no david cage is the neil breen of videogames.
tommy wiseau is too fun and not self serious. he KNOWS hes bad. david cage would never allow this kind of spectacle. hes serious and bland and over talked about like neil breen
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there are multiple awful episodes of millennium season 3 that like, evoke David Cage. I don’t know if all garbage stinks the same or if he literally ripped off a terrible season of that show for shit like the heavy rain taxidermist dlc. you can almost see the prompts as shes ambling around the environment looking at serial killer shit like hold L2 and R2 to prevent yourself from throwing up!
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david cage is closer to the aaron sorkin of games
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The super best friends LP of B2S was pretty fun. But yeah itsa weird slog to actually play. It really creeps on it’s protag.
Well Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 3: Kowareyuku Machi to Kanojo no Uta (Damaged Town and Her Song) felt like Disney Channel Disaster Report to me, a bunch of empty calorie New Features cluttering a watered-down version of the formula, with the idea of broadening the audience of the game maybe?
Design Doc Bullet Points seem to be:
- ANIME TEENS will be more relatable with a new status meter (Stress) integrated with dialogue choices to at least give the impression that relationships are developing
- PROMOTIONAL THEME SONG that our nurse/aspiring songwriter/love interest can sing in a pre-rendered cutscene halfway through and also at the game’s climax*
- FASHION! There are so many outfits littering the ground in this game! (yes you can just ignore them but they have arrows pointing at them and they all share the same collectible model so you don’t know if it’s just “Maid Outfit #3” or something cool (it’s rarely something cool))
- CIVIC EDUCATION provided by An Actual Expert and “strategically” inserted at crucial moments (it plays out like this (I literally prove that leaving these two for dead is the more effective method)
Survival action is consistently middling in intensity so all that stuff noticeably gunks up the works. The most memorable disaster piece is a fire tornado that looks loaned out from Windwaker and it just hangs out in the background while you make your way across a tiny car park (game feels small in general) looking for a fire extinguisher and dodging the shadows of falling debris OoT Death Mountain-style. I get the impression this game is more interested in the emotional beats like the opening scene here rather than blockbuster action beats but maybe it was a time/tech constraint
No peaks like the stadium escape from the first game though and maybe just as crucially no valleys of lonely exploration (one of my favourite moments in DR1 is when you leave William and Karen in an abandoned office building, William furiously typing up his article about government conspiracy, ashtray full of butts on the desk in front of him, the red glow of an apocalyptic skyline behind him and now it’s your job to leave and break into the building down the block to retrieve some evidence (involving a stealth vignette done right!) and it’s desolate twilight outside, a red traffic light eerily pulsing as the Jewel Lady comes shuffling up the street, and when you’re finally in the other building, you can look out a window and see where William is across the way and wonder how they’re doing over there and there’s none of that vibe in 3!)
Anyway, not a terrible game but disappointing coming off the first two. I do like being able to choose a boy or girl character because choosing the girl means there are long long stretches of the game where you don’t interact with a single dude which is cool!
*And the climactic scene, love a good moment-in-time-stretched-indefinitely and this one involves a group sing-along to distract the knife wielding bad guy while I sneak in from behind and greet some severely flattened survivors along the way
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I know it’s fun to dunk on Aaron Sorkin but I don’t really see this. His whole thing is snappy screwball comedy too clever by half dialogue crammed into dramatic situations where it doesn’t belong. Cage’s games are all characterized by highly spacious uncanny valley weirdness and absolutely leaden dialogue.
Also Sorkin’s actors always seem to think they’re doing something important and feel as smug as their characters. Cage’s actors… well.
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I’ve got it…
David Cage is the Russo Bros of Video Games
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literally neil breen!!! no one listens to MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
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i actually didn’t mean the content almost at all, more the prestige industry reputation Writer smugness insufferable politics “aaron sorkin episode of “one perfect shot’” of it all
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if anythign i’d say cage is the neil breen of games, can’t believe no one has said that yet
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The resounding legacy of ZZT3 is how many Disaster Preparedness Facts are throughout the game and how many people used those during 3/11.
The game is pretty whatever when I played through it however many years ago.
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I remember you really hated the kaiju one, why was that?
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WHAT? I have a whole lets play about loving it.
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oh wow been playing that ol ps5
thoughts:
the last guardian (ps4) is excellent so far (lovely music!)
ZOMBI (ps4) is surprisingly good, though showing it’s age
spider-man: miles morales (ps5) is very, very pretty and pretty great for what it is, i think. having said that, i much prefer watching melody play this than actually playing it myself
brink (ps3) (ps+ premium streaming) is the worst game of all time, i think. i actually had a fair little bit of fun with brink back in the day, but this exact release is just a cynical filler game to inflate the apparent number of games available for sony’s streaming service. i laughed until i nearly passed out from trying to enjoy this. the ps3 version was boggy and unwieldy even as a native game, but adding streaming on top of this is just torture. battling nausea, audio stutters, and the usual inexplicable brink experience — you are always playing with bots and you’ll always be playing with bots and even if two lonely ships passed in the night that is the multiplayer for the (non-crossplay, of course) PS3 version of brink, they wouldn’t even be able to easily tell they were crossing each other and… my god… i take it back, it might be the best thing of all time, it is just so hilariously funny that sony ever put this up for people to play
i am bread (ps4) is worth a few laughs
power rangers: battle for the grid (ps4) is meh, wasn’t impressed at all
raiden v: director’s cut (ps4) is really cool, i love the info overload in the borders. does anyone still play this or is the online dead now lol
monster energy supercross the official videogame 5 (ps5) is flat-out AMAZING, easily the most surprisingly great thing i’ve played so far. racing games are impossible to resist, and this one is exceptionally deep and exceptionally difficult. wonderful. the haptics and the adaptive triggers are ludicrously good in this one, so much so that despite triggering my RSI a bit I haven’t been able to bring myself to turn it down yet(!!!) diamond in the rough y’all
wreckfest (ps5) is spectacularly good, hard to overstate how fantastic of a game it is… thanks for the rec @Felix
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I forgot this was a real game and thought it was a death stranding joke
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raiden v: director’s cut is really cool, i love the info overload in the borders. does anyone still play this or is the online dead now lol
Actually tried this the other day when needing a much-needed break from Gradius II/Vulcan Venture before the urge to slam myself into crystal asteroids for another doomed 1CC Run became too much to deny
I pride myself on being able to complete Gradius but the difficulty spikes in the sequel are utterly relentless and only offer More Chances To Die Pathetically due to its less-than generous check pointing. Still love it madly though but I continue to use Salamander/Gradius III as a palette cleanser
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I feel like I’ve learned a lot about shooters, actually, from ShmupJunkie but now I need the HoboSupportAct Gradius/Salamander Tier list.
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Gigant is a Korean point & click adventure game about generational conflict and the desperate lengths we’re driven thanks to capitalism and quick time events . It currently costs $2 on Steam and it’s about 2 hours long (if you cheat like I did.)
The game begins with our protagonist losing his barista job due to nepotism. He turns to harvesting giant crab guts to turn a quick billion won. I have no clue how much that is United States dollars but I’m guessing it’s like $10k. I’d probably touch just about any kind of guts or parts for that much money so this is a very relatable character, and I am rooting for them.
There’s a magazine article in the game that talks about the “2030 generation” or some shit and I couldn’t tell if that means this game takes place in the future or if that’s like…a Korean term for zoomers? Or millennials? Is there any difference if you’re over the age of XX? Probably not. Especially not in this game. All these older folks are freaking out about vaping and the knockout game and selfie sticks and all the youths are constantly going “ok boomer” and “how do magnets work” and that all feels kinda passé except it probably isn’t, nothing fuckin’ dies anymore, this game probably isn’t as out of step as I suspect, half the planet is probably still griping about this shit, gonna give this game credit for avoiding avocado toast at least, maybe they ain’t into that in Korea.
Anyway if this takes place in the future search is as useless then as it is now. The only thing they let me zoogle were apps that were advertised in-game. And I didn’t even get to use one of them, I didn’t even get to do some Talkboy shit with the recorder app.
Our protagonist forges fleeting relationships with fellow crab egg hunters, such as this scene where he goes to sea with Jamiroquai. The other day I learned Jamiroquai’s real name is Jay Kay. Jamiroquai is actually the band’s name. I also knew this already but forgot. I think maybe he dated Heidi Klum once? They weren’t a good couple in my opinion, Seal was the much better match, yes I am once again crying over their divorce, and the loss of their Halloween parties, those two were meant for each other. Those two were perfect together.
Our millennial/zoomer/moomer protagonist’s foundational trauma is esports. His brother jumped out of a window cuz daddy said “You can’t do esports anymore, because they don’t make sense to me, as a boomer.” But then his boomer ass immediately leapt out the window after the kid. And they both died. I do not know what esport this aspiring e-thlete played. They do not share his ELO. We will never know if this kid had legit chops or was just a delusional joker. I suppose it doesn’t matter to some people but it does to me. I want to know if I could have beaten this 14 year old at League.
I really respect adventure game developers, even if their puzzles are…uh…how should I put this…a little bit wild. They make me feel like such a square, I could never possibly come up with anything as imaginative as some of the shit you do in this game, I’d probably be too hung up on trying to make something fair or sensible but this mother just goes for it, this mother is not afraid to go big, this mother def included like 4 different puzzles where you tape varying rods together in increasingly convoluted ways and I respect that.
Check this shit out: I found a surgical mask on the ground. I removed its elastic band and used it to repair a broken slingshot I found on a schoolgirl’s corpse. Soon after I found a bloodied dog collar at a bus stop. I assume it belonged to a dog I befriended earlier by feeding it bread I stole from a cafe by smashing its glass window using a brick I found at the very same bus stop where the dog later died. Disassembling the dog collar gave me a bell. I tied the bell to a piece of fishing line I got from a fishing rod that had been left at the side of the river beside an electric scooter and a giant crab that was too busy looking at an offscreen unnamed-whatever to notice me. I tied the fishing line to a tree below some elevated train tracks, then used my repaired slingshot to launch the bell over the sparking tracks and into a river, which was then electrified due to the fishing line + bell combo. I then went back to the giant crab and activated the electric scooter using an app that was advertised at the dead dog bus stop. This finally caught the attention of the giant crab, who chased me to the pier, where I hopped into a rubber raft and lead it to the electric dog bell, killing it. I then harvested its guts using a signpost I found in the park. Video games can be about anything.
The game ties up nicely at the end. It turns out the cop who was hassling you was actually using the crabs to murder teens, because teens killed his daughter by peer pressuring her into doing a knockout game. Right when it looks like he’s going to shoot you to death he pops himself instead and goes “the kids…gonna be alright.” But then the kids show up and take photos of his corpse so they can get likes on social media apps, which fills the protagonist with such disgust that he picks up the gun…and pulls the trigger…and now he is the law or some shit, I dunno, I guess generational conflict never ends huh.
One year later our protagonist is alongside the same river, in the same spot as the cop, noticing another young man who had carelessly dropped a gadget of youth, which he then passes to the millennial, who then gets cut in half by a crab. The end. Can the circle be unbroken? I dunno, I’m just saying that here, right now, cuz that song started playing on my computer, it is one of my favorite songs, anyway I believe in God, time to say my prayers and lay myself to sleep.
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I have found a workaround for now. So essentially, if you walk 12 steps you use 12 rations. Each ration is equivalent to 1 gold, so if you get in 1 battle and only get 8 gold, you lost 4 gold on those 12 steps.
Bad, right?
But here’s the thing: the gold isn’t immediately taken away (of course) and there’s exactly one way to get free rations.
Dying.
Of course dying takes half your gold - still a good deal for 100 rations if you have less than 200 gold - but hard to save up any money. However you can buy apples (which are worth 20 rations) for 20 gold a piece, and I don’t think you lose items when you die.
So the trick is to wander around near a town, buying as many apples as possible until you die. That will give you 100 rations and you get to keep your apples, essentially stockpiling your food until you can actually make the long journey you need to.
Incredibly stupid and bad workaround, and I still don’t know the good solution other than “get far enough in the game where monsters actually give you more than 8 gold per battle”. But it might do for now.
EDIT: Of course I forgot that there are banks in this game, so even if I do lose items upon death I can just deposit them there immediately after purchase. The game only accepts deposits of gold in chunks of 100 though and I literally cannot get that much gold on a single set of 100 rations right now, so that’s not super useful yet.
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