Keyrock

Besides Hard West, which I'm discussing in the Hard West thread, oddly enough, I've been playing Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry. For those not familiar, this is the re-release of Raven's Cry, the pirate RPG that released at the end of January horribly broken and flat out unfinished. They released it as a "new game" rather than an update to the original game supposedly because they added so much to the game that it was like a new game, though in reality it was almost certainly as a shady way to try to get rid of all the negative reviews they had gotten for the broken mess that released at the beginning of the year. As one of the saps that bought the original game I got a free upgrade to the "new game". It's still the same game as before, just not horribly broken any more and with more stuff to do, even if it's just picking a few plants, killing some wildlife, or finding a treasure chest in some cases (the original had plenty of areas that were essentially empty with no one to talk to and nothing to do). It also feels like there are slightly more character models in the game, though I could be mistaken, it's been a while. The on-foot combat is still quite clunky. It works okay when you're fighting human enemies, particularly in small numbers, then you can parry, attack, and use special moves as intended. When fighting a large crowd it's kind of necessary to cheese the system and exploit the character's health regenerating up to 50% when your weapon is put away. So I wind up getting a few stabs in, running and putting my sword away while I regen, then going back into combat, lather, rinse, repeat, until the crowd is sufficiently thinned out that it's manageable to fight them without cheese. Fighting animals is hilariously bad as a lot of the animals are quite low to the ground and the sword swings, which work fine at hitting humans, often go right over them, especially if you're fighting on a downslope. The character animations are stiff and the dialogue is of fanfic quality. I'll give them points for ambient sounds, especially the bird sounds. Those really make you feel like you're in a tropical setting. The best parts of the game are the naval battles. They're not as graceful as in AssCreed Black Flag, but in some ways more satisfying because the game doesn't hold your hand and give you a giant indicator of exactly where your cannonballs will hit, instead you need to judge the distance yourself and figure out the right angle to fire the cannons at, taking into account that cannonballs, chainshot, and grapeshot all have different amounts of drop over distance. I really enjoy that part of it, especially now that I got my grubby little hands on a Man o War. I'm having a blast with it, I played over 16 hours over the weekend and am eager to play more. It's one of those games that really isn't good, but, for whatever reason, I really enjoy playing. I think part of it is that I can find humor in cheesing the on-foot combat system and the hilariously bad dialogue. Also, I just really like pirate games, particularly ones where you play a proper scumbag of a pirate, not the bogus Hollywood romanticized rough exterior with a heart of gold fare we usually get. I mean, the main character is a ****ing ***hole and he pulls plenty of moves that would make the "progressives" turn various shades of red, it's great and it's how it should be. It's a pirate game, you're not supposed to be a nice person. Also, you encounter some really absurd things. They never fixed females in the game peeing while standing up, which is great because it's hilarious (Maybe Reality Pump are super into gender equality? If men can pee standing up, why can't women... other than the biological reasons ). I once came across a dude peeing off a balcony and a guy below him at ground level scrumming the floor in the same spot the guy was taking a leak on. I wish I had taken a screenshot, it was magnificent. I wonder if that was random chance that came together or if the devs specifically put those 2 characters doing that there, I hope it's the latter. There is a giant tower on one island, takes like 5 minutes to walk up the stairs to the top, and it seems to have no purpose other than there's a dude at the very top right at the edge with his back turned to you, perfectly positioned for you to push him off the edge and watch him plummet. It also helps that the naval combat is legit fun and I can just roam the seas in my Man o War spreading terror across the Caribbean. Good times. Edit: When I get home, I'll up the ante by sailing in my Man o War while listening to Manowar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2zkPqg-75g

Tony Romo is back and the Cowboys actually won a game. At 3-7 it might be too late to salvage the season. On the other hand, with how terrible the NFC Least is, they're only 2 losses behind the division leading Giants, so you never know. If nothing else, it was nice to see a team that can actually do things on offense again.

Only a truly warped and demented mind could produce guns this friggin' awesome.

I'm loving the Method in Madness scenario. It has a mechanic where you can visit and explore locations, and if you explore them thoroughly you'll often find valuables or be inspired to make an invention, but you'll also be driven deeper and deeper into madness. From a purely mechanical standpoint the madness is a bunch of debuffs that get worse and worse as the level of madness increases, so it's a trade-off of potentially getting and inventing cool stuff vs retaining your sanity. I've gone headlong into madness, exploring every area thoroughly. My man Solomon is a raving lunatic at this point, but has he invented some cool stuff. Good times.

I flat out don't like Kotaku and I avoid them like the plague, that said, if Kotaku didn't actually break any NDAs, then blacklisting them seems kinda, well, wrong. As far as Kotaku blacklisting Boogie, it's a separate issue as far as I'm concerned. Even if that is true, and I'll admit a modicum of perverse satisfaction from, for lack of a better term, poetic justice, I still don't think it's right that they get blacklisted if they didn't break NDA. I side with two wrongs don't make a right even when that is to the benefit of a publication I find rather distasteful. I mean, from a strictly legal standpoint, publishers can send review copies and invite to pre-release events womever they damn well please and, likewise, refuse those same benefits to whomever they damn well please, but if they're only give those benefits to those publications that give them favorable coverage and shun those that criticize them and/or leak unfavorable information (again, as long as no NDA has been broken), that's not something we consumers should be celebrating, even if a publication as loathsome as Kotaku are the ones getting the short end of the stick.

OG

The ricochet ability is freakin' awesome. I bounced a bullet off a bell then a cauldron to get the angle for the kill. On top of that, I used ricochet to kill a nun, earning not only badassery points for the skill shot, but extra sacrilege points.

That sucks. I was looking forward to that. And I'm an impatient SOB. Sounds to me like... You never ask for this... ...delay.

I finished the first scenario, Hard Times. I guess I'll soon get to see if the scenarios are connected with and overarching story. My hope is that it's Pulp Fiction style with several stories, with some of the same characters and some new characters, at different points in time, with the stories crossing paths and the pieces of the story falling into place over the course of the 8 scenarios. That would be cool. One thing I didn't notice before is that the playing cards which give your characters special abilities can give your character another extra bonus depending on what type of poker hand you make (2 pair, straight, etc). That's pretty damn neat, in my opinion.

Overwatch sets your character in a guarding mode, they will automatically fire upon the first enemy that moves into guarding cone (typically about a 90° cone in front of the character) during the enemy's turn. Is the combat as good as Jagged Alliance 2? No, but then what is? That game set the bar insanely high and I'm not sure any game has matched it since. To me the combat seems extremely similar to XCOM (2012). Enemy variety might be a concern, all the enemies I've faced so far were pretty basic, but I've only done 3 battles so far and the enemies were quite basic in the beginning missions of XCOM too, so I won't be able to judge that until I get deeper. To me, so far, the combat seems about on par with XCOM (2012).

Agreed. It won't win any awards for graphical fidelity, but I think it's definitely one of the prettiest Unity games I've seen yet.

Scotchmo is worth having for the banter alone.

Okay, so the player characters can't have overwatch, but the enemies can because I've run into a couple already that most certainly did have overwatch. That's fine, though, the player characters can have other special abilities to work with.

From my post in the Hard West thread: I haven't played enough to tell you how much consequence there is to the choices I've made.

Shootin' a prostitute at point blank range, all in a day's work. I bought a scoped elephant rifle just prior to entering this shootout and boy was I glad I did. Florence was the super sniper with that thing. I camped her up on the top floor near a window and she was just droppin' dudes left and right, after she done disposed of the harlot upstairs at up close and personal range with her pepperbox, that is. She also done got shot twice and didn't even flinch. The moral of the story is don't **** with Florence.

Well, I am the Obsidian Order Roden Tamer, after all.

Valkyria Chronicles is better than good, it's great.

So, I guess I'm the lab rat here. I got the game today and started playing. Here are my initial impressions. The game is indeed much like XCOM. You have 2 action points and can move a certain distance (depending on what items you have) with each action point. You can move 1 action point's worth of distance and still fire your weapon, or move both action points' worth of distance and not be able to fire. There is half cover and full cover. Certain objects like trees and canvas obscure vision, but do not provide cover and can be shot through, so long as you can see a person's shadow you can figure out where they are and shoot them through those objects. There are different weapons and items your characters can have. Sturdy boots, for example, give you increased movement range. There are consumables that have different effects like healing or improving your aim. Some weapons have unique abilities in addition to their regular firing action, for example, a revolver can be fanned to fire multiple shots at a target with an aim penalty. The game's unique mechanic is luck. Each character has a pool of luck they start with. Whenever an character has a shot miss them they lose some luck. Whenever they get shot they gain luck. There are cards you acquire during the game that grant special abilities. Special abilities require consuming an amount of luck to use. So far, I have not seen an overwatch ability, maybe it's an ability on one of the cards? Besides the XCOM style combat, there is some resource management and a little bit of choose your own adventure, for lack of a better term, gameplay on the overworld map. Rather than a single campaign, the game has a bunch of different scenarios to play through, each scenario is like a mini-campaign. I don't know yet if the scenarios are connected with an overarching story. The music seems decent and the rhaspy voice narration seems to go very well with the pulpy spaghetti western feel of the game. Visually while the game won't win any awards for graphical fidelity, I think it looks nice enough. I may try forcing some AA with nvidia-settings in the future to smooth out some jaggies. I had flickering in the game. Lowering shadow quality seems to have mostly gotten rid of that for me, not sure if that's a Linux-specific issue. So far, I'm quite enjoying the game, though it's far too early to make any sort of judgement of it. I love spaghetti westerns and I love XCOM style combat, so keep that in mind when taking my feelings into account. [shameless plug] Here's the game in action, if you want to see for yourself: [/shameless plug]

Hard West The overworld map Sniping a sucker through a window. The man taking the shot is on the upper floor but the view automatically changes to the level of the person getting shot at and only show an outline of the shooter, hence why that looks kinda weird. Another shot from a higher level to a ground level enemy. Shooting a sucker in the back at point blank range. I ain't gonna lie, it felt good to do that.

Still Victor Vran, the game is starting to get significantly harder now, which is good. Epic monsters are just ridiculously tough, as they should be. I've come to rely on the scythe as my favorite weapon type, I favor it because of its wide sweeping attacks that can hit multiple enemies and its combination of decent attack speed and decent damage. I also think it has the best combination of special attacks. There is a forward blast with medium range and a very narrow cone that doesn't do any damage (without modifiers), but it stuns every enemy caught in it, it's extremely useful both offensively and defensively. The other special is a a spin to win attack that's awesome for cutting through crowds of enemies (I've killed as many as a dozen enemies with that one attack). I have a high lifesteal build, using several lifesteal cards and the scythe I'm currently using also has lifesteal and increased attack speed (an awesome combo). I always have Hex of Pain turned on (it periodically damages you) because I can just lifesteal the damage I take back off weak mobs. I usually can lifesteal enough to counter whatever damage I take during battle except when facing really tough enemies, which is happening a lot more often now.

Melky, you don't have time to play SCL, you need to get back to posting screenshots of Mordheim to stem the FO4 tide. We're all counting on you.

And just that quickly Sword Coast Legends is gone. The other 2 games are still available.

I have the following new Steam Key to give away: Sword Coast Legends Also, from before, these Steam Keys: Planetary Annihilation (not TITANS) Gone Home ​ As usual, 1 per customer, first come first serve, PM me.

This is what happens when you eat too much pumpkin pie: