/int/ - certified time wasters

Campaign for improving consumer rights with video games. You can do your part. Here https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE is a longer version of the video.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

>>15115
Wanted to do this but am too lazy to draw up a letter in my own words to the Verbraucherzentrale. You don't happen to have a template?

>>15116
I basically did just made reordered sentence out of their bullet points. I have no other template to provide. I think it took me less than 30 minutes to write and I am a slow writer.

>>15118
That was the wrong screen shot.

>>15118
>>15119
Yes, I've seen that too, which is why I asked because I don't want to draft my own letter.

>>15120
I won't provide you mine. But if you intent to copy anyway just copy the bullet points and remove the not fitting part. I think that will have less impact, but copied is copied.

Maybe some Ernst has experience with letting AI formulate something and could provide that.

>>15121
Don't worry, we won't get graded on this and there is no teacher to bust us.

>>15121
You get a 3+.

>>15122
You get a 3-.

Setzen.

>>15123
I don't believe that you're a teacher. Can you prove it?

I just played the morrowind dlc bloodmoon. It’s so bad, nothing is enjoyable. The only positive experience I take from this "expansion pack" is how much Morrowind is well crafted. Every item is supposed to be there in morrowind, it’s not just loot placed there for no reason. The world seems to exist without you in morrowind it’s done in a strange way throughout the faction war I’d say. The terrain is well designed, the enemies are balanced and not shitty hp sacks. The settlements followed a clear logic and were masterfully crafted. Thanks blood moon to have open my eyes to what’s make morrowind special by being morrowind but bad

A video about a ps2 era sequel to a Russian game written by a prominent "vatnikist" politician figure.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LZPsrVVe2cQ

>>15577
Ohh, I recognized this guy, it's Kirill Nesterov or Kazimirka. He was a eceleb in Runet, making extremely autistic but original videos about computer games and politics. He hanged out with a very toxic subgroup of nationalists (enough to say that their head died by jumping naked from the window while being drugged).
After Kazimirka had a quarrel with them, he deleted his videos and switched to English audience. Seems like he achieved a success in that field.

>>15615
Shit, it looks like he was pretty far off from all the English written traces of his past I can gather. For having followed him for a few years, he seems to now be perfectly westernized liberal. Though I noticed some fun weird references to some underground internet communities he made in his vids, it doesn’t surprise me, plus his subjects and knowledge base, it doesn’t surprise me that much. Still, it’s one of the best gaming channels I know of

I want to play vidya.
I start up some vidya and immediately quit again.
I think I would like to play some strategy games, but I don't feel like thinking in my free time.
I think I might just be in the process of abandoning gaming as a pastime.

>>15115
There is a follow up video to the campaign.

https://youtu.be/Jezi1bE4xvc

I am playing metal gear solid 3: snake eater. The game is called snake eater because the story makes you hunt down the members of a soldier group called cobra. But eating snake for survival is also a core part of the game, there’s a dozen species of snake you can pick up and eat. This is very silly

>>16252
Zoomers discovering the classics is always c&a.
Keep us updated on when you meet characters and bosses.

>>16254
Just finished the game. I half expected a grounded, relatively realistic story and serious characters. What I had was the jojo of infiltration games. A dying man, arbitrarily designed as the father of modern sniping, who pops his eye out to better his aim and uses his old people head spots as camouflage. The villain uses electricity to shoot bullets straight from his hands. The characters were hilarious, I didn’t laugh this much for months at the over the top gun tricks of young Ocelot. Sometimes you wonder how much of this goofiness is intentional, but then I realized that besides that the game series manages to be one of if not the only to not have an idealistic approach of warfare and the condition of soldier (in 2005!!!). Being a Japanese game it probably spared it a lot

The gameplay of infiltration in itself got a bit old. Especially the novelty they tried to add to the first mgs formula which to me at least aged better. With things like the new hitman out in store it’s difficult for a game of this generation to be up to date in what it new ideas it tries to accomplish. The bosses as for the first mgs were a blast. The face models were perfect, even though facial expression are now kind of goofy.

>>16267
> I half expected a grounded, relatively realistic story and serious characters.
Oh, this was your first MGS?
Anway, the wackiness IS what makes it so endearing imo because, as you say, the gameplay is kinda eh.
In fact, I found MGS always to be bottom tier of the common stealth games. Thief and Splinter Cell were way, way better. I wouldn't put Hitman in the same category as the others, because it's not "stealth" in the sense of "avoid line of sight" and such, but it's better than MGS, too, and in fact as someone who could probably still speedrun Blood Money, I very much enjoyed NuMan.

>>16268
>Oh, this was your first MGS?
I played half of the first one about five years ago and failed miserably to change the virtual disc on the emulator to play the second half. I found it tamer in terms of wacky stuff compared to snake eater, and preferred the gameplay. As I play it on the newly released steam version, a disclaimer at the start of each game apologizes for the sexism lol

Getting back into KSP after not doing anything for like three or four years.
Spent the last two days checking and understanding where I left off, what I built why and what the mission protocol was supposed to be.
Also, shame that so many mods have been lost in time (pictures from a 1.8.1 save). Since 1.12.5 seems to be the "final" version, I thought I might aswell put everything there I ever used and deemed good.
Why can't someone just break into their offices and steal the KSP source code? I bet some of the uber-autists would actually go and clean up the codebase. A man can dream, I guess.

Speaking of emulation, I've been thinking about trying it again too.
Played my fair share of NES and SNES stuff in my early teens but never really got into the 3D console emulation thing because I didn't have the hardware for it before.

(But I'm going to refrain from trying it until I get my degree.)

>>16302
No idea how the state on M*c is, but for Windows, PCSX2 is pretty good, Dolphin works almost flawlessly, Swanstation can emulate most of PS1 pretty well, Mupen64Plus works well in most cases, Snes9x or bsnes are for those, can't remember what I use for Gameboy.
All of this is running on a 2019 upper-class laptop through Retroarch.
The only problem you might run into is availability of ROMs; the Internet Archive has a lot of stuff, but there have been purges, especially of Nintendo stuff, which might now be pretty hard to come by.

>>16304
Honestly I have zero interest in Nintendo's catalogue.
In general, the Nintendo-centricity of retro gaming spearheaded by Americans online is very stupid.

I'm not looking for anything so obscure I cannot find it. Just the first two three Persona games (will probably never sit down to play them I just put them on my hard drive) and maybe I will fire up Crash Team Racing to see if it holds up at all because I loved it as a kid when I had a PS1.
(None of these will ever happen.)

Okay I fixated on a minor detail in that comment.

I have zero clue about the quality of emulation on Mac but it cannot be that bad. (I mean worst case scenario is that I just turn on the PC. Nope, gonna have to use the PC because I only can get an X360 controller and that's not supported on Mac and I'm not fucking around with extra drivers.)

>>16307
In wonder where that animosity against Nintendo comes from. Is it pure contrarianism? SNES was the console everyone had before everyone had a Playstation.

>>16310
It's not really directed against the NES or the SNES or Nintendo itself, rather I just despise their rabid fanbase sucking them off and saying that Ocarina of time is the greatest game ever. (It's not) (No, these people are not in the room with us right now.)

Though I might add that Nintendo's 2D catalogue probably aged a lot better than its early 3D one.
SMB3 is still a very fun game.
Or the Tengen version of Tetris on the NES is an amazing party game with that multiplayer mode. (But it's not like that was up to Nintendo.)

I don't mind Nintendo games, I do mind people fellating Nintendo endlessly as it whips them. It's the oddest mass-BDSM relationship on the web.
(But in general I do have little interest in their games nowadays. Maybe I'd try Breath of the Wild but I don't see myself buying a switch to play it.)

>>16311
>muh fanbase
Good thing I don't care about that, or I couldn't enjoy Silent Hill, for example. Or Factorio. Or Disco Elysium, or many more.
And from what I can gather, the Nintendo fanbase is not any more rabid than other console's fanbases; and while Ocarina of Time might not be the greatest game ever (because we're not at the end of time yet), it's pretty damn close.

>>16312
In the early 2010s, at the height of millennial cultural relevance, pixels and 16 bit nostalgia was at its paroxysm, and early 3D catalogue was a bit disregarded. Now that us zoomers have the lead, early 3D nostalgia seems at its height. A lot of creative new games use low poly aesthetics and PS1 UI.

What’s Ernst favorite console generation?

Currently replaying Star Wars Episode 1 Racer.
IMO it's still one of the best racing games of all time, and definitely my favorite scifi racer.
I actually remember getting it "on accident", so to day. I had been pestering my mother to get me Pokemon Stadium. We went to the store but they didn't have it for some reason, so I somehow managed to make her buy me this game, even though she was rather strict about "no games outside of birthday/christmas", and I even got Pokemon Stadium later.
Anyway, I was an absolute shitter back then, like most young boys on the cusp of manhood, and only managed to beat the game by cheating (cheats could enabled the debug menu, where I also made my racer go twice the speed).
A few years later when I was more familiar with the concepts of cornering and braking (as a kid I never used the brake in racing games, so it was always smashing into walls to steer), I found that it wasn't that hard.
It's also interesting to the style of play between N64 and PC differs because of the framerate issues. As you might know, the N64 was the first retro console that had modern console framerates, and with the usually already pretty worn N64 sticks, I always chose Bullseye Navoir (because he's such a silly looking fellow I always made him into Cy Yunga by cheats, who looks more alien and less like a sausage version of the Michelin man, plus I liked his pod design more).
Now, on PC, with better framerates, the small, twitchy pods that were necessary on console were TOO twitchy, so I came to prefer Aldar Beedo for that, though I think his pod was one of the largest.
What I also like about the game is that seemingly every single racer was someone's favorite, which is understandable because gameplay-wise there aren't any major differences. One has better boost (like Ben Quadrinarios with his four engines) while Neva Kee's peculiar setup with the cockpit between the engines made him a cornering god.
Though for time trials, Ben is absolutely broken exactly because of his insane boost.
Then, the sense of progression is just so insanely fun. You win money through races (and the wagers can actually be changed from "everyone on the podium gets something" to "winner takes it all") and spend that on upgrades. However, there is a junkyard where you can buy higher tier parts that aren't even unlocked yet in the regular shop for less money because they're busted. Now the punchline is that over the course of a race, provided you're not smashing into things constantly, they are repaired, so late-game parts can be hard by early-mid game for almost no money, and while I am still doing the cups, I constantly buy busted versions of my parts on the junkyard to earn even more money. What for? It doesn't even matter, but making Watto pay me money is very satisfying.
Last, the iconic taunts like
>DOOKA DOOKA PISTOYA
>CHUPA
and the enthusiastic announcer with his
>IT'S A NEW LAP RECORD!
will stay in everyone's memory forever.

>>16369
Consoles are for children, man-children and paupers.

Replayed Majora's Mask because they released the static recompilation.
Runs flawlessly, and especially without crashes - something I had a few times during emulation.
The only downside is that there is no CRT filter, so I actually had to use downsampling. I didn't touch framerate, aspect ratio or anything though. Although, playing at 60 fps really feels smooth as fuck, but it doesn't feel like an N64.
But enough of the technical side.
The game is almost 25 years old; I played it on release and a bunch of times ever since. I was a dumb kid back then who actually used cheats and walkthroughs wherever he could. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

As for the actual game, well, there are some spots that are frustrating because of the ancient tech. One or two times I actually got fucked over by the camera during Z-Targeting, and for some reason I wasn't able to properly steer the Goron roll anymore, which led to me having to scale the Snowhead Temple step by step instead of rolling upwards.
Nevertheless, it's an incredibly well-designed game. The first cycle alone is set up in a very clever way - that is, a bit too clever for the modern gamer. While Tatl is often telling you where to go, i.e. what your destination is, you still have to figure out the way for yourself. What people considered unbearable handholding just 20 years ago would be considered needlessly obtuse today. I think that's also part of why people are put off by it. The time limit and the dungeons that are way too clever for a videogame (at least considering modern sensibilities) probably filtered millions.
For those who don't get filtered you get solid 3D Zelda gameplay, a very interesting world and a very, very special atmosphere that seems to hit harder the older I get.
Honestly, I didn't pay much attention to the themes back then, or at least I don't remember that, though one line of one of the masked kids on the moon should have affected me in some way - the question whether your friends are actually your friends, a question that was indeed relevant back then for me.
Also, the music hits differently. While doing the Kafei quest and having to wait literally until two minutes to apocalypse, for the first time ever I actually noticed the music track (see file) and it gave me feels.
I could probably ramble on for hours, but I'll leave it at that.

Next up is the Lego Rock Raiders remake called Manic Miners, which is fucking rad.

Took up Brigador a few days ago.
It's basically a real time tactics game with mechs.
I still don't quite know what the story is about, just that a brigador is a mercenary and there's some great leader who dies and some company that pays brigadors to conduct acts of terrorism.

Apparently the meat of the game is the "Freelance" mode where one can build their own vehicle - a tank, a biped mech or a antrigrav "car" - and set it up with all kinds of weapons. Doing single missions gives money which is used to buy new vehicles, weapons, pilots and LORE bits.
I am currently doing the campaign, which is also just a bunch of missions strung together; the difference here is that the loadouts are pre-set and it's only a small choice of different ones.

So far I can dig the spritework and music, and while I sometimes get stuck in corners (a large pet peeve of mine concerning games), controls are pretty good too. I am about halfway through the campaign and had my first mission I would call "kinda difficult" and which I had to try a few times.

They also wrote an accompanying novel and made it into an audiobook. In my opinion they should have written a proper manual instead, because some game mechanics just aren't explained anywhere, and I am really not interested in listening to the most stereotypical brit voice reading mech action.

With about four hours into the game, I must admit I am still not sure if I like it. It certainly has some kind of draw, but I don't see how I will put hundred of hours into this unless something clicks. Maybe I have to do a bit of freelance.

>>17725
There wasn't enough room for more pictures, so here are some more.
The mission descriptions and all of that is generally kept in a diegetic way. Note the corpo euphemism lingo.
Second picture is one of the more hilarious vehicles, which is basically just a pile of junk cars with a heavy machine gun and a thrower for grenades that release some corrosive gas.

Also, I kept listening to the audiobook. Apart from it still being not really interesting after the first half hour or so, listening to that guy is just funny. He sounds exactly like Sharpe (dare I say, he is a Norf), but the best is as always having an anglo pronouncing a non-english word. Every single one of them comes out as if he was in great pain, or had to exert heavy force to wield his tongue in such an unusual way, all while completely butchering the actual word. We are talking about spanish and portuguese here, mainly, although as far as I can tell, one of the characters is called "Armbruster".

Damn, I forgot to post about how I enjoyed WH40k: Rogue Trader, wish I did when it was fresh in my mind. That was a fairly well written RPG taking full advantage of the setting and the concept of Rogue Traders in it. It is, essentially, a TTRPG adaptation, but the story is engaging, the characters are interesting, if a bit simplistic, and the gameplay is something I enjoy a lot, a turn based squad combat, akin to X-Com and Larian games, with pretty in-depth progression and classes. I really liked the locations and the environments they've made too.

In the negative category I would list a lot of bugs, and the fact that the difficulty falls off extremely quickly after the first act. Essentually, the combat becomes way too easy regardless of the difficulty setting. The story also kinda takes a turn in act 3 but I'd say it picks up after that. I felt that the affinity system is a bit lacking as well, whilst "dogmatic" and "iconoclast" dialogue options and choices usually make some semblance of sense, the "heretical" ones could be much better written.

Overall, if you like turn-based combat and RPGs, I'd say it's a great choice for you even if you know next to nothing about 40k. I don't have any screenshots saved so I'll just attach a picture of Argenta

Still doing the Brigador campaign.
It is kind of starting to grow on me.
Still not sure if I can put hundreds of hours into it; although judging by the amount of already available missions and how some are actually hard enough to try them several times (with the best vehicle, I am by far not good enough to do it with a Tuk-Tuk for example).
I still like ZED PRIME, which is just some hovering thing that has a face and the eyes glow red when it's shooting.
I also unlocked the single most expensive vehicle, the "Mother's Love", which looks like a severed head in a pot. In addition to being able to mount two pieces of heavy weaponry (I chose the ship artillery cannon for both mounts) it also has a bunch of automatically shooting stuff which alone is basically enough to kill everything.
This is thing is a pure power fantasy, it just kills everything.

Ok so by now I have played a good 20 hours and frankly, the gameis still growing on me, especially after finding out that the correct way of reversing can be set (as "inverted" reversing).
I have also been starting to unlock shit, like a pilot that gives me a huge multiplier, plus a vehicle that gives me a huge multiplier - pictured, a tuktuk; in the game it belongs to the "tank" class.
Just for fun I tried a mission with a specific setup - a not-MG42 (called "Bonesaw" in the game) and some gamma ray emitter that just burns things through walls, called "Black Hand". Basically I managed to keep a bunch of enemies at bay and not get killed by a boss I had to kill in turn and got a hefty 100m payout - probably the largest single-mission payout possible.
Only longer runs can net more money.

The webm on the other hand shows the adorable spritework and detail.
On hovercars and lighter vehicles recoil actually matters - it slows them down (e.g. from automatic guns) and, in the case of this light mech that simply wields a huge tool between its legs, it makes it take a step back to stablilize, and, aimed in the other direction, makes it run faster.
This is especially funny when equipping a fast vehicle with the "König" chaingun (which is the not-Vulcan-as-know-from-the-A10-airplane in the game) because sustained fire will just push the hovercar back.

I still have to beat the campaign; the "regular" campaign wasn't that hard, but there are several lettered assignments (D,E,F) that were added in later updates and the F maps are community maps, and since this community seems to be masochistic, those missions kick ass. It took some tries to beat the first one and right now I am slowly grinding through the second one. Fuck Corvids and their suicide tuktuks.

Also been listening to the audiobook some more. The guy still sounds like Sharpe, but ever since they stopped introducing characters I can't remember anyway and "setting the mood" and actually getting some action, it's become rather entertaining, I must admit.
And it makes it all clearer that You, the Player, as a brigador, are NOT one of the good guys. In case you couldn't tell from indiscriminately destroying houses and causing millions of casualties of collateral damage.

Done with the campaign.
The final mission (the last community mission) was a very big map with a lot of enemies.
Compared to that the penultimate one seems rather small.
Once you understand how they work, and it clicks, it's all a matter of execution, which I suck at. A bunch of attempts failed because I blew myself up and such. One time I only had to escape and did something stupid. Not panicking when getting overwhelmed is the key.

Anyhow, with that out of the way, I can safely say that I like the game. The different loadouts provide a lot of variety, both regarding playstyle and challenge. Trying to do some of those in just a powersuit is pretty fun, although powersuits can be equipped with a nasty gamma ray emitter. Let me cite the flavor text (nevermind the scifi technobabble):

>The Black Hand is a gamma emitter used almost exclusively by Spacers; fielding the weapon alone is sufficient for war crimes charges, but the few militaries with means to pursue action against the Spacers are also the ones who employ them. Against an unshielded target, single ignitions can inflict 3rd degree burns and a guarantee of cancer at 100 yards, and within 50 you begin to see 4th degree burns and spontaneous contracture. Exposure at 25 yards is a death sentence even when protected behind several inches of armor plating; liquefaction of the dermis and internal organs is common, and even if a target somehow survives exposure at that range they are permanently incapacitated.

I have also started modding. Sadly the game was not developed originally with modding in mind, so it's not "put stuff in folder and/or edit some text files", but like we had to do back in the day with unpacking assets, changing and/or adding stuff and repacking. Reminds me a bit of the good old GTA modding days.
The first thing I did was modding in the Addax tank, used by enemies, but not playable, which is a shame.
The thing is basically a Sturmgeschütz and it's fun maneuvering around, surprising enemies from behind and running away just to ambush the goons that come looking.

I certainly don't regret this purchase, though I have muted the music now, because it was all the same synthwave Stranger Things sound (in fact some of that band's songs were used for the show) that sounded the same despite being like 20 different tracks or so. The final few maps (community made) were hard, but not in a "hard" way, but more tedious - long, dragged out. In fact I found a post by the one who made the final map saying that it's basically the biggest map possible with the most enemies possible. I don't know what caused that trend in recent years for community mapping thinking more enemies = more good (see also: Doom slaughtermaps). I enjoyed the puzzle-like maps more where you have to actually strategize instead of cheesing and peekabo. Though it was carthatic playing that same map with the aforementioned Mother's Love vehicle. Just waltzing in, sounding the seventh trumpet and let them come to me while letting the autofiring ordnance take care of everything.

Now I am in the process of doing campaign missions with the different provided loadouts - every campaign mission lets you choose one of four setups, which also serve as a kind of difficulty setting - the big tank with the big cannon will probably have an easier time than the small powersuit with its puny MGs. Some of them are hard as balls though, and I don't think I want to try the final missions again. The mere prospect of spending three real life hours scooting and shooting with a tiny vehicle and having to restart after one hit is not my idea of fun. I enjoy a challenge, but I am not a masochist.

>>18127
The trick with small armor in this game is to understand the stealth mechanics and use double Donkey Punch.
A short range, high damage, single shot weapon with enough ammo.
Emptying a single barrel obliterates most smaller armor, going for a double tap eliminates even larger vehicles in a single burst.
Then it's just a game of picking your targets while staying clear of those scout enemies that actually can report your presence or taking them out quickly.
Also I rather enjoyed playing with relative controls than tank controls.

It's a nice game, yeah.
Would be top tier if it would give more overall incentive like some conquest mode, with rudimentary economics or whatnot, as I'm not a big fan of this single-mission arcade gamestyle.

>>18175
Heh, yesterday I tried a run with the Hoker and double Donkey, but I am not gud enough to pull it off. Getting right in their faces is scary, plus the kamikaze units can very quickly fuck me up.

>>18176
Donkey and that long range mortar with silent shot and extreme impact sound is nice too, with the latter you can kind of guide them into a more or less set up ambush under shelling.
But if you get swarmed and heavies get involved, you're toast, 1 Donkey just doesn't cut it to take them out quickly enough without taking a load into your own face.

Also note that one of the pilots is the Cruelty Squad player character.

>>18177
I actually never played Cruelty Squad, or Starsector or know about the other references (frankly, I read all of that up on the wiki), nor do I hang out in the Discord. I only dipped my toe in there once, but with every new Discord server I join I hate the whole concept of Discord more and more.
At least I know about the Party Van :3

>>18178
StarSector... now this game has some nice progression from an explorative tanker fleet to AI-homeworld-backed dreadnought with carrier support!
And modded "shipbuilding companies" are great as well.
Also best 2D explosions ever.
Probably could make a lot more money if this guy moved to Steam.

>>18177
I really should get down to playing Cruelty Squad. Supposedly it's really good.

With the thread now on autosage, I decided to do a short retrospective of what happened in here and noticed that I must have posted almost half the pictures in the thread and probably made the most posts as an individual poster.
Basically I am almost only working and gaming anymore.

>>18181
It really is.
One of the rare, finishable games that I actually finished and even rarer, have the urge to play again not too far out.
Deus Ex on LSD and capitalism.

>>18182
> Only working and gaming
I can say the same about myself, at least for the last week. Trying to become decent at workers and resources, I play on hard, but I still make stupid mistakes. It's the worst kind of pseudo-achievement I'm chasing here. I need to stop. But the little cats and people going round are so nice to watch...

New thread

>>18298
>>18298
>>18298