Games You Played Today IV: Quest of the Avatar

[hellojed]

Uninstalling the Digital Hog Slop known as fortnite, freeing up several gigabytes of space on my hardrive and more hours in my life to play something that is not a cosmetics roulette machine masquerading as a 3rd person shooter.

It’s competent at what it does, which is handle 100 people in a large open arena and be a 3rd person shooter that doesn’t feel terrible. It also advertises and upsells cosmetics everywhere.

I hate the design of most of the skins, the designs of the cars, the buildings, even the trees. It’s weird that the only thing in the game not a cartoonish caricature are the guns. You know what those fuckers do, why mess with success.

This is the perfect time for this era: an endless grind of ennui and cynicism. This is taking rips off a gas-station pickle rick bong filled with $100 designer weed. This game is the perverted dream of every advertising executive that ever lived, every single IP in the known universe killing each other over and over again. It’s going to live forever like coke bottles in a landfill will live forever.

[Tuxedo]

@tacotaskforce

I briefly looked at Sherlock Year One because one of the achievements tricked me into believing that it had interior decorating, and it has an open world, crafting, and skill trees, and even a little bit of combat. I don’t get why all modern Sherlock adaptations are so enchanted with the aspect of him being a boxer.

What the hell. I just assumed the Sherlock Holmes games didn’t have crafting because that just sounded too much like a parody

[LaurelSoup]

How’s the squad aspect work? Are there like 20 teams of 5? That sounds a bit cooler than the 50 Vs 50 mode I played a million years ago

[physical]

i don’t really disagree with any of this criticism, the game is aesthetically repugnant and it’s blatantly designed to get 10 yr olds to annoy their parents for another vbucks card

the reaction here to people playing this is perplexing and funny to me because i’ve been saying from the go that i only think it’s good because nobody else is bothering to do an accessible emergent chaos hangout shooter rn. it’s a fluke that like, halo is in the hands of clowns who can’t ship a co-op mode and only care about the pros in their backwater esport and most other popular shooters atm are extremely sweaty

[isfet]

i can’t judge anyone for playing Fortnite because yesterday this arrived

it took about 20 mins for me to hook it up to my Genesis model 1 - those metal clips stumped me for a little while. unfortunately, after turning it on, the display had a distinctively-green tint to it. at first i thought maybe that’s just how Doom 32X looked, but no, it was pervasive with all games. so as always, that began the fun game of “has anyone on the internet written about this?”

some people have, but not many. most have no conclusions to their inquiries, but the hints i did receive indicated that it was either the board or one of the connector cables.

so to elaborate on that, the 32X has a lot of components: metal plates, plastic spacers, video cables, etc. one of the video cables connects the video out of the Genesis to a video in on the 32X, but if you have a model 1, there is an extra adapter cable that is needed.

luckily, i’m a psycho and also have a model 2 Genesis

(this is the one i grew up with, actually) and so i switched the 32X over to that one and, like magic, it works - no green tint.

i’d prefer to have this attached to the model 1 for reasons, and it looks like someone in the UK makes and sells new cables (that also include a stereo-out cable!!!), so i am tempted to try to do that at some point. but also, there’s something iconic about all of the Genesis pieces fitted together, like above. so we’ll see.

also, this rules

edit: oh, so yeah i played some games on it, too. mostly just samplings, for now, so i’ll hold off on posting about them until i spend at least 30 mins with each.

that said, great Space Harrier port

[moneygp]

I started playing AoE2 campaigns because I’ve been watching a lot of pro Age while working and hoo boy it’s fun to make my guys run at the other guys but I also became very quickly disillusioned with the idea of playing PVP in that game. There is a lot of active multitasking that I cannot handle in the slightest. I’ll have to continue scratching that competitive itch in the easy genre, fighting games.

[HOBO]

We’ve been playing no build mode. It’s for 100 players. Max number of players per squad is 4. We usually have too many people to fit in one squad so we just rotate in and out. I guess we could just split off into separate squads but watching has been pretty fun on its own, shit gets very chaotic and stupid and there are so many toys to to mash together – and by that I mean actual things you can do – that it continually feels somewhat novel.

[LaurelSoup]

That actually sound kind of cool if everyone is doing their thing in the voice discord too.

[HOBO]

Like, nearly everyone who’s watched me/someone else stream over the last 2 weeks has gone “Wait, you can do what?” again and again and again, there’s a constant stream of novelty, it is a game that’s frequently legit funny, it is ridiculous to dismiss it as simply a third person shooter because it is definitely not that, which isn’t really something that deserves praise as the company has more money than God and I have zero interest in actually discussing its positives at any length because it feels like doing an ad for the worst thing in the world, some real gross poptimism bullshit.

But it’s one of the few games I’ve played where I’m more interested in seeing what kind of wacky mischief I can get up to than making every other player else eat shit and die so that’s nice, very fresh experience to play a competitive game with strangers that never angries up my blood, that’s a real accomplishment

[tibyz]

the pvp in age of empires games is weird becuase they’ve alwaws lent themselves more to a “softer” experience of playing sim city-style with your buddies – no rush — or doing co-op campaigns / matches against the AI.

the moment you start being pressed to go through the ages in between 5, 10 minutes of each then the curve gets a bit too steep. i think since people have been playing against each other for twenty years, the more competitive scene became kind of a focal point for the definitive edition. it’s understandable because it’s so fun to watch but also makes me go “oh well, but that’s not really the same game i play”

[captainlove]

Finished Anodyne 2 and despite a slightly weak ending (I stood up to the Centre) I think it is very strong overall. The bulk of the game having been made by only 2 people really comes across. Easter eggs about the game’s development can be unlocked but rather than doing this at the end, they are unlocked throughout and just put in the world as you go. The creator’s names and hands can be felt everywhere this happens and I mostly found it charming.

They push the idea that the meta-textual reality of the game’s development is a fun extension of its themes. It works out largely because few games attempt this and the devs are completely without pretension. They are wholly honest in a way that a desire for clout, or a subjugation to NDAs, prevents. Motherhood ends up the big idea throughout and I liked that this echoed through to the meta-level too.

Because there’s no distinction between game, developer’s commentary, or other notes on said game, it feels more personally transparent about game creation than anything else I’ve seen try this (The Beginner’s Guide for example). It doesn’t really detract from playing the game either. The commentary and prototype levels don’t destroy the fiction as some devs might instinctively feel. Devs either bury this behind an unlockable concept/model gallery with no names attached or completely smother the notion that a group of humans made their game under a pile of logos. Anodyne 2 deepens the connection with the people behind it. A good case for the conditions of the art’s creation as worth weaving through the resulting art itself.

The last two worlds preceding the end were probably the most ambitious. One a Zelda parody laced with anti-cop sentiment, the other a treatment of the afterlife. Felt like a neat touch that there was no dust to clear in the afterlife, everyone just comes to accept their fate so there’s nothing really to clean. I think the end is just weak because the final level is an incredibly fiddly end level that introduces a boomerang enemy you must lure to hit multiple switches. I nearly had to quit since this was becoming a bit too much finger dancing for me, but I persisted out of goodwill for the game and because I got lucky with some puzzles. The whole playthrough felt like talking through your problems with a friend only to find that you had exactly the same problems, and then you sit down to watch a life-affirming behind-the-scenes documentary. Soothing.

More moody but spoilery screens

[ticky]

enjoyed the mock splatfest, will probably pony up the 80 bucks to play the full game

[scratchmonkey]

Bachi, have you caught a shark with a fishing rod yet?

[HOBO]

miffy fished up a shark the other night and I thought she was kidding about the waterskis but then I did it last night and it was true, you do sprout waterskis if you fish up a shark, sorry for doubting you miffy, I thought it was just a figure of speech

[skelephone]

Finished Cult of the Lamb which I did not expect I’d do. Says a lot about that game that I have so many complaints about it but finished it nonetheless. Wish to god it was just a village sim and not an ARPG!

The game has about 10-12 hours of village sim in it I’d guess, and after that it just kind of craps out and start giving you huge quantities of gold, as if it’s saying “okay, okay! You win!! Chill the fuck out!!” Unfortunately it’s easy to run out of things to buy with said gold so you just end up with a highly optimized village generating tons of resources you cannot use, not even for the dungeon runs.

I can understand why they needed to have dungeons and roguelike shit in this game to sell it and get funding and give the player objectives to chase with the village sim, but when I look deep into my soul I wish this game was just a fucked up don’t starve/animal crossing hybrid with 2 to 5x the amount of village sim runway in it.

If you want to play something that is interestingly flawed and highly polished, I’d recommend it. This game is a better example of of a “how do you balance your game’s gameplay pillars properly???” problem than most other games I’ve seen, probably because it fails to balance them IMO

[spacetown]

@skelephone

Wish to god it was just a village sim and not an ARPG!

this is my qualm with so many of these kinds of games

[tacotaskforce]

The primary complaint I’ve seen about it is that you can’t play it for 400 hours like Binding of Isaac, so I guess no one’s happy about the game!

[parker]

it doesn’t have crafting or skill trees, unless you mean crafting an elephant seduction device

[falsedan]

@skelephone

Wish to god it was just a village sim and not an ARPG!

opposite for me, once I saw the field of rocks and trees and bushes I thought, ah Stacklands was fun

[skelephone]

yeah if the combat had measured up to any game it was pretending to be like I might have ended up feeling this way too. but the game was trying really hard to look like Binding of Isaac, which it’s much less satisfying than, combat-wise… while also not really measuring up with the ARPG combat either. Several of the weapon attack patterns are very frustrating, and you have so little agency over which weapon you get that starting a big run and getting the hammer or the gauntlets made me think “ahh dang, should I just die and restart”