bypassing every (legitimate) criticism of BF as a whole to instead take issue with portraying a series where you can jump out of a plane mid-loop de loop, fire a bazooka in midair and fall back into your plane as a “milsim”
if it wasn’t for me shooting a wall yesterday, I was convinced every gun in BF6 had the same recoil pattern (which is fine, please make all the dumb lasers always fire up and to the right)
it has all of the BC2 things except for player-run dedicated servers
Case of the Golden Idol was good. Little Puzzle game that maybe dealt with the evils of the modern world just enough that I don’t want to play the DLC/Sequel.
Battlefield 1942 was 23 years ago. It’s absurd to fault someone for thinking a modern military FPS is repulsive. The gun barbie shit is a great way to remind the player of pure misery.
see when I read “milsim” I think like Arma or Operation Flashpoint or Squad. BF is just as dumb a version of “portrayal of time period war as virtual paintball” as CoD is, except it shifts some of the dumb from movement to “there are vehicles sometimes”. which is to say my issue is purely mechanical and detached from aesthetics
also we never stopped being stupid. we’ve always been stupid
(the fact that the 2042 kill was from a trailer and the BF6 trailer has “sticking C4 to a drone and flying it next to what you want to die” shows that Dice knows how stupid their game is and the correct kind of ingeniously insane their playerbase is)
this is complete hair splitting. to the average person all this shit looks the same
milslop
are milsim fans milsimps?
Absolutely
milsimps make up an unfortunate amount of mainstream american and british culture
didn’t we have a thread for random IA finds
played the Shinobi: Art of Vengeance demo. it’s…fine? idk. i will play through it a few more times and really try to dig in there and see how i feel about it. i think the main problem that exists here is that i think Shinobi III is the best Super Shinobi game and also one of the greatest action platformers ever created, so creating a game that is clearly very inspired by that game is affecting my feelings about it.
so, good stuff:
stuff i’m iffy about:
anyway, i think in the long run i will enjoy this game for what it is, but as a Shinobi game i remain on the fence.
yeah I know, I’m just using it as shorthand for any game that fetishizes the military, military tech, and/or the act of being a grunt. part of this is a genuine confluence between gamers, game designers, and military bullshit, but some of it is also just modern psychology-pilled dopamine-hit design, where everything has to make you feel good at all times, everything is progress, all the sounds and flashy messages and popups and voice lines emphasize how much you’ve accomplished for spending your $70 and how much more you’re about to accomplish every second. these things are both independently gross, but put together you can really see the effect they’ve had on a certain type of person.
damn i feel old now
Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is the same kind of workhorse retro game that the studio previous made with Oniken and Odallus. Oniken was one of the first on Steam of “look its like a new NES game.” That’s obviously become a crowded field.
Now I like it is more balanced like an NES game none of it requires precision of your moveset. On the other hand none of it has a moment of complete bullshit like games of the time actually had. In the driving stages you get 3 equally spaced jump hazards in a row. There doesn’t seem to be a hard mode, just a one hit dead mode.
For a game with maybe 700 words of text I did notice two typos.
That said it is good. Nice CRT filter. Absolutely no-nonsense. Despite being cyberpunk-throwback did not annoy me at all because it never hung a hat on it. It was just subtle enough that it was “a video game.” Great 2 hour purchase if it is on sale.
Way better than most of the modern-retro games I play and come to complain about, and yet also I can’t really say anything about it.
more NOLF… monolith always did really good construction sites for some reason. i feel like the game picks up a couple levels in and with a couple exceptions (like the german hotel), most of the best areas so far are the ones that feel most drably functional, the docks and construction site and a bleak feeling british warehouse. the levels in england are my favourite so far… you’re there to check out a mysterious and possibly crazed captain of industry, which is the plot of like 50% of all avengers episodes. but then the actual levels turn out to be so overcast and grim, industrial parking lots and concrete highrises against vast grey skies, that it’s sort of like stepping out of the 60s and into the 70s, or a different version of the 60s than the swinging spy one the rest of the game is playing with, like a quick aesthetic detour into ken loach or something. anyway, glad to have some lowkey levels as a break before the next mission in the glamourous, sun-swept locations of (checks roster) seattle
Monolith was in a rich strip mall office park suburb of Seattle, pretty much. Lots of parking lots & grey skies. ^ _^
This photo sort of undermines that last part but nevermind
Today I put a new 72 pin connector into my old NES, the one I got in 1989, and got it running again. It took some finagling, but I got the controller to eventually work, though hitting start requires some added pressure. And so I played what is now the 4th version of Zanac I’ve messed with, and man, it’s pretty good on the old NES.
I solved the daily Clues by Sam (Aug 17th 2025) in less than 11 minutes
Now this is more like it… almost feels like Sokoban for teens instead of Sokoban for babies
