I just find it hilarious how often what people call “meta” is just “playing the game”.
Yeah I’m META
M
E
T
Akillallnazis.exe
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Nex Machina does a pretty good job of capturing the feel of Robotron 2084 and Smash TV. I was afraid it would get too visually confusing, but it manages to avoid that, generally. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes this sort of game.
Went to a bar and played Pinball with some friends last night. Not a vidcon but Mideval Madness is a dope ass game and still one of the best pins in my humble opinion.
Played more OverWatch as well. I am starting to get into the groove but I feel games either go two ways; A fun time is had or I die every two seconds. I am terrible at FPS’s by the way.
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I like how SOMA has european-style power strips despite having done their research as far as using north america plugs
they got close!!
also the toronto subway isn’t anywhere near that dirty
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You can’t expect to scare people in a realistic Toronto, though.
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so, now that I’m playing soma, observer feels like even more of a direct response to it.
this is good! but play observer y’all
observer should be half as long as it is
mindjack? more like MINDJACKOFF!
this is an oversimplification though; my specific complaint about overwatch is that too much of the game is in “the knowledge”. it’s a little like baseball relative to other sports; the entire team is expected to perform this weird clockwork dance more or less sufficiently, and it’s only in the macro of the stats and the strengths and weaknesses of the matchups that it actually becomes interesting.
really? I loved almost every minute of it, felt like it was a nicely-sized adventure. some of the mumblemumble sequences are about 20% too padded at times, maybe, but that’s about my only length complaint
I found the mindjack sequences incredibly tedious by about the halfway mark.
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the imagery though
- that’s almost every team sport
- Overwatch isn’t actually that complicated and is largely reliant on simple counterpicking/synergy for team composition, hence why you can change mid-game (instead of locking in, which its MOBA-esque roots would imply) and why the game isn’t F2P (according to Blizzard)
- said counterpicks and synergies aren’t that hard to suss out organically
- none of this is actually relevant unless you venture into ranked (a mode you can’t get into without having dumped 10-15+ hours anyway, so both Blizzard and I would hope you would have learned something during that time and if you didn’t, well, that’s why skill rating starts at 1)
- off-meta/weird/less efficient picks/comps are totally viable if you’re that good and/or can read the situation (man let me tell you those Koreans are fucking crazy)
even with the changes made to balance, competitive mode rule sets, the addition of new heroes (I hear Doomfist gave dive meta a good fist to the ass) and the different compositions that are viable in control point maps, those points are pretty constant and even in the higher echelons of ranked play, people still do a lot of whatever the hell they want and still win and a lot of hating the meta is more or less hating either the ill-informed and stupid (as invoked above) or the top 1% of play (pro matches)
which, funnily enough, also applies to pretty much anything people play competitively
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also, why the hell aren’t any of you comparing OW to Splatoon, a game with nearly identical gameflow and game modes
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Bridge Crew got a patch that adds excellent voice commands for AI characters. You can now roleplay all by your lonesome. It’s thin in terms of interactivity, but I’m looking forward to goofing off in online multiplayer.
It’s odd having a non-generic body simulated in VR - the captain I played had her legs crossed in the captains chair and it was weird that I couldn’t rest my virtual hands on my leg when my real hands were. Lots of neat experiments with gender in VR to be had.
splatoon is better than everything
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I really disliked the mindjacks in Observer; found the symbolism thudding, obvious. They had so many ideas they flew past in easily-explainable blips rather than lingering on mysteries (they take enough cues from Eraserhead that they should have understood the power of mundane transformed into unsettling through long slow attention better).
I think they structured the mindjacks in a way that forced them to serve as narratives of the person’s life, which ruined the ineffable dream potential; if players were forced to piece the life together from the environment before the mindjack, or these jacks focused on a single character over time, they could more subtly suggest interior clues to that person, instead of focus-testing to make sure everyone understood that yes, this person performed these plot functions and yes, they felt that they had never-ending laundry to wash because work was, like, stressful.
I’d still recommend it for the early atmosphere, but the biohorror near the end overrode the cyberpunk feel from the beginning.
I like playing as an old guy born around this time and his grandpa prejudices: “Gene splicing. Like we haven’t fucked ourselves up enough already.” Some people just wanna be furries okay dad?
i’d probably compare splatoon to overwatch if i ever owned a wii u or a switch
tbh i think i’d like it a lot, too
but i never did and i don’t
so overwatch rules
I went to PAX the other day and interacted with some game-like objects.
[details=Random notes re: the free play arcade/console games on the floor]
Crystal Castles is a weird trackball-controlled fever dream of a Pac Man clone with an off-kilter perspective and an exhilarating sense of speed. Under no circumstances should you play it without the trackball.
In Donkey Kong Jr. (arcade) moving sideways on vines feels much more sluggish than the NES version. This really throws off my groove, but on the other hand it makes the game actually challenging. More importantly however, there are two Marios in the opening cutscene. I demand an in-depth lore justification, Miyamoto.
Shinobi (arcade) is good, as is Panzer Dragoon for the Saturn.[/details]
[details=Regarding current-ish/upcoming stuff]
UFO 50 has a game that controls how you’d expect a side-scrolling golf game to play, except that it’s a platformer where you play as a walrus. There is also an alien horserace-betting game, and a platformer where you have to die to provide platforms for your next life. (It’s going to be a good multicart is what I’m saying.)
Duck Game is a really twitchy one-hit-is-death platform fighter/shooter (i.e. the ideal party game). Rivals of Aether is literally just Smash Bros minus the fanservice – like, they literally had four GC controllers hooked up to play it. (Apparently both games were released years ago?)
Skate of Emergency follows the Skate or Die 2 pedigree of being a skateboarding game that has barely anything to do with skateboarding as a sport. Kill off waves of zombie things, on a skateboard.
Dead Static Drive was a Route 66/cthonic horror survival game thing with a nice low-poly look. Unfortunately, the demo build had a UI bug that kept the first objective on-screen at all times (making things more obtuse than intended, I’d bet). I feel sorry for the dev who was shoulder-watching me, because he looked nervous as all heck (gamedev is hard).
And there was an Axiom Verge booth that served to remind me that I still haven’t bought Axiom Verge.[/details]
vidcons can be fun
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