Games You Played Today Classic Mini

Oh so this is acctually good? I saw a YouTube video of Kenshi and after two minutes I thought what is this jank and turned it off. Just to come here and read all these things about it. Never stop surprising me sb

Itā€™s often compared to Mount & Blade because itā€™s a similarly cheap, janky production that needs to be coaxed to open up its beautiful possibilities. And like M&B it can contain a multitude of games depending on how you play it.

Eventually it starts to look rather beautiful; Iā€™ve been taking near as many screenshots as I did of Red Dead 2 as the game pairs the exoticism of Morrowind with incomparable scale. It sacrifices a lot to achieve that sense of scale and that feels like a secret telegram to my heart.

2 Likes

Yeah itā€™s got a Mount & Blade quality UI as well I see

6 Likes

some of these monsters are unreasonably cute and I donā€™t like killing them

5 Likes

God thatā€™s good

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Erikā€™s all about them orbs

Iā€™ve been taking screenshots for 70 hours before I learned you can hit F7 to hide that monster

UI functionality is quite good for a small game, though, with a lot of convenience/power features to make it pretty comfortable when youā€™re deep in.

After hours of foraging and building I just finally constructed an enormous, luxurious submarine in Subnautica and itā€™s one of the most empowering feelings Iā€™ve encountered in a video game. I got to name it, and I can walk around inside it, and thereā€™s a bay I can put my crappy little previous vehicle in for fine maneuvering, and I can install upgrades and change the batteries and fire off little distraction torpedoes to lure away wildlife. It works like a portable base and I can actually build shit inside it and store items! Now I can go to previously unfeasible oceanic depths, in style!

Also, I started getting creepy psychic messages from barely sentient fish things.

This game is so good.

6 Likes

ok I beat Marinara and in the end I am somehow more disappointed because it only just started to get interesting right before the final mission; that mission was a load of tedious predictable crap.

The biggest write crime of this game is its constant attempts to seem interesting by ā€œcalling a rabbit a smeerpā€. Almost literally at one point, where one character herds fantasy animals called ā€œyolā€ and when you ask what they are he just describes sheep. A knife doesnā€™t become more interesting when you call it a transdimensional scalpel but it still behaves like a knife in combat.

It is a game that, while it cribbed frequently from Gene Wolfeā€™s Book of the New Sun, ended up feeling like the opposite in many ways. Book of the New Sun is an interesting book because on its surface it is a generic sword and sorcery adventure with some unusual language, but scratch that surface and you find a weird cosmic sci fi epic full of mysteries and lacunae. Torment 2 is a weird cosmic sci fi epic on the surface but scratch that surface and you find an old CD-Rom copy of Baldurā€™s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. It claims to be weird and inventive but its really staid and familiar fantasy. Every interesting description appears once and never comes up again. The more detailed something is, the more generic it is.

4 Likes

not even the text bosses did anything for you? like I said, Iā€™m way less familiar with the genre material than you are, but I found the prose very captivating for the format it was in. I still canā€™t think of another videogame that reaches half as far in pure descriptive terms as some of those text adventure where-am-I-now scenes, but itā€™s also never occurred to me to read any gene wolfe. oh well!

agree about the part just before the final mission being more interesting than the final mission itself though

the merecasters were all too purple for me. There were some fun situations but I found myself rushing through them because the text never grabbed me.

ah, yeah, without that I can see it not coming together for you (though even as I type that Iā€™m thinking of little details I adored like the robot in the first town whoā€™s trying to die), so fair enough. to say theyā€™re too purple really reinforces for me that this game was ambitious with its prose in a way that I really liked, but Iā€™m very willing to accept that its reach wasnā€™t usefully far in practice compared to other media.

I also donā€™t normally think of myself as forgiving of purple prose, but Iā€™m a very fast reader ordinarily and those made me happy to slow down.

this is also totally consistent with my initial figuring that this game had no audience, because itā€™s so close to being a VN except it relies on its audience being interested in a lot of extraneous genre trappings around a VN which already contains a lot of artifice. very few people liked it!

2 Likes

outside of the merecasters there were occasional Rothfussian adverb abuse and ā€˜describe a thing and then describe it again but with different words.ā€™ moments that really bothered me. The worst was a passage that used ā€˜exquisitelyā€™ 3 times in a single paragraph.

4 Likes

ironically, reusing otherwise uncommon words because theyā€™re already in my head to the point where it stands out really badly is up there with ā€œomitting prepositionsā€ as my worst habits when Iā€™m writing quickly and itā€™s the first thing I always have to edit for

in the parlance of our times,

1 Like

Oh, its a bad habit of mine too. When I see it in a finished thing it makes me think ā€œrough draft?ā€

Enter the Gungeon (PS4): wasnā€™t certain I could actually slay the Dragun, much less acquire all the components necessary to create the Bullet, but here we are.

Dragon Quest XI: having started over from the beginning, Iā€™m currently back in the Manglegrove. surprised how much stuff I managed to miss the first time around.

1 Like

So far,my favorite part of Smash is world of light. Also I donā€™t play online and havenā€™t really played with anyone but my wife.

Classic mode has co-op, which is awesome

3 Likes

I never spent too much time with the Persona Arena games (too afraid of spoiling Persona 3 and 4, both games that have more or less been spoiled for me in the last decade), but that BlazBlue Cross Tag game more or less feels like I remember those games feeling, and is pretty fun, too? Tempted to say itā€™s too simple, but thereā€™s probably a lot I havenā€™t grasped yet just mashing around.

It manages to be infinitely more anime than any of its contributing parts which is, uh, impressive, since the one Arcade run Iā€™ve done through UNIEL left me feeling I could probably completely understand the story to Kingdom Hearts with ease.

2 Likes

Iā€™ve been Playing Dragonā€™s Dogma on PS4 and ooh buddy is it a mixed bag in terms of polish level.
I had monsters spawn in front of me and despawn in front of me. The tentacles never spawned in the dungeon (everfall) under the Pawn guild so now I cannot complete that one it seems.
My main criticisms of the game are I am starting to really get tired of item management and the sheer distance between things.
I am however, having a hard time putting it down.

2 Likes