The Currently Playing & Random Game Thoughts Thread (14 August to 20 August)

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I had a RAT 6 for a couple of years, until the click gave out. Definitely the coolest mouse I've ever had, but I wouldn't buy it for myself—got it as a pressie if I recall correctly, and I stopped fiddling with the adjustments once they got old after a week or so.

My current rodent is Logi's MX Master—the original, not later v2 or v3 models.
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It is the perfect one for me, so I got a 2nd one to have ready when this one fails.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
So, I can finally talk about Death Stranding without giving away the surprise in the quiz. This is certainly an oddball game - one that doesn't fit in any genre.

The basic gameplay loop is doing deliveries. You'll be given some packages, and you need to hoof it out to a station or dwelling of some sort. There will be obstacles, of course. At first, simply keeping your balance while climbing over rocks with a 50kg pack on your back will be plenty. Bandits may come after you. Timefall, a type of rain that ages your packages, can make you move quicker. Worst of all are the BTs - mostly-invisible ghosts that hang around in the timefall rains. They will try to grab you and pull you (or at least some of your packages) down to the ground, then they will kill you. Nasty so & so's. And all you can do at the start of the game is hold your breath and try to keep out of their way.

To help you on your way, you can plop down stakes with ropes on them to help you climb down. Ladders are even more useful, letting you easily go up, down, or over small streams. Later on, you can build bridges, electric generators, highways, and more. Then there's BB. BB is a fetus that looks to be about ready for birthing. You wear BB in a mechanical womb over your belly. BB is able to control a little scanner thing that will point toward the nearest BT ghost when they are close. (Yes, this game is from Kojima. Metal Gear Solid may be odd, but this is Kojima unleashed!)

So, eventually you get where you're trying to go. When you do, you can get that place on the psychedelic network thing that America is setting up. When that happens, the game picks out a bunch of other players and you can suddenly see and use their ladders and whatnot as well as your own! This is a bit odd at first. You hike your way in, carefully picking out the best place for structures, then you turn around to go back after the delivery and there's almost a dozen ropes and ladders! This is a feature you can turn off, so your stuff is visible to others, but you don't see anyone else's stuff.

You can make further deliveries between the various locations to up their level of appreciation. That will earn you some nice things. Doing deliveries well can increase your stats, too, so you can carry more, balance better, and so on.

Oh, and another unique thing: dead bodies go boom here. Biiiig badda boom! Big enough to leave a crater the size of a small town. Non-lethal is definitely the way to go in this game. You're special, though. If you die, you leave a much smaller crater, then come back to life. It makes the setting even more unique. Those bandits, for instance, will only knock you out and steal your cargo - they aren't dumb enough to try and kill you.

I'm enjoying it a lot! In fact, I should probably be a lot further along in the game than I am, but I'm having too much fun making deliveries, finding out-of-the-way contacts, and building up the area. (And taking the occasional, confusing screenshot. ;))
 
You digitally painted that? That's great, man!
By the way, I don't actually paint. Well, I do, but just little bits and pieces here and there. I've never had any training, so I just made up a method that works for me. I look at the picture and see the different shades and shadows, and then I'll draw an area that matches as closely as possible to, for instance, an area that has the same level of brightness. Of course this is on it's own layer. And then I fill the area with an appropriate color, then draw another shape on another layer. I'm basically making puzzle pieces. Eventually I piece them all together and use blurs and paint dabs with low intensity to blend it all together.
 
you turn around to go back after the delivery and there's almost a dozen ropes and ladders
That's one of the things which caught my eye when I first read about DS—sort of a co-op but with people playing at different times whom you never meet… or do you? Anyway, very interesting concept.

taking the occasional, confusing screenshot
Sneaky devil! I'm cheering for the BT ghosts :devilish:
 
By the way, I don't actually paint. Well, I do, but just little bits and pieces here and there. I've never had any training, so I just made up a method that works for me. I look at the picture and see the different shades and shadows, and then I'll draw an area that matches as closely as possible to, for instance, an area that has the same level of brightness. Of course this is on it's own layer. And then I fill the area with an appropriate color, then draw another shape on another layer. I'm basically making puzzle pieces. Eventually I piece them all together and use blurs and paint dabs with low intensity to blend it all together.

Doesn't make it any less impressive. If anything, making up your own technique like that is even more impressive.
 
Not really on topic but bite me

Seems a Janet Jackson song can crash HDD

Eventually, someone applied their massive brain to the problem and worked out that, rather than being a response from the laptop to the quality of the music, the tune contained the resonant frequency of the victim’s 5,400 RPM hard drive, so playing the song near it caused the platters to wobble, contact the drive head, and crash.


Shame its a song from 1989 and won't suddenly cause an outbreak of crashing hdd unless someone knows...

I wonder how many hdds have crashed to that song in all the years until now.
 
Its a problem that would have been more obvious 33 years ago than it is now. I wonder how close the music has to be to drive to cause it, as likely to have been played on radios in the 1990's but as time goes on, the chances of a PC having a hdd and being near song have decreased.
 
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By the way, I don't actually paint. Well, I do, but just little bits and pieces here and there. I've never had any training, so I just made up a method that works for me. I look at the picture and see the different shades and shadows, and then I'll draw an area that matches as closely as possible to, for instance, an area that has the same level of brightness. Of course this is on it's own layer. And then I fill the area with an appropriate color, then draw another shape on another layer. I'm basically making puzzle pieces. Eventually I piece them all together and use blurs and paint dabs with low intensity to blend it all together.
So you take a picture and put a layer over it, then kind of trace the picture with those "puzzle pieces"? That's pretty cool. I've never thought about doing something like that. I've manipulated the actual pictures before, but never thought to use a layer for tracing.
 
So you take a picture and put a layer over it, then kind of trace the picture with those "puzzle pieces"? That's pretty cool. I've never thought about doing something like that. I've manipulated the actual pictures before, but never thought to use a layer for tracing.
No, I don't trace it. I just look off of the picture and draw my pieces separately. I suppose I could trace it, but I wouldn't find that as much fun. It took a lot of practice, but I'm strangely good at looking at shapes and being able to recreate them with the free-form select tool. So after I have a shape created with the select tool, then fill it with an appropriate color, which I make with the color mixer. Took me forever to figure out how to get skin tones with it, but a video that @Colif posted about the color orange actually helped me tremendously.
 
Considering Slipgate Ironworks' 90s-focused portfolio (Rise of the Triad, Rad Rodgers, Tempest Rising), what are the chances that their next game will be a point-and-click adventure game without the modernizations Telltale introduced?
Their games always look so good, but I've never tried one. They seem a little too action focused to do an old-fashioned point & click, but you never know...
 
No, I don't trace it. I just look off of the picture and draw my pieces separately. I suppose I could trace it, but I wouldn't find that as much fun. It took a lot of practice, but I'm strangely good at looking at shapes and being able to recreate them with the free-form select tool. So after I have a shape created with the select tool, then fill it with an appropriate color, which I make with the color mixer. Took me forever to figure out how to get skin tones with it, but a video that @Colif posted about the color orange actually helped me tremendously.
So when you said you don't "paint" the picture, you just meant that you don't use brush strokes to do it. If you're just looking at the picture and creating that, that's pretty impressive.
 
OT: What do you all think of the real world "Line" city being planned by Saudi Arabia as shown in this Christopher Livingston article?


Just ignoring the political side of Saudi Arabia and all their other nonsense, that city as depicted in the video just looks amazing to me. I've always loved sci-fi cities. If they really do build that, I would be very tempted to pay it a visit just to marvel at it.
 
I need @Brian Boru to get a job with Playground Games. Surely any game he got involved with would let me add notes to each vehicle. Also, if it's not too much trouble, can you add something that lets me add an icon to the car pictures, like an icon for each kind of racing (road, street, rally, off-road) so that I can tell from a glance what kind of racing I set each car up for?

Thanks. Let me know when you are done.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
That's one of the things which caught my eye when I first read about DS—sort of a co-op but with people playing at different times whom you never meet… or do you? Anyway, very interesting concept.
Not properly meet. You can do some sort of linking of accounts, though, so the linked person's stuff is more likely to show up in your game. That should make it more fun for friends playing at the same time.

There's some sort of 'shout' command where, every now and again, somebody will shout back but I'm dubious the shouts really go out to other players. I've yet to hear another player shout.

Sneaky devil! I'm cheering for the BT ghosts :devilish:
I are a rebel, I are! Fight the powers that be!! ;)
 
Not properly meet. You can do some sort of linking of accounts, though, so the linked person's stuff is more likely to show up in your game. That should make it more fun for friends playing at the same time.

There's some sort of 'shout' command where, every now and again, somebody will shout back but I'm dubious the shouts really go out to other players. I've yet to hear another player shout.

I are a rebel, I are! Fight the powers that be!! ;)

I played a few hours of Death Stranding and liked it, still meaning to go back but I felt its a game to be played in larger chunks than I can manage at the moment.

The whole messaging thing really made me think that Kojima must have played a Dark Souls game and decided to take that whole system of non direct kind of communication further, and actually incorporate it so that you can affect others game world, sort similar to world tendency in Demons Souls in a way I suppose, but more kind of directly tangible in game (boiling hot take, the last part).
 
I'm not being maudlin when I say that I'm sick of my terrible car liveries in Forza. I'm just pointing out that, on average, they are horrible, and that's pretty much what I expected when I started doing them. I'm just not good at graphic design. I've had fun doing them, but I'm going to start downloading other people's designs because I like having nice looking cars better than I like carefully crafting abominations. It's a close call, but I'm going with downloading for now.
 
I need @Brian Boru to get a job with Playground Games
Oh hey, a spa town—I like me some mineral water! Big digital town too, with Ubisoft, EA, Activision activity among a bunch of others in the playground—that should mean relative job security, I mean what game doesn't need extra notes in it, right?

if it's not too much trouble
For you? Pffft, perish the thought.

Let me know when you are done
I'm done.

system of non direct kind of communication
There was something like that in The Talos Principle, people could spray graffiti on walls to help—or I assume lead astray—other players. I didn't look into it at the time…

I'm just not good at graphic design
Cars are bald, right? There's a guy here who's almost a master at either painting or not painting—yeah, he's confused—bald stuff. Just use search for 'Posts which don't make much sense', skip mine, and you should 'ave 'im..
 
I'm done.
I don't think you are. Quit being lazy. What's the problem, travel to England? I can arrange travel. I'll even punch holes in the FedEx box. You're responsible for your own snacks and drinks. Um, the cargo area in FedEx planes aren't very well pressurized and are unheated, so take that into consideration as you prepare to leave. Also, I don't want to drive all the way up to where you are, so if you could have your girlfriend seal you up in the box that would be great. Oh, tell her not to forget the holes.
 
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