toblix

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Posts posted by toblix

  2. Posted

    I agree it's wery much in the wein of Sudoku, in that you combine a number of simple rules and data in order to eliminate possible solutions, and that it's always solvable without guesswork (at least I assume that's a requirement for a proper sudoku puzzle!)

     

    When playing the first game I also expected it to require increasingly greater leaps of logic, and reach a point where I would be unable to keep all the information in my head, requiring me to start taking notes or sketch out different «moves ahead» to eliminate possible solution paths or whatever. What I found (which is also the reason I consider these games particularly great,) is that it doesn't really do that. It definitely gets harder and more demanding, but not really in that way. It really just keeps forcing you to reason and think in new and unexpected ways. My brain's not that great, and I've been able to solve all the puzzles in each game without ever guessing or taking a note or keeping track of a bunch of stuff at a time.. The challenge is always identifying the one data point you're missing that resolves or unravels a bunch of stuff on the board in a very satisfying way. You can stare at a board for hours (I literally have) without seeing a way forward, and then come back the next day with a fresh mind, glance at it and go «well obviously that cell has to go» and it's more satisfying than most AAA video game endings.

  3. Posted

    Hey, it's me toblix! I never post here, so you must think this is probably important! You're right: I want to tell you all about these four amazing puzzle games: Hexcells, Hexcells Plus, Hexcells Infinite and, as of just the other day, Squarecells!

     

    If you haven't already bought these, you should just go ahead and get the Hexcells Complete Pack on Steam right now, because these are the best logic puzzle games you are ever going to play. If you think it's a bit much, at least get just Hexcells.

     

    Okay, so all these games are very similar, the difference being the actual puzzles you have to solve. In each of them you're presented with a board of cells, and you have to use clues such as how many cells in this row are marked, or how many neihgboring cells are marked, and so on, to mark/clear the right ones. No guessing, just pure deduction and logic. It's like Picross or Sudoku, only even better, and there's ambient music while you play! If you pay close attention, you can hear your skull literally creaking to accommodate your growing brain. And so cheap, I cannot believe it!!!

     

    Do like me, and get these games and play them. I had never been addicted to anything before I played Hexcells, and now I am frustrated that I'll have to wait months for the next Squarecells game. Speaking of which, does anyone know of any other great logic puzzlers I can play while I wait for Squarecells Plus?

  7. Posted

    ??? RIDDLER RANT! CAN YOU EVEN READ, BATMAN ???

     

    Alm?ost finished now. Well, I have completed the game, but I just have to find all the Riddler trophies before I trigger the game ending. I know I shouldn't do this, because it's dep?ressing as fuck and not really worth the effort. I thought I had ri?d myself of the completio?nist ac?hievement hunter tendencies, but apparently not! The Riddler stuff has simultaneously gotten better? and worse for each game – a lot of the Riddler stuff is amazing, and it's integrated into the main game m?uch better this time, but there's just too much padding. The best trophies are the actual riddles, where you have to identify some in-game object based on a sentence. These are cool, because they make you explore these incredibly detailed environments in a way you'd never ?bother with otherwise, and they allow for some cool bits of environmental storytelling. Then th?ere are the puzzle rooms, which are also cool, because th?ey are puzzles (which are cool). But th?en there's the two hundred regular trophies, where the challenge is just fucking ?bothering to go to all the awkward places they're in and hit a button. I'm no game designer, but I can't see how the game wouldn't benefit from just removing them completely, or at least just keeping the ones that lead you to places that a?re otherwise unused.

  10. Posted

    I'm trying to avoid spoilers as far as possible, so I'm just going to post blind here. Sorry if I combo break someone's discussion, but holy freaking crap is this game great. I really loved Asylum and thought City was excellent (and I only played Origins for a couple of hours before I burned out on it) but this is the most impressive game I've played in a lot of ways. Any game designer interested in how various systems interact in an open world must have their head blown away so only a smoking jaw remains after playing Arkham Knight. Anyone who's worked with transitioning between cut-scenes and different modes of player control must have been blown so hard away there's just a hole in the shape of them in the wall now. And anyone who works with asset creation and streaming must have been melted by a neon-green ray so there's now a 90s video game ad slime-covered skeleton where they were moments ago playing Arkham Knight.

     

    I'm playing it on PS4 after giving up waiting for the PC version, and it's been keeping me hooked through so much stuff, and I keep being surprised by how much stuff there's in here, and how it just keeps going, and I can't believe how anyone could wrangle something as complex and rich and multi-faceted as this thing together in a game that plays so well. It's the kind of AAA(A?) game Assasssin's Creed wishes it could be, and it's pretty impressive how Rockstead are just consistently upping their game and taking everything to the next level and blowing everyone's faces away in a confident, big-budget way that in my opinion rivals what Rockstar keeps doing with its GTA games. I bet they'll do something fantastic whatever their next project will be (and no doubt there'll be pressure to keep Batman going), but I'd be very interested in seeing them handle something completely different next time.

     

    edit: It's not perfect. So far I've rolled my eyes a number of times over the depiction of some of the female characters, and been a bit frustrated by loading times when retrying some difficult thing. And getting a handle on all the combat stuff is just out of the question – I feel like a super old man when trying to do the right thing with all the gadgets, gizmos and doodads Batman has in his belt. Luckily I can usually just run over to a guy and break his spine the good old-fashioned way.

  14. Posted

    I'm figuratively torn on the controls. At first the motion controls felt awful, so I switched them off, but the vertical sensitivity on the right stick is also awful, and everyone speaks so highly of the motion controls, so now I don't know what I should do!!!!!

  18. Posted

    Whoa, whoa, everyone settle down. This thread is about to go off the rails and outta control with regards to the pronunciation of "toblix". Time for a dose of Real Truth: The word "toblix" was first observed on the Internet sometime in the late 1990s, but did you know: it did not have an official pronunciation until about a decade later, on Wednesday October 15th, 2008 when internet man Chris Remo pronounced it in the second episode of the Idle Thumbs Podcast, titled "The Fanboy's Lament". The first recorded pronunciation of the word has been archived on the internet at this link: 

    . You can find it there.

  19. Posted

    So the bird exit is a thing, and let me tell you how I ended up thinking I couldn't go there. It's not like I took one look at the exit and went "well, I guess there's no use trying to click on that!" I knew about the exit from chapter one, which I played right when it came out, it reads perfectly fine as an exit, and I'm sure I did click on it and the character didn't go there. If not, I did some other thing; maybe I thought I clicked on it, but missed by a pixel and so the guy just stopped, or maybe something with the ladder, or maybe I had a tiny stroke, or the Norwegian secret police are playing tricks on me. Whatever it was, I had completely removed that exit from the list of possible avenues of exploration, and was focusing on getting past the bird blocking it. It's the equivalent of having tried something and the adventure game guy going "I don't think I can use those things together". It's done, you're never attempting that again. Only you didn't try it, and combining those items is the solution to progress to the next room!

  20. Posted

    The terrible UI isn't incredible in and of itself, but it's the fact that they've made it so you can replace your guy with a chicken and everything works, and if you rev your engine at a red light some aggressive AIs will race you, and if you wear shades in first person there's a tint to the screen, but inviting a friend to a race is 20 minutes of fucking torture.

  21. Posted

    I'm pretty amazed at how bad the GTA Online experience is on PC, considering it's been out so long on consoles. There's a bunch of very obvious UI bugs, like preferences settings being ignored or not working as expected, the way the game transitions between single player and online mode, and the various online session is slow, error-prone and just a big pain. The absolute worst though, is, after the complete travesty that is the GTA IV multiplayer UI, they went and made something even worse for GTA V. The way you create/join sessions and invite people to jobs or heists or whatever – it's a mess! Nobody understands it completely, it suddenly works differently for no reason and if you make a mistake it punishes you by starting to try to attempt to begin initating the process of looking to see if there's an available session it can start to connect to that has a bunch of griefing trolls in it. Last night we figured out that creating playlists of jobs is a pretty good way of keeping things going, but even then it's brittle as fuck; people don't get invites, or they can't connect, or they connect and then get disconnected, or the game crashes and then tells you you're being a "bad sport" for having the game crash while you're on a job.

     

    It's super fun, though.

  23. Posted

    I spent years working on a pretty large eBoy-esque hyper-detailed isometric pixel cityscape with a bunch of buildings and cars and trees, all with correct shadows and reflections and it was so much work, and then I lost it, just like that. I can still recall the painstaking process of adding a rooftop ventilation duct to one of the buildings and then going over the shadow to make sure it projected correctly across a bunch of cars and stuff.

     

    As for pixel art, I have a deep love for it, and it's very much rooted in video games, in particular VGA graphic adventures, very specifically the Lucasfilm/LucasArts Indiana Jones adventure games (and if I had to pick just one, Fate of Atlantis). I can look at these, for example, literally forever. I'm filled with a sense of wonder and amazement that I'm assuming comes from, as a young human, exploring these huge, beautiful games and their hundreds of bespoke VGA art assets.