Video Games: Keanu Re3ves Is Breathtaking

[Ramsay B.]

I’m really enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn. Uncovering the backstory and exploring the world is fun as hell. I’m glad there’s different climate zones too. I think I’m around 50% done. 

One minor complaint is that I wish the machine’s aggression was affected when raising the difficulty level. I’m pretty sure it only limits the resources and makes the machines bullet sponges, which just makes it more annoying. I don’t want Sekiro type difficulty, but most of the time I don’t feel threatened unless it’s the big beasts. Not a big deal though.

[briantw]

I picked up Pit People during the Steam sale.  I'm only about two hours in but really enjoying it.  It's a turn-based strategy / RPG from the makers of Castle Crashers.

I honestly can't describe the story in this game without sounding like a lunatic, so I'll just link the first few minutes of the game.

 

[Leofric]

39 minutes ago, briantw said:

I picked up Pit People during the Steam sale.  I'm only about two hours in but really enjoying it.  It's a turn-based strategy / RPG from the makers of Castle Crashers.

I honestly can't describe the story in this game without sounding like a lunatic, so I'll just link the first few minutes of the game.

 

That was amazing.

[briantw]

34 minutes ago, Leofric said:

That was amazing.

My favorite detail is that the bandit captain is named Jerkimedes.  

[Centrist Simon Steele]

9 hours ago, Inigima said:

I did the same. Yes, it's the bad ending. Let me know if you need direction, the game is extremely bad at breadcrumbing you at that point. Direction will depend on whether or not you've already taken a train ride. 

Ha, I was just exploring, and nothing suggested I was closing in on the last boss (if he is the last, I will find out!). I did the train prior, but I have since found some areas to explore. 

[Whiskeyjack]

4 hours ago, Ramsay B. said:

I’m really enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn. Uncovering the backstory and exploring the world is fun as hell. I’m glad there’s different climate zones too. I think I’m around 50% done.

Playing this right now too.  Really good game.  I'm not as far as you though - probably only 25% finished at this point.

[Werthead]

Cyberpunk 2077 has three different starting locations and questlines, which will vary based on your origin story. Interesting stuff, reminiscent of Dragon Age: Origins.

[Inkdaub]

Back on Odyssey this week.  Fun game and half the enjoyment is how beautiful everything is.  Odyssey is the only game I have used the photo function during play. 

 

[RumHam]

The Switch Lite looks good for families with multiple kids who couldn't justify the expense of another normal one. No detachable joy-cons, rumble or TV output, but $200 and 20%-30% improved battery life. 

I was hoping for something more like a Switch+ that would lead to a price drop for the current hardware. At some point I definitely want to get a new one and do terrible terrible things to my current hackable one. 

[A True Kaniggit]

Bloody Nazis.

I'm trying to get the achievement in HOI IV  where you make Los Angeles glow in the dark as Italy. But Germany keeps on getting me dragged into a war against the Brits just a tad too early (In this last one they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938). Be patient you morons.

[Werthead]

Back to Dying Light, this time for The Following expansion. Disappointed at how rusty my zombie survival skills had gotten in just a year since last playing the base game. Also not sold on adding a buggy to the game, as it seems to be making the game a fair bit less tense in terms of getting around than in the original (it makes travelling at night much easier).

Still, lots of fun.

[Toth]

God, I hate trees. At least Surviving Mars' still wonky feeling terraforming mechanic made me hate them. Because watching trees grow is literally the only thing I still have left to do. I quite literally put out a book today to read while the game ran in the background. It was The Martian, yes, really. Then again, I can't complain. Building my colony up to this point had been fun. And even now I found a few things to mess around with.

First, like in my previous post mentioned, it irked me that my colony looks nowhere as green as all of the official screenshots of the Green Planet expansion, despite Mars essentially looking earth-like already. So I went to work: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190710/vay5g2fl.png

Pretty panorama aside, I utterly littered the map with deforestation plants. Up until now I had built them only in the direct vicinity of my colony buildings, but I want to cover the entire map with forests and for that I need to think big. I built independent Drone Hubs with a bunch of wind turbines pretty much everywhere: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190710/3r9rf2ul.png

Having done that... very little else was to be done. I had to wait for them to do their thing, all the while I used cloud seeding to mess a bit around with the rains. Making use of the improved soil quality, I added two open farms to my main colony to see how those work: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190710/l9qo5hky.png

... and my god are those utterly broken! They are fully automated, so you don't need colonists, and a single harvest nets you up to 2800 food. Normal farms yield 50 to 80 food and that's already plenty! Theoretically I could now destroy all my farms and still feed a colony five times my size. And interestingly... the former I did. Because there was still one achievement left, the "Have 40% workers in workshops" thing. So I destroyed every farm and replaced it with a VR workshop on highest worker priority. Which netted me the achievement and 10.000 research points, but since workshops are utterly useless and the achievement essentially just for bragging, I destroyed the workshops right away.

Simultaneously to the above I decided out of boredom that I should build a capital city. You don't get an achievement for it, but since it's essentially a wonder, I thought why not: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190710/ic5fsf7f.png

It's essentially a massive super-dome with three spire slots that you can only build once. It is quite nice. I drew all my alcoholics and lazies and renegades to it in order to fix them. But I only housed 300 people in it because I'm a wuss and my colony currently has an equilibrium where I can just perpetually leave it running without changing anything and that's nice. If you want to see the entire colony, here you go: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190710/7i47xgd5.png

However, much to my chagrin, the vegetation rating keeps screwing with me and decided that at 40% vegetation deforestation plants stop adding to the counter. Which is ridiculous, given that they are your only normal source of vegetation rating and already ridiculously ineffective given that each one running gives you 0,01% per Sol. That's as little in the game as it sounds. And now they are worthless? The only source of vegetation now is to send rockets on plant seeding missions. Unfortunately those missions get offered randomly, so you have no idea when you get one. Sometimes the next day, sometimes in a week. And each mission only gives you 5% vegetation. It's ridiculous...

[Jace, Extat]

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Bloody Nazis.

I'm trying to get the achievement in HOI IV  where you make Los Angeles glow in the dark as Italy. But Germany keeps on getting me dragged into a war against the Brits just a tad too early (In this last one they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938). Be patient you morons.

I reinstalled the game (uninstalled for hard drive space reasons, nothing more) during my workout today because I'm gonna get the Greece achievements if it kills every soul in Europe, West Asia, and Africa.

Gonna start with the WW1 mod though just cause it's my favorite and I wanna see if it's functional. Used to be good until some time around Waking The Tiger when it totally went to shit, and after Man The Guns a splinter mod was hatched because it seems the original is defunct. That one is... not perfect either though. Anyway, wish me luck!

[A True Kaniggit]

17 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I reinstalled the game (uninstalled for hard drive space reasons, nothing more) during my workout today because I'm gonna get the Greece achievements if it kills every soul in Europe, West Asia, and Africa.

Gonna start with the WW1 mod though just cause it's my favorite and I wanna see if it's functional. Used to be good until some time around Waking The Tiger when it totally went to shit, and after Man The Guns a splinter mod was hatched because it seems the original is defunct. That one is... not perfect either though. Anyway, wish me luck!

Good luck . 

[Jace, Extat]

5 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Good luck. 

Thanks. I've never even taken back Constantinope in the vanilla game, but my triumph in Italy is imminent I tell you!

[Toth]

I've finished it: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190711/yc3eju39.png

God damn it! The last 60 Sol or so were boring as hell, waiting for Plant Seeding missions to appear. I've actually finished The Martian in that time! And played through the challenge quests of the current FGO event on my phone! I played another game while waiting for this game to finish! Talk about ironic...

But at least it now looks like a thick forest (though somewhat helped by me making the screenshot just as it started to rain. And the view from my capital is still pretty neat: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190711/hg5ujiqr.png

Just for fun I looked at a map of Mars and looked up how the region of my base looks like in real life (it helps that you pick your position on a globe with actual coordinates). Much to my dismay it looked nothing like the area in the game: https://s18.directupload.net/images/190711/mevvq3be.png

Technically I've built my base in the big crater in the middle, the entire region is littered with them, but in the game I've barely seen any craters. Odd, given that I other maps are full of them.

Anyway, so much for Surviving Mars. Even though there are still a whole bunch of achievements and missions left (among them a "Watney Challenge" of making a colony that consists of only one poor soul), I prefer to let the game rest for the moment. Gotta scratch other stuff off my summer break to-do list...

[A True Kaniggit]

All I want to do is wreck Los Angeles. But this has turned into one of the most surreal HO IV scenarios I've had yet.

https://i.imgur.com/jordc8X.png

https://i.imgur.com/jBp7PUs.png

I suppose the right thing to do would be to help my ally Germany drive Japan back beyond the Urals. But you know what? Screw that. I was the one that brought Britain to it's knees. But through some crazy peace talk shenanigans, Germany somehow ended up annexing them. They can deal with Japan themselves.

In 2-3 years, once my new fleet is constructed, I'll be taking a trip across the Atlantic. Germany and Japan can destroy each other until then (they're already at 1.5 million dead each).

[Gorn]

3 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

All I want to do is wreck Los Angeles. But this has turned into one of the most surreal HO IV scenarios I've had yet.

https://i.imgur.com/jordc8X.png

https://i.imgur.com/jBp7PUs.png

I suppose the right thing to do would be to help my ally Germany drive Japan back beyond the Urals. But you know what? Screw that. I was the one that brought Britain to it's knees. But through some crazy peace talk shenanigans, Germany somehow ended up annexing them. They can deal with Japan themselves.

In 2-3 years, once my new fleet is constructed, I'll be taking a trip across the Atlantic. Germany and Japan can destroy each other until then (they're already at 1.5 million dead each).

That's a pretty crazy map there. Did you turn off the historical scenarios? Things that stand out, besides the obvious things like Russia, UK and Mexico not existing any more:

- Third Guanxi Clique holding most of China

- "New Mongol Empire"

- "Chinese Empire" which only owns a couple of worthless provinces in Central Asia. I'm guessing that Japan ignored China to focus on Russia instead, and that Chinese states went crazy on each other.

- Why did Germany annex Hungary and Romania?

- I'm surprised you didn't annex Croatia

- Is that France in Sahara?

- Is that independent Estonia? Never seen it before in HoI.

- Columbia conquered Venezuela.

- "Turkish Empire" with the same borders as regular Republic of Turkey.

[Jace, Extat]

7 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

All I want to do is wreck Los Angeles. But this has turned into one of the most surreal HO IV scenarios I've had yet.

https://i.imgur.com/jordc8X.png

https://i.imgur.com/jBp7PUs.png

I suppose the right thing to do would be to help my ally Germany drive Japan back beyond the Urals. But you know what? Screw that. I was the one that brought Britain to it's knees. But through some crazy peace talk shenanigans, Germany somehow ended up annexing them. They can deal with Japan themselves.

In 2-3 years, once my new fleet is constructed, I'll be taking a trip across the Atlantic. Germany and Japan can destroy each other until then (they're already at 1.5 million dead each).

Beautiful. Did you set Japan to Path of Neutrality in the pregame? I usually end up doing that when I'm playing as Hungary (probably my most used country, but I never stay Hungary for long!)  

[A True Kaniggit]

14 hours ago, Gorn said:

That's a pretty crazy map there. Did you turn off the historical scenarios? Things that stand out, besides the obvious things like Russia, UK and Mexico not existing any more:

- Why did Germany annex Hungary and Romania?

- I'm surprised you didn't annex Croatia

- Is that France in Sahara?

 

Yeah, I usually don't bother with the historical scenarios. I prefer the randomness.

When Britain turned Communist and allied with the Soviet Union, France made it's own faction that included Hungary and Romania. 

Croatia is allied with Germany. I can't take it without starting a war with them.

I think the French nation in the Sahara is a glitch. Germany tried to puppet them, but I'd already annexed all their territory. So I guess the game got confused and put the puppet nation in impassable territory. It can't build anything or recruit armies.

10 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Beautiful. Did you set Japan to Path of Neutrality in the pregame? I usually end up doing that when I'm playing as Hungary (probably my most used country, but I never stay Hungary for long!)  

No. Japan just got lucky and has been kicking ass in every war it started. Ha

 

A couple years have passed and the Germans and Japanese are still killing each other in droves with the front line barely moving. Still stuck at the Urals. Here's the two factions.

https://i.imgur.com/GxYHyXv.png

The United States and it's subordinates are actually allied with Japan against me and Germany, but have been unable to establish a successful beachhead in Europe or Africa. Once these last two finish I'll have 10 carriers. That should be enough to take control of the Atlantic. Actually, it's probably overkill.

Edit: 260K brave marines have captured Bermuda. Preparations for a landing at Norfolk, Virginia have begun.

After a beachhead has been established, I'll advance along the south bank of the James River to the Appalachians. Using these two natural barriers for defense, I'll then head south and capture everything down to Florida. Once this area has been secured, I'll be able to pour in my Modern Tank divisions for the big push towards the Rocky Mountains.

Edit 2: Blah. The first invasion was thrown back with 29,000 casualties on my part.