Of all the games that could possibly do this to me, The Witness made me pretty seriously motion sick. I was sitting pretty close to the TV but I do that often, so I’m not sure what the deal is.
Regardless, I don’t think it’s my cup of tea
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this racing game is really, REALLY cute and endearing but i’m slightly turned off by the parts shop and tuning, which i feel is just like, replay races until your little radio car is good enough for later races
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here I am just casually mentioning that I want Outer Wilds on PSVR
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i had this as well! i couldnt figure out what was doing it either
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AC Valhalla seems to add like, juuuuuust enough, just enough, to the general formula that I’m finding myself surprised and enjoying it more than I figured I would.
There’s some stuff in it that doesn’t seem to work like they probably wanted (Raids are just kinda sloppy, with enemy AI getting caught running in circles or climbing up and down shit on occasion), but a lot of the smaller touches (stamina, the way some shitty dudes will throw dirt into your eyes and blind you) make things feel fresh?
All that said, it’s an old thing, a returning character (spoiler: it’s Reda, the raspy voiced kid who sold exotic goods and handed out daily assassination contracts from Origins - and should be 500 years old by this game, but who’s keeping count), that had me hootin’. So I dunno, maybe I’m just easier to please than I claim to be.
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holy shit what is this
rc de go!
If I never had to look at these dopes I bet I would have wholly enjoyed the Outer Wilds but all these four eyes totally tainted my opinion of the game, I had zero desire to help them or myself, they look like they belong in some shoddy CG cartoon about outer space bible study, like Superbook but way more shit.
Wait there’s a CG Superbook now whoa this blows
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Stayed up late to finish Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days after finishing the first just the night before. I am now a K&L liker. Each of those games is great, and great sort of in their own way? I’m glad I played the first one to compare the two. The variety of set pieces and locations in Dead Men was a real strength, not only just putting you into cool new levels or shoot-halls but also making you have to do weird mechanical things to face creative challenges. The nightclub in Tokyo, with the swarming crowds that make sighting enemies kind of challenge, and having to make use of my squad in Venezuela were some of the highlights. But every level was at least really cool visually, for the story.
But Dog Days is just incredible. What a beautiful game through and through! I am so glad I took a closer look after years of suspecting it was a game with a cool visual style but boring mechanics, because it is both mechanically and visually awesome. I peeked around some venues for where the game continues to be talked about and a lot of people call it an “anti-game”. I think that is just a depressing reflection on the conservative nature of video games, that when a game deliberately evokes an emotional and kinetic experience that is disorienting and hard to control it just gets called an anti-game… I saw that before playing DD and expected something really unrecognizeable, but it’s just a good ass game that’s fun to play and feels deliberate and good.
This will definitely be a game that will help me to keep in mind how bad “Good Taste” in the games industry and video games discourse can sometimes be. Also I think this was the first game I’ve played on SB’s recommendation. The multiplayer modes in DD sound so damn cool.
Edit: sorry I wish this was more organized but it’s finals soooo… I just wanted to add that the last 12 minutes of Dog Days was extended for me into an hour because of set of triggers that were not firing off at the right time to have Lynch come into a room and give me cover from a massive battalion of swat types and I would have to manually trigger enemy spawns by running just like 2 feet in front of where they came in, on Hard. Was really weird and annoying but eventually things started to work the right way for some inexplicable reason.
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yeah I do think Outer Wilds missteps by making the initial town so cutesy and twee. Once I was in space, I was pleased to never see those character designs again aside from the few seconds when I start a new loop
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It also took a lot of SB posts to get me to play Dog Days. I was very bad at it but happened to be in a situation where I could try it co-op with a friend who had never heard of it and it was a good experience.
The thing that finally convinced me to try it was Dracko’s old avatar.
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Watched The Thing last night then played The Thing. Technical problems kinda took the wind out of our sails but it’s an interesting little experiment if not out and out fun: Receive a new location to go to, hop from interior to interior to get there because when you’re outside you will slowly freeze to death, issue commands to your squad members to unlock doors or repair switches, mow down face-huggery looking creatures that attack you. We got as far as performing a blood test on our crew (half of whom are doing bad David Hayter impressions (one of your guys is actually voiced by Cam Clarke)) to reveal that two members were Things due for an immediate flamethrower hose down. The game does a nice job of evoking the film’s sense of nocturnal, sub-zero limbo.
A cool aspect of video game film adaptations is seeing familiar spaces and props translated into polygonal spaces. The Thing is a little more interesting than something like Goldeneye in that you’re navigating the aftermath of what just went down in the film so you get to hang out in the billiards room, check out Wilford Brimley’s UFO and that shack where they locked him up (I actually don’t remember if we found the dog kennel (but now that I think about it, the facility was…blown up pretty good at the end of the film, it’s held up surprisingly well). I suspect that there won’t be many major gameplay revelations in store but I might circle back to this one, it has just enough humble ambitions and rough edges to make it intriguing. I wonder if you can screw yourself over by letting certain squad members die. That’s another thing they do well to emphasise in the game is the constant reliance on, absence from and suspicion of your peers. Sometimes they’ll get so freaked out they start vomiting and become paralysed by fear. Nothing a good taser to the tush can’t fix, though their behaviours can appear to be inscrutable at times…
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Played some Let it Die, and remembered just how awful my depth perception is. I had similar issues with State of Decay 2. I have a very hard time judging how close I need to be to an enemy for an attack to hit and I consequently just flail around and leave myself open for attack. Anyway, I really like everything about Let it Die’s world and story and all that, but the game itself isn’t much, I hope they do a sequel that has more to it because as much as I like fortune cookies they’re not as filling as snickerdoodles and right now Let it Die is a fortune cookie.
I also played some of Resident Evil 2 Remake last night, it took me about 30 minutes to get to the Marvin cutscene. I’m surprised I didn’t die or take a ton of damage because I ran out of bullets in the gas station and had to run and hope my perception of depth is good enough to keep me from running into something I don’t want to. I really don’t like how player characters move in modern games, it feels very heavy and stiff. I had this same complaint about GTA4 and RDR and it’s why I didn’t really play those too much, but I guess that’s that the norm now and I’ll have to either get used to it or continue to not bother with modern action/adventure games.
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Tried a bunch of random stuff from my Steam library, liked almost none of it. Having a real “video games suck” kinda night
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I think BOTW made me better at Mario 64
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More modded Factorio insanity. I’ve been busy but I have been noticing how progression in this and likely other management games lines up in four general steps.
Warning, image heavy
1. Adhoc
Kludging something together to make it work. Often this is your first introduction to these production steps and your main concern is puzzling out how to connect your inputs so that you get something afterward. No balancing of ingredients, signs of jury-rig fixes to unexpected results, and inefficient output result in a tangle that refuses to be copied easily elsewhere. Tends to be temporary unless the solution works well enough.
(weapons research processing line, has not changed in over 100 hours of play)
2. Generalized
Characterized by cleaner lines of input and output and combining similar processes onto the same lines. Your understanding of the production chain has increased and you can visualize a few steps but not yet the bigger picture. This is a general use pattern that can be repeated easily but can’t produce in significant quantities due to space limitations and proximity to other products. Really useful for “malls” or places to slowly build the factory pieces needed to expand the factory while you’re off elsewhere.
(logistic and construction robot limb production, mk1 and mk2, using only three inputs)
3. Specialized
An entire production chain is encapsulated into one area, providing a solution to guarantee maximized output from maximized input. It only produces one or two things but it does it well. Processing is balanced so no machine is waiting on an earlier one. Discrete sub-units are noticeable and tend to be smaller patterns built from earlier lessons. Layout is convoluted to minimize wasted space but has clear entry points for outside inputs and exit points for what it produces.
(Taking in charcoal and sulfuric acid, this factory produces glass and a side product of carbon. If glass output is blocked, it’ll instead produce glass fibers for fiberglass boards.)
4. Decentralized
Eventually space becomes an issue and using local logistical infrastructure is too slow or saturated with other products. Instead, you move to another logistic infrastructure that lets you run product on the same lines without worry of saturation, leading to the last innovation: taking specialized units of a production chain and scaling them up in turn. Your intermediate products now are inputs for other production chains, not just to one. Inputs become simple, the machines used tend to be only one or two types, but how many in one area gets extreme. Because of this it takes up a lot of space.
(lead, tin and copper ingot processing into coils and wire coils, brought in and out by train)
(train system supporting this nonsense, along with ore production areas and ingot smelting sections. Blue lines are power, grey is track, yellow is conveyor belts, dark blue are machines.)
It was immensely satisfying to lay out the last section, plug it into the train system, and then have everything just work. At this point I have something like 1500 mud washers running, which is the basic machine for a large portion of Seablock Factorio, dredging up mud for farms, sulfur for acid, and geodes to crush into ore. If everything was running I had a power deficit of 200MW; 180 steam engines running non-stop were already putting out 400MW.
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I tried playing No More Heroes 3 but that opening stage that’s just one long shitty runner wore out its welcome when i got through panels of alternating electric floors only to be stopped by a pipe shooting smoke and electricity so the only way to proceed was to go back, and I wasn’t doing it again, fuck that. I gave it more than enough time to hook me, and it wasted its time trying to pull a Nier: Automata but with Pepsiman. Maybe if I had some sort of nostalgia associated with NMH I’d feel compelled to push through that shitty opening, but if the game is going to just be more of that, then I’ll pass.
I started Dark Souls Remastered. I was going to start with the Wanderer or Thief because I think they both look cool, but I opted for the Pyromancer for the fire magic (though I find it kind of blargh to use). I somehow managed to kill the first boss without dying – I usually die once or twice as I fumble with the controls.
I can’t seem to get any armor drops or blueprints in Let it Die, but I got blueprints for these shades in my item box so I made them (giving me bad flashbacks from unlucky Dark Cloud runs where you’ll just go through a dungeon a bunch of times and get no goddamn weapons or anything). I only have to run through the first floor maybe two more times and I’ll have my character maxed out so I can deal with the boss on the third floor. I think I might make a Collector so I can hold more.
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Starting to resent Dark Souls. I don’t like always having to be “on”.
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I realise what you meant now but I initially read this and was like 
‘can I borrow it?’
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