revlob

13 hours ago, R0b said:

Without spoilers, where does this sit in the series in terms of quality for each of you? I adore 1, 2 and Torna. No interest in the battlesystems; I love the games in spite of those complex barriers to the good characters, story and landscapes. 

I'm enjoying this more than 2, but I'm not sure yet if it'll topple(!) XC1 as my favourite in the series. The first game had the advantage of being such an incredible breath of fresh air for JRPGs, and a smaller, more focused cast. So far, 3 is more of a refinement than a revolution, and some of its characters are lost in the crowd. Eunie and Taion are great, whereas I forget Sena is a member of the team sometimes.

Is there some benefit to not using bonus XP?

Is there a collectopedia in this? I'd like to hunt down some of the materials I need for gem crafting, but unless they are named after monsters and you can remember where those monsters can be found, there's no way of knowing where to start looking. My memory of the previous games is a little fuzzy, but I thought they both had item checklists broken down by area.

For example, I need "Quadwing's Indulgence" for one of the level 1 gems, and I know I've seen Quadwings somewhere, but a dozen hours after I've unlocked gem crafting I still haven't bumped into that enemy again. I suspect now it was in one of the areas that I currently can't travel to, but it would be handy to have a list of what can be found where.

It made a bit more sense in XC2, where auto attacks were executed as combos of three, and triggering an Art broke that sequence. In XC3 though, nothing is actually "cancelled", as auto attacks all appear to be the same.

There's definitely no cancelling in the fighting game sense. Entire attack animations play through, and moves aren't prevented from landing when the "cancel" effect is achieved.

It's great at ratcheting up the tension, isn't it?

Is there more than two seasons? I thought there was an arc about majong where I lost interest because it got very "inside baseball", and without knowing how to play the game I struggled to understand the stakes. I know the author had another series that was specifically about mahjong though, so maybe I'm confusing things.

But yeah, Kaiji is great and people should watch it. There's a live action film too, I think...

It's been a while since I've seen it, but is season 2 the one with "the bog"?

I've bought thousands of Mayday premiums, and never had more than a handful damaged. Sounds like you've been very unlucky, sorry.

30 minutes ago, Talvalin said:

Currently watching SpyXFamily and The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer adaptation that just hit Amazon Prime in Japan. It's been about ten years since I read the latter series, so I may have to remind myself of what happens before attempting to decipher what's going on without the benefit of even Japanese subtitles.

Wow, they finally adapted Bicuit Hammer, huh? I remember when it used to regularly appear on "upcoming series" charts as a joke, complete with The Pillows doing the soundtrack.

Valve are fulfilling orders on a first-come first-served basis, and there's a separate queue for each model and region.

You placed your order ~7 days after they became available. So far, they have processed UK orders for the 256GB model up to those who ordered ~3 hours after preorders began. The percentage indicates how far they've got from order #1 to your position in the queue, assuming a linear progression (which it won't be).

37 minutes ago, Dirty Harry Potter said:

Hi apologies if there is an easier way to do this… I did try one of those online calculators but couldn’t figure out how to get an actual date…

 

I reserved on Fri, July 16, 2021 how far off getting one so you think I am? 

Depends on which model you ordered and at what time. Valve haven't even processed 2 hours of orders for the 512GB model yet.

If you log into the steam website, then visit this link: https://store.steampowered.com/reservation/ajaxgetuserstate?rgReservationPackageIDs=[595603,595604,595605]

Copy the value for rtReserveTime and paste it into the form here: https://getmydeck.ingenhaag.dev/

It should give you a rough idea.

I always hoped Chow would do more films like this and Shaolin Soccer, but as far as I know he never did.
 

I haven't managed to play my copy yet, but after reading through the rules it's remarkable how much of the design I recognise from elsewhere. Most of it is obviously Terraforming Mars, but there's bits of La Granja in there too. I could teach it to my group almost entirely by referencing other games we've played. As big TM fans I hope that just means we recognise and enjoy it, but at the same time I hope it doesn't mean it's a poor imitator.

13 hours ago, Chewylegs said:

Is it suitable for a 6 year old would you say?

1 hour ago, kamaran said:

It is quite dark. So I’d avoid if they are prone to nightmares. 

I wouldn't call it a dark film, at all. We took our six-year-old yesterday and she was laughing throughout. She does have an odd sense of humour though.

A few very slightly spoilery details about content:

Anyone hoping this was going to be cheaper on Steam, prepare to be disappointed.

Metal Gear Karts.

On 28/06/2013 at 21:10, revlob said:

I genuinely feel we're on a cusp, here. I don't believe it's sensationalist to suggest that devices like the Rift (because you can she sure it won't be the only VR headset to appear in the next few years) will fundamentally change the landscape of videogames. That when paired with titles like Routine, we're looking at entirely new kinds of experiences, levels of immersion simply impossible when staring at a TV in your living room from your sofa.

I think the next generation of consoles are fighting a losing battle.

Did you cast smaller dice to go inside larger dice? They seem to have an inner and an outer layer.

Whatever you've done, those look fab.

That was fantastic. It was the first time I've been for the full three days, I'm absolutely knackered but it's allowed me to experience the show in three different ways. On the Friday I was with friends, getting exciting about the group's new acquisitions and playing silly card games until midnight in the hotel. I was on my own for the Saturday, allowing me to see everything I wanted to, at my own pace. Today I took my kids, and we had a wonderful time tossing giant dice in the family zone and trying all the Haba games.

Some highlights:

• Chatting to @therearerules and getting to see Damask in action. I took his recommendation to try out Gutenberg and ended up buying a copy.
• Meeting @michael for the first time, and seeing those wonderful Blaseball cards. My friends and I enjoyed playing The Split that evening.
• Reminiscing with another independent publisher about Cheapass Games.
• Thank goodness for Games Workshop and their free painting stand. It keep my kids occupied long enough to allow me to recover the strength I needed to keep up with them.
• Finding so many weird and wonderful indie RPGs I'll never get to play.
• The Folded Space stand was dangerous. I had to tell myself I was only allowed two inserts, otherwise I would have walked out with a dozen.
• It was great to see Nisei had a stand, and to learn Netrunner is still alive and well post-FFG. If I could justify getting back into the game I could have spent a lot money with them.
• Any doubts I had about how much my kids would enjoy the event on were totally smashed, they had a wild time and didn't want to leave. The family zone was marvellous and I'm definitely booking us in for a kids RPG session next year.
• Everyone I spoke to was having a good time and every stall I visited was buzzing with positive energy.

Here's what I came home with this year:

I queued for about 45 minutes in the end, although the line looked much shorter when I left than when I joined. From experience I would expect a similarly long queue tomorrow morning.

Who's here then? I'm in the queue for the Bring & Buy, almost didn't get in because I arrived after the ticket office closed and they were seriously considering not admitting us. Sense prevailed though, and now I'm probably stuck in this line for the next hour.

You can grab stuff! As in, you can put out your hand and hold on to surfaces (Z and X) by default.

This helps massively when things start to move. It would have saved me more than one death knowing this.

Some further non-spoilery gameplay details I would have appreciated being told by the game:

• The grapple has a secondary (tertiary?) function initially bound to middle-click which I only discovered by accident (the default PC keybindings for this game are bizarre). This "push" function makes it much easier to shove parts into their destination bins before you've mastered the "swing".
• The cutter has two modes which are toggled between whenever you press the cutter selection button ('2' on PC). In its secondary mode, you can change its orientation with the secondary fire button (right-click). It's a good learning experience to find out for yourself how these two modes differ.
• If you're playing career mode, every time you start a shift you can either work on your current ship, or bin the lot and start a new one. The position of all the parts is saved between shifts if you return to a job in progress. Unless you're trying to "use all the buffalo", don't be ashamed to move on to another ship if you're struggling to sweep up the last few bits and pieces. Especially early on, when ships don't yield as much value and you have to balance what you might earn against your daily outgoings.
• Use the scanner! You start with it and it's mega-useful for finding stray parts, amongst other things.

2 hours ago, routeburn said:

Blowing yourself up in new and interesting ways is part of the fun.

One thing I "love" is the one-two punch of blowing stuff up. At first it's annoying because dying and getting cloned is expensive. But when it comes to rushing the handling of fuel or forgetting to check what's behind a cut point, the painful death of your avatar is nowhere near as effective a detterent as seeing the mess you've made when you return. All those little pieces!

This is great, but I'm not quite sure if it's deliberately lacking in early hand-holding, or if the new player experience is still a work-in-progress. I've had to refer to a wiki a few times already just to get my head around some of the basics, such as:

• Processor/Furnace/Barge - These are the three different places parts can go. The big blue-grey tunnels on either side of the work area are Processors, the furnace-looking things are the furnaces, and the green grid underneath the ship is the "barge". When you move your reticule over a ship part, it'll tell you where it needs to go.
• Shifts - Unlike oxygen, it's fine to run out of time. When the shift timer ends you'll just get automatically returned without any (additional) penalty.
• When using the grapple, targeting a part will show you a bar that represents how "secure" that part is. You can use this to work out what needs to be cut free and what can simply be pulled from a surface.

I've got plenty more tips but it's one of those games where making mistakes and learning from experience is part of the fun. I haven't worked out how to deal with pipe junctions safely, yet.