[Aptorian]

Traveller, on 27 April 2020 - 06:23 PM, said:

I remember looking forward to it after Shadow of the Colossus. Then it got delayed, and delayed, and forgotten about. Then when it finally got released, it wasn't updated to the current gen.

Reminds me, where the hell is Mount and Blade 2? I used to play the original, must be years ago now but it was a lot of fun. Then they announced a sequel - and have been working on it so long that by the time they release it, it will probably be a 5 year old game.

Got some good news for you.

Mount and Blade: Bannerlord released in Early Access in March.

[Cause]

Breach. Breach! BREACH!!!

XCOM chimera squad. It is glorious.

[Mentalist]

Playing as Mona Sax, I finally started using bullet-time properly. IE, ALL THE TIME

That whole second chapter is brilliant. It's been described as an escort quest, but it's much more of a sniping challenge. And it's fun.

[Serenity]

Cause, on 27 April 2020 - 08:56 PM, said:

Breach. Breach! BREACH!!!

XCOM chimera squad. It is glorious.

I've bought it while it's half price. I love XCOM! Not going to play it until I've finished some other games, though, otherwise . . . well, otherwise I'll never finish those other games

[Maark Abbott]

Almost finished Trials. It really is faithful to the old game.

Unfortunately the post-game doesn't entirely make sense in context with the main story (you finish the game and then get plopped just before the fight with the big bad, and then go to do an elongated sidequest whilst the big bad is just like 'aight I'mma wait here for a bit then'). Don't get me wrong, it's still fun and the fourth class is pretty sweet, but I feel like it should have been made into an actual postgame rather than an additional sidequest before wrapping up.

Overall though it's fucking excellent. I'm going to be streaming it on hard with a new party from Tuesday.

[Mentalist]

Finished Max Payne 2. Time to credits: 8 hours.

Great little Noir story, and a lot of fun bullet-time shooting.

Next on the retro list is ShadowMan

[Aptorian]

Played a handful of hours of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint yesterday.

This is not a great game. I'm not even sure I'd call it a good game. The presentation and story is confused and middling. The animations are poor, the writing is bad, the NPC are janky and buggy. I had a wounded comrade missing from his hospital bed, teleport in behind me, zoom over to the bed and flip up on to the bed and lie there waiting for my sympathy. The menus and systems are equally confusing and hard to keep track of, though there's an interesting investigation/detective system connected to the story.

HOWEVER as poorly as the game is designed, it's an excellent turn your brain off/ podcasting game. Like the last game, Wildlands, it's a gigantic open world filled with camps and strongholds and factories and towns you can attack or infiltrate as you like, much like Farcry.

And the shooting and combat is pretty good. I've picked the game setting where there's weapon and enemy levels, right now the enemy's are easy to kill but there's tons of them. And there's drones in the sky that are pretty interesting, if they detect you, say you're lying on a cliff with a sniper rifle picking out guards, they'll drop scrambling equipment and call in reinforcements. Helicopters or elite soldiers I've yet to survive.

More importantly. There's TERMINATORS in this game! I ran into a random factory warehouse earlier and they were loading T-800s into shipping containers! Terminators! I imagine it's some kind of expansion story but now I'm paranoid about what else I'll run into. I know from the trailers that there are drone tanks as well.

[Mentalist]

Spent a few hours messing about with various mods. The result? successful widescreen/texture up-res for Blood Omen 2!

For a 2002 game, it looks damn purdy now.

[Mentalist]

2 missions away from the end of Blood Omen 2. Fun game, but I'll leave it for now. I've already played the best parts. The Mass is some straight up Giger stuff, I totally forgot about that.

Fixed up the Shadow Man re-textured mod to run properly. It's really funny to start up a 1999 game and have the NPC task me with retrieving the eternal, powerful "Dark Souls", in the year 2020, haha.

Halo 2 is coming to the MCC on Tuesday.

And I gots my Wonderful 101 Remaster backer code on Steam.

Galaxy 2.0 is being stupid after the latest upgrade and not recognizing a chunk of my steam games. Hope they fix that crap soon. I need a centralized library to know whether I should buy game bundles or not.

All these cyperpunk/sci fi previews also make me wanna dip back into Harbinger, lol.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 13 November 2020 - 06:50 PM

[Mentalist]

Hmm, like most old games, Shadow Man has a lot of metroidvania/collectathon elements.

Collecting stuff, so that I can trade it in for extra life; finding secrets in the blocky late 90s style mazelike terrains; combat made more difficult, because the new texture mod writes the targeting reticle out of existence; there's aim assist, but this is still hard mode, lol

Edit: 12 hours in, approaching level 6(of possible 10), getting decently close to buying the second health increase. Combat's not great and level design is becoming more obscure--particularly the ledges. Ledges work fine and are generally visible when interposed on cliffs. When they're part of a masonry texture-not so much. Had to go to let's plays several times, because I just couldn't see a climbable texture right in front of me.

Still, I can totally see why NightDive are remastering this. We don't have a whole lot of these sprawling, non-linear exploration games these days. With everything going open-world we got rid of corridors by pushing the skybox way out there, but we also lost the intricate layouts those corridors contained. I miss games like Soul Reaver, and apparently Shadow Man (can't believe I never played this before!). We need more "retro" games like this.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 25 September 2020 - 07:35 PM

[Slow Ben]

Witcher 3 with DLC's was $20 today. Never had a chance to play it so lets give it a shot. Never played a Witcher game before.

[Morgoth]

Slow Ben, on 15 May 2020 - 03:43 AM, said:

Witcher 3 with DLC's was $20 today. Never had a chance to play it so lets give it a shot. Never played a Witcher game before.

The Witcher 3 with DLCs is on my top 5 of all time.

[Mentalist]

Been messing about with Deus Ex Human Revolution (Director's Cut) on GOG. 20-odd hours this week, and I'm back in Hengsha, jumping off rooftops, punching through walls and doing all kinds of sneaky crap.

Using a mod to put the gold filter back in, as well as an inventory mod. I needed it to just make sure small stuff like food, alcohol and grenades would stack; but it's a bit overkill, since it also reduces all item's to take up a single inventory grid square, eliminating the inventory tetris; means I can pick up pretty much anything that's not nailed down, and Jensen's got infinitely deep pockets.


Game still fun, but it's just so awfully easy to min/max. Hacking everything and grabbing all the data nodes during hacks means you're swimming in cash and exp; and the NPC rarely bat an eye as you swipe their credit chits, making it even easier to collect infinite money.

Struggling with those "smooth operator" bonuses, though, so not gonna try for the "Foxiest of the Hounds" achievement this run; maybe later I'll try to do a speedrun through just the main path on Easy; and see how that goes.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 02 June 2020 - 07:32 PM

[Morgoth]

Got back into Europa Universalis 4 for a bit. There was a sale some time back so I snagged all the relevant DLC. Man there's a lot of new stuff. Some I'm not so sure about, but mostly cool additions I think.

An aborted run as a trade center in Oman led me to try to create a modern and humanist caliphate as Morocco. It was going quite well, despite a string of almost incompetent rulers, my income was solid and I had spread deep into the interior of sub saharan Africa. Unfortunately, Castille and Portugal allied early, and Castille became Spain in record time. And then allied with France. France which blobbed like an angry blue bruise, far into Italy and Germany. And then, joy of joys, they joined a martial union with England, with England as the junior partner. Shortly after Morocco became the target of a Spanish crusade, with the combined weight of France, Portugal, Spain, England, and Austria somehow, behind it. My allies the Ottomans put up a valiant fight, but clearly to no avail.

There's no real point continuing with this set up, so I guess it's time for a new start somewhere.

[Mentalist]

Closing in on the Missing Link DLC portion of Human Revolution. Had to mess about and restart the second visit to Detroit a few times, because I wanted the "talk Sandoval out of suicide" achievement, and the game would keep forcing me into a combat encounter instead of a convo battle- apparently, that's a bug.

I remember very little of The Missing Link despite playing through it twice, so that'll be interesting.
I'm kinda ready to move on from Jensen's escapade, but I need to at least finish Singapore, since I've been chasing down those rare experience books for one of the collector achievements, lol.

I thought about going back to Halo and playing 2; but apparently it ends on a cliffhanger, so now I'm thinking I might be best off waiting for 3 to come out. It's getting beta tested later this month, so it'll probably be out next month anyway.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 02 June 2020 - 07:31 PM

[Morgoth]

New DLC for Warhammer Total War 2. A greenskin revamp and three new legendary lords, including two new high elfs, and some polish to the high elf roster. I am excited.

[Mentalist]

So I wanted to check out that new EVA installation screen everyone's been raving about...


...


...



...



6 hours later, I've just about contained Nod forces in the Balkans, as we're pushing our way ever closed to Sarajevo and Kane's temple.

Man, this game's hard. And fuck everything with a flamethrower.

[Malankazooie]

Finished playing through the Borderlands 3 - Guns, Love, and Tentacles: The Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock DLC. Damn it was good. I really enjoyed the Handsome Jackpot DLC prior, but I think I like GL&T more. With GL&T we get the return of Vault Hunter Gaige and her companion Deathtrap from BL2... yaaaaaaa! And some cool new planet and enemies! Very cool Lovecraftian horror vibe throughout. Had a blast. Gearbox has been knocking it out of the park with the DLC, looking forward to future expansions.

Quick suggestion to you Vault Hunters - while the Cartels event is still active, you should really try to get the Yellowcake COV legendary rocket launcher. It's waaaay OP and pretty much destroys. They haven't nerfed it yet, I'm guessing they will.

[Malankazooie]

An ooey gooey, warm out of the oven chocolate chip cookie to the first forum member who guesses correctly what video game I just started playing.

[Aptorian]

Super Mario Sunshine!