Bjorn

We started playing Neon Chrome last night, and my initial impressions are that it is a very good roguelite in the vein of Rogue Legacy. It's set in a dystopian, cyberpunk world where a massive corp controls everything, and you're trying to take down the CEO. You remote control an "asset", a disposable body, from a hidden room in the corporations massive headquarters tower. Each run you attempt to reach the top of the tower and take out the CEO. You die, and you can use any accumulated credits to permanently boost certain stats, or to buy one off upgrades to take with you on the next run. Supports up to 4-player local co-op. We've only made it to the 9th floor, but I'm super digging what we've played so far. I tried it in single player as well, which seems to have a bit more of a story than the co-op mode and a few other changes, but it was bunches more fun with another person than it was solo.

hahahaha

I ran a very boring Space Soldier in the original trilogy, until MP introduced me to space wizardry and particularly Biotic Charge. My replay of 3 was as a mad space wizard, and with the expansion of melee as a weapon class, I'm very much looking forward to playing a mad space wizard with a Big Fucking Hammer.

Ethan Must Die is hard yo. I upgraded my video card this weekend and wanted to see how RE7 ran (fabulous, it turns out, my old card was deffo long in the tooth). In 10is shots at Ethan Must Die, I don't think I made it more than 3-4 minutes alive. The furthest I got was into the basement a little ways before things all went to hell.

I'm trying to be better about not pissing on things other people are enjoying, so I'm going to spoiler some critical thoughts I have about Torment (and inXile in general). So if you're digging Torment and don't want to hear someone complaining about it, skip away.

The officially canceled the multiplayer open beta. Which, this close to launch is particularly surprising since it hadn't happened yet. But it is a bit concerning that after announcing a public beta months ago they ended up not on a schedule to actually have one.

I'm feeling pretty on the fence about it, I keep vacillating between being enamored and bored. I don't think it's bad, but I'm having a hard time getting really excited about it. I'm just not all that sure that this style of game (super text heavy RPG) works for me anymore. But then there are some elements of it that I'm pretty intrigued by, and it seems to be a relatively novel system in some ways. I'm sure I'll give it a few more hours and see if it can hook me.

Yeah, talking to him just seemed to be a combat debuff, which I still think is a neat ability and something that makes total sense in overly dramatic fights. But the things I saw were:

This game is going to take me about 4 years to finish at the rate I'm moving through it. So far, post character creation, I've managed to make it through 2 screens in 2 evenings. I did have quite a bit of fun poking at the first real encounter though. I often find that RPGs break for me once I realize that most "choice" is just flavor. But the first combat encounter in Torment seems to have a pretty robust series of choices. I resolved it in three separate ways, that all seemed to have consequential outcomes. If I'm actually going to make any progress in it though, I'm going to have to make myself quit poking and reloading to see what happens and actually just start playing through though.

Imma take this opportunity to pimp the nsfw channel in Idle Slack Chat. If you're ever looking for a place to chat about this stuff, we mostly use that channel to talk about sex, sexuality, relationships, etc. Also congrats on learning and figuring stuff out about yourself! Start working on an escape plan. The more gadgets the better.

Congrats to the whole Campo Santo team on the awards tonight! CS took Best Debut and Firewatch got Best Narrative.

I don't comment much in this thread, because I am in no way a Giant Bomb regular in any capacity to be able to speak to their content. But, I do want to point something out about this for context. GB got their start as the gaming wing of a new media conglomerate, and within a few years was acquired by CBS to be part of their web content arm. I don't know what their actual reach/listenership is, but it's big. They're consistently the top or one of the top shows in iTunes for not just video games, but games and hobbies period. They're part of a huge media company. I don't think people are looking to hold a few guys who review energy drinks and play games to a really high standard, I think they're looking to hold one of the industry leaders (in video game coverage) who has the backing of a massive corporation to a higher standard. I think this is really important to bring up since a couple of loose comparisons to the Thumbs have been made. I know they might feel the same, but they aren't. This isn't an apples to oranges comparison, it's an apples to race car comparison. The Thumbs, and virtually all of the casts they host, are still primarily hobbies they do that hopefully pay for themselves. There's, I'm guessing, some professional benefit for them. It gives them individually a higher profile and it gives the projects they work on a higher profile. But I doubt very much that's why they do it, it's just a side benefit. But if the Thumbs were part of a half a billion dollar parent company and leveraging their position for access to devs, pubs and hardware makers, there would be a much different discussion about their place in the video game podcast world. Conversely, if GB was a a collection of a few dudes who made this stuff as a hobby, I don't think analyzing their actions and role in the video game world would be nearly as interesting. tldr: The size, scope and place of GB makes their decisions regarding "political" content and events worth talking about in a way that is significantly different than something like the Thumbs.

As a side note, politics is greatly affecting video games right now. Companies that hire immigrants or outsource any work are directly impacted by emerging policies. Lots of people in the games industry, particularly games writers and indie game makers are very worried about what the healthcare marketplace will look like soon. Anything that affects trans people affects video games. We're likely to see the anti-press rhetoric jump to actual First Amendment issues at some point. Any new laws targeting leakers could, intentionally or unintentionally, end up targeting private industry leakers as well as government leakers. idk, I think it's weird for any video game media outlet to not be talking about at least some of the things above once in awhile. Like, yeah, it doesn't have to be every show/piece/day. But there are really important things that are actively affecting the industry and hobby that these media outlets cover.

Yeah, I've got an FX-6300, so technically right below the minimum, but I'm hoping that won't actually be a big deal. The lady put quite a few hours into Inquisition on the same machine, and I don't remember her having any complaints about performance.

Mass Effect: Andromeda dev says game features 'full nudity,' says it's 'totally softcore space porn' Also, the system specs for PC were finally released: MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-6350 MEMORY: 8 GB RAM VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 660 2GB, AMD Radeon 7850 2GB HARD DRIVE: At least 55 GB of free space DIRECTX: DirectX 11 RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-4790 or AMD FX-8350 MEMORY: 16 GB RAM VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 1060 3GB, AMD RX 480 4GB HARD DRIVE: At least 55 GB of free space DIRECTX: DirectX 11 I'm really going to have to think about bumping my GPU up to an RX 400 series, will have to see if I can justify that in the next few weeks or not.

Over the last several weeks I went on a pretty big Resident Evil bender. Resident Evil Revelations 1 - Rev1 is kind of delightfully dumb, the script and voice acting are pretty bad, but in a good, cheesy way. Pretty classic mechanically. The thing that stops me from giving it an enthusiastic thumb's up is a single mechanic. A fair amount of the pickups in the game are "hidden" and you have to pull out a scanner, see if anything is detected close to you, if it is, then look around for a highlight spot to scan, then put the scanner away. It's really dumb and a big ol waste of time. But I think you pretty much have to do it to have enough bullets/herbs to get through. Resident Evil Revelations 2 - Rev2 is just delightful. It's got 2 different campaigns ala RE2, with different characters exploring the same spaces over the course of 4 episodes. The "hidden" loot thing from Rev1 returns, but at least it's better this time. Now there are just sparkles you can notice in the environment, and you have to point at them briefly to make them appear. A lot of them are just gems for BP (which you use for an RPG-lite upgrade system that isn't super necessary to finish the game), so it's also far less necessary to find them all. Overall I really liked this a whole bunch. Resident Evil 7 - RE7 is easily my favorite AAA game from a big publisher in a very long time. It's so good. Great atmosphere throughout. Fantastic boss enemies. I've already played through it 3 times, and plan on a fourth. One of the few complaints I have is that the regular enemy ("Molded", a kind of bioengineered monster instead of zombies) don't have much variety to them, but other than that it that game shines in every respect. I had really tired of the horror trend towards games being like Amnesia (hide/run from the monster) because I think there's only so much you can do with that. RE7 takes its inspirations from all over the place and makes the best of all of them.

I quit Wasted after less than an hour with it, which I normally wouldn't even consider worth mentioning, except for the reason I quit. Wasted is a first person rogeulike set in a post-apocalyptic Fallout-esque world. You delve into vaults looking for booze, the most valuable commodity in the world, and drinking irradiated booze can give you a variety of permanent bonuses or penalties. It's a pretty good setup overall for a sci-fi rogeulike. The problem I hit is that it has a Spelunky-like ghost. On each level of a vault, eventually (and it doesn't feel like it takes all that long), an enemy called an S.O.B. will spawn whose only job is to hunt you down and kill you. I'm sure eventually it's a thing you can handle and murder, but initially if it finds you you're dead. There's music cues to warn you when it's getting close. But, after getting killed twice by one, I just ragequit and uninstalled the game. Because I was so angry about the enemy being present at all. I had been really enjoying sneaking around the vault, exploring, finding stuff, taking out regular enemies. But knowing that the way the game is intended to be played is to either try and move to the exit as quickly as possible, and then explore more going backwards until the SOB spawns and gets close to you, then run to the exit. Or find a cheesy spot where you can camp and murder the SOB on every level, then explore to your heart's content. And it's just like, both of those options annoy me. Just let me turn the damn thing off and explore at my own pace. Normally things like this don't bother me, I'm of the opinion "It's the devs game, and they can make what they want to make." And I'm sure there are people who ragequit Spelunky because of the ghost. But this is the rare time I've ever run into a single mechanic, particularly one intended to create difficulty, that just made me want to tell the game and dev to fuck right off as quickly as this did.

Yeah, supposedly they are going to do away with that whole system.

I actually thought the movie was on the high end of video game movies. It's not high cinema or anything, but it generally captures the essence of the characters, has some good banter and tells a very Ratchet and Clank story. R&C is one of the only reasons I wish I had a PS4.

There's a bunch of positives I see in it. I like the speed things are moving at. It looks faster than ME3, but not crazy, twitch fast. The verticality with the jetpack is really good (I enjoy the goof during one point where the player goes to jumpjet away and runs into a roof right above them). I really think it looks like they've learned quite a bit about combat from ME3 MP. The little teleport jump was an MP addition. I think Annihilation Field was as well. It makes me a little sad that SMGs have been eliminated as a weapon class, because a couple of my favorite weapons were SMGs (Geth SMG and Hurricane), but it's probably for the best. Overall they felt like they never had a clear role to play and that led them to be almost always the inferior choice to any other weapon. They should have been shield strippers, but were never given that as an innate bonus. I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT EVERY CHARACTER BEING ABLE TO HAVE A KROGAN HAMMER. I'm hoping that armor gets revisited as a flat damage reduction it's been in the past, as it looks like they otherwise haven't messed with the shield/armor/health types. The flat damage reduction just was kind of boring, as it limited mod/ammo options for high RoF weapons and had a near zero effect on slow, big hit weapons. I also find it very exciting that you won't be locked into class trees anymore. Being able to combine Biotic Charge with some soldier class powers should be very, very fun, and will likely be my first character I make. I am disappointed to hear that the stealth damage bonus for cloaking still exists. Hopefully it is scaled back, stealth bonus damage was the biggest imbalance in the game.

Finally, a good look at combat and it looks so fucking good y'all. I'm on the hype train, and I'm not getting off.

Interesting, thanks! I'm deffo using the saw for Madhouse. Maybe at some point down the road it would be fun to try Madhouse in a "vanilla" run without using any unlocks, but that actually stresses me out thinking about it, because I'm sure it's possible to back yourself into a corner where you have to go back multiple saves to try and conserve ammo. I finished my speedrun tonight, clocked in it at 2:44, which wasn't even all that efficient. I went out of my way several times to get strong chems and gunpowder for enhanced ammo and to get shotgun shells. Even skipping tons of stuff, I was still super overloaded on ammo at the end. I hardly ever speedrun stuff, Souls games are some of the few that I did, and that was usually about sequence breaking more than anything. It's kinda fun and stressful in a different way.

We've started playing Victor Vran over the last couple of days, and it's so good! The voice actor for Geralt voices the protagonist, hence the title. I hope this game gets the attention it deserves from ARPG fans, because it manages to freshen up the formula quite a bit (unless there are other games that do similar things). And it has local co-op now! For fuck's sake devs, local co-op in ARPGs is the best, it should just be a stock feature now. It continues to piss me off that the PC version of Diablo 3 hasn't gotten the console features like local. Anyways, mechanically Vran is what you expect, an isometic monster horde killing simulator. You have weapons, powers, etc. Where it re-invents the wheel is that there are no classes. None. Your available powers are determined by your gear, and that's it. Each weapon class gets 3 different attacks. You can (eventually, all the extra slots are locked initially) have 2 weapons to swap back and forth on, giving access to 6 total attacks. A lot of attacks have a variety of buffs or debuffs built into them, that synergize well with other players. Then you get 2 "gem" slots, that give you access to magic powers, which can be offensive, defensive or buff oriented. You get two usable item slots (heals, buffs, grenades). You have one armor slot, that generally changes how you build up mana Overdrive or gives defensive bonuses. And finally you get up to 5 Destiny card slots, which are passive buffs or add unique passive effects. You can see where traditional classes could have been built out of all this gear, artificially limiting the tools a player has access to. But by shifting traditional class based powers to gear, it lets players mix-n-match to design whatever it is they find most fun or effective. It also means that you never find a rad piece of gear that has absolutely no value for your class and it means if you get bored with your build, changing it is as simple as swapping out your gear, you don't have to respec or start a new character. I like it as a variation on class design in ARPGs a whole bunch.

God, yeah, that is such a gross song. I just love the ridiculous over-the-top metal aesthetic, it's a huge reason I was such a fan of Brütal Legend, so seeing a Diablo-like play with that will hopefully be fun. I'm sure we'll jump back into it for awhile once these launch. Which, I didn't realize they plan on launching two expansions at once (sounds like they decided to hold everything back for the console releases). A few brief scenes from the Motörhead part are in this trailer, and it looks very much like Brutal Legend.

My birthday is the 19th (Sunday), and I pretty much just plan on treating myself to the trial on it. I do wish it was more time, but I'll take a little birthday treat.