Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

[Bee]

@Bee

It’s one of those things where it’s like, sure, this game is not Stalker

Oh, well, it turned out Russian Wife Sim is only Stalker for a little bit, and then we had a little aside where it was the cannibal scene from the movie Doomsday for a little bit and now it’s Russian Mad Max. Video games are fucking lit imo

The Stalker stuff was starting to wear because the combat in this game is just not very good. It’s too bad. Ammo isn’t money like in the first game, but it’s scarce enough that there’s still a bit of economy going on and the tension between the slightly ammo positive bandit encounters and the hugely ammo negative mutant/wildlife encounters is actually pretty nice.

[vodselbt]

I think this game has the most interesting soundtrack of the Team Silent entries. It’s a surprising collection of noises, industrial beats, ambient passages, it’s even got a trip-hop song or two, and there are absolutely no vocal tracks to bludgeon you with prescribed mood. There is also the INCREDIBLE intro song (on the album version, they include this moment of sobbing which is absent from the cinematic and that I always found extra haunting).

It’s such an accomplished soundtrack to a game in that it always enhances or directs the tension or mystery you’re bound to feel while playing Silent Hill but even on its own as an album I think it’s very good. Maybe it isn’t around your preferred genre space @ellaguro but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the soundtrack.

[Hojulas]

@Bee

bit of economy going on and the tension between the slightly ammo positive bandit encounters and the hugely ammo negative mutant/wildlife encounters is actually pretty nice.

IMO if you’re going to pull something from Stalker that’s a good thing to pull. Though Stalker had the additional wrinkle of “different groups use different guns firing different ammo”, so you had to mindful as to which specific gun you carried where you went so you could scavenge ammo, which I’ve always liked if only as an incentive for a player to maintain a stash of different guns in games where otherwise the statlines are often minor differences in practice.

[Mikey]

Finally got invited to the Google Play Games Beta for North America, was excited to try playing a mobile game or two on my laptop. But it turns out you can’t install anything in your library yet, there’s just a curated selection of current games right now.

So those were some games I didn’t Play Today

[HOBO]

Did you know Brian Doyle-Murray played a character in Bioware’s Jade Empire

[iguferon]

he plays jack ruby in jfk

[parker]

War crimes…

[parker]

There are no atheists in foxholes, and no straight men in a blown op you’re wounded and on the run in

[notbov]

all of the games on that list are awful except for Arknights, China’s number one sad/horny anime tower defense bank account emptying phone app

you have been spared

[woudww]

me and my bambino have been getting totally xenobrained the last few months, & after going thru all the xenoblades we finished xenosaga episode 1 last night.

its pretty good - i feel like w a few tweaks it would be sick, even. after so much xenoblade it was nice having a protag who wasnt supposed to be likable or heroic, necessarily, tho i appreciate that xenoblades provided a bit of a key as to what theyre going for, narratively. theres a lot of saga 1 smuggled into blade 2 specifically!

i enjoyed how crunchy it was despite being relatively gameplay-lite (my combat abilities were meaningfully developing till the end, there were interesting decisions, and a good power curve in each dungeon), i enjoyed rendering the simple models & clean textures at 4k, the long silences & numbing pace. , the dead eyed doll models, superimposed real explosion footage and characterful environment details:

-CAUTION I AM A BOOZER BANZAI BANZAI hat
-COSTMARY store
-pinup girl w baguette poster (this whole area is v redolent of midgar)
-talk to me store

generally i was pretty impressed by the environs tbh, some really fun design & delightful kitsch.

oh and attack animz:

KOS MOS X-BUSTER

Defeating Great Joe with Erde Kaiser

on to ep 2

[daphaknee]

YES!!! YES!!! XENOSAGA!!!

[Tony]

I have played Aconcagua for the PSX on my Vita.

The translation is good, but the game itself is… just fine (6/10). I was expecting more by the premise and the rave words on HG101 and whereabouts. I was expecting to dig moe into the surviving themes (dialogues about it are really bland), while it only focuses on puzzle solving (leveraging on the gimmick that every survivor has a different unique ability).

[dedede69]

also playing xenosaga episode 1 atm

[iguferon]

when i was playing tap titans 2 id accidentally download or pre-register games all the time because evil and deranged mobile game ads have to fuck with you, the button is right over important UI in the game and theres a split second after an ad ends where you can start doing something before the google play store thing pops up and you get TRICKED into downloading MERGE TYPE GAMES or bizarre anime porn. “pre-registering” is the worst because its a hidden time bomb, one day youll just look at your phone and see a game you dont recognize. for example, this game called “goddess of war” that showed up on my phone yesterday but wasnt playable until today. all that mystery and wonder for approximately 35 seconds of gameplay, because i uninstalled it for playing exactly like a horny version of the miniclip flash game “Bush Shootout” from 2004

[notbov]

oh, are we Nikke posting now

of course, I’ve been waiting for Nikke to come out ever since it was first revealed and demonstrated that the focus was on buttsCabal-esque shooting galleries, because, well, I do love assesa good dumb arcade-y shoot-thing

sort of where my opinion of the game is landing is that it’s too much game for the gacha and too much gacha for the game. if the video game part of it existed in a vaccuum, divorced away from goading you to spend money and power up units and gate you via numbers, it would be a pretty good little idiot time waster. the regular stages are whatever but the boss fights seem pretty inspired.

but the devs got bills to pay. so fucking summon more sad gun gynoids, worm and build your Farmville military base, stupid.

also, while I think the control idea (touch screen to shoot, swipe to aim, so effectively virtual stick aim) is good in theory, I have two issues with it:

1. you eventually become very aware that you are dragging your thumb against a screen unless you are a true mobile gamer and have gaming gloves or something
2. you can’t aim without getting out of cover

so all that’s left are the designs of the sad robots you pull and, somehow, because the regular rarities of gun girls have to be mundane to make the anime designs of SR and (a)SSR units standout, you get at the bottom, cool looking operator-ass looking operator robot girls and at the top, fembots in dresses and heels going to war and

okay I’m going to stop dancing around this

the butts do not shake enough

I demand more ass in my anime gun ass game and I want them to be as lively as possible

I think the game suffers from being Live2D with handcrafted booty blasting and not 3D with jiggle physics

also how are you going to sell me on a game about watching anime ass shake and bounce and then give me a free unit where her boobs are spilling out of her top and she has a grenade launcher so there’s no getting to watch the recoil constantly going off

in conclusion, it’s okay.

[jsnlv]

@notbov

Arknights

I don’t know how it happened, but over the last six months suddenly there’s a huge influx of Arknights posts among the Tumblr accounts I follow. Like, from at least three different people. I’m assuming it’s for the best that I continue to not investigate further.

[skelephone]

I have been a Caiysware booster here in the past but now I’m back again to say that Boneraiser Minions has received many updates and has like, three new character classes, a new game start/menu flow, new waves of attackers, etc. My enjoyment of it is reinvigorated

It remains an immensely visually confusing game in a way that Vampire Survivors is not, but I think its art is so much more cohesive and cute. I also love how the 3? 4? separate weird minion upgrade systems encourage a kind of meandering discovery experience where you’re constantly getting asked by the game whether you wanna combine two lumpy dudes into a new type of lumpy dude in a way you never planned for, haha. Kinda slot machine-y but I like it!

[Felix]

@iguferon

horny version of the miniclip flash game “Bush Shootout” from 2004

this is yet another new frontier in hilariously on the nose “which way, western man” shit for me, I did not think I could still be surprised, I am delighted just imagining someone in a foxhole with a lady sniper, unable to look away from her recoil-transferring ass to focus on the enemy

[doolittle]

a rare dropping of the ball for MGS

this is how you know kojima was barely involved

[DaleNixon]

I’m finally replaying F.E.A.R. again. It only took a couple of tweaks to fix the FOV at 4k and the infamous HID framerate problem.

This game still looks gorgeous and bland at the same time! The sound design still rocks! The weapons feel amazing. The shotgun is so impactful!

The AI is still some of the most interesting I’ve ever seen in an FPS. If you’re not aggressive and the enemy has time to plan, they’ll figure out ways to flush you out or flank you.

Thankfully, they yell out what they’re about to do. So that helps a lot in figuring out what they’re up to while you try to make your next move.

Moving through a creepy dark area with your flashlight on and hearing an unseen enemy in the distance yell “FLASHLIGHT!” is always fun times.

I also like when they just realize they’re screwed because you turned on bullet time and got the jump on them and all they can do is yell out a single curse word as they get unalived.