In What Electronic Entertainment Have You Been Partaking #18: Reticulating Splines

[Synobun]

The Dwarves. Eh. Interesting setup, strongly narrative focused. But there's significant empty space between stories, so you spend a lot of time just clicking icons on a map. The combat leaves a lot to be desired too. I abandoned this fairly quickly.

HITMAN. I must be stupid because I couldn't figure out any of the kill approaches beyond the most simplistic "get them alone and then garrote them." The story, as well, was essentially window dressing. Abandoned after the third mission.

GTA V. I finished this game. Overall I think it was fairly fun, but I expected more. I wanted more heists and more character interactions. Strong relationships were established for each character, but throughout the entire game there's only a handful of side missions involving them. Michael, for example, complains about his family during every main mission, but he doesn't interact with them at all except for a single optional mission for each family member near the end of the game. Really, that's it? After so much build-up about how much he loves and misses his family, about how everything he does is all for them, how they are integral to his lifestyle... that's the most the dev team could muster? Disappointing. The final act of the game was rushed and the devs neglected the core elements of each character. It's not a regretted play, but it could have been much better than it was, and rather easily too. There is also a lot of room for DLC, but Rockstar has decided to go the way of unethical mobile developers and is simply milking the Online teat for all it's worth. Make sure you buy GTA V when the PS5 drops!

 

[Takhisis]

They sort of have that in VI though as you can now combine 2 or 3 units into armies on one tile, and also non-combat units can share tiles with combat units.

That was already a staple in earlier iterations of civ.

I thought that stacks in Civ IV would automatically defend with the strongest unit, which meant a combined-unit-type stack would automatically put a pikemen against an attacking horseman, if the stack had a pikemen in it?

Anyways, in VI you definitely do want to maneuver such that you've got type-bonus units facing the enemy. The temptation is to just send units out willy-nilly but you have a lot more success when you have defensive units at the front of your column, ranged units at the rear and mounted units running the sides. Ultimately, I don't mind the slider puzzle because it adds some strategy depth to the game that really isn't there with stacks IMO.

Yeah, but if you have a city equal one tile then having one single horseman take the same space simply wrecks the map. You either have a separate battle minimap as they do in Total War or you allow some level of stacking.

btw your formation reminds me of pike-and-shot more than anything, like the famed Spanish tercios.

 

[Synobun]

Poking at FEAR 3 now.

Has my mind purged all memory of FEAR 1 and 2? I don't remember there being demons in the lore. What is going on

Have I accidentally been teleported into Doom?

 

[Arakhor]

Even better: This happened out in the snow. Because apparently outdoors on a winter night is the perfect place to give birth.

Well, if it's good enough for Mary and Joseph...

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Sorry, guys

Spoiler :

 

[warpus]

I beat DOOM 2015 and have been playing Alien Rage

This game has nothing to do with the Alien franchise.. But the typeface they use makes you think that it does.

It's FUN! But disappointing that you don't see any aliens.. well, you do, but they're different sort of aliens. This is a sort of arcade FPS type game. As you make your way through the linear levels (although you can walk around and explore, like in DOOM, but it's a bit more linear than that) enemies pop up, always in the same spot. The game is designed like an arcade shooter sort of. So a level starts, you walk in, and enemies materialize in specific spots, and you have to snipe em.. or figure out whatever strategy works for that level. It's pretty tough, but the aliens are MORONS, they always do the same thing. So once you figure out their thing, it becomes easier.. but still annoying, since you can't save your game and have to make it to the next checkpoint without dying.

The boss fights are fun too, but they are pretty stupid too. Just like DOOM enemies mind you, except maybe a tiny bit stupider. So the game is fun, but once you figure out an alien, it's sort of routine, and you just hope you have the right guns and enough ammo to take care of business.

So I like the game, but it does get old after a while. It's good reaction and target practice for your neurons. You'll enter a level and know exactly where the aliens will pop up (before you've done it before, and died) and you take care of business and remember where the next one will be popping up.

I'm about 50% done through the game on hard mode and I would probably sort of recommend it, if you're into arcade-like FPS type shooters with swearing. But if badly thought out AI bugs you, then this game is not for you. The game even acknowledges that the aliens are morons, or at least it does in the case of one of the bosses. But.. all the aliens so far have been like that, they're just automatons that you can trick once you figure out their thing.

 

[thecrazyscot]

More Minecraft.

We have now completed the canal linking the far southern Ocean to our main base.

The new canal brings with it a great building project to build some docks worthy of our landlocked base, along with a celebratory shipment of ... dried kelp. But hey, it came all the way from the ocean!

A huge amount of dirt was used to infill behind the retaining walls, and urban planners are drawing up town layout proposals. Much construction is still needed, but at least the walls and light keep just about everything at bay, so our industriousness does not need to pause.

 

[HEF]

Minecraft was not just a feature in the Hollywood movie, 'Trainwreck' but a major plot point, however, I see Minecraft on the retail shelves for every gaming system out there including the Nintendo 3DS but have yet to play it.


An honest opinion would be appreciated, "Is Minecraft really ALL THAT?"

 

[Senethro]

By this point, no. All of mine crafts new ideas will have permeated our cultural medium completely.

 

[Synobun]

Minecraft was not just a feature in the Hollywood movie, 'Trainwreck' but a major plot point, however, I see Minecraft on the retail shelves for every gaming system out there including the Nintendo 3DS but have yet to play it.


An honest opinion would be appreciated, "Is Minecraft really ALL THAT?"

On PC with mods, sure. Vanilla, and on console... nah.

 

[thecrazyscot]

An honest opinion would be appreciated, "Is Minecraft really ALL THAT?"

Minecraft is an amazing game if you like playing in sandboxes, if you like exploration, if you like freeform building (like with blocks or legos), if you have adult friends who like to do those same things with you, or if you have young kids who want to play games with you, .

I got back into Minecraft because my nephews wanted to play, so my brother started playing so they could spend time together, so then my other brother and I started playing to spend time together...essentially it's a great way to spend time together because it's a really low pressure game. This is particularly true if you have a 24/7 server. It's great fun to go on a great expedition for many in-game days and just see where you end up. Or to find a secret hidey hole and build a secret base that no one else knows is there. Or to build a huge monument or project together. Or to see a large area just start to transform from wilderness to civilization.

Conversely, I find Minecraft very boring when playing singleplayer by myself. I have started and quickly tired of several singleplayer worlds over the years...it always results in me burning out on it and not having any desire to return for months at end. Because it's such a freeform creative game, to me what is the point if you can't share it with other people? You can do all those same things that you do on a survival server, but it completely lacks the element of social discovery and creativity that makes the multiplayer experience so good. There are better dungeon crawler experiences, better RPGs, better singleplayer survival games...but none of them are better experiences than Minecraft when you have a good group of people to play with.

 

[Perfection]

 

[Takhisis]

I say that Perf has actually delivered on his username and should start the new iteration of this thread, because this one really ought to end.

 

[amadeus]

That’s illegal! If you even think about licking that

Spoiler :

you’ll be charged with battery.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

me: i love it when i put down the wrong stove and a cafeteria worker suddenly breaks in to cook pancakes
me: uh in the sims 2 i mean

 

[Synobun]

me: i love it when i put down the wrong stove and a cafeteria worker suddenly breaks in to cook pancakes
me: uh in the sims 2 i mean

wonder who you said this to

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

wonder who you said this to

I'm not sure.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The Long Dark

After more than a month in Pleasant Valley and a month on Timberwolf Mountain, I spent only 2 weeks in Mystery Lake (couldn't find the darned bunker, though) and now I'm in Forlorn Muskeg. I've had good luck with the weather, so it only took me about 10 days to map it. Not a ton to see here, I have to say. There is a hammer, so I might as well make some arrowheads while I'm here, but I'm thinking of moving on to Milton soon.

The Aurora over Forlorn Muskeg:

Spoiler :

 

[GenMarshall]

Make sure you buy GTA V when the PS5 drops!

I guess it’s a bad time to bring up that there’s going to be a GTA V cheesecake edition (a joke from UpIsNotDown’s Skyrim VR is a nightmare). Someone at Rockstar Games is stealing Todd Howard’s idea of porting Skyrim into everything .

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I finally finished The Last of Us Part II.

It was too long by about 10 hours or so. I think I finished it in 36 hours and was sort of glad that it was over.

It's a real shame as the overall narrative was squandered by the ass-dragging and plot-padding. I do appreciate that the game forced you to ask the question: Who is really the bad guy? by forcing you to play significant chunks of the game as the antagonist. The game also mirror/inverts the first game in that the antagonist (a woman named Abby) ends up being the protector of a young (trangender) man named Lev in a way that reflects how Joel was the protector of a young (lesbian) woman, Ellie.

I'm not aware of another game that forces you to play as the bad guy outside of perhaps some historical first person shooters where you can play as Nazis or whatever, and certainly none of those games have important narratives to really speak of as played from the perspective of the bad guys. In that sense, this game was quite daring and I think elevated the art form.

The main failing of this narrative structure is that

Spoiler :

Abby didn't just kill Joel (a beloved character with whom many of the mostly-male fan base would identify with) in the beginning of the game, she brutally tortured him to death. You are meant to ultimately sympathize with Abby and come to see her revenge on Joel for having killed her own father as justified. But they massively overdid it and I think alienated a lot of people by how ultraviolent they made that scene. I think had she just executed him rather than drag it out, she would have been ultimately more sympathetic. As it is, even after having slogged through the entire 35 hours and really come to appreciate the character that is Abby, I still hate her. I just restarted the game and still felt revulsion at the torture/murder scene.

I mean sure, you can count that as a narrative win in that the directors/actors made me feel something, but it ultimately undermines the entire split-narrative that was to come as it prevents me from really ever forgiving her or reconciling to what she did. I don't particularly want to replay the Abby half of the game because ultimately I don't care about her or her friends.

The ending also had more gratuitous and almost nonsensical violence as Ellie finally catches up to Abby and attempts her own revenge. By this point of the game the violence had become the point and thus it lost quite a lot of its narrative power in my opinion. It's not that the first game wasn't ultraviolent itself but it was often justified and even logical. While this was just revenge for revenge's sake, which ultimately undid all the sympathies the player has toward any of the characters.

This would all be fine and dandy I guess, if it were not for the director's insistence that the game was not only about violence, nor was it only a revenge story. He also intended the game to be some sort of commentary on the Israeli-Palestininian conflict (he grew up in Israel) as the game depicts two groups relentlessly duking it out over petty turf squabbles. Even in this, he fails as the two groups are depicted as complete equals - which is a problematic interpretation of that real-world conflict for a lot of reasons.

One thing that I can say positively about all the acting as is how damn good it was. The motion capture used was just unreal and the performances were stellar at every level. From the background chit-chat of the townsfolk, to the idle conversation in quiet moments, to the brutal ultraviolence of vengeance that the characters visit upon another, this game feels more like a movie than a game. The first game had acting but this one blows it away both in quantity and quality.

My final complaint (which I touched on briefly before) is just how much of a letdown the generic soundtrack was. The score from the first game really was the emotional center of the entire story. Despite the fact that they brought back the same music director from the first game, the score in this one is just generic and forgettable. It isn't bad at all, mind you, but it is not remarkable either and neither does it invoke any real emotional content on its own the way that the first one did.


All in all I'd give it an 8.5 out of 10. If I'm coming across as overly critical it's mainly because I'm having fun pretending to be an intellectual haute cautore game critic. The gameplay is phenomenal, the story is great and really it only comes up short when compared against the first game and even then the main failing is the way it was dragged out rather than fundamental flaws.