Video Games - Sequels of Dread and Anticipation

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

And so it begins. 

ETA: Damn, talk about an opening...

[Mexal]

3 hours ago, Week said:

Playing entirely too much GoW - it's a lot of fun. I'm concerned that it's getting a bit too easy as equipment and abilities get stronger tho. May have to increase the difficulty.

Awesome! It’s a good story too.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

@aceluby, gotta say, so far the comparison to RDR2 is not accurate. I am enjoying the shit out of it, don't get me wrong, but this feels a lot more like what I've seen from AC videos on YouTube. The map stuff is still an issue too. It does look really good though.

I feel bad that I kept having to drop the difficultly because a giant guy with a hammer just continued to kill me with one shot essentially.

[briantw]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

...but this feels a lot more like what I've seen from AC videos on YouTube. 

I told you it was basically Assassin's Creed Odyssey but in Japan.  And with slightly more enjoyable combat.

[IlyaP]

After being waylaid by a third run-through of Tyranny (this time taking all of 30 hours), I'm back on the Morrowind boat.

Having found both of the artefacts needed to give Dagoth Ur the old one-two in the patootie, I've used my magical flying pants to get me to his little Dwemer fortress. So now it's just a matter of finding the damn entrance. And the switch that I've read I need to find to open the entrance as well. Joy of joys.

 

[IlyaP]

Have become a big damn hero and defeated Dagoth Ur, so that's a wrap on Morrowind.

...For now. Considering Tribunal and Bloodmoon, but maybe after a break. 

Took me about...40 hours or go to get through the main storyline, which I finished by the time I was level 13. 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 hours ago, briantw said:

I told you it was basically Assassin's Creed Odyssey but in Japan.  And with slightly more enjoyable combat.

I'm digging it. I just liberated a dojo and a bridge (woke up super early so I figured why not game a bit). Still, I can't handle these guys with the hammers/mauls. One hit from them and I'm fucked and I'm terrible at countering. 

[Werthead]

Still pottering around on Age of Empires II, but if anything I was getting too into it (60 hours down with maybe a quarter of the game's campaigns complete) so I've also fired up GTA4 for my continued playthrough of the series. Got a bit confused because they've replaced the formerly separate listings for GTA4 and the two expansions with one "complete edition", kept my previous playthrough time of GTA4 (26 hours, apparently) but reset all the achievements. One good thing about this approach is that it means the "definitive edition" set of mods I installed work for the base game and the expansions (previously you had to install the mods twice over, which was a bit tedious).

The game also needed a bit more work even than San Andreas, weirdly, despite being four years newer. The game had severe memory restrictions on how much RAM and VRAM it allows people to use, so you have to use command strings to override them and let the game actually use modern hardware. The mods also improve texture quality, lighting and frame rate, but otherwise leave the game's original aesthetic intact. Also, not 100% sure, but in about 8 hours of this playthrough Roman's called me to hang out with him like once, so they seem to have massively toned that down.

Unfortunately they haven't been able to fix the dogshit car handling, easily the worse in the entire series. There do seem to be a few mods which try to fix it but it's linked to the game's physics engine so there are limits on how they can address it. This is making me nostalgic for Cyberpunk 2077's cars now.

I'm also tempted to do the "Boiled Leather" playing order for the game (which intercuts GTA4 with The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony in chronological order) but not certain about that just yet.

Also picked up Hades in a Steam sale. They've also just released a cut-price XCOM collection which has Enemy Unknown, Enemy Within, XCOM2, War of the Chosen, the free tactical DLC and Chimera Squad all included for a reduced price. Might be useful for anyone who hasn't pulled the trigger on it yet.

Wargame: Red Dragon is free on the Epic Games Store. Well worth a look for anyone interested in modern strategy.

[Week]

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I'm digging it. I just liberated a dojo and a bridge (woke up super early so I figured why not game a bit). Still, I can't handle these guys with the hammers/mauls. One hit from them and I'm fucked and I'm terrible at countering. 

Helpful hint that my nephew shared with my brother -- "Dad, you just have to time it better."

Ahhhh ... that's the problem. Super helpful! 

[Ghostlydragon]

I'm getting so tired of modern games. I'm really tempted to pick up an old 20 inch tv and a snes and mega drive consoles. I've got an itch for some retro gaming. Although I love my wii downloads, it no longer feels right playing them through the wii u on a 40 inch hdtv and I feel like classics like streets of rage 2 and super Mario world will be better off played in their original form.

[IlyaP]

29 minutes ago, Ghostlydragon said:

I'm getting so tired of modern games. I'm really tempted to pick up an old 20 inch tv and a snes and mega drive consoles.

Soooooo.....Chrono Trigger?

[Ghostlydragon]

2 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Soooooo.....Chrono Trigger?

Nope as it never came to Europe. However I did download it on Wii not long before the store stopped doing downloads so I might have to play it on Wii 

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

3 hours ago, Ghostlydragon said:

I'm getting so tired of modern games. I'm really tempted to pick up an old 20 inch tv and a snes and mega drive consoles. I've got an itch for some retro gaming. Although I love my wii downloads, it no longer feels right playing them through the wii u on a 40 inch hdtv and I feel like classics like streets of rage 2 and super Mario world will be better off played in their original form.

If you get an online Switch subscription (and a Switch), there’s a load of NES and SNES games available to play for free. My girlfriend and I tried out the original Mario Kart on there, and it was not easy on the eyes. It’s nice that they have so many games available though.

[IlyaP]

26 minutes ago, Ghostlydragon said:

Nope as it never came to Europe. However I did download it on Wii not long before the store stopped doing downloads so I might have to play it on Wii 

It is also on Steam, though the free rom version reportedly floating around on many a rom sites is apparently better than the official Steam release, from what I've been told (but cannot personally confirm) by friends of mine. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

The joy of failing a mission a dozen times and then finally figuring out just what you have to do.

[Luzifer's right hand]

I browsed my epic library as I try to pick up free games on a regular basis and I noticed that I own GTA V. I think I will give it a try. 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

The joy of failing a mission a dozen times and then finally figuring out just what you have to do.

Sometimes you sit down to play an older game and then realise that completely lacking anything at all approaching UI or time-respecting conveniences is less fun than you remember.

It's bad enough in the PS2 GTA games where there is no auto-saving of any kind whatsoever (if you don't manually save, at all, and log out you lose 100% of your progress) but going back to the 1990s is even worse, unless you are really prepared for it. I found the PS1-era Final Fantasy games a bit better in that regard, because the games pretty much scream at you to save every time you pass a save point (even if you have to run a screen or two off your optimal route to do so) so that becomes second nature pretty quickly.

The worst offender was OG Deus Ex. The last time I played it, I completed Liberty Island (which can take quite a while, depending on your approach) and was a fair bit through talking back at base, and it suddenly crashed and I was basically told to play through the last 3 hours or so of the game from scratch. And that was a first-person game released in 2000, by which time they'd gotten a lot better at autosaving (Half-Life gave you an autosave every time it loaded a new area and that was two years earlier). Quite infuriating.

[Clueless Northman]

Well, I've been playing games since the 90s, and I've always overused manual saves. I've never relied on autosave and always save a lot when I can, even with games with plenty of autosaves. I've never trusted that feature, so I never have that kind of issues. On the other hand, I have the opposite problem: I am massively pissed off every time I play a game which doesn't allow at-will saving. GTA 3 is a major culprit and I never finished it due to this glaring failure - always have to go back to park your car in your place to be able to save, no save during bloody missions, and since you can easily get carried away, deciding to take a hike on a firefighter truck or an ambulance, that means potentially a lot of wasted time.

[Werthead]

24 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

Well, I've been playing games since the 90s, and I've always overused manual saves. I've never relied on autosave and always save a lot when I can, even with games with plenty of autosaves. I've never trusted that feature, so I never have that kind of issues. On the other hand, I have the opposite problem: I am massively pissed off every time I play a game which doesn't allow at-will saving. GTA 3 is a major culprit and I never finished it due to this glaring failure - always have to go back to park your car in your place to be able to save, no save during bloody missions, and since you can easily get carried away, deciding to take a hike on a firefighter truck or an ambulance, that means potentially a lot of wasted time.

In 3 and Vice City I didn't find it to be a major problem, thought definitely still an annoyance: the cities are tiny and you're never really more than a 60-second drive from a safehouse in 3. In Vice City, where you can cover the map in new safehouses, it's more like 10 seconds.

Also, absolute worst-case scenario, you can't actually die in the game and the worst that might happen is you lose your current arsenal. After about 15% of the way through the game you are rich enough that restocking weapons is never a major problem, though again it is a minor irritant.

San Andreas is where it became a much bigger problem, especially those bits of the game where you are doing jobs way out in the sticks and getting to a safehouse can be a fairly arduous journey. Thank fuck for IV and its autosave-right-after-the-mission-starts.

[Proudfeet]

Autosave is fantastic as long as it isn't your only option or overwrites your manual save. Its nice to have a place to go back to when you want to redo some things and the closer it is prior to your preferred point of restart the better it is, auto or manual.

I don't really play single player games much anymore, but when I do, the inability to create a temporary save to continue is what irks me most. I get why you shouldn't be able to make save points anywhere and anytime you please, but making a temporary save that is deleted when you load back in isn't a problem and would be really helpful instead of deciding if you want to make an additional time commitment or just lose all your progress. Its worse when you don't know how long from the next save point you are.

As far as I know, this has been available since the early 2000s so its not a technical issue when games don't have it.