Octopus Overlords

I just watched my son making himself a Hot Pocket while waiting in a queue to get into his favorite online game after a big content patch released.

As I got off Discord, it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

I hate that fucking song.

Max Peck wrote: ↑Sat May 08, 2021 3:41 pm

The game looks fun, but...

Age of Sigmar. *shudder* Games Workshop are infamous trademark bullies, and this is GW at its worst.

Remember, this is the company that wants to try and enforce 'space marine' as a trademark, and that tried to sue a small business for hundreds of millions on infringement claims because they made things like shoulder pads that fit on GW miniatures (no proprietary connections in play.) They lost hundreds of claims in that suit. They launched Age of Sigmar two years later. It was primarily because they wanted to rename everything with names they could trademark (for example, they couldn't copyright 'dwarves', so they gave them names like 'Kharadron Overlords'), and make everything physically distinctive enough to count as trademarked to prevent third parties from selling 'compatible' products.

I love GW's world (well, the Old World) and buy third party games like this sometimes, but GW as a whole (and the very nature of Age of Sigmar) just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

has anyone here actually played this one and have an opinion on it? it sounds like it's an evolution puzzle game - you set the terrain, weather and such on your world, and specific creatures will appear/evolve. other creatures will appear/evolve based on the presence of the above + the previous creatures that emerge, and so on throughout time. developed by the guy who created the Harvest Moon series

Im trying to play the last Splinter Cell game. Ive never played these. But the controls are driving me crazy and getting me killed. I cant change them. Who doesn't allow controller changes these days?? Its a 2013 game. I want to make them the same as GTA. But nope. I go to change guns and toss a grenade. I go to take cover and I jump over the thing. I want to change guns but again I toss a nade. I try to run and something else goes wrong. Theres no getting used to it.

the Splinter Cell games really are optimized for controller, not keyboard/mouse

Yep. Playing them with KB/M means you're basically imitating controller functions, some of which are vital for gameplay (like movement speed.)

ok, re-reading i see you do seem to be using a controller - missed that the first time. if you're really truly insistent on changing the controller mapping, you'll have several options. if this is through Steam, use Big Picture mode to fully customize the controller outside the game itself. if it's from Ubi - or the DVD installation media - then use reWASD: https://www.rewasd.com/joystick-mapper (which you can also use for those other games that you say do not have remappable controls)

HAHA I remember when I first started playing FPS I was using a joystick, and had to regrettably force myself to switch to KB/M, though I hated it. I really enjoyed squeezing that trigger, but I was getting pwned.

Jaymann wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 1:36 am HAHA I remember when I first started playing FPS I was using a joystick, and had to regrettably force myself to switch to KB/M, though I hated it. I really enjoyed squeezing that trigger, but I was getting pwned.

Likewise. My first FPS was Unreal, and I played it with a joystick. Half-Life forced me to switch to keyboard/mouse because I couldn't pull off the squat-jump on the joystick. I used the numpad. It was Rainbow Six (1998) that got me switched over to the main portion of the keyboard, mostly because there were a crap-ton of keybinds and the numpad just didn't have enough buttons in easy reach. I was having to reach back and forth, and that just didn't work. So I switched to ESDF. I'm a trained typist, so putting my fingers on the typing keys made sense (as I know where to find every key by muscle memory from that position, and because pre-voice it made it easy to type into chat windows quickly.) I knew WASD existed, but I didn't (and still don't) see any real benefit to it. It's only a standard because one famous Quake player (Dennis "Thresh" Fong) used it, which led to a lot of fans using it, then a couple of high-profile games setting it as the default. I stuck with ESDF for about 20 years, and still consider to be the best option.

But I finally switched to WASD. Not because it is better. Not because it is faster. Not because of better button placement. It was because Bethesda are lazy-ass developers. Or rather because they were the last - and worst - in a line of lazy developers. Too many games assume that you want WASD and hard code it into their games, requiring third party programs to bypass. It was Fallout 4 that finally broke me, mainly because while they made the movement keys rebindable for world movement, they hard-coded them for other things (rotating objects, construction mode, etc.) That meant that if you rebound the keys for movement, you'd have to switch your hands back and forth depending on the activity you were doing. Bethesda figured that they had the game functional, and that was good enough. Again, lazy developers. Anyway, the amount of remapping software acrobatics to make ESDF work in Fallout 4 was insane. It involved whole keyboard profiles for each activity, then using macros to switch between profiles, and if you needed to use the console to get past a bug? Yep, your keyboard was scrambled.

So, after 20 years I finally let the lazy developers win. I got tired of fighting in order to use good controls and just learned to use WASD.

hitbyambulance wrote:the Splinter Cell games really are optimized for controller, not keyboard/mouse

I played the first several Splinter Cell games on PC using keyboard/mouse and it worked fine. The default setup back then used WASD to control movement direction, and scrolling the mouse wheel to adjust movement speed. It's a system that worked pretty well at the time, but I'm not sure how it might translate to more recent games in the series that play at a much different pace.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 8:44 am So, after 20 years I finally let the lazy developers win.

For the record it is NOT the developers. I know you aren't really speaking that specifically but it still bothers me to see it written that way. It also isn't laziness. It is time and priorities. The devs aren't in control of either. The guys with the checkbook are.

For games that will let me, I go with WQSE and R for reload. I find that rest position much more comfortable than "shooting the bird" with WASD, though can use WASD in a pinch.

coopasonic wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 11:08 am

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 8:44 am So, after 20 years I finally let the lazy developers win.

For the record it is NOT the developers. I know you aren't really speaking that specifically but it still bothers me to see it written that way. It also isn't laziness. It is time and priorities. The devs aren't in control of either. The guys with the checkbook are.

Well, somebody, somewhere decided that making it have one option for that function was good enough and never worth fixing, even though it is a function that is always considered a necessity on PC games, and always causes many players problems when omitted, including many left handed mousers and people with accessibility problems.

I don't know who was responsible for that. It may have been the developers (Bethesda) or it may have been the publisher (other Bethesda), but if basic functionality wasn't a priority, then somewhere, somebody failed. Repeatedly. Because it was also a problem for players in Skyrim before that. And it was also a problem in Fallout 76 after that.

If it isn't laziness, then it's not caring enough to fix an issue that only affects the non-primary platform. Either way, it's shitty.

Yeah I am not in any way saying you are wrong. I am just saying when you use the word developers, I think of the folks writing the code, the actual software developers, which I am fairly sure isn't your exact intent.

Control remapping isn't something one guy just decides to do as it impacts several facets of the project from the menu UI, to the configuration persistence, to the controller interfaces, to potential gameplay implications and all the parts in between.

I use it as a collective term for the entire development team from the producers/director on down. Obviously not every person in that category is responsible (the guy in charge of bump-mapping super mutant crotches didn't handle the controls, for instance), and the people furthest down likely didn't have the prerogative to decide to change it. But somewhere, probably in between Todd Howard and Bob the Bumpmapper, someone decided it wasn't worth worrying about, and somebody else agreed with them.

Those are the people I'm mocking.

Speaking of Rainbow 6, Blackhawk, I miss the early days when things were slow, deliberate and tactical. Nowadays, R6 is fast-paced like any other team-based shooter, and I don't recognize the series anymore. There was something special in the tension created in its deliberate pacing that you just don't see anymore. I had a group of friends I'd regularly play with, and we'd have a blast hunting each other via last man standing, and the tense atmosphere of knowing someone could silently come up behind you was amazing. It made for some fun nights. We had a guy in our group who would almost always fumble grenades at his feet leading to lots of laughs.

Rumpy wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 6:17 pm Speaking of Rainbow 6, Blackhawk, I miss the early days when things were slow, deliberate and tactical. Nowadays, R6 is fast-paced like any other team-based shooter, and I don't recognize the series anymore. There was something special in the tension created in its deliberate pacing that you just don't see anymore. I had a group of friends I'd regularly play with, and we'd have a blast hunting each other via last man standing, and the tense atmosphere of knowing someone could silently come up behind you was amazing. It made for some fun nights. We had a guy in our group who would almost always fumble grenades at his feet leading to lots of laughs.

+1

Back in the 1990s I never expected to see a game announcement saying "Game will release in the fall of 2022"...that would have been SO far away to me.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Thu May 20, 2021 7:09 pm Back in the 1990s I never expected to see a game announcement saying "Game will release in the fall of 2022"...that would have been SO far away to me.

What about Duke Nukem Forever?

That's a game I think most would rather forget.

Noita is turning into the new Binding of Isaac for me. it's definitely got staying power, and it never ceases to be fun to play. the environment really feels like a next-generation leap for the whole old-school 'side-scrolling platforming' type of game.

Anyone know who StrictOtter80 or rshred9 are on Epic? (We don't have an Epic names thread that I could find.)

Finished GTA V! What a ride. I even let the entire 45 minutes of credits roll. Ive never let credits play ever but this game was so damn cool that after years of off and on play I figured it earned the right. What I didn't expect is what I found in Trevors trailers when I got home.

I chose option C btw to finish the game on. Loved it.

My psych report

Damn, I thought I had finished all of the game but I don't remember the psych report.

It shows up after the credits. You then enter back into the game as Trevor and get that surprise in your home. And then it seems it is just open to you to do what ya want..I guess...gotta do the new mission now for you know who..if ya finish the game!

So I finally got around to adding my game services to the GOG launcher to try and get some semblance of order to things and it turns out that when all the duplicates had been sorted and accounted for I apparently own no less than 2,524 games. That's about a thousand more than I knew about, and it doesn't even include scattered services that aren't supported by GOG like the Rockstar Launcher or Bethesda.net (If that even still exists?). I believe my backlog just about quadrupled.

There's a thread for that.

Looks like 2K may have the next launcher. Wonder how many we're going to end up with before the fad plays out?

https://www.resetera.com/threads/2k-add ... ce.433820/

I was looking through my old gaming notepad and found an IP address labeled Zaxxon's UT2004 server

Finished Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance this afternoon. It absolutely requires a ton of nostalgia to enjoy (and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who didn't love the original), but is quite a fun game if you come in with those rose colored glasses. It's as basic an ARPG as it gets, but has a ton of character in an old-school PS2 sort of way.

Coming to PC later this year...

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Fri May 04, 2018 9:49 pm So, from the last month's Humble Bundle - Moon Hunters -- big thumbs up. Never heard of it before being part of the bundle, but it's (their words) rogue-like RPG-ish (increasing Jet Fred's difficulty in categorizing games). I know with so many keys floating around games tend to get lost in the shuffle, but I really enjoyed the time I spent with it earlier this evening. Definitely worth checking out, IMHO.

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 1:22 am ...
forgot Moon Hunters. the nephews aren't allowed to play overly-violent games, so this works as a Diablo-esque for them.

about three years after introducing them to this game, they still request to play this whenever we're staying at the same place. we've 'completed' it many times now, but still haven't made much progress on getting the _good_ ending. tomorrow we're going to attempt to complete the Endless Arena mode in order to try to see if that would help... i don't think it will.

Skinypupy wrote: ↑Mon May 31, 2021 6:37 pm Finished Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance this afternoon. It absolutely requires a ton of nostalgia to enjoy (and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who didn't love the original), but is quite a fun game if you come in with those rose colored glasses. It's as basic an ARPG as it gets, but has a ton of character in an old-school PS2 sort of way.

A quick note to anyone who might play this. The Onyx Tower is the final level of the game, and you will not have access to a vendor to sell any gear once you enter. Once you finish it, the credits roll.

So don't do what I did and spent the last 90 minutes of the game re-arranging your inventory and pumping skill points into abilities that increase the amount you can carry, just so you can hold onto all those cool weapons and armor dropping left and right that are worth 50K-90K gold. You'll never get a chance to sell them. Just leave anything you won't actively use on the ground and keep moving...it'll save you a bunch of time.

There is a rumor making the rounds that Firaxis is working on an XCOM-style Marvel title. I would buy that.

Oh wow, that would likely be a Day One purchase for me. I hope it's true!

EDIT: Unless it's a Epic exclusive. Then I will rage (pointlessly).

An RTS Marvel game? I usually think of armies when I think RTS. For this, I envision something more like Freedom Force or Baldur's Gate - small(ish) team.

Hopefully, pause-able.

X-Com style would be turn based.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Thu Jun 03, 2021 7:20 pm X-Com style would be turn based.

Well, there was X-Com: Apocalypse, I suppose. Although the real-time combat wasn't great, which is probably why they haven't revisited that idea.