On a different note. I’ve been playing this game on Steam called Suits for Hire.
The TLDR is that its Hotline Miami but with more mechanics and a slower pace–you die much less to guys shooting you off screen. There is a third person mode, but its a game mode that was implemented only for 1.0 release; i haven’t played this.
More details if you care:
You got a handy max payne bullet time ability meter you can use to save your skin or use to sprint and keep your combo up. Comboing enemies has a mechanical advantage to you, for your primary weapon, if you manage to get 7 kills in a row with said weapon, it refills your clip. This encourages you to move fast and get into conflict faster to keep the combo going.
Shooting guys also has this nice sound that makes my brain tingle each time I do it.
I’d call it game of the year with how much fun I’m having, but it somehow doesn’t have an endless mode with the great mechanics and it crashes a ton. Thankfully, with the checkpoints you won’t be losing much progress, but I’ve had this game bluescreen my pc before. My theory is that there’s a serious memory leak going on.
I geuss buy it and wait for it to patch or just wait till it gets stable enough.
I started up Cyberpunk 2077 as I was looking at my PS5 game cases and went “why not” despite having concerns over… well y’all remember the state of the game when it launched. I’m up to act 2 and it’s been pretty good so far, I worry the amount of side missions may muck things up at some point but for now it’s going well.
cp2077 was better when it was a glitchy mess, fixing that removed anything noteworthy about the game. You’ll find out soon enough that there’s hardly any side missions in the game that aren’t “go here and kill a guy/knock a guy unconscious”
this is probably the biggest reason to play online, because then the game just cheats the resources for you so you’re always just about to complete a road project to connect a length of highway together after doing the right amount of story mission
It was honestly a relief for me to realize that the game wasn’t doing any precise tracking of where I placed buildings. When I noticed that it’ll just put up structures where they would be most useful and assigned a player name at random, I stopped worrying about spamming ladders everywhere somehow cluttering up the experiences of other imaginary players
cyberpunk is very, very inconsistently quite good… every time I touch it, I get the sense that there’s a genuinely impressive 20 hours or so that could be curated out of the experience they shipped (most of which is the NPC questlines and the parts of phantom liberty that are essentially an NPC questline), but it’s hard to actually have that experience (particularly since the NPC questlines that are captivating also only have maybe 30% good setpieces).
I have been stuck in the same section of Getting Over It for about 2 months lol. I started to feel like I wasn’t getting enough oomph, so I turned on touchpad settings or whatever the mouse acceleration option is again. Maybe I’m getting better at it? Learning the way of the hammer by doing the same thing over and over again, but a little faster sometimes.
i think this is wholly or at least largely not true; the placement of a user’s structure in your world is where that particular user has placed one of that particular building. ditto with signs, ladders, cargo…
no one knows how all of it works but i’m baffled by this assertion as that’s seemingly something that’s been confirmed to work. i interacted with stuff from parker’s sister in death stranding 1 and i’m pretty sure everything i found like that could be confirmed to be an actual thing from her game. it’s like the trodden paths - they couldn’t work at all without tracking where people actually walk.
there may well be some degree of fudging going on, but i think what the game is doing is straightforward enough (randomly placing structures/cargo/vehicles/etc. from your world into other worlds and vice-versa) that there’s hardly much need to fake anything. it’s more that no one knows exactly what the restrictions are. clearly, it won’t place two of the same structure too close together. some places seem to allow more signs than others, etc.
the resources thing i assume is related to the auto-pavers. i don’t think anyone knows exactly how those work, either. there appear to be various restrictions on to what degree they can be completed by other porters based on your difficulty level and possibly your porter level and other factors. this stuff, i really think is sort of a black box
spamming ladders everywhere somehow cluttering up the experiences
you’re more likely to get structures that receive likes as far as i can tell, as well as structures from people you’ve got higher bridge links levels with, but even then i do see people’s random vehicles & ladders cluttering up my game all the time lol. you can walk up to them and hold start to dismantle them - that’s the “fix” they patched into the first game after launch so you don’t have to worry about clutter.
as far as i know no one who has looked at how online works has claimed structures are pulled into prefab locations and assigned random usernames by the game. i really do not believe that’s how it works.
pointless to argue since there is no explanation from kojipro how it works, but your description does not align with my experience
I really like how it almost immediately triggers adrenaline, but that means I can’t play over 15 minutes at a time before I feel too wired to function.
Very fun! The action is a pretty reasonable amount of complicated, I’ve enjoyed all the boss fights a lot so far and it’s cool unlocking new jobs. Game really suffers while in any sort of menu. Would be a lot more fun if they took out the inventory management, but I can’t deny I love playing dress-up. If I were 14 this would be a seminal work.
Decided to give the Jarpegs a rest for a bit and play something a bit different for a change
Survival Kids:
I only ever had this emulated back in high school and never finished it, I think I got stuck finding all the gems or something. I finished it now, and it’s still a nice, fun, charming game. Pretty short as well, but about as long as it needs to be. A bit easy, you can pretty much just eat all the fruits and nuts you find to keep filled up, making all the emergency dried meat you save up just sort of clog up your tiny inventory. I got the ending where the kids get married (10 years later, not actually when they’re kids)
The Making of Karateka
I got this because it was 40% off on Switch. I’d never played any version of Karateka before, so it’s kinda funny that my first experience with it was with the initial prototype included here. Kind of interesting that this game that supposedly kickstarted the cinematic / narrative approach to game design was basically inspired by Choplifter of all things.
There’s a modern remake included which I feel a little mixed on, because while it’s pretty decent on it’s own merits it tries to be something of a long lost Amiga port, but includes elements that clearly wouldn’t work on that platform (like soft lighting and particle effects etc)
Based on the versions included it feels like the perfect version would be one with the AppleII’s graphics, C64’s music and Atari’s speed and fluidity.
I find it funny as well that Mechner’s journal notes read a lot like the type of faked whiteboard notes you’d find in a game about science gone wrong or something. Lots of “word underlined three times and circled, with an arrow pointing at it with the word ‘TENSION!!!’” or “estimated time frame: 14wks - Yeah Right!!”
Outer Wilds
Not sure if I have much to say about this except that it’s brilliant, probably an all-timer, but also sad that it’s basically a ‘only play once’ kind of game. I only used a guide for one bit near the end, but only because I thought I knew the solution and it wasn’t working. Turned out I was missing a bit of info on account of not wanting to activate what I thought was a ‘get the bad ending’ trigger. I’m pretty sure my friend would love this game, but apparently he bounced off it because he can’t seem to get his head around control systems that stray outside the industry standard.
Guess I should do the DLC at some point as well.
After these I started sliding back to the JRPGs, but only of the action variety for the time being:
Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana
Love how quick and breezy this game is. Only around 12 hours, no extra filler, just the good stuff. I mostly played it with the music set to X64K, which seemed like the best option. Some of the bosses felt a bit bullshit, but once you learn the pattern it’s not so bad. The ice level kinda sucked a bit though.
Final Fantasy VII: REmake
Lol, compared to Ys this one feels like 80% filler. I only really played the original for the first time a couple years ago so I don’t really have the whole Midgar section memorised, but so much of this just feels like padding for the sake of making sure the runtime gets to the arbitrary mandated JRPG 50 hour length.
Still having fun with it though, I don’t mind them fleshing out some of the minor characters and adding extra worldbuilding etc, although the ghosts / Sephiroth stuff just kills the pacing and I wish they didn’t have to make all the female characters constantly pandering directly to the player.
There’s a few aspects I think they probably should have changed more, since with all the generic NPCs looking so much like everyday mundane people, it looks kind of ridiculous how the Avalanche crew try to act natural and blend with the crowd while walking away from a terrorist act they just committed while being dressed like anime military fetishist cosplayers. Cloud’s puffy pants and massive sword in particular look pretty silly.
Anyway, Clair Obscure just arrived in the mail while I was typing this, so I guess that’s next up after FFVIIR is done
I somehow never had this happen to me once because I played so extremely cautiously that the only times I died were due to bosses and carrying the nuke and when you die in those places this doesn’t happen.
This can also happen if you kill a mule and don’t dispose of the body apparently, something else I never did because I only used lethal weapons on bosses.
i’m getting a lot out of the asynchronous online integration, it’s like people are sending messages in a bottle to each other with how they place bridges and stuff. but it’s perfectly playable offline
it’s worth messing with your mouse sensitivity but i think acceleration is not very helpful unless you’re used to it in all games. i think the #1 thing that separates a new player of Getting Over It from an experienced player is the ability to softly catch a ledge.
the orange is definitely the hardest part for me still. if you get as high under the top part as you can, you won’t have to jump, you can just hook it with your hammer.
I’ve just unlocked the fish mount in Pokemon Arceus, and I like the game a lot more now.
Thanks largely to mounts. The pre-mount languid on-foot speed didn’t fit the open world structure very well. You can’t even jump until you get a mount!
I’m playing with my 5y old kid and obviously his enthusiasm is contagious. We’ve started drawing pokemon too and it’s a lot of fun. It has made clear how much simpler gen 1 pokemon were overall (and easier to draw) and that has to be a part of why they’re more iconic? Golbat looks terrible but they haven’t made a funner one to draw TBH
Our current team is Typhlosion / Snorlax / Walrein / Tangrowth / Yanmega / Lumineon but anyone can be removed if we can find a bigger, stronger looking, dumber pokemon. I had to argue to keep Typhlosion on the team (out of bygone respect towards starter pokemon) but honestly she’s probably next on the chopping block as soon as we find a giant trash bag pokemon or whatever
Arceus is so underrated as a Pokemon thing. It does a lot of things right about that whole fantasy and it’s fun that people see Pokemon more closely to wild animals of any game.
Looking forward to the reception to other mounts.
Imo starters always block a spot for a more interesting pokemon in most games
Okay, I looked up how to do one section after beating it (THIS IS NOT CHEATING OKAY) so I could turn my 10% success rate into something more like 70%. Now I’m at the part with flying snowballs. So close but I have to call it for today because my swings aren’t working like they were in my first 15 minutes.
I finished Marathon 2 yesterday (no cheats required pleased to say!) It’s a great fps game, a really fun scifi adventure with some clever levels and much better encounter design. A huge improvement overall compared to the first. Like how the super shotgun feels emblematic of all the technological level ups in design and capability in Doom 2, you can see how Bungie added the super shotgun everywhere in Marathon 2. The production value is greater, the weapons feel markedly improved and useful or get usefully deployed by level designers with more nuanced ambitions and levels of ability. It’s an easy recommendation to make.
I do think Durandal lost a lot of the interesting friction I enjoyed as I played the first game. There are some intriguingly naive or ostensibly brave design choices on display in the first game that inspired a really tense horror vibe that I was obsessed by. The design of the levels and the way your weapons were tuned and the availability of resources or save locations helped transmute mystery about what’s behind the next corner or in the following room into imminent danger. The abstraction in the way M1’s level designers represented space ships is much like what id managed the first two episodes of Doom whose human-made qualities clashed provocatively with their apparent intentions to be used as offices or labs or… whatever the fuck. Who would build this, how would it be used, and how exactly is any of this meant to be navigated are stupid questions to ask maybe but belong to a wonderment that is at the core of one of my favorite aesthetic experiences that videogames have to offer.
Marathon 2 is a great shooter, but just less interesting perhaps for being a product of the 80/90s computer game drive to grow ever more and more high-tech. Marathon 2: Now With More Dog In it! I remember @hellojed you wrote somewhere else about your time playing Durandal recently that the scope of the levels in M2 (which are much bigger than M1) wouldn’t likely be permitted in a triple-A game these days. I think I’m making a somewhat related observation here, but a little at odds, because I think Marathon 2 is actually quite excessive. What I’ve found really striking between the level design of these two games is not how many meaningless additions to the golden-path through a level you could get away with back then, but that these two games offer a really instructional lesson in the conflicting values and experiences in the aesthetics of representation vs abstraction in games made by the same people only a year apart, if Doom and Doom 2 weren’t good enough examples already. Like, thinking of the giant waste of time Ubisoft games, there are so many “useless” or insignificant spaces proc-gen’d and gussied up with art afterwords, it feels like wastes of time is not really at odds with the technological increase we see with modern games: but there does seem to be a fear, an anxiety, or maybe in my least generous mood a lack of knowledge for how to design interesting experiences with depictions that are on their face abstracted and non-representational.
But anyway. Durandal is really great, I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. I had a blast playing it. And I am excited to try Infinite. I’ve heard rumblings that maybe I’ll get a kick out of Infinite for the exact reasons I’m left a little disappointed with Durandal.
