Video game spotlight thread


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @powerlord said:

    I'm tempted to start playing WoW again. I need someone to talk me out of it.

    Everyone who signs in during the 10th anniversary gets a Molten Corgi-see-what-they-did-there battle pet, as well as a garrison so you can play Farmville while you play WoW.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    If you want a good visual novel that runs on PSTV (I assume-- it's a Vita game) get Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward. It's actually... good.

    I've already completed that one on the 3DS. I think we talked about it in the avatar thread back when you had the Zero III avatar.



  • Dude, if you have a 3ds, why are you talking about vitas? The new Pokemon came out on Friday!



  • @Magus said:

    Dude, if you have a 3ds, why are you talking about vitas? The new Pokemon came out on Friday!

    Never got into Pokemon.



  • The two 3ds versions have been pretty great. The latest is a remake of one I played years ago and still have the strategy guide for (still mostly accurate, even!).



  • I am, once again, playing The Battle For Wesnoth. Different campaigns though.



  • I won Peggle 2, SO THERE



  • I played the hell out of that game but ended up giving up after the RNG screwed me over way too many times. I have my suspicions for how random it actually is...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @KillaCoder said:

    I have my suspicions for how random it actually is...

    But it's Open Sores, so you can actually check. If you're brave, you can probably replace it with a better one.

    But I think it uses the Mersenne Twister, which is supposed to be pretty good.



  • Lol. Excellent point. I played before I knew how to program. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it 😄



  • @KillaCoder said:

    I played the hell out of that game but ended up giving up after the RNG screwed me over way too many times. I have my suspicions for how random it actually is...

    There's always a suspicion that the computer is cheating you when it "rolls" the dice. I had a discussion with Blakey at the old place about it. He reckoned it was confirmation bias which I can kind of see.

    Saying that, I had a Backgammon game on my phone that definitely cheated.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @RTapeLoadingError said:

    There's always a suspicion that the computer is cheating you when it "rolls" the dice. I had a discussion with Blakey at the old place about it. He reckoned it was confirmation bias which I can kind of see.

    Definitely. I can remember writing a game ages ago (no, it wasn't very good) where I thought it was cheating against me, despite the fact that I'd written it and I went and checked the RNG very thoroughly.

    It's just like how the dice gods sometimes hate you.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    Scribblenauts

    The Scribblenauts series is pretty much ruined for me, because I don't think it'll ever be as entertaining as this hour-long TAS of Super Scribblenauts on DS.


  • Banned


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @powerlord said:

    I'm tempted to start playing WoW again. I need someone to talk me out of it.

    I started playing it again (after years off) a couple of months ago. Played on/off for a bit, got back into the swing of it, tried to do dungeons and then remembered/rediscovered it was full of cunts who don't understand that not everyone plays hours a day and that some people are new to things even if they have been in the game for years. Then I stopped playing again just before the current expansion.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @loopback0 said:

    dungeons and then remembered/rediscovered it was full of cunts who don't understand that not everyone plays hours a day and that some people are new to things even if they have been in the game for years.

    Maybe try a different server? I've seen that too, but where I am now I don't see much of that, except when it's deserved, like the healer's off taking a nap instead of keeping the tank alive, which just happened a while ago. We took care of it by booting him, and got a new one in less than a minute.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Moving existing characters to new servers costs money, and there's still a likelihood the new server contains more cunts. I'm not invested in it enough to bother with all that, or to pay more money to transfer somewhere else.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Make new characters. It's not as it takes THAT long to level up.

    FWIW on the North American servers, dentar/whisperwind/etc are good PVE/alliance and Frostwofl/Maiev/etc are good PVP horde.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @FrostCat said:

    Make new characters. It's not as it takes THAT long to level up.

    Long enough when you only want to play casually and you're not invested enough to effectively start again.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @loopback0 said:

    Long enough when you only want to play casually and you're not invested enough to effectively start again.

    Ah, so you didn't want solutions, you wanted to vent.

    $25 for a single character transfer isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @FrostCat said:

    Ah, so you didn't want solutions, you wanted to vent.

    Yeah pretty much. Guess I should have made that clear.


  • Java Dev

    @FrostCat said:

    Maybe try a different server? I've seen that too, but where I am now I don't see much of that, except when it's deserved, like the healer's off taking a nap instead of keeping the tank alive, which just happened a while ago. We took care of it by booting him, and got a new one in less than a minute.

    With random queueing nowadays, you're going to hit cunts whatever way you put it. Best to just remember it doesn't matter what you do cause you're gonna hit different cunts next time round.

    My advice: Get a guild. A little island of sanity in a crazy world.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PleegWat said:

    My advice: Get a guild. A little island of sanity in a crazy world.

    I considered that, but even without the cunts, I'm not sure I play it enough at the moment to sometimes put something back into a guild. Meh. It's a bit like a ragequit - I'll sack it off for a bit and then probably go back.



  • I used to try it periodically. Literally every time they sent me those "try WOW again!" free trial emails, my character's skills/perks/whatever had been cleared and I had to reset them all over but in a fucking new system I didn't understand. Also the toolbars were all cleared. Also, one time, they'd even cleared my FRIENDS LIST.

    So it's like, "try WOW again! BTW our first-run experience for older players is having them try to figure out how the rules have changed over the last 6 months, also if you screw-up you have to pay a ton of gold to re-do it."

    Usually I couldn't be assed and just logged off again. Now I don't even bother trying.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Literally every time they sent me those "try WOW again!" free trial emails, my character's skills/perks/whatever had been cleared and I had to reset them all over but in a fucking new system I didn't understand. Also the toolbars were all cleared. Also, one time, they'd even cleared my FRIENDS LIST.

    Dunno what to tell you--I've quit twice but never seen that happen. You're probably doing something wrong.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PleegWat said:

    With random queueing nowadays, you're going to hit cunts whatever way you put it.

    Some servers are definitely better than others IME. I don't do a hell of a lot of queueing but I haven't run into a lot of idiots lately on the servers on which I play.

    Today I did two instances of Hellfire Ramparts on Frostwolf. We had an incompetent healer like I said above. Problem solved with a vote to boot. The next time I ran the instance the overall group wasn't as experienced but everyone did a decent job overall.

    In both the two servers I play on--one as Alliance, one as Horde, in both cases, as the more populous side, I'm in one of those 900+-member guilds. You don't get the focused benefits of a tighter guild, but as long as you log in every 10 days you don't get booted, so you get all the guild perks, and you can raid in a group if you want--there's a core of people who do it.



  • @loopback0 said:

    I considered that, but even without the cunts, I'm not sure I play it enough at the moment to sometimes put something back into a guild. Meh. It's a bit like a ragequit - I'll sack it off for a bit and then probably go back.

    The awesome, easy, cheap way to avoid cunts. Play single player games 😄

    I was into Guild Wars 1 for a bit but ya. Too many cunts. There's enough single player RPGs to keep me going thankfully.


  • kills Dumbledore

    Can't be bothered with the formatting rules, since I'm on mobile but I just got Banished in the steam sale. It's a fun little city builder where you have to manage resources, population and assign jobs to your citizens. It reminds me of Settlers 2, my favourite of that particular series.



  • SimCity

    I picked up SimCity 2013 on the Origin sale a few days ago since they added offline mode a while back. I have such mixed feelings about it. Compared to SimCity 4, there is one major major advantage and one major major drawback, and I'm not sure which outweighs the other at this point. The advantage of 2013 is curved roads... which sounds like a gimmick, and maybe it is a little bit, but I am really loving the curved roads. You can make truly beautiful layouts now. The downside to curved roads, ironically enough, is 2013's major weakness, which is city size. I had heard complaints about this, but SimCity 4 had similar complaints and I didn't find that game to be all that bad, so I discounted them. I maybe shouldn't have. It is really really cramped; I find myself running out of space at like 30K residents or something, partially because of the aforementioned curved roads leading to somewhat inefficient space use. The space crunch is made worse by the lack of terraforming... if you've got a hill in the middle of your city, sucks to be you because that space won't be very usable. You can't even do minor controlled modifications to the terrain.

    As much as I like them, every iteration of SimCity has had been dropped on its head a few times when it comes to some aspects, usually regarding traffic, and 2013 is no exception. (I think it keeps earlier versions' propensities for sims to take stupid, slightly-shorter, low-capacity routes instead of main throughfares even if the former are very congested.)

    Some WTFs:

    Train stations and ferry terminals come with their own attached roads for somewhat reasonable reasons; the building to the lower left is a train terminal. However, I can't connect the road to it with the main road to the upper right because they're too close and slightly off, or overlapping slightly (which shouldn't be possible) or something like that. That would have only been a minor WTF if I could delete a square of the road, but the dropped-on-its-head WTF is that you can't delete any of that road without destroying the placed building next to it. So that WTF train station placement cost me $15000, or something, at a time when that was a noticeable hit. Here's a cop car on the way to an emergency with lights an sirens (I caught the screenshot at a point in the cycle where the flashing lights were off) being blocked by a garbage truck as it stops at every house along that street, because as bad as real people are at yielding to emergency vehicles, sims are 100x worse. I'm not sure they _ever_ do. Don't ask me what is going on with that road. Fire truck A just finished putting out a fire at business B, which had spread to business C. Instead of, I dunno, walking next door or backing the truck up, the fire truck completely left the scene, drove to the end of the street (waiting in traffic, of course), turned around, drove past the fire to the _other_ end of the street, turned around again, then came back to the fire. This isn't a WTF, at least unless you don't like my city. :-) This is just me playing around with an explicit goal to try and make as few straight roads as I can; I thought I'd close on something I actually like about it.

    (You can see my very inefficient space use, though in my defense (1) this is far worse on that measure than my other "cities" and (2) a lot of that is an attempt to provide room for larger, higher-density buildings when I get around to providing for them, though I don't think I really have the road capacity and layout to support much on that line.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    That road layout is for the burbs.

    Filed under: I'll get my hat…



  • @dkf said:

    That road layout is for the burbs.

    <small>Filed under: <a><i>I'll get my hat…

    Yeah, it looks a lot like real housing developments I've seen in slightly hilly areas.



  • #Hyper Princess Pitch#
    It's a very fun arcadey game about a Princess who wants to prevent Christmas by shooting lots of explosive bricks.

    Old trailer video:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRJYFbJDkqs

    Really fun, but very short with only 5 levels.
    Available for free here.



  • @tarunik said:

    Eve Online

    I am currently Winning at Eve. I'm actually considering resubbing at some point in the future because CCP seems to be cleaning stuff up



  • @JazzyJosh said:

    I'm actually considering resubbing at some point in the future because CCP seems to be cleaning stuff up

    They have been doing quite a bit of spring cleaning over the past few years -- Crimewatch 2.0 and Tiericide were the banner-bearers of late, while the UI is a fair bit cleaner as well, and the new-style-anchorables train is rolling now, too. Industry is also getting an overhaul, and the clone system is getting updated as well -- never mind the upcoming work on manual ship control 😮



  • Nah, I'm talking a timespan of the past couple of months. I already knew about Crimewatch and Tiericide.

    Pretty sure my carrier is in a hostile station though and none of my ships are on it :/



  • Shadow of Mordor

    "Hey! What if we made a game exactly like Batman: Arkham series, but added quick time events?" *gunshot*

    At least, that's how it should have happened. Why do AAA titles like quick time events so much? Why does anybody? What a fucking terrible gaming concept that we all tried, and rejected, back in the 1980s with Dragon's Lair.

    The worst part is, I've played all the Batman: Arkham games, I'm pretty fucking good at them if I do say so myself. So you pit me against 15 orcs, and I can kick their asses-- until the cat-monster appears, tackles me, and-- the only way to get it off is a quick time event.

    Ok, here's the thing guys: I internalize game controls. I don't sit there in my head and think "X, Y, X, X, X" while fighting Gotham gangsters or Uruks, ok? So if you put a big-ass prompt on the screen saying "hit Y", I need to physically look at my controller to figure out which button is Y. Seriously, I'm not making this up. Maybe it's my dyslexia or whatever, but it's the way my brain works.

    Then when you add a timer to pressing Y, so you have to press Y in less than 1.5 seconds, you've now doomed me to fail. Because, guess what? I can't look down at the controller, localize the Y button, then look back up to the screen in the time you've given me.

    The Arkham games they were basically cloning when they made Shadow of Mordor don't have quick time events. I'm pretty sure they don't have a single one, in all three games. (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure.) Why did Warner Bros. fuck up their own game genre by adding them? What the fuck, guys? Where is the person asking for quick time events? Show me one person who loves these things and actually wants more of them in gaming. ONE PERSON. I dare you.

    ... anyway. Game's ok so far, but getting tackled by that cat monster like 5 times in a row and having to restart the same fight over and over due to it just pissed me off.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Game's ok so far, but getting tackled by that cat monster like 5 times in a row and having to restart the same fight over and over due to it just pissed me off.

    Is the cat monster in the same place every time?



  • Wyrmstooth

    Steam Nexus ModDB

    The main quest consists of a coherent story that takes less than five million years to do. There are new spells, new types of zombies, new alcoholic beverages, and new alchemy ingredients.

    Best of all, unlike Falskaar, none of the main characters are holding the idiot ball, and the boss you fight at the end is an actual enemy that you fight instead of an unskippable uninteractive cutscene. Google Chrome marked the last three words of that sentence as misspellings.

    In fact, the main quest doesn't waste any time. You meet the enemy and the people who will help you defeat it right away, you know the reward (10,000 gold coins!) from the start, and there are no places in it when I thought to myself "boy, I wish I was playing a video game right now instead of playing Falskaar".



  • Yeah it's part of a quest, not in the open world area.

    BTW the solution was to just ignore it and the orcs, keeping the orcs alive until they killed the cat monster. Then kill the orcs.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Yeah it's part of a quest, not in the open world area.

    BTW the solution was to just ignore it and the orcs, keeping the orcs alive until they killed the cat monster. Then kill the orcs.

    I suppose if you wanted to, you could hold the controller up in front of you right before you triggered it, so you wouldn't have to look down.



  • But I have to look at the screen too. See it's like multitasking.

    I just wish game developers would realize that there are some things some players simply cannot do. Hey Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare: I can't do dodging moves that require me to center the analog stick, move it left, right, or back, and click it without moving it any other direction at all, all in less than .5 seconds. I can't do it. I'm glad your playtesters are so agile with controllers, but you've made a game with super-useful dodge controls people can't use. (And I know I'm not alone on this one, you almost never see anybody dodging in gameplay.)

    Quick time events are easier, given. But even if you're ok at doing them, where is the person who actually likes doing them? Nobody likes them. How do they keep ending up in big budget games?!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    But I have to look at the screen too. See it's like multitasking.

    No, I completely understand. I was just saying that if you know when it's coming, you might have enough warning to hold the controller where you don't have to look as far down to see it, thus hopefully reducing the time it takes to recognize the right button and hit it.

    I've never heard of anyone who roots for QTE either, so I dunno what to say. I guess putting them in is easier than writing a story without plot holes.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So if you put a big-ass prompt on the screen saying "hit Y", I need to physically look at my controller to figure out which button is Y.

    Some games put the prompt on the edge of the screen corresponding to the button you have to hit:

    Apparently (based on my quick overview of Google image results) Shadow of Mordor doesn't do this, which sucks. It should be a basic UI requirement for QTEs.



  • @hungrier said:

    It should be a basic UI requirement for QTEs.

    No. The basic UI requirement for QTEs is: NEVER PUT A QTE IN YOUR GAME EVERYBODY FUCKING HATES THEM



  • @FrostCat said:

    I guess putting them in is easier than writing a story without plot holes.

    That earns a like. :-)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    No. The basic UI requirement for QTEs is: NEVER PUT A QTE IN YOUR GAME EVERYBODY FUCKING HATES THEM

    Well yeah. But if you must, at least have the prompts be useful like in God of War, the game that invented the damn things.



  • @hungrier said:

    But if you must, at least have the prompts be useful like in God of War, the game that invented the damn things.

    HELLO they were in DRAGON'S LAIR. 1983.

    Goddamned, kids these days.



  • Sorry for not researching the history of ancient FMV games in my off the cuff reply.



  • It was already in the fucking thread. You could have goddamned read it. Right here on this page.

    Ugh. Dealing with idiots on this board is tiring.



  • My bigger point is who gives a shit about Dragon's Lair? Nintendo didn't invent the analog stick for the N64, but for any practical purpose they might as well have. Same thing with QTEs in modern games.


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