Withywarlock

I find it hard to believe that they can afford to spend ~£450 on a brand new video games console to resell and not make said ~£450 go far if they need it. I get it, 'supply and demand' and 'asset flipping' are all valid strategies of making more money in the system we live in, and I slow clappingly applaud them on the dubious honour of their bots winning the race to resell a popular item. I say hard to believe and not 'impossible' because there probably are one or two people who desperately need not just £450, but more than that going forward, and wouldn't do this if they could swallow their pride and do better. I'm sure one or two had resorted to selling furniture to no avail, relying on food banks, changing their phone's data plans or Hell, selling their current ones for an older model that can still support the internet for their job and to scalp. But not the hundreds or however many are doing this.

On the one hand I'm glad that our government is looking into ways of stopping scalpers, because this isn't wholesale retail or anything like that, it's just playing silly buggers. But when I see the money scalpers are making in the article linked, I'm not so sure our MPs are doing this for benevolant reasons. They way I see it is they've looked at the 28million dollar profit and have decided if they're not entitled to a hefty slice of that pie, nobody is. It's why I've a feeling that loot box bills are causing a fuss in the House of Lords because they've got grandchildren who have put them a few grand into debt with shady mechanics (fear not; it'll just be written off as expenses for the taxpayer to cover.) I'll consider this a win for the games industry and its enthusiasts when I see it in action and at no cost to the public. While they're at it, they can do something about GPU prices skyrocketing. I'll start waving my Union Jack flag as soon as I get my RTX 3060.

This implies it will--, nay, can release in the way we expect games to. I just can't see Star Citizen or Squadron 42 hitting store shelves at £60 without some sort of nonsense in regards to tiers, editions, levels of access, and numerous quasi-launches. I can appreciate the ambition of this game and hope it succeeds, but it's the ambition that will be (and is, if stories about the mismanagement are true) its downfall. Good luck to it, I say.

Without equal or greater license-holding, no. Let's say I wanted to make a Star Wars game. I can't without Disney and Electronic Arts' lawyers knocking on my door. That's understandable. However, what I can do is I can make something similar, but because it's not Star Wars it won't do anywhere near as well. It's the same with 2K with WWE or whoever's got the UFC license: for every twelve of those there's one Facebreaker. People don't want new brands they want to get to know; they want Christmas Ronaldino and all the other footballers from FIFA. The business of football has spent years building up a loyal fanbase that idolises its players, so it's only natural that pay off in the games they star in. Not willingly. Publishers like EA and the legal eagles of the football empire make too much money to change the mutual benefit. What it would take is ordinary players and the big spenders (I'd rather not resort to using the dehumanising terms of publishers by calling them 'whales') to stop buying them. That's a near impossible expectation because they don't care about the industry as much as you or I do, so the cycle will continue. The best thing you can do is keep an eye out for news of Kickstarters or other means of funding others' dream soccer games and do what you can to support them.

I rather enjoy PC Building Simulator, which helped me better understand how to install my power supply and CPU, even if it's rather rudimentary. Still, it's the closest thing I'll ever get to my dream job of building PCs for a living, even if I don't know how to do it all that well!

Trying to avoid spoilers, have you been told something along the lines of crew being absent and having to find them? If you have, then you can do two missions before suicide mission before they start to leave one by one. If the crew of the Normandy is still around, you can do Lair of the Shadow Broker and any other quests. ^^

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout would be cute if it weren't for the snarling, rabid fanbase that was an inevitable result of its explosive popularity. Diddy Kong Racing immediately springs to mind, and I have to agree with CGR Undertow's description in his review as it being "sweet", a word I attribute quite liberally to We Happy Few. Katamari Damacy and The Wonderful End of the World are also cute games. You roll a ball around sucking things up to become a bigger ball to suck bigger things up. Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and its sequels and spinoffs are some of the best platform mascot games I've ever seen, and it's an IP that's woefully underused by Namco. I'll ponder this further because there's a few more games I know fit this bill.

I'm mostly digital now. There's only two times I can think of where I might go physical: 1, when I want some tat like a statuette that comes with it, or 2, should my partner and I be able to go on a shopping trip and it's a talking point for when we eat out. With coronavirus and all, high street shopping is neither safe nor smart, especially in the place we'd like to go which is indoors and while spacious, has limited ventilation. So I'm afraid it's going to be almost exclusively digital, especially as the games industry gives me less reason to trust it with exclusive tat attached to appalling games.

Bugger. The tales I could tell about Official Playstation Magazine and the legacy of their demos.... I regret I can't contribute much to this. I recall one time my mate loaned me his full copy of Jet Set Radio for the original Xbox for the official magazine, which he kept going on about me not returning. I don't think I ever did. I regret that greatly. Alas, the only other thing I can think of is the Pizza Hut demos and full games they did as a promotion for about 2 years. To say I don't like pizza, I sure ended up with a few of those.

All of my physical games are used, barring perhaps one or two such as a black label copy of Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer which is falling to pieces, having been lovingly played for over two decades now. But they make up a small percentage of the total games I own, like, less than 5% if we're going by a previous thread where I'd shown my Steam library of over 1700 games, thereabouts. In my life though, used games probably take up a much higher number as they've come and gone numerous times.

I can only recommend Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft as it's the only book of his I've owned and read (just this morning have I finished The Call of Cthulhu, despite having owned it since my college days), but I think it does a good enough job of showing off his 'Cthulhu Mythos' (what he's most famous for) and some of his 'standalone' horror works. Not really, no. Despite how generously fleshed out Lovecraft's works were during his life, they're still very cryptic and most adaptations revolve around others' work. Take for example the Call of Cthulhu (2018) video game - as I've just discovered it had virtually nothing to do with the short story of the same name, barring the tone and lots of green. However it was developed in collaboration with the rights holders of the tabletop roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu, by Chaosim Inc. As said before, some stories are part of the Cthulhu Mythos (a 'Lovecraft Cinematic Universe', one might say), wherein the Great Old Ones are incomprehensible and more hauntingly, inevitable. Others are simple eerie stories about rats. I personally would recommend looking up some Lovecraftian imagery to get a better idea in one's mind's eye when reading the original work, however what's said in the book has been lovingly recreated since. I'm surprised how true to the source material the look of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones has remained over a century later, if a lot of the themes of the books have been downplayed because it's easier to acknowledge that Cthulhu's a big bad tentacle monster. I'm afraid I can't fully answer this question, but here's my observations as to the central themes of good Lovecraftian writing: The monsters don't can't die. While a Call of Cthulhu game can have combat, it's usually a pointless affair. While many cultist worshippers of the Great Old Ones are mortal and can be gunned down, some have been blessed with near invulnerability and features akin to their tentacled gods. As for Cthulhu Itself.... It can't die. It can be made to go away, but it will come back because its cult has existed since the first men, and will be there long after the last. This is always at no small cost to life and sanity. 'Tis better to die than to go insane. Dying is considered the win state in the grim darkness of the Cthulhu Mythos. You can't possibly hope to lead a normal life knowing what you do about the Necronomicon, the non-Euclidean architecture of Cthulhu's resting place, and shooting as many loathesome hellspawn as you'll encounter. Alternatively, being ignorant of these things is for the best. Chances are we won't see Cthulhu in our lifetime given how many countless millenia It and Its kin have existed, and it's a good idea to keep it that way. A product of its time. While Cthulhu's exploits have been recorded in Ancient Rome, the Cold War all the way to the Cyberpunk future of 1994, Cthulhu is at its best in my opinion when it's set in its gaslight era of the early 1900s, or before its author's time in the 1800s. I don't say this just because of the unfortunately liberal use of racist language common for Lovecraft's region of New England, but because nobody could conceive his eldritch horrors at the time. They'd thought the worst was over with the decline of religious supernatural belief, the rise of world-changing political ideologies and the Great War finally ending, and now they have to contend with the notion they don't have everything figured out? It was the perfect time to say science didn't have all the answers, for all the advancements it had made. So with all that said, what games do I recommend? Not many as I still need to familiarise myself, but here goes: The Amnesia series. This was one of the earliest indie games to revitalise the horror genre for mainstream audiences after the so-called AAA industry had had enough of it. A first person puzzle and stealth game, the player is typically tasked with remembering what it is they're doing in the haunted house they're stuck in, chased by horrific flesh constructs and having to look at candles to stay sane. Call of Cthulu (2018) and Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth for the obvious reasons. You might also try Achtung! Cthulu Tactics for a game based on the WW2 tabletop roleplaying game of the same name (barring the 'tactics' addition). I was going to mention a few Warhammer titles like Space Hulk and Vermintide, but they don't quite do enough to capture the whole Lovecraftian theme, not that they try to however much inspiration they take. I think once you've read a few of his stories you'll end up seeing influences everywhere, and might say "this could be a Lovecraft story if it weren't for this being explained already", like I did in regards to Resident Evil lately.

It's because I'm not a fan (yet, I hope) that I'm reading his work. I've had this Commemorative Edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, unread for so many years (about 11 now) that I'm giving it another chance. I'd finished Call of Cthulu (2018) a few days back, so impressed was I that I wanted to see how it was compared to the book. I had intended to read the eponymous story but was so glued to the game that I couldn't make time for the original work. So that, and quite possibly Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth if you've the stomach for a slightly older FPS. And if you're into the tabletop I've heard many good and frightful things about the Call of Cthulu RPG by Chaosium Inc., as well as Achtung! Cthulu. What I'd give for Cthulu Invictus, the Ancient Roman Cthulu RPG book.... Ahem. The Dark Conspiracy tabletop RPG would also support Lovecraftian stuff well I think, being Near-Future and containing supernatural phenomenon and the like. We Happy Few sort of has Lovecraftian vibes to it, but is more steeped in an Orwellian, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol/Jubilee influence than Cthulu as such.

Like many aspects of video game design, traps are only as good as FARTing. Which is to say, Finding and Removing Traps. I'm currently playing We Happy Few, which has a few problems: Scarcity. Encounters with tripwires are far and few between. This means that when they come up they feel like they're a cheap way of taking a liberal chunk of the player's health away. Now some of these are hidden by darkness and the player can be blamed for not having a torch, which, err, sees too little use to be considered than going in somewhere new fumbling in the dark. "Disarmament". Disarming traps in We Happy Few almost always means either jumping over them (to surprising effectiveness), or sprinting through them thus activating them (an exploded bomb is technically disarmed) and either taking damage or.... not. Disarmament. If you're unfortunate enough to have any content left over by the time you get the Multitool required to disarm traps properly, then you'll have to hold down the X button to do so like when you've got several lockers to use the lockpick on, or a few planks of wood boarding up an entrance to be broken with your jimmy bar. It's another pain for the player to deal with it on top of the misery of (what will probably be) an extra 40 hours of that. Because of the nature of We Happy Few (a first person "immersive sim", or to use a less masturbatory name for the genre, a "0451" game) the player has the advantage of seeing traps for themselves. Compare this to something like Baldur's Gate, an isometric Computer Roleplaying Game (CRPG) based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition (AD&D 2E) ruleset. In Baldur's Gate, the most capable member of the party should be FARTing at all times outside of combat, which will run a scan once every six seconds to find any traps within the vicinity. The more points they have in the skills that aid in their detection of traps, the more easily they will come up and can be attempted to be disarmed. Successful disarmament means it doesn't blow everyone to kingdom come; unsuccessful disarmament at best means the situation doesn't change, and at worst it means it's time to reload your last save because who wants to carry the remains and loot of your party member to the nearest temple? Not my Lv. 4 Dragon Disciple Sorcerer. It's important to note that in D&D traps are essentially written as "you find it or you don't / you disarm it or you don't", and it takes great enginuity on the Game Master's (GM) part to make them better than that. Otherwise every single room in every single dungeon is going to begin with the Rogue saying "I look for traps", which is canonical (read: tiresome) a phrase as "I have Darkvision". So, how do we build a better man trap? Consistency. Ironically this is something of a trap itself, like a bomb that only arms itself upon going beyond a speed limit. Going below that speed limit means only one thing: kaboom. When a trap is introduced to a game, it must then either feature heavily (exclusively or almost exclusively) in that level, or traps have to appear every so many hours/dungeons. Think of it as the Start-to-Crate review system: forgetting you have traps and then add them later on to fill space shows a lack of imagination. Senses. How does one FART? Do we see a tripwire? Does our character make a sniffing sound? Do we hear a ticking noise that's gradually speeding up? How we find a trap is just as important as the trap's effect itself. The Dance of Death. It's important that players are equipped with the means to deal with traps the moment they encounter them, unless it's made clear before such lethalities that backtracking to get to goodies seen earlier is expected. Backtracking is a fundamental part of surviving We Happy Few, so the Multitool fits in to the mediocre interfacing that is one of the game's defining characteristics. However, it comes so late in the game that backtracking at that point is miserable. Don't make your backtracking miserable - give the player the tools early on enough that they can easily retrace their steps, but not so early that they feel they're just being yanked around for the Hell of it. The Dance of Death (Again). Supposing you're not making a game with backtracking though. Disarming traps shouldn't be the only way to make it past something, especially if disarmament is a minigame. The minigame, like everything else in the game, should be fun. Not everyone else likes minigames like I do though, so it's important that if the player can't do it there's an alternative way that uses their character skills rather than player logic skills. Something like a crawlspace they need to uncover, or enemies they have to plough through. They should have to do something to progress, if indeed the trap is preventing progress. Consequence. One problem with traps is they're just annoying. Health can be healed, and keeping me in place for several real time minutes because I continuously fail my dexterity saving throw (every CRPG with a web spell ever) causes irreversable damage to my opinion of the game going forward. You can go with stat losses and semi-permanent damage that can only be healed by something like an Injury Kit or a Surgery skill, but again that's a problem that goes away. What isn't as easily healed is pride. The trap might be harmless to the player, but not the safe they're trying to crack, which destroys the contents inside of it. Their perfect stealth run can be ruined by the crushing of glass beneath their feet, alerting the nearby enemies. An explosion doesn't have to harm the player, but an explosion usually means danger to all inside the dungeon, does it not? Reward. Like what I'd said about dungeons in another post of yours, traps don't come from nowhere. They are built with purpose. Whether to catch food or trespassers, or simply for the sadistic pleasure of watching someone weep as their precious goodies end up being melted away in jar of acid, they are borne of someone's enginuity, time and resources. People typically don't trap something unless there's value, or they've had something of value taken from them. How many people buy security cameras after they've been burgled, for instance? I'd be surprised if there were that many, because they think it won't happen to them until it does. In order to be burgled though there has to be the idea there's something worth burgling. Think of it from the point of view of the trap maker, however (un)skilled they may be - what would make them defend their property to such a possibly lethal extent? When you put yourself in their shoes, you can end up making the player's reward as good for them as it is for you as a designer. So there's my long-winded thoughts as ever. I should be reading Lovecraft, but I couldn't resist talking about another topic I do so enjoy. For further reading I recommend The Angry GM's "Traps Suck" article, which focusses on tabletop RPG traps but nonetheless begins with how Super Mario World help him appreciate - and deteste - traps, good and bad.

I'm currently playing We Happy Few set in England's swinging sixties, or slumming sixties if you're a Downer. You don't want to be a Downer, do you? Take your Joy. Not got any? You'd best run off to one of those repurposed telephone boxes and get yourself some from the Mood Booth. I hear there's a new Coconut flavour coming out. Here, why do the Mood Booths say "telephone" on them? I.... can't remember. Not that I need to. Well, is that the time? I'm due for my Joy. Vanilla this time, my favourite!

For all their faults, Bethesda Game Studios have an incredible dungeon design philosophy in the Fallout games. Here are my observations: Purpose. The dungeon isn't there because it's something for the player to do. It has a reason to exist in the context of the world. Schools, factories, towns and Vaults are all reasonable expectations in that setting, and are reasonably expected to provide the following: essential items (food, water, medicine), utilities (crafting materials), or at the very least shelter from the elements and baddies outdoors. Granted, these places should be picked clean but you can always take the goods from the current occupiers. Not every bandit exists solely to be XP fodder (OK, in the video game sense sure, but in lore, they've all got their reasons. In Fallout, the harsh world creates a harsher people). In the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion mines are differentiated from caves because of their mineral value and the assets within (boarded up walls, pickaxes strewn around) and their more even surfaces. Believable Structure. See above with location; what does a school look like? It's not going to have spike pits and holding cells. Nor is it going to have an abundance of lockers, a cafeteria, a playground and gym. Without these things you might as well have the spike pits and holding cells. A dungeon never starts out as a dungeon. Even a labyrinthian cave, a natural structure, can still have some logic for why its occupants reside there - is it warm, is it cool, is it spacious, is it cramped, is it near a viable food source or running water? Resident Evils. Who resides in the dungeon, and more importantly, why? As said above nobody wants to live in a dungeon because it's a dungeon; they won't live there of their own accord unless it provides a boon. Are they criminals on the run, or have they got the perfect place to ambush travellers? Is it the only place its nocturnal occupants can sleep? And if there's numerous types of creature living there, how do they survive? Which is the invasive species? Reward. A reward doesn't have to be material, though it can be for those who want to get something out of delving in dungeons. If it is material I always find a cache at the end of hardships (solving puzzles or besting beasties) to be a satisfying conclusion. As a game programming note, make a note that the player has completed the dungeon at least once, even if the loot can respawn. But some rewards are better than the material. Again, see Fallout and the odd Elder Scrolls cave - nearly all of them have a story via audio logs, diaries, or environmental assets such as bones or locked rooms with gas or water leaking from underneath them. I couldn't tell you of any weapons I've found in any of these dungeons, but I can tell you of the elections you didn't want to win of Vault 11, or the inescapable island where Bravil's debtors end up. That just about covers the fundamentals of what I think is good dungeon design.

I'm rather bias against The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, particularly in its art style, so any that I choose would rank low compared to Oblivion's. However, I greatly enjoyed the Hearthfire DLC and the houses that I can build with that, so I'd say those are my favourite. I didn't spend much time with the purchasable houses that came with the game so I wouldn't know how good they are exactly. I'd probably say the one in Riften is my favourite, as that was my favourite location in the game, Markarth a close second.

I very much like to gamble, but it's far more fun and safer with fake video game money. I'd rather have that as a safe outlet for my habit than suffer withdrawal symptoms and possibly relapse into going into real money gambling, a problem I've spoken about in threads you mention regarding loot boxes. If I had to choose my favourite games, farkle from Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an unusual but incredibly fun dice game especially because you can cheat with all manner of collectable die. However for a more conventional game, I can't go wrong with any game's version of Texas Hold 'Em, or bog standard Poker.

It's because of this enemy that I'm probably going to give up trying to escape them and begin a new playthrough when better prepared, but the Skeleton Beast from Dark Souls is one of the coolest monsters I've ever seen. Essentially it's a giant skeleton on all fours that swipes and leaps at the player, which isn't too scary in itself save for the damage it does. It's more that you can't see it until it's too late, even with the lantern that illuminates the unnatural darkness within the cave. I say "one of", but contendors in addition to the Skeleton Beast include the Bone Tower, the eldritch equivilant of a Pokey; and the Wheel Skeleton, or "zoombies" as I call them for their immense speed shooting out of the darkness.

I rarely beat a game as quickly as other people, especially if we go by Steam's way of clocking hours played (which is hours the app has been open, even if it isn't in use or doesn't launch correctly). I typically alt-tab to do all sorts of stuff, leaving games on in the background as I do things that could add upwards of three hours per day onto the time recorded. However I like to think I'm good at guesstimating the time I'm away and how much I can deduct from the counter shown on Steam, but even then I'd still say I spend much longer than the average person, even longer than other completionists.

A game should be as long as it needs to be to do what it sets out to do. Some can do that in under an hour, and some can do that over fifty hours. Much as I'd like to be the editor in charge of some of these games and chop out several acts at a time, I realise that would be heartbreaking for a lot of artists whose games are their life's work, so the compromise is they make their game and I begrudgingly play it or don't.

I got addicted to Warhammer: Chaos and Conquest, a ripoff of Vikings: War of Clans, which is arguably already a ripoff of the browser game Travian. It practically requires addiction, clicking ever popup to build your stronghold because you can lose everything at a moment's notice in its dog-eat-dog setting. This was only exacerbated by joining a #1 ranked Warband (guild) where one had to move in locked step to the leader's orders, kicking and repeatedly pillaging those who weren't active for any more than 24 hours at a time. The glory was short lived as we massively outranked our enemies, allowing them only to rebuild their forces so we could take pleasure in a slightly more evened playing field, still in our favour. I eventually had to quit as I couldn't keep up with my comrades-in-arms, paying their way to the top where I refused to give any more than £20 in total before I descended into further madness.

Exclusively via text, even though I love the sound of my own voice. Plus, being autistic, I have difficulty wording things verbally so writing will always be preferable. I find it interesting you improved English via chatting in video games. Nice one! And don't let bullies get you down - being from England myself, we're not exactly a country full of pleasant accents and mannerisms which to use them. At least yours will be clearer than mine (Yorkshire accent), which sounds like I'm chewing a sock with a wasp in it.

The reality is I likely never will have the time to play all of them, assuming I even want to. As I say they're mostly impulse purchases or from the ever generous bundles. In regards to storage, this is on Steam so I don't have to have them all downloaded at once, though I do have a lot across various launchers.

1,763 collected over 10 years. I can't say how many of those I've completed (at least 3), or even how many I will play. I'm not proud to have impulse purchased so many games, but a few hundred of those have brought - and will bring - many good times.

I used Sony Movie Studio 13, which had fewer features than Vegas Pro but was significantly cheaper. It's still a robust editing software that will allow you to do what you want to; I was only then limited by Adobe Photoshop, a higher resolution camera and competence. As for how long it takes to edit that depends entirely on the video. A 1 hour episode of a Let's Play took me about 2 and a half hours to render (not including the chopping and changing), though I was rendering it on an i3-8100 CPU, and not the i7-9700 I have at the moment which would probably do wonders for it. Whereas a video review of ~15 minutes would take me a good three full time days to do if I was into it, which I rarely was, so some videos would take weeks at a time before they were ready, yet the rendering process was unaffected by my enthusiasm because that's entirely on the hardware. However long it takes, it's a lot shorter if you enjoy doing it. Good hardware also helps. ^^