Stuck on the first level just like I was as a kid. Except back then I couldn’t get mouse control so had to aim with arrow keys. I tried a controller and it is, heretically, easier than wasd and mouse for me. Got through the first two levels without too much trouble and am enjoying the understatedness of the logs. Love that we got a log about the different types of doors on the Marathon and their relative costs and which AI controls them and why. Getting the MA-75 Assault Rifle was what I think I needed as a kid. The aliens go splat and Leela teleports me through the television beam.
a cute little detail in Marathon 2 is that Durandal fixes all the pentagon papers style garbage decisions the original designers made with the rifle when he redesigns your arsenal
For the original version, I highly recommend just running it in scummvm instead of the horrifically outdated hacky fork of dosbox they used to set up this repack
Dead Space (360)
i wanted to put something here about Resident Evil 4, System Shock 2, and Jeff Goldblum’s telepods, but i’m too tired to bother at the mo; feel free to come up with your own, much better one-liners and submit them to me in the form of an interpretive dance performed in the parking lot of your nearest convenience store
managed to complete the fourth level before giving up, though in retrospect i don’t know why i bothered; i also don’t know who came up with that bit with the turret and the asteroids, or what they could’ve possibly been going for besides giving PC players something to feel smug about
Technically played this a couple days ago but played through Print Gallery Of An Artist by Daniel Linssen (made Leap Year and various other small games)
Makes me a bit dizzy with its recursive, slowly rotating self but I find it such a neat thing to just sort behold… except for the one stage right near the end where instead of rotating you sorta constantly run towards a vanishing point which killed me a ton. Still definitely worth looking at for a bit.
Replayed MGSV Ground Zeroes for whatever reason, I think to benchmark it? And it’s a fun game, so I fell into the Phantom Pain trap all over again. A lot of this has bothered me for over a decade now and it has to get purged eventually.
Introducing an idea as heinous as a bomb getting surgically implanted into a young woman’s vagina and then being coy in your presentation of it, with lines like “There’s a second one in my…” or “They put another one where we’d…never think to look for it…” is maybe the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen in a game. Either you made a big boy artwork where that particular creative choice was your crude way of portraying the horrors of Gitmo – What if the sexual violence prisoners are subjected to in real-life was inflicted on a white woman? – or you’re a chickenshit skirting censorship laws and ensuring your $80+ million dollar product doesn’t get delisted anywhere, so which is it? Get fucked.
With sequels, the nature of retroactive continuity is such that the implicit message to any audience member who got invested in the original work is, “You thought that mattered? That it was imbued with any meaning at all? Moron.”
How does Big Boss go on to become the CO of a SOCOM unit after the events of Peace Walker/Ground Zeroes/Phantom Pain? Among many things that make this impossible: One of the founding members of a cabal that serves as the shadow government of the United States has, as their day job, a senior position in the Department of Defense. They are the sworn enemy of Big Boss; how has BB ever been allowed back into the fold of the military-industrial complex after the events of these games? Is there a worthwhile thematic point to be made by these games when their underlying story logic doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever? Why entreat the player to consider, in fetishistic detail, anything about real-world historical events, organizations, maneuvers, policy, etc. in that case? Isn’t that just a form of self-importance, of jerking off?
Nothing could be more self-defeating to Phantom Pain than Ground Zeroes. You crafted snappy, intuitive core mechanics revolving around third-person stealth gameplay and then buried it under twenty tonnes of bullshit. I let all those guys on Mother Base die when I had to sort through which ones spoke Kikiongo because I’d amassed nearly a thousand of them by that point and no, I wasn’t going to devote my life to menu navigation. This isn’t fun. I don’t care.
Pokopia is funny, because it’s supposed to be this cozy pastoral sim where you craft habitats for animals and harvest veggies, but then the second area has you putting bags of garbage and utility poles to string electrical wires everywhere
This as what got Adelegion (sp) (James Howell) to quit all public metal gear analysis.
He was working as an instructor and contractor in the late 80s. Hes sort of a celebrity… He directly opposed the patriots so its weird hes around the USA at all. But hes running FOXHOUND while building the land based OuterHeaven, the second one.. after which BB fakes his death again? Peace walker could have made it so OuterHeaven happen 3 times if they wanted. Big Shell is like #4 and I guess OuterHaven is like #5?!? That whole history is a mess of soft reboots made into a linear timeline.
I like that the self serious presentation sort of turns MGS into a mystery religion but it is maddening.
Started up Solas 128 and it’s been a bit since I couldn’t tell whether a puzzle game was super hard or if I am just terrible at it, but here we are. It’s basically one of those laser/mirror reflection puzzle games, except lightly tied into music and made into a somewhat complicated puzzle box where you may need to solve the same puzzle different ways multiple times in order to eventually make progress elsewhere. At some point a couple hours in it branches in two different directions and I’m currently stuck in both of them. One of them I made a good ways in but am stuck on some rough macro puzzle where I seem to have to either arrange multiple rooms in certain states or find a way to get their multiple individual solutions to take place at the same time.
The other I got stuck fairly early on and even using the three built-in hints I still can’t grock how the heck to get it to work. Like on that path if two lines meet in phase (it isn’t a constant laser but one sending out pulses every few beats) they get sent off at a diagonal with their combined colors in a light sense, there’s also a prism block you can place that divides the received light into a couple different ones shooting out each side. I have to figure out a way to break the lower incoming color into its component lights, have one combine with the one from the left (or maybe right, they are the same color) which will then be at a diagonal, but it needs to be straightened out to get to the goal but hitting it with another color changes said color away from the needed one. Scarily enough that rambling description actually oversimplifies it.
…Worth noting is that I actually got stuck in the tutorial for a bit, the game does not explain anything at all which is noble in theory but at times is not the best idea.
Oh yeah, the new season of Skate. opened up for all the plebs who didn’t pay a premium so I got a new island and a whole ton of new objectives to do. A bunch of them are stupidly tricky so it’ll be nice to have something different to skate around and pick away at for a bit.
He and I were acquaintances before I had any relationship with this site, and at the time I didn’t get where he was coming from because I hadn’t played MGSV, and now I do get it. It bears saying maybe that I don’t object unconditionally to something like this being portrayed; I object to it being portrayed in such a crass and dumb manner, which is then modulated, in a very opportunistic way, to evoke something truly horrific without actually having to reckon with it. It is putting a repugnant notion into the head of the audience, in service of something that is very trite and silly, and then it is maintaining an inferential distance from that notion for no other reason than a commercially motivated plausible deniability. That’s what’s obscene to me: In how & why it chooses to portray horror, it is simultaneously exploitative, pretentious, and cowardly. An empty vulgarity that is both self-satisfied and cynically self-bowdlerized. Something like this should be condemned in the strongest terms imo.
Lorelei and The Laser Eyes is a game I played for 22 hours in a week so we can say I liked it a lot.
I think the developer fundamentally wanted to make a puzzle book, but no one buys puzzle books. So built as much game as needed. One of the first things you find is a literal puzzle book for bonus puzzles.
It is a confident game filled with love of Roberto Felini and Grasshopper Manufacture. It is sparse with no voice acting and barely any music.
Towards the end the puzzles spiralled in on themselves and needed 3 layers of logic, but that’s okay even if I had to cheat. I sat and stared at a puzzle for 20 minutes before I resorted to such tactics. Sometimes I was flabbergasted, or felt stupid, or “…” at seeing the solution. These are all great feelings to have.
There are lots of nice philosophic musings on the nature of art and audience. As a wildly-unpopular creative person I resonate with this. Can you make art just for yourself or the art and be happy? Does audience reaction justify the terror and sweat of creation? It’s something I certainly think about.
Likes and indeed blood potions are an intrinsic knowledge SOMEBODY looked at my work. That’s a powerful feeling. Whenever I find an obscure youtube video lately I’ve made sure to leave a comment thanking them for uploading. I’ve been thinking I should try and write letters and emails to creatives I’ve loved in my lifetime.
I’d say this post got away from me but not really. A Game Of The Year, for me.
Installed Dragon Age: Origins again. Playing this on the 360 in my late 20s after a ridiculous break-up was how I graduated from Zelda/Smash Bros gamer to the rabid rpg mechanics slut I am now.
It’s comforting. I’m playing on normal. There are issues running it at newer specs. The writing is still pretty alright. It’s cool to see the puppetry that’s been replaced by mocap.
I’ve made a dual wielding warrior dwarf noble. Trying to set it up so I am pressing as few buttons as possible.
Wild to think about what happened with the series.
when I was playing dao a month or two ago i finally stopped because i couldn’t stop noticing how almost all the NPCs were white. it started to completely override any thoughts I had about the game, I began to understand what I’d grown up playing too clearly. at one point they even accidentally drew attention to it because alistair says morrigan looks chasind and yet she is blindingly pale unlike every other chasind npc. the disturbing fantasy ethnostate
