The addons are harder in Control but they're also pitched for a fully upgraded Jesse because they don't unlock until postgame.
Gaming thoughts, bite-size chewables - new orange flavor!
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The addons are harder in Control but they're also pitched for a fully upgraded Jesse because they don't unlock until postgame.
I barely had 50% of the skill tree unlocked by the end of Control. As much fun as the abilities were, I thought there was too much combat and most fights were too long. Didn't really make me want to grind a bunch of side quests for more ability points. I probably should have modified the difficulty settings - I definitely will if I ever play the DLC.
Yeah, you don't get all of the powers, but you get enough to max out one or two which makes a big difference (the one that lets you convert an enemy is great, always nice to give the others something to shoot at that isn't you).
The ability to co-opt the enemy is hard to overstate. For example, in COD Zombies, by far the best ammo mod to apply to your weapon is Brain Rot, which gets you green-eyed zombie new friends, who like nothing better than re-killing their zombie chums (and they are very good at it, at least until their heads explode).
Been pondering giving Yakuza 0 a go, and there is a steam bundle with that and the two Kiwami games (remakes of Yakuza 1 & 2) on sale.
How punishing is the combat on Easy difficulty with a keyboard and mouse? My arthritis has a hard time with repetitive multi-key combos, but I'd like to play through for the story and mini-games.
How punishing is the combat on Easy difficulty with a keyboard and mouse? My arthritis has a hard time with repetitive multi-key combos, but I'd like to play through for the story and mini-games.
Yeah, I found Control tough at first, but got easier the further into the game I got. I have not quite filled out the entire skill tree, but definitely like 75% of it. So far so good with Foundation. It is tougher (Hiss sharpened) but hasn't been too bad so far. My biggest problem with Alan Wake is dude can't run for shit, lol.
It's even cheaper at GoG - $13.49 - https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_yakuza_bundle
GoG also has Yakuza 0 by itself for $4.99 - https://www.gog.com/game/yakuza_0
I've never played the games so I can't comment on the difficulty. I'm terrible at fighting games so I'd probably need god mode to get through them.
Yakuza 0 doesn't need god mode to simply beat. If you want to 100% it, maybe, but I didn't find the fights in Y0 too challenging. Y1's 100% challenges seem to require you to do that one move repeatedly, and I can't get the timing right.
Y1 and Y3 are kinda irritating in how their fights are setup (Y3's combat is especially egregious with everyone on permablock and you needing to spam specific moves for it), but the rest are pretty good about giving you options - they're not easy, but they're generally quite doable if you don't go looking for challenges.
I'm not sure how well they'd work with KB/M though.
Like a Dragon would work better, it being a turn based RPG and all. That's 80% off on Steam right now.
Like a Dragon would work better, it being a turn based RPG and all. That's 80% off on Steam right now.
I recently finished that, and greatly enjoyed it. Hence the interest in Yakuza 0. Grabbed the GOG version of Yakuza 0, thanks all
Just played a game called Warm Snow (of note, it's on sale now during the autumn Steam sale). Take Hades, but use Chinese mythology instead. It's by a Chinese developer and voiced in Mandarin. Some of the translations are wonky, but mostly they get the point across.
The game's animation style feels a little like moving wood cuts, and very true to the mythology. I don't think it has as much personality as Hades (the main character is your strong silent type, for one), but what they have done feels good so far.
The first DLC is free to download, and the second DLC is supposed to be out in a month. If you're looking for a Hades-like experience with a different tone, it's worth looking at.
The game's animation style feels a little like moving wood cuts, and very true to the mythology. I don't think it has as much personality as Hades (the main character is your strong silent type, for one), but what they have done feels good so far.
The first DLC is free to download, and the second DLC is supposed to be out in a month. If you're looking for a Hades-like experience with a different tone, it's worth looking at.
never eat the warm snow... nor the yellow snow
In a very real way, that is the premise of the game. But for much darker reasons.
There's not a whole lot of "press O,X, and L2 all at once to do <thing>" in Yakuza, so KBM probably isn't too bad. Some of the hidden objectish side quests are probably simpler with KBM. The earlier games (and I think Like A Dragon, too) have the standard 'one stick for camera, the other for movement', so it won't be any more difficult to control than any other console port that uses that control scheme natively.
I was just looking through a folder on my drive filled with stuff from 1991.
It makes me wonder if we should really believe that things like The Lost Vale
https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Ultima_VIII:_The_Lost_Vale
are really gone.
It makes me wonder if we should really believe that things like The Lost Vale
https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Ultima_VIII:_The_Lost_Vale
are really gone.
Even if there was a surviving chunk of The Lost Vale, I'm not sure we'd have any fun playing it. U8 was an interesting game, but a pretty ungood Ultima. I love it for its dank, twilit atmosphere, and that stupidly fiddly magic system, but the jumping and the general dungeon design can go fuck themselves. More of that sounds decidedly unappealing, but I can see why poking at it as a curio from another era fed by morbid curiosity would nominally be fun to do.
Coincidentally, I had a HDD fail recently, and it took my music collection from 2004 with it - not that I can't just find that stuff on the cloud now. It doesn't feel the same though, there's a real pleasure to rooting around decades-old folder structures and discovering how your taste has evolved, or hasn't. It brings some dusty things to light that you'd once treasured but have long since forgotten, and the little sparks of reignition that doing this brings is something Apple or Spotify just can't replicate the same way.
Coincidentally, I had a HDD fail recently, and it took my music collection from 2004 with it - not that I can't just find that stuff on the cloud now. It doesn't feel the same though, there's a real pleasure to rooting around decades-old folder structures and discovering how your taste has evolved, or hasn't. It brings some dusty things to light that you'd once treasured but have long since forgotten, and the little sparks of reignition that doing this brings is something Apple or Spotify just can't replicate the same way.
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Tangentially related to Ultima 8, I played it in my sophomore year of high school and at one point I asked my mom to pick me up the strategy guide for it since she was going to run to the mall for an errand or something. I didn't think this through and I think she was mortified to buy a book with a flaming pentagram on the cover. Sorry Mom!
Man, I haven’t even turned my PC on this work week so far, and it’s looking like that trend might continue. I have a game just sitting there, waiting to be completed. Just, no time this week. sigh ![:\](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/civis/data/assets/smilies/slash-1x.png "Slash :\")
Some more love for Talos Principle II. It's definitely a good sequel to the first, and has a lot going for it. Tons of new mechanics made it fresh, and the levels were amazing to explore. Having done several run-throughs of the first game (and Gehenna), it's easy to say that the sequel is a bit easier, but that didn't make it less fun at all. I very often found myself massively overthinking solutions, which gave me a chuckle. Looking forward to a replay in a few months to pick up some alternate choice achievements.
Also, I gotta recommend Entropy Center if the Talos games are your thing.
Also, I gotta recommend Entropy Center if the Talos games are your thing.
The Steam categories are dumb.
Since when are non-randomized, fully scripted games like Elden Ring and Lies of P considered Rogue-like? I could see them classified as RPGs (due to the stat growth), but Rogue-Like?
Since when are non-randomized, fully scripted games like Elden Ring and Lies of P considered Rogue-like? I could see them classified as RPGs (due to the stat growth), but Rogue-Like?
Yeah, that makes no sense at all. If there isn't a significant random component to the levels, IMO it's neither a roguelike or a roguelite.
I haven't played Lies of P, and Elden Ring only a little, but the latter is more an open world game with punishing combat. It's not in the same lineage at all.
Some new eye candy from the Star Citizen folks. Maybe if they get into a transporter accident with Starfield we'll get the sandbox/sim/game that always seems to be over the horizon.
Within this spoiler tag is a profanity laden tirade on the game Warhammer 40000: Darktide and why I refunded it.
So, I got peer pressured into buy Warhammer 40k: Darktide last night and I ended up refunding it due to the fact I fucking hate this game. Maybe if I didn't have the 2 hour time limit to refund it I could have learned to begrudgingly tolerate it for the sake of my buddies who do like it, but no. So...
First up, fuck Games Workshop! These little fucking price gouging, IP clutching, employee and fan abusing goblin assholes can suck it. If I never spend a cent towards any of their stuff again, I'd be quite content. Next, fuck Tencent. I don't trust these IP hording, 'don't disparage China' fuckers for a second. Thirdly, I am fucking over Warhammer 40000. Maybe I was insulated in memes and shit posts when I actually enjoyed the setting, but years removed from Bruva Alphabusa's Text to Speech series (fuck GW), Astartes (FUCK GW), and me abandoning r/Grimdank, r/40klore and Reddit in general (fuck Reddit), I really don't give a shit about it. Too self serious and grimderp with very little levity to be found anymore even among the orks. And I am SO. FUCKING. TIRED of fighting Chaos in these games. Find something else! When were the Dark Eldar, or whatever IP rights holding friendly bullshit GW calls them now, last seen? Dawn of War Dark Crusade? Fuck, how about some Imperium on Imperium hate crimes? That shit is canon and encouraged in some areas as it makes for "a stronger people able to handle the endless rigors of war" or some dumb shit that propegates the setting.
So that's enough about the shit surrounding the game, what about the game? Yeah, fuck this too. I cannot think of a single game where first person melee is the primary means of combat that I've enjoyed. Tolerate, yes. Enjoyed, no. "But swiftdraw!" I hear you exclaim "You have umpteenbajillion hours in Skyrim!" Stealth archer, alakablam fireball mage, musket, and later, rifle mods. Next? "You loved Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 and Deep Rock Galactic and that has it too!" As a ammo conservation or pure desperation measure. In L4D, it was a way to get spacing from zombies to shoot them too. In Darktide the primary weapon is the melee implement and given my total of 19 hours between Vermintides 1 & 2, and my 108 minutes in Darktide I can tell you it's more or less true and I fucking hate it. I have heard people claim to can build up to being range primary, but thats the thing, you have to build towards it. I don't have the time, patience or inclination to build towards anyhting in this game. Which is another fucking thing. I hate skill trees in these games and the crafting and loot collection in this game in particular. At least in DRG, you had specific missions and task to unlock weapons and mods and it was easy enough to do. Here? Fucking randomized. Just adds to a grind to a game that I already have little patience for.
Other little things that irked me: Lasrifle has 69 shots (nice) a mag and 700some rounds in total, which is plenty, right? WRONG! It has 23 per mage and divide your total by 3! Why? Because the lasrifles are all fucking hotshot and thats what they do! Because Fat Shark couldn't just fucking account for that normally and just put the normal amount for easier tracking of ammo!
Daemonhost. At low level. And then throwing a fucking armored and range horde at us whill dealing with it. DIck move.
Objective markers not showing up until you're on top of the fuckers, leaving us to hunt for the fucking things while being swarmed. This wasn't "search for the hidden item" thing, this was the norm.
Where the fuck is my single player mode with bots Fat Shark? Oh, you gave up on that? Fuck you then.
One of my buddies, who is generally a chaotic element in these types of games. In L4D 2, and DRG, I can account and compensate for this. This game, whose gameplay is built so far from my prefered style, I can't. Especially when the game's boost are so strongly tied to "squad cohesion" and maintaining a certain distance from eachother and he is darting all over going into firing lanes and trying to face tank as a fucking pysker. It's frustating in a game I am already frustrated with.
The final thing that broke me, the last little thing, was when I went down and wasn't revivable. This act didn't put me into a rage about the unfairness for the game or something, no. What I felt was releif. I no longer had to play in the shitshow that was on going. I could do something else, at least for a bit. And when I was rescued, all I could was quietly sigh and keep my mouth shut so I wouldn't drag down the two guys who were enjoying the game. I fucking hate this game and I am so glad I refunded it.
First up, fuck Games Workshop! These little fucking price gouging, IP clutching, employee and fan abusing goblin assholes can suck it. If I never spend a cent towards any of their stuff again, I'd be quite content. Next, fuck Tencent. I don't trust these IP hording, 'don't disparage China' fuckers for a second. Thirdly, I am fucking over Warhammer 40000. Maybe I was insulated in memes and shit posts when I actually enjoyed the setting, but years removed from Bruva Alphabusa's Text to Speech series (fuck GW), Astartes (FUCK GW), and me abandoning r/Grimdank, r/40klore and Reddit in general (fuck Reddit), I really don't give a shit about it. Too self serious and grimderp with very little levity to be found anymore even among the orks. And I am SO. FUCKING. TIRED of fighting Chaos in these games. Find something else! When were the Dark Eldar, or whatever IP rights holding friendly bullshit GW calls them now, last seen? Dawn of War Dark Crusade? Fuck, how about some Imperium on Imperium hate crimes? That shit is canon and encouraged in some areas as it makes for "a stronger people able to handle the endless rigors of war" or some dumb shit that propegates the setting.
So that's enough about the shit surrounding the game, what about the game? Yeah, fuck this too. I cannot think of a single game where first person melee is the primary means of combat that I've enjoyed. Tolerate, yes. Enjoyed, no. "But swiftdraw!" I hear you exclaim "You have umpteenbajillion hours in Skyrim!" Stealth archer, alakablam fireball mage, musket, and later, rifle mods. Next? "You loved Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 and Deep Rock Galactic and that has it too!" As a ammo conservation or pure desperation measure. In L4D, it was a way to get spacing from zombies to shoot them too. In Darktide the primary weapon is the melee implement and given my total of 19 hours between Vermintides 1 & 2, and my 108 minutes in Darktide I can tell you it's more or less true and I fucking hate it. I have heard people claim to can build up to being range primary, but thats the thing, you have to build towards it. I don't have the time, patience or inclination to build towards anyhting in this game. Which is another fucking thing. I hate skill trees in these games and the crafting and loot collection in this game in particular. At least in DRG, you had specific missions and task to unlock weapons and mods and it was easy enough to do. Here? Fucking randomized. Just adds to a grind to a game that I already have little patience for.
Other little things that irked me: Lasrifle has 69 shots (nice) a mag and 700some rounds in total, which is plenty, right? WRONG! It has 23 per mage and divide your total by 3! Why? Because the lasrifles are all fucking hotshot and thats what they do! Because Fat Shark couldn't just fucking account for that normally and just put the normal amount for easier tracking of ammo!
Daemonhost. At low level. And then throwing a fucking armored and range horde at us whill dealing with it. DIck move.
Objective markers not showing up until you're on top of the fuckers, leaving us to hunt for the fucking things while being swarmed. This wasn't "search for the hidden item" thing, this was the norm.
Where the fuck is my single player mode with bots Fat Shark? Oh, you gave up on that? Fuck you then.
One of my buddies, who is generally a chaotic element in these types of games. In L4D 2, and DRG, I can account and compensate for this. This game, whose gameplay is built so far from my prefered style, I can't. Especially when the game's boost are so strongly tied to "squad cohesion" and maintaining a certain distance from eachother and he is darting all over going into firing lanes and trying to face tank as a fucking pysker. It's frustating in a game I am already frustrated with.
The final thing that broke me, the last little thing, was when I went down and wasn't revivable. This act didn't put me into a rage about the unfairness for the game or something, no. What I felt was releif. I no longer had to play in the shitshow that was on going. I could do something else, at least for a bit. And when I was rescued, all I could was quietly sigh and keep my mouth shut so I wouldn't drag down the two guys who were enjoying the game. I fucking hate this game and I am so glad I refunded it.
I see someone is trying to subvert the old milliZeus rant scale, since the titular man now has a Lego franchise and seems happy as a clam.
A distinctly enviable state of being, and one the has eluded @swiftdraw.
For good reason, in this case. I might try Darktide when I pick up a month of Game Pass, but it’s so far down the list that an expedition outfitted with ropes and lanterns and an ancient map are going to be needed to get to it.
For swiftdraw, time to play something happy for a few minutes. Snakebird, perhaps.
A distinctly enviable state of being, and one the has eluded @swiftdraw.
For good reason, in this case. I might try Darktide when I pick up a month of Game Pass, but it’s so far down the list that an expedition outfitted with ropes and lanterns and an ancient map are going to be needed to get to it.
For swiftdraw, time to play something happy for a few minutes. Snakebird, perhaps.
I played space tow truck for an hour in Star Citizen to wind down from Darktide last night. It’s fine now. Just want to get that off my chest least my usual group, who like Darktide, caught the fully force of my disdain for that game.
I did the same thing a few times - I found myself thinking that I needed to move parts outside of plasma walls and how I'd have to juggle them back and forth to get the right part in the right place...when there was a window or something else equally simple I just needed to use.
Haha, right!?!? I spent extra time on EVERY puzzle trying to see if I could get components outside of it. Every time I'd actually end up with blocks and connectors taken out, I never used them. And I'd always leave linked connectors near the entrance doors. Nope, no use of them either.
"I'm sick of playing Path of Exile. Too much RNG, and I'm not having fun any more. I need a change."
/installs Fallout 1, configures it, starts playing.
Roulette dealer: "Place your bets. You currently have 3951 caps, how many would you like to bet?"
Much better.
/installs Fallout 1, configures it, starts playing.
Roulette dealer: "Place your bets. You currently have 3951 caps, how many would you like to bet?"
Much better.
I tried Darktide - thankfully it was on GamePass, so no beer tokens died to bring us this information. The information is that it’s a bit crap.
Dug out that plastic box I've had stowed away in all kinds of places over the years that had the original xbox in it and the two original Playstation 1s. Finally got around to test them. PS1 the first worked absolutely fine. PS1 the second needed some patience for it to read discs, but once it got going, it seemed to be fine. The Xbox has developed a very noisy cooling fan and the disc drive takes forever to find and load a game. All three will be hitting eBay soon though none of it will make me rich
The only game I had to try on the Xbox was Quantum Redshift, a lousy WipeOut clone that plays and handles horribly. Not sure where my mediocre collection of original Xbox games is now... but the QR disc was luckily in the drive. Image quality clearly sucked compared to anything more modern (no surprise...), though obviously better than the PS1.
Yeah, the PS1. I want to say 'blast from the past' and I think in it was, mostly. The image quality was horrid on our 2K tv, though that could be the AV to HDMI convertor. Our TV still has its own direct AV inputs, and possibly even a SCART socket still... but can't be bothered lifting it down off the wall to look for now.
Gave two of my favourite games a run - WipeOut and Skull Monkeys. Wipeout looked awful and whatever mastery I had once had was long gone, so it was a total crashfest too Skull Monkeys though remains a stellar game and I got quite absorbed in it. I also tried the original Armored Core game but that was just hard. I think I need to read the manual for that one...
Anyway, the plan (dream) is to eventually buy a Net Yaroze version of the PS1. Sadly they're pretty spendy these days. Wish I hadn't sold my last one...
The only game I had to try on the Xbox was Quantum Redshift, a lousy WipeOut clone that plays and handles horribly. Not sure where my mediocre collection of original Xbox games is now... but the QR disc was luckily in the drive. Image quality clearly sucked compared to anything more modern (no surprise...), though obviously better than the PS1.
Yeah, the PS1. I want to say 'blast from the past' and I think in it was, mostly. The image quality was horrid on our 2K tv, though that could be the AV to HDMI convertor. Our TV still has its own direct AV inputs, and possibly even a SCART socket still... but can't be bothered lifting it down off the wall to look for now.
Gave two of my favourite games a run - WipeOut and Skull Monkeys. Wipeout looked awful and whatever mastery I had once had was long gone, so it was a total crashfest too
Skull Monkeys though remains a stellar game and I got quite absorbed in it. I also tried the original Armored Core game but that was just hard. I think I need to read the manual for that one...Anyway, the plan (dream) is to eventually buy a Net Yaroze version of the PS1. Sadly they're pretty spendy these days. Wish I hadn't sold my last one...
I've spent much of my long weekend playing Hollow Knight for the first time. I was gifted it last summer(? summer before last...???) and never got around to installing it, but it is a delightful game. I am finding it is in that happy zone of challenging but not rage inducing hard. Pretty much everything about it has been an absolute joy so far
I probably talk about this system too much, but the PS1 core on the Mister FPGA emulator is outstanding. And you get built-in scaler support and HDMI output.
The PS1 did some really wonky stuff with its video output, and if you run in the lowest latency scaler mode (four scanlines), the system just passes the original refresh rate through, untouched. This makes some flat panels very unhappy. You can insulate the TV from the native refresh rate with a different setting, but that adds at least a frame of latency.
tl;dr: the PS1 core works best with TVs that have quality onboard electronics. I've had two LG monitors that both worked fabulously in the low-latency mode.
If you want a real PS1, you'll probably want to scare up some kind of CRT to go with it. Or, you can hook a CRT to the Mister, and get damn near the same results. And a Mister is a lot cheaper than a Net Yaroze.
Oh yeah, and it's also emotionally draining AF in so many places. I never actually beat it, just because it was too much for me to deal with on top of Real Life (TM).
Just played Spider-Man 2 all the way to the platinum trophy. (First game I’ve platinumed in almost three years!) I really enjoyed it—its earnest themes of friendship, community, and redemption were a nice change from the grim, cynical nihilism of most games these days. It was a world I much preferred inhabiting compared to, say, Baghdad of AC Mirage. I also really liked how they snuck in little bits about New York’s history and cultures into the side missions.
Oddly, the parts that didn’t work quite as well were the combat and traversal. Combat turned into a spamapalooza of the various powers and gadgets. It almost didn’t matter which button I was mashing, as long as it was whatever was currently charged. Traversal felt a bit clunkier than in previous Spider-Man games—I often found myself accidentally sticking to sides of buildings when I was trying to zoom by. But it was still fun enough that I really enjoyed playing the game to completion.
Oddly, the parts that didn’t work quite as well were the combat and traversal. Combat turned into a spamapalooza of the various powers and gadgets. It almost didn’t matter which button I was mashing, as long as it was whatever was currently charged. Traversal felt a bit clunkier than in previous Spider-Man games—I often found myself accidentally sticking to sides of buildings when I was trying to zoom by. But it was still fun enough that I really enjoyed playing the game to completion.
+1 for a CRT for retrogaming on CRT-era consoles, but I realize that is not an option for a lot of people.
For a PS1 specifically, my preferred way of playing these games today is to emulate them by way of a PS1 RetroArch core and then output to a CRT using a Radeon 270X (Pitcairn is the most modern GPU that can still output analog video over DVI-I) with a VGA-to-SCART converter. This is best done on a Linux box, but there are modded Windows drivers available that can support the necessary resolutions and timings.
This gets you access to all the handy features like PGXP, perspective-correct textures, save states, digital library and anti-aliasing by way of supersampling while still getting that nice CRT look, at the cost of a bit of added latency.
The other, less insane way you could go would be to use a scaler inbetween. At minimum, something like the Open Source Scan Converter (OSSC) will do okay. A Retrotink 5X or OSSC Pro if you're feeling a little spendier for something higher quality. If money is burning a hole in your pocket, the upcoming Retrotink 4K looks like it will be the single best way to connect old consoles to modern flat-panels.
Connecting old consoles directly to a modern display should be the last resort, it'll never look nice.