I remember why I didn’t like this game: it’s gloomy. This game was victim to the “gritty” trend of the mid 00’s when everything was dirty, had excessive lighting bloom and HDR, and motion blur, it’s impossible to SEE the track and turns. It looks alright. Doesn’t reach the highs of Burnout Paradise, and it doesn’t have it’s exuberance. Burnout 3 felt like a party, and so did Paradise. Revenge feels like…idk…Call Of Duty. Somehow.
All the cars are the same, they start at 180mph top speed. Unlike the other games you don’t start with hatchbacks and work your way up to faster cars. It’s just fast from the start.
My last save was in…2005. I must have played it for 2 months and then dropped it.
Project Gotham Racing 4
The last one in the series. The car physics are very weird, you drift into most turns, but it’s not immediately controllable and it’s very easy to fishtail the car back and fourth. Cars and bikes share the track at the same time which feels…dangerous. Most of my memories are of PGR3 but 4 also has the Nurburgring on it. You can do most of the Nurburgring without touching the brake, that’s how unrealistic the driving is.
I think I know why there aren’t any more arcade racers anymore, and the simple fact is most racing games are boring and they all do the same thing. Once you had a certain graphic and simulation fidelity, it was all over. Arcade racers made sense because you don’t have enough memory to, like, simulate the tire grip of 10 cars every frame. The other reason is: the iphone happened. I am pretty sure all arcade racers are on mobile now, and they’re terrible. The economics don’t make sense on a console or PC anymore, unless you kickstart something and even then…
I am going to try to get a capture setup ahead of playing Bioshock Infinite. I want to document the…journey.
still playing mgs2, it’s funny that the parts i like about it are the same as the ones i dont like about it - a kind of sealed and airless quality. the claustrophobia of having absolutely everything boil down to competing flavours of spook blowback makes the writing feel funnier and a little less empty than like the hijacked nuclear bomb action movieisms driving mgs1. i like how mean it is abt military kitsch infecting every part of emotional life like starting in a patriarchial triad with Stern Mission Dad and Mournful Save Wife and then having to slowly bust out of it into varying levels of fight brotherhood (cause of, and solution to, all of world terrorism in this series).
but big shell is so boring… it really drives home how much spy shit relies on a sense of place, like even with deliberately antiseptic places getting to see them from odd angles and slowly figure them out… all the hexagons and bridges feel weirdly both overdetermined as abstract game shapes you have to encounter from multiple angles, sort of the same theme and variations approach i appreciated not being in mgs1, and underdetermined in that none of them are very interesting to bounce off. also all the stuff with the map terminals feels very proto-ubisoft tower now. i do like the seagulls and the seagully colour scheme of the bridges and just wish there was anything else to suggest the presence of a world outside box corridor box box zone… i miss fmv caribou
anyway just got to the part with Emma which would read as a very funny ico parody if this game came out five years later but as it is just feels kind of sad. she can’t walk unassisted bc they injected her with moe nanomachines. sure hope nothing bisexual happens to her
I played a couple of hours of The Eternal Cylinder. I am a bit ambivalent about it, the concept is nice but actually playing it feels a bit boring to me. I don’t like the exploration much and also the use of gimmicks that transform the creatures I am controlling. I feel like having to control more systems that I want to. Probably the game is not for me.
I dug out my 3DS because I have a few games lying around that I haven’t touched. Rocket Slime was fun and just when it started to feel tedious, it ended. More developers should take notes. Every game loop has an expiratipn date. Now I’m playing Contact which is a relaxing time. It’s funny in the ways it feels like a blend between a pet raiding simulator, where you’re the pet, and an RPG.
Currently thinking about whether there are other games I need to play on this thing. Definitely Flower, Sun, and Rain but what else?
There’s a late game part of Quantum Theory where you are in Anor Londo doing Mario Platforming through Gears. I would have taken another half hour of it but everything in this game is like a PSP game, 15 minutes.
Generation Zero put out a 60FPS patch for PS5 not too long ago.
game whips, it’s like the best possible version of shit like far cry or whatever co-op shooter (borderlands? idk dude lol) nonsense. just the right level of jank for my taste. shootin’ robuts is just fun, idk. esp when you take down the bigguns.
also i have a lil robo companion pupper gal and she’s the fucken best
Little discursive but I recently tried every ds pinball game & I agree pinball pulse is by far one of the best but I will say A. Shocking how low the bar is for that on DS considering how natural the system is for it
B. Unlike Metroid pinball the assets seem notably designed to be upscaled later for a higher res display
Also, there’s a Sanrio cinnamoroll pinball game which is not hard but pleasant as a cute fidget toy that’s better than it has any right to be. Especially as something to emulate for fun.
i wonder how well the first DS Zeldo (Phantom Hourglass) holds up i remember it doing some fun not-obnoxious DS tricks (the stylus-based movement control was surprisingly good) and that it had easy-but-pleasant brain teasery puzzles and a slightly less trad Z-da design space, like they were inching up to Link Between Worlds real slowly so as to not spook Ocarina diehards
I never discovered whatever merits the second game had because the default train felt rubbish and the first item you get is a “blow on the mic” gimmick. And they nerfed the big multipart stealth dungeon that everyone was wrong about in the first game (it rocked)
Got home from being at my dad’s for a while, and one of the first things I managed to do hooking my computer back up (I unplugged it, didn’t want a possible storm to knock it out while I was gone) and updating/uninstalling stuff was kill one of my dang SSDs. The one that had all my ill-gotten bootlegged games from the Internet Archive. Dang!
Replaced that drive with a 2 TB drive and went to town reinstalling games on Steam, so:
The Exit 8: Very cool game, though I regularly make it to the eighth loop and screw up. Some of the differences are extremely subtle, though some (spoilers for the game, but the guy walking extremely quickly, the weird human-shaped tile formation on the back wall, the two guys standing side by side) got me to turn around immediately. Really did not feel good seeing the terrifying water stained face on the ceiling. Hopefully I will figure out what barely perceptible difference is keeping me from finishing this.
Control: Still very good. Lost my FSR injection files though, and reinstalling it hasn’t panned out yet. Dang.
Mortal Kombat 1: 124 gigs to find out that Peacemaker is kinda fun, if only for John Cena’s lines. Pretty boring to play as, though. Uninstalled!
As for Switch stuff:
Final Fantasy 2: Constantly plagued with concerns of “oh god am I playing this right.” Feels like I’m both steamrolling the game and hitting occasional walls all at once. Most of those are my fault for failing to remember to hit “Learn” when key words pop up and having to backtrack. Just got a bell from a cave, if that means anything to anyone, haha.
Kunai: Pretty fun little search-action game with grappling hooks and Spider-Man 2 style slingshot launching with said hooks. Really like the limited color palette thing it’s doing.
