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Still loving the way that DS3's cover shot looks like our hero is giving a very non-committal thumbs up to the camera.

I, too, bought it for PS4 during the sale. Had 30+ hours in on PC when it was released, lost my save and never had the heart to return. The PS4 Pro patch gives 60fps, which is nice.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Information dump:

Finally wrapped up DOOM (2016) over the weekend.

On pure engagement, the best shooter I've played in my life. Uncanny ability to make it feel like you're an underdog just scrapping to survive. I'm not sure if it's just because of a mental backlash against cover shooters, but I LOVE how the game punishes you for standing still. Definitely recommend playing on a difficulty that's a little bit more stressful than you'd prefer.

Also making my way through the defector missions on Heat Signature. They're a bit uneven, but a well thought out change of pace from the normal game (normal game you get to assemble your tool kit as you can, defector is a little bit more of a "puzzle"). The disadvantage is that on net they're slightly too easy, so as Yoda mentioned either here or elsewhere, it's a bit more fun to self-impose some rules or win-conditions. In the normal progression you can opt into greater difficulty by intentionally taking missions that seem a little too hard for your equipment.

Got my aunt and uncle Her Story for christmas and they LOVED it. Just hearing them talk about it had me looking up let's plays of the game on youtube, which honestly are among my favorite let's plays to watch as you see them figure things out (and figure things out at different intervals because of the free roaming nature of the game, some people learn a big plot point REALLY EARLY, but they think they have it all figured out and then they get blindsided by something else). I know I'm preaching to the choir a bit here because I know there's a few big fans already, but that FMV free-roam game had no right to be as good as it was.

And now I have a short list of games I want to work on next: Hyper Light Drifter, Sexy Brutale, Oxenfree, Tacoma, Kentucky Route Zero, Inside

Any one of those that I should prioritize in particular?

Sexy Brutale, Oxenfree and Inside are all sitting in my backlog with Sexy Brutale the one I'm most looking forward to.

What I played of Kentucky Route Zero was a special experience, but the developers were so slow releasing new episodes (don't think it's even finished yet) that I totally forgot about its progress so don't know how the story shapes up beyond act 1.

Didn't have a great time with Hyper Light Drifter but apparently the 60fps patch has helped a lot of people with the combat. Hipster. Zelda.

I've taken to decorating. This has never happened to me before.





I'm not really aware of any game benefit (IE I don't think it pushes up Settler happiness or anything, other than keeping your build limit topped up). It is weirdly satisfying to set up an apocalyptic science station though, complete with microscope and radioactive goop, and occasionally see NPCs settling down at it. (Less so to see Piper teleport between some wall struts and smash it to pieces )

There's also a kind of 'made it' revelling in using a valuable resource as a prop. Although I only slapped a silver watch on my vainglorious planning desk. I'm not stupid...

I think this is only going to devolve further. I'm planning rustic medic huts in my backwoods settlements, with a liberal scattering of bones and worrying implements

I've also learned you can get a pet Gorilla with the Workshop DLC, who makes people happy and defends their honour. Now I want

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Now this is interesting...

http://www.indiedb.com/games/stay/ne...t-trailer-info


"A mature adventure game that's part point-and-click, part visual novel, STAY is a game about Quinn: A man who wakes up, alone, in a locked room, with no recollection of how he got there. From the start it's clear that he's trapped, and the only light at the end of the tunnel is a dusty old PC hooked up to a chat room containing... YOU! Though you will occasionally take direct control of Quinn during puzzle sections to solve conundrums, the majority of the game is focused on your conversations with Quinn via this chat room (and the fallout of these conversations - some of them serious - which you watch via webcams)."

I like that it's all in real time. So if you leave the game you essentially leave Quinn alone to his own devices. Which could turn catastrophic. It's pretty ambitious and I, for one, am really looking forward to it.

Now this is weird, and a bit unsettling.

Giant Bomb (It's a website. About video games) gets sent stuff from members all the time - See the mouse they use in streams from SF? It used to sit in my drawer.

Anyway, a couple of years ago they got sent an Airsoft rifle plus accessories (and a lot more besides) from a guy:



Turns out that the guy in question was about to commit a pretty grizzly murder, something which only came to light a couple of days ago thanks to a BBC documentary.



Here's Jeff's account of what was happening behind the scenes:

As I said, weird.

Dear Abby,

So I finally opened Fallout 3, which I picked up for like $15 at the local Walmart several months back. So far I'm really not getting how this ranked so high on the list last year. Granted, playing it today compared to the impact it would have had on release is a huge factor, but even still I'm not seeing it. Dialogue feels forced and at times completely random (hey, man! HELP! NO! You're a jerk! ****ing ANTS!! (geez, kid. what a mouth!)) and, while I am getting the hang of things, it was not very intuitive starting out. The landscape and color of the world are working to give me migraines.

Iderno man (men? ladies? people?), I'm playing it but having a really tough go to stay with it. For reference, I LOVED KoTOR I and II and absolutely adore (still) the Bioshock trilogy. I half expected FO3 to be some weird love child of the elements that that made those game great (to me) by some of the visual design style, but so far no luck.

Here's a perfect example that comes to mind as I finalize this post! So I ran the minefield quest and came back to the supply merchant for payment. Nope. Not one reference in dialogue to my adventure. Searching around the web I learned that I had to go to a specific playground area of the minefield for the quest completion to trigger. I'm willing to concede on missing a clue during conversation, or perhaps a note that I should have read to clue me in, but the objective was to collect sample mines, and not specifically to go through a playground. Details like that always bug me in movies; more so in games where I'm trying to invest my time and active interest.

I really doubt my opinion would have been significantly improved had I experienced this closer to release. What am I missing??


Sincerely,
From Alabama, with Love

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

Modz.

Dunno how much this factors in, but Fallout 3 is a decade old, and since it's an RPG and meant to be immersive, that can make a difference over time. As much as I was obsessed with it at first (though that was still a few years after release, I think), it felt surprisingly rough when I tried to go back and play it a couple of years ago (tech compatibility problems cut that short).

It really just depends on what irks you and what you're willing to forgive. I suppose I've simply internalized that the trade off for a huge game with tons of characters and quests is that some of them, individually, can feel flunky or be ambiguous. Insert shrug emoticon here.

Only thing I can say to really test whether it's for you is to, at some point, abandon the main quest, look out over the horizon, and start walking...and then just go check out anything that looks interesting for a bit. If you're like me, that process will be intoxicating. If it's not, then yeah, maybe not for you.

That actually rings a bell, think it may have happened to me too. I wouldn't say that's a standard thing in the way the missions play out. (Although I would say jank and bugs are Fallout's bed fellows ).

As Yods said, the immersion side is always gonna be pretty compromised at this late date. When I played it (5 years after launch I think), it hadn't lost too much lustre. I found stuff like the stories buried in forgotten computer terminals and notes scavenged from bodies to be more compelling than the NPC dialogue. Partially due to the sheer volume laced throughout the place, and how they'd often be tied to a mini mission of sorts, or loot stash, that wasn't an 'official mission' as such, but as much easter egg or diversion as anything, designed to make the world feel more lived in. Although you could just stumble onto missions, or breadcrumbs that led you to them, which I thought was cool too.

If you can start digging those aspects of it you may find it has more legs. As Yods says, at some point turn your back on the latest mission marker (or pick one that's really far away), and just trek off into the unknown

Yeah, it's really dated now - that engine is based on 2001's Morrowind - and non-VATS combat is pretty unsatisfying. While I think Fallout 4 is an inferior game, it's an awful lot slicker with some major quality of life improvements.

That said, I'm currently having a blast playing through Oblivion (on Xbone so no mods).

Yeah, no mods here on PS3. I'm honestly not sure I would have been able to get much into this one even closer to release. I'll keep at it though.

Maybe Oblivion will be an audible if I can't get more involved. Thanks guys!

I first bought Fallout 3 on PS3. I sincerely hope it's been patched by now but there was a major bug (repeated in the PS3 ports of Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim) where the game would freeze, sometimes for minutes at a time, the further you got in the story. It was a corrupted game save, if my memory serves me, and the larger the file got (ie, the more quests you'd done) the worse the freezing became.

Bethesda games on PS3 were kinda the runts of the litter, apart from TES IV. Oblivion's porting was done by an outside studio and it's really good.

Fallout 3 is generally buggy. I play on a PC and encounter several crashes to this day. That's just Bethesda, though. Their games are notoriously known for bugs, it just wouldn't be a Bethesda game without them. The worst I experienced was when I decided to enter one of the bathrooms in Megaton. Yeah, never do that. It crashed my game hard. Had to reboot the computer and everything.

I mean, you put a door there I'm going to want to open it.

Completed most of Slay the Spire, and I hope that there is more content (aside from the next character) for the final version. This isn't a criticism of the game, it is because it combines things that I love together in a great package that I can't get enough of: Turn-based rogue-like card games ftw!?!



Additionally, I keep trying to get into Shadowrun: Dragonfall but something about it makes me lose interest. I hope it isn't simply the camera mechanics. Either way I am going to keep at it until I finally get into a groove, or hit a wall with it.

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I built a clinic. And they have come...

I'm going to tab so I am.

The wasteland is being saved one garish clinic at a time, I am the silver shroud, and this is how the robot friends of Graygarden look now...



(Well two of them. This is gonna take a while )

Since you brought it up, I actually started playing Fallout 4 in Survival mode. Tried to earlier, had some problems, quit. What got me started again was some Windows update (I think) breaking the game's symbolic links. I saved all the raw data and I was able to get it mostly working again (though some of my containers--with hundreds of Deathclaw meats and Nuka-Quantums!--seem to be missing now). But it seemed like a good opportunity to give it a go.

So far, it's definitely been interesting. I'm "cheating" in the sense of using console commands for stupid quality-of-life stuff, like companions falling off of things because their path finding is crappy, or generating Antibiotics because the illness system is a ridiculous combination of devastating and largely random. But other than that I'm sticking with it and not cheating on the saves at all, even though I've lost a fair bit of progress more than once.

It's breathed new life into the game, for sure. I dunno how far I'll go, but I'll probably play at least until I start to feel "comfortable" again, which might be awhile, since I can still get one-shotted by a molotov cocktail and I ended up expending tons of resources just to take down a sickly Yao Gaui.

I gotta be honest, the game makes so much more sense played this way. Suddenly scavenging for junk makes a bit of economic sense, as does creating bases as functional supply lines (no fast travel!), and you find yourself in situations where you need the chems for even moderately intimidating encounters, rather than just as safeguards when you run into some huge enemy. This feels like the game the way it was meant to be played.

All that said, I dunno if I'd ever use it for my initial playthrough (not that anyone had the option, since it wasn't available at launch). At first the desire to explore and conquer is so strong that I feel like it'd be immensely frustrating to have to contend with all this other stuff, but if I could make myself do it, it'd probably be pretty rewarding, too.

In a Tecmo Super Bowl tournament today. Wish me luck.