It’s almost tragic how hard this game wishes to be fun and awesome
3 Likes
i am so baffled by the entire game! is it parody? is something lost in translation?
it doesn’t help that the steam port is held together by bubblegum
4 Likes
lol god anytime i see og sotc compared to the bluepoint remaster it makes me want to turn into an obnoxious lofi purist in a way that im usually not. Even the demons souls remake doesn’t bother me as much
the fuzzy glow and slow frame rate on ps2 make me feel like i’m in a dream and on the verge of waking up. ive never even thought it was that great as a game (a cool experiment but pretty tedious/frustrating) but that hazy quality, along with the contemplative nature of the game loop, is what made it memorable, to me
10 Likes
Isn’t this the absolute worst? There’s no way to turn it off.
For someone like me with an ingrained inbox zero practice from work, the real Steam gamification is that I must develop Zenlike ability to chill out and ignore the shiny green number, otherwise suffer the sisyphean fate of seeing it constantly creep from zero again with another worthless virtual pog
15 Likes
It’s fun to sell them all and have a new game every once and a while.
3 Likes
Years later, I still think about Xenoblade Chronicles X all the time. I don’t remember its characters or its plot, and I never even got far enough into it to unlock the mech suit (which I guess the maps are scaled for?), so in my head its maps always felt like an unpopulated MMO in a really endearing way. I’m often conjuring up images of its fields in my head in that vague snapshot way I relate to memories of driving through rural Ireland as a child. I think the way you jump in Xenoblade Chronicles X is the same way I used to half-fly in dreams, big long airy jumps. I like that.
5 Likes
It does, and it rules, and is also From Software, and is canon for Metal Wolf Chaos.
Also you can make your ninja neon patterns and that is great. It’s not a good game, but it’s not overly hard, and the QTEs make sense when you get enough in.
2 Likes
Yeah I haven’t played it in 13 years but it being a maximalist QTE was good.
It also takes like 7 full seconds to load anytime you click on it, just godawful
1 Like
I LOVE MY POGS i love to collect .pngs of my favorite game friends then sell them later for 5 cents
3 Likes
why don’t they just hit the enemy with a hammer a lot
5 Likes
this ancient ipod touch game. I say “oh cool!” like this a lot
8 Likes
how much i want to play nemuru mayu
3 Likes
Not really fair since I only just learnt of this while looking up info about Nintendo art but I will be thinking of it a lot from now on.
From this 2005 interview with Yusuke Nakano, the illustrator behind behind (among many other Nintendo things like most recently the ever-expanding Smash Bros Ultimate character mural) the promotional artwork to Ocarina of Time which is probably the most nostalgia inducing art of all time for me
But my favorite Ocarina of Time illustration was of Impa, Zelda’s Royal Protector: It was extremely rare that Nintendo had such a muscular woman in one of it’s games. She was a natural fit for my preferred art style.
Please Nintendo sate this man.
Also has good info about his inspirations
My generation grew up during a high point for animated series, manga, and movies in Japan, and I loved popular shows like Starblazer Yamamoto and Gundam, and manga-turned movies like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausiacaä. My interests shifted to the world of art when I was in junior high, and American comic art and fantasy art became my passions; in particular, the style of muscular, impressionistic art done by Richard Corben and Frank Frazetta. At the same time, I also liked hard funk – the music of James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone – so I was kind of a strange guy in high school, drawing hyper-muscular fantasy art and listening to that kind of music.
Today I still love American comics and fantasy art. While I was working on Majora’s Mask, I was especially into the Hellboy series. Who knows? Maybe it’s imagery influenced my own illustration style for the game. My favorite comic artists right now are Ashley Wood and Phil Hale, two artists who have really made their mark on Marvel and DC with their gritty, tough styles. And ate E3’04, I had a chance to meet one of my other favorites, Joe Madureira, one o the artists who works on the X-Men comics.
7 Likes
That time I rented Shadowman for the Dreamcast and it hacked my VMU to display a voodoo teddy bear image for the rest of its days. It’s still stuck on there! And I love it!
19 Likes
on my most recent playthrough of Jak 2 i came to realise that the game more or less exhausts all of its verb combinations leaving the design with nowhere to really go in further sequels. for example there’s exactly one point in the game where you are required to do the crouch-highjump under time pressure, one point where you have to jetboard-jump onto a moving platform then off again into a rail, one level with darkened rooms and light switches, one level exploring what you can do with conveyor belts, etc. i think if you continue iterating sequences of actions past a certain point it begins to lose its intuitive appeal and enters masocore territory, so rather than repeating themselves they made probably the right call and shifted the series’ focus laterally, making Jak 3 half into a vehicle sim, before going out with a straight up kart racer
what i found myself appreciating most was the amount of non-setpieces or “inverted” setpieces present in 2, which outside of its cutscene fetishism you’d never think came from the same people as Uncharted. unique one-time environment interactions would be casually thrown into the flow of level design, so effortlessly you might not even stop to notice.
i.e. during a level that alternates between platforming and turret segments you inadvertently shoot down a crane forming a bridge to the next platform. in another one, you shatter the glass of a massive window so that you can proceed by grinding along the sill. the game never coddles you with help tips or even so much as nudges the camera to bring something like this to your attention (unfortunately, Jak 3 is rife with this kind of crap); the path just ends there and you’re trusted to be trigger happy enough to figure things out.
around a third of the way into the game you’re given a mission to sneak into the big central palace towering over the hub city, by traversing one of its support cables which you can see hanging above you at all times (they light up at night which is a nice touch). in any modern game i feel this sort of build-up would be a cue to enter epic interactive cutscene mode, play some dramatic music and at most let you mash some buttons to stop the protagonist from slipping to their death. but you get there and it’s a fully fleshed out, tightly-paced level unto itself, with twists and turns, electrified surfaces, spinning blades and waves of turret fire. what was a piece of pretty window dressing is brought under the magnifying glass and elaborated into a coherent passage of design language. it’s so wonderfully videogamey and you can just sense how much fun the developers were having with their own project
17 Likes
Fleshy antennae
7 Likes
increasingly feeling like the reason AAA videogames are so boneheaded about subtext is because when a single character in a game now requires entire teams of people to create, it’s way easier to form an attachment to that character regardless of its place in your game
mind you I am thinking this because I saw a picture of reagan in a call of duty game
4 Likes