It still bugs me a bit that there was one TIS-100 campaign level that I skipped. I got within a few outputs of the finish but I think that’s as close as that particular set-up was ever gonna get me (I put hours into optimizing the insane ramblings that are my designs) and I didn’t have it in me to start from scratch to only possibly never get that close again.
TBF I think it is the known “oh yeah, that one is nuts” stage from said campaign so at least I know I wasn’t overlooking something obvious.
Nongunz: Doppelganger Edition instantly turned me off with its control scheme and UI. It’s doing the “inscrutable on purpose” thing and I’m uninterested in seeing if there’s a payoff in this instance.
If I had bought this on Steam instead of playing it through Game Pass, I think it would have been the first time I refunded a game and didn’t feel at least a little bad about it.
Mighty Goose is a cute-ish little run ‘n’ gun game, but ultimately not bringing much to the table beyond the character designs (which are admittedly fun but you can basically just go watch a trailer and get the effect I think).
I didn’t play The Artful Escape but I did skip my way impatiently through a YouTube Let’s Play and it’s definitely very stylish visually. I kinda look at this and I think, this is like a short from Love, Death & Robots but too long and with gameplay grafted onto it.
I zipped through all of Donut County in a sitting. It’s basically Katamari but not quite as polished, although it does do a few cute things puzzle-wise and I mostly enjoyed its brand of humor. I feel like all the characters were obnoxious in an amusing way. Game doesn’t overstay its welcome which is good.
I should probably update how my time with Final Fantasy XIII is going.
It’s going well.
I think the linearity works for me (I’m in chapter 9 BTW, about 20 hours in) as I always get hit by a degree of choice paralysis when it comes to upgrading things or deciding who to go with and so far the game has basically gone “don’t worry about that, I’ll take care of it for now.” If I come up to a tough fight I don’t have to worry that I have the wrong party, leveled up poorly or missed some key piece of equipment, I know it is purely a tactical issue. The combat system is definitely odd but neat, it is too quickly paced for me to not use autobattle but fortunately so far that isn’t much of an issue.
I think the decision to have a loss in a battle not kick you all the way back to the last save point but instead to right before the battle triggered makes it easier to just go for it and play aggressively (as does health replenishing between battles and MP not really being a thing). I think I have a decent feel for the various paradigms and roles now, I’m only rarely creating my own (and the ones I do are often doubling up existing ones) but as long as I check the list whenever I start with a new group and keep it all straight I can generally manage to adjust when needed in battle fairly quickly. My fight ratings are generally pretty good although sometimes I do get stuck in “okay made a mistake here, gotta play conservatively for a bit to just grind this one out”.
My worry is that I’ve kicked several cans down the road and they might all come due at the same time when things open up. I’ve never thought about party construction as the game has never asked that of me. I haven’t even glanced at the upgrading system. I’ve mostly kept each person with their most offensively gifted weapon, which seems to be their default one. Basically it is possible that the 20-30 hour long tutorial portion might just be the right speed for me and suddenly having to deal with all that plus figuring out if I’m doing bad because my strategy is wrong or because I’m not strong enough or need better equipment/weapons could knock everything off track. I guess I’ll see soon enough.
Oh yeah, the story. I kinda like the set-up, everyone basically stuck with doom hanging over them and having to deal with that. The execution has been touch and go, I’ve got as poor a grasp as what my goal is as any of the characters do, I get the “government bad” part (the opening slaughter made that clear enough) but the bit with the falsey (screw their spelling everything tricky) also being to blame feels unsupported by what’s been shown so far. Mainly though I’m glad that the kid got past his vengeance bit, it had grown rather irksome.
The game is also very pretty (and the loading times aren’t bad at all!), granted it likely had a massive budget but it still comes off as pretty top of the line to me. I’m sure if one were to put it against a PS5 game side by side things would stick out but on its own it definitely still holds up well.
Rygar crashes every time I deliver the coup de grace to Cetus…tried two “different” ISOs…$10 disk on the way from eBay…time to try Spartan: Total Warrior?
i finished resident evil 4 for the first time since it first launched on gamecube and while i’m still kinda lukewarm on the more ‘action oriented’ resident evil games, i’ve been thinking about trying the hard mode and ada side stories
I’m in chapter… 10 I think? of FFXIII and the current party composition feelings I have are: I like Sazh’s synergist more than Hope’s since he learns the offensive buffs first, I like Vanille’s saboteur more than Fang’s since she learns defense down stuff rather than just Slow. Eventually you get the ability to have any guy be any job which I am told is good for some of the harder optional fights (since I imagine you can guarantee having multiple Com/Rav/Rav paradigms to juggle etc) but the guys are going to tend to be better at their initial 3 jobs than the extra stuff.
I got my first ever stg 1CC! Normal difficulty P&R Reshrined with Ikazuchi. I don’t know if she’s the strongest character in the game but she definitely feels like the easiest one, very fun to play. I was watching vods of people doing hard mode and only just found out there are invisible treasure chests you can only pop with the purification attack so I still have plenty to learn…
I’m still playing and enjoying Iconoclasts. Thanks for the heads up about how bleak the story becomes, to be honest the whole thing has felt pretty depressing plot wise. It doesn’t really bother me except for the extreme tonal contrast between like, everything that happens in the game and how chipper the graphics and music are. Just kind of a strange experience overall. I’m also finding a lot of the subplots kind of hard to follow but it isn’t really negatively affecting my experience all that much.
I just think it’s kind of a strange approach to narrative to reveal such significant details so slowly in a game like this. There’s so many different vague mysterious statements and Important Seeming but Context Free Proper Nouns introduced one after another. Then you go another 20 minutes of just jumping around solving puzzles and you have to keep all that in your head before you get another info dump that marginally clarifies some of the Mysterious Details from the last dialogue sequence but raises a bunch more questions.
Anyway I assume it will all come together at some point, I just hope I can still remember what the fuck happened 3 hours ago (etc) when that time comes. I appreciate that there’s so much love put into the game, but it just seems like a little bit too much plot for a game like this idk.
On the other hand, I really do love how (mostly) self contained the levels are. I’ve never been a huge metroid (etc) fan, mainly because all of the back tracking and lock and key stuff on a huge map can get really overwhelming. In this it’s like each area is basically a self contained level with small-scale backtracking that’s pretty easy to keep track of, plus a few secrets that aren’t too much trouble to mentally flag and go “I bet one day I will have an item that will let me reach that.”
In fact, now that I think of it, the narrative style is kind of more of a metrovania than the actual game is. Like there are plot points that stand out in your mind as “I bet eventually I will learn something that will help me understand what the hell that character is referring to here” but it is kind of a struggle to keep those random details in your mind long enough so that when you are finally given the last puzzle piece you can actually remember what it refers to. Hmm…
fwiw it’s totally fine to stick with default weapons for most of the game because you can make them much stronger than most of what you pick up early on through upgrading, so i do recommend learning how upgrades work
Continuing to use that $1 Gamepass month to sample a whole bunch of games:
BloodRoots I picked out on a whim, I remember seeing a trailer ages ago and then promptly forgetting about it. It’s sort of like Hotline Miami but mostly without guns. You just constantly go through melee weapons and it’s all about stringing combos together. You might jump onto a barrel and roll it into one guy, grab a cutlass (which lets you dash in a straight line as your attack) and slice through a few guys in a crowd, swap to a boat oar which lets you pogo up to a high ledge and then use that to hit a bunch of guys with one big sweeping attack. It’s over the top in the right ways, I think the controls are juuuust a bit squirrely but the penalty for death is very minor. The missions are short. Game has a pretty good sense of humor visually, the writing is a bit meh.
I liked this more than I thought I would! Probably going to call it quits though, I don’t care enough about the story to play much more.
Doom 3 seems like it’s gotten a bit of a positive reappraisal in the past few years but I’m having a hard time seeing why. I don’t think much about it has aged well; it’s full of a lot of the worst parts of its era. I’ll give it a few bonus points for rewarding my curiosity when I poked around in a computer and unlocked an ammo locker, thus granting me a new weapon presumably “early”. That made me feel clever. The horror angle didn’t seem very convincing to me and all the weapons feel kind of hilariously weak. You have to be like point-blank with a shotgun for it to really be strong and while I know that’s a big videogame trope it just feels especially underwhelming here. Idk, I’m not into this one.
Into the Pit is an FPS roguelike thing, I feel like there are a lot of these now that are pretty indistinguishable. Here is an example of the form, etc. It’s not bad but there’s nothing here that really makes me want to keep playing. I dig the graphical style kinda, it’s very smeary-pixels-over-3D-models sort of thing. It works here.
I really can’t say why I like Doom 3. All the criticisms against it are fair. I hate that shotgun. The game just goes on and on. The monster closet thing is absurd but not in a way that feels celebratory or emotionally resonant of the way monster closets were used in the original games. There are some things I really respect about it like having to swap between the light and your gun, and some of the guns in particular are really cool (mini gun and plasma rifle), also the art direction is successful at doing the “we are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is [hissing vapor from exploded pipes] to death” thing… but idk I get the hate and I also get the love.
I kind of just realized this, but does it seem fair to say that Doom 3 was trying to make the UAC facility into as much of a place as Half-Life managed to make Black Mesa with its narrative and level design? Seen in that light, damn, Doom 3 is a bit more admirable but its failure is a little more great as well.
Yeah for the first 30 minutes or so I was very struck by this impression. I’m okay with how they did it, mostly, at least what I saw. However it does make the monster closets, like the proper “walls drop to reveal a group of baddies” ones, seem way more nonsensical.
Also I was playing BFG Edition and the flashlight just operates without Doomguy actually holding onto it, no swaps required. I think I could see why it would be very tense to have it the old way but I also think I’d get sick of it in like 5 minutes.
yeah, the graphics and art direction are really good, but I was really surprised at how bad the gunfeel was. The spaces and movement really don’t lend well to each other, as you kind of trudge ahead in one direction and can’t really move/think tactically.
It’s a first person shooter dungeon crawler?? Every ship is like a little random dungeon and you kill the robots and take their stuff. I really love this reactor room:
Did the flashlight originally run out of juice quickly, or is that something they introduced in the new version to try to maintain the tension of occasionally having to be in the dark?
