And it looks ugly as hell!!
6 Likes
Yeeeah making camo changes fast eliminates the time punishment for doing it constantly. I think QOL adjustments on a Kojima game are a huge mistake.
It looks fine most of the time. Its not the the same vibe without the dusty haze but its not garbage. Its more readable to me than the HD collection which I think went too hard on trying to recreate the weird blur effect the original had.
Metal Gear Solid 3 PS2
Its almost weird how consistent the topography is right down the the copy-paste elements
Metal Gear Solid 3 HD
Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta
Hud changes def suck ass though and the FOV is kinda wonk.
I dont know why modern game = tiny shit hud.
I beat original flavor so many times I dont know if I need to play this or not.
I do wish I had an easy way to play it again on my current TV. the PS2 version doesnāt look great upscaled. The effects it uses look amazing on a CRT though. Maybe I just need a good CRT shader.
9 Likes
no, itās time to buy an overpriced 20in crt on ebay like me
8 Likes
i agree with this guy a lot of the time
seems like a pass, the changes they made seem worse than i had appreciated from limited exposure. certainly not something you should pay konami for. iāll play it if it comes to me for free at some point but i retract any vaguely positive sentiment attributed to this game
6 Likes
think a lot about the guy who ported snake from mgs3 to new vegas and the ps2 model holds up so well that it still looks good even though thatās a ps3 game
6 Likes
I still think the cutscenes from Silent Hill 3 look incredible. Granted I havenāt looked at them in a minute, but Iām sure they hold up. Konami was really onto something near the end of that generation.
8 Likes
Recently, Iāve caught up with the rest of my fan translation group so Iāve started playing more low-key games as a mental vacation. First started with this FPS roguelike called Roboquest. It doesnāt do much unique, but unlike every other roguelike fps game, shooting at guys feel good. The weapons sound nice when you shoot them and the enemies explode satisfyingly even though theyāre robots. Most importantly, bullets donāt seem to be made of rubber and bounce off the enemies. Its got really good reviews for a good reason.
Second game Iāve been enjoying is People Can Flyās Outriders. For a while Iāve been afraid to get into these live-service looter shooters, but the fact that the game is essientially static and its monetization is restrained, and completeing the game with a character wonāt take a lot of time lets me unwind and just enjoy the shooting and not worry about the game psychologically trying to get me to build my life around it.
As for the game itself? Its kind of like Gears of War + Destiny. Nothing groundbreaking, but its fun enough. Shame that a game as solid as this might one day might have its plug pulled.
8 Likes
Surprised people are against the idea of real-time camo swapping in MGS3 as a QOL improvement, thatās actually the first intriguing thing Iāve ever heard about the remake. Menu navigation for camo/healing/eating always really let the game down for me, even after I stopped trying to optimize camo so the flow of gameplay wouldnāt be interrupted so much. Octocamo in MGS4 makes me think that if the devs had been able to do camouflage in real-time in MGS3 they would have.
5 Likes
letās see, what have I been playing lately besides Nikki and some hollow knight. been firing fzero gx up in dolphin some. that game is so outrageously good, but itās not quite the same without the GameCube controller and the smash kids have ruined the native gamecube market for the rest of us. still, as far as GameCube games go that one is entirely unrivaled, only re4 compares and you donāt need GameCube for that one.
Also been getting into battle garegga, its obtuseness has scared me off of anything but very casual play in the past, but itās really not that hard to get into in the end. if you just stick to a couple rules you can manage rank well enough, and then you get to make decisions on the fly to compensate as you mess up, which is a very different feeling for a cave head. itās excellent. and of course the OST is absolute S tier, I think itās namikiās best work
11 Likes
well thatās because octocamo is future technology and the menus are an abstraction of snake taking the time to change uniforms and/or apply camouflage. if you can just magically change camouflages with a button press in mgs3 its not as cool to get octocamo because its old shit at that point
4 Likes
Iām back on one of my bullshits, playing any commercial modern retro 2D game. This time it is Gravity Circuit. Which has this lovely single-color palette for each sprite look and the sprites are really well done but the design of everything is too samey. They took the timing of the punches from Comix Zone of all things, which is an influence almost anyone else would miss, itās one of the best things about CZ.
Itās a megaman where you punch. Spacing is important because touching enemies DOES hurt you. That seems like a weird choice. You also have a grappling hook with Umihara-Kawase properties if it wasnāt elastic.
Itās a MegaManZero like where you collect people in the stages to make your base more lively. Your endstage bosses are your old comrades from the previous war. These conversations are remarkably fluffy for an invading army destroying a city and you being the lone member still on the good side. Every conversation goes long for far too long, of course.
Playing the game feels really good. I kept screwing up with the grappling hook because of DualSense Diagonals Iām gonna say. You can spend currency (there are like 4 currencies) to recharge at a checkpoint but also you have infinite retries. I havenāt mastered the moveset and donāt think I will/can. Maybe on a different controller. Similarly the bosses have a little too many things going on and felt like I had to tank hits constantly.
The timing for tells and warnings is real weird. There is a highway stage which might be the slowest stage in the game. Imagine a Mega Man stage that took half an hour (also my problem with MM11 but I like this more, barely.) there are these road hazards that appear on the 5th! (?) beat. Then missiles that appear on the 3rd. And enemy lasers that appear on the 2nd. I could not get my balance on it. Not like Wow Hard just āwhat do you want from me game!!!ā The biggest knock against it is I absolutely do not want to play that highway stage ever again in my life.
I also had to go into options to turn on double tap to run which blew my mind.
This is getting too long. I think the playtesters played the game too much. It is tuned for a normal person to play it, but I think it is only fun if you become a real sicko with the grappling hook which has some strange strange quirks that Iām not gonna further complain about.
The Messenger remains my favorite Modern Retro.
And real quick played that new Shinobi demo and I think there is a good stage based platformer buried in the Search Action-Upgrade game.
11 Likes
i watched most of this and i feel like he does a pretty good job explaining my misgivings with so many of these remakes in general. like same goes for RE4, Silent Hill 2, etc. these are just not games that need to be remade at all lol. it does at least seem like iāve seen gradually more antipathy to a lot of these remakes than i ever had witnessed in the past though, so maybe something is finally shifting there.
i will say i did watch one of his other videos and got a lot more youtuber brain from those (having weirdly specific grievances that come from having one way you look at everything with instead of trying to understand things from any kind of broader perspective). itās a good reminder why i generally donāt engage with the critical youtube sphere because itās either so 101 or filled with highly esoteric grievances.
4 Likes
this is his entire thing. if you play a lot of shmups you know this guy, because heās like The Shmup Guy, and itās only very recently that heās decided to branch into being the video essay critic going to bat for Every Old Game. which means now instead of being the guy who thinks every game has to be an arcade game or it sucks, which was his initial specific grievance schtick, heās decided to take the received old game cannon and retroactively justify every design decision behind every one of them, even when heās blatantly contradicting himself to do so.
itās not even like he has bad opinions or spurious reasoning, heās perfectly competent and passionate about old action games, heās just constantly arguing in bad faith and assuming his own conclusions. that was easier to handle when he only talked about shit he knew, but now he plays any old well liked game for the first time and does the same shit
8 Likes
If remakes have to exist, I wish folks would remake flawed games instead. I play so many curateās egg pc games from the 90s and I would love a Dark Earth remake or an Azraelās Tear remake more than anything but thereās barely even interest in rereleasing the original versions of these games (Dark Earth is still abandonware, Azraelās Tear finally became available again 3 months ago), let alone someone modernizing them.
10 Likes
SB itself is one these mine
3 Likes
As Electric Underground has branched beyond shmups over the past couple of years, heās been trying to take on the mantle of matthewmatosisās āno bullshit deep thinker on game designā youtuber.
Even with shmups and character action games (which are his wheelhouse), heās pretty black and white on what he thinks is good/not good, but his biases are way more apparent now. Every game, in his opinion, should ultimately cater to the high level player, as the true game doesnāt start until you are reaching for mastery. Games should make players fail repetitively and push them constantly to get better. He has very little interest in narrative beyond moment-to-moment visceral vignettes. This is obviously coming the perspective of shmups and arcade games - repetition and iteration across multiple playthroughs, not a single muddled playthrough experience.
Heās also a bit too āgamer brainā/āyoutuber brainā (as ellaguro wrote), every now and then he will regurgitate the usual āgame journalists donāt know how to play gamesā and āmodern games are for babiesā thoughts. Matthewmatosis never got in the mud like that and was a more conscientious speaker.
The thing is, Electric Underground is still pretty good in comparison to most other people talking/writing about games āprofessionallyā. There is often little bullshit in his videos - he gets to the point quickly, expresses himself clearly, and while his videos are a bit long they have a large amount of actual content (compare to most other gamer youtuber, where a 1 hour video can be summarized in a paragraph). When heās not letting his biases take over and when heās not talking about industry stuff, he can make good points about a gameās blindspots and issues with gameplay mechanics.
10 Likes
His Ninja Gaiden 2 rerelease analysis was actually pretty good since he went back to do a fairly detailed comparison of the different versions but he really seems to arbitrarily hate anything that was released after like 2009. Like I get that some design trends are sometimes overcorrecting with broadening their appeal but it often feels like nothing is ever good enough for him.
Feels like the exact same pros and cons of crowbcat
6 Likes
The thing that makes me laugh when I see an Electric Underground video come up is the way he words his video titles. For some reason the wording he uses gives me an āirrational exuberanceā vibe, but as bro gamer rage bait.
Not as goofy as Max Derrat, whose reviews for old PS2 games will have titles like āA Psychosexual Masterpieceā or āA Heidiggerian Nightmareā
9 Likes
i gotta say i think this is a misread
edit: iāll elaborate, itās early - not trying to be curt
crowbcat is reactionary gamer comedy, thereās effectively no criticism whatsoever
electric underground is relatively good criticism. iād tend to / likely agree with some of the takes here about some of his downsides given more exposure, but he has good insight in the videos iāve watched with the most interest (mostly this one and the resident evil 2 remake one).
3 Likes