The Currently Playing & Random Game Thoughts Thread (May 22 to May 28)

[ZedClampet]

I played a little bit of my nemesis, Osiris New Dawn.

On thinking about it further, I have to admit I'm impressed by their commitment to having and "Easy" difficulty, but if I'd known you were immortal on easy, I'd have picked something else.

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Played some more Ghost Exile last night. The thing that irritates me the most with this game and also Phasmophobia is the activity meter in the trailer. The way we play the games is that one person buys all the equipment and then helps inside the house for awhile, but when things start to get really dangerous, they go back to the trailer and watch the cameras and the activity meter. That way, there's less of a chance that they die and lose all that equipment.

So watching the cameras is fine and fairly helpful to the team, but watching the activity meter is absolutely useless. The meter goes from 0 to 10, and at 10 the entity starts hunting (trying to kill you). The problem is that it can go instantly from 0 to 10, so there's not really any point to tracking it. If it went up quickly, that would be fine, but to instantly go to 10 from 0 is a problem and really not fair to the players. And to make matters even worse, it doesn't even seem to relate to anything. We've had paranormal events happen at any activity rating.

Our last mission ended poorly. I was the one with the equipment. I was in the house when the ghost hunted, and actually was about to die when my son ran between me and the ghost and took one for the team. We already knew what the ghost was, and we were experiencing a bug where the game wasn't understanding our speech all of a sudden, so I told my daughter we should just leave, but she said she wanted to try to take a picture of the ghost for the bonus points. She's normally the biggest chicken of the group. My son and I laugh at her because every time anything even slightly paranormal happens, she runs to the nearest closet and hides. So I was watching from the cameras when she went back into the house. Activity was at 0. She took about three steps and yelled, "Old Man Jenkins sucks!" The ghost instantly appeared and killed her. It was so sudden she didn't even get a picture.

It was kind of amusing, but that was the first mission we did where we lost two people and didn't get any bonus objectives at all, but that was because of the speech bug. Had we still been able to communicate with the entity, we'd have drawn a protection symbol in the correct room and stopped him from hunting for awhile and probably not lost anyone.

 

[Ryzengang]

So, I got Baldur's Gate 3 as a graduation gift from my brother and we started playing some of it last night. I'm having a ton of fun with it, and it's great for coop. It's still early access (probably for another year or so, I'm guessing), so there's definitely some jank, but it's a very good experience nonetheless. It has definitely renewed my interest in trying Divinity Original Sin 2, which has been in my backlog since the Jurassic era

 

[Zloth]

No idea how you play PvP in Farming Simulator....

Oh, it can be done. Maybe use an herbicide that requires a genetically modified crop to survive, and... ooops, some of the herbicide blew over to your neighbor's crop! Well shucks!

Or maybe you can plant a few acres of these?

View: https://youtu.be/D9635AJSvZk?t=321

Be sure to dupe your opponent into getting one of those scent immersion things.

 

[ZedClampet]

Oh, it can be done. Maybe use an herbicide that requires a genetically modified crop to survive, and... ooops, some of the herbicide blew over to your neighbor's crop! Well shucks!

Or maybe you can plant a few acres of these?

View: https://youtu.be/D9635AJSvZk?t=321

Be sure to dupe your opponent into getting one of those scent immersion things.

Our local agricultural college had one of those (still does, I guess), and when it bloomed, people lined up to go in and smell it. I was not one of those persons.

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Played more house husband than gamer today, but I did play some Car Mechanic 21. Had some problems modding some files. There are 2 kinds of cars in the game: the ones that came with the game at launch and DLC cars. The launch cars are all fictional. They are really nice, though, and I haven't counted, but there's probably around 100. The DLC cars are all real world cars.

So I have bought and repaired all the base game cars and decided to work on the DLC. It's been awhile since I played, and I needed to change all the car files to make sure that only the DLC cars showed up in the junkyard, otherwise I'd never get them all. But after I finished modifying the files, I kept finding the wrong cars at the junkyard. I finally figured out that the developer had added a setting that basically said all cars can be found everywhere, including the junkyard (my favorite), and that was overwriting the individual car files, so I just had to turn that off. Had me stumped for minute there.

The reason I like the junkyard is because if you get the cars at the dealership, nothing needs fixing, and the auction is similar but tends to be overpriced as well. And barn finds are just unlikely. The junkyard is cheap and every single piece of the car needs to be repaired or replaced.

That's basically all I do in the game now. Buy cars at the junkyard. Fix them up. Take them to the racetrack and get a few times. Then sell the car. You can also take customer repair orders, but once I reached max level, I stopped doing that.

 

[Pifanjr]

I've been playing a bunch of Angband again. My mage character that found one of the Elven rings of power very early in the game died after being one-shotted around a corner with a breath attack. Very much my mistake though, the same enemy had already gotten me down to 2HP earlier with a single attack, I was just greedy and hoped I could teleport them away to get to the treasure. I thought I had enough speed boosts, but didnt actually check their speed.

My next character, also a mage, struggled the entire game until I got stuck between some enemies and only discovered my staff of teleportation was gone when I pressed the button combination for using it and used a different staff instead and then immediately died.

While mages probably have the highest potential, the early game is hard and I didnt really feel like doing that again, so I asked for recommendations (I play on Angband.live which has a chat with other players) and got encouraged to try the competition, which is to use a dunedain priest.

I proceeded to die several times as I had only been playing ranged characters lately and priests are melee focused for the early game until they get their ranged damage spell. My latest one did find some magic sling ammo though, so it's going a bit better now.

Another rule from the competition however is that you have to turn off connected stairs. Normally if you go down a level in a dungeon you start the new level on top of stairs leading up. Since monsters do not travel between dungeon levels and each dungeon level regenerates when you enter, you can use this to go up and down as long as you like until you find a safe level. With the new rule, you basically just get dumped in a random spot in the dungeon every time you go down and you have to hope it isn't too dangerous (or rather, be prepared for when it is, as the game takes long enough that any repeated risk will get you killed eventually).

 

[ZedClampet]

Had plans to work outside today, but it rained, so I've been goofing around in some games. Played a little Stellaris for the first time and really, really enjoyed it. Found the tutorial lacking, so I just ignored it and started trying to do stuff. Went pretty well. I have the sinking suspicion that I should be paying more attention to my military, though. Also, I played awhile before realizing I should be researching technologies. Eh, it's my first playthrough. Don't really care if I lose.

I'm really getting into the 4X genre now, but I'm a little ambivalent about actually finishing the games. I think I like the early game the best.

 

[Zloth]

I'm really getting into the 4X genre now, but I'm a little ambivalent about actually finishing the games. I think I like the early game the best.

I hear that! Sometimes late game can be a terrible slog. You know you're going to win - you're more powerful in every respect than the others. But you still have to keep going until you're dominance is ridiculous before the game will admit defeat! Sometimes I'll play to the end just to get the achievement, other times I'll declare victory on my own and play something else.

 

[Brian Boru]

the 4X genre now, but I'm a little ambivalent about actually finishing the games. I think I like the early game the best

Yeah, you've probably seen me say it before here, late game is not where it's at in 4x. Which isn't a problem as long as it's procedurally generated, heavily customizable, and has a good mod scene.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I recently played a bunch of Civ4—wild guess say 50 games, of which I know I finished 2. Same with Crysis & Warhead, plus Far Cry 1, 3, 5 and New Dawn—second half or ending not enjoyable for me, so I don't complete 'em.

Bit like the backlog discussion going on in another thread, no reason to play part of a game just cos it's there!

4x is structurally deficient in that way as a genre tho. Late game you have a load of cities or planets, a load of units, and are involved with every other AI. It's just too much most of the time, one turn taking 5 minutes with rarely any big motivation to stick with it.

So enjoy the early parts, then reroll a new different game and enjoy that too