Video Games

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Jan 07, 2016 3:18 am

Eh, TotalBiscuit has a 30 minute rant on the matter, suggesting it's basically a matter of how quickly the price goes down (remembering that the Occulus Rift is the only thing with even remotely that level of technology so we're talking about the price of the Rift or of anything made in future that is near its capabilities), how much gamers really want VR technology, and how well people do with the developer versions to make software. That basically, 2016 isn't the year of the Occulus (apparently it's the year of the hoverboard? I missed that what with all the stuff happening in Germany and America), but 2018 might be.

I don't actually care much, because my eyes are so out of synch (I barely use my right eye for vision) that I probably wouldn't be able to get it to work. So I'm fine with things staying 2D. Preferably with sprites.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Jan 07, 2016 3:34 am

I really see it as a failure of design. Price point is a huge factor when designing consumer electronics, and you generally do have to make compromises to stay on it. There comes a point where you have to ask if certain parts really need to be of the highest quality, and so on, find places where you can cut costs.

Playstation VR's designers, for example, seriously asked themselves if they actually needed a full 1080P per eye. And their answer was a resounding no, which probably saved a bit on the screens.

But Sony is a huge company while Occulus is a tiny company funded by a kickstarter campaign. Price-performance compromises from one but not the other shows us the difference between a corporate project and someone's baby., and why the latter isn't always better than the former.

All things being equal, Sony is almost certainly going to kick their asses on this one, due to both pricepoint and user-base.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Jan 07, 2016 6:40 am

Sony is now working with Kojima Productions on a console exclusive (with PC port)
Del Toro and Norman Reedus have said they still want to work with Kojima

...VR Silent Hills is a possibility

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Jan 07, 2016 10:33 am

hyzmarca wrote: But Sony is a huge company while Occulus is a tiny company funded by a kickstarter campaign. Price-performance compromises from one but not the other shows us the difference between a corporate project and someone's baby., and why the latter isn't always better than the former.

Note: oculus was bought by facebook some time ago (by around 100 times what they got from kickstarter).

hyzmarca wrote: All things being equal, Sony is almost certainly going to kick their asses on this one, due to both pricepoint and user-base.

Well, Sony has been taking their time announcing the price of their vr stuff. They probably were waiting to see how much Facebook would price their new toy and then they'll probably ask for some 100 bucks cheaper.

But last time I checked PC and Facebook have a much bigger userbase than PS4.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Jan 07, 2016 6:27 pm

OgreBattle wrote:Sony is now working with Kojima Productions on a console exclusive (with PC port)
Del Toro and Norman Reedus have said they still want to work with Kojima

...VR Silent Hills is a possibility

Konami owns the IP, sadly, so it can't be called Silent Hills.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Wed Jan 13, 2016 12:02 pm

Having fun atm with Path of Exile.
It's free to Play (the things you could buy, are optical changes to your Char).
Looks like Diablo 2 but the skill System is (I think --> long time since Diablo 2 for me) radically different.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Wed Jan 13, 2016 1:20 pm

I've rediscovered Sid Meier's Covert Action, and I'm having a lot of fun.
It's a 1990 game where you play a secret agent. It's made of a few mini-games that are pretty basic, but the concept is pretty fun and well done:

there's a procedurally generated terrorist plot involving some people from different organizations all over the world. For example it could be a plot to break someone out of prison, with someone planning the operation, a thief to steal a passkey, a forger to forge other passkeys, a courier to transfer everything, a paymaster to finance the operation and always a mastermind behind it.

You start the mission with a few clues ("There's been a suspicious withdrawal of $7500 in London", "Agent A, a suspected operation planner has bought two plane tickets", "The Mossad has agreed to pay $7500 for an unknown purpose") and then you're on your own.

For example with the clues above, you could choose to go to London and, assuming you know the location of the Mossad building, go there and wiretap the communications (with a mini-game), giving you some more clues, like for example the message received by the Mossad agent asking for the $7500. You can then decrypt the message (in another mini-game), find out that it has been sent by an agent of the Marxists, go back to the Mossad building, wait for someone to come out, follow his car (yet another mini-game) to the Marxists hideout, break inside (another mini-game) to get more clues and maybe arrest the Marxist agent who's involved in the plot.

Take too long to arrest everyone and they can carry out their plans. Be too hasty and some plot participants go into hiding before you can arrest them.

It's a very simple game with basic mechanics, but it's still quite compelling and fun to play.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Jan 14, 2016 1:20 am

Dunky (youtuber) has a year end review thing, and at 5 minutes and 27 seconds he has the perfect joke:

Talking about the melee on your computer online play, and how great melee is "There's an enormous roster of characters"

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jan 19, 2016 5:45 am

I seem to have encountered some bizarre error in FF7. In the motherfucking crater after you spend 70 hours playing the game, when you have to split your party up. Now, it might only happen if you bring some combination of Cait Sith, Vincent and Red XIII with you, but every time (I accidentally chose Red once, the rest of the time it was the other two because that lets you collect some rare 1-of-a-kind items and still have other characters find those same items and bring them back for you), if I enter the menu, for instance to equip them because this is not my main team, it crashes the game.

I am disappoint.

Count Arioch the 28th · Tue Jan 19, 2016 9:42 pm

That's lame. I just have the stupid glitch where all NPCs look like their mouths are hanging open all the time.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Jan 19, 2016 10:40 pm

There's a mod that edits out the blowjob faces.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Tue Jan 19, 2016 11:24 pm

Getting back to Tales Of Zestria after being seperated from my desktop for the holidays. Edna is a hilarious jerk and it is continuously great. Also the only main party member to date who raises serious objections to Sorey's archaeology fetish.

Occasionally she delivers serious and valuable advice re: messianic responsibilities. But most of her dialogue is like this.

Oh, and I finally know what the fights look like to ordinary bystanders. It only took like ten hours. Honestly my mental image had varied between much flashier and like some guy flailing at invisible spiders. But apparently Hellions that don't have mundane visible forms look like dust tornados and Seraphim attacks are halfway-visible shockwaves.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Jan 20, 2016 1:19 am

Okay, continuing with my regular team seems to avoid the problem. So now I can merrily farm AP from those dumb pot things so I can leave the crater and kick the Weapons in the dick.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Jan 20, 2016 8:13 pm

Hideo Kojima is 52, here's some other men around his age for comparison:

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Jan 20, 2016 8:20 pm

The concept artist for the good Silent HIll games, Masahari Ito, is doing designs for a Maschinen Krieger-like story/model series called "Acid Bufferzone"

Here's his twitter for it:
https://twitter.com/AcidBufferzone

Here's the website:
http://www.modelkasten.com/acidbufferzone/

An artist/sculptor creating a setting and selling the models made for it is something past Japanese artists have done in conjunction with miniatures mags like Model Graphix or Hobby Model. Kow Yokoyama (Ma.K), Nirasawa (his US work includes Hellboy), Takayuki Takeya, and other Japanese sculptors/artists have done the same before.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Jan 21, 2016 5:10 pm

EA not trying to be “a corporate beast”, says CEO

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Fri Feb 05, 2016 2:46 pm

So, I don't quite get XCOM 2 premise. If Commander fucked up in the original XCOM and lost the war in the first few months, then why is he considered humanity's last hope and used by the aliens as a tactical supercomputer?

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sat Feb 06, 2016 7:24 am

I got the impression he won the battles but the Council panicked.

Though I like the implication that XCOM 1 was the Commander's fever dream fed to him by the aliens.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Feb 06, 2016 8:36 am

I primarily dislike that XCOM 2 has apparently launched so rife with game breaking freeze ups, failures to start and crashes to desktop that my own fairly unique game breaking freeze up (very odd in behaviour, only ever seen before in the still not fixed XCOM 1) is a footnote lost in the noise with no sensible work arounds or fixes that I have managed to find.

And if 2K/Firaxis do what they did last time, I can expect it to not be fixed with the inevitable addon then not be fixed after that for the next sequel.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sat Feb 06, 2016 10:16 pm

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I got the impression he won the battles but the Council panicked.

Though I like the implication that XCOM 1 was the Commander's fever dream fed to him by the aliens.

The impression I got was that the Commander is literally the player and it's being very meta; when the invasion happened he did alright but then got his ass kicked at some point prior to the mothership assault, and then they stuck him in a simulation and had him play Xcom a ton.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sat Feb 06, 2016 11:21 pm

name_here wrote:
CapnTthePirateG wrote:I got the impression he won the battles but the Council panicked.

Though I like the implication that XCOM 1 was the Commander's fever dream fed to him by the aliens.
The impression I got was that the Commander is literally the player and it's being very meta; when the invasion happened he did alright but then got his ass kicked at some point prior to the mothership assault, and then they stuck him in a simulation and had him play Xcom a ton.

This is what I got from the limited time I've been able to play it. Like others, I've been having trouble getting it to fucking work right. I did not have this much trouble with XCom 1. While I'd had crashes and weird moments xcom 2 has been absolutely terrible.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Feb 07, 2016 11:46 am

MGuy wrote:I've been having trouble getting it to fucking work right.

At the moment I'm running everything on dead minimum settings, mostly out of pure paranoia. I've set an exception on my antivirus program, based on pure rumor.

But the one thing that I'm attributing getting it from "crash randomly between 5 minutes and 1 hour of play" to "maybe crash at 2 hours plus if I make it that far anyway" has been the stupid thing of setting it to windowed mode. Not borderless windowed, that didn't help, but flat out windowed mode made a big difference. The mystery patch the other day... not so much.

Which is nice because while it's crashing didn't in any way inhibit any other program from running smoothly I had to restart my entire computer every time I wanted to run XCOM2 again after it crashed (steam would simply fail to launch the launcher, in more than one way).

edit: Reported work arounds that may or may not work for some people for a wide variety of issues are equally insane if not stupider. In the dark future of no support from 2K there is only superstitious tech voodoo.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Feb 07, 2016 2:15 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:edit: Reported work arounds that may or may not work for some people for a wide variety of issues are equally insane if not stupider. In the dark future of no support from 2K there is only superstitious tech voodoo.

This... I love being told that the solution to my problems is to 18 separate things, 7 of which any idiot can do, and 11 of which probably don't do anything at all, and then being criticized for doing them wrong when the game still doesn't work, even though it almost certainly is just that the game is programmed like shit and it's a fucking coincidence that it worked for the other person.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sun Feb 07, 2016 4:11 pm

My crashes happen at about the same time every time. The game, at this point, is almost literally unplayable. I had to go down to minimum settings just to be able to get past the opening screen because the first time I turned it on, it went to maximum settings and I couldn't get off the main menu for 30 minutes. Even with that the game crashes every time I 1) attempt to promote anyone or 2) every time I try to go to the geoscape. So I basically can't advance in the game beyond the first 1 or 2 missions depending on how shitty the game decides to be.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Sun Feb 07, 2016 4:18 pm

I haven't had it crash, but I have had weird artifacts between cutscenes, and sometimes if I load during a mission the AI dies. As in the enemies have no AI, do not react (except counterattacks), do not move, and the enemy turn is just 30 seconds to a minute of waiting before your turn starts again. The AI is then broken until you quit to desktop and start again.

Now this could be just a very subtle way to stop people savescumming. Or a way to encourage it to have a ridiculously easy game.

I'm guessing it just has a ridiculously high CPU load and assorted memory leaks, and doesn't deal well with loading during different stages of the enemy turn.