Video Game News and Miscellany

Null

Null

Saw a list of "Most Disappointing Games of 2016" and while I haven't played any of them, just from Let's Plays, Dunkey, and discussions on here, there are three that immediately stand out.

1) No Man's Sky. I called it "this year's SPORE" before it came out, and that's basically what it was.

2) Tom Clancy's The Division: Take the monochromatic ambiance of a Modern Warfare game, add in half-assed RPG elements so that even the lowest mook becomes a bullet sponge, make it massively online, then make it so that players physically block each other from interacting with things so that you have to fucking queue up for quests and objectives.

3) The Last Guardian: It would have been an astonishing game in 2010. But as gamers discovered back in 2001 with Black & White, having every single objective in the game rely on a creature that only occasionally listens to you tends to get really fucking annoying.
 
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Frank

Frank

Null said:
Saw a list of "Most Disappointing Games of 2016" and while I haven't played any of them, just from Let's Plays, Dunkey, and discussions on here, there are three that immediately stand out.

1) No Man's Sky. I called it "this year's SPORE" before it came out, and that's basically what it was.

2) Tom Clancy's The Division: Take the monochromatic ambiance of a Modern Warfare game, add in half-assed RPG elements so that even the lowest mook becomes a bullet sponge, make it massively online, then make it so that players physically block each other from interacting with things so that you have to fucking queue up for quests and objectives.

3) The Last Guardian: It would have been an astonishing game in 2010. But as gamers discovered back in 2001 with Black & White, having every single objective in the game rely on a creature that only occasionally listens to you tends to get really fucking annoying.
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Even people who didn't like the mechanics of The Last Guardian seem to be massively emotionally invested in it from the people I've listened to talk about it.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/the-last-guardian

Both critic reviews and user reviews are mostly positive. I don't know how that could be construed as Most Disappointing.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Surprised he's got one up already.
Really the division between reviewers seems to be whether they form a bond with the virtual creature or find it a frustrating pile of pixels.

--Patrick
 
Null

Null

Frank said:
Even people who didn't like the mechanics of The Last Guardian seem to be massively emotionally invested in it from the people I've listened to talk about it.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/the-last-guardian

Both critic reviews and user reviews are mostly positive. I don't know how that could be construed as Most Disappointing.
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Yeah, and I'm sure that those people loved ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, too.

When you spent half your playing time HOPING that the creature you need to do everything understands your impossibly vague instructions on an ill-defined task, it kind of doesn't matter how beautiful the game is.

Also that trotty dance the little fucker does looks stupid.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

PatrThom said:
Surprised he's got one up already.
Really the division between reviewers seems to be whether they form a bond with the virtual creature or find it a frustrating pile of pixels.

--Patrick
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The game is definitely flawed, and I can understand if people hate it, but I love the game. Full disclosure for @Null's sake, I enjoyed Ico and Shadow of the Colossus as well.

The Last Guardian I view as an excellent piece of video game art. It can be frustrating at times, but whether you enjoy it depends on if you're going to view that frustration as bad game design, or if you're going to view that frustration as the game. And I truly think that is what they were going for, the game is about learning to communicate with something that acts amazingly like a real animal, and sometimes a real animal is going to look at you dumbfounded.

The poor fps performance and janky controls on the boy are less forgivable, however. But I can overlook them.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

Steam Christmas sale this year will start on the 22nd (ie, Thursday this week), if third-party announcements are to be believed.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
The more I use it the more irritated I become with "The NVidia Experience" aka Shadowplay. So much of the footage I have recorded has the audio out of sync. There's so few settings to get it to work how you want. Really such a piece of shit software. Gagh.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

GasBandit said:
The more I use it the more irritated I become with "The NVidia Experience" aka Shadowplay. So much of the footage I have recorded has the audio out of sync. There's so few settings to get it to work how you want. Really such a piece of shit software. Gagh.
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Out of curiosity, why not switch to OBS Classic? It supports record buffering (with or without streaming to file/server), the audio can be forced to be in-sync, you can use either x264 or NVENC (in case you prefer NVidia's codec performance), ...
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Denbrought said:
Out of curiosity, why not switch to OBS Classic? It supports record buffering (with or without streaming to file/server), the audio can be forced to be in-sync, you can use either x264 or NVENC (in case you prefer NVidia's codec performance), ...
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I was using it to stream to twitch. OBS unfortunately can't simultaneously record and stream at different bitrates simultaneously. I have to limit the bitrate to 3500 kbit for twitch, but I want to record footage for youtube editing at 50 mbit or so.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

GasBandit said:
I was using it to stream to twitch. OBS unfortunately can't simultaneously record and stream at different bitrates simultaneously. I have to limit the bitrate to 3500 kbit for twitch, but I want to record footage for youtube editing at 50 mbit or so.
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Depending on how much slack processing-wise your setup has, you could just run two OBS instances (use the -multi flag).
 
Dei

Dei

GasBandit said:
I was using it to stream to twitch. OBS unfortunately can't simultaneously record and stream at different bitrates simultaneously. I have to limit the bitrate to 3500 kbit for twitch, but I want to record footage for youtube editing at 50 mbit or so.
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The new version of OBS does in fact let you record at a different quality than you stream. It came out in November.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

Dei said:
The new version of OBS does in fact let you record at a different quality than you stream. It came out in November.
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Does it have a replay buffer yet? I remember that being a big part behind me staying on OBS Classic. Being able to hit a button and grab the last 3 minutes of gameplay (instead of having to record the entire gaming session) is very handy.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Denbrought said:
Does it have a replay buffer yet? I remember that being a big part behind me staying on OBS Classic. Being able to hit a button and grab the last 3 minutes of gameplay (instead of having to record the entire gaming session) is very handy.
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Yes, OBS has a replay buffer now.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Denbrought said:
Welp. Guess I'm moving to Studio.
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I don't understand the version numbering of OBS. I started using it less than 6 months ago, and the version was 0.659b. (That version also has replay buffer)... but the new version I just got is version 17.0.0. Go figure.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Well, the new OBS worked fine once today... but now any time I try to do anything in it, it stops responding - as in the whole window turns grey and if I try to do anything about it, windows does the whole "isn't responding" dialog. Guess I'll go back to using 0.659b.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

GasBandit said:
Well, the new OBS worked fine once today... but now any time I try to do anything in it, it stops responding - as in the whole window turns grey and if I try to do anything about it, windows does the whole "isn't responding" dialog. Guess I'll go back to using 0.659b.
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Versions 0.xxxx are OBS Classic, which isn't receiving updates other than security/emergency fixes AFAIK. Anything >1 is OBS Studio, a complete rewrite.
 
Null

Null

Hey, let's remake an old game, but take everything that was cool and visceral about it - you know, the reasons everyone loved the original game in the first fucking place, the immersion, the environmental interactivity - and make it worse.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Null said:
Hey, let's remake an old game, but take everything that was cool and visceral about it - you know, the reasons everyone loved the original game in the first fucking place, the immersion, the environmental interactivity - and make it worse.
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Heh, are you talking about Dead Rising 4 vs 1, or 7 Days to Die vs Minecraft? :p
 
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