I only played a little jagged alliance 3 but it’s really baller that it doesnt tell you your chance to hit (your merc will say shit like “that shot gives me anxiety. can you have someone else do it” to suggest that its a bad idea) and you can put more AP into aiming like ja2 1.13. it feels perfectly fine so far…well see how the combat holds up. Also the laptop music and IMP questionnaire arent as good, but how could they be. there arent even any slightly moldy cultural references in the questionnaire, which im choosing to interpret is because our culture is vacant and theres nothing worth referencing, unlike the juggernauts of crocodile dundee and terry bradshaw
also the first thing i did was hire the ukrainian sniper farm girl who looks like zinaida from silent storm and shows up with grandpas rifle. they put her in this game because i mentioned zinaida in my last post about ja3. i made this happen with my words and deeds. or maybe the ja2 writer just has a fixation with a certain type of woman, whatever, either ones fine
anyway the funniest thing so far is that the game starts with a (sort of nonsense) disclaimer like your watching a racist warner brothers cartoon because it takes place in April 2001. the unwoke times before 9/11
Connectank (PS4) - wow this is extremely great in co-op. think Overcooked but you are fighting a 1v1 tank battle by creating a contiguous conveyer belt and chucking scrap into a cannon rather than cooking and serving customers
less anxiety-riddled than overcooked, but just as fun in my estimation. enjoyment partially contingent on friends to local co-op with; solo is fine but misses the tension of collaborating. art style suprisingly charming. very, very bright and saturated colors, started hurting our eyes after awhile lol.
highly rec turning the difficulty up to hard (moreso if you are playing with a friend). normal takes forever to ramp up and you’re likely to never lose a single battle for many hours
Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4) - just a really solid fighting game. story mode is cute, i vibe with the vaguely fourth-wall-breaking “your soul in goku’s body” shenanigans. visuals are mind-blowing. pretty sure if i had had this game as a kid i’d’ve played nothing else lol
This is very late to the party but wasn’t the writer on the Talos Principle also an up his ass bigoted internet idiot like Jonathan Blow? My understanding was he was an anti trans post-left piece of shit.
im going to destroy the lead designer of ja3 for adding xcom-style overwatch and enemies getting free moves into cover at the start of every fight if you dont abuse it
i assume youre talking about this guy but from a skim he mostly seems extremely annoying moreso than transphobic. even the person whose piece he picked apart just thinks he’s dumb hahaha. either way i think this is what you mean. the other guy doesnt seem to have said anything dumb
jonas is definitley just kind of annoying hes one of the kindest people ive talked to though, like i guess he could be a secret transphobe like anyone could, but hes definitely a marxist not a libertarian unless he changed his mind in the past five years. like i remember having a conversation where he said that ‘centering your identity in everything is selfish’ and then my ex was like OH SO YOU’RE A TRANSPHOBE BECAUSE YOU DONT BELIEVE IM THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD and poisoned him for a bit. i think hes gotten a lot better though, where as blow just keeps getting more and more up his own ass and bigoted. i guess like comparing someone to jon blow is the lowest thing you could say about a game designer so im not gonna go that hard on him. oh also jonathan blow like, aggressively self searches himself. he used to have a super active google alerts system until they got rid of it. hi jon, this isnt an intelligent conversation you’re leaving
yeah like i guess what i found annoying about that whole convo is like he was strawmanning people talking about having a lot of trouble with gendered harassment and lesser opportunities in a space that was about to go full gamergate by being like “western identity politics is a bourgeois indulgence” stuff. it’s the more harebrained Jacobin sort of argument i’ve seen from other people but it really got under my skin for that reason. it’s a bullshit way to frame identity and if he was a less closed-minded person he would’ve known that.
i’m not saying your ex did anything to help the case though - both sides of that debate bothered me. hopefully he’s gotten better, i dunno. it was ten years ago. it def really got under my skin though, like the condescension there esp in an environment of a bunch of tech libertarian guys (half of whom are on the path to full fascist now) talking down to like broke trans people. someone couldn’t possibly argue that this wasn’t an important issue when a bunch of agitated gamer people were already starting to be radicalized to the far right in that space because they got mad about Anita Sarkeesian at the exact time that was happening. like tone policing people about why their grievances mattered less in the midst of an oncoming wave of horribleness that was about to descend over everything or the constant hostile treatment they had already received.
also like several visible oldschool “lefties” pivoted to the right recently specifically due to personal bigotry they held about trans people, so it’s not like someone just declaring themselves a Marxist is something i trust inherently. but i dunno, blog debates of 10 years ago are sometimes kind of hard to parse in current terms now. and there were aspects of a lot of those debates where i was just annoyed by the whole premise to begin with.
lmao tbh i’m sorry for being one of the participants at all in this or other similar debates of that period. there’s a lot of my older blog stuff that i sort cringe looking at now. mostly just the “discourse”-y stuff.
So Hollow Knight started smacking me around in bit in terms of boss battles (watcher knights are a problem, and one of the dream rematches was a laughable “ain’t strong enough for this” smackdown) so I poked around a bit and still failed to find the weapon upgrade bug and remembered that there was one place I didn’t go because a NPC said “next place is hard, may want a stronger weapon I hear there is a bug ____ who could help with that”, except I walked off the screen and came back and said NPC was gone and I didn’t catch where they said the upgrader was.
Anyways I figured I wandered far enough off path that I probably dealt with trickier places already, so went to this maze like place just past the mantis village and it wasn’t that bad and it eventually lead me to one of the three marked places on my map. Expected a hellacious battle and got off a bit light, the problem is that this ended at a dead end and I’m not actually sure where I can make any forward progress beyond said Watcher Knights, and I fear that they simply have me outgunned at this point. I… might have to google.
Well I went to try and dump as much of my money as possible before going back to said Watcher Knights (which backfired as I won more in the colosseum thing than I lost), banged my head against the wall for a while but eventually managed to topple said knights with my big “all in on magic” build as my weapon does so little damage to them and got another mark off my map.
…Then on the way back I had to wait around a bit for the elevator to come and while killing time accidentally discovered a “trick” that would have made them about 17% easier.
That was the one mark on my otherwise very solid victory against them
played a little bit of Ridge Racer 4 because I don’t have time to start a new RPG or anything but wanted some chill gameplaying, and what do you know.
its interesting seeing how hard you can push the cars, as turns that you’d previously drift you can take at full speed. Phantomile remains the hardest track to figure out. Seeing what car you get during the game’s campaign is always a thrill.
re-wiring my brain from kid-me’s impression of this game:
“why is there so much talking”
“i don’t care about anything these fuckers are saying, skipskipskipskipskip”
now i find it pretty charming and cozy. presentation in this game is off the damn charts.
however, i ultimately have a major complaint with the game - if you are already able to win races, you have to intentionally do worse to unlock all the cars - basically the unlock system works by giving you different cars based on your placements and number of retries used crossed against your team and car manufacturer. from the fandom page:
In order to unlock every one of the cars, the player must race with every racing team and every manufacturer, in every qualifying position possible, hence enhancing the longevity of the game.
look, i get it. it very much does “enhance the longevity of the game”, and the game itself is so good you can hardly fault namco for wanting you to see/play more of it. it’s a good way to stretch the content they have (which is decently substantial for an arcade racer) over the length they wanted to target for a AAA home console release
