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Videogames Killed the TV Star


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18 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

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.

You can cut out most of the horse riding if you want to. It's all the non-essential side stuff like making the rarest hat that eat up a ton of time. RDR1 doesn't have any of that, so you can just do the main and side missions and keep things moving rather quickly. 

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8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

You can cut out most of the horse riding if you want to. It's all the non-essential side stuff like making the rarest hat that eat up a ton of time. RDR1 doesn't have any of that, so you can just do the main and side missions and keep things moving rather quickly. 

Agreed. I got 100% of all achievements and it didn't seem to take that long. Those challenges like kills with a tomahawk definitely took some time though. I'm nowhere near 100% in RDR2 and I doubt I'll ever get it. From checking every animal to getting lots of gold medals, I don't think I really want to. People aren't lying when they say its a 200 hour platinum trophy/1000G.

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Psychonauts 2 picking up some good reviews.

13 hours ago, Toth said:

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.

New Vegas is, from a narrative and thematic standpoint, infinitely superior to Fallout 4 and probably the best game ever made with that creaky engine. However, it isn't great at being what Bethesda does do well, an open-world playground. It's distinctly limited in that sense and there's bits of it which are a bit too on-rails compared to the other Bethesda games.

Absolutely outstanding atmosphere, characters and stories though. And I love the way the story adapts to you doing whatever you want in the quests, even if you go completely off the reservation and start murdering important NPCs (which you absolutely are allowed to do).

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6 hours ago, Ghostlydragon said:

Agreed. I got 100% of all achievements and it didn't seem to take that long. Those challenges like kills with a tomahawk definitely took some time though. I'm nowhere near 100% in RDR2 and I doubt I'll ever get it. From checking every animal to getting lots of gold medals, I don't think I really want to. People aren't lying when they say its a 200 hour platinum trophy/1000G.

I may have played that long between two tries without caring about trophies. The game is just so consuming. Meanwhile, I stayed home from work today and logged a few more hours, I'm already on what I think is the third act and it's time to hunt down Dutch.

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No idea who this guy, and is video is too long and has too much hearsay and speculation in parts. But he's done some legit investigative journalism too and found all sorts of shady stuff in the recent surge of video game collectable prices.

The biggest points are:

Wata, the collectable grading company, and Heritage, the auction house where most of these sales have occurred, have a bunch of business relationships between each other that they don't publicly acknowledge. Several of the early big buyers and sellers of video games have relationships to them too. In one case, both the buyer and seller of a video game collection graded by Wata are members of the board of directors of Wata.

All these relationships, and a bunch of media coverage, are trying to drive up the price of video game collectables in a speculative bubble because both Wata and Heritage have business models that rely on high prices. Wata charges more the higher the value of the game is, and Heritage takes percentages from both the buyer and seller in all transactions.

The co-founder of Heritage who is involved settled with the FTC for $1.2 million in 1989 for doing this exact same thing with collectable coins.

There's some claims of shill bidding and lying about grades, and it seems pretty likely to be true, but it's not confirmed the way the above points are.

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Finished my FemShep playthrough of the ME Legendary edition. Over 100 hrs, with the game playthroughs getting longer through the 2nd and 3rd game, though I didn't do every single little mission. I chose the destroy the reaper ending because I felt it was the best for the character, not realizing that EDI and the geth are wiped out, so that wasn't in line with my character. All 3 endings ultimately suck.

I'm not sure that FemShep really is that much better than MaleShep. Yeah, the actress did a good job, but that's about the only difference. In the past I just stuck with Cover MaleShep.

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Fallout 4 playthrough completed then, 41 hours logged according to Steam, but I kept it fairly focused on the main questline the whole time and didn't spend a massive amount of time exploring other than incidentally when moving towards objectives. So that's a pretty decent amount of playtime out of a €10 investment I would say, and then I still haven't gone to Far Harbor or gone up against the Mechanist. I think I'll put those off for now since this game has capitalized my gaming time lately and there are other games I want to play.

This is my first time playing this game and I did it with the GOTY edition so I don't know how many issues have been fixed since release, but I have to say I think it's a much better experience than what people said right around the release. The way I heard it the game was borderline unplayable and even outright bad but I liked it. The settlements feature is a bit bolted on and I think ultimately a bit pointless, and I ended up not really using it aside from building up Sanctuary a little bit and the bare minimum at The Castle, only to complete objectives. I think it would've been better if they had pre-planned building patterns for the various settlements that grew organically as the player invested time and resources into them rather than force the player to build them all up themselves. Making it feel like the settlers were, you know, settling. Unused companions could have been designated as governors or whatever to various settlements to bolster defenses and increase the rate of settlement. I think that would've been smoother and fit the narrative a bit better.

As I mentioned previously I think the SPECIAL/perk system is really smooth and streamlined in this version and I hope they repeat it for future games. The gun modding is way out of hand and feels really overwhelming at the start, and also very quickly turns the looting aspect of the game into just plain scavenging for materials. In previous titles every time a gun dropped you got a little bit excited because it might be an upgrade, and you had to make real decisions between different guns. Gun A had more damage, but Gun B had a better scope. Which do you pick? In FO4 you pick whichever and mod out the weaknesses.

Storywise it's a 5/10 game, not terrible or anything, and I did find it rather engaging at the start with how the story starts. New Vegas has that same thing where you're emotionally invested really early on which motivates you to push forward with the quests as opposed to just wandering around the wasteland.

Solid game, not sure when I'll be back to finish off some of the DLC content, but I enjoyed it.

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I think I could finish Horizons fairly quickly at this point but I kinda love playing it. I am rubbish at a lot of it though. No clue how to use the ropecaster at all and absolute pants at effectively setting up traps and ambushes.

Shooty shooty smash smash is good, though, and still love the backstory.

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14 hours ago, kungtotte said:

 41 hours logged according to Steam,

You know one of my pet peeves... I play games between appointments here at the office sometimes. (I know... literal first world problems.)  When I do, I usually will do a quick save or whatever the game allows and then take it back to the game title screen so I don't have to re launch the game from Steam/GoG.

From what I can tell, that still counts as being "in game" according to how much I have played.  So when I have 30 hours logged in game... GoG is saying that I'm twice that sometimes.  :dunno: 

Minor issue in the scheme of things, but wish there was some better way around it.

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21 minutes ago, Rhom said:

You know one of my pet peeves... I play games between appointments here at the office sometimes. (I know... literal first world problems.)  When I do, I usually will do a quick save or whatever the game allows and then take it back to the game title screen so I don't have to re launch the game from Steam/GoG.

From what I can tell, that still counts as being "in game" according to how much I have played.  So when I have 30 hours logged in game... GoG is saying that I'm twice that sometimes.  :dunno: 

Minor issue in the scheme of things, but wish there was some better way around it.

Yeah, I always laugh when steam claims I've played Rimworld for over 61 days. I love the game but not that much. 

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1 hour ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

So I just got a PS5 and I set it up last night. After one game of Madden 22 I realized I was getting motion sickness.  It has never happened on PS4 or Switch or anything else. 

Has anyone else expressed that? And do you eventually get used to it?

When I first made the jump from 30FPS xbox 360 battlefield to 60FPS on Xbox One it made me majorly uncomfortable for a few days. Then I got used to it. That could be what's happening? I don't know much about Madden or how it ran on the PS4. 

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6 minutes ago, RumHam said:

When I first made the jump from 320PS xbox 360 battlefield to 60FPS on Xbox One it made me majorly uncomfortable for a few days. Then I got used to it. That could be what's happening? I don't know much about Madden or how it ran on the PS4. 

I generally don't play sports games, so I have no frame of reference. A round on Call of Duty felt the same. 

The best way to describe it is eye strain, a touch of nausea and dizziness. Hearing that you got used to it kind of puts me at ease. 

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33 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

I generally don't play sports games, so I have no frame of reference. A round on Call of Duty felt the same. 

The best way to describe it is eye strain, a touch of nausea and dizziness. Hearing that you got used to it kind of puts me at ease. 

If it's a major issue you can try reducing the framerate manually to 30fps and see if that helps things. Some people don't do well with 60fps rates, and some titles go up to 120fps if they can. 

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15 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

If it's a major issue you can try reducing the framerate manually to 30fps and see if that helps things. Some people don't do well with 60fps rates, and some titles go up to 120fps if they can. 

That's a great suggestion. I turned off the motion blur but didn't see if I had that option.  Thanks. 

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18 hours ago, kungtotte said:

Fallout 4 playthrough completed then, 41 hours logged according to Steam, but I kept it fairly focused on the main questline the whole time and didn't spend a massive amount of time exploring other than incidentally when moving towards objectives. So that's a pretty decent amount of playtime out of a €10 investment I would say, and then I still haven't gone to Far Harbor or gone up against the Mechanist. I think I'll put those off for now since this game has capitalized my gaming time lately and there are other games I want to play.

This is my first time playing this game and I did it with the GOTY edition so I don't know how many issues have been fixed since release, but I have to say I think it's a much better experience than what people said right around the release. The way I heard it the game was borderline unplayable and even outright bad but I liked it. The settlements feature is a bit bolted on and I think ultimately a bit pointless, and I ended up not really using it aside from building up Sanctuary a little bit and the bare minimum at The Castle, only to complete objectives. I think it would've been better if they had pre-planned building patterns for the various settlements that grew organically as the player invested time and resources into them rather than force the player to build them all up themselves. Making it feel like the settlers were, you know, settling. Unused companions could have been designated as governors or whatever to various settlements to bolster defenses and increase the rate of settlement. I think that would've been smoother and fit the narrative a bit better.

Fallout 4 was, by some considerable margin, the most technically stable Bethesda game ever on release, so not sure where you heard that. In fact, I've had more problems with later replays on the patched-up and expanded version than on the original (in my last game maybe one in twenty NPCs didn't have any heads, which was disconcerting).

The settlement building is quite fun. I had the Vault-Tec DLC installed and that allows you to build decent, futuristic-looking buildings, even on the surface, so I used that to make every settlement look great, with cool futuristic buildings, observation posts, nuclear reactors and sleeping quarters. It looks so much better than the awful tin shacks or concrete blocks the base system only allows you to build. Plus you can have automatrons bombing around defending places.

The base settlement system is rough but some of the mods make it pretty cool. Sim Settlements 2 puts a whole AI-life system into the game so settlers have actual jobs, their assigned homes, will defend the settlement with better AI and generally react much better to the craziness that goes down. Other mods remove the settlement object limit and the population limit, allowing you to expand each settlement and more and more people will show up. Other mods allow you to mod everything to insanity, completely rebuild structures to their pre-war state and so on (be careful how you mix these, as Sanctuary can end up bigger and more populous than Diamond City, which starts to melt even the hardiest of PCs). I did find, by far, this is best employed at the Castle as it allows you to more or less rebuild it and fortify it to pretty ludicrous proportions.

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Midnight Suns is the XCOM-Marvel mashup that's been rumoured for months. The trailer is mostly cinematics, but there'll be a gameplay reveal on 1 September.

The XCOM2 team are behind this and reportedly it's a "tactical RPG" rather than a pure XCOM-alike. It's unclear what that means at the moment.

The game could be good, but of course there's a lot of annoyance they were working on this rather than XCOM3 (given that both XCOM2 and XCOM: Chimera Squad had cliffhanger endings).

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