inspectorfowler

I wish the ”big games” would incorporate more of a sim/story element like this.

A career mode that involves starting small, like carts, and working your way up would be fantastic. Along the way, picking up mechanics, crew chiefs, a track crew so you have radio, sponsors, etc. as things get more intense. Rivals that behave in specific ways, forcing you to learn how to beat certain racing techniques to place above them.

I even love games that don’t require you to place first every damn race. I recently got back into F1 and somebody got on the podium who hasn’t gotten on the podium since 2014, and he still gets to be an F1 driver and is considered a very successful racer.

I’ll have to see what the gameplay in this is actually like but I encourage any game that gets you into the off track experience and also makes the real races more...well…”real”. Racing isn’t hotlapping in front of a pack of robots in a car all by yourself. It’s a massive team effort even in kart racing and games like this get me excited.

Side note, the official WRC games do at least some of this and I enjoy it :)

I will make me, bald and pasty and fat, if they’ll let me, just like real life. Then I can pretend that *I* am the hero, not some muscular handsome lad or pretty lass.

Gotdang it I broke my damn hand today so I'll have to watch everybody get great at this game without me. I have been having a better time as more "normies" like me have hit the servers to even out the normal PC murder-pros. Now I'll watch from the sidelines as everybody becomes a murder-pro.

@sethmode: Staffing shortages. You’ll get a 3% discount for coming out of retirement to work at your own nursing home.

@monkeyking1969: Exactly. I’m like, “Shit, I made it to 93? Forget the nursing home, the most I can hope for is getting to choose which flavor of Soylent they’ll grind me in to.”

Don’t make me choose because the other olds aren’t going to love playing Yakuza Zero, Kiwami 2, Like a Dragon, and both Judgement games until they die.

@dragonmoony:I have loved the Creeper World series forever. The recent ones, especially 4, have taken on a sort of "puzzle" feel where a specific combo of structures is needed to beat specific worlds, but I have played and loved all four of them. Plus, they're very inexpensive to buy.

The general idea is that humanity nearly gets wiped out by a purple "ooze" called the creep (it's more blue in the older games but whatever). It's effectively a gelatinous tidal wave of destructive ooze and as you beat each level you get new weapons to fight it ranging from laser guns to your own "anti-creeper" ooze to bombers and whatever. You can place towers literally anywhere.

It's the kind of game where you are overwhelmed, and often you're supposed to lose the bulk of your structures up front (especially on a first playthrough) until you finally create your "safe space" surrounded by towers, and then you fight back.

It gets more complicated in the later games - they do add a few "mobs" and the rendering of the creep gets more sophisticated, but if you're into tower defense I think they're amazing fun.

A trailer from the first one, 12 years ago.

A trailer from the most recent one.

I've come to a personal decision on the hovercraft after being enraged at its combo of mobility, firepower, and durability:

It's hilarious if you aren't really into winning or losing and just like silliness.

It's a lot of fun if you're the driver or the mini-gunner - I find it hard to use the side guns if it's moving as fast as it should be.

I don't love it as an addition - in my mind it would be the modern "desert buggy" thing - it gets you there fast but it ain't gonna take much punishment. But if I look on the bright side, we get a turret-less tank that is drifting around an objective flag at like 35 lateral mph while three different guns are spraying in all directions and it can take multiple rocket hits before it has to leave to "heal".

It was very frustrating for a while and then I just decided that it's fine if I can hear Tokyo Drift playing in the back of my head when one rolls into an objective.

Now...let me level up and get those anti-tank mines and I'll make 'em sorry. But until then, drift on, my friends.

BF2042 makes you select EVERY condition in which you invert and getting into one where you forgot to change it is very disorienting.

I've played many more rounds now. Some bugs seem to be settling out but others remain. It's shocking how bad the menus have been on Xbox and PC. Click on "next reward" and it closes out the menu, leaving you to puzzle out what you have unlocked. The commo rose still doesn't consistently work on both platforms. But in terms of actual shooting people, it seems relatively decent, and the connection bug is getting less frequent.

Overall so far, my tl;dr is that it feels like Battlefield if you didn't matter at all. There are too many capture points and too much going on for you to really make a difference with just your squad.

A few matches have had close scores but for the most point it feels like one team has the "swarm and capture" mentality and they get out, get ahead, and that's it. I've been the beneficiary of this and the victim of this and it's not really that fun either way. I'd say I get 1 close match for every 3 blowouts (a team winning by more than say, 200 tickets).

Seeing 30 enemies swarm a point is impressive from a technical perspective but it really makes the older games' "C'mon, guys, this is our Alamo! We'll keep 'em at bay!" moments a thing of the past. Your squad isn't going to do squat against two tanks, a hovercraft, and a helicopter and 12 more soldiers.

I feel bad being down on Battlefield, and I know that the meta will change when a bigger player base joins in, but for me the fun of BF has always been that as I age I can keep doing well by being sneaky, flanking, trying to capture a remote point to distract the enemy team, or holding a point against all odds even if I'm not Mr. Insta Headshot. In this game, there are so many people everywhere that these tactics are very difficult to execute.

Can't go back in time but I do wish there was something modern that captured the "just big enough to be epic" feel that might mix BF3 and BF4 together.

Also, does anybody know if there is a method to group up with people short of everybody making friend lists? Like some kind of clan/guild system? I figured with all the talk about "no-pats" that would be a sort of built-in thing.

And y'all are right - the shooting itself is pretty good and I think as people get used to the maps the "flow" of BF will set in the way it usually does.