On the rent thing, if I’m remembering my time correctly playing this on the OG Xbox (Xbox One really made talking about the first Xbox confusing), the rent money will be in a bag sitting at the front door of the house and you have to go collect it manually.
1 Like
I’ve been playing Sifu over the last few days, having claimed it as part of the PS Plus free games a while ago and also recently renewing my sub for a few months.
My initial thoughts were that I get why everyone said it was tough. I’ve played and replayed the first stage a bunch of times to try and beat it without dying, and somehow fluked doing so on the second stage. I’ve just done the third one for the first time but I feel like I could get a better result than I did.
As an homage to kung-fu movies I think there’s some hits and misses. Speaking superficially, the game does a good job of setting out a revenge story and has some pretty good environments for scene setting - good stuff.
Where it falls apart for me, to an extent, is in the ebb and flow of fighting. The game teaches you early on that button mashing is going to ruin you for the most part and that deliberate actions are how the game should be played. The problem with this is that the vast majority of encounters end up being slow to play through as you attack the enemy nearest to you whilst most others wait. It feels less like the back alley scene in Way of the Dragon and more like a bunch of enemies politely queuing up to be punched in the face. The main exception to this is the bosses (so far) that move about quickly but the fights end up feeling like exercises in a lot of parrying and waiting for your two-second window to punch them in the face, and repeat.
I would have quite liked to see enemies with smaller health bars too. My character can only take a few hits before dieing but some of the enemies are like sponges. It’s weird that my trained-their-whole-life character is way weaker than any of the goons in this game. A balance more like Samurai Shodown would’ve made the game more satisfying to me.
I like it, it’s fine. I just wish that there was a bit more to it.
3 Likes
I played this game this year on the Plus thing and I loved it, but I don’t think you’re wrong about it. The one thing that I found kind of weird about it was that weaving is much easier than parrying and it works just as well 99% of the time. I didn’t even realize how good it was until I was on the third level boss, so I was at least already pretty good at parrying by that point, but then if you switch over to weaving full time your overall performance will probably improve. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s bad to weave and then you’ve learned a bad habit! I guess that’s intentional but I’m not sure how I feel about it. The parry thing in games in general can probably be a significant hurdle for a lot of players when it’s basically a requirement to advance.
2 Likes
I think I mentioned already that I finished Nine Sols a few nights back. Here’s the thing: I did not enjoy in any way the final boss fight, which surprised me, because probably the number one thing I’ve heard from folks who loved this game is ‘love the final boss fight’. I guess I’m too shitty of a player to enjoy the razor-thin counterattack timing I needed for the boss, which I just barely managed to beat, only to discover there were two more increasingly difficult and increasingly un-fun phases of the fight. In the end I just dropped the difficulty and brute forced it. It’s probably a definitive sign that the next time I see a popular game that looks cool, has great designs and world building, and has interesting traversal methods, I need to run in the opposite direction if it’s labeled ‘souls-like’.
Haha, look at me! I’m being negative! But it’s really harsh to enjoy most of a game, think I’m doing well at its signature mechanic, and then get yanked back by the difficulty of the final boss.
3 Likes
GOG got their preservation program version of Dragon Age: Origins back in (mostly) working order, so I’ve been spending some time with that after Veilguard didn’t quite scratch my itch for a Dragon Age game. My plan at the moment is to play through the first three games, in order to properly calibrate my feelings about the latest entry in the franchise
While I’m not necessarily an Origins purist (having found much to enjoy in the rest of the series, with Dragon Age II being my personal favorite), there is something undeniably special about this one. Before Baldur’s Gate 3 took the world by storm, introducing a whole new crowd to the potential of cRPGs, we had Dragon Age: Origins, and it’s striking to me just how much of the cRPG elements from Infinity and Eclipse Engine games are still present here
Ostensibly, Origins was another attempt (alongside the original Mass Effect) by Bioware to broaden their audience with an appeal to console players, but I’d forgotten just how little they did in that vein. Quest markers are still relatively limited (with some quests asking you to dig into the game’s codex for more information and others having no markers at all); many of the menues are still rather PC-forward; and while the combat does work in the 3rd-person camera, it’s still very much designed for the isometric tactical mode only available in the PC version
Now about 7 hours in, I’ve found so much of what I found lacking in Veilguard: intra-party friction thanks to companions who have negative qualities in addition to positive ones; a meaningful range of attitudes and responses available while roleplaying; thorny moral and ethical questions (and ways to deal with them that aren’t necessarily either of those things); and an immersive tone in the writing thanks to a general rule of avoiding anachronisms in dialogue (outside of Alistair, of course, who we learned recently was specifically allowed to sometimes break that general rule as part of his character)
I’m looking forward to re-tracing the series’ trajectory the rest of the way to Veilguard, particularly when it comes to Dragon Age II, which I’ve come to think of as Veilguard’s older, edgier (but also more authentically “Dragon Age”) sibling—but that’s a feeling I have having not played it in many years. Maybe once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to figure out just why I can’t stop thinking about Veilguard even though I found the experience of it so decidedly average
13 Likes
I haven’t used a ton of weapons because they have a weight to them that I find is a bit risky to commit to the swings, but I LOVED the instances I got to use the chainsaw. I’m on like chapter 13 but my favorite boss was the one you run along like a Super Mario Galaxy planet and destroy these orb things across it. This game does a lot of SMG type walking on things despite gravity and it still blows my mind.
1 Like
I was in the mood for a Koei Tecmo game so I picked up Rise of the Rōnin for $30 on black friday! It is cool to jump into a Stranger-of-Paradise-like from Team Ninja. But of course, the first thing you have to do is tone down blood. I’m no prude but it’s excessive. I was also delighted to see this game lets you “Prioritize Ray Tracing” instead of frame rate or graphics so I gotta turn that on.
The character creator is quite nice!! I just wish the “old” slider let you make them look even older! I love that you can create 2 main characters, and much like Ys X, you can switch between them.
I enjoyed the first mission and prologue… but wasn’t prepared for this game to be open world! It’s actually totally impressive. So cool to see Koei and Sony team up on what feels like a pretty competent middle budget ps4-style action game.
8 Likes
I started playing Iron Lung last night.
It might be one of the most tense games I’ve ever played and was genuinely very unsettling.
It’s an amazing little piece of game design; it’s just “very slow blind asteroids”.
It also seems like something you can knock out in a few hours, which will always be a plus in my book.
6 Likes
Played Mother 3 thru Chapter 7, excited to tuck in with a blanket and a cat or two to enjoy the end tonight.
Tried to play a bit of a 2024 release before the year ends and picked something I followed the development of on reddit, Master Key, a “1-bit” Zelda like where you play as a fox with a key(blade). It’s really cute, love the art design and how the 2D top down Zelda design hints at the world’s size in interesting ways, plus the minimalist environment/enemy drawings are well done. No text or speaking so far, little emoji voice bubbles pop up around NPCs and signs and do a great job of conveying controls/goals/vibe. Also cool that you can switch the colors from the black+white to all sorts of combos that are easier on the eyes imo (gameboy green is a nice one).
A nice QOL thing is when you “die” you just respawn at the last respawn point you access with full health and no punishments, at least nothing in this early game stage. It acts as a sneaky fast travel when you venture far from a village to farm coins and frees up the exploration, don’t have to worry about saving health to get back to spend those coins.
It’s a neat little indie so far, only played 30 min or so in bed but felt like it ran into a pacing issue rather quickly (not too surprising for a Zelda indie) where I’m running around the same small area doing little things repetitively. Nothing too slow but did not hold off sleep very well. It’s a chill game and looking forward to more exploring. Probably won’t finish it before the years up but it seems like a good 2024 release!
6 Likes
I’ll be interested in your further thoughts on this one! I had it on my radar for awhile since it has character creation, but sort of forgot about it by the end of the year
1 Like
The chainsaw is indeed cool. I actually meant something else: have you found any of those golden LPs lying around?
And hell yeah running around on the boss enemies. The levels aren’t especially complicated but stuff like that makes running around some of the environments in that game feel special
1 Like
I have found a few of them complete thankfully! Speaking of secret stuff, it took me like 9 stages in to find the Alfheim areas and they’re BRUTAL but I’m so stubborn I felt compelled to finish them if I found one.
1 Like
i finished indika. the game swung between mediocrity and genius, which i guess makes it even better had it been “all genius” in the end, or at least it makes it more interesting. i loved it.
it was at it’s most mediocre when it most felt like i was playing a game. there were puzzles that weren’t necessarily obtuse but were either tedious or nominal. then there were “walk and talk” sections that weren’t bad in and of themselves, but it did leave me wanting, like i was getting jazz standards when i was expecting sun ra. i think these indicate structural problems with the medium rather than any fault of indika itself, however, meaning that the grammar of games generated unproductive friction with the object’s goal.
at the same time, these gamey elements led to more interesting tension and reveals, particularly toward the end of the game when the irony and intent behind those choices became clearer (or maybe it just took that long for the game to teach me how to read it). in other words, part of what made the game so good is it kept me guessing how i actually felt about it.
my ambivalence also applied to indika’s “themes” of predestination, free will, morality, god, etc. weighty things to speak to, especially when trying to say something new, and my overall impression of how the game handled those themes is:
this is to say the game actually managed to do something with that material, despite it struggling its own weight and popping at the seams. again, i think this makes it a more substantial piece of art were it to have neatly crossed the finish line with aplomb.
the quality of the game that allowed it such an achievement was its atmosphere, which i think is the source of its true genius. i’m hesitant to say much about it both because this post is already a little long and also because the discovery added to my experience, but the sound and vision of the game mixed with the singular tone it evokes is quite magical, a sum greater than its parts.
what ultimately made me decide i loved the game was a small section at the end that moved me in a way few things do, producing that familiar heat behind the eyes:
indika breaks out of prison and runs into a drunk ilya outside the pawn shop. she tries to get the kudets back from the pawnshop, a fight ensues and she’s ultimately left alone with the kudets which has been knocked to the ground. this has been the game’s one and only first-person section so far, and now it’s clear why: indika stoops down to the kudets, and instead of her reflection in the mirror we see the ugly and evil devil. she now completely identifies with the darkness inside her. she proceeds to pray, and the part that really got me was how she kisses the kudets. there is ambient noise of a fight outside, but aside from that all you hear is the sad, intimate kisses indika places on the empty relic. ah, what a moment.
in all, very good game and definitely my goty. i recommend reading what @RubySunrise and @yeso have said about it in the goty thread too.
15 Likes
I went in to the game expecting a kind of philosophical treatsy on these things, or at least an attempt at one, in which the characters serve more as proxies for specific philosophical interpretations. I think what I got instead was these discussions served more as a window into more human characters worldviews. I could just be making a generous reading here, because I liked it. Either way, good gif.
4 Likes
it’s uncommon to say the least to feel like the game parts of a videogame are what needs apologizing for instead of the writing, performances, etc
8 Likes
The parts at the very beginning where you have to walk all over for a basked of potatoes or bring the bucket to the well three times only for the barrel you’re filling to be deliberately poured out felt much more substantial than say the puzzle with the big fish cans, and especially the “video game tedium” of screwing up running away from the dog.
I confess I was auditorially occupied with the sound of clicking the mouse to get 20,000 prayer points.
3 Likes
yeah, that’s exactly what we got, but it didn’t shortchange the subjects either. a very human game in that sense.
@yeso also yeah. admittedly i don’t play as many “art” games as other people on this fine forum so there’s a lot of cultural context i’m missing, but it had me wondering if those “gamey” parts of adventure games (like puzzles and walk and talks) are baked into the medium like how paragraphs are baked into books, or if there are still new and exciting ways of doing things that aren’t relegated to the “avant garde basket”
@captain also also yeah. some of the later games puzzles in particular had me groaning because i was like “oh here’s another chance for my dumbass to kill the momentum”
2 Likes
I thought the nongame material so far exceeded the game part stuff (platforming sections, some of the puzzles, the points and leveling stuff) that the latter was vestigial yeah
1 Like
My read is that these listed themes, while important, are purposely fumbled around in the sense that Indika and Ilya are processing these ideas throughout the game. I think the game’s more about the inability to reconcile religion/spirituality in the face of cruelty and material disparity, and I think the game presented that well like in the first person section you wrote about.
4 Likes
I didn’t go into it expecting those sorts of explicit discussions between characters—the opening of the game seems to suggest it’s more interested in putting the player through difficult or tedious experiences and allowing space for interpretation. I became a bit worried when they did start having explicit discussions, but you’re right that it’s more in service of the characters than the characters are in service of the dialectic.
Also, I got a Steam achievement for “watching the whole drying scene”. What does that mean? Did they expect players to skip the cutscene? Is it a cutscene?
1 Like