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[Robsoie]

Spotted this on the gog boards about the Hitman game they were selling despite it had drm even for single player modes (gog main attraction is that it is a DRM-free store if you didn't understood why it was a problem) : a few days ago gog removed it until further notice

Dear Community,

Thank you for your patience and for giving us the time to investigate the release of HITMAN GOTY on GOG. As promised, we’re getting back to you with updates.

We're still in dialogue with IO Interactive about this release. Today we have removed HITMAN GOTY from GOG’s catalog – we shouldn’t have released it in its current form, as you’ve pointed out.

We’d like to apologise for the confusion and anger generated by this situation. We’ve let you down and we’d like to thank you for bringing this topic to us – while it was honest to the bone, it shows how passionate you are towards GOG.

We appreciate your feedback and will continue our efforts to improve our communication with you.

[Kagus]

Hey, creds to them for showing a scrap of integrity on the matter.

[Astral]

There are also currently a number of bugs and oversights, along with some rather head-scratchingly odd design decisions.

Stuff like the "on death, your units have a chance to cast a destructive spell" skill. What it doesn't tell you is that those destructive spells are generally large AoE rain effects with 100% friendly fire. Which, yes, will indeed set off a chain reaction that brings down the heavens upon the battlefield... But it'll also do a fantastic job of killing your own troops before the enemy even gets to them.

Also those spells keep going for a while, including after the battle is over. This can result in losing troops after you've already won if you're not fast enough at clicking "end battle".


Oh yeah, there's also a building that can randomly spawn on the map which lets you sacrifice units in order to turn them into increases to the spellpower and mana stats for a hero. There's also no cap on how much you can increase those stats.

And this is how you end up with a hero with +2400% spellpower who can straight up one-shot an entire endgame army with a single spell, and who has enough magical reserves to cast that spell 20 times in a battle.

This stacks well with the set that allows you to keep 50% of your summoned units after the battle is over - lots of high tier summons for free leading into an infinite loop of power every week. Only limited by how quickly the game will crash with that many units on the battlefield.

[Robsoie]

Old Doom has often attracted some coding genius that pushed the engine in rather incredible ways, like by example :

Total Chaos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7IITZDBvqE

Solace Dreams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMXtXurGQ0E

Sonic Robo Blast 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia097A0pKNM

Recently spotted another coding genius doing something rather incredible for the old engine :
Doom Fighters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWiJztMAzxo

https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-fighters/news/doom-fighters

[delphonso]

Ummm... Solace Dreams looks amazing, what the hell?

[Cthulhu]

I'm on a quest to play every main-series assassin's creed game, because ?  I just beat AC2, and will be deciding whether to get all the Truth glyphs or just move on to Brotherhood tomorrow.

AC1 is pretty decent.  It hasn't aged well and it's repetitive, but it's kind of a marvel how stripped down and simple a triple-A game could be back then, compared to nowadays when every big game that comes out is a bloated nightmare with 400 hours of bullshit.  A lot of features that are ruin every modern video game are here in prototype form, rhythm game combat, "open world" full of repetitive shitty side tasks, parkour, etc.  Still, everything fits together nicely in this one and nothing becomes overbearingly awful the way it will in future games.  3/5 for me, solid game.

AC2 is great.  It's just Assassin's Creed but bigger and better.  Starting to see the Ubisoft Formula in the way the open world is set up, but the hide in plain sight style stealth is improved, parkour is improved, combat is easy but flashy and satisfying.  The main story is decent, Ezio is a better character than Altair who was monotone and boring, and the metanarrative with Abstergo, along with the "Truth" stuff with the Annunaki just continually gets more insane as the series progresses.  A lot of people hate that stuff but I love it, it's completely unnecessary to the games being good, extremely self-indulgent, but they just continually double down on it and even in the modern games they're still doing it.  The game kind of falls apart in the last act though.  Everything past Silvio Barbarigo is terrible, the game massively overstays its welcome.  You steal the apple and have a swordfight, and there's an "all my friends are here to help" moment which isn't earned because the enemies don't feel threatening.  Then the guys from A Clockwork Orange show up and steal the apple, and you kill them, and then Savonarola shows up and steals the apple, and you kill him after an agonizingly long and un-fun series of mini assassination missions, and the game still keeps going after that, leading up to a climactic fistfight with Rodrigo Borgia, who was a terrifying in literally every scenario except a fist fight. 

Up until that point the game was a 5/5 for me, but the last 3 or 4 hours of the game being shitty is too big a flaw to ignore so it drops to a 4.  Oops.

[Kagus]

Brotherhood is pretty hilarious, your little assassinlings are stupidly powerful with a couple upgrades. Also, fun fact, those "If you get seen for a split second by anyone, you lose and get sent back to a checkpoint" missions? Yeah, it only counts if the guards see *you*. They don't care if one of your stabby dudes jumps out of a conveniently-placed barrel and murders a couple guards before escaping through a brick wall.

Also, be aware of the DaVinci cutscene QTE. You don't get a second chance at it, and it's pretty terrible to fail.

[Aoi]

Dungeon Encounters... Nominally, it's more of a minimalist topdown dungeon crawl with turnbased combat, but it falls absolutely flat for me to the point that I just really don't get what it's supposed to be-- it's like a polished version of a high school (or maybe early college) project. And really bad keyboard controls that are also inconsistent, so we're off to a great start at the title screen already.   

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So you have fixed characters from which you can draw your roster from, but it doesn't make a difference, since almost all that matters is level and equipment. More important to the roster is that you have to be where they are to enlist them; they're not all just sitting around in Ye Olde Pube. So if you need to reform a party for whatever reason (unfortunate end), those said units are important.

Did you enjoy the idea of mapping, a la Etrian Odyssey? Nope, the entire map is exposed from the start, just need to run along the tiles to get your map completion reward. Oh, and all encounters on the map, including combats, are marked... with numbers. "What was 04 again?" (Not that it really matters; a lot of encounters are one-use, and the combats are marked. And while they show up randomly, they don't move or anything, so you can take your time to figure out where that healing fountain was... Or just take the long way around.)

Is there a lot of depth in combat? Uhm... maybe eventually? But a few hours in, it's basically been 'Just hit it with whatever it has less pseudo-hp for, magic or physical.' Oh, and despite being at max speed, still feels annoyingly slow, but that might be because it's been boring.

Graphics get a pass, seeing as it's intentionally minimalist. (But the non-minimalist art is, somewhat eyebrow-raisingly, quite nice.)

There's also allegedly 100 floors, and while I can only assume that there's a quick-return at some point, I haven't seen it yet. So every time you need to head back to the starting floor (only vendors I've seen so far)... commence the hike!

[Akura]

Welp, Enlisted has just been ruined for me. They just took out the ability to purchase random troops using Bronze orders. Which means the Bronze troop orders have absolutely no use, since that was their only use. The only way to fill up your squads are with Silver orders, which are stupid rare - mostly locked behind Battlepass(random objectives), except half the rewards and turning in more than three Battlepass objectives a day are locked behind Elite subscription. So it's borderline pay2win at this point.

They're changing Bronze orders to be able increase a soldier's rank(which otherwise currently requires sacrificing three troops of the same rank to get one of them back), but they haven't implemented that one yet. They're also going to do the same with weapon orders.

Honestly, it'd be better if Bronze orders were usable to do something like purchasing a bottom-rank recruit with the minimal equipment for their job, and costing more orders for bottom-rank specialists. That would still allow freemium players some measure of progression based on participation rather than luck and throwing money at the screen.

EDIT: That have added ranking troops up via Bronze orders. My mistake on that.


EDIT2: Completely unrelated to the rant above, but I just saw that the Star Trek Armada games are coming to GOG. I remember ST:A2 being fun enough. I had heard that there were some messy licensing issues involved with the Armada games that would have made it all but nearly impossible to get the games on GOG, but it looks like those were cleared up?

[Robsoie]

Just completed this week epic store freebie "Among the Sleep"

If you never heard about it, i had no idea what to expect myself, this is a game in which you're playing in 1st person view a 2 years old child that goes through some kind of nightmare in search of his mother. During said very odd nightmare you'll recollect memories and events hinting at your family story in a way a 2 year old child may percieve them.

The game is very short (you'll complete it between 2 and 3 hours at max) and very linear (out of a place in which i could go 2 ways , but said paths will have to be followed anyways), and there's no real replay value once you complete the story.
There is a short "hide&seek" part in a couple of levels that had some good "Alien Isolation" atmosphere but that part is super short unfortunately. The "puzzles" are rather straightforward (majority are of the "find the item that goes there to open the path") , though at least it makes sense as you're a 2 years old.

But despite that, it's a very original experience that i think is worth playing once (as you'll play it probably only 1 time anyways to complete the story)

[Jopax]

So Riftbreaker got a full release last week.

It's a pretty neat lovechild of Factorio and a twinstick shooter.

First off, graphics and optimization are pretty fantastic, you get hordes of critters coming at you while you blast at them with a wide variety of weapons that go brrrt, zzap and boom (the nuke especially) and it never chugged a single FPS for me.

Basic premise is that you're the first colonizer on a planet, sent ahead to build up a proper base of operations and a gateway to link back to Earth. To help with this you've got a big stompy mech that can build buildings and equip various weapons and mods. You build your base to gather various resources and process them into useful shit. The logistics are way way simpler than Factorio, and balancing production is fairly simple and straightforward, most of the base building challenge comes from making a defensible layout and having enough room for growth.  A big part of the gameplay is focused on exploring the various biomes to get access to new stuff and survey the flora&fauna to unlock new stuff as well as defending from the regular hordes of unhappy critters coming to get your base.
The main campaign is not terribly long and is somewhat linear at the start/end but the middle is fairly freeform in what route you want to take in terms of progressing your tech and base.

All in all, a neat little game, very satisfying combat and exploration with a decent, if a bit simple base building component. Devs have mentioned coop coming eventually down the line and possible expansions of some sort, which should be interesting to see where they take the game next.

[Folly]

I played the demo for Riftbreaker. Enjoyed it, and was very interested in seeing what it looked like upon release.

My main concern was seeing how the campaign panned out. The demo didn't give me much impression of what kind of persistence or story could be used to string together a series of skirmishes to create a satisfying lengthy experience. And while the skirmish was entertaining the first time, I didn't see it having much replay value without that campaign.

Unfortunately, all of the reviews I've read since release seem to bear out my concerns. Apparently the campaign is nothing more than waiting on a series of tedious research timers, broken up by waves of enemies who are trivial by the time they arrive. And the skirmish mode does not seem to offer any variety in the experience between sessions, outside of sliders the player can set to directly manipulate the frequency and types of enemies.

I really wanted to like this one, but can't justify the purchase price based on all I've seen.

[Mephansteras]

Good to know. I was interested in that one, but it sounds like I should probably wait for a sale or more development time on it.

[Jopax]

Dunno, what kept driving me forward was mostly the exploration and getting new stuff. Now this is good for one playtrough for the most part, mine took some 16ish hours.Might try it at the higher difficulty to see if that's interesting in terms of a survival and optimizing your base challenge.

YMMV but that's decent value for the asking price to me, and I'll probably get back to it eventually.

[Robsoie]

For people that have the soul-like game Hellpoint, until november 8 (unless you change the date manually on your PC) there's some halloween event going on, meaning many enemies have horror themed masks.

But actually interesting is that there are many items (that are unique to the events) that can be acquired from using those "nihl bonbon" the enemies will drop at some ufo that landed for the event in the archology bridge :
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/628670/view/4893716326544887978

the event is going on for every version of the game (even the gog one from what i just experienced)

Also noticed there's a dlc in the work for Hellpoint :
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/628670/view/5232606492415918343