Videogames Killed the TV Star

[Werthead]

id have surprise-dropped a Quake remaster on Steam. It's fairly comprehensive, adding 120fps support, 4K resolution and a moderate texture update, as well as making sure the UI and everything scales right.

Nice idea, but maybe only for ones with a huge nostalgia burst for the OG game. As a singleplayer game it was never particularly great (Quake II had a much better SP campaign), and as a multiplayer game you're better of going with whatever remake of Quake III they're still supporting.

[RumHam]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

id have surprise-dropped a Quake remaster on Steam.

Switch too! where first person shooters are less common. I was tempted because it also includes Quake 64 which as a console kid I have fond memories of. 

[kungtotte]

Annoyingly the GoG version of the game does not receive this update it seems. This is one of the few times the platform split has actively hurt me.

In Fallout 4 news:

Spoiler

I have just made it into the Institute and had a weird-ass conversation with Father-Shaun, where he tries to convince me that the evil science dudes are the good guys much like the evil science dudes in every piece of fiction ever tries to do.

I have just finished that first conversation with him so I haven't fully explored the Institute yet, but I'm guessing I will uncover evidence that there's some sort of scheme to take people from topside and use them to grow the flesh synths, or some sort of Soylent Green situation. Or maybe they've caused atrocities to happen to perform research, or perhaps a bit of everything.

I naturally rejected the invitation to work with them. Even if they aren't guilty of any of the things I suspect them of they still stole my kid and murdered my wife and that shit ain't gonna fly.

 

[Toth]

3 hours ago, kungtotte said:

In Fallout 4 news:

  Reveal hidden contents

I have just made it into the Institute and had a weird-ass conversation with Father-Shaun, where he tries to convince me that the evil science dudes are the good guys much like the evil science dudes in every piece of fiction ever tries to do.

I have just finished that first conversation with him so I haven't fully explored the Institute yet, but I'm guessing I will uncover evidence that there's some sort of scheme to take people from topside and use them to grow the flesh synths, or some sort of Soylent Green situation. Or maybe they've caused atrocities to happen to perform research, or perhaps a bit of everything.

I naturally rejected the invitation to work with them. Even if they aren't guilty of any of the things I suspect them of they still stole my kid and murdered my wife and that shit ain't gonna fly.

 

Lol, you give the Institute too much credit.

Spoiler

As far as I can tell they just like experimenting on stuff and sabotage all efforts of the Commonwealth to rebuild so that nobody is powerful enough to be a danger to them. They literally have absolutely no motivations for doing what they do outside of being Vault-Tec 2.0 somehow.

In the meantime I... abruptly left Acadia after my conversation with DiMa and thought I should rather spend my time doing sidequests. The fact that in Far Harbor a new NPC, a Ms. Nanny named Pearl, spawned who dragged me to Vault 118 to investigate a very fun murder mystery, now made me super paranoid that in this DLC I have to visit every place five times to get all the quests. The mayor (?) of Far Harbor also now had a new quest for me even though she didn't say anything more after sending me to Old Longfellow before when I first arrived. In any case, I will continue the main story after I got Old Longfellow's companion perk.

Frustratingly enough... I... installed New Vegas last week, but haven't toughed it yet. I want to clear Fallout 4 first, which will likely take me a few months at my pace.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 hours ago, Werthead said:

id have surprise-dropped a Quake remaster on Steam. It's fairly comprehensive, adding 120fps support, 4K resolution and a moderate texture update, as well as making sure the UI and everything scales right.

Nice idea, but maybe only for ones with a huge nostalgia burst for the OG game. As a singleplayer game it was never particularly great (Quake II had a much better SP campaign), and as a multiplayer game you're better of going with whatever remake of Quake III they're still supporting.

Quake 2 will always remind me of the railgun, but meh, the single player game wasn't great either. The multiplayer was awesome though. Brings me back to being a kid and having a LAN party.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Quake 2 will always remind me of the railgun, but meh, the single player game wasn't great either. The multiplayer was awesome though. Brings me back to being a kid and having a LAN party.

Pre-Half Life most FPS games had a terrible SP story. In terms of level design, AI and action, Quake II was pretty good and didn't have much competition at that point, bar maybe Jedi Knight and SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, which I think both came out the same year.

[briantw]

42 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Pre-Half Life most FPS games had a terrible SP story. In terms of level design, AI and action, Quake II was pretty good and didn't have much competition at that point, bar maybe Jedi Knight and SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, which I think both came out the same year.

Even the original Half-Life didn't have much of a story.  It was just told in a really interesting and ambient way with all the scripted events that we really hadn't seen before.

I built my first gaming PC right around when Half-Life came out, and it was one of the first two or three games that I bought for said PC.  I'd played Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake, and Duke Nukem on friends' computers, but Half-Life was just on an entirely different level.

[Fez]

Bungie's pe-Halo FPS games had impressive stories for their time. Pathways into Darkness was kinda basic still, but it was 1993; and the Marathon trilogy games, especially the second one, are quite story heavy.

Too bad they were Macintosh-exclusive so almost no one remembers them.

ETA: Not to take away from Half-Life though. The Bungie games primarily told their stories through computer terminals you could access (and Pathways had an adventure game bolted onto it's other gameplay; you free typed responses and hoped you picked the right thing), they didn't really have scripted cutscenes.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Pre-Half Life most FPS games had a terrible SP story. In terms of level design, AI and action, Quake II was pretty good and didn't have much competition at that point, bar maybe Jedi Knight and SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, which I think both came out the same year.

I'm just trying to remember if it was Quake or Doom which had Godmode and let you fly all over the map...

1 hour ago, briantw said:

Even the original Half-Life didn't have much of a story.  It was just told in a really interesting and ambient way with all the scripted events that we really hadn't seen before.

HL2 had the bug gun, right?

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I'm just trying to remember if it was Quake or Doom which had Godmode and let you fly all over the map...

HL2 had the bug gun, right?

HL1 had the bug gun, 2 had the gravity gun.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

20 hours ago, Werthead said:

HL1 had the bug gun, 2 had the gravity gun.

Was that the gun that shot blue rings at people? I remember the game being incredibly popular until everyone started playing CS.

 

Currently running through RDR1. About 50% through it and it's way more straightforward than the sequel. I miss the improved graphics and vastly superior gameplay, but the original is much more to the point. I invested over 100 hours into my second playthrough of RDR2 and only completed like 80% of the game. So far I'm just over half a day into this one, and I've wasted a lot of time on side missions that were pointless. 

[briantw]

57 minutes ago, Werthead said:

HL1 had the bug gun, 2 had the gravity gun.

The super gravity gun sequence at the end of the second game was so much fucking fun.

[Werthead]

I spent some time with Satellite Reign, which I really enjoyed playing on original release in 2015. For some reason this replay didn't grab me; I think I lucked onto a good order of doing the missions first time around and this time around stumbled onto the hardest missions in the starting area, which got me extremely killed. Might return to it later on.

With dozens of unplayed games in my GoG, Steam and Epic lists, obviously the correct thing to do was replay Hostile Waters, one of my favourite games of all time. Still outrageously good, and it's genuinely frustrating that no other game ever really did what this did (basically RTS, but anchoring your only cameras inside the units, with each unit controlled by an AI chip with a distinctive personality and battle strategy). The allied AI is ridiculously impressive and the Warren Ellis script remains excellent, with great voice acting from Tom Baker and Paul Darrow (not so much the weird guy doing a Sean Connery impression though). The graphics are getting on still but the biggest problem is the draw distance, which feels a bit claustrophobic these days.

Hostile Waters is a pretty quick game (12 hours or so) so thinking of what to play next. I've had Prey spooled up for a while - and picked up Mooncrash in the Bethesda sale today - but having just played both recent Deus Ex games and both Dishonored (plus all DLC for both), I think I need a break from immersive sim-type games for a bit.

Other possibilities: Watch_Dogs Legion, Death Stranding, 2016 Doom, Endless Legend, Final Fantasy XV or Iron Harvest. 

Something I have wanted to play for ages is Saint's Row, but SR1 is unavailable on PC and SR2 is reportedly still screwed on PC. Volition were supposed to be releasing a massive update for it to fix it, but based on news of the new game in the series, there's very confusing noises coming out if that's still happening or not.

Ooh, forgot I had Just Cause 4, which might appeal for random chaos and destruction. I still have LA Noire sitting unplayed as well, somehow, and Metro Exodus (should really do that one, as I replayed the first two games as prep for it a few months back).

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

On 8/17/2021 at 2:35 PM, briantw said:

I've been replaying the Arkham games on PS Now.  There's no shortage of good shit on there.

Well 7 days is up and I decided to buy a year long subscription since it was only $65. That should give me plenty of time to try out some new games.

[polishgenius]

I've been playing a recent indie called Garden Story that's basically a mixture of Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing type stuff with Zelda, and while I'm enjoying it and it's charming as hell, it's also making me think about bad design decisions and how some small tweaks to make things more intuitive in the early game would make it so much more likely to find success with the Stardew crowd. Basically it doesn't at all guide you into the basic flow/ gameplay loops of the game and something like this really should.

Fun once I've gotten into it though.

Also Axiom Verge 2 is very good, but much more than the first one it shamelessly opens the way for another sequel. It actually does some clever things with how the story of this connects to the first one, mind. Makes me want to replay the 1st.

But Baldo is finally coming out on Friday so I'd better leave space for that in the schedule.

 

[Toth]

Amusingly enough, I ended up taking a break from my Fallout 4 playthrough and started up New Vegas for an hour. Barely managed to do more than the tutorial, but... wow, even despite all the New Vegas craze going on recently, I never quite got just how much the game feels like a Spaghetti Western. At the very beginning there really doesn't seem to be anything reminding you that this is a post-apocalyptic game, even a Fallout game if you don't equip the Vault suit, it's just hardy people in the desert. I also must say I'm impressed by the visuals and the first thing I noticed was how spaced out Goodsprings is compared to anything in Bethesda's Fallout. Gives it a feeling of a naturally grown little frontier town and somewhat masking how few houses there are.

[Derfel Cadarn]

With Resident Evil 0 and Remake done, and most of Resident Evil 3 done, I’m now playing Resident Evil 2, as the part of 3 I’m on is after 2. Enjoying it, playing as Claire and after will play the B campaign as Leon.

Code Veronica is not remastered but I can play the on-rails shooter version on my Wii (if it still works).

Also playing Mass Effect remastered and just rescued Liara. Never actually completed 3 so will be good to do it.

Also playing remastered Assassins Creed 2 which is good. As well as getting back Into to AC Odyssey which looks excellent on ps5 on my UktraHD tv. Once I’ve done Odyssey and Origins, I’ve got the viking one - will be good to actually play a PS5 game on the console rather than remastered games from previous generations!

[Ghostlydragon]

18 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Was that the gun that shot blue rings at people? I remember the game being incredibly popular until everyone started playing CS.

 

Currently running through RDR1. About 50% threw it and it's way more straightforward than the sequel. I miss the improved graphics and vastly superior gameplay, but the original is much more to the point. I invested over 100 hours into my second playthrough of RDR2 and only completed like 80% of the game. So far I'm just over half a day into this one, and I've wasted a lot of time on side missions that were pointless. 

Very true. I reached the end of rdr2 and so much of the game dragged. 1 felt a lot better paced (although I did play it in 2012 so my memory may not be accurate).

[Fez]

Been playing Ender Lilies recently. It's a metroidvania heavily inspired by Hollow Knight and Nier: Automata (you get a heavy dose of sad backstory after beating each boss). It's not as good as either of those, but it's a solid entry in the genre and it does some things I really enjoy. For instance, the game respects my time. It is quite hard in places, but there's always a checkpoint room very close to each boss, so there's no back-tracking after each attempt. Also, the various upgrade currencies are rare, but you don't lose them on death. So it's finally a game that doesn't feel like Dark Souls.

The game also has a classic, actually helpful, mini-map. It's just a series of plain boxes representing each room, but there are dots on each side that has an entrance to another room. If you haven't found the dot it's red, and if you have it's white. If you've gone through the entrance, there's a white line connecting the dot another dot. And rooms themselves are blue at first and turn orange once you've found every item in them.

There's no crafting, the weapon and skill upgrade system is very simple, so is the equipment system, and leveling up is automatic and doesn't do much. The focus is on the core gameplay and the atmosphere, which I appreciate.

Lastly, while the setting is a pretty standard, ruined, apocalyptic fantasy kingdom, it does a few neat twists on it. The biggest one so far being, rather than killing all the terrible monsters, you're "purifying" them and bringing them on your side (I don't know what purifying actually means yet in the context of the story, but I'm expecting a twist). Your character is just a defenseless looking kinda-anime girl, all the bosses and mini-bosses become your weapons and skills after beating them. They materialize around you when you attack or use a skill, and also when you idle for a bit. And they don't change their appearance after getting purified, they look just as mutated and terrible as when you were fighting them. It's quite a sight when they're all just chilling around together in a checkpoint room. My only complaint them is that only one of them so far, the dark knight who is your starting sword, is a regular talker. It'd have been really cool if they interacted like an RPG party.

[Soylent Brown]

36 minutes ago, Ghostlydragon said:

Very true. I reached the end of rdr2 and so much of the game dragged. 1 felt a lot better paced (although I did play it in 2012 so my memory may not be accurate).

RDR2 is a 50-hour horse riding simulator with an additional 30 hours of shooting people tacked on, so unless you're really into horsies, parts of it will drag. Definitely the prettiest horse riding simulator I've played though.