time to leave them ALL BEHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIND
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Yeah, it really sucks how games used to let you toggle songs on and off in the soundtrack and, at least when that stopped racing games would have a dedicated âskip songâ button and now licensed soundtracks are worse (?) than they used to be and you just have to take it or play your own music.
Wow, I had a different read and thought Minit was incredible. The vibe felt very different than a Vlambeer joint to me; this was JW (Rami wasnât involved) and 3 other collaborators. It felt akin to else heart.break; a somewhat spare, autumnal take on Nintendo aesthetics.
Itâs in conversation with the melancholy and whimsy of Linkâs Awakening, and if that means something to you, I urge to to check it out. Even if you dislike it itâs cheap and short!
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Man, Inside
If youâd told me that a puzzle platformer could so seamlessly work in elements of Pikmin and QWOP I might not have believed you.
Genuinely surprised by how much better than Limbo this turned out to be â and I really liked that game! I eagerly await Playdeadâs next game.
Thanks for your warm reception of INSIDE. Since release, Playdead founder Arnt Jensen and the team have been working on the next adventure. pic.twitter.com/RfejnH39mR
â Playdead (@Playdead) January 20, 2017
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I guess I missed d-dog in MGSV which strikes me as a bit of a three korok seeds moment
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Thanks to the spoilerific trophies for Shenmue, I think I am about halfway through
Yeah it was probably easier to track across 3 discs.
I mean if you ask Rudie I will tell you exactly how far along and three cool things youâve missed.
I believe I just showed the mirror to Chen and now have to find out how to get to Hong Kong, and also found the missing kitten
I feel like I have missed a bunch of stuff, since there are big gaps in the notebook. The search for Charlie amounted to nothing since straight away I got the letter that kickstarted the next line of inquiry, and then Charlie attacked me in the street
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further on MGSV â either no one quite tried to impress upon me how much of what they were trying to do mechanically in 4 and Peace Walker actually worked out here, or I wasnât paying attention.
the level design and the enemy grouping are finally tight enough to make the overpowering of the tranq gun and the trivialization of CQC post-MGS3 actually feel fair, the monster hunter-ification of the mission design and the base building are neither too outsized nor too repetitive, and the general approach to the narrative and the open world and the options available from the gear menu all amount to a very sensibly built open world game with an above-average degree of simulation and a metal gear flavour (almost to the same extent that revengeance is a metal gear flavoured platinum game) rather than just a weird bastardization of metal gear solid, which is how Iâd characterize most of what they did from 2006-2014.
it takes like two hours to settle in between the not-great prologue and the still somewhat overbearing first mission but once youâre into the meat and potatoes itâs super playable, well beyond what I was conscious of.
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Hmm maybe one third.
Trying to fill the notebook is OCD madness that is near impossible and if there is a trophy for it I will scream.
also, having had the plot spoiled for me long ago, Iâll add that I think it does a very inoffensive job of filling in what is basically an irrelevant part of the seriesâ myth and chronology â the setting is well chosen and the small cast isnât misused â which further contributes to the sense of it being a really sound spinoff.
it also helps that they cleared the deck of all the Peace Walker characters in Ground Zeroes before chasing so many of the same themes here because it makes the story feel that much further removed from the weightier entries
Also (last post for now, I promise), itâs about the least enervating stealth game Iâve played in a long time and I havenât quite figured out how it accomplishes that. One of the many reasons I gave it a pass when it came out was because I was really sick of stealth action shooters at that time and especially how they can feel so tediously modal between good play and âbadâ play.
I donât think itâs quite a matter of MGSV being overly forgiving (though it is, and it only gets away with it because its checkpointing is relatively harsh, which balances out the setpieces perfectly) but it might have to do with the sheer number of variables in play at any one time. Any given shitshow is still highly, but not trivially, fixable, and it usually doesnât even bear on secondary outcomes (mission rank and other pickups) too much; itâs rare for a game like this to make savescumming (or checkpointscumming in this case) feel acceptable yet not at all necessary, and they pull it off.
anyway there are a lot of really good core design decisions in there that I had long since given up on them caring about and it feels like they mustâve gotten to iterate a ton to even get to the point where they can throw almost any combination of enemies and weapons into a level and have it be pretty compelling. Iâm glad @BustedAstromech framed his praise for it in a way that finally connected for me, because its release felt like such a bizarre unceremonious thing between all the ridiculous misogyny and the reports out of Konami but itâs so much fun!
On open stealth: I really appreciate them letting off the shackles of the true and narrow path of pacifism. Itâs like every single piece of this game has been examined under the lens of âopen worldâ and pushed out a bit further, and you get compounding player freedom. Even just running out into the bush if everything goes haywire feels a lot more right than it ever did in an earlier MGS.
I think itâs the first game to really crack stealth over wide-open spaces, too. Giving the player enough time to meaningfully make a reaction while not reducing the enemies to imbeciles is extremely tricky and it just feels so right here; Iâve been going over all the variables with a junior designer because this is The Game to copy for this right now, which Metal Gear Solid has never been. Generally, Thief has been far and away both more sophisticated and elegant than other stealth games, and MGS has stood at a simplified, arcadey (VR-arcadey?) end, but they hit a homerun in one this time.
God there totally was that Metal Gear VR Arcade game I remember nothing of.
I had no idea!
I was referencing the VR missions. They way theyâre set up in MGS 1 takes advantage of the simplistic/predictable stealth model to create something like 3D Pacman. And up through MGS 4 itâs more like itself than the rest of stealth games, and then it suddenly notices current best practices and adopts and betters them.
I probably didnât really understand most of what you said in that post, but they are indeed pretty epic. I second the idea that, to repost and bundle them up in a dedicated thread at some point, if the series continues. If anything, it conveys the intricacies and complexity of the strategies involved in nation building simulation.
Ps. your avatar reminds me of
Was watching (not playing, sorry) some of Midna Lightâs runs of Kaizo Mario Maker levels. No commentary, just skill at work, progressing through impossible levels, that would be absolute torture to any normal mortal. Shitâs insane.
(Anyone else likes the idea of a âWhat gaming did you WATCH todayâ thread?)
Iâm gonna share this one though, 'cause itâs edited for comic relief. Also gives you an idea of the freakish difficulty level.
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I have the urge to play Resident Evil 6. So if anyone wants to subject themselves to this game on PC for some coop, let me know
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Oh hey Macross Ace Frontier. A game I was mildly excited about, frightened by Japanese retail price, then forgot. I now remember you got really had reviews because you tried to piggy back off MonHun so you are a weird multiplayer title. Then you call yourself a collection of Macrossâs greatest hits and then uhh have me play as generic soldiers with generic navigators and the closest I get to the heroes is a display that says one ship is Roy Focker.
It did raise good memories of Robotech Battlecry. I uhhh was overjoyed to actually play Robotech and it looked great and played well enough and it had all the VAs. I honestly canât remember if it had the vocal songs or not. It did have giant missile explosions.
The missile explosions in Macross Ace Frontier fucking suck zero out of zero.
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