Started messing with Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, a game that’s been around forever (I think it was originally a Vita game). It’s…not bad! At least so far.
Where I found Batman Arkham Origins Blackgate to be an absolutely miserable translation of a 3D game to 2D, this one feels a lot better. The controls are good and snappy, and it rewards you for being smart about how you go about its levels (there are plenty of tools and abilities to sneak around, so the game prefers you keep kills to a minimum to max out the potential score per level).
It could be it winds up middling by the end, but so far it seems alright.
It’s also wild that the assassin in this one uses a blade hidden in her shoe and just does some real gnarly acrobatic kicks to slit thoats.
Nod campaign actually ended up being the highlight here, some very interesting missions and much more compelling characters than GDI (sorry Michael).
Game itself wasn’t very good though. Mostly boring. Extremely mid. Not as bad as Generals Vanilla, but not far off either. I can feel the executive meddling at work with the excessive hand-holding and complete neutering of TibSun’s iconic look.
I surprised myself in that I finished Dead Space (2023) after not really gelling with the first chapter.
I realise I just like exploring an industrial spaceship and using weapons with alt-fires while the computer says things like ‘Emergency quarantine’ and ‘Decontamination protocol’. I am a simple player. When the remake came out I don’t recall anyone having much to say about it, I guess because Dead Space doesn’t have a large die hard fanbase and the series has expressed all of its ideas already. So what this amounts to is a pile of slight changes that few are motivated to discuss. I am one of them.
Endless petty catalogue of ‘In the original…. and in the remake….’ thoughts:
Nicole was aged up and made more plot significant, having a whole sidequest line tracking her actions prior to the outbreak. I don’t recall how obvious the twist was in the original game (that she’s been dead the whole time). They really oversell it much earlier in the game but I’m not sure to what dramatic effect. Kinda an ‘Aerith dies’ winking acknowledgement but not as famous.
It’s implied there’s a larger number of survivors on the ship at the time the game takes place. Mostly unitologists sabotaging the ship remaining in the crew deck which you don’t get to until late in the game. They’ve all committed ritual suicide by the time you get there but the number of NPCs and other actors fictionally on board makes the ship feel oddly crowded on this go around.
Isaac being voiced leads to a lot of funny rewriting conceits. Whenever Hammond, your boss, calls you he doesn’t immediately acknowledge an action and give Isaac an order (as he does in the original) but just conveniently asks Isaac about the item he just picked up immediately after it is picked up to which Isaac always responds with some variation of ‘yeah’. It feels like Isaac should be able to be more proactive with checking in on comms if he’s going to be voiced. He never actively calls Nicole, even after meeting her, very weird.
To make the battery-finding sections have slightly more to them, some power relays involve a power redirection puzzle. Usually some absurd fuseboard where you choose between the lights and the doors having power. I’m fairly sure these weren’t in the original and I am neutral on them.
They bring over the zero-G controls from DS2 (GOOD) which is probably the best addition. Especially in sections where you have to accurately shoot little panels while avoiding like 5 enemies on the outside of the ship.
There’s a lot of Tacoma-style hologram cutscenes which I think weren’t in the original either. A lot of the time I am genuinely not even sure if there is a change. If it is a change it feels very meh to get a bunch of mocap scenes in here for not much of an effect. Only one time are you expected to have been paying attention to see where the hologram walked off to but these are otherwise inessential.
The game has sidequests and you can go back to any prior area at any time. Sidequests really bloat the whole thing and reveal how poor the game’s map is for conversion to a metroidvania. There’s no tools or abilities for gaining access to new areas, it is literally just security clearance keys and their corresponding doors to return to later. Also regular lockers get security levels that you can’t see unless you go right up to them and doublecheck the number. In a lot of cases they just have a health pack in them. The only other incentive to go back to areas is weapon upgrades which unlock parts of the weapon tree to upgrade but very much an ‘extra steps’ addition. In the original you got a sense of the rest of the ship being something Isaac would never in his right mind return to just so his Ripper blades could get an additional ricochet.
They introduce more prestige AAA cutscenes where the player isn’t allowed to move while people do things around you. They steal a scene from DS2 where Isaac has to watch someone turn into a necromorph close-up as it goes ‘oogie boogie boo’. Isaac generally doesn’t make any interesting decisions in these scenes, usually because he’s on the other side of a bulletproof window but then this was true of the original.
The balance of weapons doesn’t seem to have changed too much. Plasma Cutter, Pulse Rifle, Ripper, and Contact Beam is the best loadout again, though they’ve meddled unnecessarily with some alt-fires. The alt-fire for the contact beam is the old primary fire and the new primary is a giant laser but not it’s not quite as good at crowd control. The pulse rifle has its DS2 grenade alt-fire which is only good for crowd control in front of you. They’ve removed most AoE alt-fires basically which sucks in a game where you’re often in cramped rooms with monsters comin up behind. I still like the conceit of using [mostly] engineering tools as weapons even if they make them more like conventional guns.
Lighting is darker in a lot of rooms, I guess to showcase new lighting tech in the same environments but it also means the environment is less readable. There’s a section where you go to the executive quarters which looked like a Star Trek set in the original since it’s nicely lit carpeted suites and stands as a good contrast to the distinct but samey ribbed look throughout the rest of the ship. In the remake about 50% of rooms are in the annoying middle ground between moody lighting and pitch black.
Chapter 9, the military rescue ship level, is a great level, which I didn’t appreciate in the original. You explore a completely new environment, disarm a nuke, introduce a freaky new enemy, and witness a major character’s death. It’s very silly that a military ship that explicitly came to destroy necromorphs is overrun in about 5 minutes while Isaac blasts his way through it with ease. I think the level strikes the right ‘ action scifi horror rental’ tone and since there’s no sidequests or backtracking in this level (the level takes place on a ship external to the rest of the deadspacevania) it has the least problems of the newer changes.
They rewrite a lot of chapter 10 and the evil cultist antagonist’s whole deal. They love having scenes where he stasis freezes a person and monologues around them. He was kinda creepy in the original and willingly sacrificed himself to the weird converter bats near the end without hesitation. In the remake he is just Dr. Smugman and there’s a new death scene for hime where a giant tentacle steals the marker and he gets all upset when it kills him as well. I can’t remember the line but he might as well yell ‘this wasn’t the deal, tentacle!’ to the fucking tentacle. What was he expecting from the scenario? To be the partner in crime? Guy who’s not afraid to die for religious zealotry is scarier than selfish opportunist. I feel like I am the only person on the planet who cares about this kind of change made and in moments like this I feel like I have to share the nonsense. This change also makes zero sense because the marker is just waiting in the cargo bay in the original and in the remake the tentacle presumably just politely loads it into the cargo bay after dramatically stealing it? Who cares?
Perhaps the pettiest gripe. They removed my favourite line - a videogame thing I think about a lot.
Original: https://youtu.be/_5oe_Cp8-ZM?si=NgpqpJFvve25jce5&t=1845
Remake: https://youtu.be/SgXsn6Fbqvg?si=z1DKukXsZ2kpX0zW&t=3342
This one is puzzling because the ship’s voice lines all seem to be reused from the original, not re-recorded so it would presumably have been trivial to mark for inclusion. I think the omission of this line reads to me as the script-writer filtering out any humour or minor detail to replace it with DRAMA. It’s very minor but speaks to the little things that stay with you. I’d trade all the sidequests for this line.
So we have a 2008 pseudo-classic remake with minor plot and character changes, more open-ended environments, the addition of sidequests, and many of the same issues as the original. It improves on some things but keeps enough weird conceits that no-one will go to bat for it. The changes are there for fans but almost unnoticeable even to them. It is functionally the same result as Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.
Lego Fortnite Bricklife has distilled a lot of the juice of GTA V RP servers and The Sims and Roblox Obby tasks into a weird polished little gameplay diamond (with all the edges and messy humanity of those games sanded off, of course) and I wish I had any idea if there was a place where people were having game design conversations about it
The truck simulator winter event started and you have to drive through portals to WINTERLAND that are dotted all over the map to deliver christmas shit to and from. The whole thing feels like an excuse to test snow physics but it is kinda fun driving your truck in way shittier conditions than there are anywhere else on the map. I made 15 deliveries so now I can decorate my truck with christmas lights
The number of remakes that have either improved (heaven forfend) or at a minimum just been as good as their original games can be counted on one hand. It’s incredibly depressing to think about what that means for modern dev companies and what they think their audiences demand
I feel like I’m the closest this forum has to a Dead Space fan and I’m left with a feeling of how distant and strange 2008 is. The remake doesn’t even seem to play to nostalgia, let alone take things in interesting new directions. Looking back on it I can’t believe Dead Space supported a transmedia franchise at one point.
Dead Space to me was always like a prototypical example of like “solidly mid but well liked industry veterans get to play with a big budget and the result is both interesting for that budget and still mid.” Like Shadow of Mordor
I played the main trilogy and even the weird spinoffs. I was Invested but now the first one was the only one I remember fondly tbh. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the remake if I ever get around to it.
To be fair I bailed on the third game after like 40 minutes because it was just getting really watered down.
Dead Space was a game that I played the demo of, got to the point where I could make a breadcrumb trail to the next objective show up in this linear hallways game, and promptly uninstalled it.
It is unmatched in its condescension towards the player, perhaps the earliest adapter of the “DSP is our target audience” design philosophy
I quite like the original Dead Space, it’s a perfectly serviceable RE4-like with a fun environment, clever gimmick, and some fun worldbuilding stuff (that the series discards by the time of 3). I replayed it a bunch back in the 360 era and would in fact replay it again if the PC port wasn’t Literally Broken with a soft lock immediately after you get the plasma cutter if your computer runs it above 30fps lol. Speaking of, Plasma Cutter maybe one of my favorite guns in a game of all time? Literally goated, love that they let you play through the whole game never having to switch.
Dead Space 2 keeps up with the vibe and introduces some fun complications and has a surprisingly fun multiplayer mode, but also Isaac is voiced and this would be a bad portent. Story is completely whatever. Bonus fact since someone mentioned DSP which is my trigger phrase: This is the game that got him kicked off blip because he roleplayed as “the last nazi” and pretended the necromorphs were jews.
Dead Space 3 is completely fucked up terrible. The best part of the game is the very start in the ship graveyard. The main antagonist ambushes you, gets you in a compromised position, and then you escape in some sudden chaos three times in nearly identical ways throughout the course of the game. The crafting system is a joke, both because it prioritizes microtransactions to skip playing the game and also because you can trivialize everything by slapping a no-self-damage mod on a rocket launcher and just blasting point blank the whole game. The story discards what made the original 2 so fascinating - that the markers were human copies of something so far beyond our understanding, the imperfect attempting to replicate the perfect - in favor of uhhhh now they make ego the living planet but evil. Fucking stupid.
I think maybe my favorite thing about Indiana Jones, besides the game itself, is how quickly you go from booting the game to playing it. You can’t skip the publisher logos but the few seconds it takes for them to appear and disappear is just enough time for the game to load so that when they fade out to the menu screen it’s just the game ready to be continued.
You see Indiana Jones standing there where you left him and you hit continue and maybe two whole seconds later you have control. Every game should be like this one in this regard.
finally started and finished a new, not buggy, run of soul reaver 1. now i can finally play the soul reaver 2 remaster without that nagging voice in my head telling me i need to finish the first one before i can move on.
finally bought the package of all the Rail Slave games except Selfie nd am working thru them in order
nppd rush
his first game NPPD Rush - Milk of the Ultraviolet took me under an hour to figure out and complete, pretty normal if visually noisy 2010s game feel game where u use a meaty spray gun to blast guys who sometimes have slightly more hp than they look like they should etc etc with RS’ usual penchant for unreadable prose nd chaotic and/or under-explained hud. enemy deaths create red bloodstains on your screen but your screen-bloodstains are blue. u get no iframes against the fireballs so u can suddenly lose like half ur health to one if ur not careful. you do play as a cop in this one, exact nature of your job is extremely convoluted & conspiratorial nd given perfunctory treatment.
uriel's chasm (again)
i tried to replay Uriel’s Chasm for 15 minutes then turned it off at the scrolling shooter bit, ive cooled on it. this is the point RS starts bringing loftier christian theming into his games but it remains for the most part mechanically staid nd too piecemeal imo. i still like the 1st level, i mentioned the game-w/in-a-game frame story last time i posted UC nd more than a sense of transcendence or w/e it fits into a broader trend of contrasting suggestions of a vibrant RSverse w gaminess/abstraction. there looks to be more of that blurring diegesis stuff in Nauseous Pines
snowflake tattoo
i am currently playing Snowflake Tattoo which feels more RS’s own game, leaving behind the rote shooty bits, even if runs r a little long and monotonous. the tension between world-feeling and fake gameness is implicit this time
the HUD and texts are nicely illegible across the board - u get more walls of text overlaid on action as in the 1st level of Uriel’s Chasm. there’s a crazy visual effect in this game that i thought would be yet more filigree atop a normal shoot thing but it factors into the gameplay in an obtuse way that plays with world-feeling once again. finally feels coherent, though we’ll see if that impression survives. the way u attack in this game is not kind to the wrist.
