I’m playing The Messenger.
It’s very different from most of what I’ve been playing lately.
Xeno Crisis, Blazing Chrome, and Cyber Shadow all feel as though they more or less could have been 90’s games.
The Messenger by contrast feels like a contemporary game that merely draws a few influences from the past.
It throws new abilities at me a little quickly. I don’t feel they really tested me with the wingsuit before adding the grappling hook, but the action is fun and fast, the characters are cute, the jokes are laid on a bit thick but are okay too.
I like it.
Back when I first played it I drew the map too, but the more practical way is that the sound your control panel makes on each stop indicates the next direction to go. Another mechanism in another age can teach you the sounds, possibly several (because it’s not so much teaching you the sounds as the cardinal direction sounds being universal to all machines)
I think this has been the cadence with all of Team Ninja’s action games ever since they started doing open betas of their games since at least the first Toukiden. I think that’s just going to be the natural consequence of getting feedback from a wide open public audience. But I imagine this must have happened even more so with Stranger of Paradise since you’re going to get responses from the much larger Final Fantasy fanbase, who aren’t typically coming to FF for action game mechanics. Sad to hear it doesn’t have any challenge to it anymore though.
My only knowledge of modern Square games comes from the little bit of Lightning Returns I played, but my takeaway from the stranger of paradise demo was that it seemed similar, in that it’s so complicated and exhausting for me just to kill a single dude. There’s like 20 different game system things I feel like I have to remember to do all the time. At the core there seems to be a pretty good Team Ninja action game of attacking, dodging, partying, charged attacks, etc, but there’s so much other RPG stuff going on and it’s too much for my brain.
I always worry this comes across as a crass observation but I had a very similar feeling about Connor in Detroit: Become Human. Not cos of android-fish-out-of-water stuff but how much the awkward Quantic Dream moment-to-moment choice engine kicked into overdrive and the game seemed to acknowledge its own bizarre accommodations for the player when making an awkward pause or abrupt intervention possible. I really felt linked with Connor when it came to the day-to-day difficulty of workplace interactions (cop context notwithstanding). Something about it felt authentic without, I’m sure, meaning to be that kind of representation. That energy of being half-acknowledged as a person but everyone getting more hung up on the minor communication differences than focusing on the relevant details.
He remains the only well-written anything that studio has done imo and it’s surely by accident.
yeah it’s people like me sorry everyone! I saw stranger of paradise and I was like NOOOOO it’s gonna be hard and just blocked it out as something that I’d never play but they made it easy so I can play it and I’m actually excited for the game now! a win for the filthy casuals
It is the right choice for this game to low-ball most difficulty options, but when the game is very visibly derivative from Nioh as soon as you run into any menu screen, it just feels odd that there isn’t even an option that nods towards fans of those games in the difficulty selection.
Yeah, I think it makes sense for SoP to skew easier. It’s in a weird place in that it’s themed as part of a non-action game franchise with a huge casual audience but is spiritually the third entry in an action game series that’s built up it’s own slew of mechanics and game design sensibilities. I imagine Nioh has sold respectably well but I don’t think it has a lot of mainstream visibility such that a larger number of people would have a sense of what kind of game it is and what its mechanics are like if you haven’t already played Nioh before. Most people buying SoP will probably be completely new to Nioh and there is a lot to take in, so trying to pace the game so it’s easy enough to on-board what will predominantly be casual players while also making the game interesting to long-time Nioh fans sounds hard. Not that it can’t be done, I’m sure, but it sounds like Team Ninja just made a call on what audience to focus on in the end. Maybe they couldn’t find a balance for a harder difficult that they felt enough people/existing Nioh fans would find fun. It is what it is.
I’ve been playing Elden Ring and one thought I’ve had is that Elden Rings is the Hades of Dark Souls Games. Granted I’ve only ever played Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, but Elden Rings feels like it’s gives you so many ways to remove the moment-to-moment tension and friction that’s been a large part of the DS’ and BB’s character. It also sounds like it’s the best reviewed and best selling entry in that line of games. I imagine there’s probably a connection there.
why would I deign myself to playing other games when JACK “KILL CHAOS” GARLAND can grab a sea lizard and make crystals grow from their body and do a backbreaker that makes them explode and then enemies wall splat from the shockwave of making a sea lizard explode from a backbreaker
what if a Souls game stole glory kills from nuDoom and then went “the combat is now about this dumb idea”
this does the “what if the game was always coop” idea that Code Vein tried to trick weirdo anime perverts with better because you can actually tell your good friends to do things
only Team Ninja could dunk on other action games while doing a FF14 asset flip
This weekend it has been hard for me to get anything important complete. I developed a sore throat yesterday and today I’ve been feeling a little dizzy on top of that. I checked my temperature and thankfully have no fever and I took a COVID test that came out negative for whatever that is worth. This is a long introduction for me to say that I have been playing video games.
Most importantly, I beat a game in Spanish for the first time. It’s Mega Man Battle Network. I really like this game despite its evil dungeon designs. It’s hilarious to me that this cartoon world has cyber terrorists who pull off extremely violent hacking schemes. For one example, the WWW hacks a self-driving road system to make all stoplights green, causing multiple cars to crash and explode. I can only assume that the car batteries burn at such a high intensity as to vaporize the passengers because the cars disappear right after the crash.
I’m going to try the second game soon even though I heard it’s bad. I just like reading what the dopes in this world have to say.
been playing a lot of what most have been playing. i’m finding the Stranger of Paradise demo a nice palate cleanser after i get too tired from Elden Ring. it’s definitely more Team Ninja than i was expecting, but i still haven’t played Nioh, so maybe i’ve been missing out. it’s like Diablo meets Ninja Gaiden? i like how tacky everything is and it’s actually kind of fun to see the grimdark Hot Topic take on Final Fantasy I which is such a bright and colorful game.
the battle system feels a but overwhelming at first but i’m starting to get the point of everyhting and it’s clicking. feels like a DMC/fighting game kind of thing, memorizing which blocks work when for what reasons, etc.
i really enjoyed the Kirby demo, too. i feel like Kirby games have always been easy, but some entries are more mundane than others. this feels like one of the good Kirby games, and i’m glad it’s easy enough for my gf to look forward to playing it together like Luigi’s Mansion 3
I have been playing tons and tons and tons and also a fair bit of Vermintide with my brother. Been a blast over the last week or so and we’re starting to get our footing on Hard difficulty. The bots are surprisingly competent, if perhaps a tad bloodthirsty, but with the two of us it’s been manageable.
The pacing of combat, balance of defensive maneuvering, and focus on objectives where killing enemies facilitates the objective vs being the objective itself has been pretty enjoyable as well. Honestly, now that I have a computer that runs it pretty well, I find it really enjoyable to play, and particularly so the moment-to-moment combat.
The item upgrading systems sucks less than I initially thought it did, but definitely sucks. The bounty system, which seems to be the most reasonable way to get materials for upgrading if you aren’t putting in 8 hours a day with 3+ people, sure does love putting up the lower-end challenges only for DLC missions we don’t have. The way traits are handled on weapons is pretty ass, as re-rolling them means re-rolling the whole set of traits on the weapon and not picking and choosing which ones to keep.
Realizing it would probably take me more time to download and play it than to just watch a playthrough, I fast-forwarded my way through a YouTube let’s play of Aperture Desk Job and yeah, it’s the same jokes you’d basically expect. I think maybe for me the gag finally got old.
edit: Like, in the year 2022, “horrific working conditions for a rich megalomaniac” just doesn’t quite amuse the way it once did
I actually really love Vermintide too. Pro-tip about the DLC. It goes on sale frequently, and, at least for the mission packs, only the host of the game needs to buy it for everyone in the party to be able to play.
I tried playing riven for five seconds but, assuming I was facing north at the beginning, I turned left to face west. turned left again and instead of facing south it skipped over that and I was facing east. No. Absolutely not. I’ll wait for the remake
