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[SirNiko]

Tropical Freeze is a good choice.

[s0]

tropical freeze is one of the games that made me wanna buy a wii u. the level design looked really good (both visually and mechanically) from the videos i've seen. it seems like they "fixed" my main gripe with dkcr (bland aesthetic) too.

i still want mario kart 8 as well and maybe platinum's stuff (tho not a huge fan of bayonetta's mechanics).

unsure about mario 3d world. i mean i LIKED 3d land but in the end it was kinda bland and unmemorable (like most recent mario platformers unfortunately).

[Alevice]

3d world seems to have fantastic evels tho.

[SirNiko]

Mario 3D World doesn't do anything that Mario Galaxy and Mario 3D Land didn't already do. If those games didn't excite you, 3D World won't either. It's more of the same, just with new levels and themes to explore.

I personally thought it was excellent, though not as great as Mario Galaxy 2 (which will take a huge effort to top).

---

I did another Escape Room the other day (I've done several now), but this last one was pretty memorable. It began with our team split between two locked prison cells, forcing us to communicate the contents of our cell to the other players and combine hints. Eventually I got a rope and had to lasso and pull a wheeled cart from the hall to my cell, which we used to pass things from one cell to the other. We gradually solved more locks and acquired a metal anchor and a magnet, and it felt pretty good to tie them together and use them to pull the cell keys off the wall. It's hard enough to make item combination puzzles work in a video game, translating it to real physical objects and making it feel natural is brilliant.

The rest of the game was fun and had a lot of mechanical puzzles (flipping switches, arranging pipes, putting pieces on a chess board to trigger a lock) that were fun and very high quality, including a wired alarm system where you have to cut the wires. They did a great job using the physical aspect of the game and giving you lots of things to manipulate. The best Escape Rooms I've done include lots of low-difficulty physical tasks like arranging books, operating locks, or digging in sand for clues. It doesn't have to be hard to feel good.

I've really been enjoying these, and have noticed there's two tiers to the game setup. Some locations are much lower budget, with well decorated rooms but relatively few interactive props aside from bins and boxes to search. They're something you could set up in your own house with a bunch of combination locks and a visit to a flea market. The other tier involves installing custom doors, building mechanical puzzles and inserting things into the walls like pipes and scaffolding and intricate custom mechanical locks. The first kind is pretty fun, but the second kind is what really stands out as a unique experience compared to just playing room escape games on your computer.

Everyone ought to try one of these in the new year.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Took me 90 mins to read/translate the first 5 mins of the game. I bought this partially to practice reading Japanese. Unfortunately some of the characters and speech is similar to talking with a medieval dialect and might not be super useful to know.

[Superb Joe]

i'm glad that video games are making nerds speak like ren faire people so that even across linguistic and cultural barriers the japanese can identify them as losers

[InfiniteStateMachine]

What is Ren faire?

It's obvious which text is not normal if you've done even a basic level of night school courses. Obviously you wouldn't use it in normal speech. The difficult part is that the actual Chinese characters are different so it makes it harder to play the game since I know the standard method of speech.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

SFV Beta is on in about 6-8 hours FYI. I almost forgot

[SirNiko]

What is Ren faire?

Renaissance Faire.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Ah I see now. That was intended to be a clever remark.

[Manuel Magalhães]

crusader kings 2 is the best paradox game and also pretty accessible by their standard (still has a learning curve tho). victoria 2 is old.

familiarity with other strategy games is not going to help you thaaat much anyway because paradox's stuff is pretty unique within the genre.

i see, i'll get ck2 instead then, thanks.

[MeshGearFox]

did i mention that the vanishing of ethan carter really pissed me off

[s0]

crusader kings 2 is the best paradox game and also pretty accessible by their standard (still has a learning curve tho). victoria 2 is old.

familiarity with other strategy games is not going to help you thaaat much anyway because paradox's stuff is pretty unique within the genre.

i see, i'll get ck2 instead then, thanks.

oh btw, fair warning: the main thing about paradox games, and ck2 especially, is the political simulation aspect and the "emergent" stories resulting from it. so you have to be into that to get the most out of them imo. as "pure" strategy games they can be fun, but are somewhat unbalanced. you also have to be ok with a lack of explicit goals.

[Koobazaur]

Plowing thru Wolfenstein the new order and having an absolute blast! II haven't enjoyed a shooter this much in years, the mechanics just feel so rewarding. And I love that they still give you options like stealthing around, doing tactical cover shooting, or just going in guns blazing with dual assault rifles :D

Loved the train to Berlin where you play the little Aryan card game test, that was legitimately tense. Definitively enjoying how cinematic the game feels, much more than with CoD or the like. But im finding the clam in-base story segments a bit dull; I feel they're too much of a departure from main game. When I boot Wolf, I just want to shoot some nazis in a spectacular manner, not read through 30 paper clippings or hunt for hidden objects...

[InfiniteStateMachine]

I've been playing wolfenstein too and it's been quite fun.

It's also the first FPS to ever give me motion sickness.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

did i mention that the vanishing of ethan carter really pissed me off

go find the dude's blog post on the astronauts site smugly telling you how good of a writer he is

[s0]

donkey kong country tropical freeze is very good. feels like a combo of everything good about the original dkc trilogy + everything that was good about dkc returns. the level design in this gam is a joy.

only issues so far are mildly flawed controls (already a problem with dkcr but improved here) and eternal load times.

[MeshGearFox]

did i mention that the vanishing of ethan carter really pissed me off

go find the dude's blog post on the astronauts site smugly telling you how good of a writer he is

My issue wasn't so much the writing PER SE, just the narrative the game had really would have required considerably better writing to work.

Although my MAIN main issue is that the first real puzzle in the game you encounter is that door puzzle in the one house and that's a really fun puzzle and I was looking forward to more stuff like that. But then it also ends up being the /last/ real puzzle you encounter in the game.

(No, the hidden object ghost reorganization things don't count. Neither does the zombie letter thing or CORVUS).

And then it just kind of ends.

They made a map and like one puzzle and just completely forgot the rest of the game.

Anyway!

Briefly played a little Environment Station Alpha, and my early impressions are that I like it more than Axiom Verge. They're both pretty firmly rooted in Metroid, but EAS feels more... rooted in the /original/ Metroid, which is something I like.

[s0]

My issue wasn't so much the writing PER SE, just the narrative the game had really would have required considerably better writing to work.

isn't that pretty much every "story driven" videogame ever lol

[MeshGearFox]

My issue wasn't so much the writing PER SE, just the narrative the game had really would have required considerably better writing to work.

isn't that pretty much every "story driven" videogame ever lol

The gulf here between what was needed by the writing and what was delivered was like
immense.

Anyway I guess steam broke and is exposing account information. GUESS WE SHOULD ALL UPLOAD DICK PICS FOR A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE