its amazing how when you read about the development of this game everyone on the team desperately wants to be in a band, they call the game launching the album dropping, they non stop talk about how its more like being in a band than making a game… but none of them just FUCKING PICK UP AN INSTRUMENT AND PLAY. THEY JUST TALK ABOUT BRANDING AND REBRANDING (THE FUCKIGN BAND CHANGED ITS NAME)
and then you play the fucking game YOU PLAY THE FUCKING GAME AND NO ONE IN THE GAME EVER GOES TO A SHOW, PLAYS AN INSTRUMENT, GOES TO PRACTICE, ARGUES ABOUT HTE BAND NAME. they dont even fucking talk about real music until the fifth episode where some writer was like OOPS WE HAVENT NAME DROPPED ENOUGH COOL SHIT nad they just regurgitate current acts ala a fucking family guy episode
it is so vapid, so flat, so cynical, so calculated to be impervious to critcism because it hits all the right diversity buttons but for some reason every time you go to fuck in it you just get two ways to say yes
Yeah I agree more or less. I really like the surface tension music reprise when the helicopter is dropping mines on you though. The city uprising parts are the weakest part of the game, I actually think the hl2 leak vertigo/conscript street war stuff would have probably been slightly more interesting.
yeah i forgot to post this when i finished it but we are ofk might have misunderstood the creative process (especially for music) more than like any piece of media i’ve ever come across in recent memory
like literally just a band made up of people in the game industry is a more compelling story all around than “we wanted to make music but we’re game devs so we game deved our way into a record deal with a sony subsidiary”
like the biggest conflict in the game centers around a noncompete?? in what world is that the biggest conflict you have as a band??? and it doesn’t ever talk about a scene or anything, everyone is either “i don’t make music so the idea of it is the coolest thing ever” or “i am a professional working musician with no time to think about art”
it just seems so inhuman, i am a person who has lived in and around music scenes and games forever and i could not find a single way to connect to this game, i feel like they’ve never even been to a single show
I am officially 14% of the way through the Opacha campaign, as i have finished 210 of the 1500 missions. It’s taken me about a month to get this far so still a while to go. Most of the missions are easy but some are very hard. It’s clear that the missions are just randomly made with a slow difficulty and size increase, but it’s nice to have a sense of progress. Just doing these at random on my own wouldn’t feel the same.
i shouldnt have watched the ofk playthrough because thats like 6 hours i am not getting back but the finding out how the sheer amount of absolute nothing that the game has sucked me in. the entire game could have been one episode long. the cast spends more time on social media posts than they do on music. the plot and dialog is so vapid i dont even know how they padded it out so long. despite the sheer amount of nothing this game managed to get glowing reviews and a few award nominations. who at a publisher looks at the pitch deck for this and goes “yeah this will make us money” especially given the small army that produced it? this game might have a grand total of 10 rigged characters and they didnt bother making any without shoes so they could lounge on furniture. all of the animations are so stiff, and the facial expressions of the eyes dont match the mouths so everyone has this blank expression on them. some characters are just 2D sprites, but somehow still have vo lines, which feels incredibly cheap. im just kind of agog at how much attention this production got
finished like a dragon gaiden, colosseum too grindy in this one so happy to call it a day
started metroid prime remastered. i haven’t played this since 2003 on a sony wega with (extremely american youtube voice) r g b besides an hour or two of that custom dolphin build with kb+m support, though i found shader compilation stutter kind of took me out of that one, maybe that’s not a big deal these days though i mean i’ve played a couple of switch games in yuzu recently where the async shader compilation wasn’t stuttery at all but anyway
actually kinda like the new controls and i’ve got some authenticity because the 8bitdo pro2’s triggers are creaky and kinda nasty like the gamecube pad’s
IN STARS AND TIME - Fun “full length sequel” to Start Again, an RPG Maker game from a few years back. Beginning is kind of painfully slow, and the music is overall pretty underwhelming, but gets good after act 2. Has surprisingly deep amounts of text variations when re-doing actions and events, so the core gameplay “loop” doesn’t get as stale as you’d think. Hits the standard “melancholic VN about friendship” notes, but doesn’t feel cheesy or hokey. Overall it’s like a full season of some decent late-10s Cartoon Network show that no one watched because it wasn’t Steven Universe.
10 hours in and I suspect it has another 5-10 in it depending on how the last things on my check lists go. Ive reached stage 4 (final) upgrade on my hull. I could max out the other upgrades next session assuming I stick to 5 hour sessions.
Its very easy to get into a groove, getting fish/crab converting it to money, upgrading, pushing further into the world. Its satisfying to figure out a system and work it but the effect is it begins to feel less adventuresome. Which I mean, that fishing right? As soon as it feels rote it begins to feel on brand.
This game is very well tuned to never be annoying. Im in and out of a lot of menus and moving great distances against the clock and yet Im never annoyed with how anything except the action wheel works. Luckily the actions on the wheel are things I rarely need to use quickly.
My only and growing complaint is how not-spooky the spooky element becomes when you realize how easy it is to get around it. Its a bit too easy is what Im saying. At the same time I wondering if Im just missing a bunch of stuff by not being as reckless as I could. I think Im going to intentionally sleep deprive myself and just go for broke next round. See if I can actually see “some shit”.
This is a very nice and good game.
Small Saga is consistently nice and fun but it is dead easy. Its pretty neat how every item in the game is one-of-a-kind, but that said, Ive never needed anything. I’m running around with a cursed object that takes my defense to negative numbers on my main mouse and still cleaning up. You could prolly play this game while very stoned.
If it helps, apparently Lethal Company is just a single furry making it, I think we actually have a bunch of coop-focused games out there similar to it (Deep Rock Galactic, another horror-themed “drop onto planets” one that I’m forgetting) and this is actually the devolved version, which honestly, should happen more often. A trash version of Hades would maybe actually be fun to play!
It seems like it didn’t actually make any money at all, and watching some of the leads’ postmortem talks are just cringe inducing failures of self reflection.
we even watched a gdc talk from THIS YEAR where teddy deif reads a bunch of wikipedia articles for concepts they have a childs understanding of and bullshits about authenticity for an hour while talking about their shitty process for rigging a vtuber that everyone already does way bettter on their OWN youtube channels with 100 viewers per stream, which is more than OFK gets. teddy featured a bunch of vtubers and brand accounts that havent tweeted in a few months going ARE THEY DEAD but as of the filming of the gdc talk their ‘bands’ fucking twitch hadnt been touched in HALF A YEAR
i love being able to see your fucking notification pop up under your damn rig. embarassing. you are showing this to professionals at gdc and you cant even get a fucking decent quality example of the hot new tech you’re fucking showing off. i mean everyone fucks up their gdc talk but im in my element here AND this was the pre-recorded bit. no excuses
teddy kept using the word ‘authentic’ and ‘geniune’ to describe their game about literally scheming to get rich while doing absolutely nothing, which is the dream of a good number of ‘beloved’ indie devs to begin with. i think the most authentic thing about this game is that it reflects teddys values and beliefs super well: everything will be handed to you and it’ll all turn out fine
i would also like to talk about the lack of any kind of actual struggle that the characters went through in this game. no one ever needed money, no one EVER was scrounging, or worried about where money was coming from. theyd just go to hotels and empty the minibar, theyd fucking pay rent A WEEK EARLY
who in a fucking band that is starting out pays rent a week early? maybe like the fucking marching band for the police force but these guys are trying SO HARD TO BE COOL
you know whats cool PLAYING FUCKING MUSIC. these peoples lives are so devoid of fucking attrition, the only fucking conflict the money creature can think of is fighting over CONTRACTS. but spacetown went into this
also if luka was cis why did you give him a highschool graduation card why did he have a ‘its a boy’ party like hes a trans guy? do you think thats fucking representation??? to have teddy playing a cis guy who pretends they’re fucking trans??? is that what you mean by authentic identity???
OH
AND THE GALL OF THE GDC TALK TO TALK ABOUT HOW ‘PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS’ ARE DANGERUOS. WHEN THIS WHOLE GAMES PRODUCTION WAS MAKING THE MOST FUCKABLE LA FAKE PEOPLE TO GET OBSESSED WITH THEIR LIFE STORIES AND FOLLOW THEM TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH BUYING EVERY SINGLE TIE IN PRODUCT FOR THE GAME BECAUSE YOU LOVE THESE CHARACTERS SO MUCH. YOU MADE YOUR STAFF TRAIN IN CHARACTER FOR A YEAR SO THEY COULD KEEP UP TWITTER ACCOUNTS, STREAM AS THEIR VTUBERS CONSTANTLY AND PLAY SHOWS. YOU WERE BANKING ON PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND YOUR GAME FAILED BECAUSE NO ONE FUCKING CARES
EAT SHIT
also they CONSTANTLY use concert footage in their promo material but no one ever EVER plays a show in the game. the whole thing is a fucking lie so teddy dief could put that they were in a band on their tinder and break into another pool of bodies since the indie game orgy dried up
i hope everyone who worked on the game got paid very well and never have to larp teddy diefs stupid fantasy again because of the games failure.
does this make this the most indie game thing of all-time? that kind of entitlement/get rich quick thing feels pretty crucial to a lot of the space still, even today. it is funny when people unintentionally tell on themselves in this way, even if it’s a sort of cowardly way devoid of portraying any obvious ugliness.
oh wow - really? that’s really bad. that’s like… the whole selling point of the game. even i’m shocked by that.
the coveted most indie game thing of all time. I think if anything it wins the ‘first as tragedy then as farce’ honorable mention of transparently going for all the worst impulses of the past 15 years of indie games with absolutely no other ambition, then completely failing to be profitable anyway.
the only joy i can find in this is that no one fell for their bullshit and it failed fucking completely. my fucking ffxiv discord has more people than the OFK discord. all their accounts are fucking dead. they didnt stick with the bit the second they realized it wasnt making any money. at least their greed is authentic
