Well it is a story about the web after all.
Plus the business villain ends up composing a poignant eulogy for the people he killed and the dream of the world wide web so that’s a little special
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Killer7 still remains my favourite internet fantasy where they just ban the web altogether. It’s dystopian but seems increasingly wise as time goes on.
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Absolutely not! We just need to abandon the www and start using gopher until they ruin that one too etc
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I played a bit of it (hyono space) but I had to take a break for I dont know why and I dont know what is going on now. So Id have to start over and the beginning sucked.
Id be way more into it if I could warn people of stuff like “hide your rule breaking better” idiot. I also couldn’t abuse my mod powers to get in on the scam. Maybe you can do that later I dunno. I didn’t like how the all knowing task machine could tell when my job was done. Like if this game was cool Id be able to ban who or what ever and Id only have other admins catching me to worry about. (more like hypno space in-law)
It felt too close to a real job with real office software to me.
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I can’t disagree about the task machine being a bit artificial, but you being constrained by the shitty moderation tools and unable to make more subtle calls is absolutely the point lol
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continuing on in RE2 (2019)
must first reiterate that the game in isolation is very clearly quite competent and solidly made. the lighting in particular is really spectacular and seeing the layouts from the original game in their very nicely-rendered glory frequently gives me good-brain-chemicals
Mr. X is definitely the highlight of this game (thus far, though i’m quite near the end of Leon A now), but it feels like they’ve compromised so hard to make it happen in the first scenario - not only is the B stuff now borked in this game, but the entire thematic core of RE3 is also prematurely load-blown. but hey, now you get to see the “bonus” content on your first playthru, so it’s a win, right?
it’s also very noticeable how the game is incapable of generating tension without him. in the original game, the more methodical pace and precise line-of-sight management due to fixed camera angles is more than up to the task of generating ambient, swampy tension. the new game is too breezy in contrast, so they’ve beefed up the enemies to try and compensate. everything is sponge-y and every engagement feels the same.
of course, Mr. X is very successful at generating tension. hearing those footsteps down the hallway was an immediate eyebrow-spiking, spine-tingling chill. again, though - it’s a monkey’s paw situation - it’s impossible to not notice how dull the atmosphere had been for the entirety of the experience to that point, how much less personality the game has. so, even when you (finally) get a little taste of that magic heartbeat-elevating tension, it’s disappointing that the game has to use (and in fact, prematurely blow) its most potent trump card to even get there in the first place
the game introduces a few notable changes later into the game. the ada sequence is revised - it’s fine - and the kendo gun shop that you originally had to pass through at the very beginning of the game has been reshuffled into a more contiguous layout after the parking garage. the gun shop has a scene unique to the remake; unfortunately, it feels schlocky and tonally thin (leon vows to do whatever it takes to stop the people responsible for turning raccoon city into zombo dot com). i appreciate that they wanted to make things a bit more clear than in the original game’s relatively opaque plot delivery, but i don’t think this was the way to do it
so, i still feel much the same way overall - the game does not really justify its existence particularly well, but i am at least parsing the near-universal praise for the game better. i think ultimately, the free-aim free-look shit just sucks for RE2. it doesn’t make sense, it kills tension, and there’s no good reason for it other than the idea that fixed-camera is not “modern”. the whole thing still feels like a bad compromise for money. there’s still no soul.
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Honestly this (referring to your spoiler text) was the part that irked me most about it.
I’m not sure giving the business villain a redemption arc of sorts at the very end was a particularly good choice. I think it makes it so he gets away with things a lil too easy. Like I get that the whole point of the game, arguably, is to better humanize internet people and the complicated mess of being online but I also agree with @daphaknee in that it does present things in a rather sanitized way. This idea as well that no one’s really at fault or to blame, again this very simplified, overtly Christian form of morality… It reads a bit hollow to me. Jay Tholen’s previous game, Dropsy, also frustrated me similarly with a surprise Christian ending that felt completely out of left field. It’s a shame cuz I think Hypnospace does clearly have a very anti-capitalist heart to it but it gets muddled a bit by this strange dedication to making sure no one is ever truly held accountable for their negative actions, because we must all learn to love our enemy, etc…
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i finished doom 2!
the final chapter was a lot better than the second. i especially liked the pointless fanservice of being able to make a cyberdemon and a spider mastermind fight each other.
the final boss fight isn’t very fun to play, but i do admire the desperation of forcing the engine to do a bunch of stuff it’s not really designed for. it feels like a 90s version of when games on 8-bit consoles would have you fight a giant boss that’s mostly made of background tiles
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I did feel that the one really smart thing they did in adapting RE2 to a third-person modern schema was to randomize the damage your attacks did against zombies. It neatly emulates some of the tension around resource management from the original that had you debating whether you should just risk running past something or killing it. It also just makes sense to me in a story way, kind of. I really like that aspect of it, but practically nothing else to be honest.
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wow, didn’t know it was randomized, but i did experience some real grody feelings trying to finish off zombies a few times where it took an ungodly number of bullets. allow me to continue my hater saga in also finding that to suck and be bad design.
this contributes to the aforementioned loose, sloppy feeling. i find it anathema, it feels gross to me. even worse to me is the fact that getting grabbed now cuts to a “cinematic” sequence of you getting bit so you can press L1 or not press L1
1 Like
It may actually be some kind of dynamic variability in the damage, ala RE4’s difficulty. but yeah the randomization or whatever definitely plays against the speedrun friendly elegance of the originals, which is my preference.
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I was nonplussed my first time playing the game too, it’s definitely abrupt and unsatisfying, but replaying and reflecting on it, I find it refreshing when a video game doesn’t want to have a villain. The misanthropy permeating media these days is so tiring and I’m glad to see a bit of a reaction against that. We don’t have to excuse or overlook bad things people do, but I find it necessary to value humanity in itself if we don’t want to go down a dangerous moral and ideological road. So he’s a made up character in a made up world, and I don’t think we’d get a better ending by making him unrepentant and an easy object of scorn.
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RE4 is such an instructive comparison. whatever randomization may exist there, it is hardly notable relative to the rock-solid, reliable stun logic that allows you to methodically deal with large numbers of enemies. RE2’s stun logic, while i can’t speak to any deep understanding of it, just isn’t reliable in any way… rather than generating any tension, this just feels cheap and hollow and thin. and there’s no tradeoff where this messiness is elevating something else; at no point do the accompanying “modernizations” prove themselves over the simplicity of the original game, so you’re left with worse encounters and boring aim+shoot gameplay (like most other games, now) and there’s ultimately nothing gained in return.
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my memory of the plot, moderation mechanics, villain, and ending of hypnospace outlaw is very marginal compared with my memory of all its other interfaces and interactions and marginalia, which I thought were absolutely delightful… I have a very high opinion of it despite the fact that I would not have been able to tell you what happened with that whole apologia or w/e if not for this conversation. I also thought dropsy was fantastic and underrated too.
I think forgiveness and appreciating people’s essential humanity are pretty much universally good things even though I am like pathologically uninterested in spirituality
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I mostly like that it’s a game about music
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I mean… I agree with you! I’m not exactly advocating for making him more of an unlovable bastard, I just think the final note of having him commit this great act of redemption felt wholly unnecessary. There’s a ton of writing in the game that already does a great job of humanizing him and demonstrating how someone in that position can inevitably end up in such a dangerous state of delusion to the detriment of so many others. Why spell things out in such a condescending way at the end? The game does such a great job, otherwise, of trusting you to piece things together for yourself on other aspects of the plot/characters that it just left a bitter taste in my mouth to dedicate the entire ending to forgiving this one guy… Like we don’t have to forgive him. That’s not the same as condemning him to hell!
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I liked the resident evil 2 remake. The modern REs ive played 2 completion are that & village and while I like both I think the distinctions between the two help me feel confident in saying that stuff in 2 did work for me.
Anything post 4 is splitting the difference somewhere between atmospheric haunted house & 3D spinning heart shooting gallery . Village, which has set pieces and styling and ideas I prefer to the 2make, very quickly started scanning as mechanics & runs to me. Very arcadey, and fun for it.
The nebulousness of the enemies, pickups, etc . in the remake maybe didn’t increase “tension” in the horror sense but they did stop me from going in2 optimal accounting mode when I died. I found ammo as a nebulous way to buy chill time in the immediate at the cost of more stressful routing in the future was a fun trade that better unified the space as continuou. I liked Mr. X initially but he kinda fell apart on this front (same with the vampire lady in village) bcuz the triggers were transparent and “fair” enough that it quickly became tedium. I liked the jokes in the writing.
However, I will qualify this by saying im not very good at planning , and had 0 ammo moments often so I imagine the superior gamer may not have this problem at all. Can definitely see see how that stuff would fall flat for someone else.
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i only want to emphasize that i am pretty bad at re2make and have definitely run out of ammo repeatedly. it’s less that the challenge isn’t there, and more that so much of the original game is lost and very little is gained with the almost exclusively safe/boring changes (why is crafting in the game, for example?)
actually, i think the best change cluster is how much more lifelike (ironically) the zombies are compared to the stiffer animations in the original. both the animations and the AI in the remake are interesting and it makes zombie-watching a much more entertaining proposition. i just find effectively every mechanical change distasteful outside of (admittedly important) things like greater area continuity and removal of loading screens
edit: i guess i don’t mind the removal of ink ribbons necessarily, it seems fine enough to just count the saves (and number them on the save screen). but even there there’s a little something lost for the sake of convenience, maybe… a little less implication that every save is something important…
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there’s a new mod for outrun 2006 and mankind was foolish to think graphics ever needed to be better than this
the big thing about this mod is that you can add new music to the soundtrack, instead of having to replace the timeless songs that outrun is known for. i’ve been putting in sega music for vibe purposes:
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i’m glad Sonic R’s music has found its rightful home
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