I need to stop trying to play Shining Force 3 that game is kryptonite to me. I have quit within 15 minutes 5 times over the last 14 years. I can’t play it.
So instead I started the Japanese Saturn version of Policenauts. It seems alright? For a game set in 2040 it is so placed in 1995. Or Kojima looking at Lethal Weapon 2. The voice acting is a lot more subdued than I was expecting.
I am sure he will handle that idea of test-tube humans with grace and dignity.
definitely not
started the outer worlds on the £1 pc gamepass thing, it sure is fallout with pretty colours
the character creator randomiser gave me edward james olmos
call him edward james almost
every writeup of that game just makes me more and more annoyed that no one paid attention to the one totally solid game that obsidian ever made and they’ve gone back to Bethesda fallout derivatives
my impression of Outer Worlds is entirely based around the fact that I accidentally made my character a gunlord and am playing it like a weird open-world shootman with talking instead of an RPG
but it feels good to Max Payne and blind a man with headshots
yeah I’m a huge Obsidian guy but even as I enjoy myself playing The Outer Worlds I continually keep thinking “man it’d be cool if this game didn’t have combat like this” which is making me question if I actually am enjoying myself as much as I think! Hopefully one day someone will fix the fact that Fallout combat has like zero weight to it and isn’t interesting in the slightest. It’s cool that they let Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky make Space Arcanum though, playing this game is making me all misty-eyed about Troika all over again.
how closely they’ve been able to mimic the fallout/elder scrolls experience just makes it even more baffling why bethesda with all their resources is still on their same shitheap engine. I’d like to think it’s taking so long because they aren’t completely abandoning the dream of 90s crpg simulationism stuff like npc schedules and whatnot for survivalism crafting and microtransactions
oh yeah easily the funniest thing about the game is how quickly it makes it clear that Bethesda would be totally fucked if they had a competitor who actually gave a shit because it turns out their garbage engine isn’t some magic special sauce like Todd Howard wants people to believe it is
I played through Virtual Virtual Reality the other day. It’s a very interesting game, though I was disappointed that it didn’t carry any of its many ideas to fruition. I’m going to spoil the whole thing here so. Don’t read it if you’re going to play it I guess.
The conceit is that you are a human doing menial and bizarre work for AI in VR. The main mechanics are (a) putting on and taking off VR headsets to pop in and out of various layers of VR, (b) picking up things and putting them down (duh) and © vacuuming up stuff into your weird vacuum OR spitting stuff out of your vacuum to rebuild it.
It starts as a riff on the gig economy and how utterly demeaning the work is. The quality of your work has almost no bearing on the ratings you receive, and the work itself is utterly baffling. A large piece of butter wants you to toast bread and stick it to him, a living city wants you to disconnect parade floats, a tumbleweed wants you to use a leaf blower to keep him on a treadmill filled with obstacles. This is probably the most fleshed out idea in the game, but they basically drop it about 1/3 through.
You then spend much of the game putting on VR headsets within other VR headsets, going deeper and deeper into these bizarre realities. Again, many of these are baffling, and they’re all intended to be vacation areas for AI. It’s mostly in service of the idea that AI is not human, and their desires/needs would be completely lost on us. It’s also really fucken cool to just be, like, 15 layers of VR deep, pulling off headset after headset to try to get back to some sort of recognizable reality.
The last part of the game is about how this whole thing got started. This is the most confused and untargeted portion of the game. I think it’s trying to be Portal-Clever with the realization that not all of these characters are AI, and that many of them are uploaded human consciousnesses. But it never clearly makes the distinction about who is what, or why that is even important.
It’s also centered on the GLADOS style character, Chaz, who’s been watching you and guiding you in this bizarre job. Turns out he’s the inventor of this whole thing and the first person to upload his consciousness, but now the service he built is all but abandoned. There are no more users, so it’s just him and some other rich idiots floating around in the Friendster of VR Social Networks.
I think I’m supposed to have some sort of sympathy towards him? But he’s a rich TED Talk boy who wants to be rid of his body and live forever so it’s hard for me to think he’s anything but a mega idiot jerk, so I dunno.
And then the end undermines the whole thing by making it clear this was all some sort of thing designed by Chaz to make sure you were worthy of being uploaded?? I have no idea, it really falls apart at the end.
I wish this had been something a little more critical. If they’d leaned into ideas like Rich Entrepeneurs Are Just As Baffling As Inhuman AIs, or VR Is Weird And Escapist And You Should Probably Take Your Headset Off, or really any single coherent point, I would have been much happier at the end.
They do one thing which I think is extremely funny. Near the end of the game, you can pull off a headset in the hub area which, for most of the game, has always been the last layer. This pops you up into a testing office where you’re testing Virtual Virtual Reality while the creators take notes. But then you can pop another headset off and end up in a weird room showing, like, the coordinates of your headset and hands in real life. And you can keep doing this like, 3 more times.
I think the real joke would have been if they could have gotten access to the Quest’s external cameras so you could pull off a headset in game and it just shows you the room you’re in. But then you can pull off another headset to go even deeper. Like, fuck me up please.
All of this sounds super critical, and it is! But it was also my favorite VR experience so far, other than Superhot which is like, no contest really. It’s actually very funny and occasionally quite surreal. The creativity on display in these weird VR environments was extremely pleasing. I liked that it wasn’t afraid to show you something utterly pointless, like gigantic ethernet cables floating in the sky, or gigantic versions of the actual headset and controllers you’re using rotating with their real life counterparts. It’s a pretty clever game, it just doesn’t quite get there.
Sorry for the longpost, I have just been dwelling on this game for the 4 days since I finished it.
I really wish that more games explore dreamlike situations that Virtual VR does. Like, jumping deeper into these VR layers, then popping back up them one by one, it’s a very surreal feeling.
This could have been played for horror too. Imagine putting on a headset, then taking it back off but you’re in a different reality now. Or something changed while you had the headset on.
I feel like dreams and impossible architecture are some of the very few things uniquely suited to video games, but also relatively few games even attempt to poke at these ideas. They all insist on making sense and being easy-to-understand.
…aaaaanyway
I’m not really digging Outer Worlds so far although I’m sticking with it since I’ve liked every other Obsidian game to some degree. The writing just feels more like a Bethesda game than an Obsidian one, more Fallout 3 than New Vegas. It’s too on the nose. Flip a switch to help the evil corporation or the nice hippies type stuff. I do like the kinda garish colorful pulpy thing it’s got going, I just wish I cared about the world it’s showing me.
wait what is the one totally solid game that obisidan ever made?
also:
He [Feargus Urquhart] was in his early thirties at the time, and thought that if he did not start a new company soon, he may become too old to do so.
What, is there a fuckin’ age limit that precludes you from forming your own company once you hit your 40s?
if Outer Worlds doesn’t offer me the option to immediately machinegun down members of the Board when I meet them face to face while shouting “Death to the bourgeoisie!” then Leonard Boyarsky has gone soft in the time since Arcanum came out
I hope there’s some good payoff there! I wish they were all more insidiously evil than mustache twirly but either way there should still (hopefully!) be some satisfaction in taking them down.
It feels pretty weak so far even if it wasn’t coming right after disco elysium
That definitely isn’t doing it any favors, yeah.
idk maybe stick with it imo (though i haven’t played disco elysium yet)
i think this game’s writing is fantastic
like, this is where it starts, yeah (you also get your ship because your escape pod thing squished its old captain). it goes… a lot deeper than this. i would say. i think i’m around 15 or so hours in? and i love this game.
Look big brainless bethesda style RPG with a fun scifi setting where I can fight cartoonishly evil capitalists sounds like a fine time to me. Maybe not a greatest of all time game, but definitely fun garbage.
