My Steam Summer Sale haul wasn't all that impressive. DLC I don't know I'll ever use, Subnautica 2: Christmas Down Under and The Forest.

>>25700
The problem is I don't think Britain is going to stop producing pop-culture ever, so I'm afraid he's going to be doing this until he drops dead and everyone who remembers the Binley Mega Chippy has done likewise.

I beat Doom 2016, it was 7/10. Do away with all the tokens and upgrade points and shit, it's not interesting acquring them, and half the weapon mods and suit upgrades don't add much to the game. Just give me the full capabilities of each weapon as soon as I acquire it. I know they do this shit so people get that sense of choice and progression, "ooh do I make my railgun a million times more powerful, or do I make it so my shotgun can shoot three times in one?" but it's not done in an engaging way. I love skill trees and upgrades normally, but in a game about excess violence, it's like they're holding back the best toys.

>>25709

That was exactly what I hated about Doom 2016. It felt like all that stuff was added in out of an expectation that games nowadays just have that sort of thing, rather than them serving any purpose. Instead of making you feel more powerful as you get them, all it did was make you feel completely gimped at the start.

Eternal was a bit better with it, because they way you kind of needed to use all the weapons to fight effectively made them more akin to the gradual power curve you'd experience as you find the new weapons throughout a more traditional shooter. In a sense that's what they were really- Instead of finding the secret in E1M3 that gives you the rocket launcher, you find a secret that gives you a token to get the second firing mode on your shotgun or whatever.

Still not a fan, because that just swapped in one issue for another, Eternal's combat really started to feel tiresome because you had to go through the same routine every fight. I couldn't play it for more than a couple of hours at once. It was a very elegant system for the kind of nerd who makes YouTube video essays about game mechanics to gush over, but for me it just made an already repetitive formula even more wearisome.

Started Doom Eternal, really like how huge and interesting the levels, really hate that you have to traverse them with shitty first person platforming. Climbing up walls, swinging off pipes, I am baffled as to why they've done this. It's not like the original Dooms had extensive platforming. Also a lot more focus on story and lore and shit, not a fan.

>>25711
This. Doom works on Mars. space ases and hell Not in Minas Tirth.

I am impressed by computer games, specifically Warno. Look at this, it's WW3 and you can zoom all the way in to see the VDV's little trainers. I know I posted about it before, but it's a proper game now, basically.

Been playing Black Mesa again. I've probably rambled about this before, but it pisses me off, because it's one of those games where it's so close yet so far.

Graphically it's great, obviously, the attention to detail and everything is where it shines. Doubly so for a mod team. Or at least, I would say that were it still a mod and not a commercial product- As a fully fledged game it's annoying to have a near 10 year old game chug in places on a modern machine (3600x, 5700XT).

Gameplay wise though it's just full of things that piss me off. You can get mods to fix some of it (using the mod to restore HL1 ammo limits helps a lot) but some of it is just shite and baked in. Having to quicksave before you attempt a ladder in case you fall to your death, how a lot of the scenery will restrict your movement at the worst moments, how the HECU guys are basically just aimbots that never need to reload or stop firing at all... I could go on.

And let's be honest- Xen is still shite. They almost got it right, but they still made Interloper a boring, gruelling, ugly slog. What was the logic of cutting out half of On A Rail because it was too long and/or unpolished (not even true, I played the uncut mod and it was great), and then still put a chapter as drawn out and repetitive as Interloper in? There are contradictions like this all over the game, why fuck around with the ammo limits to rebalance combat, but remain committed to a mechanic as obtuse and pointless as crouch jumping? Also I really fucking hate the sharks and I have to noclip those sections. Xen loses points for putting even more of the cunts in.

Anyway probably going to do HL2 tonight, which I haven't played in at least 3-4 years, and see how it holds up nowadays.

>>25714
This touches on why I've never bothered with, or really seen the value in, Black Mesa. Half-Life's an incredibly good game, so fiddling about with it makes no sense and I'm not one of those graphics psychos who thinks the game would be better if the bullsquid had a higher res texture. We know what high-res Half-Life 1 looks like anyway and it's kind of creepy, see pic.

>>25714
Why the fuck are these chimps attempting to remaster the original HL in Goldsrc if they're using a forked version of the engine that basically brings it up to Source 2004 standards anyway? Where's the fucking challenge when you're using high-resolution textures you made for the Source 2018 game? Autismo mode activated.

>>25716

Demakes are in vogue nowadays, because zoomers think idealised representations of PS1 graphics are cool like our generation thought idealised versions of NES/SNES graphics were cool a decade ago.

>>25717
I disagree that it's wholly nostagia. Modern graphics are hugely resource intensive, gobble up 10% of your storage per game and cost developers time and money that could obviously be spent better elsewhere. Design is far more important than graphics in determining how good a game looks, which is probably why the Mass Effect rerelease just improved the lighting and added lots of pointless lense flares. It already looked great!

>>25718

Yeah it's an obvious way to keep costs down and production times reasonable for indies and modders. Just look at the Doom modding scene, it thrives because the barrier to entry is low enough that any reasonably motivated nerd can learn how to map and script for it.

Though it's also fair to say there's an awful lot of streamer-bait indie games in the "unreleased PSX horror game" mould. It's like a weird niche industry of people making spooky Silent Hill homages solely for streamers to play, because they're invariably more fun to just let someone else play for you.

Hell Let Loose is having a free weekend (I think, it started Thursday). Not sure if I'm enjoying it. It's one of those "run about for five minutes, get shot from a bloke you never saw, repeat" games. I think they call it "realism", but like the real army, it can get a bit tedious now and then.

It's a Team 17 publication too and it's still weird seeing the Worms guy's logo on anything else.

I don't think I'm going to buy it because I'd rather have the £24 right now, but my opinion on Hell Let Loose has completely turned around over the weekend and I know think it's a very good game. Lovely community and the realism isn't boring mil-simism so once you know what's going on, it's really good fun. So much fun I felt a bit guilty about my previous post.

MultiVersus open beta out on PC. Has the typical F2P monetisation, either grind to unlock shit with "free" currency, or spend money to get it straight away. Also a battle pass, because would it be a live service game without one? It's actually a good game, I prefer it to Smash Bros, and the 2v2 format is well balanced. Roster is stupid (is that on purpose though?). You've got Shaggy who is like in the ebin XD memes where he can go Super Saiyan. DC superheroes, Adventure Time shit, Steven Universe shit, Looney Tunes, LeBron James, Arya Stark, Iron Giant, Tom & Jerry. Not sure if it'll keep me playing long term, but if they give it care and attention I think it could become pretty successful.

Got Skyrim SE and a load of mods. It's been about long enough that I've fforgotten most of the quests and such. I've played Morrowind and Oblivion enough times that I know them inside and out, Skyrim never really had enough depth to make me want to do that, but I think its time has come.

Basically there's a mod that turns everyone into furries. Absolute game changer.

>>25723
Try as I might I've never really got any further than Whiterun.
Skyrim even in VR just doesn't grab me like Fallout does,

Powerwash Simulator
You, err, pressure wash things. That's it. It's just the right level of not-realistic that encapsulates what makes it fun while ditching the bits that would make a proper simulation not fun. There's no fall damage, you can lift a 5-storey scaffolding tower no problem, you don't have to worry about where the water you goes. I think you have to be a little odd like me to enjoy the methodical cleaning of the various levels, but making things Neat And Tidy™ tickles you, give it a try. Oh, there's a story apparently, but it's just the typical dross you'd expect.

>>25724
I had more fun playing with mods than I had playing the game itself, so in that regard you're not alone. That said, none of the Fallout games grabbed me, they felt like a badly DM'd Heroes campaign.

>>25725
I find Powerwash Simulator equal parts relaxing and frustrating. That fucking playground took me 2.5 hours, with all the little nooks and crannies.

>>25725
>>25726
I remember, ten years ago, standing in a now defunct HMV-alike with a friend, laughing our heads off at the then latest Farm Simulator game, such was the absurdity of the idea. If I'd known then that making games about mundane tasks and calling them "Simulator" would become one of best money spinners in gaming I'd have signed us both up to the local college's game design course.

Lawn Mowing Simulator is this week's Epic freebie.

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/lawn-mowing-simulator-838bf3

The Persistence was 90% off on Switch so thought I'd give it a shot. It's alright, a solid FPS roguelite. It was originally a VR exclusive, and the adaptations to make the controls work on a Switch gamepad are not the best. Also you can't run, you can only move at a slow walk, which is frustrating when backtracking through a level. Has a Prey (2017)/System Shock vibe. I only paid £2.50 so I'm not going to hold it to too high a standard, so for that price it's decent.

>>25725
It's difficult to explain why, but I've put nearly 20 hours into this now.

>>25727
They had a farmer on Radio 2 earlier. He said that yesterday there was a gang of teenagers in a field whilst he was collecting up the straw, which usually means they're going to start a fire but they said they'd been playing Farming Simulator and wanted to know if they could have a go at stacking it.

>>25733
Fuck's sake. Where can I advertise, next haymaking season?
Of course, we'd get a lot more heatstrokelads posting, but it's probably worth it.

>>25734

It might be a worthwhile idea to get in touch with one of those experience day companies. If there's a market for farming simulator controllers then there's bound to be people who'd pay handsomely to have a go on a tractor. The insurance would probably be a bit of a ballache, but it could be a nice little earner.

>>25735

It greatly saddens me that there are controllers this detailed for fucking tractors, but nothing on the same level for flying a futuristic space fighter or piloting a 40 foot battle mech.

There was definitely some kind of temporal schism in the early 2010s and we now live in the bad timeline.

>>25736
Alas, Steel Battalion had a much better controller than it had game play. I think that was possibly more relevant to the decline of the custom controller, along with the rise of digital sales.

Flight sims are probably the last bastion of large scale controllers, with driving sims a close second. I don't know when we decided that replicating reality was more fun than experiencing the fantastical.

>>25734

There are a lot of bored corporate wankers just cresting the hill to middle age and/or retirement, who "always wanted a farm" and are now thinking about buying one and having a go. You could make millions teaching them the basics while talking it up as the most fulfilling lifestyle imaginable, or you could just get free mass labour every summer.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is the only Borderlands game where I can stomach the writing. Still cringy shit, but the framing device of the whole game taking place in a DnD style tabletop game is kind of cute. Stuff like a giant Wotsit blocking a path because the DM dropped it, and the narration changing the scenery of a level, nothing super clever but it raises a sensible chuckle.

Gameplay is just Borderlands except some of the guns look more high fantasy than sci-fi, and you're fighting skeletons and goblins. If anything the guns seem less fantastical than Borderlands 2, I've played about 5 hours and still haven't found a wacky weapon yet.

>>25740

fir some reason i really hate how DnD is this whole big fad right now. Can't quite place why, I've never been into DnD myself so I shouldn't be personally bothered, but it feels kind of like the whole Big Bang Theory thing. I don't like "normies" getting into nerd stuff, on principle.

>>25735
I have this.
Can confirm it's great and you can use the side panel for Truck Simulator and Train sim games too.

>>25741
I think the makers of DnD are really courting the normies now. Stuff like the Stranger Things and Critical Role official licensed campaign books, removing negative scores that you'd have with a certain race, removing forced alignments for certain races. They seem to have been pretty successful so far. I don't mind the opening up of nerd stuff to some extent, as someone who was very deeply involved in the scene, it's nice to get some well adjusted people alongside the fat smelly autists in Dragonforce t-shirts.

Just to save me some time, and don't put in any effort if you don't, but do any of you have any recommendations for modding Oblivion into a state of being Oblivion - but slightly better. I don't want to turn it into a brand new game, just freshen it up a little bit.

>>25744

Basic essentials are the unofficial patch, DarnUI, and OBSE (which loads of the other mods rely on).

For freshening up the actual content of the game, you can't go wrong with the Better Cities set, Francisco's Creatures and Items, and Oscuro's Overhaul (but use the lightest settings, otherwise it's quite drastic and kind of shit). These add a surprising amount of new content, but nothing mad and out of place, and they also somewhat address the annoying level scaling stuff (though you can configure that if you prefer vanilla, IIRC).

To pretty it up you'll want Better Faces, Quarl's Textures, Oblivion Graphics Extender, Natural Environments I think it was called (better trees and foliage and all that), and whatever the one is called that improves the distant LOD. There's probably loads more in this regard nowadays than there was the last time I did a serious Oblivion mod-fest though.

Good luck getting it all working smoothly though, none of the modern mod organisers seem to play nice with a game as archaic as Oblivion, and WryeBash is some kind of voodoo magic I don't understand.

>>25745
That's a very helpful post, thanks.

WryeBash... I remember trying to use it years ago and giving up. I don't recall if I was impatient or it's actually difficult to use though. I'll find out later on today perhaps.

Felt like I might break the old PS2 out for a bit of nostalgia and cheap entertainment. Games are still cheap other than the really rare ones, unlike a lot of the old consoles.

£1.95 delivery, seems reasonable... Wait a minute. Fucking EACH? Are they taking the piss?

Dipping a toe back in the big blue with Subnautica: Below Zero.

Definitely a case of "more of the same", but when the same was one of my favourite games ever I can't really complain too much.

>>25748
Unfortunate CEX have gone batshit with postage.
Used to be you paid £2 for the entire order.

Just finished Wolfenstein: The New Order. The gameplay isn't great, but I did cry twice. 8/10.

>>25772
What did you cry at? I beat it 100% a few years ago, I really liked the gameplay but did not cry.

>>25772
You should have a bash at "The Old Blood" next. It's essentially a prequel but features a lot of paranormal stuff and some pretty great scenes.

>>25773

Without spoiling anything, the game doesn't flinch from showing what oppression does to people. The resistance aren't heroic figures, they're just people with nothing to lose, people who don't have the option of conforming, people who have suffered too much to fear death. Blasko is a blonde haired, blue eyed, man mountain überjew, a golem made flesh, but even he is just barely hanging on to his sanity. It's almost completely hopeless. Almost.

>>25777

Ehh. I'd say you have to be some kind of games journalist to take a game like that so seriously.

Maybe I'm just jaded and find it very hard to be in any way sentimental about anything involving Nazis (much less retro-futuristic dieselpunk mecha Nazis), because they have been so completely Flanderized over the years, but I didn't get that at all. I thought the characters were all pretty boilerplate cliches. It was a good game regardless, but I felt like all the story stuff was more of a tongue-in-cheek, Inglorious Basterds kind of shtick than in any way sincere.

Actually, I'll grant you there was that one bit where your spacker mate sacrifices himself to save you from getting Nazi'd, if I remember right. That bit did make me go "Aw no! Not the spacker!"

>>25777
Cousin Ramona's diaries were quite a thing.

>>25778

I agree that the writing is full of B-movie cliches, but I think a lot of that was wholly intentional given the history of the franchise. It meshed well with the genuine campness of the real Nazi Germany - so much of their imagery would have been ridiculous if it wasn't so horrific.

Personally, I just saw a lot of little details that fleshed out the world and showed that the writers had really immersed themselves in the question of what if the Nazis won. The newspaper cuttings, the overheard conversations, they're all grounded in a deep understanding of what Nazi occupation was really like.

>>25782

https://www.history.com/news/dutch-resistance-teenager-killed-nazis-freddie-oversteegen

Just finished The Forest, which is more than I can say for the developers. Despite all the critical praise it was clearly released with many bits here and there unpolished. Dunno if I'll get the sequel coming out next year if I can expect the same. It was quite a decent survival/narrative experience though.

>>25786
Indeed. You have to remember for most of the people in that universe, the war is over, has been for years. You over hear conversations between soldiers discussing the weather, little helga, the strange concrete etc.

To them, you're not an enemy soldier, just some insane terrorist nutter thats come out of nowhere and is disrupting a relatively peaceful society.

Wolfenstein Youngblood is an alright game, if you just want to shoot Nazis and level up and all that shite with fancy graphics. Nothing spectacular and definitely (though I can't put my finger on exactly why) less fun than the previous two, but it's not bad.

However the characters really are the most intolerably annoying people ever to come out of the mind of a writer, and there's absolutely nothing engaging about the story. It's like they just took some Reddit user's fanfiction and went with it. It's wank, and I don't rightly know if I can look past it to just enjoy the shooting. Of course, the unnecessary forced co-op bullshit which serves no purpose other than to make some parts of the game more tedious than they need to be doesn't help, but it is mostly the constant FUCKIN' A DEWD fist-bumps and so on that's irritating.

But I'm noticing a similar trend in a lot of games- Is it to try and appeal to zoomers or something? Is it some sort of post-hipster avant garde shitpost, with characters that tick all the token diversity Mary Sue boxes but strive to be as unlikeable as humanly possible to compensate for it?

>>25796
I think it might be the Marvel film popularity, with its Joss Whedon/Joss Whedonesque dialogue, a lot of writers think to make a story or characters interesting, they have to be making smart arse comments every other sentence. Or Borderlands, they made an art of shit try hard dialogue.