I got majorly sidetracked in this cemantle because subatomic particles were consistently netting me words above 600/1000. Took me a long while to realize that I should be thinking in the other direction. (ended after 185 guesses)
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it sucks when the hot words are related to a contextually close but very different word. I’m not good at navigating an n-space of word vector tags, especially blindly & with a ‘distance’ metric as feedback. I can’t see the nearby words!
a Wordle-style multi-point feedback mechanism would suit me more: tell me if my guess matches:
- grammatical category / part of speech (Boolean)
- etymological family (traffic light, amber for related families)
- distance in tag vector space (rank or actual distance)
- distance in word-pair links (integer)
- length (traffic light)
3 Likes
Finally got to sit down and play Helldivers 2 for real with a polycule of furries tonight. It was fucking fantastic.
I take a lot of breaks from SB so I assume I’m just late to the party on this? Like was there a thread I missed?
So much of this game is complex nuanced interaction within chaotic yet predictable systems where you are constantly doing unhinged warhammer bullshit at enemies with a ton of variety that get more interesting the more combos they stack up.
There are so many ways to accidentally die, so many ways to fuck up, failure is hilarious and just weighty enough to matter but respawn is so snappy you aren’t out of the game for long.
Like the closest comparison I can make REALLY IS MGSV but as a co-op shooter.
Perfectly timing orbital strikes to kill shit feels incredible. Especially with the game confidently giving you a ton of strikes. The movement is so…sticky and and great if it works, and clumsy when it fails in spectacular ways.
It’s a thousand little nuanced design choices that seem built around friction to a degree that’s wild to me compared to like…what I would expect from a mainstream multiplayer game.
Just a great time, the combat feels closer to a war movie than any CoD game I’ve seen, too.
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pretty light on activity
the emotional directing of each run is fabulous, can’t wait for when they mix up extraction getting tired with a fakeout lull + a swarm of flying enemies causing the Pelican to wave off
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It does seem to have gleaned many correct lessons from Left 4 Dead, which most other imitators have not - primarily, presentation matters.
I was constantly surprised at its mechanical depth. Each of the weapons has surprising nuances to master and I kept deepening my understanding of the game. Initially I was just building toward what I thought would be an ideal all-purpose loadout, only to find myself: first, finding more and more value in differentiating loadouts (first between bots and bugs, but also with sensitivity toward what other players are bringing); and second, playing more and more with equipment I had considered weird inefficient edge-case stuff when I first unlocked it, only to find more and more useful as I gained understanding of enemy types + geography and all the different tactical situations those could produce. There’s still a couple trap options (laser cannon, I want to love you) but they’re remarkably rare. I use more weapons the more I play, rather than narrowing down to a couple “best options” that fit my playstyle.
5 Likes
That Star Wars game that’s been on Nintendo’s “Upcoming Games” docket for what feels like years is out now, Star Wars Hunters.
I’m thoroughly in the training wheels track of it (AI squad and opponents), almost able to play with real humans, but it seems…fine?
The main menu is a nightmarish mess in the way any free-to-play game tends to be, and they definitely want you (and remind you) to spend money, so it’s definitely a Zynga game.
But it also seems like an OK 4v4 shooter? I think it probably being a mobile-first title lends it a sort of simplicity that I can gel with.
I’ll probably fall off it hard like I did with Multiversus, but I dunno. At least this game grants you XP and doesn’t charge you for extra lives in the single player mode (Multiversus is kinda fucked).
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Oh yeah the presentation is making everyone else in the multiplayer shooter field right seem totally incompetent by comparison. Having a game be almost 100% diegetic mechanically is a wild choice, especially when it nails thematic consistency.
Even moreso when it’s a game about American imperialism and military excess and self aggrandizement as a co-op shooter.
And yeah I keep discovering the depth too, this is the closest thing to a real Lost Planet 2 sequel I think we’re ever gonna see. They have a lot of DNA in common.
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Okay guess I’ll buy this tonight.
(What about Exoprimal though?)
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I always love it when something against all odds manages to be very contemporary in a good way
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Never played exoprimal unfortunately!
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has variety but hides it from you until you’re already bored of base missions.
overwatch fight at the end of each match feels so at odds with the PvE before it that i can’t imagine both parts appealing to many people. often the teams are close enough in time on the PvE part that it literally doesn’t matter and the fight at the end decides the whole thing.
i actually enjoy lol/dota/overwatch/class-based games with cooldowns and this game could not keep my attention for more than a few days.
idk how this relates to lost planet 2 i just wanted to gripe.
sometimes there are a LOT of dinos on screen so i guess that’s pretty cool…
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thankfully whatever posts i made are long dead on the old SB forum, but it is with a heavy heart that i must retract every positive thing i ever said about GTA 4’s writing. inspired by Tom Walker’s extremely funny YouTube playlist of playing GTA 4 with the NPC car speed cranked to 999% i thought “i love GTA 4, let’s just try playing it for real in 2024.”
humiliating.
every character telegraphs their emotional and thematic reference point from the moment go and so far does not deviate from rehashing it every time a cutscene starts. roman is a big phony and all his letters to niko were empty bravado, so every single interaction is a nervous tic-y transparent man on the verge of falling apart. michelle (SPOILERS) is a fed stoolie so every time she speaks it’s in the most flat, dissociated “wow… i’m… really… having… a great time” monotone and she tries to redirect every conversation back to divulging more details about the criminal operation she’s trying to infiltrate. so far as i can tell every character exists to POUND this one narrative beat that the game decided “defines” their character every time they show up. it feels EMBARASSING to sit through.
12 Likes
this pissed me off… knife was nowhere near the top 100 closest words. Their semantic distance algo is so wrong all the time
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Tonight with friends, Retroarch, and heavy heavy rewind I beat The Lion King. How I ever managed to get to the last stage as a child elludes me. Not that I could beat the last boss, as that is legendary bullshit. But the whole game caused roars of laughter at the new angle on how to punish a child playing a video game. Absolute death gauntlets and a milllion hyenas and jaguars and pixel inaccurate jumps all leading up to that final boss. They have bonus stages that don’t do ANYTHING.
At one point you fight Donkey Kong and he throws shit at you. If you try to jump in and attack he swats you away. This was the point I used rewind the heaviest.
Another stage has heat-seeking bats and boulders falling and attacking you constantly. Running past causes a swarm of angry bats to descend on your position.
I beat the stampede legitmately though!!! The ostrich double jump was 5 minutes of rewind analyisis.
Tenouttaten with friends and rewind. Zero out of Ten Crime Against Children on real hardware.
As @AutomaticTiger said “It’s Kaizo!” It’s not contempt, it’s an active threat to make the game difficult at every turn.
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Just remembered the part where you have to take a secret path because the main path kills you instantly.
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Star Wars Episode 1 Podracer (PC)
wow this looks great at 60fps, I mainly remember the very blurry N64 version, but a lot of the atmosphere and sense of speed is still there. So many of the levels are on worlds that aren’t really in the movies, and the atmosphere for a lot of them is really cool. All the podracers have fins and articulating flaps that move when you steer and each one has a unique design. One thing that the PC version has: a little video before each race introducing the world that the race takes on. This game is full of Glup Shitto style star wars characters and I’m here for it tbh.
Unfortunately the game is very very easy at the beginning. The boost mechanic is probably one of my favorites in any racing game: you press forward to boost, then activate it, and hold it while the temperature raises and you have to deactivate it before your engine catches fire.
Really all the driving mechanics are as good as I remember. I’m very surprised this never got a sequel or something.
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it’s because the target word is really strongly related to ‘cut’, and then all those words are strongly related to it instead of the target. needs weighting to dampen the rank of words that are a few steps removed from the target
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It did get a sequel on PS2 that no one likes.
I killed Anakin Skywalker in it.
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