I think that’s a bit reductive description of the housers writing and I don’t think anything in the gta games was as ugly as saints row having a mission where you “rescue” a bunch of sex trafficed women from shipping containers to put to work for yourself
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I mean that’s a pretty low bar! But I’m not even talking about some particularly hateful thing that happens in-universe so much as the narrowness and stupidity of that universe itself; I’ve never played games that missed so many cheap shots, that seemed unequal even to the truly petty and trifling shit they took it upon themselves to mimic or parody (at long last, someone “takes down” reality tv stars for being self-absorbed, action movies for being stupid, etc),while somehow managing to be so self-satisfied in doing so. When people make a case for these games as having some undertow of desperation, melancholy etc it’s usually on a tacit agreement that you can fence away this other stuff from the discussion - so that the flailing heroes don’t have to share space with the parody cereal named Cock-O’s, or whatever. But they do share space, that background of bullying self-satisfaction is part of the same picture, and it’s something that completely undercuts and makes indulgent any occasional swerve into interiority they might attempt (didn’t even Conker’s Bad Fur Day also make some play at the main character being a boozy fuck-up, before going back to treating him as the viewpoint into a world of caricature grotesques too pitiful to even deserve that minor shred of pathos? great minds). Nothing about their work has ever suggested to me they were anything other than hugely incurious writers who get given a huge amount of leeway because of their correspondingly huge amount of money, made pretty much off the back of extended technical demos and Robot Chicken bits.
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anyway apologies for getting snippy - the rdr2 release, and the critical response to it, uninsured 24 year olds on gaming websites getting paid like $50 to trawl through a thousand hours of content and write essays about it saying “some of this might be good… or is it? only time will tell. but one thing’s for sure: this is a game, that definitely exists. 100 stars” felt designed by god to put a hole through my brain.
most recent things i can remember playing:
- binky ix: bubbo, comparative epic in the longrunning binky series. you move your guy around a flat plane filled with dragons and react to everything they say by saying “wow” and “is that true?”. the plane is full of caves which lead to more villages and caves, and there’s something weirdly compelling about trying to keep track of the geography of sprawling caves within caves. there’s a good uncanny part at the end where you meet a revelations-esque pseudo binky.
- demos for toby: very funny microgame collection framed as a cover letter to be hired as a minigame developer by toby fox. perfect!! the jarring aimless gameyness of all the minigames becomes much funnier if you try to mentally amalgamate it with the hypothetical moral earnestness of undertale 2 or something.
- nancy drew, curse of blackmoor manor: only played a little of this because i had the weird feeling the game characters were going to yell at me for wandering into random rooms of their house after they explicitly asked me not to. i guess i need to ease myself back in to the mindset of adventure game protagonist / amoral mystery weirdo. also, one of the very first things you find is a 12-page long list of astrology puzzles.
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I actually got around to playing RDR2 this year and its biggest sin is that it’s just so boring. It’s an odorless fart making its way through the great outdoors, spreading itself thinner and thinner until it disappears
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But like how good is the beauty of America? As someone that now lives in a small Tokyo Apartment I keep thinking about playing it…for the Americaness.
I did like that aspect of it - to a degree. There is one technical thing that always takes me out of a videogame experience and that’s pop in. I’ll literally sacrifice all prettiness and graphical fidelity if I can get rid of pop in in exchange. Sadly RDR2 doesn’t work like that. It has a great draw distance and I can’t find a fault with that. However, you’ll always have some shrubbery somewhere that morphs from low detail to high detail as you get closer and that annoys the heck out of me! Even if it’s just at the corner of my field of vision this takes me out of the scene. I tried editing some game file to minimize it. You can’t completely get rid of it though. I have a really, really beefy rig right now and it’s annoying that the game can’t make use of it. It’s an engine limitation.
The snow looks great though! The environments are well crafted and probably the star of the show for me. As a walking/horse riding simulator it’s probably really great… Although I have a feeling something like Death Stranding would be more fun in that regard because it’s actually about walking and has systems built for that. Moving around in RDR2 just feels cumbersome and like a chore due to the animations.
Saw a lot of sites say that you oughta leave Norway (the opening map) for England in AC Valhalla ASAP, and they’re…probably right.
But I decided to go back and clear a few locations, and found a weapon I wish I had from the start. It’s…just a hammer. But! It’s not that much slower than an axe, and it just chews through enemies. slam shield broken slam 2/3 health down slam dead.
Pretty sure some part of the endgame is in Norway given the northernmost section is full of enemies that can still basically one-shot me. Time will tell, I guess.
the only time i’ve played an Assassin’s Creed game was when i rented the first one (there used to be a Blockbuster not too far from my apartment! 
) and the only thing i really remember was that:
- jumping off buildings was fun
- i stopped playing because if you didn’t make your horse move as slowly as possible past guards, it would alert them
so my question is this: have they progressed past really, really-irritating stealth mechanics in the newer releases? because it seems like it’s just an entirely different game, now.
Oh yeah the first game was obnoxiously finicky about stealth and I think even as soon as the second game things improved somewhat in terms of guards not being overly sensitive to innocuous actions. Admittedly my memories are years old but I don’t think I would have made it through a few more games if they hadn’t tuned those mechanics a bit
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the good video game western was Gun
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Yeah, they definitely made the stealth mechanics a bit more generous. Then again, there’s not much penalty in the last two games for just rushing in headlong (only the last set of DLC in Odyssey made being stealthy a bigger incentive, by introducing super powerful Greek statue robot men who would activate if you alerted guards.)
Valhalla brings back the whole “social stealth” thing from the earlier games, but I haven’t found much use for it yet. You can throw your hood on and blend in with monks, but it’s easier to just…sneak around? I dunno.
I will say that Valhalla is the first one since…god, probably Syndicate, or parts of Origins, where it feels like you do some real deal assassinations. Full on sneaking up to the rafters as some paranoid guy rants below and leaping down and killing 'em. Kinda missed that!
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I think about that teaser a lot, so this should probably be a “video game thing you think about a lot” post. It really got me hyped - music by Filter, photo montage reminiscent of a NIN show - and then they showed gameplay and it was Just Another Video Game… Did the actual game have as much LUST as the teaser made it look?
no it’s pretty bland. talented voice cast though. also, apparently extremely racist. perhaps my memories of renting it and playing it for like 20 of the 48 hours in which it was in my possession are not infallible after all
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I think I made this exact same post when I finished Spiderman 2018. literally indistinguishable from GTA3, structurally speaking.
But I have to admit that RDR2 is a lot more than that. maybe deep down at the skeletal level it’s the same thing, but the bundles of nerves, veins, musculature, skin, silk shirts, fur coats cowboy hats, six shooters that are layered on top of that skeleton are spectacular enough to hide its basic GTA3-ness
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I had this same cognitive dissonance where I remember enjoying the game but when I skipped through a play through, you’re just shooting dozens of indigenous people.
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I remember liking the environments and varied pacing of the levels a lot, and that there were optional reasons to go off into those spaces. But the superior and (edit: probably) not-racist Western from that time was just Stranger’s Wrath.
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That’s the best game I never finished for sure. In my defense, I was so blown away by the twist around half-way through the game (I assume it was half-way through, idk) that I got mega excited and wanted to really cherish the second half of the game and then the pressure built so much that I never went back to it. When stuff gets too good I get this weird anxiety and that’s also why I haven’t finished watching Tim’s recent Action Button videos
EDIT: I do have Stranger’s Wrath on my phone now though, so maybe I’ll finally finish it some day
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Honorable mention for Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
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I love the American old west as a setting aesthetically but have yet to play any video game set in the American old west or a pastiche of the American old west that I thought was any good. This includes Wild ARMs, which I don’t think is nearly as good as people remember it to be (also whoever decided on that dialogue font should absolutely eat shit). John Carpenter should collaborate (more as like, creative director, I guess) with like, Grasshopper or somebody to make a really off-the-wall Samurai Western-esque romp.
What about those stories that feel like a western but do not take place in the root’n toot’n wild west? Like the first two Fallout games, or space-westerns and that kind of thing.
Just remembered to be excited for Weird West.