Now that’s a Superstar Saga midboss
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I will hateplay this game for precisely 20 hours once it’s “fully” released.
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she is very Fawfulcore, true
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Finally actually digging into NFS Unbound. The game is set up that each race “day” has rising tension, your wanted level slowly rises as you do more races, and you have to cautiously avoid police to make it back to the safehouse, lest you lose all your session’s earnings. This is a fun risk vs reward mechanic in theory, but at the very start of the game when your car is very slow it’s very possible to be stuck in a death spiral of getting caught by cops, not being able to outrun them, and then your wanted level rising to the point where the cops chasing you will always catch you. I had one of these happen and quit the game once the in-game cops started chasing me in corvettes which are impossible to outrun as a starter car.
I’m enjoying it not as much as I expected to partially because I had to play for like 7 hours after multiple restarts to get to the actual meat of the game. Picking a RWD car seemed to be the right call, as after several in-game days I have enough money to get into the big racing event at the end of the in-game week.
You don’t get first place in a lot of races, and that seems to be by design. You earn money usually unless you get in last or second to last place. You get enough cash from winning 2nd or 4th place to buy upgrades and things. The game doesn’t require you to get first in really anything, just earn cash to enter races. There is also usually a race that requires no money to enter (except in the game’s tutorial, which you can softlock your way out of).
Driving wise the game feels very good most of the time, there’s simcade elements, and I keep expecting it to handle like a burnout game where you just power-drift around corners. Not really the case here at all. It’s still very arcady but it’s possible to gain positions by taking corners with max grip. Boosts and NOS are two separate things. You earn boosts by drifting and driving good, and you get a 3 bar boost gauge, and you either use it or lose it. NOS you seem to just accumulate through a race. Neither seem to do much in terms of speed, but the camera movement makes it feel that way. I have never been able to actually catch up or pass people using a boost.
During races other racers will trash talk you and this is very annoying, this has been a mainstay in Need For Speed games and I don’t know why. I wish to tell the developers that absolutley nobody on earth like this. This makes more sense when it’s cop chatter and you’re trying to make tactical decisions, but when you’re in a race and you hit a wall and hear some garbage bullshit from another racer I’m like “who keeps thinking this is a good idea”.
Other racers actually are characters in game, who you will sometimes ferry from one location to a safehouse, and during that drive you and the character talk and get to know each other. This is pretty good despite the fact that most characters are paper thin, including the protagonist. I hate the other racers less knowing their backgrounds and stories and wish I could just do more of these instead of them being scripted events that happen once in a while.
The story of the game thus far is some bonkers…uh…stuff. You and your mechanic friend work for a garage, you were both orphans and working there gave you a sense of security and purpose. Your mechanic friend is really good but aspires to something more, and is tired of pulling all nighters for your boss to repair customer cars and getting talked down to. You (the protagonist) carry water for your boss and try to reason with your friend. There’s one plot point where your boss wants to do a barbecue to celebrate your mechanic fixing a bunch of cars, very much a “great work team here’s a pizza party”. Eventually, the mechanic steals a bunch of customer cars and disappears for two years, only to emerge with the car that you both rebuilt in the game’s prologue. This game has some funny ideas about labor.
Really wishing someone on the NFS team would read freakin Wangan Midnight or watch an LP of the first parts of Racing Lagoon.
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I’d be curious to see your take on NFS The Run. It’s the only NFS game I ever really bothered with and haven’t seen a campaign like it since. I get the impression some of its genes trickled down into later NFS singleplayer stuff even though it didn’t do that well.
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I keep posting fucking gameplay thoughts in wrong threads because they’re named incomprehensibly and are impossible to find at a glance, oh well
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Oh lol I didn’t even notice either
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The idea of NFS The run is really good: a cross country race with hundreds of other drivers.
I have likened The Run to a Gritty Reboot of Cruisin USA. I think it’s executed alright but a lot of NFS-Isms kind of get in the way: the totally wooden characters, the incomprehensible plot setup, etc. There’s quicktime events for when your character is stuck in a car and you have to press X to not die. The game starts with a series of quicktime events. Not being able to really customize your car.
I would like one where it’s closer to LeMans or endurance racing, and you have to maintain a car between stages and get limited time to repair it. Stuff that a lot of rally games do really well. Instead the game is a lot of story stuff that doesn’t make much sense, and the load times are really long because it’s one of the earlier Frostbyte engine games. I get the sense that NFS developers are really aiming for the Casual Racer Gamer and so whenever something gets slightly complex someone goes “woah hey hey we’re not making a “sim racer” here”.
I think if someone could take modern game engine large open world stuff and translate that into a compelling cross country racer, that would be fun. Fuel did that stuff nearly 20 years ago with it’s huge open world. It would require someone with a strong vision leading the project though, and the mechanisms in the business to facilitate that are…complex. It would be a freak accident.
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The Crew 2, for instance, modeled the entire continental US in shrunk form. It took a decent amount of driving to get from one side to another. I got into the first Crew because I expected there to be a bunch of cross country races and that seemed fun, but in practice there’s just a ton of terrible rubberbanding and it suffers from the same terrible writing from a lot of AAA racing games.
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Not playing too much right now, tbh.
Potatoing around in Remnant 2 with various builds here and there.
Meteor just released a new album, this time based around the F-4 Phantom, so I reckon I’m gonna end up reinstalling Ace Combat 7 in the near future for a replay or three.
I play Warframe a bit here and there, but life’s all a bit too raw for that right now with where I’m at.
Bought Starsector awhile back thinking it’d be a great little EV Nova-alike, but uh… it’s not and I have no fucking clue how to play it. Then again, it took months of hit and bounce before EV Nova gelled too, so, IDK.
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Shining Force III is cool but kind of archaically brutal in some respects - it does seem like they want you to redo battles a few times to level up, but if you die, your “Friendship” stat is affected. it’s unclear to me how important “Friendship” is going to be at this point in the game, but i’m guessing i probably don’t want to lose too much of it…
the game also makes some of your stage goals unclear - like in the 3rd battle, you are chasing someone to another town, but then you are being pursued by guards from the first town. the narrative makes it sound like you should be heading to the town to escape, but actually, it just wants you to kill everyone.
i’ll keep plugging away
Daytona USA is the first game i have run into a glitch with using Saroo - any time i try to load any stage that isn’t “Beginner,” the game crashes back to the Saturn system settings area. supposedly there is a new Saroo update that just came out that further increases compatibility, so i’m going to give that a shot. one of the issues with any of these DIY projects is a lot of time compatibility comes down to “does the game launch, can you play it for 5 minutes,” which doesn’t necessarily mean “the game works.” only happened with this one, though, so i just went ahead and picked up a JP copy of Champsionship Circuit Edition because it was $20 and has the original music
Rabbit - this is a fighting game i’d never heard of, but it was recently translated. basically it’s sort of like the Capcom JoJo fighting game, except more Chinese in its aesthetics and themes, and each character has a spirit animal that you can attack with instead of a Stand. seems cool and maybe kind of broken - the animations and graphics are really colorful and nice to look at, so it’s a keeper.
Princess Crown - it’s weird how much of Vanillaware’s thing was just right there at the beginning. i’m using Google Translate Camera to make my way through this game and yeah, it’s a Vanillaware game all right. the combat feels pretty interesting - it’s more of a dueling kind of thing than what we see in Muramasa or Odin Sphere. i’m surprised they’ve never sought to revisit this game and give it an HD makeover, but it still looks and plays beautifully. i haven’t gotten far at all (i mostly wanted to test out if my cart saves properly), but i’ll keep going. using Google Translate is kind of annoying because the CRT doesn’t always show up properly, but it’s better than understanding 10-15% of the text on my own.
i broke the law and bought a JP lightgun that is all black so i can play the Virtua Cop games and House of the Dead and, hopefully one day, Policenauts. for the latter, i may just buy one of the repros i see on Instagram all the time these days.
Sega Rally Championship - Game Over yeahhhhh!
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friendship is the coolest thing in shining force iii, and i feel its absence in every other strategy game i play that has named characters
if two characters fight near each other a lot, their friendship increases, and as their friendship increases, they’ll get bigger boosts to their attack and defence when they’re near each other, encouraging you to put them together more and as such increasing their friendship more. a virtuous circle! of course, if you want to ship any of your party members, this adds an extra little element of fun to that, too.
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Checking battle pass boxes in Helldivers 2 and Splatoon 3. I don’t like what my life has become.
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I do the same in fighting games now and it feels like thin layer of slime on everything
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My favourite fact about princess crown is that the limited edition of 13 sentinels in japan came with a download code for it on the PSN store but thats the only way you can access it.
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Can’t you use Egress to escape battle and grind without dying? (I have only played 1 and 2)
I think this first appeared in Fire Emblem Genealogy of the Holy War and has been a core mechanic in that series since
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been getting back into marvel ultimate alliance 3 for reasons that are very embarrassing (i’ve started reading comics again after 20 years). realized i never spent as much time with the fantastic four as i should have, considering that’s my favorite marvel team. so i did the grind and got everyone to maximum level.
during this process, i remembered that i never get around to unlocking their fourth costumes.
i could not figure out how to actually get these costumes. they can’t be purchased in the S.H.I.E.L.D depot, you can’t get them in the dlc campaign, and there’s no gauntlet reward for them. so i looked online for an answer, and i have to ask: what do you mean team ninja forgot to put them in?
so yeah, the fantastic four only have three costumes. doctor doom has all of his! while the costumes themselves aren’t especially important; they would just be recolors of their future foundation gear, it’s the principle of the thing. this is closest we have ever gotten to, and will probably ever get, to a good fantastic four game, and it’s still fucked up in some way.
game still rules, though, even with those permanently locked slots haunting me.
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i’m sure the other three are pretty upset too
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I’m enjoying Homeworld 3 quite a bit so far. But I don’t think it’s a particularly amazing Homeworld sequel.
I should note that the original Homeworld is my favorite game, I just adore the feel, the story, the music, the visuals, the whole package. It gets that melancholy vibe I love so much.
The general consensus is generally correct that the story of H3 isn’t anything special, and it lacks that sense of adventure or peril that the first game had. I think Homeworld 2 also suffered from this, but H2 did have you going off on a quest and being isolated, which I think was to its benefit. I think H3 might get there, but the knowledge that your people OWN the entire galaxy at this point takes a lot of the teeth out of the places you visit. This place has been tamed, you know where everything is, and no mysteries remain. This is a stark difference from Homeworld 1.
H3 makes the very insane decision to have constant CG cutscenes of human characters talking to each other, completely missing the distance and scale that the first game brought by having you be a person linked into all chatter and all activity on or around the mothership.
In H1, the character is the mothership, it’s not Karan S’Jet. H3 seems to think the main character is Imogen S’Jet, and not the mothership.
Their decision to also put Fleet Command into the character of Isaac is like… again, not really getting it. Fleet Command was literally the commander, who would consult with other people on the ship, and then offer to you their conclusions. It was the voice of a large body of people, the people within you, the mothership. Again, that distance from the personal, made it so when personal emotion bled through at the edges, it hit a lot harder.
I think overall they do a lot right. The graphics look amazing, the game plays very well, I actually love it on a gameplay level. The chatter is great, and I am really digging how each “specialist” across your fleet has a particular voice, and this lends to it being a sort of character in a very subtle way I love. The resource collector corps has a voice, the guy that just happens to be the spokesperson who communicates up to leadership, and that’s a great decision.
I very much like the recognition that Imagen hears and “feels” the fleet. It makes it all the more frustrating they still insist on us following Imagen as a separate story character, but, whatever.
The music so far is good but obviously nothing compared to Yes in the first game. There’s a bunch of rehashes of the original songs, and you could do a lot worse.
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HOTD Saturn is an unfortunate conversion that suffers bad camera jerk to such a degree that I always switch over to Virtua Cops instead (yes because you can’t simply own just one)
Dragon’s Dogma plays nicely on Switch and spares me the daily Hell that is my weekday commute with every journey into the spite and savagery of Bitterblack Isle, which still remains a sunnier place than North London in general
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