I’ve been playing that Dead Space remake. It’s been long enough that I probably won’t notice the differences, but it’s pretty impressive so far. There’s still lots of stomping.
I wonder if they’ll remake the second game, too.
Everyone said that Callisto Protocol was really bad, but I noticed it’s a free PS Plus game this month so I might try it out.
i like that as a connection to Zelda 2, which is memorably robust despite not being super complex just because high/low attacks & guards are so crucial
To be fair, Breath (and Tears assuming it hasnt changed) does sort of do that with the dodge → flurry rush, and your shield being breakable (plus i think you can force your way through an opponents guard sometimes?). Maybe with just a bit more heft and emphasis on tool usage. OoT modders get on it
hmm. is the best “Zelda combat engine” just Link in SoulCalibur 2 lol
i think you can make an argument for Smash Bros and Dark Souls as competitiors as well
this is Hyrule Warriors, isn’t it?
I don’t think Hyrule Warriors had block states for High and Low like OoT had.
i don’t care what they are accusing him off, they need to release this guy. he has never done anything wrong, and his proud bragging about the collar marks his partner left on his neck is the cutest, gayest thing anyone in this courtroom has ever done
I think people weren’t so hot on Hi-Fi Rush when it suddenly dropped but this shit is great. I’m a huge sucker for tight audiovisual synchronisation particularly in any interactive thing so almost every aspect of the presentation is constantly giving me joy. Easily Tango Gameworks’ best thing.
Someone other than Arcsys finally tried to take the 3D rendering of 2D styles elsewhere with all the shading, careful camera locking, and animating on twos. It’s doubly satisfying because the style works to emphasise a lot of the rhythmic syncs and use a lot of comics/manga language to emphasise keyframes and impact.
The writing is pretty template, most jokes are fairly simple, but the comedic timing of visual gags is very good. I think this sets it apart from superficial analogues like Sunset Overdrive. In Hi-Fi Rush the humour derives mostly from kinetic progress rather than Overdrive’s overreliance on meta stuff which gets tedious. Like, Hi-fi Rush also does fairly limp meta stuff (‘You sound just like a videogame tutorial’), but its general delivery is tighter across the board. If a joke doesn’t land the drums move on rather than hold for applause. Even if the jokes are lifeless on paper the telling is packed with abandon.
The cutscene pacing is strong for the same reason, unlike most games where you can feel the dialogue and staging being loaded in. This was storyboarded into a click-clack typeset and plays seamlessly. It’s the kinda direction and motion I enjoy about the best audio-synchronised music videos. They’re compelling as dense nuggets of choreography. It might be because the team had to be paying attention to the timing of everything for most of the game’s other systems and presentation that the narrative pacing received the same treatment.
They occasionally transition into full 2D animated cutscenes and this is a bit more variable in quality. Sometimes it feels like a static Disney Channel original, other times it flows well between the 3D and 2D styles. It works best when they do crazy stuff in 2D that they couldn’t easily manage in 3D like super deformation of characters or having a character enter a scene through a comic panel.
In summary:
writing meh
timing dopaminergic
Combat is all synced to a metronome and counting the 1s and 2s works fairly well but I kinda wish they’d start at a slower tempo. Combos will always quantise to the beat but to get proper combo extenders they need to be input on time. I get they want the first level to get the beat rockin’ but I really struggled to nail combos that do ‘1 – 3 4’ or ‘1 2 – 4 5 6’. The tempo changes each level very slightly which makes consistent timing feel a bit tricky. Heavy attacks work on 1 and 3 (or 2 and 4 depending on where they begin in the combo) with the ‘gaps’ not being as emphasised through sound. Mentally counting or feeling the beat can be challenging in terms of cognitive load because you eventually must dodge, parry, and queue up special shield counters and much of it needs to be on beat. When it works it’s ambrosia but, until you practice a lot, your brain just doesn’t recover according to the game’s own rules. Like dodging on beat won’t always work since it doesn’t grant invincibility, or might put you on the cusp of an environmental hazard - you need to consider positioning separately from music. Likewise, you need to be near an enemy to properly start a combo so even if you’re on beat, and half a yard out, you can get thrown of rhythm just trying to get in. The balance they’ve taken is probably best because I actually find pure rhythm combat where every single thing is lockstepped takes you out of being in a world e.g. Necrodancer. It just becomes DDR-coded navigational trials that are more abstract which is fine, but I’d rather just play through a track at that point. Hi-Fi Rush kinda lets you play about a bit more even if you can get thrown off.
My biggest gripe is they subscribe to the lock and key of enemy shields with only one counter. I hate this shit, let everything have at least two approaches. Let me express.
I have no familiarity with any of the licensed music lol. I suspect if you know the tracks it likely colours the experience but to me this is just the Hi-Fi Rush OST. I might go back and try the legally sanitised streamer mode. I’m about halfway through but the tongue is pressed hard to the roof.
Icepick’s Franz is finally out! Still figuring out what exactly is going on, but I think my personality test answers angered the lil demon now living inside my phone
played a…PVZ clone probably made by 10 year olds using Scratch. The thumbnail of one of the plants smoking a blunt is what got me to click. there’s a lot of cuss words in the item descriptions. the developer has made more progress than EA has with PVZ3…
i didnt even get that question!!! it wanted to know if id accept a present i didnt deserve and then went off from there about deleting nudes from my phone
hahahhahah it kicked me out now i have to wait for the game to call me back
just wait just wait!!! it’s so good
I DIDNT WAIT AND I GOT IN TROUBLE AND IT WAS WORTH IT I’m terrible at the word game though so many nails
I’m gonna wait cuz I’m excited for what the notification is
did you know that they’re making a robocop game? I did not. but they just put out a demo and I played it and it’s very good. very faithful to the movie, and they even got peter weller to reprise the role. the production feels very low budget but the writing is surprisingly good. I feel like it “gets” what the movie is really about.
it’s kind of a lightweight im-sim, and there’s an alignment/reputation system. you spend a lot of time doing boring cop stuff like writing parking tickets and stuff. you can choose to let people off with a warning or be a hardass. depending on what you do the game grades you as either “upholding the law”, “serving the public trust”, or “protecting the innocent.” it actually does a great job demonstrating how these directives can be at odds with each other. I’m not sure how far it’s going to in terms of criticizing the police as an institution, but it does a pretty great job of making you feel like an asshole for doing cop things.
in terms of storytelling though it mostly gets by on a lot of dry, passive comedy just by putting robocop in situations. but he’s a particularly good fit for the im-sim template because so many actions are arbitrary locked behind stat bonuses and you just get a big green HUD message that says “LEVEL 6 ENGINEERING REQUIRED” or whatever if you try to do something that you don’t have the stats for. rigid videogamey constraints just become another bizarre facet of robocop’s tragicomic existence.
anyway the demo is surprisingly dense, it includes a full opening mission and then an entire early game city block with sidequests and lots of npcs and story content. I think it was a timed demo (it looks like it isn’t up on steam anymore sadly) but if you can find a way to check it out I think it’s worth your time.
I’ve been hyping it in the news thread a bit this year. It’s current gen only so I’ll have to wait but it’s by the same developer that did that Terminator game, Terminator: Resistance. That was a pretty decent game too as far these quasi-budget AA games go. They also did the 2014 Rambo game it I never played it so I don’t know how good or bad it was.
You don’t really see these kinds of mid tier games anymore but it seems like Teyon have gotten better at hitting their mark. Rambo reviewed poorly and Terminator was a bit better received than that, and this one sounds like the first decent Robocop game in forever. I really like how destructible the levels are, being able to throw bad guys through walls and stuff.
ah yes the bootleg PvZ arcade game
I’m like halfway through the terminator game and i dunno if i can deal with more of these fallout 3 ass levels. like the game is fine… i guess… but the terminators are scary approximately once and it mostly wins points because it kind of sort of looks like the future war from the movie sometimes when it’s not broad daylight for some fucking reason. The best part was when I was in the hospital and there were 1000 terminators marching around and I couldn’t equip the plasma gun I scavenged off one because I was too low level but a lot of it is scripted sequences where you can see the fucking enemies spawn. By the time you’re doing Pasadena (Reverse) it’s like ok I get it…the game really isn’t going to do anything else from here and I already guessed the twist. The maps are completely devoid of anything but enemies, fallout lockpicking and crafting items…there hasnt been a single interesting piece of level design in the game besides the vent system in the resistance base that isn’t actually connected together so it’s only good for getting between certain rooms. i guess games suck so bad that a decent xbox 360 game is a hidden gem now, a lot of people really like it.
I thought all along this looked like the good kind of cheap and ambiguously reactionary and no one seemed to agree so I’m happy to be vindicated
Playing through Arcade Story mode on “Hardest” difficulty Kimberly in Street Fighter 6 on PC.
I should’a looked up her Unique Attacks before starting, that would’a shown me the easy LP-MP-HP-HK chain combo. : P
Took me about two hours of flailing and getting beaten down to get her numerous specials kinda sorted out in my muddled head. Some of them, particularly her qcf+K multi-option dash-in, just don’t seem reliably effective against the higher level CPUs. Beating individual CPUs came down to finding which move worked against them–a sort of puzzle-solving exercise that reminded me a lot of SFII arcade mode.
Her non-EX teleport (qcb+P) seemed to get jabbed out against everyone I tried it against early on so I stopped stuck with the EX one, which worked pretty well but couldn’t be used too often due to the meter cost–and then it turns out the boss ate all the non-EX teleports! Crrrr-azy!
Hardest times against Manon (40 minutes, whut the heck; ended up getting her with tatsus), secondarily boss (37 minutes; took me a while to try non-EX teleports : P), thirdly Chun (33 minutes; early jump-ins followed by sweep pressure got to her).
I discovered I do NOT know how to read or inflict wake-up throws. : PP (Didn’t seem to be nearly as bad at it as Ken??) Struggled yet again with super move execution against faster characters. And am definitely never ever going to learn to counter or parry Drive Impacts. : P
Still, after fearing early on I just wouldn’t be able to get through with her, I DID eventually make it, so, that was nice. Hopefully will be able to make it through in slightly less than three hours next time. ^ _^ (And say, it’s 2023, why isn’t there a midway-save feature? : P)
…I actually also played the Wicked Tuna game this week. On an arcade trip. I should post about that.
