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One of my favorite trip sections in a video game came from Spec Ops: The Line, although it's hard to say where the actual "trip" starts and ends with that game.
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Jan 10, 2019 21:24
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My Cuck Dad posted:One of my favorite trip sections in a video game came from Spec Ops: The Line, although it's hard to say where the actual "trip" starts and ends with that game. That is a good one, I think the WP sequence is one of the more effective uses of altered mental states in games. If I had to point to a clunky use of the trip sequence it has to be the Scarecrow segments of Arkham Asylum. I'm almost always in favor of games changing up how you play them for short periods, but the Scarecrow segments were taking the really strong gameplay the series became known for and trying to shoehorn it into something that felt like a Mario 64 boss level. HOWEVER, I will concede that the "walk around and have visions" sections that precede the Scarecrow gameplay stuff are pretty good.
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Jan 10, 2019 21:36
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 Well, this turned into a boondoggle. I really meant to just grab some chemicals and move on, then I realized how little time you would spend getting to said chemicals and had to decide on the fly if I wanted to keep exploring the area or go back to do more DLC. In the end, as you may see, I decided to soldier on a bit more and it turned out super well because now I can make bottles into firebombs and my god, I wanted that bad. Turning junk into weapons is super fun and great in this game. You'll see me take every opportunity I get to make use of both the tin can grenades and the molotov cocktails because they are just that good. The proximity mine radios I could take or leave, though. They rely on you wanting to alert guards and the radios are rare enough that they aren't as common as they need to be for the mines to be useful. Bottles and cans, on the other hand, are everywhere. I tend to think that is because the unlocks on those are free and so the developers can rely on you having them where the radio thing is an optional upgrade and so if every second guard dropped one they would just be a distraction object instead of a possible weapon, so by making them pop up less often the game doesn't force players to decide between a distraction object that could be a weapon with a quick button press and something that you can only use to distract.
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Jan 11, 2019 04:04
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Parts of that last video were terrifying and I don't generally consider myself afraid of heights. Maybe I shouldn't watch LP videos high in the future.
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Jan 11, 2019 11:02
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"So much damage. Between the amateur excavation and the cave in." Lady, you have no place throwing stones at how other people go through tombs.
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Jan 11, 2019 13:03
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Megillah Gorilla posted:"So much damage. Between the amateur excavation and the cave in." Lara Croft and Nathan Drake walk past a building. The building collapses with no discernible reason.
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Jan 11, 2019 13:40
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It causes me deep nerd pain every time they do that. In the third(?) Uncharted where they go after pirate island and there are all those simply magnificent old houses filled with books and manuscripts and art and they set fire to them and blow them up and dump them into the ocean and it's just tragic 
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Jan 11, 2019 14:14
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Megillah Gorilla posted:It causes me deep nerd pain every time they do that. Raiders of the Lost Art on Netflix will invoke the same sort of reaction in art nerds. The first season is more about paintings that were lost, stolen or destroyed, the second season is sort of about the same thing but more biography of the artists with stuff thrown in about which of their paintings the Nazis stole and how the Monunments Men were awesome.
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Jan 11, 2019 14:24
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 I legit think I had more weird technical glitches in this and the next episode than I've had in any recording in a long time. Granted, a large part of that appears to be due to me trying to get fancy and hit the zoom button, but yeah, things get all glitchy in the next video and it really throws me for a loop. Anyway, I really like the segments of games with vision sequences that take you through the area you had your vision in and show you how mundane(ish) it really was. All those skeletons that faced you down? Just scarecrows...with human skulls attached all over. Nothing weird there. Some of the other stuff is far more interesting, though. I will also say this about the episode: I apologize for the time it takes me to finish the centerpiece puzzle here. You need to get timing fairly close to exact and the game only gives you a notification it worked out when you get to the second level, so if you get it wrong like I do, you have to just go back and try again. And again. And again. It isn't to say you see bad puzzle design, it is just that the complexities of it are a bit beyond anything in the vanilla game and so managing platform positioning with timing and a veritable spiderweb of ropes can be a bit intimidating and may confuse someone unfamiliar with all the mechanics of the rope arrows.
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Jan 16, 2019 04:11
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 So word of warning: almost this entire video is me loving up a dead simple, multi stage boss fight. I blame the fact I was trying to record at the same time. Also there's a weird glitch if you try to do stuff the wrong way, which I can only imagine exists because no one testing the game would have thought to see if you could or couldn't climb up in a spot when you could way more easily jump on a rotating platform. I had to cut out a dumb amount of video because I didn't figure that basic thing out. The fight is pretty good as far as I'm concerned. The boss isn't overly difficult, the adds that show up aren't in spots that are going to screw you over or be much of a problem, and the "puzzle" of the fight is well choreographed from earlier in the DLC. In all, I think the developers did a good job of making this DLC match with the rest of the game pretty seamlessly while also having it be its own thing.
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Jan 23, 2019 01:34
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Someone getting a little too into the act of playing the part of a mythological figure? I'm surprised this hasn't come up more often in TR games given how often it turns out to be the real deal.
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Jan 23, 2019 02:18
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Lazyfire posted:
Another good video! Really enjoying your LP - thanks for putting this together. I'm impressed with the quality of the DLC. It fits well with the overall theme while being different enough to be worth the price.
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Jan 23, 2019 02:53
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Actually picked up the Tomb Raider games after watching the LPs, just got a little past you in this one (been splitting between Rise and the original at the moment). You missed one shortcut when your weighted platform gambit failed around 10:30, there's a section of wall behind you where you can scramble up to reach some slats you can climb up (to the right of where you tried to jump up around 11 minutes). Not sure why they didn't color code it white like the usual spots, though the wall it's on is white at least. Granted just grabbing the platforms and coming back from the "opposite way" works better like you showed. Tried collecting all the stuff in that area, but it is a nightmare; at least one of them seems like a nightmare timed jumping puzzle that I decided not to screw with. Nice to see I'm not the only one starting to get too many resources so I can't collect more; think I even did the shotgun ammo pouch just to stop the complaining and try desperately to use some of the stuff up.
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Jan 24, 2019 10:09
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MadDogMike posted:Actually picked up the Tomb Raider games after watching the LPs, just got a little past you in this one (been splitting between Rise and the original at the moment). You missed one shortcut when your weighted platform gambit failed around 10:30, there's a section of wall behind you where you can scramble up to reach some slats you can climb up (to the right of where you tried to jump up around 11 minutes). Not sure why they didn't color code it white like the usual spots, though the wall it's on is white at least. Granted just grabbing the platforms and coming back from the "opposite way" works better like you showed. Tried collecting all the stuff in that area, but it is a nightmare; at least one of them seems like a nightmare timed jumping puzzle that I decided not to screw with. Nice to see I'm not the only one starting to get too many resources so I can't collect more; think I even did the shotgun ammo pouch just to stop the complaining and try desperately to use some of the stuff up. Gathering everything in the area is a problem for sure. It really is better to come back after you've gotten most of the remaining equipment to clean up as you are unable to get to a few areas (as I mentioned in the video) until you have a specific unlock. Magical Lobster posted:Another good video! Really enjoying your LP - thanks for putting this together. Always glad to hear people are enjoying the videos. The in-story DLC is actually pretty good. I sort of wish they had done more of that (though the game is long enough, we're only about 35% of the way done), but there are additional DLCs outside the story that I haven't touched yet that I plan to cover before the end of the LP and I've heard those are really different and wouldn't fit into the game as it exists too well.
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Jan 24, 2019 14:26
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Well poo poo, no wonder I felt lost, I somehow managed to miss an update  Lazyfire posted:
With the platform puzzle, I noticed that they would briefly pause three times in different positions. If you had waited for the third pause, you would have gotten the timing right immediately. You can see the pauses in the movement of the platforms clearly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcUUZYKblCQ&t=770s You shot the rope arrow just after the second pause, which is why it didn't work.
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Jan 24, 2019 15:03
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 So my life is out of control and if Thursday is a clusterfuck then Friday through Monday are the same way. Hence late videos multiple weeks in a row. Before we get much further into the game I have to make a comment here: I have no idea how crazy Lara's training regimen is, but it must be nuts. I know this is a game and there's a suspension of disbelief, but seriously. I average 4.4 miles in half an hour in the freezing cold, up and down hill or on flat land, but at sea level. I went to Lake Tahoe a couple years ago and couldn't handle that pace on a treadmill even at the end of the week, and that elevation is nowhere near what Lara is dealing with. She has to be at like peak fitness if she can handle running, jumping, swinging and climbing in half foot deep snow and freezing conditions while wearing full winter weather gear. It's insane.
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Jan 30, 2019 02:49
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 You know those moments in games where you start to see a thing and then it disappears for most of the rest of the game? Like a mechanic that gets brought up a couple times but is completely disregarded after introduction? Pushing stuff for puzzles is that mechanic in Rise of the Tomb Raider. It's used a couple times here and once in the previous video, but then pretty much stops being a major thing the rest of the time. I don't know why that is, but my theory is that they had so much other stuff happening around rope arrows, cutting lines, cranks and some things we haven't seen yet that there was just a hard limit on what they could do with it and so it just couldn't be fully implemented. I can't blame anyone for being cautious about overusing it as it is sort of unspectacular, but it is still weird that it doesn't stick around for more stuff through the rest of the game while some of the other things I've mentioned are in the game to the very end.
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Feb 1, 2019 03:15
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I do like the totally-not-Baba-Yaga's-Daughter costume. It's got enough visual going on that it's not boring to look at, and the idea of Trinity being hunted by someone associated with the Witch is just appealing to my storyteller side enough that I can roll with it.
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Feb 1, 2019 04:17
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berryjon posted:I do like the totally-not-Baba-Yaga's-Daughter costume. It's got enough visual going on that it's not boring to look at, and the idea of Trinity being hunted by someone associated with the Witch is just appealing to my storyteller side enough that I can roll with it. Same.
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Feb 2, 2019 03:34
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Nice to see/hear you make the exact same mistakes I made in that area, though my ability to ninja through doing stealth takedowns like you do instead of bumbling around and shooting my way out frantically like a madman is... noticeably worse than yours. I will say having finally finished the first Tomb Raider that I like how this sequel seems much better about the running sequences; they don't seem to be as common in Rise and the ones that happen are much easier to figure out what to do (I swear sometimes I thought having a great graphics card made the first one harder because I couldn't see a drat thing past all the debris/splashing water it kept throwing on the screen, Rise doesn't let the chaos confuse you as to what to do in the sequence as much).
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Feb 3, 2019 06:57
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MadDogMike posted:Nice to see/hear you make the exact same mistakes I made in that area, though my ability to ninja through doing stealth takedowns like you do instead of bumbling around and shooting my way out frantically like a madman is... noticeably worse than yours. I will say having finally finished the first Tomb Raider that I like how this sequel seems much better about the running sequences; they don't seem to be as common in Rise and the ones that happen are much easier to figure out what to do (I swear sometimes I thought having a great graphics card made the first one harder because I couldn't see a drat thing past all the debris/splashing water it kept throwing on the screen, Rise doesn't let the chaos confuse you as to what to do in the sequence as much). I think RotTR does a much better job of clearly marking directions at all times. It seems like that is a side effect of the game being far more "open world" style than Tomb Raider. The use of large hub areas, side missions, etc. means that they needed to indicate the direction of progress for the average player because you can't just go with the usual "find more enemies to find more progress" path. Stealth in this game is really good, but there are points where I swear they want you to stealth stuff and then design the area so it is impossible to do so. Doubling down on guards, multiple patrolling guys, several levels of people on watch covering each other. After a time you just assume everything is going to be a firefight because sneaking around is effectively not possible. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't like the illusion of choice sensation I get from those areas.
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Feb 4, 2019 19:41
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Haha, lovely work internet.
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Feb 4, 2019 19:56
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 We've officially arrived at our second major hub of the game, the Geothermal Valley. We're going to spend a lot of time here and so I used this episode to show off kind of the edges of the area, not everything by a long shot, but enough that you get the lay of the land. Just like in the Soviet Installation area there are a few different challenges and places we will need to come back to once we have new and different equipment and a couple spots that won't open up until we hit a specific spot in the story. I really like this hub. It has more in the way of terrain differences and traversal options than the Installation and some really great scenery, whether it is the giant tower off the coast or the ice floes in the river; the place isn't just snow and old ramshackle wooden structures. The only issue is that it makes my 1070 cry. RotTR is not a well optimized game, which is weird because it came out months after the Xbox version and so one would think that there was a bit more polish applied to making it run well on the PC. That is not what happened. Instead it appears Crystal Dynamics decided to bump up graphical fidelity and add a bunch of effects. Turning down settings won't do much to make the performance better, by the way, I tried that and this area just has a bunch of really rough spots no matter what I do. It always bugs me when I have a pretty strong setup with components that came out a year after the game released and the thing still makes the computer cry. Someone messed up is what that says.
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Feb 6, 2019 02:01
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Is it just me or is there a slight audio desync?
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Feb 6, 2019 08:31
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NGDBSS posted:Is it just me or is there a slight audio desync? I noticed it too, and I think it had to do with dropped frames making the level/action video slightly shorter than the audio. Or something, I'm not a VLP maker and don't mess around with editing video.
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Feb 6, 2019 18:47
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CoffeeQaddaffi posted:I noticed it too, and I think it had to do with dropped frames making the level/action video slightly shorter than the audio. Or something, I'm not a VLP maker and don't mess around with editing video. I was pressed for time and didn't run it through my usual process. I may reupload with that step added and the audio/video reedited. This is what I get for trying to get around a proven workflow.
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Feb 7, 2019 02:22
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 More side missions this time around. As I've said before, Rise of the Tomb Raider really gives you lots to do, even if things are kind of simple at times (or difficult if you are me and also dumb). Challenges, side missions, more tombs, more hunting and resource gathering; it's enough that I actually keep telling myself (and have said in some videos) that the game doesn't have a ton of combat compared to the first game. While this one is more puzzle focused than Tomb Raider Reboot it is still combat and stealth section heavy, it's just that you get long breaks in between story missions like this, and those are where most of the combat happens. One thing I haven't mentioned is just how good combat and shooting things in this game feels. You can see that when you start off with a weapon like the assault rifle it has a number of shortcomings that you have to work around, but instead of upgrading it to make it feel overpowered or like a different weapon entirely the upgrades are subtle enough that you don't have to relearn how the weapon feels as it goes through the upgrade path. It still feels like the same weapon, but you can reload faster or more bullets land on target, or the bow draws a little faster. As is usual with video games, enemy encounters ramp up in difficulty as you progress and so it seems like the gun upgrades just keep pace with the harder enemies. You can't just rely on an OP weapon to get you out of dumb situations is what I'm saying. Most shooters either don't have you upgrading at all or give story-progression upgrades that keep pace with the enemies. Rise of the Tomb Raider does gate you by controlling access to tools to take weapon upgrades to the next tier, but you have a great deal of freedom in deciding which weapons you want to upgrade and somehow it doesn't let you just blow everything out of the water if you focus on just one weapon, which is impressive.
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Feb 13, 2019 02:07
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Aww, no more Little Miss Baba Yaga. Nice to see that the allies here are actually making efforts to prepare, rather than the whole "logistics" thing being ignored.
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Feb 13, 2019 05:01
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 This is one of those "I swear to god I'm not stupid" videos. Yes, I completely forgot you had to tech-tree to make grenades. Yes, I forgot which tombs did and didn't require plot items to get into. Yes, I totally forgot that you can attach rope arrows to stuff overhead. Actually, that last one I don't feel bad about. Watch the LP so far and stay tuned for the rest and see how many times Lara jumps up to stab an anchor overhead when using a rope arrow. I think this video contains the only instance in the entire game. I have no idea how you are supposed to figure out it can be done outside of trial and error. Additionally, we haven't seen a switch to this point in the game, or at least one that is operated by using rope arrows. Again, if you don't see it or the game never explicitly tells you it is a thing there isn't a good reason I can think of that you would work it out on your own. This is a pretty open game, but it is grounded in what Lara's capabilities are. If you aren't told something is possible you have no reason to think it is, and nearly every mechanic and object you can make use of is introduced in the course of story events so you have to know something is a thing because you can't get to where you are unless you learn it exists. For some reason this and a couple other Tombs in the game sort of throw that set of rules out the window and show you stuff you may have seen if you come back after a point in the story, but have no reason to know is a factor otherwise. It's a small gripe overall, but it does bug me.
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Feb 15, 2019 03:51
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 More than the percentage of completion (we're still under 50% at this point, by the way) I knew there was a lot of game left when I didn't get the shotgun until this point in the game. Maybe doing the DLC as it appeared instead of later in the game caused me to think that I was far further in that I thought due to the sheer number of hours I had played, but for a semi-linear combat-action-puzzler Rise of the Tomb Raider is a long game with or without the Baba Yaga stuff. Blocking tombs off and keeping one of your weapon slots empty to this point is a good way to signal to the player that you have plenty of content left, but I do find myself wishing that one of the tools we've yet to get and the shotgun were earlier additions to Lara's inventory simply because handing out weapons is incredibly unevenly paced. You get the bow and pistol pretty close to each other, then the AR not long after. Then it is a long wait for the shotgun. Even if you want to point to the bow having multiple firing types, you have to remember it is basically just regular and poison arrows until you get fire arrows (like a video ago) and then finally the other arrow type next video. The fact they are throwing all these things at me makes me feel like I should be preparing for the end as the game hasn't been this generous with new stuff for quite some time, but in the same moment I know I'm pretty far removed from the end game based on my completion percentage.
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Feb 20, 2019 03:56
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Lazyfire posted:
Wow, I thought it was going to be 'defend the valley' then rush to the endgame. That's a lot of game left.
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Feb 20, 2019 13:27
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Why did a state enforced atheistic base have a chapel.
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Feb 21, 2019 03:00
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 I really like the short action sections the game throws at you. Just a couple fights in these otherwise forgettable areas without much new or different to see. The under the glacier ruins are much the same. I feel like this section is a better example, though, as you change scenery rapidly and gain new stuff at the end.
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Feb 22, 2019 12:13
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 I ended up recording this episode for a full hour, hence cutting the video where I did. We're picking up more equipment by the end of the episode, and progressing the plot somewhat, and also fighting a bunch of guys. This is basically what every episode should be. If you want to see the inspiration of the Arkham franchise, or Metroidvanias on the Tomb Raider Reboot series this is a great episode for it just because you get to see the introduction of an ability and immediately you have a reason to use it right in front of you. In subsequent videos you'll get to see us access paths that were effectively blocked off to us because of the new ability. Just like a Metroid/Castlevania/Arkham game. I think the formula is really well applied throughout this game, better than the previous game, at least, and gives you a good reason to re-explore areas to pick up the benefits from tombs or from earning xp/coins/etc. I think a lot of the time games just use those gradual unlocks of additional means of traversal/level navigation to get you to collectibles and to the next mission/boss/stage where Rise of the Tomb Raider being a slightly openish world puts those things behind the same sort of lock and key but also hides away quality of life techniques and abilities, which is an even better incentive to re-negotiate some areas of the map.
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Feb 28, 2019 02:13
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This latest gadget of Lara's, and how it's used, makes me cringe. A rock-climbing pickaxe isn't a throwing took at all! I think this particular thing would have been better used as a descender - anchor the axe, then drop yourself down, or as a swinging mechanic on a wall. I mean, yeah, i can see why the game wants you to be able to jump farther in certain places to go somewhere now as a progression gate, but how this one works just strikes me the wrong way.
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Feb 28, 2019 04:53
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One thing that bugs me is the village people are fit and strong but the game has them living in decrepit ruins. There's that one lady who wants you to visit all the tombs who is just doing apothecary stuff in a room with no roof and half the walls torn down. Lady, that poo poo's no good for your ingredients. They could at least show the villagers having stolen all the dressed stone and used it for their own houses, like the towns near the Great Wall of China. Have Laura run around bitching about having to look in everyone's house because they took the secret to a puzzle and turned it into a fireplace or a toilet or something.
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Feb 28, 2019 14:11
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 Man, it's been a while since I've actually done a stealth section in this game near flawlessly. It's been a while since we've seen one in general. To the point where I forgot that you could hide in bushes for a hot minute. Stealth sections are fine and good and I've already said a lot about my feelings towards them in this LP, but I have to hammer on the fact that Tomb Raider really does them well as you can gently caress them up and still recover and make it out with no real penalties. You can just thin the herd a bit and then go loud or just start blowing stuff up from the start and still make it through, you just may have a slightly tougher time. Giving players flexibility and the absence of a hard penalty in loving up is a good thing that more and more games are doing. I'm sure there's an argument to be made against that ("games are appealing to CASUALS now!") but who cares, it's fun. Megillah Gorilla posted:One thing that bugs me is the village people are fit and strong but the game has them living in decrepit ruins. pulling down old structures and reusing the material is an age old tradition. I think my favorite instance of that was King Tut's father building a city in his lifetime out of stone and then when Tut died the super unpopularity of his dad('s religious policy) led people to just tear down the stones of the city and use them elsewhere. Usually that's a pretty big task, but in order to build really fast Tut's dad used smaller stones rather than the megaliths we think of with grand Egyptian building projects, so people just carted off houses worth of rocks and moved elsewhere or built bridges and docks and such with them.
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Mar 2, 2019 15:58
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Oddly enough I was amazing at stealth in that area, killed everybody in every section without being spotted. Using poison arrows with groups like you did near the end helped a bunch, since apparently people coughing to death is not a suspicious sound. Though of course I did usually take the last ones with fire for pretty much the same reason you did  . I agree the fact that a screwup isn't instant doom makes the stealth parts more fun; get caught, say gently caress it and go Goddess of War on the enemy instead of re-loading.As for the lack of buildings, it seems like the Prophet's people do most of their recent building in wood, probably part of their "one with nature" thing. Add in the ruins seems semi-sacred to them (if not so much for Laura...) and I can buy them re-purposing ruins but not stripping them for stone. Hell, if not for Trinity running around playing conquistador they might not even be in the old city buildings at all. Wood admittedly is not so good in time of war, but outright building fortifications out of the stone would just point out where they were to Trinity, so just lurking in the remnants makes some sense that way too.
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Mar 3, 2019 03:41
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 This ended up being late because I uploaded the raw video file somehow and only caught it as I was getting ready to post last night before I went to sleep. I have a weird obsession with Arctic and Antarctic exploration, to the point where I just spent stupid money on reproduction Shackleton Expedition scotch. The second the arrowhead comes up in this video I had to restrain myself from turning this into Arctic Facts the Video. One of the things I love about these games is stuff like that. Lara is a terrible archaeologist, but on occasion she/the detail writers for the game has a really good observation that matches some real world facts. I can appreciate that as an Anthropology major (current job title: Senior Engineer. I don't get to use my degree in my working life) and nothing that Lara says is setting off alarms where I would start to worry people who have no idea about different cultures who play the game would get the wrong impression of a people. That does get lessened a bit because most of the people are "out of place," all of the Prophet's followers are Greeks who wandered to Siberia and got followed by Mongols and eventually Soviets. The arrowhead here is one of the few things that original inhabitants may have used. There are other items we see, like bone dagger hilts and such, but they're generic enough that most any stone-to-iron age culture could have had something similar. I guess I just wrote a paragraph about an arrowhead in a video game being kind of accurate. Man.
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Mar 7, 2019 00:19
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Lazyfire posted:I guess I just wrote a paragraph about an arrowhead in a video game being kind of accurate. Man. Now do it again.  E: Christ, I just noticed this thread is still on PAGE TWO. That is CRIMINAL.
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Mar 7, 2019 04:39
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