Playdate: Rage 2 (05/15/2019)

Right there with you on the whole college thing, @ybbaaabby

University of New Orleans undergrad. Pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of multiple choice tests I had in film and it was even worse switching to art/design. There, the prompts and answers were basically all kind of made up and you just had to know the material well enough to speak intelligently on it. The only regurgitation of memorized info applied to art/film history: names, dates, titles, periods, movements, techniques, etc. But even that wasn't multiple choice.

Junior and senior years I'd have killed for a simple multiple choice anything. It was all weeks long projects for open critique, lengthy writing assignments, and "short" answer tests that were essentially condensed, timed versions of the writing prompts.

And people wonder why I didn't go back for my Master's. Well, because half the curriculum consists of literally the same classes/projects just with double the bullshit. All so I can become what, a teacher? A curator? Nah. Bad enough I've got a mind filled with shit like everything about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and German Expressionism.

But yeah, I'm never particularly surprised to hear some colleges are far less serious about it.

I heard that too... I love Power Trip. saw them live a few weeks ago, very fun show. the crew makes fun of it :(

Yep, covered that twice.

Hey did you know you can change the difficulty at any time in the settings menu? *eyeroll* lol

me when they were pushing for the ejector seat:

"EJECTO SEATO CUZ!"

Serious question: Can you just wipe a kid's butt with a hose or something? Nothing high pressure of course, like a toilet bidet.

I thought I was getting trolled and the whole video was just the GBE Playdate logo with random music for 100 minutes, but it's only the first eight minutes or so. Is that just what the whole stream experience is? I'm used to the videos editing out the long starts, so this was a weird video to start watching.

I was a big defender of the first Rage, so I've been pretty excited for this game. I still want to play it, but after watching this I'm thinking I'll just wait for a good sale. If I can get it for $20-30 I'll jump on it, or if I just magically finish everything else in my backlog I'll pay more.

I really like the Mutant Smash TV or whatever it was called in the first game and I hoped they would expand upon it in this game... looks like they kinda just did the same thing again, though. I was hoping for multiple, interesting arenas or even procedural generation of some kind. That arena stuff just looked boring and very similar to the one in the first game.

I really hoped they would knock it out of the park with this one. Kind of a bummer. I see people saying playing on higher difficulty improves the game, but I don't believe that at all. As I get older, I don't necessarily want my games to be "harder". There are times where that is fine, but I actually prefer my shooters to be dumb and easy these days, but I still want them to be fun and crazy. This looks like none of the above.

Still, out of my love for the first game, I will eventually give this a go. Maybe I'll end up loving it? Not spending $60 right now, though, when I still have other stuff to play. Bummer.

So I snagged this, I enjoy the first person combat, car stuff seems okay, story seems bad. Problem: Mad Max is on sale on Steam for $5. I am told that game did car stuff better, is better generally, I now want to play that instead. This is the first time I feel I threw $60 at the wrong game.

The explosions look really good. That seems to be Avalanche’s strong suit, even if they can’t find a way to make great games around that.

I agree with Ben. The only part that was interesting was the car combat. It has the start of something. It makes me wish this game were more like Convoy. Convoy was the second game the FTL guys put out and was actually a very involved tactical strategy game. Would be so awesome to see a version of that game rendered with the ID engine. That Convoy he was going after should have annihilated Jeff. Even though he was knocked once he was able to revive and finish off the final convoy boss. I want to see him lose. Have some groups from the start be near impossible to beat. To beat them you have to recruit other NPC's into your party. Build up a convoy of his own to be able to take on the larger groups in the game. Have an overlay of each car where you can assign weapons and tactics to each NPC so that you can strategically take down the various enemies in the open world. Would give so much more life to the driving aspect of the game. Where you have to hide from the larger groups and can only hunt the solo or smaller groups also roaming the world. Getting stronger throughout to be the top dog of the wasteland. Please someone make that game with this engine.

I'm at around the same point as Dan in this game. I gotta say Rage 1 is a hundred times better than this. Still don't know why that game got hate. It felt great to play, had good characters and was the only big game to run 60 frames per second on Xbox 360 and still look really sharp. The ending was the only thing I didn't like about it. 2 just feels like Farcry with less stuff to do and almost no story.

One of my favourite things on this site is watching other staffers shake their heads in disbelief when Dan hits depths they’d previously not thought possible. In this stream, Abby is the MVP of incredulous looks whenever he’s in true Dan form, and it’s awesome.

Days Gone is extremely underrated

With how the team has been talking about Rage 2 I really expected this to be much worse, but it actually looks pretty fun.

Same here. I started this game last night and the combat is super fun and the world is fun to drive around and explore.