Games You Played Today: Actress Again: Current Code (Part 1)

[captainlove]

@spacetown

like, do I still put forward the aesthetic analysis/critical theory stuff knowing that the students who care are going to be very disappointed with what happens to that information when they enter the industry? because I sure was! and the stuff I’m teaching isn’t anywhere close to advanced

I lecture on similar topics for games undergrads. The way I justify it to myself (lol) is that:

• Good students will enjoy the material since its supplementary to practice anyway and transparently isn’t expected in their career. The course I teach on is extremely practice heavy. The enjoyment they get from theory is valuable (even if it is relatively short-term)
• Learning about critical thinking is useful for more than just analysis of games, it can lead to self-improvement, critical thinking of ethical practice (hello games industry), and treating yourself and others with respect.
• To follow this up, theory is like the only place (on a games course) that the games industry can receive any serious criticism or skepticism which students should be provided with to make their own decisions and hopefully change it a little.
• Many students realise by the end of 3 years working with teams that they hate working with teams. For many people a degree is more of a life experience than careers training (at least in the arts space that games often occupies).
• What the industry wants, what society wants and what a student/grad wants are usually very different. The fact that degrees teach ‘ivory tower’ stuff like critical theory, don’t exactly align with EA’s hiring practice, or that students come to university to get laid/drugs/away from home is not a bad thing in every case.

[daphaknee]

[parker]

was the great escape really that good I just payed 5 dollars to rent it and used a cheat code to play the steve mcqueen motorcycle level (where he escapes this time) and didn’t mess with the rest of the game. I was thinking there was another ww2 prison escape game around the same time that was the actual decent one

[Mikey]

Played a bit of West of Dead. It’s a third person cover-shooter mashed into a roguelike structure. Of the more modern type where there are ways to permanently improve your starting conditions so that subsequent runs become more survivable. Your weapons reload on a cooldown rather than manually (and ammunition is infinite). Many rooms are dark and need to be illuminated by interacting with hanging lanterns, which also briefly stuns any enemies who are looking in the right direction and are in the radius of illumination. So far, s’okay.

There are boss encounters which, eh… I’m not sold that they work that well with the mechanics as they exist.

The art is derivative of Mike Mignola, although although it suffers a bit in the translation to 3d models. To really drive that “we like Hellboy a lot” vibe home they even went to the trouble of getting Ron Perlman to do the voice-overs, which are amusingly reminiscent of those in Bastion, wherein Logan Cunningham channels Perlman. The wheel of influence is really spinning here.

I might spend a little more time with this one. Haven’t made up my mind yet. My verdict thus far is that the game is very much inessential.

[vodselbt]

I want to play it to find that out. Some people say it’s pretty alright, and I remember liking it when I was a kid. I have pretty low expectations for it over all, but I always like to see the highs and lows of when a text gets adapted to an unexpected medium like this. Like, the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream game is really cool to me largely because you gotta admire the audacity of its developers to ever think they could have pulled it off. I want someone to make a Last Year at Marienbad game next.

[vodselbt]

Bought and played Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive for 12 minutes today, long enough to 1-hit KO a strong man, win a bet by shooting a potted plant, and beating someone at a knife throwing contest. When the player character started boasting about all this, the loser exclaimed “Bastard!” and laid him out with a single punch that crashed my game to the desktop.

[lonelyfrontier]

i plugged in my ps2 and played some dragon quarter. that game is hard. and then i finished my replay of shenmue 1, and started my very first playthrough of shenmue 2. it’s pretty good too. i like and also dislike how easy it is to get lost in hong kong.

[Mikey]

West of Dead wore out its welcome with me quickly, so I turned my attention to another roguelike that leans heavily on a gravelly narrator to center its presentation: Children of Morta.

Lovely graphics, can’t remember at all what the music sounded like. Endearing depiction of a family of adventurers, completely forgettable main narrative. A science-fantasy setting that seems more for style points than to provide any narrative thrust.

Combat which basically amounts to “kite enemies away, hit them with your character’s one basic attack.” You’re encouraged to switch characters through a mechanic where family members will become fatigued and ineffective if you use them for too many runs. Upgrades to strength/defense that you buy with the in-game currency are applied across all characters simultaneously which is very nice but the game still appears to require a lot of grinding. If I thought the combat was going to get more interesting maybe I’d bother, but as it stands, nah.

[BustedAstromech]

@spacetown

like, do I still put forward the aesthetic analysis/critical theory stuff knowing that the students who care are going to be very disappointed with what happens to that information when they enter the industry? because I sure was! and the stuff I’m teaching isn’t anywhere close to advanced

Other disciplines don’t seem to get much play, but I notice a huge difference in designers trained and ready to think of a project as a whole versus craftspeople ready to exercise a specific tool they were trained on. It remains the case that a grounding in traditional liberal arts is the most important differentiator between average and exceptional designers.

The siloing you’ve experienced in a medium-large company seems typical of all studios above a certain size; it should be better but communication becomes the overriding problem above twenty or thirty people as everything becomes sclerotic and specialized.

While I was in school, we were subject to and crafting a program that ignored tools in favor of more wide-ranging design skills. Unfortunately, it hinged largely on a few exceptional teachers who were chased out and the project has fallen apart since.

[Iammadmak]

Finished a replay of Perfect Dark. A lot of it is more ridiculous than I remember. Can’t believe Halo CE came out a year and change later.

Perfect Dark Zero is one the most garish things I have ever played. Uninstalled that after the first mission. It was awful.

[yarusenai]

The valley of defilement is the most oppressive place I have encountered in a game fuck

I beat breath of the wild and I had shit to say about that but then I played some demons souls and it got me all fucked up

[vodselbt]

I totally agree. It was the easiest content of the game to fight through, but the atmosphere is daunting. The constant buzzing, the trudging, the way you know that place must just stink terribly, and the low framerate on PS3 hardware… feels so gross to be there!

[yarusenai]

right??? like it’s big and dark enough that it’s hard to quickly map it out in my head, i’m constantly poisoned, i can’t roll, i’m slower in general, it’s noisy and icky, and the bigger enemies are VERY hard to fight in the muck and there are areas where there are groups of them guarding items

Every aspect of the design from the mechanics to the visuals and the sounds make it very clear that it is not a place that welcomes me, and I’m impressed at the level of craft, but it’s daunting

[ellaguro]

@Iammadmak

Finished a replay of Perfect Dark. A lot of it is more ridiculous than I remember. Can’t believe Halo CE came out a year and change later.

perfect dark is interesting as a cultural artifact but i feel like i’ve seen various people defend the game in hindsight as either underrated or at least some odd and unique piece of strange janky art… and i can’t understand it. that’s one of the very few AAA games i got when it came out and played to death and i can say that… i do not find it a very pleasurable game to think back on! the story and environments are too silly to take seriously… it’s so painfully bloated and of the year 2000, and not in an interesting way.

some of the ideas it has esp in the multiplayer are neat (the multiplayer on the whole is way better than Goldeneye’s certainly). but there’s very little to hold on for there. it feels really juvenile in a lot of ways actually and it feels weird that a company got so much resources to put into something they had no absolutely idea what they were doing. but i guess 2000 is also the year of Daikatana, speaking of strangely juvenile and having no idea what you’re doing. apparently Perfect Dark and that game came out only one day apart from each other.

after playing a game like Thief Gold more recently for the first time it’s almost hard for me to conceive of that game coming from the same era as those two games. i think for 12/13 year old me something like Perfect Dark was certainly more impressive but it’s kind of hard to find it impressive from any other metric since then.

[Grandpa]

Trying my best to dodge spoilers and The Discourse on the sequel as I rush through a replay of The Last of Us Remastered.

I’m playing it on Easy this time, since I already did it once on Normal and just wanna do this as a refresher.

It’s, uh, wild how different it is? Areas I remember being nightmarishly hard on Normal (I’m bad at games, folks) are not only easier (fewer enemies, more crafting supplies, that sorta thing), but have whole moments, for lack of a better way of putting it, excised from it.

Case in point: that segment in Pittsburgh, where you fall into the flooded basement and have to start a generator to use a keycard, has the same beats for the most part (you wander around, enemies rush you when you grab the keycard, and more rush you when you start the generator). But on easy it’s like, a wave of four runners each, no clickers, and the big bloater that blocks the door you need to escape through is nowhere to be seen.

Also the best strat I’ve found on easy is just to lob molotovs in most situations. And enemies keep themselves exposed long enough to line up headshots, so even me, with my shitty twitchy aiming skills, can do OK.

I’m just past the halfway point and uhhh I guess the story still hits for me, it’s just not a very fun game to play, mechanically. Weirdly clunky!

There’s always gonna be a group that’s gonna argue I’m doing a gross disservice to the game by (re)playing it on easy, and given the omissions I guess those people would be right, but life is finite and short, and so is my patience for Naughty Dog’s penchant for long fucking nonstop waves of enemies. At some point I just gotta content myself to press buttons and watch things happen, rather than slam my head on a desk.

Other than that my hot new game is “running a scraper script every morning on my Pi and trying to find out why it never completes scraping my GBC library.”

Occasionally I actually boot up a game, though. Been trying to get good at Parodius, and after years of hearing about it I finally played the N64 WrestleMania 2000 and it is, in fact, really fucking good.

Also gotta love those graphics.

[villain]

@Grandpa

IMG_20200627_1127114032×3024 3.46 MB

i want to use both of these as my avatar and i’m not sure which to ultimately use because they’re both beautiful abominations

[Grandpa]

It looks like they got a face scan of ol’ DJ, but with Austin had someone just kinda wing it.

[villain]

stone cold steve austin was out of town so they got stone cold steve pflugerville

[Hojulas]

For me it’s less the face but the fact of how it clashes with the skin tone on the rest of the head so it almost looks like he’s got hair.

[nettle]

bad The Whisperer in Darkness vibes