| Title | Qt3 Games Podcast: Monster Hunter: Rise, Evil Genius 2 |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games podcasts |
| When | March 31, 2021 |
Jason McMaster kills things to make pants out of them and Tom Chick loses interest in world domination..
Sorry, everybody! Due to a scheduling mishap, I was unable to talk about OOTP 22, and why a gamer with very little interest in real baseball would play such a game for the past decade.
Can’t disagree too much with the comments about EG2, despite personally enjoying the game so far. I can easily imagine that without nostalgia for and knowledge of the original, it would be both less engaging and somewhat confusing. It doesn’t do an awful lot to update the original for modern gaming sensibilities, beyond graphics and UI, and apparently tweaking the endgame, though I don’t know yet if that’s a change for the better. But that’s fine for me, as I miss the old Bullfrog-style games so much. This last couple of years have been great on that front, Starbase Startopia aside I suppose.
I do wonder if some of the complaints about eg not caring about money, would be addressed by playing on a harder difficulty, but it sounds like you guys wouldn’t really enjoy it anyway.
I feel that maybe I was more negative than I really feel about it. It’s just not compelling to me and I wish it was. I’ll likely play more, just kind of underwhelmed.
The circumstances were bad too: Jason was playing it while we could see his palicoes were all asking him to launch MHR in the side window.
Hope Nick will talk about OOTP next time. Haven’t had time to do more than look at the '22 version, but it’s a fascinating game.
I got to listen to it, to expand a bit about being invincible when lying on the ground in Monster Hunter, it’s not entirely true. While monsters can’t pound on you if you’re voluntarily playing dead (thankfully, or you wouldn’t stand a chance against many of them), if you’re knocked out, paralysed and put to sleep, the monster will get a free hit on you — and if you are maimed, losing blood or poisoned while playing dead, you might end up being really dead too.
Monster Hunter is a game of many nuances, oh yes.
Yeah, the invincibility frames end after a time. And they dont work on damage effects
The thing with the ‘world map’ screen in EG2 seems a common complaint, I have read the same complaints about how is a bother having to go and manage the heat, do missions, etc.
I think it’s the fundamental flaw of the game. When you were playing management games like Theme Park or Theme Hospital, you were focused on the park, or on the hospital. The base building and management IS the game. You get the primary resource (money) by what happens in that base. Not on a second, more abstract, UI screen.
On the question of appropriate dog names that reminds me of the Donald Barthelme story ‘Chablis’. I highly recommend Etgar Keret’s reading of the story on the New Yorker podcast - he starts at the 5:30 mark.
I didn’t like Evil Genius 2 either, so within a month I’ve gotten the Evil Genius and Startopia sequels that I always wanted, and they both let me down. Thanks 2020!
@tomchick have you played Oxygen Not Included? It literally looks like an ant farm, but it’s got the work-distribution thing and the personality quirks from Rimworld, and it’s a lot more challenging, and you do have a goal.
I think that goal is building a spaceship to fly off somewhere, but I don’t know because I never survived long enough to start thinking about it.
Keeping people sane and alive is pretty hard, so if you’re looking for something a bit more intense and goal oriented than growing turnips and enjoying procedurally generated melodrama, it could be just the ticket.
I think my brain popped when I realized it wasn’t just modeling fluid dynamics, but gas dynamics. Which are more or less the same thing, I suppose. But I did have a newfound appreciation for the depth of what it was doing before I moved on to something else.
But I think it’s another example of the “hey, just survive for a long time and there will be endgame goals along eventually” gameplay that I can’t get into. I tend to prefer management that has a more direct and interactable system like Prison Architect’s prison or Academia’s school days. I want to actually manage something instead of just persevering one more day.
-Tom
Haha, yup, there’s a whole lot of dirty air and dirty water management in that game. I ended up getting a little discouraged by just how difficult it was to keep everyone safe and stable around my third playthrough, but I enjoyed messing with it.
I see what you mean, you wanna run a business!
According to the review over at rockpapershotgun, sandbox mode basically gives you unlimited cash. So of course you don’t care about the agents costing you money, you’re apparently just playing freeplay-basebuilding-mode.
I knew those two doofus were playing WRONG!