Started playing this edgy resident evil inspired game made in the doom engine called dismantled: director’s cut. Initially played it out of morbid curiosity due to gristliness, but found myself surprised to see how much they transformed the game into feeling like genuine horror game and not a Doom skin. The normal mobs in the game have a sense of danger to em that gives it a different combat pace to normal doom. Its a lot more to do with baiting enemies into spots they can get stuck on to hack with your melee weapon since your guns don’t do enough damage to pick em off from a safe distance.
Overall: I’m satisfied and excited to see how it handles bosses and the escalation of power between yourself and the enemies. Maybe the dynamic might shift.
Before you play it, be aware of the content warnings on the steam page before you venture into the game, too.
i finished captain blood with the help of a guide and i liked it a lot! theres that thing thecatamites wrote about playing videogames being like dropping pebbles into a well, i know i’m probably misreading it but i kept thinking about that wrt the interface and the oorx system (especially the way missiles are solely represented as a pair of converging indicators). i’ve started liking games that self consciously inflate the amount of abstraction thats always involved in parsing a game or translating thought into action so its nice to see people were already doing it 35 years ago, it’s uh “shockingly modern”
the plot was unpleasant in a way that sometimes worked but was also pretty crass. the constant war & genocide & racial engineering arent anything intelligent (the two warring races are color variants of each other and also are arnold schwarzenegger) but they at least create a tone, especially given that the protagonist is basically god from outside the game world. on the other hand, one of the races is a naked woman who keeps telling you how great you are and how she wants to have tons of little captain bloods with you etc.
since i heard of this game thru the winter k / mu foundation blog post i was expecting the UPCOM system to belie a more coherent world with natural language but i actually liked how artificial it ended up feeling. since every planet only holds 1 alien i eventually felt as tho teleporting another one down at the same time would break reality or something. and the aliens kept circling back to their default lines or giving multiple responses to my input based on the glyphs individually instead of the message i’d intended as a whole so it felt quite uncanny. but, as the blog post observed they were still really distinctly characterized w/in the limits of UPCOM
there were only two or so more moments of infuriating guesswork but on the whole i dont think using a guide hurt the experience too much. the time limit stopped being quite so overbearing after the first few duplicates. it did sort of feel like going thru the motions toward the end but the game is short anyhow. all to say its somewhat more playable than i expected.
I forgot to post here, but I started playing Bombe the other day. That’s the “build an algorithm for solving Minesweeper puzzles” game. Incredibly compelling. Hours disappeared every time I played—until I started to run up against my own limitations. I’m at the point where I have to bounce back and forth between puzzles searching for logical conclusions I’ve overlooked. Sometimes I catch myself making useless or redundant labeling rules that just add a bunch of regions to the map unnecessarily, but I think I’m getting better at catching myself going down that path and refocusing.
yeah bombe is a black hole and i had to add it to the list of games i’m not allowed to play anymore because otherwise it would consume all my time.
the other two games on that list are factorio and tactical nexus.
my conscious mind highly values new experiences but my subconscious will happily solve increasingly complicated and esoteric problems in a single domain all day, to the point of getting poor sleep and eroding my mental health.
finished bitter black isle in dragon’s dogma, and now i’m doing post-dlc runs to get sick gear and take out the new bosses. i admit that it’s a bit frustrating though, because i’ve hit the part of the game where meta rules all, where it feels like pawns are a liability and you cannot do reasonable damage with any vocation besides magick archer.
I have been beating my head against Dark Bishop for the past week, feeling the same way about pawns.
Actually, this fight has shown me the ugly side of DD’s charming opaqueness as… for some reason… I sometimes do crazy damage to enemies, sometimes my pawns cast smart debilitation spells or boons, sometimes don’t attack, or sometimes a boss will cast magic without doing any animations, and sometimes for some reason they will fill the arena with huge tornadoes that juggle my already dead Arisen in the air for like six minutes. It’s nuts! I have no clue how to approach having any kind of consistent affect in combat, or to count on any NPCs doing anything consistent either.
I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I just finished Red Dead Redemption 2. The story and the writing was pretty good, the world rich in stuff to do and gorgeous to behold. Makes me want to go hiking. The gameplay is for the most part just a railroaded cover-based shooter without much substance beyond chugging down your near infinite supply of tinctures while you mow down near uncountable numbers of cowboys that just keep walking into your line of fire. Despite this mass slaughter, they can’t show you a horse foaling. (Think of the children.) All in all a pretty solid game.
With Cruelty Squad I was expecting much more of a gradual onramp, and the tutorial had me thinking that it’d be a lot slower paced. but the game’s first level is really hard, especially without any upgrades which would help with, like, traversal or hp or anything. The enemies are really hard to spot at distance. The first level does have some backways in which is nice, but enemy placement seems to change from one playthrough to the next.
I did beat the first level. I like how fragile you are compared to other FPSes and the lack of mid-level checkpoints adds a lot of tension to combat.
I beat Spark The Electric Jester 3. I was shocked that the last level suddenly introduces a challenge, limited lives, and is a half-hour long 3D Sonic levels. Actually all the levels just go on for upwards of 15 minutes which is too fucking long, so then they doubled it.
The story is so poorly-wordfilled delivered. Like the script was rush translated into Egyptian and then back into English. There is some cool concepts that are immediately abandoned for the childish complicated nonsense the game indulges in over and over. The back half of the game is actually pretty story free until the hour long final stage (after the stage there are long cutscenes and boss battles).
There are moments where you go “this looks really cool” after you beat the game you gradually unlock all the levels from Spark 2 and those feel better because they are video game stages not never ending sprawling tubes and drops. Like seeing how big the environments is extremely impressive.
That the credits describe the creator as doing “almost everything” feels arrogant as well. It is an impressive 3D professional game but still has the stink of fan game on it. You wonder if half the stuff is some inscrutable inside joke, everything is left in because they worked hard on it. Half-ideas grafted into it. There is a stage in this 3D Sonic Game that has a new vehicle section 12 minutes in.
There’s a lot of video game here, but I guess I still finished it in like 5 hours.
I wanted to do a low stress run in Pacific Drive before going to bed but instead on the second level the game just completley started fucking me. In the first sector my car took a bit of damage because I had to go offroad since the game just literally puts random shit in the middle of the road. So many things gave my car damage, and the storm in the sector was approaching, and I took too much damage and lost a tire. I lost an external gas tank so I tried fueling up at a gas station. There was a “magic dumpster” that dispensed some much needed repair gel, but then the storm started to arrive and blew all the physics objects away. When I got in my car the battery was dead and I had fucking enough for the night. This was after smoking some weed too. This game has no chill and will just decide to fuck you over. I hit Alt F4. Again. maybe I should turn invunerability back on so I can actually enjoy the game
I’ve spent I dunno how long (since finishing the Fallout show) trying to get Fallout 3 to run decently on PC. It…kinda does, until I bring up the Pipboy or holster a gun or something and the whole game locks up. Or I absentmindedly alt+tab away from the window and banish the game to some hell dimension I can’t access it from anymore.
So far I’ve gotten further in it than I ever did in the 360 days (which is to say, uh, I made it to Megaton and maybe found Dogmeat?), but the writing…hmm! Hmm!!!
Everyone in Rudie’s chat last night told me to just skip to New Vegas, so I spent some time (not as much, thankfully) getting that working, having to download some .dll so characters wouldn’t all be bald. And damn, people weren’t kidding. The writing has genuinely made me laugh a few times, the characters have actual character (and don’t feel like a homogenous, singular snarky voice like most of Fallout 3’s cast).
I guess if I’m dying to play Fallout 3 down the line I’ll try the conversion mod that has you play 3 in New Vegas’s updated engine, if only because 3 is insanely unstable as-is.
My friend has been playing some mod that treats 3 and NV as single game. You start in DC and then it does a “3 years later” time skip that brings your character to Vegas. I’d almost be curious about that but I dunno, if I were going to dip into the Bethesda formula again maybe I’ll just play Outer Worlds 2 whenever that comes out
because the fallout 1 and 2 experience for most is getting them dirt cheap on steam, loading one up, and immediately getting killed in one hit the first time you encounter an enemy
3 is so undeservedly loved but i forever have to begrudgingly admit it’s what got me into the series. by which i mostly mean got me into the 1st one and New Vegas. I thought about playing it last time i ended up doing NV instead and it was after looking on the wiki to plan a build and being disgusted at how shallow and boring all the perk choices are. You get a million of them and they all suck
i gotta watch the show i think a show is the smartest thing to make out of that universe. Its a rare game adaptation that i think could be good without convincing just because the setting is so rich
