February 2025 General Game Discussion Thread

[Colif]

Not to be confused with/by

 

[isleepinabed]

Not to be confused with/by

Wasn't there talk of a Full Throttle 2 going round for the last 30 years as well?

 

[March's Ghost]

Wasn't there talk of a Full Throttle 2 going round for the last 30 years as well?

Gamer's voices rang out loud when Lucasfilm said they were going to make it less point n' click and more action based. It scared them off from making it. Might be the first time production of a game was affected by gamer outcry (at the very least the first one I remember). The internet was still not much more than a text base interface with dial-up modems and even then it was kinda trash.

 

[Johnway]

Wasn't there talk of a Full Throttle 2 going round for the last 30 years as well?

i heard the rumours and saw the PCG spy articles on it. There was a concept art screenshot and then i think after maybe one or 2 years they cancelled it. Not heard a thing since.

 

[ZedClampet]

Played a little of Tokyo Extreme Racing. Not really sure what I'm doing yet. I think you just drive around looking for people to race.

 

[Frindis]

Played a little of Tokyo Extreme Racing. Not really sure what I'm doing yet. I think you just drive around looking for people to race.

That sounds pretty relaxing

 

[Zloth]

Square/Enix released a patch for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth yesterday. A few days late, but no dollars short. Naturally, some people responded with "why did you break my mods!?" and other kicks to the gift horse's mouth, but the forums have gotten nicer. People are even talking about the game itself!

 

[BeardyHat]

Square/Enix released a patch for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth yesterday. A few days late, but no dollars short. Naturally, some people responded with "why did you break my mods!?" and other kicks to the gift horse's mouth, but the forums have gotten nicer. People are even talking about the game itself!

People always find something to complain about.

I picked up Snowrunner again. Damn do I love this game, though I think I forgot to put it on my desert island list. It's filling the void I have right now while my RC Rock crawler is diassembled for painting.

Need to jump back into Aliens, but can be a tough play sometimes, accounting for the stress and the difficulty of saving at a moment notice.

 

[Pifanjr]

I played way too much some more of The Planet Crafter. I think I have every resource automated that can be automated now, it wasn't as bad to set up as I had feared.

I think there's only two more late game resources left, which can only be found by exploration of late game areas. My terraforming progress is blocked until I find one of them, so next time I'll have to explore the last few corners of the map I haven't been to yet.

 

[Colif]

Yesterday

Not dandruff or snow, Hail.

Woke me up, hard to sleep through a hail storm though.
Not going to snow like that here... ever... let alone Summer.

Okay, I make post Game related

If only it looked like that 25 years ago on N64

 

[neogunhero]

Wasn't there talk of a Full Throttle 2 going round for the last 30 years as well?

View: https://youtu.be/xjqAN72DoyU?si=KabHHgD5DGwtDaMR


Description says it’s an E3 trailer from 2003. Huge departure from the original game, I can see why people were put off by it.

 

[March's Ghost]

Description says it’s an E3 trailer from 2003. Huge departure from the original game, I can see why people were put off by it.

Somewhere floating around is a PC Gamer magazine with an article, or at least a section, dedicated to the backlash LucasArts got from fans over the more action oriented announcement. I used to have that issue.

Personally, I think they still should have made it.

 

[isleepinabed]

View: https://youtu.be/xjqAN72DoyU?si=KabHHgD5DGwtDaMR


Description says it’s an E3 trailer from 2003. Huge departure from the original game, I can see why people were put off by it.

Somewhere floating around is a PC Gamer magazine with an article, or at least a section, dedicated to the backlash LucasArts got from fans over the more action oriented announcement. I used to have that issue.

Personally, I think they still should have made it.

Doesn't look that bad to me, but I would say the original game's memorable but wasn't that great.
It was a cool setting and, more often than not with those games, that was more than half of its appeal already.

 

[Johnway]

Still playing mechanicus and we're reaching the end game. We're cleaning up the last few missions before i finish off the final boss. My techpriests are all coming close to lvl 20 and make scrap metal of most of the enemies. The last 2 bosses so far have been a push over. Again the only thing that makes it stressful is the Doomsday clock. Whilst i make take 4 turns to beat the bosses, i enter the fight 15 turns down (alert level 3) just making my way to the fight.

Still, despite that i've been lucky with encounters and so far the dial is at 64/100. Thankfully the prior missions most of the encounters have been no more adding 1% or sometimes 0% to the doomsday clock. So we're well ahead of schedule beating the game.

On other news, POE1 maybe getting another league after the fan base sulked and doomsayers after GGG said that they were concentrating POE2 instead of in parallel as previously promised. I had hoped for more time to get challenges but honestly i'm over it. Screw the rewards.

 

[ZedClampet]

@Pifanjr remember (probably not), us discussing how I had painted over glasses in a picture (to remove them) and saved the file as a .png and somehow they kept showing back up whenever AI used the picture? After continually running into this, I asked CoPilot how this was happening.

According to CoPilot, when you paint over something with some (maybe all) paint programs, you are actually creating a new layer. This is at least partially so you can undo it if you want. However, unbeknownst to the human eye, this new layer is, for some reason, not 100 percent opaque. It's close enough so that you can't see through it, but not close enough that computers can't see through it. So to AI it's just more stuff in the picture. This can even happen if you manually remove a background. The invisible layer you created when you deleted the background is just another layer that isn't completely opaque.

 

[March's Ghost]

Doesn't look that bad to me, but I would say the original game's memorable but wasn't that great.
It was a cool setting and, more often than not with those games, that was more than half of its appeal already.

Oh I think it's very memorable:

View: https://www.youtube.com/embed/69Fw4P4hPnM?si=f6hcg1ZdLd-KTI_R

 

[Pifanjr]

@Pifanjr remember (probably not), us discussing how I had painted over glasses in a picture (to remove them) and saved the file as a .png and somehow they kept showing back up whenever AI used the picture? After continually running into this, I asked CoPilot how this was happening.

According to CoPilot, when you paint over something with some (maybe all) paint programs, you are actually creating a new layer. This is at least partially so you can undo it if you want. However, unbeknownst to the human eye, this new layer is, for some reason, not 100 percent opaque. It's close enough so that you can't see through it, but not close enough that computers can't see through it. So to AI it's just more stuff in the picture. This can even happen if you manually remove a background. The invisible layer you created when you deleted the background is just another layer that isn't completely opaque.

I vaguely remember that conversation, but CoPilot's response seems strange to me. I understand the layer part, but not why it wouldn't be 100% opaque. Though I can imagine that if you're trying to remove glasses, an AI program could still notice that the area where the glasses are is different even if it looks blended to the human eye. So it might just interpret it as skin-coloured glasses.

 

[ZedClampet]

I vaguely remember that conversation, but CoPilot's response seems strange to me. I understand the layer part, but not why it wouldn't be 100% opaque. Though I can imagine that if you're trying to remove glasses, an AI program could still notice that the area where the glasses are is different even if it looks blended to the human eye. So it might just interpret it as skin-coloured glasses.

Nope, its answer was correct. I've since verified CoPilot's answer by first creating a picture with text and saving it and then copying and pasting a picture over top of it and saving it again. I then imported it into AI and could see the text under the picture. Would be great for secret messages

Originally I thought the same as you and went back and repainted the glasses 3 times.

As for why it's not 100 percent opaque, you'd have to ask Adobe, but I've since found out that paint(dot)net is also not 100 percent opaque, so there must be a reason for it. Probably it's the Illuminati.

****
The back-end of Steam has a calendar that shows the upcoming fests, sales and big releases for the next few months. It's kind of cool. Unfortunately, I'm about to lose my access to the back-end. Although I could just pay $100 and get permanent access.

 

[neogunhero]

Hardware prices are going up in some sectors. I like to look at gaming laptops and dream about getting my GF one so we can play more than Roblox, Minecraft or Stardew Valley together. I used to see an HP Victus with a RTX 4050 and 8GB RAM for $599. I was really considering that for a budget option, since the 4050 should be good on 1080p especially with DLSS, and I can easily upgrade the RAM for about $45 more. That same laptop sits right around $699 now. Granted, there are a few other options slightly better for around the exact same price, but I’m not seriously planning on getting anything for now. Just waiting for the day that she caves in to my relentless “we should get you a better laptop” quips I make at her multiple times a week. Seriously though, yesterday I sent her a sticker on Steam chat while she was in game on Stardew, she opened it and it lagged her laptop to slideshow levels of stuttering.

 

[isleepinabed]

I have been playing Assetto Corsa (2014). It reminds me a lot of my favourite simulation which was F355 Challenge. That one had a 3 screen arcade cabinet but I mostly played it on the SEGA Dreamcast.
What I like about AC is that it's very barebones in presentation, but it allows you to modify everything as deeply as you want. Although I'm going through the career mode (just a set series of events, really, there's no real storyline or anything like that) the greatest enjoyment is in time trials: just the car, a track, your eyes and your fingers. I find these games very similar to arcade shmups in that you get easily in the zone: making the perfect line, shaving off one more second out of your best lap. When you get in the zone it doesn't matter if the graphics are 10 years old, it's basically just a skin for the meat of the experience. And I'm not a big car or racing enthusiast either. But the mechanics of these games are very thrilling, I find.

 

[ZedClampet]

@Pifanjr I would like to withdraw everything I said in my response about the .png files. For one thing, my test was flawed because I didn't even check the opacity settings. But I'm now thinking that all of us including CoPilot were wrong, but I don't know for sure, so there's no sense in explaining it yet. I sent a message to a developer I know who has created an art program. We'll see what he says. He's getting ready to release a game, so it may be awhile before he gets back to me. His game is about opening an art gallery, and it has an art program so you can make paintings in the game.

 

[Pifanjr]

I once again stayed up far too late playing The Planet Crafter. I had actually turned off my PC already planning to go to bed after walking my dog, but I couldn't stop thinking about the game. So when I returned from my walk, I just booted up the PC again.

I realised I had unlocked pretty much everything in the game, I just needed to get my total terraforming score high enough for the last unlock. Turns out that you can go all in on oxygen generation while ignoring everything else and it only took me about an hour to finish the remaining 30% of the total progress.

Now I just have to finish the actual story. Apparently I hadn't explored well enough around the initial clue, but better late than never.

 

[ZedClampet]

I once again stayed up far too late playing The Planet Crafter. I had actually turned off my PC already planning to go to bed after walking my dog, but I couldn't stop thinking about the game. So when I returned from my walk, I just booted up the PC again.

I realised I had unlocked pretty much everything in the game, I just needed to get my total terraforming score high enough for the last unlock. Turns out that you can go all in on oxygen generation while ignoring everything else and it only took me about an hour to finish the remaining 30% of the total progress.

Now I just have to finish the actual story. Apparently I hadn't explored well enough around the initial clue, but better late than never.

BTW, there are multiple endings. It's really set up well, though. You don't have to really replay hardly anything to get all the endings. Well, except for one, but you don't have to start over or anything. You can also get all the endings but continue to play the game if there is anything left undone that you want to do.

I'm glad you liked it so much. I've played it through, starting with early access, at least 3 times, and now I'm going to play the DLC planet.

 

[Pifanjr]

I had to go into the office yesterday, so I decided to play some Balatro on the bus. I'd decided to give up on unlocking everything myself and used the "unlock all" button in the settings instead. So I've been doing gold stake runs with the erratic deck and I've been really enjoying it. It's nice having all of the jokers available without having to grind them. I've had a couple of decent runs, but with the rental, perishable and eternal stickers it becomes really hard to get a proper set of jokers.

BTW, there are multiple endings. It's really set up well, though. You don't have to really replay hardly anything to get all the endings. Well, except for one, but you don't have to start over or anything. You can also get all the endings but continue to play the game if there is anything left undone that you want to do.

I'm glad you liked it so much. I've played it through, starting with early access, at least 3 times, and now I'm going to play the DLC planet.

Interesting, so far I haven't really had any indications of there being multiple endings.

I'm not really sure why I got so into it. Especially since I missed the story, the game really just hooked me with it's core gameplay loop. I've definitely had moments where the game felt tedious, but there is an almost constant stream of new unlocks or new areas that unlock such that I almost constantly have multiple things on my to-do list. However, there's no time pressure to complete anything, so I can just switch between different projects, which works really well for me.

In fact, I noticed the worst parts of the game were the parts where I couldn't switch between projects. Gathering larvae and putting them in incubators was a pain because both of them involve a bunch of waiting around, but not so much waiting around you can do something else in the mean time. Setting up all of the ore excavators was a bother as well because it involved a lot of travelling back and forth, though it honestly took less time than I thought and it was very much worth it.

I was also worried that finishing the terraforming process would be a grind, since I had nothing else left to work on, but once I figured out what to prioritise it went pretty quickly.

 

[ZedClampet]

Especially since I missed the story

The story was more of an end-game thing for me other than the emails. I would ask some questions to figure out what you've found, but I don't want to spoil anything even though there isn't all that much to it except for some fun exploration.

As far as the endings go, they aren't dependent on anything you do while terraforming. They are more of a final choice. My suggestion is not to make a choice right away. Have you unlocked the trade rocket yet? I'm assuming so. How about the portal?