the new Jedi game is kind of frustrating. It has a lot of chore game tendencies and I was anticipating a hangout game. Chore game is the enemy of hangout game. The “cinematic” set pieces are unwieldy too: there’s a part when you control a supporting character and have to lightsaber duel darth vader. So when it started I thought, this is probably one of those unwinnable battles bc darth vader doesn’t get killed, he dies when he jumps down that well with the emperor in return of the Jedi. However, when you killed during this multi stage combat encounter, you have to restart. So after like the 7th attempt I was kicking darth vaders ass, but then wouldn’t you know it, a cutscene and bam he kills you. Just kill me via gameplay or kill me in cutscene from the get go what the heck. The Slavic-coded alien lady is cool though.
Finished up with Tactics Ogre re and finally got the pull to check out Hollow Knight over half a decade late. I don‘t know how i dodged the fact that this game is full of little bug people, I would have picked it up so much sooner! It’s such a nice play before bed (dark colour palette helps so much, sorry Picross) probably the best game for me to fill that hole since DQXI.
i played a bit of shadow warrior 3 again today to try and mop up the rest of the achievements like i said i wanted to do, but i don‘t think i actually wanted to play it as much as i thought. i got one of the three that were left and after thinking about how much effort i’d probably need to put in to get all upgrades i decided to retire the idea. we had a good run tho, it's still a nice ride
@“yeso”#p114441 ah he pulled the old “lose in the game, win in the cutscene” trick
I‘ve had an incredibly frustrating week with game playing! Having an injured eye that has blurred vision from both the injury and the medication to treat said injury, as well as having quite a bit of discomfort, it’s been challenging to navigate not quite having the visual clarity I'd like to have for playing games.
So I've fallen back on some easy favourites, Fairune 2 and Advance Wars (I finally gave in and got the new Switch version). Fairune 2 has nice chunky art that doesn't require much work to differentiate, and to some extent Advance Wars is the same, but with an added bonus of making me think more than react. It's been about as good as I can expect it to be!
@“JoJoestar”#p113224 So I'm thinking I should play Soul Reaver 2 for the first time for a similar cause and effect:
https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1654151538724700162
I guess I‘m at about the halfway point in Fallen Order. I might start to appreciate the overabundance of Star Wars media we’re living through if it means some of it is going to be fun and good.
So should I also watch Andor?
@“connrrr”#p114543 I too have been playing Fallen Order. Some of the lightsaber fights are great and I‘m enjoying the game. The graphics are quite nice in spots but it just shows how difficult it is to get out of the uncanny valley when games try to show humans interacting. The cut scenes look alright but when characters are talking to each other in game they look just as awkward and stilted as they would in an average PS2 game. I’m also surprised at the amount of visual/texture glitches in the game. I'm playing the PS5 version.
yeah the graphics issues for the jedi games were surprising to me. I havent played many games on the PS5 so idk if this is just how it is though.
There is some good combat in those games, but I get frustrated by how often your movements get interrupted. Would have been better imo to just let the player take damage and keep the movement freer. _Jedi Knight 2_ was better about this, and _Bloodborne_ too for a contemporary example, a game which they might have had in mind in emphasizing aggression, but that again all the staggering and interrupting is at odds with
Can a jedi not ignore the pain??
The way parries are encouraged makes it feel like they had Sekiro more in mind but with the input latency and ganking it just doesn't play out that way a lot of the time. It could also be that I'm not using my force powers often enough and I'm treating it too much like a straightforward swordfighting game. It does look beautiful most of the time. I can forgive the glitches because they're funnier than distracting, and I can't stay mad at Respawn cause I liked Titanfall 2 so much and I'm sure they were under serious pressure to push out a good SW game—and it is good. As for uncanny valley, I was thinking that the realtime graphicsness of a video game makes all the CGI characters, who would stand out like sore thumbs in a live action movie, feel way more convincing in this context.
I wish I had a series X so I could play at locked 60fps.
Been playing GrimGrimoire Once More which seems like a really good re-release! Art is of course typically incredible Vanillaware and it has a lowkey 13 Sentinels kinda story thing going on with loops and slowly figuring out the roles of the characters. But the dialogue and scenes super quick, breezy, and very mysterious which I think is very much to its strength.
The RTS gameplay is also pretty fun and rewarding to learn and do well at. There are a lot of rules and stuff to figure out and it can sometimes feel overwhelming. What I like about it is that it's still real loosy goosy and feels like you can brute force or come up with 4d chess grand strategies to get through the missions. Feels pretty well tuned to a variety of playstyles. I also really appreciate that you can individually set every single mission to Easy/Normal/Hard. I've found the Challenge Missions too difficult on Normal but on Easy they're actually really good for playing around and exploring all of the options the game gives you in a more low stakes environment. Then going to story missions armed with more complete knowledge and upgraded units and stuff.
If you like Vanillaware at all you gotta give it a try
@“connrrr”#p114547 yeah could be more Sekiro. but they released 6 mos apart. Then again Respawn seems to be working quickly on these games so maybe they did have time to incorporate Sekiro stuff.
They're obviously a talented studio so it's a bit of shame that they're doing Uncharted and Ubisoft type stuff with these particular games. I don't care about star wars at all so maybe these games would probably mean more to a fan, but I did really enjoy _Dark Forces_/_Jedi Knight_ handful of games. Good austere and moody little games imo. There's some of that in these Respawn games, but lots of just stuff too. I appreciate Merrin though. Another data point on my Poland is the new Japan thesis. One day soon people will stop saying waifu and start saying "żonka"
I‘m not a huge fan of Star Wars but I think it fits games well. The Star Wars trappings are the big reason I’m sticking with it. It‘s a pastiche of so many games - Uncharted/Tomb Raider, Dark Souls, Metroid Prime, and it even feels a bit like Super Castlevania IV in parts to me. That along with all the levels feeling very similar make for a AAA slurry of a game. Fun enough but not very memorable. I feel like I’m reading a Dan Brown novel.
@“yeso”#p114577 oh jeez I thought it released a lot later than Sekiro for some reason. But then From must have revealed the gameplay way ahead of release, right? I haven't gotten to Merrin yet, is she Polish??
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@“tomjonjon”#p114579 AAA slurry
yeah, and it sucks bc there's neat stuff here, but it's buried under this AAA design imperative to "reward" the player and "give them their money's worth."
Survivor especially has this bad habit of stacking the unlockable abilities as a means to progress: meaning first you're jumping across gaps, then you learn the double jump so now all the gaps are twice as long so you always have to jump, then double jump. Then you learn a mid-air dash, so now all the gaps require a jump, a double jump, and a dash. You also get a grappling hook, learn to zip through green laser walls, and then learn to boing off a space balloon, and thats right you guessed it, by the end of the game in order to get many, many places you have to, in order jump, double jump, air dash, grappling hook, zip through a green laser wall, then boing off a space balloon. So you're just doing these dumb fuckin basically chores
But then you get moments like walking through a dusty frontier town at twilight into an ultra-detailed bar and this song is playing
https://youtu.be/aZoY2VB3YNI
and you can just chill with a bunch of weird little alien guys. BUT of course you first have to "unlock" the robo dj to play the music, and you have to find the chest containing that particular track, etc etc. The game has cool stuff just give us the cool stuff don't make us do chores!
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@“connrrr”#p114584 is she Polish??
...yes
video games we are playing?
well i say
recently, ive been kinda jugglin a little bit
last month i played thru and finished wario land 2, wonderful time, i had a lot of fun with it, felt like a wonderful balance between puzzle and action platformer, the puzzle elements were light but still there and it felt nice finishing them
recently finished wario land 3 (got all treasures, probably wont get all the music coins), great game that can feel a bit hampered by how metroidlite it can be with having to get certain treasures to access paths in other levels to get other treasures, repeat
im glad i used a guide because i feel like it wouldve been a little frustrating trying to trial and error through every level to get the extra treasures for 100%
however, if you mainline the campaign and only get the treasures needed to finish the game, i feel that the experience is much more pleasant because of the temple being a good place to keep you in line toward your goal
started wario land 4 today and it is really good, the look and sound and game feel, might be wario land at its peak
played a bit more mgs3, finished the opening virtuous mission, im gonna try to actually finish it this time, fell off of my last playthru because of stuff, the stealth feels so good, tranqing people from bushels of grass, the virtuous mission is a damn fine opening to a video game alongside getting that snake eater music opening of course
also have been recently playing zeroranger, amazing shmup, fills me with this want to 1cc it and do levels without getting hit, visuals and music are amazing, ive made it a lil bit of a habit to do 10 squats every time i die/use a continue inspired by another person who posted about it in server im in (goblin bunk)
also i pop nuclear throne open every other day to do a quick daily run for fun, feels nice to do, love that game
thats most of my current gaming this year
I was in this weird sludgy place with games for a few months, where I played very much but just could not settle on one for any significant sort of intake. I do love to channel surf, but that‘s typically for the vintage games on emulators; I’d prefer really absorbing a couple across modern platforms, but it just hasn‘t happened lately – seems like having the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters on Switch is finally breaking the haze (maybe I’ll talk about those over in the Final Fantasy thread), but I‘ve also been traveling a bit and although I’ve been reading IC and “liking” away, I‘ve missed the sort of light journaling of games I’ve touched via these forums. So, anyway, to chip that rock from my brain, here are barely cognizant thoughts on some but not all of the things I've looked at for the past little while (excluding regular vintage game croozing, a constant):
Diablo II: Resurrected (2000/2021) Aside from being in Wasteland 3 and loving Disco Elysium (if that counts), I have never so much as grazed PC-style western RPGs. It was pretty stupid that Blizzard was recently selling your choice of Diablo III for $30 or Diablo II and Diablo III for $19, so I got the two-pack. It‘s neat to play these games knowing nothing, wholly removed from their subcultures. Diablo II doesn’t tell you much, so I‘ve enjoyed the sense of not knowing and piecing things together, and the game is excellent at letting you do that at your pace; paired with the (revamped but still tonally apt) PC-specific, minutely grainy, fantasy paperback miniature-esque art direction of the time, that lends a real mysterious tone that I find so enjoyable. It’s also nice to just be told “go here, do this thing, come back, we'll give you a new thing to do” in an RPG, and I find that I love a loot game, probably because I partake in very small doses of loot games. Also, no one told me the soundtrack is real mid-90s Neil Young vis a vis Dead Man, and that's good, too
**_Dungeon Encounters_** (2021) This is just a fat-free, all-protein masterpiece and I'm sad I drifted from it after playing it exclusively and obsessively for a few days. I will get back to it. You can read far more original things about it, but I'll be probably the 1,000th idiot to praise its ethos of game design via the process of subtraction. Sometimes, the big dogs give us a small gifts, and this is a gift
**_Valkyria Chronicles_** (2008) You know how "old skool gamer" NES-bathed nostalgia first started showing up circa 2000s Hot Topic? That's about how far removed we are now from _Valkyria Chronicles_, and I'm sorry to report that it's kinda showing in the wrong ways over here. I enjoy the setting and adore the concept of going in, boots-on-the-ground, to directly control your units after choosing their moves in an SRPG. The art direction is great, but looks disappointingly crustier than it should without the brush-ups you'd expect it to have. I was very happy to wallow in the first 10 or so hours, but, lordy, this game gets quite difficult real quick, and on top of offering exactly zero accessibility features for a 15-year old work, it just belly crawls along at an unreasonable pace. I love u Sega, but I can't spend 40 minutes on half a battle -- 20 of which are dedicated to _listening_ to enemy icons glacially shuffle across the map in secret -- only for you to drop a unit that one-shots all of my units, and then be expected to do that again until I get it right. I just. Cain't. Do it.
**_Ys Origin_** (2006) There is absolutely no reason to have slid off this game, it's perfect and I'm a bad person. In particular, Yunica is a fantastic character. What a blue-collar, let's-go-to-fucking-work type of character she is. Yunica is pro-union. She's a steward. If I was forced to get a small tattoo of a video game character, she might be on the shortlist
**_Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness_** (2019) The Coke Zero of _Gotta Protectors_, but Nintendo poured all the real Coke down the shower drain and it didn't even unclog anything
**_Wings of Darkness_** (2021) Spent two hours on this one and it passed through me without a lick of desire to return. Something curious about that Clouded Leopard Entertainment, yeah? Quite slick _Liberation Maiden_-style simple mech battles, but lord I swear one day I'm gonna interview a bunch of people who know better (maybe some of ya'll) and find out why Japanese pop storytelling is the way it is sometimes, specifically in two extremely unsatisfying areas: telling rather than showing, and the regular, on-the-spot creation of magical logic to progress the narrative ("she didn't die, because our spirits fused!"). Anyway, this game is half visual novel, and all of the visual novel is the former type of storytelling. I appreciate the polish here, they're really trying to do something with a mid-range budget, but any genre in which half of the title is "novel" just can't get by on scenes that walk me through character growth by way of dry description ("I didn't like her at first, but then we were paired on a planning project and I began to understand her, now we have a deep respect for each other") and expect an investment. Have you heard of DIALOGUE, BRO? I'll look at it again because it's only a couple hours long, and I am the Patron Saint of stupid and bad research
**_Judgement Silversword_/_Cardinal Sins_** (2004) Twin platonic ideals of the caravan shooter. All I want forever is to be in the top 100 on the online leaderboard of either game for a single day. Pick one. I'll do that, then kill me
**_Mad Max_** (2015) As a big _Mad Max_ boy, I got this as a guilty pleasure on PC for a couple bucks. Figured I'd look at it once or twice, and ended up whiling away just about a whole day with it. This game is so dang fun, and so slick, doing nothing new but everything well with a surprising amount of interlocking to-dos on your list (get resources, use 'em to make more resource-producing centers, control territory, upgrade your car -- it's all on-theme, too). Maybe it's because the driving feels (in the best way) like a weighty _Crazy Taxi_, I'd call this an arcade-style open-world game -- like if Ubisoft did their thing on Naomi. Also, bigger-budget games of this era -- which were called visually "realistic" at the time, but are actually more graphic-novelesque in their depictions of people and spaces -- just look fantastically clean and pleasant running at super high resolutions. It does have a slight Dollar Tree _Fury Road_ vibe (Max looks like a model from a catalog you'd find in the back of an airplane seat), but I might prefer that in some strange way to making something more directly based on a greater work. Plus, more freedom for this game to dick around with. My method for enjoying these uber-polished, icons-on-the-map, here's-your-skill-tree-yep open world games that most media outlets consider The Main Video Games nowadays is to only play one every once in a great while
**_Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing_ (2010)** This here is a good-assed video game, no notes
@“tokucowboy”#p114708 valkyria chronicles is a classic, amazing, beautiful game imo, but i definitely would not have finished it without the help of a guide and a surplus of free time thanks to covid quarantine!
I played some ACA NeoGeo King of Fighters 2002 last night… why did no one tell me this game is legitimately beautiful? Like, the animations are incredible and the pixel art is fantastic. It's almost too much for the eyes to handle.
Also May Lee is awesome, such a cool design and moves. She's got that 2000's 'tude. Bring back May Lee!!
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@“tokucowboy”#p114708 fellow mad max enjoyer! i played it for about a month when it was given away on PS+ and i vibed my way through most of it listening to music and doing missions and side quests. something nice about driving fast on a mostly empty desert