like, modernity briefly existed in a form that made total sense to me and appeared to improve on what came before while calling back to it, and I enjoyed both that dialogue and the state of the art as it was, and then whoosh, all gone
id’s stuff m around then (doom / wolfenstein) vs now is also a really obvious part of this dichotomy, like “wow, we learned how to do revivals! – oops, we forgot”
honestly I think I hate the battle royale era like way way worse than I’m even aware of disliking it, but what I got prior to it was a total unexpected gift (as with VR games released in the immediately subsequent period from like 2017-2020, or CRPGs released from 2014-2018). there were a lot of mini booms in highly commercial work that appealed very directly to me in the latter half of the 2010s and it feels like a lot of them are over and that trend line is very weird.
it’s funny too because I spent a lot of the first half of the 2010s building a career in which I did a lot of open source work with Europeans and playing a lot of tabletop eurogames, and the time period right after that was a reversion to “lemme get a big GPU and hang out with my online friends more instead,” but both felt totally fresh and progressive in their way, and now I think I basically have neither so I’m working more and spending more time outdoors and traveling more and watching way more movies and sports at night than playing games until that happens to change again.
It’s so fucked up that fortnite is really fun and good.
I’ve been getting two matches in with Da Butts during nap time and it is substaining me. It’s really shockingly good.
Like seriously we are all collectively ironically going “it would be cool to have that skin…” except it isn’t ironic.
Maybe I am playing until I can buy the skank dance.
Played some Quake using the software renderer in mark_v. Got me thinking about the old days where the software renderer was notably different in certain areas. Like the vertices wobbling underwater in Quake. Or the gamma being wildly off in Tomb Raider etc. Going down a rabbithole here.
I’ve been playing the old Apogee game Secret Agent on GOG Galaxy. This is the “HD” version, which means that they do that thing I don’t like where higher-resolution HUD elements pop up on top of the blocky pixel art. (This is something I wish Celeste had avoided.)
The last time I played this game, I was a young teenager. A kid I knew from church introduced me to it. The art and the theme didn’t do much for me, but I liked the straightforward challenge of it and the varied scenes. And it was at least a step up from Aldo’s Adventure.
Maybe inspired by my recent plays of several Vikintor games, I can imagine a game like this that starts out normal but gradually gets weirder.
i’ve felt for the last few years that it’s inevitable there’ll be some kind of quake or unreal reboot that is the nostalgic ‘arena shooter, high skill gap, some kind of pleasurable movement tech’ experience for us olds and completely novel for kids while having all of the egregious trappings of modernity like seasons, no private servers or mods, gacha microtransactions and a background process that sends your photos to microsoft but they’re taking their time
isn’t this what quake champions is?
it is, although Quake Champions is still pretty fun.
cries in lawbreakers
quake champions went further into egregious modernity than i’m thinking here, the overwatch hero meme mechanics are ridiculously out of place
‘tank’ characters withstanding a quad railgun shot is pretty funny the first time you see it though
I had a design test and one of the questions was about a recent AAA FPS I had played, and I couldn’t come up with anything! Maybe a few Cods from a few years back (Advanced Warfare, Infinite Warfare, WWII, etc) and Destiny 2 a long time ago, but that’s largely it. Not enough to really dig into the dense multiplayer systems or anything.
Its true I don’t find the new stuff appealling either. The Battle Royale format and the Battlepass are the two biggest things that every game seems to have now. Games are so dense that they require a significant time investment to really understand just one because they’re all trying to be individual hobbies. Most of the FPSes I play have been (very excellent) Quake community maps.
there sure are a lot of developers making hero shooters and when you apply they expect you to know a lot about all of them. I will never play overwatch
If only you could use Quake as your design test material. If I were the person judging it, I definitely would let you!!! Quake is love, Quake is life, Quake is… eternal.
I have been playing Cult of the Lamb. I find the ways in which it borrows from BoI and Don’t Starve pretty interesting… it’s trying to chart a middle road between these two games and add some sim/village management stuff on top, but the whole look and feel of the base building and resource collecting just makes me want to play Don’t Starve, and the whole feel and (low) challenge of the combat stuff just makes me want to play BoI or an ARPG I enjoy.
That said… they really got something with these little villagers, hot damn. That’s the one thing carrying me through this game. You can do some wild shit to your villagers and the little emergent stories that you experience are pretty funny. Your guys have absolutely the saddest little faces and say tons of dark-cute shit and it’s fun as hell to murder, sacrifice, ascend, cannibalize, feed refuse to, marry, and heal them etc. One of my guys begged me to rescue their brother from the woods, and after I did that, the brother got the hots for me, so I married him, but his stats suck and I was planning on killing him, but now I’m worried about doing that because we’re married? Seems too mean for me? I was worried that I’d get tired of the game constantly encouraging me to kill cute animals–I often tie myself into knots to avoid this stuff in games–but the life cycle element on the villagers means that they eventually “expire” anyway, which encourages you to use them in all sorts of terrible rituals. Anyway, I want to collect all the little animals. Cute stuff.
I think I’ll finish the game even though I have a lot of complaints about the combat. It’s not quite good enough to make me want to actually do the combat, so it just feels like an interruption to the resource collecting and base management gameplay that I enjoy more.
The audio in this game rules, though. A delight to listen to everyone crying and babbling and gasping over the weird background music. I like how many cow/sheep/boxing ring/religious-sounding bells are integrated into the sound design, too. Every possible shade of Farm Animal Vibes.
I say this is a good thing, that games can be enjoyed at a surface level but you can go deeper and unearth dank tech or stupid systems, from behind my wall of Genshin excel documents and horse calculators
Quake levels are just a masterclass of progression and encounter design. Every level you generally start with a basic shotgun and then the level designer decides when and where you get more powerful weapons, with escalating encounters to go along with it. Things feel authored, but when I die it’s because I over extended myself and rarely does it feel like a failing of the designer.
As a counterpoint, for all its good qualities, I’ve always felt the level design in Quake could never be fully meaningful because of the ambient possibility of quicksaving. To me, it makes 90s FPS levels feel more like “play spaces” than “game levels” despite being full of elements associated with the latter.
The difficulty of a gauntlet can be thought of as probability-of-failing-between-nearest-two-savepoints, so if you allow players to save at any time, you also put it under the player’s near-complete control exactly how much friction they are experiencing. It’s a pressure release valve that any level not explicitly labeled as “expected to be played from pistol start without saving” tends to implicitly rely on. Even if I avoid savescumming and try to guess at the natural, intended places to save, there’s still a lingering, narrative-undermining awareness that most of the friction is kinda fake and self-imposed.
I do like most other aspects of that era of shooters though. So my favorites are those that adapted the Quake formula to remove quicksaves, particularly Halo. The authentic feelings of despair and triumph I experienced playing difficult sections of Halo were revelatory for me.
ROLLERDROME is a lost 70’s Sci-Fi Dystopia movie that was discovered to actually be a nifty score challenge arena shooter instead, along with the personal revelation that Tony Hawks really just needed a pair of silenced pistols and some Tusken Raiders to keep the good times a-rollin’
There is a risk that the package is a slight affair (even for its budget pricing) but even a 30 minute session yields fresh pathways into the very slick murdersport simulator as promised by its trailer
I’m enjoying the new destiny 2 activities for the season. One is essentially a strike where you attack a pirate ship and take it over with 2 of 3 different activities each time and the other is escorting a treasure chest and throwing treasure into it as enemies try to disrupt your looting. I might be tired of it in four months but it is pretty fun so far.