the hunter!
i reviewed it but i’m on my phone so you’ll have ro get the link yourself
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Oh, interesting. I don’t know this one.
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yeahhhh the hunter!! what a weird game - we knew it as battle hunter
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ADACA: very indie FPS that straddles the line between love letter to and derivative of a lot of the big shooters of the past 20 years. The campaign’s got:
Half-Life 1 (G-man stuff, except)
Control (the G-man at the end talks the same way as The Board with a big dark thing in the sky, a sphere instead of an inverted pyramid this time)
Half-Life 2 (Alyx companion, gravity gun, CP cops with beeps, combine weirdoes, same blue-white flare on some machinegun bullets, balance between setpiece battles and quiet excursions between little points of interest, a “white gravity gun” section at the climax of one chapter)
Halo (2 primary gun slots, which makes fighting feel a lot less HL-like, and robot guys that look like Master Chiefs lol)
STALKER (literally the same anomalies as environmental hazards, a place literally named the Exclusion Zone with wacky physics)
I really enjoyed it frankly, despite occasional near-eyeroll levels of “yes, ok, I get it, I’ve seen this before.” There’s got to be like 2 dozen different guns, or more, which I really appreciated running through, although of course I developed favorites. There are secrets that it does not tutorialize and I didn’t figure out the shape and form of until most of the way through the game. It’s more mysterious than it seems, which is one of my favorite things I can say about a game. All wrapped up in a flat-shaded, low-poly package, sometimes a little too simple-looking for my taste but generally attractive. And NO VOICE ACTING JUST TEXT BOXES, which like, you get 3000 points right there.
It has a really great sense of space and tons of highly varied level design that leverages different enemy types really well… just incredibly solid, could almost be a Valve episode, definitely the second best HL2 fangame I’ve ever played by a huge long shot (behind G-String, of course).
But all that’s only… half the game? There’s a whole other game in here. There’s two games in this game. This other game is called “Zone Patrol”, it’s right there on the main menu, and the little description made it sound like a kind of roguelite/horde mode, but it’s not that at all - it’s STALKER, like the names implies. It takes all the same mechanics and enemies and so forth from the campaign and makes a HUGE new map, no reused level design (although assets are of course), and lets you free explore, with TONS of totally untutorialized puzzle solving. A monitor displays a certain warehouse, you try to figure out where it is, remember the number, find a piece of equipment you need to repair another thing over there… all these threads, woven together and piled on top of each other throughout this, I really cannot stress this enough, huge and multiply-connected map…
I dunno, it really shocked me how much work clearly went into it after finishing a whole traditional single-player campaign. This game has a HL2 and a STALKER inside of it… what the hell… a surfeit of riches.
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Wasn’t interested in this until now. Every fps released after 2004 was inspired by hl2 so thats a meaningless selling point but that it contains a free roaming stalker mode has got my attention
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I didn’t mean to imply it was a selling point; actually what I’m trying to say is that despite the idea of aping HL2 being boring, it executes so well that it’s still a really good game worth playing.
Also there’s “inspired by HL2” like COD4 or whatever and then there’s… this. It’s a lot more than inspired by, lol.
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damn that would of been sick as hell if cod ended with g-man recruiting captain price to fight the combine
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I am not sure how this is possible without cheats unless enabling them somehow made the game harder. It was very very hard and not fun to get past certain levels without granting me ammo or health. being able to save wherever is what got me through some levels because redoing whole tedious firefights with limited ammo really sucked.
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Holy shit, I got over it. I love you Bennett Foddy. (Has there ever been a person’s name so perfectly matched with their life’s work?)
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started playing final fantasy 7 1997 on duckstation… got a version that has a retranslated script and uses the final fantasy 6 SNES font.
playing on a desktop CRT with a CRT shader and a grain shader i think it looks nice lol and even better in motion… these are direct screenshots from the emulator, not photographs as i’ve posted recently
it’s crazy how elongated the pacing of the remake is, i think it’s kind of both the vice and the virtue of it, it’s like the fully acted TV drama version where a huge proportion of the screentime is mostly dedicated to expanding the shipping wars, cute interactions between characters, etc., i obviously like this and think it’s a lot of fun but it’s clearly pretty different from FF7 '97, which feels like a SNES game with polygons and pre-rendered backgrounds basically (this really feels like such a direct followup to FF6 and chrono trigger! also the silly little map models of the characters look like lowpoly versions of the SNES game sprites)
basically it seems like every plot point in the original game is expanded to be roughly four times as long in the remake
i will say the music is much better in the PS1 game.
the famous “crossdressing cloud” part is so good in both the original and the remake lol… this is what videogames need more of, wacky old hollywood situations like crossdressing on a date with your love triangle imo
i’m always struck by how like effective the techniques of 90s games are… the pre-rendered backgrounds look soooooo good, they’re so evocative and have this like painterly quality to them… they remind me of the matte paintings that were quite common in american film production basically until the 21st century (a technique which remains extremely effective imo)
i’ve also talked about how i think that as a technique for conveying dialogue i think the text box has become extremely underrated and underused especially at the scale of like megacorp game development, and i often feel that for as much as voice acting seems to incur huge costs in terms of time, effort, cost of production, as well as storage space, and whatever else, it’s not always appreciably “better” imo than text boxes (thinking of how pointless the addition of voice acting to games like final fantasy tactics and shin megami tensei nocturne in re-releases of those titles seems to be…)
i think that death stranding and ff7 remake are both really good at being fully acted TV drama games and i like how voice acting is almost entirely decoupled from character animation in fromsoft games…
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how’s the re translation?
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it seems completely fine but i’m not especially loyal to the original english script or anything
save files seem compatible between both so it might be an enjoyable experience to switch between them from session to session lol…
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played a bunch of Mosa Lina, some of the most fun I’ve had with local co-op.
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Deltarune (Switch): so this is the Rebuild to Undertale’s Evangelion, then?
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i played through all of IMMORTALITY recently. i know there’s a thread from a couple years ago so i might post there too but i probably have an essay reflecting on it + some other things i’ve been thinking about lately coming at some point.
i think overall my feeling is it’s both a really unique project of a scope and scale i’ve never really seen before that is a real step forward for interactive cinema type games and its reflections on different era of film are really fascinating and wide-ranging… but also some of the game designy elements and more meta/secret elements to the story kinda didn’t work so well for me. maybe that’s not important for what the project is able to achieve but it also makes me think there are a lot more places to go and things to work on there. there’s way more to talk about and unpack than something like Her Story even if i think it’s slightly less successful as an overall game experience though.
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Because it is one of my favorite games and I can talk about it without spoilers: How often did your mind change? How much did you think about the game between sessions?
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what do you mean by this specifically?
also i only played it in two long sessions over a couple of days, but i did look up further writing/videos about the game after and have thought about it a lot overall since.
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lmao @ the samples in this
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Playing through the remake at the moment, and it keeps reminding me of the 2024 Sword and Fairy TV series for this very reason. Where they basically stretched a 15-ish hour game into 40 hours and had to keep doing repetitive plot contrivances to keep the main couple together longer, and a guy who has like 2 lines of dialogue is now a major character etc.
I just got to the crossdressing part yesterday and find it funny how most people’s idea of a remake of this game for years was probably “like really serious and mature and stuff” and this is what we get lol.
I feel like I’m not a fan of the combat system. The ATB system just means you’re waiting forever when you need to use a healing item or spell, otherwise you’re constantly interrupting the flow to choose things on a menu. I blame this game for every Chinese action RPG having super long cooldowns on item usage (although I think Gujian 3 came out before this…)
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