SleepingSilence

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

It was smart for the Figment devs to release the first one for free. (Since they have an upcoming sequel soon, and I'd assume that most people have never played/heard of it before.)

Apparently Humble Bundle doesn't want my money. (Tried to buy the bundle twice. Credit card got declined for false reasons, and the charge appeared six times on my account.) So I guess time will tell to see if I'll be getting that or not.

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To further rant on BL3. Just when I was going to give it credit for finally adding new enemy types. Holy sh*t this mid-game feels like an absolute chore. Huge empty maps. Broken mission waypoints. (Been having to look up where I'm even going. Or why these missions show up on my map, when I can't even do them yet.) Endless side quests. (Some clearly weren't even played tested.) Side missions have 30 separate objectives. There's a full unskippable minute of talking before and after every completed objective. (I've died way too many times from falling through the map. Making the grind I am doing, and the ending mission reward feel completely pointless.)

The only thing keeping me playing is "it's easy enough to mute and play music over it", and a sunk-cost fallacy at this point.

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Edit: BL3 actually got worse as it went on, and I'm glad to be finished with it.

Figment was obnoxious to play. (But it was free. So I'll cut it some slack.)

I found "Patch Quest" through the game developer's Youtube channel. Where the premise of his video was "I spent so long developing a game concept, but it took years to realize that I hadn't made anything fun yet." And in my first session/impression with it, I still don't know if the game found "the fun" yet. It's a bullet hell rogue-lite, that so far seems to reward you with jpegs of plants, and levels you up once per death, regardless of how well you do. (Basically, its beginning feels scripted.)

Anime & Manga! Oh my! (Anime/Manga Thread)

The question is "who are they going to replace him/the other cast with?" (Pretending they haven't already shown the generic anime boy/girl self-inserts.)

If it's anything like the Gary Stew that other anime had. It's not going to have the same longevity. But if they have an Ash 2.0. People will question why it was changed in the first place. (Marketing and toy sales.)

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Most of the anime this season are pretty mediocre, and I stopped watching them.

Hoping the next one is better. (Assuming Dr.Stone & The Ancient Magus' Bride aren't lackluster.)

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@Kuro That's usually what I do too. Just wish I had Steam friends who played more than one game. Haha.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

>Ghostrunner
>A cat game that I wanted to try
>A few okay/mediocre-looking games
>Games I and (almost) everyone already have
and mostly...


But it's still tempting. Even with all the other crap that's included.

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.)