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this puzzle has shattered my picross confidence

??

In Picross related news I’ve almost finished the Mario half of Picross 2. Has some good puzzles in the last area.

In EDF news I am a bit surprised you still have to pickup all the pickups!

So nosing around the right places reminded me Cosmology of Kyoto was a thing, so I finally got around to that.

And it was certainly a thing! But one that scratched the right itches for me due to being a history nerd and the fact that I love dark Heiankyo shit for some reason, so basically meandering around the place with horrible and weird shit going on was fun.

Feels very much a product of its time that could only have come out of the early-mid 90s PC multimedia and edutainment craze with the heavy presence of point and click adventure games. If it had live action FMV it would have been a perfect storm.

This game looked so good but got such shitty reviews. Please get at us. Transformers devastation was so surprisingly good id love to know it is maybe sorta like that

Never played the Transformers game about the only Platinum game of recent memory I just couldn’t care less about to try but I hear it’s better. Frankly it’s odd that Ninja turtles is the one that doesn’t work as well. But they want all 4 characters on the screen at all times. So they want a mostly overhead camera.
Combat is loose so you’ll just mash in x or y, maybe b? I’m sure there’s supposed to be combo system to worry about. But even looking at a video of ‘high level play’ of what someone had to do to get a secret boss, it was simply chug sodas to up damage and hit them fast enough to trigger the secret boss. But the bosses kinda suck. They seem to just have huge health bars and they’ll Pose for an attack, I don’t think calling it ‘animation’ is fair as you’ll basically learn to coun seconds to react, 6? 8? depends but you get the idea. Then they’ll pop down an area attack, meaning you can’t just try to avoid the attack, you have GTFO, or perfectly time a defensive trigger. Also you’ll swap between turtles to pull of ‘ninjitu’ or just use meter and while they let you customize and the turtles can have any move you want, they don’t have special moves, nor do their weapons effect how they play.
There’s a ‘stealth mechanic’ reminiscent of bad stealth mechanics on the PS2, if the enemy is yellow and you hit them, boom gone, but if they’re red you’ll have to hit them a few times before they go away.
Movement is loose, you can just run anywhere, but it’s hard to walk, and there’s no reason to. You can double jump stupidly high, then parachute down, despite that near as I can tell there’s no fall damage. You can scramble up most walls endlessly.
So IDK this is very much a ‘b’ game. It’s quick and fun to play through. There’s an interesting achievement list that if you were to go back I bet could push this game and make it more than just the sum of it’s parts.
But it has the look of the modern comic, just not the writing. It’s a dumb little beat 'em up, with a layer of charm.

I mean that’s basically a bug

It’s not as bad as scripted destruction scenes that the player can sit through because they don’t feel like participating; Naughty Dog catches most of those with one-way gates triggered in cutscenes. (By the way, I love how they treated willful player tardiness in the Uncharted 4 heist – as the bidding price goes up and up and up and Sully gets more and more desparate!)

I don’t disagree that they’re building the illusion of a one-way ride but I think the stealth play forces them to open up their environments in a useful way; I don’t really like the game but I like playing it more than Uncharted.

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well, the gamey parts of the last of us are very gamey, and that’s definitely part of the reason the game works so well, i think, even if it’s disguised. also naughty dog is very good at nudging players through and around stuff like this, generally. it’s practically part of their schtick. also also, if you’re really only halfway through the game, then i think it probably has a few tricks left, and maybe you should slow roll that verdict a little bit.

hint 1: you’ve mismarked some things, better do it over

hint 2: in particular, marked here

solution: here

Sorry, my definition of bug extends to any unanticipated, harmful behavior – so I include bad AI states, holes in level geometry, etc. It’s an oversight that they would have fixed (even if just by preventing you from going there) if they’d known about it.

Hinging a criticism upon a technical issue feels like small griping; I prefer it as an anecdote illustrating a lack of concern for narrative/gameplay cohesion but even then it’s a weak argument. To me the game feels limited as it’s so obvious it makes mainstream, less-complex adaptations of systems in survival games: resource management, scrounging, crafting, stealth – and the simplified gameplay systems (and my knowledge that they are simplified) weakens the ‘harsh world’ the narrative presents.

As to the sandbox – yeah, they definitely aren’t, and it’s interesting how much more restricted they feel next to Metal Gear Solid which has traditionally featured sandbox AI in linear environments (I really really like to play MGSV where I wouldn’t say that about earlier games). Paramount to them is the ease that the player can slip into/out of combat – they’re building off a combat engine and Last of Us encourages getting the drop on enemies more than picking them off one at a time.

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Fair enough. My memory of that section is that I tried to do what you did and the AI was already hostile; I believe they come out of the cutscene alerted to you. Their damage and numbers are supposed to be the force that pushes you into the next room. If you managed to hide the problem is that they lost sight of you – they should have stronger locks on where you are until you do the suggested route and break their awareness.

I don’t consider disrupting the normal systems of stealth a huge problem in that situation because stealth is already a huge abstraction over how a real person views the world. Moving from a cutscene where they obviously see you to a game scenario where hiding behind a desk for 5 seconds breaks that despite your routes being blocked off is more cohesive gameplay-wise but less-so narrative-wise; best to lock them on and quickly push the player into a scenario where the AI has plausible ambiguity as to whether you left and so can drop back into a less-aware state.

Yep!

We can and should decry the open-world virus but it’s a good thing the industry stepped back from the cliff of, “every game can be Uncharted because they’ve solved movie-like games” we were threatened by in the dark year of 2012.

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@janitor @The_Blueberry_Hill
thanks y’all. I’ve steamrolled through the entirety of Mario’s picross and every picross e puzzle up to this point so getting hung up on this puzzle was a wild surprise. i appreciate the help!

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finally played the last three levels of Mario 3D World that I was unwilling to completionist-replay the rest of the game to unlock now that save files are circulating for use in Cemu

they were a-OK