One thing I didn’t say was the process of narrowing is important and an enjoyable experience. I want to broaden my lines so I can start the process narrowing again but in new and different directions. For myself what I like about games and art in general is imagining why the creators came to decisions they came to and how those decisions impact me as a player or viewer or listener or reader. Even when watching a bad movie I can marvel and be fascinated by delightfully bad decisions as much as good. My brain is small and I can only focus on a few of these things at time when playing something. Good art is a synthesis of a lifetime of an artist’s decision making and the short time I sit with something I’m blowing past a lot in order to more heavily focus on what the path I’m currently on. That is the path that narrows my perspective and I’d never give that up. I recommend following your interests but all the time but never hold on to what you love about the experience of what you get out of art so preciously that it closes all the other doors you pass.
Man I just need to not write long things on my phone
Me playing SMRPG. Still having a good time playing this game. The timing for getting the little bonus in the combo attack is still engaging. So far I’ve only made too a streak of 50. It’s the myriad of enemy attacks that throw me off. Like I said earlier my adhd makes it hard to sit with mechanics that are slow a plodding like a lot of turn based rpgs. This game does a great job adding just enough friction to key me engaged. While I liked the fast forward in bravely default this is a much more elegant solution to that problem. The paper Mario games I’ve played simplified these mechanics to much as they’re meant for puerile much younger than myself. I wish they split the franchise,. One path being for babies and the other growed up babies like myself. Maybe that’s what bowser’s inside story is. It’s been too long for me to remember. I’ve been trying to find a copy locally before having one shipped.
I started playing crow country because it was on sale for an amusing 22% off discount and because the way @exodus spoke about it on the podcast made me really interested. Jealousy (or envy) are two powerful feelings that art can provoke, especially as they relate to this inexplicable urge we all have to create.
It’s really good! I had a totally different perception of this game in my head, maybe because of the setting or in-vogue psx graphics, and those have all been subverted. It’s a very sincere game that is genuinely spooky and atmospheric. It feels nice and chunky to run around.
I chose to play the standard difficulty with the enemies on, and I’m glad I did. I am very bad at aiming under stressful situations so I’ve been leaving them alive and running past them. I’m afraid this might be a bad idea because I think they evolve throughout the game maybe, so my backtracking will only get tougher and tougher.
It makes me feel the same way Night Manor from the UFO 50 collection did. Maybe I actually like these types of games.
@Bonsai and @MoH pretty much covered my pseudoregalia thoughts! It’s a cool game! Much like Dark’s Souls or Ico, it’s nice to run around a castle and have a little adventure. The movement does feel great and I appreciated how vertical it is. I didn’t mind the combat (after plugging in a controller) but also avoided it as much as I could. At one point pretty early on I stopped using the map pretty much all together, and still bumped around and figured things out. All in all, a good time!
I started in on Metroid Prime. Last time I checked, the last Metroid was in captivity, and the galaxy was at peace… what happened?
I’m liking it more than I did last time I tried playing when it first came to Switch. I haven’t played many First Person Shooters or Stealth Horror games, so the controls and pacing and everything took a lot to get used to. I remember dying some pretty frustrating deaths while platforming in Lethal Lava Land and getting frustrated having to shoot all the Space Pirates in the Cool Cool Mountain research facility. I put it down after dying a bunch in the sequence where they turn off the lights.
This time the controls feel a lot more natural and I’m taking more time to go slowly and scan everything. It’s also been gloomy and rainy here so I think that adds to the experience too. I gotta say, I think those plucky upstarts at Retro Studios nailed what they were going for here.
1 is more of a dungeon crawl and plays a bit like Sweet Home and 2 is more of an esoteric adventure game and would be more like Crow Country. I think both are worthwhile and ideally you’d start with 1
At the time of release, I chose not to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. By the year of our lord 2025, I had forgotten why. I vaguely recalled something about a heavy handed metaphor for racism, but that could have been Detroit Become Human or any other of the near future sci fi games that keep being made and released and sort of blend into each other. I did play and somewhat enjoy Human Revolution, and I think the sequel just looked like more of the same. Anyway, given the recent demise of basically every studio that made immersive sims, I booted up Mankind Divided the other day and immediately saw why I bounced off it.
In a world where tech companies dominate every facet of human existence, where robotic implants are commonplace, non-enhanced humans are seen as lower -class beings, and “enhanced” humans are entirely dependant on a drug to keep their bodies from rejecting the implants, and their behaviour can be hacked and manipulated at will. Mankind sure is divided, and times are tough. Yet the game has the gall to draw a direct, both-sides parallel between the CEOs destroying and manipulating humanity and bending it to their will, the literal illuminati (lol), and “a radical group of pro-human purists, violent, militant, and fanatically opposed to human augmentation” (cue picture of an angry black woman with short hair)… just… wow. The game starts with this beat by beat recap of the previous one, which feels exactly like the Brian Cox recap of Tekken, except this one is entirely self-serious:
Anyway, I’ll probably still get through it just because there aren’t many of these little-sandbox-puzzle games, but goddamn this is way stupider than I remembered.
I also love how the recap takes the time to describe every boss fight, by far the most hated segments of Human Revolution. It’s like oh yeah I remember that one sucked, so did that one, and that one…
It feels like ages since I’ve posted in here because I experienced one of those sort of like total interest collapses when I finished Yu-No–does anyone else get that after like, binging a long TV show or a long book series or game and you just don’t want anything to do with that medium for a while? That’s been me for a while now with video games–after Yu-No nothing felt “right” to play: another VN seemed too much like an investment emotionally and time-wise, I’m not super into or good at like, action games and I just couldn’t find anything that sounded good, so all the systems have sat quiet
UNTIL earlier this week I started this new PC game called Exogate Initiative. I don’t know how else to pitch it except for like, it’s one of those tile-based base-building games like an Evil Genius or Dungeon Master or whatever except you’re basically a like, Stargate organization. So you’ve got your little people (“Gaters”) and they can be soldiers or scientists or engineers or medics or scholars or diplomats and you make teams you explore other planets.
The core of it is like, base building and such and I’m having a blast. It reminds me in sorta spirit and sorta gameplay like the Azito games, which I have sunk hours and hours and hours and hours into and can just utterly dominate my brain, so I’m having a ball with this one.
This isn’t a spoiler or anything it’s just like, what I see ahead of me in the tech tree but there’s like, a whole faction/alien race and diplomacy system and you can be like, invaded and do the invading and I haven’t seen any of that so I feel like I have a lot of this ahead of me
I often do this, particularly after I finish large games (and since I play a lot of RPGs, that’s a lot of the ones I play!). I regularly need a week or two to sort of figure out what I want to play next, especially if most of the things in my backlog are also large games
