@“2501”#p41995 Oh my gosh, I have also been playing Nocturne & it is the game that that infamous DOOM reviewer imagined; walking through abstracted hell corridors listening to vaguely industrial music & chatting up demons instead of shotgunning them. I'll be damned.
Yeah, my experience with DOOM was always being adjacent to it -- friends had it on their PCs, I had it on the Super Nintendo & thought that was cool (hey, when it's the only DOOM you've got). But it was going back to them after enjoying DOOM 2016 that I really began to appreciate them; part of that is their unabashed metal-ness (I say this as not a metal fan) & that I have a soft spot for demonic stuff in space, so I did end up jelling with the aesthetic. It's funny that you'd bring up the N64 version of DOOM, because that's what Quake reminds me of so far. It's more subdued, more brooding, more mysterious. A sort of intangibility to the horror, whereas DOOM's horror is really tactile. I'm really enjoying taking it one level at a time because I'm finding that the level design, while still clever & just challenging enough, is a little less labyrinthine than the sometimes trollishly maze-like levels of DOOM .
Honestly, Doom is a game that I find more historically relevant than enjoyable nowadays. It‘s good, don’t get me wrong, but it's a formula that got iterated and perfected elsewhere.
For me, Blood is where is at when it comes to old school 2.5D shooters.
Yeah, for as much as I love and played Q1, I tried playing it quite a bit around Christmas and the design philosophy is based around quick saving. That may or may not be OK with you anymore. I found that it was still fascinating and interesting particularly with art design and direction and level verticality.
However the 2nd episode that I happened to choose to spend time with was really inconsistent. The levels are also extremely stingy with ammo to the point that it makes it hard to play considering how many enemies there are. The game's design really expects you to kill every enemy rather than avoid them or keep pushing through and there's just not enough bullets to be fired. I needed to turn on god mode a few times to just get through a silly difficulty spike and to keep moving forward. And you know what? I was OK with that.
@“antillese”#p42002 That makes sense. I should note that my impressions are based on my playing the new remaster on easy mode with liberal quick saves (which is how I play just about every video game these days, if they let me)
@“2501”#p41980 Are you telling me you don't want to download GLQuake, a version of Quake compatible with it (not the Steam or GOG versions???), and look up “quake ost disk image” to download a zip folder of mp3 and ogg files to dump into the game just so you can play it with the soundtrack? ? ? ?
Apropos of nothing in particular does anyone know how to make the cursor disappear when you're playing the shareware version of Quake on a Mac through GLQuake 1.1...?
@“captain”#p42005 Are you telling me you don’t want to download GLQuake, a version of Quake compatible with it (not the Steam or GOG versions???), and look up “quake ost disk image” to download a zip folder of mp3 and ogg files to dump into the game just so you can play it with the soundtrack? ? ? ?
I didn't - but I sure did do that over Christmas. It was kinda worth it though. 😎
@“tokucowboy”#p41998 Yeah based on solely the first two levels of Quake which I just played it seems to accentuate the things I like about Doom (Halloweeny gothic ambiance, kinetic arena shootouts) while diminishing the things I find more tedious (lookalike corridors, key hunting, etc.) so, so far so good imo. Also thank you Wikipedia for informing me that Quakeguy’s grunts are voiced by none other than Trent himself.
Weird to hear this game criticized for being designed around quicksaves, though, when in my experience _Doom_ is far guiltier of that. idk if it’s new to the remaster but I definitely appreciate that the game appears to autosave at the start of each level, so dying doesn’t strip away all your weapons and upgrades to the point where manual save scumming is all but mandatory.
Oh, and regarding the console ports (I grabbed it on Switch): obviously the small reticle and nature of the game’s design still indicate that it was designed for mouse aiming, but the Switch incorporates gyro inputs to help smooth over the finer points of aiming and it _kind of_ works? I’m playing on my Pro controller with actually good analog sticks, which simultaneously makes gyro aiming a bit awkward - but not (so far) to the degree of, say, _Duke Nukem 3D_, which I gave up on within the first level because it felt borderline unplayable on the gamepad. The plus side of console versions is splitscreen multiplayer, which I’m curious to try. There’s crossplay too!
I played the demo for Tales of Arise and I'm not sure if it made me want to buy the full game but it did make me want to watch literally any anime with swords in it
The Tales series always makes me hearken back to a time where I had a TV in my bedroom as a young lad, and I had those very treasured TV, and the reason it was very treasured was because it had a headphone jack in the front of the TV, a forward thinking and futuristic innovation to me at the time. Why I appreciated this innovation was because, whilst sitting at a chair nearby, I could, naturally, plug headphones into said TV, and render the sounds coming out of the TV, such as while playing a videogame, as too quiet to anyone else.
I had this TV in roughly the middle of the aughts, and at this time, it was a treasured possession of mine. It was, perhaps, one of the only things that allowed me to be able to enjoy the _Kingdom Hearts_ series, because there was just no way in hell I wanted to explain to either of my parents or anyone else living on Earth why Mickey Mouse was talking about how the Nobody's Heart is overcome with the Darkness.
Now, I am more self assured than that now, of course. But the idea of being... _observed..._ while playing a _Tales_ game just does not sound comfortable to me, even still. I even tried to give it a chance again not all that long ago and I couldn't sit through more than a few hours of _Tales of Berseria_ before thinking I couldn't take the idea of spending however many hours with this game seemingly trying to take on a darker more serious subject matter, starring a character named Velvet "Underboob" Crowe.
No offense to anyone who likes those games 'cause, like, damn, I mean, I don't think I'm special or cool for thinking the _Tales_ games are cringy, and really, I'm glad you have a higher tolerance for anime bullshit than I do.
I started the remastered version of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance with my D&D-obsessed stepbrother yesterday and it’s pretty cool! The graphics and art direction are significantly better than I was expecting - some of the animations are wildly elaborate for a 20-year-old game, really calling to mind that early PS2 moment when devs were thrilled about the possibilities of complex polygons and 60fps more than they felt obligated to push bloom lighting and particle effects. In other words, it definitely looks like a game that came out in the particular industry moment which gave us MGS2, Silent Hill 2, Dead or Alive 2, Ico, etc. but with an aesthetic that owes way more than I was expecting to the late-90s PC Forgotten Realms games it’s spun off from.
The gameplay is less mindless than I was anticipated too - not super deep combat or anything, but the main skill factors are positioning your character, choosing when to use potions, and how to cooperate with your partner to best control monster hordes. EXP is super stingy and the finite number of enemies means you can’t count on grinding. Hard Mode is pretty brutal and requires cheesing some big enemies by luring them close to save points where you can respawn your partner for free. I looked at some FAQs and apparently Hard is really meant for NG+ playthroughs??
Anyway. Cozy, nostalgic game, even though I never played the original release. I LOL’d at the massive-titted elvish bartender too - truly a different era for Wizards of the Coast. I guess Tomonobu Itagaki didn’t invent jiggle physics!!
I downloaded and played a few rounds of Splitgate after seeing a gameplay clip on Reddit and discovering it was free to play.
It was pretty gross and weird to see literally exact weapon and game mode names ripped off of _Halo_.
Shotty snipers, Team SWAT etc.
For those who don't know, the tag line is HALO MEETS PORTAL. And that's all there is to it. It's a Halo multiplayer clone with exact Halo assets and a 2-way portal system ripped from Portal. They're even the same color.
The bones of the Halo-like were mostly there, maybe a lack of friction and precise tuning. What I find intriguing is the concept of portals and their effect on strategy. Will meta-strategies emerge, will truly thoughtful portal placement add a dimension to gameplay, will it be random chaos, or will people just forget to use them?
In just a few rounds, I'm not sure. I had some highlight-reel type moments right away that might actually be attributed to random chance/ chaos from having many interlinked portals. It also came quite logically to place one portal up high on a wall and shoot out of the corresponding portal. It does interesting things to the brain to disconnect where your character _is_ and where your character can _act_. It feels like being two places at once. I did dominate most of the rounds with some old school Halo chops, and I think people just forgot to use the portals. I and everyone else also forgot to use the jetpack function! That's definitely too many gameplay elements to juggle.
In all, it's an interesting test of concept. I think a tightly tuned Halo match with good map design is already perfected and is bloated by the additional elements. Game as product wise, very creepy! My brain could hardly parse the menus, XP awards, battle pass, actual in game pop-up ads, etc. Plus the blatant appropriation of IP! Glad it was free to try at least.
played Humankind for a bit and enjoyed it but it seems a little thin compared to a fully dlc'd civ (not really fair to the game at this stage ofc). So then I played Civ VI with mods that make it look as much like Civ V as possible rather than the default nasty fortnite look. But then I could only make it through half a game before I just gave up and played Civ V