Project Zomboid
A prison!
There's too many of them!
A prison!
There's too many of them!
-
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Screenshot thread
- Thread starter potatojohn
- Start date
Still early access
10 years+ waiting for the fucking npc implementation
A horse of course
Guest
Parasite Eve (emulated via ePSXe, minor/mild spoilers)
Based on a sci-fi horror novel of the same name, Squaresoft’s 1998 cinematic action-RPG pits rookie NYPD detective Aya Brea against a DNA-warping evolutionary nightmare that is poised to plunge the big apple into hell on earth.
At its base, Parasite Eve is a fairly standard JRPG with a few twists on the formula. You’ll run around pre-rendered depictions of New York battling random monsters and looting chests for better items and equipment. When a combat encounter is triggered, the game will enclose the area in invisible walls rather than loading a separate battle screen. Combatants can then move around in real time and wait for their “Active Time” metre to fill, which lets them perform an action. Initially, you can only attack, flee and use items from your inventory, but Aya soon gets access to “Parasite Energy” that can be used to cast spells. These will be very familiar to anyone who’s played classic JRPGs, with the usual crop of heals, status effects, special attacks and such.
Though combat is quite action heavy, players can’t just rely on raw skill. Equipment and stats make a huge difference to not only damage and resistances, but also attack range, action recharge speeds, and extra abilities. A rifle, for example, does considerable damage per shot and will be effective from long range, whereas a handgun will let you attack more frequently and doesn’t force you to stand still for as long. You can make incremental improvements to weapons and armour by finding upgrade tokens, but you’ll also start discovering versions with special traits like letting you steal items, automatically use potions, use two commands per turn, guarantee first strike at the start of battle and so on.
Naturally, you can’t just use upgrade tokens on your starting equipment forever and will inevitably need to progress to equipment with better base stats. This is where the “tune up” mechanic comes in. By using one of the limited tools found around the game, you can transfer either stat bonuses or a single trait from one item to another. So, for example, if you’ve been using damage upgrades to improve your old weapon, you can transfer those bonuses to a newer one with better base damage. However, using a tool will destroy the original gear, so if you want both the stat bonuses and a special ability from something, you’ll need to choose between the two. On top of this, there are a very limited number of weapons and armour with the specific trait you want, so if you destroy or discard one, it could mean playing for hours until you see another – if ever.
Your first instinct would be to hoard all the gear you can find, but at the start of the game there are few inventory slots available. Only ammo can stack (which is mostly irrelevant unless you’re using a weapon with low damage but a high rate of fire), whereas each potion, key, and piece of equipment will take up a full space. Whilst the number of slots will slowly increase as you level up or put bonus points into them, it’s an ever-present concern. During points in the story in which the world map is available, you can trek all the way back to Police HQ and dump your stuff for later sorting, but this would devour an enormous amount of time, so your best bet is to try and stuff one or two items back in trunks and prioritize the rest according to need and value.
Put all these systems together and there’s a bit of depth to personalizing your combat style and planning Aya’s equipment upgrade path, which is a nice change from just grinding for stat boosts. Unfortunately, not everything meshes quite so adeptly. The action combat is usually quite fun, but invisible walls combined with instant damage auras around all enemies can lead to frustrating situations where you get stuck in a corner and chain-stunned by monsters, especially those with medium or large profiles. These phantom boundaries are equally frustrating during boss fights, where it can be difficult to avoid some of their powerful attacks. The team were clearly aware of this, as the possible monster combinations for each combat area are tailored to its dimensions, but you’ll still be encountering these issues in almost every battle you fight. I suppose the upshot of this awkwardness is that the average player will be forced to try and learn not only real-time action mechanics – since they can’t just endlessly out-heal boss attacks or being stunlocked, but also the number-crunching of optimal equipment builds – since they’re definitely going to take a few bad hits all the same. Another unfortunate addendum to the bosses is that a couple of them (including the final boss rush) are proceeded by non-combat instant death sequences that mean doing the fight(s) all over again until you get them right.
Another problem is that the limited inventory is often attributed to the influence of survival horror titles, but it just doesn’t fit in an RPG. Resource management in classic survival horror is contingent upon the fear of combat, with backtracking increasing the player’s risk of losing more of those resources. But combat in Parasite Eve, like most JRPGs, is inherently rewarding because it both contributes to your increasing power level and can be used to farm further resources. Backtracking is therefore often beneficial to the player in the long run, and only the endgame boss rush will risk their overall stockpile of health and ammo. Another traditional RPG trope that conflicts with the inventory limit is the late/post-game collectible grind, where players are rewarded for submitting several hundred “junk” items or finding special trading cards.
I can’t say much about the post-game content as I wasn’t interesting in trying it myself. “EXgame” will reset the player’s level but give them thousands of bonus points to spend, plus carry over their main weapon and armour and some of their resources. The attraction of this mode is the Chrysler Building, which is a 70-floor mega-dungeon of randomly generated layouts housing the best loot and most difficult bosses in the game.
Taken as a whole, Parasite Eve is a pretty good package. The plot involves quite an interesting sci-fi premise filtered through the typical JRPG nonsense and gives everyone involved adequate motivation for their actions. There are times when characters are too keen on giving exposition dumps in cutscenes, though this is likely because the story acts as both a sequel to - but also retelling of - the novel, trying to cast the events in New York in the context of “the Tokyo incident”. A lot of money was poured into the numerous pre-rendered cutscenes, from grotesque creature transformations and crowds of people being rendered into primordial ooze, to jet fighters screaming through Times Square. Obviously pre-rendered backgrounds don’t look so hot blown up to widescreen, but retain enough detail to work their magic, whilst the 3d models look fine for the era. What peeves me here is that Aya herself looks halfway between the exaggerated physiognomy of Final Fantasy VII and the more realistic art style of later games. Returning to the positives – the music usually does a good job contributing to the atmosphere of wandering around “dungeons” like eerie, snow-capped Central Park, and the combat tracks are snappy and exciting. Due to its brevity (around 8-10hrs for a first playthrough assuming you explore thoroughly) I can’t say it’s a must-play for JRPG fans, and it doesn’t really have much to offer as a supposed survival horror experience, but if it sounds interesting to you then I can certainly give it a mild recommendation.
Based on a sci-fi horror novel of the same name, Squaresoft’s 1998 cinematic action-RPG pits rookie NYPD detective Aya Brea against a DNA-warping evolutionary nightmare that is poised to plunge the big apple into hell on earth.
At its base, Parasite Eve is a fairly standard JRPG with a few twists on the formula. You’ll run around pre-rendered depictions of New York battling random monsters and looting chests for better items and equipment. When a combat encounter is triggered, the game will enclose the area in invisible walls rather than loading a separate battle screen. Combatants can then move around in real time and wait for their “Active Time” metre to fill, which lets them perform an action. Initially, you can only attack, flee and use items from your inventory, but Aya soon gets access to “Parasite Energy” that can be used to cast spells. These will be very familiar to anyone who’s played classic JRPGs, with the usual crop of heals, status effects, special attacks and such.
Though combat is quite action heavy, players can’t just rely on raw skill. Equipment and stats make a huge difference to not only damage and resistances, but also attack range, action recharge speeds, and extra abilities. A rifle, for example, does considerable damage per shot and will be effective from long range, whereas a handgun will let you attack more frequently and doesn’t force you to stand still for as long. You can make incremental improvements to weapons and armour by finding upgrade tokens, but you’ll also start discovering versions with special traits like letting you steal items, automatically use potions, use two commands per turn, guarantee first strike at the start of battle and so on.
Naturally, you can’t just use upgrade tokens on your starting equipment forever and will inevitably need to progress to equipment with better base stats. This is where the “tune up” mechanic comes in. By using one of the limited tools found around the game, you can transfer either stat bonuses or a single trait from one item to another. So, for example, if you’ve been using damage upgrades to improve your old weapon, you can transfer those bonuses to a newer one with better base damage. However, using a tool will destroy the original gear, so if you want both the stat bonuses and a special ability from something, you’ll need to choose between the two. On top of this, there are a very limited number of weapons and armour with the specific trait you want, so if you destroy or discard one, it could mean playing for hours until you see another – if ever.
Your first instinct would be to hoard all the gear you can find, but at the start of the game there are few inventory slots available. Only ammo can stack (which is mostly irrelevant unless you’re using a weapon with low damage but a high rate of fire), whereas each potion, key, and piece of equipment will take up a full space. Whilst the number of slots will slowly increase as you level up or put bonus points into them, it’s an ever-present concern. During points in the story in which the world map is available, you can trek all the way back to Police HQ and dump your stuff for later sorting, but this would devour an enormous amount of time, so your best bet is to try and stuff one or two items back in trunks and prioritize the rest according to need and value.
Put all these systems together and there’s a bit of depth to personalizing your combat style and planning Aya’s equipment upgrade path, which is a nice change from just grinding for stat boosts. Unfortunately, not everything meshes quite so adeptly. The action combat is usually quite fun, but invisible walls combined with instant damage auras around all enemies can lead to frustrating situations where you get stuck in a corner and chain-stunned by monsters, especially those with medium or large profiles. These phantom boundaries are equally frustrating during boss fights, where it can be difficult to avoid some of their powerful attacks. The team were clearly aware of this, as the possible monster combinations for each combat area are tailored to its dimensions, but you’ll still be encountering these issues in almost every battle you fight. I suppose the upshot of this awkwardness is that the average player will be forced to try and learn not only real-time action mechanics – since they can’t just endlessly out-heal boss attacks or being stunlocked, but also the number-crunching of optimal equipment builds – since they’re definitely going to take a few bad hits all the same. Another unfortunate addendum to the bosses is that a couple of them (including the final boss rush) are proceeded by non-combat instant death sequences that mean doing the fight(s) all over again until you get them right.
Another problem is that the limited inventory is often attributed to the influence of survival horror titles, but it just doesn’t fit in an RPG. Resource management in classic survival horror is contingent upon the fear of combat, with backtracking increasing the player’s risk of losing more of those resources. But combat in Parasite Eve, like most JRPGs, is inherently rewarding because it both contributes to your increasing power level and can be used to farm further resources. Backtracking is therefore often beneficial to the player in the long run, and only the endgame boss rush will risk their overall stockpile of health and ammo. Another traditional RPG trope that conflicts with the inventory limit is the late/post-game collectible grind, where players are rewarded for submitting several hundred “junk” items or finding special trading cards.
I can’t say much about the post-game content as I wasn’t interesting in trying it myself. “EXgame” will reset the player’s level but give them thousands of bonus points to spend, plus carry over their main weapon and armour and some of their resources. The attraction of this mode is the Chrysler Building, which is a 70-floor mega-dungeon of randomly generated layouts housing the best loot and most difficult bosses in the game.
Taken as a whole, Parasite Eve is a pretty good package. The plot involves quite an interesting sci-fi premise filtered through the typical JRPG nonsense and gives everyone involved adequate motivation for their actions. There are times when characters are too keen on giving exposition dumps in cutscenes, though this is likely because the story acts as both a sequel to - but also retelling of - the novel, trying to cast the events in New York in the context of “the Tokyo incident”. A lot of money was poured into the numerous pre-rendered cutscenes, from grotesque creature transformations and crowds of people being rendered into primordial ooze, to jet fighters screaming through Times Square. Obviously pre-rendered backgrounds don’t look so hot blown up to widescreen, but retain enough detail to work their magic, whilst the 3d models look fine for the era. What peeves me here is that Aya herself looks halfway between the exaggerated physiognomy of Final Fantasy VII and the more realistic art style of later games. Returning to the positives – the music usually does a good job contributing to the atmosphere of wandering around “dungeons” like eerie, snow-capped Central Park, and the combat tracks are snappy and exciting. Due to its brevity (around 8-10hrs for a first playthrough assuming you explore thoroughly) I can’t say it’s a must-play for JRPG fans, and it doesn’t really have much to offer as a supposed survival horror experience, but if it sounds interesting to you then I can certainly give it a mild recommendation.
Kalin
Unwanted
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2012
- Messages
- 29,808
For all you know the NPCs turned into zombies anyway.
Puukko
Arcane
Sakura Wars (Saturn)
Sega Saturn Sakura Wars you say?Sakura Wars (Saturn)
Segata Sanshiro!
They have concerts & that is the voice actress.
Last edited:
HansDampf
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2015
- Messages
- 1,543
Rain World (some leftover screenshots)
Can you spot the lizard that wants to ruin my day?
He noticed me.
The fuckers have long tongues.
Here I went to the next screen and appeared right in front of this blue tentacle thing with no chance to react. Game Over.
10/10
Then I played some Tyrian.
And finally, The Messenger.
It's 8-bit and 16-bit.
16-bit bubbles.
Can you spot the lizard that wants to ruin my day?
He noticed me.
The fuckers have long tongues.
Here I went to the next screen and appeared right in front of this blue tentacle thing with no chance to react. Game Over.
10/10
Then I played some Tyrian.
And finally, The Messenger.
It's 8-bit and 16-bit.
Enter The Gungeon
Like the snake handphone game, snake moves in right angles & powers up after eating egg.
Same dev as Hotline Miami.
'Go to car' after defeating him.
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/beholders-in-rpgs-and-other-media.130525/
Like the snake handphone game, snake moves in right angles & powers up after eating egg.
Same dev as Hotline Miami.
'Go to car' after defeating him.
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/beholders-in-rpgs-and-other-media.130525/
Edit: Look at these faggots butthurt over a genuinely interesting new take on a game we've all completed 20 fucking times. Black Mesa is good man. Not to mention that all of these are screenshots from Xen. The notoriously dogshit part of the original that everyone hated. There are plenty of bad and/or pointless remakes, but this is not one of them
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2018
- Messages
- 4,241
And the award for most uninspired visual design goes to...
It's Mysteries of the Sith. Went back to it after a long break, and it's still pretty terrible when compared to the main game. Main reason was so I could compare the shooting to Outlaws, and now I'd rather finish MotS first. Despite its issues I very very much prefer the actual shooting in this one.
I also finally managed to get it working perfectly on Win 10, now that I'm nearing the end of the expansion.
I also finally managed to get it working perfectly on Win 10, now that I'm nearing the end of the expansion.
warpig
Incel Resistance Leader
cutie XDD
brutal blackpill :/
nice waifus
Endemic
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2012
- Messages
- 4,442
Enter The Gungeon
Looks familiar.
I has only wooden sword
Stab
Looks familiar.
I has only wooden sword
Stab
New record. How someone dies of dehydration in the pouring rain is beyond me, but oh well. I think maybe I need to go much deeper with crafting because scavenging alone seems pretty hopeless
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2018
- Messages
- 4,241
IIRC there should be no need for crafting just to cover the basic necessities. Boiling water and bottling it should take care of thirst, trapping or botany skills should be enough for food (although you might need to craft traps? I don't remember). Cold is just a matter of finding lots of clothes and knowing how to reliably light a fire. Obviously those skill points are better spent elsewhere once you get a hang of things, but they help a ton when just surviving in the wild is the main obstacle.
I kind of feel like playing it again now
I kind of feel like playing it again now
Where do I gather it from though? So far I've only been drinking the few drops I'm able to find while scavenging ruined/abandoned buildings etc.
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2018
- Messages
- 4,241
That's a recipe for disaster my friend. Gotta sterilise that shit first. But yeah, as I remember those droplet thingies were in plentiful supply even just by scavenging normally, and you can also obtain infinite amounts of it by using (ie context-clicking) rivers, lakes etc. I don't think bottles were very hard to come by either, and you'll of course need a container of some kind to boil it in.
Disclaimer: I might be wrong about all sorts of details, since I'm going from memory as quoting the wiki at you wouldn't be much fun. I am sure about gathering water from rivers, however.
The Red Knight
Erudite
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2017
- Messages
- 485
If you find bottled water while scavenging, use it to identify water found elsewhere since clean water doesn't stack with bad water (but be careful not to forget which one is which). Delete stuff you won't need (poisonous food as enemies don't eat, junk you don't have crafting skills for, unlimited resources like branches in forests), or don't want NPCs to pick up, so it doesn't clutter the sectors. IIRC there's also some quirk with the respawning of scavenging locations that generates too many of them in urban sectors over a longer period of time, but I don't remember whether it applied to discovered locations that are far away from your current position and that you haven't visited in a while, or those that are close to you.
Berries and uncured meat provide you with both nutrition and hydration, so if you're unlucky with water you can use them as a substitute.
In case you were avoiding rivers and lakes that SF mentions, they don't get a point-of-interest icon that scavenging does - you just go to the sector and there's a resource item on the ground that you use to spawn some water (or wood in case of forests and electricity in power taps)
Berries and uncured meat provide you with both nutrition and hydration, so if you're unlucky with water you can use them as a substitute.
In case you were avoiding rivers and lakes that SF mentions, they don't get a point-of-interest icon that scavenging does - you just go to the sector and there's a resource item on the ground that you use to spawn some water (or wood in case of forests and electricity in power taps)
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