Bjorn

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Posts posted by Bjorn

  1. Posted

    On 3/9/2018 at 9:56 PM, Salacious Snake said:

    This game seems cool, but I think I’d be too scared to play it. Being deep underwater with weird critters lurking about is right in the terror zone for me. 

     

    But weirdly, that kinda makes me want to play it.

     

    "The Blood Kelp Zone: This ecological biome matches 7 of the 9 preconditions for stimulating terror in humans."

    (If you click through the link, you can listen to the dispassionate computer voice read that to you). 

     

    When it comes to the terror elements, I have generally found them manageable.  You can almost always hear something bad before you see it, so you know when you've crossed over into something's turf.  As long as you save frequently (and aren't playing on permadeath mode.....fuck that in this game), the monsters are really only as threatening as monsters in the runaway style horror games, where the initial shock of finding them gets you, but after that they're just something to be managed and approached. 

  2. Posted

    On 3/10/2018 at 2:31 PM, Roderick said:

    Curiously, instead of getting this game I started playing FTL again. Never a bad decision.

     

    I've certainly enjoyed ITB a whole bunch, but I can say I don't think it has the staying power that FTL did.  It's mechanically so, so good, but it lacks that sense of narrative hook and emergent moments that FTL had in its best times. 

  3. Posted

    22 hours ago, thenexus6 said:

    The game looks and sounds great, but I feel the game is totally let down by janky controls and camera. I was getting frustrated so much in that hour I played, and obviously I don't know how the game unfolds but I spent an hour starting at the "base" following my sword to a colossi, killing it then returning to base. I repeated this four times. It's pretty boring and repetitive, and the world was completely empty.

     

    The empty solitude of it is a selling feature for some people (me included), but I can understand how that doesn't work or click with everyone.  I enjoyed the run to each colossus (and keeping an eye out for fruits and lizards).  When I played it, I remember thinking how a less confident game would insist on having throwaway minions to chew through that added nothing other than hollow action for action's sake, and the empty world made for a better experience than needless fodder. 

  4. Posted

    I've only done one (failed) run with fire, but so far they feel like the squad that most desperately needs to add on additional equipment.  Everyone else I've played feels perfectly capable of a 4 island victory with just their starting gear. 

     

    On that one run, I even got the Chain Lightning gun on my Prime, but then splitting points between another weapon still left them overall underpowered, and thus the eventual loss. 

  5. Posted

    I started to play this recently, and this game is my jam in so many ways.  It's stunningly beautiful, like easily just one of the prettiest first person games I've ever played.  It manages to mostly be relaxing, punctuated by moments of stress, fear and anxiety, ala Don't Starve, which is pretty much exactly what I want out of a survival game.  I don't want to have to worry about dying at every moment in a game, but I also don't want a game that feels like it has no risk at all to it. 

     

    Discovery is so good in this too.  Like, it captures the awe of discovering something alien in a way that Mass Effect only wishes it could.  There was a moment walking through an alien structure where I was reminded at how poorly ME: Andromeda managed to handle those same moments. 

  7. Posted

    16 hours ago, miffy495 said:

    I have mostly been playing on Easy since I'm traditionally bad at strategy games, but have only lost once so I should probably step it up. It's a very good game. Regarding that one loss, I recommend not taking a pilot that you're attached to on a run to get a feel for a brand new squad. I'm sorry, Smashy Stan. (I rename everyone to what their mech does).

     

    You would lose that pilot no matter what tho, right?  If you win, lose or abandon a game, you have to pick a new pilot to take back with  you.  So the choice is always A) Do I want this maxed pilot for an easier start or B) do I want to pick a pilot that better synergizes with the mechs I'm going to take?

  8. Posted

    Nappi, yeah, the combination of playing Pit People and Into the Breach back to back really does highlight what each does well and poorly.  And while Pit People might be more forgivable if played in a vacuum, the speed and efficiency and weight of what Into the Breach does just highlights its flaws all the more.

     

    Also agree that just everything in the game could have half the health, or do double damage, and it would only improve it. 

     

    How does auto-resolve of combat work?  The AI just plays both sides and you watch?

  9. Posted

    Beat some co-op games recently while the kiddo and her husband were in town visiting!

     

    Assault Android Cactus - A really solid up to 4 player twin stick shooter with some bullet hell elements.  You're androids defending a ship from other robots having gone rogue and killing all the humans.  There is a final spike in difficulty at the last boss that is particularly brutal though, to the point that we weren't able to beat it with 4 of us and only got through with 2 of us trying it because of the uptick in number and health of enemies at a full squad.  Would probably be a bit lackluster alone, but great for a pick up and play co-op game :tup:

     

    Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - The lady and I had started this game many moons ago, but ended up hitting a spot where two of us running the ship was feeling more frustrating than fun.  Broke it back out with 4 players and it's such a more fun experience!  Just having to worry about 1 or 2 stations on the ship makes it a lot less stressful of a game.  Big :tup: after going back to it. 

     

    Crawl - Since this is a rougelite MP game, had to say we "finished" it, but we did have multiple completed runs, and it is such a good experience with 4 people.  In it, one person is the "hero" and the other three are spirits who animate the monsters and traps of a dungeon.  Successfully kill the hero, and your spirit resurrects and the previous hero becomes a spirit.  The player who can reach the dungeon boss and slay it is the winner of the match.  The interplay of swapping between co-op and vs play, and even having some competitiveness with other spirits if there is someone you want to block from being human, is balanced and makes for great emergent moments throughout a game. 

  10. Posted

    Quit and refunded Pit People, the new Behemoth game that just came out of Early Access.  It's got great style and music and design, but mechanically I was finding it confusing and frustrating to the point of just being a slog that I didn't really understand.  It also was having some controller issues where it multiple times lost the input completely from controllers (having to restart the game to get them back).  Since we were in co-op, there was no way to save using the keyboard, as it would inevitably happen at a point where both players had to confirm a choice.  This kind of input loss isn't something I've had with other games. 

     

    This is one of those games I can super see why some people would love it.  Just...not working for us.  The combat is weirdly slow for advertising itself as being super fast paced.  We only got a couple of hours in, but every combat encounter seemed to be our squad outnumbered by about 50 percent, and killing each enemy requires ganging up on them with multiple characters for multiple rounds.  It is super fast and easy to assign orders to characters (the only input is movement, the action is based on the characters distance and orientation to enemies/allies).  But then it's just minute after minute of watching enemy healthbars slowly go down.  And ranged units will always run away, so one battle ended up with multiple minutes of each of us chasing multiple archers around the map getting increasingly farther and farther away from other enemies. 

  11. Posted

    On 3/3/2018 at 1:00 AM, Gerretic said:

    How quickly do y'all typically take your turns? I beat the game on my first attempt, on Normal difficulty, with a playtime of like 9 hours (four islands), and from what people are saying online that seems a little surprising so I'm wondering if I'm spending an unusually long time to try and puzzle out my turns or anything like that - I do feel like I stare for quite a while to try and find something perfect (and I usually was able to).

     

    Seems like I'm averaging about 4.5 hours per victory on Normal, which is definitely taking my time on most turns to make sure I maximize the possible good outcomes.  It can get particularly slow on squads that depends on moving enemy units around to line up shots and whatnot.

     

    I've felt like Normal is maybe on the easy side for me so far?  Which seems to be the opposite experience of what everyone else is having.  I've made 4 runs, and won 3 of them.  Won with starter, rust and volatile.  Lost with Flame (badly).  All three of the winning squads play to my strengths though.  But this is also obviously a game where something small can spiral out of control very quickly.  Failing to kill fast enough, or not block a spawn, or whatever can quickly put you in a position of losing multiple buildings or objectives in a single turn.   Failure begats more failure to, not maximizing objectives or protecting time pods puts you in a bad place going into the third and fourth islands especially. 

     

    So far I've made every run at all 4 islands.  Other than shortening game length and going for a few specific achievements, is there a particular reason to go for a 2 or 3 island victory? 

  13. Posted

    On 1/16/2018 at 12:46 PM, Professor Video Games said:

    I ended up poking around in both 1-2 and 3-1 (those cthulhu lookin' guards....ugh) for a bit...I didn't go all the way through them but they netted me enough souls/upgrades and general practice to go back to 2-1 and get through without too much difficulty. Both bosses so far have be surprisingly easy. I'd say I'm feeling more comfortable with things in general at this point aside from maybe the fact that I'm (probably unreasonably) hesitant to upgrade weapons because I have this feeling I'll find something better and have wasted my upgrade materials. That and I wish the game weren't quite so dark...

     

    FWIW 3-1 (and much of 3 in general) is possibly my favorite horror environment in any game ever.  It's so oppressive and terrifying in the best ways on a first time through. 

  14. Posted

    I think I've barely played any games released in 2017, but for what I have played, the standout would be Resident Evil 7, which was just a phenomenal re-invention for the series.  After years of moving further and further into being rather bad, generic action games, 7 was tense, well paced and played with genre conventions in a way that previous REs haven't. 

  15. Posted

    On 11/9/2017 at 4:05 PM, Professor Video Games said:

    Also, go as big as you can afford/fit. At first you'll say "haha this is comically large" and like ten minutes later you'll wonder how you dealt with your old set.

     

    I've been on the far extreme of this as you can be, and it's absolutely true.  We went from a 40" tv to a 150" projector screen, and it took surprisingly little time to just be "normal" to us.

     

    On 11/10/2017 at 11:20 AM, Ben X said:

    Warning: reading that thread, you will get very tempted by projectors.

     

    This is very true.

     

    Also, I'm a big proponent of a projector, if you already have an audio receiver/speakers and you have a room that is a good fit for one.   A few years ago when I went down that rabbit hole, there were several quality mid-level units in the $650-$1000 range.  It's definitely more work on initial setup, but once it's done, it's really worth it. 

  16. Posted

    Copying something I posted in the slack.

     

    I finished up the narrative portion of Slime Rancher yesterday. It's a pretty good but frustrating game.  Frustrating mostly because it feels like it promises a depth it can never deliver on.  But that promise seeps out of its pores.  You can see the opportunity for more complexity or interaction all over the place.  It's a really tiny team that made it though.  I suspect they ultimately just didn't have the bandwidth to include everything they laid the foundation for. 

     

    It's greatest sin though is probably the raw amount of time that it takes to manage the most basic things on your farm, because it is sorely lacking in automation elements.  You use your vacuum for everything: gathering food for slimes, feeding slimes, gathering their poop plorts, etc.  But you have to first suck up the thing you need, then shoot it out.  So every action has to be repeated twice (suck up food from garden, shoot out food to corral; suck up plorts, shoot out plorts to sell).  This is fine when you're dealing in quantities of 10 or 20.  But once you get to the point of dealing with hundreds of things, it's a significant amount of time spent just sucking and blowing.  And you only ever have 4 inventory slots, so there's lots of running around, emptying, running back.  The market is also reactive to you selling, so in order to get the best price, you want to stockpile a bunch of plorts and sell at once.  To stockpile them, you need a silo.  Which just adds yet another layer of sucking and blowing.  At some point, there should be an upgrade to just insta-fill/insta-dump the gun without having to play out the animation for hundreds of items.  And the late game upgrades cost a lot.   You're going to sell tens of thousands of plorts, potentially seeing the sucking/blowing animation, a hundred thousand times to fully upgrade your ranch.  It's potentially hours of gametime just spent holding a trigger filling and emptying a tank. 

     

    I....didn't actually mean to rant about that?  I think it was bugging me more than I realized. 

     

    That's really a mid- to late-game complaint.  I'm quite glad I played it, and there's a ton of good stuff in it.  I think it's one of those things where the parts that are frustrating really stand out in comparison to what's good about it (it's gorgeous, exploring is a joy, the story is simple, but touching). 

  17. Posted

    10 hours ago, twmac said:

    Shadow of War is the worst game that I cannot stop playing. It is one giant Orc-Murder Soap Opera. Every time the game isn't about that (all of the story missions) the game is deathly dull. The combat sucks, the platforming is atrocious, but, but, but, that Soap Opera is so moreish.

     

    "Soap Orcera"

  18. Posted

    1. Dark Souls 2
    2. Binding of Isaac (original)
    3. Binding of Isaac Rebirth
    4. WarFrame (if Steam logs hours)
    5. Don't Starve
    6. Spelunky
    7. FTL
    8. Torchlight 2
    9. Risk of Rain
    10. XCOM

    top10.thumb.JPG.7b58328ebd06ab778d82eaf39b647593.JPG

     

     

    6 of 10 called, though to be fair Stardew Valley is too high, as both the lady and I played on my account on it, so a bunch of those hours on it are hers.  If it had bumped off, it would have been King's Bounty: WotN, which jesus that was a game that made me hate it.  I deleted it without finishing it because it was so big and I was so tired of it.  I'm genuinely surprised that Spelunky, FTL, XCOM and BoI original aren't even in the top 15 given how much time I put into each of those.  I was also just dumb and brainfarted Renowned Explorers, of course it would be there, I've played the shit out of it.  WarFrame's hours are somewhat inflated, because I know it got left idling a fair amount and I left it running on my second monitor farming for awhile, or monitoring trade chat at work to buy/sell stuff.  But it still is probably my most played game.

  19. Posted

    I started playing this a bit, and I'm only maybe 4 or 5 hours into it, but I'm really digging it.  I had initially written it off when I got it in a bundle, as I saw something about it being based on a Warhammer board game or something.  But I didn't realize it was essentially fantasy XCOM with hardmode permanently enabled. 

     

    It seems super deep with skills and enchantments you can eventually get, to the point that I'm overwhelmed right now with the handful of skill points I have available on my crew. 

     

    The actual missions so far are all super tense, since any person going down could result in death or a permanent injury.  The looting aspects of missions is a hair annoying, but it seems like once you're rolling it's not like you need to scour the whole map. 

  21. Posted

    10 hours ago, Kyir said:

    I'm enjoying the game a lot in my first couple hours, though I'm having a hard time figuring out a gameplay loop that works well for me. Do cards give bonuses passively and then heal when they're used (but you lose the passive?) I'm usually pretty good at figuring out games that don't use much text, but this one's pushing the obfuscation pretty hard.

     

    Cards automatically give passive bonuses.  You have to manually "use" them from the inventory screen in order for them to heal you.  The bonuses can be seen in the stat page on the pause screen, but the early cards are weak enough that it takes a bunch of them to even register a single bar.  Once you can stack a bunch of cards from level 3 or 4, they effects of the bonuses become a bunch more obvious. 

     

    You have 100 inventory slots for weapons, heads and cards.

     

    The gameplay loop is the thing that I ended up finding so frustrating in this game, in that you're actively discouraged from jumping right back into the castle after a death or leaving.  I like a whole bunch of things about this game and I think it's one revision away from being a really wonderful take on the typical roguelike loop.  It just needs something that speeds up the re-equipping phase between runs. 

     

    I ended up rage quitting and deleting it tonight after giving it another shot and wiping again.  If you finish it, I'd love to know what the secret at the end is (its related to the "exit screen", I know that much). 

  23. Posted

    I think I may ultimately end up quitting this without finishing it because of one of the things I liked about it so much. 

     

    The fact that power ups both degrade and serve as your primary healing by consuming them means that there's a bit of an opposite arc compared to many roguelikes.  Rather than starting weak and building in strength, the optimum run sees you starting fully loaded, and steadily decreasing in power through a run.  As a concept I love this!  It creates a kind of time pressure to finish a run before all your cards burn out, leaving you suddenly very fragile while in the hardest level.  Unfortunately there's no easy to way restock.  You can hold up to 100 items, but the only ways to get cards in the hub are to buy them from a vendor 3 at a time (which you can reset, but it takes maybe 10-15 seconds to force the reset), or farm a slot machine, which doesn't produce cards any faster than resetting the vendor.  The slot machine cards appear to be of random quality.  The vendor's cards match the last level of the castle you reached (doesn't matter if you died or left voluntarily). 

     

    The debilitating thing is that I ended up having 3 failed runs in a row.  First death was on the final level.  The next two deaths were both on the first level.  All my stockpiled cards are gone.  Many of my stockpiled weapons are gone.  My vendor is reset to the weakest cards.  And I have no money.   The only real option is to let the idle clicker portion run in the background for an hour or two to build up a bunch of money, and then manually spend the better part of maybe 20-30 minutes restocking all my lost goods. 

     

    It's just frustrating that restocking between failed runs is such an onerous chore, and just jumping in without being well stocked doesn't feel like a valid path.  The devs likely thought it would feel like cheating or cheap or something to easily let players fully restock between runs.  But by making it a chore, it disincentivizes even continuing playing at all, since the exact same pattern might happen again. 

     

    Which, the game does describe itself as nihilistic, so perhaps it is all intentional. 

  24. Posted

    On 8/9/2017 at 5:59 PM, UnpopularTrousers said:

    It is very sad, but I think it's also important to try not to put your own standards of what it means to have  a good life onto other people, as the changes that you see are at times only sad from your perspective. For example, near the end of my grandfather's life he was no longer able to recognize himself in the mirror. However, he really enjoyed seeing 'that nice man' in the bathroom mirror every morning. The stranger in the mirror was perhaps a net positive in his life, even if it was oftentimes hard for me to see it that way. Of course he would have preferred to be his old sharp-witted self and I'm not romanticizing things and saying that his life as a whole was better than it was before, because it certainly wasn't. However, that doesn't mean that the joy that he experienced as a result of his condition was entirely empty or meaningless, either.  These things only becomes tragic when overlaid with comparisons to a previous person who is sadly long gone. 
     

    So, despite all the intense tragedy of who Cooper/Dougie is now...he does still seem to be experiencing plenty of joy. When we see him gulping back coffee and shoveling pie into his face, he does seem to be experiencing real and genuine joy. It's sad to remember that the old Coop is locked away in there somewhere, and Dougie is oftentimes overcome with a melancholy which he probably couldn't articulate. But, he still seems to be taking pleasure in a lot of the simple things in life, which old Coop did too. So, he still has that.

     

    (Sorry if that was too much of sad elegy for a goofy Twin Peaks character who is both fictional and actually a lot of fun to watch bumble around. But these personal connections do at times pop up for me while watching the show)

     

    My mother was diagnosed with dementia last year, and it's been progressing at a faster than normal rate.  Like, she's still 70-80 percent "there" most of the times, but this entire season has had me thinking about the relationship between Dougie and dementia/Alzheimer's, the way people relate to him, etc.