The 2020 what are we playing thread

There were five or six in the Lambda complex (or was that still on the way to). I basically just avoided the whole lot there in the end; taking them on seemed too deadly.

Yup, in crates in an ammo room shortly prior to that.

Grunts are those guys you first encounter in a some creepy testing facility, when you find out you’re Billie Eilish’s hit song while hypocritically muttering something about es nicht gewußt haben? (Or so you would if your tongue hadn’t been cut out, which is probably what turned you into an immoral gun/scientist for hire.)

The one from Steam for Linux.

] version 
Protocol version 48
Exe version 1.1.2.2/Stdio (valve)
Exe build: 15:17:26 Jul 24 2019 (8308)

The whole game is about “being on the way to the Lambda complex” :slight_smile:

I was wondering because you were complaining so much about bugs that maybe you were playing this abomination called HL:Source… (I didn’t recognise the models in your screenshots but they are probably just the HD ones).

Hm, I figured Xen is what everyone was so enthusiastic about. It was definitely a breath of fresh air and it had its moments. Hammering on one of those tons in the factory to see what was in it, lmfao that was an amazing jump scare, even if I was expecting it, and not in the typical cheap way.

My final verdict remains that it’s alright, but I don’t think I’ve been missing out. The highlights of the game were the opening sequence and the teleporter puzzle in the reactor, and possibly some of the Xen parts. The crowbar is touted as revolutionary as if Duke didn’t have a mighty foot and couldn’t push chairs and boxes around.

I’ll give it that the suit guy following you throughout the game was cute.

Disclaimer: I don’t really like shooters for the most part; my favorite ones are probably Quake 3, Urban Terror & Joint Operations. For single player I prefer pre-Half-Life/Call of Duty style shooters that are more about puzzling with the world. The Half-Life trend of shooters on rails is what’s wrong with shooters today. I just didn’t know it’s Half-Life that was to blame.

Half-Life without the bad parts is called Portal.

Many player got so far because they liked the gameplay. Xen was very different, which is refreshing, but there were people not liking this completely different style (gameplay wise and art).

How did you like the end boss? It took me some time back then realising that he was restoring himself which those crystals. Being teleported all the time didn’t help either. Eventually I figured it out.

Anyway the great thing about HL was its moddability. So many mods surfaced in quite a short period of time. And it was the first game which taught me what a game engine is and how it all works together.

Huh, that was pretty much immediately obvious to me. Well, not what they were doing specifically but they had “destroy these first” written all over them. At first I actually thought they were charging his portal shooter but either way.

Also holy @#$#@ shooting into his head was challenging af. I’m sure there must be a strategy to it that I either failed to determine or execute, the most obvious suspect being something involving that crouch/long jump.

What tripped me up was that giant crab thing, I think it said something like Gomorrah. For a while I thought I was just supposed to avoid it or trick it into opening up the passage, but I couldn’t make it work without the rocket launcher and the obvious target. Somehow it gave me Thief/Deus Ex/Hitman 2 vibes but it was just a traditional Doom boss.

Gonarch, the big testicle on legs, also known as Big Momma (internal name).

Speedrunners discovered that in the last part of the fight you don’t have to kill Big Momma but you just do enough damage to the floor to break through.

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Played Simon the Sorcerer 2 (The original, not the 25th Anniversary edition, in German). GOG has the talkie version, which is nice, although the voices sound a bit tinny. Guess audio compression back then wasn’t what it’s nowadays. Graphics OTOH were as good as expected.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the “plot” and the writing. The story is basically a one-liner (Simon is abducted in a magic wardrobe and needs to fetch the fuel required to return home from the castle’s treasure chamber). Two thirds of the game and plenty of convoluted puzzles are spent achieving that goal, then there’s a final complication and for good measure it all ends with a massive cliff-hanger. All of that could be excused (the puzzles are pretty fair after all), but then there’s the writing, or rather, the attitude expressed in the writing (and in some of the artwork as well). Let’s just say It’s one of those games that were clearly targeted at teenage boys, written by developers with the mindset of teenage boys. Because of that, the game does not only feel old, but also a bit backwards, actually.

Anyone else played the game (lately) and had the same impression? Or am I just being overly sensitive?

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Indeed. Simon 2 was one of the first games with full voiceover and the whole data had to fit on one CD. The DOTT voices sounded crappy too.

I played it back then and I hadn’t that impression. AFAIR the game was very funny. But I was young :wink: so maybe I wouldn’t say the same after replaying it. :slight_smile:

Hint: Don’t play Simon the Sorcerer 3D :wink:

Ask me again in 2029. I have both games in my GOG library, next to many others.

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No, but I might be able to move them up the queue. You didn’t really make me want to though. :slight_smile:

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I haven’t played StS2 in a long time. I did play the first one recently though and this one was still great.

It’s not that bad, but what it really needs is a speedhack. All that running around and backtracking gets old quickly.
Hm, the game uses the Unreal engine as far as I remember, so it wouldn’t be impossible to mod it…

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I really can’t remember anything about the story. :joy:

And better graphics. Even back then they looked awful.

But you have to be careful: There was at least one “event” where you had to run to several checkpoints within a given timeframe. And the “bridge” could also be a problem.

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I read how awful Simon’s character was in a review back in the day and thought naaa… I’m sure they are overreacting. Few years later I played the gama and yep… So, I haven’t played it lately but I’m sure my opinion would be even more harsh now. I remember liking Simon 1 but I bet it didn’t age gracefully as well.

I don’t agree, I still like it. He might be right about StS2 though.

And I’m sure 25 years ago I would have laughed and thought no more of it. O the innocence of youth! :smile:.

I replayed a bit of it a year or two ago and I didn’t get the same bad vibes. I don’t recall anything from the first time I played it, though.

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Hold up, this is running on the same engine as Unreal, the game’s that’s basically about fancy lighting effects?

No, Wikipedia says that Simon 3D is using the NetImmerse Engine.

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I installed Simon 1.

So first impressions:

  1. 50 minute intro sequence.
  2. No QWER/ASDF/ZXCV

Didn’t get around to playing yet due to the length of the intro sequence.

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Which version are you watching playing? The “remastered” one?

Igitt! as they say in German.

I mean, look at this… there’s all kinds of filters I can enable in ScummVM if I want to. Which for the record I don’t, except for x3/x4 or whatever insofar as you can call that a filter, and the weirdest part is most of them would look better! (If still worse than no filter.)

I bought all three games[*] in March of 2018 for less than the price of one 25th anniversary edition, which was quite fortuitous as it turns out.

[*] Apparently a fourth was also on GOG for a brief spell in 2015.

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