Let me introduce you to a wonderful and wonderfully dumb world called professional wrestling, the realm of theater kids that liked to work out.
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I have a sneaking suspicion that there is the slimmest of chances that the next FF will go back to turn based, but maybe thatâs just my imagination. I feel like XVI didnât do as well as theyâd hoped and seeing how hyped everyone has been for Expedition 33, I canât help but feel like maybe that will push the needle.
I was listening to the FFVI soundtrack the other night and I think the thing FF has been missing a little bit in recent releases is the series used to really set the bar for what games could do next, ie they were always punching above their weight, a little overambitious and doing something just barely. XVI was fun to play, but it felt like a very safe maneuver. I wonder if they have the wherewithal and ability these days to get back to that.
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if iâm being cynical i think clair obscurâs biggest impact on ff17 is âconfirmation that no one will care if we use genAIâ and iâm not sure squenix has it in them to do creatively interesting things with menus anymore but it would be cool to see and be proven wrong! i canât really wrap my head around what a current day squenix blockbuster being overambitious and punching above its weight would look like though, what do you have in mind?
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donât threaten me with a good time
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What is football if not a theatrical adaptation of war
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The way this conversation has gone, we are in spitting distance of a pierre menard style recreation of Huizingaâs Homo Ludens
All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the âconsecrated spotâ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.
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Played through the Dialblo 4 expansion and finished the story. I know that Diablo doesnât have much there but I felt like there was so little story in this expansion. It stopped just as soon as it felt like stuff was going to happen.
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Final Fantasy XVII will probably be HD-2D.
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I did come up with âsport is just theaterâ before I read Homo Ludens, and then read it and felt it was confirmation, and that âplayâ covers a far wider space than gets formally recognized.
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Recently beat Control, which has an immaculate set of vibes but suffers a lot of drag from itâs painfully triple A gameplay. Crafting systems, +9% to aimed damage, pointless skill trees, collectathon side quests, the works. Combat feels mindless, with bullet sponge enemies that can kill you in seconds. Most of my enjoyment came from the aesthetics of the levels, the log writing and Dr. Darlingâs videos. The setting is just so captivating that the gameplay doesnât end up mattering much. Iâll absolutely play the sequel for the production value and writing, but by the end of my play through I was really sick of the fighting. Canât imagine missing this any time soon.
Started playing Stephenâs Sausage Roll. Beat the first 5 puzzles. My brain hurts. I miss Control.
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Things unpuzzled in Picross S9:
- Girl with a Pearl Earring
- Johann Sebastian Bach
- Assorted bladed weapons
- A cloche, which was not a thing I knew of by name
- A varied tit
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I was playing no one lives forever because you know beloved game and you can get it from that site so for the first time maybe ever a shogo era lithtech game just starts without problems in windows 10. you get a few levels in and you realize exactly why people like talking about the first one more than playing it. monolith, making a game that has heart but is poorly thought out???
the stealth is fucking horrible. I should have probably put it on easy instead of normal because itâs a monolith game from the year 2000. the way noise propagates is strange, you canât lean around corners, quiet weapons arenât as quiet as you think, itâs really fucking annoying. I karate chopped a guy in the back to knock his ass out and this was so loud I might as well have unloaded a gun in the ceiling because every thug in the hotel came barreling down the stairs at me. they straight up can hear you do shit thatâs supposed to be quiet through walls an entire floor above you. you will accidentally miss so many of the conversations because of this but itâs fine because honestly very few of them so far have been more than mildly amusing. you have to rp walk everywhere because running is incredibly loud and guys in completely different rooms will get agitated. cate used to be a cat burglar and isnât in a rush apparently
i stopped at the berlin level where you canât set off the alarm or the elevator you need stops working because the way it wants you to be sneaky but that mostly involves shooting guards in the head when they arenât in the view of a camera is like the most boring early 2000s game bullshit imaginable. oh yeah let me sign on again for the worst level of red faction, my favorite
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Luckily thereâs absolutely nothing going to go wrong there, just serve your shift as a waiter and watch the end credits roll
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Oh and learn how to drive a taxi, just in caseâŚ. 
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Donât worry it still has bizarre problems (it wonât launch at all if I have my headphones plugged in so every time I play, I have to unplug them, launch the game, and plug them back in)
When I last replayed the game, I found the stealth pretty easy to manage so long as I aggressively abused the most powerful gadget in the game: the coin. The coin is like hitting a wall with a dart in deus ex, it makes the AIs obsessed with tracking it down and they ignore other noises much more readily while they are on mission: coin. Also helps you get a sense for how large their hearing range is and how material dependent it is
I would say nolf has slightly more nuanced stealth mechanics than deus ex but much sloppier than thief
NB thereâs a hidden skill system in the game, if you collect enough intel on a mission you get upgrades and how effective your stealth is depends on doing really well on earlier missions
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i could swear crystar is a vita game but apparently its never been on the system. kind of unsatisfying 3d action thing where you run through abstracted heavy asset reuse stages awkwardly beating on monsters but also you are 15, you kinda lost it and murdered your sister sort of accidentally but its ok small girl demons have promised you can revive her if you exterminate stray souls for them. its like, in that madoka/magical girl site brand of oh god put the girls through misery. flashes of negative thoughts from the spirits youâve killed harass you at home. you can go back to the real world but choose to never leave your room. theres a dog and you can pet and hug to soften the bad feelings slightly. you cry to turn the ghost feelings into some kinda weapons? thereâs an adult woman who makes inappropriate passes at you and sheâs your very first party member now you can tag during fights. when you repeat kill stronger ghosts you unlock gradual parts of horrible stories like its yoko taro weapons
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I finally loaded up the PS2 on PS4 Siren (itâs cool they got rid of the branding to just hide these are old games running in a shitty emulator.) that asside Siren looks incredible. Back to the shitty emulator, this ps2 game in an emulator is a whooping 23 gigs because it includes ISOs of every region. So if you put your system language to Japanese you can play the Japanese version with Japanese voices.
The Japanese voice acting is not better than the British dub. Youâd think since the face model/mocap/voice actors are all the same person it would be better. It is honestly a Shenmue situation. The British dub leans literal on the Japanese performance. One Or two of the actors have VA experience clearly, but the others seemed to have been given no direction just read the lines. Anyways that was a surprise. I think it stands out in both dubs because the mocap and visuals and sound design are so good.
The game fucking rocks too. What an awesome thing. 78 God Damn Levels! What a Video Game this is. They are Video Game Levels despite this being a spooky horror stealth show. Iâve played through this version twice before. The amazing trick is your fear and lack of knowledge cranks up the difficulty (at least until the little girl levels, which I am sure are difficult.)
What an incredible huge video game. I think I still prefer Blood Curse because that is Siren: The Video Game which is just easier to deal with. Siren 1 is so intense and obtuse for its entire run time. Thanks to this port I am taking so many god damn screen shots.
I love how the PS2 on PS4 visual options are DEFAULT, RETRO, ARCADE MODERN, ARCADE RETRO. What the fuck does any of that mean Sony Europe? Ah yes we are all familar with ARCADE MODERN (???) Anyways play on default because the others just darken the image with shitty fake scanlines from what I can tell.
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Christ the options were worse than what I incorrectly remembered.
Hello my arcade gamers (at home, on PS2???)
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rise of the tomb raider update: this game is like almost twice as long as the first one. I discovered the lost invaluable formula for greek fire and lara immediately traded it away to a villager for a single suit of plate mail.
live reaction from all of laraâs advisors in total war attila
lol that rediscovering greek fire mainly benefits lara in the sense that you can now mix super byzantine molotovs out of the hundreds of discarded jack daniels bottles in Siberia. which by this point in the game is totally useless because I have explosive arrows, a real grenade launcher, incendiary shells and napalm arrows. this game has no less than four different AOE attacks that instantly kill entire groups of enemies btw and the most efficient/available one you get almost immediately after the prologue. everything after the poison arrows is completely unexciting because of this. the game is so excited to give you dozens of ways to kill people that are totally unnecessary cuz lara is already a murder machine (they give you a combat knife that like triples her takedown distance when you are up high, like okay, did she really need that???) that they totally forget that it would have been cool if she had a complete traversal moveset from the start they could have designed the game aroundâŚ
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