aight one last thing about dishonored i wanna gush about: the textures. they all seemed hand painted!!! every single one following a uniform style convention to make them look realistic at distance but stylized close up. fucking remarkable. must have taken loads of effort. hats off
13 Likes
Playing the Mad Max game from 2015, now understand why everyone was talking about Chumbucket - he’s great! I assume he’s going to die
the opening made me cry very unexpectedly when the dog came up to the unconscious max?? what is wrong with me i’m so fragile anymore but the thought of these two broken creatures helping each other out got me all weepy
anyway game is pretty good so far, only played about 1.5hrs. It seems like a somewhat streamlined version of a lot of Open World Bullshit, and the driving feels fantastic. We’ll see how long I stick with it
EDIT: Oh, also it’s $4 right now Save 80% on Mad Max on Steam
15 Likes
I never get tired of bitching about how everyone played this instead of Just Cause 3 which shipped with the same engine at the same time but instead of having boring batman combat has blue skies Eurotrash pilotwings flight options
4 Likes
I didn’t like Just Cause 3 at all when i played it. Bored me to tears for whatever reason. I’ll just play pilotwings 64 i guess
4 Likes
i finished super mario bros 3 without warp whislting for the first time! world 8 is actually super easy when you’re stocked up on pwings and clouds.
i also finished super mario bros 2 for the first time ever! with warps but i’m satisfied with that for now
i started playing the second nu-wolfenstein because i remember loving the first but man im bouncing off this hard. maybe my tastes changed or the opening couple missions suck?
17 Likes
I liked Just Cause 3 okay.
I got Just Cause 4 in the humble bundle this month though, and WOW is it bad.
5 Likes
Was very disappointed by JC4’s motorcycle physics. I had an ok time with it but I was kind of bored the entire time. There was one instance where two battleships were heading toward me and I parachuted out of the way at the last second, and they both booped into each other. That was fun.
Everyone likes the Mad Max game, and I did too, until the game’s abominable hand to hand combat sequences became too awful for me to do. You have to do a million missions to upgrade anything. Just the worst AAA impulses bring that game down. The car to car combat is so brilliant and the game world is so good, it’s such a let down on the other stuff.
3 Likes
yeah, 4 wound up being free a lot more places, which is too bad, because it loses a lot of the appeal from 3 on like… nearly every level
1 Like
The interface is just mind-bogglingly bad. Absolute all-time dogshit interface. The mechanics/controls are a little awkward too but that’s par for the course. That UI though… UNFORGIVABLE.
1 Like
It’s wild how they took a game about explosions and controlling the weather and managed to make it unfun
Also it looks like shit even on a series x, pulled back way too hard after the (legitimate) performance criticisms of 3
1 Like
I really like the first third of that game when you really feel like you’re on the brink of death in the desert without being an actual survival game, but as you unlock more and more base stuff you get invincible like every open world game
which was still fun for me, I loved the sounds my engine made and upgrading my car and doing jumps and dreamy slow underwater combat and commenting gruffly on pictures of What Once Was (so dumb) … the whole vibe is different though
but cordoning that dog to only be in the bomb sniffing fucking car is the worst crime that game commits
I stopped just cause three after the first fucking fly through literal hoops level go away that sucks in literally every game
hahaha that made me remember even in dys4ia a lot of people hated the little ‘fly through hoops’ metaphor where you gotta fly through a hoop in the gameplay cuz it was hamfisted and corny but the true reason is hoop flying blows chunks
7 Likes
i was thinking “Tomb Raider controls aren’t so bad with a ps2 controller” (which i’m using in emulator) but damn this game already got brutal with the jumping/camera in the second stage. can’t imagine playing this without savestates so… god bless savestates.
i love the crunchy textures and just the general look/feel of the game though. that’s been a big reason why i’ve wanted to play all the through for the first time. i love the feel of the Lost City level of Thief 1 which is very similar territory. they’re both infamously Trapezoid Boxed PC games also, lol. just trying to find your way through this very mysterious hostile environment. the above area introduced a T-Rex and things opened up unexpectedly which is nice. i seem to recall this area from when i played through the game last so i assume i must have gotten at least this far.
tho Lara Croft really is an animal mass-murderer of epic proportions. her and Cruella DeVille must be best friends. look at this death pose for the dogs.
if i’m being incredibly generous… maybe Core Design were trying to avoid the trope of Lara killing racist stereotypes by focusing on the animals. but the result is this game just feels incredibly cruel towards animals which is very weird. i mean it’s lo-fi enough to where it’s not as horrible as it could be, but it is strange.
15 Likes
It’s funny you mention the animal killing because the first Tomb Raider is the only one where you kill more animals than people. As the series goes on you just kill more and more people in the course of raiding tombs. Back in the day it became a thing people commented on like man remember when Lara Croft wasn’t a mass murderer and just killed wolves and bears and dinosaurs?
8 Likes
The problem was that we knew it would be really hard to put in lots of believable human characters because they’d be so immobile in comparison to Lara. I’m also not keen on just mindlessly killing humans in games anyway. So it had to be dangerous animals. The problem is that any animal that’s dangerous to humans we’ve already hunted to near extinction. Maybe we should have use non-endangered, harmless animals. Then you’d be asking me, “Why was Lara shooting all those nice Bunnies and Squirrels?” You just can’t win can you?
He tired of these words for years
7 Likes
To me, it makes more sense that the animals are protective spirits. Many are in inaccessible places with little to sustain them, and are instantly aggressive. Someone else can explain why there are extra ammo and healthpacks hidden everywhere tho’. Cached by previous tomb raiders??
2 Likes
Gotta shoot something!
4 Likes
harvestella is really neat. it feels like a first gen DS game. and while it looks like it’s just harvest moon grafted onto an ~aesthetic~ squeenix action jarpeg, it actually seems to take a ton (of arguably too-overt) influence from etrian odyssey of all things. it’s possible the novelty is just long enough to sustain the demo and will be a boring grind for the full game, but so far I’m super into it. it adheres you to a pseudo real-time clock. it also has a job system! and it’s really cute and ~autumnal~ and has hilariously overdramatic music. I love it.
11 Likes
just played this as well and lol it is pretty bad but in a way that feels true to the tri-ace legacy. good combat and terrible everything else (that jump is especially dreadful). i think i should’ve played on hard mode because all the enemies were dying in the middle of my cool combos (what happened to the overkill juggling from the past games?) and they were more of a nuisance than a threat.
iono. felt like a ps3 game, but less shiny. 
2 Likes
Tasomachi’s just this really chill peaceful small 3d platformer in a nice lonely environment. Highly imprecise controls but this doesn’t even matter.
I’ve liked the Diofield Chronicle demo and am getting the full game. It absolutely feels like another necromancy experience by Squeenix to create another RPG by stitching older RPGs together (FFT, Growlanser, Fire Emblem, and a dash of their new doll-like aesthetic) but this time it works
Was very doubtful about Squeenix trying to do an RTS but there are only 4 whole characters you control on the field, lol. It’s actually a really smart limitation, keeps things simple and fast considering skills and placement have a huge role in battles
No option to skip dialogue ahead by pressing A, you just have to watch the hot stiff characters recite their entire lines and it’s dreadful. We have reached the point where VA is not just annoying but an actual hindrance. Though I like my new meta game of trying to guess when I’ve learned enough info from a cutscene that I can skip it now.
5 Likes