I think the section inside the mountain is pretty neat if you haven’t done it. They push the puzzles outside the frame of the grid the most there iirc.
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I still don’t know why The Witness made me so violently motion sick
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Tarkovsky does that to people.
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This is making me wanna reevaluate Talos Principle. I recall enjoying The Witness a lot for its mechanics and worldspace whereas I can’t remember a whole lot about Talos. I didn’t hate it but I think it felt a little long and level-based progression can be hard to make satisfying over a long playlength for a puzzle game.
1 Like
Rocket League (PS4) - still one of the greatest to ever do it. been playing a lot lately. 'd’be down to play with butts if anyone wants to jump in. lmk
Rain World (PS5) - now on PS5. there’s a new “remix” mode, but i haven’t finished the game yet so i didn’t look too deeply into what’s going on there. caveat - no PS4 save import. the game itself is a fucking masterwork.
Tekken 7 (PS4) - lord have mercy there are a lot of moves. i feel like i’ll never be able to play this because i went into training with one fighter and they had like a hundred moves with different input sequences and shit and my brain is like “this ain’t happenin turdface”. game is fun as hell, nonetheless
Destiny 2 (PS5) - just an utterly baffling entertainment product. the first 3-4 hours i spent with the game were a miserable slog, trying to complete the tutorial(?) mission. i’d finish a bit of it, then it’d tell me to do something else (“tasks: 9/21 completed”). what relevance did this “something else” have to me shooting up aliens? not sure. constantly confused about where to go, what is going on, why any of this matters.
to be fair, there are a lot of positives despite the fundamentals being fumbled in unfathomable ways. the guns are, as advertised, extremely good. a lot of the music is exemplary. the visuals on PS5 are fast and pretty, and the lighting is moody and evocative.
i finally got to do a “strike” after reaching the last city. this was, by a very wide measure, the most fun i had playing the game. it spawned me in with two other players, and the mission was explicable and straightforward - track down [proper noun] and eliminate her. if this hadn’t been in cosmodrome again it would have been pretty legitimately great to experience. as it was i was getting extremely fucking sick of cosmodrome at this point so that dampened things a bit
most of the time i spent in cosmodrome was just trying to figure out where the fuck to go while trying to avoid getting stuck in those annoying infinitely-respawning “public events” that were literally just preventing me from discerning how to get out of the fucking tutorial lol
this game seemingly does not want me to play it. strange vibrations. joke’s on you bungie, i’ma play it some more - too many people whose taste i respect have praised this object in unexpected measures. can’t give up now
edit: oh yeah one other thing i wanted to mention. wandering the wastes of cosmodrome, i could not put a specific thought out of my mind:
wow if this was just a linear halo level with comprehensible stakes and plotting, this would be actually fun to play
11 Likes
I kept hoping Portal would do this because the concept is so well-aligned with the story of “a machine is trying to put you though a series of linear levels, but you find a clever way to break the system and escape”. I spent a long time carrying items across areas in the hope of discovering some such opportunity
5 Likes
it’s one of the few games that’s ever made me feel motion sick - and i’ve heard that’s a pretty common experience for other people too. someone else speculated that it might be a combination of the FOV and the motion blur the game uses
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yeah, i guess i was wondering if the mechanics would get more subtle/clever/integrated than most of them appear at first. my favourite stuff is when you are using the input to a puzzle to determine the state of moving platforms in the real world. the more i’m visualising and the less i’m counting, the more i like it.
i’ll probably keep chipping away at anything that seems easy enough for now, i think i’m maybe halfway to unlocking the mountain
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Besides SF6, Tekken 7 is the only “traditional” fighting game I’ve spent appreciable time with. I interpreted the depth of the move list as an avenue for player expression and less a goal to achieve. Like most fighting games, you have to learn it in small digestible pieces – what moves are fast enough to counter attack with, what are a few simple bread and butter combos? Otherwise, press some buttons and have fun.
Before each session I’d pop into training for 10 minutes and try to learn a new move or sequence. If I’m having trouble in a certain situation in a real match I’d try to find moves that help in that situation.
I played (APPARENTLY, wtf!) 60 hours of Destiny 2, and this is also the sentiment I walked away with. Like you, I started in some late season after launch, and the game does not make it clear what you can do, what you should be doing, or even WHY you should do anything.
The game absolutely hides its best content from you. 3 person dungeons were by far the most fun I had with Destiny, and if the whole game was dungeons and my friends played more regularly, I’d’ve probably put in another 60 hours. I didn’t even get to play all the dungeons – the content I WANTED to play – because I could see how much more time I’d have to grind to unlock them and I just didn’t have it in me.
I bet raids are really cool, too, but I never had the requisite number of people to participate.
Like, the core mechanics, gamefeel, art, are all amazing and largely unmatched, but it’s mired by a pointless grind where I (and my friends!) have to do X hours of mindless content to get our numbers high enough to unlock the actually good, interesting, well-designed content.
Thinking about Destiny 2 makes me very cynical so I should probably wrap my post here.
10 Likes
there’s a whole orb system that’s critical to making a build in the game and you can only become aware of it’s existence by reading the tool tips or whatever on the mods on your equipment, which you also might not know are there
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trying to come up with a joke here and the only one that occurred to me was “you can just @ me next time” but i’m afraid that makes no sense at all
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Another find in my search for simplified turn-based rpg’s with just enough crunch.
Game is in early access and I unlocked what I believe to be all races, classes, and gods in about 6:30 hours of play. I still have not beaten what seems to be the final boss but it almost seems impossible with the types of builds I’ve been doing.
All the skills are passive upgrades and the only actions you can take are attack, step, and stand still. Skills and equipment have a variety of triggers that can be stacked or chained together such as “on step deal x lightning damage to 2 closest enemies” and “when you do lightning damage to an enemy 50% is then done of fire damage.
Graphics are basic but very readable. You can see the equipment on your avatar, IMO the most important feature of any RPG. Runs are pretty short which lends to a spirit of experimentation. It’s giving me the “think about future runs while away from games” feel.
I really like this one and hope it continues development. Worth the asking price, for me, as is.
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Death Worm
I’m playing the original, v1.04. Perfect game. The controls are superbly tuned so you never feel slow or imprecise. My best score is 1028.
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wow, i haven’t thought about that game probably in over a decade
i’ve been playing a lot of mindware’s dsiware game trailblazer. it’s incredibly addictive, and watching the blocks burn up as you go is satisfying.
i also started playing sonic colours ultimate. i’ve never played the 3d version of sonic colours (though i got the ds version first thing in the morning on release day) before, and i can see why people hate the writing and characterisation in this. it feels like the classic sega problem where they either don’t realise or don’t want to acknowledge that they’ve got a large and passionate fanbase, so they go chasing after what they think the mainstream audience will want, which in this case is terrible dreamworks/illumination-level uncomedy.
the game itself is fine, though. decent sonic-goes-fast 3d game. do you really have to find every red ring in every stage to unlock super sonic, though? fuck off
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There’s a free demo
If they could make it easily playable/navigable with just keyboard they might get more traditional roguelikers on board. Maybe there’s a way to do that but it felt a little like going against the grain. There’s something to it but I also kind of felt like I died without being able to do much about it, just continually being worn down.
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I kind of need to get luck with drops to get a broken run going. Maybe there are builds that are just good all the time but I haven’t found them. I think I’m going to do a run that just alternates will and life up. Summons are pretty good for survival at least. Speed matters a lot and that’s not super clear at first so I’m careful about endurance
2 Likes
if you don’t find it compelling, it’s not worth playing, there’s literally nothing to look forward to if you’re not enamored with ‘trace the dick in the sky’ puzzles or listening to the podcast playlist of some misogynist techbro guy
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my version was bugged and none of the audiologs played, so somehow I got the best experience out of it
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Those audiologs are the smuggest shit
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Yeah I found one of these and it was by far the best time I had with the game despite breaking my brain. Meanwhile in…
TOMB RAIDER UNDERWORLD
I needed to watch a longplay to get past the very first section of the first level. Turns out I swum over the thing I was looking for like 50 times without noticing it.
I should be playing DEATHWORM instead, that game rules
4 Likes