iax

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About iax

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  1. Obviously the proper way of ensuring PUBG betting fairness is to paradrop the players onto an isolated island with a LAN setup.
  2. I played both SoC and CoP shortly after release so my memories might not be the freshest, but I think the games are significantly different. As Gormongous said, SoC is more focused on story and atmosphere. There's still a lot of freedom, but it's clearly intended as a well-defined journey through the story and multiple areas of the game. CoP is much more open, it's 2 large open maps with some safehouse areas in them + 1 end game area. I remember CoP being much more focused on providing a free-form experience with exploration and all the stalkery bits like hunting for artifacts being much better than in the previous games. Also it was pretty polished (at least as far as the Stalker games go) right out of the box, whereas SoC was pretty buggy in places. I definitely think CoP is worth checking out even if you bounce off SoC a bit. Clear Sky on the other hand was a buggy broken mess with reused SoC areas and AFAIK not even modders could fix it unless something changed recently (whereas they fixed and improved the other games quite a bit).
  3. Seems there's a bunch of games implementing the colored/polarized glasses multiplayer idea, Dimension Brothers is another one http://dimensionbrothers.circusatos.com/
  4. True, the game tries to use non-ninja controls that feel organic with lots of inverse kinematics and are a bit clumsy, I remember Ico and SOTC taking a similar approach. I do like this decision and it fits the game well, but I also feel there actually is a lot of frustrating bugginess in the controls that surely wasn't intended. The camera is sometimes completely insane including just fading to black in narrow spaces, grabbing onto objects can be hit and miss, jumping off ledges and ropes is very cumbersome and requires positioning the camera in the perfect spot. Climbing Trico is pretty rough and it's easy to get stuck on some weird bump on Trico's body or even be ridiculously catapulted away. There's a difference between making the character feel loose and human through acceleration, inertia, jump height, animation etc and making it hard for the player to specify which actions should the character perform. I feel like TLG is trying to do the former, but ends up doing both. I also do agree with Danielle that the boy has superhuman climbing skills, all the completely insane bullet speed free fall ledge/Trico grabs look like his bones are made of titanium. It's required for the gameplay, but I definitely felt it clashes a bit with the intended natural and organic feel of the character. I absolutely loved TLG, but it definitely does have control issues going far beyond just having non-ninja controls that are more that just "minor frustrations".
  5. Regarding the Imbroglio sound effects, they reminded me of Qasir al-Wasat which used various intrument chords for various enemy actions to an interesting effect. You can see and hear it here: (I also think the game is severely underappreciated, I remember it having an excellent sense of place and a solid discovery and stealth based gameplay while being deliciously strange. It also made a bold and risky decision about approaching player's expectations about its structure.)
  6. I was thinking about that recently and I agree, it feels that gameplay wise, everything from Quake is kind of present in the new Doom already, except the setting and the aesthetics. I feel that while the new Doom is successfully building on the original gameplay, it's doing that in the specific "closed arenas with waves of enemies" direction. The original Doom and Quake did not really work like that most of the time (even when it seems a lot of people remember it like that especially for Doom, plenty of wave-based fps games were described as Doom-like over the years). So I think one thing a potential new Quake could do is start from the same base and do something else than Doom 4 did. I'm not sure what it should be exactly, maybe focusing even more on 3D space traversal and not using the wave-arenas approach? I know that high level serious duels are played like that, but I'm not sure that's what the Quake multiplayer experience was/is for most people. I think it was about skillfully shooting people while rocket jumping around for most people.
  7. I think I have a higher threshold for labeling someone "a jerk". Criticising games, even in a blunt manner, is not enough. But I also think some types of online communication, especially twitter, are just weird and causing people to express and process everything in the worst possible way. I wonder if people would still perceive this "conversation" as somebody being a jerk if it e.g. happened on the 3MA podcast in a relaxed atmosphere, with people possibly continuing discussing it in sentences longer than 140 characters after the initial blunt statement.
  8. The Witness by Jonathan Blow

    Hint for the second spoiler:
  9. The Witness by Jonathan Blow

    I've looked up 2 hints for 2 very late/post-game things (how to access the "bonus" area because I couldn't find the thing I needed to find + confirmation if I understand the wreck puzzle correctly) but I avoided looking up anything before that like a plague. It's not about pride at all, it's just that not realizing something, being stuck for a little and figuring stuff out on my own is what the game is. Giving up on a puzzle, going somewhere else or turning the game off for a while, and then returning to the puzzle with a fresh perspective and solving it is The Witness's equivalent of e.g. playing through a story quest in The Witcher. I feel the game is also very explicitly telling me that. There's not that many "rewards" for progressing in the game, no cutscenes and almost no achievements (although apparently there's a bit more in the PS4 version), you can get to the ending after solving only a portion of the puzzles and the game is ok with that. As for the game doing a poor job tutorializing, I think the Giant Bomb video touches on that a bit. At one point Jonathan Blow says that he knew there are parts of the game that will be harder for some people than others (different parts for different people), but he just didn't want to compromise on what he thought is interesting even when it goes against the "agreed" rules of game design a bit. That's not to say that the game is perfect and there's no place where stuff could be more clear without making the game worse of course (Also I don't think there's a single place 100% of people are super stuck in the "main" game, e.g. I never had a huge problem with the marsh but had a bit of trouble in some other places that not many people mentioned here).
  10. XCOM 2

    Oh wow, I think I just lost a soldier to a weird bug. I finished a mission with everybody surviving and the post-mission screen said my sniper was KIA. When I check the memorial, it says she died because of unknown reason (other soldiers do have various reasons stated there). There was no time limit nor an extraction zone in the mission. I'm playing ironman so there's no way to make sure I didn't miss anything, but I'm pretty sure she was alive and sniping in the last turn and wasn't standing next to anything that could blow up.
  11. XCOM 2

    I agree, I'm also enjoying the game but the strategic UI is bad, especially the base one (but I'm also starting to see what you mean when talking about the strategy map). As you said, there's a lot of scene transitions (the stupid dissolving globe!) but also you have to adapt to the new scene and menu layout after every click constantly which can be pretty tiring and disorienting. I think it's also caused by them probably wanting to do a console version at some point, there's no way they would design the interface this way if the game was meant to stay a PC only game.
  12. I've never said it teaches general problem solving as in it's fully applicable to every real life problem out there, nor did I say the game has strong educational goals. It does however teach, or at least let you exercise and improve solving problems based of fundamentally mathematical and physical constraints. I think you have a very narrow view about what "real life problem" means, how can you be wondering whether e.g. visual thinking is generally applicable outside the game? Sure, most of the really difficult real world problems are of course much more complex and you have to apply some other type of thinking than in The Witness. But we do live in a reality with lots of mathematical and spatial constraints and we do encounter problems related to these facts in our daily lives, a lot of people (engineers, programmers, partially architects etc.) do that for a living. And I think saying that puzzle games teach bad habits is absurd, you could say that about everything as every type of thinking or skill can be harmful when applied in a wrong context. (Also "beating your head against the wall until you break through" is definitely not an experience I had with The Witness and I think it's specifically constructed in a way to discourage that even when it does allow it. But yes, some puzzle games can be like that.)
  13. Firaxis' XCOM Enemy Unknown

    (I think this thread is a little bit more alive. https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/8124-xcom-enemy-unknown/ )
  14. Wow, the criticism that The Witness only teaches you how to play it and doesn't relate to the real world is so weird. Ignoring the fact that I can't see this argument as a criticism (and even less as a criticism about The Witness in context of other video games), it's just not true. Most of the game is about identifying constraints, realizing their implications, and solving problems by satisfying these constraints. Isn't that something every human being needs to do on some level on a daily basis? Especially Danielle agreeing with Tom was weird after she said the game helped her overcome a programming problem.
  15. XCOM 2

    Haha, is it only me or does everybody use these... pauses when.... thinking about the.... right words to use in this game? Especially the... mysterious old friend.