When I played Mirror’s Edge, I muted speech+music volume, turned off subtitles, and skipped all the cutscenes because the little bit of writing I was forced to experience was bad and I didn’t like the voice acting at all. It worked way better as a completely decontextualized game about a courier silently running from cops.
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GTA6 will have a very frequently recurring minigame where you paint a door with a paint roller and your husband opens the door and you roll the paint roller over his face and he shrugs at the camera.
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In GTA6, you can evade the cops by painting a tunnel on a wall and hiding behind some scenery to watch all of them crash headlong into the wall
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God yes I remember both of these sequences really sucking the air out of the game
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Need a Naked Gun toggle in GTA6
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rosenda-a344 who was supposed to be another member of noble team they cut in reach, but they put her armor config in infinite in some dumb battle pass you can’t get anymore
jokes on them though i won’t let some shit go so i look like her kinda with an ODST shoulderpad and missing arm because it’s Cool.
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Youtube keeps recommending me live streams of someone playing Killer7, and it’s been reminding me just how quotable that game is. But while revisiting the first encounter between Harman and Kun Lan, I just noticed something I never realized in the like 20 years since the game came out.
In that moment where Kun Lan is standing there with his right hand glowing, the God Hand, and Harman shoots his glowing hand, which send Kun Lan flying out of the sky scraper, flying through the sky, and easily landing himself on top of a tower and dropping the bullet out of his hand-
He didn’t catch the bullet with his glowing right hand, the one Harman shoots. He caught it with his left hand, before the bullet even hits the God Hand. I first noticed something was weird when his animation from the bullet impact looked off for how the force of the impact should have worked, and then you can clearly see he’s actually flying through the air with his left hand forward, and then drops the bullet out of his left hand. Not his right hand.
Dang, Kun Lan is even stronger than I knew.
Also, someone should make a novelty twitter account for that exchange at 1:57, like that Yakuza account.
Edit: The music kicking in as Kun Lan lands on the tower is so sick.
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One of my favorite accounts was a Suda games account that did this every Friday.
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The lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line on a podcast saying the exact words: “I am an excellent writer.”
It haunts me.
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honestly the best part of being a professional writer of any stripe is just getting to say “I am a writer,” it’s a very classic way to have an inflated sense of your own impressiveness
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When I was actively writing and publishing in under/grad school I actually found it really… well I don’t know, not exactly delightful, but ironic in a compelling way how easy it was to actually fill a CV today when there are so many publications (physical/digital for fiction or criticism) willing to take submissions. Like, knowing this inside baseball and then being confronted by young students, who I would teach, who were wowed that I was a “published author”, and there was just no way to really get it through how little this actually meant.
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something was in the air at this point in AAA games. this was the same era as the Far Cry 3 writer guy who was intensely 
every interview he had, people in game world were falling over themselves for the equally masturbatory writing of Tom Bissell (the peak of the “Video Games Matter” guys), and Ken Levine and David Cage were still considered relevant
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This reminds me of something I’ve seen in some of these photography circles I’ve been peeking at on social media, where people will say they’re published. But the magazines they’re “published” in these digital-only “magazines” that don’t seem to really be anything but image collections printed on magcloud and sold for like $30. I didn’t get the sense they have any kind of writing or editorial to them, just a collection of photos from people sent things in. I don’t know who is buying them other than the people who submitted images and are “printed” in them. But if no one else is reading those “magazines”, does calling yourself “published” mean anything? Does it even count as being “published” in the traditional sense? I don’t know how any of that world works, so maybe that’s normal.
I was thinking “the John Wick Hex guy was talked about in that way?” until I googled it to make sure and realized that was Mike Bithell, not Tom Bissell.
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people in games world are very similar about this and saying they “shipped” x number of games. in the traditional sense of shipping units, not in the “fanship” sense. almost always they’re just talking about Steam releases, or like they might be on other digital platforms. sometimes maybe these games have physical releases in extremely limited quantities if they’re super lucky. but yeah, the definition of the word doesn’t really make much sense anymore. and to me as a person who does care the value of fan mods and free web games as important works, the distinction is a bit meaningless.
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There are nine characters to choose from in Xenophobe, three for each joystick. The leftmost controller (red) features Mr. M.Brace, Dr. Kwack, and Col. Poupon. The middle controller (yellow) features Mr. Fogg, Col F. Truth, and Dr. Udderbay. The right controller (blue) features Mr. Eeez, Dr. Zordirz, and Col. Schickn. Humans and aliens alike make up the playable characters—for instance, Dr. Kwack has a duck’s head. Players are also color-coded; for instance, the left player’s choices wear red shirts, middle player’s yellow, right player’s blue.
– Xenophobe (video game) - Wikipedia
Ah and Midway Arcade Treasures, which includes Xenophobe, is not in Wikipedia’s PS2 multitap games list PlayStation Multitap - Wikipedia but the back of the case Midway Arcade Treasures 2 cover or packaging material - MobyGames and this old review Midway Arcade Treasures 2 - PS2 - Review | GameZone (“If you have a multitap Pit Fighter, Rampage and Xenophobe can support three players, and Gauntlet II can support up to four”) both indicate it does have multitap support; and seeing as how a controller in port 2 in Xenophobe starts player 2, I’m guessing I need one in port 3 to be able to start as player 3 and play as Mr. Eeez, Dr. Zordirz, or Col. Schickn.
Dang, 'cause I got rid of my multitaps as space-wasters when moved to the wrong side of the state. Annnd I guess the ~$30 and iota of apt space isn’t worth it just to mess around as Mr. Eeez. Phooey.
– Xenophobe/Walkthrough — StrategyWiki | Strategy guide and game reference wiki
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The Lynx was a really great 80s game machine that had the terrible fortune to be released in the 90s. Playing it nowadays it’s amazing how out of date the games on it feel. Everything has the vibe of something that would be impressive on an 8-bit home computer from 84. That was pretty much the Atari vibe on the home market. There were some great titles on it but the whole thing was unfortunate in so many ways.
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