got the GB SaGa collection on Switch yesterday and digging it. i never really played these ones at all, but i have memories of a friend of mine in day camp who was like, my “obscure videogames friend,” who was always trying to convince me to play the FF Legend games. i’d like to think that if he didn’t grow out of it, he’d have fit in on SelectButton.
i wonder how my life would have been different if i got into SaGa at age 11?
anyway, the straightforwardness is oddly refreshing, but it still feels very SaGa; it’s cool to see how these ideas evolved, and i also love how you have all these different kinds of beings just coexisting with each other, casually.
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also, not playing, but watching, the Game Grumps playthrough of the first Danganronpa. i’ve never played any of these games and had no idea what they’re even about, but i’d always been intrigued because i think Monokuma’s design is great.
i can definitely see why they’re popular! although it also seems like it’s 100% meant for teenagers, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it has intense YA vibes.
kind of debating whether or not i actually want to play them, or just watch.
Oh dang, that sounds pretty gross actually. I remember Suda mentioning wanting to do a remake of it but this sounds like a bit of a yikes project. I remember people hyping up the novelty of the perspective but the sex pest stuff is very offputting.
Same except I’ve never played a SaGa game in my life. I just have a half memory of people playing FF Legend on the playground back in the day and now I want to revisit this half memory as a crusty adult. Music is groovy too.
I played several hours of Rakuen last night. It’s a little all-over-the-place, but I can’t help but dig it. It reminds me (very superficially) of Anodyne, although I think that is a better game. Likes the ~vIbES~ or whatever feel similar. I’m pleasantly surprised, after having almost bounced off of this game completely the first time I played it. I’m glad I revisited it. Although if it doesn’t grab you in the first hour, I’d say just bail out.
cool i am finally caught up with this thread. i honestly haven’t played much over the past two months besides apex legends. the movement in apex feels divine, better than titanfall 2 (i played a bit of titanfall 2 mp the other day to make sure i really felt this way) as it has more friction and immediacy. i have dreams about the movement in this game pretty frequently. and even past the satisfaction of all the basic climb-slide interplay there’s a decent amount of advanced techs that can lead to so many tasty moments of game, like doing an instant redirect off a vertical zip to fly over someone’s head or wall-jumping to fake someone out or move in an unpredictable arc. i feel like i’m always zoomin’ around the map even when i play characters without any movement abilities (been a gibraltar main lately, and i make that big fella move!).
it’s been touched on here but one of the most engaging aspects of apex is that there’s so many simultaneous axes to learn and improve upon:
weapon mechanics
(recoil patterns and effective ranges, as well as how the hop-ups change gun mechanics. things to learn like using thermites to punish enemies holding doors, l-star bullets opening doors if you shoot the handles)
map knowledge
(how to get from point a to point b as quickly as possible, or as stealthily as possible as the case may be. and that’s just on the macro scale, there’s the entire micro scale of different methods of traversing buildings, sussing out good approaches and objects to use for cover in each room, etc. there are also plenty of locations and structures that are traversable that wouldn’t appear so at first — pipes on the roof of the tunnel heading south from trainyard, for one)
movement techniques
(you can climb walls and slide, yeah, but are you crouching after clambering to get the instant full-speed slide? maybe you can wall jump to clear gaps, but how about using it to bypass clamber animations to save crucial milliseconds in a fight? to be fair i’m not, i’m not that good lol)
legend abilities
(gibraltar’s dome is labeled as defensive, but it can be the cornerstone to an aggressive push! if you’re playing wraith and you get stuck with an arc star, are you phasing to negate the explosion and stun? when crypto’s emp goes off, do you know what abilities it will counteract? are you sending mirage clones into wattson fences and caustic traps to reveal the player locations to your team? there are an absurd number of ways the abilities interact with each other)
game awareness
(how can you position yourself to have the best possible advantage given where the next circle will be? where are all the other teams now, and where will they be when they attempt to do the same thing? who can you cut off from getting to the ring, and what’s the backup plan if someone tries to cut you off in turn? constantly trying to think three steps ahead of dozens of other people, all on a short time scale)
i’m above-average-but-not-incredible at the mechanical aspect of these games, but having all these different spheres in which to focus and excel has sucked me in like nothing else. i was always drawn to halo over other shooters simply for the longer time to kill leading to slightly more strategic fights — apex feels like that with some fat exponent on the end of the equation. literally every time i die i’m able to pinpoint something i could have done better, something i can try to improve for next time, and that’s having played it since it launched almost two years ago.
for quite a while i was frustrated with the luck-based aspect of looting, but i view it as a sort of strength now — not being able to always have my ideal loadout, or the situations in which i have an objectively inferior loadout to someone i run into, forces me to lean into all those other spheres of knowledge and ability i have to find ways to still win the fight. am i going to use cover more effectively than they are? am i going to outmaneuver them, climbing a wall immediately after going through a door so they run right past me and i can get behind them? or am i going to straight up disengage completely, using my map knowledge and movement to successfully escape?
i could blabber about this game for a real long time and i probably will at some point like ten years down the road when the memories of playing it are all i have, but for now i hope that all those words can serve as an effective explanation as to why i’ve been able to sink hundreds of hours into apex without getting bored.
oh i also played siren: blood curse. i’m going to wait until i’ve also beaten the ps2 siren to really put some concrete thoughts out in a compare-contrast (i’m a ways into siren right now!) but fuck blood curse and i am so glad that the rumor of a japan studio-led silent hill remake turned out to be false, or at least not have keiichiro toyama working on it as he just split off into his own studio. the final cutscene of the game is a dorky white american teenager in a rural japanese village, either dual- or triple-wielding guns as well as a flaming blue katana, casting some meteor spell and killing zombies (no they’re not dead people they’re 死人 hahaha…) as nu metal blasts out of his headphones. it was like getting a silent hill joke ending, but it was the real ending, and it was played so seriously i don’t think it was intended to be anything but fuckin’ badass. beautiful game visually, i will write more about it in the future, but that ending left the worst taste in my mouth since i licked a switch cartridge.
trying to organize my thoughts on Back 4 Blood beyond a cursory “game is good” and while I can’t articulate things yet, I can say this
Turtle Rock, for the love of god, hire some good writers to punch the holy fuck out of the script up because if what’s in the alpha is any kind of indication, then oof
(not that a theoretical L4D3 would have any better writing since everyone who wrote everything at Valve got the fuck out, a move I don’t blame them for)
also their using the same font as Evolve did for in game text gives me a big sad (hoping and praying WB Games/whoever AT&T dumps WB Games on won’t do TR as dirty as 2K did)
I played through Dark Souls 1-3 and Bloodborne when I was sick during the winter. Now I’m re-playing Sekiro. Realizing I play From Soft games for comfort. Wishing I could play Demon’s Souls. Don’t have a PS3 anymore though. Don’t have a computer that can emulate it.
I was worried I’d return to Sekiro and quit cuz I didn’t have the patience to get reacquainted with its rhythm but it’s gone pretty smoothly. The game’s burned into my brain in a way I didn’t expect after one playthrough. They probably shoulda had a Lady Butterfly-style fight earlier on in the game. Feel like she does the best job of teaching you how to play.
I had to replay Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne solo cuz no one’s playing the original PC release nowadays and I can’t afford PS+. This meant I couldn’t cheese my way through fights I’ve been too lazy to learn. And it all went went well, I had fun, I did not do Orphan of Kos (though I think I beat that solo way back when anyway). I do not want to fight that boss again. It’s a pain in the ass. But my opinion of Bloodborne shot way up. I always thought it was great but I was disappointed in the lack of build variety and I wasn’t nuts about how aggro it was but hey now I love it wholly, I think you should play Bloodborne, bet no one’s ever told you to do that before eh.
Anyway I have somehow blasted through 2/3 of Sekiro despite all the goings-on in the home – I now love consoles again thanks to rest modes – and it’s helped keep me somewhat sane and much like Bloodborne my estimation of it has increased greatly and I dunno maybe I’ll play it again after. I beat the big monkey last time I played. They added a few things and I will never use them. I will never re-fight a boss fight. I turned off the Souls-like player apparitions right away. I loved them in Demon’s Souls but here they spoil the fuckin’ mood. This is a lonely game and that’s how I like it.
I really wanna play Apex Legends again I can’t wait until I can do fun things online again
