Korax
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Posts posted by Korax
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I don't think the original was anywhere near as dark as he was describing on the podcast. I think it's just a case of the "original" graphics actually being somewhat inaccurate. It's actually a weirdly common issue with HD up-ports (or just... ports) where one version will inexplicably be way darker than the other. I figure that the various platforms must have their own ways of handling brightness which will produce wildly different results if the developers don't bother to account for it.
The most memorable example of this for me was the light bridge area in Mission 2.
Original (PC version, but it's comparable to Xbox version):
Dim with small islands of light, sometimes dark to the point where using your headlamp might be necessary. Hard to see enemies, making ambushes a real threat. The bottomless pit that yawns below the bridge is obscured by a haze that makes it seem dangerous, even if the geometry is just a kind-of-deep trench.
Remaster (~13 minutes in):
What's a headlamp? Light it all up! Look at all that stuff! What do you mean, "atmosphere and sense of mystery?"
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I really disliked the remastered graphics in Halo Anniversary. The original game may have been a bit sparse and dark, but they made it work within those limitations. Nighttime levels and indoor areas were gloomy and oppressive, and it really added some atmosphere to those parts. The remaster just vomits neon holograms over everything and completely ruins it.
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Finally got around to starting this. It's good, but some of the little details of the original are so ingrained in my memory that when one of them doesn't work in the exact same way, I start getting annoyed.
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I think you'll find, Chris, that although most augmented people made the choice to become so, there are some who, like Jensen, never asked for it.
The one bone I do have to pick with the discussion is that the game does, once you get a little further in, try to give you some perspective on who makes up the augmented. A lot of them are lower class folks who took on augments for jobs, because this is literally a game about megacorps and the Illuminati. Your augmented workforce can do more work. Any job where they used to have to hire people and also buy heavy machinery, now the employer is hiring people and turning those employees into the heavy machinery. Additionally, the augments give you a drug dependency, so you now have an extraordinary reliance on your employer because your life will go bad if you quit and can't find a steady and affordable source for neuropozene. They do at least explore that space a little. It's definitely not enough to redeem it, but I felt it was worth mentioning.
That stuff is elaborated on in the maligned tutorial mission. It takes place in a half-constructed hotel off the coast of Dubai. It was being built by a workforce of entirely augmented labor who then went crazy and killed each other, and then the company abandoned the project because loss of workers/money.
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I thought this was supposed to be a moment like with your helicopter pilot in DX:HR where you either had to stealth to sneak away and ler her die or go in heavy to kill all the bad guys and save her, so I tried disabling as many guys using non-lethal tactics as possible, but he just kept dying. Turns out, all you need to do is be quick about disabling the chopper.
In DXHR you can totally take out all those guys and save your chopper pilot sneakily and non-lethally, it just takes some very quick and exacting play.
Does anyone really understand the energy mechanic and it's upgrades? One of the first things I did was increase the maximum energy to maximum, but it seems like at random intervals my maximum energy is being downgraded to the point where all my upgrades are effectively nill. I've noticed that if I use biocells I can pump the maximu size of the bar back up, but eventually it goes back to the starting amount. I just can't for the life of me understand the design or aesthetic justification for this mechanic, and I'm not entirely sure if it's just a bug that I'm seeing or not. Other than that however, I'm really enjoying this game, but oddly it's making me look forward to another dishonored more than anything.
Okay, so your actual maximum is just your bar. The line that you get is the recharge maximum. When you use an aug, it drains energy (obviously), and when you stop, it starts to recharge itself. As it recharges, the recharge maximum slowly depletes as well, until the two meet. You always get enough to do one takedown. That's where the aug's upgrades come into play. You can boost recharge rate and recharge time delay, making it so that the recharge max doesn't have as much time to deplete.
I finished the game yesterday, got the no-kill achievement, but didn't get no alarms even though I don't have any memories of setting one off. Just started the "I didn't ask for this" difficulty - it sets it to "Give me Deus Ex," but with permadeath. Going lethal on this one, trying to keep it stealth still because open firefights on that difficulty are a problem.
I tried Breach mode, and it's just kinda meh. Deus Ex's gameplay is focused around careful, improvisatory play, and the Breach stuff tries turning it into an optimization puzzle. I don't think it works all that well.
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For a DW game are you meant to come up with a backstory about the world being post apocalyptic? I didn't see anything about that in the book, and maybe I just made false connections when listening to Friends at the Table. But I thought part of the whole Apocalypse World idea was that there was some calamity and the world has been rebuilding since then. And that as a group it's a good idea to flesh out broadly speaking what happened to the world.
Is that a thing or did I misunderstand? I'll probably do it either way, but if I missed out on a part of the book that goes through this broad worldbuilding I'd want to go back over that.
Doesn't have to be post-apocalyptic. The rules set you up for the broad world creation, but don't really dictate too much of what it has to be (other than vaguely-fantasy). FatT made theirs post-apoc because Austin's tired of Tolkien fantasy worlds and wanted to create something different.
I would be down for Dungeon World or The Sprawl (assuming there aren't too many people already).
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Cool stuff!
Umm.. how do you hide the HUD?
There's a toggle under graphics options on PC. I eventually installed a mod that let me just switch it with a button press to make things easier (along with scanline & vignette removal). Don't think the option's in the PS4 version.
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NMS part 2!
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No Man's Sky megadump!
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Cheat Engine is making things so much better. Don't have to worry about having enough fuel for the launch thrusters, or having enough thamium for my pulse engine, or crafting warp cells, or gathering oxides to recharge exosuit components, or recharging life support systems, or having the materials to re-craft modules when I switch multitools/ships...
I just get to fly around the galaxy and try to find cool stuff.
Also infinite jetpack can get you into space:
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Culdcept Saga was for the X360. It combines some card collecting with a Monopoly-ish board game. I used to work with someone who was in love with the game, but I could never get into it.
There's also Runespell: Overture. It's a bit like Puzzle Quest, but instead of fighting with a match-3 game, you try to build poker hands out of a card tableau.
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When you're using a mouse, the menu's parallax scrolling gets clamped down on pretty severely, which was great up until this happened:
Being able to charge components by dragging materials onto them solves that problem (Did you know that was even possible? I didn't until four hours ago!), but I'll still have to juggle inventory around if I want to craft something and there are only bottom spaces available.
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The PC control overlay is the wrong binding, apparently. It's "X" not Tab or whatever it says.
HOLY SHIT IT WORKS
As icing on the cake, after you've scanned, you get a prompt that says to press "D" to find the nearest discovery to you. It doesn't work (WASD rotates and zooms the camera). It's "X" again.
Great.
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Is that what that button does? I've hit that almost every time I've used the map, and I've never seen anything obvious happen. The rest of the game constantly makes you press and hold to fill a circle or plays a sound cue when you do anything, so not seeing or hearing any sort of response made me think that it either wasn't working or there was nothing to scan.
Speaking of which, there's a mod to make a mouse click a goddamned mouse click.
Listening to this week's Bombcast reminded me that Cheat Engine exists, and there's a cheat table that strips away some of the crafting and inventory bullshit. Might be something to look at if all you want to do is just explore.
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That makes "going home" viable in a way that backtracking in NMS doesn't seem to be, or seems to be somewhat discouraged (either by a quest mechanic pushing you forward, a sense that seeing new things is a goal more than returning to previously seen things, or the overall disposability of so many planets).
It isn't discouraged so much as completely not supported. There's no way to tell where you've been or what path you've taken from the galaxy map. Early on in my playing, I had been excited about having a hyperdrive and left my starting system. After a second warp, I remembered that I hadn't scanned more than half the junk in my home system and decided to make it back there to finish it out. I spent 20 minutes fiddling with the map and never even found the last system I had been to. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turns out that there is a way to do so that's just never made obvious, but as of now, it seems almost impossible.
If they put in base-building without an easy way to return to any given planet, they may as well have never done it in the first place.
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And now there's confirmation that, just like the Win10 version, all the FMV is going to be streamed with no option to download it (like you can on XBOne). Guess Remedy just really doesn't want to sell me a game.
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There isn't much that can be done about the torrent itself, of course, but the blog's main download links just got nuked, too.
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Korax, that is INCREDIBLE!!!!!!
Thanks! When I saw the game box layout in the extras, I just had to make sure it could sit on a shelf with some of my other game collectibles.
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Right now it's just sites that were mirroring the download. The main blog still has a couple direct links and a torrent, so it's still easily available (for now).
There's also some speculation that the takedown might be in the same vein as other fake NOA takedown notices that have happened recently, but it has yet to be determined for sure.
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Metroid 2 was the first Metroid game I ever played. It's good, but the other entries in the series have sort of made it the odd one out. It's more linear than the other games, and it's the only one where actually elimination of metroids is a constant activity as you play.
You also may want to download it ASAP, as at least one mirror has been hit with a takedown from Nintendo.
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No skin for Mei and Lucio Ball is a pale shadow of Rocket League. The Summer Games event is disappointing so far.
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The Deluxe Edition comes with some printable extras. One is a game box, so:
And what sort of game box would it be without some nifty things inside?
There's a small poster, and the game's Reference Manual, turned into a handy folded reference card, great for propping up in front of your keyboard.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to put the papercraft models in, because they would have to be folded to fit in the box, but then I figured that it's the exact sort of thing that would happen: a designer puts a bunch of work into the feelies, and then someone in the assembly process just crams it all in the box when they don't fit quite right.
And of course you need the game:
I recreated the tape label from the in-game texture, and the game files are all on a fold-out USB drive.
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I'm about the same age as the Thumbs, and the first time I ever heard that use of "board" was when some people I knew used it to talk about Halo 3 multiplayer maps. It still sounds weird to me.
The Dancing Thumb (aka: music recommendations)
in Idle Banter
Posted
DOOM soundtrack officially released. Just over two hours of audio. Long versions of level tracks (~6-8 min) with shorter interstitial music in between.