No but you can do shells only, bananas only, and bobombs only I think
I would turn off lightning if I could. Blue shells aren’t that bad but lightning kills your items and slows you down, so it just…sucks
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i don’t like, hate halo reach, but i like it significantly less than certain sb peeps who insist it’s the best output of the halo series and all this sort of thing
many of the maps are ridiculously stretched out to accomodate sprinting and vehicle combat, and there’s unskippable cutscenes and the interminable star fox sequence, etc. also all the enemy designs are super clunky and meleeing them sounds like the fonz punching the jukebox
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I would agree on the insistence that Reach is mostly an important and good game on narrative grounds
I can’t imagine caring about a halo story
which might be why I stopped playing halo after 2, which cared about its story very much
god hand is insufferable garbage
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ok I only played it for 15 minutes but this is in the spirit of things, right
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I mean, my hatred of Diddy Kong Racing is only something that can be borne from beating it
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Speaking of Hand of God wow I just checked the prices on Ebay, and that escalated quickly.
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Portal 2 is bloated, forced and boring, especially as it invites the comparison to the efficient minimalist Portal 1
Portal 2 is like finding a « the cake is a lie » reference in another videogame
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the Portal 2 single player adventure is 90% tutorial and 10% actual game and the whole thing is some railroaded narrative nonsense
the Portal 2 coop campaign is the Actual Game of the package
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but all of this is okay because Cave Johnson, right
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My take was that Portal 2 is the big budget action sequel to an underfunded indie movie.
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Titanfall 2 is a better Portal 2 than Portal 2
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you’re all just bitter that I was right when I said Portal would win against Prey and y’all called me an idiot
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I’m not trying to be funny here but Portal 2 is the “best” videogame I ever played. It’s damn near perfect. For me it achieved everything it set out to do. It’s gripping and entertaining from start to finish. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it in videogame. It’s truly close to an action blockbuster movie in how it feels to play through it in terms of engagement. Just stretched out over many more hours. That’s an achievement!
I’ll probably always be singing its praises. It’s the game that should replace Ocarina of Time on the number one spot on metacritic, is what I’m saying. It’s not my favorite game, far from it, but it’s the best game, the best designed game, the best put together game
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A good game has failure not just failure to understand.
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I also felt this way about Portal 2. Whereas with Portal 1, I was ready for the game to be over well before it was ready to be.
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It feels like a well-deserved victory lap. Indisputable mastery, sure, but it doesn’t benefit from being that self-indulgent and doesn’t have the glorious breakout energy (literally) of the first game – you’re never allowed to stretch your legs or mastery and the structure becomes too visible even in its subversions.
The hour-plus of bonus JK Simmons they wrote and recorded for the user generated level tool, to play randomly and contextualize playing through random content, is so full of love and pride, though
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I have to mention that I really like the “victory lap” works in art, so I’m biased. I like self-indulgence. My favorite Jay-Z album is The Black Album, for example. It’s basically him chilling out and celebrating himself. On the last track he reminisces and talks about going to a nice place with “no mosquitoes at”. I adore the early Kanye West albums for the same reason. They contain the struggle of making it but also the celebration of having made it.
Portal 2 had the same victory lap feel, that’s true. It’s all kinds of amazing that that’s possible in videogames. That they can feel like they’re celebrating themselves without that being the actual theme of the game, without words to that effect. It must have felt truly elating to get all that critical praise for the original Portal. It put them over the moon and then they made Portal 2 and put the player over the moon
The only criticism I can lob at it is that it doesn’t get hard/challenging enough. But it’s for a good reason. The game constantly keeps you in a - I wouldn’t call it “flow” because that would imply that it gets the challenge aspect right after all, but a kind of “green zone” where you’re engaged and making progress. It’s not the flow state per se but it’s a very fluid state.
I feel like it does innovate enough, especially late game, so I’d say it preserved enough of the breakout energy…
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Yes, this is a succinct explanation of why Portal 2 feels like a boring chore, a straight line to the finish where the only option is to move forward on that line. I never felt challenged or even mildly engaged. The game often just pauses to let you find the right thing to do (including in the final fight). It’s just boring. Like most Valve in house stuff, it exists to make the player feel they are better for doing basically nothing interesting at all. All it needed was an in game girlfriend to platonically hug you at the end.
1 Like