The Miscellaneous PC & vidya Games Thread

[Solmyr]

Anyone tried InZOI yet?

[Josquius]

Anyone tried InZOI yet?

I played with the free character editor. It's pretty and runs impressively on my old machine but has FA options.
The game itself is a Meh from me haven't played sims for eons

[Syt]

I tried InZOI last weekend. It's definitely uncanny valley material. And it will therefore probably spawn a gazillion sex mods.

Character creation is cool, but outfit options still seem a bit limited, even though you can "craft" clothing by setting some basic parameters (e.g. collar type, type of sleeves, hemlines etc.) and then texture it.

Gameplay seems a bit fiddly yet. The game uses AI generation to some degree (e.g. if you want to create a texture for your wallpaper, and an experimental mode where you can describe your Sim's ZOI's character and it will try to act accordingly. It seems to be more geared towards idle gaming, but when I left my ZOI alone he didn't do much by himself (which is accurate to IRL me, but not the character I created). I like that you can walk around the neighborhood, Sims 3 style, with traffic and pedestrians around. Though there was a lot of pop in when I entered a park. What seemed to be an empty lot suddenly had food trucks, joggers and what looked like a hobo walking about.

Some of the features are unexpected, like being able to customize your "city" with weather, some decorations, but also how clean or run down the area is. If you want a run down slum, you can do it. Sims had a cartoony charm that lets it get away with more silly stuff or leaning more into game vs sim aspects. With the realistic depictions in InZOI I think this is a lot harder (even though the game posits itself as a simulated world and not a real world in game). I will keep poking in on its progress, but it surely looks like the most credible Sims competitor so far.


***


I felt like playing something "light" and space opera-y yesterday, so I installed "Star Ocean - The Last Hope (4K & Full HD Remaster)" that had been sitting in my account for a while.

The opening video starts with the world destroyed by nuclear war (yay, escapism ), like 90% of sci-fi anime English voice acting was "meh", but I thought I could switch to Japanese later to mitigate that. However, the game then threw me into a combat tutorial. Movement: Easy. Attack: easy. Switch between characters: easy. Jumping: hold B then the direction to jump in. Err, ok? Countering: hold B longer when the target reticule is on you and flick the direction stick to counter. Uhm ... HOWEVER: can't do it if target reticule on you is RED, have to wait till it flashes, otherwise your counter is countered! Also, can't hold B too long, or you will be exhausted. Also you have a RUSH meter. And there's combos! And ...

I died multiple times during the tutorial encounter.

I uninstalled after that.

(May try again on easy some time.)

[Solmyr]

Thanks Syt. I'll have to check InZOI out at some point. I keep wanting to get back to a Sims 3 playthrough, precisely because of the open world.

[Syt]

I would go back to Sims 3 in a heartbeat if it was more stable and especially if they could fix the load times. Just loading into the game or loading wardrobe options (esp. if you have modded content) is excruciating.

[Syt]

Age of Wonders 4's latest DLC came out yesterday, adding "Giant Kings". This comes with a patch that overhauls the underground (again), adding ice and lava biomes to it, plus more lava abilities (like lava walking), and split Feudal Society into two specializations - aristocratic and monarchy - with different modifiers. Also more handcrafted map provinces to sprinkle between the procedurally generated ones.

Been a while since I played. I played a lot at original launch and got all the achievements at the time, but only dabbled with the DLC. A lot has changed. Heroes were fleshed out more. The hero skill trees were revamped (and are now actual skill trees instead of drop down lists, albeit small ones ). When creating custom factions, you can assign AI personalities for when you play against them. Item forging was added a while back. They added more race archetypes (insects, lizards, wolves, etc.), plus dragon rulers, eldritch "old ones" rulers, and new cultures like Reavers (I guess a mix of builders and barbarians) and far east "Oathsworn" that are either beholden to be good, bad or evil to get their bonuses (they came with far east ape and ogre races). And probably a bunch more I forget about.

Maybe time to go back.

[Syt]

Missouri expansion has released for American Truck Sim.

Expanded map so far:



Iowa, Louisiana, Illinois are in the works.

[The Minsky Moment]

Looking forward to: Mario Forza Horizon Kart
Not looking forward to: $80-90 prices for new first party Nintendo games

[Grey Fox]

Really not looking forward to paying 1998 N64 prices again.

[Syt]

I paid 140 German Marks for The Legend of Zelda on NES, equivalent to EUR 70. Though that was in 1988 money, which this website tells me would be almost EUR 150 now. https://www.inflationtool.com/euro-germany/1988-to-present-value?amount=70&year2=2025&frequency=yearly

[Josquius]

My parents spent an insane 70 1990s pounds for mega drive street fighter 2 for me.
With that the reason was the cart itself had lots of expensive extra bits in it.
With current game price rises it's all 1s and 0s.

Much like how I regard more than 30-something pence for a standard bar of chocolate as too expensive, games going beyond the 30s are mad.
I never really buy new games anyway but the switch has been frustrating in games never dropping in price.

Switch 2... Well I like the switch. How light and plug and play it is with the docking, the quiet buttons... It's great. Certainly better than the very ropey prototype feeling steam deck.
The lack of power is of course an issue so the switch 2 on paper is good....
But the trouble with the switch is most of it's games are available for cheaper on pc.
Zelda has never really appealed (and I love rpgs) nor has 3D Mario and these Nintendo first party games are the only real reason to buy one.

[The Minsky Moment]

Funny/sad thing is that Nintendo moved production of Switch 2 to Vietnam to avoid potential US tariffs on China. Only to watch as Trump imposed a 46% tariff on Vietnam.
Switch 2 preorders in the US are temporarily suspended; not clear what the company will do.

[Grey Fox]

No matter, it's going to fuck Canada.   

[Syt]

Funny/sad thing is that Nintendo moved production of Switch 2 to Vietnam to avoid potential US tariffs on China. Only to watch as Trump imposed a 46% tariff on Vietnam.
Switch 2 preorders in the US are temporarily suspended; not clear what the company will do.

The administration also referred to Vietnam as "a colony of China" which will certainly go down well in the country.

[Josquius]

Seemingly out of nowhere an oblivion remake is apparently coming out this month.
I'm intrigued.
I won't be buying it, but curious to see what they do.