NieR: Automata - For the Glory of Mankind - The Something Awful Forums

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NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Oh my am I psyched for this. :allears:

I still have yet to read the entirety of the Nier LP but between various references in the Drakengard LPs and JordanKai's abortive VLP of it, I believe I've got a feel for what happened there. And in addition I've seen some stream footage from Genocyber, so what I've seen of the game thus far looks pretty cool.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2017 03:44

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:34

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Arkanumzilong posted:

Brazil
Automata on steam, last I checked was about 150 bucks (may be confusing it with some other games ive seen recently
Though all AAA games are 100+ with very few exceptions.... bethesda games tend to be 200+)
And ever since ps4 xbone came out, actual official wired 360 controlers became rather hard to find
Bootlegs are all over the place, but originals are rare (last I seen one, w whole year ago, it cost 100-130 bucks)

Eletronics and gaming in brazil are kiiiiind of expensive...

Does x360ce work for you? I use it myself for the two Logitech controllers I have that function a lot like XBox/Playstation devices.

Edit: Update on the previous page!

# ¿ Mar 30, 2017 17:29

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

The Dark Id posted:

Meet the first boss of the game: [REDACTED]. 2B is not able to decipher the machine language, so we just get [ANGELIC TEXT] runes as a boss name.

Spoilers: This eventually changes in the second playthrough. But it�s not like NIER�s second playthrough where suddenly Tyrann was a party member translating the Shades� language and revealing we�re being kind of a huge dick. It�s just boss names having a naming theme of philosophers. In this case Marx. As in Karl Marx.

Now, this game will have some deep philosophical questions on the nature of what it means to be alive and what is a soul and what not. But the boss names? The machines just did that for funsies. So I don�t care about spoiling that one early.

The interesting thing about that boss name is that it looks to be written in a variant of the Hebrew script, except with vowels and a left-to-right order. Maybe it's instead based off Yiddish, which actually has explicit vowels, but at this point we just have A to work with. (Hebrew is known as an abjad, which means that vowels are generally implied based on context rather than being denoted by any explicit marks.) In particular the second character is a fairly obvious aleph, which corresponds to the Latin A. Nearly all of the world's scripts derive from just two or three sources, so any connection between Latin and Hebrew is likely not a coincidence.

So the weird thing is that X = /ks/ is an unusual construction that English and some other languages purloined from Latin and Etruscan, which in turn swiped a simplification from some regional Greek dialects that just wrote X = /ks/ instead of the more formal XΣ (or Ξ, known as "Xi") for that. Hebrew was in a completely different language family, so as a result its script doesn't really have a singular character to represent that digraph. Writing out "Marx" with the proper phonetics would likely be Mem-Aleph-Resh-Kaph-Shin, but that's one more character than intended for what seems at the moment to just be a substitution cipher with the Latin script. Instead the designers probably went with some results that were close enough for the task, so in this case "MARX" is written out as Mem-Aleph-Resh-Shin. This would then be read either* as "Mars" with a soft s or "Marsh".

*That distinction on the pronunciation of Shin is where we get the term "shibboleth".

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 05:44

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

dis astranagant posted:

It's some 16th century dude named Agrippa's Celestial Alphabet. It's basically hebrew with circles on the ends of the lines and a bit of Greek to pad it out to 22 characters.

Really? Huh, apparently it shows up in the Drakengard games as well and I never noticed. :ms:

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 06:49

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Those Marxes aren't actually buzzsaws, but rather bucket-wheel excavators. Apparently surface mining can require vehicles of immense size to efficiently remove coal and ore over large areas, which is why one such excavator (Bagger 293) holds the record for the heaviest land vehicle known to man.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 08:34

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

dis astranagant posted:

Those don't actually remove the coal. They remove the "overburden", all the dirt and rock above the actual coal, so that you can get at it with more specialized tools.

Really? I was just looking at Wikipedia, so I'll take your word for it, but from what I could tell BWEs were used for some of the mining as well. (Check here for that discussion.)

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 08:56

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

FredMSloniker posted:

One of these days, someone's going to put out a game that spoils itself. Like, not even 'here's a bunch of largely context-less cutscene bits' or 'in seven days, the world will end'. Straight up 'this is the plot of the game, take this multiple-choice quiz to prove you read and remembered it, once you pass you can play the game'. Or, slightly more realistically, have the game be narrated by one of the characters after the fact and have them say stuff like 'at the time we had no idea that the orphan was a shapeshifting assassin' or 'nice looking, isn't she? We've been married for five years now.' Just completely gut any possibility of surprise at a plot point.

Next time I get to run a tabletop game with my Sunday group, I should try this sort of thing with the rest of the players. Undoubtedly it'll be weird as all hell, but I doubt they'd complain much compared to the bizarre stunts I've already pulled.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2017 07:15

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

I was considering picking up TDI's Nier LP but wasn't certain where to dive in. Normally I'd just start at the beginning but I'd watched JordanKai's fragmentary VLP, which ended right when the group met the Shadowlord (sp?). How far along is that in the plot?

# ¿ May 1, 2017 20:44

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

The fact that it's a stream-based LP of a game with a lot of ramp-up time does not fill me with confidence. (Otherwise I'd watch it too!) I remember from JordanKai's LP that there was a lot of editing needed to really show off the world, since the focus isn't on the minute-to-minute combat, and playing the game on stream seems like a very good way to instead get LPer/co-commentator/viewer fatigue.

NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 21:22 on May 1, 2017

# ¿ May 1, 2017 21:19

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

ZiegeDame posted:

Yes, and then all the humans who came into contact with it also dissolved and turned into salt.

So basically the Salt Pale from Trails in the Sky? (The Trails games are not nearly as grim, though.)

After all humans probably would be crazy enough to try to weaponize the thing in the Drakenier universe. (In the Trails games, using the Salt Pale as a weapon is called out as something of a war crime.)

NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Aug 17, 2017

# ¿ Aug 17, 2017 18:12

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

At this rate I can think of a few possibilities for what 2B gets as a DLC outfit, but given her default design work I'd guess that she'll have a rework of Zero's costume from D3.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 03:58

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:34

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Great job with this! Also it reminds me that I need to finish my replay of Terranigma at some point, since that's one of the other few games I can think of besides these that has you consciously erasing the protagonist from existence in order to help others. (Though Terranigma itself didn't remove any of your saves.)

# ¿ Mar 9, 2018 06:24

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