LAST EDITED ON Dec-31-16 AT 11:18 PM (EST)
 
So over on Steam, there are approximately 152 million games with the same basic premise: you're stranded on an alien planet with only your wits and some curiously-high-tech camping gear, with which you must a) survive and b) craft stuff. All of them seem to be in more-or-less-permanent early access. Generally they aren't very good, or at least very polished.

Subnautica is... well, one of those, although it adds an interesting twist in that the alien planet you're stranded on appears to be an ocean world. (Or maybe you just happened to come down in the middle of an ocean. It's hard to say.) So instead of roaming around the landscape on foot, plundering a variety of suspiciously compact biomes for their suspiciously specific resources, you're swimming around in an aquatic environment... plundering a variety of suspiciously compact biomes for their suspiciously specific resources.

I riff, but I rather like this game. It's better-realized than a lot of its land-based counterparts (I'm looking at you, StarsOne), the undersea theme gives it more distinction than my remarks above may suggest, and it's really pretty, particularly once you have a personal submersible* and can cruise to adjoining biomes without having to walk swim. It also seems still to be under active development, and not lost in the perpetual twilight of abandoned early access. Which is nice. And it's only 10 bucks, so hey.

Here are a few hours of Sips from the Yogscast fooling around with a couple of the earlier builds. (Caution: Sips is not very good at video games and has the attention span of a caffeinated hamster. It's part of his charm, but also very frustrating at times. :)

--G.
* © 2016 Sips
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Sips is a treasure and being bad at games is part of that..

I've heard him say on other vids that he's not as actually bad as he seems in videos as being funny while also concentrating on the game is difficult, though he will never be good at games either. He could be bad at games and funny or mediocre at games and not funny.

RIP in peace Little Jesus.

------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-02-17 AT 07:30 PM (EST)
 
>Sips is a treasure and being bad at games is part of that.

Oh, no argument. I'm just warning people who might take this stuff more seriously than I do. :)

(I'm sad that he and Kim are Mostly Done With YouTube, mainly for the entirely selfish reason that I deeply dislike the user experience on Twitch, but I can't blame them given the colossal fuckovers Google seems to have performed on YouTube's backend and high-volume YouTubers generally over the past year or so. I've seen some people chalk YT up as another casualty of 2016, which is probably overstating the point somewhat, but I can see where the sentiment comes from.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I've heard him say on other vids that he's not as actually bad as he
>seems in videos as being funny while also concentrating on the game is
>difficult,

That's a general problem with playing while doing commentary. I doubt Scott Manley makes anywhere near as many staging errors when he is just playing KSP for himself and not doing a video series.

("Check Yo' Staging" has become the unofficial motto of his current series.)

>("Check Yo' Staging" has become the unofficial motto of his current
>series.)

In much the same way that the repeated crashes in MoonQuest caused the motto on the patch for JAFFA (Yogscast's Minecraft-series space agency) to be, "Hold Space to Slow Down".

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

William Strife just finished up his playthrough/tutorial of Subnautica and has a very interesting ending note.

He said that he couldn't recommend buying it at this time, even on sale, and that while "I love the game. I hate the software." He said that while the game itself was good, if still a little empty and incomplete, the software it ran on was just barely functional, with huge issues that made the game running on that software next to unplayable.

>He said that while the game itself was good, if still a little empty
>and incomplete, the software it ran on was just barely functional,
>with huge issues that made the game running on that software next to
>unplayable.

Huh. I haven't had any trouble with it. The graphics engine isn't hugely well-optimized, but it no longer has the hilarious draw distance you can see in the early Sips videos. Everything else seems to be fine... shrug.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

My understanding that the newer areas of the game are far beyond buggy, even in the "stable" patch. The youtuber Rik complained about it a bit when exploring the last "complete" area of the latest build, saying that he had to spend over an hour trying to go into the area and not immediately crash out.

This game is still coming along; another large update just dropped a few days ago, and while I'm not far enough into it to comment on any new areas that might've been added, I noticed that the art assets are looking a lot more polished now than when I first started playing. They're also getting more of the story in place, to the extent that the game has a discernible story now (and it's shaping up to be a pretty good one for this sort of game).

Also, it's on sale for $9.99 on Steam right now. (That's the price I originally paid for it, but it seems to have gone up to $19.99 normally as it approaches completion—which I understand is a fairly typical early-access thing, for the games that don't just languish in alphaland forever.)

YMMV, of course, but I'm still having a good time.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Just as a note here, it's hit the 1.0 release and is, I believe, no longer Early Access and is, in fact, completable! So if you want to get back in, or check it out for yourselves, get on over to Steam! It's probably no longer the early access ten dollars though.

The Mighty Jingles has started showing a playthrough (as usual, don't expect to watch this and see brilliant optimal play) and it does look good, almost enough to tempt me to play and it's really not my sort of game.

I watched it on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IXI2e8Ywvk&list=PLrIoJm0QOWUpL6gHW7yqv_w4V3OF1ybJS

He started before the 1.0 release by two months and change, but MOST things were in when he started.

>The Mighty Jingles has started showing a playthrough (as usual, don't
>expect to watch this and see brilliant optimal play)

... although you will see more generally competent play than you'll find on, for instance, Sips's Twitch channel over the last few days. :)

Mind you, he isn't helped by the fact that the voice of the computer in Subnautica seems to have been recorded using the same text-to-speech voice that he has reading his Twitch donations, which has led some of his viewers to donate specifically to have her give him spurious in-game warnings. As is often the case with user interactions on Twitch, that was funny the first time someone did it...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'd watch Sips' stream more if his viewers weren't constantly abusing his donation announcement. It's got better, it aint as bad as back in the Stardew Valley days, but it's still horrendous. It's a shame he has to put up with it as that's where the $$$ is since Youtube shit all over their content creators ability to monetize, otherwise I'd watch more and probably subscribe.

------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

>I'd watch Sips' stream more if his viewers weren't constantly abusing
>his donation announcement. It's got better, it aint as bad as back in
>the Stardew Valley days, but it's still horrendous. It's a shame he
>has to put up with it as that's where the $$$ is since Youtube shit
>all over their content creators ability to monetize, otherwise I'd
>watch more and probably subscribe.

One of the things I like about watching Capt. Shack's and W4stedspace's streams is that the Armco crowd tends to use the superchat for either game advice, comments which are actually funny or honest "love the stream, have coffee/beer/dinner/etc. on me," messages.

>I'd watch Sips' stream more if his viewers weren't constantly abusing
>his donation announcement. It's got better, it aint as bad as back in
>the Stardew Valley days, but it's still horrendous.

Yeah, unfortunately, his community is... well, it's not toxic, it's not the blistered wasteland that is YouTube comments, but it does tend to be really annoying. I think a lot of them are probably really young. (Also, he encourages them.)

Mind you, he's made an effort to reduce the amount by which he makes the subs-and-donations thing worse. He used to have the most horrendous sound effects set to go off before the text-to-speech part, so that even the users who didn't post their doctoral dissertations along with their donations caused the casual viewer (i.e., me) to want to start ripping people's ears off. (Check out the vods of his Farming Simulator streams from a year or two ago. O God.)

I find the Twitch user experience bemusing because of these features—it's deeply weird for me to live in a world where you're supposed to interrupt people while they're performing and you have to touch the screen—but I admit I do like the interactivity when it's managed well. On the Lewis & Ben Save the World streams, for instance, they have (reasonably discreet) donation and sub notification graphics, but no loud sounds or TTS, and they pause to read through and acknowledge their messages at strategic points in the gameplay rather than be constantly interrupted in real time. I think that's a nice balance. It probably wouldn't work with every game, though. Old-school X-COM has convenient places to pause for that kind of thing, particularly with two players; one of them can read out the donations while the other one plays the Spreadsheet Simulator 1994 portin of the game. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>The Mighty Jingles has started showing a playthrough (as usual, don't
>expect to watch this and see brilliant optimal play) and it does look
>good, almost enough to tempt me to play and it's really not my sort of
>game.

He did a nice bit of Twitch start-all-over the other day, too. And managed to be THOROUGHLY Jingles, in that he found an island, he picked up a bunch of seeds, he brought them back to the base-to-be....and ate them. Yeah. There's a good thing.
...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>He did a nice bit of Twitch start-all-over the other day, too. And
>managed to be THOROUGHLY Jingles, in that he found an island, he
>picked up a bunch of seeds, he brought them back to the
>base-to-be....and ate them.

That is annoyingly easy to do in Subnautica's interface. Many has been the time I've opened up the ol' bioreactor to put in a fuel item, and then stuffed it in my face instead.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It seemed like it, yeah. His reaction was still very epic, and the stream ended there, more or less, for primarily this reason, really.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>It's probably no longer the early access ten dollars though.

Indeed not; it appears to be $24.99 (in the US) now. Personally, I think that's still a very reasonable price for a game this good. Even if I do think they still need to tweak the requirement/availability curve on a few of the resources a little.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Feb-05-18 AT 09:21 PM (EST)
 
"Come on, come on, where's the fucking silver hiding?"

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Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!

LAST EDITED ON Feb-05-18 AT 09:28 PM (EST)
 
>"Come on, come on, where's the fucking silver hiding?"

"Rock on, shale outcrop! Now I can—crap. It's just gold."

--G.
what, look, I really need lithium, all right?
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>"Come on, come on, where's the fucking silver hiding?"
>
>"Rock on, shale outcrop! Now I can—crap. It's just gold."
>

"Duct tape?! That's a different game!"

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

*Potential Spoilers for Subnautica below*

One of the things I don't get about Subnautica, and none of the streams I have examined has made clear, is a question.

Are you on a hidden timer all game long?

I know there some timed events you cannot intervene in. The Aurora exploding for instance. (In fact, supplementary question, can you rush the Aurora and get caught in the explosion?)

I think I know that if you put off going to the Aurora long enough the radiation level will give you a game over.

Is there yet another, better make progress or else, timer in the other progression?

>*Potential Spoilers for Subnautica below*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>One of the things I don't get about Subnautica, and none of the
>streams I have examined has made clear, is a question.
>
>Are you on a hidden timer all game long?

It does not appear so. The progression is keyed to story points as you arrive at them; if you don't get around to them, it seems there are no consequences. (Sort of like putting off all of those flavor-texted-as-if-time-critical errands in Elder Scrolls games in order to fart around with side quests.)

There's even sort of an oblique, implied in-game explanation for this, if you squint hard enough at some of the revelations you come across in the course of operations.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

EVEN MORE SPOILERS AHEAD

there is one timer in the game, but it's triggered by story, and it's something that I'm pretty certain is impossible to intervene in, because it doesn't give you enough time to do the considerably amount of work to do so. The timer is basically just to get you into position to see what happens.

I believe the "story" triggers are actually that of progression. Once you've done X, picked up or scanned Y, built Z, things happen around you. I suppose theoretically you could just dick around in god mode through use of a trainer to keep your food and water up indefinitely so long as you didn't DO anything.

>I suppose theoretically you could just dick around in god mode
>through use of a trainer to keep your food and water up indefinitely
>so long as you didn't DO anything.

Or just turn off hunger and thirst. There's a legit mode for that.

Also: man alive, Cyclops doesn't handle so good in town.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Oh, there is? I only saw the 'story free, hunger free, thirt free' mode on startup, I wasn't aware there was an option for that. Okay then!

(I haven't played the game, I lack a compy capable of it. All I have is a laptop that came preinstalled with Vista(!) and a little netbook that's even less capable)

>Oh, there is? I only saw the 'story free, hunger free, thirt free'
>mode on startup, I wasn't aware there was an option for that. Okay
>then!

I think to change mode on the fly, you do have to use the console (as for instance in Minecraft), but the modes themselves are legit game states, unlike, say, turning off aggression or using the unlimited oxygen code.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Look, I know I'm in big trouble and I've got a lot of things I have to do, but that doesn't mean I can't have a nice personal space.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I think you spelled "over-done" wrong, there, but then, I'm not native-English-speaking, so I'm not entirely sure.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>I think you spelled "over-done" wrong, there, but then, I'm not
>native-English-speaking, so I'm not entirely sure.
>

Oh, foo. Sure, it's a bit busy, but when you live in a controlled environment, you have to maximize the use of space. And a little color never hurts.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Oh, absolutely not. Not faulting that, at all.

(on the other hand, as a friend put it when I showed him the picture, "The Sims under water?")

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>I think you spelled "over-done" wrong, there

Rude!

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.