A 1970 Corvette

33 minutes ago, Razputin said:

I think the weapons most in dire need for a buff are all the Pyromania pyro unlocks, which just all either fell barely short (Dragon's Fury being able to be reflected and missing an airblast makes you killbind) or just turned out kind of garbage (all the other ones). It's depressing the second banana was actually the most truly viable unlock with TF2's last real update.

It's kind of fun to see this come up because it's one that I constantly think about. The Dragon's Fury is frustratingly close to a powerful option that you can run full time but its airblast is so bad (feels worse than the backburner which has its own bevy of issues). The Gas Passer is one of those ones that is in the opposite direction, where it's not even close to powerful and it's hard to easily figure out what made them think it was in a shippable state. The hot hand... melees are a pain in the ass to design so I almost can just accept this one being a troll weapon, but still, couldn't it have just been a disciplinary action-like?

41 minutes ago, Razputin said:

For a rework it would probably be Spy in its entirety, I really dislike how the 'meta' Spy has turned into Kunai and Dead Ringer abuse. It's quite funny how that combo can give Spy the highest effective health and movement speed in the game and still leave him the weakest class. In my opinion the big issue with Spy is that even if you get a reasonable amount of kills with him, you're still not applying as much pressure as a Soldier/Demo/Heavy shooting down a hallway. Getting kills doesn't mean much in TF2 if you're not gaining ground with it so in 12v12, an invisible spy is just a player down. If Spy was able to provide pressure like the other classes and then go invisible to try to make a play on a flank, he'd feel a lot less absent

Can't agree more honestly. I hate the dead ringer, I hate the Kunai's gameplay patterns, I hate how the class's meta is the antithesis of stealthy and moreso just abusing speed buffs to trickstab people and surf whatever the enemy team's weakest links are. 

At least they have to be near you unlike sniper. Also sometimes provide a fun use case for the Backburner since they usually just completely crutch on the resistance to let them outrun you.

49 minutes ago, Razputin said:

It should have some kind of passive like the other two banners.

I've wracked my brain for a long time trying to think of a fitting and viable passive for the Buff Banner but I never really managed to think of one. Do you have any?

The buff banner really makes me sad. The only times I have really good plays with it is when I banner on a Heavy (usually Wicket) and basically act like a jank kritz. Even on the slightly-more-organized-than-casual uncletopia servers it's very hard to play with and not feel like you're not gimping yourself for not just packing a shotgun.

You know, every TF2 player with thousands of hours has their spicy ideas on balancing weapons. If you have them, what's your spicy takes for the categories of a buff for a underpowered weapon, a nerf for an overperforming weapon, and a complete rework for one of any type?

Anything you've usually not touched in ages that randomly just became really interesting to you? This happened to me with the Huntsman when I started really coming back to the game a year or however long ago and now I can't put the thing down

40 minutes ago, Moby said:

I never heard about cut content anywhere.

You know I checked back on it and I realize now I misread the pcggamingwiki page which talked about a week in paradise mod and not the paradise lost mode. So yeah that was me being a dummy

2 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

You didn't use my secret catnip strats to turn the dervish cats into your own army!

Honestly what actually happened was I started collecting cats from the weekdays without noticing and then I used the super shotgun so much I kind of forgot anything else existed.

I eventually did notice that using the cats as suppressors on the weekend also made them launch towards enemies in dervish mode which kind of gives an extra attack, but I didn't make that much good use of it unfortunately (may have made certain fights where there's just WAY TOO MANY ENEMIES AT ONCE more bearable if I had them though)

Honestly this just brings up another part of the inventory that is a pain in the ass where the tab menu is too clunky but using the brackets to try and find what you want to use is also a pain in the ass.  Maybe it's something you can do but I'd rather just bind things like "use cat" and "use radar" and "use crackpipe" individually. Especially since the "use healing item" mixes up your donuts that heal for 5 hp and your health pipes that set your HP to 125 no matter what and I never understood its logic.

44 minutes ago, FreshHalibut said:

Yeah, Apocalypse weekend is generally regarded as a pretty bad expansion pack.
Monday to Friday is the core game and Saturday/Sunday turns into a crappy corridor shooter for most of it.

Running around the hospital with nothing but scissors trying to kill dervish cats and coleman hallucinations was painful.

 

But if you haven't played it already, Paradise Lost is an excellent expansion.

It adds another week starting after the apocalypse weekend, a bunch more content, and it's free roaming like M-F.

It's essentially Postal 2 - Two.

I read that the steam "postal 2 complete" randomly cut content from Paradise Lost, is that something that actually matters or is it minor stuff?

Also the scissors in particular were very sad for me because they had homages in sourcemods like SMOD where they were actually good weapons so when I saw them in P2 I was like "Oh shit THAT'S where they came from?!" But they were so anemic I couldn't bear it

I finally got around to finishing Postal 2. I had played up until Friday my first time, then I had some issue that made me stop playing. I went back and did the entire game.

Let me just say I shouldn't have because I had experienced all the good parts of the game and the weekend was a complete slog with much less of what made the game fun or memorable and a lot of bad level and enemy design. All of it topped off with the worst boss fight I've ever played in a game, including shitty source or half life mods, where it's basically just running a circle around the boss and holding down M1 while adds that can't even hurt you unless you do something dumb like light them on fire spawn in. The cherry on top was that as I killed the boss, the game crashed and didn't even give me the ending cutscene. Now at least that is probably due to it being an old game, but everything else was much less excusable.

It is sort of a game that gaslights you by spawning enemies in places you'd have labeled as "safe" if you've played an FPS game before, like places directly in your field of view or directly behind you. During the week it's a little excusable since the map is open and you could be approaching from different directions as you play, but the weekend section is basically linear and still does that shit to you.

It also has a serious inventory bloat issue where there are almost a dozen melee weapons ranging from "instantly kill non-boss enemies with one swing" to "30 direct hits to kill a basic enemy." The basic shotgun is fucking worthless, but the super shotgun is probably the best weapon in the tight corridoor areas of the game (which is about 3/4ths of the game). The stock pistol is worthless outside of the start, but randomly deals insane damage to one particular boss. This sandbox of quirky weapons works better in the open world branch of the game where you can experiment on weak enemies and becomes basically a debuff as you play near the end where enemies are too tanky to bother using anything other than the strongest weapons and all that happens is you have to tab through them to get to the actually good weapons

It also does something that really drives me up a wall in games where enemies can make better use of weapons than you can. Chief among these are grenades which are useless for you (both impossible to hit enemies with without hurting yourself, and also are so anemic that they only threaten basic enemies that die to everything else) but incredibly frustrating when enemies use them, but also most fire-based weapons which only work in the most open areas of the game since enemies that are on fire will just beeline towards you and set you on fire too. Explosives in general seem to only have wide explosion radii for you, and not for enemies and near the end of the game even the rocket launcher feels like a waste of time since the more stock weapons like the AR and the super shotgun guarantee a self-damage-less kill that is more consistent.

Despite all that I had fun with it, I just kinda hated the weekend segment. It's kind of really short if you don't include the weekend though and probably doesn't replay super well since part of the fun is the stupid jokes and terrible dated humor. I only managed to have a positive experience replaying it since it had been around six years since I last played it.

I've never used an alarm clock in my life. I started using my DS's alarm clock feature when I needed one, and then as time has gone on I've always had some kind of device to handle alarms for me from then on.

It's an effective alarm I'd say. I use a dumb joke as my alarm now, but this would be one I'd consider if I was going to take one that is easier to explain.

I think I've seen one of those clocks at a military base's housing though.

I still kick myself for not finding some way to archive my puush account (I didn't want to deal with sharex or whatever it turned into). At some point I had it save a lot of the things I puushed to another folder, but it didn't capture all of it and none of the stuff from before that was saved.

I mean most of it would probably be cringeworthy memes and screenshots but still.

3 hours ago, Moby said:

Warner Brothers is going on a massive tax break deletion spree, they have set some games published by Adult Swim Games to be delisted from Steam (Small Radios and Fist Puncher)

 

They might also go for other games like Samurai Jack, Kingsway and Duck Game, so might be worth looking out in case they do.

They can pry Duck Game from my cold, dead hands. That game is still a staple of my group's couch game rotation

1 hour ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

It's been over a decade since Jontron was on Game Grumps.

Exactly, the velocity hydrocity is such an ancient term that it can be officially declared distinct in its root

actually wait I might be misremembering because he might have called something "electrocity" and not "hydrocity" and that's going to completely deflate my non-argument

hydrocity (rhymes with velocity) was some nonsense word jontron called an enemy in a kirby game (or was it sonic?) on game grumps so it can't be that

Damn I love that one! great work

2 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

In infinite craft "sailor" plus "moon" doesn't get you "sailor moon."

 

But "anime" plus "David Bowie" does.

 

What did the AI mean by this?

You see anime and david bowie would give me the Naruto Abridged Parody Fandub Spoof Series Show, but that in and of itself makes about as much sense.

Unless there's some kind of david bowie and sailor moon parallel I'm not seeing. Maybe sailor moon -> moon is in space -> space oddity -> david bowie is enough of an association.

Just had a feature length movie one.

Immigrant family of mother and son* move to a new country with nothing and fall on hard times, inciting incident is eventually having to commit murder just to survive (doesn't really show it but implied it was a corrupt landlord). Somehow, though this kinda shows dream logic jumps, the two eventually join the military to change their fortunes, though there's several issue where their documents aren't clean and they are guilty of a murder, though the case is obviously cold by now. They have moments of tension where they have to mess with records before being sent to their commanding officers, keep their lies straight, etc. While life abroad in the military isn't great, they obviously like it more than abject poverty, and near the end of their tour of duty abroad there's a moment where someone asks the younger boy if they'd have a smoke and gamble with them after all is said and done and they're back in the country. I remember the scene gets really intense as the line comes up.

And that was the exact moment that the movie cut for me, right before the boy gave an answer, and I remember seeing threads being made complaining "SO WAS THAT THE FUCKING DEVIL TEMPTING HIM OR SOMETHING WHAT" and there was this whole wild raging debate about whether the end was artistic genius or a complete anticlimax, and/or some kind of weird religious grandstanding by the director. I remember thinking the power went out in my house for a moment.

*I think in hindsight it makes more sense if they're sister and brother, considering how their ages would have to be similar to join the military, but I remember they were originally mother and son. Just another dream gap I guess.

I had a very strange night yesterday where I remembered I played some of Crysis 3 and was feeling like getting back into it. I remembered playing like three levels, so I was pretty sure I would just spend the night remembering how the game works and then maybe finish it up later in the week, but then the game just ended.

I had apparently forgot that Crysis 3 was one of those sequels where it was just a DLC that they called a full game (if I remember there were a lot of these around the early-mid 2010s). What a strange experience where I tried to remember what had gone on, and as I was remembering and piecing it all together the game just started throwing up "this is the last mission" flags and then we shot the big giant alien to death.

I remember finishing 2 and was like "this wasn't like a masterpiece but it was pretty good, how bad could 3 really be?" the answer surprised me. There's also significant issues I have with the story, both the initial premise (and ending of Crysis 2) as well as just what goes on in 3 specifically, but it's kinda clear it was rushed on pretty much every level. It's really funny playing with a pretty beefy computer TEN YEARS LATER and it performing poorly - not really in the entire game being a slideshow, but certain effects being FPS killers even when the rest of the scene is perfectly fine, which I think is a lot more annoying since it's hard to tell what you would even need to turn down in order to fix it. I will preface some of my perf issues and glitches potentially being due to using the CFG tweaker that was released by the official devs but stamped with a "this can introduce wonkiness," but the settings I tweaked with it were mainly things like FOV and just turning up eye candy effects (bold of me to think my 3090 could handle a ten year old game, I know). Several bugs were entirely gameplay though, like special weapons removing movement penalties from armor mode so you just pick up a flammenwerfer and then be a track star facetanking every enemy and just running to the end of every fight arena.

I did get this recording of a terrible bug though.

2 hours ago, FreshHalibut said:

I did think the idea of perception altering drugs was interesting and hasn't been done too often in FPS games I think.

Other than stupid stuff like Infradyne in PS2 which is just "use for thermal vision for X seconds" the only thing I can think of is Team Fortress Classic's Spy grenade 

Which honestly has a really well done effect with all the phantom grenades coming at you, though I couldn't tell you if it was actually a fun game mechanic in the slightest

3 hours ago, hugthebed2 said:

I randomly joined one of my low-priority discord groups cuz I saw there were a lot of people in a channel. One of them was playing and streaming "Haze", an FPS for the PS3 I've never heard of. I thought it was a relatively intriguing viewing of the game. I was pleasantly surprised by the story, but they reached a point an hour and a half or so in where the person said "and that's where they just... stopped with the story".

 

I looked up the rest online and 6 of the 7 paragraphs for the plot on Wikipedia were dedicated to that beginning that was neat. A shame the game is actually pretty bad, likely from publisher intervention.

I associate that game (and several others like Inversion) with a specific era of late 2000/early 2010s shooters that probably caused pretty much everyone other than 13 year olds like me to be sick of seeing shooters being churned out nonstop

I don't really have any nostalgia for the lesser known titles of that era like the Hazes and Inversions but they always had a quality about them where there was a cool idea that was bogged down by having to conform to the "template" shooter at the time. I wonder if a little bit further down the line we'll get people trying to revive some of those titles with the idea of "hey maybe we actually will make the game we wanted to make now!"

...It'd be a horrible irony if they did that and then made a bog-standard template game again, just updated to be the 2020 version

4 hours ago, Silent said:

Meanwhile I'm still remembering stuff I played last year, not going to add it to the list because it's arguably even less of a "game" than those fangames I played, but Cursed Halo was another extremely fun co-op experience for me and my most halo-brained friend. It's a mod for Halo 1 MCC that adds a bunch of ridiculous weaponry and vehicles to the game, some custom cutscenes, and even an added Mario Kart level that worked surprisingly well. Said friend and I had been following the creator's work modding the game for years and suddenly we were just able to download an entire playable campaign via the steam workshop. I think what really made this work for me is that Halo was the first game where I would just have a blast fucking around with the physics engine, spending hours on Silent Cartographer carting marines around to build up massive grenade piles for warthog jumping. Combining this with things like the gmod tools is a pure stroke of genius an gave me a huge hit of nostalgia. Also there are "d20 grenades" with random effects from summoning a squad of enemies to killing everything on the map, and if you know me, that is the sort of thing I immediately seek out and play around with in any game.

You know some friends of mine talked about that and I kinda forgot it existed until now. I should really play it, especially since wacky campaign mods are my jam (though most of the ones I've sought out and played are Half-Life or Sourcemod ones)

Though we have an issue that there are three of us and Halo 1 is only two players so someone would be left out.

It's really funny seeing a post like this during the time I'm playing Hypnospace Outlaw which is a game that is centrally based around the concept of people's web pages being super-customized reflections of themselves (to an absurd degree, admittedly), and also the search being an extremely vital aspect of finding what you need and exploring since it actually works. As far as I know there wasn't any particular themes about bots though.

I feel like it'd be a fun project to make an actual personal webpage just to confuse people when you have a link to it on modern social media.

1 hour ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

If the "robots" are hardsuits, like Bubblegum Crisis, or B-ko's various contraptions, yes.  On the western side of the equation Exosquad counts.

 

If they are independent androids, no.  So stuff like Saber Marionette J or Battle Angel Alita don't count, though it's definitely a related genre.  But then again Sailor Moon style magical girls without any mechanical aspects are also a very closely related genre.

 

The key aspect of mecha is having a human controller.  The real question is if you had a human sized robot that was being controlled via remote control a la Tetsujin-28 or Giant Robo.

It's funny because I thought of Bubblegum Crisis as well, Metallic Rouge is sort of one step past bubblegum crisis where they ARE hardsuits but they're layered on an android (though these are blade runner-esque 'very hard to discern from human' types so far so who knows if a twist is coming in the future related to that).

As for if a remote control counts... I'm definitely a layman to the genre but it feels like there's a crucial element missing there if it's ALWAYS remote controlled. Like a manned one that can be remote controlled is different than remote control only.

Metallic Rouge has brought to the forefront a question that has baffled people near and far:

Is it still mecha if the fighting robots are just human sized?

5 minutes ago, Rynjin said:

Final Fantasy XIV is a game my friend loves and I just...never got it. By the time I got through A Realm Reborn and then the, zero exaggeration on number of quests here TWO FUCKING HUNDRED GOD DAMN BULLSHIT UNSKIPPABLE PIECE OF SHIT SIDEQUESTS YOU'RE FORCED TO SLOG THROUGH TO GET TO Heavensward I was pretty checked out, and nothing about Heavensward was interesting enough to draw me back in.

I got lucky in that I started playing right when they pared down some but there are still a lot of those damn quests. This is exactly why I'm in that spot of "I don't know if this is recommendable to anyone, but if they make it then they've made it" kind of situation. Wicket said the same thing to me when I started playing it too.

It's kind of sad because once you get to Lv50+ areas it does pick up, but by then you kinda have to awaken from the stupor that Lv1-50 put you in and it's kind of hard to do so. I still kind of can't really remember anything that happened before Heavensward tbh and I also don't fault anyone for dropping it even afterwards because the game kinda conditions you into boringness for a long time

I kind of forgot one big part of this year in gaming for me and it was Final Fantasy 14 Online. Which I kind of started years ago but my friends dropped and then I spent on and off playing it but kinda got all my progress this last year. This is important because if I'm adding best girl and best boys (since Huff did it) they're all coming from this game. I'll split it up into expansions though I dunno how important it will be to really bother.

And then the best boy/girl mainly so I can just gush about some characters I like from the game:

Overall FFXIV is a weird game and I am not really in it for any of the hardcore MMO stuff like raiding, though I like levelling jobs and learning new roles and stuff. I don't really know if I would recommend it just for the story either because it takes a really long time to get to the interesting parts, but once you're there it's pretty cool. It's kind of just hitting a decent blend of everything to keep me on the hook, more or less.

Good to see more Titanfall 2 friends showing up. 

I had almost written off RoboCop game since, you know, it's a movie game, but I had seen some gameplay that did make it seem like more of a fun homage than a cash-in. I'll have to keep an eye out for it since I kinda love RoboCop.

I also probably need to play Slayers X too since it seems like the perfect kind of nonsense for me. Though I just bought Hypnospace Outlaw so I feel like I should play that first (not that there's any real continuity, just that I have one already so should probably get that off the backlog first)

3 hours ago, Kraszu said:

I only bought Battlebit this year. It was neat for that it was.

I actually did play a battle of bit this year too. It is pretty cool and honestly it made me glad to see a multiplayer FPS game with graphics like that blow up in popularity, it perhaps gives me hope that large scale games in the future won't kneecap themselves by forcing unreasonable perf demands on players (COUGH planetside 2 COUGH)