what did you play it on? i played it on switch and suspect its much better with mouse and keyboard
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Oh, gosh, yes I played on PC with KBM which definitely helped
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I should really stop playing first-person action games on the switch because half the time they’re unplayable, but i like playing them in bed!!
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the text at the top of the UI in Gunma is great. it changes on each stage, but the first stage says “reading this will get you killed” or something along those lines.
that and Dawn Car are both just hilarious shitposts of games and I love them.
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I beat FFX a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it. it sticks the landing and it’s a good Final Fantasy game, although i’m not sure where i’d place it within my silly internal ranking of mainline FF games. Maybe not top 5, but like…#6? who’s to say, really. I mostly decided to ignore the end game stuff because it was just way too involved - the kind of thing meant for someone super obsessed with the game, I think, and just needs to milk every ounce of it.
anyway, I moved on to FFX-2 last week and…I have mixed feelings about it! I really like the trio of ladies and their dynamic, and it’s cool to hang out in Spira after All the Shit Went Down and see how people are moving on, but I feel like the game kind of lacks structure as an RPG. basically, the game feels like the end game of every FF where you just go explore everything to see what you can do, except this time it’s the entire game and not just the end.
personally, the end of every FF where it “opens up” (except for VI) is always where my interest begins to fizzle a little, and I always have to kind of buckle down and push myself through to the end. I think FF games work best when there is a really clear narrative direction that the game is taking you in.
And FFX-2 does have that to a degree (there are main missions I could just focus on), but I don’t really feel like i’m on an adventure because i’m just accessing places i’ve already been before via my airship hub. I don’t hate that, per se, but it isn’t really motivating me to keep playing the way FFX did.
but! there are many positives, like the music, and the dressphere system. also I had no idea the game switched back to ATB in this title, so that was a fun surprise.
but at the same time, i’m having a little trouble finding the groove I really want in battles, towards the end of Chapter 3. they feel pretty slow, even compared to X, which is also kind of slow.
so i’m starting to wonder if i’m going to be able to see this one through to the end.
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Give me the slop I say, as I boot up Quantum of Solace for Xbox 360. Treyarch put a cover system in the CoD engine. An odd choice to just put the song over the opening car chase, and it isn’t playable, because CoD engine. I was mostly excited to see how they did the Opera House. And they made it a different day, without an audience, and you just avoid security cameras. It also skips the parking garage sequence. Dang QoS is a cool movie if you could see any of it.
Between levels Judi Dench does her best to deliver video game dialog. It’s CoD style so its all zoom in and satellite photos and drivers licenses. There was a graphic for “PARACHUTE DEPLOYED” and I wondered who at MI6 designed that.
You basically only see the Bolivian lady from a distance and after you blow up 3 helicopters in a cave it flashes back and asked you to play Casino Royale. It starts with the opening chase which has a bunch of pedestrians running around. Then I got bored and felt like I had had enough. But if I play longer I guess I get to see Mads…
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Also I didn’t find very satisfying to freely explore FFX-2’s world when I literally just saw 90% of the same settings and monster designs in the previous game!
Much like Trails in the Sky 1st and 2nd, they seem like a pair of games best played with a couple-of-years gap between them. It’s probably more fun if your memory has had some time to dim and get tinged with nostalgia.
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FFX-2 might be the game to play if you are ever in the mindset of thinking “hmm, maybe I should replay FFX”
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been playing some games
The Message from Deep Space
Continuing to make steady progress in the mid-500’s. I can’t no-life this game too hard or it becomes a huge slog. the pacing is a real drip-feed of progress. still really admire what it does with building from the bare basics of communication into actual language. and the characters continue to be super charming, i love the team member interactions. “happy dictionary, happy life” it’s just a nice game, well written, doesn’t insult your intelligence, incorporates a lot of interesting real-world academic disciplines.
also I named our alien communicator friend “GHOSTWRITER”
INSIDE
I really really like this game so far. It’s hard to know how far I am but I don’t really care to know either, just enjoying the ride.
It obviously takes a ton of inspiration from Another World – instant death quicktime events, zero explanation, all visuals and putting the pieces together in your own head. They even have, for example, rope-swinging mechanics that mirror the cage-swinging after getting captured in Another World; or avoiding an animal enemy by running away and then doubling back on another vertical plane; stuff like that. I admire their ambition, their willingness to be as strict as they were with the input timings, at the risk of gory death. And the setting is really working for me – I’ve always secretly wanted to make a game like this – a game about being a child on the run, where death lurks around every corner, the setting is forbidding and mysterious, and no adults will help you. It makes me feel like the devs of this game understood on a subconscious level the same drives and feelings that I have had in the past. Every new screen is an inventively-drawn environment with more questions than answers. Really really good stuff for a certain kind of person.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013)
very belatedly getting into the original. had to deal with massive and baffling frame drops until i figured out the tricks to make it work.
protip to all playing on halfway-modern PC’s, make sure the game exe is set to run in Compatibility Mode (i used Win7), set Nvidia max framerate to 62, set it to run off your GPU in Windows Graphic settings, and any time it starts lagging turn your controller off for a while (seriously) there is something bugged about using a controller in this game.
other than that ACslop is exactly my kind of slop, I love running around rooftops chasing sea shanties and collecting treasure chests. the Abstergo framing device going from generic evil corp in AC 1/2 to evil tech corp that does AI and Virtual Reality games in Montreal is really funny. also interesting that main character is not an Assassin (to start the game at least) and instead is impersonating a quisling Assassin who he sort of accidentally kills in the first act. as a Black Sails fan this game has a lot of Age of Piracy tie-in appeal, you’ve got your Stede Bonnets and Woodes Rogers etc. I just sort of wish it was about New England whale ships instead, but that would be very personal fanservice for yours truly, probably not a mass market game. I just like the American shanties better tbh.
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calling games that keep my hands busy “finger food” from now on
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continued with the demos after getting home, played enough smtv to decide this shit is extremely not for me. i like the expanded demon conversations, but i hate being in a world full of shit to grab, and having demons walk around instead of being random encounters adds to me feeling i have too much to pay attention to. like, im sure its good and fine but you dont need STUFF all over the place to grab all the time as if you’d otherwise forget its a videogame
then i tried mesmalie and learned quickly this isn’t happening with a trackpad, but i think id like to try the thing on my laptop. fun flavor point and click with i suppose minigames, the type made for small children except i think bad things will happen here but its ok its gonna be funny
radio the universe apparently has a demo is that actually coming out ever? it has interesting hefty movement and looks gorgeous. like you are obviously a human shaped pile of metal scrambling around, it can be felt every jump and every drop and wow you do keep dropping down holes a lot wonder if thats thematic
banquet for fools is a crpg that i cant wrap my head around with an appealing aesthetic. i feel some respect but will not play. appreciate that the demo mission apparently has you kill a bunch of children turned feral by a witch. i never found them but thats the kind of stuff rpgs are all about!
500 caliber contractz is largely what it says on the page tho i do feel boiling it down to that is underselling it. momentum platformer where you get into position and shoot a rich man.
severed love, sort of erotica tho not sexually explicit, except for all the obvious sexual tension of waking up chained to a bed in a strange room and all your limbs have been amputated and the guy who did it sometimes shows up and if you say the wrong things he kills you. unfortunately the writing did very little for me. hard to stay interested despite the theme
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romp of dump kind of seems wrong to me in a way i dont like (just something about the word choices for the store page and trailer puts me off), but i still had to at least look at the being captive fetish game for women
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Inside
finished game, wow that took a real turn. i enjoyed it enough that i kind of disliked the idea of attempting to “explain the lore” or whatever. sometimes a thing is supposed to be weird and impressionistic. i admit thought it does make me ask a lot of questions about the world it’s set in, and what they were trying to get at. just not the facile explanations i’ve been seeing online, like “in the alternate ending, that’s when the boy unplugs your controller! the player is in the game controlling the boy! wOaHhHHh” and things like this. moreso interested in a literary criticism of it: what do the worms signify? why dead pigs? why did the kid have to become part of the giant blob and so on.
btw it is really hard to search for discussion of this game on SB, very generic title it turns out. i was searching “inside playdead” and stuff but didn’t find much.
re theories on the “what happened in this game”, i found this reddit post interesting and somewhat convincing. i like that it is still trying to think about the semantic qualities of the plot and not just the literal, despite the title
https://www.reddit.com/r/PlaydeadsInside/comments/10a8xdr/the_literal_story_of_inside/
it’s cool how much care was put into the backgrounds in this game, all meaningful
https://www.reddit.com/r/PlaydeadsInside/s/DfsaNqLSNB
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It’s kind of amazing how much better Inside is than Limbo, which has a fun aesthetic but was mediocre at best. I think Inside might be the best narrative 2d puzzle platformer (anotherworldlike)? It is interesting how little it gets talked about. Some games are just so good and complete that there’s not a whole lot to say.
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Modern Fighting game modes be like
- World of Episodes
- ‘’‘’‘Arcade’‘’‘’
- Tower of endless CPUs
- Versus
- Practice (please grind)
- Tutorial on how to press each of the buttons 3 times
- Gallery (please grind)
- Options
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So I’ve finished Spire in Myst 4 and have moved on to Achenar’s place (I don’t remember what it’s called, or if I actually heard/read it). I know there’s (at least) a third book but I’m not ready to look at that one yet. The jungle is cool to look at and annoying to navigate. I have four of five symbols ready (you’ll know which one I’m missing if you played) though I’m not 100% sure which matches which yet. I have one definitely ready, and two I think I have ready. Funnily I think if I get the four that I know, I can just guess on the fifth easily. Which feels a little cheat-y, but at the same time, it was deliberately part of the big puzzle on Spire, though it also spelled out that it would be that way.
Anyway, I’m mostly liking this even if Achenar’s acting is a bit uhhhhhhhh suboptimal. I try not to be too annoyed with that stuff but it is noticeable.
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I agree with the first part of this but I revisited Limbo last year when my nieces and nephews wanted to play it and I think it’s still a good game.
Inside is a favorite of mine but I guess I’ve never really made an effort to come up with a coherent overall story for it. These ideas are fun to read and I see that I missed some of the game’s subtleties (things that happen if you just sit there, etc.).
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I’m also on the “Inside is probably the best cinematic platformer ever made and thought Limbo was mid at best” train
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I don’t remember Inside very well, guess I’ll replay it
I find myself wanting to replay Another World much more often than Inside. Perhaps the ideal length of such a game for me is 30 minutes.
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