>>46250

>I also struggled a lot with WC2, I think it is considerably more difficult than WC1. The fact that I played it on PC and that the rendering sometimes stuttered didn't help either.

Well I dropped not because difficulty (I'd say secret missions 1-2 was already much more complicated than the base game) but because not get into changes in style and plot there and there. I'll replay it as soon as get back home

>There's a voice acting version of WC2?

There is in intro, at least in CD version. Not in game overall, exept in-combat, same as FM Towns WC1 version.

>Or do you mean WC3 with the movie elements, where Mark Hamill played Blair? Also: Based Tom Wilson who played Maniac, same guy who played Biff in Back to the Future, and he did a great job both times!

No, I don't get to privateer/WC3 yet. Tho I know about cutscenes and actors from 3, there was very powerfull cast for 90s videogame.

>Yeah, that sucked. All that fighting to save the claw, just that it gets destroyed off-screen. Kinda de-valued everything you did before.

This and kind of change in whole narrative. You see, X-wing/TIE Fighter get a lot of concepts from WC1 but gone compleatly opposite direction. In X-Wing there is compleatly traditional structure: Briefing-start-combat-landing-debrifieng. They cut all personal drama, rec rom, and moved personal stuff in manual, and game narrative compleatly focuses on "story of war" not story of people, and game "Tour of Duty" and cutscenes between them compleatly following structure of complete version of WC1 and it's addons. They also expanded system of pilot awards and medals and ceremonies from WC1.
WC2 on other hand abadoned all this solid structure and focuses much more on cinematographic-y narrative inbetween missions with much more personal stuff than WC1 ever had. I also just liked faces of characters in WC1 more, overall style. Pilots in brown leather jackets and jeans, this classic battlestar galactica style start. Dunno, missed all this in 2.
Espessialy angel! I think it to show that 10 years passed but this is just sad ): And hair gradients in 2 kind of strange lol.

>Could be, yes, I think no one dies in WC1, although it was kinda hard to keep Maniac alive, because he was shit :DD In WC3 he actually was decent, despite never doing what you told him. So it was just "break and attack" every single time.

No, it was not in main game, I think he dies in Secret Missions 2 even if you doing you best and out of your combat - you said he is dead after your mission while he was on other mission.

>Also: I can't even describe how much it rustles my jimmies that everytime I google for "WCx something", I get only results for Warcraft games. This is just wrong!

Say it for people who like Lands of Lore... or Might and Magic where everything up untill 7th game you will be 90% shown "Heroes of" instead of actually main series.

https://youtu.be/mpjeOih2CHA
Eeh feels much weaker than Wraith Aeon of Ruin or Ion Fury. This game don't know what it wants to be - Modern, Indy, Stylesed or Retro.

What a captivating let's play of a game I would never have the patience to play myself

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iIvNp1S9ntU

Ie. KGB, the notoriously difficult and merciless point and click adventure game set in the USSR in Autumn 1991.

The game's plot is grim and gory pulp fiction tier stuff but fairly captivating.

>>46500
Masterpeace

>>46255
Yaaay Sseth is reviewing one of my top ten most favorite games of all time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKEawmH-l9c

I've also decided I could try to run some of my older games instead of on an emulator or genuine VM or something maybe I could try to see if I actually have any of my old enough working hard drives that might still have Windows XP on it and see if I can try booting off that with an IDE to USB cable or try to find an adapter or something to load into Windows off it as my boot disk but I'm somewhat less certain I could get it to work. Unless I can get my XP CD to boot.

I'm doing my last Dishonored 2 playthough to 100% it on steam. I've done 4 playthroughs and it's still such a great game. Shame the series didn't do better.

>>46574
It was one of those series that I wanted to like but which had some features to it that just didn't mesh well with me, like how the game gave you all these gadgets but a good amount of them were only useful if you weren't doing a chaos playthrough, which made the 'good end' have less variety than just going to town on enemies in contrast to the game's theming.

I tried to get into the first game a few times but it just never captured my attention.

>>46575
I recently played through the game in no-powers mode, which is like playing thief or something, just sword and guns and stealth or combat and everything was still do-able.

The gadgets are there to give you options, if you think you're missing out by not using them then I dunno what to tell you. I'd rather have a bunch of options at my disposal than not.

I'm doing a no kills, no detections ghost run at the moment and so far I've used most of my gadgets at some point, even crossbow bolts to break glass, springrazors, sticky mines and grenades to take on robot enemies, incendiary bolts for bloodfly nests etc. etc.

>>46580
I was referring to the series and not the second game specifically. The first game was really not my cup of tea, and there weren't many gadgets that did stuff for a no-kill run, most of the crossbow's use was for killing or some variant thereof, there were only really human enemies that justified the mine so they were out, etc. I also didn't find the stealth all that engaging, being built on powers that felt kind of cheaty for a stealth game. Sounds like the sequel improved that by giving options for non-lethal uses of gadgets instead of them just being dead weight for certain playstyles, but I think I'll stick to early splinter cell for my stealth fixes personally. Game does have a pretty cool aesthetic though.

>>46575
That's a problem with a lot if not all stealth games I played, you are given a lot of deadly tools and gadgets often very fun to use gameplay-wise but ultimately only non-lethal behavior is rewarded.

>>46580
I finished every missions in Dishonered doing no kill, not being detected and not having any body discovered, safe for the flooded district, which is a very long mission with enemy giving very few feedback on weither they detected you or not. I was pretty pissed to finish it and see somehow one of those f*ckers managed to see me once.

>>46587

>you are given a lot of deadly tools and gadgets often very fun to use gameplay-wise but ultimately only non-lethal behavior is rewarded.

I think this speaks to a deeper hominid cultural narrative

Re: stealth games.
I think it's the fundamental problem of stealth games that you are given lots of tools to help you make the missions easier, but having those tools also subverts the central gameplay mechanic, that being stealth. Despite how good of a game Hitman: Blood Money is, it had the same problem: the most fun way to play was with nothing but a fiber wire and maybe a couple utility gadgets. Absolutely no guns.

I think one way to solve it might be to have the gadgets be a counter balance to the difficulty progression, as in make the game way, way harder (more targets, time limits, secondary objectives, stage hazards, etc), so that you actually NEED to use the gadgets, and do so creatively in order to win. The downside of that approach is that it might make the game feels less like a stealth game, compromising the core fiction of the game.

Traditionally, stealth games went with the opposite approach: instead of making the levels harder, they'd give you extre challenges and limitations to make the game more fun and difficult. The thing with limitations is that, well, the whole point of them is to cut down on extra gameplay mechanics like gadgets and powerups, resulting in a more purist experience. Which also has the downside of making you feel like you're missing out on all those extra features.

TBH, I think I'd like to see a spinoff of the stealth genre where the objective is to kill literally every NPC on the map, or at least a significant portion of them. With detection resulting in either a failure condition, or extra difficulties. Having more so many more targets to take out would mean there's much more opportunities for failure, thus you'd have to use every tool at your disposal.
I thought conquering forts in FarCry games (only played 4) was actually pretty interesting if you went with the stealth approach. Even though the stealth mechanics were rudimentary, having to literally kill every single NPC inhabiting the base, and alerting even the last NPC could lead to them calling the alarm and turning the game into an FPS (a failure condition in my book, since I prefer stealth), was quite fun.

All this gameplay talk makes me wish I had an academic math education, because I have this hunch that mathematically modeling certain genres of videogames would give a lot of insight on what exactly causes those fundamental self-contradictions in their mechanics. The only genre I can deconstruct in such a way is ARPGs, RPGs, MMOs, etc., mostly because I played them so much.

>>46591
I've always been confused with this meme in western movies where the moment the bell rings, all students just get the hell out, ignoring the teacher. Here, you'd get your ass whooped if you did that.

>>46592
A lot of Western ed is based on the shittastic Prussian model and Prussian mindset. You have a limited time to get to next class and have your stuff out or you'll get in trouble in primary school. Secondary school it's ironically considered disrespectful to show up late rather than bolt out of there.

>>46587

>I was pretty pissed to finish it and see somehow one of those f*ckers managed to see me once.

in Dishonored 2 and 3 there's a stats button in the options menu that tells you if you've killed anyone, or if you've been spotted. I think it's also present in D1 somewhere
>>46586

>there weren't many gadgets that did stuff for a no-kill run

you have blink, the ability to strangle people and sleep darts. You can also use bend time and knock out several at once, see this webm I made.

You can also stop time, choke a dude and carry him off before time resumes

>>46599
I didn't even know Dishonored 3 was a thing

>>46592

>Despite how good of a game Hitman: Blood Money is, it had the same problem: the most fun way to play was with nothing but a fiber wire and maybe a couple utility gadgets.

Something tell me the amount of efforts put into allowing the player to buy and upgrade weapons "from butt to sight" hints that the missions can be completed with the highest score by having a bolder play-style than just disguising oneself and strangling/poisoning the target. But i remember silenced weapons still being loud enough to alert every nearby characters in the target's surrounding, so I may be wrong.

>>46601
Just looking for "hitman blood money weapon" on youtube :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0HvxegdIzw
The game seems to be more flexible than I thought. there is a couple of abuse here and there but getting the Silent Assassin grade is possible while using guns. Nice

>>46601
I've never played Hitman games but if so it sounds much more realistic. Silenced weapons are loud as fuck. All it is is just some muffler and flash suppressor. You won't alert the entire neighborhood but the minute you fire it anyone nearby will look to your exact location to figure out what that loud pop was.

Actually I think I posted about this before but Breaking Bad was the closest to showing what suppressors sound like. The added sound of the slide slamming back and slinging back to position with the casings hitting the ground was a nice touch.

Tbh part of why I never played Hitman was my instincts told me to avoid a game where you play some assassin with a barcode on his neck. It felt super NWO indoctrination-y to me at the time and I'd simply forgotten about it since then. Is the gameplay actually decent? I have a few stealth based games but tbqh I tend to like it more in survival horror. That being stated it's actually nice to play by some of my IRL instincts for once, like stealing cigarettes from off my sleeping dad around/year after 9/11.

Did you know that somehow people can sense you watching them while they sleep? It's true and quite spooky to me. If you comcentratedly stare at them they'll wake up.

So part of what I did is I always looked away and tried not to think about him or mentally fixated on his person so his sleeping subconscious or astral or whatever tf causes it self wouldn't increase in alert and suspicion levels. Sometimes you have to try and time your breathing with theirs. It also helps to try and time your lifting of a pack of cigarettes or better any exposed cigarette in the pack of their shirt with their breathing movements. That way you can wiggle the pack out as their chest rises and falls but the difficult thing is getting the pack stuffed back in that front pocket.

And then there's those obvious things like trying to time the depth of their breathing to when they are in deepest and lightest sleep. I stole so many cigarettes that way.
Ah to be young againnot really fuck being a kid or teenager

>>46601

>Dishonored 3

it's called Death of the Outsider and was universally hated by chans because you play as a black woman in it

Usually by people who never played the series and don't realise she's in the two DLC campaigns in D1, and she's a major character in D2 and the main character in D3

I've decided to give the Old World Blues mod for HoI4 a try, because the Fallout mod for Darkest Hour is actually a pretty good mod.

This one is very janky and irritating to play.
For some reason the mod developers thought it'd be fun to add a naval perspective to Fallout, so the map is full of rivers that mimic how seas work in vanilla.
The problem with this is that you can't properly create frontlines because of these fucking rivers, and if you push through a crossing, you might lose a war you already won because the AI navally invades through the rivers into your heartland, further making you unable to properly utilise frontlines.
It's fucking Fallout, I don't give a shit about naval warfare and your autistic tech tree for it because we're fighting a war in the middle of the continental US.

I played as the Legion because why not, and invading the NCR was a pain in the ass because of the naval invasions and the fact that they spammed out 500 divisions.
Basically the only reason I won was because the AI is shit, and they kept attacking my fully entrenched 20 width divisions in the north, destroying their manpower and equipment pools. (They basically suicided more than half a million people on my lines through constant offensives that always failed. Apparently it's a thing the AI does in vanilla too. You can win as the Germans against the Soviets just by letting them grind against your lines for a year and then mopping their remaining forces up.) (For a comparison, I had a fielded army of ~200k men and 70k manpower free, while they had at least double that fielded and another 400k free.)
And even after their front collapsed they still kept navally invading behind my lines. Never knew that "Causing the other side to have a brain aneurysm" is an actual victory option.

Another thing about the mod is that it has really small provinces. Usually around canon-places like the Mojave, where you can't fucking see the provinces you're fighting in, and you have to let the AI do all the fighting for you (which is a terrible idea, because the AI can't for its life fight efficiently or effectively.)
I still have no idea why the AI won't push through swathes of empty land, instead opting for waiting until the enemy gets its divisions there.
Small tiles aside, the combat is the same as in vanilla, except your divisions are way smaller and use a lot less manpower and equipment to create.

My second big issue. I played a major nation, probably equal in importance to Germany or the USSR in a WW2 scenario, but the focus tree was broken. My progression was halted because the pre-requisite of declaring war for the Hoover Dam is that it's owned by the NCR, but after waiting a year or two, nothing happened, so I had to manually declare war on New Vegas to take the place.
Funniest thing is. After I took the damn dam and fortified the region and upgraded the infrastructure, I got an event that the NCR now controls the dam and we should do something about it.
Turns out, the NCR can get the dam, it's just that the focus trees aren't synchronised so I was out of focuses by the time they got to it.
To add insult to injury, the focus automatically shifts control of the Hoover Dam region to the NCR, which is maximum bullshit if you ask me.

The only reason to play this is the setting, but the magic of it all quickly wears off as you encounter problem after problem.

>>46612
Thank God poltards didn't exist 20 years ago. Well I mean they did it's just they were still in fundie Evangelicals form. I'd have heard nonstop bitching about everything from Starcraft to Fallout to VTMB to KOTOR how "durrr hurrrrr esjaydubyoos" probably Starcraft in particular with nonstop screeching about the Bush joke and Republican ad in VTMB and the anti-aliens guy in KOTOR 1.

The funniest thing to me is they also don't realize all those super WOKE things aren't because of ideology but because of Capitalism.

>gee how can we market more shit to the growing female gamer demographic as well as black kids and growing Mexican and other demographics
>Let's throw in a token black chick and write a character named Jorge
>oh and Mark let's also make a Li Liu character so we've got better Chinese market penetration

This kinda segues into what I ended up thinking about at wörk today which was how I could try playing a few games of Tropico totally contrary to my playstyle and try to be a brutal dictator with as much class disparity as possible while courting the Capitalists and various others. I thought it would be especially funny if I could actually flood my country with cheap immigrant labor exploiting the fuck out of them for my sweatshops and farms alongside my abused Tropican workforce and issue some edict where I blame the leftists for it and spend the game antagonizing Socialists as much as possible while blaming them for everything. It'd probably be a pretty hilarious session to play but sadly I don't think any of those games will let me blame other parties for my own policies.

>>46613
Devils advocate position here is that the riverboat has played an enormous role in intra-us warfare historically. The rivers were as important as the railroads during the civil war for example.

>>46617
Also circumventing the front is exactly what they did with boats when it was the best option. The Union forced its way past Vicksburg to hit them from a different direction than was reasonable to do from the north.

TLDR: maintain rear area operations

>>46602
Not guns, but rather a gun. The silverballers are OP to the point I think they detract from the game a bit.
They're a faster method of killing than fiber wire and pretty much as silent, the only downside being blood splatters, but they don't do anything if the body is hidden or the killing happened in a secluded place. They're an infinite free knockout if you take hostage then press E, making the sedative syringe obsolete. Better than the sniper rifle for assassinations at range because with upgrades it's very accurate, and the maps are too small to need a sniper rifle anyway.
Also, in 99% of the cases you want to be next to the body when you kill, so other range weapons are useless anyway.
Other than that, the only gadget you use is the mines I think.

I try to limit my use of the silverballers when doing self-challenge meme playthroughs. My favorite one is to enter the level completely empty handed and improvise assassinations with random objects I find on the map.

>>46612

>it's called Death of the Outsider and was universally hated by chans because you play as a black woman in it

Ha ha, usually for people who by default screaming about SJWs when see such things in games I like to post something like this for example - Terra Nova Strike Force Centauri, game from 1996 by looking glass studios in system shock universe.
Or something other from 90s vidja where nobody give a shit abut such things and it was kind of normal.

However of cource part of fault of current situation of cource on marketing, who trying to market games for retards from other side of political fashion screaming about how their game "most tolerant" or some other bullshit from corporations.

>>46672

>marketing

Bingo. Suffice it to say one of the many reasons I've come to actively despise poltards in gaming--aside from the fact they're literally the worst SJWs out there who have to say how OFFENDED they are and how TRIGGERED and OFFENDED you should be too they DARED to put a black character in the game or you're a [insert buzzword] and I have to suffer these cocksuckers all the damn time while literally never suffering SJWs anywhere on these forums--is the fact that they smokescreen all these faggot MBA suits who've been ruining gaming since forever. They're apparently too stupid to understand this is literally due to how Capitalism in gaming works because those dumbasses get together focus groups and marketing departments to decide which sort of cringey af gimmick they can insert to get a wider market share. All games are is "units" to them. They don't give a shit about the games they market, they have nothing to do with programming or artistic direction (other than the horrific examples of executive meddling) and all they see is dollar signs and by god will they fuck that game into the dirt if they think it can make them even one more dollar. Tellingly none of these faggots have as big a problem with zero day DLC, microtransactions in paid games and paywall locked content.

By them screeching about the pure cancer of ideology it effectively screens all the terrible marketing decisions that businessmen make with games. Dead Space 3 remains to me one of the finest examples of how these retards utterly kill a series and you can literally see frame by frame where the MBA faggots forced the developers to make stupid and cringeworthy changes and all these outrage farmers bother to whinge about and fixate on is "oh how DARE they add a token black woman to try to farm more demographic slices somehow!"

This is the biggest thing I am dreading out of those fucking Swedes and Hardsuit Labs for fucking up VTMB2 which is what godawful changes are going to be made for their rock squeezing, and the most horrific bad sign I'd seen about the new guy had zero to do with ideology unless you consider the marketing itself as ideology but rather the fact that he was advertised as "working on award winning games like Assassin's Creed and Farcry" (nevermind which specific installations of those games mind you) and his former role at fucking Ubisoft. So basically they just advertised to me that they're going to rape that game into the goddamn dirt in pursuit of more profits thus destroying the game itself and their profits along with it because a lot of modern businesspeople are short sighted fucking morons.

>>46679

>VTMB2

Stopped checking news about it for a while because nothing much happened. Decided to see how the development is going yesterday, and the first news I see is that they threw Mitsoda out. What in the actual fuck?! Is Paradox aiming to be the next top gaming corporation of evil, like EA or Activision?

>>46682
I have personally kept Paradox on my top three list of shittest companies. They weren't yet being actively evil but they had one of the shittiest financial policies particularly with DLC. There's a reason why I never trusted Paradox to not fuck it up.

>>46683
>>46682
You can be assured that Paradox will do anything to give you that good fuzzy feeling that OVoD players like. The worst thing that will happen is some people not buying it on launch and waiting for a sale.

Hey guys, first time in LOOOOONG time I bought new game. Well, actually new game, not something from 2007 that I usually count as "new". Game that came out 5 days ago - Hotshot Racing. It's game that trying to look and be like this old arcade racing games - flat shaded polygons, bright colors, arcade mechanics and stuff. I like such things, even tho I kind of suck at racing games, in recent years I was more and more attracted towards this kind of races - from early 90s arcade to late 90s PC ones.

Aaand this game gave me everything I really wanted from such game - no annoying boring mechanics of buying and selling 9000 used cars, have sysems of millions upgrades and all this racing team managment bullshit in "realistic" dark colors"
You have characters - racers, each have unique set of 4 cars - balanced, speedy, drifty, acceleraty. Each of tem slightly different from same type car that have other racers. Earning money and passing championships allowing you to unlock or buy (for game money) some little customisation accesories for cars and suits for racers. Pure cosmetical stuff, that also compleatly made in same style. There is 4 championships with 4 tracks each, all tracks are unique, there some with dirt segments.

While this is obviously more high poly than any flat shaded arcade sega racing games from early 90s, they really nailed style, core ideas and added more to that. Really fun stuff for that that cost all that small amount I payed for it. May recommend... if you into something similar
https://youtu.be/3glVhkFAcvc

>>46614
poltards really have come a long way from the days of /news/, they're basically a synthesis of useful idiots and trannies at this point

>>46683
Me too, I've purposefully never given them a penny because of their shitty DLC bullshit. I think I got free copies of a few of their games on steam giveaways and shit but I've no interest in playing any of them.

The only exceptions are games I got from different devs who have been published by paradox, so I did get Cities Skyline and Surviving Mars but I got them from key sites iirc so I still avoided giving Paradox any money directly

I finally managed to quit Dota, but now I got addicted to Magic instead...
cba to to look the post up now, but that video KZ-Ernst posted about Slay the Spire in the last thread was pretty interesting, one of the guys was also a Magic pro player.

Also playing through Persona 4 whenever I'm hungover mostly, it's really fun actually. Glad they released a remaster for PC, the small things like being able to skip dialogue really make a difference, playing on emulator felt quite janky most of the time.
Also picked up killer7 when it was on sale recently, gonna start with that once I'm done with Persona, though I'm only 1/3 through or so.

>>46738
Watch his Vintage Cube stuff. He's mostly a top player in limited formats for one, and two Vintage Cube is (sarcasm) 'Magic played the way Richard Garfield intended'. It's actually a very entertaining limited format because there are fewer concessions than in traditional formats, instead you get very powerful picks as suboptimal compared to broken ones.

>>46751
I don't know the old cards that well, but I'll check it out.

After finally managing to log into the game since they launched the new set yesterday, I pulled off a 7-1 in a Sealed event, feelsgoodman.

>>46758
The shuffler makes me hate this game. The last thing I did was winning with Red Mono Decks containing 5 Lands. Then I've quit.

>>46758
A part of me keeps wanting to buy the MtG on Steam but this is typically thwarted by two things, the one being I know it's a ripoff for something never on sale and don't want to give Wizards of the Coast more money for not even some pieces of cardboard, and two, that would also involve giving steam my money.

Maybe I should just pirate it if I feel like playing it.

>spend well over $2000 on finally upgrading computer system
>get shiny new graphics card with it
>pay off internet well into October if not November
>disconnect router because wasting my life on internet not even playing games anymore
>play this instead at 1440p

Classic.

Got into NEO Scavenger recently, it's pretty fun but the storyline is short. There are mods though, and you don't have to play for completion.

>>46808
that game is hard as balls, I couldn't get more than 3 missions into it
t. brainlet
>>46810
I tried to get into that 2 or 3 times, played the demo, bought it and refunded it and considered buying it again.

Have you ever played Project Zomboid?

>>46812
back in the day me and a few friends set up a server and played zomboid together, breddy good stuff it allows you to properly separate roles and skills, some working on the base while others gather supplies and combat

never really tried in singleplayer, how is the experience that way?

>>46812
Kinda surprised. It requires some of the same planning and patience that XCOM2 requires. Some of the missions are indeed pretty hard though. I beat the one campaign and got pretty far into two others today. The easiest winning strategy to cheese your way through several missions is to use the launcher overlord zombies and then click explode while they're in mid air to rain artillery fire down on tougher machine gun enemies until you've flattened everything on the screen.
t. American war doctrine

>>46812

>Have you ever played Project Zomboid?

Yes, my friends and I played it in co-op a few times a couple of years back, it's fun but I found it gets old pretty fast.

ODST came out on MCC today. Finished my intall and did a quick test run. It feels really fucking good. Nice to be back in the saddle. Game holds up for a 2009 title tbh, especially since ODST is a glorified mod for Halo 3.

They added some new unlocks but unfortunately put them behind season challenges. Most of them are actually pretty doable solo I think, but the biggest one requires beating Set 4 of Firefight Classic with 4 players. That was hard enough when we had two 360s plugged into each other and the 4 players were in the one room. Can't imagine it'll be particularly fun with randoms, especially since ODST's Firefight is a much longer form of the game (endless, very limited power weapons, hard to go on the offensive on all but one map) compared to Reach' version which has been what's available since launch (Duration of 1 set, map power weapons and weapon drops, more maps allow/require limited offensive play). I can't imagine you'll get many matchmade games going to the 60 wave deep mark, either through dropouts or uncoordinated play.

>>46738
>>46758
>>46765
>>46800
Man, we are actually very close to being able to host a full drafting pod, assuming timezones work out. Even if it doesn't work, I'd be down to play Block Party with Ernsts sometime if there's interest. Block Party is a non-rotating format where decks must obey some form of Block Constructed rules, but decks do not have to be from the same block. It's casual and even absurdly powerful blocks are relatively balanced. Mind you it's not a super balanced format, not everything under the sun is competitive and some blocks are just more powerful than others, but you can get away with a lot more jank, and play with powerful but not absurd cards (i.e. fun cards that are unplayable in a serious format).

Tbh, I mostly fuck around with Magic on xmage these days. Yeah, it's Java but it's a pretty feature-complete pirate Magic client.

>>46889
Sounds good, sign me up. I'll check out XMage in the meantime, already installed it some time ago but didn't bother setting it up since it looked so clunky.
There's also a tool to set up drafts in MTGA (https://mtgadraft.herokuapp.com/) but I suppose there's not much sense since the shared card pool would likely be pretty limited.

>>46891
I mean MTGA also lacks the ability to draft packs with 3 pieces of power in them, always a minus in my books tbh. The UI takes a bit of getting used to but it's not too bad. It's a bit like MODO, clunky but a lot more granular and friendly to weird and/or complex game states than Arena.

Beat ODST on Legendary. Shit man, it holds up to my memories of the game. There's some bad writing sure, but the atmosphere and gameplay is so good. Few notes: Data Hive is a Bugger-based mission with a short escort sequence. Both of those suck on Legendary on a good day, them together sucks even more, and Coastal Highway I remember being easier, maybe I'm just used to newer AI but the 2009-era gunner AI prioritises accuracy way too much for some sections of that level.

God the new Disney "Star Wars" games look like such absolute complete shit. It's made me realize my entire idea about anonymity and the politik is a failure and a fantasy, and that perhaps the only relevant thing ultimately actually is the author, because we can clearly see with IP swapping how you can give any universe to capable hands and it'll turn out nice, but give it to Bethesda, EA, Disney...

Anyways hey Russia what do you know or think about this game?
https://www.gog.com/game/star_wars_rebellion
Think I might purchase it at full price because why not it's just six bucks.

I also have another question re: Poland
Why do the Poles make so many games?
Why does Poland appear to have not just such an advanced but also prolific gaming industry? It sincerely seems to me at this point like they are comparable to the Western i.e. US gaming industry, except ours has an order of magnitude more money while pushing out pure trash mostly through the megacorps, whereas Poles seem to be in line with what American vidya makers were like twenty or more years ago.

I was just browsing around for new crpgs and found this
https://store.steampowered.com/app/917720/Gamedec/

>Welcome to Warsaw City of the 22nd century. The Tech of the future is so advanced that the term "real" is relative and "life" and "death" have many meanings. Virtual worlds give rise to problems of the human nature: lust, sloth, envy, and pride. The residents of these virtual game-worlds need specialists – Gamedecs - Private Investigators with experience in those worlds who work to discover th

If I had any doubt it was Western Slavs doing it rather than pure coincidence of set in Warsaw

>problems of the human nature

Although I didn't realize Poles had issues with English articles?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwCpGWhTZI8

>>46922
Not played that, but going to. Only thing I know about that one is that they put basicly every planet in wrong sector or place in galaxy and that it have wierd characters there and there. But I don't know how it is as a "game" sadly.

Found out probably one of the top3 game intros (in my list for shure)
https://youtu.be/ACDPyWubLuQ - this is the most 00s thing I ever seen, and it's awesome! Sadly, game itself and it's cutscenes is regular "3d sonic" half-cringe stuff you can expect. However, game itself is very interesting. It basicly hoverboard racing with specific mechanics - from start where you run on foot, to how to should do tricks in air to gain "air meter", how you can go in special speed-attack mode, earn levels right in track that increase your abilities, catch airstreams from speedy enemies and do tricks inside them, have different characters and hoverboards with their stats and types that also can be upgraded. Overall, not just your generic arcade racing.

I was playing through Dishonored 1 and 2 lately and came across this, thought it was funny because even in a dystopian rat infested city of plague they punish looting. Compared to BLM in the current year where looting is fine (apparently)

I'm finally revisiting Morrowind and it didn't age one bit for me. It's even more amazing now to notice every details I missed ten years ago. It's incredible how they managed to put together a breathing world packed with lore while the interaction with NPCs is bare-bone at most. Top notch world building imho.

I remembered Vivec as a boring place with cloned quarters but it's absolutely not and each ones have its oddities, like the fake-Velothi tower for the Telvanis, the arena and everything going down the lower levels.

I didn't even started the main quest, I'm mostly focused on the Telvani house, exploring the land and experimenting with strong enchants and alchemy to explore said land with more efficiency. Pic related is my current settis : The same constant light and invisibility ring I crafted when I played years ago, an amulet of constant levitation, and a pants of constant slowfalling and restore fatigue. Next object will be for 50-100 jump, it's fun but I need a strong soul to have at least 300 of charge. I also should play with strong destruction spells but I play my mage like a battlemage, only with a shortsword. It's shit against heavily armoured opponents

tldr: Morrowind stood the test of time and is still a ton of fun to play. I still want to live there

Playing human resource machine.
One of the simpler programming games, and far from the zachtronics stuff in terms of complexity, but it's a cute little game, and also the right amount of challenge for someone who's never programmed or a beginner. Maybe a good game to give to children and see if they develop an interest in programming.
It's easy to get into because the drag and drop interface eliminates "syntax errors", and you get a live step by step playback of your program, a debugger of a sort.

Since the extent of my programming experience is writing scripts to automate graphics design stuff and some very simple mods for video games, it's a decent challenge so far.

The drawback is the UI. Dragging and dropping instructions one by one becomes a chore after a while, and you just want to type stuff. Especially when you have to fix an incorrect program, and while moving one instruction you lose your place and garble up your program. it's easier to start from scratch. Sometimes I write a solution, see it's incorrect, realize immediately how to fix it, but prospect of either going through the error prone process of fixing, or rewriting from scratch makes me want to alt f4. Still, guess I can't fault it too much, since ease of access at the cost of flexibility was a tradeoff they made deliberately.

I also like how the game grades you on two separate metrics, number of instructions and number of steps performed. Most of the time though I just do an unrolled, sequential solution with the bare minimum required jump instructions, not because of muh performance, but because managing the flow of a program when you can't refactor it or even make functions is a pain in the ass.

>>46968
You playing vanilla?

>>46941
???
If that was a reference to my country people being maced, beaten, and sometimes shot even without looting.

Started a Black Sea campaign. Russian BTG in a hypothetical conventional war on the Ukraine. Game's good. May stream it sometime. Had some success with Combat Mission so far in terms of being fairly engaging to watch. The fact it's got 3d graphics gives it spectacle instead of just being very dry hex and counter that relies on engagement with mechanics that you may or may not know well/at all.

>>46972
I play vanilla on OpenMW, with only the official mods enabled, so no added texture or models

>>46978
Oh, okay. No fan patches like "patch for purists" or restors of some cut content? What OMW version and tweaks?

>>46978
Get Intelligent Textures, they are great. They are upscaled versions of the original textures, so they still stay close to the vanilla feeling without being so low-res.

>>46979
OpenMW version 0.46.0
I don't think I patched it when I installed it years ago, unless something came with the GOG installer. I have a .rar for Morrowind Rebirth but didn't bother to install it

Also no tweaks, I just set everything to make the water looks better. I tried to increase the view distance[1] to emulate what can be achieved with MGE but FPS dropped drastically and overall it didn't look as good as with the fog of war

The game really looks good with shadows and reflective water. Even with everything maxxed out the game launches instantly on my machine and my productivity really tanked since this last week because of that

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenMW/comments/b7p0ry/view_distance/

>>46983
How did you increase view distance? By loading exterior cells or by using the distantterrain feature? Loading exterior cells tanks performance, but just enabling DistantTerrain in the config should not decrease FPS too much.

>>46984
>>46983
Actual distant land with LODs avalible with 0.47 builds only (or no, it is in 0.46 already? Forgot compleatly), however I might be wrong. Before that yea, it was full-loading for cell and in more early versions OMW had less optimisation. Back in 0.45 I played with ~2 full cells load but there is no need for that now, of cource.

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45096 can recommend Patch for Purists for basicly absoluetly anyone, even for compleatly vanilla build, since it's don't change anything exept changing actual minor mistakes, misplaced items, typos in books, dialogues and scripts and tons of stuff like that.
And even in compleatly vanilla builds I usually install minor stuff like weapons and shields on-characters because OMW natively supports it and it's very neat so why not.

>>46984

[Camera]
field of view = 60
#viewing distance = 6666.0
viewing distance = 666666.0
small feature culling pixel size = 16.0

[Cells]
exterior cell load distance = 1

[Terrain]
distant terrain = True

It looks way better with "exterior cell load distance" set to something over 10 but it's to slow to play sadly. I'm fine with the classical Vvardenfell sfumato anyway

A-10C II came out. Got my $10 upgrade for free because I had some miles laying around (monopoly money for buying direct from the devs). Upgrade is new visuals and simulation, a helmet-mounted sight, new weapons systems and in the near future, a new radio stack that includes a much more modern and complex communications package built around the ARC-210(V) which has vastly improved network communications. Feels hype man.

>>47024
First impression is very positive. The HOTAS setup changed a bit to better represent USAF standard (the original from 2011 is a commercial version of USANG training software, but had to be stripped down in terms of fidelity for classification reasons), plus it also has to work with newer features like the helmet.

It's familiar still, it's just undoing some fairly entrenched muscle memory. This is essentially what conversion training is IRL so it isn't surprising. The new stuff is really interesting though. The HMCS is a massive advantage over the old airframe for TOO strikes or CAS because I can just look at an area, hit DMS Left Long and point the TGP to where I'm looking. It's not super easy to do accurately but it'll get you to the general area and you can do normal TGP operation to get your final targeting solution.

I can also use the HMCS for heads up SA when using SADL. I can have a wingman (human because the AI isn't that good) find a secondary threat, set it as SPI, broadcast SPI over the datalink, and then I can just look for the yellow wedding cake outside the cockpit (projected onto my visor) and hook onto it and keep it handy on my HUD while I conduct my own attacks, or even set it as SPI, mark it and return to my last target so that I can quickly set my new SPI to that secondary target. This was never hard to do in the past, but it required some head down work on the TAD while this is all done while maintaining SA.

If I sound excited, it's because I am. I still have much love for the old A-10C but damn the new one is so fucking tight.

>>47027
I'm thinking at this point how cool and how much better Elite Dangerous would be with a joystick and VR but each of those costs fucking $150 or more and I cannot afford to nor justify spending that kind of money on one game. Well, maybe that would make it two games.

>>47029
Just get a cheap stick and headtracking. Elite Dangerous would not benefit from a high end stick tbh. I only use a medium end stick because I wanted something with dual throttles and enough hats. If you don't need more than 20 buttons at your fingertips to even effectively operate the aircraft then you don't need a bigger stick like mine.

Holy shit I love this game so damn much! I just tried the Horizons DLC and landed on the uplift peak of an impact crater. I'm king of the fucking mountain. I can't even tell if this thing does visual and other scaling well or poorly but at least the planets are suitably small then intimadatingly--frighteningly even--big. Slamming out of hyperspace into a star never stops being startling yet. They're apparently releasing a DLC in 2021 where you can walk around the surface but if I can already drive why would I do that? Who's even a walker on a planet? I'd rather they made it so I can actually physically wander around a spaceport bar but whatever.

This game is great. I haven't even gotten a landing craft yet and it's freaking amazing. I feel like I could do this all fall. I just wish they had some added features to really feel like I'm out there exploring and mapping some specific frontier. Like maybe I could play golf and plant my flag there.

Holy shit this game is amazing. I'm just sitting there on my peak and looking around. I love this game so far. I can't find my slavicspacetrucker.webm so here have another space trucking clip. Jesus this game is cool. I can finally see the point behind having a multi monitor setup or VR.

So, been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars lately. It didn't turn out to be great, but I guess I was satisfied with it, that is, I got what I expected: Mordheim in 40k. There are quite a lot of differences, though.

While Mordheim had a campaign mode where you could take your own warband and lead it through the story by completing plot missions and any amount of unnecessary missions in-between them, in Necromunda you have two separate modes: a story mode, where you complete fixed missions with a fixed gang(s), and an operations mode, where you lead your own gang through a series of random missions. Frankly, I think that the story mode is a waste of time: it's nothing more than an overblown tutorial with some plot-explaining cut-scenes in it. That would actually be more or less fine, but the plot is not interesting at all, so the only reason you would want to complete a story mode is to unlock some more customizations for your warriors.

Speaking of which, the customizing is pretty cool, and it's much better than in Mordheim, where you could only select a general color scheme and some minor features. In Necromunda, you have a lot of options to make your guys to feel like Your Guys (or Your Gals, of whatever). you can select colors for your gang as a whole, then specify colors for each ganger specifically, and also face features, hairstyles, and body features (that are tied to the attributes, which is a nice touch: making your fighters tougher will turn them chubbier/stockier, making them stronger will turn them more athletic-looking, and making them agile will turn them slimmer and skinnier (there is no slider for boobs' size, unfortunately, so you can't make a gang of milenavelbas, hitomitanakas and maseratis; sorry, Ireland)) plus tons of miscellaneous thingy-dingies which serve no purpose whatsoever, but which certainly do look cool. And that is yet another reason why the operations mode is more fun than the story mode: much of the fun in Mordheim was derived from creating your own warriors, choosing their skills and equipping them appropriately. Necromunda's story doesn't allow you any of these and doesn't punish you in any way if you lose the warriors in missions (unless it's specified that the certain warrior must survive). Another disadvantage of the story mode is the uneven difficulty: you can play through a considerably tense mission only to find yourself in a next mission which is a total piece of cake; the last mission is much easier than the penultimate one, which is a total fail, IMO.

Another difference from Mordheim is that all ganger classes (Brawler, Deadeye, Heavy, Lay-Mechanic, Saboteur) are available to all gangs, thus somewhat smoothing out the gangs' quirks, for better or for worse. Also, Mordheim had a lot of useless soldiers (like Skaven Verminkin and Chaos Brethren), heroes (Sisters' Augur) and even impressives (Skaven Rat Ogre), while Necromunda so far has only Saboteur (or at least it seemed so to me: his skills are kinda lame (although spamming Homemade 'Nades can be pretty fun) and his weapons (flamethrowers, cryoguns and acid throwers) are inferior to all the other weapons both in range and in damage; waiting for Cawdor to be implemented to rectify the sadly underpowered flamethrowers?).

Yet another failure is the utterly stupid AI. I haven't seen such dumb AI for quite some time, to be honest. In Mordheim AI, while not being exactly brilliant (although generally being a dick), still managed to do sensible things most of the time. In Necromunda it just keeps surprising me with its miraculous incompetence. Here's a short (but definitely not exhaustive) list of the AI's fuck-ups I've encountered:

– getting stuck in the walls;
– getting stuck in obstacles;
– fielding units with useless equipment;
– using inappropriate skills for the situation;
– not using appropriate skills for the situation;
– using skills in harmful for itself ways (like, throwing 'nades under his own feet, thus damaging both himself and all the teammates unfortunate enough to stand nearby);
– planting traps in places never to be visited by the enemy;
– triggering traps it set up itself;
– walking right into ambushes (which quite and achievement, considering that you can always spectate all the enemy units);
– standing like an idiot doing nothing while being mowed down by my all-ranged gang (Orlocks FTW!);
– killing itself in weird ways (like picking up a barrel of chemicals which puts a DoT on you which damages you for about 15 HP each turn while having only 10).

Yesterday they rolled out a patch which should've addressed some of these issues, but the AI still stays hilariously dumb.

Another (small) peeve of mine is that there is no my favorite Waha faction to be seen anywhere: Chaos. Well, I can only hope that Corpse Grinder cults will find their way into the game, but seeing that Mordheim had only six warbands with all DLCs, and Necromunda so far has only three House gangs (Orlock, Escher and Goliath) so far, with, other three (Cawdor, Van Saar and Delaque) to be implemented, my hopes are pretty feeble.

All in all, it's not worth picking up this game yet. It desperately needs more patches and DLCs.

Boght 3m usb typeC wire so now with my gamepad connected to pc (Pad has bluetooth but I don't installed bluetooth in my pc) while tv connected to pc as second monitor, I can have this "console experience".

Do you guys think VR is worth it?

My first sub 100 game in a decade of playing. Maybe I'll download the versions accepted in leaderboards and try to get in next.

>>47137
Maybe next generation. Needs higher update frequency and resolution. Unless you have the money to spend then yes.

>>47137
There was a rental place in the next town over where you could rent a cubicle for 20 euro p/hour and play a load of steam VR games with your friends. I went 4/5 times with my friend and his wife and mine and we played VR games for 2 hours.

It was well worth it for the rental, had a great time always but you wouldn't do that at home if you owned the VR set. Anyway it's good shit, highly recommend if you've the money to burn

>>47137
If you don't give a shit about money - probably it's fun experience for some time. Otherwise - nah, very small and fragmented market to be valuable.

>>47137
I'm more interested in VR for things like artistic installations, education or research than for video games. Currently it's too expensive for both consumers and developers but hopefully it will get cheaper and open hardware projects more common

>>47185
Honestly that's partly what I'm hoping holographic displays and clear glass pane style monitor displays are for--both of which are available to consumers now--as well as for more technical and engineering related things. We also now even have rudimentary ion drives. Now we just have to understand singularities a bit better.

>>47240
Mass effect or nu-trek holographics interfaces are pile of shit, it not something usefull in real life, espessialy when it transperant monochrome flat shaded abstract figures floationg around glass panel.

All right, so at this point, I played, completed, or at least touched or seen all games in this series to a degree when I can have some overall thoughts.

2002 Original

Very awesome game that gets me hooked from start to finish. You might probably remember, I had made some posts here back when I started playing it. It was one of my first actual more modern console game, I played on my new controller so it was my entry in this side of console gaming I never seriously touched - 3d platformers/adventures. The only game like this I actually had some experience with was Sonic Adventure DX and... well, 3d Sonic games is not, let's say it not harsh, the industry standard in the genre. But still, returning to it now R&C not become overshadowed, it actually an objectively awesome game. Huge expansion on already established Insomniac experience with more traditional 3d platformers, they managed to insert more adventure, more features into it with limited shooting, more complex puzzles, and interesting exploring and still make it work. 3d platforming, gadgets, weapons, special stages really work together. Yes, special stages may be quite limited in a way - there only a couple of turret places, only a couple of Clank stages and starfighter combat levels, but I guess for the amount of mechanics they have I think it's exactly the right quantity.

Yes, there a couple actually kind of hard-ish places, especially for action-adventure-platforming novice like me - one level very water rising on the whole level and you should pass it ideally to not die since you don't have an underwater helmet at this point, races in this game may be hard for someone who not get used for arcade races with basically fixed opponents and no-mistake rule, etc. but all of these just remnants of a more older generation of console games, that was not kind for players and I don't mind it at all honestly. A huge step was on the world, style, and plot side. Completing expanding their core ideas from Spyro like really alive for a time mimic of facial animations for a cartoon-style character, the type of narrative they did huge step in actually heavy plot-based narrative and complex cutscenes. The wacky over-capitalist commercial universe where plot and characters serve as a clever satire on "commercial" society and what problems it can bring with. But nothing cringe and stupidity from time to time don't make you feel that game is retarded in some way. The main protagonists are very likable and have their personalities and relationships that evolve in the game.

Graphics and detail for 2002 are outstanding, being an early PS2 title it probably uses almost all of its power it makes awesome detailed beautiful locations, that still in their stylized view look cool, especially if you playing in modern resolution via emulator. Remembering general graphics standards for 2002 - it's really nice. The soundtrack is 10/10, I for half of the year have my top 6 tracks in a player, I do running listening to them. Overall it's a product of its time - probably one of the best products like that, about which I can talk for hours only positive things. It's one of these games that really hooked me up. It's a separate category of games from just "technically good", there are some games that I just want to explore so much, and once I finish them, they become one of my favorites. Like MM4-5 and 6, like TES Adventures Redguard. Original R&C definitely on this list.

Locked and Loaded/Going Commando (I don't know any reason, why some of the games in series have the different secondary title in North America and rest of the world)

A year in development. More or less the same engine and graphics, but a direct continuation of what you have seen before plot-wise. Same as, the continuation of ideas and concepts. Gameplay-wise it much bigger! The focus from 3d platforming slowly turned for actual action, shooting. But I can't say it's become just a shooter - the game just become bigger overall, and the combat system received even more updates. leveling system, weapon leveling system, a lot of interesting mechanics like your armor, enemy degrading armor, and robotic parts where you physically destroying mechanisms by peaces, bots actually have specific tactics. Big enemy animals charge and they can be ridden by other enemies, melee combat enemies can block, strike when you don't expect. While in the first game weapons were important, but more secondary tools, like you can't constantly just use only weapons, now they more or less your instrument to go.

Much more gadgets! Some old ones are the same, others changed. R&C2 has a full arsenal from the original game, and if you have you save from the first title, on one planet you can get it for free! (your weapons in the first game were made by other corporation, that does not operate in the galaxy you travel in the second game). The new braking system, new gravity gun, new rocket boots. For old gadgets like magnetic boots new bigger levels and uses. Remember races in the original game? Now there are more tracks with more challenges and mechanics. Remember 2 special starfighter stages? Now it's a full challenge mode with separate resource and upgrade system to your ship. Completely new stuff like arenas and their challenges and rewards, open-world locations like the big desert where you can ride mining machines and defeating giant sandbags mining materials for upgrading your ship. The game feels bigger, more complex in every aspect. From downsides can mention that some gadgets are underused. Glider mechanic was used only in some places and all except one of them was secondary. "Activator" gadget was not that much used, clank levels on the technical level become more complex with a different type of robots you can control, but on the other side puzzles and gameplay with them much more straightforward, in example "oh yea, you have robot-bridge and here right for you a gap you should pass using this robot!". But this is probably the downsides of the game being already very big and there was not much room for even more content.

The plot continues the same ideas and concepts. Yes, it, especially at the start, has a much less "atmosphere of adventuring into the unknown" I so loved in the first game, however, it's understandable - it's a direct continuation, our hero not some poor mechanic that stuck at his home planet anymore, have experience and some events pass. Interesting that this game actually inserts some elements that they will be ignored in PS3 titles onwards, making me believe that the actual reboot started not in 2016, but from "Tools of Destruction", but about this later, when I get to this set of games. It may sound that this game is worse than the first one. But no-no, I'd compare it to... Episode 4 and Episode 5 of Star Wars if analogy can be understandable. It's not exactly like that, but I too stupid right now to come up with something more precise.

COMMENT TOO LONG

Up Your Arsenal

Another year passed. This time, it was not enough. As I know some people left the team and Sony insisted on including multiplayer with the PlayStation network. This leed to somewhat weak results: the game feels much smaller. Locations are not so awesomely detailed and memorable. When 2 added a lot of stuff, making other stuff less significant this game actually started to cut things. Less level, no "adventure map" of the galaxy, just a list of planets. Game much, much more combat-focused. It's actually more on a side of an arcade 3rd person shooter already. They expanded combat from the second game into even more shooting and cut a lot of adventure-platforming mechanics. No rails, hook, and hacking tools appear only in the second half of the game. The game doesn't have starfighter levels, as well as open-world style levels 2nd game had. No glider, no races. What game have as main "special level" is war challenges which are actually just multiplayer maps and regimes put into a singleplayer campaign were you on the same map should defend an objective, capture objective, cover NPCs, etc. And honestly, I can't say the game is not fun. New controls and combats improvements are welcome - 16:9 support with progressive scan, actual free-aim shooter style controls, more weapon upgrades. Some "war combat" maps where you can drive a vehicle is actually not that bad and fun. But when you start to look at how much less this game and how much less stuff here it's become obvious that this is not an actual "number" sequel, it's more like an expansion for 2nd game or something.

The plot is a bit of a mess. It has a weaker logic structure, as well as it deviates from the narrative of the first two games (and the first spin-off) that told stories about consumerism, uncontrolled consumer society, and corporation in a bit clever way, like to what result it might end. 3 is more like "evil meme genius doing some not the most logical thing". There is a cut-room from developers in this game btw, that shows a lot of content that does not get into the game. But you may guess, since on your hub cruiser ship when you get the first time you mentioned for example, that you can upgrade your starfighter here... of course, there are no starfighter levels so you can't upgrade anything. But well, you certainly can play it, and I think you will clearly enjoy it as more of the same if you already played 1-2 and liked them as much, as I do. Ironically, this game loved by people and had a high Metacritic score, even tho devs themselves think it was a disaster in development hell.

This post concludes "original PS2 trilogy". I have not yet finished the PS2-PSP spin-offs, so next time I'll post about it I'll return to them, and maybe then go to PS3 "soft-hard" reboot. Maybe at this point, PS5 "Rift Apart" will come out already.

"What's a Euroshmup?"
Duckduckgo
"Article"
"Ah, yes, a title"
Duckduckgo
"Videos"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeEmfFdyLlM

It's terrible. Dunno about the local market of the time, but Japanese arcades are much more beautiful than this.

Take this in comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooFRvOjAXHk

I started playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and I never played the first game, anyone can give me a brief rundown of the first game and also some advice for the 2nd game?

Every fight I get into I get btfo except for those bug things. I picked the Red Prince and his class as Knight who specialises in two-handers?

>>47357
I don't remember the plot of the first game at all, but we played as Source Hunters, so I guess it was always bad or something. The second one I played with my friends and we didn't pay much attention to the plot but had a lot of fun with tactical battles. Now we have a fourth member in our little group so we may do another playthrough.

As to the advice, well, in the SP mode, recruit more party members I suppose? And then focus everyone on either physical or magic damage, spreading it out is ineffective.

>>47357
I don't think the stories of the two games are connected at all, only the setting is, at least nominally, the same

The XIII remake looks like shit.

Sad/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJU0lA-rkwA

>>47440
Looks like a Unity game

>>47440
The original game was not a masterpiece, but it was memorable enough for the adoption of a comic book original with a stylish presentation. The remake does look cheap, also much less stylish generic very low budget game, that basically lost all strenghts of the original game in exchange for a 2013 graphics instead of 2002, which may be considered as downgrade.
However, the audience in the comments does like it, and for all so-called "remakes" like that there are same types of hysteria about "an old game but better".

>>47446
>>47440

Funny, I got to play this game when it was free on a Gamestar/ComputerBild DVD back when I was still gaming. The remake indeed looks shit, the hybrid graphics are responsible for that, like the russian said it's like a current cheap game with older graphics. The comic look gets lost with the shiny effects, all that stuff about reflections, light and things like fire. Sorry I don't know the correct words anymore. It's not a comic look just a comic effect but it's not good polished game either.

>>47447
I would say it's cartoony instead of comic like.
Kinda like Borderlands.

I had high hopes because there where a lot of great remakes released in the last few years and especially in 2019/2020.

>>47442
That's completely unfair. There are a great many amazing Unity games out there.

>>47442
>>47458
There's a lot of super janky unity games out there that's why it gets that reputation. One thing that always gets me with them is they always seem to have this real shitty fisheye effect in first person unity games like The Forest.

The only first person unity game I played that doesn't have this is The Long Dark which in my opinion is a very high quality game.

Deserts of Kharak is also very high quality and was made in Unity.

The new Arcane Dimensions map is so good-looking, that I just running around it and taking screenshots.

Been playing a new game of CMO. Decided to do 'Liberation', which is the 4-day air campaign over Kuwait/Iraq during Gulf 1 condensed into 36 hours. Pretty fun, tried streaming it but now realising that it's probably not the most interesting one to do that for anyway. Like most of the Desert Storm expansion's missions, they're a bit of a turkey shoot where the difficulty comes from coordinating your packages more than from the OPFOR. Still haven't unpaused the game from the start position (ticked 1 second for start-of-game update), but I have my first hour of air operations over Kuwait ready to go. Now just got to do the same for Iraq.

>>47458
By the same logic calling books a good way of sharing information is unfair because of the large amount of hot garbage on the medium.

>>47461
Holy shit that was Unity? Wow. I was convinced it was Unreal or some kind of custom high end engine. It could've been longer maybe, but that game was pretty great. Not at the height of the real Homeworld games but still pretty cool and true to HW fantastic looking for its time of release. Due to my disc not working for being too old I had to pick up Homeworld Cataclysm renamed Homeworld Emergence because Blizzard is pieces of shit and it's nice to boot it up again like 15 years later. Cataclysm was the really underrated installment of the series that I never got why it was so seemingly abandoned. I thought it had the greatest story out of all of them, pretty much combining space opera with cosmic horror. It was truly fantastic gaming for its day. I wonder who even gets paid when you buy it on GOG.

I really wish I had access to the kind of capital to start my own business and I wish I could work with a vidya studio. This system is such a rotten fucking joke. It would work if people had access to capital rather than everyone turning into serfs for people like Bezos.

Sat down for the last 90 minutes and actually got a rough grasp of the mechanics for John Tiller's Squad Battles system. I kind of know his larger-scale mechanics (mostly regarding close order era games)but the SB system was kind of arcane. It makes a lot more sense now, and it's actually quite elegant, and makes a lot more sense once you read the designer's notes and get what it's trying to do and what it isn't. That is, somewhat realistic tactical battles in the vein of ASL but not a simulation like Combat Mission (which sees use by the British MoD as a training aid).

My main issue is that the scenarios are often very time restricted, and don't often give you the time to really pound a position and secure true superiority of fires before moving on it. Interesting challenge, I suppose.

>>47473
Guess I have to download that right now and install darkplaces

>>47500
I using quakespasm for it. At least, older versions of AD requred it.

>>47458
>>47461
I didn't mean to say Unity games ARE bad, just that they LOOK bad. They all have this weird kinda mobileshit look going, no matter how many polygons you have. I immensely enjoyed Subnautica, Kerbal Space Program, Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3, to name a few, but I would never say they look good. I can't even properly NAME what I find wrong about it... It was easier back in the day when every shooter was using Id Tech 4 and looked like wet plastic, that was at least defineable.

>>47506
Yes, I'm too don't like what I describe as "the modern cheap graphics", like what you metioned, which is common in the low/mid budget games. In addition, I can add "cheap modern digital art" for menues, portraits and cutscenes to the pool.

>>47501
It's recommended on the Moddb page, but only Darkspaces is in the Fedora repositories, hopefully it will run without troubles

>>47516
darkplaces* sorry, darskpace is a Swiss black metal band

>>47516
http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm well here is quakespasm if you need it
Darkpaces as I know was not updated since like 2014.

>>47518
I installed it through a third party repository anyway because Darkplaces didn't work with AD, so far so good. I didn't find the "nightmare" mode in this main hub though, only "chaos" (skill = 2)

>>47520
There are multiple habs, at least 2 right now, and IIRC Nightmare difficulty is hidden somewhere.

>>47521
Yes, I found the two of them. I'll stay with nightmare as I'm used to this difficulty level and play to have fun. The new missions are really beautiful, love how they still do amazing things with this engine in 2020

https://youtu.be/j6CGmS7NtaM
Really nice upscale, I think

>all these stupid hypefests over muh new grafiks muh raytrace muh efpee es

Look I've really got to ask at this point are there even any new games which remotely justify the purchase of a new graphics card? Or is this all just memery? While I do think that RT has got some very interesting applications it's still really primitive in how much power it takes to merely bounce the light once, as opposed to whatever the hell GPU bricks will be like when we can bounce it three, four, maybe five times with many more times the resolution and millions of polys.

But see here's the rub which is principally something with which I'd imagine Russia would agree, that there's just no games. Like Control and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, what the fuck even is that? I've been so turned off by triple A shitfest games I can't even imagine there being something good enough to justify blowing up to a thousand burger dollars on these things.

Is there even anything new at all coming down the pipeline by 2022 release which is good? Like anything at all?

I decided to check out the VTMB2 website first time in ages and my god is it going to look like shit
https://www.bloodlines2.com/

>preorders
>paid zeroday DLC
>weapon skins

Fuck sake. You know it really was the vidya industry that fully broke my embrace of Capitalism. Look at this dogshit and they'll then convince the alt retatards muh es jay dubyas ruinin gayming when it's been made abundantly clear to me that the real problem with VTMB2 is going to be unrestrained Capitalism. I cannot even imagine at this point how shit it's going to be once hardsuit, Paradox, and whatever that triple A ubisoft faggot gets done with it. The utter destruction of the Dead Space series is but one of many case studies in how corporate greed is ruining gaming and meanwhile GPU prices keep inflating alongside healthcare, education, and every other cost, all of which relies on usury to maintain corporate fiefdoms. It almost makes me wish we had proven cases of Socialism working and not getting assaulted by capitalist Wect the way everything from Libya to Venezuela got ruined. They couldn't even leave me in peace with my vidya.

I know it's a rant but it's also a genuine question as to what game exactly I'm even supposed to be excited for coming out in the next 18 months which could possibly justify blowing over $700 on a new GPU to run it. While they're not that old as things like Might and Magic or Wing Commander I don't think there's even any games I really play that much or have any interest in that couldn't run well on a RX 580 or 1070 or 1660 or something. The only interesting games lately are Industries of Titan, Wasteland 3, and Baldur's Gate 3 I can think of and I doubt any of them need that kind of power unless expanded VRAM and enhanced speeds gives serfdevs toiling for their corporate overlords more excuses to cut corners and release horribly optimized games which require 16gb VRAM and high speeds and 200gb installs because making it a 6gb VRAM 80gb install requires real effort that could be better profitized elsewhere by coding lootcrates and 50 custom weapon skins for $4.99 each.

Also why the fuck does my proprietary phone keep deleting files in my download folder and why the fuck can't I change the download pathing to my microsd card. I hope Google gets absolutely fucked in this antitrust lawsuit.

What graphics cards do you guys use and which two or three games have you been playing lately?

I've really gotten into Alien Isolation which absorbed my attention for once and it's pretty cool. A few things I found I could make fun of but it's pretty great so far, which I also hadn't realized the graphics isn't that advanced and that it is an old game. I just kept remembering thinking well will my GPU run it when I had an old RX 550. I don't know why but it's always the most fun to fuck with NPCs/monsters in these games and test their AI.

The AoE 1 and 2 remasters are 50% off on Humble Bundle. Cost me AU$17 for the pair of them. Pretty good deal. The AoE DE is very nostalgic, and touches it up just enough that your rose-tinted memory holds up, though the AI could use some work, it still feels very 1997. The AoE2 DE is much more developed and holds up even better than AoE1, especially with extra civs being brought into the game for more variety, and a new AI that doesn't cheat on resources but is just very efficient at the game.

I was never good at these games, mind you. They just take me back.

>>47583
Control is a Tech Demo game. It's a pretty established genre, and hardly something to decry as a new trend.

>>47595
I use a 1060. Don't play that much that taxes it in the slightest tbh, especially not recently, so that would be pretty meaningless. I guess DCS would be the most graphically demanding, and even then it's kind of ugly if you look closely at it and more RAM hungry than GPU hungry.

In the longer term, I played the Horizon port earlier in the year and enjoyed it a lot, and it was pretty demanding but I was able to run it smooth on the enhanced graphics setting. That's about it though. Been thinking of doing another Witcher 3 playthrough since I've had a weird desire to replay it recently, but that may yet pass.

>>47595

>Alien Isolation

For a 7 year old game it looks better than most new releases. I couldn't get past maybe chapter 5 or 6 because it scared me shitless, I could only play it while drunk and even then I was so stressed by it I would sober up

>What graphics cards do you guys use

I've a 3 year old 1060 6gig, it's a big brick of a thing and was 300 euro when I bought it 3 years ago, but it's robust and reliable. The only game it ever struggled with was Ryse son of Rome

>which two or three games have you been playing lately?

Total War Warhammer 2 mostly, also replaying Prey and playing Divinity Original Sin 2 for the first time

I was waiting for you to post about Alien Isolation, I think you're not posting as much as you used to anymore

>>47595
GeForce GTX 280. I know scrubs and n00bz are seething

>>47599
I still have GTX260 on the secondary PC. It was the good generation, they 2XX outlived all Radeon cards I had from the same time as 2006-2008.

>>47599

>GTX 280

My Missus PC was running an 8800 GTX with 768mb of Ram right up until about 3 months ago, that's 2 years older than even the GTX280.

It was honestly a great card and would run a lot of shit just fine. Got 14 years out of it.

>>47601
>>47608
I got this card from an old rig I bought some years ago just for the ATX case, and didn't expect it to perform better than the small GTX I had lying around. The most demanding game I play must be The Dark Mod and it's a pain to play on the bigger maps. For every older games I played it works great. I'll try to see how far I can "push" this card I try to see if it can handle some games more demanding than Quake or Half-life before spending some eurobucks on a new one. For something I basically got for free I really can't complain

>>47597
Oh THAT fuggin part. He can hear your beeper m8. Actually one of the funnest things to me honestly and what ruins the games the most is just how much time I spend checking shit out with the AI and establishing the "rules" for the game, which is utterly annihilating to immersion in any survival horror because I just can't help to test shit in the AI and going "what will this do" which 9 times out of ten involves you dying horribly, and the rest "oh I guess it doesnt do that." What I have to give that game credit for was its immersion and realism regardless of how much consoleshit "press X now" was in it, which includes but is not limited to:

>Is reading the computer a safe space and can the monster still see and eat me?

No and YES

>can the monster hear the clicker radar thingy beeping?

When he's near YES

>wait what if I reload can he hear that?

Also yes, which was the point I was pretty blown away about them trying to be realistic about that and holding your breath

But man, that fuggin med level. It got so frustrating because those retards got me killed twice by running directly into me down a hallway for no reason and then proceeding to either gun me down or only hit me enough the gunfire drew the alien right to me.

I spent a good hour and a half just whipping flares and flash bombs at them and tormenting them every way possible to watch them get eaten by the monster running around shooting in an angry panic. Fuck those people I'm glad that they're all dead.

>scary

Honestly nod really. While it does look amazing for its day observing the monster made me realize he does look a bit too videogamey, I think it might be the lighting, on top of the fact that both my own immersion breaking fault and also that game really broke the one core rule of horror pretty hard: don't show too much all at once, only imply. Kinda same for seduction as fear come to think of it. If you just the alien stomping everywhere it starts to normalize and kill the fear. After all what difference is a monster in an FPS or RPG versus a survival horror then? One has hitpoints. I think that game does it best when you can't quite see the monster or know what he's doing but can tell that it is near. I've gotten to Seegson and while spoopy and a fantastic game so far can't really say it gets to quite SOMA's level, which was pseudo intellectual reddit tier crap storywise but at least was a genuinely terrifying survival horror. Likewise Dead Space which holds the unique place of both being the scariest game I ever played and an FPS. DS got to the point where I couldn't play it nonstop at night.

I think Dying Light might also hold some promise although so far it's frankly more annoying than anything.

>>47597
Oh and also

>not posting as much

Probably. Dunno why. Most likely because cascade effect of being too tired from work to effectively focus on a game, thus leading to not posting so much. The last several games I ever tried was some zombie lemmings type thing, Zombie Night terror think it was called and that was weeks ago along with Project Highrise, followed by really genuinely enjoying Elite Dangerous and trying to beat Inquisitor Martyr but that was two weeks ago if not more and I've been so fuckin tired I mostly just come home and watch videos and shitpost very rarely.

>>47596
Been fiddling around with AoE, some extra thoughts. The game itself remains super nostalgic but I feel like the AoE2 DE menu dropped the ball. The menu from AoE DE is classy and simple. It's got no bullshit and just serves as a way to access the game features.

In contrast, the classic medieval alleyway menu of AoE2 is gone, replaced by a much uglier flat image that's cluttered with shit I don't care about, with a massive popup on the side about 'events' and shit. While the former retains the feeling of a pre internet age game (the only indication is where the game puts your username if you connect your MS account to it, which I did since I had one laying around from Halo and dunno if it's required for crossplay or what), the new AoE2 menu doesn't make the game feel like AoE2, even though in-game it does. There's something distinctly uncosy about having online 'community' stuff shoved in my face on the main menu screen. At least save it for the multiplayer section, you know?

Other than that, I'm still pretty happy with the games. AoE1 could use a little of the new content love that AoE2 got but I've heard rumours of an expansion being in the works so we'll see what happens there.

Maybe in the longer term we can get some casual EC games going in one or the other, I think it'd be fun.

>>47675

>Maybe in the longer term we can get some casual EC games going in one or the other, I think it'd be fun.

I have AOE2 (2013) Hd edition, I'd be to play skirmish sometime so long as it's against AI / co-op but I'm not great at it, but I'd give it a go
>>47613

>I've been so fuckin tired I mostly just come home and watch videos and shitpost very rarely.

feels are known, I do the same - the only games I play lately are ones I can play on autopilot or while drunk

>>47675

>preinternet age

While I do roughly know what you mean AoE directly had multiplayer on the main menu but man did I encounter some janky ass looking MP solutions to games from back then. It took me back to when a) battlenet was actually good and useable and blizzard itself was not shit though they had always been rather contrived and derivative with the sole exception of SC although even as a 13 year old I cringed fucking hard at SC:BW dialogue and plot like that "queen bitch of the universe" god that was fucking terrible and way to take a great game series and send it hurtling down the path to YOBA shit and b) back when the internet itself was not yet fairly popularized among bydlo beyond things like AOL and AIM chat (which I likewise sorta miss, IBs are close to it and bbs) and to have an actual internet gaming session meant you pretty much were guaranteed to be some kind of nerdy white kid most likely from a middleclass family. Just weird things like AT&T hookups and the expectation that you'd physically be dragging your into bigass desktop tower and big dick CRT monitor in the trunk of a car over to a friend's house to game because frankly anything but LAN parties was all but guaranteed to be shit in fact looking back on it I am absolutley fucking amazed we could actually manage to game 4v4 sessions on starcraft and AoE over the fucking phone lines. Like how? How did they even manage to do it when just downloading a simple jpeg took you a solid minute and a half? I'm guess it had to have been the most absolutely basic stripped down queries to figure out solely things like unit placement on a set of coordinates and its actions at any given time while leaving 100% the rest up to each networked machine. I mean we did have lag but the fact this even worked in real time is kind of blowing my mind right now and saddening me that we just don't have those kinds of engineers coming up with creative solutions to problems for limited hardware right now by and large and instead are going to be just pissing away system resources left and right on muh 12 core jiggahertz 16 big dick VRAM and pissing through half a terabyte on unoptimized and redundant code eventually.

Sometimes I miss the old days. Lots of games were pretty shit then too though.

>>47676
Drinking is honest to god the one thing I don't quite miss just because of the unholy union between slav and Irish ancestry I never encountered a bottle I could not finish and that scared me, also started heading to the "hospital or jail or sober up" end stage and I pretty much broke a pair of headphones a month back then while routinely passing out in front of my computer so I'd just like get 1-2 hours of actual gaming in and then accomplish nothing else. It was truly my wasted life between that and KC, the worst possible combination of bad life choices. To this day I struggle with internet speaking of which I need to unplug that router again.

The one most interesting thing to me back then was finally being confronted with the degree to which alcohol really impaired me when I first began playing XCOM2 and completely fucked my first ironman run because I'd told myself "it's literally just a couple or three beers" and utterly ruined my playthrough destroying that save file with just a few simple mistakes. I rapidly came to realize that even two beers was enough judgment impaired to fuck up my playing of XCOM2 which was a lot more significant to witness when I did shit like drink 500ml of vodka over a couple hours and tried gaming things like even XCOM EU without much trouble.

>>47683
I know it existed, I just mean that the game was static compared to the new version which is much more linked to the online content and thus more fluid. I prefer the regular structure of a static 'face' to the game.

>>47676
Missed your response. I unfortunately don't have the HD edition. I've been out of the RTS genre for over a decade at this point, so I didn't get it at the time.

This one is actually was kind of nice. After actually playing Call of Duty 3 and Wold at War Final Fronts, I expected much less. Well, with CoD3 and WaW there were two problems: CoD3 is just ultra boring by itself. It's just "Normandy! kill all germans!" without many interesting quirks and was probably the most boring WW2 call of duty game ever. Second, it was already games for the next, PS3 generation that was inserted into the older generation with heavy cuts and edits. It is actually an interest of my, weird ports for older and weaker or portable platforms, but from all that, I expected more early CoD games on consoles to be more boring and jankier. However, this one ended be actually very nice.
It is Call of Duty 2 but there nothing absolutely for the original CoD2. The new campaign, plot, models, even mechanics are a bit different (how different they can be in the cod game).
You have no regen, health bar system and health packs are back from CoD1. The whole campaign is about "the big red one" USA division. Prologue again in boring Normandy, but immediately we flashback into early times. Most of the game set in northern Africa which only time in the franchise includes french collaborationists and their weapons, and in Sicily, which includes yes, actual Italians their weapons. There are of course tank missions, including one in the last part of the campaign in 1945 winter where you "borrow" a german tank, there is the United Offensive-style plane mission where you also need to bomb stuff. Missions where you ride with an anti-air gun and need to speed shoot planes before they destroying you camp and artillery are also more fun than just "turret section".

It's weaker than CoD1-UO in my opinion, but more fun than the USA campaign in CoD2 is for sure. No regen is always a good bonus, the same as variety. The game plays smoothly, it's actual CoD2 engine, no attempts of inserting nextgen game onto the past gen. Oh and the last thing I wanted to mention, I played the Gamecube version. The Dolphin emulator is kind of better in places and allows 16:9 and enhancements more stable and easy. And in general, cross-platform Gamecube/PS2 games usually look better on Gamecube IIRC.

>>47723
Man, CoD from the days when CoD knew what the hell it was doing. There is some stupidly clever level design in the early games to capture the intensity of a scene from a war movie and make you feel small and overwhelmed without necessarily kicking you in the balls too hard.

Too bad the once-innovative series will be forever marred as the worst kind of corridor shooter. Similar feels to Halo for me tbh, a once trendsetting game that instead now chases trends. A sad end to something great.

Ernsts, what's your favourite Civilization from any strategy game? I mean in a 4x / strategy game where the different Civs have different flavours or abilities (examples below)

>Civ 5
>Endless Space2
>Endless Legend
>Surviving Mars
>Stellaris

For me it would be England in Civ 5 for their abilities and unique units, France is good too for building tall. But my long time favourite race is probably the Unfallen from Endless Space 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKHLH_e12o0

>>47782
Oooo that is a really good question and I'll have to think about that one since it's too late and have work tomorrow, but after wasting lots of todat and yesterday with virtually zero gaming except repeatey getting eaten a few times for half an hour I realize how deep a problem I have with internet. I need to unplug my router and whip it in a tree. Going outside to smoke doesn't help get into one either.

What immediately sprang to mind though while not 4x is Russia in Rise of Nations. I often played as Zerg and I absolutely loved it about Russia that I could expand my influence over their clay and quickly start russifying everything. I wish zerg creep did something.

So mechanically at least I try to play my 4x like map painters even though I don't generally play map painters. I rarely go for conquest victories and never extermination ones. I want to expand my borders and create either a coalition or assimilate every other race as possible. I cannot help it. All will be made atrocidad in the end. So I'd probably really enjoy Horatio though I haven't played them yet. Vodyanoi is great because I can imagine that better as assimilstion or something.

Truth be told some of the best 4x races are the ones where you can inserr anything you want by imagination. I don't like the Riftborn as much because they make it harder to do that.

Meklar are pretty great from MoO2. I liked MoO3 races more though especially gas giant Eoladi whatever theyre called, Imsaisis.

But come to think, it's actually probably the MoO2 Trilarians. Everything else was some fursona but those guys looked and behaved truly alien. I to this day like playing aquatic races which I don't consider big tiddy fish mommyI can't remember the name atm or cybernetic. I'm currently playing as Ralyeh on Stardrive 2.

Your favorite Allen?

>>47783

>What immediately sprang to mind though while not 4x is Russia in Rise of Nations

I should probably have said RTS counts too, since technically Stellaris and Sins of a Solar Empire are RTS. Age of Empires 2 factions should probably count too. I'd be taking it too far if I said company of heroes factions counted though because those are armies, not civs

>All will be made atrocidad in the end. So I'd probably really enjoy Horatio though I haven't played them yet

Unfallen are the epitome of this, they force peace upon their enemies then entwine their systems with their celestial vines and convert them peacefully until all comply. Horatio are a great civ too, but they rely on genetic splicing and conquering a lot more

>But come to think, it's actually probably the MoO2 Trilarians

I forgot Moo2, I never played as Trilarians in that game, I always played as a custom variant of the Elerians since they were so OP with thier telepathy also when you had a spy steal a tech you had her tell you about it in a tight leather titty suit shit was hot af

> I don't consider big tiddy fish mommy

Lumeris

>Your favorite Allen?

Yeah definitely Unfallen from Endless Space 2, but I also really like the Tomb Kings from Total War Warhammer 2

>>47782

>favourite Civilization

I like the general approach to civilizations in Dominions series, that is, mixing history, mythology and fantasy to get some pretty interesting results. Favorites are probably EA Ulm (it's fun to specialize in Earth and Construction magic and have stereotypical Norse barbarians to fight side by side with badass mechanical golems), EA Niefelheim (fukken frost giants, yeah!), EA Yomi (I like their gimmick of plunging the world into KAAAYOOOOS!), MA R'lyeh (good old Lovecraftian squidfaces with some fish-man hynbreds as support), LA Man (magic is shit, engineering is where it's at; also, those Wardens are cool as fuck). I also like the aesthetics of MA Asphodel, but I can't play pop-killers for shit.

In Stellaris I usually play custom civilizations, and so far I liked Determined Exterminator Machine Intelligence the most (all meatbags must die). As for non-Gestalt consciousness, non-corporate civics, I prefer Inward Perfection, it offers pretty good bonuses and I like playing isolationist anyway.

There are also some factions that I liked to play not because of their units or stats, but because of the enjoyment of making the historical losers into the greatest civilizations in the world, like playing Maya or Lakota in Rise of Nations and taking over Americas, or playing as Khmers in Civ4 and making them advanced space-faring nation instead of irrelevant people fucked up by a totalitarian regime that they are now.

>>47832
EA Ulm really is pretty cool, I think they were the first I played with and they became my favorite. Ulm is a nice civ, even late age Ulm is cool even if they suck.

MA Ermor is also fun even if overpowered and Pangea is ebin. EC Dominions match when?

>>47737
Well, I can't say it was really that type of the CoD you are described sadly. At least, by my classification. I think that the original Cod and the United offensive addon was kind of more old-school type. Like they had cinematographic moments, they already build up this linear-mission structure but it still, with execution of mechanics, a lot of missions and ideas was much more on a side of classic singleplayer FPS game of late90s early00s. Everybody remembers the nazi dam mission, intro to Stalingrad were you without rifle tirpiz - all that missions that plays more classically, not like auto-regen shooting range with some random hording bots around. Even mission types that was beaten to death right now in CoD like "gunner in a plane" mission was much more fresh, back when this series was new, and not repeated itself 9000 times.
The CoD2 was a big leap towards "shooting range". Regeneration, much more action oriented, repeating of known schemes and attempts at polishing existing ones make for me this game less original and less "personal". However, 2/3 of this campaighn felt actually fresh and plays well still. I mean russian winter levels, that have memorable moments and to some degree some less-rail moments like when you need to capture multiple buildings. And of cource africa campaighn. But last third, USA normandy oh my god how boring it is. Just this generic dark green normandy where all you do is attack or defend or same looking (or even retreat on absoluetly same maps in multiple missions) locations. It's so tideous, long and pointless. And as a bonus, there is a wierd last level in germany, after heroic defend of the hill that feels like an ending, but no, there is this additional mission that looks different and really good, as this medival german town, finnaly, but gameplay-wise it's pointless and feels like "just another mission from cut campaighn" or something.
And CoD3 is this last third of CoD2, but it is the WHOLE GAME. If you playing PS3 version you at least have a bit better graphics, like CoD WaW will use, but PS2 version is absoluetly the same and it's peak defenition of "boring". I don't mind it actually that much, if I had, I'd not played ALL COD WW2 GAMES EXEPT "THE FINEST HOUR" AND N-GAGE ONE (but this in progress). But eeh. And CoD2 Big Red One is somewhere in the middle of all this. I can same it more meh than the first 2 parts of CoD2, but better than the last part of CoD2 and CoD3. It have this classic HP system, but it kind of less "hardcore" than CoD1-UO. It has interesting ideas - like actual italians and french, less boring normandy, UO-like plane mission where you also dropping bombs, but it don't include this type of "personall" missions, don't feels like more classic games, it really feels like variation on 2nd game. Not a bad one,but not what I can call "good old classic original CoD".

I now started playing Final Fronts, first CoD released for consoles. I already can say a lot about it but well, I finish it first before making posts.

Just out of curiosity I tried the Gamecube version of the Jedi Outcast. Oh lol, this was kind of crap. At first, in-game cutscenes are now separate movie files, compressed into 240p and they were not even recorded with maximum original game graphics. Second, the game feels like it on minimal settings. No, not even on minimal... LODs are too short, enemies become from potato ultra-potato after 5 meters. Texture quality is minimal, fonts are compressed, I feel like audio a bit more. And well yea, playing this game with a gamepad is probably not the best experience, I not even counting things features like the ability to cut bodyparts with a lightsaber that I'm sure you can't turn on in this port.
Well, they added the famous GameCube "metal effect" for metallic doors, but I think it is out of place here, these doors meant to be more matt, than shiny. The original game also can into "shiny surfaces", but it doesn't put this effect everywhere.

>>47902
There are screenshots from the PC version for comparing. Interestingly, you can spot that on Lambda shuttle actual model is more detailed on the Gamecube version. It has more right form, more proper landing legs, and their cover, the rear turret is in 3d, but in the original game shuttle is actually a map brush, not an external 3d model. It was made as part of the map because in certain cutscenes and levels it required to interact with characters, land, and take off. But I suspect these moments in the console version instead of in-game cutscenes are just crappy 240p cinematics recorded from the original game. And the console version has no dynamic shadows to fuck them anyway. It's actually pretty neat, but man, these textures.

In general, I can say this generation of consoles, more specifically the whole period of 2001-2004 is quite a weird thing.
On PC you have a bit archaic in some therms games with more blocky animations, more old 90s ideas of view of the level, and its detailsation, but all this with much more high detailed textures, resolutions, amount of objects.
While on PS2-Gamecube there were some new fancy effects, sometimes awesome animations, especially of faces and alive characters, games like Dark alliance and original ratchet and clank feel like 2006 games, the not early 00s, especially in motion. But the overall resolution is garbage, jank in cutscenes, everything compressed to the degree like it is some mod for ultra-ultra low settings or mobile game.

>>47904
I really would not have guessed those graphics are from that era

Yes, there are a number of 2001-2003 PS2 games that look much more advanced in the way they or their elements made. Like they had no actual hardware to do a lot of textures and objects but had the custom hardware for some other stuff. But since the resolution was low (640x480 is something on PC most people forgot at times of the early 00s already) they kind of had opportunity and artistic think how to squeeze much more and kind of create a vision of what yet to come.
And playing some of these games on emulators with bigger resolutions does make them look really good. However in the case of the straight PC ports, yea, consoles were underpowered in raw power to show this, from the example above, big complex geometry no draw distance limit quake 3 engine level with sharp textures.
I'm yet to play for example in "Jak" games. They also looks promesing.

>>47939
>>47957
forgot the link to the post.

Ah, famous 16 years old videogames.

>>47985
That can't be right. I thought Doom 3 was like 12 or 10 years old or something.

>>47987
Nope, that game was from 2003 or 2004, pretty sure. I remeber being 16 at the time but looking like 14 there was no way I could get this game with a USK-18 rating even though I had recently aqcuired the power of getting a whole bunch of USK-16 games legally. Naturally, I pirated it and then was too scared to play past the first 20 minutes :D

>>47987
Nah. It's one of those games that just aged really well thanks to clever use of lighting to hide what are now dated visuals. Kind of like the original F.E.A.R being from 2005.

>>47987
Yes, it is from August 3, 2004.

Famous (almost) 23 years old games

>>47994
Yeah true that's a good point but I still
Oh wait a minute no you're right I'm just getting tricked again by the actual screenshots Russia posted. Which I guess really does prove your point because I get confused and mix up memories between which scene was amazing and which one looked godawful when I could finally get up close and see the textures in "real" light speaking of which why the godforsaken hell is using a flashlight so awful in that game. The flashlight problem alone is probably why I didn't get very far in it. I do remember being blown away by muh D3 grafiks which doesn't feel that long ago to me but then again I am a way past 30 boomer, so, there's that.

I do think that Mandalore was right all along. You can put whatever shiny reflective retarded meme tier RT plastered all over everything but at the end of the day graphics truly are a kind of secondary thing to lighting and great soundtrack and audio design which I think speaks to something rather interesting about us and how our emotional centers and specific aspects of memory and learning are more tied to sound and light than actual visual cues, and I say this as someone who's almost entirely visual. Like a lot about KOTOR or VTMB's graphics is similarly from that era and probably looks like complete cartoony garbage by now but because of that aspect of clever lighting in areas and sound design, much like with Planescape, Tides of Numenera, Fallout, and all of the other old and new classics, that coupled with the story it truly enhances the game to unforgettable heights, whereas some advance in muh grafiks becomes uttlery forgettable within a few years. Like, I have always wondered about and been puzzled by the shiny reflective-ish armor of troops in KOTOR, until it finally dawned on me the other day that this awkward totally out of place weird looking shiny armor was likely showing something off that was groundbreaking at the time, which I'm now curious exactly what it was. It's a problem I think every dev has to not give into that temptation and do what PS3 era did or some RT games do now of trying to show off the new technology but they just end up overdoing it and making it embarassing in the short term and in the longer term this really awkward thing that stands out from the rest of the game so people become puzzled why it's even like that ten years later, and if it's crap like heavy bloom or motion blur just gets disabled or tuned down anyway.

But like I was saying Mandalore was very much right about clever lighting although I think that the curious thing here is the fact that because maybe it tricked my mind or had similar dark spaceship with monsters settis I'd mentally considered Doom3 to have came out in 2008 alongside Dead Space, which similarly did things with lighting and looked great but there were a few scenes like the hab with plants part or the grating which I at first thought was bugs until I realized that the awful texture work I screencaped was in fact that era's graphical limitations exposed it did not help that it was specifically made for console tier hardware and then awkwardly backported onto PC, thankfully. Maybe there was just enough more openly lit areas in DS whereas D3 tried really hard to hide its shame, which it did very effectively by making so hard to use the damn flashlight and fire.

Oh and you know what speaking of graphics which reminds me that while Elite Dangerous is apparently a much older game that still looks swell but could use a minor graphical uplift, I do think that the future of gaming is not in fact muh graphics but rather much better integrated AI in things like procedural generation to make it look organic while providing much fuller scalability between the very high and very small fields of play, which some games like Mass Effect tried to do much earlier on but were extremely limited by its technical limitations at that time and making landing on planets and driving around eventually a repetitive chore, and which up to now you can even see some efforts being made to provide that galaxy wide battlemap right down to individual star systems and finally landing on planets and walking around or walking around space bars much like Elite Dangerous has been implementing "I wonder when that joke will get old" he says in 2018 about Star Citizen being a released game that poor guy sunk his heart and dreams into a game that's perpetually going to be outdated graphically and otherwise upon release and which you could've actually seen in not just 2000s era games but even much older 1990s games like Star Wars Rebellion but which got to the point of being so old that storage limitations could actually be a problem, and the older you get the more tricks you'll need to get around this.

In KOTOR's example this was pretty much just getting to pick and choose which area to go to without having to unlock due to level progression and just using the one ship map to psychologically simulate that process of travel while just getting ready to go through loading other maps, much like Mass Effect and Dead Space would 5 years later use elevators to mask loading screens, which is what a game even as new as Elite dangerous does with warp jump fast travel albeit in a way that theoretically if you just ran that game for a solid year straight you could "move" from one area to the next, which is what I do appreciate because even if it's loading screens it's so superbly done that it becomes difficult to tell the difference between a load screen for another area and real scale, with maybe minor exceptions here and there mostly betrayed due to things like occasional texture pop in and probably performance hickups on older rigs which afaik was one chief complaint about some games like Starpoint Gemini.

A great many games have traditionally just used different map areas being loaded into the game to simulate scale however as the raw computing power increases and hopefully keeps increasing this becomes much less and less a problem of technical limitations and more an issue of organic limitations like time, budgets, and manpower just to code everything, and thus a physical limit on scale only exists now because of how much man hours devs can sink into that game. A really good example of this is procedural generation in XCOM2 and Warhammer Total War games, which still use old school map loading but in WHTW 2 you can scroll to an individual level and out to full map, though still with loading screens, but eventually it's going to get to the point where like old crpgs with object permanence achieved by saving location it becomes less simulated until not needing those area loads at all and being able to simulate in real time where they are and are moving which in Fallout NV would be allowing NPCs to actually loot things and then tracking where in the map that object is with each character and its status.

Of course like FNV a certain amount of that cannot be individually done by programmers which is exactly where the real butter lays with memevidia, which is not raytracing but rather all their AI work. This is because we can see how much procedural generation is severely limited in games like Elite Dangerous where you simply cannot individually code each character, questline, and story, to where it all just looks the same obvious mess after awhile. AI can fix that however by getting deepfake better at writing individual questlines and "realistic" characters, which given enough raw compute power can make individuals look and feel unique to where like in this world you see a person who looks just like someone you know, just almost, but who isn't.

I think that this will be important because while some games were way ahead of their time they simply lacked technical advances to fully pull off and much like good use of lighting had to rely on trickery, but I do think that the way things are going eventually every RPG and 4x game can get done at realistic and fully explorable scales.

>>47903
So many of those old star wars games were filled with SOUL. I'm not even a fan of star wars and could barely keep awake during the shitty movies but the games were really top notch

>>48069

>I think that this will be important because while some games were way ahead of their time they simply lacked technical advances to fully pull off and much like good use of lighting had to rely on trickery, but I do think that the way things are going eventually every RPG and 4x game can get done at realistic and fully explorable scales.

I dunno man, there's quite a few old games out there that have levels of detail beyond anything that has come out in decades. Like this Splinter Cell webm, I've never seen anything like that before

>>48071
LucasArts really was just one of those defining studios in the 90s. Not to harp on that dead horse but it really is the gaming industry that made me profoundly anti-Capitalist more than anything, probably partly because I consider art as sacred and these were some real talented people that got shafted and now because what matters is not being Inspired or authorship but simply "IPs" that are all owned by corporations we get these total abortions. So many people actually got into Star Wars because of the games themselves and LucasArts wasn't just about the usual George Lucas trying to squeeze out every cent (people like to forget how much of a greedy hack he was just because Disney was infinitely worse) but independent (not always) people doing cool new things, and playing things Jedi Outcast really reminds me all that we lost. I'll never stop bitching about jumping or climbing a ladder being disabled or a QTE. And even though they were made for children they didn't treat you like one, and because no internet for most people you actually had to solve the puzzles yourselves. Just cool things like walking into people with a lightsaber and it causing environmental effects. It's really more lack of advance, laziness, greed, stupidity these days.

Or maybe the people are just dumber, or a chicken and egg thing. I forget which game it was, maybe Dishonored? Where the guard tells you you can't go upstairs, and so none of the playtesters could progress simply because it never occurred to them to try it anyway. I'm positive those had to be Anglos or Americans which ties into my outright hatred of compulsory public schooling that I partly blame but maybe it is also partly because the games are such schlock that they're so used to shit like that where the games trained them they couldn't. I mean just stupid shit like that new Gothic game, where you have to find a sword, and there's a sword there, but the guy tells you you can't take it so you physically can't, and then if you beat someone to death who had a sword there's no sword in his inventory, which is another plague upon so many games (including The Ark something or other where everyone shooting at you has a couple bullets and no gun). I think it's probably an amalgamation of different things though causing everything to be so scripted and handholdy there's no incentive or possibility to explore or test anything. Almost like we are ruled by oligarchs who deliberately make people a moronic homogenous uncurious mass because that's more profitable.

I wonder what happened to all those Lucas Arts guys. It's just a depressing realization that things like the original Anonymous concept are total bullshit because authorship and leadership matters in fact it pretty overrides everything else.

But anyway something like that Splinter Cell I think is really just indicative of early gaming where simply seeing your reflection or a chair or bottle that can be broken was really more of an interesting gimmick or parlor trick. Like how if you start splashing around a fountain in FEAR 2 the teammate directly addresses it and asks if you have something better to do. What I really mean is higher levels of scale and interaction like we had and came to expect of things like early RPGs and openworld games. I've seen a lot of different attempts at it, like Warshift allowing you to pilot an individual vehicle or switch out to strategic view in real time, or that Russian game Star Rangers 2 I think it was called.

>>48068
The Doom3's flashlight mechanics are cool. This game get a lot of shit on it because it is not a colorfull-bright-random circlestrafing around caricature demons but evolution of the Quake 2 and some half life ideas into a more tension claustrophobic experience. And this is was only attemt to make doom game serious and visually grounded. I lot of it's ideas like designs of the machinegun and marine armor still looks belivable and reasonable. With EAX sound also it is really great experience as corridor shooter.

And yes, 90% of modern post-doom3 graphics is lights, normalmaps, PBR and other effects.

>>48071
Star wars-es are different. The Expanded universe on which these old games was based on grow big from the not really mainstream comic and the set of tabletop games, thus, being not some super calculated by professional director stuff but more experience for assburgers. Or at least teenagers with a high assburger level.

>>48081
LucasArts already started to shrink in early 00s. Jedi outcast was mainly done by Raven only with lucasarts consultation. I don't remember if lucasarts did any game by themselfs after "Indiana johnes and infernal machine" and cancelation of their adventure game projects like sequels and action game of FullThrottle. Lucasarts had a lot sub-teams and quite a number of people left company even before, in the cource of the 90s, like the creator of Monkey Island. You may find interviews with some of lucasarts/lucasfilm games people from it on RMC channel in Tea Break section
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTE7MGINg5UQSW3CslDW2YWsFgcqUukog
But probably name of like David Fox for example will not tell you anything but still.

Now this is THE SOUND
EAX 4.0 at full power baby

I feel like I accidentally occupied the Videogames thread. Ooops. Sorry.

>>48071
i always think about all those little details in Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory. It's packed with them. It's as immersive as it can be. Fuck I'll get it and install it now. I remember the hardest difficulty is very frustrating but it's one of the best stealth game I ever played.

>>48147
Not really but eh this whole thread is generally just basically me and you and sometimes Australia all talking out loud about our autistic interests with usually not very much overlap sadly, which thus leads to not having much to say. Like I've never had any console games as a kid and probably even if I did I'm not sure I would've played Ratchet and Clank, meanwhile people get really nostalgic about C&C games virtually all of which I thought were bad as a kid with the sole exception of Dune 2000 for some reason. Probably partly because there was zero asymmetry among many other reasons. I just didn't ever like Westwood games much, and a lot of the rest both you and straya say just often seems so niche I can't comment much on it.

I've also really not been playing videogames too much lately between paying attention to all the drama and happenings around me which could include hardware releases, election, pandemic, etc and being too damn tired to barely even shitpost anymore sometimes.

>>48169
Lol I never had a console at all and never played them. I spent my childhood into PC 100%. I bought my gamepad like this year and all I say is my experience as adult.

>>48148
I never played any Splinter Cell or Tom Clancy games
>>48169

>I thought were bad as a kid with the sole exception of Dune 2000 for some reason. Probably partly because there was zero asymmetry among many other reasons

There was a lot of differences, nod had flame tanks and stealth tanks, GDI had grenadiers and Mammoths. The factions played differently in all the C&C games.

Well fleshed out factions is one of my favourite things in RTS games especially Coh and Coh2, playing as Brits, Yanks, Wehr or Soviets is all very different.
>>48170
I had a Snes but that's the only console I ever owned. I was building PCs from the shit rummaged out of the skips behind PC shops or stolen from Dell by the time I was 14

Anyone here play Starcraft 2?

I recently got back into it and the scene seems more lively than it was a few years ago. I forgot how addictive and how difficult this game is. You have so much to focus on at all times, but it makes winning even more satisfying. I play Terran, diamond 2. Currently perfecting a TvP timing attack with mass marauder/cyclone and double liberator harass at the same time.

>>48201
Yeah but I've never actually played multiplayer tbqh. Actually come to think of it something went wrong with my HotS pirate copy and couldn't get it to work on my new machine. I didn't even give a shit about the long void or whatever the fuck it's called because I got so completely asshurt at Blizzard demanding my govt ID just to play the fucking singleplayer I never forgave them for it. I'm still slightly mad 8 years later and never even bothered utilizing battlenet. I've long since lost track of that CD and I adamantly refuse to pay for any legitimate copy, offer any real credentials, or deal with Activision at all. It's a shame because in spite of certain cringey storyboarding decisions and other things that annoyed me WoL and HotS weren't bad games at all, it's just that Activision-Blizzard is permanently on my shitlist alongside EA. I guess it annoyed me more than some probably because I liked being a zerg player and while mechanically it had some nice things even just the look of growing buildings and new sunken colonies annoyed me. Man, I'm just remembering how retarded that talking "ancestral zerg" bit mixed with a dumb romance story was jn detracting from an otherwise good game.

The other thing too is they really geared it way too much towards pro players on multiplayer. I remember some highly entertaining series I used to watch years ago though, willcheesework or whencheesewins or something to that effect, maximusblack and, uh other guy I always imagined as a Canadian neckbeard. Man that was five freaking years ago wasnt it? Whencheesefails?

Anyway the one RTS I also liked in multi sometimes was Rise of Nations but it always seemed destined to fail because the moment someone was losing too badly he'd just decide to take everyone out with him and typically every MP ended up in a nuclear exchange gameover. I do wish SC and SC2 made nukes properly the way RoN did than basically being regular 500 lb bombs.

Oh, just look at these graphics! This amount of detail (or, should I say, lack of the over-detail), color palette, animations and sound, landscape. This is the beauty, my favorite kind of looks and feels. Games like that, combined with the late 90s standards of game design are so inviting for me, I, just looking at games like this so want to play them, they feel like a mystery, unlimited wonder I should discover for myself. And even if these games janky or meh, sometimes it is better for me - like they can present something I can't expect. And back then when even games was... not best quality by modern standards, unfinished or crappy there most often still was put a lot of effort, and I like this sort of adventure. Discover quality work and enjoyable adventure behind some maybe unpolished things I now mostly even enjoying.

>>48243
Man I forgot what great artistry really went into producing such sharp, clean, crisp, immersive sounds like back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Why the hell is it that I can't even think of anything off the top of my head that actually sounds good today except Darkwood? Like every game I imagine to be forgettable, and filled with either borderline cartoony pewpews and clearly electronically synthesized washed out sounds, or overly engineered equally washed out AuthenticTM sounds. Like even KOTOR which was about the end of that era had some great subtle wind across the canyons sound samples in addition to that great over the top but still good soundtrack. Although I suppose the one game I was thinking of for "overly engineered flat sounding AuthenticTM" bullshit to be fair did have a really good use of voice sound, which was Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice, which while I get that you could argue it makes the voices pop out more I disagree. If you've ever had any really weird audio distortion or hallucination it's partly unnerving specifically because it is just out of range of your hearing, or because it bleeds into background noise and so on some level you literally can't tell sometimes if they're human voices on the wind or just the wind itself. Although I guess Senua did it well too.

The only real game I sadly can think of which actually mastered sound lately is Darkwood. It's not just the soundscapes themselves but also the samples. Although I suppose it takes a certain knack for knowing where your limitations lay and what you want emphasized, so like in Planescape the effects themselves sounded horribly cartoony but because of that overpowering well engineered late 90s soundtrack it worked beautifully and hauntingly. VTMB and Fallout were basically the same way, although a couple of Fallout samples worked. I think that Fallout Tactics had some of both worlds, with more often than not good sound effects but an also decent soundtrack. I'm guessing that now we've got such high fidelity it's fallen by the wayside whereas back in that specific soundcard era you really only had what you can work with which was lower poly or sprite animations compensated by evocative soundscapes, whereas it seems everyone just wants to go muh grafiks these days well no not really everyone was probably even more about emphasizing muh grafiks back then.

There are still a few samples I hate hearing and I can't fucking stand it how many forms of media use it from movies to vidya with one of these being the same stupid cartoonishly bad guy screaming. There's actually a couple of generic royalty free "man_yells.wav" type things that annoy me but I mean one in particular, alongside a few "generic_machine_gun.flac" things I dislike, which in retrospect only makes it all the more interesting how much unique individual effort each studio seemingly put into creating great sound effects and audio experiences.

Hey is there any kind of city sim game where some kind of an epidemic or huge disease outbreak is a random event? I know a lot of them like having some kind of retarded event like volcanoes and meteor impacts but how many have got pandemic disasters? Or even any strategy game?

>>48290
Banished, it happens usually after you allow nomads into your town. In pic 1 you can see I have 550 sick out of about 1500 total population and only 5 physicians, so that's gonna be a bloodbath.

In pic 2 you can see my graveyard is full

Found out that I was 2 years behind on patches for Desert War (the game I streamed the other day). Always check the forums, sometimes even official patches don't get put on the game page because reasons. Just played a 24 turn scenario from the new patch which is about the landing at Salerno, so the game has expanded a tiny bit into the Italian theatre and not just North Africa. Turns out that the devs are also working on a new game that uses the same engine and mechanics for Stalingrad. Dunno if I'll get that one though. Much as I like this game, it is highly flawed.

With the success of my first 'wargame chats' stream, I will soon be in a position to create a new breed of grogs on EC to PBEM with
t. Ernst, evil genius

Sad news project leader of Horn of the Abyss, that big steadaloune fan addon for heroes 3 which become default for multiplayer and must-play campaihn tragically died. Work on the next addon-campaign, on which this guy also spent his alst 3 years of life, will continue tho. I hope they will finish it. Looking at one of the last promos of one of Kampaign screens with Kastore, it will be on the Jadame, continent north from Antagarich, Regna archepilago and north-east from Enroth.
https://youtu.be/paYKKlAO0ck

>>48245
I think that there are too many different sounds in the modern games, so they are more forgettable, you can't remember or distinguish a lot of them if there hundreds of different sounds constantly. On other hand, probably everybody will recognise like every Warcraft 2, Half-Life or Doom sound lol.
And add to that how much awesome was EAX when it was new, this THREE DIMENTIONAL SOUND and Echo.
However, from modern games something a bit similar I may remember from HelBlade about voices in girl's head.

https://youtu.be/EjsGdiR_qCA
Trailer for the first release of the fan opensource engine port of the Driver 2. Instructions on github, if you wnat to play this game on PC now. It is beta, but looks promising. I am happy that PC1 games starting to have opensource ports, like not long ago Blazing Dragons was added to ScummVM.

Binge-played Splinter Cell 3 to completion. It's still a great stealth game after all those years, in fact it's one of the most technical stealth game I played. The AI won't let you much room to fuck around in expert mode. It's still a very beautiful game for its age and most of the setting in which the missions take place are memorable.

That say, it's plagued in late game by gameplay sequences so fucking unfair and tedious I can't believe it got past the tests and got shipped into production. Tanks spotting you in pitch darkness I can understand for realism purpose, but they also choose to make that the AIs into battle against each other won't die in certain specific sequences, during which it's nearly impossible to guess if we got spotted. But the worst is this sequence where you have to defuse bombs in very little time. With some elite troops with night vision popping in between each set. With unskippable cutscenes, during which said soldiers are still looking for you. And with the bomb timer fully lighting you each time it clocks.. So like Dishonored, I end up finishing the game at 100% safe for one mission, same as more than 10 years ago

Playing as The Empire, 3 Skaven armies ambushed me but because the map was so big they came at me one at a time, by the time I'd fought off the initial ambush and saved my artillery, then fought off the 2nd wave, the third wave didn't even make it to my lines once the rocket batteries got a solution on them.

I have an earlier battle where I had 1200 troops vs 5,000 skaven, 60 survivors but I won

>>48388
I wish that was available on GOG. Which DLCs are actually worth it? I don't really care about playing Empire or some elven shit as much. Is TW 1 worth it or I should just get TW2?

>>48395

>Which DLCs are actually worth it?

They are bad for DLC bullshit, not as bad as paradox but also not far off it. If you want to play the grand campaign (called Mortal Empires) in TW2 you have to own both games and each is still at the full asking price of 60 euro.

Also all the dlc from the first game carries over to the 2nd game, so if you want to play as Norsca in Wh2 you need to own that DLC for Wh1 etc.

The good news is there's a lot of free DLC and it's very good for both games, mostly legendary lords and factions.

>I don't really care about playing Empire or some elven shit as much

Who were you planning on playing as?

>Which DLCs are actually worth it?

to answer this:
Warhammer 1

>The King and the Warlord

Warhammer 2

>The Prophet and the Warlock
>Tomb Kings

You could play it just fine with nothing but Free-DLC, but if you played as Skaven or High Elves you'd be quite neutered without DLC, and as Lizardmen you'd be missing a few good units without their DLC

I got most of it in various sales, but I've gotten over 1,000 hours out of the game so it was worth it, a fiver here or a tenner there.

You could always just pirate it though

>>48401
Probably something vampiric/undead or chaos related at least at first idgaf what mandalore says. I've just always hated certain things about the fantasy genre in particular and always loathed humans in them. Elves it depends though oddly I find them more aggravating in Warhammer. I'm not too sure though because I know a lot less about WH Fantasy than 40k. Think it's pizza time. Maybe play some Martyr or start a 40k Gladius campaign. I've been trying not to shitpost or waste time online too much ffs I only opened my browser to find a pizza menu

>>48405

>Probably something vampiric/undead or chaos related at least at first

So either

>tomb kings
>vampire coast
>vampire counts
>chaos
>norsca

Tomb kings are great but they're the most expensive DLC. Vamp Coast are also good fun but also an expensive DLC.

Chaos isn't fun at all and Vamp Counts isn't great because they're a Wh1 race that hasn't got many updated for Wh2

>idgaf what mandalore says

What does generic youtube celebrity say?

>and always loathed humans in them. Elves it depends though oddly I find them more aggravating in Warhammer

There's 3 factions of humans and 3 factions of elves

>I know a lot less about WH Fantasy than 40k

I knew nothing either until I played TW Warhammer and Vermintide but it's grown on me, which I didn't think it would being fantasy and mostly a rip off of tolkein

Decided to try Halo 4 since it came out against my better judgment. First mission had me questioning the decision. Next one confirmed that the game was a dumpster fire. Uninstalling as I type this.

I've got several problems with it, but they amount to the fact that the game just doesn't feel like Halo. It takes itself too seriously in every respect (game feels slowed down and 'heavier', and the presentation has a lot less camp and comic relief). It's also not innovative. When it did setpieces, they were just scripted things with a correct input. Compare this to setpieces like say the dual scarab fight in Halo 3 where you are presented a 'holy shit' scenario and then given a bunch of toys to solve it with, go wild. The environments are also oversized, feeling barren and lifeless, especially due to enemies being enemies and not really having any personality. They've still got the slightly different tactics but they feel less different and Elites just acted like shielded grunts with bigger hitboxes.

I wasn't expecting much, and I was still let down. That's pretty hard to do for me, I think it's probably the fact that the game takes a big steaming dump on a series that I love.

I'm getting better at this!
Well, I still suck with a bomber lol.
Re-installing games on a Windows 10 I did even more fixes. Now 1998 TIE Fighter as perfect as it could get, the only flaws remained here are some XvT fonts and music not as dynamic as it was in DOS original. With 1998 X-wing... well, you can't fix new meh menus and fully fix music and return cut parts of cinematics and little features, but otherwise it also fine if you replace at least some music with original tracks which is possible.

Also, NO LEGALIZE in the Empire at my watch at the customs!

>>48416
That game looks awesome

>>48437
Yea, I also love their look. And they sound too lol. And they are a lot of fun to play!

>>48438
the musoc is not that great imo but all the sound effects are just right 10/10

>>48480
I love the soundtrack of the TF, tho there is a problem that you can't have dynamic in-combat music in the 1998 version, this is a problem, yea.

Just finished Ion Fury. Took me something around 12 hours because after clearing all enemies I went secret hunting.

All in all it was a fun game, felt oldschool enough without being too retrowanking. The last boss was tedious, as it was just wave after wave of enemies with a boring boss mechanic.
Until then, I had fun. The guns felt good, difficulty was ok, I also didn't mind Shelly's one-liners. Although the Clusterpuck saw very little use because bowling bombs were just better in about every single way.
And it's amazing what they managed to get out of the Build engine.

>>48519
This is based on eDuke32 port, not original build.

>>48524
Huh, didn't know that.

Star Citizen is free to play until Dec 2. Caveat: It's a bug-ridden project in alpha with unstable servers. Gameplay is shallow, to the point that it's little more than a glorified tech demo.

But, it's the most beautiful tech demo I've ever seen.

There's three planets with one huge city each, twelve moons with unique environments, and two inhabited asteroid bases. There are ~50 unique ships playable right now, with over 100 including variants. You can fly most of them for free during the free-to-play event, and there's a huge expo hall where you can look at and go inside a bunch of ships gathered in one spot.

It's technically impressive. You can get in your ship on a planet, fly out of the hangar while looking out over a Blade Runner-esque city, see another player through their cockpit glass while they're flying past you down to the spaceport, fly up out of the planet's atmosphere, Alcubierre-drive to a planetary system on the other side of the star, land on one of that planet's moons, get out of your ship (or drive a rover out of it, if your ship is big enough to fit one), and go clear pirates out of an underground bunker. The closest I've seen a game come to that is Mass Effect 1, but this is entirely seamless and on multiplayer servers.

It's woefully little considering that this project has been in development for 8 years, but considering that the present path of development follows a near-complete reset in 2016, it's decent enough progress. Definitely worth checking out, considering it's only ~50gb download for a gameworld with this size and fidelity.

>>48519

>felt oldschool enough without being too retrowanking

I think it is quite opposite, it is actually being much closer to the actual "retro" that a lot of indie games. Just on modern ports and some sector limits removed and 2-4x scale resolution for certain things.

Also MAXIMUM GRAPHIXXX

Former Bernd here, i see some of you play MTGA. Any one of you interested in playing some matches occasionally?
I mostly play janky decks, but if you want to test meta decks I'm up for that too (standard though, my collection lacks many cards from kaladesh and amonkhet). For historic i exclusively play jankdecks.

>>48543
I don't think I'll ever touch this game no matter how great it looks after the years and years of scamming they've done to get to this point. It feels completely tainted to me. Even if they release the most brilliant game ever I don't think I'd want any part of it.

Anyway, I'm too old to be playing multiplayer games that require a lot of time investment anymore, the odd game of world of tanks or company of heroes 2 or left 4 dead 2 is about the extent of what I want in an online game now

>>48931
it looks so good

>>48936
Is that the thing that asks $20 for virtual decks on steam (and is never on sale) or some free to play online thing?

>>48939
free to play online thing, you can download it on the wotc mtg website

You can play for free and can probably build one meta dick in a single format after playing for a month, but getting a huge collection to play whatever you want takes money or playing since launch

>>48936
Sure, hit me up: 2feL#90508
I played it a bit in beta and then picked it up again couple of months ago. Been grinding ladder with some Ugin decks lately but down to try some jank too

>>48944
You're not one of those Temur ramp players are you?

I'll add you tomorrow

>>48943
Oh hey I think I found what you mean just scrolling free games on my Epic launcher.
https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/mtg-arena/home
Yeah probably this is what you guys mean and
ah hell you probably can't use a Golgari deck with this thing can you. Oh well whatever I spent so much time building and testing out decks it shouldn't be an issue but I'm a bit rusty (I practically stopped buying cards around the gold cards introduced and stopped playing many years after that so there's a fuckton of new rules and old rules with new names I'll have to learn). Like I'm only dimly aware of how Planeswalker cards work. I played most heavily with Urza's cycle cards honestly.

>>48947

>You're not one of those Temur ramp players are you?

Nah, I've been playing the Mono Black Ugin list & the Dimir Yorion one: https://mtgazone.com/dimir-yorion-standard-deck-guide/
Make of that what you will haha

>>48953
Make sure to redeem all the pack codes so you at least have a few more cards than just the starter decks to play around with: https://mtgazone.com/mtg-arena-codes/

Gotta brag about my first draft this month lol, pretty decent Landfall/Wizards deck, with a bunch of synergies I didn't even realize when drafting
Second game I lost was against some insane deck with at least 4 Mill Crabs and a Roost of Drakes, though even that one was pretty close, he just managed to mill all my green mana

>>48962
How many of you guys do this and get together for games? I know we had some server for CS, Minecraft, and a couple other things.

Oh holy fucking shit Wojtek is real?? He's a real bear??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_(bear)
I just wanted to find out the meaning of his name is all because after trying the Iron Harvest demo the Polonia campaign had a girl with her pet brown bear and called it "Wojtek" and I was just wondering if there was some meaning to the name is all. I guess there really was. Speaking of that while it so far pretty much just feels like a Company of Heroes game so far it's definitely got massive charm. It's fully voice acted in their own native languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5legIK0434
Obviously every dumb NT on YT has to leave English so fuck those streamers. Would recommend leaving language localization off.

Was weird animals kind of common in the war or something? I know Russians and Germans looked into mine detection, spycraft,and animal weaponization in the war.

Here is Polish soldier bear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twr38iHXYVw

>>48962
Nice. I'd like to play some draft, but I already have all zendikar cards and before I do player drafts in Kaldesh I'd like to make some cheaper bot drafts to get to know which cards to draft, or I will just waste all my gold. I stopped being angry at wizards for how and when they host certain events and drafts, they just do it in a way that generates the most money for them, so I know what to expect.

In zendikar I mostly went 7-x with mardu/boros/orzhov decks

>>48964
Not sure if anyone yet got together for games yet.

If you like to just play creature after creature and hit the opponents face, build gruul or monored. They are generally the easiest decks to play and don't cost that many wild cards (gruul is more expensive to build than monored, but gruul uses a lot of cards monored uses)

If you like control decks, removing opponents creatures, not playing many creatures of your own, there's dimir control and esper control, I prefer esper, because it does the same as dimir, but plays less counterspells, if any and plays doom foretold, which is a fun card. Dimir control is more straightforward: counter spells and remove creatures from the field.

Temur ramp, basically a spin the wheel deck. You try to get to 7 mana to cast a big spell that, if it resolves, puts up to 5 permanent cards into play. If that doesn't work and your opponent still didn't concede, you hope to draw Ugin the spirit dragon to exile the whole board. Really easy to play, but your games are mostly determined by luck.

>>48992
that's for standard, there's also the historic format on mtg:a, but that's too expensive to get into

>>48992
I have been having trouble finding any kind of control magics. I miss my IRL blue deck. I used to steal everything that wasn't bolted down even basic lands and global enchantments just for the fuck of it. I don't understand how wildcards work or how to try and find whatever card you want or is this just draft format within a narrow scope?

>>49041
In standard there's no mono blue, in historic, there is. It's quite cheap to build since 90% of the cards are common and uncommon. It's not a meta deck anymore though and it's not a control deck, but a tempo deck (small creatures, bounce/counter opponents spells, draw cards).

If you want to steal your opponents stuff, you also have to play historic, in standard there's only one blue creature steal spell that synergizes with mill decks, "lullmage's domination". The most busted stealing card that was in the format, that could steal lands (and everything else), is banned though (agent of treachery).

Wildcards are awarded with every pack, every 6 packs you get a rare wildcard, every 30 cards you get a mythic wildcard. Every rare in a pack can also be a rare wildcard, every mythic can be a mythic wildcard (I don't know what the chances are, maybe 2-4%). If you want look at all cards available, either look at a decklist or go to the "collection" in the deck menu. Then set the filters to what you want displayed: you can sort by format, by set, by cards collected and cards not collected. Check collected and not collected and standard, you will see all cards available in standard.

To build a collection, you usually want to play drafts instead of buying packs, because that's potentially more value for your gold. Quick drafts are the cheapest and easiest if you are not familiar with the set, you have got all the time you want to read the cards, there are no other players drafting from the packs with you, just bots.

Also these FNM events are good to get your hands on some rares for free, it's not very competetive, usually you get a deck to play in it, like in todays event. If you don't get a deck, you can just use your free cards, you will lose a lot if it's standard or historic, but there's also other people who have no cards and play the event.

Playing some comfy mudrunner again, it's nice and you can play it for 10 minutes or play it for an hour and it's just comfy

>>49152
I've had a splitting headache for three hours and projectile vomitted twice and only am now starting to feel okay again and it'll be getting dark out soon. What a waste of a day off.

How come Mudrunner seems to be so much more graphically intensive? I'm pretty sure that's the second worst running game I now own mostly due to it being free on the Epic launcher I only even have because I got free software bundled with a part with the only worst running one being Metro 2033 Redux that gives me like 30fps on ultra, that I'm pretty sure is some refresh with Exodus graphics for which I didn't ask.

It seems like the kind of game you could really have fun with after a sixpack or weed if you did those things and is kinda fun in a sense but on the other I find myself not enjoying it because it reminds me of my childhood way too much, both visually and mechanically.

>>49155
What is wrong with you?

>How come Mudrunner seems to be so much more graphically intensive? I'm pretty sure that's the second worst running game I now own

It's one of the easiest running games for me, loads in about 5 seconds and never pushed my GPU above 50 celsius

Meanwhile Warhammer 2 made my boy hit 68c yesterday.

>It seems like the kind of game you could really have fun with after a sixpack or weed

Yeah I tend to play it while either stressed or drunk, I even played it with friends a few times where 3 of us would do a map together in convoy

Big Matrix stream the other day. Biggest bit for me, was this interview, particularly the info about War in the East 2. That said, Joel Billings founded SSI and talks a bit about computer wargaming history, which may be of interest to Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71hIWT4N6aI

But for non-wargamers, Distant Worlds 2 is going into beta in January, and is confirmed as a 2021 release. Shadow Empire also came out on Steam, if you have no interest in going standalone from Slitherine (pretty sure you get the steam key with standalone anyway but your decision). If you don't know what Shadow Empire is, here's a review. In short it's a strange hybrid of wargame and 4x. Not my cup of tea, but may interest someone here.
https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/shadow-empire/