clueless1 wrote on 2021-10-15, 20:53:

What are your PC specs?

Too old for modern gaming. It's an Intel i5 5550 with 16 GB DDR3 and a lowly GeForce GTX650 Ti.

I did plan on buying a Ryzen based system last year, but then the pandemic happened, and hardware prices went through the roof. At this point, it's more likely that I'll get one of the new consoles than upgrade my PC.

Finished the original 3-episode Heretic. Now starting the expansion pack...man it's difficult even the very first mission.

I'm still trying to decide on my next game, and I'm feeling an RPG. I'm sort of swapping between Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age Inquisition and Morrowind on three different systems...

Having a lot of fun with Thief: TDP. In some ways, the technology used in this game was really ahead of its time. Being able to extinguish torches in order to create shadows was remarkable in '98. Positional audio which allows you to hear guards as they approach around the corner is superb as well.

Some minor caveats. I wish the game didn't have so many zombies and other undead. They just aren't as fun to skulk around as human opponents, and they can't be permanently disposed of unless you use some very specific and rare resources. At least on Expert difficulty, which is what I'm playing on.

Also, Garrett controls great while he's on the ground. But the moment he steps on a ladder, or needs to jump from one platform to another, it feels like you're playing as an arthritic grandpa instead of a master thief. Platforming segments usually suck in first-person games, and especially so when you need to fight the controls to do something mundane like climb onto a 30 cm ledge.

To be fair, if we compare TDP to the most recent Thief, TDP is ahead of this time too 😁

I also played through the their series maybe 10 years ago at highest difficulty, it was fun. Tried the most recent thief game a few months ago but I didn't care for it.

I am still playing Jedi Knight 1 and it is very good. I just passed the fuel depot and this is the level I remembered from my childhood as it was in the demo as well. Really cool level design but still too many enemies. Sometimes they are placed just to annoy the player as well. :-p

67 hours into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and I hit level 20 after completing first DLC. I still have not progressed in the main quest beyond the first chapter, and kind of wrapped up every sidequest/task I could find instead. It kind of became a bit tedious after a while, but now I am quite ready to basically steamroll the rest of the game. Which won't be that much fun, to be honest. This game, compared to the original, has some serious pacing issues. It lacks a sense of urgency that the plot hints at being there - after all the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you know.. Yet you can take your sweet time hunting bounties and doing fetch quests for petty criminals. I really want to like it, and I mean I like it in a lot of ways but I can see why the reception was not as great as the initial Kickstarter effort. People wanted a Baldur's Gate II from this, but to be honest PoE was a BG2, so Obsidian decided to go beyond, and when they did, they didn't always improve the experience..

I played some Halo: Combat Evolved. It's coming up to 20 years since its release.

Its easy to take for granted that Halo really is well rounded and full of features that were still new back then

I like the environment and the scale of the Halo too, plus the mysteries - though the occasionally comedic 'space marines' and some of the aliens do kind of break the spell now and then - but at least their ai seems good

I'm playing Alone in the Dark 2 right now. It definitely has some problems but I actually don't mind the combat that much. I do have to consult a walkthrough here and there. Considering the fact that the very first thing the game throws at you is a hedge maze I'm somewhat impressed that I haven't dropped it yet. Some of the puzzles are straightforward and sensible and then there are some that...have me shaking my head. In the underground passage in the hedge maze you get attacked by a pulsating ghostly spectre with tentacles. There's actually a similar bit in the first game when you enter the library. Anyway, here the solution is not to get a special weapon to get rid of the ghost, or simply dodge it (which, unfortunately, is possible and somewhat misleading), but rather to just shoot it straight in the face. *Not* good puzzle design, Infogrames. When dealing with a ghostly shade my first instinct is to run and not to clap it.

Regardless, I still somehow like Aitd2. The hand-drawn backgrounds still look very good in my book, creepy hedge-faces, decaying Gilded Age interiors, vodoo and everything. The adlib music is very listenable and appropriately spooky and even though I'm shooting gangsters with a tommy gun while dressed up as Santa Claus, the game still has a good deal of atmosphere. This stuff had us on the edge of our seats when we were 10 years old, and parts of the gameplay with it's frustratingly slow movements and oblique camera angles still conveys that initial horror of being utterly Alone in the Dark.

Demon's Winter (Apple II)

This is a childhood favorite of mine from back on the C64, though I never got very far at all back then. I did get quite a ways into the C64 version a year back or so (on actual hardware, using an Ultimate II with images taken from original disks [not cracked]), but ran into a critical issue: every once in a while the game would glitch out when saving, corrupting my game disk. Since the game saves the world/character state to the game disk, this is obviously a huge problem!

I ended up finding some Apple II .woz images of the original disks, so I decided to start over, this time on my Apple IIc with Floppy Emu disk emulator hardware. Floppy Emu has issues with some copy-protected .woz/.nib disk images, but luckily Demon's Winter requires you to create your own standard disk images from the original game disks; I was able to load the .woz images up in AppleWin and create a set of .dsk images to use on my actual hardware.

I spent a half an hour or so creating my party, ventured forth, and saved my game. That was enough for today!

henryVK wrote on 2021-10-18, 13:27:

I'm playing Alone in the Dark 2 right now. It definitely has some problems but I actually don't mind the combat that much. I do have to consult a walkthrough here and there. Considering the fact that the very first thing the game throws at you is a hedge maze I'm somewhat impressed that I haven't dropped it yet. Some of the puzzles are straightforward and sensible and then there are some that...have me shaking my head. In the underground passage in the hedge maze you get attacked by a pulsating ghostly spectre with tentacles. There's actually a similar bit in the first game when you enter the library. Anyway, here the solution is not to get a special weapon to get rid of the ghost, or simply dodge it (which, unfortunately, is possible and somewhat misleading), but rather to just shoot it straight in the face. *Not* good puzzle design, Infogrames. When dealing with a ghostly shade my first instinct is to run and not to clap it.

Regardless, I still somehow like Aitd2. The hand-drawn backgrounds still look very good in my book, creepy hedge-faces, decaying Gilded Age interiors, vodoo and everything. The adlib music is very listenable and appropriately spooky and even though I'm shooting gangsters with a tommy gun while dressed up as Santa Claus, the game still has a good deal of atmosphere. This stuff had us on the edge of our seats when we were 10 years old, and parts of the gameplay with it's frustratingly slow movements and oblique camera angles still conveys that initial horror of being utterly Alone in the Dark.

Even though I like the first game I've noped out from the sequel in record time every time I've tried it. Not a fan of the combat, thanks to the clunky controls and deadly enemies I find it frustratingly difficult.

I don't know, maybe I should try to give it a fair chance one of these days.

Sombrero wrote on 2021-10-18, 18:09:

Even though I like the first game I've noped out from the sequel in record time every time I've tried it. Not a fan of the combat, thanks to the clunky controls and deadly enemies I find it frustratingly difficult.

I don't know, maybe I should try to give it a fair chance one of these days.

Yes, the combat is just plain weird. It's not just difficult, it's confusing and there are several factors at work that are worth looking at:

Fighting the clunky controls (how the f*** can it be that running works only 1 out of 10 or so tries??) is one thing but the other is that it's just entirely unbalanced and the game doesn't telegraph which way it's going to go at any point. For instance, there's the taxonomy of enemies: shotgun guys (and even the big akimbo enemies) are, in theory, stupidly easy to defeat because they can't hit you when you're less than a step away; just keep super close to them and headbutt. If you manage to pin them to a wall or obstacle they just stay stunlocked. Btw, for all it's seeming obliqueness, the game is aware that player needs to know where a given shot has hit and indicates this with a little puff of particles. Now, Thompson dudes otoh are fairly deadly because, unless you get the draw on them first with the tommy gun, they stunlock you and you're dead. You can outrun their aim but once they have a bead on you they fire faster than Carnby can recover from.

Multiple enemies is where it get interesting because there *is* friendly fire, or at least Thompson dudes seem to be able to hit other enemies. At the beginning of the game you can dodge the gaggle of enemies outside the main entrance and duck into the hedge maze right away. If you walk back up to the screen with the two statues at the maze's entrance, the Thompson guy from across the way will start shooting at you, killing the pistol guy standing closest to the statues. Fighting multiple enemies is only really feasible with a choke point or obstacle. I was only able to defeat the horde of enemies in the first floor living room by funneling them through the room's narrow door into the sitting area off the hall. In this scene the game also decides to introduce yet another element, i.e. a big enemy that apparently can kill you in one shot unless you have the right item: a bulletproof vest. Imho this is in line with the library scene from AitD 1 as well as adventure game mechanics in general (as in "use item x to achive y") but entirely incongruous with the game's aforemetioned basement spectre encounter.

This is what I mean with the lack of telegraphing. That big mobster doesn't look "special" because you have encountered several up to this point, none of which were very hard to kill. He doesn't even stand out from the enemies around him. The spectre otoh has so far been unique -- graphically as well as how it shows up, moves and acts -- but the player can easily dispatch it with the starting pistol. In order to kill the big mobster you not only have to have the right item, you also have to funnel his crew through the door just so *and* you have to use the Thompson because, at least in my game, he manages to get one shot in (which would be deadly without the vest) before he's stunlocked and any further hit from him kills the player instantly.

Anyway, looking at what can be tentatively referred to AitD2's "formula", I can't help but wonder how the combat in particular compares to the series' cousins like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Unfortunately, I haven't played either of them but maybe after I finish AitD3 I should have a look at them.

henryVK wrote on 2021-10-19, 08:13:

Anyway, looking at what can be tentatively referred to AitD2's "formula", I can't help but wonder how the combat in particular compares to the series' cousins like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Unfortunately, I haven't played either of them but maybe after I finish AitD3 I should have a look at them.

RE1&2 are among my personal favorite games and I heartily recommend them, though I must admit a great deal of nostalgia is at play there. I do still replay them every couple years. That said I've never tried the PC versions, I play them on PS1. I'm under the impression the PC version of RE1 is not great (audio quality has issues or something?) but the sequel should be ok. RE3 is the point where the series started to go down hill if you ask me.

The combat is very similar to AitD1 actually, enemies are mostly melee only and you can just stand and shoot. No hand to hand combat and the knife you have is only in case you run out of ammo, which is something you do need to worry about in RE1 but less in RE2, the sequel is much more of a shooter than the first game.

Can't say much about Silent Hill games as I don't really care for them. They are clearly good games and they have way better plot than RE games (note: RE1 is VERY campy, embrase the cheesines!), but I just find them clunky and I do not like having to stumble around darkness. As much that contributes to atmosphere at the same time I find it irritating, I'd like to see the game I'm playing. Still, you should check them out even though I do not like them, the first two are considered classics for a reason.

henryVK wrote on 2021-10-19, 08:13:

Anyway, looking at what can be tentatively referred to AitD2's "formula", I can't help but wonder how the combat in particular compares to the series' cousins like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Unfortunately, I haven't played either of them but maybe after I finish AitD3 I should have a look at them.

Both of those series hold up pretty well in my opinion, though I personally prefer Silent Hill for its more subtle psychological approach to horror over Resident Evil's Hollywood-style sci-fi horror. Just a matter of taste, really.
For Silent Hill, the PC port of 2 (the best one, imo) is rare but worth tracking down for the extensive "Enhanced Edition" mod. I used that for my most recent run through it and it will definitely be my preferred version going forward. 3 has some improvement mods as well, but nothing nearly as extensive, and the PC port of 4 is outright missing content from the PS2 original (there are several hauntings--one of the game's defining features--just outright missing for no reason). The first four are pretty universally agreed to be the only good SH games, though I would argue Shattered Memories has its moments.
In the case of Resident Evil 1 (assuming you want the original and not the remake), you might have the best experience either finding a copy of or just emulating the DS port ("Deadly Silence") for its extra content and especially quality of life improvements that no other version has. 2-4 (and Code: Veronica) you can't really go wrong with any version. Skip 5 and 6; 5 is only okay and 6 is dire.
If I'm being honest, I'd rather play a Silent Hill or a Resident Evil over an Alone in the Dark. I've got mad respect for AitD's influence, but as an adult with limited free time for gaming, I don't have the patience for its obtuse puzzle design and sudden instant death traps. Seinfeld Syndrome, I guess; the problem with doing something first is that all too often someone else will come along later and do it better.

Over the halfway mark in Blood 2: The Chosen. It's long since stopped tickling my inner adolescent 90's edge lord, although it sometimes has it's moments. Often in the descriptions of the levels during the transition screens.

I marginally regret dropping the difficulty down, because easy is just completely brain dead. But then again medium was proving obscenely difficult with all the enemies scoring instant hit scan mortal wounds the precise moment I round corners. I guess there just wasn't a happy medium. And the level design is simply not inspired enough to bare the weight of such mediocre combat on easy mode.

I guess on the bright side, it'll be easy to finish, take my trophy photo, and move onto something else. Like perhaps Quake 2. Or an RPG like Might & Magic VI.

Just played through two FMV games tonight. First the PC/DOS version of Night Trap and lastly the DVD game version of Thayer's Quest. Had fun playing both. The later was also released under the name Kingdom the Far Reaches on PC/DOS, CD-i and 3DO, but I'm really not a fan of those versions because they completely changed the audio for the worse imo.

Namrok wrote on 2021-10-21, 01:47:

I marginally regret dropping the difficulty down, because easy is just completely brain dead. But then again medium was proving obscenely difficult with all the enemies scoring instant hit scan mortal wounds the precise moment I round corners. I guess there just wasn't a happy medium. And the level design is simply not inspired enough to bare the weight of such mediocre combat on easy mode.

Take what I say with a grain of salt because I never looked at the source code for Blood 2 but I'm willing to bet the player damage multipliers are the same between it and Shogo. (where Hard makes the player take the same amount of damage from the AI they would dish out themselves to)

Finally finished with Thief:TDP. My impressions are kinda mixed.

All the missions where Garrett was taking on human opponents were brilliant. But the ones that pitted him against a horde of zombies just weren't enjoyable for me. It didn't feel like I was playing a thief. More like Ash from Evil Dead, but with far less combat prowess.

Nonetheless, the game was pretty decent overall, and I had a good time during the non-zombie missions.

Greedfall.

Really appreciating the quest writing/design thus far -- specifically the lack of fetch quests. Gorgeous looking game world too... to where I've been using walk-mode in most places.

I haven't been back to Breath of the Wild for a week or two, not hugely motivated to do the endgame. That's no fault of the game, as I spent several weeks of hugely-enjoyed play time with it. I simply feel that I now know the game and it's formulas too well, all the discovery has been done, there are no mysteries any more, and so a certain repetitiveness or grind has finally set in. It feels a waste to continue under that attitude, and I'm about the journey-not-the-destination, so I don't particularly mind about delaying the Finishing Proper. Thus I need to set it aside, and come back another time to tie up the loose ends. A conceit afforded by luxury! 😉

Continuing with Lost Vikings 2 for the SNES, it's going well. Just finished a level named H4RD, and it did somewhat live up to it's name. These games are not overly difficult, in the sense that you simply need to keep moving your pieces forward until they can go no more, then find "the one thing it's possible to advance", but when you add in the elements of platform twitchiness and timing, it can be a bit of a dance to get there. But it's a fun and balanced gaming dynamic which is easy to pick up and puzzle away an hour.

I like to have both an older game and a newer game on-the-go simultaneously, switching between them as the want arises. With BOTW shelved for the moment, and in keeping with my tendency to be several years behind trend, it is now Super Mario Odyssey time - I'm about 6 hours in. Like BOTW, it's clearly quite a stunningly well-polished title, and it wasn't long before a section which beautifully morphed gameplay between 2D and 3D visuals (and music!) had me gaping in impressed admiration. The dynamic introduced by use of Cappy, and the control of various creatures, is a genius system. The resulting continual stream of short-lived unique play styles is creatively reminiscent of the excellent SM Galaxy games.

The beauty of growing up without a certain brand (my childhood household never had Nintendo gear at all, and my adult self continued that trend for a long time) is the later privilege of being able to traverse a multi-decade multi-system back catalog of excellence at leisure! Hence, my past couple years of eventual Nintendo catchup has been very intense!