God thereās so many of these, including the incredibly awkward one with Joker that ends in a Cliffhanger reference.
The Demolition Man one is pretty good though.
Edit: Rambo is such a wild addition to the game because they really try to play every angle of him at once? Less so the Last Blood part, thankfully (the phrase is used, at one point). But they really try to straddle the lines of, yāknow, hereās the traumatized war vet, hereās the 80s action hero, and also hereās a bunch of goofs about Stalloneās other movies.
The very first piece of gear you can unlock in his towers is an American flag headband, which kinda says it all about where that character is at in 2020.
this is a game i didnāt play today
i bought dreams on ps4 when it was on sale last week, and itās probably cool and fun. but the whole horrible condescending twee tone coupled with having to unlock literally every function and item in the creation suite by doing a seemingly endless series of āmissionsā just makes me think āugh, what a fucking choreā whenever i consider loading it up. so i donāt
i loaded up and stopped playing several games because i just want to play a fucking game not go through a tutorial.
very nearly
Yakuza Like a Dragon has taken over my spare time and I donāt care. Itās like eating an entire birthday cake for dinner every night.
crypt worlds is fun! walking sim thread is a blessing cause wouldnāt have known about it otherwise. i just love stuff like finding a settler stuck in a wall screaming. or finding a sacrificial pit for archaeologists in my basement. or that all televisions are sentient and suffering. i played with glitches and got punished with hat-tipping cowboys. itās awful but feels like a worthy reward. also may have doomed the world afterwards. oops.
Streets of Rage 4 is waaay better than I expected. only played through stage 4 on normal so far, but I am in love. the colors! the music! the vibe! the bonecrunching combos! this owns.
on the other hand Jedi Fallen Order is a little less enjoyable than I was expecting, so far. I am still enjoying it, but itās just so much less than the sum of its very obvious parts (Souls/Uncharted/Prince of Persia). and whatās with the weird sliding segments? Tim would call that a āGame Flavorā and itās probably akin to something like the flavor of the ice in a slushy
i want to play a game completely made up of sliding sections and it has no UI or menu or levels only after every segment there is a squeeze between the crates hidden loading section
Just Blasted through Armikrog in a day before going through the next chapter of Danganronpa 2.
Yeah Tennapelās a creep but I needed to play what is currently the closest thing to a Neverhood 2 for personal closure.
Itās kind of amazing this game copies most of the worst traits of the Neverhood, while minimizing itās strengths. The Neverhoodās deal is artistry, vibe, and general sense of incoherent weirdness that nevertheless remains aesthetically unified. Everything in the neverhood looks handmade, and the painstaking work that went into every scene makes up for the fact that most of the puzzles just straight up kinda suck.
Armikrog deciding that repeating the same puzzle three times, each with the same soloution but with slightly more visual and auditory noise each time, would have been pretty bad on itās own. The fact that there are no less that two sequences of puzzles that work this way are jaw-dropping. The fact that one of them is a stock sliding puzzle and the other is a sound puzzle feels like rubbing salt into the wound.
The endgame culminates in decoding a sequence of symbols explained through visual auditory clues that take literally minutes of walking between to record. You canāt record them as you go through the game because itās literally impossible before you get to the end! The game makes you go through every single area again to find out all of them. Good luck writing down the symbols, some of them are elaborate and are also extremely close to other symbols. And the final puzzle has like, twenty options for symbols to choose from.
The actual last puzzle in the game is so incredibly opaque I just sort of accidentally set everything right.
Movement is slow, and the longer the game goes on the more backtracking each puzzle takes. Thereās a few puzzles in the middle of the game that are literally just walking back and forth and pushing buttons. About a quarter of the game is puttering around in trams. Iām kind of impressed they replaced the tedium of the wall-carts in the Neverhood that consisted of simply going through mazes that seemed endless to having puzzles which require multi-screen back and forth tram rides with no way to see what youāre actually accomplishing without multiple back and forth trips that feel like theyāre going to last forever.
Whatās weird is the first half of the game is pretty pleasant. Nothing is like, an especially deep puzzle, but theyāre on par or better with the best stuff in the Neverhood. Itās just so blatantly clear they ran out of money way faster than they expected.
The lack of money is also evident in a lot of the art. Iām pretty sure a bunch of the screens were made by photoshopping the backgrounds out of photographed clay textures rather than filming an actual set. This isnāt the end of the world, I donāt think this is unethical or anything, and if I make a claymation game someday Iām virtually certain to use something like this because Iām one woman and would want to actually finish it.
Itās justā¦when the puzzles are this middling, youād hope the art would justā¦blow your mind. The Neverhood certainly still does, and the fact that parts of this look like something that could have been thrown together in a week really undermines this. Thereās a few scenes that look pretty cool, sure, but everything feels kinda thrown together.
(Upon doing some further research, thereās a pretty decent chance a bunch of this game was made by extremely skilled but also extremely over-stressed unpaid interns, by the by)
The sound quality for the voice acting is weird. A few scenes sound like they were recorded in one take and then left the original cold script read in. A few bits of audio sound like they were recorded from home or an office rather than in any kind of sound booth.
To sweeten the deal, they havenāt patched this game in four years despite it having at least one game breaking bug youāre virtually certain to run into. Animation glitches are constant, movement is touchy at best.
Eventually, the game almost ceased to be a game in my head. I started wondering exactly when the project went off the rails. Exactly how much money they expected from their Kickstarter during the Kickstarter boom. How much Doug Tennapelās involvement was almost certainty the reason the spiritual successor to the FREAKING NEVERHOOD barely managed to clear itās obviously too small in retrospect stretch goal.
After all, I would have backed this day one if he hadnāt worked on it. Not aquired it for pennies half a decade later with a sense of deep curiosity from my childhood self.
I somehow forgot to mention in this entire post that the strangely vast feeling of there being a big, cosmic, unknown weirdness the neverhood had is pretty much entirely missing from the game. Every creature has a place, every character an explanation for how they fit into the universe. The novel of backstory doesnāt really allude to greater things.
The fact that the plot might be a pro-life parable if you really read into stuff.
Oh and the soundtrackās great but thatās not exactly a shock.
Iām down for the spaghetti sauce economy.
games i watched today: enjoying this letās play of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by liz and xeecee from the shrieking shack podcast. both because theyāre very funny and cause itās a surreally bad Bully ripoff
Crypt Worlds is great. Thereās a demo of the sequel Crypt Underworld, but Iām holding out for the full game.
still rinsing yakuza
had a giggle that my onenote is half Mission Critical work and home stuff and half shit like this:
Have now spent 5 nights with Outer Wilds. I went looking at the thread for it and it gave me the final piece in the āsometimes stuff doesnāt work.ā Know thereās some kind of end game and should see it tomorrow.
I guess I liked it because each day I am looking forward to my time with it. Even if I hate Physics shit and I hate one of the story conceits that is a bane of game storytelling.
I really didnāt vibe with that game the way I wanted to. It seemed like Cania-bait, butā¦yeah i dunno. Itās weird to fall off a game that I should like in every respect, but doesnāt click with me at all. I have no real criticism, just the sound that a ballloon makes when itās slowly deflating.
I kind of felt the same way. But my constrained game time and (points at previous posts in this thread) like I didnāt think I was enjoying myself but I am. I wasnāt looking forward to more donut county, or Jak 2, etc. but during the day Iām thinking āmore Outer Wilds tonight.ā