Playing more FEAR. It introduced a mech and gave me a gun to shoot it with, but I know there’s gonna be more mechs in the future. These encounters are not ultra hard but require a balance of caution and aggression. Game feels repetitive because it’s like… Encounter → Encounter → empty section → light puzzle → Encounter → Spooky guy shows up → Encounter. I’m still in this same endless office building. I want to finish but nothing is really pulling me forward, so play sessions go until I’m like “alright, I’m done”. Really does feel like the auto turret section was just there to drain everyone’s health kit stockpile, because I can’t seem to get a surplus anymore, which allowed me to get a little more liberal in firefights.
Still this game makes you use cover, I always thought that peeking around corners was silly until this game, but I had a good hallway firefight where I was just peeking around a corner to pop shots into someone. Bullets penetrate walls so cover isn’t actually cover.
If the game wanted to it could dynamically change what weapons other NPCs carry, so that it forces you to run out of one or two kinds of ammo and improvise with other guns. Having to only carry 3 is pretty fun but I stick mainly with the AR and Shotgun, and the 3rd slot is for fun guns I find.
Look at this spooky hallway! The NPCs will call out that they see a flashlight, so I stopped using mine to maybe be less visible. the darkness feels a bit safer that way.
I’ve been trying to watch youtube videos about stalker and it feels like no one has ever liked this game for the same reason as me and a handful of people I already talk to
I will never get over hearing some kid who still sounds like he has braces say in the same breath that tarkovsky was a “politically ambiguous filmmaker” while the strugatsky brothers were “communist propagandists”
Im getting further and further in DUSK, about a map each day. I just did “ESCHER LABS”, E2M5, which puts me exactly halfway thru the game. Somehow each map just ups the ante and manages to bring new surprises. I thought the first episode was cool but apparently I had no idea because this shit is INSANE.
Next Im going to play AMID EVIL. I dont think it will compare but we’ll see.
old-timey IC poster dhex used to talk to me about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. a lot and he seemed to like it for very similar reasons (hard, obtuse, exploratory, etc.). unfortunately, i could never play it because i didn’t have a PC that could run it, at the time, so i felt like i missed out.
i’ve gotten the sense the sequels kind of deviate in a less-interesting way.
if the game is still worth playing, though, maybe it’s time for me to dive in, finally.
I regret to inform the forum Tchia is if anything a video game.
I was really hoping for a Wind Waker something something based off a real culture but after 30 minutes I turned it off. I could already feel the dozens of tiny cuts that would disappoint me from hitting start.
Here is one tiny example. There are multiple full length songs in those 30 minutes. There is an accompanying mini-game where they inform you playing good/bad doesn’t matter. You can in fact hit a L3/R3 to put it on auto. The entire time it is on auto in the bottom left it informs you you could go back to playing. The songs go on for a while. At the end of the song you get a % pop-up for how much song you did, despite them telling you it doesn’t matter, but you know video games.
That’s just one I’d tell you more but if you even go close to water in this game, the whole soundtrack gets a low pass filter that sounds like what the world sounds like when I have an ear infection. It sucks so much. Did I mention sound is important to this game? I was starting to get sick any time I had to do anything near the water. I still am a little bit.
So Game Over.
Also I got to the minecart section of FF6 but then died to the second boss and didn’t save after the first. What a fool I am. Try again tomorrow.
We Katamari: & Royal Reverie Re-Release Redux Revision … version:
dunno about other languages, but at least in the german localization, the text bubbles from the King of All Cosmos have been defused, i.e. he’s less nasty to the player now, and instead … he’s just bored now.
Fully understand why they did change his texts, but it becomes a bit more ambiguous now whether you have cleared a level properly or whether you have left something on the table.
Which is, when you consider how this game came into being (Keita Takahashi initially didn’t want to work on it, but when told Namco would release it anyway) came back to do damage limitation. And via the texts of the King of all Cosmos, the game did let the player feel that he wasn’t happy about that) a truly genious move, because after almost two decades, there’s no point in perpetuating his grudge.
Have gotten my best time arouns the race track down to 1 minute 6 seconds after a few tries, will continue until i knock it down to a sub-1 minute just for the sake of it.
Looking for the ultimate game to play with a (non playing) 3 year old kid, Ape Escape is a pretty strong contender. It has cute little levels, a running animation you want to imitate, and dinosaurs. Apes have tons of personality and catching them is always funny and exciting.
It’s great playing slowly, looking at trees and skyboxes, pretending you’re struggling to catch a monkey.
I never played Ape Escape 2 and 3, but 2 seems like a stratospheric drop in vibes, and 3 is unavailable on the PSN store!
I’m trying to think of a 2010+ game that’d be as good as Ape Escape for this purpose. Maybe Mario Odyssey, and that’s it? Hat in time is too busy / wordy / scary and I can’t see any game outside of the 3D platformer genre nailing it
My niece is coming to town this weekend, turning 3 week after next, and I figure I’ll play either Kirby Star Allies or Return to Dreamland Deluxe for her.
That or, y’know, Mario Odyssey or something. She’ll probably get bored and watch Disney stuff on a tablet anyway.
I was kind of into Midnight Suns actually, it just ran like shit at launch and I didn’t play a lot of it because of that. It was kind of like Mass Effect + a simple but well produced card drafting tactics game. Had good character for a licensed game, and felt more comic book than MCU.
I don’t really understand why it’s eating resources, there’s just not much to the game, but there’s a lot of wasted graphical flourish you can turn on/off, or slide for depth. I just don’t need it. This game would have been better as a budget title.
For all the graphical whatnot, the art design is a miss. The Spider-Man suit is ugly. Which should be impossible, but they managed it.
The combat is thin, and coming off trails it’s hard to ignore how similar yet how much more limiting the system is. It doesn’t matter where the enemies are to attack, but if you’re doing an AOE where they are standing matters. Or if they’re close to an object to be thrown/dropped, that’s it, but if you need to just wack someone across the map it just doesn’t matter.
But you have so many popcorn enemies and no tool that truly address them as they need to be addressed.
Also for some reason, the game is VERY FOCUSED on hanging out and having you go mushroom hunting and gathering resources. It’s pointless and just ruins the flow.
I’ve never seen a game designed so poorly but it’s like comfort food, I barley have to think to play. What’s funny to me is that there’s tons of mods for this game. A billion nude or sexy clothes mods which is… expected. But nothing for like GET INFINTE MUSHROOMS AND DUMB RESOURCES. Which would be the first thing I’d want to boot up mods for here. It’s not performance, it’s literally just runninging around nabbing them.
as a youngun who had never played an rpg before and had no real concept of levelling up etc. even though the manual insists you should, spiky tiger took me a week or more and i was legit wide eyed in amazement when i actually managed to kill it one evening
then i blitzed through the rest of the game in a few days
Then you’ll love to hear that he also said “Stalker has a reputation, and I don’t mean like Taylor Swift has a reputation, I mean like Joseph Stalin has a reputation”
FEAR has gone from being spooky and making me feel vulnerable to me feeling like a fucking cleaner. The office building maze has gone from being a spooky liminal space to being Winchester House Office Park. I’m annoyed at all the elevators that don’t work! or do work only to get stuck! or elevators that break! Or go to multiple floors! Fuck the elevators in this game.
Anyway in this latter part of the office levels you get the vague notion to get this one character. all the story stuff is done through voicemails left over. it’s so quaint. The problem is you have to stand there and wait for a voicemail to complete to get any part of the “story” and it’s usually office workers yelling at each other and vaugley alluding to something. Nobody plays FEAR for the plot. but god. I’ve eaten instant ramen noodles that are thicker than this plot.
It’s around this time the game gives you what I called THE BUGZAPPER and it sends a beam that turns enemies into skeletons. it’s really fun to instamist someone especially coming around a corner with no warning. The game is giving me less firepower to deal with the same powerful enemies. It gave me a mech encounter and didn’t provide a rocket launcher, so I had to improvise. I remember the first “Heavy” encounter at the end of the water treatment plant, where I lobbed grenades at the guy forever. Now I’m dancing left and right taking them down with hipfire. Also, @iguferon is right the pistols own. I occasionally find pistol ammo and you can just dome these fools with a few shots.
Anyway, then you meet an NPC that we’re going to have to escort.
The elevator section is neat, reminds me of Tower Unite a little but with guns.
THEN the game throws flying drones with fucking lazers on them. You see a schematic for them on a wall in a level like 2 hours earlier, nice foreshadowing.
Anyway the executive’s (?) daughter runs off after your evac helicopter blows up (WHAT ELSE IS NEW) and then the guy on coms calls her a bitch for not wanting to take a death ride. I’m like “you know what she’s right we should just fucking drive, also you’re an asshole for calling her a bitch, it’s 2007 videogames I GUESSSS” and then not 10 minutes later we’re in ANOTHER helicopter that gets shot and crashes.
These fucking Community College ass looking levels look fucking great though!
The burned out buildings are going to be fun. They dropped a mech on me in an enclosed space and I feinted in a direction and was able to…run away? Eager to go into this “vault” that everyone keeps talking about. Also doing it solo because this fucking operation has 5000 helicopters but only one guy with a gun!
Katamari: & Royal Reverie Re-Release Redux Revision … version:
