the daughter lust gets better
not many AAA games can claim that
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i think a few can. aaa games have contracted the “sad dad” illness almost as bad as dtv action movies
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Indika is really something. Steam’s algorithm said it was similar to SOMA, and in a way that’s not inaccurate. Though while SOMA’s philosophical ideas are part of the structure of the story this one is more about theological discussions between characters.
The game suffers a little from Bloober Team syndrome, where they might have been better off keeping it a walking simulator instead of adding occasional “challenges” that are kind of annoying. (But fortunately more interesting and nowhere near as frustrating as what you find in Observer, for example.)
I’m glad I knew next to nothing going in, though depending on your temperament it might be worth mentioning that (as with SOMA) the themes get pretty bleak.
I like that the surrealism isn’t constant or overt (except occasionally when it is).
Here’s a random screenshot that doesn’t spoil anything:
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no I’m going to argue that Binf goes past sad dad and into Pornhub tags
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i somehow missed the word “lust” in your post lol
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I knew I was in for a bad time
but my gosh
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played the first couple of hours of eiyuden chronicle and yeah this is suikoden, but the boss fights take far too long and i’ve had the game crash enough that i don’t think i’m gonna continue
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In a bit of a rut pinballing between Tekken 8 and Unicorn Overlord. There’s some stuff coming out next week that might break me out of my funk but I worry I’ve just grown complacent with games I know I like and am less able to experiment with random new things that might be bad (but might be good) than I used to. I feel like I’ve fallen off of indie stuff almost completely which feels at odds with what I want. I think it’s just been a bit of a comfort food year so far with games.
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For all that Kevin Levine goes on about “choice” in games Bioshock Infinite presents many moments which would be interesting to go one way or another but instead railroads you down to a highly choreographed virtual animatronics display. Like when you’re picking the ball for the Racism Raffle, earlier you get a message saying “don’t pick #77” and you don’t have the option but to pick a ball with #77 on it. Or like when the two characters give you a coin to flip and you can’t pick heads or tails. Considering how lavishly the production was on having bespoke voice acting and animation for so many incidental NPCs I am surprised they didn’t spring for having minor differences in how things play out.
Systems wise, I think Ken Levine thought “What if there were turrets that you could hack to shoot your enemies instead of you?” and has been riding that idea for his entire career. The levels are full of turrets, you use “salts” to turn them to your side for a limited time. This was a selling point of the earlier Bioshocks, and something Ken mentioned when promoting his next game “Judas”. It seems bad that any machine can get hacked by anyone who drinks a potion, in a society full of machines, but what do I know.
Booker Bioshock must be the dumbest game protagonist alive, he is presumably a bounty hunter but does not secure his own transport to a remote lighthouse. He gets into a mysterious chair. He drinks anything from any bottle that any NPC hands to him without question. The aforementioned coin flip characters also give you a potion that gives you a shield and you gotta drink it. You spend much of the game drinking from bottles of beer and whiskey you find which give you infinitesimally small amounts of health or “salts”.
Calling Mana “Salts” is the dumbest thing. I will press the left trigger to ADS and instead the words “You need more Salts to use this Vigor” show up on the screen. You drink bottles full of Salts. Why? The vigor bottles are the ugliest things I’ve ever seen and are way way way too elaboratly designed to be mass manufactured.
Perhaps I should go over the world design, it’s hard to suspend disbelief when there are stone buildings floating around on blimps and there is no infrastructure for getting around, in fact it pisses me off a lot.
It’s really easy to get lost in the levels. I keep forgetting you use the skyhook to get around because there’s no visual link between buildings to see paths from a distance. More than once I have fucked around in a building looking for a way through when there is no way through. The buildings, which already piss me off, are labyrinthine and nonsensical. This is also why I couldn’t get through much of System Shock 2.
The game will tell you information about 5-6 times in different formats. You’ll get an ability and it’ll play a video which explains the ability, then a text popup will show up which also explain the ability, then you’ll go about and the game will stop and tell you to use the ability. Then Booker Bioshock will mutter “Huh, I better use the right trigger to activate an ability”.
Gunplay is fairly basic, you have to have a gun to be an FPS, but this seems like they shaved off all the rough edges that come with an FPS. There doesn’t feel like there’s any skill at all. You click in a stick to go to ADS. This is about the only thing the game has over Dark Void though.
You do search for stuff, a lot, and somehow this sucks. The health you get from pickups is really small, and there’s lots of health items lying around, so you spend a lot of time searching for and picking up stuff. Cops will carry cans of beans on them and hotdogs, and you can loot their corpses for them. I don’t know why it tells me what’s in them when the options are “take all” and there’s no downside to taking all items since there is no inventory. It would be nice to use your salts to heal, or carry around a medkit, then it would feel a little strategic. Instead you’re at the mercy of the game’s level designers. Granted, Cruelty Squad has similarly stingy health pickups both in the world and from corpses, but it seems to fit in with the themes of the game. It’s also a game that takes some skill to traverse levels.
Bioshock Infinite is a dark ride of a videogame, frequently halting the game to make you look at some Racism. I had to stop a few times because I was like “god this sucks” . I am unsure why the gaming public at large, who seems to be for systems and skill driven games, can’t see behind the paper thin systems of this game and the lack of skill one needs to play it. The Old Timey Talkin NPCs and world design was done much better in the Dishonored series and rubs thin within the game’s first 30 minutes, but is probably going to relentlessly dominate the rest of the game. I have stopped listening to the audio logs that are scattered around the world because they are so annoying.
I’ll probably keep playing it because I am poisoned by my own curiosity.
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god I wish Binf was that nuanced
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Binf is like almost literally not worth anybody’s time at all.
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ftfy
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still the only game ive ever hate played! it only gets worse up until the very stupid ending! Booker dewitt is a fucking maniac and he deserves everything bad that ever happens to him. What’d you think about the part where he got baptized so hard he passed the fuck out and floated down a sewer
or learns that people are looking for a person marked by a specific number, notices that number on himself, goes like “What the…” and then does nothing else about it including comment on it further
or how about after he doesn’t throw the baseball (but is either racist about not throwing it or isn’t) and the cops try to grab him (because the number) and he jams a rotating blade right into one of their faces and turns a mans head into hamburger something something violence in videogames!!!
The fact that you get to this place in the first place by going a Myst lighthouse and inputting a symbol code to access a rocket chair and it’s the first thing you do in this game. and people for awhile called this a new standard for games as dramatic art
ohohoho 
i love clowning on this stupid, stupid very bad game
One of the preorder bonuses is a pair of pants that makes enemies heads explode ART
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I’m glad bioshock infinite exists because it gives me an easy answer to the question of what the worst video game is
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I am hate playing it, partly because I wanna see it for myself, and I think deconstructing what little is there is useful.
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Somehow (it was the good company, really) I spent like four hours streaming Endless Ocean Luminous in chat, and it might be one of the most crushingly disappointing games I’ve played in ages.
You just…you swim and you scan. That’s it. Sometimes you pick things up off the ground. Sometimes you find a giant pentagram coin that says “BRING ME THE WHITE INSECT THAT CRAWLS ON THE OCEAN FLOOR” and then you can’t, because there’s some capacity mechanic that is never explained.
Your main contact in the game is an AI lady which, like, I think it might be an actual text-to-speech AI? Given how long each of the 500+ fish explanations are, and the weird cadence and inconsistent pronunciations, it might just be.
There’s also like…very little consistency to the randomly generated maps (look I know but work with me here). Each map generates with one unique little biome, and in there are more or less themed creatures - my first one was a very deep hole filed with prehistoric fish and lizards. The second was a deep underwater lake with giant arowana types. The third was an incredibly difficult to parse, uh, iceberg donut with narwhals and porpoises and beluga. But! The majority of the map is just random. You swim into deep ocean waters and find like, a mudskipper? A mudskipper?
The most obvious goal is “find the seven glitchy fish to make some sort of weird fish appear.” In the last case it was, uh, a gigantic seal. Not as cool as the previous “weird giant shark covered in crystals and pulsing with electricity.” What was the one for the first map? With the dinosaur hole? I’ll never know…I abandoned the map before I found them all…
Your reward is leveling up, and getting PP points for…something? Changing your dive suit up, buying stickers and emotes. I think that’s it. Sometimes you scan enough stuff and a slot machine starts spinning and I have no idea what it’s all about.
To it’s credit, the little fish facts are pretty cool. Never realized how many fish just change sex on a whim. It’s a wild world down there. Some of the facts for their made up fish, especially as spoken by the AI, just sound like some shit ChatGPT makes up when it’s scraping bad data.
There’s gotta be other games with fish cooler than this. Don’t get this game.
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i cant believe you cant even pet the fish anymore
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EverBlue still exists. We can all decide to play that.
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Gonna keep ranting a second here.
The story is absurd so far, about something called “The World Coral” that the game presents as this very impressive tree of mixed coral but…visually…it just kinda looks like shit.
Anyway, it’s dying, and you gotta stop it from dying by releasing light to restore it, and the only way to restore light is by scanning fish. Oh, and if it dies it’s the end of all life on earth.
These story missions are like three minutes long, bookended by load times that are nearly a minute long, and when you go to select the next story mission it asks you to scan, y’know, 500, 2000, 3500 more fish. So hop to it.
The seven glitch fish I mentioned earlier appear in random spots on the map. Nothing clues you in to which one it’ll be other than your reticle will flash orange and the controller will shake a little. They can appear anywhere on the map, and while the Endless Ocean is more finite than you’d think, you still gotta scour every quadrant hoping they appear.
And! And! After three dives I’ve discovered all but a few less than 200 fish. So now I’m scanning every little reef in vain hope that there’s a little shrimp or worm or something I’m missing from the compendium…
There’s no interaction with the fish. As best I can figure this is some sort of oceanic purgatory. You just phase through most of the creatures. There’s some collision with the really big ones, your sperm whale and whale sharks and such. But you can’t grab on or something cool. You just kinda stop in your tracks if you bump into them.
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