For SuperSonick it is at least /German/ SciFi. So maybe in the original it comes off as better than monotone?
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Tried out two more games:
Ori and the Blind Forest is really pretty but it tries to be like a… directed metroidvania and the pacing was just kind of driving me crazy. I was irked by a lot of other things about it and I decided to put it down after about an hour.
Sunset Overdrive I knew I was probably not going to be in for the long haul but I’d always been curious. I like some of what it does, and I dislike a lot of what it does. I sort of wish it were stage-based rather than an open world game? I think the movement in this game would be really well served by some strongly directed, linear paths.
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Exactly!
I’ve started enjoying more and more moving through future-setpieces that stray a bit farther off the beaten path than the usual fare, and tbh, Remember Me (Paris, 2084) back in 2011ish hasn’t been kicked off the #1 spot it has had for almost a decade now, so the main draw of State of Mind is being in/around Berlin, and I will report back in some sort of topic when i have gotten around to properly playing it. The Story? Well, i don’t expect anything at all…
The dub is mediocre so far, though I recommend anyway playing with the original dub and subtitles - doing this (french dub+subs in your language) when playing Remember Me for the first time was a brilliant choice, since it made one of its boss battles so much more intense.
I had a similar experience after fiddling around with tech settings.
Did you get in your ship? I did have a huge problem with the virtual joysticks you grab – I couldn’t find my neutral position to reset my attitude (but grabbing the cockpit window down is awesome!). I’ll have to see if I can get it to analog sticks when in midair.
Ori’s one of my favorite games to complain about at work and annoy people
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I think maybe Yomawari: Night Alone was the wrong choice of game for me to start right now
My neutral was a little skewed but still usable. I’ll have to try the gesture again with this in mind – I wonder if the initial hand-orientation during the grab defines neutral.
Hmmm, that’s a good idea.
Some other things that may have been causing issues:
- I couldn’t see the stick while looking ahead, so I couldn’t self-calibrate the edge angles of the joystick
- There’s the natural delay as the joystick feeds the thrusters to angle the ship and that’s a steep learning without physical stick bounds
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No Man’s Sky with finite resources felt like playing a version of Animal Crossing with a rapidly-depleting hunger meter and a mandatory human-animal translation device that needs to be recharged every 12 people you talk to. Like, the only fun thing about NMS is exploring outside and flying the ship, and the game did as much as possible to ensure that you spent 3/4 of your time doing busywork to support that.
I really enjoyed the ‘tutorial’ of the NEXT version of NMS, where you have a really harsh start to fix your ship and stabilize your systems. What got me is that you never ‘solved’ any problems. At first, I didn’t necessarily mind having to refuel my ship all the time, but I would have liked to have been able to follow a craft tree to make it solar-powered or something so I could just use it. Same for O2. I put 12 hours into the last version of NMS before reading the wiki and realizing that it would never open up the way I had hoped it would.
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Oh, infinite resources in No Man’s Sky is not a new game mode but a mod for the PC version? If so, that’s unfortunate. (I have it on PS4.) I would play No Man’s Sky again if I didn’t have to deal with the tedious parts. I guess I should at least see what it looks like in VR.
It’s the “creative mode”. Looking at the notes for the Beyond update, it looks like they implemented many quality-of-life changes to basically fix all the problems I outlined above lol.
Now Ape Out there’s a game I can fuck with.
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the only reason I didn’t get it earlier despite trusting bennett implicitly is because it looks a lot like teleglitch, which I adored and never finished
I’ve been watching through all of BeagleRush’s Operator vs. Aliens streams (Xcom2) and the number of times he’s said, “how do I solve this” meaning “which squaddies do I use for stun/lockdown abilities, which for breaking enemy stun/lockdown, and which for damage/kills” is astounding. Though there is an awful lot of cover consideration & counting squares for range as well.
Late game XCom is a puzzle game about how to eliminate pods on the same turn as you activate them, so M: YZ sounds like it got it right
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Funny you should say that because the real purpose of his mod is to make the game less like that and use more volume of fire and take 60s and 70s. Vanilla WotC is a real 100% puzzle. Grenades are always the answer
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What I’ve noticed is, with the cheap easy guaranteed grenade hits gone & no aim bonuses from weapon mods, he’s leaning hard on multi shots, reaper cheese, mag shorties, and the AT4s. I’m only up to ep 26 but even before then there was plenty of working out how to cascade suppression removal.
Those are all more interesting than popping grenades from half the map away. I’m also nurturing this idea that tactical turn-based games are puzzle games with nondeterministic actions.
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Capy’s Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes taught me to think of puzzle and tactics on a scale: limiting player moves pulls you to puzzle, while opening up complexity and play space pulls towards tactics. High difficulty or optimal play tends to pull tactics games towards puzzle. It means the same thing, but in this circumstance I like to describe tactics games as having ‘tightness’: Invisible Inc. is the tightest tactics game I know and very close to puzzle; it’s not, though, because of the spatial and order-of-operations choice the player has.
Under this rubric, Chess is closer to puzzle, and Go is farther.
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He also continuously modifies the modset to make the game play the way he wants to, and to limit cheesy solutions that he finds. On the other hand it’s a constant battle not to make himself too weak; if someone who’s played 2000 hours of XCOM can’t even beat a campaign then it is too hard, and every once in a while he realizes that and gives himself some kind of break.
It’s very, very interesting to watch the design process of a person who has completely inundated himself in this extremely specific medium (new-style SRPGs), iterating and iterating to take the thing as far away from “puzzle” as he can. (I believe this instinct, of “what firefights should be like”, comes from his Arma experience with ShackTac - paging @iguferon.) That’s actually what I like most about the videos! Well that and the totally god damn amazing cinematic shit that this commitment produces sometimes
i think coming from arma is part of it, yeah. like shacktac’s preference for ironsights/unmagnified optics, for example, comes out of the fact that magnified optics in arma are pretty fucking cheesy which is why i’ve previously said a lot of arma combat is bullshit pixel hunting, because everybody prefers to just sit on a fucking hill and plink at infantry all day without any risk. personally i tend to agree with them on this matter but its really hard to convince your friends not to put a fancy 4x optic on their rifle so you can have risky, close range engagements where your success is determined by your ability to fire and manuever rather than how good you are at looking through a scope. a lot of the weirder decisions shacktac has made about what firefights should be like are rooted in a desire to make the game more fun and interesting, and difficulty just happens to be a byproduct of those decisions. i think that ethos has definitely carried through to beagle’s xcom 2 videos
The other day I recommended Daniel Remar’s MURI to some bloke looking for a game inspired by Duke Nukem 1/2. However, I felt much guilt and shame making this recommendation on account of the fact that I had never played it (even though it’s been on my wishlist for 5+ years). Given that my disposable income is much greater now than it was in 2013 (i.e. >$0), I decided to actually buy it.
5 dollars and 90 minutes later, i beat the game. it’s a good game.
on the remar scale from Iji to Hero Core, I give this a respectable 5.5 out of 8 turricans
the action is more interesting than the old duke nukems, but the level design is significantly more scrutable and less labyrinthine and stuff, so it’s kind of a wash. also, i felt towards the end that the levels got a lot more attritional, but that might just be my problem idk
the plot feels like you’re watching an anime on TV in the late 90s but you miss over half the episodes because your family doesn’t watch TV during dinnertime
the ‘smooth’ mode is an affront to nature
in conclusion, i finally spent money on steam my life is ruined
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