August 2023 Random Game Thoughts Thread

[Kaamos_Llama]

No, I always blame the developers, they should have made their game idiot-proof

Funnily enough my Youtube algorithm is giving me some decent hits for once. This reminded me of the convo we had about players following the path of least resistance or optimizing vs getting creative when theres no incentive.

View: https://youtu.be/dlmU7bHynPE?si=6-jGUQXiHQyzXdmw


5 minutes in he starts talking about games dovetailing creativity with progress and how difficult it is to do. Honestly just watched it this morning the first time and it came up here, albeit indirectly.

@ZedClampet Yea, I miss obvious stuff all the time, its why I often look up a non story spoilery beginners tips or basic game guides in more complex games.

 

[Pifanjr]

Funnily enough my Youtube algorithm is giving me some decent hits for once. This reminded me of the convo we had about players following the path of least resistance or optimizing vs getting creative when theres no incentive.

View: https://youtu.be/dlmU7bHynPE?si=6-jGUQXiHQyzXdmw


5 minutes in he starts talking about games dovetailing creativity with progress and how difficult it is to do. Honestly just watched it this morning the first time and it came up here, albeit indirectly.

That video was interesting, but far too verbose in my opinion. That didn't need to be longer than 5 minutes at most.

I do think he should have mentioned achievements. A lot of games have achievements for creative solutions that aren't otherwise rewarded in the game itself.

 

[Shodan_]

At this point getting back into GTA online feels like leaving the house for a year and coming back to realize your parents went to clown school and opened a circus.

Laser guns, flying cars, tron bikes. All this sci-fi crap is just weird.

 

[ZedClampet]

Funnily enough my Youtube algorithm is giving me some decent hits for once. This reminded me of the convo we had about players following the path of least resistance or optimizing vs getting creative when theres no incentive.

View: https://youtu.be/dlmU7bHynPE?si=6-jGUQXiHQyzXdmw


5 minutes in he starts talking about games dovetailing creativity with progress and how difficult it is to do. Honestly just watched it this morning the first time and it came up here, albeit indirectly.

@ZedClampet Yea, I miss obvious stuff all the time, its why I often look up a non story spoilery beginners tips or basic game guides in more complex games.

The only game I know of that lets you actually compose music is Warframe, and that was one of the things I enjoyed most in that game. There was a warframe that was music-oriented, and they created an entire system for easily writing songs (very short songs), and then you would select your active song and go do missions. Your active song became one of your abilities, and everyone could hear it. Just playing the song gave combat boosts to all the players, but if players timed their strikes to the beat of the song, they would get more bonuses.

Of course, you didn't have to make a new song. You could fiddle with the creator and put in famous songs. A popular one to use was "Another One Bites the Dust", but even then each player had their own, unique version of that song. I tended to make my own music from scratch and had a few songs that I really liked.

As far as drawing/painting goes, SuchArt is pretty popular, but I struggled to make any paintings I liked (the game simply likes everything you make).

But, as for the video, I think AI may soon be able to render artistic judgment to a certain degree, at least better than games can now, but as the video says at the end, the main reason to create in these games is for your own satisfaction.

Speaking of which, a lot of these factory games scratch your creativity itch and do it in very fulfilling ways. No two players' factories ever look alike or produce alike.

 

[Zloth]

Excellent video, @Kaamos_Llama!

@Pifanjr - achievements might fit, especially secret ones, if they are encouraging the player to be creative instead of just doing what the achievement says to do.

@ZedClampet - nothing is stopping you from singing whatever song you want while playing! Well... maybe your family, but they can't stop you all the time!

Laser guns, flying cars, tron bikes. All this sci-fi crap is just weird.

Are you playing GTA or did somebody sneak in a Saints Row game on you??

 

[ZedClampet]

Excellent video, @Kaamos_Llama!

@Pifanjr - achievements might fit, especially secret ones, if they are encouraging the player to be creative instead of just doing what the achievement says to do.

@ZedClampet - nothing is stopping you from singing whatever song you want while playing! Well... maybe your family, but they can't stop you all the time!


Are you playing GTA or did somebody sneak in a Saints Row game on you??

Speaking of singing while playing, my daughter when she was little loved American Idol and wanted the video game version. She barely played it, though, because video game Simon Cowell kept telling her how awful she was Was maybe not the best implementation.

 

[Zloth]

True artists are never appreciated in their lifetimes. True critics are never appreciated at all.

 

[Johnway]

With the chiv2 update no where to be seen (13 days and counting...) i've decided to play another indie game to past the time. unfortunately i've chosen streets of rogue. A roguelike game where you commit crimes and make your way up to the top to kill the mayor.

its ok so far. its not as unforgiving as other roguelikes, but the combat could do with a bit of work. I managed to get to down town (so stage 4) where in less then a minute mobsters just gunned me down (6 vs 1) . Will play with the mutators for a bit and see if having infinite bullets makes life easier. For the soldier who starts with an uzi, almost certainly.

 

[ZedClampet]

Since Guido left for college, my wife has poured herself into some mobile game and declared a few minutes ago that she was ranked #1. I told her I was #242 in Super Mega Baseball overall and #76 in home runs, and she called me a slacker.

 

[Zloth]

Marvel's Midnight Suns is nearly done.

I've started playing Crisis Core, a 2007 spin-off of Final Fantasy 7, which released ten years earlier. This is the Reunion remake, so it looks nicer than the original Playstation Portable version. Combat sure is different, though! In the upper left, there's a spinning slot-machine set of pictures and numbers. Depending on how those come out, you get various buffs throughout the battle - maybe spells will cost nothing for about 30 seconds, maybe you'll be allowed to use a "limit break" power of some kind, or maybe you'll gain a level!

Yep, you read that right. Your character doesn't gain levels by defeating monsters or finishing quests in this game. The one and only way to do it is for the jackpot thing to come up all 7's!

Side missions are weird, too. They aren't found "organically" in the game world. Instead, there's simply a big list of them you can access when at a save point. You pop in to a small area, fight a few spawn points, fight one bigger spawn point, and that's it. Maybe you get somebody telling you a little bit of story after the battle, but mostly you just pop back to the save point.

And yes, this game's saves are mostly done at ye'olde save points, which also fully heal you when you touch them (so the game doesn't have to waste precious bytes with your current state, I suppose). There are a few auto-save points, too.

I had to work at the controls for this one. At first, I went with the default keyboard/mouse controls. Blah. Then I tried using my controller - better, but still often awkward. I ended up using keyboard/mouse with re-assigned keys and making use of my two thumb buttons.

 

[Pifanjr]

I've been playing Fortnite on my phone with my wife and a friend of hers. The controls are obviously not ideal, but it's nice to have a game we can play together again.

It's going better than I expected though. There's some things you can't do well with the phone controls, like sniping, throwing grenades or quickly switching weapons, so I mostly stick to an assault rifle or SMG. The game automatically fires my gun when I aim at someone, so I just have to keep them in my crosshairs (which doesn't work while sniping).

I'll be honest that my wife and I mostly rely on her friend, who has been playing for quite a while. However, yesterday I got 9 eliminations, 1 assist and 2 revives in a match which doesn't seem too bad. I think we win roughly 40% of the matches we play, though it does feel like the matchmaking system is pairing us with much better opponents than when I just started.

 

[ZedClampet]

I would love to play a Yakuza game, but I just can't. In all the attempts I've made, I just can't make it past the introduction to first save point. Just...can't...do...it. I played one of them for 1 1/2 hours and there was no sign of coming to the first save point. My character was doing karaoke and all sorts of nonsense. I was so frustrated I swore I would never play another one. I like playing games for about 30 minutes at a time, especially the first time.

 

[Zloth]

I played one of them for 1 1/2 hours and there was no sign of coming to the first save point. My character was doing karaoke and all sorts of nonsense.

I remember in Yakuza 0 I didn't understand that the pay phones are the save points. I played through the opening sequence and still had no clue how to save. I eventually went searching and found out that it's at the pay phones. The game sends you to one but, if it mentioned that that's also where you save, I missed it.

If you just played it, though, it shouldn't be a thing now. Just skip through the videos, get whatever score in the karaoke, and you'll get sent to the phone booth. Once you're through the start, the save points are all over the place.

 

[ZedClampet]

Played Total War Three Kingdoms tonight and became another faction's vassal. Had I known how much that was going to cost me every turn, I might not have done it. I had to disband an entire army plus some just to get back in the black. But my enemies all made peace with me, so I didn't need those units anyway. So I spent the next 30 turns building up my infrastructure in peace so I could make more money and have more powerful units available to recruit. Finally ready, I declared myself independent and swept through my former master's territory burning everything to the ground and getting all my money back. For some reason that made my reliability 0

 

[Zloth]

For some reason that made my reliability 0

Careful! They'll send this guy after you!

View: https://youtu.be/cvR_69bjcqE?t=168

 

[ZedClampet]

lol at Epic. I tried to buy a game there for the first time in I don't know how long and got an error message about Captcha (there was no Captcha).

I'll give them a little credit, though. Their support is much more responsive than Steam's. Did live chat at 3:30 am. Not that the person was able to help me. He said it was an error they were working on and that they'd send me an email when it was fixed.

That's some amazing store you got there. Just imagine how good it will be when you can buy stuff.

 

[ZedClampet]

After fully waking up, I went back to Epic in my browser, instead of the app, and was able to buy Railgrade.

It's a puzzle game, and it's fun, but it has one very serious problem. You can't start levels over from scratch. Make a complete mess of something? All you can do is demolish everything.

The problem with that is that the levels are graded on your time.

 

[neogunhero]

At this point getting back into GTA online feels like leaving the house for a year and coming back to realize your parents went to clown school and opened a circus.

Laser guns, flying cars, tron bikes. All this sci-fi crap is just weird.

I know it kinda defeats the purpose, but I enjoyed GTA Online while playing solo immensely more than in an open lobby. You can reload the game in a private server and focus on the story missions instead of getting killed every 5 seconds. I know you can turn on Passive mode but playing in a private solo server was a lot more fun for me since I just wanted to do the story missions.

 

[Brian Boru]

Epic. I tried to buy a game there for the first time in I don't know how long and got an error message about Captcha (there was no Captcha)

Just for kicks, try it in Edge browser. A month ago Epic stopped letting me sign in with Vivaldi due to Captcha malfunction—in my case, there was a Captcha but doing it correctly multiple times refused to let me continue.

Edge worked straight away, and handles another wonky site the others choked on too.

ETA: oh never mind, you weren't in a browser. Just for info, what browser let you in?

 

[ZedClampet]

Just for kicks, try it in Edge browser. A month ago Epic stopped letting me sign in with Vivaldi due to Captcha malfunction—in my case, there was a Captcha but doing it correctly multiple times refused to let me continue.

Edge worked straight away, and handles another wonky site the others choked on too.

ETA: oh never mind, you weren't in a browser. Just for info, what browser let you in?

I was in Chrome with my Ublock turned off. I was going to try Edge next.

 

[Brian Boru]

The battles look more interesting than the ones in Factorio

Zade has a 13m video on Desynced EA:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF96Fg19R_E

 

[ZedClampet]

Zade has a 13m video on Desynced EA:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF96Fg19R_E

Looked through the user reviews yesterday after it launched into EA. I'm going to buy it eventually. Right now I'm trying to force myself to get consumed by Techtonica. If it doesn't click with me soon, I'll take a break from it and try Desynced.

 

[ZedClampet]

Railgrade dev has now explained to me how to reset a level, so I'm happy with that again.

 

[Johnway]

The Path of Exile league starts this friday and so far scant information. Sure, the new league is interesting, but i'm all about the rewards and so far i've not seen anything from them about it. I'll probably play the noob/gear friendly poisionous concoction raider build to ease the pain.

of course, if the rewards are crap, i might not bother at all. I might just go back to my ballooning gaming collection and tick a few more games in the completed list.

On retro gaming news, i'm working my way through the Lost vikings 2. i didn't realize that they made a sequel for the SNES/megadrive. i remember seeing a preview of it for the playstation/sega saturn and thought it never got released. Still, almost done with that game (level 26-27 out of 31) so my usual post soon...

Concerning chiv2? no update and honestly i'm getting worried. especially jumping back in after several months i suspect i'm going to rage quit pretty quickly.

 

[ZedClampet]

Guido and I, it's his last day before classes start, played Total War Three Kingdoms. During his turns I played Railgrade.

Three Kingdoms is much more complex strategically in just about every way than are the Warhammer games. Will be interesting to see which direction they go in Pharaoh, which comes out in October.