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PC Games - Afterparty & Quest for Conquest out today!

BroloBrolo BroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered User regular
edited October 2019 in Social Entropy++
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

Brolo on
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Posts

  • Indie WinterIndie Winter die Krähe Rudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    Will this thread allow us to escape the vile machinations of popery

    Indie Winter on
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  • BroloBrolo Broseidon Lord of the BroceanRegistered User regular
    Will this thread allow us to escape the vile machinations of popery

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    the pope is inescapable

  • I needed anime to post.I needed anime to post. boom Registered User regular
    wake me up when september games

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  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    So going back to the weird Borderlands 3 stuff, it sounds like someone accidentally told Jeff the real reason that they didn't give certain outlets access to the game

    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

  • OlivawOlivaw good name, isn't it? the foot of mt fujiRegistered User regular
    Daymare 1998 is certainly a title for a video game

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    PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    there might be... too many games

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  • CorporateLogoCorporateLogo The toilet knows how I feelRegistered User regular
    Olivaw wrote: »
    Daymare 1998 is certainly a title for a video game
    It was originally an unofficial RE2Make but then the official RE2Make happened

    Do not have a cow, mortal.

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  • JedocJedoc In the scuppers with the staggers and jagsRegistered User regular
    there might be... too many games

    It's all fun and games.

    It's all fun and games.

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  • HobnailHobnail Registered User regular
    Daymare 1998 is a beautifully shit awful bucket of piss

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnNjhn6fS_k&t=34s

    Broke as fuck in the style of the times. Gratitude is all that can return on your generosity.

    https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
  • NaphtaliNaphtali Hazy + Flow SeaRegistered User regular
    I only got to play the first 20 minutes or so of Blasphemous but it seems pretty promising so far

    Dark Soulsish Metroidvania, sign me up

    Steam | Nintendo ID: Naphtali | Wish List
  • ElaroElaro Apologetic Registered User regular
    Will this thread allow us to escape the vile machinations of popery

    Why would we escape the gentle aroma of dried, naturally fragrant plant material?

    Children's rights are human rights.
  • MrGrimoireMrGrimoire Pixflare Registered User regular
    Blasphemous is absolutely gorgeous. I get that the aesthetic isn't for everyone, but it's definitely for me.

    Though it's been a while since I played a 2d platformer and my hand is hurting right now.

  • IoloIolo iolo Registered User regular
    Necrobarista is a good game name.

    Lt. Iolo's First Day
    Steam profile.
    Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
  • Dee KaeDee Kae Registered User regular
    Behold, the single greatest offline lootin' game ever made.

    https://crawl.develz.org/

    This is in response to someone askin' in the last thread.

  • TofystedethTofystedeth Registered User regular
    DC:SS is great but not in any way the same kind of game.

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  • milskimilski Poyo! Registered User regular
    Seeing the evolution of DCSS over literally a decade of playing it brings me great joy

    I ate an engineer
  • DirtyboyDirtyboy Registered User regular
    I am weirdly craving some Doritos and Dew now.

  • Mx. QuillMx. Quill I now prefer "Myr. Quill", actually... {They/Them}Registered User regular
    there might be... too many games

    But there is only one horrible Goose.

  • DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    Fuck, I just beat a couple more bosses and explored some shit in Blasphemous and it's still good. Our Lady of the Charred Visage was hard as fuck though, I have never been good at those kinds of bosses in 2D games like Contra and stuff. I had to retry it about 6 times and even then I barely beat it, by the end I was down to a sliver of health and just waling on it hoping it would die before me.

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  • ShortyShorty touching the meat Intergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
    I've been playing Control

    this game is pretty good

  • PerrsunPerrsun Registered User regular
    Gears 5 is fun. And the Escape mode is a cool gimmick.

    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.

  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    edited September 2019
    I finished Phantom Doctrine! I drank very deeply of the game because I was enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay so I put off advancing the main story and did lots of tactical missions so I could a) afford all the best upgrades and b) have ample occasion to actually get to use them.

    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.

    Jacobkosh on
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  • ShortyShorty touching the meat Intergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
    I also played the first level of Nier: Automata and it did not make a great impression

    does it improve from there?

  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    The gameplay will probably never blow you away, it's mostly just serviceable and something you deal with to get more story

    In spite of that, it's one of the best games of the generation

    Maddoc on
  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    what you see in the demo/first level of automata is what you get pretty much in terms of gameplay yeah
    although it's much less punishing of death after the factory part is done

    BahamutZERO on
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  • BroloBrolo Broseidon Lord of the BroceanRegistered User regular
  • Crippl3Crippl3 oh noRegistered User regular
    edited September 2019
    Speaking of games that we're not sure of coming to PC but probably will, here's a bunch of piping hot new TGS trailers:

    Yakuza 7 Like A Dragon
    Story (English subs)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x6FUgFl-KQ
    Gameplay
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rabEooWDC4

    Project Resistance
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYTi1U9TC_A

    Death Stranding
    Briefing (aka it actually explains some story things) (there is a 49 minute gameplay trailer coming later this week)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwuPIgIsqyI

    Crippl3 on
  • KelorKelor Registered User regular
    Jacobkosh wrote: »
    I finished Phantom Doctrine! I drank very deeply of the game because I was enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay so I put off advancing the main story and did lots of tactical missions so I could a) afford all the best upgrades and b) have ample occasion to actually get to use them.

    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.

  • WearingglassesWearingglasses Of the friendly neighborhood variety Registered User regular
    That Death Stranding video still of the lady just went past the nadir of the Uncanny Valley and is about halway on the other side. It feels weird to me! I haven't seen her move, though, so maybe that's it.

  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    meaning she doesn't look uncanny?

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  • Indie WinterIndie Winter die Krähe Rudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    I'm... pretty sure I like Blasphemous

    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

    Indie Winter on
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  • Crippl3Crippl3 oh noRegistered User regular
    Man I am really not enjoying Dicey Dungeons as much as I thought I would and it's extremely bumming me out :(
    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.

  • FencingsaxFencingsax It is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understanding GNU Terry PratchettRegistered User regular
    I just need a yes or no answer, but is the sword the only main weapon you have through the game?

  • Indie WinterIndie Winter die Krähe Rudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered User regular
    Yes

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  • TaminTamin Registered User regular
    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.

    does RPS not stand for RockPaperShotgun? Because I'm looking at their reviews (and previews) and I'm not seeing anything like that.

  • PsykomaPsykoma Registered User regular
    I want to play borderlands 3 3because I quite enjoyed 2, but I flat out do not want to hear hardwick's voice.
    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?

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    Crippl3 wrote: »
    Man I am really not enjoying Dicey Dungeons as much as I thought I would and it's extremely bumming me out :(
    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.

    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.

  • HobnailHobnail Registered User regular
    Whos steaming their balls and asshole with John le Carre

    Broke as fuck in the style of the times. Gratitude is all that can return on your generosity.

    https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
  • David_TDavid_T A fashion yes-man is no good to me. Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered User regular
    Psykoma wrote: »
    I want to play borderlands 3 3because I quite enjoyed 2, but I flat out do not want to hear hardwick's voice.
    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?

    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.

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This discussion has been closed.