>>23064
>Sort of. I played the Official Xbox Magazine demo as a wee'un and didn't understand why I couldn't chop people in half with a lightsaber.

Then I recommend doing Kotor 1 and 2 once you're done with VTM (they will both need unofficial patches). You're in for a good few months of solid fun at this rate.

>Nosferatu's kind of my jam fyi don't tell me how to live my life.

Excuse me but I'm clan Ventrue so you have to do as I say.

>>23067

Excuse me but I'm clan jam so you're done with VTM (they will both need unofficial Xbox Magazine demo as a wee'un and 2 once you're done with VTM (they will both need unofficial Xbox Magazine demo as a wee'un and didn't understand why I couldn't chop people in half with VTM

>>23065
What's so special about Malkavians then?

>>23067
Both Kotors have been re-released with those mods officially supported and made available through Steam Workshop.

>>23069
Not him but I've been into Vampire for a while so I'll happily answer. Malks are afflicted with an ancient madness via blood. It makes for some interesting - if a bit lol randumb in places - dialogue options and unique encounters in the games. It goes a bit deeper in the tabletop with some insightful lore but that's the long and short of it.

I usually roll Nosferatu 'cause vampire neckbeards, innit.

>>23069

see >>23068

>>23071
I've just had a pretty daft realisation: I must have mistaken VTM for some other game; I've never played VTM. I might though, it sounds fun from your description.

Encircled and exstinguished roughly half a million Axis forces south west of Minsk. If the Krakow-Katowice strategic operation goes to plan then I could well be playing Vampire by Christmas. It is now only a matter of time.

>>23075
Still playing HoI lad? Send the nazis a hearty Feuerwerk present from me sometime.

Playing this today. Kind of Sim City+++.

>>23077
Accidentally lost 13 hours playing this yesterday.

Dead Money is still shite on Hardcore.

I realise I might be a bit late to the party, but I've just chugged through the first few sections of Half-Life. At one point I found myself trapped in a kitchen, unable to find a way out, and it turned out that I wasn't supposed to have gone that way. I finished the bit with the rocket and the hentai tentacle monster, noticed the time, and figured that I might want to try and get a couple of hours kip.

>>23077
I got a copy tropico 4 from CEX only to find i needed to buy a Steam CD key to use it. Fuck that, i'm not paying for it twice. A shame because it looked pretty nice.

>>23082
CEX reselling PC games is a scam.
People buy games, activate the key, and then sell them to CEX, who know what's going on and just turn a blind eye.

Tropico 4 is sold online by grey market key resellers for .68€.

Buying from CEX is just dumb even if they had verified their keys as good.

Do they still make decent beat 'em up games?

>>23083
>>23084
I usually buy the older titles which don't seem to have this problem, plus it's worthwhile browsing their stock when you don't have access to the 'net (if you can get the bloody games to work, that is).

>>23085
Mother Russia Bleeds is a pretty good 2D scrolling beat-em-up. Of course you could acquire MAME and play all of the Capcom classics. Final Fight, Captain Commando, AvP and Cadillacs & Dinosaurs for a few examples.

>>23084
>Tropico 4 is sold online by grey market key resellers for .68€.
Be aware that if you're doing this you're complicit in financial crime (as in actual crime, not this "piracy" nonsense), and you might find the key gets cancelled anyway.

>>23088
I take it you've not been watching any of Harvey Weinstein's films since #metoo broke?

>>23089
Comedy gold, m7.

>>23090
Wasn't joking. I mean if you already have the DVD rewatching it is kosher but buying his rape-powered films is a no-go surely.

>>23091
>Wasn't joking.
Don't worry, half the acts on Live at the Apollo aren't funny anyway, so you'll fit right in.

>>23092
Even Stewart Lee would be ashamed to repeat an insult this well worn.

>>23093
Low-grade shitposts get low-grade insults shocker.

Do you have an actual point or are you just struggling to control your jerking knee?

I've been playing Wargame Red Dragon again, I'm enjoying being far more proactive, but I'm still not terribly good. I've written "attack at the point of least resistence & en masse" on a white board, because it's a bad habit of mine to throw piecemeal forces against enemy strong points, turning every village and treeline into the Battle of Monte Cassino. I've also been taking pointers from Soviet Deep Battle Doctrine. Sound in theory, it's proving far harder to implement with a row of Challenger tanks in my way.

>>23081
As a wee lad (and a pretty thick one) I had tossed about half a hundred of grenades down the pit of that green pointy dickware before I realised there got to be some other way to kill it.
Would have been somewhat funnier if it was actually possible to ice it that way. Sheer idiocy overpowering more practical approach or something. Why the hell not.

>>23081
>>23096
Warning: vital signs critical.

>>23081

I love Half Life, and I think it still holds up fairly well (I don't mind the platforming bits). It's just a good old adventure and a lot of the encounters and set pieces are original and fun to work through.
People say it's the father of scripted shooters which it may well be but none of them seem to capture the feel of it well.

>>23098
When I was a child I could do a pitch perfect impression of the "access denied" door line, then puberty hit and everything went downhill from there.

>>23099

To this day I'm not sure if I prefer 1 or 2.

I've spent a lot more time playing 2, but there's something really appealing about the structure of 1, the way you're escaping by just exploring, making use of the weapons you find along the way. You're not really a big hero you're just a dude trying not to die.

Are there really any other games that get that feeling right? I seem to remember the first Red Faction getting very, very close to the same vibe. The combat was broken up nicely by exploring abandoned tunnels and C4ing your way around doors, but it all fell apart towards the end.

>>23101
>Are there really any other games that get that feeling right?
Fallout: New Vegas gave me that feeling the first time through. Max Payne too, to a degree, though there's the obvious noir nihilism overhanging the whole affair. Unreal as well.

I'm sure there are some games made this side of the early 2000s that are competent enough in capturing that feeling but I'm an
unapologetically elitist retro-cunt so any such titles escape me.

>>23101
Dead Space? You're just a lowly engineer turned hobby amputator

>>23101
Not the same genre but I had a similar feeling about Planescape: Torment. An amnesiac wakes up in a mortuary, trying to figure out who the fuck is he, where is he and what's the strange world around him. You are immortal though.
I think I like 2 better. It has some really sinister vibes at certain places. Oh and remember when you acquire the bugbait? A D-Day for Combine, reversed.

>>23104
Also Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, to an extent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7XH-nSMXYM

>>23101
I definitely preferred the first one. The second one was a remarkable achievement in many ways, and raised the bar substantially, but moment to moment I just didn't have as much fun as the original.

>>23102
I replayed Max Payne on a little Android box recently and it was absolutely brilliant. It might help that I can remember playing that game whilst tripping back when I was a teenager, so certain areas of the game still looked like they were luridly coloured and shifting. It's a peculiar thing, trip memories.

Rage sage for /A/ ramblings.

>>23104
Did you play Torment: Tides of Numa Numa, or whatever it was called? I got past the first "disc" and got distracted, never to return.

Metro 2033 was strongly reminiscent of the Half Life vibe I thought. It broke up the tense horror, shooting and exploration segments in a very nicely paced way I thought, nothing out stayed it's welcome. Those bits where you're up on the surface scrabbling about for gas mask filters and not sure if you're even going the right way were some of my best memories in any game of the last decade. Shame the sequels sort of mucked it up.

I've not tried Exodus yet, I pirated it (out of objection to the Epic store exclusivity) then never got around to playing it.

>>23108
I fell out of love with 2033 after trying to beat it on the hardest difficulty, getting to the end bit where you fight the sentient blobs, and simply not having enough ammo left to keep the NPC I was with alive. That's some kind of '90s adventure game trick.

Sage for probably posting about this earlier ITT.

>>23108
I didn't get on very well with Metro 2033 because the whole experience seemed too railroaded - sometimes literally - and the whole bullet economy thing .. seemed weird. Maybe i'm just one of those compulsive hoarder types who never wanted to use the military grade ammunition because 'they're valuable', then having less fun because a lot of the cool looking monsters are difficult to kill with the scrap metal rounds.

>>23109
>>23110

I think a lot of modern games get difficulty entirely wrong. Gamer pride and a thirst for challenge makes you want to play it on the hardest mode, but the fact is they are designed and balanced around "normal mode" and that's how you have the most fun with it.

The recent iD shooters are prime examples of this. I made the mistake of stubbornly playing through Wolfenstein and DOOM 2016 on the hardest modes, and I couldn't escape the feeling that they were just kind of bullshit. The challenge was unfair somehow. But then when I tried it on normal, despite my inner feeling of "but REAL shooters are meant to be played at the hardest setting!", it turns out the gameplay was fundamentally more well balanced. It wasn't just because it was easier, it's because you could actually engage with the mechanics instead of having to cheese it by peeping around corners and shit.

Contrast this with classic Doom. Doom didn't increase the damage you took from enemies on harder difficulties. Doom didn't make enemies arbitrarily harder to kill. What it did do is put in more enemies, and give you less ammo. You might try and argue that's just a roundabout way of doing the same thing, but it really isn't. There's an important difference between having to use half your ammo on one baddie and you'll die in two hits, to having to use half your ammo on four enemies and they will kill you in eight hits, because it stays granular. The balance of the mechanics stays the same, which is what matters.

tl;dr everything new is shit why can't these modern devs get it right fuck

Metro was great though, and I think what you may have missed is missed is that it was more in the spirit of a first person survival horror than an FPS, really. The ending segment was a bit weak, but since we were comparing it to Half Life initially, that's definitely the pot calling the kettle an African American.

I decided to open a new career on KSP after about 5 years and it's surprising how much has changed. They even did another update just the other-day. Reentry is much less forgiving than I remember but you can run things faster without the physics shitting the bed.

I'll probably get to the point where I need to land on Minmus and get bored again.

>>23111
I agree entirely with this. It puts me off once I realise a game is actively cheating (i.e. strategy games) and its gotten worse these days thanks to poor planning.

>>23111
Most of that about Doom isn't true, you know. Enemies on harder difficulties deal double damage, they also increase in speed (which is arguably an arbitrary way to make them harder to kill), and the hardest difficulty has double ammo, not less.

Just pedantry on my part though, I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote. On the "gamer pride", "real men play on hard" thing, I had a friend growing up who insisted on playing games on the hardest difficulty, and then would sit there fuming throughout the whole experience, mostly just fucking up and wasting time replaying areas because he hadn't played it on Normal and didn't have a clue what he was doing.

In most cases with complex modern games, harder difficulty modes are intended for players who've played through the game already. I do not understand the appeal of trying to brute force your way through an experience that is carefully designed to teach you bit by bit, it just seems fucking dumb.

>>23113

>Most of that about Doom isn't true, you know. Enemies on harder difficulties deal double damage, they also increase in speed (which is arguably an arbitrary way to make them harder to kill), and the hardest difficulty has double ammo, not less.

ITYTD had double items and the player takes half damage.

NM had double items, fast monsters, respawning monsters, and cheat codes were disabled.

HNTR, HMP and UV all had "normal" game parameters. Doom never increased the damage the player took on any difficulty.

The middle three represent easy, normal, and hard. The first and last represent mentally challenged baby mode and not even remotely fair mode, respectively- Most players don't consider NM to be a real difficulty choice, it's more of a distinct challenge mode. Indeed, the initial release of Doom as shareware didn't have it, so arguably it was DLC.

I spent an entire summer when I was unemployed making Doom maps. I know my Doom and I am prepared to defend my honour on the internet even at these small hours.

>ITYTD had double items and the player takes half damage.
Another way of putting this is that every mode other than ITYTD deals twice as much damage.

>The middle three represent easy, normal, and hard. The first and last represent mentally challenged baby mode and not even remotely fair mode, respectively
Agree with all this, at least.

Any of your Doom maps still knocking around? I haven't fired up a WAD in a long time, would be a nice excuse.

>>23115
I've spread a few WADs in my time IYKWIM.

>>23112
I can easily lose a whole weekend on KSP. Looking forward to version 2.

>>23107
> Numa Numa
Do I get to play as Dan Balan in it?
Awright, back to the topic. Negative. I never got around to install it, life gets in the way.
Mind you, I had a similar feeling about the P:T initially. It was just too odd and made little sense. Then it clicked; now it's one of my favourite games.