toblix

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by toblix

  2. Posted

    So here's what happened to me: I was determined to play this without looking up anything, and this worked for a while until I got stuck with both characters and spent almost two hours making no progress with either character. My attitude started at "oh boy, this is really working my brain! I can't wait until the next breakthrough suddenly forms in my mind!" and was able to keep that up for surprisingly long, but eventually frustration took hold and I suddenly realized I was super angry at the game. Then, of course, I looked up a thing and got super annoyed as I realized I would never find the solution, because I had spent hours exploring a possibilty space that did not include the actual solutions. With both characters I had at some point made an ass out of you and me regarding a thing, and, even though the next step in both puzzles was right in front of me, I had already excluded them from my mind. The two things were:

     

    Shay:

    In the cloud town I had decided that the bird with the egg was blocking the path it was next to, and was sure that solving the egg thing would let me proceed up the path.

     

    Vella

    I never caught the pause icon on the camera system, so I had this whole alternate solution in mind regarding the vacuuming robot thing.

     

    In both cases I passed through the relevant screen many times, trying everything except the right thing, and by the time I broke down and looked up the solution, naturally, weak as I am, I just continued doing that at every subsequent hint of challenge; which is natural, because obviously I didn't want to waste another couple of hours chasing wrong ideas just because I had mentally tagged some critical element as non-essential! I don't know what to take from that experience other than that your game should have a good hint system.

  3. Posted

    Also it's an hour long! I hope they continue this trend going forward into the next episode which will also be the last.

     

    I've said it before, lots of times, but it's still really interesting (to me) that the documentary series about making a game is probably giving me much more enjoyment than the game itself (will). I really enjoyed the first part, and I bet the second one will be even better, but these episodes are so goddamn interesting, and the story of the studio and the people is extremely fascinating and gripping. I wonder if a ... "thing" could come out of this, whereby a documentary series is continuously being produced at all studios and about every game, and that you can buy either the game or the documentary, or both. Would that even work out financially?

     

     

    Why isn't some documentary team going around at Campo Santo with DSLRs and boom mics right now, recording every little thing and selling it to me?

  4. Posted

    It should be said that, if memory serves, none of the puzzles really rely on twitchy timing. A few of them may seem at first to have a solution that requires you to do a bunch of stuff really quick, like quickly grabbing a thing and running super fast through a door and place something, but it's probably not the case, and may indicate you're not quite on the right path. Most of the puzzles do have one specific solution, though.

  9. Posted

    Damn it, I forgot to come back here and say thanks! The solution was, of course, to jump and use the drone. I had never even thought of deploying the drone mid-jump before – I guess it's my fault for not trusting the game enough.

  10. Posted

    Well I fell down a ravine and can't get up. There are a couple of out-of-reach platforms, and nothing else dow here. Since it's 2015, I felt confident a game wouldn't put me in a hole without any way out, so I spent a good while trying everything I can, namely jumping around, shooting, drilling and disrupting, but nothing happened, and I'm wondering which of these are true:

    • This shitty game puts the player in a hole with no way out other than to restart the game,
    • This shitty guy is missing some obvious trick or technique, or is constantly ignoring some obvious visual hint in the environment.

  13. Posted

    Who's ready for taking an exciting franchise in a new direction? The future of Deus Ex is transmedia, and it won't be just a video game, it'll be "available in other media such as tablets, smartphones, books, graphic novels, etc..."

     

    Check it out here. I couldn't be more excited about this exciting news!

     

    update: According to Eidos, it'll be a richer and more immersive experience than ever before. So excited.

  16. Posted

    The more I play this, the less I enjoy the traffic management. I find myself out in the boondocks making scratchpads of crisscrossing roads of different types to see which ones get traffic lights and which ones don't, and it's so frustrating not being able to undo my way back to try different paths, having to bulldoze over and over to wrangle overlapping parts into place. It's really satisfying when it all comes together, but I feel like building more complex traffic structures is a lot more work than it has to be. I almost never bother with the curved roads anymore, as it's such a pain to avoid kinks and achieve symmetry (or at least I haven't figured out how it's done). A shame, since they look so fantastic when they're done well. It's amazing how well their assets look in all sorts of different angles and constellations!

     

    Anyway, it's still super fun, despite my traffic frustrations; it has been a long while since I last played a game that seemingly swallows hour after hour just like that.

  18. Posted

    I'm forever doomed to restart at the first sign of trouble with my infrastructure, which I'll be doing for a while, I think. My biggest issues at this point (taking in to account that, in total, I love this game):

    • Upgrading the roads is so destructive and unpredictable, I feel like I have to have this wide apron of available space around every road I build, and because of how zoning works, I feel like there's no way to take later expansion into account. Once you need to upgrade a road, you have to bulldoze everything around it. Of course, this is very true to real life, and I don't really know if tearing down a few blocks actually is as terrible as it feels.
    • Road architecture is awkward. I don't know how people get these nice intersections in the screenshots, mine are bulky and bloated and have weird kinks everywhere, and I still haven't figured out how to transition effectively between the different types of road. I see that off ramps let vehicles leave the highway without slowing down, but apparently there's no way to make them merge onto another type of road without doing a full stop first, which seems weird. This should be possible, yes?
    • I would like a drawing mode that let me specify start and end points, and then define curve control point(s). Doing it the current way is so imprecise.
    • Hey, remember in EA's popular video game franchise SimCity™ when they made roads also carry water, sewage and power. That was such a great idea! Having to place power lines is bad enough, but then going back and remove them and repair zoning scars is the worst.
    • There's very much repetition of buildings, which looks weird in my lame screenshots.
    • I guess I'm mostly concerned with road traffic ... I would love a tool that let me select a car or some points or whatever, and see how it calculates that it shouldn't use my brand new asphalt and concrete pillar knot of wide-open road, and instead line up in the dirt road traffic jam along with everyone else.

  19. Posted

    I just finished the second fleeing sequence, and

    I found it a bit annoying; a lot of the stuff was badly signaled, and every time I got past a new obstacle I knew I'd die again right after, hoping to decode what the hell they wanted me to do next.

    After finishing it, I was mentally exhausted.

  22. Posted

    Oh yeah, for some reason the choice of font is super weird. Everything in the game is super polished in this one style, and then the text is like out of Microsoft Word or something.

     

     

    lso I was looking in the game directory and holy motherfucking shit; this game is made in Unity! I know I should at some point stop being amazed and blown the hell away by discovering all sorts of different great games being made in Unity but holy crap.

  24. Posted

    Wow, holy shit. Even though this looks like a baby game (animation = made for children IMHO) it's more like the Dark Souls of video games. I'm still not halfway through and it's already consistently difficult, though the save system does keep the frustration at bay. Don't play this game if you're not into some half-way difficult platforming combo stuff.