figmentPez
Staff member
What, you mean you can't beat it in under an hour like these guys? Git gud!
This is a tool assisted speed run that abuses glitches found in an earlier version of the game. Here's a video explaining.
fade
Staff member
This is my biggest complaint about both portal games. The puzzles are fun, but I wish they had an option to make them harder.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yesterday I spent about 7 hours playing Empyrion: Galactic Survival.
It's basically Space Engineers but closer to minecraft than... whatever Space Engineers is close to. Its building and crafting mechanic is much simpler, and it stresses survival a lot more - in addition to SE's energy and oxygen needs, you also have to get food and deal with illness (venomous bites and food poisoning). There's no rotors or pistons or anything like that that I can find.
The planet you start on is MUCH smaller than a Space Engineers planet - it's actually possible to outrun the sun, if you keep running west, the sun might never set on you
Kinda made me think of the season 2 finale of Rick and Morty.
It's still got a bit of a learning curve to it, and while the interface is somewhat arcane, it's not as hard to learn as Space Engineers - though how much of that is because I've already put 600 hours into SE, I don't know. It does let you put things directly from inventory into your hotkeys, so that's a step toward intuitiveness I guess.
I haven't gotten to the endgame (obviously) and I hear it is lacking, and I've also heard that multiplayer is broke as hell. But if you can get it for less than 10 bucks, and you like being challenged to survive in a hostile wilderness (but, you know, with ray guns and other sci-fi tech), it's worth a look.
It's basically Space Engineers but closer to minecraft than... whatever Space Engineers is close to. Its building and crafting mechanic is much simpler, and it stresses survival a lot more - in addition to SE's energy and oxygen needs, you also have to get food and deal with illness (venomous bites and food poisoning). There's no rotors or pistons or anything like that that I can find.
The planet you start on is MUCH smaller than a Space Engineers planet - it's actually possible to outrun the sun, if you keep running west, the sun might never set on you
Kinda made me think of the season 2 finale of Rick and Morty.It's still got a bit of a learning curve to it, and while the interface is somewhat arcane, it's not as hard to learn as Space Engineers - though how much of that is because I've already put 600 hours into SE, I don't know. It does let you put things directly from inventory into your hotkeys, so that's a step toward intuitiveness I guess.
I haven't gotten to the endgame (obviously) and I hear it is lacking, and I've also heard that multiplayer is broke as hell. But if you can get it for less than 10 bucks, and you like being challenged to survive in a hostile wilderness (but, you know, with ray guns and other sci-fi tech), it's worth a look.
The most difficult part is the Portal 2 co-op, but only because you have to work with another person
.
Depends on how your marriage is going, I'd imagine.
I played through co-op the day it came out with my husband, and there was lots of both oops deaths and sorry, not sorry deaths. Amazingly we are still married.
Yeah, but you guys actually finished the co-op, right? Because that's not a thing that happened for usI played through co-op the day it came out with my husband, and there was lots of both oops deaths and sorry, not sorry deaths. Amazingly we are still married.
. It got too difficult for her. Would've been more difficult if I'd killed her on purpose more than I killed her by accident.Look, we both did it, in the name of achievements.
In any case, finishing Portal 2's single player made me realize why I was finding things less than intuitive this time through. I actually died a couple times during the final sequence out of confusion; never happened before.
Playing nothing but the Souls games the last six months got me stuck in that kind of game. On the plus side, I got really good at it. On the downside though, I think my mental processes narrowed to it. So I want to mix it up a bit more.
I got Freedom Planet and if you're someone who misses the days of good Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Genesis, they made this game for you. You can do the full cutscene version of the story, or play Classic mode and just play through the stages, only seeing what story stuff would happen in-stage, much like old Sonic games. There are some different mechanics, but they work really well, and the levels are interesting and fun, with more than one path to the end.
Playing nothing but the Souls games the last six months got me stuck in that kind of game. On the plus side, I got really good at it. On the downside though, I think my mental processes narrowed to it. So I want to mix it up a bit more.
I got Freedom Planet and if you're someone who misses the days of good Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Genesis, they made this game for you. You can do the full cutscene version of the story, or play Classic mode and just play through the stages, only seeing what story stuff would happen in-stage, much like old Sonic games. There are some different mechanics, but they work really well, and the levels are interesting and fun, with more than one path to the end.
Replaying Bioshock Infinite. Regardless of my current opinions on its creator, the game itself is still an experience. This time I'm trying to get all the voxophones, so I'm hoping none of them are in difficult bullshit places. Without looking at a guide, I've already found several non-voxohpone details and secrets that I missed the first couple times I played this. Also getting my shield broken less in combat since I'm playing more defensive guerilla tactics.
I thank Dark Souls for these advancements in my gaming patience and perception
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I thank Dark Souls for these advancements in my gaming patience and perception
.
Finished Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward. That was...twisty. My favorite part was going online to make sure I didn't miss anything, and finding forums of people complaining bitterly about the cliffhanger ending and the fact that the third one will never get made. The one that comes out June 28th. Waiting to play games FTW.
Moving onto The Room 3 until I finally drift back towards my Xbox.
Moving onto The Room 3 until I finally drift back towards my Xbox.
fade
Staff member
The Secret World
I wanted to like this, and I guess it's fairly engaging. But it just feels like your standard off-the-shelf MMORPG to me. All MMs nowadays just seem to be single player games with really odd, non-aggressive, mute "NPCs" bouncing around everywhere. The opening zombie scene is interesting enough to keep me playing. It's funny though--this game bragged about no "gather X of Y" quests, but that seems to be all I'm doing. I mean, they have a little more story meat on them, but it's still the same. Still, there's a good bit of unexpected humor in the dialogue, and tons of movie references. The leveling up goes almost too fast, and very few of the mobs are challenging. I'll play a bit longer.
I wanted to like this, and I guess it's fairly engaging. But it just feels like your standard off-the-shelf MMORPG to me. All MMs nowadays just seem to be single player games with really odd, non-aggressive, mute "NPCs" bouncing around everywhere. The opening zombie scene is interesting enough to keep me playing. It's funny though--this game bragged about no "gather X of Y" quests, but that seems to be all I'm doing. I mean, they have a little more story meat on them, but it's still the same. Still, there's a good bit of unexpected humor in the dialogue, and tons of movie references. The leveling up goes almost too fast, and very few of the mobs are challenging. I'll play a bit longer.
You'll get through Kingsmouth pretty fast. Things start to slow down in Savage Coast and Blue Mountain.
There's not really a level system, you just gain ap to unlock abilities in the wheel. The inner wheel is all basic stuff and takes very little AP to unlock, the outer wheel is where you will specialize, and takes considerably more. If you want to track how strong your character is by a "level" then it's your item level you want to look at.
The opening area is pretty easy, but get ready for a significant jump in the next area. IIRC even the end of the first area, when you start battling fishmen, gets pretty difficult compared to the zombies.
Most people quit the game when they meet the A'kab.
Pretty sure that's their full name.
fade
Staff member
Yeah, I get that, but that's just another name for the same thing to me. A game with levels tells you you can buy one 1st tier power, this one gives you one AP and gives you a bunch of low level powers you have to buy to progress to the bigger powers. Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to.
"Fries".
Don't knock the low-level powers. Some of them (like Escalation and Fire-At-Will) are among the best powers in their trees. The devs simply make you buy the inner wheel first to ensure you know how powers work, period.
GasBandit
Staff member
Continuing on with Empyrion: Galactic Survival -
Riding around in my ghetto hovertank, I managed to scrounge enough resources to make a self-sufficient base with defense turrets and grow enough food to fill two refrigerators. But the natural resources aren't present to build the second tier stuff - things like jump drives and better constructors that need less micromanagement and drills that do their own resource collection. So to get that stuff, I have to go raiding.
There are aliens on the planet, too, you see. I think they're called espilons. They're the ones who keep sending out the asshole drones that sneak up on me and shoot at me when I'm out and about, and occasionally they also make probing attacks against my base, though my 30mm turrets shred them like nothing. So, unlike the local, native, spear-wielding aliens, I don't feel it a breach of ethics if I were to say, kick in the door on one of their bases and gun them down.
So, I built a small fighter vessel. It's just got the bare essentials (and by bare essentials I mean cockpit, generator, fuel tank, RCS, thrusters in all 6 directions, oxygen tanks and oxygen dispenser, ammo box and small cargo container), plus I stuck a mini-fridge inside it on the off chance I get stranded or shot down somewhere out of reach of my base and I get hungry. I arm it with twin forward-facing 15mm miniguns, and wrap the whole thing in a single layer of light armor. Mobility is going to be my main defense. I hope.
Well, turns out the small vessel RCS system is WAY more powerful than it needs to be, and the freakin controls are squirrely and overcompensate to all hell. Just getting to learn to fly the thing I nearly smash into a mountain, and then into the bay near my base.
I manage to finally get a handle on it, so I go over to make trouble with my nearest neighbor, a point of interest my computer has labeled "Epsilon spaceport" which started lobbing rockets at me previously when I got too close. The difficulty with controls makes it a little challenging, but after 12 or 15 strafing runs I manage to finally gun down the rocket turrets, and then use the miniguns to blast open the door by the landing pad.
Inside I find 3 or 4 aliens, armed and angry. But the AI on the NPCs in this game is really, really basic and awful. I easily manage to gun down all of them without suffering any injury. I take the elevator down, and there I destroy a defense turret and kill 4 more aliens. Then I'm confronted with two doors I can't open, and my assault rifle doesn't seem to be powerful enough to break them open. So I decide it's time to gather the spoils and leave. Checking the cargo containers and the alien corpses, I'm slightly chagrined to find most of my plunder consists of canned goods and antibiotics, both of which I already have plenty. As I return to my fighter, I see alien troop transports landing outside, and the aliens getting out of them look bigger than the ones I'd killed previously. I take a few experimental potshots at them, but they don't seem as quick to die... so I decide best to cut and run.
After nearly crashing into another mountain range, I manage to coax my fighter down onto the landing pad at home and unload the booty. I refuel, manufacture more ammunition, then decide to try picking over the bones of a wreck I saw near the spaceport I just raided, labeled by the computer as "MS Titan wreck - rear section." I didn't know it at the time, but the game's wiki tells me after the fact that the MS Titan was the ship that brought me here, and from which I escaped in a lifepod.
The wreck is very large, even this one section of it (and there are three sections apparently) is at least six times the size of the base I've built. There's one drone hanging around it, so I quickly and easily shoot it down, then land on the broadest flat surface on top of the wreck that I can find, turn on my jetpack, and go scavenging.
The pickings are actually better here than in the alien spaceport. No sign of survivors - or even corpses - inside the ship, but the cargo containers have some of the resources I'm missing - notably, neodymium ore. However, this alone is not enough to build the equipment I want, so I'll have to find another source. While I'm poking around down in the wreck, I start to hear gunfire, and climb out to find another drone has arrived and has been shooting at my parked fighter, blowing off the dorsal thruster and destroying several armor blocks. It's tricky to draw a bead on the thing as it weaves around the towers of the wrecked capital ship, but finally I manage to shoot it down with my assault rifle, then inspect the damage to the fighter.
All in all it could be a lot worse. The dorsal (top) thruster is completely gone, but everything else is fixable. And fortunately, in a gravity well, the top thruster isn't 100% critical because, as long as I keep the thing right side up, gravity will do the job of lowering the ship when I want to go down. But this means no barrel rolls or complicated maneuverings, so I figure I'd best head back to base for repairs. I manage to limp there without running into anything, unload the salvage, and repair the fighter.
So, my next step is to leave the planet and see if I can find the resources I need offworld. Getting off the planet is much easier in Empyrion than it is in Space Engineers - it's practically trivial. My fighter craft does the job just fine. I just need to remember to keep my helmet on so I can breathe. Once I'm in space, I note my computer has marked the locations of several resource-bearing asteroids and that the planet has a moon. Well, of course it has a moon, I've seen the moon every night since I arrived... I just guess I never really got around to thinking about it as a destination. So I check out the asteroids, and note the presence of an orbital base that also shoots rockets at me if I get close, and more drones toddling around in the asteroid field that rings the planet. I get into a fight with one that is armed with plasma weapons, but still manage to defeat it with little effort. Checking the wreckage, my disappointment at finding no useable weapons is very quickly reversed by finding several components that are exactly what I need to build the devices and equipment I want.
I take them home, build myself a T2 hand drill, then head back up into space and get myself about a thousand units of Sathium, whatever that is (but apparently I need it), explore the moon a bit and find it has good places to mine neodymium. Things are looking up. But there's still one kind of material I don't have a source for, it is called "Zacosium." But, I figure, why bother making my own when I can just blow up enemy drones and take the parts I need? So that's what I did.
Back at base, I process the Sathium ore, build an advanced constructor, rearm, and refuel. I give the "front" section of the MS Titan wreck a once-over, but pickings are pretty slim there. Mostly simple components I can already manufacture myself in large numbers.
I think the next item on my list is to go kick in the door on that space station and see what they've got that needs to be defended by 5 missile turrets.
Riding around in my ghetto hovertank, I managed to scrounge enough resources to make a self-sufficient base with defense turrets and grow enough food to fill two refrigerators. But the natural resources aren't present to build the second tier stuff - things like jump drives and better constructors that need less micromanagement and drills that do their own resource collection. So to get that stuff, I have to go raiding.
There are aliens on the planet, too, you see. I think they're called espilons. They're the ones who keep sending out the asshole drones that sneak up on me and shoot at me when I'm out and about, and occasionally they also make probing attacks against my base, though my 30mm turrets shred them like nothing. So, unlike the local, native, spear-wielding aliens, I don't feel it a breach of ethics if I were to say, kick in the door on one of their bases and gun them down.
So, I built a small fighter vessel. It's just got the bare essentials (and by bare essentials I mean cockpit, generator, fuel tank, RCS, thrusters in all 6 directions, oxygen tanks and oxygen dispenser, ammo box and small cargo container), plus I stuck a mini-fridge inside it on the off chance I get stranded or shot down somewhere out of reach of my base and I get hungry. I arm it with twin forward-facing 15mm miniguns, and wrap the whole thing in a single layer of light armor. Mobility is going to be my main defense. I hope.
Well, turns out the small vessel RCS system is WAY more powerful than it needs to be, and the freakin controls are squirrely and overcompensate to all hell. Just getting to learn to fly the thing I nearly smash into a mountain, and then into the bay near my base.
I manage to finally get a handle on it, so I go over to make trouble with my nearest neighbor, a point of interest my computer has labeled "Epsilon spaceport" which started lobbing rockets at me previously when I got too close. The difficulty with controls makes it a little challenging, but after 12 or 15 strafing runs I manage to finally gun down the rocket turrets, and then use the miniguns to blast open the door by the landing pad.
Inside I find 3 or 4 aliens, armed and angry. But the AI on the NPCs in this game is really, really basic and awful. I easily manage to gun down all of them without suffering any injury. I take the elevator down, and there I destroy a defense turret and kill 4 more aliens. Then I'm confronted with two doors I can't open, and my assault rifle doesn't seem to be powerful enough to break them open. So I decide it's time to gather the spoils and leave. Checking the cargo containers and the alien corpses, I'm slightly chagrined to find most of my plunder consists of canned goods and antibiotics, both of which I already have plenty. As I return to my fighter, I see alien troop transports landing outside, and the aliens getting out of them look bigger than the ones I'd killed previously. I take a few experimental potshots at them, but they don't seem as quick to die... so I decide best to cut and run.
After nearly crashing into another mountain range, I manage to coax my fighter down onto the landing pad at home and unload the booty. I refuel, manufacture more ammunition, then decide to try picking over the bones of a wreck I saw near the spaceport I just raided, labeled by the computer as "MS Titan wreck - rear section." I didn't know it at the time, but the game's wiki tells me after the fact that the MS Titan was the ship that brought me here, and from which I escaped in a lifepod.
The wreck is very large, even this one section of it (and there are three sections apparently) is at least six times the size of the base I've built. There's one drone hanging around it, so I quickly and easily shoot it down, then land on the broadest flat surface on top of the wreck that I can find, turn on my jetpack, and go scavenging.
The pickings are actually better here than in the alien spaceport. No sign of survivors - or even corpses - inside the ship, but the cargo containers have some of the resources I'm missing - notably, neodymium ore. However, this alone is not enough to build the equipment I want, so I'll have to find another source. While I'm poking around down in the wreck, I start to hear gunfire, and climb out to find another drone has arrived and has been shooting at my parked fighter, blowing off the dorsal thruster and destroying several armor blocks. It's tricky to draw a bead on the thing as it weaves around the towers of the wrecked capital ship, but finally I manage to shoot it down with my assault rifle, then inspect the damage to the fighter.
All in all it could be a lot worse. The dorsal (top) thruster is completely gone, but everything else is fixable. And fortunately, in a gravity well, the top thruster isn't 100% critical because, as long as I keep the thing right side up, gravity will do the job of lowering the ship when I want to go down. But this means no barrel rolls or complicated maneuverings, so I figure I'd best head back to base for repairs. I manage to limp there without running into anything, unload the salvage, and repair the fighter.
So, my next step is to leave the planet and see if I can find the resources I need offworld. Getting off the planet is much easier in Empyrion than it is in Space Engineers - it's practically trivial. My fighter craft does the job just fine. I just need to remember to keep my helmet on so I can breathe. Once I'm in space, I note my computer has marked the locations of several resource-bearing asteroids and that the planet has a moon. Well, of course it has a moon, I've seen the moon every night since I arrived... I just guess I never really got around to thinking about it as a destination. So I check out the asteroids, and note the presence of an orbital base that also shoots rockets at me if I get close, and more drones toddling around in the asteroid field that rings the planet. I get into a fight with one that is armed with plasma weapons, but still manage to defeat it with little effort. Checking the wreckage, my disappointment at finding no useable weapons is very quickly reversed by finding several components that are exactly what I need to build the devices and equipment I want.
I take them home, build myself a T2 hand drill, then head back up into space and get myself about a thousand units of Sathium, whatever that is (but apparently I need it), explore the moon a bit and find it has good places to mine neodymium. Things are looking up. But there's still one kind of material I don't have a source for, it is called "Zacosium." But, I figure, why bother making my own when I can just blow up enemy drones and take the parts I need? So that's what I did.
Back at base, I process the Sathium ore, build an advanced constructor, rearm, and refuel. I give the "front" section of the MS Titan wreck a once-over, but pickings are pretty slim there. Mostly simple components I can already manufacture myself in large numbers.
I think the next item on my list is to go kick in the door on that space station and see what they've got that needs to be defended by 5 missile turrets.
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Finished Fallout 4: Far Harbor. Aside from the REALLY, REALLY boring block puzzles you have to do at a single point, I rather enjoyed it. Far Harbor is a great setting, it has some real challenge, and you tons to do. Plus with multiple different endings, it has good replay value. Definitely worth the cash if you didn't pick up the Season Ticket.
Finished Bioshock Infinite. For some reason the ending got me more than the last couple times and I got teary-eyed.
I gotta say, though the original game is the masterpiece, Infinite has a hell of a narrative.
(Also vigors > plasmids. I love knocking guys off of Columbia, though each work in their context since the original is more suspense and Infinite is more an adventure.)
I gotta say, though the original game is the masterpiece, Infinite has a hell of a narrative.
(Also vigors > plasmids. I love knocking guys off of Columbia, though each work in their context since the original is more suspense and Infinite is more an adventure.)
Hey! Hey Zero Esc! That means you'll go on to Infinite's DLC story, right? Right, Zero Esc? Hello? Hey, where ya going?
I want everyone to know that what's about to happen is Nick's fault.
Elizabeth: “I see all the doors, they’re open, and through one of them I see … him.”
Jack: “Hey there, folks.”
Ken Levine:
Fanfic bullshit. I was struggling to formulate my thoughts at the end of that clusterfuck when my wife took the words out of my mouth. "That was stupid." And really, that's all that needed to be said.
From someone else's much longer post:
"They basically took one of the most interesting characters from Infinite; from the entire series really; and turned her and the other characters into a footnote. Bioshock Infinite said “there are infinite possibilities”, this DLC comes right back and says “no we were just kidding”. It was pure fan service made worse by the fact that it wasn’t needed at all.”
From another longer post:
"Even as it desperately tried to connect the worlds of Rapture and Columbia, Burial at Sea sucked the life and spirit out of both."
In a world where Bioshock 2 exists, Burial at Sea is still the worst thing in this franchise.
X
Jack: “Hey there, folks.”
Ken Levine:
Fanfic bullshit. I was struggling to formulate my thoughts at the end of that clusterfuck when my wife took the words out of my mouth. "That was stupid." And really, that's all that needed to be said.
From someone else's much longer post:
"They basically took one of the most interesting characters from Infinite; from the entire series really; and turned her and the other characters into a footnote. Bioshock Infinite said “there are infinite possibilities”, this DLC comes right back and says “no we were just kidding”. It was pure fan service made worse by the fact that it wasn’t needed at all.”
From another longer post:
"Even as it desperately tried to connect the worlds of Rapture and Columbia, Burial at Sea sucked the life and spirit out of both."
In a world where Bioshock 2 exists, Burial at Sea is still the worst thing in this franchise.
X
AND ANOTHER THING:
Fuck Ken Levine.
Fuck Ken Levine.
GasBandit
Staff member
I loved being a big daddy. I loved drill slam. I didn't care in the least that the entire game was one great big escort quest, I really had fun.
