Laiv162560asse

@stryker1121 said:

You can do everything, including side stuff, races and collectibles, in around 30 hours, maybe closer to 25-26 if you're fast. I'm guessing the main missions can take like 10-14 hours if you focus on nothing else. I have 36 hours clocked up on Steam, but I'm a slow methodical player and that time also includes benchmarking, time sat in setup screens and time spent messing around in the world for no real purpose. I'd say I felt done with SD at around 32 hours (although lately I have been thinking about getting some of the DLC or playing through again).

It's pretty damn good. There's more of a sense of impact and brutality in Sleeping Dogs than in the Arkham games, but it doesn't quite have the Arkhams' range of combat options, animations, fluidity or multiple simultaneous counters (as in B:AC). It's enjoyable enough that I ran around looking for fights with anyone I could, whenever I could. Some people like Rorie or other posters here have said it's too easy, yet back when the game was newer most of the complaints in the Steam forums were that the combat was too hard. To me that suggests it's pretty well pitched. I did find it a little easy, I guess, but I also find the combat in the Arkham games very easy and that doesn't stop it from being an outstanding strength of those games.

As for the rest of the game it's a lot of fun. It's short for an open world game and the driving isn't very good, but the environments have a lot of character, the story is fairly solid and the collectibles actually feel worth collecting. Looks gorgeous on PC, too.

I think my favourites were the Naruto fighting games on the Gamecube, Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen 3 and Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen 4. The 4 player free for all mode was a total blast & I always preferred it to SSB. I heard that some people have been able to get it NGNT4 working online over Dolphin too. Great games with tight accessible mechanics and bold visuals.

For more recent games I'd go for Magicka. The chaos on the recent test stream is just a taster of how vindictive and nuts that game can get when you have people who more or less know what they're doing, but not quite well enough to deal with enemies and team mates at the same time.

I'll second this classic. I still think it holds up.

@fifichiapet said:

That's not really definitive. To quote wikipedia (although the quote is currently unsourced) "Method actors are often characterised as immersing themselves in their characters to the extent that they continue to portray them even offstage or off-camera for the duration of a project. However, this is a popular misconception. While some actors have employed this approach, it is generally not taught as part of the Method."

I might have been mistaken with McKellen, but it boils down to his psychological approach when inhabiting a character. I strongly agree with what you're saying with "ultimately, if you can tell if an actor is method or not by his performance, his performance probably isn't very good."

I went off on a slight tangent, ruminating on the state of acting nowadays when I mentioned Dance and Carlyle, however Carlyle is a method actor. Someone told me he slept rough to get into the role of a homeless person at some stage. For Kingsley, I kind of assumed he was one because of how much he throws into his roles. Some of the interviews I saw with Ray Winstone about Sexy Beast, and Kingsley's behaviour on set, led me to the conclusion that Kingsley is definitely a method actor.

I think the flaws of Nic Cage and Pacino's acting are their own particular flaws, not necessarily the flaws of their method. Both have a tendency to fall into a very familiar character groove, particularly as time has gone on. In fact due to the manner in which they tend to slip into the same character every time, there's an argument to be made for the fact that neither are the greatest at the 'method' of getting into the heads of the characters presented to them in screenplays. I do like both (Cage was among my favourites for a time), but their intensity doesn't match their versatility.

Still, I don't think you can say that DDL is 'avoiding' anything by the nature of the roles he picks. If anything, picking characters that require enormous magnetism presents a massive challenge, which he consistently lives up to only by dint of his versatility and acting chops.

I watched Drive for the first time the other day and was very impressed by Gosling. Even without much dialogue he pulled me completely into the psychology of his character.

Silly thread, sorry OP. Witcher 2 is extremely well optimised. Even check Zero Punctuation where Yahtzee grudgingly praised it for running well on his laptop (which was never as good as yours).

Your problem is that you have a laptop card equivalent to a desktop GTX 570, yet you're running the game on the highest settings possible. I have 2x570s in SLI and I still chose not to play with Ubersampling, because it meant unstable FPS of <50 frames and massive heat. Turn off Ubersampling and the game will probably run like silk.

The Metro series are notoriously system intensive and might be open to this criticism, but not TW2. Rather than mistakenly grumble about poorly optimised games for your new machine, why not ask for well optimised ones? Max Payne 3 is a good, fairly recent candidate. Should run very well for you.

On a side note, this has reminded me I watched some Bob Hoskins clips the other day, after Ryan's booboo on the Bombcast led me to the sad discovery that Bob has retired due to Parkinson's Disease. In one clip from 1988, Hoskins talks about having problems with hallucinations after Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Having immersed himself so thoroughly in the role and world for 6 months, forcing himself to see imaginary characters everywhere, it carried over into his everyday life for a while after. I think that speaks a lot to the level of commitment which produces great performances and magical cinema.

When method acting leads to overly intense, scenery-chewing performances that jar with the tone of a film, I feel that's more of problem of direction than acting. You can't ask for more from the actor in such situations. At least they're acting, which is more than a lot of 'actors' manage to accomplish. Furthermore, you don't necessarily have to be a largely one-note performer like Pacino to be able to pelt out those kind of intense, emotional performances. There are actors of great versatility who immerse themselves in the Method. Still, in films where Pacino shows up and he chews the life out of the set, and it doesn't make for a performance that's congruent with what the film may have been asking for... that's still not his fault. He's shown up and been Pacino, which is exactly what he's expected to do (although he's phoned it in more and more as the years have passed). If it produces a bad result, I blame the director, or perhaps the casting director, but also maybe myself for picking the wrong film to watch.

Give me a choice of films and I will always go for the one with a committed method actor over another one. Ben Kingsley, DD Lewis, Forest Whitaker, Ian McKellen; these are all names that make me want to watch something because I know I'm guaranteed a certain calibre of performance. I actually think we're in a wonderful time for television because thesps with real chops are starting to be recognised and utilised by the bigger American cable companies more and more. Take a look at how Robert Carlyle's doing or how Charles Dance steals every damn scene he's in in GoT. Great times for great actors. However, the presence of such an actor doesn't guarantee they'll be directed well or that their performances will be well utilised.

The only thing you've said that I agree with is the way the game handles missions and saves. There's no incentive not to reload a game after failure, because the penalties for getting busted or killed are so harsh, plus it's in the nature of a GTA game that some missions are a complete bitch and may take 20-odd retries. Travelling from the safe house to the missions to retry them over and over just becomes meaningless busy work. Also you're discouraged from ever using whatever cool cars you may have, because the game will force you to abandon them at the mission start and give you no way of saving them for later. That all needs an overhaul in GTA5.

As for the rest, I don't agree with any of your criticisms. The game was great fun to me. You don't have to deal with any targeting nonsense when you play with mouse & keyboard as I did. Although I didn't use it much, the cover system seemed like it worked well, which impressed me because much of the cover is dynamically created and movable/destructible (ie. cars). The driving is tight, as you attest. Explosions feel great. I even had fun with melee, punching people until they were staggered and watching the Euphoria physics do the rest. Even while playing Saints Row 3, I frequently found myself thinking 'I wish this game had the mechanics of GTA4'. Perhaps it's not quite as fun in pure gameplay terms as Sleeping Dogs, but that game had the advantage of having Arkham Asylum's melee system to crib off. I recommend you find a couple of the armour spawn points and turn off targeting, maybe play a bit more cautiously... or more recklessly? I dunno. I just found it pretty damn satisfying and not remotely frustrating, different strokes.

Regardless of the other quality of the games in the genre, and the fact that it isn't technically point and click, Grim Fandango is the only thing that comes into my head whenever anyone asks this. Too good.

New console cycle dawns, everything's already getting speckled with the blood from fanboys' rage-induced nosebleeds.