and it’s harder than it looks to replicate this nonsense voice
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probably easier if you’re just like filling in boxes in a spreadsheet though
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This episode gives me a headache.
honestly hundreds of 40-character textboxes of ambiguous flavour text being translated into another language and then fit back into the same 40-character textbox limit is probably the videogame version of iambic pentameter or something
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kiazi’s children their faces wet. the beast at tanagra.
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oh it’s cool - i think ultimately sleepy’s point is right in that it doesn’t really live up to the grandeur of that opening screen and cover art. but for the first few hours it definitely feels like it might i guess is what i’m getting at.
but yeah the weird whale-song to title screen moment is a feeling i’ve been chasing ever since, i don’t think anything could really live up to how magical that feels
the seagulls at the beginning of chrono trigger are also in this category. hmm maybe “best first 5 seconds of any game?” would be a good thread
6 Likes
I finished up Utopias (the ending was very pretentious but did not crash) and bothered to get a screenshot to better explain part of my ramblings about it:
This is after picking a world to go to from the hub area. It goes to a Ratchet & Clank-esque “spaceship flying through space to cover for loading times” screen except it then asks permission to run a different program in which the world you selected runs in while the original program/screen just sort of idles in the background. When you finish this world this program closes and the original one fades in from black with you back at the central starting place.
I have no idea why it does not just work like every other game with a hub I’ve played and load the level you jump to in the same game/program.
7 Likes
The fuck have I been up to, anyway?
Oh.
Right.
Warframe
Not too much, here. Got the Halloween stuff done mostly day one as it’s all bought with the main tokens from recent open world zone and I played the ever loving shit out of that. I gave the little kids mobile/Halloween story thing a listen, and it was enjoyable enough but in 2020 on the eve of an election that could very easily plunge my country into a civil war whose scope and bloodshed would be anything like most who advocate for such to occur, it just ends up ringing hollow to me. Have been messing around with more Banshee builds here and there, as well as the Helminth system, and pondering that Warframe’s general sense of incompleteness and its ability to be tailored to work how you want it (to a point, anyway) is both its greatest strength and source of friction.
'Course, I could be pretty far off the mark on that last bit, so, just take it as some idle rambling from someone who plays the game too much.
Genshin Impact
If you’re looking for a fairly low key explore’n’fight experience this is pretty great, especially for the price. It’s damned pretty, too, and the translation is overall pretty surprisingly good. If you’re the type with a “Gotta catch 'em all”/collector type brain, just keep walkin’. So far there’s about 2/7ths of the world in place, the leveling up system is too complex for its own good, and I’m annoyed by the gacha system. No, not the getting characters part. That’s whatever, there’s plenty of pulls to be gleaned by mostly ignoring it and the shitty battlepass, and just getting on with playing. Tying character progression, specifically their Constellations, to additional pulls of that character, though, is pretty gross as a lot of characters gain huge amounts of utility and usefulness via their constellations. Don’t like that at all. There’s also too many fucking things to level up. You’ve got two branches for weapons, your character, their 5 accessories, each of their individual skills… it’s just not great at the moment. Maybe that side of things will smooth out as it develops.
Anodyne 2
Haven’t made much headway on this one, but I’m enjoying it so far. Lot of PS1 retro feels coming from the 3D segments. Not really sure the characters or writing is doing much for me, though, but eh, we’ll see. Oh, and no, I haven’t played the first, so maybe there’s a perspective that’d give that I’m missing here.
Homefront
Got it free on Steam sometime back, installed it, and gave it a whirl. Basically a greatest hits reel for the CoD series circa 2010 thrown into a blender with Red Dawn, and a drum’s worth of Yellow Peril with the resulting slurry then overcooked to the point that any dog would refuse to come within 10 ft. of you for fear of having the resulting mess’s stink on it. Which makes sense given John Milius was a story consultant on it. There’s a few bits where it almost manages to have an insightful critique or two of the U.S. in spite of itself, but mostly it’s just mediocre and racist.
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utopia being blocked for not having a verified publisher isn’t bad in a joni mitchell lyric sort of way
5 Likes
Spent an hour or two last night playing through the Immortals Fenyx Rising demo on Stadia, so I guess this is sort of a two-fer.
For one, Stadia. I think this is kind of a rad way to do a demo? I’m never gonna buy into or subscribe to digital products on a Google service that’s not just their phone stuff ever again (RIP Google Play Music), but having some sort of system in place to offer demos like this in the long run would be fantastic. I couldn’t get it to run on my laptop (extensions or something can make the service hang up), but I was able to get it to run on my decrepit old Samsung Galaxy Tab A without a hitch (or an account, apart from my Gmail). Even with my shitty WiFi the visual quality rarely dropped (plus, being letter boxed in a 10" screen, it was only really noticeable when my connection dramatically changed), input lag felt nonexistent.
So, Stadia. Pretty neat! Still not gonna buy into Stadia!
As for the game…errgh…I…I think I like it?
The writing is, uh, awful. There’s this constant narrative banter between an exhausted Prometheus and a sort of uh, dumb Scottish jock Zeus, who constantly changes things up in the events before you return to the action. And the few times Fenyx herself says anything or vocalizes, she comes off as an absolute gremlin.
I dunno, maybe it’ll be funny to somebody out there, but it’s at best very “ah, yeah, I guess that’s cute.”
Visually, coming from the team that made AC Odyssey, it’s really goddamn good. The art style is cartoony, sure, but the world design feels more focused than Odyssey was. Not just land and terrain for the sake of being there.
The gameplay is some pretty blatant design-by-committee distillation of what made Breath of the Wild work into a game that only sorta feels like it. Gliding over terrain? Yep. Stamina meter? You got it. Cooking? Well, sort of (there aren’t many ingredients, and they can only be crafted into one of four potion types). The special moves and how you pull them off, plus the guided arrow system, feel right out of the new AC games. The combat feels much tighter than it has in Assassin’s Creed of late, too.
And, of course, climbing up and around these huge, beautiful environments is pretty fun. Or at least 10+ years of climbing shit in Assassin’s Creed has tricked my brain into thinking that climbing shit is fun, I dunno.
So it’s got a pretty awful narrative delivery and is derivative as hell, but…damn it looks nice and actually feels pretty great to play. So I dunno. Maybe.
4 Likes
heh
good joke
on some level I feel the complaints about maxing out a character are misplaced because you don’t even need to get constellations fully unlocked to be useful since it’s still very much tilted towards action game and anything beyond a basic power level (character, weapon, artifacts) is superfluous because there’s no endgame content or high-end coop content yet where you are power-gated or drag other people down with your limp team, but you know, in your heart of hearts that that kind of content surely has to be coming
personally, I’m more up in arms that they have the gall to drip-feed content out while trying desperately to get me to spend money (I’ve already done 90% of stuff for free and the only thing stopping me from finishing up the Spiral Abyss is actually grinding up 4 other characters and their weapons and their artifacts)
but also I want Klee
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today in lsd, i finally met this famous character! they gave me a kiss!
overlooked this moody parking lot but accidentally collided with the fence while trying to walk down there and explore
got warped into this room with vaguely menacing images on the television and this teddy bear sitting in front of it. it then started floating at me like this and i fucking panicked
23 Likes
I interpreted that kiss as like a hostile headbutt or maybe they were trying to absorb/fuse with you by clipping into your body somehow. Definitely works better as a kiss.
Any kind of hostility I read in LSD scenes aside from the “violence district” I feel is my brain filling in dream logic gaps with a Lovecraftish xenophobic fear that I’m not really sure they were going for.
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tried out ghostrunner and I don’t love it – I never like indie first-person action games as much as I hope to, and this is no exception; the design space is always a little overtuned and not very expressive to my own expectations
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Sounds like someone needs to play G-String
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I gotta play G-String
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I finished Metroid. I took too long and got the ending where Samus melded with the inside of her suit
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Huh, looking it up, looks like there are 5 endings to NES Metroid. I played it a lot and was under the misapprehension there were 3. Maybe I saw all of them at some point but conflated the 1st and 2nd and the 4th and 5th.
The third ending (“reasonably good pace”) where she takes off the helmet is my headcanon ending.
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So Fusion was the real Metroid II all along…
I remember being totally electrified by this intro. Feel like the whole game cruises on this five seconds of non-gameplay.
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