mikemariano

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    1830

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by mikemariano

  1. Posted

    I watched a Let's Play of Sonic Dreams Collection.  Thank you for adequately preparing me for the nightmare.

     

    But I was also put off by the process it would take to actually play the game.  First download some random .exe and ignore a ton of security warnings.  Then play it on a Windows-only machine.  And the game is two-button-plus-scroll-wheel-mouse-mandatory, too; the button combinations for Sonic's camera are impossible to recreate on a trackpad.

     

    I guess most games are like that, but it's weird to be reminded of that when I play so many first person games on a MacBook with the trackpad.

  2. Posted

    Pillars of Eternity crashed over a hundred times for me, and I think it's finally crashed its last.  Here's what I just posted in the official forums:
     

    I have been playing Pillars of Eternity for months like this on my 2013 MacBook Pro.  I walk to a new area, the program crashes, I restart it and continue from the autosave into the next area.  Sometimes I got lucky and PoE stayed open from one area to the next—if I made it through one transition without crashing the following transitions in the same session would usually work—but most playing sessions consisted upon crash after crash. 

     

    None of the suggested workarounds made any difference: typing msaa 0 into the console, trying to search for a GPU option on the system that doesn't exist, syncing and unsyncing Steam saves.

     

    But I kept playing.  Until tonight.  I am at what I assume is close to the end of the game and I am expected to jump from one area into another with a text transition in between.  But the game does not autosave in the new area; it saves right where I was.

     

    So I jump into the pit, the game crashes, I jump again, it crashes again, and unlike all my previous crashes I don't get into the next area.

     

    I'm sad; this seems to be the end of Pillars of Eternity for me!

  6. Posted

    Tegan it's great to have you back in the forums; we missed you!  It's a shame about the job, though from their delay in getting back to you it sounds like it would be a disorganized place to stick around.

  10. Dune

    in Books

    Posted

    Thanks for the link Guts!

     

    Apparently there is also a literary YouTube series called "Thug Notes" that is gimmicky, but does a really good job summarizing and discussing this novel:

     

  12. Posted

    Oh wow, that screenshot proves that Grim Fandango was an FMV game all along.

     

    For some reason, Don Copal and Lola only exist in cutscenes.  This really confused me when Manny would be talking about Don vs. Dom and Lola vs. Lupe and I would have no way to see both characters to figure out which voice belongs to which face belongs to which character.

     

    (And Sal's the freedom fighter!  ¡Viva la revolución!)

  13. Posted

    Yeah, I'm ok with there not being a HL3 but it's a damn shame that Valve aren't making single player or story driven games at the moment.

     

    Upthread I said that I believed that Valve will never release any game ever again.  This video is yet more evidence!

     

    Also I like how they avoided mentioning a certain hashtag movement when describing the awful behavior of gamers.  And that their source believes that fellatio metaphors are universally applicable to all Half-Life fans.

  14. Posted

    I realise that the TV is black and white. I boot up Melee, and I'm greeted with characters in varying shades of grey. Red Marth and Green Marth look the same. Orange Fox and Purple Fox also look the same. Well, I guess we won't be playing character dittos on this TV then.

     

    You should try and sell the black and white television by claiming it has even less latency than a color TV, that it offers the same benefit as playing Quake without textures.

  16. Posted

    "Should I kill a pregnant woman to win favor with the guy in the Pope hat?" sounds like one of Nick Breckon's Crusader Kings II stories.  Except with Nick I guess we know what the answer is.

     

    Also Nick Breckon's name was mentioned countless times, Jeff Goldblum's was mentioned twice, and Danielle's was mentioned zero times! (At least at the 50 minutes mark I'm at now.)

     

    I miss Danielle!  I guess I miss Sean, too, but I just assume he's sitting in the next room and is with you all in spirit.

  19. Posted

    That makes me feel a little better about things, but it's not remotely raised in the first hour or so of the game so it just comes across as "bad," instead.

     

    Virgil has some initial vocal hesitation as "Cave," so I think that's supposed to be the way they clue you in that something is up.

     

    Story-wise Portal Stories is just "more Portal 2," but puzzle-wise it retained the looser feel of Portal 1 and some of the insane difficulty of the best-slash-worst Perpetual Testing maps.

     

    Towards the end you are in unfinished test chambers and I spent a half-hour bouncing around, trying to get to a button that wasn't attached to anything.  Fun times!

  20. Posted

    That is awesome to hear!  Steam's data is telling us that 0 people who have played the demo have bought the game even though a bunch of people have told me the demo sold them.  Really happy to hear that is a bug, I want to believe that providing a demo is the right way to do things.

     

    After I purchased the game through Steam's overlay while in-demo, I decided to stop and quit the demo.

     

    When I did that, I saw that the demo had been removed from my Steam Library with no full game to replace it.  I was showing "Installed" games only, so I switched to "All" games in my library, found The Magic Circle, then had to install it from scratch.

     

    Luckily as promised, the game continued from when I left off in the demo.  I'm not sure if what I went through was a fluke or a victim of Steam Logic or what.

  21. Posted

    I feel like I'm the only one who really didn't like Ex Machina, for really basic reasons. I thought the movie did a bad job with basic storytelling stuff, like what information the characters know when.

     

    This is true, even if some of it was intentional misdirection (like Caleb's secret plan inside of his secret plan!).  I didn't like the film much, either; all of these spoiler tags play more intelligently with the characters than the film did.

     

    Garland wrote the films 28 Days Later and Sunshine, the latter of which was one of the worst betrayals I've ever experienced in cinema.  But luckily Ex Machina lowered its expectations early enough to let me down easy.  Isaac's performance especially said: "This is all you're going to get out of this movie, so let's have some fun with it!"

  22. Posted

    FYI, the demo for this ends with you entering a System Shock 1-esque space station underneath Stephen Russell narration.

     

    I have never whipped out my credit card faster than tonight.

  24. Posted

    Eva, who looks like a beautiful white woman, not only kills the two men who are keeping her as a literal and figurative person, but also gains her independence from the actual skin of the other female robots (who just so happen to be women of color).

     

    Haven't got to the Ex Machina part of the episode yet, but the Argobot's last sentence is what really bummed me out about the movie.

     

    I fully expected to see the pilot get dropped from his helicopter in midair.  He made such a big deal about security to Caleb yet he'll pick up strange women no problem!

     

    Ava said she wanted to run away with Caleb and experience the busy hum of life at a city intersection.  But since that first desire was a complete lie, is the second any more real?  It undercut the ending: Ava might not be finally getting what she said she wanted; she might just walk through the crosswalk without stopping on her way to Kill All Humans.

     

    EDIT: Now that I have listened, I thought it was a good discussion.  I share Sean's pessimism about humanity—we have chosen the form of our destruction!

     

    Any sympathy any of you had for Caleb should have been thrown out after he accepted Nathan's word that there was no point talking to Kyoko and treated her like a Roomba.

     

    Any sympathy you had for Ava should have been thrown out after she showed no desire to help Kyoko recover from a seemingly minor injury.

     

    Any sympathy you had for Nathan was probably because of his drinking problem.  But since we didn't get any reckoning or explanation for that I guess that sympathy should have been thrown out, too.