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You skipped a chat with Fen before activating that last tube! Will we ever get to hear his snide or snarky comment to getting out of the fungal cave? 
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Sep 13, 2019 01:04
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berryjon posted:You skipped a chat with Fen before activating that last tube! Will we ever get to hear his snide or snarky comment to getting out of the fungal cave? Short answer: oops Long answer: yes, I remember eventually.
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Sep 13, 2019 03:27
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OH MY GOD, please equip some more cogs. they're reusable. even if your current loadout is suboptimal it's better than nothing!
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Sep 13, 2019 08:18
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Nononono, let Lazyfire blunder along as he has been! Half my enjoyment of this is him figuring out what works and what doesn't.
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Sep 13, 2019 17:54
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The only blundering that I can't let stand is the waste of water to open up the tubes, they can be opened up with your trusty pick axe.
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Sep 14, 2019 04:39
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 One of the things I love about this game (besides the change in how upgrades work so now I look dumb for not realizing cogs can be slotted in and out for like three videos. This was recorded a week ago, so I did figure it out on my own) is that the secrets and optional areas are so much more expansive than in the previous game. I get the distinct feeling that I'm actually going to get lost or confused playing this over Dig 1 where things were kind of linear and side paths and secondary areas were few and far between. There's also a good chance I'll forget about the windblown area I found once I get the super speed boots or whatever I'll find to get me through it. In a lot of ways it feels like Dig 2 is way more of a Metroidvania than Dig 1, but that's not being fair to it as it is clearly its own creature in a number of ways. There was some backtracking in the previous game, but I can already tell there is going to be far more here, which I think is a good thing overall as it gives you a chance to explore and test things out, which really fits with the spirit of the story. I've been playing Link's Awakening in anticipation of the remake and playing that and this at the same time really remind me of how much I love exploring and testing out the limits of games. With a lot of the stuff you have around now you know the rules are kind of set in stone and you are pushed in a specific direction a great deal of the time. In games like Dig 2 I get the sense that if I hit a wall the right way or dash along a path far enough I may be able to get somewhere I shouldn't yet. You are seeing me actively trying to control myself during the LP so I don't spend 30 minutes trying to make a jump just to see if it works. Link's Awakening has a lot of the same elements to it that make me think I can or should be able to do things the developers didn't intend, but I know for a fact you can totally break that game over your knee if you know the right techniques. Dig 2 feels like those opportunities are going to be rare if they exist at all.
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Sep 15, 2019 00:14
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 For as much time as I spend digging up random materials in this episode, a lot of things happen. We see a new enemy, we meet new friends and find a hidden depth to the seemingly mindless shiners from the previous game. I'm actually kind of excited to see what happens with that last one, but I'll let you watch it instead of talking about it extensively. One of the things I'm learning about this game is that it does expect you to make use of the fact that you have multiple tools available at any time without having to switch to the right one for the job. Using the pick to kill everything is just not going to work, you need to make use of the pressure bombs and gain some distance if you want to keep surviving. I'm still in the mindset of the previous game where I only had the one weapon/tool button and it shows in this video, especially when I start hitting the weapon change button by mistake. The new enemy here is just not something you could effectively deal with in the first game unless you knew it was coming, and even then you would run a risk if you had to break a wall to get to it and quickly switch to something like the steamfist. It's nice to see the developers didn't just rely on what was done in the previous game when it came to combat, which wasn't nearly as important as exploration and something they could have kept just as simple and been OK in this game.
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Sep 17, 2019 23:02
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Ah, yes, the birds. They're called "chocobos" internally. I don't remember what the public-facing name is supposed to be. Anyway, they were the first enemy model ever made for the game, way early in development. Then for a while it looked like we weren't going to use them, then they came back again later in development and made into the avian menace that you see before you. For a while in development, we did have a classic weapon switch system where you could assign tools to the four d-pad directions. At that point, it looked like we were going to have a lot more tools than ended up actually being the case, so when the list was pared down to the ones that are in the game now, we changed it to simply give each tool its own unique button instead. The Jackhammer originally had a chisel tip, by the way, but in some meeting or another someone suggested a fist would be pretty cool and people generally agreed. Improved enemy combat was one of the explicit goals of the project. I think the people who worked on Dig 1 were generally unsatisfied with the variety of enemies in that game; most of them were just slowly moving obstacles. So this game has over twice the number of enemies, many of them are much faster (like the chocobos) and have more varied attacks. I believe bloodstones were part of that design, to give you a tangible reward for engaging with monsters (plus it smooths out the economy a bit and gives you an endless source of minerals should you mine out an area completely). I think Portal of Pardon was added in part because Dig 2 doesn't have the portable teleporter pads from the first game. It's a nice convenience feature.
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Sep 18, 2019 09:35
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 If you can't tell by the end of this video, I'm absolutely enamored with the upgrade we get at the start of the episode. I love things that make me feel like I'm breaking the game in some way, and of course I immediately try to use the upgrade to do just that and get somewhere I probably am not meant to go at all. It's fine, next episode I actually follow up on where the game tells me to go. This time I decide to follow my dumb "never make progress" instincts that almost send me back to the start of the game.
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Sep 25, 2019 02:07
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Temple of Guidance Part 2! Most stuff post-hookshot was designed to let you tackle it in basically any order, although certain things are still inaccessible until you make more progress elsewhere. The Grenade Launcher is an optional upgrade, so it doesn't impact progression anyway. By the way, remember what I said about sequence breaking? You can get to that part of the Temple of Guidance right from the start with the right inputs, circumventing getting Fen entirely and going straight to Yarrow. That's a legit sequence break in the sense that we didn't think it was possible on release, unlike some other sequence breaks that were entirely intentional. (One even gives you an achievement.) That little digging spot on the left with the lever at the bottom is a somewhat vague reference to the opening sequence of Dig 1. As you can imagine, the Hook Shot went through a lot of iteration to get just right, but I personally do like the end result a lot. You can do some pretty fast movement with precise grappling, as you'll see.
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Sep 25, 2019 09:46
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That hookshot is rad. Nice work! I'm home sick and I woke up my dogs shouting at the screen at some of the things you missed - not going back to stacking the mine carts, not trying to trigger that double gate switch puzzle with your new grenade launcher - so thank you for the entertainment.
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Sep 25, 2019 14:41
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That temple music is pretty drat good, it's up there as my top ten spelunking music choices! Also that hookshot, so good, so fast.
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Sep 25, 2019 15:07
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SageNytell posted:That hookshot is rad. Nice work! You and several people on YouTube seem to have taken issue with my hasty retreat from the temple. The fact that I'll have to come back here later should make everyone feel a bit better. The fact that I'm playing for an audience and not by myself is going to force me to occasionally divert from what I want to do to what will be fun to watch, this is one of those cases. Hyper Crab Tank posted:As you can imagine, the Hook Shot went through a lot of iteration to get just right, but I personally do like the end result a lot. You can do some pretty fast movement with precise grappling, as you'll see. I love the hookshot, it starts to become my main method of transportation in the next episode. Getting the momentum and angles right to get to new and different areas, or to more effectively backtrack is just crazy satisfying.
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Sep 25, 2019 15:19
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So I got really busy on Friday and Saturday and didn't post the latest episode. That means the next two weeks will be video free as I am in Spain and then France until mid October.
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Sep 30, 2019 19:46
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Well drat. Looks like I'm gonna have to actually buy this game so I can get my fix!
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Sep 30, 2019 20:47
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AltaBrown posted:Well drat. Looks like I'm gonna have to actually buy this game so I can get my fix! It was on sale for 10 bucks on the Switch, so I just up and did! And yeah, its really smooth to play, and it doesnt quite come through as much on the updates, but the music is really great.
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Oct 2, 2019 04:50
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 I've successfully extracted myself from Europe without accidentally knocking over other tourists or getting run over by an electric scooter. I frankly do not remember a single thing about this video, I recorded it a week before I left, but the switch puzzle room traumatized me to the point where I walk into it in the next episode and near immediately remember what it was and what it required of me. I think that is a hallmark of good design where one off or unique areas stick in a player's memory. It's why you have "best opening levels in games pt. 48: Colecovision only" videos on YouTube as the developers know they need to hook you right at the start and keep you wanting to play on. Putting a sequence that sticks in the player's mind mid game gets a bit harder because skill levels are going to vary and so you could have someone who breezes through something like this and thinks nothing of it or you have someone like me who can barely bumble through it after multiple attempts and it sticks in their head. Maybe if I didn't use the hookshot like it was the only way to get around it would be easier for me, but the thing is too much fun.
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Oct 22, 2019 11:19
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Oh poo poo, THAT puzzle room! That puzzle room can eat my ENTIRE rear end! That room prevented me from getting 100%, and I don't care. Even with all the upgrades NOTHING (edit: that I'm aware of anyway, I'm sure SOMEONE will be along to explain how easy it is with some esoteric cog upgrade) makes that room any easier.
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Oct 22, 2019 20:59
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Well, a certain upgrade I don't want to spoil helps a little bit, but ultimately that room is down to manual dexterity and there is nothing that makes it easy. It's one of my favorites! There is post-game content that unlocks after getting every single artifact in the game, so if you want to cover that... The Temple of the Destroyer is the first real big area you get to that is themed differently from the more "classic" Dig underground rocky caverns. Personally, I think it's one of the coolest things we managed to do with the series - expand it to new locations that look and feel very different but still maintain the same fundamental gameplay. Among many other things, I worked on the conveyor belts and crushers; the latter are infamously terrible to work with physics-wise and they ended up being a massive pile of hacks just to get them to behave correctly. Not only do they have to move, but they have to crush things if they collide a certain way, push things out of the way if the collide another, and worst of all carry things along if you stand on top of them... and still be able to crush you against the ceiling when coming back up. It took ages getting it right and I still think they might be the buggiest game object in the world to date.
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Oct 23, 2019 11:04
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I think my favourite thing about the temple is the fist-bumping trapdoors that you open with the levers. A great example of the earnest silliness that permeates these games. And I remember that switch room causing me no end of grief on my first playthrough, but managed to breeze through it in one or two tries when I ran through again at the start of this LP. I guess my grapple hook muscle memory must have stayed with me.
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Oct 23, 2019 12:10
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Well, a certain upgrade I don't want to spoil helps a little bit, but ultimately that room is down to manual dexterity and there is nothing that makes it easy. It's one of my favorites! There is post-game content that unlocks after getting every single artifact in the game, so if you want to cover that... At least it's easy to get back to that puzzle room. The conveyor belts and crusher traps are really different for what we've seen of both the first game and this one up to that point, but they were introduced in an organic enough way that it didn't even occur to me that it was worth remarking upon. I'm surprised by the hacked together nature at play for the crushers. It almost sounds like it was more trouble than it was worth if they only show up in this temple. I get the feeling I should expect a hellrun late in the game featuring all the obstacles.
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Oct 23, 2019 12:52
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 I'm really having fun with the cogs in this game. Slapping them in and out to meet the unique hazards of whichever area you find yourself in is pretty simple and adds some depth and either a level of safety or challenge to what you are doing at any given time. I know I'm bad at timing and precision movement, so being able to gain a bit of a reprieve from the dangers of the lava drips is huge for me. I should probably also slap on whatever keeps me from taking fall damage as soon as it shows up... Other cog upgrades aren't as useful, like the thorns thing I put on for a hot minute here. I can see where if you were dueling enemies and trading blows often enough you would benefit from it to run it for a bit, but massive swaths of the game have little to no combat, and most of it can be handled without endangering yourself to the point where you need to deal damage while taking it to win. Ignore my terrible combat skills in the episode while I make that point. I'm really looking forward to where the game goes with them and the blueprints from the archaeologist. I don't think that the game is going to end with Dot dropping nukes on the cultists or anything, but some of the abilities and upgrades I scroll past in the video suggest some serious martial upgrades are in our future.
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Oct 26, 2019 16:59
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Managed to find a video of someone doing that Floor is Lava challenge cave, if anyone wants to see it beaten with little to no light. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BWN8QeY1js
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Oct 27, 2019 05:25
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That eternal sunshine lantern mod seems extremely potent.
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Oct 28, 2019 03:35
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That is one of the best mods in the game.
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Oct 28, 2019 07:31
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 This has just been a week from hell, I'm getting back home at like nine at night at best and so while this video has been uploaded since Sunday afternoon for a Monday release this is literally the first time I've sat down in my own home since then. Not a ton more to say about this video without spoiling anything besides what you see in the image. We're fighting a boss this time and get an upgrade. The boss isn't terribly difficult, or wouldn't be if I was competent. You just have to keep an eye on where he's teleporting to and gently caress him up when you can. Maybe remembering you can break stone helps, I don't know. The pick upgrade is nice, at the very least it solves a few puzzles at the end of the episode, though I can't tell if there is a damage or destruction speed boost at play. Next episode: Digging for the first time in a while.
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Oct 31, 2019 00:41
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Ah, the fire axe. This was originally a flamethrower that could shoot through walls, and a lot of the puzzles involving it had to do with setting fire to things in places you couldn't normally access. It was considered too weird to have a projectile that magically passed through walls in a game where the solidity of the environment is kind of a fundamental aspect of the whole digging gameplay, so it was changed into this kind of... burrowing thing that dug itself through walls invisibly. That didn't last long, and this was I think about the time when we decided to cut down on the number of selectable tools, so it got turned into a passive upgrade for the pickaxe instead. The high priest boss is, of course, none other than Ronald Hubbot, the guy briefly mentioned by the artifact collector earlier.
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Nov 1, 2019 11:18
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The Priest video is Unlisted, but none of the other ones are so I don't know if that's on purpose. I know this because I was relying on Youtube to let me navigate from video 8 to video 9 (e.g. Up Next... ) and it wasn't showing up for some reason!
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Nov 2, 2019 01:56
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 Scaramouche posted:The Priest video is Unlisted, but none of the other ones are so I don't know if that's on purpose. I know this because I was relying on Youtube to let me navigate from video 8 to video 9 (e.g. Up Next... ) and it wasn't showing up for some reason! I continuously forget to set things to public. I usually give videos a day before switching them over, but every now and again I just don't get to it or it keeps slipping my mind. One of the ways this game is different from the previous title is that we spend way more time doing puzzles and exploration segments like the temples that we do just digging down like we do in this video. Most of the areas of the game give you plenty of opportunities to dig and pull up ores, but if you watch the last few videos you see a lot fewer areas where there is a lot of that and what you do have is generally as a way to get you from one area to the next without a ton of mining opportunities. It means you don't have to haul a full pack back to a tube every couple minutes like you have to in the first game, but it also means there's less money coming in per-minute and so fewer upgrades purchased in the same span of time you would in the first game. This isn't a bad thing, just something I noticed after doing a story/exploration heavy segment back to back with a section of the game like this where there's a lot more digging and fighting and dragging ores back to the surface than what we've seen recently.
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Nov 5, 2019 02:41
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Have you forgotten you have 3 cogs in an ability that lets you warp back to town as long as you are not in a special cave and are standing on solid ground? There's a little vortex symbol between the armor and the lava boot symbol that lights up when you can use the warp. Might save you a bit of annoyance - I always warped back to town unless I was right next to a pneumatic tube. If you have a chance to post the next bit of history, I'd love to find out what happened next! Thanks!
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Nov 5, 2019 07:07
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You really shouldn't drop those heavy stones in the dark. Who knows how much ore you destroyed doing that.
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Nov 5, 2019 18:10
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Kacie posted:Have you forgotten you have 3 cogs in an ability that lets you warp back to town as long as you are not in a special cave and are standing on solid ground? There's a little vortex symbol between the armor and the lava boot symbol that lights up when you can use the warp. Might save you a bit of annoyance - I always warped back to town unless I was right next to a pneumatic tube. Also the lantern cog upgrade that prevents it from dropping below 50% light. Quite useful, for both you and your viewers.
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Nov 9, 2019 08:30
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 I had every intention of posting this while working from home yesterday, but the last two weeks have been hellish and I have barely had time to do anything that wasn't work until today. There's a lot more that actually happens next time, this episode is a lot of exploration and setting up for new stuff in the near future. Teledahn posted:Also the lantern cog upgrade that prevents it from dropping below 50% light. Quite useful, for both you and your viewers. like this. Spoilers, I guess, but I finally make some hard choices about cog distribution next time. The infinite lamp is amazing. Kacie posted:Have you forgotten you have 3 cogs in an ability that lets you warp back to town as long as you are not in a special cave and are standing on solid ground? There's a little vortex symbol between the armor and the lava boot symbol that lights up when you can use the warp. Might save you a bit of annoyance - I always warped back to town unless I was right next to a pneumatic tube. Someday I'll finish the history writeup. It took me nearly three weeks of working on that in my downtime in the office to get what I did post so far, so I need another stretch of nothing to get more out. Unfortunately, it's the end of the year and in true corporate fashion, everyone is trying to spend money before the end of the year so their budgets don't get reduced next year. I'm against this because who knows how much money we could save on both commercial and government contracts by now doing this, but also because I'm the guy who has to source and order all the stuff they want.
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Nov 9, 2019 21:21
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Remove the cogs from it if you aren't going to use the teleportation skill  The upper part of the cave with Vectron's entrance was indeed a secret area although you couldn't get up it yet.
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Nov 13, 2019 07:39
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 As you can probably guess from the title of the episode, there's a new upgrade in this video and it is fantastic. No more me attempting to use hookshot momentum to get around bad routing. No more stupid jumps into the unknown and taking damage. Shorter return trips when I don't use the portal of pardon. Best of all: It doesn't run on water so I don't feel guilty about using it. That's just fantastic forethought there. The jetpack actually charges while you aren't using it, whether you are falling, hanging or sliding, if it isn't firing you are gaining time on it again. That's going to either make things really easy in the future or is going to lead to some frustrating puzzles for my tiny brain and limited coordination. Lord Zedd-Repulsa posted:Remove the cogs from it if you aren't going to use the teleportation skill I take care of both these points in the video. The long awaited day has finally come where I readjust my cogs. That came out wrong.
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Nov 14, 2019 00:28
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Steamworld Dig 2 is a masterpiece. I wish it was longer, but the entire Vectron section and the Jetpack are executed so well. It's rare to see a game with this much focus on wanting the player to have fun.
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Nov 14, 2019 03:17
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FactsAreUseless posted:Steamworld Dig 2 is a masterpiece. I wish it was longer, but the entire Vectron section and the Jetpack are executed so well. It's rare to see a game with this much focus on wanting the player to have fun. The game really is a lot of fun, which I hope gets conveyed well in the videos. The Vectron section was a great surprise as neither Steamworld Dig up to that point had incorporated a "run from the rolling boulder" style segments, which are usually the kind of things a game will use early and often if they are part of the design (the Tomb Raider remake series does this to great effect). Because of that I though I had missed something important or had taken a death when it ended. It's a nice twist on the formula.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:28
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I wonder if you'll retry the button room now that you have the jetpack.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:34
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Lazyfire posted:The game really is a lot of fun, which I hope gets conveyed well in the videos. The Vectron section was a great surprise as neither Steamworld Dig up to that point had incorporated a "run from the rolling boulder" style segments, which are usually the kind of things a game will use early and often if they are part of the design (the Tomb Raider remake series does this to great effect). Because of that I though I had missed something important or had taken a death when it ended. It's a nice twist on the formula.
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Nov 15, 2019 02:47
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The original intent was for the jetpack to run on a separate fuel resource, diesel oil. This was also the same resource that fueled the flamethrower (which was also cut). I don't remember how exactly you were supposed to get more of it, but it was supposed to be a more rarely acquired but more long-lasting resource. Eventually it was all changed in favor of what you see now. The big metal golems in Vectron are called Terminators. This is an area I remember primarily from testing; it was really difficult to get right. Anyway, now that you know of the remaining doomsday devices I can point out something that isn't really a secret because it's actually one of the achievements, but: You can take out all the doomsday devices without ever entering Vectron and getting the jetpack. Mraagvpeine posted:I wonder if you'll retry the button room now that you have the jetpack. The jetpack is the upgrade I hinted at earlier as making that room easier.
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Nov 15, 2019 09:46
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