Video Games General

sooo, how likely it is that it sucks?

 

At least three. Three likely.

I was reading about it yesterday and apparently it's supposed to be more survival focused rather than a straight shooter. I think they were aiming for something like Left 4 Dead though with more to it.

 

A L4D style game set in the Alien's universe? At least this is better than Colonial Marines.

 

That's a pretty low bar to pass considering it had things like the alien ai being worse then the shitty thing it already was because a single line of code had been misspelled.

 

I'll have to give it another try then, I think I gave up on it too soon.

 

It's not that EA doesn't know single player games are viable. It's that they were desperately trying to convince the public to try and get rid of single player games entirely. This is little more than them realizing their efforts are ultimately doomed to failure. That no, Gamers still understand that single player games are good.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for this change. But don't think for a second that the war on single player games wasn't pushed heavily by EA

 

Messing around with the Incorrect Quotes Generator. Considering most of them would fit on a Terrible Tiger meme, l discovered the best trio to use.

(I think this is actually a Gravity Falls quote...)
Laharl: We need a distraction.
Etna: Is anyone here good at jumping up and down and making weird noises?
Flonne, whispering: My time has come

(Who does cook around the castle, I wonder?)
Laharl: HELP! I TOLD FLONNE I’D COOK DINNER TONIGHT BUT I CAN’T COOK!
Etna, pouring milk directly into the cereal bag: And you thought I could help?

(Etna fucking with people.)
Laharl: Sometimes I drink milk straight out of the container.
Etna: The cow???
Laharl: What?
Flonne: Etna, W H Y?

(Flonne, keeping it simple.)
Laharl: What's a word thats a mix between 'sad' and 'mad'?
Etna: Disgruntled, miserable, desolated-
Flonne: Smad.

(Demon Guide to Parenting, chapter 3.)
Laharl: WHY. why did you give Flonne a KNIFE?!
Etna: I’m sorry. They said they felt unsafe.
Laharl: Now I feel unsafe!
Etna: I’m sorry.
Etna: ... would you like a knife?

(...Definitely a demon custom.)
Laharl: Here’s a fun Christmas idea. We hang mistletoe, but instead of kissing, you have to FIGHT whoever else is under it.
Etna: Laharl no.
Flonne: Mistlefoe.
Etna: Please stop encouraging them.

 

And here's something for Transistor fans that I just saw.

 

Random review of Lenna's Inception, a game I played recently. Because why not.

Good points:

• Top down Legend of Zelda style game. It's kind of a blatantly obvious love letter to the series.
• Actually has a pretty good story
• Pretty cute characters
• Catchy soundtrack with my favorite genre of music: sweet ass boss fightin' tunes
• Multiple endings
• You can play the game in 32-bit or 8-bit graphical styles for funzies
• Randomized worlds so the adventure's different each time and there's a few different challenge modes 'n' such

Not so good points:

• A couple of the later plot points are somewhat unclear.
• The randomized nature of the worlds mean there's not much in the way of actual puzzles.
• The 8-bit version of the soundtrack makes the occasional high pitched bleep which hurts my damn ears.

Spoiler: story spoilers

I don't know why everyone suddenly knew it was a game at the end when they didn't throughout the rest of the story. I have to assume the power of Truth had something to do with it because that's the only thing I can think of but, they never spell it out. I'm also unclear on the degree of intelligence 8Fridge actually possessed. Like, was it acting of its own will when it was sowing chaos, especially at the end with that nightmare shit it pulled, or was it just following Devlin's orders the whole time?

Overall, I give it a pretty good so check it out because it's only like ten bucks on Steam out of 10.

 

I think, like most procedurally generated games, it would have benefitted from just not procedurally generating it and having an actual human being design the levels. The constant things, the bosses and the last dungeon, were the best parts.

Spoiler

Regarding 8Fridge, the feeling I got is that it wasn’t sapient, and I’m not sure I’d even say malevolent. It felt more like an animal or maybe a force of (un)nature than anything else; nothing it did felt like it had any design or meaning to it besides propagation. It certainly wasn’t helping Devlin any.

 

Just finished Haven today; it's a scifi adventure romance, where - unlike most games/stories of the romance genre - the focus is mostly on the relationship of the characters (Kay and Yu) after they've already come together and been a couple for a while.
The writing in that regard is pretty good; it can get rather silly or cringe-y at points, but in a way that feels rather natural; ie, the characters are being silly/cringe in the way a real couple might be silly or cringe.
The game as a whole has its flaws, of course - combat and exploration are fairly simplistic, for example, even if dashing around on hover-boots is quite fun, and the story and setting just felt a bit too melancholic for me to truly enjoy - but I rather liked and admire how the developers picked a core concept for the game - ie, Kay and Yu's relationship - and then committed to that and molded the rest of the game's mechanics and gameplay around that.
When exploring the two will link hands while you're moving along in the hoverboots in a straight line for long enough, for example, and one of the idle-animations consists of the two sharing a hug and a kiss (which also happens to heal whichever character is currently the most injured). In battle, you control both characters simultaneously, and a lot of enemies require the two characters acting in concert - whether by performing dual-attacks, that if properly timed are stronger than their individual versions, or one character shielding the other while the other takes advantage of an opening created by the enemy's attack. Gaining points to improve the characters relies on the characters doing stuff together; this does include fighting enemies (though the "XP" gained from that are fairly low), but mostly relies on doing everyday couple-stuff like making and eating food together, playing games together, teasing and annoying each other, having arguments about meaningless stuff, talking about sex, having sex (in a fade-to-black way), having a drink together, and so on, and so forth.

Overall, while I can't really recommend the game unreservedly - even the good ending is rather bittersweet, which combined with the setting of an uninhabited planet makes for an underlying tone that's just a bit too melancholic for my likes - I do think it's worth a try for those looking for a romance-focused game that diverges a bit from the usual formula.

 

So, anybody else remember how the first trailer for the upcoming Dark Alliance game was basically the worst thing ever? They put out a new one that looks a bit less bad with a June 22nd release date:

 

Big bit of news: the full trailer for Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part 2.



And the release date: TOMORROW! Slayers! Tonight we dine in HELL!

 

Oil up your chainsaws and load your super shotguns!

 

Had a thought while playing Cyberpunk.

What do you call it when it's not Dystopian? The 'punk' part of a genre generally denotes the lawlessness, chaos, and generally gritty grimdarky-ness of the setting. Which usually, in cyberpunk, comes in the form of being dystopian.

So what do you call a relatively bright cyber-future setting? I've only ever actually seen such a setting once.

So I also tried to imagine what it might look like, and I came up with cyborg LARPers. Riding around on motorcycles, forming gangs, blowing each-other to gibbets... and then the cleaning crew comes around and picks up everyone's (practically indestructible compared to the rest of their body) heads and sticks them on new chassis and shoos them away so they can clean up the bits. Or, for the sake of economic realism, just guns and parts that work like the space laser tag in Ender's Game.

 

Post-Cyberpunk, if by "relatively bright" you mean "in comparison to normal cyberpunk".

 

Oooh, thanks. I see a couple series in the list I might be interested in watching.

 

You this reminds of something that rarely is done with Cyberpunk genre especially in video games.

I believe it was Ridley Scott who saud that when giving interview on Blade Runner when asked what is cyberpunk.

" Future is old." Was the answer IIRC. And He's kinda right. Lawless, and dystopia doesn't get born from progressing society. It's when system is getting old, outdated and Tech doesn't manage to preserve it youth and strenght.

So often Cyberpunk focuses of showing amazing tech, holograms and lasers, transfer of mind into cyberspace etc and what kind of super amazing progress and leaps humanity made but government oppress people.

There should be more stuff were they show that all that tech is just gray everyday thibg and really useless thing that didn't manage to improve humanity in the past amd won't improve it now.

Deus Ex. The first one was a game that IMHO quite perfectly captured that atmosphere.

 

Hm. Cyberpunk, yes, that sounds like a good idea.

I think one of the key notes you'd want to hit on Post-Cyberpunk though, is that the technology is neat and useful, but it's all about giving people more options- and the effect it has on the world is down to how they choose to use it.

Hm. For that matter, you could write an interesting story about a Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk character as the pro and antagonist... which is which changing as the story progresses, and emphasizing that it is, as it always has been, the choices people make that change the world, not the technology. Have their respective factions not united in evil, but divided, coming to a head at the end and splitting into the assholes and the decent people just doing what they think is right. The Cyberpunk's anarchist buddies turn on him when he decides not to kill the Post-Cyberpunk, only for the MegaCorp's vice president/pencil pushing jerk/what have you to turn all the robots on them even when they're the only ones that can probably turn the reactor off before it goes critical. But Cyberpunk's real friends stand with him, and the company's CEO or branch manager or what have you runs interference with the robots so both parties can work together to prevent the whole freaking city from going up.

Just the thoughts that came to me. I'm sleep-deprived right now, so they may not be as good as I was thinking they were.

 

I'll just leave this here for all the people who hadn't heard of it.

Haven't seen it yet, but just from the trailer I suspect it might just hit that 'so bad it's good' sweet spot.

 

For those interested in Evil Genius 2 here's a 30 minute preview done by a third party:


From what I can tell from watching it's very true to the original. Has been given high marks for an early build.

 

"Early build", suuuuure... you do know the game releases at the end of the month, right? Assuming they didn't cripple that version at all (and that it was the latest build when they gave away the code), there's a good chance that's what got submitted to Valve and/or Epic as the final game.

 

*Shrug*
Allegedly they've been told about the camera controls needing tightening up and are doing that. Beyond that, damned if I know.

 

That sounds patchable, so I think we know some of what will be in the Day 1 patch besides bug fixes.

 

Stellaris 3.0 is going to be released on April 15th, and it's intended to address some of the micromanagement issues in 2.0 (and add Espionage).

Pertinent for QQ, the code-name for Stellaris 3.0 is "Dick" ... after Philip K Dick, but the name is just "Dick".

So, if you want a harder, faster, deeper experience, you need Dick.

 

I've not touched Stellaris since 2019 when I got super addicted to it, that might just draw me back in.

 

Thanks, I'll try to remember to keep an eye on it

Unrelated to Stellaris, someone tried to take down Jimquisition again.