Right, I shouldn’t step on the mini-boom of shooters rediscovering cool movement kicked off by Titanfall. I probably should clarify to shooter PvE design.
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here is a tip i’ll put behind a spoiler, but it’s a tip to make sure doom 64 doesn’t become a completely miserable experience by the end: make sure you find all the secret levels, otherwise the final boss is going to be a load of bullshit. I’ll do another spoiler that tells you which levels have the secret exits on it so you know where to look
secondary spoiler:
level 4, level 12, level 18
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hexen is literally a fps crossed with a (bad) myst clone, never play it felix. i hate it.
you’ll probably hate the marathon games too, but they are good, unlike hexen which is bad.
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i said warioware but meant warioland and it looks like everyone just understood what i meant instead of correcting me and thats beautiful
but yeah i meant warioland not ware sorry
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remembering when Treyarch proudly announced that CODBLOPS4 MP was returning to “boots on the ground gameplay” to riotous applause and dying inside
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The best Call of Duty games are Advanced Warfare through Infinite Warfare and it’s precisely because they got silly with it. Fuck boots on the ground. Give me a fucking jetpack. Let me turn into a dog and gib people.
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Advanced Warfare also had a mech level which actually was alright. Infinite Warfare had a pretty good space/flying combat system. CoD’s will never be that silly again, not since they can endlessly milk the Bin Laden raid instead of storming the beaches of Normandy
Pinball FX (PS4)
Guess they’re rebooting this from PFX3 or something, have fun re-buying your tables, hm. 11 GB download, you get their own Old-West-style table for free (relatively non-flashy, but I just don’t like their own pinball designs) and you still need to download even just the demo versions of tables. Was thinking maybe just maybe they snuck a Williams or something in by now that isn’t coated in flashing lights in my pupils, but no, they’re all still pretty flashing-light-intensive.
The World’s Biggest Pac-Man (worldsbiggestpacman.com)
Ran slow in my Firefox, which also had sound glitching, although that might have been partly due to uBlock Origin. Better in Chrome–about the same as MS Edge, although this thing was designed in 2011 as a showcase for IE running HTML5 apps. Still incredibly bad input delay.
600K somehow-interconnected user-made mazes.
The horrors. You can’t get back to the map without resetting your score and all the mazes you’ve cleared, so you can kinda just get trapped in a neighborhood of horrid mazes. Doesn’t have the usual Pac-Man thing where you can lean into a turn a few pixels in advance, so in addition to being laggy, cornering is stiff–and goodness help you if you’re in one of those maps where the creator made corridors extra wide, so you’re swimming in space, or too close together, so you have to kind of take half-height turns; almost all the mazes I tried had one or both of those.
As a demonstration of crowd-sourced collaborative techno torture, it’s sort of interesting; as a Pac-Man game, it’s pretty dire. (Oh yeah also you’re stuck playing in a 512x560 window, surrounded by ads.) If you want free randomized Pac-Man that actually plays really well, that’s RandomPac.
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yeah I didn’t find the super secret powerful weapon thing and struggled with the last boss but still had a lot of fun.
anyway it turns out you can just bum rush her with the BFG at close range and like three shots kills her before she can even do anything to you 
kind of disappointing in its own way but having to fight off the waves of enemies before that was extremely satisfying. still kind of a weak ending but name a doom game that doesn’t have that problem
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I mean sure. on its own terms I think doom 2016 is quite good, and is notable for like… not being a shitty cod-like. that’s significant for when it released and the general design is inspired and fun. it’s much better than Doom 3, though god what a low bar. really what bugs me is that if anything it’s a spiritual successor to quake 2. which like… is that even saying anything?? it’s only a little glib to assert that on some level every first person shooter released after quake 2 was basically some form of quake 2, and honestly I think quake 2 is still an overall better game than most of them, including doom 2016. and quake 2 is so boring compared to quake!
I just like… miss doom, and I feel like modern attempts to return there from both AAA and indie spaces completely miss the mark. I don’t know if it’s possible to return there under the constraints of either industry… and that bums me out so much.
honestly g string is kind of relevant here. it’s true that it doesn’t fit in with boomer shooters or anything else. it’s almost like outsider art, in that formally it’s quite mundane – it’s literally a half life 2 total conversion, it doesn’t really do much outside of the basic mechanics and design patterns of half life 2. but it has this strong, authentic personality that is not held back by self-awareness or notions of marketability. it insists upon its own existence for no other reason then then fairly insane determination of the person who made it. I still highly recommend it, but only on the basis of the experience, like it’s well made enough and has some interesting set pieces but none of that is what makes it compelling. the atmosphere is just bizarre and oppressive and idiosyncratic. and that’s very compelling, and in a lot of ways doom 64 hits me the same way. nothing about the content itself is particularly notable, though it’s generally quite good. but playing it feels like hanging out with a very unusual and interesting person. the experience tends to focus more on peculiar obsessions that may often be entirely orthogonal to game design or mechanics. it feels intimate in a way that I don’t often encounter in something like a first person shooter. and I think that’s part of what makes doom 64 interesting, because it sort of feels like a weird one-off fan project that somehow got a major console release. painfully rare.
(there’s some connection with anodyne here for me too, like those games aren’t particularly commendable for any kind of mechanical innovation… they just have this kind of specific intimacy and personality. it’s kind of nice when the format and mechanics aren’t centered, but are only incidental to more concrete, specific, personal matters)
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Metal Gear Solid continues to happen. I’m enjoying it like one would a good book, except my progress is stymied once in a while.
The torture minigame was actually well thought out. I dunno why that’s a thing to say, it seems like every game post 9/11 had a torture minigame due to the entire fucking enhanced interrogation shit. During this part of the game I failed to fake snake’s death in the prison cell and the guy closed the door on me. Something that @lonelyfrontier had never seen happen. It was also nice to have 'em as co-driver telling me if I needed to do something or not.
Each boss battle has it’s own gimmick and part of it is figuring out that gimmick and then getting in attacks, which is something I’ve missed about modern gaming. Lots of "oh, I have to do this thing kind of stuff. Usually after 1 or 2 tries I can seem to grok what’s going on.
And that’s the end of Disc 1. I can’t remember the last time I had to insert a second disc. It seems like such a nice thematic shift, one that you really don’t get anymore.
I am not actually sure how much of the game is left. It’s been interesting going into this with near zero knowledge or context.
Oh yeah one part I forgot is sometimes the game is like “put your controller on the table” or “put it on your arm” and you know it’s just gonna vibrate but playing along adds a little bit extra. Thankfully duckstation interfaces with the rumble in my xbox controller so it works. This game does more with rumble than any other game I’ve played and it makes me wonder…why? ah well
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honestly I just think Quake II stinks. Half the guns are bad, the military and objective design is a big step down. It marks the point where iD starts following instead of setting the course and it doesn’t have any strong ideas it wants to see through.
The N64 port is the best thing out of it – Quake II-resembling levels in the team’s Quake engine with Doom 64 neon lighting.
As long as games of a certain budget are unwilling to let players get lost or frustrated or let the pacing dip we won’t see Doom again. That’s why shooters moved away from dungeon level design in the first place. Even after ten years of Souls games nobody else has been willing to let that go.
It’s too bad the Respawn Jedi game doesn’t consider itself descended from the old Lucasarts series, because as much of a Souls game as it is, they’re the closest to giving themselves permission to go back to the old knowledge. Just homage one of the Jedi Knight or Dark Forces levels, see how it makes you feel. C’mon.
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more games need to make you walk up slopes that are unclear if its possible to do that or if you just slide back down and take damage, and all the elevators need to be activated by buttons that are directly in the path of the descending elevator so you get crushed when you call it
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yeah I could not get through Q2 after playing Q1 and the excellent mission pack for it. Weapons were weird, mission and level design was hard to follow. I kept getting lost.
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Only good thing about Quake II is it had by far the best fan-made Teletubby skins of all the Quake games…heck, of any FPS…real fuckin’ high quality…sound effects and all…impressive work
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i will kill ford escort RS cosworth
sega rally best game
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best thing about quake 2 is the dm maps it didn’t ship with
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Golden Sun is just a perfectly pleasant SNES JRPG on the GBA. I remain surprised by the structure of it. I beat an evil spirit out of a tree and…didn’t save him. In fact there was no fanfare. The party says we need to do something. So we just…wondered off to the next town with problems.
1/8th of the way through with no revive options means when my wizard takes a serious hit it is quite a trek back to town. I also refuse to the grind and only get by on my smarts. The game feels dangerous but is very generous with tactical options. Glad Camelot got better at games. Take that Shining Force. Maybe SF3 is better, i get bored out of my mind every time I start it and sit through those 15 minutes of politics and then I am in a JRPG town.
FAQs say this next boss is probably going to kill me but Ingot scrap. In that I am underleveled and underequipped. I’m only going to get access to this town’s equipment after I finish this dungeon, that’s interesting. I’ve actually gone through two towns with inaccessible shops.
Did you know Camelot/Sonic Planning made Beyond The Beyond? i didn’t! Now I want to play that forgetable PS1 JRPG.
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i think this is exactly why it’s a thing to say! because MGS is pre-9/11 and therefore coming from a very different angle i.e. the “long and heartfelt tradition of torture employed in 20th century warfare” where all games post-9/11 with torture are just poorly-hidden manufacturing of consent
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Hope you love holding one direction for minutes on end while watching an endless ocean backdrop scroll past and mashing buttons periodically when sea bats attack when you get to the sequel
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