Johnatone

Just as the title suggests, I'm curious if there are any open world games with a population of enemies and NPCs that never regenerate. A game where the deaths matter, and you could ultimately hunt every living thing down. I know there are games with permadeath parameters for player characters, and simulation games with finite populations you have to manage for good or for bad. However, when it comes to open world games like GTA, Just Cause, Skyrim, MGSV, Mercenaries, or whatever the game may be, killing enemies or civilians has very little permanent effect on the gameplay. Soldiers and NPCs respawn like nothing happened, with only the story letting you know things have progressed. (FarCry 2 would have been so much more fun if those fucking outposts didn't respawn immediately and infinitely. The game would still be a slow burning tech demo though.) There are games with morality systems, and this is definitely on track with what I'd like to see. Even then, there aren't many consequences to killing indiscriminately aside from the way NPCs behave around you and a few gameplay choices you may be locked out of. So, assuming this game doesn't exist yet or ever, here's the pipedream gameplay ideas I have for such a system: Remember the first John Wick, where Wick whittled away at the bad guy's henchmen and resources to the point he was willing to give up his own son? Now apply that to a game where you play a criminal. You start killing your own guys, or kill the boss's favorite cousin, and begin a campaign to take over. The boss sends guys at you, you kill them, they get more, but your infamy makes it harder and harder to recruit. The more you succeed, the more wild and desperate the tactics get. They might form an alliance with other crime bosses, or say fuck it and leave town entirely. During this fiasco, you might play recklessly and kill a lot of civilians and do a lot of collateral damage to public property. Because you didn't play it safe, now the cops are on your ass. Since it's gang shit, they're willing to bring in big guns. Had you played it safe, they would have ignored your coup as an SEP*. Get vicious enough in your campaign, and the military might step in. Prove yourself ruthless enough and the city/island/planet government gives everyone the green light to hunt you down. NPCs would start to report your location, shoot at you, form neighborhood watches, or even flee to the outskirts to get away. Eventually, if you wanted to, you could kill everybody. Or, they could kill you and you get an ending that's now considered the good ending because you became the bad guy instead of an anti-hero. Or. Join the police force/military/militia and be a good character, but you're too loose with your gun, too tough in interrogations, and consider yourself Judge Dredd most of the time. So you can be kicked off the force, branded a criminal, and be hunted like a vigilante. Or you can be a good cop and clear the game with honor. Or or. Be a Dexter like serial killer. Be a criminal with a secret serial killer hobby. Start the game with the intent of being a serial killer. You clear with a good ending by retiring a free man, or a bad ending when you get caught or killed. Sick? Sure, but I want my open ended world to be fully open ended and impacted. Not an empty map full of fetch quests and outposts that quickly get boring to capture. Those are just ideas of what you could do with a system like that in my opinion, and I'm probably crazy to think it would be a dynamic game changer. Not to mention I don't wish that kind of a programming task on anyone, as fun as the challenge may be. *SEP = Somebody Else's Problem. Kudos to my fellow H2G2 fans who got it immediately. Please point out any grammatical errors. I'm trying to brush back up on my writing skills. Yes, grammar nazis are very welcome.

Oh yeah! I've heard of it. I saw a short clip of the protagonist fucking a guy up a few years ago and was quite impressed. I'm gonna bump it up on my (way too long) list of things I need to read. Funny this is, I saw the original manga is 245 issues and didn't flinch, but when I see that number associated with an anime's length I find something else to watch. But I can honestly say that even though the manga predates my birth by three and and half years, I'd never heard of it until recently, and I thought of explorer man as a stupid little cheap project I could do one day about twenty years ago. Fuck it, I should do it. It's 15 minutes with two lines of dialog, no world building, no explanations, no names, in a vague city, with one single track of music, and the only method of death is a CGI version of 1960's TV style explosion deaths. And I'm in Utah, they love making movies here.

Yeah, but have you heard the "'Doom: The Movie: The Board Game III - On Ice! OST: The Concert Film' Orignial Motion Picture Soundtrack" though? It's phenomenal.

Not a movie, but a jumping off point. We open to a shot of a young man happily walking down the street on a beautiful day. As he passes by the alley he stops and looks as if he's heard something. He looks down the alley and spots a small gray object. As the young man approaches we cut to a close up view of the object with our subject approaching from the background. It's a classic Gameboy, on the Tetris loading screen, the familiar music blasting away. We cut back to the young man who's face lights up at the discovery, and his pace quickens. But as he gets near, the Gameboy suddenly vanishes, and three ninjas appear. The ninjas proceed to start kicking the shit out of the young man until he finally passes out. In the next scene the young man comes to, shaken awake by his friend. "Are you okay? What happened?" The young man, still confused, says, "I was attacked by three ninjas." His friend replies, "Did you kick back?" Cut to a flashback of me in high school telling this to my friend Kyle. "I hate you," he said, and walked away. Based on a true story.

Like this?

Okay, so my assessment that Disney would kill any new attempts to bring attention to the mod being like foxing is somewhat correct. I was hoping I wasn't crazy lol. I remember being worried about that when Quake Champions: Doom Edition came out, and actually thought about it today when I found a screen cap I had of the release weekend matches. Thankfully iD and Bethesda aren't dicks like that to our community though.

I've had this idea for a long time. It's an action film. It follows a guy on a quest. Everywhere he goes, he's fighting people. BUT everything he punches or kicks or headbutts or stares down or whatever fucking explodes. So we go through the movie watching this guy be a total fucking badass and fucking everything up until he finally gets to the chamber of the man he's after, who's sitting at the head of room in a throne or some shit for some reason. "Finally, I will have my revenge!" the hero speaks, for the first time. He takes a step towards the bad guy and trips on a snag in the carpet. When he falls forward and hits the ground, he explodes. We end with a shot of the bad guy completely bewildered, asking his arriving henchmen, "Who the fuck was that?!" Cut to title screen The Exploder Man Roll credits You can use this for your next film project. I only ask 5%, a piece of the merchandising rights, my name in the credits, and permission to tag along at conventions. We're gonna be bigger than Short Circuit 2 baby!

Weird but on topic segway...Fox used to own Aliens, but now Disney does, and while the TC walks the line legally it's otherwise fine but there's no way it'll ever be added to the officially supported list for obvious reasons. Correct? Anyway, wasn't "Foxing a project" a term for when a passionate fan project was squashed by the IP holder, named after Fox did that to some fans making a mod using a lot of their character IPs (like a multiverse thing) way back in the day? So Disney foxing a project for infringing on an IP they bought from Fox is...well, not irony. I have no idea what it is, or if I'm even in the right ballpark here.

I got a chance to play again today. I was on the top level of Trolley Square here in downtown Salt Lake City - third story and open air. My cell quality was perfect. Streaming, navigating menus, and connecting to matches was fast and fluid. However, it was now that I most noticed the input lag. With lower sensitivity and smaller movements it isn't too bad, but I fair a hundred times better in bot matches than I do against real players. So to reconnect with Halo, which is why I got the Gamepass in the first place (I'm not in a posistion to get an XBox or PC at the moment), I'm quite pleased with the results, and I'll just stick to bot and custom matches when I'm not on wifi. Quake Remastered played terribly on the same connection. Too much input lag. If you were unfortunate enough to experience lag on the OG Quake, that's exactly what it feels like (press forward to move, go shooting off in a straight line, go to move again and you have to come to a complete stop before you shoot off in a straight line in another direction. Not rubber banding; I don't know the name for this type of lag.) I'll be trying out all the old and newer single player games mostly, which like you mentioned should be fine if they don't require precise timing. My life has been hectic for the last...eighteen years now? ...so I missed a lot of titles. I just wasn't much interested in my Switch (Link's Awakening and Quake were all I'd actually played in the eight months I had it), I don't have room for a console or PC at the moment, and a gaming laptop is out of my budget. So I'm quite pleased with how far the game streaming and cloud technologies have come (even if I'm not pleased that publishers want the entire industry based around it purely for greed), but outside of situations like mine (space and financial) or people that just want to hop on every now and then and play something new, and $15 a month here and there or all year is cheaper than constantly shelling out $20-60 for games you might not even like, I can't really say that I'd recommend this service as the way to go unless you already have an XBox or PC. But it works for me.

If you're not in the loop, here's a couple of prominent Doomers playing some of Sandy's levels while talking to the man himself. Some interesting tidbits here about the levels, who did what, artists vs. designers, some gossip, et cetera. Towards the end is the interesting part though: Sandy is asked to put the "Is the Shambler furry?" debate to rest. It's then that we get a look at the inspiration for the Shambler; he leaves it for us to decide. That topic starts at 1:31:50. Screencap below. So my question is, at certain points Sandy sounded bored or disinterested (granted how many times has he gone over all this over most of three decades now), but at other times he seems a little smug. Otherwise he seemed either excitable or trying really hard to make sure he told it as close to exactly as he could remember it, almost cautiously. I've never heard an interview with him before, so is this just his usual style?

XBox One controller in the black finish for that classic feel, and one month of Gamepass Ultimate, for the express purpose of playing Halo Infinite. Also picked up a badass Cowboy Bebop shirt, because I'm going crazy for that stuff while it's in style.

With the release of the single player campaign coming soon, I was excited to learn that Infinite is available with the xCloud via Gamepass Ultimate, that the multi-player is available now, that Gamepass and an official Xbox controller both work with my phone, that both those things will work with the Chromebook I'm purchasing Friday, and that I need an excuse to be paying for a 5G unlimited plan. So I've been playing it in a Target parking lot for the last few hours. How does it run, you ask? Is it a horried, laggy mess? Surely the signal quality is inconsistent booty? Some games run great (-ish), and yes and no to the other questions. I'm running the app on a Samsung Note 20 Ultra, with T-Mobile 5G, in a major city. At this spot I have five out of six bars. Network tests earlier in the evening showed an average of 59 down and 10-20 up, but towards the end of the night and right now I noticed a network slowdown; the same tests are showing me at 10 down and 10 up. Halo Infinite plays very smoothly, with no noticeable input lag. However, with the inconsistency of a cellular network and the aforementioned slowdown towards the end of my session, some really nasty lag spikes showed up and lasted for almost ten seconds. A good minute of one match was unplayable. I switched to big team games after that and got much better signal and gameplay before I crashed into a "cannot connect to server" loop between matches and logged off for the night. Overall very smooth experience, and it will serve my purposes well. Infinite has been a ton of fun to play so far. Other games fared differently. I tried to start up Halo 5's single player campaign and it was completely unplayable. (Haters, get your jokes in. I've never played it.) The stream couldn't keep up rendering the game and the input lag was bad. As a disclaimer, the spot I tried that game in was a weird 4G zone in the middle of the city; I know fuck all about the differences between 4 and 5G, but if they're that vast, well, that's crazy. Battlefield 4's conquest large played...pretty good. Noticeable hiccups when action was intense on screen, and the occasional lag spike during a firefight. Playing the objective and using vehicles was fine, and input was otherwise responsive. My friend tried playing one of the Gears of War while we were driving back to his house. Did not work at all. Cellular signal is too inconsistent while moving, which I knew was gonna be the case. He also booted up San Andreas TDE just to give me shit because I've been obnoxiously and incessantly lamenting the missed opportunity and disappointment that game was since it released. (He's fine with it. I'm a purist though.) The Note 20 Ultra's screen is bigger than my Switch Lite's was. However, games for the Xbox aren't scaled for a screen this size, so reading text is a pain in the ass. The Chromebook is 14" so that'll solve that issue. For now. So I'll need to put more time into it. Obviously on a good strong home wifi signal the streaming issues should be nonexistent. There's a ton of single player games on there I never got to experience too. So I think the Gamepass will hold me over nicely until I can afford a real gaming setup. My next test on the network (tomorrow. Today. It's 4 AM, shit!) is the Quake Remaster. I am so pleased with that game. I'm thankful this year to know there's still developers that can treat a franchise with respect and passion when preserving and updating it's legacy for a new generation. I'm just glad I can play Infinite. I'm having a blast with it so far. Funny thing, I have the default controls on but I keep trying to zoom with R3. I didn't even play the MCC with the legacy controls yet my muscle memory kicked in for this one. (Or was Halo 2 zoom L3? I've smoked a lot of pot since then, my muscles might be confused. I sure am.) It feels fun and solid though. I'm pretty new on XBox; aside from the original big box (and the Halo Triple Threat pack and LAN parties, good times) I've been on PlayStation and PC, so if you'd like to play a few rounds and have some fun and just take the piss- I don't get too serious these days lol- add me: Johnny Nebulous (with the UNSC emblem.)

Yes. From my experience on PS3 (and a small stint with it on PC): Play RAGE Twice, once on a normal or hard campaign, and once on Ultra Nightmare with the Scorchers DLC. The art style and lighting is quite beautiful, although the pallet suffers from the Quake (Quayola!) playbook. The models are all great, and the whole game has a unique atmosphere. (Which was stripped completely in Rage 2 for a more neon and Borderlands style approach. Boo.) The driving is fantastic, arcade like, and fun, and the multi-player modes for it were great! I wished they had expanded upon this more. However, on PC the driving controls are shit and sluggish to control, and I'm too dumb to get an XBox controller set up properly, so I didn't enjoy those bits as much during that playthrough. The shooting, looting, crafting, gear, and item systems worked flawlessly on a controller and were fun to use. The spider bots are quite OP, and some things like the RC car get completely underused. I said play it with the Scorchers DLC on your second run with the hardest difficulty for a reason: the nail/rail-gun you get is super overpowered, and the additional looting and money means you'll never run out of resources. The gunplay is slow like Doom 3 but a lot more fun. While linear (with a few levels being reversed with evidence of your earlier rampage littering the level for your return and opening up new passages*) there is a nice bit of push and give to a lot of the battles, the arenas feel more handcrafted for each encounter. Other spots you're just playing a lot of wack a mole. I loved the card game: it's my favorite in-game mini-game since FFVIII's card game. I wish there'd been a irl version of it for marketing, or even a companion app for my phone. The other mini-games were fun as well, especially five-finger filet. I felt the Scorcher's DLC was fairly priced and one of the last examples of great single player based DLC before the industry took a shit. It added a little bit of everything to the game except MP modes: a new weapon, characters, an actual boss, a complete side story, more Mutant Bash TV, a couple or mini-games, et cetera. You can get all the preorder DLC on PC with the standard edition by simply changing a configuration file in notepad. Obviously I don't advise doing this if there's a legal way to get it and support the creators/IP holders. But the double barrel, balanced armor set, and extra money and loot from the sewer levels help pad the runtime and make the game easier to get through. I thought the celebrity voice actors were used well, even though I find that whole trend to be a waste of money that could go into development. On the other hand: Steve fuckin' Blum. Hell yes. (I was upset he wasn't brought back for the sequel.) Game was overall too short and the ending was booty, but to 100% it with all the extra content will still fill most of a fun day for you. Lots of potential with this one, a lot of fun for two playthroughs. Then you'll play Rage 2 once and enjoy yourself, but feel a dirty sense of wasted potential. Overall, I think Rage is like Quake 4, flawed but wrongly underrated and forgotten. EDIT: Oh yeah! Co-op. Well. I couldn't find anyone to play online with, my ex-wife refused to play it via split screen with me, and there was only one level I could actually cheese by playing with both controllers. So I guess it's there still. I don't think you're missing too much. And the multi-player car combat was awesome! I was so happy to get the opportunity to experience that. I hadn't had that much fun with a car combat game on PlayStation since Twisted Metal for the original PlayStation (before the started fucking with the car physics in III and beyond, that is.) Yeah, the vehicle MP is a completely underrated and forgotten gem in this game that deserved more attention and post release support. So I guess it's still there, but I don't know if you can do anything with it anymore. But besides that, RAGE + Anarchy Edition DLC + Scorchers DLC is totally worth two sessions. And take the first time slow, breath it in, explore the nooks. It really is worth it (and helps you realize half the nooks are empty so you can skip them on the second 100% guide assisted playthrough you'll do if you're a completionist.)

If I understood the Black Book on Doom's engine correctly, then technically it's because Carmack understood how to write code that utilized the processor and RAM hardware in ways they weren't designed for that allowed for a lot of the technical advancements that amazed everyone and pushed the industry for a decade and a half or more. I mean, technically COD was still running a heavily modified Quake III engine until very recently, right? So basically Carmack's own work made his honest for the time comment not obsolete but definitely dated it lol. I'll admit, his description of a VR dependent future sounds more depressing than even the empathy system in Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? But with the way people are with their smart phones and attention spans these days, we're technically already there anyway. But at the same time I love exploring the concept. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex did a good job of showing a more positive spin on the otherwise dystopian idea. One episode in particular featured a home for severely autistic children that couldn't function unless they were fully plugged into the internet. And in the net, their minds functioned so well that they were capable of great things, including building unbreakable online security barriers. So while on the surface a safe place for these kids where they can also be productive was good, but then you have private and military interests poking their nose into it as well as the question of "are the kids being treated well or abused and taken advantage of?" to consider. Anyway, much like Philip K. Dick, Carmack is one of those rare guys who's mind works in a way that can see and accomplish things normal people wouldn't even consider, but because of that they also see other concepts in a different way too and often say or create crazy stuff as well. Like my previous paragraph implies, you have to take the good with the bad on everything lol. What was the topic again? Oh right. I think Carmack's focus on his engine work in the last half of his career with iD is what hurt Doom 3 and Rage the most. A lot of iD engines are best utilized in expansion packs and licensing. D3's engine in Prey and Quake 4 was phenomenal, and Rage would not have received so much flak IMO if more time had been spent on content and the ending instead of megatextures (because I'll be honest, I absolutely loved Rage on the PS3, and the driving segments were amazing ((especially considering iD had never done proper vehicles in an engine before.))) But by that time Carmack was too big to fail in a lot of people's eyes, so there was nobody to ground him. Instead of building crazy code to implement new gameplay ideas, it became building crazy code to show off flashy tech tricks. So maybe not a mistake so much as missed potential due to ego and focus?

I guess every series has it's holiday episode, and CB got two Halloween season episodes (three counting the movie.) I'm not a big fan of horror but I liked them, and better than a Christmas episode or the series going on so long we got the obligatory fan service beach episode lol. I like my 18 episode cut though, I think that's the most complete, and clocks in at 6 hours and 20 minutes, way shorter than the Netflix adaptation. (And you can shave another 65 minutes off if you don't care that much about Ed or Ein and exclude three episodes.) Edit: add two minutes to that time, because you do have to watch the intro and credits sequence at least once. But otherwise I shaved the three minutes for the intro, credits, and "Next time on..." segments but my runtime estimates.)