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What game are you wasting time on?

Humppaleka

Cipher
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
863
Trying to play grandia redux but it is just so tedious.The mod by itself is great but the game fundamentals just don't work very well.
I played until the desert in disc 2 and i think i will probably stop playing it right there.
Would you recommend the mod for a first playthrough?
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
3,199
Would you recommend the mod for a first playthrough?
Absolutely,the original is way too easy and most skill are absolutely useless compared to redux.
Just grab the redux patches for disc 1 and 2 and not redux complete demo,the complete version is abandoned and crashes mid game.
Here is the website for the mod:http://grandiaredux.blogspot.hr/
http://grandiaredux.blogspot.hr/
You can also see enemy info on the website which will be very useful.
And here is every single map of disc one locations with loot information:
http://cyberian.tripod.com/Grandia/ghframe.htm
 
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markec

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Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Dead State Project: Eternity Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
What else is on your tour? I've been doing the same thing recently. New highlights include: Unreal, Hexen. Sin was okay.

Ill see when the time comes, Redneck Rampage for now and maybe next in line No One Lives Forever.
 

Jaesun

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MCA Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech
Played almost(?) an hour of Alien: Isolation. As someone who has watched Alien 500 million times, they (so far) have done a fucking fantastic job on the environments (it's JUST like being in the Alien movie). Their attention to details and sounds so far is pretty fucking cool.
 

Dux

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Played almost(?) an hour of Alien: Isolation. As someone who has watched Alien 500 million times, they (so far) have done a fucking fantastic job on the environments (it's JUST like being in the Alien movie). Their attention to details and sounds so far is pretty fucking cool.

What difficulty? I believe normal difficulty makes the xenomorph slightly retarded, while hard will flay your face in no time, which is appropriate considering what you're up against.
 

WhiteGuts

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May 3, 2013
Messages
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Finished Transistor. It's a gem of a game, imo. Gameplay relies on a neat idea of combining the abilities you unlock through the game, which can dramatically alter the way you play the game.
It's pretty a pretty straightforward game, very linear, but the art, the music, the atmosphere is fucking great. Reminds me in a lot of ways of Okami, which is the best thing you can say about a game in my book.

That ending is p. sweet too. There seem to be a New game+ mode, which may even have a different ending if the achievements are anything to go by. I'll try to go around to do it.

:5/5:
 

pakoito

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I couldn't finish Transistor, I never got engaged to the combat system the way I did with Bastion :/ And the pace was quite slow.
 

iqzulk

Augur
Joined
Apr 24, 2012
Messages
294
Finished the first three maps in "Wrath of Earth" on Hard. Kind of on the fence, regarding the whole thing so far. The combat system and the hit detection in particular are horrendous (with the only possible saving grace being the use of locking weapons, and all the tactics, on when exactly and how you use or don't use these, into which I didn't have much of a look so far - and which are severely hampered by the inability to affect weapon lock in any way whatsoever anyway). The main gimmick is that some places (in the open or under the lightbulb) make you regenerate, while other places make you gradually lose energy and health - and it already proves to be annoying (not to mention reducing the game to a crawl - like, 5-6 hours for the completion of any single map - considering the amount of damage you take from every sneeze on hard difficulty, all of which is to be regenerated under that lightbulb), and, I imagine, will become progressively more so as I progress further. There is also a very weird choice concerning the fact that the energy shield don't protect you for shit, and that any incoming shot whatsoever, even with the full shields on, has the chance to damage the random system of your suit, meaning either of those (and more!) a) your weapons suddenly stop working, b) you get a ton of health-damage, c) your battery suddenly drains completely. Or maybe all the shots will go into frying your HUD and thermal visor, so that all the systems that matter (even shields!) will not receive a single scratch. Regardless, the thing is, you can regenerate anything, EXCEPT your health, under the lightbulb. And for health, you need, natually, medkits, which are in pretty short supply. Thing is, in this game, you take damage by design. Any "anti-regenerative" place on the level will progressively harm your health directly - and, moreover, it is impossible to evade the damage in this game with this wonder it has for its combat system (again, any given shot has a chance of harming you directly, past the shields). With the amount of damage you take from each shot on hard, the entire thing becomes heavily dependent on luck, and, thus, savescumming (because, you know, having your health drop from 100% to 30% as a result of a single potshot you didn't even have the chance to react to - not that there is any way to make enemies react to the hits of your weapons, well, other then dying as their HP counters hit 0 - somehow doesn't seem either "fair" or "acceptable" over the course of the game, especially considering how frequently that kind of thing actually happens)

The maps, however, are interesting, and, for the most part, very well thought out and structured (stupid Doom Temple nonwithstanding), especially considering that all the levels are absolutely flat, Wolf3D-style, only with 8 wall orientations instead of 4. They are huge, varied, very well structured, and, basically, they very much remind me of Cybermage (only a MUCH slower version of one) - which is a VERY good thing, because, in my book, Cybermage is better than, say, any Build game (barring, perhaps, Exhumed - which I haven't finished yet). Only, well, Cybermage had 4-layered maps, while WoE is, as I've already said, absolutely flat. There are some loose and gimmicky ends (that Doom Temple, the quests which are for nothing at all, that weird hint about "treasure at 128,128", etc.), and, maybe, those maps look better if one consider them from the, sort of, "bird's eye view", instead of in terms of "being there" (you DO get lost there without the use of the ingame map/minimap), but, for the time being, I am absolutely fine with this game's level-design. Basically, every of the three maps I've seen so far, felt like a, sort of, "complete story" in and of itself. And it was immensely satisfying to see The Last Thing You Didn't Get About The Map to finally click into its place, so that it's finally complete, and done, and you can reflect upon everything that happened over the hours you've spent on this map (half of that time was wasted on regeneration and savescumming), and you know that there is a new level before you, and you can wholeheartedly progress further without looking back.

I dunno, the thing is, progressing through this game is oddly satisfying despite the process of the actual progression being, for the most part, a pain. And it's not even about exploration and finding the secrets and whatnot. Because, when you have access to the terrain lit brightly enough for you to regen, you can regen battery power, and when you have an endless supply of battery power, you can use battery-based weapons without wasting consumable ammunition, you ultimately waste much less of that consumable ammunition, that you find while exploring the levels. And, basically, the only things the levels can offer you, are energy packs (regenerable on any brightly lit terrain), health kits (which ARE useful, but it's not like they eliminate savescumming, due to completely random nature of the damage in this game), consumable munitions (which you don't need in such quantity, because regenrable energy on any brightly lit terrain) and quest items you need to pick up in any case. So, the entire thing is not, like, about finding awesome loot, but more about seeing everything the map has to offer. And, I won't lie, probably, the biggest part of this game's allure is that it's made seriously enough, so that there is, in some strange sense, some illusion of immersion and "realness" to the whole thing (and the crawl pace, actually, somehow works FOR it) - and without it, the whole allure of completely exploring the map, would simply fall apart.

So, this it what I happen to think about the first three levels of this game.

Upd.: Fucking knew it. Fucking ice moon. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
 
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SirSingAlot

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Nov 27, 2014
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750
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in front of my keyboard, obv
Path of Exile

was cruising though it on normal with some friends casuallyn.
got into some labyrinth, died to UberBoss and traps over and over, had to restart whole thing over and over agai

11/10
 

pakoito

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I'm on the Disgaea PC mindless grind. It's mostly just turning the brain (and animations) off to see numbers go up/down.
 

Humppaleka

Cipher
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
863
Beat Hard Reset Redux on Hard. Not that Hard after all, comfortably challenging I'd say. The two-weapons with a bunch of different firemodes -thing really didn't work that well in the end, it was a mess to try and accurately switch between even 3 weapons, yet alone 4. Did enjoy it though.
 

Leechmonger

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Jan 30, 2016
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Valley of Defilement
Finished both expansions to Quake 1. Man, who couldn't have seen decline coming after playing Quake + expansions. The levels are extremely linear, with setpieces that I have to assume they thought were cool but look extremely cheap by today's standards. The gunplay is zzzzzzzzz. A lot of enemies take too long to kill, the melee enemies are basically interchangable save for their HP, and you'll be seeing that grenade launcher dude ALL THE TIME. Any time you hear an unusual sound you can bet a wall just opened behind you with a grenade launcher guy behind it. And that's actually the best you can hope for: oftentimes the devs just go "fuck it" and simply teleport enemies behind you. Laziest fucking design. Not popamole at least, so I guess that's nice? Earlier in the thread someone complained about the new ammo types introduced with the second expansion since you run out of ammo less often. I actually liked this since it sped up the pace of the game. The quad rockets in particular were fun to use. I do wish the extra ammo types weren't basically straight up upgrades, and that the game remembered the selected ammo for each weapon rather than treating each ammo type as its own weapon.

Also played through Teslagrad. I was expecting a platformer puzzler (read: brain-burner with some action). The game is actually the opposite: it mostly tests your reflexes while leaving your brain to idle. That's not so much a strike against the game as it is a case of incorrect expectations (I don't remember how the game was marketed). What IS a problem is that the devs clearly don't give a shit about wasting the player's time. The game will constantly place checkpoints before a long walk or easy challenge followed by a much more difficult (or trial and error) one. Same thing with bosses. They start out with easy attacks that get progressively harder with each hit they take, and if you get hit at any point you start over from the beginning. The problem is that the early attacks are too easy and there's too much time between attacks so there's too much dead time. It's simply not engaging. Then there's shit like a sequence where you're propelled upwards and have to dodge out of the way of obstacles above you. It would have been cool except that the camera has you at the center of the screen rather than at the bottom. This combined with other game mechanics means that it's very hard to dodge things on reaction and instead must memorize them one by one. Finally, when you beat the game you can go back and get the rest of the game's hidden scrolls in order to unlock the true ending. Except that doing so entails scouring the whole map for these things and redoing most of the puzzles and platforming sections. You'd be better served watching it on Youtube. Having done this, I can assure you if you'd actually beat it proper you would be disappointed. The game's credits are, of course, slow and unskippable.

I also played a bit of Infinifactory. Seems pretty fun. The game's 3D nature appeals to me more than Spacechem, another game that I enjoyed.

EDIT: Tried the D44M demo, wow it's way worse than I expected based on what I saw from Lirik's stream.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Finished both expansions to Quake 1. Man, who couldn't have seen decline coming after playing Quake + expansions. The levels are extremely linear, with setpieces that I have to assume they thought were cool but look extremely cheap by today's standards. The gunplay is zzzzzzzzz. A lot of enemies take too long to kill, the melee enemies are basically interchangable save for their HP, and you'll be seeing that grenade launcher dude ALL THE TIME. Any time you hear an unusual sound you can bet a wall just opened behind you with a grenade launcher guy behind it. And that's actually the best you can hope for: oftentimes the devs just go "fuck it" and simply teleport enemies behind you. Laziest fucking design. Not popamole at least, so I guess that's nice? Earlier in the thread someone complained about the new ammo types introduced with the second expansion since you run out of ammo less often. I actually liked this since it sped up the pace of the game. The quad rockets in particular were fun to use. I do wish the extra ammo types weren't basically straight up upgrades, and that the game remembered the selected ammo for each weapon rather than treating each ammo type as its own weapon.

I haven't played through the expansions myself (only Vanilla Q1 and Q2) but I see and understand what you're saying.

With the shift from sprites to polygons, iD Software realized quickly that they'd have a lot less enemies about for players to frag. So they tried (most truthful word I can think of) to make the fights against each enemy be more important, have more relevance, than the ol' "kill'em all!" atmosphere that Doom brought along.

iD Software also went through a huge staff transition during that era (including John Romero) so it's only natural that they would have problems getting it all working properly.

All of this is the reason I'm not very fond of any of the Quake games. Yes, I realize their importance. Yes, I know that they raised the bar for FPS games. No, I'd rather drink a bottle of (bad) tequila than play a Quake game ever again.
 

pakoito

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I've finished The Swapper. ~4h worth of puzzle and I know why the game journos loved it so much, most puzzles are piss easy. It's still a good game tho, and if I had stopped to read the lore maybe I'd found that deep story they were aiming for maybe.
 

Leechmonger

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Jan 30, 2016
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Valley of Defilement
I thought Quake was bad but Quake 2 is straight up unplayable. It is mind-numbing tedium. One level is more than enough. Also LOL at both Quake 2 and 3 having mouse acceleration with no in-game way to disable it. Fuck this company.
 

Fowyr

Arcane
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Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
Apparently, PC version of Total Eclipse is buggy.
Explored pyramid, but door in the ceiling of Shabaka-B requires 5 ankhs.
Started again, not used any ankhs but still could not open it. I even tried to have exactly five ankhs, no luck.

Used walkthrough only for completely retarded solution to Pharaoh-F where you need shoot and run. It's probably bug, though, and it should be reached through Ramesses-A.

Unkillable Cat because I know that you played it.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Fowyr

I did...25-30 years ago. On the Amstrad CPC. I can barely remember how I did it.

I might be able to dig up something to help you, though.
 

Fowyr

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Fowyr

I did...25-30 years ago. On the Amstrad CPC. I can barely remember how I did it.

I might be able to dig up something to help you, though.
Thank you. Just tried to download it from Abandonia, loaded my game and it's no luck as well.

I have found original map:
totaleclipse-alt-map.jpg
 
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Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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I remember the Illusion Part - you go through there in a specific sequence, including right back through the door you just came at one point.

(If you can reach Shabaka-B, then you know that you start the game by going round back and enter Ramesses-B to unlock the door there. You'd be surprised how many miss this.)

Did a little digging, and I found this video from the Amiga version:



The Amstrad version did not have a flashlight, nor did it do that funky stuff that happens in Shabaka-B. It also didn't have any music, which is GODAWFUL.

There's also this video of a Total Eclipse remake (which would drive me mad if I ever played it):



And finally a walkthrough video for the Spectrum version.



I did find a video of the PC version, which is only a gameplay video and not a walkthrough, though it seems to be a straight-up port of the Amstrad version (or is it the other way around?)

Anyway, you should now have 3 videos that all show how to beat the game. I only watched the Amiga one, and there didn't seem to be any trouble with opening the door there.
 

Unkillable Cat

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One final bit - found a text-only walkthrough printed in a computer mag in 1989 - are you using the Crouch command to be able to climb up on the pedestal right beneath the final door?

It seems the way to open the door is simply to touch it while holding 5 Ankhs...and in order to do that you need to crouch to be able to climb up on the top step, then stand up (button H?) to unlock the door.

Anyway, hope all of this helps.
 

Fowyr

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If you can reach Shabaka-B, then you know that you start the game by going round back and enter Ramesses-B to unlock the door there. You'd be surprised how many miss this.)
Yup, and then it bite them in the ass like me first time. Game is unwinnable if you fall in Ramesses-A without unlocking backdoor.

One final bit - found a text-only walkthrough printed in a computer mag in 1989 - are you using the Crouch command to be able to climb up on the pedestal right beneath the final door?
I remembered that I tried to crouch and shrugged and then I understood that I do not tried to stand from crouch on the last step.

Tried that.

No luck.

Spent spare sixth ankh and tried that again.

BINGO! It works.

So you need exactly five ankhs and make stand on last step. Just shooting, like says another walkthrough, do not work in PC version. So you can use sixth ankh in Pharaohs-A on top of disappearing steps to take one chest on pedestal in the next room, then destroy this pedestal and travel through hidden door to Pharaohs-C to collect final treasure chest in the game.


Thank you very much.

I once tried it a long time ago, but never thought that one day I will finish this little evil, evil game.
 

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