I really didn’t enjoy FEAR, but I know it’s beloved around here. Just sorta samey and gloomy and bland to me. Rise of the Triad could be a fun option though, I’ll scope it out.
Darktide / Vermintide are great options, just takes a bit to organize a group for it and all that. Grounded has been fun as a group game too.
i actually liked some of the current tracks a lot! i think the campaigns generally have been been hit or miss though. i don’t know if the very first campaign in Summer 2020 appealed to me the most because it was my first time or those tracks were genuinely stronger.
i agree about the user made content - got a lot of fun out of the game the year i paid for it, but hurt my wrist playing too much Trackmania so i had to back off after a certain point. i really do like the visual style of 2020 even if it’s limited to the stadium environment, which is why a lot of the user made content is so fun. i will say it is extremely all over the place though - there are some really great tracks that go far beyond the campaign, but then there are also bullshit stupid hard ones or ones that are just kinda bland and gimmicky. i usually don’t bother to get a gold on the user made tracks either because of this.
also even though i have played the game an absurd number of hours for the last three years, i have never got the hang of ice surfaces. i tend to just skip tracks with a lot of it in it. that and the tracks that that tube-like surface… don’t know what it’s called, but those tracks are really hard too.
i have played a lot of Trackmania 2 Stadium and Canyon but never got to Valley or Lagoon - maybe i will one of these days. i like the mood of Canyon a lot especially though i heard they made some of the visuals worse after a certain point so i intentionally cracked an old version. i do like Nations Forever but i don’t love it i guess - but i didn’t play those games back in the day, so i don’t know how i’d feel then. i think Trackmania 2020 is still the one i’ve had the most fun with overall.
FEAR has excellent AI and top notch combat; all the interstitial ‘horror’ stuff doesn’t work at all, it’s just something to rush through to get to the next arena
Don’t let the bland aesthetic get in the way of finding what the game does well (unpredictable combat and particle effects that make every battle look like a peckinpah shootout)
I was baffled when they doubled down on the horror stuff in the sequel
I think this is public now, but apparently the situation with the plural sequels is that in Vivendi’s collapse, it wasn’t clear who owned the rights. So a new studio began working on a sequel simultaneous to Monolith and nobody realized it until much later. They worked out a deal to publish both.
Supposedly this informed Warner’s skittishness around any of the old videogame rights and is part of why they prefer nobody excavates No One Lives Forever.
yeah i think my main criticism with the current campaign is there are a lot of “hold gas” maps at high speeds with tons of boosts, and i prefer to have to let up or brake sometimes. i find it’s harder for me to get good times when you take out that axis of control. it means there are more limited ways to get better times – minimize air time, tighter lines, speed slides, and those can be pretty subtle.
Thanks for the info! : D Nations being free somehow makes me recoil from the notion of paying a subscription fee, even one as low as $10/year. ^ _^
This TM map looks like the ultimate form of some of the Nations tracks I’ve downloaded = D
Oh my god this happened in like 2006 get the fuck over it warner. Though honestly it’s probably better nobody fucks with no one lives forever. It’s too pure for the modern world
Now this from the fans though? Fuck yeah. Fuck yes
One thing I really like about Nations is that it doesn’t have boosts; it makes me think that boosting maybe too often is sort of a crutch, artificially injecting some attempt at excitement and speed that should instead come from natural track layout. Anyway I’m enjoying the simplicity of non-boosting. ^ _^
funny enough the “tube” surface might also be ice. there are both flat ice pieces and like bodsled-shaped ones.
ice takes intentional practice to get good at i think, yeah. for the bodsled parts, you want to keep your car in between the two red lines shown here:
at lower speeds, you have to tilt your control stick about 40% but at higher speeds (450+ i think) you can full turn and you’ll stay in those lines.
for flat ice turns you often have to do an “iceslide”
it’s sort of like controlling the ship in asteroids. since there’s so little friction you have to point the car in the direction you want to “thrust”. like adding vectors together.
some of this is helpful! i knew about the ice-slide just intuitively after so many attempts, but it was always hard to know if i could be going faster or doing it better. that’s Trackmania in a nutshell though. you always feel like you’re missing something obvious about the mechanics even like 1000 hours into playing it.
the tube parts i meant are not the ice/bobsled sections but like when the center of the road is raised and the sides are lowered, like an inverted tube i guess. i always find them really hard to handle/they really mess with my speed and it’s really easy to fling yourself off the track.
oh, yeah, i think i’ve heard the community call those “sausage” tracks! you’re right, they’re pretty rough. like you said, they make lines really hard because it’s super easy to fly off the track (or simply get too much air, which also slows you down). some tracks use them as transitions and you need to figure out where you’re supposed to use them to fling yourself to another section.
the ones that just want you to drive on them for a while, well, it’s mostly about speed control and not leaving the ground. whatever line keeps you grounded without losing a bunch of your speed is usually the best. inside lines tend to be better because then the curve is working with you to do the turn. i’m not great at them either! they’re hard to reason about because there’s not like one rule of thumb – they’re very dependent on how the rest of the track leads into them or leads out of them.
Megaman Legends 2. In order to beat the game and unlock the famed Mother Lode hinted at in Mega Man Legends 1, we have to find the four keys, each one on a separate game area. Our first stop is a jungle island. The caves in this one have vines and trees, and it’s a stark contrast from the blank and liminal corridors of MML1
We fight a very laid back boss 2 times, at the end of the 2nd one he says “You’re gonna get old someday, so gain your skills now, because you won’t have speed later” and it’s genuinely haunting (for me)
The boss battles in MML2 kind of start from MML1’s difficulty. The early ones have been tricky. This one is a frog who blows bubbles that follow you around, sticks his tongue out in multiple different patterns, stomps. etc. There’s also spinning blade things circling the room, and a bunch of crawling enemies on the bottom, so if you get stuck down there it’s very easy to get stunlocked. You have to keep farming robot dragonflies to get enough health to make it through the boss fight, I did multiple save states because damn it was a pain in the ass.
We get the key and emerge. the Villagers are back, and we can fund the repair of their village by paying to take a quiz. What’s on the quiz?
These questions are at random, I got the Hall and Oates and Sex Pistols questions back to back and it was really weird!
Anyway, we drop the key off, and head on into the next island, a floating platform.
Which is immediately attacked by a bunch of…robot chickens??
Anyway I did 2/3 of them, then failed the last one when they rushed a door I was trying to protect. if you fail, the mayor blows the whole place up
I have finished up Relicta in apparently 15 hours and 38 seconds, should have been a lot less as I checked out a vid for the first puzzle in the last area and I apparently did five different portions of it the wrong way which may be a personal record. Managed to avoid any softlocks in the jungle, huzzah and all that.
Just dropping in to touch on how the narrative wraps up in case @Father.Torque is curious there is no big twist or reveal. You go through powering up generators to try and help your daughter who is also infected by space rock, your ex is sending people to “take care” of the situation, you eventually have to decide whether to escape with your daughter and the parasite or staying behind and letting your ex’s men take you. The former leads to you traveling to deep space with you and the parasite studying each other while I think the parasite make a Toy Story reference (“to infinity and beyond”), the latter has a future news report talking about how your ex was the first true human at the start of when humanity become one gestalt mind. There is no twist with the puzzles or the original AI, they are just simply there.
Wasn’t Trackmania bundled with Bonzi Buddy or something? That was from the early days of “free to play” where they hadn’t figured out that the cost could be your soul yet.
MML2’s boss battles are fucking frustrating. the robot birds are relentless and it’s really easy to get stunlocked by the 3-4 different things happening in each battle. It’s more frustrating when they’re in flying things because mega man doesn’t lead his shots, and there’s so many things in a scene that using Lock On sometimes targets something behind you instead of what’s in front of you. The last several missions have been “defend a point while all these mobs come at you, and also destroy one big thing” and all the gamefaqs guides are like “this is easy lol”. When they’re finally all done on the island, the mayor is like “you have to go to the island where they live and destroy them” and i’m like “can I please get unlimited shit from the town shop so I can save your asses?”
One fight is there’s a bunch of flying machines, and they drop bombs and shoot at you, while turrets on the wall also shoot you. It’s impossible to shoot these without targeting them and the shots don’t go fast enough. Then the next room is this huge castle where they are constantly throwing bombs and you have to shoot at them. Next room is tanks while mobs of robot chickens swarm at you, and there’s wall turrets. The final room has multiple big mechs, small mobs, and in the end you have to stack up a bunch of boxes to get to a window.
Except…the boxes can damage you! I have zero health so every time they bounce off a wall and hit me I die! you can’t just stack them anywhere they have to be close enough for you to make the jump. It’s like you make it through the first two hours of the game and then suddenly the game just gets too frustrating for it’s systems and overwhelms the player with shit coming at them.
Well I’m really glad I didn’t do all those long ass puzzles just to find THAT out. You’ve done journeyman’s work
You can find my post from maybe 5 years ago where I beat the prologue said “This seems too difficult” and quit. Looks like that was the right call. You thought about turning cheats on?
Homie I turned those cheats on
I tried doing another run of the “last” room hoping that I would end it with more health, and I couldn’t, and that room was a huge pain in the ass and none of the enemies give you any health if you kill them. so I went to stack the boxes, and this took several save states because in both my save states I have 1hp left and if the boxes bounce in a weird way they’ll land on you and I die. After this is a small room where you rescue someone, but there’s enemies in there. Then a final room where you have to fight two tanks, 3 guys, and a flying enemy. You have like 120 seconds to do this before the whole castle blows up I am doing this with 1hp, the projectiles aren’t fast enough for the flying guy. At this point I’m like “fuck it” and turn on unlimited health and invulnerability. To actually get out you have to pick up the NPC you’re trying to rescue and bring her to the door,
So the island blows up and the robot birds are dead. or are they?
For the…5th time this chapter. you are defending a point against an oncoming enemy while a timer counts down. Roll has to repair this laser thing. What does the laser do?
No idea! Everyone on the ship gets very goofy and it blows up.
I want to play more…but…my tolerance for bullshit is gone.
Boneraiser Minions
Crab Champions
Deadlink
