Shame you haven’t persevered, there’s an alternate universe where you’ve uninstalled it 5 seconds after starting a New Game and seeing this:
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(I actually think it’s the only natural fit in the publisher’s recent history, not a potentially cool experimental title they ruin with overproduction but an unambitious Night in the Woods-like cinematic platformer that really benefits from presentation values which Annapurna provides. The writing has decent rhythms that work well with the voice acting, the screenshot above seems to be done in an at least partially self-conscious manner, the story seems to be fundamentally about Privileged White Boy With Guitar’s Self-Discovery™ so no amount of Robert McKee-ness or Save the Cat-ness will ruin its essence. Still uninstalled it 30 minutes later and now I’m writing a book about how space rock opera fantasies are inherently reactionary)
11 Likes
Welp with this release I’m never gonna be able to buy El Shaddai Jeans on Yahoo Auctions.
3 Likes
Gotta stop Slay The Spiring. You get a bad run and just going to lose and that was 40 minutes of your life.
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I got 30 HP and the first turn these 3 idiots are gonna hit me for 25 and the best I can block is 13.
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this was a big problem with c. 2019 midbudget roguelikes
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Played a little more Nox and decided to shelve it as it seems like the entire game was going to be all MMO-style mob-kiting in every combat encounter. Finding secrets was fun, though! I fukken love finding secret rooms.
Played some Chuchel and although the animations are sublime I think overall this is one of Amanita’s less inspired projects. Feels a lot like the team just using up old notebook sketches and ideas that couldn’t be incorporated into other games.
Wowee, you want to talk about Tank Controls, Crusader: No Regret is so stiff.
2 Likes
and with this, videogames have finally become Art. thanks Annapurna.
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I am playing Doom 2016. I am enjoying it, but “Hurt me plenty” difficulty is too hard and I had to move to “I am too young to die”. Should I be ashamed?
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how naive i was to say CotM had “sparse” enemies
harmony of dissonance has so many empty hallways and rooms that just slow down navigation for no reason. and then when there are enemies, most of them are the opposite of purposeful. this game sucks
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also the map is glitchy
Play games to have fun imo
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I played Wolfenstein II on the mode that puts BJ in a baby bonnet and had a better time for it
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There’s a lot of simultaneous threats to keep track of in Doom 2016, the arena design systematically denies the usual tricks to manage enemies one at a time, so you need to know how every enemy works and what they might be doing while your back is to them. On the other hand Doom 2016 has many game-specific overpowered tricks which are A) nonobvious until you try and B) mostly unavailable in the early game. Therefore the first two levels are the hardest in the game, and in general it doesn’t mean much about general FPS abilities to struggle with it at first.
Personally I downgraded from UV to Hurt Me Plenty on my first playthrough, then my second playthrough was back on UV, and then my third was on Nightmare, and it felt roughly equally difficult for me on each playthrough (and all three times the second arena in the game, where it introduces grunts in addition to imps, took me the most retries to get through). And FWIW I was playing on controller for ergonomic reasons.
5 Likes
I’m officially putting replaying the GBA Castlevanias on my docket. I loved those (which was very much a minority opinion on IC, glad things have come around), but I gotta agree with the R and L dashing on HoD just not feeling right. When I first started Aria, I had to unlearn all that.
I’ve also been meaning to sit down with those Shaman King games that are pretty clearly based on Aria. Can anyone vouch for those?
3 Likes
I personally prefer to play every shooter on the hardest non-bullshit (monsters don’t respawn or exhibit out of character behaviors, no permadeath, etc) difficulty, because they are typically balanced in a way that you don’t really need to care about mechanics on anything lower than that. This is definitely true of nuDoom, which I beat on nightmare.
That said, play how you want. It’s not like the combat design of nuDoom is high shooter art in the same way Halo 1 Legendary is, and even if it was, games are meant to be enjoyed however you please.
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Only you can determine what is the right for you.
Play the game and pay attention to how you’re feeling as you go.
If it’s feelin’ easy or isn’t engaging you enough to enjoy ‘cause you’re finding yourself swatting enemies aside with ease, turn it up. Conversely, if it’s bustin’ your chops so furiously you’re seein’ the respawn screen more than the game itself, or maybe it’s inducing the kind of frustration that’s makes you think about how much you’d rather be doing anything else but trying to get past the place you’re at, maybe turn it down a notch or two until you’ve developed your skills to where you’re feelin’ like the previous sentence.
Who knows? A bit of practice and chance to adapt to the game’s arsenal and cadence might find you changing your mind down the road and pushing the difficulty past where you started.
So, I’ve played some games recently and since we’re on the topic of DOOM, let’s start with the new weapon I picked up in Warframe, the recently added Ghoulsaw (parts available currently through the returned Plaugestar event, but to be made available elsewhere after the event ends).
It’s not particularly good, but there’s something very satisfying about tying up the Acolyte mini-bosses that spawn in missions on Steel Path, revving up that big ol’ blade, and doing my second-best Doomguy impression on 'em. Works nicely on Grineer too when you pull them all together and just buzzsaw them into a fountain of flying bodyparts.
Also played Genshin Impact and did the recently added Act III of the Inazuma Archon Quest the Raiden Shogun Character Story mission that followed it and, whooo let me tell ya, they’re bad. Like “Did the previous writers team die?” bad. While the story stuff hasn’t been super-great, it’s had a pretty neat melancholy-vibe to it when dealing with the Archons, and a neat undercurrent of political intrigue on the part of the Fatui with recurring characters of the Harbingers. Act III summarily torpedoes most of that, at least for the Inazuma Arc. There’s no woman whose story is handled remotely well here, to the point that their core audience in China is pretty well up in arms over how badly the story is executed.
I’ll add finer details later under spoilers but, yeah, Inazuma has been notably and noticeably worse on that front than preceding quests in a really awful sort of way.
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This is like that bodybuilder meme in real time.
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Replace each bodybuilder with a different boomer shooter protagonist
1 Like
many people already replied to this but i’ll just add my feeling that playing on hard difficulty to prove gamer ability or whatever is extremely overrated. i kinda hate it when people try to enforce the idea that you have to play on a certain difficulty to get “the real experience”. play on the difficulty you want to play on and then if it’s too easy you can always raise the difficulty later. for me whatever the “normal” equivalent is most of the time is acceptable because i want a little friction from the game, but not too much. though for other things easy (for extra hard fan levels) or hard (for games i’ve already played through) might be more acceptable.
3 Likes