Games You Played Today Oratorio Tangram

I’m just messing with you. It’s a good take, imo.

Okay!

Going further down this good take then, I’m thinking my real problem is that Mary Sue characters are dull even when it’s a self-critical type like Evangelion’s Shinji. It’s unfortunate that for a while in videogames, devs were fooling themselves into thinking they were delivering the summit of videogame high art by leaning really hard into choice tree designs that baked in Mary Sueness at a deep level.

To bring back the discussion to Dark Souls (naturally), a really cool thing about its covenant and costume system is that it nudged players to perform various interesting roles which were not necessarily supposed to be “themselves”. When I invade somebody, at one level I am a psychopath, at a meta level I’m gamely delivering the experience of being chased by a psychopath and we both enjoy the scenario whether it ends in me slaying them or me getting my comeuppance. Videogames have a connection with theater that is just starting to be explored.

3 Likes

Always up for some games of Frozen Synapse if you end up trying it @dongle : )

1 Like

I tend to think of player and designer as accomplices, and possibly co-conspirators. There’s a wide room of space to play in if you can get the player to cooperate, but you should be very careful about trying to judge the player for the role you have placed them in.

7 Likes

I think the “bad end” could have been perfect if it were the only one. I was impressed by the fact that I called its bluff and yet it never reached the point of needing to recycle text. It engaged me in a staring contest and it won!

I appreciated on a mechanical level that you had to think somewhat outside the (dialogue) box to get past this ending. A few of the other little gotchas went a long way to making me overlook the otherwise botched attempt at critical distance from the tropes it employed. That being said I didn’t stick around for a second cycle of playthroughs so maybe that would have spoiled my positive impression.

(edited for a shameful misplaced apostrophe, and then for a typo in this edit note because I’m a boob)

1 Like

SB rules.

2 Likes

ok so about 8 hours into Grim Dawn, 2 player co-op:

The difficulty has finally ramped up to a pretty decent level. boss fights, in particular, have been challenging in the last two hours.

However, both of us are not using the game to its fullest, in order to do full damage. We have done very little item augmentation and/or crafting. I only just starting putting points into the constellations, at about hour 5. So what I’m saying is, the difficulty curve could probably still use some tweaking.

Also, yeah, there is a staggering amount of stuff to tweak in this game. Its…kinda dumb. I mean, I get it that people want this nowadays I guess. But it’s not great for co-op. Your choice is to either stop frequently and spend several minutes looking at and clicking on things and crunching numbers. or as we have done…ignore half of it and miss out on part of the game. I wonder if that Dungeion Siege 3 game which got shit on a lot for not being “enough” is maybe actually a good co-op game. Because it doesn’t have/expect you to craft and spend a lot of time in menus.

And while Grim Dawn is a solid game overall----I’m reminded of why I haven’t played a Diablo style game in a long time: They are kinda boring. and this game does little to mix it up or add surprises to the game style.

I feel like there is an obvious hybrid game to be made, which combines soulsbourne, musou, and diablo. and it would probably be a GOTY contender.

1 Like

Yo @ me or hit me up on Steam when y’all plan to play Siege. If I get time I’ll try to learn something about this game before we play???

I finally started playing SUPERHOT but I’m finding it to get pretty repetitive quite quickly. The story seems cute but is mostly seems there just to make you think you’re not just randomly killing red dudes. I just got the body switching mechanic which I’m not really feeling at all. Eh.

Yeah Twitch just gave out Superhot but I feel like it’ll just be a bummer in its non VR from.

I thought normal Superhot was great fun but I don’t know if I can go back now that I have sucked from the VR teat.

btw did you know I’m incredibly bad with money and also superhot VR is much more challenging in a small room w/ a narrow stretch of free floor available between a bed and a desk as compared to say playing it in a yurt (on a system that gives you a handy blue boundary ring to tell you where you shouldn’t walk/swing (provided you don’t get too into it and forget about the ring and punch some @anothersphere in their cup))???

12 Likes

I’ve got a great solution for both those problems. Sell all your furniture.

9 Likes

Should i spend the extra money to get the standard edition over the starter edition?

everyone says yes but I didn’t

starter edition you start with 2 random characters + you can pick two more + it takes you as long to unlock a fifth as it would take to unlock all 20 in the regular game

Either choice is fine. If you just want to dip your toes in, the starter edition gives you a full experience. The bummer is that buying your way out of the starter edition is something like an extra $30. On sale right now, the regular edition is $24.

A group of IRL friends play so I figured I’d get ~60 hours out of it over the course of a few months and went with the regular edition.

what a deal!

1 Like

Yeah, I paid the extra money. The starter version sounded hellish and my income is more disposable than my patience in this case.

Yeah, I will go with the regular edition when I have a chance. I probably won’t get much playtime in until after Christmas due to visiting parents etc

can’t wait to really have earned that fifth character

2 Likes

what does buying the dlc do, just make unlocking the newer characters doable