HITMAN™

yeah I wish squeenix hadn’t decided to dump IO because as far as I could tell they were doing OK by one another

Why experience a replayable murder puzzle adventure game when you can watch a racist movie on mute with the quiet man

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it’s still on steam in the uk at least

Well I guess for anyone who’s on the fence about this game and is also in the US - the vanilla version is like $30 for Cyber Monday at Best Buy and Gamestop.

Use some of that saved money to get the first game’s campaign and hurl some expired spaghetti sauce cans around.

Dang I hope that’s not a sign that this game bombed. IOI has had a rough enough few years as-is.

Was it just the intro level? You can download a demo version of the second game for free that has that intro level too.

I remember an old one had the tutorial levels – the cardboard ship and the air base, but it was later replaced with the Paris level, and then later replaced with the Sapienza level, and in both cases the price wall at the end encourage the repeating play that the game was going for quite excellently.

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I’ve had the most trouble finishing the story missions on the last level because every line of dialogue makes me want to stop what I’m doing and start killing every person on that island

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I pirated Hitman 2 to fool around with and I’m finding it a little tonally off compared to the last one (plus the character models look slightly worse?), I wonder who IO lost to make that trippy stealth game I didn’t play last year

Tone has always been the every- and only-thing keeping me from loving Hitman; I love IO in general and these games are great but I can’t be in a world as cynical as GTA and move this slowly. Ambient conversations are just cringingly ugly and obviously so. If the non-targets were drawn more like normal people I’d be a lot happier, though I understand they want to color it as a world where everyone needs a Hitmannin’.

I didn’t have that problem with the prior title though! I guess I’m gonna have to dig hard for why

do unlocks work in the cracked version

they do not

I hadn’t pirated anything all year and I was on the fence about this one but I am trying not to judge it on that basis

I saw it was cracked and was wondering whether it’d be worth recommending to someone to obtain it that way, but if you can’t unlock anything probably not. I hate to recommend spending money ever though

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did you play Sapienza/Marrakesh from the last game? thinking on it, what separates it from GTA in my mind is that, rather than being unfailingly snide in a way that almost leans to South Park, it’s both unfailingly (though not necessarily usefully, per the discussion earlier itt) critical of the world it depicts and unreservedly playful in how it approaches that world, and the latter is not really contingent on the former. it’s bleak but a priori bleak and doesn’t dwell on that; it’s genuinely funny and even though it hinges on a fundamental immorality, almost all of the NPCs are just doing their jobs.

I did Sapienza, Paris, and the opening tutorials (the boat, the airfield).

I think it’s less snide, but I don’t think I agree that the playfulness undercuts it in a different way than GTA; the player verbs remain ‘wreak holy vengeance’, and it’s expressed in similarly complex chains of causality and chaos, though obviously more controlled in Hitman.

The main character as straight man plays very good, in a similar way that unhinged maniac Trevor in GTAV finally made the world snap into shape and the player’s almost inevitable manslaughter escapades seem normal.

where do you come down on Dog Days?

it’s perfect

I think the tone reads very differently; Dog Days is ugly people in an ugly world where everything fits into itself, and it’s the beauty in ugly, the crashing glass and shimmering oil and greasy skin.

Hitman is architectural renderings filled with stock photo people and Ikea catalogs and they’re all ugly in very boring ways and, yeah, I get it, but when that idea isn’t presented with a crackle I find it unpleasant to be around.

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interesting!

I’m gonna keep probing what makes it work for me and not for you. It’s astonishing even to hear you dismiss the mise en place as “Ikea catalogues” like that because I find even the little nooks and crannies of practically unused space in the level design to be so generous and even warm – thinking of the restroom of the tunnel in Sapienza or the rooftop terrace of a shop in Marrakesh immediately sticks out in my mind. I feel like you’re dismissing it as the banality of evil when for me it’s more like, the banality of the banality of evil. Totally sublime.

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Io lost the rights to kane and lynch when square kicked them out

also mini ninjas

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