Bloober would really benefit from having their capital pillaged and razed, their fields burned and salted, and their name forever forgotten from this earth
8 Likes
Whatâs the beef with Bloober? Iâve only played Observer by them which I enjoyed when it wasnât being stealth horror nonsense
1 Like
Tried playing Breathedge today, which was a free Epic game a million years ago. I grabbed it because it looked like Subnautica in space.
So I hate âsurvivalâ games a lot, but I really loved Subnautica, BECAUSE: it is a survival game with very directed objectives and an interesting atmosphere. You engage the harvesting/crafting loop specifically in order to increase your capacity to travel further (rather, deeper) to uncover information to resolve mysteries about this planet youâre on and harvest what you need to escape. The game⌠has an ending! No tooling about aimlessly going, well I guess Iâll build this thing. Hey hereâs a bigger thing I can build. Thatâs cool I guess. Just before the crafting stuff gets too big for its britches and becomes boring, boom, itâs over. Perfect pacing.
So Breathedge is the same thing, except in space in the particular context of you being the apparent sole survivor of a crash of a big space liner, so you drift around its debris to harvest and craft. Instead of getting the capacity to go deeper, itâs to get further away from home base (your home bases keep advancing as well) by increasing air tank capacity and speed. So â look, itâs mechanically a step down across the board, I could go into all the little details as to why exactly but who cares, itâs still competent and I would still play a not-quite-as-good-as-Subnautica in space, EXCEPTâŚ
The mysteries and story? The goals that are powering your desire to craft bigger and push further? Are presented in an extremely outdated lolrandom fashion, nearly parody except not specific enough to be anything than stupid pastiche. Oh, with a lil bit of spicy anti-SJW, gamergate flavored stuff thrown into the mix to really give you the shits. Itâs mystifying.
The writer/s are also very clearly ESL. Like the game isnât localized, itâs just written directly in English by ESL people, and it shows. Obviously no one on earth is obliged to be fluent in English but when you are writing a comedy game you really need mastery over the language to make anything land. Which it wouldnât anyway because the subject matter is so awful, but it makes everything even worse.
So I look up the developer, âRedruins Softworksâ, and thereâs basically no information about them on the internet except that they are headquartered in the fuckin UAE? What the fuck?
Anyway I was actually enjoying the space stuff so I tried to knuckle down and make it work but after 3 or 4 hours I just couldnât hack it any more. Massive waste, what a shame.
5 Likes
I searched sb and hereâs what I wrote about Observer earlier:
Itâs definitely the best of theirs I played. But then thereâs the Blair Witch game, which is an actual crime.
5 Likes
Observer skates on the environment design and the VA for sure, and that does make it their best game. the writing etc are not great
3 Likes
i literally remember nothing about the story so that tracks, i just liked running around the pretty environments investigating things and hearing old man hauer talk to me
3 Likes
their approach to horror never exceeds âembarrassingâ
5 Likes
they somehow fucked up the absolute layup that is âmake a cool Blair Witch gameâ by repeatedly going to the well of âgee mentally ill people sure are scary, huh?â
Iâve heard that the Medium pursues this even further somehow
(the one cool part of the Blair Witch game is that they recreate the videotape replaying mechanic from Book of ShadowsâBook of Shadows gang rise up)
5 Likes
I played a game and I actually like it!
Slice and Dice is a Slay the Spire kind of game with dice instead of cards. Thatâs a little reductive but yeah thatâs basically it! Been a while since I got sucked into one of these and it feels good right now.
First run on Normal ended at floor 15/20. Will at least play a few more runs.
7 Likes
Tried SnowRunner for the first time last night. The starting trucks you get seem to be much worse than the starting trucks you get in MudRunner. I guess because they needed to make room for the upgrades.
Seems the game wants you to grind a little, but I somehow ended up with some DLC trucks. (I donât think I paid for them but itâs been ages so who knows.) Selling one of those gave me lots of money to upgrade things.
Just wandering around in the little pickup truck is a lot of fun. The punishing kind of fun that these games offer, that is.
10 Likes
R-TYPE FINAL 2 (PS4) - pretty great. i have yet to get around to playing the first R-Type Final but this is very nice. the UI is slick and the visuals work pretty well for me. lighting, in particular, is great. legibility isnât the best, tho.
will need to give it some more time but i really like the foundation here
Days Gone (PS4) - ugh. the only thing i like about this game outside of how well it holds 60 FPS on the PS5 is the voice acting. Deacon sounds like a fucken gremlin just chittering and prattling on to himself about random shit. itâs endearing.
the rest of the game is unmitigated ass
4 Likes
My new adventure this unsurvivably hot summer has been visiting the cityâs public pools. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays itâs Emancipation Park ~20mins away and/or the newly-constructed Alief Community Center about ~35 mins away. Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays itâs the prison-esque changing room bunkers and absolutely zero shade of the Stude Park pool 1PM-7PM. My 33 year old carâs A/C doesnât work, so I usually take my wifeâs, but it was unavailable on this occasion so I braved the ~15min 100 degree Wednesday afternoon cruise to the free community water. Upon arrival I am greeted by a locked gate an employee saying theyâve ended the summer swim schedule early and all pools will only be open weekends from now until full-closure sometime in September. Oh. Well then. Hmm.
Do I drive back home, already partially cooked? I decide to continue on, in the blistering heat. To the Cidercade, the arcade of cider. Yes itâs true, I already went back, try and stop me.
Anyways, a sampling of the machines I spent time with this visit:
Scramble is an early horizontal shmup. Youâve got a forward-firing gun and bombs that drop in a downward arc. Gimmick here is that your fuel gauge is constantly depleting and must be refilled by bombing the frequently occurring âFUELâ tanks that line the surface.
Kangaroo is a Donkey-Kong-ish vertical climbing game. Instead of barrels there are monkeys that appear and throw fruit that you have to either duck under or jump over. You can punch the monkeys.
Xybots here is an interesting faux-3d maze shooter. Gameplay only takes up 1/4 of the screen. The joystick can be twisted left or right to control your characterâs rotation in 90deg increments; the stickâs twist-action just activates a button press essentially itâs not free-rotating in multiple increments like the Ikari games. Also of note, the joystick is top heavy and seems to be intentionally designed to remain in the direction it is forced?
Gravitar is an advanced Asteroid-like vector game. The first screen is similar enough to Asteroids, but sometimes little one-on-one battles are triggered that zoom in the camera a bit. Also, you can warp through these portals that bring you to a separate Moon Lander-type side-view gravity stage area. In these zones you need to carefully hover down to just above the surface and pick up little cargo containers with your TRACTOR/SHIELD button. Notice the handsome control panel.
Crystal Castles lets you zip your little dude around as fast as you want with this here big red trackball. Satisfying. Your classic eat dot game.
Of all the games mentioned thus-far, Congo Bongo is the only one Iâve played previously. Never on an actual cabinet, though. Regrettably, this one had a barely functional joystick.
Wizard of Wor is a primitive overhead maze shooter, with some charming early speech synthesis.
Xenophobe is an odd late-80s Midway sidescrolling beatemup kinda thing. Again, another one where the gameplay only occupies a sliver of the screen in single-player. You run your little Arch Rivals-looking ham boy around with your big dual-button flight-simulator joystick and try to zap and smash the strangely passive aliens in some kinda space station thing? I dunno, worth further investigation but not overly compelling.
Nevermind, I lied earlier, Iâve played World Series '99: Go to the Dream Ballpark before. During a family trip to Disney World in the year 2000. Hard not to like, with its little wind back bat, fully-analog ball-top sticks, and handsome forest green cabinet. A charmer.
Wacko is basically a twin-stick shooter that you control with a trackball + 4-way joystick combo. The trick here is that you need to shoot pairs of matching monsters to eliminate them from the screen, and things escalate in complexity from there. Neat tilted wacky cabinet design.
Time Soldiers is an ADK-developed SNK-published Ikari-clone with rotating joysticks and everything. Another one Iâd never heard of before. This cab had a tired yellow-tined monitor, but worked well enough. They also have an Ikari Warriors cab a few feet away.
Ah, Bemani, the refuge of the true sicko. I donât know anything about Jubeat. I bet there are like 100 variations of this game, not sure which one this is. Youâve got a grid of transparent buttons, under which is a screen. Little animations play on the screen to indicate when and where press the transparent buttons. Song selection: annoying as expected. I liked it.
Wait a second I know this guy? His smug grin will remain in my memoriesâŚuntil next time.
24 Likes
I just now understood that Pikmin 4 is an alternate universe where Olimar got the bad ending in Pikmin 1 and the Pikmin converted him into a plantâŚthat rulesâŚ
10 Likes
Lmao I need to push my way through the olimar mode but i really need to go back and finish 1 after reading that
1 Like
I owned this on NES for my entire childhood and never had a single clue how the fuck it was supposed to work
3 Likes
Did someone say
Also, Time Soldiers is one of my favorites. The SNK 40th thing on PS4 adapted it into a twin-stick shooter, which is nice.
4 Likes
municipal pools are the best, really underappreciated
and this is an impressively eccentric arcade
2 Likes
frustratingly close to 1ccâing mushihimesama original mode. just need to practice the last two stages â didnât lose a single life until then (had 5?? stocked up).
iâve 1ccâd 1.5 mode before, which is probably considered to be much easier (at least it is for me?)
iâve been playing shmups with a stick ever since i started playing street fighter 6 and let me tell you it feels soooo good. iâd tried it before but i didnât have the throw distance of the joystick memorized at that point so it was hard to be precise. now w/ sf6 practice it feels sooooo good and iâm making all kinds of micro adjustments and itâs less hard on my thumb than a dpad would be. i love it!!
16 Likes
Seimitsu 4 life
4 Likes
Oh wow, Iâve never seen a Kangaroo cabinet. Fantastic. : )
2 Likes