games you played today chronicles X: ten things I played about you

King of Posters King of Posters 2000
1965

Shit I be playing:

Remnant 2: Been kicking around in this again and still loving it for the most part. Recent patch did a lot to rebalance a lot of stuff that was garbage and make the game generally funner, imo. Improved quite a few mods that weren’t just lackluster, but damn near “You should resepect yourself” levels of bad. Also rebalanced the XP gain on the new prisms to be somewhat reasonable for all the power they offer.

No fix for the tutorial/introductory stretch, but to anyone picking it up, I promise you it turns into a very different game once you actually open up the main hub. Said hub, however, doesn’t open up the first time you visit it, but upon your first return.

No Man’s Sky: Participated in the recent expedition for cosmetics, ships, and attacks by interdimensional jellyfish invaders. Still probably best played by turning multiplayer off and just kicking around the galaxy and seeing the footprints of other folks’ paths. I have a small base on a snow world and recently became mayor of my own little backwater town on a desert planet in a system with a blackhole. I also have a 'mech, I guess. And I guess there’s now a new old expedition for the ship from Mass Effect. Okay then.

Warframe: Not too much this one, but I’ve played around with the pet stat/AI revamp and what I’ve experienced of it, I really enjoyed. I also really dug the little preview of the upcoming 1999 update. Though I guess “This is just what it’s always felt like to play Banshee as a shooty frame rather than afk lockdown bot,” left me a bit less impressed than it seems to have others.

Roadwarden: I really wish I could play this on my phone, otherwise I’ve been enjoying it so far. I need to play more to form a more coherent opinion, but so far it’s been an enjoyable RPG experience so far.

Intravenous 2: Pretty fun stealth-action shooter. Kicks my teeth in, in a good way. Story is pretty much what if Death Wish 3’s entire final gunfight was a game. Story is schlock in a bad way, and the dialog makes a circle of stones look like damn think tank. The sneak, shoot, and enemy reactivity are all great, tho.

Armored Core 6: I need to try the new patch out, as it looks like they made a bunch of changes to a bunch of things I really like, and overall looks like they pretty heavily expanded the viability of a lot of setups and loadouts.

3 Likes
1966

there should be a glossary that translates ‘stupid term monte cook made up to sound different’ to ‘term everyone already knows and understands from every other fantasy rpg’ for numenera. Setting is just rotten with this shit.

Nanos are just wizards. Jacks are just rogues. Cyphers are just spell scrolls. Artifacts are all other magic items

there’s nothing actually weird in numenera, they just use a thesaurus to try and fool you into thinking standard dnd shit isn’t standard dnd shit

8 Likes
1967

i actually love that but only when the writing makes it work (plays wah-wah horn over an author photo of Patrick Rothfuss)

2 Likes
1968

iirc there are no mandatory boss battles until the end of chapter 3 when you’ll have already gotten like 80% of the xp in the game

3 Likes
1969

I much prefer the book of the new sun approach of calling a weird mutant alien a horse because there’s a much more satisfying frisson to figuring out the thing everyone calls a horse is a fanged monster that runs 80 mph

10 Likes
1970

having just got into Disco Elysium i like their approach of using mostly real world words & signifiers but you just have to accept that like a “car” is actually a “motor carriage” that’s operated by levers & switches instead of a wheel & buttons. Like make it a plausible alternative tech & lean into the similarities. I mean every multiverse altworld thing that uses zeppelins already figured that out, i guess

like it’s fun that Karl Marx = Kras Mazov & “commies” = “communards” but communism is still just called communism, is still recognizable as such

or/and yeah just call a smeerp a rabbit

4 Likes
1971

I also unfortunately remember Edmund, it was a big moment for me because it was when I first realised “maybe these indie art games can actually be shit”

7 Likes
1972

this kind of vibes with my feelings on this game, having played through it about a week ago - except i might be even a little bit more negative on it than you. the plot felt very like mid 90’s anime and all the formal stuff like the cool transitions between scenes or the endless narrative jumps just grew more annoying over time once you realized it was all in the service of a narrative that wasn’t that interesting.

i wrote this on backloggd but: in the end, it doesn’t really do anything to sway my gradually hardening perception that a lot of these lo-fi horror games are aiming at something more profound are increasingly mostly carried on vibes more than anything else. the more they try to strive for meaning, the more the meaning is elusive. there’s benefit in being willfully abstract in a way that a lot of lo-fi horror stuff has taken advantage of, but this one seems too attached to trying to have a Real Narrative in a way that feels ends up feeling half-baked and compromised.

also the use of random shocking imagery i just became fully desensitized to by the end. the few sections where you have to dodge imminent death or start over were annoyingly out of place too for a game that didn’t require that anywhere else and just kind of felt like filler. it felt like a bunch of scattered ideas for cool effects and setpieces in search of larger meaning.

it smacks of effort too much me overall, i guess. i don’t want to give Paratopic too much credit but this feels like a White Elephant Art sort of version of that. it just kinda lost me fully by the end.

also unrelated but: i feel both very sad and vindicated by how much i kept trying to push EXTREME EVOLUTION: DRIVE TO DIVINITY on people who’d look at me like i was a crazy person because they were apparently not open-minded enough to understand that a game that looks like that can be something other than just a vessel for wacky visuals.

11 Likes
1973

Was there a game called Edmund or are we talking about Edmund McMullin?

2 Likes
1974

There was a game called Edmund that tackled topics the creator was VERY unequipped to tackle.

6 Likes
1975

I’m kind of po’d because I had my bartz as a samurai when I think I probably would have been happier as a ninja. I mean I’m sure it’s not too late to change but feels a bit… Sad… You can turn a new leaf but you can’t turn back the clock you know

RPGs sometimes feel like the original life sim games in that the main thing they simulate is the irrevocable March of Time. Every one is kind of like memento mori as edutainment.

7 Likes
1976

shocking few posts on here about balatro. anyway i played balatro again today. not sure if i like it. or rather, i like it but i think it’s bad for me.

actually i’m just kind of uncomfortable with playing video games recently. look at what these gamers have done to the country. mind poison…

4 Likes
1977

Literally listening to My Life In Gaming rave about Balatro as multiple non-SB friends have said “DUDE YOU HAVE TO PLAY BALATRO.”

I really just play Slay The Spire because it requires very little, I can listen to my own music during it, and then after 40 minutes I am very sad I lost.

2 Likes
1978

Did someone say Balatro

2 Likes
1979

yeah it was a late 2000s indie platformer of the same title which handled topics like war crimes, ptsd and sexual assault with the thougtfulness and sensitivity only a late 2000s indie platformer can bring to bear. it briefly became a big tigsource topic of discussion bc it was a game handling Serious Issues.

my favourite thing about it is that iirc the war the protagonist fights in was vietnam. i personally don’t know too many indie devs who were around for that one and it seems like they’d have their pick of more recent conflcts but who knows, maybe war crimes stopped happening when we all stopped making movies about them. as the guy said when asked not to smoke in front of a baby, “first of all, it’s not smoke, it’s vape. they don’t know what it does to you yet.”

13 Likes
1980

That’s easy because as someone who has also explored tons of random indie games, UFO 50 is an excellent and worthwhile collection of excellent games. I don’t see this as contradictory at all, they’re extremely different in practice.

3 Likes
1981

What if you made a very serious and very boring mario game with muted colours and a stupid old film filter, have it end up more morally repugnant than rapelay and everyone was enamoured with your insight, your courage and your mastery of atmosphere.

I love how in the 2009 thread the only person condemning the game in 16 pages of gushing praise is cactus of all people.

7 Likes
1982

This is a reminder to anyone who would like to join November’s Renga Game, reply today before 2024-11-09T01:00:00Z and I’ll add you to the mix!

4 Likes
1983

OK… OK… I have swung back the other way… I think Rogue Trader is actually very good. I just did an extremely funny sidequest that involved trying to fill out paperwork… and in general the way they intersperse your companions’ side quests with your exploration in the mid-game is among the best I’ve ever seen and suits the “we’re trundling around on our capital ship” structure extremely well, they arise very organically and feel nearly random yet dense enough to work naturalistically.

I am about 25 hours in and get the impression I’m only about halfway, and I still think they would have had a much better game if they could’ve cut the number of trash mobs in the rykad minoris part of chapter 1 about in half because that was like 2-3 hours of ruined pacing at a time when the combat had not yet gotten more interesting (it since has), but… Rogue Trader is good, if you liked BG3 and you enjoyed the CRPG revival a decade ago, you should probably play Rogue Trader.

the writing is predictable but it’s exactly dense enough for my tastes and very flavorful, and the systems get introduced at a very strange pace (I have complaints about Chapter 1 in general), but I am having a great time

6 Likes
1984

i’m into the second chapter now, it seems like normal mode is basically flexible enough that i don’t need to fuck with judicious buildcraft which is a blessing considering all these skills a character can pick
i wonder how many plot paths i’ve already managed to scuff with my profane and unserious choices

i don’t think i’m really looking forward to having to manage my resource extraction planets

2 Likes