Games You Played Today: 358 Threads Over 2

Tuxedo · April 12, 2021, 7:09pm

I finished Operencia. I wouldn’t worry about resources too much, the game’s loaded with firewood! There are about 1 piece of firewood per 2 enemy encounters.

I overestimated the battle mechanics in this game but its really good encounter pacing makes up for the not-super-deep battles

I like the comfy little dance you have to make with a complex RPG, learning what’s useful, what’s not, what you really have to pay attention to, what you can safely ignore, starting to get comfortable, encountering harsh new challenges, adapting, reconsidering your previous assumptions, optimizing, etc. It works really well here because this game has about 120 battles total and that’s it.

Also that game has one of the most accurate and bone-chilling depictions of Hell I’ve ever seen

It has sliding puzzles

problyfine · April 12, 2021, 7:13pm

That’s one of my favourite things about Operencia.

notbov · April 12, 2021, 11:52pm

:goes zipping around shooting and throwing shit at enemies:

hey Control seems like a pretty neat game

:runs up against a punch card puzzle that is literally mastermind and the solution is spelled out:

Sam Lake is a fun terrorist and I hope the war crimes tribunal throws the book at him

Rudie · April 13, 2021, 12:14am

I was just about to make a thread about sliding puzzles.

I learned how to do them in 5th grade so they never give me trouble.

Maybe I’ll write down an explaination.

5 x 5 is pretty cruelZ

stavekoff · April 13, 2021, 1:24am

please do i have never understood these fucking things

Rudie · April 13, 2021, 4:18am

Probably easiest to take video but here is my hastily written explaination:

For 3x3 assuming the top right piece is empty in the final picture

Put the bottom left piece into the bottom left. Next without moving the bottom left put the bottom middle into position.

Move the BLp to ML and CBp to BL. Insert the BRp into CB. Make the empty space BR. Now slide the bottom row into place.

Next put Middle Left piece into ML. Move MCp to MC. Move MLp to Top Left and MCp to ML. MRp should naturally move into MC. Slide the Middle row into place.

Statistically the Top Row should be in the right order. What I usually do is if it isn’t instead of trying to reorganize I scramble the puzzle over again and go back to step one. Having two pieces out of order is much harder than having the pieces completely random.

This method has served me for 25 years and any time there is a sliding puzzle I just to hell yeah. I remember trying to guide Bachelor through one of these.

Victor · April 13, 2021, 5:29am

After failing to get hacked versions of OS9 to boot natively on my eMac last year, I decided to reinstall and dual boot 10.4 along with 10.5 and see if running old stuff under Classic was as bad as I remembered from the period. After some futzing, games still not really acceptable. I found Rikintosh’s ClassiX some guy’s slightly modified pre-config’d image of 10.4. He swapped the Classic executable from 10.3 into 10.4 for better performance, packaged various OS9ish theme/ui addon/mods, etc.

Got it up an running (and swapped the shapeshifter theme to to skinning legend Max Rudberg’s eternally classy Rhapsodized) and it works better but still not good, frame drops and stutters, in both late PPC stuff like Diablo and simple 68k stuff like Prince of Persia and Lemmings, etc.

Oh well.

I switched tactics. I don’t think I have played Diablo in like 15 years and I read about this Diablo 1 mod called The Hell 2.

I didn’t watch this video, you’re on your own there. I think the mod is for Pros? has all kinda wild shit I guess, the readme is all like “it is impossible to beat without restarts, melee only is untenable” etc, but lots of neat new ‘features’ and ‘content’ and ‘menus’ as well.

Can run it all zoomed out 1:1 at any resolution, which was always a dream I had when playing games as a kid “what if this screen was like real big and I could see everything”; turns out 27”1440p everything is too small and dark for me to make sense of. Would be sweet on a projector though I think, that would be fun. I switched back to 800x600, put it on the easiest mode and played through the first 2 levels, both vanquishing the dreaded Butcher and clarifying the demon-fouled water supply of Tristram. Had fun clicking on the monsters.

meauxdal · April 13, 2021, 12:38pm

you might be interested in adespoton’s excellent 68k testing matrix: Classic Mac Game Matrix - Google Sheets

my testing is under different circumstances but it helps identify picky games as well (particularly in the ShapeShifter section):

the thing about Macs is you never know if its the weird hack you’re using (yes, you’re always using a weird hack. it’s a given) or if the games wouldn’t have worked anyway even on perfectly period appropriate hardware lmao

welp this is probably that hack you’re using i guess

meauxdal · April 13, 2021, 5:43pm

it occurs to me that i should make another mac thread. there is a mac thread, though. maybe i should just post in the mac thread more

Father.Torque · April 13, 2021, 6:44pm

hmmmm

I’m not sure Diablo benefits from a whole big numerical RPG system but… I’m willing to find out

VastleCania · April 13, 2021, 6:58pm

Remastered music in Hi-Fi stereo . Original Diablo music was mono, did you know? TH2 has better quality, stereo and more variations of music for dungeons. Over 3 hours long in total (original was about 32 minutes).

now i’m interested

notbov · April 14, 2021, 1:07am

Control just kind of ends, huh

that was alright, I guess

lonelyfrontier · April 14, 2021, 3:19am

been on a resident evil kick all weekend. unlocked everything in the original game (again) just for the hell of it. still a classic.

HOBO · April 14, 2021, 9:44am

I didn’t play Style Savvy today but I did stumble across some screenshots I took so I’m posting them here, even though I may have done this at least once before, because we should all be reminded that Style Savvy is one of the greatest games of all times

This was my character. Her name was Olives.

She definitely had her own look.

Every single shopper in this game is precious.

Does anyone know why people say ‘no unicorns’ on dating sites, is it cuz people like this who have secret unicorn collections, is it wrong to hoard unicorns

Ladies…you don’t have to do archery to impress me…but it might help.

I bet this screenshot happened when I put on a pair of striped socks or something

I came across these photos while searching for photos of my trip to Gundam Planet on my birthday last year. In 2013 I spent my birthday playing Style Savvy. I’d bought it the night before at Best Buy for $20. It was the ultimate gift. It was my only friend.

Tell me about it, I have finally given up on fountain pens, I drop them too much, and bend the nibs. I love them but I clearly cannot care for them. This is also why I’m still single.

I’m a very good speller unless you ask me to spell cheuffer or coniosseur or annal.

Gotta think this is a trend that ain’t coming back, that shit sounds fuckin nasty.

I haven’t read any of those books but I bet I will someday. I imagine they all involve doing pranks, or incest, like in Clueless.

This is maybe the only thing dumber than making a video game. Or maybe not? Maybe that’s a way better grift, maybe I should take out a loan and clear out a gamestop and try and get a grant to preserve all my copies of Red Faction 2 and Folklore and Elebits.

Probably a sex thing, I’d kick her out of my store.

This was originally a link to a live video but watching it upset me, I had no clue the Buzzcocks were such dorks, what the fuck, I just assumed someone who wrote so many songs about gay cum would have better fashion sense, sorry if that’s bigoted of me, sorry

I also don’t got no beef with bugs, I think it’s one of my positive traits, though I also won’t kill a bug if it freaks you out so you may feel differently. Sorry, maybe try and be like me, a guy who isn’t some blood thirsty bug hating freak.

This is what I’m gonna look like at the next meetup. But fat.

Rudie · April 14, 2021, 11:41am

select button dot net is the best forum on the internet.

And it’s thanks to posts like these from Bachelor.

la_ciel · April 14, 2021, 4:36pm

i will hold this passage close for the rest of my mortal life

notbov · April 14, 2021, 4:58pm

I don’t recall giving permission to repost my picture

ticky · April 14, 2021, 7:49pm

Played a few hours of the A-Train All Aboard! Tourism demo and it’s a surprisingly difficult demo to complete the objective in, it times out after 1 year of gameplay (for me that was about five hours worth), and I’d completed one and was ~85% to the other objective. Another month or two and I’d have had it, I reckon.

Given what I’ve heard about these games requiring you to be delving into the real estate, market and services industries to make most of your money, I’m sort of surprised the demo restricts you to trains and land only. I think that’s because it’s actually the first tutorial level of the real game, but it’s still weird!

The cargo stuff was also sort of incomprehensible, the in-game help and the tutorial really didn’t make it clear how it was supposed to work. Maybe that would’ve made up the difference in revenue?

There’s also the rough edge that the tutorial suggests you develop a new train, but it’s not specific enough so you can quite easily spend a month and a few billion yen developing a “new” train which is just a differently coloured version of the one you already have. Oops!

I think I’m tempted to give this a go, even though the performance (and oddly extensive graphics settings menu) on Switch (at least in portable mode) makes me really wonder if a PC port might be forthcoming (Neo ATLAS 1469, their previous touch-friendly game on Switch, is also on Steam in English), and the price tag feels sort of steep. It also sounds like the save game from the demo carries over to the full game, but I haven’t verified that.

la_ciel · April 14, 2021, 7:59pm

this expression stresses me out in an indescribable way

it’s the hands

thecatamites · April 14, 2021, 8:42pm

not feeling this year’s haunted ps1 bundle as much just yet tbh although the namco museum framing is nice. it feels like the creepy walking sim format might be falling down the same hole as rpg maker and twine: the easy and effective affordances that made the thing interesting to begin with are now what people distinguish themselves by not using, in favour of things that are more technically impressive but for that reason harder to do well and less amenable to happy accident. more third-person protagonists, combat, actual gameplay, etc. a lot of stuff that just feels indistinguishable from every other mid-range indie project, indie as the ur-aesthetic of monetised hobbyism being the black hole that i guess everything falls into once it hits sufficient mass.

there is some good stuff, this one is probably one of the prettiest games i’ve seen in a while