games and eroge you played today 12 times the fun and the excitement!

[skelephone]

Thank you to everyone who checked out Skin Deep. I don’t post here anymore but I admit I’ve been curious how folks on this website would take it. We went all the way on looney tunes and genre pastiche and concentrated cornball and 80s b movie vibe on purpose, and we knew it was a big swing, and we’re so glad the swing connected. During development we were particularly aware that the decision to make the game fundamentally a hyperverbal experience was a stretch, and I felt that decision particularly heavily for obvious reasons, haha. For a year I’ve been certain that the game would be exactly what we wanted it to be and that we would nail the landing. So of course the big worry was: will people appreciate that at all?! Hahaha.

I’m still playing the game every night myself. I feel so lucky to have been able to do work worth doing. It is a hard experience to obtain in life. I owe it to everyone else on the team and I will probably never be able to repay them.

[hellojed]

I wrote a rambly blog post about it last night after drinking a bunch of beer, but I think my favorite quote from it is “Skin Deep is a language of slapstick violence that you use to write your own elaborate jokes.”

Return to Nuevos Aires : Skin Deep

[shnozlak]

@elvis_shrugged

The secret sauce of Goldeneye and the early stages of Perfect Dark was really the staff, though—and they all booked at that exact point in the original PD’s development. I ran through Timesplitters 2 a few years ago and it’s got the Goldeneye energy for sure in a way neither PD game does.

I used to compare Timesplitters 2 to Golden Eye all the time and had no idea.
Yeah they really had a signature flow.

[Tuxedo]

I’m getting the hang of Last Defense Academy. The main story is Danganronpa-esque and lasts about 30 hours and it’s frankly Good Enough for a game of that kind.

Afterwards the game « unlocks » the « sequel » inside the game (Hundred Line : Last Defense Academy 2) (I love this), goes back to the start, and the story starts having branching paths. (The first choice at this point is whether to immediately go to the Evil Traitor Mastermind and kill them on the spot. It’s very funny)

The choices can eventually lead to 100 different endings across… I’m guessing approximately 10-15 different main big routes. Each with a « theme » and presumably written by a different person / team. So you get a bunch of mini-VNs rolled into one. Honestly the size is staggering. One reviewer have said it takes a ridiculous 130 hours to see « everything ». The seams do start to show there though. Lots of scenes with illustrations, so they just show the sky instead?

Admirable way to cut corners

I bask in the slice of life routine aspect of the game. Each in-game day is very codified, with a morning announcement, evening announcement, meetup in the cafeteria, etc. This means the pace is pretty relaxed, and I take it more slowly than I usually would. The game is too long to be rushed anyway. I don’t need to know who the Second Evil Traitor Mastermind is right away, or what’s the deal with the mysterious numbers, etc

Since it’s a visual novel, there’s an option to auto-advance dialogue so we don’t have to press anything during dialogue. I set it up so text auto-advances half a second after a text box is filled.
This only works with pure text though. Whenever a character has a voiced line, the game will wait until the voiced line is finished before auto-advancing.
But I disabled voice acting entirely by setting voice to 0.
This means sometimes the text will randomly take 10,0 full seconds to auto-advance instead of 0,5, because there’s some phantom unheard voice acting happening at that time.
It is very annoying, but it allows me to play another game in parallel called « Guess whether the line is voiced or not » and I have become very good at it

I have so thoroughly mastered the TRPG combat at this point. I can give four of my teammates Despair Potions to sacrifice them so 1) they get huge free attacks 2) my main character’s damage gets boosted + he gets a bunch of free turns. Every boss dies in one turn without even being able to act. It’s very funny.

My gameplay focus now is about exploring to The Board Game to find materials to craft gifts for my team mates

And ask myself which one of those freaks would love the useless promo stickers on bread the most so I can get the most affinity points (it’s unclear whether those have any use ATM)

[ellaguro]

@tacotaskforce

Perfect Dark" had 3 good stages, and they were the first 4 stages of the game. I dunno, maybe the Pelagic II or the alien mothership would be OK levels if they weren’t running at such a low resolution and framerate it looks like the game is dissolving into bitrate artifacts on the original hardware.

i think the Area 51 levels were pretty good in general. i particularly like the weird super hard bonus mission where you play as an alien in Area 51. but i agree Perfect Dark missions get quite confusing and bad. i could only ever get halfway through the game on Perfect Agent in spite of trying so hard. better framerate, resolution and saves during levels i’m sure they’d be not quite as bad. there were a lot of great ideas in the game throughout but Perfect Dark is just a mess in general. that said, i got an absurd amount of play time from it back in the summer of 2000 so i guess it isn’t all bad.

[muaad]

@strangelilfella

Cryptic… I recognise that this is DMX but beyond that you may have to provide a bit more context here…

The butts caught my attention and making me forget the woman in front of me.

[Mikey]

@ellaguro

i think the Area 51 levels were pretty good

Probably my favorite levels in the game!

[ellaguro]

yeah i think at its best Perfect Dark is a lot more interesting than Goldeneye and i think a lot of moments across the levels show that, but esp the bonus Area 51 one i mentioned. but it is also such a dumb and incoherent mess

[Sykel]

GoldenEye is a better RPG than Perfect Dark imho

[GherkinForce]

I definitely remember arguing with a friend in high school about whether Duke Nukem 3D was an RPG. I think his reasoning was that being in first person meant ‘playing the role’ of the character. Which I guess is not technically wrong

[Mikey]

God I bet a Duke RPG would be so sick. And you could probably do it in a few different styles and it would work in different ways

Duke Effect
Duke: Nuke Vegas
Duke: Like a Nukem

[Father.Torque]

I mean existing as the character Duke Nukem as anything more as an occasional one-liner dispenser in an action game sounds completely intolerable, they’d have to play it as like a super irony self-effacing thing which would get tiresome about 5% into a typical crpg’s length imo

[Tulpa]

to get the duke nukem rpg experience, just play any shitty russian fallout clone, the protagonist is always a wisecracking cynical guy who treats women like shit

[Mikey]

Wait I just remembered that Alpha Protocol is already a jerk simulator

[Sykel]

I’d say that’s more a sociopath simulator

[stylo]

Duke nukem is just unironic Johnny bravo with guns

[hellojed]

I am playing old levels of Skin Deep to get all the side objectives, despite systems mastery the game still catches me off guard and plans still go sideways. As someone on bluesky said: In most imsims you end the game as like a killer ninja, but in Skin Deep you’re still Wiley Coyote.

The side objectives are all pretty funny too and contained stuff I missed on my first runthrough of the game. It’s wild that each ship has a gimmick like being a laundromat or observatory, and that gimmick is actually functional and affects the rest of the level.

[Iammadmak]

Finished Mouthwashing today. I thought it was really good.

[hellojed]

there was a big Deadlock update so i tried it again with coworkers. impossible to keep up on souls. laning is stressful. i keep losing matches and getting zero kills and 10+ deaths. this isn’t the game i played several months ago and all my old strategies no longer work. i hate this game

games seem to be decided in the very first contact with the other team and after that its about 20 minutes of struggling. i think everyone who had a life decide to play the videogame equivalents of styrofoam (marvel rivals, overwatch 2) and all that’s left are the terminal lifers

i hate this current thing where a videogame has to be your entire fucking existence, you can’t just hang out and be competent you have to eat breath and sleep every single game otherwise they’re nightmares. was i ever good at this game? can i even get good at the game again? is it literally too late?

it’s already too late for Marathon, i have never played Tarkov and I “only” played 20 hours of Destiny 2. Pop out of the womb with that meta already internalized if you ever want to have fun again.

[hellojed]

[Taking a big drag off 40-50 cigarettes at the same time] you know what the real problem is? Blizzard. They stuck their HQ in fucking Irvine where there is jack shit to do, so anyone who works on these games has no life out of work. You wouldn’t have Overwatch if the systems designers could go to a noise show every so often. You can’t have World Of Warcraft if the producers are waking up and seeing the Cascades every day. A lack of grass touching has damned us all to these bespoke hells of evolving metas.