Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[beatbandito]

they are also side quests that you have to choose to pray to an evil god to do sooooo

[Mongrel]

Nope.

As soon as you choose to help random dude, you get locked in a house. No "pray to evil god" is required.

[beatbandito]

You can try to leave and the other guy goes hostile. Yes, it's not an amazing ending where you beat out a fucking god, but you are never forced to be the one that follows his will. Then he lets you leave and you choose to track the old man down. True, also dumb that you have to just abandon the quest and there's no alternate, but you 100% chose to torture that old man and need to face your sins.

[Mongrel]

I'm not talking about the Stendarr guy you agree to help. I know full well you can avoid attacking him and then he just aggros on you. That's not so bad, self-defence and all that.

Yes, you can abandon the rescue mission part, but it pretty well makes it clear that if you don't go rescue the priest he's just going to be tortured to death and is compelled to go back to the shrine, so if you go back to help him, you get locked in again.

The point being that there is no option to just say "No. Fuck you." and drop the mace and accept the consequences, even permanent, of Rape-Satan getting mad at you. There being a technical workaround where you just abandon the quest isn't some secret meta-genius move on the part of Bethesda, it's them being shit.

Look at the way the recent Deus Ex handles that kind of situation. When there are alternate bad choices, you have meaningful decisions to make and the consequences are actually written into the game. Like, the Airplane mission when you go to the airport to get $someguy you're told to kill him on the plane. Obviously killing someone in cold blood is kind of fucked up so you can say no, and if you do Anna kills him. The SECRET THIRD OPTION is to kill Anna before she gets to the room in which case the guy lives and she's dead for the rest of the game. You actually get to make a real decision and suffer the consequences there.

[Thad]

Man, Axiom Verge is fucking fantastic. I recommend it highly, with the caveat that I had some issues using a DualShock 4 wirelessly and I wound up giving up on playing it from the couch and switched to my office with the controller connected via USB.

Specifically, the controller issues I had were as follows:

With InputMapper or x360ce, the game registered as having the right trigger always slightly pressed down -- not enough to activate the drill, but enough to prevent weapons from firing normally. No matter how low I set the sensitivity and how high I set the deadzone, the issue persisted. To the point where when I set sensitivity to 0% and deadzone to 100%, the game wouldn't recognize when I actually hit the right trigger, but still registered it as being slightly pressed all the time.

With the controller by itself and no additional software, the game didn't recognize R1 or L3 and instead double-mapped R1 to L2 and L3 to R2. For the first few hours of the game this isn't so bad; you switch weapons every time you use the drill, which is annoying but not game-breaking, and the disruptor is mapped to the wrong button, but it works. But once you get the bombs, you've got two things mapped to L2, and that's the point when I quit and moved to the other room. (And for awhile kept using L2 instead of R1 because muscle memory.)

Neither of these things is show-stopping; you can get around the right trigger issue by holding L1 every time you fire your gun while standing still, and you can get around the multi-mapped buttons by swapping out button-mappings as needed. (Say you're not using the drone right now but you need the bomb; map the bomb to Triangle.)

But, neither of these is ideal, so...if you want to play the game with a DS4, you probably want to wire it up.

[Yoji]

I had to quit Axiom Verge for a while until I got a control solution figured out, and even then it was kind of wonky and unintuitive. It felt like a completely different game once I gave up trying to use the keyboard, but I was still accidentally launching bombs all the time.

It's stuff like those ridiculous control workarounds that make me really hate working with computers.

[Thad]

I wonder if that damn $20 dongle Sony just announced will help. My money's on "nope, will only work with PSLive."

[Rico]

Your Amazon.com order of "Dragon Quest VII: Fragments..." has shipped!

Well between this and WoW I suppose I might as well quit my job now before I get fired.

[Thad]

retroUSB Order: shipped

Ohhhhh shit, it's on.

[Silversong]

My partner just built a couple-thousand-dollar gaming computer and got two Steam controllers. It's now attached to our massive TV running Steam on Windows 10 (education version).
Is there anything in particular I should try playing on this thing? Given that I like pretty art and music and enemies who wait in an orderly queue and have not done much PC gaming since Princess Maker 2.

[François]

Dang, given these criteria I don't think you can go wrong with Trine 1 and 2, still easily the most beautiful games I've ever played. They look like this...




And sound like this...




There's some very easy combat going on, but the meat is in physics-y puzzle-y platforming, and it's co-op so you can put those two controllers to good use. And they have Steam demos available!

(There's a Trine 3 by now but I haven't got around to trying it myself and it earned scathing reviews. Apparently the art direction is still top notch but the actual gameplay got kinda cruddy.)

[Brantly B.]

Skyrim's approaching 5 years old now but it's probably still your best bet for justifying buying a brand new system to render pretty shit in between bouts of clicking casually on a virtual renne faire actor until it falls down.

[Mongrel]

Skyrim's approaching 5 years old now but it's probably still your best bet for justifying buying a brand new system to render pretty shit in between bouts of clicking casually on a virtual renne faire actor

The most accurate comment I've heard about Skyrim is "This is how I spend 40% of my time in Skyrim"

until it falls down.

Man, I finally got my shit sorted in figuring out how to run the Russian ENB hack to expand memory use for x64 systems (I had to. Even with a fairly light mod set, I was crashing every two minutes in Windhelm). It was not actually complicated at all, but the damn site's uncanny-valley English and weird layout shied me off trying to make it work earlier.

Before that, I was pretty accustomed to stuttering near cities and running out of VRAM and crashing every 1-2 hours or so (which wasn't so bad because the autosave fires so frequently and crashes served as a good excuse to go do something else), but now it runs smoooooth almost all the time. I've only had two crashes in the past 10 days, and I can try some more intensive mods too.

[Thad]

You could also try messing around with Dolphin, see if you can get some upscaled GC/Wii games going.

[Thad]

Thoughts on DQ7 so far:

The good:
* Graphics. You guys know what? I think this Akira Toriyama fellow has some skill and may have a bright future ahead of him. The character models are all loaded with personality, which they really weren't on the PS1.

* Script. Silly accents and all, the word "personality" applies here too in a way it didn't before. (Even if Kiefer and Maribel are both total bitches.)

* Basically the entire first interminable dungeon is gone.

* DQ9-style encounters.


The bad:
* Text crawl. Didn't this used to be adjustable? Not just for battle, but in general? I dunno, maybe not, but it was back in fucking DW1.

* The reset-orientation shortcut (L+R) and the minimap on the bottom screen sometimes do not agree on which direction is supposed to be north.

* And for some reason some areas still don't have 360-degree camera rotation.

* I know this is Dragon Quest, but some token concessions to the last twenty-five years of game design would be nice. Like, if I don't know any spells, maybe don't show the "Spell" menu at all, instead of letting me select "Spells" and then "Offensive" and then get an error telling me I don't know any offensive spells. And if I could maybe press the A button fewer than ten times in order to save? That'd be just ducky. (This is not an exaggeration. Press A to talk to the priest; press it two more times to get through his fucking yammering; press it another time to select Save, then he says some shit, then you select a slot, then confirm, then he says some more shit, then you need to confirm that you want to keep playing for some goddamn reason (I guess so if you hit "no" it can warn you to hold the Reset button while you turn the power off?), and then one more time to exit out of the dialogue.) Which wouldn't take so long if not for the fucking text crawl.

* Wait, so my Chimaera Wing won't just take me back to the last town?

[Thad]

* Inventory management is still fucking garbage. Would it kill you to automatically put any item that doesn't respond to the "Use" command in the bag?

* As opposed to, say, taking all the herbs out of Kiefer and Maribel's inventories and putting them in the bag because they left my party for five fucking minutes.

* Which wouldn't be so bad if there were some way of moving items in groups.

[Mothra]

Yeah, that's what's kept me from getting into the series. Without the nostalgia, it's just a really tedious old-style JRPG.

[Rico]

And if I could maybe press the A button fewer than ten times in order to save? That'd be just ducky.

Bonus points for the quicksave feature, which instead of taking you back to the main menu, forces you to hardquit and relaunch the game.

But my baby being so damn pretty is an automatic -100 sins.

[Thad]

Yeah, that's what's kept me from getting into the series. Without the nostalgia, it's just a really tedious old-style JRPG.

I'd say, oh, 4, 5, 8, and 9 are all solid enough on their merits for the charm to shine through their weaknesses, and 8's getting the remake treatment in December.

It's just too bad about the UI.

(At least encounters are avoidable now. Well, sort of. If a monster's standing right in a chokepoint, it's not really avoidable.)

Now that they've finished remaking the entire series, I'd really like to see them go back and start over from the beginning, redo 1-6 in the 9 engine. (Or the 10 or 11 engine.) 4 and 5 are delightful but I find it hard to slog through unavoidable random encounters these days. (I never did finish 6. Or 9, come to think of it. Dragon Quest does not do last bosses like Final Fantasy does last bosses.)

Bonus points for the quicksave feature, which instead of taking you back to the main menu, forces you to hardquit and relaunch the game.

There really is no rationale for the "Now turn off your game" screen except "That's how we did it on the Famicom."

And frankly I'm not even sure why it was necessary on the Famicom. As alluded above, the NES had that save bug where every game had to warn you to hold the Reset button as you powered off, but I don't think the Famicom did.

[Thad]

Adding: It goes without saying but I'm going to say it anyway: the whole save point/quicksave system is bullshit and I don't understand Japan's continued insistence on shoving it down our throats. I should be able to save wherever the fuck I feel like, and none of this crap where I can only load the save once.

I understand why DQ, in particular, spaces out its save points the way it does: if you die and then get sent back to the last town and keep all your experience, and then have to work back through the entire dungeon to get to the boss again, that forces you to grind experience on the way so that you're stronger on your next try.

But the problem, obviously, is the word "forces". Hey game, don't force me to play a certain way. If I want to save right before a boss, let me fucking do that. And then let me decide if I want to go back and grind, or go back to the last town to buy new gear. (And facilitate this by making Evac/Return free commands that are available at all times; no consumable items, no MP cost, no only-certain-characters-can-cast-this nonsense.)