Brackstone

I'm glad the site is continuing despite these departures, but it's hard not to be concerned about what comes next. There's always been pressure on new hires in particular, comparisons between them and the classic crew, pressure to fit in, and these are pressures that are absolutely going to happen for whoever comes next, maybe worse than ever. I'm sure people will apply for the job and it will be a great opportunity, but I truly don't envy the weight on any new hire's shoulders.

Run and hide horror games are generally just bad stealth games (in a strictly mechanical sense) with a spooky theme, and bad stealth games always wear thin fast since they ultimately have binary fail and success states. You beat the encounter or you die and restart, that's it.

Combat based horror games have more variety possible, and more variety in how the player feels upon finishing an encounter, strict win or lose states exist but aren't the only possibilities. Maybe you beat a tough enemy but are low on health and ammo. Maybe you encounter an enemy that can't be killed, or one you can't run or hide from. More variety is possible when every encounter isn't just "walk into room, look for hiding spots on the way to the exit while an enemy dawdles around in plain sight. Variety is what keeps a game spooky over longer run times, and a lot of these run and hide horror games run out of ideas long before the credits roll.

Regarding the slow burn, weekly release for streaming shows, it makes a lot, and I mean a lot more sense on the business end than the netflix binge. Weekly releases both keeps people subscribed for longer (multiple months), and more important than that, keeps a show in the news cycle. If people watch a whole show in a day or two, they're maybe going to talk about it, mention it to friends, and on the media side of things, write articles and publish stuff for about a week or two, then everyone moves on. Can't sustain a zeitgeist like that.

It's not all business advantage though. For the people creating the shows, more popularity means more success, which means more seasons and maybe other, different shows from the same creators. It keeps those people employed. The netflix binge watch model is generally bad for the show's success, especially for shows further down the totem pole. It also requires a constant grind of content for netflix. If people finish a show in a day, they have to have another show lined up to keep them subscribed, which ends up hurting discoverability and long term success for a show since there's always something new nipping at its heels and taking the spotlight on the service. Since this is a video game forum, think about how steam has massive discoverability issues due to the sheer amount of new content being made available each day.

@imunbeatable80: Yeah I don't think Hard West's gameplay is perfect by any means, but I think it was interesting and perfectly fine for what it was trying to be. I think the shots landing vs not landing in this is awkward cause it mean misses were perhaps more common than xcom, which is bad, but your misses aren't complete wastes of your turn, they make you more likely to hit later, which makes it feel slightly better. It's a wash I think. It's rolling dice vs a dice deck, to put it in tabletop/board game terms.

Not greatest video game ever, but I think it's an interesting one I had a pretty good time with. Haven't played their followup game at all, though I heard more mixed things about it and frankly the setting isn't quite as interesting.

Hard West isn't a game I'd recommend for people who want a turn based tactics game, it's a game I'd heartily recommend for people that want a western or more specifically, a spooky western game. There are some spooky westerns, but not enough, and this one I think is pretty high up there.

I think I probably enjoyed it more than you, but it's been, oh, 3 years or so since I played it, so I might not remember everything about it.

I remember actually liking the luck system a fair amount, especially when you started getting into weapon types, cover, ricochet shots and especially the deck of cards/magic stuff. Even if the deck building for stat bonuses doesn't amount to much, that's not really the point, the active and passive abilities were more meaningful.

Also, overwatch is technically there still, but mostly only for enemies, because it's more proximity based than line of sight based, to prevent point blank max hit chance shots from being abused. Enemies just never actually get that close to you. I don't think the lack of overwatch necessarily removes strategy, but refocuses it. Problem with xcom is the correct thing can often be, creep up and overwatch ad nauseum. If something is too useful on its own, that also in its own way reduces your strategic options, because the answer to too many questions becomes "why not just use this?".

In general I found the system worked really well in terms of narrative for a singleplayer, story based thing. You can have big firefights, and feel like you're both making progress against enemies and in danger yourself without that visual of "this guy just got shot 6 times and is still going". Not that you don't also get shot a lot, but that's where the spooky magic comes in. I had some really scrappy firefights that were a lot of fun because of that.

I do like Hard West quite a bit, but I think it's mostly because it has a "neat" gameplay system on top of a fun setting, theme and story. It's not as refined at what it's trying to do as Xcom is at what Xcom does, but it's not actually trying to be xcom. The overall structure of an xcom campaign has different demands than this mostly linear story based thing with non-randomized short chapters and frequent story mandated party mixups (your party of characters changes completely quite often as the story shifts perspectives). Things aren't as unfair when you're not at risk of losing or stonewalling hours of campaign progress like in xcom.

Big vague recipe go!

Get yourself some basics for a stir fry. Boil up some cheap dried egg noodles, something like this, or just set aside some old rice from another meal. Those sorts of noodles are cheaper and imo better than instant noodle ones, and don't come with a bunch of seasoning you don't need, but fancying up instant noodle packs works just fine too. If the egg thing is a serious allergy and you can't have egg at all, any old kind of dried asian noodle will do the trick, not to worry. Even rice noodles hold up just fine. Just don't overcook the noodles, you want some chew but you want the noodle to be evenly cooked and hydrated in the centre.

Cabbage is a cheap, healthy vegetable that lasts really well, cooks easily and tastes great. Chop it up roughly but not too fine or small (1 inch wide chunks or strips), stir fry it in some neutral oil until the desired texture. I leave mine a little crunchy. For the best flavour, try to char the cabbage some, the brown bits taste better. Carrots are a great addition if you want to add in a second vegetable, but you can put anything in here. Broccoli instead of cabbage is a solid choice too, but only use fresh for the veggies.

Your soy sauce of choice and mirin is a great base for any sort of stir fry or fried rice. You don't need to get real mirin either, the cheaper fake stuff does just fine, Kikkoman sells a good one. I'd go 50% soy sauce to 50% mirin for noodles, and maybe 75/25 for fried rice, but just taste it and play around with it for whatever works. Mix it up and set it aside until later.

Then stir fry a protein in neutral oil until it's cooked how you like it. You can use almost any protein, ground beef, pork, turkey, sliced chicken. I use ground turkey. If you're doing fried rice, even stuff like ham, bacon and hotdogs can work. Fried rice is a leftovers meal, so who cares, use what you got. If you really want to get into veggie options and saving money, you can try making your own tofu and use that. Before it's done cooking, throw in some scallions and chili flakes to fry alongside it for the last little bit.

Throw it all together, cook a little bit longer until it's all nice and mingled, and you've got a decent meal. Not claiming this is authentic cuisine or anything, but it's something that's easy to throw together. You can fancy it up by adding in things like ginger (fresh or ground), sesame oil, sesame seeds, oyster sauce, different kinds of soy sauce (I like Tamari most of all), rice vinegar (for some sour if that's your thing), but this stuff isn't necessary.

When I do something like this with noodles, I'm usually cooking 2 blocks of noodles, a quarter of a cabbage, roughly 2 scallions, about 4 tablespoons of the soy/mirin combo (a little more if you go the tofu route), and then the meat you just eyeball for whatever feels right. Depending on your appetite that should give you at least 2 meals, but you can cook up a bunch all at once and use the leftovers for several days, it's still good cold or reheated. For the cost of 1 pack of ground meat, 1 cabbage, 1-2 bunches of scallions and 1 pack of noodles like the one I showed, you're generally getting 6-8 meals out of it. The stuff like soy sauce, mirin, spices and so on will last you a while once you have them.

Sorry if that was too long, but I wanted to give options since you can really just make this into your own thing.

@nodima: So I never played the single player, planned on picking it up eventually but I had other games to play. Three folks I regularly play other games with all had it though, and were wanting to dive into this, so I got it. The multiplayer is actually my first experience with Ghost of Tsushima at all, so I think I might count as a neutral observer.

It's fantastic, amazing that it's a free expansion. It took me some time to figure out the combat since I had no singleplayer experience, but once I did, it's really clicked with me. It's a very fun horde mode that really does value teamwork a lot, and the progression system is fairly generous and meaningful.

The co-op story missions are cool as well. It's got some really creepy imagery in there, very appropriate for the season. I'm not too deep into those though, since I've mostly been doing horde mode.

The group I play with had been bouncing around between some 4 player co-op games like this. WWZ and Vermintide most of all, and while Ghost of Tsushima isn't exactly like those, it's a similar enough kind of experience, and all of us greatly prefer Tsushima over the others. The progression system is the biggest thing. You can grind out levels/gear in Tsushima of course, but playing normally the progression still feels rewarding, whereas gaining levels/gear in Vermitide/WWZ is such a chore that playing normally for fun feels completely unrewarding. I can't stress enough how good the character/loot progression feels compared to most other games.

Right now it's a pretty great horde mode with some really neat (but short) story missions. If they nail the raid that's due out a bit later, this completely free expansion might be the best co-op game on PS4. They really could have charged money for this and it would have been worth it.

I actually really like Mad Max a lot, but it's far from perfect.

First, I actually really like the on foot combat. Yes, it's just batman combat, but I had a hard time getting into those games for other reasons (despite loving Batman TAS). So it's not really anything special within the space mechanically. But the animations and the pacing of the combat, all the little details, made it so much fun. It felt like it had a weight and impact normal Batman combat doesn't, even if they're almost mechanically identical. I'd argue it's the best of the Batman style combat systems.

However, for a Mad Max game, it felt like it had a split of 50/50 melee and car combat, but it probably should have edged more on the side of car combat. 65/35 maybe.

Speaking of car combat, I loved it, until it did the thing all open world games with character progression do, make you so overpowered you trivialize all combat encounters. The thunderpoons really just make the combat a joke later in the game, and kind of spoil the earlier car combat loop of using the grappling hook and ramming people. The shotgun is limited enough to avoid this issue, and I think having both the thunderpoons and the shotgun was a bit unnecessary. The grappling hook was already incredibly powerful, and overpowered itself once it's upgraded a bunch.

Also, honestly, the game should have just focused on those convoy encounters. More of them, more often, even maybe have convoy encounters where you're on the defensive (which is the way the movies play out). They are, bar none, the best part of the game.

I started to get a little tired of it towards the end in the way that all open world games with upgradable stuff just start to run out of fumes, but man, the first 75% was a complete blast for me, and I loved the world of Mad Max enough that exploring was always interesting to me.

Honestly I've been thinking about replaying it.

The entire event unsold me on next gen, at least for several years.

It really seems like old, arrogant, PS3 era Sony is back in full force. They have the gall to tell us that the PS5 can only use a Dualshock 5 because games are built from the ground up to take advantage of those features (that won't affect how you play 90% of games), and then it turns out most of their games are cross gen anyway? That controller stuff was always bullshit, but especially so now. Add to that the extremely high price of the console anywhere but the US, and the increase in game prices, and really they aren't giving me a reason to get a PS5.

I just don't really have faith in that ecosystem if this is how they're going to handle things. I have more faith in the microsoft ecosystem, but then, they don't really have any games.

Really the winner out of all of this looking like Nvidia. Sure PC has always been the better option, while consoles are more convenient, but honestly, the price difference has closed enough with next gen that it's not as big a deal, and the exclusives just aren't there yet.

I was going into this thinking "I'll probably get a PS5 next year, after the launch window is over" and now I'm thinking I might not get one at all.

Episode 1 was great. Pacing was a little off at first, but once they got on the road it was fantastic. Tackling racism in the US is absolutely in the wheelhouse of lovecraft horror, lots of lines to be drawn to stories like Innsmouth, with hostile locals and barely concealed contempt. It's a perfect fit.

2nd episode was less good. Very rushed, perhaps a little too goofy too fast. We'll see if it finds it's place in the coming episodes, but episode 2 was a bit of a slump.