redhorsejacket
@redhorsejacket@lemmy.world
- Comment on "It was a pretty harrowing three months" – Undead Labs head Philip Holt on what happened after Xbox cut the studio loose 1 week ago:
Man, I sunk a lot of hours into both 1 & 2. They were great for scratching the survival crafting zombie defense itch without having to delve into the “pick up sticks and stones to make an axe to chop trees to build a base to house forge to make metal tools to…”-type gameplay loop of many other similar games. I hope the third is successful enough to keep the studio in the black, if only because that will mean the game is good and I’ve done pretty much everything in vanilla SoD2.
- Comment on MMO players (past and present): what is your attitude towards "forced" group content? 1 week ago:
Including an indicator that this is a character’s first go at a dungeon is an awesome design element. It’s kind of like an icebreaker which invites the (presumably random) group to ask what experience that player wants, or a shield that the newbie can point to if they’re getting lost in the sauce.
- Comment on MMO players (past and present): what is your attitude towards "forced" group content? 1 week ago:
Lol, I didn’t include it in the post body since it strays from the typical MMO structure I was referring to, but Warframe is definitely a big culprit in the “I loaded into the mission and my teammates cleared it before the intro VO wrapped” space. No shame in that game, if I had the frame and mods to do it, I’d likely do the same. Instead though, I’ll take 45 minutes on a Spy mission because I’m playing it like Sam Fisher instead of Cyber Ninja. Of course, unlike SWTOR, where I feel my focus on story and world is encouraged by the game (or, at least, not punished), with Warframe I do feel like my approach is contrary to the design.
Still, love the game, and I’ve had mostly positive experiences with the community, even if I’m inevitably bringing up the rear in group content.
- Submitted 1 week ago to games@lemmy.world | 51 comments
- Comment on EA is shutting down BioWare and the next Mass Effect has been canceled 1 week ago:
Depending on how old you like your old school, you might enjoy Spiderweb Software’s games. They (mostly just a guy and his wife) have been cranking out RPGs since 1994. While all their games are superficially similar, there’s an impressive amount of narrative and mechanical variety. If you’re a D&D fan, especially the Forgotten Realms setting, you might enjoy the Avernum series. You’re a prisoner, banished to the underground realm of Avernum , never to see the light of day again. However, you are not alone, as the ruthless Empire which sentenced you has long enjoyed sending its dissidents into the subterranean realm. In fact, there are several factions which vie for influence, and the player can throw their lot in with any or all of them. In some ways, it feels like an old school Underdark module for DnD.
Their other series are worth checking out too. In Avadon, you play a party of inquisitors (essentially) for a tyrannical, immortal overlord who exercises nigh totalitarian control over an alliance of 5 nations. Over the course of the game, your party uncovers a far-flung conspiracy against your boss for his abuses of power, and you are free to RP your characters’ reaction to this in a number of ways. Even further afield of that, the Geneforge series is set in a science fantasy world which blends magic with bioengineering and genesplicing. As an apprentice of the Shapers Guild, you have the power to change (or even create whole-cloth) life forms to suit your purposes. Brings created in this way are programmed (for lack of a better word) to be completely obedient to their Shaper, despite otherwise being sentient, free beings. The ethics of this form a large part of the tension in the plot. Mechanically, though, it means that the game is like a weird Ultima/Pokemon hybrid, where your party consists of your mad scientist chimera creations, who will protect your squishy gene wizard until their dying breaths.
I first came across their work when I watched Jeff Vogel’s GDC presentation several years ago. It’s an hour long, but, if you have the time and interest, it’s a very candid look at how the sausage is made in indie game development. In particular, I appreciate that he is very conscious that the games’ visuals could at best be described as “quaint”, but that just encouraged him to lean into the writing even harder to make up the difference, since that cost almost nothing.
- Comment on Anons text isn't green but that's far from the worst. 1 week ago:
Hol’ up, are you telling me someone would just lie? On the internet?
- Comment on Just coincidence 3 weeks ago:
I don’t disagree with you in any particular part, and almost wrote a paragraph clarifying that the swastika and fasces are not 1:1 equivalences specifically because the Nazis divorced the swastika from its original meaning for their own purposes, while the Fascists selected the fasces as their core symbol because of its already established symbolism.
However, you can understand that the circular logic of calling something “fascist” which predates the codification of “Fascism” is doing my head in. If you want to counter that that’s a semantic argument which doesn’t invalidate your point, I tend to agree, with the significant caveat that this entire discussion is semantic in nature, so it’s more relevant than usual.
Long story short, I don’t equate every example of a state using violence to achieve its purpose as fascism, though it’s certainly a necessary ingredient, so I won’t yuck your yums if you do. To me, a war memorial is an appropriate venue for the fasces to appear, given its martial and reflective nature (as in, reflecting on the past), whereas including a fasces as the centerpiece of the nation’s diplomatic emblem is significantly more concerning as a forward looking statement of intent (so to speak).
- Comment on Just coincidence 3 weeks ago:
I feel like there’s a term for this sort of backwards misattribution of a symbol’s later meaning onto examples which predate their modern connotation, but I can’t think of what it would be. The war memorial you’re referring to was dedicated in 1920. Considering fascism as a political ideology had just started coalescing around Mussolini in Italy circa 1919-1920, it strains credulity to link the two. In a similar fashion, you wouldn’t suggest the presence of swastikas outside a Hindu temple indicates support for Nazism by default.
Fasces have represented the strength of the state dating back to the pre-Roman Etruscan kings. Therefore, seeing it on the national architecture of a Western nation which fancies itself as a descendent of Greek and Roman civilizations shouldn’t be that surprising, nor taken as a tacit endorsement of capital-F “Fascist” ideology. Case in point, do you know what’s prominently featured on the cover of every French passport? It ain’t a baguette, I’ll say that much. Heck, in 1953, France elected to keep the fasces as part of their diplomatic emblem, despite their very recent experiences in WW2 under Fascist rule. If we can give France a pass for continuing to use the symbol after post-war, surely that can extend to a 1920 Revolutionary War memorial in America. Unless every example of nationalism is equivalent to Fascism (and I readily grant that nationalism is a core tenant of that ideology, but allowances should be made for nuance), sometimes a fasces is just a fasces.
All of which is not to say that America is fascism free. Obviously not. Just that the above comment made me roll my eyes when there are so many better examples to cite, like the roving gangs of brownshirts disappearing people into nebulously legal holding centers.
- Comment on Mercenaries Recompiled - Teaser | Launching 9/26 | PC and Linux (Proton) Native Compatibility 5 weeks ago:
I don’t use Linux, and I didn’t know if there was a difference between any of those terms. Soni just used all of em 😅
- Mercenaries Recompiled - Teaser | Launching 9/26 | PC and Linux (Proton) Native Compatibilitywww.youtube.com ↗Submitted 5 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 9 comments
- Submitted 1 month ago to games@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Anon learns about astronomy 1 month ago:
Heh, glad someone else immediately thought, “Well, that’s Lovecraftian”. Also, man, I should dust off my collection of his fiction. Abominable human being, but his writing sure is evocative, if a touch on the purple side.
- Comment on STARCRAFT | Announce Cinematic | Dominion 1 month ago:
Nah, that.was just a classic set of Marine armor, but in Terran Dominion colors, as opposed to the more typical good guy blue. Given the speaker in the trailer sounds a lot like Arcturus Mengsk in full Emperor mode, I’m guessing that this game takes place in between SC 1&2. Maybe even during the Brood War? Seems like that would make sense for their open world shooter set up.
- Comment on Two years into the world's most complicated board game, masochist gamers "still don't understand what the camels do" 2 months ago:
Well, ain’t this board game a temporal oddity? A week away for years now!
- Comment on Guess the game (#010) 2 months ago:
For anyone passing through with nostalgia for CnC Renegade’ multiplayer mode (which was a first-person take on the parent series’ base building) give the fan made remake Renegade X a look. I played several games with full servers when 1.0 launched and it scratched my nostalgia itch like no one’s business. They have the link to the download in the description of the video.
- Comment on :o 🐟 3 months ago:
“Get in here! New asshole slang just dropped!”
- Comment on Guess the game ! (#001) 4 months ago:
Good eye sniper! I was wracking my brain trying to think if there was some obscure predecessor to Blood Wake that I wasn’t aware of or something.
- Comment on What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)? 4 months ago:
Thank God for SPT. Modding away so many frustration points, no cheaters, improving AI… Makes it a lot more enjoyable, at the cost of running even more like ass than usual.
- Comment on I don't make the rules 4 months ago:
…thank you.
- Comment on Im a weekly showerer 5 months ago:
I mean, I can’t speak for everyone, but I do.
Eating a mint to deal with bad breath seems like the equivalent of a 15 year old boy dousing himself with Axe body spray to deal with their BO. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just temporarily masks it, and usually to a lesser degree than you think or hope.
- Comment on Being Difficult 6 months ago:
Sorry, best I can do is this Anthrobussy.
- Comment on The first new Heroes of Might and Magic strategy game in over 10 years will launch this month 6 months ago:
I tend to agree with you about the art style. While I know HoMM3 is the fan-favorite, HoMM2 was my jam growing up, and it’s distinctive “80s-fantasy-paperback-cover” style is firmly embedded in my mind as the essence of HoMM. While that definitely speaks more to my nostalgia than any rational critique, I do find the current direction to be lacking in character. It’s all fine, but it could belong to any modern fantasy IP.
My hangups about the art notwithstanding, the game seems to be rock solid. I spent 6+ hours in the demo in a single sitting. When I came to my senses, it was well into the wee hours of the morning. If that’s not the hallmark of a good HoMM experience, idk what else would be. Additionally, the actual game map tends to look pretty good, and there are graphical touches that I quite enjoy (like different troop variants having entirely different models, rather than simple pallete swaps). Finally, as a HoMM3 fan, you might even enjoy certain aspects more. When I wrote about this a few months back, someone in the comments mentioned that they felt like there was a fair amount of HoMM3 DNA in the art (which, as a HoMM2 head, I wouldn’t have clocked).
All of which is to say, give the demo a shot if you haven’t. While my bugaboos with the art style never entirely went away, they were easily relegated to the background by the rest of the game’s strengths.
- Comment on The first new Heroes of Might and Magic strategy game in over 10 years will launch this month 7 months ago:
They’ve got a demo available! Worth checking out if you want to whet your appetite.
- Comment on Nacon faces existential crisis: Cyanide, Spiders and Kylotonn slide into insolvency. 7 months ago:
A shame to see a AA publisher go down in today’s market. I know indie dev is touted as the panacea for modern gaming, but the projects that come from that space are often a little more slight or niche than I’m interested in. I’ve enjoyed games from all three of the named dev studios.
- Comment on COMPUTER WORLDS - A New Showcase Celebrating Strange & Distinctive Games 7 months ago:
Ultimate Drummer looks like the best kind of high-effort shitpost.
- Comment on whos your favorite borg? mine is localhost 7 months ago:
Seven of Nine channeling this Barbie
- Comment on Political leaning 8 months ago:
Feels like that could be a minor villain from Captain America’s Silver Age rogues gallery.
- Comment on The kid is inventive 8 months ago:
The desperate helplessness in that man’s voice during that call never fails to make me laugh.
- Comment on Take-Two CEO Responds to Stock Price Drop Following Google Genie Announcement: 'I Think People Are Confusing Tools With Hits' - IGN 8 months ago:
Idk man, could be I’m just projecting on you conversations I’ve had with myself, but fondly remembering the sense of discovery you had with the Infinity Engine games while being sour on BG3 because it was “spoiled” for you seems like it has a lot more to do with your sense of nostalgia than any rational critique. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the sorta person who will break out my soapbox to yell about Morrowind’s virtues vs Oblivion or Skyrim, and I’ve also attempted to cajole several friends into giving BG1 a shot in the lead up to and wake of BG3’s release, so I’m sympathetic to your broader point. I just think, unless you’ve been out here reading reviews, watching Let’s Plays, opening discussion threads, and sucking down all in-house marketing Larian did, you vastly overestimate how much of the game is spoiled for you. And, frankly, if you’ve been doing all of those things, then the real culprit is how you spend your time online, not being online in and of itself.
Besides, the game is massive. Even watching multiple Let’s Plays of Act 1 would still leave room for discovery, simply because there are so many paths to pursue, many of them mutually exclusive. Hell, my big critique of the game is that I find the plethora of choices to be overwhelming, as I’m the sort that likes to consume all content in a single playthrough, and that’s literally impossible.
- Comment on lightbulbs 8 months ago:
There’s practically no chance this knowledge will ever benefit me, but I’m happy to learn something new regardless. Thanks for sharing!
