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Blogposting About Whatever Shit I Play

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unfairlight

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As you may guess, I play a fair few games unlike a few on this forum. I started logging what I played in the middle of last year, but I'm going to take it a step further now. I also write up various thoughts about these games quite often, but I generally write them on Shoutbox where there's no permanence to those thoughts (well, you can look at logs but that's not the same) or a short overlook on my thoughts after I am finished with them. My short term memory is selective and less than ideal, so imagine this as just a notepad where I write my thoughts. I'm also going to be making this thread because then I feel obligated to update it every so often.

I think I'd just shit up the place making 35 threads per year with the majority of them being 10 hour long games, so I'm going to put everything in this thread instead.
 
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unfairlight

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I am currently playing Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. This is practically my first contact with JRPGs. I played it long ago on PS2 but I never got past the second area. I am playing it emulated since I prefer the comfort of using my PC, and not having to use a PS2 with a busted disc drive and without any good displays.
This is going to be a little disjointed since I am mid playthrough with this game.

rUjmOwO.jpg
The game is pretty, being a late PS2 game they really were squeezing everything out of the hardware. The character models really hold up even today, it's only really the texture resolution that is lacking since they had 32 megabytes to work with.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
The game is pretty, being a late PS2 game they really were squeezing everything out of the hardware. The character models really hold up even today, it's only really the texture resolution that is lacking since they had 32 megabytes to work with.
A lot of late-gen PS2 games still look really good e.g., MGS3
 

Kabas

Arcane
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Feb 10, 2018
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PS2 was the only console i ever had, it left me with plenty of good memories.
Still, i notice from time to time that i missed out on a lot of good stuff.
 
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unfairlight

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Realistically I think the lot of you, even those who claim to be busy can play a lot of games, they would rather just shitpost on Codex or Reddit or imageboards because that's effortless. That mindset is why a lot of people play multiplayer games (or rather are addicted to them.)
 
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unfairlight

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In this game you move around the dungeons and towns in this side scrolling mode. While in the side scrolling portion you can find loot chests, pouches with supplies and these purple ghosts who initiate combat if you touch them. If you are touched by them above, below or in the back then you can get a chance to have a combat disadvantage, meaning you start with 0 AP and the enemies have advantageous positions. This generally means you are guaranteed to get hit.
You can turn these purple ghosts into solid gems temporarily by shooting out white light. This renders them unable to start combat, and allows you to use them as platforms to find extra loot, Einherijar (party members as ghosts, who after a certain level can be freed to gain items that grant permanent stat boosts) or other things. You can also swap places with these solidified ghosts by shooting the light again.

You get placed into an arena like this if you touch the ghosts, and unfortunately there are a few not so good arenas in this game like this one. Realistically, there's no way to pass this without getting hit. You're in a tunnel against multiple enemies that have a lot of range. Generally they are not this terrible at all.
You can dash to move a distance without having the enemies move, which uses up AP, and if you move around normally you regenerate AP but the enemies can move as well. You end up in the red area, you get hit. Combat in this game rewards killing the leader of the group fast. You kill the leader, you end combat and get an extra reward if you were fast enough. This will "purify" the ghost in the side scrolling portion meaning they can't initiate combat again, unless you leave and enter the area again.
 
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unfairlight

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Went through a pretty snowy area and then went back to Dipan.
Unfortunately emulation isn't flawless. To get to Dipan you have to go through this forest which is broken and without any fix other than running it software mode (which means running it at native res, which doesn't look great on a 1080p screen.) The Alpha hack in the renderer fixes many/most issues though.
They background artwork and sprites really do look stellar overall. Of course it crumbles apart a bit when running it at 4x Native resolution, but it still holds up surprisingly well. Smart usage of resources.

I had two boss fights. One was against an archer and another against two mages. The archer has a bit of a bloated health pool with well over 28k HP, I can whittle down maybe 4k or so with each 100ap turn. First time around he managed to heal back 26k of that health. He can only do that once but still a pretty fucking annoying gotcha moment that essentially forces you to restart. I completely forgot about Holy Gems which silence spells since I have basically never used consumables regularly other than basic healing but I consulted a walkthrough and it reminded me of them. Fighting ranged enemies is always a bit of a pain, especially if they can attack your entire party.
 
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unfairlight

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I completed VP2. Sort of. I didn't, actually. The truth is that the game goes on this comedic tirade with the boss fights near the end where you have what you think would be the "final boss fight", and then you keep doing them for like 10 hours more, with one every 2 hours. The actual final boss (who has 2 phases) has this really god damn annoying gimmick to him where you have to deal 1000 damage to a gem that defends him that takes 1/10th damage from everything. I could beat it, should I want to spend either an hour and a half slowly grinding them down on each phase or grinding in the overworld to minmax my character until I can just stomp it, but I'm just not gonna bother. I will chalk it up as finished and leave it at that.

Solid game, but story gets pretty god damn dumb toward the end and a lot of the boss fights just get tiring.

Otherwise, I am finishing up my second playthrough of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and I just finished Portal on the side. Portal is real short, only like 2 hours. Still a good game and was a total paradigm shift back in 2007, though.
 
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unfairlight

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Dying Light is good. I've been playing it for about 15 hours now and the gameplay loop is really good, killing hordes of zombies feels satisfying and the loop of kill zombies > loot > do random encounters > do quests > upgrade has worked nicely. Unlike Dead Island it hasn't held out guns from me for too long either, although ammunition is quite sparse so you can't use them willy nilly. You do get a bow which kills most zombies in one shot to the head, and ammunition is dirt cheap. Unlike melee weapons it also does not require repairs or anything of the sort. The game also has this awesome free running system which is easily the best I have ever seen in a game. At night it especially comes in useful when zombies become twice as deadly and Volatiles spawn in, who will fuck you up if you don't keep moving. The game rewards that you play risky during the night as well, by doubling your XP gain.
Crafting system is great. It forces you to loot and most of the stuff you can craft is actually useful and progresses along nicely. Even lower tier items like molotov cocktails or basic throwing stars are really useful.

There are a few complaints as usual:
It feels as if I "cheesed" the game by getting my hands on a 230dmg sword early on by having a survivor die in a random encounter, but I think this was a net positive as otherwise each zombie took way too long to kill before I got one of these. Reason why this feels like cheesing is that you have 40dmg weapons otherwise for a good 5 hours, and my current Survivor rank would only get me 150dmg weapons tops from the store when I can get 270dmg or 800dmg swords from random encounter bandits for free with relative ease. So why buy store weapons if these bandit weapons are better and these store weapons aren't going to be worthwhile for many more hours? Just feels as if the game isn't keeping pace with where I actually am in player, character and weapon progression.
Sometimes the zombies spawn and surround you way too fast. Like when I am trying to get through a very hard difficulty police van lock, even when I clear out every zombie in a 20m radius the game just keeps spawning more (and even more, if I get unlucky and the game spawns in a bomber or gas tank zombie who does and can explode, in that order, which then makes noise and spawns in Virals) so I can't get enough time to pick the damn thing without getting grabbed or having to interrupt myself.
Writing/story is pretty boring and shit but who cares about that. The voice actor for the MC does a nice job though. I think it's voice direction over voice acting most of the time. A talented voice actor is a valuable asset, but since you're working with averages most of the time you need to get that average to a good level by directing their voices better.
On that good crafting system? Yeah, there's one problem. There's two items to make a medkit - alcohol and gauze. The latter is far too rare. Medkits are obviously crucial out in the field and I run dry on medkits far too often. The online PVP mode (a bit like Dark Souls invasions) did manage to get me back at a good level with them, since if you can't heal and are damaged the game gives you like 10 or 20 medkits which carries over back to single player. It was invaluable when I was zeroed on medkits, but I'm doing fine again now.

I think a lot of these complaints are deleted if you play co-op like I think it's intended to, but I've only done single player so far.
 
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unfairlight

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Been playing Dying Light further and I have even more complaints.

This game has bullet magnetism on the bow, and it's annoying as fuck. See this video.


I have both aim assist options turned off in the settings. Essentially I can't hit long range headshots with the bow because of this, because at a certain height above the zombie head the magnetism will kick in and direct my shots into their chests or neck level, not their head. If I try to aim over them some more, then the bullet magnetism lock will break and I will just shoot at a wall. This almost feels as if it was intended to limit the effective range of the bow with how bad and annoying it is, but I know that it was just console port nonsense instead.
This was on keyboard and mouse but I normally am playing on my Steam Controller just to be 1000% certain that it somehow couldn't be a controller only thing (shouldn't be regardless, my Steam Controller is emulating mouse inputs, not joystick inputs.)

Gameplay is losing its touch. I'm not having quite as much fun any longer and a lot of the newer enemies in the second area are kind of boring and terrible. A of them are rehashes, one of them is this rock throwing big zombie who you have to attack with melee. It's the same as a boss fight you fight earlier. The other is heavy rebar goon, and while they're not too difficult I think the newer, more powerful versions of him in the new area have their hit detection way off since they increased their attack range. Hits that wouldn't otherwise even be whiffs on the earlier versions are knocking me down and I hate it.

Story is getting even more retardo by the minute. I know I said who cares earlier but man this just blows. Every time its the same shit. Go into bad guy's base, shoot up guys for 20 minutes, arena fight, some bullshit about research, end. There's also what appears to be a plot hole here, earlier on in the story you destroy 2 crates of Antizin that prevents infected people from turning into zombies but you take one vial regardless. Bad guy throws you an injector to save another character or yourself (not actually a choice, you go through a lengthy terrible dream sequence and the choice is made for you), but what about that second vial he took earlier? Why not use that to inject them and then yourself? You'd clearly have the time if you just didn't hesitate. Unless they bring up that other vial later, this is a total plot hole. Am I also supposed to believe that the main character has only gotten one shot of Antizin throughout the entire game up until this point? What about all those airdrops I have taken to quartermasters?
 
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unfairlight

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It's done. Took me 32 hours.
I'm not sure how to feel about it. The first 15-20 hours were great but after that my fun level really reduced. Side content was a mixed bag, it was generally a lot of backtracking which was a real problem since after you have ran around the map 10 times that fun kind of decreases. Gun combat sucked but that was largely secondary, luckily.
I seriously disliked the balancing and progression. At the very end, only then did I have a weapon for the first time in a store that beat my Superior Sacrificial Shortsword in damage, but only by about 80 points with way worse handling. I did have two Zweihanders which had about 1200 damage but those were from killing the Chivalry event knights, so they don't count.
Night time gameplay was fun for a while, but pursuits often got just too annoying to deal with later. They just keep coming and there's no easy way make them go away but to keep running and break line of sight until they fuck off, the way pursuits are engaged is also quite tiring since essentially the zombies who can engage them look like any other zombie but at some point they might have an eye detection indicator appear above them and you'll get a horde to start chasing you instantly. I wish Volatiles were also more rare, since their per hit DMG is absurd. They kill you in 3 hits flat on hard difficulty so there's times where you'll just feel so helpless against them, especially if you are on the outskirts of towns. They run a lot faster than you on flat ground so you are forced to use climbing to evade them, which isn't always an option and can make doing things at night such as quests or airdrops a lot less fun.
Story was terrible and dumb to the very end. Words can't describe how bad it is. The "final boss" was also a QTE and some climbing. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
 
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unfairlight

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I've been keeping reasonably busy, see signature.

Just Cause 3 wasn't great fun. It was alright, it was fine, it was okay, it was average. But like the few other games I played recently it was something I pretty much just ghosted through and wasn't too engaged by.

Trackmania 2 is Trackmania. It was good fun. I'll get back to it soon and try to grind for a few better times, then do Canyon and Valley.

Fallout 4 was alright. This was my second playthrough. I had enough fun with the looting and crafting side of things. As long as you forget the whole Fallout thing, you can enjoy it as a 7/10 looter-shooter. Also did Far Harbour, that was quite good.

Kingdom Come was alright. Oddly enough some of the recent patches have managed to ADD bugs to the game (getting tackled from the front) and the much slower progression that was also patched in I think are a net negative when it comes to the late-game I have whined about repeatedly.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was a game I had on my PS2 but never completed up until now. Enjoyable. My friend described it as Full Spectrum Warrior where you can shoot a gun, and I think that's a good thing. A few of the final missions were wonky. I'll have to do the later BiAs after this.

Aragami was a short stealth game. Much better than most other short indie stealth games, but only worth it on sale for like 5€ because of the shortness.

Doom 2016 was 5/10. People rave about this shit so much and I can't see where they're coming from. The level design sucks, the weapon dynamics suck, the glorykills suck, the cutscenes suck, the soundtrack sucks, the movement sucks. I say "sucks", but what I really mean is that it's so menially average and boring that I can't muster up many positive thoughts. The only good thing I will give to this game is visuals and performance, and that nightmare difficulty was reasonably difficult (despite being pretty bad for other reasons). I ran the game at a locked 200 FPS at max settings, a stellar showing honestly, but if I could have given up that performance for a less shit game I would have taken that trade.
This was another one of those games I ghosted through. I didn't put much thought into it, I just played it until it ended with usually Youtube bullshit running in the background.

Dishonored was good. I enjoyed it a fair bit more than Dishonored 2, it generally just feels a lot more tight and well rounded and designed. Dishonored 2 generally took a few too many extremes with the supernatural stuff and it felt a lot less grounded with a lot less character compared to Dishonored 1. The black woman's ship is no where near as fun or interesting of a hideout as the Hound Pits Pub, either, especially since the few characters you have there have no actual character. I didn't feel too involved with Dishonored 2, but it was a decent enough game.

I think someone here really liked Prey 2017, I forgot who that was but I found it decent enough. It was similar to Doom 2016, I mostly ghosted through it until it ended. Enemy designs were pretty bad (both gameplay and art wise) and combat was very unenjoyable. It feels like every enemy was designed to induce frustration. Imagine it as getting shotgunned in the back when an enemy spawns behind you in System Shock 2, it's that type of feeling much too often.
Maybe the highest difficulty made it less enjoyable with the bloated health pools but even then the combat mostly boiled down to just comboing too much. Psychoshock, shotgun, repeat until they die. I was fool enough to not get Psychoshock until a little later despite being the best combat power in the game, which made some enemies take a lot more ammo to kill than they should have. Telepath, Technopath and Weaver specifically were really bad, but Weaver became easy after you get Psychoshock while Telepath and Technopath was just too much of an ammo sink. I REALLY hated Cystoids.
The Q Beam gun was really bad. I barely used it, it just was too slow to kill with and the ammo was too pricey early on compared to shotgun, and later it just was too slow in DPS.
The Gloo gun was cool. Good idea, I like it, even if it trivialised some things. Same for the recycling system.
It feels as if the art design in Prey has a lot less character than Dishonored or System Shock 2. The enemies are all boring black blobs and the environments aren't that memorable.
Prey, similarly to Dishonored 1 and 2, had far too many readables as well. This is something Arkane is obsessed with for some reason. I never paid much attention to them but you kinda have to because you want to get those passwords and keycodes. They need to tone them down, they rarely add much to anything.
 
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unfairlight

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Did the Xen chapters of Black Mesa, wrote about it in its thread.
I completed the rest of the game last year but I just did the Xen chapters alone. I'll say it's pretty good, but Interloper was kinda wonky with all the platforming and repetition. Visuals too, for that matter, Interloper looked a fair bit worse than the earlier parts of Xen. It's good, but I don't think that's the real problem for the majority of people. The question is rather if it was worth waiting like 5 years for just 4 hours of content to be made, and if another team couldn't have just made another Half Life remake in Unity or Unreal Engine instead in that time, which would have had a lot less technical limitations. The way they managed to wrangle the Source engine to such an extent with how good the earlier parts of Xen look, it's truly impressive; it almost manages to look like a modern game using PBR and fancy dynamic lighting techniques, but I do wonder if they couldn't have just started from scratch in another game engine instead.
I think the game leaks memory. Both VRAM and RAM. The game topped out my VRAM usage to the 8gb I have and over time my RAM usage went to about 11gb/16gb, when my normal desktop RAM usage is about 6gb, and loading times and performance got worse too. Near the end my performance took such a huge dump I had to restart to make it run well again.
tl;dr it's pretty good but the Interloper chapter isn't that great, too drawn out and repetitive without very many fun combat setpieces. The final boss fight is pretty okay, better than the one in HL1 at least. Visuals and art wise I enjoyed it a fair bit.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
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I guess those opinions got too hot.
 

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