Been playing Turbo Overdrive this weekend, as there's a demo on Steam, and that was enough to get me to plonk down the cash for the full thing. It's an early-access Boomer shooter, that plays like greased lightning, and has fantastic movement options.
It's a lot like Ion Fury, but if that game were rendered in the Quake engine instead of Build. Lots of cyberpunk neon, and interestingly, enemy designs that remind me of Post Void, what with TVs for heads and other oddities.
Some absolutely fantastic guns too, including a double-barrel shotgun that has an alt-fire that launches two homing sticky grenades.
But it has also helped crystallise an oddity of my gaming taste these days for me.
Straight-forward FPS games with little room for creative expression on behalf of the player beyond clever gunplay have their place, but they don't flip the switches that something with more systems for interaction does for me.
Procedurally generated levels can help (which Turbo Overdrive doesn't have BTW), but in general, I prefer a game these days where my creative tools aren't just limited to guns in someone else's story.
It's odd in that while I used to enjoy a straightforward shooter as much as an epic RPG, god game or 4X, these days they definitely take a backseat in comparison.
And I'm loath to say it's the usual older gamer excuse of aging reflexes. Henke's played enough Quake with me to know there's no problem on that front
It's just that ultimately, most of the time, I want something that stimulates more areas of my brain than most FPS games do.
After finishing Tunic (which I really enjoyed), I'm now playing Black Mesa, which I'd started but not finished before, and Rusty Lake Paradise, which is a nicely dark/surreal puzzler, much like the earlier games in the series. I'm hoping to finish a couple of shorter games before I finally, finally try my hand at Sekiro.
Back to World of Warcraft. Can't ever quit that game, I think.
But another game that I got really, really into right before the pandemic hit is one I didn't expect to enjoy at all. My wife was playing Stardew Valley and called it a "relaxing" game. It made me wonder what kind of game out there would be "relaxing" for me. Stardrew wasn't it. So I tried a game similar to it called Garveyard Keeper. I liked it, but it wasn't "relaxing." I asked myself, "What do I find relaxing?" And the answer was: long drives on the highway while listening to good music or a podcast.
The lightbulb over my head went off. And I gave "American Truck Simulator" a try. It is 100% my "relaxing" game. I've put over 400 hours into that game, it pushed me to buy a really nice steering wheel (and now pushing me to buy some nice head/eye tracking hardware), and I don't plan on quitting. It has a great community and the devs are continuing to put out solid content for it.
I really like ATS too. I'll be happy when they have a transcontinental route and we can finally do a proper cannonball run. More proximately, I'll be happy when Texas is out (being Texan).
Cool. Which wheel did you get?Originally Posted by Jomero
Thrustmaster T300 GT, with triple pedals. It's the one made for PlayStation, but is compatible with Windows.
It's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive. But it's quite nice. I like it. It's belt-driven, so the Force Feedback can be quite strong (if you want it strong).
I'm looking forward to Texas as well! They have announced they are working on it.
I'm personally looking forward to Montana, so that more routes are all connected-up in the north.
That's a good wheel; I almost got one myself but they were out of stock pretty much everywhere in Canada. I ended up with a Logitech G923, which Reddit will tell you is vastly and, for some, offensively inferior, but I've been absolutely loving it with Assetto Corsa Competizione and Gran Turismo 7. If I ever upgrade, it'll be to a direct-drive model, but those cost piles of money.
Hey, any wheel is better than a controller or the mouse/keyboard! And there's nothing wrong with the G923. Especially if it works for you and you are happy with it!
I was seriously considering that wheel myself, but the T300 happened to go on sale for a hundred or two cheaper than it normally was at the time I bought it.
I haven't played ATS in ages, should get back to it soon.
I picked up Turbo Slider Unlimited, which released into Early Access yesterday. In singleplayer it's a bit humdrum, but multiplayer on the more outrageous tracks is where it really shines. Like Fall Guys with cars.
I played through Thief 2014 for a 3rd time and this is what I learned:
uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....
the ending? Still very bad. I think I'm most upset that after the credits have rolled, and the game dumps me back in the city, when I go to see Basso he's just like "hi Garrett" not even acknowledging all the crazy shit that happened. Come on man, I NEED CLOSURE!
The spooky asylum level is the level with the best storytelling, mainly because most of it isn't related to the boring main plot. It lets you piece together the dark history of the place through logs, and that's always fun.
I'm pretty sure "sloop" is something you eat.
The HANDSTUFF in this game is perhaps the best HANDSTUFF in all of gaming (and no I'm not talking about the pinchcocks down by the docks). I was playing Dying Light 2 recently and when you pick stuff up in that game the character just waves his hand in the air in front of you and then the object disappears from the world and pops into your inventory, and y'know it's kinda crazy with all the advancements in game-graphics how few FPS games bother trying to make your characters hands look like they're actually interacting with objects in the gameworld. RDR2 certainly made sure your hands touched stuff, but there the animations were too slow. I feel like Thief 2014 struck a good balance between realistic handstuff and also moving along at a good speed. I am currently trying to revolutionize Videogame Handstuff by bring it to THE NEXT LEVEL. I mainly started replaying Thief for research purposes but ended up kinda getting into it.
Man, I finished Elden Ring and I just don't know what to do with my life anymore. Derp. ;3
Continue to make regular posts about the demon bosses you defeat in your head.
Such a battle is nigh endless...
(Hohoho)
henke, I believe it was you who revisited the 2014 Thief recently, right? I thought I'd install that one and give it another chance, but I have to admit there are few games I've played that have put me off as immediately as this one, and the reason is how bad traversal and just generally being in the world feels. With a game like this, I want immediacy in my controls, I want to be in control of where and how my character moves, yet this game constantly takes control away from me in small ways that nonetheless add up to a pretty bad gamefeel. Grab an object? I press E and my character does a half-second animation, leaning in, grabbing the thing and leaning back again. Everything feels contextual, but never in a way that makes me feel like I'm in control; instead, it feels like the game keeps playing these ultra-short first-person cutscenes to me. It's possible that it's just the tutorial that is this bad, but if I don't enjoy moving through the world, then I won't enjoy the game.
I may give it another chance again in a while, but the first impression Thief's left is that it's not a game I'd enjoy playing.
I do remember the instant "cling" of loot stolen adding to the fantasy of being a master thief, in the first two games. Pick up them baubles without even stopping in your tracks.
For my part, after a long exhausted period of no games, I almost finished Disco Elysium -- only to face a recurrent crash in the endgame. My fault for running Linux, though it's amazing the Steam compatibility program (Proton, a fork of WINE) worked well enough to get me this far. If I can't resolve it I'll just watch a video at some point.
Then I picked up Vampire Survivors, which is a twin-stick shooter that's missing a stick. Your weapons fire automatically, but all have positioning quirks that will keep you on the run from encroaching monsters. You can earn gold to earn modest upgrades (small compared to the in-level ones) and unlock characters. Around the mid-game of each run a flood of monsters runs you down unless you've managed to build one of the powerful item combinations, which are sadly difficult to intuit. I lucked into getting five of them in a run by sheer chance, which gave me enough information to figure out most of the others. Unfortunately I burned through the early-access content in half a day, but hey, it was only three bucks.
It's strange, since the last game I played prior to the absence was Inscryption, where I had the opposite problem: I was terrible at its card game and could make no headway. I'm still going to retry it at some point.
Last edited by Anarchic Fox; 1st May 2022 at 16:08.
I prefer the New-Thief way actually, but there are simply way too many things to steal in that game! The animation looks nice and it's so short that you don't really "lose control" of the character, but when you have to pick up a hundred little objects (some of them don't really even feel like they're worth stealing) that are scattered around all over the place, it's no longer that cool. It's quantity over quality when it comes to treasures in Thief. The old games did it a bit better at least.
I really need to replay Thi4f. I've said this many times over the years, so I forced myself to click the install button a moment ago - that at least takes me one step closer to actually playing it.Previously I played the game with Focus disabled, but I kind of felt that I was missing out on something. I think I'll keep it enabled this time and see what it's like. I'm quite looking forward to this actually!
Ugh, that always bothered me in the Dishonored series. I'd see some treasure over yonder, go through heck and high water to get there, creep in, and get 3 pennies and a nickel. They said in an interview that people liked picking up treasure, so they made more treasure to pick up. I think that was missing the point.
Always thought it was funny that "Garrett" had a quote in Thi4f where he says "It's not how much you steal, it's what you steal" - and he then proceeds to loot a bunch of ink bottles, letter openers, and ashtrays.
In the Dishonored games I didn't generally feel that it wasn't worth exploring. Sure, the monetary reward wasn't always great, but it gave me much more of a sense of the place and the people, and the environmental design was varied enough to indicate who the people were whose placed you broke into, added to which there were usually goodies of one kind or another to find. Based on the tutorial at least (which I admit may not be entirely indicative of the game as a whole), Thief (2014) is much more the kind of game where you explore everything to find loot adding up to two dozen gold coins.
On a different note: Rusty Lake Paradise, while being more of the same (namely surreal, uncanny, and darkly funny puzzlers lasting a couple of hours), was very enjoyable. I have to admit that I had to look up some of the solutions; sometimes my brain understands what a puzzle is about, sometimes I find that I'm looking at completely the wrong thing for ten minutes without even understanding that I should be focusing on, say, the number of legs on the various flies or the pitch at which they buzz when you click on them. Still, the puzzles have an internal logic that, once you get into the strangeness of the Rusty Lake games, is fairly coherent. I wouldn't want to play more than one of these in a row, but they're just what's needed if I play one of them every half a year or so in between more lengthy games.
Started playing Indiana Jones & The Emperor's Tomb. After some modding and tweaking I've got it running in 1440p widescreen with gamepad controls. It's fun! Kinda a halfway point between Tomb Raider and Uncharted. Seeing how the Indy movies were such a throwback to old TV-serials, it somehow feels very charming and right to be playing an outdated Indiana Jones game. The combat is scrappy and fun, with environmental hazards and improvised weapons. The shooting has fantastic gunsounds and an early version of cover-shooting. The platforming and exploration is neat. Tho by the 4th chapter, Hong Kong, I'm kinda starting to feel like I've seen what the game has to offer gameplay-wise, and it's starting to drag a bit. Apparently I'm not even halfway through the campaign yet? Folks who have played it, is it worth sticking with? Are there any real standout moments or gameplay revelations still to come?
If you're not enjoying the handstuff in the tutorial then you're not gonna enjoy the rest of it either, cause it's aaaaall handstuff!
Based on this snippet from the Wikipedia synopsis of the game, it sounds like it's not worth sticking with the game, henke:
I've not read on in the synopsis, but the game probably ends with "Jones rid[ing] into the sunset on a tremendously dull horse."Von Beck gives chase to him in a boring machine bent on getting rid of Jones once and for all.
Indiana Jones & The Boring Machine
I actually tried playing Indy and The Infernal Machine the other week. It is a carbon copy of OG Tomb Raider, right down to the PS1 era tank-like digital movement. I'm sure that there's a decent game there, heavy on puzzle solving and exploration, I just couldn't be arsed putting up with the dated player inputs.
I'm back on the GTA IV grind after a few weeks off. Played a mission where you rescue Roman from being held hostage by some mobsters he owed gambling debt too. As I was trying to find a way back to the road my car suddenly exploded. I think I drove over an exploding barrel I didn't see, LOL.
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