The game-design itself is as flawed as a game development student's first paper draft in contrast to games like Left 4 Dead.
The hitboxes are fucking hilarious (such as bullets going through heads, sledgehammers completely missing the head despite being a dead-on hit), and zombies and humans always leap-dance around each other to avoid their hitboxes from being struck by weapons/hands, since the developers are lazy cunts who haven't fixed these fucking issues for over ten years...
But it can be fun, when you have a good map on (and not a shitty gimmicky one). I find myself enjoying playing a few rounds, even though you can be killed by a box or door falling on you/closing on you (but that's more to do with Source 1's dated physics engine).
Popping people's heads like grapes as a zombie is amazing.
I have stumbled my way into a game called Siralim Ultimate. It hangs out in the monster catching games that pokemon tends to dominate but stands on its own just fine. With 6v6 battles, perks your character can get to buff your monsters on top of items, spells, and each monster having its own special ability. They manage to make it even crazier with the ability to fuse two monsters and over all stats meeting in the middle between the two, but it gets both abilities. So you can do things like stack increased crit chance with increased crit damage on abilities alone. Stack it with a item that buffs either and then a buff spell on top of that and you can suddenly have a monster that hits for 3x or even 4x the normal crit damage. And thats just one of the mountain of examples.
Been playing GTA V recently, and wow, it is really set on mocking both liberals and conservatives a lot.
Also, the TV and radio programming in GTA V is not something to miss out on. Particularly Impotent Rage and Princess Robot Bubblegum.
My opinions of GTA V are rather mixed so far though. I don't really agree with people's arguments that GTA V is a deep sandbox; it seems fairly shallow to me. The main parts that seem to make up for its shallowness is just how good the driving is, like dang, driving in GTA V feels really nice. It also has the best car shooting, in my opinion.
The side activities, though, don't feel deep at all.
I'd honestly say that I liked both Watch_Dogs and Saints Row 3 better than GTA V.
I think Red Dead Redemption 2 is better than any of them, though.
Also been reading through more of Higurashi. Currently on Chapter 4. Chapter 1 is free on Steam; I'd highly recommend at least trying it. Its a pretty great thriller/mystery sound novel. Once the next sale comes I'm going to pick up all the rest of Higurashi and Umineko (another sound novel series by the same author).
I really like Better Locational Damage, but as a warning, it's more of a general overhaul that makes the game into much more of a tactical shooter. It takes some getting used to in the early game where you can drop a raider with just a few hits from a pipe gun.....but so can they.
It also doesn't play well with modded weapons, you can adjust them to work with BLD's framework but it's tricky.
I may or may not be snatching this up immediately.
Loved played the first two games! I was wondering what happened to the third before realizing it was released exclusively on something lame called Google Stadia last summer so basically unavailable to me on principle alone. But it's finally coming to Steam.
Sword of the Stars 1 (currently using the ACM mod) and Sword of the Stars 2.
SotS 2 is actually pretty good, despite its quirks. Hopefully, if the needed signatures are acquired, they use the fleet mission system to replace the shitty system of SotS 1.
Umineko is not anywhere near as good as Higurashi. I'm in the middle of Chapter 3 and feeling serious burnout on it, and I didn't feel burnout on Higurashi till Chapter 7.
Been playing more Grand Theft Auto V and really enjoying it.
My brother got better internet, so I bought a month of GeForce Now so that I could try a lot of games from my library that I haven't played.
Here's a list:
Marvel's Avengers (I haven't actually bought this, just playing the free weekend)
Hitman 1
The Adventures of Captain Spirit
Paradise Lost
Call of Cthulhu
Witcher 3
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Metro 2033
Ghost Recon Wildlands
Hitman Absolution
Death Stranding
Alan Wake
Besiege
Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts
Blacksad
Farming Simulator 17
Destiny 2
Dead by Deadlight
Blair Witch
Genesis Alpha One
Just Cause 3
Vermintide 2
Far Cry 3 and Primal
Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut
Pathfinder Kingmaker
WRC 7
Aven Colony
Tower of Time
Black Desert
I already tried The Surge 2 and Cuphead and kinda bounced off of both of them.
Played this last year. Had performance issues on PC, despite using an RX 580. The game looks pretty hideous at 1920 x 1080 so I had to go for a higher 2560 x 1440 resolution, but it wound up meaning I had to put up with a choppy 30 FPS framerate. Dunno what performance is like on consoles. The devs stopped patching KCD years ago and are presumably working on the sequel.
The first 10-20 hours were a ton of fun. Well, not the first hour. The first hour has an infuriating sequence where you have to run as fast as you can and mount a horse and hope the enemy soldiers don't knock you off the horse and kill you before you can escape. Had to reload a dozen or two dozen times before I got lucky and was able to progress the game. Anyway, once I finished the tutorial, I went about thieving in the first city, and it was a ton of fun! Snooping around for places to rob, memorizing schedules, trying to break in and sneak around undetected, smothering guards in their sleep and shanking witnesses, slow walking out of town at night while overencumbered with my ill gotten gains, hoping to not get stopped and searched by a guard... selling all of my stuff to the fence and reaping in that cash, and doing it all over again.
One day, I got caught robbing a store and wasn't able to kill the witness before she ran out of her house screaming to all of the guards. I thought I was going to gameover, but it was at that point I found the ultimate cheese way to play KCD:
just get a spiked hammer, mount a horse, and ride around thrusting your targets in the head at full gallop. One shots almost everyone even through armor.
At that point, the game became a breeze. Outside of a few instanced story battles where you can't summon or steal a horse, I used the cheese strat to win all combat encounters. And, really, the cheese strat was the only really enjoyable way for me to play combat (by circumventing it). See, combat in KCD is theoretically interesting (practice combos like a fighting game to get good), but in practice it is incredible infuriating and unenjoyable. It entirely boils down to your stats. If your character can't thrust faster than your enemy can block, then you lose. And you can only reliably thrust faster than your enemy can block if you're wielding a shortsword or a spiked hammer and have a maxed out one handed skill, which takes dozens of hours of repetitive grinding to level up (I did this by doing the Rattay Tourney). Once you get your max one handed skill, then combat is a bore because it boils down to just spam thrusting your enemy in the face until they die.
Also, this game has a horrifically terrible auto lock on. Whenever you get hit by an enemy, or an enemy gets close enough to you, your camera auto locks on to that enemy and it screws up your movement, and you can't look away and flee. You have to press a key, but it is extremely finnicky, so you're jamming the key trying to break off so you can flee while your enemy is slashing you to death and knocking you around.
Also, archer is pretty terrible. Don't bother with trying to be an archer in combat. Even after going deer and rabbit hunting and levelling my archery to max, I can't reliably hit my targets in combat. Archery is only ever good as a close range opener to an ambush when you can't quite stealth close enough to your enemy to backstab them.
The main story is... meh. Much more interesting than the sidequests, though.
The only DLC I would recommend would be the Rattay Tourney (to safely grind up your skills) and the Band of Bastards.
Supposedly, a sequel is in development (KCD1's story doesn't have a conclusive ending). Hopefully for KCD2, they will fix the awful combat, and maybe we'll get to go visit the huge city of Prague. Not sure if visiting a city populated by hundreds of thousands of people would be doable in a game (or even a small district in Prague), but it'd be cool.
That being said, according to Steam I played this game for 77 hours, so apparently it was enjoyable enough for me to stick around that long. I stalled out of the story near the end and never finished it.
TL;DR:
Performance issues on PC
Good thief gameplay earlygame
Combat ins KCD absolutely sucks. Is among the worst combat in any game I've ever played.
Honestly, the biggest thing that worries me about KCD is its save system, though its combat does sound awful.
I've been playing the first Hitman. Already played the second one (I was a subscriber for Humble Bundle when the second Hitman game came to Humble, but I wasn't one for the first). Thought it was pretty good.
I'm not really into the whole 'grinding the same missions over and over again in order to unlock more ways to complete it / different starting locations' thing, but its pretty fun to play through the first time.
Oh well, returning to the classics - now I'm playing (again) Skyrim SE. Heavy moded, of course.
Still receiving new mods and more importantly, the really good ones still get upgrades/fixes.
Oh well, returning to the classics - now I'm playing (again) Skyrim SE. Heavy moded, of course.
Still receiving new mods and more importantly, the really good ones still get upgrades/fixes.
Been playing Horizon Chase Turbo lately. It's a fairly decent retro racing game, very reminiscent of the Gamecube era with relatively simple graphics and easy driving controls. The system for unlocking cars is good at making sure there's always another car unlocked in just a few more races so you don't get bored, but the new cars aren't necessarily better than the old ones, just different so you don't feel like the cars you already collected are just obsolete junk. The basic fundamentals of the game are quite nice.
The only real complaint I have is that the designers seem to really, really love messing with you via the visuals, whether by making the hazardous roadsigns you to have to avoid use the same color scheme and appearance as the fuel pickups you need to hit to make it to the end, the many races where sections of the road happen to be nearly the same color as the surrounding terrain, or the sheer ungodly number of races that happen in sandstorms, snowstorms, monsoons, thunderstorms, at night, or other conditions that make it hard to see where you're going. If this happened only now and then it wouldn't bug me but it seems like it's getting to be every other race, and the remaining ones have fun stuff like hairpin turns after a hill so that you have to know it's there and start turning before you see it. I just never seem to be able to actually see the road clearly now that I'm about halfway through.
Just played through Dead Space one and two. One holds up really well, yeah there are some glitches still there but gameplay, mechanics etc, it's still a blast to play. The sequel is almost as good and better in some places. They have new mechanics and enemies but it's gone a bit more arcadey shooter. I played both on the hardest difficulty setting. I'm trying Dead Space 3 currently with the only caveat being that the horror elements are basic (so far) and the challenge is largely down to being stuck in rooms with three to four necromorphs who each take three to six shots to each limb and your weapons fire agonisingly slowly. The "dodge roll" also appears to do nothing really.
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