Recently finished playing Hexen. Finished as the cleric the first time using a real DOS PC, then played with the fighter and mage using GZDoom. Then finally finished the Deathkings of the Dark Citadel expansion with the fighter on GZDoom (not feeling like playing with the other classes, so I guess I'm done with this game).
The game is quite fun, but a guide was needed to get past some parts. The expansion is even heavier on the switch hunting and the more annoying enemies are always respawning (the original only respawns Ettins).
The fighter was my favorite because of his speed and not depending on mana so much. Mage was my least favorite because of his crappy ice shard weapon, spent most of the game using his wand until the part I got the electric hands thing. Cleric was ok but his first weapon just sucks.
I attempted to play this game many times since its release, but never got through the whole thing as I always enjoyed Doom or Heretic much more due to the simpler levels (and also the fact I didn't have a guide or understand English at the time).
Want to start Hexen 2 but I hear this one is ever crazier on the puzzles, plus the melee combat doesn't feel as satisfying as the first one.

Tried to play Hardspace Shipbreaker and bounced right off. Don't consider "job" games fun.

DosFreak wrote on 2022-10-15, 19:38:

Tried to play Hardspace Shipbreaker and bounced right off. Don't consider "job" games fun.

I wonder if this would be fun, though. 🤣

Started playing Dark Forces 2. I skipped it back in the day since my PC at the time couldn't run it well, and also because I wasn't a fan of the first Dark Forces game. I mainly disliked two things: the inability to save manually and the huge amount of platforming. The sequel makes it possible to save the game at will, which should hopefully make any platforming segments a bit easier to manage.

I'm playing this on my AthlonXP rig, and (so far) it seems to run well enough on a Voodoo3 at 1280x1024. This system also houses an Aureal Vortex2, which is a nice fit since this game only has A3D support. The sound effects and voices are certainly much crisper than in the first game. Music is also excellent. It uses CD audio for playback and the tracks have a lot of familiar themes from John Williams mixed in.

At the moment, I'm only a couple of levels in. Map design seems a bit better compared to the first game, but the levels still feel unnecessarily large, and it gets kinda stale fighting the same 3 enemies all the time. Anyway, I am looking forward to getting the lightsaber and the force powers. Should make things a bit more interesting.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-10-15, 12:38:

Finished my Duke Nukem 3D playthrough.

I agree with your assessment. I liked some of the levels in the lunar episode but yes - those drones!

the game holds up well - i don't mean in terms of graphics but in terms of fun, it just remains fun!

gerry wrote on 2022-10-18, 07:34:

the game holds up well - i don't mean in terms of graphics but in terms of fun, it just remains fun!

For sure! I had a blast revisiting it.

BTW, Duke3D was one of the earliest games that I ever played on my first PC back in '96. For that reason, it will always remain special to me. 😀

Under a Killing Moon: It's been a long time since I played through this, but I must have beaten it a dozen times back in the mid 90s. That probably explains why I remembered so much of it despite the long break, though I did still consult the built-in hint system a few times when I got stuck. Good, cheesy FMV goodness! So many of Tex's one-liners still made me chuckle. I'm not really a fan of this genre anymore - point & click questing, item collection, combining, using, etc. isn't really riveting gameplay - but this series is special. Just being able to explore the environments in a first person perspective added so much to the experience.

I tried playing this first on one of my Win9x machines but it doesn't play nice with fast CD-ROM drives, what with the frequent accessing and disc swapping. CDBeQuiet works temporally to slow the drive down in DOS but ejecting the disc immediately resets the drive speed, on mine at least, and you swap discs a lot in this game. Nero DriveSpeed works better under Windows, but UAKM isn't really a Windows game. It can be forced to work but has issues when swapping discs. Sometimes the game wouldn't launch at all under Windows due to a lack of memory requiring a reboot. In the end I just used DosBox and mounted all four CDs to different virtual drives which the game supports. That completely removes the disc swapping and is a nice quality of life feature!

I think I'm about half way through Dark Forces 2 since the game just switched to disc 2. I like the FMV sequences a lot more than the cartoon animations from the first game. Granted, some of the acting is a bit cheesy (the villains mostly) but the protagonist and his girlfriend are both ok.

I recently got the Lightsaber and it's really powerful. Most enemies go down in just one hit, at least so far. Of the Jedi powers, I put all my points into Force Jump, which allowed me to take a few shortcuts through some of the more tedious levels.

On that note, level design is still not great. Despite being a bit better than in the first game, you're often left wondering where you're supposed to go. Typically, one set of textures is used throughout the whole level, making everything look the same. Heck, even the original Doom had more varied scenery and better designed maps.

I started encountering some weird issues with A3D on the Vortex2, with bits of speech and sound effects occasionally getting cut off. I tried a few different settings, but I think the driver version that I'm using (2041) might be too new for this game, so I switched over to my Audigy. Positional audio is not as good as on the Aureal card, but at least I can actually hear every sound now.

I remember getting lost all the time as a kid in Dark Forces 2. I have a few memories of the only path forward being some terrifying homage to Luke Skywalker escaping Darth Vader in Sky City. But it was never an intuitive path forward for me to slide down some slope into an open vent. Always just looked like certain death to me. And of course, back when I played it, on my sad little Pentium 120 with a Diamond Viper V330, with it's used, slow, extremely clicky HDD, the load times were so prohibitively long I was extremely averse to figuring out which terrifying falls were the path forward through trial and error.

I recall relying on a strategy guide a lot to find my way through some of those levels. But even then, some of the text descriptions on where to go really didn't click with what my 13 year old self saw on the screen.

I did replay it a few years ago though, and didn't recall having those issues. Either because my childhood memories of the game, which I cannot distinctly recall, fueled a sense of intuition. Or because it legit wasn't as confusing as I remember. Or maybe, as I alluded to, playing a GOG copy on a modern computer provided such responsive load times that I was perfectly willing to trial and error it over all the ledges, all the time.

You know I actually recall a lot of the heights in that game giving 13 year old me some serious vertigo. Enough to legitimately scare me away from many sections of the game. Adult me had no such problems.

Namrok wrote on 2022-10-19, 19:13:

I remember getting lost all the time as a kid in Dark Forces 2. I have a few memories of the only path forward being some terrifying homage to Luke Skywalker escaping Darth Vader in Sky City. But it was never an intuitive path forward for me to slide down some slope into an open vent. Always just looked like certain death to me.

That's my other gripe with the level design, besides everything looking the same.

Like you say, the developers sometimes want you to go in a very unintuitive direction. Examples include jumping down from heights that seem too dangerous, moving through some cramped space that feels more like it's a secret room instead of a way to progress the plot, diving underwater to randomly find an opening in a pitch black corner and so on. I think I'm starting to get better at anticipating what I'm expected to do, but it still feels off.

Icewind Dale
There are two ways to play ID. You can play with the two expansions integrated, or can just import your winning ID party into the expansions one after another. I decided to do the former, because I figured if I completed ID, I'd lose motivation to do the expanions if they got too frustrating.

The only thing to keep in mind, though, is that there are points of no return between ID, the first expansion, and the second expansion. Basically, you reach the point of no return in ID, start expansion 1, reach the point in expansion 1, start and complete expansion 2, go back to complete expansion 1, and then finally go back to complete ID. I looked these up beforehand, so that I wouldn't lock myself out of any content.

Anyway, I've just now reached the point of no return of the first expansion, and have started the second expansion. So far it's taken just under 50 hours to get here, and I've enjoyed every minute so far. I've found it to be far, far less frustrating than Baldur's Gate (which I loved, outside of the occasional frustration). It plays great whether I'm just popping in for 15-30 min. here and there, or devoting hours into the game late into the night. Every time I finish exploring a map, I can't help but want to explore just one more and see what I might find. It's very addictive!

You are making me want to play Icewind Dale something fierce. I actually beat it back when it first came out, but never again since. Though I did fire up another session back in 2009 or so, but got distracted.

I'm currently trying to wrap up Xenoblade Chronicles 3. My feelings towards it have soured significantly the further through it I get. I feel like it started off much stronger than previous games, but fundamental game design decisions they made did not work out well past the mid point of it.

Like, they managed to make a job system boring. The hard caps they put on jobs until you fully unlock them are pitifully low, and super easy to reach. Then you are just wasting progress if you stay in that job. Aha, but they thought of that, so you can always spend silver nopon coins to upgrade jobs, actual experience be damned! Except now that cheapens the whole process of building up a job.

You can see an evolution in reducing the tedium of side quest. The original Xenoblade Chronicles told you to go hunt certain animals, or collect items off animals. Except animals are named so bizarrely, and items as well, you have very little intuitive sense where to go to accomplish this. Assorted re-releases added map icons for this. But making it easier exposes the tedium of it. To help with the tediousness, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 let you send your blades on mercenary missions to accomplish assorted "Kill X Creature" objectives. Now you don't even have to after you've unlocked that functionality! Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes this even further, and I don't recall a single "Kill X Creature" side quest the entire game.

Unfortunately, they came up with remarkably little to replace that tedium. Instead you are left with rather hollow side quests that singularly involve fast travelling to different NPCs and speaking to them. You spend more time in loading screens fast travelling than anything else. Sometimes they throw a boss battle at the end. It's rarely exciting.

All in all, combat is underwhelming. At first I was hopefuly, and had thought maybe they improved on it from Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The Golden Country. Unfortunately, the wheels mostly come off it. In the beginning of the game, you can only chain certain arts with certain other arts. This adds an element of engagement. Later on, they fully remove all those caps, and anything can chain to anything else. This makes combat far more rote and boring. Enemies generally feel like they have way too many hitpoints, especially bosses, only adding to the roteness of it. I'm 20 levels higher than this creature, it is not going to threaten me. And yet it can still take minutes to slowly grind down a boss, and what feels like prohibitively long to take out random mobs. My gut instinct is that if you outlevel a creature by 20, it should be a "1 round" combat encounter tops. In real time terms, maybe a few attacks of your party, no more. This is not the case in XC3.

But they thought of that too! Since combat gets annoying and boring, If you are a high enough level most creatures won't aggro on you! Except, once again, like most "solutions" in this game, it only exposes more problems. Void of combat, exploring these wide open spaces also gets boring. This is not Breath of the Wild's open world, with fun little korok seed puzzles around every corner, larger shrine puzzles over every hill, and lots of hidden sidequest that don't draw an excessive amount of attention to themselves. The world of Xenoblade Chronicles leans more into the Ubisoft style of open world where there are icons for collectibles you can find in the open world... and that is more or less it. I guess there are lots of optional boss monsters that are occasionally tucked away. But that feels way less exciting than it should be due to the aforementioned problems I have with the combat.

I donno. If you are a fan of the series you should play it I guess. The story is a brilliant homage to both the previous games. I think these are actually my favorite characters yet. The nopon aren't annoying in this one either! Shit, there were a few story beats that actually had me fighting bad tears. I don't recall a game doing that before. And while actually playing most of the sidequest is incredibly boring, each sidequest hub often ties all it's quests together into a fulfilling cohesive narrative. But mechanically, the game is enough of a mess that if you are predisposed to like it, I wouldn't suggest it.

I've been playing through Rage lately. It runs butter smooth on max detail settings.

I do one or two missions at a time right now and it's a decent way to kill of 15 or 20 minutes.

Weird how the environment is even less interactive than something like Fallout 3 though.

Namrok wrote on 2022-10-21, 14:10:

You are making me want to play Icewind Dale something fierce. I actually beat it back when it first came out, but never again s […]
Show full quote

You are making me want to play Icewind Dale something fierce. I actually beat it back when it first came out, but never again since. Though I did fire up another session back in 2009 or so, but got distracted.

I'm currently trying to wrap up Xenoblade Chronicles 3. My feelings towards it have soured significantly the further through it I get. I feel like it started off much stronger than previous games, but fundamental game design decisions they made did not work out well past the mid point of it.

Like, they managed to make a job system boring. The hard caps they put on jobs until you fully unlock them are pitifully low, and super easy to reach. Then you are just wasting progress if you stay in that job. Aha, but they thought of that, so you can always spend silver nopon coins to upgrade jobs, actual experience be damned! Except now that cheapens the whole process of building up a job.

You can see an evolution in reducing the tedium of side quest. The original Xenoblade Chronicles told you to go hunt certain animals, or collect items off animals. Except animals are named so bizarrely, and items as well, you have very little intuitive sense where to go to accomplish this. Assorted re-releases added map icons for this. But making it easier exposes the tedium of it. To help with the tediousness, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 let you send your blades on mercenary missions to accomplish assorted "Kill X Creature" objectives. Now you don't even have to after you've unlocked that functionality! Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes this even further, and I don't recall a single "Kill X Creature" side quest the entire game.

Unfortunately, they came up with remarkably little to replace that tedium. Instead you are left with rather hollow side quests that singularly involve fast travelling to different NPCs and speaking to them. You spend more time in loading screens fast travelling than anything else. Sometimes they throw a boss battle at the end. It's rarely exciting.

All in all, combat is underwhelming. At first I was hopefuly, and had thought maybe they improved on it from Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The Golden Country. Unfortunately, the wheels mostly come off it. In the beginning of the game, you can only chain certain arts with certain other arts. This adds an element of engagement. Later on, they fully remove all those caps, and anything can chain to anything else. This makes combat far more rote and boring. Enemies generally feel like they have way too many hitpoints, especially bosses, only adding to the roteness of it. I'm 20 levels higher than this creature, it is not going to threaten me. And yet it can still take minutes to slowly grind down a boss, and what feels like prohibitively long to take out random mobs. My gut instinct is that if you outlevel a creature by 20, it should be a "1 round" combat encounter tops. In real time terms, maybe a few attacks of your party, no more. This is not the case in XC3.

But they thought of that too! Since combat gets annoying and boring, If you are a high enough level most creatures won't aggro on you! Except, once again, like most "solutions" in this game, it only exposes more problems. Void of combat, exploring these wide open spaces also gets boring. This is not Breath of the Wild's open world, with fun little korok seed puzzles around every corner, larger shrine puzzles over every hill, and lots of hidden sidequest that don't draw an excessive amount of attention to themselves. The world of Xenoblade Chronicles leans more into the Ubisoft style of open world where there are icons for collectibles you can find in the open world... and that is more or less it. I guess there are lots of optional boss monsters that are occasionally tucked away. But that feels way less exciting than it should be due to the aforementioned problems I have with the combat.

I donno. If you are a fan of the series you should play it I guess. The story is a brilliant homage to both the previous games. I think these are actually my favorite characters yet. The nopon aren't annoying in this one either! Shit, there were a few story beats that actually had me fighting bad tears. I don't recall a game doing that before. And while actually playing most of the sidequest is incredibly boring, each sidequest hub often ties all it's quests together into a fulfilling cohesive narrative. But mechanically, the game is enough of a mess that if you are predisposed to like it, I wouldn't suggest it.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
Having not touched it for 6 weeks I guess I can safely say I've petered out of the game, before having gotten too far into it (let's say 30-odd hours).

It was fun to dip my toes into the Xenoblade waters and see what it's all about. The games are an impressive expression of the art form. The story telling and style, the characters and emotions. But the gameplay seemed like a small variety of rote experiences, each rewarded by the next cut scene.

Perhaps somebody has/will eventually release a fan-made 'movie version' of the game, where you can just sit down and watch the whole story play out. I'd probably watch that, compressed down to a few hours. Because the story itself evokes similar enjoyment as other classic sci-fi and anime stories. It's high quality stuff.

But the game as-is, with the story generously spread out over 100 odd hours of arguably rote-y gameplay, doesn't give me much reason to continue. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my gaming to be gaming, and my watching to be watching, and beyond a certain degree of crossover I start to wonder whether I'm actually doing either one! And I only have so much gaming time...

Done with Dark Forces 2. I went for the Light Side ending, which canonically leads to the next installment. Despite some overly exaggerated villain performances, the live-action cinematics were pretty cool. At times, it almost felt like I was watching a classic Star Wars movie.

Sadly, the unintuitive level design only got worse as I progressed further, and that greatly diminished my enjoyment of the game. Therefore, I decided not to play through the Mysteries of the Sith expansion, and just watched the cutscenes to keep up with the story.

Kinda disappointed that the add-on had no FMVs, and used in-engine rendering instead. This made the characters way too blocky and low-res. I liked the audio narration though, and the actress who voiced Mara Jade did an excellent job. The plot was also interesting, with an unexpected twist at the end.

Anyway, moving on to Dark Forces 3 Jedi Knight 2. From what I hear, it's supposed to be the highlight of the series. We'll see if it's more to my liking than the first two games.

Finished Command & Conquer GDI campaign during the week, had a lot of fun. For me the game is on that sweet spot of being still fun to play and having a lot of happy nostalgia for it at the same time, makes it very easy to shrug off the faults the game clearly has like pathfinding, balance and some questionable map/mission design that requires trial and error.

GDI mission 11 is particularly annoying for this reason, you start with a MCV and only a few soldiers on a beach where three NOD turrets immediately open fire on you and a light tank also comes to say hi. You have three possible directions to go, one takes you straight to an ambushing flame tank and thats effectively immediate game over, one path takes you to the right direction and the third path takes you for a looparound that takes you right back. Once you have taken the correct path by luck or trial and error and dealt with the pursuing light tank without getting your few soldiers run over by it, then you need to find a tiberium field so you can start building your base. It's not far but can still require some trial and error, I didn't consciously remember where it was but subconsciously I clearly did and was lead directly to there by a hunch.

But the mission still has a surprise in store! As I started to build my base a damn flame tank shows up and ruins my day, I didn't yet have defences to deal with that. Okay, so I need to double time to get a tank or two as early as possible and that's what I do. Except now the flame tank doesn't show up. What does show up is a large infantry attack force that my two medium tanks couldn't win against. The hell? Well, it turns out that earlier flame tank is just sitting on a bridge north of the tiberium field and my harvester wandered too close to it. Solution: keep the harvester on the southern part of the tiberium field and build two guard towers to deal with the attacking infantry. Smooth sailing after that. I'm not a fan of this kind of mission design or trial and error in general, never touched the expansions for C&C and Red Alert for this reason.

Pathfinding also caused both frustration and hilarity, on one mission I noticed two of my harvesters had stopped on a bridge to have a staring contest neither willing to back up, this happened twice and I wasn't happy about it. But what was much more funny was how I noticed on the last mission NOD just stopped attacking for some reason and let me build up my forces in peace. I wondered had they already somehow managed to run out of tiberium only to find a huge traffic jam on the path to their main base when I was ready to attack 🤣

So yeah, it's not a perfect game, but I love it nevertheless. Now I'm contemplating should I start a NOD playthrough, which I've done only once before and don't remember liking it very much, or move on to Red Alert and finally beat the Allied campaing which I've never done. Or concentrate on Neverwinter Nights for a while to get the OC done so I can move on to more fun things there.

Sombrero wrote on 2022-10-22, 08:35:

Pathfinding also caused both frustration and hilarity, on one mission I noticed two of my harvesters had stopped on a bridge to have a staring contest neither willing to back up, this happened twice and I wasn't happy about it. But what was much more funny was how I noticed on the last mission NOD just stopped attacking for some reason and let me build up my forces in peace. I wondered had they already somehow managed to run out of tiberium only to find a huge traffic jam on the path to their main base when I was ready to attack 🤣

I have similar memories from back in the day. It's especially fun when this happens to the enemy, as you've described. 🤣

Or concentrate on Neverwinter Nights for a while to get the OC done so I can move on to more fun things there.

If you're still planning on playing the first NWN expansion, that one starts off at level 1. You're not supposed to import your character from the main game. However, I think you are canonically meant to import the character from exp1 to exp2, since the plot resumes from there.

Sombrero wrote on 2022-10-22, 08:35:

...or move on to Red Alert and finally beat the Allied campaing which I've never done.

Hmm but then Red Alert has those damn special forces missions where you have to sneak around with that annoying jackass who can blow stuff up and snipe - I have a lot of nostalgia for both Red Alert and C&C but I think both games are at their best when they leave you alone on one side of the map to get set up and then engage when you're ready.

I vote for Red Alert Allies campaign. The maps design is really improved compared to the GDI campaign, and same for the FMVs.

badmojo wrote on 2022-10-22, 08:49:

Sombrero wrote on 2022-10-22, 08:35:

...or move on to Red Alert and finally beat the Allied campaing which I've never done.

Hmm but then Red Alert has those damn special forces missions where you have to sneak around with that annoying jackass who can blow stuff up and snipe - I have a lot of nostalgia for both Red Alert and C&C but I think both games are at their best when they leave you alone on one side of the map to get set up and then engage when you're ready.

Tania is so overpowered those missions are really easy compared to what is described above, or even compared to the commando mission in the GDI campaign.

Their are some timed missions where you have to find your path with only a few precious soldiers. Those are not good for one's blood pressure. I found them fun and refreshing back in the day.
Now that I'm older, I have less patience towards them. But, it's still one or two missions overall, thankfully.

badmojo wrote on 2022-10-22, 08:49:

Sombrero wrote on 2022-10-22, 08:35:

...or move on to Red Alert and finally beat the Allied campaing which I've never done.

Hmm but then Red Alert has those damn special forces missions where you have to sneak around with that annoying jackass who can blow stuff up and snipe - I have a lot of nostalgia for both Red Alert and C&C but I think both games are at their best when they leave you alone on one side of the map to get set up and then engage when you're ready.

I agree 100%, precisely the reason why I haven't finished the Allied campaign and beat the NOD campaign only once! They are more gimmicky and force you to use weaker units while GDI/Soviet campaigns usually let you just build up, listen to awesome soundtrack and kick some butt.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-10-22, 08:48:

If you're still planning on playing the first NWN expansion, that one starts off at level 1. You're not supposed to import your character from the main game. However, I think you are canonically meant to import the character from exp1 to exp2, since the plot resumes from there.

Yeah, I'm not looking forward to starting from lvl 1 again, NWN's combat system isn't the most engaging thing ever to begin with and in OC the first 5 or so levels could render insomniacs to the verge of coma. Thankfully it's gotten a bit better now with levels and better gear. The campaign is still written by a high schooler though.