F.E.A.R. just fucking owns… god.
5 Likes
I’M LOSING MY SHIT
IT COSTS FORTY DOLLARS TO PULL 10 SAD GUN ROBOTS
40 USD
ARE THE ARTISTS MAINLINING COKE OFF SAD ROBOT ASSES INBETWEEN ANIMATION SESSIONS
40 DOLLARS AND I’M GOING TO GET 80-90% DUPES
MY DUDES, I ALREADY OWN NIER AUTOMATA, AND YOU WANT ME TO PAY TOP MARKET RATE FOR SAD ROBOT GIFS?
I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY I’M SO INCREDULOUS OVER THIS
IT REALLY PUTS THE BILLIONS OF VIDEO ESSAYS TITLED “OH NO BLIZZARD IS GREEDY ABOUT OW2 
” YOUTUBE KEEPS TRYING TO SHOVE DOWN MY SOULLESS EYE HOLES INTO PERSPECTIVE
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i cant believe i have to agree with bov here but those 2d asses are NOT worth 40 dollars. they should have gone all the way! at least when steam is like yoooo wanna check out some japanese sex game? its not GAMBLING and the store page is 200 paragraphs about how its the most extravagant 3d coom simulator ever devised, how it took 100,000 man hours to create and it only costs 80 dollars. sounds like a better deal to me if anime butts drive you nuts!
6 Likes
Jeff Orkin’s paper about GOAP is still a great read & covers how they implemented that behaviour (it’s not, the AI advances to a Cover node & and when the chosen path is out of LoS, it looks like an ambush/flank)
4 Likes
Oh yeah, the jorkin paper is a classic! It was probably you who linked it here years ago when I first read through it.
It takes me back to learning Prolog in college and something about a monkey finding a banana.
The AI in FEAR still feels like magic to me in the same way that watching a plane take off feels like magic.
7 Likes
The sad, low poly face of a man who wants to listen to three 6 mafia but has to blow up Russian tanks with a rocket launcher nicknamed VAMPIRE instead
ghost recon 1 is a classics of game to me, i just love walking around listening to gentle forest ambience and shooting random guys who wander into the open like its deer hunter 2005 but for people
13 Likes
I have finally started, on the PS4, 428 Shibuya Scramble! I don’t see many impressions on SB, but I have quite high expectations. Comments will follow
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I started playing that 2018 God of War. I tried the tutorial once like a year ago and I absolutely could not stomach it. Playing it again today, I immediately had a great time. What changed?? Guess I was in a bad mood that day.
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Worn down by four years of more Sony dad games
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Maybe your mood actually wasn’t bad enough to fully identify with the mature fatherly rage of kratos
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videogames are meant to be about hating your dad and killing god, not raising your son and killing god 
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I also had this response to the start of it – I’ve complained in this thread a few times about how it telegraphs both its tone and its difficulty very poorly at first, but I came to like it a lot after the first hour and a half or so
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Yeah, I have an allergy to giant beefcake masculine power fantasy protagonists, so I was immediately put off. But it’s a little more nuanced and not as annoying as I’d initially assumed. Best part of playing this game is imitating Kratos and booming out “BOY. STOP GLITCHING INTO THE POISON” and such. This is actually my first raise-em-up dadgame I’ve bothered to play, so those themes aren’t as tired for me as I’m sure they are for others.
Combat’s surprisingly good so far but I’m looking at this enormous edifice of a skill tree and dreading all the different button chords it wants me to remember. I always get annoyed by this… Playing a fully upgraded Kratos seems like it’s going to be on the same level of complexity as learning to play the clarinet.
6 Likes
You can hate your dad, raise your son, and kill god!
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i am having a great time playing sonic frontiers in the worst way imaginable
this is probably good for my critical faculties. “do you still like this with 50-500ms of latency and crashes?”
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I keep getting the release date of this mixed up with the new Pokémon I didn’t even realize it was coming out yet. What’s good? What’s not so good?
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it’s out on tuesday 
i think the new structure fundamentally works and avoids the #1 3D sonic pitfall of being stuck on something you hate. you’re getting X to go do Y to get Z to do X and skipping some of each is OK to progress.
the writing is probably the best ever if we’re being honest about sonic adventure’s localization
the music is very eclectic and either just good or entertainingly schlocky. described one song as having “peaches rap flow” and another as 90s night at the gay bar. (that’s schlocky and just good respectively)
i would not play the switch version if you can help it
the options menu also just lets you tune sonic’s handling like it’s forza which is weird as hell but I’ll take it
the not so good part is the budget is apparent as ever and it’s on the short side but i am not looking to sonic for AAA production values or hours-per-$
reserving judgment on jank
17 Likes
i mean no disrespect to peaches btw it’s just that + linkin park production that’s a bit much
6 Likes
5-2
This is a real trudge as the second area in the run but it’s a good trudge. 5-2 is notoriously a horrible poison swamp with several nasty chokepoints. This is the first time I’ve seriously swapped rings constantly through an area to get by safely. This is also a good example of how the game’s generally narrow and precarious level design, opens up into a huge field except just standing or being in the field is a huge disadvantage.
The damage hike is significant around level 20 or so and this is where the game pushes you to use more tricksy strategies.
Gotta get past the first part of the swamp by using regenerators ring to mitigate inevitable poison damage but rather than take on the first island with the giant plagueman, I just thief’s ringed around the first fog gate with no combat to speak of. The next huge challenge is two giant plaguemen and a plaguewizard. Kite em back and next fog gate (except I got greedy, murdered all the slugs for the Moonlight Sword and died to a regular guy lol). I forgot how stressful the village at the end of the swamp is and just how far they push the most relieving shortcut of any Souls game. I swear I never played many of the other Souls games quite as cautiously, checking the exact angle of every piece of terrain and pinging lock-on like it’s the echolocation mechanic it really is.
5-2 is a real piece of shit but at least the boss is easy. Basic velcro-to-their-back-and-move-away-when-they-telegraph-a-shockwave strategy.
1-2
Tower knight fight had really cool sound design but 1-2 remains a pretty straightforward affair on any replay. This is kinda an early level anyway so there’s not much different going on in the randomized order. Still kinda weird the dragon just operates like a mechanical trap than a sentient thing but hey. Again, the heft and crunch of metal and magic is really good in this game. Dunno why they made the fat controllers look like this though. I always thought the implication is they were demons in disguise as human guards, not mutated officials:
5-3
Garl Vinland encounter also low-key great design. He stands in a little cave tunnel which sometimes causes his initial swings to hit the nearby wall which can mess up the players timing if trying to dodge or parry. Because I’ve been using the spiked shield a lot and I had no other shields, the only way my shrimpy magic build was gonna damage the anti-mage knight was by equipping a falchion in the offhand and drilling the parries. Luckily, but also sadly, Garl is too dumb to pursue me out of his defensive cave. Garl down.
Talked to Astraea for the victory. Selen Vinland’s dialogue about the swamp seeming odd because of it’s pure-seeming nature is quite haunting as a thought. Because I never got pure white world tendency here before, this will become a video game thing I think about a lot now. I don’t think it gets talked about enough, but Astraea’s final gambit is simply to leave the player with a false sense of security and an archstone buried in plague. Could easily kill a player (newly in body form) who’s not keeping their wits about them. I like a game that’s bold enough to have a status effect that occurs at literally two instances in the entire game.
Music director being overly dramatic with the implementation of the score in this area. Trying to be super fancy with the musical flourishes and the theme only really plays when you get close to Garl. As if to say…
‘REMEMBER THIS BIT?’
‘THIS IS REALLY SIGNIFICANT EXCEPT TO A NEW PLAYER WHO MIGHT BE WONDERING WHY THE POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE IS BEING APPLIED TO AN NPC WE’VE BARELY HEARD ABOUT’
Astraea is surely more memorable for having had the actual boss encounter, not the parade of music beforehand announcing the arrival of a gamer’s most cherished memories.
Remaining level order: 2-1, 3-1, 1-3, 1-4, 4-1, 2-2, 4-2, 4-3, 2-3, 3-2, 3-3
12 Likes
picked up code vein again. got to a bit white cathedral, which looks cool. like a catholic version of wat rong khun. because even if the setting is post apocalypse japan vampire cyberbishies, it’s a soulslike so there’s gotta be big catholic superstructures
5 Likes