I am so glad that I finally put my head down and played through Killer 7 a year or so ago, I’ve never enjoyed any of my attempts at it but now I am sure that I’ll never be tempted to boot it up ever again. I don’t think I could name a single mechanical aspect of that game I’d even describe as mediocre (movement is fine I guess), the nicest thing I can say about it is that I no longer feel it is the absolute worst game I’ve ever played. I never want to hear any of you complain that a game is only getting by on vibes again.
I tried the Like a Dragon: Ishin combat demo and I haven’t played a Yakuza game recently enough to remember how the combat works, and the demo doesn’t tutorialize it at all. Managed to just barely stumble through it on normal but really didn’t grasp much of what was going on so not any more sure what the think about the game.
If you ever wondered what type of puzzle game would frazzle my brain Syzygy is still free and while I started to grasp the main gameplay loop a bit I just hit a twist a second playable character whose three movement types are all highly unusual that I can barely follow the basics of, much less then using them in a strategic manner in order to solve puzzles.
Into the fifth area of OlliOlli World and one of the stages asked me to use a technique three times that I never learned or was shown how to do. Using the move dictionary I think I figure it out but it doesn’t seem to work. I give up on the stage to try another one and then it pops up the tutorial showing me how to do said technique. Utterly curious.
This is the only part of Metal Gear Solid that I actually know about, thanks to a bunch of magazines going over the fight probably multiple times. It’s clever! thankfully duckstation allows one to…finish the fight in the intended manner.
this sniper section is misery. I’m sure you have to take the anti-shakes pills so you can aim, but the aiming fucking sucks, and when you’re hit then your view goes like 10 degrees to the side, so the solution is to take out another weapon, reposition, then get the sniper back out. But for whatever reason you can’t do micro adjustments it’s just either too far to the left or the right. I’m sure there’s some dumb trick to this that makes it a breeze. I can only seem to play this game for an hour at a time until I get frustrated and come back later.
i’ve played through gargoyles quest like 4 times now, so i guess i love it lol. for my first playthrough i used rewind a lot, and then tried to one credit clear the other times. it’s pretty easy once you learn the levels and bosses (the final boss is very easy though it took me ages to figure out how to actually hurt him). the manual and translation is really bad so it took me a while to understand some mechanics, but the game is super generous… really easy to get extra lives, they even just drop an extra four of them on you before the final boss! infinite continues too. tough but VERY fair (though now the game is super easy)
random battles are still silly, but they do let you farm for money if you want (though there is better ways to do that a bit later) and it does a bad job of communicating stuff to the player (even without the bad manual and translation, leaving some trial and error situations) but once you get everything it’s a grand ol’ time
it has the same problem most other games where you play someone “evil” though, you’re not being evil or anything, you just happen to be a demon saving the demon realm from invaders. could easily have been a human saving the earth story. i guess being chummy with all the ghouls and ghosts bosses is neat
this post is poorly written but it’s 1 am and i cant be bothered fixing it
playing the steam release of doom 64. it’s incredible. it’s the real doom 3 imo. I know it’s commonly considered slept-on but damn I’m sorry I waited this long to actually play it
it’s worth adding the caveat that the level design challenges a lot of prior and future conventions of fps mapmaking. there’s a lot a of “you worked really hard to get past this difficult setpiece only to flip switch whose function is entirely unknown”. the first several levels I spent a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out what I had to do to progress next. after awhile though it starts to click and is internally consistent enough to work. once you realize that the level design is ambitiously aiming for myst-like environmental puzzles, you start to develop an intuition for it and it gels wonderfully. the game demands that you pay attention to environmental details in a way that goes far beyond looking for thing like misaligned textures as hidden doors.
also, man, the aesthetic is just sublime. the spritework, music, and overall color scheme/atmosphere are just incredible. takes a lot from quake while also being more colorful and diverse in appearance.
“complicated doom level design” is one of those things I never ever had any appreciation for, either as a kid or now. I don’t know what it is, I could barely tolerate dark forces by comparison, but that kind of obscure geometry and pathing was never in the least enjoyable for me. quake and myst I liked!
still playing monster hunter rise almost daily. it’s great, although i get obsessed with things like “this outfit is cool, i want it”, instead of “these skills are useful and i’m making a build”.
also tried the first gen games because i got curious about how the series changed and wanted to see some of the previous places. the first game on ps2 has great mood in the village. i kinda like the analog stick attacks even tho they aren’t all that easy to do accurately. somehow the segmented “rooms” do make the world feel larger, on account of everything in between you never get to see. it’s not as easy to play as a straight up boss-rush action game as you can play rise, which feels like a quality. setting traps and using tools feels more motivated when it’s kind hard navigating a group of raptors all taking shots at you while you move with less finesse than a silent hill protag. moved to freedom on the psp which is mostly the same game, for the sake of eventually doing the hub quests there since it seems like a pain in the ass to set up some kinda private netplay for mh ps2. mostly the same game, tho admittedly the aesthetic doesn’t quite carry as well on psp.
started to somewhat resent quality of life changes. seeing the monsters on the map at all times saves you time looking for them but… neither searching nor tracking for them kinda sucks? and the dogs you ride are adorable but… why exactly was it necessary to have high speed movement across the map? it’s like, the goal of development has been to reduce time between monster fights as if everything in-between is “bloat” and i just… i’m sorry why?
got back to the first playstation ridge racer, partially because of people having fun with other ridge racers in the thread. managed to finally win on all the regular tracks and unlocking the reverse versions. thought i would just not do those. i was wrong. it’s only on the last few races that i’ve started being able to blaze through that claustrophobic extra segment of slithery turns they add on advanced and tt, and it’s so satisfying. great game.
i actually played some of this yesterday too. i own the Switch version but i definitely prefer playing it on PC (i realized i had it because of the Epic games store giving it away at some point). yeah the audio in particular is good. also some of the levels so far seem to be more trap focused than most of Doom 1 or Doom 2. i was worried it might just feel like Another Doom Wad as someone who has played a billion of those… and in some ways it does. i still want people to play more Doom wads if they want a spiritual successor to Doom - that’s partly why i talk about the wad A.L.T. so much - i really can’t overstate how memorable of an experience it is. but Doom 64 does manage to feel at least a little different, because of all the colored lighting and the focus on traps. and ofc the scary ambient soundtrack.
i also played some of Control last night on a whim, for maybe two hours. the aesthetic is cool but the combat is… a bit bleh. this game at times feels like someone tried to make an artsy indie horror game into an AAA action game. to be honest, it all feels a bit mid so far. i’m getting deja vu to playing Prey except i liked Prey more. but going to play more.
Combat in Control gets exponentially better the longer you play as you unlock each new super power. Maybe you’re already there and it’s still not impressing you but if you’re just talking the gunplay itself then yeah, it’s not really strong enough to stand on its own without the other abilities.
Spent hours grinding for a specific ability in Like A Dragon Ishin only to discover I misread the description and it doesnt operate how I thought. I was so stuck on having this power up I halted progress in the main quest for hours. It’d be a waste of time if this kind of thing were not exactly what RGG games are all about!
My experience of Control’s combat is it was at its best in the midgame, but circles back to boring when you’ve mastered it. It boils down to just psych attack when your gun is reloading and shooting when your psych is reloading, and there’s no element of the enemies or environment that is problematic enough to force variety into that metronomic pace.
Similar problem as Doom 2016’s lategame come to think of it
always appreciate how doom64 was very obviously made for the n64 and a controller so it’s perhaps slower and leans into more of a horror vibe but the level design and art direction are both so good that it still works on pc at 10x the resolution with a mouse
yeah I mean doom 64’s design is rough in a lot of ways but it’s also remarkably coherent as its own thing. there’s a distinct sense of personality to its design that I really admire, even if some of the specific level design decisions are frustrating. it’s overall very memorable and it feels more like a true sequel compared to doom 2 because of the redrawn sprites and refined mechanics. the weapons are all redone, and while they’re generally faithful to what you’d expect they are retuned in very interesting ways. there’s a stronger emphasis on situational awareness and using the right weapon at the right time. switching weapons is notably slower and it feels deliberate, like you’re expected to be committed to the weapon you’ve chosen for a given situation and that switching isn’t to be done lightly. the super shotgun is even more powerful than before, with a greater spread and effective range, but the firing rate is signficantly slower. it’s even more satisfying to use as a result – landing an well-placed shot feels so good because of how much you have to commit to it. the rocket launcher also has a greater firing delay and kickback, making it similarly trickier but more satisfying to use effectively.
enemy behavior and stats are also tweaked, most notably with lost souls and pain elementals. lost souls are terrifying in doom 64: they move more quickly, do tons of damage, have more hit points, and can kill you very quickly if you come across a group of them unprepared. consequently, pain elementals are even more dangerous. because of how slow the super shotgun and rocket launcher are, the chaingun is suddenly a very useful tool for crowd control and stunlocking when dealing with these enemies (as well as hitscan shotgun grunts and the like), and the plasma rifle is similarly critical when dealing with pain elementals. I appreciate this a lot because I always felt that those two weapons were underutilized in doom and doom 2. here they are essential tools and you can’t just get away with shotgunning and rocket launching everything.
these dynamics are all present in the original doom games of course, but they feel laser-focused here. as frustrating as the level design occasionally can be the combat is consistently tight and the setpiece design is generally quite good. so to me it feels like it’s significantly more like a true sequel and not just another expansion.
