What are you playing?

You can play with both, GB is just old and set in his ways. It's peasantry, not filthy casuals!
I have been engaging in peasantry lately just because the JRPGs I want to play are on console. I still would never play a multiplayer shooter on one though, that's madness.
Madness?

 
Alright, Spider-Man is done (until the DLC comes out) so it's time to stop all this console peasantry. I've got a high end gaming PC, it's time to rejoin the master race and put all this hardware to use!


 
Well, I played through Dishonored 2 now too.

I thought the sneaking was way more fun in Dishonored 1, whereas I hated the combat and the complete opposite in 2. Loved fighting since you're given so many new combat options in 2 whereas the sneaking felt so clunky and awkward.
 
I'm writing this with a huge caveat, I fucking loooooath Brad Wardell of Stardock and his continuing bullshit that will hopefully tank his ass in court against Fred Ford and Paul Rieche.

Star Control Origins is exactly what I feared. It's the Fallout 3 of Star Control. It's obvious the folks at Stardock played and loved Star Control 2, the problem is they've chosen to emulate the worst parts of it without actually getting what's great about Star Control 2. Can I put a finger on it? Nope, otherwise I'd be a successful game designer.

It feels like a shitty, barely funny, modern mobile clone.

Fuck this game and fuck Bard Wardell for trying to torpedo an actual Star Control sequel from getting made.

PS: I absolutely did not pay for this game. It was day one pirated. Good on them for not using Denuvo but it allowed me to hate play an hour of it.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Alright, Spider-Man is done (until the DLC comes out) so it's time to stop all this console peasantry. I've got a high end gaming PC, it's time to rejoin the master race and put all this hardware to use!


Aw snap, one of the best post-lucasarts point and click adventures the 90s had to offer!
 
More on Star Control Origins.

Why does it take like 2-3 minutes to boot up when you start the game? The initial load is insane. I can't even imagine what it would be on a non-SSHD.

Why did they make the planet lander have difficulty going over the slightest of bumps on the planet? It's as aggravating as the shitty driving segments from Mass Effect 1 were.

Why are there mid battle power ups? It's....like why? Why can run over a powerup like I'm playing Mario Kart and get a damage boost or a crew boost? This is some dumb add-nothing garbage. I can't stress how bad the combat feels. It's slow, awkward and plodding and nothing about planetary gravity feels right and instead of the wraparound that Star control combat is known for there's a magic asteroid barrier that you can't pass through around the planet. It feels worse than Star Control 3. That's a feat.

The music is fantastic, but it's almost literally all remixes from SC2. They even use it some weird places, like the Yehat theme remix is used for starship outfitting.

Oh, and selling minerals is needlessly awkward since it seems like it taxes the engine doing the math on what you're owed if you just sell all and if you go one by one, it takes an eternity. Also, you need specific minerals for quests, but you can't sell all but one, so if you need just one unit of uranium for something you have to hold onto the entire stack until it's used, taking up valuable space. This sucks ass.

Here's how a bit more play feels, this game is half-baked. I'm taking a shot and saying it was rushed to market in order to help Wardell with his lawsuit. Too many aliens without actual interface screens, just pop up dialog boxes and lots of unfinished voice acting. Obvious garbage barely functional combat, in fact, the whole game runs like crap. This game is too primitive and ugly to require this many system resources. It feels unpolished and unfinished.
 
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You mean...handsome? -ish?
Maybe they wanted something less DeVito-esque.

--Patrick
It's not just appearance; it's personality. He's a completely different person. If you changed the name, you'd never guess it was him. And then his motivations are in line with Nolanverse Bane.
 
It's not just appearance; it's personality. He's a completely different person. If you changed the name, you'd never guess it was him. And then his motivations are in line with Nolanverse Bane.
Everything in the game is an elseworlds story. It's done because most people playing already know the characters and they want to keep it fresh. Keep playing (or watching) and you'll understand.
 
I see a lot of folk commenting on reviews about how Star Control Origins is a good game and how much they love how carefully crafted the combat is. These are not real people, this is some astroturfing bullshit. The combat specifically is so shit tier that I can't even take the 6/10s it's getting from actual review outlets that weren't given ahead of time copies seriously. The more I TRY to play this game, the more of a mess it continues to be. The planet lander landing minigame is beyond awful. I've crashed so many times on planets where I was given LITERALLY NO warning that landing would be difficult. Just launched and it fires radically off course with no hope of saving it.

I'd rather play Star Control 3 than this piece of shit.

I JUST WANT A GOOD STAR CONTROL GAME. FUCK.
 
Alright, the last of my ranting about this game because I'm done with it.

They only put the good minerals on planets that will instagib your lander. I'm not talking 1000 degree dodging flames on heat world Star Control 2 instagib, I'm talking literal your lander explodes the second you land on the planet instagib. Meaning, that until you progress far enough into the game and unlock more upgrades (which you do via finding random space stations) you can't collect good stuff from planets. This fucking sucks. Oh, it also fucking sucks that you can't even buy cargo pods or fuel tanks for your empty upgrade slots until you find some magical precursor technology. Apparently we're too dumb to build boxes in empty spaceship holes in Star Control Origins.

Also, the Scryve are the most bargain bin lameass knockoff villains ever. They make the fucking Hegemonic Crux from Star Control 3 seem intimidating.

Here's your first communication with the bad guy aliens in Star Control 2 and Star Control Origins.



 
Everything in the game is an elseworlds story. It's done because most people playing already know the characters and they want to keep it fresh. Keep playing (or watching) and you'll understand.
I understand it's an elseworlds story, but I don't see a point in calling a character a name and then changing every detail about him as to be unrecognizable. I'm not bashing the game as a whole; it just seems like an opportunity they could've made a new character if none fit their needs. There are some interesting ideas, like building an alternative to Arkham, or how Thomas and Martha Waynes' deaths are treated as this "where we're you when it happened?" kind of event with Bruce as a living reminder and not as someone for whom it being brought up is traumatizing.

Whether we keep going is up to Julie. She finished episode 1 last night and then she spent the rest of the evening making fun of the Waynes as mobsters plot.
 
Holy shit, I've been lurking on the Star Control subreddit and apparently the combat in Origins used to be wraparound until some higher up at the company thought it was too confusing to players. So despite the devs actually developing the game wanting the combat to be true to Star Control, it got Executived. Christ. This doesn't excuse the absolutely bullshit wonky gravity and inertia physics (the ships in the game have drag for some reason, you stop thrusting you start slowing down immediately).

I know this is meaningless to most of you, but Star Control 2 is literally my favourite game of all time and has been since I was 8 years old and despite my misgivings and general loathing of Brad Wardell of Stardock, I wanted this game to be good.

Actually, that's how that whole subreddit feels. Old fans of Star Control that despite not liking the way Stardock is treating Fred and Paul, they desperately try to find every silver lining in this storm cloud of a game. "Oh, there's a good game somewhere in there!" "Man, I hate this and this and this, but at least there's this!"
 
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Tim Curry attempting to do a Cajun accent is some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard...

And yet I miss it when it's gone. Tried the remake of Gabriel Knight but he just sounds wrong.
 
I didn't expect Pathfinder Kingmaker to be using the actual Pathfinder rules. I thought for a long time that WotC didn't allow video game adaptations of their core rules under the open license (Pathfinder is modified, crunchier D&D 3.5).

But it is straight up Pathfinder rules. These are some CRUNCHY ass character creation choices. So far they look 100% accurate to the tabletop game.
 
Batman: The Telltale Series

So for the problems I've had with the writing at points, I had a feeling Joker was going to be off.

But this whole teacher's pet thing with the doctor is perfect. I don't care for the voice actor, but this angle is great.
 
Playing more Kingmaker.

S'hard on Challenging difficulty. Rul hard.

3.5/Pathfinder rules are very unforgiving at low level. AoOs all over the place, SHITTY NPCs throwing fucking alchemists fires into my melee ladies, doing more damage to them than the horde of bandits....mother fu....anyways. It's really good. One aspect I like is the tutorial prologue has you teaming with evil and neutral/good characters and depending on your character choices, your party will be split between you and a rival....I think, anyway. It could be just that you end up with the good characters no matter what. I'll find out when I evil bastard play.

AND THEN, I learned the thing that proved that this game was meant to be injected DIRECTLY into my veins. When you apply metamagic feats to your wizards spells, you can customize the colour of the spell. So you can shoot a bright blue empowered fireball. SO pleasing.

It's a lovely adaptation of the original Adventure Path so far. Hopefully, they rebalanced the kingdom aspect since that ended up being a bookkeeping chore in the tabeltop version.
 
I have to lower the difficulty. I can't even complete the first sidequest. The difficulty is nuts.

Apparently it's nigh impossible to even complete the tutorial without specific broken builds on the highest difficulty.

Needs some real tuning. They were definitely rushed to release (apparently the game only had a final build 2 days before release).
 
Tim Curry attempting to do a Cajun accent is some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard...

And yet I miss it when it's gone. Tried the remake of Gabriel Knight but he just sounds wrong.
The accent is terrible, but he gives a great charm to the character.

I thought the biggest voice acting blunder in the remake was Mosely. Then again, the original had Hamil, so...
 

Dave

Staff member
Tonight! Watch Dave play PUBG with a guy named TBro. It's going to be funny!

God I suck at PUBG so very much.
 
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