Games You Played Today Part 007 Goldeneye

[Father.Torque]

My experience is very different, I’m getting pretty bored with it. In theory the locations are varied and there’s bits and pieces of cool geometry here and there but the game is ultimately too Doom Eternalized. It’s all about pairing the correct weapon against the correct enemy and managing your health pickups during the big arena fights, which are the only time the game gets challenging. Looking to be a case of all flash, no substance to me.

It’s also REALLY long. Or it feels really long. I just got to Chapter 3 and I really hope it’s a Doom 1, 3-episode situation, because if there’s like 5 chapters and they’re all the this long there’s no way I’m gonna make it.

[GherkinForce]

Instead of starting Zelda, I decided to play through Project Zero: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse instead, because it’s short.

One thing I find weird about both this and the 5th game is how they both involve looking for characters who have gone missing within the last couple hours or so, and apparently while running terrified of vengeful ghosts they still have time to leave notes of their weird emo poetry lying about. 5 was the most ridiculous because you’d find them literally sitting at the bottom of a pool of water.

I think I like this better than 5, although I think I am not too keen on how much the level design relies on long narrow corridors. Feels like most ghost encounters have you sliding backwards against a wall trying to get distance from a ghost as it passes through a wall.
This one is also super jank with the controls and camera, but somehow it just feels better than 5, I think it’s just all in the execution and narrative structure. Still, I think either 2 or 3 were the best games in the series for me.

[Mothra]

I’m taking it one level a night, and that pace is working, but I definitely am having the feeling that this game should wrap it up soon. If there’s fully half of the game left, I’m probably not gonna make it, same as Doom Eternal’s expansion.

What’s keeping it fun for me rn is the addition of yet more powerful weapons, which you can only keep up for so long.

[toups]

I played the lies of P demo and

it’s actually pretty good. more of a bloodborne-like than a souls-like. it’s extremely rote in how it adheres to the formula except instead of firearms you have a sekiro-like deflect/perfect guard mechanic, and guarding still does chip damage unless you get a perfect guard. there’s also what feels like a simplified posture mechanic too where if you aggressively hit larger enemies enough they get dizzy which sets you up for a critical.

the art direction and animation are really good and the mechanics are well-executed. feels really good to play. the voice acting is kind of bad, though, and nothing in the demo suggested to me that it’s gonna do anything to distinguish itself from bloodborne but I’ll probably pick up the full game when it’s on sale.

[meauxdal]

my opinion has really soured on the horizon games

aloy is great, they are visually beautiful, some of the music is pretty solid, the combat is fine, but

the NPCs are mind-numbingly boring*, the voice acting is off-putting and weirdly flat, and the narrative is just not interesting enough to carry these shortcomings

i find it very difficult to muster any enthusiasm every time i consider booting one of the games up

i do like shooting cannisters off robo-dinos, tho. that part slaps

*lance reddick gets a pass

[Broco]

The best Horizon is Frozen Wilds but unfortunately it’s a late-game DLC, not a standalone game like TLoU Left Behind.

[meauxdal]

Outriders (PS5) - curious things have happened in my mind. for some reason, after playing this, i am getting the urge to watch that 4-hour destiny lore explainer…

idk how to explain it. outriders is a weird game, some good elements (combat is immensely satisfying, no mtx, no in-game real money shop, kinda intriguing sci-fi premise), lots of negatives (random scenery objects have no collision, cutscenes are glitchy and stuttery, voice acting is all over the place, bizarre framedrops when spinning the camera, barely-legible reticle at times due to all the particle spam, lots of dialogue gets randomly cut off by abrupt and jarring fade-outs, lots of loading screens)… but given this is a weird janky thing, it has further piqued my curiosity - at the very least coming from a person interested in the history and evolution of games - in getting some destiny under my belt, somehow…

---

Immortals Fenyx Rising (PS5) - alright yeah this game blows chunks. the combat is ass, the controls are fiddly and annoying, the UI is atrocious, the game really doesn’t look very good to me (bad art direction)… it does have greek mythology and lots of jokey banter between a pretty well voice-acted Zeus and Prometheus that lands alright. the protag, which you get to create yourself, kinda sucks tho. dunno how the guy sounds but the woman is just kind of annoying. paper-thin characterization. she has some goofy animations when opening chests but it is more “OK” than endearing

the main thing is the game is chock full of terrible things. everything on the map is anti-fun. fresco challenges? terrible, terrible sliding block puzzles. puzzle-guarded chests? terrible “shoot the braziers with fire arrows to light them”, or “press these 3 barely-hidden switches to unlock the door”. vaults of tartaros? off-brand zelda shrine puzzles. very little creativity. tedious to play thru. big lyres? literally Simon. it is consistently inane and just… embarrassingly shallow stuff

there’s a bit where you re-enact rolling a boulder into the sea to create the foam that birthed aphrodite. you have to slowly push a boulder into the sea. who thought this was fun?

it also has horrible ubisoftian qualities. stand in a spot and mark all the random shit on your map. there’s no discovery, exploration is pointless, and the things you encounter all suck to engage with

game is 100% not worth your time, despite lots of decent reviews out there. just play botw

[Sakurina]

Played Returnal for an hour last night and was blown away by how good it feels, I did not know how much I wanted a AAA Metroid Prime roguelite

[isfet]

yeah Returnal owns

[ellaguro]

i’m happy they finally released it on PC, because it was the one PS5 exclusive that i was particularly interested in and i was never going to get a PS5. i def want to play it eventually.

[Drem]

Outriders was a game that I played the demo of solo and thought it was kind of boring, then played it mutiplayer with some SBers and realized how wacky your powers could be and how fun that was, then bought and played the real game solo and realized that your powers don’t and abilities don’t notable change after the first couple of hours. With the kinds of paradigm shifting buffs you could get for your abilities via armor in the demo I was interested to see how all of that was built on in the full game. But in actually the ability buffs just ended up being damage boosts to a few base variations on the main abilities’ behaviors. The combat scenarios did not have enough variety for long that game is and how little your moveset actually changes.

Maybe it would be more fun multiplayer.

I have conflicting emotions towards the story of Returnal, but it was an unexpected and interesting ride for that type of game. It hits the kind of tone and narrative I always imagine Silent Hill 2 as being based on what I always read people say about SH2 but never actually playing it myself. I need to play the DLC because I have no idea where it would go next.

[JokersWild]

My Final Game by SemieRose

My Final Game (2023)

[Father.Torque]

@Drem

I need to play the DLC because I have no idea where it would go next.

It doesn’t really go “next”. It adds an endless horde mode roguelite (well, more explicitly gamey roguelite) challenge mode type thing that unlocks new little interactive cutscenes (analogous to the house sections) as you hit each tier. They don’t add to the story so much as backfill the one in the main game and honestly I really didn’t it like it either mechanically (the main game is already nearly too-roguelite for my roguelite-hating brain) or narratively (the story of the base game didn’t need any detailing, thanks). If you’re curious I’d just youtube the cutscenes, which is what I did after I figured out what the thing was and how it worked.

[Father.Torque]

I’ve also been playing it in one-level chunks, sometimes even less, but these days when I have 40 minutes to blow on a videogame I’d much rather boot up Diablo 4 and that’s bad news when you’re an fps, which is a genre I like a lot more than ARPG naturally.

[Drem]

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. It didn’t feel like the game wanted to tell more story so it was very weird when I heard the update was going to add more story bits. Sounds fairly disposable. Thanks!

[jsnlv]

I played Mask of the Rose last night.

In Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, and Fallen London, it felt like I could do anything, given enough time and willingness to grind. This gives the opposite impression: there’s not much of a grind to accomplish anything, but time is a precious and limited resource, and realizing I’ve squandered half a day on a something that didn’t yield the results I wanted makes it feel like the possibility space is crashing in upon itself like a crumbled parliamentary building.

An example, followed by other lightly spoilery material:

thoughts on my first playthrough

You need money to buy clothes, pay debts, and grease palms.

Your first job is as a census-taker, which provides material incentive to meet and interview new people. Pay is low, but predictable. After a few days of play, I gained a new opportunity: I could also (or instead) help a struggling writer develop the plot of her new novel.

This makes use of one of the game’s more unusual features in which you can slot characters and narrative concepts into a chart to describe a system of actions and motives. This process generates a “story” that you can then refer back to in dialogue for various benefits.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. In practice, the story creation process is a bit ambiguous. You can generate as many stories as you want and they fill up a page of your journal with their various titles, but I think you only discuss the most recent story relevant to the conversational category you’re pursuing. So, although I can create three different narratives for the authoress to make use of, by the time I’m actually talking with her, I may not be able to remember what distinguishes the story I presented with the others I generated but did not get to show.

This was bad enough for me, but the entire “exonerate your fellow lodger from a false (?) murder accusation” angle requires much more involved use of the storytelling system to generate theories and probe witnesses for necessary details. I was floundering, so I abandoned the pursuit of justice to find another method by which I could save my friend.

The game also lets you play matchmaker, and I wound up encouraging a relationship between the murder victim’s sister and the very architect whose plans prevented her brother from obtaining the justice he sought posthumously. That proved awkward.

As for my own romantic-and-otherwise prospects, I wasted such time on the writing project and on pursuing tenuous murder leads that I never got around to talking seriously to the lady I’d been flirting with. While our spark never blossomed into flame, she did invite me into a fraternity of criminality due to my “Jack-of-all-trades” disposition. That’s not nothing, I guess.

Though this is nothing like a roguelite, it offers the same “let me try again and see how things go differently” impetus. I’m curious to see how well it stands up to that additional scrutiny.

[iguferon]

I need to talk about this somewhere so please forgive me. I play a lot of simulator games, like flight and submarine and tanks and shit. Since this is a very niche market, the games are all aging and usually benefit greatly from mods…but because there’s such a small market these people can kind of do whatever they want. So that leads to situations where like, up until recently, you had to go to a neo-nazi forum to download a bunch of mods for the game while the forum owner is like bragging about how his great-grandfather took his uboat straight to Argentina and didnt bother surrendering to those damnable allies, then go through an elaborate install process that hopefully works out okay and yay now you can play a Silent Hunter 3 that looks and plays better even though the Das Boot theme plays every 10 minutes like clockwork…now the neo-nazi forum has been sidestepped by some guy who just put all of it together in a google drive and made his own easier to install build lol. Thank god.

This brings me to strike fighters 2. Strike fighters 2 is another aging flight sim that hasn’t been updated since 2013 and doesn’t officially support windows 10 because the developer is off making mobile game versions of strike fighters to sell microtransactions for, and it still costs 100 dollars on his personal storefront where he just emails you a link to an installer. There isn’t any DRM so you can probably guess how I am playing strike fighters 2. His pricing on DLC and the individual games like Vietnam, Israel etc. is nearly on par with IL-2 Great Battles, which has over 1000 dollars of DLC, except he doesn’t sell individual planes for 20 dollars or whatever like IL-2 does. It’s worth noting Oleg Maddox (the original aircraft engineer who made IL-2 1946 in his garage) abandoned the IL-2 name to his publisher 1C over disputes with the 2010 sequel…and then helped the war thunder guys make the game (wings of prey) that eventually became war thunder, so his legacy of intense monetization is vast and horrifying. The strike fighters 2 guy could be making money hand over fist if he really wanted to selling this shit for half as much on Steam because his game is the only flight sim more casual than DCS that covers early jet war/Cold War jet conflicts. There hasn’t been a Korean War flight game since 1999 (Rowan’s Mig Alley, which owns) unlike the IL-2GB situation, where you could literally go play Battle for Britain II (20 dollars on a site you’ve never heard of, like 1/3 of an IL-2 module!!!) or Wings over the Reich and its xpac which still costs as much as like, IL-2 Battle for Normandy. Shit, those guys also made Wings over Flanders Fields, which is 44.99 vs the IL-2 flying circus packs’ 180! And those games have way better dynamic campaigns than IL-2 because they’re dedicated singleplayer! I have to wonder if people would put up with this stuff as much if they knew they had real choices.

Anyway…the only strike fighters 2 modding site is called COMBATACE and you can only download 5 files every 24 hours. Sure…no big deal…except the vietnam expansion is 12 FUCKING PARTS to install fully patched. I hate this site for many reasons (there are dozens of posts on the forum where they make fun of new people trying to get setup by saying “this isn’t Ace Combat, this is REALISM!!”) but the main one is that they will split up perfectly good tiny ass rar files into multiple parts so you pay for this shit:

Bro…what the fuck. Are you serious? I will never pay for this shit in my entire life. It’s compounded by the fact that you’ll finish downloading all 5 parts of some shit and then the installation instructions direct you to like, a paid plane by some company that doesn’t exist anymore, or another thing to download off the shit site, or whatever the fuck is going on here:

IL-2 mods have this problem too, where you have to download literal 30 part rar files off of mediafire, but the lack of download restriction is a lot nicer. That being said installing a 83gb mod that way took me two days lol, but hey, if you’re playing these games you clearly don’t give a fuck if your time is getting wasted to begin with.

I’m like fine with people making money off of making shit, that’s not my problem really, my problem is you can’t even get to a point to give these guys money without them either first annoying the shit out of you so bad you don’t want to (CombatACE) or it’s like impenetrable and requires me to do shit I really don’t want to do so I can paypal you fucking 40 dollars or whatever. There’s this graviteam game called Steel Fury: Kharkov 1942 that’s pretty good but it never got any official patches and you literally have to seek this stuff out to play the copy they sell on steam right now, except the one big mod for it is on a Ukrainian forum that charges money 30 dollars for it through two guys, both of which were hard to get a hold of before they stopped having internet because of a war. Now the forum is mostly dedicated to discussion, where a 56 year old ukrainian grandpa goes on Russian soldiers’ facebook accounts and posts pics of them with their faces X’d out when they die in the war with commentary literally like “Another Russian ork denazified and demilitarized! Slava ukraini!!” which is understandable I guess but just makes me really profoundly sad to look at.

[Hojulas]

Yeah I think the obtuseness of actually obtaining Steel Fury mods is part of why Panzer Elite endures.

[Gate88]

Well, I played Bombe basically all day.

It’s an unholy marriage of Minesweeper, Factorio, and uh maybe Cookie Clicker.

You create rule sets to instruct the computer how to solve minesweeper puzzles. The interface is kind of shit and obtuse but you get used to it pretty quickly. The game checks your logic, so you cannot make any logically incorrect rules, but you can make messy, slow, or pointless ones (which will absolutely bog you down as you get further).

The game will automatically solve puzzles using your rules until it gets to a board that your rules can’t solve. This means that once you have a decent base for most simple minesweeper situations, you’re left staring at some really fucked up puzzles. A lot of the time, I’m struggling to parse or even understand what I’m doing. I can’t even solve some of these puzzles by hand, let alone coerce the computer to solve them. It’s beautiful I love it!!

It has a demo if you want to test it out before dropping $5 on it.

[VastleCania]

welp

purchased and installed no demo required