I had a brilliant idea to sign up for the local library (that was 20 minutes away by foot no less) and to get an A2-sized 3 cm thick atlas just to play this stupid game! I distinctly remember walking back, it was in the evening, already dark, clear skies, freshly snowed, -25C, the snow was making that squeaky sound and I was vividly imaging all the gold I will now be hoarding with a shovel thanks to this nice little trick... lol. Good times, not a care in the world.
If people can use one Azeron Cyborg with one hand (or two with two hands) as a way against carpal tunnel syndrome then 80% and 60% keyboards are likely just a hack to keep backwards compatibility whereas the better long term solution is likely a proper alternative (with e.g. chording).
That said, I'm happy with my 80% (not with the 60% due to it missing arrow keys which I sometimes use, for example with a shell). But vertical mouse with a lot of buttons are rare (Azeron Cyro is an exception), so for now I'm using a Logitech Vertical MX.
I'm rocking an MX Mechanical Mini and I'm overall quite satisfied with it, though it's frustrating that the single-touch switching between multiple paired receivers doesn't take the MX-series mouse with it; this seems like really obvious functionality to have left on the table. At the same time, it doesn't seem like any of the other premium/gaming peripheral makers have tried to integrate anything like this. It's just 1:1 peripheral to receiver dongle, and "get a KVM" if you have more than one device to control.
Port Royale (and many other games) kind of take the core aspects of Pirates (open world, combat, trade, pinnace to ship of the line, retirement, piracy/privateering, and so on) and then try to expand on it allowing one to operate multiple fleets, developing cities, and many other such things - with no particularly annoying aspect. And they're enjoyable, but somehow don't come anywhere near Pirates, and I can't think of any particular reason why not.
Actually come to think of it, most of every great game I can think of also had some really really terrible aspects. For a more popular example, the combat in Skyrim is some of the worst in any RPG. But perhaps these failings make the rest of the game shine that much more.
The combat in Skyrim is much better than Oblivion though, and light years ahead of Morrowind
Honestly? I kind of prefer it to something like Witcher 3, too. It's much more fast paced and dynamic because you are locked into first person and you have to be aware of your surroundings and such. Whereas Witcher 3, once you learn how to beat a particular enemy you can pretty much just do the same every time without fail, for the next 80-100 hours
What's the Civ VII dev team doing these days?
Writing the last 80% of Civ VII I should think. I've never played such an unfinished version of Civ at launch.
I get that there's probably not a market for that game yearly but I'd play an iteration on Black Flag every few years
I dont recall seeing anyone happy about this, outside white knights on reddit.
It seems like there are a lot of niche game concepts and genres that are falling to the wayside as the major devs and publishers are more interested in dumbing things down for a larger, more casual (or in some cases more competitive audience). Hell Civ7 is sitting at mostly negative recent reviews after pulling that shit.
Assassin's Creed Black Flag is definitely not an arcade shooter though
The antipiracy measure in Civilization was possibly the weakest ever devised.
After playing the game for a while (so the player gets a demo), it will bring up a screen that displays the image of a technology and asks you to choose the prerequisites to that technology. You answer by selecting one of four multiple-choice options listing technology names.
So right off the bat you have a 25% chance of passing the check.
The intent is that you consult the manual, which lists the prerequisites for every technology and also displays the images. But you don't have to do that. You can consult the in-game Civilopedia, which does the same thing. (You can't do that while you're being asked to pass the check, but nothing stops you from doing it in advance.) Or, of course, you're likely to have the answer memorized, because this is a fundamental part of the way the game works.
[1] https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a...
For LOOM, which was just a chart of arbitrary symbols, we had a xeroxed copy of the chart.
Also it left me with still surprisingly good knowledge of the geography of the Karibik ;-). Everyone who played this knows where e.g. St. Nevis is.
What the? BASIC!!! Astonishing that you could develop and publish a successful C64 game using BASIC.
> It is mainly the text screens that are programmed in BASIC. The battles are all in machine code, including the sword battles, the ship sailing and the ship battles, the drawing of the terrain and the men walking on the land; basically anything that involved reading the joystick input and displaying sprites is all programmed in machine code and are called by SYS routines from BASIC. I spend many hours exploring the code and hacking the game by changing variables and memory locations.
Me! I love the original civ.
It's easier when you know the rules of the game.
Once you start to really succeed at the game it starts to push you up the difficulty ladder with each iteration. Some things are only available on higher difficulties, but the timing in the minigames becomes inhumanly difficult to keep up with.
I'm a long time gamer and my reflexes are pretty good, but I could never keep up with the higher difficulties. It was missing a difficulty sweet spot for me, where the difficulty I was on was too easy, and the difficulty above was near impossible.
It just wasn't very fun and it was too difficult to really engage with past that point
But.... i never worked out the intent of the sun height measurer. :/
i had no idea they did a re-release of it.. might have to have a look at that..