Yeah I’m definitely showing up for that Alien atmosphere and being stalked by a satanic space demon. The human on human combat does seem like something I’ll think is a bit of a drag but it sounds like the good far outweighs the bad. I appreciate the input y’all (I’m gonna go for it).
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Even if you play 2 hours you’ll get your money’s worth on those conditions!
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The thing about the non-human enemies is that it’s very easy to fall into a pattern where you treat them as, pretty much, the same enemy when your strategies against them can be totally different. Conflating them I think makes the game a greater, slower slog than it needs to be. I had a lot of fun, and recommend, testing the enemies to see what you can and can’t get away with doing. Alien Isolation is long enough to be both a pure stealth game and a game about intelligently knowing when not to waste your time and run. When you go fast and loud, the danger is not from getting caught but from making, like, a wrong turn or running into someone you didn’t plan to run into.
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Interesting, I’ll keep that in mind!
I’m currently playing through Sky Odyssey so if I follow it up with Isolation it’s gonna be a heck of a contrast.
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How do Trophies Cheevos work? Like structurally? How do you make the flag to trigger them? How much extra processing to track 500 nazis killed or got to the top of the mountain for no reason or did a barrel roll?
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I don’t know how anyone else does it or if there’s a set of standard practices by now (though probably there are) but Josh Ge wrote a really nice, really detailed technical overview a couple years back on how he did achievements for his game, Cogmind.
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Generally someone takes it on as a job late in the project after the achievement list has been passed between the design department hoping someone would pick it up and love it. When the design lead realizes nobody cares and it’s up to them they finish it and mail it off at 7:30 or so so they can go home and then they need to find an engineer who can do it.
The engineer is probably grabbed out of the SDET (testing engineers) because nobody understands their normal work and now they have to plug in 50-odd special-case trigger conditions. They do this grudgingly and, as they are not a gameplay engineer and have not been in the code before, they invent thirteen novel ways to solve problems already solved in the standard gameplay code. This creates fifteen bugs.
Seven of these bugs are still extant when the game goes gold, but the day one patch solves five of them. The remaining two bugs are never solved and an eight-hundred-page thread exists on the Steam discussion board where users ask why they haven’t received the achievement, which does nothing and has no effect on Steam.
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Effect or no effect, I didn’t throw Gnome Chompski back in the car 100 times after he physics glitched his way out of there only for the game to just not give me the cheevo
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Wonder what the “actual awards” cheevos roadmap looked like at Microsoft in 2007 and what reasons they eventually never went through with it.
I mean now it’s like I’ve had trophies for 10 years.
I’ll pipe up just as a dissenting voice in that I loved the atmosphere of the game but I just do not care about any interactions with The Alien. I found the Working Joes, and the way they could potentially switch between benign to malicious to benign, as a more compelling antagonist force, but they weren’t going to call the game Working Joe: Isolation.
I also dropped off of Resident Evil 7 for the same reason.
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I started adding games to my Steam wishlist last year when it’s something I might consider playing but I don’t have time or feel like it right away. The idea is that when I had a free weekend I would browse through the wishlist and play one or two that catch my fancy.
But I’m realizing this doesn’t work. Now I already have 52 games on it, and whenever I browse the wishlist, nothing catches my fancy, and it’s increasingly a mess. There’s no kind of categorization, nothing to help me archive stuff I’m clearly never going to play after all, and also it doesn’t show screenshots on the overview so it doesn’t remind me of what attracted me to the game in the first place.
It’s even worse on the Switch. I can never even remember where the wishlist page is buried on there.
What do people do here to curate games to play? Anybody have a better system to recommend?
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Hoo boy, I have a major obsession with constantly checking my wishlist and backlog but here’s what I do.
Whenever I see a game announced or have one recommended I’ll do an initial desirability check. Do I want to play this? Why? Is it worth my time?
Then I add it to a list in something like Trello. If I add something to the list I will usually also add a trailer or gameplay section to my watch later page on Youtube. If, after watching the video, I still desire it and don’t skip through the video I will keep it on the list. If the game is not out yet then all I have to do is wait until the release date is coming up (about a month from release) and redo the above procedure to check desirability again. If it’s tepid and a lot of games are coming in the same month or so I will sometimes screen stuff for the sake of time.
If the game is already out then I’ll do research about the best version and platform, do another desirability check with video and then purchase. However, I will ultimately cut a lot of games I have mild interest in. There are exceptions based on who is recommending me the game and if the game is on sale or if I suddenly have a huge mood change about a game.
A Steam wishlist should never have more than 10 games on it (if you want to refine it). If something strikes your fancy, and the maximum has been reached, you must bump something from the list. I keep my total backlog and wishlist hovering at around 45-50 games. Half of these are speculative and will probably release a year from now.
TLDR; The key to a manageable wishlist and backlog is to be extremely ruthless and impose a maximum limit.
Also I’m fairly sure I have some kind of problem keeping me in this process.
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Some googling turned up https://steam-backlog.com/ . Looks like a strictly better way to browse my existing Steam wishlist. The custom tagging/labeling system looks a little thin at first but maybe I can make it work for my purposes.
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I’ve seen similar tools to this and many people find them pretty useful. imho I think they kinda of just prolong the whole thing anyway and shift the focus of what you actually want to play to endless categorisation of games you have mostly fleeting interest in. I used to constantly have about 150 games listed that I wanted to play at any time and just trying to organise this by genre, price, length etc was too much anxiety for me which made me just downsize. I get through about 60ish games a year on average so it felt crazy to have so many games on the list and devote so much energy to organising them. However, I am still a list-making wreck so take my thoughts with copious amounts of salt.
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I kind of bias the other way, no real compulsion to manage lists for their own sake, but it’s meant over time that my media selection has withered and gone in circles a bit, so I’m trying to balance it.
Probably it’s in music and movies that I have the real problem TBH though. (If you can call a simple absence of experiencing media a problem as such. I’m just dimly aware there is a lot of stuff that I would probably find enriching that I’m totally oblivious to.)
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Text file. If it’s worth my while to open the documents folder and find the txt and add to it it’s probably something I’d actually want to play
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Write List Articles every six months forever.
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The only time I use a wish list is when I want to buy a new game but I don’t know what I want. So I’ll browse through games on sale and wishlist anything that looks interesting. Then I cull the least desirable games from the wishlist until only one is left. That’s the game I buy.
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I have two Sonic-related questions!
1- Should I play Sonic Adventure DX (Gamecube version)? I don’t have a Dreamcast. Is DX really worse than the original or are the changes negligible?
2- I have downloaded Sonic Robo Blast 2 for Android, installed the apk, inserted the assets as explained here:
https://www.srb2.org/download/
But it gives me this error: “A wad file was not found or not valid. Check the logs to see which ones.”
What should I do?
For me the steam wishlist is a very focused combination of “game that I might like” and “game I probably will completely forget exists otherwise”. But I’m also not too often browsing the store either so that helps keep it trim.
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