Watch The Road instead, the Cormac McCarthy adaptation starring Viggo Mortensen. The only post-apocalyptic media that’s nearly perfect.
i was put off watching that because i heard it was too dad coded
2 Likes
There is dad stuff, I suppose, but I’m not particularly vulnerable to it.
2 Likes
There is a bit in First Light where you steal a dump truck to make an escape. IOI just loves dump trucks I guess.
Anyway I’m halfway through the game, I think, and it’s a great Bond story but the game mechanics are a bit weird in that you can’t shoot someone unless they shoot at you first or you get the license to kill from your superior, otherwise you have to fist fight them. However the fist fighting is pretty good but I just played a stretch where I had to shoot through like four dozen dudes only to get stuck on a part immediately after that required me to fist fight two guys who wiped the floor with me repeatedly because I was still in shoot mode not fisticuffs mode.
Tac sim is a pretty good mode too. I like the challenges and it’s nice knowing they’re going to keep adding to it and updating it for a while. Really gives the game legs after you’ve played the story a couple times but still want to challenge yourself.
3 Likes
brother-in-law has a switch 2, so i played the Star Fox 64 HD demo. it’s the training stage and meteo, with all of the new cutscenes pertaining to both.
the game cuts to the training mode directly after the prologue cutscene (“FIVE YEARS LATER”), with it being contextualized as a VR exercise. the training stage is almost completely unrecognizable to me in terms of aesthetics and layout. if you fail a section it loops back and has you redo it (supposedly (i didn’t see that myself)). there’s banter from your squad. slippy is an idiot and clips your wings, just in time for you to learn about wing damage. some battlezone-like mountains materialize on the VR horizon once you get to the all-range area – little touches like that made me wonder what this team could have done if they were given the keys to make a new game.
anyhow, as for the game itself, it’s nice enough. the gamefeel is on point. i got the medal in the stage without taking the warp on my first try.
idk what gamers think they’re saying when they say “remake” or “remaster” or whatever, but despite the fresh coat of paint and new engine, this game was absolutely made on the bones of the old source code every single step of the way. while it seems like that were given some artistic license, so many things are absolutely identical to the original in ways that would fundamentally impossible without access to the original code and data. (errata: i don’t think the duration of the laser power-up spinning as it spawns was adjusted to the new framerate, but i’m too lazy to double check)
the new coat of paint is excessive. it makes for nice screenshots, but the realistic lighting model makes the visual language much harder to parse compared to the simple textures and colors of the original (you already know this), at least for the space levels. the massively increased draw distance for the level geometry is neat, but it makes it very funny when you notice points where the original just had enemies fade in relatively close to the camera and see the remake do the same (the formations just past the checkpoint are where it’s easiest to notice)
the music is a bit overdone. they’re nice arrangements, but meteo is a bit loud and bombastic in a way that betrays the more subdued atmosphere of the original, and i just can’t help but laugh whenever the choir joins in.
the full rewrite of the script was probably the correct choice. having the new actors directly compete with the original line reads would have been a fools errand (just like this remake, now that i think about it…). in basically every instance where the scripts do match, i prefer the original.
trying to get to the warp zone was the part for me where the new visuals inhibited things the most. it was always a difficult thing for me to do, but the new trail effect feels like it takes up more of the screen or something. fortunately i could retry over and over by pausing and selecting restart (which doesn’t take your lives or power ups in this…). they added some party chatter to the warp zone for some reason (fox was the kind of kid to skip class, apparently).
given the choice, i would have rather seen this treatment given to the snes game with an art style resembling benimaru itoh’s nintendo power comics. also, i would have given each route in that case a different party so there could at least be some women in the game (read: fay and miyu pretty please)
verdict: hey nintendo you could probably keep the entire shmup industry afloat with the money you threw at this plz fund ubusuna
19 Likes
my tiny experience with 1 Iranian doctor has been exactly this, there was a 6ft photo and all. And then i met the guy from the picture’s mum at a community group, and she said ‘My son is a doctor. You know him, there’s a big picture of him down the road’ lol
11 Likes
i finished and this is really my big gripe. watson is mostly reduced to kind of an accessory and barely has any presence outside some case introductions. it’s sad really, both for the lack of married couple squabbling, but also because watson was a really funny foil to sherlock, something which there is little room for here, maybe because the player is expected to feel they have singular agency over the cases.
still liked this a whole lot.
6 Likes
currently crashing out because I’m realizing that I’m on the outside looking in re:StarFox discourse
no I promise you fellow olds, I’m like you! but I still like new game!
I like to imagine they trying to be like “well you’re in the deep, dark vastness of space and there’s only one light source for the enemies and it’s rim lighting so Good Luck” but hilariously the Arwings are still pretty much full-bright. also I find that happens alot in the original game in emulation or in Starship, especially if you increase the viewport (Aquas is really bad about this because they abuse off-camera and murky depths fog to spawn enemies in and the illusion falls apart the second you can break those bounds)
well I guess that’s why Nintendo’s genre for it is “cinematic shooter”
6 Likes
Currently trying to grapple with the fact that ready or not is horrible but it’s been amazing for my social life because I’ve befriended five other dumbass mostly international queers in the past week. I actually kind of enjoy their company and sincerity which feels fleeting and rare these days
11 Likes
this week games
pronoun palace
got this on a lark, basically it’s a rogue lite word game, like scrabble but on a board like a match 3 game. the narrative is pretty in the background slash flavor text, there’s an orwellian government that’s taken your pronouns and you have to fight various earthbound type characters by doing scrabble words at them. it’s fun to play with digs since she can effectively backseat game it unlike most games. the narrative is trans in a sort of online but not overly forward about it way, i enjoy the humor
titanium court
this is a roguelite match 3 game where after a set point the board becomes instead a tower defense board. the selling point is the presentation and narrative, heavily inspired by (and framed as a ) stage play, where your character has been isekai’d to a fairy court in a scrambled and shifting world, where she is the fairy queen and must figure out a way to get back to her world. the match three tiles are resources and enemies with which one musters ones fairy army for the tower defense phase. again there’s good offbeat humor in this one, i haven’t got a good sense of it yet
2 Likes
I really buried the lead on Flintlock: Seige of Dawn.
You liberated Occupied Territory to open up Coffee Shop so that you can buy new pants with Reputation. There is no coffee in the game.
4 Likes
Havana level of Kane and Lynch is really hard. I also like how it just goes from Tokyo to Cuba and it cuts to Lynch being really over it and Kane being like “too bad!!!”
7 Likes
I really like how this happens in the first game then again in the second game after you get tortured but their relationship has developed more so the tone is very different.
2 Likes
Getting rocked in Havana, having to watch an LPer do it for tips, and even they are getting rocked. Commenters mentioned dying like 50+ times in this section. This is really diabolical
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I think I did it CoD style and just ran until a checkpoint triggered.
3 Likes
To try and get my partner into games I got Hello Kitty Island Adventure because it is the only game that features Retsuko from Aggretsuko who she is obsessed with. It is a very simple and straightforward adventure game with insistent resource gathering.
There is a guiding light that acts as a little waypoint thing to follow, no camera controls, and barely any timed challenges so it’s ideal for my partner who initially had to keep looking at the face buttons. The game is quite buggy and sometimes the quest logic gets stuck on particulars. Like when we first open up the nature reserve, we can’t just dump all the animals we found so far, we have to dump the one specific animal it’s asking for to progress the quest, even though it allows us to dump multiple animals.
We were initially handing the controller back-and-forth but I find the game only somewhat academically interesting for being an adaptation of Sanrio characters into a gameworld that has to accommodate a universe that is understood by most people through the lens of merch. I left my partner to it to do solo play and she has taken flight. I only really input when there’s difficult puzzles or I have to unpick the MSQ logic. There’s a spooky mansion Kuromi gets you to go through, full of maze and Boo-stage style puzzles which she struggled with and I breezed through with gamer sense but I think she (rightfully) can’t be arsed with the occasional sudden difficulty spike. That said, there are 120 hidden little gudetamas to photograph in the game. When we first started out we got 13 together. I come back two days later and she has 75. She is obsessed with this grindy collector game full of cute shit. It’s great.
Interestingly, Retsuko is treated like a stranger by all the other characters since she doesn’t really fit the Sanrio extended universe and I don’t believe she is that popular a character compared to Cinnamoroll or Pompompurin. Everyone else is best friends except for Retsuko who everyone was told to play with but generally shuns.
Tales of Berseria
Tale 2
We progress to stealing a boat, running into pirates and effectively becoming a pirate crew who all coincidentally want to kill the pope or his lackeys.
We raid a military checkpoint which characters claim is staffed by imperial soldiers but all I see are bats and ghosts in the combat sections.
Probably the most interesting dynamic aside from the fact that our party are all nonhuman crimedoers, is Velvet and her transferred brother complex. Our brother, Laphicet, dies in the outset of the game and we then meet a tiny church boi who is part of a race of magic users who are basically used as slaves, magically deprived of their will. Boi joins the party after being kidnapped because he can do fire magic good. He resembles Velvet’s brother such that I feel like the twist is he is actually her brother but this doesn’t seem to have been considered by Velvet so we’ll go with it being a coincidence for now.
Everyone loves the boi despite initially treating him like a tool. After he nearly dies Velvet instinctively yells out her brother’s name when rescuing him and even names him after her brother (as a slave he only had a number designation). It’s not particularly deep, just unusual as a character dynamic for the RPG lead. It’s kinda an ambiguous filial/familial/brocon thing going on.
Combat continues to be inscrutable. I have a full party of four on the battlefield now and it just doesn’t feel like a coherent system even if there is an underlying logic to it. I mostly just put the party on auto to save my hands the trouble. I haven’t come up against a roadblock yet and when I do I will probably just auto grind basic enemies assuming I want to finish the game.
13 Likes
I played just a bit of Spiritfairer and so far I am charmed. It tricked me into thinking there might actually be some challenging gameplay, but no, the section in question was basically un-failable. That’s fine, this is a Vibes Game. And they are good vibes, the animations are very nice, the dialogue is… okay. I can’t actually remember the music, I suspect I could just play this without music or replace it with my own and be happy enough. Which would be easier if I was playing on PC, but I’m not, so oh well.
I can see the Make Gamers Cry angle they are going for and even though I know I’m being set up I will still probably get a little misty.
So far the game is tutorializing the hell out of me and I hope it will wrap up and let me run free
4 Likes
found a kool tool for doing fozhoz6 tuning, which i will surely piss around with tonight
3 Likes
Yeah, the haunted house and the volcano temple puzzle areas were the exact amount of puzzle I needed. I’m not looking to play the Witness or Kwirk.
Theres a bit of dialogue from Pompompurin where he says he doesn’t use the map, and I think it’s a bit of a concession that the map will outright solve some situations for you by showing you where to go. If you want a less chill game you’ve got to intentionally make it so.
I haven’t really bothered with the Animal Crossing esque home decorating aspect yet but I hear the guest characters that arrive through that have big quest paths just like the original characters.
7 Likes
I really really liked that game, even as someone who hates most of the stuff it contains.
3 Likes