If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE

Vidya Gaems General

1360361363365366431

Comments

  • edited 2015-01-30 20:48:40
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Anyway, I'm on a spree of idling for cards playing games with Steam trading cards that I have but haven't touched yet.

    Other games I played:

    Played QP Shooting - Dangerous yesterday. It's a shmup that's
    quite difficult, despite the cutesy graphics and the relatively
    irrelevant storyline. It's (ostensibly) about a dog-girl, QP, who is
    desperate for pudding. The first stage has her fighting chickens,
    trains, stoplights, and finally an old friend who is obsessed with
    videogames, in her quest for pudding. The second stage features crows,
    apple-tossing pine trees, butterflies, and potted plants, and the boss
    is from an April fool's joke yaoi game who believes the main character
    is a boy.

    Some of its features:
    * Defeating an enemy or some
    projectiles generates stars from them and their bullets. you can chain
    picking up stars (not defeating enemies).
    * QP uses "rbits" (tiny
    rabbit-looking things) as little pods that generate additional bullets
    for her, and she has various rbit formations she can use. For example,
    the default three formations are one that shoots an arc in front, one
    that shoots an arc backwards, and one that shoots concentrated fire
    forward. Other formations are unlockables. You have three formations
    on hand when you play, and you can switch between them anytime.
    *
    Game comes with "Arcade" and "Conquest" modes; the latter lets you play
    single stages. (You get upgrades to start the latter stages.)

    Also, if you own the game on Steam, the extra character "QP - Dangerous" is unlocked in the game 100% Orange Juice.
    Just like in QPSD, this version of QP is obsessed with pudding, and
    gets stat boosts from holding pudding-themed cards in her hand.

    ----

    Another game that I decided to try is Snuggle Truck.
    It a pretty simple game with an amusing premise -- you're driving a
    truckload of stuffed animals to a zoo. Navigate a linear 2D
    environment, and try not to lose too many of them from the bumpiness of
    the ride -- and there will, of course, be lots of bumps. You can choose
    to speed up, slow down, tilt forward, or tilt back your truck, while
    the 9 or so stuffed animals in the truck's cargo hold are individually
    simulated and each of them could fall out if you go over a bump or
    ascend a ramp a little too roughly. And sometimes you get to pick up
    extra stuffed animals that just suddenly fly out of nowhere.

    The
    stages are pretty short, but there are a number of them, so it's good
    for pick-up-and-put-down gaming. Each stage gives you medals for
    different accomplishments -- bronze, silver, and gold medals for
    increasing difficulty, an "ark" medal for finishing with all the animals
    you start with regardless of time, and a "speedrun" medal for finishing
    with the minimum of one animal but in a very short time. Getting
    enough medals in one set of stages unlocks the next set.

    Not exactly the most glorious game of all time, but kinda amusing and fun.

    ----

    Yet another game I played is 99 Levels to Hell.
    It's a platformer with some degree of randomness. Basically a
    roguelike -- collect treasure, kill enemies, go deeper. Every ten
    levels, there is a boss fight; complete the boss fight to unlock the
    next set of levels.

    Each level randomly picks from one of a set
    of predefined level layouts for that ten-level group, and also randomly
    distributes powerups, special doors (which can be elevators that
    randomly take you up or down, shops, slot machines, or secret book rooms
    that reveal more of a story (which doesn't seem to have much to do with
    the game but I'm only like 20 levels into what is alleged to be a
    100-level dungeon).

    The level layouts can get a little tedious,
    though after a while you'll have learned the layouts and know which way
    to go. It's not quite as much variety as if they had used fully
    procedural generation of levels (a la Spelunky for example), but it's
    still decent.

    You start off with the Magician unlocked; he starts
    with 5 health and 4 bombs and a short-range spread shot. Pick up
    upgrades to gain extra attacks, more range, or do other things. I'm not
    sure what some of the items do, but I haven't checked to see whether
    there's a manual yet...that said, it's not like roguelikes tell you what
    items do anyway. (I think there's one item that takes you straight to
    the boss of the area!)

    Overall, a decently fun game. Note that
    it uses mouse to aim so you have to use left-hand controls (WASD+space)
    for platforming -- I know it took me a while to learn this for Terraria
    the first time I had to do it. On the other hand, you can jump off of
    ladders, and can even jump out from beneath one-high passages where the
    ceiling and floor end at the same point. I also think that the
    red-colored crosshairs icon (for where you're aiming) and the blood
    effects and the red bats all blend together a little too much (they
    should just change the crosshair color and get rid of the blood
    effects), but that's about it for specific issues I've found. Pretty
    fun game, overall.


    (This was copy-pasted from a post I made at Caves of Narshe.)
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Then I added two more games to that list.

    Go Go Nippon is a visual novel about a guy who visits Japan and stays with two cute girls.  Blatant emphasis on cute.

    It's supposed to serve as a basic tourist's guide to Japan, actually.  Tells you the kind of electrical adapter you'd need, as well as the fact that foreigners can buy express train + normal farecard combos for transit use.  And much more.  And it does this effectively.

    However, in the course of doing this, the perspective character is pretty much turned into a country bumpkin otaku who is impressed that a major train station has a bunch of shops and thinks that having 24-hour convenience stores and vending machines is a sign of neighborhood safety.  Also, he clearly wants those two girls, whose parents are conveniently out of town for the week.  Conveniently.  This point is not even subtle.

    There's an additional feature that displays the Japanese text alongside the English text, for stuff that's canonically communicated in Japanese (in the story).  This would probably work well for you if you wanted to practice reading Japanese and already have a working knowledge, but if you're like me and don't know Japanese at all and are more curious as to how the syllabary and vocabulary even work in the first place, it's sorta useless.

    Sniper Elite V2 is my first foray into serious military FPS games.  Slightly ironic in that this actually isn't that much of an FPS -- it's got a big third-person component, showing my character on screen.  Anyway, it's set at the end of WWII and it's about a sniper.  The controls take a bit of getting used to because they're somewhat different from TF2 controls. but in the end they seem decent.  More importantly, though, I had to turn down or off a bunch of graphics and mouse settings in order to minimize the response lag.  Once I did, though, the game played pretty smoothly.

    By that I mean the program ran rather smoothly.  I was of course no good at the game itself.  Set it to easy mode.  It seems normal mode actually has you account for bullet physics such as the effect of gravity -- which is a great thing, but considering how crap I am at these sorts of games I'll just leave that option alone for now.  That said, I started doing some missions, and perhaps most importantly of all, I found myself actually kinda having fun.

    There're some odd instances of enemy soldiers calling off their search for me in ways that don't even seem remotely realistic, or not climbing out of their tank to totally screw me over.  But overall, I actually started enjoying being able to look for, target, and take out enemy troops.  And it seems like there's more stuff (e.g. bullet physics) for more advanced players.  So this seems like a pretty decent game.  Still kinda surprised that it got a "get it for free" day a while back.
  • Maybe On Earth. Maybe In the Future.
    Currently going though Tales Of Vesperia, which is my first proper JRPG in years. While I generally dig the real-time combat system it has, and like overall, there are way too many problems with it for me to ignore. From the fact that some times attacks will seemingly not register, to the AI for your party members occasionally just shitting the bed resulting in you all being killed, or boss design that just feels flat out unfair at some points, the combat for this game just feels extremely rough around the edges.

    However, most everything related to the story aspects makes up for this entirely. The cast has some of the best chemistry I've seen next to Persona 4, with them bouncing off each in a way that is endlessly amusing, and the the sub plot of wither the MC's vigilante actions are justified or not just clicks with me in all the right ways. The overarching main plot's fine, although I currently have no idea where it's heading at the point in the game.

    I've also been playing though Sunset Overdrive, which, while I love the extremely fluid movement mechanics that allow you to traverse the terrain in really satisfying way,  the gunplay just feels flacid and kind of not great. Odd, given the all sorts of crazy weapons that Insomniac Studios put in there.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human


    This is an awesome game.
  • Gunbound was the first game I played online. Good times.
    Or maybe it was MtG, or chat games, or who knows.
  • edited 2015-02-04 14:42:30
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Let's try that approach that @Monsoon had with gaming self-discipline, but my take on it:

    10 games/VNs that I have and would like to complete:

    Ys II
    Aquaria
    The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, the First Chapter
    Recettear
    99 Spirits
    Puzzle Agent 2
    Steel Storm: Burning Retribution
    World End Economica
    To the Moon
    Shadows on the Vatican, Act 1: Greed

    10 games that I have and would like to try:

    The Girl and the Robot
    A Valley Without Wind
    Aztaka
    Element4l
    Dust: an Elysian Tail
    Slam Bolt Scrappers
    Symphony
    Wooden Sen'SeY
    Wizorb
    Oniken

    I pledge (barring social occasions) to not play any other games except for these, until I have completed (or tried) 10 of these 20.

    (Further exception is made for the purpose of idling Oozi: Earth Adventure for cards, since I've already completed that game before.)
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    ^^^ Whoa, people still remember it? That was some fun.
  • I remember playing a shareware version of that on Win 98. Really fun if you like turn based thing to kill the time.
  • Maybe On Earth. Maybe In the Future.

    Persona 5 trailer for those who care.

    Defintely jumped up to one of my most anticipated games of the year now that we've got some gameplay footage!
  • edited 2015-10-09 07:02:09
    [user deleted]
  • edited 2015-02-11 01:44:43
    "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."
    Games I've been playing this past week:

    - Metroid Prime (Picked up Trilogy a week ago; just got to Phendrana. Probably going to take a while to beat, though; I get a bit motion-sick if I play it for too long.)
    - Transformice (Just came to Steam, and oh hey! My old profile still works.)
    - Contraption Maker (Build-Off no. 3 is going until Monday. Sleds!)
    - Dustforce (One more red key left; unfortunately, it's Hideout, which is a nightmare. Probably going back to the level editor for a while.)
    - Outland (Just picked it up from a Steam sale an hour or so ago. Movement/combat seems fluid (but definitely optimized for a controller rather than a keyboard), and I love the aesthetic.)
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Oh gosh.  These are depressing; the last of these ('Daddy's job in video games was no longer a cool thing they liked to brag about') is outright terrifying.

    http://kotaku.com/the-pizza-party-where-everyone-got-fired-1685455125
  • Yeah, publishers are pretty abusive.  Especially if you're QA.
  • So I thought I'd give Path of Exile a try. I remember a bunch of us talked about it, so does anybody still play/wants to play?
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Is it just me or does anyone else find the combination of very-realistic graphics and a turn-based JRPG battle system a rather jarring combination?

    Like, if you're gonna make it an abstraction, just make the whole thing an abstraction, rather than showing the detailed super-cool-looking moves just to intersperse it with the characters bobbing up and down and staring at each other as if nothing's happening.
  • LaiLai
    edited 2015-02-18 21:02:01
    Whenever someone asks is it just them, that is rarely ever the case.

    Though I don't really get where you're coming from at all honestly, Glenn.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    I played Path of Exile. Decent game, but  I got bored after a while. Perhaps it was the repetitiveness, I know it's a diabloclone, but somewhere in the Third or whichever Act I no longer felt like finishing. 
  • edited 2015-02-19 05:23:28
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    ^^ Basically I just found it a little weird for JRPGs from FFVII onward to have increasingly detailed graphical representations of the characters when in battle (and increasingly detailed representations of their attacks too) but just overlay that onto a totally-lacking-verisimilitude turn-based battle system.

    Especially if they have an idle animation.  I kinda feel that it might be more jarring that way, since the animation implies that they're actually bobbing up and down like that, in the heat of battle.

    Or maybe I'm just used to sprites.
  • ^^ Yeh, I see what you mean by repetition, there's only so many times killing a group of monsters the exact same way isn't dull, at least as a witch. I probably won't play much longer, it already filled a diabloclone crave I had.

    > mfw no auction house
  • Maybe On Earth. Maybe In the Future.
    ^^ Basically I just found it a little weird for JRPGs from FFVII onward to have increasingly detailed graphical representations of the characters when in battle (and increasingly detailed representations of their attacks too) but just overlay that onto a totally-lacking-verisimilitude turn-based battle system.


    I think what offsets that is how completely and utterly outlandish some of the designs are these days.

    That, and the last three FF games not really having a classical battle system too.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    ^^ Yeah, "filling a diabloclone crave" is a good way to describe it. What they did to the skill tree (skill bush?) was a fun concept, too.
  • edited 2015-02-23 23:53:02
    "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."
    So I won 3rd place in the Contraption Maker build-off. $30 in Steam games; what to choose, what to choose... (probably Infinifactory, which leaves $5 left over...)
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Congrats!
  • LaiLai
    edited 2015-02-24 23:26:00
    Shit. Now I have the sudden urge to play Capcom vs. SNK 2. Damn it I love that game, and that announcer.
  • ^^^ Grats! That looks better than the stuff I've done on the actual Line Rider, was it difficult?
  • "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."
    Once the layout was finished, it was mostly covering up everything with black/white rectangles.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Nice job.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Basically I just found it a little weird for JRPGs from FFVII onward to
    have increasingly detailed graphical representations of the characters
    when in battle (and increasingly detailed representations of their
    attacks too) but just overlay that onto a totally-lacking-verisimilitude
    turn-based battle system.
    The alternative to this in modern JRPGs (Mostly dungeon crawlers but also Mind Zero) is just not to show the characters at all.

    There are cases where characters need to move across maps on their turns, like Tales, Valyria and Shining, but I guess sprites could do that.

    As for why it's done, it's because it can be done and is pretty and it's a bonus to the people playing it. I mean you don't really need much to make an FPS aside from stick figures and vaguely gun looking shapes but those have graphics too.

    Also it's kind of hard to charge $60 for sprites and I'm pretty sure the homogenization of game prices has led to massive margins for making a couple of 3D models.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly Humble Weekly Japan Bundle

    also


  • edited 2015-02-27 18:30:12
    "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."
    Alright, sent in my request to Spotkin for the $30 prize: Infinifactory and Micron. Held off for a few days to see if anything on my wishlist went on sale; no such luck.

    Speaking of my Steam wishlist, I added a little Early Access game to it a month or so ago called Mini Metro. I only found out a week ago that there's a free demo on the dev's website, and good lord it's exactly as addicting as I thought it would be
Sign In or Register to comment.