tegan

I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

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I wonder how this cancelled game's beta got made available

 

 

It's the Warcraft Adventure.

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What games do you play when you have 5-15 minutes to kill? Can be mobile, but I rarely play games on my phone.

Starseed Pilgrim or The World Beneath or a harder table on Pinball Arcade like Gorgar, Centaur, Central Park, Big Shot, or Eldorado.

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What games do you play when you have 5-15 minutes to kill? Can be mobile, but I rarely play games on my phone.

 

Nuclear throne, Necrodancer, Threes (doge2048.com), Spelunky

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You Must Build a Boat and Sproggiwood have been serving me well for quick sessions. 10,000,000 and Threes before that.

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What games do you play when you have 5-15 minutes to kill? Can be mobile, but I rarely play games on my phone.

 

Desktop Dungeons, Plants vs Zombies. I also like playing various roguelike games in ~15 minute segments because I enjoy the sense of progress, but most roguelikes (true roguelikes, as in turn-based dice-rolly dungeon crawls) get dull if I play too long.

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You Must Build A Boat was the first game to dethrone Threes as my go-to 5-minute timewaster. I feel like there must be more games out there, but... fuck it, man.

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Not to sound too gamer broy, but Spelunky and Crypt of the Necrodancer start to take a good half hour+ when you're experienced at them.

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Not to sound too gamer broy, but Spelunky and Crypt of the Necrodancer start to take a good half hour+ when you're experienced at them.

 

Yeah I'll agree with that, at least for Spelunky (haven't played Crypt yet).  The only times my runs are in the 5-10 min range is when I'm doing particularly bad or trying to do speedruns.

 

I really liked 10000000.  I haven't picked up You Must Build A Boat yet, mostly because I forgot to check that it was out.  My number one phone game is still Pixel Dungeon and its modded variants.

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I have some quibbles about You Must Build A Boat, but please understand they are quibbles from having finished it like six times by this point.

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Not to sound too gamer broy, but Spelunky and Crypt of the Necrodancer start to take a good half hour+ when you're experienced at them.

 

On one hand I agree, on the other hand when I'm playing them to spend 15 minutes playing them I approach them really aggressively. "Oh man I could go to hell this run!" *instantly dead*

 

I played a hell of a lot of You Must Build A Boat, but I beat it and stopped for a bit. I think Fallout Shelter can be pretty consuming as well, but now that I'm at 50+ Dwellers and not getting cool or interesting gear it became a mating simulator and lost a lot of pull on me.

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Huh, I have to find this you must build a boat. iOS right?

 

It's on Steam as well, but it fits really well on an iPad mini.

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Yes, I suck at necrodancer, I knew that already.

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@moddy

Thanks for sharing that feeling. I didn't realize Natural Selection 2 had that type of thing going on with it. It's interesting how all the gruesome violence and competition in many video games can lead me towards thinking that there is no sustained solidarity and communion among players. It's interesting to try and figure out what encourages sustained non-anonymous communities in multiplayer games rather than just trying to figure out what keeps a population high.

 

Well I mean it wasn't perfect. There were factions that ebbed and flowed with events. We had drama too sometimes. But most times at the end of the day the people and teams I knew regularly were competitive people who enjoyed balanced matches But would also hang out for a bit at the end of the match hanging out or partying up to play other games together.

We had our share of salty players; and a few of the kind of 'classic' Australian server personalities were around. But most people in the comp scene had a level head. A lot of our players were older too (above 25). There weren't many women around who were open with their gender in pub servers But the few I've seen around who are don't get crap about it afaik. We also had some kickass female leaders as captains and shotcallers of various teams.

I think solidarity came from the game being so unique. Players always became super co-dependant on each other because the enemy could always be ignored for their base. Unlike say CSGO you're not going to end up with a clutch player who could 1v5 the enemy team or save the entire game because they're over-watching one alley. You always have to be conscious of the attack and defence or you'll just be outplayed. So you had to talk to each other and say what you planned to do, you had to call out where people are and as a captain you always had to make the effort to recognise players for the contributions and offer advice on how to improve.

Some teams just played to win and they kept most of their social interactions to the top level of players But even those guys could be super fun and friendly at times.

Ultimately I think it came down to how we all loved the game feel and how emotionally rewarding that game could be and how much we enjoyed playing with people who took a steep learning curve game and devoted the time to be consistently good and competitive at it.

But the community drifted because people picked up other games they wanted to 'git gud' at. Also the game has always created a lot of performance issues for players and while major fixes were coming to the shooting mechanics for many it was too little too late. Plus the Community Development Team only recently acquired their own patch testing servers so no new patches have released since the start of the year.

Also the game was plagued by server problems because it's built to run servers on gaming CPUs rather than what's usually cost effective for server hosts meaning that players either paid huge amounts for unstable servers or tried to run their own servers which was equally expensive. Some of our best servers came from someone hosting it on the Monash University network for quite a few months..

Anyway the last dedicated server host had to move and between his life stuff, the last tournament, and the disappearance of all competent Australian servers Ausns2 is pretty extinct.

Hah sorry for chewing off yer ear about it this is a nice way to vent.

Anyway it's not all bad. There have been community meetups and if I'm ever in the right part of Australia I'll probably hang out with an ex team mate or two. Also I've played with a lot more NS2 vets in games like Dirty Bomb recently and I've been invited to party with them for MM games a few times and who knows in a few months I might be pugging in Dirty Bomb. Here's hoping this game has a larger lifespan than ~two years; if not well Overwatch will be good. Right?

 

Also what is "pugging"? Do you mean "pubbing"? As in going into public matches?

Pugging as in PUG, Pick Up Group. Basically pubbing, yes.

To me pug is a competitive match with all or mostly random people, against a similar or sometimes more organised group of people, whereas a pub game is a totally open game anyone can leave and join at will.

 

So a PUG in my context is a 6v6 match where players assembled in voice comms first and were committed to playing a match (a human and alien round) of NS2 once the pug began which generally meant consenting 30-60 minutes of your time. At 12 players two people would stick their hands up and become captains (usually also the commanders during the game)and after establishing players relative skill levels these captains took turns to pick the best players in a format that generally ensured teams were balanced. Then everyone played one map and at the end of the game we went back to the 'ready room' in the pug voice channel for another match. When teams weren't balanced sometimes we played on but we might also call the match early, or repick. Pugs are a level below scrims which are clan/team vs team matches usually agreed in advance.

Thing is if you took a 6 player pug team to one side of a 14-20 player public server you were probably destined to kill the server in 1-2 games.

 

What games do you play when you have 5-15 minutes to kill? Can be mobile, but I rarely play games on my phone.

 

Oddly enough Pillars of Eternity has been that for me recently.

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Man, you're really making me want to pickup and try out that game, (I've had it on my Steam list forever) but also even more chicken about jumping in not knowing what to do.

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Hrm. Maybe watch an explanation or two and look at some game footage?

Marine is the natural choice of the new player but they often don't check their corners or keep an eye on their ammo (good aliens wait for a reload to bite).

Aliens though is very fun but you have to learn to jump on walls rather than run on the ground. The most common alien usually has to pack marines to kill them because marines can receive meds anywhere on the map. But they can take on lone players when ambushing.

There are quite a few active EU and US servers of varying skill levels.

But there might still be one or two players who throw off the team balance but there's also likely a few new players about.

NS2 was in the steam sale so for the next few weeks new people will be checking it out.

If you do pick it up feel free to ask me questions.

Also most servers will help out newbies who stick their hands up.

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Random video game design thought.

 

Do any devs ever throw project files to one another for unique spins on their games?

 

I understand this might not be feasible for any full time studio but has this happened with small time indie devs? It seems like its becoming more and more possible with people working on smaller projects in popular engines like unity or unreal.

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Besides mods of commercial games, the one that comes to mind in Experiment 12
http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/26/4559008/experiment-12-by-12-different-indie-developers
They are making a new one right now.
http://forum.makega.me/t/chain-game-2-schedule-games/1483
I think the game might just load a new scene, all of which are assembled afterward though and not really exchanged. I'm not sure.

The game ihavefivehat is working on with everythingstaken and FirecatFG is probably a better example.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/9226
They've been throwing the project file to each other.

 

There's also Moonlit Corpse  where Rylie James Thomas is organizing an exquisite-corpse game with Sword of Moonlight (the King's Field engine(?))
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/turning-dreamlike-spaces-kings-field-exquisite-corpse/

 

And the Sharecart 1000 project is focused on having games share a save-file which isn't really the same thing, but it's kind of related.

http://sharecart1000.com/

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Oh cool. Thanks clyde. Experiment 12 is really interesting. Id like to see more of this sort of experimentation in the future.

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I just realised that when I get a game, I almost never just click 'start game'. Case in point, I just got shin megami tensei 4. First thing I did was check the audio options to try and change the audio language. And then I checked out the dlc page. I haven't even played the game yet.

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I do that.  I was also one of those kids who actually read the manual before playing a game, back in the days when manuals had actual information.

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