I served my enemies a dish but it was already cold when it got to them
both of my top topics are offshoots of the news thread where I post some shit about TLOU and then there’s a discussion that gets cleaved off into it’s own discussion. I’ve done this shit twice!!!
ya know the ps4 remaster of the last of us came out only a year after the ps3 release. would this feel as ridiculous if the remake of part 1 didn’t just come out? I wonder how much more involved this remaster will be compared to that. I guess the difference is that ps4 wasn’t at all backwards compatible with ps3 when the last of us remaster came out? except I’m sure there are some meaningful improvements that can be made running the game natively on ps5 that backwards compatibility can’t do.
either way this all feels kind of neurotic. like I feel like some of the messaging with the remake of part 1 was to bring it up to the standard that part 2 set in terms of visual fidelity, AI, etc. is the idea with this remaster to bring it to parity with the remake of part 1? that’s the part of this that feels kind of insane to me, I feel like it just wouldn’t even be controversial if the remake of 1 wasn’t still so fresh on everyone’s minds.
I’ve only played part 2 on PS5 and it looks incredible. aside from a higher framerate it’s hard for me to ask for much more in terms of a remaster. I kinda want to compare it with the remake of part 1 to see if there’s that much of a difference.
the real reason for all of this is probably just to pad out the ps5’s library. it does seem funny to me how people criticized the switch for its library mostly being ports of wii u and ps3/360 games. and yet…
yeah we’re just running out of videogames to make, no wukkas
At least the visual and performance leap between PS3 and PS4 TLOU was pretty significant, imo. I can’t imagine this being that much different but who knows.
I was forced to play all the way through TLOU2 for Professional Reasons and I hated the story because not only is it trying to do this boring thing:
“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post . “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
It isn’t even good at it. There is a scene where you have to hit someone to death and kill them as Ellie… and I just didn’t want to. I’d already learned about “the cycles of violence” 10-15 hours previously, thank you Neil, I learned my lesson, I won’t kill people for revenge anymore, I’ll swear it off. And the game is like “I dunno, dumb baby, have you really??? We will make you kill someone in a regrettable way so that you can double learn it.” Well I was so mad about this dead horse beating that I just put the controller down and got a snack. Ellie’s heart was beating and the audio was going nuts and I waited it out thirty minutes to see what was gonna happen. Nothing happened. I had to do the evil murder like I (the player) was a dumb baby idiot who didn’t already learn about my cycles of violence.
The game is simply too long to do what he wanted it to do. At the very most in a game like this you can put the player through that ““learning experience”” one time. Here they make you escalate, like, 3 times… and if you are an adult, the whole time you will be thinking “hmm, they’re trying to teach me about da cycle of violence” and the ““lesson”” won’t stick the way Druckmann wants it to. It becomes a total chore and a bore and it makes you feel stupid and untrusted.
I can see a game with a more surreal or heightened sense of reality pulling off this reverse move after an escalation of violence. You’d have to tell a story where the player feels excited, rewarded, and motivated to do murder before finally changing their mind, and you’d have to find a way to acknowledge players who choose to put weapons down like I did. But that’s very hard! A big budget character action game can’t afford to recognize your intelligence in that way. The escalating murder content is too expensive to produce!
bioshock-ass storytelling
I believe I saved a video of the final 15 minutes of me waiting it out as I described above, but it’s on a console I don’t have plugged in, so I won’t post it. But it’s very funny, trust me
shoot the hinges but the hinges are a detailed human face experiencing lifelike brutality
i think sometimes it’s literally better to just let the player be the audience watching their idiot dolls act out on screen
Absolutely. It was the aaa narrative design participatory stuff that really destroyed it for me. If Ellie had done that shit in a cutscene I would have actually probably been less mad… through I’m not sure the me in that universe would have even realized that haha. So much of my frustration was due to the precise execution of these moments
no one must have noticed how naked snake executes the boss if u put the controller down for a couple minutes
I was definitely curious if something like that would happen
so what you’re basically saying is that this games compulsory violence is on the level of like Spec ops the line and is therefore a complete joke I guess that makes plenty of sense I dunno what I expected. The white phosphorus was a cheap trick there as well
(later edit; I was being kind of shitty here!!! sorry!!!)
the more edgy and kind of interesting political idea in Spec Ops the Line is actually when you get into one of the first gun fights, it’s an ambush, and your buddy yells “fuck those are Americans firing at us!!” and your dude says “fire back or we die” and you know that 0% of gamers set their controllers down in that moment.
Paying attention to the way the american flags are flying so you can see if you’re killing good americans or bad americans is one of the funniest things anyone has ever put in a game, like gamers give a shit about FLAG CODE enough to get upset about who they are shooting
flags don’t matter, everything is shootable meat when gamers aim down sights
The funny thing is that the biggest game that ever got this “so you chose to do violence???” gimmick right was Undertale… and it is so so funny and unlikely and cool that Undertale actually is more popular than both of these videogames and will probably be remembered for ten times longer
For some reason stuff like this is what makes it particularly gross that these games are turning into basically glorified tech demos for subsequent generations of new consoles