i still have 58 other games to catch up on before i can think about playing mario 64
Oh, you misunderstand! Itâs actually not the 64th game in the series, no need to worry
i think haley asked if anyone took the end of history stuff seriously in the politics thread once and seeing that civ 7âs victory conditions involve building the world bank, the worldâs fair, the apollo program or the hydrogen bomb really provides a succinct answer: yes, they totally did, and somehow still do. the most 90s brained set of victory conditions imaginable. and i lolâd that one of harriet tubmanâs traits is that she likes when wars are formally declared and doesnât like when they happen by surprise. theres the 2010s-2020s touch: utmost respect for the rules based international order. a clown game for a clown series.
I really havenât liked it since 4 even though I keep thinking Iâm gonna, and I like that they like, employ historians and all that, I think doing game development in this genre at that scale is still neat, but I donât really get who itâs for at this point
thereâs like a clear development from 1-4 where it kind of makes sense what theyâre doing but the panzer general obsessed goof who was in charge of 5 put the series on this path where theyâre not really doing anything better or more interesting than previous games, itâs all just this awkward side development of fixing problems that donât need to be fixed, like one unit per tile (this is especially egregious because of how badly it was implemented) and hexes, ditching the maintenance system from 4 or how 5 fucked up the happiness system from 4⌠6âs district system is probably the worst way to do adjacency bonuses iâve ever seen (hope you like keeping a chart in your head!) and the UI is getting progressively worse with every installment on top of that. this is probably the most blatant theyâve ever been in chasing what other 4x games are doing, with a bunch of new mechanics being lifted from games like humankind, and the whole project is just kind of embarrassing and rudderless now. there is literally no reason to not play old world instead unless you really donât like the antiquity setting but the mechanical changes to the civ formula in that game plus the emphasis on people and storytelling is so much better in every aspect.
Iâve said it before and Iâll say it again but itâs absolutely shameful that Civ games have some sort of reputation of being for History Buffs when they have done more to damage popular understanding of what history is than perhaps any other form of pop culture I can think of
The only part of civ games that feels pertinent to history is city placement: cities typically form along rivers near many resources. Everything else is odiously wrong but there is one actual correct observation in the games
We do love the riparian zone
I always think about how Civ 6âs description of the Scythians sounds like it was written by a xenophobic guy in the eastern roman empire 500 years ago. The way theyâre like check it out we are being culturally sensitive how in 7 is kind of amazing because the juxtaposition between âwe consulted indigenous peopleâ and letting you run a brutal imperialist slave empire while playing as them is insane. But this is also a series where they do shit like adopting oral tradition gives you +1 culture for every plantation you build, so you know, very cool.
Googleâs AI on why there are so many things to collect in Donkey Kong Country Returns HD: âto encourage exploration, replayability, and reward players for thorough gameplay.â
Thorough gameplay.
got a big bundle of picross visual novels and while i did enjoy them, I cannot recommend them, any of them.
After playing so much Tokyo Extreme Racer, I decided to retry Need For Speed Unbound. my play session
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Enter a drift race and get last place because despite having a 240z, it wontâŚdrift? I canât explain it but the drift physics in NFS are somehow just really bad. The radius of the turns doesnât match the radius of the drifts, and it seems impossible to maintain a skid. This makes me wonder why a racing game has non-racing activities. Drifting can be fun, they make whole games about it! For some insane reason you only get a limited amount of retries per race, so I run out of these and stop trying to drift and just finish the event to get it over with.
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Get into 3-4 cop chases on my way to another race, itâs very annoying to just be driving somewhere and get into multiple unavoidable cop chases. You get into at least one or two driving from one objective to the next, and it doesnât feel like a threat it just feels very annoying. You either drive normally and then try to escape or you sneak around the cop vision cones on the map. The cop chases are not fun, maybe theyâd be more fun if I could destroy the cop cars super easily and end them quickly, but instead I have toâŚdrive really fast away from the objective I was trying to drive to on the map. Then lose the cops, then hide while the cooldown meter resets, then drive back towards my original destination.
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do a race. Discover my carâs gearing tops the speed at about 150mph. Wonder to myself how much grinding Iâll have to do in order to unlock, like, more speed.
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try to return to garage to bank dayâs winnings. get into 3 cop chases. Twice I reach the entrance of the garage but a cop chase then immediately gets triggered. On the second time Iâm like âif a third one gets trigger, I am uninstalling the gameâ and a 3rd one gets triggered. Alt F4. Uninstall.
My god Criteron fell off. I think if someone came in and randomly removed systems the game would be better. I am tempted to play NFS Most Wanted (the first one) just to see what that game got ârightâ vs this game.
Thereâs just so much shit in here. The visual effects, sound effects, everything is so obnoxiously overwhelming. The character writing is AAA writing quality, so itâs incredibly bad. I wanted to like this game so much, maybe thatâs why Iâm so upset.
I did it. GTA 4 is still very good, even if all the most interesting narrative threads are underdeveloped. Its a game you can only play when you see your breath outside⌠damp, dreary and cold. I do not like the ridiculous amount of driving back and forth across all 3 islands at the end. Still way better than 5 by like, a huge margin.
I finally slid over the finish line in Factorio Space Expansion.
I think of the planets available, my satisfaction towards solving them is, from top to bottom
Gleba - Constant feedback loops are neat and farming the main product tickles that sort of agrarian slowness I appreciate. Pentapods are cool, even if they stomped my farms a few too many times.
Aquilo - Once I realized double-ended trains were the way to go for logistics it made designing remote outposts to collect and process things much, much easier. Then the weave of heat pipes mixed into the normal infrastructure, especially when youâve got it all tight together, makes it feel like youâre top tier for not wasting space. I really want to try a chaotic spaghetti sprawl when I inevitably return because I can see how in my mindâs eye and I imagine it would be incredible noise.
Fulgora - LETS GO GAMBLING no no, gotta stop with that alluring gacha hunt for quality. Instead, the idea of taking the mass of potential products from processing scrap and paring it down to what you need and then DISCARDING THE REST is freeing in a way. My initial landing spot had a lot of trouble doing this and I kept throwing good-enough solutions at it until the âcannot find logistical storageâ warnings stopped. The deliberate outpost where I wanted only Holmium plates and accumulators was much better at dumping everything else with fewer hitches. And then I didnât need it to win; themâs the breaks sometimes!
Vulcanus - Hey, how would you like Nauvis except everything is better and itâs the most immediate impactful addition to your infrastructure? You could literally uproot your Nauvis base and stay there and it would go just as well, especially as your handling of Demolishers increases. So much free stuff. And elevated Rails oh gosh yes if you love trains this is the best.
Nauvis - Youâve been here before in the original game, really hasnât changed much you just need more rocket pads no more, nuh uh at least double that again. Because space platforms are important and building them with like 4 launch pads is sloooooow. Biters and worms remain the same threat, though dislodging is a little more difficult in the ramp up to getting off-planet due to the scaling health of the nests. I eventually got the walls up with lasers behind it, with a couple tanks then spiders to drive remotely and repair/replace.
SPACE - Yeah, itâs a neat idea, youâre encouraged to build tight initially. I managed to come up with my own designs for inner planet travel and getting to Aquilo. I burned out at that point and borrowed someone elseâs build to get to the end of the game; itâs exhausting all the factors to consider by that point.
this is the funniest thing iâm going to read this week. being so light corporate antiracist that you circle back around to segregationist views on the old south
After getting knocked off my personal to-play list a couple times over the past few months I finally got around to start playing the copy of Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity a generous SBer gifted me last year ( <3 you ). I played through the demo when it first dropped a long while back, but that was on my old PC which struggled with it a good bit. Now I got to dig into it for a good hour or so and man itâs a wild little thing.
Presentation is bold and abstract, game design feels very âwe know best practices, we just donât careâ, itâs all kinda derived from the Monkey Ball design the devâs earlier games were riffing on but at this point itâs mutated into something else. If forced to I guess Iâd classify it as a 3d platformer by way of a roller game, but even that feels like it is missing some key ingredients. Basically⌠well many challenges can be bypassed in broken seeming ways, but the tools you are given and the physics in play are of such that there is no way the game didnât expect that.
There is a slight issue on that it isnât always clear if a certain stage is currently passable (stages may have many exits, if there is a main path it isnât clearly marked at all), but even the larger stages so far are compact enough that if you have to restart several times to see if picking up enough momentum to roll oneself up a steep ramp in order the transform from a ball into a spider will let you climb over it (for example) it isnât a huge time investment and you can revisit any stage youâve been to from the pause menu at any time.
Oh yeah, you find various pickups to permanently raise your energy pool and new forms to transform into if you have sufficient energy, think less lock & key and more various shaped hammers to smash things with.
Anyways some concern that at some point it could collapse into itself, but thatâs an issue for another day.
Very good, congrats. Now get a turkey (3 strikes in a row) in the bowling activity if you havenât already. I thought that one was going to be impossible for me until I tried a zillion times, it clicked and I realized itâs super easy on a controller. When you flick the stick up to launch the ball you can keep holding it up and the ballâs trajectory will veer to the left or right slightly depending which way you turn the stick.
I tried to play 5 once with the heavy cars cheat but they werenât slippery and bouncy enough for it to feel the same. Just a real shame.
I got all the achievements. I got a turkey on the first date with Michelle.
More Final Fantasy XV. Itâs somewhat annoying how inconsistently car travel is handled.