Never. The tension was always that you couldn’t use the flashlight and shoot at the same time, but since the muzzle flash of the gun lit stuff up, there was a lot of cool interplay between inconsistent light and dark.
…which very few game reviewers at the time acknowledged even though it was objectively the coolest gameplay idea Doom 3 had.
Surely did just stay up late (by my old man standards) playing Boyfriend Dungeon
I have also jumped on the Iconoclasts train due to all the talk here (also it was on sale on Switch)
Finished Cloud’s story in FF7R. Enjoyed it a lot more than the demo I played a few years ago! They managed to hit all the original character beats while also fleshing them out in fun ways. My main criticisms are:
All in all: pretty good! I hope the second chapter, and the Crisis Core remake, and the Compilation of FF7 game are all good. I’m a sucker for this setting even as I loathe the spinoffs and the worst impulses of Nomura.
played more HL: Alyx and I’m still enjoying it, it’s definitely the most tense and sweaty VR experience I’ve had outside of hours of dancing lol
a headcrab jumps on my face and my solution is to shoot myself in the face to get rid of it, 10/10
I went camping and I had a lot of food prep duties, so I spent a lot of time sitting around waiting for shit to cook in my solar oven while listening to my friend’s new favorite album (Afrique Victime) and playing Poinpy. I am now level 14 in Poinpy and it is still good. I believe I may be close to collecting all the upgrades? Not sure. I feel that maybe I am not even halfway through my time with Poinpy, getting-tired-of-it-wise. What a game! I’ve already said that here but I need to say it again. Try playing Poinpy in nature… it’s not a good way to experience nature but it is a good way to experience Poinpy.
Before and after camping I’ve also been continuing to play Nobody Saves the World. It gets grindy in the middle but there are so many weird little grind objectives that it hasn’t gotten boring yet. Yes, I am running the first 60 seconds of a dungeon over and over in an attempt to farm one of my forms’ attack quests as quickly as possible. No, I am not getting bored. This may just be because I personally am boring, but the game is cute and lively and it’s successfully persuading me to do a lot of weird busywork, so there’s that!
I tried playing Chicken Police and I didn’t get thirty minutes into it before running into their elaborate lore and new homebrew racism (in this setting, animals are racist against each other and super racist against… bugs) and I immediately put it down because it hadn’t done anything to make me think it would handle its fantasy racism with any sort of care. Has anyone here played this? How right am I in my guess here? The reading experience/text UX is pretty bad so probably won’t continue it regardless. (The text unfurls slowly to match a VO performance more closely, and tapping A advances the text to the next utterance immediately regardless of how much current text is exposed. Expected behavior for a game like this should be for the first A tap to complete revealing the text in the current box, so the player can read it before advancing.) Also I haven’t really enjoyed noir cop pastiche in years so I guess I have no idea why I am playing this game. I got it in the Humble subscription so giving it a shot seemed low risk, but it just made me cranky instead! Oh well.
I’ve gone over this before but
Having a physical manifestion of fan expectations and demands was real great! It had to be lording over them the entire time they were making it any time they poked at the internet and the longer this project burned and recycled in the mines (it was clearly supposed to be a Ryu Ga Gotoku like at some point.) the longer that expectation and weight grew. Making it tangible in the universe and a device recognizing that the game itself had played and consumed and loved FF7 and felt beholden to it. God i get bumps every time I think about it.
Of course the fans are gonna manifest Sepiroth here at the end to climax FINAL FANTASY 7 REMAKE.
Only by defeating Fans can they escape both what the fans want/expect and the path of Final Fantasy 7. Now is their own path to be made.
The little bonus ending in intergrade really did show off the dialog is horrendous though.
I also hooted like a howler monkey when it is the exact same animation as Tom Braider.
Yeah Ender Lilies holds up. Really solid level design with tons of exploration puzzles, alternate paths, secrets and challenge gauntlets. You start off with a moveset close to fully equipped hollow knight (iframe roll and double jump) and by the endgame the platforming has airdash/cling/grappling-hook mixups and the boss battles have you mashing every face button to attack with 5 different spirits at the same time.
The protagonist starts off looking like a pure innocent child who wouldn’t hurt a fly (and indeed spirits do all the attacking for her) and slowly her appearance changes until she has glowing red eyes and tentacles
Welp, that’s the first time anyone’s been able to sell me on that game.
Alundra: warp/ice maze with multiple levels that you can fall off.
Gran Turismo 7 continues to consume me, but it’s made me discover that the PS5 controller is really uncomfortable to use for extended amounts of time in that game. something about the grip and placement of my hands on the shoulder buttons was just giving me some real pain between my thumb and pointing finger. sorry, but sometimes i need to brake hard.
Returnal - a friend of mine is real into this game (but also all the other games made by this team) and wants to do multiplayer, so i gave it a spin last night. i like it, but it’s another roguelite or whatever. HOWEVER i will say that the actual search-action features and backtracking was an unexpected twist that i think makes this game worth mentioning at all as more than “just another roguelite.” it feels like they took the narrative decently seriously, and they don’t just want you to focus on loot and killing stuff the entire time. the fps exploratory stuff has been done well, so far. anyway, should be fun in multiplayer, i think.
Ghostwire: Tokyo - this game is pretty solid. it isn’t necessarily remarkable, but if you want a decent action-based FPS with open world elements set in a MegaTen-ish world, then you’ll have a good enough time. i don’t feel like there’s much more to say here - you kill ghosts, you take their crystalline hearts for power, you do sidequests, you enter homes and shit gets freaky
tried to play Myst a little but philistine that i am, i just can’t stand mechanism puzzles, when i find an old notebook with a significant looking drawing of a pipe inside i just get preemptively annoyed, if only there was a similarly handsome hypercard deck made for low attention span sloth people, and that’s why i played The Manhole instead.
it’s a good game!! i get why games like this could never be considered as the future of the industry. you could pile up screens to click around forever and functionally people would still blaze through and get tired of them pretty quick. but what a relief it feels to just extend the feeler of curiosity sometimes and have it reach forward, forward, down random corridor after corridor, and never have to hit that brick wall which says “ok, you have to take things seriously now.” sometimes you come across a familiar place you’d passed earlier and sometimes you go down another road instead. eventually your own attention span creates a kind of weblike slime network between these locations and you can choose whether you want to try to fill in some of the gaps or just withdraw again, back out of the screen. myst has some of the same generosity - you click around at random, duck into different buildings of the island, poke switches without knowing what they do, read the books. and then you go back and familiarise yourself with all the parts and move forward. this one just feels like kind of a sad, wistful dream, because it’s full of aesthetic pleasures you have nothing to do with, you can’t solve, you just absorb them and keep on rambling and go away and forget. but in the memory, certain corridors, dark rooms, a strangely melancholy song that plays in one particular stone corridor, persist with the weird unnecessary quality of all memory, and also some of the views are pretty.
Yeah I actually liked it okay up until the very end, but ending it with multiple tedious multi-stage bosses and a bunch of cryptic dialogue to bait out this interpretation didn’t do it for me. The new ending is way too “Sora flying through the air swinging his keyblade” for my personal tastes, and I find fourth-wall “fan/audience expectation” stuff to be cornball and passé. It only works for me if it’s not blunt, or it’s very funny, and FF7R is neither, so I personally didn’t like it.
This said, they did a great job with the game otherwise, so it’s mostly a minor complaint.
Agreed – I really liked FF7R for the most part, and I like the idea of the ending, but the execution of the last few hours is sadly far worse than the rest of it
didn’t realize how invested in the original ff7 I must be because I found every moment of the remake excruciating and every decision they made with the story boneheaded
Many of us have been playing Unreal Tournament 2004 lately.
Let me share a taste what it’s like to play UT 2004 in 2022.
This was a map where a hot lady can be your angel, or your devil. Everyone who tried to join it got flagged as a cheater and banned. Except for me. I was allowed to look at the stained glass bobobs. Keep this in mind if you ever think “Bachi keeps fragging me…he’s almost too good…maybe I should accuse him of using an aimbot!” Don’t bother!! I’m 100% not guilty!! The Frag is Back !!
Many servers are running “rat maps”. In this one we were very tiny insta-gib fraggers in a very large garage with a bunch of Agent Smiths standing outside of it. If you tried to leave the garage you died. All the rat maps we have played are bad but they’re also loaded with the kind of Bush-era trash that you suckers can’t get enough of so here’s your garbage, give this post 20 bloodpotions or I’m going over to Insert Credit and hosting Half-Life 2 deathmatch nights for those losers.
Whoa I got kinda hostile there sorry about that, returning to this fragging lifestyle has caused me to regress some, I was far too competitive during my e-Thlete days, I was filled with such a rage, I thought I’d gotten past all that, I thought the part of me known as “fatal1ty” was dead and buried, but no, he’s still there, he’s still angry, he’s still foaming at the mouth, waiting to turn you into giblets. Anyway here’s shrug and km as Oni and some crocodile from Russia, this game has some pretty good skins, we have an entire google drive filled with them, come play with us and we’ll hook you up.
We found a server running an Onslaught map set in an Australian brewery. We got to drive around in vehicles and shoot bots and wonder if this would all be funnier if we were Australian. I did not get a screen cap of this map’s EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH: CLIFFY B poster. I wonder if that man has any regrets.
This is a nice screencap, I think. UT2004 is a pretty ok looking game, sometimes. Its music? I dunno, did you like the Spawn soundtrack? The game comes with multiple announcers. You’re probably familiar with the default one, he says stuff like MULTIKILLLLL and HEADSHOOOT and FRAGASM, but there’s also a Sexy announcer. She’s a babe who does lots of moaning and oohing and counting, sexily. This announcer was produced by Epic, and included with the game at no extra cost. It was a different time.
We also play with a bunch of voice packs we downloaded, they are all awful, I have instituted a ban on Family Guy voices in my presence, they are 100% NOT LEGAL.
Even Lois? YES, ESPECIALLY LOIS.
Last night we played on Wyoming Unreal Tournament Server, which I’d like to think is hosted on some state computer that no one’s touched in 15 years. Its map selection was pretty sweet and its ruleset was mostly vanilla. Low kill cap, which I like. This rat map was in there though, this rat map was the best we’ve played, this rat map was set in a 12 year old’s idea of a firehouse. Or a 27 year old man from 2004, either one. Please note the Appetite for Destruction Poster, the Xbox, the dalmatian art that I keep thinking is some 9/11 tribute but probably isn’t, the pizza, the Stewie Griffith doing Michael Jackson dances (animated in-game), and, of course, the cheesecake velvet painting of Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie mounted above one of the beds.
I won that map so that means I get to sleep in that bed tonight. Sorry, losers. Shoulda fragged harder.
I use a Martian from Mars Attacks model. It makes constant clicking sounds as I play. Sometimes it kinda quacks like a duck. No one can ever beat me. I’m unstoppable. Thank you for reading, maybe come play with us sometime, I’m sure we’ll do this at least 2 more times before we run out of steam and go back to playing sad depressing dark room RPGs all by our lonesomes, thank you.
I continued to play Boyfriend Dungeon today. I have several partners and I keep waiting for the game to actually call me out on it, and the only time it did it was when the designated creep NPC slutshamed me for dating around. Then I guess I must have done some things out of order because a few story vignettes seemed to ignore a very significant thing that happened.
Butttt in spite of some of my nitpicks I guess I’m having a good time? The combat is pretty basic/boring though.
ah shit I played that exact same weird austrialian beer map at a IRL lan party.
I just need to find a source of custom skins. I can’t commit to this game unless i can be some kind of furry, it’s essential
don’t miss out on going to the house at the top of the map
