the main thing i remember about winback on an emulator is that some of the action movie story beats were impressively condensed even by videogame standards
didn’t even get six feet from the truck
the other thing i remember is that it belonged to that weird 90s period where everyone was very into double-barrelled french forenames like jean luc or jean claude or something
they probably saw star trek
the other main one i can think of is Jesuit Batman, Jean-Paul Valley (and to a lesser extent “Ravage 2099” starring one Paul-Phillip Ravage). it’s kind of funny to imagine all these jacked action guys as inspired by picard but maybe the combination of tng and van damme led to some kind of saturation point in the culture for teen boys.
just got to this incredible part in Thief 2
lmao @ that one guard fucking losing it at the end
i love all the guard-based comedy in these games
just a suggestion, but maybe you’d want to think about splitting this PS2 adventure into its own thread? i think it warrants it
Oh yeah, this is a good idea. I was hesitant to start one at first because I didn’t know how long I would keep up with this. At this point, I’ve played and written about twelve games and I’m still having fun.
lol Jesus, Watch Dogs Legion, on two counts.
One, the dialogue is…atrocious. It’s not just the weird faux conversations between teammates/potential recruits. It’s, uh.
I’ve got a super Cockney-ass construction worker lady who just says the most obnoxious shit. And to no one at all, in the middle of nowhere, she muses “Should I bleach my arsehole? Would that make my farts smell better?”
Just…woofah.
Anyway, second count. I recruited a cop lady (turns out secure areas aren’t so hard to walk about when you don’t need to sneak as much) and in turn tried to recruit a protestor, who was convinced that their friend who was killed by the police wasn’t actually dead. After hacking a terminal in a hospital (which took forever, since I had to hack the GPS data off the ambulance driver, who was well protected), I find their friend alive and not so well, locked up in some sort of police equipment facility.
I sneak in, do some subterfuge, and am about ready to rescue the presumed-dead guy, when I, uh, knock out a guard. Who was listed (in the protestor’s “Deep Profile,” I guess) as an NPC who had been harassing the protestor.
Your AI buddy goes “OH GOOD JOB I’LL TELL THEM YOU KNOCKED OUT THEIR HARASSER” to which the protestor goes “ugh fine I guess I’ll join” and the guy I’ve spent all this time trying to rescue…vanishes. Right in front of me.
Just the weirdest goddamn game. I think, character-wise so far, an enormous step back from 2 (there’s actually a lot I can think of so far that 2 did far better), but in just being, uh, extremely fucking weird, it’s in a league of its own.
Had a very unnerving moment in Elsinore last night. I was listening to Polonius, Ophelia’s father, alone in his room lamenting how everything might be a dream, and what if it were a dream? And then he just disappeared. Poofed out of existence, it seemed. I checked the map and his icon wasn’t anywhere to be found. Eventually he did appear somewhere else, but my was that strange.
Also about Elsinore. One of my favorite examples to come out of the work they did rewriting and extrapolating from the events of Hamlet was this interesting encounter between Ophelia, Hamlet and Lady Guildenstern where they reveal to Hamlet that he has a certain type of lady he likes. On a ship headed to England, Guildenstern (who once dated Hamlet) asks if they could ever rekindle their affair. Hamlet says no, because he is still in love with Ophelia. Somehow this leads to Ophelia and Guildenstern teaming up and getting Hamlet to admit that he could never love a Dane, a blond haired blue eyed rude woman like Lady Birgette, who is a noble. He says women of the kind that Ophelia and Guildenstern belong to are better because they’re nicer to him and more reasonable, but the ladies argue this is just because they are of a lower standing than he is so they are obliged to be that. This depresses the depressed Hamlet, but eventually leads to him redoubling his efforts to be a better person “should he chose to keep on living.”
absolutely adored that plot branch
really it’s such a great work of IF, almost certainly the best groundhog day adaptation and one of the best shakespeare riffs I’ve ever had the privilege to experience
I really didn’t like the way it controlled with the perspective when I first tried it out, felt like they didn’t quite commit to an isometric unity game, but once I got past that I was blown away
The isometric view does look a little off sometimes. I think the area by the pond is actually where it’s worst, if anyone faces towards the bridge they look like they’re doing the Michael Jackson smooth criminal lean. And that’s the first image you see in the game too. Most other places it looks good enough imo!
Ring of Red is near and dear to me, but yeah, those battles aren’t really going to get any shorter. Even when you git gud and can bring down an enemy AFW in a single turn fairly often, the numbers generally increase and offsets that. The main thing you’ll get into more as you go on is using your infantry squads to best effect based on their type but also their special abilities. Like your long range gunners can benefit from having dudes with tripwires that can keep your enemy from closing distance and such.
I played for a few more hours today and I started to get a better understanding of how to maneuver troops and change out ammunition. The developers put a lot of thought into making this different. It’s cool! I just wish there was a way to skip animations. It’s a shame that there was never a sequel or spiritual successor that could’ve refined these ideas further.
I hope I’m missing something because if I’m not, one of your commanders is a Nazi war criminal?
I wonder whether he’s called Rodriguez, because he originally planned to move to Argentina like his nazi peers and got a fake identity, but instead went to Japan for unknown reasons
Or because no one making the game noticed they gave a Spanish name to the German nazi
I was at Best Buy today picking up a copy of Judgement for $15 and I saw they already had PS5’s stored behind the front counters.
Tried out some Multitroid with my brothers to keep my mind off of our impending national doom. It’s a weird ~thingy~ that lets you play Super Metroid while connected to other people, and you share items, ammo, health, events, etc. Neither of them were super familiar with Super Metroid in the same way I am, but it was a fun way to spend 2 hours.
Better or worse it does mention basically all South(? I forget the specific division in the setting) Japan’s military basically picking up Germany’s leavings IIRC. Look at your hardware too; Weizegger’s AFW is full of Tiger bits, your light is a walking Panzer II and assault types are ambulatory StuGs. A lot of this carries over to the North(?)'s stuff for being based on Soviet hardware of similar vintage, and I think some of this stuff is supposed to be new models even though it’s the early 60s. And then you’ve got stuff like not quite Nazi Germany uniforms shared by others and not just Rodriguez. Really it’s always had me wondering on the development of the game and if the game was originally going to just be in WW2 and somebody decided to cook up a new story at some point.
Yeah, I was thinking about Iron Storm and how that game let you play as America, Germany, or Japan. There’s a sort of war games brain that mainly just cares about the equipment and numbers. I can tolerate that in strategy games, but why mention his war crimes?!
The flooded Sydney game? yeah it’s dull, good to learn about wallclimb schemes and environmental signposting.
My internet at home is still out so I’ve been trying out the games that don’t need to sign-in online, and I picked up this. It’s totally not essential because: it stinks. The crappy level design, BBC4 radio play writing, no run speed. Plus I just don’t feel like playing a game whose main theme is the inevitability and arbitrary cruelty of death! not really the vibe I’m looking for right now
I last played this when it was released, and never made it to the end because of the long waiting, so that doesn’t change. If I recall, the plot develops with a nod to another Konami property! Also with walking robots!
This was my chief complaint the whole time through tbh.
