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Just finished Life is Strange 2. It was... ok. Ending was fine, but by god is this game slow. Jesus Christ, can you make it even slower, I'm not sure. Worst is, you can't even skip cutscenes, which turns a replay into a huge pain in the arse. Wouldn't mind to check out some alternative paths, but not like this. Most of the time you'll sit around and watch long winded cutscenes with characters that speak too slow. Rest of the time you will be trapped in a small space and interact with hot spots that shower you in toxic positivity. Note to the writers: Not everything has to be cool and awesome. It's ok to not like things. Some characters are nice. It's cool to see The mother was... just so pointless. I wonder how so many people could be nice to her. I really didn't care and feel like she deserved nothing. Some of the writing is really awkward. It's like they had to make everything somehow wholesome... it really shouldn't be. Now I wonder if all their other games are this slow as well. LiS1 had A LOT more and interesting gameplay going on than whatever was going on here. Guess I'll be rooting for Dontnod now to deliver a better next game. True Colors was cringe as hell, but at least it had a lot more fun gameplay. 😄

Arcadia Fallen. Finished the game. I liked it, though the subplot with the alchemy teacher landed significantly better than the main story, which felt very off. It might have something to do with that the former required to solve puzzles (not sure if the last part changes based on it or not). Review: The Kickstarter campaign for the sequel is live, though I am planning to purchase it later, rather than back now. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/galdra/arcadia-fallen-2

Hello trolls and denizens, I am now looking for a submission for the August 7th edition. Please PM me or share this invitation to those in your circles and networks for whom this might be of interest https://forums.obsidian.net/announcement/64-the-community-blog-an-invitation/

Wow, I haven't been here in years! I forgot my password. lol A friend sent me a link and I saw Gorth's superb offering. Respect! This brings back memories of BIS and the Interplay boards. It's funny in that I played so much Grounded on Steam a couple of years ago before it was completed. I had just gotten back into playing the finished game for about a week when I received word about this project. It's like running into an old girl friend at the grocery years after you broke up. It's not that you have animosity. You just don't know what to say.

Well, those branching story paths in those games are usually always fake for the most of it. The effects they have on the actual gameplay almost always is marignal or just not existent. Pick your path, and then you'll later get either a letter, a mail, or a phone message in good or bad variation. At best you'll meet that character again for 10 seconds and that's it. Not really blaming the developers that much, since we know that those story permutations quickly get super expensive... but still... it's starting to get very formulaic and lazy, imo. /Edit: I was surprised to see actual tiddies in LiS2, though. Shame they didn't had the balls to also show some... balls, heh.

Ah damn, true. It was Deck Nine. But whatever, I guess. Still more gameplay than LiS2 had. I'm seriously kinda angry right now about the game. Took me 18 hours of which Probably at least 10 or more was spend on looking at slow cutscenes, while the rest was just wandering around, trying to find the next hotspot. The remaining hours was me having the game paused in the main menu, because I needed a break for a while. They have this whole mechanic of the brother being able to use telekinesis and it is barely outside of a few scripted sequences. The few emotional touching moments weren't enough to weight this up. Thank god I had nothing better to do.

Tell Me Why was slow. It is free during June, by the way, if you would like to try it. I haven't played, but would like to eventually, Twin Mirror. Dontnod also develop some action games - Vampyr (played, the game is funny for the wrong reasons, the combat is not good) and Banishers (have not played, but would like to as well; the genre is hack and slash) and Jusant (something about climbing). And there is Harmony: The Fall of Reverie, which looks like a VN. True Colors was developed by a different company, as far as I know.

Adrenaline overtake on Brands Hatch in ACC GT4. Almost impossible to overtake on this track, so I have to share it 😄 https://clips.twitch.tv/GlutenFreeDarkSquidMingLee-6RAbF5lXq53JKh9m Unfortunately impossible to embed

I've got a GamePass key. I am unsure when it expires, but if anyone would like to have it, it would be most welcome.

Ill see myself out.

I really hated Dobby when I read the books, but I hated Dobby somehow even more when I watched the films. Besides The Chamber of Secrets unfortunately having the highest Dobby-to-No-Dobby ratio, it's probably also my favorite. For me, this problem also applies even to the earlier books, especially insofar as the series predominantly takes place at a school of magic where students supposedly make life-long friends, grow up, and study/learn magic. You know, normal school and coming-of-age stuff. With the exception of The Goblet of Fire (the film of which is both strange and kind of horrendous for my tastes - big surprise when you hire a new director that didn't watch the previous movies or read the books and who you then ask to adapt the wackiest and most off-beat entry), I feel the movies do a much better job than the books of conveying all of that than the books did, which doesn't make a lot of sense given how easy it would be to just...write more stuff into the books. How precious little time is actually spent in the classroom learning or doing just normal school/friend stuff versus "Harry didn't have a good time in Divination and Potions with Snape proved to be no better" and then we're suddenly into the next month is a bit bizarre. The only spells the series ever mentions characters learning are always the exact ones that will be needed for the plot to function without something we've never heard of or seen before just suddenly appearing and being used. Most characters outside of the core cast which should in theory flesh out the world feel like they're only mentioned in brief, vague asides that aren't even actively written but are instead just passive descriptions of what they said or did. At times, reading those books almost feels like they were explicitly written to be turned into movies. Despite their issues, I do think the first three to four-ish books are pretty fun - heck, even movie 4, as much of a disaster that constantly goes off-style and off-script as it does, has its moments. That changes in a very bad way with book 5, and... In film The Order of the Phoenix's defense, I think the book is way worse than the film, which you kind of allude to later in your post. I expected the movie to be pretty unbearable because of how awful the book was (it does not help that Harry, whose eyes we see everything through, becomes an absolutely unlikeable bastard during this whole book, though I'll blame it less on him as a character and more on all of the idiotic circumstances that start at the end of The Goblet of Fire which Rowling wrote), meanwhile I was looking forward to film The Half-Blood Prince because while still very messy, it had been a hugely welcome and much more enjoyable respite compared to The Order of the Phoenix. To my surprise, I got almost nothing out of movie The Half-Blood Prince while I felt movie The Order of the Phoenix did about as well as it could to minimize how atrocious its source material was. I guess the flipped expectations helped the one I didn't like and hurt the one I did.

Definitely one of the sloppier episodes.

Arcadia Fallen There were occasionally unavoidably unwise options and somewhat odd, though well-meaning, social commentary. The game was rather nice overall. Some story paths do not offer choices. This part of the main quest always felt off - why does the PC have to save the locals who clearly want to be left alone (technically, exploited by another local who was digging magical fossil fuels)? I strongly suspect that the mages were the stand-in for immigrants and/or LGBTQ+ persons (including the conversion therapy subplot), which is not unusual, but does not quite work when the story needs the PC motivated, instead of saying "Lol, good riddance" and riding into the subset with the party. Adding a likeable NPC or two who are neither party members nor wizards could have helped. There are options to choose how the PC feels about things and they are clearly communicated. But no option to lie to the person in power who threatening you. The PC is unavoidably honest. The florist mage is very nice and trying to integrate. One should always use password managers and memorable, but not guessable, passwords for them. The alchemist should have thrown acid at the attackers or at least a smoke bomb, but there was no option to do so, only to run or to fight. To be fair, the world being destroyed can threaten one's research. Ironically, he was right. I was honest with a child and the child disapproved. But I got an achievement for it. That particular quest lacked any tough moral choices, though. And the PC lacked the perception to find the McGuffin before the quest. The alchemy mini-game. The challenges are on the right. It is rather fun. It gets a bit spoilery from here and onwards. Seems to be only one additional costume and it's a flower crown. Technically accurate. Arcadia Fallen II (Demo) The game did not trust the players to be completionists and befriend all possible NPC. Disappointing. The scene was slightly animated (the carriage was moving), so I did not notice the painting in the background being so stylistically different.

Finally decided to give Life is Strange 2 a go. Bought it back in the days but then never played it, because somehow lost the motivation. Finished episode 1 now. All in all it was better than I expected, but IMO a bit too slow, with really long cutscenes. It's like, if I am breaking down the gameplay segments from the cutscenes, there's really only very little content. You're basically just walking around interacting with hotspots, then pick up some stuff and let's go to the next cutscene. The first game felt a lot more balanced in that area. Also I now remember all the people crying about the game being woke or whatever, because it features a racist character who is very clearly a trumper-type. Didn't felt too off to me. What was a little more weird was the savior dude who was into nudism. That was a bit... not sure what to make of it. Started episode 2 now. Will see how it continues.

Death Must Die Nice combination of Hades and Vampire Survivors.

Guess they shouldn't have beaten them at the Euros

It did not take long, and the new collaborant government of Slovakia started its first political process. They started a case against former Minister of Defense Jaroslav Naď for donating Mig-29s and one S-300 system to Ukraine.

For a single class barbarian I think the best choice is the Fury Shaper - Blood Ward being arguably one of the best abilities at his disposal. If you want to benefit from the human racial ability it's probably a good idea to max constitution to have a very high health pool and be able to play with your life under 50% without fear. (I would dump RES and increase CON for that)

The question of recognizing Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism has been opened at US senate again, after Putin’s lovey dovey with Kim. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/06/21/7461906/