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STEAM | July 2014 – 25TH THREAD EDITION (2008-2014)

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Halo 2

Banned
What are some classic games you guys wish would come to Steam with achievements and badges?


Off the top of my head, I wish Symphony of the Night and Breath of Fire IV were on here.

Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy VI (OG version)
 

Elija2

Member
Man, I really want to like Cloudbuilt (and I kinda do) but boy is it frustrating.

I hate the enemies in this game. Every time I'm having fun zooming through the levels I end up coming across a patch of turrets and crawlers to ruin my fun. The crawlers are the worst. Sometimes you can't see them before jumping on their platform and they wreck your shit. The only way you can kill them is by knocking them into the abyss which is much easier said than done. So when I come upon a situation where I have crawlers and turrets to deal with, I shoot at the crawlers first to disarm them. Then I start shooting at the turret, but then the crawlers come back to life and hit me! I get that they're meant to encourage you to never stop moving, but then why put them near obstacles that take me a bit to think about? There are also these drone enemies that follow you around everywhere, and if they spot you they put up a shield making them invulnerable. So basically if you don't spot and destroy them before they spot you (and you'll often miss them because you're zooming through the levels too fast to notice them), then you're stuck with these things following you everywhere (or at least until they lose sight of you, but that can take a while). Trying to quickly assess what to do with a drone following you everywhere is super-stressful (but I'll admit it feels good to zoom through obstacles without a single mistake while being chased). I'm sure that experts would be able to breeze past these scenarios, but nobody is an expert going through these levels on their first time. This stuff requires trial-and-error and you'll end up dying a bunch of times which leads me to my next complaint:

If you lose all of your lives you have to restart the level. I know this is typical to most games with lives, but in this one it's so frustrating. The hardest parts of a level are always near the end, so once you lose all of your lives trying to get past it you have to go through the entire level all over again just to get back to the part that you were stuck at. It is nice that your lives are reset after completing/restaring a level and there are ways to increase the life cap (apparently it can go as high as 316) but this requires you to beat the levels with a higher rank (or collect tough-to-reach tokens within the levels) which by the time you're good enough to do that you'll have already beaten all the levels and won't need the lives anymore. It's when you're a noob that you need all the lives you can get. Either get rid of the lives or get rid of the bullshit enemy placement (but I'd prefer if they got rid of the lives).

Also I'm getting terrible performance in this game, even on the lowest settings. For a game like this, frame rate is really important and low frame rates are the cause of many of my mess-ups. It's weird because the game doesn't look like something that would be really demanding, but I found this post by one of the developers on the Steam forums:

In our case all lighting is dynamic, so all light (levels use everything from a 100 to 600 realtime lights atm) affecting all objects, including the player, in the same way which is assuring that everything looks consistent. We are also using a style with the hatching and outlines that requires a lot of texture samples(hatching is built from 12 layers of patterns but reduced to 4 textures, and the outlines uses 8 samples, and additionally we also have default samples for assembling the deferred rendering in that shader), combining all that you get something that’s pretty fillrate intensive. So the resolution you use greatly impacts the performance, as it greatly increases the number of pixels that the GPU need to sample and process.

I dunno, the aesthetic looks really nice but I don't think it was worth making the game so demanding. Maybe there's a better way for them to achieve that look without impacting performance as much, but I'm not a developer so what do I know? But it sucks because after putting in all that effort to make the game look good and kill my performance, I'm forced to run the game in the lowest settings which negates all of their hard work. I'm not allowed to turn the texture quality higher than Very Low without the game crashing (apparently because I only have 512MB of VRAM), so I'm stuck with terrible-looking textures (although there are still many textures that are high-quality which is weird). I guess that's the point of having a texture quality setting, but even the UI elements are affected by this setting. So basically stuff like the level rank images, level preview images, and even the timer are so compressed that they're sometimes illegible. Why would you tie this stuff to the texture quality setting?

But despite all these problems I have with the game, it's still really fun to play! I dunno, I just really like fast-paced platformers. Even after I rage-quit the game because of a stupid level, I find myself going back to it and trying again. This doesn't mean that I forgive the game for my complaints, just that I'm willing to deal with them because the game is still fun. I hear that there will be free DLC levels too so I can't wait for that. I'd still recommend the game to anyone that is interested (and has a good GPU). And thanks again for gifting it to me, Dragoon En Regalia. Don't think I don't appreciate it!

And, uh, sorry for that wall of text guys. I just really needed to vent. Anyway, back to playing Cloudbuilt.
 

Indignate

Member
OMG I finally killed one of them... now just to kill the one from the .gif...

Edit: welp..

Kill the one in the gif first.

The other one is only guarding a soul pickup, I believe, and won't be able to attack you once you're on the ledge.

A good trick is to lure him back to the platform you used to run up to the ledge. He'll usually make himself fall.
 

Mono

Member
Still not beaten the advanced edition :(

I'm 20+ hours in and still haven't beaten the normal version. I'm terrible at FTL but I think it's a lot of fun! I think my problem is that I try to have everything on all at once, so I spend way too much scrap on power.

Advanced edition features are really fun, though. That was really cool of the devs to release such a huge patch for free.
 

Grief.exe

Member
venturing a guess I'd have to say it's dat post Steam sale buzz

Picked up new members, 25th Anni thread, and coming off the Steam sale high.

Perfect storm of posting conditions.

Scanning the top ten, I see a few new people I don't recognize posting up a storm. We've unleashed the whales!
 

Kanokare

Member
Gawd finally got a good random group for CSGO. Went about 20-6 and got my assignment done. Now I gotta pray for another assignment to drop :(
 

iosefe

Member
Morrowind, definitely!!

Also FTL. Achieving something is FTL is a pretty big deal. That game is really hard; they should put the in-game achievements on Steam.

i managed to do a full heal from having 1 hull point left

damn right i want an achievement on record for that.
 

Soule

Member
Haha yeah I guess there's a lot of people excited about having so many new games to play but I just didn't expect the pace to be so fast without new big sales to propel it forward and the bulk giveaways (although there's plenty of generous people still doing good work there)
 

dot

Member
Thanks so much Grief! I didn't have the money to buy this during the sale since i was busy buying gifts for others.
 

Casimir

Unconfirmed Member
Man, I really want to like Cloudbuilt (and I kinda do) but boy is it frustrating.

And, uh, sorry for that wall of text guys. I just really needed to vent. Anyway, back to playing Cloudbuilt.

Thanks for the impressions. I appreciated the aesthetic of Cloudbuilt, but I have a few games I need to finish before I buy another one.


Heh. Post a (positive) Steam review of Gone Home and immediately get it down-voted.

There are 8 million accounts on Steam. This isn't a meaningful occurrence. Some reviews for the game have a few hundred approvals or down votes. They all started somewhere.
 

Hugstable

Banned
Kill the one in the gif first.

The other one is only guarding a soul pickup, I believe, and won't be able to attack you once you're on the ledge.

A good trick is to lure him back to the platform you used to run up to the ledge. He'll usually make himself fall.

Thanks I'll give that a try on this attempt. If I can trick him into falling that would be perfect, already trained some of those monsters right before to jump off ledges :D
 

tav7623

Member
What are some classic games you guys wish would come to Steam with achievements and badges?


Off the top of my head, I wish Symphony of the Night and Breath of Fire IV were on here.

I wish the PC versions of Silent Hill 2 & 3 were available on Steam as well as all the early Test Drive and Need for Speed games.
 

Mono

Member
i managed to do a full heal from having 1 hull point left

damn right i want an achievement on record for that.

Holy hell, good job!

It's sad that the FTL achievements are only in-game because they're something to be proud of.
 
Here are some of my favorite games, I always make sure to pick up some extras around the summer sale to make sure others get to enjoy these as well in case they were on the fence.

The Dirty Bomb keys are for Splash Damage's new F2P FPS game. I have been in the alpha for a little while now and the game is quite solid. It's a good mix of Enemy Territory with a variety of different classes, and does not require ADS. You will need to go through their client for this one, get started here http://dirtybomb.nexon.net/Instruction

Dead Island Epidemic is just an extra I had laying around.
Thanks a lot for Brothers!!
 

Soule

Member
That STFU pic reminded me of Galak-Z which still doesn't have a solid release date that I can see. Makes me sad, really want that game.
Galak-Z_GIF_3.gif
 

Grief.exe

Member
There are 8 million accounts on Steam. This isn't a meaningful occurrence.

Concurrent and total accounts are completely different things.

The concurrent number hit a new record of 8 million recently, but there are probably around 80-85 million active accounts on Steam by this point.
 

Caerith

Member
I saw that. Pretty lame. I gave it a thumbs up though.

Thanks. I posted it friends-only for a reason, but I guess I befriended an asshole at some point. It wasn't that poorly-written.

Link it here and you'll get an upvote (clicking on reviews in your profile doesn't work for me currently).

Also a Gone Home Special Edition is available!

http://steamcommunity.com/games/GoneHome/announcements/detail/227746029756992822

Oh I don't care about the up/down ratio, I just think it's funny the hate the game/not-a-game gets.

I saw that special edition too, and am kinda tempted.
 

Casimir

Unconfirmed Member
Concurrent and total accounts are completely different things.

The concurrent number hit a new record of 8 million recently, but there are probably around 80-85 million active accounts on Steam by this point.

Oh it was concurrent number? For some reason I thought it was total accounts. whoops.
 
EDIT: Nevermind, I found it out. It's Postal 2 that it's from. Luckily, that was the one I bought 2 days ago. About to try it out, I've heard good things about the game.
 

Mono

Member
Did you change your name from Leila or are you two using the same avatar?



:p

Lol, I used to be Leila. My normal screen name is Mono, but some gaffer took the name in 2005 and only posted twice. I asked the mods about it and they seemed to have stealth-changed me to Mono yesterday!
 
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