i donât think theyâre widely beloved or whatever (a bit like Zen in HL1 i guess) but i really like the last several levels of Tomb Raider 1. i think theyâre really interesting thematically and generally well designed in spite of some annoying or ill-considered little bits (the big boss enemy is pretty bad i guess but whatever). thatâs more than i can say about so many PC games of the era, many of which have generally weak and rushed endings.
im glad that i get to see this stuff for the first time while veronica is playing it and be like (dsp voice) WTF WHOOAAA but im also surprised i never knew about the later levels like at all
the line from gaming in the clinton years about giving lara breast cancer seems completely reasonable now
Iâll admit that I wasnât really paying a ton of attention to the story or fmv cutscenes because they were kind of weird, ugly, and not upscaled so great. but the cutscene at the end of the second to last level is like the first time i actually perked up and paid attention. atlantean cyborgs (??) argue about libertarian politics (???) in front of the imprisoned girlboss villain and itâs absolutely perfect. The voice acting!!!
Wasters.
Turns out Tomb Raider is pretty fuckin cool eh
astonished at how tiny lara is in that screenshot
the skinned, thalidomized torso kinda-sorta looking like [larson voice] miss jacqueline natla, was deeply amusing to me and my sister back in the '90s
the ultimate balcony of the atlatean pyramid also has the most satisfying plunge to your death in the entire game
purging another decades-old skull demon from by brain: pierreâŚu litterbug
adjusting your pack and gingerly making your way down a hill trying not to let your momentum carry you away while itâs storming and the cross breeze is threatening to push you over, goddamn this game is so good. itâs maybe the most embodied game iâve ever played
kojima you son of a gun
haha YES HAHAHA YES!
I spent a few days playing Mundaun. A swiss game in the near lost local language of (checks wikipedia again) Romansh. Surprised even still that my American ass caught understanding a few words without the subtitles.
It is best described as a Half-Life total conversion. You have a janky vehicle, non-existent bad stealth-combat, and a strange bashing things together tone to all of it. I loved it. I played so many HLTCs and to have something that ?accidentally? Stumbled into that same tone while trying its hardest was fantastic.
You return to your home town of Mundaun (a real town in Switzerland) because your Grandpa died. Quickly strange things start happening and you gotta figure it out. All the textures are hand drawn and the whole world is two tone. You gotta make coffee on an old stove.
Iâd stared at it on PSN store for years and glad it really paid off. If you got any love/nostalgia for a janky Half Life mod I think youâll like it just as much as I did.
what I really loved about Death Stranding is that the world is the level, it isnât an open world where different shooting levels are connected via a set of roads and streets you drive through to get to the rest of the game, the game is navigation and making micro decisions about what ridge to climb and where to climb it. I feel like the game was best on foot. I did loathe those BT sections though
felt like trying out return of the dark sorcerer again. started a new game where i finally figured out how to actually do damage and not take over an hour to defend the esper in narshe. there are more media and cultural references and i enjoy them in way that reminds me of the time when people made fansites twenty years ago, before wikis and hashtags took over.
37 hours into fantasy life i and i finally fucking unlocked all the jobs. this is an mmo, im playing ffxiv again but with level 5 art. it keeps happening!!
i expanded my house twice though and im gonna make my island all pretty and my house all messy and get out all the animal crossing energy i didnt spend for the switch version since it never clicked
FANTASY LIFE I IS CLICKING THOUGH theres even a brand new relic grind in final and i keep being like âhhmmm maybe later i feel like being an expert in cookingâ
id proudly post a screenshot of me having every single job unlocked but when i screencap the game it gets all fucking blown out and i dont want to look for my phone to take a screenshot with regular lighting so you just have to believe that i only have three fledglings left and my character is VERY cute
please stop selling me on Fantasy Life i
i tried out folklore for the ps3, the one set in an irish village where you play a copyleft wb yeats named âkeatsâ. to be honest that was enough to make me interested in it for a while, i always wanted to try it to see if there were any other weird details like that. like maybe a dramatic finale where you foil a conspiracy to occupy the general post office, or your dad keeps springing out at you like majima and you have to keep walloping him in the head with a spade.
to be honest there wasnât much like that in the first few hours at least⌠it took the less-interesting-to-me angle of a kind of handwavey contemporary setting crossed with âfairylandâ done in a similar style to american mcgees alice. i did like some of the slightly downbeat empty real world areas, just seeing a particular kind of country road or beachside used as texture for the classic vgame corridors, like the early parts of rule of rose⌠i do kind of like ps3 era graphics for some reason⌠like they always feel sorta doll-like, as if the devs are still thinking in ps2-scale for the character designs and rooms but end up with an extra level of definition and slickness theyâre not sure how to fill in yet. uh, some cloth physics⌠some emissive lighting⌠uhâŚ
the fighting is kinda fun, for some reason i thought it was an rpg but itâs an action game where all your attacks are enemy creatures and you get a refilling stamina bar to test them all out. itâs fun rolling giant woodlice at things and thereâs kind of a not-all-there-ness to the combat that was kind of refreshing but at the point where the game started asking me to get good i wasnât excited to keep going. the thing is as well you have to play all the chapters twice, once as each character, same bosses and stuff⌠and one of the player characterâs cutscenes feel noticeably worse written / paced than the other? the female player character is written like sheâs 12. thereâs also just a weird paucity of character for this game set in a desolate west irish village that also contains a portal to the neverworldâŚ?? talk to the real world bartender and the first thing he says is âweâre not open yet. i have no quests to give you.â talk to the ghost world bartender and the first thing he says is âwelcome to a world of mystery and imagination stranger. i have no quests to give you.â
the monster descriptions are pretty good though⌠i guess this game used to be âjewel hunterâ or something in development so i feel kinda bad for the guys who just wanted to work on a game about firing virtual tigers at other virtual tigers and then were asked to make a Big Ticket Item instead.
itâs funny to me as well that the two character backstories are ârecieves a letter from dead family member asking to meetâ and âeditor of a failing occult magazine investigates deserted islandâ. the silent hill 2 / siren 2 crossover gamers demanded.
itâs so good!!! you find furniture and glasses of beer and the turn them into buddies that raise your stats and clean up after you, and you have a robot mode that does everything from terraforming to picking flowers for you real fast and apparently you can find more robot parts to make him even bigger all on a base island thats just a whole other game you can get sucked into
sometimes on your farms a vegetable will grow SUPER HUGE and then you have to have a vegetable boss battle thatâs actualy different mechanically from big tree and big rock battle!!! also the jrpg boss music that plays when you cut big tree/hit big rock/catch boss fish is so exciting. the music is mostly just inoffensive though, I only have it on half the time
thereâs a random dungeon where each floor is themed to a different life. well multiple random dungeons but Iâve only planted one of them
theres a whole other island I barely go to where you can find korok seeds and talk to giant eyeballs and BASICALLY DO FATES ON THE MAP to get points to level up the area to make rarer fates spawn
every job has a skill tree!!!
if you get silver treasure gold treasure and pirate treasure you can craft them as an artist to make a treasure furniture that sells for like 45k
you can wear any clothes you want even if it is a special outfit for another job
i just unlocked the ability to apply APPLIQUĂS on a couple crafters which is gonna make my stats so sexy and strong
the biggest thing I donât like is having to find a party formation person (at base or talking to the bone dragon) to switch my party in and out to equip them. thereâs constant drops so I wanna get everyone geared up FASTER
I can only assume you played in an emulator because you canât talk about folklore without talking about swinging the controller around to rip souls out of the monsters bodies.
Also the guy protag looked identical to a friend at the time down to the jacket and that was fantastic.
the emulator has a patch for â6 axis movementâ so at the end of every battle i just watched as the ghosts got rhythmically jerked without my input
Id say it is one of the few Motion Controls Are Good Games. And Ripping the souls out is 1/3rd of The Game.
You did notice everything else though.