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STEAM- Announcements & Updates 2011 Edition
- Thread starter ClovingWestbrook
- Start date
- Status
archnemesis
Member
I used a keyboard and it controlled fine.Detox said:
Freeza Under The Shower
Member
Can't say I liked VVVVV, even though I bought it in the holiday sale. Far too slippery on the controls to become any real platforming fun for my tastes.
Thief: DS must be bought though. Mainly because of that one level that made it through production by some miracle.
Thief: DS must be bought though. Mainly because of that one level that made it through production by some miracle.
balladofwindfishes
Member
Buying Humble Bundle part 2 early is the gift that just keeps giving.OmegaDragon said:
balladofwindfishes
Member
I was actually playing VVVVVV one handed, which is something a lot of games can't say they are capable of.
CrookedRain
Member
You can move left or right and press a key to flip. That's it. There's no reason to use the 360 pad.1-D_FTW said:
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
Something weird may be happening on the Steam store.
Frankenstrat
Member
LovingSteam said:
yeah, for me too. Only seeing Top Sellers and New Releases in the games menu thing. Also every new release is pre-2009.
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
Drkirby said:
Only games up to 2007 are showing. Take a look.
I know the Summer sale isn't happening soon since the registry hasn't been updated with the packs and sale items. Guess just an error.
chixdiggit
Member
LovingSteam said:
Hmm like the new releases being from 2006? Cause that's what it shows for me.
Dog Problems
Banned
It's back to normal for me now. It was showing older titles.
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
NVM, its fixed
Boss Doggie
all my loli wolf companions are so moe
Wooo! Finally bought Cities XL 2011! That 75% off really makes it feel worth it.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
2 copies of VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV to give out to the first 2 PMs with e-mail address that you will be able to access the gift from.
Edit: gifts going out now.
Edit: gifts going out now.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
Lol one of the winners had the word "sex" in there email address haha.
MmmSkyscraper
Unconfirmed Member
From 18/05/2011:
Today I clicked on the Thief deal:
You already own Thief: Deadly Shadows
MmmSkyscraper said:
Today I clicked on the Thief deal:
You already own Thief: Deadly Shadows
stuminus3
Member
Oh sweet, Still Life 2 is on Steam now. Both Still Life games @ 20% off this week.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/5594/
http://store.steampowered.com/news/5594/
It didn't work on the first launch but I quit it and restarted and Shift+Tab works fine now.PaulLFC said:
Oh sweet, impressions time for CitiesXL 2011! (If you were looking, it seems only this maniac had anything to say; some true some a tad insane.)Sarcasm said:
I played it for about 3 hours, so still, wheelbarrel of salt here. I've played SC since 2k up to 4 Deluxe with mods for the longest time so there's any relevant experience there.
First off if you watched the LP video linked earlier, the UI delay is not as bad as it seems -- it was patched, though the delay is noticeable (about half a second) when your city gets much bigger if you plan on pulling up information overlays.
I turned on advanced placement (i.e. plop and drop instead of zoning) and expert mode (didn't seem to make it harder) later on and there are a lot of buildings. Plop and drop is sometimes nice for better control instead of getting repetitive buildings in commercial areas (though I didn't really see that as a problem zoning anyway), or you get to chose between neat higher apartments or really tall skyscrapers to compliment your skyline.
- Tutorial is mostly reading, whatever. Spent about 70-90 minutes on it getting stuff down. About 10 or so parts (15 maybe?)
- Teaches you pretty much all the basics - how to zone, place roads, how to manage resources and trade them, how to deal with unemployment and other satisfaction "factors" (mostly in one way, leisure, and then you simply apply the same lesson to other factors like security, fire, health, etc.)
- Also goes teaching you how to set up bus routes (which is a pretty neat feature IMO) and metro routes, bridges. Highways not taught however, but pretty easy, just a separate set of roads with their own set of entrances
- Unlocking higher sets of buildings seems "loldumbwtf" at first but mostly it's there to be more of a safety net since alot of the higher stage buildings have pretty astronomical upkeep and/or construction costs on your income or they require X amount of a certain building (e.g. 1 silo for 10 farms). You can just unlock expert mode (doesn't change the difficulty) if you want them off the bat and want to just use them to manipulate regardless if you can work with it.
- The game is fairly easy to make money with; if you have excess resources (in the form of tokens) then you can trade them for things you might require, or in case. I pretty much just traded some heavy industry tokens (2 or 3) to the ingame corporation and asked for about 135k cash in return each round, making money pretty easy straight off the bat.
- There aren't "objectives" like a scenario but there is a notification (very straight up, not wacky like 3k's news ticker) on what you should do next, like "need more unskilled workers" or "skilled workers face unemployment" so you know what you probably want to do next to keep building.
- It's much more complex than even SC4D - you need to worry less about power lines and water lines (at times fun yet a chore) but the new focus is on balancing priorities.
- So you need to started by connecting your city, then building residences, then industry and then commercial zones to satisfy people's needs but at the same time all RCI also contribute to resources (people can be "traded", so can excess commercial and industrial resources). Even utilities (power, garbage, water) can still be traded.
- You also need to worry about supplying specific types of workers to specific (not just industry/commercial) buildings -- later one, they require a mix of 2-4 of them
- some resources, industries (farming) and services (fuel) also need the map to support; so if there is no fertile land, you can't even considering placing farms on the land and you'll need to trade/import some elsewhere. Same with fuel, as it is one of the resources that industries and commercial services "buy" (aka need) to work and make make income for your taxes.
- I really like the trade system, though except for cash it's a bit ambiguous on how you obtain some of them other than having a lot of too little of something; but it usually makes sense
- It looks pretty good, depending on the time of day (it does time from all 24 hours), though at night it feels way too dark right now (small city I'm guessing) to really play at except at very close levels but it's definitely not Crysis levels. The shots on the steam store are bullshots, if I even needed to say that. (To be fair alot of people who post screenshots of their cities on the game's forums don't even have AF or AA on much less decide to run it through PS or something for postprocessing)
- I only got to taste a bit of bus/metro route making in the tutorial but it's amazing and I wish SimCity had thought of it
What I didn't like:
- The guy on the Steam forum is right, there isn't too much numerical information, though the large amount of overlays provided are good. But too many charts, not enough graphs for my taste. I like to see how everything is doing over time
- I can't really manipulate funding for separate buildings (e.g. fire, police, schools) ala SC4D
- All the damn buildings are all the same damn lot size, and even if they weren't it's so similar enough that the scale isn't as noticeable as in a square grid. But to be fair, alot of the skyscrapers reach up pretty high.
- Lack of parks, mostly because I was a park nut in SC4D. I really liked the "puzzle piece" parks modders made where you could assemble your own parks using different trail types or grass types with different trees/benches on them. The list goes on and one but the only substitute for CXL2011 is one "environmental park" (air pollution mitigator?) and "plazas" which are just filler for spaces enclosed by roads. They look fine and do their job is all they do, however. Not much beautification options that I could find (You can't even place your own trees)
- There are some alternative Asia/Europe building sets (houses, businesses mostly, some landmarks too); they are nice but fairly limited but satisfactory.
- can't manipulate land before you start (simcity peeve right here!)
- also, you can't zone over a building and let it rebuild to a higher density (just another simcity peeve)
What I did like though:
- 3D means no grid system, which means curved roads aren't hackjobs and making suburbs are also alot more fun (for me at least).
- The systems that you need to keep track of -- the query windows for buildings do a good job (though sometimes dumb because it's colour-coded too much) of what it is lacking or what it has enough of.
- much greater control of roads, so you can -- on the fly -- make certain roads go 1-way or the other (though it's hard to tell because the diagram doesn't adjust with the camera orientation), or have a 5-lane avenue be 2+2 or 3+2 or all 1-way.
- All the roads are different length (small roads, roads, small and regular avenues, expressway and highway) so you have to be much more careful placing things or needing to manipulate roads to manage traffic. (The guy in the steam forum post didn't like it, suck it up, we aren't on a grid system here)
Those damn technical issues:
- The game uses the equivalent of one core, so even with the multicore tool mod for the game, you really just shift the work across the rest, but you never gain any performance improvements
- unfortunately this is hard-coded into the game so even if the developers wanted to fix it, they'd have to rewrite a new game, and they seem more committed to helping the game do well for now
- sometimes the game starts to chug while calculating things like free-form zoning (you draw a polygonal shape and it looks to see if the area is too big/small, and how to optimize where the plots go and if the roads/intersections/etc are valid (angles, etc.). Bigger = slower. Same with roads if they extend a bit too long at once but not a huge issue)
- but proper mod tools still haven't been released
- Game uses Starforce 5-machine activation, pretty sure there is a revoker but haven't checked.
- The game takes about 70 seconds to load for me, maps load relatively fast, but bigger will get slower. Not as bad as SC4D though, especially with 4GB worth of mod files on a large map!
- I'm running it at 1280x1024 2xAA, 16xAF, and it gets a bit bogged down later on. Some of the later tutorial cities have 110k plus people and it sometimes chugs, but since it's a sim game, I really don't care too much about frame rate or pop-in when zooming in
- You can't really adjust your mouse settings (there is windowed mode) and mouse control is locked to the horizontal axis except at the lowest (ground) level of zoom.
For 10$ however, I'm sure I'll play more than its worth out of it. You might be afraid of the DRM, don't care for 10$ at least. The single-core business is kinda stupid but SC4D has the same problem too, and the loading times are worse when you throw mods in the mix (to be fair). There's a bit of humour to be found when a business/factory goes under ("Boss went to take a smoke break but never came back" is a good one) so they aren't all super serious (the tutorial is just that).
Other than that, this is really your only other choice if you want a city sim game other than SC4D. Maxis isn't coming back any time soon, this is a substitute though not entirely subpar but not exceptional enough for me to be completely glowing about abandoning SC4D (also I don't really hold the performance issues too much weight since you can pause the game and SC4D is just as bad at dealing with gigantic metropolises). The resource aspect of the game is fun enough that it stands separate of SimCity on its own merits. There are mods but no proper mod tools, so if you are really in the need for mods, SC4D might tide you over better (though the work involved, IIRC is still aplenty). The best hope for "SimCity 5" is for the devs of CitiesXL to write a new engine so it doesn't run on one core and keep the sim aspect alive for the next title sometime down the line.
yeah yeah WALL OF TEXT this isn't me trying to recommend a shooter but a city builder
Revolutionary
Member
Just played like an hour of VVVVVV. It was endearing at first, I was feeling nostalgic... but then I realized it was because the main song's melody reminded me of that of an old GB game (Final Fantasy Adventure). I managed to snag a few of the shiny objects or whatever, but then I hit the "Doing Things The Hard Way" one, which requires you to navigate through like 9 total screens with the left and right keys alone.
Fuck. That.
It's not a bad game - I just don't have the patience for that kind of stuff anymore. lol
Fuck. That.
It's not a bad game - I just don't have the patience for that kind of stuff anymore. lol
Finally picked this up. I had a pretty infuriating experience earlier though. After I don't know how long, I got that veni, vidi, vici trinket. It was one of the biggest FUCK YEAH moments I've had from a game in a while. Anyway, save my game and touch a checkpoint for good measure before quitting. I come back to the game only to find that it didn't save. FUCK. Fortunately it didn't take me long to get the trinket again. Found out I pressed enter when selecting save, but that just un-pauses the game.plc268 said:
Princess Skittles
Prince's's 'Skittle's
The control delays in VVVVVV worries me, but I'll probably get it anyway.
I didn't like VVVVVV, it didn't evoke good memories of good 8 bit games, it reminded of the bad ones, with the slippery controls.
For anyone buying Thief: Deadly Shadows
Widescreen mod http://mugon.org/widescreen/thief.html
Texture pack http://www.john-p.com/textures/Thief-DS/index.shtml
YMMV, I haven't installed these in awhile so I don't know if they still work.
For anyone buying Thief: Deadly Shadows
Widescreen mod http://mugon.org/widescreen/thief.html
Texture pack http://www.john-p.com/textures/Thief-DS/index.shtml
YMMV, I haven't installed these in awhile so I don't know if they still work.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I didn't notice any control delay when I played.Princess Skittles said:
I've had VVVVVV for a while, and yes, there absolutely is input lag. There's a bit of sliding as well, but most notable, there's input lag.
Sliding would be on the level of Megaman 2, which maybe a little more input lag (yes, Megaman has noticeable input lag to me...but some people don't notice).
Sliding would be on the level of Megaman 2, which maybe a little more input lag (yes, Megaman has noticeable input lag to me...but some people don't notice).
paperspace
Member
Well, I can't get past the first level and it seems like there are a few who have the same problem, if that's any indication.Gloomfire said:
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