That’s an awesome, classic table. Nice!
Until last week, I was trying to get as much time in at one of the best pinball arcades in the country before it closed. Sadly, good things don’t always last.
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A podcast that I have a personal affiliation with mentioned Pinball Wizards on their latest episode:
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Darkest Dungeon just got a huge update, if anyone else is playing. It looks nicer, but is harder. The enemies seem smarter.
Currently cycling through Ticket to Ride, Catan and Carcassone on the PC as I can’t find peeps to play boardgames IRL.
That Planetbase looks good though
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Catan as a videogame pales in comparison to the boardgame. The whole point of the boardgame is that you make and break alliances, fuck each other over and generally manipulate the gameworld socially; playing against AI is no fun at all…
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I whole heartily agree, but it has helped me grok the expansion rules better than the once in a blue moon I can play with humanoids
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I got a Diablo 3 Necromancer beta invite the other day. It’s been a lot of fun – not unlike the first experience playing D3 as a Wizard and joyfully disintegrating stuff and being thankful you weren’t a potion drinking machine anymore. Though in this case, it’s more like… tearing the blood out of the nearest enemy, then using their bones as a missile to kill the biggest one, then exploding that corpse to wipe out all of its lesser allies, while your skeleton squad keeps enemies away from your own squishy self. It’s morbid, metal, fun 
And it’s a really smooth experience without all the “I need mana” and “not enough hatred” and “you can’t afford your medical bills” and whatever.
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My screentime games (i.e., Steam) lately have been longtime favorites 7 Days to Die (with an extensive mod) and Torchlight II. I’ve also been trying out Democracy 3 and Poly Bridge. These last two are particularly good because I can play them with just the mouse while petting the cat with my other hand.
Up thread, there was the discussion about playing ‘evil’ characters? I find something similar with Democracy 3. There are achievements I will never be able to get simply because I can’t bring myself to implement certain policies in even a fictional country.
In the real world, we’re just at the starting to organize a Pathfinder game based very loosely on The Pirates of Dark Water. (I’ve never seen it, but the GM is a fan.) I’m really more of a GURPS player, but I don’t currently have the spoons to run a game, and this is what the GM is most comfortable running.
Also in the real world, the “game” I’ve been playing most is Zombies, Run!, which I really feel like I should start a new thread to discuss a bit, but right now, I have to go out and evade a few dozen zeds!
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Nethack. Still.
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My controller of choice for Descent was either keyboard only, or keyboard and a Sidewinder 3D Pro. I can’t imagine playing that game with any fewer inputs at hand. The people who actually chose to play it with a mouse are a sick fascination to me…
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Oh man, I remember playing Knights of the Sky (great old WWI fighter pilot game) on keyboard, madly tapping the cursors to line up my stream of bullets with my target… Dogfighting like that was mental.
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It was actually surprisingly smooth in Descent, but having the ability to strafe was a large part of that… rotation for the gross, quick part of the aim, with a little sideways slide to fine-tune. It still meant a LOT of button dancing, but it was absolutely possible to hold your own in multiplayer against someone using a joystick.
Of course, finding someone else who could wrap their heads around the game enough to want to play multiplayer with you was a whole 'nother challenge…
And then there was the fun of setting up a multiplayer connection if you weren’t on the same LAN.
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I just (more or less) finished Mass Effect: Andromeda, after 80-some hours to finish the main story missions and get to around 92% completion. I’m not gonna bother with the rest of it, I don’t think. I’ve long since gotten all five of my planets up to 100% viability, so what remains is pretty much driving around literally looking for rocks (even the quest is called “Banging Rocks Together”) and shooting rando Kett dudes. Not sure what I’m going to play next. I’m most looking forward to Red Dead Redemption 2, though now that I’ve had a peek at Anthem, that one looks mighty tempting. I’m just afraid it’s gonna end up being a prettier Destiny clone, and Destiny ended up pissing me off as a lone wolf single-player who utterly resents the MMO grind. I enjoyed enough of Destiny and The Taken King that I might possibly get Destiny 2, but don’t bet the mortgage payment on it.
Having seen what they announced at E3 this week, I was somewhat vexed that Bethesda is trying to keep us playing Skyrim and Fallout 4 instead of putting out an actual TES 6 or F5. I was roundly disappointed in F4 after all the wonderful times I had in F3 and (especially) F:NV. And I’m simply tired of Skyrim. In case anyone has Bethesda’s ear: I don’t care about crafting or micromanaging. That shit ain’t fun. Also: hire eight or ten more NPC voice actors, especially for the innumerable villager/soldier/raider NPCs. And if you’re gonna do factions, do 'em right, like Obsidian did in New Vegas. Make our choices have real, tangible, in-game consequences!
I think I may have to get around to finishing Witcher 3. Everyone tells me it’s fantastic, but I’m a couple hours in and it has yet to grab me. I also would like to finish Dragon Age: Inquisition but I bought it for my Xbox 360 before I had an Xbone, and goddamn but it’s fugly on the 360. I’m maybe 4 hours into it, and can’t really face the prospect of diving back in, even though I really like those Bioware RPGs. (Though Andromeda sure disappointed me. I mean, I played it and enjoyed it, but you could tell it was rushed to meet a release date, and was not nearly up to former Mass Effect quality, both technically and–more importantly–writingwise.)
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Without any spoilers as this is next in my backlog - how was it (beyond disappointing ) ? I loved the first three games but I’ve heard so many mixed things about the new one. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
I still need to get through Persona 5. I’m 70 hours in and I feel a loong way away from completion. 
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If you haven’t yet, you might want to check this out:
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Well, it’s tough to describe the experience without spoilers, but I’ll try. I too loved the first three, and felt they got better and better with each iteration, though I was certainly one of the many who were very disappointed and let down by the ending of ME3. I honestly wasn’t bothered about whether Shepard lived or died at the end , but the undeniable fact that the ending relied not at all upon any of the decisions you’d made in the three games leading up to it, unlike every other part of the saga, really bugged the shit out of me.
Still, the overall experience was one of my favorites in my entire videogaming career, so I was very excited to learn there’d be a new Mass Effect. I was a tad nonplussed at the early reports of facial animation problems, especially the videos that compared the 2007 Mass Effect to the 2017 Andromeda, but frankly I don’t play these games for the graphics. Still, it was concerning, and actually indicative of the fact that, although Bioware started development of Andromeda five years ago, most of the actual game was created in the final 18 months or so of that time. You should check out Jason Schreier’s largely spoiler-free article about this game’s development over at Kotaku. (EDIT: ninjaed by @LockeCJ!)
Technical issues aside, I got this nagging feeling while I was playing the game that may have been related to whatever it was that set off those sexist jerks Jason mentioned in his article that figured “SJWs” ruined the game. I dunno. I just kept feeling like the Mary Sue element of the Andromeda story was strong. Much stronger than in previous ME games, anyway. The game felt… well, too easy, not in a combat sense (for the most part, the combat’s just great), but almost as if all my decisions had consequences that… well, didn’t make a hell of a lot of practical difference. Even if I made decisions that certain NPCs strongly disagreed with, they generally seemed to get over it awfully quickly. At one point, I reverted to an earlier save point just to briefly pursue an alternate plot decision, and while I was there, I redid a certain heart-to-heart conversation with one of my potential love-interest crewmates. Unlike my first trip through the conversation, on my second pass I knew I wasn’t going to pursue her, so I took the conversation in a much less sympathetic direction, just to see what would happen. She seemed slightly taken aback for about three seconds, then chirpily smiled and told me I was right about my opinion, blithely thanked me for the fresh perspective, said it made her feel much better, and carried on just as cheerful as before.
Basically, there are plenty of ways to die in this game, though only the ones that happen several firefights past your last checkpoint are particularly inconvenient (stepping off a cliff, for Christ’s sake, doesn’t even take the trouble to kill you; it just fades to black for a second and respawns you a foot or two back from the edge). But even though there are plenty of FPS-style deaths in store for you, it sure seems that it’s really hard to actually fuck up and make any genuinely wrong decisions in the game. In retrospect, I don’t even know if it’s ever possible to kill off any major characters through making a “bad” decision… or at all. I was waiting for a Kaiden-or-Ashley moment, and for me at least, one never came.
Instead, I kept collecting congratulations from countless NPCs for doing something no-one else had been able to do. Most of my successes felt wholly unearned, unlike the older ME games where I often had to really weigh a decision before committing to it. Andromeda really felt like a ME-flavored RPG designed for people who have never played an RPG before, and there are two or three difficulty settings easier than the one I played on. (And I’m kinda terrible at shooters anyway.)
I dunno. So much of the game feels to me like a misallocation of resources. There are a zillion different guns and lots of crafting to do, but it all feels like a waste of time and energy. (I built and leveled up a Black Widow sniper rifle and never gave another moment’s thought about gun crafting.) There are several different “profiles” that kinda work as skill-loadouts, but you can switch between any unlocked ones on the fly at any time, so you never feel locked into any given character build. So that removes any potential interesting tension there. I just picked the one that let me snipe the hardest and left that profile on, all the time. Unlike the old ME games, I never bothered to learn any biotic skills for my character, nor even any melee ones. I just plain shot my way through the game, which never seemed remotely difficult except for when fighting one of the “Architects,” which are big robotic bosses that show up on occasion (there are maybe a half dozen in the game, and I fought four of them in total). Those guys are just extremely time- and ammo-consuming slogs, and they don’t make a hell of a lot of sense either.
I never touched the multiplayer game. There are missions you can undertake in two ways: either play them yourself in multiplayer, or send a “strike team” to do the mission for you, and either way if you succeed, you get… I dunno, loot, I guess. I always sent out a strike team, which nearly always was successful, and I kept getting money and loot thereby that I never bothered to spend. That whole economy side of the game just never seemed to matter. By the end I had many tens of thousands of credits and ungodly amounts of XP, and nothing that I could think of to spend any of it on. Except a snazzy red paint job for my Nomad. I did buy that.
Anyway. It’s worth playing, it really is, but man, you really do get the feeling that Bioware sunk way too much time and effort on the wrong parts of the game. But I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to your opinion of it.
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For what it’s worth, my housemate’s a huge Mass Effect fan, and has really enjoyed Andromeda, while also acknowledging that it didn’t feel as epic or meaningful as his adventures with Commander Shepard. It brought back the Mako for lots of planetary exploration, the combat and upgrades seemed fun, and he especially enjoyed interacting with the old Krogan, Drack, on his team. He’s certainly spent a huge amount of time playing it, and has had a lot of fun exploring and flying around, as well as doing lots of multiplayer missions.
But @Donald_Petersen 's criticisms are valid in that the writing and overall production seemed like a B-team effort, somehow. My housemate pointed out that while ME2 and 3 got big splashy launches with multiple soundtracks, art-of books, and fancy collector’s editions, Andromeda didn’t. No extras, no collectibles, no DLC. It feels like it got abandoned, which is sad.
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Yeah, this.
According to Schreier’s article, the Bioware crew in Edmonton, which had developed the first three ME games, was pulled off Andromeda so that they could work on Anthem instead, and Andromeda was assigned to the Bioware team in Montreal. Maybe that had something to do with it as well as the wheel-spinning that took place while they tried to make procedurally-generated worlds, which turned out to be biting off more than they could chew given the limitations of the Frostbite engine.
But there’s something philosophically askew about Andromeda as well. It feels almost as if they were trying way too hard to make the game more accessible to players outside the straight-white-cis-male gamer stereotype, and fell all over themselves doing so. Much was made of how they screwed up with their trans character (she somewhat atypically outs and deadnames herself almost immediately upon meeting the player character, which isn’t too terribly representative of the usual lived experience), and they’ve updated the game so that the male Ryder has more opportunities for gay romance, though still not as many as the female Ryder does. (By my count, as a male Ryder you can romance five women and three men, and as a female Ryder you have opportunities for three men and four women.) The romantic spectrum representation is great (and you don’t have to romance anyone at all if that ain’t your thing), but as I mentioned before, there’s a high Mary Sue quotient as well. In RPGs with character creators like Mass Effect, Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls, I always play as a female character for various reasons, but one of the things I like to see during gameplay is if I notice my character being treated noticeably differently for being female. Usually I don’t, except in instances like in the last few Fallouts when I might get a perk like Black Widow or Cherchez La Femme that gives me an edge over opposite sex or same sex NPCs respectively. But anyway, in the first 3 Mass Effect games, my FemShep was an Ellen Ripley grade badass. She didn’t feel particularly masculine or anything, but her dialogue (on both sides) never felt tuned to her sex or gender. People took her seriously at every turn, and it felt easy for me to take her seriously. (The only time I couldn’t take her seriously was when she was drinking or dancing at the Citadel’s bar. Holy Christ did that look awkward as hell.)
My female Ryder, on the other hand, is supposed to be a relatively low-grade officer at the start. Her dad gets all the respect, but my character is supposed to be youngish and absolutely new to command. And yeah, plenty of characters second-guess her, especially in the first half of the game. But no matter what boneheaded shit I pulled, if I completed a mission at all, I’d level up and have to record some speech for posterity and generally get treated like the hierarchical equivalent of Shepard’s boss, when all along I’m just playing as a wisecracking, informal twentysomething who gets dropped into the thick of crisis after crisis like the battle-hardened and experienced N7 that Shepard was. I mean, the game seems deliberately designed to kiss the player’s ass about how awesome and competent they are, even if their play decisions objectively suck ass. I’m sorely tempted to start a playthrough as a male Ryder to see if I get the same impression, because I’d be horrified to think that this impression is predicated on the fact that I was playing as a woman half my age and that my own sexism prevents me from seeing her as a competent professional.
I don’t think so, though. I never got that impression with my female Shepard. But Ryder has one loyalty mission that consists of going to a desert planet and scattering seeds by tossing them oh so prettily into the air. And there’s a whole series of side missions that aren’t anything more than going from planet to planet and collecting various and sundry snacks for, of all things, a movie night for the crew on our ship. And this series of missions is spread out over DAYS. Somebody was writing missions for the game for people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to concern themselves with suspending any science fictional disbelief… like, at all. There’s even a quest to find out what’s leaving crumbs all over the ship; a quest that results in you owning a cute, fluffy little space pet in your quarters. It squeaks adorably when you click on it!
I just keep remembering how carefully I had to play in ME2 to cultivate my crew’s loyalty and keep everyone alive and leveled up to make it through the final battle, and how I played the minigames and side apps and stuff on ME3 to try and ensure the best outcome for everyone, whereas in Andromeda I played zero multiplayer and blew off most of the strike team missions and didn’t spend more than a couple hundred credits during the entire game and found it way too easy to reach 100% viability on any given planet and rarely remembered to sell off any salvage or mined resources and still got to 92% completion with an apparently happy galaxy. I wonder if it’s possible to lose at this game, or at least to finish in a less than satisfactory fashion. And I wonder if, in Bioware’s desire to achieve maximum accessibility, they nerfed the thinking part of the game as opposed to just the combat part (which would be where the five or six difficulty settings come in).
I don’t want to think they did that. I want everyone to be able to play, but I can’t help but feel that Andromeda holds your hand way too tightly, not as an FPS but as an RPG with a story.
And now that we’ve seen what Bioware Edmonton has been up to on Anthem, I grieve for the dregs of what Andromeda could, and should, have been.
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That was a lot to unpack so all I can say is thank you for your insights!
I definitely felt that they kind of wrote themselves into a corner at the end of ME3 but the ending didn’t make me as aggro as it did some people. I just wish there was another way beyond “no matter what you do you’re dead in the end”. It was kind of a cop out (but alas it seems like many episodic games end this way).
Anyway looking forward to ME:A even though it’ll be quite a while before I get to it.
Which is so weird to me because Bioware has shown with past games that they can do gay and trans characters very well and without relying on the usual clichés.
Oh you mean DestinEA? Blech, because all the world needs is yet another MMOish 3rd person space shooter game.
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You’re very welcome! Thank you for giving me an opportunity to rant. I guess I needed it.
Well, I think they could (and should) have thought of a way around it, but they had a point they wanted to make, and goddammit they were gonna make it, and be true to their “creative vision.” (Snort.) I hope they finally understood that the biggest deal wasn’t that there was no way for Shepard to survive but rather that unlike every other key decision point in all three games leading up to that point over five years, it literally made no difference at all what you had done in the past; you just picked a color and died and watched an epilogue that was barely distinguishable from the other two.
I know, right? These guys are usually better than that, I thought, or at least less clumsy.
It’s awfully pretty though. And here’s what’s tempting me: even though I loathe the MMO loot/weapon/armor grind, and though I play solo so I never get to do raids, I genuinely enjoyed Destiny as a world-class shooter (Bungie basically perfected it over five Halo games), and if only they hadn’t shit the bed in the story department, I would have loved Destiny’s PvE campaign. I don’t expect Anthem to be Destiny’s equal in the shootin’ department, but Bioware can tell a story better than Bungie ever did, even in Andromeda. Anthem looks geared for clans and online co-op play, which is fairly useless to me (I don’t even own a working headset), but if they promise a good single-player campaign story, I am totally on board. Fingers crossed, since it looks so gorgeous!
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