What are you playing?

GasBandit

Staff member
Alright, so here's the thing about Starbase-

First off: Pat - it's one unified universe, all players, no private nothing, as I suspected. No private instances, no private servers, everybody is all around, all the time.
  1. It's alpha. as. fuck.
    1. I crash constantly. "workarounds" for the crash are suggested as: Turning off steam overlay (for ALL games, no thanks), turning off steam network ip usage (again, no thanks), and running as administrator. Definitely not ready for prime time, anywhere close to it.
    2. Physics glitches and bugs abound. I've had to delete perfectly good stacks of ore in my inventory because they became bugged and could not be moved under any circumstances.
    3. The lag. Dear god, the lag. And not just latency, there's a huge loading chug every couple seconds whenever more than one player is within 20km of each other. It's excruciating.
  2. It's arcane and opaque as fuck. Even compared to Space Engineers
    1. Outside of "EZBuild" mode - which is of extremely limited utility - the amount of little fiddly shit you have to do to build ANYTHING is astonishing. It's mindblowing to think anybody would want to have to put up with this. It's a step in the entirely wrong direction. To put something on a ship, you have to frame it out with actual beams attached by flanges that are bolted together (with you using a bolt gun to literally rivet every single bolt one at a time) just like you would have to do in real life. It's like the designers are explicitly trying to drive away the casual crowd.
    2. I scrimped and saved to buy a mining laser for my first ship on the auction house. After an hour of fruitless attempts to bolt it on, I finally looked through a VERY less than helpful wiki to discover that just having the laser isn't enough, you have to combine it with a "utility tool body" and a "utility tool capacitor" and THEN you can mount it on a hardpoint (which itself has to be mounted on your ship in a very special way so that not only is it bolted securely to the structure but you have access to the back so you can wire cables to it for power. Then you have to wire buttons and levers into your cockpit to control its power and range. It's just a billion tiny little things you have to do, and it feels like it is getting in its own way.
  3. It's slow as fuck.
    1. Remember space engineers before jump drives? Where your max speed was 100m/s and it took a half hour to get anywhere, during which you might as well AFK? Welp, that's this game.
    2. Research and crafting are super slow and super grindy. It takes over a minute to build a single item, and you have to build items to generate research points to spend on research. So, a lot of players end up building a lot of stuff they don't need and throwing them on the auction house, just to grind research points. Which I guess is good for the economy, somewhat.
    3. You have almost no personal inventory other than space for tools. To move anything of actual volume (ore, ship parts) you have to "tether" yourself to a cargo port on a ship, or transfer the cargo from your ship to your "station storage." But a crafting bench can't use ship storage, only station storage. So there's pretty much no crafting on ships. So enjoy the 30 minute commute between the asteroids and the starting station, dozens of times, when you get started
    4. You can't do ANYTHING when you start, except mine. Then you can use the starting station's crafting table to build things so you can start researching things to build more things. It will be dozens of hours before you can build a station of your own, but it doesn't much matter because at this point they don't serve much purpose other than storage and crafting.
    5. Even the tutorial takes forever. And you have to do that tutorial to be given your first ship. And unlike Space Engineers or Empyrion, it is 100% impossible for you to build a ship or a base unless you already have a ship. So, if you lose that, have fun doing the tutorial again to get another noobie ship - it took me about an hour to do the tutorial.

So what's nice to say about it?
Well, the auction house does work extremely well. I was able to sell ore I mined and buy other things I need (including ship parts that I would not have been able to research myself for hours and hours).
It's pretty and colorful.
Ship management is actually pretty good. Instead of having a big floating ship graveyard, you can fly your ship to a station's parking area zone, and then "despawn" it into a sort of ship inventory. You have to respawn it at the same station, though, so you can't ship ships, so to speak. And if you park your ship too close to the noob station, it will despawn itself in 10 minutes, making sure the actual useful parts of the station stay clutter free.
It has a ROBUST backend, with its own in-game programming language. And everything is pretty much infinitely customizable if you're willing to take the time. So if you find yourself one of those people that LOVES "Dwarf Fortress" levels of depth in everything you do AND you are the kind of person who loves tedium and overzealous detail-oriented "gameplay," then this will be heaven for you.

Starbase gave me a taste of how Terrik must have felt when I tried to get him to play Empyrion. It's just... too much. Even for me.

That said, here, have some screenshots.

The tutorial teaches you how to demolish ships with a buzzsaw - something you will not be doing for a good long time in the actual game, because there's a 30km safe zone around the start that prevents you from salvaging any structures other than your own
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The tutorial also teaches you the wrong way to mine. It has you left click with a pickaxe, which breaks up voxels, and then the station hoovers them up. What you REALLY do in the wild is RIGHT click to hit it with the hammer end instead of the pick end, to actually collect ore into your (tethered ship's) inventory.

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The tutorial rewards you with a basic ship called a "laborer module." Glamorous.

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I do like how the game allows for cockpits with useful functional readouts and buttons built into the model instead of on a HUD. That's one thing this game definitely has over SE or E:GS.

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Despite the difficulties, I did manage to add more cargo space into my laborer module, so I could spend a few minutes more mining before having to fly the 20 minutes back to the station to craft and sell, to do it all again.

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The area around the starting stations is littered with the detritus of hundreds of noobs who tried and gave up, like me. Their laborer modules will drift here forever, I guess.

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You have almost no personal inventory other than space for tools. To move anything of actual volume (ore, ship parts) you have to "tether" yourself to a cargo port on a ship, or transfer the cargo from your ship to your "station storage." But a crafting bench can't use ship storage, only station storage. So there's pretty much no crafting on ships. So enjoy the 30 minute commute between the asteroids and the starting station, dozens of times, when you get started
This is the single mechanic that made me stop playing E:GS. Volume and weight restrictions that require you to constantly tether yourself to your inventory or your base's inventory or your ship's inventory or the trade station? So much fun when can we start? Then they added to that inanity by including the CPU restrictions and expanding CPU restrictions to also include armor blocks. I have to build a bigger CPU because I decided to use combat steel instead of regular steel? It's just inert blocks of material! How can CPU capacity possibly matter?

I might pick it back up again, there are folks making noise about the games they're playing and wouldn't it be great if they had someone join who already knows how to play, etc. Maybe. We'll see.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
This is the single mechanic that made me stop playing E:GS. Volume and weight restrictions that require you to constantly tether yourself to your inventory or your base's inventory or your ship's inventory or the trade station? So much fun when can we start?
To be fair, the nice thing about station storage is it is connectionless and omnipresent, so long as you are at the station. You can just drag and drop to it or right-click-and-send to it at any time, and pull stuff out just as easily, and crafting only happens to-and-from station inventory anyway. And Starbase handles tethering much more seamlessly than E:GS did - you just hit the "interact" key (default F) on a specialized ship piece called a cargo port (you can see my yellow "tether" connecting me to one in the mining tutorial screenshot) and the ship's inventory is just seamlessly tacked on to your own inventory. And it works because your own inventory is just a dozen "backpack" type slots that can only hold tools or other small items, and then TWO slots for large volume stacks like ore. So your untethered inventory is tiny. But once you tether to a ship, your inventory looks much like untethered inventory would look in SE or EGS.

It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out you could also tether something to something else, and that's how you're expected to buy ship propellant. There are "refill" kiosks around the starting station where you hit F on your ship's cargo port, then while tethered hit F on the refill station's cargo port, and that connects you up to the system so you can buy propellant and battery power and have it fed right into your ship.

Oh and that reminds me... battery power. It's kind of counterintuitive. It's cheap because you make your own from your ship's generator, easily. But the generator uses fuel rods. And you have to swap those in and out of your generator manually (and not by inventory manipulation, it's a physical process in the engine). So your generator generates energy from fuel rods and your ship uses both energy and propellant to move.

(Oh and that brings me to another gripes - SPACE HAS DRAG in this game. Even more than E:GS did. Like, if you stop thrusting from 100 m/s, you come to a dead stop within 5 seconds. So you can't get up to speed and drift. And also for some reason, thrusting requires as much electricity as it does propellant).

So about the time you start to deplete your first fuel rod you have to discover - the hard way usually - that your ship has 4 more fuel rods stored in special racks that you can gravity-gun out and snap into place in your generator. It's possible to manufacture (and refill depleted) fuel rods via crafting, but you have to research it, and it requires a resource that isn't available in the safe noobie area. But that's ok, that's what the auction house is for. So once you, the player, know all this, it's not a big deal. But nobody tells you and there's no tutorial about it and apparently (I found while researching what to do in a panic as my first fuel rod dwindled) there have been problems with people price gouging new fuel rods on the auction house to suck newbies dry of their credits.

Oh and another gripe I found - if your cargo load in your ship is unbalanced - more mass on one side than the other- your SHIP WILL CONSTANTLY TURN IN THAT DIRECTION WHILE THRUSTING AND YOUR GYROS WON'T COMPENSATE. This would not be a big deal if the UI actually gave any indication of what part of the ship each inventory slot was in, but it doesn't. So you have to just shift cargo around until it stops happening.
 
"Eh, Dwarf Fortress and Eve are too mainstream and easy, let's make something that really makes everything tedious".

When you're at the point of riveting individual pieces in place, may I suggest that, as a hobby, you can also....I dunno, repair real stuff for a living and get paid?
At some point there's no more fun to be found in a job.
 
"Eh, Dwarf Fortress and Eve are too mainstream and easy, let's make something that really makes everything tedious".

When you're at the point of riveting individual pieces in place, may I suggest that, as a hobby, you can also....I dunno, repair real stuff for a living and get paid?
At some point there's no more fun to be found in a job.
That was one reason I finally quit Eve. I learned that you could buy game time with in-game currency. So I developed a very stable and profitable trade run where I could spend few hours a week getting all the materials I needed and then building some fairly rare missiles. Since they're consumable, there was always a demand for them, and I made a fairly predictable income. It was enough for me to buy monthly game time, with a bit left over. It didn't take me too long to get a caldari navy raven and have it tricked out very nicely. I think I had about a billion and a half ISK sunk into it.

But eventually, I realized I was mostly logging on every few days just to keep the business going, and it started to feel like work. And if it was work, I was making shit per hour at it. ;)

But that Raven sure was nice whenever my friends got into Eve a couple of years later, and I dusted off the old girl and went on runs with them. They all had noob ships, and were running complexes, so I show up, and while they're all on vent making a plan for these pirate ships coming toward them, my missiles all just fly out and start popping ships while they're twice as far out as any of my friends ships could even reach. They were flabbergasted. I was amused. :D
 
Now I was curious. Hadda log in and see if I still had the Raven. Account still active, 10 years after my last play time. Raven's still there, off in some station 10 jumps away.

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I don't remember how to play this game at all.
 
“Keep spending money andtime until you win.”
I think that’s about right.

—Patrick
I do recall when I was playing last, I had excel spreadsheets open to track all kinds of business data points as well as stuff on my ship. It really was more accounting than play at that point.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Welp, turns out, since the last time I played Oxygen Not Included, they've introduced a number of changes I hate.

First and foremost, you used to be able to keep food from spoiling indefinitely simply by keeping it in a CO2 or Chlorine gas environment. Not any more. Now you have to do that AND put it in a sub-freezing temperature.
Duplicants can no longer access things through a diagonal gap
New debuffs for breathing polluted oxygen or passing through chlorine (Yucky lungs and stinging eyes)
And they shuffled around the tech tree.

Man... now I don't even want to play it any more.
 
so, since I had eve back open, I started poking around to see if I could remember how the hell to play. My factory orders that I'd started ten years ago were still there and waiting to be delivered. Most of that stuff was 30-60 day orders, so I had hundreds of thousands of tier 2 missiles (for instance). Sold everything at the immediate buy order price (generally 10-15% market value) and still ended up with 1.1 billion ISK. heh.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
so, since I had eve back open, I started poking around to see if I could remember how the hell to play. My factory orders that I'd started ten years ago were still there and waiting to be delivered. Most of that stuff was 30-60 day orders, so I had hundreds of thousands of tier 2 missiles (for instance). Sold everything at the immediate buy order price (generally 10-15% market value) and still ended up with 1.1 billion ISK. heh.
And probably crashed the market for tier two missiles.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
For reference, people, the colors are:
Red: AnnaDei
Blue: GasBandit
Yellow: Cobra
Orange:Shawnacy
Green: Ashburner
Pink (AKA "Man Purple"): Eriol
Purple (AKA "Woman Purple"): Celt Z
Gray: Terrik
 
My retro gaming journey has brought me to Snatcher on the Sega CD.

Snatcher was released in 1988 in Japan on the MSX, and eventually released as a remastered sega cd port in the 90s in america. It's a cyberpunk point and click adventure game that's heavily inspired by Akira, Blade Runner and Terminator, where you play as a Junker named Gillian who hunts down Snatchers, robotic humanoids that kill humans and steal their skin to assume their identity. You have no memory of your past, and so you're trying to solve the mystery of the snatchers while solving the mystery of your past along the way. All with the help of your robotic companion, Metal Gear.

What's that? Oh, right, this is also a Hideo Kojima game.

If you like point and click adventure games, this is easily one of the best I've played. I'm loving everything about it so far.

 
My retro gaming journey has brought me to Snatcher on the Sega CD.

Snatcher was released in 1988 in Japan on the MSX, and eventually released as a remastered sega cd port in the 90s in america. It's a cyberpunk point and click adventure game that's heavily inspired by Akira, Blade Runner and Terminator, where you play as a Junker named Gillian who hunts down Snatchers, robotic humanoids that kill humans and steal their skin to assume their identity. You have no memory of your past, and so you're trying to solve the mystery of the snatchers while solving the mystery of your past along the way. All with the help of your robotic companion, Metal Gear.

What's that? Oh, right, this is also a Hideo Kojima game.

If you like point and click adventure games, this is easily one of the best I've played. I'm loving everything about it so far.

Other than the peepshow in the shower on a character that is like 14 or something in the original Japanese (Kojima.....) Snatcher rules ass and it's where he should have stayed. Just dump all your reference heavy nonsense into fun, goofy point and clicks because Death Stranding....hooo-stinkeeee.

I too am on a retro journey of comfort. I'm playing Breath of Fire 2 right now. I did play through BOF1 over the last week or so (on 5x speed). With 2, there's copious editors out there, so I just patched the SNES Rom with an updated translation and used an editor to crank every enemy in the game's experience and money and item drops by 4 and I'm playing it at 2x speed (no need for 5, no grinding!). Rand is supposed to be a big beefy horseman, but his walking around sprite looks like a buff mouse. He's the best.
 
Other than the peepshow in the shower on a character that is like 14 or something in the original Japanese (Kojima.....) Snatcher rules ass and it's where he should have stayed. Just dump all your reference heavy nonsense into fun, goofy point and clicks because Death Stranding....hooo-stinkeeee.
I think that's a bit unfair: Death Stranding's actual gameplay perfectly encapsulated everything Kojima wanted to say philosophically and did so in an interesting fashion. It's just the actual narrative was completely bonkers (though it still had some charming stuff, especially Deadman and Sam's interactions and growing relationship through the plot).

I kind of think for his next game that Kojima should team up with someone on the narrative, so he can design the gameplay to say what he's trying to say (i.e. the thing that he's good at) and have another storyteller write a story that actually stays on the rails for once.
 
Other than the peepshow in the shower on a character that is like 14 or something in the original Japanese (Kojima.....) Snatcher rules ass and it's where he should have stayed. Just dump all your reference heavy nonsense into fun, goofy point and clicks because Death Stranding....hooo-stinkeeee.
That must be Katrina, who every time she comes up a character is quick to say "don't get any ideas, she's only 18."

I assume that 18 number was tweaked in translation.

I haven't gotten to that scene yet, but in light defence of Kojima, Gilliam is written as a creep and it's at least so far not been presented as a good thing. Gilliam objectifies women and pathetically tries to hit on them, and every other character rightfully calls him out on it.

I plan on playing Policenauts after this, another point and click from Kojima and the spiritual successor.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
My weird RPG phase continues. Got "Dark Quest 2."

It's is the most mobile-ey of mobile app game things. The animation is bad, the english is completely unpunctuated and often awkward, it's just got that whole "mobile game ambiance" thing going that every android and IOS game for the last 10 years as absolutely reeked of, if you know what I mean.

But you know what, there's a halfway interesting turn based strategy game (not really an RPG) under it all. Granted, it's buried under 9 fucktons of Chinesium Ore you'll have to drill through to get to it, but it is what it is.

On the one hand, there is absolutely no reason for this to be on PC (or PS4, for that matter, which it is, for some reason)... but on the other, if it had not been on steam, and on sale for 3 bucks, I probably wouldn't have ever heard of it or given it a single look.

So I guess if you're jonesing for a casual timewaster, you can grab it when it's 3 bucks or less. Or maybe get the mobile version, because when I'm sitting at my PC, I don't really feel like playing something like this.
 
My weird RPG phase continues. Got "Dark Quest 2."

It's is the most mobile-ey of mobile app game things. The animation is bad, the english is completely unpunctuated and often awkward, it's just got that whole "mobile game ambiance" thing going that every android and IOS game for the last 10 years as absolutely reeked of, if you know what I mean.

But you know what, there's a halfway interesting turn based strategy game (not really an RPG) under it all. Granted, it's buried under 9 fucktons of Chinesium Ore you'll have to drill through to get to it, but it is what it is.

On the one hand, there is absolutely no reason for this to be on PC (or PS4, for that matter, which it is, for some reason)... but on the other, if it had not been on steam, and on sale for 3 bucks, I probably wouldn't have ever heard of it or given it a single look.

So I guess if you're jonesing for a casual timewaster, you can grab it when it's 3 bucks or less. Or maybe get the mobile version, because when I'm sitting at my PC, I don't really feel like playing something like this.
I know I sound like a broken record, but if you haven't played Disco Elysium yet, I highly recommend it if you're on an RPG kick.
 
I just finished Breath of Fire 2 and Jesus Christ that last dungeon is the biggest test of patience I've ever had. I had it on 3X speed and the encounter rate (even with a pack full of smoke bombs to reduce the encounter rate) was still almost too much for me (sometimes as few as 5 steps).

The biggest shock to me is the complete lack of credits. None, not even the usual pseudonym nonsense that Japanese games tended to have through the 8 and 16 bit eras. Instead of credits, it just names all the NPCs in the game. There's literally no record outside of secret Capcom ones (if they even exist) of who made this game. Sure they know the producer, but that's about it.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Orcs Must Die 3

It has a really rough start. Some cold water dumps early on in the form of tar traps that cost 250% (750 instead of 300... that's more than brimstone for crying out loud) what they used to, a heavily nerfed wind belt, and starting weapons vastly inferior to the good ol' default crossbow. The starting traps are just floor spikes and wall arrow traps, which let's face it, floor spikes are barely worth even placing except for that they're all you got. So yeah, a lot of the first few levels, is just basically holding down left click and shooting orcs (and even headshots have been nerfed, even medium orcs take 2 headshots to kill) and your traps doing jack and shit.

It feels VERY not fun.

But then you get to the historical missions that take place outdoors. That give you ridiculously over-the-top giant sized traps and weapons (like a boom barrel TREBUCHET that you can sit in and aim and never runs out of ammo), and suddenly the game finds its stride again. Until I got to those outdoor missions I was ready to write this off as a complete and utter failure and refund it. My thoughts were "I want more orcs must die! We have orcs must die at home. Orcs must die at home: this" and "I feel like somebody could have made a better OMD sequel in Roblox than this" but I'm glad I stuck with it, and now my friend and I are having fun in it.

So yeah... you have to suffer through the first few missions, but then it gets pretty good.

But just go into it ready to accept that every previous strategy you ever built up in OMD 1 and 2 has been nerfed and it's time to learn some new tricks.
 
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