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What game are you wasting time on?

blurbo

Novice
Joined
Dec 25, 2011
Messages
10
Playing it safe

Gothic 1 - Things that bothered me in an otherwise amazing game, in order of importance: 1) the fact that you have to restrain yourself from stealing OP weapons because the combat is all about 2) whacking people repeteadly in the head with a blind man cane's swing motion (only exceptions I can recall are the fight with Kharim where you have to block his combos, and the little timing game involved with hornets/leaping wolves/dinos etc. 3) the fact that you can go through the orc encampment/temple TWICE, first time with the orcish staff the other with the supersword (or three times in my case because of that damn bow), as it kills any sense of momentum. Anyway what bought me right from the start was the "quest" where the guy in the old camp tells you there's a treasure somewhere, so you follow him outside and he robs you blind (I feel that most of Age of Decadence is an exploration of this concept of a world where the nicest guy acts like Jordan Belfort).

Fallout: NV - Very mixed feelings about this one. It's too long, epic endgame is epic except for the fact that it's that terrible engine and everything looks ridiculous, plus "prepare for the battle!" quests, which I did because I'm an idiot and trust developers they won't wind me up by throwing 40 hrs of nothingness at my unemployment, just for fun. But on the goodside, all the small atmospheric western things worked very well for me: the goodsprings gunfight (not the gunplay itself, which in general didn't seem to involve more than either sitting still taking headshots or spraying bullets in close quarters), the exploration of the abandoned gas station, hearing from the sniper lady in the NCR outpost that there's a pile of smoke coming from Nipton and then finding out about the Legion, the ghouls near Novac, Mr House trying to protect his Vegas, Benny's plan to take over etc. In general, I think all these well fleshed out small-scale conflicts always worked well in the post-apoc setting, while the big battle for Hoover Dam is absolutely over the top and out of place. Plus movement and gunplay in this game are the kind of things that make you look at sleep paralysis in a better light
 
Last edited:

Durandal

Arcane
Joined
May 13, 2015
Messages
2,117
Location
New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Got the 2-ALL on ROLLING THUNDER 1 (ARC) (New version). It's pretty messy, but the mistakes made do neatly illustrate some of the jank in the game, which I'll get into later on.

The gist of Rolling Thunder is that you're playing as a Super Spy called Bames Jond, on a mission to rescue his partner from the LGBT-division of the KKK, led by Piccolo from Dragon Ball. Rolling Thunder isn't about bare-chested excess and covering the screen in spreadfire and brimstone like Contra is--instead you're a spy, and spies act with lethal precision. Most enemies take only one or two shots to die, and as for Mr. Jond, taking one bullet means instant death (despite the misleading size of his health bar), and colliding with enemies shaves off half. Yet, the ensuing mercy i-frames on a collision are so short that most enemies will simply collide with you again right after your recovery, so a collision usually means instant death anyways (unless you get very lucky).

SE56PgB.png

Maskers struck with awe and terror in the face of Mr. Jond’s shining new pair of red Yeezys (1986) (Colorized)

As ammo is limited, enemies are everywhere, and you can't shoot while moving or jumping, so you need to be quick and precise to not get overwhelmed and Hitler-greeted to death. The premise and limited ammo is also what makes it satisfying to calculate how many shots you need to take out a group based on the amount of enemies and the enemy types present, and then execute them with no shots wasted (even though the game is pretty lenient with ammo refills and lets you carry your stockpile over between stages). Besides your semi-auto pistol you also have a full-auto SMG, which you want to apply some trigger discipline with and not waste more shots than necessary. Enemies that take more than one shot to kill subtly reinforce this with their slight on-hit i-frames; taking one bullet knocks them back into a crouching position, and á la Shinobi AC they're invulnerable until they land on the ground (but unlike Shinobi this only takes a fifth of a second and doesn't feel like it takes ages). This means that if you fire a stream of bullets from a standing position at an enemy, one will connect, but all other bullets will go right over his head. Therefore you want to follow up with a shot from a crouching position or be shooting from crouch to begin with, but you also want to slightly space out your shots to take the i-frames into account. Firing full-auto from crouch will have the enemy soak up three bullets instead of two because of the way the collision works in this game, so you’re better off manually double-tapping.

You also want to be quick about your Tactical Espionage. Not only is the time limit pretty strict and you get more score the faster you clear a stage, but the longer you take, the more chaos you subject yourself to. Enemies in Rolling Thunder primarily enter the field through the right side of the screen, but also through the many doors in the background, and they will keep coming out of those doors at regular intervals unless you move on. So a stage will behave more predictably when you’re blazing through, but less so if you're being a turtle as enemies that you didn’t originally account for in your route start making themselves known. It's a bit how Ninja Gaiden (NES) discourages backpedaling by giving you more respawning enemies to deal with if you do back up instead of facing towards danger. The enemy types that come out of the doors in RT also tend to be semi-random (usually one of two possible Masker types, where there's 8+ of them in total), so even if you're blazing through you still need to take this into account.

RT is also pretty interesting to play for speed, primarily because bunnyhopping forwards lets you move faster than your walking speed. Doing so also carries an inherent risk, because you cannot attack while jumping, and enemies come out of doors unannounced and quickly enough that a misplaced jump can make you fall right into a Masker's bosom and die. At the same time there are enough obstacles in your path that you can't just bunnyhop past everything like it's a Half-Life 1 speedrun, so you need to be smart about knowing when to go fast. The ability to bunnyhop also brings rise to a technique that I call 'queueing shots', which operates on a similar principle as the jumping attacks in Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden. It involves firing a bullet and then bunnyhopping alongside it to increase the distance it travels before it hits an enemy or exits the screen. This allows you to kill enemies right as they enter the screen while moving at max speed without having to stop and shoot right as they appear, adding more depth to optimizing a given stage for speed. This is also partially made possible because the speed of your bullets isn't blazingly fast--it's only slightly faster than you moving at bunnyhopping speed. If the bullet speed was practically instant like in Rolling Thunder 2, it would despawn before you could even begin bunnyhopping.

One thing Rolling Thunder introduced that other games would steal is the ability to high jump and vault onto the platform below/above you, effectively presenting two planes of combat. Not only are you worrying about enemies coming from the left and right and the background, but also from above and below, because all enemies will high jump up to where you are. High jumping also makes you invincible against bullets (except for the startup of the jump), so it makes for a good escape tool. All this is cool on paper, but the game rarely does anything interesting with it. Short of being physically blocked off by walls, there isn’t a lot that makes you want to move towards the other plane (like enemy groups that shoot bullets from both standing and crouching), or being forced to vault towards a plane that’s already contested by enemies. Most enemies will already move towards your plane, who you can catch by staying on yours and safely shooting them as they vault in (unless they’re vaulting exactly into your position for a collision kill). Enemies that can badger you from other planes, like grenadiers that will spam grenades on the plane below, are surprisingly rare. Moreover, multi-planar combat is only really a thing in Stage 1 and 5 for both loops, in all the other stages they only play a minor factor, usually because there’s no other plane to begin with.

Instead, too many stages in RT seek to impose a challenge through diagonals or height differences in terrain and enemy placement, even though your moveset isn’t always well-equipped to deal with them. For example, take the chest-high peekaboo shooting sections near the end of Stage 5, where you and the enemy are forced to wait for each other and take potshots like some kind of generic cover shooter. This is precisely where having another plane would give you more options to negotiate obstacles like these instead of being forced into playing peekaboo, but unfortunately they are absent here. Another example is the staircase section in Stage 2. Because the enemies come in diagonally from below and because you can only shoot to your hard left and right, your only option is to wait for them to ascend/descend into your line of fire. You can jump over them, but usually there’s another enemy group at the bottom, so the collision damage would kill you. Here I again wonder why the game doesn’t use multiple flat planes to let you vault down repeatedly (like Stage 2 in Rolling Thunder 2). The end of Stage 1 does employ staircase formations in the same way, but the enemies are placed in a way where you don’t have to wait more than a second for them to fall into your line of fire, so it’s much more tolerable in comparison.

Some sections of the game are even worse in this regard, which involve you having to drop down or ascend to proceed, except your path forward is blocked off by very inconvenient enemy placement which you can’t jump over without dying to contact damage, and said enemies simply won’t budge. The only way to negotiate these situations is to abuse the hidden ability of your jumps to induce spontaneous brain aneurysms in the enemy AI, and make them move the other way. I can only surmise the devs knew about this and designed parts of the second loop around it, because there’s simply no way you can pass through certain sections without this knowledge. But because this only works when an enemy is in a neutral state and some of these enemies will be attacking non-stop, you will have to jump repeatedly until their AI gets the message, and then you gotta wait for them to process their brain aneurysm and slowly turn the other way, which just puts a massive dent in the pacing of the game. This is honestly a band-aid solution for situations that the player character turns out not to be properly equipped to deal with, and would be better solved by designing situations around your existing toolset (i.e. add more planes), or giving you the proper tools necessary for these situations (jump while shooting/non-lethal contact damage).

The Maskers come in many different color schemes, all of which signify different behaviors and properties (in a clever bit of asset reuse). Strawberry Green Tea is your standard mook that wants to get all touchy feely, Banana Blueberry is the same but takes two shots, Orange fires bullets from standing positions, Lime Green Tea fires from crouching, Lime and Chocolate Lime throw grenades in an arc, and you also get the illusive Ninja Maskers that appear from thin air. It’s a bit of a basic line-up, but they’re often employed in great numbers and from several different directions on the screen that it still allows for a good deal of variety in the stage design. Signifying different enemy behaviors through color coding helps you formulate a plan to deal with a given situation instead of being forced to guess whether an enemy will shoot from crouching or standing, which is why it’s especially frustrating when the game decides to break this rule in the second loop. Suddenly Strawberry Green Tea can throw grenades, and Orange fires from crouching instead of standing. On its own enemies being able to do things like randomly decide between shooting from standing or crouching would push you to take the safest and most consistent option for dealing with it, but because the game actively misinforms you with no warning, dying as a result can’t help but feel cheap and disrespectful of your time and effort.

There are also other non-Masker enemies, most notably Mutants whose small stature means you can only hit them while crouching, but once they come close enough to you they will quickly leap into your face and jump right over your crouching shots. So at long-range you want to shoot from crouch, at close-range you want to catch them mid-air with a standing shot, which makes them pretty effective to force you to stand up every now and then, considering crouching shots will take out most other enemies. Aside from Mutants you also got Panthers, which behave the same except less aggressively, but they’re more of an annoyance because of their growl. Their growl actually lowers their hitbox and makes it impossible to hit them on a flat plane. This is not an attack, this is just a taunt that wastes your time. There are also Owlbats, which are horrible enemies that thankfully only appear rarely. Upon getting triggered they will fly around at the top of the screen for several seconds, then swoop in like a homing missile. Much like the Panther, them flying around just wastes your time. Owlbats could be a good fit if you were forced to deal with other enemies on top of the Owlbats (like in an autoscroller section), but as is, you can just back off instead of moving forwards and deal with more enemies, and then wait for the Owlbats to swoop down so you can safely take them out.

BORING STAGE-BY-STAGE NITTY-GRITTY

Although most of the enemy cast can be dealt with by shooting from a crouching position, the stage design does a good enough job of using the stage terrain in a way to force you out of it, particularly Stage 1, 3, and 5, on account of actually presenting different planes for you to vault around, and using doors to spawn enemies right next to you.

Stage 3 is mostly a retread of Stage 1’s ideas, but with the addition of Mutants to spice things up. Initially you will have to get used to their ability to leap over your shots when they get close, but over time you can mitigate the threat they pose by memorizing most of their positions. One interesting thing of note is that Mutants cannot enter the screen via doors (nor can any other non-Masker enemies, although all other non-Masker enemies beside the Mutant suck and are better off not appearing at all) and only appear from the sides of the screen, which all things considered makes sense, if they spawned within leaping range they’d come at you so fast that you can only survive by memorizing these spawns. However, this lack of response time could be mitigated if Mutants could only spawn through doors on the plane that you’re currently not on, so you would still have adequate time to react.

Stage 4 opens with another staircase where you have to wait for the enemies on it to drop down into your line of fire, and then giving you Owlbats to deal with. After that you have to drop down into a pit, but if you take the most straightforward path of simply dropping down, a Ninja Masker will suddenly spawn in your face, which will make you collide with another very inconveniently placed Ninja Masker. Instead, you have to descend platform by platform to get down safely. This isn’t particularly hard to execute or get around, it’s just some bullshit designed to get first-time players considering the Ninja Masker isn’t remotely telegraphed. And after that you get a platforming section, which again involves more trial ‘n error. The first part is the running men-on-fire that keep bouncing around the screen, and split into four ascending spirits when you shoot them. You have to memorize what platforms to shoot them from, else their erratic bouncing will make it infeasible to get them in your line of fire (especially if you’re on a higher platform and they’re on a lower one), and shooting them while they’re close means their released spirits can get you by surprise. Again, it’s easy and consistent once memorized, but their erratic nature is primarily designed to catch first-time players by surprise. But the second part involves the actual platforming itself, which takes some time getting used to, as you’ll probably often end up falling off platforms by accident while trying to jump. This is mainly because the player’s hitbox and neutral stance is pretty thin. Most platformers allow the player character to eke over the edge in order to make jumping off the edge off a platform more lenient; you can see how the character’s sprite is standing with one foot on the platform and the other on thin air. But as this isn’t the case in Rolling Thunder, you have to be very precise with your jumps, which IMO is a bad fit for a game that primarily isn’t even about precision platforming at all.

Stage 5 is where all enemies and bullets start moving faster. Even though the actual enemy compositions aren’t that hard by themselves when compared to previous stages, it’s certainly more engaging because of their numbers and all the different directions/doors they are coming in from, on top of the increased enemy/bullet movement speed. In this stage the foreground/background plane switching comes (somewhat) into greater play, although bizarrely going into the background is never required to progress, so you can just ignore this altogether. There is an interesting dynamic to combining background/foreground switching on top of the existing plane switching; being in the background protects you from enemies on the foreground and plane above you because enemies on the top plane cannot jump down into the background (but enemies can jump from the background towards the top plane), but you still have to contend with enemies spawning from the background doors, and you eventually have to exit into the foreground through a chokepoint doorway. Being in the foreground means you no longer have to deal with the background doors, but you’re still vulnerable to enemies on the top plane, and on the top plane you’re vulnerable to background doors AND the bottom planes on the foreground AND background. This kind of asymmetric set-up in terms of potential risk is something the terrain could have played into--where there’s trade-offs in taking one plane over the other, with hard counters forcing you away from one particular plane. Sadly the terrain in Stage 5 never plays with this, so the foreground/background switching ends up being an underutilized gimmick.

Stage 5 isn’t the end; you have the second loop as well. It’s not just the same thing as the first loop but slightly faster; you get new enemy types, revamped enemy placements, some stages feature redesigned terrains, and the Stage 4 in the second loop is a completely new stage that doesn’t resemble Stage 4 in the first loop at all? Given how short the first loop is, (10 minutes) this is basically the second half of the game, and if you intend on playing this game you shouldn’t skip out on it.

So Stage 6 (or ST2-1) features way more enemies, tougher enemy types appear more often, and previously flat hallways now feature enemies poised to drop down from the windows above. The second half features laser gates that you have to time your approach through (while being mindful of their wack hitboxes), but their inclusion feels kinda wasted. You can usually dispatch all enemies first and then safely pass through the gates while the lasers are down, although this way the laser gates always pose the exact same challenge regardless of how the enemies are placed. Laser gates would be more interesting if you were forced to pass them while having to deal with enemies that you can’t permanently remove. Doors to both of your sides that spawn Maskers at a higher rate would be a great fit). Laser gates aren’t used again until Stage 9 (and in the same lacklustre capacity to boot), so there’s some wasted potential.

The most bizarre change between loops is that the final stretch of Stage 6 features enemies that will jump up unannounced out of the sandbag mountain you are standing on. You cannot see this coming because the sandbags are obscuring their sprites (save for teeny bits sticking out), and whether they will jump up to begin with is mostly random. You can kind of route around this, but the only way possible against a threat that you literally can not see coming is through trial ‘n error. This part is a headscratcher and I cannot even guess what the rationale behind it is.

Stage 7 plays mostly the same as Stage 2 with slightly tougher enemy types, the only noticeable changes are the addition of Owlbats in the crate sections and Mutants in the staircase section. For Owlbats you want to memorize their positions so you can pre-fire them while they’re still on the ground, so you don’t have to wait for them to stop flying. The Mutants don’t really add anything to the staircase section, all you do is stand on top of the staircase and shoot while standing as all the Mutants leap into your line of fire. It’s a static threat that doesn’t overlap with anything else, and is repeated several times in a short timespan in the exact same way. Just a waste of time.

Stage 8 doesn’t look all that different from Stage 3, but then it keeps going, and it just keeps going, until you’ve realized that they slapped a remixed version of Stage 4 at the end of this stage. The No Miss clears on YouTube can only manage to finish this stage with less than 20 seconds left on the timer because of its sheer length, and only with an airtight route and a compliant AI at that. The role of time limits should be to discourage excessive dilly-dallying and encourage more aggressive and engaging playstyles. All making them this strict/making stages this long is make only the most optimized routes feasible, while making any elements of RNG a massive pain in the ass.

One such RNG element is the new Panther cage. Whereas you could just pass by it via the foreground in the first loop, now the foreground path is blocked off, and you have to get around it by going into the Panther cage. And the only way you can do so is via two narrow doorways, while there’s a massive group of Panthers on the other side unpredictably walking around and making it unsafe to enter it. All you can do here is wait until an opening presents itself--costing valuable time, or try to force one by jumping and making all Panthers jump along with you as well. But all of this is subject to a lot of RNG, because sometimes the Panthers will decide not to jump (because they randomly decided to growl), sometimes they will decide to leave their cage and get the jump on you, and how they move around is unpredictable.

Particularly cruel here is that if you move a slight bit to the left before entering the cage, a Panther can spawn on the left side of the screen and immediately maul you before you can react. There’s nothing inherently wrong with enemies spawning in from the left, but the player character’s position then ought to be locked to the center to give you enough time and space to react to this, as opposed to Rolling Thunder 1 where your position is locked a one-third screen width from the left. This makes RT1 more suitable for threats that come in from the right, but certainly not from the left edge of the screen.

The ensuing lava section has to be one of the worst cases of trial ‘n error in the game. First you get an Owlbat that for some reason decides to fly around the bottom of the screen instead of the top, and in order to hit it you must jump on a platform amidst lava. The only issue here is that this platform is placed just close enough that if you jump off the very edge of the prior platform (as the game taught you several times before), you will overshoot and land on hot lava instead. Air control is very limited in this game and your jump arc is mostly fixed, so you can’t adjust your trajectory mid-air by much. The only way to avoid this is to unintuitively jump a few steps before the edge of the platform. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall even Castlevania ever doing this. Again, there’s nothing inherently with this kind of setup, but Rolling Thunder isn’t primarily about platforming and never drilled fundamentals like these into you, so being expected to suddenly know about not having to jump from the edge of a platform (while the time limit is almost running out) is a bit obscene.

This is also why the last section of the stage where you have to platform across incredibly narrow pillars also feels rather out of place, but the most offensive thing about it is the men-of-fire that get spawned mid-jump--in a game where you can’t attack while jumping. Even if you land safely, they will inevitably collide with you and kill you. The only way to avoid this is to pre-fire a bullet before you jump, which is some mighty kuso. I did say before that I liked queueing shots for its speedrun potential, but only because it was optional. Forcing the player to pre-fire obstacles is always going to be a problem if you don’t telegraph what’s ahead.

Stage 9 is on the mild side, all things considered. Not a lot of doors or multi-directional spawns to worry about. Instead you get a lot of boring sections where you have to drop down something, but have to wait for a Masker at the bottom to move out of the way so you don’t collide with them. There are also more Stage 3-style Ninja Masker pits, where you gotta drop down several platforms, but standing on particular platforms causes Ninja Maskers to spawn in your face, so you just have to trial ‘n error your way through until you find a consistent route. Not particularly interesting on replays. The only interesting obstacle of note is the two laser gates stapled to each other that activate at asynchronous intervals, since you need to use your brain a little to find a gap between the laser gates, although their RNG nature makes it crappy when playing for speed. One thing I’d suggest for laser gates in general is to have them move back and forth horizontally, allowing for more interplay with enemy spawns by making laser gates more of an overlapping and persistent threat, as opposed to the current implementation where you can just chill near one and take out all enemies first, effectively isolating the element of enemy placement from the stage hazards, instead of combining them.

Stage 10 is more of the good ol' stuff. More enemy swarms, less gimmicks. However, the foreground/background switching is still mostly boring, and there is one crappy part that involves enemies pre-firing at a place you have to drop down towards, which again involves more jumping to get the AI to GTFO. At first I was convinced that the extension of the final stage in the second loop was some bullshit that you couldn’t reliably pass through, namely having to ascend a staircase populated by Maskers that refuse to budge unless you bait them into dropping, so I used an invincibility glitch to waltz past the whole shebang. Turns out my Google-fu just wasn’t up to snuff and I somehow missed the existence of a No Miss clear before the time of recording. Designing games around gaming the enemy AI like this is tricky, because behavior is not something that you can really telegraph until it’s too late, like the Red Arremers in the Makaimura games or Donovans in Streets of Rage hard countering your air attacks. It’s more tolerable in beat ‘em ups because you have a wider margin of error thanks to the beeg health bar the genre usually affords you, but less so in precision run ‘n guns like Rolling Thunder. At the very least you want to teach the peculiarities of the enemy AI in a controlled environment early on in the game, not the absolute last stretch.

Finally there’s the final boss fight against Piccolo himself, where you must face his most powerful technique of Running Into You. This is actually an interesting fight where you must constantly gauge how many shots you can afford to let loose before having to jump over him again, because the distance after which he decides to turn around after you jump over him is AFAIK random. And often that distance is so short that you have no choice but to immediately jump again. Cool fight, but the randomness makes it bad for speedrunning, which is also especially bad in a survival context, because if you no missed everything up until this part you will likely have about 20 seconds remaining on the timer, and RNGesus making you pay more of it really makes you want to scream. However, all this is assuming you let the fight play out as intended. Instead, if you have at least 25 bullets, you can simply spray him to death before he even gets close. You can do this by conserving SMG ammo throughout the stage, but if you enable autofire your pistol basically functions no different from the SMG anyways.

All in all, Rolling Thunder has a good core of ideas and mechanics, it’s just not utilized as well as it could be, and it often throws situations at you that are better suited for a different kind of game. The amount of trial ‘n error in the second loop kind of sours the whole thing, and although the game is fun to be played for speed, often it just doesn’t let you.
 

CyberModuled

Savant
Joined
Mar 31, 2019
Messages
443
So rather than playing anything decent or in my recent RPG backlog like Naheulbeuk or Labyrinth of Refrain for the holiday, some part of my brain decided to go, "Yep, it's time to finally play Deus Ex: Invisible War." Honestly, it's hard to say much about something that is universally criticized even outside of these forums but man, that was astonishingly bad. The closest thing I can compare it to is something like Thief 3 which likewise had a lot of consolization decline to its general design when compared to its predecessors but I found it was still at least able to be a generally enjoyable experience. Nothing about that was remotely reflected in IW though. The moment the game just decided to drop five multi tools at the player's feet for no explainable reason was the moment I realized it wasn't about consolization or even being too handholding (like getting three upgrade canisters and a black market canister within the tutorial mission) but just the designers outright thinking whoever was playing it was an absolute, utter retard. Honest to god, how the fuck did people like Harvey Smith and the rest of Ion Storm end up working at Arkane after this when nothing about the game design, RPG mechanics, and simple world building make any sense at all?

Really, I only got two things out of it.

1. I can finally say from firsthand experience that any individual who says IW is a bad Deus Ex game but a "good" game on its own can fuck off.
2. I have newfound appreciation for HR and MD that I thought I'd never have after playing the original Deus Ex and find it better than either of them. For all their narrative issues, at least Eidos Montreal's level design team clearly knew what the hell they were doing to make a fun world to play around in and explore which is the absolute bare minimum I think is needed to make these games engaging at all.
 

JDR13

Arcane
Joined
Nov 2, 2006
Messages
3,930
Location
The Swamp
Gothic 1 - Things that bothered me in an otherwise amazing game, in order of importance: 1) the fact that you have to restrain yourself from stealing OP weapons because

The stronger the weapon the higher the stat requirements to use it. By the time you can use the really good ones, you're at the point where, in most games, you're OP anyways. They did a much better job with that in Gothic 2 though especially with NotR.


Fallout: NV - Very mixed feelings about this one. It's too long, epic endgame is epic except for the fact that it's that terrible engine and everything looks ridiculous

Why didn't you just use some graphics mods?
 

Ezekiel

Arcane
Joined
May 3, 2017
Messages
5,372
Yay, some Hard As finally.

20201225002515-1.jpg


I like this BDSM dungeon, complete with retracting spikes on the walls that damage you, and the boss whipping her slaves into submission. I love that they had the balls to do something like this, and somehow got away with a T rating, for being Mildly Suggestive.

20201225002224-1.jpg


I don't think the ESRB was even paying attention, lol.

This is an action-fighting game in which players choose one of four vigilantes to battle against a crime syndicate. As players traverse side-scrolling environments (e.g., streets, jails, police stations), they use punches, kicks, and throws to defeat waves of human enemies (e.g., gangsters, criminals, police officers) in melee-style combat. Players also use knives, swords, pipes, and tasers to inflict more damage against enemies. Combat is frenetic and accompanied by impact sounds and cries of pain; some sequences involve more protracted one-on-one combat. A handful of female characters wear low cut tops and are depicted with jiggling breasts. The words “p*ss off” appear in the game.
 

blurbo

Novice
Joined
Dec 25, 2011
Messages
10
Gothic 1 - Things that bothered me in an otherwise amazing game, in order of importance: 1) the fact that you have to restrain yourself from stealing OP weapons because

The stronger the weapon the higher the stat requirements to use it. By the time you can use the really good ones, you're at the point where, in most games, you're OP anyways. They did a much better job with that in Gothic 2 though especially with NotR.


Fallout: NV - Very mixed feelings about this one. It's too long, epic endgame is epic except for the fact that it's that terrible engine and everything looks ridiculous

Why didn't you just use some graphics mods?

Shitty laptop. Most of the unease comes from the clumsy movement, high fps notwithstanding (which I managed to get).

For G1 I remember there’s a bunch of 1h weapons that have a very convenient strength req/damage ratio that you can get early on. I agree that lots of rpgs get easy towards the end, and actually g1 has some spikes when it comes to the crossbow guys in the mines, but in the end I think the temple didn’t feel as threatening as some of the early-game forest encounters
 

Kabas

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Feb 10, 2018
Messages
1,258
There is a Holy one running around, IIRC.
Didn't found any holy glaives running around but i found out that there is no problem with giving your weapons an early +1/+2 enchantments to make your life easier, these can be upgraded into a +3 with elemental damage no problem.
However, i run into a different problem.
s4ypi3p.png

I am now level 10 and both my cleric and wizard are at zero excess exp, they can't earn any and therefore can't craft anything. It was a really lucky decision of mine to craft Holy/Axiomatic glaive +3 and Frost/Shock longbow +3 while they were still at level nine.
I am currently at the 4th dungeon of the temple, is that because i outlevel the current encounters or something? Will i be able to earn some exp later? Or is that a bug?
My rogue is now really lagging behind my fighter and ranger without a properly enchanted weapon, i made her a simple rapier +3 on what excess exp i had left after reaching the 10th level but it feels like it's not going to be enough.

It's a shame if i am unable to craft anymore without cheating, for me the game really opened up once i got access to all these cool toys. It feels satisfying after a dozens of annoying encounters with bugbears to finally reach the point where i am the one who is pushing them around.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,865
Now I'm playing with power! Going to beat this bitch one way or another.
u1W0rDh.jpg

eh.... i'm down to 40 credits... :despair:
 
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Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,287
There is a Holy one running around, IIRC.
Didn't found any holy glaives running around but i found out that there is no problem with giving your weapons an early +1/+2 enchantments to make your life easier, these can be upgraded into a +3 with elemental damage no problem.
However, i run into a different problem.
s4ypi3p.png

I am now level 10 and both my cleric and wizard are at zero excess exp, they can't earn any and therefore can't craft anything. It was a really lucky decision of mine to craft Holy/Axiomatic glaive +3 and Frost/Shock longbow +3 while they were still at level nine.
I am currently at the 4th dungeon of the temple, is that because i outlevel the current encounters or something? Will i be able to earn some exp later? Or is that a bug?
My rogue is now really lagging behind my fighter and ranger without a properly enchanted weapon, i made her a simple rapier +3 on what excess exp i had left after reaching the 10th level but it feels like it's not going to be enough.

It's a shame if i am unable to craft anymore without cheating, for me the game really opened up once i got access to all these cool toys. It feels satisfying after a dozens of annoying encounters with bugbears to finally reach the point where i am the one who is pushing them around.
There are several Holy weapons lying around. I know for sure there is a Spike Chain and a Longsword, and I am pretty sure there was a polearm. I thought it was a glaive (it definitely wasn't a halberd), but I can recall exactly. I has been a while.

I am not sure about the bug as I never played with the cap on, but CO8 allows you to go past the level cap, so it should continue to accumulate?
 

pakoito

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Messages
3,086
I just got into Erannorth Reborn because it's a sandbox adventure deckbuilder thingy. I got hooked so I bought the expansions after playing ~4h today. It feels more ambitious than most games, while keeping complexity properly scoped to character builds and factions.

The downside is that it's windows only so I have to play over Parsec from my mac.
 

Kabas

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Feb 10, 2018
Messages
1,258
There are several Holy weapons lying around. I know for sure there is a Spike Chain and a Longsword, and I am pretty sure there was a polearm. I thought it was a glaive (it definitely wasn't a halberd), but I can recall exactly. I has been a while.

I am not sure about the bug as I never played with the cap on, but CO8 allows you to go past the level cap, so it should continue to accumulate?
Guess i will just fiddle with some houserule options then
 

pakoito

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Messages
3,086
The downside is that it's windows only so I have to play over Parsec from my mac.
Is this like Stadia but for your own PC?
Yeah pretty much. I bought someone's gaming laptop very cheap so I have it running at home or even by my 2015 mac, just so I can multitask on the other laptop's power.

I've heard of people renting high-end Windows VMs from Microsoft, Google or Amazon very cheap; then playing over Parsec.
 

Serious_Business

Best Poster on the Codex
Joined
Aug 21, 2007
Messages
3,909
Location
Frown Town
Actually went through Fallout for the first time in I don't know how many years, maybe 10. Here's a couple of heretic comments, as I am perfectly aware the game was discussed before (no shit) and saying anything new about it, other than how great it is, will seem inappropriate -

For the game that is hailed as the template for cprgs, it has very little possibilities in how you can choose your own goals for your character, or even how you can create said character. What it does great is give you very clear goals, but allow you to be creative in how you reach them ; but the goals themselves, and thus your "role", are very set in stone. You can't ignore the Vault's plight, nor can you try another solution, like having everyone move out to the nearby towns, for example. This is not a "problem", but it goes to show that crpgs are not really about emergent gameplay, about setting your own goals, nor they are about "expressing yourself" through a character creator. They are actually, at least originally, fairly structured goal-oriented experiences, even though Fallout doesn't need the player to jump through hoops to get where they need to be. The ability to ignore content is probably what makes the experience of freedom in this game. In itself, this doesn't seem all that important - open world games also allow this - but it's how the quest design is open, without using open world dynamics, that you get this experience of freedom : goal-oriented creative problem solving. So one could actually propose this for a definition of crpgs (goal oriented creative problem solving), if we admit that Fallout is still the template to follow. The important part is certainly not "who you are", but what you're doing. Who you are actually matters little beyond what you can do. Fallout has practically no psychology behind it. That's why it's good. Psychology makes culture idiotic (this is my pet peeve, I'm trying to apply it to video games).
 

goregasm

Scholar
Joined
Aug 19, 2016
Messages
135
Usually cycle between em each night for my hour or two of game time.

Battle Brothers, haven't gotten into actually playing the new dlc but still enjoy the gameplay loop, events etc.

Viking Conquest- 900 hours of warband since it launched and I still can't stop.

Legend of Grimrock- finally giving it a proper go, glad I picked up the sequel too if this continues.

Expeditions Viking- Still like it better than conquistador not being able to murder primatives kind of sucks though.

Stellaris- mana bars, global genocides of furries.

Attila- all TW games are the same. This one is ok to take squatting slavs to glory.

Kcd- still chasing rabbits with a club and feeling quite hungry, haven't progressed the main story past finding ginger since launch since I will put it down for months at a time. Still enjoyable enough.
 

pakoito

Arcane
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Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Messages
3,086
Just bought and refunded The Forest. I thought it was a story-driven exploration game, instead it's just plain survival against cannibal and mutant hordes.

I have to admit the first one I saw gave me a good scare.
 
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Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
Patron
Joined
Jan 19, 2014
Messages
13,514
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I beat Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines. With that over, I am done with all my PS Vita games. You have served me well, little fellow.

I didn't get exactly what I expected, but I had a good time. You'll get turn-based combat, with an active party of four people, lots of dungeon delving, and raising new characters once your old ones die. The clan you get to control is cursed. You get to use each character for around 20 months, give or take. Be sure to train them well, so their heirs can grow strong. You get new offspring through rituals with gods. Once you get enough devotion (by fighting), you have the choice to go through with the ritual. Stronger gods need stronger devotion. The fighting system is traditional jrpg style. There is a job system, and row placement has a somewhat important role. Some classes are more useful in the front row, while others are better in the back.
You can improve buildings in your town for better stuff, like improving shops or your shrine. I didn't do much of that.
As I aid in a previous post, this game is as Japanese as it gets. Japanese names, the graphics and the music. It's a game for Japanese people for Japanese people or Japanohpiles. It's a shame that it's stuck on PSV. I don't believe that many people played this one. Some weebs on the Codex would probably find it to be a decent game.

Other than that, I am almost done with my second run of Ho Tu Lo Shu. Cyberpunk 2077 is being played in shorter 30 minute sessions. Not sure I will beat it before CDPR sends me the parcel to return the game to them. As of now, I'm playing a game that I got a refund for.

I also started up Guild Wars 2 again. The democratic vote was to play this. We're 5 people messing around. I can't say that we're dead serious. We mopped up the first map and then did some platforming challenge. It was probably the most fun part of what I have played. Platforming in my MMOs is nothing that I am used to. I rolled an Asura Necromancer. While the class feels very strong, I am disappointed. I was hoping to have a plethora of summons at my hand. We'll probably last two or three weeks before we move on, but for now, I will play along with democracy.
 

bloodlover

Arcane
Joined
Sep 5, 2010
Messages
2,039
ETS2 these days. Since traveling is not possible and visiting (or god forbid having people over) are a big no no, I found myself playing ETS2 while listening to different podcasts more often than not. It's relaxing and offers a bit of escapism.
 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,182
Location
Bjørgvin
Completed Dungeon Master again (third or fourth time).

I wanted this time to be more of a challenge, so I decided to play it Iron Manlet and don't do any Combat Waltz/Two Step Dance. I also wanted to do it with only two characters, but that sucked too much fun out of the game, so I later recruited the two coolest dudes in the Hall of Heroes: Hissssa and Gothmog.

My two original champions were a boy and his dog: Zed Duke of Banville and Wuuf the Bika. Zed spent most of his youth playing Dorks in Dungeons, a dungeon survival game created by the great sage Gyro Gagax, so he knew the strengths and weaknesses of the denizens of the dungeon and could ID the items.

I was able to get through the whole game without reloading, except once when I lost my cool, when the poison clouds were activated after picking up Diamond Edge.
I saved all the Magic Boxes for the big, fat dragon. Only needed three of them. With Zed wielding The Inquisitor, Hissssa wielding Hardcleave, and Wuuf and Gothmog casting Poison Clouds the dragon soon turned into a neat stack of Dragon Steak Tartar.

DM is still a great game.
First few levels are a bit boring for an experienced blobberer and are more like a tutorial. Then you face Purple Worms which is the biggest difficulty spike combatwise.
The first six levels are quite straightforward, and then the level design improves significantly. Not nearly as intricate as Chaos Strikes Back, but superior to any other real time blobber except possibly the Grimrock games.
I still remembered the gist of most of the puzzles, so they were not much of a problem, except the green gem that you have to "put me back". I was so fixated on finding the crack in the wall to insert it in that I forgot to consider a different meaning of the message.

I found a HD-ready Amiga install (from a thread in General Gaming), but the downside is a stretched image on a modern monitor. I could try running it through DgVoodoo or something, but I eventually decided on the DOS version, mainly to get an "authentic" experience and to get the correct aspect ratio. The only real downside to the DOS version is no directional sound, unlike the Amiga version.

I'm really tempted to dive into Chaos Strikes Back now, but I know it's better to wait. Replaying DM was mainly to refresh my skills before playing Conflux, which is one of the main DM mods.
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BLOBERT

FUCKING SLAYINGN IT BROS
Patron
Joined
Jun 12, 2007
Messages
4,236
Location
BRO
Codex 2012
BROS FUCK DOOM ETERNAL

FIRST OFF I PLAY WITH A CONTROLLER CAUSE MY WRISTS ARE ALL FUCKED AND THE CONTROLLER DOESNT WORK RIGHT THE SETTINGS MENUS ARE FUCKED

NOW TO TALK THE GAME

I WANT TO SHOOT SHIT NOT JUMP PUZZLES I ALREADY OWN FIVE HUNDRED FUCKING VERSION OF MARIO ID PLAY THAT IF I WANTED A PLATFORMER
 

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