i played through most of max payne 1 today, so it’s gonna be a while till i can open that thread again
Sonic Generations (PC/Steam)
First boss fight was randomly de-syncing the wired DS4, like Sky Sanctuary A2C5 did.
Was reading on Steam discussions and Gamebanana that this is a bug in the game, and happens with all controllers.
Supposedly the Hedge Mod Manager utility HedgeModManager [Sonic Generations] [Modding Tools] with the “System - Allow Controller Hotplugging” code loaded allows controllers to reconnect, so you don’t have to restart the game (I got mine to reconnect once without it but didn’t usually work). So I’ll run the game from Hedge Mod Manager next time! The Windows icon for it sucks and so does the one for SG so I’m using a manic smiling cartoon Windows 98 Sonic ico I found on archive.org ^ _^ Misc Sonic the Hedgehog Windows 98 XP Icons : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Was feeling some shoulder cramping using the DS4. Maybe I should try arcade stick next time. (Oh, it’s probably 'cause like race stages have been stressing me out and I’ve been clawing on the d-pad too hard.) ^ _^ Well I went ahead and ordered a cheap “official” Retro-Bit Sega “Genesis” repro USB 6-button pad. I think part of the ergonomic thing with using the DS4 is I feel like I have to hold the DS4 in a sort of awkward low-slung grip in order to have my fingers positioned over the “bumpers” as Steam insists on calling L1/R1–and the game uses those shoulder buttons for skidding to the side in 3D sections. : P
There’s an 8-button Genesis-style (they also have Saturn-style) Retro-Bit Sega pad that does have shoulder buttons, but that just seems wrong to me. In theory I can manage on the 6-button with two of the face buttons set aside for the bumper functions. : PPP
Classic 2D Sonic uses ONE button doggonit! ; P
Maybe this is pointing toward me not coming back to Generations as much as the 2D Sonics, I dunno. I guess I’ve got a small ergonomic issue with it. Sometimes rocketing around in 3D is fun but I guess it’s often annoying and feels super-arbitrary. Like, hitting Jump then realizing you needed Dash and are now dead because for some reason they can’t handle the same stuff, or the game seeming to invite you to Jump-target-dash…into spikes or a pit.
Seaside Hill A1C1 was maybe the one stage in which it was immediately obvious that the level designer was making it so that you could see upcoming obstacles, react to them, and make choices to get smoothly through the level. It also gave you more to do, since you had to jump on the cages throughout the level. Most of most of the rest of the stages have felt more like either a) smashing you into obstacles you can’t see coming and have to memorize or b) whooshing you past stuff real fast and you don’t really do anything.
That one stage was real cool! ^ _^
The first boss fight is shockingly poorly put together–the sequences felt all out of whack, like they just didn’t care where you were or where the bomb was or where EGGMAN or his aim was or what. Even just hitting him once you’d somehow aligned all the sequences and run up his arm felt awkward. Just real real bad in almost every way, yikes. Not to mention something about the fight randomly kills the controller input. ; D
Thinking I want to blast through this game as quick as possible rather than chilling out with it. Just tear through, YAAAHHH. Yeah I think that’ll be the most fun way to do it.
Wasn’t too keen on the main stages themselves I played here (Speed Highway, City Escape, Seaside Hill), although graphically they were nice and the driving part of Seaside Hill, though janky as heck, was actually a lot of fun, and no gas pedal/button to hold down so ergonomically the best driving game. ^ _^
more quake wars. guy on the server dm’d me that a match was starting, so I decided to join up. This game has a shit ton going on, and everyone on the server has been playing forever, so it goes really fast and it’s very easy to be disoriented. However I was able to push through and stick to being an engineer, repairing tanks is helping! I think! you can also deploy big turrets, which isn’t very intuitive. You have to select the binoculars, then go to an area you can spawn something in.
I’m terrible at the moment to moment shooting.
Based on my interactions with the community, they seem pretty welcoming to newcomers. By that I mean they don’t yell at me for accidental teamkills or sucking.
I recall playing QW way, way back when the alpha came out and everyone got their first taste and the things that stuck with me:
- oh lord I know it was early code but it ran like shit and did not endear anyone to MEGATEXTURES
- the way Strogg revival worked in comparison to the EDF’s shock paddles (more or less a standard shootman solution) was a perfect confluence of design and narrative, but also oh god it made it amazingly easy for a Strogg team to be entrenched around an objective (guess which side was on defense in the included map) and make defenders too strong (Brink had this problem too)
- Strogg! Strogg!! Strogg!!!
glad to see all the toxic pieces of shit who play splash damage are busy crawling through dirty bomb’s dessicated corpse like bugs to call new players homophobic slurs for using grenades instead i guess it’s funny that i haven’t had anyone be mean to me in wolf et in decades
yeah the game kinda runs terribly, there’s a lot of lag, people have 100+ pings on homebrew servers. is what it is
I used to be neighbours with a guy who was hooked on QW in 2008. He would place worldwide top ten for one of the flying vehicles. There was one day he played 20 out of 24 hours of the day. He lied to his bosses about how long works tasks would take so he could play it more. He eventually realized how unhealthy it was for him to play all the time so he uninstalled. He works for the Globe and Mail newspaper now. Nice guy.
I played a lot more Alan Wake 2, I am really enjoying it. Picked story difficulty and it isn’t hard at all.
idTech 4 was not meant to run multiplayer games or have huge outdoor maps
god bless, they kept trying anyway
i can’t help it. i see two brains in jars and go “fuck yeah!”
also this mission aged well
I thought Get to the Orange Door was going to be a high-speed FPS that emphasizes quickly making it to an exit and blasting goons. But it’s more of a roguelike? That’s not what I wanted out of this one and the disappointment is enough for me to be pretty sour on it. The gameplay is Fine, the aesthetic is Fine, the soundtrack is Fine.
I have enough Fine in my life so I’m bailing out on this one.
I remember they edited the game’s box to remove damage to the twin towers right before release, but I can’t remember if they also removed their damageable properties in-game.
Kirby Star Allies does the thing these games all do of getting weirdly hard right at the end, and just then.
Maybe the coolest thing going for the game is the easy little victory lap level that ends with the Joycons vibrating loud enough to play Green Greens with the vibration motors.
Apparently to get 100% completion I gotta mess with all these other modes. I’m…good. Think that’s enough for me.
i wish i liked RTSes because udo kier as cyberlenin(?) sounds like a treat
After having picked up Pokemon Go again during the meetup I am again confused and agrivated by how they have gotten so close to making one of the two perfect videogames (a videogame about going to a place and doing a thing (the other perfect videogame would be a text adventure inside an authored space with a LLM-style permisable text parser)) and yet they have sabotaged it by making the primary game mechanic checking your email.
Far and away the action that takes up the most time in Pokemon Go is opening up your inventory, seeing if you need to throw away bad pokemon to free up space, checking the stats on a pokemon to see if it’s a bad enough pokemon, and comparing the bad pokemon to other bad pokemon to see if you want to throw away one or both. And then you have to do the same thing again with your items, because for some reason you need to hold 6 different tiers of healing items, half of which are actually useless, and then throwing away the bad items to have more space for more bad items you pick up at random.
Pokemon Sleep fixes this problem by jettisoning the better half and just removing the pressure to do this while walking around. Lie down and organise your bed of trash
watch the red alert 2 cutscenes on yt for a treat
Sonic Legends Trial Version (PC)
Sonic fan game demo, free download from Sonic Legends - TRIAL VERSION by Ultra Ring
Feel and looks and sounds super good! Love the drop dash (press and hold Jump in air). Drop Dash apparently first appeared in Sonic Mania: Drop Dash | Sonic Wiki Zone | Fandom ; Sonic Legends was a SM mod at one point.
It’s a fan game OF Sonic fan games: the Sunrise Gate Zone in the demo is based on Sunrise Gate Zone Act 1 in the 2014 fan game demo Sonic Overture ( Sonic Overture [SAGE 2014 Demo] | Sonic Fan Games HQ ) (which separately JUST GOT a re-creation by ANOTHER fan team just weeks or so after Sonic Legends as Sonic Overture '95 ( Sonic Overture - 2023 Demo by Sonic Overture Team )), and Panic City Zone is based on Metropolis Madness - Panic City from the 2006 Sonic fan game demo Sonic Utopia ( Sonic Utopia - ScaleyFoxy ) (a 2D game, not to be confused with a 3D demo called “Sonic Utopia” from 2017).
The trial version’s attract sequence credits video that plays I think automatically if left on the title screen for a bit or something uses background video from the credits sequence of the anime Mahoromatic (like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lNos8KeymE ), and will cause YouTube to outright BLOCK a video containing it from playing due to a severe copyright claim; Bandai Namco isn’t quite as into Sonic fan games as Sega, apparently.
The trial version doesn’t have controller support so I used the JoyToKey utility to map the keyboard controls to my DS4.
I played the Unity mod for Daggerfall, but couldn’t get the sound working, and died on the imp during the tutorial.
DOM 6
Well, i’m not actually playing it since it doesn’t come out til wednesday, but i booted up Dom 5 for for the time since 2018, so I’m pretty stoked.
Dominions is a an example of the difference between complex and complicated. Some games have huge skill trees/endless wikis that you have to keep open on another monitor, but the meta of optimal play gets figured out about a week after a new patch, because once you understand/memorize enough shit, the core mechanics are still exploitable in the same way. It is said that you aren’t even a noob in Dom until you’re a few hundred hours in, which is accurate, but even after playing for years there’s new strategies and creativity in play. I’ve obv been out of the loop for a long time, but i think i can hop back in with core knowledge, memorize some new lines, and come up with new viable strats. Dom is my favorite game to fall asleep thinking about.
What is new in Dom 6
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Shrubs on the battlefield exist, and have hp. You can summon shrubs, x of which based on your nature mage’s pugnacity have a chance to become sentient.
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like, no one even knows everything because there isn’t enough time on the earth to see everything and the dev doesn’t document all the changes because he doesn’t give af he just wants to make his mythological battle sim
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it still looks like this:
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There is a multiplayer lobby ! Previously, games were handled by email (lasting a few weeks to months) or you organized a hotseat game. This has evolved with discord enthusiasts making apps that has made playing not based on a cat not accidently disconnecting a server in someone’s apartment in Finland, and they are making new shit that works with the lobby. For a game that’s at its best in multiplayer, this is a big deal.
edit: oh there’s hella mods and diplomacy
This game can not be preordered and has no announced price.