What are you playing?

GasBandit

Staff member
If you love them, set them free.

--Patrick
Are you kidding? There's Zombies out there! And Pirates! And Slavers! And Mechanoids! And regular old giant carnivorous beasts!

If you love someone, build a 10-meter-thick wall around them and set up turrets around the entrance!
 
Are you kidding? There's Zombies out there! And Pirates! And Slavers! And Mechanoids! And regular old giant carnivorous beasts!

If you love someone, build a 10-meter-thick wall around them and set up turrets around the entrance!

So far it seems like your colonization strategies have been build a wall and lock her up
 

GasBandit

Staff member
So far it seems like your colonization strategies have been build a wall and lock her up
Not necessarily! Kickygirl's sister, Flo, crashed in a pod, and I saw she was completely useless and a pyromaniac to boot. So instead of "rescuing" her, I "captured" her, bandaged her wounds, then "released" her so she could go on her merry way.

I'm planning to use the "booze and arrest" method to get rid of Brainy, as soon as he's done researching everything. He's incapable of violence and his only other interest is art, which Artdude has covered. So, unless he manages to get into any romantic entanglements (which is unlikely, given that he's holed up in the laboratory every moment he's not asleep - it took TailorSwift 2 months to realize he existed and add him to her social interactions list), soon as he's done with the research, I'll be rid of him. Probably.

I just wish SirBash had lived. Artdude, Granny and especially TailorSwift are TERRIBLE shots. And Kickygirl wants to only use melee weapons - which probably isn't the best idea when the zombies are starting to arrive in bunches of 20+.
 
Papers Please

WELL-this game is liquid obsession if I ever saw it. You think its ALL in order or ALL out of order BUT THEN-that fucking paper crawls up from the bottom telling you how much of a fuck-up you are! Fun game, I recommend it!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Craziest thing happened in Rimworld last night. Mechanoids were attacking, my guys were behind the sandbags as usual, they've got armored vests and advanced plasteel helmets and charge rifles, so taking out a couple scythers should be no problem, right?

Well, never take the RNG for granted. One of the scythers powers up his charge lance, the bolt shoots out straight to "Farmguy" and thacks him hard. I see the "headshot" mote pop up from him... but no damage number. That's odd, I think, did the helmet absorb it all? So I check his health tab.

His jaw is shot off. But there is no bleeding. Not even any pain. It's just gone. Dude got shot in the one thing not covered by armor that I can't replace (the game doesn't even have prosthetic human jaws), and I guess the plasma bolt must have cauterized the wound itself and seared off the nerve endings, for there to be no pain and no blood. I've never seen that happen before.

Alas, though, poor Farmguy. Cruelly disfigured, he'll never find love. Watching him eat would probably turn anyone's stomach.
 
Craziest thing happened in Rimworld last night. Mechanoids were attacking, my guys were behind the sandbags as usual, they've got armored vests and advanced plasteel helmets and charge rifles, so taking out a couple scythers should be no problem, right?

Well, never take the RNG for granted. One of the scythers powers up his charge lance, the bolt shoots out straight to "Farmguy" and thacks him hard. I see the "headshot" mote pop up from him... but no damage number. That's odd, I think, did the helmet absorb it all? So I check his health tab.

His jaw is shot off. But there is no bleeding. Not even any pain. It's just gone. Dude got shot in the one thing not covered by armor that I can't replace (the game doesn't even have prosthetic human jaws), and I guess the plasma bolt must have cauterized the wound itself and seared off the nerve endings, for there to be no pain and no blood. I've never seen that happen before.

Alas, though, poor Farmguy. Cruelly disfigured, he'll never find love. Watching him eat would probably turn anyone's stomach.
The detail of this game's RNG is incredible.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Update on Victor Vran... it's mostly good-ish. It's not nearly as good as Torchlight 2, but it's still solid. I think I only prefer Titan Quest because of my nostalgia for the title, but while TQ does have some better features VV doesn't have the same ridiculous difficulty spikes TQ does. Anyway, I think I'm done with VV, despite the fact that it's got a lot more content I haven't touched yet. It seems to be designed for a lot of grinding and replay.

The Good:
- Combat mostly feels fun. There's a good variety to weapons, and figuring out how to best swap back and forth between any two is pretty cool.

The okay:
- The Art style is fine. It works. It's not really anything special.
- The lack of a skill tree works. Despite it being such a big departure from other ARPGs, it's a decent system.
- The map design is okay. It's got some problems, especially when it comes to looking for secrets, but it mostly works well.

The Bad:
- Holy shit did I find the mocking voice of the evil narrator annoying. Sometimes it was funny (like when he suggested maybe I wasn't cut out to be a demon hunter, maybe I should be a pirate. "A pirate I was meant to be, trim the sails and roam the sea!"), but most of the time it was just grating.
- Some enemy attacks just require you to run in circles and hope you don't die. Several of these are just moving area of effect that can move as fast as you can, and they sometimes do a crap-ton of damage too. You can't dodge them, defuse them, you just have to move and move and move until they're over, and it just feels stupid.
- Map challenges are wildly inconsistent in difficulty. They're optional, sure, but some maps you can finish all 5 with no trouble, others I don't even know how to accomplish.
- Enemies just seem to randomly be bullet-sponges. I've killed some bosses before I even realized they were a boss, while other run-of-the-mill enemies just would not seem to die.
- "Transmutation" (read: crafting) is frustrating. It isn't consistent across the different item types; I found myself constantly checking the help menu to see what the recipes were, and I still felt like I didn't get how it was supposed to work. It sucks up a ton of resources, so it feels bad trying to improve your stuff. I do not like it, and I was glad I didn't have to do a ton with it to finish the game (on regular, with some dropping to easy just to keep moving forward).

Overall, I had fun, but I've put in 25 hours to finish the campaign and I think I'm done.
 
Played through the original Nier on PS3 and enjoyed it enough, even if it is the epitome of padding. I had a good time with it. Wanted to play through it before cracking into Automata.

Now, I'm playing Nier Automata....oh God, this is a good fucking game gentlegirls and boidies. The Platinum combat game is on point.
 
So much anxiety over the boulder levels in Crash all coming back while playing the collection released.
 
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Life is Strange shows a really neat mechanic to introduce for a choices-driven game, since we all wonder what the other option would do.

It's too bad this is American college as seen through the eyes of a Japanese company, so it comes off as "extra-shitty high school." The attitude on these teenagers would make the Power Rangers question their qualifications.
 
I would think that 9 to 12 hour process times for training and whatnot would be even less endearing on PC as they were on mobile, but I'm curious to know your take once you've played it for a week or two.
Only took a couple of months, but I got to 200 vault dwellers, and all level 50. My first floor can handle any raid/deathclaw/goul event sent at me without a death.

All I'm doing now is slowly building amplified gatling lasers and +7 gear, so I feel like I'm at a grind rather than making any real progress. So, I've mostly stopped playing. It was fun while it lasted though.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Only took a couple of months, but I got to 200 vault dwellers, and all level 50. My first floor can handle any raid/deathclaw/goul event sent at me without a death.

All I'm doing now is slowly building amplified gatling lasers and +7 gear, so I feel like I'm at a grind rather than making any real progress. So, I've mostly stopped playing. It was fun while it lasted though.
That's about where I ended up on mobile, too. Except I extended my playtime a bit by deciding to kick out and replace (already level 50) dwellers in order to make my vault entirely populated by redheaded women.

It was a lot more challenging before they added in the barber room that lets you change a dweller's hair at will. That got the job done a lot faster :p
 
Life is Strange shows a really neat mechanic to introduce for a choices-driven game, since we all wonder what the other option would do.

It's too bad this is American college as seen through the eyes of a Japanese company, so it comes off as "extra-shitty high school." The attitude on these teenagers would make the Power Rangers question their qualifications.
It actually is highschool (albeit a private one that only caters to 12th grade) and DONTNOD is a French studio, not japanese.
 
Squenix is mostly just a publisher these days, their in-house devs are busy not making Kingdom Hearts 3.
That makes sense.

I'm not sure how far I'm going to get into Life is Strange, anyhow. I'm not sure how long I want to put up with these characters. They feel like they stepped out of the same kind of teen movies I always hated and still do.

Especially when I realize I got Tales from the Borderlands also as a free download with PS Plus at some point. Did not realize that, must've forgotten it. If I'm going to play through a game-length cutscene where I pretend to have input, it might as well be funny.
 
That makes sense.

I'm not sure how far I'm going to get into Life is Strange, anyhow. I'm not sure how long I want to put up with these characters. They feel like they stepped out of the same kind of teen movies I always hated and still do.

Especially when I realize I got Tales from the Borderlands also as a free download with PS Plus at some point. Did not realize that, must've forgotten it. If I'm going to play through a game-length cutscene where I pretend to have input, it might as well be funny.
Tales from the Borderlands was... ether this month's or last month's big offer. Life is Strange was the other month of the two.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Still playing Rimworld. For the little bit I DID get to play today, I started experimenting with caravans, or rather, using suborbital launch pods to cross great distances almost instantly. I found that, in conjunction with the "set up camp" mod, I can basically build a space-age pony express network, given that I can launch somebody in a pod, he can set up a camp, then the main colony can send another pod with more supplies, including the stuff it takes to build a new launchpad and the materials for making and fueling more pods. This, of course, works best if you hit the toggle to make "camps" permanent.

"Camp" maps are much easier on your computer as they're waaaaay smaller than normal "settlement" maps, so there's a lot less processing involved (since the game keeps every map you have going in real time simultaneously). However, it feels an eensy weensy bit like cheating, as the guy who created the "set up camp" mod made it so that events simply don't happen on camp maps. As in - no raids (no trader caravans either, but at that point you basically ARE your own caravan). So, technically, I could evacuate my entire population to various "camps" surrounding the main settlement if things got too hairy, and they could rest and recover in more or less complete and total safety... which sort of defeats the purpose if you ask me.

One funny note though, I learned the hard way you can't "rocket caravan" straight into an allied town to trade with them. Landing your pod in an allied town map is interpreted as an invasion, and the entire faction instantly turns hostile to you O_O whoopsie.

But you can set up a camp 1 hex outside their city on the world map, and walking from your camp to the town to trade takes about a game-hour, depending on terrain (Half an hour for a plains tile with a road, 24 hours for a mountainous forest in winter with no road). Thus, you land your goods at the camp, drag them down the road to sell them, walk back with the money, and send it in a pod back to the main settlement (with or without the colonist doing the schlepping, as needed - like I said, he could potentially stay in the "camp" and hunt game/grow a small amount of crops and live forever in complete safety, or you could just send him food in a pod periodically even).

So that's how I came up with the idea of pod relays. Since they have limited range, you'll have to send the stuff to a camp in range, that camp sends it on to the next camp, and so on... potentially crossing the globe in less than a day, once you have your camp network set up.
 
Ico

"I did that, so that should happen, and then this should work. So why am I still stuck?"

I read that a playthrough of this takes 4 to 5 hours, but I have a feeling it's going to take me a little longer. At least the game is engaging.
 
Ico

"I did that, so that should happen, and then this should work. So why am I still stuck?"

I read that a playthrough of this takes 4 to 5 hours, but I have a feeling it's going to take me a little longer. At least the game is engaging.
I'm up to a point where I can't figure out what to do next, too.

--Patrick
 
Finished my first runthrough of Fallout 4. Only took 140 hours. Went for the Minutemen ending, because they were the faction I worked with the most during my playthrough.

I want to emphasize that I absolutely do agree with the criticisms that have been leveled at this game. It does shit all over established canon. It does have repetitive quests, and lackluster writing, and a lack of meaningful choices. It does lack in-depth character customization and other RPG elements. And it absolutely does continue Bethesda's hallowed tradition of only using, like, four voice actors. (I swear I heard Garrus everywhere)

Nonetheless, I had a ton of fun playing it. The world's still great to explore (and I didn't even visit every location), the combat feels much more satisfying than the previous games, and there are some genuinely emotional moments. Even stuff like the voiced protagonist and the removal of skills didn't bother me that much. Yes, it's a bad Fallout game, but it's still a fun game, and ultimately that's what matters most to me.

Now, to do the DLCs vanilla, or should I start modding... decisions, decisions...
 
Now, to do the DLCs vanilla, or should I start modding... decisions, decisions...
The Mechanist is basically a glorified sidequest designed to introduce you to some new features the DLC adds. Feel free to mod it.

Far Harbor though? I'd do that Vanilla first. Probably Nuka World too.
 
Finished my first runthrough of Fallout 4. Only took 140 hours. Went for the Minutemen ending, because they were the faction I worked with the most during my playthrough.
Agree with the review, however I couldn't even finish it.

The piss-poor FPS once you hit BOSTON is terrible. I have a GTX 980 TI, I shouldn't be getting 15 FPS.

No other game I own/played has had issues when I play EVERYTHING at max.
 
Agree with the review, however I couldn't even finish it.

The piss-poor FPS once you hit BOSTON is terrible. I have a GTX 980 TI, I shouldn't be getting 15 FPS.

No other game I own/played has had issues when I play EVERYTHING at max.
Have you revisited it lately? I get 60fps at 2K resolution, and my gpu isn't that much higher than yours (1080 vs 980)
 
Well, for some reason Nexus Mods refuses to download any mods for me, either manually or with NMM. Not sure what the problem is. If I had to guess, it's because the recent Steam sale is causing Nexus's servers to get hammered.

Guess I'll continue playing vanilla for a while.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I'm kinda regretting not turning my current playthrough of Rimworld into another "halforums edition" and delivering the play-by-play here again. There's been a couple really poignant deaths, a debilitating brain injury that turned into triumphant recovery with a love triangle subplot, and a story of romance and betrayal that ended in death for both. Also, man-eating elk and boomalope stampedes.

And also lots and lots and lots of goddamned zombies. They make the pirate raids look like babytime frolics. I'm routinely getting 40-50 zombies per invasion horde.

But it all falls back to if I HAD done so, it meant having to name one of you my sex slave right at the start. :dumb:

That aside, I've got a couple more mods in the list now that I'd recommend for any other Rimworld players in here.

Billy's Improved Load Transport Mod
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=960731735
As it stands in vanilla, the way loading a transport pod works is pretty stupid. One colonist (and only one) has to run back and forth carrying armloads of what you've directed to be put in the pod. This is stupid because the pod has a weight limit (150kg) but no numerical item limit, whereas a colonist hauling stuff has a numeric limit (One stack of whatever, be that something that stacks in 10(food) or 75 (most everything else) or 500 (money)) but no weight limit ("Carry that muffalo to the infirmary? No problem, boss!") If you've designated a pod to be filled with, say, 300 steel, this doesn't take so long. 3000 cloth, though, and it'll take days to load the stupid pod. This mod fixes that somewhat by allowing multiple colonists to load the pod simultaneously. It still takes longer to load 3000 cloth than 300 steel, but at least now co-operation makes it get done so very much faster.

Expanded Prosthetics and Organ Engineering 2.0
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=725956940
It never made sense to me that, no matter how much I research, I can manufacture power armor and plasma rifles... but not a simple prosthetic arm. Also that I can easily replace lungs, livers, hearts, kidneys, jaws, even eyes, but not ears or noses. This mod addresses those shortcomings in a very balanced way. It makes all prosthetics craftable (with the proper space-age tech tier research and the construction of appropriate fabrication benches), and divides them into grades - IE, crude (peg legs and hooks), simple (shaped wood and metal with hinges), bionic (stronger, faster, cooler), and advanced bionic (OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAND) - each requiring their own research and exponentially more expensive ingredients. Plus, it adds in things like bionic ear implants and prosthetic noses so that there's a way to get rid of those pesky -15 to social "disfigured" debuff for people who've had ears and noses shot/bitten off. Also, bionic hands and feet, so that you're not lopping off at the shoulder what should be addressed at the wrist, and for less resources. It also lets you fabricate replacement organs (so you don't have to butcher a captive or deal with seedy merchants for that replacement liver for your favorite alcoholic) from various materials, also separated into tiers, and my favorite - brain surgery, which lets you implant neural stimulators and AI augmentation chips to restore function to otherwise "permanently" damaged brains, or make anyone better at certain tasks (for example, an Agricultural supplemental AI implant will let a colonist harvest faster and receive greater yields. The good stuff is really expensive, though. Of course.
 
I'm kinda regretting not turning my current playthrough of Rimworld into another "halforums edition" and delivering the play-by-play here again. There's been a couple really poignant deaths, a debilitating brain injury that turned into triumphant recovery with a love triangle subplot, and a story of romance and betrayal that ended in death for both. Also, man-eating elk and boomalope stampedes.

And also lots and lots and lots of goddamned zombies. They make the pirate raids look like babytime frolics. I'm routinely getting 40-50 zombies per invasion horde.

But it all falls back to if I HAD done so, it meant having to name one of you my sex slave right at the start. :dumb:

That aside, I've got a couple more mods in the list now that I'd recommend for any other Rimworld players in here.

Billy's Improved Load Transport Mod
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=960731735
As it stands in vanilla, the way loading a transport pod works is pretty stupid. One colonist (and only one) has to run back and forth carrying armloads of what you've directed to be put in the pod. This is stupid because the pod has a weight limit (150kg) but no numerical item limit, whereas a colonist hauling stuff has a numeric limit (One stack of whatever, be that something that stacks in 10(food) or 75 (most everything else) or 500 (money)) but no weight limit ("Carry that muffalo to the infirmary? No problem, boss!") If you've designated a pod to be filled with, say, 300 steel, this doesn't take so long. 3000 cloth, though, and it'll take days to load the stupid pod. This mod fixes that somewhat by allowing multiple colonists to load the pod simultaneously. It still takes longer to load 3000 cloth than 300 steel, but at least now co-operation makes it get done so very much faster.

Expanded Prosthetics and Organ Engineering 2.0
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=725956940
It never made sense to me that, no matter how much I research, I can manufacture power armor and plasma rifles... but not a simple prosthetic arm. Also that I can easily replace lungs, livers, hearts, kidneys, jaws, even eyes, but not ears or noses. This mod addresses those shortcomings in a very balanced way. It makes all prosthetics craftable (with the proper space-age tech tier research and the construction of appropriate fabrication benches), and divides them into grades - IE, crude (peg legs and hooks), simple (shaped wood and metal with hinges), bionic (stronger, faster, cooler), and advanced bionic (OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAND) - each requiring their own research and exponentially more expensive ingredients. Plus, it adds in things like bionic ear implants and prosthetic noses so that there's a way to get rid of those pesky -15 to social "disfigured" debuff for people who've had ears and noses shot/bitten off. Also, bionic hands and feet, so that you're not lopping off at the shoulder what should be addressed at the wrist, and for less resources. It also lets you fabricate replacement organs (so you don't have to butcher a captive or deal with seedy merchants for that replacement liver for your favorite alcoholic) from various materials, also separated into tiers, and my favorite - brain surgery, which lets you implant neural stimulators and AI augmentation chips to restore function to otherwise "permanently" damaged brains, or make anyone better at certain tasks (for example, an Agricultural supplemental AI implant will let a colonist harvest faster and receive greater yields. The good stuff is really expensive, though. Of course.
It should have been @Terrik for sure.
 
I'm kinda regretting not turning my current playthrough of Rimworld into another "halforums edition" and delivering the play-by-play here again. There's been a couple really poignant deaths, a debilitating brain injury that turned into triumphant recovery with a love triangle subplot, and a story of romance and betrayal that ended in death for both. Also, man-eating elk and boomalope stampedes.

And also lots and lots and lots of goddamned zombies. They make the pirate raids look like babytime frolics. I'm routinely getting 40-50 zombies per invasion horde.

But it all falls back to if I HAD done so, it meant having to name one of you my sex slave right at the start. :dumb:

That aside, I've got a couple more mods in the list now that I'd recommend for any other Rimworld players in here.

Billy's Improved Load Transport Mod
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=960731735
As it stands in vanilla, the way loading a transport pod works is pretty stupid. One colonist (and only one) has to run back and forth carrying armloads of what you've directed to be put in the pod. This is stupid because the pod has a weight limit (150kg) but no numerical item limit, whereas a colonist hauling stuff has a numeric limit (One stack of whatever, be that something that stacks in 10(food) or 75 (most everything else) or 500 (money)) but no weight limit ("Carry that muffalo to the infirmary? No problem, boss!") If you've designated a pod to be filled with, say, 300 steel, this doesn't take so long. 3000 cloth, though, and it'll take days to load the stupid pod. This mod fixes that somewhat by allowing multiple colonists to load the pod simultaneously. It still takes longer to load 3000 cloth than 300 steel, but at least now co-operation makes it get done so very much faster.

Expanded Prosthetics and Organ Engineering 2.0
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=725956940
It never made sense to me that, no matter how much I research, I can manufacture power armor and plasma rifles... but not a simple prosthetic arm. Also that I can easily replace lungs, livers, hearts, kidneys, jaws, even eyes, but not ears or noses. This mod addresses those shortcomings in a very balanced way. It makes all prosthetics craftable (with the proper space-age tech tier research and the construction of appropriate fabrication benches), and divides them into grades - IE, crude (peg legs and hooks), simple (shaped wood and metal with hinges), bionic (stronger, faster, cooler), and advanced bionic (OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAND) - each requiring their own research and exponentially more expensive ingredients. Plus, it adds in things like bionic ear implants and prosthetic noses so that there's a way to get rid of those pesky -15 to social "disfigured" debuff for people who've had ears and noses shot/bitten off. Also, bionic hands and feet, so that you're not lopping off at the shoulder what should be addressed at the wrist, and for less resources. It also lets you fabricate replacement organs (so you don't have to butcher a captive or deal with seedy merchants for that replacement liver for your favorite alcoholic) from various materials, also separated into tiers, and my favorite - brain surgery, which lets you implant neural stimulators and AI augmentation chips to restore function to otherwise "permanently" damaged brains, or make anyone better at certain tasks (for example, an Agricultural supplemental AI implant will let a colonist harvest faster and receive greater yields. The good stuff is really expensive, though. Of course.
Wife's finding the run fairly entertaining. You're a good substitute for when I'm not in the mood to play :p
 
I bought RimWorld a week and a half ago and I'm already at 90 hours played. -_-

Gogo gadget summer vacation with only one working car. (Yep, still haven't gotten my car back. Fuck everything)
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I bought RimWorld a week and a half ago and I'm already at 90 hours played. -_-

Gogo gadget summer vacation with only one working car. (Yep, still haven't gotten my car back. Fuck everything)
And for the studio audience, that's already 27% of my played hours (250) and Tinwhistler got it for me last august.

If things continue in this manner, by my calculations, she will overtake my playtime in 40 more days, assuming I still average 5 hours a day (4 hours/weeknight, 8 hours a weekend day) for that time. Sooner if and when I switch off to Darkest Dungeon.
 
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