Hangout 10/27

By Shamus Posted Saturday Oct 27, 2012

Filed under: Notices 55 comments

It’s been ages since we’ve done a hangout. Between Chris getting married, Josh moving, and me getting sick and dying, we just haven’t had time. We’re going to try one tonight, Saturday October 27 at 8pm Eastern time. For other time zones, check here.

The plan is for Josh to play X-Com. I don’t know who is going to make it. We’re kind of throwing this together at the last minute because up until yesterday I wasn’t even sure I’d be feeling well enough to do it.

I know this time is pretty much terrible for Europe. Sorry Europe. It’s just a bit harder to get a good time slot early enough in the day to work for Europe. Hopefully next time.

I’ll post the links to the stream when the event goes live.

 


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55 thoughts on “Hangout 10/27

  1. anaphysik says:

    I guess I’ll see if I can check this out.
    Had trouble with the streams last time.

    1. Andy_Panthro says:

      Did you cross the streams? You should never cross the streams.

  2. Irridium says:

    Hopefully I’ll make it. But between Guild Wars 2 and Team Fortress 2 Halloween events… who knows.

  3. evileeyore says:

    Since I’ll too be playing XCOM… I won’t be there.

  4. Johan says:

    Horray

    Your SR3 New Year’s stream was part of what got me interested in Saint’s Row to begin with (though I didn’t buy SR3 til you started reviewing it)

    Maybe I’ll buy XCom if it looks good. Though I wonder, pre-release I heard a lot of hate about how the new XCOM wasn’t going to be true to the original and would be a gutted mess, but your tweets seem to imply otherwise

    1. Andy_Panthro says:

      It’s definitely not a mess, but it is quite a bit different from the original.

      I thought I wouldn’t enjoy it, but heard so many positives I thought I’d gamble and see if it was good. Turns out I really enjoy it, even if some of the design choices aren’t quite to my taste.

      I’ve also bought Xenonauts though, which has a style much more similar to the original.

    2. McNutcase says:

      I got the new XCOM for my birthday, and I’m definitely happy with it. I haven’t played the original, but this version is just easy enough to make me stupidly overconfident in my abilities, and deep enough to keep me interested. This leads to excellent tension.

    3. Jace911 says:

      I enjoy the hell out of both the original and the remake, and while there are one or two design choices I don’t agree with 100% (Max squad size should definitely be eight with upgrades) I really prefer the new one. It’s got a lot of the charm and suspense of the original game (My first UFO mission remains my favorite by far, they really nailed the atmosphere) while streamlining most of what I didn’t like about UFO Defense (Multiple bases got really tedious and TUs took me forever to get the hang of).

      So far the only two types of complaints I’ve seen regarding NuCOM are “they changed it and now it sucks” (Which is totally valid if you preferred the original) and “PC version needs more polish”. Seriously, I’ve seen essays on Spacebattles where people praise the gameplay in one paragraph and then lambast the (Reportedly) myriad of bugs. Thankfully the 360 seems to be relatively bug-free, so for once I can tout the superiority of the glorious console gaming master race!

      1. McNutcase says:

        I’ve had one crash (which may have had to do with my alt-tabbing to my Excel roster of volunteers; the Unreal engine is not the most alt-tab friendly engine around), and camera control on the PC can be a bit hit and miss. My one complaint on the interface is that the default zoom level is too close; I would prefer to zoom out all the way by default. My only other complaint is with class assignment; my current game is drowning in Support and Assault class soldiers, but my one and only sniper got flanked and killed because I was a moron a couple missions ago, and none of the rookies since then have turned into snipers, so I’m hosed for long-range support. I’m having to fake it by giving my Heavy (as portrayed by Jarenth) a scope for extra aim.

        1. Andy_Panthro says:

          I’ve had one complete freeze-up on the aliens turn (required me to end the game via the task manager), and various other small bugs including: people firing over their shoulders; the camera zooming to an empty area for no reason; scrolling problems when trying to use grenades.

          Generally though, the frustrations are more gameplay-based than bugs. The squad size is ridiculous when the soldiers are just as fragile as in the old game. It can be hard to balance building your squad with the way you lose soldiers early on. Once you’re meeting thin men and floaters, the enemy are doing 6-7 damage if they hit and a rookie has only 5 health.

          1. Irridium says:

            Or when dealing with different elevations and you try to move a soldier to the edge, but ends up jumping over the ledge and landing in the open where everyone can see and shoot him/her.

            That’s always fun.

      2. guy says:

        I’ve got a decidedly mixed opinion of the changes, but both are pretty good. That said, there’s a number of things I really dislike about the new one:

        1. The two-moves system instead of time units. I really don’t like it, even though I’m a fan of Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, which have the same sort of thing with letting you move once and act once. It’s hard to pin down exactly why it doesn’t work here, but here goes:
        A. Badly incomplete information. Most maps in the games I mentioned above let you see everything on the field, and the others are hated.
        B. No way to back out. When moving a guy you’re commiting to leaping blindly into the unknown and probably can’t back out. Even if you only used one move, you can both trigger a group of aliens and waste your entire turn.
        C. Squad size is too small. It’s unlikely you can muster enough firepower to even possibly take out the aliens you just set off unless you’ve got a sniper and a miraculously clear fire lane, or you’re just begging for a grenade.
        2. Not fond of the changes to the reaction fire system. Firstly, entering overwatch consumes half your movement, while reaction fire usually took more like a third. Secondly, in the original soldiers fired sequentially until the target died, and in the new one they fire simultaneously and waste extra shots. That means that positioning your team in overwatch to hose down a chokepoint is actually a really bad idea, because the first alien dies and the others are unharmed.
        3. All the high end gear takes absolute heaps of raw materials, and they’re harder to get because UFO missions are so much rarer
        4. It’s really hard to judge lanes of fire and line of sight. It’s hard to tell if a given location will let me shoot a specific alien, and because of the two-moves system, there’s no way to recover if I guess wrong about exactly which pieces of clutter will get in my way.
        5. 3D movement controls are just absolutely terrible. They’re troublesome enough when you’re just dealing with getting onto building roofs, because it can be a bit inconsistent about displaying movement range on top of them, but it completely goes to pieces when you’re using Archangel armor or other fliers. In the original, when you clicked on open space with a flier, they went to the level and location you clicked. In the new one, they might do that, or they might go to the location on the ground directly under it. Granted, the impact of that is reduced by hovering not actually being a very good idea anymore, but sometimes I find a valid use for it and then the interface stops me from doing it.
        6. Inventory. There’s only one accessory slot until really high up the support tree, and too many things that use them. You want two arc projectors, because stunning people is even more of a suicide mission than in the original (two-move strikes again!), you want medkits, you might want grenades, and then there’s the scopes and defense measures. And if someone goes down, your other soldiers can’t pick up their accessory, which is particularly infuriating when you need to stabilize a medic.

    4. ehlijen says:

      They cut out a little too much of the strategic layer, in my opinion, but the tactical layer is brilliant, if suffering just a tad from a need for more map variety.

      It is not the original, but it’s good in its own way and close enough to still invoke nostalgia.

      1. guy says:

        Frankly, I don’t miss the bases change. In the original I generally had only one real base, because by the time I could afford a full secondary strike base a skyranger full of recruits in jumpsuits with earth weaponry no longer cut it even slightly, and producing and ferrying over a full set of gear simply took too much effort, never mind transferring veterans to reinforce them.

        1. ehlijen says:

          I’m not saying the original strategic game couldn’t have been improved, but I still think it was more fun than this new one.

          Interceptor management: The big change is that you can’t pick which base to launch a fighter from. There wasn’t much to the interceptor gameplay in the original, but having to chose where to put your bases so that your interceptors could cover important regions with their real, limited range was the big challenge. Taking that out hurt the strategic game a lot.

          Facilities: There is only one building you want to build more than one of for what it gives you. The rest just have to be built so that you can build something else. They are a game progression tax.
          Workshops are great.
          Labs are pointless, but could have been just as useful with only a little tweaking.
          Power stations are the new living quarters, you need X to make the rest of the base work. Wouldn’t be too bad if uplinks, lifts, excavations and to a degree early on workshops didn’t do the exact same thing: tax you for wanting to progress. One or two of these would have sufficed, but all put together just means that half your base does nothing but allow you to build the other half.
          OTS, Foundry, Containment, Psi lab: These are ok. Maybe the game should have allowed more than one foundry (with bonuses for more), but in general these are important buildings…but you only need one, ever. So they don’t really seem to fit into the base building minigame like everything else that gives ++ for building more.
          Decoder, Gollop: plot buildings. Build one, and done.
          Uplinks: These shouldn’t really have been seperate from satellite manufacture. I get that the reduction to one base was intended as a simplification, but this was a poor way. See generators above.
          Lifts: More or less the relpacement for building new bases. This didn’t need to be seperate from excavating.
          Hangars, living quarters, storage: aren’t even buildings anymore. You just get given free nearly unlimted amounts of it (You should really be able to build firestorms directly to other bases, otherwise I never had too little of any of these).

          The research tree was improved, manufacturing was done ok (though instant completes shouldn’t have been a thing). The situation room is an improvement, though the limit on alien bases removes the scanning for them (small loss).

          Basically, what I’d change:
          – Combine excavation and lift building, takes a lot of time and money
          – remove power generators
          – add living quarters and allow the player to split available space between scientists/engineers/soldiers, allow hiring at any point
          -workshops and labs give a speed and cost bonus and increase the respective personell max, but don’t actually give you more people
          -uplinks come with free satellites but cost more and are slower to build, replacement satellites must be build in engineering.
          -Hangars: can be built up to two in each country, max 4 per continent. Fighters can attack UFOs over other continents if in range.
          -OST takes time, more than 1 can be built to speed things. Also allows rookies to be trained for chosen classes.
          -More than one foundry can be built for speed bonus
          -all manufactures take at least some time.

  5. GM says:

    I´ll be able to watch for an hour but then i´m going to sleep as it will 1 hour after twelve,past sleep time.

  6. StashAugustine says:

    I get to be at work. Lucky me!

  7. Sagretti says:

    I think you should stream Josh trying to complete the Mad King’s Clock Tower from the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event, but that’s mostly so I can laugh at the obscenities sure to come from the never-ending attempts. Anyways, I’m sure X-Com will be an equal provider of schadenfreude.

    1. Mari says:

      I second this motion.

    2. Irridium says:

      I read that as “Mad King’s Cock Tower” and it made me giggle uncontrollably. Ah, I am 5…

      1. Phantos says:

        I think I saw that one…

  8. krellen says:

    I hope I’ll be awake.

  9. Andy_Panthro says:

    Not sure I’ll still be awake, but I’ll give it a shot! Might just have to play XCOM until it starts.

  10. Mr Compassionate says:

    Sooo, where is this steam? Can somebody give me a link?

    1. anaphysik says:

      “I'll post the links to the stream when the event goes live.”

  11. slipshod says:

    And this will presumably be hosted by Ruts?

    Looking forward to it!

    1. Chris says:

      Rutskarn’s stream, most likely, but Rutskarn himself will quote, “Be at a Halloween party rocking a Fallout 2 costume.”

      1. MrGuy says:

        Which begs the question – which character?

        1. Aulayan says:

          Not a character. He’ll be dressed as Fallout 2, the game.

  12. newdarkcloud says:

    Damn. I’ll have to miss it. Shame, as I typically enjoy these.

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      Actually, my schedule just cleared up. I’ll join you guys.

  13. Aanok says:

    It’s funny, Shamus… tonight we switch Daylight Savings Time off (or possibly on? The hell if I know). And you know that happens at 3:00 in the morning, when we set our clocks back one hour to 2:00. So… which one of tonight’s 2 o’ the clocks will be the one for your stream in Central Europe? :D

    1. bbch says:

      I know what you mean – I’m in SE Europe and I’m totally lost this night when it comes to knowing when’s what :D

      1. Museli says:

        The event timer Shamus linked shows the current time in Eastern, which will remain consistent regardless of what our crazy European clocks are doing. You can use that to check the time. As I write this, the event should be around two and a half hours away.

        1. McNutcase says:

          And for the extremely concerned, I present this elegant and finely-crafted link to a JavaScript countdown to go time (or a snapshot of when you clicked the link, should you happen to have JavaScript as restricted as it ought to be)

  14. Kimagure says:

    I wonder, is Josh ever going to finish his let’s play on Shogun, or is that over?

    1. Aanok says:

      This is a most intriguing question.

    2. Wedge says:

      I hope he finishes it! He was so close to victory…

  15. Yes, 1pm on a Sunday afternoon and there’s no DotA2 Halloween update yet. And XCOM where Josh will curse his terrible shooting accuracy regardless of how good it is.

  16. baseless research says:

    The stream will still be available afterwards for us Europeans, right? Could you provide the link afterwards for people who don’t know this functionality (I know how to get to it, but others might not).

    X-COM: it’s got a lot of good stuff to it, BUT
    * the ending blows ass. (in terms of story, and gameplay-wise it feels “cheap”. As in, it’s difficult but not in an interesting way).
    * it’s buggy as hell, especially the animations and the way the camera scrolls if/when you try to lob grenades or rockets. Also, at one time the camera decided to go take a scroll at the opposite side of the map and nothing I could do would make it move back to my units.
    * Base Assault and similar missions from the original (to specify would be a spoiler) don’t happen often and the level design for alien base is boring as hell. IN the original you had a big area with interesting objects, a variety of big open areas, areas with a few cover items and finally the twisty corridors that led to an “elevator” in the middle. IN XCOM 2012 the base design is, well, dull. It’s also really contrast-less and saturated in dark tones, with little variance.
    * base management seems less interesting than Original.
    * the interface feels very console-y (because it is). Especially in the base management mode. STOP WITH THE CONSTANT DRAMATIC ZOOMS!
    * I miss managing multiple bases.
    * I also miss the old design of the Crysalids (for all it’s pixelated glory). The new version doesn’t cut it.
    * Let’s have a minute silence for the Reaper, Snakemen, Celatid and Silacoid. You shall be missed. (Thin Men are gloriously awesome though. Their design is spot-on).

    1. Piflik says:

      The one thing that annoys the hell out of me is the free turn enemies get whenever I detect them…flank enemy, he gets to move to cover…I don’t get to do this, when an alien reveals itself…I accept reaction fire, but aliens should NEVER move on my turn…

      1. ehlijen says:

        it’s a cpu resource shortcut. this way, the aliens don’t have to map their moves out in detail when you see them, but they’ll still try to be in cover, which makes sense as they must have seen your plane land.

        and you can still flank and ambush them, but spooking them from one direction, towards your men on the other side.

  17. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Noooooo!My sleeeeeep!Damn you!

    Oh well,we will watch xcom,or we will die!

    1. Lovecrafter says:

      Probably both, since this is XCOM, after all.

  18. Deadyawn says:

    It is, however, a pretty good time for Australia, so there’s that. I’ll be there as long as I remember.

    1. Chris says:

      I always forget just how into the future Australia is. As I write this, it’s a cloudy and dark 6:30 PM on a Saturday night. But for you: a bright, sunny 9:30 AM on Sunday morning.

      This time travel stuff just fries your brain like an egg.

      1. McNutcase says:

        “This is your brain. This is your brain on time travel. Any questions?”

      2. bbch says:

        Oh, you silly Americans, always living in the past :D

        1. ehlijen says:

          I bet they don’t even have hovercars yet…

      3. Stephen says:

        It’s a good deal for Aussies. I literally woke up, started breakfast and noticed that the Shamus crew was streaming in half an hour. Nice.

      4. MrGuy says:

        Sounds like YOU’RE living in the PAST. Contemporize, man.

  19. Steve C says:

    Hang out in GW2. The Halloween events are on and Arenanet is giving out candy with razor blades shoved in them.

    Yes I’m saying it’s sweet and painful, and yes I want you to experience the pain. I enjoy it when you complain about good ideas that have been destroyed and boy there’s stuff to complain about.

    So hang out in GW and omg why is my mouth bleeding?

  20. Cody211282 says:

    Any chance for a link?

      1. Cody211282 says:

        Oh thank you, I thought I had it bookmarked but it looks like I didn’t.

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