solved the mystery of the Mausoleum of the Giants, “oh I need to change the thing again to get up there”, changed the thing and returned, and
that’s right, crushed again. and the rules state each session must end when crushed. so that’s it for a day
love how pathetic annoying and infuriating the bats are. come here and taste whip, batboy
I played Nubby’s Number Factory because I’m an easy mark. It borrows so much of it’s flow and friction from Balatro, but the decisions never felt as satisfying as they do when I build a strategy around certain jokers. I beat the game twice, once with the standard rules and again with a slight variation. On both occasions, winning the game seemed to hinge on getting a cactus item that would eventually spit out a near endless supply of needles.
I wish the items were more inspired. I wish I could make the ball more elastic or boulder-like. I wish there were legible “builds” I could anticipate after two or three draws from the shop. As it is, it just feels incredibly rote.
@tibyz and i played some aoe2 and the difference between the 1999 AI vs the 2023 AI vs today is so crazy. we ended up on Michi, which has extreme childhood custom map energy, because the two teams are separated by a wide belt of forest that runs horizontally across the map that you slowly have to cut through to start the fight. so part of it is strategically deciding where to cut.
what’s really impressive is that we spent a lot of time strategizing, building markets in the map corner to keep our limited gold supply high, fortifying a position to begin the cut, and the AI basically matched us in thought - even our AI teammate kept my military production going by sending me thousands of gold - the enemy started massing their forces in a similar place, they were also employing the same market strategy…
here are some impossible to parse screenshots of the big battle…
the initial wave of enemy troops that survived our siege weapons pouring through the breach
tibyz and i counterattacking
breakthrough for the allied forces
their castles were too far back so after the initial huge skirmishes they started ceding ground to us and we quickly swept through their lands. we narrowly avoided plan b which was winning by default with a wonder. so awesome
In my new nighttime routine of watching old game compilations on YouTube, I find myself yearning for the RTS.
Old rts games have the best art. Blitzkrieg looks so good with the cute 2003 3d models, sprite infantry, and pretty terrain textures
Another crazy aoe2 thing I think about a lot is that the new scenario designers have been the same since the 2010s and even back then they had worked on scenario design much longer than the original developers. So much of that game is still the product of like 3 guys…just different ones…
bring back sprite based rts games… command & conquer was always meant to be isometric 2d graphics…
I haven’t yet been able to get total war shogun 1 or medieval 1 working to my satisfaction, unfortunately, because I love those sprites. I’ve been feeling like trying to play a romance of the three kingdoms or some old koei thing, but it’s got to have 2d art
I played a few more missions in Black Ops III and enjoyed some more Sweaty Christopher Meloni, lol’d very hard when the game starts giving you a bunch of BioShock powers, and decided that your main squadmate guy is the fucking worst. Gleefully expressing how stoked he is to have carte blanche to murder everyone he pleases because you’re in a disaster area that nobody really cares about.
The player character is also a big slab of meathead.
Also, just like in The Order: 1886 a beef I have is that the cool guns always seem way less effective than just plain old Assault Rifle.
Also also, one of those rare situations where I can’t suspend my disbelief for the protagonist’s plot armor.
Why did the robo soldier tear him apart sadistically instead of just efficiently snapping his neck or something, and my dude definitely should have just bled out and died. And subsequently is way too cool with like, everything that follows.
Good grief
As soon as all the loadout customization stuff came into play I was like, no, I don’t want to spare the brain cycles thinking about this anymore really
This all makes perfect sense since the plot of the first CODBLOPS is just jingoistic Cold War paranoia taken seriously while making America Seem Cool before inexplicably becoming bioshock for the last few levels, complete with it’s own version of ‘would you kindly’ in an underwater fortress.
Fuck.
I wouldn’t really say the first black ops is about making america seem cool (you spend most of the game getting tortured by other americans lol) but it engages in the usual call of duty thing of pretending russians did shit largely attributed to america in the common consciousness (mkultra, operation paperclip, biological weapons lab leaks). at least the psychological programming shit in black ops is like based on a real thing the CIA was doing even if its exaggerated for narrative reasons. the game ending with JFK getting shot probably by the main character is 100% cooler than anything in bioshock as well
They address this later in the game
Gears of War was good even if my memories were right and it was definitely falling apart towards the end there. The final boss was hard until it wasn’t.
So far Prey (xbox 350 2011) is hilarious, and racist of course. But it has ideas and is pretty much Doom 3 and it is gross biomechanical horror. Thanks Blockbuster. I laughed till I cried at least twice in the first 30 minutes. There were also these enemies that I shot off their heads and they didn’t die. No one on the radio or wall grafitti told me what to do then so that was pretty hard. My friends were equally baffled.
Just based off the beginning can the Doom3 engine handle um…environments? So far everything is very contained. I never played Quake 4. Doom3 has some out door sections(without enemies?) and I have very vague memories of Hell being more open but that could be me thinking about Dark Souls.
Oh I laughed till I cried at least 3 times I forgot open handed pawing the urinal flash and then just slaping my limp hand against the condom disspenser. Maybe that is a side effect of Xenia. I wouldn’t change it.
So much of it’s portrayal of Cuba and Vietnam glosses over what America was actually doing, and the myth of heroic soldiers being tossed around by the ‘deep state’ while fighting the true good fight has been the byline of the far right for years to square the circle of being rabidly nationalistic while hating the current president, or at least like, Obama and Biden.
Mostly it’s hacky writing that is every bit as bad as Bioshock’s worst writing. Blindly stealing imagery from movies with no real thought to what the things they’re stealing from were actually doing. Then it drops a classic rock song to make you go ‘woah, classic rock song that’s awesome’.
And I would contend for whatever real life CIA CIA they were inspired by…they use it for literally the same plot twist as bioshock while you are in a flooding underwater fortress. It’s impossible to not look at the gaming zeitgeist and go “oh yeah, that isn’t a hyper commercial series copying a popular game”.
I was thinking how many games do I have installed, maybe like 200? but then I counted and it was 944. I was never great with numbers. manual pirated installs, not counting anything legitimate installed through a digital storefront, might have miscounted an empty placeholder folder or two or something like anachronox or such that I can’t actually get to run. and that’s not even getting into the emulation folders
This is my favorite Call of Duty and it is surprisingly layered narratively, maybe the most subversive game in the series re: jingoism. Like Veronica said, the plot armor bit with the robots is directly a part of the story. When you finish the game, if you have questions, I recommend reading the mission debriefings that flash by at the start of the levels; they are very enlightening.
My favorite Call Of Duty…when I Call the pizza place because it’s my Duty to fill my tummy
T in Y World is a ZZT-style game made for Ludum Dare in 2012 (theme was Tiny World, hence “T in Y”) which directly and independently inspired both Puzzlescript and Baba is You.
Every room is a grid of ASCII characters and I think it’s a persistent online world. You can press the tab key at any time to open an editor and modify the current room, which will be saved back to the server and reflected in everyone else’s games (except for a few locked-down tutorial rooms).
There’s a concise scripting language to establish rules for how characters (as in letters and numbers) behave, and it’s easy to see the resemblance to the Puzzlescript language. But like Baba is You, all the rules must fit in the room itself, and rules can modify the characters that make up other rules.
There are some devious Baba-style puzzle levels that the creator made, but most of the rooms seem to be community-created ones where people just leave funny messages or make fun ASCII art gimmick rooms, like this level where you ride a bus and the schedule cycles around:
I couldn’t actually figure out how to get off the bus.
I dunno, I think the game is interesting as a part of game design genealogy linking ZZT to those later things — but a more rough and idiosyncratic precursor. There’s even an indie-nerd-rock-comedy (?) theme song with lyrics that plays on the title screen, which feels very of its era.
