July 2024 Game Discussion Thread

[Pifanjr]

I've played a bunch more PokéRogue. I had a good run that once again ended at a trainer with a boss Pokémon that was faster than all of my Pokémon while hitting like a truck. I actually had a decent counter Pokémon for it, but it was at 10% health from the last battle.

I should probably spend more effort on planning my team composition if I want to beat the game. As well as making sure my Pokémon are healed once I reach the late game, so I don't get caught without a counter again.

 

[ZedClampet]

I've played a bunch more PokéRogue. I had a good run that once again ended at a trainer with a boss Pokémon that was faster than all of my Pokémon while hitting like a truck. I actually had a decent counter Pokémon for it, but it was at 10% health from the last battle.

I should probably spend more effort on planning my team composition if I want to beat the game. As well as making sure my Pokémon are healed once I reach the late game, so I don't get caught without a counter again.

hmm, this reminds me of bullpen strategies in baseball. I might actually enjoy that if it were on PC.

 

[Pifanjr]

hmm, this reminds me of bullpen strategies in baseball. I might actually enjoy that if it were on PC.

Do you mean if PokéRogue is on PC? Because it's a fan project that runs in a browser at https://pokerogue.net, you can try it out for free.

If you do try it out, I would suggest at least turning on Type Hints in the display options, which highlights which moves are extra effective or less effective against the opponent's type. Sadly it only shows it for the active Pokémon, so it still helps to have a chart open for when you're switching, but it's still a great improvement.

---

I just defeated the elite four and reached the champion, whose first Pokémon again outsped me. Luckily I survived the first hit and managed to KO their Pokémon in a single hit. Unluckily their Pokémon had a passive ability that does damage to the attacker, KO'ing my Pokémon as well.

I still had a decent chance until they pulled out a buffed up Lapras and I failed to KO it in one shot with my Pikachu, after which it healed almost entirely back up to full and I had nothing left to defeat it.

I had one Pokémon throughout this run that became almost entirely useless because I never got the item to evolve it. The problem is that at high levels wild Pokémon become almost impossible to catch, so I wasn't able to replace it. I'll have to keep a closer eye on that the next run.

 

[neogunhero]

More Death Stranding last night. I’m grinding out the very beginning of the game to the point where I barely have made any progression. I finally unlocked a generator to charge a bike I found and rode that thing until the wheels fell off. Unfortunately I haven’t unlocked the ability to make a new bike yet so now I’m back to walking like a chump. I’ve almost 5-starred all of the facilities I’ve unlocked so far, just working on the Wind Farm and Geoff Keighley’s house. I’m having too much fun just doing the deliveries that I keep forgetting to do the next story mission.

A few songs from the CP2077 soundtrack somehow wormed their way into my Spotify rotation and now I’ve got an urge to play it again. I really want to and go a completely different approach than just a Katana wielding cyberpsycho, maybe a more stealthy approach or a Smart Weapon build if I want to play on my controller, but I’m already so invested into DS that I feel like I shouldn’t start a different game yet. Besides, I got my Summer Sale purchases I need to play through.

 

[ZedClampet]

A few songs from the CP2077 soundtrack somehow wormed their way into my Spotify rotation and now I’ve got an urge to play it again.

There's a song that one of the radio shows I listen to plays every now and then that sounds like it almost has to be from CP2077, but I've listened to YouTube playlists but there are over 5 hours of songs in the game, and I'm not finding it.

I've asked for help on the sports forum because there are other people there who listen to that same radio show. Hopefully someone will know what it is.

I know I like the Grimes song 4 am.

 

[neogunhero]

There's a song that one of the radio shows I listen to plays every now and then that sounds like it almost has to be from CP2077, but I've listened to YouTube playlists but there are over 5 hours of songs in the game, and I'm not finding it.

I've asked for help on the sports forum because there are other people there who listen to that same radio show. Hopefully someone will know what it is.

I know I like the Grimes song 4 am.

The one song that’s getting played the most on my playlist is Major Crimes by HEALTH. I’m not really into industrial music, but I saw a live performance of that song by them on YouTube and immediately had to add it.

As much as I love a great video game OST score, I also really enjoy it when they use “real” bands and artists to make the music for games. My favorite example of this is the Red Dead 2 soundtrack. Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age does a cover of a Willie Nelson track and it’s amazing.

 

[ZedClampet]

The one song that’s getting played the most on my playlist is Major Crimes by HEALTH. I’m not really into industrial music, but I saw a live performance of that song by them on YouTube and immediately had to add it.

As much as I love a great video game OST score, I also really enjoy it when they use “real” bands and artists to make the music for games. My favorite example of this is the Red Dead 2 soundtrack. Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age does a cover of a Willie Nelson track and it’s amazing.

Well, I'm glad I didn't spend all day listening to the Cyberpunk catalogue of music because someone from the radio station told me that because this show also streams to YouTube that they have to use royalty free music, and that the song I'm referring to is a royalty free phonk song, like these:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOjfw8Z0u0Y&list=PL7pkSK1xbGD6y-RilgjOOpeExLav98m9c

They weren't sure the exact title of the song and said they were looking for it, which is a lot more work than I wanted anyone to do on my behalf today, so be careful what you post to the sports forum is the moral of the story.

I would be embarrassed that the song I'm looking for is generic, royalty free music, but I never claimed to have any sort of refined music taste

 

[DXCHASE]

Star Trek: Borg - Remastered

Play Star Trek: Borg online, remastered to HD quality.

borgremastered.com

Is there a remaster of the Klingon FMV from the same time? I loved playing both as a kid, but i liked the Klingon one waaay more.




So my new news for July so far is i have been playing the F2P game The First Descendent. Its kinda up my ally as a game (third-person looter shooter / powers like Destiny). Its... ok. I really havent done much in the game, but its fun. Not anything like a Destiny killer or something, it reminds me a lot of Warframe but hey its free. Yes there are a lot of MTXs, nothing that you need for the game.

Its also kinda unoptimized because with my rig of a 4080S with ray tracing at max, im only getting about 60 fps in the hub at 3440x1440. I get FPS drops through the map as im running around, its less significant if i roam an area solo (You can choose to play between by yourself or with the general population) but it doesnt run terrible anywhere for me so thats a plus these days.

 

[Johnway]

Just getting warmed up with Dark Souls 3. i decided since its early days i could in theory play as embered for the early bits at least. I've got to the point i've defeated vordt of the boreal valley, but as to where the hell i'm going i have no idea. i might go into the church and face off against the other boss whilst i'm still fully embered (not going to win, but hey, lets see whats there). I hope i don't get ganked so early on in the game by invaders...

When i first started i got stuck where i was supposed to go. Got to the firelink shrine and then your quest begins. unfortuantely the game does a really piss poor job imo as to where you go next. hell, i beat the samurai guy outside before i realised i had to use the teleport. A bit embarrassing tbh. Would have been nice to have some sort of portal to link to the walls or something.

All said and done, i'm not entirely sure i want to play DS3 as my summer game, it takes some serious commitment and i had hoped for something a little more gentle and relaxing.

an update on the humble bundle voucher dilema. i decided to get dave the diver out of impulse and stop thinking too much about it. What made it worse was perhaps it took a fair bit of time for me to accrue that much free credit and i had hoped to save it for a rainy day for that special game. Oh well, its done now so i'll move on.

 

[ZedClampet]

To put a bow on it, here was the song I was thinking might be a Cyberpunk2077 song. I'd only heard the first few seconds that were played as the radio show started...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWCNpCHeMf0

 

[ZedClampet]

Because Microsoft is terrible at what it does, the voice-over lines in Evil West weren't playing on my Epos headset. All the advice online was for an old version of Xbox Game/Pass, Game Bar, and the options to change the settings don't seem to be there anymore, so I changed headsets, and it worked.

 

[ZedClampet]

@neogunhero Played Evil West on Game Pass. I may be getting people confused, but I thought I remembered that you liked Strange Brigade, and this reminds me a lot of that game. Might be worth a try for you. Combat is hectic and fun, and the story, what there is of it, is fairly entertaining.

I don't know if it's my lack of sleep, but the game has a lot of melee combos that you can use when not shooting, and they are kind of difficult for me to remember, so I've just specialized on a couple and use my guns a lot.

 

[neogunhero]

@neogunhero Played Evil West on Game Pass. I may be getting people confused, but I thought I remembered that you liked Strange Brigade, and this reminds me a lot of that game. Might be worth a try for you. Combat is hectic and fun, and the story, what there is of it, is fairly entertaining.

I don't know if it's my lack of sleep, but the game has a lot of melee combos that you can use when not shooting, and they are kind of difficult for me to remember, so I've just specialized on a couple and use my guns a lot.

Strange Brigade was definitely a … strange game, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I may have to check out Evil West sometime, I do like me some third person shooters.

---

---

After turning on some anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering options in the Nvidia Control Panel for Death Stranding, I somehow unlocked the ability to configure the AA settings in game. Previously it was set to TAA On but greyed out and I assume it wasn’t actually on.

Well I turned it off and on and it seems to have done the trick. This particular screenshot is from a shot of Sam where the lighting is slightly better and more cinematic than while actually playing, but you can see the AA jaggies are nearly gone.

Spoiler: Sam Porter Bridges AA Test

Looks a lot better now, I’m happy.

 

[ZedClampet]

I'm going to stop posting until I get some sleep. I'm posting in the wrong threads pretty consistently, forgetting what I've posted, etc. I've probably made @BeardyHat mad by seeming to ignore his post in CMCC, among other things. With any luck I'll get some sleep later tonight, but I'm not counting on it.

 

[Frindis]

🤔This is not how I remember playing HL2:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7LD4BrEvGg

 

[BeardyHat]

I'm going to stop posting until I get some sleep. I'm posting in the wrong threads pretty consistently, forgetting what I've posted, etc. I've probably made @BeardyHat mad by seeming to ignore his post in CMCC, among other things. With any luck I'll get some sleep later tonight, but I'm not counting on it.

I'm so mad right now. So mad.

I haven't really even looked at the forum in several days, as this week has just been daunting and relentless for me. Even right now, I ought to read through the threads and catch-up, but it seems like an enormous hurdle I'll try and tackle later...

To keep this tangentially related: I haven't played Yakuza: Like a Dragon for a couple of days now. Again, seems daunting. So I've been just playing Desert Golfing on my phone, I'm at something like hole 320 now. Otherwise, I fired-up Transport Fever 2 again and that's been nice to just focus working out the kinks in my supply; still working on a map I started about a year ago and have almost completely covered in trains and cars.

 

[neogunhero]

🤔This is not how I remember playing HL2:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7LD4BrEvGg

I wonder why they turn all the graphics settings to minimum. Surely it can’t be for performance reasons, maybe it makes it easier to see where they’re going. The fullbright nodes replacing all the dynamic lighting is making me laugh, it makes the game look like crappy custom Garry’s Mod maps

 

[ZedClampet]

I may have just seen a developer rage quite during a Steam livestream. She was sneaking (crouch walking) along with her NPC party, but for some reason she had the camera only on her and the party, so I couldn't tell why she was sneaking, and she was speaking in Japanese, so that didn't help me. This went on for awhile until she accidentally snuck off a cliff.

She didn't take that much fall damage, though, and she looked back up and her party members were now engaged in a fight with a giant monster of some type, so she took off running down the road. I assumed she was trying to find a way back up, but there didn't seem to be one. She ran and ran, and then suddenly the stream ended. Maybe another developer was watching and thought, "Okay, this isn't going so good" and cut it off. Or it could have just been a network error. Steam has been full of those recently.

 

[BeardyHat]

Happy to hear it is good, have been keeping my eyes on it. Speaking of Stark Trek, this might be of interest: https://borgremastered.com/ Is a fan-made remaster of the full-motion game from the 90's called Star Trek: Borg.


@BeardyHat The Dragon Kart races in Yakuza: Like a Dragon was fun. Did not get far in the game, probably because my Xbox Pass expired, but I remember collecting some caches around town, trying to sing (which I was terrible at), and never being able to win at the catcher claw games. Some of the quests were also fun, "find the peeing guy" was such a typical Yakuza moment for me.

Borg sounds pretty neat. I still need to give Star Trek: Bridge Commander a try. I bought it a couple of months ago, installed the fan patches and the like, but haven't done more than fire up the game once to see if it worked.

Your body will be explaining the difference to you soon. Oh, and have you ever wondered what would happen if you ignored the instructions on a bottle of laxative and just took the whole thing over the course of a few hours?

Oh, I've had arthritis in since I was a teen, so I have a good idea! Though I did just start feeling some carpal tunnel, but wearing a brace to bed has seemed to mostly resolve it.

Helped my wife through a colonoscopy and really not looking forward to that. But I did just read an article by a parent who had one and described it as almost blissful, since all she could do was sit by herself, in her room and read. Maybe I should setup a bi-monthly schedule...

Oh, the Brits made a comedy since Young Ones and Red Dwarf? Huh. Guess that makes sense.

You haven't seen Peep Show or That Mitchell and Webb Look?

Just getting warmed up with Dark Souls 3. i decided since its early days i could in theory play as embered for the early bits at least. I've got to the point i've defeated vordt of the boreal valley, but as to where the hell i'm going i have no idea. i might go into the church and face off against the other boss whilst i'm still fully embered (not going to win, but hey, lets see whats there). I hope i don't get ganked so early on in the game by invaders...

When i first started i got stuck where i was supposed to go. Got to the firelink shrine and then your quest begins. unfortuantely the game does a really piss poor job imo as to where you go next. hell, i beat the samurai guy outside before i realised i had to use the teleport. A bit embarrassing tbh. Would have been nice to have some sort of portal to link to the walls or something.

All said and done, i'm not entirely sure i want to play DS3 as my summer game, it takes some serious commitment and i had hoped for something a little more gentle and relaxing.

I do recall being confused for awhile with DS3 as to where to go and at this point, it's been so long since I played (which, given my memory, could be a couple of days or a decade), I can't remember where you're supposed to go. The church definitely isn't the correct way; I do believe there's either a teleport or a bird that grabs you and flies you to a new place after Vordt.

One more day until I start the drive back home; looking forward to being done with travel for quite awhile. But one thing being in the Southwest makes me want to do is play Red Dead Redemption 2; I still haven't indulged yet, as I'm still enjoying Yakuza here and there and don't feel like I have the bandwidth for two story driven games. Hell, I barely have the bandwidth for the one; really looking forward to being back in my own space and hopefully having some to myself or at least, time where I'm not running around all day every day.

Should also say: I have had a little bit of time to play some stuff. My friend gave me his old 2016ish gaming laptop a few months ago and I've been bringing it on these trips so my kids can play Minecraft and such. Last week I bought Forza 4 Horizon (Forza Horizon 4?) and I've been playing through that a bit while they watch and unlocking some cars for them. We also had some family time the other day and everyone wanted to watch me play some more Lies of P, where we made it to the final boss, who seems to be pretty damned tough. I'll just have to keep banging my head against him and will hopefully eek out a win and finally finish this game. Next family game will maybe be Elden Ring...

 

[BeardyHat]

Here we go. Just finished paying off my "new" laptop and now I've once again used Paypal Credit to buy myself an upgrade for it. It came with a 512Gb SSD, which has been fine for now, but ever since I got my eGPU, I've been struggling with space issues, since I can now play bigger games.

I try not to keep too much installed at once, but it'll be nice to be able to keep many of these 100Gb games installed, not needing to constantly remove stuff and fiddle with space to install something new.

 

[Frindis]

Borg sounds pretty neat. I still need to give Star Trek: Bridge Commander a try. I bought it a couple of months ago, installed the fan patches and the like, but haven't done more than fire up the game once to see if it worked.

He looks a bit like Khajiit

 

[BeardyHat]

He looks a bit like Khajiit

Picard has wares if you have coin

 

[ZedClampet]

I thought, "Hey, my new warehouse employee has already picked everything up from the street!"

I guess I should have explained what shelves were for.

 

[Pifanjr]

I have reached part II of Marvel: Midnight Suns. I'm starting to get bored of the game a bit, but the story, dialogue and abbey mysteries keep me interested.

And it's not that I'm not enjoying the gameplay, it's just that I have so many other great games on my backlog that I'm starting to get impatient with how long it's taking me to finish this one.

---

I've also played a bunch more PokéRogue, but haven't been very serious with it. I'm just trying out some different Pokémon and strategies to see what works and what doesn't.

My main problem is that there are far too many Pokémon and there is no way to easily tell in-game which ones are good and which ones suck. So I have to look up each Pokémon I encounter to see if it's worth catching, which slows down the game. Or I have to just catch them and try them out myself, which keeps the game going but also means I lose runs because my Pokémon suck.

Luckily I've played the first three generations of the official Pokémon games, so I can usually make a pretty decent guess whether a Pokémon might be worth using, which means I don't have to look up every single Pokémon I see.

 

[ZedClampet]

I have reached part II of Marvel: Midnight Suns. I'm starting to get bored of the game a bit, but the story, dialogue and abbey mysteries keep me interested.

And it's not that I'm not enjoying the gameplay, it's just that I have so many other great games on my backlog that I'm starting to get impatient with how long it's taking me to finish this one.

---

I've also played a bunch more PokéRogue, but haven't been very serious with it. I'm just trying out some different Pokémon and strategies to see what works and what doesn't.

My main problem is that there are far too many Pokémon and there is no way to easily tell in-game which ones are good and which ones suck. So I have to look up each Pokémon I encounter to see if it's worth catching, which slows down the game. Or I have to just catch them and try them out myself, which keeps the game going but also means I lose runs because my Pokémon suck.

Luckily I've played the first three generations of the official Pokémon games, so I can usually make a pretty decent guess whether a Pokémon might be worth using, which means I don't have to look up every single Pokémon I see.

I played some PokeRogue. First run didn't go so good because I was still figuring out the controls and left with only 1 Pokemon. I'm still figuring out how to tell exactly what is going on during battle.