Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Niku
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Niku » Sun May 28, 2017 7:56 pm

Yeah, I've heard Rise is even better, and I really liked '13 for what it is. I picked it up for cheap on PS4 not long ago and was plucking away at a second playthrough until a one-two punch of Zelda and Persona came along, so I might go back and finish out the second run through '13 to get in the mood to jump into Rise. It sounds an awful lot as though Horizon: Zero Dawn on the PS4 is the heir apparent to TR's specific style as well, so I'm kinda curious about that one.
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Thad
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Thad » Mon May 29, 2017 1:57 pm

It also occurs to me that the tone is probably what Metroid: Other M was going for, and probably makes me think more favorably of both games -- because taking a badass loner heroine, sticking her in the middle of a group setting, and stripping her down to the point where she's powerless and uncertain, and making a story out of that that's satisfying and compelling, is hard.

(I'm sure I don't need to quote the unfortunate "I want to protect her" quote that preceded the game's release and had everyone thinking "Oh God, it's Other M all over again.")

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Mongrel
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 29, 2017 4:14 pm

What I remember is that "Rape is being overused as a female characterization device" was a really big hot button topic when the game came out, and there was some initial reaction to TR13 on that basis. So I was a bit leery of how it was going to go.

But once I actually played the game, I found out the scene that had people up in arms wasn't a rape at all. I mean there was some implied potential there, but the scene itself is mainly a straightforward "hero(ine) has been captured by really bad thugs who probably plans to do horrible things, but they escape before Bad Stuff happens" trope.

Which is a standard and ordinary mostly gender-neutral hero-building event and, more importantly, is actually really well done and believable and deftly avoided being creepy or exploitative, while still being tense and genuinely scary (and still carried a measure of trauma for the hero, but the character-building kind, not the "ewwwwww game designers, whyyyy" kind).
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Thad
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Thad » Mon May 29, 2017 4:24 pm

Yeah. It's such an easy thing to get wrong, and the assumption of rape-as-plot-device turned out to be off-base but I think it was reasonable given what we'd seen, heard, and come to expect.

Pratchett deserves a hell of a lot of credit for threading the needle the way she did, but of course it's a visual and interactive medium and it took a whole team of people to make that sequence work, to keep it on the side of horror and pathos and not let it cross over into gross exploitation. (Or, y'know, do what Other M did and have the heroine fall to pieces and a man save her.)

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Mongrel
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 29, 2017 6:21 pm

I actually thought it was especially well done scene when considered as showing the trope of how a person who was not a born killer is thrust into a situation where they have to learn how to kill to save themselves (and fast). That sort of character development is REALLY DIFFICULT to pull off convincingly considering how incredibly overused it is (usually lazily).

I really do want to play Rise, because you can tell the story of TR13 is almost a prologue in a way, of how Lara goes from ordinary person to someone who is a toughened fighter and survivor, but still within the realm of the (sort of) ordinary. Rise is supposedly the story of how she graduates from a generic toughened fighter to an actual experienced adventuress, a true Indiana Jones hero-type.
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Thad » Tue May 30, 2017 12:35 am

Mongrel wrote:I actually thought it was especially well done scene when considered as showing the trope of how a person who was not a born killer is thrust into a situation where they have to learn how to kill to save themselves (and fast). That sort of character development is REALLY DIFFICULT to pull off convincingly considering how incredibly overused it is (usually lazily).


I also really love how it integrates into the gameplay -- you go from killing a deer to killing a man to killing a bunch of men, because it is, after all, a video game, and that's how a difficulty ramp works. But it's handled in-story -- when you kill the deer there's that moment where its eyes go out and Lara says "I'm sorry"; then when you kill the first man it's an intense experience -- and then after that, she has to kill multiple people to get to the next objective, and the first time she acknowledges it in dialogue, she says something along the lines of "It's disturbing how easy it was." It feels true to the story, the setting, and the character, and it just happens to correspond to how video games work.

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Mongrel
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jun 16, 2017 4:20 am

This is not a mod or skin. This is in tanks now. And I have one.

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Yoji
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Yoji » Tue Jun 20, 2017 1:59 am

Mongrel wrote:This is not a mod or skin. This is in tanks now. And I have one.

(edelweiss.jpg)

(team voice chat)
(match starts)
Mongrel: Squad 7, move out!!
Dude A: squad 7? wtf u talking about
Dude B: I thought this team was called Dunning-Kruger...

I thought about showing this to my wife, but then I remembered that she completely neglected the tank and just had Rosie do everything. "Why waste command points moving the tank when you can move her twice and kill a tank?"
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Mongrel
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:51 am

Yeah, tanks in VC generally aren't worth their point cost for attacks. Only when you need them for specialized things like firing smoke or providing mobile cover do they tend to be worth it. Poor Shamrock rarely saw use (except for a mission or two where the big flamethrower came in handy).

Also, people on our server (the Asian tanks server) are SUPER SALTY about this tank BREAKING MUH IMMERSHUNS. Even though the idea that World of Tanks is anything even remotely close to a realistic tanks game or only contains real tanks is already a total fucking joke. Never mind that combat is HP based, or that tanks from all eras and nations fight together and against one another, or that they've always fudged stats on real tanks for balance reasons, they've been adding "We found this lost tank design scribbled on the back of a napkin used by a wehrmacht/people's design bureau/Imperial Army design group/etc. engineer, in a secret lost filing cabinet it's toooootally real, we swear." tanks to the game for years.

I think this was a trial to see if they could expand into adding fictional tanks, and figured the best place to try a weeaboo tank was the weeaboo server. But even on the Asian server the reaction has been so virulent that the management on other servers are practically falling over themselves to assure their players that such "Cartoon tanks" will never pollute their super realistic and totally serious arcade tank game.

So far my favourite was a guy who complained that REAL MEN don't want this sort of thing in their game. I must have missed that line on my REAL MEN handout, where it says to whinge and cry about pixel tanks from one video game being transposed into a different, wrong video game.
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Thad
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:36 pm

Tanks are a lot more customizable in VC2, which (at least by my play style) makes them more useful. You can make a tank that's a little on the squishier side but packs good firepower and only takes one point to move (like the Shamrock) and can also be used for transport. I don't always bring a tank, but they're a more versatile unit than they were before.

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Yoji
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Yoji » Fri Jun 23, 2017 12:25 am

People got their dander up over realism in World of Goddamn Tanks? If memory serves, one of the commercials has CG tanks driving straight at each other as if they were jousting. I'm no Rommel or Patton, but I don't think that's how tanks engage each other.

And besides, animu tanks could be fun, so long as they're not horribly unbalanced or anything. Hell, they did that in an Ace Combat game I bought from Vance and it was fun. "Haha, LOL! That fighter jet has an Idol Master girl on the wing! Nyyurrrrwww! Oh god, I forgot I suck at this game!"
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Mongrel
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jun 23, 2017 1:46 am

To be fair, there are very reasonable complaints about one of the tanks being grossly unbalanced (the Tanks version of the Nameless from VC3, which I did not buy), but there's been an ongoing creeping balance problem for a long time, made worse a few months ago by the firing of most of the old balance team for (apparently) ~office politics~, so that's not really a "animu tanks" problem.
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Newbie
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Newbie » Sat Jun 24, 2017 1:32 pm

Finally picked up Va-11 Hall-A through the Steam sale yesterday. Man! This game is good! I like mixing drinks, and I like chatting with clients about whether I know what they want more than they do, and I like that you're 'distracted' at work when there's something you wanna buy but couldn't for whatever reason. I gotta go back and play "Night of the Corgis" before my next playthrough, although I kinda like only being able to speculate about what happened.
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Yoji
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Yoji » Sun Jun 25, 2017 2:59 pm

Chatting with Romo wrote:(Romo is wearing a weird video game shirt)
Hardly: ...that shiba is 100% rad?
Romo: Yeah, it's from this bartender simulator. It's awesome.
Hardly: Another awesome game that parenthood will prevent me from playing?


I finally got a copy of Driveclub VR. I wasn't really hyped about it since it's not Gran Turismo, but I got it anyway for a couple reasons: 1) I hear GT Sport's VR is practically an afterthought, and 2) I need some racing game to play with my dad sometime*. I miss the GT4 campaign mode, but so far so good. There's a decent variety of tours, and I'm really pleased that they have some rally-style tracks which GT4 never had.

*as I might've mentioned over in Shittier Days, our interests don't really intersect, but racing games are one of the few points they do. If they ever come out with a game about top-fuel drag racing, he'd be visiting eight days a week.

What I wish they had was some kind of passenger mode for the VR headset. VR racing is nice, but a bit too intense for me to take my eyes off the road. It'd be neat if I could just race on the TV while someone else got to wear the headset and try not to puke as I nearly crash on Norwegian switchbacks. I guess you can do replays like that, but it's not really the same.
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beatbandito
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby beatbandito » Mon Jun 26, 2017 6:38 pm

Now that the steam sale is on I've basically given up on WoW other than logging in for Pandaria fishing dailies. Oh, that reminds me...

Okay, that out of the way, I've been playing a bunch of GTA Online and it's preeeetty fun when it's not people who can oneshot me from a mile away with and I basically wouldn't be able to shoot anyway because they have literal super armor and tons more health from years of playtime.

Anyway what I'm getting at is does anyone else still fuck around in this?
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Yoji
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Yoji » Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:02 pm

Just had a thought about The Last Guardian.

You know how during the ending, you have to give Trico the command to go away? Like, you actually need to use R1+Left Stick like you used the whole game before to direct it?

Now I wonder what would happen if you used a different R1 command like "praise," "scold," or "jump" instead.
The Boy: *weakly* <Good... doggy...>
Trico: Aroo?
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Mongrel
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 05, 2017 3:19 pm

I bought a game on Steam yesterday (Windward; looks fun, will be trying it later today) and under the system requirements for graphics card it just says "Any card that cost $200 in 2010".

xD
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Esperath
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Esperath » Wed Jul 05, 2017 3:47 pm

Windward is fun but the core gameplay loop is pretty shallow. The trading element is almost completely worthless. Combat is satifying for a while, basically control point capture but with broadsides.
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Mongrel
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:35 pm

Apparently it's best played multiplayer (which is only co-op vs the AI), which supposedly adds depth according to the reviews.

In any case, for $2, I don't care if I don't get months of replay value out of it.
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Yoji
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Yoji » Mon Jul 10, 2017 1:38 pm

I just realized that today is the 20th anniversary for Armored Core.

I guess I should bug my friend for his copy of Project Phantasma if he still has it. Should probably really finish up that painting/tracing, too.
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