T w e n t y S i d e d
These are strange times indeed. The news changes by the hour, it rarely agrees with itself, and everyone has a different story. We’re either getting to the end, or it’s only just begun.
I have no idea what’s going on, but I’m just keeping my head down and writing. Hope you’re all safe out there.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast295
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 How is isolation going?
How’s it going out there? Life as usual? Sheltering at home? Working while everyone else shelters?
14:04 Router crashes IE crashes laptop
I look forward to hearing your theories.
26:36 Internet and Napster
And then we talked about this for some reason.
30:37 Doom Eternal – final thoughts
‘Salright I guess. Had fun out of 10.
33:50 Watch Dogs: Not Even When Free
I suppose I could use this as an excuse to link to Campster’s video again, since he pretty much sums up all my gripes with the game. Also, I’m glad I didn’t play all the way to the end. Ugh.
37:52 Graveyard Keeper
Link (YouTube) |
45:50 UE Viewer
52:13 Mailbag: YouTube views
Dear Diecast,
This one is for Shamus, mostly . . . I stopped by your Youtube channel and was startled to discover that your “This Dumb Industry” videos had gone from having around 5-10k views each to having 50-200k. Wow! Big deal! What happened?!
Jennifer Snow
53:43 Mailbag: Thief 2: 20th Anniversary
Hi!
It’s 20th Anniversary of Thief 2 The Metal Age this week, and I’ve finished replaying it last week. And I saw some videos on the topic. So it got me in the mood. Outside of Hitman standing proud and tall, other great stealth series are, at best, dormant, while in other games stealth is treated as a shallow option to explosive violence (Dishonored / Assassin’s Creed / Uncharted). There are few indie titles (Aragami or Swindle), but nothing that makes crowds speak about them. I want to ask Paul (for a change), what’s his opinion on why there’s practically no pure stealth games these days?
Best regards, DeadlyDark!
56:37 Bonus: RPG elements in Doom
Deadly Dark also asked an extra question:
P.S. Ok, here’s the question for Shamus. What’s your opinion on quote on quote «rpg-elements» in Doom ‘16 and Eternal?
57:52 Mailbag: Star Trek Picard
Shamus & Paul,
Now that the first season is complete, I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on Star Trek: Picard.
From Sam
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
the link to campsters video seems broken
Thanks. Fixed.
Another slow download, though faster than last week. I think everyone now working from home is waiting, and snags it at the same time. Since I’m curious and have time on my hands, I’ll try tomorrow, some time during the day. See if it feels like normal speed.
Paul, mate, look after your hearing. Please, don’t fuck it up. Bad hearing is no fun.
I often add games to my account, if they’re free. I can’t see myself ever playing Black Desert Online, because I don’t play MMOs, let alone ones Shamus has complained about. But what if I change my mind? There’s no harm.
What is the single point when skill trees started being added to FPSes? And when did they start being called RPG elements?
I watched the first three eps of Picard, but when I started ep 4, I just found I wasn’t looking forward to it and stopped watching. Even though that was the moment I’d been looking forward to. Somehow the desire to watch had abandoned me. However, according to IO9, the season ends well. Not perfectly, but not terribly either.
I think it would be hard to draw a hard line, where RPG things started getting added to FPSs. Like, there’s heavy “RPG” systems in both System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Do those count as FPSs, or RPGs? How do they compare to other games in this discussion, when (i’m pretty sure) none of them have a proper skill-tree, just individual skills? At what point would an “FPS” become an “RPG”? Skill-tree plus inventory-management? That plus cyber-enhancements? (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) What if it doesn’t have a skill-tree, but has all the rest? (System Shock 2) What about a game that has no inventory management and no skill-tree, but skills that can be upgraded and passives that can be upgraded – is that just an “FPS”? (Bioshock, and sequels) We haven’t even gotten into proper “role-playing” elements, like having choices in the narrative, or the ability to customize your character in a non-combat, non-skills way? Does that bump any game from one category back to the other?
Good questions. Furthermore, both Skyrim and Diablo get the RPG tag. But I’ve played those games, I wouldn’t put them in the same category as some other games. Looks like there’s no real answer. It’s like measuring the shore when the tide comes in and out.
Shamus, I re-downloaded the ep 12 hours later. It hummed along at my maximum speed, suggesting that everyone was waiting and downloaded at the same time.
I would summarize the show with one word: Banksian, in a very good way. As in, the writer Iain M. Banks. Both structurally and thematically, it reminded me of his Culture novels. I struggle with an explanation, but if I didn’t know he had passed away years ago, I would have suspected that they hired him at least as a co-author for the script. Just to name a few things in a very non-exhaustive and subjective list:
*
Seven is basically Perosteck Balveda, and I love it.*
The scene in the simulation with Data is 100% something Banks would do.*
Rios and his set of holograms is just the kind of quirky that I would expect from a Culture citizen.*
The overall pacing reminded me more of a book than your typical TV show, and I very much enjoyed that they were allowed to commit to slower sections longer than just one episode (notably, the beginning in the vineyard and the intermission at Riker’s home).But it comes down to more than just bullet points. From little details to the grander flow of the story, in every episode there are moments where I think to myself “this totally feels like Banks had a hand in it”. I say this is the best Star Trek has been since DS9, if not ever. Both Discovery and Picard are experiments to build upon and deviate from the usual Star Trek formula, and I hope that the latter will set a new standard going forward.
That’s a very interesting take on it. I’m not really seeing it though; the Culture does the post-scarcity utopia thing, while Bad Robot Trek has almost completely abandoned that setting in favour of sweary grimdarkness.
It’s not the setting itself, which is indeed quite different, but more the tone and flow of the story, characters, and other various details in the show. Also, the Culture books do contain their fair share of grimdarkness themselves (like the whole deal with the
simulated hells).The virtual hells are a thing other civilizations do that the Culture fights to destroy, and that book ends with an epilogue describing how they end up considered barbaric and no one does them any more. The way Picard handles the Federation would be like not acknowledging that book while writing another where the Culture has its own hells because actually they’re just assholes.
I did not claim that the Federation – or anyone in the show – is like the Culture, but that the show feels like it is written like a Culture novel, or more generally as if Banks did contribute at least some part of the writing.
While I can’t honestly deny this show has some merit, or my very obvious bias against it – your associating it with Banks hurts. Just, ow. Dammit.
The result may or may not be high quality television but it’s definitely not Star Trek. Maybe if they wanted to make a show like this, call it something else instead of playing a bait-and-switch?
Wow, im surprised HL alyx isnt in the shownotes.
I saw George Weidman play Alyx, and it seems just as gimmick-y as the first flood of motion-controlled games. The gameplay is actually a step backwards from Half Life 2 (no real jumping, gravity gun, or ball-bouncing). I like that they at least have full-magazine-dropped reloads, instead of magic-auto-consolidated magazine reloads, so you at least have a choice to make about when to reload, instead of always mashing the button when you’re not shooting. A lot of the “immersive” stuff in the game, like groping corpses for loot instead of just magic auto-pickup loot, just highlighted all of the remaining video-gam-y things, like magic heal-juice that hasn’t been hacked by the enemy to kill you, magic pockets full of all your bullets that somehow can’t hold more health-syringes or grenades, and a magic-upgrade-juice for your guns, despite all of the upgrades being pretty standard items on real guns.
Counterpoint: it’s still pretty great. The game starts out pretty “safe”, which makes the early parts which LP’ers are showing off on stream look a bit simplistic, but it really picks up later. I think Valve were very careful to avoid making people sick on their first VR experience.
Do you mean “safe” as in “fewer enemies and more health items”, or “not very novel or shocking”? I don’t think the game really accelerated either as it progressed…
Both, really. It starts very “traditional Half-life game” and mixes in VR mechanics gradually. The encounters do get more hectic, although there are armoured headcrabs in the early game that are a real pain to deal with.
I don’t know if you’ve played or just seen an LP, but the immersive bits really only work in VR; having to count shots and fumbling to swap in a magazine in the middle of a firefight (and flicking your wrist to complete a reload) add a layer of tension to firefights that don’t translate to a video stream. Also: headcrabs jumping right at your damn face.
As someone who’s shot a few guns in real life and played Receiver, the reload mechanics in this game seem very game-y and shallow. It doesn’t seem up to the level of hectic from an indie game’s mechanics. As for fumbling for shotgun shells, that’s actually kind of cool, but only if you forget (or don’t know), that 20-round (or higher) drum-mags exist. The magazines for the SMG visually look like the side-loading mags from WW2-era SMGs, but act like magic stripper-clips that instanly dump rounds into an (apparently) infinitely-small internal magazine. It’s in the uncanney-valley of guns-realism.
VR fits poorly with streaming. The unique feature of VR is literally the thing that can’t be experienced by watching a video of someone playing.
The experience of going towards a ledge and feeling genuine vertigo is such an amazing feeling the first time it happens, and on a stream it just looks like you walked towards an ordinary drop and got overexcited.
I guess the potential nausea and discomfort don’t show up on streams either, so it’s not all bad.
For me anyways, I got pretty bad nausea from watching the VR stream, more so than watching a normal 3D game. Part of it was probably the field-of-view being calibrated for George, wearing the headset rather than me the stream-viewer, but part of it was also that he was teleporting all over the place, because the game lacks a “run” button. Additionally, the game totally doesn’t handle if your 3D sensors are a bit messed up – his viewport was constantly glitching out by about 10-45 degrees of rotation left-right, and then immediately switching back again. (He mentioned at some point in the stream, that one of his sensors was misbehaving, even after recalibrating it.) On top of all that, you have the normal disconnect from a rapidly-moving camera, that’s not under your control. (The difference between playing the game yourself, and watching someone else.)
From a quick glance at the stream, he was using snap turns and teleportation. The game has options for smooth turns and smooth locomotion; also for image stabilisation for streaming, which I think he wasn’t using. Otherwise a lot of the camera swinging is an artefact of human gaze and is invisible when you’re actually in the headset.
Sensors misbehaving is definitely a thing, especially if you have something reflective in your VR area as the IR lasers get bounced around. Seems a bit worse on the Index than the Vive, but my own setup leaves a lot to be desired.
Re: gun realism; yeah, it’s definitely the equivalent of hitting “R” rather than a simulation. But that was definitely a deliberate design decision on Valve’s part, and adds enough of a frisson without being a pain in the neck (Half Life 2 is way more popular than Receiver for a reason). Other VR Gun Simulators Are Available. For people who want a more conventional FPS with VR controls, Borderlands 2 is now in much better shape than it was at launch.
Valve definitely decided to make a Half Life game in VR and it works very well as such. It’s not as mind-blowing as, say, Beat Saber or Superhot VR in its use of the medium, but it really isn’t possible to judge HL:A fairly on the basis of a stream either. The flatscreen mods for HL:A which are coming out really won’t do it justice either.
Half Life is more popular than another game because of its reload mechanic? No, it’s not because it’s in a franchise that’s had a decade without another installment, nor one of the largest companies on the planet with a massive marketing budget, nor the high-fidelity graphics that are required by the general populace – it’s because they chose to implement a specific level of fidelity when reloading a gun in VR. Hah!
Neither of us have VR, so it’s inaccessible to us.
I was thinking more in the trend of
Shamus: “hey Paul, did you hear, valve released a new halflife game”
Paul: “what, youre kidding”
Shamus: “No Im not”
And then you both start screaming and the outro song cuts in.
Belgium is in lockdown. I wouldn’t care too much where it not for the fact that I can’t go to my sports club. Fortunately IT work can be done from home, which makes me wonder why so many employers keep insisting you need a driver’s license.
I can’t go to the gym, so I’m just jogging at the end of the day, and doing push-ups and sit-ups. More annoying than the lack of gym, is the fact that nobody actually seems to care about the distancing / germ-control stuff. I have to jog on the street or on people’s lawns because nobody cares to step aside. People are in the grocery store within arm’s reach, and every once in a while I hear a really phlegm-y cough. If you’re going out to pick up supplies…at least eat some cough-syrup so you spread less germs. I guess that’s why the Canadian government had to shut down all bars, gyms, etc, and ban all gatherings larger than 50 people. (Now 25 people.) Everyone’s a dumb-ass, who isn’t following the guidelines. :S
The mayor of Chicago had to close the lakefront parks and certain trails because as soon as the weather turned even a little nice people were out in droves, virus be damned. I went to a local track to jog, and, yeah, not going back. Too crowded. I’ve been doing weights and calisthenics at home. When it stops raining, I think I’m going to take up jump-rope in the backyard.
Yeah, I had to make a grocery run yesterday, and in the forty-five minutes I was at the store:
1.) A couple (with cart) stopped about a meter past the front door for one to get something out of the other’s backpack;
2.) Another pair kept their cart in the center of the aisle, whilst splitting up to look at items on each side simultaneously;
3.) I had a woman come up to within a foot of me, perusing items without actually selecting anything.
This whole distancing thing is pretty rough on extroverted me, but I was quite ready to get back in the car and head home.
It’s the dry coughs that you need to worry about, not the phlegmy ones ;-)
I do groceries only once per week now and in the late evening. That works pretty well. During the day, the 1.5m distance rule is a total joke. Even old people didn’t care. Hey, I want to protect you, but I can’t jump up on top of the shelves when you’re coming at me! Some supermarkets limit the number of people that can be inside at a time, but not this one, unfortunately.
Swede here. No real lockdown, noticably less people around though.
Internet speed: I have ~49Mbps down. Which for me is amazingly fast, as 8 years ago I had ~200 Kbps.
Nowadays that’s pretty slow. I think at that speed (from when I had a roommate, hogging up half the bandwidth), would start choking a 1080p stream on YouTube. That, plus every website nowadays[1] is a total bandwidth-hog, even if they’re just displaying text and some images. Scaled-down thumbnails for fast previews – what’s that? Just shrink the images with your CSS! Actual pages of content? Real searches that aren’t garbage? Nah, just have infinite scrolling so everyone’s browser chugs when the amount of (again, poorly-optimized) content is all in memory. Then there’s Javascript…
[1] Who am I kidding; People have been making bloated websites for decades.
I’m pretty sure I used to be able to stream 1080p flawlessly back when I had a cable connection that only hit 10mbps (albeit a rock solid 10mbps) – Nowadays not only is my almost equally solid 38mbps landline causing buffering occasionally but the codecs Youtube now are making my i5 choke out too. Also with YouTube – while not having the dreaded ‘infinite scrolling’ – any more than two clicks on the show more comments button causes my cursor and text input to lag and drop frames. I ask you…
Reddit’s not so bad tho, I was reading and commenting on a thread with 500 replies with the kind of silky smoothness I just took for granted in the good old, bad old days.
I feel a bit guilty as my job is secure, but I don’t have much work to do and I’m finding it hard to concentrate working from home. I’ve had to rely on friends shopping for me as my partner may have the virus, so I shouldn’t go outside, but her symptoms are mild and it isn’t really a hardship.
I’m a bit shocked at how slow it’s taking for the lockdown to work. Most people look like they’re staying inside – before I got 100% isolated the streets seemed very empty. Even in Italy their cases are only just beginning to curve off (on the logarithmic scale) and they’ve been locked down for ages.
I really need to stay away from the news (and Reddit 100x more so) it only adds to the stress, it’s monotonously boring, I can do nothing about it and (particularly in the case of Reddit) isn’t even very informative / accurate.
But I’m finding it hard to stop looking. There’s no other news to distract me and I’m stuck at home. Plus it is a really big event in human history. It feels weird not reading about it.
My job is relatively easy to do remotely (software engineering) and is for a company that isn’t likely to go under as a result of the lockdown (Amazon). In addition, I’m an introvert and don’t have to deal with children. I’ve actually been a bit disturbed at how much this has *not* changed my life. I’m thinking I need to get an outdoor hobby once this is over.
I have also avoided deep-diving the news. I got the sense that they were more interested in driving panic than providing useful information, and I have a pretty low opinion of journalists’ ability to clearly and accurately explain science under the best of circumstances. My wife and I are moderate preppers so we were well positioned to self-isolate, and what happens on the national and global scale is largely out of my hands. I don’t see the point of ranting about it on Facebook.
I do have a large pile of games to occupy my recreational time, luckily. I’m currently stuck into the new fan translation of Nihon Falcom’s Trails From Zero, which is excellent. Truly a professional job.
I find it strange how Shamus said the trick with the rice his wife does is something he hasn’t seen very often. Where I come from, it’s a pretty common folk medicine for when you’re cold or have a fever.
With regards to the virus, I’m also under lockdown (just like the rest of the country), so the entire company is working from home. On the topic of how that affects my interactions with the site, Paul’s comment about routiune is very true for me. I still occasionally visit the site, but I don’t check my RSS reader as often as when I’m at work. Still, whenever there’s a new article, I do read it as quickly as I can. I’m also visiting the site less often on account of an online course I recently started doing.
Also, Paul, you use Internet Explorer? I’ve always thought you were more of a Chrome kind of guy. Or did the program just decide to use IE, even though you have something else as the default?
Oh, and Shamus – I didn’t know you used to listen to Moby! Although, given his eclectic career, that doesn’t really tell me much :D If you’re into his most famous stuff from the late 90’s – early 2000’s (Play, 18, etc.), then you’ll probably like his second-to-last album – Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt .
Due to writing this comment, I just found out that this year he’s released another album, which I’ll probably give a listen to soon.
Yeah. Moby’s Play was my jam for years.
I think Napster was actually how I discovered that electronic music was a thing. That stuff didn’t show up on the radio, and I didn’t go to clubs.
I also really like Play! I got exposed to it as a kid, when they played the video for Why does my Heart Feel so Bad on TV. It was the first time when I saw how something extremely sad can be beautiful at the same time.
When I became a teenager, I found that his other work from that time is also top notch. If you haven’t yet listened to the album I talked about in my OP yet, I strongly recommend you watch this video of Moby playing the best song from it on the Steven Colbert show. It’s a bit different from the studio version, and I can’t really tell which version I like better :D
I do use Chrome, but I’ve left Internet Explorer as the default browser on my work laptop. A number of the websites I have to use for work only function on IE. Plus it makes it really obvious when something opens up a web-browser from an outside link or an app launcher.
Re: Social Distancing
Things are okay here. Case numbers aren’t massive here. My wife is working from home so there’s still income in the family. I’d been laid off a little before the outbreak so avoiding people was easy, but now the job search has stalled. I work in a very oil & gas focused part of Canada and one of the side-effects of the whole world ceasing travel (and a price war) is that our oil has become worthless. That scares me more than COVID-19.
At least as a gamer-by-hobby I’m well-prepared to weather long periods of boredom. Even if I finish all the games I just bought, I can just get something else. Digital distribution is great. My parents though… they’re not. I worry about them more than myself; they’re more likely to go stir-crazy and they’re way more vulnerable if they do catch it.
Router, Crashes
No clue. No theories. Me no understand blinky-boxes.
Napster, Pirating
I think piracy rises in direct correlation with how annoying the legitimate businesses are.
DOOM Eternal
I’ve heard of the deliberate changes to the core gameplay loop, and found the idea offputting. I dislike shooters that intentionally heavily restrict ammo if it’s not a horror aesthetic.
Watchdogs
Yup, same thought. I don’t care if it’s free, I have a value on my time. They would have to pay me. Not sure where my price point is; how long’s the game? I did the same mental calculation as Paul; my asking point isn’t going to be $0.50 – we’re talking a bunch of dollars per hour.
Remainder
Best Watch Dogs experience is ChipCheezum’s LP.
I recently watched a video called Watch Dogs 5 Years Later by someone called Whitelight, and apparently you can play Aiden as John Wick ?
Maybe combat-wise (haven’t played myself). But not in terms of personality. John Wick is very straightforward; find the bad guy, kill everyone between him and them, leave everyone else alone. Aiden Pearce is much more manipulative; there’s various infiltrations where he meets the villains face to face and just talks to them, and several points where he either threatens or blackmails someone’s previously uninvolved family members to get information.
That video reminds me that the various Digital Trips are supposedly good enough by themselves to be worth getting the game on sale. Come for the hacking, nearly leave because of the disappointing hacking and awful Aiden, but then discover Digital Trips and stay for the Spider Tank.
Doom Eternal took a little longer than expected to click for me, but now that it has I’m enjoying it more than Doom (2016). The main thing was finding out that the chainsaw quickly refreshes when empty (which should have been made much clearer in game), meaning ammo is way more abundant than it initially seems. Its clear that the developers want you using all the available weapons, and making held ammo low so you switch weapons often before chainsawing a fodder enemy is part of that. I’m way less stingy with ammo hungry mods, and low ammo weapons like the rocket launcher, than I was starting out and that’s not something I could have said about 2016.
Watch Dogs is a game I’d like to wipe out of existence and this is despite, or perhaps even more so because of, me thinking it has a lot of actually good gameplay. It’s one of the few games where I found driving to be fun (disclaimer: I don’t play a lot of games that involve driving so make of that what you will), a bunch of the hacking abilities were empowering and really cool to use, there was a good variety of pedestrian and driver behaviours that made the city feel really cool (the one I always quote was when two cars bumped into each other entirely without my interference and the drivers got out and started an argument, it sort of felt apart when I listened to it for a minute or two but as a background scene it was super cool).
Eeeeeexcept this is all tied to absolutely godawful writing, it’s one of the few games I actually made me feel bad as a person. Let’s leave aside the fact that in the main story the protagonist is a despicable asshole who refuses to acknowledge that he’s at fault for anything, numerous characters clearly read the script, the corps are moustachetwirlingly evil and the antagonist’s actions make no sense whatsoever. But that’s not all! Play today and you too can experience the awfulness in side activities too! In particular there is a minigame where you hack into security systems and get to peep into an apartment, watch a little scene and steal some change of off people’s devices. Ignoring the fact how you invading people’s privacy in this way kinda runs counter to the whole “corporations are bad for doing this” they try to make some of these people “acceptable (or even desirable) torgets”, like “hey, here’s an internet troll”, or “hey, here’s someone rich ranting about how poor people are crap”… and then there are… other scenes. Here’s five that I particularly remember from the least to the most awful in my opinion:
1)
Guy gets friendzoned, haha, lol… eh…. Not too awful in its own right but could we please just… not? I’m going to spare you the rant about how friendzoning is an awful concept but I Have Opinions. Also, I’m not sure if we’re stealing from the guy or the girl in this scene but I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea was “she deserves it for doing this to the guy”.2)
We call in to see an old man lying on the floor, phone next to him, we listen as his son calls along the lines of “hey dad, haven’t heard from you in a couple days, you fine? I know you’re in poor health and I thought you could move in with us”. The implication is the old man is dead, though in reality we don’t know, he could be just unconscious, maybe he didn’t call his son for some other reason and just dropped to the floor five minutes earlier? Whatever, steal his change. It’s kind of sad but I’m putting it down as 2 because if you do go with the interpretation that he has been dead for a couple days than okay, sure, he doesn’t need that 100$. Aiden is still an awful person for taking it and not doing anything.3) If you’ve asked yourself why #2 was #2 it’s because the 3, 4 and 5 are, well, a category onto themselves. Your opinion might vary about which one should have priority. So, on to the scene.
Hello child abuse! I don’t remember this one super well, I think it involves one or two children misbehaving and then the mother lashes out at them.4&5 together because I can’t decide)
Scene one: A man is pacing around the room picking up and putting down a gun, obviously contemplating suicide. Scene two: Possible suicide happenning offscreen, you can see the open door to the bathroom and hear a woman yelling some very self-hating things, then there are some gurgling and everything falls silent.What makes these worse is that they are actually generally well made! The voice actors are definitely putting in the work and the animations are very good too, while many times we don’t see people’s faces or even things happen completely offscreen for example in the “pacing man” scene the tension is palpable.
My favorite stealth game is Mark of the Ninja, which coincidentally I replayed just last week. It was released in 2012 and re-mastered and re-released in 2018. It’s a 2D platformer, probably closer to Swindle than to Aragami, despite having, y’know, ninjas in common with the latter game. Apart from a few puzzles and a few pure platforming segments, the game plays very much like one of the “Predator” areas from the Arkham games. The difference, of course, is that you’re a (potentially) murderous ninja rather than Batman, so the mercenaries and bandits you’re hanging from the light fixtures are very definitely dead and not, ahem, unconscious. (Except when they are. You can eventually get an unlockable costume that allows for non-lethal takedowns.) Unlike Batman, the ninja can’t really stand up to guards in direct combat. Being spotted in the open by two or more enemies is usually a death sentence. Fortunately the game is generous in its checkpointing.
I am a very bloodthirsty sort of a ninja. I can’t help myself. I love stealth kills–they’re also the best part of Shadow of Mordor, for example–and Mark of the Ninja gives me a lot of stealth kill options. It is, however possible to play the game mostly non-lethally. There are, I think, two boss characters who must be killed and there’s another unavoidable death at the end of the game, but for the most part the game is just as happy to reward you for sneaking around enemies as it is for sneaking up on them and stabbing them in the back. You can’t 100% the game without committing a few dozen murders, I’m afraid; many of the optional challenge objectives involve killing. But 100%-ing the game is pretty hard anyway–personally, there are some levels where I just can’t find all of the hidden scrolls–so don’t let that deter you.
And now I realize that I’ve just used “100%” as a verb. My shame is deep.
You made me realise that’s what I miss in the new Assassin’s Creeds. They wore it into the ground quickly, but there’s something very satisfying about a powerful stealth kill. Running up behind two guards and doing that leaping twirl kill was (nearly) endlessly fun.
And the best part of Metal Gear games was always messing the AI round with devious collections of cardboard boxes and magazines. Being the puppet master (sometimes benevolent)
I know what you mean. Some of my favorite bits of Mark of the Ninja involve manipulating enemies. I’m especially fond of the “terrify” mechanic. Performing certain actions can cause enemies to enter a permanent panicked, trigger-happy state in which they sometimes blind-fire into the darkness and may kill other enemies. And there are so many ways to terrify enemies, too! Dropping a body right into their cone of vision will do the trick. Leaving a body strung up from a light fixture will also do it. Or you can set up a trap that kills one enemy while he’s in view of another. It’s also possible to use various environmental hazards against them. I think my favorite level in Mark of the Ninja must be the bonus flashback level which sticks you in the non-lethal take-down costume and whose final objective is to terrify a certain number of guards.
I’m not sure what this says about me.
Mark of the Ninja is such a fantastic game. It deserved to be remembered all these years
What I found most interesting about the grocery stores is seeing exactly what runs out of stock. Not the obvious things like toilet paper and rice, I mean particular types of milk (apparently 2% is in high demand during a crisis) or the reveal that corn is the least popular canned vegetable.
I’m still working from home: I’m at a tech company so that’s easy to do, though my apartment is tiny so I had to sacrifice most of the kitchen table to setting up my work computer and all the dedicated hardware we work with. I too have allergies so whenever I cough it triggers part of my brain that goes “Oh no, do you have the plague?” before I remember that I haven’t left the house in two weeks so no, I don’t.
Shortages happen when a tipping point is reached, where people fear it will happen, so they start buying it just because they want to have some when the supplies run out. This leads to chaotic effects where one guy forgetting to restock a single shelf may create the perception that there is a shortage of milk, causing every who sees the empty shelf to want to panic-buy milk from every other shop in the vicinity…
I liked the 538 article that said there’s regional patterns to what gets panic bought. Apparently some regions of the US panic buy peanut butter anytime a hurricane swings around
Yeah, that checks out. My mom always explained it as follows: if the power goes out, peanut butter takes forever to spoil, and you keep eating without a means to cook.
It makes more sense than the UK which always panic buys bread and milk, neither of which last well.
(You can freeze bread, but there are better things to use the freezer space for)
I think part of what’s going on, is also that some items are more popular than others, but stores have to buy everything in the same sizes of crate, instead of exactly what they need. For example, Cambell’s condensed tomato soup has been low-stock, long before COVID-19 came onto the scene. Mushroom soup on the other hand, is always nearly fully-stocked. (Personally, I think it’s a bit gross…) In addition, I’m sure most large-chain groceries have a mandate, to have barely more stock than gets sold per week, to save on shelf space. So even a relatively small increase in peoples’ shopping amounts, to keep a little extra on the shelves at home, could push the store from “this item runs out just before the next truck comes in”, to “this is short for days at a time”.
At my local store, first there was only chocolate milk, and then 2% came back before 1%. So it seems to vary. Even for cream corn, the brand names were gone but the no-name brand shelves were full, at least at first.
I went grocery shopping two weeks ago, just as the panic buying in my state was beginning. I typically make two grocery runs per week; I go to one store on Friday morning and another on Saturday morning. On Friday morning, the first store was perhaps a little more crowded than usual. It was out of ramen and low on a few other things, but at that point I honestly wasn’t sure whether panic buying had really kicked in or not. The following morning, I went shopping an hour earlier than usual and the second store was, well, not packed, because it was still just 7 am, but significantly more crowded than usual. Not only was the ramen gone, but so was the flour, the frozen vegetables, most of the paper towels, and a fair few other things besides. I didn’t go shopping again until last Friday. There was a little ramen this time and maybe half the usual amount of flour, but things were otherwise mostly normal, apart from the total absence of yeast.
What I’d like to know is who is doing all this baking, apart from my wife? (And me, I suppose. In a normal week I use 350 grams of flour making pizza dough.) People mostly don’t bake any more. If they did, there’d be more flour at the grocery store in normal circumstances and it’d be cheaper too. I suppose a lot of people suddenly have a lot of time on their hands and, to be fair, flour doesn’t spoil or go stale in the same way that bread does. The store had a large, prominent display of 25 pound bags of flour on Friday. I’ve never seen that happen before.
Our intention during this social distancing period was to reduce our grocery shopping to once every two weeks, but I don’t think that will be possible. The stores seem to be limiting milk purchases to 2 gallons per customer, and that’s just about the amount we use in a week. It looks like I’ll have to go out again this weekend. Otherwise, we’re doing pretty well. Video conferencing seems to be working out for us. Even my daughter is doing it. The school district is groping its way towards a distance-learning program and so she had video conference with her teacher and most of her class just this morning.
The shortage of sliced bread may be to blame for the yeast/flour issue. I know we resorted to YouTube bread-making videos after a week of not having any in the house.
Even if you don’t bake normally, hard-tack, or even basic (non-horrible) bread is pretty easy to make. Flour, water, salt, maybe yeast eggs, or whatever, depending on the type and the recipe. So I can totally understand more people than normal, making bread for themselves. Probably not because of a lack of inventory, but as something to do to keep from catching cabin-fever. :)
Add a little sugar and you’ve got my pizza dough recipe.
It’s really funny, once I couldn’t find any paprika, and I was wondering if I missed some important fake news. It’s curious how much canned food is still on the shelves compared to less durable things. My pet theory is that refilling these just takes up almost all of the time of the supermarket staff.
Unfortunately Graveyard Keeper is not in Early Access, it was released unfinished.
Alas!
It’s like 85% of the way to being a fantastic game. Needs a few more quality-of-life fixes to be a real classic. The endless hiking around is really starting to take its toll on me.
My wife spent a good 30 mins this morning trying to get me to pick up Stardew Valley.
If you haven’t bought a teleport stone from the tavern keeper, it’s absolutely worth it; it’ll let you teleport to a destination every couple of minutes, which basically cuts the walking in the game in half.
Once I was a bit farther in the game I started buying speed potions. They’re a silver each (and more with how the game adjusts prices), but they’ll give you a day or so of increased running speed, which was a life-saver. (… which isn’t quite as fun as Stardew Valley where you can increase running speed by drinking coffee, which basically meant I was role-playing a caffeine addict. )
—
And Stardew Valley is really fun, even as someone who doesn’t care that much about getting to know the villagers. GK is great for people like me who played Stardew Valley and got bored[1], but if you want a less tedious Graveyard Keeper… it’s Stardew Valley.
[1] I always get to the point a year or two in where I’ve got a farm that basically just prints money without much effort – using sprinklers and plants that don’t need to be replanted; and I basically just run out of stuff to do.
And this hit me hard when a previous update somehow wiped my save. I wasn’t that far in, but it completely killed it for me and I just wasn’t able to go back in.
But that’s OK. I went FULLRETRO with Crosscode, Ion Fury, and Octopath.
Oh hey, I talked about Graveyard Keeper in the last “what are you playing?” thread. I like Shamus’s description of “fighting entropy”, as I feel that’s one of the main itches that the game scratches for me as well.
One correction, Shamus describes the game as “early access”, but AFAICT, it isn’t, the game is complete and even has a $10 DLC expansion.
I did pick up the expansion – which adds a bar that you run, and a bunch of side-quests reveal the world’s backstory. The side-quests are nice – in the base game there’s essentially 6 villagers with quest lines, and all the other villagers are just vendors with maybe a one-time side quest; but the DLC adds more interaction with those other villagers – and running the bar gives you another thing to improve (like the church and the graveyard), and serves as an extra source of income.
I do have one more gripe, the potion making system – either you look up recipes online (which is boring and feels like cheating), or else you just randomly combine ingredients, but there’s way to many possibilities for that to be a very effective strategy, or else you can buy a random recipe from the witch every once and awhile. It just feels like there should be a better, more deterministic, way of learning recipes in game. I think it’d be better if it worked like cooking: where you can’t cook something until you have the recipe, and you get recipes from quests or by buying them.
I’m nearing the end of the game; I’ve wrapped up a few of the villagers quests lines, and I’m close on the others. I’ve had a lot of fun with the game, but I’m also ready to be done (I’m finally hitting the point where I have more money than I know what to do with). I think the game is a good length. I’ve gotten a good long playtime out of it, and I think it’s going to end without overstaying it’s welcome.
Oh, one tip that would have saved me a bit of annoyance:
don’t slack on collecting skulls from corpses – they aren’t very useful so I wasn’t collecting them, and then suddenly one of the villager quests will need like 20 of them at once.I’m out of quarantine now and feeling fine. However, since we’re in lockdown, the only real difference it makes is that I can go to the shops again. Otherwise I’m working from home, playing Greedfall and watching a lot of YouTube videos.
My workplace is on the third week of a work-from-home request, where they politely “asked” us not to come in which was really an order to work from home, with progressive lockdowns at the work campus to ensure that. So far, it’s not an issue for me — I’ve joked that it’s what I’d do if I was on vacation except that I’m actually working — but I envy the people who are talking about how much more time they have because of this because I find that I have LESS time now than before.
I did manage to start playing Saint’s Row the Third, which I originally picked up ages ago after seeing it recommended on this site. I kinda like it, but it has two huge flaws. The first is that with the conversations and the music in the car I have to pay attention to the sound and so can’t have something on TV while playing it, and without baseball there’s no sport to watch that I only want to play a little attention to so it’s actual shows and DVDs that I want to watch at that point. The second is that I suck at the game. I drive and shoot badly, and can’t figure out how to deal with human shields without just shooting the human shield first. I’ll have to see if I keep playing it and/or when I do that.
Glad to hear you’re back up to speed!
How are you finding Greedfall?
I really enjoyed most of my time with Graveyard Keeper. I played the game for 30 hours and then I just stopped. I don’t know how close I was to the ending, but at this point in the game the grinding became so prevalent that I guess I subconsciously noticed the amount of rewards was getting too small for the amount of work put into it, so I just never got any desire to continue playing.
Other games are sort of like cleaning a train, where you have to back and forth in the same place but the wagons are short enough that you don’t get tired of the same place before having to advance to the next one. This game is like building a spider web, where you have to constantly advance in a spiral in all the areas at the same time. You’re changing places more often, so you get less bored at the start, but the more you advance the more familiar you are with every area, so they all start to become stale at the same time. Yes, you get to change from area to area, but it’s always one you’ve already been to. When you’re starting to get tired, there’s no new area to discover.
Yeah, there’s all the minion usage to lower the amount of grinding done, but it really doesn’t help that much by the time it becomes available. I think the game still needs some refinement to be fantastic. Some better fast travel than the one we have (two options and it’s still a lot of walking), less grinding and do something about that annoying potions system.
Then again, 30 hours of playtime, I can’t complain about not getting my money’s worth.
Gonna take this chance to recommend “The Hex” again. There’s a fun jab at Bethesda in it. Well, between other game companies, but since we’re mentioning your Bethesda video. BTW, congratulations on your channel growing.
No isolation for this guy! Nope, in fact this whole ordeal has ended up with a mandatory 50hrs/wk for the foreseeable future at my distribution center. This is especially arduous since I live an hours drive away, meaning a two hour commute to a 10hr/day job. There’s no time to cook/clean/etc and even if stores were open, they’d still be closed by the time I got off work. This leaves me two full days to compress a weeks worth of…everything.
Hey I work at a distribution center too! I just got home from my fifth 11 hour shift in a row. I get tomorrow off then it’s back at it. We are falling more and more behind.
The Graveyard Keeper video felt to me like a very long joke without a punchline at the end. Like, I thought, “That’s it? You just click the ‘work’ button to transform resources into other resources a bunch of times? Don’t we have Cookie Clicker games for that now?”
I dunno. I never understood the appeal of farming games in the first place. At least with Minecraft/Factorio/Whatever, there’s an engineering aspect to it, you’re trying to build systems and adapt to environments. This just seems like making meaningless numbers go up for the sake of it.
For the router crash story, I think the router webpage is not coded for IE; so much that it causes a segmentation fault (or any kind of session-killing error). And then when the laptop is restarted, it tries to restore its session from before the hard stop, including the IE browser, which again causes the same error.
Maybe the page that IE tries to open takes too many resources (RAM/CPU), which causes the system to go down. An IE segfault would just crash the browser but leave the system intact.
You asked for it . . .
I’m not going to lie — I’m struggling. As the link on my name will attest, I’m an educator, and adapting my workflow to remote learning is a challenge. My home Internet is not up to hosting virtual meetings with multiple students, so I feel like I’ve gone from respected(ish) academic up for tenure to no-name YouTuber. This is compounded by the fact that the remote learning paradigm kind of neutralizes what I think is my strong suit as a teacher (building rapport with students in the classroom). On the upside, our homework was already being delivered digitally, so I didn’t have to figure out how to collect and grade scads of assignments.
Beyond my jaggedly shifted workflow, I am a big-time extrovert, so getting to see a grand total of two other faces every day is wearing on me. At least our local Pathfinder group has set up virtual game days through Roll20, so I should have a chance to socialize with some fellow dorks for a few hours on Saturday.
This ArsTechnica article has some tips on remote teaching but I don’t know if it will work with your internet (and they concluded it sucks no matter what you use)
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2020/03/a-crash-course-in-virtual-teaching-real-learning-achieved/
Thanks for the link; if nothing else, it feels good to have someone on a major website commiserate. I also want to stress that my institution is doing a great job of supporting our faculty through this. We haven’t just been cast into the void.
I could have gotten a tablet, but my handwriting on devices is massive, to the point that I can get about five words on a screen. I ended up buying a decent-sized whiteboard and recording myself in front of my laptop’s webcam. Thus the low-end YouTube feelings. It’s not ideal, but it feels like I’ve reached a local equilibrium.
We’ll see how this week’s tests shake out.
I’m part of my family’s business which is making frozen food, mostly for seniors, so we’re considered an essential service and can remain open. Due to the isolation and people stocking up and wanting to avoid grocery stores, it’s been super busy for me. Game releases in the last few weeks have been great for me[*] so I’m not really feeling the isolation for now(If my family or I get sick and we have to close the business temporarily I’ll probably reeeally feel it then).
[*] Borderlands 3, Rune Factory 4, Animal Crossing, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon etc..
Ooooo Shamus, on Graveyard Keeper–are you playing the version with all the DLC? Or just the vanilla version? I’ve been waffling on buying it (I adore Stardew Valley), and am unsure if I want to go whole hog with the DLC or should just buy the vanilla version and see how I like it first. Any thoughts?
I mentioned the DLC in my comment above. I actually bought the DLC halfway through the game, and it gets added to your current game, which is nice. (As I don’t plan to replay this game anytime soon) So I’d definitely try the game without the DLC first.
The biggest part of the DLC is probably the tavern, so there’s not a huge reason to buy it before you’re at the point of brewing alcohol anyway (though getting it sooner would give a head-start on all the backstory side-quests).
The Netherlands is not in a lockdown, or at least, they’re not calling it a lockdown, but we’re supposed to work from home if possible and keep 1.5m distance. Schools, restaurants, bars and gyms are closed. Otherwise, non-essential businesses can stay open as long as they can keep the appropriate distance to customers. Our local Gamestop-like, called Gamemania, voluntarily closed their brick-and-mortar locations, though. And the local Magic card shop doesn’t allow any in-store purchases, either.
I can work remotely pretty well, as a software engineer. I was supposed to switch to a different team when this all started, but that’s on hold now because working me in remotely would be more difficult. My biggest problem is my internet connection. The bandwidth is somewhat low, but that’s not that big of a deal. The problem is that it is a bit flaky even at the best of times. When it rains, it becomes much worse. That probably sounds weird, but I swear I’m not crazy! I’ve got 20GB of data per month on my phone, so I just use tethering when necessary.
I miss lifting, I miss the boardgame nights and I haven’t visited my family in Germany in a long time, but compared to others, I really can’t complain. And I’m glad that my parents and grandparents are taking this seriously, too.
Your internet becoming worse when it rains sounds like there might be an issue with sealing of the copper wiring to the local cabinet (or in the cabinet) — that’s happened to me before (once in Australia it was specifically due to old paper-coated copper wiring, which understandably has issues when water gets to it). Unless you’re on fibre optic all the way to the house? Most fibre internet connections do still use copper for certain small links, but there are some which are exclusively fibre.
Have you contacted your ISP about it? Dunno how things are in the Netherlands but here in the UK it’s the sort of thing that will get fixed reasonably quickly (and for free, if the fault is established to be outside the house).
I don’t have fibre, and I really should contact my ISP. I’ve procrastinated on that forever because I figure first they’ll send someone to check up on my router, and probably it will all work perfectly at that time. Not a good reason to delay it, but I never needed a good reason for delaying stuff…
(Aaand today I learned that you need to poke the Nintendo Switch to resume an interrupted download. So much for downloading Final Fantasy X overnight.)
I believe you about the worse internet during rain, because it happened to my parents. They live way out in the country so they’ve had satellite internet since 2009 and it would absolutely get flakier during rain (not that it was that great even at the best of times).
(Shamus, please let me know if splitting top-level comments by topic like this is annoying.)
I think the biggest problem of stealth games is how to handle failure. You don’t want the player to take on guards in open combat. At least not too often. Maybe you don’t want them to kill anyone at all. (Except the target in Hitman.) So these games are prone to devolve into DIAS or save-scumming. There are ways to allow the player some slack though. I think the gas arrows in Thief are neat, they’re like panic button that can knock out multiple guards coming after you at once, but they’re rare and expensive, so you don’t want to have to use them. Unfortunately, they’re only a very-late-game toy.
Styx: Shards of Darkness (the sequel to Styx: Master of Shadows) is a pretty good stealth game, they handle getting caught by using a very difficult timing-based combat system.
Didn’t the original Styx also do that? Great games, by the way, extremely underrated! Although, I never finished the second game, since it was a little too janky for my tastes. It was a bit too ambitious, and the rushed development cycle showed.
I think part of the magic of the new Hitman games is the way they’re broken up into discrete missions, and in particular how it lets you replay those missions at your own pace.
Yes, it’s possible some stupid mistake will blow the mission. But generally speaking:
* There’s a recent autosave if you die completely
* If you don’t die and the mission is technically winnable but screwed up heavily, getting out of that is half the fun (on your initial run)
* If you want to go back and ace a level, you can turn around and replay it. Or you can come back to it later if you’d rather continue the story. Being able to do either means the player can choose their fun, which means whatever they’re doing is more likely to be fun.
(Note that a lot of this doesn’t apply to the Elusive Missions which I lost interest in immediately after trying one)
Contrast to something like the Metal Gear Solid games where if you want to do a 0 times spotted run you will have to commit to that for the entire game.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun explicitly leans into save-scumming as part of its gameplay (unless you play on the hardest difficult with ironman mode!), with quick-save and quick-load buttons (which are genuinely fast) and optional reminders on screen if you haven’t saved in 30 seconds or so. I found it to be a pretty fun game, and I’m not usually one to like trying something over and over again; I think it’s that it usually doesn’t take too many tries to get something to work. Maybe. I dunno.
As somebody who rarely comments and, really, is mainly here for the podcast, these days, we’re basically-but-not-quite under a shelter-in-place order in Kentucky. I (and nearly all of my coworkers) are working from home.
FWIW, this does disturb my usual routine–I spend a lot more time staring at my work machine, doing the equivalent of twiddling my thumbs, and move my now-abbreviated recreational web surfing entirely to an adjacent personal machine.
I kind of expect this situation to continue for about the next year, unfortunately. Basically, until there’s a vaccine widely available and administered. I hope it’s mostly over in the next couple of months, though I’m (obviously) not optimistic. Going to be an interesting time to be alive, really.
“I like the idea of a start-up cult” So… Cultist Simulator? In case it has flown under your radar, it’s essentially a resource-management game where you play as a founder of a brand new cult, recruiting new members, inventing rituals, that sort of thing.
As for the isolation… eh, as an introvert, it hasn’t affected me that much, apart from working from home(we have a strong recommendation to work from home if we can, but no actual orders to). Well, not being able to go swimming(as public pools are closed) is a bit annoying. In general, things aren’t very panicky here in Finland.
Since you’ve asked about isolation… I’m one of those people who annoy everybody by being like “hey, I’ve been praciticing for this my whole life”. Initially I got scared because everybody was talking about how draconian the limitations would be but then as the details were made public… I leave the house for social purposes literally once every four weeks, when my work schedule coincides with the local geek hangout (my other boardgame group that I used to drop by every two weeks or so kinda dissolved about a year before this whole thing started), I go shopping about once every week, typically in the wee hours of the morning while coming back from a nightshift. Between this and the fact that I’m in one of those positions that can’t work remotely and can’t be closed not that much has changed for me, there are some inconveniences, like the bus schedule is becoming increasingly problematic and I might end up waling 6km to and from work but in all honesty it’s more a time issue than it is something that’s beyond my capability.
I got Watch Dogs when it was free because I wanted to play Spider-Tank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhFWlso3lto
You can play spider-tank almost immediately after the tutorial, and it’s definitely worth your $0.