Ive found it strangely difficult to nail down, is Pathologic 2 like actual sequel to Pathologic or is it a siginificantly polished and gussied up re-release
The thing to know about Pathologic 1 is that it's sorta framed as a play. Which is why you can play through the same story line from the point of view of the different protagonists but have different things happen. I assume the 2nd game is just another version of that play.
hbomberguy did a video about Pathologic 1 that was pretty interesting. After he explains it all he then goes to give a full-on 'everyone should play this' recommendation for Pathologic 2.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Disco Elysium is a game where you can take a swing at an asshole tween, miss, and be so embarrassed that you retire from the police force to live under a bridge
It's an objectively perfect game, sorry
I cant tell if this is the same asshole tween or if this game is just infested with them but I started this game recently and when I tried to take a swing at them I fell down, had a heart attack and died.
The very first thing I did in the game was try to pick up my tie, fail, have a heart attack, and then die.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
im a little frustrated with my first day in Pathologic 2 because it freezes my computer and forces a complete restart, and getting chased to the ends of the earth by randos in the street is probably more frustrating than compelling
but i'm gonna take a few days then persevere. That whole opening sequence is phenomenally good.
Fuck yes. The next chapter in the "To The Moon" Series by freebird Games. Imposter Factory. I found this series with "Finding Paradise", the middle chapter, then went back and played To The Moon. God they are great games.
Disco Elysium is a game where you can take a swing at an asshole tween, miss, and be so embarrassed that you retire from the police force to live under a bridge
It's an objectively perfect game, sorry
I cant tell if this is the same asshole tween or if this game is just infested with them but I started this game recently and when I tried to take a swing at them I fell down, had a heart attack and died.
The very first thing I did in the game was try to pick up my tie, fail, have a heart attack, and then die.
Is Disco Elysium... the first roguelike-RPG hybrid?...
(The ellipses indicate facetiousness.)
Children's rights are human rights.
0
I ZimbraWorst song, played on ugliest guitarRegistered Userregular
I ended up getting Sims 3 and a couple of expansions for less than $20. I'm looking forward to the mundane adventures of Sperf Berkman and his cat, Chonk.
+1
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Fuck Me Tarkov Update:
Go into a scav raid at the mall very late, only 20 minutes left, but near the tech stores. I go in looking for left overs and find it totally unlooted and found two Tetriz, which are obviously knock off Tetris handhelds, and go for a lot of money. I grab them and run just as my keyboard decides to just break. The Numlock, volume, and other buttons on the top right start flicking, rapidly muting my sound on and off and putting keyboard lag. I somehow extracted but now I'm using my old keyboard as nothing I've tried has fixed my normal one.
Riot settled the gender discrimination lawsuit with their female employees. They've set up a $10,000,000 fund that will be used to pay all women who worked for them since 2014 an amount each based on “their tenure, length and status” as an employee.
It's a start, I suppose.
I want to like disco elysium but it sure does think slurs are funny
I think I disagree?
The characters who use em are universally pathetic and/or reprehensible people
"Should you make art with shitty people in it who say shitty things, and thus introduce more shitty things into the real world under the auspices of fiction" is an entirely valid argument, but I think it's a different one than, "The game thinks slurs are funny."
Riot settled the gender discrimination lawsuit with their female employees. They've set up a $10,000,000 fund that will be used to pay all women who worked for them since 2014 an amount each based on “their tenure, length and status” as an employee.
It's a start, I suppose.
Couldn't find the figure for their profits, but LoL made 1.7 billion in revenue in 2018. This'll cost them less than a percent of that.
Also, good lord thats a lot of revenue for a single year. Every person who works there should already be millionaire. Capitalism is fucked.
Apparently there's's a glitch on steam where page banners are all mixed up, so you have anime girls on the Dirt: Showdown page and a dude with a sniper rifle on a page for a Fable game, among others.
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I did wonder why I kept getting anime girls fucking everywhere even though I own zero games in an anime style and never even look at them in the store.
I mean, I think that Disco Elysium is very interested in forcing you to interact with unpleasantness. And part of that is making you interact with people who yell slurs and are generally kind of awful. And in addition to making their bigger points and trying to make it sad and unpleasant and unjust, I do think that the game find the idea of a child who's hopped up on speed yelling slurs at you funny.
But I dunno, i think it goes deeper than that. And I think that the underlying humanity of the game does make it worth it.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I want to like disco elysium but it sure does think slurs are funny
I think I disagree?
The characters who use em are universally pathetic and/or reprehensible people
"Should you make art with shitty people in it who say shitty things, and thus introduce more shitty things into the real world under the auspices of fiction" is an entirely valid argument, but I think it's a different one than, "The game thinks slurs are funny."
Yeah like one of the first things you can do is utterly dunk on a dumbass racist.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
+1
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
I did wonder why I kept getting anime girls fucking everywhere even though I own zero games in an anime style and never even look at them in the store.
I did not find the way that Disco Elysium used a variety of horrible ideologies, slurs, and racism ("scientific" or otherwise) to be a negative, and interviews with the creators gives me pretty positive feelings about the motive behind writing such things into the game.
Like, yes, some people use slurs. One is a drunken idiot racist you can dunk on, and two of them are children with pretty understandable reasons for being fucked up, and you're absolutely not supposed to feel those characters are morally upright or correct.
Among DE's many questions are, "What do we do with impossible ideals? How do we hold onto them in a broken world? Are they worth holding onto? If so, who do those ideals hurt? If not, what do we replace them with? Is the world worth saving? Are people? What's justice, and who gets it?"
I think all these questions are complicated by, and made more interesting by, having to interact with absolute shitheads. Other folks' mileage may vary, and that's totally fair.
Poorochondriac on
+9
Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
modern warfare is an amazing mystery game where every day I must do computer detective work and other random computer-y maintenance actions and occasionally it might actually play for longer than 10 minutes without crashing!
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Among DE's many questions are, "What do we do with impossible ideals? How do we hold onto them in a broken world? Are they worth holding onto? If not, what do we replace with? If so, who do those ideals hurt? Is the world worth saving? Are people? What's justice, and who gets it?"
I think all these questions are complicated by, and made more interesting by, having to interact with absolute shitheads. Other folks' mileage may vary, and that's totally fair.
I am gonna restart my playthrough soon because I got a little more comfortable with the systems and I don't wanna play a full game with logic at fuckin 1.
But one of my favorite things to do in the game so far was fucking bitch out a delinquent mom for being such a piece of shit, thus improving her kid's life.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
LasbrookIt takes a lot to make a stewWhen it comes to me and youRegistered Userregular
Oh boy I do not remember what I was doing in Battletech at all, I'm looking at the mechs in my bay and my pilots(with reset skill points), and just ?????
Oh boy I do not remember what I was doing in Battletech at all, I'm looking at the mechs in my bay and my pilots(with reset skill points), and just ?????
Bulwark is still best. Bulwark + Multi-shot for most of your pilots. Ongoing debate about whether Breaching Shot or Coolant Vent is better (I prefer Coolant Vent, although Breaching Shot is better for any dedicated LRM hurlers.)
It's usually handy to have a pilot with Sensor Lock along, especially if there will be turrets. I usually pair Sensor Lock with Bulwark and then go up Tactics for the Master Tactician skill (or whatever the name of it is.)
The piloting skills are better, but still not as good as the others. Incremental points in piloting are way better now, though, as you get passive defensive boosts at level 6 and again at either 9 or 10.
I dunno if it's the BEST strategy to have her rush up a mountain and one-shot some poor chump in round one of turn one, but it's a very SATISFYING strategy
+10
Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
Riot settled the gender discrimination lawsuit with their female employees. They've set up a $10,000,000 fund that will be used to pay all women who worked for them since 2014 an amount each based on “their tenure, length and status” as an employee.
It's a start, I suppose.
Couldn't find the figure for their profits, but LoL made 1.7 billion in revenue in 2018. This'll cost them less than a percent of that.
Also, good lord thats a lot of revenue for a single year. Every person who works there should already be millionaire. Capitalism is fucked.
Stuff like this is why if you're a high ranking executive and you "ball-tap" and dry hump your employees all day, all you get is a timeout for a couple of months so you can reflect about how wrong your behavior was.
Meanwhile, the people who called a bunch of internet shitheads mean names on twitter are still fired. I'm sure those folks are thrilled about the $10 million.
With the Newgame+ Feature completed we’re now focusing our work on the Post Game DLC that will add a little Epilogue to the current end of CrossCode. Among other things it will feature things like an extended Rhombus Square, more Quests, and a proper Final Dungeon. And also a few answers to some of the questions you might still have at the end of CrossCode’s story.
We don’t have a release date for the Post Game DLC yet, as it will still take some time to develop. We’re currently targeting Q2, 2020.
As we’re currently focused on the DLC, we unfortunately don’t have a lot of content ready for regular game update. However, you can expect an upcoming technical update in the next 1-2 weeks, as we plan to update NW.js, the software/engine we use to run CrossCode. We hope that this will fix some of the Crash issues people experience on Linux as well as Memory Leaks on Windows. There will also be a little feature added to that, but more on that later!
Also working on console versions, with the Xbox version being focused on first.
I’ve been mostly playing console games for the past ~six years, but should be finishing a pc build tomorrow. I’ve grabbed Total War: Warhammer 2 and Battletech off the steam sale, what other recent-ish titles should I be looking at?
I’m open to anything except horror, sims, and the more intensive 4x/strategy games (I’m on the fence with Stellaris, it looks neat but I also thought that about Crusader Kings 2 before dropping it after a couple hours).
On my buy-in-the-near-future list I’ve got Control, Disco Elysium, Plague Tale, a multiplayer shooter (either Rainbow Six or Overwatch, both of which I’ve played on console), possibly Monster Hunter when the expansion drops. I might add some bigger multiplatform titles, but particularly I’m interested in more modestly budgeted / indie releases that I might be overlooking.
Ok! Here's a quick list based on all of that, with notes in the spoilers:
GAMES WITH TACTICAL COMBAT
- XCOM and XCOM 2
(maybe you already played these on console, but if not, they're definitely worth it here!)
- the Shadowrun Returns RPGs (Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, Shadowrun Hong Kong)
These are by the studio that developed Battletech (and which is run by the guy who invented both tabletop franchises). They're story-heavy cyberpunk-fantasy RPGs with grid-based tactical combat, a la XCOM; you control a party of people specializing in various guns, melee weapons, and magic styles. Outside of combat, the stories are well-written with memorable characters and some difficult choices. Each game clocks in at 10-15 hours and I think they're excellent examples of how to do a good game on a small budget.
- Into the Breach
Giant kaiju monsters have invaded the world and only you, controlling a squad of mechs, can save it. You do this by battling the monsters on a grid, trying to defeat them all before they do critical damage to buildings and the people within. There's no random element, and the creatures move in predictable ways (and the game tells you what they're going to do with their turn) so you can pull off cool tricks: is a monster shooting at a building? Try knocking him into a different row so his shot hits his buddy instead. Playing optimally means you can defeat every monster and save every human with no losses. Of course, that's way easier said than done.
It's very Pacific Rim, with an interesting and welcome emphasis on saving lives, and you can get different mechs with different powers and equipment that can be upgraded, resulting in very different play experiences. The whole thing has a very tight, elegant feel, and the lo-fi pixel art presentation is charming.
- The Banner Saga 1, 2, and 3
Tactical RPGs where you control a dwindling caravan of warriors, refugees, and survivors fleeing the end of the world in a Norse-themed setting. The tactical combat has a very chess-like stark simplicity, where characters move and act in strictly-prescribed ways without an element of randomness. Which can be a bummer as you can't rely on a lucky headshot or whatever to save the day, but is very satisfying when your perfect tactics utterly destroy the enemy.
The campaign layer above the tactical layer is a mixed bag. The story is well-written and compelling and the presentation is lush, with characters and environments rendered in a very quasi-Disney, vibrant, colorful way, but the story presents a lot of choices where the stakes are obscure and the consequences don't become apparent until much later. Do you pick an apple from this tree? You did? Oh, you stupid fucking fool, now your best guy is dead. I kind of hated that part of the game - but it's a testament to how much I enjoyed thecore gameplay, and how fascinated I was with the story being told, that I plowed through anyway.
- Phantom Doctrine
A rough-around-the-edges, not entirely successful but smart and interesting and innovative XCOM-a-like set during the Cold War. You run a spy agency and are pitted against a global conspiracy; you recruit agents, build a global spy network (not too fiddly, though, this is much more XCOM than Crusader Kings), and send them on tactical missions where they can use stealth and gadgetry or go in guns blazing. Agents can develop personality quirks as you play and some might turn mole for the enemy - but you can also brainwash captured enemy agents to your own side.
The combat does an interesting thing where instead of relying on a percentage chance to hit (an infamous source of frustration in XCOM when your guys blow 99% headshots) every shot is assumed to hit instead, but targets have an Awareness score that is drained (very quickly) by being shot at and only regenerates in cover. So the onus is not on you to get lucky and roll the dice well, but to mitigate damage and incoming fire by doing everything you can to keep from being shot at in the first place. Which feels really appropriate for a spy game, to me.
ADVENTURE + PUZZLEY GAMES
- Unavowed
A 90s style pixel art adventure game combined with a Bioware RPG. You play an ordinary person in modern-day NYC (choosing their gender and a profession of either bartender, cop, or actor) who was possessed by a demon and forced to commit horrible crimes. Now you awake a year later, freed from the possession by the Unavowed, a secret society of monster hunters. You join them to help set right the demon's crimes and track it down. It's a classic puzzle adventure game, but each member of the Unavowed has a different skillset (one person is super-strong, another sees and communicates with ghosts, etc) and who you choose to accompany you on each mission changes how the game plays out. It's well-written and a ton of fun.
It's also a sequel to...
- The Blackwell series (The Blackwell Legacy, Blackwell Unbound, The Blackwell Convergence, The Blackwell Deception, The Blackwell Epiphany)
A series of indie adventure games by the creator of Unavowed made between 2008 and 2015. You play Rosa Blackwell, a reporter in NYC who discovers she's inherited the family curse: Joey, the ghost of a deceased wiseguy from the 20s who's been sent to Earth to help Rosa's family put lost souls to rest, often by solving the circumstances of their deaths. It's like the Sixth Sense, except Haley Joel Osment is an adult woman with social anxiety and Bruce Willis is a pinstriped joker who calls people "toots."
The games are well-written and the fantasy elements are very low-key; mostly you explore real-life New York environments and get involved in very slice-of-life (if sometimes tragic) stories of forlorn lovers, college kids who took a wrong turn, etc. The puzzles are mostly fair, to the point of being on the easy side. The games are short and sweet, each one clocking in at only a few hours long; playing them in a row feels like binging episodes of a TV show, and they build an over-narrative that comes to a satisfying conclusion. They're also only like a couple bucks apiece. I strongly recommend them if you like point-and-clicks.
- Heaven's Vault
A science-fiction archaeology game that puts you in the role of a woman trying to track down a missing scientist across a series of alien worlds, and challenges you to decipher the inscriptions left behind by a long-lost civilization to advance the story. That...might not sound like fun, but in truth, I was hooked. The alien language has some cool subtle shades of meaning that actually change your perception of the plot as you move through the game. The actual presentation is really lovely, with beautiful environments.
- Baba Is You
A puzzle game with charmingly minimalist graphics where the rules of the puzzle are physical objects within the puzzle, and manipulating those objects can change the rules. So if Baba (a cute little sheep thing) is You, you control the sheep on the screen. But if you push the word "baba" away from the phrase "baba is you" and replace it with the word "rock", suddenly you control every rock on the screen. Or maybe you want to get past some lava, so you say LAVA is DIRT. Those are just examples. Idk, it's a hard game to explain but it's incredibly intuitive and elegant in practice.
- Black Closet
A very weird and cool indie narrative puzzle game/visual novel...thing. I never see anyone talking about this, I think largely because its anime-y style gives people the wrong impression about it, but I strongly recommend it.
You play a young woman, a senior at an exclusive private boarding school for ladies, who is elected senior class president. It turns out that being head of the Student Council means being responsible for policing your fellow students to avoid scandal and keep the school's name out of the papers.
What this means in gameplay terms is that there are procedurally generated mysteries to solve. This blew my mind, because I didn't think procedural mystery generation was even possible, but here this indie anime game goes and does it? Anyway, what happens is that students come to you wtih a problem: Jenna is being kept awake at night by spooky noises, Raven has been depressed and has run away, Valerie and Ilana got into a brawl in the cafeteria over a boy.
You command the girls of the Student Council, each of whom have different specialties: one is towering and intimidating, one is scientifically gifted, one is such a wallflower that she can get anywhere without being seen. You assign them various tasks - talk to the witnesses, investigate the scene, break into someone's dorm. They succeed or fail based on their stats, and come back to you with information: the runaway girl had letters from a boy in her drawer, the strange noises are being made by the girl's roommate who wants her to fail calculus, the two angry girls tell you to fuck off. You decide what kind of action to take, whether to recommend anyone for suspension or expulsion, and are graded on your results. Meanwhile, time is passing and you have your own exams to study for.
And along with all this, there's an overarching story involving a mystery at the school, and a dating-sim element where you can hang out with the various girls of the Student Council, each of whom has their own story, and try to get to know them better. Which is good, because one of them is a traitor who's trying to undermine your efforts on behalf of a rival school. All these different subsystems and the actual overarching narrative feed together and synergize with each other in a way I don't often see in games and really dig.
GAMES WHERE THE POINT IS THE WRITING
- Firewatch
You play a troubled man named Henry in 1989, who takes a summer job as a fire lookout at the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. You're hundreds of miles from any kind of civilization and your only human contact is Delilah, your supervisor in the next tower over, whom you can speak to by walkie-talkie. The game takes place in a few square miles of beautiful forest wilderness around Henry's tower, which you can explore (mostly) at will, and it's all rendered in a beautiful, vivid style influenced by 1930s WPA poster art.
A mystery begins to unfold involving disappearing campers and someone stalking Henry and Delilah, and the mystery begins unraveling the baggage that drove both these characters to flee the world and get a job in one of the most remote places in the country, but the meat of the story happens in your radio calls with Delilah; you can choose your responses, and that gradually shapes how these characters' relationship evolves.
The game doesn't have much gameplay beyond just walking and talking (although unlike other "walking simulators," you do get to make some interesting choices through the dialogue system) but even with just those things it's an absolutely memorable experience.
- Gone Home
Another "walking simulator," this one casts you in the role of a young woman who's returned to her family home after a year abroad only to find the old place empty on a rainy night. You begin exploring to try to figure out what happened, moving through people's rooms, rooting through their stuff, reading old diaries and receipts to reconstruct the story of your family. Again, there's no real gameplay beyond just, like, opening doors and going through closets and drawers, but the presentation is lovely (the graphics are realistic-ish but not stultifyingly so, and there's good music and voiceover work) and the writing is often poignant.
Since you don't like horror, I will go ahead and spoil a minor thing by revealing that no, there are no serial killers or ghosts. The game tries to be coy about this at first, and has the lights flicker (it's an old house in a thunderstorm) but what's going on is more personal and more mundane.
- Sunless Sea and its sequel Sunless Skies
Narrative-driven RPG/uh...vehicle games?...where you're the captain of a ship (a steamship in Sunless Sea, a space train in Skies) voyaging through an atmospheric world of dark Victorian/Edwardian gothic mystery/comedy/horror.
The quick version is that it's the late 1800s, and London has been magically transported to a vast cavern the size of a continent underneath Europe, called the Neath. Hidden from God's sight, physical laws work differently in the Neath; death is a temporary inconvenience, devils are real and walk around in top hats, and magic and other alien forces are at work. Most of the Neath is dominated by a huge underground ocean, the Unterzee, which is dotted with islands on which various strange and alien civilizations reside, and its waters conceal huge monsters and other horrors.
You play a captain trying to make a fortune on the Unterzee, beginning with a rusted junky steamship and hopefully advancing to bigger and better things. You steam between ports, carrying cargo and undertaking missions (transporting people, hunting monters, looking for resources etc), all while trying to earn enough money to keep your crew fed and your ship stocked with fuel. When you arrive in port, you navigate the story through a series of choose-your-own-adventure text boxes and skill checks (different captains can specialize in different things, and you can earn XP and improve your skills). Each island has its own mysteries to unravel, and it's all told in writing that is wonderfully evocative, alternately touching and poignant, hilarious, exhilarating, or terrifying.
The actual sailing of the ship is functional rather than super great and exciting, and the game has a steep learning curve, especially early on. There's a roguelike element where death is frequent and freqently unfair, but a captain can pass on some of their possessions and stats to a successor (and it's also possible to beat the game in one of many ways, which also confers additional bonuses to future captains). The problem is that climbing back up to the top can be time-consuming, so I personally play with permadeath disabled and saving/loading enabled. The star of the story isn't the gameplay, anyway, but the writing. There's also some genuinely wonderful music.
Sunless Skies is the same deal and a direct sequel to Seas, except it takes place a decade later, in the early 1900s, and London has escaped the Neath and created an empire in space (albeit space as imagined by 19th-century writers, where "aetheric wind" blows between stars, and solar systems are encased in great glass spheres). The gameplay is much improved and the controls are better, as are the visuals. It's a straight improvement in most respects but it's still worth playing Seas first.
Tales from the Borderlands
I guess technically you could call this an adventure, but the gameplay elements are incredibly minimal. Instead, it's more like an interactive movie where you make dialogue and story choices. It just happens to be a very good interactive movie, with terrific dialogue, and is easily my favorite Telltale game. I hugely recommend it even if you don't think much of Borderlands otherwise.
Jacobkosh on
+15
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I kinda put Into the Breach as more of a puzzle game than a straight up tactics game. You often have a very specific set of moves that will actually bring you to victory in those missions, whereas in a lot of tactics games there is a chance to straight up fail a lot of actions.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
+3
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Any sort of genre breakdown is ultimately a judgment call. I could also stick Shadowrun in the narrative section, since for a lot of people the story is absolutely its core appeal versus the XCOM-lite turn-based RPG combat.
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Also if you like 4X games then the best 4X game of all time is Master of Orion 2.
It's. So. Fuckin. Good.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
+3
BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
good news, everyone!
Star Citizen hits $250m in funding! Phase 1 funding is almost complete!
Posts
The thing to know about Pathologic 1 is that it's sorta framed as a play. Which is why you can play through the same story line from the point of view of the different protagonists but have different things happen. I assume the 2nd game is just another version of that play.
I still won't ever play it myself, but i'm glad it exists.
The very first thing I did in the game was try to pick up my tie, fail, have a heart attack, and then die.
but i'm gonna take a few days then persevere. That whole opening sequence is phenomenally good.
Might try verifying the files or something
Steam // Secret Satan
These were the first games that i actually cried while playing.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Steam
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Is Disco Elysium... the first roguelike-RPG hybrid?...
(The ellipses indicate facetiousness.)
Go into a scav raid at the mall very late, only 20 minutes left, but near the tech stores. I go in looking for left overs and find it totally unlooted and found two Tetriz, which are obviously knock off Tetris handhelds, and go for a lot of money. I grab them and run just as my keyboard decides to just break. The Numlock, volume, and other buttons on the top right start flicking, rapidly muting my sound on and off and putting keyboard lag. I somehow extracted but now I'm using my old keyboard as nothing I've tried has fixed my normal one.
Riot settled the gender discrimination lawsuit with their female employees. They've set up a $10,000,000 fund that will be used to pay all women who worked for them since 2014 an amount each based on “their tenure, length and status” as an employee.
It's a start, I suppose.
I think I disagree?
The characters who use em are universally pathetic and/or reprehensible people
"Should you make art with shitty people in it who say shitty things, and thus introduce more shitty things into the real world under the auspices of fiction" is an entirely valid argument, but I think it's a different one than, "The game thinks slurs are funny."
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Couldn't find the figure for their profits, but LoL made 1.7 billion in revenue in 2018. This'll cost them less than a percent of that.
Also, good lord thats a lot of revenue for a single year. Every person who works there should already be millionaire. Capitalism is fucked.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/so-uh-if-you-own-dirt-showdown-on-steam-could-you-pls-check-it-on-your-list-to-see-if-theres-anything-wrong.156616/
But I dunno, i think it goes deeper than that. And I think that the underlying humanity of the game does make it worth it.
Steam // Secret Satan
Yeah like one of the first things you can do is utterly dunk on a dumbass racist.
You need the light of Nep in your life
Like, yes, some people use slurs. One is a drunken idiot racist you can dunk on, and two of them are children with pretty understandable reasons for being fucked up, and you're absolutely not supposed to feel those characters are morally upright or correct.
I think all these questions are complicated by, and made more interesting by, having to interact with absolute shitheads. Other folks' mileage may vary, and that's totally fair.
I am gonna restart my playthrough soon because I got a little more comfortable with the systems and I don't wanna play a full game with logic at fuckin 1.
But one of my favorite things to do in the game so far was fucking bitch out a delinquent mom for being such a piece of shit, thus improving her kid's life.
Steam
Bulwark is still best. Bulwark + Multi-shot for most of your pilots. Ongoing debate about whether Breaching Shot or Coolant Vent is better (I prefer Coolant Vent, although Breaching Shot is better for any dedicated LRM hurlers.)
It's usually handy to have a pilot with Sensor Lock along, especially if there will be turrets. I usually pair Sensor Lock with Bulwark and then go up Tactics for the Master Tactician skill (or whatever the name of it is.)
The piloting skills are better, but still not as good as the others. Incremental points in piloting are way better now, though, as you get passive defensive boosts at level 6 and again at either 9 or 10.
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
I dunno if it's the BEST strategy to have her rush up a mountain and one-shot some poor chump in round one of turn one, but it's a very SATISFYING strategy
Stuff like this is why if you're a high ranking executive and you "ball-tap" and dry hump your employees all day, all you get is a timeout for a couple of months so you can reflect about how wrong your behavior was.
Meanwhile, the people who called a bunch of internet shitheads mean names on twitter are still fired. I'm sure those folks are thrilled about the $10 million.
Also working on console versions, with the Xbox version being focused on first.
Ok! Here's a quick list based on all of that, with notes in the spoilers:
GAMES WITH TACTICAL COMBAT
- XCOM and XCOM 2
- the Shadowrun Returns RPGs (Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, Shadowrun Hong Kong)
- Into the Breach
It's very Pacific Rim, with an interesting and welcome emphasis on saving lives, and you can get different mechs with different powers and equipment that can be upgraded, resulting in very different play experiences. The whole thing has a very tight, elegant feel, and the lo-fi pixel art presentation is charming.
- The Banner Saga 1, 2, and 3
The campaign layer above the tactical layer is a mixed bag. The story is well-written and compelling and the presentation is lush, with characters and environments rendered in a very quasi-Disney, vibrant, colorful way, but the story presents a lot of choices where the stakes are obscure and the consequences don't become apparent until much later. Do you pick an apple from this tree? You did? Oh, you stupid fucking fool, now your best guy is dead. I kind of hated that part of the game - but it's a testament to how much I enjoyed thecore gameplay, and how fascinated I was with the story being told, that I plowed through anyway.
- Phantom Doctrine
The combat does an interesting thing where instead of relying on a percentage chance to hit (an infamous source of frustration in XCOM when your guys blow 99% headshots) every shot is assumed to hit instead, but targets have an Awareness score that is drained (very quickly) by being shot at and only regenerates in cover. So the onus is not on you to get lucky and roll the dice well, but to mitigate damage and incoming fire by doing everything you can to keep from being shot at in the first place. Which feels really appropriate for a spy game, to me.
ADVENTURE + PUZZLEY GAMES
- Unavowed
It's also a sequel to...
- The Blackwell series (The Blackwell Legacy, Blackwell Unbound, The Blackwell Convergence, The Blackwell Deception, The Blackwell Epiphany)
The games are well-written and the fantasy elements are very low-key; mostly you explore real-life New York environments and get involved in very slice-of-life (if sometimes tragic) stories of forlorn lovers, college kids who took a wrong turn, etc. The puzzles are mostly fair, to the point of being on the easy side. The games are short and sweet, each one clocking in at only a few hours long; playing them in a row feels like binging episodes of a TV show, and they build an over-narrative that comes to a satisfying conclusion. They're also only like a couple bucks apiece. I strongly recommend them if you like point-and-clicks.
- Heaven's Vault
- Baba Is You
- Black Closet
You play a young woman, a senior at an exclusive private boarding school for ladies, who is elected senior class president. It turns out that being head of the Student Council means being responsible for policing your fellow students to avoid scandal and keep the school's name out of the papers.
What this means in gameplay terms is that there are procedurally generated mysteries to solve. This blew my mind, because I didn't think procedural mystery generation was even possible, but here this indie anime game goes and does it? Anyway, what happens is that students come to you wtih a problem: Jenna is being kept awake at night by spooky noises, Raven has been depressed and has run away, Valerie and Ilana got into a brawl in the cafeteria over a boy.
You command the girls of the Student Council, each of whom have different specialties: one is towering and intimidating, one is scientifically gifted, one is such a wallflower that she can get anywhere without being seen. You assign them various tasks - talk to the witnesses, investigate the scene, break into someone's dorm. They succeed or fail based on their stats, and come back to you with information: the runaway girl had letters from a boy in her drawer, the strange noises are being made by the girl's roommate who wants her to fail calculus, the two angry girls tell you to fuck off. You decide what kind of action to take, whether to recommend anyone for suspension or expulsion, and are graded on your results. Meanwhile, time is passing and you have your own exams to study for.
And along with all this, there's an overarching story involving a mystery at the school, and a dating-sim element where you can hang out with the various girls of the Student Council, each of whom has their own story, and try to get to know them better. Which is good, because one of them is a traitor who's trying to undermine your efforts on behalf of a rival school. All these different subsystems and the actual overarching narrative feed together and synergize with each other in a way I don't often see in games and really dig.
GAMES WHERE THE POINT IS THE WRITING
- Firewatch
A mystery begins to unfold involving disappearing campers and someone stalking Henry and Delilah, and the mystery begins unraveling the baggage that drove both these characters to flee the world and get a job in one of the most remote places in the country, but the meat of the story happens in your radio calls with Delilah; you can choose your responses, and that gradually shapes how these characters' relationship evolves.
The game doesn't have much gameplay beyond just walking and talking (although unlike other "walking simulators," you do get to make some interesting choices through the dialogue system) but even with just those things it's an absolutely memorable experience.
- Gone Home
Since you don't like horror, I will go ahead and spoil a minor thing by revealing that no, there are no serial killers or ghosts. The game tries to be coy about this at first, and has the lights flicker (it's an old house in a thunderstorm) but what's going on is more personal and more mundane.
- Sunless Sea and its sequel Sunless Skies
The quick version is that it's the late 1800s, and London has been magically transported to a vast cavern the size of a continent underneath Europe, called the Neath. Hidden from God's sight, physical laws work differently in the Neath; death is a temporary inconvenience, devils are real and walk around in top hats, and magic and other alien forces are at work. Most of the Neath is dominated by a huge underground ocean, the Unterzee, which is dotted with islands on which various strange and alien civilizations reside, and its waters conceal huge monsters and other horrors.
You play a captain trying to make a fortune on the Unterzee, beginning with a rusted junky steamship and hopefully advancing to bigger and better things. You steam between ports, carrying cargo and undertaking missions (transporting people, hunting monters, looking for resources etc), all while trying to earn enough money to keep your crew fed and your ship stocked with fuel. When you arrive in port, you navigate the story through a series of choose-your-own-adventure text boxes and skill checks (different captains can specialize in different things, and you can earn XP and improve your skills). Each island has its own mysteries to unravel, and it's all told in writing that is wonderfully evocative, alternately touching and poignant, hilarious, exhilarating, or terrifying.
The actual sailing of the ship is functional rather than super great and exciting, and the game has a steep learning curve, especially early on. There's a roguelike element where death is frequent and freqently unfair, but a captain can pass on some of their possessions and stats to a successor (and it's also possible to beat the game in one of many ways, which also confers additional bonuses to future captains). The problem is that climbing back up to the top can be time-consuming, so I personally play with permadeath disabled and saving/loading enabled. The star of the story isn't the gameplay, anyway, but the writing. There's also some genuinely wonderful music.
Sunless Skies is the same deal and a direct sequel to Seas, except it takes place a decade later, in the early 1900s, and London has escaped the Neath and created an empire in space (albeit space as imagined by 19th-century writers, where "aetheric wind" blows between stars, and solar systems are encased in great glass spheres). The gameplay is much improved and the controls are better, as are the visuals. It's a straight improvement in most respects but it's still worth playing Seas first.
Tales from the Borderlands
It's. So. Fuckin. Good.
Star Citizen hits $250m in funding! Phase 1 funding is almost complete!
Dec 3 - Phoenix Point (Epic Game Store, Tactics, Strategy, X-Com Like)
Dec 3 - Halo Reach (PC) (shooter, action, FPS, single player, multiplayer)