i. don’t wanna tell u you’re wrong but are you sure you’re not mixing up Kim with Cuno, cuz i cant imagine how to get Kim to do speed with me. i barely got the guy to admit he used to play pinball & might’ve smoked pot once and those both took HUGE Authority checks
the actual cutest part of the game so far has been realizing Kim is not so secretly a huge gearhead. i do it for Kim and i would do it again i do it for her… that is to say, i do it for Kim
Tell me more this sounds awesome.
Sleepy are you referencing the Armageddon poster I think about all the time? Because I sure do think about it all the time.
ahahaha no Rudie dear im referencing a song from the children’s animated television series Steven Universe but i also definitely fuckin remember that poster now that i see it again
whyd they have to emphasize his forehead like that
So like it’s halfway between survival horror and a shooter/brawler so like you don’t get a lot of resources and the enemies do a lot of damage and etc but they are all always faster than you, so you HAVE to kill every zombie that pops out, no running past or away allowed. Luckily you can dodge literally any attack by holding strafe (the tutorial helpfully says you don’t even have to time it! just be holding down strafe when something attacks and you will dodge!). So like you dodge back and forth until the thing is done attacking and then you attack back. It doesn’t matter if there are like five guys, they’ll all wait for you to dodge that one guy’s attacks and then do your attack string back. Does this make the default melee weapon the most important weapon in the game and the guns just sort of little cherries on top? Yes.
A little later on it introduces enemies that have gross tentacles pop out. You have to shoot them in the gross tentacles or they morph into more powerful guys which don’t matter because you can just dodge their attacks and attack back like everything else. But ok, so now you dodge dodge melee attack string then when tentacles pop quickly ADS and shoot tentacles.
I just fought a giant two-headed boss zombie and he attacked really fast! And didn’t get hitstunned! So what you do is dodge, shoot one bullet. Dodge, shoot one bullet. Dodge, shoot one bullet. That’s the whole fight.
You still stomp corpses to make loot pop out.
There’s a gravity gun and spikes on walls everywhere so you can throw guys into spikes. Then you brush up against their vertically pinned corpses and do lootstomp kind of in their vague vicinity and it makes their lower leg pop off so you can get their loot.
Also anywhere “out of bounds” in an extremely videogamey way is instant gravity throw death, even if it’s just a little water on the other side of a waist high railing or whatever. Toss a guy in there and he just disappears in a blood splatter.
The plot is hack cliche stuff and it operates on the lubrication of characters never actually saying things clearly to each other even though they have a motive and opportunity to do so. Like please white beardman if you just say two more sentences we would clear all this up immediately.
It’s got Graphics that are basically exclusively in the service of portraying dilapidated space pipes which actually rules, I love that Doom 3 shit.
Name of a Kojima character
When called he provides the player with esoteric trivia about Father Christmas. He mutters ‘you could say he was one of the first porters’
I made it to the part in Fallout 3 where you finally catch up to Liam Neeson. I’m trying to power through this so I can delete it from my steam deck and install other things but it’s such a poorly paced combat heavy slog. I put almost all my points into a diplomat build the same way I did New Vegas and the result has just been that I neither have enough points in speech to pass speech checks nor enough in weapons skills to not have to resort to save scumming and running around throwing mines everywhere.
Played a few games of Straftat. It’s free but you can pay five bucks to get extra maps and stuff (which I did).
It’s really good. 1v1 dueling on levels like fy_iceworld with WarioWare-type guns. Rounds are over in ten seconds, first to two round wins on a map wins it, and first to 6 map wins takes the match. Favorite round so far was one with only prox mines and repulsor guns where we had to push each other into explosions.
The only downside is there’s no spectator system. I really want it to have lobbies where you can spectate, comment on matches with other spectators, and jump in arcade-style (winner stays, loser goes to back of queue).
Apparently I managed to skip half the main questline in Fallout 3
Zelda II is super hard in the most frustrating possible way, which is “fair and transparent.” By the second time you see an enemy you know how to handle them, except you don’t handle them because you’re old and slow and now you’re dead and out 634xp.
im always saying that dark souls is the first sequel to zelda 2 (i bet demon’s souls is but ive never played it)
I love Zelda 2 but don’t know that I’d characterize fighting RNG knights with ultrashort windup animations with Link’s toothpick sword as “fair” precisely…
For me, getting better at Zelda 2 mainly involved memorizing the most direct route (and where to use spells) so that I can do the absolute minimum of honest sword-and-shield duels. Because it’s so hard to avoid taking hits, I felt like my health bar and lives functioned almost like a timer that counts down how many rooms I visited, and I liked the rush of racing to finish the dungeon just as my resources are running out
flummoxed and bewildered that i now seem to be winning 20% of the time against actual humans, provided that i stick exclusively to terry
revising assessment:
sf6 is basically the orange box, except containing rgg studio’s takes on both sonic adventure 3 and phantasy star online; plus a modern 3d take on real bout fatal fury 3; except all of them mostly use capcom characters for some reason
Got to a South American Temple in Monster Boy complete with Tiki Mask Natives that throw bombs that eliminate 3 of my 5 hearts and take 4 hits to kill and because each of my hits causes knockback they fall off the platform so I have to clumsily reapproach to get the final hit in and decided this is unfun and I am done here.
Got to the first For Real Dungeon in Lunar and it was absolute sicko Fuck You RPG design I respected the hell out of it. Working Designs and GameArts were a perfect match. I fought one required enemy that drained me of my resources and I barely scraped by and on the next screen it went Okay how about 4 more? And if I ran past them was the boss who would also stomp me. I only survive through Save State trial and error and I still had to load a saved game and redo half the dungeon to even be at even standing for the boss. Great Job GameArts did not think you’d be bastards given how breezy the game was until then. I want the game to hurt me more.
Finding Death Stranding to be…kind of boring in this middle part. I am slowly unlocking more hauling capacity and frequently the most interesting puzzle in the game is how to get around. I am probably doing too many side deliveries and picking up random garbage which is probably slowing me down. I feel obligated to get this random crap back to it’s owner, somehow. There isn’t the same tension pulling me forward. Every once in a while I’ll get a Mads Mikkelsen cameo.
That said it’s a nice change of pace from other AAA open world games: The main game is in the in-between spaces, the transit. In most AAA open world games you’re driving from one terrible shooting or punching mission to the next, so the whole world is just a pretense to these encounters. It’s nice that delivery and building seem to be the only things you have to do, thus far at least. Other player structures showing up is usually a big help.
The world design is really considered, it seems like each delivery path has it’s own challenges from a few relatively simple ingredients but it leads to a lot of variety. You move slow enough to actually drink in the environment and atmosphere. Probably the smartest way to build an open world game.
Death Stranding is weird to me because it’s impeccably crafted but vacuous. I still keep coming back to it. I guess I haven’t bothered to actually collect and read all the lore documents though.
Yeah, that was basically my experience with the game.
Honestly, the game needed to shed the horror/on the ropes/you’re just trying to get by schtick as soon as you got the telekinetic glove and just leaned harder into the action/combat side of things, 'cause from there forward you are 100% certified badass. The dodge system, unintentionally or not, just drove that home. 
