hilariously, there used to be a best buy in Cleveland in a plaza that was right next to an old steel mill/rail yard.
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i had to tell so many kids NO when they tried to buy that game at gamestop. loved being a raincloud in their sunny sky
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I reinstalled arcanum today because its great and i was thinking about how awesome it was all day, and the first fight in the game i got into involved me throwing like 7 boomerangs and obliterating an emaciated wolf before the first one even came back to me because mashing the attack button in real time mode lets you do hilarious DPS. it’s so inelegant, i love it
the only survivor of the crash is one dangerous woman armed with a boomerang. It’s over for these bitches when I get my doctorate in explosives and start making molotov cocktails out of street trash
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it’s winter so i guess that means im a gamer again… anyways im sorry fake doll but there can only be one of us. let’s see what is it i want to play. finish demons souls and digital devil saga 1 which i both started up in the summer, maybe then ffxiii and dragon quarter (which i started years ago and never finished but its been quite long enough id wanna start from the start). digital devil saga 2? tactical ogre?? panzer dragoon saga??? live a live hd maybe… need a bad bitch to play lightning returns with. stat!
demons souls structure does really kind of lend itself to picking up and putting down…
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been turning this over in my head because i feel undertale ought to be funny to me and it’s instead excruciating. rather than drag undertale for being corny and tedious, i think i can express by comparison.
deltarune is hilarious because it gives the player jokes to tell (e.g. hug ralsei to be obstinate in the battle tutorial, make a duck when asked to make a design a “machine to thrash your ass”) and jokes about them acting weird even implementing obscure flags to this end. the game goes out of its way to make the NPCs and the narrator comment when you’re pressing against the boundaries — in ch2 if you try to go down the wrong hall while you have trash piled on your head you encounter your mom asking your teacher if you’ve done anything strange and your teacher, seeing you in her periphery, says “they’re normal.” when i JRPG “checked” every bed in the first chapter the narrator awarded me the title “bed inspector,” told me i needed to make sure to inspect all beds to retain it in the future, and then placed the final bed in the second chapter near the very end.
these kinds of player-actor and player-subject comedy are where games excel imo, not delivering jokes through mechanics with player as audience. adventure game puzzles are much funnier when mocking the player for brute forcing solutions than over-egging the solutions (two words: glottis vomit).
MGS’s best comedy tells jokes at the player’s expense or election — raiden immediately slips on bird droppings 30 seconds after giving the player control and hits his head trying to cartwheel up a staircase. snake catches wild animals in the jungle and, instead of eating them like every byte of the game is straining to suggest, “equips” them as items and throws them at guards. hitman (2016) makes an entire fucking hilarious game out of this by permitting you to concuss the worst people in the world by disguising yourself as a waiter and stealing cans of soup to throw at them.
player expense comedy is also fantastic when action game design is gleefully sadistic — sen’s fortress is full of jokes.
in the first destiny expansion you scale the outside of a fuselage and come to an open hatch where you are introduced to a new enemy, the taken phalanx, with a shield that repulses you away, out the hatch, and to your death to repeat the platforming. they’ll do this again with a phalanx of phalanxes three years later in the middle of a then-nailbiter raid encounter with six people trying to scale rotating half-spherical platforms on a timer after coordinating a nonsensical “lock” involving four people standing in three different positions on a 3x3 grid within five seconds of each other. you can’t help but laugh and think, you marvelous assholes.
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The dialogue in Kirby’s Avalanche is the funniest a video game has ever been
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To be fair, Carpenter has a few interviews where he mentions that one time he singled out Kojima as the one person his lawyers shouldn’t sue for plagiarism because “he’s a nice guy, at least nice to me”
Park Chan-wook (who has since visited him in his studio, so I guess HK knows how to ultimately win people over) had an equally funny excerpt in one of his interviews:
I can see why my films remind people of computer games, but I’ve never played one. Actually, I was approached by a Japanese designer of a PlayStation game called Metal Gear Solid. When I met him, I found that there was nothing really to talk about. But I was told that I was idolized in the world of computer games.
Re: the way Kojima writes women - the most mindblowing part of the book about his inspirations (The Creative Gene) was the part where he proclaims that the way he wrote The Boss and tends to write women in general is largely inspired by Paul Gallico’s Jennie, a story of a boy who gets hit by an automobile, awakens as a kitten and is trained by a motherly cat “betrayed by her masters” to become a “boss cat”.
Recently, thirty-three years since the last time I read it, I took Jennie from the shelf and gave it another read. What I found surprised me: Jennie hadn’t just influenced my view of women, but my creative work.
I created The Boss (a mother cat) to bring in the viewpoint of motherhood and stray cats. MGS3 was born from Jennie’s meme.
I must have been inspired for her character by Jennie.
By the second half of the book, the reader has practically become a cat themselves and begins to hold special feelings for the character of Jennie, no matter that she’s an animal.
Jennie is a lover, a teacher, a rival, a partner, and a confidante.
According to most bookstores, Jennie is recommended for “readers ages nine to twelve”.
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I think I’ve seen a screenshot of this before but I’ve never seen the game in action. Looks like something I will definitely need to play.
Turns out it has a PS4 release, too.
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i think undertale is right on that line where i start to find games extremely tedious and overwrought, essentially the “wholesome games” line. it just doesn’t quite cross it to me, and even though i have huge problems with a bunch of it, it just happens to be right in the target zone for my brain.
conversely, i actually didn’t like the first chapter of deltarune at all!! i didn’t even play the second one. i have no idea why it didn’t land for me, and i’m not tremendously interested in investigating it. i’m very interested in your take on it though, since it seems like something i should like.
i generally agree though - the best comedy in games is at the expense of or in cooperation with the player. i think that’s why my favorite joke in undertale is the papyrus one - the punchline is you getting beaned in the head by an attack that 3 seconds ago would have been practically impossible to hit you at all.
anyway i also find that comedy (like music) is such a specific taste that i almost never recommend something i find funny to anyone else. like, whenever someone recommends something comedic to me, i am almost always disappointed with it, and then i feel weird being like “you found this funny?” it just seems like a hard line a lot of the time.
like i think that Anchorman is one of the funniest things that’s ever been made but i watched it with my sister and she sat there entirely stony-faced for the whole duration. it just didn’t work for her!! comedy is weird
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I played Undertale too late, long after the impact it had on internet humor had become indistinguishable from the impact internet humor had on it, but none of its “jokes” landed for me. I still think about certain bits and roll my eyes internally. It maybe ruined the word “dating” for me.
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Yeah, comedy is rough. I still recommend things I love to friends that are close enough or who I know have similar sense of humor, and occasionally risk showing something I think is very funny to my partner, but there has been way too much of my life spent in moments where the energy got sapped out of the room because I showed someone a Kids in the Hall sketch or someone’s holding up their screen so I can watch a tedious TikTok
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Actually Dungeon Keeper is a better choice because can anyone tell me they haven’t slapped a workshy imp to death on their smoke break or not dropped 8 demon spawns on a band of would-be heroes to the cacophony of WHABLEHPBLEHPBLEHPBLHEP and kept a straight face…?
Also YOUR CREATURES ARE FIGHTING AMONGST THEMSELVES
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A video game will never be as funny to me as repeatedly clicking on a peon or a sheep in Warcraft II was in 1996
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Sonic Adventure 2 multiplayer is pretty fucking funny
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i’m glad my meant-to-be-throwaway but half serious comment about games not being funny inspired so many posts on the subject. i basically agree with everyone’s thoughts - games can be funny, but games like High on Life cannot be funny
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Testing out my new (but old) Official Saturn Steering Wheel on Daytona USA has me throwing drifts like it’s Outrun 2 or some shit. It also dawned on me that I’ve never actually owned such a peripheral in all my life while proving a most delicious spend of very little change
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Remember when that one guy in Yakuza 0 said he’d never even seen a boob
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Finished A Way Out with @Godamn_Milkman last night. It’s a really interesting game, I don’t think it’s totally successful but they really do go hard on “this is a movie you play, but it’s also co-op all the time” thing. For the most part, it works!
Mechanically, I thought the highlights were the row boat where you both have a paddle and can both switch sides, the famous back-to-back wall climb scene, and anything where one person is driving and the other is shooting at cops. I don’t even mind the garbage shooting near the end that much, because the game is generous enough that it’s not really worth complaining about it.
However, the wild tonal shift of the ending is worth complaining about. For a game that was primarily about two guys running away and occasionally knocking people out, it certainly turns into a murderfest as soon as you land in a different country. Grossness of that aside, it’s just…really weird that the game turns into a shitty Gears of War knockoff with less than an hour left. It’s just Time To Kill I guess.
Ending spoilers and complaining
Also, the plot twist at the end means that you end up fighting each other and…I dunno, I didn’t buy their friendship all that much, but it was kind of cute. So the turnaround to Unstoppable Violence was just a bizarre shift. I would guess that most players weren’t that into it, because I know at least for us, we just kinda poked at the mechanics until we realized we couldn’t continue until one of us got shot enough. It felt pretty bad, honestly.
I of course made the brave sacrifice of getting shot a bunch because the big twist is that I was a cop the whole time. So ethically it had to be that way.
Anyway, that was definitely the better ending (me dying) because my character was kind of an unlikeable prick the entire time, and the other guy both had a very charming relationship with his wife and was charming himself. He’s an alright dude! I’m glad we picked that ending.
All of the above said, I really did enjoy it, and it’s a short game at 6 hours for our playthrough. I’m glad we played through it, especially since there just aren’t many co-op only games in the world (that aren’t game jam experiments or twee platformers). Looking forward to playing It Takes Two (even though I’ve kind of heard bad things about the plot in that one too).
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Man okay, slightly different than the normal BMX XXX take but: this was disappointing not because they tried to use sex to sell a shitty game, but because the team behind it was beforehand starting to get very good at developing this sort of extreme sports game and they tossed all that away for this.
I never played XXX as enough people I trust confirmed it was bad and… it was just so tacky looking even to a young hetero male who would be the target audience for boobies. The prior two Dave Mirra BMX games were never quite all the way there but had interesting bits to them and multiplayer that was much more interesting and well considered than what the Tony Hawk games had at that point with an actual version of horse (match the other player’s exact trick as opposed to the THPS “just get more points” equivalent) and the second game had Skate’s “let’s see how horrifically you can crash and injure your skater” mode a decade or so earlier.
The thing is between BMX 2 and XXX they went and made Aggressive Inline which is a legitimately great skating/extreme sports game, I’d argue the only truly great non-Tony Hawk one of that generation. It fixed a bunch of “well Tony Hawk did it this way so it has to be this way” problems in the genre, it had great level design, it was basically a legitimately fun 3d platformer with an unusual control scheme. Seeing the improvements that team made from BMX to BMX 2 to Aggressive Inline they were in position to make something that could be among the best that subgenre offered… and they followed with BMX XXX.
I know all these years later these kinds of games aren’t considered… well worthwhile would be too harsh but let’s say not particularly meaningful or important, but there was some things of value and fun in there and this was one of the bright lights taking as big and pathetic a fall as imaginable.
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I also feel that at least on the internet circles I follow women tend to stick with MGS longer and dig into more than most men. It’s also funny to me I read a statistic somewhere that at some point City Hunter’s largest demographic was women.
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