Finally got around to trying OnRush this afternoon. Interesting cross of Burnout takedowns, SSX-style boosts, and Overwatch-style vehicle classes and team dynamics. I like it a lot.
Then tried out Control for the first time on base PS4. It gets pretty close to N64 levels of unplayability if you leave the motion blur on, but it’s manageable (but not ideal) with it off. The game is very visually striking and has super interesting environments. Headshots feel as satisfying as Destiny’s and gunplay feels better than I had expected. (I don’t usually enjoy third-person shooters.)
I would love it if one of those Instagram trap art exhibits popped up that just tried to recreate some of these spaces IRL… or if I could walk through these in VR
Since FFXIV still isn’t available to purchase, I’ve been taking advantage of all the extra space on my laptop after removing WoW to get back into Guild Wars 2. I forgot just how much of this I played through—I had eight characters all at least level 25, and since I made them all right at launch time, they all had like eight years worth of birthday bonus level boosts, so without even really touching any gameplay I’ve more than doubled their collective levels. Despite never maxing any characters when I was first playing, I did manage to play through a bunch of the first season of seasonal content before I stopped, which is fortunate since that’s basically the only content that isn’t still in the game. Kinda nostalgic to play through Personal Story content that uses the original Lion’s Arch map, as that city was otherwise completely replaced with a new version a few years ago.
Meanwhile, @familyjules is over here playing through Hunie Pop again and just remarked “if I was a guy, I’d probably be an incel,” so. We’re all making good choices today.
Yeah I kinda loved Sword and Fairy 6 but it takes way too much effort to fight past the game’s flaws to find the real quality. There’s a weird inverse difficulty curve where the first few bosses are all major roadblocks that’ll make you want to quit and then suddenly it’s super easy for the rest of the game. I probably wouldn’t recommend the game to anyone whose game time is at a premium.
I recently played through Xuan Yuan Sword 7 from the same developer, and while it’s got some performance issues on base PS4, it’s a much more competently made game. It’s a fairly linear action RPG with kinda dark soulsy combat, but there’s seemingly no hitstun or iframes and enemies are very health-spongey on hard so playing on normal is recommended. I switched to normal after the second boss was giving me trouble and with the faster paced combat and support characters it started to feel more like Ys than souls at that point.
You can pretty much complete the whole game including all side quests in about 20 hours, and while the plot’s not as interesting as Sword and Fairy 6, the characters are enjoyable in the same way as S&F6
While I haven’t started it yet, I’ve been envious of the players I’ve seen zipping around. I found a recommendation to take the content in order since flying mounts remove a lot of the challenge and reward of Heart of Thorns, so that’s just what I’ve been doing.
The other day I was in the mood to replay Majora’s Mask, which I loved back in the day, but I forgot how videogamey it is. I gotta like jump on these lily pads? Stealth segment? Then I lost all motivation when I was trying to find the dungeon and I ended up in a skulltula house. I decided to just go for it but then I’m pretty sure 90% of the spiders I needed some later-game abilities to get. It was hard for me to even backtrack to the entrance of the house! Meanwhile my 3 days had basically run out. (Forgot about the slow-time song)
I recently got my NES A/V modded. (It’s the later top loading model that only has RF.) It has been a little fuzzy lately, so to be safe I got a recap too and sure enough one of the caps had been leaking onto the board. I’ve had it basically since I was born so it was gratifying to have it repaired before it got damaged and see it working better now.
So that means I’ve been playing a lot of NES games and realizing how much I really enjoy the earlier/simpler games in the library, and not so much the later post ninja gaiden wannabe-16-bit games. This is good news because I think i want to rebuy a lot of those games I sold because i used to think they were lame, and they are still dirt cheap. Watching a lot of game center cx lately is also influencing me…got me thinking getting heavily into like lode runner and mighty bomb jack is a good idea.
Anarcute’s controls are maybe a little squirrely and I’m not sure if the game is going to wind up having a ton of mechanical nuance, but my crowd of little animal people threw a tanker truck at some riot cops and blew them up. 11/10!
Blasphemous is pretty cool. I appreciate that it’s a bit merciful in some respects, while still being pretty tough as far as these kind of games go. I thought it was going to be slower (I thought it was one of those “2D Soulslikes” and this is definitely more Castlevania than anything) but everything is pretty snappy.
I played a bit of Archaid, the @Tulpa approved, early-access action puzzler. It’s a compilation of 6 separate games, all controlled by rotating an hexagonal ring. The game helpfully sorts these games by their complexity. In the simplest tier, there is a Hexic-like matching game, but I found this one to be the least satisfying.
All the rest take advantage of an hyper-cube sorting mechanism for their symbols. I think this is where my description of the games is going to break down. Basically, I am staring at a 2-dimensional field of hexagonal tiles, each with its own symbol. These symbols have relationships with others based on their coordinates in the hypercube. I was able to understand and thoughtfully engage with two of these games. In one, I had to link symbols that were fixed on opposite ends of the hypercube by chaining them with intermediaries. In another, I had to create a ring of at least 6 tiles so that the end would connect with the beginning. It’s a though-provoking design, but difficult for my mind to visualize.
Yeah, the simplest mode is more an interface tutorial than anything, but the full game with the n dimensional coordinate system is so compelling because it forces you to think and eventually intuit space in more than 3 dimensions. Its precisely the sort of alienation I love in games
This turns out to be more useful and interesting than Miegakure probably will be/could have been (same developer, same linear algebra, but a direct and tactile implementation of it to better construct brand-new intuitions).
Instead of a block-pushing game, I’d probably extend 4D Toys into…a game of catch, or racquetball – something that blends the realtime predictive trajectory power of a human brain and limb coordination with alien geometries.
Similarly, I think this is why I really liked Mirror Drop. It’s a simple puzzle but it’s an overwhelming sensory experience. That same summer Mirror Drop was released, we visited a Yayoi Kusama exhibition with a half-dozen of her mirror rooms:
And in a lot of ways, the full-body sensory experience of the art exhibit was less impactful for its flaws and limitations (the door, the defined pathway, the gaps in the mirrors, how easily parallaxing dispelled the infinity) than the infinities in the game world. I ended up enjoying some of her other conceptual art much more – especially an exhibit built by audiences placing stickers in a model room, a slow accretion of people and experiences that reveals patterns over time.
