its great, this final release is significantly easier than the old beta of the sourceport I played, now its just a pleasant, breezy experience with great level design
5 Likes
I do believe Iāve overhyped Powerslave to myself just a bit over the last few monthsā¦or Iāve too idealised recent dives into Quake and the Dark Forceses but I felt like I was falling into those games fast and loose while Powerslave kinda smells a little like Zelda what with all the pot smashing and the wind symbol doors and the war symbol doors and (yeah Quakeās gold keys, silver keys etc. but) itās felt a tad stifling flow-wise. Iām only like an hour in though and still into it.
That camel. The way you can stand still and look up into its eyeball and auto zoom warp into itā¦pretty rad, itās got the others beat there.
2 Likes
Played a couple hours of Lost Arkā¦ Itās probably got the most dartboard-ass storytelling Iāve seen in a game. In 3 hours I went from an ancient god ruin to a demon invasion zone to a zombie plague invasion zone to a regular zombie invasion zone. Everywhere you go thereās NPCs saying stuff like āThose damned infectedā¦ Theyāre at the gates!ā or āThose damned regular zombiesā¦ How long can we last?ā.
Iām told the endgame is apparently challening and fun but right now Iām looking at all the menus and squinting at the intense, raw mobage progression energy everywhere. I dunno. I think Iāll keep poking at it for a bit but everything about this game is like funny-to-offputting right now. Every single element just kind of feels like it exists in service of being a live service game and nothing else.
edit: played another half hour and uninstalled. I donāt really get the āthis is a completely meaningless use of my timeā thing when playing most videogames but itās near-constant with this one. Apparently later on you get a town to build and collect materials from because having daily log-in bonuses isnāt enough of a retention mechanic.
5 Likes
Oh yeah for some reason I played Nanaca Crash for like twenty minutes last night. Still vaguely amusing.
8 Likes
I also played this and it is the perfectly cynical distillation of everything I hate about kMMOs aimed towards gamer chuds. Gender-locked classes, absurd titillation designs, overwrought boilerplate plot, skills that are just ādo damageā¦ in an area!ā It is absolutely vile; a factory game, without soul. Hypercapitalist exploitation given digital form.
There was one funny part and itās that the Gunslinger (Female) class wears her heels like a digigrade furry. Like this:
Iām just not gonna play kMMOs that look and play like this anymore. Ragnarok Online, Maple Story, and Mabinogi are the gamerās true choice.
10 Likes
After the intial slam in your face of 2009 that Neo World Ends With You is, itās pretty alright. Your team of people are a bunch of weirdos and seeing them slam into each other is fun. Itās Nomuraās team if not Nomura so lots of ~mysterious conversations~ and ~snippits of future actions without context~ and ~withholding obvious information~. I think I already found an attack pin combination I could just carry for the rest of the game.
Guess I am an idiot gamer, because I immediately changed to a cumbersome combination that does more damage. Idiot.
Seeing all the parts of modern shibuya is nice. Interesting how much of itā¦just has the name but not the logo/branding. Commenting on the fading boba boom.
One of the passerbys said āthis city seems to change every 3 years, makes me feel old.ā I was in Shibuya in December for two days and buddyā¦same.
Locking QoL upgrades behind NPC social links is evil, especially in a linear game like this. Iām in W1Day6 and have to go back to Day 4 to do some side quest to unlock a large part of the baffling upgrade system. Maybe I can just do the quest and peace back out.
There are a lot of tendrils in this of wasting my time, maybe I am going to see that in all video games now.
Gonna finish the first week, maybe tomorrow night, then decide if I just want to quit.
10 Likes
I had a lot of misgivings about Lost Ark and a bunch of legitimate criticisms that can be leveled against it have been brought up
then I logged off my bard and rolled a scrapper and the lone working brain cell left in my head activated
most enemy packs are whatever (it is both hilarious and depressing that a lot of the nothing quests you get can be cleared with a single AOE button), but itās satisfying getting behind a boss and pressing button and seeing āBack Attackā pop up a bunch of times and seeing their health melt
you probably shouldnāt this as endorsement, coming from someone whoās spent the past year deep in the phone game abyss, playing a game made by a studio who also makes a big phone game
I have been enjoying The Evil Within 2 a surprising amount after absolutely hating the original. Initially I was really pleased with how much of the basic tenants of survival horror gameplay, namely resource conservation, route-planning, frequent backtracking and constant risk-assessment translated into this gameās hub-based open world format. Especially early on, and on the harder difficulty I have been playing, a bungled attempt at stealth or a constrained fight between one or two breaking out into a fight with other mobs always had a significant impact on my resource levels and my confidence about moving forward. This is actual survival horror! Not to sell it all too highly, however. Like all survival horror games things do get kind of trivial and TEW2 is nowhere near as snappy as like an RE3, there is plenty of tedium and glitchiness to baffle you among the good parts. I am nearly finished up with it, and Iād say itās a pretty solid game all around. Though the plot is stupid, since it is a horror-action game, I think that is perfectly excusable. What I did not expect was to find the art direction to be anything worth writing about, especially as the best compliment I could give the previous game was āvisually incoherent and nearly interesting because of it.ā But, yes, there are a ton of really awesome āāsurrealāā horror visuals in this sequel! Though I had to pick my eyeballs off the floor after having them roll out their sockets while listening to the masochist artist villain talk about beauty and pain and the human body as sublime material, all the grotesque murder scenes that tie his plot together were super cool! And thanks to the gameās computer-world setting, they do interesting things with suddenly populating void spaces with digital artifacts and conflicting tilesets basically. And though the main enemy you fight most of the time, The Lost, are pretty damn generic, the unique enemy types in this game are pretty memorable too!
A lot of that is recommendation on its own merit, but I think it is also worth saying that when you see through its budget game tone and jank (and despite the PC port being absolutely awful, esp in the UI department), this is like one of the most surprising sequels I have ever played.
Also, I keep getting reminded of Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick as I run around the hub worlds in this one and see how they enter different phases throughout the story. I like it!
11 Likes
Cheat and just give yourself the light sabre.
Finish it, 06h:19m:28s, not sure Iām 100% in game, thereās no status to show.
Like Ghoulboy, Beholgarās final boss is still the weakest in game and still needs an Alt+F4 to quit the ending sence.
Anyway, thanks to the training in Jump King, this game is not that hard for me as Ghoulboy.
10 Likes
Still on my emulation bullshitā¦ just downloading GBA/PS1/N64/GC games and playing them from anywhere between 5 minutes - a week straight. Hereās some screen shots from the opening sequence from Urban Yeti for GBAā¦
Urban Yeti (GBA, 2001)
19 Likes
amended Lost Ark opinion: I got a bit further in and unlocked the the system where you take a special stone with bonuses on it and refine it and saw the refine system and realized that this probably integral and important endgame gearing subsystem was running on gacha and
well it was fun while it lasted
13 Likes
Exactly where I quit too. The whole castle siege was a cute setpiece, but immediately after when you get a glimpse of all the end game grind /1000 different confusing currencies/and then the mobile phone stronghold stuff, yeah Iām good. The combat is fun but doesnāt seem deep and I need to have some kind of interest in the world instead of mashing through all dialogue to want to keep going.
1 Like
- Finished episode 1 of Quake (God, that āboss battleā is so silly)
- Finally finished world 1 of Radical Rabbit Stew
- Powered through several worlds worth of levels in Sizeable
Just a āmake incremental progress in a bunch of level-based gamesā kinda weekend, I guess.
edit:
After finishing the first level of episode 2 in Quake I thought āOkay now I really spent forever in a levelā
ā¦and it was a hair under 9 minutes lol. Iām sure thatās pretty slow for true murderheads but I was still quite amused that Iād fooled myself again.
10 Likes
Worth noting for Last Ark that the South Korean game industry, at least this particular niche of it, is also virulently misogynist. I sorta took it for granted, but I went ahead and did a casual google search to see if Smilegate had done anything publicly evil, and sure enough:
Another studio in South Korea, Smilegate, declared last month that the company will remove images by female illustrators who are accused by gamers as being linked to womenās rights groups.
19 Likes
The South Korean anti-feminist movement is real bad, especially scary how strong it is in under-35 men
9 Likes
Picked up Sekiro again for maybe the third time since blasting through the whole thing and completing it totally when it came out, andā¦ I donāt want to have my current impression deny the fun I totally had playing it initially, but in hindsight I think a lot of this game is really boring. Certainly all the best areas are at the mid-point of the game. I really want to resist this souring on it, but itās hard to.
2 Likes
I maintain that the game seriously seriously needed to be like 40% rearranged and it very nearly sinks the whole thing when they clearly had a near-classic in there
2 Likes
hi I was told that Kena was just a PS2 platformer with fancy graphics
this is just a souls game with occasional platforming
I demand the zeitgeist around this opinion refund me my 19 dollars
6 Likes