ohhh i think i remember hearing about this when it was a VR game using eye tracking and your actual irl blinks flitted you forward. much more compelling concept imo
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So it actually does use your IRL blinks! I played on my phone and used its camera. There’s just also a cursor for interacting with specific elements of any scene, and specific points where it’ll timeskip you forward when you blink. This was all pretty neat and it worked surprisingly well overall
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Played the first 5 minutes of the new Souls-but-anime-sci-fi AI Limit. The game starts with you waking up somewhere with no explanation, and then you find a rusty sword on the ground. Soon after, there’s a huge robo-creature with its back to you, and it has this sign next to it:
15 Likes
Got to the second puzzle in that last area of Infinifactory, while not “hard” in terms of figuring out what had to be done it was big enough in scale and finicky AF enough to execute that it took me a good three hours to complete it.
There are four puzzles left, I fear they may kill me 
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playing avowed on easy because i dont like it enough to actually engage with the combat but easy is NICE cuz i can just switch to whatever weapon fits my fancy at the moment. and respeccing is cheap so i just do it constantly hahaha
my two biggest complaints, and they’re pretty big are:
what the fuck is up with the minimap? it is a blank circle with no map features on it and its NOT locked in place and it DOESNT have clear nsew markers (north is a slightly bigger diamond, but if youre not gonna lock the minimap to a directon YOU NEED CLEAR N.E.W.S. MARKERS!!!) . i have to constantly check the map to re-orient myself. it should just not have a minimap at all and go full morrowwind with people just describing shit to you. but i guess that would make the red dead style treasure maps redundant. i will be so happy when someone makes a mod to make the minimap have any kind of purpose whatsoever
the fucking journal notifications. theres nothing more i hate than pointless exclamation marks that tell you something that was already said in a popup but you still have to go three menus deep to get rid of them. i cant STAND exclamation marks on my screen or red dots or whatever. i hate that shit! so when i finish a quest and get a NEW ! ON MY JOURNAL AND THEN HAVE TO GO TWO MENUS DEEPER TO SHOW MY FINISHED QUESTS TO GET RID OF IT I WANT TO SCREAM
the mantling is fun though and picking up a million objects is always a great time, its gonna be funny how much i like kingdom come 2 more than this game
OH ALSO
ALSO when i skip a word of dialogue because an npc is talking to slow and they snap back to the beginning of their next animation and their hair flies around and their clothes whip back and forth that shit is distracting stop that, stop punishing me for not wanting to sit through every single spoken line, try having less voice acting next time!!!
the combo for when you hit a guy with a wand a million times and cause a sigil to spit out a bunch of fireballs from the ground owns though, that attack is so fucking cool
12 Likes
they’re both probably my favorite games of the year so far tbh and it’s exactly because one of them is hardcore simulationist and one of them is like purely story + exploration + combat. each of them is much better on their own than any attempts to split the difference in the middle (a category that almost all other first person RPGs fall into). plus they both have fun writing and are nice to look at.
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I genuinely can’t believe the minimap and journal shit. It’s like tailor made to piss you the fuck off. Congratulations on having a worse radar than GTA 3 I guess… good lord.
On a more positive note I love that my character doesn’t pick up most of the notes I find but the second I found a well worn copy of some lesbian porn she made sure to put that in her inventory
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Finished (well, as much as I’m gonna) Steamworld Dig 2. The final boss is actually hard! It’s wild how much more of a game this sequel is than the prequel. Not that the first Steamworld Dig is bad, just that this one takes just about everything it did and does it better.
I kinda gave up on 100%ing it (like with the first game, there’s some achievements that require either perfect or a second play, plus some of the challenge caves are pretty damn hard!), so it was funny when I wound up getting my ass kicked again and again by the final boss only to find I had passed an extremely accessible, extremely easy cave right next to a warp pipe that had an upgrade that halved damage.
Went back to the final boss and beat it first try, with that.
Guess it’s back to the idol life with Haruka and Yakuza 5…
7 Likes
Regretfully, I’m finding The Saboteur to be kind of boring. The game wants to be a stealth action game and a 3rd person shooter and both neither seem to work.
The stealth is kind of good if basic, you can dress in a disguise to sneak around, but it’s far too easy to trip an alarm and have everyone shoot at you. You also spend the entire time in stealth looking at the minimap trying to avoid people’s aggro areas. You don’t get a silenced pistol until later and when you do stealth becomes a bit more viable, but oy. There’s one mission where you sneak through a large graveyard and it takes forever. I think you’re meant to turn off the alarms periodically to reset the alarm state but, eh.
There’s an entire subplot here where it’s implied you’re getting the Ark of the Covenant but they don’t say it, which is kind of funny.
There’s another mission where you shoot your way up a citiadel to get to a zepplin and this is where I was like “ok the game is meant to break sneaky state every once in a while to do shooting stuff”. Somehow not liking the shooting mechanics despite Pandemic basically building their entire oeuvre around 3rd person shooting. Maybe playing with a controller is making this harder than it should be because there isn’t much target magnetism that I can really feel.
It is more fun to freeform blow shit up in the open world and try to get away, despite the fact that enemy encounters have this positive feedback loop where you shoot the people chasing you, and then more show up, then your wanted level grows which also sends more guys to shoot you. This can make traversal difficult and also tedious.
The game was really good in the city where you have to infiltrate areas and can kind of pick your pathway in and how you blow stuff up. So when it goes to the countryside and you have to drive everywhere it gets to be a slog. Also the cemetery mission I mentioned above while it has multiple paths they’re all pretty linear.
8 Likes
Returning to Shin Sakura Taisen because I did not have enough harddrive space to install the Spike Lee NBA Joint. It was a bad session with too much talk about anime panties and then to my own guffaw, the game made me play the first action stage again in its entirety to let me know there was a simulator room. The game is still a real delight to look at, but while what I do behind closed doors is my business i do not appreciate being made an anime sex pest for wwwwwws and lols.
And I tried Slitterhead and just, that’s a real bad game folks.
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I’ve deleted Slitterhead and started NBA2k16. How the hell do normal people play this? This is as confusing as Destiny.
Lady Rude walked in and asked “Why are you watching Basketball?” So yes we did reach peak graphics 9 years ago. The game does look upsettingly good.
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NBA 2K is very good and complex!! also the career modes are often genuinely funny and have good cameos and they keep adding WNBA teams and stuff. it is much better than a lot of other big sports franchises imo. Madden by comparison still feels mostly like it did 20 years ago, and MLB the show is OK audiovisually but imo there’s just not that much room to improve a baseball video game. FIFA is also legitimately great as a competitive game though I haven’t played the last few.
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Yeah I am only here to see what Spike Lee does in the video game space. I had to go to bed but I was having trouble figuring out which option was A Spike Lee Joint.
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This is what I want from video games
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they went on a really good run with the career modes in the latter half of the PS4 era, I think it’s 2K19 that has Shaq like breaking into your house in one cutscene and dismissively calling you “Barkley” like it’s a tic. I’m not sure if they’ve kept up in the last few years.
FIFA is legit good for the same reason as 2K mechanically, because you can actually set up plays and do extremely complex ball control to protect passes
5 Likes
For some reason me and one of my few hardcore nerd friends played a ton of some Castlevania themed marble pusher at the arcade for cards with Jonathon and Charlotte on them, the use and value of which we were kinda fuzzy on.
We got those damn cards though.
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GT Academy 2013’s music gave me the most intense collection of pop-jank I’ve experienced in the series. ; D
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Oh my, someone call the national weather service
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omg the way he just hangs his head and freeze frames at the end
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Got through the third puzzle yesterday, took slightly less than 3 hours as I made the dreaded “did not notice something was flipped until the very end” error and had to re-engineer a whole section in now limited space.
Got through the 4th one today, in lieu of words I have a picture.
(The cycle score is where one should look).
2 Likes