hey hades ain’t bad
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i will drop a post in the mega drive thread too probably, but i continue to plug away at Shining and the Darkness / Shining in the Darkness (megadrive, 1991). this game is so fucking charming! there is an absurd amount of JRPG tedium that i thought i’d sworn off years ago, but it’s just buttressed enough but the exceptionally high level of charm, the brilliant music, and the stunning spritework. my let’s play is up to like 30+ hours over 14 parts now and i still have more dungeon left to explore
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How are these handled on a Switch Lite?
Just the same, you gotta lean the thing. It works fine… ish
So I did, and continue to do, a lot of goofing around in Watch Dogs Legion, because as some reviewers who’ve taken their time to write this stuff have put more eloquently, the story/vibe of this game is fucked.
I mean, my first red flag, running around collecting upgrade points and masks, was seeing all these underground holding cells, with walls smeared with blood, “KILL ME PLEASE” written multiple times on the walls. Cool stuff!
Construction sites have pits full of bloody body bags. Gang hideouts have tables with heaps of discarded organs on them. Mercs beat people to a pulp on every street corner.
Dour shit! But not the truly heinous stuff.
Nah, you’ve got protestors waving gas grenades around, shouting into megaphones, to end fascism and, uh, restore the police.
Walking around as a regular cop (what I believe they call a “bobby” over there on that isle), people hoot and holler. “A proper rock star!” “You do a thankless job but you’re a hero, mate.” Etc. Etc.
It, uh, comes off as pretty hollow, y’know! Like, once again an Ubisoft game has unwittingly emerged during a turbulent time it happens to portray, and once again it gets it so goddamn wrong it blows the mind.
I haven’t engaged much with the story because honestly doing my People Pokemon thing and getting cool new garbage masks is more entertaining. Thus far the story is “the cops and the mob and the PMCs are in league harming the country, better put the former back in power!” via, y’know. The power of hacking, I guess.
I dunno! What an enormous leap back from the progress Watch Dogs 2 had made!
Watch Dogs 1 was the game where you could stand by the side of a building, hack into the network, and see cool moments of things like, I dunno, a man dead on the floor of his home, while you can hack his answering machine and hear his kids desperately trying to call and see if he’s OK. Or snoop on Aisha Tyler as she talks about farting. And then you would go do some murder vengeance and hack a street sign to display Keyboard Cat. Garbage stuff!
Anyway this one feels a lot more like the former than Watch Dogs 2 and, wow, that sucks!
Poor Watch Dogs 2. You will be missed.
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A bunch of stuff I got wrong, saved to remind me of my hubris
Important detail that I forgot, that maybe explains the, uhhhh, dire tone and theme of the game - Legion was apparently handed off from Ubisoft Montreal (who blew it on the first game and course-corrected the second) to a joint effort between Toronto and Paris, namely the studios that handle all the Tom Clancy shit.
Would explain this game having you play as supposed anarchists working hard to restore law and order, I guess.
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That’s not exactly correct (I interviewed one of their writers last week - lot of good stories in there)
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Aaaaah shit, well let me delete that then!
That said, as fair a reminder as any that people work hard on these things, so - I genuinely hope the game turns around and surprises me!
The actual doing stuff is fun, but the sort of light tone of 2 was so damn good (to the point that the one part of the game that does go real grim-dark is maybe the most universally called-out moment in the game) that this one just kinda feels like whiplash by comparison.
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Don’t worry too much, I should be a little more specific – the tone problems, a disaster all around, are largely due to the unexpected strictures of the design and the cuts made throughout development, the difficulty of communicating tone across studios and workers spread across the world (Ubisoft’s pervasive slackness), and the general entropy that makes everything good more difficult as it gets bigger. The team had free reign to say what they wanted, and what they wanted to say is not what the game speaks.
Holistic design, with mechanics reinforcing and responsible for the story, is real hard and it’s harder when it tries to parasitize an existing game and make it serve a new message.
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The best game to be a cop in is Crackdown.
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There’s nothing unique in the feeling of my body or sense of my mind, since my last check-in, of feeling overtaken by the creeping dread of American existence. I have let my desire to keep up with writing output be easily swept aside and de-emphasized. On my best days I can complete some work emails, make a family meal, and even enjoy the game I may be playing. With due perspective though most days I endlessly cycle through rounds of Mario Golf, staring into a middle distance and feeding off the news of fear that peers through the morass of Reddit political threads and links. I feel like a fool with no confident joke to peddle. Instead just my hourly shuffling steps in my two-bedroom condo becoming new ankle aches consistently ignored.
From outward view there’s nothing THAT wrong and, maybe even inwardly, it is often the same. The mental trajectory bends toward descent along the yaw trying to fill me with empty space irrespective of my blessings. Alongside that space I’ve managed to expand my once inane ‘one-game-at-a-time rule’ into a now cadre of experiences, oscillating between what room I’m in and what other screens may be in use. It’s not sadness or despondence or anything, just a willful subjugation of that ever ballooning void in my stomach with whatever can tamp it down. And games have done more in that regard for me than perhaps they ever have.
I’ve beaten three games since I last wrote: Earthbound, LifeForce (NES), and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. I’m currently alternating between the aforementioned Mario Golf, Mega Man Zero, Resident Evil 7 (on VR no less! can’t tamp the fear of the Earth down better than the fear imbued in me in that game), and Kirby’s Epic Yarn. I really, truly, am looking forward to ending my year with Mother 3, a game I’ve long sought to finally experience.
I don’t know how much I have in me but I at least want to say something about the games I’ve beaten.
Earthbound is a masterwork that already brings a lump in my throat just thinking about it while writing this sentence. It was everything I always dream of experiencing that I missed out on growing up. It’s art is charm incarnate, it’s music warbles and coos my synapses into a beautiful stupor, and it’s characters and narratives are the kind of journey that I always want to be mentally whisked away on for all time. There’s…so so much to say but in the effort I have now I just want to say how grateful I am to still be able to play through something so god damned beautiful and adventurous and able to fill me with childlike wonder.
LifeForce was a task and a half for me. I imagine myself being a shmup master but in practice I am at best a fetus. The music needled into my brain in a way I appreciated and upon beating it I didn’t care that it offered so little in the way of an ending. I BEAT the fucker and it felt like I’d just knocked the bully out. About two weeks of daily struggle yielded my BEATEN shield in my brain and I’m damn happy to have it.
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is the kind of game everyone who dislikes it makes you want to reflexively enjoy it that much more. And I fairly did for the first five hours or so. The whipping SNAPS, the jumping LEAPS, and the music BEATS the brakes off of most short side-scrolling adventures. Then come the hours…lost and wandering…wondering…what the fuck am I doing. Trying to figure out the clues on your own and damn any guides. And the stacking experiences of the day turning to night begins to mount and topple and you are just fighting mindlessly with no real end game to your actions. And you’re drawing maps but confused how you get from one town to the next. And then you find a mansion and you annihilate it because it’s a total cakewalk. And you finally find your way…and are ready for a gut-busting right-and-left-hook-swinging Dracula fight finale. And you annihilate him in like three seconds. And you get the ‘worst’ ending cos the game took you too long by its standards. It’s not the worst experience but it’s the worst you’ve had in a while. And the bad taste won’t go away, at least not for a bit.
There’s some shine there but it’s gonna take a long fucking time to see it.
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the best game to be a cop in is resident evil 1 and 2 because you can’t shoot anybody living, only the flesh-eating ghouls.
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I was hoping you would write here again! I even had the thought last week, “who was that baby who was posting a couple of weeks ago? I like their words. Where did the baby go?”
That’s an incredible chunk of games to help you through a funk. A good chunk for the funk.
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oi, guvnah. bung a bob for big ben’s bong. here, watch out! ugh! aargh! yeaaarghh! i hear wolves have been sighted near the northern provinces. go in peace. oi, watch it! you’re facking dead mate. poppy day is well minging innit. yes? so long.
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the new destiny expansion is good. it is a evening romp length haloesque campaign followed by a matryoshka doll of gradually more complex quests and RPG design. the content culls were the right call. removing the cruft without making a sequel was the right call. it’s taut where it’s been slack for too long.
it’s free on the console version of xbox game pass (as are the previous two expansions). there’s no homework or leveling to do before you get into the game - you start within ten levels of every other player. if you have a character on a different platform you want to use you can link your accounts and cross-save. there is no cross-play for what i assume are platform-political reasons. come over to this thread where i wrote a short faq. shoot me a PM if you want to clan up on PC or maybe xbox if there’s a crowd.
if you read the collector’s edition journal story i posted up in the old news thread, imagine if that piece of errata somehow concluded in the game as something poetic and life affirming and gorgeous, not to mention maddening/elegant in its obviousness-in-hindsight. i love it. i’m so happy.
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You joke, but a lot of the dialogue isn’t far off from this.
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Thank you, really, just a few positive words help!
The writing helps me come unstuck in that funk and the chunk is surely chewable til years end, where I can lark with a new lunk.
Here’s to more brain-words expressed as type-words.
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Yeah this is the same for me, it’s a very wistful game for me and was even when I originally played it at like 12 or 13.
The eternal fantasy of “having friends” and “going outside”
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I’ve been playing a lot of Open Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. Im trying to break it with min-maxing.
Ive hit on a few coaster formulas that are really good.
My main thing is developing fun efficient coasters, saving the design and restarting the scenario.
Its all about maximum intensity+excitement+through put. Length of the ride does not matter. Throughput is so important.
Having more people inline than you can seat is pointless and people waiting in line aren’t having fun. People like looking at cool scenery / trees so keeping them moving keeps them positive. I cant figure out if a line being full is some kind of of a downer but it doesn’t generate a thought. Ride line length should be exactly the right length such that it will fill the next train coming into the station right as it comes into the station. Making trains leave as soon as the next one arrives also saves park goer’s time.
Cheap food in high traffic zones keeps people happy and energetic.
Real park designs suck. You want paths that encircle blocks of rides so navigation is easy. Congestion of paths seems to be meaningless and its easier to keep paths clean if you funnel people into a few main arteries in order to hyper focus your janitorial efforts.
I thinking of inventing some multi-station, magnetic-launcer rides so I can transport guests around forcibly and super fast. Dunno about costs vs trains.
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