What are you playing currently?

!g*mers

Previous Iterations:

2024

2023

Other rDrama vidya content

Last week's game: Street Fighter IV

Final Score: (10*0+9*2+8*1+7*7+6*0+5*0+4*1+3*2+2*0+1*0)/(0+2+1+7+0+0+1+2+0+0) = 7.77

All Previous Games:

Game to Discuss?

The Witcher. A trvly classic game, which introduced the world to Geralt: the greatest kitty monster hunter the world has known. It's more or less what you'd expect from a polish fantasy game: you peepee down innumerable white slvts with your BBC, and also there's some shit about killing the various monsters (presumably standins for the more civilized races overrunning poland at this time) which have been eating people or whatever. The game is also known for its one of a kind combat style, where you press your m1 button at various times in order to kill the monsters. Unfortunately (for Geralt) s*x is somehow less engaging than this boring button mashing combat, though completing a s*x scene rewards you with a s*x card, a piece of commemorative art for horny polack teens to jerk off to. Leave your thoughts, votes, and c*m tributes below.

Future game discussions:

September 22: Anno (1404-2205)

September 29: Huniepop

October 6: Katamari Damacy

October 13: Factorio

carp, capy, geto, donger pin please

Fallout is actually about how gay and retarded you are 😇

Hope this helps!

— Sam (@kbdznxawyu) September 15, 2024

[Sorry, I forgot to make it so the screenshots get blown up to fill the screen again. Just pls zoom in (you'll see the same thing) and bear with me.]

When we left off I had just gotten through the grueling process of character of generation. Now it's time to start going on some adventures!

Inventory

The first thing we do is find out what goodies our characters have brought with them from their civilian lives. Besides skills and attributes, their previous occupations have provided them with equipment and knowledge of saints and alchemical formulas.

We do pretty badly for equipment. Sasha has a short sword. Redactor and Yuna have clubs. None of them has armor. But what can you expect? A merchant, an alchemist, and a nun aren't going to be walking around with a lot of firepower in their daily life. Nathan was a recruit soldier when he joined us so he has good leather armor and a short spear. He at least is ready for some low-level adventuring. (Note that the game gave everyone an appropriate weapon based on their highest weapon skill.)

If we want to be making moves on the street, this is okay but he still doesn't even have a shield or any missile weapon. We need to upgrade everyone else to at least this level.

When it comes to alchemical formulae, obviously Redactor is the only one who has any. You either are an alchemist or you're not, and there's not much point in having more than one in the party. He knows "Breath of Death" (poison gas), "Arabian Fire" (napalm), and "Quickmove" (agility buff). These are all very useful and having them will be good in the mid game. The problem is, this is pretty high tech stuff. The components to make these are expensive and hard to find and in the early game we will (hopefully) not be running into enemies dangerous enough to actually be worth using these on. I'll be trying to find some low-end formulae that are more appropriate for our party.

Each potion has different versions. Our Arabian Fire formula is the one from Geber, AKA Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. If you subscribe to the "Muslims never invented anything" school of Incelist history, I have to warn you, this game is set in the 1400s so you will be disappointed.

Finally let's see the knowledge of saints we have. This is the 1400s so the intercession of saints is especially important. But you can't just be like "hey, some saint, help me out with this pls". You need a saint who is the patron of the activity you're doing, or the place you're in, or something like that. You need to actually know who they are and what their story is, because they're the patron of something that happened in their life. So a character can only implore that saint for aid if they have studied and understood their life. (This got me as a kid reading medieval hagiography. What other game can claim that?) It's the closest thing in this game to a wizard knowing spells, except it comes from a totally different place than Gary Gygax's belief system about elf nonsense. If you feel like any of this might be anti-Catholic then pls, again, remember this is about the 1400s not about you. I'll go into detail about the saint mechanics in a later episode.

If you remember, Redactor is mainly an alchemist but we had him be a hermit for his last 5 years before he joined the party. He's got knowledge of one saint but it's an important one: St. Anthony. He was a Franciscan friar in the 1200s originally from Portugal who... well he did all kinds of stuff, he was basically the ideal of what you should be like if you're doing that. In the game he's extremely useful. He can heal us a bit. He increases Charisma and Speak Common, vital for any time we've got to talk to anyone. Also Latin and Read/Write which will help in certain situations like dealing with university professors. And he can banish demons, which is important because we're gonna run into some of those.

The saint will always hear you on their day. Saints' days are still a big deal, like the Greeks celebrate the day of the saint you were named after kind of like a birthday. In game I've never used this because you'd really need to have a calendar with you.

Yuna is our nun. Everyone in the party is a Christian of course, that's our whole purpose for going on these adventures, but she's the specialist here. She knows St. Dorothy of Somewhere. I'm not familiar with her. Apparently she's only hears prayers from people with very high Virtue because she won't even consider listening to us. Then we've got St. Jude. One of the apostles but I don't know him well. Patron of hopeless causes, which will be useful because we'll end up in that situation at some point. Then there's St. Longinus. This is the Roman soldier who when they crucified Jesus was like "guys, I think we made a mistake". He also thinks he's too good for us, but perhaps if Yuna gains more Virtue during our adventures he will listen to us.

Plans

I gotta go with Nathan here. We got three members of the party who are running around naked. The core mechanic of the combat system (will explain in detail in a later episode) is about whether a weapon penetrates armor. Our people need at least the most basic level of armor if they're going to fight even the lowest level enemies. Sasha and Nathan have adequate weapons for now, but Redactor and Yuna just have simple clubs, basically tree branches. It would be nice to get them something better.

But how are we going to afford all this? I look in our purse and we only have 10 groschen (money in Darklands will be explained later). Remember how Redactor started out with those formulae for high-end potions? He also started out carrying one of each. These are overkill for any enemy we meet and they're worth a lot of money. So we're going to sell them so we can afford armor and hopefully better weapons.

I go to the local craftsmen, sell our potions (6 florins, wow!) and buy some basic armor for everyone. Redactor and Yuna get cuirboulli, the best kind of leather armor. Sasha gets regular leather and a shield. I'd like to have more (better weapons, some javelins) but I'm feeling fairly confident about our chances in a fight now. We only have 11 pfennigs left, which is basically nothing. So let's try getting into one.

Sasha with her new gear.

First we'll have to kill time until nightfall.

It's worth mentioning here how incredibly outstanding the music is. They did their best to recreate authentic music from the period as MIDIs (this was high tech at the time) and play it through our Soundblaster cards and terrible little speakers.

We wait in the park until nightfall. Then we go out in the streets like Charles Bronson in Death Wish hoping that nobody tries to mug us.

Tbf we don't shoot these guys in the back when they were running away. That always seemed a little much for me. Always kind of left me unsettled like maybe there is a racial thing going on here.

Of course we're immediately set upon by four thugs. They're armed with falchions, these are short machete-like blades.

We don't have a lot of tactical options here since we've only got our own personal weapons. (Later on combat gets more interesting but this admittedly is a persistent problem, that your tactics don't really matter that much.) Most of our people don't do great in this fight, but Nathan quickly turns his opponent into a red streak on the ground. Then he can start stabbing the rest of them in the back. You're at a huge disadvantage trying to dodge two guys' attacks at the same time, so he makes short work of the rest of them.

Conclusion

We pick up a little cash and their weapons and armor. Notice those are 5-quality falchions and 10-quality leather. Every item used in combat has a quality level, with 25 being the baseline. So this is really bad equipment, one of the reasons we were able to beat them. But we can at least sell it for a little money. Unfortunately we're going to need it. Redactor and Yuna got hurt and Sasha lost half her strength. That is, in addition to being the strength she uses while fighting, her long term hit point pool. When strength gets down to 0 you're dead, so if she goes into battle again she risks getting killed.

Our biggest gain from this is that now our local reputation is up to Respected. In Duisburg we will get a little bit better prices and just generally more respect in terms of people cooperating when we ask for jobs or skill training.

Next episode we find out how to heal our party after a tough fight, and hopefully get to see some of the other attractions of the town besides robbers.

The entire staff of Annapurna Interactive resigned this month following a dispute with its owner.

"A spokesperson for Annapurna confirmed that it had explored a spinoff and said the parties failed to reach an agreement, which led to the resignations."

"The spokesperson said… pic.twitter.com/yelq4Sr3r4

— Wario64 (@Wario64) September 12, 2024

I'm gonna try to make an LP of the interesting parts of Darklands, an amazingly wild and interesting game that has been largely forgotten. It came out in 1992 and that's around when I first played it. I can't even guess how many thousands of hours I've put into it. I know this game way better than the people who made it, so I have a lot of habits of how to play the game optimally. But I'll make some effort this time to play like a normal person approaching the game for the first time.

The manual describes the game better than I could:

Darklands is based on a real time and place: Greater Germany in the 15th Century. The strange, miraculous and magical elements simply reflect popular beliefs, superstitions and myths. This is an era before logic or science, a time when anything is possible. In short, if medieval Germans believed something might be true, in Darklands it may actually be true.

We need to put ourselves into this mindset. Remember that we are good Christians, but we are not any kind of Christian you would recognize today. Disclaimer for anyone who might be offended: There will be parts of the game that show Christianity of the time in a bad light. There's bound to be since it permeates everything going on in the game. If you think you see something anti-Catholic or pro-Catholic, remember that the Reformation hasn't happened. There is no "Catholic" or "Protestant" yet. We're all on the same team.

I'll talk more later in later episodes about what the game is all about, including some special insights the guy who made it gave to me personally, but we gotta keep the pace up so let's start now.

Character Generation

Darklands is famous for having a character generation system that is a better game in itself than 90% of the games you've ever played. It's based on the old Traveler pen & paper system, where you live out the whole life of the person through their education and careers until the moment they joined your party. You want to put them on a career path where they will pick up the skills you need, but let their physical abilities waste away. Every 5 years you choose what their occupation is, and you can't just jump from any job to any job. You need the right skills and work experience. (Darklands is sometimes a little too real.) If you want to become a master alchemist, or bishop, or robber knight someday you've got to build your way up to that.

Also keep in mind that once we get into the game, Darklands is not some fantasy game where you get XPs and you can assign them to your elf wherever you want. Skills increase through experience. As in actually using them. (Or through being trained by experts, but this costs lots of time and money.) So during character creation we're actually going to neglect our weapon skills, the skills we use the most, because we'll get so much practice in the game those will improve quickly.

(If you see other seemingly weird choices on the character sheets, like making a streetwise nun, I am doing some metagaming where I already know every time there will be a skill check in the game, who it's rolled against, and which skills are difficult to increase.)

The Party

I'm so good at this game that I've been generating intentionally handicapped parties for the last 20+ years, but that would be bad for an LP. So I'll try to make an actually decent party this time. Our theme is going to be great figure skaters. Here's my concept:

Sasha Cohen - The queen of my heart, the reason I got into figure skating. She's going to be the face of the party, the one who speaks for with others. Extremely charismatic. Crafty. She's an investment banker or something now, which is pretty close to being a thief. She's gonna be agile too (again, obviously they all are but for gameplay reasons we gotta build up the stat in one of them). Good with a blade.

I have her be a local trader, later becoming a traveling merchant. That builds up her people skills but keeps her physical abilities in shape.

Redactor Zero - How do I image myself as a hero in 1400s Germany? I'm an idiot savant so I'll be the alchemist. Having the maximum possible intelligence is important. I'll need to be literate, so I pump up my Read & Write and Speak Latin skills. I don't want to be like one of those people who plays D&D and gives themself a magic wheelchair, so I'll give myself relatively low agility. Impact weapons.

Before you ask, this is from several years ago when I guess somebody wanted to see my foot.

I first study as an oblate, a lay student who is taught at a monastery. That will cut into my charisma even more, but let's get real. I never was a personality boy. From there I go to the university. Now I have the knowledge to become a professional alchemist. Later on I could promote myself to Master Alchemist, but I don't want to get so specialized into alchemy that I can't fill my other roles on the team. I've made sure to bump up certain skills like stealth, streetwise, woodwise because checks against these are run against the whole party and they don't improve quickly. Everyone needs to invest in those. For my last job, I decide to go out in the forest and be a hermit. You can never be too close God, amirite? At 35 characters begin losing their physical abilities but that hasn't hit me too bad yet and my age allowed to build up a lot of skills that would be hard to get in game.

Kim Yuna - The 국민 여동생, the Nation's Little Sister and a devout Catholic. She'll be the warrior nun in our party. Of course your personal connection with God is vital to every one of us, but she's gonna take that to the next level. She'll also have the academic background to understand theology because we're gonna be running into some pretty wild stuff out there. She'll have high perception and she's also going to be our medical expert. This is a crucial skill and she's got the best background for it. Impact weapons.

Her career path is very simple. She's just a nun the whole way through. That allows her to study so many useful skills that she really doesn't need to do anything else. I might have made her the abbess of her own convent but the option never came up, probably because when choosing her background I didn't put her in a high socioeconomic class.

Nathan Chen - The man who launched the Quad Revolution. Incredibly strong gigachad. He's also the most agile. When we run into a really tough physical challenge, like scaling a wall, he'll be the one we send. Polearms. At the end he's gonna be the ultimate killing machine, using a halberd to chop up our enemies, which if you think about it is the 1400s combat equivalent of landing a quad.

Since Nathan is only 25 this is pretty simple. He begins as a hunter so he can pick up Stealth and Woodwise skills, which our party is lacking in. Then he spends one term as a recruit soldier to boost his combat skills. We'll be relying heavily on him in early fights as the other characters get some on-the-job training.

Let's Go!

We now pick each character's heraldry and appearance. There's not that much to choose try, but I'll try to make it fitting.

• Sasha - Based on her outfit in the legendary 2006 Olympic short program at Torino.

• Redactor - There's two different male body types and one is the fat friar, so I guess I gotta be that.

• Yuna - A nun outfit of course, because she's not allowed to be a sexual being.

• Nathan - I just kinda tried to make it look like him.

Our party. Yuna, me, Sasha, and Nathan. Do you see the resemblance?

And the game begins, with our party coming together in the town of Duisburg near the Rhine. Who knows what adventures await us?

BREAKING: Microsoft is laying off 650 employees from its gaming division today. Xbox chief Phil Spencer sent an internal memo to employees this morning to announce the layoffs. Details below 👇 https://t.co/NxqUsg5Lui

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) September 12, 2024

!g*mers

Deserved - 17 votes

Deserved, but still bad - 10 votes

Deserved, but Xbox is still r-slurred - 110 votes

Nooooo the heckin corporate diversity manager got laid off!!!!!!!! - 45 votes

Do you dare to enter the dangerous world of 1400s Mythic Germany and fight back against Satan and his followers?

Do you dare to learn what those 4-character abbreviations stand for because we didn't have enough room on the screen to actually type out the full name of each skill?

Do you dare to enter the DARKLANDS???

(It took me like 3 goddarn hours just to create my party while writing down what my reasoning is. I'm exhausted. Will post it someday.)

The PS5 Pro will cost $1,199 AUD in Australia

https://press-start.com.au/news/playstation/2024/09/11/ps5-pro-price-australia/

I recently got a raise which has left me with some discretionary funds.

Having also just settled from a move I've been on FB marketplace and other similar sites. And when I say into these sites, I mean DEEP in it.

I offer my services to friends who can't be fricked because the autism drives my body.

You want an entire bedroom set for $100? Easy - the sellers are moving interstate and need it gone.

You want a specific type of discontinued ikea furntiture? I'll find it in my sleep for $12.

Art deco paintings / posters? Please, for pennies from a deceased estate.

But then an ad came across my marketplace feed. "Digimon World, PAL PS1, disc only - $80"

MARSEY WHAT? Surely not!?

So on a whim, I searched for a few of my old favourite PS1 games and I was horrified at the after market for some of these games as just discs with no / busted cases. I mean, I know COVID drove the market insane and t being in a PAL territory also applies an exponent to the rarity but this pricing was diabolical.

So I have been DETERMINED to find bargains. In Aus OR overseas. Luckily I have friends in parts of the UK and Europe who visit and can bypass the butt raping of shipping costs.

So far I have managed to find CiB versions for at minimum $20 AUD less than their current market value of:

• Digimon World

• Vagrant Story

• Guardian's Crusade

• Star Ocean 2 (just the discs but I have a copy where the discs are kind of fricked so this gives me CiB)

• Chocobo Racing (NTSC-U sadly since PAL version cost is ridiculous)

• Wild Arms

My collection from childhood already consists of:

• Grandia (Greatest hits version)

• FF7, FF8, FF9

• FF Anthology

• Tron Bonne (apparently this game is disgustingly rare - I had my parents get it from ebay in the UK in like 2000 for $50AUD)

• Jade Cocoon (which I didn't realy like tbh)

I'm thinking if I can find PAL versions of:

• FFT

• Legend of Legaia

• Legend of Dragoon

• Chocobos Dungeon II

• Suikoden I

• Suikoden II

• Koudelka

• Megaman Legends

• Megaman Legends 2

• Parasite Eve (only in NTSC)

Then my little collection will be complete.

The goal is to not open a vein in the case of Legend of Legaia, the Suikodens, and Megaman Legends but THAT'S a tall order.

But FRICK is it exhausting. It just comes down to getting lucky and trying to avoid losing to retro resellers who up buy cheap and up the price by 200%.

And after this long a post, I hear you wonder, 'P-Buss, why not just emulate?' and my reply is 'The need to has CONSUMED ME' plus I like using the original hardware :).

In ANYCASE I'm seriously hoping that more situations like a sealed shipment of Rule of Rose being found in Italy occur to drop the bottom out of these markets, at least for a bit before resellers snap them up.

In CONCLUSION:

Anyone got some good lead on PAL games if you're in the US where they're worth comparably less (or even a copy of Parasite Eve)?

ALSO - What are the jewels in your collections /r/drama? Mine is the aforementioned Tron Bonne.

I was wondering why such a cool looking game wasn't getting more attention. Then I played some of it and realised god this game has some bad writing. Why would they make a story based game, put so much effort into the graphics, but then hire such a shit writer?

Has anyone played this one? Does it get any better?

I especially get annoyed by bad use of profanity. I think a lot of writers grow up in polite middle class homes and then try to write swearing into their stories but don't actually know how to swear themselves so it comes off as awkward and unnatural. The dialogue in this game seems to be just a lot of 'frick's thrown around and sounds more like squabbling children than the cutting remarks of a private detective. !writecel you know what I mean?

Example dialogue to show what I'm talking about:

Poor wittle incels.

SIX HUNDRED NINETY NINE US DOLLARS

SIX HUNDRED NINETY NINE BRITISH POUNDS

SEVEN HUNDRED NINETY NINE EUROS

DISC DRIVE NOT INCLUDED

Reminder that over 300 people work on Minecraft to deliver less content in a year than a single unpaid modder can deliver in a week part-time

Despite this lackluster pace Microsoft announced recently that they will be cutting back on Minecraft updates and updating it even slower

!g*mers what are your favorite MC mods

No Argentine child, you may not use words I don't like in your popular Spanish language vidya publication! You will rebrand or enjoy prison!

an unlisted YouTube video confirms it's PS5 Pro (duh) https://t.co/TkuEPocXcW https://t.co/aCh54rS5xP pic.twitter.com/E8R50AZf1N

— Wario64 (@Wario64) September 9, 2024