Duck and Cover

I know, modern games suck man. Most of it. But seriously, there is improvement.

Like what?

Dogmeatlives wrote:I'm not really playing it anymore because it's a massive time sink and I'll be dead soon

cmon bro

cmon

Holy Moly!!!!!!!!!! Johnnygothisgun?!?! How have you been?!

Fucking around in Fonline2.

Nothing happening yet.

I will make a shitty army of throwaway alts who are Jinxed.

Their job is to be rodeo clowns, except it is not a rodeo and they will just be shot to pieces.

I will hand out the passwords to people who give not a shit about an online game, but who wouldn't mind a bit of hilarity.

That way they can "play" 5-10 minutes (if they are online when the action is happening) and just laugh at the results later. No investment required*.
(Results = screenshots/battle reports, etc.)

*Except downloading the client.

livin the dream hermano, keepin the fire burnin

what's new with you bud

Far Cry 4. It's 3, but better. Highlights (and, in all likelihood, spoilers) include :

Semi-automatic crossbow.

Elephant gun.

My first major purchase was the wingsuit. Fuck yes.

Random eagle attacks, both upon the player and various NPCs.

A rhinoceros, on fire from a molotov to the face, giving no fucks while sending a truck (containing the original owner of molotov, naturally) over a cliff.

The wildlife in general, especially when they're leaping from the bushes and eviscerating the unsuspecting.

Zipping about in an ultralight helicopter, M79 in hand, bringing invisible explosive death to everything from endangered fauna to hapless mooks.

Co-op mayhem.

Customisable UI elements.

Map editor.

Mortar emplacements.

Getting high as fuck and fighting Rakshasa in Shangri-bloody-la.



Ridable elephants !

Some excellent music.

Repeatable outposts.

The primary antagonist, Pagan Min is also quite engaging, despite his relative lack (thus far) of actual on screen presence. Troy Baker puts in an impressive performance.

Hell, so far all the actual characters have been very well done, vocally.

Awesome no-longer-much-of-a-secret 20 minutes in alternate ending.

It's really pretty.

Unhighlights include :

Not the greatest PC optimisation I have encountered . . .

One of the most obnoxious DJs (tautology, ehue) I have ever had the displeasure to hear. He has a grating voice, he constantly talks over the music, his incessant blather is a consistently vacuous stream-of-<strike>shite</strike>-consciousness. Even as deliberate as it so obivously is, it's still as egregious as Blood Dragon's 'FORCED TUTORIALS SURE DO SUCK, DON'T THEY ? LOL.' during the forced tutorial. Except, in Blood Dragon, that was only the first 10 minutes. Whereas, this is the entire goddamn radio for the entire goddamn game. At least you can mute the fucker, though I wish there was the option to kill him.

Un-fucking-skippable, un-fucking-pausable cut scenes.

A fairly bland protagonist (I know, open world cipher blah fucking blah), though he's a substantial improvement from 3 - which, to be fair, isn't too difficult a feat.

Honey badgers. Not that they're out of place, I'm just sick of them.

Hurk.

A disheartening lack of man-portable mortars.

Arbitrarily curtailed bullet ranges. Why yes, that SMG bullet should clearly vanish from existance after 100 metres . . .

Open world ? On a mission ? Close the world ! At one point, this astonishingly idiotic design element assaulted my senses as, after starting a mission, I walked perhaps 10 metres across a road to tear town a propaganda poster - and FAILED THE MISSION. What the shit ?

Some of the weapon unlocks make you wait until essentially the end of the game. From what I've read, at that point you only have whatever side quests and open world filler you haven't already hit.

The purported leaders of the Golden Path, Sabal and Amita, are a pair of shallow, sophistic cretins who invariably delegate to the player, even if you've previously worked against their intentions, and will tirelessly piss and moan if you don't do everything they demand of you. Their respective goals are as aggravatingly depicted as their character, and with all the subtlety of a proselytic mormon at a BDSM convention.

Cretin 1 : 'Oh you monster, you didn't destroy all the heroin as I assumed you had agreed to by saying nothing ! Now I'll just have to console myself by re-establishing the oppressive theocracy of my forefathers, of which I shall be the unassailable king, by way of marrying the 13 year old reincarnation of our national goddess because TRADITION.'

Cretin 2 : Oh you monster, you destroyed all the heroin despite my expressly forbidding it, how will I bankroll my dreams of creating a fascist junta all my own then ? Now I shall transparently attempt to engender <strike>guilt</strike> sympathy by explaining in great detail how challenging it is to be a <strike>an aspiring power crazed, drug addled warlord</strike> <strike>Khmer Rouge fan-girl</strike> woman in Not-Nepal.

This leads me to hope, hope, hope that the possibilities hinted at by the aforementioned not-so-secret ending become full blown expansion, as personally, I would welcome the opportunity to hunt down and aerate the Golden Path leadership, destroy their dreams (more overtly), and consign their precious country to the hell of ruthless, shameless exploitation that it clearly warrants.

Still, having fun, for now. More later ?

Sounds like your having more fun than me playing CoD Advanced Warfare, In my opinion AW eats ass!

At the (high ?) risk of being uncharitable, it's your own fault for playing CoD, really.

Further FC4 thoughts :

The writing is, mercifully, better than 3's, but still <strike>typical of Ubisoft</strike> insipid and unengaging. I suspect that the resolution will follow suite. It still hits all the outsider messiah figure notes, just like 3, though it's perhaps a bit less on the nose given the differences in characterisation and background of Ajay versus Dwayne or whatever the fuck his name was. Regardless, Ajay's motivation escalates in a relatively implausible fashion :

Honour the last wish of his mother by traveling to her homeland to scatter her ashes ? Sure, that's reasonable.

[GAME BEGINS]

Kill hundreds of people in a variety of awful ways for nebulous (at best) reasons, constantly mainline random psychotropic plants, wantonly slaughter endangered species for the sake of personal convenience and haute couture (I shit you not) . . .

OH BUT IT'S OKAY BECAUSE AJAY STILL INTENDS TO SCATTER MUM'S ASHES ONCE HE'S KILLED EVERYTHING AND TAKEN ALL THE DRUGS.

What the fuck ?

As previously touched upon (and with the caveat that I am, at most, at the halfway point of the narrative), the Golden Path power struggle dynamic is poorly executed, as when it does crop up ; it merely involves possibly visiting a different location, a slight alteration of objectives and post mission outcome, banter typically dominated by whoever you pissed off, and finally, determines who provides intermittent feedback on some of your open world shenanigans (raiding outposts, side quests, hijacking supply trucks etc) - then everything returns to the status quo until the next 'choice'. And, naturally enough, cutscene idiocy is in full effect for poor Ajay - far too many instances to relate.

The AI still has the hive mind aspect from 3 (and 2, IIRC), which makes ghosting an outpost rather aggravating until you get a feel for the quirks. Once you realise that you're fine until the tiniest sliver of white bar appearing over their heads, you just start doing things like leaving mines on likely points of egress, and then setting C4 charges to act as a general 'I should investigate over there' signals to send them on their way - or throwing bait to attract throngs of tigers, or hovering at 200 metres in an ultralight and grenade sniping every last fucking one of them. Still, even with these (and other) options, it's remains irritating to accidentally melee attack a wall, and have everyone immediately jump to alarmed and rush you from all directions. Or, if you have the Buzzsaw or a flamethrower, it's can instead be quite relaxing. Or you could play it safe and boring with a silenced sniper rifle or the bow, which, once you become comfortable with gauging ranges, is extremely effective.

Also, I am disappointed at the complete lack of alternative ammunitions. I would have loved, to name but a few, thermobaric grenades/rockets, AP/explosive/incendiary bullets, dragon's breath shells/slugs, WP mortar bombs. Claymore mines would have been brilliant, too. While there is a 'unique' anti-materiel rifle with explosive bullets, it's an entirely separate weapon, and this irritates me. I am very unreasonable about computer games. Yes.

The incendiary arrows are amazing, though. Especially against helicopters, because a rain of burning, screaming bodies is as fun as it makes me sound like a sociopath.

The signature weaponry is anything but, other examples include an M14 knock-off with 3 fixed mods instead of your choice of 2, or a .44 magnum with an extended barrel. Wow ! Modders unlocked this inane system in 3 within the first week of release, I have similar hopes with 4.

It's complete bollocks that cutting (that is, non-takedown) someone with the khurki won't even stagger them, but the moment they wind up with their rifle stock, it's almost guarenteed death as you land on your arse and slowly stand up while everyone shoots you to bits.

The fortresses are simply slightly larger outposts, there's really nothing noteworthy about them.

The DLC content is underwhelming. Some very samey scenarios at high altitude, which includes earlier access to some later game weaponry (such as the flamethrower, which I concede, is entertaining), and 4 intensely terrible events involving Hurk, who is intensely terrible. In keeping with the theme, the harpoon launcher is astonishingly underwhelming, primarily because it doesn't even have the capacity to pin people to walls/trees/angry rhinos etc. The first mission, cunningly entitled 'The Syringe' has you chasing down some ancient mythical wonderdrug, which, upon completion, you don't even get to make use of. Would it have been too much to hope for a new syringe type ? Is 4 options really too complicated to expect the average player to keep track of ?

Toggleable sticky explosives are great, they really enable the whole merciless guerrilla simulation by way of such joys as roadside bombings, C4 loaded elephants and fire, fire everywhere. Also, because it has yet to cease to be hilarious to open an ambush by attaching a grenade to the face of whoever's unlucky enough to be on point.

Oh, and, joyously, it appears that you can kill both Amita and Sabal ! Now for the DJ . . .

Blargh wrote:At the (high ?) risk of being uncharitable, it's your own fault for playing CoD, really.

It looked really cool... but looks can be deceiving.

It lags, multiplayer has the worst spawning system ever! And there are countless map glitches and tricks.

So I finally got Wasteland 2 on Steam (the legal way). I updated it and now its pretty much unplayable. I'm sorry, but wtf? Like the game does not seem that complicated that seasoned game developers could continually fuck it up so badly. It crashed often when I was playing the launch version, but at least I could play it. Now I enter a location and the screen is entirely black except for the UI, I re-enter the same location and the sun turns on and off constantly, or I try to trade with someone and the screen becomes a weird collage of strange symbols. Now, this is after I paid for the game. The shit I downloaded free actually worked.... sort of. Anyway, I still love the gameplay, but DO NOT BUY the game at this point. It's fucked.

Clearly, it's trying to do you a favour. Be glad.

I guess that's true. I got shit to do anyway. But I have gotten back into Myth II which is ancient at this point but still incredibly fun to blow up whole squads of walking corpses with dwarven bombs... It really makes me scratch my head as to why nobody has ever tried, as of yet, to replicate that kind of medieval fantasy tactical combat shit. it's addictive as hell.

I'm also working on my own board game, which I have shown off at a convention, but which is still in its earliest version. It's called Sweet Saga and I'll have to post about it more when I get closer to finishing.

Dogmeatlives wrote:Myth II [...] dwarven bombs... It really makes me scratch my head as to why nobody has ever tried, as of yet, to replicate that kind of medieval fantasy tactical combat shit. it's addictive as hell.

This.

I don't understand how it was never more popular. The multiplayer was intense.

I can't stop playing Crusader Kings 2.

DEAD STATE.

Dead State is certainly fun but damn is it taxing to play. Every time a zombie lunges at one of my party members my stress skyrockets. Other survivors at least don't run the chance of infecting your people.

SenisterDenister wrote:I can't stop playing Crusader Kings 2.

I always come back to CKII.

Is anybody aware of patches/updates to Wasteland 2? Still interested, still nervous.

I think inXile have 4 patches for it now, seems stable.

I would have liked it more if I had waited until now to start playing it and just burned through the complete game, valuable kickstarter experience I suppose. Still, the main thing that puts me off is implementation of the writing/lore. There's no real choices, it's just filler backstory with certain boxes leading to quests. The sense of immersion is lost on me, it feels like an MMO, very impersonal.

As far as what I'm playing now; a combination of Fallout 1/2, Silent Hunter 4, and STALKER:SoC. It's working kind of like methadone for a heroin addict. Only instead of saving money on smack, I'm saving money on the monthly premium for world of whorecraft. I'll wave at you guys from my conning tower next time I refuel at Christmas Island.