Astroneer

[Dweller_Benthos]

I've been watching some videos of this and at first was a bit put off. First, it's 3rd person, and you know my opinion on that. But a lot of people are saying this is what No Man's Sky should have been. It is essentially the same, you land on a planet and have to find stuff to build things to explore more to build more things, etc. The art style is a bit cartoonish, think Slime Rancher in space, really.

So, after a bit of consideration, I grabbed the early access for $20, which is a decent deal, I think. If I don't like it or can't get past the 3rd person (maybe there's a 1st person option, I don't know) then I'm not out much.

The one mechanic that might be a bit bothersome is you have to stay tethered to your base or a vehicle so you don't run out of air. You do have a suit supply but it is limited, so you can go off tether for a few minutes, but you pretty much have to bring it along with you wherever you go.

So, it might be a fun little game to fill in around other games. I'm currently playing Wolfenstein Old Blood which is fun, but linear and limited in length. Something else to have will be nice for a change. And who knows, maybe I'll get used to 3rd person?

[PZ]

OMG, are you serious, D_B! ... 3rd person!

You are definitely sliding toward the dark side just by having bad thoughts like that :-()

[Art Blade]

paraphrasing D_B's signature, once "you've touched 3rd person, you can't un-touch it." :-()

[PZ]

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, thing is, I like the game, it's just the controls are so wonky and frustrating. I've died a few times because the controls and camera were so weird that I got stuck in an area where I could have easily gotten out of if I had 1st person and normal controls.

Not to mention the driving, holy hell, is that bad, and the devs have even mentioned they want to w@&k on it. Ugh, it's one of those games where the forward key doesn't always make you go forwards, since movement is screen based and not view based. So, if you swing the view around to where the character is looking at you, then the backwards key will move him forwards, or towards you, infuriating.

[Art Blade]

oh yes, I hate that type of "control" or more precisely, the loss thereof.

[fragger]

Yeah, I hate that too

[Dweller_Benthos]

I get around it most of the time by making sure the guy is facing away from me. That way forwards is actually forwards, left is left, etc. The thing is, to look around, you have to hold down the right mouse button, so you're constantly holding it while moving. I'm hoping they add a 1st person view with normal mouse look, I've said as much on the reddit thread for the game which the devs supposedly look at for how the game is being received by the players (actually beta alpha testers who paid for the privilege)

But anyway, I have built a space ship which allows you to travel to the other planets to get the more rare items, and a truck which I used to circumnavigate my home planet, which was a fun journey, despite the wonky driving controls.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Got lost on the game's version of Mars last night. Trying to my way back to my space ship, my rover ran out of power and I had to wait for sun rise (and nights on Mars in the game are 4-5 times longer) so my solar panels could recharge the rover. Heading into the next night, I stopped to pick up some energy crystals to recharge with, and the local nasty plant/fungus things released some noxious gas that hurt me a bit, then the wind picked up and tossed a spiky plant ball-thing my way which killed me.

I respawned in my space ship, which is about a quarter of the way around the planet from where I died. Had to leave it there as I didn't have enough materials to make another rover to go pick up the original rover and the stuff off my dead body. Will probably need to go back to the home planet and resupply, then go back to Mars (the game doesn't call it that, but that's what it is, the game calls it "Arid") and try to retrieve my rover and gear off my body. At least now I'll have a marker to follow to get there. The game places markers on your vehicles and bases, and you can drop one anywhere you want, but they only show from a certain distance, get far enough away and you're lost. Part of the game, and quite a fun adventure.

[Art Blade]

Dweller "Christopher Columbus" Benthos. In space. :-D

[fragger]

Sounds quite fun :-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

It's been fun so far, even with the occasional minor, or major, see below, early-access issues.

I returned from Mars with the intent to grab some materials fast and head back to build a new rover back on Mars to go get my stuff from my dead body and retrieve the other rover. Well, I land at my home planet site and find the rover and carriage (you can attach one rover to another in a train) had disappeared. Looking around, I see the trailer sticking out of the ground a short distance from where I left them. The truck front end was seen nowhere. Trying to dig out the trailer just caused more glitches as it bounced around from the physics of being buried half in the ground. Long story short, the truck had sunk through the ground and fallen into a cave a distance below ground. The trailer was still above ground though, and the tether between them was stretched to the limit (you think?) and causing some issues. So, I dug a hole under the trailer, following the tether into the ground, digging straight down (breaking the cardinal Minecraft rule of never dig straight down) and promptly found the truck as I fell into the cave, landed hard, and was killed by a nasty plant that grows spikes and kills you if you get too close.

Respawn back on the surface and dug a spiral down the edges of the hole I had dug and got safely down into the cave and got rid of the spiky fungus and got my truck and trailer back on their wheels and picked a direction to drive out. Got just around the bend and found my trail of oxygen tethers from exploring the cave previously, which I wasn't aware was the same cave system. Then I find a bunch of my other stuff that had fallen through the ground as well, a bunch of storage panels with materials stuck on them, my coal generator, and my mining drill head.

Turns out anything not physically attached to a structure can fall through the ground, and if you're lucky, end up in a cave below, if there is no cave below, I guess it just disappears, who knows. So, I spent the next hour getting the cave opened up enough to allow my truck to exit and made a couple trips back and forth to get all my stuff out. I built structures attached to my base to attach all that stuff to so I no longer have things just sitting around on the surface.

And I still need to get back to Mars and retrieve my dead body and rover. Maybe tonight.

[Art Blade]

that almost sounds like straight from the movies.  :-D

[Dweller_Benthos]

Although the glitches are a bit of a pain, it was a fun puzzle to solve. First, where is my truck? Second, how do we free it from where it is? Third, how the $^@*$# do we get out of here now? The caves in the game are cool to explore, and if you don't run a string of tethers behind you, a nice place to die from lack of oxygen, or getting gassed or spiked by the native fungus plant things.

I didn't play last night, it was updating and that takes forever on my connection so I played Wolfenstein Old Blood instead. Then, because as part of that game, they have included "nightmare" levels where you go to sleep and find yourself in the levels of the original Wolfenstein 3D game from 1992, this brought back some nostalgia and I fired up DOS Box to play the original game in all it's 340x480 glory. You know how big a 340x480 screen is if displayed on a modern 1920x1080 monitor at normal pixel size is?

Not very big, lol. And, the original Wolf3D had an option to make the screen even smaller for those with less CPU back then, like slow 386's.

[Art Blade]

..and we used to have modern 14" CRT monitors for gaming.

[fragger]

You know how big a 340x480 screen is if displayed on a modern 1920x1080 monitor at normal pixel size is?

This big (assuming you're looking at this at 1920x1080):

[smg id=9440 align=center]

[Art Blade]

fragger, LOL :-X

[PZ]

I loved the original Wolfenstein, and created maps of all the levels and modded what I could.  It was great fun, and totally state of the art at the time.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yep, that's about the size of it. I also did a bunch of mapping and modding for Wolf3D back in the day. Matter of fact, I was looking at the maps in mapedit this weekend so I could find the secrets in the version of the game they have in Old Blood. Some of the details are slightly different and the final fight with Hans Grösse was way too easy.

As for Astroneer, I think I'm about finished with it. Seems short, yes, but it is pre-alpha, really a little more than a tech demo. I've visited all the planets, found all the items for researching the various items. So, I'll fire it up now and then when they update it and see how it goes.

[PZ]

If I recall correctly (which is always in question), Wolfenstein 3D was one of the first of the 3D first person shooters. Another game that was quite basic, but fascinating at the time was an arcade game called Zaxxon. It was the early 1980's and I was in graduate school - it distracted me from my studies  :-()

[Dweller_Benthos]

Wolf 3D is considered "2.5D" really, there is no up and down to it. But it was the first well-known "3D" shooter. There may have been a game similar to it a few months earlier, I forget at this point. Probably a wiki on it somewhere. But I also recall playing a game called "Ken's Labyrinth" which was the same idea, but a little more kid-friendly, you shoot jelly bombs at various un-scary enemies. Something like that. Then once Wolf 3D got big, the engine was licensed and you got dreck like Depth Dwellers and Operation Body Count. A few less bad ones were Blake Stone and Corridor 7.

Zaxxon, though, yeah I liked it but could never get the hang of it's 3D space and always crashed into  things. It was a real quarter-eater, so I didn't play it too much, quarters being hard to come by back then. But I have played it a bit on the MAME emulator, and I still suck at it.

Oh, then there's this http://3d.wolfenstein.com/game_NA.php

[PZ]

Ah... the good ol' days of gaming in it's infancy

[Art Blade]

oh yes. :) Funny how Doom and castle Wolfenstein and DukeNukem3D could keep us up and playing on end. Compared to what we've got now. :-D

[fragger]

I remember how we all used to take our computers around to my best mate's place on weekends and plug them into his LAN setup (he was a budding comms engineer at the time and had his own test setup in his house) and we'd play Doom, and later Duke 3D, all afternoon. Great fun :-X

Wolfenstein was the game that really got the FPS ball rolling, but unfortunately there was no multiplayer mode in it. When Doom came along and we found out we could play together, co-op or deathmatch, we were in heaven :-()

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yep, there was a shop in one of the malls that didn't last long, but while it was running, it had a dozen or so PCs on a LAN and would run DOOM and other multiplayer games. I never paid to play there, they would sometimes have free weekends or actually a couple hours free now and then on the hopes that people would hang around after the free time and start paying to play. I guess no one did, they closed fairly quickly, but it was fun while it lasted.