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Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?
What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:50:33 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:40:39 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson ><spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game >>(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?
I don't really need links. I am perfectly capable of finding any game
that I am interested in. Of course, I can only speak for myself. >Although... Ant likes links. You are probably making him happy at
least.
Always keep the ants happy. I for one welcome our new insect overlords
and I'd like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up
others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Oh! What with all the holiday excitement and usual CSPIGA comments, I
almost forgot that we have THIS thread to do too! We can't start a new
month without talking about what we played LAST month... can we? I'd
rather not take that chance. So here we go again: let's talk games!
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?
I've been surprisingly busy with games this month so my list is a bit
fuller than usual (read: this next bit is gonna be _long_)
A List
---------------------------------------
* MechWarrior 5: Clans
* Magic Archer
* Pacific Drive
* Their Land
* CloudPunk
* Front Mission 1st: Remake
* Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2)
* Teardown
A Novel
---------------------------------------
* MechWarrior 5: Clans https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000890/MechWarrior_5_Clans/
I'm terribly disappointed with this game.
It should have been a slam-dunk. One of my biggest issues with its predecessor (MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries) was the uninteresting level
design; everything was procedurally generated, and the various
missions very quickly became repetitious. "Clans" promised a full
campaign with hand-crafted missions. How could it all have gone so
wrong?
Visually, the game is fine; it uses an upgraded version of the
"Mercenaries" engine, and there is a general improvement to the
animations of the mechs. The first couple of levels look terrific too,
with a lot of lush vegetation, custom architecture and lots of
superfluous detail that make the world look real. The cockpits are
improved, with greater variation between different mechs and all
looking more three-dimensional. It all makes for an excellent first impression.
But the further into the game you get, the worse it seems. Later maps
are far less detailed and interesting to look at. Some are downright
ugly; most feel quite generic. Worse, the level design is -with only a handful of exceptions- extremely tedious. Most maps are just long
winding canyons, with no real open spaces or options to step off the
beaten path. In pretty much every mission you are led by the nose from waypoint to waypoint, often not allowed to even progress to the next
arena until you fight off waves of enemy mechs.
The combat is, arguably, a slight improvement over "Mercenaries", but
it still is not very good. The AI is just terrible; it rushes straight towards you, rarely making use of cover or even relying on its
long-range weaponry. Too often, combat devolves into in-your-face
brawls with multiple mechs picking away at one another from close
range. The respawning is particularly bad too; you will be forced to
mow down dozens of enemy robots per mission, with new enemies popping
out of indestructible hangers or jumping down cliffs that would leave
your mech smashed if you tried a similar feat. There's just no
strategy to the game, and ultimately your best tactic is to field the heaviest mechs you can so you can endure the onslaught, making any
lighter robots in your arsenal practically useless.
Don't even get me started on the boss-enemies! Bosses... in a
MechWarrior game! They're incredible bullet sponges that don't abide
by the same rules the players have to follow, and feel completely out
of place.
There's little else praiseworthy about the game either. The cutscenes
are fine... except for the weird facial animations (what is with the fat-lipped mouth movements?). The voice-acting is awful. The story is
dull. The characters are all unlikable. The music is completely uninteresting. There are some areas where the visuals completely fall
apart (such as the missile impact textures, which are laughably bad).
And once you finish the game, that's it; sure, you can replay the
missions but there's no option for procedural missions to keep the
action fresh.
That's not to say I disliked everything. The battles did have a bigger
feel to them; you often are fighting alongside multiple other lances
and the narrative gives the impression that your unit is just a small
part of a much larger war. That's sort of neat. The improved MechLab
-where you can customize your robot's loadout- has been improved, and
I liked the ability to research new upgrades (even if it feels
completely out of place for a BattleTech game). But these are all tiny improvements on a game that otherwise feels a massive step backwards.
I really wanted to like this game. I broke my rule about not buying
games immediately on release because I was so excited about playing
another MechWarrior game. But in almost every respect, I was
disappointed by the experience. "MechWarrior 5: Clans" probably ranks
below all the other games in the franchise. It takes all the worst
parts of "MW5: Mercenary", does almost nothing to improve them, and
adds on a host of new flaws. It is not a good game.
* Magic Archer
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2905170/Magic_Archery/
"Magic Archer" was hyped up as that free game 'so good people are
insisting they should be allowed to pay for it.' And even though there
are, indeed, people making this demand, the game is in no way
deserving of it.
Oh, it's enjoyable enough... for a free game. But it's extremely
shallow, even for the 'clicker' games it resembles. Click a button to
set up a target, your archer will shoot arrows at it. Once enough
arrows hit it, it breaks apart and you earn experience. Select which
stat that experience gets assigned to; get enough, and the stat will
go up. As stats rise, you unlock various quests (automatically
fulfilled) and upgrades which improve the rate at which you earn
experience.
It's barely a game. In fact, after about fifteen minutes of play, you
can buy an upgrade to automatically reset the targets for you, meaning
past that point the game essentially plays itself. There's no real
strategy, no way to lose, and the only 'challenge' is how fast you can
get to the end.
And, look, I'm not objecting to this. The game's retro-aesthetics are
nice, and the speed at which you constantly earn upgrades ensures a
constant dopamine fix. You're getting a unceaseless stream of rewards,
and our brains respond positively to this. There's an extremely low
barrier to entry; if you can click a mouse, you've all the skill you
need to win the game. Even the most luxuriously played game won't take
you more than a couple of hours before you're done. It's welcoming.
It's fun.
But it's got no challenge, no depth, and no replayability. It's a
modern day equivalent to those Flash games of the early 2000s;
something that briefly occupies your time and then you move on to
something better. It's a palette cleanser; a respite from more serious titles. It's definitely not worth money. As much as I liked it, I'm
not sure it was even worth the time I invested into it.
Get "Magic Archer", sure. Play it, fine. But don't fool yourself into thinking it's anything but the most basic of clicker games, and even
for free you may be overpaying.
* Pacific Drive
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/
"Pacific Drive" got a brief moment of fame on its release, hailed as
one of the best survival games -and perhaps one of the best games- of
the year. But, let's face it; it's not that. It's a good game, sure,
but in the end it's still a fairly unexciting example of the genre
that quickly faded from public consciousness and is unlikely to leave
any lasting mark on the industry.
There's a lot to like about the game, though. It's stylized graphics
--it reminded me a lot of the almost cartoony wilderness in
"Firewatch-- do a really good job of presenting the eerie world in
which we find our self. There's just the perfect blend of the alien
and the familiar, and there's just a terrific atmosphere to the whole
game. The music is surprisingly good (although I gravitated more
towards the techno soundtracks while driving), as is the voice-acting.
The driving is surprisingly fun. Imagine the bouncy planetary
exploration of the first "Mass Effect" game... except done well. You
feel every rock and tree you hit, but there's far less loss of
control. Whether zipping down the broken roads of Washington state or
through its heavily-wooded forests, the driving is amazingly
satisfying.
I liked a lot of the world design too. An isolated bit of wilderness
now haunted by unexplainable 'anomalies' caused by Science Gone Wrong, "Pacific Drive" wears its heart on its sleeve when it comes to its influences, and it obviously took a lot from "STALKER" in the creation
of its 'Olympia Exclusion Zone'. But where "STALKER's" Zone feels
actively malicious against the player, the oddities in "Pacific Drive"
feel less concerned with ruining your day. They're still incredibly
lethal: you'll face off against weirdness ranging from radiation
storms, exploding mannequins, giant balls of acid falling from the sky
to gremlin dust-bunnies that glitch your car. There's just such a
variety of foes you'll face off against, many of which do more than
just cause hit points to deplete by a few points. Many you can't even
fight (anyway, you go through this journey completely unarmed), and
you must either avoid or endure their unwanted advances. They feel
less like foes than other-natural forces that just happen to have been transported to Earth. It all works strangely well.
So "Pacific Drive" has a lot to offer. Where it falls short, though,
is its main gameplay loop. The game is a story-based survival
experience; entering the world with nothing but the clothes on your
back, you must scrounge for supplies and build up your inventory of
tools (largely upgrades to your car) in order to complete a series of missions and escape back to the real. All well and good, except the
game is exceptionally grindy and there just isn't enough variety to
keep up interest for as long as this game takes.
Even the simplest of missions (either the harder story-based ones or
just resource gathering) can take a considerable toll on your car,
requiring you to go out to find even more resources to repair your
vehicle. You can't stay too long out in the field either; the longer
you're away from base, the higher the chance a radiation storm will
hit, so you're limited to how many resources you can collect on each
run. The upgrades aren't any of them that exciting, and the number you
can affix to your car at any one time is extremely limited.
Worse, as interesting as the world is in concept, it all looks very
much the same: endless roads winding through forest and dale. You do
get to some new climes --a radiation-wracked hellscape-- about three
quarters of the way through the game which looks significantly
different, but by then it's too little, too late (it's also too
hostile a region to linger and take in the sights). Most of the game
will be traveling the same roads over and over again, scouring the
(randomly placed) buildings for resources to repair your (too easily
filled) vehicle and slowly --ever so slowly!-- manufacture necessary upgrades.
It's not that I ever found the game that difficult; the nature of the Exclusion Zone is that the harm it inflicts on you is largely
reactive; you're only ever at risk if you stay out too long. But
resource gathering is so slow, that inevitably you're going to push
for longer runs just to finally see some progress. But the upgrades
don't really help much and you never really feel secure on your
drives; even by the end of the game, I felt almost as much at risk as
I did at the start. There's no sense of satisfaction at having
invested so much time and effort to upgrade your vehicle.
Still, kudos to the development team for offering one of the most
nuanced and customizable difficulty setting I have ever seen in any
game. You can strengthen, nerf or even ban from the game outright
almost every opponent/event in the game. Don't like those radiation
storms? Turn them off. Think the acid should do much more damage to
your car? Crank it to max. Want every chest to be filled to the brim
with resources? That's an option.
But I played on the default settings because... well, that's the way
the game was intended to play. And I just don't think the intended
game-play loop is much fun. You're quickly stripped of that sense of
wonder and awe from exploring the strange world by sheer repetition,
and left with a too-slow grind that offers little reward. "Pacific
Drive" is a game with a lot of good ideas, but sadly is less than the
sum of its parts; it ends up being a very average-feeling survival
game that should have been a lot better than it was.
* Their Land
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2430990/Their_Land/
I really hate dumping on this game. It's a student project, and it's
free, so it deserves some leeway when it comes to judging it against
its peers. But "Their Land" is just not a very good game.
Visually, it looks extremely dated; it looks only a little better than
a game from 2005, and that is largely because it's using a modern game
engine and things like lighting are free. The worst is the character animations, which are obviously key-framed and lack any sort of
fluidity or realism. The models themselves are extremely chunky too.
But I can forgive that; obviously resources were tight and
motion-capture isn't always an option. Less pardonable is the
lighting; while it is technically impressive, in a cinematic sort of
way, it's too often washed out in brightness or overly dark in actual gameplay. Appearance took precedence over practicality, and not being
able to make out what's going on because the developer had so fixated
on their vision is unpardonable.
I'll give the writing a pass too. Not only are these students, they're obviously don't speak English natively. Sure, the story is terribly
told and lacks in originality, but it's just enough to keep the
adventure moving, so we'll let it slide. The voice-acting is pretty
bad too but, again: student project. They aren't going to be able to
afford Troy Baker. Maybe they could have afforded a better microphone, though. Or run some of the subtitles through a spell-checker.
The gameplay is not very good. "Their Land" very obviously takes its
cue from "Peter Jackson Presents King Kong", which diagetically plops
you into a lost island environment and has you fight off bugs and
monsters and savages, oh my. There's only a very minimal interface
consisting of two quite unnecessary icons indicating your current
weapon and stance... which are completely obvious in-game. Player
movement is incredibly slow, and the controls needlessly clunky. The
game consists of combat that isn't very much fun, and puzzles where
the answer is always solved by running about until you find that one interactable object hidden in the clutter. It isn't fun.
Still, I have to give the game some credit for its visual design (even
if it does detract from the gameplay) and the look of its almost
Cthullian monsters. It's a shame the AI is so braindead.
As a student project, this is an excellent product. It reflects a lot
of effort and a forthright desire to create something unique. A lot of
"Their Land's" faults lie in a lack of experience and not having
enough resources. I'd happily give them top scores for the project.
But I'm not their professor and regarding this as a game -as something anybody would actually want to play- it is absolutely terrible in
almost every regard. As much as I hate to say it, "Their Land" is not
worth playing.
* CloudPunk
https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/
"Cloudpunk" reminds me a lot of Annapurna Interactive's 2022 game,
"Stray". Not for the obvious reasons that both take place in a
decaying futuristic city or deal with the humanity of artificial
lifeforms, no. Rather, the main reason to play both games is that you
enjoy their aesthetics. In the case of "Stray", it's because its
protagonist is a adorably rendered cat whose movements are sure to
melt the heart of any cat-lover. With "Cloudpunk", it's the gorgeous cyberpunkian cityscapes.
The game is beautiful, and this is despite (or maybe even perhaps)
that everything you see is made up of some very chunky voxels. But
there is such detail in almost every scene, and such terrific lighting
that you can't help but want to soar through its flying highways and
take in more of the view. It's "Attack of the Clone's" Coruscant, or "Bladerunner's" Los Angeles, or "Fifth Element's" New York... except
in your face and yours to explore as much as you want. And there's so
much of it, with neighborhoods ranging from the dark abandoned Ventz
(the undercity), to a futuristic China Town, to the Spire (the only
part of the city with a view of the sky). You play "Cloudpunk" so you
can gawk at the city like some podunk tourist off the farm for the
first time.
You certainly aren't playing the game for its gameplay. There's really
not much too it, unfortunately. "Cloudpunk" could easily be subtitled,
'Fetch Quest: The Game', because that's pretty much all that you do.
Go to location X, pick up box, take to location Y, drop off box.
Sometimes the box talks, or it's a bomb, or -on occasion- is a
passenger; this all adds variety and spice to the world. But the
gameplay itself is all very samey. Except for two brief instances,
your skill in driving is not a factor; there's no time-limit on any of
the missions (you do pay for fuel though, so meandering about too much
will cost you, but it's not a steep price).
There are a variety of NPCs to talk to -some of them even trigger
their own fetch quests- and several characters have you go on extended missions to locate various items. But beyond that, there's sadly very
little to actually do in Cloudpunk's world. Which is a shame, because
I could easily see myself getting lost living a virtual life in its
environs. But no, it's just drive here and deliver that. Sadly, even
the driving is a bit of a mixed bag; while I love soaring the
skylanes, mechanically the actual driving is a bit clunky and
inaccurate; your hover-car lacks the precise cornering that would make
the experience really enjoyable.
The story and characters are endearing, if somewhat trite: na∩ve farm
girl comes to Big City and has all the usual sorts of Big City
adventures. Still, even if there's not much originality, the
characters are well voiced and the tale is entertaining. Mostly
though, I like how it fills out the world's setting. But it's still
pretty forgettable by its end.
No, the real reason to play "Cloudpunk" is its visuals. I quite
enjoyed my time with it --enough so that I'm even considering buying
the DLC expansion-- but overall it's a fairly shallow experience. If
you watch the game's trailer and aren't entranced by its cityscapes,
there's little else in this game that will appeal to you; it's just
too limited. But if you look at it screenshots and think, "I'd like to
see more of that" then it's worth giving the game a shot. Even if the gameplay isn't all I hoped it could be, and even if the story isn't
saying anything new, it's still fairly well done and I had fun with
it.
* Front Mission 1st: Remake https://store.steampowered.com/app/2399730/FRONT_MISSION_1st_Remake/
I don't have much to say about this game, simply because I didn't
stick with it for very long. I vaguely remember having more fun with
this game back when I first encountered it on the SNES; it was an
interesting combination of anime styled-combat, giant robots, and
strategy. I suppose it still is, but it's also a game with an
incredibly trite story and tediously slow battles where the vast bulk
of each mission is simply moving your robots into position where they
are close enough to actually use their weapons.
The weird ziggurat-like map design --forgivable in the 8-bit days when
memory was short and pixels were large-- don't translate well to
modern visuals. I've little desire to get into the nitty gritty of
fiddling with each mech (sorry, 'wanzer') to min/max the perfect build either. All in all, the entire experience felt extremely old-school,
where games demand you spend months getting through them. I just don't
have interest in that sort of experience anymore.
The most dedicated fans of the original will probably love that this
game's mechanics haven't been changed since 1995; me, I'd prefer
something a bit more fast-paced and modern.
* Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2) https://www.mobygames.com/game/12011/baldurs-gate-dark-alliance-ii/
In honor of the latest stable release of PCSX2 (a Playstation 2
emulator), I fired up "Dark Alliance 2", a game I haven't played...
well, in such a long time I've actually forgotten what its about. A
fact which probably says a lot about the game itself.
It's not that "Dark Alliance 2" is a bad game, but it is a fairly
shallow one. An action/RPG, is lacks even the minimal complexity of
"Diablo"; it's all hack-and-slash, with only a minimum of role-playing elements. The basic strategy of buying the most powerful weapon you
can and clicking as fast as you can is as much strategy as you need to
get through the game (at least on the default difficulty). The game's
levels are incredibly straight-forward, and the AI is easy to cheese.
Still, for all its simplicity, it's nonetheless an entertaining power-fantasy, even if it didn't challenge me in any way, neither with
its gameplay or story. It offered a fairly steady drip of new weapons
and skills, and a surprising variety in enemies, including everything
from goblins to troglodytes to drider to dragons. The levels were less exciting --small and blocky, they rarely stood out from one another
(despite some significant cosmetic differences) -- but you never
stayed in any one area long enough for it to become bothersome.
In fact, the most annoying part of "Dark Alliance 2" wasn't the fault
of the game itself, but of the underlying architecture; saving on the
PS2 was such a burdensome chore; slow and clunky, I eventually stopped bothering entirely and instead relied on the emulator's save-state functionality. It's amazing PS2 users didn't throw their consoles out
the window from it being so frustratingly slow.
But otherwise it was an enjoyable --if admittedly mindless--
adventure; not one I'm in a rush to play again (at least, not for
another decade) but neither anything I regret spending time with.
* Teardown
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/
"Teardown" is a tech demo. It's a gimmick. It's neat, but it's not a
game. Or rather, it's not a good game.
It's gimmick is its fully-destructible voxel-built world. Well, not fully-destructible, sadly. You can't smash up the bedrock, so there
are limits to how much of the world you can blow up. But if it's a car
or a building or pretty much any object on the map, you can smash it
into tiny cubes. It's neat.
But it's so limited. The physics engine is incredibly basic, and that
limits how much fun the destruction is. Blow down all the supports of
a building except for one tiny pillar of glass and that building will
stand indomitable right to the end. It's only once you knock out each
and every one of the supports that it falls... rather lamely. There's
no crumbling of the upper structures, no sense of collapse. It just
drops a bit. The work needed to blow things up right and proper never
matches the results. It's disappointing, especially since we've seen
it done a lot better in other games.
Worse, the actual game (it comes with a campaign) seems to
misunderstand why this game might be fun. You're tasked with various
criminal enterprises and given a variety of tools to do so:
sledgehammers, blowtorches, dynamite, the works. But the missions
you're sent out on never take full advantage of that capability,
thanks to all your targets being hooked up to alarms which, if
triggered, end the mission in 60 seconds. That trigger varies -it
could be stealing an object, or getting it wet, or on fire- but once
that alarm starts blaring, you're on the clock. This wouldn't be so
bad if you only had the one target, but almost all missions have
multiple goals. The idea is, I think, to plan your route ahead of
time, but it also incentives you to limit your destruction lest you accidentally start the timer. Some missions forgo the destruction
entirely (one has you trying to beat a lap record in a automobile
race). The campaign is absolutely the worst thing about "Teardown".
There are mods, of course, which take a crack at improving the
experience, but the majority of these just enhance the idea that the
whole game is just a gimmick; "Here's a more powerful gun to make
destruction easier!" or "Here's an intricately detailed level for you
to rampage through!" None of them really give you any reason to do so
beyond the, "hey, that's neat" experience... and that wears pretty
thin after the third or fourth one.
The game's tech is fun, undoubtedly, but I wish it could have been
more robust and I wish there was actual reason to use it. As it is,
the whole experience became a lot more tiresome than it should be, a
lot faster than it should have. It's a neat tech-demo, but not
something worth paying for.
----------------
Well, that took forever. I *did* warn you.
Anyway, that's me for November. How about you? Did you have an excess
of spare time for video games, or was life putting up its usual
hassles? Either way, you gotta tell us:
What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:50:33 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:40:39 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?
I don't really need links. I am perfectly capable of finding any game
that I am interested in. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Although... Ant likes links. You are probably making him happy at
least.
Always keep the ants happy. I for one welcome our new insect overlords
and I'd like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up
others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
/me whitelists Spalls.
Oh! What with all the holiday excitement and usual CSPIGA comments, I
almost forgot that we have THIS thread to do too! We can't start a new
month without talking about what we played LAST month... can we? I'd
rather not take that chance. So here we go again: let's talk games!
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?
I've been surprisingly busy with games this month so my list is a bit
fuller than usual (read: this next bit is gonna be _long_)
A List
---------------------------------------
* MechWarrior 5: Clans
* Magic Archer
* Pacific Drive
* Their Land
* CloudPunk
* Front Mission 1st: Remake
* Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2)
* Teardown
A Novel
---------------------------------------
* MechWarrior 5: Clans https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000890/MechWarrior_5_Clans/
I'm terribly disappointed with this game.
It should have been a slam-dunk. One of my biggest issues with its predecessor (MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries) was the uninteresting level
design; everything was procedurally generated, and the various
missions very quickly became repetitious. "Clans" promised a full
campaign with hand-crafted missions. How could it all have gone so
wrong?
Visually, the game is fine; it uses an upgraded version of the
"Mercenaries" engine, and there is a general improvement to the
animations of the mechs. The first couple of levels look terrific too,
with a lot of lush vegetation, custom architecture and lots of
superfluous detail that make the world look real. The cockpits are
improved, with greater variation between different mechs and all
looking more three-dimensional. It all makes for an excellent first impression.
But the further into the game you get, the worse it seems. Later maps
are far less detailed and interesting to look at. Some are downright
ugly; most feel quite generic. Worse, the level design is -with only a handful of exceptions- extremely tedious. Most maps are just long
winding canyons, with no real open spaces or options to step off the
beaten path. In pretty much every mission you are led by the nose from waypoint to waypoint, often not allowed to even progress to the next
arena until you fight off waves of enemy mechs.
The combat is, arguably, a slight improvement over "Mercenaries", but
it still is not very good. The AI is just terrible; it rushes straight towards you, rarely making use of cover or even relying on its
long-range weaponry. Too often, combat devolves into in-your-face
brawls with multiple mechs picking away at one another from close
range. The respawning is particularly bad too; you will be forced to
mow down dozens of enemy robots per mission, with new enemies popping
out of indestructible hangers or jumping down cliffs that would leave
your mech smashed if you tried a similar feat. There's just no
strategy to the game, and ultimately your best tactic is to field the heaviest mechs you can so you can endure the onslaught, making any
lighter robots in your arsenal practically useless.
Don't even get me started on the boss-enemies! Bosses... in a
MechWarrior game! They're incredible bullet sponges that don't abide
by the same rules the players have to follow, and feel completely out
of place.
There's little else praiseworthy about the game either. The cutscenes
are fine... except for the weird facial animations (what is with the fat-lipped mouth movements?). The voice-acting is awful. The story is
dull. The characters are all unlikable. The music is completely uninteresting. There are some areas where the visuals completely fall
apart (such as the missile impact textures, which are laughably bad).
And once you finish the game, that's it; sure, you can replay the
missions but there's no option for procedural missions to keep the
action fresh.
That's not to say I disliked everything. The battles did have a bigger
feel to them; you often are fighting alongside multiple other lances
and the narrative gives the impression that your unit is just a small
part of a much larger war. That's sort of neat. The improved MechLab
-where you can customize your robot's loadout- has been improved, and
I liked the ability to research new upgrades (even if it feels
completely out of place for a BattleTech game). But these are all tiny improvements on a game that otherwise feels a massive step backwards.
I really wanted to like this game. I broke my rule about not buying
games immediately on release because I was so excited about playing
another MechWarrior game. But in almost every respect, I was
disappointed by the experience. "MechWarrior 5: Clans" probably ranks
below all the other games in the franchise. It takes all the worst
parts of "MW5: Mercenary", does almost nothing to improve them, and
adds on a host of new flaws. It is not a good game.
* Magic Archer
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2905170/Magic_Archery/
"Magic Archer" was hyped up as that free game 'so good people are
insisting they should be allowed to pay for it.' And even though there
are, indeed, people making this demand, the game is in no way
deserving of it.
Oh, it's enjoyable enough... for a free game. But it's extremely
shallow, even for the 'clicker' games it resembles. Click a button to
set up a target, your archer will shoot arrows at it. Once enough
arrows hit it, it breaks apart and you earn experience. Select which
stat that experience gets assigned to; get enough, and the stat will
go up. As stats rise, you unlock various quests (automatically
fulfilled) and upgrades which improve the rate at which you earn
experience.
It's barely a game. In fact, after about fifteen minutes of play, you
can buy an upgrade to automatically reset the targets for you, meaning
past that point the game essentially plays itself. There's no real
strategy, no way to lose, and the only 'challenge' is how fast you can
get to the end.
And, look, I'm not objecting to this. The game's retro-aesthetics are
nice, and the speed at which you constantly earn upgrades ensures a
constant dopamine fix. You're getting a unceaseless stream of rewards,
and our brains respond positively to this. There's an extremely low
barrier to entry; if you can click a mouse, you've all the skill you
need to win the game. Even the most luxuriously played game won't take
you more than a couple of hours before you're done. It's welcoming.
It's fun.
But it's got no challenge, no depth, and no replayability. It's a
modern day equivalent to those Flash games of the early 2000s;
something that briefly occupies your time and then you move on to
something better. It's a palette cleanser; a respite from more serious titles. It's definitely not worth money. As much as I liked it, I'm
not sure it was even worth the time I invested into it.
Get "Magic Archer", sure. Play it, fine. But don't fool yourself into thinking it's anything but the most basic of clicker games, and even
for free you may be overpaying.
* Pacific Drive
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/
"Pacific Drive" got a brief moment of fame on its release, hailed as
one of the best survival games -and perhaps one of the best games- of
the year. But, let's face it; it's not that. It's a good game, sure,
but in the end it's still a fairly unexciting example of the genre
that quickly faded from public consciousness and is unlikely to leave
any lasting mark on the industry.
There's a lot to like about the game, though. It's stylized graphics
--it reminded me a lot of the almost cartoony wilderness in
"Firewatch-- do a really good job of presenting the eerie world in
which we find our self. There's just the perfect blend of the alien
and the familiar, and there's just a terrific atmosphere to the whole
game. The music is surprisingly good (although I gravitated more
towards the techno soundtracks while driving), as is the voice-acting.
The driving is surprisingly fun. Imagine the bouncy planetary
exploration of the first "Mass Effect" game... except done well. You
feel every rock and tree you hit, but there's far less loss of
control. Whether zipping down the broken roads of Washington state or
through its heavily-wooded forests, the driving is amazingly
satisfying.
I liked a lot of the world design too. An isolated bit of wilderness
now haunted by unexplainable 'anomalies' caused by Science Gone Wrong, "Pacific Drive" wears its heart on its sleeve when it comes to its influences, and it obviously took a lot from "STALKER" in the creation
of its 'Olympia Exclusion Zone'. But where "STALKER's" Zone feels
actively malicious against the player, the oddities in "Pacific Drive"
feel less concerned with ruining your day. They're still incredibly
lethal: you'll face off against weirdness ranging from radiation
storms, exploding mannequins, giant balls of acid falling from the sky
to gremlin dust-bunnies that glitch your car. There's just such a
variety of foes you'll face off against, many of which do more than
just cause hit points to deplete by a few points. Many you can't even
fight (anyway, you go through this journey completely unarmed), and
you must either avoid or endure their unwanted advances. They feel
less like foes than other-natural forces that just happen to have been transported to Earth. It all works strangely well.
So "Pacific Drive" has a lot to offer. Where it falls short, though,
is its main gameplay loop. The game is a story-based survival
experience; entering the world with nothing but the clothes on your
back, you must scrounge for supplies and build up your inventory of
tools (largely upgrades to your car) in order to complete a series of missions and escape back to the real. All well and good, except the
game is exceptionally grindy and there just isn't enough variety to
keep up interest for as long as this game takes.
Even the simplest of missions (either the harder story-based ones or
just resource gathering) can take a considerable toll on your car,
requiring you to go out to find even more resources to repair your
vehicle. You can't stay too long out in the field either; the longer
you're away from base, the higher the chance a radiation storm will
hit, so you're limited to how many resources you can collect on each
run. The upgrades aren't any of them that exciting, and the number you
can affix to your car at any one time is extremely limited.
Worse, as interesting as the world is in concept, it all looks very
much the same: endless roads winding through forest and dale. You do
get to some new climes --a radiation-wracked hellscape-- about three
quarters of the way through the game which looks significantly
different, but by then it's too little, too late (it's also too
hostile a region to linger and take in the sights). Most of the game
will be traveling the same roads over and over again, scouring the
(randomly placed) buildings for resources to repair your (too easily
filled) vehicle and slowly --ever so slowly!-- manufacture necessary upgrades.
It's not that I ever found the game that difficult; the nature of the Exclusion Zone is that the harm it inflicts on you is largely
reactive; you're only ever at risk if you stay out too long. But
resource gathering is so slow, that inevitably you're going to push
for longer runs just to finally see some progress. But the upgrades
don't really help much and you never really feel secure on your
drives; even by the end of the game, I felt almost as much at risk as
I did at the start. There's no sense of satisfaction at having
invested so much time and effort to upgrade your vehicle.
Still, kudos to the development team for offering one of the most
nuanced and customizable difficulty setting I have ever seen in any
game. You can strengthen, nerf or even ban from the game outright
almost every opponent/event in the game. Don't like those radiation
storms? Turn them off. Think the acid should do much more damage to
your car? Crank it to max. Want every chest to be filled to the brim
with resources? That's an option.
But I played on the default settings because... well, that's the way
the game was intended to play. And I just don't think the intended
game-play loop is much fun. You're quickly stripped of that sense of
wonder and awe from exploring the strange world by sheer repetition,
and left with a too-slow grind that offers little reward. "Pacific
Drive" is a game with a lot of good ideas, but sadly is less than the
sum of its parts; it ends up being a very average-feeling survival
game that should have been a lot better than it was.
* Their Land
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2430990/Their_Land/
I really hate dumping on this game. It's a student project, and it's
free, so it deserves some leeway when it comes to judging it against
its peers. But "Their Land" is just not a very good game.
Visually, it looks extremely dated; it looks only a little better than
a game from 2005, and that is largely because it's using a modern game
engine and things like lighting are free. The worst is the character animations, which are obviously key-framed and lack any sort of
fluidity or realism. The models themselves are extremely chunky too.
But I can forgive that; obviously resources were tight and
motion-capture isn't always an option. Less pardonable is the
lighting; while it is technically impressive, in a cinematic sort of
way, it's too often washed out in brightness or overly dark in actual gameplay. Appearance took precedence over practicality, and not being
able to make out what's going on because the developer had so fixated
on their vision is unpardonable.
I'll give the writing a pass too. Not only are these students, they're obviously don't speak English natively. Sure, the story is terribly
told and lacks in originality, but it's just enough to keep the
adventure moving, so we'll let it slide. The voice-acting is pretty
bad too but, again: student project. They aren't going to be able to
afford Troy Baker. Maybe they could have afforded a better microphone, though. Or run some of the subtitles through a spell-checker.
The gameplay is not very good. "Their Land" very obviously takes its
cue from "Peter Jackson Presents King Kong", which diagetically plops
you into a lost island environment and has you fight off bugs and
monsters and savages, oh my. There's only a very minimal interface
consisting of two quite unnecessary icons indicating your current
weapon and stance... which are completely obvious in-game. Player
movement is incredibly slow, and the controls needlessly clunky. The
game consists of combat that isn't very much fun, and puzzles where
the answer is always solved by running about until you find that one interactable object hidden in the clutter. It isn't fun.
Still, I have to give the game some credit for its visual design (even
if it does detract from the gameplay) and the look of its almost
Cthullian monsters. It's a shame the AI is so braindead.
As a student project, this is an excellent product. It reflects a lot
of effort and a forthright desire to create something unique. A lot of
"Their Land's" faults lie in a lack of experience and not having
enough resources. I'd happily give them top scores for the project.
But I'm not their professor and regarding this as a game -as something anybody would actually want to play- it is absolutely terrible in
almost every regard. As much as I hate to say it, "Their Land" is not
worth playing.
* CloudPunk
https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/
"Cloudpunk" reminds me a lot of Annapurna Interactive's 2022 game,
"Stray". Not for the obvious reasons that both take place in a
decaying futuristic city or deal with the humanity of artificial
lifeforms, no. Rather, the main reason to play both games is that you
enjoy their aesthetics. In the case of "Stray", it's because its
protagonist is a adorably rendered cat whose movements are sure to
melt the heart of any cat-lover. With "Cloudpunk", it's the gorgeous cyberpunkian cityscapes.
The game is beautiful, and this is despite (or maybe even perhaps)
that everything you see is made up of some very chunky voxels. But
there is such detail in almost every scene, and such terrific lighting
that you can't help but want to soar through its flying highways and
take in more of the view. It's "Attack of the Clone's" Coruscant, or "Bladerunner's" Los Angeles, or "Fifth Element's" New York... except
in your face and yours to explore as much as you want. And there's so
much of it, with neighborhoods ranging from the dark abandoned Ventz
(the undercity), to a futuristic China Town, to the Spire (the only
part of the city with a view of the sky). You play "Cloudpunk" so you
can gawk at the city like some podunk tourist off the farm for the
first time.
You certainly aren't playing the game for its gameplay. There's really
not much too it, unfortunately. "Cloudpunk" could easily be subtitled,
'Fetch Quest: The Game', because that's pretty much all that you do.
Go to location X, pick up box, take to location Y, drop off box.
Sometimes the box talks, or it's a bomb, or -on occasion- is a
passenger; this all adds variety and spice to the world. But the
gameplay itself is all very samey. Except for two brief instances,
your skill in driving is not a factor; there's no time-limit on any of
the missions (you do pay for fuel though, so meandering about too much
will cost you, but it's not a steep price).
There are a variety of NPCs to talk to -some of them even trigger
their own fetch quests- and several characters have you go on extended missions to locate various items. But beyond that, there's sadly very
little to actually do in Cloudpunk's world. Which is a shame, because
I could easily see myself getting lost living a virtual life in its
environs. But no, it's just drive here and deliver that. Sadly, even
the driving is a bit of a mixed bag; while I love soaring the
skylanes, mechanically the actual driving is a bit clunky and
inaccurate; your hover-car lacks the precise cornering that would make
the experience really enjoyable.
The story and characters are endearing, if somewhat trite: naïve farm
girl comes to Big City and has all the usual sorts of Big City
adventures. Still, even if there's not much originality, the
characters are well voiced and the tale is entertaining. Mostly
though, I like how it fills out the world's setting. But it's still
pretty forgettable by its end.
No, the real reason to play "Cloudpunk" is its visuals. I quite
enjoyed my time with it --enough so that I'm even considering buying
the DLC expansion-- but overall it's a fairly shallow experience. If
you watch the game's trailer and aren't entranced by its cityscapes,
there's little else in this game that will appeal to you; it's just
too limited. But if you look at it screenshots and think, "I'd like to
see more of that" then it's worth giving the game a shot. Even if the gameplay isn't all I hoped it could be, and even if the story isn't
saying anything new, it's still fairly well done and I had fun with
it.
* Front Mission 1st: Remake https://store.steampowered.com/app/2399730/FRONT_MISSION_1st_Remake/
I don't have much to say about this game, simply because I didn't
stick with it for very long. I vaguely remember having more fun with
this game back when I first encountered it on the SNES; it was an
interesting combination of anime styled-combat, giant robots, and
strategy. I suppose it still is, but it's also a game with an
incredibly trite story and tediously slow battles where the vast bulk
of each mission is simply moving your robots into position where they
are close enough to actually use their weapons.
The weird ziggurat-like map design --forgivable in the 8-bit days when
memory was short and pixels were large-- don't translate well to
modern visuals. I've little desire to get into the nitty gritty of
fiddling with each mech (sorry, 'wanzer') to min/max the perfect build either. All in all, the entire experience felt extremely old-school,
where games demand you spend months getting through them. I just don't
have interest in that sort of experience anymore.
The most dedicated fans of the original will probably love that this
game's mechanics haven't been changed since 1995; me, I'd prefer
something a bit more fast-paced and modern.
* Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2) https://www.mobygames.com/game/12011/baldurs-gate-dark-alliance-ii/
In honor of the latest stable release of PCSX2 (a Playstation 2
emulator), I fired up "Dark Alliance 2", a game I haven't played...
well, in such a long time I've actually forgotten what its about. A
fact which probably says a lot about the game itself.
It's not that "Dark Alliance 2" is a bad game, but it is a fairly
shallow one. An action/RPG, is lacks even the minimal complexity of
"Diablo"; it's all hack-and-slash, with only a minimum of role-playing elements. The basic strategy of buying the most powerful weapon you
can and clicking as fast as you can is as much strategy as you need to
get through the game (at least on the default difficulty). The game's
levels are incredibly straight-forward, and the AI is easy to cheese.
Still, for all its simplicity, it's nonetheless an entertaining power-fantasy, even if it didn't challenge me in any way, neither with
its gameplay or story. It offered a fairly steady drip of new weapons
and skills, and a surprising variety in enemies, including everything
from goblins to troglodytes to drider to dragons. The levels were less exciting --small and blocky, they rarely stood out from one another
(despite some significant cosmetic differences) -- but you never
stayed in any one area long enough for it to become bothersome.
In fact, the most annoying part of "Dark Alliance 2" wasn't the fault
of the game itself, but of the underlying architecture; saving on the
PS2 was such a burdensome chore; slow and clunky, I eventually stopped bothering entirely and instead relied on the emulator's save-state functionality. It's amazing PS2 users didn't throw their consoles out
the window from it being so frustratingly slow.
But otherwise it was an enjoyable --if admittedly mindless--
adventure; not one I'm in a rush to play again (at least, not for
another decade) but neither anything I regret spending time with.
* Teardown
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/
"Teardown" is a tech demo. It's a gimmick. It's neat, but it's not a
game. Or rather, it's not a good game.
It's gimmick is its fully-destructible voxel-built world. Well, not fully-destructible, sadly. You can't smash up the bedrock, so there
are limits to how much of the world you can blow up. But if it's a car
or a building or pretty much any object on the map, you can smash it
into tiny cubes. It's neat.
But it's so limited. The physics engine is incredibly basic, and that
limits how much fun the destruction is. Blow down all the supports of
a building except for one tiny pillar of glass and that building will
stand indomitable right to the end. It's only once you knock out each
and every one of the supports that it falls... rather lamely. There's
no crumbling of the upper structures, no sense of collapse. It just
drops a bit. The work needed to blow things up right and proper never
matches the results. It's disappointing, especially since we've seen
it done a lot better in other games.
Worse, the actual game (it comes with a campaign) seems to
misunderstand why this game might be fun. You're tasked with various
criminal enterprises and given a variety of tools to do so:
sledgehammers, blowtorches, dynamite, the works. But the missions
you're sent out on never take full advantage of that capability,
thanks to all your targets being hooked up to alarms which, if
triggered, end the mission in 60 seconds. That trigger varies -it
could be stealing an object, or getting it wet, or on fire- but once
that alarm starts blaring, you're on the clock. This wouldn't be so
bad if you only had the one target, but almost all missions have
multiple goals. The idea is, I think, to plan your route ahead of
time, but it also incentives you to limit your destruction lest you accidentally start the timer. Some missions forgo the destruction
entirely (one has you trying to beat a lap record in a automobile
race). The campaign is absolutely the worst thing about "Teardown".
There are mods, of course, which take a crack at improving the
experience, but the majority of these just enhance the idea that the
whole game is just a gimmick; "Here's a more powerful gun to make
destruction easier!" or "Here's an intricately detailed level for you
to rampage through!" None of them really give you any reason to do so
beyond the, "hey, that's neat" experience... and that wears pretty
thin after the third or fourth one.
The game's tech is fun, undoubtedly, but I wish it could have been
more robust and I wish there was actual reason to use it. As it is,
the whole experience became a lot more tiresome than it should be, a
lot faster than it should have. It's a neat tech-demo, but not
something worth paying for.
----------------
Well, that took forever. I *did* warn you.
Anyway, that's me for November. How about you? Did you have an excess
of spare time for video games, or was life putting up its usual
hassles? Either way, you gotta tell us:
What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?
Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote at 18:24 this Sunday (GMT):
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:50:33 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:40:39 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?
I don't really need links. I am perfectly capable of finding any game
that I am interested in. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Although... Ant likes links. You are probably making him happy at
least.
Always keep the ants happy. I for one welcome our new insect overlords
and I'd like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up
others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
/me whitelists Spalls.
Oh no, what are you planning
("Black Myth: Wukong" also looks interesting... but not so much I want
to pay full price for it;-)
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote at 18:24 this Sunday (GMT):
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:50:33 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:40:39 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?
I don't really need links. I am perfectly capable of finding any game
that I am interested in. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Although... Ant likes links. You are probably making him happy at
least.
Always keep the ants happy. I for one welcome our new insect overlords
and I'd like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up
others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
/me whitelists Spalls.
Oh no, what are you planning
You'll see
On Sun, 1 Dec 2024 21:00:11 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Well, not a whole lot new? I re-bought Hypnospace Outlaw and beat it in
5 hours again, still a FANTASTIC game but I don't have the patience to
go for 100% HAP completion. I also started playing the first Ace >>Investigations game and Pokemon Black. I'm trying to see if theres
anything else I want to buy before the sales end though.
Be a good consumer and buy. It's not what you want that matters, but
how much of it you own ;-)
I had to look up which game "Hypnospace Outlaw" was. I remembered
playing it but initially couldn't recall anything else thing about it.
It was the one that had a fake Internet that you had to surf. I was
impressed by the depth of the simulation, but less so with the
gameplay. Maybe it's because I don't have much nostalgia for the old
web; probably because I wasn't a kid when it was new so it didn't have
the same impact on me (that, and the 90s web was a movement away from
the advertising free, academic internet I was familiar with; it was
loud and brash and filled with a lot more nonsense; a step down in
many ways, as far as I was concerned ;-)
//World of Warcraft Classic
I don't know what I was expecting, but definitely not this. I have not
played WoW for more than 2 months in my whole life, and that was when
the game was in Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor. Just clicking
on an enemy and waiting until it dies while pressing the number row
is... eh. Like if I wanted to do that, I'd rather play Diablo II and
III. Maybe it made sense playing as a hunter with a firearm, but as a >warrior, I expected to be able to circle around the enemy, parry, evade, >jump... It's like my brain wants more Dark Souls, Ocarina of Time or
Nier Automata combat. And obviously I'm playing solo, so not great
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?
I swear, this gets harder every month. I don't know where october gaming
ends and November gaming begins anymore.
I think I may have been playing:
- The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
- Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney
- World of Warcraft Classic
- Link's Awakening (remake)
- Link's Awakening (original)
The long read:
//The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
It's officially the game I have put more hours into it since I have an
Steam account, something I'm not happy about it. There's a discussion,
"Isaac is a Roguelike". "No, Isaac is a Roguelite". "Both of you dildos
are wrong, only things that are like Rogue can be Roguelikes" (Dildo as
an insult provided by Metapocalypse). If we use "roguelike in the sense
of a game with high risk, high difficulty, never ever getting easy,
etc), Binding of isaac is a weird game. I perceived as a roguelike, but
then I began wondering if the game was a roguelite, given how with each
run it seemed to get progressively easier thanks to the unlocks.
Well, not roguelike nor roguelite. more like "The guy who does not want
you to use the term roguelike screaming 'karma, bitch!!!'". The game
balance makes it so that the more you play, the worse it gets, until the
game finally got too hard and I hit a massive wall, made worse by the Repentance DLC that removed all the easy strategies (why it felt like roguelite when it was Afterbirth+). I should have quit a long time ago
when the run counter got to -19, but I just could not. I literally had
to "cheat" the game to reduce the handicap: Ditching the Steam Deck,
using a minimal latency computer screen, a wired dual sense because the button separation actually matters and I was using Snes separation
buttons (also the extra non slip rubber coating in the analogs), and
tooling the config files to make the game less zoomed out so that I
could play on a smaller part of the screen an focus better.
Well, I sorta did it. Got the negative, defeated Satan 5 times, and
gained access to the Dark Room where The Lamb was waiting for me. After
that, the next day I managed to kill the angels, get to the dark room
again and open the golden doors, encountering the true final boss of the game: Mega Satan. This guy has damage scaling so that it always poses a challenge and you can't kill him fast. The battle was so long and hard
that when i finally got over it, I finally was able to put down the
game. There's a lot more stuff after 10 years of expansions, but I feel
like this is skill ceiling. Feels good that the urges are finally satiated.
//World of Warcraft Classic
I don't know what I was expecting, but definitely not this. I have not
played WoW for more than 2 months in my whole life, and that was when
the game was in Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor. Just clicking
on an enemy and waiting until it dies while pressing the number row
is... eh. Like if I wanted to do that, I'd rather play Diablo II and
III. Maybe it made sense playing as a hunter with a firearm, but as a warrior, I expected to be able to circle around the enemy, parry, evade, jump... It's like my brain wants more Dark Souls, Ocarina of Time or
Nier Automata combat. And obviously I'm playing solo, so not great
//Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney
Making things clear: I love Ace Attorney, I hate Layton. Only playing
this because I have run out of Ace Attorney games. Hate the puzzle
sections, suffer with them until I can get to the Ace Attorney trial
sections
Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote at 21:15 this Sunday (GMT):
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote at 18:24 this Sunday (GMT):
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:50:33 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:40:39 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam >> >> >>(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it >> >> >>worth the effort or should I not bother?
I don't really need links. I am perfectly capable of finding any game >> >> >that I am interested in. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Although... Ant likes links. You are probably making him happy at
least.
Always keep the ants happy. I for one welcome our new insect overlords >> >> and I'd like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up
others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
/me whitelists Spalls.
Oh no, what are you planning
You'll see
scawy :(
XCOM:2
------
I did get one game in the Steam sale but this one has been on my list of
I should probably play sometime and at £1.74, well why not now. I
haven't played more than a couple of missions but so far seems like good
solid XCOM fun and it's seriously can one of you at least hit the
target*. Hopefully the whole base building part won't be as distracting
as I found it in XCOM:1 although I do realise it wouldn't be a XCOM game
without it but then you have Laser Squad.
I think its not so much the RNG as the concealled RNG. It's one thing
when the random numbers say 'you hit' or 'you miss' but when the game
says "99% chance of hit" and then you miss ten shots in a row because
the game didn't show you that there wer -70% penalties... well,
there's something wrong with that.
I think XCOM2 was more transparent with regards to hit-percentages
than was its predecessor, but it's been a while since I played the
game. But XCOM (2012) was really annoying in that regard.
Fahrenheit 451
--------------
I finally got around to reading this as it's always on those lists of
must read sci-fi books. I very much enjoyed it with its mix of a
dystopian future (all books to be burned) and commentary on US politics
at the time. Well worth a read with a downside that I found some of the
writing a bit clunky compared to modern standards.
Bradbury was one of those sci-fi writers were the idea took precedence
over the story and characters. His writing reflects that. It's very work-a-day with little excess or flourish. It was fairly common
amongst authors of the genre of the time.
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote at 21:15 this Sunday (GMT):
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote: >> >> Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote at 18:24 this Sunday (GMT):
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:50:33 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
On Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:40:39 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam >> >> >> >>(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it >> >> >> >>worth the effort or should I not bother?
I don't really need links. I am perfectly capable of finding any game >> >> >> >that I am interested in. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Although... Ant likes links. You are probably making him happy at
least.
Always keep the ants happy. I for one welcome our new insect overlords >> >> >> and I'd like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up
others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
/me whitelists Spalls.
Oh no, what are you planning
You'll see
scawy :(
Scawy? Scary? :P
The long read:
//The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
It's officially the game I have put more hours into it since I have an
Steam account...The battle was so long and hard that when i finally got
over it, I finally was able to put down the game. There's a lot more stuff >after 10 years of expansions, but I feel like this is skill ceiling. Feels >good that the urges are finally satiated.
What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:
What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?
* Castlevania
Played with this a little but platformers were never really my
thing. But one freebie checked out for once.
* Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender
Someone mentioned it and I kinda remembered playing it back when. Clunky pixel adventure from the 90s, kind of trying to maybe be both Leisure
Suit Larry and Space Quest. Well, at least looking around usually
mentions if you need to pixel hunt on a specific screen to grab
something. Although this has actual difficulty levels so it might well
be that sort of help would go away on higher difficulty. Puzzles seem to
be pretty much object puzzles, give or take something to/from someone to
get something else or somewhere. And deaths are gruesome and common. At
least the game just undoes your last move automatically when that
happens.
Curious, I read a review from 1992. It was positive 92/100, even though
it mentioned the game was short and fairly easy and the marketing with
sex was just that. I guess the game counted as pretty good then in 1992.
* Fallout: London
My interest in this seems to be waning. I guess now it's all the
scrounging and of course, I played Fallout 4 *a lot*. I got to the point where I can finally mod my armor but I don't have as much leather as I'd
need to add a "deep pockets" mod to each part to be able to carry more
stuff. Likewise, I unlocked "kinetic fibre" which can turn many hats
into badass helmets but actually finding that stuff? Gah. One traveling vendor at least should have it but... Might need to teleport to the guy
via console commands. Which isn't just for cheating, sometimes need to
do that to work around quest bugs. Might be the vendor is dead too...
I've kind of lost track of the main plot but I think I need to get into
a government building next by collecting some petitions or something.
On Thu, 5 Dec 2024 16:00:05 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Anssi Saari <anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi> wrote at 20:50 this Wednesday (GMT):
Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:
What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?
* Castlevania
Played with this a little but platformers were never really my
thing. But one freebie checked out for once.
* Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender
Someone mentioned it and I kinda remembered playing it back when. Clunky >>> pixel adventure from the 90s, kind of trying to maybe be both Leisure
Suit Larry and Space Quest. Well, at least looking around usually
mentions if you need to pixel hunt on a specific screen to grab
something. Although this has actual difficulty levels so it might well
be that sort of help would go away on higher difficulty. Puzzles seem to >>> be pretty much object puzzles, give or take something to/from someone to >>> get something else or somewhere. And deaths are gruesome and common. At
least the game just undoes your last move automatically when that
happens.
Curious, I read a review from 1992. It was positive 92/100, even though
it mentioned the game was short and fairly easy and the marketing with
sex was just that. I guess the game counted as pretty good then in 1992. >>>
* Fallout: London
My interest in this seems to be waning. I guess now it's all the
scrounging and of course, I played Fallout 4 *a lot*. I got to the point >>> where I can finally mod my armor but I don't have as much leather as I'd >>> need to add a "deep pockets" mod to each part to be able to carry more
stuff. Likewise, I unlocked "kinetic fibre" which can turn many hats
into badass helmets but actually finding that stuff? Gah. One traveling
vendor at least should have it but... Might need to teleport to the guy
via console commands. Which isn't just for cheating, sometimes need to
do that to work around quest bugs. Might be the vendor is dead too...
I've kind of lost track of the main plot but I think I need to get into
a government building next by collecting some petitions or something.
Wait, is that a real game? I have never heard of it before.. is it by >>Bethesda?
No. Well, yes. Except no.
It's a free fan-made total modification for Fallout 4, available from
GOG (and possibly other places). It uses the base Fallout 4 engine and
some of its assests (so its not entirely fair to say Bethesda had no involvement) but all the new stuff is made by the Team FOLON. AFAIK,
there's no official relationship between Bethesda and the modders.
Available here:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/fallout_london
It completely revamps the game, with new location (London), new
quests, new monsters; the whole she-bang. It's even got voice-acting.
It's recommended that -if you play it- you use the GOG version since
the Steam version has been updated and you'd have to manually
roll-back all those updates first. GOG offers the un-updated version
so installation of the mod is much easier.