I’m kinda into this
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Saw Cloudpunk at PAX, so it’s been on my wishlist. Kind of thinking about it.
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The Voxel art looks really good.
I’m getting it. Does anyone want to try to use the steam play together to do co-op over the Internet?
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Yep I was figuring you could do full 4 player coop with the steam play together setup, but wasn’t a hundred percent sure.
Deadly Premonition 2 is releasing July 10!
Late to the 4x discussion party, but I want to put in my two cents.
When I first got into them I was as incompetent as anyone should be, and it was mostly about the story. I cheated at Master of Orion II a lot at first because I didn’t understand the game particularly well. It was kinda just about exploring the full tech tree, trying different race picks, and the story of it. I eventually became competent enough in what was going on to play it for real on easy as a kid.
When I came back to it much later and had access to the internet I learned I didn’t really know the game that well, and there are these strategies that just brutally powerful, but some of them didn’t have good heuristics for me as a kid to latch onto (and maybe were not even intended). Stuff like using extremely small planets as population farms to grow population very fast and import them around. Stuff like just abusing missiles early to take planets protected by alien monsters.
And it was neat to learn that, abuse it, and dominate the game (still single player)… but after I got that out of the way I basically reset to the level of min-maxery that is my comfort zone… and a lot of that is focusing on technology and ships, and not necessarily caring to perfectly optimize every turn.
I played the most recent master of orion game and it borrows a lot from the old one, but it didn’t have those clear big feeling developments like getting a new weapon tech or advancing it so you can upgrade it. When I enjoyed that aspect the most of of the old game (and things like race customization), the focus on all the other parts I personally wasn’t into min-maxing wasn’t great.
Eclipse hits a different itch for me. It takes a while, but it’s more like like a euro game or a game of risk or something, there’s a certain roleplaying factor I take to the table. Part of the game is the social aspect. There’s a lot of randomness and you can mitigate a lot of it, but eventually dice happens one way or another in most games. And that’s fun, but also why I don’t get too overwhelmingly competitive about it.
Anybody pick up SOR4 yet? I’m thinking of grabbing it at some point tonight. Launch day trailer below.
I got it, but haven’t played yet because work. Then I’m going to cook dinner. THEN I can play.
So I played through story mode on normal with a buddy last night as Blaze, gotta say pretty enjoyable and I can see needing to learn to combo efficiently for the points at higher difficulties to get the lives you need, especially in arcade mode with no retries. Abusing invulnerability frames in the throw animation and the neutral special also seems to be a pre-requiste for beating bosses efficiently. Really enjoyed the art style and levels and cant wait to sink more playthroughs in getting to know all the characters.
Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1+2 are getting a “remaster” which is coming out in September. These games heavily influenced me during my teenage years and were particularly impactful to my musical tastes. I played these games so much that I was basically speedrunning them without knowing what speedrunning is. A lot of fans of the series think THPS3 as the best game of the series, but my personal favorite has always been the second game, as I think reverts were an unnecessary addition.
Unfortunately in later years the series saw a significant downturn. As an Activision title it was pushed into yearly iteration despite really no necessity for it. The real downturn came I think with Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, which promised an interconnected world, but that was basically just levels connected by narrow corridors that you could skate through to mask loading times. A far cry from the open World that EA’s Skate series had.
This is actually the second time a lot of these levels are being remastered, as there was a THPS HD which featured stuff from both games, but was rather underwhelming. A couple of years ago a game under the lofty banner of “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5” was released, but it was universally panned and was by all accounts a mess.
We can just hope this is a lot better. Supposedly everything will be back, all levels, characters and the entire soundtrack of both games. The reveal trailer looks very promising, though I am disappointed in that they are still censoring the lyrics of Police Truck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-eYJRR5lyE
Also, today is Tony Hawk’s birthday, so thanks for the surprise. Have a good one, Birdman!
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I think that’s maybe the biggest fall, but I think the downturn happened with Underground 2, where it took a hard pull away from being a Tony Hawk skating game, and turned into a Bam Margera and his crap fake prank show Featuring Tony Hawk and some skateboarding game.
Eh, the series always had a juvenile sense of humor, with frequent references to scatological humor (wet fart sounds in toilets, having to skate over literal bullshit in one level, etc.), sex (having a porn actress as a secret character, one level where you have to impress skimpily dressed women as an objective), general mischief (e.g. destroying satellite dishes in the Suburbia level), and making fun of people injuring themselves. While I do think the focus on Margera was a bit unwarranted, it wasn’t really out of character for the series.
Though perhaps I felt that impact less so because I did skip the first Tony Hawk’s Underground. I don’t really remember a reason for it, just didn’t play it, but that means I had a break in between games before returning to a series I liked.
In any case, THAW was the first time I was really disappointed in the series as Neversoft made it seem like the new game would feature an open world that was becoming popular thanks to GTA and similar titles, which seemed like a fantastic idea, just to use these loading coridors. When Skate actually realized this concept a couple years later, I think it was the death knell for the series, though of course there was also a big gap in between how the games played. Too bad though that EA is a fucking stupid company and killed the Skate series on their own.
This morning I found out that there is a completed documentary on the series, a fact that had completely passed me by. That documentary has premiered at some film festivals and only a couple of days ago found a distributor, so it isn’t “out” yet but it is finished from what I can tell.
Another thing that I didn’t know about was a fan mod project that is attempting to put every level from the series into the PC version of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2. It’s called THUG Pro
Well, yeah, that’s really the two contrasting games. THUG1 was true to the series, with that juvenile humor, the style, so on, even though it was going in a new direction by having a story and progression. THUG2 is when it jumped in a different direction, and being built more to capitalize on Bam Margera’s rising MTV star, and like his shows, it was just over-scripted, focus-tested-to-death, feeding on it’s own mythos, fake edgelord reality show shit. That’s exactly what I mean - it felt more like a reality show TC mod of a tony hawk game shat out by an MTV marketing team, than a Tony Hawk game.
THPS 1-4 are all I really care about. 1+2 as a remaster is a great idea, but I’m hoping there’s a few nods from 3+4 in characters if not a full levels or features even if as bonus.
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