“How do I get my Krazoa spirit inside Kystal?”
I think we’re going to need to go to the fanfiction to answer that one Fox.
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it’s very corny but on the other hand I can’t think of an official nintendo game where one character gets to feel yearning for another like this?
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Grotesque videogames
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sherlock vs jack the ripper
finished… yesterday? it was very good. types of puzzle thinking more geared towards me. please no more multiplication, never show me arsene lupin again. i only had to look at hints when i was lost over what the next thing of interest was, which i occasionally lost track of if the game told me. watson sex worker ally is so very funny, i like this guy. a lot of dialogues and voice acting have this hard to place compelling quality where its kind of silly but you want them to keep talking. i think sherlock is growing meaner each game. love when he cattily lashes out at watson presumably cause he’s too embarassed to admit he missed him.
testament of sherlock holmes
tried this soon after. my hands appreciate controller support, so that particularity is a welcome change, altho the constantly following camera is not as good as the previous fixed angles. it seems good. holmes new voice is more… flat?.. in his acting. he doesn’t come across as charming as the previous one but it does enhance his rudeness by a lot. appreciate a gruesome murder so quickly after starting, fucking love the state of that corpse, a+, excited to examine brutalized and tortured clergy. environments look really nice, good lighting. people occasionally look really creepy, in particular the children who are reading the story as you play it. what twist awaits at the end to motivate introducing us to these wretched larva?
hundred line, it never ends
i drudged through an awful romance route set up like some game show where three bachelorettes have all fallen for takumi and he has to hang out with them and choose one (or none) or whatever. its kinda funny that he has movie dates with the rotten green tomato but… bleh
some routes are very good. some are ok. some feel completely unnecessary, and a few are actually painful, in a bad way. i have that illness that makes me explore all of them. even tho it will end up making me partially hate the game. its the way it is.
also my hated expectation that takumi will sort of romance every single girl seems to be true. some of those routes are good tho. SOME. despite allowing takumi that. despite barring other interesting relationship from flourishing because it has to only happen to THE FUCKING PLAYER INSERT. i also found the yaoi i was looking for and it wasn’t what i expected and i HAD TO SUFFER A PATH I DID NOT LIKE TO GET THERE but there it is, eito sexually assaulting takumi forever. happy pride!
now i’m on the darker side of the routes (or thats what it seems like) so maybe that’ll be good.
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I don’t think there will ever be as good a detective game as sherlock vs ripper because it’s based on a real thing, they picked one of the more likely real life suspect who maybe most people don’t know about cause they’ve heard about the fan fiction reddit theorist suspects more, which they also put in some of as red snappers, they let you invent modern criminal profiling as holmes, because it’s based on a real thing there’s a bunch of weird shit and coincidences that happens in ways those things happen in real life, there’s an authentic awkwardness that would come across as just incoherent bad writing in a made up story. I can’t stand listening to podcasts but if they adapted true crime podcast stories to this format the appeal suddenly makes more sense to me. it does have some adventure game bullshit, building rube goldberg contraptions out of garbage to cause a distraction etc, but nobody is perfect.
all the current holmes games they went all in on the deduction system from ripper which sounds great but they’re made up stories and since it’s usually not hard to figure out who did a crime in an era where you’re the only person who knows about forensics to make things non-trivial they just always give you two equally evidence supported suspects, and you just pick whoever you want to punish based on the social context lol. the chapter one reboot even seemed to acknowledge reality becoming whatever holmes chooses, maybe as some metaphor for his ego or something?? bizarre and frustrating, and yet, I’m still compelled…
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I wanna give Tales of the Borderlands a half hearted defense. It is probably the highest point of writing in the whole series but its still in line with the tone of its source so if that’s your pain point then yeah it probably won’t land for you. I think most of my affection comes from the final action sequence is one big Voltron/Super Sentai send up and giving a joke character an actual emotional exit from the whole thing. There’s also good robot characters in there. LoaderBot and Gortys are good robos.
Shame about the personalities running Gearbox where it sounds like they made actual efforts to undercut the characters that got reinegrated into BLands3.
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I’ll also put in a finite number of good words for TftBL and say it was one of the only Telltale games of the time to do some meta experiments with the format (npc memories, flashbacks, presentation of action, adaptation of an existing property in a different genre) the characteristics of which were already pretty tired by The Wolf Among Us. I wouldn’t really play it again but it’s the best of the Telltale stuff fwiw.
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i thought the bust a move branding had been retired eons ago
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you can only have 3 people on a team but the objective thing only ever shows the missions of two people at a time.
classic late-era bungie. nobody else out there is even close to competing for head-up-their-own-asses game design thought at their level
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Because I always talk out both sides of my mouth, I currently have a month of Playstation Plus Premium Ultra Instinct. Riven came out on PS5 and the + discount was as much as one month of Plus. I’ll take that bargain and play a giant pile of garbage.
One of the benefits is Game Trials. These can vary extremely in length. Because of E3 there are like 40 indie games with trials until the end of the month. You get to play the game from start to whatever, and then a big black screen shows and says YOUR TRIAL HAS ENDED DO YOU WANT TO BUY GAME?
Demonschool’s trial is half an hour. One of the Trails of game’s is TEN hours.
Mafia: The Old Country is one hour. After Mafia 3 impressed the hell out of me, I thought I’d hang out in a minor section of the Godfather. The character models are great. 1906 Scicily looks great. You can do incredible things with polygon eye movements now.
But, we gotta start respecting graphics more. Old Country has modern ray-tracing super calculated realism lighting engine of everything now and it is impressive and just flat. I just hear Digital Foundfry voice when I looked at it. The world’s greatest computers cannot replicate Barry Lyndon OR cheap trash Italian film making. Give me baked lighting!! Or an actual lighting system and not just trying to process it.
We had just established the characters and I was riding a horse out of my new Don’s villa in the midday sun when the trial ended. Seemed good! I’d hang out with the game more for 2500 yen.
Post too long but I also very briefly tried RDR1 Remastered and everything looked weird and mobile game-y and I can’t seem to find anyone else saying this so maybe I’m the weirdo.
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I mean, yes, but probably not for the opinion on any remaster.
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No I think PS3 games in 4K do just look kind of like phone games. We weren’t meant to see these games at these resolutions. If they redid all the art work and rendering pipelines and stuff to make it look like a current gen game it would basically be a remake.
Bully on the phone is like this too but not as noticeable because the phone screen is smaller than a tv so it just ends up looking like a sharper version of the game.
The higher frame rates also contribute to making the games feel unnatural after you’re used to and remember playing them at lower frame rates. I played God of War Ragnorak on PS5 last night and it’s 60fps which feels weird after playing the 2018 game on PS4, even all those years ago.
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The Eternal Life of Goldman demo is the first 90 minutes of the game and incredibly gorgeous.
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Okay Eternal Life of Goldman is straight up masterclass in every way. Art and animation is beautiful, controls feel perfect, the challenge is just right (at least in the beginning parts of the game) and the story is probably going to make me cry a little at some point.
I was thinking due to the amount of work that went into the animation that this would probably be on the shorter side but what I just saw indicates it might end up being a bit longer than I was expecting. If the quality holds throughout and there’s not a bunch of padding then that would be quite fine indeed. But even if it is shorter it could still end up being a perfect game if it sticks the landing on everything else.
I was excited about it before but I am really pumped to see the rest of it now.
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Are you enjoying the new season? I really like Night Marsh and the overhaul to every menu and system was pretty good.
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this is my only season of marathon so far cause it’s free at the moment
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I have a vague recollection about something about Eternal Life of Goldman irking me when I played a demo of it some months back, but I no longer recall what it was. It was definitely very pretty, my guess is that it might have been very talkative?
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Played the first level of Kayne and Lynch: Dead Men. It’s really nice that there’s about zero exposition: you’re a guy on death row in a van and suddenly 10 million cops are shooting at you…and you need to get this thing for a guy to save your wife and daughter.
What’s really funny is in the second training level you actually have to “teach” Lynch how to cover fire and throw grenades while learning controls.
Early game really takes inspiration from Heat, hopefully that stays through the rest of the game.
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I sort of analyze games in terms of how difficult they seem to pull off and what ingredients the game is playing with to make different encounters. Kane and Lynch has a pretty robust cover system and enemy AI, which is enough to carry the game.
Combat spaces feel like natural places rather than arbitrary rooms arranged to be game like. There’s one part that I got stuck on and you’re moving between cars in a tunnel around a long corner and the cops have snipers, and that’s enough to create something pretty compelling.
There’s also a part where you have to cover a guy trying to open a vault so you are downstairs shooting up a staircase and the cover the cops use is bulletproof glass, so you know when they’re about to come out. One of the only games where I’ve fired in the general direction of an enemy to get them to duck under cover so I could move instead.
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