i mean fallout 4 (and 76) is just like the most brazen settler colonialist homesteading fantasy right, i’d hesitate to characterize it as “non-cynical.” i like the idea of it being hopeful but i also don’t think that was really on purpose insofar as like the game systems came first and any thematic purpose or justification for them came later if at all, and even so i don’t think it amounts to much, especially compared to something like fury road or any other post apocalypse media whose message of hope isn’t connected to a compulsive endless skinner box thing, the result of which is that like the player character is as fetishistically obsessed with the the refuse left behind by the previous world as the previous world was with destroying itself. like isn’t the whole recycling the trash left behind by the apocalypse thing kind of just what wall-e was about, i think wall-e did it better
starfield just seems like more of that from what i’ve watched except dressed up with new age techno yuppie pop spirituality sci fi bullshit instead of like, the post apocalypse. you’ve re-colonized america after a nuclear war destroyed it and any trace of anyone who originally lived there, now wander from planet to planet, each conspicuously devoid of any human life, massacring the wildlife and looting artifacts from its abandoned temples, and any other human you meet is also there to ransack and pillage except they’re not part of the space government like you are so you can space murder them without thought or any space consequence
the observation that like everyone is so ridiculously nice to you is a good one i think, it’s so toothless, it’s like they put all this ~diversity~ in the game (which is like a good thing in the abstract) and everyone is so nice and friendly to you and at its core it’s still just like a hugely regressive settler colonialist fantasy, like they were trying to paper over it instead of just thinking of a new kind of game to make
also whenever any character speaks it looks and sounds like they are being badly overdubbed and it is so funny
Was browsing the software repos on my new Linux machine and stumbled across a fantastic open source game called Mindustry, which is essentially what happens if you staple a tower defense game onto Factorio. I’ve never played one of these factory creation games before because most of them are a bit too visually abrasive and too sandboxy for my liking, and this is the first one that I really felt compelled to try. It’s really cool and I almost forgot to post the new Swan Song episode yesterday because I was too absorbed by it. Gonna be playing more of the campaign today to get familiar with the systems, but there are some really cool multiplayer modes I could see myself getting into down the line. Just thought I’d shout this out because it’s really cool, it’s on PC/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS, and I had never heard of it before despite being around 2017.
all i have to say about Bethesda is its a shame theyve never really advanced their game design chops beyond Arena. and a bigger shame they decided to surgically remove all the fun lore & enjoyably frictional mechanics from their games instead. (and other people’s games (glares @ Fallout 3)) Morrowind is where they peaked cuz its the closest theyve gotten to the right balance
Of course because they basically print money with every game (even when fans admit that theyre consistently shallow and full of the most dogshit writing) they never have to learn anything, theres a reason why Skyrim being released over and over forever for the rest of time is memetic
The only reason i really want to play F4 is because i want to pal around with the hardboiled detective robot voiced by the Garrett guy and laugh at how my character impatiently goes “mmhmm. uhuh. got it” when i skip dialogue
in addition to a cat, life is strange true colors also has a LARP segment where you’re playing with a kid and the camera pans to a flat angle like a jrpg with battle options instead of dialogue choices. later, when you’re empathically seeing as the kid sees, you see a fantasy world around you and the boss battle gets a whole UI with square enix menu sfx. really cute
Fallout 4 is one of the worst games of all time to me, a endless hell of vacuuming up useless garbage to funnel into a settlement system that acts as little more than a way to grind XP by planting Corn and building Metal Shed Side A, with inconsequential character decisions (you’re never locked out of any perk choices lol) and truly one of the stupidest plots of all Fallout games.
There’s a glimmer of something there; the character controller feels okay,they finally got some nice viewmodels and animations, and with more coherent design the settlement system could have been cool (mods, of course, attempt to approach this with limited success). But the promise it makes to the player is fundamentally empty. A power fantasy of epic and idiotic scale. Even Fallout 76 is better. Just about the only part I can stomach is when you make it to the hub town. Piper and Nick Valentine deserve a better game.
I don’t have any hope for Starfield personally, I’ve been watching friends play it the last few days and it looks pretty much the same as Fallout 4 but with a different art style and a worse take on No Man’s Sky. Will probably be trying it out on Game Pass when it drops, but honestly not sure how far I’ll get into it.
Relatedly, I tried the new Saint’s Row. I finished the first two story missions and requested a refund. How they managed to make just moving around and interacting with the world feel SO bad is honestly an accomplishment. Writing was fine; most of the reviews complain about it but I thought it was perfectly in line with what I expected. It just felt like total shit to play.
people get shocked pikachu @ me when i call Skyrim the most overrated game ive played. and i usually just deflect and say “well yknow i still played it for like 40 hours the first time, i get it…” but the combative poster in me always wants to ask “Name a single cool perk in that game. Name a single cool perk TREE in that game”
The character building in that game is so dogshit vs its reputation as an ultimate freeform open world experience. i never found a single character as fun as a stealth/archery/dual wield axe guy
argonians look pretty cool in it though. wish they still had those big ear-fanrings and silly leggies… grumble, grumble…
i never played skyrim past the first hour because i had it on xbox 360 and i got it for like $4 which i thought was too much for that first dogshit hour of playing it, so i felt very comfortable ejecting it and never putting it back in
This is as far as I got with this which makes you me and I you
Same story with Oblivion however VATS Violence is pure Looney Tunes so Fallouts 3-4 will always scratch my back in ways that are tasteless and don’t care to recommend to others
Tamriel by default is more like one of the cool DnD settings (Dark Sun, Planescape, Ravenloft, Spelljammer imo) and Morrowind is the only tine they really went for that. e.g. instead of wolves you get attacked by fuckin, huge bug monsters called nix hounds. Which you swing your sword at and miss a million times cuz the combat sucks and theyre not really different from wolves BUT!! STILL!!!
oh yeah and you have to mod the game to make cliff racers mostly passive so its like tolerable to go anywhere or do anything. But that kind of shitty design is at least funny
The Sea Of Stars talk here reminds me of my recent time with Void Stranger. A company follows up a good (maybe great) genre piece with a pretty™ example of another genre with bad anime dialogue, hand holding level design, derivative music and so dedicated to aping other examples of sokoban that the times it DOES try to be its own thing are so embarassing you’d wish they hadn’t bothered (a particular mini game later on nearly made me quit the whole thing). Beat the first run without doing a mandatory hidden checklist of options and didn’t feel like a second after seeing the iterations. What a disappointment.
Conversely I’ve played void stranger and thought it’s quick tutorials on mechanics that lasted like one screen immediately progressing into actual puzzles was great. Maybe I haven’t played enough sokoban but the puzzles have been interesting and I’m looking forward to finding out what layers it has.
The narrative already seems good, and the presentation is honestly stunning. I have some guesses as to where it’s going to go but I’ve loved the ways it plays with the meta ideas and the space it wants to put you in.
Outer Wilds (PS5) - one of the best games i’ve ever played. the music is so, so good. flying around is really fun and satisfying. i get a huge dopamine hit every time “ship log updated” appears.
sometimes the game can be kinda tedious (whoops fell into the got dang black hole again) and sometimes i get frustrated when i feel “stuck” and don’t know what to do next, but these are consequences of meaningful decisions by the designers, and as such i find them more agreeable than i might otherwise
similarly, there are some performance issues and framedrops on PS5 that would be more annoying if the game wasn’t so incredible
i haven’t finished it yet but i’m really enjoying just marinating in this solar system. utterly essential game experience; if you haven’t played it, don’t learn anything about it. just play it.
I respect the amount of thought and care put into this game
however the RPG trappings of the presentation and aspects of the conversations cannot actively trick my brain, which has figured out that the game is trying to disguise the fact that it’s an (extremely open-ended) point and click adventure game and has sounded the alarm
(and, again, describing it like this is selling it short because it implies the things in the game are puzzles and not problems; puzzles have an answer, whereas a problem has solutions)
so I’ll probably keep poking and prodding at it but this might be one of those “it’s good but it’s not for me” kind of things
okay, also maybe some of the writing is too on the nose, but it’s funny so I’ll allow it
Oh let me add to theme and say that it is 2023 and I have finished Breath of the Wild. When I started it up again last week, I was surprised to see my last save was from 2021. My favorite part of the game was scouring the map in search of memory geocaches after I had downloaded Zelda’s images from her iCloud. Second favorite thing is that I don’t know how Zelda sound in English because I played in Spanish.
