Useless gaming news & chatter

[Signe]

Suddenly I feel twenty years younger!

[lamaros]

I mean the steam version. Worth the upgrade over the older one?

[Rendakor]

I've never actually played it at all, but I love DCSS. Worth buying?

[Phildo]

This is probably naive of me, but I just got a PS4 and was pretty disappointed that none of the downloadable Playstation One games I had on my PS3 were available on the new console.  I just want some Final Fantasy Tactics, man.

[Ruvaldt]

I mean the steam version. Worth the upgrade over the older one?

If you like slapping graphics onto roguelikes it might be.  I bought it and still play with ascii though.  You can change keybindings and a number of parameters when generating a new game, such as item drop rate, whether the character dies permanently upon death or if you can restart from your last save, and also the rate of chaos generation/mutation.  It was always possible to savescum but now it just does it automatically for you if you want.  Plus, it has achievements if you're into that sort of thing.

The new version has some additional content.  There's a new area with a character called the Ice Queen, for instance.  But that's also available on the free version.  It's just something that Thomas Biskup recently added and is worth mentioning if you haven't played in a while.

I was happy to finally pay the guy for the game since I've been playing it for almost 20 years so paying $15 was an easy decision.  Objectively though, the $15 doesn't really add a whole lot for someone like me and if I didn't have such a history with it I'd have waited for a sale.

[Ginaz]

Raiinbow Six Siege is surprisingly cool, very cool. Borrowed "just enough" from MOBAs (Characters and special skills, 5v5) and applied it to a realistic, tactical FPS.

Has Uplay.  Will not buy.

[Soulflame]

So is ADOM any good?

It's an interesting twist on the rogue-like genre, but the shit that could fuck your character up (mutations, chaos, etc) was too random for my taste.

If you're referring to the Steam version, I don't know that I'd pay for it.  You can get it for free, at least to try it out.

Or you could play Nethack!  (Sorry, just could not resist.)

[lamaros]

I prefer ADOM to Nethack. My question was just about the steam implementation. Sorry for bad question expression.

[Falconeer]

The Steam Controller being built. At Aperture Science 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCgnWqoP4MM

[tmp]

Best comment: "neurotoxin in Steam controller confirmed."

[koro]

If any of you are familiar with the Spanish freeware game developer Locomalito's games like the Gradius-like Hydorah or the Ghosts 'n Goblins-style Maldita Castilla, he just released another game today: Curse of Issyos.

It's a platformer that feels kind of like a mix of Castlevania and Zelda II.

[Yegolev]

Which Castlevania?

[koro]

The old ones, the NES ones.

[Falconeer]

Sony has announced a partnership with Kojima Productions, Hideo Kojima's new independent development studio, which will create a new game for PlayStation platforms.

[Yegolev]

That's so useless, it should be the first post in this thread.

[Nija]

I'd think about it, but Sony has like two console launches to do before that game will come out.

[Kail]

Well, good for him, at least.  This gets Kojima away from Metal Gear (which I think he's been wanting for a while) and Konami (which everyone else in the world has been wanting for a while).  I'm sad that now there's basically no chance of getting whatever his next thing is on PC, but whatever.

[Rasix]

I think they mentioned somewhere that it'll be a time limited PSwhatever exclusive, after which it will be released/ported to PC.  Whatever it is.  If it ever exists.. (and so on)

Kojima was gone from Metal Gear and Konami already.  This is just where he landed.  At least he's didn't land at Nintendo or start a mobile game studio.

[Falconeer]

  American Truck Simulator gets a release date. February 3!

[Sky]

Will it feature meth, peeing in bottles and rest stop gay sex?

[Nija]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0u6Lb6RCz4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjapSF94eCc

[KallDrexx]

Wife randomly surprised me with a PS4 for Christmas.  There goes my plans to buy a 970 and upgrade my gaming PC, but I"m not complaining.  Only complaint is she got me the Nathan Drake bundle, and I've already played all 3 uncharteds. 

Any suggestions on games that can be played in a week?  I'm going back to Texas on Jan 3rd and can't bring it with me, so I need some game that I can complete in that time.  I'm debating between Last of us, Wolfenstein: New Order, and Shadow of Morder (all of them $20 on the PSN store).  Any others I should consider?

[brellium]

Wife randomly surprised me with a PS4 for Christmas.  There goes my plans to buy a 970 and upgrade my gaming PC, but I"m not complaining.  Only complaint is she got me the Nathan Drake bundle, and I've already played all 3 uncharteds. 

Any suggestions on games that can be played in a week?  I'm going back to Texas on Jan 3rd and can't bring it with me, so I need some game that I can complete in that time.  I'm debating between Last of us, Wolfenstein: New Order, and Shadow of Morder (all of them $20 on the PSN store).  Any others I should consider?

SoM

It's a fantastic murder simulator.

[Jeff Kelly]

Still playing Nuclear Throne (game timer says sixty hours played). I have sort of a love/hate relationship with that game.

On the one hand it's insanely fun and thrilling and I can't stop playing "just one more game". Even though I suck at bullet hellish things. The dual stick shooting mechanics feel great and the overall controls feel tight and have exactly the correct amount of heft and weight.

On the other hand this game is another example of just how toxic early access is for developers in terms of polish, design and the general quality of the product.

This game has been in development for two years. That's a lot of time for a game that has a core design team of six people, features twelve rather small levels and can be finished in under ten minutes. It still has a lot of issues in its core game design and mechanics, isn't play tested well and crashes regularly.

Even though the core gameloop still needs lots of work and polish the game meanwhile has twelve playable characters, a lot of unfinished secret levels and content, a coop mode that's broken and online leaderboards for dailys and weeklys that don't work half the time. The also still regularly break game saves with patches and content updates.

After two years of work the core game should be tight as fuck and all game subsystems like for example the procedural level generator or the randomizer for item and enemy spawns should work flawlessly. As it stands though items, level inventory and even enemies can spawn inside walls or out of bounds of the level (in which case the game despawns them and they don't show up). You can run out of ammo half way though a run just by sheer bad luck. Which will make you fail the try since the game has no default weapon. The game may spawn beginner guns in harder areas making them hard or impossible to complete before running out of ammo and the level generator regularly generates levels that consist of one big room with you and all of your enemies in it. Since enemy line of sight is much farther than what you can see on screen this will mean that you die in harder later areas since two hits will kill you. The game also has no invincibility frames after a hit making everything essentially one hit kill later on. Just a few examples of stuff that needs attention in my opinion.

This game could be binding of Isaac levels of greatness but it lacks focus as the designers add more and more superficial crap to the game even though they should rather fix what's still broken in the core of the game.

[Jeff Kelly]

Early access makes me sad because the lack of external oversight coupled with a game that has essentially already been paid for by your customers makes it so that the Dev team often just does what is fun or interesting to do until the funds run out or the team gets bored and they move on.

Those projects sadly more often than not don't focus on the work items that make a game polished and tight but are often boring and repetitive like for example condtantly iterating on the core game systems, bug fixing, play testing and tweaking of mechanical aspects.

This leads to lots of games that could be really great but that mostly consist of a great core idea that is only half implemented and lots of superficial content grafted onto as developers and designers regularly move on from the boring "iterate on it until it works" before the "works" stage has been reached to focus on the next great feature that is much more interesting to work on.

[KallDrexx]

Grr.

Since i hadn't logged into my PS3 account in about 3-4 years (when I originally got my PS3) I don't remember the password to my PSN account, and of course Sony isn't prepared for christmas so emails are massively delayed, so I'm sitting here with a useless PS4 waiting for a verification email to come through.

Reading online people have been waiting 4 hours..... blah.

[Draegan]

I just bought Grim Dark on sale on steam. This is actually a pretty decent ARPG.

[KallDrexx]

15 hours later, still can't create or get the password for my psn account.  So still stuck with a paper weight unless I go and pay extra for a game in the retail store rather than through PSN.  lovely.....

[Montague]

I'm playing Elite: Dangerous for reasons I don't quite understand. If they would actually build a game around the space sim proof of concept demo it'd be a runaway hit.

Edit: For some reason I thought I was in the What Are You Playing Thread. Ignore me 

[Jeff Kelly]

I'm getting more and more irrationally angry about games that don't put enough effort in the basics. I somehow feel that this has been continually getting worse over the last two years.

The last case was with Binding of Isaac: Rebirth + Afterbirth for the PC. It started in a tiny window that was probably 640 by 480 on my 4k Display and it was so small that I could barely read any of the in game text. The game doesn't have an option to set the resolution or the aspect ratio for windowed mode or fullscreen mode. You can resize the window and it resizes the whole game and game UI which can look really really bad depending on how you resized it. The only graphical option the game has is a "fullscreen" toggle that can't deal with the 16x10 aspect ratio of my screen and which cuts off the left and right side of the game probably assuming that this is a 16x9 display.

I then spent an hour or so googling and reading forum posts hoping that I could find a useful hint as to how I could fix my issues. I also checked the homepage of the developer for an FAQ or any sort of help. Then I gave up and decided I'd rather play Rebirth on my PS4 instead.

In the grand scheme these things are no big deal. I was nevertheless sitting at my desk, cursing out the developers for not having an option I thought was absolutely necessary in their now 5 year old game and cursing out the internet for not being at all helpful as to how I could fix my issues.

I encounter this more and more - especially with "Indie" titles that a game has lots and lots of stuff but lacks "basic" things it probably should have in the first place.

[Hawkbit]

Dark cloud 2 is releasing on ps4 next week; goodbye, February productivity.

[Yegolev]

Did I read this correctly?

Why not just PCSX2?  No original disk?

[Morat20]

Well, apparently I somehow filled up the 500gb PS4 drive already. That was...fast.

Ordered a 2TB drive from Amazon, I hear swapping it out is pretty straightforward. Hopefully that will last longer.

[Yegolev]

I have that same task on my TODO.  I don't see much reason to go SSD when I really just need the most enormous storage.

[KallDrexx]

I replaced my PS4 hard drive not too long ago, replaced the 500gb 5400rpm with a 500gb 7400RPM sshd that I had lying around.  Super super simple.

From the research I did, a 7400RPM or SSHD will give you 90% of the performance bump that an ssd will get you, so a full on SSD isn't worth it (unless you really have money to burn).  Even then a 7400rpm/SSHD drive still only shaves a couple of seconds off.