JCC Gaming Förceboat Parté - JC G4m3z thr34d (Gaming General Discussion)

I remember a lot of the chatter around The Sims 3 looking weird/worse in comparison to The Sims 2 when the former first came out. I am not quite sure how I felt when I saw the first trailer, but I can vividly recall asking my dad to take me to either Best Buy or Target after my last day of 8th grade to buy it. Those were the "good ol days"--- when new games were $40 at launch and not $60.

I do agree with you on the faces looking kind of same-y. It is why I work very hard at trying to differentiate them from each other. Playing with the sliders is so fun and I have gotten some pretty different looking Sims from messing with them.

The Sims 2 was fun as heck. I remember playing it and being so confused when one of my male Sims came back pregnant after he was scooped up by aliens. Unfortunate implications aside, it was a really cool feature. What I did not know is that I have the expansion pack for The Sims 3 that includes aliens. I am trying to keep the more out there stuff (witches, fairies, aliens, etc) out of this neighborhood I am populating currently, but I may enable aliens just to shake things up later on.

 

I miss the original "The Sims".

 

I own that too. What's nice is that you can purchase the digital versions of the game and expansions these days and not have to worry about installing from DVDs.

 

Death’s Door is bewildering. Why is this game pushing 90 on Metacritic? Was the industry that starved for another generic isometric hack-and-slash with a dull, by the numbers story posing as quirky? With gameplay that feels sluggish and a broken upgrade system? Wandering around a large environment with samey areas and no map?

Color me confused, friends. This one’s a head scratcher. I’d recommend a hard pass.

 

I just bought third person indie stealth game Aragami on a whim in the PS Summer Sale. Anyone played this, or even heard about it?

I'd never heard of it but I like buying random well rated indie games.

 

It's in my backlog and like all games I have there I don't know when I'll get around to playing it.

 

Live event with Arena Net just now regarding the "End of Dragons" Guild Wars 2 expansion due in Feb

I shall pre purchase once it goes live in 58mins

 

I still need to finish Path of Fire...

 

Never played it, but interested to hear your thoughts on it. There’s a sequel coming in September that’s a day one release on Game Pass, so I’m curious.

 

Yeah I had seen that. And the first game including DLC was on sale for $5 so I figured it was worth it.

 

Having a literal blast with F.E.A.R at the moment.

The Max Payne meets Half Life style of gameplay within the Japanese horror style narrative works perfectly (more than it deserves to, in fact).

What happened to the franchise? I know there's a trilogy, but nothing since.

Not to mention it nary gets a mention these day.

Does the third game bomb?

 

It's a bizarre set of circumstances.

F.E.A.R. has two DLCs, BTW - one is a continuation of the main story, the other is a weird offering where you play another member of F.E.A.R. that happens to also have the same super-power.
The rights were somehow lost, so the sequel was originally not going to use the F.E.A.R. name or team, but somehow with mergers or something they came back together, but as a result F.E.A.R. 2 you're part of a military Spec Ops team instead, set at the same time as end of F.E.A.R.
F.E.A.R. 3 is set months later and seemed to have everything going for it - a popular franchise, bringing in John Carpenter of all people to work on it, but the corp was more interested in developing multiplayer (similar to what happened with Bioshock 2) and the game suffered for it.
That was 2011. There was some lame online-only FTP game years later, but the franchise is defunct.

 

That's a shame, i'm really enjoying the first one at the moment.

I also did receive the two expansions as part of a promo pack on Steam but it downloads the pair in (literally) one second as none of the game contents itself seems to come with the download.

I'll need to dig through the discussion boards to see if anyone else is having (or had) the same issue.

 

New PS Plus freebies announced for August.

Hunters Arena: Legends, Plans vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville, and Tennis World Tour 2.

I'll likely download the Tennis game right away but simply add the other two games among my "backlog" of PS Plus freebies library that have yet to be installed.

 

“During a company event (an annual convention called Blizz Con [sic]) [Alex] Afrasiabi would hit on female employees, telling him [sic] he wanted to marry them, attempting to kiss them, and putting his arms around them,” the complaint reads. “This was in plain view of other male employees, including supervisors, who had to intervene and pull him off female employees. Afrasiabi was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the ‘Crosby Suite’ [sic] after alleged rapist Bill Crosby [sic].”

But the “Cosby Suite” was more than just a nickname or a joke. Based on images and comments Afrasiabi posted on his Facebook supplied to Kotaku by a former developer at Blizzard, it was reportedly a booze-filled meeting place where many, including Afrasiabi, would pose with an actual portrait of Bill Cosby while smiling. It was also a hot spot for informal networking at BlizzCon, three sources told Kotaku, where people looking to make inroads at the company would go to meet and hangout with some of its top designers.

Afrasiabi "mysteriously" left the company last year.

 

Rotten company symptomatic of a rotten work culture:

 

The Women Gamers reddit I'm on organized a "no one play Activision Blizzard games" day today. Of course I already don't, so I donated to a charity to help women coming into gaming. The whole thing is disgusting.

 

The original Starcraft and its expansion and first two Diablo’s are some of my favorite games of all time. But that company has been dead for a long time now. They can rot.

 

Problem is they have CoD to animate their carcass.

 

Trails of Cold Steel III continues to be a very assured game for the most part.

It does have its flaws - mostly when it throws in its accursed swimming game, there's something about the speed circles decrease in size, relative to a target circle, set around a button symbol, that doesn't work at all for me; or it throws in a weird, pointless chase sequence; or it just sets up random crap multple chioce questions; oh and et's not forget it deciding I must play it's Vantage Masters minigame - but, it's also far more adept at dispelling the irritation those moments cause.

Of all its self-inflicted flaws, the biggest is its habit of hiding way too much stuff - you think you've done everything in a chapter and then get a B or C rank because there's still stuff to find but you'll need a guide to do it.

Outside of these though? The story flows very, very well. I can see why, for some, it falls victim to the criticism of 'win the fight, lose the cutscene', but more often than not, the same cutscene is used to reintroduce Old Class VII characters, in very over-the-top but fun style. Hard not to like that kind of execution. Chapter 1's finale was supern, chapter 2 surpassed it, with chapter 3 then topping both its predecessors. Chaining multiple boss fights together should really irritate but here it doesn't. The game's habit of enabling regular time limited guest characters changes up the party roster in a way that encourages experimentation. As do its quartz systems.

For anyone thinking you can start this game and have a clue as to what is going on - you really can't. Sure, it summarises as best it can, but even with that, there will be so much you miss out on due to the sheer size of its two predecessors and the web of character relationships it sets up.

The battle system continues to be fun, working out that an order gives the party 80% reduction in spell costs, allows for a very brutal magic defeat. Alternatively, you break your enemies and then take them out with a series of chained link attacks. Having partners positively transforms the Divine Knight fights too.

 

So I finally finished my play though of Doki Doki Literature Club. Full on completion. Here's a link to the playlist of it all.

Doing that for a "let's play" was different for me and quite rewarding in a sense. So glad I did it.

My next major game to playthrough will be RWBY Grimm Eclipse. I'll still be doing my golf and other game vids, but that will be the major step

 

Sooooo..... J Allen Brack has resigned.

His exit statement reads like You've Been Fired page of The Executive Playbook.

Of course, this happens only after the stock takes a sustained nosedive in value.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft.....Continues to be Ubisoft.

 

Brack’s sacking resignation is just a face-saving measure and luckily it doesn’t seem like many of the actual people on the ground are buying it as a “fix.”