Vidya Gaems General

glennmagusharvey

Oh wow this is a nice ad.

glennmagusharvey

This is a really well-designed Metroid hack as far as aesthetic sense goes.

I can't judge the map layout and gameplay difficulty, though it looks rather difficult and inaccessible to the lay audience.

But I do want to say this hack puts together a distinctive palette of features and visual stylings in a way that almost feels like it is its own game and not just a romhack.  The way the areas are put together feels unusually coherent and high-quality for a romhack.  And you don't get weird confusion between foreground and background like in some other romhacks.

There are also a number of interesting gameplay changes, though the nature of them and what I've seen on screen suggests that it's for experienced players, though I can't say for sure.

Blueeyedrat

The first game was a lot of fun. Here's hoping the sequel continues the trend.

KilgoreTrout

Did anybody who plays Dota 2 notice that Vengeful Spirit had only three fingers before now? One of the new loading screens has a closeup of her hand.

Skywrath Mage is the same, I guess. Anyway, that came as a small surprise to me.

Stormtroper

Having no internet makes me productive, and by productive I mean I finally finished the Allies' campaign in Red Alert 2. It was hard, although it got much easier after I learned that the AI always targets the War Factory with its nukes. Anyhows, I started the socialists' campaign, but I'm getting the nagging feeling that since I don't have the video files (including the in-mission transmissions) I'm not enjoying the game as much as I could.

Also I can no longer 1cc Mountain of Faith.

glennmagusharvey

Why do I feel the need to play Steam games online even though I can play them offline?

Same goes with GOG games.

I guess I just really want the playtime tracking.

glennmagusharvey

Played some Mighty No. 9.  Now I can actually start to weigh in on this controversy.

17:07 - Quint the Globular Springtail: the game doesn't seem that bad
17:08 - Quint the Globular Springtail: there are some early interface stupidities but once i get the settings right the game seems reasonably interesting
17:10 - Quint the Globular Springtail: my biggest complaints about it so far are the options, control config, and i guess the voice acting
17:11 - Quint the Globular Springtail: i could also complain about the game being really laggy but when i used the default low graphics setting, everything basically runs fine
17:11 - Quint the Globular Springtail: at least, as fine as a 2.5D platformer could run
17:11 - Quint the Globular Springtail: i don't like using 3D polygons to do 2D platforming because it feels a little imprecise compared to pixel-perfection
17:11 - Quint the Globular Springtail: like, it's harder to "see" the edges of things
17:12 - Quint the Globular Springtail: but this is a complaint that's shared by a large number of games
17:12 - Quint the Globular Springtail: starting out though i was kinda annoyed that it's not clear at all what accept, cancel, and the rest of the buttons are
17:12 - Quint the Globular Springtail: and you can't remap the controls from the main menu
17:12 - Quint the Globular Springtail: you have to start the game first
17:13 - Quint the Globular Springtail: if you try to remap the controls from the main menu, and you go into controller adjustment or something, the keyboard is actually locked off, so if you only have keyboard, you have to restart
17:13 - Quint the Globular Springtail: that's a poor interface design, of course
17:14 - Quint the Globular Springtail: the voice acting is either lame or memetically charming (the way SotN's voicework is)
17:14 - Quint the Globular Springtail: (i haven't decided which yet)
17:15 - Quint the Globular Springtail: i just spent some time playing Countershade's level and i thought it had an interesting design idea
17:15 - Quint the Globular Springtail: Cryosphere's level is a bit slow, but it does start in the water, and that was the first stage i messed with
17:16 - Quint the Globular Springtail: Brandish's stage is...a lot more detailed than what i was expecting from having played mighty gunvolt, lol, but that's not really a fair comparison
17:16 - Quint the Globular Springtail: the main xel-dashing mechanic is sorta interesting, and also makes it so that i basically have infinite horizontal dashes, which is something i've certainly not completely explored yet, and i'm now curious to what extent they made use of this ability
17:17 - Quint the Globular Springtail: i wouldn't characterize this game as the second coming of mega man
17:17 - Quint the Globular Springtail: but that's because it's just...very different from mega man
17:18 - Quint the Globular Springtail: and in my opinion, those people who wanted a second coming of mega man actually made things worse by trying to make things more like mega man
17:19 - Quint the Globular Springtail: now you could blame this on the fans/backers, as well as on Inafking's handling of the publicity basically promising said second coming of mega man...tbh i'd say both.
17:19 - Quint the Globular Springtail: then again i'm not sure why people say that mega man's gameplay was all that excellent to begin with
17:20 - Quint the Globular Springtail: it's solid, and it's good, but even capcom themselves certainly improved on it with the X series

glennmagusharvey

Crowtel is a nice game.

If My Con Had Fusion is an amusing little VN (with a scoring system so you can try to get the best outcome).

Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt is also a nice game.

glennmagusharvey

Updates regarding Mighty No. 9:

1. I actually misremembered one resource-intensive 2.5D game as being in Unreal.  Actually, Never Alone was made in Unity.

Then again there's also Explodemon, which was also resource-intensive, and which used a custom game engine, and A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda, which I remember ran fine, which also used a custom game engine (engine info for both was obtained from their Desura pages).

So color me still a little skeptical about how easy it is to get 2.5D games to run well on lower-spec hardware.

2. It's come to my attention that MN9 has had a bug wherein it bricks the Wii U.  I don't have the Wii U version so I can't test this myself, but assuming this is true, that is a pretty serious problem.

Bee

I seem to recall Castle of Illusion was ungodly resource intensive.  Very pretty, granted, but dynamically lighting fucking everything comes at a cost.

Stormtroper

I find it funny that Pokémon Go seems to have resurrected much of the 90s anti-Pokémon moral panic.

Bee

At least this moral panic is more like "stop driving while doing this you fucking idiots", so I can't really discount it much.

Stormtroper

I was thinking more along the lines of that thing where it encourages violence, animal fighting and competition, and is psychological conditioning.

Bee

Yeah but the people who say that usually jump right back into FOOTBAAAAAAALL, which is basically all of that minus animal fighting but plus racism, sexism, horrible sportsmanship, extreme corruption, and sucking up most of our education budget, so...

Also most of the people playing Pokemon now are adults.

lrdgck

You know, I just met an interesting premise for an RPG in a paper on narration in video games.

Picture this: instead of level-ups, you have level-downs. Your character starts as powerful and keeps degrading throughout the game. In-universe it might be quite easily described as a debilitating disease. I can even see the plot: the land is plagued by a mysterious sickness and you need to find the source to cure it. (Or, your character suffers from the sickness, but that won't work in a typical RPG with an adventuring party and so on.) There will presumably be some final boss you will have to defeat in spite of your character being completely outclassed in most respects. The cheap way to do this would be to implement some sort of skill tree or other advancement scheme, and let the player strip the character from a well-rounded jack-of-all-stats to a single-purpose minmax; better way would be to give the player some opportunity to win by planning, preparation, discovery of game secrets etc. to give the ending the taste of the weaker side winning by outsmarting the opponent. Also, completing quests and fighting the monsters would be spiced by the need to balance the opposites of plot advancement versus preserving the capability of your character.

Stormtroper

Just finished the reds' campaign in Red Alert 2, and am now Premier of the World. The final mission was a walk in the park. The second-to-last mission was more challenging though, but it got much easier after realizing that Kirovs can't be mind controlled, and that the computer doesn't bother hunting them down, so putting it right next to a cliff meant effortless bombing attackers, relieving much pressure.

Maybe I'll play Lesbian Anime Romance's Revenge next, but I'm still bummed about the lack of cutscenes.

Stormtroper

Beat the Allies' Yuri's Revenge campaign. That was quick. They really put effort in the expansion, it's not often that an entire faction gets introduced in one. But boy did they make the campaign annoying. First of all, the Yuri faction's most basic unit beyond the babby tier infantryman is a mind-controller dude, it will control your units one at a time until it's killed. As long as you're there to order your units to kill them it's not too bad, but if you're managing something elsewhere, your controlled unit will get insta-gibbed by your other forces, and you get no notification (unless there are other units to attack you) so five seconds later the process repeats. Now being a super common unit, many waves in all missions include them, so you have to be much more attentive to attacks and/or save scum a lot. Besides that, the second and third missions have lots of random enemy movement through the map with you having lots of things to do in many places, leading to the above times 10.

Still fun though. Fortunately the Soviet's campaign so far seems to be more about killing fascists, so it averts that.

Stormtroper

Triple post because I beat the Soviet's campaign and hell yeah, that was fun. The above didn't cause me much trouble, due to the faction variety I mentioned and the AI simply not using those units as often. Many of the missions disable air options, though, but I guess with Yuri having so much anti-air that wasn't viable anyways, I had to do with old-timey sieging. They also put effort in making the writing especially cheesy.

Yuri's campaign is conspicuously absent.

Alright, I'm done.

glennmagusharvey

My gaming shortlist currently:

Pokémon Crystal Version: Emu Edition
Unepic
LiEat
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
A Witch's Tale (second playthrough)
Recettear
Momodora I/II/IV (I've played III)
Tales of Symphonia
Mighty No. 9
Sage Fusion

Stormtroper

My friends got into WoW again, and want me in. Hmmm...

Goldfarming ahoy!

lrdgck

Good, in the worst case WoW gold can be exchanged for dollars.

Bee

Seriously, even if you wanted to ignore the account hacking and shit that funds gold farmers, there hasn't been any plausible reason to buy gold since daily quests were introduced in Burning Crusade.

Stormtroper

The flying mount in Burning Crusade was still a significant invenstment, tho.

Still wouldn't buy even if I had money to spare, anyhows.

Bee

Only epic flyer, which was nice but not particularly essential because nothing threatened you in the air.  And even then, daily quests would get you that in like a week or two.

lrdgck

Apparently the primary clients of gold farmers are the 30- and 40-somethings who like to spend an hour in a virtual world once in a while between job and family duties and don't feel like wasting it on grinding. So I've read.

Bee

In theory.  I found the "casual" players tended to play longer than half my raiding team, because they spent so long grinding meaningless bullshit and wiping on easy stuff.

Like, this is what daily quests were specifically for.

Unknown_Entity

Here, enjoy some Metroid II remake.

glennmagusharvey

Unknown_Entity wrote: »

Here, enjoy some Metroid II remake.

Someone on Steam told me about this earlier, but this is really really awesome.

Bee

Oh they finally finished it

Last I heard of it, they had just finished the sequence after the power bomb.  Looked balls-out hard though -- it was a 100% run and there were a lot of bosses and pseudo-bosses where there were just BARELY enough missiles to kill it.

Unknown_Entity

It's certainly hard with no map and a lot of the areas looking similar getting around, plus the missile management with Metroids. I've streamed the game a couple times and played the game through many times, and I still worry about running out of missiles going into the omega metroid section, even though it's been some time since I've ever actually run out. There is a trick to omegas in the original at least though; shooting their backs counts as...I think 3 missiles damage instead of 1. Then of course bombing the queen's stomach for /massive/ damage.