What are you playing?

Help I started binging a bunch of Sims 4 building videos and now I can't stop building game houses.
Sorry. I'm in my own rabbit hole of Sears Homes recreations. Tried an expanded Elmhurst that was absolutely PACKED inside, but in practice was a failure.
 
Do any of you FFXIV players have real estate?

Any advice for a new person? I’m working on the cash and need 3-4 more ranks with my GC. I did a push one day last week and got 4-5 ranks.
 
Do any of you FFXIV players have real estate?

Any advice for a new person? I’m working on the cash and need 3-4 more ranks with my GC. I did a push one day last week and got 4-5 ranks.
It's going to be tough. Sometimes it's best to just buy a lot off of someone else. If you want space for just yourself? I'd buy an Apartment. It's cheaper and harder to lose. But if you NEED a house... your best bets are probably going to be The Goblet or Mist. Just outright forget Kugane.
 
I’d like to garden and have as much space as possible for that. From my understanding, I can have two flower pots in an FC room and two in an apartment.

If I buy land, would I have access to much more?
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I’m two ranks away from what I need for a GC rank and slowly getting there cash wise.
 
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I’d like to garden and have as much space as possible for that. From my understanding, I can have two flower pots in an FC room and two in an apartment.

If I buy land, would I have access to much more?
Post automatically merged:

I’m two ranks away from what I need for a GC rank and slowly getting there cash wise.
You can get at least 8 spaces to plant in a single garden patch with a house. You also need a house for crossbreeding because you can't crossbred with flower pots.
 
Baby Ariel has a marketing deal with EA and appears in the City Living pack for Sims 4. Without cheats, she's an immortal, perpetual teen. You have to cheat to get her to age or get pregnant. I MCCC'd a baby in her, and the last I checked the daughter was just short of Elder while Ariel was still a brand new teen.

I sent the original sim's great-great-great grandson to do the same. The new baby has a different last name than the first?
 
Baby Ariel has a marketing deal with EA and appears in the City Living pack for Sims 4. Without cheats, she's an immortal, perpetual teen. You have to cheat to get her to age or get pregnant. I MCCC'd a baby in her, and the last I checked the daughter was just short of Elder while Ariel was still a brand new teen.

I sent the original sim's great-great-great grandson to do the same. The new baby has a different last name than the first?
Your sim play is starting to get a little weird
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Strange Brigade

What do you get when Left 4 Dead and Tomb Raider have a third person shooter baby? This. It's a "rollicking adventure" type of affair set in the 1920s with a LXG or Defenders of the Earth flair to it. The titular Brigade is a group of archetypical adventurers trotting the globe in a massive victorian dirigible, squashing paranormal threats for the good of mankind (and the profit found in plundering the tombs along the way). Each character has their own little quirks that affect their playstyle, but at its heart it's an arcadey 3PS through a series of scripted set pieces where you have to fight supernatural creatures and solve puzzles to move forward toward a boss encounter at the end of the level.

It lacks the procedural generation of games like L4D or Vermintide, so I worry that once you've played a level, the replay value evaporates. That said, it does take more than one trip through a level to unlock all its secrets and puzzles usually, so it's not a one-and-done. Also, there are other game modes I haven't tried yet, just the campaign, so I may have only scratched the surface here. There's a variety of weapons and upgrades for them, so you can customize your loadout to suit your desired playstyle. It also doesn't seem to emphasize teamwork as much, as I played it solo for a while and the game did NOT fill with bots - I was well and truly alone. Additionally the game lacks the "special" or "elite" monsters that can incapacitate you with one attack, necessitating rescue from your friends. Despite that, I still would like to try it multiplayer. I don't know if it will really hold my attention as a single player title. Maybe I'm just too used to playing co-op games with actual people and can't go back to single player anymore. Well, I guess that's not particularly true, I still play KF2 solo all the time.

Anyway, if anybody else ends up getting it the next time it's on sale, hit me up if you want to try it multiplayer.
 
I'm enjoying Hollow Knight.

And I may delete Fortnite because I feel it may be doing to my brain what other games have done in the past, and I don't like that.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Snuffles got Strange Brigade and we played a fair amount of it multiplayer last night. It's DEFINITELY more fun with friends. Had a real good time. Figuring out the puzzles also makes for a nice change of pace from the other games we've played.

I just wish I could get OBS to see it so I could stream it. It doesn't even want to capture it using display capture, and that's supposed to get ANYTHING.

Ah, that explains it... in windows 7, I have to use the vulkan engine version...and OBS can't capture Vulkan.

 
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figmentPez

Staff member
The First Tree - this is a bad game. The art design is lovely, but everything else sucks. The gameplay is almost non-existent, and what is there is mostly wandering around picking stuff up. The stories are connected by only the loosest of themes, and only the loosest of connections to the gameplay. None of these connections enhance anything. The gameplay, and I use the term very loosely, doesn't help tell the story. This is just a bunch of ideas thrown together.

The "story", and there's barely any more story than there is gameplay, is a guy telling his girlfriend about a dream he had about a fox looking for her lost cubs, but then he ends up telling her more about his childhood and his father than about the fox. So the game consists of wandering around collecting shiny things and digging up items that relate to the stories this guy is telling about his life. The game never makes any connection between the fox and her cubs than just that death is a part of life, and this guy's life was a journey.

The ending just dives off into pretentious bullshit:
The fox, having found each of her three cubs dead at various points in the game, reaches The First Tree, the source of all life. The guy's girlfriend says something like "If the First Tree taught birds to sing and something something then imagine what the first tree could teach us." The game then asks you for a short message of what you'd tell your fox cubs.

Then the game switches from 3rd person controlling the fox, to first person controlling the guy, in his father's house in rural Alaska. Going through a house that isn't laid out like any house would be in reality, you make your way outside, and to the tent in the backyard where father and son went camping.* A glowing fox appears, and the player has to chase after it.

Which leads to a tree, carved with a message from the dead father asking to be forgiven for being a shitty father. (A fact which is not established in the game. The father's terrible offenses? Being a single father; being a strict father who lectures his son after the son stole his car to go joyriding with friends; and asking the son to take over the family lumber business, instead of pursuing an art career, during a fit of depression after a worker died in an accident [the father then resumed support of said art career.])

That's the end. And it looks shitty. The game is pretty. Not like, amazing graphics that are a flawless technical marvel. It's just well done. The message carved into the tree, however, just looks lazy. I wish I'd thought to grab a screenshot, but I was bowled over by how bullshit it was.

*They live in rural Alaska and they camp fifty feet from the house? When they've got fenced off property that extends much further? I don't understand.

Actually, let me correct something I said earlier. The gameplay isn't just unconnected from the story, it actually detracts from the story. Because it's so awkward to search the giant environments in the game, the whole narrative just becomes stilted. The story comes very unevenly. Sometimes I went long stretches without hearing any narration or music, and sometimes I think I cut off bits of narration by finding the next section too quickly.

The level design is atrocious. It does not flow well, it does not guide the player well, and worst it doesn't give much indication of where you'll hit the transition to the next area, and thus cut off your ability to keep looking for secrets. By the end of the game I was sick of trying to find the secret shit this game had, because the level design was so poor.

Don't play this game. Just don't.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Stranger Things the Game

This is a free mobile game (no microtransactions), and aside from the frustrations of touchscreen controls, it's a good game. It's a Zelda inspired action adventure, and there are some enjoyable puzzles and dungeons. There are eight playable characters, and you switch between them to use their special abilities. You start playing as Hopper, who has a dash attack at full health (and later is the only character that can go into the Upside Down, when you get a hazmat suit), and gradually collect more characters.

Pros:
- The 16-bit inspired graphics do a good job of capturing the style of the show.
- There are fun puzzles in the dungeons
- Character abilities tie in well with the show
- You get to smash things like bushes and trash cans to find money and health!
- Lots of cool gaming and pop culture references like this one:


Cons:
- The touch screen controls. While not terrible, I'm looking forward to proper controller support when the next game appears on other platforms.
- A forced stealth section. On the standard (easier) difficulty this just plays like a puzzle game of sorts, enemies are very predictable, but it's still forced stealth.
- Some of the things you smash for items include bookshelves. What kind of monster thought it was okay to make people smash books?
- The overworld is plagued with owls that dive-bomb you. They don't ruin the game, but they're just stupid annoying.
 
Stranger Things the Game

This is a free mobile game (no microtransactions), and aside from the frustrations of touchscreen controls, it's a good game. It's a Zelda inspired action adventure, and there are some enjoyable puzzles and dungeons. There are eight playable characters, and you switch between them to use their special abilities. You start playing as Hopper, who has a dash attack at full health (and later is the only character that can go into the Upside Down, when you get a hazmat suit), and gradually collect more characters.

Pros:
- The 16-bit inspired graphics do a good job of capturing the style of the show.
- There are fun puzzles in the dungeons
- Character abilities tie in well with the show
- You get to smash things like bushes and trash cans to find money and health!
- Lots of cool gaming and pop culture references like this one:


Cons:
- The touch screen controls. While not terrible, I'm looking forward to proper controller support when the next game appears on other platforms.
- A forced stealth section. On the standard (easier) difficulty this just plays like a puzzle game of sorts, enemies are very predictable, but it's still forced stealth.
- Some of the things you smash for items include bookshelves. What kind of monster thought it was okay to make people smash books?
- The overworld is plagued with owls that dive-bomb you. They don't ruin the game, but they're just stupid annoying.
The owls are important for the meta-narrative. They're the most important bit of the game.
 
So I've been playing a game of the Sims with my RL family as the Sims. We were all out at a restaurant celebrating a birthday, and since the whole family was out together I forgot that I had set a curfew for the teenagers. So with the parents out, who enforces curfew?

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So I said before I'm becoming super obsessed with building in Sims 4 lately, so I decided to try to recreate my house. It's not 100% accurate, because The Sims, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's a quick and dirty house tour that I just recorded and threw up.

 
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