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PC Games - Afterparty & Quest for Conquest out today!
Brolo
BroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered User regular
BroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered User regular
The games of September:
Sep ?? - Necrobarista
Sep ?? - NeonTail - Early Access
Sep 26 - Flotasam EA
Sep 24 - Noita
Sep 24 - I Love You Colonel Sanders
Sep 20 - Tracks, the Train Set Game
Sep 20 - Untitled Goose Game
Sep 20 - Sojurn
Sep 19 - Overland
Sep 18 - Exorcise the Demons
Sep 17 - Devil's Hunt
Sep 17 - Daymare 1998
Sep 17 - Session
Sep 16 - Later Alligator
Sep 13 - Borderlands 3
Sep 10 - Blasphemous
Sep 10 - Gears 5
Sep 10 - Greedfall
Sep 9 - Unrailed! EA
Sep 6 - Creature in the Well
Sep 6 - NBA 2k20
Sep 5 - Fantasy General 2
Sep 5 - River City Girls
Sep 5 - The Light Keeps Us Safe
Sep 5 - Starpoint Gemini EA
Sep 5 - Space Cows
Sep 5 - Fit For A King
Sep 5 - Atomicrops
Sep 5 - Sin Slayers
Sep 2 - Children of Morta
Sep ?? - Necrobarista
Sep ?? - NeonTail - Early Access
Sep 26 - Flotasam EA
Sep 24 - Noita
Sep 24 - I Love You Colonel Sanders
Sep 20 - Tracks, the Train Set Game
Sep 20 - Untitled Goose Game
Sep 20 - Sojurn
Sep 19 - Overland
Sep 18 - Exorcise the Demons
Sep 17 - Devil's Hunt
Sep 17 - Daymare 1998
Sep 17 - Session
Sep 16 - Later Alligator
Sep 13 - Borderlands 3
Sep 10 - Blasphemous
Sep 10 - Gears 5
Sep 10 - Greedfall
Sep 9 - Unrailed! EA
Sep 6 - Creature in the Well
Sep 6 - NBA 2k20
Sep 5 - Fantasy General 2
Sep 5 - River City Girls
Sep 5 - The Light Keeps Us Safe
Sep 5 - Starpoint Gemini EA
Sep 5 - Space Cows
Sep 5 - Fit For A King
Sep 5 - Atomicrops
Sep 5 - Sin Slayers
Sep 2 - Children of Morta
Brolo on
+10
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
the pope is inescapable
On the Bombcast, he says that they were refused access due to the tone of their E3 coverage, or something like that
If it wasn't incredibly obvious enough already that "security concerns" was not the reason for it, considering they gave access to streamers
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
It's all fun and games.
It's all fun and games.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Dark Soulsish Metroidvania, sign me up
Why would we escape the gentle aroma of dried, naturally fragrant plant material?
Though it's been a while since I played a 2d platformer and my hand is hurting right now.
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
https://crawl.develz.org/
This is in response to someone askin' in the last thread.
But there is only one horrible Goose.
this game is pretty good
It’s a 3 person PvE mode where you start in the middle of a hive, and set of a poison gas bomb, then try to get out. You start with just your pistol, and have to scrounge up weapons off of dead enemies. At the end you get scored based on how quickly you got out, how many baddies you killed, and other bonus stuff. And at the end you hit a switch to close the (slowly moving) big blast doors and seal the hive.... so you end up with these tense moments of hitting the button to close the doors, and then somebody goes down trying to get to the door, and do you try to save them or leave them for dead?
I always liked Horde mode, but I never wanted to play it with randoms because it took too long and I never wanted to voice chat, but Escape is quicker, and even without a mic it’s been good times so far.
Completing the standard campaign once (as the CIA or KGB) unlocks the option to begin the Extended Campaign, where you play a Nazi hunter for the Mossad, and which apparently has a new take on the main storyline with alternate missions and more background on what's actually going on. I'm definitely interested but having drunk so deep of the game this go-around I'll probably wait a bit.
Overall, this game is a solid B and I'm very glad I played it and very satisfied with my purchase, and on balance, I am still somewhat nonplussed with the mix of hostility and indifference it was greeted with upon release. I feel like I understand some of the criticisms very well now, and agree with them, but others have receded even further into the distance. In particular it highlighted the degree to which I just don't trust or really take seriously RPS anymore, as their reviewer went on about how much he'd been looking forward to a proper spy game and was then disappointed at the lack of car chases, sexy women, volcano lairs etc; it was painfully clear that he was thinking "spy" meant "James Bond", and as someone who daily steams my scrotum and asshole in a tea made from pages torn from John le Carre paperbacks this made me very sad.
(Digression: I totally acknowledge there is value in matching a video game to a reviewer who may have no knowledge of the media context the game exists in, in order to see how accessible the game might be to a general audience, but I find myself growing more and more frustrated with the crippling insularity of nerd culture. I feel like even savvy, politically aware games dudes, like the Waypoint guys, just kind of elevate their game by knowing about nerd culture + the actual real world around them, but I still literally have no idea which video game critic or commentator I could ever talk to about almost any of my interests outside of video games or modern, immediate pop culture. It's weird. I feel so fucking alone in crowds of video game nerds in ways I never did with film people, or band people, or even comic book people.)
Anyway, in summation:
THE GOOD STUFF
- I love the combat. I love it. I love it! I love that it's deterministic, where you will hit (or be hit) unless the target has Awareness, a limited, quickly-depleted resource that allows them to turn a hit into an only-slightly-damaging graze. This is something I depart from some of the critics I read: I saw a frequent complaint that it took the drama away from fights because you weren't, you know, wondering if you'd hit the Muton or whatever. But for me it added drama because I knew for sure that as soon as the guns came out my guys would get shot - and since there are almost always more bad guys than you, that's not a tenable situation for very long!
(I also have to ask if those dudes just can't gel with games like Advance Wars, which are also broadly deterministic and don't have a huge amount of room for randomness but are still, to me, wildly fun.)
The thing is, the combat system rewards information and preparation. If you know where the bad guys are and where they're coming from, you can set up overwatches, you can flank (which negaes their ability to dodge), you can make the fight very one-sided in your favor: and the reverse is also true, so you don't want to just charge into rooms without a plan, because it will go horribly for you really quickly. It's also the case that your information deteriorates over time as a fight goes on and people move, civilians wander into and out of the battlefield, your powers go on cooldown etc, incentivizing you to do whatever it is you came for and get out quickly.
This all feels right to me. It feels like the same headspace I was in when I played the original Rainbow Six. I've never been in a gunfight but it certainly sounds like what I've heard about from people who have. The behaviors it encourages are ones that make sense to me as someone sitting here trying to imagine it. Certainly if I knew I was going to a gun battle I'd want to like, know where all the exits were? And not go anywhere without backup, and not wander into strange rooms on my own?
This does mean you lose some of the mad, cinematic drama of an X-COM, but, like, that's okay? What if it's okay for things to not be like a greatest hits of an action movie all the time? It pays dividends in making me feel like I'm there.
- There are extensive options for offscreen support you can bring along on missions. You can have spotters with telescopes who peer into building rooms for you, you can set up sniper nests, you can have "cleaners" who come in after the battle and tidy up, reducing attention from law enforcement. You can even pay a helicopter to be on standby, unlocking the ability to do airlift evacs in a pinch. Lots of these options are also upgradeable, too (you can buy better telescopes for your spotters, suppressors for the snipers, etc). I'm going to be sad the next time I play a tactical game and it doesn't do any of this, because it just delights me and gives me interesting choices to make beyond just equipping the best gun and best armor.
- The base managment, for me, hits the sweet spot between the modern XCOMs and the original X-COM, between being too on-rails and hand-holdy vs too fiddly. There's a worker-placement aspect I really appreciate, where your off-duty agents can be put to work crafting tools like flashbangs or lockpicks, decrypting signals traffic, training on the firing range, etc. You learn to develop your own approach to stationing agents around the globe so they can respond to situations in time (if you hear about an assassination in San Francisco and your nearest agent is in Kabul, you quickly learn why the CIA sticks guys all over the world).
- The "body engineering" system, where you inject agents with experimental drugs to improve their stats, is effectively a skin over a logic puzzle. Like, to make up an example, Anadorphin can increase their reflexes by 10 points but lowers sensory ability by 6, and it blocks the ability to take Gondorelin or Fenyxl afterward. I actually got out a pad and paper and sat down for a few hours in my bedroom trying different combinations and it felt like doing those old "Jenny was born on the same day as Brad, but before Kara" things in the back of Discover magazine. And my patience was rewarded with a squad of coked-out, gimlet-eyed psychopaths with multiple shooting and action points every round.
- That reminds me: a tiny detail I love about the way the tactical gameplay works is that additional move actions by your characters take them one square less distance. So a standard dude might get, like, two six-square moves, but a guy whose stats have been amped gets three five-square moves, or four four-square moves. I like it because it's still a clear upgrade, but it doesn't turn people into the Flash - but it wildly increases their flexibility and versatility, as they can, for instance, loot three objects in the same room in one turn instead of just moving 7 squares from the computer to the safe and then losing the rest of their movement because that was two move actions. Like I said, it's a little thing, but I dig it, and it's emblematic of the thought and care that went into the game's systems.
- Occasionally the game pops up random events with tough decisions, very much like Battletech or Crusader Kings or whatever, and these were often excellent. A couple of my agents had questionable pasts: the guy who was a former terrorist I let slide, while the woman who had worked for Third World slavers ended up in a hole in the backyard. One agent got cancer and paying fully for his treatment earned me the Loyalty perk for him (so he would never turn traitor).
- I love the loyalty stuff. Sometimes agents will turn mole or traitor and this doesn't seem to be just a story-mandated thing: stuff will happen. Like you'll be stealthing through a mission and suddenly the alarm is raised and you know it wasn't you who did it. It's delightful and feels incredibly appropriate.
- The main story incorporates all of the game's systems (and often introduces you to them) instead of consisting of a series of forced exceptions to the normal gameplay. None of that "your power won't work on the boss" kind of shit.
- The main story is solid, ties into real-world events in a couple of interesting ways, and was clearly very well-researched. A couple of things I thought were farfetched actually turned out to be true (the downing of KAL-007 by the Soviets due to a navigation error actually helped propagate the Global Positioning System - I didn't know GPS had even been around back them!). It hits a lot of the beats that I would want from a spy thriller, and it never goes insane. Aliens don't show up.
THE INDIFFERENT
- At the same time, the story doesn't have much in the way of interesting characters or memorable dialogue. it's mostly just plot rather than narrative as such. A lot of that's the nature of the beast (this is a tactical game with lots of randomness a la XCOM) and the fact that they didn't have the budget for lots of cutscenes. Still, I think it could have punched at least one or two notches higher than it did.
- While the plot and much of the gameplay is surprisingly grounded (nobody gets laser eyes, people who you use a "med kit" on still need to spend time in the hospital, etc) it's very Hollywood realistic. There are still magic silencers that go "thwip." NPCs don't react to characters jumping through plate glass windows UNLESS the character is now trespassing by being on the other side of a property line. These things are issues partly because of how they just defy logic or kind of fly in the face of the fairly sober, realistic tone, but also because they feel like missed opportunities. Making windows an obstacle where you either need to take time to carefully open them, or crash through and make noise, would add new wrinkles to stealth. Depriving us of the option to make quiet, consequence-free murders (or making it riskier by creating noises that people want to investigate) would make stealth more challenging. This is all to the good.
- There's definitely a tension between the fact that combat is fun and the fact that stealth is optimal but not as fun. Stealth in tactical games often means a lot of patiently waiting for people to leave a room, or creeping forward one or two squares at a time. I found myself hoping for an unexpected bad development (a passing civilian seeing me at the wrong time, or a traitor) just so I could throw down more often.
THE BAD
- There's an unfortunate choice to have lootables in the game world - classified documents on desks or in safes, racks of guns to loot, etc - and make you kind of pixel-hunt for them. Like, they only become visible when someone sees them, so even if a mission has a fairly clear objective, you find yourself taking an hour just to march a guy into every room of a base just to see if there's more stuff to steal. They're optional, you don't have to grab them, but a lot of this stuff there's no other way to get in game - you can't just buy a Dragunov sniper rifle or whatever, unless you happen to get lucky and earn a contact who sells them, you gotta find and loot it. This feels suboptimal.
- The interface is often just garbage. Like, there's a degree to which it's unavoidable, because the game has a lot of complexity and there's only so many ways you can boil that down, but it's shit like...I told you about the drug system earlier? Those drugs aren't alphabetized. You have to scroll through a menu of words like Fenaloxine and AMPYGYRL and shit like that and it's not organized sensibly in any way. Also, scroll menus have a way of snapping to a random point.
does it improve from there?
In spite of that, it's one of the best games of the generation
although it's much less punishing of death after the factory part is done
TGS trailer for FF7 remake
Yakuza 7 Like A Dragon
Story (English subs)
Gameplay
Project Resistance
Death Stranding
Briefing (aka it actually explains some story things) (there is a 49 minute gameplay trailer coming later this week)
Thanks for posting your thoughts.
I preordered it prior to launch but the bugs early on put it off me.
So this will likely push me into giving it another go.
It has lodged into my brain something deep, in a way that hasn't really happened since
well since Diablo 2, oddly enough
You'd think Path of Exile, a game which I played and enjoyed, would have already scratched that itch
But as it turns out, nah
I guess because PoE is very much aping Diablo 2 not merely in genre and style but in feel and narrative beats; it is a reaction to Diablo 3, something that tries to give you that same old feeling but from a different brand. It's nostalgia one degree removed; it works but you know something's missing
But Blasphemous is so much its own thing while still evoking that melancholia, that sadness and struggle at a world that has broken down and broken so many people with it
I want to be clear I'm not talking about gameplay here. As far as I can tell Blasphemous is not merely serviceable but quite adequate at being a Soulstroidvania
But it's everything except the technical mechanisms of combat and exploration that is staying with me. The sad piping of church organs in a ruined abbey called Mercy Dreams, the arches of a sewer system shaped to resemble the low curves of Cordoba's Our Lady of the Assumption mosque-turned-cathedral humming with the reverbed strumming of an electric guitar, the stories and anguishes and ecstasies of people warped and gnarled into inhumane forms by something they consider truly holy and the stitching of the aesthetics of Catholicism into a great and horrifying display, wood splinters and broken skin and unfathomable divinities and gilded bones and calloused hands clutched around petty icons and pain and guilt and
It's just so much
It's just too hard! I can't even get past Witch 1, and I'm not really having any fun with the other episodes I have unlocked right now for anyone else. I was looking forward to this game so so much but it's just really frustrating me.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/sep/08/how-did-twitch-become-as-big-as-youtube-by-live-streaming-video-game-players
does RPS not stand for RockPaperShotgun? Because I'm looking at their reviews (and previews) and I'm not seeing anything like that.
Does he voice a player character who you can go the game without hearing if you choose, or is he an NPC who you would have to hear no matter what?
Witch 1 is very hard. Took me forever.
I put myself on a rotation pattern to play it, and I think that helped with preventing some burnout problems. I'll play the next episode for each character in order down the line, rather than trying again repeatedly on one that I feel like I need to beat. It means that I've made it through Inventor 5 and still have only scratched off 1 or 2 levels for some of the other characters, but it is keeping things fresh.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
He's not one of the vault hunters, but I have trouble seeing his Tales From The Borderlands character being like an integral part of the story. That said, you will probably hear him for some amount of time if you play the game.