The Miscellaneous PC & vidya Games Thread

[Josquius]

I should get back to that. It is quite good.

[Pedrito]

Try Mutant Year Zero : Road to Eden

https://store.steampowered.com/app/760060/Mutant_Year_Zero_Road_to_Eden/

Thanks, will try! 

L.

[DGuller]

I've come back to Jagged Alliance 2, on patch 1.13.  The world desperately needs a new Jagged Alliance game that's been done right.

[mongers]

Bought my first and last cycling management game, not so much complicated as huge amounts of content, it would take tens if not hundreds of hours to play one full year. 

[grumbler]

I've come back to Jagged Alliance 2, on patch 1.13.  The world desperately needs a new Jagged Alliance game that's been done right.

Ah, yes.  Jagged Alliance:  the Hunt for the Guy with the G11. 

[Syt]

Ένα νέο παιχνίδι στρατηγικής για την αρχαία Ελλάδα θα κυκλοφορήσει σύντομα.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1183470/Imperiums_Greek_Wars/

Imperiums: Greek Wars is a unique combination of turn-based 4X and historical grand strategy with a mythological twist.

Inspired by our previous award-winning title Aggressors: Ancient Rome, we bring you a fresh look at a Greco-Persian world of schemers, warmongers, and ruthless politicians. This merciless world is enhanced by myths and stories about heroic deeds and hidden treasures as only the Greeks were able to imagine.

Greco-Persian world

The game starts in 359BC when Philip II of Macedon takes the throne. Macedonia at the time is a backwater on the edge of the Hellenic world, but Philip is an ambitious man. He has a dream to become leader of the whole of Greece, a dream he will follow until his death...

Choose one of 30 playable factions ranging from mighty Sparta or Athens, ambitious Macedonia, slowly declining Achaemenid Empire and its power-hungry satrapies, to a number of smaller Greek city-states and groups of semi-nomadic societies living on the outskirts of the Hellenic world. Lead your nation to glory if you can...

Lead, rule and conquer

Your task is to do more than survive. You are divine ruler, supreme military commander and political leader who seeks glory and prosperity for all your subjects. Lead them to magnificent victories, manage the economy on all levels, and provide successful livelihoods as well as stable and just government.

It is not a task for the weak; all problems rest upon your shoulders; every crisis is a test of your political and military prowess. Decisiveness, tactical thinking, political shrewdness, and above all an adventurous spirit is what will cause one person to stand out - to rise as a star shining through the darkness of millennia to come.

Historical immersion

The Greco-Persian world of Imperiums is a faithful representation of historical reality, political relations, animosities and ambitions. Take a unique opportunity to experience on your own shoulders the weight of responsibility as the chosen one. As leader you can follow your own path or take advice and guidance from dozens of nation-specific objectives.

Experience the ancient Greek world in such a detail as never before.

Myths and Legends

Ancient people believed in myth and legend; it was part of their reality. Those adventurous enough can send their generals in the footsteps of ancient heroes to find the Golden Fleece or untie the Gordian Knot. Unveil the truth of some of the stories and myths of the Greek world.

Face the opponents

Your opponents will be unforgiving, but if you want more of human slyness and unexpected turns, join a multiplayer game and challenge other players in a race to victory!

New worlds

The universe of Imperiums offers an endless number of realms. Imagine a world to your liking and let us bring it to you. Whatever your choice, enter with a clear mind and prove that you can not only survive but build an empire worthy of the title.

Take advantage of the imagination of others and explore worlds they created. Go even a step further, let yourself be inspired as creator whose ideas shape others' worlds.

Learn with ease

It is not shameful to take advice from time to time. You're not alone in this cruel world; there is always guidance to explain, provide context, and offer recommendations. Let yourself be guided by your intuition and logic, and you will soon become a master.

I couldn't get into Aggressors: Ancient Rome, but I'm curious how this one will turn out.

[Syt]

No E3, but Devolver Digital did their .... whatever it classifies at. Originally on stages at E3, their storyline is now in the 4th year. Fictional CEO Nina Struthers is caught in her mind/simulation after nearly dying at the end of last E3, with Linda from marketing taking over and placing hype over everything else, even announcing games with no intention to release them. But a resistance has formed to stop her reign of terror and free Nina's mind. It's the usual meta commentary on the state of the industry as in previous years, but with even more meta references, and somewhat less violence/gore. Might be weird and confusing if you're not familiar with their schtick.

Not many games they showed would be interesting for me, except Carrion in which you basically play the thing from, uhm, The Thing. Here's the Nintendo trailer, but it will also come out for PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nFSVKH0nAQ

There were also new trailers for Shadow Warrior III. Seems they got inspired by the terrain traversal in Sekiro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00d8nw3eG18

And there's a trailer for Serious Sam 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3f8ikw4xDk Bit weird to see the Roman ruins from Talos Principle in this.

Full presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN2dcsx7mJA

Or if you just want the cheesy 80s end credits song: https://youtu.be/AN2dcsx7mJA?t=2417

[Syt]

If you wondered what an Assassins Creed game made by Akira Kurosawa would look like, I think this Japanese trailer for Ghost of Tsushima answers that quite nicely:

https://youtu.be/ZvF_dv5-aRI

Comes out this Friday on PS4.

[Syt]

Beans, a new Toronto studio with Devolver is looking for staff. Their website is .... very ... 90s. If you ever were on Geocities, you will find its quite familiar: https://www.thebeansteam.com/+

[viper37]

Jedi Fallen Order.

It's probably game of the year for me so far. Great story, great setting, great characters, great gameplay.

It's great!

9/10

I love the banter between the stormtroopers. Some of them felt relieved by the fact that they held the high ground

I've recently started playing this.  I had to buy an Xbox controller for this, it's unplayble with a keyboard and a gaming mouse.

I'm struggling with the controls, I'm at the second difficulty level, right after "story mode".  It's taking me twice the time to do anything in this game, because I keep pressing the wrong buttons.  Never played with a controller in all my life.

I'm a bit disapointed that it's stricly a combat game, I expected a more RPGish feeling to it.

[Syt]

Trailer for Far Cry 6, featuring Giancarlo Esposito: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgPZ1PG8bD4

Kind of funny since he and Michael Mando (Vas from Far Cry 3) are both in Better Call Saul.

[Josquius]

I hope they have a bit more freedom and less silly fantastical stuff than FC5

[Razgovory]

Far Cry 5 was terrible.  So unless they really mix things up and improve the game I'm a hard no.

[Josquius]

Far Cry 5 was terrible.  So unless they really mix things up and improve the game I'm a hard no.

I kind of liked it for its Red Dawn aspects.
But then being randomly captured about 8 different times in scripted events only to escape/be set free/some prophesied bollocks. No.
It really did have a lot of the makings of a good game, but they screwed it massively.

[Syt]

If you wondered what an Assassins Creed game made by Akira Kurosawa would look like, I think this Japanese trailer for Ghost of Tsushima answers that quite nicely:

https://youtu.be/ZvF_dv5-aRI

Comes out this Friday on PS4.

I was being flippant about the Kurosawa bit, but apparently the developers aren't:

https://ew.com/gaming/ghost-of-tsushima-akira-kurosawa-estate-cinematic-mode/

Jason Connell and Nate Fox, the creative directors behind Ghost of Tsushima, are very upfront about the influence legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa had on their open-world samurai game.

"I think one that is just crystal clear is the movie Sanjuro," Fox tells EW of the 1963 work. "It's a film that features, at the very end of it, a standoff between two samurai. The tension that those two warriors have, they wait for the other to make a first move and then one of them dies with just one stroke of his sword. We tried to translate that into the standoff in our game very directly." Another he points to is Kurosawa's 1954 classic Seven Samurai, "which defines my concept of what a samurai is," Fox remarks. "The samurai in that film have a dignity and a heart that we really strived to capture."

Connell, Fox, and their team at Sucker Punch, which developed Ghost of Tsushima after the inFamous series, pulled from a long list of inspirations for their next saga, about a lone samurai who must betray his noble principles in order to save his home from invading Mongols. We're talking everything from Japanese comics like Usagi Yojimbo to other games like 1984's Karateka. But the influence of Kurosawa's work is so strong that they decided to honor the director, who died in 1998, with something called Kurosawa Mode.

Prospective players caught a glimpse of this gaming format during May's virtual State of Play preview presentation. It's the black-and-white cinematic mode that mirrors Kurosawa's filmmaking style and aims to give gamers the feeling of playing inside a samurai movie. Connell and Fox pitched the concept to Kurosawa's estate to get the official blessing.

"We have this great game that transports people back to feudal Japan and Akira Kurosawa was one of our reference guides, especially early on about how we wanted it to feel," Connell explains. "As we got closer and closer to making that a reality, we were like, 'What do we call this special mode that we created, this black-and-white throwback?' We threw out a bunch of different words and we thought, 'What would be awesome would be if we could call it Kurosawa Mode.' In order to do that, we felt that we needed to reach out to the estate and see if that's something they'd be interested in. We sent a short video showing what it generally looks like, what it feels like."

It's not just a black-and-white filter, Connell clarifies. "We actually did some research on the curves that may have existed on that kind of film that [Kurosawa] might've used."

It proved difficult to translate that directly into a game like Ghost of Tsushima with current film-mapping technology, so Connell took various black-and-white samurai films and analyzed scenes from various times of day and weather conditions to track "how deep were the blacks? How bright were the whites?"

For final touches, the team added a film grain to make the mode appear as though it had just emerged from the age of Kurosawa, as well as an increased wind function. In Ghost of Tsushima, the wind serves as the player's navigational tool; Jin actually follows the wind to find his next destination. In the Kurosawa Mode, the wind is "cranked up," says Connell. "And lastly," he adds, "we actually toyed with the audio a little bit. Our audio team have an internal tool that mimicked sounds of old TV and, specifically, megaphones, radios, TVs back to the '50s." It all makes for a game with the feel of theatrical entertainment.

I approve of this nonsense in games. I still believe L.A. Noire was best played in black and white (it also made the combination of 3D environments and facial animations less jarring).

Preview video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok1HR9B2bys

Cinematics with the same filter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIMnJgOuon0