Yeah I stopped playing GGXX after creating a blister on my left thumb on the weird playstation dpads. And that’s the milder kind of RSI, probably good that it stopped me in my tracks
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I’m up for some slippi matches some time but about to sleep. GMT/BST 21:00-23:00 is when I usually play. I can pm the code for some matches if you like.
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Found out I had a bunch of free Prime games.
I played Q.U.B.E. 2 and very deliberately avoided gaming it: always go straight to the next obvious pathway, never investigate or do anything that wasn’t go through the obvious door and get to the next puzzle. I made the right choice, there’s nothing in it besides the puzzles.
The game is FPS puzzle chambers, you have three colours you can place on white panels (only one panel per colour at a time), which can either bounce whatever’s touching it, extrude a column, or spawn a block. The puzzles are not ‘tight’ (there are panels in chambers which are not part of the solution), there’s one ‘right’ solution, there’s no run button. Here’s the puzzle I spent the most time on, because I didn’t realise how far the oil nozzle on the left would squirt.
The plot is terrible “don’t tell, don’t show” sci fi garbage where the cube structure is alive and testing you on behalf of all humanity. The ending is hilarious, where cube structure radio frequency asks you to take the left path to save the structure and human advisor radio frequency urges you to take right to blow it up, and they join up just around the corner, laying bare the artifice right in front of you.
If you ignore the plot the game is quite hellish (literally) and the protagonist constantly accuses the cube structure of taking them, has no memory of how they arrived, discovers the crashed wreck of the helicopter they last remembered taking them to a site, hears worrying vocal messages about “getting them to safety”, etc. all making it easy to form an interpretation that the protagonist has died and is in the afterlife. The game starts sterile and white, then overgrown, decaying temple, then dark vaporwave, then greebly black open abyss. None of this is acknowledged in the writing or plot, with chapters named ‘House of Leaves’ without any! damn! space-subverting! level geometry!
There’s also an eco theme that was whiffed on, the temple has a lot of oil- and fire-based puzzles but no message about the terrible impact humans are having on our fragile planet.
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yeah, this is the good bile
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oh yeah uh if anyone wants to play melee using slippi I will join in
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Paradise Killer. Surprised this works, honestly.
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I went back to nier and had to do the last dungeon 3 times because they updated rpcs3 since I started to where the in ingame keyboard ui is supported now but I’m playing the translated japanese version so that caused me some problems I had to figure out when I had to type my name in and then I was doing ending b and I was just getting tired of doing the same things and still hearing the same handful of songs over and over again and also the game crashing if I went from a window to full screen sometimes and I get it everyone I kill has their own rich full life so I think I quit again for a while.
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Siren is extremely cool but super hard. I just failed at this long escort mission in a school after like 20 minutes of crab shuffling. I’m going back to finish it later, but jeeze. Things are difficult as designed, but there are certainly some things about how it controls which make demand a lot of my delicate attention. Sort of like how people explain away the confusion of camera-relative tank controls in Resident Evil as part of that game’s disempowering and horror inspiring affect, Siren’s terrible controls are endearing because they regularly create enduring moments of serious tension that’s physically and emotionally experienced, emerging from a feeling in the fingers on the controller. This is one of the hardest games I’ve played I think!
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Back when I played it, I beat my head against levels like the one you mentioned and eventually gave into my compulsion to look up a guide. I probably missed out on the satisfaction of puzzling out the stealth mazes it puts you through but there is too little margin for error a lot of the time to work out what it wants you to do without outside help.
I appreciate that this might be intentional in getting you to identify with the characters’ hopeless situations in a way that I don’t think other games in that genre really captured. You have the Silent Hill games emphasizing the player characters’ lack of combat skill, but the odds are so stacked against you here in such a way that you really feel the desperation it tried to evoke. (Might be slight spoilers as the Excel spreadsheet timeline of the game in all its glory is shown briefly, but I felt the character collapsing to his knees in despair and music swelling in this short cutscene kind of encapsulates how this game felt to me as a whole) That game really is a hell to play and be in, but it’s good in part because of that.
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CAUTION: pointless WoW venting
I’m a little bit heartbroken tonight.
World of Warcraft’s new expansion (“Shadowlands”) should open on October 27. Players have already downloaded most of the patch data, and on an unspecified Tuesday prior to the 27th, the prepatch will launch, officially ushering in the expansion’s system-level changes (level squish, class overhauls, deactivation of the corruption powers introduced at the end of the previous expansion, etc.) and paving the way for us to access the new areas on the release date. A pre-launch questing event will also start on this date, and test data suggests players will need at least two weeks to complete these quests. So, unless they make major unexpected changes to this event, prepatch could launch on September 29, or October 6, or maybe October 13. Players had been hoping it would be tomorrow, but most people agree that it’s probably October 6.
I have been hoping that the prepatch is later, rather than sooner: the deactivation of corruption effects coincides with the removal of a particular solo challenge that I’d been hoping to complete, as the mount and the title awarded for accomplishing this will be impossible to acquire once that happens. I’d have to solo the Horrific Visions of N’Zoth instances for both Orgrimmar and Stormwind with all five faceless masks activated, which isn’t TOO much of a challenge if you’ve been playing continuously since the previous patch released and regularly engaging in practice runs to build up your resources. I had not been doing that, and so I spent a frankly stupid amount of effort over the last 72 hours to acquire every potential competitive edge that’s available to me as a solo player without a guild or access to high-difficulty content. I spent nights practicing and preparing, and tonight is my last chance to attempt the Orgrimmar clear, and I botched every attempt. I’m completely out of resources to try again, and in a couple of hours, the weekly rotation will change the instance from Orgrimmar back to Stormwind; prepatch is almost certainly going to coincide with Orgrimmar’s return.
I should really know better by now—every time a new expansion comes out, I’m always spending the last possible moments completing time-limited challenges, and it’s a huge stressful mess every time. While I was able to get the mage tower appearances I wanted during Legion and the green fire feat of strength in Mists of Pandaria, I missed out on a bunch of Brawler’s Guild achievements and now also the Horrific Visions rewards tonight. If I’d just done my stupid dailies through the spring, the autumn would not find me so crestfallen.
I’m hoping posting about it will serve as a good reminder to get the stuff I want done ahead of time in Shadowlands.
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You have played enough child the mask can fall from your eyes look upon my incredible Siren protip and know: The game is really not that hard and if you aren’t playing the little girl you can just beat the shit out of every enemy you come across and game the hell out of the AI. It is necessary you go through the gauntlet before you find this out. It’s a pretty neat magic trick the game pulls!
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I don’t want to grow up Rudie 
But this is true, so long as you have a weapon or don’t run into any Shibito with rifles.
I am really trying to not use a guide but sometimes I literally don’t have a clue. I feel okay knowing that I could be relying on gamefaqs a lot harder than I am because the game is very obscure and hellish like you point out. What a terrible situation to be in…
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Does anyone know what the patient zero was on mandating the (do I have to spoiler this?) time travel thing as being a Big Twist when it was one of the game’s main marketing points and I’m pretty sure was even in the game’s original announcement trailer?
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Thief is wonderful but i haven’t completed it yet because i just want to rob Bafford’s Manor over and over. It’s an incredible first level. I bet if i owned the game when it came out, i would have squeezed hours of fun out of it alone. As it is ive played it trying to speedrun, trying not to knock anyone out, trying to get all the treasure and not knock anyone out while speedrunning, etc.
It’s really fun that there’s a post-mission score for how many guards you knocked out in midair lol
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Fwiw I don’t remember any of the game’s marketing
I know the sunk costs are incredible and this is not a thing you need or want to hear, but: you don’t have to do this.
I appreciate you saying this! But this is one of the costs I sometimes have to pay for the many other joys the game brings me. I feel no compulsion to worry about progression or gearing, I have no guild or group drama to worry about, and I get to basically disregard most of the issues the retail WoW community is raising about the new systems in Shadowlands. I get to have a lot of fun, and if I have my TSM functions set up properly, I may soon be able to stop paying for a subscription altogether. A couple of nights of stress and disappointment is what makes the years of satisfaction so much sweeter.
this is what it looks like when a cave man trips on a rock
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fwiw, NWOA is all about corralling the enemies to the center or to one side so they don’t gang up on you. you should basically never be attacking anyone at the edge of the screen (or do your best to avoid that scenario as much as possible)
use the one-hit guys as a way to manipulate the placement of other characters (you can do this most easily by throwing) AND you should also be guard rolling a LOT (hit the jump button and a direction while guarding) because you are totally invincible in the direction you’re facing when you do this and it’s the easiest, safest, and fastest way to get around the screen (depending on which character you use, your mileage may vary, but i find this to be a generally true thing).
really i think the beauty of NWOA is that once you understand character movement and placement, it becomes clear that the titular Ninja Warriors are incredibly overpowered and no enemies stand a chance.
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the best thing about Once Again is doing the stage 6 boss with Ninja, where the strat is “hey can you guys stand next to each other so I can press up+attack three times and win, thanks”
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