Saturday!

18 thoughts on “Saturday!”

1. I’m taking another hack at Banished, and continuing my slow play-through of Tropico 4. 🙂Report

   1. Banished pisses me off in exactly the way games *shouldn’t*.

      The actual dangers you face in the game is: Everyone is an idiot. They’re starving to death and they walk halfway across the place and die. They horde food and others die. They *fail* to horde food and they die because everyone else did. It’s idiotic.

      I feel the game zoomed out to exactly the *wrong* level of temporal abstraction. You can’t have a seasonal cycle and have people take, apparently, months to walk back and forth. Likewise, takes years for people to become adults…and considering that is functionally your only way to advance in the game and expand, means you have to basically try to set up an equilibrium and let things run…and then you did something wrong and, two years later, everyone dies.

      And…the thing is, this dying is *nonsense*. In a small communal village, people don’t fricking starve to death because the market is half a mile from their house. Entire communities don’t slide into starvation cycles because the food distribution is slightly inefficient, and then the guy carrying food dies (WTF?) so the guy operating the farm dies (WTF^2!!) so more people die and pretty soon half the place is dead. THIS IS NOT HOW THINGS WORK IN SMALL PRIMATE VILLAGES. (It’s not how things work *anywhere*.)

      The *entire gameplay* is structured around these completely invented problems! I’m not sure what *actual* problems I, and my village, should be facing, but it’s not these! It’s like if Tetris were marketed as a lumbermill simulator and you had to fit logs into the mill. You…you guys understand that’s not any of the actual problems that lumbermills have, right?

      Seriously, I have put a lot of time and effort into Banished, each time thinking ‘Oh, I’ll get it this time’, and it just becomes a chore of waiting and then constantly going ‘Well, Moron X killed himself, should I load an older save and try to fix, or go on without him?’Report

      1. Sounds like a lot of the bad parts of Dwarf Fortress without the transformative underlying mindset.Report

         1. I don’t know, I’ve never played Dwarf Fortress.

            From what I know of the game, though, the thing you’re fighting is outside enemies, not the stupidity of dwarfs, right?

            Also, perhaps more to the point…you can actually *direct* the dwarfs, right? Because you can’t direct them in Banished. You can give them a specific job, as in, make them the blacksmith or something. But you can’t make them walk somewhere and get food, you can’t control where they live, you can’t even tell them to take a break and go home, or to rush back to work.

            They just wander around, doing really dumb stuff, and dying.Report

      2. It’s like if Tetris were marketed as a lumbermill simulator and you had to fit logs into the mill.

         Someone should make this game.

         You can even explain the how the blade will only cut a particular line of wood if the line is uninterrupted by an air gap.Report

         1. When you beat a level, you get to eat buttered scones. And when you beat the game …Report

            1. … someone dressed as a policeman enters stage right and arrests you because the creators couldn’t write a decent ending and were under deadline pressure?Report

               1. Now things are getting silly.Report

      3. I don’t even get that far. I generally get a pretty self-sufficient village going if I can survive the first two winters. After that, it’s a race to make sure I build enough houses so I don’t hit an old age spiral.

         You see, your little minions won’t reproduce without alone time. So if they’re crammed 10 to a house, they won’t have kids. And apparently they live like 10 years tops, so…Report

2. Taking my time with Skyrim. Replaying for the first time in 3 years.

   (My dog recently blew our her right knee ligament. We’re all now living in the kitchen and being a lot less active so she isn’t running around so much and can recover from the surgery. Moving slowly through all of the tasks is a different experience as compared to racing through the way I did last time.)Report

   1. Bethesda is releasing a remastered version of Skyrim later this year. If you’re on PC and have the Legendary edition or all the DLC on Steam, you’re suppose to get it for no additional charge.Report

      1. Oh dear god. That’s another 1K of hours right there.Report

      2. I’ve been considering picking it up again. Might be a worth PS4 purchase. I need a break from SimFallout. 🙂Report

         1. I saw evidence of VR Fallout on the twitters.

            Not even Arkham VR made me say “yeah, I might need to upgrade”…

            But Fallout VR?Report

      3. But is it going to be anything you can’t get with mods right now?Report

         1. From what I understand, some of the effects, such as volumetric lighting, are difficult to do with mods. In other areas, I expect mods have already greatly surpassed what Bethesda will deliver with the new version.

            This seems mostly geared towards the hardware of current gen consoles and to introduce modding on consoles like they did with FO4. That’s probably why it’ll be free to current PC owners, they’ll need them to make and upload mods to bethesda.net.Report

      4. Is it too late to ask Bethesda to have a default left-hand setting? (This is such a pet peeve of name I should name it and take it on long walks on the beach.) Needing to remap all the keys for a left-hand mouse user is such a pain, and I still can’t set up a left-handed character.Report

         1. This just might be something you could email them and/or ask them about on Twitter.

            It might be something that just never, ever occurred to them. (I’ve seen some game companies go out of their way to create a color-blind palette for already released games, for example.)Report

Comments are closed.