while I still use the snes9x core in retroarch out of defiance, and I used snes9x for a very long time while running standalone mednafen for everything else, I cannot answer this
I’m pretty sure they work in retroarch snes9x because they’re zipped on my pihole’s filesystem
Question:
All my friends who have played Ghost of Tsushima keep telling me that it’s wonderful and poetic.
Could it be that it’s actually much better than the usual Assassin’s creed clone?
I’m curious about Tony’s question but also how fetishist/racist it is, too
For a moment, due to language barrier I misterstood your post and was worried that my question could sound too anti-AC crowd ahah
i’d put pretty good money on yes it’s better than the average asscreed clone + no it’s not wonderful/poetic + yes it’s racist/fetishist
haven’t played a minute of it though (and won’t lmao)
that seems accurate, won’t win you over to that style of game, but an decent one if that’s what you want? ignorant and silly, but mostly fine?
I plan to play it in the next two years!
People that have played it say it is a completely fine lawnmower sim. It’s also completely stupid about either being honorable or shameful in combat.
Yeah, like all Sony first party stuff, I will buy a ten dollar copy of it and play through half of it before putting it down forever.
Eh, It could’ve been worse. They cribbed extremely heavily from mid 20th century samurai movies for a lot of it and supposedly had a lot of scholars on staff to get that stuff right so maybe it messed up my sensors, but I found the the depiction of “the samurai” to be way more reserved than I was expecting, even if it still got a little goofy at times. It was fine. (Plus you totally dump that samurai/honor shit about 45 minutes into the game to become essentially an AC assassin anyways.)
I got more of the heebie jeebies with how the Mongols were just orcs from LOTR. They speak mostly unsubtitled Mongolian, exist only as mooks to kill, and you kill them unceremoniously by the hundreds. The game does the very bare minimum to make the Mongol leader seem like a human but that’s pretty much it.
Anyways overall I liked it, but if the setting creeps you out I’d recommend playing Days Gone in survival mode instead for a taste of a no-mini map no-lock on no- fast travel open world game.
The one wrinkle to day’s gone is that the folks making it are in a part of Oregon known for the prevalence of white supremacist biker gangs.
…and they made a game about being those biker gangs. Set in the same place all the white supremacist bikers are in real life. In a genre that is increasingly visibly about fantasies of survivalism vs the ‘hordes coming to take America’.
So I’d rate it as equally sketch in that regard.
Sony Bend is definitely not Sony Santa Monica but they’re much closer to that studio culture than, say, the distinct culture of big Texas studios like Gearbox and iD. I think it makes more sense to view them as the second-wave tech culture seeding out of a hub like Portland into mid-size post-extraction towns.
There definitely are nuances in the Specific Oregon Situation that Im probably missing, but I found the game to pass my own personal “is this fucked up” test by portraying the 1%er characters exactly as how I knew them growing up around Michigan militia members in rural Michigan: as completely incurious numbskull shitheads who would nevertheless outlive me in the case of a zombie apocalypse. (Of course the huge caveat here is the extreme racism that exists in these types of 1%er gangs, and which the game completely sidesteps for obvious reasons)
It may have just been my own biases talking but Days Gone skirts by the “portraying doesn’t mean condoning” line by having the main character and his idiot biker friends unsympathetic to the point of perversion. They fucking suck!! But that was kind of the fun of it for me I guess.
It’s exactly like Assassin’s Creed but I guess the combat is better. I used to think it felt like just another Assassin’s Creed-like until I went back and played Lord of the Rings: Shadow of War earlier this year (sorry Busted). I think the game’s quality is inversely proportional to how much side content you do though. It’s definitely an Assassin’s Creed game in giving you an endless amount of copy pasted Stuff to collect and do.
Wouldn’t call it poetic though.
Oh yeah, and the online is pretty neat.
hey it’s not my fault
I want to be clear, I’m not saying don’t play it (although I won’t because I’m a crank and hate that sorta open world game anyway) I’m just saying it’s sketch as hell in it’s own way.
To be clear, my (mild) pushback is that I know a bunch of people who work there and I don’t think it’s appropriate or correct to imply there’s a studio culture or undercurrent of cultural attachment to mountain west crank conservative politics.
Easy and clear enough that they simply took the ever-naive game and middle-class tech worker approach to underexamined middlebrow culture and antiheroes.
I’m sure there are folks who work at that company who are great people! But you yourself mention a lot how it’s nearly impossible to push back against stuff from the top and the top signed off on a game that was about bikers in an area known for white supremacist biker gangs in a metaphor for racial displacement anxiety (zombies apocalypse).
I’m not saying every person who worked on it needs to get shoved out the airlock, and I’m not saying that people who play should be either.
I mean hell, god knows I like playing a ton of games with settler colonialist undercurrents if you pick them apart enough and that’s it’s own kind of fucked up. Lots of games have really fucked up subtext.
But it is a subtext, that exists, and a number of layers of corporate signed off on that. And I like to critically examine this fact, and a lotta folks outside of the particular sphere of Oregon I’m in aren’t even going to be aware of it, so I feel like I should mention it, especially in the context of games featuring dubious cultural undercurrents. 
Oh yeah, I think the product they made is totally valid to critique for those undercurrents. I think it’s that mindless regurgitation of pre-existing cultural narratives that makes it possible, without anybody involved signing on to that cultural project.
going to my deathbed screaming into the void they did a great job making a game where the main character is an unsympathetic piece of crap!!! It’s rare and difficult to do in video games!! His involvement in a fantasy biker gang plays into that!! The developers don’t glamorize it at all! Please play the game! flatlines, gathered family shakes their heads sadly
yeah see that’s the thing, I would always rather someone make something, like, weirdly if not nakedly fascist if they can also ironize it and make it unsettling. where is gaming’s s craig zahler, where is subtext, never say what you mean, even if it’s an accident