Octopus Overlords

I am in my third month of not playing any games. Previously I had gamed nearly every night since 1986, so that's a big deal.

This wasn't intentional; I just lost the urge and haven't got it back, even though I have 3-4 games that I bought and never even installed. Amnesia was drawing me back in until I hit that horrible underwater jumping-puzzle level. I finally beat it -- after 3 tries -- with a walkthru, but after that I was like "NOPE nope nope nope".

Although, come to think of it, finishing Amnesia might be just the Halloween thing to do...hmm. Will I? Should I?

I probably should, and I probably won't, knowing me.

I cycle through phases. I'll game like mad for a few months, then paint like mad for a couple, then read like mad for a few, then game like mad again. When I'm doing on, I do very little of the others.

Blackhawk wrote: Sat Oct 05, 2019 12:52 am I cycle through phases. I'll game like mad for a few months, then paint like mad for a couple, then read like mad for a few, then game like mad again. When I'm doing on, I do very little of the others.

Same here. I do things in phases. Some times I want to write, sometimes I want to read, sometimes I want to play games...

Make slow progress through Far Cry 4. Dang, there sure are TONS of things to do. Liberated 2 outposts (one of them ALMOST killed me with mortars), saved a couple more hostages (using only arrows), and liberated another belltower. Used the LMG on the roof and gunned down like 8 soldiers. Chose to side with Bharal instead of Amita on the mission tree. Now I need Yak and Wild Boar and demonfish...

Looks like My.com is a store too now..another games store. They are transferring all accounts over to it now.

https://games.my.com/?lang=en_US

PC GamesN

PDXCON 2019 begins on October 18, and we will see the next game from Paradox Development Studio there. The internal studio has been responsible for the grand strategy games Paradox is best known for, and this new title will follow suit – but it is not the title many fans have been asking for over the past few years.

Paradox’s main announcement show will take place the morning of Saturday, October 19, and a slot for a “new title from PDS” is already in place just afterwards. Paradox confirmed (again) that it’ll be a new grand strategy game on Twitter, with a handful of additional details. Most pertinently: “it’s not Victoria 3.” Given how heavily fans have been asking for that particular title, it’s little wonder that Paradox would give that part away early.

The only other clue we’ve got is a video message from producer Linda Tiger, who’s standing in front of a suit of medieval armour with an upsettingly large sword in hand. That seems like a pretty strong hint toward a Crusader Kings follow-up, but we’ll know for sure in a couple of weeks.

Kasey Chang wrote: Sat Oct 05, 2019 4:29 am Make slow progress through Far Cry 4. Dang, there sure are TONS of things to do. Liberated 2 outposts (one of them ALMOST killed me with mortars), saved a couple more hostages (using only arrows), and liberated another belltower. Used the LMG on the roof and gunned down like 8 soldiers. Chose to side with Bharal instead of Amita on the mission tree. Now I need Yak and Wild Boar and demonfish...

Got demonfish. Fishing with an assault rifle is just... weird. Basically, wait until it bobs near the surface and hose down the area.

Now need more rhinos and yak and wild boar. I'm building up all my carrying capacity first. Once I'm an unstoppable army, everything else is easier.

Advice from a Far Cry veteran:

Mix it up. Upgrade a little, clear a couple of outposts, do a story mission, grab a couple of side quests along the way, then GOTO 10 (repeat.) It is absolutely possible to upgrade so much that you get way ahead of the curve, which makes the game way too easy.

Which is *sorta* what I am doing. I think I'll go take a Bhadra and a Hurk mission now.

EDIT: Got the wild boar, got the super demon fish so now I have TWO ultimate carriers. And a couple on stage 3 out of 4. Just need a few more Yaks, and bears. I sold all my bear pelt when I thought I needed the space.

Got all the bears and yaks (found a bear spot and kept dropping bait and machine gun down any bears that run up)

Now I just need some snow leopards... Not Cloud leopards though. Everything else is the Fashion Show special hunt.

Truck armed escort is easy when you have a grenade launcher and you don't miss "much" (i.e. able to eyeball your target instead of trying to "aim" it)

Just did the 9th tower, which is more than half (out of 17).

Also did the 9th village, which ain't bad. I've perfected the approach now. Snipe carefully with a silenced weapon (or arrows). The MS-16 with marksman scope is good if I remember to double-shot the target. Just bought "Predator" signature sniper/hunting rifle, will see how that works out. As long as nobody sees me, they can see bodies and nothing happens (no reinforcements are called). They'll try to hunt me, but I can kill them faster from the shadows, and they won't find me.

Same with assassination missions. Snipe my way into the compound, pick out those at the outer edges. The others may panic a little, but as long as you stay hidden nothing will happen. Just have to watch out for the mortars.

As I'm only in the 10th or so campaign mission, I guess I should do some more side missions to unlock the next campaign mission.

Lawsuit alleges Fortnite addictive as drugs

Said some pair of idiot teens logged into it 1700 times in a month. Hell I played it for two weeks , decided I didn't care for it, and deleted it. Addictive LOL what a crock. I cant stand greedy attention whoring lawyers.

With NFS:Payback on sale over at Humble Store, decided to buy it... and nothing else. I don't really play online so none of those MP shooters interest me. The story still sucks, IMHO. It makes a little more sense than "The Run", at least.

it is Canada where they just awarded $120K to a non-citizen who applied for a job and on the application indicated he either was a citizen or had the appropriate documents for work. Got an offer and then in background check it came out he was not a citizen did not have work docs- he lied.
The rescinded the offer. He sued and got $120K. The Human Rights Tribunal- shades of the French Revolution- decreed the question about citizenship was discriminatory. This was a job in oil/petroleum industry where you would think citizenship/background might be a somewhat important.

Well, that was pretty video games random indeed.

MonkeyFinger wrote: Fri Oct 11, 2019 10:01 am Well, that was pretty video games random indeed.

The punch line was that his name was Justin Bailey.

Jaddison wrote: Fri Oct 11, 2019 9:50 am it is Canada where they just awarded $120K to a non-citizen who applied for a job and on the application indicated he either was a citizen or had the appropriate documents for work. Got an offer and then in background check it came out he was not a citizen did not have work docs- he lied.
The rescinded the offer. He sued and got $120K. The Human Rights Tribunal- shades of the French Revolution- decreed the question about citizenship was discriminatory. This was a job in oil/petroleum industry where you would think citizenship/background might be a somewhat important.

Is this the sequel to:

Today, Oct 12, is International Day Against DRM. Join in on this one guys.

https://www.gog.com/news/join_us_in_sup ... gainst_drm

Getting back into Far Cry 4. I'm over 50% done, but I'm not capturing enough "outposts". I've bought all of the available guns, even the signatures. I just need a couple more snow leopard pelts to finish the fashion stuff. I got 5 already to finish the first stage of something else, Need two or three more. *sigh*

Just went into Shangri-la and it was... interesting, relying on melee and coordinating with the tiger.

Taking the outpost is easy now, esp. if I have the Driller LMG signature gun with me. And instead of bow, I carry the Shredder SMG. Sidearm would be the blooper grenade launcher, and a sniper rifle rounds out the outfit. Shredder is just a much better killer though the bow is a bit more... satisfying, and has alternate arrows available. I may switch back depending on my mood.

I've learned to drop mines to thwart counter-attacks. Dropping them on entrances to blow up reinforcements makes my job MUCH easier as I don't need to watch my back that often.

Then somehow, a circuit breaker tripped and my room lost power. *ARGH*!!!!!!!

That's one of my favorite things about Far Cry - it has elements of immersive sims, and so many different approaches are viable. Outposts for me: Bow and silenced sniper rifle. Find an overlook somewhere and identify/tag the enemies and alarms. Use the sniper rifle to take out the alarms first. Next, take out snipers, people in towers, rooftops. Snipe the doors/locks off of any animal pens. Make sure nobody is near the target. If anybody notices the shot, run like hell and circle around so that they're looking in the wrong place. Now, sneak in and set up a few stealth takedowns. If they're further away, pull out the bow. Most of the time that's a 'no alarms' capture, often a 'not detected' capture, each of which brings a hefty bonus.

If it is a particularly tough nut, I'll throw in some bait and a let the local wildlife take a few out first.

Bow and silenced sniper rifle

Thats always my normal loadout. I hardly ever buy the custom weapons unless its one Ill actually use like a bow or sniper.

Bow with explosive heads became my go-to for any of the missions where I had to take out a convoy. And usually what I used to take out re-inforcements. Apparently I really enjoy blowing stuff up.

Kinda sad that I can't get the UPlay bonuses to work. The super pistol, and the Painted Elephants perk didn't work. I paid for it on UPlay, but they don't activate, even though the UPlay accounts are linked.

TheMix wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 11:56 am Bow with explosive heads became my go-to for any of the missions where I had to take out a convoy. And usually what I used to take out re-inforcements. Apparently I really enjoy blowing stuff up.

Nah, you just want to do your Rambo II reenactments.

Damn both me and Bethesda. I cant remember my password and they dont send an email reset when I click for one. Wonderful.

EDIT: Well I finally got in after weeks of not using Bethesda launcher or site. Turns out contrary to what they were showing me my user name does NOT have a capital letter. I never did get emails from them. I had to search back through my mail history to find this tidbit. Stupid f'n company.

Far Cry 4 at 55%. Just delivered de Fleur to the Golden Path, and did a couple more rescue, animal control, and revenge missions. Next will be a golden path mission at the brick factory, which should be a doozy.

Just took out Noore. Let her took herself out, actually. Time to conquer her fortress, which would open up the rest of the map. Already enjoyed Willis' betrayal and escaped from Durgesh. I was wondering why are the royal army soldiers cursing in Cantonese, but the backstory was the senior guys are actually Hong Kong mercenaries recruited by Pagan Min and his protege Yuma

2,500 More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Archive

Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we’ve added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago.

To browse the latest collection, hit this link and look around.

Loading screens! Ugh. Some developers are a bit more clever at hiding the loading screens into making them part of the game world ie, Mass Effect's elevators for instance, but some don't even pretend to hide it. I'm currently playing Obduction, which might as well have been called Loading Screen: The Game. This game has a central mechanic of teleporting to another part of the game world to complete puzzles. There's no avoiding it. The problem is that when teleporting happens, it does so as a loading screen. The further you progress into the game, the more you have to use these teleporters, sometimes seconds only after having already used one, especially if you need to backtrack to make some adjustments. It gets tiring very quickly. Who decided this was a good idea? When a game has a central mechanic that forces a loading screen has to be done repeatedly, it's probably not such a great idea. These days, loading screens should be minimized as much as possible and should only really have to be done if one dies.

Rumpy wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 3:12 pm Loading screens! Ugh. Some developers are a bit more clever at hiding the loading screens into making them part of the game world ie, Mass Effect's elevators for instance, but some don't even pretend to hide it. I'm currently playing Obduction, which might as well have been called Loading Screen: The Game. This game has a central mechanic of teleporting to another part of the game world to complete puzzles. There's no avoiding it. The problem is that when teleporting happens, it does so as a loading screen. The further you progress into the game, the more you have to use these teleporters, sometimes seconds only after having already used one, especially if you need to backtrack to make some adjustments. It gets tiring very quickly. Who decided this was a good idea? When a game has a central mechanic that forces a loading screen has to be done repeatedly, it's probably not such a great idea. These days, loading screens should be minimized as much as possible and should only really have to be done if one dies.

What amuses me, even way back in the old days of Commodore 64 loading screens, Mastertronic would use the Invade-a-Load fast loader routine for their loading screens. Which allowed the user to at least play a simple clone version of Space Invaders (along with a great Rob Hubbard chiptune) while the main game was loading. If they were able to provide a wee bit of interactivity to the user while awaiting for the loading process to finish even way back then, one would think something better or at least similar ought to be possible 32 years later.

Namco had the patent until 2015.

Anonymous Bosch wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 5:26 pm What amuses me, even way back in the old days of Commodore 64 loading screens, Mastertronic would use the Invade-a-Load fast loader routine for their loading screens. Which allowed the user to at least play a simple clone version of Space Invaders (along with a great Rob Hubbard chiptune) while the main game was loading. If they were able to provide a wee bit of interactivity to the user while awaiting for the loading process to finish even way back then, one would think something better or at least similar ought to be possible 32 years later.

Yeah, that'd be a great idea, even if just as a parody, depending on the tone of the game in question. Could be something as simple as a game of breakout. Obduction's game mechanic is frustrating because it saddles a long loading into the gameplay. I don't know if it's a limitation of the engine they're using (Unreal), but it seems to be loading entire map chunks and perhaps swapping out different states depending on puzzle status, which is then contributing to the loading times. Because when using these teleporters in-game, it brings along a piece of the world the teleporter was standing on., thus having to reload a new version of the map?

You can see a teleporter here in this video:

When I was playing Skyrim, every time a loading screen would come on, it was like a guessing game, "is the game going to crash now" (medium to high chance) and "did I remember to save before going through this door" (medium to low chance).

Slightly interested in two games in the Warhammer sale... Space Wolf looks interesting, though not sure about the card-based combat and a dozen different DLCs (base game is like $8, but with all the DLCs adds up to like $23 even with special bundle discount).

Also like the idea of Man O' War, which sounds like Warhammer version of Pirates! and the DLCs apparently are completely optional, so $7.50 is all I need to play.

jztemple2 wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2019 9:36 pm

Few things are as painful as realizing your quicksave puts you in a place you can't escape and your last real save was 3 hours ago when you sat down to play.

Learned that the hard way myself.

I had a quicksave like that in Sniper Ghost Warrior 2. It was one of the Alamo segments, and I didn't have enough ammo. You can grab ammo from the kills before you are "locked in", but apparently I quicksaved AFTER I was locked in and was basically standing in wind of lead with no chance of shooting back (and they are out of pistol range). Phooey.

Far Cry 4: Conquered Noore's compound, was totally undetected.

Took out Pagan Min's double. Almost got nailed by the RPGs coming from the tower.

Did a bomb defusing mission. So far, the easiest way was simply to kill everyone from afar with sniper rifle. As long as you were never detected, it's easy-peasy.

Liberated a few outposts and two towers. Did a couple missions, esp. the armed escort. Dang, the one where they throw a chopper at you? That's hard as ****. Fortunately, I have the 40mm grenade launcher and one hit from that usually takes down the chopper, or just about any other vehicle if I get a good enough hit.

At least as far as Quicksaving goes, you have full control of it. Autosave on the otherhand can often be worse, catching you off-guard at inopportune times. And then everyone hates checkpoint saves of course. I've often been screwed by checkpoint saves when low on health.

I am *somewhat* curious at The Division 2, but I don't play online at all, and I feel that I would have wasted the money on it. I have too many games in my backlog anyway.

The beta was soooo choppy and stuttery on my PC . I saw an official video of the new update the other day from a pro streamer that they used themselves and it was still jerky and stuttering all over the place. Pass.