apextwin

god damnit, i missed this! was it good?

eeeeverything about the AOEII soundtrack is wonderful. It's just this big warm blanket of being an adolescent and spending all weekend on msn gaming zone. So many ideas in that soundtrack, great arrangements and life. That opening track in particular is my favorite... associate it with the clean slate of a new game, getting the basics of your starter level village up and running... such a nice feeling.

Looks wonderful. Some interesting mechanics in that video, like the tsunami waves that hit all tiles and the dam that can flood the tiles in front of it. FTL was fantastic and i cant wait to see what these guys do with a turn-based game.

Love NOLF2. Such great mood.

On my first playthrough and I had to go from Veteran to Rookie after 5-6 hours of play. I figure I'll play on "easy" (scoff) and learn about what's available to me, what sort of events happen, etc. before I go punishing myself.

Played through the game today in one sitting - loved it! Such wonderful art, graphic design, humor, storytelling. The first 10 minutes - the text narrative intro - has better drama in it than most games have in their entire length. Was legitimately choking up learning about Hank and Julia's story.

That is incredible. I wasted ten minutes staring at the periodic table trying to find Bromide. I got a C in high school chemistry. Finished this game last weekend and loved it so much I blasted through a second time on permadeth mode and got the "pacifist" achievement. It's amazing how much content i discovered the second time around - whole new parts of prague and quests I never saw. Hoping Chris Remo + Nick Breckon make progress and have some good conversation about it this week. I think it's much smarter than a lot of people give it credit for. It's more or less the same as that, unfortunately. That's one big thing Deus Ex 1 had on the new gen games. The world was much more toned down and believable, which made the conspiracies and technology that much more interesting. Unfortunately there arent a lot of funny hobos singing the national anthem in the latest game :S

Agreed about the maps - hope we get livelier and more balanced ones. Loving all the new art and UI decisions.

Great post. Going to trawl through these links this afternoon. RPS in general is such a great source for smart games discussion.

Man, robbing people is practically the soul of the series for me. The biggest thrills and rewards in any deus ex game are always the points when I've crawled through all the vents linking together different spaces and found everyone's hidden compartments to find some awesome treasure trove full of grenades or neuropyzene. I want Eliza Cassan to die. I'm so sick of hearing her stupid voice on every single TV in this world. The first thing I do whenever i walk into a new space is turn off all the fucking tv's that are playing Picus News. It's insane how many times they let the same loop play. "I still have memories of that horrible day two years ago", "I don't need to remind you folks that this is the third such attack to happen in prague this year". Shut the fuck up. Her voice is so staid and fake sounding (and I know that's supposed to be her role, that she's this manifestation of the 24 hour news cycle emptiness that we have now), but man they could tone it down a little. Also... The AI - I was impressed when a guard turned suspicious when I flicked the privacy shades on in a guard station and went to check out the situation - but thats really about the only time i've been impressed. I know that its hard to make stealth games, and that the dev has to finely calibrate things like NPC view depth, length of time a player is visible before triggering an alarm, etc, but it feels super neutered in deus ex. I can be highly visible an NPC will give me a solid 3-4 seconds before reacting to me at all unless I am within 10 feet of them. But then once you've triggered an alarm, they suddenly become able to spot you from across impossible distances, as if their relaxed / offensive states have radically different settings for view depth, etc. It's also a bummer the way I can pick off guards one by one, quietly, and no one seems to eventually realize that people have gone missing. I want to see a stealth game where guards are frequently checking in with one another and getting suspicious when anyone is missing. And once any unusual event happens, like a guard going missing, the guards in that area should be permanently on alert, or at least for a much longer time than they are now (alarms only last like, what, 60 seconds?) I'm just struggling to feel immersed in the stealth gameplay as it is, so I'm trying to enjoy it more by roleplaying, for instance telling myself that I can only ghost an area and cannot knock anyone out, in order to maintain some sort of narrative facade that my character really did complete a mission stealthily. There's just something very phony about stun gunning 10 guards in a room and then having the narrative give some pretense that I actually did a good job on a mission like that. It's also ridiculous how easy it is to access areas in someone's property that should be off limits. A shop owner can be directly talking to you while you open the door to his basement, and continue to talk to you while you walk downstairs and rob the shit out of him. Come on, give me at least the illusion that the people in this world care. It makes thievery a little less rewarding. Those criticism aside though, the game is mechanically very good, as in the controls, the UI, the inventory are all super well built. All of the shortcuts on console work really nicely. The inventory wheel is also super good, cant believe no one has made one as good as this before (the way it spreads each inventory slot into an equally-sized slice depending on the number of items in your inventory - so if you have 8 items, it creates 8 equally sized segments, but if you have 20, it creates 20 equally sized segments.) It just means I can play the game without worrying about fussy inventory management and things are always accessible. And the politics and tone of the game are smarter than people are giving credit. You're frequently able to give an answer that articulately expresses the complicated nature of some of the struggles in the world, like the aug apartheid, or police violence. Jensen said something smart about how the ruling class needs to take some ownership for the fact that their actions are the cause of a lot of terrorism in the first place; another time a counter-terrorist guy (Macready?) made a smart observation that he stopped seeing the point in fighting terrorists after doing it for 12 years, since it always seemed like more terrorists kept getting created. I think the devs shot themselves in the foot with their answer about "aug lives matter" being a coincidence (which is bullshit), since the game is actually quite intelligent. Also I love hacking. Only on mission 2 or 3 and I've maxed out hacking. So rewarding.

what a smart response. you're right that MP games have a 'stickiness' and that when a community waxes or wanes, it has a big impact on the game. I guess I just find it funny / sad how much irrational tribalism / nationalism there is for various franchises, when ultimately most people who like shooters are probably going to enjoy most shooters to a degree. At least I feel that way. Going to hopefully spread many hours across many shooters this fall.

Hold on the expansions until youve gotten through the main game - it's a huge game! Expansion 1 (Hearts of Stone) is great, with lots of memorable characters and personality. Also has much more intricate and challenging boss battles than the base game, for better or for worse. Expansion 2 (Blood and Wine) is getting great press but I haven't really connected with it yet, and I'm 4-5 hours in. It's got unbelievably good art - like, sometimes the Witcher looks better than real life - but something about it doesn't quite click with me.

Great video, Vorlonesque. Watched til the end. Made me reinstall on xbone and play all night yesterday. I really hope they slow it down a bit in #2. I also hope matches are longer. It's always a bummer to me when MP FPS games have short, 5 minute matches these days. It always feels like, just when I get comfortable with a map or how a match is going, it's almost over. Have to say I like the new art direction and graphic design in TF2 much more than the previous game. TF1 had some clutter and gaudiness in its menus and UI, but the new shots look refined and airy. Also love how much the art seems to be inspired by real world tech, in the same way that Aaron Beck's art is: http://skul4aface.blogspot.com/ So many promising sci fi games coming out soon... XCOM2, TF2, Deus Ex, and COD: Infinite Warfare looks super good, at least to me. Same deal there, very real-world tech inspired look. One stray thought... it's a bummer that so many gamers get caught in arguments about how "this year, COD is going to fail, it's all about Battlefield now". I see that type of argument all over gamespot and other major outlets. Why can't both games be good? I've played loads of COD, BF, Halo and more, and I like them all for their own reasons. Titanfall has its own good niche. Anyone else feel frustrated about how gamer culture at large is so obsessed with certain games succeeding while others fail?

It's amazing how mechanically challenging DKC and DKC2 are... I wonder if my 10 year old brain would have been able to finish those games to the same level of completeness without strategy guides. Probably not. Did you get to the Lost World?

Will FW get ported to xbone? Dying to play it but lack the means...

Almost done with Samorost 3. It's a wonderful game, a real 'total work of art' - there's just such a handcraftedness and purpose put into every tiny detail, especially details you're likely to miss. It makes scrutinizing every scene fulfilling. The main bummer is that some puzzles quickly become laborious - you'll see the solution but realize how long it will take you to solve (mechanically... all the pieces you'll have to move around very slowly). The rewards for progress are fulfilling on so many sensory levels (especially audio) that you can usually slog through those slow moments. The sound design in Samorost 3 is an order of magnitude better than even Machinarium. So tactile, full of texture and space, wonderful use of reverb and ambient sounds. Super recommended.

I remember loving morrowind when I was about 13. Such an immersive, marshy world. Did the atmosphere hold up so many years later? What you're describing about fetch quests is the problem with all elder scrolls games, even Skyrim. I rarely felt like what I was doing mattered, so eventually in Oblivion and Skyrim I just would skip through all the text in a quest and focus purely on the mechanics, leveling and aspects of the game outside of story or immersion.

I really want to quit Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. Right now it just has none of the magic that the base game or first expansion had. Just did the spoon-man quest. Maybe I'm not in the right frame of mind. Anyone else feel this way?

It looks like XCOM 2 got delayed to September 26th for consoles, unfortunately. Or fortunately, if it means they release a more stable game. Really looking forward to playing this on an xbox one controller. I played 2012's XCOM on PC on a 360 controller and actually preferred it to mouse and keyboard! Hoping this version feels as snappy and precise. Anyone here planning on getting it for console?

Did anyone else have low expectations for this game? NMS always seemed to set out to do the things that mattered to me least in games: huge amounts of barren worlds with generated, non-curated content, a focus on magnitudes and numbers, and crafting, blech. I guess for me, I've always been averse to those kinds of promises. I think there's a big segment of gamers out there that loves the idea that the planet they're seeing is algorithmically unique, and that they are the only ones to see it, but really they're just seeing one iteration of a hand-made formula; if there are 18 billion permutations but only 10 different formulae that generate those permutations, then there are really only 10 different planets, in a way. Whether a planet has tiger butterflies or purple grass doesn't really mean much to me. They're effectively all equally arbitrary, garish Lisa-Frank hellscapes. I don't know, I just don't get the appeal. Not trying to troll here - if you are enjoying the game, don't let me ruin it for you - but just looking to see if anyone else was skepical about NMS in the first place.

bcmn, that sucks - I know the feeling of drifting from friends for sure. Not easy to deal with! Are you in the Bay Area? I'm a long time thumbs listener living in Oakland. Does anyone else in the forum live in the Bay Area? I'd love to do an area meetup. I love Idle Thumbs, its brand of smart humor and earnest discussion. Would like to make some other gamer friends in the area - seems like its hard to meet anyone who is into games here since it's such a hiking/camping/outdoors crowd! Plus I don't work in tech...