clyde

@Badfinger You can still play multiples in Overwatch 's arcade mode.

I'm gonna list my GOTY's over the course of multiple posts because I keep putting it off when thinking that I need to make one big post about it. These are the games that defined my 2016 gaming. Trackmania 2 Stadium demo, Trackmania 2 Canyon demo and eventually Trackmania Turbo really established the franchise into my habit this year. They are all essentially the same experience so I'm grouping them together. Playing the multiplayer in Trackmania 2 Stadium demo hooked me with the novelty of odd custom racetracks and odd custom playlists of music. After a while though I started to understand how much I liked having 5 minutes and infinite restarts to figure out how to get to the finish line. I realized that the full-speed tracks were build for 'w'a's'd' and the game really clicked for me as a way to keep my eyes and fingers busy while I do other things like chat with my wife as she watches a movie. I also grew an appreciation for sensibilities of the track-authors who would create architectural spaces that leveraged speed and orientations of the racers. Sometimes they even create instances of racing puzzles. Then I moved on to Trackmania 2 Canyon demo where there is much more nuance to the driving due to the ability to drift in a much more significant way. The tile-set lends itself well to brutalist architecture and I began to appreciate that a lot. Finally I ended up buying and playing Trackmania Turbo which greatly simplifies the experience at the cost of removing the strangeness ans freedom of the previous two. Still, I found that the 5 minute, infinite restart formula continues to work well in multiplayer. The improved lighting allows for some neat aesthetic experiments from the community maps and I like how easy it is to collect them and put my own racetrack-playlist on a Ubisoft server. People tend towards Canyon maps which I prefer and after the U.S. presidential election, playing multiplayer as I listened to shoegaze was helpful for a week or two.

We made it all the way to the last episode of Scarlet Heart: Ryeo. It ultimately felt like a bait&switch that I got something out of. IU's character in the historic circumstances is the main draw at first, but once they lock in to the political drama (which is intriguing) IU's character just kinda fades away into depressing conformity. The thing I got out of it though was a better understanding of how hereditary monarchies have inherent tendencies towards fratricide. Anyway, I'm hear because I want to post this music video:

Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking about you for the past few days because I'm reading a lot about the Byzantine Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries.

I haven't played Catacombs of Solaris yet, but Chris's description of getting bored the first time resonated with me. I play a lot of smaller hobbyist-made games and often I have to trudge through the first attempt at playing it. Actually, this is true for most games I play regardless of its production. I think that games vary widely in their pacing and demands; the first time I spend time in it is just a way to catalogue the experience so I can go back to it when I'm in the right mind for it later. Speaking of Chris, I know he said that premature annual awards annoy him but can we start doing GOTY lists soon so I can have a wishlist ready for the Steam-sale?

I enjoy reading your impressions and war-stories even though I haven't played the game. I just don't comment unless I have something to say.

I just played The Lab. I really enjoyed my time in it. The archery game was especially fun. I think it works a lot better than Dead and Buried's shooting-range because you are using both your hands to aim and you can only shoot one projectile before reloading. I liked that one a lot.

So I'm playing Kingspray on the Oculus, but from what I understand, it has cross-platform play with the Vive. Here is the trailer that gives you a good idea of the game's scope: There are three (maybe four) impressively realized environments and then a few vehicles in white-boxes to paint on. Multiplayer offers rooms with up to four people. I've only tried rooms with one other person (determined when I make the room). When someone comes in, the game lags hard for about a minute, but then things seem to run smoothly. There is a boombox that plays internet radio-stations and that is a really super nice touch. The pieces can be saved as .png that remove all the surface images that you are painted on, pictures of the graffiti on the surface, and 360 panoramas. So I like this game a lot. Now I will start to get into how I am responding to it as me. I am pretty aggressive when it comes to territories in art, but I do it with a desire for collaboration. I used to paint and draw with people all the time and I would actively subvert tendencies of trying to create and maintain territories on the surface/page. I want to draw with people, not beside them. That means that I will draw into their stuff and I hope that they return the favor. This is a while ago, I've pretty much become a hermit in the last decade, so I don't have the opportunities to do this much anymore. Going into Kingspray, I have to build up those understandings again and tonight I realized how far away I am from it. I tried to start by creating sections on a wall that might eventually intertwine, but they didn't. I'm usually confident about my doodles, but I find myself feeling really self-conscious about them when working next to someone who is working on refining an explicit image. BUT I'm confident that I will again get to experience collaborative art with others, largely because I have experiential knowledge that it is possible and a lust for it based on how rewarding those past experiences were. I will get over my hang-ups! Here's what me an the random other person made this evening while listening to the funk station. http://sky.easypano.com/panoramic-images/Kingspray-2016-12-11-81655.html

I think Medium and Kingspray have a recording functionality so you can record the process. I'm not entirely sure, I haven't examined those features. The Medium tutorials do seem to be recordings though and I totally stood back and watched the person in Kingspray I was painting with. I think Quill might have recordings too. I will say that when I was painting in Kingspray with that person, it was like we were just hanging out listening to music and painting which is something I used to do a lot (not necessarily grafitti). They didn't have their mic on, but they gestured a lot. Sometimes I would stand back and look at my progress while dancing a bit. It's chill as fuck. Also, it's worth mentioning that when that person came into the public Kingspray room, it lagged really hard for about a minute, but then it just fixed itself and we were fine.

Just hung out with some rando on a rooftop and listened to funk while we painted these in on our separate sides. This is much more enjoyable for me than just painting in Gimp on a tablet and one of the exports is a .png with transparency that doesn't include any of the game's surfaces. This is perfect for me. I'll probably start a Kingspray thread later.

I wonder if Kingspray multiplayer is cross-platform. Edit: apparently it does. If anyone has this game, I'd be interested in figuring out how to paint together. Here's what I painted.

From what I understand, Quill is like TiltBrush. Medium is volumetric and you can paint on the meshes. I recommend checking out what the non-artists in your office can do with it. I just tried Dead and Buried, and Kingspray. Dead and Buried is cool, but now that I can use the sight on the gun, I want to take my time shooting and the majority of the modes have active threats. I still like it, but I need to just do target-practice for a while before jumping into multiplayer. Kingspray is great. There is a boombox that plays internet-radio and you can just chill and paint on walls without your nozzles clogging up. It's a really neat way to just spend some time. I haven't tried multiplayer out in it yet. Also, I keep getting weirded out when I look at my real hands after playing for a while.

After doing 40 minutes of tutorials, I made this in about 30 minutes. https://skfb.ly/XwVX Oculus Medium is going to have a big impact on my game-assets. I'm not sure if the artifacts that show up in Sketchfab will also show up in Unity, I haven't checked yet. They don't show up in Oculus Medium. Also I checked Quill out last night and some of the demo pieces of art are just so intimidatingly impressive. I'm really excited about all this.

Best Buy delivers! This shit is fucking cool yo. The opening demo with the robot was just awesome for me. The Bullet Train demo was really wild. I think the audio had a lot to do with it. I felt very present in that subway. I thought this would be cool, but I didn't know it would be such a big difference than using a controller. It's significant in comparison.

I took me a couple of play-throughs before I really understood my role. I do enjoy the premise of playing as a journalist who is trying to angle a piece towards hating on the subject using the leverage of socially conservative norms (I'd find an expectation of socially liberal norms just as interesting). It's a neat mechanic/narrative for villainy. I enjoyed approaching each interaction as a muck-raker. Personally I thought the voicing of the subject-choices to be too explicit. I felt that presenting the choices as transparent motivations misses an opportunity to express the player-character's motives and methods and misses the opportunity to allow the player to do a little conceptual work. I would have enjoyed looking at specific phrasing of the questions and creating hypothesis about how they were crafted to make the interviewee feel open enough to admit to their own snobbery or whatever. That said, the way it is now does express a professional efficiency and indifference in making local hipsters look bad for the paper. Also, I was reminded of Glory Days of the Free Press.

FYI: I canceled my Touch pre-order from Oculus because I still have gotten know info on being charged or shipping even though it is launch-day. Best Buy had them in stock online so I just ordered from there; expected delivery is Friday. This means that I won't get The Unspoken or VR Sports Challenge for free, but I don't really have an interest in those games anyway.

I just spent 4-5 hours playing Paragon for the first time. I was relieved to see that I could play cooperative vs bots for as many matches as I like. We won every time. They recommend four or five heroes for beginners, I tried all of those and played as Gideon three times to get familiar with a character. I like it. I expected it to be more similar to Super Monday Night Combat than it is. Shooting doesn't require a lot of accuracy, the 3rd-person shooter perspective is just for people like myself who are uncomfortable with top-down action-rpgs and not being able to jump (even when it does nothing). Paragon feels satisfying. There are optional buffs and resulting pushes.There is an archer who can do a piercing shot and since range is far more important than accuracy, you can halve the health of a whole wave of creeps in your lane; that feels great. Gideon has an ability to suck all the enemies towards him in a stun. Steel has an ability to ram and knock-back enemies. The two of them could work together really well. It's really pretty and I could see myself playing this for a while. I tried the Battleborn beta and didn't like it much at all. It seemed like they watered down the leveling and that made the pace of the match feel sluggish. Paragon on the other hand feels well balanced to me (after just a few matches this morning). I'm probably going to play more cooperative versus bot matches until I can navigate the jungle reliably. I also want to try all the heroes before I go into competitive matches. I was surprised that the cooperative versus bot matches were fun for me; we never lost, but double and triple kills are encouraging during practice. I am starting to understand the general idea of how the card system works and the difference between towers and ...intercepters(?) If anyone else is playing, it would be fun to discuss it.

It's interesting to have a comparison piece. The more I listen to these, the more I think this could be a genre in itself.

I'm able to turn with a mouse.

Regarding lo-fi programming: If you think of the game-engines and default assets as the instruments, then there are certainly lo-fi games being made. http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/games You can do a lot just by using Unity's standard assets, dropping .jpg on cubes and telling it to play an audio file. One of my favorite games is Destroy Your Home. http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5279 ...which has coincidentally been cloned in Earth Defense Force Your Home https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/10305 For something less serene, check out A Terribly Fast World. https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/9144

Well I've already ordered the Touch. If there are any questions you want answered about it you can ask me once I get it. There are a couple of other folks on here that have Vives so they might be able to provide answers about that product.

Oculus just listed a bunch of games that will be available for Touch at release on December 6th. https://www.oculus.com/blog/touch-launch-lineup/

So I had a really cool experience this evening. A good amount of context will be beneficial to my testimony: I've been playing the demo of Trackmania 2 Stadium and Canyon off and on for a year or so. The way the demo works is that when Persephone is in the land of the living, you get an hour a day to play what appears to be the full game of either version which are separate applications somehow unified by something called "ManiaPlanet"; when Persephone is in the land of the dead, you are supposed to get unlimited time with the demo. Over Thanksgiving-break, I ended up over-extending the demo somehow, multiple times. Now I will explain what the appeal of Trackmania 2 is for me: I play on the multiplayer-servers. The ones I play most are the "Full Speed" servers which exclusively feature maps that require no braking. Sometimes they play unlicensed music and that really hooked me. Eventually though, I started to appreciate how the game required a similar amount of attention to what Bejeweled requires on casual-mode. (I often don't finish races within the 5 minutes, so my standards have an impact on how focused I feel a need to be). That, mixed with the sense of other people from all over the world experiencing the same simulated space and music simultaneously without an expectation for interaction beyond witnessing each other's existence. I recently tried surfing in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (what an appropriate name!). In fact, I bought CS:GO because I heard about surfing in it. But the required skill-level for the beginner-maps is ridiculously high. Trackmania 2 Stadium Demo helped me get the CS:GO surfing-experience without the high dexterity requirements or the toxic chat. I should mention that if you download the Trackmania 2 Stadium Demo -> go into the online multiplayer Full-speed room and start playing, you probably won't be able to finish the races; I wasn't able to initially, but the expectations that the tracks put on the players were fascinating to me because they weren't purely dexterity challenges; sometimes the tracks seem more like mazes , but most of the time they just have paths that are intended to surprise rather than challenge. Once I start zoning out a bit, the tracks become cathedral-like in a way. I didn't mind failing over and over and I quickly adapted to the short-races and frequent restarts. The 5-minute limitation, non-interactive presence of other players, and the jukeboxy nature of the music and all of it somehow made the failures digestible. So from what I understand, these servers are run by players rather than by the developer. The various servers often have HUD-links to PayPal for donations and Facebook for community-organization. They also keep persistent global and personal race-time records. I've briefly looked into running a server just because I was curious about the unlicensed music-track aspect, but I quickly realized that running one of these servers takes a load of commitment (not something I have). But still, this is an important part of my story: I have a respect for folks who are organized and committed enough to curate custom-made maps and music in order to create these fascinating and populated digital spaces. Wouldn't it be cool to have the opportunity to be one of those curators without all the work or commitment? A lot of the reviews for Trackmania Turbo focus on the lack of customization and lack of support for a 3rd-pary leaderboard-system or dedicated-servers and the damage that would do to the existing Trackmania 2 community if they were to move over to this newer title. I myself am disappointed with the lack of ability to upload .oog that is played on speakers around the world as we race, but est quod est. In deciding between buying the games I've demoed for 18 collective hours (Trackmania 2 Stadium and Canyon) or buying the simplified and newer Trackmania Turbo, I went with the newer one because I figured the older ones were going to be harder for map-making and map-sharing. Plus I can just continue to play those demos OK. So now that I've caught you up, let me tell you what happened yesterday: I spent some time figuring out how to download hobbyist maps, how to follow authors, and how to create a public room where I get to show other folks the maps that I've decided to curate. All of this is detailed in the video I posted here most recently. So last night I made my first room. I populated it with all the maps I could find by one particular author who had caught my attention as I played in someone else's room. I tried to set them up in what looked most like chronological order so I could get a sense of how this artist has progressed in this creative medium. I assumed that there would be some duds (there were), but that this would be a good way to figure out which ones I liked and the others I could "remove from favorites" during the race and then when I make a room next time, the playlist will be a bit more refined. And I went ahead and made the room public. It didn't take long before two other players joined and I think those two players stuck around for half of the playlist. More came in. At max it was five players. I was so excited, I felt like I got a chance to roleplay as a Trackmania 2 server host! They weren't listening to the same shoegaze, but I didn't notice that too much. By the time the playlist started repeating, pretty much everyone left and I had flagged the maps I didn't want in my future rooms using the "remove from favorite" system. It was really neat playing through an oeuvre with randos! So after this experience I had some more thoughts, specifically about the assumptions that I kinda shared with the folks who are disappointed with the lack of support for dedicated servers, unlicensed music, and customization. It's counter-intuitive that a lack of cross-platform map-support would be a good thing. I mean, doesn't it make sense that it would be better to be able to play a Trackmania Turbo map made on PS4 on the PC? I would think so, but now that I've had this experience with game's lack of cross-platform support, I kinda think it is a good thing. Making maps and curating maps are super rewarding roles to fill, but at some point everyone kinda gravitates together and it makes it so that only the most committed curators and the most talented and/or skilled map-makers will be played. I like that the communities are broken away from each other in the case of this particular game. I'm sure it would be cool to fill a room to the max in Trackmania Turbo (PC), but there isn't really that much difference between playing with 2 people or with 12 like there would be in a competitive first-person shooter. Because the communities are asunder, it allows for casuals such as myself to fill the vital roles of curation and map-making and feel some amount of appreciation for our smaller efforts. I think that is really neat. Right now I've collected all the maps of about 6 different authors and I'm going to work through each of their oeuvres and develop a taste from my combination of their various sensibilities and technical capability. I'm psyched. Oh, here is the music playlist I've been listening to as I play btw:

I made a tutorial video on how to download custom tracks in Trackmania Turbo on PC.