uh speaking of fakeout endings i accidentally finished the ‘a’ ending of nier automata before i did all the sidequests, because i didn’t figure the final boss was actually going to be the final boss
did i fuck up?
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You can go back later to get sidequests but it might be a little while.
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ah okay
yeah it was all a bit sudden, there are clearly a lot of strings left (including crafting ingredients i’ve never even encountered once) and i’m just not sure how much of those are actually available on a first playthrough, having gone in knowning even that this is a game with 26 different ways to get to the credits
living this in vidcon’s fourth dimension is weird
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it’s almost hilarious how the soundtrack elevates the entire show though, it’s so well done. my favourite character, singing in unlanguages and all
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always disappointing when this happens
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We love katamari
We do. Do we?
I thought Katamari would be the perfect first game to show to my kid but I was wrong. Something was off. Things weren’t clicking. Seeing it from the eyes of a small child, I understood. Levels are too abstract, too cluttered, too blocky. I know this is the untouchable Katamari aesthetic, but I feel this makes it a kid’s game for old people only. We’d probably prefer an ultra realistic Katamari game.
I’m going to say the most heretical thing ever written on this forum : Maybe, deep down, Goat Simulator is better
Anyway Katamari is still cool let’s not get too carried away
Grapple dog
Nice momentum/jump physics, nice graphics, I hate the Yoshi’s island-like collectathon. Woops I missed 1 fruit out of 250. (Don’t be misleaded by the screenshot you need the full 250 to unlock the uh blue coin)
Could I just ignore it?
No. I cannot
Strange Telephone
Yume Nikki like. Make a phone call, get transported to a small randomly generated weird world. There’s a lot of repetition between the worlds though, and I don’t feel compelled at all to do the illogical adventure game hoops required to progress.
Enjoyable for 15 minutes
Virgo vs the Zodiac
I was ready for some girly JRPG but the The post-Undertale, less interesting Drakengard 3 writing here isn’t great.
I think timed hits in JRPGs are inherently shaky (they’re the soul of fucking Yiik) and they’re worse here as the game’s battles are too complex for them. Like imagine if Slay the Spire had QTEs. Bleak.
Bleak sword DX
This looks so good. I love when the cutscenes zoom in on my little Intellivision guy, bravely wobbling.
Fighting has a very rigid attack- dodge - block - powerattack structure and all enemies are fairly basic. Gets quite a bit repetitive after a while but it’s good. « DX » in the game title gets an automatic +1 pt on the /10 rating scale IMO
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Hard disagree, as someone who couldn’t stand that game and just found it more tedious to play than amusing. I can’t stand most physics based games, where the whole conceit is that the controls suck.
Also I really liked Prey, it’s been years since I played it though. I remember the difficulty curve being out of whack which made it hard for me to recommend it to folks but I personally loved it. Didn’t know there were any fake out endings. I still need to try Mooncrash.
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The difference I think is without spoiling it for others, is it is an original presentation, with an original soundscape. Getting Meme’d or Rickrolled is about the repetition and spreading of a concept. Like Sea of Stars has the fucking companion cube in it. That feels insulting, replacing a cultural artifact instead of Original The Idea.
I’ll almost always take something loud, earnest, and dumb.
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feel like if you’re going to do this you’ve got to really bring something to it beyond what QWOP did ages ago
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1-2 at magic night. Loaned mono green so I was on Angel Tribal. Every night my conclusion is that I play too fast and that I’m bad at magic.
Gotta go fast tho tbh
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This is why I eventually just started playing Red
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I get that, it just didn’t feel earnest to me.
More like the marketing dept saying ‘hey remember this cool part from Alan Wake!?’
But then a lot of Control is jumping through hoops to tie the ‘Remedy Universe’ together which is not really my thing…to each their own!
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spent ten bucks to play Baldur’s Gate 3 early on PS5 with my wife over Labor Day weekend, we installed it at 11 and were up until 2 playing it. it’s hilarious that it emulates even the things that I don’t particularly like about DnD (for example, combat being a little finnicky) so perfectly that it’s charming to me.
also marathoned Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, which is indeed The Real Deal
videogames are so good, y’all
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idk if we have a Starfield thread, but i spent a few hours with the game last night and idk - it’s pretty boring!
like it’s pleasant enough to play and it’s on Game Pass so i’ll probably spend more time with it, but it has not made much of an impact so far. there’s also a lot more killing than i was expecting - i had this sense the game was about 50s future optimism and space travel and i’ve already murdered a dozen people with machine guns.
the assets look really nice and you can tell there’s a lot of work that went into making the places feel real, but in terms of being a space-travelling game with a massive scale, it’s pretty mundane feeling in a post-No Man’s Sky world. even NMS 1.0 which was also boring, at least entering and leaving planets felt like something. in Starfield, you don’t even have skippable cutscenes showing any of the interstitial stuff; it’s like you just load into all these places that don’t feel connected, which is very videogamey in an 8-bit sort of way.
i was able to talk a guy out of fighting me which is always a fun thing to do in these kinds of games, so idk - i will keep exploring to see if something finally pulls me in, but for now, it’s a lot of the same: enter a room, steal all the garbage in the room to sell it, shoot some dumbasses, talk to some smarmy folks who give you purpose.
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whoops somehow my post escaped the drafts
I agree, I think this is a great way of putting it. There are lots of kid’s games (and shows and movies and toys) for old people but they all suck because they’re designed to be nostalgia traps and are poisoned as a result.
Katamari Damacy is pretty much the only non-nostalgic version of this idea I can think of. Anyway it’s great - I think I would have disliked it as a young young kid because it’s so abstract and weird, but it hit just right as a teen,
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Yeah Katamari Damacy is like a wooden toy. Even if they’ve never had wooden toys, adults will prefer the texture and underlying positive associated values of wood while kids love the more immediately appealing plastic. Katamari is Kapla
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I’m finally digging into the system shock remake and I’m having an excellent time. playing with all the difficulty settings cranked and zero manual saving except when I have to quit and there’s no autosave opportunity nearby. it takes a lot of patience (especially bc I already had to restart once due to the time limit), but it’s absolutely exhilarating to play this way. every tiny decision you make matters. and it works especially well with how the game just does not hold your hand at all. and holy shit this game is huge, it feels like twice as big as system shock 2. I love how playing it with the time limit means you just don’t have time to explore every floor, and to my knowledge many of them are optional anyway. and it’s so refreshing to be unable to afford to do tedious min-maxing save-scumming shit. my only complaint is that there isn’t an option to completely disable manual saving. it’s just a self-imposed restriction for me on this playthrough, which is fine, but the way it makes you live with your mistakes instead of meticulously redoing every sequence to minimize resource loss does so much for the experience that I wish it was built-in. for me at least I’ve reached a point where I’d rather restart the entire game than repeat the same setpiece 20 times until I clear it using as few resources as possible.
it’s still remarkable how uncompromising it is from the original game’s approach to difficulty, and that alone makes it such a fucking unicorn among not only remakes and remasters of DOS-era stuff, but also just among modern AAA and indie releases. and I love how detail-oriented it is, it preserves so many weird little quirks from the original, like the automap is shitty and weird in like the exactly the same way as the original, and that feels especially relevant because of how much user interface is literally world-building and game design in the cyberpunk genre. I’m honestly so impressed with everything nightdive has been doing lately.
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yeah the system shock remake is by far one of the best videogames i’ve played this year. such an exhilarating experience!
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plus plastic is nicer to chew on, and i rarely chew on my toys anymore as an adult
(is this horny sounding? i promise it’s not on purpose)
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