brokemonkey

To those that mentioned Mutant League Football and Outcast on page 1 of this thread, they, uh, did make sequels to those. It's probably for the best that you forget I said that though

@judaspete: I too would like a sequel to Sacrifice, a perma-install for me. It was pretty much a proto-MOBA, especially in multiplayer, and now that there are actual MOBA's I'd be super curious to see what someone might do with that (the original also made me not totally hate Brad Garrett)

Anybody remember Darklands? DOS-era RPG set in literally a map of the entirety of Bohemia with no mainline plot to speak of? Get Larian on that. Or a new Krondor game, or whynotboth.gif

@dirty_duck: Yeah I guess you can perfect that sequence (never figured out how to view the cheevs in the EGS version). It was obvious that I was doing very poorly but my excuse is I was just trying to plow through it and it was late on a work night, yeah that's it

Finished it right before bed on a work night because of my enormous, wrinkly brain.

I have many Thoughts and also Feelings about the final stretch, but the stuff that most sticks in my craw is the post-interview quest lines for everybody (which I mostly did in a big bunch when most Grumpuses were back in Snaxburg). Not the quests themselves--they're fetch quests, you know, videogames--but where they go narratively, which is to say that most of them go dark dark dark. Wambus and Floofty (!) are the only ones that find some worthwhile, productive, healthy places to be, mostly from their own efforts. (Triffany seems pretty alright throughout, doing the fulfilling work she clearly wants to be doing.) Everybody else, though, even my beloved Himbo King Chandlo, just burrows deeper and deeper into their insecurities and eventually just gives up on it.

I didn't finish all of them. When I got to Beffica's final quest, I fed her two Green Lollives, an Inchwrap, and a Pinkle, and the game read only one of those as "green." Don't know if bug or what*, but I'd already about had it with cop-ass-Beffica-who-needs-to-mind-her-own-business, and decided I wasn't doing this anymore. I'd started to feel for her as she went through the poisonous environment she was running from in the first place (she kind of already had a parasite before she arrived on the island), but joining her in her toxic games wasn't helping her feel better or get to any healthier a place. Because why would it? Nor was (for the most part) feeding the dependencies and hungers of the other Snaxburgers. Because why would it?

At first this whole sequence of quests left a sour taste in my mouth, which was why I left the last few behind and just beelined for the end. It felt like trying to make a depressed person "happy" by just doing whatever it is they tell me they want, and since they're videogame fetch quests, that's the only option I have for showing them any kind of support. It sucks here as much as it does in real life, and ends in the same frustration and tears for all involved. But the more I thought about it, the more sense that makes in the context of where the story goes ultimately, that feeding the beast is never going to fix anything. Floofty (of all the dangerous psychos) comes to their enlightenment through connecting with Snorpy and understanding something outside of themselves, and Wambus gets there by coming to grips with loss in a meaningful way, and neither were the direct result of my actions. The rest just sink deeper after finding that having their immediate wants met wasn't accomplishing anything real. The videogame-ass trope of "Get Thing/Kill Guy to fix me" was never going to fly here any more than it does anywhere else.

I lost Beffica and Snorpy in the big action set-piece at the end (which I thought was fine and an interesting inversion of the core gameplay stuff, though tonally a little abrupt) and Beffica's death speech was easily the darkest shit in the whole game, shockingly so. And Snorpy's death made Chandlo sad, which made *me* sad because I want Chandlo to be happy.

EDIT: Also am still a little sketchy with how the ending set-piece handles its stakes. I don't know if the player can perfect that sequence so no one takes a hit, but it seems clear that no matter how poorly I was doing I was never taking damage. The other Grumpuses were paying for it, and I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

Gave me a lot more to chew on ( :) ) than I expected I'll say that much.

* Probably I was supposed to make her green and making her arms into Lollives turned them pimento red and fuck this come on

@shorap: As Rep Ilhan Omar said when asked how she felt when trump made the Minnesota vote a referendum on her, "He fucked around and found out." I'm so relieved that trump lost.

I like her, and she's right, and so are you!

The euphoria on the streets and in people's homes looks like a fascist regime was just overthrown. Because it was. A lot to be done (and that was true regardless of which not-Trump won), but it'll be such a relief when that bigoted piece of shit isn't just setting all the oxygen in the air (and also the entire government) on fire all the time.

@bane I'm shocked / angry / sad that after four years of this Nazi clown shitting in the Oval that 70 million of my fellow Americans voted for him again! I'm not sure how to move forward with this reality.

This is totally fair, and I'm with this too. Tuesday night was a motherfucker, and felt like a majority of this country had been slapped in the face again. And even though the final outcome ended up better than it looked like it might that night, it's going to smart for a long time. Lot of work still, regardless of who won.

Well, do you? Cuz somebody fucked around and made one and it's on Steam now.

It's like this: I get on a little safari cart with a delightful little man and a camera in an abandoned park, and I take pictures of delightful little creatures, beeg and smol. Some are running about or flying around, or sleeping, or not super into it, but I take pics of all of them. Got a little grabby hand to pick up artifacts around the park, and some of the animols are REALLY not into that and come up to the fence like "RAAAAAAR!"* and I'm all like, "Aw! [click]"

Then we get to the end of that portion of the park and into a menu where I get graded with stars for my pics and grabs, and that fills up a bar that grants me an upgrade token, and now I have little balls that I can hurl at the babies for different moods, and yo, you like Pokemon Snap? Cuz somebody fucked around and made one.

It's got a just wonderful papercraft-ish art style, and a SPOOOOOPY REEEEALM WOOOO-OOOO

If you'd asked me like a month ago if, a week from Election Day, would I be needing a Pokemon Snap in my life, I'd have been like, "... oh dude, absolutely, are you shitting me?!" And here it is.

* Which is literally just a dev going "RAAAAAR!" into a mic

@fistoh: Where this game distinguishes itself even from CK2 is it feels like to me they've leaned a lot more into the role-playing aspect of CK, it already feels like the events that happen are far more dynamic, and they give you more insight into the character you're playing which enables me as a player to feel a lot more confident that I can make decisions as this person would if they were in the same situation.

Dead agree. When I first started playing and saw the Stress mechanic I could see right then how confident they were in the more role-playing-centric flow of CK3, going so far as to *enforce* that role-playing element with increasingly severe maluses. Marked a pretty stark contrast with Imperator at launch, which felt so rushed and tentative.

And yeah, war has never been CK's strong suit. But there are generally ways around it, and in a pinch the end is rarely The End.

@theoriginalatlas: Your approach to finding fun in CK where you otherwise weren't reminds me of how I used to approach Wolfenstein 3D as a kid: IDDQD, IDKFA, jump straight to Mecha-Hitler and BLAP BLAP BLAP. Never got old. Get fucked, Hitler.

I suspect you're not alone in bouncing off CK for just those reasons. In most games, they give you problems, and the tools to solve those problems in relatively few steps, and all you need is some skill and persistence and the game closes its loop all nice and tidy, and that just doesn't fly here (or, to a lesser extent, in most Paradox games). The "C" in "Crusader Kings" stands for "clusterfuck," and that's kind of the essence of it and a major part of the appeal. It's such a rare thing to come across in a game, that kind of sidewinding complexity, where thousands of NPCs are playing basically the same game as you, standing in your way because that's how *they'll* get what *they* want; mechanics that intentionally blow your shit up every few hours so you're constantly starting over or facing down brand new crises; constantly being pushed on to your back foot, no matter how big and butch you are, by any number of things you'll inevitably miss or forget about, since it's not remotely possible to keep track of everything you'll need to know in any given moment.

That's CK baby! But those same clusterfuck-y dynamics are what also allow you to just willy-nilly marry some kids off to whoever, while you're just doot-dee-doo maybe conquering a duchy or two nearby for shits, then finding that two generations later you've inherited the Byzantine Empire as a Catholic, and good luck with that! I don't know of many other games that will let you get down to the kind of wildin' shit as a matter of course. (Many of them are made by Paradox, which is why I'll happily eat big handfuls of shit to play them, including but not limited to uncommunicative interfaces and domino bug-bombs, interesting new mechanics locked behind expensive DLC that let them support and expand these games for 6, 7, 8 years, and that I will inevitably buy [usually on sale] despite my groaning about it; mechanics that are, uh, not particularly interesting but are still locked behind expensive DLC; etc.)

The closest analog I can think of is Dwarf Fortress, which makes you eat even more shit to play it, but is such an amazing clusterfuck simulator that they just tell you straight off the bat that everything you do will eventually end in tears no matter what. But oh the places you'll go!

And also CK lets me have the experience of fucking my sister, which, as an only child, is an experience I'll never get to have IRL. :(

You can argue Kardashian and her ilk are active participants in this culture, which excuses them from being able to credibly present such a takedown, but that's another essay for someone much smarter.

Or someone who's more invested in the methods and modes of celebrity and celebrity culture, but whatever.

No opinion on the game, good article though.