They weren’t really dressed up the way they are now, and they were not nearly as much of a focus as the hardware stuff. They were pretty minor in the scale of the whole thing. Astro Bot (2024) actually reuses some of those animations though for “official” cameo bots, like the Dante one.
the rest of life is strange double exposure is out. really psyched to have noticed (third chapter end spoiler) some of the mocap performances felt like they’d been swapped between actors and models before a shapeshifter was revealed.
6 Likes
I want to talk about Cucky again
5 Likes
Paleolithic Civ 4 mod?
1 Like
finished this last night. it’s a weird entry
spoilers i can't really talk around
when i played true colors i noticed that they were leaning into writing alex like a troubled young mutant from x-men
safi, max’s friend, the murder victim, and ultimate antagonist, is mystique. max tries to help her through her power spiraling out like max’s did. max’s eagerness and secrecy makes things worse. like professor x
the core trick of using safi’s actor’s mocap performance on other models was so creepy and novel (?) i kinda love it just for that. max’s actor also makes the make-or-break performance
the overall writing and side characters are some of the best but they’re overshadowed by the x-men plotting. i genuinely laughed at a lot of the sitcom dialogue!
the subplots about relationships, true crime podcast ethics, book publishing, plagiarism, student org politics, workplace transphobia, and higher ed administration were all compelling in their own right but also fall away a bit
in the end the two timelines merge and everyone in the town remembers both sets of events, which inverts max’s take-this-to-the-grave burden and exposes her to the world. there’s a denouement where you have to talk to everyone about spending the game lying by omission. kind of a miniature “outing” plot that radically changes what future games have to work with (for the worse?)
i don’t think it really holds interest unless you care a lot about that first game and max specifically. lost records (the dontnod spiritual successor next year) will probably be more likely to break out to a broader audience
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My favourite thing about the first game is that it treats Max as kind of a shit person, so uh, I don’t know.
3 Likes
oh, same, kind of. that’s a kind of caring. double exposure is everything catching up with her
3 Likes
Descent from Arkov’s Tower (Steam)
Great pixel art and sound/music in this streamlined roguelike with controller support (after some Steam Input adjustment…) but seemingly fairly limited content.
The base game mechanics may be TOO steamlined: if you pump your base Armor stat, which point-for-point directly reduces damage taken per hit, even as the Rogue class–the only one available at the start–who can’t wear armor, you quickly become invulnerable to most enemies in the game. At base Armor 8 by the end of the game–an hour and 45 minutes of my typical slow play speed in–the final boss was unable to hurt me.
Installing the full version somehow caused the demo (“prologue”) to become marked as installed again in Steam. And neither would uninstall clean; for the full version, I had to exit and restart Steam before the Uninstall command worked. Haven’t seen that before.
3 Likes
Poor Cucky is now too ruined by Internet discourse to ever make a comeback (while also having been here for years etc)
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The main menu theme is a song from Gex.
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It’s Halloween so I started the Dead Space Remake because.
Already the accessibility features aren’t gonna help me aim. The aim assist directs shots directly towards the centre of the body and voids the gimmick of the entire thing. The environments look very nice and the interface and machine noises are good but the score is somehow worse than the original. Dialogue Isaac is ignorable. I don’t think this level of visual fidelity convincingly supports aggressive stomping as a regular person ability. Since I can’t really engage with the combat very meaningfully I might as well lower the difficulty and poke around a bit more. I played the original maybe 5 times through back in the day and I think only curiosity about whether one of my favourite comedic lines still remains might carry me through.
5 Likes
my gothic space retinue now contains every flavour of goth gf far as i can tell: the shooty hench one with a fetching bob, the pierced bloodplay one, the wacky drunk one, the demure artsy one
now to discover how to make them all ludicrously OP
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not that lord-captain pisse von valencius would ever simp
to simp is to commit direst heresy
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the new dragon age is basically just “do you miss marvel movies c 2018” (I don’t, but the dumb good faith is now somewhat novel)
they would love to have shipped it on schedule 6 years ago and it’s more or less exactly what it would’ve been
3 Likes
and the dialog and characterization is indeed very “and what do we say to the nice lady here? do we say thank you?” which I guess sets off modern reactionaries but it scans about as much like 90s star trek to me as these always did, ie vaguely remedial but still endearing
the combat, as expected, feels roughly like dragons dogma 2 in its physicality (in other words, forgiving but not terrible) and new God of War in its systems (your party members are basically an extension of your moveset)
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so far I am very charmed by their new interpretation of “choices and consequences”: when you bring a party member with you on a dangerous mission they can wind up getting injured, which means that they have like, big ol’ elliott gould head wounds and eye bruises in every cutscene subsequent to the mission and half of your dialog options become “I’m so sorry I hurt you… do you need aftercare”
honestly god love them for being like this… I feel bad for everyone whose reaction to this is along the lines of “this is NOTHING like the TRUE SPIRIT of bioware, I miss REAL RPGs” because the true spirit of bioware is absolutely a CW show. jane schoenbrun should see if they can get to do the expansion pack
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Riverdale with swords
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It seems like the bioware curse is how the 4th game in a series seems to break the spell that the first 3 games have over the audience. Its not fundamentally different from what came before but for the first time players can see that they’ve been playing formulaic junkfood
Like, I am not convinced that andromeda was significantly worse than the mass effect trilogy either
3 Likes