Reseñas recientes de Pave

---
Some quick random bullet-points of mine:

- Procedurally generated maps.
Sure, there are predictable "patterns"
( like a "connecting-tunnels" between each cavers ).
But all things considered I have yet encounter a cave-system which wouldn't engage me into exploring all the nooks-and-granny especially when it comes larger "room".
Full exploring the cavers is well rewarded so even a single mission-session can take more than 60-minutes.

- Mission-type and side-activity variety.
From your basic "mine x-amount this mineral" ro escrding a big drill, there is a good enough amount of variations alongside the secondary objectives.
Random encounters with various hazards (E.G. meteorites) also provide extra source of income.

- Tools and creative freedom
Especially "On-site Refining"-missions showcase the amount of creative-freedom players are allowed to have:
Dig a path up to the roof? You do that!
Create pipelines that rival the "Rollercoaster Tycoon"-building? Feel free to do so!

- Modding / houserule-freecom
There is a slew of white-listed / "Approved"-modifications that allows to progress the main-game with various houserules
( E.G. disabling Friendly-fire ).
Anything else is counted as "Sandbox" which is a separate save-file.
Note: Any non-cosmetic / "Verified"-mods disable Steam-achievements.


Eventually it would be nice to have replay-/demo-file-support or some other archive-system to save player history of cave-map that has been played.
---

---
So, what if QP, a hyperactive pomeranian kemonomimi-girl with an addiction to (giga-)pudding and video-games was to break out in a song?
You get a single something like this!

Absolutely captures the spirit of QP (and Poppo) in one of the most perfect ways of possible (so far).

Just like the "Ultimate Weapons Girl", this DLC also contains the lyrics in PDF-file
( though no romaji-version out-of-the-box ).

---

---
EDIT: Some typo-fixing.

I foremost want to emphasis that my dis-recommendation is specifically for the question:
"Should I sink money into this game?"
Well, since this is a dis-recommendation, obviously the answer is a "no".

Now while the "Season Passes" itself aren't all that expensive ranging from currently-live of 5€ to archive/legacy-passes of 7,5€ both which you can "stamp" anytime simultaneously alongside another pass/stamp-book,
the rest of the cash-shop is yet another "Fear of Missing Out"-exploitation with rotating selection and "for the maximum-profits!"-money grubbing.

For reference,
there is a "wiki"-page article named "S.A.W. Shop" which lists all the items:
Single most expensive example ("Sunflower Bundle" ) costs whopping 13€
(or 1260 "S.A.W Tickets") with a supposed 40%-off applied even though you cannot buy any of these items separate in the first place
( or least none of the items hasn't been listed on the wiki-page ).

Bare in mind that this is a full on 2D-game with "rigged" swappable 2D-("flash"-player-)character ("vector"-)template:
For those unaware,
yes you can indeed give "bones" and "joints" to a 2D-drawings on "unity" and other game-engines;
In essence you'd be paying top-dollars/euros/currency for a copy-paste of a JPEG/PNG-image
( especially the case with 7,5€ "mini animal (pets )").


And of course, because the
"expensive aesthetics over expenses-spared functionalities"-bingo-card wouldn't complete, this game includes all the "essentials":
- Client-side-authored gameplay
( an "everything goes buffet" for cheater )
- No replay/demo-file-system
- Convoluted and otherwise unintuitive player-reporting "tool";
extra points because you can only use at your death / at the end of the match;
you cannot even choose who you report;
and it's time-limited because as soon as the game-session-lobby closes, you're booted straight into the main-menu
- Completely off-the-balance AI/CPU-fillers;
majority of times you'll be teamed with bots that walk in straight line while opposing team has "GODLIKE-UBER-DûBER"-bots with buffed movement speed and bullets travelling across the whole map


Like I wrote at start, I mainly concentrated on the money-spending aspect here;
in this review I won't be going into details about the gameplay and such, since there is nothing new I could tell.

Main takeaway here is that for the "tech" and such, the amount you would need to spend money in this "game" is ludicrously high;
heck to even enjoy of the "full-free-to-play"-elements in this game, you'd still need to spend 15€ from the get-to into the
"Super Edition"-package which, yes, in essence is like buying 1K-tickets and you also get exclusive cosmetics...
...Except that 1K-tickets costs only 10€...

Meanwhile "Starter Pack" costs 5€ and gives 500+100-tickets alongside the exclusive cosmetics
( and "naturally" since the devs/studio does not want more money, there no possibility to purchase the previous "season-starters" nor there is no other way to get the cosmetics even when there is demand for these... ).


So yeah, maybe give the gameplay few tries; perhaps you'll enjoy the experience.
But the sake of your finances, do not spend any them here!
(( For the record, I personally have no idea why I had the "Super Edition"-unlocked; maybe I got as a gift or something; that's my defense. ))

---

---
Random-pointers to give this game a try especially if you get everything for a good discount:

Before buying this game, I highly recommend giving the first "Endless Space" a try get a little taste of the "feeling" of this game;
if you connect your Steam-account to their " Games2Gether Platform" you get the game without any extra payments needed.

"Endless Space 2" is a generally the first game full-on fixed and improved:
- No longer "guarding / sieging" disables a system
( or at least this was the very reason I never got finish a session in the first game since I couldn't build any counter-fleets on my lone-home-system )

- "Alliance / Co-Operative"-victory is big game-changer in this market since "everyone" in an alliance can win the game;
of course this has occasionally lead to abrupt victories when members have left the alliance for a reason or another.

- Although "stack-of-dooms" are prevalent in this game, there is fortunately less than ten (10) ship-base-designs players are allowed to retrofit with module-choices, even if the smaller-ships eventually become pretty much completely obsolete later on.

- On the relevant nore, warmongering can be super-expensive to uphold for the most part especially if the "influence"-generation of the player is low.
This is of course if one is one influential enough to even declare a war to begin with especially against players that are able to forcefully up-keep the peace between players.

- "Senate" or the internal-politics are somewhat difficult to min-max around since this all depends not only on the action of the player
( E.G. boosting technology research which increases the support to the "Scientist"-party )
but also what your population of your empire consists of.
Different "government-types" can having more influence over the laws players wants to pass.
But this can also limit the flexibility players have in overall gameplay also
( E.G. being locked into Military-government rarely helps with non-warmongering-players ).


Fair warning:
Due occasionally requirement to some serious "micro-management", a singular turn can take up an hour if your happen have more than 20-systems occupied, especially if player with a (Hissho or Custom-)faction with the "Resource Recovers"-faction-trait
( which in practice gives and increasing "FIDS"-penalty the more "over-colonization" you have ).


I personally also recommend of ignoring the "tutorial" and instead play a "live"-session with all the tutorial-pop-ups:
The "[Beginner]"-session doesn't have any of the expansions and basically is the "vanilla without the vanilla"-version of this game which can actually break even more features and fixes implemented.
"[Beginner]"-sessions also are not "whitelisted" therefore are not counted as "official"-sessions to be listed to on the gameplay-history-section called "Empire Chronicles"


"Together to the Stars!"

---
---

---

After almost a decade, seemingly nothing of like "Dead Island Epidemic (DIE)" has surfaced in the video-game market.

Before they introduced the "desync/rubberbanding-kill-bug" and left it running for almost 6-moths till the very abrupt shutdown, this game really was one of its kind and had done tiny'ish but hugely impactful improvements to the general nature of the game to far less toxic
( most important being
"Patch v0.8" on March 12th 2015
in which they turned "Kills" into "Takedowns" that combined both last-hit-player-kills and assistances, plus the additions of "Damage (done)" and "Healing (done)" ).

Aside for "Planetside 2" most notably, seemingly no one even dares to try to make asymmetrical un-even team-battles anymore:
In "Scavenger" which was the PvP-mode here, there was three (3) four-player-teams
(I.E. 4 vs 4 vs 4 )
trying to gather crates and fill-up their home-truck.

Capturing "supply-drop-zones" allowed passive gain of crates up until a point after which rest of the crates had to be manually loaded into the home-base.

Other teams were allowed to steal from the base, which crated end-game situation where both of the other teams had to team-up in order to prevent the leading-team winning too easily.
Or as m,any times happened, the two leading teams might have been outsmarted by the underdog-team who gathered the "wild-crates" during the tussle between the lead-teams.

This was a very dynamic game with loads of turnabout without the need to being "uber-l33t-master" either:
Just putting the basics into practice while also playing cautiously / not being suicidal won the game many times also.

The randomized PvE-mode "Crossroads" was a very good replacement for the dull-linear "Horde"-mode.


Character-variations was nicely refreshing too, especially the "Armored" and "Mutated"-variants.


The option of characters being able to most a melee and a ranged-weapons gave enough freedom to try out all the available characters without the need of worrying about being able to excel in long and/or close-quarters-combat.

---

It is very unfortunate this game was a victim of yet another "Uwe Boll / The Producers"-insurance-scheme...

---
---

---

I decided to take a look if the earlier "Yager Development GmbH"-game(s) had the same issues as their current one(s);
yup!
(( Granted, I've yet to play the year-2003 "Yager", though that is a space-shooter-thing instead of just a cookie-cutter'ish / typical'ish Unreal-Engine-third/first-person-shooter. ))

---

I am not going into the story or anything else in relation;
for those one can simply watch the Youtube-videos or read the other summaries.

Though in some fairness'ish, if you already are familiar with primarily "Apocalypse Now" or anything else heavily inspired by the year-1899 novella "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, then you for the most part have already have "read/watched" this game already.
Well, aside for maybe not experiencing the "waving index-finger of guilt" which this all pretty much boils down to
( yes, that "trope" is a reference to "Nostalgia Critic - Avatar (2009)"-episode ).


(( And to clarify once again:
I do not mind same stories being told over and over again;
all it needs to is to tell the story well or otherwise entertainingly enough. ))


---

The biggest gripe with this game right from get-go is that it is made home-consoles in mind, specifically to "Xbox 360":
Even when playing full-on with keyboard & mouse, all the prompts are in gamepad-format;
I do not have the luxury of constantly re-plugging my gamepad whenever I am not playing this game...

The "one-button-to-context-them"-approach is taken to the extreme here
(in this case, "cover/sprint/context-actions" are under one button),
while confusingly enough melee and "vaulting" are the same button and same goes with the (gun) reload and pick-up-button
(so with same button you pick up both intel and the dropped guns);
why they decided to reinvent the "wheel" instead of copy-paste the control-scheme from say "Gears of War" is beyond my comprehension.

---

If you get this game without paying anything extra and you have the patience to get through the control-scheme and other wonky-game-mechanics, then all power to you.
But otherwise if you're only here for the story, there is (as of writing this) more than enough 3rd-party material to watch/read through this mess.

---
---

---
Previous-version(s) here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16iz4UvvX_WJA_kmyKX6oP6vFlKSblj5B5C5kB7LMmQg/

“Highlights” of the season 3:
This is the most broken version since Beta-1.
And it is no surprise, since (supposedly) they actually went back to season-1-version of this game but broke it even further than what it was during pre-Season-1-moment.

This is especially noticeable with the re-skinned / remaster-build’ish maps to have slew of collision problems alongside layered objects
( like cosmetic-objects and interactables on top of each other, E.G. many civilian-lockers ):
- Biggest problem being the “mis-aligned” Bluetails / “noise-birds” since they’re still using the old spawn-spot-data which makes them spawn inside ground on far too numerous spots.
- The skyrocketed amount of mineral-resource-nodes ( Veltecite, Titan, etc. ) spawning inside bedrocks and therefore are not possible to collect

- Probably the most important “change” is the mobs / PvE-creature no longer doing the line-of-sight or hearing / noise-checks before agro’ign. This means there is no longer a possibility to sneak past the mobs unnoticed, which especially descending “Tharis Island” silently impossible.

- Like before, specifically Rattlers are as broken as they used to be.
But now all the creature “ghost”-hits are no longer hidden.
In facts, all creature-projectiles clearly are shown aiming way above the foreheads of the player-models revealing that there is a invisible extended hitbox to which all their attacks gravitate towards to even when facing opposite direction;
this is most obvious with the “beam”-attack of Rattlers tepping right behind them when they wind-up their attack.
The example here isn’t the most clear, but you can see the “beam” being shop straight upwards instead of forward:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2970893490


- Yes, Tharis Island no longer requires player-killing to be accessed;
2/3rd of the “campaign” still is locked away very early on if one refuses to do player killing.

The Season-pass grind has been increased while daily-cap has been lowered:
- Final rank required 2849-points instead of 1.5K
- Most importantly the max-point per 23-hours from “Jobs” is now limited to 1.5K instead of 10K.

Still managed to complete the “pass” while refusing to do any player-damage yet once again.
You can find all the related screenshots here:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/PaveMentman/screenshots/?appid=868270


Oh and, this game is obviously still in “authoritative client”-architecture without the replay / demo-files activated.
---

---
Random-thoughts-mode:
"War Thunder" tends to be nicknamed as "World of Wargaming" for being an almost copycat when it comes to "research"(/unlocking)-trees and the monetisation in the same vein as "Steel Ocean" did.

They even copied the dice-roll "spotting"-mechanic in which the enemy units can suddenly pop-up and out right in front of your nose.


Having battles in which the aircraft-players can be combined with either ground or naval-forces is a nice.

The game being cross-regional and cross-platform is "the way it should be", alongside the server-side provided match/battle-replay/demo-files.

I like all the fine tuning that can be done with the control-options.


I just wish there was far less "texture-popping";
it's simply far too jarring and distracting.

The artificial limitations on "sniper"-mode and the pretty much non-existent range-finder gives the cheaters a far too much of an advantage when they snipe of you off with a single shot from the other side of the map.

---
There are far too many other games in the markets to pick from super-simulators to arcades.
And "War Thunder" simply is not fun enough to me alongside being a such a huge penny-pincher without throwing any "bones" for me
( especially with all the +70% "Battle Activity"-demands in order to be "paid" in the first place ).
---

---
Having had Steam have the options being stealthily reseted the umpteenth-time resulting me not noticing
(until this very moment)
I hadn't taken any screenshots for over two weeks (14-days),
I have finally fully ditched the screenshot-tool the Steam/Valve-provides which was simply unusable on 32-bit-softwares to begin with
( as in there is a like several second "freeze" whenever a shot is taken ).

Compared to "FRAPS", "Greenshot" and many others from older times, "ShareX" has an initial higher hurdle to cross over with the slew of settings available tucked away some additional menus
( "Task Settings", "Hotkeys", "Application Settings", etc. ).
But once you have tuned (and backup-saved) all the settings to your likings, you will have a very lightweight screenshot-tool with loads of post-processing-settings
( most importantly including sorting the screenshots into separate folders according to software and date and whatever you set the tasks to do ).

Their slogan of
"The best free and open source screenshot tool for Windows"
certainly is not an understatement:
Whatever things the aforementioned example tools used to have are also available on ShareX
(well, aside maybe for the framerate-benchmarking;
we're talking of a screenshot-tool primarily here).
---

---
Worth noting:
I have owned this since the original release on Capcom's own (Digital River) Store (August 25th 2008).
I primarily just wanted to boot-up and see if this Steam-version runs in the first place.
Yes, you'll need to install "AGEIA PhysX v7.11.13" which the Steam-installation provides automatically on the first boot.
But otherwise on my setup? No, I wasn't forced to go hunting for "3-year-old PhysX legacy drivers" or anything else like that.
And the game is running just as well as it is supposed to
( though obviously perhaps better than what it did back then 13-years ago on my "ATHLON 4600X2" although even back then the game was super well optimized ).

Here is my computer as of writing this (with the most up-to-date drivers, BIOS (yes, "TPM 2.0"-enabled) and software:
- Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X570-F Gaming
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
- GPU: Sapphire Radeon RX 590 8GB NITRO+ Gold Edition
- RAM-amount: 32GB
- Two Monitors with 1680x1650 and 1920x1200-resolutions
Max resolution output of this game is 1680x1650.
And yes, it has the default "borderless-fullscreen"-default if you try to output past the max-capacity of your monitor.
So, in order to move the game-window to larger monitor, you'll need to turn the resolution down enough (E.G. 1200x800) in order to get "borders" to move the game window around.

---

As for the game itself, it's the same as it was back in 2008.
As in it still functions and full-on -playable with gamebreaking bugs I am aware of
( well okay, there have been some feature-update(s) sure before "Grin" was shutdown.
And I am uncertain if Capcom has since released any maintenance-updates ).

The (optional) tutorials are still very comprehensive alongside the challenge-courses.
The gameplay itself still superb like it was were back then.


But as said at beginning, better into the details yet once again was the main point of this "review".
But to primarily post that the game indeed actually can be run with modern equipments
( even if mine is like 3-years old at this point as of writing this ).

If you can get this game for even cheaper than the current 9€/10$-asking price, and the game runs on your setup, this game certainly is well the buck
( especially since I personally bought this for 15€ originally ).
---
---
---