The right game for the wrong turn of phrase, at least
2 Likes
William Joseph Knausgaard
3 Likes
A little bit of a downtime day = time to play Steam Library Roulette
American Fugitive is a GTA clone, a sort of modernized version of the original two games. Itāsā¦ alright. But I felt like I was just following mission markers around, and it was all a little too sober for me to just cut loose and have a little fun with the criminal fantasy. I did appreciate the way it handles breaking into a building:
You peek into a window to see if anyone is home, then break a window/pry a door etc to gain entry. Then youāre presented with a blacked-out schematic of the homeās interior that you work through as a menu, and you search rooms for loot/encounters individually. I think itās an elegant way of not having to bother modeling building interiors and also making break-ins a little tense because you donāt know whatās in any of the rooms.
That said, I just kind of got bored after a little while. Nothing really hooked me, the wanted system just seemed like a hassle. Meh.
3 Likes
at least the clip didnāt start at 14:88 (because YT suddenly converted to using the USPS standard of 24 hour time for hours + decimal time for minutes) which would have just been too much of a coincidence to ignore
1 Like
Beat Dark Forces last night. It still rules. Appreciate how it builds on DOOMās wraparound labyrinths with all the vantage points for peeping where youāre going and where youāve been while adding more verticality (Jedi engine) and platforming (which is mostly well done). The spaces are trying for something a little more ārealisticallyā built but Imperial space-fash architecture still allows for abstraction in service of pure level design in that special mid-90s FPS way in which I can just focus on the geometry, a delight unto itself, and get into a flow state of pure shape navigation. Subtle ledges and crawl spaces encourage and often demand a kind of observation and finessing that I donāt get from a lot of shooters these days (possible I donāt know what Iām talking about, Iām not super hip to current FPS) and I enjoy having to illuminate some utterly dark corners of a map (the little droid mice that drop batteries for your flashlight are a cute touch and one of the many ālook we can render polygonsā things sprinkled throughout (the ship that drops you off and picks you up every mission being another (this sort of naĆÆve new tech flexing is very charming to me, it transmits an exuberance which is maybe why Iām kinda stuck in 90s/early 2000s games right nowā¦))).
The game does overreach a bit in ways that make it inferior to DOOM, especially the puzzles which can be cruelly obtuse (screw that cross-level lift puzzle in the detention centre, I never got past that part as a kid (being content to wander the first 5 or so levels, that was enough back then)). The mission structures with basic data retrieval/NPC rescue goals is nice though and theyāre strung together with briefings and voiced pixel art cutscenes in between that do create a convincing sense of adventuring in the Star Wars universe. The final boss encounter, fighting through hordes of Dark Troopers (pretty tough even on medium difficulty!) was genuinely climactic.
Oh, and you get tossed into Jabbaās prison at one point and have to kill a Kell Dragon with your FISTS, so sick.
Guess Iām committing to this series having got Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II up and running. Never played beyond the first game and can already tell these intricately chunky 3D levels are going to be a real treat.
10 Likes
Speaking of Star Wars games I been playing that Respawn one. Remember when āRespawn is making a Star Wars gameā was an occasion for wonder and awe and hooting and hollering? How times change.
Itās a competent AAA mashup allgame, here in the search action mold rather than the open world. Itās really checking all those boxes on the professional best practices whiteboard. Uncharted climbing and occasional Thrilling Setpieces, best in class facial mocap that make the cutscenes less than a chore to watch. All the lockānākey abilities have nonkey uses. The combat is half souls, half character action (the essential fact here is that the attacks are on the face buttons) and therefore vastly more interesting than the asscreed/arkham standard. It feels souls but without stamina management is much more about timing, though itās not about customizing combos in a fighting game style like a DMC.
The look & sound is impeccable, weāre really Star Warsin up in here.
Probably the weakest individual element is the level design. There seems to be a real fear of the player missing content, which leads to a series of interconnected corridors that are dotted with the gameās various locks. There are half-hearted gestures at soulsian shortcuts and funny-surprise enemy placement but these directly contradict the mandate for cinematic gameplay and Uncharted puzzles so they end up vestigial.
Itās like, better than all the other AAA games Iāve tried playing, but still an empty and heartless experience. Thatās that Respawn expertise I guess. Very similar location to Horizon in my soul, except the game had the cool protagonist to draw a wider spectrum of people into its Highly Competent But Ultimately Disappointing AAAness, where the lead in this one is just a whiteman lump. Recommended as a timewaster for cheap especially if you have affection for Star Wars junk. @u_u would love this game
squadrons was the much superior polished-but-unexciting star war of recent years imo
2 Likes
And you find out The Jedi HATE goats and spiders.
The level design makes more sense as Metroid Prime than Souls - the shortcuts are carefully storyboarded play-discovery labeled on a wireframe map with color-coded tabs and highlighter.
star war is a good game
1 Like
Oops, I sat down and played through all of Kathy Rain in one sitting and when I looked up I had missed dinner. This is not necessarily and endorsement, I just kinda knew if I ever stopped playing I would never come back.
Itās a supernatural mystery point-and-click game. The protagonist is a little bit Daria, a little bit Jessica Jones (sans any special powers). Her room mate is a good Christian girl with a penchant for invading peopleās privacy and is also a comp-sci major it seems like. Iām going to be honest I really wanted these two characters to smooch very much but they didnāt, so I guess I have to go write some slash fic.
Thereās some real Adventure Game Bullshit toward the end but for the most part? The puzzles are figure-outable and theyāre all sort of internally consistent.
The one major red flag is (CW:) a bit thatās sort of thrown in there about the protagonist having had an abortion as a teenager and it is used as sort of a supernatural plot twist in the late game and that seems in bad taste. Although you as the player are empowered to have Kathy sort of shrug her shoulders and say āitās sad but Iām at peaceā, at least.
I think the game sort of riffs on Twin Peaks? I dunno, Iāve never seen that show, but there was a black & white checkerboard floor in one part and that seems like the thing that always is supposed to be the big exaggerated wink at the player.
Yeah I dunno. I donāt recommend this game exactly, but I guess it was doing something right if my stressy, depressy ass managed to get all the way through it.
edit: Oh wait I do remember one pretty shitty thing which is maybe the real deal breaker, thereās a homeless comedy-relief character and everyone (even the gameās UI) refers to him as āa bumā and that really left a bad taste in my mouth.
3 Likes
Up to disc two in Killer 7, running around a town gathering a ton of color samples except the town is like a labyrinth and I seemingly missed one somewhere yet the map isnāt helpful in the least so wandering around trying to figure out exactly where in the heck I missed one of them. Iām overflowing with blood I canāt ācash inā and am probably gonna end up having to watch a LP of this section to see where in the heck this dumb thing is.
I swear if any of you say āitās bad on purposeā Iāll slap you with my mind.
14 Likes
Did you create the second order parody of āLove Shackā (āMind Slapā) Iām hearing in my head now? Iām sorry I even thought it was bad on purpose!
That said I also got stuck there and looked at a YouTube video to solve it. 
2 Likes
Iām now stuck on this one. dammit.
I know when I actually succeed, though, itāll feel like a major historical achievement
1 Like
saga scarlet grace is the greatest
brutalised by an early boss, on the retry one character sparked a tech killing just the right enemies to start a huge chain of unite attacks, some real tetris shit it was beautiful
13 Likes
IGDB donāt acknowledge it as a game but I say it counts; Iāve been enjoying the daily challenge of Wordle (the web one not the desktop app) with my morning coffee, a cute little simple word guessing game. I only wish there were more than one a day! But maybe thatād make it wear thin too quickly? Not sure!
5 Likes
I picked up Black Book as a Christmas present for myself. It mixes visual novel and point-and-click adventure with card-based RPG battles. Itās set in 19th Century Russia. You play as a young village witch who wants to break the 7 seals of the Black Book to bring her fiancĆ© back from hell.
Everything happens during twilight or the dead of night. It looks a bit like Kentucky Route Zero. The narrative oozes Christian and folkloric superstition. Thereās a sin stat. You keep servant demons in a basket and need to assign them to torment villagers to keep the demonās from tormenting you instead (I think this affects the sin stat).
Battles, so far, are about balancing your defensive barrier against your damage output. Seems straightforward 2 hours in, but there are some complicating interactions between cards, which are pages of the Black Book. Battles are one-off affairs, and I find them pretty engaging. The music sets an amazing mood, and there are some very cool but understated spell animations.
Very moody, evocative game.
5 Likes
Iām amused at the way New Colossus finds ways to increase the spectacle and hilarity, getting to kill my dad, the moment of triumph clearing the courtroom level, followed by the emotional ventilation of it being a daydream sequence, feeling of sadness from the execution scene, genuinely wondering if I am getting a bad ending, or if this is a specific timeline from choices I made, going through all the stages of grief until I start nervously laughing at BJ getting the DIO treatment, all of this cleverly lampshaded by the following conversation with Anya about whether this is all a dream or the afterlife, but oh no, no time to love your hot pregnant wife BJ because you have sneak into Hitlerās base on planet venus where you get to watch him piss and puke himself on screen. I especially like that part because itās like, āWe have to have Hitler in our game for plot reasons and we want to avoid making him seem like a cool badass villain by any means so we are going to give him the most cartoonishly senile and paranoid interpretation we can so you know that we hate himā. The writers broadcast how intentionally they took every corner of tone shifting with this game and I love it. still gonna finish it later but for now it just keeps delivering
14 Likes
playing a lot of disgaea. the first one. i played very far into it back in my teens but never really finished it. kinda trying to āquicklyā put together an overpowered team, which means iāve probably spent more time in the item world than doing story missions.
the mechanics really are novel and fun in how you just kinda break stuff in weird ways. like, the geo effects where you can either try to play a sequence puzzle game while trying to not kill all the enemies, or use their effects to your advantage. or how you can undo player actions to set up the same characters for multiple team attacks. or how you can use the infinitely stackable throw mechanics to pretty much move anywhere you want in a single turn.
had a very long time where i just considered this game very slow and grindy, and getting back to it and using all this stuff to speed through leveling up feels good.
also played and finished pythagorasā perpetual motion machine.
itās a block pushing puzzle game about setting up perpetually looping patterns of rolling boulders.
not very long or difficult. still very satisfying to get these 3d contraptions to work and seeing the resulting loop.
17 Likes
yeah it fucking rules
3 Likes