Been going through those F.E.A.R games since they’re now backwards compatible on series x (what a wonderful 360 machine). The first game is unmatched when it comes to the visceral thrill of shooting. I don’t know what it is, there’s just a special sauce I can’t quite put my finger on, but it’s just satisfying to empty your entire clip into a row of cubicles and watch the effects. In terms of office action games, I’m not sure it gets much better (maybe Control is, haven’t played all of it). It’s a pretty spare experience though, almost feels like a souped-up tech demo with some very thin J-Horror trappings slathered on top. Although, I don’t really mind the approach considering the game was released in 2005 and could’ve easily been another Bush-era war porn shooter.
With that being said, that’s kinda what F.E.A.R 2 has been so far. In the time between the release of 1 and 2, a game called Modern Warfare came out, and the influence on F.E.A.R 2 is a bit much for me. They added iron sights, and more expansive arenas to do battle in, and you just lose the spirit of the first game doing that. I’m nearing the end but it’s been a fairly dispiriting experience thus far.
F.E.A.R. 2 is such a disappointing sequel to the first game. I pirated it the night it first became cracked and for some reason played the whole thing in one sitting that same night. I didn’t like it. More generic and less satisfying in basically every way. The ending is a bit surprising at least.
What a beautiful sequence. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets me all het up about when something like Hades is called a ‘roguelike’ just because it has something like permadeath and some procedural content. The wild swings of random fortune that you describe have been entirely shaved off and worn down to a nub of tiny discrete movements painstakingly designed for you, part of the existential grind of modern games that seems to me like nothing more than removing the actual point of playing the game.
ETA: Of course I’m being incredibly snarky here; what you get in Hades in particular just feels so safe and predictable to me when you can see examples of what could be – of course, the argument would probably be that it doesn’t sell and that Hades absolutely did. I don’t really have an argument against that other than it stinks to have people say “this is the sort of thing you like” when it’s a body of something that you might have liked if it hadn’t been completely drained of vitality.
I love this because it’s both a perfect criticism and celebration of what you get out of roguelikes. What I’m really decrying is the movement away from taking these sorts of risks in a design sense. Not every game should be like this! More games, these days, should be though.
As part of a break from playing games (in a sit-down-and-focus fashion) I’ve been almost exclusively playing Pikmin Bloom.
The focus of the game is just treadmilling Pikmin friendship levels until you have every type of hat.
The game has some features I find hilarious yet cruel. Pikmin travel time is probably the best example since they move at about walking speed and travel in a straight line to the location of a thing. If you unlock a thing to go pick up, say a lemon, you can get on a train and travel away from it and send Pikmin on storied voyages.
Every time you retrieve an item or send Pikmin to beat up some fungus you get a postcard, and because I live in a smallish town I have 580457 duplicates. You can send them to friends but I can’t make headway into getting rid of shit in this economy. You can delete postcards but the menu is so laggy and difficult to manage it’s barely worth it.
I maintain that naming pikmin is the most fun thing to actually do in the game but it’s wearing thin at level 29. Nearly got all those comb pikmin tho.
I’ve been playing this as well. Haven’t been able to make much progress recently as i’ve been holed up in my home trying to wait out this omicron spike, but on my Amtrak trip home from the east coast a few weeks ago, I left some Pikmin doing a task in Chicago. I live in Los Angeles. It took them over nine days to walk home… magnificent, haha. If I’d remembered to, I would have left some doing a task in New England to see how long it took them to cross the entire continent.
This game is interesting to me because it’s clearly much more of a, like, fitbit competitor or whatever than Pokemon Go is. Pogo measures walk distance in km, but Pikmin Bloom measures it in steps, like most fitness software does. It also requires much less constant interaction than Ingress or Pogo require when you’re out on walks. I suspect that this was Niantic’s attempt to make a map AR game that is playable at the same time as their other titles, so that they stop cannibalizing their own audience, haha.
I’ve been playing Pogo almost consistently since launch, haha. I am a big time freako. Though part of the reason I play that game so much is that I am in the process of building a living dex in Pokemon Home, mostly through only trading, and I got a lot of the Pokemon I was missing through transferring Pokemon from Go to trade or bank.
These days I send extra shinies from Go to Home and use them to trade for other shinies I want… because I am also building a shiny living dex, haha. This has been a very silly but very time consuming project for me during the pandemic, which is exactly what I wanted for my brain during this time. My main living dex is missing only like 5 Pokemon, and I have two of those ready to transfer in when BDSP connects to Pokemon Home… anyway. I’m a ridiculous brand fan for this and only this, haha.
I used to work for Niantic and I can tell you that pogo is buggy because their QA department is run by an asshole and their production process is twelve kinds of fucked up. We’re talking sending a release candidate build to QA for release within the week that is missing the tentpole feature because as it turns out nothing was ready.
I’ve dealt with many types of development dysfunction in my time, from interpersonal to otherwise, but Niantic was a perfect storm of awful.
Spent last night and uh, oh god look at the time, all of today replaying the first Phoenix Wright game on Switch.
I haven’t played this game since my freshman or sophomore year or college, so I’m both surprised at how much I’ve forgotten in it as well as how much I recall.
I’m super iffy on these redrawn graphics (supposedly they’re much improved from the first “HD” stab of the 3DS trilogy), but I will say that moving a cursor around that lets you know what is clickable, isn’t clickable, and what already has been clicked is a godsend. Maybe not for this game in particular, but I hope this time around I’ll enjoy the second game, rather than desperately pixel hunting on a shitty OG DS screen.
been listening to “everything to guppy” by recommendation of @VastleCania and it got me to download the game (the binding of isaac rebirth) and try it again. It took me like three attempts to beat Mom, and then I saw the credits, and thought “yeah that’s enough for me”, which was my reaction the previous two times I played it. very middling twin stick shooter that lasts just as long as it needs to. don’t know how people get like 500 hours in this game
beating Mom is like maybe the first 10%, and the more you play, the more absurd and ridiculous everything gets.
definitely a game it took me a few tries to fall into, but once it clicked, i was totally sucked in. only real complaint about it is runs are often over before they even get going because of your drop luck, and you NEED good synergies to take on the harder bosses and especially mega-satan
I like Binding of Isaac a lot, but the whole look and vibe of it is such a deeply unappealing Newgrounds throwback that I always feel a little embarrassed playing it.
Forgot how incredibly long the bonus case they added to the DS version of Ace Attorney was. Gotta be at least half as long as the entire rest of the game. At least the Switch version doesn’t make you blow on the system constantly (the fingerprinting minigame is still clunky, though).
Here’s hoping I don’t hate Justice for All as much this time as I did back when!
Hitman III VR is fucking hilariously janky and despite not meeting the minimum spec it (at least the tutorial missions) runs acceptably on our PC, though it did require some experimentation to get it to not hang when the Oculus software started (pro tip: don’t start it in exclusive fullscreen if you plan to engage VR mode, it will fuck it up)
