Still more heat, still more man cave.


Well there was a brief train trip up to Good Beer Co in Santa Ana.


J and I finished up our Destiny 2 run. It was a longer ride than the first installment, but we didn't see a whole lot going on the endgame that would warrant much replay.


We got a little taste of Borderlands-style farming. The Relics of the Golden Age quest simply wasn't going to complete itself through casual play.


We had some fun battles, but the best memories of the game are the environments:




On to Alienation. J read that it was a cross between Borderlands and Helldivers, with maybe more emphasis on the latter.


The combat is very much like Helldivers - dual stick/third person with various weapons and specials. Maybe if we moved directly to this game from Helldivers it would be a little stale, but instead it was nice to have the muscle memory to play reasonably well (once I remapped the buttons).


Upsides:

• Randomly generated maps in Helldivers is a cool feature, but Alienation's pre-cooked worlds probably allowed more latitude in level/mission design. They are pretty.
• A bit more depth in classes, weapons, and side quests.

Downsides:

• No vehicles (so far, but probably at all), not counting the evac helo.
• The baddies don't feel quite as iconic as the ones in Helldivers, where each non-squishy enemy had distinct composition and behavior.

I finally cracked one of my bday presents, God of War 2. Naturally, I'm a bit late to the party.


I'm still figuring combat out. There are lots of moves, attacks, and blocks, but it feels like strong smash works best most of the time. I'm hoping a more nuanced approach than button mashing will be the dominant strategy.


In some ways it feels like The Last of Us, but with bros. This is somewhat unfair because the gameplay is pretty different and it's not really derivative, if anything the resemblance gives GoW a lot to live up to. The voice acting and storytelling are very good, I was worried that Kratos would be one dimensional and maybe I still am a little.



Weeknight pubg sessions are still going. I finally put together a gameplay summary for the uninitiated:


We've moved on from cold drops and late deaths to hitting the edge of the hot landing areas and getting, uh, mixed results.


E.g. on Sanhok we like the back section of Ha Tinh. Most people drop in the warehouses and if they come over to the Sirichai shop, we're pretty proficient with the zero-skill-required auto shotty.



One fine evening a pubger named Kenny Powers dropped out of the blue and had me interested in the video replay utility.


The game stores replay data as geometry to be recreated in-engine. From what I read online, this means the only way to create video is to use the replay viewer and have your graphics card (Nvidia Shadowplay) record what you're seeing. This isn't the best, for a couple reasons:

• You can't have any menus up because it takes direct screengrabs.
• The "Now recording" graphic is recorded, so everything needs editing later.
• Your cursor is recorded so it better be on the edge.
• Sound/mic need to be set up correctly.

So basically this leaves a process of putting together a bunch of clips using Shadowplay for later editing. Of course, the benefit of the save format is that you can move and pan and hop between players using their clunky interface.

Related - internal

Related - external