Soviet Fallout

by

The joys of being sick. I am sitting down to write this while taking a breathing treatment, though admittedly the sound of the nebulizer does sorta serve as a calming white noise. I am returning back to work today and while my asthma is still engaged, the actual influenza should be long gone apart from this damned cough given that it all started on leap day. During my periods of recuperation I have been trying to find various low key ways of enjoying myself while gaming, because my reflexes and ability to do anything that involves a lot of momentum went out the window. I wrote a lot last week about my adventures in the EZ Everquest Server, and I have not quite finished that but I did feel like I needed to venture out a bit more and do other things.

In my travels I stumbled across some patch notes for a game I had never heard of before. Atom RPG is an admittedly poorly named game, but it represents a nostalgic journey back into the era of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. I’m not sure if you have attempted to play those games recently, but they are a bit of a struggle to get into. They are way more sluggish than your memory of them would indicate, and I struggled quite a bit a few years back in attempting to get started once more in the first game. Atom on the other hand is the sweet spot for Nostalgia gaming… it plays like you remember Fallout playing with all of the modern trappings that make it tolerable for long play periods.

Fallout was a post nuclear war game focused on what happened to America after the bombs fell, and ATOM is very similar except it instead is placed in the civilization that came after Soviet era Russia. This serves to give a really interesting glimpse in how the other faction viewed the inevitability of nuclear conflict and what might occur to society after a great fall plunges us back into the dark ages. Interestingly enough the picture painted is one way less bleak than that of the Metro series. You play as a member of A.T.O.M. a pre-war military organization that more or less plays the same role as that of the Brotherhood of Steel does in the Fallout games. You are sent out into the wastes in search of what happened to a General of your order who was on a mission to recover some ancient tech.

During your journey you will cross a waste dotted with small settlements and all manner of curiosities presented very much in a similar fashion to which you might remember Fallout. There are random encounters as you cross the waste either on foot or later through driving one of a handful of automobiles that are available and that require a constant supply of fuel for which you need to scavenge. The game as a whole feels a little harder than I remember Fallout being, or at least the availability of weapons seems a little harder to come by for a long time. The first handful of weapons you come across break easily, but thankfully the game has a reasonable crafting system and I was able to keep making improvised shivs until I came across better options.

The part that I find most intriguing is all of the soviet era nostalgia that is included in the game given that it is built by a team of Russian developers. I love seeing this familiar genre through a different set of eyes, and a lot of the same tropes playing out in a completely different manner. As far as your party composition goes, you encounter a whole bunch of random characters in your journey. The first for me was a dog that you can in fact pet and befriend and later equip with some nifty armor. After that I encountered a writer that had been exiled to the Gulag before the war and was living a life of isolation walled up on a farm trapped in by giant spiders. After clearing out the spiders he announces that he is joining your party and provides a certain bit of comic relief.

Other companions you can pick up for an indefinite amount of time. One girl for example I saved from a bunch of slavers and she wanted to follow me for safety. You can continue adventuring with her for as long as you like, but I escorted her to the main city in the game and “released” her where she then becomes an NPC working in a bar run by another party member you meet along the way. You can keep checking back in on her to make sure things are going okay which feels nice. The writing is extremely good which is important given this is a game without voice narration and you have to be drawn into the text in order to stay engaged.

I am not sure how long this journey is going to last, but for now I am deeply engaged. It is a game with some rich factions that will be recognizable when viewed through the lens of Fallout, but with a decidedly soviet spin on them. The game also gives you some interesting examples of raiders that are not just madness induced murder machines, but are instead a sort of organized crime syndicate that you can opt to join. I am more or less playing the life of the wasteland hero, helping the downtrodden like I almost always do in a game like this. However there have been more than a few situations where things went south and I wound up having to fight an entire settlement. I am just going to hope those were bad guys, because they didn’t exactly give me much in the way of friendly options.

If you too are prone to fits of nostalgia, then I highly suggest checking out this game. Fair warning however, that if you do get stuck you are going to find yourself wading through a lot of Russian language pages trying to find some of your answers. Additionally the game supports mods but I am finding them prone to the same problem of needing copious amounts of google translate to understand, and as such I have not gone down that rabbit hole. The base game is less than $9 right now and the “supporter” edition with extra goodies is less than $13. Definitely worth checking out if you too have ever tried to go back and play the original Fallout games.

AggroChat #290 – Voxel Vacation

by
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Tamrielo

Another week of sick Bel trying to get through a show without going into a coughing fit and more or less succeeding.  Tonight we talk about The Touryst a wonderful but misspelled visual puzzle exploration game for the Nintendo Switch. From there Bel talks about a poorly named game called Atom RPG that he stumbled across which plays like you remember Fallout 1 and 2 playing.  Ash talks about playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX and his enjoyment of the game in spite of the poor reviews. Tam talks about a project that he is taking on to convert the Star Wars roleplaying systems to Pathfinder 2.0. Bel talks a bit about the Halo Combat Evolved shadow drop and a really brief discussion about Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo.

Topics Discussed:

  • The Touryst
  • Atom RPG
  • Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX
  • Star Wars Conversion
    • Porting to Pathfinder 2.0
  • Halo Combat Evolved Shadow Drop
  • Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

FF7 Remake Demo Thoughts

by

Last night I finally made my way upstairs and played through the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo available on Playstation right now. I have a weird relationship with FF7, namely because I did not own a Playstation 1 at the time in which it was released. I desperately wanted to play it, but ultimately had to wait until the PC Port came out some time later. This means I played the game with the weird midi soundtrack… which was made better by the fact that I had a sound card with a Yamaha synthesizer in it but still not quite like the CD audio. I enjoyed the game quite a bit but it wasn’t the world changing experience for me that it seemed to be for everyone else. The game that really blew my mind was Final Fantasy VI because of the extreme depth it had.

Ultimately all I am saying is that I was not pining for a remake in quite the way the rest of the world seems to have been. That said I am excited to see the final product and get my hands on it, and quite honestly enjoyed it a whole lot more than I thought I would. The moment to moment game play is really enjoyable. The boss fights are less so because they seem to drag on forever. I am hoping that this game releases with a difficulty slider because I am absolutely cranking it down so that I can more or less just experience the story again in an ARPG shell without having to worry too much about doing the right thing at the right time. There were times when the slowing down time while taking actions worked… and then there were times when it felt like I didn’t have nearly enough time to react to incoming attacks that I was supposed to be dodging.

Combat feels similar to that of Final Fantasy XV and you have a basic attack, the ability to do some special attack or shift into another attack mode and then abilities and spells. The part of combat that felt really awkward was having to wait for your ATB Gauge to fill up enough to be able to input any action other than the basic attack. This meant I would have to wait around in order to be able to access the item menu and take a healing potion, which feels real bad when everything else in the game is happening in real time. Similarly it felt odd having to wait out before I could input a special attack or magic because I was not entirely certain what caused the ATB gauge to fill faster. Evasion and Blocking also didn’t seem to work like I would have expected them to work. When you block an attack it still deals a sizable amount of damage through the block, and evasion seems to be super hit and miss if you are going to actually successfully roll out of the way of an attack.

The other negative is that on a baseline PS4, the textures were fading in and out of focus causing some moments of the game-play to look pretty ugly. I am lamenting the fact that this is going to be one of those one year exclusives for PlayStation and that I won’t simply be able to play it on my preferred platform of choice… aka my PC on day one. This game would look amazing with glorious 4k 60 fps treatment, and I am somehow doubting that the PS4 Pro even is going to be able to run it at that. I’ve held off on getting a Pro because it never really seemed like that big of a leap in either performance or graphics. Now I am on the fence as to if I play the game this year or wait until next year and pick it up on the PC.

Like I said before I think this is the sort of game that I will want to be playing on Story Mode. I don’t care to learn the nuances of this action combat system, and fighting anything other than trash mobs seems to take forever. The game does support a classic mode which is turn based, which might feel better when it comes to those tankier fights. However I think I would rather just run through on a lower difficulty and have fun slashing things to pieces with my buster sword rather than fiddling with more detailed combat. I am absolutely not a gamer that cares about the difficulty of games, and I tend to play them for a fun escape from my hectic real life rather than something I am doing to prove some nonsense to myself. I am the polar opposite of a competitive gamer and I am fine with my scrub status. I did however beat the demo and now I am on the fence if I order for PS4 or wait it out.

GeForce Now and My Anger

by

I’ve had this post in me for awhile now but each time I sit down to try and write it nothing but an angry screed comes out. So today I am going to try going about this from a different angle. There is an issue that is occurring and each time I try and talk about it, I wind up catching shit about my “opinion”. I’ve fired off random tweets on three occasions and each time I’ve gotten someone telling me that my thoughts were more or less wrong because I was not viewing things from the standpoint of the business and only looking at things from the viewpoint of the consumer. The thing is… while I have lots of friends in the industry and can often times give them credit for their stances on issues… at the end of the day I am a consumer and at the end of the day right or wrong I want the thing that is going to be best for me and others like me.

However we are already veering dangerously towards the anger zone and I am going to take a step back and explain why Remote Gameplay matters to me. I have a weird use case namely because I game from two different locations in my house. The secret of my marital bliss has been to be flexible and being able to hang out somewhere other than sequestered up in my office with my gaming equipment. As a result I have a gaming laptop downstairs in the living room and my fancy gaming desktop upstairs in my office. Gaming laptops however are a frustrating proposition in that they just don’t stay viable for very long in the grand scheme of things. The hardware placed inside of them is lower end to deal with power draw and battery life issues and as a result you wind up needing to replace them roughly every two years to keep playing modern games.

That is not an expense that I enjoy and as a result over the last three years I have been exploring various options that would allow me to be on the sofa on my laptop but actually playing games upstairs off my gaming desktop. Remote Play and Game Streaming is nothing new and it has been available in one form or another since at least 2014. There are various issues around it related to input latency and graphical hiccups but some almost seven years later most of these issues have been ironed out. Steam In Home Streaming works well for anything that runs through the steam client and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Then there is my tool of choice called Parsec that supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Web Browser.

The vast majority of my gaming is done while sitting downstairs on the laptop and remotely playing games off my Desktop upstairs using Parsec running in LAN mode. That said I could just as easily connect into my machine from outside of my four walls and remotely play my games on a mobile device. If I so chose I could also go out and rent a box on Amazon or Paperspace and connect my Parsec client out to the cloud server that I am renting and install my games that way. I personally don’t need to go down this path since I have a good gaming machine that I control access to, but I know folks who are doing this and it is working fine for them. Just like the server room has moved to entirely virtual servers that may or may not exist on premises, this heralded the beginning of that being a game for your gaming machine as well.

Why GeForce Now is important is that it took this concept that has already existed for years… and refined it down to something that someone who is not technically savvy could do. It also took the madness of a multi-tiered cloud provider billing system and burned it down to a simple number… $4.95 a month. If you had an Nvidia graphics card in your gaming desktop and one of the many Nvidia devices like the shield… you have been able to stream your games for years now. However GeForce Now blew away all of the artificial barriers and just allowed you to have that same experience without owning the Gaming Desktop and instead renting one sitting somewhere in an Nvidia server farm… or more likely a nameless server farm that Nvidia is themselves renting space in.

Stadia, XCloud and Playstation Now are gaming platforms designed to alter your game buying preferences and channel your focus in a new direction. XCloud and Playstation Now are both following the Netflix model, where your subscription fee gives you access to several titles in their library of licenced titles. Stadia goes down a different path trying to replace both the method of playing the game and the purchase point for that game as well. You make your game purchases through Stadia and you play them within their walled garden on any device you choose to do so. GeForce Now however is something completely different and is not a gaming platform, but instead a hardware surrogate. You still have to purchase games like normally through Steam or Epic Games Store and instead of installing them on your own machine you connect out to your temporary server in the cloud and install the game there. From there you can play that game and maintain progress in that game on any device that supports GeForce Now.

So my frustrations rise when people keep calling GeForce Now a gaming platform and treating it like an equivalency to the other Game Streaming Platforms. While I agree wholeheartedly that a Developer should be able to dictate what store fronts their games are available from, and choose which locations that they want to offer them. I disagree completely that those same Developers should have a single bit of control over the hardware we gamers choose to play those games on. If I go to Best Buy, I can purchase a brand new laptop, take it home and install the Steam client on it and within a few minutes pending download speeds be playing a game on it. When I connect to a cloud server with GeForce Now I am doing the same thing. They have provided the Steam Client for me, but I still navigate to my game that I own in my Steam Library and choose to install it and then moments later play it.

The license for the game is between the end user, steam and the game developer and Nvidia does not factor into that process at all. Nvidia is providing me the gamer with a hardware surrogate. I am renting computing power in the cloud just like I would if I choose to go with Amazon Web Services, Paperspace or Azure. I could achieve the exact same result by doing these things as well and the developer would likely have no clue at all that I am doing it. The only reason why this has become an issue over the last few weeks is because Nvidia has managed to package this same service up with a neat bow and offer it up at a reasonable price point that is enough to get people to jump on the bandwagon and start trying to play games remotely. The truth is that I have been subscribed for a few weeks now and I am still not playing a lot of games through it… but that does not stop me from wanting to fight for the right of such services to exist.

I stream almost all of my games through my laptop from my desktop and I doubt that paradigm is going to change in my household. It allows me to exist with a cheaper laptop and pour any of my finances into my gaming desktop upstairs instead of trying to maintain two rather expensive form factors. With Parsec and an android enabled Chromebook, I can have the same gaming experience that I have on my desktop anywhere inside my house. That is extremely powerful, and what GeForce Now has promised to do is to extend that same flexibility to gamers who either don’t have the skill, patience or knowledge to go through the process of setting the same thing up for themselves. It is really compelling to think that a blah business laptop and $4.95 a month will allow you to purchase games through existing storefronts and play them with RTX enabled graphics.

So yes I get frustrated when Developers be it small indies like the dude behind The Long Dark or big companies like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda take an anti-consumer action and claw their games off of the GeForce Now service. This is the point where I get told that there are business decisions that we are not privy to and that there are complications. I know when you say “no offence but” you are just about to be an asshole… but while I understand the realities of doing business and why sometimes we can’t have nice things… it doesn’t stop me from thinking all of that noise is a lot of bullshit. GeForce Now is not a new platform to deliver games through, it is a hardware surrogate that allows you to play games through existing content delivery vehicles. If you were fine with allowing your players to have the game on Steam or Epic Game Store then you should be fine with them playing it on GeForce Now. In my opinion Developers shouldn’t get a say about it, just like they don’t get to choose the hardware that we purchase.

I hope I successfully rode the line between angry screed and think piece. I am worked up as I sit down and try and finish this because the thought of someone dictating what I do with the games I have valid licenses to always fires me up. I am generally one of the most pro-developer bloggers out there because I do see the ramifications of some of the decisions that are made echoed on the lives of my friends in the industry. This situation however is just a bridge too far for me, and I am unlikely to ever back down from my stance. I will always view the companies that are clawing their games away from GeForce Now in a bad light because I view them as now being on what will ultimately be the wrong side of history. Hardware surrogacy is a thing that is going to happen one way or another and the time of us not having physical hardware in our homes is rapidly approaching. I will always stand on the side of doing this on a manner that benefits the customers.