I have to admit, coming back to seeing everyone talking up the warthog while I’m mentally wondering if it controlled worse than the taxi in Raw Danger has really thrown me off, I’m also coming off someone telling me to turn the difficulty in the game up after it again took me an hour and several deaths to make it through the second mission on normal so it may just be that me and Halo folks are just built differently.
5 Likes
I hated Halo until I jacked up the difficulty, it really did make the game way more fun, it also lead to me trying way too many games on Hard and none of them benefitted from it, wish that wasn’t the case, I like when games are hard and fun, Halo on Heroic is the way to do it though, I really recommend it even if you think you’d hate it
9 Likes
i dont know why they ever stopped saying “this is the way halo is meant to be played” in the heroic description because i never wanna hear about how legendary is the best again
7 Likes
Y’all making me want to drive the warthog first person in my driving rig while someone handles the gunning.
4 Likes
what if i said i considered both the handling of the warthog in halo and the taxi in raw danger to handle excellently… bc i think they both work really well
4 Likes
what do you think about that moon buggy thing in mass effect
2 Likes
after mentioning it in my post in the screenshots thread about inuyasha, i played a bit of capcom vs snk. as well as the lighting stuff and the cool stage intros, there’s a lot of other really interesting little details in that game.
for example, you can knock vega’s mask as well as his claw off. are there other games where that’s possible? i know you can know his claw off in most appearances.
also, the portrayal of sakura is really interesting too. instead of making her like a martial arts manga protagonist who can pretty much do anything all the adult shoto practitioners can do as a teen, they make her somewhat more believable as a self-taught prodigy. her hadoken is just a blast of light, she can only shoot an actual projectile for her super. and her dragon punch is mure like her running up and doing a slightly-harder-than-normal uppercut.
also, arcade mode put me up against a team of two very different muay thai practitioners: sagat and king. that really made me think about how interesting it would be if capcom and snk teamed up for a (or a series of) small scale crossover fighting games only starring the more semi-realistic martial artists in each of their rosters.
using muay thai as an example, a game about a muay thai tournament, maybe set in an alternate mid-20th century. playable characters are king, joe higashi, sagat, and adon. they all have their own stories, and there’s a bunch of generic fighters to fill out the tournament.
karate, taekwondo, and wrestling would also be great candidates, and all could have totally differernt stories and moods to them. maybe even a sumo game, with only honda and hinako, for a really tight, enclosed story?
obviously, that’s something that wouldn’t get made at any point in time, and especially not now, where every game from major companies has to be a big super-event. but it’d be nice.
i am getting ever more impatient for dojo masters to come out lol
10 Likes
I’m getting back into video games, for better or for worse, and I really love just thinking about how explaining what happens in the first hour and a half of Death Stranding would sound like relaying the events of a fever dream.
9 Likes
never played it tbh!
1 Like
Not as bad as all the complaints online say it is imho
3 Likes
It rules actually, it’s solely responsible for making the otherwise stupid and interminable planet exploration nothing zones bearable
4 Likes
hit lv30 in darktide, pretty alarmed how much more frantic the game becomes going from second green to first yellow difficulty
4 Likes
Victory Heat Rally (Christmas SAGE 2023 demo)
SAGE is the Sonic Amateur Games Expo–although the developer has had intentions of releasing the game commercially: there are older demos on Steam Victory Heat Rally on Steam (2022) and itch Victory Heat Rally by skydevilpalm, Colonel Sandwich (2021) that appear to have different modes, and a driver select, which this SAGE demo does not. Earlier visuals
had an elevated, segmented Power Drift look; the tracks are smoothed out in these more recent demos, but the cars and the stage sprites still have a definite old Sega “Super Scaler” arcade look, and you could call the overall vibe an updated Sega “blue skies” style with an even more up-tempo theme.
The itch page indicates that dev skydevilpalm is two artists (“based in Las Vegas,” according to their home page https://www.skydevilpalm.com/), and the game has other contributors for other aspects.
The itch page also still says the game will be published in 2022; there have been complaints on Steam and itch that the devs have been silent lately, and even the recent SAGE demo downplays the updates somewhat, but a response to one complaint notes that the devs post regularly on X–which I have not verified as I don’t want to log on to X if I can possibly avoid doing so. :PP
There’s also a 2020 demo–which I also did not try–on SAGE host site SFGHQ: Victory Heat Rally | Sonic Fan Games HQ
This 2023 SAGE demo features cotton candy sweet graphics and music, glitchy, harsh, unbalanced sounds, control mapping that can leave you unable to navigate the menus (which I did, of course; reinstalling didn’t help but I was able to reset my controls by deleting the config file from my Windows user profile folder (C:\Users[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\VHR_THE_FINAL), thanks to a tip at controls are awefull game has a good consept :: Victory Heat Rally General Discussions : D) (and the game didn’t respond on my DS4, even using DS4Windows; the DS4 worked fine with it when run as a non-Steam game through Steam, though) (and the menu BACK key ISN’T Esc, it’s Backspace = ooo…so people are gonna get stuuuuuck if they’re like me ; ), and controls that take a little getting used to, but the drift-to-boost shtick quickly becomes addictive.
The controls WERE killing my dang ol’ wrist–I suppose maybe because it’s SO over-the-top arcadey that there’s never a reason to use Brake or release Accelerate–until I found, in the MISC menu–which unlike the other option screens can only be accessed from the main menu, not the Pause menu = oo–the “AUTO ACCEL” option, which holds the gas pedal down for you! = D A feature every true arcade racing game should have, my tortured ol’ joints say! ^ _^ (I refer you also to the otherwise janky 10-second racing segment in a side route in Seaside Hill Act 2 in Sonic Generations https://youtu.be/WbX1l9WEzS4?t=5601 = D)
So, I had fun! Once you get the hang of boosting, the demo rips along, and you can absolutely nuke the little super-deformed CPU cars off the track if you slam into them hard enough. The last stage in the demo is a rally stage, with Sega Rally-style turn call-outs. ^ D^
18 Likes
Halo infinite’s campaign is amazing. Cutscene starts and chief retreats to his black void mind palace to hallucinate child soldier mommy dr. hitler physically handing him a new cortana that’s like a rookie pencil pusher and all chipper and whatnot that walked from her hand into chiefs hand. We were fuckin howling with laughter this is the best halo they’ve made in years, just completely spaced out bullshit where the chief is openly hallucinating like he’s in a silent hill game
changed my perception of whats possible in halo. 343 just needed to keep making these so they could hit 4th plateau and finally make a really good really bugged out one
7 Likes
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I (PC/Steam)
If you have a save but pick “New Game,” a window saying “Delete all of your game data saved so far?” pops up–and if you pick YES, it resets all your Options settings! So the volume went from 20% to 100% suddenly and deafened me as the first stage started. ; D ; P
But it works okay with my DS4 and hasn’t crashed or choked up yet so it feels better on a technical level than Sonic Generations, which came out on PC a year earlier (although in the console version releases, Sonic 4 came out a year before Generations ; D).
Things I don’t like:
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Sonic moves too slow in the first second of trying to get him to move. He comes to awkward stops on sleep inclines, and slows down when running along telephone-cord-shaped spiral paths. Jerky vine swings. Why didn’t they copy the original physics? This feels chore-like. Baffling. : P
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Geckos phasing in on the wall right in front of me and firing instantly point-blank. Whee.
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Lock-on jumps. Just let me jump freely, man. Sonic used to jump good in 2D. : PP Now there’s twice as many button presses necessary and you die if the lock-on decides to do something different.
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There are a lot of spots where you die if you don’t move in the air in a particular way toward a target or landing spot that’s still off-screen–so you lose a life, and continue losing lives until you memorize the spot where you have to do the particular air move toward the still-unseen goal; in fact the stage designers seem to take a certain glee in setting up jumps that leave you just short of current safety.
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Massive chasms at the ends of stages, requiring move memorization to survive. Easier than making a boss fight, I suppose. Barf barf.
On the other hand, I kinda like the sorta janky (light flares on grass, weirdly photo-realistic background cloudscapes) high-res 2D art.
And the bonus stage I’ve had to do so far was actually chill, and easy to control; kind of a rip-off of Taito’s Cameltry
–way better than any Sega-made bonus stage I had to do in Sonic 1-3, which were more or less out to destroy you.
8 Likes
Finished the Stones Unturned DLC for Mafia 3 so I can get the big machine gun to mow down Klan shitheads in the Faster, Baby! DLC.
3 Likes
also the Ring (they capitalize Ring now in the dialogue lmao) is called ZETA HALO which is hilarious to me for some reason like they made 25 of these fuckin things and they got blown up before. it’s so fucking anime
the first boss was a brute named Archmage Tremonious and when we killed him we stepped out into a big base named Outpost Tremonious which a loudspeaker kept talking about how was the coolest thing ever because they built it on human death and failure
If new cortana is an exact copy of cortana why is she so nosey…why’s she act like such a fuckin busybody. This is the most fun I’ve had thinking about halo in years, between this and the tv show everyone hates because chief is sad all the time and isn’t mean enough to girls.
3 Likes
halo is good again imo. it’s important to maintain a positive mental attitude
3 Likes
Just wait till you get that grappling hook.
1 Like
You start with it! And also I played like 40 hours of firefight beforehand lmao it ROCKS, I can’t believe they only added a pve mode 2 months ago and it’s king of the hill and it has less queue times than pvp because nobody wants to play the shitty pvp
chief has the grappling hook in season 2 of the show now too
1 Like