Sadly, I can’t be among those currently rolling dice and cosplaying their hearts out in Indianapolis, but I can cobble together some celebratory stuff that everyone can enjoy:
• It’s looking like this is a great year for the tabletop games industry as Hasbro’s CEO says D&D is having its best year ever, and across the pond, Games Workshop is reporting that their profits have doubled.
• However, when at the gaming table, be aware that these mystical weapons aren’t going to work, so don’t use them.
• If you’re in need of a free tabletop RPG, Ironsworn looks pretty good, and it even has rules for playing solo.
• Going off on a bit of tangent into nerdy consumables, a Star Trek themed vodka called “Ten-Forward” is now a thing.
• Going further off on tangent as you need food to go with your drinks, the photoblog We Want Plates is all about showcasing the oddball ways some places serve food on anything but actual plates.
• Back to games (sort of), we have a story about how an ex-cop and his pals rigged the McDonald’s Monopoly game until the FBI busted their scheme in 2001.
• The usual flash game rounds out this post with Stickman Boost 2. Run, jump, double jump, wall jump, and grab power-ups while collecting coins and avoiding your stickman’s untimely demise (like you do).
About a year or so ago I bought No Man’s Sky for my son to play with. He’d seen the trailers and I figured that it’d be a decent first spaceflight sim, as he was already into Minecraft, which just lacked spaceships (sans mods). Then came the controversy over how the game that was teased wasn’t the one players received.
It still kind of isn’t, if a living, breathing, undiscovered universe is what you were wanting. However, it’s got enough going for it now that I’d say it’s worth picking up on sale, with a few caveats.
Firstly, let me just say that whatever the game does when it loads, it takes a really long time:
I’m not running it from a solid state drive, but it out-drags Fallout 4 for loading times, at least initially. There are some loading bits in-game that are covered up with warp drive effects and what have you, but those weren’t terribly noticeable unless a lot of asteroids, enemy ships, terrain features, etc. joined in and drove up the lag factor. Basically, once it’s loaded up, it does okay.
I played it on survival mode, because I like a bit of challenge. However, that challenge comes at a cost: Risking a lot of work. I got killed because I started out on a planet that was slowly making me freeze to death, and I didn’t reach my ship or any shelter in time to beef up my space suit’s resistance to the elements. Unfortunately (as if death weren’t enough), I lost the gizmos I’d spent an hour or two gathering resources to build along with that life. It made the thought of having to risk death to go even farther from my ship to replace those resources a groan-worthy concept, and I wound up deleting the save file and just starting over.
The game is better at telegraphing what you should do next than previous versions, but I think I missed something important: Having a base probably helps with the whole “I died and lost everything” concept. I didn’t get far into base building or getting a freighter, but you can add a lot of extra storage in those sorts of places. You’ll need it, as the game still isn’t terribly good at letting you know what you might need in the future and if it’s rare or not. It also doesn’t do terribly well without consulting a wiki at letting you know if the thing it says you need is something you find or something you manufacture in a multi-step process. I suppose Minecraft was the same way until they added the recipe book, so it’s probably not a deal-killer.
At least early on, this isn’t a game for the impatient. You’ll probably start out on a planet with a hostile environment, so your suit’s protective meter will start to drop immediately, even more so if there’s inclement weather. You can hop back into your ship, duck into a building, or take refuge in a cave to let that meter recharge. You can also use sodium or one of its many refined forms to fill this protective bar back towards full, but I found I ran out of it in short order, probably due to the lack of the stuff being near where I started out. Anyway, I found myself sitting and twiddling my space-gauntleted thumbs a lot waiting for storms to blow over.
One complaint about the game that I can completely understand is that the marketing appeared to promise a universe to discover, as if you’d be the first person to visit the various planets across the galaxy. However, every planet is littered with alien artifacts, ruins, structures, outposts, and a bunch of robots called “Sentinels.” I skimmed the lore, and the Sentinels were made to fight off an invading race by injecting said race’s eggs with nanites that turned the resulting mechano-creature against the invaders. Now, they’re described as “gardeners” of every planet. They fly around and make sure nobody does anything to disrupt the worlds they protect. “Disruption” includes mining, resource gathering, killing wildlife, or (in some cases) by daring to exist. When roused, you get a Grand Theft Auto-style infamy rating of one to five angry-Sentinel icons. The higher you go, the larger and more deadly the robo-cops are that come after you. These are, I think, the mechs that that you can see in the most recent trailer. I wouldn’t know since the normal flying-camera version is more than enough to send me running for my ship.
The game has a meta-narrative I’ve heard about from various YouTubers, and it may not be to everyone’s liking. It’s ambitious, in a kind of “big idea about reality sci-fi” sort of way, but I’m not sure this was the right game to deliver it. You’ll have to judge for yourselves, but only if you find base building and resource gathering a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Lest I leave you with my own light experiences to go by, I want to share a video that had some pretty helpful tips on getting over the early game hump of a lack of resources and money. I haven’t been able to use his tip on getting a better ship, as my use of the signal booster only showed me where some ruins and trading outposts are. Procedural generation must hate me, I guess:
Here we see DC hero “Dove” using her powers to slam a jelly donut into the face of some hapless criminal. Speculation abounds if the ability to keep jelly stains off of her gloves and outfit is among her powers or a property of some high-tech uniform material.
The first on our trailer list is one that needs a bit o’ warning. It’s got Robin saying a most un-Adam West-like word, so if you decide to watch this trailer for the DC show, Titans, any fans of Teen Titans GO! might need to leave the room. It’s even rated TV-MA, so consider yourself warned.
I think they might have embraced that “dark ‘n’ gritty” thing a little too much, which has been a problem with DC the past decade or so. Almost everything is shot at night with a blue tint, and it looks like everyone’s super-costume has been coated in dust (though not, as noted above, jelly donut filling). One thing Marvel has done well is designed costumes that don’t look too silly in broad daylight. I know there’s been some complaints about Starfire’s outfit, but she falls into a category I call “the more godlike your powers, the more ridiculous a costume you can get away with.” Superman usually falls into that group, as does just about every version of Galactus. I think Dove is going to come in for more complaints in the end, though I’ve only got this trailer to go on.
For a lighter look at these sorts of characters, here’s a trailer for an upcoming animated Young Justice tale, “Outsiders”:
It’s not so much a trailer as it is a string of scenes as if you’re taking your thumb off of the fast-forward button. Maybe with the emphasis on Kid Flash, that’s appropriate? Anyway, as a fan of YJ and the Justice League animated shows, this is the one I’m more interested in.
Meanwhile, in the grimdark future long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there is only Star Wars:
Given the dialog, the accents, and kerblooie, I’m almost thinking that the Clone Wars era is becoming kind of like the franchise’s version of Warhammer 40K. All we need is for someone at Disney to put Stormtroopers in armor so huge they look like Robocop’s refrigerator and you’ve just about created Ultramarines… and I’ll stop before someone there gets any bright ideas about acquiring Games Workshop.
On to blue-tinted sci-fi futures, here’s a trailer for the next season of Star Trek Discovery with bonus Lenny Kravitz:
I’m not sure if ‘Trek has given up on science fiction to the point where the “hardness” of their stories is about as resilient as a brick made of packing foam, but at least they seem to be going for “fun,” which can be enjoyable as well. The “red signal” thing isn’t, I hope, a reference to Mr. Spock’s Red Matter macguffin that sparked the Kelvin universe, but you never can tell. I also find it interesting that while the Mass Effect video games aped Star Trek’s tropes, Discovery seems to be returning the favor, at least aesthetically. I can almost see the conversation wheel during some of the conversations, and the armor/spacesuits just scream “Bioware video game.”
Anyway, it looks interesting, though I wonder how many of these “godlike aliens have something we need to find” stories the genre can pull off before the galaxy is littered with the First Ones’ relics from Babylon-5. 🙂
It’s also worth noting that, I think, all of these shows are only going to be available (legally) via their respective parent companies’ streaming services. It’s going to be expensive to be a well-rounded nerd…
Bad Behavior has blocked 1696 access attempts in the last 7 days.