Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

obv i endorse its placement given my high opinion of it but did you beat norco this weekend? that’s was a heavy one for me

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I’m just nearing the end now, adore it

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it communicates sense of place so well (and accurately as far as i can tell from living somewhere similar for a bit)

writing about it makes me think of @u_u re: star wars as dry history you can enrich by analysing vs a work that speaks for itself. destiny is the former; this is the latter

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Warriors All-Stars (PS4) - luxury musou. Bonkers plotting. characters from tons of Koei Tecmo games means more variety than usual in terms of move sets. You can train up characters you aren’t using between battles in the hub area, there are social links if you use heroes together often… good. No real complaints. I haven’t played any of the licensed musous of recent vintage (Berzerk, Dragon Quest, Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem, etc.) so I don’t know how this holds up to those, but being able to use the protagonist from Deception IV with her trap-centric play in a musou game is pretty rad

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Dipped into Immortality. Screen tearing was a problem initially but managed to fix it. It’s kinda aimless to begin with but in a very toy-like way.

Not loving the score that plays as a backdrop to your scrolling through clips. I have no idea what is and isn’t significant because of it and I’d rather just scroll through film unbothered.

The match-edit feature is interesting for how it matches between significant items in fiction and sometimes between a character’s watch and a clapperboard holder’s watch. Sometimes the link is imagistic, sometimes it’s semiotic. Initially it seems crazy that any object might have a link, but I’ve found that certain things keep leading me down the same kinds of roads – particularly faces. The more I explore the more engrossed I get. The most interesting stuff happens at the periphery of scenes, or in-between series where an edit is presumably planned.

One strange scene threw me off where the characters do a scene on the set of a talk-show. The scene appears to cut but the fictional actors felt very similar to the characters they were just playing in the fiction within a fiction. I wasn’t sure if a metafictional scene was being filmed in the fiction of Immortality or if they were meant to suddenly be more natural as actors after the scene genuinely cut. I think the acting was a bit too subtle or not varied enough to convey parts like this. Part of the problem is the dialogue in the outtakes must still be clearly audible and often has the pacing common to scripted dialogue which makes it sound less natural and, therefore, less identifiable as the actor just being a normal people. At least to me.

I’m not sure if found footage is the appropriate term since the conceit is that the footage has literally been found and presented to us, but I feel like pursuing the logic of this conceit too far constitutes a silly question. I want to play more but might turn the music off.

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I loved offworld trading company for similar reasons

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I enjoyed offword trading company the first few times I played, but the first time I won by hammering buttons in the stock market menu, my enthusiasm was pretty much sapped. For some reason, winning by hitting a lot of up-down plus-minus buttons in a menu suddenly didn’t really do it for me, and made a lot of the other stuff I was doing feel kind of cheap. I may also just be an absolute devotee of that age of empires build-a-quarry-next-to-these-rocks shit to the extent that I cannot enjoy more creative riffs on the form, haha.

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Yeah this is very important I think. I don’t want to play a literal spreadsheet, I want to play a spreadsheet extremely thinly veiled with nice little diorama graphics

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absolutely. I want to see a guy go pick up the rock and put it inside his house. That’s the only thing that makes the spreadsheet feel like a game to me!!

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look if i have hangups about wanting to play a game that is ABOUT playing a card game and very specifically NOT just playing a card game y’all can have your thinly veiled spreadsheets

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speaking of offworld trading company, has anyone played the old world, have any thoughts on it?

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felt very very thin and dull when I tried it early in EA, like an underresourced cover act

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Oh yeah, I also played Out of Line this week as it was a free give away a few months back, game came out in 2021 so I assume it wasn’t super successful

This is the most comfort food puzzle platformer I’ve played in a very long time. Think of a game very inspired by your Limbos and Insides of the world with less of a budget (although not low budget, still looks neat enough). You have a spear you throw that can get stuck in walls to make platforms and do various other not-combat things, none of it really slows you down for long, looks alright, has one of those not spelled out narratives, lasts maybe two and a half hours. If playing through something like that sounds like a pleasant “brain off” sorta activity this does exactly that, if not you can safely pretend you never heard of it.

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it’s been out for like, 2 years at this point, so its in a pretty good place. it didnt sell super great so i dont think we are getting many expansions. its not really interested in innovation so much as refining existing mechanics. the orders system is great, old world has hexes and 1upt but it works cuz you can move units a great distance every turn and even further with force march. having a limited number of actions you can execute per turn means you cant just automate workers like civ either which i like. theres adjacency bonuses but they arent as strict or permanent as civ 6, you have a lot of freedom to set stuff up. i like the way you can only build cities on certain sites to discourage plopping cities down everywhere too. so its a competent civ type game with a narrow scope of historical focus and a like character relationships system slapped on top for narrative fun and cuz you can use the stat boosts events give characters to make them better administrators or generals or whatever. i had a kid who refused to do anything but be a wandering sage and like disappeared for 5 years before becoming famous for sitting in a bathtub in the town square all the time, and eventually people got sick of her and I had to like intervene to save her or let them kill her. I got killed by my pet monkey cuz i tried to train it to assassinate the leader of rome. Its cool when like marrying into the royalty of a minor faction gives you a slight advantage in a war or something. its goofy crusader kings type stuff. its pretty fun, its more focused on randomness/variety than it is picking the right techs every time or whatever. you cant even do that in ow because you get random choices of techs to research anyway

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this game continues to rip. you can go to the hub area between battles to level up your social links with your besties. koei tecmo really did a bang up job of retaining the “feel” of characters from different series. i can start rumbling with a dead or alive character and it actually preserves a bit of those games’ mouthfeel, excellent. the trapper folks from Deception are delightful, wanna make them best friends

the “card” system in this game is way too arcane, i have no idea when it is better to sell/destroy/create cards lol

Ashen (PS4) - wow, this game has some weird tonal stuff going on. the atmosphere of the environment is strong, but the enemies are too sponge-y and the voice acting is some bizarre post-dark souls cringe melodrama. still, i’m rather enjoying it, more than expected.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PS4) - already played thru the first level or so on the PC version a few years back, but having the PS5 has reinvigorated my desire to play random games something fierce. this one is some real comfort food type shit. yamane’s soundtrack is exquisite, iga is as iga as always. mindless castlevania isn’t necessarily bad castlevania, but not expecting much here

Overcooked 2 (PS4) - holy shit this game gave me bad flashbacks to working in foodservice… this is a game meant to be played for fun? i’m getting a stress headache just thinking about it. it does give me some thoughts about how close a game can/should be to “work” before it feels Real Bad to me lol. in a post-capitalist world i would probably appreciate this more

Rocket League (PS4) - still good

Monster Truck Championship (PS5) - uhhh, idk about this one. you can turn your front and rear axle wheels independently! i have no idea what i’m doing. i thought this game would be for big ol’ idiots but apparently it is for geniuses

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blighttown isnt actually that bad once you get used to it… to a woman like me, a poison swamp is fine, actually. and being cursed in the great hollow? its Normal. i shouldnt have gone down there it was such a pain to make it back to the surface and get purging stones :face_with_spiral_eyes:

with all that done and the help of 1 maneater mildred i have rung the 2nd bell of awakening now im at sens fortress… which is where i stopped playing last time!

this area is so fucking fun… one of my favs… just a real ass Dungeon…

im at level 6 rn… maybe more health would help rn

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the thing with blighttown really was that the game ran at like 12 fps on the PS3

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yeah, i think in some rare situations it could even crash down there

also love 5-2 in demon’s, wading through the pitch black swamp to find the slugs guarding the moonlight greatsword is some iconic shit

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i really enjoyed the blighttown performance metagame of “don’t look at anything” while playing dark souls 1 on 360, trying to keep the camera pitched up, any time you let it slip down you’d be looking at some slideshow-ass framerates

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in my mind this is what inspired the way you take psychic damage from looking at the wrong space oddity too much in bloodborne

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