Nice
Gradius IV gets very nasty on Stage 4 with the RNG Bubbles set to chill music
4 Likes
i can see a glimpse of where they wanted to go (robots as allegorical golems and life extension). i also couldn’t shake the unflattering comparison to krz where junebug and johnny are effortless allegory without being science fiction
3 Likes
Norco is included in a batch of narrative adventure/adventure-rpg games I got recently, among Citizen Sleeper, Curse of the Golden Idle, Sunless Skies, and Suzerain. I am most suspicious about Citizen Sleeper and Norco, as they are shilled the hardest by the Twitter cohort of games bloggers and narrative designers, but I am also apart of this to some extent and so I’m sure I’ll end up liking them.
4 Likes
Norco is genuinely phenomenal, Citizen Sleeper is regular-style fun. That is my verdict on these two. If you want to be really impressed by a story and a world and a bunch of emotions which are fairly outside the commercial-indie norm, I suggest Norco. If you want to see a bunch of interesting mechanistic loops which act on one another to simulate a lifestyle for the character, I recommend Citizen Sleeper
10 Likes
I have been playing Peridot, the next Niantic phone game.
It’s a virtual pet game and I am a real sucker for those. I was big into tamagotchis and shit. I’ve been playing virtual pet games on the phone for years and I’ve been bitterly disappointed by almost all of them. My friend worked on Peridot so I had to play it, but I woulda played it anyway because this is my shit.
Unfortunately the game is too expensive!!! I don’t think it’s gonna take off with its current pricing.
You start off with a baby animal… you can interact with it only through AR, so it makes your phone feel like a nuclear bomb is going off in your hand. Anyway, my phone does. It’s like 5-6 years old so it’s having a hard time with this game. The animal is cute, though… it’s buggy but not any more buggy than any other AR shit I tend to see.
You raise your animal to adulthood. I completed all the gameplay demands my creature made of me (“desires”) over the course of 2 days by going outside and walking around the block three times. Sometimes it wanted me to walk a certain distance, other times it wanted me to like… point the camera at a flower or something, or at a dog. If you do these things the creature gets XP and grows up faster.
The thing is that you can trick the camera, and tricking the camera became the entire game for me. I have learned that there is a blanket on my couch which the camera sees as a dog or a cat every time. The blanket is straight up a dog, to this game. Like I can just clump it up on a side of the couch and point the phone at it and within ten seconds it’s telling me that my fake animal has seen a dog.
It will also ask you to “forage” on certain surfaces. The surface you point it at affects what resources the animal digs up. It can recognize grass, soil, and apparently sand… but it doesn’t see any of the sand in my neighborhood as being “real sand”. To help me out, my husband photoshopped a tiled Sand Image which my phone recognizes as Diggable Sand. (We had to experiment with several sands.) If I cover the camera lens and then reveal a PC monitor containing this image, it gives me the sand reward!
Anyway this is what my first animal looked like when it became an adult.
When they’re adults, they’re ready to fuck. That is the core gameplay loop of the game: you raise the animals and then scout nearby map locations to find animals to breed with. There are bunches of different traits you can acquire which cause the animals to grow up differently. There seems to also be some kind of DNA inheritance system in play.
BUT THE ITEM YOU NEED TO USE TO BREED THE ANIMAL COSTS FIVE DOLLARS!!!
The entire community forum for the game is full of people complaining about the five dollar egg nest item. It’s the main topic on the Niantic discord-alike they use for community stuff in their games-- just different people logging into this chat system and saying that the game costs too much for them to play. It’s nuts.
I feel so bad for my friend!! This game is not gonna be playable with a five dollar paywall to get new animals. You can just care for the animal you have, if you want. Treat it like a fancy AR tamagotchi. That could be fun for some people who are really just looking to poke at a virtual cat… but I don’t know how many people exist like that in the world. The entire game is pushing you toward the breeding mechanic anyway.
I got one nest for free at launch and then I put three dollars into the game as a salute to my friend and got another nest on discount. That’ll be it for me probably. It’s possible that the five dollars is an “anchoring” price for the nests, and they’ll be constantly discounting them down to two dollars or whatever… but this game isn’t gonna work for most players unless the breeding is free, I think. Apparently earlier betas were based around a mechanic where you crafted the nest out of foraged items, but they stripped that out and replaced it with this system.
Here is the first baby that I bred in the second generation. It’s got more rare qualities, I guess, than the previous one? It also has some kind of inconvenient texture overlap on its chin that makes it look like it’s frowning.
13 Likes
I think it’s deeply solipsistic, and the multiplayer is as aggravating and compelling as the rest of it. Because dumping resources into a road is only a tiny amount of dressing over filling a progression bar, because everything is mediated for you already. The exaggerated physical hardship is kind of a joke, part of the lengths the game has to go to in order to ground itself in it’s strictly artificial coating, techno-dens, holo-people.
More literally, Sam is a home office worker whose work relationships are distanced and mediated and he finds himself by roughing it on the weekends, believing he’s experiencing real physical hardship as he walks on paths provided by others using gear and kit built to make this possible.
Annoying and compelling in equal measure, everything is so open in that game. It takes forever to end because they’re trying to to find a thread that can feel like real human connection after seeding the whole project with distance, limits, caveats.
8 Likes
These are great criticisms about the pacing and structure, and what the narrative has to contort itself in order to hold those things, but, for anyone not yet convinced reading this, I think these reads of the game are leaving out the more important qualities about Death Stranding that you feel directly and observe only from your embodied perspective with your hands on the controller and your agency influencing the systems. It’s Kojima’s most emotionally unearned spectacle, but it is by far the least mediated, most tactile physical experience he’s directed that I’ve played
5 Likes
i think death stranding is utterly incredible, but i also see a lot of things that if they don’t hit you just right, won’t land at all
it is a very understandably polarizing game, but i really feel like if you love videogames you owe it to yourself to give it a try at some point because it really is unique and special
also, just 2 little notes:
you can turn all the online structures off and play solo
you can change difficulty freely, and there’s no penalty for doing so
5 Likes
yeah if you stay ahead of the story with your building it’s pretty incredible. I was very focused on the building and I was way ahead of the story every time I guess, because I never saw it auto complete a road for me once.
5 Likes
I was a highwayman too, getting a big rig and rolling in the resources was a little dream I was able to fulfill. Gosh, taking a chance to go over a ravine, getting stuck with a full load and the bandits roll up on you, everything getting poisoned the whole way…there’s a lot of great play the kept from MGSV and the medium-term loop is outstanding.
And that character control is really interesting, defiantly animation-driven in a way that would normally be disconnecting from controller response but with a million tiny details of feedback that keep it connected. I generally think character control has taken a big backseat as Naughty Dog-style systems have become the norm but in this case they built it to enable interesting new things and even more impressively maintained legibility with normal inherited controls - it’s so much simpler to make 'control a character’s new by making a brand new control scheme. The constraints of that budget are suffocating and they thrive in it.
What an interesting and infuriating game
5 Likes
my only problem with game is the guy in the truck with you at the beginning talks to much, otherwise it’d be perfect
I don’t think I did hardly any of the non story or mechanic teaching missions but I took long breaks to build roads
3 Likes
I remember finishing a road and thinking “that took a long time and driving on it is way less fun than walking and now I have to move on to another area where I won’t even use this thing and who knows if I’ll ever come back so why did I bother at all”
7 Likes
this sucks
i am the target audience for this but i don’t even want to download it if breeding is five bucks a pop. even one buck a pop! i want a coterie of insane monsters living in my pocket, not like, 3 guys i look at once a day and sigh because they’ll never get to breed because i’m too damned cheap
4 Likes
The game seems designed for free breeding and there were free breeding mechanics in the beta so I hope they relent and go back to the original design soon!
5 Likes
I think my feelings on DS turned sour when I was given a mission in which I’m required to deliver a nuclear bomb and had to pretend like my character didn’t know what they were delivering even though I could go into the package inspection menu and see I was carrying a nuclear bomb and couldn’t refuse. The game was like ‘quel suspense’ as I danced like a puppet. It’s not the biggest problem (don’t get me started on doing the chiral artist context free) but for me it was the last straw. The last 5 hours were insane, unhinged, I hated it but couldn’t stop playing.
I do think the core gameplay loop is really good though.
6 Likes
that part, as with many other moments, made me laugh pretty hard
shady guy gives you a bomb and is like, uhhh yeah system messed up and gotta give it directly to fragile
i also actually really, really enjoyed the ending! i think the writing is generally quite good! in one of my earlier posts i said i wasn’t a “superfan” but i must retract that and doff my disguise as a non-superfan. i could no longer bear to have the record fail to reflect this reality
11 Likes
i am still working on the postgame, i’ll try and shift my musings on it into the dedicated DS thread moving forward heh, i have a lot i want to write about it but i don’t want to litter this thread with kojimaposting lol
2 Likes
Custom user title, anyone?
12 Likes
i can’t blood potion this in good conscience but i did do a loud “pfff” and spit all over my phone when i read it
spitpotion
8 Likes
I’LL TAKE IT 
10 Likes