Briareos H on 31/10/2020 at 14:07
Wow Aentity looks really interesting. I'm definitely getting that, thanks for the tip.
Other than that:
* 2020 is a fantastic time for liking tiny cubes, with my voxel trifecta making for my best gaming experiences this year:
* Cloudpunk is still my favourite game of the year. I know it's not super exciting in gameplay and the driving could be much better, but this has hooked me in ways no other game has in a very long time. The writing is very good, the atmosphere and sense of place are incredible and I've turned around completely on the voice acting, which I now (mostly) love. Really looking forward to the next major update where they will introduce a new storyline and hova races.
* Cloud Gardens (early access) is a beautiful, atmospheric and relaxing (yet sometimes challenging) plant-growing puzzle which strikes a great balance between being an aesthetic expression tool and a straight puzzle game. It's an unusually good feeling to have completed a level but to keep tweaking and adding to it just to make it beautiful, and some people will also see it as a nice optimisation challenge. An update was released recently, I'm waiting to get my hand onto some decent weed to play through the new chapters.
* Teardown (early access) is great and will probably take second place really soon, especially as people start releasing custom maps. Go to henke's thread.
* 2020 is voxels but also cyberpunk. I'm slowly making my way through Ghostrunner. If you're one of the git gud bros who's really into competitive gaming this will please you, but as a single-player experience it's as fun as it is frustrating for the moment. The sensation of flow, speed, story, visuals and music are all great at first glance, but the challenge quickly takes over. Movement is great but not always predictable (the game's biggest sin, although surely it would not happen if I got gud), enemies are punishing, visuals are often wonderful (especially with RTX) but become repetitive and so does the music. I cannot recommend it yet.
* As Cyberpunk 2077 looks more and more like a GTA game, I have lost any hope that the game will interest me. The latest trailers were really bad, the whole marketing strategy for the product has this sort of high profile AAA energy that puts me off to no end. I don't give a shit about cars and the fact that you can get Porsche, in fact I was hoping that you would only get one car that would become iconic. Bleh.
* froghawk you're not alone, which nearly feels comforting: I often feel like I'm the only one unable to get any enjoyment out of the DOOM reboots. I've tried playing both of them several times but I always give up, they are formulaic and unfun to the point of putting me off, everything either makes me roll my eyes or just doesn't capture my interest. I can't fathom how people are excited for a Quake 1 reboot, as it's obviously going to follow the same patterns, every year I pray that they don't announce it and leave my sweetheart untouched.
* Speaking of which, the amount of quality releases from the Quake community is still mindblowing. This month we got a new release of Arcane Dimensions with an awesome new map (Tears of the False God), two entirely new and high quality episodes (Epochs Of Enmity and Dwell), the Halloween Jam 3 as well as a few other gems released independently. What a good time to be a Quake fan.
* After months of hiatus due to an overdose of norse mythology in gaming, I finally finished Apsulov: End of Gods. It is a pretty decent viking walking sim survival horror. Nothing really original especially gameplay-wise, but with some great set pieces, good atmosphere often reminiscent of the best bits of Doom 3 and a pleasant story arc.
* Formula Fusion remained in development hell for a long time, with its early access release never taking off, and was finally released last week as Pacer on console and PC. The development team includes some staff from the original Wipeout games, as well as The Designers Republic branding and CoLD SToRAGE (+ many others) for music. Many circuits are really nice, the weapons feel good, the gameplay is challenging, physics are ok but definitely less floaty than Wipeout, of which I'm not a fan. I spent a few hours on Formula Fusion and can see myself spending more on Pacer but in the end, I still feel it lacks something. An edge, perhaps.
Thirith on 2/11/2020 at 12:26
I think I've arrived in one of my periodical gaming funks. I couldn't be bothered with Hades yesterday and thought it might just be me having burnt out on the game, but then I started SOMA and found that I could barely be bothered. The Arma coop session on Saturday was still fun, but coop gaming is different anyway, I find. All in all, an almost-lockdown may not be an ideal time to tire of gaming, but hey, if it means I can read more, that's not too bad - though it usually coincides with a more general funk. Ho hum.
PigLick on 2/11/2020 at 12:46
I feel you Thirith, I am not playing anything because I want my gaming mojo back for the (eventual?) release of Cyberpunk 2077
catbarf on 2/11/2020 at 15:49
I finally got around to setting up a desk in my VR space, so that I can play flight sims on my Index. I've started with Il-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, and this is the closest thing I've yet seen to a killer app for VR. I can't see myself going back to a monitor for flight sims, or fussing with TrackIR- the 1:1 movement and feeling of actually being in the cockpit is like nothing else. I tried it a bit with my Vive a few years ago, and the resolution just wasn't good enough, but with the Index I think it's passed the threshold.
Sturmovik supports a 'VR Zoom' function, which per the name allows you to zoom the display to better spot/ID things at a distance, compensating for the low resolution. Coupled with some visual trickery (non-linear reduction in apparent target size beyond a kilometer or so, so planes appear bigger than they should be at long range) it's actually possible to spot planes 5-10km out. So for the first time since getting into flight sims circa '07 or so, I'm able to play with all HUD elements turned off, spotting planes visually and relying on my cockpit gauges for information, and it's really elevated the immersion.
It's hard to put into words just how much being able to stretch upwards to look over the nose of the plane, or duck under a biplane wing for visibility, or lean over the side of the cockpit to look downward, adds to the experience. The audio quality on the Index is also great, and being an open over-ear design means it doesn't feel or sound like wearing headphones. I'm now waiting on an extension for my VKB joystick so that I can kludge together a center-stick arrangement like a real aircraft, and at that point I think about the only thing that would add to the experience is an HVAC fan pointed at my face.
Also, I got to experience losing half of my wings in a Fokker Dr.I and entering a flat spin at 1000m up, spinning for about 30 seconds before hitting the ground. It's the closest I've come to throwing up in VR. 11/10 would do again.
I've also played a bit of Star Wars Squadrons in VR, which supports crossplay, and get the distinct impression that HOTAS players are at an advantage over gamepad players, and then VR adds another advantage on top of that. At first I thought only the Republic/Rebel fighters with their WW2 fighter canopies would benefit, but even in a TIE Fighter, being able to lean over the controls to see better downwards proves pretty useful.
Next I guess I ought to try DCS.
qolelis on 2/11/2020 at 19:42
Quote Posted by henke
MutazioneI approve.
I've had this idea floating around in my brain that they are living in an anarchocommune of sorts (no monetary system; no central government; limited private ownership; freely shared tools and services; and any "payment" is done by contributing to the collective, not the individual). Not as a deliberate choice, but as a consequence of the incident, wiping out most of the societal infrastructure. The same thing could probably be said about any group small enough, like a street of neighbours, while they themselves might deny it. Also, the sausages somewhat contradict this "hot take" (as well as any implied communal harmony).
Quote Posted by demagogue
AentityThere's also a virtual museum connected to it:
(
https://www.arquoia.com/)
Anyone can submit to it, although I don't know how often it's updated. Last I spoke to the dev, they had moved on from the game medium and was busy with other things.
I wrote a thing about it, but I suppose it's one of the more superficial ones (reading it now, 2 years later, it feels uninspired):
(
https://maskinkultur.com/2018/05/08/review-aentity/)
Malleus on 2/11/2020 at 22:16
I recently finished Styx: Shards of Darkness. The first Styx (Master of Shadows) was kind of rough around the edges, but the sequel improved on it in pretty much every way. The movement, controls, gameplay and stealth felt better right from the beginning, for example the lighting of the engine is much better, now you can tell wether you're in the shadows or not just by looking at the game world, though we also got a lightgem to help us. Styx's special abilities return, both the invisibility and the cloning, the latter allowing us to safely recon ahead or distract guards. Enemy variety is still great, although there are no major new additions.
There are also items to aid us in our quest, like the familiar throwing knife to deal with unarmored enemies, the pocket sand to extinguish torches and some new ones like the acid trap, which kills any enemy, and dissolves the body so others don't find it. The major new aspect of these is that we no longer just find them, we have to craft them from raw marerials found in the levels. This was a really good idea, since hunting for materials gives another reason to explore the locations. And explore we can, since compared the the first game, the levels are bigger, and less linear with more paths. Apart from doing secondary objectives and collecting materials, there are also so-called Tokens to collect. This is also better than in the first game, since there we had to collect all of them to get rewards, but now we get some xp even for getting half of them. Another reason to thoroughly look around the levels.
I mentioned xp: there is a small rpg system here, where we can upgrade Styx's abilities from the experience points we get from completing objecitves. Most of these are actual, meaningful addition to the gameplay, and some of them are quite clever. For example, one ability allows us to craft a clone cocoon, which can be thrown and it spawns a clone at the point of impact. Another ability allows us to teleport into our clone. Combining these we can significantly increase our mobility, which I felt was cool.
So the gameplay is really fine, with one exception: there are two bossfights. You kinda have to use stealth in those too, but you can't save, and it's easy to die, so they end up being quite annoying, although having the right abilities can help a lot. I rarely encountered bugs, only one where I had to reload a save to be able to complete a secondary objective. I'd also mention objective markers. The game is designed around them, so you have to use them, otherwise you can't really find where to go. I don't consider this a problem, even though it would've been better to have, like, a map and compass or something.
The story was entertaining as well, although not as good as in the first game, but kept me interested until the end. There I received a big slap unfortunately, since the game ends in a massive cliffhanger, and there's no Styx 3, so that's kinda disappointing. The writers tried to be funny in this, and while the fourth wall breaking humor was pretty bad, the rest of game managed to make me smile often, despite the humor being quite crass and juvenile. Styx is an asshole, but he's an entertaining asshole, at least he was for me.
All in all, the game is a big improvement over Master of Shadows, and in my opinion is actually a good stealth game. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes the genre.
demagogue on 3/11/2020 at 03:19
Quote Posted by catbarf
I finally got around to setting up a desk in my VR space, so that I can play flight sims on my Index. I've started with Il-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, and this is the closest thing I've yet seen to a killer app for VR.
Il-2 BoS is one of my favorite
sims games, actually going back to Il-2 1946, and it was also the game I had the highest hopes for with VR. Also up there are games like Subnautica and maybe a realistic driving sim like BeamNG.Drive. But I'm happy to read that it's been such a good experience for you with Il-2 BoS. It's definitely on my list to set up now if it wasn't before. Do we have a list somewhere of the best games for VR?
-----
Also, to people putting Aentity on their Steam wishlist, I feel a responsibility to do some expectation management. It's not a game. It actually advertises itself as something like a procedural art tool. It's designed to be alienating. For the first probably two hours you're going to be wondering how or even if you're really in control of anything happening, and even wondering what is happening. You push buttons and the screen changes, surreal images emerge, maybe they're related to what you're pushing? At least you think they might for a moment... You take a screenshot. After a lot of this, you don't really know much more than when you started. You just know you had an experience.
And while I was under its spell for a bit there, it doesn't actually pay off even when you start "discovering" things, depending on how you define pay off. I can't say if their experiment works, but even that is part of its purity. There are other games that also throw random events at you that you don't understand, but you can experiment with them and start to pick up on their weird logic. The first two that come to mind are Cult Simulator and Mu Cartographer, both of which I recommend for that BTW. But with those games they actually do pay off when you figure things out, you can make some kind of progress, and they are at last games at their heart. But Aentity, probably to its credit, never gives in to being a game, and it stays relentlessly true to its alienating vision of being an experience to the end.
Most of it is having something like this painted on your screen and trying to make some sense out of it -- like who is that guy? he looks special -- or just taking it as it comes, but anyway taking a screenshot before it's lost and already being covered it up with something else, already in another world.
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/Lms32Vg.jpg
Judith on 5/11/2020 at 20:48
Fired up the Ghostrunner demo, but gamepad controls feel janky, and fighting enemies gives a bit random results. Like in Hotline Miami, but it's somehow less fun here.
Nameless Voice on 5/11/2020 at 22:44
I just finished playing through Partisans 1941.
It's a decent Commandos-like game where you play a group of Soviet partisans on the eastern front. Not bad, but not amazing either.
I feel like it lacks a bit of something to make it stand out.
The levels are kind of drab and not that memorable, there aren't many varieties of enemy, and your characters don't quite have enough to distinguish them.
It's somewhat interesting that you always get to choose which partisans go on each mission (except for Commander Zorin, who's always mandatory), but that means that each of the levels has to be completable with any set of partisans, and so there can't be any "puzzle"-like setups where you need to use specific skills in clever ways. It's also rather annoying that you can only bring three partisans on each mission, especially after the early missions which tend to let you recruit someone mid-mission and so play with four.
Each character has two active skills, but their quality varies greatly. Zorin's throwing knife, Valya's chloroform, and Morozov's whistle are incredibly powerful, so I almost always wanted to take at least two of those characters. There were also some characters with "sweeper" moves to kill all enemies in an area, useful for patrols but not very stealthy, so it was useful to take one of those, though later I just used mines instead (which somehow many less noise than gunshots, and are barely noticed by nearby enemies.)
The characters also don't start out with their skills - instead, they have to unlock them through a skill tree, unlocked by gaining levels. Characters receive XP for each enemy killed on the map, and also from side-missions (more on those later.)
This is, of course, another reason why no map can expect you to have a certain skill.
The levels follow the usual formula of systematically killing off the enemies, one at a time, until they were all dead. One slight variation to that formula is that your characters can actually use firearms, and take out a decent number of enemies in a direct firefight if shooting from cover. While that makes a lot of noise and draws nearby enemies, the gunfire radius is not that large, so you can use it in one area, to take out a small group of enemies, without alerting the entire map. There are also a few times when you have to defend an area against incoming waves, which usually involve finding a good defensive position with lots of cover and hopefully a fixed machinegun placement, and then placing mines along the path they will come from.
Levels tend to be on the smaller side compared to something like Commandos, and also tend to have a bit of a detached nature, without too much of an over-arching plot. (That's not to say there isn't any, some levels follow on from others, but the story isn't hugely important for the most part. It's just war. The partisans want to cause as much trouble as possible without dying.)
There's also a camp, where your partisans spend the time between missions. There are always a few days between missions which you have to spend here, and you need enough food to feed your partisans during this time.
Each day, you can assign your partisans to tasks, either side-missions, construction, or resource-gathering.
Side-missions are simply a task which you assign 1-3 partisans to, with a chance of success based on the number and level of the partisans assigned, which give some reward for successful completion (such as a bundle of XP, resources, weapons, or food.)
Construction allows you to unlock extra camp facilities, such as more ways to gather food or resources, craft equipment, or modify weapons.
You can also gather supplies during missions - so, yes, this is the first Commandos-like game where you have to play inventory tetris as you try to arrange for your partisans to carry as much loot as possible back to base. There are different types of weapons (with 3 types of quality), useful items like mines, grenades, and medical supplies, but also tons of "junk" items which count as resources or food back at the camp. You can also dismantle unwanted guns for resources.
The inventory tetris is a bit funny, because you can't drop anything. You can "discard" guns and weapons (which makes them disappear), but not the junk items, which is just bizarre.
The game is also annoyingly buggy. I had quite a few cases where I had to reload because one of my characters got stuck and couldn't move any more. The load times were also extremely long, but they seemed to get shorter father into the game, so it's possible that the developers quickly patched those to improve them. Inventory gets slower over the course of the game as you get more items (especially the camp storage where you keep all your spare items, which starts to freeze for a second or two each time you move an item.)
Eh, it's a small team and a just-released game, so can't be too angry there. I didn't meet any game-breaking bugs, apart from having to reload a few times, and it does at least give you three rotating quicksaves, so even you save after a bug, you won't lose much.
It's certainly playable. Hopefully they'll fix the bugs in future patches.
It's also rather strange to be playing a game set in WW2 where they only use the word "Nazi" once. They insistently call them "fascists" throughout the game. A lot of the enemies are collaborators rather than actual Nazis, but that excuse starts to fall down once you're fighting Wehrmacht and SS troops.
I guess they wanted to avoid using the word (and, of course, the flag) for fear of censorship in Germany.