I have never played truly enjoyable computer game.
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I can see why this remake took so long they went and made xen as long as the entire previous game. hours of dicking around with wires on alien machines. it’s garret gets a factory job at the end of thief 2 but in space.
there’s a whole vortigaunt village
the scientists back in black mesa continually teleport you supplies in these pods throughout xen
in the vortigaunt village they teleport a pod full of doritos
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Is the Xen stuff cool though or does it overstay its welcome?
replaying bayonetta and i’ve got the panther transformation and parry, so this is the point where the game turns from great to divine
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I don’t really like the garret gets a factory job part of thief. so yeah I was getting tired of it. you keep doing the same things too. go to three almost identical looking alien control center things. puzzle out where to get two spare cables to plug into the two sockets. push the button to fire a laser thing. once you have three laser things firing it opens a portal. etc. then you take the portal to go do maintenance on a series of alien pistons. finding the wires that need to go in the sockets at each one. over and over. I guess that’s half life though. digging around in maintenance tunnels and shit to get some thing powered on so you can flick a switch and go forward. and it’s not always clear what or where you’re supposed to be going.
I guess this is all kind of the appeal of the thing too though, a long ass meandering 90s pc game like half life 1 but it looks like a nowadays game, only no voice on a radio or hud marker constantly telling you where to go. the indoor black mesa areas are way too dark and moody looking but the outdoor areas look great.
I played the original half life all through once in 1999 or 2000 and I can’t remember if I legitimately got through xen or noclipped my way through to the last boss. I tried the other day replaying a little bit of the original to compare it to this but the sound design kind of drove me nuts. felt like there was always some harsh wailing 96kbps mp3 klaxon or buzzing fluorescent light or shrieking monster or something or other blaring at any time in the background, so I didn’t make it far.
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just set sail for the new world, in Grandia. i can’t help but imagine the experience of playing the game at release; it has some real grandiosity to it and reminds me a lot of Xenogears, in some respects (i mean, mostly visually, i guess). there’s something about this blending of 2D pcs/npcs with 3D diorama-style backgrounds; i guess maybe it’s my favorite era of jrpg, in retrospect. the games still had their feet planted firmly in the 16-bit era, but used all the extra power to create even larger (Grander?) and more interesting worlds. it’s also reminding me of what i enjoyed about the Lunar games when i first played them. characters really have some life to them, even if Justin is kind of a dumbass (shounen tropes, though).
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it’s the best
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PS1/Saturn era JRPGs still able to evoke a sense of the unknown in their primitiveness, before the plasticy generation that came after
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Whoa I love the raw win32 MDI look of that game
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Yeah! This game and Lunatic Dawn: Passage of the Book are both really good examples of this. I might have to leverage the collective brain here and make a thread about games with this kind of UI because I always end up loving them.
Still playing VMO, still trudging through the scenario mode - slower and slower as I unlock more units and the maps get more complex. This last fight against Neil Ganam felt impossible until something in my brain clicked and I beat him without much hassle on my ninth-or-so attempt. It feels really cool that roughly every three stages you’re forced to have a significant revelation about how to play the game better to keep progressing through it.
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Asian developers in this era did a lot of that, and usually with what looked like PC98 successor graphics – I assume it’s the result of translated API docs being followed very narrowly and precisely in a way that few western devs did. Super neat era.
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The Windows ports of like, Suikoden I want to say also did that.
{disclaimer: i’ve only played half of doom 2016}
yeah watching this it’s just… if you want to make this it has to feel cleaner, and partly this feels like an aesthetic issue (rip and tear gore and guts etc) where every action has to look and sound like you’re hitting a dead cow with an aluminum baseball bat, but also there’s some mechanical elements to this feeling? like this gameplay seems suited to a serious sam thing where there’s weaker enemies but many more of them and they go down easy and spectacularly.
idk i’m not the doom knower it just strikes me that this (like bayonetta tbh) is plodding even when you go as quickly as humanly possible. i guess i’m looking for the ninja gaiden equivalent to this, where it feels difficult but also fast and fluid
maybe that’s just wolfenstein
Serious Sam is more about threat management and tool selection whereas Eternal leans towards resource management (consider the value of weaker/popcorn enemies all being weak, easily killable health, armor or ammo containers)
Ninja Gaiden or a fast and fluid but hard thing would be Doom
Wolf is Pac-Man with guns
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REmake: what better use for a broken flamethrower??
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My problem with late 90s RPGs is that the pacing took a turn for the sluggish at the same time. The absolute nadir of pacing was the PS2 era but the problem started with the PS1. A mix of technical reasons (Nintendo with their cartridge thing had a point!) and just maximalism tending to make pacing worse unless the problem is carefully considered.
On emulator, hard disk loading speeds and fast-forward might’ve helped these age better though. And maybe some of them are better paced than the ones I’ve played (I’d be curious to know which if so). I’ve been wondering about trying Grandia
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Oh yeah! It even had an inventory window where you could drag and drop items between characters, which feels like some space age societal advancement after having played the PS1 version.
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I keep wondering now about pacing and length and how much of that is defined by “consume and move on”.
Maybe it is cool to just play the same game 3 nights a week for two hours for 3 months.
I’ll keep making the analogy of consuming games by looking at the buffet and going “I’m going to eat it all, TODAY.”
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Apparently I was only playing on easy. Huh.
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captain toad is a danger game
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