Lies
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I never passed up a chance to play this in the arcade as a kid. But it was only in the C64 version that I had no competition and was therefore able to get the high score so that my initials would be in the first level.
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yeah, there definitely seemed to be a fair bit that was in there because the environment modelers wanted it or because they could. I agree they couldâve done more with them narratively, but I never really got tired of the shifting imagery or of the hotel as a lived in space, so it was still very successfully as a pure visual work â and not only that â for me. even the laundry bit you mention awed me.
for narrative weirdness and quality of writing it has to compete with nier and torment this year, which is not a small feat. for visual design thoughâŚ
i played the beginning of romancing saga 2 again
this is probably going to lead to a âlets playâ thread in the near future, i really want to talk about some of the bizarre mechanics in this thing
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I beat horizon zero dawn!!! WOO HOO.
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My sister let me borrow her switch and I remembered that I had Linkâs exact haircut for a bit.
Thatâs a really good haircut
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i still try and play overwatch sometimes but itâs harder and harder for me to keep up with whatâs going on, and there are so many jerks
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i set up DOSBox on my partnerâs laptop so they can play Battle Chess. next up is getting psx stuff working and also putting stardew valley on there maybe
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I talked about this in the News thread and elsewhere already, but fuck it. I fried my motherboard a couple months back, so Iâve pretty much exclusively playing whatever will run on my original-run Surface and my PS4. Since I have a deadline coming up at the end of this month, turn that tendency up to 11.
Sunless Sea - LONG RAMBLING INSIDE
Sunless Sea: Zubmariner: Although I played a fair bit of Sunless Sea back when it first came out, I pretty quickly dropped it over the consequences of its identity crisis. See, the game bills itself almost like a roguelike; it warns you that your first captain will probably die, but suggests future captains will be able to learn and grow from their sacrifice. Most islands will shift around to a limited degree when that happens, and any changes in the story of the gameworld are reset. This can kind of break the spellâCaptain Abernathy may not have been able to rescue the sisters from the flames when Hunterâs Keep burns down, but his daughter can return to the isle to find Cynthia, Phoebe, and Lucy once again entertaining visitors as though nothing had ever happened. Stuff like this can almost make sense in this setting, since death isnât permanent and memory is unreliable, but it doesnât really hold up to serious consideration.
The real problem is that playing Sunless Sea âcorrectlyâ is kinda monotonous.
See, each island on the Unterzee has fantastic stories and mystery and atmosphere; itâs like the seven journeys of Sinbad the Sailor through the lens of Lovecraft & Poe, from a world in which Lovecraft and Poe had been travel-writers. To get to these places and pace your exposure to them, to make the decisions you make on these islands meaningful, you have to actually sail out to them. âSailâ is a misnomer: the Unterzee hasnât enough wind for sail power. Your ship uses fuel, and you have to stock supplies for your crew, and both of these things cost money and space in your hold. Furthermore, your fuel can be spent to keep the shipâs lamp burning; failure to do this will accelerate the existential and cosmological dread that will inevitably overtake any who stay on the Unterzee for too long. So: spend money and space on supplies (which deplete continuously at a rate determined by crew count while away from port) and fuel (which depletes based on your movement speed and engine efficiency/power); fuel can also be spent to turn your lights on, which slows the accumulation of fear, and which also speeds up target acquisition during combat; if fear gets too high, your officers and crew will have a tendency to off themselves or disappear/die in mysterious circumstances. If you run out of supplies, you will probably wind up eating your crew, which definitely increases terror. If you run out of fuel, youâre probably just fucked. If you get this tightrope act out of balance, finding your way back to port and recovering from that error is a tense, thrilling experience.
To have any hope of progress and profitability, though, youâve got to play it safe. Find a trading route that earns you more than it costs in supplies and fuel and repeat it as long as the game will let you. With your earnings, invest in the next affordable expense that will allow you to make even more: ferry sphinxstone to buy a bigger boat with more fuel and supplies. Trade a bunch of those supplies for the Tomb Colonist tour. Get your earnings from that to buy lightcatch boxes so you can smuggle sunlight from the surface. This minmaxery only works if you take the most direct routes and avoid combat, so having any hope of surviving the good parts of the game requires hours of playing a long, boring, and repetitive version of the game first.
Despite this one pretty-serious issue, if you donât really care about âwinningâ, the gameâs still great. I got to lose crewmates in a knife-fight at a pirate fortress, butcher gigantic luminescent crabs for science, and sold my soul to a bored, bureaucratic monkey. I found an awful hollow gravity below the island where postmen dwell; I ended a war between the rats and cavies on Pigmote Isle, and so became a laughingstock by trying to report as such to the Admiralty. I discovered that if you sail the wrong way and can slip past Mt. Nomad, you can find the gates of Avid Horizon. Do not sail this way; things did not go well for that captain.
This trailer still gives me goosebumps.
I havenât even touched the DLC content yet:
Does that seem like maybe it covers some familiar territory? Then letâs double-down:
Sunless Skies looks pretty, plays smooth, and has failed to captivate me in the single hour Iâve given it. Granted, itâs in early access, but Iâm very ambivalent: âVictorian London on the shore of an underground oceanâ is an easier buy than âVictorian colonization of a space-like cosmological void using ships that look like trainsâ. And once it occurred to me, I havenât been able to shake this analogy:
Sunless Sea : BioShock :: Sunless Skies : BioShock Infinite
I know thatâs not a fair comparison to make, but the parallels in setting and vibrancy of color make it a little inevitable. Plus, I mainly play these games for the writing; Emily Shortâs (admittedly limited) involvement in Fallen London and Sunless Sea was a big part of my interest in those games. Not only have I heard nothing of her contributions this time around, but one of the main developers and creators of those earlier works, Alexis Kennedy, left the company more than a year ago and has actually just funded his new Cultist Simulator on Kickstarter. I donât know if this is biasing me unfairly against the text and atmosphere in Sunless Skies, or if itâs just the fact that itâs in an early access state, but none of the ports Iâve found so far has managed to approach the mystery and marvel present in nearly ever island on the Unterzee.
I guess weâll see how things develop.
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Played the Gundam VS. open beta this weekend. Quite enjoyable and I like using the Gold Sumo but damn if this game doesnât throw a lot of systems at you at the same time. Hope the complete game has a good tutorial/training mode so you can get comfortable with the system.
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for some reason i thought of sunless sea as sunset (the game by tales of tales) and your post was really strange for a moment
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About the only thing a sussed out of the Gundam versus beta is i like being Oveflag, zip in as a plane and do the forward melee that does a grab and scrape on the ground.
so iâve had the addams family table from pinball arcade on my ps4 for a while, and i love it. so i got the first disc full of tables, since it was ÂŁ10 for 23 tables, while theyâre ÂŁ5 individually on psn.
anyway, i got really into playing a couple of the vintage tables on there, big shot and genie. theyâre just really simple and satsfying to play. a bit later, i was watching stuff downstairs in the living room, and went to the internet archiveâs collection of dos games to see if there was anything to play while i was down there.
i found this, and after a bit of research, i found it was made by a husband and wife team whoâve made a bunch of other pc pinball games, as well as the dreamcast game neo golden logres. unfortunately, the store section of their site is down for âmaintenenceâ, and none of the other sections have been updated in a few years, so it might be a piracy job to play them.
anyway, tristan seems like a pretty simple game, but itâs a ton of fun, and makes me think i could maybe make a simple old school one-screen pnball game in game maker, with the aid of some tutorials and stuff maybe :?D
(if you want to play tristan, the controls are: left shift/right shift for the flippers, c for launch and space to nudge the table)
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Metro 2033 is full of gross mutants but it is possible that the grossest mutant of all⌠is man???
Also I was told I could buy a sneakysuit but it turns out they removed that in REDUX! Lamedux!
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I never did play too much of redux, but it apparently fixed a lot of the stuff that bugged me in the original, like bad animation on the mutants and kind of squishy pacing around the nazis / polis / kid bits midway through
the tunnels under moscow are real eerie when youâre all alone and done purging them of fascist infestation
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shrug I am glad you are playing Metro 2033 because it is a Very Good Game.
You are a STALKER guy right?
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I like STALKER until it turns into a corridor shooter except the corridors are elevated platforms and everything that wants to murder you can see you from everywhere all the time.
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Switch to the Vita on the train.
You wouldnt expect it but the first thing you do in Soul Calibur PSP is murder some animals. The animals have motivation and bravery so yeah. Who would expect that game to be upsetting! It does start with telling you this game is NOT CANON.
Strider 2 fucking rules. Sure you can beat it in 30 minutes and it is confusing that disc one is strider and a PS1 classic does not do a good job of telling you this game has two discs. Its fucking great though. Fantastic loading screen art. Something about itâs entire statement makes me think of Barkley.
Good lord Crash 2 is garbage. What a shit jump cycle. What horrible OCDism. Beating the first round of stages to discover you didnât collect enough shit. I know that I am the sole BK defender here, but that game is built around collecting stuff. This game is a weird half-breed with a terrible jump arc that is about forward momentum and kleptomania. Look we want you to have fun moving through the stage but also stop constantly to collect all the shit with are hate physics.
I played some Observer today. I know Felix said it was super Polish but I guess I didnât expect it to be With Fire and Sword fanfiction level Polish.
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