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

Played this briefly and was a neat little appetiser before more Paradise Killer. It starts off very satisfying but I realised that the increasing complexity was highlighting that I should be doing this to my actual home.

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This is the most powerfully evocative sentence I’ve read all week.

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I can’t stop thinking about that game since the post the other day. I’m in love with so many things about it.

These videos that play before boss races are like peak PS2 beauty

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The fact that no other “magic” or even spirituality appears in the game it really takes your brain places about this apparently haunted night racing world.

Oh those big racer boss battle preamble cut scenes are so pure. TXRD2 has the same deal.
Highway romance fogs my brain and powers my motor. Time to take stock but not too much, crack your knuckles and prepare to die for street cred.

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Holy shit, what unexpected beauty

I seriously dislike this (on a personal level). A huge part of my philosophy of life is that the energy needed to get that last little bit of order in life is a waste.

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I think that doing one or two of these (in-game or in life) can feel rewarding in small doses but the repetition of it really files away the pleasure to reveal the inherent pointlessness of order in an entropic universe. If anything I can see this game giving someone frustrated anxiety more than it would relax them.

Again, this is just me personally, but I found this overwhelmingly irritating in the first 2 seconds.

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I liked the idea of the game and appreciated the variety, but it got me feeling edgy and neurotic real quick! Then I looked around my apt and saw there so much potential material to work with irl that if this was a real impulse of mine, even a therapeutic one, it would be so distracting.

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I have been playing A Hole New World which is the only game I know that has LITERAL BLOOD POTION.

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I guess I am playing it until I find the blood potion honestly? It is okay as a throwback but has a poor sense of balance and thinks dozens of things coming at you is difficulty.

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why does warriors orochi 4 feel so much worse than the nintendo ones? is it the jump instead of the dodge? is it really that simple?

yes

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Cosmology of Kyoto is another game I’d place in the same wheelhouse as Beyond Blue and AC Discovery Tour. The goal is not education (it doesn’t assess learning of a syllabus) but it takes a specific topic (10th century Kyoto and its surrounding literature and history) and aims to inform the player of it in a direct way.

Unlike the virtual museum of Discovery Tour it embeds the player in specific stories and events rather than being a catch-all summary of an entire culture(s). It gets a bit repetitive but having to enact and encounter these stories makes it more engaging than just reading Cosmology’s copious notes. Some of the stories are simple and curious, others are surreal and grotesque.

There’s a spirit of Gilliam-esque animation but it is not appropriative of existing art. The similarity is mainly in caricature of human form and limited animation giving birth to horror and preposterousness, often together. It manages to feel very distinct even now and I can’t easily think of any other similar styles.

It was not until I had finished the game that I suddenly recalled that I have actually visited the modern palace grounds and that trudging lengthways alongside its lengthy walls was almost the same experience of navigation in Cosmology where you pace an endless grid of similar walls. It is not a game I would absolutely recommend someone play but it gets a lot of things right aesthetically.

I love that the sky is perpetually in twilight never really feeling like day will break and, by extension, that the misery so many citizens endure will ever end. My favourite sections involve the priest Kuya, a historical figure who was an early proponent of ‘pure land buddhism’. The game uses him as a sort of thematic stake and is the character most prominently ‘aware’ of the game’s themes. Or at least that’s how I read it. His kindly face still sticks with me long after I finished the game.

happiness

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I agree. I do like that you can get some verticality if you need to, but you never really do need to. I still stand by the magic attacks feeling good and by and large making me like the game solely because you get a targeting reticule painted on mooks and shoot out homing lasers as if you’re playing a rail shooter.

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I played a lot of Horizon Zero Dawn now that it’s on PC and they finally patched out all the crashes (it didn’t crash on me yet). Thanks @daphaknee for the recommendation

The game is slightly less than the sum of its parts but basically robot hunting in a really pretty version of a postapocalypse is the formula I needed to actually get into the whole Monster Hunter/Witcher type of game (I tried both of those and bounced off quickly). It’s transparently an amalgam of other highly popular games from the last 5-10 years but it feels to me more like a new synthesis than a derivative.

The robot beast premise is fundamentally clever and solves a lot of game design problems all at once. Above all, it justifies and makes natural the objectifying relationship that the player has with the beasts. There are horse-like “mount” robots and you can either slaughter them for parts or make them your ally and ride them around. It doesn’t force you to name them like in BotW and it’s not weird to leave them alone in the middle of the desert while you fast travel elsewhere.

And of course, there are gigantic beasts minding their own business and you challenge them and whittle them down with a hail of arrows and traps, but there’s not that undertone of malaise that SotC leaned into and Monster Hunter tries to sweep under the rug. Yes, this is the “easy” solution and SotC’s contradiction-maintaining one was more profound. But it’s perfect for comfort food in the middle of a year where I want comfort food and have my fill of ethical ambiguity.

The writing is overall workaday but there are occasional real highlights. I was impressed by the intro script which initially felt to me like it was doing something very subtle and clever: sounding like a translation of untranslatable future-nomad language into English, and therefore necessarily stilted. I still think this is a little bit of what’s going on, but it quickly became obvious that I was also giving it too much credit. It’s mostly that the writing has no concept of prose style and no real idea how to engage with the cultural chasm it sets up. Especially as the game advances it increasingly conflates Aloy’s perspective and culture with the player’s – Aloy seems to basically understand the recordings from thousands of years in the past, and the script is mostly a giant missed opportunity for sparks or play with the theme of time.

The one place that does have such sparks is in the inventory item names and descriptions of ancient artifacts, with their wild misinterpretations of everyday objects. The use of metal shards as currency is also the smartest currency concept I’ve seen: particularly the fact that all arrow crafting eats up shards because of course it does: it’s the arrowhead!

Mostly though the game stands on its art direction. It’s peak Western conventional high-detail/slightly-cartoony style, and though that’s not the sort of thing we generally praise around here, it’s the result of both mastery and love on the dev’s part, and I really enjoy it just as I liked TLOU’s style. It manages to be so pretty in so many different lighting conditions, and there are lots of little touches to appreciate everywhere like the recurring visual motif of mountain streams, Aloy’s armors inspired from different indigenous traditional dress, and the climbing sequences which are there as showcases of kinematic animation as well as character-building moments for Aloy (her vigor, pride and recklessness).

I said it was a bit less than the sum of its parts and the main reason is that it sometimes feels like just a lot of pretexts for engaging in the same 5 or so activities. Little ever feels like a unique setpiece or particularly richer challenge, and the game feels the same in the late game at it did in the beginning. My one tactic of slamming 3 of my strongest pure physical damage arrows at the enemy’s weak point works on pretty much every enemy, and although I’ve started to use elementals and traps a lot more as I understand the enemy types, that still doesn’t feel actually necessary (on Hard). Still, the 5 same activities are good enough I keep playing. Also I’m now at the point where I can start hunting the optional endgame megabeasts (I took down my first Stormbird yesterday), and that might feel meaningfully different.

I occasionally took screenshots in the game’s “photo mode” when what I was looking at struck me as especially pretty, and just now I realized photo mode leaves in the UI unless you explicitly press X to hide it?? Wat

Imgur

Imgur

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it’s funny, i know what you’re saying, but other than the fact that you’re controlling a character in third person in both of these you couldn’t name two games that are more different in every possible direction

Yeah it probably only makes sense in light of this game feeling about equally derived from each of them

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turning around feels the same in all three i get it i get it!

i felt corny for thinking the misrepresentation of earth objects was funny BUT I DID, it reminded me of straight title robot anime in a really cute way

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not home for a week, only stuck with my crummy laptop. so i did a run-through of tower of druaga

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I think this is intentional, but it’s used mostly to push a modern perspective against the fantasy tropes. Aloy is the only character who shares the audience’s to call things out. In the plot construction, I think the idea was that, having found the future tech as a kid, she had a different perspective forced on her. She can see her world with a modern perspective, literally, with her bluetooth earpiece, and she’s been doing it for a decade.

It conveniently lets them use her more as an audience surrogate, to, rather than distancing the player character from the player, a harder trick and usually something that wavers back and forth.

I think Horizon explicitly tries to pull Monster Hunter lessons into a successful western mode: beasts have habitats, very specific weaknesses, and they’re willing to build 5 or 10-minute long fights. They get over some of Monster Hunter’s obtuseness by breaking health pools into modular bits, so players aren’t in a vague progress space.

Ironically, Capcom finally made Monster Hunter work shortly after this came out and it doesn’t look like such an important task anymore.

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Continuing down the racing game path I’ve gotten into Gran Turismo 6. I played a little 4 before that and while I dig the Vibe of 4 more I must admit I’m a sucker for the improved graphics and way this one dishes out the content. I think it might be a little easier? Maybe I’m getting better. With any luck this will be the first time I finish a Gran Turismo game since I bought the first one 20+ years ago, couldn’t even get a license properly, and swore off the series. Not sure what brought me back 20 years later.

This one apparently sold poorly due in no small part to it coming out one week before the PS4 launch. It isn’t looked at very fondly either, though the main complaints are confusing to me. “Bloated”, as in too much content…crazy! The game is generous as hell, giving you a nice choice of races to get a certain amount of Stars in to unlock tests for the next license. A bunch of unique side content, including:

—a new 27km course that has Arcade-y type rules, i.e. timed checkpoints you have to make it to and a score multiplier you get for passing cars cleanly. Fun!
—an Ayrton Senna tribute mode, where you play through famous races from his life (complete with narrated slideshows describing what happened). Beat his times (yeah right) and unlock his cars! If you finish this mode, you unlock a 20 minute documentary about kids in Brazil learning how to read. Neat!
—race the lunar rover on the moon. seriously! watch out for rocks and avoid big floaty jumps, try to reach the end in time! ridiculous!

It’s just damn cool. And while the 4 setup is unrivaled, 6 isn’t a slouch. You’ve still got slick relaxing menu music, fun presentation, the ability to watch people wash and change the oil in your car. I was able to buy the car I’m driving now and put 100,000 dollars of racing parts in it to make it viable. This is a lot of fun and I couldn’t be more excited for Gran Turismo 7!

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