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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

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So I went back to playing Breath of the Wild. I want to start a save on Master Mode, but before I do that, I want to try and finish upgrading all of my armor sets. The problem? They all need Star Fragments, which (barring exactly 8 preset spawns and very rare drops from Lynels) can only be found from shooting stars, which are uncommon enough as is. Which means there are two games I'm playing where I'm at the point of sitting around idling. Maybe I should just go kill a bunch of Lynels.

Although, speaking of Cookie Clicker, I've decided to work on building up all the crops in the Garden minigame. Which means I let myself get a bunch of buildings just to build up a huge stockpile of cookies, then sold everything except one farm, dropping my CpS to a trickle, meaning the cost of everything in the garden is basically pennies compared to what I have banked. It's just RNG to get the new seeds to actually spawn, now.

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I got a Switch this year, and have been making my way through Breath of the Wild for the first time. I find the fact that weapons break and there's no way to repair or buy more of most of them annoying, and I was disappointing by the lack of proper dungeons, but over-all I'm really enjoying it. The world feels incredibly real, and exploring it is downright addicting.

I was also able to play Metroid Dread not long after it came out, which as a big Metroid fan was very nice. It was fun, but in my opinion it wasn't as good as Super Metroid, Fusion, Zero Mission, or the Prime trilogy.

I've also enjoyed playing some games in the "Arcade Archives" series. In particular Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. reminded me of playing arcade games as a kid (only without worrying about running out of quarters), and Vs. Super Mario Bros. was a fun (if very challenging) spin on the original SMB.

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14 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

I find the fact that weapons break and there's no way to repair or buy more of most of them annoying,

Ah, so they are finally catching up with TTRPG.  I was doing that as a Game Master 20 years or more ago.

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On 12/24/2021 at 9:34 AM, mlooney said:

Ah, so they are finally catching up with TTRPG.  I was doing that as a Game Master 20 years or more ago.

Ahhhh. I now fondly remember gamesmastering Rolemaster a quarter century ago. I let a player find a +20 sword (the equivalent of +4 in D&D) which unfortunately also had triple fumble chance. The player could have stopped using it at any point but he stuck grimly to it in spite of the constant fumbles BECAUSE IT WAS +20. It provided me with a great deal of entertainment because he kept stunning, injuring and near maiming himself with it.

No, the sword didn't break, though it did eventually break the player. Killed the character he played, too.

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On 12/27/2021 at 9:16 PM, The Old Hack said:

Ahhhh. I now fondly remember gamesmastering Rolemaster a quarter century ago. I let a player find a +20 sword (the equivalent of +4 in D&D) which unfortunately also had triple fumble chance. The player could have stopped using it at any point but he stuck grimly to it in spite of the constant fumbles BECAUSE IT WAS +20. It provided me with a great deal of entertainment because he kept stunning, injuring and near maiming himself with it.

No, the sword didn't break, though it did eventually break the player. Killed the character he played, too.

Seems like he could have made good use of that, by giving it to someone he didn't like.

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So I got some games on Steam after Christmas.

Octopath Traveler. It's definitely one of my favorite games. Currently I've recruited all eight protagonists and have unlocked all the subjobs, and I'm just trying to figure out what order to do everyone's Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Also level grinding. Might finish up all the side quests in the Chapter 1 towns first, too.

I'm also planning on having like four other save files so I can get some achievements: Reveal every enemy weakness (start with Cyrus as otherwise you miss the weaknesses for your starting character's chapter 1 boss), solo character run (start with Tressa as she's apparently very good for this with her Hired Help ability), steal from everyone (start with Therion as otherwise you miss stealing from your starting character's Chapter 1 boss), and speedrun (Tressa again, soloing optional this time; apparently there's an 8-hour window). Everything else I can get on my main file.

Antichamber is one of those games that's fun to mess around with. Like Portal, once you've beaten it, there isn't too much replay value other than just messing around with stuff, so that's gonna be a thing to go back to just casually.

Raft is currently taking up all of my attention. Another sandbox base building game, this time floating on a raft in the middle of an ocean full of trash with occasional islands and an ever-present shark that likes to eat your raft itself. I'm doing pretty good, but the main hold up is metal and scrap, which at this point can only be reliably found underwater around the islands. Underwater. With the shark. Keeping the shark at bay is the main reason why I'm not swimming (heh) in metal. I also can't spend time around certain huge islands, as they have either giant boar things that kill me or giant birds that drop rocks on my head to kill me, and I'm not interested in getting caught in a spawn camp loop. Again. No thank you. Still, it's a nice game, and I'm just gonna float around and build up my supply of stuff. ...I'm thinking six or seven shark bait should do it.

I'm also sitting on No Man's Sky, Sea of Thieves, and Kerbal Space Program. Those are gonna be things to look forward to.

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20 minutes ago, Zorua said:

Octopath Traveler.

The name of this attracted my attention for a second.  Then I noticed that there was only 1 l in the name and your description wasn't really a SF role playing game or a star ship combat game.

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Booted up No Man's Sky. Huge open world with literally quintillions of planets to explore. Resource-gathering and base-building with some story and a massive focus on exploration. The planets it could generate range from desert, snowy, lush and forested, barren, hazardous, and more.

It spawned me on a planet with a caustic atmosphere. Fun. Now I had to hide in caves to not die until I could build up enough of a resource stash to make it to the ruins of my ship.

My ship, which spawned on top of a plateau, whereas I spawned on the bottom. Spent like fifteen minutes trying to walk around before I realized I need to try and scale a sheer cliff.

Anyway, I eventually built up enough resources to fix my ship and leave, then headed to the other planets in the system. Built my first base on a nearby no-hazards grasslands planet. It's a really nice planet with a ring system. Very cool.

Main objective is trying to upgrade all my stuff and learn words in the aliens' languages. There's some story paths I'm kinda following but mainly I'm just looking for better gear and expansions to my inventory.

I did manage to build a hyperdrive to the next star system, where two of the planets had apparently already been discovered and named by other players, but the third one (an arctic planet) hadn't, so I put my flag down and threw in a rudimentary base because why not. Dibs. I can make and power a portal generator, and I slap one in each base, so I can freely switch between the two systems without needing to waste hyperdrive fuel on the back-and-forth.

I also have a second base on my main planet. I found a plateau that was hollow and decided it would be a perfect volcano-base-style base.

While flying around looking for distress signals to investigate, I found a crashed ship. That's normal. What isn't normal is that this one apparently crashed in the side of a cliff, and all the junk around it spawned at the same level as the ship...floating way up in the air! (might be an interesting insight into the game's spawning and world generation algorithms).

Welp, back to looking for more storage slots.

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When they were first talking about No Man's Sky I wanted to give it a try, but not enough to by a console for just it.  I also understand that the early releases has some bugs.  Sounds like you more or less found one with the crashed ship and it's wreckage. 

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So I've gone back to Raft and messed around a bit with it. Two things:

One, I finally managed to explore the next story island, the one with bears and the recipes for biofuel stuff. First, a bear killed me and I lost like four spears, a bow and all my arrows, two water bottles (deceptively expensive), a metal axe, and some other stuff. That's a good majority of my metal supply gone. Being a bit more cautious, I managed to go back through the island, kill that bear and several others, distract the Mama Bear with story progression items, find all the notes and blueprints, grab a bunch of new materials, and got the code to track down the next story island. My current objective is to restock my supply of planks and metal and improving my raft (especially my storage system) before moving on to the next story island.

No, seriously. Planks are the resource you're gonna be using the most. You can't build pretty much anything without it. Rope is also a deceptively high-demand material as well. Metal is another big one and easily the hardest of the three to obtain, as you can only find it around the islands. Underwater. With the shar-

Two, I went into a creative-mode world (infinite health resources and the shark ignores you and your raft, but the raft doesn't move and there's no trash or islands) to mess around with raft designs. I built a little area to see what I can do with a bee hive, tried to recreate my current house, messed with water tanks and water pumps, tried to build and subsequently destroyed a giant wedge with a huge sweep of collection nets as a potential raft design, then made a line of engines hooked up to a few biofuel tanks to see if that would work and built a biofuel setup near it. All well and good. Except...

Remember when I got killed by the bear? The game autosaved right as I was dying (or maybe dying triggers an autosave), and I didn't like that, so I disabled the autosave. So I'd done a lot of things without saving. Then the game crashed. And I lost all that stuff in that world.

Ah well. It's a creative mode world. It's not like I lost any actual progress. So instead I just built a storage room on my recreation of my survival mode raft.

I later went to my second creative mode world where the objective is to have the raft supported by as few platforms as possible, with a large platform raised above the small ones. The main point of this world is to see if collection nets count towards the engines' limit. One engine is needed for every 100 foundation pieces, and I didn't know if the nets counted; turns out they don't, so I can have a lot of nets and only really need 13 or 14 foundation pieces and I'll be golden. The original plan was to have basically an inverted pyramid for my raft platform. Then, while I was messing around, I made a very important discovery. Did you know that if you place a foundation and a collection net, place a wall or support beam on the intersection between the two, and break the foundation, the wall or beam will still be there? You can't place the wall or beam on the net by itself, but this setup bypasses that quite nicely.

My current plan for this world, and a potential second survival file, is to have it so there's one platform in the center to start, four spokes of 25 collection nets sticking off from that, all in troughs of walls, and then twelve more platforms for the important stuff--eight for the anchor, three for the sole engine, one for the water purifier...and maybe a thirteenth platform for a paint mixer if I can ever be bothered to go that far (spoilers: I can't). Everything else will be raised up on higher platforms in two intersecting valleys or something. It's gonna be an interesting engineering problem.

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So, Nintendo Direct was yesterday. I didn't watch it myself, but I did hear about one bit of news I'm super excited about: a remastered version of Chrono Cross is coming to Switch (and other current systems and Steam) this April, and it will include Radical Dreamers on it!

(For those lacking the context: Chrono Cross and Radical Dreamers are both sequels to my favorite game of all time, Chrono Trigger. Radical Dreamers was originally released for the Japanese-only Super Famicom add-on the Satelliview in 1996, and has never had another official release until now. Chrono Cross was originally released on the Playstation in 1999-2000, but it's only other release to date was on the Play Station Network.)

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the official translation of Radical Dreamers compares to the fan-translation I've played. As for Chrono Cross itself, it was quite flawed but also still a lot of fun, and I've actually been thinking about replaying for a while; it looks like when I do it will be with shiny new graphics.

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20 hours ago, ijuin said:

If we’re lucky, they may be redoing the translation itself as well, as was done with the DS remake of Chrono Trigger.

I haven't heard anything about that, but I'm hoping so too. One of the game's biggest flaws was it's confusing plot, and I suspect the original translation made that problem worse than it had to be.

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I've been told this is from a video game.  The devs for that game either have not seen a gun (even a picture of one)  or just don't care

image0.jpg

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The most glaringly obvious error that comes to mind is that the thumb hole is put right in between the magazine and the receiver, making it impossible for the ammunition to load into the receiver.

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1 minute ago, ijuin said:

The most glaringly obvious error that comes to mind is that the thumb hole is put right in between the magazine and the receiver, making it impossible for the ammunition to load into the receiver.

That was why I said never seen a gun or even a picture of one.  It's like they modeled it from a description of a gun from someone that had seen a photo of one.

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16 minutes ago, ijuin said:

It was definitely designed by somebody who was not thinking about how such a gun would actually function.

It's obvious how it works. The ammo gnomes in the stock move the rounds from the magazine to the chamber.  See below. 

cursedgun.jpg

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Just now, mlooney said:

That was why I said never seen a gun or even a picture of one.  It's like they modeled it from a description of a gun from someone that had seen a photo of one.

I have concerns about the absence of a trigger guard. I also have concerns about the mechanism for ejecting spent cartridges, which would seem to be purposefully expelling them into the user's face. Though in this regard the thumb hole is not as much poor design as a safety feature: if the ammo cannot reach the firing chamber, the gun cannot mangle the shooter's face with red-hot empty casings.

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

I also have concerns about the mechanism for ejecting spent cartridges, which would seem to be purposefully expelling them into the user's face.

To be fair, the ejector port could be in the other side.  It is for most rifles.

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There's also the fact that it looks really awkward to hold in such a way that your finger is over the trigger but not pressing it. (As someone who has used squirt guns and other toy guns before but never a real gun, this is the first thing that came to mind.)

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It's a railgun-type weapon. What's under the thumb-hole is the power cell. The shiny metal you see at the butt of the weapon is actually the back end of the ammo magazine. There is no casing to discharge out the side, so that's not an issue, but there DOES need to be a way to see whether the weapon is ready to fire and a safe way to clear a weapon from that condition.

(You can explain anything if you're sufficiently desperate, insane, or ignorant of what you're talking about.)

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