Count_Zero_Interrupt
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Posts posted by Count_Zero_Interrupt
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Totally psyched to hear Chris likes Darkest Dungeon. I backed it on Kickstarter, so I have a copy coming to me when it fully releases, which means I'm trying really hard to resist just buying in to early access to start playing now. I wanted to wait to play the totally finished version, but the more I hear about the game the weaker my resolve gets...
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I have to say that I really dislike the scene where Andy finds out Lucy is pregnant. Like, she suddenly is willing to talk to him because he shot a guy? I know it is because the rest of the guys are talking him up as a hero, but I thought it felt messed up and not true to character.
I never paid that close attention to Lucy and Andy's interactions the first time around, and I didn't this time either. They're great characters but I never found their side plot very interesting. So I could be totally wrong. But my take on it is that she tells him not because he shot a guy, but more because he finally gets up the guts to take some initiative with her - first with the kiss and then finally confronting her directly about what's been bothering her - instead of bumbling and tip-toeing around her like he usually does. I think the prospect of parenthood freaks her out, and she passive-aggressively takes it out on Andy because she needs him to show some assertiveness, to reassure her about having a kid with him.
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Welp, I guess pork chops are totally ruined, now that I know they smell like the inside of a guy's cut-in-half head. Thanks Jake!
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It's interesting that she's taken notice of BoI since the only other games she's paid attention to are more "casual" stuff like Mario Kart and Peggle.
It's funny, my girlfriend's gaming experience was pretty much limited to Super Mario World and Tetris. She watched me play some BoI back when it first came out, and for whatever reason it piqued her interest. I eventually bought her her own copy, and in the end she wound up sinking WAY more hours into it than me. And I put in a lot of hours. She played it almost obsessively.
BoI seems like such a strange game to totally hook a total non-gamer like that. I would never have guessed that it would even appeal to her.
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Poop doesn't drop bombs or keys now, just coins and hearts (including soul hearts on rare occasions). So poop farming isn't what it used to be, but it is still useful.
Really! That explains why I ended up with some coins and a room full of hearts. I chalked it up to bad luck, thought maybe keys and bombs were just rarer. Well, at least it let me max out the blood donation machine.
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I'm sure this little trick is well known, but I just grabbed Rebirth a couple days ago and found this little synergy, and thought I'd share:
The petrified poop trinket dramatically increases the chances of items dropping from destroyed poop. If you nab it, and are lucky enough to run across a Larry Jr. boss or room, you can basically farm the poop he drops as long as you want. Great way to stock up on keys, bombs, coins and hearts. Obviously it's not useful if you're going for a speed run.
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Man, I love the the camera work on Bobby's scene with his father. I don't know much about film-language, but it seems like a very rigid framing around his body. It's probably mostly just to do with his posture, and the fact that he's full front to the camera (although not addressing the camera), which is unusual in TV. It feels very regimented and strict, as appropriate for the character.
Since the whole frame is taken up with him and Bobby, Bobby seems even slouchier by comparison.
Also, is it bad that when I think of Bobby, I basically just mentally replace him with this:
Haha! That's awesome, how have I not seen this!?
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http://steamcommunity.com/id/count_zero/
Particularly looking for fellow low-level crooks to play PayDay 2. Just started out, have no idea what I'm doing.
Also may grab DayZ in the near future. And I play a variety of other things, on and off.
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I actually really like Bobby as a character. He's an ass for sure, but his freakout with his dad in this episode is amazing, like the barking in the police station holding cells. He's doing the stereotypical teenage douchebag thing, but a little crazier, a little more unpredictable. It's tough to get a read on how much of his emotion is genuine and how much is an act. And I like how the cheating on Laura/running drugs side of his plot gets balanced out by his being genuinely protective of Shelly and put in opposition to Leo, a way bigger scumbag.
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That makes Cooper this tragically naive character, because he is so easily charmed by what seems like an idyllic town and he lets it get the best of him.
I don't think I'd characterize Cooper as naive. It's been some time since I watched the series, but from what I remember he is pretty much immediately open to supernatural possibilities, and perceptive of the darkness lurking just below the surface of the town. As the series unfolds he seems to take the stranger revelations in stride. Even more so, at some points, than the sheriff and some of the other townsfolk, who presumably have lived with the strangeness and darkness all their lives.
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I just finished too.
There was no core emotional hook to the season. The first was all about Lee and Clem. This one was about Clem and... a series of different survivors. There was no key character really, even with say Kenny or Jane or the sheltered girl I forgot the name of, there is a relationship but the way the series was planned there was no one person to tie it all around.
The main emotional focus of the story was Clem maturing/showing her maturity but to be honest, I'd be more interested in playing Clem as a vulnerable character that has to deal with everyone else taking charge on her behalf. I didn't feel like Clem's experience was very different to Lee's, they were both influential and highly capable members of the group.
These are my main criticisms of the second season, as well.
I also felt like there's no strong central arc to tie the season together, certainly nothing on the level of the Lee/Clementine relationship in season 1. I was hoping it would be all about Clem's journey, how she grows as a character, what sort of person she becomes and her struggle to be taken seriously and respected by the adults around her. But there's not much sense of a progression - she starts out pretty tough and self-reliant, and ends up pretty tough and self-reliant, with some tragedies and misadventures along the way alongside a cast of fairly one-note fellow survivors (most of whom were too-easily sorted into "good guy" and "bad guy" categories).
And you're right, she plays too much like Lee. When she speaks up in favor of a plan, the rest of the group tends to go along with it, and she seems to be entrusted with the lion's share of dangerous tasks. Of course she's the protagonist, and the player obviously needs to have some agency in the story, but I really wanted to see more characters ignore, dismiss and underestimate her, or try too hard to coddle her. My favorite part of the whole season is when she stitches herself up in the shed. To me that moment - more than any other moment in the game - drives home how resourceful and tough Clementine can be in order to protect herself when no one else around her will, even though she's scared and alone and in way over her head (although the mood is totally ruined by the predictable zombie encounter, in my opinion).
I didn't find the climax very effective, either. The season doesn't give you much time to warm up to Kenny before he goes off the rails, Jane is a cool character that doesn't get much time to develop, and the baby kind of comes out of left field. Everyone's instinct is naturally to be protective of a baby, but I don't think it really ties into Clementine's character in any specific way. I guess it was super-effective as the catalyst for Kenny's insanity, though. And I will say, although I don't like Kenny and found the final decision too easy to make, I think he's one of the best-written and fullest characters in the series.
Lastly, I really disliked a lot of the zombie encounters. It's a problem that most zombie fiction seems to suffer from, but it seems like the zombies pop up out of nowhere simply because the plot calls for it. They're slow, mindless and clumsy, but they seem to have a knack for materializing out of the trees and instantly surrounding the group, somehow without making any noise or getting noticed until the last second. It really felt like a zombie ex machina that happened whenever an action scene, some tension or a character death was called for.
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I second Vosslerlarry's recommendation of Jeff Vandermeer's "Annhihilation". Some extremely excellent psychological horror. Although I don't know if "horror" is the right word.
The term "Lovecraftian" gets applied to a lot of things, usually questionably, but that's a book that I think actually captures the essence of Lovecraft. It's dealing with utterly alien, unknowable forces encroaching on our world, and what happens to the people who come in contact with this thing that seems impossible to understand via the laws of our science and reality.
It's the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy. Unfortunately, the second book - "Authority" - is nowhere near as good (in my opinion). The third just came out. But I think Annihilation stands well on it's own, anyway.
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I can relate to Sean's comments about not wanting to spend money on a F2P, because it seems like you're only getting a fraction of the content for what feels like a big investment.
I've been playing a little Blacklight: Retribution lately, which is a F2P shooter. And it's not a bad game, the mechanics are fun enough that I would have been willing to drop $40 on it, if it were a regular game. But I'm not willing to drop $40 in micro-transactions, because that would get me such a tiny slice of the available content in that game that it hardly seems worth it. It's got this whole weapon customization system, where you can swap out like six or seven distinct parts on most of the guns to get different stat adjustments and special effects. To really enjoy that system, you need to have several options for each part, so you can play with different combinations. But to unlock enough stuff to get to that point, you either need to invest dozens and dozens of hours, or spend way more than any shooter is worth.
The value proposition is terrible, because they've designed it to catch whales, so it needs to be possible to spend hundreds of dollars without running out of things to buy.
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Witcher 2 needs a little bit of perseverance, out of the gate. I never played the first one, heard a lot about how great both 1 and 2 are, and finally picked up the second in a Steam sale awhile ago.
Initially, the combat was SUPER off-putting. It was awkward and difficult and didn't feel very good. But I stuck with it, and eventually I started to click with the way the game does things, and then it started to get enjoyable.
I played on PC with an Xbox controller, and the gamepad definitely felt like the better option, over keyboard and mouse.
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Hello!
New listener from the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada. Recently unemployed, and currently spending a lot of hours in front of the computer working on portfolio stuff. Luckily, I also recently discovered that Idle Thumbs is the Best Damn Video Game Podcast, which helps distract me from the discomfort of having software UI slowly burned into my retinas.
Been working my way through the archive for a couple weeks, however it was the talk about Neptune's Pride 2 in one of the episodes that motivated me to get on the forums. I might get into it, but I don't know anyone who plays, so I figure this might be a good way to get into some games with some rad people.
Episode 343: XCOM 2
in Three Moves Ahead Episodes
Posted
The strategic layer is a bit muddled and unsatisfying this time around. I agree with most of the comments in the cast on it.
But I'm loving the tactical side. Concealment is amazing - it speeds the early turns of maps way up, letting you skip the torturous creep forward/overwatch routine in favor of dashing into a good ambush position and wrecking the first aliens you encounter. Rangers with concealment skills are a huge help in moving faster without activating multiple pods.
I also like the timers, though lots of people hate them. Again, they speed the game up. I loved EU, but by the end of my time with it the slowness you had to play at in order to survive became painful. I think XCom 2 compensates for the timers by giving you multiple ways to deal with less-than-ideal map positions - concealment, of course, but also early access to stuff like flashbangs, smoke grenades, and specialists with defensive buffs and ranged heals.
Snipers feel much less overpowered, so far, and I think that's another good change. Squadsight is as crazy as ever, but so many maps demand mobility that you can rarely just plant your sniper in a perfect spot at the start of the map and call it a day.
And Sectoid mind control is actually a sort of blessing. Early sectoids in the previous game were deadly and obnoxious. They would just pelt your troops with plasma from distant heavy cover, and had the annoying habit of constantly retreating and setting up overwatch. Here, mind control is almost a wasted turn for the aliens, because if you expect it you can set up to kill or stun the Sectoid and immediately get your controlled trooper back.
Of course, what's inarguable is the terrible, terrible performance issues. My game, like lots of other people's, is running like garbage. Mission intros and outros are a stuttering mess, and there are often huge pauses during combat where everything will just kind of stop, and then a minute later some piece of burning scenery will crumble and combat will start up again. It's almost enough to get me to put off playing any more until it gets some patches...but I think I'm too addicted already.