Might drop Marathon Infinity. Even the neat BSP work isn’t enough to overcome the frustrating level design. The story is neat but it’s hard to maintain narrative momentum if I’m stuck in a level for like 20 minutes trying to find a door that a switch opened.
The game shines when I have shotguns or the smg. Or it’s on the weird abstract levels. The voice lines that the fusion pistol BOBs have are entertaining and breathe life into the game.
That said, an uneven experience. Kinda wish they’d play Quake and take some notes idk
I’m sure in some universe there’s an incomplete Infinity mod that makes Marathon maps play like Quake maps. But I don’t want to be in that universe. I love the idiosyncrasies of these games way more than I mind being frustrated by them.
I made it to Poni Island in Pokemon Ultra Moon. I’m guessing that’s just over halfway through the game. Digging it, but also having a lot more trouble than I ever expected to have from a pokemon game again. Still, nothing top frustrating. Really just at the edge of annoyance, where the difficulty enhances the experience.
Am still plugging away at Cyberpunk and in a short period of time got hit by a GLaDOS cameo followed by a Scorpion one. I have no real point beyond that but I was caught very off guard; it also makes me wonder if these have been going on all game and I just missed them.
Yes, you have. The annoying side quest with the broken dick guy is some YouTuber, Grimes is in the game, Kojima is in the hotel lounge during the big heist rambling about ludonarrative possibilities in brain dance or some bullshit…
Yeah almost every single cultural reference in the game is Fallout 2 level total fucking dogshit. Like do I really need to pick up a data shard where they’re telling me my princess is in another castle. It’s embarrassing
fantasy life i is terrifying… i kind of liked the first one for somehow being kinda charming and a bit more inventive than you’d think within its very bleak remit (of basically being a depression game - “mmo stucture but without having to talk to anyone”). i guess if that was kind of piggybacking on the most ultraorthodox design tendencies of 2012 then this is what the 2025 version of that looks like, where in addition to “mmo minus mmo” it’s also kind of “gacha minus gacha”, “cosy minus cosy”… i’m not really familiar with the genre baselines so it’s funny to kind of sense they’re there just based on where you can feel the template creak. so yeah there’s the relatively dense and pleasantly small scale area design of the first one, and it’s one of three “worlds” where the others are respectively a base building / animal crossing island and a vast and empty “open world” zone full of the same three evil lizards and valuable rocks forever. there are mounts… there are towers… there are lootboxes and daily quests and other things that only sort of make sense if you try to imagine an origin point in genshin or something like that. i think i’m still only on the tutorial or else the work of connecting the layers (you need to progress in the main dungeon! you need a new villager to solve this obstacle! you need to go back to the island to pick flowers to unlock the villager! you need to build more buildings to unlock more flowers!) kind of condemns it to some state of eternal tutorial. it’s pretty mild in what it actually seems to expect (total disinterest in 90%+ of what you could conceivably do) it’s just that… it kind of feels like being in a very tidy warehouse where the walls perpetually vibrate in ways that make you know that somewhere nearby is a vast assemblage of terrifying machinery ready to pluck off an arm and throw it up into the rafters.
i do think the minigames by which stock fantasy careers sort of get recast into pseudobattles (against fish, big rocks, big vegetables etc) are still a nice enough touch to count for a lot. also, at a point where even the most bleakly extraction based games seem to feel enough vague shame to want to narratively sand off the obvious implications (uh, don’t worry, you’re not killing animals, you’re killing otherworld demons, that don’t belong in this… ecosystem) it is kind of funny to me to play a cutesy game that just asks you to “kill 15 apes” and doesn’t even make them particularly hostile, and where the trees and minerals you chop down seem to instantly respawn when you re-enter the room. land of cockaigne.
Unless something mind-blowing happens in this Mysterio side quest or the last sad side quest I’ve got left that Kotaku spoiled a while back, I think the final thing I gotta say about Spider-Man 2 is - it’s kind of impressive that they made a game that’s twice as big, with twice as many playable characters, and somehow feels like half the game the other two were*.
Had I bought a PS5 just for this I would have been pissed. Thank you, uh, “precarious and unsustainable gaming market that pushes Sony to port its games to PC when necessary.”
*This is the monkey paw curling to my complaining that the first Spider-Man was too long, and that the shorter and more concise Miles Morales felt better.
Edit: OK not gonna make another post on this, just wanna say the payoff to the Mysterio quest line was cool, and the sad quest was so cornily, heavy-handedly written that it ruined any gravitas it might have had.
I posted about it in the Saturn thread but many more hours later Magic Knight Rayearth and it continues to be a relaxing fun adventure.
This game does so much well I’m kinda disappointed in JRPG like games that came after it. Just having character perspective logs you can read / have read to you summarizing each major plot point is so nice. I feel like you could storyboard a whole game out in log format and then just present that back to the player with a voice over after each section. Turn your notes into features, game devs!
I like the Rayearth Anime at first but (in my memory of it) it turns into glowy power battles past a certain point. That doesn’t work in game format so it has had to maintain the fun and discovery aspects of the first half dozen episodes in terms of pacing and immediate stakes. (EDIT this is the worst sentence ever written, enjoy my weird brain) I haven’t read the Manga (yet) but this is shaping up to be my favorite way to consume Rayearth.
I like the world event where you have to ‘watch the race’ but you’re supposed to kill the hare in the tortoise and the hare race. but yeah my favorite part about it are the 100 step fetch quests you have to put yourself on if you like, want a new axe
if you leave them both alone then eventually the tortoise kills the hare with a spin attack! i really liked stumbling on this weird little semi story in an empty open world with the two or three little scripting features they had. my next favourite part was trying to mine a big rock and having dramatic boss music kick in replete with monk chanting
THE FINAL BOSS MUSIC FOR THE BIG TREES AND ROCKS AND FISH is so dramatic. the way they change their weakness spot too would always make me run out of SP at first but now I have three buddies of each job so I can destroy all civilized objects!
I have the music off now because I’ve been playing for over 80 hours but the RPG BOSS BATTLE music gets stuck in my head every time I hit a boss rock still
Good news I finally made it to the winners bracket on my 6th attempt. Turns out using the best deck in the game and having miffy coach you is the key to victory.
Just gonna warn you on this in case you haven’t tried it yourself yet: I’m pretty sure that you can’t trade over to use your Game Boy pokemon in the story mode until you’re in the post-game after beating the final boss. I think this mostly because they expect you to want to transfer mons out of the game instead since the ones you can catch are mostly Johto ones that you have no other way of getting in the Gen 3 games.
I’m sort of afraid to try Fantasy Life i because I have so many other games on my list and I know this one would be like a 150+ hour timesink.
I bounced off the 3DS game, but I think that might have been because at the time, I found it hard to commit to playing games on that system for long periods
Almost feeling like I should recommend Tale of Immortal…
I think the issue is that while all two and a half of the games are fairly well done they just kinda stay mostly the same? It is largely the same basic city, mechanically they add a few moves but the nuts and bolts of it all stays the same, like even by AAAA open world standards very little changes from entry to entry. Naturally this means you get diminishing returns while the budget swells to absurd levels (that one leak suggested they expect the budget for 3 to be about $385 million) while what they need is to either take a break or a chance, yet the budget almost makes that impossible.
Like knock them for whatever reason but the Batman Arkham games changed so much more between each mainline entry.
