yeah when the whole thing is singing on an audiovisual and mechanical level like some midgame FFT battles it’s untouchable
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Motorstorm: APOCALYPSE Singleplayer Demo (PS3)
You only get one race and it’s through a brown/gray/exploding ruined city and you have to press /\ every so often to I guess see something collapse. Lots of slewing around; it’s in 1080p which is kind of unusual on PS3 but the control doesn’t feel all that sharp, and I felt like I was basically just leaning on the boost button while sledding. Just one car race (there was a motorcycle race as well, didn’t try that) in the 1.2 GB “demo” which I suppose probably magically unlocks the full game with all the tracks if you purchase it.
I’d really just been hoping to find the first MS game but I guess that was disc-only and I sold mine ages ago. APOCALYPSE doesn’t have the deforming mud of the original and feels less interesting, despite its intense efforts with constant scripted disasters.
Cubixx HD (PS3)
Action puzzle game in which you play a simplified version of Qix on each side of a cube floating in pea-green soupspace. Runs in 1080p but looks rather fuzzy, must be 720p or lower upscaled or something. ; P
The cube itself looks sharp as it can, though, thanks to the blazing laser and glowing dot you’re controlling as you scythe away rectangles of the cube’s surface, revealing pretty 3D innards. This is all actually kind of cool, so it’s weird they chose such dull and gross surrounding colors–maybe a misguided attempt at contrast?
Eyes don’t care for the central dot’s glow shining into them constantly though so I guess I won’t mess with it more; the actual six-sided Qix gameplay seems solid enough.
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Super Stardust Portable (PSP) (PS5) - pretty good fun. immediate, arcade score attack action. feels like asteroids stock with a dash of robotron, maybe a dollop of geometry wars. music is not my taste, though. i need to see if it is possible to map the face buttons to the right stick on PS5 so i can play this twin-stick-style. i understand this is one of the first games by housemarque, who’ve since made Resogun and Returnal, among others
Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition (PS5) - really quite liking this. it’s got a very hub-and-spoke structure once you get out of the tutorial area, and in very apt soulsian fashion, every direction has killed me repeatedly.
the time tracking stuff on the PS5 is broken, it will randomly not track time or sometimes put more time than you actually spent. very annoying if you like those kinds of stats. there’s a website called PS-Timetracker that can give you more accurate time tracking.
to make this work, you gotta add a friend on PSN (they’ve got a bunch to choose from), and then you get accurate time tracking. pretty cool, dunno why sony has left their shit half-broken tho (apparently it’s been like this the entire life of the PS5 so far)
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I didn’t know there was a separate “portable” version of Super Stardust. If you haven’t tried the console version, I’d recommend that. Still my favorite Housemarque game. And I don’t know whether the style of music just isn’t to your taste or whether it’s different for that version, but I really like this song from the PS3/4 version:
3 Likes
SEGA Genesis Classics (PS4)
The 3D “your bedroom” motif is a bit of a pain but the emulation seems fine, except I would prefer to be able to remap my buttons, and on a per-game basis. Every time I re-install this I’m reminded that I can’t stand Genesis games close-up.
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Any time a game advertises itself by touting it has music from a classic game composer (or has contracted some other classic game dev name), my warning alarms go off. It feels so many games (particularly many Kickstarter ones) try to bank on star power/nostalgia to make up for quality in other areas- it’s like video game stunt casting.
I’ve got my eyes on you, Songs of Silence… (though at least the game is trying to be something a little original and I’m hoping it can somewhat scratch my itch to play Sega’s Sangokushi/Sengoku/Eiketsu Taisen games).
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i was most of the way thru persona 3 on game pass and my saves are now gone
should have learned my lesson the time i had to use powershell just to uninstall something but wow this service is not usable
edit: they’re suddenly back? some cloud sync issue maybe…
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Definitely how I felt about it. I would push myself to see the whole game which was a mistake. Once you get out of the main city the plot just spins in circles for 60 (!) hours.
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I FINALLY FUCKING GOT MY NEOPET BACK
ITS HAIKUU THE 21.4 YEAR OLD NEOPET. my account is older but I HAVE BEEN KEEPIGN THE SAME NEOPET FOR ALMOST THE WHOLE TIME. i got a nimmo and i was like fuck this frog i want an usul and never went back. i used the strawberry paintbrush because everyone at the time said it was the ugliest paintbrush and i wanted to destroy them with my ugly in the battle arena
i can play scorchy slots without blowing all my caniabuxx now!!!
they barely ported over any of their stuff to html5 (and they said they were gonna do this in 2019 so i doubt more are coming). these are all the games on neopets left (not counting exploration stuff, weird dailies like fruit machine and tombola etc)
SO HAPPY TO HAVE MY NEOPET BACK. TIME TO DABBLE IN NEOPIA
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I played a survivor
has everyone been gaslighting me over the past year about this whole genre
they are perfectly well made and tuned games and I guess I had fun but also I was anxious to stop playing most of the time
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playing star wars the old republic cuz YOU BET I WAS AN EARLY SUBSCRIBER to this shitshow because i was playing kotor 2 and i remembered how this is more or less kotor 3 and its on simutronics engine they sold off instead of making a game with it so its got that gemstone connection…anyway i made a sith inquisitor because in kotor 2 (1 doesnt exist to me outside of mission vao) i only can play someone who doesnt suck, so im still light side even though the empire are hitlerians. they’re like comically nazi in this game too in this story you start off as a slave (if you play as an alien because people are DOUBLE RACIST to you) forced to learn the dark side or die and on korriban your constantly being beaten over the head by white men yelling SLAVE and FILTHY ALIEN at you while ineffectually threatening to kill you. They also talk about BLOOD PURITY and HEREDITARY SUPREMACY a lot like laying it on really fucking thick and its like ok i get it the empire is bad. i was actually sort of enjoying that my character is actually powerful despite her low status so i was able to be exceptionally cruel to the imperial hitleroids and scheme to bend sith morality so i could help people and twist other sith against each other… That lasts for like 1 planet though because the game has a very inscrutable morality so you start getting good boy points for shit like “proving a man’s innocence by getting OTHER random people murdered but it’s OK because they were Bad” “not killing a guy, instead binding him to your service to create a weapon capable of killing hundreds of Jedi” “Encourage a guy to go after the families of the people who killed his family” and “Lethally applying nerve gas to slaves instead of letting them suffer.” its funny that theres like no nuance in the political conflict in this game cuz despite the republic being portrayed as generally wracked with corruption theyre clearly the compassionate hero faction because their quests arent full of inane “morality” choices where you pick the sweet spot of acceptable murder to remain a Good Guy, instead you get to make GWOT era style decisions like “Threaten the child” and withholding food from refugees until they tell you where the damn terrorists are if you’re a jerk. But you don’t actually kill or torture, cuz the Republic would never do that!!
In kotor 2, of course, you get like 10 dialogue options a conversation (at least wth restored content mod) and like your attitude and the tone of your responses gives you good boy points or bad boy points. This makes sense because if you respond to things like a psycho you naturally become more evil, even if you aren’t actively punting Gran babies into airlocks or whatever. Naturally in this game you have 3 dialogue options and usually the 3rd one is some variation on “You’re ugly. [Refuse quest]” or some other rude comment and THEY DONT TELL YOU WHAT YOURE ACTUALLY GOING TO SAY this is even more insulting because on the fleet there’s two guys you can talk to who engage you in a “Classic Conversation” which made me feel like i was having a stroke for 15 seconds because it letterboxed the screen and it took 10 seconds for the dialogue to actually load, and it’s like if you put in all the effort to remake the kotor 1 conversation system for like a joke quest you could have at least made the dialogue options show me the actual line! Half the time your character will just say some non-sequitur and it’s obnoxious because there’s like a pool of 3 lines that get used over and over again for this so you’ll hear THATS A TOUGH BREAK. IM SORRY 12304 times and your character comes across like a dick for responding to every suffering person they meet the same flat way. Here are the kinds of thrilling moral choices your expected to make
Also the only reason my character is curing this disease is to rally the lower classes to my side so I can make a cult to rival the current sith cult leader guy whose brainwashed all the homeless people. Not really sure I can be “light side” and be like the most cruel callous manipulator but the game doesnt seem to really have an issue with it. It is very hard to roleplay any kind of way but EVIL when I say things like this seemingly at random about fucking Nar Shaddaa citizens.
The whole reason I finally posted about this is because I got some fucking random quest and the conversation just broke me. The first thing that made me confused was an option I got labeled “Was that a joke?” that made my character tell a joke for some reason?? And then this.
If you pick option 1 here you say “I’ll give them some pointers on the best parts to send back” and the NPC just says “Thats not what i meant milord” and then just moves on like you didnt say something completely random. 50% of the conversations in this game are like this, where you just completely talk past each other. I’d love to meet what? The corpses? What the fuck are you people talking about?
14 Likes
Finished Metro: Last Light Redux and… it is a game that definitely exists. Once I got used to the light/dark system I thought the stealth sections were for the most part pretty okay (the enemy AI is awful if you ever get spotted or they have to do anything) but the action parts were markedly less so. There is a personal slant here as I think I am just dreadful at “traditional” FPS gameplay for the most part but by the midway point I just tried to run past mutants or run around the combat arena in circles hoping to run out an invisible timer until a NPC does all the work for me or something shows up that lets me progress (they use that latter set-up at least 4 times in a 10ish hour long game).
FWIW I never actually bought Last Light, I picked up the original on deep discount some years back and thought it was very “less than the sum of its parts” hence felt no reason to continue with the series, but I ended up with Last Light for free somehow and decided to try again only to end up with similar feelings. I’m sure at some point I’ll end up with a free copy of whatever the third Metro game is called and convince myself that maybe this time will be different.
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the funny thing is I think you’re actually playing it right cuz i’ve never played an FPS series that wants you to not use any of the guns they give you or engage in combat as much as metro. they’ve always been really odd to me for this reason
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Funnily enough I looked up the good ending to the game online as I did not get it and it seems like the requirements for it are insane. Basically there are two areas in the game where you aren’t penalized for killing folks, and even if you do everything morally right if you don’t strum all the guitars hidden around the game world you may still be judged as lacking. The logic behind such a system is… a lot, although I can appreciate a game that goes “no, you can’t kill all these people and still be considered good, that’s silly”.
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yeah, I dont hate it conceptually either, it just never felt like it made sense when i played those games…funnily enough a lot of russian stalker mods have similarly esoteric moral requirements for their true endings, though its a lot more daunting in those because they are like 800 hours long (not exaggerating) and you have to save npcs scattered across like 100 huge maps…i really do have to respect the commitment to making a player act a certain way for a whole month of their life…that is some hard shit
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I think the common wisdom w/r/t/ the base game content of SWTOR is that the stories are all bad except the Imperial Agent storyline
having finished the Jedi Knight story and gone through a good chunk of the IA story: yes, one million percent true and correct
I am probably misremembering thw JK story stuff because I did it at launch (when I say launch, I mean “the last quest/fight of the story is actually broken is a few ways” launch. it’s cool though, I caught on to Force Sweep before everyone figured out it was good and beat it underleveled through the magic of LoS abuse)
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actually you should play female Republic trooper because it’s just Jennifer Hale doing the femshep voice in Star Wars and one the partners you get is Moira Quirk
let Mo back you up
(I think a lot sometimes about the EA Wife post and how every single goddamned thing shit talking SWTOR in it was true)
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I think I might suffer a debilitating brain aneurysm if I have to read dialogue for a class called “Trooper” in this game
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all I remember about the jedi knight story is being traumatized by having to run back and forth across Taris for the bonus series for like 6 hours because at launch you had to do fuckin everything to be proper level
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p sure I finished the JK story 2 levels under cap because that last planet was just fucking awful and clearly came at the end of dev and I just played Huttball to 50
I would buy Huttball as a standalone game also I am the problem
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