>>22822

So Rimworld?

>>22822

It's just a map view of an old server. All pretty things and no actual life save for the players.

>>22739

Was this the one with the BBC (obnoxious obsidian tower at spawn) in it? That was the one I ran and I do miss it. I don't have the time now but I suppose if you're all fine with the owner cheating a bit I'll start it up again.

It's entirely possible I still have the world, but don't hold your breath.

>>22825

I'd love to go back and have a look around if you do find it.

>>22819

You seem angry that video games are becoming more affordable and accessible. Did you really think the £60 AAA disc release was the optimal, fairest solution to gaming?

I'm not a fan of micro-transactions and will pretty much avoid any game that has made them integral to the experience - I will never play Shadow of War, even though they've 'fixed' that now, but you know what, that's okay, because I also now get to pay six quid a month to access an increasingly impressive digital game library.

I will be annoyed if the prices of digital releases don't drop in the next few years, mind. I'd much rather every single game in the world had a cosmetic loot crate system in it if it actually subsidised the sticker price of the game, but as it stands it's still slightly more expensive to download a game than it is to get the disc, which is all sorts of daft. I do have hope the shift towards disc free consoles will herald a more 'steam sale' approach to the digital console marketplaces. Time will tell.

>>22831

They're still adding microtransactions to £60 AAA titles. They're selling £100 premium versions of those games, because loads of content has been carved off as day-one DLC and £60 doesn't get you the full game. The whole industry has gone fucking mental.

>>22828

No lad. Just pirate it instead of paying. Were fortunate enough to live in an age where you can have your cake and eat it- You can vote with your wallet and still have the game. If you pretend that that's somehow morally wrong then you're either sheltered, naive, or both.

Videogames make silly money. If we want them to improve the only way to do it is to stop incentivising the greed by buying into it. You're not going to be putting some poor starving Dev out of a job- There's a separate discussion to be had there about unionisation for developers and rebalancing the role of publishers and executives etc.

Indie games gave us a brief hope but they're really just AAA lite by this point. Support small devs. Think of it like you would the music industry- You support the bands you like by buying their shit and going to gigs, but they make fuck all off your Spotify subscription so you literally might as well pirate it. The only benefit you get from that is the moral high ground.

>>22831
>>22833
I mean on this theme
>Did you really think the £60 AAA disc release was the optimal, fairest solution to gaming?
I'd have to answer yes. If your disposable income is near zero, £10 is as inaccessible as £60. If the whole game is on one disk, you get a pretty equitable breakdown where people who could afford to pay usually did, and people who couldn't would pirate. It's something I've always appreciated about games as a hobby in a way - other than the hardware costs there was a sort of equality about it all that you don't find in a lot of other hobbies.

There's perhaps an argument that it's not sustainable but I'm increasingly coming to the view that most of the best games have already been made.

>>22834

There was always preowned, too. The live service/digital distribution model conveniently kills that dead.

I can only see it as entitlement on the part of the publishers. They were already making plenty of money but they see it as their right to make even more money, year after year, forever. Not just in games, to be fair, but other digital software. We've lost the inherently democratic nature of a product being something you buy and subsequently own, and can do as you see fit with. It baffles me really that people are just fine with it.

In our hellish dystopia of a future, you're going to have to pay a subscription for the DRM on your Google Mind, and every time they release a patch you'll go blind until they reboot the servers. This is how it starts.

I posted a while ago about some of the older Total War games updating to include all their DLC. It was mostly unit packs so I wasn't too bothered, but I decided to check out Napoleon's Penisular campaign and it's realy good fun. I thought it'd be the regular capaign only on a different map, but because it's the same amount of provinces with fewer resources, you actually end up conquering differently. Agents feel more important because of the pro or anti-French sentiment you have to manage, and it's far harder, at least so far, to reach the tipping point that occurs in the main campaign where you become on unstoppable wrecking ball, mostly because there's always something slipping past your big armies to raid something. As the British you can also recruit local Portugese and Spanish forces, which I like to see because it really diversifies what your army can do, and what it looks like (that sounds minor but endless rows of redcoats and the same two cavalry units can get very boring, very fast). And I haven't encountered any perfectly flat areas of the map yet, which is a major bugbear of mine about the main campaign, as all of Southern Italy and the British isles are perfectly flat for some reason.

The main problem is that the campaign AI still sucks, and the Portugese and Spanish allies themselves don't do much of anything, and will sometimes actively impede you by sitting on a brige and forcing you to go around the entire river. I've also seen a couple of French doomstacks just wander by my armies like pillaging a farmstead was more important.

Thank you for reading my review of a eight year old DLC, please give it a like and check out my Patreon linked down below.

https://www.patreon.com/HHHolmes

>>22784

Napoleon is my favourite Total War of the lot, I reckon, and I say that even as a lifelong Warhammer nut. I'm not sure if that's because it was actually good, or if it was just the last one before the series itself went to shit, but I have a massive soft spot for it.

It suffers from some similar problems to Shogun 2 where the factions feel too similar (ooh, these foot regiments have an accuracy stat of 85 rather than 80, good grief. How unique) but ironically I think it was a type of warfare and an era that suited the engine and the turn based strategic overview best. I enjoyed how it was more manoeuvre based than just charging your rock/paper/scissors blobs of guys at each other.

I did hate some of the quirks, like how the AI would sometimes just sneak something like a single unit of foot on its own past your armies and you'd end up with this annoying little army just walking around teabagging all your farms and universities at the furthest corner of the map. But at least it didn't quite so blatantly cheat to appear challenging, like it has to in the recent ones.

"Baba Is You". It's a neat little puzzle game. In a Sokoban style playing field, there are items and a few kinds of "rule" blocks. These consist of nouns, verbs and attributes and can be arranged to change how the game behaves. The aim of the game is to get the noun that is "YOU" to be on the field that is "WIN".

Screenshot is a (badly stitched together, mea culpa) tutorial level. The "Baba is you" near the bottom left means that Baba, the white rabbit character, is currently you, the player. The other existing chain "Wall is stop" means walls stop things (including the player). Use the rabbit to punt any of the words from "Wall is stop" out of alignment and the rule no longer applies, i.e. "wall" is no longer "stop". From there, you can assemble "Flag is win" and hop onto the flag for a simple solution. If you're feeling a bit more whimsical, though, you could arrange it as "Wall is you" and "Baba is win" and then move the wall onto the rabbit. Or declare that "Wall is flag" to turn every wall tile into a flag, then declare "Flag is win" and take your pick. I hope you get the idea.

The only contraint is that something must always be "you". You don't lose immediately if nothing is you, but you can take no further action unless something else re-assembles an "X is you". It's quick to reset the maps and you can rewind as many steps as you want at any time, even after "death".

>>22771
After 60 hours or so played it's hard to argue I don't enjoy the game, but your sentiment of
> The previous games made me feel like I was being taught, here I feel like I'm being told. That's alright, but it's not as fun.

hits the nail on its head. I've reached the final boss of the Immortal Severance ending and I think I might drop it here. I enjoyed the non-boss content of the game right to the end but for the most part the bosses were challenging not (just) because they are difficult but because fighting them quickly became tedious. The boss I'm on right now for example has a phase one which, after a few tries, is just a tedious chore and delayed attacks after telegraphing, quite reminiscent of DS3's Nameless King.

A minor correction here from my earlier comment, by the way: "proper" boss runs are universally short, mini-boss runs on the other hand range from fine to dreadful. They often involve clearing the arena before it's safe to engage and, of course, if you fail then it's time to do it again, stupid!¹ Juzou the Drunkard and Seven Ashina Spears are particularly egregious examples, in my opinion.

> a particular unblockable sword skill

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

Started playing Trails Of Cold Steel. It's supposed to be about 60-80 hours long, which is a big investment, but so far it seems fairly interesting. Came with a decent sized full colour manual, which is a rarity in this day and age. Brought back memories of going into town with my mum as a kid, buying a new game, and reading the manual on the way home. It's a shame most big publishers have done away with manuals.

Continuing to spend my time on UT2004. I've discovered Onslaught maps that feature the bloody Leviathan.
It's tough. Lots of armour - 5,000 hp, compare to 800 hp of the Goliath, the in-game tank variant, which is a formidable opponent itself. Still, not that tough if used incorrectly or left without ground/aerial support. The main plasma cannon delivers devastating damage at the cost of making the vehicle stationary and precluding the driver from using homing rockets. That makes it rather vulnerable to air and artillery attacks.

It's lots of fun to drive it on the ONS-Severance. All it takes to win is to get to the enemy base with enough hitpoints to deploy the main cannon and waste the core in just two shots. That 'just' will be a tense time period as the cannon charges slowly; the road towards the core even more so, it's the whole fleet of tanks, helos and other battle machinery against you plus the small arms fire. You're golden if you managed to grab a Redeemer en route and hopped off just before the tank explodes from incessant fire. Very annoying for the opposing side even if you didn't blow the core right then.

Sage because I feel like that HL2/cake lad from the XKCD comic strip.

>>22796

>but at the same time you shouldn't moan about having LGBT culture 'rubbed in your face' simply because it exists (as a lad did above).

Whilst that is true, sometimes it purposefully is. I usually consider that something to do with the insecurity of the person who insists on the rubbing in their own identity more than anything whenever I've seen it. Kind of like how American Atheists seem to revel in an adversarial to Christian position.Among groups like the fet scene there is definitely regularly the obnoxious righteousness that goes with that kind of psychological insecurity, where the stance of indifferance isn't good enough for people.

>>22796

Indeed, but I think in general it's easy to read things as an attack on LGBT stuff when in reality it is just somebody saying that's not really their thing. Which, as we've agreed on, is fine. The phrase he used was "rubbed in his face" but I didn't take that as a moan at LGBT people, just a general way of expressing it was like having a bit too much mayonnaise on his chips for his liking.

>>22795

Of course, but not everything has to be for everyone. It's just as valid for a straight bloke to go "no thanks, it's a bit gay for me" as it is for a gay lass to go "nah, it's not gay enough for me". Generally though I think if people are placing so much weight in their sexuality and how it defines them as a person, I feel they would be able to make bigger gains by putting their self-esteem in healthier things, than by the token gesture of having a game call them xe.

You don't hear me complaining that furries are under-represented. We still have to make the yiff mods ourselves damnit.

>>22791
I've avoided getting involved with this why can't we just talk about our RP adventures and Ventrue being best? and I don't know your LGBT resistance HQ but I used to frequent a gay-bar every month or so because I had gay friends. It was awkward at first but eventually I made friends with the other regulars and we got drunk and had a laugh as friends do.

This sounds more like the place you're going to is just full of dickheads who base their identity on being the other or you've not gotten to know anyone and therefore unconsciously see them as the other. I'd hazard the latter but there's always one person writing in the guardian. I mean, you're presumably a lovely couple so how is that different to any other bar? If you went with your boyfriend what would be different?

That said it's neither here nor there. We're talking about a game whose plot centres on an underground society of vampires and blood-magic. Although the franchise has a complicated relationship with sex it is generally assumed that vampires lack a sexual impulse and gender norms are irrelevant when you're a blood-thirsty predator. Pronoun choices are by extension irrelevant but there's absolutely no reason to tout it in this day and age unless they're going to make it a core part of the plot (which would ruin it) or otherwise use it to try and cover a bad game (the typical option).

>>22799

That's mostly why it feels disingenuous, which was my point. Neither of us are the type to talk to strangers, so why are we there exactly when we could be anti-social in any pub we like?

It's because she doesn't want to feel like she's sold out by taking the dick.

>>22799

>We're talking about a game whose plot centres on an underground society of vampires and blood-magic. Although the franchise has a complicated relationship with sex it is generally assumed that vampires lack a sexual impulse and gender norms are irrelevant when you're a blood-thirsty predator. Pronoun choices are by extension irrelevant but there's absolutely no reason to tout it in this day and age unless they're going to make it a core part of the plot (which would ruin it) or otherwise use it to try and cover a bad game (the typical option).

From what I remember of Masquerade, a young vampire has been dead for 25-50 years and usually several hundred, some of them living for thousands, slow to adapt to society as they become more reclusive, and becoming consumed by their bestial nature they hardly seem the sort to be on the cutting edge of progressive. They also referred to the ruler of the city as 'the prince' regardless of sex because such concepts were irrelevant to them.

>>22748
The visuals are very memorable and unique*, from the colourful guns and enemies to the beautiful sky boxes, you've got a quality campaign (at least until 4) and the multiplayer is probably the most fleshed out I've known in an FPS. Obviously it's all a matter of taste, but I also prefer the pace of the gunfights over Quake or Counter Strike, which were always 2fast4me even before I hit the e-sports retirement age I'm at now. But going back to how diverse the multiplayer can be, you could probably edit player speeds, health and weapon damage to have a Quake-like custom game mode quite easily, or just race ATVs, or get chased by an unkillable zombie ghost. Basically it can be anything you like, hopefully doubly so once it's on PC.

*Yes, I am aware they cribbed plenty of ideas also.

I played the first Halo recently for the first time since it came out, and I was surprised by how open it was. It has the reputation for the dumbing down of FPS games, but even early missions don't hold your hand with excessive way points like modern games have.

>>22748

The one thing it probably did better than anything else is AI. It feels believable for reactions in a war zone, each type of creature has it's own personality that comes through. I don't recall anything doing as good of job of it before or since.

>>22756>>22757>>22758

All of this. I remember the Halo series being the first games in a long, long time that really made me want to play through them on every difficulty and get all the achievements and all that. There's nothing that brings four hopeless nerds together like spending days or weeks trying to get the LASO achievements. The AI really helped with that, it wasn't just "more" enemies running at you, they were actively more aggressive.

More than anything else, the appeal of Halo to me was that I grew up with it. It's a game I could play in my room on my little 14" telly, I didn't have to borrow the family PC and sit in the living room and all of that, it was mine. Even if the games were shite I'd probably still have that feeling, but they also happened to be very good.

Halo is also the reason a lot of my online life exists, I have friends I made on Xbox live before it was even called Xbox live, that I still talk to today. I have friends from the Rooster Teeth and Machinima communities, both companies that simply wouldn't exist without Halo. It was a Big Deal for console gaming back then and that won't be forgotten easily by someone my age.

Halo CE being on PC, and able to run directly from a flash drive was excellent craic too. We used to just play each other in it in school/college computer labs when nobody was looking.

>>22752
> "God, this reminds me of how much fun I had with UT back in the day!"
Same, that's why I've been replaying UT99 recently. Got to the DM-Phoboss, getting massively wrecked there.
I also have the GOTY edition which sadly has some decent DM maps replaced by some other ones that I like less.

Sort of want to play UT2004 again too. I have my reservations though, as I remember the 2004 was pretty intense too and somehow differently intense. For example, in UT99 the November Sub Pen CTF map had the most vicious combat situations right in the middle. In 2004, the middle seemed to be rather dead. There were more 'tension pockets' across the map, the overall pressure just wasn't there.
It also felt a bit more Quake-ish in general to me.

Thanks for the comments. Perhaps I'll find some time to try it if it really comes to PC.

This point and click adventure is free on epic games right now

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/thimbleweed-park/home

>>22734
There are many different clients which have free game incentives. If I didn't know better, I would be inclined towards the assumption that you want people to download the launcher and the free game is irrelevant.

>>22735
Not at all. People have shared games here which I have enjoyed in the past so I thought I'd contribute. I saw this on efreebies and I thought some people might like it. I'm not the same lad who mentioned it earlier.

>>22735

You reckon anyone is doing to bother directly marketing to the three of us?

>>22737
Fortnite must really be getting worried by Apex Legends if they're marketing directly to us.

Nope. Nope. As soon as I heard his voice, I stopped the video. Not watching that.

>>22293

Good for you, it is badly delivered meandering tedious crap.

I thought it was a very well made review of an existential masterpiece of a game.

I've watched a lot of Kim Justice videos in the past and they've always been very good, not seen that one mind.

I'll just leave this here:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i62K01nSla4

>>22720
For me it's comics. When I was a kid a comic was a treat, a small one but a treat nonetheless. You had to at least be good for half an hour first while you went around the supermarket with your mum. Now I can just sit in bed reading years and years of Spider-Man in one go on my tablet whenever I have a couple of days off. There's a part of me that still wants to pinch myself even as a 30 year old man.

>>22723

For me it's online chess. I used to dream of the day when I'd be old enough to get the bus into town and play against good players every week. By the time I was old enough I had very much lost interest in chess, but now I'm a boring old man and I can play blitz against strong players at any hour of the day or night on my phone. If you'd told the nine-year-old me that one day it would be possible to watch lectures by grandmasters or play in chess tournaments on a little glowing slab, he would have been delirious with excitement.

Also YouTube in general - it's now possible to curate your own nerdy TV channel that's full of fascinating weirdos. TV is a lot stupider and more facile than it used to be, but it almost doesn't matter.

>>22724
Have you played Dennis Bell of Torquay?

Not quite the same but I've been spending too much time and money in B&Q lately; it feels like being a kid in Toys R Us.

>>22723
>>22724
>>22726

For me it's Darknet drugs and prostitutes that get delivered in Ubers. Now this is a future I can get behind IYKWIM .

>>22385
Duuuh nuuuh nuh - duhnuhnuhnuhnuh, nuhnuhnuh

>>22386
Mah nà mah nà, di-dee bi-dee-di.

So we're just letting the Irish post here now?

did he really believe trump was trying to kill him? i really couldn't pay attention to him anymore with all his anti trump shite.

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>22344
Danny Dyer's let himself go.

I have fond memories of the Minecraft server.

>>22531

I ran the first one we had, I enjoyed that too. I was going to mention it but I thought people would't be into that sort of thing anymore.

>>22532
Minecraft or human interaction? I have minecraft on PC, haven't played it in ages. I've been playing Warframe a bit though, it's a decent multiplayer game.

What would you all have in mind to spunk some time on?

>>22477

can't unionize if you don't have a job.

Nursing is also a much more niche skill, and the value dictated heavily by a nationalised industry, brain drain and retaining people trained specifically for that role. Where as care workers which are effectively unskilled nurses (so 'anyone can do it') frequently work absurd hours and get fuck all.

>>22477
>If they all unionise, companies have to recognise them; that's literally the point.
All the laws in the land won't save you from someone pointing a gun to your head.

>>22478
Care workers are unionised though, my mate is a support worker and he is in a union. He works mental shifts some weeks, granted.

The final episodes of TWD are being finished off by Skybound Games.

Proper dead and filing for Bankruptcy now.

As most have said, the Xbox controller is a great way to go, there's native support in most games and it works well on Windows for obvious reasons.

That being said I'm sure a PlayStation controller works too. What I'm trying to say is go for one of the controllers that a company spend millions designing and developing as the sole control input for their console, instead of a MadCatz abomination.

PS4 controllers are actually quite lovely, but I got mine for naff all so that's obviously a factor, and of course you need a bit of third party software to trick games into thinking it's an Xbox one. However, in terms of the hardware itself, I'd say it's the tops.

>>22516

It's a lovely controller but I think the voodoo science I have to do to make it work changes every fortnight or so.

>>22511
The D-pad really can be an issue. It works fine movement controls even if it feels a little spongy, but some games initially designed for Sony consoles, RPGs in particular, use the D-pad like an extra set of four buttons instead. This works reasonably ok since they are physically separated making it easy to hit one direction only. Trying to do the same with an XBox controller, on the other hand, can be pretty torturous if fast and precise actions need to be done using that control scheme.

>>22527
If the d-pad is a concern then a 360 controller is a bad choice. Solid otherwise, though, and should be pretty cheap.

If you play platform games or other games that use the d-pad extensively then a PS4 DualShock 4 or an Xbox One controller are the clear winners, IMO. Their d-pads are tighter than any of the classic controllers were even back when they were new, and even if you've got an old PS2/Saturn/SNES pad knocking around, chances are it's a bit knackered.

The Xbox One controller hooks into Windows using xinput, which is the de facto standard for pad support in PC games, the DS4 used to require fiddly third-party software to emulate this though Steam apparently now does a good job of supporting it natively. DS4s come with a rechargeable battery inside, but the battery life is pretty feeble.

>>22512
The Steam controller is an interesting design and I don't regret buying one, but I found that it landed in a no man's land between a pointing device and a gamepad, while not being especially competent at either. I've mostly used it for turn-based games where its accuracy isn't such an issue.

>>22520
This Train game?
https://web.archive.org/web/20090515101046/http://playthisthing.com/train

>>22521
no

>>22518
Diplomacy is the only good boardgame.

>>22523

Only if your definition of "good" involves six hours of bitter arguments culminating in actual physical violence.

After playing "Pandemic: Legacy" to find out what all the fuss was about and having a really good time with it our little group has mostly been playing cooperative games. So far, we've probably sunk the most hours into "Eldritch Horror" (which made Arkham Horror tempting only until we heard it was even more fiddly). It does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved: each player's turn is less one person making decisions while the others watch and more of a group effort to decide how the team can best achieve the shared goals and divide up tasks. Just beware: the box says "1-8 players", but that is a big fat lie. Unless you literally have all day or play with machine like efficiency any more than 5 isn't really playable.

>>22430
Which Total War game would you recommend for a beginner? Are there any that have decent tutorials?

>>22431
I think part of my shitness at Warhammer was that I'm used to the older games, so it might be less of a culture shock for yourself. My own, very personal and non-committal opinion would be Shogun 2 or Medieval 2. However, they're probably all worth playing. Shogun 2 was when they began changing the series up and has some very worthwhile add-on campaigns, so I'd probably advise you start there. If you really love stupid nerd shit though, Medieval 2 has an absolutely brilliant LotR mod called "Third Age", which is a major add-on/semi-sequal all of its own. And even though it's getting on a bit, Medieval 2 still looks ace.

>>22429
I'm still here. I've got Two Point Hospital in my Steam wishlist so I'll probably get them it for Christmas. Thanks, lad.

At the minute they're mainly playing Fortnite and they seem to have suddenly got back into Stardew Valley again.

>>22433
Have you made sure they thank the bus driver every game?

>>22429
Well blow me. It's literally Theme Hospital in HD.

Lads, I'll be back in a month or three.