it’s fun to give opinion using objective language if your audience knows what’s up and you can use that to communicate differences between opinions you feel you can argue strongly and those you’re less committed to defending
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I have neither the energy nor the desire to engage with deflection tactics. All I’ll saying is that I feel like conflation of facts and opinions has become a bit of a thing around here lately.
things gettin’ a little too nedgey, 's all I’m sayin
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Well, The Last of Us feels “like a movie” more than any other game ever made and that is clearly what they were going for. It’s very natural for a game pushing the limits of mocap, cinematography, lighting, all in the spirit of emulating Oscar-winning prestige dramas, to also follow the conventional screenwriting beats. But this being an effective script strategy is deceptively narrow to the specific thing they’re doing (which is blissfully rare nowadays), and I don’t think they should necessarily be going around recommending it to other studios…
I may not watch enough modern movies or maybe narrative distended of a dozen hours of gameplay gives me time to unpack but movies rarely feel as predictable as Naughty Dog scripts and follow-ons like God of War. And I hate it! I hate seeing the game fall into the ‘strained relationship’ level and knowing why the thunder is booming and knowing I have to wait through twenty minutes of dialogue and level to resolve the beat. I hate having a dozen lines of dialogue for every state and that every line is perfectly polished (read: workshopped to death).
At least God of War could fall back on a surly joke of not talking fairly often.
I’m not willing to say it’s categorically bad but I have a feeling this mode will feel embarrassing in twenty years the way BioWare games feel now.
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I finished Wolfenstein: The New Colossus earlier today and… thank god it ended when it did. The final battle was almost exactly the very limit of what I could actually handle, I probably died a few dozen times and that was even with half of those attempts coming after I made a manual save halfway through a good run.
The story was pretty snazzy if undeniably feeling like it was missing a chapter near the end. There is a whole big run up to stealing the massive flying fortress of doom, and then you jump straight to the ending which never even teases it mattering in the least. To be fair the story is often sloppy in this regard you literally detonate a nuke over a likely still somewhat populated city to get your metaphorical tires to no longer be stuck in the mud and probably could have used another pass, but it is forgiven as it has an absolutely amazing… let’s call it cameo in the penultimate level.
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Naughty Dog games have always given me a “TNT Original Movie” vibe.
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My phrase was always, “USA Network Original”
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to be fair I was thinking that in darker days when Assassin’s Creed II features its hacker’s den and I knew immediately that games were now hiring TV writers, but they were CSI writers at best and oh god we were worse off
Shit, no, you’re right, I was also thinking of the USA Network.
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Playing one level of NOOM a day is perfect.
SO GOOD
unfortunately their combat pace doesn’t sit well with hour-long+ levels and in a way I don’t think they anticipated, but
SO GOOD COMBAT
and that’s all I need and I’ll wave that flag till I die, the most important shooter mechanics rethink in a decade or more
And about the cutest story you could ask for.
I like NuGod of War but god there is no game on this planet that is going to age worse than that one.
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Hollow knight is very polished and is filled with cute bugs but i wish the narrative design wasn’t just beat for beat dark souls.
the last boss is artorias
all the examples of parasitism and shit in the bug world and youre really gonna go with glowing orange explodey corruption goop?
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Rings hollow, doesn’t it?
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I agree that Hallow Knight rocks very direct thematic and mechanical similarities to Dark Souls. But somehow the format and presentation is different enough that it doesn’t feel like Dark Souls to me.
The massive size of the map and the difficulty impresses me. I expected this to play more like a GBA/DS Castlevania that I could methodically and almost passively plough through in ~10 hours, but I’ve been playing Hollow Knight for 12 actively engaged hours, and I’ve only seen a few of its areas so far. I like playing through this game knowing almost nothing about it. The game surprises me a lot. It’s good at evoking a labyrinthine cave for its setting. Exploration and event triggers seem somewhat open ended. The world feels cohesive and lively. The NPCs convincingly inhabit their corners of the cave, or their journeys feel parallel to my own. I’ve come across several difficult boss battles that I’ve disengaged from. They seem to have little bearing on my progress. I’ve made headway in areas I probably shouldn’t be visiting yet.
Actually, I guess I’m describing a Souls. But I think it must be the platforming and the abilities related to platforming that set the tone aside from Souls. That is different enough that I don’t feel like I’m retreading familiar ground. Anyhow, I’m having a great time–this game feels worthwhile.
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I spent some time troubleshooting my outdated machine’s Steam streaming performance and had a little baby breakthrough after realizing I could re-enable the Intel iGPU in the bios, connect one of my monitors to it and then have Steam use it just for hardware video encoding instead of trying and failing to use the very outdated ATI card I have in there.
Should be good enough for now until upgrading to a newer ATI now that CRT_emudriver has supported the more modern models (and Windows 10, a project for another day) for a couple years now.
It’s running acceptable for adventure-y stuff but I think next I will either try to experiment with powerline ethernet adapters, upgrading to a wireless AC from the N card currently installed, or trying to run like 100 feet of ethernet cable along the ceiling with staples?
I wonder if you could get a hack-y workaround with a dummy hdmi plug or software to spoof an additional monitor, if you’ve got a free port, and set big picture mode to output to it. It’ll still takeover as primary, which I guess is kind of a necessary evil with how most pc games don’t handle multiple monitors well, and would prob. be annoying to try to do desktop stuff while it was running.
I just got the Steam Link in today, as well, and it lets me control the menus with the dpad on the DS4 I have hooked up, and I think I was also able to control big picture on the host with its keyboard (though didn’t try controlling from a gamepad on both ends) while streaming.
I also booted up the GeForce Now beta again, for a few minutes, on my wife’s Macbook Air and that thing is still amazing to me, it works very well; I could see paying for this if I had real interest in contemporary big graphics games. I stumbled onto the fact that, contrary to what they advertise, you can seemingly install anything you own on Steam onto their virtual machine - not just the stuff they have listed in their client. Tried the FF15 demo and SF4, runs noticeably better than Steam streaming over wifi.
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pokemon quest is somehow my favorite pokemon game of recent memory
I just want to be able to do more things with my pokemon in a mainline game but as far as pokemon-where-90%-of-the-systems-are-combat-oriented games go this is not bad!
just let me watch my little friends beat up other pokemon I don’t really need input on it
and then they hang out at my home base that’s fun
Can’t wait for this to come out on some hardware I actually have. Too bad its 6 months.