neon white is good. I feel like it does for me what I want a racing game to do. idk if that makes sense. the writing/VA is kind of cringe but mostly charmingly so.
8 Likes
its the year of cringe im declaring it literally nothing wrong with neon whites writing
10 Likes
yeah I mean I am cringe but somehow I am not free but $20 is $20
5 Likes
Reinstalled Ace Combat 7 was not overly pleased to find that all of my previous save data is gone, so I’m plugging away at that. Probably gonna pick up the aircraft DLC packs I don’t have.
1 Like
Not sure if I should play them. I am considering True Colors, which might be better than LiS 2, but the reviews around are very confusing. For some people TC is the best of the crop, for others it has the weakest story, and so on…
1 Like
i’d say LiS2 is the best one by a large margin
2 Likes
I’m playing through Sherlock Holmes: Crime and Punishments
The game is pretty unexpectedly breezy, more of a hidden objects game than a deduction game really. I do not feel like I’m playing Sherlock Holmes at all, I’m more of a general guiding hand pointing him to wherever he needs to go. I’ll see a pool of blood at the crime scene under the victim and click on it, and Sherlock will go « weird, the blood hasn’t coagulated well, I should take a sample to analyze it » Did I notice this too? Absolutely not. I just clicked on the blood. Whole game is like this
For this reason it feels downright wrong that the player has the final say on who Sherlock thinks is the killer and how the murder was committed.
Sherlock will handle the first 99% of the case masterfully as always, then send an innocent man to the gallows because they suddendly put me in charge at the end. And I’m an idiot, half awake, bedridden with the flu
15 Likes
Did you prefer it to the first one also?
massively. i think the first one fell apart very quickly, and then all the other games have been trying to capture what made that first game popular, so i haven’t really dug too far into them.
Returnal (PS5) is pretty easy to roughly describe: Gears of War meets Metroid Prime in a rogue-lite container. it’s got the moodiness, sci-fi trappings, and environment scanning of Metroid Prime with the combat of Gears of War (including tactical reloading, lol), wrapped in a procedurally generated map that reorganizes itself each time you perish. there are some persistent upgrades for your suit, but your equipment and map are wiped each time.
It is actually a lot of fun! haptics are absolutely bonkers, probably one of the better showcases for the dualsense controller. enjoyable game so far, kind of inscrutable. game just runs at 60 FPS, there aren’t any performance options - no matter, game looks and runs great.
probably my favorite specifically-PS5 game so far
Star Wars: Racer Revenge (PS4) - more PS2 emulation testing. gotta say, the PS2 stuff looks and plays much better than the PS1 stuff. latency feels negligible, everything runs in progressive, framerates are stable and visuals are uprezzed well. this game in particular looks crisp and clean — no interlacing artifacts! — and runs better than it did back on the PS2. also, this game is really, really good… i spent a lot of time with the N64 version, to which this game is like a… sorta-sequel, sorta-remake? I think it has the same tracks for the most part… not 100% sure. anyway this game rips on PS4/PS5, highly recommended
Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (PS4) - giving these games another try. you can’t remap the horizontal camera axis and it is opposite of what it should be! this is really annoying! anyway, daxter is still the most obnoxious sidekick of this generation, every time he opens his stupid fucking mouth i want to turn the game off. the cutscenes are unskippable in this game, too. naughty dog really wanted to make sure you could soak in all that zany voice acting. gotta drink up every last drop! anyway despite my perennial crankiness re: this game, i’m committed to playing more of it this time. at least so i can try jak 2 without feeling like i totally gave up on this one without getting out of the first area, lol
13 Likes
Assetto Corsa Competizione (PS5) - wow! extremely impressive. visuals, performance, haptics/triggers - this thing cooks on sony’s hardware. immediately satisfying. among my favorites of games i’ve played on the PS5, just a really appealing racer. not too daunting to jump in despite how sim-oriented it is
you can literally feel the car losing grip as you enter a turn with the haptics, the bite of the brakes fighting you… it’s way better than i imagined
5 Likes
the first few hours of judgment didn’t really do much for me and i’d kinda filed it away as a c-tier spin off game but it has totally grown on me since
i’m really curious why the pc port of this recommends 32gb ram
5 Likes
I feel like I recall reading somewhere that the requirements were somewhat inflated for some reason and not strictly necessary, but I can’t remember why or how much of that I’m making up. It is Sony’s first actual next-gen exclusive game to get a PC port, so maybe it’s just not optimized well enough.
I need to go back and play the update and see what the new stuff is all about. That game had such a vibe and I’m curious what they would actually want to pursue narratively since it’s already so ambiguous. Adding more story just to ultimately stay as ambiguous as it already was would feel weird.
2 Likes
i played some streets of rage 1, and noticed that the walk cycles, even for the player characters, are only two frames. but it still looks fine for a 1991 16-bit game. that’s pretty cool
10 Likes
Been playing 7th Dragon III: Code VFD as my train game alongside new Pokemon. I wouldn’t necessarily say they are very similar besides being JRPGs, but it feels a bit like night and day comparing them as far as general gamefeel goes.
Pokemon battles are just so frickin’ slow, I swear they’ve been just porting the gameboy code through each generation. It takes a full 5 seconds for the game to tell you that a pokemon got damaged by poison, and anytime a multi-hit move is used it’ll just pause for 2 seconds between every hit. I don’t really understand why they still do the “show the text box telling you what is about to happen, then show the animation of the thing happening”. Just do the two things at once, or better yet just give us the animation and skip the text unless necessary. The battles tend to go by super quick regardless because you’ll just use the strongest supereffective move and OHKO everything, but then they stand there dumbly for a few seconds before fainting anyway.
7th Dragon on the other hand, everything in battle is super slick and quick. Messages go by a little too fast to read sometimes, but I prefer that to slowmo pokemon. There’s a good flow to the battles as well, and it feels much more engaging and strategic, at least in the Dragon battles. The classes are all very diverse and unique as well, although the more standard ones seem to be the most useful overall. The battle system seems to be more about setting things up for One Big Hit, or chaining together moves that cause ongoing damage. I felt like a genius when I realised that you can trigger a React (extra turn) inside an extra turn, and so with my Agent character, I can set up the React (extra turn on critical), Hide (Crit and Evade up), and then basically stunlock the enemy in several turns of Rush Attack, which does around 5 or 6 hits, with at least one or two being critical.
The game is just overall pretty cool as well. I like the overall aesthetic with the colour scheme using lots of rosy hues mixed with greens and purples. Some of the character designs are a level of horny usually reserved for those PSVita spank-to-level-up games, but at least these characters look like adults. You can rescue cats and send them to a cat cafe, where you can them go to rest and recover. It’s redundant since you can just heal up at save points, but it’s just there because hell yeah Cats.
Anyway, I am up to the last dungeon, which of course is one of those “long linear walk through suspended platforms in a purple void, also all the previous bosses are back” things, so my interest has waned a bit unfortunately.
As for Pokemon, I think it was still fun overall but I think this one plus the last few has made me feel that I may be pretty much over this series now. I’m not really into the meta stuff like shinies or online battles. So for me it’s all about the main story and filling the pokedex, and neither of those really do much for me any more and the battles are just not engaging when the challenge isn’t there. I pushed myself to complete the pokedex, and for the last few hours I could practically see the skeleton in the doorway tapping his watch at me to get out of there and I was just like “well there’s only 50 left, so…”
I’ve also started playing Dusk Diver 2. So far it feels like a much more fully featured game than the first. The first game just had one big map for all the mission areas, just with barriers set up in different places, plus the small-ish Ximending map to wander around. This one lets you take the MRT to different areas of Taipei like Dadaocheng and a legally distinct version of Taipei 101 (now called Climax 508, I guess even skyscrapers have IP protection?). You can also now wander around the Red House with the adjacent gay bar district just outside Ximending. The mission areas are all distinct from each other as well. Some of the level design is a bit average though, like the underground MRT passage dungeons that are a bit monotonous. The game is also still super repetitive in the battles, enemies have way too much health and there’s often several waves of them before the game lets you continue.
One funny thing is how most of the side quests are foreign tourists sending you on errands to find missing hats or fetch tourist pamphlets, with main character Yumo being way too eager to help. It kind of tracks with my experience of being in Taiwan, where whenever I seemed lost someone would inevitably show up to help. Maybe I am just an NPC quest giver after all…
14 Likes
I recently called the battle system dumb in 7th dragon code vfd, I had a very similar situation to what you described, and I liked it a lot for those reasons. Calling the game dumb is just another way of saying the game made me feel like a genius
6 Likes
Yeah I dunno if I’d call the battle system ‘smart’ or anything, especially since 60% of random encounters start with the samurai wiping out all enemies before I can even do anything, but there feels like a lot of neat tricks and ways to get each of the class types to sort of play off each other that feel pretty cool to work out.
1 Like
Forspoken Demo (PS5) continues to confound. let’s just get this out of the way - the banter between frey and the cuff is obnoxious and way too frequent. it seems to be trying to be funny (even that i’m not 100% sure of), but is absolutely never remotely funny. you open a chest and frey goes “meh”, and the cuff goes “hey, let’s not be ungrateful” in that weird butler voice and like… what even is this? what is happening here
the movement and combat has a fair bit of depth to it. you can press use the grapple (square button, never explained in the demo) in combat along with the parkour button to chain together some flashy stuff. i dig that you get graded on combat like it’s DMC or something. there’s a lot of mental overhead with needing to switch between different spell sets and offense/support, but it started coming together after more play.
world map is really, really big… but there really isn’t much going on in it
it has its moments, but based on the demo this doesn’t seem like it will be particularly good
The Last Guardian (PS4) - can’t get over how great the music is. the animation for trico is amazing… i do have some qualms with this game, though
the controls are weird and clunky, and the game constantly needs to remind you what the buttons are with big pop-ups in the upper right, which kind of kills the mood. there is also some pretty hellacious input latency when moving around, and the deadzone on the right stick is absolutely massive and can’t be adjusted, further lending to a constant “lurching” feeling in this game.
honestly, my issues with the game don’t really detract from what i’m getting out of it, though. just interacting with trico feels magical. why do i have empathy for this fictional creature!!! ahh!! very special game
15 Likes
Something about windjammers 2 feels so much more ‘nostalgic’ than its predecessor, like its sprite work was dime a dozen but to try and modernise it while accidentally creating the perfect synthesis of early 2006 xbox live arcade titles is really charming (they even bloomed the shit out of it!) Even enjoy some of the bizarre stage ideas like discs worth a random amount of points and the umpire wearing a swim suit even when in a disco club and whatever actionbutton buzzwords about gamefeel you want to apply to the original also apply here which is nice.
6 Likes
i have put 20 hours into this and i still have no idea what’s going on with the card shit. i get elemental bonuses? there are friendship bonuses, but they are… on the cards? i don’t… understand… i have to pay gold to destroy cards!!! wtf!
anyway so, here are my beefs with this game after putting lots of hours into it:
the difficulty is weird and gross and makes no sense. been playing this one generic “ally garrison” mission that lists the recommended level as “5”. i’m level fucking 20, no problem. my squad of 4 other goons are all levels 16-19 as well - I SHOULD BE GUCCI, RIGHT?
no, actually, i can’t reach the third ally before they die and if i don’t boost my bravery the first general actually super armors through every attack and takes even longer, but if i take the time to kill some intermediary lieutenants to level up my bravery first, i can’t even get to the second ally before one of them dies…
other times you can go in underleveled and just start smashing, there’s no real consistency to it
also: this game runs OK, but it continues to suck that there’s no way to use the PS5’s hardware on games that haven’t explicitly been patched for it. load times are zippy on an SSD, but the game still drops frames often, even just walking around the hub area
ALSO: for a game that is such blatant fanservice, why have i still not unlocked any alternate costumes after 20 hours lol
10 Likes