Downloading Highguard
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Me too…
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Played one match of Highguard and lost.
Plusses: you can ride a horsie
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The irony of this launching 48 hours after my polycule started getting into Deadlock is deeply funny.
Unfortunately I think might Deadlock rock. I don’t like that it does anymore than you do.
brawl mode hints at them trying some more contained TF2 style modes too.
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Alright I played one match and can’t get in because matchmaking broke
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feels like Apex Legends but the sightlines are really long so snipers are the best options
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there’s several phases. Gathering stuff → getting the sheildbreaker (a sword) → planting the sheildbreaker → planting 2 bombs at the base. not clear if there’s a way to turn it around after the sheildbreaker is planted
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there’s base building but the bases have a million walls so it’s basically useless to try and fortify the entire thing strategically, they’re also really easy to get lost in, so they’re hard to defend.
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you can ride a horsie
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it’s free to play. Skin packs are $20
I don’t like it, on a team of 3 if you suck then it makes playing worse. It isn’t like a battle royale where you have to stick together, the maps are small but also easy to get lost in.
No healer class as far as I can tell, or support class, you gotta shoot or die.
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i keep telling other AAA designers I got into deadlock because of the “art and vibes” but secretly it’s because Ivy lmao. “I can be a gargoyle?! saweeeeet”
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I wanna give Highguard a chance but it seems like a very sweaty Apex Like and it seems specifically geared for people who played Apex. so unless you played that for 1000 hours you will get slaughtered. I have lost 2 matches and it isn’t clear what I need to do in order to not die
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I’m too bad at shooters to enjoy this lol
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They should bring back bot matches
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YES
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Apex with horses? It’s Apex Horses. That’s funny to me
It turns out Deadlock has those. Valve has a more complete shooter and technically it hasn’t even been announced yet.
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yeah, deadlock bots matches are a great way to practice the game and new heroes. An online match is absolutely frantic and it’s hard to learn everything.
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Street Brawl in Deadlock is quite good, perfect little contained mode for people who don’t wanna play the strategic macrogame of farming and counter-itemization.
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Thanks to post-xmas sales and some upcoming games, I have a lot of RPGs on my to-do list. So I guess it’s JRPG season for the next month or so. I’ve plowed through 3 already to try to clear as much of my plate before DQVII comes out.
First one was DQ I HD2D. I started on hard difficulty, and was checking it every now and then to make sure I selected it correctly because the game seemed to have basically no challenge. Then I crossed the bridge to the western continent and got destroyed immediately. I was dying to regular enemies so much that I had to switch the difficulty down one notch. It’s surprising what a difference having just one party member makes. So often the boss battles had me going from “WTF, this is bullshit” to “ah yes indeed, twas a finely tuned battle”.
Tenshi No Uta: Rudie was right about the title screen. The translation is about passable, I don’t think it’s AI but it feels like the kind of roughness you’d have gotten if the game was translated for its original release. Some lines feel like they were translated without context, like a guy in a hideout saying “We have to get out of here” which I think was supposed to be him telling you to get out of his home. Also I swear some horses had pidgeon noises as dialogue.
I like the backdrop of celtic/christian mythology in the British Isles and the basic looking character designs. It sort of puts me in mind of classic 60s anime like The Little Norse Prince.
The set up of the plot is interesting, but it sort of falls apart after you’ve gathered all the party members and set out on the vaguely defined main plot thread. The music is great as well and there’s a fair bit of charm in the NPC interactions.
As far as story presentation goes, I feel like both this and the sequel are sort of straddling the line between the JRPGS of the 80s where plot progression came via cryptic clues from NPCs, and the more anime cutscene-centric 90s CD-ROM games.
Otherwise the game is a pretty standard no-frills RPG that feels pretty rough and unfinished in places. The battles move super fast, which is the only real plus about the battle system.
There’s almost no challenge. I didn’t get game over until the final boss who is a pretty big difficulty spike (not made easier by the weird decision to make 3 out of 4 final party members flimsy magic users). I thought I’d need to grind several levels, but luckily I found a trick that made it trivial. Overall a pretty easy breezy game with a certain level of charm, but probably won’t be on any top 10 JRPG lists.
There’s a bonus comedy radio drama in the cutscene menu about … domestic abuse?
The sequel seems like a better game in almost every regard. It loses that simple charm of the original in favour of 90s anime coolness, but it has Nobuteru Yuuki as the character designer so I can’t complain too much. Lots of Phantasy Star vibes, from the way the character sprites look, to the way you automatically move around corners. It also does the thing where you return to the world of the original game for the final act. If the battle system was less generic, it could almost be a classic.
I think the translation must have been handled by a different person, because it seems much better than the first game (but still full of the odd mistake)
One dumb but funny thing is that before the final boss, you choose your party but I didn’t realise that it also unequipped everyone but the main guy, so I inadvertantly had my party strip naked for a fist fight with Satan. It was a tough slog, but I made it through thanks to the same trick from the first game sort of still working.
Oh yeah , the secret shmup is included in the Switch release as well, but it’s clearly an unfinished prototype.
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First of all, thank you to those people who potioned that post that got me into trouble, and understand that it’s a cultural thing. Some of you need to educate yourselves!!
ON WITH THE GAME RAMBLING
FIGMENT
SHORT VERSION: A middling action puzzler with great art, all let down my horrendous writing that’s both irritating as hell, and also an insult to people with mental illness.
LONG VERSION: Boy howdy, this game can eat my whole entire ass!
Yet another indie game about depression (specifically car crash trauma), it’s explored via a Yellow Submarine style colourful, imaginative world. I guess it’s more Dali, actually… the visuals are the best thing about this game and by best thing I mean the only good thing.
The gameplay itself is incredibly mid, with repetitive, fiddly, shallow combat. The isometric perspective gives it a very “shitty Bastion” vibe, and I wasn’t a big fan of Bastion to begin with. There are also lots of Zelda-ish puzzles that felt more like busy work due to requiring so much backtracking between different points, and also just being dull like moving batteries around to power different things… padding upon padding.
But the writing! Holy shit. First of all, the whole metaphor for the mind is about as subtle as a brick and feels like something off Sesame Street except bad. The big bads are called Nightmares. There are whirlpools of “gripping despair” you need to dodge through. You’re rewarded with LITERAL endorphins to collect. You use batteries to power SYNAPSES. The levels are called things like THE OVERPASS OF ORIGINALITY.
Even worse is your character, who is basically Poochy… made by someone trying way too hard to make a cool, in your face character. I kept expecting him to go “Well, exccuuusseee me, princess!” Incredibly obnoxious, grating, and unlikable. His sidekick isn’t any better, who is annoyingly cute and constantly makes bad puns. And not fun bad puns, just bad puns. Ones that make no sense or are so much of a reach that they are on the other side of the planet.
But worse of all are the villains, who feel straight out of the Care Bears, with horribly hokey dialogue, and they have SONGS that feel straight out of after school specials. Here are some lyric samples:
THROW YOUR HANDS UP IN SADNESS
AND LOSE YOURSELF IN THE MADNESS
I’M A SICKNESS YOU CANNOT QUELL
THERE IS NO CURE - YOU WON’T GET WELL!!!
I’M THE PLAGUE, YOUR FEAR OF DISEASE
I COME WITH BARF AND ROTTEN TEETH
(yeah most of the songs have awful “rhyming”)
Dayman from Always Sunny had better written songs than this. The turd song from Conker’s Bad Fur Day was better than any of this.
God, this game was so painful. At one point it made me say to my partner, who was enjoying how much I was hating the game, “art was a mistake.”
Sure, Inside Out did similar things, but it was far more witty and charming, plus didn’t tackle something as serious as trauma. I have a friend who still has trauma from a car crash, and the way it was presented here sickened me when I know how much it still impacts them. This entire game is an insult to anyone with mental illness, including myself.
This game is just a complete embarrassment.
WHAT REMAINS OF EDITH FINCH
THIS CONTAINS EXCESSIVE SPOILERS FYI
SHORT VERSION: A collection of fun and interesting vignettes involving tragic death! I could NOT take this game seriously, but still had a good time playing through it.
LONG VERSION: I thought this was supposed to be some big serious artwork, but it’s actually a hilarious black comedy?! Why didn’t anyone tell me?!
Sure, it starts out all moody as you approach the house and listen to the cloying voice-acting about the family that lived there, but once you get to the vignettes about how each family member died, things really go off the rails.
Playing as that girl and ending up becoming a shark rolling down a hill, and then eating sailors and then yourself as a sea monster? Funny!
That story about the actress told like a comic book, complete with a Tales of the Crypt style narrator and the literal actual Halloween theme? Funny!
The dad getting knocked off the cliff by the buck he forced his daughter to shoot? Poetic and funny!
One of the characters disappearing and CANONICALLY because they disappeared into the developer’s other game? Stupid but also funny! And also evidence that they devs weren’t taking the game entirely seriously.
That story about the dude who comes out of a shelter after 30 years and immediately gets hit by a train? Funny! If incredibly obvious, and also I’m pretty sure Alanis Morissette already sang about that in Ironic.
That story about the guy who kills himself because of his excessive day dreaming and realising how much he hates his job and existence? Okay, that one hit closer to home, but it was still… EXECUTED in a funny, silly way!
The story about the kid who swings too hard and goes off a cliff probably wasn’t supposed to be funny, but it was for me because I kept constantly clipping through the tree trunk and it looked so silly, also why would you build a swing right over a cliff?! Sounds like idiot parents.
Ditto with the kid who gets killed with the poorly made tent, and ditto with the kid having the LSD trip in the bath who dies due to the mother leaving him unattended. I laughed when the letter to her kept insisting it wasn’t her fault because uuhhhh it 100% was her fault?! Oh, the shark girl also died due to parent negligence.
Really, I thought it was funny how the family thought it was cursed but it’s mostly just shitty parenting. Refusal to take responsibility for their own actions! The game of course doesn’t explore that idea, though.
And the game ends with you being shot out of a vagina, from a first person perspective! How is this not a comedy?! TELL ME. TELL ME HOW IT ISN’T.
Anyway, visually the game looks great, and all the vignettes are interesting to play through at least the first time, and some are actually really fun to control. Many feel more like 90s multimedia toys with some narrative and tragedy thrown in rather than actual games, and I didn’t have a problem with that all. I think Molly was my favourite vignette.
The writing is all over the place, and far too many outcomes are predictable or lamp-shaded way too hard (as soon as I saw my character was pregnant, I knew she was going to die during childbirth). I liked it when the death wasn’t what I expected… made me think of Final Destination.
Obviously I know it wasn’t supposed to be a comedy, but I just couldn’t take most of it seriously, it was a very silly game. But… I enjoyed it! I enjoyed playing through the stories (as linear as they were), enjoying exploring the big mysterious (poorly built) house, enjoyed learning more about the family. So, even though I couldn’t take much of it seriously, I still enjoyed it.
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after having reached chapter 18 of Bahamut Lagoon, i decided i needed a little break from it, just for a little bit
the Silent Hill series has become one of the “i play these while my wife watches” series, so we finally made some good progress in Silent Hill f this past weekend. i think this game is really good - like a lot better than i think any other Silent Hill game post-4 has been. i can’t seem to recall seeing much discussion about the game here, but maybe i missed it or intentionally avoided it to miss potential spoilers about the game.
i think my main complaint about the game is that the countering system is too finicky and they still think combat needs to be in these games. i find it hard to reliably anticipate when an enemy is going to do a move i can counter, except in certain kinds of situations. it mostly makes you memorize enemy attack patterns, but sometimes they defy those attack patterns. but the issue is that you can’t just counter whenever; you need to first activate a particular state, and then you can counter, but you can’t really do this all quickly enough to play the game like an action game.
however, all of this becomes completely moot once Hinako gets her wolf powers, which suddenly transforms the game from survival horror to action, so i can’t really fixate on this one thing, too much.
based on peeking ahead at some walkthrough chapter lists, it seems like i’m not too far from the end, now, so i’m curious to see how it all resolves, and what specifically will resolve by then. also curious how the various endings are determined, but i’m not going to fret about that too much on this playthrough.
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Join us in the thread, though spoilers abound
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Mouthole: maybe the best first 3 minutes of a game I’ve ever seen, including the company logo intro and the title screen, just an incredible audiovisual feast followed by a purposefully lazy Earthbound questionnaire as a big fuck you
The rest of it doesn’t quite measure up but how could it, really. The soul of this game is Manhole - do weird things and find weird stuff. Unfortunately a lot of this stuff is gated by absurdist adventure style game logic which sometimes comes off as parody and never in any case comes off as completely earnest but, I mean, if you want to see the cool stuff you really do have to think about it a little. Features a time system where significant actions eat up portions of time so if you want certain things to happen so you can explore them you have to figure out the interactions and then restart and plan ahead. I think this is all a drag, frankly, and not really funny enough to make up for being a drag. I’d rather it just give unlimited access to all the weird stuff. I did enjoy that there is no way to actually resolve what the game sets up as the central conflict, just a limited space for you to explore what you can before the inevitable end. Still, not everything it could’ve been, unfortunately. Very sad to see the developer fold, they had huge potential for sure and I would’ve been very keen to see their next effort.
Roadwarden: an IF in a lite rpg wrapper. Features a very plausible “points of light” classic rpg setting, where little pockets of civilization are beset on all sides by the ravening of nature and the inevitability of entropy. The kind of low fantasy where having an extra ration or a well made rope can be the difference between living and dying.
The people you meet have a winsome variety of personalities, and the central tragedy of the region you slowly uncover is compelling, as is the setting’s place inside the wider world and what it all means for your mission there. Politics, religion, society - all the makings of a great OSR campaign. The author is very conversant in the dark age intricacies of their setting and is able to have its different parts authentically reflect off each other in complex ways. It starts off feeling HUGE, but appropriately for your role as a roadwarden - part messenger, part scout, part adventurer, tasked with patrolling and maintaining roads between towns to secure the vital arteries of trade that make life in tough places possible - you slowly achieve a piecemeal mastery over the geography, getting a better and better sense of where to get what and how to move quickly and safely.
This game too features a time system, although obviously it’s a lot more granular and robust than Mouthole’s: you have 40 days to explore this frontier land and secure favorable relations and agreements with the settlements there before you have to return to the rich (though not as rich as it used to be, thanks to losing a war) urban center that sent you. As you slowly work on the transportation network your travel times go down, letting you do more in a day.
The game has a very stiff curve. Early on just scraping out basic survival will occupy most of your time; then you get a little more comfortable and are able to complete some more complicated objectives; then in the last 10 days or so you almost have more money than you know what to do with, and are ready to supply and arm yourself for the final mission, which takes you away from the landmass you’ve spent the whole time on for a kind of skill challenge gauntlet. It was actually remarkably easy to complete, probably because it’s designed to be completable by people who didn’t laboriously squeeze the the game for all the juice it can give you like I did.
The game has an easy mode that disables the timer entirely and a hard mode that reduces the time limit to 30 days and makes some other changes; I really think the default difficulty with the 40 day limit is best. I wouldn’t want to play the game without some wiggle room to experiment and fail, but neither do I think its systems would really work if you didn’t constantly have that time limit on your mind, pushing you to do accomplish things efficiently even when you might not be fully prepared (4 more hours to sundown, I could just go to town and sleep, but this other thing is RIGHT here, even though I’m hungry and a little beat up…).
By the end I was starting to see the seams a little much, like I could begin to detect each game mechanism in play behind the text, where originally it all seemed very mysteriously naturalistic and interwoven. It’s somewhat less of that than it appears. Still, it took a lot of play to really take it apart like that, and the writing remained compelling straight to the end, including the ending itself, which was as surprisingly robust as the rest of the game. Recommendation from me.
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