Video Games Thread

[Late]

It ain't my area of expertise, but it can depend on the deal you make (and transfer of debt might have different rules/laws in some countries). Generally if you're "buying" a company you buy the full thing - so you'll acquire all of it's assets and all of it's liabilities.
If all parties agree to it, certain elements can be excluded from the company sale - but if it's a publicly floated company "all parties" can mean thousands of people - as anyone with shares owns part of the company. If the company is owned by one person or a small number of people, they may agree to sell part of the business and retain the rest.

So as a general rule, the new owners become responsible for the debts of the company they're buying.


Naturally, rich new owners are often then in a position to restructure the finances of their new company - so they'd likely agree more favourable terms with the creditors. (From the creditors' point of view, would you rather be owed £500,000 by a company that's massively struggling, or owed £400,000 by a rich company that you know will definitely pay up? For example. Lo and behold, the new owners have just increased the value of their new company by a significant amount, the share values go up, the rich get richer. As is always the way. But I digress...)


An alternative strategy for a prospective buyer is to acquire some of a company's assets without buying the company - so they might pay a large sum to the company in exchange for some of its assets (including intellectual properties and staff).

I could go on, but tbh this post is already way too long for anyone to be arsed to read, and it's 3:30am so I should probably go to bed.

[harv]

I gave my Mum and my Step-Father their first taste of VR yesterday. My Step-Father played First Contact which is a mini-tutorial of how the controls work, how to pick stuff up etc. It has a robot that closely resembles Number 5 from Short Circuit and is done with the Unreal Engine so it looks like the dog's bollocks. You have to do things like put disks into machines, the first to start the robot's programming and then the robot gives you several disks to put into a 3D printer which gives you butterflies, a gun, an old-school football rattle and a sleigh bells thingy to play with, several rockets that you can pick up and pull the string to launch and a final disk that breaks the printer and 3D prints a huge structure made of glowing cubes. He was absolutely blown away, particularly with the finger tracking.

I then put my Mum through Inside Trump's Head and Dreamdeck. She nearly pooed her pants with the T-Rex in the Museum lol

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Have been playing Edge Of Nowhere which is excellent so far. Very Lovecraftian which is just my cup of tea. I'm playing it on the default difficulty level but will have absolutely no problems at all playing it again on the hardest one. You REALLY get a sense of scale of things in VR, the big monster in it is fucking HUUUUGE.

Gameplay is pretty much Tomb Raider/Uncharted, so you've got a mixture of platforming, sneaking around, shooting and climbing. There's been a few bits of gameplay where you're being chased by monsters whilst the ice under your feet is collapsing which can be pretty tense and the monster design is excellent. I reckon I must be getting towards the end of the game now because the difficulty has ramped up a bit now. I've got bugger all ammo for my shotgun left (2 shells I think lol) and am having to get past a shitload of monsters.

Not sure how long I've been playing, probably around 6 hours or so.

Chronos was one of the games in the Daily Deal in the Oculus Store today so got that for £14.99.

[harv]

I've now unlocked all of the levels in The Climb. So I can now do the Easy, Medium and Hard climbs in each of the four locations (Bay, Canyon, Alps and The North) and both Boulder climbs in each location.

I can do the Medium in all locations but haven't managed a Hard or a Boulder climb in any of them yet. Doesn't help that I'm not too good with heights, my legs tend to go a bit wobbly sometimes lol

Making jumps is particularly hairy for me which is why I haven't completed the Hard climbs yet.

The Boulder climbs are climbs where you can't use chalk and aren't allowed to get the on-screen guide that shows you which direction you should be going in so you have to work it out. Think I'll do the Hard climbs before I attempt any of those.

The amount of content and replay value makes this game great value even at its full price. Along with SuperHOT it's one of the best VR games I've played so far.

If any of you decide to join the 21st Century you should definitely pick the game up

[jman]

I've seen gameplay, it looks boring and like it would get old after 30 minutes.

I bought Unravel over the new year period.. was £3.75 on MS Store.. didn't take long to finish, but it is a very beautiful and polished game that was definitely worth that price.  Shame it wasn't a bit tougher with some of its puzzles, but with such basic mechanics I guess it was quite hard - the achievements look like they would take a while though.

Also bought Duck Tales Remastered, I loved the old NES classic, I played it A LOT when I was younger - again was only £3 or so - so worth the money even if it won't take me very long to complete.. its still a bastard of a game in places.

[harv]

Like with most VR games you have to be inside the game to appreciate how awesome it is.

I've been very pleasantly surprised by it tbh. 4 different locations with an Easy, Medium and Hard climb plus 2 Boulder climbs. And there are multiple routes to take so there's plenty of replay value even before you start to think about the leaderboards and races. For races you go to the leaderboard and select another player who has completed a climb and choose to race them. Then when it starts you see your opponent's hands in ghost form and the race starts when you start to climb. Once you start your opponent's previous climb starts and you have to beat their time.

I'd quite like to see a proper online mode for this so that you can race in realtime but what's there is pretty good.

And because the game is score-based it's quite addictive.

The controls are very intuitive and as I've mentioned some of the jumps you have to take can be pretty trouser filling, especially for me because I'm not too good with heights lol

[harv]

Omfg, the Touch control update for Dreadhalls is on the way. Again, it's another game that doesn't look all that, but once you're inside the game it's fucking amazing. The stress levels (or maybe more fitting to say Dread levels?) are through the roof when playing it.

[harv]

Have just finished the Medium climb in the North location. It's a lot more challenging than the other locations...I ended up falling to my death LOADS of times and it took me 36 minutes to complete lol 

Graphically it's the best looking in the game, particularly the wildlife - polar bears, puffins, penguins and woolufs so far. There's a bit where one wooluf is growling down at you from above that's VERY convincing. It looked so real.

You end up having to climb on moving icebergs and along the moving props of a crashed plane which are a bit nerve-wracking, particularly for someone like me that isn't too good with heights

Medium was bloody difficult, I hate to think what the Hard climb is like lmfao

[Late]

Scalebound cancelled. 
Shame - looked good, and surely was nearly completed.

http://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-exclusive-scalebound-has-been-canceled

[jman]

Well that fucking sucks!

[harv]

Just put my Mum through The Blu which is an Unreal-driven VR experience with 3 scenes underwater. I didn't let her know about the bloody great big whale and I almost had to pick her jaw up from the floor lmfao

She also nearly pooed her pants in Dreamdeck with the T-Rex scene in the Museum when she and my Step-Father came down just before Christmas lololol

It's a real shame that there aren't any sharks in The Blu tbh, but what is there is jaw droppingly beautiful and a guaranteed OMG moment.

If any of you have an opportunity to have a demo of The Blu you MUST do it. It'll sell you on getting an HMD.

I almost switched my game development from the Unreal Engine to the Unity Engine the other day because there's A LOT more tutorials and stuff from Oculus for Unity integration but am sticking with Unreal I think. It's just going to take me longer to work out how the fuck I can do stuff lol

It's worth sticking with Unreal because the engine is better suited to realistic looking games and performs better. I am, however, dropping support for the Vive. Oculus have this thing called ASW (Asynchronous SpaceWarp) which allows PCs with lower spec to use VR. If the game or experience falls below 90fps it drops the framerate to 45fps and generates alternate frames predicting where the graphics are going to be to make 45fps look like 90fps.

So basically I only need my game to perform at 45fps which means I can up the eye candy

[jman]

£280 for a Switch... 32GB internal storage and it uses cartridges... lol - another failed console to add to their list methinks.

[harv]

It's actually a good idea and what a lot of people have wanted Nintendo to do for years. We'll have to wait and see how it does but I won't be going anywhere near it myself. If it isn't in VR I'm not going anywhere near it. Not even for Zelda.

Dreadhalls has had an update implementing Touch controls and it's made an already great game even better. You end up holding the lamp with your left hand and open doors and stuff with your right hand. The best thing, and it's only a small thing but gives you a greater sense of presence, is the map. Before the update you used to look down to see a floating map but now you press the A button on the right controller and see the map in your hand and you need to move the lamp in your left hand to be able to see it in the dark.

It's in my top 5 VR games list and will be for some time I think.

[jman]

Its a crap idea.. when you are choosing a "home" console to play - why would "portability" suddenly be a main factor ?

Not only that but,
There's hardly any games in the launch line-up
It won't be able to output in 4k
It has a measly 32GB storage space
Its too expensive
The battery life is only between 2.5 - 6 hours.

Its gonna flop hard.. I can guarantee it... what most people have wanted Nintendo to do for years is to release their games on other consoles.

[harv]

What's even worse is their PlayStation Plus/Live subscription. No idea what sort of subscription it's going to be but PS+ and Live give games away for free. Now you'd think with their ridiculously HUUUUUUGE back catalogue of classic games on their previous systems that they would throw in a few of these every month with your subscription. There are thousands of games across several systems that people would be happy to get as part of their subscription fee and still have enough games on the VC for people to buy. And what are they doing..?

They're giving people a ROM. Yes, one. And they're only having it available for free for a month, after that you need to buy it if you want to carry on playing it lmfao

So they're effectively loaning you a SNES/NES game for a month lol

One of the big attractions of the Wii U was free online play, even if I wasn't all in on VR I wouldn't be going anywhere near the Switch. Not even for Zelda.

Some of their decisions for the Switch have just been plain bizarre tbh.

Meh, I'm a member of the PCMR now anyway, consoles are for peasants

Played Dreadhalls for a bit last night and nealy crapped myself. There's a one enemy that's like a big round ball with a face on it, looks pretty gruesome. It floats around and just like a T-Rex it doesn't see you if you stay still. Thought I'd got past the fucker and looked to my right and the bloody thing attacked me, didn't time it right. I didn't scream like A LOT people playing this game do but I shouted pretty loud lmfao

Have been experimenting with the VR in the Unreal Engine, think I've got a grasp of the basics now. My FPS character was only about 2 foot tall at one point. Someone on the Unreal forums has been kind enough to sort out some hand models for me which is going to save me a lot of work.

Going to have a mess around with SketchUp later and work on a gun and torch, shouldn't take me long I reckon. I haven't done any work on my game for a couple of months, partly because I've been enjoying the Touch controls and games so much and partly because I've had problems with my depression for a while.