yeah i’ll never be able to disconnect from what it was like to play that game when it was new, but i honestly think it’s better than half life lol
unsure how well it holds up but i fuckin’ loved jedi knight back in the day
(does it run well on windows 10…)
We watched Tigress play the first level till it hard-crashed her computer.
So uh…it kind of works?
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it was an amazing moment/segment for sure, but I kinda hated the song. it was distractingly bad, so cheesily on the nose and like bad 00s hard rock, a genre I cannot handle. i wasn’t sure if it was meant to be ironically bad or what? probably not. still, what a game. I plan on continuing with sidequests and whatnot. the mechanics feel soo good. they know how to make you feel like an incredible badass. the sound design is A+.
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I heard it runs well via Proton… which is a weird work around.
The beauty of that segment to me is that the music simply acts as a key to get through the lock and is arguably incidental - it’s decided by the same collective unconscious guidelines that everything else abides by. Yes, someone on the dev team probably consciously chose to construct the setpiece around it because they like the vibe, but I also think the idea of the previous FBC director being in a similar position of having to listen to the piece if they want to traverse the lock is what’s quite unique about Control. The world functions by zeitgeist logic that doesn’t care about your specific taste as an FBC employee. Similar to how employees of that hellish department must hate the rule of three or having to talk to objects or whatever. The game creates so many scenarios where something mundane becomes strange and vice versa in really fantastic ways.
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it felt to me almost the opposite - in a game that contextualizes “being a videogame” with beautiful subtlety throughout, suddenly it became a heavy-winking meta music video. it was jarring. if the lyrics weren’t directly referencing the game’s title it would probably have felt differently.
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i liked the meta winking stuff of the ashtray maze. good timing of audio crossfades, nicely-paced challenges, and just goofy and fun. after hours and hours of dour self-seriousness, it was a welcome moment of levity for me. will probably feel different about it the next time i play control tho lmao
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I for one neither loved nor hated the solution to Ashtray Maze, my reaction was largely “meh okay I guess this is what it is”.
The sequence made so little impact on me that the last time it came up I was struggling to remember what the key item was that unlocked it, I just remembered vaguely it was one of the magical objects but not which, and I couldn’t quite summon the memory
(I guess if someone at Remedy who was really excited about this concept were to read my post, they might well be much more dismayed than by vikram’s strongly negative response)
the lead up to that—finding Ahti on his ‘vacation’—was one of the best parts of the game. I was hyped up to go back and see what the Maze was all about (after spending a good hour in it before I realized I had gotten there too early). I was expecting an actual puzzle, or to get some new ability to get through it— only to find out the “solution” wasn’t really a solution at all, and the Maze not even a maze but just a backdrop for this player-congratulatory action set-piece.
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the game is made by finnish people so no, but also the song is by poets of the fall who have done songs for max payne and alan wake so they’re remedy’s buddies
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I fell in love with Alan Wake for the scene with “Coconut”
I played 20 minutes of some random action platformer called Pankapu. Tedious story bits (with very whatever writing) should have tipped me off right away that this was a game that wouldn’t respect my time. The second indication was when the game immediately puts an unchallenging variety of damage-sponge enemy in your path constantly… and the most expedient thing to do is jump over them or just tank a hit and move on because your health is going to get refilled at a checkpoint in 20 seconds anyway.
So the game immediately incentivizes me not interact with one of its main mechanics, cool. It also immediately incentivized me to uninstall. Player avatar looks like Marvin the Martian in WoW armor, anyway.
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Ashtray Maze Song Owns.
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It should be noted on Cuba’s best list that the best actual shooting is in Dark Forces.
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Jedi Knight has a higher peak (the nar shaddaa level and the space ship in freefall level) but it has far worse level design overall than Jedi Outcast, what are you even talking about?
Like, I know that everyone who says Jedi Knight has good level design doesn’t remember the mission right after Nar Shaddaa, but it is worse than any part of Jedi Outcast, it’s worse than the one sewer level in Dark Forces. If Mysteries of the Sith didn’t exist, it would be the worst level in the entire series.
Dark Forces has the best level design of the whole series though, and by a massive margin. Best shooting, too.
the scale of the environments of this game is bonkers for the era. def left a huge impression on me as a kid watching my friend play it over at his house. tbh it seems to be memory-holed compared to the other games in the series… maybe there are reasons for this. but i appreciate the commitment to weirdly large spaces and an ungoldly amount of slopes
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Jedi Outcast is a boring middling game that’s not great at anything. Though it was boring enough that I never beat it so I dunno maybe there’s some great stuff in the back half.
This is such a wild take. It’s totally a raven software game but it still does pretty much everything better than jedi knight 1 except for the two good levels (nar shaddaa and the plummeting ship as I mentioned)
JK1 is the mediocre, poorly aged middle game, jk2 is the good version of jk1, ja is jk2: multiplayer edition, and dark forces is the good in every way original.
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