Vasari

Open the cube, and YOU get to be the next fire lookout.

This has been coming up on the podcast lately so I figure we should have a thread to talk about it. Also I really like this game. I think it got passed over because the first episode didn't really stand out, but I'm really enjoying the story and as much as people complain about the dialogue being silly none of it has bothered me so far.

Oh my god they actually changed this D:

I was tooling around with the SDK last night, I found a couple of interesting (and sometimes hilarious) things. What's really cool is that you can run a debug version of XCOM 2 for testing mods, which lets you set parameters for procedural maps and watch them be generated. The downside is that if you watch it enough you'll learn how the pieces fit together which might ruin the surprise on your first playthrough. I think there are also some other spoilers in there regarding unit types/plot characters that can show up in missions.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-11-a-single-button-press-skips-loading-screens-in-xcom-2 It looks like the loading takes so long because the game is diligently preloading every texture used in the next scene. If you skip too fast you'll get some of Unreal's patented texture pop, but it's worth it to get out of the Skyranger in any reasonable amount of time.

Oof, I pretty much mainlined Firewatch, I probably missed some things. But I finished it in about four hours. I'm too tired to form coherent thoughts right now but holy crap, what a game. One thing that bugged me is that the R button toggles running while Shift pulls out the radio. I'm pretty sure you can change them in the controls but I spent the whole game waving my radio around instead of running as though my limbs were wired upside-down. And don't even get me started on where they put the Reload button! e: Gatazhk declares this a PC game and in the very next post I get mad about the keyboard controls. Sorry, but these two-bit devs are clearly amateurs when it comes to keybinds!

If you can't take out a lancer at range, have someone on your squad stay on overwatch. You know they're going to move out of cover to come get you, so you'll have a better shot on overwatch that if they're behind full cover. This works twice as well if you have a ranger on overwatch with a shotgun waiting for the arsehole to come around a corner.

Oh boy. I just did something with my Ranger that went SO wrong. It's a mechanical thing but I'll put it in spoilers.

I think doing it later means that later enemies will appear. I first attempted it early on and went up against Vipers, the second time I waited until I had magnetic weapons (good call by the way) and went up against Mutons and those big robot arseholes.

Rob's problem with the enemies in The Division sounds like the exact same experience I had. I saw a bunch of looters looting an electronics store, so I killed them all and proceeded to loot the store. I think The Division has a problem in general with being an RPG with a realistic setting. If those looters were goblins and the electronics store was a crypt, you wouldn't think twice about taking all the gold because that's what you do in an RPG. But when you have real people in a real world setting it's hard to justify abstract mechanics. It's also why it's a bit weird to have these distinct factions like Looters and Cleaners (the garbage men turned hazmat pyromanics) because in reality, people and groups aren't that easy to classify. And RPG mechanics are all about classifying things and putting them into neat categories. Although as for them being criminals from Rikers Island, the radio host you hear in the Dark Zone saferooms does say something to the effect of "90% of the people in Rikers were only in there for stuff like possession, it's the other 10% I'm worried about". So at least someone on the development team noticed the issue.

How is everyone finding the load times? I've installed XCOM 2 on a solid state drive and loading when starting or finishing a mission is at least 45 seconds. How is it on a mechanical drive?

Oh my god, Chris

I just moved a soldier into cover, and inadvertently triggered another squad of enemies that was just out of her sight. They all moved into flanking positions and proceeded to miss every shot on her. This is still XCOM!

I am not optimised for mobile devices.

Got my tshirt, bring on tuesday!

I usually go with random soldiers, but if I do name them I tend to only do it after they've been promoted once. That way they get a chance to survive and become an interesting character instead of becoming a smear on the skyranger ramp on their first turn.

I got an Nvidia beta key, but turns out people could get into the beta by preordering, downloading the beta and then cancelling the preorder, so now the beta is over-capacity and they haven't sent my key. They say they'll be sent out in waves today and tomorrow but I have no idea if I'm actually going to get in.

http://www.magiccirclegame.com/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/323380 This came up on the last podcast, but I've been following it for a while. In terms of gameplay it's got alot in common with stuff like Hack n Slash or Glitchspace. You can dive into the code that controls creatures and collect different attributes, then create new combinations to solve puzzles. I guess technically it's early access right now, but the game itself has all the content. They seem to just be doing EA to deal with localisation and hardware configurations.

I don't know how they could do XCOM DLC well. The DLC in the first game felt really silly; who cares about a narrative-based mission about a new character in a game where all the character stories come from systemic events and player imagination? But on the other hand, a game this tightly designed can't have new mechanics dropped in as DLC, because either it's balanced well enough that the game feels incomplete without it, or it's unbalanced and serious players won't want to use it. It's a tough situation for them because I can't see what kind of meaningful DLC they could add without making a full expansion.

I jumped into SvenCoop yesterday and played a map I hadn't seen back when the mod was first around. At the very end of the map, a little credits text popped up and said it as made in 2015! That made me really happy to know that people are still making levels for it, and it makes me want to dust off those tools and make my own level (I was big into Half Life map making when I was 13, but being 13 I was also terrible at it). Like Deadpan said though, it's not a very complex game. Most maps are either just massive waves of enemies, or they're obtuse puzzles that you have to get right or are unable to progress. For example, SvenCoop (the original map that the mod is named for) has a section early on where you have to push a wooden crate out of a tunnel and into an elevator. If you don't bring the crate into the elevator, you'll be unable to progress and forced to restart the server. All it takes is one person who doesn't know this to run into the elevator and hit the button, and everyone is stuck. In the case of last night, that person was me. I haven't played this mod in a very long time and I made everyone angry.

I haven't encountered any issues with Windows 10. That's just my experience though.

I'm of two minds about this game so far. On one hand I've gotten far enough to see some of the creepy stuff, and it's really inventive and scary. I want to keep going just to see how much weirder and horrible it gets. But every single moment that I liked has had the air sucked out of it because every character in this game is so sarcastic all of the time! Even when horrible, otherworldly things are happening people are reacting in such annoying ways that it's ruined every moment of the game that I should have otherwise loved. I think the only character I like so far is Ren because he's the only one who isn't being sarcastic about everything and he actually has a personality. I loved Life is Strange so I don't have a problem with Awkward Teens in video games, but in this they manage to kill any tension or atmosphere by reacting in all the wrong ways to every situation. One thing I forgot: Why does progressing cause you to skip conversations to start the next one? You'll be walking along in one conversation and then hit the trigger for another one, and whatever was going to be said in the first conversation is gone forever. I know it's not an easy problem to solve but surely that's the number one priority if your game is mostly walking + talking? It's really frustrating; I have to stop moving every time dialogue starts so that I don't miss anything, and even then I'm still caught out from time to time.

I think we're done here.

Just to provide a counterpoint, I watched that whole video and had no idea what was going to happen, and the ending was hilarious.

SEXY ALIEN BODS