I like how much flows from the premise of taking a video game world literally and backfilling something ‘plausible’
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games sure are dumb
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This is maybe just another way of saying “limitations breed creativity” but reminds me of this bit from Half Life 1 postmortem
We eventually got into the habit of placing a number of unrelated requirements into each area then doing our best to come up with a rational way to fit them together. Often, by the end of the session we would find that the initial idea wasn’t nearly as interesting as all the pieces we built around it, and the structure we had designed to explain it actually worked better without that initial idea.
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I needed something mindless to play to relax so I just played through Cat Girl Without Salad: Amuse-Bouche. It’s a shmup published by Humble in 2016, developed by Wayforward. It’s full of wacky nerd humor (although one or two things did genuinely amuse me).
The most interesting thing is that all the weapons you can pick up, while genuinely more powerful by far than your default gun, are very awkward to use. Fire out a Pac Man you have to control, a Bust-a-Move gun, a DDR gun, etc. Complicated weaponry does spice things up a bit, especially since the enemies are all big bullet sponges if you try to ignore them in favor of just using the default weapon.
Anyway, the above is not a recommendation. Though I wonder if there are better shmups out there that incentivize using difficult weaponry via damage output etc
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finished persona 2 innocent sin last night. i’m really fond of a lot of things about it, but it’s also a deeply flawed game. i still like the tone and (most of) the characters; the basic thematic elements it shares with most of the other persona games (jungian bullshit, mostly shallow character/self-realization arcs) are still pretty uninteresting and lightweight, but there’s more texture and charm throughout and it doesn’t have the fundamental teen boy-oriented cynicism of the later dating sim games. the demon negotiation is so cute and characterful and the upfront bluntness of the gay romance option is both pleasantly refreshing and a nice little fujoshi snack. the plot is silly and all over the place in a way that winds up feeling coherent, i really like how small scale and intimately specific the central past dramatic event turns out to be, and the conclusion is weird and ambiguous and ultimately unhappy in a way i appreciate. i also love that the last thing you are presented with is the choice to punch philemon for treating the whole game as an orchestrated bet with nyarlathotep and his mask falls off and he has the protagonist’s face.
buuuuut… the fights up until the final boss were generally trivial and low on strategy. i fought almost no random encounters, did very few optional fights and finished at level 50, and because the game gives you three successive sets of story personas that are fine to use for the first ~quarter and second half of the game before the final boss, i only ended up summoning a few on my own despite how many cards i had by the end. and since i was always underleveled, pacts only became possible/useful at the very end when i was developing a specific strategy for the last boss. there were relatively basic mechanics i didn’t even know existed for most of the game, and ones i enjoyed that quickly became useless from a dps/efficiency perspective since there was no need to mess around with advanced summoning and customization anyway. this was frustrating because i really like the systems in these games! and it made me sad that i didn’t have any incentive to engage with them much in this one until the very end. i got stomped by the final boss the first time and it was fun to rework, plan a strategy and stomp him back the next time using skills and mechanics that hadn’t been necessary up til then (finally, buffs! pacts! turn-canceling! mid-battle persona swapping! research-based summoning and customization decisions! big number fusion spells!). it was a very megaten-y dynamic reversal that only required a bit of backtracking, but it was pretty dispiriting at first since i wasn’t sure if i was expected to have been getting even more OP up to that point. it just seemed out of place with how… not designed the rest of the game felt. curious about how it would change on the hard mode they added for the psp version since i stuck with normal.
anyway, i’m happy i played the psp version because it was smoother and more “convenient” since i was beelining through it, but i started eternal punishment psx immediately after and wow does this game look so much better with 4:3 framing/composition and the original ui and text design, it’s such a good vibe. i’m looking forward to spending more time messing around with the systems and it already feels like it expects you to engage with them more. the tone is really cool and unique, it’s doing a lot of cryptic and subtle (and not-so-subtle) stuff with its relationship to the previous game (i would imagine this was so weird to play in english at the time since innocent sin wasn’t localized yet) and it’s soooooo nice to play an rpg where the protagonist is an adult woman with a job and friends/party members who are also adults with jobs. so cool.
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Yeah, a lot of scenes were confusing because they explicitly call back to events from Innocent Sin, and most players had no frame of reference for what was going on, outside of events that related to the first game. The English EP manual, if I recall correctly, also just outright spoils the story of Innocent Sin.
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yeah i’ve heard about that, i guess there was no real alternative. kind of amazing that EP was localized in the first place. and the translation is weirdly… weeby-accurate to the extent that it retains puns and expressions that are only used in japanese but with no obvious english analogue or replacement that you have to infer from context. it’s preferable to, uh, persona 1’s original localization, but it’s awkward in a specific way i’m not used to in games of this era. the dub still sucks but even though there’s an undub there are no subtitles in the fmv cutscenes so what can you do.
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It was weirder going from the IS fantrans to ep psx where the text takes up thrice the space of the fan work so sentences stop several words sooner than you expect them to.
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Also, like, it’s hard to overstate how novel this (and a bunch of other stuff) was 20 years ago. It probably spoiled most RPGs for me. Like, I couldn’t go back to humdrum medieval RPGs after getting to play as a journalist for a teen magazine, a wiretapper with ties to the Chinese mafia, a detective with expensive sunglasses and fake sideburns, a bad-ass retail worker and amateur boxer, etc. in a strangereal parallel world to our own.
Nope, absolutely not. It sounds exactly as it should, like an early to mid-90s anime dub. I think it’s Maya who’s voiced by a Sailor Moon voice actor. It’s whoop-ass time!
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yeah decision paralysis between the two versions is a big part of why i haven’t actually played this for more than a couple of hours
(leaning psx, when i get round to it)
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While I was downloading a system update for my PS4 I decided to start playing Nier: Reincarnation on my phone on a whim. I didn’t realize it was an auto-battler but that’s probably better for me as action-heavy games and touchscreen controls are just a combination that doesn’t gel with me.
It’s uh, okay I guess? There’s a ton of shit going on systems wise, but I guess it’s not bad if I’m in the mood for a more passive gaming experience.
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I have finally found some time to play with Deathloop and I think it’s really, really fun. Things are pretty janky, the combat most of the time is kind of basic, and the world feels less responsive than other Arkane games, but I can respect this is like a condensed imsim and I even think that’s kind of cool. The narrative elements are topnotch. I was so so so pleased and obsessed by that reveal where Colt realizes Julianna is not his scorned lover, but his scorned daughter. What the fuck!! Oldboy shit… Never see that kind of disgust evoked in a videogame, and they also make it totally hilarious in a deranged way.
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This was a cut plot from
BioShock Infinite so Arkane polishing up Irrational’s work has another example. When my partner told me the twist I groaned but I’m encouraged that you found it effective!
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That makes so much sense, it really does have that same derangement that you see a lot of the characters in those -shock games exhibit. Like, Julianna comes across as super aggressively violent and giddy, and when this reveal lands she is just as as intense about her reasoning that she wanted her dad to just feel awful about this, like it’s a joke to her. I love that kind of stuff where a character just makes you do the eyes emoji and let out a long “…ooookaaay…”
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I’ve been playing a lot of MechWarrior Online with my friends.
It stinks big time so I don’t recommend anyone here play it, but it tickles the part of my brain that loves griefing and making self-important people mad. We make goofy builds (like, a lance of lights that overheat assaults with flamers and then backstab them, lol) and just watch as people piss their pants with fury.
Anyway a few years back PGI put solid gold mech skins for the then-newly-released clanner mechs up for sale. $500 for ONE SKIN, and there were 8 skins in total. Some people actually bought them too!
In response, the playerbase banded together to mercilessly teamkill anyone using them. So now nobody uses them anymore. That’s class consciousness babey.
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psp IS → psx EP was/is ideal for my purposes, but if you’re committed for the long haul either way then psx for both might be preferable. lmk when you get around to them!
The Final Station tasks you with keeping a train in operation (mainly by clicking buttons to “monitor” “systems”, rescue survivors from zombie-infested stations, and take care of those survivors by feeding them/treating their wounds until they reach their destinations, at which point they give you rewards.
It does the resource-scarcity thing, you don’t have many bullets, etc. But what gets me is somehow throwing a chair at a zombie is a one-shot kill, but it can take 2-3 bullets to take down the same enemy. Or one charged up punch. Sure, you’re being asked to risk health to conserve ammo. But that still makes me go 
I played a little bit, and that’s enough for me. On to the next thing.
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I finished this game, and while it’s fun (and gets kind of a weird interesting vibe at the end) it never deviates from the established formula, so you’re not missing much. Fitting for a game about trains to stay solidly on-rails, but that hurt my overall enjoyment of it in the end. I guess at heart I just love logistics/travel games and The Final Station was not that at all.
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AAAAH this is so
good, what a cursed crusade Arkane is on
I’ve only had two hours to put into it but I fully endorse this interpretation
did I tell you how, when I asked a narrative designer on BioShock Infinite why Elizabeth was drawn and acted like a love interest despite the flip, she said, oh originally you had sex
and then Troy Baker picked up his guitar and strummed away…
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