Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

[jsnlv]

I’m pausing my FFXIV playthrough (nearly done with Eden raid series) for the Dragonflight launch.

Launch day was catastrophic as usual: the opening quest in Stormwind for Alliance players has you board a boat in the harbor, but the harbor has a very fixed number of docks, so the dock in question is the same one that you’d normally use to get to Boralus. Accepting a quest gives you an hour-long buff named something like “Waiting for the Sturdy Scalerider”. Players naturally assumed that this meant the ship would show up after an hour, but in fact this buff just existed to teleport people back to the dock if they boarded the Boralus ship by mistake.

Meanwhile, another NPC at the dock was supposed to provide the time remaining until the boat’s arrival, but for something like 4 hours it just said “Unknown Time Remaining”. They also had a portal to go there directly for anybody who already completed the boat quest, but I’m guessing all the impatient players clicking on it to try to bypass the boat was hammering the servers cause the portal vanished after like an hour.

We did finally get in, though, and this is the best WoW has felt in years. Lots more voice acting from characters at varying levels of importance! Every quest-giver has multiple pages of optional conversation available! Zones are designed specifically for the dragon-riding version of flight, meaning the landscape combines the huge size and pacing of enemy distribution of the old expansions with the landmarks, verticality, and completeness of modern zone design! While I don’t have particular fondness for either elementals or dragons, I must confess that their jewel tones and environmental effects have made this the most visually satisfying setting they’ve ever created! The needlessly silo’d covenants of SL have been replaced with four separate rep factions that still use the superior renown reward system to unlock minigames like rock climbing and cosmetics!

[meauxdal]

Jorge Constantini

embarrasssing lol

i am so glad i have zero stake in current games anymore, truly nega-interest in this shit

[Felix]

honestly I adore this game and the little puzzles are kind of weird as friction but they don’t bother me nearly as much as in other AAA stuff

they seem to exist purely to keep the game from feeling like a massive coronary, weird choice but eh

I’ve probably played all of five games this year and I’m getting about as much out of this one as elden ring, it seems slept on somehow

[hellojed]

the verbal hint system in God Of War Ragnorok probably took untold hours of expensive VO sessions, tedious implementation into every puzzle, and months of debugging. All so the player can be annoyed, but its an expected “feature” of AAA now

[jsnlv]

Oh, can’t forget that this is the first expansion after Blizzard’s ongoing reckoning began, so they’ve fully embraced levels of diversity that previous expansions would have mocked—I’m not even finished with the first zone and I’ve already met a male/male romantic pairing, a female/female romantic pairing, and at least one quietly they/them dragon.

With the end of the faction war, they’ve made a big deal about how the the mortal races’ expedition is a joint operation between the Alliance and Horde. It was touching to hear a human paladin telling Horde players “Lok’tar ogar!”, while the opposite side of camp had a pair of orcs reminding each other to say “Light bless you!” to players of Alliance persuasion.

Players are infamous for complaining about not having access to flying mounts after reaching max level. This time around, they get to fly almost immediately, but the flying can turn into a struggle through overuse until they’ve developed their dragon-riding skills. I cannot get over what a huge improvement this is, both because it’s so much fun and because most of the complainers will finally be silenced.

[Tegiminis]

i unironically love how mad this is making people because it seems to draw parallels to parenting and patience (having your kid explain things to you you’ve already figured out, frustration with unasked-for advice) and that seems to be the main theme of nu-God of War. perhaps-unintentional thematic synergy!

[vodselbt]

I’m glad for more inclusivity in general, but the stuff I’ve seen of it from Dragonflight makes me think that I would be playing it and encounter a dragon talking to me about their androgyny and I would take that more as a representation of the shift in the cultural regime at the company rather than a quality of the world or that particular character. Self-conscious posturing.

I guess it has to happen this way, not as a natural assumption of a new way of being, because it’s a company of a million billion people making a focus tested product, so it hits in a blunt way like a correction being rendered. Still… I think I would find a lot of it really tasteless in the same way I’ve found that games story and drama developing in the past decade. I’m also traumatized from being around MFA people gushing about bad “spec fic” and modern fantasy.

[jsnlv]

Yeah, expecting subtlety out of WoW is a recipe for disappointment, and I wouldn’t call what they’re doing here subtle. I appreciate that so far it doesn’t feel like tokenism—there are way too many characters to meet and interact with for any particular instance to feel performative. (If a note hits wrong, it’s easy to get past by just continuing to play.) It does stick out compared to everything that’s come before, but at least in what I’ve played, it’s never the point of the interaction, or at least no more so than the fact that WoW dragons are all able to take whatever humanoid forms they prefer. Questions about identity and expression have fewer constraints when that’s true.

All of which is to say that this is still World of Warcraft, and that’s a very particular taste, even if the ingredients have improved.

[hellojed]

Despite how rudimentary the game is, and how rough the first hour or so of gameplay is, Need For Speed Underground 2 is actually a really well realized open world game. I’m surprised at how much they got right on the first try. There’s stuff hidden in the game world that doesn’t appear on the map, so you’re incentivized to explore. Hidden events usually pay more money too.

I’m not sure but I think this is one of the first games that combined car customization + being able to exist in an ambient open world. TXR was mostly highways and you couldn’t really park anywhere, and previous titles you’d only ever be on a track. Here you get to express yourself with a car and inhibit that car within the context of being a car going from A to B.

The different racing events reward different driving techniques and contexts, but you don’t have to build a specific car to do those races well. Hell, you can do drifting events with a FWD car, and somehow this isn’t a huge problem. I like the Underground Racing League the best, since it seems like there’s enough to the driving simulation to reward good driving.

I like how the game gets around the “cars cost a lot of money” problem by making them all freely available when unlocked. I was initially worried I’d have to do a ton of grinding for money to get the car + parts, this was a main problem I had in the Tokyo Extreme Racer series.

The Bling/Customization options are fun. I don’t think they’re ever done in a subsequent game, but dressing your car up in a ridiculous way and then posing for a magazine cover has an expressive charm to it. The amount you spend on, say, decking out the back of an SUV with a huge stereo system is pretty trivial and adds nothing to the “gameplay”, but it’s fun in it’s own way and I wish more games would let you do that. The upgrade “points” system needed to unlock further sections of the game feels kind of weird at first, but it makes you engage with the customization systems and makes expressing yourself with flair as a part of the game’s gestalt.

The game’s meta loop is pretty good: do races, get money, make car go faster, do even more races with a faster car, unlock a faster car, upgrade the car to go faster, etc. It’s a level of progression that feels natural to the rules of the game’s simulation, and you can feel a very distinct difference between a stock car and one that’s been upgraded.

All in All, I guess I’m surprised how much they got right on the first game. I think the world design leaves a bit to be desired, but other than that, pretty good

[Felix]

I am obviously not the target audience for parenting stuff but tbh I consistently love how it’s handled in these – Kratos is extremely comedic as a terrible, stern father, and Atreus and Mimir and your other occasional party members are written really well as foils. I play most AAA stuff in French to avoid annoyance with the English VA but ymmv there

there are a few things the game does really really well that you can tell were front of mind in the design doc: being able to deliberately bait and knock enemies off of ledges like in old belt scrollers for crowd control is one of them (and feels great 100% of the time), and the ensemble cast is another. it never ever feels like you’re out there solo and it makes the game a million times better.

[MimeParadox]

Got TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection and, after ascertaining that the water level in the first NES game is as memorable as people say, I decided to try the arcade Turtles in Time. I knew, going in, that the arcade version was substantially different from the SNES version, but what I did not expect was feeling as if I were experiencing it for the very first time.

Like, yes, I expect the SNES version to be the one I remember best, as it’s the one I’ve played the most and ultimately completed, whereas the arcade version was one which I could only experience on occasion, and only partially (I was not terribly good at this game). That said, I was surprised to find that I remembered nothing of the details specific to that version–the different cutscenes, the lower health bar, the extra animation frames, the voices–let alone the differences in stages.

Playing the original arcade version really made me appreciate just how much care was taken to ensure the SNES version didn’t feel compromised. Like, maybe it’s just because of nostalgia, but I don’t think there’s any change I don’t like? “Sewer Surfing” as a bonus stage? Yes, please. Extra Technodrome level? Fantastic. Slash? Could be easier, but he’s much more memorable than the Cement Man, who really makes no sense. Pirate Bebop and Rocksteady? Sooooo much better than Razhar and Tokka. I’m left wishing the remake of the game that was eventually released had tried and merge the two, instead of just focusing on the arcade version.

[smbhax]

[RT-55J]

decided to play Universal Paperclips again, and was having an okay time for the most part. I had a much better handle on things like the stock market and yomi, which seemed very opaque my first time around. Things seemed to be going much more smoothly than my first playthrough.

However, I ended up being too clever for my own good. I invested too much in processors over memory, and now I realize that by doing that I inadvertently trapped myself in the monetary economy for an absolutely stupid amount of time.

i think there’s a lesson to be learned here

[Hojulas]

@MimeParadox

after ascertaining that the water level in the first NES game is as memorable as people say

For all that correctly gets remembered the real lurking devil is getting that fucking rope to work. Or the one particular sewer map that IIRC is on the approach to where you need to use the rope that has this evil little jump, as in it literally has to be a small jump because of a low obstruction over the span which is flowing water. Jump too high you hit the obstruction and fall in and die, jump too little and you can’t make it and also die. Of course a lot of people probably hit a wall at the pink seaweed and never got that far to see what horrors lie beyond the dam.

[username]

It is 32 years later and I am still angry about this.

[HOBO]

That blew my mind when I was looking at Nintendo Powers a few weeks ago

Especially when you know the games it beat

[RT-55J]

further proof that Readers’ Choice awards should never be trusted

[Tulpa]

this is literally my criticism any time we try to sum up sb opinions into a comprehensive ranking. All of our opinions are valid, but the sb hivemind is a monster that needs to be killed

[Rudie]

Stealth ATF?

Stealth ATF (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

Well okay.

[Tuxedo]

I like TMNT more than all these games lol (haven’t played C/D/G)