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

[COINTELBRO]

for a stealth reimagining of morrowind, the power advancement treadmill in avowed is way too obtrusive, smooth, and non-diegetic. by the second zone i was already completely sick of the busywork weapon upgrade system. it was weird that the best loot was sticks and leaves that i could somehow use to upgrade pistols, and each of the tiers took dozens of them, more for each sub-tier, incentivizing breaking down every weapon i wasn’t using in every fight into more sticks and leaves. it felt like i was alt-tabbing over to some inane forgotten facebook marketplace game every few minutes

i wanted to like it and enjoyed how much you could compensate for your character’s numerical weakness by exploiting enemy pathfinding and your companions’ effective immortality but you could only subvert the rules up to a point. the notion of having to upgrade my pistols another 20 times each made me so tired, i could use that time to develop actual skills or make actual things

broadly, i wish the staff at obsidian well and appreciate that they clearly have some passionate students of history among them, but i’m also glad that the broader political context led me to pirate this one

[dogs]

i second tulpa’s ironwail rec. it looks like software rendering but runs at light speed. i personally enjoy 640x480 with all interpolation (mesh and position) disabled. looks hot.

[dogs]

god quake fuckn rips man. everyone should go play the spiritworld map pack that shit owns so hard it’s unbelievable.

[Tuxedo]

Last Defense Academy

I’ve gone through six main paths in the Last Defense Academy flowchart hell. I have 33 endings out of 100. I feel like I’ve played for 80 hours already.

Two routes were extremely good. Two were extremely bad. Two were OK. I’m enjoying the big shifts in quality and themes. The routes all feel like they’re written by a different person, and they are.

One issue is that some routes are written by The Main Writers, and are meant to advance the plot, when some other routes are written by the B-team and are either Just For The Fun or Just For The Fetishes. They feel like pure filler yet all last 10+ hours. The game is so long…

I can’t quite abandon any useless route, because a few paths are locked behind completing other paths. Maybe I have to get to the end of the « comedy » route, where everybody gets transformed into a dead fish, to unlock the end of the mystery route and learn the identity of the second assassin …

Pokemon Arceus

My kid obviously loves this first exposure to a Pokemon Videogame but I’m only enjoying it vicariously. I find it stuck in open world hell.
Empty world. Annoying menus. Too much dialogue. Too much god-pokemon related mysticism. We’re encouraged to catch a bunch of pokemon then release them one by one? We’re encouraged to fight peaceful pokemon?

There’s no cool nonsense so far, aside from the photoshoot

I got a good two hours of thrill hiding in high herbs and throwing pokeballs but that’s not a lot

My 4,5 year old kid is already into min/maxing. He wants the strongest team to bulldoze through the game. That’s why he chose fucking Graveler for the photoshoot. Hopefully I can convince him to keep one or two useless insect / poison pokemon

Wilmot works it out

Owns. It’s a lot more clever than I expected from a jigsaw puzzle game. There’s a lot of fun misdirection and a sweet final plot twist.
It lasted us about 6 hours!

[Father.Torque]

The 12 yo beat BotW and asked for “more open world games” so now I have him playing Stalker lol

[iguferon]

It better be the right version

[Father.Torque]

I did tell him to do the regular one and not the “enhanced edition” but didn’t watch over his shoulder as he installed, so who knows what road he decided to go down

[Grandpa]

With the new Robocop hitting soon (and kinda wanting to try maxing Robocop out in NG+ and just literally running through dudes, the one ability tree I didn’t pursue), I loaded up Rogue City, which (as mentioned before) weirdly never kept my end game data? It’s like an hour or two from the end.

Game is still rad. But goddamn it is so fucking loud. I cannot wear headphones playing this game. Robocop’s gun will make you go deaf, I’m sure of it.

[villain]

Cheap vodka is the only thing keeping me going these days.

I hate this village. I hate these villages. It’s so easy to get mixed up and turned around and not know you’re heading back in the direction you came, and there’s nothing really that sets one house or building apart from another, so you’re trying to remember what the hell these places are based on what NPCs are wandering around outside of them. Just give me a goddamn map!

I can’t stand Fei. You know you were banished, right? Like, everybody agreed to exile you. Nobody wants you in their village, you idjit. Also, the whiny “I don’t wanna pilot the robot, I never did!” bullshit is as annoying in this as it was in Evangelion, except it feels really half-hearted. So far, Fei is just flip-flopping between feeling sorry for himself and arguing with people over who’s to blame for what.

This guy seems cool, but not cool enough for me to keep subjecting myself to this unfinished mess. Especially since right after this, we’re thrown into yet another set of dungeons where you’re struggling to figure out where the fuck you’re going. Because, you know, a map would’ve totally ruined the experience.

This is a game that could probably benefit from a remake. It’d probably be way uglier, but maybe they’d add maps, fix the awful platforming, and give us better camera control.

And then, a few minutes later…

What the fuck is this guy talking about? He goes on some tangent about how humans were only created 10,000 years ago, and God Robots and shit, and how he believes that instead of evolution, and then he’s like , “Nah, bruv, it’s all just fairytales”.

I really don’t like this game. It’s such a frustrating fucking mess. It doesn’t even have a Configuration menu/sub-menu! If you want to increase the text speed, you need to use a cheat code or a patch. Don’t want to sit through these animations every goddamn battle? Too bad!

I’m kind of interested in the (presumed) villains and maybe Ersatz Asuka (Ersuka), but right now, I only have some boring doctor who I’m not even sure is a doctor or not, some lame blonde sand pirate, and Pony Tail.

The game locked up on me in the Yggdrasil when I decided to rename my robot so I had to re-do the Calamity battle.

(ETA: Also, bits and pieces of this game feel like things they pulled out of Final Fantasy VI and VII. Like, Bart gives me Edgar vibes and I’m waiting to find out he has a long lost brother).

[parker]

hating the villages in xenogears is like hating the parts where you have to steal in thief the dark project

[jujotech]

I think they were pretty boring too but I’m not sure what part of the game I didn’t find boring.

[Father.Torque]

@villain

Because, you know, a map would’ve totally ruined the experience.

Correct

[strangelilfella]

@villain

I hate this village. I hate these villages. It’s so easy to get mixed up and turned around and not know you’re heading back in the direction you came, and there’s nothing really that sets one house or building apart from another, so you’re trying to remember what the hell these places are based on what NPCs are wandering around outside of them.

As someone who hasn’t ever played this, I’m really struck by how much this description feels incredibly accurate to over-industrialised areas in general… In complaining about it you’ve made me oddly more interested in the game, haha…

[jujotech]

I’m not saying a map would have fixed the game, but it might have made the endless hallway ‘n’ sewer trudging slightly more tolerable.

[HOBO]

I hate Xenogears

[shnozlak]

I love Xenogears

[bib]

the only time i played it was in winter 2006 and my memory is that i was in some massive late-game dungeon and at some point i loaded my save and managed to accidentally head back the way i came without realizing it and trudged the wrong way for an hour or something and was so disheartened that i never fired it back up

i of course consider this to be further evidence that a map would have ruined the experience

[Cerium]

I hope they do a full HD 2D remake of xenogears that lets them implement the unfinished sections of the game because I hate art.

[Broco]

I beat Zio on the first attempt but really inefficiently and by the skin of my teeth. The last turn I was like: “I have no more revives left so fuck it I’ll go down swinging”:

Aside from the rest of the party missing out on the 25999 exp (still a large amount even 5 hours later in the game), I used up all of my Star Dews (full-party-full-heal items).

Now that I knew how to fight Zio, I thought of restarting to try for a better outcome, but then I was like “ehhhh whenever I’ve done that in other RPGs it wasn’t worth the trouble in hindsight. Let’s just move on.”

Then the next 3 major bosses proved to all constantly spam full-party massive damage attacks, and the dedicated healer mage who could cast a spell similar to Star Dew just got sick and left my party. Now I’m stuck on Lashiec with only 1 star dew I found in a chest since then, and gnashing my teeth bitterly regretting my past complacency…

[idiot]

sick music when you fight zio