I might have fucked up and eaten all the food in Giza in Indiana Jones.
I should probably keep going with the main quest, but I do feel bad for this dude locked in a house…I’ll find out how to get you outta there, bud.
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I’m not sure where I got the idea that I should give Tunic a chance even though it’s always looked generic to me. I tried it and I don’t care much for it. The art is nice enough but the actual experience alternates between dull and frustrating.
Seems to be yet another example of selectively mimicking Dark Souls but leaving out the elements that make Dark Souls compelling. I do like the idea of nothing being explained in the beginning, but it doesn’t seem worth bothering with the repetitive fighting and aimlessness to try to puzzle it out.
At least it was free.
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Whenever you die a lonely, grisly death in Tsukihime, your soul goes to a “hint classroom” taught by parody versions of the two main heroines
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I also started up this tonight, I think this is all Felix’s fault.
I’m still in the on-rails opening bit and getting my brain used to the combat again (I’m still getting my parry/reflect laser timing back) but it does seem solid so far. Some weird not quite tearing hear and there which is momentarily distracting, apparently it ran much worse before but it definitely has a very high budget/held together by tape feeling here and there.
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Almost done with ATOM RPG. It’s funny that it’s a genuinely fascinating encapsulation of being an adolescent young man in the former Soviet bloc while simultaneously being a game where fucking guys wives is frequently the most consequential action you can take. 99 percent spot on to the minds of the people I used to hang out with 20 years ago except theres not enough people talking about brat 1 and 2
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Two chapters left of Resident Evil Revelations. Going to finish tomorrow.
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I’ve been playing Tales of Rebirth with my buddy since the translation patch came out. It’s really good!
I’m particularly struck by how beautiful this game is, it all looks like drawn animation rather than spritework, the motion is fluid and the characters are expressive. It rocks.
The storyline is overall pretty good, nothing spectacular but I’m a fan of the unique hume/gajuma fantasy world they have where, where the only magic-users are the anthropomorphic “gajuma”, whereas the humans are mundanes, until a disastrous experiment starts waking up magic in humans as well.
It’s an interesting world where there is a significant power imbalance, but they’re arrived at a place where humans aren’t second-class citizens, which is sort of refreshing after a million games where there’s one dominant race and one oppressed one. That’s not to say most of the plot isn’t about race, because it is, but it’s more an incidental aspect of their world than the focus.
Cute characters and homes in each city we’ve gone to so far. I really love the warm style everything is cast in, from the streets to the beds to the desert caves.
If you’ve played another Tales game since the Gamecube, combat is as you’d expect. There’s 3 planes you can shift between, and up to four players can engage in the battles. We’ve got it on the hardest difficulty, and the challenge has been genuinely tough. We’ve had to adjust our builds and our approach a few times now. Good stuff.
We were absolutely not prepared for how big a factor cooking would be in this game. Us bungling around and finding a rice risotto recipe in a random house has become a load-bearing pillar of our combat strategy, with each battle yielding us enough ingredients to make the life-giving dish, keeping us alive for the next battle, and the next.
I like a system where you don’t whittle away until you must return to a town. Here, if you succeed in battle, you can make a dish and heal to half, and that keeps you going into the next battle, and so forth. There’s been plenty of times where we’ve gotten our balls smashed by like 12 regular crows or a line of demon gekkos, so I like that it’s kept us on our toes.
There’s are some systems here that, even with the translation patch, remain completely fucking alien to us. The “food ticket” and market system defies understanding at every turn:
But! Excited to keep trying to figure it out. It’s true what they say…
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Ah boy I don’t remember the cooking system must have just mashed through it.
My favorite part is how Veigue is so absolutely full of rage he cuts off every Evil Monologue trying to get back his childhood friend.
I think once The Twist happens you can shelf the game.
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Oh yeah…
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Holy Crap Okami (PS4) is a thousand times better in Japanese. The dialog moves super quick, you can fast forward it, YOU CAN SKIP ANY CUTSCENE. I know I saw in English people complaining you can’t do any of that. Any time they start tutorializing I’ve just skipped it this is great.
All the dialog has Furigana so it is also great practice for the Advanced speaker (weird dialects, lots of talk of Japanese gods and religion and Mukashii stuff.)
Also it looks so disgustingly good I want a new TV luckily I know this in fact 3 games in one and I could just beat the first game and shelve it. I think my kid would love the big white dog. What a game to look at.
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Resident Evil games will have a character get impaled by a monster, then fall into an exploding pit of acid virus juice in a space module that then detaches and burns up in orbit, only to have the character come back later fully ready for duty.
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It’s really cool you’re digging in on those systems
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if you give it any more time, i strongly suggest using the accessibility menu to remove combat difficulty. other elements of the game are neat enough, but the combat is a death knell for the entire game on default settings
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Compelled by discussion in this thread and the game being $5 on Steam, I started playing The Talos Principle. I was surprised at the extent to which you can carbon date this game to 2014 just by playing it. It’s so of that moment! That’s not a problem though. I’m not far but I’m enjoying chilling out with these puzzles in these pretty ruins. I’m getting curious about all the secrets the game is telegraphing.
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That’s interesting. Can you say what 2014 is about it? Not sure I could pick up on that.
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It’s hard for me to put a finger on it because it’s more of a vibe, but it feels like that was the boom era of the whole “discrete quasi-diegetic puzzles in 3D space with first person controls” style of puzzle game. To me it feels like the exact bridge between Portal 2 and The Witness. The presentation feels sort of “what if Half Life had greek statuary” to me too, which also feels mid-2010’s to me.
EDIT: Also, there’s a lot of epistolary text in the style of 2014 internet, e.g.:
“Disguntlomeister’s Blogstasy, Episode 204”
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Indiana Jones is so good. Just finished Giza. If you told me this game would have a boss fight in the darkness against a blind enemy who tries to hear you out, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Game’s really got that Starbreeze DNA that MachineGames’s Wolfenstein games didn’t.
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I found that fight (and pretty much all the fights) incredibly jank tbh
the essential combat loop of “oh this looks like a stealth section” → “find a shovel to bonk nazis with” remained funny to me for the whole game but the boss fights were all a mess. I couldn’t win anything after the first fight in the battle arenas
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Oh no it’s absolutely janky, but it’s still pretty good.
I’m terrible about remembering that I can swing with my right and left fists. Always just hammering that right trigger…
I do love how forgiving stealth is most of the time. Occasionally you fuck up real bad and dudes open fire, that’s not great, but most of the time they run at you with hammers or whatever, so you can knock a few guys out and hide for a bit and things go back to normal.
I also like how they’ll occasionally just have, y’know, a solo Nazi hanging out, sight unseen. You could leave him be, but why wouldn’t you knock him the fuck out?
The “long weapon raked from behind across the nuts, then smashed in the face” is such a good, brutal attack. The foley work in this game is something else.
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Playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night while sick. At some point I got kind of stuck on this towering lightning flinging boss in the reverse castle. now I have a new rare drop blade that does continuous damage. Even stun locking / glitching the boss it took like 30 seconds f continuous swings to kill it. Prolly doing 600+ damage a second. So really the answer was to fuck off and leave this guy alone till last. Fought my reverse doppelganger and learned the power of using mist during a fight (which helped me get further with mr tall). This makes me think that turning into a poof of fog and back into a solid vampire again should be more a of a series staple.
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