Gaming fleeting thoughts

[karhell]

Having not played the franchise since Resident Evil 4, I was wondering; have they only recently turned to found-footage style? I have Resident Evil 5 & 6 in my 'to-do' Steam list. Anyway, I started playing it, but being alone in the house at night, I found it too scary to continue. I barely made it five minutes through before switching it off. I'll wait until I have company (and daylight) before I try it again.

As far as I know, the found-footage style is new to RE7. And yeah, they really upped the spook factor, from what I've seen (only watched a let's play of the demo, though).

[Sableagle]

It arrived yesterday and, having only Dark Souls III to play (where I miserably failed to defeat the first boss: I'm not a particularly good gamer, and From Software games are hard af), I decided to download the Resident Evil 7 demo. ...

That whole "died in the prologue" thing may actually be part of the plot, if Dark Souls III is anything like Demon Souls ... or Bloodborne or Carl of Duty: Black Cops 3* or Shadow of Mordor or Dead Space 3 or CoD IW, GoW, MSS, D'sD, ME2, LoK or P.


* not my joke

[Felstaff]

Tried my first gas cloud harvesting in Eve. It... didn't go too well. Probed and found an unstable wormhole, and jumped right through it. Being in -1.0 sec, it sure does feel lonely to be in unreachable space. I remembered (this time!) to save the wormhole's location, so I wouldn't end up drifting in uncharted space when I feel like going home. Unfortunately, I took my eye off the ball for, like, 5 seconds whilst I was trying to zone in on a cosmic signature. I'm quite slow at pinpointing stuff, and was concentrating too deeply on the solar system map, so I didn't see the dude's ship until he literally bumped into me. It only takes 500 damage to destroy a Venture ship, and while I was frantically hitting the warp button to a safe location, he destroyed me in one clean shot. He did, kindly, destroy my squishy body too, saving me the need to navigate my naked ass back to the wormhole, so I re-cloned myself back at the cozy, safe Ammold V Republic Military School, where I had another Venture waiting to be destroyed.

I've noticed Ventures have doubled in price in this area of space, so whilst I'm hopping around refitting my ship (to the tune of 5,000,000 ISK), I'm going to have another shot at gas cloud harvesting. If I lose this ship, well, I have zero dollar left and only a badly-fit Burst ship to fall back on. So it'll be back to scraping veldspar off asteroids for 12 hours straight to get me back in the black again.

Here I go...

[DaBigCheez]

On the plus side, if you find a good gas cloud, you can make back ten times the value of your ship in one run. (Note, however, that wormhole gas sites have very powerful "Sleeper" enemies that spawn after about twenty minutes - be careful how far you press your luck!) Exploration can be a similar high-variance but potentially high-profit activity.

Try doing the "Career Agent" missions if you haven't - they should give you a nice gaggle of ships. https://www.thealphasguide.com/start/ can also be a nice resource if you're just starting out

[Felstaff]

I lost my ship again; only got to mine for a few minutes. So close to warping away with nearly 3,000,000 ISK in gaseous bootay. But no, I looked away again for only a few seconds (damn you side-monitor, with your internet treats!), and--a woman, this time--had showed up and locked onto me before I realised what was happening. My own fault again, but crikey these Wanted Bandits are fast. I nearly got away with it too, if it hadn't been for that meddling warp disruptor they managed to toss out just as my ship was beaming its way out of Dodge. Their username was something stupid, like Dr1ll4 K1ll4 (drill four kill four?). I bet 2004 them really regrets such a sucky moniker.

Anyway, not enough moolah to get the gas-fit again. Had to spend a few spacebucks doing regular mining shit again at 700,000 a pop. Slowly build up the credits. This wasn't like eleven years ago, when you could just buy a ship with a Scrooge McDuck's moneybin-sized hold, and while away the hours while you went off to college, and came back home to enough cash to buy a golden-palace-sized machine that specialises in printing out golden palaces.

[Sableagle]

...something stupid, like Dr1ll4 K1ll4 (drill four kill four?).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079082/

[Thesh]

Fucking Dishonored 2. I am at the beginning of the second mission in Dishonored 2, I haven't encountered a single hostile, how the fuck do I have a kill, and why do all my saves have it? Why the hell isn't there at least a restart from the beginning of the mission? Yeah, fuck this shit.

[Felstaff]

I am, as it turns out, aware enough of both the intricate nuances of leetspeak and Abel Ferrara movies to break that particular near-indecipherable code.

[Thesh]

So started a game of Civ 6 for the first time since the new patch (which adds an Alert status that wakes on nearby enemies!):

I mean, at least I don't have to worry about barbarians... This was pretty much standard settings, just changed the map to the new "Earth" map.

[HES]

(which adds an Alert status that wakes on nearby enemies!)

Wow. I'm glad I haven't got round to picking it up yet if they're only just getting round to that.

[Thesh]

Yeah, I quit the game after losing entire units to me not knowing there was a nearby enemy (generally just having so many moves in one turn that I forgot to wake the one unit that was under attack - any unit that gets attacked should be awoken no matter what).

EDIT: Playing a little more, I'm still annoyed by the trade system. I'll offer silk for diamonds, coffee for elephants when we both have multiple of ours and none of the others but they reject 100% of the time, yet I've had them come back the next round and offer 10 gold per turn for 30 turns, a luxury resource, and open borders for the exact same thing I just offered them for just the exact same luxury resource they offered.

EDIT 2: It wouldn't be so much of a problem if luxuries weren't the only way to bring amenities into the city early on in the game, forcing you to trade ridiculous amounts of gold if you don't have enough amenities for a city.

EDIT 3: Also, still no way to preemptive strike without a huge warmonger penalty when an opponent is massing troops on your border, obviously preparing for an attack, even when they had previously declared war on me and lost. I think I had every right to capture Leeds, and cut off her land route to Africa (and she did cede the city). Also, where Leeds is now used to stand Seoul, which I was Suzerain of when she launched an unprovoked attack and took the city state. Of course, while I was attempting to liberate Seoul, fucking Toronto took the city and razed it. Seriously, fuck you, Toronto. Assholes. I'm only your Suzerain because you are located right next to Spain (who is currently an ally, but who knows for how long?).

[Sableagle]

How did this get from Tatooine to Middle Earth?

[Thesh]

Is that a movie or something? I'm trying to figure out why I need JavaScript, and wondering how many more things I will have to allow before it actually displays.

[Sableagle]

It's a thumbnailed version of an image hosted on photobucket. EVERYTHING wants Javascript these days, probably to track how many times each image gets viewed and from what countries. Here:

THAT. I last saw that being herded across the dunes of Tatooine by sand-people. What's it doing in a wolf lair in Middle Earth?

[New User]

My guess is that either it's meant to be an animal from Middle Earth, and the resemblance is a coincidence, or else, if it's meant to be from Star Wars, it's there as an homage or easter egg.

Nerd research:

Spoiler:

The animal from Tatooine in Star Wars is called a bantha. A web search for a bantha shows that the horns are different from the image above. A web search for a bantha skull gives many results of an emblem from Boba Fett's armor, which I have found described by Star Wars fans as commonly mistaken for a bantha skull, and apparently is being called a mythosaur skull. It's a stylized image, apparently not meant to be an accurate depiction of any skull.

After a web search for "bantha skull tatooine", I could find no image of a bantha skull from the films. I remember the droids (or maybe it was just the stormtroopers search for the droids) being near enormous bones, which google tells me is from an animal called a krayt dragon. The skull looks different, and has no horns.

I found an image of a bantha skull from Star Wars: The Clone Wars film, and the horns are different from the image above, matching the horns of the bantha in the films.

Bantha skull from Star Wars: The Clone Wars film. Taken from Wookiepedia.

[Sableagle]

I was thinking of this:



Pretty much bison with bigger horns, and they have "prety much bison with bigger horns" in LotRO too. They wander around the Misty Mountains, and murr and stamp their feet at you if you get too close while hunting goblins, wargs and yetis.

[SecondTalon]

How big do you think Bison are?

[Sizik]

It's a thumbnailed version of an image hosted on photobucket. EVERYTHING wants Javascript these days, probably to track how many times each image gets viewed and from what countries. Here:
ScreenShot00191 Big skull.jpg
THAT. I last saw that being herded across the dunes of Tatooine by sand-people. What's it doing in a wolf lair in Middle Earth?

Looks like a Balrog skull.

[Sableagle]

How big do you think Bison are?

Considerably larger than spiders?

[gmalivuk]

I split the FO4 discussion into the FO4 thread, as it was no longer really fleeting (plus that's one of the few threads that correctly shows up in my egosearch so I'll be able to keep up with the conversation there more than here).

[Koa]

It has been a while on this neck of the forum. Page 10 was getting weird too.

[Xeio]

Newer games I haven't even finished and for some reason I reinstalled Startopia and got 5 missions in...

[karhell]

Newer games I haven't even finished and for some reason I reinstalled Startopia and got 5 missions in...

Funny coincidence, I reinstalled Startopia just last week. Haven't been able to play it unfortunately, the damn thing refuses to launch. Did you need any tinkering to get it to run ?

[Xeio]

I recall it crashed a few times while I was fiddling with the settings, I may have had to launch it 3 times till it "stuck" too. I did have to avoid setting the resolution too high once it loaded (my native monitor resolution just crashes the game instantly). I think it's set up to use a software renderer device rather than my GPU by default by the installer.

Otherwise no particular issues I remember. Windows 10, installed from GoG.

[Flumble]

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a working version of Battlefield 2142. The master server by GameSpy shut down in 2014 already, but a few months ago some people (the same team that reverse-engineered a master server for Battlefield 2) managed to make a new one for BF2142 too. So it's time to fuel my addiction again, together with some 1000 others.

The game shows its age though: when there's a bit of lag (>100 ms, when playing on a trans-atlantic server because everyone's over there) and your movement is slightly out of sync with the server, you start bouncing back and forth like crazy. And you can barely jump over a fence while standing against it, instead you need some forward momentum. (also there's no special case/animation/action for jumping over a fence; which is nice in a way, because here you can actually stand on the fence)

[Zohar]

On a whim decided to install Assassin's Creed II again. Enjoying it quite a bit. Yes I've played it before, but it's nice to come back to something familiar, and a highlight of that series.

[Xanthir]

Also, Ezio is just legit the best character. My wife and I can both swoon over him!

[Felstaff]

I'm on the last leg of Brotherhood. Ezio is tricked out and Rome is entirely out of the Borgia's control. Now I'm maxed out, it should be a cakewalk, but I only seem to play it in fits and bursts. Which explains why I'm only as far as the third game in a 99+ game series. I'm annoyed that they stopped numbering them properly after "II". Now I don't know whether I should play Unity before Syndicate, or Revelations before Rogue. I didn't even go to see the Fassbender movie film!

[Zohar]

I didn't even go to see the Fassbender movie film!

From what I hear you didn't miss much.

[Xeio]

I reinstalled Black Flag recently, though I haven't restarted it as of yet. I lost my save file when I originally tried to play through which put me off finishing it the first time.

[Zohar]

Oh yeah, that can be a hindrance to getting back in a game. I played Valkyria Chronicles for a whole while and then lost my save, and never got back to it. Black Flag is pretty great, though.

[Xeio]

I have to find all those sea shanties agaaaaain (because I can't imagine playing Black Flag without all those sea shanties).

[Magnanimous]

I've been playing Age of Empires 2 for nostalgia and the new expansions. It holds up pretty well, although the unit AI is annoying.

[Sableagle]

I have to find all those sea shanties agaaaaain (because I can't imagine playing Black Flag without all those sea shanties).

Sea shanties vary from nearly safe for work to the downright unsafe for a deserted island, via adorable, the kind of sweet and the obscene.

Don't forget the classics.

[KnightExemplar]

I've talked about Hatsune Miku: Project Diva before. The english release last year was... okay.

But now I got "Future Tone", and boy, this game is just so much better. There are over a hundred songs (a lot I don't like, but a lot that I do like). And as silly as this may seem... a lot of the dance routines just look better in this new game. The game definitely puts an absurd amount of emphasis on the dance routines of the virtual characters, so... yeah, its important within the context of the game. Take for example, the song "Hello, Worker". When you youtube for other people's playthroughs, you can clearly see how many accessories and costumes are available for customization of the routine.

A kind of stupid thing that I appreciate in Future Tone: there's a button (L2 + R2) which picks out the default costume associated with the current song. Diva X (the PS4 game last year) had bonuses for insane combinations of accessories... from a "power-gamer" perspective, I always was interested in maximizing my bonus... but it would come up with insane combinations like kitty-cat ears, a rabbit face-mask and a crazy bowtie for like +8% bonuses or whatever. In Future Tone, I can quickly select a reasonable default costume and not have to worry about playing dress up. While for others, the dress-up opportunity is still there if that's your shtick.

The game is organized into two packages for $25ish each. The "Future Tone" songs (itself $25) are songs from earlier PS2 games. While "Colorful Tone" songs (another $25ish) are songs from the arcade version of the game, which was also never released in America. But this is my 2nd buy in this series, and I'm actually enjoying it now.

---------

The game is entirely self-aware, and includes internet meme-hits like Nyan Cat and Ievan Polkka (aka: Leek-spin, so of course Miku pulls out the Leak as part of the dance).

As usual, all of the songs are sung by Volcaloids (aka: robots), but the song selection is just so huge that the game does cover a lot of genres. Rock, Pop, electronica, etc. etc. The quality of the Volcaloid lyrics are somewhat masked by my ears (I don't understand Japanese...) but overall the "pleasantness" of the song depends on the arranger / composer.

One major point of contention: although the menus are all translated to English, there are no English-translated lyrics to any of the songs in this new release. The lyrics are in romanji for easy pronunciation, but I'm not really going to be able to understand it. Project Diva X did have english subtitles to all of the songs. But because of the shear number of songs available... I think its still okay anyway.

I still stand by and say that there are better music games out there. (Superbeat Xonic for the Vita). But Hastune Miku Future Tone is pretty darn good. Definitely better than "Diva X" from last year.

[Sableagle]

Quest text, approximately: recover the belt-pouch from the Guaradan Thief who stole it.
Translation to gameplay: go out there and kill every Guaradan Thief you see until you get a pop-up saying you've retrieved the pouch.
What quest focus* does: points at a particular Guaradan Thief, ignoring all others, and continues to point at where he was until I pass an invisible line in the snow (the perpendicular bisector of the line from him to another particular Guaradan Thief) then jumps to point at a particular other Guaradan Thief.

I think either the pouch is assigned to a random one of a scattered group of them or each of that group has a chance of yielding the pouch when killed, and the others just happened to be in the area too.

It'd be nice if quest focus would restrict itself to pointing at creatures that are actually in the game at the time and ignore the ones that don't currently exist.


* arrowhead on your compass rim telling you which direction to go to get within 50m of quest objective.

[Zohar]

Ugh, my Assassin's Creed II save was erased in a game crash, and I was pretty far in. I found save files from around where I was, but the person who did them didn't get all the collectibles I had. Other than those stupid feathers, I pretty much got everything that was available up to my point in the game. I tried to look for a save editor but all the ones I found are for XBOX saves, so unless something else pops up I'll probably just quit.

In happier news, it looks like Ni No Kuni 2 will be released for PC! I haven't played any of them (lack of consoles) but it looks gorgeous and has a soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi, so I have pretty high hopes for it.

[Koa]

I finished Raven Shield with the 2.0 mod and I'm still coming back to it for fun. As much as I enjoy the reticle, I didn't know how much I missed iron sights, and it seems the two are mutually exclusive. Raven Shield doesn't have iron sights, and so the iron sights are more like a 2D scope being brought up, and such a thing would look especially terrible if the reticle couldn't go away. The reticle in the Rainbow series has always been very expressive visual feedback of when you should be firing and what causes inaccuracy, so I find it a bigger loss than in other FPS games. Apart from that there's also a mod that adds 3D iron sights (significantly better), but it has a few devastating bugs. For being the last and ultimate version of its kind the game isn't in a prime state.

Early on I was interested in using sniper cover teams. After several failures I figured the best way to do it is to play a lone covert sniper, using the other teams for breaching and clearing. I made a video doing it in the Swiss Alpine Village. Not the best map for it but definitely not the worst. It's a very quirky and suboptimal strategy but I enjoy it.

[Koa]

Torment Tides of Numenera quietly released. Very dialogue heavy game, probably even more so than Planescape Torment. You can avoid most fights with skill checks and it's a little too easy to do so, sometimes even easier than fighting due to the unusual stat system in place. In PsT there are often encounters where you have four dialogue options and only one will maybe lead towards you talking your way out while the rest would lead to a fight. In TToN, you're given four options where one of them is clearly the "let's fight" option, and the other three are skill check dice rolls for getting out. If you fail one you can do the next one, or even retry. And your companions make this process even easier because they can use their stat pools or provide bonuses. It's far too easy to avoid fights, but maybe it's a good thing because...

The combat is hideously simple, arguably bad. I'm not even sure that I like it more than PsT even though on paper it should be better. No tactics, no challenge, no thought. Sometimes simplistic combat can still have a sense of satisfaction, but there is none here. Same thing with character progression. You choose what you want when you level up, but each choice is almost entirely pointless, especially if you plan to avoid combat.

It's otherwise an exploration of the nonchalant weirdness of the Numenera universe. Multiple people stuck in a single body, someone who has connected with many alternate reality forms of themselves, someone who has only a vague understanding of what it means to exist in the present moment. Your character is a fragment of a mysterious god mage who transcended mortality by being persistently reborn. Typical stuff. The boring people almost seem more unusual.

So I still find it very fun despite the dull gameplay systems. The falling star thing is one of the more interesting introductions to a cRPG. As a spiritual successor I do approve.

Why isn't there a codex or Tyranny-style tooltip thing? And why didn't they put pictures like this in the loading screens? You don't get to see that kind of vantage in game.

[Felstaff]

I was thinking of getting it.

Completed Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. All I need to do to get my 100% completion rate is to collect ~8 or so Borgia flags from the Romulus levels, achieve 100% sync with about ~15 missions, and do all the things that the thieves' guild/courtesans require me to do. Which are silly things like 'throw 50 guards into scaffolding' and 'jump from 10 beams onto a horse' (or is it the other way 'round?). It's more fun replaying the earlier missions when you have a tanked-up Ezio++ looking like a suave Italian Juggernaut.

I literally don't know why I'm bothering with getting 100%. The minute I achieved the magic 100 on Assassin's Creed II, I switched it off, and haven't played it since. I just have this... psychological desire to get All The Things, even after everyone else stopped bothering seven years ago.

I also suck at the combat. There's one requirement where you need to get a 5-kill-streak in order to complete the mission at 100%. I simply can't do it. Although I'm sure I did it: I killed five guards with five clicks of the mouse in a row, but still it said I'd failed once the timer expired. I dislike the combat enough to not 'get good at' it; I ended up roaring at my screen in frustration every time someone smacked me over the head just as I was on a roll, but not caring enough to run through the training exercises again.

Anyway, like Assassin's Creed II, I was disappointed with the climax... (do I still need to spoiler a 7-year-old game?)

Spoiler:

Yes, probably.

The sci-fi-ish future-cave--complete with hologrammatic angels--they built just beneath the Vatican seems so contrived. They stick to an entertaining and stylish simulacrum of historical realism for 99% of the game, and then wham: suddenly you're in Renaissance Cybertron? Ehh. I can handle the protagonist falling five stories and living, or taking out an entire phalanx of Papal guards with a shiny dirk, but the moment you step beneath the lovingly-realised Rome-circa-1500 and find yourself in some sort of rejected set from Masters of the Universe meets a Portal level, it really hurls you out of your suspension of disbelief like a cold shower.

I suppose it's on to Revelations, now. Once I get from 88.6% to 100%, then shelve Brotherhood and never look back, that is.