Though I have enjoyed and respected Helldivers 2 since its release I have done what I’ve always done with coop games and only ever played it with friends. Until like 2 weeks ago, when I suddenly started playing it every day with randos, which works out well probably like 70% of the time. I have no idea why I started doing this. It’s not making me enjoy the game any less, which is surprising. I dunno, there are ways in which, ironically, my own mind becomes even more opaque to me as I get older.
13 Likes
yeah think this is a common experience, or at least i’ve talked to my friends about it recently and they seem to experience it too. i don’t mean specifically the helldiver multiplayer experience i mean being surprised by what i like despite assuming i won’t.
i certainly wasn’t this way when i was younger. guess it took me a while before i could accept i don’t have perfect predictive knowledge about the world and should let the experience dictate my reaction to it rather than some preconceived notion of it. it’s very easy to unknowingly participate in self-fulfilling prophecies.
it has had a softening effect on my grumpiness too. it’s hard to stay as pessimistic when your pessimism is often proven wrong. that said there is still a lot in the world to be pessimistic about but pessimism as my default reaction is deployed less than it used to be, even though if pressed i’d have to admit my perception of the trajectory of society is primarily negative.
7 Likes
there’s some weird mismatch between how the game presents itself and how it feels to play. i think it wants to feel loose and exploratory but the biking part is so stiff and lacks expression that it ruined the vibe for me pretty quickly.
4 Likes
the vtmb unofficial patch plus lets you pick a history for your character which is a cut feature, and if you spend your stat points then take off the history it unintentionally duplicates your points and you can spend them again. i thought you should get a stat bonus for picking Homosexual, because you don’t, so I simply didn’t take it and took the extra points instead as compensation. except smilin jack immediately took me to task for going back into the closet for stat reasons and I had to start the game over. thank you wesp5, this is so much more normal than fixing the character creation screen so it doesn’t duplicate your stat points
15 Likes
I started up The Talos Principle 2 and am a bit taken aback at how much more story/world centric it is than the original so far. I think I legit went an hour between puzzles which is… not what I expected.
5 Likes
this fuckin rocks I shoulda done a plus patch playthrough instead of a nosferatu basic patch for my current replay
6 Likes
9 Likes
That was the best moment of that whole game by far! The spirit of Yakuza is alive in Midgar.
6 Likes
it’s funny playing a game that’s like Bioware level horny despite having like, real actors and a much more TV-grade production pipeline. it definitely could not pass for not videogame dialogue but it’s pretty endearing
3 Likes
and, writing aside, it’s structurally pretty novel… even though it’s being pedigreed and presented as basically a Telltale game, in practice it’s like a combination of 13 Sentinels and Promise Mascot Agency that just happens to look like a combination of calarts style and rotoscoped animation. it borrows the exact same dispatcher mechanic from the latter, except instead of having you do weird 3D platforming in between dispatcher segments it’s almost closer to 13 Sentinels’ alternating visual novel and tower defense chapters.
I’m honestly not sure what made me take the plunge, I’m not a telltale head from way back, but I’m impressed with it. it’s one of those situations where it’s probably only in the top 10-15 games I’ve played this year if I include sequels or stuff I know isn’t really that great relative to how much I liked it, but more like top 5 if weighted for structural novelty and scope.
3 Likes
I am about halfway through Outer Worlds 2 now and it is absolutely just Avowed with 30% worse combat and 30% better roleplaying. I’m not entirely sure this is a great tradeoff because Avowed had unusually great combat and very mediocre roleplaying, and the result here feels less exceptional in general. that said, the world design and quest writing and such are imo still vastly better than either Outer Worlds 1 which I put down a few hours in or Starfield which I put down a few hours in or last decade’s Bethesda/Obsidian efforts; these games being pleasant enough to move around in is a very novel phenomenon that I don’t mean to diminish by them being structured as very comfort food-y modern single player RPGs. the fact that they had 2 of these in them in one year definitely speaks to a very stable pipeline and if not for KCD2 demonstrating that this genre can still be actually ambitious would have very little competition.
5 Likes
worse combat better roleplaying makes it sound like I might be pretty apologetic towards it. Avowed’s combat was not nearly good enough for me to overlook how dreadful the writing and RP was
too bad it’s microsoft
5 Likes
I have four gym badges now, and have beaten two of I think six Team Star bases and two of five Titan pokemon. That seems to be roughly halfway through the game. I encountered and beat the gym leader Larry, a normal type gym leader who became instantly beloved for having a crushed soul and a miserable existence
I’m still not even a little bit happy with my current team, I think I like two of my six pokemon, but things keep moving forward so whatever. I will say that catching pokemon is fun again for the first time since Gen 1. That is one thing they managed to get absolutely correct somehow and I don’t even know how, I don’t know what they even changed.
5 Likes
I need a battle removed FF7R so I can see some of this stuff and play bad mini games.
There has to be a 9999 damage mod right?
2 Likes
if you can sift through all the AI TIFA JUGGZ gooner shit there are cheat mods yes. from when i looked before i started this playthrough that’s basically all there were, nobody has even figured out how to port cloud’s dress into it
7 Likes
One of the worst parts about looking at mods for any new game that has a pair of tits in it is how rapidly impossible it becomes to find anything interesting on the nexus
9 Likes
The Switch 2 and Xbox releases in January will have some toggles to make the battles trivial, I believe. Dunno if those will get patched to PS and PC.
2 Likes
16.2 hours in. This is my current team, which is still not good, and I still don’t care:
I’ve gotten all the sandwiches/sentient motorcycle powerups, but have not gone back to the lab yet. I have five gym badges and have defeated four of the five Team Star bosses. The last boss battle was against what may have been the strongest type team against my team, against a full team, all of which were ten levels above my pokemon. I still somehow won, and between that and everything else my immediate, tragic feeling was “this is an iPad game”.
I do appreciate that, like Deadpool 2, a franchise beneath serious attention has taken it upon itself to breach the subject of child abuse in a serious but occulted-through-stupidity kind of way. I mean that sincerely, I am glad there is literally any media that discusses how adults fail children. But I just don’t see Pokemon remaining worth it.
5 Likes