- Joined
- Jun 28, 2017
- Messages
- 32,345
There is a certain challenge here in optimizing your settlement but it really isn't very historical. I just jumped from the Neolithic straight into the Bronze Age.
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Screenshot thread
- Thread starter potatojohn
- Start date
DJOGamer PT
Arcane
PrimeHack
Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
All things considered it could be worse, the audio design is great, and the soundtrack is very good, and since it was made in the 90's it was made by competent people that knew what they were doing and you weren't getting The Message shoved down your throat every five minutes. On its own it's not that bad, yeah, sure, but in the context of being a System Shock sequel it fails entirely, and it wasn't meant to be one in the first place, it's not even in the same genre or ballpark. The step from SS1 to SS2 is more jarring than between SS2 and Bioshock. If you ask me playing them one after another makes you enjoy the second game less since you'll be more aware of what a downgrade it is. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on them after playing them back to back, it might be that the consequences of SS2 retroactively colored my perception of it somewhat.
MaxPaint
Literate
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2024
- Messages
- 43
A shame there are no banished-level mods for it. People don't seem to care enough to make mods also. And the game did not sell well, so little hope for a sequel.
Some news of the adventures of gallant Henry Kanthaka, the horse wonder, sponsored by the yoga club of Rattay :
I eventually lost the contest because innkeeper #2 did not dare to fire through the horse, stalling the afternoon.
The cupboard wench is clearly jealous of those barbarian. That's not at the bailiff service she's gonna have any fun.
Move aside pleb, Henry has no time to lose with trivialities such as law, accountability or ethics.
I eventually lost the contest because innkeeper #2 did not dare to fire through the horse, stalling the afternoon.
The cupboard wench is clearly jealous of those barbarian. That's not at the bailiff service she's gonna have any fun.
Move aside pleb, Henry has no time to lose with trivialities such as law, accountability or ethics.
Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
Playing Bloodlines, 1.2 official patch version, CD install, no mods, no tweaks, no unofficial patches. I'm about halfway through the game, only ran into two trivial bugs that had little impact on the experience so far, unless you count that all doors are deathtraps if you don't wait for them to open properly. Unless the second half of the game is crammed with bugs people that claim you need to install any unofficial patch to get the most out of the game don't know what they're talking about, it's perfectly serviceable without any "fixes" that break 14 other things, or pointless changes alluded to in this post.
As for the game itself it's an absolute shit RPG, a terrible shooter, and an awful third-person action game if you go for melee, with abysmal stealth tacked on. Despite all that I'm still enjoying it because it's so rare to see a modern setting being used for this format, and even if it is gay urban fantasy for "that guy" and women, it's still fresh compared to poorly understood off-brand-Tolkien and Mexican tranny orcs, as well as the more rare science fiction or post-apocalyptic themed FPS-RPG/Action-RPG offerings. I swear post-apocalypse is at least twice as common as a modern world setting in the RPG genre even in the loosely defined and broad sense, only the Japs even remotely go for modern settings in their JRPGs.
Surprisingly the hype around the facial animations still hold up, and in general the game has a lot of distinct character to it. Even if the sequel weren't in the hands of Paracuck and the Sumo group, two cancers on the gaming industry, you couldn't replicate it today. The goth chick and cultural edge just isn't there anymore, in a sea of twerking niggers and Whitey hunting chubby Latinas goth girls in the American parlance has come to mean any White-passing woman not dressed in bright pastels. The bouncing tits with breast physics, hot women, and gore isn't a good fit for a medium that is turning women into sexless versions of Robert Zdar and infantilizing violence, other than when it is directed towards enemies of the regime, then they can revel in it and go for extreme and vicious gore beyond that of Soldier of Fortune.
Being so much a product of its time, running on a ramshackle early version of Source, it's hard not to like it despite how declined the gampeplay is if you actually sit down and think about it. Even if its development was being headed by a fag and a kike it is genuinely a game they thought were cool and they didn't hate their audience. If you wanted to get political about it you could, the vampires being this parasitical class of people that look down on the rest of society (kine=goyim), and have to hide what they really are and are up to, can't have people naming the vampire (jew), and them being closeted like homosexuals. These undertones can either be ignored or simply accepted without this making the game less fun. YES, there really is a race of bloodsucking in-fighting manipulative and degenerate retards out there borne from the stock of the Bibilical Cain.
According to the less Biblical Cain of Troika Bloodlines was the first game of a planned trilogy at one point, but I'm glad it didn't pan out, because there were no place for that sort of game in the days to come after Bloodlines was released, arguably it was too late already and this might have been one reason for the poor sales, could have done better in the 90's if the overral cultural landscape is anything to go by.
As for the game itself it's an absolute shit RPG, a terrible shooter, and an awful third-person action game if you go for melee, with abysmal stealth tacked on. Despite all that I'm still enjoying it because it's so rare to see a modern setting being used for this format, and even if it is gay urban fantasy for "that guy" and women, it's still fresh compared to poorly understood off-brand-Tolkien and Mexican tranny orcs, as well as the more rare science fiction or post-apocalyptic themed FPS-RPG/Action-RPG offerings. I swear post-apocalypse is at least twice as common as a modern world setting in the RPG genre even in the loosely defined and broad sense, only the Japs even remotely go for modern settings in their JRPGs.
Surprisingly the hype around the facial animations still hold up, and in general the game has a lot of distinct character to it. Even if the sequel weren't in the hands of Paracuck and the Sumo group, two cancers on the gaming industry, you couldn't replicate it today. The goth chick and cultural edge just isn't there anymore, in a sea of twerking niggers and Whitey hunting chubby Latinas goth girls in the American parlance has come to mean any White-passing woman not dressed in bright pastels. The bouncing tits with breast physics, hot women, and gore isn't a good fit for a medium that is turning women into sexless versions of Robert Zdar and infantilizing violence, other than when it is directed towards enemies of the regime, then they can revel in it and go for extreme and vicious gore beyond that of Soldier of Fortune.
Being so much a product of its time, running on a ramshackle early version of Source, it's hard not to like it despite how declined the gampeplay is if you actually sit down and think about it. Even if its development was being headed by a fag and a kike it is genuinely a game they thought were cool and they didn't hate their audience. If you wanted to get political about it you could, the vampires being this parasitical class of people that look down on the rest of society (kine=goyim), and have to hide what they really are and are up to, can't have people naming the vampire (jew), and them being closeted like homosexuals. These undertones can either be ignored or simply accepted without this making the game less fun. YES, there really is a race of bloodsucking in-fighting manipulative and degenerate retards out there borne from the stock of the Bibilical Cain.
According to the less Biblical Cain of Troika Bloodlines was the first game of a planned trilogy at one point, but I'm glad it didn't pan out, because there were no place for that sort of game in the days to come after Bloodlines was released, arguably it was too late already and this might have been one reason for the poor sales, could have done better in the 90's if the overral cultural landscape is anything to go by.
running silent, running deep
fookin aliens
these sons of bitches are easily in the list of top 20 most annoying fucking enemies in first person shooters
FOOKIN ALIENS
WTF IS THIS
dakka dakka dakka
EAT SHIT AND DIE
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
sser
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2011
- Messages
- 1,866,910
Still blows my mind that Doom came out in '93, and everyone is wowed by all of it despite being a fairly simple shooter advancing on the Wolfenstein formula, and then you have SS less than a year later with mini-maps, ability to lean around corners, a tight narrative, cool level design, a wicked villain, and a host of elements way ahead of their time and Looking Glass can barely stay above water cause nobody gave a shit.
Doom's genius was that it played extremely smooth and fast even on lower end hardware.
Ultima Underworld and System Shock were much more complex and technically impressive games, but they were anything but smooth especially if you didn't have a beefy PC for the time.
Krivol
Magister
Even then 3/4 of the screenplay was UI.
And to be honest the controls were cumbersome even for the time. I only played them in the late 00s when I got into abandonware, and initially bounced off because the controls take a lot of getting used to.
Compare that to super smooth Doom (which supported mouselook from the start and plays well on keyboard only, too), or the step-based dungeon crawlers of the time like the Might & Magics, and UU/SS have a much bigger barrier to entry compared to other popular first person games of the time.
Sure they were better and more complex games, but they controlled and ran like ass.
Compare that to super smooth Doom (which supported mouselook from the start and plays well on keyboard only, too), or the step-based dungeon crawlers of the time like the Might & Magics, and UU/SS have a much bigger barrier to entry compared to other popular first person games of the time.
Sure they were better and more complex games, but they controlled and ran like ass.
Big dump of final Powerslave levels.
Was it aliens?
IT WAS
FOOKIN ALIENS
Also clunky first-person 2D platforming, always in vogue
I like how this game decides to reward you with scantily clad dancing babes in secret areas. Games used to be much better back in the day. True heterosexual warfare.
Unreal vibes
Last two levels look... alien
surely pressing this button is not going to do anything bad
AAAAAAAAAAA
(the flamer actually can't even harm the fucking spiders i used it here only for the flamesaw gif)
I'M COMING FOR YOU ASSHOLE
one big mutha
massed rocket spam takes care of him just as well tho
unfortunately i shot one rocket too many and since they are homing, if they don't find a target they start chasing you
Much better
O FUK HE'S GOT A BOMBERMAN-STYLE PHASE 2
which can't possibly harm me when my weapon buff is still active
turbo-m60 goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
this is it, men
the moment of glory
fagets trying to blow up Erf!
got our eyes on the prize
FEAR ME
alien bug men are putting up fierce resistance
only the control centre left to wreck, x-com style
ROOM SERVICE HAS ARRIVED
FIERCE RESISTANCE!
DIE UGLY ALIEN SONS OF BITCHES!
THE MONOLITH! WE DESTROY THAT AND THIS IS OVER!
CHARGE!!!
protag said:
Ivan
Arcane
Do you recommend it? How does it stack up against Duke, Blood, Shadow Warrior?
Big dump of final Powerslave levels.
Was it aliens?
IT WAS
FOOKIN ALIENS
Also clunky first-person 2D platforming, always in vogue
I like how this game decides to reward you with scantily clad dancing babes in secret areas. Games used to be much better back in the day. True heterosexual warfare.
Unreal vibes
Last two levels look... alien
surely pressing this button is not going to do anything bad
AAAAAAAAAAA
(the flamer actually can't even harm the fucking spiders i used it here only for the flamesaw gif)
I'M COMING FOR YOU ASSHOLE
one big mutha
massed rocket spam takes care of him just as well tho
unfortunately i shot one rocket too many and since they are homing, if they don't find a target they start chasing you
Much better
O FUK HE'S GOT A BOMBERMAN-STYLE PHASE 2
which can't possibly harm me when my weapon buff is still active
turbo-m60 goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
this is it, men
the moment of glory
fagets trying to blow up Erf!
got our eyes on the prize
FEAR ME
alien bug men are putting up fierce resistance
only the control centre left to wreck, x-com style
ROOM SERVICE HAS ARRIVED
FIERCE RESISTANCE!
DIE UGLY ALIEN SONS OF BITCHES!
THE MONOLITH! WE DESTROY THAT AND THIS IS OVER!
CHARGE!!!
protag said:
Ivan
Arcane
Clearly inferior to all of them, and overall very mediocre but still mildly enjoyable.
Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
Following up my previous post in this thread about Bloodlines. Unsurprisingly the latter half of the game, and the endgame, did not turn out to be buggier or more unfinished than the first half, 1.2 was still smooth sailing up until the very end. Unlike Arcanum that had botched ending slides scripting that Drog had to fix up, that I did encounter playing that game without his patch a year or so ago, but Arcanum's bugginess is also overstated and often exaggerated.
One of the reasons, other than many never having played the official patched version, that contributes to a reputation of Bloodlines being a buggy and unfinished game must be that over time people have come to expect a standardized Deus Ex sort of FPS-RPG bastardization, If you've played a more recent one you know the drill, in every mission or quest there must be a speech check that lets you automatically win it, several convenient ventilation hatches all over the place, computer systems that solve everything for hackers and so on. Bloodlines focuses on atmosphere and conversations most of the time, when it does not it is much more traditional and places like the Hollywood sewers are very much like a more traditional dungeon, although without many of the things that make crawling them great. D.W. Bradley managed to retain much of dungeon crawling staples in Dungeon Lords, hot off the release of at the time ultra-traditionalist Wizards & Warriors, with traps, labyrinthine navigation and enemy encounters comparable to Wizardry but in a more action oriented sort of way.
Obviously the focus was not on this with Bloodlines, but even if it had been I don't think the modern world, unless set in a warzone, lends itself to that sort of gameplay. Makes it feel like something is missing when the game is stripped down to these bare elements, of combat and sneaking, hacking and lockpicking contributing to navigation, but many skills being more or less useless. But this isn't because they had to rush the game, at the very start by the beach you get the same design there too, with a quest of getting a stolen item back you can either sneak and take it, or kill everyone, and that's it. It's very traditional gameplay, but in Bloodlines you probably had more fun spooking someone with blood magic in conversation than you had waving your slightly underwhelming pop gun around, the tabletop system itself was focused on the social bit more so than combat.
The only part of the game that felt rushed or undercooked was the Giovanni Stronghold, with things to find that didn't lead anywhere, and one NPC had unvoiced lines, but it wasn't a huge deal and I think they would have improved the game by cutting most of it, at that point I had already explored four large hubs filled with content and I just wanted to finish the game already. Arcanum is a game with enough going on that it could have used an expansion, to fill in the continent with more locations, and spice it up with more dungeons, it's a large map and some places were underused. Bloodlines on the other hand almost outstayed its welcome but managed to close the curtains before I got bored with it.
There's a bit more combat towards the end, and we get a late re-enactment of The Matrix lobby scene when you assault LaCroix's tower, with an explosive finale.
Not much more to say about it, other than that the diegetic hacking interface being like a command line OS is cool. SiN did it earlier with terminals with command lines, but that sort of thing vanished when games became more console-centric, due to lack of keyboards. There's been a few games to bring that back, one among them being Fortune's Run, but it's still very rare to see. It's also making me lament not seeing more modern setting RPGs back in the 90's and 00's, now it is too late for the industry to produce anything decent even if they wanted to. It allows for plots that simply aren't possible in fantasy RPGs, like tracking down the source of a snuff film, and it makes ranged combat less gay.
One of the reasons, other than many never having played the official patched version, that contributes to a reputation of Bloodlines being a buggy and unfinished game must be that over time people have come to expect a standardized Deus Ex sort of FPS-RPG bastardization, If you've played a more recent one you know the drill, in every mission or quest there must be a speech check that lets you automatically win it, several convenient ventilation hatches all over the place, computer systems that solve everything for hackers and so on. Bloodlines focuses on atmosphere and conversations most of the time, when it does not it is much more traditional and places like the Hollywood sewers are very much like a more traditional dungeon, although without many of the things that make crawling them great. D.W. Bradley managed to retain much of dungeon crawling staples in Dungeon Lords, hot off the release of at the time ultra-traditionalist Wizards & Warriors, with traps, labyrinthine navigation and enemy encounters comparable to Wizardry but in a more action oriented sort of way.
Obviously the focus was not on this with Bloodlines, but even if it had been I don't think the modern world, unless set in a warzone, lends itself to that sort of gameplay. Makes it feel like something is missing when the game is stripped down to these bare elements, of combat and sneaking, hacking and lockpicking contributing to navigation, but many skills being more or less useless. But this isn't because they had to rush the game, at the very start by the beach you get the same design there too, with a quest of getting a stolen item back you can either sneak and take it, or kill everyone, and that's it. It's very traditional gameplay, but in Bloodlines you probably had more fun spooking someone with blood magic in conversation than you had waving your slightly underwhelming pop gun around, the tabletop system itself was focused on the social bit more so than combat.
The only part of the game that felt rushed or undercooked was the Giovanni Stronghold, with things to find that didn't lead anywhere, and one NPC had unvoiced lines, but it wasn't a huge deal and I think they would have improved the game by cutting most of it, at that point I had already explored four large hubs filled with content and I just wanted to finish the game already. Arcanum is a game with enough going on that it could have used an expansion, to fill in the continent with more locations, and spice it up with more dungeons, it's a large map and some places were underused. Bloodlines on the other hand almost outstayed its welcome but managed to close the curtains before I got bored with it.
There's a bit more combat towards the end, and we get a late re-enactment of The Matrix lobby scene when you assault LaCroix's tower, with an explosive finale.
Not much more to say about it, other than that the diegetic hacking interface being like a command line OS is cool. SiN did it earlier with terminals with command lines, but that sort of thing vanished when games became more console-centric, due to lack of keyboards. There's been a few games to bring that back, one among them being Fortune's Run, but it's still very rare to see. It's also making me lament not seeing more modern setting RPGs back in the 90's and 00's, now it is too late for the industry to produce anything decent even if they wanted to. It allows for plots that simply aren't possible in fantasy RPGs, like tracking down the source of a snuff film, and it makes ranged combat less gay.
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2015
- Messages
- 4,838
That guy looks familiar.Following up my previous post in this thread about Bloodlines. Unsurprisingly the latter half of the game, and the endgame, did not turn out to be buggier or more unfinished than the first half, 1.2 was still smooth sailing up until the very end. Unlike Arcanum that had botched ending slides scripting that Drog had to fix up, that I did encounter playing that game without his patch a year or so ago, but Arcanum's bugginess is also overstated and often exaggerated.
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