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

[SUPERSONNICK]

Yes, I have planned to do a follow-up to my prior two Watchdogs threads, and will probably get around to it later today.

However, their questionable decision to force me to click through three pages of SIGN UP TO THE UBISOFT DATAWAREHOUSE before i can cancel out of the account-bullying. If you don’t want to be thrown back to the initial loading screen multiple times,
you have to

• confirm you want to join
• choose to sign in with an existing account
• cancel out with B, instead of Y, which just goes back to the previous screen

That BS left me sour on the whole game for the whole evening, and I stopped playing after half an hour or so.

Luckily I don’t have a twitter account, or i would have gone to war about this, since if you think about it, it perfectly matches the inclusion of their accessability functionality, so no, that is no accidént:
someone made sure to not tell the stupid peasant how to avoid their account-dreck, therefore text-to-speech must not give away how to circumvent it - meaning you have to be creative to skirt around it, and when you DO HAVE accessability issues, hey, what’s better than being bullied into signing up to an online service. Checks out in a game that is about hacking and privacy!

[vincenttoups]

I’d love to know the history of these sorts of “Now you can’t do THIS” game mechanics. The Final Fantasy Tactics Advance games do it and it seems like it could only result in frustration.

[sponkmonkey]

I find it a curious design choice, restrictions breed tension and creativity yes; but with that realization should come an understanding that they‘re best applied in a way that does not make them feel arbitrary and externally enforced, no?

[captainlove]

When a game removes all of my abilities or puts me in prison, that is my fetish

[Grandpa]

I’m a fool and am starting another Ubisoft open world game without having done all the DLC for the last entry (forgive me, AC Odyssey and, in this case, Watch Dogs 2) and started Watch Dogs Legion.

It seems…OK? My instinct with these games, to ignore the story and explore the world and get my bearings, isn’t working out as well with this one.

You start out with London’s DedSec head, Sabine (who sounds kinda like Judi Dench, if Judi Dench was a 30-something punk goth lady) choosing from a bunch of potential recruits. As much as I wanted to choose the rugby lady, I went with a hacker dude who, according to his profile, thinks he’s a psychic? It never comes up when playing as him, but hey, whatever.

Anyway it seems kinda neat. In the short time I’ve played I’ve recruited two people before playing the first open world mission, which took some doing, seeing as your skill set isn’t remotely as extensive as the last game (not at first). I switched to a homeless guy who is good at being sneaky, and managed to hospitalize two people - people who will, uh, apparently not be recruitable later, because I ran them over with a car.

Anyway the near future London is kind of a lot, and there’s a rich irony in the story going so hot and heavy with these audiologs talking about capitalism and analytics and the erosion of piracy in a game that’s absolutely raking in data about how you’re playing it. Ah well!

For now (at least until I get some actual weapons and skills - sucks to almost recruit someone and have no way to blow up a container or something that they need), it’s been kinda fun to make use of the little spider drone and hack around.

Oh also definitely playing this with permadeath. Mostly because the folks I’ve run into so far are boring compared to the WD2 crew.

[aislesgrises]

a giant demon slowly approaching the town

saw a missile launch out in the fields?!

more cool graffiti in puppet combo streets

the overall visual and sound of that place is really oppressive, unlike most of the other zones. always feel compelled to see as much as possible when i get here

[Polygonzo]

Buying an OG XBox was well worth it even if Gunvalkyrie is the only game I play. Tearing through space in these twinkle-toed tanks is one of my favourite video things. Like driving a Ferrari with your feet tied together for the fun of it. Sometimes you just pull up to the precipitous purples and cosmic yellows and chill out with mid-90s Mancunian warehouse warbles.

FunGalkyrie

[BustedAstromech]

Pairs well with Otogi which also believes in inventing its own color palette

[Polygonzo]

Totally gonna get down with Otogi in the near future, really vibing with that little gang of FROM/SEGA XBox titles.

[BustedAstromech]

the golden age of purple, teal, and yellow

[idiot]

i played about four hours of hades in one go, i think that’s more time than i’ve put into roguelikes or roguelites at all prior

[Rudie]

Played through Modern Warfare Remastered. After so many recent war movies and the strengthing fire of criticism I kept wondering what I thought it said in 2007. There are no characters. The game is drinking it’s own kookaid that being a special forces/marine is badass and about getting the bad guy even after America invaded a country and got a nuke for it’s troubles.

I mean some Marines got nuked but the real victim is the unseen population of unspecified invaded military capital.

The game opens with you killing uninvolved civilian sailors. “Crew expendable”.

Now we have lived in the era of Las Vegas drone strikers. There is no message to the Ac-130 section.

You also kill HUNDREDS of dudes.

It’s not about military heirarchy or just doing the job or geo-politics or the man on the ground or the uniforms or the enemy or any of the things i go to war movies for. It also is a mess mechanically as a game in which you don’t know where to stand and zoom down sights to shoot tiny pixels of men. Join the military kill lots of dudes without consideration because it’s badass. I complained a lot about codww2’s story but at least that was a story.

“I was just a young man doing some wetwork.”

[Mikey]

I played Overload and Forsaken for a bit last night, a bit of a Descent clone double feature. The former nailed the feel and really felt great to play but aesthetically it’s so bland. Maybe the original was too but I think it had a greater sense of mystery/danger.

Forsaken has an extremely late-90s aesthetic, right down to the spoken bits of dialogue and a posh lady computer voice that calls out every powerup you pick up. But boy did it feel bad to play. I wasn’t sure if it could use kbm controls but it felt more authentic to the N64 experience to use a controller and holy hell are 6DoF games not suited for a gamepad.

[Mikey]

I also played some non-VR Superhot and it’s still pretty good but it’s just not the same.

[VastleCania]

@Mikey

it felt more authentic to the N64 experience to use a controller and holy hell are 6DoF games not suited for a gamepad.

see i had a hard time with Descent because i really enjoyed using a controller for that, seeing as i played Forsaken first.

[Mikey]

I played Forsaken on N64 a million years ago, briefly, so I thought I might be fine with using a controller. But I just felt like my accuracy was horrendous whereas playing Overload with kbm I was really grooving right away.

[VastleCania]

oh accuracy is terrible yes, this is true

My memory of Forsaken is mainly the music and the fact that one of the deathmatch levels has a “bigger on the inside” sphere thing. So like, you had this large room with a little sphere int he middle that had 4 entrances (i think), but it was like 10x the size on the inside, and had multiple ways to link back to the large room that were not the normal exits. Again, IIRC.

So basically, nonsense space. I loved discovering that.

[loki]

on the subject of forsaken and control schemes, the playstation version is apparently compatible with this thing

[Grandpa]

As I am an easily distracted baby I still have not done the first mission of Watch Dogs, which would make my life infinitely easier.

I’ve recruited a few people, which seems to involve 1) go somewhere 2) hack something 3) go somewhere else 4) destroy or steal a car, followed by 5) thanks for the delivery now survive all these goons coming at you.

I…maybe I’m crazy, but I think they’re using some sort of voice modulation or something to sorta diversify the voices of recruits? I recruited a lady whose special ability appears to be “owns a gun,” whose voice is uh… curiously tinny. Just kinda weird!

That said I’m at the point where permadeath hasn’t kicked in yet, so my cool Muslim graffiti guy has eaten shit in those aforementioned ambushes several times now (once when the ambulance I was driving nudged a car and exploded? For no reason?) and lives on.

If you fail to recruit someone it turns out there are more complicated means by which you can try to regain their favor (this also works with people who outright hate DedSec). After said ambulance exploded, the lady I tried to recruit wouldn’t talk to me, but I unlocked a “Deep Profiler” that gives a number of vaguer options to try and sway them to one more try. In this case, I killed an assassin who was going to kill the MMA lady I was trying to recruit. And now, instead of getting medication for her friend (who I guess is dead, thanks to me, whoops), I’ve got a second chance, this time resolving her gambling debts.

Anyway, neat game. But also…kinda boring? Like, I forgot, somehow, in the years since Watch Dogs 2 that so much of the action is parking yourself somewhere in range, hijacking a camera, pointing that at another camera, pointing that at yet another camera, etc., setting up traps and slowly picking guards off, then running in and cleaning up.

I mean, it’s kinda fun (you’d think after the same truck comes to life three times to plow over people again and again they’d stop walking in front or behind it, but you’d be wrong). But I guess that’s also it! Just kinda fun.

Maybe today I will Do A Mission.

[Mikey]

I fired up the PS4 and sampled a whole mess of things today.

Submerged – pretty, but utterly dull.

Toren – genuinely seems half-baked.

Entwined – sorta nice, maybe should have been harder? It reminds me a bit of Rez but the music isn’t as good.

TorqueL – honestly brilliant, also kinda of maddening. Going to go back to this one.

Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture – compelling enough to get me to play through it in one (long) sitting. Maybe not essential, but if you had the opportunity to play it, sure, why not?

Skulls of the Shogun – pretty fun, and I really find the premise amusing. I’ll revisit this one some more in the future, probably.