Videogames: Perfect homies for the great indoors.

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

You're alone. 

There are dozens of us!!!!

[Rhom]

2 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

You're alone. 

Seriously though.  ME:A has the best gameplay of the entire series.  It is an HD version of what the original Mass Effect tried to be with open worlds and exploration as a theme.  

The original trilogy was weak until ME2 and 3 fleshed it out.  If Andromeda were given a chance to grow from here, I think it could similarly blossom.

[Jace, Extat]

False.

[sifth]

24 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Seriously though.  ME:A has the best gameplay of the entire series.  It is an HD version of what the original Mass Effect tried to be with open worlds and exploration as a theme.  

The original trilogy was weak until ME2 and 3 fleshed it out.  If Andromeda were given a chance to grow from here, I think it could similarly blossom.

To be honest I liked all the Mass Effect games, except for 3.

[Toth]

Okay, I am done. This was insane, but the payoff is incredibly amusing.

I raced Le Mans. A two hours race. I started off from 8th after the qualifying. Pretty soon it came clear that I couldn't get better than 6th place due to being in the LMP2 class and the LMP1 cars running away from me. Therefore my biggest concern was a black Nissan that was about two seconds faster than me each lap and kept nervously driving into my back... until I made a drastic mistake in lap 5 and was thrown off into the pit walls, falling back to place 10 or 11 or so. The next 3 laps were absolutely terrific. I made my best drive so far, making less mistakes and pushing my car more, overtaking everyone but the black car and then kept staring at those red tail lights during the young night, clenching my teeth and crawling up second by bloody second until I finally got him.

Then came one or two laps of us fighting. I still made mistakes when lapping slow cars or being lapped by LMP1 cars who prefered punting me off the road during corners instead of allowing me to let them pass on straights for some reason. Why has Le Mans a mixed field again? This sucks!

However at some point I managed to get a routine in my driving. I had still some corners I severely disliked. There was one at the beginning of sector 3 that I only recognized by the rattling of my gearbox when I was breaking after a long straight, causing me to very often loose control of my car briefly and once even scraping the tire wall. And then the very last chicane immediately before the finish line, that one I found super annoying and regulary took it too wide, especially when there was a slower car blocking the entire bloody chicane. I think I also got a penalty there at some point, because the pop up looked different to the usual "laptime will not be counted" thing. Luckily from then on I made no mistake whatsoever anymore, but on the other hand only making one lap that was faster than my nightly push for vengeance.

In the end I finished 6th overall, 1st in my group, getting the golden accolade. I certainly won't do that again.

The next part however is funny. With this the season ended and I got my next contract offers. Remember that I was still technically a supercart driver. Here is the tier list of the career mode: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/New-career-cropped.jpg?strip=all

Superkart is Tier 7. I got offers from several Formula Rookie and Renault Touring teams, which wasn't surprising. But I did notice that I could scroll through two more invitations. One was a GT3 team, the other one was a LMP2 team. Wait, what? Those are Tier 3 and Tier 2? So apparently winning Le Mans as a Kart driver DID cause the game to break and give me so much reputation that I could just skip towards the end of career mode. Unfortunately with this I couldn't get into open wheel racing and Formula 1 was my main goal. I still took the LMP2 offer and now I am in a racing class on equal prestige to Formula 1. Let's see how that will turn out...

[Werthead]

Got frustrated with Fallout 76. You can play it absolutely as a SP CRPG, but because of the basic design you can't pause the game (even in VATS or the Pip-Boy) and it got way too tedious trying to manage the typically clunky Fallout combat in real-time alone. The game design, which seems to deliberately ration ammo to an insane degree, means you're going to likely need to switch weapons several times in a firefight, which this game engine definitely was not designed for doing that. I did enjoy the atmosphere enough to inspire a Fallout 4 replay (I probably should have gone for a New Vegas one, but my patience for modding up the game was limited at the moment). I might mix in FO4 with a bit of Chimera Squad, try to get a newer game out of the way as well.

Quote

Seriously though.  ME:A has the best gameplay of the entire series.  It is an HD version of what the original Mass Effect tried to be with open worlds and exploration as a theme.  

The original trilogy was weak until ME2 and 3 fleshed it out.  If Andromeda were given a chance to grow from here, I think it could similarly blossom.

I think Mass Effect had the best story but the worst gameplay in the trilogy, Mass Effect 3 had the best gameplay and a really huge scope, but that collapse towards the end when you realise your decisions didn't really matter was acute. Mass Effect 2 was probably the best all-rounder but I could never quite forgive it for dumping so much of the already-fairly-minimal CRPG elements and turning pretty much into a third-person shooter with dialogue choices, which was fine but not what we were sold on. Haven't played Andromeda yet, but having loathed Dragon Age Inquisition with the heat of a billion suns, I'm not particularly keen to try what everyone seems to call a DA:I-in-space.

It did occur to me that a marked difference between BioWare and Bethesda is that Bethesda seems to realise when they've fucked up and move to try to fix it (although not entirely successfully or quickly). BioWare seems unable or unwilling to admit this and doubles down on their mistakes. For that reason I don't have a huge amount of optimism that BioWare will reverse course with their next game or two and make something worthwhile, whilst Bethesda retain just enough trust to make me willing to check out Starfield.

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Sleeping Dogs is really great, IMO. It's the only "GTA"-ish type game I've played, and its evocation of Hong Kong and Hong Kong action films -- particularly John Woo films like Hard Boiled, as well as Infernal Affairs and even a bit of Jackie Chan's Police Story series -- was terrific. Looks pretty decent, too, all these years later. Good voice acting, good story, etc.

Yup, Sleeping Dogs is excellent. It can't hope to compete with GTA5 in sheer scale or production values (GTA5 and RDR2 are worth playing just so your eyes can pop out of your head at what more money than has ever been spent on a movie budget gets you in a video game), so it goes in for a much tighter focus and it executes it's main storyline far better than GTA5 ever does.

The only complaint I remember from it is that after focusing so much on the martial arts, it gives you a pretty huge arsenal and allows you to murdergun your way through most of the game. I think it might have been better to have stayed tightly focused on the martial arts thing. Same problem as the Watch_Dogs duology, which give you all these hacking abilities to differentiate themselves from the GTA games and promptly throw in an insane arsenal of weaponry so you can cheerfully ignore them and just play a GTA clone (and without the hacking, those games simply aren't as good as GTA).

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

False.

Methinks a Jace is full of rage.

Unleash upon the man with the traitor for a son! 

[Rhom]

58 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Methinks a Jace is full of rage.

Unleash upon the man with the traitor for a son! 

For Easter the kid got a Tyler Herro Miami Heat jersey and shorts.  The City Edition in the Miami Vice blue/hot pink lettering.  Kid may be a front runner... but he looks good doing it.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

20 minutes ago, Rhom said:

For Easter the kid got a Tyler Herro Miami Heat jersey and shorts.  The City Edition in the Miami Vice blue/hot pink lettering.  Kid may be a front runner... but he looks good doing it.

At least the father knew to buy the right jersey.

I even want one of those Vice jerseys, and I don't buy many in general. The only one's I know for sure I have are for Moss, KG, Allen, Portis and I believe I have a Randle one too somewhere. I have a few others. Like a red Jordan's Bulls kit. 

One I've always wanted to get was for Dr. J. I got to meet him at a pro-am when I was a kid in the mid-90's, and he was a true gentleman. 

I threw my Peterson one away though.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

 

 

[Rhom]

12 hours ago, Werthead said:

Haven't played Andromeda yet, but having loathed Dragon Age Inquisition with the heat of a billion suns, I'm not particularly keen to try what everyone seems to call a DA:I-in-space.

I also hated DA:I and I do kind of consider ME:A to be that in space, but I still liked Andromeda.  Probably depends on what you didn’t like about DA:I.  I hated the gameplay, but loved Andromeda’s; so even though the games were similar with the open world approach (which is not BioWare’s forte) I really did enjoy Andromeda while recognizing its flaws.

[Liffguard]

I'm continuing to chip through Outer Wilds. I usually only do one loop a day, maybe two, so it's taking a while (one loop is 22 minutes). This is genuinely one of the most captivating games I have ever played. I'm actually taking notes in real life about what to explore next, and making and testing hypotheses about how to find certain things or get to new areas. If anyone ever looks through my journal it will look like the ravings of a madman.

"New idea to reach the Quantum Moon. Shuttle from Brittle Hollow? Keep it from warping with a scout image."

"The Vessel needs a warp core. Take one from the high energy lab."

"Can't reach southern observatory with gravity lifts exclusively. Need to jetpack to a different path. Avoid black hole."

[Inigima]

I really wanted to like Outer Worlds, but I just found it obtuse. In games that execute this short loop well, like Minit, the time limit is more generous for what you need to do. In OW you have to do so much stuff to get back to where you were, you hardly have any time to try new stuff. It's just frustrating, and it sucks the joy out of exploring what should be a captivating universe.

Sleeping Dogs was awesome. I never really liked most GTA type games, including GTA, but that one really worked for me. The story was great, and I cared as much about my gangster life as I did about my cop life. It's funny, I played that game so intensely that I almost turned into the oncoming traffic lane in real life once because I was so used to driving in pretend Hong Kong. 

[Fez]

41 minutes ago, Inigima said:

I really wanted to like Outer Worlds, but I just found it obtuse. In games that execute this short loop well, like Minit, the time limit is more generous for what you need to do. In OW you have to do so much stuff to get back to where you were, you hardly have any time to try new stuff. It's just frustrating, and it sucks the joy out of exploring what should be a captivating universe.

You mean Outer Wilds, right?

I was pretty disappointed in Outer Worlds myself, but I wouldn't call it a loop game.

I still haven't played Outer Wilds.

 

[Ran]

22 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yup, Sleeping Dogs is excellent. It can't hope to compete with GTA5 in sheer scale or production values (GTA5 and RDR2 are worth playing just so your eyes can pop out of your head at what more money than has ever been spent on a movie budget gets you in a video game), so it goes in for a much tighter focus and it executes it's main storyline far better than GTA5 ever does.

 

The only complaint I remember from it is that after focusing so much on the martial arts, it gives you a pretty huge arsenal and allows you to murdergun your way through most of the game. 

It's the John Woo factor, gun play is such a big factor in some of the action films. I do think it would have worked better to better mix situations where it was all gun play vs. kung fu, but so it goes.

The game's the source of one of my favorite bits of video game NPC dialog:

 

[Inigima]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

You mean Outer Wilds, right?

I was pretty disappointed in Outer Worlds myself, but I wouldn't call it a loop game.

I still haven't played Outer Wilds.

 

Yes, thanks. So, so stupid that these games are named almost the same thing and were released at almost the same time. 

[Werthead]

14 minutes ago, Inigima said:

Yes, thanks. So, so stupid that these games are named almost the same thing and were released at almost the same time. 

There's a great Noclip documentary on the game. The Outer Wilds team was a year into making the game and had raised a lot of attention in the indie space when The Outer Worlds was announced with a massive PR boost from Take Two Games. For The Outer Wilds they didn't have enough money to completely rebrand the game and Take Two (obviously) didn't give a shit about what they thought was a tiny indie game, so there wasn't anything Obsidian could do about it.

The Outer Wilds team did point out that they probably picked up a few thousand sales from confused gamers who hung around and tried the game and liked it, so as far as they were concerned it was a win.

I was amused by some of the criticism of The Outer Worlds (not from anyone here) about its length: people asking, apparently with a straight face, why a game that cost $10 million and only took two and a half years to make was only 30 hours long and not as long as, say, Skyrim (costing $80 million) or Fallout 4 (costing $120 million), taking four years apiece.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 5/7/2020 at 4:11 PM, Rhom said:

I followed the link for the Ellen Page article and saw a news blurb at the bottom Destiny 2 is coming to PS5 and XBox series X.

Its been so long since I played Destiny 2, that I kinda forgot that it was still a thing I guess.   The article said it went Free to Play... but I thought it was always Free to Play?  Unless that means you don't even have to buy the actual game itself anymore?  I am confused and have obviously missed out on some info along the way.

Yeah, I got into it in the fall because it's free (you don't have to buy the game). You do need to buy the newer DLCs, but I played so much before I even considered spending money. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 5/9/2020 at 10:36 AM, Werthead said:

Mass Effect Trilogy Remaster reportedly in the works.

I'm all for it--I'm replaying 2 and 3 right now, but I find the first one really hard to go back to. I'd love it if they expanded aspects of the games too--like, in ME3, it'd be cool to have my ME2 squad back and fighting with me...without a mod.

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

I’d be interested in a Mass Effect remaster. The first game felt too clunky for me to get into.

I finished Doom Eternal and did really enjoy it, but I think it’s a step down from Doom 2016.

I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program, which I’ve played on and off for years, and I’ve finally landed on the damn Mun. It’s great fun and super addictive.

I’ve also been playing Civilization 6, which is fun, but I feel like it’s missing half the game and you need the expansions, which I will get when they’re discounted. Until then I’ll stick with Civ 5, which I play with my girlfriend. I do like a lot of the changes from Civ 5 though.

I also need to play the Outer Worlds properly. I got a little way in and then got sidetracked, which surprised me because I love New Vegas. I’ll give it another go this evening.