I havent played the Death Stranding Director’s Cut but I stopped my playthrough of Vanilla DS when the missions became rote and repetitive (and when I realized that the “online” aspects were almost entirely fake) so a version with more mission variety sounds like an objective improvement
Honestly, just play Snowrunner instead. Similar traversal-delivery puzzle loop but no plot or execrable kojima writing to ruin the vibes
snowrunner and death stranding are both very very good imo, and I’m not a natural fan of the genre at either extreme of production design
they would be excellent companion pieces if either of them wasn’t more than enough of that sort of thing on its own
I think every ethical recommendation for Snowrunner should come with a fair warning about the entirely charmless European vibe that it exudes, especially if it’s being made as a counter suggestion for Death Stranding.
I am not sure what this can mean as eurojank is the only good form of video games
yeah yeah… but be fair now, Snowrunner isn’t Gothic or Outward
I am gonna sit here thinking about “Death Stranding’s missions got rote and repetitive, get the version with more missions” for a while now.
(The online aspects being clearly fake ruined the ending of Nier: Automata for me, I may be a monster)
The online aspects are not fake, though you can encounter things in the world populated by the game. This happens in offline mode, and presumably in regions where no one is playing the game, but this has never been an issue on PC in my experience.
Oh I assumed more missions meant more mission variety. The problem with the base game is that there’s only 3 or 4 mission types and once you solve all the puzzly aspects of how to do those jobs efficiently, its just grinding
Nier Automata’s ending was some real « wait how can Santa visit all these houses in one night » moment for me. I think that’s when I lost interest in Taro’s work. How dare he use his vile tricks to try to make me feel good
I was put off by Undertale’s final boss for similar reasons
Death Stranding makes you think the building bridge part is true collaborative work, but in reality the other player’s contributions are severely reduced. As a result the game feels like Being The One Person Working In A Student Group. I didn’t mind this as much as Nier Automata’s example
Somewhere in Death Stranding is a dial to control how many roads and bridges are loaded from online and the async design wouldn’t make sense if they weren’t tightly tuning it; on one end the player would have no agency, everything having been built before, and on the other hand, no help.
I think presenting all human interaction behind superfical likes and holo-chats works in favor of how artificial the asynchronous multiplayer can feel. Are you getting actual help from other players, or is it all mediated by an algorithm? Should you feel good when they give you likes, knowing they’re doing it because the game rewards them for being generous (blood sacrifice as the only true mark of favor). That ambiguity is part of the text.
the online in nier can’t be completely fake either cause I pirated it and wasn’t able to finish it
Same here, I had to watch ending E on youtube because of that. But, if I understood it correctly, it doesn’t add that much to ending D?
Ending E just feels like a retread of Nier’s final ending but takes the shootem mechanics to their logical extreme. I don’t think it’s quite as impactful because none of the characters in Automata are interesting and I already played a better save destroying ending
having finished the life is strange prequel just drives home what I already knew, that anyone who chooses the sacrifice chloe ending in life is strange 1 is a monster. absolutely insane to me that apparently 53 percent of people go with that option. it is not my problem a seaside town can’t take cover from a hurricane on their own, especially after multiple days of biblical warning signs from god that he’s repaying them for the rot they let take root in their community etc. who goes through this story and thinks, gee I think the right ending for all of this is for the girl who was wracked with guilt over telling her best friend she’s moving is for her to ultimately hide behind a bathroom stall while said friend is shot to death, then go on about her life. It’s either a story about a girl breaking time itself for love, or a story about personally making sure the universe finishes taking it’s long giant cosmic multiverse shit on one girl, and over half of people choose the latter.
I was almost certain I wasn’t going to like Norco but given the chance with game pass I tried it anyways. Yay for a game set in southern Louisiana, just a stone’s throw from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, my hometown.
It really made me respect the tone and restraint of Kentucky Route Zero, which used it’s Extra-Ordinary elements as implications and representations. The near-future cyber-punk stuff in this clangs for me. The dialog made me yell Come On too many times. It is terminally online and I am to believe there is several different social upheavals but it’s 204X and everyone is just talking about Apps all the time?
You can’t just add sentient robots and it not be like a thing.
I think it lost me when it had a psychiatric session to explain a character. And yet still I kept going “who are these people?” A day later the closest character personality point I could think of is the characters from Hotline Miami, which is really…something.
I’m not as eloquent about this as I’d like. But wanted to get my thoughts out.
I’d also played Return to Monkey Island very briefly and the writing and the Jon K style close-up gross ups made me give up on that as well. Then I checked selectbutton dot net forums and the one poster who I had played it and talked about the ending and laughed for about 10 minutes straight, in anger.
Hope I enjoy Pentiment!
never has a more evil game been designed and released than arcade gradius 3. i cannot fathom how this was allowed to happen. this thing presumably went through location testing, and yet here it is. the first loop has loop 3 gradius 2 level difficulty. why?
My progress was locked at Stage 6 after a good month of throwing myself at the game (something like 60 recorded hours)
Also not an easy game to train for despite a level select (depending on version release) but it can be satisfying to break through a checkpoint without upgrades however there are some sections that seemingly cannot be done this way by the Average Human
Sounds like you managed Gradius II though…?
The Sharp 68000 has an explicit homebrew game just for training the crystal gauntlet.
i’ve been playing through gradius console ports the last few weeks going for 1ccs (which are basically the only way to clear most of these) and am now refamiliarizing myself with the arcade originals. i am at a 2cc in gradius 2.
I felt like I had no agency when I realized that what I did had no meaningful impact and it was just auto-loading a completion level for roads and bridges based on my story progress. Spending too long grinding out one section of highway because I thought it actually meant something, doing one story mission and going back to see the entire highway completed to the highest level made the whole thing feel like a solipsistic waste of time.
sometimes, noticing the man behind the curtain is enough to undercut the intended experience.