SleepingSilence

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Silence, try out Mount and Blade Bannerlord, or if you have a potato try Mount and Blade Warband.

@BangoSkank

I've heard nothing but good things about the Mount & Blade series. Though I'm not the most experienced with the management/simulation aspect. (Never really played most of those games for long.) Maybe if I see it on sale sometime, I'll pick it up.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@SleepingSilence do you like any video game? Or do you always find something to dislike?

@Dark Cloud

Cult Of The Lamb runs perfectly fine and is an enjoyable enough time sink.

@SleepingSilence

Yes. :P

My brain is always turned on, and I critique and analyze all the content that I consume. (The only difference between me and many others, is I think it's actively beneficial to do so. So I've never reacted negatively/dubiously to someone else's critical taste. Only their reasoning as to why.)

But I'd like to think bad writing and immersion-breaking bugs are pretty easy to dislike...

Though I'm still playing BL3, so it has to be doing something right.

But even with the few positive/appreciated add-on's that BL3 does offer. (Alternative firing modes, teleporting to your vehicle, or a slide move that I rarely utilize.) It doesn't really change the core gameplay loop. It's simply more Borderlands. (With a much more annoying set of characters to listen to. And a hub world that has seven different advertisements to buy its DLC content.)

I'm just happy that I picked the class that I did. (One with a pet that revives you.) Because the game is a lot easier than BL2. Except for the bosses & their abrupt difficulty spikes. (The last boss I fought one-hit ko'd me twice, basically out of nowhere.) So I'd love to see how other classes handle that one solo.

But I also found a legendary shotgun (many levels ago) that simply dwarfs the damage/reload speed of every other weapon in the game to the point of near-uselessness. So it's hard to be excited about the higher frequency of "rare" loot drops. (When it's all worse than the gun I already have.) Though it's amusing when you can turn every living/blathering opponent into a silent cloud of red dust in one shot, every time. It makes the rare times I do feel challenged (because a half dozen enemies spawned/fired upon me, before they even appeared on my screen) feel incredibly cheap.

And Borderlands 2 didn't feel nearly this unbalanced to me. (The rocket launchers and sniper rifles were a necessity in that game. With the trade off of having less/harder-to-find ammo. But sniper rifles barely function here, with how most enemies don't appear until you get closer. And I've not found a single rocket launcher that's worth using yet in BL3.)

So I struggle to see/agree with the same positives that other reviewers mention. (Someone like Skill Up, for instance.) It's also hard to appreciate 'the improved visuals'. When I'm running this thing on my mid-tier PC, with the graphical settings turned down. And even with the best computer possible, the game supposedly still has a frequent stuttering problem. (Plus, I don't know how smart it was to hype up "Twitch integration systems" in a game that clearly loathes streamers, and made them the literal villains of your story.)

But I digress.

How's Elden Ring? :P

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

Borderlands 3 is great if you turn off the voices and just make up your own story because anything anyone comes up with is better than what is actually in the game.

@Fabricant451

You aren't kidding about the voices. They are insufferable. (And that's coming from someone who tolerated BL2 dialogue's just fine.)

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>Watches supposedly dramatic cutscene with a death of a character, while my invisible pet's shotgun is floating around awkwardly the entire time.

An obvious bug that you'd expect to be patched out already. But that's the type of quality one can expect from Gearbox.

"It's all your fault! You killed her! You did! You!"
>Less than a second later.
"Oh, what a sweet girl. She blames herself."

Straight up gaslighting me with this dialogue, are ya?

What shows/movies are you watching?

"Cocaine Bear is overhyped and shockingly bad at comedy!" - The internet

Uh huh. Couldn't have figured that out from the title and premise alone could you?

Its director - made some of the most mediocre films ever crafted.
Its writer - somehow wrote a worse sequel to an already shitty Netflix horror/comedy movie, and nothing else.

Does anyone else even look these things up, before watching movies anymore? No, just me? Okay.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

From all the issues and disappointments I've had with games lately. I was worried about all the "framerate stuttering" problems that this game was supposed to have...(According to Steam.)

But Cult Of The Lamb runs perfectly fine and is an enjoyable enough time sink. (One in which I had to restart from scratch, because I failed to understand and properly build several crucial things that I needed to progress.)

And now I'm also playing Borderlands 3, since it was on sale, and I can crossplay it with a friend. (Hopefully it'll be better than the Prequel game was, at least.)

What shows/movies are you watching?

The Lazarus Project: Time Loop stories should be the easiest thing in the world to make appealing right from the start. But this one feels delusional (and already dated beyond belief), poorly acted, and the characters act like they're in a horror movie. "Ala speak vaguely, be an asshole, and never listen to what someone else has to say - and voilà - you create instant conflict!" (So it didn’t even manage to hold my interest for the entire episode.)

Mythica: A Quest For Heroes: (Think "Gamers", but without a sense of humor and Rey is your main protagonist.) It's ambitious to make five whole movies, out of a minimal budget, I guess? But I wouldn’t call this film entertaining. Nor would I recommend it as a "hidden gem". Since its cliché-riddled plot is impossibly bare-bones, and yet it still struggles to make any sense. So you’ll be struggling to find things to even enjoy about it, like "oh look, it gets 'cold breath' right. And I just watched a modern big budget movie that failed to have that." (So, I'll give it an E for effort, and move on.)

Redline: I swear I saw this before. But I definitely didn't watch the dub version. So it was thoroughly entertaining, for what it is. (Certainly a feast for the eyes.) Though the pacing is breakneck like nearly all anime movies, and the plot clearly did not matter to the writer at all.

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I actually enjoyed Nope.

@BangoSkank

Who do you think was the reason I watched it in the first place? >:c

I’d have accepted its slow start, if anything that was shown previously had mattered in the long run.

The only positive thing that kept me going was how Keke Palmer's character was playing an "enjoyably annoying” character. (Since she seemed to be the ONLY one giving a performance of some kind. Then I looked up her IMDB to see what else she’s done, and saw she was a character in Big Mouth.) But after she went on to lecture an entire audience at her brother's workplace, and then they all proceeded to smile and clap in response. I realized that the movie DID NOT have any sense of self awareness. (I seriously think the movie struggled to find a tone and stick with it.)

What shows/movies are you watching?

>Have more things that I intend to watch and add onto this post later. But these movies made me stop preemptively.

''Reviews'' for...
Sunshine: I imagine the high praise for this movie comes from the critics that obsess over cinematography. (Since this movie is style over substance in every way.) The plot and pacing of this movie is a clusterfuck. And I think this movie tried to make the characters seem human by making them all disastrous fuck ups. But for a mission to save the planet, you’d think they’d pick less stupid, reckless, irrational and more empathetic individuals? (Apparently both the writer and director are pretentious as hell though. And that comes across in the movie they made.) So, yeah sure, the last third might’ve been the worst part of it. (And it only gets worse and worse as it goes on.) But the nonsense writing is apparent from the start.

Nope: It has a literal “and then everyone clapped” scene within the first ten minutes. As if I needed such a transparent sign of how the writing will be for the rest of the film. And “What was the point…fuck the point” is a line in the movie that describes how I feel about it. (And an apology to Sunshine, your writing was not this bad.) The first hour plus of this movie was an endurance test of how long you can stand nothing of interest/substance happening. With countless ‘meta’ scenes and references about shows and making them. I Nope’d out of this movie and hit fast forward. (Two hours to see one cool shot/idea that I have to assume the whole movie was created for.)

Pandorum: The first monsters shown in this are basically the Navi, and the planet of the Navi is called Pandora. But then it's just the creatures from The Descent. This feels like a pilot of a show on SyFy. It has an abundance of sci-fi concepts, some better than others. The acting is far superior to the past two movies I watched. (And there’s no fucking cringy modern dialogue.) But the pacing is off, the audio mixing can get obnoxious, and the editing is a mess. And “the story” is in desperate need of an editor.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

>An hour and thirty minutes of messing around with controls and trying to grasp simple movements later...

Okay...

So I have stopped playing games that I've wanted to like more, because of how the basic controls felt. (Shovel Knight felt clunky to move as, Celeste made diagonal jumping seem harder than it should've been to pull off, and Rain World felt like it was first made on Newgrounds and had some kind of archaic control scheme as a result. Yet the devs raised the game's base price recently, w/o adding anything. But one problem at a time.)

But now I've discovered an entirely different beast that makes me want to rant and rave. So I'll do it here...

Outer Wilds has THE WORST

I repeat.

THE FUCKING WORST flight controls that I've ever experienced in a video game on Steam. It's like I'm playing a shitty Kinect game. AND NOT ONCE, is that mentioned in its general reviews.

And again, this would've been refunded already, if had I bought this game myself. (Making it a strong contender for 'the most disappointing game that I played this year'. Along with Ghost Song and the rest of the games that haven't lived up to their critical reception.)

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@Dark Cloud I honestly don't care for its "Adult Swim cartoon/deliberately ugly" art style. But I'm sure it has its appeal/charm, and it seems like it's doing fine on Steam. (Going by all the fanart that it has on Twitter.)

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

My wishlist has substantially grown, and I’ll likely never get to all the games I want to play.

I'd give Hyper Light Drifter a strong 7. (It really feels like where Death's Door got some of its inspiration. Because they feel very similar to me. Except this one doesn't overstay its welcome. Since there is no secret hidden ending. So you don't have to feel obligated to get 100% completion.)

Has a pretty decent atmosphere and soundtrack. Combat is challenging, and I beat most of the bosses on my first try. (Though the former is mostly due to filling the screen with enemies, and the latter felt like brute force luck on my part.) And while it certainly doesn't hold your hand as to where you're supposed to be going. The rewards for exploration were often hidden behind progress walls that I hadn't completed yet. So without any map markers to make the purposefully obscure map any more useful; it made backtracking and finding secrets less than ideal.

Biggest nags were how the dash and platforming needs tweaking, because it's occasionally inconsistent otherwise. (Leading to unfair damage being dealt.) And how certain upgrades are pointless and others are 100% needed to progress. But I was able to finish the game, and feel a little underwhelmed from the narrative. However, the gameplay was solid enough.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Lonesome Village is about as fucking awful as you can make a game. But I tried my damnedest to get through it anyway. (Until my character got stuck in the ground, and that cost me hours of progress. Because the game has no autosave.) As if this game wasn’t already getting tedious, with its Navi-like tutorial character popping up every other second. And I’d honestly ask for a refund, if it wasn’t an x-mas present.

Thirdly, I decided to play Bloody Hell (a free bullet hell on Steam) and it’s pretty damn good. (Haha pun.) Even if I still suck at twin-stick shooting. And I don’t know why I originally thought your character looked like an old homeless man with a beard.