ironically, despite my horniness and the horniness of the devs, most of the characters they’re making don’t do much for me? Endfield is actually pretty restrained and chaste (Arknights in general tends to have interesting and attractive designs that aren’t beelining towards horny) so I tend to like characters for being characters there (Mi Fu my beloved…). ZZZ gives me the most because there’s actual butts on these characters (yes I’m looking at the ladies’ butts but also they infamously made a male unit’s ass bigger during a beta), NTE is… cringe and Genshin is so far deep in its particular visual design tropes that 95% of the female designs in that game just wash over me at this point. yeah, no, I love detached sleeves and split hair and women free soloing walls in heels
meanwhile game aimed at women Infinity Nikki has multiple women I wish would step on me so it’s winning by default
I completed The Message from Deep Space earlier today. I’m not sure I have a lot to add on top of the thoughts I shared during my playthrough. It comes dangerously close to going a bit sideways at the start of the final 100 transmissions with some stuff that IMHO goes beyond reasonable world building to rather navel-gazing “yeah… I don’t really care about this level of minutia” but fortunately that is mostly confined to a single in-game week as it gets back to its baseline right after (it does reinforce my thought that the game definitely needed an editor though). It remains tricky as while it is a translation game throughout the back two-thirds are so different than the opening on that… normally I’d say to try the demo but even as lengthy as it is you rarely see a game change so significantly ten or so hours in. Then again by the back half I’m not convinced it is nearly as much of a puzzle game as it is in its first so perhaps seeing if the theming and characters appeals to you is the most important thing. Still think it was pretty good, but with a couple more caveats than I was hoping.
Checked the steam achievements and a bit shocked only about 9% of people saw it through to the end, granted it is a 40 hour game but generally games with a diehard fanbase seem to be a bit higher than that.
Oh yeah, have also been playing through The Darkside Detective this past week. I expected it to be one full-sized point & click adventure game, instead it is broken up into several standalone cases and I think that actually ended up being a better thing. Each section being smaller both in terms of screens and items means it was less likely to step into one of the frequent pitfalls I experience in these games (if you have to combine various items together to form a different one it is less likely to be bothersome when you only have four or five items to begin with). Not essential but ended up being fairly pleasant.
Long been of the opinion that Slipstream’s controls are far too floppy for a super scaler-style racer. Well, turns out if I play it set to auto drifting and use the d-pad instead of the thumbstick, it feels pretty good to play.
The Message From Deep Space
in the 800-900s getting annoyed at the way the alien discusses its pride in its children, children as its greatest achievement, etc is extremely culturally American. i can tell you this is not how all cultures on Earth discuss their children or having children in general let alone an alien from deep space.
it’d be like, uh, if some message from deep space came here and after a year of translating the aliens started talking about standing for the flag and respecting the troops or some shit. immersion breaker
in general i’m finding this whole tangent of philosophical bullcrap really boring. i find this type of stuff very annoying in real life, let alone the made-up version
The game feels like it might become a cult classic in 10 years. It has a lot of PS360 DNA. It’s basically a very forgiving Souls/Sekiro-like with high concept Nier-esque worldbuilding but its narrative pace is very slow. It’s far in the future and plants have taken over the world. Most of humanity have migrated into gleisners robot bodies, and flesh humans are second class citizens. Most animals are now super-powered plant hybrids that are actively hostile to humans. You’re a human-plant (Emma) who is treated like total shit despite being powerful enough to fight 5-storey tall tree-deer in hand to hand combat. She also has a small girl in her brain who talks to her. Memories can be shared via plant hybrids touching vines. You’ve got a tree-wolf companion, it just throws ideas out constantly which is both interesting but might also benefit from reining in the focus.
The PS360 stuff comes from weird genre blends like your pet tree-wolf being commandable through a ‘turn-based system’ which really just pauses time while you select an ability, there are no ‘turns’. Otherwise combat is mostly very simple Sekiro parrying and the parry windows could be described as French. There is an enormous skill tree the progression of which is tied to your character and tree-wolf’s stats. You have 3 stats each so this is technically an RPG. Special moves don’t look very special, your starting one is an awkward animation where you sort of step forward and elbow an enemy. But you can also do cool stuff like grow plants out of your legs to jump or create stealth attack diving boards to jump off of.
There’s a mechanic which shows up at the beginning which has the plant ‘blight’ sweep over the landscape dynamically growing trees and changing the environment so you can grapple to new areas. When it passes, giant tree models literally shrink into nothing as if the engine editor is tweaking the dimension sliders on the model to 0. The game markets itself as a one-person one-dog action game which is mostly shash. Your dog is constantly spinning and clipping, spawning and despawning, and is only indirectly controllable when you have enough ‘turn-points’. Otherwise it’s just a very effective but automatic companion who barks out the location of every nearby object and enemy.
The game is enjoyable; very easy by Souls standards. Every campfire can teleport to one another early on and dying loses you nothing. Ranged weapons are very powerful and ammo is plentiful. Early skills boost your capabilities immensely and combat is often over in less than 30 seconds. I find it compelling for how jank the Game Freak touch is and it probably resembles 2010s Souls most in its workmanlike textures, and ambiguous emptiness. There is lots of lore the game is in no rush to catch you up on. It’s implied humanity tried to eradicate the plants with a satellite weapon and people are forbidden from looking up which I thought was a dumb detail until I tried looking at the orbital wreckage in the sky which does slowly kill you. Lots of neat ideas I’ve not seen elsewhere despite how much it borrows from other popular stuff.
Emma is heavily coded as autistic. She almost condemns herself by admitting to the militarist robot government that she befriended the tree-wolf instead of killing it (bad idea) because she believes she always has to tell the truth. She is also unable to feel emotions which isn’t exactly accurate alexithymia, but does endear her to me in a weird way. Even though it’s a horrible writing decision if you want your plucky new Souls-like to appeal to an audience who at this point mostly respond to cool epic shit. I wanna finish it but so far good feelings despite its flaws.
been thinking about dipping into gears reloaded again, since it was on sale for a tenner
it is midly baffling to me that a now 20 year old series with an infamous and loadbearing emergent pvp movement mechanic - wallbouncing - has still not seen fit to actually guide new players in its practise
akin to street fighter just leaving cancel combos completely unpresented in training mode, trials, anything, since world warrior
small wonder new players to these things hit a mammoth salt wall
So an actual, sorta satisfying ending to the main campaign of Assassin’s Creed Shadows was added in an update after the game had been out for a bit…actually just two months ago? Goddamn.
It seems to exist mostly to tie the game to past games, but also Black Flag Resynced, so I guess take that as you will. The boss fights in it are awful, though - the bosses themselves are very interesting characters, for the short time they’re around, but the way the fights play out are terrible. Damage sponges that avoid all your ability attacks, have almost entirely unblockable attacks, and can easily kill you in one or two hits. Dropped the difficulty to “Story Mode” and just kinda blew through the last fight after struggling with it for a while. Not worth it.
As bad as those are, you can’t even really get to that final mission until you do an extremely long side quest given by two comic relief characters, that has you doing a sort of scavenger hunt for glyphs around the map. The clues given are terrible, and the game is so goddamn big that I can’t imagine anyone would do this legitimately, rather than just follow a guide.
Anyway. Better ending than the main game, I guess. At least the alien artifact shit finally came into play.
Suddenly got the urge to play Desktop Dungeons, which I hadn’t touched in ages. Since I bought in on their alpha phase a million years ago I had access to the Desktop Dungeons: Rewind and let me tell you - I don’t like it. The graphics just look worse. I really liked the top down 2D stuff, and the too-big 3d dungeon that you can’t rotate just looks worse in every way to me. I’m going back to the main release. Which I guess is actually “Enhanced Edition”. Whatever. I’m ready to party.
Been playing through The Unlife of Gorlak, by a friend of mine from the TIGS days, the last few days:
It’s a really good raising-sim RPG where you play as a dragon raised into a skeleton by a necromancer and whose nemesis hero is coming to attack him in 30 days. Also you’re coming to realize you’re gay for the hero. Uh oh.
You raise stats by either training at home or making choices out in expeditions where you do fairly straightforward turn-based fights against various enemies. I like this balance where you can build stats by taking risks (if you fail a check, you still get stat ups for that stat). It means going on expeditions and experiencing the variety of events and outcomes is also the optimal way to build a strong character. I will say, I think the magic build is easily the strongest of them all; you can win basically every fight in one turn. But there’s a variety of builds you can try and they’re all capable of winning the game.
There’s five endings (normal, good, bad, swole, shut-in) with their own trigger conditions. I liked pretty much all of them. It helps that basically all the dialogue is really charming, especially the interactions between Black, White, and Gorlak. I also really liked that you see the perspective of the hero approaching each time the game ends, and how it changes based on what you did. There’s also bespoke hero sprites for the occasions as well.
It’s doing okay but I really hope it takes off. A run is around an hour so it’s really easy to try new builds and get new endings. I’m kinda kicking myself for sitting on it for so long because I ended up super liking it. Very sweet, cute, and well-balanced little game.
The monkey’s paw “I wish the new Marathon was a 8-10 hour FPS instead of an extraction shooter in the vein of apex legends” 720 lariat’s into CICADAMATA’S 8-10 hour FPS in the vein of Neon White. Every assault on alt text is animated on one’s and the One Perfect Route is more muddled and open that SpeedRunners and its ilk but if it’s lack’s the former’s machinegirl OST in favour of a ken ishii B side then at least it MERCILESSLY cleaves any animirony or however much ADV dub steve blum could pump out in a three hour recording booth.
If it feels a bit weightless at least one sphere in its of the sort that encourages Replay Value and other SEO optimised terms that the marketing will try to avoid. The marketing also avoids how round the robo rabbit girl’s butt is that’ll have it within the SICK and TWISTED section of backlogged within the year.
If you have a friend group willing to grind. I imagine it may appeal to a person who likes Monster Hunter. I thought Peace Walker was suuuuper tedious to play, and adding the logistical challenge of coordinating with others doesn’t make it seem more appealing to me.
Halo: Combat Evolved
after dying more times than i care to remember before ever getting off the god damned Pillar of Autumn, i’ve decided to write off Legendary mode
co-op’ing the hd collection was some of the most fun i had on my ps3 so i’m fully in favor of people buying that game again.
CO-OP TIP: in the mission where Snake is captured, do not skip the cutscenes, as your Co-Op partners will be playing their part of the mission at that time, and they have longer to do it.
