Thank you! but my laptop probably can’t run it. I’d have to play it on my ps4
I want to give more unliked sequels a try, i had a good time with invisible war and even if my low expectations/investment had an influence, i liked developing my own feelings about it. i dont trust popular takes on videogames that’s why i get all my opinions from selectbutton.net
I had to review the Thief reboot and it was probably the worst game I was assigned next to Wii Party U. I’m still amazed that I managed to finish it. Has some cool hand animations though.
I added my friend code to my profile. I’m not online too often these days, hope we can compare scores soon.
Thief 3 has a pretty cool story at the very least. It’s biggest problem is it’s great writing has ideas that are cooler and more interesting than the levels they’re attached to.
It’s stuck in this awkward middle point because mechanically it would be a great intro to the series, but the story is really tied to the first two.
Thief 3 has its moments. what was bizarre about the thief 4/reboot was it of all things kept the compromised to fit on xbox era hardware attempt at an openworld from thief 3, with nothing improved about it
THI4F called itself THI4F without apparent shame or embarrassment which is really all you need to know about it
I’ve played about 20 hours of A Realm Reborn as prep for Final Fantasy XVI. It’s bland as hell but kinda in a good way? It’s possible under different conditions that I’d be completely bored with it, but right now seems to be the ideal time to spend chunks of hours with this game given the current circumstances politically/socially/economically/etc.
I’ve heard it “gets good” once you hit the expansions but I’m enjoying it right now as comfort food. I play it before bed, after my CBD dose (most nights, not all) and just kinda zone out.
Time for more of my misadventures in PC gaming.
Little Bug is another game from the giant bundle, a puzzle platformer where you play as a little girl and also a little blue orb. It looks like this:
Left analog stick controls the little girl while the right one controls the flying blue orb so yes, it is technically another one of those “control two different characters at the same time” games. Fortunately it very rarely requires you to move both at the same time in a coordinated way which prevents it from being maddening. The little girl cannot jump, so the only way she can get over obstacles or gaps is by pressing a button which causes the blue orb to basically shoot a beam at the girl which pulls her a bit towards it but is largely used as a swing. The gameplay in general is setting the right point for the blue orb before using it to swing or pull the girl through a set of obstacles, different kinds of obstacles are added the further in you get, you get the basic flow.
The game is a few hours long (less if you are actually good at it unlike me) and for most of that time it is… okayish if a bit too fiddly. I think the physics and controls are off, it feels like you have to let go of the button to break the connection between the two a moment or two before it feels right and it every surface in the game feels like it is made of ice given how much momentum carries you after landing on something (then the game adds in actual ice which is even more ridiculous). You can stand still on a slightly sloped surface (I’m talking 10-15 degrees) and if you look away to position the blue orb you can find out that the girl died as she slowly slid into a pit, that is how slippery everything in the game is. It has some nice set pieces and obstacle ideas, I found it overall to be a bit too weighed down by its issues but could easily see someone feeling much more positively about it…
…until the very last stretch of the game, at which point my experience with the game went completely off the rails. The game ends on what is basically a boss battle, something chasing you as you in theory have to go through a number of obstacles over a couple minutes without dying. No checkpoints during this kinda lengthy stretch, the opening 25 seconds (I counted) is you just holding down right until you get to where the actual challenges begin. It is a bit of a difficulty spike in theory, in theory because it is so bugged out on my copy to quite possibly be impossible to actually complete.
My first few attempts were fine, I died on the early actual obstacles but figured out what I had to do although there was a hard to see pit I fell into about half the time that was screwing me up. This sends me back to the start of this section (pictured above) where you just hold right as you run over those light blue pillow looking things which spring you ahead over the gaps to the next one. Despite being a literally brain dead section I managed to screw this up once or twice, so I took to just holding down D on the keyboard so that I couldn’t somehow screw up pushing right on the analog stick yet again. I got to the part where half the time I fell into a pit I couldn’t quite see due to the dim lighting and made a discovery:
There is no pit.
If you look where the little girl is standing you can see the solid ground under her thanks to those pink hands (which we’ll get to in a second). You drop in from where that blue block is above her which fades in and out, and literally at least 50% of the time I’d fall right through the floor to my death. This became impossible to ignore after the time where I stood still on it for three seconds while maneuvering the blue bit through the part above before she just randomly fell through what I had been standing on the moment before.
At this point I closed the game to go look online to see if enough people had played the game to tell if this was a known issue with it. A number of people have played it, some had reported issues but nothing along these lines. I looked up a vid of what the whole run of obstacles looked like as if it is that buggy I needed to make the most of my actual attempts and…
…Listen, I played another 15-20 minutes of the game over the past two days and not one single run hasn’t ended up bugged out worse than what I described previously. That opening run of 25 seconds? I am failing to make it through the spring jumps at least 2/3 of the time by falling short somehow. The pits I fall into are filled with those pink hands which are designed to kill you instantly when you touch them; they no longer kill me. I instead fall forever beyond the designed game space, the background scrolling down in odd ways until it just stops moving. The only way out of this is to pause the game, choose to return to the main menu and reload from there. I have to do this every time one of these automatic jumps is missed (if I was jumping too far I’d say it was me screwing up and I should have stopped pressing right for a sec, I have no clue how it is even possible to come up short when holding it down the entire time).
I finally got a run that went past this and… well that screenshot above is from it, the one where she is standing on the platform she often fell through. I wasn’t completely honest before, as that screenshot was a pic of her somehow getting her feet stuck in the floor and becoming unable to move. Those pink hands I pointed at to show the solid ground below her feet? Those aren’t a background element, those are the series of hands chasing me through this section that are designed to kill me if they catch either me or the blue orb. Clearly they have passed through me here without doing that, and as I waited for them to catch my blue orb so we could both die and try again they passed through it as well. I paused for a second, sighed and decided to move the orb through a bit of the above maze section so it can bump into one of those tall shadow creatures you can barely make out in that pic and I can then have the sweet release of death. I bumped into it and I did not die, however at that moment the ground gave out and the little girl went falling into the pit except now here as well it refused to kill her, her just falling forever as the game struggled to keep up. I pressed pause, returned to the title screen and quit the game forever.
…I mean actually I tried a couple more times and couldn’t get past the opening jumps either time and then gave up, but it’s more poetic the other way.
Worth noting is that the game wasn’t buggy up until this point. There was one point where I clipped into something right past a save point and had to have the blue orb fly into an obstacle to kill them and respawn, but for the most part it was very solid in this regard. Hell this ending stretch wasn’t even this buggy the first few times through it, it just completely collapsed upon itself even after shutting down the PC and reloading it a day later. I may simply be cursed.
i’ve been playing the remake of hyperdimension neptunia because i got it for free, and it’s that time of year where i enjoy playing weird, mid-level budget an*me shit. it’s actually a really fun rpg that’s pretty cute and funny in the “plot isn’t that serious so we can make a bunch of references and shit” way. and i don’t feel like the fbi is about to bust down my door playing this, like they would for a lot of similar games (looking at you, blue reflection). maybe just put me on a list.
the enemies are good, too.
been playing Dark Souls III for the first time, since i want to play the Demon’s Souls remake and can’t, yet.
i like it! i can see why it’s sort of divisive, though. definitely feels as though it’s a game designed around the idea that you’ve played ever other entry in the series and sometimes i wish it were a little more chill. but as always, dying is really funny.
I’ve been playing Game Boy and Game Boy Color games lately.
One thing I like about these games is that they are however long they are: It doesn’t feel like the developers were under any particular obligation to aim toward any particular length. One game might be 14 hours, then another an hour and a half, another might be under 15 minutes.
One game I’d never heard of before, but now have and enjoy is Aerostar.
It’s a shooter. Your ship travels on the ground but has jump jets. Enemy bullets at ground level don’t hit you if you are jumping, and enemy bullets in the sky don’t hit you if you are on the ground.
I like everything about it.
I like it’s simple gimmick.
The music is good.
I like the weapons options.
I like the graphics.
The first stage is my favorite visually. You are on a series of roads in the middle of the screen. On your left is a shore line, and on your right are the buildings of a coastal city.
Basic enemies start as simple futuristic vehicles. Future planes, and future tanks.
At first only bosses get especially stylized designs, but as you progress the basic enemies start to look more stylized and futuristic too.
It’s a good shooter with a good gimmick.
was too tired to play xiv ( once again ) yesterday so i started xii: za. i have a lite and it makes me wish i was playing on a bigger screen. graphically, things look okay but i still feel like they’d look better if i was playing on a tv. the re-orchestrated ost sounds really good through earphones to the point that when i stopped playing i opened up youtube to listen to the rabanastre theme some more.
p sure there was entire thread about this game so this has more than likely been mentioned but the new job system is a little stressful. right now i’m just at the very beginning with vaan and i want him to be the dragoon / uhnlan class but i don’t have enough money to buy the spear rn and i’m locked out because of the rogue tomato quest and i hate that i’m going to be locked into something for awhile before i can build party members the way i would like.
either way, i love final fantasy xii so much in case that hasn’t been really obvious with my posting history over the years so i am going to slowly let myself sink into this version while in bed and just take in everything it has to offer. the only thing i’m not looking forward to per se is trying to go find items that are not in the same place anymore. the one thing i’m really glad of is the zodiac spear chest shit is gone because it has been years and even with reminders i fuck up each and every time.
i am very late but this will undoubtly be my game of the year along with vagrant story because ivalice, ivalice, ivalice forever.
Now I gotta listen to this whole OST again.
This game has a good vibe.
I played this some just now. It’s quite creative and actually reminds me of the work of a particular Dreams creator I like.
i know the person/people who made this. they’re nice. my opinion about it is it’s one of those things where it was someone’s first Unity project that ballooned up into a full multi-year game project… when maybe it shouldn’t have. from what i played i was like “why don’t you make this into a shorter narrative-based game like the opening bits suggest instead of just relying on fairly bog-standard platforming” to the main person who made it. well i was nicer than that. i think a lot of people who are making game projects for the first time don’t understand that you can just like… not make a platformer. you don’t have to have a cool mechanic or whatever. because just doing so increases the complexity and need for fiddling with it immensely esp if you’re trying to polish other things a lot. and it’s not that i have a problem with jankiness either - it’s a game relying on ideas or sections that are clearly not the strong suit of the person making them. something that’s frustrated me with many different projects i’ve seen, from people who are very well-intentioned but maybe do not really understand what they’re getting into.
tl;dr it’s a project primarily by one person (with help from several others) who was doing it for the first time which would probably explain why there are bugs and other weird things. i think it’s a case of “it was a learning experience” more than anything else. i do think they were quite disappointed in the general lack of reception for their game and i’m not sure if they’re going to make anything else. sadly that’s how indie dev goes these days (spending years working on something only for it to be a tiny blip at best on release and then vanish…). that’s something that depresses me a lot.
there’s something about the vibe of Thief 2 that i like less. i guess i like how unpredictable/strange Thief 1 can be. and Thief 2 actually adds more to the mechanics in a way i actually like less! it feels more like a true Thief sim i guess instead of… something else. which is fine! i just like the something else. i don’t want the game to give me exactly what it promises to the letter. i like intangible weirdness. T2 still has some of that, but not nearly as much.
in general i would definitely dispute the idea of things being undeniably improved/ i think you can very well make a case that they regressed in some ways. they made the automap more explicit which takes out some of the artistry of the first, for example. i guess in general i feel like some of the artistry has been removed from the first game. admittedly i only got like halfway through the game and am going to return to it at some point. but several of the missions were giving me a vibe that i just didn’t like as much as i did in the first game. i especially didn’t like the first mission much at all. just felt more… template and standard in every way i guess! whereas T1 throws you all over the map to keep you interested. the one in the Seminary was cool though.
i do agree about the Thief 2 villain being way better though. the way Thief 1 ends is a big letdown to me.
THI4F is on sale right now on Steam 
I find it surprisingly hard to say something more interesting and meaningful in judging than the boilerplate scope!, first five minutes! talk I’m sure they’ve heard before but is so hard to learn without your own painful experience.
