Please enjoy these monster closets.
I played the first disc of Heart of Darkness and after an hour gave up on retroarch allowing me to do the disc change. Nothing worked.
Then I remembered I did infact own this game at some point. A game I have held feelings for for many years. Maybe once I saw my friend in high school beat it. Or maybe he stopped to play Tomb Raider 3. Which came out the same time as Ocarina of Time. There was comparisons in magazines at the time.
Heart of Darkness. With Eric Chahi. The weird grotesque CG sequences. They might as well be in a different language.
I am playing it and a lot of PS1 games with the Neuromancer shader which gives everything a dark washed out feel. Like a dying monitor in a movie. It feels perfect.
Maybe someone has a save state early in disc two I can borrow.
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me: oh hey, Splatoon 2 is fun, I forgot
Splatoon: hey, Splatfest goinâ on this weekend
me: okay, if youâre bothering to have a âproâ playlist for the splatfest, why does it have to be turf war and not something else or did you spend all your energy on Shifty Station just making it and not balancing it for anything else other than turf war and also doesnât the implication of split normal/pro playlists mean that thereâs no actual matchmaking going on in the normal playlist and look, I just want an objective thatâs not âpaint the groundâ because, shockingly, siege warfare is much less interesting in 3 minute chunks across 15 feet of territory
Splatoon: sir, this is a video game
Heart of Darkness is fucking weird because the cutscenes are real goofy and make it clear itâs supposed to be like this childrenâs dark fantasy movie, but then when youâre actually playing the game it plays dead straight what would happen if a protagonist of a childrenâs dark fantasy movie failed, so you get to repeatedly watch a little kid get immolated by fireballs and eaten by monsters (complete with bone-crunching noises) and whatnot. like, there are death animations that are as unsettling to me as anything youâd see in an M rated horror game, even without any gore
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Played up to the first chapterâs title screen in Yakuza 6, which is my first Yakuza game.
No offense to these orphans but Iâve decided to start with Yakuza 0 instead.
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I finished Drakengard 3 last week after being away from it for a while (well, I got to the final boss, tried it a few times, and then watched the ending on YouTube). It doesnât hold together as well as either Nier game, but it does such fascinating things with Mikhail and Zero and the overall tone of the game. A lot to think about. Grinding for money to get ending D was a slog, though.
After that, I decided to finally try to finish Persona 5. I continue to be baffled by both the story and the plot in the formalist sense. Not âbaffledâ in the sense that I canât understand it. âBaffledâ in the sense that I donât understand why itâs happening.
Also playing Iconoclasts because my PS Plus membership gave it to me (I meant to buy it, but I guess I wonât now). It feels good to play. Iâm enjoying it a lot. There was a moment where I had to partly backtrack through a stage and couldnât figure out where I was really supposed to go, though, and I got so bored I almost didnât continue.
Oh everyone says the mission pack is good and the base game is bad so Iâm ready for this take (I like both btw)
the only thing I really remember about doom 3 was how cool the heat haze effects coming off the guns were
Keep that memory. Cherish it
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It is strongly recommended to play DOOM 3 on a display that offers true blacks (i.e. CRT or OLED). The sparse lighting is harsh and awesome.
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My memory is that Doom 3 is great, but it only has one trick and that doesnât last the dozen-plus hours it wants to go. Jump scares and ambushes are especially fatiguing once they start to feel like a pattern; itâs an induced stress response that Iâm conscious of being manipulated by. If it could run through its Half-Life 1-esque light-flickering setpieces in a third the time itâd be better remembered.
Doom 3 is so completely in thrall to Half-Life 1âs level design ethos that it was probably really damaged by launching in the same window (yeah, I know, the HL2 delay really throws this off but it was key to their hype cycle). To say nothing of dark horse Far Cry, which ended almost as important to the future as Half-Life 2.
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I donât remember much about the first Far Cry other than it was real pretty and had so much color for an early 2000s shooter
And that it was one of the first games where having a 64-bit version was a big deal, I think my copy was even AMD branded
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Notable features to me were:
- Insane draw distances and semi-open levels. The first level (featured as that incredible and confident demo) began outside some small islands, transferred onto a beach, then climbed a mountain; at the top boats some kilometers away begin attacking and youâre able to snipe them while running from a helicopter. The freedom and scale this promised outside of the standard corridors was immense; games like Battlefield 1942, Operation Flashpoint, Starsiege Tribes (and Project I.G.I.!) were toying with the PCâs ability to do large levels but hadnât delivered it in this context (single-player mainstream shooter) at all.
- Physics and simulationism â the first game I played with deeply integrated Havok physics, this was big and meaningful. I remember looking at a caught shark hanging from a rope and being impressed at how it moved in response to impulses â then gasping when I shot the rope and it snapped and the shark flopped on the ground. Vehicles were modeled with per-wheel physics (though they never controlled well on a keyboard), stacks of barrels and ragdolls were of course present, and allowed meaningful chaos in open natural environments, with damage modeling on impact. And, though I now realize it was a simple trick, I was so excited by the level inside a rusted-out beached tanker, where bullet holes in the walls let light stream in.
- Programmable shader future â Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry were the 3 standouts of the future promised by DirectX 9 and the Radeon 9700: complex materials on everything, and extensive use of real-time shadows (Far Cry had an excellent implementation of the âswinging lightâ trick that started to pop up in this era); a meaningful generation shift past the existing consoles. It looked as good or better than anything else and did it with the scope of a huge, free environment. Compare to Max Payne 2, a contemporary high-budget PC game from a team known for pushing rendering, which goes for a conservative, clean style, and represents the end/apex of a simple high-quality diffuse textures look on PC.
Or, compare to Ion Stormâs ill-fated Deus Ex: Invisible War, which saw the same future and built its engine to support these same features but catastrophically poorly, with heavy restrictions on poly count, map size, and performance.
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Yikes, yeah, I remember the level loads every 20 feet, with sightlines to match. The future always seemed so small!
The story is that this was to fit within the Xboxâs memory budget (64MB) as they were developed as cross-platform, but Iâd say it was really the catastrophic engine development catching design flat-footed. Thief 3 eventually handled this much better through level design more mindful of the issue, while load-on-demand features like load tunnels were becoming a thing in games like Halo and Metroid Prime.
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i donât think iâve ever been as disappointed in a sequel as i was in invisible war. never cared to finish it, plays like shit.
one of the funniest things about far cry to me is that despite the open level design (for like the first half of the game anyway), all the tech, the thing the guys who made boiling point: road to hell got out of it is that they should just lift the incredibly shitty final level from far cry for their game and replace the dumb ass infinitely spawning rocket launcher mutants with squads of infinitely respawning enemies. somehow they both manage to be nearly unplayable in entirely different ways
its secretly kind of a terrible game. after the first half they ditch the open-ended level design and replace most of the human enemies with mutated monkeys and bullshit huge guys with rocket launcher arms. theres a level where they throw you out of a helicopter with 10 bullets surrounded by these enemies which fucking sucks and then theres the final level, which is just kind of obnoxious up until the last stretch where it turns into a bullshit pixel hunt so hard that my dad is the only person i know who finished it without cheating
Yeah, the way Far Cry falls apart in the back half was an early indication that they only stumbled into a great game on accident and foretold the future plot of CryTek.
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I remember playing Crysis and loving it and then the aliens show up and I was all, didnât you guys learn???
I kinda did like that level in FarCry at the end there they drop you in with nothing surrounded by rocket dudes and you gotta sneak around
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