bloodborne day whatever:
…
well, that escalated quickly.
1 Like
I can’t put my finger on what exactly makes Ibara Kuro so much more enjoyable than CAVE’s other shooters but I like how it takes a lot of what works in Yagawa and Ikeda’s school of thought and mashes them together. Even when credit feeding the fun weapon variety and ever-present ranking system gives it a nice sense of continued agency compared to their other games. It’d be nice if it was less moe but at least the somewhat bland visuals are complemented with a nice soundtrack.
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look, mirrors edge catalyst is great ok
u r ded
Playing Assassin’s Creed: Origins out of professional obligation and I realize they’ve drifted farther away from our Assassin’s clone.
Origins is a game almost entirely devoid of play; there’s a simple fort assault game refined in the Ubidungeons since Far Cry 2 but all the hooks and loops are so limp the game begs to be looked at more than engaged with. Its closest comparison is Witcher 3 (all open-world AAA games are comparing themselves to Witcher 3 at this point) but it’s Witcher 3 without roleplaying or monster hunting.
The passive tourist mode they announced is the clue to this game’s heart; they’ve toned down on the Dan-Brown-esque historical fantasy in favor of loads and loads of expensive environmental storytelling. Almost everything driving the player is watching the incidental behaviors of NPCs cooking, selling, processing, melding between the ancient Egypt of rural villages, the opulent Greek nobility, and the new military outposts of the Romans (if each of these civilizations was roughly a hundred times richer – seriously every third child must be a master artisan who bleeds gilding here).
So I’m enjoying feeling its atmosphere without doing much; gazing up at a collonade-lined road topped by statues, dominating the Egyptian ruins, you see the statement of power. You feel what you understand, the use of public works to impress culture in a pre-literate age. For creating an understanding of a historical mindset, it isn’t as encompassing as Witcher 3’s east European medieval setting, which literalizes folk beliefs as an understanding of trauma, but it is as engrossing as walking around Novigrad and truly feeling the scale of commerce and trade and human buzzing at this time. And again, they are much, much lighter on pop-history and so flat in storytelling but ‘don’t be stupid’ is as good as I can hope for here.
I keep saying feel because I think the virtue in the massively expensive tourism games is not in transmitting facts (god help us when they try) but in creating the pedestrian experience, in communicating the human experience at such a remove – even in the bits they get wrong, by having it laid out you can see how the pieces functioned.
Also has realistic bathhouse simulation; lots of dudes ogling other dudes
shocking true stories of back hair
the few servant girls (mostly native Egyptians catering to Greek clients) aren’t too happy about it
It’s just so nice to see people using artifacts as daily implements that I can forgive the casual opulence
16 Likes
I really wish AGTP would finish Laplace’s Demon or somebody would take the project over. It’s a pretty chill game, but the fan translation is fucked. But it’s been like, 16 years, so I don’t think it’s a priority. It’s a haunted house RPG, kind of like Sweet Home, but set in the fictional American town of Newcam (Nukem!).
Battles and stats always display this way.
i played a bunch of snes games today and had no fun with any of them. uh ohhhh
please elaborate. i am tempted to get it during the steam sale.
bought it too this holiday season
couldn’t get over how much less striking it looked. Why run when there’s
nowhere to go
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Gonner is pretty hot. It explains the absolute bare minimum. It delights and surprises, at least in the early going. I am rather taken with it.
Gideon’s been working on multiple projects as he sees fit for the last few years, including this, so who knows when it’ll be ready. I think he gets a lot of pressure put on him to churn these out. I recall him talking about how the coding in this game is what’s fucked, and it requires a shitload of work to turn into something usable.
the best tekken sets feel like incredible acid sex when you’re done with them
it’s like religious ecstasy. a fighter’s high. the feeling is only made more intense by how much depth the game has. two brains just had a moment together. what the hell… i’m on the verge of tears
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I played through all of Steamworld Dig 2 over the past couple of days and dang that thing is fun. I kinda wish it was twice or three times as long (but that’s mainly me being greedy, it feels like it ends a lil sooner than I’d like though, regarding the story pacing and potential map space). The level design is super great but I’d also play the heck out of some roguish templatey procedure-toy in this engine/world. What an exceedingly fun thing. Played it on Switch too, which it feels perfect for. Grab it in the sale for sure.
game idea: zachtronics like engineering game where you have to mod a particularly quirky and fucked up game to be translated
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Steamworld Heist is super great and a ten minute session is all I need for the day, and I’m very grateful for that
Has anyone else here played Fidel Dungeon Rescue? Very tightly designed rogue-like puzzle game that is sorta like The Witness meets Spelunkey. The game has a lot more to it than is initially apparent (like Spelunkey and The Witness, it’s best going in blind - the initial puzzle is figuring out how the game works and how to clear each enemy).
From what I can tell it got no press or attention anywhere, which is unfortunate. It’s fast and simple enough to be a relatively casual game but has enough depth in both gameplay and content for SBers to check out.
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i haven’t played the series since the first one but tourism mode has def piqued my interests. being able to explore a game world without having to deal with gameplay sounds thrilling to this old woman, honestly, esp if it has a good photo mode haha
It’s important that tourist mode allows me to still pet cats though
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Discovery Mode, as it’s officially called (I think), has been described as the game minus combat/questing plus some number of “guided tours” (a dozen or so?) at various locations that were set up with input from academics and Egyptologists. Pretty sure you can still pet cats but agree it would be gigantic misfire if you somehow couldn’t.
Michael Brough, AKA smestorp, AKA my favorite iOS game developer, has just released a new roguelike game called Cinco Paus!
Brough is studying Portuguese, and he decided to release this game in Portuguese for two reasons: to help him learn vocab, and to give his English-speaking audience the experience of learning one of his games through an unfamiliar language. I’m planning on studying Portuguese soon myself, so this is actually helping me pick up some vocab too. The title is really clever! It can translate to “five bucks” (the cost of the game) or “five sticks” (the number of wands you can use in the game)
The game is very cool! It takes the wand mechanics from Rogue and does a deep interrogation of them. You are a wizard in a labyrinth of monsters, and you are equipped with five wands. You don’t know what they do until you use them. Each wand has several possible effects, randomly chosen from a very long list. The meat of the game is in learning what your wands do, and figuring out how to use them to advance. Like his previous hit 868-HACK, there’s a surprising depth here, and it seems like there are very cleverly hidden secrets to discover.
Also, the sound design is really incredible. It’s a rare iOS game I actually want to listen to. Check this thing out!
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