Video game spotlight thread
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@stillwater There are games where keyboard and mouse are not ideal: most third person action games. They typically involve a different kind of precision, and benefit from dual-analog controls and more buttons easily accessible.
For fighting games, you basically need a keyboard or a specialized controller that actually has a usable D-pad, because most aren't worth your time. Or a fightstick.
My point is, it depends very much on the game.
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Hollow Knight
I'm sure I'm not the first here to play this game, and it could even be on this list already, so I'll be brief: It came out on Switch, so i bought it, and it's great. I can only assume I'm 2/3 of the way through the game by now, because __________________________________________. This game has some creepy imagery (I hate bugs! But it's still great), but at the core of it it is a very castlevania-ish game. It obviously has the more metroid style endless backtracking that later castlevania got, causing the name-mashup genre people think is cute, but if you want metroid, you'd buy Axiom Verge (which is great!) - whereas this is very much more castlevania.
You fight with a sword called a nail, as does everybug down there, and you learn magic as you go that charges as you damage enemies (You basically start out with a heal spell, but you get more). As you gain skills and money and items, you can go further and further in. I have no idea who thought that leaving your money (and nothing else!) behind when you die was a good idea - that's dumb, and doesn't add much other than a disincentive to explore in case you end up in a boss room - but it's a well designed game.
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@magus said in Video game spotlight thread:
There are games where keyboard and mouse are not ideal
Experienced it first hand. I played Dustforce (which if anyone hasn't checked ought to check it out first) most of it on keyboard and few levels were really difficult and then I used an Xbox controller and the game experience improved a fuckton immediately. If a game was designed with keyboard NOT as the intended mode of control then it usually is a subpar experience for the user
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
@cartman82 said in Video game spotlight thread:
I posted a pretty good one above in this thread. Paper Sorcerer.
You've never played Wizardry 8, have you.
What's so special about Wizardry 8 that other run-of-the-mill RPGs don't have?
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@jaloopa said in Video game spotlight thread:
What, a screen that looks like it was made in 5 minutes in Winforms as your first introduction to the game? You're weird if that endears you to it
Not only that, but all Unity games do that by default.
I'm also not sure why that's considered a selling feature.
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@gąska said in Video game spotlight thread:
What's so special about Wizardry 8 that other run-of-the-mill RPGs don't have?
Wizardry 8:
Paper Sorcerer:
Not even remotely close. (Although Paper Sorcerer looks vaguely similar to Wizardry 6, sans the ability to create your own characters which is THE ONE MAIN THING I LOOK FOR IN AN RPG LIKE I'VE POSTED HERE A MILLION TIMES.)
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@gąska said in Video game spotlight thread:
I don't mean the "60 mercantile gives you infinite gold" and "I've made a healing potion that lasts a week" mechanics. Those were fun. I meant the "you only hit with your sword 1 in 3 times at point blank" and "putting the most used skills as primary skills will make you weaker" mechanics that will make any new player throw the game disk out the window 5 minutes in.
This. My wife is an avid gamer, and loves open-world games, but the specific, counterintuitive combat and leveling mechanics of Skyrim have proven endlessly frustrating to her and been a real
to her getting into the game.
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@masonwheeler I was talking about Morrowind. Skyrim has both of those fixed. The problem with Skyrim is that it's too much Action and not enough RPG.
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@gąska said in Video game spotlight thread:
Skyrim has both of those fixed.
Not really. It's not as bad as Morrowind, but a lot of the underlying problems are still there.
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@masonwheeler said in Video game spotlight thread:
Not really. It's not as bad as Morrowind, but a lot of the underlying problems are still there.
What problems are you referring to?
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@magus said in Video game spotlight thread:
There are games where keyboard and mouse are not ideal
The only one I can really think of was the cross-platform Shadowrun game. And that was by design. They intentionally made the keyboard-and-mouse-handling feel laggy and inaccurate so the Xbox players had a chance. It was so bad I was better off plugging an Xbox controller into my PC and pretending the PC was a high-powered Xbox.
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@jaloopa said in Video game spotlight thread:
@pie_flavor said in Video game spotlight thread:
This game actually had my heart from the second I ran it, because this is what happens. That was such a nice touch and I really wish that every game could do this.
What, a screen that looks like it was made in 5 minutes in Winforms as your first introduction to the game? You're weird if that endears you to it
No, a game that lets you configure all graphical settings before starting. Obviously the default isn't "shitty", so imagine if you had a computer that was shitty - just click the preset and click play instead of navigating through a 5fps settings menu after several 5fps loading screens.
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
@jaloopa said in Video game spotlight thread:
What, a screen that looks like it was made in 5 minutes in Winforms as your first introduction to the game? You're weird if that endears you to it
Not only that, but all Unity games do that by default.
I'm also not sure why that's considered a selling feature.
I've played many Unity games, and I've never seen it.
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@pie_flavor said in Video game spotlight thread:
I've played many Unity games, and I've never seen it.
Never?
I find that hard to believe. But maybe you only play good Unity games, which universally disable this dumb dialog.
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@mott555 Any game by Platinum would not be fun with a keyboard and mouse. And Xenoverse 2's control scheme just makes people immediately ragequit if they try playing on PC with no gamepad.
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@blakeyrat Rings a bell, but that's still not nearly as fine grained control.
Look, I'm not saying that it's a 100% unique feature. I'm just saying that it's a good idea and made me like it that much more.
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
@cartman82 said in Video game spotlight thread:
I posted a pretty good one above in this thread. Paper Sorcerer.
You've never played Wizardry 8, have you.
I've only played 1(NES & Apple II), and some Knight of Diamonds(Apple II). How is the rest of the series?
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@thebread It is what it is.
Wizardry 8 was special, though, as an attempt to turn the grid-based previous games into a full 3D real-time experience while retaining all of the stuff that made Wizardry Wizardry. AFAIK, nobody's replicated its formula or even tried.
(Although maybe the later Might and Magic games tried; I haven't played them beyond the 2D era.)
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
I posted a pretty good one above in this thread. Paper Sorcerer.
You've never played Wizardry 8, have you.
I did.
Paper Sorcerer is the closest to that play style.
Well, there's also Frayed Knights, but that game has an embarrassingly bad UI.
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@cartman82 I thought you said Paper Knights had an embarrassingly bad UI.
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@pie_flavor said in Video game spotlight thread:
@cartman82 I thought you said Paper Knights had an embarrassingly bad UI.
Yes, but Frayed Knights has really REALLY embarrassingly bad UI. As in, they mix in OpenGL rendered environment, poorly skinned Win32 controls and amateurish drawings.
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@cartman82 said in Video game spotlight thread:
I did.
Paper Sorcerer is the closest to that play style.Then that's sad.
@cartman82 said in Video game spotlight thread:
Well, there's also Frayed Knights, but that game has an embarrassingly bad UI.
Every screenshot of it on Google looks embarrassing. (The 3D stuff is ok, and oddly about the same resolution that Wizardry 8 managed in 2001. The 2D stuff looks like garbage. Lazy garbage.)
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
this dumb dialog.
That dialog is the best thing ever. I absolutely hate it when a game launches fullscreen by default and throws all my windows around and changes my screen resolution unexpectedly, plus if you have pointer trails on you can't see your mouse cursor in native fullscreen and sometimes games require using the mouse to exit them. That dialog is my MVP because it's consistent and does exactly what I want with no surprises. It doesn't need to be particularly aesthetically pleasing.
If only more games had launchers like that.
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@lb_ said in Video game spotlight thread:
I absolutely hate it when a game launches fullscreen by default and throws all my windows around and changes my screen resolution unexpectedly
MechWarrior Online does something so bad during startup that my primary monitor disconnects and switches to "No Signal." Then I have to unplug the HDMI connector and re-connect, and it's all fine a moment later. Same thing happens when the game exits. I've never seen any other game do this before.
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@lb_ Fullscreen by default is fine. Fullscreen by default in a non-native resolution is what you actually have a problem with. And yes that is retarded.
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@mott555 said in Video game spotlight thread:
MechWarrior Online does something so bad during startup that my primary monitor disconnects and switches to "No Signal."
Haha on my computer it only draws every other frame flashing to black inbetween. Yeah they have some kind of nasty bug. I'd be surprised they haven't noticed and fixed it by now but... Pirahna Games. They're so incompetent we're just lucky it doesn't format your boot drive somehow.
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@cartman82 said in Video game spotlight thread:
Yes, but Frayed Knights has really REALLY embarrassingly bad UI. As in, they mix in OpenGL rendered environment, poorly skinned Win32 controls and amateurish drawings.
*cringe*
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
They're so incompetent we're just lucky it doesn't format your boot drive somehow.
You joke, but I did one time launch a game that... somehow... started deleting everything on my hard drive. (It was a legitimate game, that I had opened many times before, and it hadn't been updated recently, so I have no idea what happened there.)
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@blakeyrat said in Video game spotlight thread:
Fullscreen by default is fine
In your opinion. Even at native resolution, borderless/windowed fullscreen or native fullscreen is always an unexpected and undesirable thing when I am launching a game for the first time before even configuring graphics options. Especially when my mouse gets trapped on whatever monitor it happened to be on at the time, whether it's the monitor with the game or a different one.
Fullscreen after first setup is fine though, if I configured it that way last time.
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@blakeyrat My point is, there are two options: either you have a dialog asking whether you want fullscreen, which you're the first person I've known to find annoying, or you don't have any such dialog at all, which can easily result in annoyance as it most certainly annoys me and others I've talked to. Which option sounds like it is less annoying to people on average?
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@lb_ said in Video game spotlight thread:
which you're the first person I've known to find annoying,
... where the fuck are you getting that from? I certainly didn't type it.
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@lb_ I looked at some older videos. Most gameplay footage was done in the early access stage - in fact the developer was in the chat of one of the streams I watched - and it had the everloving shit patched out of it. I can see one of the bugs the guy was talking about (the T-pose enemy), but the rest of them I ended up seeing on that stream, and while it crashed a few times, the developers were taking careful note and by the time he ended up in the Reservoir, load lag had almost completely disappeared from patching (in one memorable point it patched right after a crash in the middle of the stream).
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@blakeyrat oh, my bad, you called it dumb, not annoying. I misinterpreted that.
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Rage
RAGE on Steam
Powered by id’s revolutionary id Tech® 5 technology, RAGE is an intense first-person shooter with breakneck vehicle combat, an expansive world to explore, and jaw-dropping graphics!
I got this on one of the sales. It seemed like a meh game, but I figured, 2 euros for a AAA shooter made by Id software, how bad could it be?
It's bad. Rage is an amazingly incompetent game.
Imagine Fallout 3 or Borderlands, and then remove everything that makes those games fun - exploration, finding better and better weapons, cool story, RPG elements, humor. Then make action dull as hell. That's Rage. Hell, even graphics is nothing special.
WTF happened to Id software?
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DEADBOLT is an extremely challenging stealth-action hybrid that allows you to take control of the reaper to quell the recent undead uprising.
Play and complete missions given to you by the mysterious fireplace as you become the avatar of death. While the reaper has an impressive arsenal and skillset to kill the undead, he has one flaw - he dies in one shot... leaving you with no room for error.
[NOTE: The game is also available for PS4 and PS Vita, but is not Cross-Buy.]
I'm going to immediately preface this by saying I'd highly recommend this game. Your objective, usually, is to eliminate all the targets, but some levels have you only needing to complete a single objective (kill a specific enemy or acquire intel) though you may still end up wiping out everything that moves before you leave.
The game is easily more "puzzle" like than just a straightforward action game. While you can try to go guns blazing and take cover from gunfire to trade bullets, it's often better to shut off or blow out lights and knock on doors to ambush your foes and finish them with one or two shots to the dome. In most levels, you are expected to plan things out, otherwise you likely won't win as you'll either run out of ammo well short of clearing everything, or be stuck in cover with a number of enemies firing at you, covering each other's reloads, or be stuck trying to run away from an enemy that can outrun and smash you in melee.
You start with a single six shot revolver, but as you clear levels and unlock achievements, you get more souls that you can use to buy new weapons to start a level with, ranging from dual revolvers, stronger revolvers (one specialized for headshots, the other just strong and pierces walls), a pistol, a silenced pistol, a silenced SMG, a shotgun, a silenced shotgun, and, as expected for a reaper, a scythe. You can also buy secondary weapons to also start with, including a two shot "mousegun" and a knife or a hammer (both of which are silent and can be used as melee or thrown). For the most part, I was running with either the silenced SMG or the scythe and the mousegun.
It's not a particularly long game, at just about 8.5 hours in, I've completed the base game and 18 of the 24 achievements (though the last 4 are "clear all levels with a 5 star rating", "play through the whole game in under one hour in one sitting", "play through the whole game without dying in one sitting", and "unlock all other achievements"), but the game does have a "hard mode" that probably shakes up the levels some and has Steam Workshop support for custom maps, so there's more for it than "one playthrough and done" like some other games.
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@cartman82 They did also make Doom, remember.
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@cartman82 Whats' incredible is that they've made a sequel to it. WHY.
(And it shouldn't be that much of a shock. Doom III was pretty awful too, and that was years before Rage.)
EDIT: BTW you didn't even mention how fucking SHORT it is. You get to what you think is the first boss, kill him, then credits roll. Whaaa? I was just getting started!
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@magus I've just picked up Hollow Knight for the Switch as well, though I haven't yet had the time to actually start playing it. I've heard good things though, and I've been looking for more things to keep my Switch relevant to me.
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@e4tmyl33t are you excited for Super Smash Bros Ultimate?
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@pie_flavor Not in the least. Never been a big fan of Smash Brothers, to be honest. I'm more excited for Super Mario Party later this year.
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@e4tmyl33t :( but it's so good
Also, agreed on Mario Party. Looks like they've finally stopped doing that goddamn 'everyone is in the same car and minigames are when you roll them' thing.
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@pie_flavor I know! That drove me nuts with 10 (and I heard that 9 had it too, but I never played that one). I'll be glad to have a proper competitive Mario Party again.
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@e4tmyl33t Agreed. Honestly the car thing didn't matter as much, but so much of the time was spent doing fuck knows what so you end up with an actually pretty small board, and the game about minigames gets the minigames thrust to the sideline.
I maintain that Mario Party 7 was the last good Mario Party game.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Video game spotlight thread:
@pie_flavor Not in the least. Never been a big fan of Smash Brothers, to be honest. I'm more excited for Super Mario Party later this year.
I'm exactly the opposite. Never really got into Mario Party, but SSB is a strong contender for the title of Greatest Thing Ever. (Although Brawl was a bit disappointing. I'm hoping Ultimate will be better.)
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@pie_flavor I am.
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@masonwheeler said in Video game spotlight thread:
(Although Brawl was a bit disappointing. I'm hoping Ultimate will be better.)
Brawl is the most hated of all, and is responsible for Melee still being the only one people play. Smash 4 was way better, but slowed down a bit, and no one played it because it was on Wii U and Brawl had killed their expectations.
Ultimate is speeding things up again, and giving more movement options, while still cutting down on the spam a bit more than Melee fans like, but I think they'll consider it mostly an improvement. Mechanically, it certainly sounds like the best yet to me.
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@magus said in Video game spotlight thread:
Smash 4 was way better
Yes
but slowed down a bit,
Not compared to Brawl
and no one played it
Incorrect.
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@pie_flavor Look, the Wii U was a complete failure of a console. It barely sold. It would be very surprising if a game for it sold very well. Whereas you just know that Smash 5 will sell better than all the previous games combined by several orders of magnitude.
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@magus Yes. The Wii U rapidly became "the console you play Smash on".
