I’ve decided I hate ray tracing. it’s more game developer cowardice, trying to get out of having any artistic input in the image, turning everything into a 3rd person free cam photo lit by the sun. always trying to cede responsibility for the image onto the player, you’re making the game, have an opinion on how it should look coward
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the sci-fi framing device in 1000xresist is wearing really thin. i don’t mind the time travel mechanically but seeing the tactical anime cyborg characters sucks the pathos out of the psychonaut vignettes
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Got to the bit in the Tsukihime remake where Arcueid wheels out a whiteboard to explain all the vampire lore
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I know this game/series has always had a reputation for being trash but I’ve always felt like there is something there. Not enough for it to ever reach greatness, it only ever peaks at alright but I don’t recall ever being let down when I booted it up for a little bit.
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I beat Alien Isolation for the first time, on hard mode. It was one of those games where for the first third I thought I was playing a stone cold masterpiece, in the middle third it seemed like a good game that showed its hand a little too early, and by the final third I was playing it for the sake of finishing it and not actually enjoying myself.
The derelict flashback seemed really misjudged even as I was playing it and I couldn’t believe the game kept pulling that kind of should-have-been-a-cutscene stuff with the Anesidora and then the dish antenna spacewalk. As soon as you’re in the space suit for the second time you intuitively know nothing will happen to you, because it can’t when the mechanics/pacing are that laborious.
The Alien itself loses a lot of its bite when you get the flamethrower. Learning AI feeling out its distance from you, trying to flank you, and waiting to snatch you in the vents didn’t make up for this. At the same time, the game puts you into more and more direct confrontations with the Alien in the back half. It took things from being tense to annoying. The facehuggers are the apotheosis of this dynamic because they are never anything more than trigger point jumpscare tests of fast-twitch reflexes, the complete opposite of what the game is initially going for with the Alien. It turns into Doom.
You can only pass by a lit-up landmark you know you’ll have to backtrack to in order to activate two switches at opposite ends of the map after the Alien inevitably shows up, or wait it out in suspense while a door unlocks or a train/elevator arrives, or scour a room you’ve already scoured before for a keycard in plain sight that only becomes interactive when the narrative determines it’s important, so many times before you start to feel ahead of the design and start seeing the gameplay loop instead of the beautiful presentation. It felt like the devs had a perfectly good 9-10 hour game that market forces demanded be stretched out twice as long.
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Finished level 20 of Luck Be A Landlord. Great game! Funny what games wind up grabbing me lately.
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Been playing Arco which has been touted as The Lost Prestige Indie game of 2024 and it made a strong first impression with its setting and splendid vistas and little Pico-8 guys running around but it quickly devolved into…. Not exactly slop, but the middle and especially end betray the atmosphere of the beginning to become something pulpier and more gamey and far less memorable
Combat is pretty clever as this new, 1-2 controllable characters only, vaguely TRPGish / vaguely real time with pause-ish system, with Into The Breachian possibility of planning enough in advance to never take any hit. It feels good though I suspect it doesn’t have too much lasting power on its own, which is compensated by frequent protagonist shifts and getting showered with skill points. You go over one character’s entire skill tree in about 3 hours, 3 times, then the game ends 30 minutes later.
There’s resource management in between fights but with no real sense of friction, presumably not to let anyone fall behind. Too many one-use items I never bothered with because it just seemed easier and better long-term to master my permanent toolkit instead. Sometimes games are too generous for their own good
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Does it ever happen to you that there’s a book, movie, or video game that looks okay but that you’re not particularly interested in, but a friend really likes it and is excited to share and brings it to you to borrow? Which you appreciate but aren’t sure when you might get around to trying the thing in question and wonder whether you’ll feel obligated to finish it after you start it even if you don’t really care for it?
Anyway, Stellar Blade didn’t look all that appealing to me at first aside from maybe some flashy graphics but it’s been growing on me more as I go along. It feels a lot like a mishmash of other games with a sterile sheen and doll-like characters. I like exploring the environments and there’s some nice design work, and as long as I keep it set to easy mode I can see myself playing it to the end. Last night I was surprised to find myself in a Dead Space-looking area.
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this is obviously way too on the nose for me, BUT
i think the game would be better if they doubled the top speed and got rid of the gates and tricks and just made it a super-scaler-feeling racing game. maybe make the turns harder so you have to actually slow down (the doubled top speed probably takes care of this by itself, tho). the movement feels quite good for the faux-3D style they are riffing on, but the tricks are probably too finicky. the tricks most worth doing point-wise are 4-button (8 for the special mountain bike trick!) sequences, and there’s scant generosity in terms of the inputs, esp. considering the relatively short airtime for most jumps. tony hawk, this ain’t.
but there’s something really compelling about just blasting down the city streets, punching people off their skateboards and getting sick air…
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the horrible murder elves stole all my shit and gave me a bunch of nerfs but i still managed to incinerate all the pit scum with my mind
found a space marine in a cage. this huge rumbling viking is the best space marine characterisation i’ve yet encountered
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i am iron fae
if i don’t do it, someone may
though still early days, officially i am better than completely terrible at street fighter now
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ah hah. ahe he he. hoo hoo.
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also, current vibe:
i kinda wish the game worked avatars into fighting ground, let you choose high-res gurning faces where you can see your pores for the versus screen, auto-generated profile pics for your character like baldur’s gate or something
(or even let you snap your own, like tekken 8)
i don’t know that they would need story scenes as-such, given that the whole world tour mode serves as the avatar’s story and that the arcade story all seems to take place before world tour—but maybe like so many rpgs the player could answer a quick questionnaire about background and let the game auto-generate a nominal pre-quest story ladder appropriately?
that’s a lot of extra material, granted
i just want to use azurelore as my main outside of battle hub avatar battles, which are kinda drawn-out and slow
this feels like it could be kinda revolutionary for the genre
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I got my steam deck yesterday and today I am replaying Killer7 for the first time in almost 20 years and I am much worse at it than I remember.
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the final boss of that chapter is legit hard at last, I was down to just cassia and ulfar when I beat her. really admired their willingness to mess with my strategy after spending chapter 2 getting more and more OP.
the fight would probably have been marginally easier with Heinrix instead of Marazhai but I didn’t have that option
also I like how half of your party’s final companion quests kick off right after you get back to your ship at last so you know you’re in the last free roaming chapter. I have very few pacing complaints at this point for being like 42 hours in and probably only 2/3 of the way through, if anything I’d have cut those 2 hours out of chapter 1. I think everyone also mastered their second class with the XP from ending that chapter so we’re all just about to get our 3rd.
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Nearing the end of Metaphor I realise I have completed 4 major RPGs (the other three are Unicorn Overlord, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and FF7Rebirth) all from this year. I think this is the most RPGs of comparable length (75+ hours) I’ve ever finished in a year. I have feelings about it - mostly exhaustion - but I had an urge to graph out some of them based on my thoughts lingering from the RPG definition thread. All lines and units are vibes-based and the scale is arbitrary.
To be clear, I don’t think ‘sense of rote’ is always a negative, I think of it as just the type of pacing you fall into when plot progression doesn’t feel significant or varied and it gets overtaken by more systems learning and grind optimisation which can be its own pleasure.
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This is a great chart
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I’m sick so I am back at my Metroid Prime save and just put it down at the Big Bad Pirate. I think it is just this guy and then the final run to the final boss and definitely not an absolute tedious world crossing scavenger hunt as if you haven’t been doing that the whole game.
Putting color coded enemies in the room with the Big Bad Pirate is just the worst. Real fuck you rentals level design. What’s the final area? Uhh super dark cave with grey mushrooms. And there are platforms you can only see with xray vision.
…
I don’t think it was the Scavenger Quest that broke everyone I think it was this later-middle 30% that is just all the games worst tendencies. I ended up having to repeat 20 minutes because I decided to test my luck on a side-path that I was taking a little bit damage in but they made it absolutely as long as possible to make sure you couldn’t attrtion it and simultaneously made it where you couldn’t try to escape.
It really has a lot of shitty locks to shitty keys. Against first two hours are like Best Game Of All Time and then it just saps your energy away from you.
Didn’t help this ps4 controller apparently has right stick drift so I kept having to yell at having the wrong weapon equipped.
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Finally made it to Heartman, now time for some more challenging mountain terrain. why did I think it was going to get “easier?” when it’s the “harder” part of the game. Heartman’s thing is pretty funny, kind of.
I was wondering why there were only ziplines around half the map then had it pointed out it would be very stupid to have them be placed globally, the game would be unplayable. I’m not sure how it determines what structures get placed where and how much help to give players.
I am…sorta ready for this game to be done. I think.
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