Waiting til I have time off again before I hop into Doom Eternal, so I, uh, messed with that Predator Hunting Grounds beta.
Hoo boy wow wow, it’s…rough. It’s gonna take a lot of optimization to get it feeling even slightly good to play, and that’s not taking into account the wild balance indifference, bad AI foes, and the fact that it’s probably mostly done already.
It’s a shame, too! Like Friday the 13th, there’s some real glimmers of good ideas floating around in it, but the execution doesn’t do those ideas many favors. It’s got crossplay with PC, but since it’s a Sony console exclusive (for now? for good? I dunno), it probably won’t have the same sustained fanbase as that game did.
Anyway you can play as a Predator with boobs. And if you’re a human you’ll hear your character say “I’M MUDDIN’ UP!” a lot. I guess that’s fun.
Kolibri no matter the rom will hard crash Retroarch. I keep wondering if this is accurate because my real copy of Kolibri definitely hardlocked on me a few times. (It was not one of the 32x games that crashed to a DOS prompt (Motorcross Madness, DooM.)
First school day in The friends of Ringo Ishikawa. Sat through History, found what I guess was the Be Attentive button after d-padding through adhd postures. Got 2% better at The Subject. Chatted in down time. Left class and wandered the halls and smoked, in the boys’ room, squatting in front of the open stall. Had someone tell me I should be in the school play. Saw a sign about karate and judo classes + DON’T BE LATE! outside the gym and the judo class was coming up but thought “there’s a second Class Proper today, maybe I should try to find it.” Didn’t. Showed up 10 minutes late for Judo and couldn’t get in the gym.
Found the library. Chose a book @ random. It turns out I read extremely fast, and there’s no way I can stop until I got The Full Number that is ticking up! I’m me! When at last I have The Whole Pagecount I announce that this book is worthless, full of shit, why did I read it, gosh?
So I chose another book from the list. This one taught me something about the structure of the brain???
Anyway when I leave the library it’s well into the evening. Nobody is in the school. I cannot go back into the library. I can go into the gym again, but it’s as empty as the rest of the place. I try to leave by the front door and I just clip through it. The setting does not change. I walk back. I go up to the roof and smoke a cigarette while the sun goes down. I try the front door again. No dice.
My menu tells me I’m STARVING. I have no food.
I am trapped in the school because I was hyperfocused on the library after being too late and/or unable to locate the other things I thought I should do or might be interested in.
This is probably a glitch but it’s also a bit too relatable re: the patterns of my Actual Life, etc.
I didn’t play but did watch a no commentary exhaustive click/listen to everything walkthrough of The Black Mirror, a Czech developed adventure game from 2003. I was drawn to its Resident Evil-y pre-rendered backdrops and the promise of morose upper-crust murder mystery solving. It is 1981 and your grandfather dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances and you must return to the crumbling ancestral manor you swore off all those tragic years ago to pay your respects and investigate. The backgrounds are pretty good throughout, and the stiff intrigue dialog is at least at first appealingly hammy. The main character’s standout attributes are his dark shoulder-length hair, his thin black mustache visible only in the FMV cutscenes, and his utter contempt for the lower class laborers his fading but extremely wealthy family employs. The latter is maybe the most endearing part of the game, just a real prick. I watched it at 1.75x and it still took days to get through, it drags. I accidentally watched a few moments at normal speed, thought there was perhaps something wrong with how the footage was captured until confirming with other videos. The twist ending is telegraphed plainly enough that the main tension becomes whether it must certainly be a red herring? Nope. Bit of a turd, then, sure, but with some charm.
I’ve started watching a playthrough of 2008’s Black Mirror II: Reigning Evil which takes place, at least so far, in a small Maine tourist town, stars an extremely disaffected snotty “uni” student from Boston visiting his mother there on his “semester break” who has mentioned Pearl Jam and Nirvana multiple times in the first two hours. Not sure if I can endure.
The twist ending is extra great because when I got to the end about an hour later I realized that the ending did not actually answer one of the most important questions in the game.
I have nothing but free time so I figured if I was ever gonna give another Final Fantasy game a shot it would be right now so I decided let’s go FF XV. So far I’ve made it through the tutorial and the battle system sure is a dramatically different than what I expected given I haven’t played one since X so many years back.
Heading in all I know is it has a car and Cup of Noodle. If I bounce off this (I’m giving myself a 5 hours in eject button) I may have to guy try a Witcher or something.
Doom Eternal: the Gladiator boss is significantly less frustrating than I was expecting after my experience with the Marauder.
still thinking of setting it aside, though- at least for the time being. I can feel myself about to hit that “twenty-odd hours” wall and I’d prefer to walk away before that happens. what did we think of La-Mulana 2, again?
Maybe not the hottest take as it once was but going through the FMV Sega CD games they have fantastic perfect acting and unusually good camera work. Look at this stuff!
removed from their $50+ price tag bouncing around Ground Zero Texas et al I am deeply entertained. Maybe more just sitting down to watch Long Plays. Sega CD FMV watchparty???
