You might like The Incredible Laboratory.
4 Likes
man, no offense to those of you discussing it, but i really didn’t want to start a debate about David Lynch here in my prior post. i think his movies have a lot to offer and was using him as an example of someone who has some credible issues you can claim in his films - but i think it’s pretty clear that the good pretty far outweighs the bad. if you disagree with me - fine! but i think you’d be overlooking a lot of stuff in order to do that. and i personally am growing more and more annoyed with that way of looking at art.
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I ain’t speaking on behalf of other folks who have grappled with disability and I don’t think the dude’s batting 1000 in any way but Lynch’s best work has felt so far removed from gawking to me, he is one of the few artists that’s made me feel like I was looking back at myself during my most challenging times, depicting elements of myself and my life in ways that left me feeling simultaneously shaken yet deepening my empathy for both the subject and myself, and appreciative that this shit was depicted at all cuz like, not many other people were showing this shit in this way. Certainly not people with a platform as large as his. There are always elements to criticize and a lot of his stuff really misses the mark but I really bristle whenever people write shit off as freakshow gawking.
Also sure seems like he treats actors as collaborators rather than puppets, which seems to be a fuckin’ rarity with this sort of thing. Not saying the dude is a saint but I think that comes through in a lot of the work and sets it apart from many of his peers.
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SO FAR two tracks in the Steam version of Crazy Taxi have been copyright flagged by YouTube : P
Radical Sabbatical
by The Days The Nights
Your Mouth Is A Guillotine
by The Vicious Five
Went hunting around for public domain punk songs; now I’ve replaced those two in the game with
We’re All Going To Hell
by Hearse Pileup
-https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Hearse_Pileup/2020/were-all-going-to-hell/
Coastin’
by Defy The Mall
-https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Defy_The_Mall/Defy_The_Mall/Defy_the_Mall_-Defy_the_Mall-_12_Coastin/
which both seemed to fit pretty well. ^_ ^
To do this I used Audacity (mp3 to wav conversion, default settings) and AdxEncoder.exe from the ADX Tools for Windows pack (wav to adx conversion, default settings), downloadable from a link in this tutorial: ADX Making/Editing Tutorial [Sonic Adventure 2] [Tutorials]
Then you just put the tracks in the game’s music folder
Program Files (x86) \ Steam \ steamapps \ common \ Crazy Taxi \ SoundData \ music_adx
and rename them to the file names of the tracks you replaced. : )
8 Likes
Legend of Zelda Oracles of Ages is way worse than Seasons! Trying to get to Dungeon 3 the steps are:
- Go to the past and talk to a guy
- Go to the present and get some flippers and rope in a cave
- give the rope to a guy who can make the raft but he says go get something else
- find Tingle on the overworld but cut off by a ledge, a unhittable switch, or an unjumpable jump
- finally come across after passing through 3 times a kangaroo
- oh the kangaroo won’t help you need to go to the beach and find their glove
- okay now you can talk to tingle (because all those unpassable keys were a smoke screen for the kangaroo)
- take the map to the guy get the raft, float out to see and wonder around till you get a cutscene where you crash
- on new island all your weapons get stolen so run around to recollect them, this includes a shop where you have to keep going back to switch out shovel/feather/braclet
- so you keep making an inch of progress and find out you have the wrong equipment so go back to the shop.
I gave up because I realized it was 12:30AM and I had only started it at 11PM because my body wouldn’t let me sleep. I give up. Oracle of Ages can shove it.
Edit: each new step isn’t a new door opened, it’s find immediately there is another new door waiting for you.
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yup
They said they wanted it to be the puzzle-focused one, but they just made it the slow one
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Enjoying the literal new sandbox of BeamNG.drive’s
Something nice and meditative about crawling on rocks in a van at like 5-10mph
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I think maybe I liked this one a lot more than Seasons because I like walking around the overworld doing dumb fetch quest sequences in 2D Zelda games, and when I get to the dungeons I think ‘oh no, stress time’.
Maybe that’s also why I like Soleil better than LttP, because it’s basically just all dungeons disguised as overworld areas
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I cosign all of this and I’d like to follow this up with:
I know it’s cliche for me to say at this point, but Lynch grew up in the same part of the country I did. I showed Blue velvet to a friend who also grew up there. We both could recognize the exact ways our families were dysfunctional, the exact ways men hurt people around them, the cycle of trying to escape even though it keeps trying to pull you back in. It’s uncanny how much he nails it.
There is absolutely a case to be made for his flaws but there’s so much in there that has has a level of humanity that I value more every day.
12 Likes
Crimes of the Future’s attitude towards mutations and weird fleshy things is a 180 from the rest of Cronenberg’s work. That’s why it was so refreshing.
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Cronenburg has some nuance though. After all he’s in Nightbreed which is very in line with Crimes of the Future. A Dangerous Method is also about people who find their truth in being something other than one society is telling them to be.
A lot of it comes down to who gets to control your body more than the body itself being a bad thing, I think.
5 Likes
I totally forgot about Nightbreed! I guess I was filing that under being one of Clive Barker’s coming out metaphors.
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Perhaps a day late for this but at some point after I played MGS V and had very mixed feelings on it (it plays very well, aspects of the story/themes I kinda hate) I had the realization that I had significantly negative feelings tied up with pretty much every Metal Gear game after 3 and went “I’m not a fan of this any more, it’s grown pretty toxic for me and I’d be better off without it.” MGS 1-3 were some of my favorite games at one point but I pretty much avoid any discussions/articles/whatever about the games (I only really skimmed the posts here as it is in a giant omnibus thread) and I think I’m better off for it. I know that for many here Kojima was a huge part of their videogame fandom and growth, but if the negatives ever become too much you can just say enough and leave them entirely in your past.
Maybe some time down the road if I feel I’ve got enough space I’ll consider giving Death Stranding a shot as it would be a fresh start, but I’m personally in no rush.
9 Likes
I figured out that I was playing Nikke wrong
see, you just tell the game to play itself and then watch butts jiggle instead of actually engaging with the mechanics
I randomly heard a streamer talking about a game that was making a bunch of money with men 45 and older and I’m p sure they were talking about Nikke and then I understood why it was charting in some countries
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Simply having a blast driving through the desert in big vans + trucks and imagining the stories behind the journey.
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I got into the habit of taking screenshots of whatever PC games I am playing in case I want to mention them in my Random Games Played topic but the program I use doesn’t work with certain games, such as the game I just started named Infini. This is a shame as less than an hour in and this is one of the most random ass puzzle games I’ve come across in quite a while with so many visuals I would have really liked screenshots of just to prove that it looks exactly like I thought it did.
Anyways I think it has been okay so far but apparently it is fairly lengthy and I could see this mechanically going completely off the rails. Narratively too as well, really if any part of it went haywire I would not be shocked.
I believe when I left the game that dog 999,999,999 days in the future was remembering what I did 800-some million days prior as this is the framing device for the level select screen.
6 Likes
i played that one. i was on the Independent Game Festival jury that nominated Infini for the Nuovo award in 2020 - i think the same year as Life Tastes Like Cardboard and a few other things people here on this forum have talked about. it was interesting and certainly unique, enough for me to recommend some people play it. i think the strange presentation/style is what’s most compelling about it, though, and less so the specific design of the puzzles. because of that it didn’t stick with me as much as some of the other stuff that year, but i also didn’t play far enough into it.
3 Likes
I actually almost tagged you when I wrote that as I went “This seems exactly like the kind of game Ellaguro would have stumbled upon at some point, wonder what they thought of it”. More than the narrative and visual uniqueness (which is striking so far) it is the fact that the puzzle mechanic is also so unique that I want to see how it pans out as even having played a good number of puzzles games I don’t really have any sort of feel as to how it mechanically will progress. Quite often games that do something like this end poorly and the third section definitely had some puzzle design yellow flags (three straight puzzles with very slightly different design and mostly similar solutions), but as much as I enjoy the legion of “sokoban with a twist” games I do like to give those trying something truly different a full chance even if they go astray at some point.
3 Likes
important messages…
matching 
another boss fight warding is incredibly good for… i beat the maneaters on my first try
you have to watch this cutscene every time you ascend the stairs… i didnt get matched for pvp any of the times i tried fighting him
these guys are real bastards and unlike other black phantoms seem not to despawn once u kill them? so you have to refight them and watch that old monk summoning cutscene every time 
this is another good example of the souls game requiring u to develop methodical approaches (perhaps this is the primary reason souls games are “hard” at all) when they cast their like close range sonic boom spell that can 1-shot u they have hyper armor but you can use the geography of the staircase to get them into a run animation during which they are easily staggered. so it becomes a matter of simply looping them in stagger if you can get the first good hit yknow. just running up to them is pretty tough. i’m sure there are other methods like maybe antimagic field works if i had the +1 miracle slot ring or wasnt wedded to sl1 or if i wasnt using warding for the boss fight again i could cast a bunch of soul arrows but i found an approach that worked for me…
another archdemon destroyed… i forgot how the nexus music becomes much more imposing once you reach 3 archdemon souls. from the sedate comfort of the usual theme that makes the nexus feel like home to an ominous organ piece…
all i have left are 5-2 and 1-4…
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Dougie in The Return gave me pause: oh no, is this really a character that effectively has IDD making up the bulk of the comedy? But after a bit it felt like an inversion — look at this person who needs help and is invisible to everyone, implied to have lost significant functioning overnight to no one’s concern. The woman in the casino sees him because she is elderly and invisible too. You start to primarily empathize with Dougie rather than chafe at the TV show toying with you
17 Likes