Video Games: Keanu Re3ves Is Breathtaking

[Werthead]

Homeworld 3 is (almost certainly) going to be formally announced on Friday from the original developers, with Gearbox to publish. Very excited to see what they've come up with.

[Corvinus85]

For anyone who enjoyed the old Knights of Honor, its sequel KoH 2: Sovereign was formally announced at Gamescom, to be released sometime next year.

[Toth]

10 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

For anyone who enjoyed the old Knights of Honor, its sequel KoH 2: Sovereign was formally announced at Gamescom, to be released sometime next year.

I have some faint memories of that one (and the CD still somewhere in the house...). I remember it to be a very smooth gameplay experience with lots of great ideas. Though I didn't play it for very long and don't know why exactly I threw it off my hard drive...

So interesting, THQ rises from the dead to challenge Creative Assembly in making the Medieval 3 they keep refusing to do.

[briantw]

7 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

I started Batman Arkham Asylum and it's pretty great so far.  No jumping, though.  All game developers should view jumping as mandatory. 

The game is designed in such a way where you don't really need to jump, though.  You can climb things of an appropriate height and you can leap across pits by running at them.  

As Jace said, though, Arkham City is the better game, which makes sense as it builds upon everything the previous game did well and makes it bigger and better and crazier.  

The third game, unfortunately, jumped the shark a bit by assuming that we wanted to spend half the fucking game in the Batmobile shooting wave after wave of unmanned tanks rather than stalking around as Batman scaring the shit out of crooks and busting heads.

Arkham Origins isn't bad either.  It was a bit of a mess when it came out from a technical standpoint (a problem Arkham Knight suffered from too), but I think it has the best story of the four games.  The main issue I had with Origins was that the combat didn't feel as tight.  Occasionally you'll hit the counter button and it just won't register and you'll get hit.  Also, there's a certain fight against Joker with these roller coaster carts zipping around the arena that is absolutely infuriating.  

[Corvinus85]

18 minutes ago, Toth said:

I have some faint memories of that one (and the CD still somewhere in the house...). I remember it to be a very smooth gameplay experience with lots of great ideas. Though I didn't play it for very long and don't know why exactly I threw it off my hard drive...

So interesting, THQ rises from the dead to challenge Creative Assembly in making the Medieval 3 they keep refusing to do.

Most people seem to veer towards the idea that THQ is challenging Paradox more than CA, as they're pushing this game as being a more accessible grand strategy than Crusader Kings. For most players, KoH 2 is the hoped for bridge between CKII and Total War. I have KoH on steam, and while it does feature large RTS battles, they have a way to go to match or beat CA, given that the sole strategy of winning a battle was to go after the enemy marshal, and unit maneuvering was extremely unwieldy. 

[Rhom]

2 hours ago, briantw said:

The game is designed in such a way where you don't really need to jump, though.  You can climb things of an appropriate height and you can leap across pits by running at them.  

As Jace said, though, Arkham City is the better game, which makes sense as it builds upon everything the previous game did well and makes it bigger and better and crazier.  

The third game, unfortunately, jumped the shark a bit by assuming that we wanted to spend half the fucking game in the Batmobile shooting wave after wave of unmanned tanks rather than stalking around as Batman scaring the shit out of crooks and busting heads.

Arkham Origins isn't bad either.  It was a bit of a mess when it came out from a technical standpoint (a problem Arkham Knight suffered from too), but I think it has the best story of the four games.  The main issue I had with Origins was that the combat didn't feel as tight.  Occasionally you'll hit the counter button and it just won't register and you'll get hit.  Also, there's a certain fight against Joker with these roller coaster carts zipping around the arena that is absolutely infuriating.  

I loved Origins.  I think I’d rank the games:

City

Origins

Asylum

.

.

.

Knight

[Inkdaub]

7 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Arkham City is the highlight of the series to everyone I've ever met.

I only mention this while you're on Asylum because I wasn't crazy about certain parts of the game and don't view it as highly as many other do, but Arkham City is fucking aces all the way across. So if, like me, you don't think the first one is a masterpiece but you like it anyway then I highly highly recommend the sequel.

I bought The Arkham Collection at the PS store so I have Asylum, City and Knight ready to go when their time comes.  Sounds promising.

[Inkdaub]

5 hours ago, briantw said:

The game is designed in such a way where you don't really need to jump, though.  You can climb things of an appropriate height and you can leap across pits by running at them.  

As Jace said, though, Arkham City is the better game, which makes sense as it builds upon everything the previous game did well and makes it bigger and better and crazier.  

The third game, unfortunately, jumped the shark a bit by assuming that we wanted to spend half the fucking game in the Batmobile shooting wave after wave of unmanned tanks rather than stalking around as Batman scaring the shit out of crooks and busting heads.

Arkham Origins isn't bad either.  It was a bit of a mess when it came out from a technical standpoint (a problem Arkham Knight suffered from too), but I think it has the best story of the four games.  The main issue I had with Origins was that the combat didn't feel as tight.  Occasionally you'll hit the counter button and it just won't register and you'll get hit.  Also, there's a certain fight against Joker with these roller coaster carts zipping around the arena that is absolutely infuriating.  

Oh yeah.  Also grappling is fun.  I'm grappling around whether I need to or not.

[Werthead]

And Homeworld 3 is a go. Not until 2022 though, which is disappointing. I'd been hoping that they'd been working on this since Kharak came out in 2016 but apparently not.

[Fez]

Finished Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It was my first FE game and I enjoyed quite a lot, though it did start to drag a bit by the end (and I apparently was on the shortest of the four paths). Black Eagles for life.

I'm still playing a ton of FFXIV as well. I've finally reached Shadowbringers, and yeah, it's really good. Square Enix has stepped up their writing in a big way (guess this is where all their in-house talent went). The writing in the last few 4.x patch quests that lead up to the expansion was easily the best written Final Fantasy content since FFIX (not that that's such a high bar). And I'm absolutely thrilled that the PC has finally become an actual character, complete with recognizable opinions and reactions to events and having pretty regular dialog options. Still no voice acting, and I suspect that's a barrier that won't be overcome, but it makes it so much easier to feel connected to my PC when they are an actual character. I despise the silent, blank protagonist trope so much (and it was my big complaint about FE:TH, even though it had at least some story justification).

I've also picked up Remedy's new game, Control, after hearing a lot of good things about it; and a desire to support AAA single-player games when they still exist. Haven't had a chance to start it yet though.

[Caligula_K3]

I think I may be the only person who prefers Arkham Asylum over City. Both are really fun games, but I liked how much Asylum was a focused Metroidvania, without much fluff. As cool as it was grappling around City, it also was a little bloated, and the story  felt pretty underwhelming. On the other hand, that Mr. Freeze boss fight is so good.

I'm playing through Final Fantasy XII on the Switch! It's my first time playing it, and I'm still pretty early in. The combat system seems fun; very Dragon Age: Origins. I can't say the story's grabbed me yet, but the voice acting is very good, especially for 2006 (though not so much for the main character, who like nearly all JRPG protagonists is a wet blanket). 

The new Fire Emblem game seems really cool, and it's good to hear that people who haven't played any before like it. There's so many games I'm interested in coming out this Fall though, from Pokemon to the Outer Worlds, so I might see how those review first before I decide which one or two I'll buy at full price and which I'll wait for sales.

 

[Fez]

So I'm having a PC tech issue I'm hoping the collective minds here can help with. My PC has an SSD (which has my OS), a 4TB HDD and a 1TB HDD. I've started having the issue where I can't launch games that are stored on the 4TB HDD, no matter which launcher or through Windows Explorer. Games installed on the SDD or the 1TB HDD are fine.

I assume the problem is with the 4TB drive itself, but Windows keeps saying there are no disc errors. And I can download files onto the drive, look at all the files on the drive, and open things like text documents saved on it. But using any .exe just causes a crash. Any thoughts on what this is, or even just how I could figure out what this is?

[Relic]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

So I'm having a PC tech issue I'm hoping the collective minds here can help with. My PC has an SSD (which has my OS), a 4TB HDD and a 1TB HDD. I've started having the issue where I can't launch games that are stored on the 4TB HDD, no matter which launcher or through Windows Explorer. Games installed on the SDD or the 1TB HDD are fine.

I assume the problem is with the 4TB drive itself, but Windows keeps saying there are no disc errors. And I can download files onto the drive, look at all the files on the drive, and open things like text documents saved on it. But using any .exe just causes a crash. Any thoughts on what this is, or even just how I could figure out what this is?

Was the drive renamed recently? 

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

So I'm having a PC tech issue I'm hoping the collective minds here can help with. My PC has an SSD (which has my OS), a 4TB HDD and a 1TB HDD. I've started having the issue where I can't launch games that are stored on the 4TB HDD, no matter which launcher or through Windows Explorer. Games installed on the SDD or the 1TB HDD are fine.

I assume the problem is with the 4TB drive itself, but Windows keeps saying there are no disc errors. And I can download files onto the drive, look at all the files on the drive, and open things like text documents saved on it. But using any .exe just causes a crash. Any thoughts on what this is, or even just how I could figure out what this is?

My guess is that it's a security issue, and that something is blocking executable code from that drive. Did you do anything like bitlocker or update any other security software recently, or change the drive in some other way?

Also, what kind of crash do you get? Do you get a crashdump, or do you get a 'program blah has stopped working' or something like that?

This in particular sounds a lot like what you're seeing. If for some reason your drive has been marked as 'removable' like a USB drive, it'll behave this way by design due to security. Another thing to try is running the executable from the command line instead of via windows itself, using the 'start' command. 

[Corvinus85]

On the topic of PC issues, I've been experiencing frequent (every 1-2 days) blue screen of death crashes ever since Win10 got updated to the 1903 version. Unfortunately, I've waited too long, and can't do a rollback. I've tried numerous fixes like using the chkdsk command, sfc /scannow command, and some issues got fixed but still get the crashes. I've made sure all my drivers are up to date. @Fez maybe some of these will work for you, if you haven't tried them yet. I keep hoping the issues will get fixed by one of the additional updates Microsoft have been doing, but so far, no luck. I'm at the point where I'm considering re-installing Windows.

[Fez]

3 hours ago, Relic said:

Was the drive renamed recently? 

Nope.

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

My guess is that it's a security issue, and that something is blocking executable code from that drive. Did you do anything like bitlocker or update any other security software recently, or change the drive in some other way?

Also, what kind of crash do you get? Do you get a crashdump, or do you get a 'program blah has stopped working' or something like that?

This in particular sounds a lot like what you're seeing. If for some reason your drive has been marked as 'removable' like a USB drive, it'll behave this way by design due to security. Another thing to try is running the executable from the command line instead of via windows itself, using the 'start' command. 

If I'm using Windows Explorer, I get the (Not Responding) show-up in its name, if I'm using Steam either just nothing happens or Steam stops responding, if I'm using Epic Game Launcher either just nothing happens, EGL stops responding, or my PC softlocks and I need to restart. I don't get any error messages about permissions or access or anything.

Something else I should mention, I said I can download to the disc fine, but that's only sort of true. I downloaded the game Control on to it last night and the download itself was fine and happened as quickly as my relatively fast internet connection allows. However, when EGL was verifying the game, that took literally hours, and EGL was reporting a disc read speed often of sub 1mb/s, sometimes getting up to around 10mb.

I'm wondering if the issue is that something is wrong with either the motherboard's SATA port, the SATA cable, or the disc and it is causing the connection to be too slow to be able to launch executables? I don't know enough about PCs to know if that's possible though, I only know enough to say terms and sound dumb.

I do know that a different SATA port on my motherboard failed last year (although when that happened, the symptoms during its decline where different from these), so its not out of the question that new hardware issues are arising. 

[Kalbear]

Okay. Try doing the run via commandline like I recommended. If you want, copy over a small exe like wordpad and try that. 

It's possible that the executables are simply trying to load from disk and for whatever reason it is taking WAY longer than expected to get the program into memory. That'd get the not responding. I don't know of many disk errors or SATA errors where it's perfectly fine just butt-ass slow, but I guess that's a possibility. 

[RumHam]

13 hours ago, Fez said:

Black Eagles for life.

I'm kinda surprised to hear you say that! I definitely felt that I made a bad decision siding with Edelgard the first time.

I get that her motives are supposedly good, but she does or allows a lot of shitty shit! For one thing she spent months at the school conspiring with "monica" who eventually kills your dad! I know she and Hubert say "oh those people aren't us, we're just working with them because we have a common enemy and then we'll deal with them" but still. It doesn't help that despite being ~4 chapters shorter than the other paths, you never actually deal with them. They game just tells you that did in the epilogue. I dunno I really disliked her after the twist.  Part of it was just the deception. Whatever path you choose she's secretly the villain for the first half of the game.

Plus like....okay Rhea is secretly a dragon and Edelgard want's to put the fate of men back in the hands of men. But is Rhea actually like....doing anything evil at any point prior to that reveal? Are people suffering unnecessarily because Rhea leads the church and the church has a lot of power? I never had that impression.

 

 

 

Regarding your computer problem, I would back up anything on that drive that isn't already right away. If it was a security thing I think you'd be getting a permissions error. Just cause windows says there are no errors doesn't mean that it isn't dying. How old is it? Is there any way you can plug it into another computer and see if it works there? Or maybe try copying like a decently long movie file to it and then try to watch it. If it starts stuttering there's something wrong with the drive for sure.

I had one fail a few years ago that had all my downloaded movies and shows. I could copy files on and off fine, but actually try to play them and it'd get all choppy. Error check showed no problems. I started copying everything off and it died totally like 1/3 of the way through. (thank god that streaming has sorta made having a huge hard drive of movies less necessary. )

[RumHam]

I dunno why I can't spoiler tag only part of that post. isn't it (spoiler) text to be hidden (/spoiler) only with [] ? The part after /spoiler is still getting tagged...

[Inigima]

Should be, yeah. Usually when I have problems like that I've screwed up the tags. Doesn't seem to be a preview option anymore, so let's see how this goes: (EDIT: Working fine for me -- check that your tags are right, not missing the / on the closing tag, not missing a square bracket, etc.)

 

Test spoiler 1

 

Test spoiler 2