badmojo wrote on 2022-03-12, 09:41:

newtmonkey wrote on 2022-03-11, 03:49:

Elden Ring

This looks great and I'm looking forward to it. My daughter's been loving it - she nor I usually persists with difficult combat which is why I've never bothered with the Souls games, but it's a lot of fun apparently. I'll need to wait for the price of graphics cards to come down before I try it though.

Make sure you aren't judging graphics requirements based on using fullscreen. Switched from fullscreen to borderless on my 1080ti and gained 30fps. Think I remember reading somewhere where the devs weren't going to bother fixing fullscreen which is hilarious since that's what the game defaulted on for me. Now I'm playing at 50+fps at 3840x1600. Had to use Elden Ring FPS Unlocker to get ultrawide resolutions as well. Sigh, the laziness of console devs never ceases.

What annoys me about this game is I'm never going to remember if I cleared a place or not. Since I'm too weak I'm running around with the horse discovering locations, I guess when I'm strong enough I'll go back and slowly go through and get everything.

Oh Golberg Steam Emu works fine with this game if you don't like the Steam requirement. 😀

Thanks for the tip - I never do borderless so wouldn't have thought of that. There's a co-op option apparently and my kid wants to try it out so I might have to man up and play with low frame rates for a while.

DosFreak wrote on 2022-03-12, 17:44:

Make sure you aren't judging graphics requirements based on using fullscreen. Switched from fullscreen to borderless on my 1080t […]
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badmojo wrote on 2022-03-12, 09:41:

newtmonkey wrote on 2022-03-11, 03:49:

Elden Ring

This looks great and I'm looking forward to it. My daughter's been loving it - she nor I usually persists with difficult combat which is why I've never bothered with the Souls games, but it's a lot of fun apparently. I'll need to wait for the price of graphics cards to come down before I try it though.

Make sure you aren't judging graphics requirements based on using fullscreen. Switched from fullscreen to borderless on my 1080ti and gained 30fps. Think I remember reading somewhere where the devs weren't going to bother fixing fullscreen which is hilarious since that's what the game defaulted on for me. Now I'm playing at 50+fps at 3840x1600. Had to use Elden Ring FPS Unlocker to get ultrawide resolutions as well. Sigh, the laziness of console devs never ceases.

What annoys me about this game is I'm never going to remember if I cleared a place or not. Since I'm too weak I'm running around with the horse discovering locations, I guess when I'm strong enough I'll go back and slowly go through and get everything.

Oh Golberg Steam Emu works fine with this game if you don't like the Steam requirement. 😀

They dont expect you to get everything is one run, in fact its pretty much impossible depending on choices you make during the game.
So my advice is to sit back and enjoy the game and get used to dying, in fact you should try and like dying as each death here will teach you something about what killed you.

I took my own advice here as previous From games became rage quit fests for me till I learned that playing like that just made me hate the game, this go around has been far more enjoyable.

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror
I go back and forth on this one. It pretty much eliminates everything I like about playing RPGs, and what it offers instead of that sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't.

On first glance it looks like a pretty typical RPG. You have a large world to explore, dungeons to clear, monsters to slay, and NPCs to get information from. However, you earn EXP only from completing quests and "boss" monsters. The game goes even one step further than this; if you leave a dungeon without killing the boss, most if not all enemies respawn. On top of that, you gain nothing from slaying regular enemies. You do, however, the dungeon state, so any doors you've unlocked stay unlocked, etc.

The intent was to eliminate "grinding" but I think this was a failure. First of all, in my experience, very few RPGs *require* grinding. Second of all, this is the very definition of grinding, as every single battle you fight is pretty much meaningless; what's worse, if you get low on resources and have to retreat, you basically just completely wasted your time. The game also has basically no loot whatsoever. Instead, you typically will find resources used to develop your forts. Instead of finding, say, a magic sword in a treasure chest guarded by a dragon, you'll find a couple logs of wood and a stone block. You use these to build vendors in forts, and having multiple vendors of the same type allows you to purchase higher level equipment.

So far, the overall structure of the game is very repetitive. You start in the center of the map, and there are nations to the west, south, and east. You need to clear a dungeon to get into each area, and from there you build a fort, clear mines to get resources, and then repeat in another direction.

It all "works" (i.e. it's no broken), but it's definitely my least favorite Spiderweb Software game so far. There's also a huge disconnect between the premise of the game (you represent the most powerful kingdom in the world, and are sent to convince/threaten/negotiate with vassals to reestablish power) and what you actually do (stab spiders and goblins to death in mines). Having said that, there is something addictive about the formula used here, and it's always a bit exciting to exit a dungeon and get a report on your next shipment of resources, so that you can go and upgrade your forts.

newtmonkey wrote on 2022-03-13, 17:03:

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror
However, you earn EXP only from completing quests and "boss" monsters. The game goes even one step further than this; if you leave a dungeon without killing the boss, most if not all enemies respawn. On top of that, you gain nothing from slaying regular enemies.

The Realms of Arkania series uses a similar system. The first time you face a new enemy (never encountered before), you get a small amount of EXP. Subsequent battles with same enemy gain no EXP (only their loot). The rest of EXP is gained from completing quests. It certainly has an effect on how you approach areas with potential enemies. Stealth and diplomacy become actual tactics.

clueless1 wrote on 2022-03-13, 18:11:

The Realms of Arkania series uses a similar system. The first time you face a new enemy (never encountered before), you get a small amount of EXP. Subsequent battles with same enemy gain no EXP (only their loot). The rest of EXP is gained from completing quests. It certainly has an effect on how you approach areas with potential enemies. Stealth and diplomacy become actual tactics.

I think the system in QW could work if stealth and diplomacy are options. Unfortunately, dungeons are generally just linear tracks that circle back to the start, so there is no way to avoid battles (they always occur in fixed areas).

Pathfinder: Kingmaker
I am almost done with "House At The Edge of Time" and that means I'm probably about to start the final chapter. I've done a mostly blind playthrough of this, but even so I knew that companion quests decided who lived and who died as you went into the final chapter. I am happy to say that my favorite (and to be honest the only interesting) companion Nok-Nok has made it. The only other companion that I even remotely liked, Ekundayo did not. Why? Because at one point my other companions wanted to throw a birthday party for him, and being a brooding Lawful Evil priestess of the Goddess of Death whose only goal is to cheat death by becoming undead I said "No." I promise to throw a party to commemorate his death though. Interestingly enough, one of the companions I actually did all his questline for, Jubilost, also bit it. I must have missed some weird game-logic choice or another, at some point. Even more interestingly, my two wizards - Octavia and Regongar also survived. Earlier in the game I made them let innocent people burn to death in order to exact personal revenge, and the experience pushed one to become mentally unstable and the other to be ruthlessly evil. I was almost sure they would kill each other, but they came out unscathed - they had gone through too much shit in this world together to kill each other, apparently. This made two previously completely forgettable companions a lot more endearing to me. Now I need to finish this game and give it my final verdict. Spoiler Alert: It's a very uneven and overly long experience.

Avernum: Escape from the Pit

Gaming time is still hard to come by lately. I'm getting between 3-6 hours a week in, which makes progress slow. Currently I have 40 hours into this game over 44 days. It is getting more fun and interesting each time I play, though. I have settled on Normal difficulty with the occasional switch to Casual during more difficult boss combats. The story is decent enough, though far from gripping. Lots of quests to be had, but most of them are just fetch or kill quests that serve to grow XP and loot. There is a good Quest Log that helps you remember which quests you're working on and the world map nicely highlights where your open quests are. Character development is a highlight, with lots of ways to choose to distribute skill points, leading to more unique characters as the game progresses. My biggest gripe continues to be in combat. If you aren't very careful where you click to move your character or attack, you will waste turns. For example, if you're in a crowded corridor, you can, if you're careful, push past your party members to attack. If you click carelessly, your character will decide to try to go in the opposite direction, though, in an attempt to "go around" to attack the enemy from behind. The trouble is, he'll only make it part of the way before running out of action points and be stuck out of combat range for another turn or two. Even 40 hours in, I still find myself doing this occasionally! My characters are all level 12 (halfway to 13) and slowly gaining more powerful weapons, armor, and spells. It's a great RPG for those who don't have a ton of time. It's easy to get in and out of, or to just play for a few minutes if that's all the time you have. It does not have that addictive gameplay like Wizardry 6-8, KCD, MM4, and Lords of Xulima had for me, so I'm less apt to dive in for 15 minutes here and there. I typically play a couple of hour sessions on Saturday and Sunday mornings or if there's a holiday. So this game may end up taking a long time to finish. If something more exciting comes along (System Shock remake), it won't be hard to set this game aside temporarily or permanently. In other words, just fun enough to keep poking along until something better comes along.

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror
I completed this just now.

Queen's Wish is an attempt to merge kingdom management with classic role-playing game elements such as exploration, combat, and character building. Unfortunately, the kingdom management is too simple, and the role-playing aspects are too repetitive, for it to be considered a true success. Having said that, there are moments in the game where the formula is just right, and you can see the seed of a fantastic game here.

I found combat to be pretty dull. Bows are extremely overpowered, and there's no reason not to give one to each of your characters. Enemies typically just rush straight at you when combat starts, though enemy spellcasters, etc. will of course use their abilities. There are some nice (optional) difficult encounters throughout the game, especially in the final area (which features, by far, the best dungeons in the entire game).

The biggest problem with the game is the overall structure, which is very repetitive and has you fighting through a gate, rebuilding a fort, clearing out mines for resources, and then going to a castle to negotiate with a faction leader. Then you do the same exact thing, so that you can talk to the other faction leader. Then you do all of this again, in two other lands. It's such a slog.

Having said that, the various mechanics—building up forts, unlocking new equipment, attaching runes/augments to equipment, unlocking abilities that have a synergistic effect—all begin to come together toward the middle-end of the game, and it feels quite satisfying.

Overall, it's 20 hours of content stretched out to 35-40 hours. A shorter game with the same exact mechanics/world would have been much better in my opinion, and I hope the developer considers eliminating some of the more repetitive content from the upcoming sequel.

Finished tomb raider 1 unfinished business. I played the regular version a few months ago. I was pleasantly surprised that it had shadows on my voodoo 2, the regular version didn't.

The game itself is not that interesting. I would have liked more pointers so that you felt that the puzzles you solve is for a greater purpose. I mean it feels like I'm pushing rocks and jumping ledges to solve 'this room' but the connection to the greater puzzle was lost to me.

The enemies are more or less thrown at you which imo takes away the suspense that the regular game had.

The regular game is really close to my heart, especially the part that was in the demo. To the end it was quite eerie,

The unfinished bussines levels don't really add anything to the game imo, it's just some more levels that were somewhat sloppily thrown together. It did include a calendar, probably written as a joke, on a coffee break.

Continuing my traitorous non-PC jaunt through Nintendo classics of yore, the latest victim has been Zelda: The Minish Cap (again on GBA, via MiSTer). Proudly brought to you by the ancient days of 2004.

It was good. Not a hugely long game, I guess I spent about 20 hours on it.

My meandering progression through the Zelda games is happening not entirely, but somewhat, in reverse. This has the interesting effect of bringing the core Zelda mechanics, which by the later games have fancied-out quite a bit, into sharper focus as I progress back towards the simpler founding games. The origin of the popularity becomes clear. Shigeru Miyamoto is The Man for designing such an incredible set of core game mechanics in the Zelda series, and if this were his only achievement (it's not, by a long way!) he'd still be deservedly one of the biggest icons in gaming history.

Anyway.. the Minish Cap's flagship additional mechanic is the ability to temporarily shrink down to miniature, to access tiny parts of the environment. Necessary to achieve certain quests and access certain areas and extras. It was generally fun, I was happy with it. In the context of the time and system (GBA), the graphics and sound were good. On MiSTer with the graphics and sound suitably tweaked by modern niceties, e.g. Stereo Mix %, inbuilt scanlines/filters, integer scaling, and other features such as Save States and Turbo, it was excellent to play on a modern LCD monitor with a DS4 gamepad.

Joakim wrote on 2022-03-21, 21:09:

Finished tomb raider 1 unfinished business. I played the regular version a few months ago. I was pleasantly surprised that it had shadows on my voodoo 2, the regular version didn't.

I think shadows show up if you use the original 3DFX patch and are missing when using the Voodoo Rush patch. Not sure which one of those two patches the Voodoo2 supports.

The unfinished bussines levels don't really add anything to the game imo, it's just some more levels that were somewhat sloppily thrown together. It did include a calendar, probably written as a joke, on a coffee break.

Agreed. UB just feels like filler content, with less engaging environments compared to the original game.

It was my birthday recently and a friend got me Steins;Gate 0, so I've started playing that. Interesting sequel: instead of following directly after the original game, it opens with a recreation of a scene from near the end of the first's best ending, but things go a bit differently and the story diverges from there. Pretty good so far despite the very different tone (Steins;Gate got pretty dark by the end of it, but 0 is fairly downbeat right from the start with far less comic relief).

I also replayed Tyrian 2000 again last week. Still really like that game no matter how many times I go back to it, and I wish there were more shmups with that style of freeform loadout customization.

Finished playing Powerslave Exhumed, this is not the original PC game but a new port of the console versions (it contains content from both the Saturn and Playstation versions, making it the "definitive edition"). Playing through it was much nicer than playing it on the Saturn due to mouse/keyboard controls.
Not too long ago I played and finished the original PC DOS version as well, both are totally different games. The PC version was made using the Build engine and you play the levels in a linear way, ammo is specific for each weapon and powerups are temporary boosts you can use when needed (similar to other build games like Duke Nukem 3D).
The console version uses a proprietary engine and it is a whole different beast... its has a metroidvania style (powerups are permanent and there is a lot of backtracking between levels) and ammo is a "generic" powerup, basically you get blue orbs which will fill the weapon you are currently carrying. In my opinion the console version is the better game due to its originality despite the PC version still being very good.

It's always a bit of thrill for me when I complete a game, as I typically then spend a couple hours just trying out different games to determine what next to complete.

Having completed Queen's Wish: The Conqueror the other day, I tried a few games. Here are my thoughts:

Encased
This RPG is very clearly influenced by Fallout 1/2, and in some respects is a better follow up to Fallout 2 than the actual Fallout 3. There's not much to say so far; it plays almost exactly like Fallout 1/2, even down to character generation, combat, and skill checks during dialog or when interacting with objects. The interface, however, is much better than F1/2.
Even though it is described on its Steam page as a "Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG," it feels more like a retro-future type of game, as it takes place in an alternate version of the 1970s. It's interesting enough in my opinion.
So far, I am enjoying this. I've read that it really falls apart during the second half due to lack of budget to properly complete the game, but we'll see.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister
This game was an attempt to create a turn-based somewhat tactical RPG based on the 5th edition D&D rules, but has extensive creation tools akin to Neverwinter Nights. I know absolutely nothing about D&D 5, but it seems close enough to the AD&D I'm familiar with from the Gold Box games. I must admit, the game feels very clunky. You can't scroll the camera around the environment with the mouse, and instead have to use WASD to do so. You can rotate the camera around. I really don't like having to move the camera around with the keyboard while controlling everything else with the mouse; am I playing an FPS here 🤣. The first hour or so of the game is also very dull, with some boring linear tutorial and really awful dialog. It then drops you in a city and tells you to walk over to some building for a briefing. Normally that's fine, but my patience was already tested by this point, and it seemed annoying; why not just put me there already, so I can get on with the game?
I'll put this one aside for now to revisit later.

Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory
Very disappointing. This is an isometric RPG with realtime-with-pause combat, akin to Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, etc. The problem is that the combat is probably the worst RTwP combat I've ever experienced, the game is extremely linear, and there is basically no role-playing at all. You have a hub area, but can't interact with anything. Instead, you just wake up each day, get your mission, go do it, and then sleep. It's just a linear chain of missions so far. It's a PC-only title, but feels like playing a mobile game; it just feels cheap, though some of the environments look decent enough.
Having said that, it can be pretty funny and the missions have clearly had some thought put into them (though they play out completely linearly).
It's apparently a very short game, so I do plan on finishing it. Hopefully it gets a bit better soon.

I've been paying the half life games as of recent, and my eye for vintage hardware has made me faintly aware of Valve having more than a few Pentium 4 machines in their offices, a freely usable-for-photos slot-1 motherboard, and some Asus CD drives. It's hilarious to be able to see it despite the texture resolution in Half Life 2.

still in this heck but hey look i've got the hat finally!

leileilol wrote on 2022-03-24, 23:05:

still in this heck but hey look i've got the hat finally!

gosh, you mean those character classes don't already start with that hat in PSO2?

nope, pso2 has had these hats as premium items exchanged with premium ragol memory, which recently had a limited time giveaway keyword (After no way of getting such for the first time).

Oh, THAT figures... Well, it's good to see it's appearances hasn't changed much at all at least!