I started playing LSD: Dream Emulator a week ago (shoutout to @BustedAstromech and @Alterity). I’m finding the best way for me to play is one dream a day.
So much has been said about the atmosphere, I’m not sure I have anything new to add. I especially like when I see other people in my dreams. You have a limited ability to interact with things, but I still feel as if I’m being invited to play with what I encounter. I see a boy kicking a ball and stand to his opposite, pretending to kick it back. I see people dancing in circles, and I revolve around the room with them. As much as the game itself seems to be making free associations, I feel pushed to do the same with how I move around the world.
Mini Metro is cool and I wish I had played it sooner. Soothing. It has a dark mode.
Pinball FX3 is playable on Switch, in portrait mode, portable with only the right joycon attached. I don’t know anything or care about “ball” “physics”. The catch: there’s this spandex suited lady that follows you around the UI like Clippy and just like says all kinds of shit, I see you are trying to play would you like to link your hiscore account to the mainframe and score pin points to your ball vault?, and announces outloud every menu option you hover over.
In The Division 2 I rescued someone’s daughter and when I came back to the base they opened a Barbecue area in my honor. I don’t know what it does but now there’s some big white text floating in a corner of the area that says THE BARBECUE.
I’d be her momma, thank you very much (I was asked by her mom to save her though). In fact I think all the characters in every cutscene for these first couple of hours have been women. I have no idea who they are but they seem really angry about something.
To be fair I was being a bit cheeky when I said “opened in my honor”. I have no idea why it opened, it’s just something that unlocks after that mission is finished and you head back to the base but it didn’t seem interactable. Maybe I’d know what was going on if I didn’t have the volume at 40% so I could watch Giant Bomb spend over 6 hours trying to get that gauntlet time trial achievement in Titanfall 2 while I play.
There have been a few positive mentions of Nex Machina in here recently and it is on sale on PS4 for about $3 for the next couple weeks, but I have a question about it. The Housemarque games I’ve played before are Resogun, which I thought was swell, Super Stardust, which was okayish, and Dead Nation, which was just bad.
Of those on the surface Nex Machina most resembles Dead Nation and is the main reason I’ve never given it much of a thought before now. Of those who’ve played it (and perhaps both) are they much alike, or are they significantly different enough that disliking one shouldn’t disqualify the other?
I’m not trying to be flip here but this is a case where you can watch 30 seconds of gameplay of both games and be like, wow, how did they make both of these games. The quality gap in presentation, feel, design philosophy, and effort is staggering.
I also wrote off Alienation within 10 minutes when it thought 30FPS in a snow level for a twinstick shooter that looked worse than Helldivers was okay, notwithstanding all the ill-conceived lootfesting in a world where Diablo III on consoles is actually awesome.
Nex Machina is a legit no-compromise arcade game that could actually work as an arcade cabinet and I am sad the plans for that didn’t go through.
I mean, the video on the PS Store for Nex Machina is 32 seconds long and it is what raised these worries for me, so clearly it’d have to be at least 45 seconds worth…
The PS Store has really bad videos idk. Takes too long to load them too. I’d say for $3 you should give it a shot; it’s at least as good as Resogun and uses an evolved version of their voxel technology there.
I loved going through the different towns, swapping ideas, but now I’m currently grinding to get past a boss. I’ll be happy to give a second opinion if the future pleasure is worth the present pain.
I know exactly what you’re talking about and it is just awful but after that you’ve only got maybe two dungeons left; the rest is about five-ten hours of world cleanup, dashing through history, trying to avoid inevitable cyclical collapse. Like my earlier advice, if you felt touched in any way by the epochal implications of the story you need to see it through; if not, I’d advise jumping ship.
7 hours in and Baba Is You is phenomenal! The word « Not » has appeared and is a game changer. Writing « Not Baba is you » means that you get to control every single object in a level at once except Baba
There still haven’t been any of the Sokoban style pushing puzzles I feared the game could have.
Or to be more accurate there is in fact one Sokoban puzzle at one point, but it’s impossible and you « solve » it by ignoring it and removing the walls or something
I bought Hypnospace Outlaw based on the amazing trailer and the excitement in this thread.
This game is so cool. This is the best 90’s internet pastiche I’ve ever seen. It nails the aesthetic, the different kinds of writing you’d see back then, the different wonky applications, the quirks of a mid-90’s operating system (the screensavers!! What happened to screensavers?). It successfully replicates the feeling of browsing through the old web. And its parody of 90’s Microsoft and AOL is pitch perfect.
I do find myself getting completionist about it in a way you never could have been on the real internet though – following every link and reading every page. I feel like this is an unavoidable way that the act of playing a videogame intrudes on the simulationist part of the experience. I’m trying to consciously avoid doing this and treat the experience more like I’m really browsing the web, just clicking on stuff I’m interested in, or stuff that I have to investigate as part of the game’s moderation tasks.
It’s interesting that the game puts you in the moderator role and makes you enforce some pretty questionable rules. The first task it gives you is enforcing a copyright takedown notice on an elementary school teacher’s website, for god’s sake! It sort of feels like I’m in the role of deadening the wild old web and corporatizing it into web 2.0. If this is what they’re going for, it’s a really interesting concept for a game!