Before the Storm, by what I feel has to be divine providence because I can’t believe it could have been planned from the start, has a really compelling mechanical hook because it’s a sequel to the original LiS.
The appeal of LiS is that Max has the ability to do-over things until she gets it right, which is the most universally desirable superpower. BtS, by taking that away, changes a core part of its interaction into making choices you can’t take back no matter the outcome, which perfectly fits with playing the character of Chloe.
That Clickolding game is pretty wild. I don’t know much about clicker games in general but this one may be a game changer for the genre. It’s lurid as hell though, so consider that efore playing
While it’s visually and aurally beautiful it is not one of the greats, it’s a jank ass fairly crap game. If you’re coming off the highs of SMRPG and CT, just be prepared
oh also you can attach parts to so many different attachment points which gives you the ability to get REALLY WILD cuz they also move and rotate onthree axis! axes? axises? whatever. like the ps3 controller but halved
like i feel like the commercial for it was only the tip of the iceberg of what you can REALLY do
you can have up to like 100 custom mechs (you can just use every part you have once, so you dont have unlimited supplies to work with) and the only time your mech dies is when the legs get destroyed. i made a mech today really quick during the stream that had a tank and a car and a train for legs so every time one got destroyed it disappeared but i kept going cuz i had BACKUP LEGS. oh and i figured out agood strategy for teh horrible to hit drones: EQUIP A GIANT DRILL TO YOUR HEAD
the levels feel too small though. i just hit the walls of them a TON. the visual effect for when you smash against the walls is neat though, it looks like it damages HP but it doesnt, you can smash those walls, they cant hurt you
maybe they first played them a decade or two after their release in much higher resolution than the original hardware would have comfortably supported?
Apparently the critical reception for Deus Ex was mixed at the time, with poor comparisons to its contemporaries on various points. Maybe there’s a value in considering a game as one amongst many rather than singling it out as a cult object of worship…
Where did you hear this? I played deus ex at release, in part because every review was glowing (and in part because the demo was so good)
The most criticism it received at the time was that it wasn’t as pretty as previous unreal games, but that just means it was an 8/10 rather than a 10/10
There was a backlash later on, some time in the early 10s, when it was just a bit too much of a pain to get running and the wartiness of the experience compared to the smoothness of thr prequel made people feel it had been overrated at release but that wasn’t part of the original critical consensus. (Also those folks were wrong, the prequel was trash)
yeah lol deus ex ran like ass at release and the first time i played it the recommended graphics settings covered all dark areas of the screen in a distracting dithering pattern
Just anecdotally people had complaints along with praise - I remember Jim Rossignol for example saying he didn’t like how a lot it worked at release but appreciated it more later.
The thought of someone doting over recreating the visual look 24 years later would have been strange.
have to agree that this was not my experience at all in the time. i think PC Gamer US gave at least a 95 if not an 100 at the time and i bought the “Game of the Year” edition (well okay - i convinced my parents to buy it probably cuz i was 14) in response a year later, named as such because several publications gave it that at the time. the only PC game i remember being as acclaimed at the time was like maybe Half-Life (tho i know the PS2 version of Deus Ex got less good scores). also Deus Ex is easier to get running than many older games of that era from my experience. i never had the issues running it i had with Anachronox, for example. the main complaint of Deus Ex at the time i remember was the difficulty and the fact that the save game files are really big. and yeah some of the video card compatibility might have been weird.
my main issue with a lot of indie “immersive sims” is it’s kind of a terrible genre to try to recreate from scratch especially as a solo developer unless you’re doing something substantially stripped down/newer. it was hard enough for the Deus Ex team to make Deus Ex, which is part of why Invisible War was a weird compromise in a lot of different ways. but it’s just one of many genres these days where i’m like “i don’t know why people are choosing to do this as their first big game”. i wish people would get over just trying to recreate 90’s/early 00’s games and do something else. it cheapens a lot of what made those games good in the first place to me.
As a non-Pc Gamer Teen at the time yeah Deus Ex was universally praised and one of the games I was jealous without. A friend could talk about this endlessly considering his internet handle has Deus in it on account of how much he played the multiplayer.
Took about 5 hours to play through Industria, which was free on Epic at some point. It’s just a commercialized Half-Life 2 singleplayer mod, which is a great way to endear yourself to me. It’s not an epochal work like G-String, but it’s fun. Like many non-professional productions it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, in a cute way. It starts out with a couple very light adventure game elements which it never really tries again; it’s got metaphysical cutaway stuff which was always worked in the Source engine, from G-Man on down; and it’s got that lonely Lost Coast vibe, where you’re traveling through the environment and raiding little points of interest that are filled with a handful of enemies (robots) and supply caches. There’s two difficulties, Normal and Hardcore; Hardcore made it a pretty straightforward survival horror experience and I’d recommend it to any old fps head. There is some amateur voice work which, as I often find with amateur voice work, is better than 95% of the professional stuff that gets sanded down to blandness by the directors working at the behest of monied devs. Ends with a big unresolved cliffhanger, another HL2 classic, though the title screen informs me that Industria 2 is in the works, so who knows. It’s fine, though, as its own contemplative, often beautiful, little experience.
i was much happier not knowing how happy chloe was before Life is Strange
MUCH happier
the last episode is the weakest, because rachel is out of the picture for most of it whereas the first two were more about the romance with chloe which was often quite touching