clyde

It's cool looking through that list and remembering that year. That was the year we got and Xbox360. I was downloading arcade trials and every available demo. It was amazing that I could play all those demos without subscribing to Playstation Magazine and getting those demo-discs. Every Extend Extra Extreme and some racing game ("Mad Wheels" maybe?) were the first digital titles I bought. I played so much Halo 3 multiplayer and then discovered Shadowrun 360. I played hundreds of hours of Shadowrun. It was my go to game for many years. Puzzle quest on DS was a big thing for a while. I remember having dreams of matching skulls. We still had Wii Sports so we continued to bowl that year. It was also when we first got access to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion which we played obsessively. I had never seen a game where you had so much freedom to walk into peoples' houses, steal, and join guilds and such.

Cool thread.

I'm using a space that is exactly that size with the Rift (when playing Touch games). My x-axis is the 8'. It isn't great, the lack of space is noticeable. Pretty much all the games I've played allow you to use teleport mechanics, but you have to remember to use them. The Guardian wall shows up a lot though you can turn it off if you like. All that said, I don't think the Rift is going to be significantly better for you because of a small space. If anything, you can think that the games which are on the Oculus store (and the duplicates on Steam) will be optimized to allow you to play in the space you describe, but it will be tight.

I don't really know much about either of the games I mentioned. I am just making assumptions. There is also Dear Esther which again I have not played. Oh and there is Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist which I played and very much enjoyed. Therd is also The Stanley Parable which I have not played. Oh and The Beginner's Guide which I liked for reasons I imagined on my own.

I find it interesting that the two games you mention being the most immersive lack character-models. I suspect that games that cost less than a couple of million won't have the character-animations you need to suspend disbelief. I haven't played either of these, but the impressions I have (based on the marketing) of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture would fit what you are describing a desire for.

We are currently on episode 4 of Uncontrollably Fond which stars Suzy from Miss A. I was pleased to see that they managed to sew two full episodes of flashbacks into contrived circumstances that make the first episode and premise more interesting. Is anyone else watching any K-dramas? And since K-pop fills pool of actors, any MVs will be considered relevant to this thread. I'd also be interested in discussing how 16-episode korean rom-coms have a distinct sensibility from american television and how it may require one to adjust their tastes.

This was a really helpful explanation of some of the more nuanced techniques in Western music.

I know everyone says that the Budget Cuts demo is awesome, but I didn't realize how fun it would be. OMG I want that stealth game.

Don't forget to try out Lucky's Tale and Farlands at some point. I enjoyed them more than I thought I would. I assume they still come free with the Rift.

Rainbow Six: Siege is the game that I spent the most time playing and that I've played the most intensely this year. This is a game that has a multiplication effect to its highs&lows. Initially, the variety of abilities to choose from as you pick an operator seems like the engine of permutation, but really it's the way the level design and destructible environments work with the 5 minute objectives. Slow team-play is optimal, but it's not always an option. Once dead, watching surviving teammates beat the odds or get out-smarted becomes something akin to a Twitch-stream with voice-chat. The demands of the game have encouraged a lot of folks to open up their mic and I don't like everyone I play with, but I work with them. I've put somewhere around 120 hours into R6:Siege and I know the most of the maps intimately, it gives me an advantage for sure, but knowing how many possibilities there are while breaching or defending while a timer runs down creates an addictive anxiety that I have enjoyed immensely and frequently all year. 66 and 6/6ths has captured me and remained on my mind all year. I've never seen anything like it. I've been playing everythingstaken's games for a while now, but this one just grabs me and I've thought a lot about why that is. The draw of the fanfic inspired slice-of-life narrative pushes me to solve the puzzle and manage the dexterity required to get more of this interactive sigil's symbols on the screen. It's fascinating and I can't get very far in it. It's possible that if I did have the dexterity required to beat the game, then I might have quickly forgotten about it. The fact that it has a very small audience (pretty much just me) makes it feel like if I don't solve the game, then I will never know what it is and because of the way it looks, feels and sounds, I really really want to. Overwatch is pop-art I can really get behind and enjoy. I love the discussions about how the design evokes fandoms and how those fandoms feed back into the game-as-a-service. Even before it came out, I enjoyed the art and feels surrounding it. As a casual-player, I feel like every match is pretty much the same, but really I just kinda want to play with my dolls and it's nice to have targets to shoot at, objectives to center the crowds attention, and have situations, abilities, and mobility necessary to sometimes run away.

Let's both try the first episode of Love and War out and report our impressions! Edit: Hmmm, it seems that this may be a reality-television show that is not available from my typical sources (Dramafever and Viki). Edit #2: wait, is this it? https://www.dramafever.com/drama/407/Love_and_Marriage/

Thanks for the suggestions. I attribute a lot of my enjoyment to the over-acting and the reliance on tropes, but I'm willing to try out the first episode of the drama that isn't many years in length.

It had everything that I want from a StarWars movie: -campy characters with british accents -lots of exciting looking costumes and sets -super confident shapes in monochromatic shots. -huge senses of scale -StarWars music

@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.