Video Games: 'Does Not Open From This Side' Edition

[briantw]

I also think that people overlook that, if they really wanted, Valve could start doing some strong-arming of their own and secure exclusives for Steam.  They have the capital to do so, and are much more respected in the games industry than Microsoft or EA or Activision.  They just haven't shown any interest in doing so thus far because I doubt they've felt they needed to.

[Kalbear]

Yeah, this isn't me being an insider here, but I don't see how Microsoft buys Valve. Valve is privately owned, is absurdly successful, and hates the hell out of Microsoft and is trying to divorce themselves from MS as much as humanly possible, and a lot of that is because MS hasn't played nicely with them. 

What I want, desperately, is to be able to buy a game and play it on any god damn system I want. I have 4 copies of Borderlands 2. I have 3 copies of Battlefield 4. I have 3 copies of Mortal Kombat X. This sucks. 

[Werthead]

3 minutes ago, briantw said:

I also think that people overlook that, if they really wanted, Valve could start doing some strong-arming of their own and secure exclusives for Steam.  They have the capital to do so, and are much more respected in the games industry than Microsoft or EA or Activision.  They just haven't shown any interest in doing so thus far because I doubt they've felt they needed to.

 

Steam effectively already have a lot of exclusives on Steam: their own games all require Steam and most PC games now require Steam to run even if bought in boxes off the shelf. They already have a very strong, exclusive library of games unavailable elsewhere.

 

[Red Tiger]

3 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, this isn't me being an insider here, but I don't see how Microsoft buys Valve. Valve is privately owned, is absurdly successful, and hates the hell out of Microsoft and is trying to divorce themselves from MS as much as humanly possible, and a lot of that is because MS hasn't played nicely with them. 

What I want, desperately, is to be able to buy a game and play it on any god damn system I want. I have 4 copies of Borderlands 2. I have 3 copies of Battlefield 4. I have 3 copies of Mortal Kombat X. This sucks. 

Why? Just why?

[Kalbear]

Let's see. We first got Borderlands  2 for the 360. Then we got it for the first steam account. Then we got it for the xb1. Then we got it for a second steam account.

Battlefield 4 went 360->XB1->PC. 

MKX went PC->PS4->XB1. 

Most of the time it went that way because my kids wanted to play with friends who had accounts on those systems or moved over. MKX went that way because my daughter was trying to find the best platform to play it on, and she had heard that the PS4 was better than the PC - and then heard XB1 was better than the PS4. 

[briantw]

8 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 

Steam effectively already have a lot of exclusives on Steam: their own games all require Steam and most PC games now require Steam to run even if bought in boxes off the shelf. They already have a very strong, exclusive library of games unavailable elsewhere.

 

They do, but aside from Valve's own games (which are obviously exclusive), they don't actively enforce exclusivity on anyone.  And a lot of those games use Steam by default if you buy a boxed copy but are also available on Origin.

[briantw]

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, this isn't me being an insider here, but I don't see how Microsoft buys Valve. Valve is privately owned, is absurdly successful, and hates the hell out of Microsoft and is trying to divorce themselves from MS as much as humanly possible, and a lot of that is because MS hasn't played nicely with them. 

Yeah, people kind of overlook that Valve quite literally started adopting and pushing Linux because they hate Microsoft.

[KiDisaster]

19 minutes ago, briantw said:

I also think that people overlook that, if they really wanted, Valve could start doing some strong-arming of their own and secure exclusives for Steam.  They have the capital to do so, and are much more respected in the games industry than Microsoft or EA or Activision.  They just haven't shown any interest in doing so thus far because I doubt they've felt they needed to.

Valve would lose a lot of that respect and good will you're talking about if they did decide to start pushing other publishers into selling their games exclusively through Steam though. 

[KiDisaster]

1 hour ago, Sullen said:

Yeah, the Iron Tarkus wannabe is also the one who gave me the most trouble in the area, there's two things to consider while fighting him.

1) Unless you want to try to parry, your shield is useless, blocking one of his hits is a death sentence... two-hand your weapon for more damage

2) He has super armour on many of his attacks, so don't try to interrupt him

Having a shield up has saved me from his attacks, they do about half my HP if I block them. The main thing that's screwing me up is that I keep forgetting about his up swing that he sometimes does when his sword is already the ground after a big attack. I keep thinking it's an opening, then when I'm already past the point of no return I get wrecked. 

[Sullen]

Just now, KiDisaster said:

Having a shield up has saved me from his attacks, they do about half my HP if I block them. The main thing that's screwing me up is that I keep forgetting about his up swing that he sometimes does when his sword is already the ground after a big attack. I keep thinking it's an opening, then when I'm already past the point of no return I get wrecked. 

You have enough Stamina/Stability on your shield to tank one his hits?

My build is relatively endurance-heavy, and using the grasscrest shield, a single hit of his staggered me, while lead him to do an execution, which killed me at full health. Dodging was pretty much the only thing I could do to take him down. Dodge, and then stunlock him with standard R1 attacks for about a quarter of his health.

[KiDisaster]

14 minutes ago, Sullen said:

You have enough Stamina/Stability on your shield to tank one his hits?

My build is relatively endurance-heavy, and using the grasscrest shield, a single hit of his staggered me, while lead him to do an execution, which killed me at full health. Dodging was pretty much the only thing I could do to take him down. Dodge, and then stunlock him with standard R1 attacks for about a quarter of his health.

Seems that way. I'm just using the first 100% physical block shield I found still. Knight Crest I think? Can't remember what it's called. 

I'm rolling through all his attacks so maybe it's that I'm not getting hit directly or something, but I haven't gotten staggered and executed by him yet. He has taken down all of my stamina with a single attack but I've always had just enough time to roll away. 

ETA: Looked it up. It's the Silver Eagle Kite Shield that I'm using. 

[briantw]

15 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

Valve would lose a lot of that respect and good will you're talking about if they did decide to start pushing other publishers into selling their games exclusively through Steam though. 

Would they, though?  What if they offered a publisher a deal like the publisher gets an extra ten percent of all profits that Valve forfeits from their normal cut in exchange for exclusivity?  That's just them doing business.

[KiDisaster]

Is it just me or is the difficulty spike in DS3 after the Catacombs kind of insane? I was doing just fine up to this point. Finally managed to get through Smouldering Lake and now the blue frost town whose name I can't even be bothered to misspell is utterly destroying me. Just in the first area. I'm struggling just to get past the first three spectral bride looking things. 

5 hours ago, briantw said:

Would they, though?  What if they offered a publisher a deal like the publisher gets an extra ten percent of all profits that Valve forfeits from their normal cut in exchange for exclusivity?  That's just them doing business.

I think they'd lost at least some of it. PC players tend to hate exclusivity from my experience. 

[briantw]

26 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

I think they'd lost at least some of it. PC players tend to hate exclusivity from my experience. 

I don't think PC players hate exclusivity, but rather how, in recent years, they've tended to be on the shit end of it.  That's not even mentioning the delayed releases for PC ports and how many PC ports are absolutely terrible or just generally half-assed (Arkham Knight, for example).

No PC gamers really complain when a title is PC exclusive, nor would they really care if a developer opted to only put their game on Steam.  After all, Steam is, you know, free.

[RumHam]

23 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

Is it just me or is the difficulty spike in DS3 after the Catacombs kind of insane? I was doing just fine up to this point. Finally managed to get through Smouldering Lake and now the blue frost town whose name I can't even be bothered to misspell is utterly destroying me. Just in the first area. I'm struggling just to get past the first three spectral bride looking things. 

I think they'd lost at least some of it. PC players tend to hate exclusivity from my experience. 

You're not alone. I can deal with one at a time, provided I manage to kill it before it gets into it's melee combo of death. They are nasty. 

I'm wondering, whats your + level on your main weapon? I feel like I have plenty of scales but no chunks. Is there a Frampt like NPC in this game who can down-convert? I just got the ability to buy large shards. I feel like by now chunks should at least be rare drops, but I don't think I've seen any. Which makes me worry I've missed an entire area. 

[Gears of the Beast]

6 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Battlefield 4 went 360->XB1->PC. 

I didn't know BF4 was even on those old consoles. Frostbite is optimised really well but it must have run like shit?

[KiDisaster]

56 minutes ago, RumHam said:

You're not alone. I can deal with one at a time, provided I manage to kill it before it gets into it's melee combo of death. They are nasty. 

I'm wondering, whats your + level on your main weapon? I feel like I have plenty of scales but no chunks. Is there a Frampt like NPC in this game who can down-convert? I just got the ability to buy large shards. I feel like by now chunks should at least be rare drops, but I don't think I've seen any. Which makes me worry I've missed an entire area. 

I've got my Sharp Uchi+6 and my Pyro Flame+6. Been finding plenty of large shards lately but haven't found a single chunk yet.

[RumHam]

3 hours ago, Gears of the Beast said:

I didn't know BF4 was even on those old consoles. Frostbite is optimised really well but it must have run like shit?

I must've logged hundreds of hours playing 360 BF4 before Fallout 4 gave me a compelling reason to upgrade. It didn't run any worse than BF3. The larger maps did sometimes seem sparsely populated though, with it being limited to 24 players.

[briantw]

I've been making a concerted effort the past few weeks to actually go back and beat some of the hundreds of games that have accumulated in my Steam library over the past decade, most of which were bought on a whim during a Steam sale for next to nothing and then never or barely played.

Finished off Guacamelee, to which I'd previously dedicated about three or four hours.  I liked it.  It was a solid, albeit short, Metroidvania-style game with a great art style and surprisingly challenging platforming.  There were a few platforming sections that seemed more annoying than skillful, but generally I liked the tough parts that really made you work on your timing.  The combat was similar in that it was mostly fun and occasionally quite challenging, but it also felt cheap every now and then.  The quick yellow enemies were an absolute bitch to deal with sometimes, especially when they were equipped with a shield and thrown at you with another tough enemy type.  The flying dragon things also made me want to chuck my controller through my monitor a couple of times with their bullshit projectile spam.  Still, I'd recommend it overall if you're into the Metroidvania type of game.

Beat Grim Fandango as well.  To be fair, I'd beaten this game in the past, as I own a disk copy of it buried somewhere in a box in my guest bedroom with all my other old games.  But I hadn't played it in years and bought the special edition when it released.  It made me remember what adventure games used to be like when the puzzles made no sense and fuck you if you couldn't figure them out.  Grim Fandango isn't as good as Curse of Monkey Island (the all-time best adventure game in my opinion), but it's a fun title with a unique premise and solid characters.

In addition to Final Fantasy IX right now, I'm also doing a Ranger Hardcore playthrough of Metro: Last Light.  Let me tell you, this game does not fuck around on the hardest difficulty.  Two hits from one of those watchmen creatures and you're dead.  Same with a couple of bullets.  On the plus side, enemies are similarly easy to kill, so the difficulty is nicely balanced by fairness and stealth is basically required if you want to survive.  Alerting enemies on most stages would be a death sentence.  I'm trying to play through it without killing anyone, although I made an exception on the train level because, honestly, fuck that.  I know that it's theoretically possible to beat that level without killing anyone, but I wasn't really into spending several hours trying.  I watched a video from a guy who pulled it off and he commented that it took him about two hundred attempts.  That's fine if you're filming a YouTube video shortly after the game came out, but I just shot all the mother fuckers in my path and called it a successful day.  Other than that, no human casualties on my end, although I have to assume at least a few of those guys I left alive were executed for incompetence after I escaped.  

[Fez]

Anyway, playing FFIX again is everything I could've hoped for. Granted, I'm being consumed by overwhelming nostalgia, but even so, I think its a really great game. Its still crashing too much, but I discovered that there's now an auto-save every time I change screens, so I've never lost more than a minute or two of progress.

It would still be frustrating if it crashed right at the end of a boss fight, but, on the other hand, the game feels way easier than I remember; so it wouldn't really be too of a hassle. I'm about a third of the way through what I think was the second disc back on the PS1 and I've only died once, and that was in a fight that I remembered I was forced to lose by the story, but forgot that I needed to do a certain amount of damage before losing; otherwise its game over instead of jumping to the next scene. Beyond that, all the bosses have been incredibly easy; I feel like I'm doing a lot more damage than I remember, particularly Vivi. Also, I'm nearly positive that they've toned down the frequency of random encounters, and increased the exp you get from enemies so you don't get underleveled. Maybe its my imagination. But I've gone through way to many areas and only had literally two or three total fights (only had 1 the entire time I was climbing Cleyra), whereas I remember there being way more in the original version.

The story and writing is a JRPG, so I have to mentally pretend that everyone's age is about 10 years older than its stated, but I think its really good. Better than I remember in fact. I'm remembering scenes as I see them, but I feel like I'm appreciating them more than I was 16 years ago. I'm wondering if I was just too young when I first played it to properly see how the story flowed from beat to beat and instead was sort of just treating each piece as a separate thing. There have been a few moments where I feel like the story rushed along too quickly; but I think that's because I really am going through the game much faster. So what should feel like a longer passage of time at points actually only took me a few minutes.