Luckily the redux patcher can fix almost any QoL problems with the game. Love text at 4x speed and skip cutscenes.
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1999 in pc games was quake 3
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You ever think about how MechWarrior 2ās jump jetting was so fast and nimble and made 'mechs so close to their general canon agility that every MechWarrior game since has basically bent over backwards to restrict, limit, or otherwise minimize their utility? ~this message brought to on behalf of The Brotherhood of Steiner Recon Lancemates. āLet our 100 ton mechs do jump kicks, damnit!ā
Aaaaanyway, Iām mostly wasting my life over in Warframe and occasionally poking away at Armored Core 6.
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The best thing about the AI mod for mechwarrior 5 is that it inexplicably includes a mod that changes the jump jets to work like tabletop so in lunar environments with low gravity you can ski like tribes
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Modders are undeniably the best thing that ever happened to MechWarrior.
Maybe also the worst, but definitely, definitely the best.
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The ellipsoids are all rendered using the same 128x128 sprite, representing a sphere, deformed along the relevant axes to their final shapes. There are two textures, a palettized one representing the material color, lit from the upper left in screen space and switching palettes for different materials, and a second one for depth which is what allows for nearly pixel-perfect intersections.
I remember an interview of Andrew Spencer where he mentioned everyone was talking about ellipsoids but to him it was surface stuff, he was much more proud of the animation system, which is a whole scripting engine in itself that can add and remove bits to models and manipulate them dynamically in ways unheard of at the time (although it seems to be a constant for those early games, AITD had skinned skeletal animation which would then basically disappear until half-life).
Personally what I find really interesting is the whole game area is really in one coherent chunk, no cheating or teleporting. I remember there was a german guy who made a photogrammetry-style 3d reconstitution of the world from the prerendered backgrounds.
EDIT: Itās kind of a wasteland but thereās an abandoned technical wiki, hereās a shot of the sphere textures:
http://ecstatica.wikidot.com/article:ellipses
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once again got some super cheap games from psn
space moth: lunar edition is a decent stg with a fun scoring system. nothing earth-shaking, but decent enough
breakneck city is a beat em up with a nice look and okay-feeling attacks and no other positive aspects. thereās enemies that can only be beaten by interacting with stage hazards, which in at least one case means slowly luring one up some stairs, knocking him off for a tiny bit of damage, and reapeating that a few more times. the music is unbelievably awful. the two playable characters are functionally exactly the same. the worst crime of all though is that itās impossible to get a game over in this game. when you run out of health, you respawn a room or two back, and this will just keep happening no matter how many times you die. you donāt even get the choice to continue or not. i guess youāre just supposed to endlessly respawn until eventually youāll have completed the game.
didnāt mother russia bleeds also have a similar problem? augh
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my copy of the Mega Drive version of Xiaomei and the Flame Dragonās Fist arrived yesterday. iām sure folks here have played some version of it, or, are at least aware of it. for those who arenāt, itās a Kung Fu/Vigilante-like, and from what i have played of it so far, it doesnāt stray very far from that formula at all.
mostly, i like collecting fun-looking new Mega Drive/Genesis releases, but it helps if theyāre good games, too. i would say this one is maybe a little too slavishly dedicated to its inspirations. which is not to say i donāt enjoy those games; i think theyāre really fun, quick, kind of breezy game/arcade experiences, so having another one to play is not a bad thing.
that said, there are some modern flourishes in terms of combat and its systems, but they almost feel unnecessary, and donāt really add anything to the experience of play (i.e. a double jump kick, a special move meter, an upward/shoryuken-type attack) in a way that feels meaningful.
iām still glad i got it, because the game is cute and i support the ideas behind it (lots of folks seem to hate on Kung Fu and i think theyāre wrong), but itās not as interesting as something like Xenocrisis or as necessary feeling as the recent City Connection MD port.
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iām planning on getting that at some point, because i really liked the pc version (i was the first to write an english review!) and the pre-owned copies on suruga-ya arenāt super expensive. and of course, the novelty of getting a recently-released mega drive game with box and manual
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iām not sure when buying stuff of amazon.co.jp became so easy (for US customers, at least), but i got it there and the yen is down, so
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iāve been buying a lot from suruga-ya recently because they have pretty frequent free international shipping weekends (and the yen is down.)
i have no idea how theyāre making money from this
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totally unfamiliar with the site - will have to check it out!
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OoT has galaxy brain old school puzzles, fantastic art direction, unique gameplay, actually fun and engaging writing, and uses 3d space in interesting ways. Itās a game that needs all itās parts in tandem to function, working towards an experience more than just the moment to moment action and is genuinely emotionally affecting to me.
Even if you donāt like playing it, the way it writes NPCs though simple remains one of the high water marks for the era, especially with the time skip framing device. They have character and distinct voice to their writing in a way most PC games of the time just donāt.
I say this as someone who unquestionably adores Thief and continues to say Doom is The Best Game.
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Powering through SF6 before Tekken 8 and am otherwise still Pokemon-brained
Itās nice taking a break from playing anything new but feel like now is a good time to dive through a bunch of backlog clingers all in one go. Iām just not feeling that urge yet.
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I think I agree with this assessment of its component parts which are mostly very, very strong ā what works against it in my memory is that I feel its reputation is wildly disproportionate to what it did and can do as a 1998 N64 game, and its heights arenāt very high considering. more than most other stuff that gets mentioned on boring ābest games ever madeā lists I think it gets distorted out of proportion.
like, all the parts that are supposed to make it a timeless masterpiece actually scan as childish and scoped down, even though the rest of it is excellent
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Speaking of Doom, I read a post on cohost about someone trying Ultraviolenve difficulty for the first time and realized that I, someone who thinks of herself as a true doom murderhead, had never done.
Turns out on UV Doom is an even better game, fuck. Had to actually stop myself from blasting through more than Episode 1.
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Itās a game about the end childhood, it isnāt super deep butā¦itās about something. Like I canāt emphasize enough how Thief and Half-Life arenātā¦about anything.
And that can be fine, I think Thief can survive on vibes alone but Half-Life has remarkable presentationā¦that has zero themes and often hold back the level design from being as fun as itās immediate predecessors like Quake. Which it barely adds anything structurally to besides presentation.
I just think OOT is poking at something narratively that has more substance even if the substance is slight.
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orcharina of time: substance
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yeah, and another helpful way to frame this is that itās actually a very logical progression from what they were doing in Linkās Awakening, and Linkās Awakening is beloved by virtually everyone for its smaller scope, whereas OoT makes me groan and roll my eyes like 75% of the time itās brought up, and I fully admit that is really not fair to the substance of OoT
most of its early 3D contemporaries (including likeā¦ Mario 64) are made a lot more inherently interesting and memorable for being early 3D games whereas OoTās stature makes it paradoxically way less so (imo)
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orchirina of time: master quest
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