Recent reviews by runlvl0

Games crashes with a message that "Master of Orion could not create new save" in the game save folder. Looked on forums for solution, and apparently this is an unresolved issue since 2016. The save file appears to be present, the the game still crashes. Twice. Requested refund. Personal Windows 10 desktop, moderately recent hardware. It was fun for the 0.6 hours until the crashes to desktop.

First, my bias: I currently have "1,804.2 hrs on record" (Steam, 4 or 5 complete playthoughs) playing Fallout 4 (non-VR), I have experimented with non-VR Fallout 4 using tools like VorpX, and I am generally predisposed to view Bethesda products favorably. The Bethesda "mod market" rubs me the wrong way, but I love and appreciate the Fallout and TES series. At the time of this review, I'm about 4 hours into Fallout 4 VR - I've just talked to the settlers at Tenpines Bluff, and am headed down to Concord to confront the raiders at Corvega Factory. I've done some settlement work in Sanctuary and some crafting.

That being said, I cannot in good conscience recommend this game in its current state of development (a week past release). Graphically, the game is a low-resolution mess. There are "fixes" that *you* can apply to compensate (how much work do you want to put into polishing their product?), but out-of-box, the game runs at an unexpectedly low resolution and video quality, even on systems which grossly exceed reference specifications. It doesn't look like the pictures above, unless you imagine them at quarter-resolution, with pronounced screen door effects.

I don't believe that the current price of the game, the current full price of a "triple A" title ($60 USD), reflects the value of the title. They're charging full price for what amounts to a "mod." In fact, many mods reflect more work than is apparent here. I can see that work has gone into it but apart from the graphic deficiencies, the interface is cumbersome - if you thought that settlement building was awkward before, it's actually unpleasant now - and locomotion options are either tedious (teleport, with teleport range restricted by action points) or nausea-inducing (free movement, based on left touchpad).

I can see why the marketing previews (including the advertisement video above) have focused on reviewers moving around a small area, like the Red Rocket station or the Boston Airport: it works for a short period of time, but walking even from your house in Sanctuary to the Museum of Freedom in Concord becomes a (click-teleport 8 feet-click-teleport 8 feet-click or drunken-wobble-on-Segway) chore.

Missed opportunities: when you enter power armor, there is NO ANIMATION. Simply click to enter and the display changes to power armor display. I have to admit that I was looking forward to seeing in first person what that would have looked like, and that giving entering power armor a more "momentous" feeling. Also, your Vive controllers are represented in this game with... Vive controllers! Not hands, but two immersion-breaking Vive wands right in front of your face. Why would they animate the Pip Boy (for immersion), but leave the controllers AS controllers? Even generic "ghost hands" would have been a better choice. Settlement building should be a "solved problem" in VR, give that Minecraft VR exists, but the current Fallout 4 VR system makes you shift "modes" between movement and building, so you have to go somewhere (for instance, the living room of a Sanctuary house), then long-hold down the build button to enter build mode, build, then re-enter move mode to go down the hallway into a bedroom, lather, rinse, repeat.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the new, improved VATS, which works like "bullet time" - go into VATS, point gun in general direction of bad guy's head, torso, arms, or legs - hit based entirely on percentage - time slows down - fire - watch shells fly out of your gun's receiver in slo-mo. Neat! Also, the minigun is a weightless bullet wand now, so it's simply a matter of pointing your Vive wand in the direction of something you don't want to exist anymore and pulling the trigger. My PC playthoughs have been mostly with a controller, so non-VATS targeting has been problematic in the past. Both of these are positives and negatives though: outside of VATS, iron-sight shooting - particularly in the low-res VR - seems inaccurate (I am a Texan. I shoot. I know what it *should* look like.), and the weightless minigun REALLY breaks any immersion while using it. It's a minigun-shaped balloon!

I think that Fallout 4 VR is an interesting experience. I don't know if I'll play though an entire game (which makes the "triple A" price tag particularly irksome).

If Steam will let me post a hyperlink in a review,

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=688086068

This. Stellaris has become my favorite new game, in a way that only the Civ series and Master of Orion (1 & 2) have touched me before. (Ew.) Vanilla Stellaris is interesting; I enjoyed it. I still haven't won a game, and it's annoying that the only way to "earn achievements" is to play in the so-called "iron man" mode, but it's an interesting real-time-ish implentation of Master of Orion-type play. It's like "Sins of a Solar Empire" and "Master of Orion 2" made a baby. I notice that there are a lot of new negative reviews, centering on the publisher's policies regarding multiplayer and DLC. I really don't care about either of those, and the game works perfectly well in single-player WITHOUT a "Paradox account" and with respect to DLC...

So, after getting comfortable with the game and the interface, I went to the Steam Workshop to look for Star Trek and Star Wars mods (don't judge). There - for free, so I don't know what other "DLC" is available for this game, and so long as New Horizons is available, I won't care - I found Star Trek "New Horizons" (https://stnh.tk/). This game mod is insanely well polished, with music, graphics, custom 'story' modes... one of my Science ships had an encounted with the Star Trek Mirror Universe while surveying a distant star system. Another was waylaid by Pakleds who wanted the Captain to make their ships "go fast." It's just beautiful - the models, the load screens, and it all works well with the core Stellaris game. If you play as Earth (you can play as any one of about fifty Star Trek "races"), the game begins just after "First Contact." As you play through the Enterprise, Original Series, Original Cast Movie, Next Generation/DS9/Voyager eras, you have the ability to research new technologies and the ship graphics change to reflect this. I just played one game as the gamma quadrant "Founders," who start off with a huge edge in technology, resources and three settled systems.

I don't want the entire review to be of the (amazing) mod for this game, but I really think that if you're on the bubble about this, that a free mod like this is available should blunt some of the criticism that the game gets for selling expensive DLC. And after all, the game itself (again, talking about the "vanilla game") is a good one. Even without mods/DLC, the single-player experience is easily a match for any other 4X space game available now (July, 2017).

I own a Vive because of this game.

I went to a friend's house to try out his Vive system, and was duly impressed by the initial "training room" and Valve's Lab games. This game, though, which my friend hadn't even played, was the one which "sold" me the system. I played the VR Office game, and (like everyone, I'm sure) set about testing the limits of the VR experience. I used the copier to copy the coffee cup, I played a quick game of Minesweeper on the computer, and generally ignored the "instructions." The greatest moment was when I threw my red stapler into another cubicle, and a "co-worker's" head popped up, annoyed. I then threw a virtual cup of coffee in his face. I don't know why, but that was an amazing experience to me, and I spent much of the rest of my time in the office scenario throwing things over the dividers to lure the co-workers into standing up, then assaulting the co-workers with hot coffee and office equipment. My friend suggested that it was because I'm "a [jerk] in virtual reality, too."

I had to go right out and buy a Vive.

I've since played the other job games and have assaulted customers in the convenience store, poured sugar in the gas tank of a customer in the garage simulator, and thrown food in the restaurant kitchen simulator. I have found the expeience intensely theraputic, and it is now my "go to" for demo-ing the Vive VR experience for others. I don't think that it's a "pack-in" game for the Vive any more, but I would still reccomend the purchase to new Vive-ers. Hey, you got Hover Junkers and the Blu, which I had to pay for seperately!

tl:dr - Buy it, but be aware that you'll have to do work to make it at all useful.

1) This is where I want to go when I die.

2) The "game," "out of the box," does next to nothing. Because this replicates an environment where you'd play classic, "retro," "copyrighted" arcade games, none of those games are included in this arcade. Amazingly, even the arcade emulators have to be downloaded (the libretro packages) and installed separately. "Game does not ship with ROMs" doesn't even begin to cover it: game does not ship with anything except the shell of the arcade. You can buy this, and then walk around in it.

3) To make this into a working arcade, you'll have to:
a. download and install the emulators
b. download and add your legally owned ROMs
c. you see the art on the machines? The side panel graphics, the marquees, and the button and stick arrangements? You'll have to configure those for your games, too. Remember that you'll have to do this for each game in your arcade. They provide an "arcade builder" tool which makes this less difficult than it would be if you had to custom-write your own xml, but

4) SOME DOCUMENTATION WOULD BE NICE.
As of 8/24/2016, the documentation that I can find is this: https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=736005082
for everything else, the answer appears to go to Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/NewRetroArcade
For example, I'm working on an Asteroids machine, now. I managed to find and install mame2014_libretro.dll, my legally-owned Asteroids ROM, front and side panel art from Reddit, but now I'm at "panel layout" - do I use LayoutPhallicOrder, LayoutRobertCop, or LayoutAlienBoom? (Actually, I just found the information that I was looking for in an image on the Steam guide page, but they certainly don't make this easy.) In avoiding copyright issues, Digital Cybercherries is sometimes a little too cute for its own good, although "Stonky Dong" is one of the funniest things that I've seen this week.

5. I haven't even talked about the other rooms, like the theater, where you can watch plug "videotapes" into a virtual VCR and watch videos. You can customize these with local or streaming media. There's also a kind-of creditable bowling alley, weird-floaty darts and dartboard, and a virtual bar (I think that this is new - you can't do anything in it).

In short, this is neat. I like it, and I'll like it a lot more when I get the thing running, I just wish tat it was at all better documented.

Why is there only one thumb up for reccomending this game? There should be another category for "if you don't like this game, I'm judging you because you don't know what fun is."

There might be a more fun game out there. I just can't imagine what that game would be. This game takes "over the top" as its starting point, like a Jim Carrey performance, and just goes up from there. You can see in the screen shots that it's a side-scroller, but it's a side-scroller with destructible environments, which means that you can play this game either in balls-out Sonic/Mario mode, or in many cases, you can literally tunnel around danger and play this hilarious game tactically. Each Bro except the first is recovered as a captive, like in the Metal Slug series, but then you play tag-team style as that character. The Bros are all immediately recognizable action movie stars, and all have their own play styles and advanages, except the McGyver Bro, who sucks. :)

There is very little about this game (and here, I'm just thinking about the abortion minigame) that is not awesome. If you are on the bubble about purchasing this title, just do it now. My only criticism, apart from the abortion minigame, is that it's too short. I finished the in just under 51 hours, according to Steam, spread across an embarrassingly few number of days.

In the 90s, I used to love Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space; KSP covers most of the same ground. Create and launch everything from basic sub-orbital to lunar and planetary landings, except here, you can pilot the ships instead of depending on a random number generator for success and failure. Thanks to xkcd.com for introducing this to me!

Oh, this is just awful. I suppose that if you thought that the Ace Combat series was too realistic, this might be the game for you. A 'health bar' and infinite missiles make this arcadey shooter a disgrace to the Jane's name. DO NOT RECCOMEND.