also it’s plain great to see such a viscerally emotional representation of a different culture in videogames given how Edith Finch in particular was like “new frontiers in white people”
I think it slow rolls its animating conflict a little bit given it’s only like two hours long (the “religious belief” bit in the synopsis seems like an even stranger choice having played it) but it is very good, and none of this territory has really been explored in the same way
Yes, I’ve been anxiously anticipating new interesting game culture from east asia and China especially although the disastrous political repression lately has dampened my hopes.
Studio Oleomingus in India does really cool stuff and they appear to be getting grant money to keep doing it:
http://oleomingus.com/
after Edith Finch continuously boomed ‘twee, TWEE’ into my ear for hours I came to understand why the studio is named Giant Sparrow
horror games are benefiting enormously from current first person engines and economies in terms of the imagery they’re able to present and the length of time in which they’re able to tell their story
I am assuming it’s spillover from 3D modeling training for TV & film CG? and the ease of basically just dumping a maya scene into Unreal or Unity3D with someone who half-knows scripting and presto: game. I’m very happy it exists but am mad it doesn’t mean, like, anything I’ve ever worked on I’ve been able to get a prop or two I request for any reason ever
I’m also very impressed by the specific respects in which it’s critical of its characters
there is not one part of this story that is constrained by vidcon or the expectations of vidcon
and it makes you actively confront that in a way another medium couldn’t
it’s also like the first videogame about parenting I can think of that doesn’t involve a big strong dad killing zombies or some shit
I’m not totally sure how I feel about the last part though
potentially controversial opinion, but, i think Final Fantasy XIII is actually maybe…good?
i feel like it came out at the wrong time. everyone wanted a next-gen FF game to be what FFXV ultimately turned out to be, but XIII is actually kind of interesting as a game and not as an RPG (which apparently was the intention). treating it as a turn-based action game, it doesn’t really matter that you don’t explore towns or go on sidequests etc. it’s just sort of non-stop action, and it feels good.
obviously it has flaws, like uhhhh some of the writing and the fact that for the first three to four hours of the game, people keep talking about things that have little-to-no meaning to the player.
and with the xbox-enhanced graphics and framerate, it’s still a very pretty game to look at.
oh, well.
Yeah, there’s definitely good stuff in there. It’s not my favorite in the series by any stretch, but it’s certainly not my least favorite.
Genuinely good music, for one, and the characters are actually really good (something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now), though you wouldn’t know that because of the awful script. Also I just kinda love those sorta bonkers-ass jrpg futuristic settings like you find in Cocoon. I loved Esthar, that was me. I was the one.
what class did you go with?
Tried to give Darkest Dungeon a go again (this time on PS4) and bounced off again.
There is just SO MUCH going on right out the gate with no easing in like how to heal, what conditions like blight do, etc.
Also the game’s tutorial popups would actually obscure things happening in real time. I had a character die while a tutorial popup about dispair was onscreen. What the fuck.
Knight every time
How much do all the gundams/summon vehicles actually show up in the game?
Outside of combat, not all that much, just a couple cutscene appearances. In combat, they’re roughly analogous to limit breaks.
Finished up Iconoclasts and feel y’all were a bit too hard on it. That’s not to say that it was without flaws, it had plenty of them! The large amount of story is baffling and given that the writing has a bit of “english isn’t my first language” to it that is even more of a problem. The obvious comparisons to Treasure also don’t help as they were very gifted with things like stage/set piece design while this bloke wasn’t and instead just tried very hard. That it is still rather solid in that area shows that said hard work did pay off to a degree.
That said it is a case of someone having a big, grand, perhaps overly ambitious idea for a game and going for it, and SB usually is on the side of those even with, and often in spite of, their numerous flaws. I am here for a game that throws in a 2d platformer version of The End battle from MGS 3. I am here for future bosses and other characters randomly appearing in the background and otherwise teasing their existence before their big moment in the sun (I love it when games do this, this game does it all the time). I am here for a game that goes with the whole “you got captured but break out and have to get your stuff back” but puts it in a multistage tower with numerous elevators and ventilation shafts to crawl through whose floors are designed with the knowledge that while you start crossing them with no weapon you will later backtrack with only your wrench, then with your normal weapons, and then again with a new you find there and takes that into account. I even have a soft spot for the story as while it is… what it is, you get the feeling that the author cared a lot about it and tried to fit all his various notions for it in the game somehow.
This isn’t to say that it isn’t fair grounds for criticism or that one should feel that they have to like it, that would be dumb! I just found it to be an easy game to root for while playing it, more deserving of pats on the back for what it pulls off while going feeling bad about the parts where it stumbled rather than just going “yeah it wasn’t that great.”
But yeah, it really really talks too much.
I turned the difficulty down in Sunless Skies–to medium after my fifth death, then to easy after my sixth. It is still not easy, but I’m not really interested in the economy of risk that you have to navigate to make profitability at all respectful of your time. I just want to see the stories, I think, so I should probably have done this sooner. After I get an ending or two out of this lineage, I’m turning off legacy mode altogether. I’m still really enjoying the game, and I wasn’t losing THAT much progress when I died, but the roguelite elements antagonize the narrative every bit as much as they did in Sunless Sea, even if this game is magnificently more forgiving and flexible.
yeah and at least sunless sea was denser, I feel like they took away the thing that made the questionable roguelike mechanics acceptable in the first place
Reinstalled Zelda (BotW) after putting it away for half a year. I’m at Calamity Ganon. I keep dying. It’s not necessarily that he’s too hard, but I’m just really impatient and don’t want to learn the proper timing to dodge his attacks. The issue is that I keep pressing the dodge button way too early, forgetting that every enemy needs to go on a personal vision quest and write a memoir before swinging their weapon. Going from any Souls’s’s game to Zelda requires a stark readjustment, because it takes me about a third of a second to react to an enemy attack’s startup, while the attacks themselves take about 1.5 seconds to initiate. Frustrating.
Oh yeah and I keep running out of shields because Ganon destroys one in one hit.
Just played a bunch of Wolfenstein Reboot: The First One: No Not That One, The Other One.
It’s neat, but man, the levels are just too long, and there’s almost no downtime, you’re always either shooting Nazis or moving towards more Nazis to shoot. Was kinda hoping for a little more narrative tbh
I just beat BotW. I’m glad I bothered to pick it back up and see the ending. I should probably do that with the other X amount of games I’ve never touched in years
yes, i really love the aesthetics. they’re super strange and beautifully psychedelic; not really anything else out there that quite looks the same way.
also (mostly) agree with the characters. Hope and Vanille are just barely tolerable, but this, again, has more to do with the script than the characters themselves. the same can be said, to varying degrees, for the rest of the cast, but overall, i think they’re good attempts at actual human beings.
also, i think it’s interesting to play this again after XV, because it’s clear that the whole “your party members actually speak to you as you wander the world” thing started here and i totally forgot about that. it isn’t as fully realized as it is in XV, but it’s cool to see it here.
