What are you playing this weekend/these days?


Been eyeing Subnautica for a while, it's high up on my list even though I'm not a fan of survival games.
I too don't like survival games, anyway I started playing in survival mode and it's not difficult, but it's very repetitive and boring... also there's an interesting story that unfolds in time, and to proceed you'll need a LOT of components for upgrades and base building... so after some hours of play I wasn't anymore happy to continue searching over and over for the same things, and found out that there's a cheat console :cool:
The cheats you enable are officially recognized, so a message tells you that your game mode has changed, and achievements are disabled.
Even with cheats enabled it will be a long game anyway, but at least I can just build stuff and swim around in peace xD
 
I too don't like survival games, anyway I started playing in survival mode and it's not difficult, but it's very repetitive and boring... also there's an interesting story that unfolds in time, and to proceed you'll need a LOT of components for upgrades and base building... so after some hours of play I wasn't anymore happy to continue searching over and over for the same things, and found out that there's a cheat console :cool:
The cheats you enable are officially recognized, so a message tells you that your game mode has changed, and achievements are disabled.
Even with cheats enabled it will be a long game anyway, but at least I can just build stuff and swim around in peace xD
Thanks for the warning! I've been dreading exactly that.
 
Played The Stick of Truth again. Liked it, again.

SW:KotOR now. Though rather bummed out, since I learned - when I was already a lvl 8 Scout - that I could/should have ignored the level ups, until I was a Jedi, to end up with a higher Jedi level. And as much as I like the story, I'm not willing to start over. I'm sure there were a way to undo the level ups if I were playing on PC, but I'm on Switch.
 
Thanks for the warning! I've been dreading exactly that.
This cheat recipe makes Subnautica a good and enjoyable experience for me:
freedom
oxygen
noenergy
nocost

It could seem exagerate, but still the exploration part is huge, and this way you can build a base (with sonar) and vehicles everywhere, this helps when a monster destroys your vehicle and you are in open ocean... and you'll have to swim for hours to reach your nearest base).
Projects for upgrades, new type of rooms and data logs must still be found and scanned manually before being able to build them, and the map is HUGE (also deep) and very different, it also has some "overwater" islands to explore, with secrets inside.
 
I started playing Half-Life Alyx. I bought it when it came out but never had a good setup for playing it. Now I have a good enough setup and a bit of spare time to play.
As people might know already, I worked on a few VR projects but those were stand-alone Android VR applications. Those I develop on the PC and build to run on the VR headset. Now I use my PC for streaming wireless to my VR headset.
So I'm familiar with the mechanics of playing in VR, including games I played on the PSVR.

Half-Life Alyx makes me feel somewhat like playing the original Half-Life for the first time. The way you can be pulled into a game like you can be when really being involved in a story from a book or a movie.
I don't have that feeling much, I have too many games I guess. Last time I had a similar feeling was with GTA 4, where I had the feeling I moved to the US and entered a brand new city to explore (quickly killed that feeling by having cops chase me for no good reason and shoot me, although that might sound like the feeling some people have about reality also).
Although it also feels like HL:Alyx is a transitional game, initially developed with non-VR tooling, methods and ideas and during reprogrammed to fit VR concepts. While it does feel like a full VR game experience, there are some strange things that can break the immersion. Like the super thick glass, objects floating or collisions, walls not always aligning so light can shine through, all the static objects and object placements, and more. And for some reason some objects feel too big, I've had this feeling in multiple VR games. And as with any game, but especially VR, I would like more interactive objects. HL:Alyx does have nice drawers and doors you can open and close, even with your gun or open-hand, sometimes this feels not used much. This is one of the things making me feel like the game was designed and build on a regular PC and not in VR.
They also have some reference to things older players will recognize, like a 3DFX 3D card, or floppies. But if you look at the PC next to the floppy it only has a CD-drive and at the back it has USB-ports (so not an old school PC with floppy drive and DIN/PS2/serial/parallel ports). Who knows, the floppy drive might have been hidden by the cover on the tower PC. But those assets are static, so you can't open and check. I understand you can't make everything interact, but in VR your just triggered more to check those things (at least I am).

Also the green from this Snarks head looks really nice in VR, like more light effects. And you can feed it to, which is nice. But it's also the only thing you can do so it also directly makes you feel limited as it feels like a scripted event.
feedingsnark.jpg

I haven't finished the game yet, I read it's about 16 hours of play and I'm somewhat a exploring slow player so I might take longer. If you ever have the hardware and physical room available to play I do recommend the experience.
And it's a game, nothing can happen to you in real-life obviously, but the experience in VR does make it more scary compared to the previous Half-Life games I played. Having more physical room to maneuver might help with that (I have ~2x2m of space).
 
SubNautica took me 45 hours to be finished, using cheats, it's not a game that takes your hand, there are no arrows to follow, I liked a lot the exploration and the clues I had to get from found data logs.
The story is interesting, but could be very similar to different sci-fi games.

AER - Memories of Old was a short exploration/puzzle game, the story is like a fable but there are many interesting details on the map. While the graphic is minimal with polygons aspect, the animation is great, the movements of the main character, the transformation and flying as an eagle is very cool.
 
That's slightly more than this page gives for main and side quests together. Huh, just learned that this is the same team that made Natural Selection 2.
Since those statistics don't specify the game mode, I suppose that also times with cheat are included, and I was picky with them, there were also the teleporting ones and the added speed that I didn't use.

About "Natural Selection 2" you can collect some posters of the game from ship wrecks
 
Aegis Defenders

A very well made platform + tower defense game, with a cool retro style art, secret areas and even some cameos from other games.
It has very short levels that follow mostly this recipe: a beginning of platforming (metroid style), some little puzzles (this metroid style too, but also like The Lost Vikings) and at the end a zone to be defended from attacking waves, were turrets just gives an hand but you'll have to be very active to win.
You have a group of characters with different abilities, you can switch between them, the others can either follow your main character or be left in some places to act like "automatic turrets".
Every character can build traps, turrets or support items of different kind, if enough components are gathered, and there are also upgrades and all.

It is difficult to find something to criticize in this game, but there's a thing that definitely was forgotten, a good calibration for a single player game.
During the "tower defense" part you have like 60 seconds to grab components and build traps where you can, before actively defend the cores against the waves, but in single player, even in EASY difficulty, this not enough to run around the entire level grabbing things, switching characters to build their unique stuff, then make them run back to their positions (were they will just shoot straight), and also some turrets require to be built by more than one character, so even more run back and forth...

This game is definitely intended to be played in coop, were people can split and actively defend different areas at the same time, it's mainly made as a split screen coop game.
 
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Just finished The Forgotten City.

It's amazing. Talking too much about it will quickly move into spoiler territory.
Your objective is to solve a mystery. Discovering places, finding items and helping people along the way. It discusses moral philosophy and religion, and is rooted in ancient history.
I'd say the games most closely related to this are Disco Elysium und Outer Wilds, both titles I whole-heartedly recommend aswell.

Play time was roughly around nine hours for seeing all four of the endings. The last one of which, among other feelings, sent shivers down my spine, made me laugh and warmed my dry, shriveled heart.

10/10 must play.
 
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It was end of last week, but still..
2 Months (whitout TM) Steamdeck
Made another Atempt to beat the first Boss whit its Ban Hammer, but still failed a lot, but i got lots of Updates for my Character, unfortunally they ditnt fit all even if i would figure out how to turn these Tetris Pices ^^
Cool Pyra Relatet Game, but quite difficult if you dont have Dark Souls Experience

So i put Dark Souls Switch in my Switch Game Case, maybe i will first play this game a few times..
 
I would like more interactive objects.
There are two kind of players, ones that actually just run through, not quite speed runners, but not pausing and looking at an object and going for "action" and not thinking much about texture details, but get bored if it looks the same. And slower players, that just pause for the music or a green patch of grass and flowers.
There are games specifically geared towards one or the other, as you can't really please both kind of players because of limited budget (or limited technology, like in the past), although some games really try to (be able to complete a level using either stealth or berserk violence, for example).
I can't wait for the new AI technology to be implemented in games to generate game levels. We already have terrain generators and randomizers, but I think that a big city can be made better using AI that classical terrain generation.
 
There are two kind of players, ones that actually just run through, not quite speed runners, but not pausing and looking at an object and going for "action" and not thinking much about texture details, but get bored if it looks the same. And slower players, that just pause for the music or a green patch of grass and flowers.
There are games specifically geared towards one or the other, as you can't really please both kind of players because of limited budget (or limited technology, like in the past), although some games really try to (be able to complete a level using either stealth or berserk violence, for example).
For me it doesn't feel like they want to cater only one group of people, they do add some resin to spots you really have to look for (although most time they aren't too complicated).
My feeling is that they made the game and realized what's possible afterwards, so they couldn't change much as those changes would impact the gameplay so much they have to redo everything. As many things are already present in the game, they just aren't really used.

In Half-Life 2 (if I remember correctly) there was a spot where you had to puzzle your way around an elevated floor and you have to pick-up some wooden planks to chain a way up. This felt like a tech-demo for their engine, but they only used that mechanic in that spot. So they introduce some new mechanic that is later not really used. I feel the same about some VR mechanics, they are present but not used consistently.

I can't wait for the new AI technology to be implemented in games to generate game levels. We already have terrain generators and randomizers, but I think that a big city can be made better using AI that classical terrain generation.
I always wondered about describing game assets similar as MIDI. In MIDI you describe the notes and their attributes, assign them to an instrument, and have the system (whatever that might be) handle playing the actual music. So a MIDI file is really compact and works on very old to modern systems. The actual generated music can vary wildly from simple antique Nokia ringtone sound to studio quality orchestra. The advantage here is that it plays on many systems, and quality usually increases over time.
If games would be described the same (which is probably hard to do, but again: if you don't start and try it will never happen) the game could be very compact and the system has to handle the interpretation of the described game. With the advantage of this increasing quality over time, and being able to run on multiple platforms easily. In the past this sounded like an impossible thing to do, but with AI these days it doesn't only sound realistic to do it even sounds easier compared to actually making all assets yourself up front.
 
I always wondered about describing game assets similar as MIDI. In MIDI you describe the notes and their attributes, assign them to an instrument, and have the system (whatever that might be) handle playing the actual music. So a MIDI file is really compact and works on very old to modern systems. The actual generated music can vary wildly from simple antique Nokia ringtone sound to studio quality orchestra. The advantage here is that it plays on many systems, and quality usually increases over time.
If games would be described the same (which is probably hard to do, but again: if you don't start and try it will never happen) the game could be very compact and the system has to handle the interpretation of the described game. With the advantage of this increasing quality over time, and being able to run on multiple platforms easily. In the past this sounded like an impossible thing to do, but with AI these days it doesn't only sound realistic to do it even sounds easier compared to actually making all assets yourself up front.
I talked about the produkkt before, didn't I? It is a techdemo/game that uses algorithms to calculate highquality textures. How good? It fits in under 100KB:





Here's a nice video explaining:
 
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I talked about the produkkt before, didn't I? It is a techdemo/game that uses algorithms to calculate highquality textures. How good? It fits in under 100KB:





Here's a nice video explaining:
While that was an awesome demo (best I might have seen actually), it was more a fancy way to encoded textures in a procedural way combined with fancy compression. My suggestion was more to have a textual description of a game, describing the assets in a human readable language and have AI interpret this to generate the assets (and game code). Just like you would describe your notes in MIDI, although that is even somewhat of a technical description and not a human readable notation. The goal is not to have a small executable, it's to not have an idea of a game and manually translate it into an actual game but have the idea written down and have AI create it for you. Obviously it would require some manual curation and tweaking to get your idea written in a way it's suitable for AI to make what you want. But after that any AI translator would be able to generate a version of the platform you want to play it on. Something that is just a dream at the moment. But what I've seen from AI it should be really feasible to have such a thing nowadays.
The concept of not translating manually is something I support in general btw. If you look to what people call 'work' it usually involves a lot of manual translation of a process, which could be automated in an optimized way. With cloud solutions this happens somewhat naturally already, having a central database storing appointments for example. But for software development you still see people designing, programming, testing and documenting. While they all work on the same conceptual work, but using different tools and having to translate between those views manually. So translating a design into code, and build a test to see if the code works and document what was eventually delivered: all steps that feel redundant to me but for some reason never got automated away. Model based engineering feels like a concept solving this problem, but I'm not sure if it 100% fits. It at least is big step to a more efficient way of working.
 
So translating a design into code, and build a test to see if the code works and document what was eventually delivered: all steps that feel redundant to me but for some reason never got automated away.
It more or less exist but in practice it's rarely good enough. The design has to be perfectly clean, take into account all the edge cases and be specified in a way that can convey everything. And if the designer were able to do this, they could just as well do the code directly.

Generally when you have this kind of "automated translation" in place, there's always a bit of manual work left and doing it feels like duct taping things to make them work which isn't very pleasant. It's actually getting quite common in software development itself, where all the big work (the thing that's interesting to develop) is done by open-souce libraries and developers are left with the boring (and generally frustrating) task to get the libraries to work together.

This isn't new: twenty years ago, many companies moved their manual procedures into information systems which generally meant forcing a fuzzy process with a lot of manual adjustments/human judgement/shortcuts into a single bureaucratic automated procedure that could rarely handle everything correctly. So many people's job was changed from manually doing things to manually tweaking stuff so that it could be fed into the machine.
 
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