I thought EGTTR has a run but you have to hold down the button for like 5 seconds to activate it. I think it’s a debug feature they left in
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Huge news for my speedrun
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This Blair Witch game by the Layers of Fear people who have somehow deliberately called themselves Bloober Team sucks extremely badly but there is a map of Maryland in it at one point so I got to talk to my stream about Maryland counties for 10 minutes, 3/10
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I thought EGTR sucked when I played it, but I liked the story and mood. Always down to be alienated by senseless cosmic death, idk why. That game was like what I wanted M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening to be like, which I know is just an association between two very lame things.
I played some of The Evil Within last night. I bought that game on release and hated it. Couldn’t understand how it wanted me to play. Got through the rip-off RE4 intro village part with the chainsaw man in the barn and I think I’m starting to see how it plays. But it’s weird to me how split it is between combat and stealth. It feels like there aren’t even phases you naturally progress through, from a stealth set up sequence to a combat part, you never know what you’re going to be doing in an area. Which is pretty interesting. I guess it would keep the levels from feeling formulaic but it’s hard to get handle on as far as like trying to figure out the convention. There’s an uncomfortable ambivalence I’m feeling right now as I tread a line between playing it conservatively like a survival horror game or something closer to RE4 and The Last of Us. Weird game. Also everything about it is just absurdly indulgent. Seems like Mikami had no editor and all the time in the world to make these environments as ugly and sinister as he wanted. Just a reckless accumulation of motifs, all for the sake of being cool.
Which, like, hell yeah…
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I am a huge fan of the Blair Witch Project and its mythos, and horror games, but I cannot bring myself to play that. It looks so boring and generic 
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It’s worse than you think. And worse than it first appears, as well. Just degrades the more you play it
Just had a guy permanently beef it on a mission in Watch Dogs. He was a weirdo conspiracy theorist Asian guy who spoke with an almost Jamaican patois? Ah well, dude’s gone now.
Anyway, sucks to find out today that one of the hosts of a fake radio show (extolling, y’know, power to the people, down with government oppression, etc) in the game is, in fact, a real radio show host, and a gigantic TERF. Cool looking out there, Ubisoft.
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I played through Actraiser over the course of two nights. I remembered it being this epic experience but it’s like 5 hours long, the city sim bit is incredibly slight, and the action stages are very easy until the final stage where the difficulty spikes a li’l bit so I started rewinding every time I died cuz I had no patience for that. You go inside this tree and it’s filled with veins and bubbles and Salamander-style cell lumps. I assume it’s Yggdrasil or some shit. At the top you fight some ice dragon. I just hit the Magic button 4 times and it died. The bosses are all pretty easy if the shooting star magic RNG works in your favor.
The final stage is a boss rush. You can’t beat them all by spamming magic. You have to learn their patterns and shit. I said nuts to that and looked up the ending on YouTube. Except I didn’t really watch it cuz the Let’s Play I clicked on had a really annoying narrator. I just skimmed through in 2 seconds. Looked like you go around to all the lands you raised and they say thank you. As a kid I loved post-game tours. It’s one of the best things about Earthbound! It was cool in Lunar. They’re a great way to cap off a long journey. But it doesn’t feel like much when your game can be beaten in a night or two.
Half the grunt enemies in this game are some variety of dwarf. Just all these little ugly dudes with bare legs striking a wide stance, shooting blow darts at you. Kinda makes you feel like a bully.
I was inspired to play this cuz I saw a few seconds of the Actraiser episode of Game Center CX and the subs explicitly mentioned having to kill some god or another and I was like ‘holy shit, is that line in the English version’ and it’s not. The game’s disgustingly colonialist but all the text is about killing monsters, not exterminating every other god so you can safely spread blond white people around the globe, so I will not blame my pre-pubescent self for loving this problematic game.
Oh yeah every single time you select one of your God Skills you have to read all this text describing what, like, Rain does and that’s one thing I do judge my younger self for tolerating. Though I guess I mainly played this game in Japanese so I probably thought that was all important text I couldn’t read. Thank God for fast forward holy shit.
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my favorite thing about actraiser is that it keeps score, implying that god is trying to get on the leaderboards
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Can you dig into this a bit more? I thought it was extremely Bloober: gorgeous environment art, merely competent in every other respect. I put 3 or 4 hours into it but got a pinch of novelty out of being chased in looping woods; it’s too easy to make tree branches in a pitch-black night under a flashlight terrifying
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they have absolutely no subtlety in their writing, and (aside from observer) satisfied with dodgy acting that highlights just how crap the writing is. Every time they had a good idea or an interesting image, they would repeat it so much it loses all impact. Every single spooky sequence is 3 or 4 times longer than it needs to be.
that and their portrayal of ptsd is just shockingly bad. About as much sensitivity as they applied to alcoholism and child abuse in their layers of fear games.
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And schizophrenia. The schizophrenia self diagnostic sheet in Layers 1 made our whole stream chat burst out laughing.
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Finished Sunset Overdrive and kind of wish I hadn’t bothered.
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Yeah, I agree – quite poor writing, same as all their games. Luckily it hits me as stupid like a PSX/PS2 game, not like a modern bloated AAA game, so it’s tolerable. I suspect what charms their games have (environments and brief periods during their scripted scenes) would suffer in a streaming environment.
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If I wasn’t streaming it I would have almost certainly bailed well before the ending, though. It’s so repetitive, even the cool imagery is repetitive.
The first time you see the mannequins in Layers 2 it’s creepy and cool. But they just drive them into the ground so hard.
And playing a game set in the golden age of Hollywood with Alien, Batman, and Fight Club, pop culture references really broke me out of the narrative. Even the metropolis homage just made me go “oh yeah, it’s metropolis”.
To say nothing of the bizarre gender stuff in the ending of it. Or the frictional monsters in both.
It just seems like such a waste of great assets.
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Pair them with some of Frictional’s designers and writers and I think they’d have everything they need.
Restarted Dragon Quest Builders. What a charming little game thing.
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Dq builders 2 takes sooooooo loooooong to load on the switch I rarely play it because it’s such an investment
The plot is kind of endearing though and it’s fun to hang out with the friendly monsters and tend their little gardens
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I think I sunk like 80 hours into that lovely little game on my switch.
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finally sat down and beat Undertale tonight (True Pacifist) for the first time.
idk why, but when i first played it, the game really didn’t click for me. i think i was overly critical of it because its inspirations are so apparent, and maybe i somewhat resented how huge it became when there have been all these other games before it that explored similar territory.
that said, i finally started it up again a few months back, made it to Asgore, died a few times, and put it down. tonight, i figured, you know what? i should actually beat Undertale.
and so i did.
anyway, i don’t think any of the above is incorrect, per se, but i really do appreciate what this game is doing and the amount of heart that’s in it. i really do like the characters, and i enjoy how, visually, the game kind of misleads you into thinking it’s really basic and then gradually introduces all these other graphics and effects that completely defy it’s aesthetics (yet still blend).
guess i’ll play Deltarune, now.
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