the guy that first prototyped that was also an 18 month contractor like me, you’d think they’d let them stick around after putting in something so pivitol but, uh, microsoft huh
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I’m pretty sure anyone who had a good idea for Infinite has since been fired or laid off
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“we couldn’t make this game without contractors” says the lifer with a lakefrount house
“well this is what you signed up for” says the lead when I talked about my contract, who would go on to work on Dr Disrepsect’s NFT FPS thing
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it was incredibly frustrating to watch msft do these weekend long “retreats” where they would try to find the core idea of the meaning of Halo while a bunch of 20 or 30 something contractors were re-inventing it after rounds of Shadowrun (xbox). It was really sad to see something in a prototype session knowing it was going to get all of it’s interesting bits sanded down after hundreds of playtest sessions. it was also pretty frustrating seeing who they’d open up headcount for and who would get churned out. i still can’t bring myself to play it, much like the call of duty I worked on. Too many bad memories.
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HahaHA got u i dont think the library sucks and i do like fighting the flood!!!
…but no one who says “play Halo on heroic mode it’s the best” ever caveats that it introduces a
zerg rush monster species partway thru in a (fun but) very repetitive pseudo-Marathon level
i think its a deliberate gonzo move from Bungie but i cant lie i only came to appreciate it in retrospect, and fucking hated it the first time. and still suck ass at it Halo introduced a slow paced console FPS style that ive never fully jibed with
basically: i was spoiled by playing Ravenholm first which did a similar trick what worked on me better lol
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ravenholm is so low stakes compared to the library
I don’t caveat it because I don’t think it’s bad? the flood are fine on heroic difficulty. Your rockets kill enemies in one hit too. It’s kind of a spoiler to mention anyway in a hypothetical situation where you are telling someone to play halo who’s never played it
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Play halo heroic coop with me coward. Come see the error of your ways!!!
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They fired everyone on halo infinite so you could have magma hitler
Also james joyce was on my fireteam
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Love this aesthetic, shame to hear the devs have been quiet for a while.
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They did get that demo together in December, so possibly they’re gearing back up on the project.
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one of my friends compared the visual of hucking the knives at radahn to this ancient meme and he had a point
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seamless co-op is an amazing mod, it’s often a little buggy but stopping and restarting the session as the host only takes a few seconds and it fixes everything we’ve run into so far (usually being unable to call torrent, the jankiest thing so far was the enemy summon signs in front of the great jar, at one point one of the phantoms was only visible to one player and at another point one of them was untargetable, though still hittable with attacks, but the attacks bounced off a mobile invisible wall that surrounded it after doing damage. well within the realm of enjoyable jank imo). i only wish i could invade people who are using it
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have you seen the full length doc about people who play Nero it’s called monster camp it’s fucking wild
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nope, looks like it’s up on youtube though!
edit: main takeaway so far is that the 2000s were the frumpiest decade. this movie is entrancing
like even setting aside everyone here being a huge nerd this is some frumpy-ass industrial design
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yeah its such a good slice of that 2000s anti social nerding life. i love it. the documentary has a lot of chances to be dicks to the people in it and never does
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Virtua Fighter 4 (PS2, in PCSX2)
Forgot you can play Kumite without a data file–so I was doing that for a few minutes before I realized it, with no rank up or winning items; faced some higher kyus, maybe helped by a win streak.
A flickering effect on the walls of the Aquarium (Pai’s stage) in the emulator only happens in the first round. Doesn’t happen in the version of the stage in the Underground fighting arena in Event Square in VF4E. There is a bug entered about it for PCSX2 [BUG]: Virtua Fighter 4 (flickering Pai stage) · Issue #5893 · PCSX2/pcsx2 · GitHub – sounds like it’s a floating point math issue; emulating the precision necessary to fix it would slow down the emulator, although it sounds like someone found a work around, which may be made into an optional patch (in PCSX2 you activate game patches simply by checking the box for the one you want on the Patches tab of the Game Properties window in the emulator).
A crazy string of promotion matches that took me from 7th kyu to 3rd kyu in eight minutes (and there was a fifth consecutive one but that was against a 1st dan Lei-Fei who toasted me) just had to happen right as I wanted to log off and hit the hay, didn’t it? How do these VF Quest sessions always know?!
VF4E looks significantly murkier in the emulator due to its built-in PS2-resolution anti-aliasing:
I’m noticing now that there’s a huge difference in AI between the two PS2 VF4s. Vanilla’s Kumite has always been far harder than Evo’s Quest mode, even on the harder of the two Quest difficulty settings–I’ve hit the named ranks with I think at least two characters in Evo, whereas I’ve only reached 2nd or so dan in Kumite!
But more than that, there’s a big difference between the two games in how the AI fights. In Kumite, the AI is hard because it fights really well–it defends well, and attacks at the right times and distances. In Quest, it gradually becomes apparent that a lot of the eventual difficulty–and it doesn’t start getting kinda tough until at least 2nd dan or so–is due to the Evo AI’s blatant input reading, robotically perfect counter-attacking, and hyper-speed fuzzy guarding; in other words, it sure feels like VF4 Vanilla’s AI is just real solid at fighting(1), whereas Evo’s has to cheat.
(1) I haven’t got nearly as far through Vanilla, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has its share of cheap shenanigans; but it sure doesn’t have to resort to them to beat me! So I feel much better about the fighting in Vanilla; it’s just good, meaty fighting! But it also must be said that there are a few glaring flaws / broken things in Vanilla: the CPU can’t avoid Vanessa’s P-plus-K flying spin kick https://youtu.be/otK41Sg0J9E , which she can simply spam at them nonstop if she wants, and the CPU absolutely refuses to block versus Wolf, presumably to make it hard for the player to use his throws on them–but it makes them act really weird against him https://youtu.be/cWUzbqgHT8k .
So Vanilla looks better and fights better than Evo. Do I try to stick with it? It’s a bit weirder, and so relentless that in the past it has simply scared me off. ; D Basically I have to be able to play Kumite knowing that it will beat me more than I beat it, and that I will likely never even get close to clearing the mode! ^ _^ But dang it’s some solid fighting; VF never really managed that in any of the other versions I’ve played, at least for single-player: don’t know about 1, but 2’s muddy character physics are horrible https://youtu.be/7bSi-s_QeFQ , 3tb’s AI can’t defend sweeps https://youtu.be/7SvDE_LUlQs , Evo’s is blatantly cheap to the point where, in the end, you (well, I ^ _^) can only use one or two moves against them without getting instantly countered with a maximum combo every time https://youtu.be/yZO8Lnw5hFE , 5’s can’t defend against throws https://youtu.be/WjzLs7uHIKw , and Final Showdown’s defense folds under pressure https://youtu.be/1shyoAEY68M .
Maybe brutal 4 is the one!
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So Silent Cartographer is a really good stage, by far the best mission of the four I’ve played in Halo so far! Even the warthog bit only really asked me to sort of drive around a beach for a little while, and there often wasn’t enemies (at least not constantly) so I took my time to focus and really try to internalize the controls. This means I can now drive it as long as it doesn’t ask me to do much of anything, so basically just that one bit where I got to the entrance of a base that is also by a ledge which ended with me tumbling over it and killing my marine buddies.
I kept on heroic and it is stunning how much less of a pain things were here than on the prior mission, it is possible I made some progress (it is also possible someone asked me if I knew I could just shoot those big guys in their orange backs to quickly kill them and I went “well now I do”) but mainly I think they maybe put those missions in the wrong order difficulty-wise. Also loading up with a rocket launcher, not using it before getting inside the base which allowed me to use it to sow chaos inside against tougher set-ups was a nice bit of good fortune. Hopeful that I’ll keep up this good momentum next mission I play.
Also someone told me the listed par times were an addition for MCC and are borderline absurd for a non-speedrunner, so feel less bad about how long my clear times have been.
(FWIW I have heard of the Flood, the Library and how a lot of people don’t care for either, but no real context for why beyond I think the Library re-using a layout or something?)
I mentioned a week or two back my playing of Mobile Light Force 2 (Castle Shikigami) on easy with all 9 continues as a way to test out PCSX 2 and have some low stakes shmup fun via a single daily run. Well I decided that since I also ripped my Castle Shikigami 2 disc I may as well jump into that while my reflexes are still okayish. I’ve only gotten two runs in so far but a few things are immediately clear. One, even playing on easy it is very evident how much better pretty much everything in the second game is, I’d go as far as to say that it appears like it might be legitimately good (the first game was not). Two… I somehow am much better at this game even with it still throwing a lot of bullets at me. It only starts me off with 3 continues (gain one each hour played) vs the 9 of the original and I’ve already made it to the 5-1 boss, heck I made it to 3-2 without having to continue this last run and I’m not sure I ever pulled that off in the original. I think the slowdown is more significant when things get hectic but I was pulling off like… legitimately god dodging for solid stretches of time.
So yeah everything gaming sorta broke my way today as long as we don’t mention any puzzle games 
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I like the Flood but the flood specific levels are always the worst part of the games for me (in halo 1 and 3, halo 2 itself was the worst part of the game for me)
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Finally gathered some braincells to play some Mafia 3. On this episode we go to a racist theme park but don’t get to burn it down. But we get to string up someone on a ferris wheel which is pretty good. I feel conflicted about “recruiting” people rather than killing them. After a while these all seem like generic objectives, and you earn money along the way. I guess running a war is expensive.
A lot of the game’s initial polish is starting to wear a little thin and it feels more like a videogame, usually when there’s dozens of NPCs running in the same direction. At one point I called the gun van over, and after I bought more ammo he drove straight into the guy I was supposed to attack. Oops. Sometimes me and my CIA guy will just be standing in place while he tells me about some guy I gotta kill and it’ll be a single static shot. These are forgivable, it’s a AAA open world game, there’s no way every square inch of it will be perfect. My CIA guy explains i can wiretap junction boxes to make a bunch of icons appear on the map. [stares at camera] it’s a living.
Now we have unlocked the Irish Arc and, coming from a family of Irish alcoholics, they have gotten the characterization pretty dead on. Unfortunately I hit the RB button and released it on accident, hurling a molovot cocktail into the wall in front of me and killing me instantly, and losing $1500 in the process. The game’s “bank” is sometimes a pain to get to in the game’s relentless chain of missions.
I find the cars so delicious to control. They are big rolly-polly things. Land Yachts. Huge and slow, and yet I can maneuver them around pretty easily. How did they do it? I must study them…
I didn’t discuss the game’s 3rd person combat much. I find the 2 level healthbar to be interesting. The halfs regenerate, so you can be careful and generally get through most firefights if you go slow. Multiple times I’ve found myself reloading while a guy is directly next to me. Ammo is pretty scarce but if you find a gun you like you can keep it and buy ammo for it, and having to drop it for something else to take up the slot is an interesting tradeoff. There’s enough ammo to unload on people but you generally have to make every shot count.
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Oh my god. Linda^3 fucking oooooooowns.
I’m sort of a renowned open world hater among my friends, and I’ve thought about and articulated my problems with the format to death, but this game has really struck me with the ways that even a conventionally structured open world game can have its potential unlocked by not just being an existing game with more and shitter everything. And it predates our conception of open world games! Insane.
There are so many systems in this game that it would be overwhelming if not for the fact that it’s all so grounded. I know what a loan is, etc. Combat is about as “Here to facilitate the story/vibes” As I’ve ever seen it outside of OFF, as of my 4th hour or so basically all I’ve done is hit guard while my dogs tear everything to shreds. Really nice for the game to let you focus on the bigger picture because that’s definitely where the beautiful, virtuosic, decadently special sauce is.
Insanely impressed with this game fucking so cool oh my god. If anyone is meaning to check it out and hasn’t I reckon it’s the sort of game that you can very comfortably get the gist of in about 5 hours. If I stopped now i’d be happy. But I won’t
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