So… bad?
5 Likes
Got a buncha games to play on the go while I travel.
I played the Arcade Archives version of Tetris the Absolute the Grand Master 2 Plus. Rudie is completely right about the co-op mode. I tend to prefer Tetrises like this one where you can’t hold pieces and I like its flow. The piece lock when it touches down on a surface is kinda short and has a funky rhythm that I initially disliked but feels good to get better at. The music is very good but there’s just the one track? Nope I’m just bad at the game. A limited OST is pretty standard for Tetris but I’d appreciate a bgm select. The battle theme is some good clink-clunk
I also picked up Pizza Tower on Switch because I missed it on launch but enjoyed its music a lot. Playing it really just confirms what I already kinda knew which is its one of the better Wario games. I’ve yet to nail the rhythm of maintaining the dash momentum but this feels like something you take the whole game to work up to. Not sure if I’ll complete it or reach a natural dipping out point. Depends on how intensive the end level escape routes become.
8 Likes
it is anything but bad, but the only exceptional things about it are a) having a design document that seems like it was written by a huge Elite fan 35 years ago and which is only (but arguably amply) diminished by how many of those component parts are not now novel, and b) having something very close to first place top end graphics, up there with Alan Wake 2 and few others.
also I genuinely like its platforming-thirpsing puzzleboxes more than latter day uncharted’s, they’re less comically overtightened
6 Likes
it feels a bit like a throwback to the late aughts in terms of how many classical RPG concepts it tries to stuff into an action game but unlike your alpha protocols and mass effect 1s and whatnot, the gamefeel and structure are not dog shit
3 Likes
exceptional and mid!
3 Likes
highest praise I have for it is probably that the “let me just fire it up and dick around for 45 minutes” game almost doesn’t exist for me given my media consumption habits and this is pretty much it
2 Likes
more seriously: every 90s pc action game mechanically separated into a slurry cast into a ubisoft mold
5 Likes
Hilariously most of the criticisms can be explained away as attempts at diegetic game design. The stealth is very rudimentary and stealth kills aren’t very stealthy because Kay Vess is not a highly trained assassin. The shooting is simplistic and sloppy because Kay Vess is not an elite super soldier. The lockpicking and hacking mini games are incredibly basic because Kay Vess is very smart and technically inclined. Etc.
4 Likes
I never played any of the DS Castlevania games (or any DS games at all) so I picked up this collection. I started with Ecclesia but found it kind of frustrating so I tried the Haunted Castle remake and it’s great. You can play it through in one sitting even if you’re not that good at video games.
6 Likes
The lighting may be good but I haven’t seen a high-budget game with such a lackluster walk cycle on the main character since the 2000s
1 Like
I think this is the part that makes it bad.
2 Likes
Some games I played at the Seattle Indies expo, a adjacent event held during pax
Chairs
Holy guacamole this is super monkey ball meets cs surf maps. Insane movement type game with very colorful graphics. Made me feel things in my brain
Hyper Beat
What if Grasshopper Manufacture made Rez as a rhythm game. It’s incredible basically
Vagabones
what if four swords but better and cuter. This was fun. Wished the demo was longer
16 Likes
it is too bad that the spaceship gameplay is so much worse than squadrons, a game I liked a lot that seemingly no one played, maybe because before that there hadn’t been a good star wars game since like kotor 2
3 Likes
also, between Dragon’s Dogma 2 and this, I want to say that (at least among the very few games that are even technically “current generation”) there is a nascent trend right now towards a specifically 90s maximalism, and it’s one of the only interesting throughlines in single player game design post-2020
edit: the eight billion minigames in FF7 rebirth probably counts along these lines as well
7 Likes
Batman and Gundam continues…
Batman Arkham Origins: This game is a lot uglier than I remember it being. The gatekeeping on a lot of the otherwise standard abilities in Asylum and City are a bummer. Like, it gives you something to work towards, yes, but if you fail to do some of these challenges in the allotted encounters are you just…screwed? I dunno. Probably not. I beat this game before when I was worse at these things.
Also while it was maybe a little novel at the time, Troy Baker’s Joker is just…bad. It’s like a almost sorta close Mark Hamill impression that has a very patterned sing-song-y up and down into a snarl at the end for almost every line read. Pushing Silly Putty against a Garfield comic and stretching it a bit reading the ink imprint voice acting.
I mean, it’s a tough (if not impossible!) act to follow, but you’ve got Roger Craig Smith not really trying to imitate Kevin Conroy as a younger Batman and it’s so not even close that it works - he just sounds way angrier and green. They could’ve done that! But nope.
Batman Arkham Origins Blackgate: Do you like Metroid? Do you like the trappings and combat of the Batman games? Would you like both of these combined in a game that manages to somehow be less than the sum of its parts? Here ya go. Uninstalled it after I zipped up to a platform and spent several minutes trying to figure how the fuck to get off of it. Spun the stick around, pressed and held various buttons. Somehow hopped off and found out I was at a dead end anyway. Unplayable.
Shadow Complex Remastered: The last game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I figured I would play a good search action game with writing that’s in incredibly bad taste. I haven’t hit the point where Nolan North’s bootleg Nathan Drake says “The killing is getting easier, not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing…no, it’s good…” but I’m bracing myself for it. It always throws me off guard and it’s horrible every time.
Gundam Breaker 4: Seen people say this is basically the Xenoverse 2 of Gundam games, and while I haven’t played that game in years (it’s still getting content updates!), I kinda get what they mean. You’re not here to really play the game. You’re here to grind for parts, make numbers go up, mash buttons and fight enemies, get parts, make numbers go up, repeat.
It would be cool if the part where I use the robot I mash together was as fun as building it, but, well. I guess it’s one or the other.
13 Likes
These load times for Bloodstained on a PS5 are unbelievable. We’re talking 45 seconds or more.
5 Likes
I think it crashed.
6 Likes
I want to say how much I like a small detail in World of Goo 2 but to describe it I’d have to give the context which is itself one of the game’s biggest surprises.
@Bee is the only other SB person I know of who has played the game so far, so I’ll just be very vague and say it’s related to a physical artifact from 2009 that I have in my closet.
7 Likes
Endling: Extinction is Forever is a terrible title for a game. You’re a momma fox! You start the game off pregnant. The game is extremely constrained, you don’t even have a jump button. You just run back and forth on contained paths and use the Action Button to do context sensitive stuff. You also have a run button, a creep button (because you know, why bother taking advantage of the analog input of the left stick you use for movement), and a sniff button.
You have to go out every night and find food for your kits. The game calls them cubs, which makes me mad because even if it’s tecnically correct I think kits feels less generic. Anyway! The game contrives to have an Evil Human steal one of them by luring it out of your den with a wind-up toy on a string, which fails to awaken momma fox. Sure.
So then the tension in the game comes from 1., keeping your kits alive, 2., investigating the whereabouts of your kidnapped kit, 3., making it back to your den before sunrise every morning. Although I’ve “run out of time” at least once and either the bar is misleading and the game gives you more time than it implies or the consequences at least in the early going are not very meaningful.
Also there’s a whole heavy-handed environmental disaster backdrop going on, there’s trash everywhere, at a certain point your fox gets a plastic bag stuck around her neck, the game opens in a forest fire, etc.
There’s maybe some good ideas in here but they’ve all been fumbled. There was brief period in the game development zeitgeist where there seemed to be a lot of Fox Games, and this is one of them.
9 Likes