Sleeping Dogs

Barbecue pork? YES
Custard? YES
Chicken? Meh
Red Bean? Noooooooo

If you guys have never tried salted egg yolk buns, then you have never lived.

I would add to the list

Steamed pork
Spicy Prawns
Grilled leeks, and garlic.

Yes, we try to add many many things to buns.

Do you like balut?

Goes well with drunkenness. Tastes like egg, only lumpier.

I'll take sweet red beans over duck fetus any day of the week, though.

One thing I don't like about this game is the writers come from the "Durrrr, 'mature' means we should have every character say 'fuck' at least once per minute herp deep" school of writing. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

I noticed this, but to be fair, doesn't it limit it to characters whom one would expect to be potty-mouthed? I recall the street toughs were far saltier than the genteel higher-ups. Wei was also at the "sailor" end of the spectrum, but given the strains he's under, I can't blame him.

I picked this up on Saturday on a whim (sales!) and have been having a blast with it. I don't know how far I am in the main story - I just got the second apartment, in Central - but so far it's been pretty great. There are definitely a few rough edges here and there, but overall I think United Front / Square Enix did a good job of pulling everything together. I like the emphasis on melee combat, the story and acting are actually decent, the cars are pretty well done and while the took some getting used to, it's not bad. The graphics are good overall, just inconsistent - but a few low-res textures here and there doesn't stop Hong Kong from looking gorgeous when you're driving down the streets at night during a rainstorm with some Bonobo on the stereo.

I have had almost exactly the same experience. Also, the last open world game I played was Saints Row 3, and this strikes a pleasing contrast. It's an object lesson in the importance of boundaries. SR3 gave you everything but ended up feeling like a tedious, incoherent mess, the videogame equivalent of eating nothing but chocolate until you were sick. Sleeping Dogs throws some roadblocks in your way with the Face level and various other things, but they just give you something to aspire to with plenty to get on in the meantime. I was delighted when I was able to buy some non-stupid jeans.

A quick tip on making mad money from an early stage; call Tran as soon as you can. You can do endless carjackings on no cooldown for huge amounts of money - I made 300k in about a minute with the right car, but generally it's in the 75-100k range. I haven't abused it too much (and fortunately the face requirements stop it being completely gamebreaking) but it's useful to know.

Yeah, I got on Tran's money-train a little late. Which, interestingly, is one of the things I like about this game - when someone says "call me anytime you want X" they usually mean it - that person is likely now a Contact in your phone, and that's all the game does, add them to your phone list. You know what it doesn't do? Call you every two minutes to pester you about doing some bullshit activity. Take that, Cousin Roman.

So Tran really meant that yes I could call him and hijack cars, but I didn't realize that at first b/c I wasn't taking my phone out much. When I did, lo and behold, I've got some peeps under Contacts that want calling. There were a few dates in there too. And I noticed the same thing - the hijackings take minutes and I'm getting $20 - $80k for them so far. Which is nice, because some of these fancy cars are like $600k or more. Hell, a bowl of noodles is thirty bucks!

BTW, if anyone else picked this up on a recent sale or gets it for Xmas, be sure to grab the free DLC packs. I'm enjoying this enough that I might pay for some extra DLC, too - anyone have any experience with the paid packs yet?

My Wei never eats. He draws all the sustenance he needs from snapping the legs of gangbangers across Hong Kong. There's probably an island-wide shortage of plaster for casts at this point.

This reminds me of another thing I enjoy* - persistent staining! I did all the fight clubs in a row and by the end my workout gear looked like it had been through an abbatoir.

*er, in the game

I probably wouldn't eat if it was just cosmetic or short-term heals, but I really like the buffs from consumables are longer-lasting. You can pop a free energy drink from the fridge (Dragon Kick LOLOLOL) and get a damage buff that lasts like 20 minutes. The better food and herbal tea lasts quite a while, too, and I like that it gives you persistent health regen beyond the halfway point. I actually make a point of eating pretty regularly.

And peeing. I pee. It's roleplaying, shut up. Did you ever notice that you can use the sink in your bathroom to wash your hands and face and remove those persistent bloodstains?? Nice little touch there.

I've been sucked into this after picking it up during the Steam sales, and am loving it.

While the freerunning is a bit clunky in spots, it does the job. I especially appreciate that all the foot chase sequences using it so far have been entertaining. Although I'm still fighting Assassin's Creed muscle memory of holding down the trigger to run, which has led to a couple funny moments on the rare occasions I have a gun equipped.

Like most everyone, I'm also pleased that gunplay is kept relatively rare at least so far.

The last mission I did involved needing to fire a gun at enemy cars while driving. I of course heaved a weary sigh internally, and prepared to like the game less. Because you know what has never been fun in GTA3 onwards and clones? Trying to shoot enemy cars while you're busy weaving through traffic at high speeds. And then the game made me eat crow because throwing things into slow-motion at such moments is beautiful. Then it was even more beautiful when I saw the result of shooting out tires. It's of course of a piece with how solidly cars are connected to the ground, erring on the side of heavy cinematic action instead of attempted realism, which is the proper side of the scale for this type of game to sit on.

I was really happy to see how the game includes several mechanics that bring that kind of cinematic feel - the slow-motion, sliding-over-cover headshots, shooting out the tires, car-jacking from one moving vehicle to another, etc. It's like playing a John Woo film.

It does get a bit silly later on though. It's pretty cool when it's just one car, but the impact is somewhat diminished when you spray backwards with an assault rifle and suddenly cars are raining down around you in sets of 5 in some of the later missions.

I also started playing this game after the sale and I'm liking it a lot! I'm still wondering if the SWAT Armor (DLC) actually lowers all damage by 50%? Because that seems ridiculously overpowered for me. Also, the "dating" missions are dumb. Other than that though, really cool game.

What's cool about the dates is that they offer tangible benefits for what would generally just be fluff interactions. That said, I do get the impression that there was going to be a more robust 'dating system' implemented, but that probably got the axe somewhere along the line. We're left with some oddly truncated relationships that go nowhere and don't add much beyond the opportunity to yell "STARRING EMMA STONE" from the credits.

I think the honeymoon period is now ending. Later on, the lack of polish in the melee system really starts showing; the real bane of my existence right now is drug busts where you need to clear out a dozen-plus goons, all but one or two of which are either armed with melee weapons or are the big chunky grapplers, so your own grapples (and thus environmental kills and other options) are most of the time no longer an option. Which contracts options down mostly to standing around and countering over and over and over again. It's also a real shame that when Wei's armed with a melee weapon, he no longer counters, just ducks and dodges; they lost a real opportunity for a whole more brutal class of moves that would have been countering with tire irons and meat cleavers.

One solution to this tedium is ramming the thugs into submission with the nearest vehicle. Yes, it's cheap and borderline cheating. No, I don't care.

It does get kind of samey if you take it upon yourself to complete every drug bust and the like, and as with any open-world game, the shine of seemingly endless possibility wears off at a certain point once you've familiarized yourself with each of the activities. The one condolence I can offer is that unlocking more abilities in the Triad and Melee trees can really help speed up the combat and give you more options to make things interesting. Even if the Dim Mak is basically cheating, it's still fun.

Don't do this. It's boring as sin and you really don't have to. It's a basic rock paper scissors, and the big grapplers' weakness is that they never block. So you just beat the shit out of them with heavy strikes. The 2-strike then knee combo works well, particularly if you've upgraded it to stun. Just do that a couple of times and it will knock out the fatties. Pick them off and the others are trivial to remove. Brawlers aren't staggered by your regular strikes but are vulnerable to grapples and heavy strikes, so you've got a wealth of options. The quickest is to grab them and toss them into a phone booth/electric fan/tray of conveniently-placed swordfish heads/expensive feature aquarium/the South China sea/etc etc. If no environmental hazards are available, grab them and use the leg break a couple of times. Normal dudes are obviously a cakewalk.

The counter timing window is very wide and your counters interrupt all of your other animations, so you're perfectly safe. Plus activating face mode through combos restores your health. There's no reason not to constantly be on the offensive. You can end fights extremely quickly this way.

That has simply not been my experience. Rather, it's not reliably or predictably been the experience--counter timing is very generous, except for when it's not. There's been times I've known for a fact I hit counter well within time, but I've remained locked in a strike animation, or simply not countered. But mostly I think I made the mistake of running too many drug busts, which don't mix up the enemy types enough--the last couple ones that made me nerd-cranky really did have almost entirely guys with cleavers, which through the occasional clunkiness of the game's melee system into sharp relief. Enemy groups in other bits of the game have been a nicer mix that rewards being more aggressive. (I did really enjoy a big battle in a fish factory, with hanging ceiling hooks and swordfish pallets aplenty.)

Hunty may be thinking of the counter timing after getting the Counter Recovery ability in the Triad tree, which speeds up the 'cooldown' between counter attempts and basically makes countering a no-brainer.

I have (had? dunno, kinda stopped playing) the same issues with the melee but what ticks me off is that I need to run these guys over 3-4 times. Ugh.

I wish that I could set the difficulty down to easy and get through it cause I want to see what else is there, but they don't have that.

You could always drop a couple bucks on the Screen Legends DLC, which gives you the Wing Chun outfit (which slows time when you're attacked, making countering easier) and a permanent sword that spawns in your safe houses, which makes hacking enemies to death easier. :)

ETA: Also, free energy drinks in your fridge + copious vending machines / candy stores / vendor stands around the city means you always have access to buffs that increase your melee damage, as well as the tea shops which sell buffs that reduce incoming damage. Food also enables you to heal fully between fights, and a man who never eat pork bun is never a whole man.

It may also be useful to spend some time driving around and hitting the Health Shrines around the city to increase your maximum health; you eventually double your total health pool by activating them. They'll get added to your map once you go on your date with Amanda. (STARRING EMMA STONE)

My Wei is always stuffing his face for sure. One of the things that still makes me want to give the game a hug is that even in the middle of missions, you can freely get out of your car and hit a food vendor or grab a collectible you happen to be driving past. So many other GTA clones, including GTA itself, panic if you get out of the scripted vehicle and will either fail you or give you a few seconds to get back in the car or fail. Sleeping Dogs will patiently wait for you to get back in. And since collectible-grabbed state is saved independently from anything else, there's even been a couple occasions where I simply made suicide runs to a shrine that happened to be right there, since restarting at checkpoint wouldn't make me lose having grabbed it.

So the honeymoon's over, but don't get me wrong, it's still a fine game.

I use them, but fuck them, it's broken in a terrible way, of they like to fuck their players, but either way fuck them. I'll explain.

I loaded up on +damage, +health and +face before doing this mission Club Bam Bam. I go through all the hostess and karaoke nonsense and fight the first round of thugs upstairs. I go downstairs and I die. Back to the checkpoint and ALL OF MY BUFFS ARE GONE! Fuck you! "Hello player, we know you loaded up on these buffs to make it easier for you and despite that you died, so we're going to take them away. Have fun!" Intentional, honest oversight, I don't care, I flipped my lid at that one.

Could you just restart the mission or load a save prior to starting that mission? Not ideal, I know, but maybe preferable to a checkpoint reload that loses your buffs.

Also, I wouldn't bother with +Face (the massage buff) for missions; I'd recommend tea shops for the damage reduction buff instead. Face XP is comically easy to get via completing races and fight club activities.

Man, I want a pork bun now.

And some curry fish balls. You have to try them! You have to!

Not continuing to the checkpoint fails you to the hospital and then you have to re-do everything.I actually did this cause I raged out the first time, but wasn't 100% sure if my buffs expired or vanished like a fart in the wind. The second try confirmed this. Good to know about face.

Really it's only Triad XP that's difficult to get. Cop XP is easy to get via the drug busts, and Face XP through fight clubs, races, favors, and so on, but in the base game, the only real way to get Triad XP is by completing missions. (There is some DLC that adds repeatable activities that grant Triad XP.) By the same token, there's no point in worrying about Cop XP penalties from dinging parked cars or knocking down streetlights during missions, since you can easily earn more than enough of that XP through the drug busts.

WHY DON'T YOU HAVE A PORK BUN IN YOUR HAAAND

Oh hell naw! Open world and emergent gameplay, baby! I'm a thug-ramming fool in every game that I can. There were a few "gang operations" in SR3 that I cleaned out by just driving the hell over everyone who even looked at me funny. That's how we did it in Tha Row, and I bring that knowledge to Pork Bun City as well.

We call them Humbows in civilized countries.

Sleeping Dogs was awesome. A fun open-world romp with a button-mashing friendly combat system, and didn't overstay its welcome.

I can now confirm that I could smack my past self for splitting up Triad points along the branches and thus delaying when I gained this ability. It's night and day. Previously, I bet at least two-thirds of my damage taken came about because I kept being premature (it was the stress! It happens to everyone now and then!) on the countering, and thus kept getting beaten up for flinching.

Also I now love the Climbing Elbow Smash in the kung-fu-statues section so much. Likewise, past-self-smacking for not making an upgrade beeline directly to it instead of detours along the way. Second honeymoon!

Awesome, that's great. It definitely pays to pick a branch and go down it all the way, or at least to a point where you unlock a specific ability that works with your playstyle. In my own case, other than the Slim Jim ability (amazingly useful and a level 1 unlock) I ignored the bottom branch of the Cop tree until I'd filled the top. (The bottom is all car-related abilities while the top deals mostly with firearms.)

On the Triad skills, I think the lower tree is more useful overall, but the top tree's Surprise Exchange ability is an excellent addition to your arsenal since it gives you a kind of dodge that makes it much easier to get out of situations where you're getting surrounded on all sides. (But it requires locking on to an opponent that you can then grapple-vault over, so if you don't use the lock-on in combat, it can take some getting used to.) The Charge Kick Follow-Up is good too, but that falls later in the tree.

Melee skills: IMO top tree is most effective in combat, since it grants you a couple additional striking moves or follow-upa - every unlock was really useful for me, especially the Spinning Heel Kick (which extends your normal striking combo and adds a knockdown) and the Jumping Power Roundhouse. The Double Jump kick adds a great sprinting opener that can knock out some of the lower-level opponents in one attack. The bottom Melee tree deals mostly in grapples, of which the Leg Breaker and Arm Breaker grapples are brutally awesome.

Goddamn, now I want to play this again. There's new DLC out, isn't there? Hmm.

I've been down with the flu / a wicked cold for the past few days, so this has been my go-to zone-out game. So this happened:



Utterly fantastic game, and I think it's ended up as my favorite open-world GTA-style game, including all the GTAs and Saint's Rows. I love the focus on melee combat, but the gunplay certainly isn't embarrassing. I love their version of Hong Kong, and running around in it never got old. I even liked the DLC.(Zodiac Tournament much more so), and want more.

Now all I want is a Yakuza game to crib the combat and freerunning while keeping the batshit story, awesome characters, and ten billion side-missions. It would probably be Game of the Century for me.

And completed. The ending was a bit abrupt, mostly due to some really hasty epilogue work tying up loose ends.But the final setpieces themselves were pretty satisfying, and the final fight at least non-irritating, so good all around.

Still have to max out Face level in the main game and there's a few shrines scattered about still. But in the meantime, I started playing the Nightmare in North Point DLC because being able to use kung fu against hopping vampires is a sorely underserved need in videogames in general. And it immediately justified the purpose by indeed brawling against hopping vampires. It's also a very fair-minded treatment of the gates of hell opening, because it turns out most regorged spirits possessing the citizens of Hong Kong are content to just go about their business, sell me pork buns, etc.

What those undead vendors with the glowing eyes aren't telling you is that their pork buns are now made with pork braaaaaaains.

So they're exactly the same then.