Video Games Thread

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Yup, it's pretty cool. I just wish they hadn't included a bloody scanning mechanic. I get bloody obsessed with these sort of things. Got a scan them all!!!

The work that Hello Games have done since Beyond first launched on 14th has been incredible. 14 patches altogether. They must be working crazy hard. And there's a 15th patch on the way soon for a VR performance boost too, it's in the Beta tab on Steam.

Am about 14 hours into the game so far and I'm only about to land on my 3rd planet.

[jman]

I'm hearing good things about it (No Man's Sky) lately. Will probably pick it up on the Xbox if I see it on sale.

Haven't gotten stuck into a game for a while. I'm currently playing Tales of Vesperia (never played any of the Tales games the first time around, and I believe this is widely considered to be the best of them) but I'm not really feeling it

(Am also playing a bit of Minecraft again. I'm building a giant pyramid in survival mode but I bit off more than I can chew. The size is just ridiculous and my attention span isn't the best, so I'm just mining and adding a few thousand bricks every now and then. I think I've been building it for a couple of years now, on and off, and the outer shell is about 80% done, and there's not much inside. I should just delete my save file really, but I can't see that happening.)

The only Tales game I played was Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube - I quite liked it, although obviously not enough to buy another one - I have been tempted to get Vesperia - but they rarely go down in price - I remember trading in ToS in at a higher price than what I bought it at several years later.

I started Life is Strange this morning - finished the first episode - but I'm struggling to enjoy the plot or care about the decisions I'm making - its pretty slow.. I might give the second episode a go - but the Walking Dead games are better examples of how to make these types of decision based games.

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I now have all the parts needed for a Warp Drive so I can leave the current system I'm in and continue the story. But I've only visited 4 out of 6 planets in the system so far and haven't scanned everything on those yet lol

I might have to forgo my usual obsession with scanning everything in games otherwise I'll never get going with the storyline. It's supposed to take around 30 hours to complete and I need to do some of it so that I can start swimming underwater and build bass underwater and take a nice trip in a sub.

Once you get to the underwater bits it's supposed to be very much akin to Subnautica which is another great game.

The planet I'm on at the moment has orange seas and lakes, looks amazing.

Sean Murray has said that he wanted the game to look like the cover of a sci-fi novel, and he's certainly pulled that off so far.

I quite like the way that you learn the languages. With the Gek you can find monuments that teach you a word when activated and you can learn one word from each alien you meet on space stations. So when you talk to traders and stuff you see a load of text with alien sounding words with the odd word here and there in English.

I spent some time last night just reading the notes on the flora and fauna I've discovered. I'm a real sucker for this sort of stuff, I can read it for hours if there's enough info there.

There's just so much in this game that appeals to me. A nice grind, exploration and discoveries, a scanning mechanic, walking around on planets and flying through space.

It's still JUST behind Elite Dangerous in terms of awesomeness though but it's now number two in my Best Games Of All Time list, knocking the first Elite game to number three and I NEVER thought that any game would knock it off top spot for me. Although to be fair to Elite it did take 30 odd years!

[jman]

Yoku's Island Express is definitely worth a download on game pass, a pinball based platform adventure (metroid) style.. I didn't realise it was pinball when I downloaded, so that was an awesome surprise.

Was excited to play Gears 5, but had no end of trouble so far... firstly the game makes the xbox go nuts, so mine has shut down a few times over ventilation, it's ok if I move the xbox out the cabinet, buts that's annoying.  Then I've had a few glitches in chapter 1, but chapter 2 starts and some bug prevents me from picking up an item which means I can't move forward, unfortunately if I restart the checkpoint, it takes me back into the back end of chapter 1 for some reason and chapter 2 is still locked in the main menu.... well now it seems to have lost all progress in ch 1. because I tried to load my game by chapter rather than checkpoint... so that means I've got to do chapter 1 all over again, FFS.

I've heard it's supposed to be quite different to the previous gears games by being open-ended world (after ch. 1) so I'm a bit miffed it's quite buggy.

[stupac]

I started Life is Strange this morning - finished the first episode - but I'm struggling to enjoy the plot or care about the decisions I'm making - its pretty slow.. I might give the second episode a go - but the Walking Dead games are better examples of how to make these types of decision based games.

I hope you gave Life is Strange more time. I played it (and the prequel) towards the end of last year and absolutely fell in love with it. It's not for everyone and definitely starts off slowly, but it really picks up and has some tough decisions and some heart wrenching moments.

I love the Telltale games, especially The Walking Dead. But imo Life is Strange completely blows it away. The world, the characters, the soundtrack are all incredible!
That's just my opinion, but I hope you.ll give it another chance.

I loved it that much that it's now my 2nd favourite game of all time.

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Am now almost 40 hours into No Man's Sky and it's awesome. I've had some framerate issues here and there in VR but I've got all of my settings pretty high cos I like games to be pretty and my immunity to simulation sickness means I'm not bothered by framerate drops in VR.

I decided to start doing some of the missions for the storyline and it's pretty good so far. But it's not helping my scanning OCD AT ALL lol, it's VERY difficult for me to resist scanning EVERYTHING but the last three star systems I've been in I haven't scanned THAT much. I've even missed visiting a few planets altogether here and there!!!

I can't wait to get to the underwater parts of the game because it looks VERY Subnautica-esque which is another great game when played in VR.

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Asgard's Wrath has now been released for the Rift and Rift S. It's now the most highly rated new game on Metacritic with a Metascore of 93 (although that will probably change with a clickbait reviewer giving it 6/10 - always happens with highly rated games on all platforms).

6 reviews so far: https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/asgards-wrath

I'm too busy playing No Man's Sky at the moment, have done 63 hours or so now and have just started the Abyss DLC which is pretty cool so far. Just built myself a mini-sub and am looking for a crashed freighter underwater to continue the story.

The amount of content in this game is just plain ridiculous, there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets to explore (that's almost 18 and a half quintillion planets lol) and all of them are different. Crazy. Here's a quote from a Polygon article:

Even if you visited one of those planets every second, and could travel between them instantly, seeing the entire game would take you nearly 585 billion years.

 

I'm loving the shit out of this game, I've always loved scanning things, always loved exploration and always loved sci-fi. Not quite there as the best game of all time though but I'm putting it down as number three which sees Skyrim VR dropping down to number four. Elite Dangerous is still number one and the first Elite is still number two. I don't think anything will move those two games down in my list.

You've really got to take your hat off to Hello Games though. It was hyped like mental before it launched. They launched it and it was a complete fucking disaster, and then over the space of three years have transformed the game with several FREE pieces of DLC into (imo) one of the best games of all time.

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Oh shit. Someone has released a VR Mod for GTA V and it's supposed to be really good.

So that's ANOTHER VR time sink game I need to play lol

So I'll end up having No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR and soon GTA V VR and Borderlands 2 VR.

Bloody hell lol

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I bought Asgard's Wrath the other day and it's incredible. Everything that Oculus has funded over the last 3 years or so has been top notch, VERY close to being AAA quality but this game has risen the bar quite considerably. I'm comfortable in saying it's the very first true AAA quality VR game released.

I'm always a big fan of Nordic mythology and in this game you play as the god of animals. You can possess humans (am currently inside a Shieldmaiden ooh-err missus ) and have created a couple of animal minions, one that's a shark in origin and you can use him to bite bodies in gibbets to open doors and stuff and one that's a turtle in origin who uses her shield to protect me from fire traps.

I'm sure there are going to be a good few more too.

You can also increase your size which is pretty cool, you can then pick up your minions and place them in other areas of the map to solve puzzles.

The best thing to it all so far is the melee combat. They've REALLY nailed it.

I've also now bought GTA V and Borderlands 2 VR but haven't tried them out yet.

So that's my hundred quid birthday money spent!

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Okay, so I've spent a bit more now. Stormlands was released yesterday by Insomniac so I bought that for 30 quid yesterday.

It's awesome. Has a bit of a Metroid Prime feel to it in the way that you add parts to your robot body that allow you to fire a weapon, climb surfaces and fly around so I quite like that.

The IK isn't as good as the IK in Lone Echo, which really is exceptional, but it's pretty cool playing a VR game where you can see you in-game arms being in the same place or very similar place as your arms IRL.

Asgard's Wrath also has this feature too.

Only played it for about 15 minutes or so because my leg was a bit bloody painful. There's an option to play it seated but playing these things sitting down isn't as cool as playing them standing up.

I've got WAY too many games to play now, I'm going to try my best to complete at least a couple of them before Christmas I think.

I'm going to have to turn the difficulty level down in Asgard's Wrath too, I've got it set to the highest one and I keep getting my arse kicked lololol

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Plenty of Nerd Rage going on after Valve announced Half Life: Alyx as a VR exclusive game released next year lol

It looks fucking awesome 

The only downside I can see is that because you're playing as Alyx you can't check out her arse in VR lmfao

I saw a mod for Half Life 2 mentioned on Rdddit last month that allows you to play it in VR using motion controllers so I might have to check that out at some point.

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A strange patent for the PS5 controller:

https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/09/ps5-dualshock-5-controller-single-player-games-multiplayer-11554893/amp/

Sounds like the sort of weird thing that Nintendo comes up with!

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Oh Shit!!!

https://twitter.com/nibre_/status/1205097012472926208

Done by the same guy that's doing the Alien Isolation VR Mod.

[jman]

Wife bought me a switch at xmas with Pokemon (Sword) and Zelda (Link's Awakening).. I like the portability and easy-to-use features and with a few business trips coming up this year - it will be handy as I'll be on my own for a fair amount of time

But.. I'll stand by what I've always said with Nintendo, outside of the Nintendo exclusives.. there is still nothing there.. I went looking for games to buy and felt severely disappointed.. I honestly could have bought a few third-party games... but I'd MUCH rather play them on my X1 - in the end I bought Zelda (Breath of the Wild) and Super Mario Odyssey.. and I've got enough games on that now to last me a while - I am excited to play Breath of the Wild as I have never played it, and Zelda is probably my favourite Nintendo franchise.. I'll probably pick up Luigi's Mansion 3 at some point this year too.

I'm not overly enamoured with the control sticks - playing in portable mode - it does feel a bit too wide, and playing in TV mode - I've had a few synch issues when the controllers suddenly just lose connection.. it also still sucks that Nintendo have NO implementation of achievements or trophies.. or anything - just feels weird playing a game now without a reward for hitting game goals... also gives you nothing to really work towards post-game.

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Nintendo are dead to me until they embrace the wonders of VR 

Epic are giving away plenty of decent free games. I've already got all of the Batman games, including the Lego ones, for free and now they're giving away Darksiders 1 and 2.

Definitely worth checking out.

I've started work on my VR game again, just designing my menus at the moment. Have done the basic movement of the game character and will work on control customisation once I have the menus finished.

I lost a lot of work when my PC got hacked last Summer, I lost the data on two hard drives, one containing my game and the other containing my backup

I'm hoping to get a playable demo on the Oculus Store before the end of this year.

For the final game I'm planning on having 5 levels altogether and have 10 versions of each level to give the game plenty of replay value.

I'm also going to have to create my GDD (Game Design Document) again because I lost the original when I lost those drives.