rincewitch

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Everything posted by rincewitch

  1. Danielle's vision of what No Man's Sky could have been-- all of the extremely chill and relaxing free exploration with fewer unnecessary mechanics and more space lesbians-- is so compelling to me and what I specifically want out of games that I feel really bummed that such a game does not actually exist.
  2. wait are there people who don't say it "goeey"?????????????????
  3. Yeah, if you want to get into EV, EV: Nova is definitely where to start. It's more polished, fancier, and bigger than the older ones, without losing their openness and feeling of a living universe to explore. Or, well, the illusion of a living universe, since I'd done enough modding to know all those ships flying around and going about their own business are just a bunch of dude, pers, and fleet resources. But it still closes the magic circle in the moment. It also actually runs on modern OSes, which is a plus. :V I do have to wonder how people develop mods for it nowadays, since ResEdit is super dead. Edit: I, of course, meant düde, përs, and flët resources. I regret this important error.
  4. I was pretty excited to hear my reader mail about ResEdit on this episode! Hopefully it wasn't too inaccurate-- I was trying to remember stuff from when I was, like, eight years old or whatever.
  5. Idle Weekend June 17, 2016: We Happy E3

    FWIW I understood exactly what Danielle meant by "Sword Dad".
  6. Idle Weekend May 6, 2016: Top This

    I love myself to know that even though most of my friends love them I should probably never play a Souls game because they're hard and I'd probably cry if I spent 14 hours trying to beat one boss and then died, but I'd totally play Dark Souls: The Walking Simulator.
  7. I have kind of the opposite anxiety over RPG character creation, where I always happily dump points into conversation/lockpicking/etc. skills to unlock story but then feel profound anxiety over worrying if I've made the combat impossible for myself-- whether through using points frivolously or, more likely, just spending my points "wrong" or picking a bad build or optimizing poorly. Occasionally, this has actually happened-- I never did beat Shadowrun: Dragonfall because at a certain point it was just way too hard for me and I felt like my character (at my skill level-- I'm pretty bad at most games) was in an unwinnable situation, so even though I was totally into the story and setting of the game I felt like I'd hit a brick wall in difficulty and I was locked into a character build that made it insurmountable. And because things like that have happened a few times, I get hugely worried every time I play a new game with new systems to master and wonder if I'll accidentally make it impossible for me to beat. I'm kind of glad my favorite RPGs from Bioware tend to have an easy mode that's easy enough I can just pick whatever seems cool and then be reasonably confident I'll make it to the end. And I guess I'm the target audience for things like when WoW drastically simplified its spec system, or FFXIV just not having specs at all, just a single stat your job should point points into.
  8. Idle Weekend May 6, 2016: Top This

    Mass Effect 3 was actually an example of escalating stakes I liked a lot! But I think the reason for that was because Mass Effect 2 was so low-stakes in general-- the Collectors were doing their thing out on the edge of space, so mostly you just enjoy these episodic adventures in a galactic society that's still basically functional-- which makes the Reapers arriving and blowing everything up mean a lot more in Mass Effect 3, since you've become invested in the setting by just kind of hanging out there for a while when there's no ongoing crisis.
  9. Idle Thumbs 261: Unsubscribe

    Always excited when Myth comes up in a podcast! Jake was basically right about Myth III-- when Microsoft bought Bungie, Take Two got the Myth (and Oni!) IP, and they hired Mumbo Jumbo to make Myth III, which as far as I know literally nobody liked. I checked out as soon as I played the demo and realized the mission briefings weren't read by Geoffrey Charlton-Perrin, since why even play Myth if you don't start every level by reading an old man's diary about the hardships of war or whatever. I guess afterwards Take-Two just gave up on Myth and according to Wikipedia the whole Mumbo Jumbo Myth team was laid off. edit: why on earth did these forums parse a frown face emoticon as some kind of chomping tomato
  10. nthing that the ad reads were incredible. Also I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by ~*~*~git gud~*~*~ discourse around difficult games!
  11. Monster Factory is one of the most incredible things on the entire internet IMHO.
  12. Idle Weekend March 11, 2016: Buried Treasure

    I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers those Myth difficulty descriptions so vividly! I was even worse at games as a kid than I am now (and I am still extremely bad at games), but the way the difficulties were characterized made me strive to better myself, and eventually I clawed my way up to normal difficulty-- probably the first game I ever finished on normal or higher. I still mostly gravitate towards easy difficulties, especially in games that are more about narrative experiences (what is it about me that I'm perfectly willing to sink like 48 hours into a Dragon Age game, but no time on top of that towards actually getting good at playing it or engaging with its systems), but somehow I managed to limp through Myth I and II. :V EDIT: Speaking of Myth, are there any games that could be seen as its spiritual successors? It's the only RTS (RTT?) game I've really loved, but there doesn't seem to be anything with the same emphasis on physics. Myth did a lot of things really well, but it's the physics that stand out for me.
  13. Idle Weekend March 11, 2016: Buried Treasure

    Haha, yeah, I'm way too much of a scaredy cat to play Alien: Isolation I guess because of the things it does really well. I also haven't seen Alien itself. :V
  14. The Nick Breckon Stardew Valley story should be placed in the nickbreckon.museum for future generations.
  15. ES2D 2016/03/01: 2 Ass, 2 Spurious

    I fully endorse slam-dunking misogynists and transphobes in the esports community directly into the garbage can, where they belong.
  16. I really like the little achievement popup right after Freq breaks down in sweaty tears after hearing about Vic's death.
  17. I haven't played or watched any of That Dragon, Cancer, because I know it would destroy me for all time, but the way you're describing its UI reminds me a lot of SWERY's D4-- a realtime rendered 3D environment, that you interact with by moving between nodes and clicking on objects (and I guess with gestures if you have a kinect or whatever?).
  18. Sheesh, at least when most post-apocalyptic games invite the player to imagine themselves going out into the world and mowing down everyone who seems suspicious they at least have the decency to code them as zombies or whatever. I'm not really sure what they should have done instead. Maybe just... not made a game that takes place in a real city that also needs to support roaming around and murdering people indiscriminately as a gameplay mechanic. I feel a bit grossed out even when science fiction or fantasy settings posit that certain kinds of people are just inherently Bad (Orcs are chaotic evil!), but it's like ten times worse in a near real-world setting like The Division has, where your factions of generic mooks are based on real people who actually exist in the world right now (Rikers inmates, poor New Yorkers, etc.) And yet from the way it's described in the show and from the screenshots and videos I've seen, the setting looks so gorgeous and detailed? I think, more than anything else, I wish that somehow video games could support building worlds with this level of budget and graphical fidelity behind them in games where your main mode of interaction is something other than shooting people with a gun.
  19. I love the Myth narrator. I'm glad they decided that in Myth II the narrator would still sound exactly the same even though it's like 60 years later. You need that voice actor in a Myth game.
  20. I feel like Myth II and Oni were, like, Bungie's anime phase?
  21. Yeah, there's a few things like that. I think being dead is one of the ways you can see the ghosts hanging around in the Lordaeron ruins? And there was that questgiver in Blackrock Mountain you could only see while dead. And probably a few other quests that just kill you outright so you can do some ghost stuff? It's all much less integrated into the lore than in TSW, though, since if WoW characters could actually just casually saunter back to their bodies and come back to life literally nothing that happens in the story would make any sense whatsoever anymore. In TSW, player characters (and NPCs with similar abilities) swallow a magic bee and get superpowers, and turning into a ghost and coming back to life are explicitly one of those abilities-- so at one point when you're fighting rival agents who have also swallowed a bee, they keep on coming back every few minutes because there's a portable Anima well nearby. God, TSW had so much cool story stuff. Too bad the actual gameplay sucks so much. :V
  22. I like that both Myth and Myst came up, because usually whenever I try to talk about Myth everyone hears it as "Myst". Anyway, I feel like the veteran unit mechanics (kill counts, names, and flavor text being persistent across campaign missions) and the game's narrative and how it's told both work together to encourage the player to get attached to their units. It's striking to me that in place of the pre-mission briefing most other '90s RTS games seemed to have, every level opens with a passage from the diary of a common soldier writing about the hardships the Legion faced, instead of, I don't know, a Starcraft 1-esque conference call between the Nine Avatara where they give you a bunch of orders. There is a high fantasy story of ancient prophecies of destruction and fallen heroes and all of that stuff, but you're seeing it from the ground up, from a narrator who cares more about how cold it is in Bagrada ("your eyes frost shut and the snot freezes in your nose") than whether Balor used to be the legendary hero Connacht or whatever. And the gameplay reflects this! Weather matters-- that Bagrada narration leads into a level where snow can extinguish your bombs and the wind blows your arrows off-course-- and every unit is precious, and when Fallen Lords or Avatara do actually show up on the map, they're terrifying, larger-than-life figures. Like, it might be cool if, say, Starcraft told its story from the perspective of some random Marine, but it wouldn't be as fitting for a game where you just pump out hordes of faceless marines and send them to grisly deaths, since you know there's more of 'em where the first ones came from. But Myth not only had a good story, it was exactly the right story for the kind of game it was. I wish there were, like, some modern spiritual successor to Myth. Is there one? It's the only RTS I've ever really loved.
  23. Re: Death mechanics-- The Secret World has pretty standard MMO death mechanics (when you die, you appear as a ghost at an "Anima Well" and can choose to either respawn right at the well or go out into the world and find your body to resurrect there), but unlike a lot of similar games it actually incorporated this into the game's story as an explicit ability of the player character so you'd get things like, e.g., a villain realizing that killing you is a waste of his time and just trying to bury you under rubble to slow you down instead. And for a while, the game's fast travel system was to just kill your character with the /reset command and choose the anima well closest to your destination to respawn at, although eventually they added a proper fast travel system. Most pertinent to the discussion of death mechanics that change your perception of a game, though, is that some of the game's investigation mission involve killing yourself, appearing at an anima well as a ghost, but then actually exploring the world as a ghost instead of just making a bee-line for your body and coming back to life. As a ghost, you could often see spirits, other ghosts, weird birds and various other supernatural phenomenon invisible to the living. So in that case death literally makes you see the game's world differently, providing you with key information necessary to solve a mystery. So sometimes, when I was stuck in an investigation quest there didn't seem to be any information about where to go next, I'd just type /reset and watch my character keel over dead so I could see if anything looked different as a ghost. :V
  24. Esports Today 1/19/2016: A New Season

    I agree; France is definitely the new Korea.
  25. Jake's hypothetical palette swapped Kylo Ren reminded me of somebody I met in Star Wars: The Old Republic. So one of the NPCs in SWTOR is this Kylo Ren-looking guy (although he was designed long before Kylo Ren was even a gleam in JJ Abrams' eye) named Darth Marr. In the game's timeframe, Marr is one of the leaders of the Empire and represents the colder, more rational side of the Sith, and is probably the single most prominent Sith NPC. On my Republic character, I queued for a dungeon and was put in a group with a player who had dressed his Jedi Knight in Marr's exact same armor, except dyed white instead of black. edit: also i guess jango fett is basically a canonical boba fett palette swap