Darren has also decided to take a sabbatical. So I will be picking up the The Ville Retrospective event, at least for the time being. I haven’t played this week’s Ville so I figured I’d give it a shot, but don’t expect commentary as insightful as Custom Gamer!
This week it’s the overdue AmbushVille starting at 10am EDT on Saturday, which is 3pm UK time and 4pm CET time.
I will also have a game or two to give away on the stream.
You should double check the Time & Date.Com website for your local time.
All streams will be on the RTSL Twitch Channel and announced on the RTSL Twitter Feed.
If you have any questions about the streams, just ask.
Hooray!/Oh no!
I’m happy to see TVR picked up again, certainly, but I’ll take this chance to reiterate what I mentioned back in the Week 31 thread shortly before Darren was scheduled to play this. My map, Temple Stand-in, is extremely frustrating. For someone who’s never played it before it’ll be even worse. To sum up from my previous post:
The goal is to get down to the gnome, pick it up, and then get back to the start of the level, with or without the gnome. If you want to bring the gnome back to get the good ending, you can just punt him up one level at a time with the gravity gun. Remember more or less where you shoot him, use the pillars as cover, then sprint up the ramps, find the gnome, and launch him again. Repeat to get to the top, then just blast through enemies as fast as possible. You don’t need to kill anything unless it gets in your way, just run; the Combine aren’t infinite, but they may as well be. There are two sets of spawners at the bottom of the map which can, under one circumstance, both be active at once, and they’re set to spit out something like 20 or 25 Combine each, so standing your ground after grabbing the Gnome will see you potentially tackling 40 to 50 soldiers, two or three at a time, all running at you in a straight line. Even with just one active it’s a pain. I really didn’t know what I was doing.
I say this not as an excuse for my bad level design, but as an accommodation for the sake of your viewers and sanity. No need to get frustrated and waste time screwing around with a poorly executed idea. I’m sorry to “spoil” some of the map for you, but without that info you’d either skip the entry in irritation or see your stream grind to a halt as you wandered around in confusion. I don’t want to drag down the mood of the chat with years-old mistakes. I did write up a post-mortem in the AmbushVille discussion way back when, so if anyone’s interested in the reasoning behind my various decisions they can take a look there.
I also believe Radio Tower Ambush had a tendency to crash people’s game when blowing up the APC, as happened to me, so be prepared. I think the author mentioned something about an updated version in the Week 31 post, hopefully he’ll be by in time to clarify.