Tag - Screenshot Saturday

Screenshot Saturday: Expansive Worlds

METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN_20150912162304

Videogames are confusing, beautiful, complicated messes, and the best way to convey that is through screenshots, whether they are beautiful, informative, or goofy. Each Saturday we bring you one screenshot each from a game we played. It’s Screenshot Saturday.

Dave: I’ve easily played – really played, not idled or AFKed – a solid 20 hours of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain since last weekend. And I’m at 7% completion. I’ve barely made my way through any main story missions, as the open world, the combat, the reconnaissance, and the base building involved in the game are so satisfying. As a newcomer to the Metal Gear franchise who, nonetheless, heard a lot about the games in the past – I’m shocked. I thought Metal Gear was all cutscenes and snakes?

Thomas: The past few weeks have been busy. If I had the time, I’d be plowing through Shadowrun: Hong Kong and Pillars of Eternity right now. I don’t. What I do have time for is turn-based play-by-email games, and Solium Infernum is one of the best around. My fellow demons and I are vying for the throne of Hell, and I’ve built my avatar around Praetor combat. A Praetor a sort of Satanic lieutenant-cum-prize-fighter, and disputes between Hell’s aristocracy can be settled by their duels. As you can see, Praetor combat is a glorified rock, paper scissors. Also, I am terrible at it. My Haagenti was one the best duelist Praetors in the game, with a full 14 hitpoints, and my rival’s Decarabia nibbled him to death. This is when the game started to turn, and I knew I’d have to take my plotting in a different direction. Satan’s abandoned throne will not be secured in an honorable duel.

James: I’ve been spending most of my time in mad Max the past few weeks. It’s a hard game to recommend, honestly – it has split ambitions and never really seems to pick a design to stick with – but it has a satisfying vehicular combat system and some of the best-designed environments I’ve ever seen in an open world game. Also, you can pause the game at any time and take free camera photos of cars exploding while you punch people, so that’s pretty great too.

Screenshot Saturday: Blood and Glory

Feature

Dave: I’ve been falling down the World of Warcraft rabbit hole again this past week. It started with a trip down memory lane not too long ago; then, I moved on and experienced some vanilla WoW thanks to a couple of private servers, which I’ll talk more about later. Eventually, though, I found myself back with my own account once more, looking at UI options and gear options and so on. Here’s the UI I ended up with (at least for now – it still needs some tweaks). It’s called RealUI and is super minimalistic – this is with the UI shown, out of combat. Once in combat, action bars appear, but when you’re not busy killing stuff you can enjoy as much of WoW as your eyes can take in. Pretty sweet!

Thomas: Shadowrun: Hong Kong came out! I actually pre-ordered it, which is an insane thing to do, but I don’t regret it in this case. (Other pre-orders I have not regretted: X-Wing Alliance. End of list.) So far it seems very similar to Dragonfall in both mechanics and story. I love the gunplay and the XCOM-style cover system. The storyline is serviceable enough so far. And cyberpunk Hong Kong is pretty cool. This screenshot doesn’t have any action in it – I just really adore the environment art. Look at those lanterns, the lighting, the flowers, the little details! It’s lovely.

James: Planetary Annihilation’s expansion pack, Titans, released this week, and it was just the thing necessary to get me back into blowing apart planets and looking at colorful little bots. It’s not even the titans that drew me back, although they are definitely nice; it’s the changes and optimizations to the core game that pulled me in. From better performance to a smoother interface to terrain changes that allow for elevation differences, Titans brings many quality of life features that make Planetary Annihilation much more of a joy to play. All we need now are multiplayer Galactic War instances and flat map projections, and we’ll finally have the Total Annihilation successor we really deserved.

Screenshot Saturday: Pikes and Pillocks

Feature

James: Besiege is one of my favorite games to act like a complete dunce in. You are tasked with building complicated machines out of medieval parts, and then taking those machines out to annihilate camps of enemies, castles and anything that gets in your way. It’s great fun because you end up, more often than not, ripping your machine apart in some miscalculated use of springs. Or an enemy soldier gets jammed in your wheel and rips it out of its housing. Or the bomb you tried to throw didn’t go very far and exploded in your face. It’s a game of delightful chaos and destruction, even when you’re floundering, and that’s something special. Oh, and it has workshop support, and the creations which range from “totally serious medieval catapults” to “Metal Gear RAY”.

Dave: I already have over a thousand hours in Crusader Kings 2, the majority of which went towards unmodded CK2. However, thanks to Thomas, I may have found the only way I’ll ever play Crusader Kings 2 again: the ‘After the End’ mod. I played it ages ago, back when it only consisted of the eastern seaboard, and found it an interesting but not very compelling mod. Now, though, the whole North American continent is up for grabs – and I, the King of Socal, shall be the master of it all. Or at least Barstow. The fidelity to current day America (the existence of La Mesa, El Cajon, Camp Pendleton, and more locations from my local area) and the easter eggs laced throughout (Humphrey Bogart is current Lord Mayor of Los Angeles) compel me to play on a level that Europeans must feel towards the base game. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there is also a significant element of comedy.

Thomas: I’ve been putting some time into Pike and Shot Campaigns, and I’m pretty pleased with it. The initial Pike and Shot release was fine enough – I really loved the setting and the well-represented weirdness of early gunpowder warfare, but the battles just weren’t engaging enough on their own. The addition of a Total War-style strategic layer has really turned my opinion around. Here, my Parliamentary army engages a Royalist force in the English Midlands. My musketeers and pikemen are doing pretty well – we’ve successfully seized the little hamlet in the center of the battlefield and Fragmented and Disrupted two Royalist foot units. Less promising: off to the right, my horse are getting mauled by Royalist Cavaliers. It’s messy, obtuse, and fun, and now it has consequences. If I lose this battle, Charles could march on London…

Screenshot Saturday: Flights of Fancy

Feature

Thomas: As I wrote yesterday, I’ve been dipping my toes into the War Thunder pond. I’m still figuring things out. Biplanes can pick up quite a bit of speed in a swooping dive, you know! I was pretty proud of myself for the maneuver, coming down right on this Ki-10’s ass, before I realized I didn’t have any brakes to pump. About a millisecond after this screenshot, the two of us were tumbling towards the ground in burning chunks. War Thunder Is Good.

James: Despite all of my frustrations with it (which I hope Horizons will help with), the exploration profession in Elite: Dangerous is still my favorite. Once you get good at it, you can skip across the galaxy extremely quickly, picking up some great screenshots while making a buck on the side. It may not be the best-paying way to play Elite: Dangerous, but it’s certainly the prettiest. I recently found that you can disconnect your camera from the ship as well, which led to screenshots like this one.

Twisted Metal anyone?

Dave: I now officially own every car there is in Rocket League. Turns out that if you win a match with each of the standard unlockable cars, you get a bonus vehicle: Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal series. I’m not sure if this is a nod specifically to Rocket League’s genesis (which you can read about in this great Kotaku article) or what – but it looks pretty sweet. Unfortunately, it lacks full customization options (for somewhat understandable reasons) and I ended up not using it a bunch: but still pretty cool. Now all I need is to drive 18 million miles or whatever it is to get the Platinum for Rocket League!

Screenshot Saturday: Wide Open Spaces

Feature

Dave: A few weeks ago, my wife decided to restart her World of Warcraft subscription. We have both played WoW since 2005 (off and on) and both have fond memories, particularly of vanilla WoW and The Burning Crusade. Our constant return to (and subsequent departure from) the game speaks volumes of its nostalgic power. This time, I didn’t resubscribe along with my wife – instead I decided to hop on her account and make a character to run through Elwynn Forest and Westfall. It may be 10 years since we started playing, and the visuals are a bit different now, but those old spaces still hold a certain comfort.

Thomas: My current addiction is Rule The Waves. It’s June 1919; France and Austria-Hungary are at war, with French troops on the defensive in Tunisia as a naval war rages in the Mediterranean. Just west of Corfu, the French battlecruiser Duquesne spots and engages the Austro-Hungarian Taurus-class battlecruiser Arethusa. Duquesne takes a 12 inch shell to the engine room early in the battle, slowing her, and the destruction of her aft turret makes attempting to escape futile. She turns and fights, and the war hangs in the balance.

All this fantastic narrative and technical complexity springing forth from a game that looks like it was designed 20 years ago. I love it.

James: Far Cry 4 has a lot of problems. The overall structure of the game is unsatisfying, the sidequests are repetitive, and the balance is thrown out the window the moment you get a silenced sniper rifle. Despite it all, though, there is one thing Far Cry 4 does extremely well: beautiful wide-open landscapes. The nation of Kyrat is extraordinarily beautiful, with lush vegetation, towering mountains, and clear blue lakes. It may be difficult to recommend Far Cry 4 on the strength of its mechanics, but it’s (almost) worth playing for the vistas alone.