiming at that soldier's balls the camera pulls away and then you are playing. So either they are real-time or they are made in realtime then prerendered to allow for dissolves and some post-effects. But yeah, I noticed the stuttering some times on the cinematics which might confirm this too. Yeah I forgot that HS is 720p. I also played this in 480 and it ran smoother, but honestly, I'll take the framerate hit if it means it looking as nice as it does.
The framerate stuttering during the cut scenes really threw me off. Of all places in a game to do that, one of the times was when the camera was zoomed on bohan's face. Maybe it's due to loading occurring in the background? Either way, I'm so glad I didn't bother to buy this game. Pretty decent gameplay and graphics, but you can beat it in one sitting ffs. Hell, the only reason why I didn't play through it in one sitting, is because I had to go to a barbecue. If I had stalled another 45 minutes to play, I would have beaten it. And hell difficulty? No thanks. Very rarely do I bother replaying a game on a harder difficulty, and in this case since the game is so short it'd be playing levels that I just played the other day. And it's really a shame, since it's the first game I had played where the motion control was almost worth a crap; those parts being the shooting, which was pretty damn cool. The combos and recovery on the other hand... what moron includes "shake the controller(like an idiot)" in the middle of a combo string? I bothered to recover maybe 2-3 times during the whole game, and air combo'd maybe 4 or 5. I just got tired of shakin the controller around. I want to control the character in the game, not pretend like I'm having a seizure.
in some places the framerate is fine, fo rme the last level v bohan was as smooth as hell. and the effect that shoots from your sword looks teh awesum. i just odn't understand why the framerate suffers and then its fine other times. i hope there's a patch, because when it is running smoothly its a lot easier to play. ps. i can't seem to get more than 2 hits in an air combo, is there a nack to doing it? do you have to press the combo really quickly?
Yea, you have to be really fast, which is kinda lame since it's almost at the same time as shaking the controller. I got 3 hits in a couple of times.
I turned off aftertouch on all cases. This is one situation where they reached to use SixAxis. It wasn't needed.
i think it works well with the arrow shooting, but it is not needed for air combos. how would you do them with sixaxis turned off?
Well I always start the air combo by launching them with the L1 and Triangle.. Then when they are up in the air, press X and she jumps up to them, and then you actually start the combo Square, Square, Trainlge., etc. On the combo list, it shows Triangle and X as part of the combo, but they are not. They are only the way to initiate it in the first place. The Air combo starts after X
cool. if i turn off sixaxis for air combos, i'm guess it'll also turn off for after touch. hmmm dilemma.
yeah the only thing I kept Six Ax on for was Camera. It helps to have that control and not worry about buttons to look left andright.
