working my way through Retronauts (great podcast), i discovered Gamecenter CX and Retro Game Challenge. i love the concept, working on the 4th challenge of the first game.
I am on the antepenultimate boss of Furi
(a game which I cannot look up on SB because this search keeps finding āfuriousā and āfatal furyā)
itās kind of a weird and cruel dynamic, that the learning curve somehow feels very front-loaded in terms of time to get to grips with things paired with potentially deleting oneās save in the middle of the game if the player prisoner cooperates at all with the corrections officer. which I grumbled about, because it feels mechanically like a trap than a choice and plying hard on tragedy-writing written in blood and fifty foot letters, but that wasnāt very hard to bounce back from . the later bosses all have their own extreme gimmicks, but of the eight bosses Iāve played here the first four took twice as long to get down than the fifth-to-eighth. Iām actually learning how to play this excessive and stressful action game! ā¦though it probably helps that thereās a decently-consistent attack vocabulary (all boss melee chains may be stupid fast and potentially variable but have the same sound cue and you heal from parrying, for example) and that the structure is actually quite accommodating (a stock-based system where one gets a life and a full heal after every boss stock really accommodates come-backs despite it being so easy to die very quick)
the voice acting isnāt variable enough (nor the cartoonish script strong enough) to support canned line banter during these really hard bosses, but Iām more snippy against people telling me constantly to ādieā and āgo backā than annoyed. Iām already dead and would never go back anyway, I suppose. thereās a few keen points- I appreciate the seventh guardianās twist more than the protagonistās innate twist, a time masterās final-attack line being āSeek joy in these last precious moments!ā, and the one time the boss corridor ends with a trap door. The sweeps of it all would work much better with less spoken lines to emphasize the each of them rather than constant taunts and repeated round-start rejoinders and boss corridor exposition, I think.
and also Iāve been streaming about half of my play to Robin; when the current boss of a master swordsman said
she said āAh, an explanation for how youāre so cuteā and then I couldnāt play for several minutes.
(said boss is kinda fascinating to me, as the very premise of āIām gonna do a 3-hit melee chain where each attack is 3/10ths of your health, and I can randomly extend or hesitate during it, have funā feels like cruel souls-parody nonsense. however, the countercombo from being interrupted every single boss before this had is substantially more managable and also actually valuable here; hiding a safe approach in that only feels reasonable because those seven previous bosses took me, like, 14 hours to beat.)
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Texture filtering is an appropriate term. Whether or not the texture is filtered in a separate rendering pass doesnāt change the fact that the underlying mathematical model at work is a spatial FIR filter (for most forms of interpolation).
Anyhow, tangentially related, Iām now trying to imagine a 3D game without any form of texture interpolation ā not even nearest-neighbor. What Iām imagining is that every (visible) texel would correspond to only one pixel onscreen, so any texture that youāre zoomed in on would be a like a grid of disconnected dots.
ā¦thereās gotta be a way to make this happen.
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Yeah, it shouldnāt be too hard to write a shader/sampler combo to do that. It seems analogous to how in real life, atoms are separated by great voids and held together by forces, so it might be interesting to represent molecular structures at a skewed scale so that you can see that with the naked eye.
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I tried revisiting the witness today to potentially finish the village with the idea of finally doing the challenge but Iāve forgotten too many of the internal rules and wasnāt having a great time
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Yeah a lot of them are really specific and arbitrary, I realized watching people play the game on Twitch I donāt really know how to re-solve some of the puzzles I was seeing. Maybe it would work better to start at the beginning and quickly blast through a lot of the puzzles you already solved?
I pretty much had to look up the different puzzle types to refresh myself, plus spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out where I āwasā. But I did successfully re-enter the necessary headspace.
I really enjoyed Furi andā¦ really wish that it would let me skip the walking parts on replays.
I got rather into it for a bit and played through it three or four times over the course of a few weeks, it really hit a sweet spot for me in terms of asking a decent bit from me but it being something I could actually deliver.
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I also think Furi is really really cool and need to beat the dlc boss still.
Child of Eden is so good! I love Rez, but I was never sure if it was too damn easy or if I was just good at it. Edenās additional defensive weapon has me constantly realizing that Iām in peril.
My thrift store Kinect didnāt come with the power cable but that should be coming in the mail any minute. Hyped to live the Minority Report life by both waving my arms around and being survailed in my own house.
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I did this when the iOS version came out and knocked out several lasers in one sitting.
I finally got back to playing The Observer after a 5 month break. It was surprisingly easy to get back into it! Being able to look at my case log to see what my goals are helped a lot. The sequence in the surgeonās apartment was a serious highlight.
Going from this rotting cyberpunk tenement hallway into this lush palatial apartment full of doctored renaissance paintings and analog devices was such a startling moment. The couches scuttling around on metal legs was a surprisingly effective spook. Loved the metaphorical representation of surgical disfigurement too, very Cronenbergian.
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Just finished Observer, after an almost unforgivable stealth maze sequence. The ending was OK, but not as cool as I was expecting. Kind of a rote take on the ending of Ghost in the Shell. I was hoping for something a lot weirder. But I shouldnāt be too surprised, this game is essentially a very well done collage of all the cyberpunk influences it wears on its sleeve.
I would definitely give this game my unqualified recommendation, though if you only have time for one cog-sci horror walking sim this year then Iād suggest SOMA first. This game has more interesting visuals, but SOMA has a more engaging and emotionally resonant concept and story.
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Did you try Layers of Fear? I enjoyed that game more than I did Observer. My favorite parts in Observer were the rapid flashes of imagery, not the things that you actually do as a player. I almost quit the game at that stealth segment.
One of the strengths of Layers of Fear for me is that however disorienting it gets, you generally arenāt punished for doing something āwrong.ā
People complained about the monster chase scenes in SOMA (so much so that they added a mode that makes the monsters harmless), but I consider them a valuable part of the game even when they get frustrating. Observer, on the other hand, might benefit from a mode like that.
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I agree that thereās some flabbiness in Observerās design that keeps it from being better than it is, but both the scope of the environments (the tenement is perfect for the amount of open-endedness and tension the game provides) and the sheer impressiveness of the environment modelling in and out of the dream worlds, even though itās something the eastern European games industry is widely regarded at being very good at due to economies of scale, make me forgive a lot
Very few entries in this genre do much for me in terms of playability but this one absolutely smokes the production design
Soma is still the better work but if you have a high end computer, Observer is really really worthwhile
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Nine whole hours of depression skyrim
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I played a lot of Resident Evil: Revelations over the weekend. I bought it for $5 a few years ago and never bothered to finish it until now. Its linear, episodic nature might not be very āREā, but itās definitely a really enjoyable action game. It being cut up into 20-minute chunks makes it a really great handheld experience. The shooting feels very satisfying, which really compliments the Raid Mode, which is its objective-based arcade mode. My main playthrough of the campaign took a total of 10 hours, and there was a lot of Stuff going on story-wise that I couldnāt make any sense of due to picking the game up after a several year hiatus. The final boss was really underwhelming. Unlike most enemies in the game, you canāt dodge his attacks. He does the typical video game boss thing of teleporting around the stage while creating illusions, and you have to pick out the real one (he spits purple gas from his mouth) and shoot him during the startup of his attack. It took a few deaths to actually understand the patterns, but once I did it turned into a game of Simon Says. Not very thrilling, considering the boss of the episode prior was a giant sea monster with parasitic tentacles creeping out of it, which you have to kill with rocket launchers that your buddy drops from a helicopter. Despite the unsatisfactory ending, though, I immediately started an NG+, because fuck, itās still a really satisfying action game.
Another game I picked up after a long break was Pushmo, which I noticed I had completed about 90% of the levels. Dunno why I never finished it back then, because I remember now that itās a lot of fun.
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Played 47 hours of Shadow of Chernobyl with that bugfix mod.
My favorite part was in Pripyat when I had to go to the abandoned hotel to pick up some old stuff. Ever since I was introduced to that scary mutant that pulls you to him and scorches your brain, I was always expecting to be put in a Mulholland Drive Winkieās scene type of situation when things got too quiet
My least favorite part was having to shoot thousands of soldiers in the head in tight corridors
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home sweet home
Should I go for the authentic launch era 3ds experience of cramming a console-grade game onto a tiny screen, or just get one of the ports?
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