Video Games: Shadow of the Rise of the Live Madden War III- HD Remaster

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

It will only give you the option to swap guns if it is something different then what you are carrying.  Usually you will just pick up the bullets.

Also a tip for bounties... if you have large ones go out of state to pay them.  For example since you are in chapter 3 I presume you are committing most of your crimes around Rhodes and the two plantation manors.  Go to the Emerald Station mailbox which is out of state then you wont have to deal with the pesky bounty hunters before you pay it off.   If you have bounties in New Hanover (Valentine, the Ranch, Van Horn, and Annesburg) go to Rhodes or Saint Denis. Have a ton of bounties in Lemoyne and New Hanover... go to Strawberry(which is in West Elizabeth) and pay them off there.

Also if you want to travel a little faster between bigger towns, stable your horse then take a stage or train to somewhere next to a stable far away. (If you don't stable your horse it will stay put meaning you will have no horse on hand without stealing) You can also fast travel from camp but you need to upgrade that.

I know that about the bullets. I’m talking about the actually command to pick the guns up. I follow it but it never grabs them.   

And the rest of that info was quite helpful. Thanks!

[Slurktan]

9 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I know that about the bullets. I’m talking about the actually command to pick the guns up. I follow it but it never grabs them.   

And the rest of that info was quite helpful. Thanks!

You pick up a gun (or other weapon) by hitting L1 on PS4 or I presume LB for xbox.  However it swaps out whatever gun you might have had equipped of that type.  Say you are carrying a bolt action rifle and it gives you the option to pick up a Worn Springfield.  The Worn Springfield will be in the spot you had the bolt action.  Same for pistols and revolvers and even knives and such.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

21 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

You pick up a gun (or other weapon) by hitting L1 on PS4 or I presume LB for xbox.  However it swaps out whatever gun you might have had equipped of that type.  Say you are carrying a bolt action rifle and it gives you the option to pick up a Worn Springfield.  The Worn Springfield will be in the spot you had the bolt action.  Same for pistols and revolvers and even knives and such.

I know it’s the L1 button, but I can’t tell if it’s actually doing anything. It doesn’t appear to be replacing the gun I have.  

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

Thanks for the laptop advice! I know a desktop is a much better investment in almost every aspect, but I still want the portability of a laptop.

[Werthead]

Evil Genius is £1 in the Steam sale. Meant to play it when it came out but was burned out on superhero games at the time (I'd been playing a lot of Freedom Force and Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich), so nice to be able to catch up on it at last.

[Jace, Extat]

14 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Evil Genius is £1 in the Steam sale. Meant to play it when it came out but was burned out on superhero games at the time (I'd been playing a lot of Freedom Force and Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich), so nice to be able to catch up on it at last.

Freedom Force vs The Third Reich sounds like something I'd masturbate to.

Tell us about it.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Freedom Force vs The Third Reich sounds like something I'd masturbate to.

Tell us about it.

The Freedom Force games are two isometric RPGs which do away with stuffy like inventory management in favour of comic book fighting and puzzle-solving, along with some nice worldbuilding and magnificently cheesy dialogue. It's extremely entertaining.

It was made by the same team who made BioShock and BioShock Infinite. Imagine the strengths of those games with the pretentious BS stripped off. They're very solid games, and because they were so stylised they haven't aged that badly at all. You can get both  games on GoG.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich is an awesome game.

I got it for free years ago with a game magazine and enjoyed it a lot. 

I never played the first one though.

 

 

[briantw]

Man, Freedom Force brings back some childhood memories.  Those were great games.

[Ran]

Agreed. Big fan of the two games, loving homages that they are to the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby era of Marvel Comics. Man-bot, El Diablo, Man o' War, the Minuteman, Liberty Lad, Mentor, Bullet, Alchemiss... really memorable cast of characters.

Easily the best superhero games I've ever played. 

 

Evil Genius looks sort of like a supervillain spin on Dungeon Keeper.

[briantw]

3 minutes ago, Ran said:

Agreed. Big fan of the two games, loving homages that they are to the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby era of Marvel Comics. Man-bot, El Diablo, Man o' War, the Minuteman, Liberty Lad, Mentor, Bullet, Alchemiss... really memorable cast of characters.

Easily the best superhero games I've ever played. 

 

Evil Genius looks sort of like a supervillain spin on Dungeon Keeper.

With that in mind, really wish we'd get a reboot of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series.  Those games were super fun too.

[Werthead]

Argh. Total War: Thrones of Britannia is almost impenetrable. Started off playing Wessex and I was told to solve a famine problem. The game gave me a name of where to solve the problem, but it wasn't of a city or region or even a town. It was, weirdly, the name of the lord of the town. I tried to solve the famine problem by building some new food production buildings, but even the lowest-level one took 4 turns to build. 3 turns later the game decided I'd taken too long and promptly failed me the mission, despite it being (apparently) physically impossible to resolve it in time.

I then marched an army from one city in one province to another, only to have half the army disband because it didn't have any supplies. I worked out I was supposed to use very, very small armies and that 20-stack armies wouldn't be something you'd be seeing too often in this game, which was fair enough. Then a 15-stack army from another faction invaded my kingdom and sacked several towns and didn't seem to suffer from this problem at all.

After bouncing hard off the Warhammer games, and been quite sour on Rome II, I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe the series has just moved off in a direction I really don't care for at all. The original idea was that the map was there for you to build armies and fight battles. Shogun and Medieval were perhaps a bit too bare-bones so they added a lot more stuff in Rome and Medieval II which made the game a lot richer, but they never lost sight of the fact that the map metagame is purely there to justify the battles (Empire did start going a fair bit further but mostly held it to a reasonable level). Trying to turn the series into a Civ or Crusader Kings clone or some kind of mega-realistic simulator is really not playing to its strengths.

At this point I may have to think of Medieval II (and its brilliant modding community) as the highwater mark of the series and bid adieu to it. A shame.

[Corvinus85]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Argh. Total War: Thrones of Britannia is almost impenetrable. Started off playing Wessex and I was told to solve a famine problem. The game gave me a name of where to solve the problem, but it wasn't of a city or region or even a town. It was, weirdly, the name of the lord of the town. I tried to solve the famine problem by building some new food production buildings, but even the lowest-level one took 4 turns to build. 3 turns later the game decided I'd taken too long and promptly failed me the mission, despite it being (apparently) physically impossible to resolve it in time.

I then marched an army from one city in one province to another, only to have half the army disband because it didn't have any supplies. I worked out I was supposed to use very, very small armies and that 20-stack armies wouldn't be something you'd be seeing too often in this game, which was fair enough. Then a 15-stack army from another faction invaded my kingdom and sacked several towns and didn't seem to suffer from this problem at all.

After bouncing hard off the Warhammer games, and been quite sour on Rome II, I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe the series has just moved off in a direction I really don't care for at all. The original idea was that the map was there for you to build armies and fight battles. Shogun and Medieval were perhaps a bit too bare-bones so they added a lot more stuff in Rome and Medieval II which made the game a lot richer, but they never lost sight of the fact that the map metagame is purely there to justify the battles (Empire did start going a fair bit further but mostly held it to a reasonable level). Trying to turn the series into a Civ or Crusader Kings clone or some kind of mega-realistic simulator is really not playing to its strengths.

At this point I may have to think of Medieval II (and its brilliant modding community) as the highwater mark of the series and bid adieu to it. A shame.

Yeah, a lot of baffling decisions with regards to the Britannia gameplay, not enough good stuff to out balance the bad. I like the Warhammer games, and if I think it fits the criterion you just described quite well, the campaign map is there to build armies and go fight. It has a lot of diversity with so many factions, though sadly CA's business model is now like all others, too much content behind additional paywalls. 

Medieval II remains my favorite, no doubt about it, though if I were to judge only by the vanilla release, can't say it was much better than the rest. It's the modders that made it great. You mentioned up thread you got Attila, too. Go ahead, and try it. Britannia was essentially built on it, but Attila has more factions and cultures worth exploring, and more traditional Total War features; and its naval battles are actually good.

I'm also feeling hesitant about the upcoming Three Kingdoms game. One one hand, they seem to have done a tremendous job with the diplomacy system, bringing back the much missed settlement trading, among other things. The system of army recruiting and having different types of generals is also interesting. On the other hand, not having naval battle, in a land and time period when naval battles were often critical is disappointing and will reduce immersion. Also, I have a bad feeling the historical campaign will suffer compared to the Romance campaign.

[Slurktan]

1 hour ago, Corvinus said:

I'm also feeling hesitant about the upcoming Three Kingdoms game. One one hand, they seem to have done a tremendous job with the diplomacy system, bringing back the much missed settlement trading, among other things. The system of army recruiting and having different types of generals is also interesting. On the other hand, not having naval battle, in a land and time period when naval battles were often critical is disappointing and will reduce immersion. Also, I have a bad feeling the historical campaign will suffer compared to the Romance campaign.

To be fair naval battles weren't really critical in the Three Kingdoms period.  Having what we might call marines for amphibious assaults?  Absolutely.  The lack thereof from Wei/Jin is why Wu lasted until 280. The only naval battle of Note was Chibi and that wasn't so much of a battle as it was Cao Cao clumping his ships together for Zhou Yu to ram with boats lit on fire.  Even that battle was mostly fought on land.

[Heartofice]

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

Argh. Total War: Thrones of Britannia is almost impenetrable. Started off playing Wessex and I was told to solve a famine problem. The game gave me a name of where to solve the problem, but it wasn't of a city or region or even a town. It was, weirdly, the name of the lord of the town. I tried to solve the famine problem by building some new food production buildings, but even the lowest-level one took 4 turns to build. 3 turns later the game decided I'd taken too long and promptly failed me the mission, despite it being (apparently) physically impossible to resolve it in time.

I then marched an army from one city in one province to another, only to have half the army disband because it didn't have any supplies. I worked out I was supposed to use very, very small armies and that 20-stack armies wouldn't be something you'd be seeing too often in this game, which was fair enough. Then a 15-stack army from another faction invaded my kingdom and sacked several towns and didn't seem to suffer from this problem at all.

After bouncing hard off the Warhammer games, and been quite sour on Rome II, I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe the series has just moved off in a direction I really don't care for at all. The original idea was that the map was there for you to build armies and fight battles. Shogun and Medieval were perhaps a bit too bare-bones so they added a lot more stuff in Rome and Medieval II which made the game a lot richer, but they never lost sight of the fact that the map metagame is purely there to justify the battles (Empire did start going a fair bit further but mostly held it to a reasonable level). Trying to turn the series into a Civ or Crusader Kings clone or some kind of mega-realistic simulator is really not playing to its strengths.

At this point I may have to think of Medieval II (and its brilliant modding community) as the highwater mark of the series and bid adieu to it. A shame.

I have to agree, I have Britannia but have never been able to motivate myself to spend more than about 1 hour with it at a time. I actually however found the game to be far too simplistic rather than too complex, the inability to really make any large strategic decisions about your provinces means I didn't see there was very much to do. I still think Warhammer is the one game that has really managed to get the balance right, the  way CA are releasing new content constantly and changing up the game means its always exciting. Each new faction improves the game in a new way. 

Britannia seemed like a decent idea but a step backwards. For it to work, I needed it to be far more along the lines of a Paradox game, it needed more depth, not less. So far I see all the same tired mechanics they use in other games, repurposed. The games also are really just about a series of buffs or debuffs, rather than greatly changing the way you play. 

I agree that Medieval 2 is still the best game in the series for me. I wanted to love Empire, its so far the most ambitious and could have been incredible.

[Toth]

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

After bouncing hard off the Warhammer games, and been quite sour on Rome II, I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe the series has just moved off in a direction I really don't care for at all. The original idea was that the map was there for you to build armies and fight battles. Shogun and Medieval were perhaps a bit too bare-bones so they added a lot more stuff in Rome and Medieval II which made the game a lot richer, but they never lost sight of the fact that the map metagame is purely there to justify the battles (Empire did start going a fair bit further but mostly held it to a reasonable level). Trying to turn the series into a Civ or Crusader Kings clone or some kind of mega-realistic simulator is really not playing to its strengths.

At this point I may have to think of Medieval II (and its brilliant modding community) as the highwater mark of the series and bid adieu to it. A shame.

That's actually pretty much my take as well. I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by the direction the series took. Especially since the battles themselves felt ever faster and trimmed more for show rather than strategy. After Napoleon I never really cared for it anymore and my attempt to get into Attila was very short-lived (especially after all the frustration of actually getting it to run on any system of mine).

[Heartofice]

16 minutes ago, Toth said:

That's actually pretty much my take as well. I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by the direction the series took. Especially since the battles themselves felt ever faster and trimmed more for show rather than strategy. After Napoleon I never really cared for it anymore and my attempt to get into Attila was very short-lived (especially after all the frustration of actually getting it to run on any system of mine).

Did you try modding any of those games. Almost all of them improve greatly in terms of battle times and speed with the right mod 

[briantw]

Apparently I own both Freedom Force games on Steam.  Not sure when that happened, but this thread has made me want to replay them.

[Toth]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Did you try modding any of those games. Almost all of them improve greatly in terms of battle times and speed with the right mod 

Not yet. The last mod I used for a Total War game was a realistic accuracy mod on Napoleon Total War, which made the game quite a bit more challenging (though it didn't change the messed up pathfinding that seems to have gotten worse with each game - TCA and their ludicrous obsession with motion capture animations really take the fun out of it for me). For Shogun and Attila I haven't, mostly because I had far too much trouble getting the base game to run. They are stupidly picky in regards to my graphics cards, so I stopped caring.

[Fez]

I have hopes for Total War: Three Kingdoms, simply because I like the setting so much. But when it comes to grand strategy, I'm far more excited for Paradox's next offering, Imperator: Rome. Granted, like most Paradox games it'll probably be worth holding off until there's a bundle that includes some of the eventual DLC, but what they're doing looks really interesting. Most Paradox games eventually turn into a map painting simulator to varying degrees, unless you create self-imposed challenges. But with Imperator, it looks like managing the internal politics of Rome will always be a challenge, no matter how strong you become. That's my hope anyway.

As for my current gaming, I've surprisingly given up on Mutant Year Zero. The game's got great style, but surprisingly shallow combat and story. There's actually not much character ability or weapon customization available, and the battles are so lopsided against you that they all unfold the same way (slowly sneaking around the area ambushing enemies with your weaker, silent weapons until the core 3 enemies are left and you take them on using all your limited abilities and loud weapons). And with a weak story and limited character dialog, there's not much driving me forward.

I also stopped playing Infra. It's a neat idea, a long (like 30 hours long) walking simulator with puzzles about a structural engineer exploring the crumbling infrastructure of the city (and I think uncovering a conspiracy in city planning). But there's just way too much jank. There's no indications of which random environmental elements are interactive unless you go up to them and try to touch each one, there's no visual inventory so there's no way to know what items you have unless you write it down outside the game, and the puzzles are often very unintuitive (also, only some of the puzzles actually opens up new areas to go to versus just being something to be, and there's usually no indication of when a puzzle has opened a new area).

Other recently stopped games are: Recettear (played for a couple hours, decided that's kind of neat and worth the $5 I paid, but I'm not interested in doing this gameplay loop for another 20 hours); Conan Exiles (my PC hasn't BSOD crashed once since I stopped playing it); Thumper (too hard for me, I'm bad at precise timing like that); and Sunset Overdrive (fun goofy game, reminds me of Saints Row IV; except not charming enough character to keep me going after the gameplay starts to get a bit stale around 10 hours in).

Instead, I've started playing Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus, which seems like a far deeper turn-based strategy game than Mutant Year Zero; despite it being, so far at least, one with less interesting environmental geography to move around in. It's also the extremely rare WH40K game that actually seems to nail the look and feel of the setting; the Adapteus Mecanicus are weird and gross and way more interesting than just a handful of catchphrases about mutants, heretics, and the emperor.

I've also started playing CrossCode, which seems interesting though I'm not sure how long I'll actually play it. It's a single player game set in an MMO setting, as you in, you play a player in an MMO uncovering a conspiracy and trying to regain your memories. So there's a combination of these single player quests alongside what the MMOs quests would be, and there's all the lore and story of the single player and the fictional MMO happening at the same time. It's just a lot to take in.

And I'm still playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey; which is now firmly in The Witcher 3 territory of "This game is great, but why won't it end? Every time I think it's going to end, there's another twist that adds another 5+ hours to the game." Right now I have 5 separate main quest chains going, each one with some unknown number of hours left in them and I have no idea how much game is left after they're done. But there's a very spoilerly piece of promotional art I saw before release that has not been referenced or set-up in any way yet, so I suspect I've got a ways to go.

I've also got the Dishonored: Death of the Outsider DLC and Shadow of the Tomb Raider sitting in my library, but I don't want to start them until I've finished off at least one of my current games. I'm also thinking of giving Pathfinder: Kingmaker another shot over the holidays, or at least see where the developers have gotten the game to now.