Big Red Barrelcast 26: Ram Jam

The Big Red Barrelcast returns to tickle your ear drums with their ramblings! On this week’s episode, On this week’s episode, Dave, Pacman and Kev ramble on about caffeine, XCOM, and the Xbone delay. Don’t forget to visit our sponsor Insert Coin Clothing and cover up your nakedness by using discount code BIGREDSAVINGS15 for 15% off your order!

This time, they ramble on about:

  • Rayman Legends
  • Dragon Age Inquisition
  • Balder’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition
  • Batman Arkham Origins
  • XCOM: Enemy Within
  • $150 edtion of GTA V
  • WiiU price drop
  • Xbox delayed
  • Shout outs
  • The official BRB Extra Life song http://bigredbarrel.bandcamp.com
  • Some lovely bonus content for BRB podcast app owners.

We’d love to give you all some sort of incredible hug immediately followed by a polite conversation about how cool you are, but frankly we can’t afford the travel expenses. So, while we save our pennies, cents, and whatever the heck Canadians use, we’ll offer you some download links to help bide the time. Subscribe here. Here’s the RSS feed.  Leave an iTunes review here. Download the mp3 here.

Comments

  1. sheezcrafty

    Kev, listening know, could you be a little more specific what you don’t like about the way TLOU controls? Is it because you can’t get a decent flow going, the action is too broken up, you have to do too many things, the cover, the shooting. Not hating just genuinely curious. I play games where I’m “This is so frigging AWKWARD!” but I just power through because I think I’m just inept, or derpy.

    • It’s not just the controls, but since you asked for specifics I’ll write a short list:

      1) The PS3 controller is a thing I don’t like. The triggers are slippy and spongy and the sticks are loose and have too much travel. That’s a personal grievance though. I understand there is a large number of players that like that controller. I’m just not one of them.

      2) The latency between controller input and character action is measurable. Albeit in milliseconds, but it still remains noticeable, especially with my next complaint…

      3) 30 or less frames per second throughout the whole game. This directly affects control, and is particularly noticeable to me given that virtually every game I play runs at a minimum of 60 on PC.

      4) Cover doesn’t always work first time, and travelling from one cover point to another is often really fidgety, primarily due to reason number 5…

      5) The character slides rather than steps. That’s a weird description, I know, but it’s the same issue I have when controlling Nathan Drake. Another thing I dislike about both TLoU and Uncharted is…

      6) Enemies have no sense of self preservation whatsoever and seem to enjoy running at the player in the open. This is justifiable when it’s a zombie — ostensibly that’s what they do — but when it’s a human character that exists in a world in which humanity is literally fighting for survival, it’s dumb. And when five or six enemies decide to do this simultaneously, thus boxing the player into a bullet-ridden corner no matter how said player reacts, well that’s really dumb, and poor encounter design.

      7) Enemies are bullet sponges, as with all the Uncharted games. The counter to this is that — like Uncharted — a headshot usually does the trick in one go, which is cool, but the former should not be so uneven compared to the player themselves. Again, poor design choice. That’s literally a number tweak to change it, and yet it still exists after four games in that engine. When that’s as intentional a design choice as it clearly is, I get infuriated.

      8) My last complaint: The stealth system is never really taught, so much as learned, and that would be fine if it were consistent, but it’s not. Sometimes they see you, sometimes they don’t. The only enemy that stealth seemed an appropriate course of action for on a regular basis, as far as I could tell, were the Clickers. Some sort of UI design that stated how likely the player is to be seen would have been nice, as would an AI routine that didn’t follow the player precisely once spotted unless they move out of a pre-determined area.

      Ultimately, I’d just like this game to play as well as Splinter Cell. That game is impeccably designed and it is a joy to play, even when you mess up. I wish I could move through the issues I have with The Last of Us so as to see what the story and characters have to offer in the long run, but at no point did I enjoy playing it. At all.

      Maybe these are all issues that are pet peeves of me and me alone, that’s absolutely possible, but I when I can’t enjoy playing a game, I stop playing. It’s why Infamous 2, GTA4 and Red Dead Redemption exist on my pile of shame and will likely never be moved. I wish I could like them, but I can’t stand the way they play/control.

      Anyway, that was a really long and probably malicious-sounding response which I honestly don’t intend maliciously. It’s just where I’m at. I realise I’m in the minority, and I totally accept that.

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