100% confident that an author who kept afloat placing work in New Worlds never once thought himself a writer of “science fiction” 
also I love Ballard but talk about some “workmanlike sentences” that just narrate internal states to the point of meticulously explaining every metaphor, just to make sure you Absolutely Get It
It sincerely blows my mind that some people think about fiction on a word-by-word basis like this. Once I’ve converted it to meaning it is just noumenal mush like everything else. If I have to recall a series of words I have to go back a step and recall the sense that perceived them.
Just want everyone to know that based on what he wrote in the article above, Ned Beauman has neither read The Invention of Morel nor watched Last Year at Marienbad.
there’s a watch dogs 3 dlc with the protagonist from the first game. and there’s a part where he goes into a coma and you have to use some neural tech thing to go into The Mind of Aiden Pearce and it’s just his sister’s house in chicago and he’s digging a grave in the backyard, and you have to collect his favorite things in the world, his phone, his cap, and his coat. and the house turns into a silent hill hell maze full of red lit hallways with industrial fans that leads down to the site of the traffic accident that killed his niece where his cap sits in a shrine, and when you make it back to the house it’s covered in blood and bagged up bodies and he’s stuck in a loop killing the same guy over and over and you have to take the guy’s place to get him to stop and get his coat and then you get to the backyard and convince him to just bury the vigilante and find a better way to live and so he puts the cap in the ground instead etc. this all sounds great to me, I gotta say the cap is starting to become a little Iconic to me, though it’s an ubisoft game so it is a bunch of cw tv show acting and every character has to obviously commentate too much on everything, but nice effort at least. only this is some prequel before the events of the main game which the guy participates in so then it comes across like he does some backsliding and doesn’t really learn anything. that’s okay these things take time.
I wonder though how much of this characterization of aiden pearce exists now only because of the response to the first game. these two other watch dog games, I assume the protagonists don’t functionally play all that different, but this guy everyone knows is a maniac. how much of that was intentional at the time in the first game. if the first game had just come out pre-think pieces or in a slightly more abstract graphical era would he have been depicted or thought of completely different outside of that first game?
i have sunk into this game the way one would sink into a warm bed with a nice comforter and the gentle sounds of crickets outside.
there’s basically no public info about the game online, which is making it a lot more fun for me. i CAN’T see the consequence of my decision until i make it. no mercy. but nothing has even been catastrophic so far, even when an AI drone microwaved my ship until the computer system shorted out completely and i had to manually thrust away before my reactor went critical.
so far equipment come in two flavors: linear upgrades (like more fuel rods, larger fuel tank, or a cargo bay that processes mineral faster) and side-grades (basically all thrusters and hardpoints). there’s a nice balance here between the rather simplistic decision of “do i upgrade now or later” for the straight upgrades, and “does this change how my ship handles too much?” for the equipment.
let’s say you put a claim beacon on your ship, which basically lets you save somewhere in the ring to fast travel to. Now that side of your ship is gonna be loaded down with this heavy-ass beacon and it completely changes how you fly. i had to thrust and rotate at the same time to stay straight, otherwise my ship started rotating to the right.
as you progress you can buy different ships, and you can either trade in your existing ship or keep it for later. honestly… i like the starter ship (i call it “the tug”) more than the intermediate ship so far; yeah, it’s clunky and has a few tricks (like accidentally sandwiching a nugget between the strut and the excavator), but it has a very straightforward shape. if it had a larger cargo bay for either nuggets or processed minerals i’d probably still be flying it. the RCS design on the Eagle just sucks; better for turning, worse for braking.
there’s a crew system where you get various passive bonuses for having good crewmates, like getting accurate pricing for nuggets (letting you be more picky) or better jury-rigging (field repairs for if you really fuck up a thruster by slamming it into an asteroid NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW). what’s super cool is that every crewmate has a hidden quest/backstory and it reveals itself as you interact with them in the ring. so far, members of my crew have:
again, since none of this is online anywhere i’ve just been having to chance it as i go. adds to the mystery and allure. maybe also a little to the intimidation, though, which sucks because so far i haven’t died ONCE and i’ve been kinda reckless and slammed into asteroids at 50m/s a few times. it’s very failure-tolerant, which i wish more games would embrace. more fun failure!!!
anyway it’s fucking great and i’m gonna evangelize it now.
sold! excited to check this out.
Used save state(no S because this collection only has the one) to beat Dracula in Bloodlines. What a cool weird game.
Really Dracula is hardest part of the game. He takes triple the hits of any other boss and then has 3 forms on top of that. Surprised myself by getting through the boss-rush, Death, Camilla in one life.
Maybe I’ll play again through with Jonathan. Of the many “differences” Bloodlines has from the rest of Castlevania that the canonical Vampire Killer is not of the Belmont bloodline is a cool one.
It’s also this tour of Europe, and like the best 16bit sequels a reinterpretation and twist of the 8bit. It’s very hard to do now but taking environments and ideas from the old and twisting your expectations and your memories is so good.
Guess I’ll burn through Super Castlevania next. Seem to remember the other times I played that one I went straight through in two hours.
Playing the Game Boy ones I kept thinking how cool and deliberate they are. And how that slow and decisiveness made them perfect fodder for adult-children yelling. PS4 controller doesn’t feel the ideal way to play them. Maybe too much input lag? But also know the reputation is these games drop inputs as is.
Anyways beating Bloodlines without tricks is an accomplishment that I am too old and tired for.
Beat paradise killer and I’m deeply irritated by it. More when I’m not sleepy and can actually articulate my problems.
IIRC he’s supposed to be distantly related or something. But anyway having the two protags with different move sets is also one of the neat things of Bloodlines, especially since it changes how you navigate the stages just a little bit, including some small routes you’ll only go to with each one of them. Though nowadays it’s nothing as involved as the different routes in a stage the retro styled Bloodstaineds do, but it’s nice.
Booted up Path of Exile because i wanted to hit some goblins and get a yellow item and instantly got overwhelmed at what happens when you make a diablo-like and percolate it as a live service for 8 years.
anyone who counter picks off a win in a fighting game is either a dork or 12
the dearth of ARPGs and the Tencent purchase has allowed the game to become hostile to players.
finally playing resident evil vii for the first time and in vr and it whips ass. wild as hell. shout out to felix
I love that this game turns a haunted house sidequest into a joke and then into a ‘capitalism is a voracious and uncaring chaos monster’.
I cannot stop artcopping
Paradise killer wants to be the cool new thing so, so, so extremely badly. It was immediately tossing so much ‘cool shit’ at me: DEMONS! SPACE! GOAT HEADS! FRIENDLY BAR OWNING SKELETONS! INTERDIMENSIONAL SPORTS CARS! VAPORWAVE STATUARY!
…which gives the thing a really try hard vibe. So much of this feels like chasing internet cool shit. Half the characters feel like they were engineered for people on tumblr in 2015 to get obsessed over, and still have the same sarcastic character voice even if their voice acting lines are delivered pretty differently.
The world is cool looking though, with the vaporwave tropical vibe. The most interesting writing is pretty much all the little vignettes about what being enslaved in vaporwave heaven is like, and you get literally hundreds of little collectibles. Which means constantly, constantly, picking them up alongside currency and talking to a weird demonic dog thing. The currency matters, the rest doesn’t.
Navigating the world is initially neat. The varied multilayered map design is fun to work out initially, and learning the flow of the place is real pleasure at the start. So many nooks and crannies, and juuust enough of them hide actual game relevant evidence and light puzzles.
But…this is in the context of an investigation game, so periodically you have to stop exploring the cool space talk to the same-voiced sarcastic jerks. You collect new evidence, you tell them about evidence, you do very truncated social links, and you get new clues for the clue rolledex…which the game immediately spells out for you. Every time. There is no actual logical reasoning in the detective work, all the evidence is put in a nice list. There is no carefully piecing together the timeline, no carefully comparing your initially contradictory evidence and proving both things actually happened…you just get a bunch of evidence and the game draws the links for you.
So much of the game is just getting dripfed hints from people until you run into someone who just blurts the whole story out.
Once I was getting to the end, the cool multi textured island started to become a pain. I had extracted everything I could from it, and was just talking to everyone while running down the clock.
Maybe this would be fine if the story was actually cool but no. The story feels so…limp. So very, very, little of the worldbuilding actually matters in the end. But so much of the writing focuses on worldbuilding over characterization?? Nobody has a personality until you max out their social links and then you get about one paragraph of text that really, really, doesn’t matter to anything much.
The much vaunted single trial system itself seems like an underbaked joke. You literally just pick a person with a long list of evidence and just click each piece of evidence and then it tells you if you had enough to convict. That’s it. That’s the trial system.
spoilers for the shape story (but not specific details)
The actual final trial itself is supposed to be about ‘choosing your truth’ which is what it literally is. There are two conspiracies, both of which happened, and both of which basically get the same people people convicted the only real change being which final mastermind is declared the final mastermind. But neither set of events is contradictory, and in fact, both clearly happened. There are maybe one or two subjective choices but in all cases but even then there is a clear actual canonical truth that fits the larger facts even if on paper even when both are plausible.
Also it’s really clear there is a fail state for the trial, even if the game says there isn’t. So beware of that.
At the end of the day, I wanted this game to be a fun puzzle to chew on, a compelling roller coaster of revelations, a deep exploration of a cool fantasy world, something that made some kind of interestingly chewy philosophical statement…and while it hints at all of that it’s just kinda just underbaked? And the obvious level of attention to detail and craft of the whole thing makes all the writing so much more painful because it really is the writing that kills it.
It’s such a weird wet firecracker of a game it kind of made me angry from how good it almost could have been but wasn’t.
Good soundtrack though. Or at least, a soundtrack I can’t get out of my head.
totally agree with this evaluation but I think it’s saved by the traversal, which is the good kind of wet firecracker – here’s all this level geometry, go nuts
Oh also the fast travel system requires a finite resource and the game is super cagey about how much of that resource you need to uncover all the clues, so I just ended up not using fast travel until the very end of the game.
been grinding out all the new abilities in streets of rage 4’s survival mode
this game frankly has no business being as good as it is. “beloved japanese game series getting a new entry made by french guys whose last game was a weird digitized deal where you played as the nostalgia critic” is a recipe for disaster, yet the game is really good? it really is just guardian heroes, except not a terrible game that pisses me off whenever i try to play once every six months because i’m still believing the 20+ years of hype behind it.
i like playing as max and adam.
Finally beat The Burning Crusade by getting to level 70 this morning.
Now you can finally play the game.
