wait maybe we should have a musou thread if there isn’t one
1 Like
After almost 200 hours of Grid Autosport on my Switch, I only just noticed that there are no drivers in the AI cars when running the game in performance mode:
This really freaked me out; it was an absolutely haunting realization.
11 Likes
devil kings is a musou game, it’s the heavily localised version of the first sengoku basara game, plus it adds some weird mechanic where you have to do charge attacks to weaken enemies before doing your regular combos on them or else your meter won’t fill up.
if you’re looking to play every ps2 musou game, then demon chaos is actually good and has stuff to add to the concept, the oneechanbara games have boobs and gore, and buccaneer is pirate-themed
there is already a musou thread!
2 Likes
I don’t want to draw out the haters and have this discussion all over again but personally to me HL2 feels something like a miracle
4 Likes
The stilted/absent body animations on non-scripted alive characters (player and enemy) and the extreme linearity are the main dated things about it — those aspects remain at the level of HL1, whereas modern games give way more thought/effort to them. The main problem with HL2 is that the initial sense of impressive polish can curdle into an uncanny effect where you start to feel like a floating camera on a flimsy movie set.
2 Likes
regardless of anything else, very few games have a more satisfying (use of ragdoll + sound cues + meaty pistol) than when you shoot a combine in the head in HL2.
Playing through about four hours of Black Mesa, my new opiion on HL1 is that it is actually a Very Bad Shooter with a Very Impressive World. I am very confused by it and don’t know how to feel about it.
3 Likes
despite how much i hate on a rail in the original I think black mesa has worse level design overall
2 Likes
like, I’m not seeing major differences in Black Mesa but it’s been years. However! The shooting feels just like I remember it. The sound effects are great, but the actual play of “Shooting in the direction of some guys” does nothing for me now that I have played more games.
Care to elaborate more regarding the floating camera concept? It’s interesting, but as first thought, the same could be told about many games… Perhaps, especially fps. What do you think?
they streamlined stuff quite a bit in some of the longer chapters and reworked other sections, I haven’t played it since the mod version, maybe the changes are more in line with the original hl1 now, but like in the version i played the surface tension section was not nearly as good
Yeah, FPS inherently tend to have that issue, but newer high-budget FPS do their best to mitigate it and introduce a sense of physicality. They use inverse kinematics and dynamically adjusted mocap (stuff that HL2-era Source engine had minimal support for) to show arms/gun swinging/wobbling while running, grabbing onto ledges with both hands, pushing doors or heavy switches with visible effort, etc. Doom 2016 is one example of a game that does all of those things.
The classic example of a first-person game that felt more embodied is Mirror’s Edge. The lack of a permanently held gun freed it to be way more dynamic with camera wobbling, swinging limbs etc. But you can do a fair amount of it with a gun too.
2 Likes
been playing fire emblem: monshou no nazo (the snes remake of fe1 and its sequel)
girl, your brother is clearly a dope and you were better off without him
1 Like
deleted my save in Doom Eternal for the second time
it’s trying to present a surfeit of plenty to overcome and overwhelm checklist compulsion.
it’s like trying to overwhelm a fire with gasoline
3 Likes
I think that, initially, I had interpreted your idea in a different way: feeling like a floating camera on a movie set, because everything is already set up for you and you just have to progress in it.
But from your last post, it seems that you had in mind more of a graphical thing, which depends on the staticity of the weapon and similar (lack of) effects.
Am I right?
technically some fires can be extinguished by a large explosion, so…maybe this could work…
I meant both of those things at once, and I feel they wind up combining into a single feeling of unreality. The camera part comes from the poverty of the animations and the set part comes from the linearity of the levels.
Update on celeste: I did beat the last screen yesterday and even got the green berry two hours later, so it wasn’t as much of a marathon as I was prepared for.
I remember reading a review of Chapter 9 that said the last screen took as long for them as the rest of Chapter 9 combined, but that was definitely not the case for me. It’s a very long screen but only at B-side difficulty and it didn’t take too long to become very consistent at each part. Green berry stages approach 7C or 8C difficulty but I found it slightly easier than those (actually 8C is the only stage I’ve yet to beat). The varying experiences probably turn on exactly how fast people got the hang of the floaty squid mechanic specifically.
2 Likes
When I was kid, the flamethrower looking power in Mystic Defender and the twisting lightning blasts in Blazing Lazers were gaming mag screenshot porn for me.
4 Likes
I finished Sakura Taisen (1996)
First of all, in case you were wondering, it’s pretty embarrassing and problematic stuff. I guess you’d call it a “harem” type of situation. I guess there’s also some “möe” going on here. I’m not really sure however, as I have only read about such things, and have only watched Evangelion all the way through once.
As a strategy game it’s pretty raw & experimental. No classes, no experience points, no levels, no items, facing different directions doesn’t matter, etc. Your options are move, attack, heal (twice per battle), and defend. And you have a limit break meter you can charge. Your characters each have different attacks (that is, attack ranges) for the entire game, so you have to use them effectively. So it would have been my ideal strategy game…but the level design is almost entirely boxes of enemies arranged in a straight path to the boss. This was a hell of a comedown from Vandal Hearts, which also has very simple game design, but has these great maps with choke points, elevations, gimmicks, unusual objectives, etc.
It’s also 50% an adventure/dating game. The best part is that your dialogue choices are timed, and if you don’t choose in time you won’t say anything. Sometimes it’s best not to say anything. And sometimes the timer is super-fast depending on the situation! Sometimes, you’ll have seemingly-random timed conversations/bonding experiences on the battlefield too. My only frame of reference is the tiny bit I played of Fire Emblem Awakening, which had like a separate menu where you would have these awkward disembodied conversations, and I guess if you did it like 4 times you could marry that person, so Sakura Taisen seems a million times better in that regard.
Anyway while I was playing this Bachelor built a Sakura Taisen model kit, so I feel like it’s destiny that I also had the patience to finish this game.
9 Likes