Video game thread

@Barhandar  
Don’t have Gothic 3. I have Gothic 1 & 2, and they require 3rd party patches just to keep clicking the new game button from instantly crashing the game.
 
EDIT: Actually excuse me. I do have Gothic 3. I just never bothered with it after dealing with 1 & 2.

@Officer Hotpants  
Gothic 3 is garbage compared to 1 and 2 (PB got onto hard times and had to sell rights to a retard publisher who then made them do trash game instead of what Gothic is known for). And I’ve never had those problems, what kind of setup are you even using?

@Barhandar  
At the time? Windows 7, 3Ghz AMD processor, AMD card (don’t recall specs), 12 gigs of RAM. Seems to be a common enough problem, though, given that it’s the second result when searching “Gothic 1 crash” and the first when searching “Gothic 2 crash”.

@Barhandar  
Oof. Gothic 3. Haven’t thought about that bugshow in years. Could never stabilize it to the point where I could play it without constant “grey screen” flickering.

I wish Stellaris had shipbuilding similar to Starship Corporation. Maybe not as complex, but it would be interesting to make tradeoffs between weapons/defense/power. Cramming a single medium weapon into a corvette at the expense of obsolete subsystems, no shields, and no excess power would be a questionable decision, but somewhat funny.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
I love open-ended ship design. Shame so few games allow for it. Best I can think of is Distant Worlds. You have a hard size limit and can do basically whatever you want within it (for ships and stations both). A few classes have required inclusions due to serving as behavioral direction for the AI or certain commands (mining bases must have a mining unit, colonizers must have a colony unit, etc) but otherwise you can do whatever the hell you want.

@Officer Hotpants  
Galactic Civilizations III is the one that springs to mind for me. After selecting your base ship class, your only real limit is current weight restrictions based on current research. Aside from the modules themselves, there are tons of weightless structure parts and greebles to do with as you please.

@Azure Fang  
GalCiv is pretty good for it in both 2 & 3. Three runs like ass, though, and the maps are far too small for their memory requirements so I don’t play it as much.

@Officer Hotpants  
I’ve never had any performance issues, but then I do run with 32GB RAM so I’m a bit ahead of that curve. Still not as bad as Space Empires V was to IV, but that’s a whole ’nother story.
 
Semi-related note: GalCiv 4 was announced a couple days ago.

@Azure Fang  
That may explain it. I only have 16gigs. The primary issue is that the AI takes for-fucking-ever to take its turns (I’m talking 40+ second waits) even in just the first few turns of the game, though, and that seems more like a processor issue to me. Except I have an 8-core, 4ghz processor.
 
And good lord, Space Empires 5. So much potential and every single last ounce of it was utterly wasted. Pretty sure that’s why there wasn’t a Space Empires 6.
 
Already? Wow. The game’s already six years old. I could swear it was, like, half that.

@Officer Hotpants  
It’s hard to place what killed Malfador Machinations (SE’s dev). The story I could piece together was that Strategy First, an abusive publisher, was holding back Malfador’s owed pay for SE4 and (of all games) Starfury, so MM sued and started working on SE5 confident that they’d win. They didn’t win, and when they finally got paid most of it went to legal fees which meant SE5 went under-funded, then MM got bought out by Strategy First (by that time only in name as they were bought by a predatory holding company a year prior) and they just pushed out SE5 and effectively washed their hands of it. Space Empires 4 will likely forever be the best of the franchise (which isn’t so bad, it’s fantastic and moddable as hell).
 
As to GalCiv4, yeah, time flies. I thought the same thing when I got the e-mail (been on Stardock’s newsletter since back when they had their own “proto-Steam” distribution platform Stardock Central, around 2001). Let’s hope they don’t shit out so many bad expansions for this one, maybe take a page from Endless Space 2 and only have one catastrophically-bad one.

@Azure Fang  
Maybe don’t dangle a DLC in front of us that you have to sign up to their website to get. It doesn’t do a franchise any favors to make players think “bullshit” every time they see the start menu for the most recent entry.

Zuma by Popcap is basically Puzzloop with a frog and a someewhat-slightly different layout.

@Officer Hotpants  
Not sure what DLC you’re referring to. There are three DLC “exclusive” to the G2G platform, but they’re all inconsequential - a few relatively pointless heroes, two short quests, and one faction-specific fleet skin - nothing that has any actual game impact (EDIT) and all intended specifically as rewards to the G2G community for participating in various site-oriented campaigns. (END EDIT) Even the Love Thyself “super secret ending DLC” is just a joke ending. I was referring to the horror that is Awakening that turned The Academy into an unstoppable monster.
 
Or are you talking about a GalCiv3 DLC that I’m not familiar with?

@Azure Fang  
GalCiv3. Every time I start it up I see something about signing up for their website or newsletter or whatever to redeem some DLC.

@Officer Hotpants  
Oh, I was unaware. I never paid attention when booting it up, just clicking play as fast as possible. Muh bad. Looking at it now, though, I’m not seeing any signup DLC. I’m seeing ads for their premium DLC even when I already own them all, as well as links to their other franchises, both of which I find utterly ridiculous and insulting (I detest ads in premium games with a passion).

@Azure Fang  
Pfft. Wow. At least with me they’re hawking something I don’t already have.

I’m glad Starmancer seems to be coming along well. At least one incomplete game I threw money at might not be a complete piece of garbage.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
I remember seeing this. Yeah, I hope it’ll be good. I see the name Chucklefish attached to it but fortunately they’re just playing publisher.

Postal Redux is pretty fun, though I prefer the main menu theme from the original Postal 1, and the fact that it started playing as soon as the game launched.

@ThatJewAsshole  
I heard they removed a level from it. Is that true?

@Officer Hotpants  
I don’t own Postal Redux, so this is all original research. From what I can find, the only “removed level” was the ending, which was changed to be more cohesive with the game’s narrative (while also tailoring it to pass Nintendo’s standards for the Switch release) according to the developers and has been relatively well received by fans. I did find some mention of some unused tracks discovered in the assets, but a dev responded saying that those were intended for brand new levels that never came about.

@Azure Fang  
Ah. Thanks. I’d only heard that they’d removed some level or other. Never details.

@ThatJewAsshole  
You might be referring to the fact they swapped out the school shooting ending from Postal 1 for a new funeral ending, but I think they said that it was because the former had lost its shock value.

@Officer Hotpants  
That might be it.