It really is a shame things didn’t work out with Nier. And for that of you who are about to leave a comment without watching the video: Yes, I installed the FAR mod, which legend claims is a panacea for all graphical issues. This claim is false, as the stream shows. The game very regularly had the freeze-frame “crash”, and FAR didn’t help with that. I’m not the only one with the problem. It’s been reported by people for a full year now and if they haven’t fixed it by now then I doubt they will in the future.
I was willing to put up with the crashes to get through the game, but I’m not going to put up with that sort of nonsense during a stream.
Link (YouTube) |
New week the plan is to play Left 4 Dead. Yes, the original. Yes, I’m aware that the game turns 10 this year. But see, I’ll be playing with my podcasting buddy Paul Spooner and this will be his first time playing the game. Here’s the event reminder. I hope you can make it. I’m not sure if I can play the game, teach Paul, and talk with chat, but it might be fun to watch me try and fail.
I’m looking forward to this one.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
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This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
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What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
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This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
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There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Pixel City Dev Blog
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An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
Oh, man, a shame about the game. It’s going to sound weird to say this, but I wish the issue was more propagated. If it had been spread enough, massive refunds would have forced Square-Enix to fix the problems, like it (more or less) happened with Arkham Knight.
But I guess the game fell right into the undesirable middle, where the problem is bad enough to be annoying to a lot of players but it doesn’t indirectly cause enough of a hassle for the developer to do anything about it.
Why would you *ever* play Left 4 Dead and not Left 4 Dead 2? oO
I mean, it’s not like Left 4 Dead 2 added any glaring regressions, right?
I vastly prefer the original to the sequel. I prefer the environments, the characters, the scenery, the level flow, the music, the humor.
Yes, melee was better (no longer OP) in L4D2, and the additional special infected make things a lot more interesting. But I still prefer the original.
Also the original is probably a better introduction for a newbie, which is what we’re doing.
So the original L4D1 campaign added into L4D2 is not up to snuff?
Yeah, that’s what I meant.
L4D2 has every single L4D campaign, plus melee weapons, plus defibrillators, plus new infected, etc.
The L4D1 levels aren’t designed for those special infected though. I always found a lot of the charm in the first was learning to circle your butts and corner up, and while L4D2’s anti-cornering infected taught us how to be mobile, it also meant that previous response was forever lost.
Is that a thing? It’s been 7 years. Can you mix and match team members now? How does this work?
If I remember right, it automatically picks L4D1 members on the L4D1 maps, and likewise for 2.
Way better to play L4D2 on the L4D1 maps. You aren’t wrong, the maps,setting and characters for 1 are better, but the gameplay in 2 is better… thankfully you can get the best of both worlds.
All the original L4D maps are available for L4D2. There are also a couple new maps featuring the old cast, and a map that features both sets working “together” (same map twice with different sets of survivors). The game automatically picks which 4 survivors are appropriate for the map
No Mercy became a HUUUGE “you can only find games for this map when you random queue” for Versus because people were obsessed with any map that allowed an insta-death-charge back in the day.
Oh my god, yes. I said there was no glaring regressions, but this almost counts as one. No Mercy was clearly not designed with Chargers and Jockeys in mind. It’s not a problem in PVE, but it’s infuriating in PVP.
And yet, that was EEEEEEEEEEEEVERYBODIES’ favorite map, apparently, judging by the games you could find. People were seriously obsessed with those imbalanced charger spots
I wasn’t miffed by this, what would make you think that? It’s not like playing the same map over and over and over and over…would ever get boring, right?
Personally, I feel like that’s because the game was generally imbalanced in the favor of the survivors. A decently coordinated survivor rush could only be stopped at a few certain chokepoints in the game and even then it depended on the spawns being favorable for the infected.
With most of the L4D2 maps favoring the survivors, I don’t find it surprising that people gravitated to the older maps that allowed for more power plays from the infected.
That made the game SO MUCH WORSE THOUGH. All the stupid maps with cheesy infected insta-kills were always shit games, because one team would make it through while the other didn’t and the entire match would devolve into “one team turns over four times per match,” which in turn meant 99.9% of every game you queue for sucks unless you stacked. It pretty much killed the game for me
Re: melee being “no longer OP”
The blunt weapons were fairly reasonably balanced, but all of the swords cut through multiple enemies, so were even more over-powered than the melee weapons in the original game. Good thing they balanced it out with the chainsaw being underpowered. :)
erm….”melee weapons in the original game”…? All there was was shoving (and maybe chainsaw?)
Yes…right. I forgot it only had fists and buttstocks. Still, they introduced the cooldown timer, because melee was way too good at shoving back zombies in the original.
I have to ask: how much effort did you put into making that title card? There’s no way you actually purchased ITC Benguiat, screencapped the background, and photoshopped the logo style just for one stream, right?
Anyways, it’s a shame that the NieR streams are off the tables now. Will you at least play through the other “endings” on your own? There are a few that are basically essential to the experience. From the looks of your savegame data, you have only played about 30% of the main game.
I was looking forward to watching you play the twin-stick shooter sections for a bit (the hacking minigame version) seeing as you made a twin-stick shooter yourself. It’s actually my favorite part of NieR, and I’ve been trying to find something similarly light but mechanically satisfying to occupy myself during the lulls of programming class.
One last note; I don’t know if you’ve still never completed a Soulsborne game, but the main gameplay in NieR is actually quite similar to FROM’s games (right down to the checkpoint warps and corpse running), and since you said you really enjoyed NieR, I was wondering if you’d ever be looking to give Soulsborne games another chance.
I didn’t pay for the font. Looks like there are site that offer “free” fonts that aren’t actually free.
All told it was just a 20 minute job.
Eric, clones of all the well-known fonts were everywhere in the Eighties. IIRC, Corel was the first high-profile offender forced to pay up over the ripped&renamed shovelware font CD they included with CorelDRAW 1 through 3; their next release licensed better fonts from Bitstream and URW. Luc Devroye’s font site has a lot of info about this stuff.
About 12 years ago when I bought a licensed CD of Japanese fonts from legitimate foundry DynaFont, they threw in a free disc of cheesy cloned western fonts as well. Their ITC Benguiat was called Bangle, “copyright 1994 Bay Animation”, apparently a clone of a clone that added computer-generated “italics” and bolds.
-j
Darn, I was looking forward to that… But yeah, a crashstream would be no fun at all.
also, “but I’m going going to put up”
I’d like to see you play MOO II, but I realize that sort of game isn’t really appropriate for this sort of casual stream. Master of Orion 2 turns 22 in November (on the 22nd, oddly enough) and it’s still one of the best (if not the best) “4X” games out there.
Maybe we can get a 22nd anniversary celebration on the 22nd?
Just a thought. I’m really enjoying the stream, even if I’m not a fan of the GTA series.
It’s too bad the Master Of Orion franchise went downhill. Stellaris, with the good mods and all the balance patches, is a pretty worthy successor to the genre. Although, the game is balanced around games that take days to play at minimum (even with the map size and other sliders set all the way down).
Try stars in shadow.Its good.
What makes it better than Stellaris?
I cant really answer that since Ive played stellaris before all the patching was done,and it did not grab me.This one did,even before the patches and the dlc.
But while I cant say if its better or worse than stellaris,I can say that its different.
The combat is tactical,instead of going on on the main map,so you have more control.
The turns are more pronounced,instead of the stellaris consecutive turns unless you pause.The planets dont go into the tile details as stellaris,but they rather go for the old “planet has X slots,what will you fill them with”.
Theres no manual assignment of civilians,but its their number thats important for the efficiency of buildings.
Theres no customization of races,but the ones that exist are pretty solid and have different feels to them.
That description, plus the cartoon aesthetic, makes it seem like a much better MOO successor than Stellaris. Especially the tactical combat; Combat in stellaris is just plonking down your dudes, then watching them spam weapons at each other, until the bigger army wins. Too bad it’s not for Linux yet. :S
Thats a shame.I was looking forward to watching you kill more fruit fuckers.
But shouldnt the two of you be playing saints row together,seeing how this is “open world gangsters do ridiculous shit” stream?L4D will break the flow.
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but he explicitly said he never intended on it being a GTA/Open World Goofiness stream all the time, he just happened to pick GTA for the first few streams, and when he tried something else, it broke.
Really looking forward to L4D, especially if there is a newbie on boat.
You know what would be a great thing to have in these games?Bootleg items.Stores that sell you cheaper versions of stuff that have a chance of being a ripoff that breaks after a bit.
Shame you couldn’t get Nier to work. I haven’t played it yet myself but I don’t shy away from spoilers, from what I’ve read you need to beat the game 5 times to get the full intended experience, so if you can bring yourself to continue it’s supposed to be well worth it. Maybe not on stream, but on your own time.
EDIT: Specifically, Endings A, B, C, D, and E. All others are optional.
To expand on that a touch in a non-spoilery way:
The first time through the game gets you Ending A. The second time through the game has a few differences and provides a new perspective, and gets you Ending B. The third time through the game is very different, and there’s a branch near the end that gets you C or D, depending on what you choose. You can go back to that branch and get the other ending fairly quickly, and once you get both of those, you can get Ending E. So “you don’t have the full story until you’ve seen all five endings” isn’t as daunting as it originally looks.
Endings F through Z are all jokes, mostly as responses to you deliberately doing something stupid like “remove the OS chip that says removing it will kill you,” and are optional. Just a few lines of text and the end credits blowing by in about a second.
Reminds me of the Zero Games games. In the remake of 999, they let you jump to any important decision to make the different choice, but you needed to go down certain paths to get the clues to get the scenes that triggered some things, and in Virtue’s Last Reward you had to see certain endings to unlock certain paths. Of course, the plot of the entire game series is based around justifying why that works …
(And in the last one you can get to the true ending by pretty much selecting obvious paths and looking up the passwords on Gamefaqs, which is very disappointing).
I dislike that they added the scene jump feature for the remake of 999. The repetition of playing through the non-verbal scenes again was key to
communicating to the player how the series’s particular flavor of psuedo-magic, the morphological field, works.The flip side of that, though, is making the player solve the same rooms that they’ve already solved just to get to one conversation that would be different or being able to choose a different option. It’s striking a balance between gameplay and story, and I think it works pretty well.
Do the stupid endings count as proper “endings” or are they simply cutscenes that play in a failure state? (I haven’t played the game myself, so I don’t know.)
They technically count as endings, in that they show up in the list of which endings you’ve got.
Functionally, though, they’re just unique game over screens for doing certain things.
They all get marked as Ending [Letter] on your save file, but are otherwise non-canonical* failure states.
*Some might work canonically but they’re still clearly not “true” endings.
Proper endings. They get credits and everything.
Will you be allowing watchers of the stream to join your L4D jog or will you be just letting the AI handle the other two characters?
It will be interesting to see L4D1 being played again.
But then we’d need to knife-fight to see who gets to play L4D on the stream! :O
Breaks my heart. I was really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Nier. Well, can’t be helped. It seems that there’s a number of Nvidia models that suffer from that freeze-frame thing with no real fix in sight. All in all, the lack of an official patch for Automata’s many performance problems is a disgrace. Then again, this is pretty par for the course for most Japanese PC ports. If not for Durante and Kaldaien and a number of others playing Japanese games on the PC would be pretty terrible.
Who’s playing the other 2 slots?
The plan I heard was “they will be bots” which I assume means Shamus has a few spambots that’s he’s been talking to on the Twentysided DarkComments who will be trying to interest us in Russian brides and discount bulk calliopes while startling the Witch.
“I was willing to put up with the crashes to get through the game”
It is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.