EvaUnit02 on 13/7/2020 at 07:56

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That's in PC Xbox Game Pass. Or is it yet another sequel? Google says it's a Switch game. The naming conventions that developer uses are confusing and dumb (i.e. Lucky's Tale was a VR exclusive game, the next game in the series was entirely separate and named "Super Lucky's Tale").
Finished up the MoHAA vanilla campaign. Aside from the Sniper Town level, it was a really good time.

Got started on the expansions, Spearhead and Breakthrough. Spearhead is just as good I remember it being, highly recommended!

With Breakthrough I'm still on the African war theatre levels, which have been fun. I recall the quality nosediving hard when you get to Italy.

It took me a little while figure out how to get the expansions going properly. Seems the expansions don't display properly if the game resolution 3000 horizontal pixels, you only get to see about 1/4th of the game. The sweet spot was 2688 x 1512, which is 70% of 4K. The main game displays fine at 4K (3840x2160), so my guess is that the expansions are running on older, less optimised builds.

[video=youtube;iYWhyA-yaEw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWhyA-yaEw[/video]
[video=youtube;dX3SNupELhA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX3SNupELhA[/video]
[video=youtube;Hr38iw2VnsQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr38iw2VnsQ[/video]

Anarchic Fox on 14/7/2020 at 17:28

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If you like that concept, West of Loathing has a fair amount of it, and Heaven's Vault is entirely built around that mechanic. However, in the latter, you have to venture the meanings of words on your own, so if you make a critical mistake it can render later gameplay nigh-impossible.

demagogue on 15/7/2020 at 00:55

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I've been playing some Rimworld recently. It's a top-down base-building sim that triggers random events in line with your base's development, so it has a kind of built-in progression. It has about the same depth as Dwarf Fortress but is a lot more accessible. I think it works well because it's character based, so you get invested in the characters and their foibles, and it just has a game loop that works, building defenses and taming your surroundings while being subjected to raids and having to gear up to survive the winters.

Jason Moyer on 24/7/2020 at 05:09

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I replayed Quake (which is still basically perfect as far as action shooters go) and then played both expansions for the first time. Scourge Of Armagon was mostly good; I liked that the entire first episode consisted of the tech base theme because that setting was kind of underused in the OG campaign. What I didn't like were the cheap traps and the lame new enemies that were introduced. Or that there are about 800 vores and shamblers in the last 2 episodes because who wants to run n gun when you can press your face against a wall and pop out periodically for hours. The roboscorpion enemy was lame as shit, and the goblin type things that steal your weapons were complete non-threats (I didn't realize they stole your active weapon until I read about it in the fandom wiki). Dissolution Of Eternity, on the other hand, was pretty much badass from beginning to end. The new enemies are tanks, but they give you upgraded ammo types that turn them into mincemeat. The level design is basically all medieval and runic, with the same sort of 'getting lost but everything loops back around itself' kind of thing that the OG levels have. The encounters were tough but it never did the cheap "let's spam 40 monsters and not give you any resources" thing that MachineGames Episode 5 did. Probably wasn't quite as good as the original but it was a damn fine expansion pack.

I started a replay of Hexen II, to keep with the Quake engine theme, but got sick of the tanky combat. The puzzles are fine, there are generally clues scattered around that tell you what to do and I'm an ImSim fan so I'm already ok with looking everywhere and trying everything, but the actual combat is kind of bullshit. The first hub throws tons of green mana at you, when you don't have a weapon that uses green mana. The slow weapon switching is annoying. The "every class starts with a melee weapon, even the rogue and mage" thing is kind of bullshit. I dunno, enjoyed the levels and the puzzles hated the combat. Oh well.

Up next in the 'going through old stuff I haven't played in forever or probably never completed' pile are Descent 1/2/3. I'm a little over halfway through Descent 1 and it's super close to being as good as Quake, which it predated. Exploring/mapping the mines is fun, the movement is great, and most of the combat is fantastic on the harder difficulties. Then around mission 6 (of 27) they introduce a glass cannon hitscan enemy and a hp-sponge that fires homing missiles, and every map from then on that features them is total garbage. I'm still plodding along because overall I really like the game, but the difficulty spikes due to two enemies that are supposed to be relatively low on the totem pole is are annoying as hell, and even going back and restarting on "trainee" difficulty makes no difference because that just slows enemies down and reduces their fire rate. So the hitscan assholes that fire immediately when they come into view are just as dangerous on the lowest difficulty as the highest (and they can shred like 1/3 of your health in a second) because weapon damage doesn't scale. The accepted strategy among long time D1 fans is to know where they are and shoot homing missiles around corners which obviously doesn't work if you're playing it blind. I've read that Descent II has better enemy balancing, but has its own sets of problems (in particular, doors and forcefields that can only be opened once, meaning you can trap yourself in parts of mines if you are behind them when they close). Anyway, if someone made a mod that fixed those 2 bots, D1 would be ace.

Edit: On a TTLG related note, the two main guys who designed the Descent games were both SubLogic and Looking Glass alums. So they were basically doing polygonal 3D when Carmack was in diapers, then worked on engines that were more sophisticated than what Id were doing at the time at LGS and Parallax. That's kind of awesome. They should be gaming legends.

PigLick on 24/7/2020 at 12:34

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yeah nah