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[dragdeler]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That demon tilt they had on epic a while back is a pretty cool pinball game. You're supposed to nudge to accelerate the ball, or shoot curveballs, can't spam it ad nauseum, but you're supposed to do it a lot, the table doesn't tilt.


I'm peculiar about pinball I like it a lot but not all tables, this might be my new favourite... Pokemon pinball and judge dredd pinball and space cadet are cool sure, and I generally prefer pinball with balls that feel light, but there is something to be said about 1440p 144hz pinball and I feel like the nudging mechanics is teaching me to play well, instead of just juggling the ball up for as long as I can.

Went from 5m games, to 70m games, and at this point i regularly crack 200 million points.

Two weeks ago I thought I was a mediocre pinball player. Today I am (barely hehe) in the top 200 of demon tilt's billionaire club.

Spoiler: tres commas baby! (click to show/hide)

[Robsoie]

Impressive ! that's a very lot higher than my best score

After discovering in Demon's Tits Tilt i mean that unlike what i thought you can really disable all the crazy flashing (it's not in the game options that are available from the main menu, it's only available from the game options from when you're ingame, very odd game design) i finally could play this nice arcade pinball without killing my eyes.

Spoiler: My best score is only just below 6 millions (click to show/hide)

It looks like that unlike Devil's Crush that is the obvious inspiration to Demon's Tilt, there's no special levels that you can access during the gameplay, i wish they had that too as it was always some nice fun.

[Il Palazzo]

Anyone here check out ORX?

Hey, it's pretty neat!

[dragdeler]

The first few games I didn't use nudge at all (analogue sticks are a big plus here IMO).

Then I had this weird thing where I would nudge up just after touching the ball to give it extra speed, usually on the opposing thumb.

Now I'm getting much more deliberate, basically try to control the ball to avoid pitfalls (very important in the middle board), keep it longer on the highest board (bounce up shortly after touching the pink corona thingy that blocks, and accelerate sidewards if the ball comes down an awkward slide). Sometimes when the ball is slow I draw beautiful curves with the analogue and the nudge, I feel like it tracks longer than the first direction it measures, maybe that's just an illusion.




What you want to do is train to send the ball on the 2 outer slides in the middleboard, that will teach you the most control, this also helps when you have more than one ball the slides take a fair while and aren't too unpredictable. When you're up try to do the trickshot, the blue thing all on top that sometimes shows, once you've done that you can lock the ball in the wheel on the left, once you locked 3 balls, you get mutliball insano-mode and global multiplicators. When you're down good luck, tactics differ from situation to situation but it's never easy, you can go hard at the first boss, he's treacherous but it's early game, but the 2 after that I usually try to keep them alive, n°4 is nasty, n°5 is scary, after that it loops. Usually after you beat a boss the green portal at the very bottom activates that takes you to the middleboard. Make gratitious use of that portal there is no shame in nudging straight down if it's there, it doesn't stay very long. You can use nudge to stop the ball more reliably on a raised flipper, if you want to aim at something in particular.

[Robsoie]

It's sad that the first year is mostly a tutorial and you're not free of your decisions yet, because

Spoiler: i wanted to keep Bastakos in the ring after that (click to show/hide)

(King of the Dragon Pass)

[feelotraveller]

It's sad that the first year is mostly a tutorial and you're not free of your decisions

Try the 1999 version.  It got somewhat dumbed down for mobile in 2011, tutorial being a case in point.  Still a great game though. 

[Robsoie]

It's not really dumbed down, that PC version that is adapted from the mobile version has actually more content than the old 1999 version, there are more events, more artworks, etc...

In further years after the unfortunate demise of a few of my clan ring members, i could get back Bastakos the trickster in the Ring

Spoiler: Bastakos the Wise (click to show/hide)

[feelotraveller]

It's not really dumbed down

Well the euphemism that the developer used was 'simplified'... whatever we think that really amounts to. 

Off the top of my head we lost the ability to decide the number of crafters and what types of goods they worked on, we lost pigs and sheep which disappeared into abstractions rather then needing to carefully balance different herds for different purposes (and keep sufficient extra of each type for use in the different temples/ceremonies), and we lost the ability to plant different types of crops (barley, wheat, rye) that each had different yields, tolerances and strategic purposes. There's probably more I'm forgetting, but even the above amounts to a significant dumbing down - or... um... simplification - of the game.

Yes a few extra events are nice but losing a number of the knobs and levers used to play the game is a cost that is far too high to my mind.

[Robsoie]

I thought it was only the interface that was "streamlined" in this newer KotDP as it felt easier to navigate the menu than in my memories , i didn't noticed there were many features merged into one for simplification.

Oh well, fortunately it's still a very good game.
But there IS a very annoying bug and i have a difficult time to see how this one could slip unpatched for years considering it's not rare :
In some of the random events you'll have to select a clan (by example like an event in which your clan may be hit by some kind of curse and the shamans you contacted may have managed at best to redirect it elsewhere, and you may choose which clan is going to be on the nasty recieving end).

And most of the time you don't have the full list of clan to choose from, only the 7/8 first clan in the alphabetical order, there's no way to scroll down or change page to the remaining clans.

[Robsoie]

After getting the epic store freebie "XCOM2" to run with legendary, then tweaking the numerous system settings in XComEngine.ini (always nice to see an unrealengine powered game, they have so many settings that you can change easily beyond the small selection of them that the actual ingame options offer) to get it to run smoothly on my notsogood computer (and it can run really surprisingly nicely once tweaked ) , i got into several missions and had a lot of fun. 

But it looks like despite the years there are still noticable unpatched issues, like this one i just ran into :

Spoiler: rescue the VIP from the car, oh but you cant sorry as we spawned him outside of the map (click to show/hide)

That's probably a side effect of having map parcels being randomly assembled together when you get into a mission, as if a parcel in which X can spawn is generated outside of the map area, you get a chance (rare fortunately as lots of parcel can spawan things) to have that nasty bug. Though i imagine if the xcom devs wanted they could have fixed that , after all i read that in the Long War mod developement they ran into a similar bug , but the mod devs fixed it ...

But even so, there are some design decision that are way too silly to not be bugs , but apparently they're not bugs :
During a mission, at many steps of them, you will have your contact in the HQ talking (i think there's a meme about that guy considering this has annoyed nearly everyone at some point), but instead of talking while you are playing, the game will take away any controls from you, will wait for 3 to 5 seconds with you staring at the screen wondering .. why ? (because why not make you wait uselessly ? )  then will have the HQ guy start his speech "oh here are the enemy", "hey be careful with that enemy", "rescue that guy before it's too late", "don't wait too much to evac" ... and finally you can continue to play.

Yeah all those stupidly captain obvious remarks that will play in every missions (because you are apparently to dumb to understand things by yourself after being told once, then twice then ...) will all remove your control on the game, force you to wait 3 to 5 seconds then play the stupid speech.

There are mods like "Stop Wasting my Time" that cut down a lot of the silly delay between things, but does not seem to do much regarding that idiotic delay with those obnoxious speech thing unfortunately.

But out of those annoyances, the game is fun but i don't have the same kind of fun i have with the OpenXcom mods. Still i can see why the newer xcom game has been popular (even without any of the DLC), there are some interesting game mechanics are well made and the gameplay loop isn't repetitive.

[Rolan7]

You can skip a lot of animations like riding the evac rope up, or even moving to a position, by swapping to a different soldier with tab or shift.  I don't know if that works with the odd pauses you're talking about though.  I didn't notice them so much with the VO's, but sometimes an enemy pod will get revealed and the camera will just hang on them for a few seconds - just long enough for me to wonder if the game's waiting on me, before it moves on.

What's bizarre to me is the loading times between levels.  They might be better (my computer is MUCH better) but they're still pretty long... compared to the expansion, War of the Chosen, where they're only a handful of seconds.  That's frustrating to me since I find the expansion to be an overcomplicated mess I couldn't take at all seriously (though the Alien Hunters DLC does that too).

It's all moot since I won't be playing XCOM 2 ever again.  Friday it crashed my new-ish video card so hard that it wouldn't operate again until I left my computer unplugged for an hour, then manually re-enabled my video card in the device manager.  Saturday after turning the settings way down, it did the same thing after just a few minutes...  so fuck it.  That might not be their fault but I'm definitely staying away.

Oh also sometimes a VIP will be counted as murdered...  Either if they're with the last person you evac, or NOT the last person (posters seem to disagree).  It was introduced with the Shen's Last Gift DLC and hasn't been patched, so a big MEH from me.

I'm disappointed because the setting has a lot of potential but I feel like they made a complete mess of the UX and, eventually, the setting.  Plus the mission timers and campaign timer (Avatar project) are annoyingly harsh - something ELSE they fixed in War of the Chosen (with an option).

[Robsoie]

Lots of people mention that the game is not very optimised (especially in comparison to the first "modern" xcom) but that's something else if the game managed to hard crash your GPU like that.

From what i tweaked in the XComEngine.ini, there are a lot of very heavy/taxing graphic features that aren't even tweakable from the ingame options, and they make a huge difference in term of framerate, i lowered a lot of things thanks to the .ini file allowing me to run this smoothly despite i have by now an old computer (that is below the official minimum requirement) , that tells a lot on how they could have certainly made it run better but didn't cared enough if by editing the files you can get something like that smooth on potatoes.

And about the loading time, what can be said of that game optimisation if after completing a mission when your squad is in the airship on his way back to the base  by pressing CAPS/LOCK you cut completely the -very- long loading time ...
https://www.vg247.com/firaxis-kind-of-explains-why-the-caps-lock-trick-works-in-xcom-2

Anyways, while it's good and fun, i still enjoy the openxcom mods much more.
And about the xcom2 setting , the openxcom mod i mentionned in the other thread, "From the Ashes" has a storyline inspired by the "xcom failed and you're now the resistance against the aliens"  , i'm certain with time it will get even better.

[dragdeler]

The VIP bug is an epic specific bug (just how?!), had it happen 3 times allready, when I see that mission type I avoid it like the plague even if the reward is better. Loading missions will take a bit,but on my pc, flying back home can be allmost entirely skipped by pushing caps lock (just why?) seriously try it out.


 Will the endgame still launch if I manage to keep avatar project derailed? It feels like my game is not going to end at the pace I'm uber-effectively protecting earth ( I savescum )

[Robsoie]

From my googling, i found trace of that bug reported by steam version users from before the game appeared in the epic store.
A possibility i see then is that the xcom2 devs just screwed up and probably used some old xcom2 code base for the epic version from before they patched that bug out of the steam one...

Back at xcom2 hard crashing Rolan7 GPU , even with my low settings (low from editing the XComEngine.in because low settings from the ingame options aren't really low at all) i noticed the game will still use 100% of your GPU nearly all the time, even in the game main menu in which nothing really happen (you just have a xcom guy in cover and a couple of enemy soldiers waiting in the background). No wonder it can crash as the window display needs to use some GPU too and will then have to wrestle with that game to get some % of it.

Googling around it seems to happen to nearly everyone, showing that indeed optimisation wasn't really done, after all it was so hyped by all the media under payroll that never mentionned the noticable technical issues that they knew xcom2 would sell a lot so why even invest time and money in optimisation ...

I also found that if i use Riva Tuner to limit the game fps to something like only 10 to 15 fps, the GPU usage will drop from 100% to 60%, and being turn based you don't really notice the noticably lower framerate ingame and it still run smoothly.
So yeah there's definitively something that could have been done in regards to optimisation.

I wonder how the gog version is doing in regard to GPU usage, as it's drm free and who know how much whatever drm is in the steam and epic version are screwing up the code.

[Robsoie]

After toying a bit with World's Dawn (that is a freebie on indiegala currently), it's more and more feeling like a clone of the GBA era of Harvest Moon games. But so far i'm very unimpressed as it does not feel as good as those old games that obviously inspired it, hopefully the supposed focus on npc interaction will help but it feels like i would better spend my time with the originals on a gba emulator.

Apparently it's made with RPGMaker so i don't know if it's related to that fact and that the RPGMaker engine has its issues, but despite World's Danw has such antique visual and animation, is rather slow paced and is a 2D game with rather limited areas displayed at once (as you have some kind of loading everytime you enter a building or move from a part of the map to another), you'll see from time to time when moving around some very strange micro stutter.

Maybe it will get better but so far it feels there are much better alternatives if you want to play a Harvest Moon-like game.