“Stella shows you how.” I love that. The confidence. I would trust her with almost as much as my life.
11 Likes
the tutorial in tr1 is definitely worth playing because it teaches you everything necessary for platforming success, including correcting lara’s angle of approach, making sure she jumps off at the very edge, etc etc
5 Likes
signed into Fortnite to check what the requirements are to get the goth cat girl (bad news; you need the battle pass lol) and immediately managed a completely unearned victory royale in no build mode
we got down to three and the other two I guess got stuck outside the circle? I won with one kill and 0 deaths, my k/d is currently infinity in Fortnite
5 Likes
okay did my penance and actually earned two so I now have a crown emote lol I guess that’s it for my Fortnite career
5 Likes
honestly enjoying death stranding way more this second time through because I’m just hanging out building cool roads and painting my van hideous colours while listening to podcasts instead of rushing through the body thetan story
18 Likes
the rising escalation of my past month:
Tower of Fantasy: Genshin 3.0/Sumeru waiting room
Genshin 3.0: Back 4 Blood DLC waiting room
B4B DLC: Splatoon 3 waiting room
Splatoon 3: Gundam Evolution waiting room
Gundam Evolution: Overwatch 2 waiting room
OW2: ???
1 Like
Gundam Evolution: it has GM
Jim is a very good robot, he stand on point and hold up shield and take no shit from no Sazabi
I like Jim and his 70s-looking ass
even nerfing Jim’s ultimateG-Maneuver can’t slow down the Jim train
1 Like
Every Jim needs a Dom.
Dom doesn’t need Jim, he has his boys, Dom and Dom, backing him up
Played a match of Gundam Evolution. My team won. I had fun.
I like it a lot more than the last Gundam f2p game I tried.
gotta get these thoughts out before I forget them because I am playing we are ofk on my brand new steam deck
i’m past the third episode and i…am losing hope that this game will be able to successfully thread that line between peoples’ roles in creative industries and their own creative desires. the perspective continues to follow this we made it/we sold out binary delineation and follows it all the way into the music industry in which the conflict centers around…a fucking noncompete for the producer of the titular band who wants to produce the band but also wants the stability of a regular job, i guess? i’ve just literally never ever heard of a noncompete for producers, and it’s made all the weirder by the fact that the big name artist who is forcing the producer to choose between stability and their band seems to be portrayed as a kind of new-money up and comer, who would be WAY less likely to enforce any kind of noncompete and doesn’t seem to be tied to any kind of major record label??? no conflict in this game seems like anything an actual human person has ever gone through, it’s all just filtered through these conceptions of creativity that only seem to come from movies or tv. also i’m pretty sure the producers’ parents’ voice actor and actress are faking their asian accents? did i ever mention that this game feels like asian-american orientalism? because it does
the game also manages to have this incredible animosity toward anyone who isn’t part of the core cast; everyone around these 4 people save for the person who works at the boba shop is written in a way that completely removes their own agency from these situations around wanting to do your own thing but having to think about MONEY, MAAAAN - the game just never seems super interested in interrogating how a narrow-minded conception of “making it” closes off one’s perspective to how other people deal with the same dynamic in their own ways, it just needs this band, these people, specifically, to have their desires be the only ones that are real, while everyone else around them is merely part of the disaffected masses
18 Likes
I’m having another weird turn with Hyper Demon where the sensory overload is wearing off and I’m seeing how weirdly basic the enemy spawns are. It seems to be on a very rote, repetitive pattern and I find that fascinating
Like, Devil Daggers had a very, very tightly designed enemy spawn routine that felt kind of like a playlist, with ebbs and flows depending on how long you were playing. I would have expected any sequel to iterate on that part of the game.
But this sequel seems to have dropped all of that in favor of “These four enemy types respawn over and over in order in essentially the same place every time.” Like, what a strange decision!!
Instead, the iteration was completely on movement, perception, user interface, and scoring mechanics. And holy shit did they iterate on that
It feels a bit like how games, when played often enough by interested people, have all their unnecessary mechanics sheared off in favor of whatever the playerbase finds interesting, and how this can take different forms depending on who’s interested.
Starcraft had tons of custom maps focusing on different, minute aspects of the game. Tower defense maps were only focused on AI pathing, DotA was only focused on micromanagement, Evolve maps were only focused on moving large amounts of units around. Two of these were strong enough design spaces to spawn entirely new genres.
So yeah that’s kind of how this feels to me, except somehow by the original designer of the game which never fucking happens. I feel that sequels are more likely than not to misunderstand the appeal of their own game, and iterate on the things that nobody (or few people) care about. This game decided to cut off a bunch of shit that made the original look unique in favor of something that feels more like the actual core of the game.
Granted, I have only been able to survive in this game for ~60 seconds, so there may be a larger pattern to the spawns I am missing here, but so far the feeling of rhythm is entirely focused on player movement and control rather than understanding the spawn routine. It’s still a very rhythmic game but I certainly have more control over the rhythm than the original.
15 Likes
Yeah I would say Devil Daggers and Hyper Demon have related but distinct feelings.
Devil Daggers feels like a drag race. You basically always want to kill enemies as quickly as possible because letting them pile up kills you pretty quick. So there’s no “limiter” mechanic.
Hyper Demon feels more like trying to control a rally car, going as fast as possible down super rough roads without having so much speed going around a curve that you lose control and explode.
They’re definitely both pretty simple games, and even have roughly the same number of enemy types (shout out to the return of the Spine Worm!), but simply changing the scoring mechanism and adding more interactive depth to your shooting/movement opened up Hyper Demon’s possibility space a ton. There’s no “2m of boredom” anymore like in DD. You’re in the thick of it by 10s and it only gets more wild from there.
I can understand people not liking it or thinking it’s simple, but I personally think it’s the right sort of complicated, where there’s no concrete “correct decision” other than to not die. Similar games in this microgenre of “character action shooter” tend to focus too much on lock-key interactions (cough Doomy Ternal) so it’s refreshing to play a game that gives you so many effective tools.
11 Likes
Been playing Bowser’s Fury and I cannot believe how good this game is. I am not really a Mario Gamer… but hot damn do I love an open world puzzle platformer with a shit ton of systems and a drawing of a cat hidden on almost every single surface
Cannot believe I didn’t play this when it came out!! But also I am indifferent to Mario so oh well
13 Likes
Ive been playing Guilty Gear -Strive- every day for about a week. Im a terrible Leo, carried only by the character’s strength.
Ive also been playing Starbound periodically with a friend. Mostly it’s just to hangout and talk, I don’t really get this game. I can’t wait for Strive to go cross platform.
Might make a thread about Stargrave and tabletop gaming in general soon.
5 Likes
oh yeah i wanna be clear: i don’t think the simplicity is bad, just a surprising choice. I appreciate it! I’m glad both exist.
4 Likes
In the least dismissive way possible, glad Xbox Game Pass let me play Deathloop for 30 minutes and go “Oh not for me!”
Weird how these 70s infused games do nothing for me when I enjoy movies of the time period. Headlander, Psychonauts 2, Deathloop. “Eh” I go.
3 Likes
this is Gen X’s fault.
3 Likes
Going to ask my furry fortnite friends to escort me to do this one fucking quest I’ve died at 4x trying to do from people stalking the quest point.