got back up to where I was in Policenauts. The bomb disposal scene is excellent. A real highlight. And then Kojima did not let me forget he can’t write women ever.
As the daughter that looks exactly like your dead ex-wife confesses she loves you after knowing you for a day. And throws herself on you. This is shockingly not horny boob grabby Jonathan Ingrams and he is real weirded out by his ex-wife’s daughter doing this.
She’s also terminally ill.
yeah it definitely doesn’t get any better re: that stuff in Policenauts
I’m playing Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and like, for what is essentially a big collection of Dust Bowl Flash Fiction strung together by some dodgy mechanics, it scratches a little bit of the itch that things like Sunless Sea do for me. The latter is very much a better Game, but I think the writing is on par.
I appreciate little touches like getting to eat regional cuisine in a lot of the big cities as just sort of an extra bit of flavor (pun not intended). I had a coney dog in Detroit and thought of @LaurelSoup
There was some post-mortem where the Where the Water Tastes Like Wine dev admitted they didn’t have anyone playtesting the thing and they were blindsided by folks, like, not enjoying having to slowly walk around all of America while whistling “Oh! Susanna” using Xbox face buttons. I swear the words “If there’s one mistake we made it’s not having anyone playtesting” were in there somewhere. And “We made a PC game but didn’t consider players might want to use a keyboard and mouse.” Blew my fucking mind. That game won industry awards years before it was even out and they didn’t have anyone playtesting it. That game had Sting (the bad one) doing voice acting for it but they didn’t think to recruit some thirsty retiree Police fans for free labour. How is that possible. How are there people running an even more ramshackle operation than I am.
I feel bad that they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on that game but also I am insanely jealous and I know if I had that kinda money I’d hire someone to play my good game and tell me what sucks. And I’d pay my talented, good-looking friends to do voice acting rather than celebs. That would then make my friends celebs, and me a starmaker. That’s the role I was born to play.
Maybe they eventually sold enough copies to turn a profit cuz they’re still working on the game? I hope so, even though I regretted my purchase and hated all that walking. I’m gonna have to try it again and see how they tightened things up.
I think if words are the main draw of your game you should not make me walk as well. If I wanted to do that shit I’d hoof it on down to the library. Just let me click on a map.
I bought the Sega Ages port Virtua Racing and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I do like the walking, though
There’s absolutely no way they made a profit; if someone’s working on it it’s out of love and/or misguided attempts to turn around their dream project
Honestly I have less issue with the walking and more with the whole trading-stories system. I appreciate that they don’t totally spell out what stories will satisfy what demands, but it leads to a lot of trial and error. Either that or I just really am too jaded and that’s why everybody always thinks I’m trying to tell scary stories when I just think shit is Weird & Neat/Exciting
I think once I actually switched to a pad (which I only did after I read that post-mortem) it was way more palatable but I think I still struggled to whistle? Perhaps I’m misremembering, and thinking more about my real life struggles with putting my lips together and blowing.
I think I had the same issue with the somewhat-off labels on the stories and I think that may be why I ended up putting down the game.
Someday I’ll start taking notes on things as I play them so I can consult them when I want to levy a critique cuz that’s probably way better than me gesticulating wildly while going “I vaguely recall it feeling like this maybe?!”
amid evil is the pretty hexen reboot i didn’t know i needed
maybe i should play dusk now
It is this; the core of the game and the decisions they made in rendering the stories, in splitting them up, in both resisting and integrating them with a game-like progression and unlocking model. I think they want to focus the player on a ‘story is its own reward’ mindset, but the strictures of a game, even as they fight against it, push so hard into a hoarding, filing cabinet mode of approach. And the stories aren’t consistently well-written or well-acted enough to make it work.
I think the best glimmer is the interjection system, and the concept that the random sights the player finds become new folklore. But as great as it is conceptually (and as much as I like the fuzzy timescale it implies the player character, rendered a mythical storytelling vagrant, is living through), it isn’t a satisfying interaction. I think it’s something that needed to be explored in a series of text adventures before being ready for all this art and production to be built around it.
This is one of my favorite things thus far, I was pleasantly surprised by it
It sets such a good table for the mutable nature of folklore, and the way we receive these stories without a clear time even though we often get a clear place as they form a regional mythos.
ring fit adventure is pretty dang good i’m very into it
jesus christ Cool Cool Toon is such a fucking beautiful looking game, holy shit
I’m just gawking at this thing on hardware through a VGA box (emulating it and turning the up the internal res doesn’t compare to how sharp this thing looks on a CRT)
it’s maybe like, the best looking 3D Dreamcast game
which is why it’s such a bummer that the game part is so terrible
SNK accidentally kinda came up with Osu/EBA years before except instead of a stylus, you have to use the analog stick on the controller to move a cursor on a circle (essentially replicating the stick’s movement)
you should be able to see the problem with this just by reading that description. it’s fresh but hilariously impenetrable
the first stage of the arcade mode (well, as close as an arcade mode as the game has) has a section where you have to hit four quick notes in succession and they’re all at halfway pushes of the stick in the four cardinal directions and different face buttons
I also just gawked at that and then gave up
I want to like it but I feel like I have to become a DC analog stick master wizard before I can get any deeper than 2-3 minutes or a few chapters into the story mode
also who the hell makes a game where unpausing means either restarting or quitting
If you scroll back I made pretty much the same post 3 years ago. It is uniquely terrible.
I’m still buying a copy and you can’t stop me
why is there a button for more points if you can only activate more points when you get a big enough combo
why wouldn’t you just give more points
why wouldn’t you just make it automatic when you can just hold down the button and have it activate when your combo is big enough
why does pressing different face buttons sometimes count as a press and other times count as a miss
I want to meet the gods who did QA on this abomination
I want to learn from them
nanaon sha
I picked up Sekiro again and tried to finish my Bell Demon run, which I quit right before Sword Saint months ago. After another 5 hours of attempting him and all 63 of my red candy eaten up – still no luck. The fight is like Orphan of Kos in that it represents the most developed version of the game’s mechanics and requires a lot of persistence, but the similarity ends there. Instead of facing a hideous thing making earsplitting screams on a desolate beach, you’re in a pretty field of silvergrass facing a likeable old master who really just wants you to be the finest shinobi you can be.
The pace of the fight is also fairly slow – even in the later phases – and the difficulty comes more from the sheer variety of moves. No part of fight loses its interest even after I’ve partly mastered it, because there is usually a more precise or aggressive response to be discovered even to familiar moves, and I know by now posture only consistently goes in the right direction when you’ve accumulated as many little edges as you can. So even though I’ve spent 15 to 20 hours on this fight alone, I still walk into every attempt with equanimity and hardly feel a twinge of tilt.