Ostriig on 12/11/2018 at 10:43
Is your son locking himself in his room for ours on end, screaming at his computer about rolling? Does he sit down at the dinner table and mutter about "fucking loading screens" when the chicken's taking too long to cook? Do you find confessions on his social media about how he knows what he's doing has adverse effects on his wellbeing, but he just needs another fix? Has his neck grown a beard?
Ladies and gentlemen, your son might be taking (
https://www.gog.com/game/pathfinder_kingmaker_explorer_edition) Pathfinder: Kingmaker, a highly potent substance hailing from
the frozen innards of a Muscovite garage top-secret Russian laboratories. With its generous dose of roleplaying options and a D&D 3.5-derived ruleset concentration the likes of which hasn't been seen in the free world for over a decade, this latest and most dangerous effort to subvert the youth of America is supremely addictive, plying victims with highly compelling gameplay while also subjecting them to continuous exposure to bugs, patches, clunky implementations and fucking loading screens.
If you believe that your son is using Pathfinder: Kingmaker, don't hesitate! Pick up the phone now and call our hotline on 1-800-CRPG-OF-THE-YEAR and we'll send you an emergency kit of Baldur's Gate: The Complete Saga, the only known treatment.
WARNING: Baldur's Gate: The Complete Saga contains Infinity Engine, which is a highly addictive substance. Treatment may be ineffective on Pathfinder: Kingmaker consumers who've already developed tolerance to Infinity Engine.
twisty on 12/11/2018 at 11:10
Quote Posted by henke
This month's PS+ lineup is perhaps my favourite one ever. Yakuza Kiwami, Bulletstorm, Roundabout and Burly Men At Sea are all games I've wanted to play, but not quite enough to actually pay for. Only played a bit of revolving-limousine-game
Roundabout yet, but it turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. :)
I haven't tried the others yet but Bulletstorm is a hoot. Pretty easy game so far but lots of variety and good pacing.
Malf on 12/11/2018 at 14:55
Right, well I managed to tear myself away from RDR2. I still have a lot to do there, and it's still a wonderful world to while away the hours in, but:
I needed to finish Shadow of the Tomb Raider that I started on before RDR2 came out.
I did manage to finish it this weekend and was decidedly "Eh" about the whole thing. Serviceable enough, but didn't really set my world alight. And even while it's skewed more towards puzzling over combat than previous entries in this series, I found it lacking.
I turned off all guides and completed it at the hardest settings. The linearity of its transitional areas annoyed me, and while I appreciated the ability to turn guides off, some of the puzzles were obviously designed with having them turned on in mind.
I also had several scenarios where I'd be performing the right moves while platforming, but Lara would consistently fail to latch on to whichever surface I was leaping towards. Very annoying.
And Lara's character in this trilogy annoys the piss out of me, not helped be her voice actor's consistently lack-lustre performance. If they'd gone full-on "Lara's a bit of a dick, isn't she?" there wouldn't have been the dissonance there was in this story. They really can't escape the unsavoury white saviour overtones. I would have been a lot happier if they'd just emphasised that Lara's a badass international thief with little regard for the cultures surrounding the tombs she's raiding.
But in this, she's portrayed as the only one who can help these people. She's mopingly sympathetic to their faces, then the next minute she's ripping plaster off the walls of their ancient ruins without seeking permission.
ANYWAY, glad that's behind me.
MUCH more enjoyable is Hitman 2.
Yes, I plopped down for the full on deluxe shenanigans and have been playing it before release. And yes, I don't care, because it's more of what made Hitman 2016 awesome.
After the enforced slow pace of life in RDR2, this is a refreshingly crisp and snappy experience, best played in iterative 15-30 minute chunks. It really is about playing the levels over and over again, revealing new layers with each play-through. This is going to keep me happy for a very long time, especially as they've updated the old maps with the new tech too, meaning it would be rude not to play them again.
The new features such as crowd-blending and hiding in long grass may have been stolen shamelessly from Assassin's Creed, but they fit perfectly. That they're also perfectly conveyed to the player helps massively.
And it seems the game's a lot better at signposting opportunities, being more subtle about it than it was in 2016. But I am playing at Master difficulty which disables "Story Missions". You still come across these opportunities yourself, but they don't have full guides on how to complete them in the Intel menu. Instead, it's up to you to observe and puzzle out how best to take advantage.
The only thing I'm missing and that I wish they'd stolen from RDR2 is the contextual chat. It would be nice to be able to have 47 respond to these NPCs greeting him.
But otherwise, I'm loving it. Regional accents are the icing on top.
Also, 47 deadpan dancing in a pink flamingo suit is one of the funniest gaming moments I've seen in a LONG time:
[video=youtube_share;1AYgi12vXec]https://youtu.be/1AYgi12vXec[/video]
I'm also playing Diablo 3 alongside Dead Cells on the Switch in portable mode. Having played a lot of Dead Cells up until buying D3 last week, I'm still undecided about which is more deserving of my commute time. Both are gloriously pick-up-and-put-downable. I think Dead Cells is definitely the more interesting of the two, given how familiar I am with D3. And it's nice that you're not on a never-ending gear treadmill in Dead Cells.
But Diablo 3 is fully formed on the Switch, and pretty damn incredible. I worry that my favourite class, Monk, may be critically broken on console thanks to not being able to control where its key ability, Dashing Strike lands. But maybe this will force me to play a class I'm less familiar with. I'm leaning towards Wizard or Necromancer.
Oh, and I did pick up Forza, which is ace but being crowded out by the other aceness outlined above.
Sulphur on 12/11/2018 at 19:17
I've only played the Wiz in Diablo 3, and I really don't see how any other character's going to top the absolute maximalist ridiculousness of it. My character currently wields a laser ray of death that slices through crowds like a knife through hot butter, can summon a lava hydra in the middle of a crowd, has an orb of ice armour that reduces melee damage and chills enemies that come into contact with it, can transform into a being of pure energy that lays waste to things for a limited period of time, and can teleport to any part of the screen which causes it to split into two ghostly clones that can spam all of the above abilities at the same time.
For about 90% of the time, my screen is an unreadable, coruscating light show of carnage, explosions, and death; enemies keep falling over in a blowout that makes me want to cackle with sheer joy at the unfiltered insanity of it.
Of course, once you've done that, the rest of the game is a Skinner box laid bare because a constantly exploding screen has a way of numbing you given enough time, and you see the mechanics for what they are. I grew bored very quickly after that, but in the run-up to this eventual disenchantment it was one of the most magnificently daft games I've ever played. It's not the Diablo reboot I wanted, and its fast-food mentality to the gameplay coupled with a relentlessly cheesy B-movie story meant I was never overly charmed by it, but its never-ending carnival of instant gratification does the business when all you want is to watch your screen explode for half an hour.
Starker on 13/11/2018 at 05:07
Quote Posted by icemann
It has that 90s cartoon / anime style humor to it all. Some of it would definitely not fly in our politically correct society of modern day (eg one female demon enemy was teased about being flat chested, in a very tongue in cheek style manner). All adds to the charm of the Disgaea series, as the first game was very similar.
What are you talking about? This is one of the most common anime tropes.
Thirith on 13/11/2018 at 15:03
The wizard both made me enjoy Diablo 3 while I was playing it and not be particularly interested in returning to that character: my wizard was such a death machine, nothing could touch me. My wife played as a barbarian, and she'd complain that she never got the chance to kill more than the occasional stray bad guy because everything on the screen just dropped like flies due to my death ray. At least for the duration of the campaign, there was barely anything that could touch me, and in the long run that got really, really boring.
Starker on 13/11/2018 at 17:27
The bit about flat-chested women. Lots of anime have jokes like that. This is an extremely common trope and not by far some rare thing from political correctness free 90's.
Not to mention there are shows and games like South Park in our politically correct society of modern day.
Sulphur on 13/11/2018 at 18:49
Hell, there's an anime that was released just this year about a socially awkward gamer dweeb waking up in an MMORPG world as a demon lord, and it has both a busty elf and a flat-chested catgirl and approximately a million jokes about both while fan servicing its audience until their knobs probably twisted off and rocketed into space. Japanese anime routinely does not give a fuck about being PC, and the flat-chested, awkward girl character is a pretty well-used trope.
As far as games with non-PC content and stupid titillation go, there's hundreds of them on Steam both in the anime jRPG and VN genres like right now, and they've been making at least some of these things for a very, very long time.
Sulphur on 14/11/2018 at 10:43
I'm just addressing that you think people can't get away with things like this today, which isn't especially correct if it's a Japanese video game. The linked games aren't about sex, they're about crotch shots, boobage, and badly written comedy/innuendo. If I wanted to see good sex in games, I'd... really just watch a porno instead. Mannequins bumping into each other isn't a turn-on for me.