kojima stans will always feel oppressed regardless of him and his games being some of the most well known in the world.
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It turns out more folks click on stuff labeled ‘underrated’ on youtube, so everything is underrated now.
I’m looking forward to “The Office (both of them) is an Underrated Masterpiece” at the rate it’s going these days.
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my favourite underrated movie is the godfather
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If someone’s already made this video essay I’ll never know because the youtube search for “The office underated” is already clogged with dozens of compilation videos of The Office from the official youtube channels for The Office and Peacock.
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The second someone calls a thing underrated it no longer is.
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mikey is an underrated masturbator
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We should implement a new rating scale where everything is either underrated or overrated.
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I think post-mgs kojima releasing an anti-violence cargo delivering walking sim and sb being like “eh it’s not the disaster I was hoping it to be” and everyone else being like “well it’s not quite metal gear solid” means it’s underrated
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Everyone wants to be an underdog
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almost 23,000 people have reviewed that game on steam and it has 92% positive reviews
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in my experience, “overrated” and “underrated” are kind of a trigger for people who feel more or less oppressed by mainstream criticism (ie youtubers) — they’re not the best terms to use because some people here are way more attentive to games discourse than others (sometimes because they’re trying to make a living in and around it and are exhausted by its contours!) and so when you might use them to mean “didn’t really seem to land in your friends’ canon vis-a-vis your own” that’s not what people hear
doubly true of cases when someone was playing against type… anyone who is tired of hearing about kojima is going to roll their eyes at the suggestion that the budgets he commands are or could be in any way marginalized, whereas it’s (imo) totally valid to say that death stranding is kind of helpless to compete with metal gear solid in the collective imagination and passing mentions of it subsequently seem revisionist/dismissive
iirc you in particular were kind of disappointed in the way that TLOU2 and RDR2 seemed to just roll off of us because there didn’t seem to be the critical mass here for that kind of game around then and I appreciated you voicing that disappointment because I am always willing to hear that my coverage has gotten poorer/lazier
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i was over at some friends playing ufo50 and it was difficult to articulate the exact level of popularity it occupies to someone whos concept of games is vague awareness. The best comparison I could offer was books, if one person into YA called Roberto Bolaño obscure and another into lit said actually Gabrielle Zevin is, its like, ur both justified but both incorrect in a broader context.
In a field as wide and stratified as games where anything below a certain budget depends on discourse for sales it’s near impossible to remove the context of judgement from personal engagement. Death Stranding has about half the steam reviews as Balatro despite having a billion dollars of ads to balatros 0 and dropping 2 years earlier, im sure theres more ps4 owners who have Death Stranding than Balatro but if u only game on computer and have adblock, ur ecosystem is telling u this is not as big a game as Balatro and plausibly ‘underrated’ (especially if u have a mind that associates popularity with success).
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I think what we’ve determined is that youtube essays shouldn’t use the word underrated or, ideally, any words at all
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What I would actually be interested in learning is how many of the guys who are like “I like snowrunner but I wish it was more about building infrastructure” have heard of Death Stranding. If they haven’t someone should tell them.
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Thats funny because I came to snowrunner from the opposite direction
What if death stranding was more focused on logistics and had good vehicle physics and also had all the kojima cutscenes removed
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yeah… I personally like and admire snowrunner way more and came to it second because Kojima is still a more reliable signaling mechanism for stuff I’m gonna play than miscellaneous Russian sims on steam are, but I think that is by now an unusual set of data points!
(I don’t dislike death stranding and I am far from anti-Kojima)
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I really liked death stranding on the day of launch where we all played on the same save file at the meetup because I didn’t sit in on any of the prologue cutscenes and only played for a couple hours doing deliveries and cqc. That stuff was a pleasure and I was glad to discover that the game that only had the parts of death stranding I liked existed
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I remember playing a few hours worth of Death Stranding and feeling like that was enough. TBF I have probably had a lifetime fill of his writing/cutscenes but mostly didn’t find it interesting mechanically in the least, I just walked from point to point and never fell down or failed (aside from the water that one time, did not know the rules there). Just never found an in really, guess this means I should avoid Snowrunner as well.
Started up Torment: Tides of Numenera, fortunately this game has a tutorial battle so one can figure out how the system works before getting to the adventure proper. Of course I’m pretty sure I failed said tutorial battle, might be an ill omen.
Also played through Cosmic Express over the past week and change. Solid enough train track puzzle game although a bit on the long side and later on when it adds portals it was not a good idea IMO. Looked up a hint for the last puzzle as it was hard and I had long had my fill by then, no regrets.
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The one virtue of Tides of Numenera is that you can build to skip all but like two combat encounters. Unfortunately there’s still the rest of it.
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Yeah my big gripe with ds is that I was rarely challenged except when I was intentionally reckless. But i had a really chill time even when I wasn’t.
Finished crow country. Its also not very hard in the regular difficulty. I had one really close shave, got A rank. You dont really need to be that stingy with ammo btw. I played a little of the hard difficulty and whoo boy thats serious by comparison. Maybe next year ill try to beat it on hard. But I think more likely I’ll try some of the classics of the genre.
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