10(!) years ago the always-online requirement of Need for Speed (2015) stymied my attempt to play it because I was leeching shitty, unreliable wifi from my landlord.
Now I’m finally sitting down to play it after all these years and I no longer have the time or the patience for this kind of thing, it seems. The street racer pastiche and Car Community Social Media Star fantasy don’t really hold much appeal for me. All I wanted to do was drive around for a while in the rain. It’s a lovely game, the lighting is nice. The live action cutscenes (mostly just NPCs talking into the camera at you) are… earnest. But the characters are basically all the standard tropes, right down to the manic pixie dream girl mechanic (overalls and everything!).
I don’t really want to do all this open world stuff that much. At least not in this game. Maybe it’s because I got my fill via Burnout Paradise many years prior and that game’s less grounded (ha, grounded in comparison to Need for Speed that’s pretty funny) approach to racing and exploring the city appealed to me more. In this game I’m getting texts and phone calls from NPCs all the time and random players are showing up in my game world which I very much do not want but can’t seem to get away from. I tried the “play alone mode” and the game just kicked me to the title screen and when I finally could play again, I was just in another public game with randos zipping around ruining my vibe. I hate this live service crap.
NFS Unbound felt equally as grating so Need For Speed being the same way sounds about right. I feel like the Criterion produced NFS Most Wanted and Hot Pursuit are the last of the good Need For Speeds before it gets unrelentingly bad.
Edit: I did play the unrelentingly forgettable NFS rivals, which has dueling super car racer and cop gangs, each with equally unhinged narration about their motives. It was the first game I got for the PS4 because there were no other racing games out for it yet.
A few more snap judgments (and dismissals) as I clear out the ol’ PS4 backlog:
Velocity 2X sure looks like those old animated e-surance commercials. And it’s sorta dull otherwise. Pass.
Trek to Yomi makes me think about how I’ve never actually watched any of those old samurai movies and maybe I should just do that. The swordplay feels bad? Like there’s a bit of an input delay, almost. Maybe it’s just me but I wasn’t really enjoying it.
;_; Need For Speed 2015 is great because of the weird passive multplayer stuff where a race will be happening and another player will be doing the mirror race at the same time. Big Giggle Fit game.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS4) - much as i hate to repeat myself, i really can’t improve on what i said last time:
I just don’t get you, MGS3 Enjoyers- I really don’t. What’s so fun about slowly creeping and crawling through boxy, vaguely-woodland-patterned rooms, inevitably getting spotted (because Koji & Kompany give you next-to-no guidance on what any of your kit does or how you’re meant to proceed), and having to throw your hands up and Benny Hill your way back to the nearest enemy-free area time and time again, all while calling the devs every pejorative you can think of (plus a growing list of new ones you’re making up as the proceedings wear on) at the top of your lungs?
Edit:
why not just start shooting instead
i can’t be sure, but i’ve a vague idea that it might be the same reason i don’t trim my nails by sticking my hands into random lawnmowers
Simply don’t get spotted. Problem solved.
you know, i had just made up my mind to try this- but then Snake stood up when i needed him to stay prone, a sentry whose position and patrol route i hadn’t yet committed to memory saw him, and things kinda snowballed from there and long story short the Ruskies won the Cold War.
I haven’t played the first one but the confidence with which they build the fantasy and ease you into the world in the first few hours is inspiring. Loved the way the stealth tutorial is framed (and how the song keeps reappearing as a catchy leitmotif in the soundtrack later on!) as well as the anticlimax it reaches. Adored the constant stream of indignities your character is subjected to in order to put you at the bottom of society and justify all sorts of roleplaying decisions you might make. The sheer attention to the physical pleasures of alchemy turns it from a boring crafting system into something that enriches the world. The codex is incredible, handcrafted-feeling pages talking about nothing but fun historical detail (from priests running brothels to women using agricultural tools to comb their hair).
The system seems to push you towards interesting roleplaying and granular consequences: when I got sweettalked into drinking at the beginning of the quest in order to make carrying heavy stuff easier I later regretted it because stat-lowering hangover arrived right before the first difficult combat scenario, which meant I had to strategically dismantle the enemy camp’s outer defenses, wait for nightfall and choke out the heavy armor guys in their sleep (by the time I did that the guys I choked out earlier woke up and I had to scare them off into the forest by yelling at them). Oh, and the way NPCs treat you differently if you look bad and smell like crap! So much little stuff to make you feel like a part of this world, and none of it feels tacky so far, which is almost unthinkable of in videogames (well, the delirious flashbacks came the closest but at least I feel like I caught up on most of the important plot points I missed out on by not playing the first game). Between this and some of the most recent games from Koei Tecmo, I feel like these detailed historical settings are a perfect balm for someone who’s had enough of the usual AAA proper noun worldbuilding sci-fantasy nonsense (as long as it’s not Tsushima/AssCreed-school of skin deep interest in the given era’s aesthetics).
Pathologic 3 Quarantine is 30GB for a 90 minute game. Two minutes in my gaming PC struggled to load a chandelier properly and crashed. Every character moves like this to talk to you.
I’m still kind of surprised 3 exists because 2 already seemed like such a painful labor to produce a game like that at that scale and its various contrivances all barely worked in the service of providing an incredible atmosphere and a phenomenal story… but apparently 3 is just an adaptation of another of the campaigns from 1 to 2’s engine so that makes more sense
I don’t think I have it in me to play another one but I’d love to watch someone else do it or try it cooperatively, I think that’s the only thing that can offset its oppressiveness
There’s a lot about The Order: 1886 that is bad (for example, the gameplay), but I remain a sucker for silly Steampunk shit so the game hasn’t yet aggravated me out of playing. There’s a lot more Uncharted in this game than I anticipated.
I was running it through dgvoodoo, which seems to be working fine with it, so it should get picked up as directx11 but no indication reshade is even installed running the game. it’s strange I don’t think I’ve had this problem with a single other game
For pathologic classic, reshade works with the base dx9 version and with dxvk but not dgvoodoo so I recommend swapping to dxvk if you want to do anything that needs compute shader support and just using the base dx9 renderer if you don’t
