Y’all these great posts starting with catamites’ would be great fodder for THE PLAYSTATION 1 SOCIETY thread in Output land
This is a fun idea which I ran with and took far too seriously for my own good:
The police in RE2 are typically represented with an air of classical heroic stoicism in the games’ files. Leon diligently attempts to rescue the other survivors, despite both Claire and Ada being more than capable of handling themselves.
Chief Irons is an interesting exception. He adorns the police station with hyper-masculine, chauvinistic, speciesist tat; mounted taxidermy, a portrait of a nude woman being hanged etc. He is portrayed foremost as a narcissist and a pervert.
He is abusive towards his secretary, as noted in her diary. In the original Japanese version, the final entry hints at her murder by his hands. He is infatuated by the mayors daughter, their are even undertones of necrophilia in one particular scene.
ACAB (even Leon).
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I’ve been playing ECHO, a high concept stealth game released last year.
Main menu :
Protagonist:
Exploration:
There is only one enemy type: Clones of the main character, that copy the player’s behavior. You see a bunch of clones behind doors, you open a door to get to an exit, next phase they all know how to open doors, you run away, oh no they know how to run now, etc.
Before that, there’s like one hour of linear slow walking, with an interesting weird trick: the game sprawls similarly in every direction and gives the sense of a massive scale. Like, you can go right or left, the paths will never connect, but on each side you’ll find the exact same thing
I can’t actually stand playing the game because the gameplay is so far from what I like, but I still sort of love it
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The gameplay does switch up but it is a game that requires patience, even though you don’t need to be constantly on the avoidance once you’ve got a sense of the loops down and how to exploit and play around with them.
Also the final gameplay element reveal near the end is a pretty singular horror instance.
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weapon and health cheats for tr2 sounds pretty good honestly. might try to skip that speedboat level as well. fillet this sucker. the guns in tomb raider are so funny to me since there seems like no reason the first one wouldn’t just have some kind of generic “attack” but instead you have all these very flamboyant john woo dives and flips and things. and you’re shooting dogs and birds! honestly i wonder if the whole reason those games became more combat focused was because they had all these dual wielding pistol jumps in the first game and they were unwilling to either strip out or leave undeveloped such a prominent part of the game’s look and so inadvertently doomed themselves to having to build in very fussy shootout sections forevermore. curse of the haunted gun animation.
@woudww i still haven’t played much of it but honestly the transition from the pastiche-scuzzy “big city” of the first areas to the white, empty marble cathedral lobby of the “police station” was so striking and so charged that i couldn’t help wondering just what was being conveyed. like, no doubt prior experience in structuring these games within very large fancy puzzle mansions had something to do with it. but making the haunted house into a police station and giving it architecturally a kind of frozen, grandiose monumentalism and classiness out of sync with anything outside felt itself like a kind of statement, as if this was the exaggerated horror representation of “police-ness” in the same way that the ransacked gun shops and burnt cars outside were the exaggerated horror form of “big city-ness”. i still have to play more though.
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this was my perception of it from previews too but I’m glad that at least someone bought it to be impressed by it in spite of that!
King’s Field 4 completely rips so far (up to the mines) but now i’m wondering why the hell Head Eaters don’t appear in any of the Souls games. And people call them spiritual successors! Harumph!!
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My only beef with FF 15 so far is the similarity to Witcher 3 as far as levelling up and main quest difficulty. Like, I go off and do a bunch of hunts and sidequests but when I get back to the main quest it’s trivially easy.
I get that the devs wanted to make it so you could just blow through the story and not necessarily have to do anything else but still
i’ll have to pick your brain about your experience when you’re done over in the fatigued souls thread
i have a lot of impressionistic thoughts about KF4 i’d like to revisit and suss out
With the old Resident Evil games, I too was not really interested in dealing with the controls. I am totally down to feel claustrophobic from being boxed in with limited resources------from good game design around good controls. Not a game design based on the shortcomings of junk controls. Anytime it asks you to shoot upward, I feel like the game is smacking me in the face and laughing.
Fore the pre-rendered background Resident Evil games, I would always use a gameshark pro cheat code, for infinite ammo. Then I could just mow down all the molasses zombies and still see the cool stuff that there is. And indeed, I like the tone of the later half of RE2.
As far as RE1 goes: you should probably play some version of REmake (remake of Resident Evil 1).
i finished all the online stuff for gravity rush 2, so decided i should also finish the final chapter. what a drag 
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ECHO is good. It’s slightly underpolished given how unforgiving it can be – you’ll have to eat some “cheap” deaths where your character gets stuck on eg some ankle-height object while running away – but the art direction is fantastic and every element of it is extremely tasteful. As a fellow Hitman fan, I think you’ll enjoy it; you can tell that it was made by ex-IO folks.
I went to my local game store and bought Golden Sun: The Lost Age, thinking it was the original Golden Sun (the cartridges look very similar and the subtitle text is tiny)
Since it’s a direct sequel that takes place immediately when the last game left off, I have no damn idea what’s going on, but I definitely love this battle system.
I also love the mind reading spell and how you can use it in the overworld on anything, even animals.
It also has the best first enemy I’ve ever encountered in an RPG: PUNCH ANT
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I enjoyed Golden Sun while playing them but can’t say it left much of an impact on me. Camelot’s intentionally-plastic art and character design bounced off me to an extent that I was lost in the plot by the time the second game came out.
I’m very fond of the dirty, pixelated spell effects in the battles, though. They have no shame in layering on giant transparent/additive spell particles and it’s impactful rather than clean; the best trade-off for the Game Boy Advance and its fuzzy sound and rough screen.
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the first game is also like aggressively by-the-numbers (to a pleasing extent, for the most part, if you’re into block puzzles and four elements and that sort of thing) and the second is considerably weirder and longer. also you can import your save from the first into the second to get access to your original characters at the end of the game when the two parties meet up and you get to make the best job classes if you have all 56 djinn by then or whatever!
imo they’re pretty good but almost totally unremarkable other than as very polished, rote jRPGs when those couldn’t be taken for granted on the GBA (there’s still a tiny bit of the lingering shining force aesthetic but you’d have to be pretty into it to care). camelot was one of those studios that did pretty reliable work for nintendo during the GBA/GC era when EAD themselves were not great, and like a lot of those other studios (like intelligent systems or R&D1 or HAL or retro or amusement vision) they were either dissolved or got a lot more facile with the Wii/DS generation
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the beginning 40 fathoms in Tomb Raider 2 used to freak me out so much.
I fucking love Tomb Raider 1 and Tomb Raider 2, as well as the other Core sequels. I played and finished TR1 a few years ago and I was absolutely mesmerized and awestruck by the atmosphere.
Also the controls are perfect, the physicality of climbing and moving around is somewhat exaggerated, but it’s just so satisfyingly weighty.
Knowing that we’ll probably never get even a spiritual sequel to these games is just so fucking painful.
It hurts.
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the only camelot games I’d played before were their portable sports games, and it’s kind of incredible how identical this game’s aesthetic is to Mario Golf: Advance Tour
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aggressors of dark kombat is a really fun and interesting game, and it’s a shame the “beat em up boss fight fighting game” idea never really got revisited.
some of the move inputs are absurd though
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current mood
i don’t care what anyone says it’s still the best igavania
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