Horizon Zero Dawn

[Grogan]

I've been eyeing this game for years on GoG, and finally got it last night. I had a craving for a new game, and ended up refunding one (Star Wars Dark Forces... blech, 1990's game remastered and "preserved" in all its rudimentary glory... deceptive screenshots showing cut scenes, not gameplay) so I bought this one instead.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/horizon_zer ... te_edition

I'm enjoying it so far. The prologue starts you out as a little girl, of mysterious origins, and it progresses to a young woman as it dumps you into the game proper. Things are tribal and you're an "outcast" so nobody likes you and your mentor. It's shooting machines with bows and meleeing with a spear-like weapon and collecting their loot. On "story" level the combat and sneaking aren't too difficult. Autosaves and manual camp fire saves.

EARTH IS OURS NO MORE

Experience Aloy’s entire legendary quest to unravel the mysteries of a world ruled by deadly Machines.

An outcast from her tribe, the young hunter fights to uncover her past, discover her destiny… and stop a catastrophic threat to the future.

Unleash devastating, tactical attacks against unique Machines and rival tribes as you explore an open world teeming with wildlife and danger.

The graphics are nice (dx12) and the movement is good.

It would have worked out of the box with steamplay as Steam installs appropriate runtimes, but with Wine it needed MS Visual C++ runtimes installed in the prefix (the vcrun2022 package installed with Winetricks... 2015-2022 libraries, it covers most everything). I'm using my system Wine 10.0 (TKG) with vkd3d-proton 2.14.1

[Zema Bus]

I have a craving for a new game too, I have for months, but right now I'm playing a financial game of survival I remember hearing a lot of mention of this game a number of years ago, it must have been a popular title when it was released. It does look good. Bows and arrows vs giant bots with lasers lol!

[Grogan]

Oh well, I should think that right now if you actually got to play ANY of your games, it would be like having a new game

It isn't that bad, when I was a child I fell into an old bunker, with old technology and got this VR device that attaches to the side of my face. It lets me scan and highlight weak spots, and paths that the machines are going to take. You keep crafting arrows (fire arrows too and likely explosive arrows soon). I have this shock trap gun too, that I can fire a shock trap on the path of machines too. The spear-like melee weapon I have is actually faster to kill machines with. Also, I picked up a heavy weapon that was like a heavy, hip fired machine gun when the tribe got attacked by these mask wearing cultists. I mowed several of them down with it before it ran out of ammo. I can't keep heavy weapons like that, only pick them up and drop them, but there may be other weapons later when I encounter vendors in different lands. I have left the silly, superstitious tribe now and will be traveling.

Anyway, I lucked out on this one, it's a good game. That's what I like best now, RPG style story games. They are what keep my attention.

[Grogan]

I got the sequel to this game, Horizon Forbidden West. It was somewhat on sale on Steam, ~$50'ish for the Complete Edition.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2420 ... e_Edition/

I had to get this one on Steam (not GoG) because it's all Sony Balony'd up with DRM. It only works with Valve Proton (I'm using Proton Experimental) as there is some extra setup Steam is doing at every game launch, that seems to fail with my proton-tkg builds. You can see it at game launch, the status stays blue and if you look at the game page on the steam it says "running install scripts" (or similarly worded) for some seconds before the game goes into green "running" status and it launches. It's the same shit that the Indiana Jones game is using.

Oh well, as long as it works and I can't notice any performance issues.

It's similar to the first one, and picks up where the story left off. The climbing is more complex in this one though, there are a few different techniques like this grapple gun thing, and a dodge-jump type move to reach further away climbing points/surfaces. The prologue was a bit long, and had a lot of this in it, I hope it doesn't have too much of that.

Anyway, it's more rich and colourful than the first one

A few shots:
https://www.mikeserv.org/coppermine/thu ... p?album=26

This view was pretty cool, riding an elevator gondola

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