Video Game Chat Thread - Pre-Alpha Experimental Version

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Are videogames for children?


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Recently in the game giveaways thread @IAmNotAlpharius had many random Steam codes he was parting with. 90% of these codes are seemingly the kind of stuff they give away in bundles, that is to say things nobody has ever heard of. I asked him to give me one of the codes at random because I thought it'd be fun to review some random thing I've never heard. Well, he ended up giving me 2 random codes so here are the reviews.

Rym 9000

It's a good thing he gave me two codes, because this one doesn't have a lot to talk about. Rym 9000 is a vertical space shooter and... it has some quirks. The first very apparent thing is that when launching the game it appeared in the top right quadrant of the screen with the rest being nothing but black space.


Rym9000.jpg
The bottom right is the Steam overlay that always glitches as it recedes, happened every launch and never left.
You might also think the colors look fucked up, almost like an old VGA game. That, however, is not a glitch. This game gives an epilepsy warning at the beginning and boy is it not kidding. The visuals are so garbled and incomprehensible it is extremely difficult to focus on any kind of small oncoming obstacle. Well, now we can actually talk about the gameplay which is... that of a below average vertical shooter. When your brain can comprehend it you fly upwards as enemies come from every potential direction in set patterns and shoot them. Occasionally power ups that look like crosshairs, which caused me to avoid them for awhile, appear and they upgrade your weapon a level which is mostly just more damage despite later levels changing the appearance. The power ups also seem to be your health in that taking a hit drops you one level and you die when taking damage at base level.

This game seems to be some kind of "audio-visual experience" type game, or whatever pretentious designers would call it. It seems to trying to revolve around it's music which is alright, syncing with the eye-melting visual effects. When you die, you restart the current level with seemingly infinite tries. I played for about 30 minutes and got to level 3 but in the end it wasn't worth going blind for life. The first boss took more attempts than it should have just because of visual noise making bullets hard to see and that is not a good long term playthrough. I don't know if this game was shovelwear, art project, mobile game ported to Steam or all three, but I can say I don't recommend it.

I'd give it a 3/10 for being a 5/10 game that is obnoxious to even play due to the visuals. Imagine looking at this shit for an hour or two straight.


The Amazing American Circus

Alright, now this is more what I was hoping for. The Amazing American Circus is an interesting deck building game set in the old west where you control a troupe master who inherited a failing circus from his late father. In this game you travel through the old west going from city to city to put on shows which take the form of card battles against the audience, and there are a ton of mechanics. Perhaps too many.

In simple terms you have a group of performers which you can bring up to 3 in a show. The performers have a deck of 5 cards each which can be changed and upgraded as the performers level up. Each performer focuses on slightly different playstyles such as the juggler building up stacks of balls to release for big impressions (damage, basically) or the mime who focuses on defense and returning damage to attackers. Cards take a stamina resource to use of which you have 3 of each turn that can be changed with certain cards. Each round you draw 5 of the combined 15 cards and use them to delight the audience and protect against insults and hurled tomatoes. When you reach the end of the deck the cards are reshuffled and all your performers take a sum of damage depending on the city. Performers have a base 10 hp which can be raised through some means temporarily and when they reach 0 one of their 5 cards is permanently removed, if all 5 are removed the performer is removed themselves. Cards also have a finale value which when filled lets you use a super attack.

That is the basic ruleset, but tons of shit gets added soon. You can find and choose a misfit opener (basically a freakshow freak) that gives bonuses on the opening turn, performers can gain 'gifts' and 'hoaxes' after shows which are extra cards in their deck with beneficial and negative effects, they also gain flaws and boons which similarly help or hinder, there are temporary buffs from food and random events and so on. While there are a lot of mechanics they are mostly added complexity for the sake of it and some are really annoying such as random flaws/hoaxes you have to pay to remove.

Speaking of money, it is in short supply. You need it for everything - leveling up, changing stats, buying food for travel, hiring new performers, upgrading you caravan which is another big thing with tons of options. The thing about gaining money is the system for doing so is stupid. When you do a show you choose your risk level which changes the range of the reward. 0 risk could be potential $300-$400 payout while max risk could be $0-800. You can see the problem, pay isn't based on performance but RNG where you could potentially get $0 for winning. The only way to improve this is paying additional money before the show for 3 kinds of advertisements that push the minimum pay up but also take out of your profits - it is stupid to not do this every show, however. Max risk and max advertisements is the only way to potentially get a lot, and even then you could still roll the lowest pay. On top of all this you can only do one show per town unless you travel to like 10 towns in-between first, wasting resources, and even then repeat shows pay about 1/10th of the first time so it is often not even worth it.

Traveling the map from town to town is a series of paths between towns with occasional areas unrevealed that you can pay $75 to free form select and area that's size is based on an upgrade you can purchase. Anything within that area is revealed if there is anything there, you can reveal nothing and waste your money. Areas are largely new towns to put on shows but they can also be side areas with little quests or random events. Random events are kind of bullshit though, they are mostly a choice between two bad options where you pick the lesser of two evils. While traveling the map you also have to make food from ingredients bought in tows that effects 3 bars positively or negatively, each bar giving different buffs or debuffs depending on level.

That is a lot of shit to explain, but I think that mostly covers the mechanics. Now, with all this stuff is the game any good...? Well, yeah, I am actually enjoying it. All the different levels of upgrades really speaks to my autism. The battle system was weird at first but as I got used to it it became enjoyable. It is also very easy to exploit, and while I struggled at the beginning I am now regularly winning matches in the first few turns, thought the drawing aspect can still net you some bad luck in that regard. All the mechanics disguise what is at it's core a very simple game. It does have a very charming and unique art style and theming to help hold back the monotony. I am already kind of interested in restarting and min-max blitzing through now that I know what works well. I've played a combined 4 hours over last night and today which is more then 80% of Steam reviews which is too bad but exactly the kind of experience I was looking for when asking for a random key. It's nice and charming and a solid 6/10, the kind of thing that gets overlooked all the time.

I am not sure how much the game sells for, but if it's ever on sale for $5 or less I would say it's worthwhile for a couple of evenings.
 
Any others you might suggest? I remember there being a fairlysolid Warhammer Pirate game a few years back, but it got shut down due to the ban, so I've been looking for something new.
Assassin's Creed: Rogue is also good if you like Black Flag.

@Professor G. Raff sounds fascinating, thank you very much. Love seeing things that gamify stuff that's not just "kill 10 million more goblins/zombies/aliens with your sword/gun/laser gun."
 
>play Octopath 2
>started with the Jewish class for the first game
>go with Cleric for the 2nd game
>decide to get the Hunter furry because whatever

I hate the Hunter class so much. It's so fucking useless and feels like it should either get better spells or be scraped entirely. If it weren't for the furries special bullshit, she'd be useless. Fucking pokemon bullshit just takes up space.
 
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The Midnight Club series for its time was pretty fun, especially if you play it during the Spring/Summer seasons. Personally, the “DUB Edition” sequel was my favorite.
 
It's getting tiring having to rely on mods or slavjank to get my fill of playing as a /k/ommando.
Why can't I just have a nice, short, 6-8 hour game with really detailed mechanics in a dense, probably linear campaign?
I think people get mad when a game is short but I do miss the era of games with a handful of cool mechanics and solid gameplay where the developer basically delivered you a full-course meal where the game gradually expands and introduces mechanics, then ties everything up brilliantly.
Even a half-life 1 style game where I'm mostly in one place the whole time would be nice. I just want to feel like an operator.
Oh well. Back to Gmod/Running with Rifles/Arma/SP-Tarkov/Stalker I suppose.
 
@IAmNotAlpharius

Follow up on The Amazing American Circus.

Alright, I have now finished the game and have some more insight. Overall I ended up with just shy of 15 hours including my original run that got about 1/4th through and my min-maxed speedrun I blitzed through. I want to start by explaining my hax method because I think it's funny and allowed me to destroy the game.

One of the performer types is the Aerialist, basically those old-timey acrobatic girls who do tricks in suspended hoops. Their gimmick is that when at full focus (HP) their cards have stronger effects and are broken when stacked so I had my performers be 3 of them. They have 2 important cards. One is a card is Lion Trick which does 4 damage to all enemies, but 8 when at full HP... doing 4 to all is already strong on it's own, but 8 is ridiculous and when upgraded it becomes 5/10 and it costs 2 vigor (turn resource, which you get 3 of per turn). The next card Sleeper lets you draw 2 cards but at full HP it also adds 2 vigor for a cost of 1 vigor, so a net gain at base, but it's upgraded version is a ridiculous draw 4 and gain 3 vigor. Potentially losing HP to use the weaker effects doesn't matter if you win on the first turn, you see. I stacked my decks with as many of these 2 cards as I could, optimally 2 Sleepers and 3 Lion Tricks each though the random nature of level ups and 8 being max level I was only able to get one perfected, with the other having 1 and 2 other cards respectively... but all their cards are good at full HP so it wasn't a big deal. Basically you just have to draw a single Sleeper on turn 1 and chain it into vigor gain to unleash 3, 4 or even 5 Lion Tricks which almost nothing can resist. On top of this, the gift cards I mentioned in the big overview contain a card called Cookie that is draw 1, gain 2 vigor so I just stacked them and deleted every other gift to maximize drawing. There are also late-game freaks that power up your turn 1 power and a trait called glass cannon that gives you more power in exchange for less defense and this all comes together for a near unbeatable strategy.

I'd also like to mention some more of the charming atmosphere. Throughout the game you get mini quests where you meet famous historical figures of the time such as Henry Ford and Nikola Tesla who builds you a automaton that counts as a freak when you help him get revenge on Thomas Edison. On top of this each zone's primary boss is a famous entertainer in Buffalo Bill, The Ringling Brothers and PT Barnum. There is probably another boss because when you finish the first zone you get a choice between central America and Mexico and this middle choice is apparently once per game which is a pretty meaty chunk of difference to incentivize another play-through. You also encounter several cryptids which are fun because they join you as freaks or performers sometimes, you can get Bigfoot in your circus as a strong man which is great. The final boss is a gauntlet battle Vs. PT Barnum, Theodore Roosevelt and finally the visiting Queen Victoria. The final boss deserves credit - it was the first time I actually lost because I underestimated it's length and burned all my resources at the beginning.

Having played through I can also speak to the fact there are some very annoying bugs in the game. The biggest issues is many instance of the individual menus bugging out and overlapping each other. Now, this is easily fixed by restarting the game and usually fixed by moving towns... but that comes with issue. Moving towns takes resources, going there and back if you need to do something in that town. That makes restarting seem ideal but for some reason, as far as I can tell, the game only autosaves when you change towns with no way to do so manually. I learned this the hard way when having to redo some stuff after resetting for menu issues. The worst bug I had legit kind of pissed me off because it happened early enough I was unsure if it was a bug. I mentioned my strategy involves full HP performers, but suddenly using cards on my own turn was changing their health seemingly at random. I looked through all my cards, gifts, hoaxes, buffs, curses... I looked at all the enemies special abilities in attempt to find why but nothing was mentioned as to why. I eventually quit annoyed and when I tried later that evening it turned out it was just a weird bug and restarting fixed it. Luckily that one never happened again.

The achievement I got for beating the game only had only a 2.9% player completion and almost no reviews on the page had anywhere near the amount of time I did, so I feel like I am legitimately one of the most qualified and in-depth reviewers of this game. I can understand it though - it's very repetitive and especially so if you like min-maxing like I do. I thought the game was going to end at the first 1/3rd and was kind of surprised how much left there was. It's the perfect example of an average game that gets overlooked and lost in a sea of thousands of similar 5, 6 or 7 out of 10 games. Still, I thought it was charming in presentation and graphics with fitting but not stand out music. One day I might even replay it at least as far as the middle chunk to see what changes if you take the Mexico path, but probably not for quite awhile.
 
since I enjoyed the fuck out of half the games already, gotta shill this: https://www.humblebundle.com/games/unparalleled-puzzlers

can't go wrong with all that for just 10 bucks (remember to adjust your donation on the right, especially if you don't agree with the charity part of the money goes to, and you can't always choose).

It's getting tiring having to rely on mods or slavjank to get my fill of playing as a /k/ommando.
dunno if that is gonna scratch that itch, but there's stuff like this:

otherwise if you're used to slavjank and don't mind rough edges and lower graphics, just browse through the past editions here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest
you can filter by genre and then scroll down to specifics (keep in mind it goes by tags, so all kinds of stuff will end up in the FPS category).
 
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Atelier Ryza is a pretty good game (if you enjoy JRPGs). Even if it took me way too long to fully understand the alchemy system.
 
I hope Russians do what they do best and pirate the shit out of every game because they shouldn't be giving money to services that ban them on a whim.

I like Atomic Heart but it's a shame that it has some globohomo traits, the main character is a metrosexual guy that spends his money at twirls & curls, there is a doctor with short purple hair, the game always has waypoint markers on screen, you can see through walls, in general it plays like a modern AAA console game which isn't what you want in a video game. Still, good game, it's not another remake/remaster, and I'm enjoying it.
 
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