Video Games - Storage Space Blues

[polishgenius]

Kirby day today woo. All reviews seem to think it's a boatload of fun, so I'm happy to hear that.


Also, how fun does this look?
 

 

[Werthead]

They need to use the voiceover guy for every game from now on. The unironic way he bellows SKYBLIVION is amazing.

[Fez]

On 3/24/2022 at 5:48 PM, Rhom said:

Noticed that Deathloop is 50% off on the Epic Store.  That feels quick for a sale of that magnitude.

It's been 6 months. I feel like that's a pretty standard time for a 50% sale for most AAA games; excluding Nintendo and the absolutely massive hits.

[Werthead]

Started Prey (2017 vintage) and enjoying it a fair bit. Once again, an Arkane masterclass in level design and atmosphere. It reminds me of Alien: Isolation but not as terrifying. It is a lot more minimalist than Dishonored though.

[polishgenius]

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is fun. Very fun. There's really something to be said for combining tight, smart level design with being very charming and very silly. 

[Werthead]

A few more hours into Prey and I'm not sure I'm feeling it any more. The bad guys are rubbish, as in totally awful and just not fun to fight or deal with, especially with their very vague insta-death attacks where you can't tell what's going on. Stealth is poor to the point of feeling broken (shocking from the makers of Dishonored) and the minimalist storytelling, so refreshing at the start, now just leaves me feeling like I'm wandering around not entirely sure of what's going on.

I must admit finding it trick to focus on a new game at the moment, so that's not helping either.

[Proudfeet]

I've bought and installed an NVMe to try and improve my loading times, but it doesn't seem to do any better. Wonder if the bottleneck is elsewhere or if its because I've only moved my Steam folder but my %appdata% is in C drive although that is an SSD too. 

[Toth]

Okay, because I got sick of war, I ended up playing Heats of Iron IV... as Switzerland. Since I still have no clue how to be good at this game, I preferred to sit back and watch the AI mayhem unfold while tidying up my desk and doing my preparations wor work.

I also found it interesting that you can toggle AI behavior. So I made the experiment of making Germany democratic for the hell of it. The game is then scripted to follow a certain path to make WW2 still break out, but against a communist conquest, but it was still interesting to see:

- Germany starts out in a civil war between military and Nazis, that the military win. Elections are set and Adenauer takes over
- Franco looses the Spanish Civil War, Spain becomes communist
- Japan ends up in a civil war between democrats and fascists that drags on through the entirety of WW2
- as such, the Republic of China... still looses the Civil War as the USSR intervenes on behalf of communist China
- France turns communist and sends volunteers to communist China
- Great Britain also turns communist, but just to spite the French, they send volunteers to the Republic of China instead
- the USSR still attacks the Baltic states and Finland, causing Germany and Poland to intervene on their behalf
- France then declares war on Germany... and gets tank-rushed by Belgium, somehow
- while everyone's attention is on the USSR, Hungary somehow decides to attack Czechoslovakia and gets instakilled by Germany
- Mussolini who didn't do shit the entire game seizes the opportunity to conquer communist Greece and Spain under the umbrella of the current anti-communist alliance.
- the USSR gets defeated and explodes into two dozen countries, but communist China holds out for a year and a half more with pretty much frozen frontlines. In the end they also fold, turning China into an utter clusterfuck of like 5 countries that all belong either to Germany's or Italy's faction
- somehow during all of this democratic Japan joined the comintern while still unable to secure Japan, but still have a few dozen divisions to send to defend China. Therefore fascist Japan gets reinstated in the peace deal
- a large patch of France inexplicably ends in Italy's hands, its colonies now belong to Poland. Germany also got three provinces out of it, but I can't find them anywhere
- Spain gets freed, with Galicia and Catalonia as independent German puppets
- communist Britain then, after everyone went home, declared war on Italy and keeps failing to land in France
- the USA didn't do shit the entire game

I myself was just sitting on my ass being not quite as neutral as I should be. I kept sending equipment to those I wanted to see win, first to the Republic of China, then to Germany. Now at the very end I instigated a regime change in Italy, causing a democratic uprising that already conquered almost all of Italy while they were too busy worrying about Britain. Meanwhile I'm also trying to instigate the same democratic uprising in Britain itself, just to get rid of the more whacky aspects of this world.

[Caligula_K3]

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is fun. Very fun. There's really something to be said for combining tight, smart level design with being very charming and very silly. 

I really enjoyed the demo and the reviews seem to be good. I'm thinking of getting it this week instead of Arceus. My only real concern: is it challenging at all? I feel like games like this need a bit of challenge to keep my interest (Mario Odyssey/3D World level challenge, I'm not talking Dark Souls), and the demo was really easy. But it was also the first few levels.

[Durckad]

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

A few more hours into Prey and I'm not sure I'm feeling it any more. The bad guys are rubbish, as in totally awful and just not fun to fight or deal with, especially with their very vague insta-death attacks where you can't tell what's going on. Stealth is poor to the point of feeling broken (shocking from the makers of Dishonored) and the minimalist storytelling, so refreshing at the start, now just leaves me feeling like I'm wandering around not entirely sure of what's going on.

I must admit finding it trick to focus on a new game at the moment, so that's not helping either.

Ah, that sucks. Prey (2017) is probably my favorite immersive sim from the last couple of years, but then again, I don't have quite the affinity for the Dishonoured franchise as others seem to (I like them quite a bit, but I don't really love them), but yes, I agree that the weakest aspect of Prey are the enemies. I certainly don't think they are bad, but after a certain point, they're just kind of there.

[polishgenius]

4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I really enjoyed the demo and the reviews seem to be good. I'm thinking of getting it this week instead of Arceus. My only real concern: is it challenging at all? I feel like games like this need a bit of challenge to keep my interest (Mario Odyssey/3D World level challenge, I'm not talking Dark Souls), and the demo was really easy. But it was also the first few levels.

 

I mean, it's never gonna be hard, but I'm finding it engaging enough, and the first world is definitely a gentle intro. Definite uptick just after halfway where I am now, but also because it's such a tight design and there's so many various ways to use the abilities and mouthful modes, there's consistently something new so it's not just relying on challenge to keep the interest engaged. 

It's too different a game to Arceus to really say what's better, but I will say this one is a lot more polished, there's no rough edges here. On the other hand, it's probably gonna be a fair bit shorter, though I dunno how the postgame looks and that does also come with some portion of Arceus being makework.

[Werthead]

5 hours ago, Durckad said:

Ah, that sucks. Prey (2017) is probably my favorite immersive sim from the last couple of years, but then again, I don't have quite the affinity for the Dishonoured franchise as others seem to (I like them quite a bit, but I don't really love them), but yes, I agree that the weakest aspect of Prey are the enemies. I certainly don't think they are bad, but after a certain point, they're just kind of there.

I'm wavering on this game more than any for a while. After that post I played another 2-3 hours and got more into it and completed the hydroponics garden bit, which was great, but then found I really needed to go all the way back to near the start to unlock Q-beam ammo, which sucked (it meant doing two trips along the very long zero-gee tube, in addition to the first trip I did along it in the first place), especially once I discovered enemies respawn (AAAARRRRGGHHH).

However, I'm reliably informed once you have unlocked Q-beam ammo and get the skill to harvest it from corrupted robots (which I have) the game becomes a lot easier, because the Q-beam can just tee enemies up to explode at long range, which is nice, whilst the upgraded shotgun can take care of almost anything else at close range.

[Durckad]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I'm wavering on this game more than any for a while. After that post I played another 2-3 hours and got more into it and completed the hydroponics garden bit, which was great, but then found I really needed to go all the way back to near the start to unlock Q-beam ammo, which sucked (it meant doing two trips along the very long zero-gee tube, in addition to the first trip I did along it in the first place), especially once I discovered enemies respawn (AAAARRRRGGHHH).

However, I'm reliably informed once you have unlocked Q-beam ammo and get the skill to harvest it from corrupted robots (which I have) the game becomes a lot easier, because the Q-beam can just tee enemies up to explode at long range, which is nice, whilst the upgraded shotgun can take care of almost anything else at close range.

I know there are a lot of people that do not like the amount of backtracking you need to do in the game, but I found it really helps to make the station feel more like a character. And as you unlock various alternative methods to get around, it does reduce the tedium. That said, fair warning, it is definitely a part (understatement) of the end game.

[IlyaP]

Finished off the absolutely lovely Cloudpunk from Ionlands. This was the first time in a long time since I've been able to play a game in a single sitting. It's a wonderfully breezy game, that lasts all of about ten hours, and never overstays its welcome.

A sequel-sized DLC, Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts, is next on my to-play list.

[IlyaP]

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

A few more hours into Prey and I'm not sure I'm feeling it any more. The bad guys are rubbish, as in totally awful and just not fun to fight or deal with, especially with their very vague insta-death attacks where you can't tell what's going on. Stealth is poor to the point of feeling broken (shocking from the makers of Dishonored) and the minimalist storytelling, so refreshing at the start, now just leaves me feeling like I'm wandering around not entirely sure of what's going on.

Sounds like you had the same problems I did. Despite the clever opening, and the obvious tips of the hat to System Shock, Prey never failed to grab me either. It felt too open-ended and more interested in emergent gameplay styles than in being fun and interesting. Its use of audio/text logs approach to build out the world around the player feels antiquated and tired at this point.

[Werthead]

11 hours ago, Durckad said:

I know there are a lot of people that do not like the amount of backtracking you need to do in the game, but I found it really helps to make the station feel more like a character. And as you unlock various alternative methods to get around, it does reduce the tedium. That said, fair warning, it is definitely a part (understatement) of the end game.

I don't have a problem with backtracking per se, but I do if it also respawns tons of enemies for you, especially much tougher ones then when you first passed through. It's particularly egregious if you can just ignore them and run past them, as you can in about 90% of cases here, and once you get upgraded combat skills you can just massacre them.

10 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Finished off the absolutely lovely Cloudpunk from Ionlands. This was the first time in a long time since I've been able to play a game in a single sitting. It's a wonderfully breezy game, that lasts all of about ten hours, and never overstays its welcome.

A sequel-sized DLC, Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts, is next on my to-play list.

Cloudpunk is absolutely fantastic, and I need to get around to the DLC.

[Werthead]

On 3/28/2022 at 11:37 AM, Werthead said:

I don't have a problem with backtracking per se, but I do if it also respawns tons of enemies for you, especially much tougher ones then when you first passed through. It's particularly egregious if you can just ignore them and run past them, as you can in about 90% of cases here, and once you get upgraded combat skills you can just massacre them.

Further to this, I think I'm pretty deep in the endgame now. I'm back in the main lobby area, just went to Neuromods for the second time and unlocked the entire second floor and "backstage" area and now it feels like there's not much to do apart from go back to the Arboretum to meet my dodgy brother, complete the treasure map and decide on whether to blow the station up or not. At around 24 hours, which seems to track with the 26-30 hour average for completing the game.

I've fallen on the side that it's good, and in fact it feels like a redeemed Alien Isolation. That was a great game but flawed in that it limited your ability to move around too much by the unkillable xenomorph. Prey does the same thing with the Nightmare, but with the Nightmare you can dodge out of the way and if it doesn't catch you, it assumes you're in a completely different part of the station and disappears, and you know you're safe staying in the area you are now. That's something that I think would have worked well for Isolation, where the absolutely superb level and graphic design was let down by the fact that you could never really enjoy it because of the constant fear of the xeno (not to mention the whole fear thing was dragged out over 25 hours, which was far too long for that game, which has much less going on than Prey). Plus, you actually can kill the Nightmare, it's just really hard.

[IlyaP]

I am trying out Batman: Arkham Asylum tonight. I legit don't know what to expect, but it was practically free on the Steam store during a recent sale, so...

[Derfel Cadarn]

Finished Assassins Creed Brotherhood replay (tho first time with the remastered version). Possibly my favourite of the pre-Black Flag games.

Now replaying AC: Revelations. Basically the same as Brotherhood, but like Rome, they did a good job with Constantinople/Istanbul. And the hook is quite fun.

Also continuing (finally) my replay of Mass Effect. Basically usijg my PS5 to play PS4 games, some of whixh are remastered PS3 games…

Though I have been playing Farpoint and Blood & Truth on thr VR haadset, as I have the gun and the Move sticks. Fun!

[Rhom]

5 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I am trying out Batman: Arkham Asylum tonight. I legit don't know what to expect, but it was practically free on the Steam store during a recent sale, so...

Lucky you.  I wish I could go back and experience that game fresh.