i’ve never played the witness but i just wanted to say that’s one of my favorite ellsworth kelly pieces
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I witnessed Galak-Z: The Virtual at probably the highest fidelity anyone ever has. It still feels very nice if a bit chatty.
The cutscenes have intense camera angles where your head feels just a bit too close for comfort but seeing the models crisp and up close is good early VR novelty.
The main (incidental?) improvement to playing in VR is the improved parallax on levels - in 2D they’re demarcated by lighting but actual depth feels better. It reminded me of the M2 3DS ports.
I wonder how many other small gems are locked up in Oculus’s store soon to be deprecated.
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still thinking bout myst
tried to play riven but i need someone to hold the mouse/controller, this RSI shit is fucked
I think it’s very interesting to compare Myst to several specific games:
The 7th Guest, The Labyrinth of Time, and The Journeyman Project. All originally released in 1993 alongside Myst.
I love all of these games, though 7th Guest and Journeyman are the weakest. But Myst is so transcendent compared to this lot. It does so much more while explicitly saying so much less.
The visuals are more wild and unpredictable - and larger too, most of the time the other games letterboxed the visuals. The spatial characteristics of these enchanting 3D spaces are more fully realized in Myst - consider the grid-based Labyrinth or the simpler, smaller layout of 7th Guest.
Consider how it balks at inventory systems, which kind of bogs down Journeyman and Labyrinth both. It’s easy to miss an item or, in Labyrinth, they make it especially easy to accidentally use an item in the wrong place, cutting off possibilities or even ruining your save permanently. And there’s no risk of death, or time limit, like in Journeyman, mechanics which initially feel interesting but ultimately somewhat superfluous and even counterproductive to the totality of the experience.
And consider how much more elegant and entwined the puzzles are compared to 7th Guest. Witness’ puzzles are almost more like 7th Guest’s puzzles, but much, much more thorough and insistent and specific. In Myst the puzzles require understanding the space, the “puzzling” itself drawing you deeper into its world, versus 7th Guest’s much more isolated, “brain teaser” approach.
I dunno, I’m too old to be this enchanted by a game, lmao
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yeah, I think ‘toybox’ is an interesting and valid aesthetic in VR. Could we put 2D Virtual Boy-style views next to 3D diorama platformers like Moss and Astrobot? The latter have real interactions built in, like peeking around corners, that aren’t present in strictly 2D affairs.
I’ve been playing Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force on my PowerBook G4 and i don’t think I’ve ever seen a game work harder to remind you of a different, better game
It’s very clearly drawn a lot of inspiration from Half-Life. It’s got story scenes interleaved with combat sequences, most of which are first person and allow you to wander, and it tries to keep it all contiguous in space and time. It falls down a bit in that it has to contrive a lot of extracanonical conceits to justify a Star Trek first person shooter where you can actually defeat the big bads of Voyager. First up, you’re part of a “Hazard Team” (never seen or mentioned in the show) whose job is to be the militaristic first response to hostile situations both aboard Voyager and elsewhere. Secondly, because you come up against borg and species 8472, and you’re supposed to win, Seven of Nine has conveniently come up with the Infinity Modulator, a weapon the borg simply cannot counter. I guess every time they’ve rotated weapon frequencies it’s been literally rotating rather than random, and someone finally remembered entropy existed? This… does not occur in the show, ever, for obvious reasons.
And you do shoot a lot of these enemies. Encounter design can be summarised as large numbers of enemies spawning out of nowhere for a few minutes and not much else. A shame, because the levels certainly could be used in more interesting ways.
The Half-Life references are all over the game. There’s a “hazardous materials” level which has you leaping from broken catwalks over radioactive water, B’Elanna mentions needing to calibrate the resonance cascade couplings, they wear their inspiration not on their sleeve but as a tired graphic tee. And it’s really rather distracting.
You spend a decent amount of time wandering Voyager, and these sequences are probably my favourites, as exploring the ship is pretty fun. There are plenty of little touches, like a signed photo of your player character with Worf in her quarters, and a segment where you get summoned to the bridge. These parts just make me wish this game hadn’t had such a focus on the out of character combat, I’d have loved a game like this more interested in a story aboard Voyager, and less focused on being a Half-Life-like with a Quake style multiplayer mode.
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See if you can find the iso for the expansion pack to just wander around voyager in the Virtual Voyager mode which is cool.
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I forgot that was in there! I do have access to that, I’ll give it a look.
almost done, just gotta get the rarest achievement now, which is “play the game and get a character killed 7 days in a row”
ahh the one good thing about star trek voyager elite force
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Actually the best part of elite force is watching janeway slaughter dozens of neelixes in HOLOMATCH which ih ave to assume is like some kind of future sport like parrisses squares or kosho cuz it has quake 3 rules and neelix says threatening shit like “Soup’s on!” at yiu to lower your combat effectiveness. you get like starfleet performance evaulations at the end for getting the most frags and shit
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I never played any holomatches but now I want to.
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Star Trek: Elite Force is the first experience I ever had playing player-made maps in deathmatch
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madden being on PC and MLB the show being on xbox and EA play being on game pass means that all the banner sports sims are basically free on most platforms for the first time if you’re already in that ecosystem
it’s pretty neat! I just played some madden and MLB the show!
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i finally beat vic viper in zoe 2, did they make the ps4 version easier?
I lost my yakuza 5 save in the middle of the game and probably the saves to every other cracked game I ever played cause I reinstalled windows and forgot that stuff was kept in the public documents folder instead of the username folder. Is this god attempting to get at me for stealing? Well I’m unmoved. I’m not bothered in the slightest. I’ll steal twice as hard now
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the real saves were the games we pirated along the way
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The best 3D Sonic game is … 
The day stages from Unleashed ported to the PC version of Generations. A delightful breezy hour.
I tried playing Unleashed through Xbox BC but the second Werehog stage was awful
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I tried this when it came out and I still found the unleashed level design like markedly worse than generations, idk if it was just me but it reminded me of the colours levels that are basically on autopilot
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3D sonic will never be as good as Adventure
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