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STEAM | August 2014 - Everybody loves iDLEM@STER

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I had a pair of Trittons, they were great minus the short primary cord. They broke after a year and a half or so, they snapped at the band where it says 720 (mine were kunai though).
 

Arthea

Member
apparently I missed several price mistakes. I bought Tropico 4 long ago, but it would have been nice to buy couple of gifts, especially of complete version. Oh well.
What else did I miss?
 
My headset's mic stopped working today and I want to get a new one. Any suggestions?

I'm going to be the douchebag that says you shouldn't get a headset and should instead get a stand-alone microphone. The sound quality is worlds better. For now, stick with the headset and buy something like this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MF39YS/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Then, when you want/have some extra cash, buy a real pair of headphones. I did (thanks to Grief.exe) and I love it. I sound amazing to my friends, and my games sound amazing as well!
 

Sendou

Member
So I'm done with Always Sometimes Monsters. It's also my perfect game #12. Below are some impressions.





Always Sometimes Monsters is a weird game. It's a story about the player getting invite to their ex's wedding on the other side of the country. The main objective in the game is then get there in time. To do that you have to gather money since as it turns out life hasn't been too kind for you. On this journey you have to make dozens of choices that then determine the outcome of the story. Thematically the game seems to spend a lot of time with poverty, drugs and love. Player is allowed to choose both their lover and themselves from a set of precreated characters. You can have a same-sex relationship too.

Gameplay in Always Sometimes Monsters consist mainly of trying to find money for your next meal and for the bus ticket out of the town. You have to eat or otherwise your stamina drops and you risk something happening when you sleep although I never found out what that is. Playing this game means a lot of walking and talking. To make that money honestly you have to prepared for many monotonous tasks (work!). I get that the idea here is indeed to simulate work but I never was a big fan of this kind of game design. There's also many different kinds of minigames (for example frogger clone and rock, paper, scissors based boxing). These minigames sadly succeed at nothing else but being annoying obstacle between you and your goal.

Story in this game is all about choices. The developers say they don't judge you for your choices but it's hard to write the game completely objective like that. I felt there was a couple of times when the writing indeed wasn't completely subjective when treating the outcome of your choices. There were also times were you had no choice for doing something immoral although I could have thought of quite a few other choices. In the end the choices barely matter. What changes is the characters in the final scene. It's not like the Mass Effect 3 deal but I'm still disappointed. In my game they even brough back some guy from the dead that was supposed to be that way because of my actions. That probably was nothing else but a little bug but still a little weird. I think the ending works although it's not quite as satisfactory as I would have hoped. Beyond the choices not mattering the story's bizarre nature made it hard to relate to the characters for me. This game has a weird way of going from 100% serious to completely bizarre in the next scene. I mean if I laugh at someone dying because of my actions then maybe you can see how it was hard to take the choices seriously from time to time.

Original soundtrack in this game is a joy to listen to. It sets a great mood to everything that happens in the game. Graphics are below average. About what you except from a RPGMaker game. There's also some weird random things in the game like F12 taking you to the main game without asking (or saving!) instead of taking a screenshot like you are used to on Steam. You get all the achievements simply by playing the game through. The developers have stated that they feel it's not right to control players choices with achievements and I agree with them. I felt good about the lenght of the game. It took me about 8 hours and I think I wouldn't have wanted to play it more than that.

Overall I'm glad I played the game. It's just so hard to outright recommend it. If you read my impressions and decide the weaker parts of the game aren't that annoying to you then go for it. It was nice to see a game take a shot at portraying poverty. You don't see that too often.

Always Sometimes Monsters is 50% off on Steam. You can also try the newly added demo that has unique content.
 

ghostlight_ross

Ghostlight
He posts here from time to time. I don't remember if he gave some hints that could help guessing which game it could be.
Anyways, I hope that soonish will really be soon.

Don't really have internet at home at the moment so I missed this but it will depend on how long it takes for us to get some media together for the announcement and get some approvals.

I'd estimate that it will take a few weeks yet but I'm not really sure.

Edit- Also to answer a point that came up in this thread. My use of "Japanese console release" doesn't mean it hasn't had a Western release.
 

Arthea

Member
So I'm done with Always Sometimes Monsters. It's also my perfect game #12. Below are some impressions...

It's a pity that choices doesn't matter, but it does sound interesting, maybe I should wishlist it, otoh I have too many games already
Anyway, thanks for impressions.
 

Dr Dogg

Member
Don't really have internet at home at the moment so I missed this but it will depend on how long it takes for us to get some media together for the announcement and get some approvals.

I'd estimate that it will take a few weeks yet but I'm not really sure.

Edit- Also to answer a point that came up in this thread. My use of "Japanese console release" doesn't mean it hasn't had a Western release.

You tease! This is like a really hard game of 20 questions. Cheers for the info I take it you guys will have something on your blog or on twitter when you have more information to release?

It's a pity that choices doesn't matter, but it does sound interesting, maybe I should wishlist it, otoh I have too many games already
Anyway, thanks for impressions.

You've played Spec Ops: The Line right? You should know that choice and player agency are just an illusion of your wrapped mind. In the end it all results in the same outcome just framed differently :p

did everyone receive this? quote if interested

Yeah I just has 2 coupons turn up and one was Montague's Mount. I'm sure Dusk Golem might have something written about it somewhere seeing as it's got some horror elements to it and Dusk is loopy for those kind of games. The only people on my contacts list who own it are games collectors, peeps with press accounts oh and Arthea.
 

Sendou

Member
You've played Spec Ops: The Line right? You should know that choice and player agency are just an illusion of your wrapped mind. In the end it all results in the same outcome just framed differently :p

I still think that one day there will be a game that treats players' choices with respect. I don't mind if the game has to end early because of some choice I made. Add in an option to rewind time if that's what it takes. It's just that no matter if it's Mass Effect, The Walking Dead by Telltale Games or Always Sometimes Monsters they market the game for offering choice but it really is just an illusion.

Of course making such a game is way more expensive but I think the result would be worth it.
 

lashman

Steam-GAF's Official Ambassador to Gaming-GAF
Yeah I just has 2 coupons turn up and one was Montague's Mount. I'm sure Dusk Golem might have something written about it somewhere seeing as it's got some horror elements to it and Dusk is loopy for those kind of games. The only people on my contacts list who own it are games collectors, peeps with press accounts oh and Arthea.

oh you :p lol
 

Arthea

Member
You tease! This is like a really hard game of 20 questions. Cheers for the info I take it you guys will have something on your blog or on twitter when you have more information to release?

You've played Spec Ops: The Line right? You should know that choice and player agency are just an illusion of your wrapped mind. In the end it all results in the same outcome just framed differently :p

Yeah I just has 2 coupons turn up and one was Montague's Mount. I'm sure Dusk Golem might have something written about it somewhere seeing as it's got some horror elements to it and Dusk is loopy for those kind of games. The only people on my contacts list who own it are games collectors, peeps with press accounts oh and Arthea.

Ya, but also I've played Long live the Queen, where every choice matters!

I was asking Dusk about Montague's Mount before buying it, but he didn't respond, so I bought it anyway, haven't gotten around playing it yet, though (><)

I still think that one day there will be a game that treats players' choices with respect. I don't mind if the game has to end early because of some choice I made. Add in an option to rewind time if that's what it takes. It's just that no matter if it's Mass Effect, The Walking Dead by Telltale Games or Always Sometimes Monsters they market the game for offering choice but it really is just an illusion.

Of course making such a game is way more expensive but I think the result would be worth it.

That's one of problems I have with Telltale games, actually. I don't like when a game lets me make a choice and right away throws out of the window, just because.
 

ghostlight_ross

Ghostlight
You tease! This is like a really hard game of 20 questions. Cheers for the info I take it you guys will have something on your blog or on twitter when you have more information to release?

Me a tease? Never :).

Will do. We'll announce it in a blogpost and you can probably expect a few Tweets when we know what date that will be.
 

Dr Dogg

Member
I still think that one day there will be a game that treats players' choices with respect. I don't mind if the game has to end early because of some choice I made. Add in an option to rewind time if that's what it takes. It's just that no matter if it's Mass Effect, The Walking Dead by Telltale Games or Always Sometimes Monsters they market the game for offering choice but it really is just an illusion.

Of course making such a game is way more expensive but I think the result would be worth it.

Daily gushing over Symphony of the Night alert!

See I put it more down to developers and more over publisher don't really want to create too much content that players will either never see or will never get to experience. Didn't IO Interactive say that only about 20% of people who played one of their games (not sure in Kane & Lynch or Hitman) never saw the end. Also it's bloody hard to create a tight story without having linearity unless you really take your time to check and recheck the branching options and how they relate and interact with each other. Might be easier for one person or a small group overseeing all aspects of production but a 1,000 staff Ubisoft game I get the feeling that's a jigsaw puzzle of a production environment as it is let alone adding in variability to the narrative.

I would like to see some dev/pubs do the Symphony of the Night thing. Not just a bad ending and a true ending but have close to half of the content tied to your choices. If you didn't bother to bump into Maria before going to the 'final' encounter you miss all of the inverted castle. I wonder how many people missed that back in the day as this was the early days of the internet and GameFAQs had only been around a couple of years prior to that. It might encourage players to take their time with games and not just rush through them and move on to the next. Though with the amount of new releases every year and some folks having this obsession of buying everything in sight whether it's their kind of game or not I don't see this happening. A few Japanese RPGs do this as well, though they do usually have much more end game content that the traditional action or adventure genre of games. Though during playing Persona 3 and 4 I was being super cautious not to mess up a dialogue choice so not to lock myself out of an extra dungeon and boss

oh you :p lol

Ha! Glad someone caught that.

Ya, but also I've played Long live the Queen, where every choice matters!

I was asking Dusk about Montague's Mount before buying it, but he didn't respond, so I bought it anyway, haven't gotten around playing it yet, though (><)

Well I assume it's stupid o'clock in the morning there. You know there will be a long reply later at some point.

Me a tease? Never :).

Will do. We'll announce it in a blogpost and you can probably expect a few Tweets when we know what date that will be.

Top stuff. I'll keep an eye out.
 

AHA-Lambda

Member
You have to eat or otherwise your stamina drops and you risk something happening when you sleep although I never found out what that is.

You die, seriously. Happened to me twice :/

I agree with your impressions of it, I largely felt it was a waste of potential and most choices don't amount to anything aside from the end one (I can only think of one other).

It makes a big deal about being down on your luck and making hard choices but tbh going down the "good" route is pretty easy. Nor, can I sympathise with the premise of the story, why would you want to go to your exes wedding?

Also the consistent 4th wall breaking from the developer on the games industry is incredibly irritating and comes off as quite arrogant imo.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
I inadvertently realised why people noticed that their Steam Community game count went down after using the FoD script posted a couple of days ago: Valve's changed the FoD sub type such that the games no longer count as owned and adding one to your account kicks this into gear. I didn't use the script myself, but I did try to add Age of Wushu to my account earlier via the store page and in doing so I "lost" about 85 games.
 

Arthea

Member
Daily gushing over Symphony of the Night alert!

See I put it more down to developers and more over publisher don't really want to create too much content that players will either never see or will never get to experience. Didn't IO Interactive say that only about 20% of people who played one of their games (not sure in Kane & Lynch or Hitman) never saw the end. Also it's bloody hard to create a tight story without having linearity unless you really take your time to check and recheck the branching options and how they relate and interact with each other. Might be easier for one person or a small group overseeing all aspects of production but a 1,000 staff Ubisoft game I get the feeling that's a jigsaw puzzle of a production environment as it is let alone adding in variability to the narrative.

I would like to see some dev/pubs do the Symphony of the Night thing. Not just a bad ending and a true ending but have close to half of the content tied to your choices. If you didn't bother to bump into Maria before going to the 'final' encounter you miss all of the inverted castle. I wonder how many people missed that back in the day as this was the early days of the internet and GameFAQs had only been around a couple of years prior to that. It might encourage players to take their time with games and not just rush through them and move on to the next. Though with the amount of new releases every year and some folks having this obsession of buying everything in sight whether it's their kind of game or not I don't see this happening. A few Japanese RPGs do this as well, though they do usually have much more end game content that the traditional action or adventure genre of games. Though during playing Persona 3 and 4 I was being super cautious not to mess up a dialogue choice so not to lock myself out of an extra dungeon and boss

Well I assume it's stupid o'clock in the morning there. You know there will be a long reply later at some point.
but you see it's possible, I've played at least two games that do that well, granted one of them is JRPG, so as you say, these are kinda exception, but other is VN, and it's possible to make a good game based on choices, in fact, so good that you need to see where all paths lead!

nah, it was a week ago or so, it's hard to keep up with this thread, probably he didn't even see my post.

random thought: our thread title was never that on point from the time of "every day is Tuesday". idlemaster gave me some quality time away from PC, and not only that, I'm about to finish one PS3 game, yay! Still can't wait to get it done (probably in couple of days), that I can get back to Trails.

I inadvertently realised why people noticed that their Steam Community game count went down after using the FoD script posted a couple of days ago: Valve's changed the FoD sub type such that the games no longer count as owned and adding one to your account kicks this into gear. I didn't use the script myself, but I did try to add Age of Wushu to my account earlier via the store page and in doing so I "lost" about 85 games.

wait... are you saying that doing it manually still keeps game count intact? That would be strange...
 

Copons

Member
Literally every single change made by the mod begs the question, why?

Even more because HL2 has aged absurdly well, especially considering it is a 2004 game.
Damn, in 2004 there was like Halo 2 (that looks like crap today) or Doom 3 (I don't really remember it, but searching for non-modded screens, it appears to use great textures for characters models and extremely low detailed ones for surfaces, more or less like Halo 2, but with more power).


On a lighter note: how
creepy
cool it is that y'all woke up with two ME in your inventory?
 

Dr Dogg

Member
but you see it's possible, I've played at least two games that do that well, granted one of them is JRPG, so as you say, these are kinda exception, but other is VN, and it's possible to make a good game based on choices, in fact, so good that you need to see where all paths lead!

nah, it was a week ago or so, it's hard to keep up with this thread, probably he didn't even see my post.

random thought: our thread title was never that on point from the time of "every day is Tuesday". idlemaster gave me some quality time away from PC, and not only that, I'm about to finish one PS3 game, yay! Still can't wait to get it done (probably in couple of days), that I can get back to Trails.

Oh there's nothing stopping anyone making choice based gameplay a reality other than what I assume to be some publisher don't really want to spend money and resources on aspects of a game that possibly only a fraction of your audience will see. Even the choices that do exist are so black and white it's comical.

Though that's not to say they don't exist. As you point out VN's are all about choice and usually they are the right length that you would go through them a couple of times over if they have that much variability. As we can both agree quite a few RPG's have more content after the main quest is finished and usually substantial content at that.

And yeah now the Idle Master hangover is over and I'm only running it when I get a new game with drops I'm at a bit of a loss as what to finish of my already started backlog. Really close to finishing Transistor but I'm trying to savour that (and I'm screenshotting like it's the end of the world), got stuck back into Wolfenstein TNO yesterday, Shovel Knight just got an update, Trails is staring me down and I've got a whacky idea for an Unearthed and Marlow Briggs double header. Playing games is hard man :(
 

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t1408357886z1.png
 
Finished the Wei storyline in Dynasty Warriors 8 XL yesterday and I still think that the series never really evolved.

Somehow it still kinda plays like a 2001 game. The leveldesign is bad, the animations are bad, the story just makes sense if you know about the history and it just feels like it doesnt play like a modern game.
I played Sengoku Basara before and that plays far better than DW.


Edit: Thanks anonymous. Entered for Larry :D
 

Arthea

Member
Finished the Wei storyline in Dynasty Warriors 8 XL yesterday and I still think that the series never really evolved.

Somehow it still kinda plays like a 2001 game. The leveldesign is bad, the animations are bad, the story just makes sense if you know about the history and it just feels like it doesnt play like a modern game.
I played Sengoku Basara before and that plays far better than DW.


Edit: Thanks anonymous. Entered for Larry :D

I would buy it so hard on PC...
I haven't played DW in years, so I hope it won't be that bad for me, still haven't bought it yet.

And yeah now the Idle Master hangover is over and I'm only running it when I get a new game with drops I'm at a bit of a loss as what to finish of my already started backlog. Really close to finishing Transistor but I'm trying to savour that (and I'm screenshotting like it's the end of the world), got stuck back into Wolfenstein TNO yesterday, Shovel Knight just got an update, Trails is staring me down and I've got a whacky idea for an Unearthed and Marlow Briggs double header. Playing games is hard man :(

I managed to resist Wolf's sale last time. And I'm not sure why you want to torture yourself with Unearthed. Just play Trails with Wolf, problem solved!
I'm a bit uneasy about playing Marlow Briggs after such praise it got from steamgaf
 

Sendou

Member
You die, seriously. Happened to me twice :/

Well that's not exactly what I expected. I understand what they were going after with that stamina bar but I'm not sure it was the best execution.

Also the consistent 4th wall breaking from the developer on the games industry is incredibly irritating and comes off as quite arrogant imo.

Forgot to mention that but I completely agree with you. I mean you see developers more than the actual main characters of the game which is a bit ridiculous. The demo though... That guilt trip by developers when you give the game a "bad" score (2/4)
 
I've finally settled into my dorm. How am I supposed to live with this paltry 3rd world 3 mbps connection?
It's a bit late, but thanks freshveggie for the birthday gift. Hikkis for life.
GabeN also gave me a booster pack for gun monkeys. T-thanks gabe
Hey, sorry it's a crappy cheap game but it's got nice colors :p
Did you move to USA for studying there?
Funniest thing I heard all night "How can you play? You're a vegetable, you have no arms!" I don't remember who said it, but it was hilarious
Yeah, I wanted to laugh but I was the last man and afraid of choking... and I did, lol.
FellowGAF, what video games is worthy enough to be the first video game I play as a 32 year old? You have three hours to state your case.
Happy birthday man! Spend some quality time with your kids and wife.
Nah, the opposite: it doesn't matter.
:(
Hey Jason (?), it's nice to be able asking a real collector. Care to a quick AMA?
When did you start collecting or better when did the thought came up I need everything?
Why do you want to have everything?
What are you gonna do after you have all games?
Do you want to leave this to your kids for them playing or more like a curiosity/museum-type of collection?
How much did you spend already?
What was your most expensive/hard to get game?
What is your most desired/hard to get game and what would you be willing to do for it?
 

Dr Dogg

Member

Isn't there already 50 different version of this already? I think I've even got a couple of copies of this on the Wii.

Drinkbox tweeted this 10 days ago:

https://twitter.com/DrinkBoxStudios/status/497831883929972736

STCE is coming :)

Noice! Actually what is the difference between vanilla (well the Gold Edition in Steam's case) and the Championship Ed?

Tropic 4 Collector's Bundle, paid for by IdleMaster cards

yay/nay?

Well considering everyone and their mothers who were around when it had a pricing error on Saturday picked up about 10 copies each you might find some really cheap copies still kicking about.
 

AHA-Lambda

Member
Forgot to mention that but I completely agree with you. I mean you see developers more than the actual main characters of the game which is a bit ridiculous. The demo though... That guilt trip by developers when you give the game a "bad" score (2/4)

Weird thing is I expected that demo to be the same as the one I played at Rezzed this year but it wasn't. It has the same game section in it with the dorm but the set up is different.

You're not a games journalist you are in the developer's office and they discuss what they're game should be like. They say things like "let's make it pixel art cos it's easy and also retro" and "let's put in same sex relationships cos we'll get good press doing that".

It was extremely obnoxious and not funny. I didn't finish the demo (admittedly a game like this doesn't demo well at a con) and I mentioned to the devolver rep what I thought and she agreed she admitted she wasn't happy with the demo either. Probably why it's never been seen again.

Only reason I ended up playing the full game was cos of good reviews that I didn't end up agreeing with and it was cheap on GOG's summer sale.
 

Kiru

Member
Oh wow, I won Sonic & All-Star Racing Transformed on reddit. Soon I will see what all the hype was about aaaaand I get the to play with Dunder some day. :D
 
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