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RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
PIamstK.png
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/e3-2077/

All the big announcements from E3 2077
We interpret a message from the future.

Midway through our usual Monday morning meeting, an unidentified person joined the video call. Evan Lahti, global editor-in-chief of PC Gamer was in the call. Twice.

But this new Lahti looked much older, his frazzled grey hair crowding the frame, a bushy beard riddled with small bits of debris, including velcro cable management straps, LEDs, and crumbs from an unidentified snack.

Impostor Lahti claimed to be from the future, having discovered a probability rift in the spacetime continuum upon inserting a USB cable into his PC the right way on the first try. He’d just come from the convention center in Los Angeles v3.58 (BETA), California with all the latest news and announcements in PC gaming from E3 2077, news and announcements he then shared with us. We recorded every word.

Below are the headlines and a few details from the biggest stories in PC gaming from E3 2077. It is not guaranteed that this reality will come to pass, but trust that it is one possible timeline. Was Future Lahti trying to warn us? Or was he just hella hyped? Time will tell.

Microsoft is finally getting serious about PC gaming, again
Games For Windows Live’s rebirth as a rogue AI didn’t win over the hearts of gamers. Rather, it tore out the hearts of gamers with mechanical hands made of grimy discarded Xbox gamepads. That explains why Spencer’s E3 t-shirts have read 'help me' for the last couple decades.

EA reveals that reality has been a videogame this entire time
The known universe has since been panned by cosmic critics for boring and aimless missions, exploitative microstransactions, poor matchmaking, and a roadmap that ends with the destruction of mankind.

Google ditches cloud gaming, announces new system to download games directly to your cerebral cortex
But Google can't figure out how to improve brain latency. Synaptic seepage is another issue entirely.

Bethesda partners with McDonalds on the McSkyrim, a biomechanical cheeseburger that can run The Elder Scrolls V
Mod support is limited to ketchup, mustard, nudity, and pickles—hold the tomato.

Borderlands 8 will have ‘all the guns, simultaneously, as if every moment in time were and weren't happening at once, forever and into eternity blinking in and out of existence oh god I can see it... and it can see me’
That’s about 12 more guns than Borderlands 7. Will it be worth the usual MSRP of 5000 insect overlord labor units? Find out more once our writer awakes from their fear trance in our chained hands-on preview.

Hands-on: Cyberpunk 2077 is looking great, and we can’t wait to play it next year
The throwback RPG is looking better than ever. Buy our hardback compendium of previews collected over the decades.

Ubisoft’s E3 press conference takes home the coveted Tony Award for Best Musical
Standout songs include 'The Heart's Tower', 'Heart Assassin', 'A Siege on my Heart', and 'Far Cry 10 will release next year'.

Syndicate, Shadowrun, and System Shock to be rebooted as real-world simulations
Early testers claim the reboots are glorious bastions of peace sealed off from the horrors of daily life.

Devolver's show was still fuckin' weird somehow
We’ve never seen that much blood, and we survived the Blood Wars of 2056.

Want to feel old? Norman Reedus' Death Stranding baby has gout in trailer for Death Stranding 6: Stranding Strong
No word on a PC version yet. The announcement comes shortly after the Norman Reedus Clone Family Union received formal recognition. It is uncertain whether they will reprise their roles as a bunch of Norman Reeduses.

Esports alternative called 'sports' announced, but are they really esports?
We turn to Twitter for the answer.

Call of Duty 9: Modern Warfare 6: Black Ops 11: Infinite Warfare 3 marks the series' long-awaited return to World War 8
Watch out, because Call of Duty is about to get political.

No battle royale games announced due to less than 100 surviving humans on Earth
For the first year since Fortnite gained sentience, no new battle royale games were announced due to—ah, I've been stabbed. That's me out. The intern got me. Should've suspected it all along. You know, I always thought it was weird that videogame characters recorded audio logs and diary entries moments before death, but now I get... it... gahhh.

Half-Life 2: Episode 3 is out now!
70/100.

More headlines from E3 2077:
  • DMV, TurboTax, pee smell, ennui coming in next Dwarf Fortress update
  • 1992, 2003 announced as Oculus Timerift exclusives
  • Every game is now an Epic Exclusive; Epic Store finally adds shopping cart
  • Randy Pitchford's hologram is at it again
  • Star Citizen adds spaceship
  • New Assassin's Creed game set in 2035, conflict revolves around something called 'clean drinking water'
  • First fully RGB person born on show floor, is very blinky
  • Exploiting a loophole in intergalactic law, Star Wars: Battlefront 6 will offer endangered species as loot box rewards
  • Intel's 13th Gen Quark CPUs are creating unintentional wormholes
  • Samuel Roberts’ pickled brain takes the stage at The PC Gaming Show to announce he’s finished The Witcher 3
  • AMD may finally release drivers that support DirectX Raytracing
  • Mount & Blade 2 Developer Blog 62,587 released, now with horses!
  • Paradox announces Europa Universalis XIV will cover all known timelines
 

lightbane

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Messages
10,553
Hardcore gaming's newest game article is quite something: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/grand-pigeons-duty/

Have you ever heard of this old game called Potty Pigeon? It was a juvenile game where you controlled a pigeon and had him drop bird poo on cars. That happened, and it got a few ports. You can probably find some equally immature versions around made by flash developers for browsers, knowing the internet. Now you would expect the bird pooping simulator genre would have disappeared as soon as it began, and for the most part, you would be right. But then in 2016, Russian indie dev WolfgangIs released Grand Pigeon’s Duty, a new entry in the bizarre sub-genre that not only managed to somehow be good, but also managed to be so wildly different from anything ever seen before that it defies normal categorization.

You know you’re in for something different when the menu includes a button that shows a message for English players where the developer apologizes for his poor translation done entirely by himself, and then goes on to explain how he tried to capture the simplistic logic he believes pigeons would think and talk with. Starting the game proper further catches you off guard, as a long text crawl explains that humanity have become a race of gas powered cyborgs that no longer need bread, causing pigeons to starve since nobody is feeding them bread crumbs anymore. Your character, John, has a dietary disease that causes him to poop far more than normal, which becomes the resistance’s main method of getting attention for their plight. At one point, you reach a decision that can branch you off into three different story lines, one with the resistance, one with your brother and the head of the oppressive Bread Bank, and one where you help carry out terrorism with the Tyler Durden bird.

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Yes, there is a Tyler Durden bird. There’s a lot of pop culture references in this game …and somehow, most of them are thematically appropriate for the surprisingly involved story that explores class divides, social economics, revolutionary ethics, and the extent of family bonds. In the game where you poop on people and watch them run away with poop on their face. There are entire subplots about corrupt banking systems, committing public demonstrations to send political messages, revenge killings, and religious redemption. There are characters that represent ideologies of excess, survival, and charity, and endings that revolve around making moral choices based entirely around your reactions to the ideals your allies have shown you. Once again, none of this is made up. This is all in the game, and it is not subtle about it.

Characters will have long dialog sequences between missions where they talk about their world views and how they became who they are, and it’s all well thought out, even taking into account the relationship between the birds and humans. For example, your brother Claus has a weight problem and failed at everything he tried, but a human millionaire found him amusing and took him as a pet, pampering him to keep him chubby. The end result is a fun loving hedonist who will occasionally edge you on to ruin other people’s good times out of spite as he hogs the world’s only remaining supply of bread. Most major character have believable back stories like this, and a firm conviction in their ideology and ethics. It’s genuinely interesting to read, even with the messy translation. Someone made a game about birds pooping on people and put in a narrative more thoughtful than the large majority of AAA games do. It must be said again that none of this is made up. Of course the game shows it has a sense of humor about itself quite a bit, particularly with the few scenes with the Tommy Wiseau bird (because of course there’s a Tommy Wiseau bird), but it never lets self-awareness drown out the effective drama.

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Grand Pigeon’s Duty has narrative chops, but it also has gameplay chops as well. Every mission has a different challenge, sometimes pooping only on cars, sometimes only people, and sometimes planting explosives on a train, pooping on a bunch of rich birds into scat, or trying to cook a potion that will grow massive bread. This is a game with variety, and when it doesn’t have that, it has challenge. Most every mission gives you very limited ammunition, so you have to make every poop carefully, especially on the tiny, moving human targets. It gets even more complicated once wind is introduced, blowing either right or left and requiring better timing to successfully hit a target. The game can easily take up to four hours to beat just due to how difficult some missions get, despite a perfect run taking only a few seconds. It also becomes incredibly frustrating, as it is common to be stuck butting your head against a brick wall of a mission before you manage to magically complete it. Before then, expect cursing from having just one badly timed poop. Hitting people is especially frustrating, your best chance sometimes is just focusing on cars if they’re apart of the goal and hope people walk into your poops. If cars aren’t part of the goal, prepare for failure. Thankfully, restarting a mission is as easy a pressing R, and there’s no loading for it.

To make the story even more engaging, little change ups on some missions pop up. They make the game stick out and make it something special, almost always connected closely to the main plot. One mission where you poop on a journalist over and over is a means to try and send a message to get him to write about pigeons. The out of nowhere formula cooking minigame in the Tyler Durdan bird branch is an exercise in symbol reading to make out a recipe. The pooping on an entire religious order for Claus is the first major moment that reveals Claus’ true nature. Even traveling in some air vent tunnels to reach a kitchen involves having conversations with a crazy rat king who has eaten some of your friends but feels bad about it, going on about how he has gone mad from being lost in the maze. He’ll thank you if you find the exit, and even become friends with the resistance after. There’s always a reason for these strange moments, and it makes the story more engaging. It’s sort of like this game combines elements of visual novels and …uh, Potty Pigeon. And it works.

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The sprite work isn’t moving fine art like you’d find in Owlboy, but it’s by no means poor either. There’s overlap in pigeon body types, but it’s offset by their wildly different clothing and colors. The vistas in every stage and during dialog scenes are incredibly detailed, with individual bricks and cracks. There’s a great use of contrast between color tones, making a lot of what you see pop just enough to make you notice the details. The animation is also smooth, really shown off during the ending fight in the Tyler Durdan bird route where you both become giant monsters and fight to the death (long story). While a good impact sound effect is missing, the whole screen shakes when you land, really making you feel your weight. There’s even cute additions like little exclamations coming from successful hits, especially rewarding when you finally nail someone in the face. The music is also quite catchy and may even stick in your mind a bit after playing, especially with as often as you’ll be playing certain parts over and over. Despite the absurd premise, Grand Pigeon’s Duty takes itself quite seriously, and so much care was poured into every aspect of it.

The game is less than five bucks to get on Steam, and it’s so polished and filled with passion that it’s hard to believe it’s not priced higher. This is the sort of game that makes the indie gaming scene something special. Anyone can build on the foundation of the classics, but building on the foundation of a joke game about pooping on cars until they crash and including political commentary with real complexity and depth in the process is something you would never see anywhere else. We should be glad this ridiculous game exists, because we need the ridiculous to push the boundaries of what this medium is sometimes. Grand Pigeon’s Duty doesn’t necessarily do that, but it certainly is unlike anything else you’ve ever played.
 

Dayyālu

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Shaper Crypt
I seriously like some of HG101's articles (they are fairly well made) but that Jonathan Kaharl guy has been a blight on the site for too long. Didn't he get thrown out of the forums because he was a whiny, easily triggered bitch?

I mean, I'm probably the thing most far away from complaining about diversity hires in reviews, but the fuck gave YIIK a glowing review, such bad taste should not be possible.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Someone filed a cameltoe on the statue - that guy had an eye for detail.
 

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