SleepingSilence

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Does anyone use their Steam trading cards?

@Kuro

I usually sell them for cheap.

I also haven't used Fanatical. (And only recently heard of it on Reddit. Where some people were complaining about how they've been raising their prices.) How's their customer service? If you've used them before.

Humble Bundle took three days to give me an obvious robot email.

---

I've been tempted to review most of my Steam games. (Especially the indies.) But it would take a considerable amount of time. (Plus, I’ll likely go back and give certain games a 2nd chance, before I leave an unfavorable review.) So I'm debating on whether to do it or not…

That—and I now have a dozen or more new games to play. Thanks to Steam’s 'Spring Sale’ making most of my Wishlist discounted. (And enduring the intense boredom of house sitting.) With my original intention of getting through some games that I got from random bundles again. So here's hoping that I can find some diamonds in the rough…

Instead of all these disappointments...

Stopped Playing:

• Clustertruck - Controls poorly, and the RNG only hinders the player. So it managed to bore me quite fast.
• Revolver360 Re:Actor - It’s a bit incomprehensible. But I don't dislike it per se. Though the minutes-long gameplay sessions aren't keeping me engaged. (And any tutorial whatsoever would've been nice to include.)
• Bendy And The Ink Machine - The art style is nice. But its third chapter of 'find RNG items and avoid this spoopy monster that spawns in directly behind you' is incredibly flawed/boring to play.
• Shadow Warrior - This game has strange controls, inconsistent abilities, unclear hit detection & bullshit exploding hazards. (My ex-roommate liked this one. But I sure didn’t.)
• And as someone who quite enjoyed the original trilogy of games, I did not expect ‘The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles’ to be such an insufferable bore. But it really does have the worst (and most dead simple) mysteries of any game that I’ve played in recent memory. (Saying nothing about how awful both the characters and writing is on top of it...)

Games I'm Still Playing:
Cult Of The Lamb: It’s really good at keeping you playing. But the game’s shallowness only gets more apparent in its second half. (As I was experiencing a lot more bugs than before.) Plus, it’ll keep repeating the same trick of forcing you to quit your dungeon run, or else several of your cultists will die. So you’ll be done with all the cult upgrading, long before you can complete (or get tired of repeating) the other combat dungeons.

But at least the Devs are still adding even more content to it. (Hopefully with some bug patches included.) Though I wouldn't know as of yet, since I decided to play some other things too…

Environmental Station Alpha: Goddamn. And I expected this one to be something that I’d immediately like. It’s immediately challenging, and it’s very familiar to how Axiom Verge started off. But its control setup is f*cking busted, to put it lightly. (For instance, turning “D-PAD only” on, is the only way to get the controller's stick working? For some reason. Otherwise its control menu has a seizure and starts changing all the settings by itself.)

So it took some time to get my controller working, and then after I beat a boss and acquired the hookshot. (The world’s worst hookshot in all of video games, but I digress.) It somehow combined my jump and hookshot ability to the same button. Canceling out my jump and making it literally impossible to progress onward. (But I couldn’t change it in the settings, nor save and restart.) So I had to repeat the boss fight, as the controller suddenly stopped working and forced me to do it again. So THEN I succeeded—and found myself stuck forever in a room requiring TWO jumps with the hookshot. (Then four more in the very next room, before you have any chance to save.)

So uh. It didn’t surprise me that I found numerous “this developer has clear contempt for the player” posts on forums. (Maybe it's where HAAK got its inspiration...)

But I’m continuing for now, in hopes that it’ll improve…

---

Narrator: It did not.

Environmental Station Alpha certainly made me swear a lot. But it fails to deliver rewarding exploration, and at providing boss fights with a fair challenge. Its smattering of HP upgrades (eight max) give you 2 HP each. Yet they're still incredibly frustrating to get. (Single attacks can and often do more than 2 HP.) Most areas have no rewards whatsoever, and its platforming is only difficult because the hookshot is terribly inconsistent. (Straight up will not do the same thing twice in many instances.)

Stopped at a three phrase boss fight (midway through the game) that has many attacks that spawn at random and overlap. To make it likely that avoiding one, means frequently getting hit with the other. But he’s also invincible for long stretches of time. So you’re doing nothing but losing all your health to bullshit attacks. The second phase is where it becomes completely unfair, as the camera zooms in and it becomes impossible to see the numerous attacks that are coming from off-screen. The third phase (I didn’t even bother getting this far) requires the hookshot to work flawlessly. (And it doesn’t.)

And this was right after the last two phase boss fight had pulled the exact same fucking trick. (Multiple overlapping attacks that go off-screen.) Apparently this boss requires a random secret weapon upgrade to make the fight bearable. But I couldn’t be bothered.

Even the developer sounds like he knew he fucked up with this boss. But he clearly didn’t fix it. And the reward for beating this boss like many others is—nothing.

Though I could tell that it was “one of those games”, where the game basically cheats you the first time you fight them. And after death upon death, the boss fight simply gets easier every failure. So you’ll do better each time, regardless of how well or poorly you play. (It was really obvious with the two phase boss fight. As the third time in, the boss was barely attacking in comparison to the first two times.)

So sure, if I wasted more hours of my life, I would’ve gotten past it. But maybe the game should’ve given me any kind of interesting characters, dialogue, a decent song/soundtrack, combat that meant anything, etc etc, that made me want to keep going.

What Are You Listening To?

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

It was smart for the Figment devs to release the first one for free. (Since they have an upcoming sequel soon, and I'd assume that most people have never played/heard of it before.)

Apparently Humble Bundle doesn't want my money. (Tried to buy the bundle twice. Credit card got declined for false reasons, and the charge appeared six times on my account.) So I guess time will tell to see if I'll be getting that or not.

---

To further rant on BL3. Just when I was going to give it credit for finally adding new enemy types. Holy sh*t this mid-game feels like an absolute chore. Huge empty maps. Broken mission waypoints. (Been having to look up where I'm even going. Or why these missions show up on my map, when I can't even do them yet.) Endless side quests. (Some clearly weren't even played tested.) Side missions have 30 separate objectives. There's a full unskippable minute of talking before and after every completed objective. (I've died way too many times from falling through the map. Making the grind I am doing, and the ending mission reward feel completely pointless.)

The only thing keeping me playing is "it's easy enough to mute and play music over it", and a sunk-cost fallacy at this point.

---

Edit: BL3 actually got worse as it went on, and I'm glad to be finished with it.

Figment was obnoxious to play. (But it was free. So I'll cut it some slack.)

I found "Patch Quest" through the game developer's Youtube channel. Where the premise of his video was "I spent so long developing a game concept, but it took years to realize that I hadn't made anything fun yet." And in my first session/impression with it, I still don't know if the game found "the fun" yet. It's a bullet hell rogue-lite, that so far seems to reward you with jpegs of plants, and levels you up once per death, regardless of how well you do. (Basically, its beginning feels scripted.)

Anime & Manga! Oh my! (Anime/Manga Thread)

The question is "who are they going to replace him/the other cast with?" (Pretending they haven't already shown the generic anime boy/girl self-inserts.)

If it's anything like the Gary Stew that other anime had. It's not going to have the same longevity. But if they have an Ash 2.0. People will question why it was changed in the first place. (Marketing and toy sales.)

---

Most of the anime this season are pretty mediocre, and I stopped watching them.

Hoping the next one is better. (Assuming Dr.Stone & The Ancient Magus' Bride aren't lackluster.)

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@Kuro That's usually what I do too. Just wish I had Steam friends who played more than one game. Haha.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

>Ghostrunner
>A cat game that I wanted to try
>A few okay/mediocre-looking games
>Games I and (almost) everyone already have
and mostly...


But it's still tempting. Even with all the other crap that's included.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Silence, try out Mount and Blade Bannerlord, or if you have a potato try Mount and Blade Warband.

@BangoSkank

I've heard nothing but good things about the Mount & Blade series. Though I'm not the most experienced with the management/simulation aspect. (Never really played most of those games for long.) Maybe if I see it on sale sometime, I'll pick it up.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@SleepingSilence do you like any video game? Or do you always find something to dislike?

@Dark Cloud

Cult Of The Lamb runs perfectly fine and is an enjoyable enough time sink.

@SleepingSilence

Yes. :P

My brain is always turned on, and I critique and analyze all the content that I consume. (The only difference between me and many others, is I think it's actively beneficial to do so. So I've never reacted negatively/dubiously to someone else's critical taste. Only their reasoning as to why.)

But I'd like to think bad writing and immersion-breaking bugs are pretty easy to dislike...

Though I'm still playing BL3, so it has to be doing something right.

But even with the few positive/appreciated add-on's that BL3 does offer. (Alternative firing modes, teleporting to your vehicle, or a slide move that I rarely utilize.) It doesn't really change the core gameplay loop. It's simply more Borderlands. (With a much more annoying set of characters to listen to. And a hub world that has seven different advertisements to buy its DLC content.)

I'm just happy that I picked the class that I did. (One with a pet that revives you.) Because the game is a lot easier than BL2. Except for the bosses & their abrupt difficulty spikes. (The last boss I fought one-hit ko'd me twice, basically out of nowhere.) So I'd love to see how other classes handle that one solo.

But I also found a legendary shotgun (many levels ago) that simply dwarfs the damage/reload speed of every other weapon in the game to the point of near-uselessness. So it's hard to be excited about the higher frequency of "rare" loot drops. (When it's all worse than the gun I already have.) Though it's amusing when you can turn every living/blathering opponent into a silent cloud of red dust in one shot, every time. It makes the rare times I do feel challenged (because a half dozen enemies spawned/fired upon me, before they even appeared on my screen) feel incredibly cheap.

And Borderlands 2 didn't feel nearly this unbalanced to me. (The rocket launchers and sniper rifles were a necessity in that game. With the trade off of having less/harder-to-find ammo. But sniper rifles barely function here, with how most enemies don't appear until you get closer. And I've not found a single rocket launcher that's worth using yet in BL3.)

So I struggle to see/agree with the same positives that other reviewers mention. (Someone like Skill Up, for instance.) It's also hard to appreciate 'the improved visuals'. When I'm running this thing on my mid-tier PC, with the graphical settings turned down. And even with the best computer possible, the game supposedly still has a frequent stuttering problem. (Plus, I don't know how smart it was to hype up "Twitch integration systems" in a game that clearly loathes streamers, and made them the literal villains of your story.)

But I digress.

How's Elden Ring? :P

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Borderlands 3 is great if you turn off the voices and just make up your own story because anything anyone comes up with is better than what is actually in the game.

@Fabricant451

You aren't kidding about the voices. They are insufferable. (And that's coming from someone who tolerated BL2 dialogue's just fine.)

---

>Watches supposedly dramatic cutscene with a death of a character, while my invisible pet's shotgun is floating around awkwardly the entire time.

An obvious bug that you'd expect to be patched out already. But that's the type of quality one can expect from Gearbox.

"It's all your fault! You killed her! You did! You!"
>Less than a second later.
"Oh, what a sweet girl. She blames herself."

Straight up gaslighting me with this dialogue, are ya?

What shows/movies are you watching?

"Cocaine Bear is overhyped and shockingly bad at comedy!" - The internet

Uh huh. Couldn't have figured that out from the title and premise alone could you?

Its director - made some of the most mediocre films ever crafted.
Its writer - somehow wrote a worse sequel to an already shitty Netflix horror/comedy movie, and nothing else.

Does anyone else even look these things up, before watching movies anymore? No, just me? Okay.