The big game’s PS4 Japanese version was only in Japanese and took me roughly 10 minutes before I was completely sick of beating my head against every text box and trying to parse what was important and what was a bullshit lore word. So will put it up for sale tomorrow. Buy It in English during The Golden Week Sale. Real sad about it.
Also tried it on my ancient laptop but just crashed to a white screen so refunded it.
Horizon: FW continues to be a fun game with sick combat and cool weapons and a huge drag of a story line roughly 80% of the time, including at least half the side missions. It reminds me a lot of sitting through all-hands story reviews where a CD explained a plot that was effectively just a series of things that happened while I tried desperately not to fall the fuck asleep leaning on a pillar.
AAA games have this problem where the people setting out story beats forget that a story has to have like… story structure. Even if in-game it’s just a series of list items to check off, the story has to have things like rising tension and resolution and use literary devices like irony or foreshadowing (like you learn about in, I don’t know, elementary school?). Narratives in HFW oscillate between actual stories and the game equivalent of “I thought my keys were in the drawer and they were so I took the car to the store to get milk and when I was at the store I bought the milk and I came home and I drank a glass of milk.”
Spoilers ahead (if you care), but there’s a story mission I really liked set in the ruins of Las Vegas: you come across a group of three Oseram performers who were looking for little hand-held holographic relics from the before-times (that one guy’s grandfather was obsessed with finding) in a domed area under the city when the entire thing flooded. You’re currently looking for a water… thingy (too complicated and honestly too stupid to summarize) so you agree to help: you swim under the city, dodge a lot of scary machines, and find that all the holograms of future-vegas have been corrupted into weird marine life and coral. Eventually you drain the area, fight a big guy, and get your water thing, which restores the city. When you resurface the entire area is lit up with cheesy vegas holograms and the three performers decide they’re going to make this the new entertainment centre of the world. And like… it’s good! It has a whole arc: it lays out a story, it has some really pretty visual set pieces, it has a big fight, and it ends with more or less literal fireworks, as well as some fun fallout-esque dramatic irony (like we all know what Las Vegas is but in-world it’s just some old ruin). It’s not an intellectual treatise on what it means to be a human being but it’s like a functional story—the folks you’re helping don’t get exactly what they’re looking for, but in a way they get something better.
Then there’s another mission where you’re hanging out with the main “tribe” (ugh) of the game—a bunch of warrior clans all inspired by a corrupted holographic museum depicting an ancient US military unit. They think these guys were basically ancient machine-fighting warriors and what they know of their exploits forms the great myth that underpins their society. You can guess where this is going, can’t you? No, you cannot, because you have a functioning sense of drama. In reality once you restore the original holograms in the museum to their full glory it turns out… they totally were a badass military unit who fought machines. The holographic guys give a stirring speech about how the army is cool and everyone does an american-style salute. So like… there’s just no story there? If you’re anything like me you were expecting the big story of their civilization to be built on myth and fabrication, so it’s like “wow, how do they recover from that? Do they have to face social changes? Do they cling conservatively to a myth they know is false?” Nope, they got it 100% right initially so nothing happens and you learn nothing.
Honestly this game is really making me appreciate how basically everything is written in, say, The Witcher 3, because half the stories here are just non-starters. This would be goty if they’d just turned the entire story off and given you a map full of zones to play around in, but as it stands it really does not understand what makes open world writing tick and there’s an awful lot of writing to get through.
you know, our old narrative director who quit after fighting too much with our creative director over the sequel became the narrative director on the first Horizon. Then quit after fighting too much with the creative director over the sequel
I can’t imagine a worse fit than making your post-post-apocalypse ultimately revanchist, especially with Horizon’s aesthetic motifs
The pro-army, pro-conservative stuff on its own is very weird and it’s clear they don’t know how to play it. One mission features an injured tribe member who can’t go home because they’ll kill him for being weak. In another, a tribe member gets injured and their commander does the whole “we all go home or nobody goes home” speech about how they take care of their wounded. Their ethics and worldview seem to flip on a dime and none of it makes any sense.
One of my big problems with Horizon Zero Dawn, a game I came to hate by the time I finished it (despite thinking the combat was mostly pretty neat!), was that it was completely inconsistent and frequently hypocritical (or at least weirdly dissonant) about the value of human life.
Here’s the sidequest moment that really broke me:
Which built off my disgust with this sidequest moment:
Anyway, y’all makin’ me almost want to play it based on the combat alone, but it sounds like everything else is also worse.
Playing through Sonic 3 and Knuckles (the “complete” rom hack) and wow did I totally forget how hard the Knuckles path and bosses are…
Started up Killer 7 the pc port and Im struck by how time has changed my preception. It is no longer time for Killer 7. It just isn’t weird in 2022. I’m just a different person and my approach and way of thinking about it is different. It feels like a dream I had that turned out to be real so I must press on. The pc changes like the free switching smiths with the number keys is def a good thing. Im surprised it works in 16:9 but I may try it in 4:3 once I have my CRT setup back.
G-String has been pretty fun but its def nakedly a half life 2 mod. I don’t know what I expected but I guess not this? Still only like an hour in so who knows whats up. The design is all really good though.
Not having a machine capale of the endenn ring I am downloading that bloodbourne demake and oping for the best
I held the controller and narrated all the documents during a playthrough (my second) of Devotion with a group of my non-games friends last night and had a. great time. Everyone was like “whaaaaat I can’t believe this is a videogame!” Even I came away with a stronger impression than my first playthrough left me with. It’s such a strong vision, so well realized. Devotion honestly rocks.
I’ve been playing Cyber Shadow.
It’s similar to the NES Ninja Gaiden games.
Movement feels very similar though somewhat bizarrely it doesn’t have crouching.
It has frequent checkpoints (kinda standard now) but it’s really nice to be able to pick up and play for a few minutes and stop knowing you have a recent checkpoint saved.
So far it doesn’t do any one specific thing that’s surprising but it is very good throughout. There is a weapon called the swag blade which has yo-yo physics and swings around you. You can strike it with your sword for a forward projectile attack or alter your movement to alter the movement of the weapon. It’s very fun to use. Cyber Shadow is a great modern platformer in the style of NES action-platformers like Ninja Gaiden and Shatterhand. I like it.
After playing a few more levels I’ve decided to hang it up on Radical Rabbit Stew, I just kinda feel like I’m forcing myself through it even though I think the core gameplay concept is good.
Goopy
Goof Troop is a pretty alright 2 hours to spend playing with someone. Even if it’s online with Fightcade.
Expect there to be plenty of time where you both stare quietly at the screen for several minutes though trying to work out the numerous sliding block puzzles
Playing a lot of Pokémon Crystal and I really enjoy how backtracking is destigmatized through the relaxed tone and people calling you wondering if you are around to fight. Its less a chibi heroes journey where you must always press on and instead just about hanging out in Johto.
i hadn’t thought about it this way but yeah, that generation in particular has extreme hangout vibes. just chillin with your buds
convinced some friends to play wild guns reloaded, which was a great time.
then they wanted to play something called fort triumph, which has been going on for hours now, and is so boring i think i might die
started up this dark souls 2 run as a sorcerer, which is not my usual souls build, and it’s pretty comical how for the first part of the game all i can do is spam soul arrow while trying to hide behind level geometry
i feel like for where i’m at i should have more spells, maybe i’ve missed a spell merchant
This discussion is reminding me how one of my fav things about MGS2/3 is that kojima has the characters say “press the Action button to climb ladders”… but they’re actually saying it to other in universe characters. so snake will be like " Got it." as if he is going to now Press The Action Button
and if you don’t understand that the first time, well then good luck cuz we’re not telling you again. Snake Already Knows
I continued my aborted disco elysium save from a year ago… working my way onto day 4 or so
enjoying how all the threads of “random thoughts intruding on your life and making you act crazy” from the beginning of the game start morphing into “detective has a sixth sense enabling him to unravel the case” the more skill points you upgrade… especially things like shivers, empathy, visual calculus, inland empire etc
i think part of the reason i’m returning to this now, where i bounced off it before, is that a story about the failure of communist revolution seems more in tune with the times now that we have an imperialist invasion, whereas the last time i tried it was more like… “yeah you have a deadly pandemic but things can never improve”
i’m trying to play my guy as a combination of the last communard / Art Cop / hardboiled detective who inspires the folks around him / a little gay
looK INside (I hate how this is rendered) is a game where you poke around in little dioramas which are presented as pages of a photo album. There’s a bit of, uh, magical realism(?) of sorts going on. You turn on a lightswitch and the flowers on the wallpaper nearby bloom. That kind of thing. It’s fun in sort of that Vectorpark kind of way (although this is perhaps overselling it and the game insists on narrating some story at you that I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to).
I played for a bit and then the game crashed when I clicked on something and that felt like a fine time to call my time with the game over.
Hi Rudiey
Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom is a cute little twitchy platformer with a nice cartoon look and fun soundtrack. The whole thing is one map and you can hit a button to zoom out and see how close you are to the end at any time. I guess it’s built around speedrunning etc. I played a few minutes, had a good time! Now I think I’m done. I’m gonna go track down the OST, though.
