Sulphur on 20/7/2024 at 04:11
RE5 is a pretty mediocre to average Resi, but it's 110% better in co-op. Hit Jesh up for that if you like, since he really likes it for whatever reason.
henke on 20/7/2024 at 06:40
I did already play a bunch of it with Jesh, years ago. :) It was fun, but not so fun that we finished it. Think I'd rather try it solo if I play it again.
vurt on 20/7/2024 at 08:13
No Man's Sky. Been a while since i played it, like 3 years. wow, so much has changed after those big yearly updates. A real treat in VR too!
100x the game that Starfield is, just so much stuff you can do. Performance is excellent too (160 FPS, which seems to be constant with everything on Ultra), haven't checked what i get in VR.
PigLick on 20/7/2024 at 14:30
I really wanna like No Mans Sky, and I do to a certain extent.
But, every new update I dive back in and after a few hours, it's just meh. Something about the systems just turns me off.
Why can't I just buy all the fuel I need (like Elite) and travel. No instead I have to keep crafting shit to keep up my fuel and so on.
vurt on 20/7/2024 at 15:06
Of course you can buy fuel, you can buy anything, or obtain it through a number of other ways, looting or even purchasing from someone when playing online (i guess? never tried it personally). There's also upgrades that makes fuel auto-generate.
PigLick on 21/7/2024 at 14:25
I guess I never really messed around enough. All I remember is there was no actual fuel gauge, I would constantly run out and have to craft more with materials.
vurt on 21/7/2024 at 15:19
Yeah, the game has a pretty slow start because you do start from absolutly nothing and really have to build up everything from inventory slots on your exosuit to eventually having freighters and base(es), additional ground vehicles. I've spent 2 full days just building up my inventory. For people who doesn't like grindy games, this will be tedious and feel slow. It also has no story to speak of, or a single memorable character. Definitely not for everyone... It does have a MMO-like feel to it i would say, and it's a similar time sink.
Thirith on 22/7/2024 at 06:57
I've been playing Halo: Reach in parallel to my Thief 2 replay, mainly to have something to play just before going to bed. I'd previously started playing the first Halo game but stopped after an hour or two because I simply didn't enjoy it all that much. I can see why Reach has such a fan following: for an all-out action game it's surprisingly moody and melancholy, which I can appreciate. Having said that, though: without feeling much of a connection to the Halo franchise or overall story, it all feels a bit flat. I don't regret having played it, but it doesn't exactly make me want to play any of the other Halo games right now.
Other than that, I've now got started on Thief 2's "Masks", and once I've finished this level and the final one, I'll take a bit of a break from Thief before returning to some of the fan missions and campaigns that henke recommended.
Also: seeing how I don't feel much of an urge to return to Animal Well (where I at least saw the credits) and Leap Year, I think I'll uninstall those two. I definitely enjoyed what I played of Animal Well, but not enough to want to persist with the post-credits content, and Leap Year, while clever, didn't really click with me. Its puzzles are on a different wavelength than my brain, it would seem.
nicked on 22/7/2024 at 07:17
Started, played and finished Minishoot Adventures over the weekend, which is a fun, polished game that takes the structure of 2D top-down Zelda, and the gameplay of a top-down/bullet hell shooter. It's not especially original beyond the initial mash-up being quite unique, but it is very slick, well-designed and just plain fun, with a clean, appealing art style. It's about the perfect length too, big enough to reward exploration and small enough for the high intensity gameplay to not outstay it's welcome. Highly recommended.
demagogue on 22/7/2024 at 18:15
I've been surprisingly absorbed by Potion Craft lately.
The mechanic of combining the process of mixing chemicals with traversing literal terrain is pretty clever, and I think this kind of mechanic would be great for all kinds of things. (Little aside, it fits with my physics study recently, where I'm learning about how functional operations, algebra & calculus, can be associated with operations on actual spaces, like making, spinning and stretching vectors or the grid lines of functional spaces representing the math operations.) Once you start thinking like that, you start seeing it everywhere, and this game fits right in there. It means the space itself has functional meaning... each cardinal direction is a element, the distance of potions matches the similarity of their functions, etc., so you can start thinking in your mind what ingredients you'll need and how to mix them to get where you want to go. It's also got me thinking about other kinds of processes that could be gameified in this way, but that's for another post.
But what I like about it as a gameplay mechanic is the Zachtronics angle. Once you figure out where a potion or effect is in the map, you can start trying to optimize the path to it over time, in terms of how common or cheap or helpful certain ingredients are over others, or what paths would be better to take given those things, or what combinations work better than others. And sometimes clients will want special conditions, like using only certain chemicals or proportions or combined effects, so you have to rethink the path with those conditions and then how to optimize that. So I keep coming back to my recipes the same way I kept coming back to my Magnum Opus blueprints, trying to optimize the process. There's also the Papers, Please angle where you have to cater to a random stream of different people with different needs, so it stays fresh. Great game, for someone like me.
