It’s the same as how a landlord who just converted a bunch of their units into condos would like ideally like everyone else to go into a condo buying frenzy, and at the same time will bitterly oppose “Big Developers” who want to build competing condos nearby
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tobal 2 would be a good game if it wasn’t completely terrible and the ai didn’t blatantly read your inputs after the first fight
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The Eternal Cylinder looks like it’s going to be the first Ace Team game I really love since Zeno Clash. Properly cosmic, and with the right amount of goofiness to skirt by self-seriousness to make it read more clearly and humanly.
It doesn’t hurt that it’s hitting all my buttons: evolution, playing as prey, and the pastels and bio-shapes palette of the early '00s.
It’s a clan character strategy game like Tail of the Sun or Ancestors: Humankind Odyssey or Spore sub-game 2 and it’s just as fiddly as these games have always been but if you theme it like EVO or Cubivore I have very few defenses.
I mean,
this cube’s for me
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AAAAAHHHH!!!
I don’t know why in 2015 I heard no-budget Deus Ex-like stealth game and thought “I should play that.” Here in 2021 I spent 15 minutes finally with Neon Strut . I think I had it on my wishlist for 5 years and just bought it sometime during the pandemic.
It is a no-budget Deus-Ex Like Stealth game. The AI was dumb as hell. It has almost no reason to exist because New Hitman is real and is everyone’s (except me’s) friend.
I heard about it on a podcast at the time and looking back did not do proper vetting of “this guy will buy a game because they are waiting for the next AAA.” If you love Deus Ex and don’t give a crap this is probably good.
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can at least confirm that this is good and reminds me of my time with Deus Ex, except the ugliness and jankiness are the entire point. They also fixed a lot of the slowdown with a patch.
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cruelty squad is probably the most original and interesting FPS i’ve played since devil daggers. describing it compared to other games will never do it justice, even as i want to try. is it rainbow six? is it deus ex? is it dark souls? yes. and also none of them.
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Beat Valkyrie Profile 1! Very very good game. I would’ve been fine if the entire game was like Disc 1 where you were just doing dungeons and getting unrelated sidestory cutscenes with no real narrative thread, but the developments in Disc 2 (I did Ending A which involves Lenneth slowly remembering who she was in the past) were sometimes very cool, so I’m fine with it. Also some of those later dungeons and bosses get fuckin’ hard, which is fun but surprising after the first half being trivialised by either a strong mage or one of the “Slayer” weapons that instantly kill most bosses up to Chapter 5.
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In Sekiro news, I’ve hit a wall. The world really opens up after the bull and I enjoyed exploring all the new areas, but I can’t beat any of the bosses I now have access to. Last night, I cycled between a few of them and tried each several times until I became too frustrated to continue.
Lady Butterfly is probably the one I have tried and failed the most times. I’m at the point where I can actually deflect her attacks and I don’t have to resort to very slowly wearing her vitality down. But that’s her first form. The second form just destroys me as if I’ve never played the game before.
It is nice that I have so many paths open, though. Some of the available bosses I have attempted only once or not at all because they just seemed obviously too powerful for me. But I guess it’s easy to misjudge that because a couple of the most intimidating (drunkard and bull) were ones I ended up beating without much trouble.
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block more
run less
that’s where I was at this point
practicing strictly blocking and parrying against the samurai in the castle and fighting the castle boss were the next breakthroughs for me
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I stopped and deleted the game at that point after having a similar experience and really failing over and over at successfully deflecting every boss available at that point. Also I was having 0 fun
Good luck
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For Lady Butterfly’s Phase 2, I spammed a dodge attack (I dunno which one, I haven’t played since my system restore) every time she charged me and it was a very effective cheese. Couldn’t spawn her phantoms, couldn’t do anything but use the same attack string.
Yeah in retrospect all three midbosses-with-their-own-room available in Sekiro’s midgame are totally one-dimensional challenges there to teach you that the timing windows are calibrated so that you can Just Simply Deflect Anything even if it’s a flurry of strikes that look like only a superhero could deflect.
The major bosses in the midgame can also be taken down with pure deflection strats or the pure running strats that Ogre teaches, but they’ll really go down easy if you mix both tactics together (focusing on running first when their stamina regen is still too high for deflecting to get anywhere)
I dunno. It reads like brilliant game design now that I lay the theory out on paper with 20/20 hindsight. But almost nobody immediately takes in the intended lessons in practice, I certainly didn’t at the time
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It’s only good communication if it’s only communicating!
I think it fails at their goals but still makes an interesting game. On paper, they’re trading depth of design (multiple approaches allowed) for something simpler that messages better, with strong tactics. But the pressure is high enough that we anecdotally know it doesn’t communicate well. So they’ve theoretically weakened the game for communication that doesn’t work.
However, something strange happens. Players don’t hear the game communicating but a survival strategy eventually forces them into shape and they feel that they’ve overcome it due to skill. Even without clear communication, they’ve molded their response and found approval and it feels meaningful.
The game’s a cruel, terse, and capricious teacher and the crumbs of love you can pull out of it feel sweeter for it. Good thing you can cut the power
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From must’ve been self-aware about this because it’s an explicit part of the game’s script. There is an inventory lore paragraph about lord Ashina unexpectedly going down to the lower levels of his castle some days to challenge his samurai trainees to impromptu swordfights. And the reward for defeating bosses representing parental figures in Sekiro’s life is one single line of grudging praise uttered in their dying breath.
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I watched Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril! the other day and realized how much of Sekiro is a direct reference; you’re effectively the cub, sworn into this life and with a hidden interior. Every parent you can find is mired in guilt and cycles of violence. I’d read the first Dark Horse volume a while back but it didn’t stick with me, but the tone of these '70s revenge movies, self-serious but ludicrous, fits From’s taste. A baby cart with machine guns! a joke just as funny as a monkey with a gun
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That makes me realize the theme was all over genre storytelling for decades but started to fade a bit after the 1980s. In sci-fi for instance, Dune contains this theme, and Ender’s Game grew out of a short story where a master teaches Ender the skill of vigilance without uttering a single word. The trope of the child ceaselessly seeking to find a surrogate father in new, forbidding spaces is made into a metaphor for humans’ first contact with aliens.
From’s secret weapon as artists is how they are more observant of tropes that people loved all along but that contemporary culture has for whatever reason temporarily forgotten about.
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The device of a frustrating teacher lines up well with an artist’s goal, when they have a throughline and a basic message but need to wrap it in layers of story and world to earn the trust of an audience. A lot of artistic practice is the self-restraint to avoid what you want to talk about and focus on what your audience needs to get there.
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