rimworld has a mod called “real ruins” that scatters fragments of other players’ bases in your world. the glimpses into other players’ games that you would otherwise never get to see can be fascinating. i don’t know what the art on this excellent bed is but i’m glad it’s there
9 Likes
So I got one of them there N64 flash drive dohickies and it turns out Quest 64 is a game I am enjoying.
14 Likes
Every time I play Marvel Rivals my team seems to win or lose arbitrarily, like it’s about 5 minutes of back and fourth before suddenly we’re winning, or losing, and it doesn’t feel like I play any better or worse. It’s weird how bland this game feels. But they have copied what Overwatch 2 feels like. I don’t feel like I particularly win or lose by skill or team makeup it just seems to happen. With something like Deadlock I at least had a sense that I was losing or winning at some point and could therefore adjust my strategy when things worked or didn’t work, but the action in Marvel Rivals is so uniform it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t.
1 Like
I broke the cycle in EYE Divine Cybermancy. All 3 endings complete, final ending unlocked. And then I immediately broke the seal and re-entered the cycle.
5 Likes
Still chipping away at The Saboteur. Thought there’d be more Sabotoging, but the mission design is pretty good. I feel like it’s way too easy to trigger an enemy onslaught but playing with that kind of tension is neat, eventually the missions do just go to full on shooter but when it happens is hard to predict and that uncertainty makes missions feel like they’re falling apart and the only way to pull through is to mow everyone down. It’s hard not to make breaking stealth feel like a failure and I have to restart, but only if it’s early in the mission.
The game is hinting at a climactic race, it’s weird how much racing is critical to the game and the systems in there are serviceable but not exactly deep. The car physics have been designed such that the cars cannot ever tip over so the center of gravity must be 100 meters below the surface (I have done this in a few games I worked on, otherwise cars will fly around and tip over unpredictably)
I managed to steal a tank once and it was fun for about 30 seconds before enemies swarmed me and blew it up. I feel like in a Pandemic Open World game you gotta get a tank and just unload on fools.
6 Likes
This (Sultan’s Game) just came out, I played it today, there’s a demo. I read people describing it as a more resourcey/videogamey Cult Simulator (which I haven’t played), but I’ve played adjacent things like Citizen Sleeper and I can imagine how that description would align.
The main loop is following 7 day demands in the form of a game a cruel ruler is playing, the ruler draws a card which describes a type of action (bloodshed, conquest, etc.) , with a minimum tier of person/card to involve (wood, bronze, silver, etc.). You (a male character) have seven days to complete that action or die.
The main loop is a map with nodes, nodes are events(narratives/quests), some are repeatable, some are sequential, many are on day(turn)-timers or created from the consequences of other events. Sometimes events can also satisfy ruler card conditions, if not you can also generate events by dragging a card onto the skeleton in the bottom left corner to “reflect on it” (specifically, the game calls it, “methinks”)
To do an event, you assign a person (a card) who’s stats determine the amount of dice you roll with matching stat sigils. Enough sigils face-up and the event is passed. Too few and it’s a fail. There can be gradations to success but the game lets you know the requirements for a minimal pass. Different events can take a different amount of days, events only resolve once you end however many turns they require.
Your character is also an assignable card, and if an event’s failure would result in death, you lose. I like how narrative heavy this game is without being overbearing. I could take or leave the card iconography but it’s an interesting level of abstraction. This is my wife, she is a card. This is me, I am a card. This is my best friend, he is a card.
The tone is definitely ominous, the ruler cards demand cruel actions and picking characters to meet those actions often mean potentially sacrificing or harming someone who is more intimately known. Bit of an implied Marquis de Sade vibe. It’s interesting! And there’s a good amount of thought seemingly applied to narrative consequences. Stories will reappear and progress in a variety of ways. It seems designed to be replayed more than something like Citizen Sleeper.
This game was made in China, I haven’t had any large issues with the english but every once in a while there’s grammar or statements clearly muddled by translation issues. Was trying to find info about the devs, was crowdfunded, seems like a smaller all or mostly female team, who previously worked on mobile game narratives and books? Appear to also have gained some controversy for the incredibly low bar that the game allows you to pick gay lovers for romance events and the devs said " yea we’re pro". If you want to expose yourself to this knowledge you can sort by negative reviews on Steam and find complaints in english and chinese.
At times it feels a little intimidating to me. It seems big, I picked “Normal Difficulty” which gives you takesie-backsies in a few ways (limited amount of free rewinding of turns, redraw lord cards every 7 days, etc.) but I get the sense that there’s a way to play optimally that I’m a little far from.
Example: Assigning a character to stay at home generates gold. Gold can be used to buy equipment that gives stat boosts or at the bookstore to get books which permanently improve stats, or at the brothel which involves meeting a rotating cast of courtesans who all have their own character. Equipment is a simple transaction but the bookstore or the brothel are events with rolls their own. Books also have minimal stat requirements for reading (if the bookstore roll is successful) and take a turn/event to read, different characters can see you at the book store which can improve your standing in court. Any character can be assigned to the bookstore or store but only your character can go to the brothel. You could also give an offering of gold to the court independently. etc.etc.
It’s difficult for me to ascertain early on how much this is a narrative game ( dice rolling CYOA) vs. a game in which a pro eventually clicks super fast to optimize through early events skipping dialogue etc. Anyways, seems good so far.
16 Likes
picked up citizen sleeper. good vibes. vague sense of danger, hopes the devs got paid
5 Likes
The 360 era continues with nothing grabbing me. It was a pure delight after suffering Sonic 2006 (A Game Of All Time) and putting the controller in @dylan’s hands and seeing the color drain from his face after losing his lives in a Shadow stage and doing the math on replaying the stage to get back to where he died. I’m not playing anymore because that game is torture but I can respect it because of how near religious playing it is.
Killzone 2 ended up being on the upper end of these PS360 FPSs because I happen to have a demo of Timeshift which has filled an unecessary amount of my brain because it is so generic. I had a demo for it and didn’t finish it before quiting. Come back to me when you have slight magnetism to your aimming.
I think I fulfilled my investigative need in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory because like all stealth heavy games I just started muttering “I hate this I hate this” until I turned it off.
Years ago I bounced off Lost Planet, though I love 2 and have weird respect for 3. Turns out I still feel the same years later. As you just push into the Archids hive or the Snow Pirates base I feel it absolutely tips over from action game to mass murder simulator. I killed like 200 people so my plucky team of 5 could move in. The slowly move forward and then bugs jump out of the ground but don’t run too far forward because all the bugs jump out did not do it for me. Nice giant worm (rather play 2’s Giant Worm!!)
After a year of casually playing on the train I also finally looked up what the hell I was doing in SaGa and made progress.
12 Likes
And Toki Remake is a truly horrifying product glad I bought it for 3 bucks. Looks like I’ll win an ipod.
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I still maintain a weird level of respect for Lost Planet because of how much it seems like it was developed by a bunch of graphics perverts…
Like all the excessive post-processing effects, bloom, blur and other stuff lathered on the screen at any given time while playing still somehow makes it look more technologically advanced than a lot of current triple-A stuff…
The experience of playing it is pretty mindless though. Can’t remember a single detail of the plot either, just have a strong memory of the snowy environments, glowing orange goop everywhere and oddly detailed animation on the main character as you moved around - Oh, the grappling hook too!! I remember that being a lot of fun to use cuz it often let you get to parts of the level that felt like you weren’t meant to be in…
Never did play 2, I guess because it was marketed more as a multiplayer affair and 3 seemed to be by an entirely different developer if I remember right?
9 Likes
Between the Super Mario All-Star graphics and the way they mix and match stuff with seeming thoughtlessness–a level where you pick up stuff Mario Bros. 2 style and use them against Charging Chucks!–the Super Mario Advance 4 e-reader levels are really quite unsettling. The whole thing feels utterly unlike Nintendo, in a way I’d dig more if the levels themselves didn’t feel so middling, so far. The button configuration on the Switch doesn’t help–my kingdom for being able to dash with the Y button.
7 Likes
Gears of War (360): there may indeed be a masterpiece of third-person shooting here, for all i know- i’d never have seen it for all the Objective Failed screens. by time i reached the fight with the Berzerker, i’d lost all will to live and just let the big dweeb steamroll me.
lol y u so bad @ vidcons hater?
Edit: made it to the shootout @ the gas station, largely through trial and error; still can’t wing the broad side of the observable universe at ten paces, nor go ten minutes (average) without dying in a manner which i’m sure you’d find equal parts amusing and pathetic.
10 Likes
playing lost planet for the first time i really enjyoed how hard it was leaning into "you are the bad guys’ but i feel like it just forgot that a few hours in and turned into normal shoot-the-bugs-and-its-cold-outside
5 Likes
yeah you join the snow pirates super early
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Had a mission in The Saboteur that takes advantage of the ability to climb basically every building. You have to set up wiretaps on a bunch of rooftops, and you have to do so in a time limit, so there’s a little bit of traversal as a puzzle, and a bit of shooting, and a bit of stealth. One enemy near the end dropped a rocket launcher. This is good videogame mission design.
6 Likes
Yeah Lost Planet 2 is fantastic as a coop experience. One of the best ever made for you and three friends. Shame the PC version is absolutely fucked. All the reviewers played it in single player and that is not a good idea.
3 I got shortly after release for 500 yen. It was developed by a western team and tries to tell what it would be like to be on the hell snow planet working for a corporation that thinks nothing about you lightyears away while you miss your family*. It does a reasonably good job of this. The mechs feel lumbering and heavy. I think stopping it halfway through is an excellent idea. It is not what anyone that played Lost Planet wanted. As someone that is playing a lot of C Grade PS360, it has probably aged well.
*- the brief moments where the main character just stops and stares at a video message from his wife are really good. Then you know you gotta shoot one thousand angry bugs.
Shout outs to the Japanese multiplayer community for LP1 and 2 who played those games for years and if you went online you’d be instantly DESTROYED.
10 Likes
I’m doing more of the side missions after realizing the greyed out icons on the map are actually side missions and not inactive NPCs, whoops.
The side missions are fun and short and it’s usually “just kill this guy”. One was at a book burning and the guy was in a tank and there’s about a million bad guys around them. I couldn’t blow up the tank from afar so I snuck in (and found a bug, if you’re discovered as you change into a disguise the map stays red but the alert gets cancelled), then set a bomb, then ran away. A lot of this is explosive trial and error, but eventually you can pull through.
My main gripe is you get spotted really easily from very far away, it’s harder to do stealth kills and whatnot. You also can’t really stock up on ammo and guns after a mission starts so you end up with low ammo or stealth guns when you need machine guns, etc.
the npc and world interactions are fairly sophisticated. I accidentally ran someone over and an NPC reacted by saying “I should not have seen that”. In another incident I hit something head on and flew off my motorcycle, landing on a bench, which cracked in half like I was doing a wrestling spot.
5 Likes
I briefly played Leximan. It is quite inventive but does ultimately feel like it hasn’t left the vestiges of a student game entirely behind. Messages apologetically saying that ‘if a crash happens to do the following…’ don’t demonstrate much confidence. Similarities to Undertale are probably most immediate in the visual style. Sense of humour feels quite like Magicians and Looters and has a sort of unvarnished, raw energy that is somewhat charming.
The main abilities revolve around assembling words or using keywords to activate certain effects. It’s set in an absurd magic school where everyone sees you as an unskilled nuisance who happens to be able to use word-based magic very well. There’s a good pacing of jokes but I gave up due to an unfortunate softlock which prevented progress.
I have also started on Pikmin 4 after enjoying the demo a year ago. The game is still a bit too chatty for my liking and there are a lot of systems and additions.
The Dandori sections are fuckin nuts. You’re pursuing a character that is clearly not Olimar who keeps kidnapping and mutating the crew you are meant to rescue. In pursuing him he takes you to these abstract toybox realms to play a simplified nonsense version of competitive Pikmin. I detest them because it has no reasonable context for why you follow this man into a completely unnatural whitebox level when the rest of the game takes more time to ground the environment in a natural ecosystem. They are also absurdly easy and just feel like we’re going through the motions to sell players on the multiplayer mode.
The Pikmin formula feels more refined like how nectar is made more valuable via it healing Oatchi and Pikmin losing petals as they take damage and having to be replensihed. The whistle calling back idle pikmin but only pausing Pikmin already in a task is also nice. You gotta hold whistle to recall everything in the radius. Pikmin 4 is quality-of-life-Pikmin except it has too many menus and gadgets and shit. I ignore pretty much all these features and just play Pikmin as God intended.
I’m finding it’s a good podcast vehicle, but it just feels too nice. Pikmin 1 was a shipwreck narrative and felt a lot more like you were making meaningful progress towards a singular goal. Even 3 had this with the juice. I miss the progress charts showing the Pikmin numbers and juice. 4 just feels like we’re essentially untouchable and that success is inevitable. The only sense of danger comes in the moment from boss fights and the more arbitrary limit on the number of pikmin you get but it’s too easy to just grind up pikmin populations. I get why they still have timebound days but there really needs to be an option to just stay in the area overnight rather than have to constantly go back to the home base. The main reason is that going back to base incurs a lengthy load time and then going back to the same environment you were just in incurs the same lengthy load time. It becomes a tedious bloat despite seemingly attempting to refine everything. I don’t think Nintendo is legally allowed to just release a basic Pikmin sequel but they just get safer and safer whilst simultaneously being slightly more annoying to play.
Pikmin 5 will be the Hocotatians setting up a suburban nimby neighbourhood and building a giant wall to shut out all the wildlife and you’ll deploy pikmin in some sort of dull tower defense minigame instead of having a goddamn adventure.
12 Likes
I’m playing Crow Country on the difficulty with no enemies and I think I made a mistake. There is no tension which is no surprise. I’ll play it again on normal difficulty when I finish the game which should be soon.
5 Likes