my husband and I refused to finish the game for the exact reason you mention. We were very soured by the last hour and wanted an ending where cop bro got redeemed by abandoning cop status for his bro
My favorite bit in this game was when one of you you is trying to call your wife in a pay phone booth, but the other player can walk halfway down the block and ring the bell on a parked bicycle aggressively the entire time, completely destroying the mood of the phone call. THIS is videogame humor
finished dusk today. it was cool. the standard issue opinion that “it gets real good after the first episode” is correct, but it does make me wish that the first episode was shorter or got to the good stuff quicker.
it makes me wanna play/make more quake maps. which is good cos i’m teaching level design again next sem and have decided that two out of three assignments will be quake maps.
Once more into the breach! God. I think this game wants me to do every single race on the map before it’ll let me do the final showdown (editor’s note: yes). It’s been grueling.
Turns out you can carbon fiber-ize the default bumpers, I did this for the Corolla to give it the classic AE-86 look. This is the only way you can color your bumpers, everything else is body colored.
The game presents it’s plot with “motion comics” which is a very very very clever and economical way to do things.
Anyway
Anyway Caleb here runs the “Reapers” a mean group of street racers who have been taking all the sponsor money. Yeah this is back when NOS and AEM had money to throw around. But since you’ve been winning so much, you’ve been getting all the sponsors, and Caleb is Pissed.
Having done every single url race I’m now just kind of clearing the entire map of usable races. I have to be close…right?
There was one photoshoot that takes place in a huge refinery. I had taken my starter honda civic and “downgraded” the visuals until it was something I actually liked. You get more money for a higher visual rating, but at this point money is really secondary.
One thing I would like to point out is the signage in the city is really well done. There’s pictographs and symbols for where the highways and locations are, to the point where they’re generally at every major intersection. so if you want to get on the highway just follow the signs. I don’t know if any other game has done this but considering how twisty this fucking game world’s roads are it actually comes in handy.
RIP.
After several hours of racing, there is finally one last miserable dot on the map, another URL race…
Every other car is one of these “reaper” cars from the aforementioned gang, with a special sticker and all black paint. It’s all of them vs the 86.
Little did they know, I had it on easy mode. (thank fuck this seems like it’d be impossible)
After this, there’s one final race that shows up on the map. Ominously, It’s in a gigantic fucking refinery
“just give me one more chance, I can take him”
“YOU DOWN OR WHAT”
It’s FIVE FUCKING LAPS god. fuck. I decide to give Caleb a chance and change the difficulty to “Medium”
To Caleb’s credit, he does keep pace for a few laps. He manages to pass me only for the AI to try and ram me off the road, Forza Public Lobby style. but…
Anyway when you win, it shows one final motion comic of two girls going like “YAY you did it” while Caleb sits on a stoop in the dark all alone. it’s very funny
The game then flashes through a fast forward of the past 20 hours. which is exactly what it feels like to play this game.
Ok now it’s time to get silly…
And that was…NFSU2.
I feel like I’ve raced down every street and every turn. I feel like I’ve totally steamrolled this entire city’s street racing scene into submission. I feel…something? Nothing? Is this how Alexander The Great felt? It feels somewhat good to finally finish this game after having played it a few times over the last 18 years, only to now sit down and complete the whole damn thing. I am eager to play a real driving game for once with non-cartoon physics.
Having foiled his plan to hoard NO2, I guess Kane will have to turn to more exotic substances like tiberium next
men aren’t strong enough to make
Something like 30 to 40% of senran kagura players are women. I dunno what that proves about anything.
I remember reading back in the day that more women played Leisure Suit Larry than men, too
everyone loves mediocre Tamsoft games
My opinion on funny videogames is that the only truly funny videogame is Super Mario Maker 2
Demon’s Souls Remastered continues, and so does the fight between the sound design and the score.
4-1
The stingrays are really well done in this version. They have much more of a whalesong, hyperdolphin thing going on in their sound design. Since I’m doing this level so late, the skeletons are really not as big of a threat as they usually are in a playthrough. There’s not much to say other than the level design is the proto Sen’s Fortress and I will always forget the direction of some arrow bolt traps and will always die to at least one.
The Shrine of Storms has one of my favourite premises in any Souls game where the shrine was important to a long-dead sect of fanatics, the Shadowmen. The Demon plague brought about on Boletaria has a somewhat unique effect in that the folklore of this religious group are made manifest. So mythic beings involved in the story of their death rituals like the Adjudicator, the Old Hero and the storm beasts are literally warped into reality from the area just being soaked in mythology.
Adjudicator has always been cool and I like the idea that it stabbed itself in the gut as the result of a previous battle with another adventurer. Since the bird on its head is the only thing that takes damage it is presumably immortal and just did this as some sort of bizarre strategic thing. The fight feels a lot easier than it did in the original, I suspect they widened the arena a bit so you don’t get as easily shoved into a corner.
2-2
2-2 is a bit of an odd level in retrospect the ‘main route’ avoids most of the level. There are also lava caves which you can barely survive. I like the tension between mine/ecosystem but it is funny how much of it is ‘optional’. Slightly easier to see your way down the big hole to the boss but the geometry will still fuck you over if you jump carelessly.
Flamelurker is a great fight. Basically the Ur-version of most Souls bosses. They managed to keep the same AI behaviour where it randomly backs off or gets stuck on debris really well. The fire explosions are slightly less readable than the original but overall the fight is still great, a tense war of attrition due to the larger healthbar which is reflected by the weary plodding theme in the original:
Whereas in the new game’s music, you can hear the Flamelurker, voiced by Benedict Cumberpatch, say things like
‘Do you fear me adventurer? You Should!’
‘I shall burn thy body and crush thy bones for killing my demon brothers!’
‘I have lurked in the flame for a hundred eons!’
And so on
Bad music here. Almost unrecognizable from the original as orchestras blare. This version of Demon’s Souls would probably be definitive for me if we could just toggle the original vs new music, original vs new voice acting, and facial animation/NPC conversation camera zoom on/off.
I finally have the searing Demon’s Soul and can now upgrade and craft real stuff. Have decided to go with upgrading Epee Rapier for the hitstun from the fire effect.
4-2
God what a horrible level, until you rehearse the tricks.
5 key sections back to back that mostly revolve around clearing a single threat via a narrow walkway:
1 The tomb room, first area you learn about the resurrecting giant ghosts and the reaper that keeps spawning them. The room misleads you into thinking you can tackle it like a basic level but eventually you realise the goal is to beeline it to the reaper. The Patches encounter is basically the same and I have a feeling he’s one of the few returning VAs.
2 Once you get outside the trick is to manage the stingrays detecting you on the cliffs while skeletons (both regular and gold) try to catch you on a narrow ledge. Like the first room, success in the run relies on managing kiting behaviour while thief ring blinds the stingrays.
3 Second reaper trial and the narrow walkways continue. You can barely run through due to how thin the walkways are and how the enemies block you and induce panic so you probably won’t take your time to look around carefully. I always forget about the second reaper location and he be sneaking round a wall at the bottom of the horrible staircase run where the ghosts show you their laser powers.
4 A final narrow hallway which has a sneaky reaper tucked away in a tight space right next to a giant ghost. Kite and bite.
5 The final room before the boss is, in my mind, a trap for the player who assumes they’ve gotten through the worst and throws a new dynamic that someone who has gotten the run down might slip up on at the final hurdle. A shiny room full of slugs seems fine but the explosion spirits floating around are there to cap off the run. Even if you know the danger and the environment well, you can still be caught out by their blast radius, especially since some of the walkways push the precarious narrow paths to their limit.
Probably the most direct, ‘figure this sequence out’ level in the whole game.
Old Hero still a great idea that I’m sad From never really tried much again. A blind boss is neat and having enemies detect you through senses other than automatic AI sight/pathfinding contributes to the more organic feeling of the fight. Like Odysseus and the Cyclops.
4-3
Sound design brings this in line with some of the more unnerving Shadow of the Colossus encounters but the music is once again silly pomp. However, listen to the sounds, I love this shit:
As with most of the end-stage fights, the fight itself is a gimmick but this was always the game’s strength when it came to a lot of bosses. Each is its own adventure.
Grabbing a sword of legend which only works in its proper mythic context is just very cool. A simple encounter that caps off what might be my favourite bit of world in the game.
Nearly there: 2-3, 3-2, 3-3, 1-4
Got two hours into Resident Evil 3. I had played it way back on the Dreamcast (as my first RE!) I played it on easy, just because of the week I was having, but it was comically easy. I did end up getting killed by a dog in my malaise and my save was from 20 minutes before.
Might restart on Hard, but also it seems like the game isn’t very good structurally. RE1-2 are good about making you do circles. This looks like I am taking very long straight paths back and forth.
Mercenaries mode is the best part of RE3
women can and do enjoy misogynistic media. it doesn’t excuse the misogyny but it just shows that for most people that is neither the beginning nor the end of critical analysis (nor should it be imo)
that said I felt death stranding was notably less misogynistic than mgs as whole. at least in terms of the male gaze the contrast is huge. like mgsv has one major female character who’s primary personality trait is being naked all the time. meanwhile sam bridges is like the most nude dude in all of videogames and part of fragile’s backstory is that she is a never-nude, but unlike quiet this is like a footnote in her story instead of being her whole story. I think there’s an ass shot or two of her but we see sam’s bare ass like constantly and as far as I’m concerned that’s preferable to just not sexualizing anyone.
there was one flashback scene with fragile that made me uncomfortable and felt icky and gratuitous, mostly because it felt like a set-up for a pervy wet t shirt scene – but then it never actually goes there (and yeah maybe that says more about me but who cares). it still does feel like gratuitous torture and more sexualized than it needs to be. and I get taking issue with women lead characters having names like “fragile” and “mama” but like, having actually played the game, these names are clearly applied with heavy dramatic irony. like fragile turns out to be tragically resilient and mama’s whole story is basically a surprisingly nuanced abortion narrative. meanwhile the more traditional “mother” role is taken on by the big tough men like sam and mads’ character. and honestly for my money both fragile and mama have more interesting/fleshed out backstories and personalities than any of the male characters save maybe heartman. but it’s fair to criticize the game for still pigeonholing women into typically “feminized” dichotomies. like amelie is basically damseled for most of the game.
but also it is cool that mgs just kind of casually having queer characters happened at a time when most videogames, if they had queer characters at all, would almost universally reach for tired homophobic stereotypes and gags at their expense. the running gag of men grabbing each others’ crotches in mgs is about as bad as it gets and even that is notable for not resulting in some tired gay panic sequence.
the real shit I take issue with is all the paz dates in peace walker. far more egregious than anything else in a kojima game imo
this just makes me think about lars von trier, who I mostly hate and I think his movies are extremely misogynistic and often amount to gratuitous rape/torture porn but time and time again his most ardent defenders are women. but I’m quite sure that they are seeing something there that I don’t and I don’t have a problem respecting that. but I don’t know if I’ll ever not find his shit extremely hard to watch with little to redeem it when it’s all over.
i don’t have enough of an opinion about Kojima’s work enough to make a point there either way, but i will say that Von Trier is like on record of having directly harassed women he’s worked with and afaik i haven’t heard the same about Kojima. ofc i’m not working at his companies so i don’t know! but the sense i get from a lot of female fans of Kojima/MGS is “it’s complicated”. i get the impression a lot of the women in his work are like not constant victims of torture and degradation in the way Von Trier’s movies are but are more these weird archetypes that are like fetishized in various ways. but i’m not deep enough into his work to be able to break that down.
and just in general i do think the input of women fans at least somewhat matters when discussing the misogyny of a particular work even tho yes, obviously women can and do enjoy many misogynistic things. but that debate is complicated and not as black/white as some people seem to want it to be either way. and i’m more concerned if the male directors are directly harassing women they work with or treating them badly than i am with them working through whatever weird demons in their work. the bigger issue here is just lack of female directors getting the opportunity to work through their own demons in the same way.
certainly i can say that there are plenty of elements of misogyny in David Lynch’s work, for example. but most people would agree that just characterizing his work as that that kind of misses a lot of stuff going on in his movies, or how he’s shifted throughout his career. like he also dives deeper in the internal worlds of female characters in a way very few directors do in general at all. and yes that is mixed in with some archetypes/ideas that aren’t so great at times. so that’s why It’s Complicated. there are certainly male directors or artists where i can look at their work and just say “this guy really hates women” (plenty of them, in fact) but there are a lot of others where it’s way more complicated than that. and more to the point, i’d rather see them work through that stuff in their work than in how they treat people in real life.
tl;dr i don’t have a lot of tolerance for consistent shitty behavior towards women but i’m a lot more open to people working through their own weird demons in their art and a lot less willing to cast judgment on that either way.
yeah i started to appreciate “troll” levels after you originally posted your twitter thread on them. i had no idea they were this creative.
I liked to play Forgotten Worlds in the arcade when I was in middle school, and I was happy to find a PS4 port with adapted controls. I remember reaching the second-to-last boss in the arcade with a friend, and I wonder now how many quarters it took for us to do that. There are cheap kills all over the place, especially on the bosses.
At first, I was using the rewind function in places. But that was a little much with all the other controls required. I wouldn’t have minded a full conversion into a twin-stick shooter, though I guess that would have lost the nice rotational animation.
I had forgotten that each stage is a sort of a tribute to another Capcom game.
It’s funny I think the best part of the game was Connect 4.
oh yeah actually it did kinda rule to take a break to play connect 4 instead of visiting my wife who had just given birth. great game.
Intentionally crossing incompatible font encodings in Angband gave birth to weird ASCII glitch streams and trees. ^ _^
I was really excited to try Gibbon but maannn it just doesn’t feel good to control at all to me. I’m going to give it another chance (I paid $10 for it after all, thank goodness I waited for a sale) but I don’t have my hopes high
