Lover of Heavy Metal, Pro Wrestling, Sports, and Nerd Stuff.

  • 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle


  • This is key. A decade ago I did all three days at the New England Metal and Hardcore festival. Bodies fell from the sky on me. I got punched in the back of the head. I was almost knocked out on multiple occasions. I lost my glasses and was blind for most of the trip. What hurt the most was my feet. The pain was only alleviated when I was running around in the pit and walking back to my motel. I was in my early 20s then. I can’t imagine doing that now.


  • I’m on a Ryzen 7700x with 32gb or ram and a rx5700xt GPU. I average about 25fps on low to medium settings at 1440p. It’s not the best, but it’s playable.

    Performance issues aside, it’s a much better city management game than CS1. The progression system is fantastic. There’s a lot to learn when growing your city. The wonderful part is you can really go at your own pace. I got a 15k pop city and barely touched some of the mid game tech yet. It’s not forcing me to upgrade like my city will come to a halt. It really is the best combination of management and city building we’ve had since SimCity4.

    That being said there are some sore spots. Maps with bumpy terrain are a pain in the ass. It feels like I’ve done more terraforming in 10 hours of CS2 than 500 I clocked in CS1. That’s how ridiculous the terrain system can be. I have no clue what they were thinking making the terrain so janky in this game. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not game breaking. It’s more of an inconvenience. Like I have to spend meaningful time terraforming large chunks of the map to get good land. Even after that it still comes out janky. To my understanding it’s all about the map. Like maps added later in development were flatter and I picked one of the rough early maps. It’s still a jank system.The way buildings lay on terrain abd morphs the land is bad and needs to be looked at.

    As good as the road tools are, they’re finicky. It’s probably because I don’t have the muscle memory for it yet, but I spend a lot of time micro moving roads into place to get the right connection. The node based system is great, but takes some getting used to.

    Balance seems off to me. My industry demand is always on max. I’ll build out an area and it goes away just to pop right back to max once the new buildings are running. Then I look at the numbers and they don’t make sense. 10 workers for a factory is way to little. I end up having whole neighborhoods of nothing but factories. It’s annoying. When in reality there might be a few factories here and there, they each employ thousands of people and take up little space. Where as this game has you building full factory cities because each building employs no more than 20 people. It’s another thing that needs to be adjusted imo.

    Those are the only things I have to complain about the game so far. During my first extended playthrough I thought it really felt like SimCity4. I was blasting the SC4 soundtrack when playing it, but the progression system felt familiar. It adds so much to the game. It gives you a sense of accomplishment when you see your work means something. And there’s a lot of levels a city can reach. There’s always gonna be something to work towards. Performance wise, it could be better. Hopefully it gets sorted out in the coming months.




  • The first three Metal Gear Solid games have fascinating stories. They’re not the most logically sound stories and they have a lot of weird elements that make them hard to follow. At the micro scale they’re not the most comprehensive. On the macro scale they’re not hard to get into at all. When the story hooks you it really hooks you.

    I was a child when I completed the first two MHS games. I never finished MGS3 because the disk got smashed to pieces. I do remember liking it a lot though. MGS2 is my favorite of the bunch. It was a good mix of old characters and new that carried the story in a satisfying way.

    The absolute best story in video games(IMO) is the Mass Effect trilogy. For the longest time those games set the bar for video game story telling to me. Every character was so easy to get invested in. I cared for all of them and deciding who completed the journey or not was a series of deeply personal tough choices that carried across three games. Did the ending suck? Absolutely. Do not let that last 0.1% mar what is easily %99.9 one of the best space scifi stories in any medium.