I tried to write an essay about this once in college and got a D
14 Likes
That era, right when CD ROMS became the standard but before the idea of âcontentâ as a thing which fills up all available space became like formalized, games had a weird open character which I think is exemplified by FFT and Symphony of the Night.
Elements in those games donât feel âdesigned inâ some much piled together. The effect is to make the game seem like a lot more than just the sum of its parts.
Like the latter Metroidvanias, with their soul collecting mechanic, formalize something which was much wilder in SOTN. Mechanical elements were haphazardly attached to all manner of things in SOTN whereas in latter games its all souls and you can imagine the designers working with a spreadsheet to fill them all out.
3 Likes
Yes! A harmony of aesthetics from the mechanics to the writing to the layered, mathematical music.
In the same way, Shiren is always evocative but terse â the backdrops and story and item mechanics donât tell a complete story, but give you the pieces to finish it yourself.
3 Likes
Its like games used to have gimcrackery rather than content. I feel like right at that inflection point games felt like they genuinely had a lot of different things in them and now they feel like they have many variations on the same sorts of things.
It matters that you steal HP from enemies in SOTN with a weird controller input to cast a spell but activating shield Rod effects requires a specific combination of items. In latter-day games all those effects would just be different souls. It just doesnât feel the same.
3 Likes
Relevant to this discussion: Outer Worlds, which I got⌠some time ago for free or on super sale or something. This isnât the fantastic and GOATworthy Outer Wilds adventure game, this is the Obsidian Fallout/Mass Effect thing.
Itâs got all the parts. Brightly colored, varied environments that really fit the pulp space adventure vibe. Genuine choices in the main questlines that sometimes have a bit of layered complexity beyond a binary âchoose this faction or that faction.â âFunâ, well-written dialogue.
But itâs all so⌠perfunctory. These are the things that are in these games. Hereâs the checklist. Hilarious killer robot. Pointless weapon and armor upgrade system. Marvel quipping. A horrific amount of pick-em-up kleptomania. Very Funny And Incisive leadenly sarcastic commentary on the moral void of post-capitalist wage slavery. I probably wouldâve loved this game when I was 12. But now Iâm sitting here going, the choices & consequences are less nuanced and itâs a damn sight more ugly, but somehow Iâd rather be playing Mass Effect, with its much more manageable and discrete inventory and more po-faced, earnest galactic politics stuff? This is a dire feeling for a game to evoke.
7 Likes
I played it right after disco elysium so it never stood a chance
2 Likes
gabriel knight 2 stopped working for me just at the part where you start exploring the informational tourist displays of the ludwig ii castles. i was sincerely looking forward to going through all that stuffâŚ! i wonder if itâs a general rule that narrative multimedia games will just gradually tend towards edutainment. one of the most charming parts of the game so far was all the times you click on something and just get a full-screen picture of a famous historical munich glockenspiel clock or whatever presented without comment. âcontentâ!
the other thing i enjoyed about it was the acting. gabriel was kinda hokey and the lady who played grace went through each scene with a kind of crazed intensity that was fun but most of the appeal was the smaller roles, like the police chief (played by nicholas worth, aka pauly from darkman) or the lawyer in the hunting lodge, both of whom veer between scenery chewing and a kind of neutral unreadable quality. maybe the latter is partly due to the way conversations in the game worked - every FMV video representing a different conversation tree option ends with a kind of odd moment of silence, as the characters stare into space the better to segue back into the idle animations of their sprite versions. the pacing that results is weird but engaging⌠i donât know that any of the film parts of the game are that far outside the confines of, like, a TV movie, but i think the combination of the chopped-up way you encounter them, the sometimes surreal proportions of the greenscreen backdrops, the flat and static camera angles, all play on that in a good way. if the appeal of TV movies is that of minor moments of energy or mystery buried in a dreamlike vagueness then the FMV adventure game framework is actually quite good at capturing this.
havenât played GK3 but remember reading about that puzzle and have to say, everything in this one so far has been very sensible by comparison and mostly just plays on the kind of natural circuitousness that comes of being in a country where you donât speak the language. you guess your way through small interactions by context and end up having to bug people to help you translate things, etc. the worst puzzle was probably the one about using a concealed cuckoo clock to simulate the sound of a knock on the door but by adventure game standards it was honestly fairly tame.
one of the items you get is a magazine with what appears to be ulrike meinhoff on the cover. gabriel makes no comment.
9 Likes
Iâve always said the cuckoo clock puzzle is the only bad one and other than that puzzle wise gk2 is basically sierraâs full throttle
1 Like
All right youâve got my attention
I think itâs as close as sierra can get to a lucasarts style adventure game, which means its still an unbridgeable gulf away from âgood puzzlesâ but at least it isnât actively painful to play
Been making some time every couple of days to play something between finishing work and eating:
I also started Rage which i bought on sale ages ago, after seeing the Rage 2 trailer and thinking âhell yea I want FPS mad maxâ. But instead it plays like Jak II? I think if your overworld has a boost button to make it less tedious to get around AND it takes ~45 seconds to get from one side of the map to the other, then you have a design problem. Have spent more time talking to not-John Goodman (jesus christ, actually is John Goodman) than shooting the spongy enemies. Headshots only count with the sniper rifle, some parts try to look like a cover shooter but pro strats are always shotgun and bumrush. The âopen worldâ doesnât add anything, wish you were teleported straight to the next shooter section like in Doom!
2 Likes
I beat Deus Ex Invisible War. I thought it was pretty good! it has all the problems everyone says it does, but the only one that really bothered me was the UI.
the story is sort of confused â it seems like they werenât totally sure how to do a direct sequel to the first DX (which accounts for the warp in the west style take on the different endings from that game). I think the faction system is largely to blame. The first DX has a very clear 3-act structure that corresponds with your mission control handlers â alex/unatco in the beginning, tracer tong in the middle, a rotating cast of illuminati washouts in the end. In IW the faction handlers all yell at you to do stuff without forcing you to commit, and if you choose one the others just go âi wish you wouldnât 
â but keep inviting you to help them, so if you donât find any one of them compelling (and i didnât) you end up drifting aimlessly from plot point to plot point. It makes sense in the long game (spoiler alert theyâre all just the Illuminati all the way down) but that seems to me like evidence why you donât muddle half your plot for the sake of a twist. Then in the second half youâre working directly with major players from DX1 and it feels like youâre helping the Bros. Denton get a mulligan on the first gameâs ending. Never really grabbed me. the subplots were my favorite story bits â itâs pretty cute that the warring coffee shops end up mirroring the main factions, i liked keeping up with ng resonance the hologram pop singer/surveillance AI and your dipshit schoolmate who gets catfished into the omar. I think if you take all these as a whole the story hangs together, but itâs less immediate and wants you to soak up the (tiny, airport-like) world more.
I think cutting up the levels into smaller chunks makes them feel less Deus Exy and thatâs a shame (what a shame!) but i was pleased with how strong those chunks were. It felt like they did the best they could to maximize the little bit of space they could use for each portion of the level, it amounts to giving you 2-3 routes through a given complex instead of 3-4. Definitely a compromised game and a poor sequel, but i had a fun time with it. Also, it only cost me a buck lol
anyway hereâs my man JC Denton tearing it up
13 Likes
Yeah Rage isnât very good lol. I would have skipped straight to Rage 2 if it were available but even though itâs a lot better (I think) it is still a contemporary id shooter. They had some help from MachineGames on that one so the guns donât feel as plinkity-plink and it delivers on the Mad Max type setting but itâs a clear-the-map-of-icons open worlder everyoneâs seen a hundred times by now. I think itâs still on gamepass though.
1 Like
i have a soft spot for IW for the reasons you mentioned, i think airport-like is a good descriptor probably for the game in general and iâm far enough from it at this point that that comes to me (blearily) as its peculiar appeal
3 Likes
I really want to finish Invisible War some day.
itâs quite short if that helps, i think i clocked ~8 hours
1 Like
Invisible War is kinda funny in that they did the weird âall three endings happened simultaneouslyâ explanation for the set-up, and then the endings for this game are just more extreme versions of the first gameâs, plus one extra
5 Likes
from the promise of Red Haired Anime Girl Sitting Passively on a Walkway i downlaoded Yrpubleshooter: Abandoned Children on steam because itnhad the âsrpgâ tag.
what i thought was fire embpem ended up being
well
they finally did it
they made an xcom just for me
just for meâŚ
welcome to the trash pileâ cuz they finally fucking made anime xcom
12 Likes
you fucking dorks told me for years if i wanted to âget into the realâ i had to play a game that was like math homework crossed woth doing spreadsheets in an office and the math isnt even RIGHT and now im raising a farm of anime himbos who i think want to fuck their aunt who is a robot
6 Likes
okay videogame you think i am going to be able to go to bed when you tell me certain combinations of skills on my boys create âsecret specialtiesâ when i level up and you dont even point me in a direction
1 Like