Robocop Rogue City is more of an imsim than Bioshock and that game is stupid (complimentary) as all fuck
it has better writing too
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everything I need to know about Levine as a writer is him being an admitted libertarian going “boy it sure would be bad having a libertarian utopia” multiple times and everything I need to know about him as a designer I got from the boss at the end of Bioshock
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I guess Defender and R-Type would be SEALLs (“shoot 'em along a line of latitude”) or SESs (“shoot 'em sideways”).
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Shmoops
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Shmoors!
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hi I’m not done yet
let’s unpack the ending of Binf being you finding out that you’re the villain and ending the (daughter fucking) loop by having your daughter and her multiverse versions (one of whom canonically exists in a universe where The Empire Strikes Back came out) drown you at a baptism, thereby literally making you born again and
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I’m going to buy and play whatever the fuck his next game is going to be and then get mad later when it’s bad
just like every Shinkai movie where I enjoy the first two acts and go “oh thank god, he figured it out” and then the third act kicks in and I start yelling “HE CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT” in the theater
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hi I enjoy consuming the output of creators I consider hacks
thank you for enduring my therapy session
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BioShock is the theme park ride version of an imsim, is probably the most succinct way of putting it.
Prey was awesome. I took the upgrade paths that boosted movement speeds and such so by the end of the game I was just flying all over that space station running and super jumping everywhere. I think I stayed pure human as well. I decided to save the alien upgrade paths for a future play through, which I guess I’ll start now that the party is over and we’re probably not going to get anymore Prey or imsims.
Judas will be an imsim-like and may even have some good ideas. Hopefully since they’ve been working on it long enough someone will have had enough time to experiment and make a real breakthrough somewhere. There may be something there but I’m not exactly holding out a lot of hope.
Ken Levine is the kind of guy who is smart enough to come up with an interesting premise and a cool setting but he comes at it from the angle of being a writer first and a game designer second so the games he makes never end up being really nonlinear in the way they suggest themselves as being. Instead of you existing in a space that reacts when you poke at it you find yourself in the lead role of whatever stage play Ken Levine is writing and all semblance of choice and consequence become set dressing. And he’s painfully self aware of this too, I think, which is why BioShock Infinite was all about the multiverse by the end of it.
Having your body 3D printed in Judas looks cool though.
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Actually, like all of this was lifted by Bioshock from System Shock. And Prey is just a redo of System Shock, so this follows.
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i liked far cry 2 also, albeit the infinite respawning guard posts were a bit much
still some of the most beautiful brush fires i’ve seen in gaming, and i appreciated the variety of “prying a bullet out of my leg” animations
yeah metro is definitely on my list of games to try, STALKER also. the other game that did this well, funny enough, is Pathologic 2 - at least having seen the lets play, despite the menuing etc, it does feel like an all-consuming world and
i think an element of bodily frailty or vulnerability is the thing missing from most shooters that keeps them from being considered in this category. like far cry 2’s bullet wounds or malaria, pathologic’s coffee beans and plagues, etc - the sense of being mortal
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Was it just Arkane Austin that was shuttered? If the Lyon studio is still going then we should be good. Imsims will still be made in the AAA space.
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I’m actually pleased that imsim is finally leaving the AAA space and becoming an eccentric indie microgenre full of eurojank
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Would you say that you’re not after immersive sims but embodied sims?
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speaking of which, do really appreciate the vibes of one
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i guess so? i mean there are a lot of things that are embodied but i don’t consider particularly immersive, evocative. Mirror’s Edge, Octodad, Qwop, etc
i’m lacking the language to talk about the thing for sure, but it’s like those moments you get after coming out of meditation - or when you realize you’ve stopped dissociating - keenly aware of your presence, body, the fact that you’re a living organism within a particular location and world context, etc. it’s as much about awareness of the location around you and the world as it is about awareness of your body itself. there are different emotional contexts that could happen in as well - peaceful, contemplative, wary, threatened, out-of-place
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Northern Journey is such a delight. I don’t even know what genre it fits into, it’s just an idiosyncratic game that has a little bit of everything the developer liked in there somewhere
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Perhaps somewhat far off from what you’re describing, but I used to love playing rainbow six maps on difficulties much too high for me when I was younger for this reason, instant tension and basically guaranteed jump scares as I inch my way through a death maze I didn’t really grasp & was too impatient to make real progress in.
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I mean, this is technically better than the game forgiving you and giving you a good end because you only killed a few children.
I bounced off Ctrl Alt Ego as I hit a point in the demo where I finally had a boss-type encounter that I just couldn’t figure out (the combat equivalent in this game was bad), but it was very committed to the full imsim thing. I also give credit to Mosa Lina for describing itself as “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim, where nothing is planned, and everything works” and daring people to call it on it.
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it’s even a false choice, if you save all the little sisters, you end up with enough spine juice to basically fully power up
it doesn’t matter narratively and it doesn’t matter mechanicly
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