For sure. I don’t know that if it had all gotten made how it was originally designed it would have made for a better game.
Kind of want to see a dedicated group of modders actually remake it based on the original design though. Wouldn’t that be wild.
my Trials of Mana endgame experience: my Angela’s best spell did a quarter of the last boss’s health every cast. 3 minutes later the ending is playing and then there’s some post-credit stinger thing and the game comes up with some fan fiction bullshit and I ran around getting stuff for Class 4 (no, it’s not the game calling it Class 4, all of the characters are calling it Class 4 in their dialogue, also you have to capitalize Class 4) and then I ran around in a challenge(?) dungeon for a couple of hours and reached the secret boss and then Angela’s best spell did a quarter of its health every cast (actually more because this boss had multiple body parts in its second phase so it got hit by everything multiple times) (at this point in the game, Angela probably is getting a 250-300% bonus to spell damage)
for this extra 3 hours of running around, the game gave me New Game+ (oh.) and a passive that gives triple XP (oh?)
guess I have to do a Sausage Party run
charlotte is the best
Today in Outward, I defeated a giant pistol shrimp (these are the deadliest enemies in the starting region), was captured by slavers in a southern fortress, talked the guard into letting me help in the kitchen, so I worked in the kitchen until I had enough silver to bribe a guard while also stealing supplies from everywhere the guards weren’t looking.The guard smuggled me out in a corpse wagon, and so I found my friend Yzan’s treasure stash next to a shipwreck.
Death events really are essential to getting the full experience of the game, IMO.
Unlike typical survival games, the soft-failure system in this game makes me totally unafraid to die every 45 minutes while still making me cautious and even trepidatious about venturing to far away from my home. This feels @BustedAstromech core in some ways because as empty as the world can seem at times, it uses the bits of emergent narrative to make for what I consider a very compelling loop.
This is maybe one of the first times I’ve encountered this kind of ‘failure is not the end of narrative’ systems outside of CYOA-inflected games like King of Dragon Pass or the much less narrative-focused death mechanics of Mount and Blade.
Deus Ex has a strong linear-ish central narrative but it lets you operate with relative impugnity in the margins, and it gives the player a strong sense of ownership over their own narrative.
So yeah, it has moments of being railroaded but it affords way more flexibility than was the norm at the time or even decades hence
It definitely feels in conversation
Predator update: I played a match with a kid on my team who kept yelling “fuck” for no reason and was, uh, claiming he had a lot of people watching his stream and that we needed to do well or his followers would be upset. We got wiped out.
Anyway now I hate this game.
today i on ourwards i discovered a man by the beach nearly after starting the game who needed a bandage: i had conveniently just used mine. i dark souls ran all the way back to town and bought more. for whatever reason the game spawned like ten hyenas between town and the bay. i wasnt paying attention and kited four or five of them all the way to the ocean where they owned me and i contracted sepsis. fuck - they also dragged me to their cave (i still had sepsis)
i dashed back to town, dropping my bag numerous times. i narrowly got back to town and immediately collapsed from disease.
i woke up several days later to find out my belongings had been taken by the inn as payment and all of my silver, amd it was too late to pay the life debt so i was now homeless. i had to talk to the village elder who told me i was a nonce and a failure and have been basically thrown out of town
10/10 experience would do agaim
also the guy by the beach was dead now oops
look i onow it makes me a bad communist but i am joining the desert libertines but i am glad ome of the responses to being told i am a failure and my family was a failure is telling the village elder i’m glad her daughter hates her
Holy shit winter is brutal in Outward. I finally got to the center of the Conflux Mountain and sacrificed 15% of my health and stamina for some more powerful magic, but the first snow happened while I was in the mountain, when I emerged it was freezing and I nearly lost consciousness from the cold, several times. I’m gonna have to retire my really good armor in favor of fur armor for the foreseeable future.
Oh well, I have 3 spells now, Spark (which is really weak unless I cast it inside a fire circle), Flamethrower (requires a source of flame, any torch or lantern works, costs more mana, does way more damage), and boon of cold (general buff to my cold damage and resistance, needs a source of cold to cast in the first place)
winter is definitely not uwu snowfall like it was in i dunno the last WRPG i played with weather. i had to stop to camp four fucking times just to make it from the edge of the forest back to the starting town, hopping in every cave i could to warm up
A few people told me that particular spot in Deus Ex was an unusual somewhat weak moment in the game’s layout, so I feel less bad about myself today.
Today’s adventure in the game I moved on to the following mission and there is a part with a couple armed guards guarding my brother’s body and coincidentally right in front of them is a huge pen containing a couple giant mutant dog creatures. I go around the side, hack into the system and open the pen door and a giant mutant dog runs out and… nothing happens. The guards aren’t bothered by this and the mutant dog just sorta stands around next to them. I swear to god I literally have no idea what sort of cause and effect engine this game runs on.
I ended up hacking the gun turret in the pen to fire on the guards instead of me, ran past them to get their attention and ran around the pen while the guy tried to shoot me and the automated gun turret struggled mightily to hit anything. The second guard I think may have shot a dog as I came out and saw the dogs chewing on some mess of meat. I was gonna proceed but all the racket seemed to alert a nearby secretary who saw me, basically an augmented super soldier surrounded by a couple dead bodies, and decided to chase me with a taser. I went back into the pen and ran around backwards in a circle while she chased and honest to god I think the automated turret failed to hit her a single time. I got bored and pulled out my pistol to shoot her while I circled around endlessly and put her down.
Odd, occasionally baffling game.
Stardew Valley update: My best friends are the goth girl and the homeless guy. I have a kitchen now, though!
Fallen into a Zelda 2 hole out of absolutely nowhere.
Maybe this is a case of JRPG/retro game inexperience but this game has me hooked in a way that no game has in a long time. I tried playing Link to The Past for the first time semi-recently and I really did not connect with it and ended up stopping after completing a couple dungeons in the Dark World.
But despite being kind of awful at the game and having to look at a walkthrough twice, I am really into Zelda 2. It’s linear enough that I can usually Adventure-Game “try everything” to continue (after dying a million times) but the way they split encounters helps make the scale still feel very large.
Really though, I like the game’s tone more than anything. The dialogue has this feel of everyone speaking to you in a super terse paranoid tone, which fits with the general oppresiveness of the combat encounters/world. Lost my last life the first time a person I talked to turned into a bat, made me laugh a lot. Next time when I tried to thwart the guy who said “only citizens can pass this river” with a very unsuccessful leap.
But like, what is going on here? Link keeps waking up by this dead(spellbound?) princess? What is this dude’s relationship with women? Why does he heal by entering the homes of strange women (and restore magic by entering the homes of older women). Why did I have to break into someone’s house to learn how to do an upward sword-thrust?
The combat feels great too, even though I keep messing up and dying constantly I love how it feels like the push & pull of a dramatic swordfight.
The whole game is just sketched-in enough & consistent in tone that it gives me room to project my own mind on this sort of dour & confusing world.
Which, honestly, I guess is kind of the point of toys right? An aid for imagination. Totally thrown by my reaction to this game. I played a lil of the first Zelda but never really commited. Clearly my mistake, I’m realizing.
What always gets me is the Zelda that’s sleeping at the start is a completely different Princess Zelda than the one from the first game IIRC. How many Zeldas does one Link need?
Wow even as a WipEout geek I really don’t like Fusion on the PS2. Your craft just feels like a big box stuck to the floor, you grind against the sides of the track and other craft rather than bumping. The trackless course parts were a mistake… What’s the point of unlocking super weapons when you should turn weapons off anyway. Wow bad wow.
Wipeout 3 / special edition is the one. The PS4 collection is cool too.
Well, I think this tracks because supposedly there are many Links. Zelda 2 probably takes place a long while after the first game, whose map is in fact a subset of the larger map in Zelda 2
Pretty sure the manual story mentions it’s the same Link as the original. Though maybe that’s a translation issue or something?
Zelda II is a direct sequel to the first, for sure, but generally yes, different Links and Zeldas, so we should assume the visual discrepancy is just a hold over from the days when Nintendo was more loose about consistency in their character designs.
