Bruninho wrote on 2023-11-07, 17:32:

Testing some games on M1 Max Mac Studio before I even try a G29 steering wheel on it. […]
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Testing some games on M1 Max Mac Studio before I even try a G29 steering wheel on it.

Automobilista 2 through Game Porting Toolkit, and Assetto Corsa through Windows 11 ARM64 Parallels Desktop VM.

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It's kind of funny how well GPTK alone can work. Well, so long as you don't try something that's heavy on a small number of cores. I can run Cyberpunk better at max than I can run Guild Wars 2 on my M2P Macbook Pro.

I started playing This Is The Police. This is a masterpiece AFAIC. Fantastic game.

BetaC wrote on 2023-11-08, 08:15:

Bruninho wrote on 2023-11-07, 17:32:

Testing some games on M1 Max Mac Studio before I even try a G29 steering wheel on it. […]
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Testing some games on M1 Max Mac Studio before I even try a G29 steering wheel on it.

Automobilista 2 through Game Porting Toolkit, and Assetto Corsa through Windows 11 ARM64 Parallels Desktop VM.

Screenshot_2023-10-30_at_21.png

Screenshot_2023-10-30_at_11.png

It's kind of funny how well GPTK alone can work. Well, so long as you don't try something that's heavy on a small number of cores. I can run Cyberpunk better at max than I can run Guild Wars 2 on my M2P Macbook Pro.

Yes, GPTK is absurdly good. I am also testing windows version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it (yes, I am aware of the mac port, but it is a test)

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-11-08, 03:16:

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction I completed the base game earlier this year and was going to save the expansion for next year... […]
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Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
I completed the base game earlier this year and was going to save the expansion for next year... but it felt weird to not complete the entire game in the same year 🤣.

Anyway, I started playing LoD. So far, I'm not sure that I like it. It looks great (I'm still impressed with the "Perspective Mode," which makes this 2D game look convincingly 3D) but the soundtrack so far is even more boring than the soundtrack of the base game. I get what they were going for, but this kind of high fantasy soundtrack just does not work with Diablo II imo.

The first couple of areas so far combine the worst of Act I (massive but empty spaces) and Act III (tons of tiny, fast enemies that constantly run away from you requiring you to chase them down). I've also not found any equipment upgrades whatsoever at around (I'm guessing) 25% into the expansion, which seems nuts; in fact, mostly everything I find is just standard equipment (not even magic!). Really strange.

Huh, the loot you say you are finding in Act V sounds off from my very distant recollection. I remember it being a smorgasbord of upgrades back in the day. "Bloody runs" in the Bloody Foothills were an extremely reliable means of farming exp and decent loot drops. What version are you playing? I wonder if they got nerfed at some point.

Namrok wrote on 2023-11-08, 15:33:

Huh, the loot you say you are finding in Act V sounds off from my very distant recollection. I remember it being a smorgasbord of upgrades back in the day. "Bloody runs" in the Bloody Foothills were an extremely reliable means of farming exp and decent loot drops. What version are you playing? I wonder if they got nerfed at some point.

I'm playing v1.14D. Maybe I've just had bad luck in the first few areas?

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-11-09, 03:28:

Namrok wrote on 2023-11-08, 15:33:

Huh, the loot you say you are finding in Act V sounds off from my very distant recollection. I remember it being a smorgasbord of upgrades back in the day. "Bloody runs" in the Bloody Foothills were an extremely reliable means of farming exp and decent loot drops. What version are you playing? I wonder if they got nerfed at some point.

I'm playing v1.14D. Maybe I've just had bad luck in the first few areas?

I'm not getting many search results back. They're just too polluted with people talking about D2: Resurrected, D3 and D4. But I saw some evidence Bloody Runs got nerfed post 1.10. I know I did most of my D2 playing between 1.07 and 1.09. I think that's roughly when the expansion pack first came out, but before synergies were added.

Man, this really drives home to me how much even these old games aren't immune from some form of games as a service. At least I could play Diablo 2 1.00 offline to my hearts content, and experience it just the way I remember it. All the nerfing Blizzard did of popular zones or character skills might have been beneficial for long term meta and player engagement, but really suck if you were trying to play Diablo 2 for the first time and just wanted a fun run through the game on normal difficulty.

Namrok wrote on 2023-11-09, 16:31:

I'm not getting many search results back. They're just too polluted with people talking about D2: Resurrected, D3 and D4. But I saw some evidence Bloody Runs got nerfed post 1.10. I know I did most of my D2 playing between 1.07 and 1.09. I think that's roughly when the expansion pack first came out, but before synergies were added.

Man, this really drives home to me how much even these old games aren't immune from some form of games as a service. At least I could play Diablo 2 1.00 offline to my hearts content, and experience it just the way I remember it. All the nerfing Blizzard did of popular zones or character skills might have been beneficial for long term meta and player engagement, but really suck if you were trying to play Diablo 2 for the first time and just wanted a fun run through the game on normal difficulty.

Yeah, it's very difficult now to search for information on Diablo II, without getting tons of results for D2R.
I'm now more than halfway through LoD, and I only found two worthwhile upgrades so far. 99.9% of drops are common or magic items, which are not even useful for selling!

I first completed Diablo II, then installed the expansion and imported my character into it. I wonder if things would have been different if I had installed the expansion from the start.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Well, I think I'm near the end of this one, since I just discovered the final waypoint. I did end up replacing my belt with a better item, so it wasn't all a waste. I also finally reached a level where I could use some crazy mace I found in base Diablo II; it's a nice weapon, but it costs an insane amount of gold to repair it, and because the attack speed is so fast, it wears out really quickly.

I really haven't been enjoying this expansion so far. Some of the areas look pretty cool, but there's not much variety. You fight the same annoying enemies over and over, basically. There is nothing more frustrating than having a half a dozen tiny enemies constantly running from you whenever they are damaged, requiring you to tediously hunt them down (since they all throw fireballs at you at range). Also frustrating is enemies that gang up on you and freeze you so that you can barely react to anything. In the latter case, I just turn on the freeze protection skill. It's cool that there's a way around it, I guess, but it's basically a case of a bunch of annoying enemies swarming you at all times.

I've found my way back to Chronicles of Myrtana, which is the total conversion mod for Gothic II that came out a couple of years ago. I was reasonably far into a play-through of this but then life got in the way and nearly a year went by somehow, so I've started again.

I'm still loving it this time around. The level design is fantastic and if anything the attention to detail is better than the original games, which makes the world seem so alive and plausible. The questing is generally good and very much along the lines of G1 and G2, so if you enjoyed those games then this will feel right. There are some memorable characters and a huge range of creatures to do battle with - several of which were introduced by this mod.

My only issue with it is the English translation - I have no issues with listening the Polish voice acting and using the subs but either the original writing was amateurish or Google translator was used. I suspect I'm missing out on some humour and nuance due to the very literal and poorly worded phrasing.

Complaining about something I got for free feels more than a little entitled, but I really do love this in general. I might even go so far as to say that I like it more than the originals.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Finished! I actually had made it to the area right before the last boss, without realizing how little game I had left.

I finished Diablo II (w/o expansion) earlier this year, and went away somewhat disappointed. I found the "field" maps to be too big and empty, and several areas were full of tiny, fast enemies that would constantly run away from you, forcing you to chase them down.

I was therefore even more disappointed to find that Act V is basically just more of this. The outdoor maps just seem to go on and on and on, with you fighting the same two or three monsters constantly. Even worse, character development just ceased to exist. I leveled up quite a few times, but adding points to my attributes and skills basically had no effect whatsoever. Enemies and chests dropped mostly normal and magic loot, while I was running around decked out in unique stuff that I had found in the base game. I found upgrades only for my belt and amulet.

It wasn't all bad though. It looks and sounds great (supports EAX!), though the soundtrack is very forgettable. I found it to be far more challenging that the base game, though it was still quite easy on the default difficulty level.

Had a go at playing Holy Hell custom wad on ZDooM but there was to much slow down so left it at that.
Ill have to cross a P4 2.8/GF6200 off the list of possibles.

Two weeks in Elex. A lot of time spent with this game in such a short time. Became Today I became a legate of the clerics. And I had no money for the legate armor. I worked myself up to a point where only the highest tier enemies are a threat. I still can't take them on face to face, but against common enemies I do alright. Finished about half of the companion quests as well, and it looks like they are meant to reset how they feel about me. At least it happened to me 3 out of 3 times. I spent most of my last session in the Domed City. I'd expect the Duke won't like me much once I get back to him. Not that he did in the first place.

Well, I finished Talos Principle 2. 100%'ed it too, unless I missed something. Didn't get all the achievements though, a lot of them require you to solve puzzles in specifically obtuse ways, or take different paths of it's branching story.

I definitely think it was easier than Talos Principle 1. It wasn't unwelcome. Some of the mechanics in the first game were just obnoxious. Like getting blown up by the spheres, or the puzzles where you record yourself doing some shit, and then have to use that recording to do more shit. Getting the timing right on those was always a pain in my ass. Now they just let you control multiple clones for certain puzzles.

At the same time, it took until the very end of the game, on one of the golden door puzzles, for me to finally get the "Spend 20 minutes on a single puzzle" achievement. Maybe I just got really good at the game, but 95% of the puzzles came to me nearly immediately. Although I did have to look up the solutions to two of them. One because I was expected to see something that was approximately 1 pixel large literally halfway across the huge zone I was in, and the other just cause it was late and I was feeling lazy.

That said, while I didn't find most of the puzzles hard, almost every single one had a solution that made me feel appropriately clever. A few I got stumped on because there was some corner case of the game mechanics I wasn't aware of until I started trying wacky shit.

The end of the story was wholesome and a lot more satisfying than the first game. And the last batch of puzzles found one more way to put a twist on everything you'd learned so far. Highly recommend it.

"Restricted Area" a 2003 Diablo clone with Cyberpunk Setting.
Really enjoy that game, a bit of junk but fun to play!

A good moment to advance on my Full Throttle save.

Jackhead wrote on 2023-11-14, 19:28:

"Restricted Area" a 2003 Diablo clone with Cyberpunk Setting.
Really enjoy that game, a bit of junk but fun to play!

i had not heard of it, looks pretty good though so i watched some youtube play too, i think i'd like it !

SpooferJahk wrote on 2013-05-26, 09:58:

Silent Hill 2 (The almighty PC port, got it as a present for myself since it was my birthday recently)

Good choice! (I may be a little biased though 😁)

while testing an older win98 system i played some eGames compilation games!

https://www.mobygames.com/game/71022/galaxy-o … silver-edition/

there were so many compilations like these around from DOS, Win3.1 days up to early mid 2000's

most of the games were forgettable but some were actually fun, original or otherwise memorable. Anyone have a favorite?

i played 'blast thru', one of many breakout close featuring dropped power ups/downs and an editor, it was pretty good actually 😀

Jackhead wrote on 2023-11-14, 19:28:

"Restricted Area" a 2003 Diablo clone with Cyberpunk Setting. Really enjoy that game, a bit of junk but fun to play! […]
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"Restricted Area" a 2003 Diablo clone with Cyberpunk Setting.
Really enjoy that game, a bit of junk but fun to play!

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hey its on steam...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1348880/Restricted_Area/

😜
jk

Well, after nearly 50 hours I just found out I can use old coins in wending machines to buy stuff that are much higher value than what shops pay for the coins. Makes me wonder if I can also use bundles of old world money somewhere. I wasted a lot of resources over these 50 hours.

Also starting to run out of side missions. At level 22 I need to level up some more before I can be promoted again with the clerics.