Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Aklyon]

Should I get the first three Tropico games or the fourth one?

The fourth one is very similar to the third.

[forsaken1111]

Should I get the first three Tropico games or the fourth one?

The fourth one is very similar to the third.

But with some important differences. Honestly I like the fourth one the most and would recommend it.

[hemmingjay]

Should I get the first three Tropico games or the fourth one?

The fourth one is very similar to the third.

But with some important differences. Honestly I like the fourth one the most and would recommend it.

+1

[Levi]

My roommate loved the 4th one.  I remember he got pissed of at a save corruption bug in the third one.

[nenjin]

4th is pretty much a total upgrade to 3. But for some reason I like the look of 3 more.

[Thexor]

As mentioned before, Tropico 4 is basically a (very large) expansion pack for Tropico 3. Same basic mechanics and functionality as T3, but includes a whole bunch of new buildings, a new faction, some new systems (faction disasters, real disasters), etc.

If you don't own either of them, buy Tropico 4 for sure. If you already own Tropico 3, buy the 4th if you want more content for T3. 

[Lightningfalcon]

Ok, now time to... damn it, I have two too few cents to buy the bundle.

[Mullet Master]

Max Payne 3 & DLC on sale right now. Fantastic game for a reasonable price.

[nenjin]

I'd say OK game at a good price. If you've played one Max Payne, you've played them all IMO. MP3 to me was notable for the redonkulous amount of cut scenes, and a story that kind of just drags on...and on...and on. Want to see Max drink hard liquor and stare into the distance? Oh boy, are you in for a treat! The handling and shooting are good on the PC, but they've always been pretty good in MP games.

[Aklyon]

I heard MP3 was a movie.

[nenjin]

I heard MP3 was a movie.

Honestly, if there's anything to appreciate about the game, it's this. There's good dialog, nice scenes and framing....yes, it's very much like a movie where you shoot people for 10 to 15 minutes between scenes.

Unfortunately the story ultimately isn't as sharp or honed as the production values. I mean:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Two whole chapters, at least, are you trying to rescue this chick, repeatedly. In terms of the story, that's like an hour and a half of "shoot shoot shoot....D'oh! Foiled again by a convenient plot twist!" It's not even clever or exciting in the way, say, the Fugitive rationalized a whole movie about chasing after one dude and not catching him. The height of this is when you're chasing after her and her captors in a speed boat, hit a ramp, and in bullet time shoot almost everyone on the boat near her. But as soon as you shoot like your 3rd or 4th guy, the game automatically goes to a cut scene of a guy walking out and grabbing her arm and dragging her away....as your boat finally dies after all the absurd shit the level put you through. It's supposed to be "poignant" but MP3 has this bizarre aesthetic where it's trying to be serious but then throws absurd action on top of it. Which completely undercuts the narrative, sometimes intentionally so.

MP3's story is supposed to make you bitter and angsty, so you eventually get angry and share Max's motivations of "just being sick of all this shit", including him. Instead it left me noticing how tedious and strung together their reasons are for you running around and shooting EVERYONE! The game even pokes fun at itself occasionally, noting how you've effectively killed an entire battalion worth of bad guys in your pursuit of....whatever you want to call Max's motivation. Pursuit of hours played? I dunno.

[Mullet Master]

I heard MP3 was a movie.

There are a lot of cutscenes, but the Max Payne series has always been story heavy. Except in 1 and 2, they used comics rather than cutscenes.
If you are looking for Modern Warfare : Max Payne Edition, it's probably not a good buy.  I personally love noir fiction, so I like the "movie" aspect. As far as nenjin's criticism ... uh, frustration is a very common thing in games. A lot of games have the same kind of screwed up loop of convenient plot twists , from Mario Bros to Braid. Played a mid 90s squaresoft game? Defeat the bad guy, oh no, bad guy is back x 100. It's not a bad thing in iteself.

The visuals are great, the controls are slick, and the music works really well. I think it's highly underrated.

[nenjin]

Except for how seriously the game takes itself. That's why it didn't work for me, at all. I was digging the story (obligatory cutscenes of Max drinking aside), but when it hit midgame it just went as flat as a pancake. They took the theme of victory always being out of your reach and made 4 levels out of it, and after a while it got so thin and transparent, it's like the writers just kind of took a break. It shows in Max's dialog as well. He starts repeating, in sentiment as well as word, the things he's been saying since the start of the game.

I've played all the Max Payne games, and I can this is honestly the first time I found both the story and Max boring. I love Noir, personally. And Max Payne has always been known for taking Noir so far to the point it becomes parody. Except in MP3, it's not really funny. It's cheap and played out "like a $3 whore dragging herself across a floor covered in piss and broken glass."

Plus, there's not really any of the characteristic weirdness of Max Payne games. Instead they substitute in a lot of screen noise and colored effects to simulate how fucked up Max is all the time. In the beginning I was like "That's pretty cool, that immerses me." By the middle of the game, it was giving me a headache. At least in that, I had a moment of real enjoyment when:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Max sobers up and all that shit finally goes away.

If Rockstar's goal was to make me dislike Max so much and share his self loathing, that the end of the game actually felt a little bit like Redemption, then they accomplished that. The end of the game was pretty good, I will admit.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Walk with a limp" indeed.

But the road leading up to it was very long, repetitive and pretty damn boring in terms of the story. It's still essentially Max Payne in all things, but it's probably the most "grown up" of all the games. Something about the game just elicited strong, unfavorable reactions from...and it wasn't the constantly down beat note of everything, every inner thought and some of the sheer brutality of the scenes. I'm pretty used to that from MP and plenty of others games. It was how some of it was handled, and how it felt like there was so much padding.

[umiman]

Max Payne 3 is pretty good. I wouldn't say it's worth full price because of how little replayability there is (and it seems to actively discourage replayability because of the inability to skip cutscenes, of which there are an infinite number) but for $14 I think it's pretty good.

Essentially you're paying the price of a movie ticket for a really long movie. It's a good movie, not particularly stellar, but good. It's also very well optimized and the shooty shooty bang bang bits are honestly quite fun. The physics of you falling all over the place is quite amusing too.

Mrm... if you want to know how the story is, it's kinda the same level as GTA4. If you like that you'll like this too.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

Worth buying Football Manager 2013 at 50% off a day after Football Manager 2014 is discovered on Steam database?