You go in these small randomly generated levels and shoot masked gunmen in suits. different colored masks also shoot it out with each other. there’s some kind of tension meter or something in the corner that builds when you’re getting shot at and seems to increase the chance of a malfunction, maybe the damage you take too. certain enemies just being near you seems to build the meter. there’s a counter that slowly increases while you’re in the level that must be the difficulty
enemies and floating gold refrigerators drop coins and upgrade resources. you escape the level through a microwave that takes you back to your homebase, which you can upgrade. you take tasks, which either put some items in the world or make certain enemies drop certain items and get so many of them and bring them back to the nurse at the nurses station upstairs from your underground lair.
You have unlimited ammo but only a 10 round magazine to start with, middle mouse button racks or releases the slide which you have to do after reloading from empty or when you get a malfunction
just realized this is true for me too (only bioware game I’ve finished). I played it when it came out and forced myself to finish it because everyone around me loved it but oh my god me and veronica tried to play it again like a year ago and had to stop cuz it’s not even funny it’s just uncomfortable!!! I love how the dude who came up with the made up racist language has a thing on his linked in that’s like DONT ASK ME ABOUT JADE EMPIRE!!! I REGRET IT!!!
The thing I most remember about it (aside from the offensiveness of … everything) is that I just beat the last boss by looping between the one style that paralyzed him and some other one. It somehow felt like I broke the game in the most boring way possible.
I was looking forward to Jade Empire really hard after enjoying KOTOR 1 on the Xbox. Inspired by this review, I rented it and knew within 30 minutes that the game was trash.
Also between the hours of 2-4am I played some more Gran Turismo 3. I now have a 2000HP racecar that can’t turn that makes everything except Special Stage Routes and Cote De Azur playable
Well, nothing in Talos Principle 2 wowed me as much as just the initial shock of the scope of it, but then I always have been an ideas first guy. Each chapter brings new revelations and I was constantly surprised by how big they were willing to go, in one way or another, but each step is a bit smaller than the one that came before, to the extent that the ending seems a bit cramped and rushed, relative to the big openness offered to you by the rest of the game. I wonder if they ran out of money.
I appreciate how much they tried to do with their premise. There’s not quite enough writing to make it all pan out, especially at the end, where it seems like the living part of the world runs out of gas and the game just focuses on a couple main characters and the choices that lead to your ending. But talking to your buddies is nice.
I also actually like how the game itself has a point of view. Your choices are not evaluated neutrally by the writers, it’s clear that they have a bias and are attempting to demonstrate that not all moralities are equivalent. The simplicity of their chosen perspective (the simplicity of each perspective, really) might read as annoying to some, but I dunno, I was just glad to experience a piece of art where the artist had an actual opinion.
The puzzles were mostly not difficult until the optional last bit (there were some real brain teasers in there) but I’m glad for that. The game was more interested in feeding you novel mechanics than overly deepening complexity, which I think is the better choice, especially in a game with a prominent narrative. I also appreciate that each puzzle has a limited amount of space and moves - if you know the solution ahead of time, every puzzle can be completed in like a minute flat. It means you can comprehend the whole thing in your brain at once, and also that on the occasions when you softlock yourself you are not really losing any progress by reloading. (Earlier in the game I really admired that each room seemed to be built to make softlocking yourself impossible, but eventually they give up on that in the interest of broadening their palette.)
Biggest disappointment was that the “breaking out” metapuzzles, rather than being a huge revelation like in Talos 1, are themselves regular and marked in the UI. They’re still fun to figure out, and them being predictable in this way is narratively justified, but it’s still a bummer after how mindblowing they were in the first game. I guess that’s the trade - big beginning awe in exchange for lategame metapuzzle awe. Not quite convinced it’s a worthwhile trade, but the game overall is so much more interesting that I’m willing to say it’s an improvement.
This inspired me to finally get around to trying those Zelda 64 decomps, and damn, it’s wild to be able to play OoT and MM at over 100 FPS.
Jumped through the hoops to get them on my Steam Deck, where I’ll probably play them through, even if I’m too lazy to hook up a keyboard so I can hit F1 and tweak stuff a bit.
Hyper Iria we watched youtube men talk about video games they paid money for. One of them buys the worst indie games that have questionable physical releases. The other got some questionable repros that all had the exact same ink-jet error on their boxes. Anyways they featured this and I didn’t know it. It’s like all those Anime PC Engine games I played but a little more competent. Love seeing dericative 90s anime stuff. Will have a good time in the future with it.
Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou this came up on the attract mode and I dived for the controller to try it. Seems like a cool RPG with a weird premise. It looks beautiful. Had a pretty early in the scheme of things fan-translation and I had not heard of it. I don’t think this is the game I have seen for decades in bargain bins with a man with a turban on the cart. Mostly using this post to mark both of these in my memory.
one of the upsides of the N64 actually having a weirdly modern GPU architecture (which was rather poorly cut down in the N64 itself) that required them to actually like, target SGI-designed rendering APIs in C and so on, is that the games are abnormally portable and much easier to improve via porting than almost any other console’s. that was why UltraHLE worked on hardware that was not as many orders of magnitude more powerful as were normally necessary to implement interpreter-based emulation.
I keep dipping in and out of Tomb Raider 2013, a game I’ve finished…twice, I think? Once on PS3, then again on PS4.
I was gonna say something about “maybe they don’t need to spend so much on games when a game from 2013 still looks pretty damn good!” but the budget on this thing was like $100 million, so insane no matter how you crack it. But! Apart from the character model faces dating it a bit, the animations and environments and stuff still really holds up.
Still absurdly gory and violent, hit the part where Lara says “I hate tombs!,” so, y’know. The stuff that was corny and off-putting then still is now. But it’s still pretty fun to scramble around and climb shit in here.
I attempted to do some of the TDM stuff in Let It Die, but it looks like anybody outside of Bronze that’s doing the TDM stuff have either like, a cadre of level 75 fighters and like, a Coen, or a cadre of level 150 fighters. So, you can’t do shit – all you do by racking up points in TDM is open yourself up to being raided by dickheads you can’t Revenge on because they’re overpowered. It’s a pretty stupid, bullshit system, and what makes it even bigger bullshit is you get absolutely no information about the person you’re raiding other than their TDM rank and when they last logged in, which doesn’t really help you with strategizing who to attack.
I’m probably just going to remove any fighters from the waiting room defense, and just do what I’ve always been doing which is keeping my SPLithium and Money relatively low because I don’t really want to keep dealing with being raided several times a day when I can’t do dick back.
