Video Games Randomness - Prioritize specific game threads!

[Daehawk]

Ive tried Darkstar One 2 or 3 times and just never got grabbed by it............... Maybe another try in the future.

[Rumpy]

Jade Empire was a bit rough, but it's still fun to see the beginning of Bioware's 3D titles. Doesn't have great gamepad support though. I thought it would be good with a gamepad seeing as it was originally an XBox game, but I gave up on that and just used the keyboard.

[Kasey Chang]

Got sidetracked into Star Wars: Starfighter, it's a bit of PITA to make it run in Win10, and it doesn't support 16:9 res so it looks squashed. Mechanics are painful as targeting controls makes no sense. Where is "target nearest"? There are no explanations of the different fighters and their secondary weapons. Mouse controls are painful even with editing the config file directly. There are no checkpoints yet some of the missions lasts like 15 minutes. WTF!?! If you die you end up all the way back at the beginning. ARGH.

Had enough of Choplifter HD. It's fun in that they managed to add a bit of 3D into a 2D game while keeping *most* of the same mechanics. But the gun seems to overheat way too easily, and when you get to operation 4 enemies are just overflowing with man-portable anti-air missiles (often announced as "RPG") and then the game threw in "Sniper" (who has an EMP weapon) and flak... and TANKs... and technicals... It's got an interesting system where you have to "win" a mission with the default helo in order to use the DLC helos to get 5 stars rating on the mission. And some of the helos are very good indeed, with a boatload of missiles, or higher speed, or built-in life support so those "critical patient" timers are zeroed with no penalty, and so on. There's even an "anti-zombie" helo with auto aiming turrets. However, some of these missions are so hard, even on cadet mode (easiest) I still can't survive. Yikes.

[Kasey Chang]

Steam is not posting my reviews.

Darkstar One is an interesting take on the Elite/Privateer formula where you move around the galaxy, be good or evil, while upgrading your ship and chasing a particular objective. However, some design quirks, such as "1 mission at a time", difficulting in trading, and unclear upgrade path, as well as "gradual reveal" of the map makes for some frustrations.

The story was a typical "young pilot inherits a ship", but this one had you chasing someone who you believe may have caused your father's death. There's a twist later that's actually quite masterful, but I'm not going to spoil it here.

Your ship, Darkstar One, is modular in the sense that if you keep finding "artifacts", you can upgrade the ship in three ways: hull, wing, and engine. A nice touch is your ship physically changes shape as you upgrade it.. simple wing becomes X-wing. Twin engines became triple, quad, quint. And so on. Upgrading the ship level also lets your ship accept "high level" equipment, weapons, and so on.

Which brings us to travel. The galaxy is composed of six race, each of whom owns several "clusters" of systems. The stations are quite distinct looking. Initially, the systems are pretty close together (4 lightyear or less), but you will need to upgrade your jump drive to longer range versions to reach beyond certain sectors. By the end you'll have a 9 Lightyear drive.

To reach a different system, you need a "hyperspace key" to emerge from that system's gate. So if you don't have it, you can't go to that system. Some keys are free and obtained easily by flying somewhere. But sometimes, a system is locked and requires performing a 'side mission' to unlock, and even then, it'd probably be a pirate system for you the liberate. The problem is the side missions are not always visible and require you to travel to many systems, looking for the side mission at each trading station... if you see it. Yet there's no way to mark systems as "visited" or not.

The actual space combat is not bad, but it's not Wing Commander. You can have front-firing weapons and turrets, as well as missile/torpedo/mine launchers. Weapons vary from slow but hard-hitting to rapid-machine gun, but they are all energy-based, except the missile / torpedo / mines, of course. I personally found no use for the missiles, as I didn't buy any. The ships can rotate, afterburner, side-slip, even reverse (-20% throttle is possible). However, Wing Commander style "Sheldon slide" is not possible as your ship slows instantly when thrust is discontinued. Turrets engage nearby enemies automatically. There is a 3D radar like Elite to tell you if you have enemies behind you.

Gamepad works, but I found the controls tedious and not enough buttons to recommend its use. There's a very obscure way to invert axis (click on the red rectangle). Instead, I use mouse control which also helps with targeting.

The game also has a lot of OTHER controls onscreen that were not well explained. One mission calls upon you to "scan" but there was no mention of a "scan" control mapped anywhere. Turns out it's an onscreen button to the lower left of your lower left target screen. Each of the icons on screen, but top, bottom, and to the right, are controls.

There are a lot of equipment available for purchase, but many of which has no use other than plot.

This game handles cargo in an interesting way. Your ship only has 20 tons internal capacity, but you can control up to 3 cargo drones each with up to 100 ton capacity. However, trading was extremely primitive. There was no way to view another planet's prices, even in the past. The ONLY THING you know of the other system is what it produces, and depending on what government, what it considers as contraband. But you can't tell if the prices are any good, as some systems have depressed prices, while others have "exorbitant prices", even though both appears to be at the same tech level and is the same type of colony. When you have mix of colony, from research to mining, it gets really mixed up. At the end, trading just doesn't make me enough money that it's easier to hunt for bounties on pirates and undertake missions instead.

There are a couple of oddball missions... a couple tunnel missions, a couple planet missions, and 2 "man the turret" missions. IMHO, the turret missions are the hardest, as there is a time limit on them and you need to be very accurate and quick. The planet missions are hard, but if you are careful, you can probably make it.

Your DarkStar One has a special plasma device, and you can spend upgrade points on it upgrading it to be a shield booster, a special EMP weapon to disable ships, an ultra powerful plasma cannon, and so on. Using it properly can save you from dire circumstances.

if you are confused by everything I've mentioned, that's okay. As you play, you'll pick it up, as you follow your father's killer across the various sectors, and found yourself in the middle of a giant conspriacy. But the game basically encourages you to play a shooter, not a trader It seems to be a lot of unrealized potentials, with occasional glimpses of brilliance that went unrealized. Those hoping for a modern version of Elite should be playing Elite Dangerous instead. This is... nostalgic at best.

[Rumpy]

That's a fair assessement of Darkstar One. I had a lot of fun with it, but it does have its quirks. I ended up playing with the Gamepad axis inverted because I couldn't figure out how to change it. Like you, I was confused by some of the things needed to do, such as scanning. Those sound like they should be more straightforward, but often the game will tell you to do something and brings up a wall of frustration because they never adequately explain it. Also, part of the problem is translation leading to confusion.

[Kasey Chang]

Playing Jade Empire. The gamepad controls are lagging quite badly, as it's actually buffering my button presses. Eeek. Fortunately I'm playing on EASY. I'm almost done with Tien's landing, having dispatched "Mother" and dealt with Gao the Greater. I've also done all the secondary quests, but I've somehow not moved fully into open palm camp yet despite being nice every turn. Guess it's time to head for the ruins!

Finished the ruins, and even the fight against Lim and minions wasn't that hard (I did have it on easy). I'm way tempted to keep using the same styles, but I'm learning new styles all the time and don't know which ones to put points into. Reached Imperial City and resolved the Black Leopard School problems. Still exploring the city, will probably play with the arena next.

EDIT: Did a lot of stuff in the Imperial City, and found yet more to do. Almost ready to head to the Lotus Assassin Stronghold. Resolved *most* of the secondary quests.

EDIT: Almost finished with the Necropolis, about half done in the Lotus Assassin fortress. Will have to perform a double assassination soon.

[Defiant]

I just learned that Gold Rush 2 got released yesterday, developed by the same developer as the original. Considering that the original Gold Rush got released by Sierra back in 1988, it's got to be the longest gap between game and sequel, even longer than the 26 year gap between Wasteland and Wasteland 2.

TIL I was wrong.

Deus Ex Machina was originally released in 1984

It's sequel was released in 2015, 31 years later.

[Rumpy]

Soooo, Lego Harry Potter 5-7. 100%'ed it, and I feel pretty disappointed with the end result. Other Lego games give you more for your effort, but in this game, you only get one bonus level (the first game had several including one where you played as Voldemort), but here the only thing you get for your trouble is that you get to build Hogwarts with the gold bricks and nothing happens other than it raining studs. So, umm, yay?

I think in terms of variety, my favourite Lego game is Lego SW 3: The Clone Wars.

[KDH]

.
.. Thousands Of People Are 'Playing' A Hidden Steam Game



pieces:

You might recognize the name. Spacewar is, after all, Valve’s take on an influential early video game that went by the same name. It’s an extremely basic space shooter where ships are represented by little triangles, swirling forever around a doomed sun that looks kinda like a Tinker Toy. Valve made their own version as a tool for developers to test Steamworks features like achievements and the Steam Workshop.

you’ve gotta enter “steam://run/480" in Windows’ “run” dialogue box, which you can access by pressing Windows key + R. At that point, you should get a prompt from Steam asking if you want to install Spacewar. That’s pretty much it!

[jztemple2]

I remember being on a ocean boardwalk (NJ?) back in the 70's and finding Spacewar on an arcade machine. It was too bright outside to be able to see the screen clearly but I remember hearing the sounds and playing around with the controls, but I sucked at games even back then. I knew what it was from an article from Analog magazine about this game back when it existed only at a university lab. I think somewhere I still have a photocopy of the article.

UPDATE: Found an online version of the article. Analog Magazine, July 1971. I had a subscription for years.

[Kasey Chang]

Finished Jade Empire... Had to download a trainer. Looks like I got the wrong techniques and can't defeat my 3 evil clones. Phooey. Gave myself infinite focus so I can just go full Matrix and kick everybody's ass in bullet time.

It's interesting, and I realized I missed a couple folks in my playthrough. Oh well.

[jztemple2]

I remember being on a ocean boardwalk (NJ?) back in the 70's and finding Spacewar on an arcade machine. It was too bright outside to be able to see the screen clearly but I remember hearing the sounds and playing around with the controls, but I sucked at games even back then. I knew what it was from an article from Analog magazine about this game back when it existed only at a university lab. I think somewhere I still have a photocopy of the article.

UPDATE: Found an online version of the article. Analog Magazine, July 1971. I had a subscription for years.

Thought about it and narrowed it down, when I saw the arcade game. It was May of 1972, I was at Virginia Beach, Virginia. And I located an article about the arcade machine itself... the arcade game was called Computer Space, but it was based on Spacewar.





Also, a short YouTube clip of the arcade machine gameplay. Note that this isn't what Spacewar looked like in it's original single player version, but it's similar.

[Daehawk]

Good Lord look how long her middle toe is!

[JetFred]

Middle toe? I don't understand anything going on with her foot, unless it's a really subtle reference to aliens.

[Kasey Chang]

I am definitely going retro... I'm replaying Freespace 1.

While the graphics are a bit primitive, and I had to download nGlide (the GLIDE 3DFX wrapper) for the game to work right in Win10, the game is just as I remembered... and a PITA to setup on PC. There are just too many F***ing buttons! You can target subsystems, turrets, bombs/torpedoes, arm multiple weapons (both primary and secondary), and just the targeting controls number in the DOZENS. Setting it up on the XBox360 controller is a bit of PITA also as it does NOT support using the left/right trigger as weapon triggers as it's got that as "analog" axis and it only supports 3 axis (up-down, left/right, and banking) even though I have FIVE axis on the reference controller. I am wondering if I should just forgo the joystick and use mouse and keyboard (or mouse and my Logitech G-board)

[Zarathud]

Great game. I liked it so much I created 2 missions in the Space Sim of the Year edition of FreeSpace 2 after helping create the community mission review site.

Mouse control works well, but you're in the same spot with using a second hand on the keyboard.

[Lorini]

TODAY! Cities Skylines Mass Transit released. Check. Oxygen Not Included went into EA with a big update. Check. Portal Knights Steam came out of Early Access. Check.

WTF?!!!!

[jztemple2]

TODAY! Cities Skylines Mass Transit released. Check. Oxygen Not Included went into EA with a big update. Check. Portal Knights Steam came out of Early Access. Check.

WTF?!!!!

Production Line went into early access today, also Flight Sim World as well.

[Rumpy]

Finished Jade Empire... Had to download a trainer. Looks like I got the wrong techniques and can't defeat my 3 evil clones. Phooey. Gave myself infinite focus so I can just go full Matrix and kick everybody's ass in bullet time.

It's interesting, and I realized I missed a couple folks in my playthrough. Oh well.

I think that's an easy thing to do, because I don't think the game really prepares you for it, and there are a lot of things that are easy to miss, sometimes because of the UI even. I think overall, it's a very clunky game. It's funny because there are are things that they would borrow outright for KOTOR.

[Kasey Chang]

RE: Jade Empire

There are WAY TOO MANY techniques (combat schools) that if you pick the wrong ones (and I did) I am basically sunk. I didn't get "area attack" moves like Storm Dragon. I put too many points on the weapon techniques which don't work on the advanced enemies and spirits. And the initial two techniques are kinda lame and too slow. Legendary strike wasn't bad, but the heavy strike was too slow.

[Daehawk]

Ive finished Jade Empire 3 or 4 times and picked different stuff each go. I dont recall a bad build.

[Kasey Chang]

Didn't pick anything with area damage was what sunk me.

[Kasey Chang]

Freespace -- tried to configure my G13, the built-in joystick started confusing the game and I can't control the craft with the Xbox 360 controller. Had to turn on mouse mode. Oh well.

Way too many targeting controls. Wonder how we got by back then?

Comparing Freespace reference card to, say, WC Prophecy reference card, to something modern like, say, SOL Exodus, we're just seeing fewer and fewer controls.

[JetFred]

As someone who has given Steam more money than my funeral will probably cost, I just want to say that I wish the desktop client wasn't so buggy.

[Smoove_B]

What buggy issues are you having? I don't remember the last time I've had issues with the STEAM client. Though maybe when you own 5K+ titles, things get weird.

[JetFred]

What buggy issues are you having? I don't remember the last time I've had issues with the STEAM client. Though maybe when you own 5K+ titles, things get weird.

Mostly how Community behaves when it goes down and comes back up. I don't know enough about it to say whether the client should handle traffic slowdowns and disconnects better than it does. For example, earlier I had the client open, and even though my web connection was fine, Steam online went down. The window regularly blurs and stretches as it thinks, and it would do that and still not come back online. When it reconnected, I tried to click a notification for a booster pack drop. The inventory failed to load, and when it did, it wouldn't show the notification to be cleared. I went to my library and found it had ditched all my categories and everything was back under "Games". I tried to close the client, and it got stuck cloud syncing. When this happens, if I wait long enough and restart the client, I get the categories back. And many times lately, when I open the client and it updates a few games, then it is so slow to respond to clicks that I have to restart it, after which it is fine. Often when I'm browsing the store or my library and switch back to a community window like the market, it says to login, then after a pause, it reloads the page and realizes I was already logged in. All of these things happen regularly. I've got several gigs of space free on all of my drives, and my RAM is enough to keep this from happening most of the time, so I have to think that intermittent problems are bugs in the client, or at least how it handles net slowdown.

Other issues with the store are that you can add a key and the store has all kinds of difficulty deciding the game is in your library now. Sometimes it removes it from the wishlist, sometimes it doesn't. You can view the store page and it doesn't say you own it, restart the client and it doesn't say you own it, restart the computer and the client and it sees I own it. Sometimes reloading the store page a few times is enough. A few times lately it has dropped the contents of my cart.

Is that enough?

[Smoove_B]

Huh. You're clearly a power user.

I have noticed when the Community stuff has problems, but I always attribute them to network issues with Valve or internet issues on my end. Rarely do they last long. I've never had my categories wiped, but every now and again my inventory gets wonky. Nothing is ever lost though, sometimes it's just a matter of refreshing it a few minutes later.

[JetFred]

It has been a while since I've had it happen, but at least two or three times I had trades of large numbers of cards get completely lost. I would email support, and they would reappear a day or two later, but whether it had anything to do with contacting support I have no idea.

But yes, 6424 (right this minute) games and >$950.00 net gain in trading card sales may occasionally contribute to my blips, like failure to pull up my game list from another profile, but it doesn't explain all of my daily encounters with goofiness.

It still isn't bad as Microsoft Outlook in Windows 10.

[Skinypupy]

Finished Jade Empire... Had to download a trainer. Looks like I got the wrong techniques and can't defeat my 3 evil clones. Phooey. Gave myself infinite focus so I can just go full Matrix and kick everybody's ass in bullet time.

It's interesting, and I realized I missed a couple folks in my playthrough. Oh well.

I think that's an easy thing to do, because I don't think the game really prepares you for it, and there are a lot of things that are easy to miss, sometimes because of the UI even. I think overall, it's a very clunky game. It's funny because there are are things that they would borrow outright for KOTOR.

I have a funny relationship with Bioware games. With the exception of the last Mass Effect, I have finished and thoroughly enjoyed every Bioware game. Once.

I have tried going back and playing through all of them a second time, and it just never seems to click. I get anywhere from 6-10 hours in, then simply wander away to play something else. This happened recently with Jade Empire, which is why I bring it up.

I don't know why it always happens, because a new playthrough can be vastly different when using a different class, gender, or making different decisions. For some reason, however, Bioware games just never seem to click with me a second time. The only one I've made it through twice was Mass Effect 2.

[Lorini]

There was a problem earlier with Steam today.

[Kasey Chang]

I was playing through Freespace 1, with NGlide, when I had an epiphany... WHY wasn't I playing this with FreeSpace Open (the open-source remake) with the enhanced FS2 Open Engine? The scaled up textures and visuals on my 1080p screen looks... bad. And mouse controls are horrible. I haven't checked how well it supports a gamepad, but the built-in mouse controls suck. So, downloads, downloads, and downloads.

[Daehawk]

Always used a joystick.

[Kasey Chang]

Ah, FSOpen is MUCH better than the original engine. Now it looks like a modern game! Someone even re-rendered the cutscenes and briefings to look right with modern resolutions. Too bad it won't read old savegames. But I'm not too far into the game, that's all right.

[Daehawk]

Still love that mission I think its called The Great Hunt from FS2.

I still like FS1 the best. I like its story of fighting the Vasudans then switching gears and joining them to fight even worse aliens.

[Zarathud]

Oh, I thought you were using FSOpen to play FreeSpace 1. FSOpen is an extended version of FreeSpace 2 which is an extended version of FreeSpace 1.

[Kasey Chang]

Oh, I was dumb enough to run the ORIGINAL exe (which required NGLIDE to work in Win10, and even then it can only scale up the original graphics, and looks like and old game blown up a bit) NOW I am using FSopen.

[Daehawk]

I think after completing all of them...Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4........that New Vegas is my favorite among them. I played it the longest and kept adding mods to do more stuff in it. I actually enjoyed roaming the wastes and kept it installed the longest.

[Kasey Chang]

Finished FS1 main campaign, playing Silent Threat Reborn (the community mod improved version).

Dang, some of these missions are HARD, and it's like "if you fail you fail the campaign" bad.

[KrishnaPrall]

I think after completing all of them...Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4........that New Vegas is my favorite among them. I played it the longest and kept adding mods to do more stuff in it. I actually enjoyed roaming the wastes and kept it installed the longest.

To tell the truth, I don't like the setting of New Vegas. Those deserted western... nah. But also I can't disagree that it's the best game of the series Especially in terms of the main story.
To tell about Fallout 4, it's very good in terms of setting, I really enjoyed wandering about in Commonwealth. Also weapon customisation was pretty good. Though not perfect if we talk about balance.

[Blackhawk]

I like Fallout 3 a little better. Invariably in these conversations, the 'best game' seems to come down to whether you play for story or exploration. I'm an immersion player, so the exploration is a high priority for me.

Fallout: New Vegas had a better story and better pacing, but Fallout 3 had better exploration. The world itself was just more interesting. Fallout 4, for some reason, didn't quite achieve that 'one more ruin' feel that Fallout 3 had. I honestly think it was due to the settlement system which turned every object into something valuable. It turned exploration from sorting for treasures to vacuuming up everything, which got tedious.