Gatazhk

Members
  • Content count

    101
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Gatazhk

  1. I spit out my coffee when Dia referred to Total War as "such a fucking Dad game."
  2. I didn't know anything about 3K but have really enjoyed playing TW:3K as a historical epic. On the other hand, even though I love the Total War series, TW:Warhammer left me bored and I've bounced off every campaign despite repeated tries. It may be for some of us, once you develop a mindset about what Total War is, it's hard to cross over to a completely different context (i.e. historical v. fantasy).
  3. Designer Notes 40: Brian Reynolds - Part 3

    Top notch interview. Fascinating look into a storied career. Thank you so much for doing these.
  4. Designer Notes 44: Clint Hocking - Part 2

    These interviews are amazing. In early 2009, Civ IV and Far Cry 2 were two of my favorite, go-to games. So interesting to hear this conversation!
  5. More bad news from the good folks at Valve: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/06/07/valves-abdication-of-responsibility-over-steam-is-the-worst-possible-solution/ Delicious quote:
  6. Another Totalwaraholic chiming in here. My memories are unencumbered by childhood or youth - in the sense that I was deep into marriage and children when I first encountered Total War. It was Medieval 2 and I thought it was kind of silly till I discovered mods like Stainless Steel and Broken Crescent. I still wasn’t hooked though. What made me a Total War fanatic wasn’t any actual game, it was my idea of a game during the run up to Empire:Total War. Somehow I managed to fantasize that we’d have battles with tens of thousands of individually animated authentically uniformed pike and muskets faithfully recreating the wars of Louis XIV, with great battles and epic fort sieges of countervailing trenches, before gradually moving to the more familiar Seven Years War and then on to the revolutions and Napoleon. Instead we got the buggy 1/2 finished mess of small stacks and even more limited AI that was Empire. As disappointed as I was with the reality of Empire (ETW) - and later Total War Rome 2 - it didn't matter because I had dreamt of something awesome. After 700 hours flailing around in ETW with Darthmod it was on to each successive historical release, always hoping for a breakthough. I’ve put at least 500 hours into each historical game. 500 hours is one month of waking time x 6 titles = half a year of my life. In reality I've spent probably more like 10 months because I put even more time into ETW, Rome 2 and Attila, always fiddling with mods, chasing the dream. At this point, I’m approaching the half way mark to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of becoming “world class” at Total War and I haven’t even played MP yet! While each total war iteration has disappointed me in myriad ways, each one served as a roughly cut paving stone on the pathway to my dream...always "maybe they’ll get the next one right, they’ll innovate and gather momentum, drawing closer to my ultimate Total War fantasy -- a game of military history sprung to life. Then Warhammer arrived, the same Total War as all the others really, but a setting so antithetical to the great historical epic in my head that I was no lonoger able to able to hold onto the dream. What I’d imagined and what I'd hoped for all these years -- through 3 computer builds and one huge, beautiful 4K panel --was at best a mirage and at worst a hustle (we all remember the deceptive "pre-alpha" siege of Carthage trailer). But Warhammer brought my disgust home -- a disgust at my own culpability in all this. Fortunately with Thrones of Britannia the dream has been so streamlined I’ve been able to revert to a stance of bored disinterest. Then Total War: Romance of the Three Kingdoms looks to pick up where Warhammer leaves off, then more Warhammer. Thus my feelings for Total War have been streamlined and unlike the games, I believe I’m a better man for it.
  7. I think Fraser should recuse himself from future historical Total War episodes, given his Warhammer-centric outburst about unit variety in a game covering 10th century Britain. And for his original TWR2 take.
  8. Congratulations to the entire Campo Santo team! I hope everyone got paid, and paid well indeed! I've personally never gotten over the CS GO skins gambling scandal and Valve's role in it, which was to willfully ignore it while perfecting the loot box economy that made it all possible. I sort of see Valve as an epitome of the libertarian tech boss so often lampooned on Important if True. In other words I've got mixed feelings. But hey, video games!
  9. Far Cry 5

    This is astounding, after almost 10 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8
  10. Kingdom Come: Deliverance

    The more I hear about this game, the less interested in I am in playing it. That said, I haven't seen anything particularly compelling that shows how the game is "bad history." It actually seems that the historical details in the game are quite firm, if stilted in its representation of women. The core of the historical criticism seems to be aimed at the lack of people of color depicted in the game. Yet KC:D reportedly features the Cumans, who were a Turkic group displaced to Hungary during the Mongol invasions. If some are clamoring for Africans (specifically sub-Saharan Africans) to be featured in the game, that would not be historically accurate for 15th Century rural Bohemia. This is an odd basis for criticism because it seems to demand skewed history in order to get even with someone who's got Alt right sympathies etc. Find something genuinely alt-right in the game to make this case . For example, how are the Cumans depicted in the game? Is that depiction historically accurate, given the time and setting?
  11. GOTY of the Year

    Prey is my GOTY. How original. But it's got a killer combo of action, tactics, planning, story, exploration, and experimentation. There are some huge caveats, such as: I only game on PC, I don't play sidescrollers or platformers (nothing since Trine 2 anyway) and I only have time for 10-12 games a year. Honorable mention from the strategy category: Byzantine Games' Field of Glory II.
  12. Three Moves Ahead 399 - Air Combat

    I've never played an air combat game or flight sim for that matter, but I found this supremely interesting. Thanks Bruce and James for a great podcast and keep 'em coming -- this is the long haul driving season in the US and I need these desperately.
  13. E3 2017

    Yeah I got excited for this too. But then I found out through PC Gamer that it's going to be the same linear Metro. The STALKER/FC2 open world itch remains unscratched.
  14. The desire to change formats is understandable. I hadn't noticed a drop off in episode quality - you guys are pros- but why keep grinding when you'd like to try something new? Go for it!!! I'd just like to say thanks for helping stoke my enthusiasm for games on an almost weekly basis --all the more so as I realize your having to play constantly to inform the podcast grew stale and might have developed into a bummer. I don't play games every week - let alone new games - and I can certainly see how exhausting that would be, year in and year out on top of other jobs and commitments. Looking forward to the new show!
  15. I bought this and would like to give it a shot when it's out of early access. I am a bit obsessed with how to make large-scale battles fun to fight at, say, a company or regimental scale, but running the whole battle against the AI and have it be challenging and enjoyable. It should be possible to make an overall deployment and battle plan for a large scale battle like Antietam, sit back and watch the battle unfold in "real time" and make decisions about which sectors to take over and micro for a limited period. This would also allow for occasional large scale orders like assault, skirmish, defend, draw arrows etc at a divisional scale. The battlefield would be arranged in sections - each perhaps a Total War scale of about 20 units - which you could then take over and try to micro. I hope this is something Nick Thomadis and his team are seriously thinking about for the future, especially for the large scale battles of the 18-19th Century. Would love to see UG beat Creative Assembly at their own game, especially seeing how bogged down in the fantasy arcade style CA is at the moment.
  16. Hearts of Iron 4

    Got this over the holidays and made it through the inevitable Paradox learning curve with the help of You tubers like Bridger. My first HOI. Really enjoying the era specific Grand Strategy feeling that permeates the game. I'm also digging my first Japan in WW2 strategy play through in any game ever. I am finding the army order mechanics VERY fiddly, so I tend to micro the battles but I'll keep trying to master those controls. Fighting a land war in China was intensely fun but it's all over now and Mao is toast. I let Chaing have Tibet and Xingiang as a consolation. It's time to take to the seas and build the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity sphere,while hopefully sinking dozens of Anglo American fleets in the process 😀 Aluminum is going to be a resource problem though and I need those Zeros! I love combined arms games, I just wish HOI didn't have all those endless entire fleet v.s. 1-2 ship battles like EU and CK have. Oh well can't have everything. Perhaps I'll I become disenchanted as I dig deeper -- I've struggled with EU and Vicky in the past- but this has been a lotta fun for $25 or so.
  17. Civilisation 6

    This has been my experience. The AI, especially with respect to maintaining units and fighting is basically broken. This spoils the game for me because once you realize there's no AI military threat it's too easy to manage. If they can bring a Civ 4 level military threat into the game through patches, it could be one of the best Civs ever. I really do hope they get into fixing the AI so I can return to the game and lose myself in multiple play throughs.
  18. GOTY.cx 2016

    My problem is time. Either I buy games a year after release, or I buy them at release but don't have the weeks off to play them all. Just bought Hitman for example, and I'm still waiting to play Rocket League that sits in my library. At least I've launched it once or twice. Anyway, I have two Gotys, both for exposing me to new kinds of video game experiences -- neither are in my wheelhouse but I've sunk dozens of hours into: Dark Souls 3 - my first Souls' experience (thanks Nick) which I still haven't quite finished 60 hours in Deserts of Kharak -- the first RTS I've actually managed to get into (thanks for the tip, Rob & Co.)
  19. Actually, I was counting on you two to do this conversation. It was welcome and needed. You did not disappoint.
  20. Yeah that's cool. I'm just trying to point out that those sites you don't like are part of the fabric of modern day Greece and very important to the modern day culture of the Greek people. You don't have to like them - but if you miss them, you kind of miiss Greece. I get how a day with hundreds of tourists slogging through the heat up to see the Parthenon might be a bummer, but for every experience like that there is something else that is ancient and sublime available to someone with an interest in the classical past like Rob. The remnants of ancient temple or complex at a gorgeous site with spectacular views and few if any tourists around. Dunno - been awhile since I've been to Greece maybe it's all been spoiled now? Damn Euro!
  21. History is about time and place. So if you're in the place, then you're halfway there. I should point out also that the Greeks themselves (the modern day ones, that is) wear their ancient heritage proudly on their sleeve. They cherish their past, and they see a direct line from Homer through the conflict with Persia, to Alexander, Roman times, the thousand years of Christian Byzantium, the Turkish occupation to the present. And in major towns like Athens and Corinth, the backdrop to their daily lives is the acropolis, just as in ancient times.
  22. Had trouble hearing Rob in this episode. Also I agree, 100% with Ninja Dodo about Greece Rob, you'd be amazed at Delphi, the Acropolis, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Corinth, Delos, Knossos, not to mention all the stuff in Turkey and a dozen other sites in Greece, plus the various archeological museums, you are simply missing out.
  23. Far Cry 2

    Lol, so many many great memories with FC2. It was my first FPS game, and it shipped free with a Nvidia card and I almost didn't bother to install it. After dozens of hours of insane adventures with FC2 I was totally up for another shooter so I bought Battlefield Bad Company 2. I quit that game within minutes, after realizing that you couldn't just run around a big open world, explore and do whatever you wanted. Really pissed me off.
  24. Things to look forward to?

    Oriental Empires is a 4X set in China. It looks like a Civ/Total War hybrid although I don't think you get to micro your armies like in TW. I'm going to be watching this one closely: http://www.orientalempires.com/