Korax

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Korax

  1. E3 2017

    So Microsoft has decided to pull Avatars out of their medically-induced coma? I like the sheer variety of customization on display, but the way that Avatars became almost entirely a vehicle for microtransactions makes me wonder how many $.99 purchases you'll have to make in order to actually construct yourself.
  2. E3 2017

    Fuck, then. Don't know who's making it, when it's coming out, or really what it even is. Nintendo has done a pretty bad job of making Metroid games over the last 10 years, so they will have nothing but skepticism from me. I'm intrigued by Samus Returns because I have a lot of nostalgia for Metroid 2, but then seeing it's being made by MercurySteam tempered my expectations quite a bit. I don't need no melee counters in a Metroid game, neither.
  3. E3 2017

    How about comments made two months ago?
  4. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    Yeah, you have to go to a specific room at Mother Base to find her, and she's the only reason to go there. Avoid the room, never see her again.
  5. Dark Souls(Demon's Souls successor)

    You must not have met Solaire or Siegmeyer yet.
  6. The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

    If anyone else wants to play along, Painkiller: Black Edition is on sale for a cool $2.49 for the next half a day on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/39530/Painkiller_Black_Edition/
  7. The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

    Every weapon has a primary and secondary fire, and the secondaries aren't really related (or sometimes obvious) in any way. The Painkiller (your basic melee weapon) is probably the one that needs the most explanation. Primary just spins the blades around, chopping at enemies as you would expect. Secondary fires the folded blades. It can be used to either directly hit an enemy or it can be stuck into a surface. When stuck, pointing your view at the projectile forms a damaging energy beam from it to you, allowing you to sort of slice through crowds. Also, if you're holding primary, you can hit secondary to send the spinning blades flying. The shotgun has a freeze blast, the stake launcher is also a grenade launcher, there's a combination rocket launcher/minigun, and a weird lightning gun shuriken thrower. Oh, tip for the stake launcher that I just remembered: you have to compensate for the projectile drop, but if the stake is airborne long enough, it catches fire, doing more damage when it hits. Aside from still being really fun, Painkiller is notable to me because it was among the first games to use Havok Physics, and it was the first game I played with a weapon that would pin ragdolls to walls.
  8. The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

    As someone who loved Painkiller when it first came out and has revisited it recently, I think the gameplay holds up really well. The story, not so much (and the CG cutscenes didn't even look great at the time). Everything done with the series after the first game+expansion has been bad, being developed by other studios under the auspices of the rightsholders. They even managed to donk the HD remaster by making it a story reboot that didn't include about half of the levels from the expanded first game.
  9. I'm curious about which log this is.
  10. Finished this a couple days ago, and man did I enjoy it. I'll probably go through it again sometime soon, just to try out different play styles and such. One thing I really liked was a reveal that happens in a post-credits sequence. Not necessarily that it happens, or even what it is, but because there are clues seeded throughout the game. They're nothing too specific, but if you're paying attention, exploring, and thinking about things, you can start drawing a conclusion a few hours into the game that is then built upon later.
  11. Life

    Apparently there was a cool funnel cloud or two that didn't quite become dangerous: I don't have a car, so I've been spared from the majority of the damage that's occurred, but that did mean I had to wait out the hail before making my way to my bus stop. I figured that because it was sheltered, I wouldn't have to worry about any further hail while waiting.
  12. Life

    The Denver area got FUCKED UP by hail yesterday: http://kdvr.com/2017/05/08/hail-breaks-windows-windshields-in-lakewood-and-golden/ This was 30 minutes before I normally leave work: I haven't heard of any human casualties so far, but there are plenty of shattered windows and stripped trees. My house lost power for 6 hours!
  13. Games giveaway

    I've got 3 invite links for the Gwent beta. Let me know if you want one and I'll PM it to you.
  14. Big Robot, the dev team behind Sir, You Are Being Hunted, just launched their new game, The Signal From Tölva! Available on Steam, itch.io, GOG, and Humble! The major touchstone for this one seems to be the STALKER series. You explore a distant planet by jacking into surveyor bots that are stationed there. There are a couple of other factions that have outposts, and a whole bunch of systemic interactions as they have their own routines and goals that you can stumble across. I really like the sound design. The gunfire is incredibly satisfying, and all the little beeps, whirs, and clicks are great:
  15. I started a New Game+ on Insanity difficulty out of curiosity, and there are some problems with its implementation. It all seems to stem from the fact that the increase in difficulty seems to just be an increase in enemy health. Instead of mixing the makeup of enemy encounters or having more tactically challenging AI, everything's just a bullet sponge, which makes most fights a tedious battle of attrition. The real problem comes in the way that the increased health interacts with other elements in the game. I figured that a great way to take care of enemies would be to throw them around with biotics. Slam them against walls, throw them off the map, drop them from extreme heights, etc. Turns out that the damage from physics forces isn't good compared to the increased health, and that maps (in Habitat 7, at least) don't have any sort of kill box at their boundaries. I was stopped twice by scripting that was waiting for a final enemy that I had thrown across the area to die. The first time I was able to eventually find the guy I had thrown and kill it, but the second time the enemy had apparently been tossed out of the navigable area of the map, and I could only progress by reloading a checkpoint and making sure not to use any powers that caused combo explosions.
  16. I dunno, I'm using a controller and I'm able to get about 3x the rate of fire from the Mattock after the patch, and the only inaccuracy I have to worry about is from weapon spread.
  17. I like the juxtaposition of the first two bits of weapon rebalancing: I know there's more to that with regards to fire rate, but it was pretty funny to see that.
  18. Just finished the main storyline and every non-task mission I could find. I took screenshots of every galaxy map close-up I saw. All planets, moons, asteroids, shipwrecks, etc, etc, etc. It's 233 images. Assuming 15 seconds per object in travel time, that's just over 58 minutes of flying around in the map. There are a few locations that are sort-of-duplicates or redundant scans, so that time is a bit inflated, but it doesn't count all the repeat visits to major areas.
  19. Yeah, that was baffling. They started off with an "ugh, it's bad, right?" and then apparently made the assumption that everyone else in the world is in complete agreement and that it didn't need any more thought or elaboration. That whole conversation was such a waste of time and effort that didn't express anything worthwhile to me.
  20. Holy man, do I ever disagree. The dialog is one of the most unevenly messy things in the game. It's mostly fine, but then you get some weird phrasing ("My face is tired..."), or even worse, some writer was trying to be funny, with all the sense of comedy of a reaction gif subreddit. When people say things like "the snark is strong with this one" and "Best. Pathfinder. Ever," I shudder to think of what might have been left on the cutting room floor. Ryder's reactions and attitudes are all over the place, even within the same conversation. As much shit as the trilogy's Paragon/Renegade system got, it at least allowed consistency of character. I've had conversations where Ryder shows professional concern during almost the entire dialog, and then the only option I get to end the tree with is with petty sarcasm. I've almost entirely stopped paying attention to what anyone is saying, skipping through lines to get the gist of what's going on from the subtitles.
  21. It looks like I misinterpreted the Human Kineticist's ascension ability. The shield drain isn't constant, it only happens on biotic use, and it recharges normally. That means that as long as you maintain awareness of your shield level, you never have to worry about waiting on cooldowns to set up ability combos.
  22. I just went through the "First Murderer in Andromeda" side mission, and
  23. Somewhere in the bonanza of bonus packs that I got I unlocked the Human Kineticist ultra-rare class. It's a biotic with pull, throw, and lance, with an ascension ability that charges as you get kills. Activate ascension and you get zero cooldown on abilities at the cost of constant shield drain. I'm curious to see how well I can get it to work with a team of more front-line characters.
  24. I present the first screenshots in a series I call "Galaxy Pap." Blighted Waste Tedious Horizon Rock Breaking Nothing to Scan Here Time Sink Blank Space