Meatball wrote on 2023-02-03, 12:48:

I just picked up a tranquilizer gun. What?

When the fans talk about the cerebral bore in Turok 2, they were right. 🙃

leileilol wrote on 2023-02-04, 01:52:

Meatball wrote on 2023-02-03, 12:48:

I just picked up a tranquilizer gun. What?

When the fans talk about the cerebral bore in Turok 2, they were right. 🙃

I've now made it past level 2. I've only fired the Tranquilizer gun once just to see if an enemy would explode after being anesthetized; it didn't (missed opportunity by the developers). Anyway, the game has finally picked up, and the weapons are much better with minimal backtracking in level 3. On to level 4.

Planescape: Torment

Completed! I ended up really enjoying this. It's got a weird yet fascinating world to explore, a great story, excellent writing (in most places), and some of the best pre-rendered graphics you'll find in a game. It's a truly alien world, but the game is excellent at giving you just enough exposition to fill you in, without it really feeling like an exposition dump. I found myself really becoming attached to the characters and their quirks as the adventure went on.

The main quest is generally linear, but has a lot of reactivity. Many quests have multiple solutions, and the choices available to you often depend on your character build, or even on other quests you have and have not done. It would definitely be worth replaying the game with a different character build or with different companions. There are also a lot of optional quests to seek out, and it's very rewarding to do; in addition to earning experience points and unique items, the optional quests really provide a lot of information on the world and characters of Planescape.

The biggest disappointment for me (besides the chaotic and boring combat) was the weird pacing toward the end of the game. The game takes you on an hours-long linear trip through several tiny areas during the last bit of the game, with no access to shops or anything. By the time I got back to the main city I had a ton of money to spend on upgrades for all my characters... but then after buying a bunch of stuff, the next step is the endgame and all the other characters are taken from you!

Anyway, these are just minor issues, and it's worth putting up with them to play the game. Highly recommended!

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-02-04, 07:57:

Planescape: Torment

Completed! I ended up really enjoying this. It's got a weird yet fascinating world to explore, a great story, excellent writing (in most places), and some of the best pre-rendered graphics you'll find in a game. It's a truly alien world, but the game is excellent at giving you just enough exposition to fill you in, without it really feeling like an exposition dump. I found myself really becoming attached to the characters and their quirks as the adventure went on.

The main quest is generally linear, but has a lot of reactivity. Many quests have multiple solutions, and the choices available to you often depend on your character build, or even on other quests you have and have not done. It would definitely be worth replaying the game with a different character build or with different companions. There are also a lot of optional quests to seek out, and it's very rewarding to do; in addition to earning experience points and unique items, the optional quests really provide a lot of information on the world and characters of Planescape.

I'm glad you liked it! If you end up replaying the game you might want to get the cube from the curiosity store and figure out what it is (as you seem to have missed that) and also find yourself a Lady of Pain doll and pray to it repeatedly and see what happens 😉

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-02-04, 07:57:

The biggest disappointment for me (besides the chaotic and boring combat) was the weird pacing toward the end of the game. The game takes you on an hours-long linear trip through several tiny areas during the last bit of the game, with no access to shops or anything. By the time I got back to the main city I had a ton of money to spend on upgrades for all my characters... but then after buying a bunch of stuff, the next step is the endgame and all the other characters are taken from you!

That would be the "we are running out of time and money and need to finish up the game pronto!" part. There's been a couple playthroughts when I just stopped playing after reaching the point where you leave Sigil. I'd love to have seen what the game would have been had the devs have the time and money to do everything they wanted but I guess I should be happy the game exists at all. Plenty of BG style games around but only Torment: Tides of Numenera attempted to be like PS:T but failed hard in my opinion.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-02-04, 08:48:

I'm glad you liked it! If you end up replaying the game you might want to get the cube from the curiosity store and figure out what it is (as you seem to have missed that) and also find yourself a Lady of Pain doll and pray to it repeatedly and see what happens.

Thanks! I actually did have the cube, but never figured out how to use it (I looked up the solution just now). I will probably play PS once more, just to use a different build and select different companions, but will probably give the Enhanced Edition a try, just to compare. That's probably years off though haha.

Speaking of which...

Baldur's Gate II
Just the regular version from GOG. I imported my winning BG1 party (full party creation using a fake MP game), and selected kits for a few characters: Berserker for my Fighter, Cavalier for my Paladin, and one of the specialty priests for my Cleric. I also dumped my Halfing Thief and remade her as a Dwarf Fighter/Thief. This should be fun. 😀
I had intended to just import my party for later, but ended up completing the first area. It pretty much feels and plays exactly like BG1, and it's nice to be playing a more "traditional" RPG after completing Planescape. I must say, though, that BG2 feels like quite a step down graphically, even though it was released after P:T. On the other hand, EAX actually works with Alchemy in BG2, so I am getting some very nice audio effects.

I'm not sure if I will keep playing this so soon after P:T, because I sort of want to save this for a rainy day, knowing how good it's supposed to be. We'll see!

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-02-04, 15:30:

Baldur's Gate II
Just the regular version from GOG. I imported my winning BG1 party (full party creation using a fake MP game)

While you can definitively get a stronger party that way, I would suggest only importing your primary character and using the provided joinable NPCs instead.

In Baldur's Gate 2, they have much more defined personalities, interactions and personal quests. You'll miss out on some nice content if you don't use them. In particular, I suggest using Imoen, Yoshimo, Jaheira and Minsc for your first run. They are supposed to be the canon party from the first game.

I really don't like the companions. I'll use them if I ever replay the series, though.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-02-04, 15:41:

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-02-04, 15:30:

Baldur's Gate II
Just the regular version from GOG. I imported my winning BG1 party (full party creation using a fake MP game)

While you can definitively get a stronger party that way, I would suggest only importing your primary character and using the provided joinable NPCs instead.

In Baldur's Gate 2, they have much more defined personalities, interactions and personal quests. You'll miss out on some nice content if you don't use them. In particular, I suggest using Imoen, Yoshimo, Jaheira and Minsc for your first run. They are supposed to be the canon party from the first game.

The companion quests are incredibly hit and miss, I did the romance with Jaheira (it is one of the REALLY difficult romance paths) and after shagging me she decided I was upsetting her balance and stopped it right there. It was so anti-climatictic.

In my good run I used Kheldorn, Minsc, Jaheira, Nalia and Aerie (replaced by Imoen later).

Baldur's Gate II
I've put a few hours into this, and it's okay. I don't think I like it as much as BG1 so far. The starting dungeon is fun, but then the game drops you in the middle of a giant city, forcing you to "unlock" other areas by chatting with NPCs to get quests. I much prefer the more open-ended exploration in the first game, where you can wander in any direction and just discover stuff.

I'm also not impressed with the graphics. Part of this is due to having completed Icewind Dale and Planescape beforehand, both of which have some of the best graphics the Infinity engine offers. Even so, I find BG2 to look worse than even BG1 is some respects. Characters seem smaller (even when running the game at 640x480) and less detailed, the interface graphics aren't as pleasant (including the paperdolls on the inventory screen), and the backgrounds look strangely grainy yet smudgy. It might just be the starting city area, though.

Finally, the writing/dialog is roughly just as bad/inconsistent as BG1 so far. This was easily overlooked in BG1, because most of the worst writing was for meaningless "joke" NPCs, which you could just ignore. In BG2, I am sometimes stopped dead in my tracks for a "cinema scene" to watch some kind of "funny" skit between NPCs. There are also a lot more joke NPCs, which force you to click past multiple one-liners and zingers. We'll see how it goes.

I'll end on a good note. The quests are generally much more interesting than those in BG1, which tended to mostly be fetch quests.

Baldur's Gate II
Played a bit more tonight, and really started to get into it! I've finished exploring the starting city of Athkatla, and I ended up with a good handful of quests to do. I complained earlier about not being able to explore outside the town without getting quests telling you to do so (and I still don't like this), but I do like how the main quest is handled here. You just have to get a certain amount of gold to continue the story, and how you do it is up to you. There are a couple of lucrative quests you can do to get enough money quickly, or you can do a bunch of smaller (easier) quests to earn enough. I ended up doing the latter, and I could continue the main quest now if I wanted, but I will probably put it off a bit and do some more questing.

I do like how involved even the optional quests are, compared with BG1. Really good stuff. I also like that encounters are (so far) much fairer than in BG1; I haven't yet run into a situation I couldn't handle with some careful spell slinging and item use. No more climbing the stairs and immediately getting confused and otherwise torn apart before I can do anything, which happened more often than I would like in BG1.

Having said that, I might put this aside for a bit, so that I don't end up completing 4/5 Infinity Engine games in just a year or two.

Eiyuu Densetsu: Sora no Kiseki
Back to this again! I am playing the original PC release, and it works fine on Windows 10. Although this has been ported to consoles, etc., it started out as a PC game, and it plays great using a mouse and keyboard (or even just a mouse). It actually controls a lot like Ultima VII.

Hours into the game, I have finally completed the prologue. There is just something I really like about this game... the graphics have aged quite well, the characters are fun, combat is easy but enjoyable, and the soundtrack is great. There are some anime tropes, etc. I don't really care for, but otherwise it's written quite well.

This is a massive, seemingly endless, series of games, so I have a lot to look forward to if I end up enjoying this to the end. There are two more games in the trilogy (and also two "side story" games that use the same engine), and then another older trilogy, and two games before even those. The series is still going strong today, so even if I complete all 10 (!) of these games, I have several newer games to look forward to as well.

I gave up on Turok 2. Level 3 was the highlight in the open world/marshes. Tunnels galore from then on. During level 5 I missed destroying one of the Queen larvae mission targets, and there was no way I was backtracking again. I put in the cheat codes to beat the bosses and called it a day, never to play this game again.

I played Ultimate Doom via GZDoom and played through the "Knee-deep in the Dead" level for the first time ever; much more satisfying. I'll pick up the rest of the game later.

Now, I'm going to play through Blood 2. I got it working on Windows 10 without too much trouble. Any problems I had were self-induced; I forgot to set DGVoodoo2 as the renderer in display setup.

Meatball wrote on 2023-02-07, 15:41:

I played Ultimate Doom via GZDoom and played through the "Knee-deep in the Dead" level for the first time ever; much more satisfying. I'll pick up the rest of the game later.

I still believe original Doom levels are better experienced through a more vanilla-like engine, like PrBoom+.

dr_st wrote on 2023-02-07, 17:01:

Meatball wrote on 2023-02-07, 15:41:

I played Ultimate Doom via GZDoom and played through the "Knee-deep in the Dead" level for the first time ever; much more satisfying. I'll pick up the rest of the game later.

I still believe original Doom levels are better experienced through a more vanilla-like engine, like PrBoom+.

Thanks! I have the originals on my retro machine w/CRT as I do enjoy the old-timey feel as well.

Bioshock 2 Remastered
I've gotten a few more sessions in on this one. Roughly 4.5 hours in so far. Like the 1st one, I find the whole concept far-fetched and hard to believe (like they could've really built this elaborate city so far under the ocean in 1959), but at the same time, I'm looking at it as complete fantasy and enjoying it for what it is. The story is cohesive and easy to follow, the combat is fun and not too difficult, but some of the weapons I've been slow to pick up on. For example, some of the different ammo types for the rivet gun or machine gun I forget about and don't even realize I'm on one type when I should be on another. The game didn't do a good job IMO of reminding me to use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel press) to switch ammo types. But whatever, I eventually figured it out. 🤣. The game is beautiful and very easy on my system. CPU usage is typically around 20% and GPU usage is surprisingly around 10%! I've got vsync on and am constantly pegged at 60 fps. I see very little difference in graphics between this and more recent FPS that tax my system. I guess I'm old-fashioned in my old age. It's been a few days since I've played my other current game, Icewind Dale, but I'll log another session of that one tomorrow.

Bioshock 2 got remastered? I didn't know.. I loved the first game, I have yet to play the second though. I have it on XBOX 360 sealed, I'll probably play that version unless Steam has it for super cheap 😀

Diablo II
I am putting Baldur's Gate II aside for now, because I would like to save it for a rainy day in the near future when I want to play a really good party-based RPG.

Instead, I will play Diablo II. I played this a lot back when it was first released, but never completed it. I ended up playing and finishing several similar games last year (Diablo, Grim Dawn, Torchlight II), so I think I can now appreciate this better. I decided to just play the original version without the expansion, initially. I'll add the expansion once I've completed the base game. I'm playing as a paladin, focusing on the Holy Fire skill.

I'm using the D2DX wrapper/mod, which adds a bunch of features, but I'm just using it to add Glide support to get the proper gamma and enable the "perspective" option. Otherwise, I am running it at the original 640x480 res with a 2x clean scale, and it looks great!

I've been going through Guild Wars 1 recently, and it's made me kind of tired of it. Prophecies is not designed to be played mostly solo, especially on a new account.

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-02-09, 09:35:

Diablo II I am putting Baldur's Gate II aside for now, because I would like to save it for a rainy day in the near future when I […]
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Diablo II
I am putting Baldur's Gate II aside for now, because I would like to save it for a rainy day in the near future when I want to play a really good party-based RPG.

Instead, I will play Diablo II. I played this a lot back when it was first released, but never completed it. I ended up playing and finishing several similar games last year (Diablo, Grim Dawn, Torchlight II), so I think I can now appreciate this better. I decided to just play the original version without the expansion, initially. I'll add the expansion once I've completed the base game. I'm playing as a paladin, focusing on the Holy Fire skill.

I'm using the D2DX wrapper/mod, which adds a bunch of features, but I'm just using it to add Glide support to get the proper gamma and enable the "perspective" option. Otherwise, I am running it at the original 640x480 res with a 2x clean scale, and it looks great!

I revisited this recently, albeit the updated Resurrected version.

It was fun, but the novelty had worn off by the time I'd finished Act IV of the Normal difficulty run. Others could probably draw more nuance out of the game and the different classes and builds, but for me it's just 1000 short walks between 1000 mob blastings, interspersed by frantic quaffing of potions.

I really enjoy the aesthetic, the sound and music design, the atmosphere. Show it to somebody playing Gauntlet in 1984, and all their Christmas's would have arrived simultaneously. And there's a certain addictiveness in the game's loot and upskill mechanics.

At heart it's the same experience again, and while it's a very fun experience, it's not what I would call a long-lasting one. Perhaps if I hadn't already ground through the first 4 Acts a dozen times in previous years/eras, the novelty would take longer to wear off.

BetaC wrote on 2023-02-11, 20:15:

I've been going through Guild Wars 1 recently, and it's made me kind of tired of it. Prophecies is not designed to be played mostly solo, especially on a new account.

Me and my wife are going to start GW1 probably this summer. We're currently working on map completion for Central Tyria and getting our Siege Turtles.

Diablo II
I finally completed Act I. I'm not sure what to think about this game, honestly. It's hard to believe I still have 3 more acts to complete (plus one more with the expansion). I really doubt the game is going to introduce any new mechanics along the way, and I already feel like I've been doing the same thing now for hours. I've not even died yet, which is quite a surprise considering how deadly Diablo 1 could be if you weren't careful.

The "field" areas in the first act were extremely dull, just (mostly) featureless flat plains with the same enemies over and over. On the other hand, every once in a while you'd come across some abandoned shack, or a cave, and then it works; it feels a bit more like a traditional RPG with exploration. There's also the awesome part where you come upon the MASSIVE cathedral, and this wouldn't have had the same impact if you were just selecting it from a map, or whatever.

Still, there is something addictive about this game. It's not necessarily the loot, etc., though it is of course exciting when some rare item drops. What keeps me going is the atmosphere, music, and graphics. It's always fun to arrive at a new area and find new monsters to slay. The graphics in this game are really fantastic, there's so much detail in the backgrounds and monsters. I also really like the "perspective" effect that makes this 2D game look almost polygonal at times. Anyway, I complained a bit up there, but I'm liking it so far. Although I prefer Diablo 1 so far, I'd rank Diablo II over its clones (or at least those I've finished, Torchlight I/II and Grim Dawn).

Metroid Prime (GC)
Normally I don't post about the console games I play here, but I'm playing this on the Dolphin emulator. I played this a lot back when it was released, but never completed it. I'm mixed on this one too.

This game looked amazing back in the day. A console FPS running at 640x480 at a constant 60 fps with high poly environments, visual effects all over the place, and good quality textures. Playing it today, it still looks great; it doesn't really look out of place at all rendered at a modern resolution, unlike a lot of console games from that era. The control does take some getting used to. It's more an action/adventure/exploration game than an FPS, and once you realize that it plays fine. Having said that, I had some trouble controlling this game with my Xbox One controller; I ended up getting a GC-USB converter and an official Gamecube controller, and it plays like a dream.

Having said all that, there are some annoyances with this game. A lot of the "puzzles" consist of just having to scan stuff in the environment. I'm only a couple hours in, and I've already had to do the "scan four runes in the room to open a door" "puzzle" twice already. Also, after many years of playing FPS games on PC, the restricted FOV is somewhat infuriating here. I feel like I am navigating the world in one of those old fashioned diving suits.

I'll end this post on a good note. The graphics, atmosphere, music, and sound effects in this game are all top class.