geometry wars is back baby awoo
6 Likes
itās VERY designer-brained. playing it is giving me like ten thousand ideas
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Throwing a grenade is Star Citizen is an experience that about 1-in-3 times goes something like this:
Me: "Okay, Iām gonna bank the grenade off that wall behind the crates to set off the mines that are back there with an explosion. Now, as soon as I throw it, Iām gonna run the fuck away so thereās no chance of me getting in the blast radius.
Okay, 1ā¦2ā¦3ā¦pin pulled, 'nade chucked, and Iām off and running!"
Star Citizen: āOwO, did you lost this?ā [proceeds to put the live, extremely angry, hand grenade back in my hand]
6 Likes
Now Iām on the part that combines Bomberman and Pengo. Iāve been collecting every coin as I go, but there were a couple I just couldnāt figure out. Then I got a new item that made them easy to get. I canāt help wondering whether it was possible without that item. Iām annoyed at myself if it was and annoyed at the game if it wasnāt (since these were levels before the item was available, though in the same world).
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Four Sided Fantasy is a puzzle platformer that revolves around screen wrapping tricks. Canāt reach a platform? Freeze the frame and walk to your left and youāll pop out from the right side of the screen on the thing that was previously out of reach. Iāll give this game credit it doesnāt hold your hand at all and doesnāt waste too much time giving you easy stuff to warm up on. That said after a little while I felt Iād seen enough. It does do things to keep the puzzles fresh but eh, I dunno, I donāt feel compelled.
@wourme Youāre way ahead of me in RRS I have not touched it since I first posted about it. I was most of the way through the first world, I think. Worth pressing on or have I done you a disservice by gassing up the game based on my first impressions?
3 Likes
If you liked the first part, itās worth continuing. I actually like the game a lot, though I think they overuse some annoying sound effects.
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I tried The Anacrusis because I was curious why anybody would get so far in a project that just seemed to be āLeft 4 Dead but lifelessā and, yeah, it was basically as awful as that launch trailer made it look. All the generic not-zombie Alien monsters had funky 70s clothes on at least.
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Four Sided Fantasy does offer a big mechanical shift with each new season so if you are near the end of one it might be worth pressing on just to see if the new one hooks you, but that said yeah the basic idea is what it is.
1 Like
Iām finally dipping into MGS V for the first time. Wow, that prologue in the hospital is some wild shit! Thoroughly enjoyed that over-the-top interactive action movie. Now Iām doing the first mission and I have no idea how to play this game properly. I keep sneaking up behind fools and knocking them out, only for them to wake up in 30 seconds and cause me more trouble.
I am loving sneaking into empty huts and grabbing rare diamonds and boxes of metal, with perfect arcade game reward sound effects. Thatās my favorite part so far.
Iām also realizing that, despite playing all of MGS 1 and 2, and half of 3, I have NO memory of any plot or characters from this series. Iām just floating in the void. Was that psycho mantis floating around in a straitjacket? I dunno! Howās he gonna get me now that there arenāt any memory cards to read?
15 Likes
I got up to the point where each of your characters has their own gravity and that was pretty cool but by that point I was already inching toward the door, so to speak
The most important story connections are to Peace Walker and 3. So youāre not confused, you just donāt know!
Hope you love the game, I think itās amazing.
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Should I be avoiding killing guys? I just assume thatās how youāre supposed to play a stealth gameā¦ But thereās all these guns around!
1 Like
Full stealth is super tricky and fun in that game. But using all the tools is also really great fun. I wouldnāt discourage you from doing anything tbh. Okay, in place of my original non-answer: I think that the way the tech tree blossoms and the pile of cool shit you have by the end of the game basically is there to push you to turn into a terrifying cyborg murderer who doesnāt have the time to even look at the thing its killing. So, Iād say, embrace the slow creep full stealth lifestyle for the first bunch of hours. When you get the urge to test your tech, let it rip Jack.
8 Likes
I watched a video of that with one of the devs playing and explaining some of the design ideas going into it and my main takeaway was that it was surprising that someone would spend so much time and effort to create a complicated system that is designed to produce a really steadily middle-of-the-road experience at every possible player skill level.
3 Likes
Hard not to see a lot of things about this game in a sunk-cost kind of way.
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The great thing is you can switch back and forth. I definitely did quite a few missions rambo style and it felt great.
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I think my guidance would be ādo whatās funā but also spend a little effort trying for at least some of the bonus objectives on the missions, which can really crack the game open. When youāre not actually on a mission, fuck it, do whatever, but I think I was pretty much never not on a mission, the game is not really āopen worldā in any significant design sense, except the one where it lets you approach points of interest from different angles.
4 Likes
Watching this trailer made me think of this video which pretty successfully contrasts L4D/2 with B4B and explicates thru example why the latter is so lackluster compared to the former. There is clearly a TLJ style āgamer rageā undercurrent to the eventual final argument about who is to be credited with the good & bad stuff in these games but you donāt have to care about that, itās almost entirely blessedly commentary-free and lets the games speak for themselves
Anyway this Anacrusis thing looks like it makes all the same mistakes as B4B
3 Likes
I think the thing about that video that rubs me the wrong way is that a lot of it, even sans commentary, is āthis is not as good because the people doing it arenāt as good/donāt care as much as Valveā, while showing stuff like, really nice animation based on motion capture, without really acknowledging that something like that requires a huge team and access to a motion capture studio, i.e. something thatās impossible for an indie developer. Valve wouldnāt have been able to do what they did either if they hadnāt been stacking cash. The āmistakeā that these studios made is trying to make spiritual successors to a really well-loved series without the financial backing to make something with the same amount of polish, because the comparisons are always going to make you look bad.
ETA: Even if itās with the scare quotes, Iām not being facetious, I do think itās a big mistake. Itās very easy for people to get swept up in these passion projects where they have these big inspirations in existing titles, and they donāt see that cliff coming, Thelma and Louise-style.
Further ETA: I mean Cubes, the Anacrusis is one of the people from Valve and maybe more relevant for you, itās one of the Old Man Murray dudes in Chet Faliszek that made the game. Maybe itās a bad game! I dunno, I havenāt played it or L4D. The dunking video is just too glib to sit well with me though.
11 Likes
Chetās a smart guy,
games are hard,
every game project has a huge chance of failure or, worse, being a failure from the start thatās carried through to mediocrity
8 Likes