Well, I finished Cyberpunk today, after putting it off over Christmas because I frankly had become board with it.

Overall what a disappointment of a game. I wasn't on board the hype train, so I wasn't initially outraged about the bugginess or the missing features or anything like that. The fundamental mechanics and game world are probably the game's strongest parts, in my opinion- You can feel where they have been cut back from what was originally envisioned, but it's by no means bad. It's a solid mash-up of Far Cry and GTA in a Ghost in the Shell dressing, and that's fine with me.

The problems set in after you've got about a third of the way through, and it's only downhill from there. It starts very strongly. It sucks you in, sets up the world, paints a really immersive vision of a setting you feel like you could dive in up to your neck. The trouble is the longer you play, the more you realise it's only an inch deep. They set up a lot of story avenues and thematic ideas, then never do anything with any of them. You never get to see much of the suggested corporate espionage, or cool hacker stuff, or much to do with the gangs, and on and on.

The memorable moments are all from the prologue, before Jackie dies, and after that you're really going to struggle to stay invested. Your character had a well defined goal and motives at first, but once the main plot arc is set up, everything that happens afterward just feels contrived and rushed, and just doesn't make anything more than superficial use of the opportunities the setting provides. It just tells some pretty bog standard RPG character stories and then you do the last quest. Just a lot of wasted potential, honestly.

>>24801

Yep. I only finished the suicide ending, and need to revisit the other relationship endings but cba.

I was hyped about it from the early trailers but was getting mad Daikatana vibes from later promo materials.

What's good in it is really cool, but the fundamentals are PS2 tier in some respects and never surpass the best games on PS3.

The marketing of the game was deceptive to the point of criminality and I am a moron for pre-ordering the game. It makes me think of when THPS3 got ported to the PS1 and was shit, but the port was an aside and not the main volume being shipped at that time.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9abEq5c2_OQ

I enjoyed playing Untitled Goose Game. It's by no means long, maybe it will keep you occupied for 6 hours at most, but in terms of goose-based shenanigans it can't be beat.

>>24803

Definitely was the best goose themed stealth puzzle thief simulator that I played in 2019.

>>24802
>pre-ordering
Oh mate.

Hbomb touches on a lot of other stuff in his video, but he's particularly emphatic on "don't pre-order games, ever, ever, for any reason". Give it a watch.

>>24805

I quite like Hbomberguy's videos, but I also find him to be kind of an intolerable manchild jeb-end. Jim Sterling has also been going on for years about why you shouldn't pre-order anyway, but the bit I find appalling is just how many people need to be told you shouldn't pre-order.

At least in the old days it made a little bit of sense, because you had a risk of a big new release selling out, and then you'd have to wait another week or two. But in the days where everyone's games come from Steam, Epic, GOG and Xbox/Playstation store, there's really no reason for it. Gamers have just been conditioned into the most ideal consumers imaginable, and put up almost zero resistance.

The best part about it is how the gaming press is in on the scam, and every time something accidentally happens (like the Cyberpunk release) to rouse gamers from their slumber and realise they're being ripped off, you see them spin the story to be about those mean toxic gamers and their Twitter death threats, instead of the real dissatisfaction at anti-consumer practice underneath.

>>24803
Fantastic bit of absurdity that doesn't outstay it's welcome.

>>24806
Do Not Pre-order has been the default stance for Brit-adjacent gaming youtubers for a while now, TotalBiscuit (RIP) was also staunchly against the practice.

There is no real upside to it these days when even boxed "copies" are just a download code or require multi-gigabyte day one patches making the physical copies all but obsolete. Pre-order bonuses are basically front-loaded "micro transactions". It makes sense for the companies that can get away with it to do these glorified kickstarters because hey, free money, but for the user there's no real upside to the practice anymore.

Since the December lockdown myself and a very longstanding friend have been playing Total War games against one another and I must say I rather miss the days when I was way, way, way better than him. He's practicing and watching people online now, I never did any of that. I've got to keep my hand in sim racing too and there's cunt-offs to attend to, how could I spare the time? I guess in many ways I'm just like Napoleon; ten years ago I was brilliant and now I've gone off the boil somewhat. Maybe I'll get my own island if I lose again?

>>24809

You'll have to get out of the habit of licking the wallpaper if you do.

>>24810
I'll tell you the same thing I told my therapist: I don't change for anyone, you Cornish scum.

Hades
I'd mention more about it, but there's so much out there already it would be redundant. Supergiant Games storytelling in a rogue-lite hack-n-slash that makes you want to lose sometimes so you can see the story unfold.

HROT
The perfect kind of retro slav jankgame. It's a Quake style FPS that saw how brown Quake was and decided that no, that would not do, and made it Brown. It's technically in early access but what is there was quite fun to play through if you like that sort of thing. That it is written in Pascal is just icing on the cake.

Gladius
I'm a sucker for 40k stuff and while I think this game is brilliant it certainly has its rough edges. It's a hex and turn based strategy game akin to a basic Civ game (it would be classic 4X, but there's no diplomacy because in the grimdark future etc...), if you're not playing PvP you're playing skirmishes against the AI (which can be adjusted from "push over" to "it literally cheats to beat you"). Given it's an adaptation it's really quite faithful to the tabletop game and compared to the usual dreck that gets the 40k license it's an absolute gem. If you can get it on a Steam sale with its DLC it's not too, but it gets really quite pricey if you wanted to get everything outright (I'd make excuses for the developer needing to recoup costs for a niche product, but that's their problem not mine).

Wilmot's Warehouse
I've worked in a fulfillment warehouse for a mid-sized non-Amazon company before, and this is basically a picker-stocker-packer simulator. Do you like shapes? Do you like colours? Do like when things are Neat And Tidy And Exactly Where They Belong? This game will seem like a waste of time, an infuriating nonesense or the best thing ever. You play as a square that gets delivered a pile of squares with symboles on them, you need to drag and push them around a large fairly open area (the warehouse) and sort them in whatever way makes sense to you within a time limit. You have limited vision range, so you need to remember where you stored things. Once the sorting time's expired, people appear that will demand combinations of the things in your warehouse and you have to find and deliver them. I think it'll take only one or two minutes of watching someone play this game to decide if you'll love it or hate it.

I started playing at the start of December, I have 240 hours clocked,

send help.

>>24819
Is it that good? I watched a review of it by a chap by the name of Lord Mandalore on YouTube and it looked a bit of a mess, this was some time ago now though.

>>24820

It is that good to me. All things battletech related have always been a bit of a mismanaged mess and this is no different. But that has always been in the things surrounding the games never the games themselves.

As for the game. I love it, and I've never had a soft spot for the franchise. The greatest asset to me is the community it self. Most online multiplayer experience are an experience of infighting between foul mouthed teenagers. This there is genuine cooperation and discussion on voice chat. I don't rightfully understand how it has happened but it is quite wonderful. I've made friends via this game.

As for the gameplay primarily fps with tank controls in team deathmatch. But as the set up for that imagine if you played something class based like tf2 but within that you had full equipment management like diablo but it was balance so no equipment was objectively better. I would be lying if I said that wasn't overwhelming to a new player. And if you want to give it a try I would happily recommend starting builds so you don't get completely lost immediately.

Half-Life Alyx, once it finally came down to less than £30 but only because there's a sale on.

It does live up to the hype in most regards - it's the most convincing VR world I've ever seen and for the most part controls are good (though as a dirty lefty I had to do a little bit of tweaking).

The horror aspects of HL2 really come into play here - you have to manually reload the guns -- eject the magazine, pull the new mag out of your backpack, push it into the gun, and pull the slide. There's also no partial reloading for the pistol -- you can eject the mag before it's empty but you can't store partial mags in your backpack, so this adds another element to the survival horror aspect since you can't just reload in a quiet moment if you've got 5 left (without wasting 5 bullets, anyway). You also have to point the torch with your off hand, meaning that you lose ALL sight during dark sections when you have to reload. Even clearly telegraphed jump scares have so much more impact in VR.

It can't hide the fact it's a Source game though. There's the classic noise of Source physics objects interacting everywhere, and the level transitions are absolutely painful - on several occasions needing a restart as the Oculus compositor gives up, assuming the game has crashed.

>>24858
7 hours in:
It really does have a great atmosphere at times.

The hacking minigames are tedious, and Valve's main idea to step up difficulty is just to make you do it multiple times.

>>24858
>>24859
What headset are you playing it on? Is it worth spending the buckaroonies just for it?

>>19768

Going right back to the roots of the thread. Openxcom 40k mod is an extensive reworking of the original early 90s Xcom. This is a mod for an open source remake of the game and you need to fiddle around a little with files as well as a copy of the original game.

Once you tweak the visuals to see more of the map and get a feel for the hot keys and gameplay, this is a superb and lovingly crafted game which goes into a lot of detail with the source material.

Expect heavy losses. You start out scrapping against poorly equipped cultists but before long you are going toe to toe with khorne berserkers and plague marines.

>>24860
Rift S. If you can get a headset cheap enough I'd say it's worth it, but I wouldn't advise getting it just for Alyx. I mostly play Beat Saber on it these days, but I'd say I've probably got about 50 hours per month so far in VR and that's made it worth it for me. I'm not sure if there are any big VR games in development right now, but if nothing else, there's porn.

Finished Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Took me around 80 hours, and I did probably 75% of the side stuff. It reached a point where I was so overlevelled that it trivialised everything other than boss encounters. The story fluctuated in quality, some arcs were compelling, some arcs were shit. Ending was fucking atrocious though, the modern day bits have always been awful and I can't understand why Ubi won't bin them off.

>>24863
Trouble is they want to keep the modern day aspect going, but dont know where to go with it because they have to save some story for the comics etc.

Honestly, they should just do a full on Modern Day game to properly advance or finish the thing.

>>24861
That looks utterly fantastic.

This better be fucking great.

>>24868

If you like rallying, it's an absolute joy. If you don't, you will have a bad time.

>>24869

Really? Damn, I hate rallying.

>>24869
I am rather going into it with that expectation in mind, yes. I probably should have just downloaded Richard Burns Rally instead, but honestly by the time I get all the mods sorted and what have you Dirt Rally 2 would probably have been done downloading for several days. Though I wouldn't have a tenth of my SSD taken up by one game either, so it's swings and roundabouts.

>>24871

You'll see why it's so massive when you play it - the stages are incredibly detailed, right down to how the surface degrades as you go down the running order. If you follow WRC then you'll get a weird sense of deja-vu as you run through the stages. It's absolutely epic in VR, but you need a very strong stomach to get through Finland. My only gripe is the tarmac physics, which just feel a bit floaty and loose.

>>24872
Yeah, I get why it's so big. It'd still be nice to have a "I'm playing at 1920x1080 on high, please let me half my download size" option. I think I'm too much of a sim racing pleb to know quite what tarmac physics should feel like in a 90s Ford Escort rally car. I'm quite sure I will like like it, because I've been spending a lot of time in Assetto Corsa doing rally stuff. It feels a bit less serious than road racing, so it's a nice change.

Also I accidentally throttled my download to "1.2 KB/s" for a couple of hours because I assumed it was in MB/s. I'm Impressed Steam acknowledges when a download will take "more than a year".

>>24872

>My only gripe is the tarmac physics, which just feel a bit floaty and loose

I don't know enough about modern rally to know, but could that just be down to what it feels like running lower psi knobbly tyres on a hard tarmac section?

>>24872
I have no problem perceiving the audio, but I can still barely make it out as language so for a giggle I tried transcribing the video. I can make the numbers and about half the rest like "keep left", "jump" and a few more. Is this jargon that takes practice to understand or am I just crap at listening?

>>24875
If you listen to lots of it it starts to make more sense. It's probably a bit like if you were an American, no offense, and you moved to Liverpool, no offense. Same langauge but you'd probably spend six months smiling politely and nodding. Also there's probably a limit to how many times you can end up in a tree before you definitively remember what a "left 3 tightens over crest" is.

Didn't mean to say "probably" three times in one post I'll do better in the future.

>>24874

Rally cars are almost totally rebuilt for tarmac with different wheels, tyres, brakes, suspension, transmission and aero bits. At WRC Spain they have to change over in 75 minutes, which is a feat comparable to a two-second pit stop in F1.

>>24878

That makes sense. I did assume there were mixed surface stages though, for no real reason other than I thought it'd be cool.

>>24877
I'd be more concerned about "no offence". Thanks none the less, glad to hear it's not me but practice that's missing.

>>24875

>Is this jargon that takes practice to understand

Yep. They're called pacenotes and they're a very abbreviated way of describing the road ahead. The driver and co-driver are allowed to drive the stage beforehand in a normal road car to prepare their notes. All driver-codriver teams have their own particular system, but the general theme is that the numbers 1-6 are used to indicate the sharpness of the corner, while larger numbers are used to indicate the distance to the next corner.

It's not rocket science, but it's absolutely crucial in rallying - the driver is always setting the car up for the next corner before they can see it, so an inaccurate or late pacenote almost always leads to a crash.

https://racemarket.net/blog/rally-pacenotes-what-why-how/

>>24879

There are some stages with a mix of surfaces (tarmac and gravel in Australia, tarmac and snow/ice in Monte Carlo), in which case the car will have a compromise setup with noticeably less grip on tarmac. The loose-surface physics in DIRT are excellent and you can really feel the effects of tyre wear or setup changes, but there's something slightly off about the tarmac physics. It's not cartoonishly awful, there's just a slightly exaggerated feel when the car breaks traction that's noticeable if you've come from a track-oriented sim like Assetto Corsa or rFactor.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that either they used a modified version of the loose surface physics for the tarmac physics, or they intentionally loosened up the feel on tarmac to make the cars a bit more predictable at the limit.

>>24880
That bit was an intentional act of comedic repetition to draw a parallel between the two locations mentioned, IE, the presumption they aren't very nice.

I've just marathoned Outer Wilds, and luckily I'd watched very little about it at all so even things that appear in the trailers were completely new to me, which made it that much more of an experience.

It's one of those games that's going to stick in my mind for a long time.
My near-blind original run through Portal comes close for the sense of discovery and exploration, although that's a much different scope.

I got the game expecting a rustic space exploration game but the initial presentation belies the real core of the presentation in some ways. Then in other ways it is exactly what it presents itself as - you just go out and explore this fantastically crafted, miniaturised, fully simulated solar system in your spaceship. Just there's more under the surface that you'll find out in time.

I think this is the absolute least spoilery review I've found:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfbyWk1HTpc

Not sure I'm liking this Dirt Rally 2. Always online? Baffling amount of info? Weird UI? That bloke what killed them kids with a helicopter? It's not a good first impression.

That Evilk Genius 2 game looks alright, but the steam reccomendations make it sound like shovelware. Full priced at 30-40 quid too. I'll stick to Two Point Hospital for now.

I'm trying really hard not to become someone who says things like "games were better back in my day, lad" in the cadence of Fred Dibnah. However, I've just had 35gb of updates that were mostly just cosmetics across two different games. Do people still have download limits in the UK? What happens if your favourite game decides you need another 50gb of hats installed before you can play it again if you are limited? "Sorry, boss, I can't work from home this week, Apex Legends downloaded several terabytes of ultra-high definition hairstyles whilst I was sleeping and EE cut me off".

>>24887
Have you actually gone back and replayed the old games? I recently gave up on my replay of Red Alert 2, having finished the main campaign and found that about 90% of the content of the Yuri's Revenge campaigns are just the same maps again as a different faction. Games haven't got significantly worse, I think we're just able to see through the bullshit better now.

>>24887
You should watch some Worthabuy, if you don't already. Replace Dibnah with a geordie accent and you're there.

>>24888

Selective memory, more like. We were well aware of the shite back then, but I think the market in general being smaller meant flicking through the bad scores in PC Gamer felt a lot less like the 24/7 deluge of horse shit browsing Steam feels like today.

Mt project over the last couple of days has been filling up a 3DS with emulators and that. Long story short, due to the slightly fiddly nature of converting files over to the 3DS, I haven't just been dumping the full romsets onto an SD card like I normally would with something like this- I've had to hand pick the games I actually know and remember being good. For the SNES, out of over a thousand games, that comes to 46. For the Megadrive it's only 30. For the more obscure systems even less.

So in reality, even the golden age of my childhood when everything was amazing, only something like one in twenty games were good, and the rest were garbage like Nigel Mansell's Formula 1. But I bet that ratio is more like one in a hundred today.

>>24890
The greatest video game review I have ever read (from PC Zone, much better than PC Gamer, fuck you) attests to the fact that bad games existed back when you bought physical copies too.

>>24891
They even did a little logo of someone squatting to do a poo. Glorious.

>>24890
There were plenty of shite games back in the 90s and early 2000s but the average quality of what was on sale definitely seemed better.

I think it's mainly down to online distribution and ubiquitous fast internet. Back in the 90s and early 2000s when everything was sold on physical media it took much more money and effort publish and distribute a title so only the better stuff from legit publishers made it to the shelves.
Also studios couldn't get away with selling what are effectively public betas as finished games when a good chunk of their customer base wouldn't be able to download the inevitable massive patch to make it playable.

Almost everything big had a playable demo too, so there was much less risk of buying something only to find out it was garbage after you'd spent money on it.

>>24891
EA have always been money grabbing cunts. Just look at all the DLC packs for The Sims 4 https://www.ea.com/en-gb/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/pc/store It's the same old shite, just without a shiny disc and a DVD case.