Playing the (now delisted) Steam version of Colin McRae Rally, which is a remake of Colin McRae Rally 2.0.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2023-04-02, 10:41:

WASD isn't present in the original release. I have the physical "LucasArts Collection" edition from way back. 😀

Yep, the manual confirms it 😄

Judging by this picture from the same manual, it seems also the mouse configuration was tweeked to handle better (by removing the mouse movement typical of Wolf3D, DOOM, DOOM 2)

Haven't really been playing much the past few weeks. I tried this free visual novel on itch and it ended up giving me so many thoughts as I picked apart the layers of its story that I've been writing about that instead. This will probably end up turning into a monster of an essay; might produce it in video form, I'm not sure yet.
Not sure it's a game anyone else here would care about (probably not) but it's been consuming quite a lot of my time as I do the in-depth literary analysis thing.

Finished the Human campaign in WarCraft 3. It was fun, except for a couple of levels with annoying victory conditions, where I needed to do something before a timer ran out. I wasn't a fan of those back in the day, and I don't like them now either. On the other hand, I enjoyed the hero focused missions, where you don't have a base but lead a hero and a small group of units across the map, finding artifacts and such.

I like that units now automatically cast some useful spells like healing, without the player needing to do this manually. A big improvement over the past games. Overall, the gameplay feels familiar, but every unit has much more health now. Not a bad thing, since you get to use their new abilities more often. Heroes are cool, and I like how you can choose which skills they acquire on leveling up. The inventory management is kinda lame, since you find way more useful items than they can carry.

Sound effects and voice acting are excellent, though I find the background music to be less memorable than in the previous WarCraft installments. As mentioned before, the cinematics are top notch, both in terms of visual and audio presentation. Hats off to the developers for their work on those. Now, to the next campaign!

played a bit of soldier of fortune 2 using the random mission generator - although the missions are very generic and short, its a fun way to enjoy the game mechanics without having to have a bots deathmatch

i like the idea of random mission generation too, would like to have seem it more in other games

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-02, 13:29:

Finished the Human campaign in WarCraft 3. It was fun, except for a couple of levels with annoying victory conditions, where I needed to do something before a timer ran out. I wasn't a fan of those back in the day, and I don't like them now either. On the other hand, I enjoyed the hero focused missions, where you don't have a base but lead a hero and a small group of units across the map, finding artifacts and such.

I like that units now automatically cast some useful spells like healing, without the player needing to do this manually. A big improvement over the past games. Overall, the gameplay feels familiar, but every unit has much more health now. Not a bad thing, since you get to use their new abilities more often. Heroes are cool, and I like how you can choose which skills they acquire on leveling up. The inventory management is kinda lame, since you find way more useful items than they can carry.

Sound effects and voice acting are excellent, though I find the background music to be less memorable than in the previous WarCraft installments. As mentioned before, the cinematics are top notch, both in terms of visual and audio presentation. Hats off to the developers for their work on those. Now, to the next campaign!

As someone who played a lot of Warcraft 3 back in the day (it was my first RTS, actually), I've always wished they'd done more to expand upon the RPG aspect of it as they were leaning pretty hard in that direction already. The orc campaign in Frozen Throne was one of my favorite parts of the entire game since it was designed much more like an RPG than an RTS, but even there it was a bit shallow as the engine was still designed more for the RTS stuff. I'm not saying these elements weren't integrated well into the primary strategy gameplay, they just felt a little vestigial at points.
Seems to some extent Blizzard thought something similar considering Warcraft became an MMORPG after this, but even that's not really what I meant. I just think that Warcraft 3 showed there was a lot of potential in more of a "tactical RPG" sort of approach for the series where the heroes could be the primary focus with any further armies there mainly to support them. Just a shame there was never any attempt to try that.
I'm sorry; I am not explaining myself well at all.

NovaCN wrote on 2023-04-03, 13:42:

As someone who played a lot of Warcraft 3 back in the day (it was my first RTS, actually), I've always wished they'd done more to expand upon the RPG aspect of it as they were leaning pretty hard in that direction already. The orc campaign in Frozen Throne was one of my favorite parts of the entire game since it was designed much more like an RPG than an RTS, but even there it was a bit shallow as the engine was still designed more for the RTS stuff.

Yeah, this is why I like those hero focused missions, without base building. It sort of feels like you're playing a mini-RPG.

They provide a nice break from the normal levels.

I finished Halo: Reach not long ago (screenshots later today), and thought I might try out another long RPG for a change (I finished 3 of these last year) - so I started Torment: Tides of Numenera. 2 hours into the game, I'm just not feeling it..

I also started XCOM 2 with the expansion War of the Chosen for the first time and I'm really enjoying it so far! I might instead finish a WOTC playthrough.

Welcome to XCOM 2 !

If you are stuck in any X-Com game, there is the UFOPEDIA (although it would spoil the game).

Good hunting, Commander !

Still on WarCraft 3, just finished up the Undead campaign. I liked that there was only one timed mission here, the last one. And it did make sense, in terms of the plot.

Speaking of the final level, how many times have we destroyed Dalaran again? It seems like every WarCraft game has the player squaring off against those pesky wizards. And often multiple times as well. Anyway, it helped that my heroes were powered up to the max. I often delayed victory on the previous levels, which allowed me to more thoroughly explore the map, and acquire some rare artifacts that were hidden behind walls of trees and such.

My free time has been scarce over the past few weeks, so progress kinda slowed down. But I should be able to pick up the pace now. Guess it's time to see what the Orc campaign has to offer.

I really want to play Warcraft III myself, but I feel intimidated when I realize how long beating Warcraft II and Starcraft took me... I am just not good with RTS games. I either make mistakes, lose most my army and have to replay parts, or else spend a very long time gathering forces, where a more skilled player would have been able to win missions far earlier.

dr_st wrote on 2023-04-08, 11:51:

I really want to play Warcraft III myself, but I feel intimidated when I realize how long beating Warcraft II and Starcraft took me... I am just not good with RTS games. I either make mistakes, lose most my army and have to replay parts, or else spend a very long time gathering forces, where a more skilled player would have been able to win missions far earlier.

I think WarCraft 3 is a bit more forgiving in terms of difficulty, at least so far.

As mentioned above, units have more health in general, which makes keeping them alive easier. And those auto-healing priest types are useful indeed, for the races that have them. Heroes make the biggest difference though. They are far more impactful than the heroes in WarCraft 2 and StarCraft, and have some very useful abilities that are not available on normal units.

Finally got around to playing Night in the Woods. It's cute, hits close to home for me at points, though with its short length I feel like it doesn't have time to really go into some things as deeply as it should. Really the most frustrating part is how it autosaves and you only have a single save file, which means you only ever get one chance to do anything and if you mess up or miss something you don't get another try. I get that's sort of what they were going for thematically—you only get one chance at life and missed opportunities will never come back—but it does make it frustrating trying to see as much as possible in a single playthrough. Not that doing that is even possible what with some scenes being mutually-exclusive.
For context, NitW is a story-focused adventure game with some light platforming, which takes place over about a week and a half after the protagonist Mae moves back in with her parents after dropping out of college. All you really do for most of the game is wander around town, talk to the neighbors, hang out with friends, and occasionally play a minigame (for example, Mae plays bass in a band and this leads into a rhythm game), though a ways into things a more structured narrative does kick in and leads to the game taking on some heavy horror elements. At which point it shifts from a general character piece into a pretty on-the-nose allegory that admittedly does tie into the sort of things the characters were already going through; feels almost Buffy-ish in that way.
As much as I found it to be pretty shallow compared to a different, oddly similar game I played not too long ago, I rather liked Night in the Woods. Have a feeling parts of it will be sticking with me for a long time. I'll have to replay it at some point to see what I missed, though I am not looking forward to attempting that last band practice again (Pumpkin Head Guy, my beloathed).
In conclusion, if I had a nickel for every time I played a narrative-driven game about an early-20-something in the mid 2010's returning from college to their small hometown and reconnecting with old friends only to learn that their friends and the town itself have changed during their absence and to ultimately be confronted by dark secrets and horrors and also everyone is furries for some reason, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that there are two of them.

NovaCN wrote on 2023-04-13, 13:16:

In conclusion, if I had a nickel for every time I played a narrative-driven game about an early-20-something in the mid 2010's returning from college to their small hometown and reconnecting with old friends only to learn that their friends and the town itself have changed during their absence and to ultimately be confronted by dark secrets and horrors

This part pretty much describes Life is Strange. One of the few "modern" games that I actually enjoyed. I put quotation marks around modern since it came out in 2015 or something.

Anyway, reading this made me want to replay that game for some reason. I'll add it to my ever growing backlog for now.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-13, 13:36:

NovaCN wrote on 2023-04-13, 13:16:

In conclusion, if I had a nickel for every time I played a narrative-driven game about an early-20-something in the mid 2010's returning from college to their small hometown and reconnecting with old friends only to learn that their friends and the town itself have changed during their absence and to ultimately be confronted by dark secrets and horrors

This part pretty much describes Life is Strange. One of the few "modern" games that I actually enjoyed. I put quotation marks around modern since it came out in 2015 or something.

Anyway, reading this made me want to replay that game for some reason. I'll add it to my ever growing backlog for now.

I should really get around to playing Life is Strange at some point, complete the LiS/NitW/Echo trifecta. Actually, another parallel that just hit me about all of those: the protagonists of each happen to be bisexual.

Just finished the Orc campaign in WarCraft 3. There was an unexpected difficulty spike in the middle of the campaign, during a lumber harvesting mission. But other than that one level, it was all smooth sailing. Overall, I did find it a bit more difficult to keep the Orcs alive, since they only have one healer unit, and he isn't all that great.

Here's something I forgot to mention before. While voice acting is generally superb, some of the unit lines (mostly dwarves and goblins) were kinda over the top. And I don't mean the intentionally silly stuff they say after you repeatedly click on them. I mean their regular sounds. For example, dwarven mortar squads yelling "Mooooooortar Combaaaaaat!" whenever a new unit gets produced was immersion breaking for me. Even as a fan of the Mortal Kombat games, I found this annoying. It would have been fine as a funny repeat-click sound, but hearing it constantly during normal unit production? No thanks.

Anyway, off to the final campaign of the base game, with the Night Elves.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-17, 09:19:

Here's something I forgot to mention before. While voice acting is generally superb, some of the unit lines (mostly dwarves and goblins) were kinda over the top. And I don't mean the intentionally silly stuff they say after you repeatedly click on them. I mean their regular sounds. For example, dwarven mortar squads yelling "Mooooooortar Combaaaaaat!" whenever a new unit gets produced was immersion breaking for me. Even as a fan of the Mortal Kombat games, I found this annoying. It would have been fine as a funny repeat-click sound, but hearing it constantly during normal unit production? No thanks.

I'd find that annoying too in any other game, but in my case all that's left of my immersion is such a shivering wreck after the in-game cutscenes have had their way with it that I don't think I would even notice a thing like that 😁

I guess I'll find out once I get around playing it, I never did finish the expansion before burning out back in the day.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-04-17, 09:19:

For example, dwarven mortar squads yelling "Mooooooortar Combaaaaaat!" whenever a new unit gets produced was immersion breaking for me. Even as a fan of the Mortal Kombat games, I found this annoying. It would have been fine as a funny repeat-click sound, but hearing it constantly during normal unit production? No thanks.

Yeah, that's kind of cringeworthy. BTW, I spent a lot of time the past weeks replaying the classic MK games (MK, MKII, MK3, UMK3 and MKT) on DOS and MAME. God, the AI in the last two is such a cheap-a$$ cheating bastard that I accidentally (re)discovered some the bugs triggered by letting the timer run out during post-game Endurance matches.

i'm going through Hexen again, but...........
- It's the Nintendo 64 version (BEST console version, Software Creations did a good port, PSX and Saturn versions are super stinky in comparison)
- It's through Mupen64Plus with ParaLLEl-RDP through RetroArch so it's as noisy and grotty as I require for my emulated N64 experiences (NTSC adaptive shader on top)
- I'm tracking achievements and I am 99% confident i can master it hardcore. The ultimate cheevo is just "kill korax on medium"
- Controls are weird because n64, but not too bad to adjust to after doing a whole keyboard only run earlier
- The monster AI's a little more deaf and the bosses have less HP
- Some very dark rooms (pitch black etc) have their lighting bumped up
- The hud's a little aliased. it's like that on real hardware too
- Cleric still OP

Done with the Night Elf campaign in WarCraft 3. Some of the missions felt a bit gimmicky, like the one where all mines only had 2000 gold inside, but it was fine overall. The heroes were pretty cool though, and I particularly liked their thorns and trueshot auras.

Overall, I really enjoyed how all WarCraft 3 campaigns formed a cohesive story, each one continuing where the previous one left off. It was like that in StarCraft as well, and I greatly prefer this approach to the diametrically opposed storylines in the Command & Conquer games.

That said, I'm a bit burned out on the RTS genre after going through all of these missions over the last couple of weeks. Think I'll pass on the Frozen Throne expansion for now, and play it properly at some later point.