JamPaladin
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User ID: 1227
JamPaladin
2yr ago
Steam VR Home Environments on the workshop for Steam VR. Some of them are recreations, and some seem to be ripped from the original game and imported. For example, you can find Zelda's Castle, the lakeside laboratory, Peach's Castle (both inside and out) from Mario 64, and the campfire scene from FFX - it was interesting seeing the varying heights of the characters. You don't notice on a regular screen, but Kimahri Ronso is a huge guy. The environments themselves are static, but its neat to BE in a place you've been in.
I don't know if there's a way to import them into VR chat (I only spent 5 minutes in VR chat) but it seems plausible.
JamPaladin
2yr ago
Feel Good Hit of the Summer - Queens of the Stone Age is a list of drugs the singer is implying they have taken.
Would you consider "You don't call Wagga Wagga Wagga"? A list of Australian towns with double names you would not call by the singular abbreviation, as argument to say the singer's home town's name in full.
JamPaladin
2yr ago
Cont. from above
I have always felt a sense of "place" in video games. The levels I've played over and over, I could draw a map, I know the environments. When I got a VR headset, I discovered people had taken places from games I like (such as Zelda: The Ocarina of Time) and imported them, so you could see them in full realisation. It's fantastic. I have the same sense of place in my dreams - I think I always have. Off the main street of my city, go down the stairs that don't exist, there's a bookstore with piles and piles of dusty archives. Across the basement, up the stairs, you're in a street from another city I've been in, and there's another book store here that doesn't exist in real life, this one selling RPG manuals. There's a non-existent game shop on the other side of the city, which sells a non-existent miniature game with inch-scale modern jet fighters in pewter, and I want to play it. But more than the people or events in my dreams, it's the places I remember. I could map them out, if they didn't follow non-euclidean dream logic. Sometimes I return to them in dreams years later.
When I looked at some videos of Medieval Dynasty (since its 2022 and games are collaborative experiences with the internet now and there's no joy in discovery), it was strange seeing the other villages that had been built by other players. You can build your village wherever you like, flat ground notwithstanding (and there's plenty around) - mine is near a lake in a forest. I've slowly clearcut the forest to provide the logs to build it, and it's nice and central to everything, with a great view. Others put theirs on the plains northeast, or in another forest - but all are different. Yet the whole game takes place in the village! So when I remember Mario 64, I remember surfing on a Koopa shell around Bob-omb Battlefield and the slide on Tall Tall Mountain. But when I think back to Medieval Dynasty, I remember my village. I remember running to the other side to get to my barn, farm and animals, then back across the entire thing to get to my smithy. I remember I can go to my storage, get out goods for the kitchen, smithy, workshop, food storage, and tailor, and I can run a clockwise circle around my village and visit those buildings in order. But to another player, the layout will be entirely different.
Have I left a mark on a virtual world that no-one else will ever see? Did the others really play the same game if they never visited the places I did?
JamPaladin
2yr ago
Recently, I have been playing the video game Medieval Dynasty. It might be classed as a "survival" game; it certainly stems from that lineage, but the survival is pretty basic. You must drink, but rivers are plentiful. You must eat, but craft a knife from a stone and a stick on the ground, chase down two rabbits, and you're fed for half of the three-day season (Each in-game day is about 30 minutes), and the meter refills on season change anyhow. Occasionally, you run into wolves unprepared. Your stamina bar is depleted from running, you cannot out-run them, and you're mauled to death and sent to the last autosave, ten minutes ago. You quickly learn to save before going out into the wild.
Instead, the main focus is building a village. Select a spot to build a house (each building is templated, not freeform), clear the area, craft or hold a hammer, have the right materials in your inventory (logs from chopping down trees, rocks and sticks from the ground) and hit it enough times for the meter to be filled. Different buildings grant different abilities in a tech-chain (the workshop builds items, the hunter supplies meat, the barn works your farms and so one) and you slowly move from wooden to copper to iron tools, which last longer and take less hits. You invite people into your village; you need a house for each new male or female villager - if you put them together, they are now married and produce exactly two children (unless you built a small house, in which case they produce one). Meanwhile, you need to woo a partner to have your exactly one son, and you must, for eventually you die of old age and play as him. Then, you spend a lot of time on a manager screen with a kind of clunky interface, ensuring you have enough food to feed everyone, and setting tasks for each building each season.
Is it a good game? Not really, it's a waste of time. I frequently have sat, playing on my phone, for 20 minutes waiting for a crafting meter to fill while I cook 160 soups or what-have-you. Vendors have limited funds, so you spend time each season selling your goods, only to become rich quickly and easily. If you're OCD like me, constantly trying to manage where your stuff is versus where your villages put it is aggravating. The game is quite easy, the only real challenge is optimising your day to be the most efficient. The main gameplay loop in that sense is the list of to-do tasks: "first, I'll cook as many of these as I can. Then I must repair my buildings. Oh look, the hunters need new knives, which means I need to go mining - I can stop at the town and sell on the way. I need to harvest before end of season, don't forget, which means I won't have time for this quest".
Yet the game is compelling; I've yet to put it down, with my plans of what to do next in the game frequently being my top thought. I plan for what I'll do years ahead of game time, and I'm constantly chasing after the next thing to do. I'm 88.8 hours in (Fun coincidence!) with half that in the past fortnight. There's some legitimately funny writing, and an optional main quest with a pretty decent storyline. The valley it takes place in has all the beauty you'd expect of the Unreal engine, and its nice to just be there, watching it change each season. There's a sense of creativity, getting your village looking nice and just how you like it, but it's not stifling with possibility, because the options are limited, and you can only do a bit at a time.
If not really a survival game, what shall we compare it to? The obvious answer is Minecraft, but as I've never played Minecraft, I suggest three games I've played recently for contrast: Stardew Valley, Valheim, and Subnautica.
Stardew Valley is the primary exemplar of the "Cozy game". I played Harvest Moon on SNES, I still have my Game Pak, which I bought after saving for weeks and planning on my family's once-a-year shopping excursion from the bush to the city. A little bit of me dies when I see the current fanbase, and how they would spurn me, and how they never would have played the original, but I digress. Stardew Valley was a must-buy, a truly beautiful game, polished and filled with love. I first played it at a difficult time in my life - stuck, alone, in the city, longing for my rural childhood, and the opening scene brought me to actual tears. How I wished my grandfather could have left me a farm! My grandfather was quite a man, and there are stories of him for another time, yet he passed in early elderly years, and my grandmother, becoming too old, had to sell the farm. Yet here was a fantasy of that same life. I made a character who looked like me, made friends and fell in love as I couldn't in real life. Until about 40 hours in, when the stress of trying to optimise for increasingly complex goals sent my anxiety haywire, and I stopped, never to return. I regret it, and look longingly at the game, but I just can't deal with going back. I've made twice that time in Medieval Dynasty, and it is yet to become anxiety-inducing. When I quit, it is more likely to be from boredom from the grind of unlocking new improvements.
Instead, let's compare Valheim. Valheim stole me for 50 hours; I enjoyed the exploration, the planning, the building of my designs (unlike in Dynasty, you can be truly creative with your modular building designs, and some epic designs can be seen online.). The combat added a nice bit of spice to the loop, but then I hit the swamp. The difficulty increase was too big a jump. I was killed far too many times trying to build a small shelter to sleep in near the swamp I'd found, and running back had become just too much of a chore. It felt like I needed to be playing together with friends, and while I HAD friends playing the game, I just wanted to go at my own pace and build my own thing, undisturbed - with combat as a spice, not as a danger. So, I looked at my lovingly crafted longhouse, with its loft bed and outside forges, and the bridges I was so proud of linking the nearby islands, and the small dock I had nearby, and bid them farewell. Nah, I ragequit and uninstalled. The game had made me feel unwelcome as a solo player. Medieval Dynasty is a single-player only game, and one where the threat of danger is minor. It is a peaceful valley.
Another single player only game is Subnautica. An underwater survival game, you must manage your oxygen, food and water meters, much like Dynasty. You build modular buildings, like Dynasty, although there's no management component. The central loop of identifying a crafting material required, going out of your base to go find it, then coming back to build is very familiar to Dynasty. Both games have hand-crafted, not procedural worlds. Yet Medieval Dynasty has no real exploration. The same materials you need are either grown in your village or available pretty much anywhere. There's always trees and stones and sticks nearby, same with herbs. Specific animals to hunt always spawn in the same place, and these places are marked on your map when you encounter them. You need to find one source of reeds early on, a couple of claypit locations, one cave for metal, and learn which village has which shopkeepers (or look in on the wiki, since its 2022 and games are collaborative experiences with the internet now and there's no joy in discovery). Otherwise, there's not much to find, although it is pretty. In contrast, Subnautica is filled with many biomes, and exploring these is the main thrust of the game. Each has different resources to obtain, and different tech blueprints to discover, and soon, you must go into the terrifying deeper waters to get what you need. Subnautica is accidentally a horror game. I loved it, even though I hate horror, and I finished it, but only with my girlfriend holding my hand in the deepest and scariest parts of the ocean.
Cont.
Use a bottle opener on the edge of the lid, if it is a metal lid. This breaks the airtight seal, letting air in and allowing the jar to be easily opened. This is especially fun after the jar has been passed around and everyone looks tired - you effortlessly open the jar and look smart.
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