Octopus Overlords

Daehawk wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 6:05 pm M.U.L.E has been released on GOG.

https://www.gog.com/game/mule

Unless you're a purist, I suspect you'd be better off playing the free remake and tribute to the original M.U.L.E. game, Planet M.U.L.E.:

Tried Battlevoid Sector Siege and Battlevoid Harbinger. Both are kinda real-time procedural scifi 2D combat RTS.

Harbinger is probably a bit more understandable, as it's a cross between Drox Operative and FTL... You are a single ship, and you need to make scrap and upgrade points by either destroying enemies or performing "missions", like fly to X, clear Y, destroy Z. Improve your ship, salvage new weapons from enemies you destroy, research better items, buy/hire more ships for your flotilla (up to 3, including yourself), complete your overall mission (usually, destroy the HQ base in this "sector" (they call it galaxy?!) with a dozen or more systems. Enemies travel randomly, and so do some allies. There are even units that will follow you if you hire them (as mercenaries). Weapons come in several genres: slug thrower, plasma cannon, laser, rocket launcher, missile launcher, etc. Some are good against hull, some are good against shield, and you also have point defense hardpoints, and some ships also have small craft hangars, which can carry fighters, drones, or bombers, with different weapon mixes. You don't control the ships other than "move to" orders, and when things go bad, "jump out" orders. Ships will fire appropriate weapons by themselves, but you can give general directives, like "shoot at nearest, shoot at ships first vs shoot at fighters first, and so on. It's interesting, except as you are limited to 3 ships, and enemies are not, the trick is to know when to run.

Sector Siege is set in the same universe and is an RTS. You have a base in this sector, and you need to defeat the enemy base (by taking out their asteroid resource points, and eventually, produce enough ships and defensive sats to wipe them out completely. But you also need to build some simpler ships to "conquer" those other asteroids (hopefully unprotected) so you get their resources. But the enemy would be doing the same thing. So it's basically back and forth as your ships (and fighters, and bombers) take out enemy defenses, while the enemy does the same to you.

The trick here is you are limited in the number of bases, hangars (for fighters and bombers), and ships you can build (which you can tweak slightly based on your allocation of your crew). And you can also deploy marines which can take over enemy ships. So build ships, take over asteroids, and take out the enemy base. / There is also a tower defense bit where you need to protect your base against like... 50 waves of enemies of mixed ships and fighters (basically, enemy counterattack). As the ships keep coming, you need to setup defenses to thin out the enemy so they don't destroy your base. An interesting variation on the RTS.

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Also played a bit of Gravel, an offroad racer by Milestone, maker of 3 years of WRC games, and Sebastian Loeb Rally Evo, and general maker of racing games with a long history. This one is based on the Unreal ENgine, IIRC, and it does look good, and still races quite well. But with minimal innovations, the game felt very much like a Dirt 2 clone with less flair and less celebrity cameos, but with more FMV and more weird racing modes (knockout/elimination, red gate / green gate, etc.).

games i have recently found in local sidewalk-side boxes and Little Free Libraries:

STALKER: Clear Sky
Dishonored
Far Cry 3
Colonization (2008 remake)
Bioshock
Bioshock 2
Outcast
Quake (Mac version)
Myst (Mac version)
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
Age of Empires 2

Great games. Stalker would be my favorite among those. What kind of sidewalk are you walking down??

Daehawk wrote: Tue Mar 02, 2021 5:14 pm Great games. Stalker would be my favorite among those. What kind of sidewalk are you walking down??

the newer titles were all from North Seattle. the older ones were from Capitol Hill (near downtown).

got the Asmodee digital board game bundle, and i am shocked at how poorly these board game clients are coded. Ticket to Ride locks up if you try to move cards to the board by clicking and Small World crashed multiple times. and Splendor has a mandatory timer where if you don't take your turn within about a minute or so, you get booted from the game and an AI takes over your player!

I mean it wouldn't be Asmodee if it was all good.

So with the M.U.L.E. discussion, and nostalgia about the music, I had another video game song stuck in my head and could not figure out where it came from. It was so clear in my head that I was able to sing it for my brother over the phone. He remembered it too, but couldn't place it.

After some searching, I finally figured it out....

Marble Madness

Love/hated the game. Died SO many times! But I remember that song clearly, though not the music later in the clip. Maybe I never got much past the Beginner Race.

I've played Ticket to Ride a good bit and never had it crash. I know it's unhelpful for me to say that, though.

I sucked at Marble Madness and yet for some reason got really excited about it on C-64. Screenshots of that version mess with my brain more now than that music does.

Was playing a bit of Renowned Explorers. Interesting mechanic where your tactics matter if which type of attack you're using, but I think I was using abbreviated combat and didn't see what sort of damage they were using, and it wasn't explained that there were only 5 expeditions TOTAL so those were the only times you can defeat Rivaleux. I think I was like 5th place before going to final mission. In the final final battle their guys basically beat the tar out of my crew. I keep healing them, but they were hitting so hard they're taking out my resolve, and once that's out, it's all over.

A "pre-alpha" game appeared in the banner for Steam today for me. I didn't even realize they were into releasing non existent games. Then I read the description and realized I need to put some kind of filter in place.

Carnal Instinct is an Adult RPG with an emphasis on AAA quality visuals and compelling erotic interaction. You enter the world of Sabu a slave, but will forge your own destiny and shape the world itself in this realm of ancient gods, mythical creatures, and boundless lust.

Between this and the game about shooting half naked women trying to get to your sniper nest, I'm convinced Steam needs to put up a red curtain for the back of their store.

Except they aren't bothering with the curtains.

Christ...I looked at the store page for the game because I was curious about what a "pre-alpha" gets you, and was hit with actual hard core, rated x scenes. That was a bit jarring.

It feels as though some game producer are constantly trying to push the boundaries of what's possible on Steam.

Personally I can't wait for this one, I mean who could resist playing this game?

The developers describe the content like this:

A female cyborg performs fellatio on a bald man who wears panties on his head

A stunning femme fatale engages in passionate consensual sex with a human male whilst her giant knockers bounce sensually up and down in front of the camera

A psychotic pirate queen dominates a poor smuggler by grinding her buttocks on his crotch whilst gripping his member with her cute heart-shaped tail

Whilst walking past the Laboratory, the player can hear sexually suggestive moans coming from within as a bipedal alien stud called Bulgetto pleasures your Chief Science Officer. There is nothing you can do about this, so don't even try.

An enigmatic alien known only as Chodestool will engage in doggystyle copulation with various crew members if you forget to feed him

A stoned engineer called Dallick proudly lets his tiny penis hang loose as he parades around your ship in a lurid display of free-spirited expression

An enemy faction called the FuccBotts employs spaceships that are shaped like fluorescent dildos in order to ram and destroy their opponents. These FuccBots are considered extremely dangerous.

hepcat wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 12:01 pm Christ...I looked at the store page for the game because I was curious about what a "pre-alpha" gets you, and was hit with actual hard core, rated x scenes. That was a bit jarring.

Oh come on, how bad could it b...HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

Yeah, that's not one I was aware of before today. There are some...interesting alleyways on the STEAM store that you can wander down. That game looks, uh...special. I guess if I'm ever in the mood for a furry sex romp in ancient Egypt, I now have something to consider.

So, is that what you'd call a roleplaying game?

I really would like to see how ray tracing would help with this game. Someone get Nvidia on the horn.

Never reach for food while playing Tales From the Borderlands.

The Steam friends server sure has been down a long time.

I redeemed a Steam key! My first!

At least the Japanese adult games know how to tease. Remember when Criminal Girls caused a frenzy way back when? That your job is to dom them and train them to defeat all sorts of evil critters, and your training tools consist of whips and electroprods, so it's basically soft porn with bdsm themes?

What the game really is: RPG-lite with a naughty UI. You move around "Hell" starting at the bottom, kill random critters with your party. You choose out of 4 possible actions, and/or use items (potions, et al), repeat until either all the critters died or your party all died. If you win the fight, the dead members will be resurrected with 1 hp. Else you have revive potions (kinda expensive). Later, when you get more than 4 members, you can swap out your party so you can put in some fresh folks and keep fighting.

The naughty bits are in the level up sequence. The skills don't level up themselves. You have to use the currency, "CM", for training in their skill categories. Each will have a physical attack, a magical attack, or a support skill. Most will have 2 out of 3. Some attacks can use both physical and magical attack for a supercombo. Some attacks work on full groups. Support skills can raise Physical defense, magical defense, group heal, and so on. As you can guess, some party members are better at some than others, while each has a unique skill. The problem is, you don't have full access to their skills during the fight. It's a bit of random chance to see which one comes up. So you need to adapt.

ANd it's in the leveling up of those skills that the game turned naughty. Primary skill needs "maintenance", where you use the "primary" training tool to "destroy the temptations" (i.e. whack-a-mole). It's naughty because the target is in a suggestible pose, and you slowly part the pink fog with the whac-a-mole action. EVENTUALLY you may see something more suggestive, but let's just say it's cartoonish and the important bits are covered as the target are usually wearing cosplay costumes, often really silly ones. Secondary skills are leveled up the same way, through a little different mechanic: turning on randomly placed switches.

So your game play loop is basically running around the map, looking for treasure chests which contains potions, CMs (the ingame currency), and sometimes, special attacks, such as chained attacks or group skills. For example, the two sisters have a shared skills where if they are both in the party, they can engage a cheer skill that will heal the entire party for a couple turns, not fully, but will make the fight last longer. Fight critters, unlock new regions of the map via switches and doors, and rise to the next level up, and repeat.

And combat basically is raise your defenses, figure out the schtick of the enemy you encountered, and use the best available attack to win, swap in healer or other party members in order to mitigate damage as well as cause the max damage possible.

And the naughty bits are just... naughty. Not gross toilet humor.

Some people have heard me comment on how much I dislike Ubisoft as a publisher. I came across this today that gives one example of how despicable they are.

No single player game should ever "sell" time-saving boosters. If your single-player game is riddled with grinding, fix that shit.

Ubisoft doesn't make many games that interest me to begin with, so I'm largely immune to any kind of temptation. I think the last one I got was AC: Black Flag... and before that ... Far Cry 2?

Without the boosters it's bad game design.

With the boosters it becomes intentional bad game design in order to sell the fix for a profit. That's just bottom-of-the-barrel scummy.

If its forced on you then boooo but if its just there to make it easier I just ignore them and move on. I dont do microtrans. I didn't even know that about FC5 ND. I finished it just fine.

Not to sound like an Ubisoft apologist, but I've played pretty much every mainline Ubisoft game (other than multiplayer focused stuff like R6 or Anno stuff) to completion on release and never felt the need for any kind of booster. On the other hand, I may spend more time gaming than your typical adult so I never feel "behind." Also my completionist nature may have masked any kind of grind. AC: Valhalla came close though.

For the record, I didn't watch the video. I play the games, I enjoy the games. Ubisoft is probably one of the more reliable studios for me.

I really like a lot of their franchises (Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, AC, Far Cry, etc), but I've been hit in the face with their monetization pressure more than once, and I've had to deal with their awful support a few times. It's better than Comcast, but not by much.

I play games from a lot of Ubisoft game franchises (The Division, Far Cry, Watch Dogs, Ghost Recon, Assassin's Creed) and while I've seen various microtransaction thingamabobs, I've never felt the need to purchase any of them.

coopasonic wrote: Tue Mar 09, 2021 11:43 am Not to sound like an Ubisoft apologist, but I've played pretty much every mainline Ubisoft game (other than multiplayer focused stuff like R6 or Anno stuff) to completion on release and never felt the need for any kind of booster. On the other hand, I may spend more time gaming than your typical adult so I never feel "behind." Also my completionist nature may have masked any kind of grind. AC: Valhalla came close though.

For the record, I didn't watch the video. I play the games, I enjoy the games. Ubisoft is probably one of the more reliable studios for me.

+1

I don't feel particularly strongly for or against Ubisoft as a company, but I hate, hate, hate the Uplay/Ubisoft Connect/whatever the hell they're calling it this week App.

It's utter garbage and needs to die a fiery death.

Skinypupy wrote: Tue Mar 09, 2021 2:22 pm I don't feel particularly strongly for or against Ubisoft as a company, but I hate, hate, hate the Uplay/Ubisoft Connect/whatever the hell they're calling it this week App.

It's utter garbage and needs to die a fiery death.

And yet, oddly, I've never had any issues with.

Same. I own most of their stuff and finished most of it.

And yet there wasn't a single thing in the video that didn't actually happen.

Ubisoft has done some nasty, shady stuff, and their support is terrible. I'm glad people around here haven't bumped into a lot of that, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

jztemple2 wrote: Tue Mar 09, 2021 3:36 pm

Skinypupy wrote: Tue Mar 09, 2021 2:22 pm I don't feel particularly strongly for or against Ubisoft as a company, but I hate, hate, hate the Uplay/Ubisoft Connect/whatever the hell they're calling it this week App.

It's utter garbage and needs to die a fiery death.

And yet, oddly, I've never had any issues with.

Same here. Not that I like it, but the times I've used it, I haven't had any issues. I've had more issues with the games themselves.

When Skyrim first came out I was always taking quests to visit the Greybeards. Now I am one the Greybeards.

Does that mean adventurers are coming to you for quests now?

dbt1949 wrote: Tue Mar 09, 2021 11:54 pm When Skyrim first came out I was always taking quests to visit the Greybeards. Now I am one the Greybeards.

One of the funniest things I've read in a long time.