I don’t believe it is but I suppose it’s not a big issue ultimately. They play up her Australian background in 2. Lost Legacy was massively welcome compared to 4 which went on far too long. Lost Legacy is about the size (or bigger) of one of the larger levels in 4 so makes for a breezy playthrough.
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lost legacy is the only tomb raider reboot game that doesn’t suck in some glaring aspect. the part where you drive around in the car is great and there’s at least one fist fight in the game that rules. I don’t even really like uncharted chloe and nadine are just fun and allowed to not be in extreme sexual peril 24/7. its existence makes it really funny that the new tomb raider game is also set in India. crystal dynamics knows they got owned on this one
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I find it really satisfying to rush dudes and have Nadine & Chloe give them a tag team beat down, probably more fun than the shooting a lot of the time
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Great bit of unintentional comedy 15 seconds into a game
(Sound on)
PRESS ANY BUTTON is so epic
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Feathery to my knowledge has never been a term, and if it has, it’s been extremely limited and barely used.
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Fired up Katamari Damacy Reroll on Steam Deck and am…confused. I’m pretty sure I at least dabbled with this on PS4, probably Switch, so I don’t know why it’s so surprising to me that it feels incredibly…off?
I gotta assume they had to sorta reverse engineer this whole thing, but so much about it feels kinda wrong. Like on a basic level the faster (basically instantaneous) load times mean less dialogue from the king, but a lot of this thing feels bolted together. Like the King’s face, which you see on the loading screens, doesn’t “mesh” with his body when he’s talking before a level. It just looks like a weird asset floating over it. Scooby Doo ass “door that is going to open” floaty vibe.
Did the first game not let you know you picked up cousins? I keep going to the little mushroom they hang out on and I keep unlocking them, but I don’t recall picking any of them up. Almost feels like they’re unlocking automatically upon level completion.
I knew about the cutscenes not being in English anymore, but I was surprised they cut Wanda Wanda from this thing, too.
I dunno why this is weirding me out so much. I feel like I played this before and it was mostly OK?
I should probably just emulate the original, that’s probably the real way to go. This port is just irking me for some reason.
(For what it’s worth, the parts where you play the game feel…mostly fine. I don’t remember stuff flying off your katamari so easily though…is it an FPS bug or…)
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Not the simulation mode stuff (which I pretty much felt the same way about, although I did probably get halfway through that utterly bizarre map before noping out), checking the game’s forum if you go to gameplay settings and select “explorer mode” it removes both chase sequences from the game, in the case of chapter 8 it results in an entirely new back half of that chapter and an all new ending to go along with it.
In Fallout 1 I got to what was my first large scale battle in the remains of LA and I keep having to redo it. First time I got stuck in a building because someone was blocking the door and never moving so I eventually said to hell with it and shot them; it was a random town citizen and turned the entire place hostile to me even after the battle was supposed to end. The second time I played the same thing happened but the guy eventually moved out of the way allowing me to rejoin the battle, which mostly went well enough without me. The issue is that the dog that was following me around died during it and while I was warned to not get too attached to the people following me… I think I can at least get the dog a bit further than this. Hopefully third time is the charm.
Oh yeah I forget if I mentioned this but I apparently hit two fairly rare random encounters between cities that gifted me two of the best weapons in the game within a short period of time, so as long as I don’t accidentally almost die from radiation poison again I might be set.
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it’s not cut, REROLL just matches the original non-localized game which plays a different song (You Are Smart) in the first stage. wanda wanda is still in the game and plays when you complete a 2-player match
i believe the cousins are handled the same way as the original game.
people tend to say the controls are better in the remake. they are quite stiff in the original PS2 game, which is part of why We <3 Katamari is important imo - much better handling overall
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iirc original Fallout is aggressively hands off about actually treating your companions as party members the way you’d expect to have any kind of interface to do that in any other RPG — like yes they follow you around but even trying to give them equipment feels like a hack and they can just die like any other NPC, and it feels almost like a concession to modern wikis that they’re even mentally classified as companions rather than this halfway thing. I remember when I played Fallout, being willing to live with consequences and not reload for anything other than getting a companion killed, and I think that’s for a reason; even if you’re a big tabletop/CRPG head from way back and you’re self consciously resistant to turning the whole thing into a spreadsheet whose numbers mostly only go up, so much of the appeal of the genre is (Marc Maron voice) having your guys, you know?
anyway I think Fallout 2 basically conceded this and gives you a functioning party management interface rather than implicitly insisting you not get too attached
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tbh this is a consistently interesting hangup (imo) of 90s RPGs where they seem totally unable to get past the Ultima mindset of like, you are a narcissist and this is your playground, no party member can ever be your equal because they are not the player character and it is insulting to pretend otherwise. even in Planescape Torment your companions feel a bit more like walking dialogue trees / meat shields than they do party members per se and I think it’s because of this same lingering design mentality. this more than anything else feels like why BioWare became popular, because they were the ones to be like “shut the fuck up and just make it like Final Fantasy,” which is why it’s so appropriate that BG3 leaned so heavily into like Halsin fancams for its marketing success (but also comes along with the expectation that companions should never die permanently or risk severing a huge portion of the narrative, which you can only really counter with something like Fallout’s small scope).
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like actually the closest thing to it being fair stakes to kill “companions” in a modern game I can think of is in Until Dawn or The Quarry where half of your teens can die by the end but you still get an adequately paced horror movie out of the remaining plot elements
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I actually disagree pretty strongly with this characterization of how Fallout 1 feels. The infinity engine games definitely have this kind of narcissism to them but Fallout and Arcanum have more of the feeling that these characters have their own lives that aren’t tied inextricably to you on the basis of you being a protagonist. To me, it ends up feeling the opposite of the bioware style solipsistic world building where everything in the game revolves around the protagonist
It’s weird to characterize BG3 like this because its very accommodating to every “companion” dying ingloriously. I laughed out loud when I finally did a dark urge character and ended up killing Gale during his introduction because I chose the dialogue option that seemed the funniest
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It’s definitely been used before, multiple bird pals of mine used to call themselves “featheries” (also, now that I recall, “beakers” lol) in the mid-late 00s, but you are correct that it’s pretty niche, not even rising to the commonality of something like “scalie” and generally seen in a more ironic sense. Still, you can see people using it unironically on places like FA to this day.
I’ve been playing quite a lot of Quake Brutalist Jam 3, and can highly recommend it to basically everyone. The total conversion changes are cool and do a good job of setting it apart from vanilla Quake while also retaining touchstone enemies and weapons from id’s masterpiece. The levels are generally pretty high quality - only a few so far have been something like “good beginner” and most rise to the level of “good intermediate” to “excellent professional” - and the centerpiece level, a massive endeavor titled “Escape from KOE-37” with THREE ENDINGS, is large enough to substitute as its own little indie game.
It’s great! Play it.
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If you want more there is a hack made for the gamegrumps that has a ton more multiplayer levels.
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I don’t disagree that the games inevitably produce this impression, but it’s funny to know that FO1’s hacky “companion” management was just the result of the production running out of time. They’d wanted to do it the FO2 way but didn’t get the idea to implement them until it was way too late to get an interface like that running correctly.
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btw after I found accounting ledger template, I abandon backloggd. It has date, description, in, out and total. And I can add any sub pages for a single game in same template better than ‘log a play’ on backloggd.
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I use Backloggd, and used to use Backloggery (the OG!), but both of them feel overcomplicated compared to something like, say, Letterboxd.
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certainly I did not mean to suggest that the writing of BioWare games is consistently better in this respect, more the mechanical implementation of parties, but that was a pretty persistent bias all the time
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So it is done.
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