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10- Dark Souls
> 9- Hotline Miami
> 8- Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
> 7- Hitman: Blood Money
> 6- Spelunky
> 5- Alpha Protocol
> 4- Limbo
> 3- Spec Ops: The Line
> 2- Q.U.B.E.
> 1- Hydrophobia: Prophecy
> 0- FIFA 2021
if it looks like i made this just scrolling through my Steam library it's because i did
pretty good list, but I‘m now curious to know what’s wrong with fifa
The Vita was the most frustrating thing to work on with Read Only Memories. You‘d think that a game that looks like ours would be able to run without any issue, but that RAM limitation definitely threw a wrench in way more than you’d think! Especially with texture memory! This was a game that initially worked fine on an OUYA.
That, on top of their proprietary power port and proprietary expensive memory cards (and how it handled them with profiles) was so baffling. Love the hardware on a surface level, but it just fumbled so much over the potential the PSP showed.
Wow, I‘ve played Resident Evil games for most of my life and had never considered the themes Kazuma pointed out. I’m a white guy so very predisposed to not notice them bar the obvious problematic imagery in Resi 5. Good insight and a new lens to look at some of my favourite games through.
@JJSignal#30837 yeah, I should‘ve mentioned the proprietary media too! lots of bonehead stuff in a console that by all rights should’ve been king of the handhelds.
@exodus#30779 I'm sorry, I could go on and on here.
The way I described it focusing on germs isn't even really right, at least as far as that implies I'm worried about becoming sick: it was/is centered on objects, which I needed to keep "preserved" or as close to new as possible (pristine in a sense somehow more literal than usual). I came to associate the idea of germs with the idea of deterioration (this sounds very Freudian and loose), so they were not welcome on certain things. These were basically tech objects—video games, movies, CDs (not vinyl, mysteriously), game consoles.
Over the years I've made the group of things I basically have to quarantine from other people smaller and smaller. It used to be all PS3, PS4, Wii, Xbox 360, DS, Vita, and 3DS games, the PlayStations themselves, Blu-rays, CDs; then it became just brand-new ones (keeping consistent here I haven't ever bought a used game for PS3/4/Vita (sales, hooray)), then it became a select group of the new ones, and that's more or less where I'm at right now. Helpful in making the groups smaller was every time I've moved to a new dwelling (school, other school, apartments) I've had to take different groups of stuff and decide what will even be possible to keep "perfect" (which is not everything). Also becoming an adult—this started in high school—and having to get used to normal adult housekeeping tasks (cleaning kitchen, bathroom, surfaces), as well as realizing the impossibility of keeping anything perfectly untouched, was helpful. If I had ever gone to therapy for this it likely would have gone away completely, but it's never posed so much of a problem that I ever felt the need.
With Xenoblade I realized I could just wipe the contact points with an alcohol wipe and put it and anything else I wanted "safe" somewhere where it wouldn't be "at risk." I don't think playing it again would have any negative effect—it wasn't the only thing I was like this about (or the only victim of The Great Contamination) and in any case I booted the Wii one up recently to see if I could actually figure anything out based on memories from seven years ago. I was OK! I couldn't remember a thing.
(Sorry for all the quotation marks, just trying to forecast I'm aware of the weirdness.)
@Syzygy#30780 I retroactively wish the timestamps on posts were more exact than they are, that I might have had a chance to notice. I wonder how you feel about this, but for me it's been having to live around and interact with people that's helped me fight these tendencies (though it has sort of also been people who provoked their development in the first place). Meeting someone with the same set of conditions might be great, or it might make the problem worse since you would never challenge each other (guess that's not the question). It would be interesting. If you've both got separate sets of conditions I have to think it would be hell on Earth trying to live fulfilling both of them.
@exodus#30835 Oh now there‘s a whole can of worms. Can’t speak for tombo‘s reasoning but I think they’re kinda awful feeling. The ball has no weight and zips around between players, and the game is weirdly balanced around elite teams and players which makes everyone who's not Kylian Mbappe comically slow and inept.
A big part of why it's like this is because everything in there now serves the microtransaction monster that is Ultimate Team mode, at the expense of everything the game says it's about. Like, instead of a simulation or celebration of soccer, an enormously varied sport, it's a game about grinding for or buying (with actual money) the same set of very highly rated players to pull off whatever the meta tactic is this year. And EA use the games' ubiquity in every soccer fan's home to get them to engage with the scam. It's a sad state of affairs!
@exodus#30835
i used to play these kinda obsessively years ago, with friends and online (the AI has always been pretty unsatisfying to play against). i got that EA pass thing to play Titanfall 2 and a couple more games and i saw there was a 10 hour trial of this so i gave it a go. the controls used to be extremely responsive and “sticky”; if you knew what you were doing, you could think of a strategy and execute it pretty much as it was in your head. the “problem” with that was, it was easy to fall into a rhythm where you only play in a particular way, and you use certain strategies all the time, resulting in many similar/unremarkable goals. so the tendency in the last decade has been to introduce more and more elements of randomness and floppiness in the game. when a player receives a long pass now, there‘s a chance he will control the ball immediately where you want it, and there’s a chance he won‘t, that it will bounce weirdly or not exactly the right way. similarly with defending, there’s a “pressure” button with simulated physics that means whether or not a tackle ends up in a foul is kinda up in the air.
these elements of uncertainty, which are everywhere in the game now, are heavily decided by each individual player's stats, which are derived from real world data. they make the game look more realistic but it's at the expense of satisfying play. i played a bunch of online matches. unlike before, the vast majority of my opponents chose the same team, Paris Saint Germain, because their players have the best overall stats. i ended up using PSG too, it was too unbalanced otherwise. so you have what used to be a game with a diverse set of playstyles and viable strategies devolving into a game between two teams that are clones of each other, all trying the same 2-3 things with the top players.
there's also something that has *always* been kinda fundamentally broken about Fifa, derived from the fact that you're playing a team sport but controlling one player at a time, which means there will always be an element of frustration both in attack and defense, but the ways they have chosen to go about fixing it have made the game way more annoying. even when you pull off an impressive goal, at no point does it feel like you were fully in control. it only ever feels like you _almost_ were, like the game is testing your patience and self respect more than anything else. also microtransactions.
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@yeso#30668 seconding the guest praise and I know I’m a dang broken record but kazuma should play pathologic 2 if he hasn’t already (if I may make a suggestion re said political themes)
^YEAH^
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@tombo#30856 there’s also something that has always been kinda fundamentally broken about Fifa, derived from the fact that you’re playing a team sport but controlling one player at a time
This almost feels dirtbag worthy to ask but why the heck has there not been a FIFA or at least an NHL where each player on a real life team sport is being controlled by an individual player? Or at least each position. Like, okay I'll admit I don't even know how many people are on a football field at once, but at least for hockey it's not like 10 players (2 on defense and 3 on offense) in one online game is all that much anymore.
I guess one hurdle would be what to do with the goalie... the simplest answer would be to just let the AI control it I guess. And if you decide to pull the goalie the 6th player is controlled by AI. Or maybe there could be a sixth player who can switch between a supervisory role with a birds-eye view and can try and co-ordinate the rest of the team, but then who can take control of the goalie on the fly even if it just means they can increase the chance of saving and then decide who to pass to once they gain control of the puck.
I mean surely I am the millionth person to ask this, it can't really be technical limitations per se anymore, right? Is it just that... well... the current format is easier to monetize lol
@Gaagaagiins#30860 they actually did do that at some point! i think it was only a few players per side, not the whole team, but anyway it was a complete mess. you know how kids playing in middle school just all go for the ball, not caring about strategy or whatever? that‘s basically how it was. there has been so many novelty features like that that have come and gone, i don’t even recall what the mode was called, “Be A Pro” or something like that. just unplayable.
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@espercontrol#30639 p.s. this week’s lightning round is a real fun game to play on your own, I need to think of my own ranking scale
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10 - Factorio or Bloodborne
> 9 - Monster Hunter World: Iceborne
> 8 - Final Fantasy X
> 7 - Journey
> 6 - Death Stranding
> 5 - Final Fantasy IX
> 4 - Ratchet and Clank (2016)
> 3 - Diablo III
> 2 - DOOM: Eternal
> 1 - Persona 5
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@xhekros#30692 which is “The Birth of a Nation” of video games.
I am going to allow myself to ignore what I think the worst aspect to think about is wrt _Birth of a Nation._ As horrendous as its content matter is, what really makes this film an awful thing to think about is that it was extremely commercially successful and is a landmark film in technical achievement as well as filmmaking as an art.
Let's instead remind ourselves that the creation of _Birth of a Nation_ was not just controversial in hindsight but controversial at the time of its creation. It's not like we invented antiracism in the late 20th century.
And so, while I didn't set out to answer this question with my calibration ranking, I posit that this is the definitive answer to what the Birth of a Nation of videogames is, and unequivocally a goose egg outta ten:
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@Gaagaagiins#30860 I‘ve definitly had this idea before for soccer (its 11 a side btw). I wanted to make a first person game so its more accurate with how much information you can pass. I think it’d work well in VR so you‘d have to manually follow the ball’s position. I think the main reason it hasnt been done publicly is that playing as an individual soccer player would be somewhat boring. Its a simple sport and if you were simulating a player you wouldnt do much other than get into various positions and pass.
Rocket league is probably one of the best soccer games because the cars are so hard to control which makes getting into position, passing, and shooting take a lot of skill.
@Gaagaagiins#30860 This did exist, at least in the NHL series. I used to play it online with my friends all the time in high school. This was maybe NHL 13 or 14. You would create your own team and players, and would face off against other groups of 6 people. It was chaotic and stupid, but also a ton of fun, if simply for the fact that you are playing a game with 5 of your friends. Idk if it still exists because I haven‘t played any of the games since. I don’t think the ‘Ultimate Team’ stuff existed back then, or if it did it was early enough in its development that it was still possible to ignore.
The 'Be a Pro' single-player feature in the same vein was... terrible. Seems like an impossible thing to balance or make fun at all, and obviously all you want is to get the AI to pass the puck to you so you can score goals, so most of the time you're deliberately making your teammates stupid by calling for a pass (a call that they programmatically can not fail to heed). Add that to the fact that playing defense is not fun in basically any sports game, and the fact that hockey players spend a lot of time sitting on a bench doing nothing, and yeah. I still played a bunch of it tho lol because i had a _lot_ of free time!!
I like the be a pro career modes in theory quite a lot, but the mlb the show take is the only one that really works. The structure of baseball and how it narrows down to discrete 1 v 1 or individual actions makes it easier to represent as a video game (imo)
Really enjoyed this one, Kazuma has a just plain nice voice to listen to, & their take on Resident Evil was super fascinating (as someone who loves RE at its dumbest & views it as pure pulp, it's a reminder that even pulp is worthy of thoughtful interpretation). I also feel like I got extremely educated on Shadow the Hedgehog, & am thankful(?) for that.
The question from Deadbeat reminds me that I recently deleted Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity after about 40 hours due to a single line of dialogue. It was something like || "When Terrako traveled through time, a new reality was created" ||, & this bit of totally nonsensical, massively de-canonizing narrative was delivered on a _loading screen_. It was just the worst bit of anime-adjacent writing, & not in the fun way (fun anime tripe for me is like Sin & Punishment, bad is like Xenoblade 2; I don't know where the line is or why). It made me roll my eyes so far back into my head that when I unrolled them, the game was deleted from my Switch.
I love this lightning round exercise, lemme try (with some recency bias in terms of what I've played here lately):
10: Garou: Mark of the Wolves
9: Resident Evil 2
8: Death Stranding
7: No More Heroes
6: Sega Bass Fishing
5: Liberation Maiden
4: Jinmu Denshou
3: Cyber Dodge
2: Mohawk & Headphone Jack
1: Chicken Shoot
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@Syzygy#30845 a culture where these ‘conditions’ are taken as a sign of divinely-inspired genius, and later revealed to be a sort of shackle deliberately engineered into the genome of super-babies
I did not ever read those (or Ender's Game), but that sounds extremely cool (and the first part _might_ be the truth, who can say)
@captain#30843 Very interesting, thank you for sharing! It does seem like the kind of thing therapy would help with because it feels like a symptom of something else - the tail end of a problem rather than the start of it? But armchair philosophizing probably doesn't help.
@christoffing and @tombo this all makes sense to me! and I realize it's a tough game to design in that way, with a fuzzy line between "possible to perfect with skill" and "looks dynamic" and "has realistic stats" and etc. This is why I vastly prefer arcadey sports games over attempted simulations, and it seems like even as a simulation this fails, because of course PSG doesn't perform at peak all the time.
@tokucowboy wow, that hyrule warriors line is roughhhhhhhhhh, dang. Totally agree jinmu denshou is a 4.
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@captain#30881 Syzygy a culture where these ‘conditions’ are taken as a sign of divinely-inspired genius, and later revealed to be a sort of shackle deliberately engineered into the genome of super-babies
I did not ever read those (or Ender’s Game), but that sounds extremely cool (and the first part might be the truth, who can say)
As someone who has a different kind of divinely inspired genius, I actually sincerely subscribe to a version of this theory.
At the very least, I am invested in the idea that a great deal of what western psychiatry calls disorders and even a good bit of the things they call illnesses, to a lot of different societies and cultures, would have been much more readily seen as having particular aptitudes if not just straight up spiritual abilities.
There is a perspective I've encountered in my own community where we've more or less attempted to re-establish that way of looking at it, it is helpful to people with schizophrenia who experience hallucinations, for instance, to consider they are hearing or seeing spirits who are communicating to them on a personal level no one else can perceive.
Whether you believe that in a literal sense or a metaphorical sense or not at all, it doesn't seem to harm and can even help people who are experiencing that to have people they talk about it with to not WELL ACKSHUALLY them and just be chill and, you know, not feed into it but to not try and correct them. 'Cause like, you know, that is how they're experiencing reality whether we agree or not. Framing it within the spiritual angle is also a helpful way to undo internal stigmatization for sure too. Maybe at some point this is a person who would have been thought of as having an incredible gift.
At the very least it makes me feel a lot better to identify what it is that actually causes me distress or suffering about the Cool ways my brain works because it's usually not those aspects themselves but the degree to which the world around me doesn't accommodate or is outright hostile to that difference. When you think about it, having someone who would, say, be extremely good at maintaining the cleanliness of the food storage might have been the reason that winter isn't killing everybody this year. Or like, for thousands of years we probably needed the guy who likes to stay up until the sun rises and is really good with the dogs for some weird reason. It makes it make sense that these things have a genetic component you know?
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@wickedcestus#30875 This did exist, at least in the NHL series. I used to play it online with my friends all the time in high school. This was maybe NHL 13 or 14. You would create your own team and players, and would face off against other groups of 6 people.
Oh boy, I'm actually most fascinated by the fact that it is indeed teams of 6. Did the person controlling the goalie just sit there unless there was a shot and they had a chance to pass?