General gaming superthread

Ooh, I love fun things! (Games, both video and traditional, discussion. looser posting styles allowed)

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aramek (?) » Sun Dec 10, 2017 9:52 am

I'm going be without internet at home for a while due to my family abandoning me, I mean, phone, but still.

I'm gonna use this time to catch up on my steam games that I can play offline.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by BackgroundPony (?) » Wed Dec 20, 2017 10:06 pm

I just played through What Remains of Edith Finch. And though I usually like the so-called walking sim genre (Gone Home GOTY all years), I did not really like it that much. The environment design was great, the voice acting was good, and it does OK at world building and drawing you in to the story, but it feels like that's all wasted in the end. I guess I'll spoiler block the rest of it

It's essentially a story about several generations of a family living in a big, unusual house and dying in unfortunate ways. And no matter how much they try to dress it up with fantastical settings and scenery, that doesn't change the fact that it's just a bunch of shitty situations that I don't get any joy out of playing. Here's a little girl who ate poisoned berries, hallucinated that she was a cat and then died. No matter how much time and effort you put in to making a scene where you play as a cat jumping around on branches to catch a bird, you can't override the heavy weight of 'actually this is a kid dying of poison and seeing things.'

One guy gets so involved in his inner fantasy life while ignoring his repetitive, banal job that he eventually gives up and shoves his head under the fish chopping machine that he's been working at while imagining himself as a prince in a fantasy world. A kid wants to fly off and be an astronaut, so he swings higher and higher until he flies off the swing conveniently located on the edge of a cliff. Etc., etc. It's all these sort of magical settings full of wonder, that end in death.

And I guess that's the crux of what offends me about it. I go to games or stories for an escape from the often grim and soul-sucking nature of day to day reality. I don't want to read a story about, say, a warrior princess off to slay a dragon that stops midway through when her boss from the call center shows up, berates her for believing in dragons and tells her to get back to work because her break ended three minutes ago. The suspension of disbelief that it takes to enjoy fantastical stories is already a fragile thing. This new-ish trope that I'm starting to see in some games, of bringing the weight of mundanity down on top of the fantasy, is upsetting to me in an almost visceral way. It's like taking a sledgehammer to a stained glass window and then acting as if you've accomplished something mature and important.

Not that you can't have death in your fantasy stories. Far from it. Heroic, tragic sacrifices for the good guys, or well-deserved poetic final justice for the baddies is great. What has no place, though, is arbitrary meaningless death. Because there's plenty of that in the real world. I don't need a fantasy story to remind me that usually people just die for no good reason. I have plenty of real-world examples that I'd prefer not to dwell on any more than I already do.

Aside from that, I also disliked the ending, or more the lack of one. The game seems to be leading towards two unanswered questions. One is why you moved out of this odd house in such a hurry, leaving half-packed moving boxes strewn about. And the other is a more general question of what's up with your (great?) grandmother Edie. She's not around in the house any more, but has left these memorials to all of the dead family members which are the triggers for all of the sort of mini-games about their deaths that you experience throughout the game. And at the end you finally get to play through her story and think 'ah, now I get to know more about her'.

So you're in your own flashback to the night you moved out of the house, and grandmother Edie has sent you to a book where she's talking about the night of your character's birth. An earthquake far out in the ocean has led to an extremely low tide, pulling back the water to allow her to reach an old sunken house just off the coast (which the patriarch of the family had tried to move over by boat from the old country). And just before you reach it, your character's mother, back in the time where you're reading this book, comes and grabs it away from you, tearing it in half, then takes you to the car and leaves the house. You are told that when people were sent from a rest home to come get Edie the next day, she was 'already gone'.

And that's all we get. You never get to find out what Edie found at the house, or why it was important, or anything. I had assumed that maybe since this was a flashback, you'd be able to return to the place where the ripped book was in the current time frame and read the rest of it, since you were now all alone visiting the house again. But nope, we cut straight to the end of the game. Your character, Edith, dies in childbirth, because of course she does, and we find out that the journal she'd been writing in all game has been passed on to her son, who we now get one brief shot of standing at her grave near the house. And THAT'S. IT.

This is another trope that infuriates me, that of basically not including the ending of your story. Possibly because, much like the earlier one of dropping cold ugly reality on top of your fantasy world, it feels like one that hack writers will employ and then act like they are being ever so mature and intelligent. While it is possible in storytelling to cut away a lot and do it well, it takes a masterful touch to accomplish it correctly. An experienced architect who knows everything about loads and sight lines and how people interact with a space can design a very minimalist building and make it work. But an amateur who tried it would just end up with a big empty warehouse that collapses in on itself at the first stiff breeze.

...Ahem. OK, I think that's enough ranting. Thanks to anyone who bothers to plow through all of that. Maybe no one will, but at least now I've got it off my chest. :pinkieshrug:

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Thu Dec 21, 2017 1:45 am

got some christmas money early so I decided to pick up Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, and KH 1.5+2.5

Yakuza 0 is extremely good so far, and Kiwami is a fantastic example of a good remake/remaster (it's a remake of Yakuza 1, a PS2 game)
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Captain Rufus (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2017 4:07 am

I am still collecting slowly but surely. And mostly sticking to the Atari 8 bits since it is kind of my THING now. I do collect PC stuff too but the A8 is just my thing I guess. Popular enough that its not in the MSX rarity hell, but not well known enough to generally cost a ton. Mostly.


Click for Fullsize


I have been on the ebay search for a good Atari 5200 keypad for years now and my search usually brings up the A8 keypad. Got one for super cheap loose which means my pals at Atarimania are needed for a manual and the disk to use the bastard. Its total fluff but a couple of the wargames I have use a numeric keypad movement layout and should this thing work with them (or some of the other options it has) it means I can play said games a lot easier. I did data entry for a couple years in the 90s so now I get messed up when trying to do shit on a non numeric keypad for numbers. Kursk I kind of ran into looking at something else and Koronis Rift I stumbled upon at a normal retro game type store. I think its owner was a C64 person but its a flippy disk and that is good for me. Sadly a couple of other games I would have killed for the prices to be A8 bit were C64 but I still might get them if for nothing else than having it boxed and then I can just hunt down the loose disks. Or feel less bad playing it on the Atari with my Lotharek SD drive. Which is rad as fuck BTW.


Click for Fullsize


In case anyone wants to see the box backs.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aramek (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2017 9:42 am

I bought myself Original Sin 2 last night, played an hour, real good so far. I loved the first one, but for reasons I could never figure out, never got very far in it.

Also you all buy me things.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2017 10:21 am

So Catherine, the action puzzle game by Atlus is getting a remake for PS4 and Vita, with new content! Neat stuff! Except.....



Modern Persona games have a crap track record when it comes to good lgbt representation. Catherine is no exception with how it handles a trans woman character a bit badly. Now granted, I'm all for good representation and potentially, this could turn out to be very respectfully done and the previous problems with the game could be fixed. But i don't see that fucking happening at all with their track record.

Barf.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by The Ghost of Ember (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2017 11:22 am

Little early to jump to conclusions



This is all in line with the original game and marketing

If anything Rin seems like she's the more traditionally japanese option, since Cath and Kath are both full body foreigners, even if Cath is a bit more petite.

Also Rin will likely be an angel, considering the option were -> Devil -> Human -> Secret Goddesss Endings in the original game.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by DarkMatter (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2017 12:42 pm

Atlus certainly doesn't have the best track record for these kinds of things but I also want to give them the benefit of the doubt. If Rin is indeed a trans character but is still a story route you're able to go down, Vincent will fall in love with Rin regardless of what she has down there. And yeah, Vincent has over the top reactions to just about everything in the game. It also would make sense for her to end up being some kind of angel, given Catherine is a succubus.

There were some issues with out Erica was handled in the original Catherine, but I still felt like she was represented positive overall with her friends only using female pronouns to refer to her, even if they brought her up in conversations when she wasn't around.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by SlateSlabrock (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2017 8:37 pm

Aramek wrote:
Fri Dec 22, 2017 9:42 am
I bought myself Original Sin 2 last night, played an hour, real good so far. I loved the first one, but for reasons I could never figure out, never got very far in it.
For me, the trouble with the first game was that you had to do absolutely everything, or you'd start to slip behind on XP, and later areas would just be utterly impossible unless you were some sort of barrel wizard. I missed a few quests in the first area, and the second was miserable until I went back and cleared them.

And then eventually I went home to my moon base and realized there were, like, fifty of those locked warp zones still, after 60 hours of playing.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Gloomy Rube (?) » Fri Dec 22, 2017 10:35 pm

BackgroundPony wrote:
Wed Dec 20, 2017 10:06 pm
I just played through What Remains of Edith Finch. And though I usually like the so-called walking sim genre (Gone Home GOTY all years), I did not really like it that much. The environment design was great, the voice acting was good, and it does OK at world building and drawing you in to the story, but it feels like that's all wasted in the end. I guess I'll spoiler block the rest of it

It's essentially a story about several generations of a family living in a big, unusual house and dying in unfortunate ways. And no matter how much they try to dress it up with fantastical settings and scenery, that doesn't change the fact that it's just a bunch of crappy situations that I don't get any joy out of playing. Here's a little girl who ate poisoned berries, hallucinated that she was a cat and then died. No matter how much time and effort you put in to making a scene where you play as a cat jumping around on branches to catch a bird, you can't override the heavy weight of 'actually this is a kid dying of poison and seeing things.'

One guy gets so involved in his inner fantasy life while ignoring his repetitive, banal job that he eventually gives up and shoves his head under the fish chopping machine that he's been working at while imagining himself as a prince in a fantasy world. A kid wants to fly off and be an astronaut, so he swings higher and higher until he flies off the swing conveniently located on the edge of a cliff. Etc., etc. It's all these sort of magical settings full of wonder, that end in death.

And I guess that's the crux of what offends me about it. I go to games or stories for an escape from the often grim and soul-sucking nature of day to day reality. I don't want to read a story about, say, a warrior princess off to slay a dragon that stops midway through when her boss from the call center shows up, berates her for believing in dragons and tells her to get back to work because her break ended three minutes ago. The suspension of disbelief that it takes to enjoy fantastical stories is already a fragile thing. This new-ish trope that I'm starting to see in some games, of bringing the weight of mundanity down on top of the fantasy, is upsetting to me in an almost visceral way. It's like taking a sledgehammer to a stained glass window and then acting as if you've accomplished something mature and important.

Not that you can't have death in your fantasy stories. Far from it. Heroic, tragic sacrifices for the good guys, or well-deserved poetic final justice for the baddies is great. What has no place, though, is arbitrary meaningless death. Because there's plenty of that in the real world. I don't need a fantasy story to remind me that usually people just die for no good reason. I have plenty of real-world examples that I'd prefer not to dwell on any more than I already do.

Aside from that, I also disliked the ending, or more the lack of one. The game seems to be leading towards two unanswered questions. One is why you moved out of this odd house in such a hurry, leaving half-packed moving boxes strewn about. And the other is a more general question of what's up with your (great?) grandmother Edie. She's not around in the house any more, but has left these memorials to all of the dead family members which are the triggers for all of the sort of mini-games about their deaths that you experience throughout the game. And at the end you finally get to play through her story and think 'ah, now I get to know more about her'.

So you're in your own flashback to the night you moved out of the house, and grandmother Edie has sent you to a book where she's talking about the night of your character's birth. An earthquake far out in the ocean has led to an extremely low tide, pulling back the water to allow her to reach an old sunken house just off the coast (which the patriarch of the family had tried to move over by boat from the old country). And just before you reach it, your character's mother, back in the time where you're reading this book, comes and grabs it away from you, tearing it in half, then takes you to the car and leaves the house. You are told that when people were sent from a rest home to come get Edie the next day, she was 'already gone'.

And that's all we get. You never get to find out what Edie found at the house, or why it was important, or anything. I had assumed that maybe since this was a flashback, you'd be able to return to the place where the ripped book was in the current time frame and read the rest of it, since you were now all alone visiting the house again. But nope, we cut straight to the end of the game. Your character, Edith, dies in childbirth, because of course she does, and we find out that the journal she'd been writing in all game has been passed on to her son, who we now get one brief shot of standing at her grave near the house. And THAT'S. IT.

This is another trope that infuriates me, that of basically not including the ending of your story. Possibly because, much like the earlier one of dropping cold ugly reality on top of your fantasy world, it feels like one that hack writers will employ and then act like they are being ever so mature and intelligent. While it is possible in storytelling to cut away a lot and do it well, it takes a masterful touch to accomplish it correctly. An experienced architect who knows everything about loads and sight lines and how people interact with a space can design a very minimalist building and make it work. But an amateur who tried it would just end up with a big empty warehouse that collapses in on itself at the first stiff breeze.

...Ahem. OK, I think that's enough ranting. Thanks to anyone who bothers to plow through all of that. Maybe no one will, but at least now I've got it off my chest. :pinkieshrug:
This makes me angry just reading it. I agree with all the points you bring up, and am glad I don't have to get annoyed by playing this game and getting a garbage experience, as someone else who plays walking simulator games. Gosh dang, what is with this trend of "Mature, interesting games have to be downers and only tease interesting things." Like... the latter happens in Firewatch, which is one of the reasons I wasn't super into it, but at least it resolved the plot instead of just going "HERE'S THE MYSTERY SOLVING BOOK OOPS THE GAME'S OVER BEFORE YOU CAN READ IT" gosh dang
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by BackgroundPony (?) » Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:19 am

Yes that was pretty much why Firewatch didn't feel all that enjoyable to me. I liked the setting and the interplay between the characters, but the fact that it was bookended by the tragedy with your character's wife and then the tragedy with the missing child kind of ruins everything else about it, for me. I played through it once, felt kind of blah about it, and put it away for good.

Whereas something like Gone Home, or Tacoma from the same studio, manage to tell interesting stories that still feel pretty realistic (to a point, I mean Tacoma is in a space station, but still) without going all grimdark. The endings aren't fairytale 'they all lived happily ever after', but they're not tragedy doom death death death either. More of that please!

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aramek (?) » Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:21 pm

I've not played any of those "walking sims" because they all seemed like games for people who feel feelings about stuff.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Gloomy Rube (?) » Sat Dec 23, 2017 9:30 pm

Aramek wrote:
Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:21 pm
I've not played any of those "walking sims" because they all seemed like games for people who feel feelings about stuff.
you might enjoy some of them but as a whole I think, from what I know of you, you're right to give the genre a pass :-I
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Vivianinatoga (?) » Sat Dec 23, 2017 10:11 pm

You'd think that with how much Aramek loves to tank all of the physical attacks possible in video games, he'd relish the challenge of tanking emotional attacks so huge and unquantifiable that numbers can't do them justice.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Fizzbuzz (?) » Sat Dec 23, 2017 10:24 pm

The only one I ever played was Gone Home, and that's because Venusy very kindly gave me a copy of it a while back. I enjoyed its story and I don't think there's anything wrong with games like that existing as a genre, but Gone Home in particular I just felt was overpriced at $20 for how short it is.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Pocket (?) » Sun Dec 24, 2017 12:00 am

The problem with games like that is that you can't just get them from the library.

Like, it's probably worth playing but not the sort of thing I'd want to get locked into owning forever, regardless of price.

And video games are the only medium that have this problem.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aramek (?) » Sun Dec 24, 2017 11:42 am

Davyinatoga wrote:
Sat Dec 23, 2017 10:11 pm
You'd think that with how much Aramek loves to tank all of the physical attacks possible in video games, he'd relish the challenge of tanking emotional attacks so huge and unquantifiable that numbers can't do them justice.
I'm tanking this post right now.

Also, I totally don't wanna smooch Red Prince by the way.
No matter how confident and perfect and handsome he is

And when he first met you on the boat he grabbed your jaw and inspected your teeth.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Sun Dec 24, 2017 2:03 pm

RE: Rin in the Catherine remake:

this article articulates the worries here better than I probobly could:

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article ... -full-body
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by DarkMatter (?) » Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:17 pm

It's a well written article and I don't want to downplay the depiction of trans people in media, nor will I say Atlus has been the best when it comes to it. The lady with the facial hair in Persona 3 on the beach was especially shitty. They also made shitty mistakes with Erica in Catherine, but I still felt she herself was a well done and lovable character. But I do feel it's worth noting that Vincent having a wide-eyed look of horror is a common occurrence in the original Catherine, too. Here's official art of from the first game featuring Catherine, her legs spread, with her crotch obscured by Vincent's head with a look of terror on his face:
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Also, regarding Naoto from Persona 4, I never saw her at an attempt at a trans character. She presented herself as male at her job due to sexism in the male dominated workplace. She felt like it was the only way she could be taken seriously. But as her route and social link play out and taking some time to think it over she finds out that she actual likes being a girl. I even know some people who felt a personal connection to Naoto's plight. I never took Naoto's romance route because, aside from my devotion to Chie, having to say things to her like "I'm glad you're a girl" comes off as really creepy and making her wear things like the girl's school uniform when she's more comfortable in the boy's uniform is fucked up.

We're still a year away from the release of Catherine: Full Body so I think we need a little more information to go on. I myself am not trans, so I'm not the best person to really off their opinion on this and I can understand peoples worry because, yeah, Atlus hasn't been too great at this in the in the past.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by The Ghost of Ember (?) » Mon Dec 25, 2017 4:10 am

I will say one of the reasons I was skeptical of Rin as being coded as transgender was cultural differences. Rin's hyperfeminity could easily be just her being pitched as the perfect Japanese housewife type, similar to say, Yukiko of Persona 4. Considering Rin would be the angel counterpart to Katherine's all-too-human needs and Catherine's devil-may-care attitude, it would make sense for them to shove in a perfect polite demure Japanese house wife fantasy in the angel's quarter.

When the Japanese want to do an insulting shorthand stock trans-female character they usually go for something voluptuous and deliberately provocative and seductive, Ericka despite being my favorite character of the original Catherine is pretty exemplary of the Japanese stereotype for the male-to-female transexual. Rin is too petite and polite to be played straight.

The fact that she's got the exact same color scheme as the trans flag is a little too neatly coincidental for me to feel like its on the level though. Even if Rin doesn't turn out to be trans, a few things about this feel like it was deliberately set up to fuel the speculation that she is and to generate controversy based on that. Even if the final product turns out to be on the level with Rin, either with her being cis or a well thought out trans character, I think trans folk have a reason to be upset about the marketing.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Orange Fluffy Sheep (?) » Mon Dec 25, 2017 8:59 pm

DarkMatter wrote:
Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:17 pm
making her wear things like the girl's school uniform when she's more comfortable in the boy's uniform is fucked up.
Whatever little it's worth, you have to take a specific subset of romance route choices to get that as an option. It's an alternate Christmas Eve event, compared to the normal one which is just a standard romantic date.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by DarkMatter (?) » Mon Dec 25, 2017 10:23 pm

Orange Fluffy Sheep wrote:
Mon Dec 25, 2017 8:59 pm
Whatever little it's worth, you have to take a specific subset of romance route choices to get that as an option. It's an alternate Christmas Eve event, compared to the normal one which is just a standard romantic date.
Oh, yeah, I know that you can romance her and continue to have her dress in the boys uniform, which is what I would do if I decided to woo her. It's just fucked up that you even have the option to guilt trip her into wearing the girls uniform when it clearly makes her feel uncomfortable.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aramek (?) » Tue Dec 26, 2017 8:42 am

I just got to the second zone of original sin 2. I'd forgotten this game very very much has the "wrong neighborhood mother fucker" thing. Not a lot of rpgs have that these days. Like the NPCs warn you "hey, uh, east is kind of a shitshow". And levels matter a lot, so suddenly there's enemies that are 5-6 levels higher, that come over and kill 2 of your guys outright round one.

But yeah, this one also encourages you to not get attached to gear. Like Diablo. Every level matters, so new gear will always have a noticable number jump. But you won't find stuff every level, so I went from a level 8 blue to a level 12 common and it was almost double.


Anyway, game owns. And I still don't wanna smooch Red Prince.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by BackgroundPony (?) » Fri Dec 29, 2017 12:42 am

Fizzbuzz wrote:
Sat Dec 23, 2017 10:24 pm
The only one I ever played was Gone Home, and that's because Venusy very kindly gave me a copy of it a while back. I enjoyed its story and I don't think there's anything wrong with games like that existing as a genre, but Gone Home in particular I just felt was overpriced at $20 for how short it is.
I have mixed feelings on length being considered a viable criteria for judging games. Like, on the one hand I get how you want something that you can dig in to and be distracted by for a while. But we don't judge any other media by the same criteria. No one's ever said 'this movie was only 90 minutes, which makes it objectively worse than this three hour movie'.

Maybe it's just as I've accrued more and more of a massive Steam backlog over the years that my opinion has changed. I've got a billion more games lined up, so one that drags on isn't doing me any favors. If it's a good game that tells a good story and I can consume it in a couple hours, who cares if it's short? I'd pay 20 bucks for a movie and some popcorn and get the same entertainment time out of it.

I think maybe it's because games that are more of an experience, like Gone Home, etc., we still mentally put in the same category as games that you enjoy for their mechanics, which may or may not have any story or emotional impact. An FPS or a spectacle fighter that was only a few hours long, yeah that wouldn't be great.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Venusy (?) » Fri Dec 29, 2017 2:17 am

Movies no, but length can be a factor when judging the value of things like books, comics, or TV box sets. A lot of older British TV series had 6 episodes to a season, and so most of them retailed for £10 while American 13/22 episode seasons retailed for £20. I don't buy individual comics because a few quid for 10 minutes of entertainment is a bad value proposition to me (particularly if the comic then asks me to buy a different comic because there's an overarching story going on) - I'd rather get the paperback collections if anything.

My backlog is also huge, and to me, that means that I'm spending over £15, it needs to be on something that either:
A. I know I will enjoy and most likely put a lot of hours into, having enjoyed past work by the developers. (e.g. Forza Horizon 3)
B. I'm unsure if I will enjoy, but I like the developers and believe they might be in financial trouble. (e.g. Agents of Mayhem)
C. Is in the process of crowdfunding, will not exist without support. (Though if the base game tier is over £15, I may decide to wait for release if it looks like it's getting funded.

Everything else (on PC, at least) will be bundled or on sale at some point.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Fizzbuzz (?) » Fri Dec 29, 2017 8:05 am

Meanwhile, I have virtually no backlog. If I'm going to buy a game, I have to know it'll be one I'll play for a long time, "long" varying somewhat with the price of the game. Like with my Switch, two of the three games I've bought are BotW and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, both of which I've already put at least 15 hours or so into and which I intend to go back to at some point (Mario Kart in particular since I bought it mainly to have something I could play local multiplayer). Even though those are both full-priced console games, and even if I never touched them again, 15 hours for $60 is still a better ratio than the three hours I got out of Gone Home vs. its normal price of $20.

I certainly don't fully make my decisions on what games to play based entirely on this playtime/price ratio. I mean, the third game is Splatoon 2, of which I've played at least 155 hours. That's a big ratio, but it's nothing compared to the hundreds and hundreds of hours of TF2 that I played in years past, a game which was far cheaper than $60 when I bought it and is F2P now. If I were that tight with money then I'd still be sticking it out with whatever the hell TF2's turned into now.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with really short games existing. Maybe there are a lot of people for whom a game being short and sweet has a big appeal. I'm just not one of them.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aramek (?) » Fri Dec 29, 2017 9:28 am

Upon the urging of one of my ESO guild members, I re-specced Beast to have 10 summoning because they said that the basic level one summoning spell gets a super mode.

Holy shit does it ever. God damn. If any of you have DOS2, you should try it. Just 10 in summoning, the rest in other magics, because turn one will always be casting the summon, maybe buffing it twice, and then acting like normal the rest of the fight.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by !saak (?) » Sat Dec 30, 2017 7:19 pm

I'm uh... 45+ hours into The Witcher 3 and it's kind of mindboggling how big it is. It has so much breadth and depth at the same time and in contrast to the previous games I actually like the combat in this and feel compelled to craft new swords and armour, upgrade those with runes, the lot.

What's also unique is that I actually enjoy doing all the sidequests and little things, cuz the world just feels alive. This is leagues beyond Skyrim or Dragon Age.

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by SlateSlabrock (?) » Sat Dec 30, 2017 8:57 pm

W3 has been on the back burner while I play through other stuff, but I have 75 hours in it so far and haven't even made it to Skellige yet. :-I

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Fizzbuzz (?) » Sat Dec 30, 2017 10:49 pm

I managed to record another clutch play in Splatoon earlier:


And shoutout to the one follower I just discovered I had, which is one more than I ever expected to get on Twitter.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by !saak (?) » Sun Dec 31, 2017 6:09 am

SlateSlabrock wrote:
Sat Dec 30, 2017 8:57 pm
W3 has been on the back burner while I play through other stuff, but I have 75 hours in it so far and haven't even made it to Skellige yet. :-I
Haah, yeah hours just vaporize while playing this. I'm doing some of the sidequests right now around Novigrad before going to Skellige.

Apparently this is just act 1 :-I

And I still have Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine to go through after this :-I :-I

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Highbrow Dash (?) » Sun Dec 31, 2017 1:24 pm

!saak wrote:
Sun Dec 31, 2017 6:09 am
Apparently this is just act 1 :-I
To be fair act 1 is the longest one. But yeah, it took me 90 hours to play through the whole thing and I still haven't played any of the expansions :-I

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Pocket (?) » Mon Jan 01, 2018 1:18 am

I'm kind of hooked on watching people play Battlegrounds. First Vinesauce and now the Yogscast (which I otherwise haven't checked in on in like five years). I'm tempted to get it, but the developer has already been caught in some kind of scummy tactics and who knows what direction it's going to go from there. Plus, there's strong evidence that Valve is working on a Battlegrounds-y gamemode for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which I already own. If nothing else, if they can pull it off, it'll be nicer-looking and support MacOS and Linux out of the box.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aramek (?) » Sun Jan 07, 2018 9:12 am

Turns out there's sex scenes in DOS2. And the extremely professional British narrator... Narrates it!
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Wayoshi (?) » Thu Jan 11, 2018 9:17 am

Nintendo has a few news tidbits for Switch in 2018. https://www.nintendo.com/nintendo-direct/01-11-2018/


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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Orange Fluffy Sheep (?) » Thu Jan 11, 2018 9:34 am

Stop teasing me, either announce TWEWY 2 or confirm it's never happening.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Thu Jan 11, 2018 10:40 am

Final Remix is the closest to TWEWY 2 we're getting right now, with the epilogue content
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Weird Autumn (?) » Thu Jan 11, 2018 11:53 am

maybe if we buy the remaster they'll make a sequel

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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Fizzbuzz (?) » Thu Jan 11, 2018 1:00 pm

Kirby Star Allies looks way cool. It's nice that we're getting a main-series Kirby game on a console early in its life, this generation.
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Re: General gaming superthread

Post by Pocket (?) » Thu Jan 11, 2018 5:18 pm

I'm considering writing a thinkpiece about how "Ride to Hell: Retribution" is one of the few truly So Bad It's Good video games in existence by virtue of actually being playable, and how it's a testament to the power of QA giving a shit even if the game they're working on is patently garbage.

But I suppose, in order for it to be authoritative, I'd have to actually play the game myself, rather than base the whole thing off Let's Play videos. Which would entail acquiring an Xbox 360 or PS3...
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