Luckily a white journalist never made his career on American Colleges having an underground network for treating Yakuzas with cancer.
5 Likes
doesnât the ps4 remaster fix the localisation?
1 Like
it made 4âs a little worse so idk, waiting to see what K3 is like
1 Like
Same here, although for me slightly complicated by the fact that one of my best friends has for the past five years only played Yakuza games, and has done each of them like 3 times at this point. I canât keep on making up funny quips to respond to the screenshots he texts to me. Help
2 Likes
Iâm in the same boat regarding the Yakuza series, kind of. I started the very first game back on the PS2 and was enjoying it but I never finished it or kept up with the series and they just kept making and remaking them. I keep saying Iâll check out 0 or Kiwami or whatever the newest one is but I never do.
1 Like
Pirate is hovering at the top of my wishlist but I am in no rush. Ainât no way Iâm giving Kiwami 3 any time of day. Feels great to be free of the need to play anymore remakes.
3 Likes
started playing rainworld again. this is maybe my third or fourth attempt, and each time i get a little farther and i like it a little more.
i play a lot of traditional roguelikes where you can lose hours and hours of progress with one mistake, so I was surprised with myself when my previous attempts at playing rainworld ended in intense frustration. after giving it more thought, the main difference is that rain world requires a LOT of trial and error. for roguelikes or competitive games if i donât understand something i just look it up (and with newer roguelikes, this information is usually readily available in the game itself). but gaining understanding seems to be core to the experience of rainworld, so instead of looking things up i would just quit instead.
this time i started a file with a friend who was visiting from overseas â weâre both pretty stubborn, so two people tackling the same difficult problem meant that it was rare we were both discouraged at the same time, so we made a lot of forward progress even in the face of some pretty devastating setbacks. after about 5 hours of play, we had gotten father than i had ever been in the game.
after he left, i couldnât stop thinking about the game so i picked up the file from where we left off and iâm kind of hooked again.
itâs incredible the game sells the scale of an eroding megastructure as well as it does, and in 2d! some of it is the super detailed ecosystem & creature AI, some of it is the scale of the areas, and some is this ânoisyâ art style that implies even more detail than it has to actually show. but all that culminates into this really grounded sense of place, and emphasizes a feeling that very few video games manage to accomplish: this huge detailed world doesnât care about you â neither the character nor the player.
this approach is of course super alienating. rainworld often feels unnecessarily cruel and unfair. almost nothing is explained. hours of trial and error can lead you down an incorrect path, and attempting the return trip can be even worse (people complaining about being stuck a few hours in on steam forums or reddit are often instructed to start over completely, as thatâs likely the path of least resistance).
and the game is fucking scary. it very often gets extremely visceral reactions from me, and those havenât really stopped, even as i start to understand how a lot of the game mechanics work. despite being and looking like a couple of physics balls, your slugcat manages to be incredibly expressive. the floppy physics sell getting death rolled by a lizard in a way that feels almost gory, even though no blood or entrails are depicted. drowning forces your character to swim upward, defying your inputs, and if you manage to escape the water, the cat shudders and pants, its whole body heaving up and down 10x faster than normal as it desperately gasps for air. throw animations are snappy â a near-instant motion blur smear â which makes fights these quick bursts of movement that end in a sudden lifeless slump to the ground.
itâs definitely a beautiful intricate game and a largely unique experience but it absolutely asks too much of the player so itâs very hard to recommend without caveat.
were i giving my past self advice on how to approach the game: learning how to play this game (or even a new area in this game) requires a ton of trial and error. donât be afraid to experiment and die over and over. yes, certain gates care about how many consecutive days youâve survived, but those are just to prove mastery once youâve gathered enough information. split your play into two distinct goals - âright now iâm experimentingâ vs. âright now iâm trying to make progressâ and that will take some of the edge off of the frustrating elements.
17 Likes
played this one just then. it IS cute
3 Likes
Geofferyâs doing some awards show and gifted humanity a Pragmata demo
Pragmata is a good ass video game
two-hemisphere game
play Vanquish while you run a maze to hit the most squares
yelling and screaming about what looks like 2026âs lone good AAA vidcon (all other games are lies or got delayed)
7 Likes
PS1 Namco Museum?
3 Likes
Cocoon is really knocking my socks off. The aesthetics/vibe are very My Shit, the puzzles are reasonably tricky but no real stumpers. I really like the whole recursive world thing it has going on.
You lug around orbs which act as power cores, powering various doors, bridges, etc. They also have different search-action style key abilities: reveal hidden paths, dematerialize barriers, etc.
The rub: Your little bugman can only carry one orb at a time. The orbs also have worlds inside of them. Place the orbs on special pedestals and you can dive inside of them. You can carry orbs into one another, both so you can use them to explore the orb worlds, and as a way to get around the one-orb carrying limit. Best part is the game tells you absolutely none of this, there is no turorializing whatsoever. Doesnât even tell you which button is the Action Button â when you press it without an action to perform, the bugman just sort of shifts/shrugs a little, it hardly screams YES PRESS THAT ONE or anything.
There are boss battles in each orb world, in the Zelda style but puzzle-ish because you have no direct means of attacking. One of my favorite things about them is they donât kill you if they get a hold of you, they just chuck you the hell out of the orb world which is so insulting in a dragged-out-of-the-bar-by-a-bouncer way. Great stuff.
The progress indicator says Iâm 40% in after about 3 hours or so, so Iâm also glad to see this game wonât overstay and stretch its mechanics too thin.
12 Likes
the pragmata demo is really testing the limits of how much shit I hate you can dump into a game while still maybe being good
6 Likes
Thatâs it. : )
1 Like
iâve been slowly working my way through mostly vanilla STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl for the first time and i had a ridiculous moment recently where i accidentally got into a gunfight with a Duty guy who was trying to shoot wild dogs but i thought was firing at me. i killed the hell out of that guy and the dogs responded by summoning all their friends and trapping me on top of a rock.
there were like 12-14 of them circling around the rock, occasionally stopping to try and form a Dog Stack and get up to chomp me. i am trying to avoid killing dogs so my only recourse was to try and sprint away from them as attempts at scaring them off werenât taking. as you can imagine, i got incredibly fucked up doing this
(moments before my health went to 5 pixels wide)
eventually i got away from the dogs only to realize that thanks to my encounter with that Duty guy earlier, everyone at the Duty checkpoint wanted me dead. i snuck around them and back out to the Bar hoping that this was just a local issue but no, everyone there wanted to fuck me up bad too. i had a quest i needed to turn in so i decided to Start Blasting, carrying out a completely unnecessary nightime raid on the Duty HQ, resulting in me hitting the quickload button more times than i can remember and the tragic death of Get Out Of Here Stalker guy and beloved funnyman Georg Burnt
at least Danya Anaconda still likes me
i managed to turn that quest in then shot my way back out of Duty HQ heading off to meet those scientist guys in Yantar. i have a silly orange suit now.
20 Likes
I was laughing like a maniac the other day because I was playing after you told this story, arrived in Dark Valley in the midst of an enormous pile of enraged dogs and found myself trapped on the very same rock with Bullet yelling at me to get my ass over to him, totally oblivious to the blob of killer dogs because heâs a dumbfuck dutyer while I was getting torn apart. stalker is the best game ever. you can imagine every story being told around the campfire
9 Likes
Thief 2 is done. I really liked it. The variety of objectives and mission scenarios were very refreshing and often surprising, keeping the game interesting even during some of its worst moments. I wish there was a little more presence of the supernatural. It felt like the game swung too far in the other direction of being mostly grounded in the world of humans, though I guess the mechanist presence is this gameâs counterbalance. Sadly I also fucking hated the mechanist enemies. And though I really want to be contrarian with every opinion Iâve read online about the final level Sabotage at Soulforge, I cannot abide it myself. Getting nailed in the head by fourteen exploding and heat tracking volleyballs by the large walkers for an hour and a half was more of Thief 2âs worse qualities than I can stomach. Still, the significance of that level and the grim threat its ambiance implies is great.
7 Likes
itâs fitting that in thief 1âs (the one with more fantasy creatures and tombs and dungeons) last level you go to hell and in thief 2âs (the one with banks and apartments and museum levels) last level you also go to hell (get a job in a factory)
11 Likes
got the platinum trophy in TimeSplitters 1, still trying to finish the campaign on Hard, tho.
iâve been playing some Red Dead Redemption 1. âsalright i guess. you can really feel the gta iv engine on this thing.
CrossOver for Mac is pretty fun, I played a bunch of Control on my MacBook Air. ran way better than it had any right to! i guess the GPU in the M4 can do a lil ray-tracing, huh.
7 Likes
Finished Far Cry 6.
Itâs funny that this one has two of my favorite characters in the series (Dani Rojas and Diego Castillo), makes you empathize with them, and then completely fails to stick the landing.
Deeply hollow game. Going through the motions, unwilling or unable to break free of the legacy of its predecessors. Weâre a long way from the excellent story of 2, or even the serviceable one of 4. All thatâs left is an endless open-world playground where the solution to every scenario is a silenced weapon with armor-piercing ammunition. All these tools, all these stories, all for nothing. Donât you want to keep killing?
I genuinely hope this is the last one they ever make.
8 Likes