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Coolguye posted:i would happily organize a few games of zombie master, ya'll are more than welcome to use my discord server to sort things out if you need a spot to sit in, but be aware that tolth specifically mentions skilled ZMs. if you do an in-house you can expect the survivor experience to be one of generally confused ease the first half dozen times because the ZM's controls are awkward as gently caress and it's entirely expected for them to fall flat on their faces the first couple of times playing. I’m on vacation for 3 weeks, but I’ll definitely play when we get back!
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Oct 15, 2018 17:26
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TGLT posted:F13 has more issues than its own bugginess. The chases are fun, yeah, but there's a lot of not-Jason downtime that is pretty dull. 20 minutes is also longer than most any DbD match, so it's kind of a moot point.and the series it's based on is poo poo Yeah, seconding this. You don't really have the choice to play as Jason, and playing as a survivor is a slog. Jog between cabins at a Parasite Eve Aya-level pace, open drawers, find some goodies maybe, get lucky and find a macguffin or two, haplessly try to organize macguffins between counselors, hope you don't get chosen for murder. Alternatively, even with all of the (legitimate) criticisms levied at it, DbD feels zippy. The difference between walking crouching and running is significant, there's ways to use all three to your benefit in different ways, your survivor can really move when they need to, and doing so is always a risk because you are leaving a highly visible marker that won't get lost in a sea of 7 other people also simultaneously running around in the distance. I've been getting into DbD for the last month or two and really the game is fun because it's pick up and play and every match is different. Yes, you're repairing gens or hooking survivors without fail, but there's so many stages and killers and perks and a community large enough that not everybody is 110% try harding at this point that every match feels like a new experience and that it keeps it fresh. Also, my experience playing the game from 0 hours to 70whatever hours I have now is that there's always something new and different to learn and pick up on. Running around a tight loop and then suddenly crouching into a corner to confuse the killer into chasing after the scratches on the ground that nobody left, walking around a rock just tightly enough that a killer won't spot you, figuring out how the gently caress flashlights actually work and trying to use them, there's a lot of little incremental things there! In comparison F13's Jasons are barely different, and more or less amount to one killer with a (admittedly more robust) perk system from DbD. Shall I play <Walk Fast> <Throw Things> <Grip Strength> Jason or <Set Traps> <Destroy things> <Fast in water> Jason? That said, in higher level play people absolutely do run the game entirely optimally with the absolute best perks possible as others have mentioned before, which is remarkably boring and lovely. I'm just an adult with a job so I don't really play enough to grind that high, and the ladder is reset on the 13th of every month so 
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Oct 15, 2018 18:59
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Too Shy Guy posted:
MrKravin did a video and then a stream on the same day of this game and yeah, really cute/nice aesthetics with outrageous difficulty. There are actually power-ups that spawn though, but only two and they're both randomized and timed which is a real kick in the dick, there's a red one which shows you the enemies on your little PDA map which REALLY feels like it should've probably been a default feature, then a yellow that stuns all the enemies for probably 10 seconds or so. I almost wonder if the game's just stupidly overtuned at the moment because there's only one level so far, so they gotta get that unfair difficulty padding out so that people don't just blast through in one try.
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Oct 15, 2018 23:24
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Yardbomb posted:Evolve was real cool, but it was bogged down in 2K bullshit from birth to death. Were the models for DLC/microtransactions as developed as today when Evolve came out? (Ie. A few popular models that don't piss people off too much, BFII notwithstanding) It seems like Evolve was especially egregious and going against the grain even for its time.
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Oct 15, 2018 23:39
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evolve had a bunch of microtransactions and poo poo on top of a normal purchase, so you bought the game only to buy more content. same general complaint line people had with battlefront 2, really.
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Oct 15, 2018 23:42
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And then when it went f2p they changed it to involve a very generous currency system with a daily mission system that'd get you all the new stuff pretty quick. It was cool. 
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Oct 16, 2018 00:33
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Thundercracker posted:It seems like Evolve was especially egregious and going against the grain even for its time. It really was, Evolve was one of the notable times when people actually went "What IS all of this bullshit?" when a developer pulled out all the stops on their retailer specifics, pre-order exclusives, multi-level season passes on top of overpriced cosmetics model. It was a super cool game buried under an unbelievable amount of greed.
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Oct 16, 2018 01:09
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Evolve had a few good ideas that was murdered by Turtle Rock trying to partition as much as they can into DLC and how the hubris of a developer can doom a game by shutting out criticsm their actual players gave them until it was far to late to resurrect your sack of poo poo.
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Oct 16, 2018 02:01
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But they listened when it went F2P and the game was fun and good and then 2k or whoever in the suits just shitcanned it because it wasn't making money fast enough. capitalism is the real horror 
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Oct 16, 2018 02:30
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Crabtree posted:Evolve had a few good ideas that was murdered by Turtle Rock trying to partition as much as they can into DLC and how the hubris of a developer can doom a game by shutting out criticsm their actual players gave them until it was far to late to resurrect your sack of poo poo. I mean it's pretty obvious it wasn't Turtle Rock's say on most of the real dire stupidity, 2K were already pretty notoriously greedy shitheads by then and have only gotten worse, they do the NBA/MLB/WWE games after all.
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Oct 16, 2018 04:06
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This kind of nonsense is why I don't buy anything not meant for playing offline by myself that I can memory hack to hell and back to get whatever the gently caress I want from it if necessary.
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Oct 16, 2018 08:20
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Every Spooktober I end up covering at least one game that isn't horror per se but shares some themes or is just generally Halloweeny. This one is definitely the former, and I'm glad the devs handed me a key for it because I'm still having fun poking through all the mysteries. 1. Little Nightmares 2. OK/NORMAL 3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn 4. Rise of Insanity 5. Paratopic 6. Rusty Lake Paradise 7. Cube Escape: Paradox 8. INFERNIUM 9. Dead Secret 10. All Haze Eve 11. Welcome to Hanwell 12. Gray Dawn 13. The Last Cargo 14. Observer 15. Dark Deception 16. Cultist Simulator    The magic of gaming is that it allows us to abstract any event or action into anything we want. Kingdoms can rise and fall from matching blocks, monsters can fall to menu selections, and the very worth of a person can be reduced to numbers on a worksheet. But the truly unique abstractions are few and far between, which makes the card shuffling and token trading of Cultist Simulator all the more special. There are hundreds of ways to simulate starting and growing a cult, after all, but with a deck of cards is perhaps the least likely. And it’s just about as odd to follow as it is to conceive of, so be ready for plenty of struggle and experimentation to get the most out of this hand. Congratulations, you’re starting a cult! The unseen things settled into the cracks of the world have whispered to you, and mundane life can no longer satisfy the hunger in your soul. Starting from a chance encounter at your normal job, you begin to follow the trail into the inner workings of the cosmos. This might mean studying obscure texts from a bookstore, it might mean proselytizing your discoveries on the streets, or it might mean performing arcane rituals on those who have crossed your dark path. No matter how you pursue the infinite secrets, you’ll still need to keep yourself flush with cash and healthy, and brushing up on your conventional studies won’t hurt either. But take your discoveries too far, and you might attract the wrong kind of attention, or push your own psyche past the breaking point. What all that means in practice is that you’re going to be dealt a whole lotta cards, and you gotta manage them. Cultist Simulator sets you down at a table with a few basic cards, representing your job, your passion, you health, your funds, and so on, and a few tokens that process those cards. So, in the case of your health, you can stick that card in the work token to perform manual labor, or you can stick it in the study token to train your body, or stick it in the exploration token to walk the streets in search of oddities. Processing cards takes time, and some of the cards you get back decay over time. Similarly, temporary tokens will appear at random, representing new opportunities like inspiration or dangers like investigations or illness, and producing even more esoteric cards like Fleeting Memories and Mystique. We’ll get to the interesting part of that in a minute, but first I want to cover how that translates into challenge. You can die in Cultist Simulator, and as I’m sure you’ll discover it can happen very suddenly. While you’re busy turning Passion into Glimmerings there’s a token eating your funds at regular intervals, to represent the need to support yourself. Occasionally this kicks out new tokens like one that produces Restlessness from your particular inspiration, or one that eats Dread produced from decayed Restlessness. The end state of these processes is essentially a countdown to madness or inescapable despair, and you must understand these processes in order to interrupt them. But you won’t, not until you try combining cards in tokens or produce special timed cards at just the right times to see how they interact, and that’s going to lead to more than a few frustrating deaths. But hopefully that will inspire you to suss out the mechanics at work, because once you get those plates spinning there’s a whole ocean of dark machinations to play with. Starting a cult is easy, based on one of the many Aspects you’ll uncover from your studies, and from there you can recruit and promote followers, kidnap or kill troublesome investigators, and perform rites that do all kinds of weird stuff. Again, you’re not going to know HOW to do any of this at first, but a healthy amount of experimentation will reveal the systems in time. And really that’s what you need to be here for, because that’s the heart of the game. All these strangely-named cards and interlocking systems form a giant puzzle separating you from the secrets of the cosmos. There’s some neat writing to be found on the cards (as one would expect from the Fallen London folks) and some neater concepts represented by the systems, you’ve just got to find them. If you have the inquisitive mind to plug away at Cultist Simulator until it makes sense, you’ll eventually solve the puzzle and that will essentially be that. The threats you face can be dispelled with the processes you uncover, and while there are many Aspects to found a cult under they all require a wide spread of secrets and rites to function properly. The meat of the gameplay here is solving the mystery of its systems, and once it’s solved you’ll have seen it all save for some even more esoteric achievements. But the road there is a fun and challenging one, and the whole game oozes style with its evocative icons and rich sound design. This isn’t how I ever expected to found a cult, but it’s also more fun than I ever expected and I’m glad I went the card route with it.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:29
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I really love Cultist Simulator despite not playing it for a while after my first win. The discovery of what the game actually wants from you and like, what the actual goals of the game are are actually kind of fun and feel like you're actually a cultist researching forbidden knowledge and uncovering the secrets to ascension. When I realized that the next step for me toward victory involved cannibalism I knew I had a winner.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:38
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FirstAidKite posted:Monstrum looks like a super fun game and I hope the devs are able to make sequels using the same idea of "you are trapped in [place] with [random monster] and [items are randomly spawned] and to escape you need to find one of a few methods of escape and obtain the necessary items to successfully escape without getting killed" Disclaimer: I have not had time to play Monstrum yet. Monstrum was poorly publicized and looked old even when it was new, and I think it lacked some of the things that draw people to these games. I think if Friday the 13th was a single player game featuring counselor play only, it'd probably sell as poorly and be forgotten as quickly. Monstrum did a number of things right, that sadly didn't translate to making a popular game. I like that the items they spawn are more varied than most games like this, and I think that the monsters themselves are pretty cool, especially compared with other games in the genre.
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Oct 16, 2018 17:10
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I saw Monstrum in my Steam queue, but I honestly didn't even realize it was singleplayer. It just looked so much like one of those asymmetric deathmatch multiplayer bore-fests that have absolutely nothing to offer unless you really really like playing "tag" with random people on the internet. Too bad it didn't bother explaining itself properly, or I might have actually tried it.
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Oct 16, 2018 17:17
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Of any complaints to have about Friday the 13th, lack of variety in the Jasons isn't one at all. Which one you choose makes a *huge* difference in how the game plays out. Like, Jason 2 is the only one who gets an overabundance of traps, so going up against him is going to be an exercise in trying to overcome his lockdown game. Jason 4 is the exact opposite, he can murder you in a couple of hits (and can smash doors at double speed just for fun), but he has no lockdown at all. Playing him means he's either going to blitz everyone in the first five minutes or they're going to blitz him in the first five minutes. I do kind of wish the devs would have figured out how pointless a stat Grip Strength is and replaced it with something, but eh
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Oct 16, 2018 17:35
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Too Shy Guy posted:Every Spooktober I end up covering at least one game that isn't horror per se but shares some themes or is just generally Halloweeny. This one is definitely the former, and I'm glad the devs handed me a key for it because I'm still having fun poking through all the mysteries. Did you ever do Slayaway Camp? Not really this threads forte since it's more of a pastiche played for laughs, but it was a decent little horror themed puzzle game.
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Oct 16, 2018 17:41
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DeathChicken posted:I do kind of wish the devs would have figured out how pointless a stat Grip Strength is and replaced it with something, but eh Pretty much, the only thing Grip Strength's really useful for is making a kill you're already gonna get even safer, characters with a ton of Composure are still gonna be able to mash out if you're trying to cart them to an environmental kill, while people who don't were already not gonna be able to get out anyway.
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Oct 16, 2018 23:34
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Cardiovorax posted:I saw Monstrum in my Steam queue, but I honestly didn't even realize it was singleplayer. It just looked so much like one of those asymmetric deathmatch multiplayer bore-fests that have absolutely nothing to offer unless you really really like playing "tag" with random people on the internet. Too bad it didn't bother explaining itself properly, or I might have actually tried it. monstrum and devilry ended up in the same general box for me. since miasmata came out i really liked the idea of one strong monster rather than a hundred and one trivial threats, but the games were so narrowly defined i felt like i never got the opportunity to really play around with the monster. i solved the situation they put in front of me and that was kind of it. monstrum's ship was kind of cool until you realized that 99% of it made no difference at all and you had very few ways to interact with it, so there are no clutch plays, no clever forethought, no narrow or lucky escapes - you either press the button to win the game in this situation or you don't. devilry had somewhat more interaction but only took place in one house, so after you learned the interactions you were allowed to take the game became very formulaic. miasmata had that huge island, lots of nooks and crannies, and lots of items you could mess with, and lots of drugs you could make and use to hold off the Creature. then you get a game like alien: isolation which takes the lessons miasmata learned and cranks them all to 11 and makes a goddamn masterpiece.
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Oct 16, 2018 23:48
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Coolguye posted:monstrum's ship was kind of cool until you realized that 99% of it made no difference at all and you had very few ways to interact with it, so there are no clutch plays, no clever forethought, no narrow or lucky escapes - you either press the button to win the game in this situation or you don't. How so? From what I'd seen of it, the game seems pretty solid on that front. Sure you can't interact with everything, but a person going in blind or relatively blind is going to find out how useful some of the various items are for creating traps or trying to stay undetected, and the different monsters having different patterns and skillsets means the player has to learn how to best survive against them as well as finding out how to properly complete one of the 3 escape routes and how to deal with surviving encounters with the enemy while still managing these escape attempts.
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Oct 17, 2018 01:58
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miasmata also had you falling down and eating dirt because you decided to keep running down that steep hill and that needs to be in more games of this sort tbh
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Oct 17, 2018 03:20
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Zetsubou-san posted:miasmata also had you falling down and eating dirt because you decided to keep running down that steep hill and that needs to be in more games of this sort tbh
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Oct 17, 2018 03:23
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Coolguye posted:devilry had somewhat more interaction but only took place in one house, so after you learned the interactions you were allowed to take the game became very formulaic. In a way, games like Devilry don't really have gameplay. You run, you push button, but the rest is really more or less setpieces that are there for you to watch happen, not to play yourself. In my opinion, Alien Isolation succeeded so well because it approached the problem from a completely different angle. It offers you a solid core of gameplay and things to do that draw more on classic stealth FPS gameplay while retaining the core conceit of a single enemy that can only be temporarily driven off. It makes for a far more satisfying experience.
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Oct 17, 2018 06:01
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FirstAidKite posted:How so? From what I'd seen of it, the game seems pretty solid on that front. Sure you can't interact with everything, but a person going in blind or relatively blind is going to find out how useful some of the various items are for creating traps or trying to stay undetected, and the different monsters having different patterns and skillsets means the player has to learn how to best survive against them as well as finding out how to properly complete one of the 3 escape routes and how to deal with surviving encounters with the enemy while still managing these escape attempts. compare this to isolation, which lets you use even 'harmless' things in a way that really fucks up the xenomorph (by, for example, throwing a noisemaker into a dangerous area), or use combinations of gadgets to get an effect after one in isolation stops working and that's what i'm talking about with the difference between feeling resourceful and feeling like a monkey that's solved a test chamber.
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Oct 17, 2018 06:23
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Coolguye posted:that's what i'm talking about with the difference between feeling resourceful and feeling like a monkey that's solved a test chamber.
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Oct 17, 2018 06:44
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This is an article I didnt expect to read about Swery's new game, both because I'm surprised the story is that deep and also, well, you know ....Thomas https://kotaku.com/the-missing-gets-queer-love-stories-right-1829784922 completely unrelated but for some reason I just thought of Cold Fear a completely unremarkable but perfectly serviceable RE4 clone set entirely on a huge ship. Anyone remember it? I have the disc version around here somewhere and amazingly its still on Steam??? Basticle fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 14:13
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I remember cold fear. I also remember deep fear, which (not related to cold fear) was even more of a ripoff of resident evil.
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Oct 17, 2018 15:38
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Basticle posted:Anyone remember it?
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Oct 17, 2018 15:39
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Some of these horror games I got through Curator Connect are such incredible messes. If you want the full effect of this one, I streamed it a few weeks ago. 1. Little Nightmares 2. OK/NORMAL 3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn 4. Rise of Insanity 5. Paratopic 6. Rusty Lake Paradise 7. Cube Escape: Paradox 8. INFERNIUM 9. Dead Secret 10. All Haze Eve 11. Welcome to Hanwell 12. Gray Dawn 13. The Last Cargo 14. Observer 15. Dark Deception 16. Cultist Simulator 17. House of Evil    Some games have a lot of heart, but lack the design chops to make something of it. You can see it in games that work hard to be different, in games that have unique art styles and paper-thin gameplay to make up for it, or in games with unusual gameplay systems that just don’t come together quite right. House of Evil is the latter, a game of great ambition that can’t really deliver on any of it. And while it’s a hilariously confounding romp for awhile, eventually you’re sure to run into something that’ll stop the fun dead in its tracks. Your protagonist is but a simple Russian man who receives a terribly disturbing (and confusing) phone call. His ghost hunter wife has vanished into a remote mansion and it’s up to him to extricate her. On arrival, though, it becomes immediately apparent that all is not well in the house. The occupants are varying degrees of eccentric, there are strange creatures roaming the grounds, and ominous portends abound. If your fated fellow is to survive this ordeal, he’ll need to bone up on the dark rituals being carried out there and whip up some sanctified remedies for the evil before it consumes him, his wife, and the whole world. That’s about as much as I could piece together from my hour with the game, really. I completely understand the difficulties of localizing a game into other languages but there’s a basic level of comprehensibility required, and House of Evil sails comfortably under that bar. You’re going to be dealing with item descriptions like “It allows to start expulsion a pianist” and dialog like “Eee, thanks! suddenly” pretty much universally here, muddying already confusing cutscenes where characters blink in and out of existence after not being properly established in the first place. I didn’t recognize my own character until half an hour in when he started talking to a little girl who may or may not be a ghost. These problems are only compounded when mixed with the game’s more involved systems. You’ll have a full inventory to manage here, cluttered with notes, keys, tapes, herbs, vials, and so on. Everything has a potential use, too, and your herbs are of particular interest if you can decipher the text block that explains the alchemy system. In lieu of actual combat, you must mix potions to perform exorcisms on the creatures that assault you. In and of itself that’s not too complicated but interpreting what you need, how it works, and how to perform the actual QTE ritual will take a few frustrating restarts and a fair bit of experimenting, too. All of this plays out in a mansion that looks cobbled together from a first-year AutoCAD project. Again, I respect the effort that went in to creating this place but it fails to resemble an actual, physical place, with stark white rooms attached directly to wood-planked chambers full of misaligned textures. Cutscenes will grab you and transport you across unseen distances, shattering any concept of space or setting here. And when you can explore, you’ll find troughs of coiled poop and sexy zombies beating on the bars of their cages. It’s a jumbled fever dream of a place, and one I was getting a genuine kick out of exploring until I triggered some monster that would instantly kill me without apparent recourse. House of Evil is one of those games that seems so bad it’s good, but ultimately just ends up being bad. I feel a little bad myself saying that, because I really was getting into the unbridled madness of the whole thing. But the further I got, the more the shoddy mechanics impinged on the fun until I got to that one zombie that ruined everything. At that point I didn’t really have the will to push on, because it’s not like the story or the graphics or the gameplay were amazing. It was a big, goofy joke until it stopped being funny, and that was that. I hope the developer can take some important lessons from this for their next game, because I’d hate to see this kind of passion die without getting a proper shot. It just needs to be way, way better and more polished than this.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:03
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quote:Everything has a potential use, too, and your herbs are of particular interest if you can decipher the text block that explains the alchemy system. In lieu of actual combat, you must mix potions to perform exorcisms on the creatures that assault you.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:20
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Basticle posted:This is an article I didnt expect to read about Swery's new game, both because I'm surprised the story is that deep and also, well, you know ....Thomas I like to think Swery has a good heart at the end of the day. Japanese opinions of trans folks / not heteronormative sexuality tends to be, yeah, like Thomas, so it's good to see that with The Missing he (or at least the dev team) has come around to a more open mind. I'm looking forward to playing it.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:27
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I don't think you can write Deadly Premonition and not have a good heart at core, and yeah, it's been 8 years. Maybe he learned and decided to do a different kind of queer story.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:28
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Bogart posted:I like to think Swery has a good heart at the end of the day. Japanese opinions of trans folks / not heteronormative sexuality tends to be, yeah, like Thomas, so it's good to see that with The Missing he (or at least the dev team) has come around to a more open mind. I'm looking forward to playing it.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:35
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Cardiovorax posted:I think someone did a Let's Play of it. No idea if it ever got archived. The most I remember is that it looked... functional, I guess. Someone did, and it did. I haven't watched it in a long time but it's fairly thorough from what I recall. And someone mentioned Routine, never forget
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Oct 17, 2018 17:36
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Cardiovorax posted:I mean, it's been ages since I actually watched the LP of Deadly Premonition, but if you ignore the weird clock tower boss fight, I thought Thomas was really kind of unoffensive. It's why the reveal kind of hit me out of the left field - prior to it, he's portrayed as a very normal guy with no weird affectations or mannerisms of the type Japanese video games tend to include for their "camp gay" or "drag queen" style stereotypes. Sure, he likes to cook, but so do a lot of men. Am I missing something? Really? https://i.imgur.com/92w8BiK.gifv
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Oct 17, 2018 17:44
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In terms of characterization, I mean. I assumed he was supposed to be the kind of feminine opposite to the "tough macho manly guy" sherriff, I guess? Not exactly tasteful, but no blatant "hey I'm a secret trans person, look at me being into dolls and fashion" type signposting. I'm usually pretty sensitive to this kind of thing, so I figure I must have overlooked something that others noticed.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:47
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I actually thought this was kinda charming until the big reveal boss fight.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:50
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Pretty sure you can peep into his house and he's in the dress.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:50
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Bogart posted:Pretty sure you can peep into his house and he's in the dress.
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Oct 17, 2018 17:52
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there was also his encyclopedic knowledge of squirrels, which should have been the biggest giveaway
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Oct 17, 2018 18:12
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