Black suit is a very odd and antimonious narrative arc for a game. Gameplay and presentation wise it is a rich seam but the plot wavers between unbearable melodrama and comically angry characters. Angry Peter just constantly yells and aggressively complains about everything that he encounters which is very funny for an open world game.
After a certain point in the plot the black suit blocks out sound which I thought was a glitch at first but it’s a strong effect that helps sell the isolation the suit is trying to create. You can only hear a dull pasta-stirring sound as city ambience is noise-cancelled out. Leaves you cold and alone despite the contrast of the sun shining on New York.
Just visually Venom is slick-looking - well animated. The right body proportions and texturing to be somewhat uncanny and freaky to look at. A fucking weirdo who licks everyone it meets. Strangely well-written as an entity that lies to get what it wants and just becomes a feral animal when met with resistance. The playable Venom section was a nice highlight as well just for how the game wants you to inhabit a ball of chaos for a little bit. However, the narrative context for a lot of Venom stuff is very silly since it’s effectively a treatment for Harry Osborn’s non-specific terminal illness. No one ever questions how dangerous it may be until several city blocks worth of property damage has happened. It is also brutal how much of a beating this terminally ill man (albeit encased in alien worm) takes. And he’s still alive, resurrected even, at the end (!!!) so that Spider-man 2 can have the same cliffhanger as Spider-man 1. They both concern the same terminally ill guy getting setup to be turned into a super villain, next time he’ll be Green Goblin and we’ll go through all this again.
There’re some minor themes scattered throughout which are a bit of a mix. The game has a very Covid theme which feels somewhat dated now and was likely the team responding to having to go through remote development for part of this. MJ ends the game starting a podcast called ‘The New Normal’ which is on the nose even for game writing. They have another underlying theme of reforming supervillains which I would’ve liked to see more of rather than focusing so much on Kraven who doesn’t really have a very human/relatable motivation. Miles has more interesting personal stuff going on, but it mostly gets shoved to the side so that Peter and Harry can yell at everyone and each other.
I remember being angry at a lot of combat in the first game where you’re expected do all sorts of ridiculous counters in succession and then spend 5 years punching each person. It’s still there but you can make it much briefer and more bearable with the combat adjustments. I think I was more occasionally annoyed than completely fed up lol.
Overall, the game is a lot more compact and is kinda what open world games should return to. The world is a playground rather than something to densely clutter with things. The average playground has a major activity on every sixth to tenth of its square footage. Why not open world games as well? I think the 2000s got this right by way of limitations.
The overworld of oracle of seasons feels designed to waste your time and to drive me in particular insane, I think I’m close to the end but fiddling around with the seasons to get around is doing my head in. It’s such a hassle and not fun at all.
It’s pretty funny that the main villain in Robocop (at least for now) who is constantly referred to by everyone in the game as “The New Guy” is not only for some reason the brother of the dude from the first movie who gets doused in toxic waste and explodes on Red Foreman’s windshield but is also modeled to more or less look like a slightly off-brand Alan Rickman.
The game’s tossed in a PCB mechanic now, where you find PCBs scattered around that somehow cram into your pistol, and you slot Pipe Dreams style with little directional widgets to try to maximize buffs and minimize or outright avoid debuffs. I keep switching to whatever new one I find, but I may switch back to the one that auto-reloads your pistol so that you’re effectively never out of ammo? I think is maybe how it works?
Awful lot of them just have a perk for making the gore gorier, which as far as I can tell just amps up the particle effects and blood decals and maybe the odds for dismemberment.
Currently at a part where you can pick up landmines and just sort of frisbee them at guys. Not great at landing them but it has the desired effect.
Edit: forgot to say (thought I mentioned it earlier anyway) that, inexplicably, five hours into the game, they’re suddenly doing Borderlands-esque enemy intros for special enemy types. I guess the mooks I blew up before weren’t anything special, but “guy on bike” and “guy holding flaming propane tank and beelines for you” and “shithead with a radio who scurries around and calls for backup” and “guy with grenade launcher” merit little special cinematics.
Anyway, in true “don’t overthink it, it’s just a game” style, I love how every gang hideout and random warehouse has what’s gotta be some sorta proprietary healing tech for Robocop. Frankly I’m just upset he’s not slamming back baby food.
I’ve been playing The Talos Principle 2. It’s more of the same at its core but it greatly expands on every aspect of the first game.
While I’m generally critical of talking parts in video games, I like the science fiction/philosophy talk in this one. It’s charming to see all of these earnest robots discussing what it means to be human, etc. (You can skip all of the dialog if you want, though.)
The puzzles introduce some new mechanics along with the old, and I’m probably about halfway through (if that) so I imagine there’s a lot still to come in that area. I’ve barely touched the “outside” puzzles thus far.
The environments look great and have a nice sense of scale to them. The music is good, too.
So I dabbled on the bits of the RE7 DLC that seemed interesting and… man they made a series of odd choices with how they handled this. I’m not sure I’d call fairly high budget escape room and blackjack minigames the ideal way to build upon RE7 but full credit for thinking outside the box. I did the brief “Daughters” prequel bit, got the bad ending and got a tip for how unintuitive and particular getting the true one would be so I decided to just walk away. Someone told me that I should at least try End of Zoe and god, they were right to do so. Tonally it is a stark departure, shifting slowly then rapidly from tense to goofy, becoming a first person beat 'em up with some light stealth elements before just going full ridiculous for the end run when you basically pick up a bionic fist and can punch through several not-zombies at once. Good strong note to end on. Apparently the Not A Hero bit is also fairly meaty but I’ve heard mixed things, it’s made by an external company and to be honest Chris seems rather boring, so I will leave that lie.
the new old fortnite map is pretty bad because it wasnt designed with zero build in mind, so there are so many boring wide open spaces. still, it’s been interesting seeing how it looked and played back in the day but I dont see this season holding my interest long
Black Mesa Xen is, amazingly, worse than the original (which I don’t really have a problem with) in many aspects. In the first chapter I had to drag 14 plugs into various sockets which honestly seems a little excessive and isn’t as engaging of a puzzle as they think it is…I mean the art design is nice at least even though there’s a bunch of places where you can obviously tell you’re playing a Half-Life Mod all of a sudden. The facility stuff comes across as a lot more high quality…even if it was better than original xen it’s still 4x as long for no reason. I guess the curse strikes again.
Yeah I felt the same way, it dragged on for ages and kept repeating itself, if it was cut in half it would be good I think, but as it is it’s a total drag and I prefer the original
God the original art style is really hilariously awful. I never thought I would miss a fortnite look, but good God those cars in the original are so bad.
I got a Series S yesterday. We loaded up Alan Wake 2 and I got to play as a naked, shivering man. Then we talked about how there’s no way we could share the same playthough and I sat at my computer and played Ironclad Tactics and Mobius 83.
It has been 10 years since Ironclad came out. It’s a weird, laneswitching, deckbuilding, action tactics game. I’m hitting a point where I have to replay a mission multiple times and tweak the deck every reset in order to win. The loop of winning cards, moving through the story, and trying to get further feels off. The comics are terrible.
In contrast, Mobius Front plays like a fairly typical tactics game, but units behave a little different than the Fire Emblems and Shining Forces that I’m used to. The sound design is perfect. Cribbage is neat. I think I’ll play at least until I unlock some puzzles.
This is Opacha, a mobile strategy game. Each circle generates soldier ship things, and they can either be changed to generate more quickly but with less defenses, or vice versa. You can send all your ships or half your ships along those lines, but no other number.
I’m green here. This may not look like much but this is the hardest map ive encountered by a large margin. Purple always takes the planet southwest of its start for some reason, and teal has way more territory to conquer. That means purple tries to take my stuff, and if i fight them then i’ll lose to teal. But if i rush north purple will come up behind me and take all my stuff anyway.
The trick was to start a war between the two CPUs but the question of how is complicated. I ended up with a roving army playing chicken with each CPUs large armies chasing me. I had to basically trick them into sending their armies at each other, then quickly scoop up as much territory as i could before their armies regenerated.
I won after like twelve attempts.
Opacha rules, it’s probably my favorite mobile game and it’s free with no ads. I bought this person’s paid game just because i like this one.
got annoyed at alan wake 2 crashing and played a few runs of the roguelite mode in Severed Steel. dunno what it says about me that my stress relief is seeing how many screaming FEAR guys i can shoot in a single dive (eight but i jumped down a 3 story atrium so i had a lot of air to work with) while breakcore blares in the background lol. the roguelite mode puts you through random stages with mods added after each stage, pretty rote stuff, but it’s a good excuse to get you blasting
fans of titanfall/FEAR/max payne really should play this one if you haven’t
the “GODDAMNIT” thru the troop voice filter as you kick off a guy’s face, strip his pistol, then shoot him and his squad in the heads (giant pink HEAD SHOT 500!s flying out) before touching the ground is a videogame thing i think about too much probably
I was intrigued by something so outside of their usual fare and I’m certainly getting something out of it, but that something is more like nostalgia for scrappy and ambitious indie works. This is the sort of thing that could break a small studio’s back ten years ago, but now it’s almost quaint.
all videogames should have an option to make the enemies sound like this. The replica soldier filter that makes killing random fucks more satisfying
i am trying to get all the achievements in severed steel and they just patched the PC version so you can do every firefight level with 3x the enemies and still get ranks so im having the time of my life clearing out 80 guys per level. its the best! the game literally has three awesome train levels people gotta play it
i was wrong, I gave this a shot. It’s too easy so far!!!
Like, you start with all your staff, money, items, etc. And the only real change is a bump in difficulty and time limits. But so far I’ve been able to blast past the time limits - currently have not failed a single mission and am on target to get literally the best possible in-game time.
I kind of wish this had a way of starting a new game from scratch, but with well designed time limits and restrictions that match having to start from nothing. Basically, I want a harder difficulty. The game is essentially trivialized now by all the work I did.
So yeah, I’ll probably beat a round or two of New Game + just to see if it gets more interesting as the difficulty slowly increases. But so far, it’s pretty much trivial to beat it at the fastest possible speed.
i played sonic robo 3d blast phantasy star for like an hour or so even though the fucking spin attack was mapped to PUSHING MY GODDAMN RIGHT ANALOG STICK RIGHT, YOU KNOW EVEN THOUGH EVERY OTHER DIRECTION CONTROLS THE CAMERA??? DONT TURN IT RIGHT YOU’LL USE YOUR MP or whatever the fuck its called in phantasy star, which i havent played. i mean i meant to with SB people but shit was all weird then
anyroad i only got to the fucking first level and started freaking out about keycards but every time i tried to quit the game threatened me which made me wanna try a little harder but i mostly wanted to post it here
