It comes across differently in Connery’s Scottish accent.
I guess that must be it. That and maybe barber shops in Kentucky probably just present differently.
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The problem with building my factory in The Swamp is that there is a lot of prep to it and I am building it over the course of a number of play sessions. I know that doesn’t sound like a problem, but here’s the kicker: all the alpha beasties that you cleared out in the previous session have respawned.
Once I get the factory run Ning they will stay away but, for now, fuck me am I blasting through a lot of ammo. At least having cleared out most of the foliage down there I get a good view of the infestation (TWSS).
Swamp Factory complete.
It’s been running fully for an hour or so (real time) and I was just going around adding walls etc. when I was bounced by a squad of the big jumping spider-bastards™️. Not the evil green ones that fart poison gas and are harder to kill than John McLane (thank the Fiscite overlords!), but still one level up from the basic bitey spider-bastards.
The thing is that they jump at you and, if they land in your factory, they start scurrying around, hiding amongst the machines only to leap out at you like a fucking face-hugger in the MedLab. Add to that the problem with engaging in combat using a keyboard and mouse for controls, and you have the recipe for a 10-minute, ammo-sapping battle just trying to clear them out.
The good news is that I am almost done here for now. I just need to build the drone ports to export the products being made, plus make a baby fuel plant to power said drones from leftover crude oil I have down here.
Then, the next project is my nuclear power plant. Why is “We’ll Meet Again” playing on a loop in my head…?
Here’s the extent of my rail network now (it’s the hot pink lines with the green markers). This is already the most extensive network I have built, especially considering the interconnections, and I’m not done yet.
South east is the now-completed Swamp Factory. The north east spur is out to an area that has an abundance of coal and quartz where I am going to make the resource-heavy Time Crystals.
North west is going to be the site of my nuclear escapades - built out over the water - that bright white blob is actually an exceptionally tall rock formation which has a uranium node atop it. Handy to keep it out of the way and then call it in by drone once the enrichment and waste processing is set up and ready,
While I wasn’t involved with Satisfactory until it’s formal 1.0 release, it’s those who helped develop the game during its years of pre-release version that form the core of the YT community, so I have seen a lot of their content.
There seems like such a symbiotic relationship between the studio - Coffee Stain - and this community its heartwarming. For example, when Coffee Stain added hypertubes - a way of moving more quickly around by having an entrance that accelerated a pioneer to propel them trough a flexible tube to an exit - the community almost immediately “broke” it.
To wit, someone came up with a hypertube cannon: a method of daisy-chaining multiple hypertube entrances together with a stubby open-ended tube that leads straight into another one. It turned out that the hypertube entrance adds to the velocity you carry into it, so the acceleration effect is cumulative. The more entrances, the faster you go.
Now, Coffee Stain simply had to add a line of code to limit the velocity in the tube to end this mania. After all, being able to cross the map instantaneously is an ability unlocked only at the end of the game (and requires some serious power and resources to maintain the connections). The ability to yeet oneself across the map almost as fast by abusing hypertubes was not in their plan. But, instead of killing it, they left it.
So now we have fun like this:
I watch the first half of “Jeremiah Johnson” last night (too slow for me to stay awake for the whole thing). Holy shit is it a live action version of RDR2.
Camping out by fire in the snowy mountains. Hunting and fishing. Fighting bears. Random encounters with colorful characters. Helping a distressed widow. Random gunfights.
I knew the game drew from other Westerns (like Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch) but JJ is like the core of the whole game.
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It’s not just me.
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While we wait for the expected/wishcasted re-master of RDR2, here is the smartest way to get outside of the artificial map limits I’ve seen.
It’s the typical “drink 'til you pass out” at the edge of the map trick. What sets this apart is that you get to keep your horse with all of your supplies.
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One of the fun things about Satisfactory is that you can share your build with anyone just by sending your save file. They can load it ups and walk around to see what you’ve made.
That’s what happened here, and this shit is mental.
What we don’t know if this was made with any game mods employed. That’s somewhat irrelevant though, because it’s not a competition, it’s just to marvel at the imagination and ingenuity on display.
Lots to digest here; Electronic Arts (EA) doing the leveraged buyout thing with Silver Lake Partners.
Layoffs and other cost cutting moves are typical after a buyout like this. If the Silver Lake name sounds familiar, it’s because it is a part of the Oracle joint venture that is taking over the US version of TikTok.
The sovereign fund owning a video game house is in no way going to impact the content they put out.
Opening Screen
Men, Click Here Women, Click Here
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Women…get back in the kitchen.
As if EA didn’t fucking suck already. Fasten your seatbelts.
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I technically worked for EA 25 years ago. I actually worked at Westwood Studios, but it was bought out by EA and eventually shut down. I was at Westwood in Vegas on the day several EA HR execs showed up and laid people off after Louis Castle’s all-hands meeting.
I survived and got an offer to move to Silicon Valley and work at EA HQ, but it was a pitiful offer for the Bay Area and I turned it down. Which turned out to be smart because the game I was working on got cancelled 6 months later anyway. (They actually wanted all our online servers and equipment and shit for their upcoming new expected MMO hit, The Sims Online.) EA paid millions upon millions of dollars to move a team, and all their equipment, from Vegas to Silicon Valley, then cancelled the game six months later. And the dumbass Sims Online crashed and burned anyway.
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Westwood released some bangers back in the day.
I still haven’t really forgiven EA for swallowing up Westwood, Maxis, and Virgin Interactive. All three of those produced games and franchises that I played the shit out of in my teens, and none of them were ever the same afterward.
That’s an S tier name for a gaming software company.
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Every Friday after work at Westwood, there would be Command and Conquer tournaments on the internal Westwood server. But ironically, the designers who actually built the game rarely won; it was the QA staff in the converted trailer on the parking lot who would always win. QA was a bunch of high school and college nerds who did nothing but use different computer configurations to beat on the games all day. They knew every trick in the book, so well that they could consistently beat the guys who made the games.
Also, one time a co-worker and I went snooping way back in the rafters at Westwood’s Vegas studio, where all those cheesy-ass cutscenes were made. Deep in the storage area we found all the Army uniforms and props from those cutscenes, and even some stillsuits from the Dune games. After the Westwood shutdown was announced, we went back to try to steal some souvenirs, but they had already disappeared to EA HQ.
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Satisfactory comes out on console on Nov 4; same price as the PC version, being $40 (there are no in-game transactions).
Perhaps bigger news for some of you: they have it running on SteamDeck. There are a couple of UI issues, in that some of the in-game menus have text that is too small to read easily, but they are working on that. The important thing is that the game runs perfectly so they just have to fix some of the cosmetics.