a few days ago i finished getting the epilogue in studio system: guardian angel
feel like its a very ps2-brained take on “survival horror”, like i feel like i could guess many influences the game might’ve had, but i think it’s fair to say it doesn’t fall to the trap of relying on familiarity or references. i love how visually it alternates between aesthetic cleanliness, abstraction, grime, and it’s framed quite well. good static camera angles. or not really, not quite, because while the position of the camera is locked and changes based on you passing invisible tresholds (like normal fixed camera angles), you get the ability to rotate your viewpoint, and this as it happens is your weapon and your physics puzzle manipulator. the camera is a thing you’ll get to be aware of. you can kill enemies by “shooting” them with the camera, or use your viewpoint to grab hold of special objects and move them around. while simultaneously controlling your main girl becky with regular old tank controls.
it gets messy, and difficult, and i don’t think i developed any ability for it but rather learned what to expect and how to set up “easy shots” so i don’t have to think too much about the things i’m doing simultaneously.
i’m not good with uhh… what is this thing about? because i feel like it could be a lot of different things? there’s a visual theming around primary colors red, yellow and blue and the palette is often built around these, including representing our main cast, so i can’t help but consider what an unopenable door with one of these colors, in a staircase with many other uncolored doors, could mean, tho i can’t even form a theory, it just kinda nags at me. but that’s good too.
I think the most enjoyment I derived from that game was just wingsuiting around. Distinctly recall there being some rock formations in the water, sorta tunnels that come and go with the waves, and trying to thread the needle gliding through them.
Just Cause 4 is interesting because they do take strides to make it more fun, but they also had to make it run better (since 3 ran like shit on consoles), so it’s really goddamn ugly.
They do let you tether all kinds of shit together and Frankenstein some vehicles. Nothing like putting some thrusters on the bottom, back, and sides of a truck and making the worst hovercar the world has ever seen that immediately crashes into a fuel depot and explodes.
bumpy trot has really been elevated by emulation problems. the jaunty upgrade music slows down in menus, it’s the next Buying Goods at Palmira. the desert sands are ominous, solid black. an omnipresent ui element is so broken in rendering that we have to guess at its intended purpose. walk into a building and discover the void
game itself is both lovingly crafted and kind of a mess (in every sense), im having a good time even if i definitely wouldn’t have the patience to pilot it
i wish i could osmose more of these games without extreme time investment
a black photograph mirrors your lost memory. inside your journal you keep a meticulous, serial killer like tally of how normally you’ve greeted people
there’s a recolor of the sage of the lighthouse named the sage of the lake. he’s alone on a tiny island on the lake and when you talk to him he says “hiyaa!” and heals you. that’s the sage of the lake
you can busk for tips in town, walk a few feet and discover spinning wheels looping a HELP ME! voiceline. it’s unclear who’s yelling or if blowing it up helps
the narrative is approximately as dreamlike in practice. subplots pick up and drop arbitrarily according to the dream logic of production
if you want to avoid bugs in emulation, you have to play bumpy trot in software rendering mode, it also has correct lighting (the different times of day all look identical in hardware mode) and the photograph album actually works, etc
software rendering is still the only way to do it for Steambot Chronicles, indeed. even Retroarch’s new-ish ParaLLEl-GS renderer struggles: you still get that glitchy UI element (didn’t see many other visual glitches, only recall a broken background on the menu) and performance is significantly too slow even on a pretty recent PC (9700X, 7800 XT) at 1x resolution.
Read that post as though you were describing your own life. Didn’t see the one above mentioning bumpy trot (excellent name). Kinda sad to have had the illusion shattered…
Holy crap. All the sounds and flashing lights and make it hard to focus but just blasting and trying to slowly get farther and farther is so much fun. After finally biting the bullet and getting mame working on my pc I’ve had so much fun trying out the various arcade classics. The fact these games are so brilliant even today makes hard to fathom how addicting these would be in the 80s!
I played a little bit of CoDBlOps 3 it’s the first game in this series I’ve ever touched (because I got it via PS+) since I played the demo of the original Modern Warfare like 20(!) years ago.
Lots of waiting for NPC squad mates to open doors after saying some military shit. Lots of pulled-from-the-headlines world building.
The gunplay thus far feels serviceable enough. There’s some sci-fi cybernetic stuff in this game but I dunno how interesting that’s going to wind up being from a gameplay perspective
