LMN8R
1564
It kind of reminds me of when I played Sim Theme Park all the time, which I guess was also called Theme Park World in other parts of the world:
I still have some screenshots I took over two decades ago, which I thought were amazing at the time. But I guess riding your own theme park creations makes more sense than going through a Sim City-style city?
Ultrawings 2 update
I wrote some feedback to him in the Discord
“My feedback on the new upgrades: you should have made upgrades to be ‘+40% more fuel/ammo’. That way the player would feel less as if he was buying a cheat. Functionally would be the same (40% is more than enough to alleviate the limits on some particular missions) and that way it would feel as a normal plane upgrade. Right now it feels like a harsh overcorrection, you go from a design where you have to go careful with the fuel or ammo in some missions, to whatever dude! unlimited ammo/fuel! And because it’s an upgrade and not some accessibility option, it isn’t conveyed to new players than it’s something optional, that the missions CAN be done without the upgrades. Players are trained to buy upgrades in games whenever they can.
Also they should be toggleable but I guess that has less priority.”
spiffy
1566
By permanent, do they mean unlimited, or just that it carries over between missions? The latter would basically be what you’re describing.
Wooooo, multiplayer! Combat of course would be fun, but I would absolutely love air racing multi, as long as they could make it work where collisions weren’t too much of a problem (ie, I think it would either have to be no collisions, or else with collisions but with rally-style staggered starts).
Unlimited, as in infinite fuel or infinite ammo.
Permanent upgrade, as it can’t be sold or turned off, it’s forever installed in the plane.
I don’t like it, because the only parts where I want some help towards fuel/ammo is the Combat Ops missions. But once you buy it, it also applies to the normal jobs, screwing up the delicate balance of missions where the challenge comes from handling the fuel, for example.
spiffy
1568
I definately agree with that one. The original game had some beautiful glider missions where you really had to gracefully plan your runs on the targets to coast back in time. So far the Comet hasn’t felt as tight with fuel, and like you say the only missions I’m getting frustrated by lack of fuel are the combat missions, where it’s really annoying to spend five minutes shooting 7 planes down and then run out of gas 20 seconds from the strip. The mustang does not glide well.
The thing, the game was balanced with the limited amounts of fuel and ammo. He implemented this two months after the initial release because people complained how hard it made some specific missions, in special Ops missions where you literally could spend all your ammo before all enemies were destroyed, making it fail in a way that felt cheap. So it’s like an easy mode that once activated, can’t be turned off (for that plane, at least).
Sounds like they should have added an “easy mode” option with this option available, and a “hard mode” with it inaccessible. I haven’t bought the game yet (too busy with Elden Ring) but I was going to, and this sounds like it trivialises it.
I just noticed FB changed how to do referrals. I have a simple link now
spiffy
1572
Looks like Warplanes Pacific has been released on Applab. What’s the deal here, if I buy it now, if/when it gets to the main store, do you have to buy it again or does the title simply carry over?
It carries over. It will be really the same title, it’s just that the AppLab games are ‘tagged’ to not appear on the official store when you browse it.
Even more, given they already published the first game on the official store, I doubt they will have issues doing it again, the hard part is to do it the first time. If they are publishing in AppLab surely is because they truly want to do ‘Early Access’ development.
DLC incoming to Ultrawings 2. Plane races in this game makes all the sense in the world.
I’m finishing up the game, I’m at 71%.
Alas, the last update seems to have broken a pair of missions, with the Haws in the stunt courses, they ask me to return and land into the airport, and I think the texture with the green/yellow/red areas is not loading, because I complete the job and land and it fails always.
spiffy
1575
Maybe, or else Oculus has to take time to vet the app, and they need funds sooner than later. In any case, I picked up Warplanes Pacific. It’s all right, very much the same game as WW1 but with faster planes, basically. It’s cool to take off and land from a carrier. That said, maybe it’s because of the excellent flight model of Ultrawings, but I’m really not feeling too much of an attempt at modelling stalls or loss of lift. You’re cruising along on the carrier approach, almost feeling like there’s no lower speed limit at all, and then your plane suddenly falls out of the sky, without any preemptive mushiness or wobbles that I’ve associated with risking too slow a speed in other sims. I’m also having trouble spotting planes, given that the distances are greater, it’s the first time I’m feeling the lower res of the Quest vs a hires monitor is impacting gameplay. I mean, it’s not a problem as I’m playing on medium, and they draw reticles around targets, but understanding the distance is trickier.
Long story short, though, it’s fun to shoot down planes in VR, as always, and that stays true for Pacific. But if I had to pick, Ultrawings 2 is head and shoulders better value, better feeling of flight, better mission design and better campaign. But hey for £10, pro que ne los dos?
Houngan
1577
You know, that just kind of pisses me off, because two devs can make something that looks that good, and Valve can’t be bothered? I would pay roughly $5 an hour of Alyx gameplay for the next five years.
Green Hell hit Quest, anyone going to check it out? It was a pretty popular survival game on Steam. I believe there’s also a PCVR version coming in a few weeks.
I had decided I was done with Ultrawings 2 already. I has finished the job and I was stuck at an Ops mission, possibly because a bug made enemy planes attack me instead of attacking a bomber). But I saw an update, I tried again, and it seems the dev fixed the bug, so now I can continue with the Ops. Hell, I actually got gold medal.
He also changed opinions on the permanent upgrades, and it seems at least the ammo ones are locked for after finishing all the Ops (and the fuel ones after unlocking all the airports?). I’ve read there were people buying the upgrades too early and getting stuck in the game because they didn’t have money to unlock the next airport. I already warned him in Discord of all the issues his system had, glad he kinda admitted it now.
The current Ops where I am is one with the Mustang dogfighting, and well, I lost my first attempt because I had spent all my ammo, while I was fighting the final wave of 4 planes (more exactly, only the last one remained, and it was damaged already). It’s SO frustrating to have a game over while you are still alive and kicking, and only one enemy remaining, because the game doesn’t give you enough ammo. And it isn’t like I was firing blindly to the sky, they can be stingy with the ammo.
No idea but it got a positive review on uploadvr where thy noted there are differences, not only in graphics but in the gameplay.
Here it’s a graphics comparison
It’s also the first Quest title to use the AppSW technology.
In any case, it seems the audience was thirsty for more ‘hardcore’ games like this. While the more casual looking games like Cosmonous High or Tentacular got a handful of ratings on the first day of release, Green Hell got a magnitude more, 239.
I tried two games this weekend
Cosmonious High is exactly what the tin can said/the trailer showed: The Job/Vacation Simulator guys doing another game of the same type, but this time because they noticed their games were popular with kids, they explicitly made more kiddie. Brighter colors, character design taken from modern morning cartoon shows, writing to accompany this tone (man, there are some cringey parts), and minigames and powers a bit more tailored to fool around, that they kids like to. It’s hard to judge because clearly I’m not in the target market sector, but I will say they haven’t made deeper minigames nor there is story worth mentioning, nor it seems a longer game. Alien high school premise could have been better used, even if truly is more like ‘kid friendly alien high school’.
Jetbounce takes the short Daedalus (a 3d platformer/puzzle zen game where you calmly jump and glide around with modern art vibes), and tries to make a full game, with much bigger levels with exploration (think Super Mario 64) and even with permanent upgrades of your movement abilities. The inspiration in Daedalus is too obvious (in both you have a doodad in your hand that allows you to jump in little arcs you can guide, and glide, and the jump recharges when you touch the ground, that’s specific as heck) but unlike in Daedalus, you bounce way too much here. The idea behind the game seems to change the zen-like experience for a more hardcore 3d platformer. Alas, it makes a few important missteps. Gravity is ‘normal’ unlike the low gravity in Daedalus, and with the levels being much bigger, it’s like you are role-playing being a rubber ball in this game, believes me it gets tiring. Not only that, but who knows why, the dev decided the gliding should be much more limited here, you can’t deploy your wings and fly after the first second of free fall. In practical terms this means you can’t use gliding more normal ‘A to B’ movement, which ties into what I said before of way too much bounding, gliding seems to be to recover if you slip and fall, so you only have to repeat say, the last 4 jumps instead of the last 40.
Finally, the game just goes too much into being hardcore, in an unnecessary manner. Guess what happened when I slipped and used the glide too late, falling in the end to the bottom. Did I respawn on the last platform I touched? At the start of the section that forms together a challenge? Nope. It literally spawned me… outside of the current level, back in the hub. So you gotta repeat again. Yeah, no.
Man, what a disappointment has been Virtual Virtual Reality 2.
It starts great, with you being a human who has been recently uploaded to a digital metaverse where AIs are low key racists against mere humans, and you have a surprise multi blind date with… things that could talk. It’s the type of crazy science fiction tale I expected of them.
Then the game goes awry. First, it has some action/platform elements, which is already weird and divisive to the fans as the first game was a pure adventure game.
Second, it is VERY clunky with these new elements. They give you a big robot, and you pilot the robot from inside moving awkwardly pulleys and levers… Third, it’s made even more worse because their awkward position. And with said clunkiness you have to do first person platforming (which already can be awkward in normal games!). I was like ‘oh, they are doing a comedic bit, they are giving you this super clunky robot that crashes everywhere, surely in a pair of short scenes you will get out’. Oh man I was wrong, most of the game is with the stupid robot.
Fourth: Just imagine this, they don’t lock your view to the view of the robot. So there are times where you by mistake press one of the joysticks and you move your character inside the robot (which is more like a small house, you can visit areas), so you are trying to jump some wooden parts floating in the void, and suddenly you move forward so you can’t reach the controls that are suddenly out of reach, or you look right by mistake and the same happens. And the game has a way to put your ‘in the skin’ of the robot to move directly the arms instead of the ‘arms controllers’ but somehow you can’t move in that view. Maddening.
Apart from that, in the area I am the thing is being pretty aimless, it’s lacking a clear forward path in the story.
I wonder how they can go from one game to the other. I can only think they didn’t ‘plan’ VRR, it was instead the result of a very experimental approach to design, so maybe they thought of repeating the same approach because it worked the first time… ?
