I have also never played it and bought the remastered version a few weeks ago.
I can’t decide whether the facial animations are really wonky or if it’s some as-yet undiagnosed aspect of my personality but wow, I am crap at choosing the correct dialogue path. You could plow through it only ever hitting the same button and still get better results than me…
“Well, she’s clearly lying about something in her witness statement. I should probably gently hint that I don’t believe that she’s telling me everything about the murder she just witnessed.”
(Hits button)
“WHY WON’T YOU ADMIT YOU WORSHIP SATAN AND KILLED HIM YOURSELF AS PART OF SOME SICK RITUAL?”
Check out this article. Not only were the dialogue options mislabeled from the start, but there’s no real great way to relabel them to fix the issue (though I think that Coax, Force, Lie makes more sense than Truth, Doubt, Lie).
One thing I’m digging about this game is I’m often wrong with the dialogue options and I don’t care**. It makes it feel more real, rather than a game where you go from find evidence > convict person.
It may not be the intention, but being able to make mistakes, miss evidence, say the wrong thing etc and still have things progress for good or ill is refreshing.
Played through Bridge Constructor: Portal just recently. Nice physics puzzler, and gets some of that Portal flavor that Valve’s been letting stagnate. The difficulty progression is mostly smooth, though there were a few stumpers that were followed by far easier levels.
Currently playing the original Bridge Constructor and, well… I really liked the interface and motion of the Portal version better. I keep accidentally deleting portions of the bridges when I’m just trying to cancel out of a tool I’m using. The difficulty also seems much more uneven, with some early levels requiring a completely different approach from the level before them. The music and sound effects aren’t great, either. Still a decent puzzler, but it feels much less polished.
Oddly, I could have sworn I’d briefly played a “Bridge Constructor” some time ago that was much more like the Portal version. Not sure what game I might be thinking of there.
I was enjoying Bridge Constructor Portal but I got stuck on Level 53 of 60. And now these later levels require so many pieces and so much fine tuning that I’ve given up for now. (Also I haven’t yet succeeded getting the convoy through on levels 31 and 47, though I did get the single forklift through.) I am not sure if I’ll continue. Maybe if I get stuck at the DMV for a long wait. It’s fun, but those hard ones are hard! Also there isn’t enough GLaDOS.
And I thought there might be some penalty for going over budget, but if there even is a budget I didn’t see it.
I thought it was rather odd that it calculates up what you spent, but doesn’t do anything with the results. It makes it a lot easier (mentally) to try really crazy solutions, and makes more sense in the Portal universe (can’t really see glados as a penny-pincher considering the random and silly “science” tests) but it still felt a bit weird.
Yeah, that one’s a bit of a nightmare. My drivers ended up flying through the air through most of it, but getting the first one to hit both buttons rather than just barely missing one took a LOT of trial-and-error adjustments of their launches.
I also got the distinct impression that the physics engine changes ever-so-slightly between sending one driver through and sending a whole convoy. In particular, cubes tended to have an annoying habit of bouncing in a completely different way and spoiling carefully-adjusted paths.
Yeah, weird. I haven’t played the original Bridge Constructor, but I got the impression that you actually had a budget to stay within. Maybe that would have made this Portal version just too hard to enjoy. God knows I went crazy on many of the more complicated levels with a lot of probably extraneous pieces. But no matter how frugally I built, at the end it tells me “You wastefully spent: $xxxxx.” At the very least they could get rid of the insulting adverb if you actually use the minimum possible number of parts. I guess scoring the game is just trying to minimize the expenditures, but there’s no reward system in place for that that I can see. Maybe… cake?
I picked this up on Steam today. I was suckered in by the theme, but it’s pretty much Crimsonland with more colors and some fun extra abilities. Not bad though.
Yep, the original has a budget, and keeps track of total scores. It also has achievements for things like building any one (successful) bridge a certain amount below the given budget. The budgets are frustrating at times… they really constrain the solution space, especially with the way the game often limits the materials you can use while also very strictly limiting possible attachment points.
I think the Portal version was probably improved by leaving that out and just focusing on the architectural challenge. Of course, I did start out trying to minimize spend as much as I could, until I realized it didn’t matter. I eventually just took the “wastefully” bit as one of GLaDOS’s usual insults showing that her sarcasm core is working.
“sailing through the air…majestically…like an eagle…piloting a blimp.”
Holy poopsticks I die, all the time, I die. I get parasites and infections! I’m thirsty all the damn time! And suddenly everyone is really hard to kill! I got killed by bloatflies for petes sake! But I like it! Is good! Makes you really plan out your next moves and what you really want to be doing! (4th play through, shut up!)
I keep hearing about how good Subnautica is. Currently I have it on my Steam wishlist waiting on a sale, but I could be convinced to go ahead and pick it up.
I played Fallout: New Vegas on survival mode. I liked it. Mostly it involved taking naps and finding water. Eventually I found a water purifier and some goofy halo thing that constantly healed me (though slowly) so most of the survival stress went away. And once I realized that ammo had weight, I dumped a shit-ton of 5mm and 10mm bullets and regained untold carrying capacity.
I don’t think I played that mode in F4. Did I? Can’t remember. I should try F4 again, though I was ultimately disappointed by it.
Am I the only person that reflexively checks how long it is until Far Cry 5 comes out, each time I see another article about how trump voters think he’s the best president ever?
I’m also replaying New Vegas! LOL When I die too often in 4 I’ll switch back to New Vegas and go kill some of Caesers troops for a while. Defo the story is better in New Vegas, but the modding of armor and weapons in 4 is amazing and the levelling up never ends, and the DLC is amazing. Dead Money is great don’t get me wrong, but Far Harbor could be a game all on its own!
I like Far Harbor a lot, but all the crafting in F4 was a drag for me, mostly because of how hard it was to collect resources. If I’m going on an actual mission to collect aluminum cans, then I’m not playing a game; I’m homeless in L.A.
I spent a great deal of the game being really frugal with my power armor usage, thinking that fusion cores would end up being a lot rarer than they were. Turns out I keep scrambling for aluminum and copper to keep repairing and upgrading the damned things. Fusion cores aren’t a problem at all.
My other problem with the power armor was after a while I was already so OP it was just more of an annoyance than anything. About the only time I really used it was when I first went to the irradiated wasteland and needed all the help I could get against the super deathclaws and super radscorpions.
This discussion is making me want to play the Fallouts again. I got through 1 and 3, but not 2, 4, or New Vegas. I think I’d go back to New Vegas again before 4, primarily because I found all the crafting and settlement stuff in 4 to be out of place and the VATS changes made it less enjoyable and more FPSy. But now I’m wondering what all I missed out on by not finishing 2…
