To be fair the back half of 2016 already begins to abandon the coolness of embodying the silent Rage Demon that the front half promises. It was obvious this is what they always wanted.
9 Likes
There was a making of doc on Doom where they show off the rough version of the original 10 minute long cutscene opening of the game that they had to cut entirely, and it was so frustrating to hear them being unable to connect the dots of âcutting all of this made the game betterâ to âso we should apply that to an entire gameâ.
5 Likes
They need to boomerang even further and make Tom Hallâs Doom. Do u choose Lorelei Chen for her +dmg pistol, or Thi Barrett, for bayonet buffs?
3 Likes
That game was called Rise of the Triad.
5 Likes
Played the Lies of P demo. Demos are now my opportunity to assess a games do-ability. Given progress doesnât carry over I didnât go in too far, but it seems like basic combat is fairly doable. Itâs relatively slow and you can often evade without always needing to worry about blocking precisely. Also blocking seems to reduce all damage afaict? It follows the Souls formula well although it is funny how much they need to rename almost every resource/item; itâs like a hallmark of Souls-likes is trying to decode the new vocabulary.
I actually prefer it to Bloodborne which always felt a little jank design-wise and reactionarily over-tuned against defensive play. I didnât play long enough to get to the boss and Iâm hoping they arenât too taxing in terms of constant inputs required. It doesnât really seem like a Sekiro or Bloodborne.
4 Likes
Echo Update: The Route where Chase is Bisexual
Thereâs five routes, I just finished route four.
This one is the longest, and also has the most variance depending on choices. It was supposed to be the big capstone on the the project and didnât come out until six years after the release of the first demo. It has a ton of callbacks to the previous routes, and is much longer than the others. It also branches the most aggressively including having some wildly different scenes depending on if you say Chase is gay or straight in the prologue.
(me posting updates about Echo)
Jennaâs Route Spoilers:
Jennaâs route, as a captstone to the entire project, has a tone of callbacks to the other three routes Iâve done so far. And possibly Flynnâs, but I still havenât touched it. Jenna is The Only Girl, and probably the character I have the best idea about from other routes. Sheâs native, fortunately, the game doesnât have her as some kind of magic guide who understands the town because of her AnCiEnT wIsDoM. Nah, sheâs a kid who escaped poverty and an abusive family and got a psych degree.
Like the other routes so far, we find out more things about folks in town. Including Leo, whoâs actuallyâŚworse than he is in his own route?? A lot of people hate this because this is supposed to be a gay visual novel to them and the big hunkey wolf boyfriend being a sex obsessed manipulative creep gets A lot of folks riled up it turns out. The game frames it a bit at the ways the town fucks you up but thatâs justâŚmetaphorical.
But like yeah, seriously, hunky wolf boy is very fucked up. Donât fall for his hotness.
It also does the same thing where it introduces a lot of drug users and tries to walk a fine balance of tragedy and empathy, but I donât think it does so as succesfully as Leoâs. We once again see the return of the Creepy Murder Queer, who is once again used as a monstrous antagonist. The queerness isnât the disquieting part, more theâŚI dunno. Cartoonish nature of him compared to everyone else? It still sticks out.
The counterbalance is one of them is Micah, this routeâs Featured Townie. Whoâs a delightfully foulmouthed tatooed bat who has a lot more empathy and kindness than youâd expect. The cool part of this route is the subtle back and forth between Jennaâs hatred of Echo and Michahâs empathy for the folks still living there, and I like it a lot.
Stuff feels much more heightened and weird than the first three. A house that is dressed up like a fake castle (although that could be a hallucinations) for example. TheâŚnever previously mentioned dam with floodgates that can be opened to destroy the entire town which seems to exist just to justify the bad endingm which I didnât get(??).
The best moments are the ones it hews closer to the first three parts, where we just get moments of folks trying to deal with their shitty childhood and shitty town. The conversations between Chase and Jenna, the two that Got Out, resonate a lot with me. I have to admit, the way Jenna feels about Echo is a lot like how I feel about my home town. The way it justâŚsaps and destroys good things. Isolating and wearing down people.
Anyway, despite the tone shifting a little bit, and the characters maybe feeling a little off from the first three, Iâm still really liking it. It has, as I always say, introduced even more fucked up shit than before, which I still think itâs handlingâŚwellâŚmaturely for the most part. Still very good writing, and itâsâŚso different than a lot of otherqueer VN stories Iâve encountered that are either mostly fluff or dealing overtly with bigotry.
(but not Trixie Glimmersmith which in a lot of ways feels likeâŚa parody of Echo by this point because Echo was first)
Also Teej is a Five Iron Frenzy fan: Confirmed
11 Likes
I watched some of a Letâs Play of Forgotton Anne which was the right choice, it looks like it plays like ass.
Also whatâs with that typo. If itâs a story thing I didnât glean it from what I watched.
1 Like
playing The Old Hunters dlc like a hungry mouse, slowly creeping down caves and retreating in fear of everything
toll of church bell? run back to last lamp
guttural cry of alarm? run back to level start
slightly dark doorway? edging forward crying and swinging sword with eyes closed
I came straight out of a chalice dungeon so I have my best murder gear on and melt enemies in 1-2 hits. it doesnât help me feel any better
13 Likes
Demon Lord Reincarnation (PC)
Floor 4âs twistâaside from the first place I dropped into with a big wide dark pit-strewn hall
âis, at least in its first half, having you go after four separate specific Bone Wizard targets, it turns out,
to disable a force field blocking your progress to the ladder down to the main chunk of floor 4 from floor 3. Nice to have some important fights, unfortunately the scripted fights donât scale so they were incredibly easy for my built-up party. Still, it was nice to have specific objectives to head for.
2 Likes
SONIC LOST WORLD
This is just Sonic Team trying to copy Mario Galaxy (and maybe explore some ideas Xtreme had), except itâs nowhere near as polished. I know someone who reviewed this game back in the day and hated it but⌠Iâm kinda enjoying it?
Donât get me wrong, this game isnât good⌠in fact I hated it at first because the physics donât feel very good, but once I adjusted, I started having a good time and this has some of the most imaginative ideas Iâve seen in a Sonic game (even if, again, a lot was taken from Galaxy). Itâs also frustratingly jank at times, but they give you so many extra lives and checkpoints that it doesnât feel too bad.
The boss fights are all boring though. Also the new characters are all Tim Burton rejects, and the writing feels like itâs aimed at really young children so Iâve been skipping the cutscenes.
I quit last night because I got to some puzzle bit where Iâm supposed to use one of the powers in a certain way but Iâm not sure how said power works, so this might just be where I stop playing
In conclusion, this:
6 Likes
So like⌠is it still worth getting around to Doom Eternal at some point knowing it isnât as good, or does all this wreck it enough to no longer be worth bothering with. Like I said the first stage seemed problematic and not as good as the equivalent in 2016, but I donât think Iâd call it outright bad.
1 Like
the first stage and the last third are pretty bad. the remainder is not much worse than 2016 overall
1 Like
Felix is wrong, the whole game is significantly worse than Doom 2016 in just about every way. Lock-and-key enemy strategies, enemies that all behave roughly the same and with zero nuance to how you beat them, ugly levels with incoherent throughlines, a combat loop wound tight so tight it limits your ammo to an absurd degree and yet is completely helpless to hotswapping the Super Shotgun + Gauss Cannon, and worst of all FAKE INFIGHTING.
It is without a doubt one of the worst shooters Iâve ever played. It made me appreciate Doom 2016 more in hindsight, because at least that game has levels, minimal story, decent ammo pacing, and one of my favorite multiplayer modes.
8 Likes
Doom Eternal finally went off the rails for me when it introduces big rotating Mario fireball rods alongside laboured origin lore and I couldnât identify what I was meant to be getting out of it.
9 Likes
i finally finished all the campaign stuff in breakpoint. the final mode is structured like wildlands where the map is split into regions and some regions are more tough than othersâŚi guessâŚthe whole thing mainly feels like a dumping ground for ideas that didnt make it into the main game. so some of the missions you do now actually do have consequences, like theyâll remove ground drone coverage or clear patrols from the roads. theres even a region you can capture which will disable the big UAV patrols that can spot you, which they hint at in the main game with the behemoth towers but it isnt implemented. all this would be cool if every region didnt pick from the same pool of like 4 mission types, which are recycled ideas from other dlcs and sometimes combined like the civilian pressure plate bombs and following blood trails which now becomes following a blood trail to guys on pressure plate bombs. you will spend a lot of time blowing up vehicles and assassinating guys and sabotaging power boxes if you choose to do the destabilization missions. i think you only have to do one of the three or four per region to unlock the main mission so itâs basically just mafia 3 rackets down to the incredibly repetitive tasks. at least the previous two DLC had way better mission design than the main game
i think part of the problem is that there was more shit going on in wildlandsâ world that lended itself to this design. there were the corrupt miltiary guys, the cartels, the rebels, and civilians. in breakpoint everythings under martial law so the civilians are mostly clustered in buildings and dont do anything, they arent driving or walking around. you dont see little interactions between the NPCs anymore because they dont really interact. the military and cartels were odds in wildlands and you could utilize it to your advantage, and honestly the military guys were a way bigger threat than the elite troops in breakpoint. and unlike the cartel and military the wolves and PMC guys are on the same side so theres never that chance of encountering infighting. so that leaves the rebels, which had alot of their functionality removed in breakpoint, that are the only real faction that can start FACTIONAL WARFARE anymore. the way the game achieves this in the resistance event is to just spam friendly cars and helicopters so you cant go anywhere without a firefight breaking out. so operation motherland tones it down a bit and makes you have to do the destabilization missions to get them to patrol and show up more, and they help you take the main objectives if you get spotted. that combined with the airstrike ability from the resistance event completes their transformation into a less useful version of the wildlands rebels.
ok so what about the story? well its fucking awful of course. they bring back BOWMAN who was your nakedly fascist CIA handler back in bolivia in wildlands and fortunately this game doesnât stop far cry 5 style every hour on the dot to show you her torturing people anymore. more on that later. its three months after the main campaign and every country has shown up to auroa because DRONE TECHNOLOGY so the CIAâs big plan is to hand off the island to the outcast rebels who were mostly useless in the main campaign besides accidentally blowing up some scientists and there is a lot of talk about nation building. bad stuff is happening and the BODARKS are back so the ghosts are going back discretely to help the outcasts liberate the islandâŚagain. theyre all war crimed to shit when you get there so the tutorial is basically rescuing the leader and getting the outcasts going again. then youre free to liberate the rest of the island in any order, which is kind of a problem because it fucks the narrative all up. if you go in the numbered order the game suggests, it becomes very quickly apparent that the bodarks are trying to frame the russian government for all these war crimes (compared to the main game, there are even more machine gunned civilian corpses everywhere) but because you can do this shit in any order the dialogue has to be really non specific so nomad will be like âI found evidence they are trying to make it look like the russian army is occupying the materials depotâ and bowman will respond âwell, Im not sureâ even though literally 5 minutes ago she told you that they are running a disinformation operation on the russian governmentâŚi heard her literally contradict herself line to line, telling me that yes the russians are definitely getting fucked and then immediately changing her mind to not be sure again within the span of 10 seconds. like jeez i know the writings bad ive played like 150 hours of this fucking game but some consistency would be nice
they reuse tons of places youve already raided in the dlc or the main campaign before, like you basically attack every single place one of bernthals lieutenants was at but now its an beheading video recording studio or chemical weapons factory full of russian guys. ISIS videos are actually a key plot point in this DLC, every single civilian whose being held hostage by a pressure plate barrel bomb has a camcorder pointed at them and theres multiple mass graves with cameras set up around them, culminating in a mission where you have to raid VASSILI KROPOTKINEâs recording studio before he can upload his massacre videos to liveleak. one of these missions had a singular breaching door from the operation amber sky mission which i thought was funny, like some designer remembered that mechanic existed for approximately 5 minutes. anyway after some time you finally kill your way to the mastermind who is an ex russian oligarch lady who i guess has masterminded this plan to own russia for taking away her money. shes got a behemoth on her front step like every other antagonist in this game and nomad has the gall to call it unoriginal. like go fuck yourself lol. its never cute when developers do this
anyway your CIA handler tells you to waste the mastermind I guess because either the dialogue didnt play or i was too high because i was confused as to why the outcast lady was begging me to capture her instead and not do the âprofessional choiceâ of shooting her in the head. i captured her mostly because i captured everyone else and its fun to inconvenience the CIA. i guess this is probably the worse ending because bowman implies the CIA will have to let ms oligarch go to cover up the USâ involvement in everything. not quite the fuck finish of wildlands but its still pretty stupid. thats it though. you dont get an ending cutscene or anything, just bowman being pissy and then signing off. the game helpfully suggests that you can play through this mode again and again if you feel like it
usually in wildlands when you capture someone you get a cutscene of bowman like idk taking a blowtorch to them, or talking about how theyll get sexually assaulted to death in an american prison, or how theyre gonna take their kids away and put them in american foster homes because you KNOW what happens in the system right, these arent even exaggerations they are actual examples from wildlands, like i said shes a real fucking nazi. much of breakpoint is backpedaling from the cynicism of wildlands so now you get one line of dialogue from bowman thats like âthey confirmed what was on the audio logâ (that you get anyway if you just kill them) instead and this is probably for the best because god fuck those fucking cutscenes. as a side effect though your squad has zero personality now instead of being pro-torture psychopaths who can barely contain their contempt for the country theyre in, and nomad is reduced to being a near emotionless robot who purely exists to scold scientists and talk about how only the military is smart enough to have killer drones, which i guess could be considered an improvement.
overall its a very mysterious game. not quite classical clancy boomer shit but definitely along those lines. it falls into some of the same traps as wildlands, like i dont know what to make of the decision to put all these ruins everywhere that suggests there was an indigenous population we never ever see on the island at some point, when both this and the past game have been ducking talking about colonialism by making everyone Foreigners. in wildlands youre in bolivia taken over by a conveniently mexican drug cartel, so that the game never has to meaningfully address the culture its using as a backdrop. here everyones a white libertarian american or a russian ultranationalist on a fictional island so we dont have to worry about that shit either, even less than the last game does the context for whats going on actually matter. and every time they do cite something real, itâs fucked up in some way, like how they donât know what the department of defense is or how bowman explains to you that a bunch of servers with KNOWLEDGE on them are like the federal reserve, or how the game canât keep the FSB and the SVR straight and eventually just starts using the terms interchangeably. its just fucking sloppy
it is kinda funny because this is a series that started off by inadvertently predicting the 2008 south ossetia invasion, but things were a lot simpler then, these games werent caught up in the full whirlwind of shitty US foreign policy until the ps2 exclusive ghost recon where you invade cuba. you can tell ghost recon 1 came out just after 9/11âŚits about a UN sanctioned police action to liberate georgia from fascist paramilitaries that ends up with you liberating moscow as well. ghost recon 2âs from 2004 and suddenly weâre dealing with a SECOND KOREAN WAR more accurately reflecting some of the anxieties of the time. by the time we get to advanced warfighter 1 and 2 its some real advanced level boomer shit about mexican border anxiety and intervention in nicaragua. they are pretty straightforwardly like pro-military games. but its hard to call wildlands and breakpoint pro military, they are way too incoherent for that. wildlands completely dispenses of the idea of professional soldiers in favor of the right-wing death squad fantasy and starts focusing on extrajudicial justice. breakpoint steps back from that slightly but you do spend 2/3 of the content as an executioner for the CIA and of course all is forgiven in the course of your solo Guerrilla Man Struggle For Survival. all the enemy war crimes in breakpoint are a lot less shocking when half of them are things you were casually doing in the previous game. blowing up churches, doing extraordinary rendition, all this shit that would get you put in front of an international court, that stuff was part of the cool military fantasy last time around but please this time think itâs evil because the other team is doing it. its terrorism when they do it
its strange that the book clancyverse is probably more nuanced than ubisofts despite turning into a jack bauer pilled nightmare on the virtue that at least as clancyverse america got more xenophobic and evil the resulting damage from terrorisms became proportionally higher until like whole american cities were getting wiped off the map. tom clancy and sammyclassicsonicfan held onto the same hope: that your actions have consequences
lol. i put more thought into all of this than anybody who worked on this game, and i should stop doing these kinds of things to myself, because whats the point. its all just a bunch of fucking poison
9 Likes
the movement is real good, thetools they give you let you do a lot of jumps you dont think tou can make but actually can barely
2 Likes
This is a second 1CC of this game, with the other playable character. Iâm only posting this because the final fight was the bloodiest battle the world ever saw.
7 Likes
Hyperforma is a Breakout style game with a cyberspace hacking (of the very fantastical variety) story and theme. The game takes place sometime after an apocalypse and you, lone hacker, sift through the old networks in search of yada yada.
Okay, yes, fine, but donât lead off with this
Anyway the âtwistâ here is actually that you do rotate the bricks in 3d space as you seek an opportunity to line up a killshot on the core you are trying hack
Yes friends hearken it is time to Shoot The Core.
Thereâs no failstate as far as I can see you just get more XP and âkeysâ for accomplishing certain objectives in each level. Iâm sure before long Iâm going to hit a point where Iâll need to replay levels to earn keys in order to proceed and at that time I will uninstall the app from my phone.
Bonus points for being played in portrait mode. I hate being forced to hold my phone sideways.
3 Likes
just read the first twenty pages of a mack bolan novel, like me. feel like youâll get everything you need in 1/1000 of the time
3 Likes
How is Disaster Report 4? Should I rather play Raw Danger, or should I care about DS4 too?
1 Like