Hear me out. I made it farther than ever in Blightown. Up some elevator-carousel thing, across this bridge or maybe a tree. Found some Crimson gear. Looks cool, all right! As I’m trying to cross back over the bridge, I Havok physics slip and fall to my death. Ok, that’s just Dark Souls. Impatient, I see if I can run past the zombie, the little red dogs, a couple more zombies NOPE three hits and I’m dead. Closed the game, deleted it. Bye! 
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ys origin is pretty good
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yesterday rather than today but i finished episode 3 of quake and the last map of that really loves just teleporting monster ambushes. i dunno how i feel about that, but i appreciate that the final fiend ambush is on that little bridge so i think even if you fucked up with ammo you aren’t actually sandwiched, but can drop off and run back around if needed.
played a bit of e4m2 until i died and i think i might love it. dropped through a fake water surface into a shambler pit. found my way into a room with jankily placed wooden beams and hills which was really awkward to navigate and fight and platform. love that! i’m all for this kinda stuff. i guess i also just like that this specific map somehow feels like a dungeon crawl? i like dungeons. i like janky dungeons with traps and illusions and awkward/precarious geometry.
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played Little Nightmares for a bit, which my brain keeps amending to Little Rascals. it’s ok so far, am maybe underrating it because i was actually really excited to try this for the longest while - it seemed really different to anything else, the little doll people, waxy, gloopy look of all the models, horrible slapstick atmosphere, willingness to play with the uncanniness of IK animations etc - and then i finally started playing today and was like, oh, i guess this definitely came out after Limbo, right. for some reason i hadn’t made that connection before and it kind of demoralised me. there’s still some good imagery and moments so far, i like the lake of shoes and the horrible flatworms, but it still kind of gives me the impression of something too stagemanaged for its own good in all those stately camera pans across the areas. haven’t met alfalfa yet so maybe it picks up after that.
played some Lone Survivor for first time since it came out - i like it, at the time i was too nervous about the scary parts to keep going but now it feels like it stands out for a comparative looseness and flexibility in how it handles that stuff. not too focused on remaining on-brand, consistently pretty goofy in the writing and willing to point you in odd directions with all the background systems rather than just using them to reinforce a uniform sense of scarcity - reminds me of the weirdly involved cooking system in bloodstained ritual of the night. that said i think i might starve to death from having saved too often so we will see.
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You may be interested in Ice-Pick Lodge’s Knock-Knock. It doesn’t feel finished but it conveys a bleary-eyed midnight headache and the annoyance that flavors spookiness in an old, cold house
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i was just reading about that one earlier today! is on my list along with Count Lucanor and The Sexy Brutale of things i should probably check out while i still have the energy to play videogames
Sexy Brutale is…mannered. It didn’t do anything for me though it was well put-together
my ideal version of that game would look more like
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yeah, sexy brutale didn’t work for me – play elsinore and/or paradise killer instead
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Count Lucanor was okay. But I dunno if you need to go out of your way to play it.
Game I didn’t play today: I looked at the trailers for the 2019 Star War because after all I like Titanfall 2, I like Souls games and I used to like Star Wars so it’s reasonable to assume I’d enjoy this.
My reaction stream of consciousness: the environment looks pretty pretty, and between the 3rd and 4th movies is a good timeframe to set a game in. I don’t like this audience-surrogate redhead protagonist although I guess I don’t dislike him that much either. Hoo boy now the John Williams motifs are kicking in and I have a really intense kneejerk reaction against that, it activates my “try anything else for Christ’s sake” attitude on a gut level.
Hmm there was barely any gameplay in this trailer which was the main thing I wanted to get a feel for, let’s look at the second one. (2 minutes into second trailer) finally some gameplay. These 5 seconds of boss battle looks like the most vanilla and basic interpretation of Souls combat I could’ve imagined and it’s totally weightless, now I’m having the “try anything else” reaction for a different thing. Hard pass
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good choice
combat is mostly functional but there are 4 or 5 decisions that indicate they didn’t understand what they were doing deeply enough
best part:
this level that makes me think of Metroid Prime
hair physics, esp. this guy’s civil war 'chops
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Super Valis IV is a cool game and definitely more fun than i kind of pictured in my head. also the music is really nice, too; great use of the SNES soundchip.
that said, i feel like everything in this game takes more hits to kill than it should, and it sort of throws off the whole rhythm of the game. also, on Act 4, some of the enemy patterns feel completely random.
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All I’ve been really playing is the minesweeper dungeon in Shiren. I’ve been avoiding the main quest since having a plus something weapon and shield in the warehouse, feels weird being able to keep equipment.
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e4m2 is classic sandy petersen design. Ugly, sometimes flawed, but absolutely delightful to play, with so many creative ideas lurking underneath the uncertain theming.
This is exactly how I would describe sandy petersen’s work even going back to doom!
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Dicey dungeons (Terry Cavanagh roguelike) was releases recently on switch.
On one hand, I like dice as a physical object, to hold and throw. On the other hand, dices in videogames are not exciting - they’re the embodiment of randomness. My kneejerk reaction to this game was not positive: I don’t want to play a roguelike about dices. Of course, this is a well designed game and RNG plays a much smaller role that I was led to believe (overall, the game feels less random than deck building games like Slay the spire!) ; but I wonder whether people had the same kneejerk reaction and this cost the game some popularity and sales
Anyway I like it a lot! It’s a more approachable, cooler Slay the Spire for now. The art is pretty lovely and the soundtrack very infectious. Electro swing music is a pretty good fit for a video game and I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it implemented in one before - though I never really thought about it either so
The level of polish in general is high - The mechanics would take an extremely long post to explain but are immediately understandable from the first fight when playing the game. I have to love the craft here.
I only wish every piece of equipment had its own little cute graphic for readability.
I don’t think the game will last extremely long (which I am almost thankful for) there are 6 vastly different characters but there’s not that much variety between different playthroughs of the same character.
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I have 140 hours put into art of rally at this point, the daily/weekly events are good for putting you in a car that you wouldn’t normally choose, which puts you enough outside your comfort level to give it some frisson.
I’m also going through time attack for every course for every group of cars and trying to get a 50% or greater ranking for each iteration, which is a pretty good way to provide myself with a difficult yet achievable goal without going insane from repetition. The most difficult of these is with the group b/group a cars, as those are the most popular vehicles, and nailing down even an average time is a matter of really perfecting how you intend to approach the course and then hoping for ~75% successful implementation with no major-fuckups. Outside of those, I top out about the 20th percentile for my best runs, which I’m pretty okay with.
While I was doing the weekly challenge today, my son came and watched me (so that he could know when I was done using Steam, so that he could then play Dead Cells as we do a Family share) and put his hand on my shoulder when I went slightly off the road, letting me know that that happens to him in Mario Kart, so he knows how it is, only Mario Kart is worse because sometimes you fall off the course and then as part of getting back on, “Lah-key-too” takes some of your coins because that’s his “side hustle”.
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actually never really thought about who made which maps in doom/quake but it’s gonna be interesting going back with that in mind. gonna figure out if it’s one specific dude setting me up with these teleport ambushes
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i think sexy brutale, count lucanor, little nightmares have all been on my list for a while just because i felt like i didn’t really understand what effects they were going for, or why, reading about them - they seemed like unexpected combinations of elements but of a kind that didn’t necessarily highlight their own unexpectedness, compared to things like elsinore/astrologaster/etc that are likely better but in ways i’m already kind of prepared for in advance. but it’s also likely that i’m just not familiar with whatever sources they’re really drawing on, same as with little nightmares. the next time i feel baffled by the conceptual direction of a game i should probably just assume in advance it’s a knowing reboot of mario’s cement factory(1983) or something.
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It’s American McGee, who I still think was the worst level designer at id
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Yeah the worst Sandy Peterson map will always have at least one idea that makes you go “Huh, that was weird” but in a good way.
Mcgee somehow manages to blend the worst impulses of Peterson and Romero together with very few, if any, of their strengths.
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