South Park: Stick of Truth finally at a reasonable price of $13.59. Waiting was the right move.
Picked it up and played a bunch on the bus to Rochester. It's pretty good. I'm playing a thief with bar darts + extra bleed combined with a bunch of passive buffs to heal/drain health when attacking plus extra healing to make a crazy powerful character. I'm taking this too seriously for a game where my optimal build included a dildo for a while.
South Park: Stick of Truth finally at a reasonable price of $13.59. Waiting was the right move.
Picked it up and played a bunch on the bus to Rochester. It's pretty good. I'm playing a thief with bar darts + extra bleed combined with a bunch of passive buffs to heal/drain health when attacking plus extra healing to make a crazy powerful character. I'm taking this too seriously for a game where my optimal build included a dildo for a while.
I played it a bunch today. It's legit. I'm obviously a jew. I'm just picking what seems to be the strongest equipment available at any given moment. Just want to see all the stuff and avoid boring RPG combat as much as possible. The key to making it easy is to remember to modify your weapons and equipment with materia... I mean patches.
One thing I really like is that you can use an item and THEN attack. I find a lot of battles where I'm all alone without companions, every turn I use a tiny healing item and then attack. Makes things really easy.
Oh they already put up some weird auction mechanic thing on Steam. I don't think there is anything I'm really looking for anyway. I mostly bought everything I want during the Thanksgiving thing.
Oh they already put up some weird auction mechanic thing on Steam. I don't think there is anything I'm really looking for anyway. I mostly bought everything I want during the Thanksgiving thing.
There was no point to it. Everything worth getting was a few hundred thousand Gems, so unless you wanted to spend 2-3 times the cost of buying it normally on Gems just for the prestige of maybe winning it, rather than buying it, it was a bit of a non-starter.
Oh they already put up some weird auction mechanic thing on Steam. I don't think there is anything I'm really looking for anyway. I mostly bought everything I want during the Thanksgiving thing.
There was no point to it. Everything worth getting was a few hundred thousand Gems, so unless you wanted to spend 2-3 times the cost of buying it normally on Gems just for the prestige of maybe winning it, rather than buying it, it was a bit of a non-starter.
Yeah they took it down shortly after I said something about it because people were buying a shitload of gems or something through the store and things were going for millions of gems.
Yeah they took it down shortly after I said something about it because people were buying a shitload of gems or something through the store and things were going for millions of gems.
Sort of. They pulled it down due to a massive glitch allowing duping which lead to virtually instant hyperinflation, but then reset and reinstated the Auction after the fix, and it ran to conclusion after that.
After that, the cheaper of the more popular games still tended to go for anywhere from 50K, all the way up to 300K. Though you could still get a ton of shovelware for about 800, if you really wanted, which nobody did.
I would be fascinated by a Geeknights review of Euro Truck Simulator 2.
I like it. It's very zen.
I need some one to explain the love of Euro Truck Simulator to me, I like messing around in car games but I like going fast around circuits or even open world. Does driving a truck in game require a different set of skills (the largest vehicle I've driven in real life is an ambulance, but have driven shotgun in many cargo trucks in regional / farming areas).
My friend also plays Euro Truck Simulator 2 with a steering wheel setup for many hours at a time. He is not incredibly expressive when I ask what he enjoys about the game.
I love racing games. It's my favorite genre of video games. I love driving cars against other cars around circuits, across rally stages, and in Gymkhana. No other kind of game will make me swear, scream, cheer, fist pump, grit my teeth, or try to get just one tenth of a second faster over and over and over again like a racing game.
But that is not EuroTruck Simulator. It's slow by design and, above all, solitary. There are no competitors to beat. Even in the golf type sense of "you're not playing against players, you're playing the course" it's not particularly challenging; it's just regular roads. No surprises there. The learning curve of the controls is incredibly short and shallow. If you play with steering wheels and pedals, even more so, since you now have the ability to enact controls with analog nuance, as opposed to the digital boot stomping of keyboard controls.
No, no, no; This is a game about a driver, a truck, some road, and time.
Let me throw it into reverse for a minute.
Eurotruck Simulator 2 is, ostensibly, a game about being the owner of a fledgling trucking company. You start off as the only driver of the only truck. If you manage your resources well, you can eventually buy more trucks, get a proper home base to house said trucks, hire drivers to do jobs so you don't have to and expand across Europe. If you were to judge the game by mechanics and goals alone, this is a business simulator game (Like Football Manager) but from a first person view instead of the usual god-like overview view.
But the first person view alone doesn't make ET2 what it is to most players. The secret sauce is that it has an in-game clock. Most management games let you skip forward in time in big chunks between events. Your team plays a game in an instant. Your rock band has just played their show and you're looking at the t-shirt sales before they play their next gig 300 miles away. You hop from one action to another with no mind to how long those actions would actually take.
In ET2, you're the one doing the driving. You're picking up cargo, driving along the highways, and dropping them off. It's not real time (80 miles of driving won't take you an hour), but it's still time and you are actually doing it all. And this is where it all comes together.
With the first person view and the in-game clock, the game becomes less about the goals (deliveries, pickups, etc) and more about the journey. You've got places to go TO, yeah, but once you get there, it's only a few minutes until you're driving again. And the roads are easy and open. There aren't too many cars to avoid and you have to be a safe driver to avoid fines, so you take it at a easy, steady pace. You start to zone out and just let the years of driving experience you've gained on real roads connect with the new control's you've learned and defocus. Just like in the real world, you stop actively noticing the cars and exit signs and just maneuver to where you eventually need to be. You can have some music on and your brain starts to relax. You've done all this before for years and years in the real world and you can just follow the GPS. No sweat.
And, by the time you're done, it's a couple of hours later and you suddenly realize you no longer need the GPS to get from Birmingham to Glasgow. It's a game you can get lost in, not because it's engaging like Portal or BioShock might be, but because it's familiar and easy.
And that's about as good as I can put it. I don't love the game, but it is a way (of many ways) to relax.
The Shadowgate remake is only 5 bucks on Steam for the next 16 hours or so. It's one of the few games that have gone on sale this Winter Sale that I don't already own and have interest in. If I didn't already own "Dont Starve", "Battleblock Theater" and "Stanley Parable" I'd have picked them up in today's sale as well.
Comments
One thing I really like is that you can use an item and THEN attack. I find a lot of battles where I'm all alone without companions, every turn I use a tiny healing item and then attack. Makes things really easy.
A few free EA games on PS Store this weekend.
Definitely gonna grab the PvZ. I've been wondering how it plays as a FPS.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/11/7377043/steam-holiday-sale-paypal-leak-december-2014
Starwhal on sale. Good for holiday parties.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/263020/
After that, the cheaper of the more popular games still tended to go for anywhere from 50K, all the way up to 300K. Though you could still get a ton of shovelware for about 800, if you really wanted, which nobody did.
My friend also plays Euro Truck Simulator 2 with a steering wheel setup for many hours at a time. He is not incredibly expressive when I ask what he enjoys about the game.
I love racing games. It's my favorite genre of video games. I love driving cars against other cars around circuits, across rally stages, and in Gymkhana. No other kind of game will make me swear, scream, cheer, fist pump, grit my teeth, or try to get just one tenth of a second faster over and over and over again like a racing game.
But that is not EuroTruck Simulator. It's slow by design and, above all, solitary. There are no competitors to beat. Even in the golf type sense of "you're not playing against players, you're playing the course" it's not particularly challenging; it's just regular roads. No surprises there. The learning curve of the controls is incredibly short and shallow. If you play with steering wheels and pedals, even more so, since you now have the ability to enact controls with analog nuance, as opposed to the digital boot stomping of keyboard controls.
No, no, no; This is a game about a driver, a truck, some road, and time.
Let me throw it into reverse for a minute.
Eurotruck Simulator 2 is, ostensibly, a game about being the owner of a fledgling trucking company. You start off as the only driver of the only truck. If you manage your resources well, you can eventually buy more trucks, get a proper home base to house said trucks, hire drivers to do jobs so you don't have to and expand across Europe. If you were to judge the game by mechanics and goals alone, this is a business simulator game (Like Football Manager) but from a first person view instead of the usual god-like overview view.
But the first person view alone doesn't make ET2 what it is to most players. The secret sauce is that it has an in-game clock. Most management games let you skip forward in time in big chunks between events. Your team plays a game in an instant. Your rock band has just played their show and you're looking at the t-shirt sales before they play their next gig 300 miles away. You hop from one action to another with no mind to how long those actions would actually take.
In ET2, you're the one doing the driving. You're picking up cargo, driving along the highways, and dropping them off. It's not real time (80 miles of driving won't take you an hour), but it's still time and you are actually doing it all.
And this is where it all comes together.
With the first person view and the in-game clock, the game becomes less about the goals (deliveries, pickups, etc) and more about the journey. You've got places to go TO, yeah, but once you get there, it's only a few minutes until you're driving again. And the roads are easy and open. There aren't too many cars to avoid and you have to be a safe driver to avoid fines, so you take it at a easy, steady pace. You start to zone out and just let the years of driving experience you've gained on real roads connect with the new control's you've learned and defocus. Just like in the real world, you stop actively noticing the cars and exit signs and just maneuver to where you eventually need to be. You can have some music on and your brain starts to relax. You've done all this before for years and years in the real world and you can just follow the GPS. No sweat.
And, by the time you're done, it's a couple of hours later and you suddenly realize you no longer need the GPS to get from Birmingham to Glasgow. It's a game you can get lost in, not because it's engaging like Portal or BioShock might be, but because it's familiar and easy.
And that's about as good as I can put it. I don't love the game, but it is a way (of many ways) to relax.
I had no idea about the business management side of it. The growth of an empire explains the number of hours people have racked up with this game.