What are you playing?

[Yoshimickster]

Gori: Cuddly Carnage

Its a fun combo based platformer about a cat, on a hoverboard, slicing up mutant zombie unicorns, ALMOST perfect I'd say!

The almost being because its a VERY newly released game, and it can crash at times.

 

[Yoshimickster]

Apparently if you have a CD in your computer and play Half-Life, it'll play the music during the game during certain scenes. Which made my stream a bit awkward when "World Inferno Friendship Society" started playing out of no where.

 

[PatrThom]

"I'm a medieval man..."

--Patrick

 

[Yoshimickster]

Me Then: I don't want to wait until Christmas to get the last Psychonauts achievement, I'm just gonna change the date and time on my computer and then STREAM IT!

Me Now: AND-apparently when you do that, it labels every website you go to as security risks for not updating their whatever in the whatever time, making going on the internet impossible. WELL-guess I'm waiting until Christmas for that one.

 

[bhamv3]

Apparently if you have a CD in your computer and play Half-Life, it'll play the music during the game during certain scenes. Which made my stream a bit awkward when "World Inferno Friendship Society" started playing out of no where.

This was the case for quite a few games back then. I remember Quake 1 did it too. I had a habit of keeping my Warcraft 2 CD in the disk drive, which meant I was often playing Quake to the music of Warcraft, and it fit quite well.

 

[PatrThom]

apparently when you do that, it labels every website you go to as security risks for not updating their whatever in the whatever time, making going on the internet impossible.

The Microsoft Windows default is 5min (300 seconds). If your system clock is off by more than 5 minutes from GMT/UTC, you run a very real risk of breaking the ability to start/maintain any secure connection (SSL, HTTPS, email, even joining your WiFi). Most common to run into this after you've let your battery die (laptop) or changed the CMOS battery (desktop).

This isn't limited to just Windows PCs, either. Many OSes/devices are more sensitive to date/time than you might think. Just ask any iPhone user back in early 1970.

--Patrick

 

[ThatNickGuy]

Deadlock

Got an invite from a friend on Steam.

I didn't even get to play the game because there are no options to use a controller. What game, even in an early build like this, doesn't have an option for a controller in today's day and age? I've been having issues with tennis elbow lately, so keyboard and mouse is uncomfortable and mildly painful.

 

[GasBandit]

Deadlock

Got an invite from a friend on Steam.

I didn't even get to play the game because there are no options to use a controller. What game, even in an early build like this, doesn't have an option for a controller in today's day and age? I've been having issues with tennis elbow lately, so keyboard and mouse is uncomfortable and mildly painful.

There should be a way to use Steam Input to do controller mappings...

Yep, here, check this out



It's possible to do this for most games that don't have "official" controller support, so you can use a controller on them, too, and allow your RSI to heal.

 

[ThatNickGuy]

There should be a way to use Steam Input to do controller mappings...

Yep, here, check this out



It's possible to do this for most games that don't have "official" controller support, so you can use a controller on them, too, and allow your RSI to heal.

It's more that there isn't controller support or mapping built in, like for tutorials, you know?

 

[IronBrig4]

I’m trying to beat Fallout 4 once and for all. It’s becoming hard to do that because of the bugs, bugs, bugs, BUGS. Bethesda games are such buggy messes.

 

[figmentPez]

I impulsively bought Saints Row (2022) and I would have refunded it if I'd bought it directly through Steam and not in a BYOBundle on Fanatical. This game has absolutely terrible controller support. Not only does it not work with Steam Input, but it's support for PS5 controllers is broken. The game will detect a DualSense controller, and even display Playstation glyphs, but the analog axes aren't mapped correctly. The analog sticks and triggers are all jumbled, making it impossible to aim and move correctly. So my Steam Controller can't work at all, and my DualSense doesn't work natively. Without DS4Windows I'd have to resort to mouse & keyboard.

That aside, the game is fine, thus far. The writing feels like the characters from New Girl turned to a life of crime to make rent, which I find amusing, but I can see why other Saints Row fans were pissed. The game as whole is a real mixed bag, with some good changes, some puzzling, and some bad. I may write more later, but mostly I'm still grumpy about the shitty controller support.

 

[ThatNickGuy]

I impulsively bought Saints Row (2022) and I would have refunded it if I'd bought it directly through Steam and not in a BYOBundle on Fanatical. This game has absolutely terrible controller support. Not only does it not work with Steam Input, but it's support for PS5 controllers is broken. The game will detect a DualSense controller, and even display Playstation glyphs, but the analog axes aren't mapped correctly. The analog sticks and triggers are all jumbled, making it impossible to aim and move correctly. So my Steam Controller can't work at all, and my DualSense doesn't work natively. Without DS4Windows I'd have to resort to mouse & keyboard.

That aside, the game is fine, thus far. The writing feels like the characters from New Girl turned to a life of crime to make rent, which I find amusing, but I can see why other Saints Row fans were pissed. The game as whole is a real mixed bag, with some good changes, some puzzling, and some bad. I may write more later, but mostly I'm still grumpy about the shitty controller support.

Yeah, I got it for free through the Epic Game Store and tried it out not too long ago. I gave up on it pretty early in, honestly.

 

[Squidleybits]

I recently started a new game of My Time at Sandrock. I played in early access, but they’ve added so much since then.

I’m really loving it! Today the kickstarter for their third game in the series launched and I think I’m going to back it. I’ve never contributed to one before, but I think this game is a good one to start with

 

[figmentPez]

I impulsively bought Saints Row (2022) and I would have refunded it if I'd bought it directly through Steam and not in a BYOBundle on Fanatical. This game has absolutely terrible controller support. Not only does it not work with Steam Input, but it's support for PS5 controllers is broken. The game will detect a DualSense controller, and even display Playstation glyphs, but the analog axes aren't mapped correctly. The analog sticks and triggers are all jumbled, making it impossible to aim and move correctly. So my Steam Controller can't work at all, and my DualSense doesn't work natively. Without DS4Windows I'd have to resort to mouse & keyboard.

That aside, the game is fine, thus far. The writing feels like the characters from New Girl turned to a life of crime to make rent, which I find amusing, but I can see why other Saints Row fans were pissed. The game as whole is a real mixed bag, with some good changes, some puzzling, and some bad. I may write more later, but mostly I'm still grumpy about the shitty controller support.

I'm kinda tired of games that make it clear that the developers spent more time making the game bigger and more complex, and not enough time working on making the game function well. I'd rather have a smaller, more polished game, but apparently publishers don't care.

Here is a screenshot of just one example of how this game is a thousand paper cuts of bad and broken gameplay. The navigation arrows are broken every time you get on the highway. The minimap is showing the correct route, exiting the highway. The purple guide arrows don't show the exit path. If you follow the purple arrows, they'll very quickly switch to pointing behind you.


The navigation sucks for other reasons, too. Unlike previous Saints Row games, you don't unlock shortcuts. The reboot has no concept of cutting through alleys or parking lots, and is way too fast to reroute if you drift even a small bit off of the lane it wants you to drive in. It doesn't function as well as the previous SR games, and those weren't anything exceptional.

Not that everything is worse than previous games. There are some improvements. I'm really glad you get unlimited sprinting right off the bat, instead of having to unlock it. The assassination / wanted missions are finally treated as actual missions, rather than being an after-thought in the menus.

There's also a lot of stuff that's both better and worse. For instance, you no longer have to purchase a clothing item multiple times to get it in different colors. Which is nice, except for the fact that you have to choose custom colors every time you go to reequip the clothes. I think you can save whole outfits, but I don't see a way to save individual items. (I do appreciate that guns can now have custom color schemes, though.)

Dressing weird in Saints Row games is fun:

 

[drawn_inward]

I can participate in this thread now. I started a Civ6 world. I got this a awhile back but never sat down to play. It has been a while since playing civ and some things are quite a bit different in this version.

 

[Dave]

I can participate in this thread now. I started a Civ6 world. I got this a awhile back but never sat down to play. It has been a while since playing civ and some things are quite a bit different in this version.

Just in time for the release of Civ VII.

 

[AshburnerX]

Civ 7 is looking pretty good too. I bounced off Civ 6 hard and so did most of the other Civ fans I know. They didn't like the districting system.

 

[Tress]

Civ 7 is looking pretty good too. I bounced off Civ 6 hard and so did most of the other Civ fans I know. They didn't like the districting system.

I had the opposite experience. A lot of Civ fans I know put 6 as their favorite, or second favorite.

 

[Dave]

i still like Civ IV.

 

[AshburnerX]

I had the opposite experience. A lot of Civ fans I know put 6 as their favorite, or second favorite.

My biggest issue was that it was basically hard to play Tall, so you you were forced into the early expansion/wide phase of the game whether that was how you liked to play or not. I don't generally like playing the more war/wide focused empires.

 

[ThatNickGuy]

Civ 7 is looking pretty good too. I bounced off Civ 6 hard and so did most of the other Civ fans I know. They didn't like the districting system.

I actually liked Civ 6. I played a lot of it during a bad period of depression, so I wound up hyper focusing on it and learned the system. I know a lot of people liked Civ 5, but I couldn't get into it.

I'm with Dave, though. I liked Civ IV, too.

 

[Bubble181]

I I'm II > V > IV > VI.
Never got into III for some reason.
VII is looking interesting, but I don't know whether it'll be a day-one buy for me yet.

Also, I first bounced off VI hard and only got into it more later.

 

[PatrThom]

i still like Civ IV.

I still haven't played anything newer than Civ III.

--Patrick

 

[AshburnerX]

I I'm II > V > IV > VI.
Never got into III for some reason.
VII is looking interesting, but I don't know whether it'll be a day-one buy for me yet.

Also, I first bounced off VI hard and only got into it more later.

I'm the exact opposite: I prefer the odd entries. Started with 1 on the SNES, got 3 during a Scholastic Booksale and played that a bunch, and I've almost done ever civ in 5... just working on the more war focused ones now and then I'll jumping into some of the scenarios.

 

[drawn_inward]

Any love for the Civ Rev games? Civ Rev 2 got me through sleepless nights and/or early morningings with baby #1. I still fire it up for a quick fix.

 

[Bubble181]

Any love for the Civ Rev games? Civ Rev 2 got me through sleepless nights and/or early morningings with baby #1. I still fire it up for a quick fix.

Never played'm.

I do also have fond memories of CTP once and two, though

 

[Bubble181]

Just finished the main quest of Hogwarts: Legacy.
Overall, I liked it. It most definitely isn't perfect, and while you start out as a student exploring Hogwarts and using Lumos and Accio and whatever to solve riddles and puzzles, by the end you're pretty much a standard fantasy hero blasting his way through dozens of goblins and dark wizards, potentially with Unforgivable Curses without any repercussions.
That aside, I spent around 50 hours in it, so yeah, fun. Some beasts are really cute to care for, etc etc.
What bugs me though, is that I'm stuck at 99% quest completion (89% overall, I can't be arsed to go collect every possible collectible and pop every possible balloon, thanks, I've done a whole lot of them but I don't feel the need to hunt them all down). I've finished all main quests. I've finished all companion quests. I've finished all puzzle quests. As far as I can tell, there's no quests left undone - and yet, the game claims I still need to finish 1 side quest to have them all. And I cannot find which one it is. Even comparing to walkthroughs I seem to have done them all. It's apparently a minor bug where two quests in a questline that automatically follow on one another, don't always get counted as 2. That sucks. BOOOH.

 

[Ravenpoe]

Just finished the main quest of Hogwarts: Legacy.
Overall, I liked it. It most definitely isn't perfect, and while you start out as a student exploring Hogwarts and using Lumos and Accio and whatever to solve riddles and puzzles, by the end you're pretty much a standard fantasy hero blasting his way through dozens of goblins and dark wizards, potentially with Unforgivable Curses without any repercussions.
That aside, I spent around 50 hours in it, so yeah, fun. Some beasts are really cute to care for, etc etc.
What bugs me though, is that I'm stuck at 99% quest completion (89% overall, I can't be arsed to go collect every possible collectible and pop every possible balloon, thanks, I've done a whole lot of them but I don't feel the need to hunt them all down). I've finished all main quests. I've finished all companion quests. I've finished all puzzle quests. As far as I can tell, there's no quests left undone - and yet, the game claims I still need to finish 1 side quest to have them all. And I cannot find which one it is. Even comparing to walkthroughs I seem to have done them all. It's apparently a minor bug where two quests in a questline that automatically follow on one another, don't always get counted as 2. That sucks. BOOOH.

I tried to give Hogwarts Legacy a chance after someone gifted it to me after getting it in a bundle.

It seemed like an ok basic collectathon action game, but I couldn't get over all the JK Rowling problems. The wizarding world in general still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and the main plot about the goblins is still gross.

Even though I didn't pay for it, I still ended up contacting steam support and asking them to remove it from my profile. I don't want anyone that looks at my game profiles to think I'm supporting the terf Queen.

All the porn games I play can stay though, I'm not ashamed of those.

 

[figmentPez]

I'm kinda tired of games that make it clear that the developers spent more time making the game bigger and more complex, and not enough time working on making the game function well. I'd rather have a smaller, more polished game, but apparently publishers don't care.

Here is a screenshot of just one example of how this game is a thousand paper cuts of bad and broken gameplay. The navigation arrows are broken every time you get on the highway. The minimap is showing the correct route, exiting the highway. The purple guide arrows don't show the exit path. If you follow the purple arrows, they'll very quickly switch to pointing behind you.
View attachment 49537

The navigation sucks for other reasons, too. Unlike previous Saints Row games, you don't unlock shortcuts. The reboot has no concept of cutting through alleys or parking lots, and is way too fast to reroute if you drift even a small bit off of the lane it wants you to drive in. It doesn't function as well as the previous SR games, and those weren't anything exceptional.

Not that everything is worse than previous games. There are some improvements. I'm really glad you get unlimited sprinting right off the bat, instead of having to unlock it. The assassination / wanted missions are finally treated as actual missions, rather than being an after-thought in the menus.

There's also a lot of stuff that's both better and worse. For instance, you no longer have to purchase a clothing item multiple times to get it in different colors. Which is nice, except for the fact that you have to choose custom colors every time you go to reequip the clothes. I think you can save whole outfits, but I don't see a way to save individual items. (I do appreciate that guns can now have custom color schemes, though.)

Dressing weird in Saints Row games is fun:
View attachment 49540View attachment 49541View attachment 49542

This game continues to amaze me with it's mix of excellence and awful. I legit cannot decide if this is a good game or not, because there's so much shit, but there's also a lot of fantastic stuff too.

The pros:

A newly added customization feature is advanced materials, which really add some wild visual effects to clothing, guns, and vehicles. Here are a couple of examples.

The base clothing item is the pumpkin suit, and the two advanced materials applied were galaxy and lava. You can see how the lava looks in full sun, versus how it glows in shade. The screenshots don't do galaxy justice. If you've seen how Stan's plaid suit works in Monkey Island games, it's kinda like that but with a galaxy. As you move the camera around, the view of the galaxy moves, as if the suit were a window into the cosmos.

There's all sorts of weird materials: moving ink blots, rusted steel, diamond, shattered mirror, coins, cactus, carbon fiber. It's absolutely absurd, and I need to try it out on other clothing pieces. I love the visual effect, and it can be applied to weapons and vehicles, too.

Other stuff I'm enjoying:

• There's a whole storyline about LARPing, where you don carboard armor and shoot people with foam dart guns and cardboard swords. It's post-apocalyptic themed, but every speaks in really bad medieval stereotypes with a lot of "thou" and "verily". It's very tongue-in-cheek and it was hilarious! One of the best story-lines since How the Saints Saved Christmas, and apparently there's more of it to come when I play one of the DLCs.
• There's a storyline where you work with ghosts to hunt demons. I have no idea if this is base game or DLC, but it's hilarious. The mechanics of it are kinda bland, just follow the ghost until you have a rather standard fight. The theming and conversations that happen are enjoyable, though.
• Motorcycles handle much better. In previous SR games they've been squirrely. Very prone to going out of control. They're actually useable off-road in this game, which is welcome, given how much off-road there is.
• Helicopters are sturdier when it comes to collisions with the landscape.
• The wingsuit is a lot of fun. Better than flying in SR4 and more balanced, but not as fun as flying in Gat Out of Hell, though that would have been overpowered. It's almost overpowered as is, because one of the DLC weapons I started with allows you to launch yourself into the air from anywhere. Though, honestly, I like that, and love having lots of movement options.
• The writing is absoutely great, if you don't want grim'n'gritty gang warfare. As I said before, it's New Girl takes up a life of crime, and I'm here for it.
• The weapons and vehicles have signature abilities that you unlock by doing stuff with them (e.g. get 20 double kills, sideswipe vehicles, etc.) Some of the abilities are really powerful, like refilling some ammo on a headshot kill, or causing AOE damage when you fire, and vehicles can get ejector seats, or semi-unlimited nitro boost. There's some good variety and interesting abilites, though the requirements to unlock some of them are pretty steep and I've had to grind to get some of them.
• Insurance Fraud continues to be one of my favorite criminal activies, and this version is fine. It's not the best iteration, but it does introduce exploding cars when you've got adrenaline. Which solves the problem of traffic jams at intersections, and makes it less important to head to the highway. Which is good, since the Santo Ileso map doesn't have as many highway areas as other SR games.
• The main plot missions have been varied, with some good set pieces.

Stuff that's a very mixed bag:

• The notoriety system now includes a mechanic where enemies will call for backup, and you have a chance to shoot them to stop the call. On one hand this allows you to de-escalate the situation without just running away. It rewards skill and situational awareness. On the other hand, if you want to raise your notoriety, then you have to slow down your mayhem, and make sure you don't accidentally shoot too many enemies, so someone is alive to make a call. Also, you can't reliably lower your notoriety by running, so if you don't want to get to max notoriety and face a mini-boss, you'd better be shooting anyone who starts a call.
• The game looks good, but not as good as you might expect in 2022. There's some great weather effects, I really like the foggy nights and how the lights of the city make a glowing cloud islands around the map. It's pretty, and the low visibility could have made for some good gameplay, if any missions intentionally set themselves on foggy nights, which doesn't seem to be the case.
  
  
  

The stuff that's absolute shit:

• One of the criminal activities is illegal waste dumping. It plays out as tracking down trucks full of glowing waste barrels and carefully driving them to a dumping site. If you drive carefully that's it. If you have an accident, the barrels become unstable, and you have to drive fast to try to keep them stable, but that's only if you screw up. There's no incentive to drive quickly otherwise. Cautious, careful driving, in a Saints Row game. WTF were they thinking? The most useful part of this dumping site is that it always has a ton of guys in hazmat suits around, so it came in useful when I had to choose a spot to fight rival gangs.
• Another criminal activity is repo work. There's a new tow rope mechanic added to some cars, and it's implementation doesn't feel very Saints Row. None of the missions using it thus far have focused on using it for destruction. Some of them have allowed you to break stuff with the object you're towing around, some have even had bonus objectives, but a good chuk of the repo work penalizes you for smashing too much stuff, because if you break the thing you're towing, you have to start over. I don't know why there hasn't been an activity to try to destroy as much stuff as you can by hauling around something big and durable. Why does this game keep asking me to drive carefully?
• The game makes you choose where to locate the base for certain criminal activities, but they don't give you any information to go on before placing them. It doesn't matter much in the long run, but I hate it when games make you choose placement with no idea of how it will impact things. I placed the illegal dumping off to the edge of the map, but that might have been a mistake because you have to drive to it so many times. Other places, like the clinic for Insurance Fraud, only get visited at the start and end of their series of quests.
• The healing mechanic is crap. It works okay in the early game, but rapidly becomes next to useless. What's supposed to happen is that you have a special instant takedown move that restores health. Only it has a hefty cooldown, and doesn't heal enough to be useful. Especially since you have to be in melee range of an enemy that has been weakened enough to use it on. There's another ability that gives you a shield, and that remains useful, but it uses "flow" but it would have been nice to use the healing mechanic to heal.
• The wingsuit sabotage missions are so fucking boring. Like, you'd think that gliding from rooftop to rooftop, shooting enemies and blowing stuff up would be fun, but meh. There's no skill involved in the wingsuit flying, just glide to the next building when you need to. The rooftops are horribly designed as levels go, and throwing the explosive satchel charges at antennas is clunky and awkward. There's no flow to the missions. It just doesn't feel rewarding, and I didn't care for the mission dialogue either. It's really bland corporate warfare shit, and the boss should not be this stupid about motivation for blowing shit up. "I just don't see why they'd have a small army protecting communications equipment." Says the person who controls a criminal empire from their cellphone! FFS
• I'm pretty far into the game and the Saint's base of operations is still a shithole with junk everywhere. I'm paying $1.6 million dollars each to set up the latest three criminal enterprises, but I can't so much as put a big screen TV in my hideout? Or hire a cleaning crew to get rid of the piles of broken trash in the corners? Oh, I can decorate with scavenger hunt items I find around the map, using a terrible interface to do so, but some of the spots are so poorly lit I can barely see the objects when they're placed. No upgrades to unlock additional display slots? No lighting for the cool shit I'm finding? WTF? All the past Saints Row games let you turn your crappy hideout into something slick, and pretty early on in the story, at least if you had the money.
• There's way too much searching for stuff and photographing it. The advanced materials I love? Go to a location and read a clue to search for the right object to photograph. Want to decorate your crib? Search huge areas with cryptic clues, or keep your eye out for a certain glow/shine on objects you can photograph to copy. Plus just photograph landmarks for money and XP. Photograph stuff to unlock fast travel! Why are we taking so many photos in a Saints Row game? I dunno, there isn't even a real photo mode in the game. Not that I bother with depth of field and all the other bells and whistles in photo modes, but it would be nice to be able to get a higher angle for some screenshots.

I want to love this game, because it does a lot of the Saints Row things I love. But there's so much wasted potential, and I'm still grumpy about the terrible controller support.

 

[bhamv3]

It's strange how sometimes an urge to play an old favorite will pop up in your mind. I suddenly had a hankering today to play some Left 4 Dead 2, so I redownloaded it and played some single-player mode.

I'm very bad at it. The game feels a bit janky by modern gaming standards. But goddang it's still such adrenaline-filled fun.

 

[Bubble181]

So based on a combination of what people said here, a nice discount, a desire to play something new/modern that my old PC definitely couldn't handle, and interest in a longer RPG, I decided to buy WH40k: Rogue Trader.
Knowing myself, I'll probably only play through it once (at least for now - if it REALLY holds up I'll play it again in 4 years or so after having forgotten half of it).
So now my question is (@Vrii and @Frank , since I think you're the only two here who mentioned playing it?): should I go in completely blind, do some basic lookup for a build and some REALLY DONT DO THIS kind of stuff, or look up a guide/walkthrough/whatever to get the most out of it? I don't particularly care about spoilers, and I'm not looking for a really big Challenge - I play to relax, not to have to grind and retry the same fight 15 times. But on the other hand, going in blind does have its advantages, as long as I'm not locking myself out of big parts of the game or unwillingly completely gimping myself;

 

[Frank]

You don't have to, they've streamlined it a lot since it was first released and all the abilities are much more explanatory so you can kinda just do what you want, especially on normal and easy.

Pick what tickles your fancy.

 

[Bubble181]

Pick what tickles your fancy.

Well, I bought "3001: A Lust Odyssey" at the same time, so that comes down to "don't start it yet".
(It's very much a Star Trek porn visual novel, yes.)

 

[Vrii]

Yep, I mostly agree with Frank. Unless you're on the highest difficulty there's plenty of room to figure out what works well and get through the game. I don't think I even tried to look anything up until the third chapter of the game, and that was just because it was doing a Mass Effect style "if you make the wrong choices here some of your people will die for real!" and the runs are long enough that I didn't want to gamble on losing one of the people I'd been using for tens of hours to a dialogue option.

 

[Bubble181]

Holy crap. I had forgotten I know some of the lore, but absolutely 0 about any of how any of it works. It's a whole different system with whole different skills, powers, etc than I'm used to. I'm two hours in and still trying to define how I want to build my character and what would be a cool and/or good combination. Zero idea of what I'm doing. Going in blind is...not my usual approach. Going in this blind may turn out badly. No clue what kind of companions I'm going to meet (is it useful to be an officer? Is the first guy you meet The Greatest Officer Ever so Never Start Out Like That? Fuck if I know!)
Daunting. Scary. Out of my comfort zone. But....Well, let's give it a go.