I guess I’d better try this one.
It’s certainly the best of the VR horror games that I’ve played, and Cuba will be able to try it next week if he’s so inclined. But I also find myself wishing for something more along the lines of Silent Hill.
There are so many subtle effects that would work well in VR. For example, I can imagine what the apartment hauntings in SH4 would be like in a more immersive medium like that. Or even just incidental things such as the heads that float by the window.
i hit the bloodpotion so quickly when i read
that I’m sure it’s a world record
I’ve got a mediocre Silent Hill 4-in-VR fangame that demonstrates how effective this can be even with shaky writing (that name!):
I was disappointed there wasn’t much meat to the linguistics mechanics. For me translation is a hobby and none of what I enjoy in learning and interpreting other languages was in here. There are basically two parts to the system, 1) make grammatical and natural phrases in word-for-word literal English, and 2) your character magically realizes whether a particular candidate meaning is correct or not when you’ve collected enough samples. It felt like a missed opportunity.
I disagree!
Though its non-obvious I really like that the meanings you assign to words are just glosses with a bunch of contextual information thrown out. Each of the graphemes is meaningful in itself in addition to forming part of a word or phrase, which lets me puzzle out correct solutions long before I can get that solution validated by the game just by recognizing “oh that grapheme suggests possession, that grapheme suggests something to do with people”, etc.
Its less a game about translating a known language and more a game about picking up a layer of meaning from an unknown language even if that layer will be hopelessly incomplete.
The language in Heaven’s Vault is definitely not literal english with fancy writing. Its an agglutinative language where, so far, negation is signified with an infix, quantity is a suffix, type is a prefix, etc etc
the way the words are constructed is really fun to puzzle out and it is certainly a good deal more complex than just making contextual guesses of word meanings (if you want it to be)
I am liking the process of figuring out how to distinguish verbs and nouns by grapheme position
I’m late to the party but return of the obra dinn is real good so far
can somehow run the crash and spyro remasters. spyro is good so far
I lost a whole day to The Outer Worlds yesterday so I guess it’s doing something right but I find myself with just an absolutely hilarious amount of consumables in my inventory and I feel like I’m loathe to ever use most of them and they have poor resale value. So it takes a little of the satisfaction of finding a cache of items away when half of the bins are full of booze and stuff. I need a better shock or corrosion weapon though I’ve been getting my shit wrecked by mechanical enemies.
Haven’t been offered any flaws yet which is disappointing. I’m like 12 hours deep in the game.
now that I’m close to finishing link’s awakening I’m even more torn. in some ways I feel like it’s like the ideal zelda experience that I’ve always wanted, but I still miss how the gameboy game felt
like… there is almost an inherent characteristic to gameboy games where playing them is sort of like trying to interact with a boat in a glass bottle with elongated tweezers
in this remake, the boat is just out in the open and can be directly perceived and interacted with and that’s kind of exciting and neat but it’s just not the same, man
Punch the boat
in conclusion, I’m glad that anodyne exists
i still haven’t finished it, because i got distracted, but i agree with this. i do really enjoy the remake and that it exists and is a thing, but the feeling of the game is partially tied to it being on the Gameboy.
that said, if the game ran consistently at 60fps, i bet it would congeal better.
it’s weird because the frame rate hiccups bug me but also it’s one of the few things that contribute to the sort of dreamlike atmosphere that the original was awash in. I kind of wish there were more weird technical issues with it lol.
like idk, I think it would be better overall if the performance was more solid. I don’t think it’s really possible to recapture the experience of playing old gameboy games in a modern AAA package no matter how you package it. I think pretty much all the aesthetic choices they made were on point. The game still feels small and intimate and you can tell they took pains to keep that intact. the tilt shift perspective was apparently chosen specifically with that in mind and I respect that thought process. the musical production and audio design is dry. there’s the tiniest amount of small room reverb when it’s applied at all and it results in a tone of “kind of puny but determined”. I don’t feel like there were any missteps there, except the weird muted trumpets that come in during the owl’s music.
but you just can’t simulate dot matrix stereo sound, man.
yeah, this exactly. there’s no way it could ever be what the original game is, but i guess that’s why the 60fps bugs me? because if it was just more secure in being this highly-stylized diorama thing, it would be easier to digest it as such. when it actually does move at 60fps, it always feels like a breath of air; it feels clear to me that this is what they envisioned for it, but for whatever reason, the Switch can’t deal with it.
The spots of slowdown come at such strange times. The first time I encountered it I thought “Switch Pro 2020”.
there’s a digital foundry video about this and the drops seem really weird. I think it has something to do with how the game implements vsync.
it baffles me tho because I feel like breath of the wild does far more technically demanding feats and has overall a much steadier framerate? I guess that game had a much larger and more experienced team working on it, and maybe a longer dev cycle, but still.
the reveal of the thing that happened to the ship in return of the obra dinn caused nika to literally go “DAAAMN”
silently praying that VRR kills off v-sync in the next generation
