Oh no
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Don’t forget about “This compass has a new feature—a tone will tell you if a key is nearby!”
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i will never play this game
It’s good! I’ve just got some kind of boomer brain thing going with the soundtrack in particular.
(I also kinda agree about the tile thing - I think one thing that sets this Zelda apart from most is that there is very little wasted space. Almost every little square has something, and if it doesn’t, it teases a landmass or something else just out of reach.)
At least the descriptions for picking up the guardian acorns/pieces of power are mercifully brief in this version. Those things are just an awful lot in the originals.
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Spent a large chunk of the day playing the Ghost Recon: Breakpoint beta and I can’t decide whether I’m elated that they fixed most of the mechanical issues I had with the game’s stealth and shooting or am pissed that they seem to have piled on or gutted almost everything I actually enjoyed about Wildlands.
The whole gear score/weapon collecting thing just completely ruins what feels like the best parts of MGS3 and MGS5 mixed together. It’s all made even sillier when gear score doesn’t affect TTK/weapon effectiveness on headshot.
yeah I don’t know what they were thinking with all that. I don’t want to cycle through different guns constantly, I just want to use the ones I like. it’s supposed to be some tactical game why does it have this mmo shit. at least with the gear once you picked it up you’ve unlocked it for your appearance which you can have separate from your actual equipment.
I enjoyed the stress test from before the beta when they didn’t have female voice actor yet, so the game starts with an upside down view and a microsoft sam voice saying “fuck. fuck. fuck.” and then you fall to the ground and have a man’s voice. and there’s missing textures while everything is on fire and your account name is plastered all over the screen.
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It’s so blatantly done for the “Gotta keep you playing” aspect because you can unlock blueprints of all weapons so you can just have an up-to-level version of it whenever you need or want, provided you have the (at least in the beta) relatively cheap cost.
It’s all so much pointless busy work.
The consumable items system is obnoxious, too. You have 2 slots for offensive items (Flashbangs, Decoy grenades, Rocket Launchers, Frags), 2 for support items (Binoculars, Canteen, syringes, various rations), and 2 dedicated to your class item and Bandages (these two are locked).
Not that you’ll need the bandages most of the time, you only take wounds when taking damage at less than 2/3rds health, and since wounds are a % chance on hit in that range, you’re just not regularly getting hit enough for it to matter. Especially on Extreme difficulty. In a game focused around decoying, flanking, and ambushing enemies. It all comes off as just a back-of-box bullet point.
That said, you can just change whatever items are in your item slots through the pause menu whenever, so it’s not like you need to carefully consider things like item selection and how it relates to your weapon choice and plan of action. Even though they have the perfect mechanism for doing in the bivouac system.
The AI is so much better, no more killing one enemy off by themselves silently and then having the entire base descend on where you were sitting when you made the kill because the base was at yellow alert.
The story is… garbage, yes, but gives you a direction/focus that Wildlands lacked, yet still gives you enough space that doing side missions doesn’t leave a sense of “Why the hell am I wasting my time on this while that bomb is ticking away?” a game like, say, Borderlands 2 or Destiny 2 runs into.
However, they sabotage all that sense of place and pace the moment you step into the (pointless, unnecessary, bullshit) hub and find 50+ fellow Ghosts/Nomad-clones running around. Which is so incredibly egregious int he face of how much time spend setting up the start emphasizing that 32, and only 32, and not more than 32, and certainly no less than 32 Ghosts were sent to the island.
They make it clear you can turn off the general Ubi-style world of waypoints, and then give useful directions for navigating by landmarks and the topographical map, which lends a sense of place to everything that makes getting out and getting your boots muddy fantastic… but then every few missions, it’s back to that stupid hub to annihilate that sense of existing in a place.
Oh, and yes, it’s racist, colonialist tripe. At least a quarter of the game looks like it’ll be helping the “Homesteaders.” On this fictional, previously uninhabited island. Covered in ruins of folks that make it clear the place was anything but uninhabited, though all the indigenous folk seem to have just kinda “bamf’d.” That said, that may be fleshed out elsewhere but I’m not holding my breath.
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yeah I really hate these kinds of aw-shucks-just-doing-my-part-for-our-post-apocalyptic-community-we’re-trying-here hub zones. far cry new dawn had one where you were in your little fort where somebody with a guitar sits around playing woodie guthrie shit, and you leave to go murder the gang that rides around on 4 wheelers listening to I guess threatening to boomer music like run the jewels and die antwoord or whatnot. this survivalist fantasy thing is like a whole subgenre of the warcrimes genre now
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all the years of training my reflexes on 3d sonic games and groove coaster are finally paying off with sayonara wild hearts
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Get out of here stalker
Bad North is really good. It’s a minimalist RTS thing mechanically, with I guess what you’d call a roguelike campaign progression. The battles are brief and their difficulty builds gradually alongside the slowly escalating tension of managing your limited set of resources, which are essentially gold for upgrades and fresh squads ready for deployment which impacts how many islands per “turn” (one nitpick, in this context I think “turn” wasn’t the best word they could have come up with here, but IDK) you can battle for/reap rewards from. Islands you don’t visit will be made unavailable after a turn or two.
Your squad commanders are upgradeable but also subject to a soft permadeath (there are limited checkpoints accessible in the campaign and you can revert to one of them if your run goes sideways and you don’t want to start the whole campaign over).
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still going through Control - the boss fights are the only things i’m having real trouble with, but the art and the writing/fmv are keeping me going.
“think of them as a sort of life preserver, only instead of water the thing HRAs protect you from is classified.”
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Having run through Hitman 2’s Haven Island level a few more times, I’m now thinking it’s maybe too easy?
I mean, to be fair to it, it’s coming at the end of two entire games worth of levels, with all of my unlocks in tow, so it shouldn’t be too hard. But if this is supposed to be this game’s Hokkaido, it’s…kinda not.
Then again! Isle of Sgail is pretty tough, and is effectively the last level in the game if you don’t buy the season pass, so I guess it checks out.
Looked up a video guide on this week’s Elusive Target, since I fucked it up in an astounding way the last time she was a target in the 2016 game. There’s a weird AI quirk that applies to one disguise that makes zero sense that makes getting to her incredibly easy, so, hey! That’s done!
Anyway, Hitman 2. Heck of a game.
I’d love to play those DLC levels at some point but they seem extremely expensive
i’m away from home for a couple weeks for a work thing. i brought this 12 year old external hard drive with me, which i have plugged in to this terrible desktop pc at the place i’m staying at. i’ve spent pretty much the whole week playing crawl. not just the newest release, but some of the older versions of the game i have on here from like 2005.
turns out there used to be a race called “sludge elves” and they were removed for some reason? a reason that is probably really stupid? they are called “sludge elves,” that is aesthetic as fuck!
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The season pass I’m kinda mixed on. I mean, you have the two DLC levels, which are both pretty great, and the additional “special assignments” give you new targets in kinda remixed versions of the standard levels. Those? Those are good!
But they also added a couple of Sniper Assassin levels, which…I dunno. There’s still opportunities for kinda goofy setups and everything, but it’s mostly a lot of looking around, waiting, and comically launching guards and targets into bushes and snow piles.
If the season pass ever goes on sale, I’ll say that NYC and Haven Island are both pretty dang good. The rest of the package, I dunno!
Spent the last of the time I’m gonna be able to with GR: Breakpoint, I think. Did use a machine gun in the game for a bit when it decided to spring a “Defend the Objective” mission on me when I was clearing up some faction side mission stuff, and I admit I was surprised at how much they’ve improved machine guns from Wildlands. I think with the right optics they might make a pretty decent long range weapon, provided subtlety isn’t desired.
Played a bit of co-op with a friend who I’ve known for years and, like Wildlands, it really changes the dynamic of the game in a pretty great way. Even better is the AI spotting a teammate doesn’t make you auto-spotted the moment you do anything, leading to a lot of nice opportunities for mixed roles in combat and varied approaches to objectives.
I guess I’ll add it to my “wait-and-see” list. If the raids end up being solo able (even if it’s ridiculously hard to do), I might consider looking at a way to get my hands on it. That said, the recurring cost for keeping up with everything and the always online aspect of it definitely put me off it, as well.
Also played Warframe and, being on kind of a Gundam/mecha anime kick care of the recently released Gauss, I decided to see if I could put together a mecha-themed Zephyr. So far I’m kinda liking where it’s at, but I’m not 100% certain on what weapons I want to use.
Bit different from the look I normally use with her, but eh, I like it so far. That said, Zephyr is (imho) one of the easier frames to work with when it comes to cosmetics. Below are a couple pics of the more common cosmetic loadout I use with her, as well as weapons.
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After 219 hours of playtime, I’ve finally beaten FF14 patch 2.5 and have unlocked Heavensward, and can finally get to the good part of the game.
I still have a lot of side dungeons from A Realm Reborn to do first though, so that playtime is going to go up before I actually start Heavensward and see what I hear is where this game finally gets good. To be fair, as much as I disliked A Realm Reborn, the story content gradually had an upward climb in quality over the course of the content patches although it still had a tendency to get sidetracked with meaningless chores.
I think they’ve said they are looking into slimming down some of the ARR stuff soon, which is why I’m holding off before jumping into FFXIV any time soon. Not that it matters because when I’m averaging 14 hours of games on a good month, I’m not going to be making any meaningful progress anyway.
Been playing Spelunker, and some other jank famicom games
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