Sulphur on 8/5/2020 at 08:30
Though now that I went back and looked it up, I think I read more into the Moshae as an elder construct than there really is.
Starker on 8/5/2020 at 09:37
I would certainly have wanted to see more politicking. It's one of the more underused aspects of space operas, IMO, and would be far better suited for RPGs. But I think that would also require a story far more sophisticated than Mass Effect where at the end of the day you play a space hero that's destined to save the day/world/galaxy with all the tropes that go along with it. I think it was Shamus Young who in his analysis of the series pointed out how Shepard goes from someone who's simply uniquely qualified to deal with the situation because of the knowledge in his/her head to being the chosen one in the span of a single game.
The ambassadorship was one of the things that was just thrown out there kind or reminiscent of the choices you had with the council at the end of the first game (which turned out to be largely cosmetic anyway). And there are plenty other threads left unresolved as well -- like what will happen to your mother (which was revealed to be the reason your father made you a pathfinder in the first place), all the intrigue with the mysterious benefactor of the Intiative and the murder of the founder, what happens to the quarian ark, etc...
As for the Angara, the tribal nature was at least in part a logical extension of their family structure and had some religious undertones as well. The Moshae, for example, was not just a brilliant scientist and inventor, she was their spritual leader as well. And yes, while it might seem kind of backwards to simply put a Leonardo da Vinci / Gandhi figure in charge of your whole society, it was largely thanks to that that they were able to reach the technological level that allowed them to slow down the Kett invasion and mobilise an effective resistance.
Tony_Tarantula on 8/5/2020 at 15:48
Quote Posted by Taffer_91
Final Fantasy IX is what comes to mind for me, but I'd imagine you played that already judging by your post.
I would also recommend Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (preferably with the Hardtype hack) but that does fall into the “weird” category of JRPG's. Still, if you ever want to try something different I highly recommend it.
Anyway, been playing Thief Gold and even downgraded it to TDP to try out the levels as they were before Gold.
Have not actually. I've done 7 and X. Thought 7 was great (and loved for entirely the wrong reason by gamers). I thought X was pretentious trash as far as the writing went. I'd like to try to branch out a bit although if something can hit similar gameplay notes that's fine.
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There's Bravely Default II if you've got a Switch. I played the demo, and it's about as throwback to oldschool Final Fantasy as you can get.
Do not.
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I would also recommend Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (preferably with the Hardtype hack) but that does fall into the “weird” category of JRPG's. Still, if you ever want to try something different I highly recommend it.
Should consider that one. Persona 3-5 were very good. "Weird" is perfectly fine so long as we're not talking "seduce your harem of suspiciously under-age looking, tentacle fetish waifus" weird.
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I'm going to stick with Mass Effect Andromeda until I'm done with the first planet, but I suspect that that's where I'll call it a day. I'm simply not enjoying the game, the characters are badly written, it looks like so many corners were cut in so many respects. I don't mind that the game doesn't have the production values of the trilogy, but I do mind that they obviously didn't use the resources at their disposal particularly well, so that pretty much everything we get is half-baked.
That's why I don't play Biowares anymore. A lot of what made their old school games great were that titles like Baldur's Gate, KoToR, and the original Mass Effect had a lot of great characters both in and out of the party with standouts like Irenicus, Jolee, Black Whirlwind, and Garrus (not to mention some low hanging fruit everyone remembers) defined those games. It kind of went off the rails starting with Dragon Age 2 where most of the characters started becoming forgettable cliches and the dialogue started to turn into "Pathological narcissist wish fulfillment: the game!".
Anarchic Fox on 10/5/2020 at 04:26
I finished a couple short games as a break from longer ones.
Globesweeper: Hex Puzzler is a harder Hexcells Infinite, about on the level of Tametsi. It's Minesweeper on a sphere, except all levels are hand-designed, guessing is never required, and there are additional rules allowing for nonlocal interactions. By the way, did you know that there's an entire genre of hand-designed Minesweeper-like games? The superb Hexcells seems to have spawned it all on its own.
The Hero of the Kingdom series is a guilty pleasure. Like the superior DRoD RPG, it retains the resource management of RPGs while discarding everything else. However, unlike DRoD RPG, Hero of the Kingdom lacks a fail state, and thus permits far less optimization. I can't recommend it unreservedly. However, it satisfies a very specific craving I have in games. If you have this craving too, this series might be a godsend.
Malleus on 10/5/2020 at 14:58
I love stealth games, but somehow only now got around playing Styx: Master of Shadows. The stealth is light/dark and sound based, but detection was a bit janky. Sometimes I was seen in situations where I thought I was hidden. Good thing it has quicksave/quickload. Also, while there is an indicator to show when you're hidden, the game world doesn't always reflect that. Sometimes I went from a sort-of-dark place to another sort-of dark place and I was visible in one and hidden in the other.
There are some tools and abilities to help us in our task, ranging from the usual stuff (sandbags to extinguish torches from afar, throwing knives for ranged kills) to some cool ones, like the ability to create a clone of yourself, which you can use to distract enemies, or for example, move it into a cupboard, where it waits until an enemy passes in front of it and takes him out. Speaking of enemies, there was a nice variety of them, gameplay wise. The normal guards have variations, some with helmet that can't be killed from afar, some fully armored knights, who can't be killed at all, unless you manage poison the food they're snacking, some enemies are blind but hear very well, some sense your presence, etc.
The levels were a mixed bag. They were big, often quite vertical, mostly with many pathways and so, but most of the time your objective is just to make it from A to B. Apart from secondary objectives, there's just not much reason to explore. You can collect some kind of coins, but that didn't motivate me enough. Would've been nice to have readables, like in Thief, to flesh out the lore or something. Speaking of the lore, the world didn't seem interesting to me at first glance, and I had no expectations for the story, but it ended up being interesting with a twist I didn't see coming. I was pleasantly surprised with it. All in all, it's not a AAA game, but I ended up liking it. I'm interested in the sequel now, will probably grab it when it's on sale.
Tomi on 11/5/2020 at 09:00
Starting with the first Witcher? I played it around two years ago and despite of the combat system not being particularly fun, I enjoyed the game. Still gotta find time to play the other two Witcher games though!
EvaUnit02 on 11/5/2020 at 09:52
I started playing
Inversion (2012), a highly polished, yet unremarkable Gears of War clone. There's nothing terrible per say about the game. The game's gimmick is basically the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. You use it suspend enemies in the air for easy picking and to hurling environmental objects at them. Outside of combat the gravity manipulation is predictably used for basic environmental puzzle solving.
The plot so far has presented a mystery to unravel. I'm sure there's going to be a plot twist, I suspect that it maybe along the lines of the one from Star Trek: Insurrection. Your contemporary city is invaded by mysterious force of meathead beefcake people, they have access to technology that seems beyond their intellectual capacity. They definitely seem to be human. They kidnap all of the children and put the adults into prison work camps. You play as Davis, a cop looking for his young daughter. Nobody knows what happens to the children so far.
Probably worth the $2.50 USD it would usually go for on sale IMO.
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https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1019447475847823807/F773EC0D37D4D7A28689383CD794FAF38B5B54AB/Inline Image:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1019447475847823581/F10C656BFDBDA22E84F328C9B15FC3DAF08837E4/qolelis on 12/5/2020 at 06:26
I got started on SOMA. It's good. I get the thalassophobia thing: Standing at the edge of a pit under water is somehow worse than above water.
I'm not a fan particularly of horror; it's either too stressful, if it's good, or, more commonly, just plain annoying. SOMA gets away with it most of the time and has enough else going on to keep me interested. I especially like the exploration and almost chose safe mode, but went with normal mode, because I wanted the sneaking challenge and I had a... sneaking suspicion that I have had otherwise done the game a disservice. Safe mode feels like a thing I could do later to check if I missed some story or exploration bonus.
The story touches on, or reminds me of, something I've thought about before (and, yes, I know it's not a particularly new thought): For machines to become truly intelligent they must sooner or later gain self-awareness -- either as a consequence (of being sufficiently complex) or as a requirement -- but then we can no longer use them as the tools we planned for them to be. If this is true, the real limit to how intelligent machines can become lies not in how complex we can make them -- or the rules they abide by -- but in what rights we would be willing to give them.
Of course, a system of "independent" thought that is not self-aware can still be useful, but seeing how we humans always strive to improve the things we make, we might have to one day deal with the question of what we are creating perhaps being a new form of life, and, lest we wanted a violent uprising on our hands :cool:, still insisting on treating them as tools (i.e. slaves) would no longer be an option.
Is a tool with rights less useful than a tool without rights?
Sulphur on 12/5/2020 at 06:53
Well, I think that the final answer to that question boils down to a couple of things: sentience and self-awareness. If your tool starts to exhibit those qualities, is it really a tool any more in the classical sense? The answer, you'll find, is no.
I'd posit that rights automatically apply to anything that classifies as sentient life, and they're really not ours to give; but the wilful taking away and abuse of them, that's something people can do, sure.
Thirith on 12/5/2020 at 06:59
After finishing chapter 2 of Red Dead Redemption 2 (and doing a lot of side activities, including getting all the satchels and hunting all the possible Legendary Animals), I took a break and played the Two Colonels DLC for Metro Exodus. By and large great production values (as long as you ignore some of the non-combat character animations) and atmosphere, but the design isn't particulary great. It was a good palate cleanser, but as a FPS I cannot particularly recommend it. The first half is repetitive, while the second doesn't offer all that much gameplay. If you liked Exodus for the open expanses, this isn't where you'll find them - it's strictly corridor shootery and not very good at that.
