I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

[Twig]

...So uh does anyone want to start playing Starbound semi-regularly? Because I'd be down for that. It's a Terraria-like!

 

EDIT: Actually I'd also be down for Terraria. But Starbound is newer and I haven't played it as much as its predecessor so.

[SecretAsianMan]

...So uh does anyone want to start playing Starbound semi-regularly? Because I'd be down for that. It's a Terraria-like!

 

EDIT: Actually I'd also be down for Terraria. But Starbound is newer and I haven't played it as much as its predecessor so.

 

I might be up for that.  I played Starbound for about 10 minutes then stopped because no one else I knew was playing it, even the original group of people I got the game from.

[Twig]

Haha that's how it went for me too. I think they've also finally stopped doing character wipes too so no worry of that happening anymore.

[Bjorn]

I've held off on buying Starbound, because I've read so few positive things about it.  Has it finally started to come together?  Everything I had read was that the promise existed, but the reality just wasn't very good. 

[chummer]

So i've been fairly resistant to the emergence of the Minecraft genre, the handful i've played around with never clicked, the idea of digital legos built up on a kind of bad survival game framework doesn't really do anything for me.

 

In regards to vanilla Minecraft, I really enjoy the first few days of building a house and making a renewable food resource farm of some kind. After that, I kind of drop off. This works for me though as I only play the vanilla version after it has been patched a few times, giving me something new each time I log back in. The only times I've ever been compelled to make something big is when I've played with other players.

 

 

All that said, I really enjoy Hexxit- it's a mod that adds dungeons, a more intricate crafting systems, and different enemies. Gives the game a layer of action/adventure on top of the base systems of surviving and building. Perhaps that's something ya'll who don't like the directionless nature of plain Minecraft might be interested in checking out.

[Valorian Endymion]

Granado Espada (aka Sword of the New World) is at the same time on of the most original mmos and one of with the most bizarre or broken things.

 

First you have the concept of control not one character but three at once,instead of direct control you order stances, but, and here get strange, most of times you only use a stance which is almost autoplay as you character will attack and move on their own, however they won´t pickup stuff (only with pets, which require food, which could be bought ingame or cash) by themselves and only a few character will autoheal. This make Granado Espada a strange mmo, you almost feel you don´t need party with anyone, just let them autohunt and even alt-tab the game, sometimes I wonder if Granado Espada would work better as a singleplayer game.

 

Along with this system, you have lots of npcs which you can recruit to your familiy, most by doing quest ingame and handful of rare ones which are by cash. The surprise is that most of the character are really good, both in visual design and the game even  tries to give them some deep. However, often don´t very well, but still I had this npc character, Gracielo, which is impulsive martial artist, one of his quest is about how he accidently kill someone and the goes a journey of self learning and redemption...another character Emilia revel to have a darkside generated when her father made experiences with her... This make hunting for them quite fun, also npc character value a lot of ingame money in the action house. But, the quest to get  many of them is very difficult or require absurd ammount of things.

 

One problem, you family does have a limited space for number of character, to get more you need item which you can either get in action house or cash, but only give a single slot.

 

Another problem, is that begin a mmo Granado Espada does have so many patches over patches and expansions of expansions that its original system is quite a mess to figure out, as they add or change stuff, you might be a high level but begin too weak to most stuff (which happen to me right now) unable to figure why exactly your character aren´t doing much damage against this or that monsters, also the game don´t give much feedback during combat.

 

While many games are now on the steampunk aesthetic, Granado Espada is maybe one of the firsts one (in the recent days), also they way they do is very different. Because you see, most games use steampunk was only "dark/grim/colorless/detailess" aesthetics with lots of clichés. However Granado Espada mix a steampunk, period, gothic and anime aesthetics with lots of colors and details, the result is that while a old game, it somewhat gorgeous to look, one of its main feature is "costumes" which is item wear over you armor that change the character, many of them where very good and well made (other not that much, a few appear to have low res textures or simple aren´t very good), but point is - as the tumbler costumecommunityservice once said (unless I am mistaken) Granado Espada is consistent on its own weirdness in its visuals, the result is a rather unique visual design.

[Gormongous]

I have now played two recent games with emphasis on narrative aesthetics through iterative failure. Unfortunately, the first run of both games was a charmed experience for me, so I'm not sure where to go from here.

 

A couple weeks ago, I got through This War of Mine with only one character death, thanks to an incredibly lucky first few scavenging trips, and spent the final two weeks living in ridiculous comfort, only going out at night to scavenge parts for building luxury items like a moonshine still. It actually got a little boring near the end, since I only found difficulty if I made it myself. Then I played 80 Days last night and got around the world in sixty-three days thanks to picking up an item in Paris that sold for £4800 in Berlin and an item in Lima that sold for £3000 in Port Royal. I was even imprisoned for a week and still made it effortlessly because I could always afford the most expensive direct flight to wherever I wanted to be.

 

This isn't how these games are supposed to go. I'm supposed to bash my head against the wall over and over until I learn the system and then catch a lucky break, right? I feel like it's almost perverse, after a solid win in each game, to go back seeking failure because that's the memorable experience everyone else has had.

 

Come to think of it, this is also why I stopped playing the new XCOM after one campaign, too...

[JonCole]

Loading up a lot of games on my laptop to play with the family over Christmas, so far I've got in mind - Nidhogg, Towerfall Ascension, Mount Your Friends, Samurai Gunn, and Sportsfriends. Any other couch PC games worth grabbing that I'm forgetting about?

[clyde]

I have now played two recent games with emphasis on narrative aesthetics through iterative failure. Unfortunately, the first run of both games was a charmed experience for me, so I'm not sure where to go from here.

 

A couple weeks ago, I got through This War of Mine with only one character death, thanks to an incredibly lucky first few scavenging trips, and spent the final two weeks living in ridiculous comfort, only going out at night to scavenge parts for building luxury items like a moonshine still. It actually got a little boring near the end, since I only found difficulty if I made it myself. Then I played 80 Days last night and got around the world in sixty-three days thanks to picking up an item in Paris that sold for £4800 in Berlin and an item in Lima that sold for £3000 in Port Royal. I was even imprisoned for a week and still made it effortlessly because I could always afford the most expensive direct flight to wherever I wanted to be.

 

This isn't how these games are supposed to go. I'm supposed to bash my head against the wall over and over until I learn the system and then catch a lucky break, right? I feel like it's almost perverse, after a solid win in each game, to go back seeking failure because that's the memorable experience everyone else has had.

 

Come to think of it, this is also why I stopped playing the new XCOM after one campaign, too...

 

I've actually come to account for this whenever I read your reports of games. You are far better (and probably much more interested) in optimization than I, so when I read about your experiences playing games I have to remember that you are playing on that level and I am not. 

[N1njaSquirrel]

This isn't how these games are supposed to go. I'm supposed to bash my head against the wall over and over until I learn the system and then catch a lucky break, right? I feel like it's almost perverse, after a solid win in each game, to go back seeking failure because that's the memorable experience everyone else has had.

 

Come to think of it, this is also why I stopped playing the new XCOM after one campaign, too...

 

 

You should try Binding of Isaac Gor, sounds like you have the luck of the devil! I imagine you'd get brimstone in your first devil room and polybius in your first treasure room.

 

I'd like to write a short journal on here about my ps4 aquiring attempts over the last 2 days:

 

So like an idiot, I've been trying to get my hands on one of those super cool 20th anniversary PS4's. In England there's a pretty neat way whereby you can potenitally be in the runnings to buy it if you are the first 100 to fill out a form, which you have to get to by clicking on the correct character from here: http://ps20.software.eu.playstation.com/ which is hinted at at a certain time for each day, for example, today's is parappa the rapper.

 

I actually think it's a really neat way of generating interest in the console, and whilst it may not be the best way to select the lucky few who can get their hands on this in the UK, it's certainly the funnest.

 

On the first day it was crazy. The website with the characters just didn't load. It was released at 11am, and the hint was going to be posted on twitter at 4. For the first hour it just loaded headers and footers. At around 12 it loaded a progress bar, with a 'file not found' image on the loading bar. by about 2:30 it finally loaded. Holy fuck there are a lot of characters, and holy fuck I don't know half of them. Nethertheless, I waited till 4 for the all knowing tweet to arrive. 4 o'clock came, and nothing. 'Maybe this is the hint' I thought. 10 minuets later sony and GAME posted their clue. Also did I mention that you had to reload the fucking page? Because that's when shit hit the fan as the servers crawled under the pressure of the whole UK gaming community trying to refresh one page to find a sweet link. That was broken. They mis-typed the link in the html, and put in a . where it should have been a /. knowing the shortcomings of a shit internet, I ventured onto GAF where I found the link to the form page, and filled it in at about 5:27. I knew I had no chance of getting it, but the wait for an email that never came was crushing. The character on monday was Rinoa, from FF8, which I would have never got anyways.

 

The second day started, and I had my gameplan. I was to load the GAF thread, load 2 versions of the website, one for looking at characters, whilst the other was for the inevetable refresh. The clue was going to drop at 5 today, so I planned to take a 45 minuet lunch so I can spend 15 mins at 5 to try and get this lucrative console. Screw the clue and the website, there was no way I was going to get it from that. I got into work, loaded the pages and hid them. The thread then started using comments that only members could see. shit. So I created a GAF account, at around 10. I then found out that I have to wait for an admin to verify me. double shit. Then the best and worst thing happened. At around 3, an admin closed the thread. triple shit. My gameplan has all gone to waste! I quickly scramble around the internet, and find myself on the Playstation forums. People are talking about setting up a chat room, like on the msn era. I log onto the chat room, put it in the background and continue work. I look at it again at 4:55 to find that I've been logged out of the chat room due to inactivity. quadruple shitting fuck balls. Paniking now, I reload the PS forums to find that someone had created an IRC. Sweet! at 5:02 I logged onto the IRC. At 5:03 the link had been posted on there. At 5:05 I had subimtted the form. It was all over. Nothing to do now but wait. Compared to the 30 minuets of agonising on Monday, this was quick.

 

 I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get it, as I saw posts on GAF and the PS thread that shows people on the correct site at 5:01. I have had butterflies in my stomach the whole day. I feel like a kid like nothing else. I've been excited, nervous, something that I haven't felt for ages. Even if I don't get this fucking console, I'll still look back on this week fondly, because if nothing else it's envoked a genuine emotion and fevour to get this damn console. And if I do, I'm going to fucking love this over-priced paint job till the end of time.

[Sno]

Loading up a lot of games on my laptop to play with the family over Christmas, so far I've got in mind - Nidhogg, Towerfall Ascension, Mount Your Friends, Samurai Gunn, and Sportsfriends. Any other couch PC games worth grabbing that I'm forgetting about?

Play Lethal League, it is the best. Do it, do it, do it.

 

Do it.

[Dewar]

Speedrunner and Yawgh come to mind. I'll take a look and see if I've bought anything else recently.

 

Oh, and Jackbox just came out on Steam too.

[Bjorn]

Yawgh definitely. 

 

Risk of Rain is great, but takes a pretty high skill level to get anything done.  BattleBlock Theater is lots of fun, and it has both co-op and competitive modes depending on what you're in the mood for.  Monaco I've found to be hit or miss with people, they either love it or it makes their eyes bleed and gives them a headache.  All of those support up to 4 players. 

 

Oh yeah, and for versus stuff, ScreenCheat is out, one of the few PC shooters that has four player split screen.  Serious Sam 3 is about the only other shooter on Steam I can think of that supports four people on split screen (though I've only done that in co-op, haven't seen if it supports that in vs). 

[Gormongous]

I've actually come to account for this whenever I read your reports of games. You are far better (and probably much more interested) in optimization than I, so when I read about your experiences playing games I have to remember that you are playing on that level and I am not. 

 

You're probably right. I quickly get bored of trying to crack a system completely (unless it's something with both mechanics and theme I'm interested in, like Crusader Kings II), but I still don't enjoy feeling like I'm not doing well in moment-to-moment play, so I naturally gravitate towards the most self-contained and comprehensible set of mechanics and learn it all the way through. I had a board game day with my advisor today and noticed this exact behavior with Euros (Tzolk'in, Agricola, and Hadrian today), where it rarely secures me a victory on its own, but in the simpler and less interconnected systems of video games, it's often more than enough. I still roleplay, but only within the subconscious confines of pushing towards my chosen specialty, like big paydays in 80 Days.

 

I hope it's not an annoyance that I'm so analytic and hard-nosed about my games. Sometimes they totally sweep me away, but I'm a problem solver in real life, so I guess I have a hard time not also being one in my escapism, even if I'd enjoy it better otherwise.

 

You should try Binding of Isaac Gor, sounds like you have the luck of the devil! I imagine you'd get brimstone in your first devil room and polybius in your first treasure room.

 

Funny! I suck at Binding of Isaac, because I don't have the mechanical skill. I never have, really. It makes me wonder how I ever beat Olmec in Spelunky, but at least I knew there that Hell was almost certainly beyond me...

[clyde]

I hope it's not an annoyance that I'm so analytic and hard-nosed about my games. Sometimes they totally sweep me away, but I'm a problem solver in real life, so I guess I have a hard time not also being one in my escapism, even if I'd enjoy it better otherwise.

It's not an annoyance at all! Your perspective is great because it typically tells me how much strategic depth there is and what aspects are strategically useless without me having to find out myself. It's rare that I play a game at full concentation in a long session and that is what I require in order to play at similar levels for most games. Even when I do, I suspect that you are much better at it than I.

I often make overly ambitious, mechanically ill-informed, or just plain disastorous decisions in games on the regular. I'm not trying to do so, I think I just have a tendency to over estimate my capabilities. I've come to judge games largely based on how enjoyable the fail-states are. I'm not role-playing a clutz, I just happen to be one.

I still might not have an accurate perspective on how you play though. Let me give an example of someone else and if you like, you can respond with how you differ:

When I was playing a ton of Pinball FX I went to those forums and there was someone who judged tables largely based on whether or not there was an exploit. By exploit, I mean a guaranteed shot or a reasonably scoring shot that was very unlikely to lead to a drain. Assumably, this person would find one of these and just spam it for hours and hours until they got the highest score on the leaderboards.

I could never do that because it would bore the shit out of me. If I manage to do something well once, I'll probably never do it again unless I can add a little more challenge to it. Eventually this practice will inflate my perceived capability far beyond what I am reliably capable of.

When I build Netrunner decks, I typically have one or two optimal combos that I'm wanting to try out. If I manage to pull it off, I'll most likely end up starting over with building my deck. If I fail, then I'll spend many games making slight alterations until I manage to pull it off a few times or just get an idea that interests me more.

Edit: Re-reading this:

You're probably right. I quickly get bored of trying to crack a system completely (unless it's something with both mechanics and theme I'm interested in, like Crusader Kings II), but I still don't enjoy feeling like I'm not doing well in moment-to-moment play, so I naturally gravitate towards the most self-contained and comprehensible set of mechanics and learn it all the way through. I had a board game day with my advisor today and noticed this exact behavior with Euros (Tzolk'in, Agricola, and Hadrian today), where it rarely secures me a victory on its own, but in the simpler and less interconnected systems of video games, it's often more than enough. I still roleplay, but only within the subconscious confines of pushing towards my chosen specialty, like big paydays in 80 Days.

It sounds like you have similar tendencies to my own. I really think that your base-line strategic ability is more effective than my own, so you just require more challenging games.

[JonCole]

Am I losing my mind? I thought that there was a game called "Dropkick" where it's a two-person fighting game where you can only jump and dropkick. Each player has one HP and you can select from different characters who can do dumb stuff like teleport or dropkick upwards but it's ultimately just dropping and kicking.

 

Is this real? I'm trying to search for it and I'm getting nothing.

[Sno]

Divekick, it's called Divekick.

[Bjorn]

Divekick?

[JonCole]

Thank you. I seriously thought I lost it.

[Gormongous]

It's not an annoyance at all! Your perspective is great because it typically tells me how much strategic depth there is and what aspects are strategically useless without me having to find out myself. It's rare that I play a game at full concentation in a long session and that is what I require in order to play at similar levels for most games. Even when I do, I suspect that you are much better at it than I.

I often make overly ambitious, mechanically ill-informed, or just plain disastorous decisions in games on the regular. I'm not trying to do so, I think I just have a tendency to over estimate my capabilities. I've come to judge games largely based on how enjoyable the fail-states are. I'm not role-playing a clutz, I just happen to be one.

I still might not have an accurate perspective on how you play though. Let me give an example of someone else and if you like, you can respond with how you differ:

When I was playing a ton of Pinball FX I went to those forums and there was someone who judged tables largely based on whether or not there was an exploit. By exploit, I mean a guaranteed shot or a reasonably scoring shot that was very unlikely to lead to a drain. Assumably, this person would find one of these and just spam it for hours and hours until they got the highest score on the leaderboards.

I could never do that because it would bore the shit out of me. If I manage to do something well once, I'll probably never do it again unless I can add a little more challenge to it. Eventually this practice will inflate my perceived capability far beyond what I am reliably capable of.

When I build Netrunner decks, I typically have one or two optimal combos that I'm wanting to try out. If I manage to pull it off, I'll most likely end up starting over with building my deck. If I fail, then I'll spend many games making slight alterations until I manage to pull it off a few times or just get an idea that interests me more.

Edit: Re-reading this:

It sounds like you have similar tendencies to my own. I really think that your base-line strategic ability is more effective than my own, so you just require more challenging games.

 

It sounds like we're fairly similar, I agree. I might just have a stomach for slightly more boring optimization paths. For example, when I played the worker-placement game Tzolk'in yesterday, I quickly realized that I couldn't understand the entire system, which involved placing workers on certain gears of a massive clock and them removing them when the gear reached the desired point. Instead, I just focused on corn, which functions as currency in Tzolk'in, because I could see the path of those mechanics from beginning to end. Corn could be used to buy all the other resources and ultimately to buy victory points, too, so a massive corn-generating engine seemed like a good idea. And it was! It just needed to be hand-in-hand with a couple of other strategies so that I wasn't wasting all of my time converting corn into actually useful things. But, like I said, video games don't tend to have as much of a place for near-optimal strategies. Educating your heirs for maximal diplomatic skill in Crusader Kings II removes the biggest challenge in the game, and that's it. There's no downside or need to diversify.

 

I am also incredibly interested in good fail-states for games, but this goes back to my original complaint, that I want to see good fail-states but my playstyle is almost entire built around avoiding them.

[Professor Video Games]

Loading up a lot of games on my laptop to play with the family over Christmas, so far I've got in mind - Nidhogg, Towerfall Ascension, Mount Your Friends, Samurai Gunn, and Sportsfriends. Any other couch PC games worth grabbing that I'm forgetting about?

 

Didn't you mention getting Hatoful Boyfriend somewhere? Seems like an obvious choice...

[SuperBiasedMan]

It's kind of funny we have a must see TV thread but not really a games equivalent. I was thinking about starting it but then I thought that it might be even more divisive. TV is TV, you just have to sit and watch it. But if someone says DOTA 2 is a must play game, you're implicitly obligating someone to familiarise themselves with a gameplay system they might not care for at all. And with plenty of games, the gameplay is almost all of what you can get out of it (particularly because if it's pure story or art you want, YouTube exists) so if you don't want to engage with that element the recommendation becomes pretty useless.

 

Admittedly with TV 'must-see' is kind of... loose as a term since obviously it doesn't mean that everyone must actually see it but it definitely gets more watered down in games when a percentage of people are turned off when the first few words you use indicate a playstyle they're not into.

[SecretAsianMan]

Along similar lines, I've always wanted to create a user driven game review website where reviewers also make a list of games they liked/didn't like and people can find other reviewers with similar or different taste to get recommendations from.  I think a general recommendation isn't useful if you don't know what kinds of things that reviewer likes.

[Griddlelol]

Starting that wouldn't be a bad idea. It's great to see classic games come up that I never played and gives me an idea of what I want to try. I asked about SNES/NES games a  while back and found that Super Metroid is an absolutely fantastic game (which I've not finished yet due to my refusal to use a guide) that I would never have even looked at without people mentioning it. 

 

Also, something like DOTA2 in my opinion should be on a must-play list. I don't like it, I loathe Lords Management games, but I'm glad I tried it. 

 

So anyway: make the list. It'd be cool. 

[Bjorn]

Along similar lines, I've always wanted to create a user driven game review website where reviewers also make a list of games they liked/didn't like and people can find other reviewers with similar or different taste to get recommendations from.  I think a general recommendation isn't useful if you don't know what kinds of things that reviewer likes.

 

Penny Arcade had the Decide-O-Tron app for awhile, that let you put in a bunch of games you like, and it would compare that with other users and spit out a list of games you should play. It was really too simple though, and I never felt like it particularly worked well.