since the last time i posted in this thread i’ve played two games that absolutely rocked my world and destroyed me before building me back up again. That makes three games in half a year alongside Linda^3!!! Goddamn!!!
HEAVEN WILL BE MINE ruined my fucking lifeeeeee (in a good way)
I have no idea how to talk about this game. I’m somewhere in the middle of a chain of tgirls who were recommended and then recommending this game to their friends and all of us had a similarly extreme emotional experience with it. I have had long, deeply gay, somewhat emotionally confusing conversations about embodying certain characters, agreeing that the other girl embodies their favourite character, and how hot both of them are.
Absolutely love the broad use of gravity as literal grounding force / personal strength and agency / distance from hegemony, all collapsing possibilities into outcomes and forcing the protagonists to fight and scream and both develop/heal damage in order to self actualise. I’m generally not interested in mecha but HWBM also has the most compelling interpretation of big robot battles that I’ve personally experienced, being quite literally meant to look and act like big silly toys that allow you to fight and squabble and cry and shit but not kill each other. Machines of war that exist solely to prevent real war. Beat the shit out of each other, get it out of your system, go home. Beautiful contrast with the small, ugly, efficient and paradoxically more alien weapons that represent Earth and its interests.
ANTHOLOGY OF THE KILLER was designed in a lab to get me making shit
I waited for the anthology to start playing any of the killer series. I just KNEW that it was going to be my shit and goddamn it is. Writing and presentation chops aside, this is one of those games that absolutely gets me going as a game developer myself because the efficiency, the effectiveness of this work is just awesome. Beautiful, sprawling, malevolent spaces established in such a delightfully sketchy way. I’m such a huge believer in what fixed cameras and a cinematic eye can do for 3d indie games!!! It’s helped me crystallise the way I want to tell a story that’s been percolating in my brain for half a decade now, and I’m giving it a real shot. Drool of the killer is the best chapter >:)
This Viewtiful Joe 2 might not be as good as the first because switching between characters to solve puzzles and then remembering the secondary ability of each power isn’t fun.
I’m coming out swinging. I am against games where you have to balance two characters!
Skald is a nice sort of retro CRPG, haven’t done much with it yet but the options are nice, and there’s enough character classes available to give you decision paralysis at the start
Played Ghost Recon: Breakpoint yesterday. Got myself a revolver, a shotgun, and turned off most of the HUD, then went for a walk. Covered maybe an eighth of the island on foot, just filling out the map. Fought some enemies, but stayed away from the big facilities. Hunted a bit of game in game (which is, unsurprisingly, not a strength of the game) and foraged.
Always meant to go back to that game since they did all the updates to it. The whole “you’re all by yourself except for a few drones on a heavy cooldown” was fine to me, but I guess enough people complained that they added the squad back in there.
On an Ubisoft note, decided to try to play Watch Dogs Legion on my PC, see if I could carry over from when I played on PS4. Turns out I never uploaded my save, so, ah, whoops. Game runs better on my PC, until it crashed, anyway. That’s gonna be the end of my adventures as Deidre the 60 year old novelist who won a bare knuckle boxing tournament against all odds.
Exactly why I can never finish DMC5 despite everyone saying it’s one of the best action games… As soon as I get my groove with one guy they switch it up on me.
if it helps, one of the great things about DMC5 is that it’s not that demanding by character action game standards… like it demands way less exacting play than erdtree (for example) does at this point, they managed to make it more accessible without feeling any less snappy
Yeah, I just leave 'em at home. The normal campagin and first couple DLC campaigns aren’t really built with them in mind and they feel out of place most of the time, imo. The expanded, revamped, Russian Warcrimes campaign gets more mileage out of them for sure, but even that’s pretty manageable solo or with just one ally bot.
[EDIT]
It’s a petty complaint, but it still irks me they got rid of the ability to stow/holster/sling your firearm when traveling overland and not needing it in hand.
Started on Myst IV since Riven Remake got me in the mood for more. Initial impressions are this is Myst IV: The Movie!; the score is so in your face and bombastic. It’s funny there’s a music frequency slider since it does not chill out, almost every node some new orchestration or choir is blasting in.
I’m enjoying the premise of the family drama centred around showing your young daughter why you imprisoned your other children for life. I kinda wish they’d stop going back to the Sirrus and Achenar well and try something new but hey. Catherine and Yeesha’s actors are not great to put it politely but it does remind me how much I miss FMV integration. There’s a lot more missable stuff and I feel some environments could just be a bit more forgiving with where journals are and other key plot info. This stuff wasn’t really as missable in previous games and not everything needs to be hidden behind the tiniest interact prompt.
Because your hand cursor is animated in this one they have a neat feature where you can tap on physical objects in the world and it will make contextually appropriate sound effects. It would be doing a lot to draw you in to the world but I think it just calls attention to the fact that you are a floating hand.
Anyway, I’m grooving, the inciting incident kicks off and I get to my first new world. So far most of the puzzles have just been figuring out a cipher for a five digit code, whatever, I’m enjoying myself. Then the mangree sound puzzles come up. Holy shit.
By far the worst puzzle in the series, perhaps of any game. Conceptually it’s fine, mangrees talk using tones and you have to mimic their tones to give them instructions. However, the input mechanism is so analogue (cranked wheels which you have to crank for indeterminate ‘long’ and ‘short’ periods). Number of rotations and exact crankin’ time are unclear, the game is so stingy about its requirements. Not only this but you have to become familiar with 4 different mangree names and coordinate them as though they are a sliding block puzzle so the strongest mangree can grab a fruit from the leftmost shell to attack a predator threatening them. Even with a guide I am stuck. The solution is laid out in front of me (lost my patience for figuring it out a long time ago) and it just doesn’t work. Mangree 1-3 I am calling you! Pick up the phone! You are needed, my mangree!
The guide is some consolation.
Unfortunately, moving the Mangrees around involves using the wheels to simulate their names and the game is a stickler for precision. Feel free to turn around and bang your head against the nearest wall.
This might be the quitting point if it doesn’t work after a break.
Shadow if the Tomb Raider is a wild game. The aforementioned “oops I started an apocalypse because I couldn’t not grab the shiny” opening was this in a good way, the part with the peruvian natives who seem to lack a verbal language and are more or less shrieking monsters crawling on ceilings who take multiple shotgun blasts to put down… less so.
The oddest thing is that the main conflict of the central part of the game is between various non-monster native groups in an hidden peruvian city and like… it feels like a genocide but I’m not sure if the game is purposeful or even aware of it? I have gone through several parts where I’m crawling through masses of bodies with still much of their flesh left or various other piles of bodies and… if I have just had the bad fortune to stumble upon every single person who has died in this conflict it’s still a lot. Yet the game acknowledges that one group is bad and that people are suffering but literally no one (Lara included) seems to acknowledge just how bad it is?
Hilariously they also seem to have cut down on the combat a good deal, perhaps aware of how much of a body count Lara has been leaving behind. Of course she just had a moment where she had enough, rose from the water with flames in the background like a spirit of vengeance, mercilessly killed a downed man with a knife before machinegunning a whole battalion down to who really knows at this point.
The game part is dialed in about as well as one would hope for a game like this but… yeah, it goes a bit wild here and there.
For how aware modern games are that Shadow just barrels into White Messiah is uh…I still don’t know what to think of it. Bad on instinct, but I can’t believe they did it so blindly even though it is played as if it is an original idea.
With Zenless Zone Zero you feel like you have to squint beyond the currencies and structure to see the game sometimes. It’s almost like the game is begging you not to worry too much when 6 currencies pop-up and the pace urges you away from the combat as fast as it can.
The animation and polish is excellent but it’s almost like the game burns itself out sprinting and then spends minutes gasping for air before resuming combat. It’s quite jarring just how well animated some cutscenes are and then it switches to a sorta low budge VN style of dialogue or literally asks you to navigate a grid to progress through what can generously be called a ‘level’.
It is character action via the structure and satiation denial of a taster menu. I feel compelled to play more as an action lover but also as a curiosity. You can feel it’s budget bulging occasionally and certainly in its marketing yet the quality is relegated to aesthetics and fleeting game feel. The style seems resonant and it does admittedly have some appeal despite leaning heavily on moé trope playbooks. I cautiously step further into the cave.
Fiance and I just beat the 2021 Myst remake without a guide in 2 days. That game’s difficulty was really in the sweet spot for us. Enough to get us thinking but not so much to be frustrating. A nice way to spend your time while enjoying some of the prettiest scenery in videogames. It’s classic for a reason! And this is a great remake, IMO. Screenshots don’t do it justice. The water is particularly beautiful, which is crucial considering every Age you visit is an island. I also enjoyed the ray tracing in this more than any other ray tracing I’ve seen thus far. I’m excited to check out the Riven remake next.
I hate to say it but I might…I might give up on Shin Megami Tensei 3, for right now.
It’s just so dang hard! I was getting myself acclimated to RPGs, playing DQ1 and 2 and FF1 and 2, sticking my toe in the hot tub, then resolved to fall ass backwards into a pool of lava jumping to this.
Gotta play me a short RPG to make up for time…Super Mario RPG is supposed to be pretty short, right? Maybe Atelier Marie?
Gotta restore my confidence, get back on the slow difficulty climb. Then one day I’ll go back to the Demifiend…
Turns out I shoulda just done exactly what the guide suggested. The cranks must be turned exactly 1/4 and 3/4 for a short and long note. It doesn’t even matter if they make a sound (!?) that is how you do it.
Progressed on to the next world and it is more enjoyable than having to tell monkeys what to do but this time the puzzle just becomes so complex that it becomes annoying rather than fun to explore. You activate lots of circuitry and machines which felt like a refreshing return to normal and it is ostensibly about a prison break attempt but eventually you have to activate a veritable supercomputer of calibrations with a (once again) tedious interface. I don’t get why later Myst games fell to such convolutedness to what should just be engaging with abandoned machines that tell the story. It often boils down to busywork figuring out a sprawling multistage cipher. I sure hope you didn’t miss even a single one of the important clues haphazardly scattered around that provide key details of the machine.
There’s a ‘zip’ feature which lets you fast travel to previous nodes which I think some people felt would’ve been a good quality of life feature in Myst and Riven but I think it’s what contributes to this kinda lengthy puzzle design. The developer just assumes that now you have fast travel you magically have more patience. In Myst and Riven the journey is never quite so tedious and the components for a solution not quite so interdependent that you get stuck by the sheer scale of the problem. Also travelling the world helps you become more familiar with the natural principles of the relatively simpler puzzles, the travel time is really contemplation time.
