Just finished Rakuen not too long ago and I love(d) it. The game play is really simple, any of the puzzles are simple enough, the music is for the most part pretty solid, and the story was pretty good. Nothing to complain about besides how short it is.
Not sure what the next big game I’ll be playing is, but I have been thinking about saying screw it and playing Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters again.
I’m favoring h265 10-bit for my library recently. Whether SDR or not, it seems to provide a slightly better compression ratio and fewer banding artifacts than 8-bit. Any player that can handle 4K streaming content can decode h265 10-bit, so there’s a ton of forward compatibility for the foreseeable future
Final Fantasy VII. I love the franchise, but never got far into VII. Played through it so I could have an opinion on it, so I could see what I was missing. I ended up very disappointed.
Mass Effect Andromeda. The reviews convinced me I’d hate it, but I couldn’t stand the thought of possibly missing some lore after I loved the first 3 so much. Turns out it was actually pretty good.
No Man’s Sky. It looked slow and grindy but people kept hyping it up. I caved, and forced myself to play 20 hours trying to find the good bits. I never found them.
I think the hate for Andromeda was a little overblown. I enjoyed the heck out of the game, regardless of any weird facial expressions! It of course was never going to live up to the original trilogy but it stood out on its own in a lot of positive ways
No Man’s Sky. It looked slow and grindy but people kept hyping it up. I caved, and forced myself to play 20 hours trying to find the good bits. I never found them.
That’s a game I tried as well but I feel like I set myself up for failure by trying to see everything the beginning of the game had to offer versus exploring naturally.
Baldur’s Gate 3 on my partner’s days off when he wants to play games, that game is That Game, so freaking good, I think about it all the time. Because I don’t want to progress the game past our co-op session’s progress, and I’ve replayed Act 1 solo a few times over by now, I am back with good ol’ Skyrim otherwise.
I know it is a meme, but I genuinely have the thing of only modding and not playing Skyrim. I am proud to say I am at a point where I just play, instead of finding more mods. I feel like I have a pretty stable modlist, seldom crash, and this is because last winter I spent a lot of time with the crashlogger thing weeding out problematic mods. It is really hard not to go to nexus, I actually don’t visit it anymore at all, it is intense FOMO when I see others’ screenshots. My main achievement is that upon returning to Skyrim after a break, I even picked up my same character instead of starting over with fresh mods–it was like, not giving up progress.
I’ve played it now for about 3 hours and it feels very much like Skyrim/Fallout in space - not more, but also not less. There is nothing revolutionary about anything, but this was also not my expectation. The NASA-Punk aesthetic works well enough and gunplay was surprisingsly good so far - but your enemies are quite spongy.
NPCs and dialogues are a bit wooden, but this is nothing new for Bethesda games as well.
The worst thing is the engine. It really shows how old this engine is. There are things which simply look terrible in my book, this becomes obvious during the first visit in New Atlantis (which is pretty early in the game).
There are people who have hungered for a new Bethesda Game^TM for almost a decade, and Starfield will ladle out another big helping, and I’m happy for them that they have many hours of enjoyment coming.
I’m just, kind of full, when it comes to that dish.
I’m shelving Baldur’s Gate 3 for now after a full run plus more. Had a great time with it, but I think I’d rather wait for more polish first before I tinker with it any more or check out the story branches/side quests in Act 3 I didn’t see.
I started playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker and I was surprised at how quickly it grabbed me. The story has a very similar vibe to Papers, Please and something about the UI and the artistic design is reminding me a lot of old space sims. Surprisingly cozy game, though I might look into seeing if I can swap out the music. Don’t know if I like what it says about me that I really like games that are work simulators, though.
I have Hard space Shipbreaker on my list. I’m hoping it’s the type of game you can pick up and play I short, relaxed bursts. Is that how you’d describe it?
It's incredible so far. I just made it out of Act 1. For the most part, you can come up with plans and ideas on your own, and they'll usually work, which makes you feel like a genius, but I have to call out two times that this specifically did not work the way I thought they would.
some light spoilers ahead
Early on, there's a target that you have to either eliminate or side with, and I choose to side with them, with the express purpose of getting them to let their guard down so that I can separate them from the group and eliminate them. The dialogue options even allude to the fact that this is a strategy they want you to use. This target wants you to sneak into another (good) faction and open a gate for a bloodbath of an assault on that faction, but the target also leaves their battle plans out in the open. So I figure I'd steal the battle plans, give them to the other faction, and just not open the gate, and then that target dies. Well, it doesn't work that way, and progressing that far along with the target invalidates the other quest entirely. Bummer.
The second is a fight right near the end of Act 1 where you've got to eliminate or side with a target again, in a room with a lot of lava, some slaves you can try to rescue, and a lot of enemies. Depending on how the dialogue goes right before the encounter, you either side with the target against the room full of enemies (but the slaves die), or you fight everyone. There are about 15 enemies in the room, which means they get a lot more turns than you, and since they're all grouped in that room, there's no real way to isolate them and take them out stealthily ahead of the encounter. I tried using a bard Performance to get them to all clump up so that I could push large groups of them into the lava, which was fairly effective, but then the slaves would join that group too, and it was very easy to aggro them. Worse still is that the slaves will happily fight you if you aggro them, but they won't join you to fight the other enemies in the room that enslaved them, let alone the target you're trying to eliminate. The only way I found through it was to reload an earlier save and to make different dialogue choices with a particular NPC so that some of those 15 enemies end up on my side in that fight when the time comes.
end of spoilers
The game usually lets me get away with whatever crazy plan I come up with, but I just wish these two points so far were a bit more flexible.
For your second fight, you can actually get above all the enemies (there’s a platform, to access some other parts of the map) and just completely break the AI, because they can’t get to you. I don’t remember if the slaves even joined the fight, but they all survived.
You can use this “tactic” in multiple locations, if you’re not above cheesing fights. If the enemy doesn’t have a ranged attack, or have no easy way to get to you, they just run in circles.
spoileryou can either jump to a small outcropping down below, near the “entrance” of the big room, where the slaves are, or on the other side of the map, are a bunch of dwarves trying to go through yet another wall (these have like two goats with them), and go from there.
For the fight in Grymforge you’re talking about, there’s also an opportunity to get some of the duergar on your side, which makes the fight a lot more manageable.
Also, the game never explains this, but you know the buttons in the bottom left of the screen during cutscenes? You can use these to trade with characters that don’t normally have an option for it, to switch party members to sneak around while the one in conversation distracts an NPC, or to attack before a cutscene finishes playing out. Doing these things can affect the outcome of game events!
Trading specifically I’m not sure if it changes anything, but you can buy things from NPCs that normally you can’t trade with. I do know that stealing from NPCs and attacking before a cutscene plays out can change the survival of some NPCs.
One thing I learned about the game fairly early on (actually in that same area, with a certain imprisoned bear) is that once you do something that makes NPCs hostile, they are going to stay hostile for good. That’s not to say there aren’t opportunities to flip allegiances a bit, but going fully subversive isn’t well-supported. And to a degree, that makes sense; a good DM’s going to make it difficult on you, because once you’re seen with the enemy, it’s going to take a lot of convincing.
For the Grymforge event, you can also just…
spoilernot excavate and let Nere die in the poison trap.
But again, my expectation is that I had other ways to go hostile against these folks, especially after the goblin camp. But that scenario is basically set up to make that combat encounter next to impossible, but I didn't know that ahead of time, because after you clear the obstruction, the state of the map changes.
Yes, there are a couple of situations in the game where one can end up in a dead end situation, and that’s probably the easiest of the bunch to stumble into. The player pretty much has to either make a deal with the chief ahead of time or just not do the battle. It’s not ideal, especially since it’s likely easy for a player to go into it when needing a rest, too.
I think your just playing games that don’t have a grid. I still play a lot of games with a grid. If you want a strategy game that has a grid, my dad has been playing a lot of jagged alliance 3 and has been saying very positive things about it.
I find grids helpful when I’m the game master, because they simplify the job of fairly resolving distance and AoE mechanics, and speed the game along. Also in big strategy games, because they allow me to plan ahead on a map with many (often stacked) units without unfair surprises.
I’m enjoying the gridless approach here, though. The computer handles the geometry crunching, there aren’t too many actors for me to keep track of, and the freedom of movement lets me play with tactics that would be impossible on a grid.
Worth noting: I don’t think D&D has ever required a grid, so it might be inaccurate to say this game has gotten rid of it.
Fair enough. I started with 3.5 and the PHB does have a section on the battle grid, though of course it’s never listed as a requirement, only an aid. I think there are certain times the grid really helps the strategy, both in tabletop and video game scenarios. Something as simple as ‘I want to block this doorway’. With the grid, it’s very obvious which squares need to be occupied. With a GM at the table I suppose you could just say ‘I block the doorway’. But, at least so far, every time I’ve tried to block a doorway in BG3 (limited play time, granted), they’ve just moved right past me, making me look rather foolish, and usually leading to my early demise.
I’ve played more BG3 now, and maybe I’m an idiot, but I can’t figure out how to block anything. E.g. I’ll stand at the top of a ladder to block enemies from climbing up, but they’ll happily climb up and walk right through me. Or standing on a narrow beam, and somehow they go to stand next to me on the narrow side to push me off? What am I missing? How are you able to block any space?
Tried the demo for System Shock remastered and finally started Jet Set Radio with the release of the spiritual successor. They did not age well for me, but I could see why they were popular back in the day
I believe I had this working once but unfortunately I don’t recall having to troubleshoot anything.
Right now I just use a stack and put all my apps the need VPN in that docker stack and use kasm Firefox with ipleak to double check the VPN.
The reason I use the VPN container (gluetun) is I think I can specifically connect it to the nord p2p servers… Is that possible with the proxy settings?
I started playing Children of Morta with my son yesterday and I’m pretty impressed with it. I e tried playing Diablo 3 a couple times and found it really boring, so I assumed dungeon crawlers just weren’t really my thing. But I started to find some depth in the combat after a couple runs in CoM, and I quite like the roguelite cycle and progress. We’re making pretty slow progress because my son is young and kinda sucks at it, but I’m enjoying it more with him than many other games we’ve tried.
I also started Baldur’s Gate 3 with my partner with it yesterday and am pretty much in love so far. I had similar experiences with both Divinity games but they both were just a liiiitle too long and we would lose steam around the end. Hoping that’s not the case with this one.
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Aktywne