Games You Played Today: Actress Again: Current Code (Part 1)

holy shit are you kidding me the way you have people keep morale up is by getting fucking wasted at the bar

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pathway unlocked: Anime Cop (dirty)

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yes you still have a base to upgrade that keeps track of all of your stats and shit. it’s a fucking hipster bar its great. in your hipster bar you can manage the districts you have available missions in like dispatching units to in XCOM. it is bad gangland fantasy. great shit. v

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Boy the Spider-Man DLC sure is miserable from both a mechanical and a storytelling standpoint. I really need to learn to stop buying DLC campaigns.

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It can really go both ways. I just played through Horizon Zero Dawn’s DLC and it felt like it finally fully realized what they were trying to do in the main campaign all along, but couldn’t quite pull off before (maybe it was the timeline pressure on the initial release, or maybe it was the learning process)

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Spider-Man story DLC is unusually bad compared to other expansions. It actually ruined some aspects of the main game for me.

Wrapped up Paradise Killer and I loved it. It has a lot of mood and I appreciated the developers taking on the challenge of designing a murder mystery game around freedom. The setting is kinda genius in that it both allows for absurdly absolute game rules because the world is so magical while also providing a good story to pick over how abstract justice is when you look at it closely against how the world actually is. In fact the justice process kind of requires you to scrutinise the world in this way even though they are somewhat incompatible. Genocide of kidnapped humans is A-OK but a murder of the elites is the top priority for all involved and even when justice is performed there’s no telling whether it will have a long-lasting effect.

Without getting into spoilers I liked that I was able to actually correctly guess the mystery from the clues parallel conspiracy which neither mastermind was fully aware of. Even with all the information you’re still left to piece together the bigger picture which i really appreciated. There is the issue of the Big Ol’ Clue which kinda just straight up tells you who did it but I don’t think it ruined it too much. The gating is such that you’re unlikely to just stumble upon it but I feel bad for people who got these kinds of clues early.

Slight structural and end trial spoilers I was thinking that the final solution would allow for tiers of guilt where there would be a murderer, but you’d unlock the co-conspirators and mastermind and there would be a sort of ‘layers of success’ thing. I wasn’t expecting the trial to go through each mystery section in the way it did although it seems obvious in retrospect. I liked that the freedom even extended to accusations and you can make some really weird accusations if you want. There are also a few threads that never get adequately cleared up like whether Yuri really did go through all the seals, or who set up the death scream device. In the end I managed to execute everyone except Doom Jazz, Crimson, and Henry. Henry dies either way because of the law and it’s fucked up. I also thought it was hilarious that I managed to exonerate the Killer Demon of all crimes.

Aside from the mystery and exploration awkwardness the characters and world end up being the draw. The mystery solving is simply a lens through which to understand the fucked up legal system and governance of this island. I guess this makes it pretty noir. Great music too.

It was also neat to see more ex-AAA people (UK as well) make a passion project that works.

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I’ve never tried disabling that. I kind of like the filtering like you notice certain print artifacts in comics, but the clarity is pretty nifty too. It’s way clearer than I thought a PS1 could ever pull off!

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I like how audio and visuals in dreams get progressively distorted as you revisit them, as if trying to suggest the decaying/warping effect of fading memory, but kind of wish there was a way to revert to their original state like in your pics without the accumulated distortion but also without losing your dream chart. But I know that nitpickiness is super missing the point.

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I don’t think non-scanline pics of non-filtered texels make a lot of sense – there’s still too much context missing, and the texels don’t look hard-edged like that in practice. LSD is kind of an odd case, too, because its textures are so low-resolution that texture filtering doesn’t do much.

Nothing like that Diamond Dither pattern the PSX uses, I love games that intentionally draw it out. Visible dither looks so much nicer than the color banding we get nowdays.

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In the case of the PS1 if you were on a CRT you usually didn’t see the dithering. The dithering and colors chosen were intentionally designed to blend together smoothly when displayed to your tv screen.

It’s a cool aesthetic now but originally you weren’t “supposed” to notice it.

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yeah, that’s true – one of the ways that I prefer a shader setup that can do the CRT blooming and blurring but preserve the dither patterns that I like so much

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You’re right. It might just be that I personally never noticed or remembered noticing the dithering and it was always there the whole time.

Also I don’t know what the debate is the waterfall clearly looks better on a crt.

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more than any other console you really need to find a way to soften emulated Genesis video, there’s so much blocky dithering and flickering transparencies otherwise. Just like how you need a low-pass filter on the audio to get it funky smooth

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It’s not that I’d run PSX games with filtered textures, it’s that an LCD-harsh representation of them isn’t correct either. Like earlier 2D games, the edges aren’t intended to be as harsh as they can come across. For example, organic textures like LSD’s concrete and brick texture are look noisier than designed when viewed straight; with a slight CRT blur, they look more like pockets of light and shadow than speckled texture.

Same concept as:
image

You really stacked the deck in the Silent Hill comparison! (but someone’s gotta learn people how to emulate with class) – high res + texture filtering + no dither does that no favors. It probably doesn’t make a good comparison case for texture filtering because texel edges aren’t really visible even without an LCD in that game, as it favors higher-resolution, low-contrast textures with soft, realistic-ish shadowing and the constant full-screen dithering from the fog layer sits atop it.

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yeah I’m dying for simple shader setup in PCSX2. Especially given how many PS2 games used interlacing to run at odd resolutions – they can only look right with that temporal softening and it’s so easy to make them look bad.

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Aah I’m glad you liked the game

I think during the trial you have to go « Wait! Somebody else broke that seal ! » early on to get the full rundown of what each team was doing. IIRC Yuri did get through all the seals to install the portal that the demon kid used. He used the demon kid blood and piece of the crying grudge to get past the two last seals. Could be wrong though.
Witness installed the death scream device on the box in his lab in the cursed dead place, the Day Breaks moved his stuff around with no full knowledge of his ulterior motive

I ended up with the same trial result - it’s the most lawful one I guess. What’s interesting is that you can successfully convict anyone during the trial and end up murdering every character in the game! I wonder if the game acknowledges going for weird convictions that would be motivated by Love Die’s ulterior political motives (Probably not though and that’s fine)

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do you mind if I ask how you got the analog camera mod? I don’t see that among the available mods in sm64nxbuilder. do I need to add it manually?

ok nevermind I guess it’s just in there by default in this version.

I sure wish there was a way to adjust the sensitivity though

otherwise this is rad as hell. feels like if mario 64 was an arcade game released in 1996

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im playing mario 64 on n64 because i used amazon points to order the all stars collection, but i got it sent to a free locker that’s actually a university of washington student project. SO NATURALLY THEY WERE UNABLE TO DELIVER IT (the lockers are bizarre. like today i got a code for an order, even though i didnt order anything, and then i got a code that it was picked up so i guess they’re just sending codes to everyone!) BUT AMAZON DIDNT REFUND THE POINTS so we had to talk to customer service for a year and eventually they resent the game to a place i can pick it up

BUT I WANT TO PLAY IT NOW so i borrowed @BustedAstromech’s copy. its still fun except for the time i BEAT the cheating penguin on the third level snow world, realized i had 49 coins and was like ‘oh yeah EASY ONE UP’ in a john connor voice and stepped outside to climb a nearby tree for a coin. LITTLE DID I KNOW THAT CHEATING PENGUIN LOCKS YOU THE FUCK OUT so i couldn’t enter the door and grab my star!!! i teleported back to the top and HE MADE ME RACE HIM AGAIN AND KNOCKED ME OFF THE TRACK FUCK THAT STAR

mario64 rules but after playing on new analog sticks for a million years the n64 controllers joypad stick is SO LONG AND AWKWARd. i am using the best controller ever but nothing can save me from the joypad

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