I’ve tried console level remapping before on PS4 and it was a pain. You can’t remap specifically for a game, so it seems a tad useless to me. Say I want to play southpaw style on a FPS that doesn’t support it, I flip the functions of the sticks. Now I have to navigate everything in both the game and console menu with the right stick and I have to change the bindings every time I want to play a different game.
I have a very minor form of cerebral palsy that affects my coordination with my right hand, so I tinker with control setups all the time to try and adjust for it. I could go on forever about different dumb control schemes and stuff that make things a headache, when it could all be easily alleviated if devs would just implement rebinding. My personal favorite is the sprint button on most console FPSs. Sprint is often inextricably linked to the L3 left stick click. Even when games have southpaw sticks it’s rendered useless because the same stick I use to aim/look is the one I have to click to sprint - so any time I want to sprint my screen starts wildly convulsing because I’m holding in on the aiming stick.
Steam’s input is pretty neat if your game can go all in on it. Many of those steps handled for free, and the menu is prominently placed on BigPicture/Steam Deck. They’re also intentionally less picky on what they consider to be a blocking issue. Which we’re all seeing with Verified has its ups and downs.
Oh, I had no idea and just assumed it was more full featured. Even more reason why a game should try and support it at their layer.
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I’m playing Virtua Fighter 5 on the Steam Beta. I buy it everytime it’s out. The characters don’t get any easier and the movelists don’t get any shorter, but the videos, wikis, and social media guides get buffed every time.
After a forum poll I picked up Indika for the PS5 - I wanted to play this game in turns with my partner as I thought she might be intrigued by it and my living room doesn’t currently have easy access to PC games.
Thoughts below (mild spoilers)...
I didn’t realise how little I knew about the game until we started playing, just that it was popular on the forums really. That meant I had the rather magical experience of thinking this was a period piece, only to gradually notice strange things about the world as it became increasingly apparent we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
First of all, we noticed a giant goat at the monastery, then the train scene was… odd, an upside down house, on and on as each new area became increasingly impractical and unsettling - with not a single comment from the characters that anything was amiss. I think people acting unfazed in bizarre and unbelievable situations is a core tenet of surrealism and executed very well here. The game also manages to maintain this escalation of weirdness throughout its runtime. It was a world that somehow felt very coherent and expansive to me, like the game was only a small part of something much deeper.
My experience was marred significantly by unpleasant technical issues on PS5. I don’t know what this is like on PC but the framerate fluctuations were absolutely wild and the sound balancing was terrible - somes scenes featured Indika yelling almost to the point of causing me physical pain while Ilya was barely audible. Issues of this nature were constant throughout, and kept me from giving myself over to the game experience in the way I think it deserved.
In the moment, it made me feel negatively about the game but afterwards the whole experience sort of sat with me. I kept thinking about the various character arcs, their motivations, the subtext and finding new depth and significance at almost every turn. I feel like almost nothing happens in this game that doesn’t serve to elevate the overall theming. My partner and I had a really long discussion a couple days later about the game that helped solidify and contextualize all the thoughts that had been rolling around in my head.
I will say, I didn’t really like the 16-bit sections. The story they told was cool, and I can see what they might have been going for but it just didn’t work for me. However, super happy I played this game so thanks to all the people on the forum who recommended it! I guess it would slot in just behind UFO 50 in my GOTY list.
While I’m still diving into Dragon Age: Origins when I have suitable chunks of time to do so (perhaps once or twice a week), I’ve also been picking at Persona 3 Portable for a couple of weeks now, usually playing an in-game day or two per session. I’d been holding off on sharing any thoughts until the game got some proper hooks in me, but I’m about four hours in now (on the evening of May 1st), and that hasn’t happened
I’m generally not feeling the cast here, with only Hikari really piquing my interest, while the game seems to want me to enjoy Junpei far more than I do, judging by how much more screen time he’s gotten than anyone else thus far. I’ve also been lamenting the lack of a strong narrative hook when it comes to exploring Tartarus, too. While it’s clear it’s what I’m supposed to be doing, it’s all felt rather aimless thus far after about 10 floors, which may be a symptom of my general lack of familiarity with Persona and SMT more broadly. The battle system is serviceable (I think I like it more than that of Soul Hackers 2, at least), but not strong enough thus far to make me want to dive into Tartarus lacking in some motivating factor
I do think I’d be more engaged if I could actually move around in the school and various other locations, rather than navigating simply via cursor and menus everywhere outside of Tartarus, as I’m also missing a valuable sense of immersion in the setting. This is, I imagine, something unique to the portable version of Persona 3, but unfortunately for yours truly, Atlus did not see fit to include FemC in the recent remaster
Given this general lack of connection to what Atlus is doing here, my sessions of play have been growing less frequent, so I have a feeling my time with this one may eventually taper off, even if I continue to pick at it for a little while yet
I saw Crow Country listed a few times in the GOTY thread, so I started that up last night and finished this afternoon. This marks number three in the recent Resident Evil/Silent Hill throwbacks I’ve been cruising through, after Signalis and Sorry, We’re Closed (if you have any other modern recs that might fit the bill, let me know OR throw a boot at me for not having played the original SH2 yet).
I was pretty lukewarm on CC in my first couple of hours. In comparison to what the former two had done with their formats, it felt verrry stripped down — it was clear this was a much more cut and paste tribute to its inspirations. The limited camera controls and fiddly aiming initially felt at odds with each other, I missed Signalis’s clear highlighting of interactables, and it all felt a little too generic — by the end of my playthrough though, I came around to its charms and enjoyed it enough for the simple, polished puzzle box it was.
Setting this in an abandoned amusement park feels about right — It’s a creepy little Fun House. There’s a lot of care put into its cued-up surprises and tempered thrills and it made for a pretty fun Saturday.
Likes
• Feels really polished for an indie — The animation, sound, music, art-style all gels. It seems like this is where the majority of the focus went and it works together nicely to create some memorable set pieces. There’s a lot of care put into the details, making each room feel distinct and purposeful — they have a diorama-like feel that’s really satisfying on the ol’ eyeballs.
• Short, dense games!
• I really like how the atmosphere of the park changes as you progress — starting off in early morning and progressing through the day until its dark and unnervingly quiet. This ruled!
• I liked that a few of the puzzles had a couple different solutions. Felt a little more natural / less rigid than the original RE’s.
• The setting is fun. The distinct theming of different areas in the park makes navigating / remembering locations pretty breezy. On top of this, I really liked the backrooms inspired staff only areas weaving in between.
• There’s a short story recap at the end that takes you through your key items as you lay them out on the table. I don’t know why, but I thought this was such a charming touch before the final boss.
Not so much
• Puzzles feel pretty basic. Definitely in-line with its inspirations, but maybe felt a little flat after coming off of Signalis. I wish there were a few more pieces they expected you to keep in short term memory.
• The story and characters feel a little bland.
• Randomly generated traps felt gamey and took me out of it, on top of just being kind of annoying.
• The “game hints” tacked to all the walls is such a weird choice. Why the need for these to be in-world / immersive? Finding a sheet on the ground with “controller inputs” has the opposite effect for me.
• There isn’t much in terms of resource management, which detracts from the tension a bit. Maybe the harder difficulty is the way to go, unless you just want something relatively breezy.
I finished Indiana Jones and the Great Circle overall pretty good. Machinegames did it’s thing of altering the pace and structure of the game as you go, so you’re not stuck doing ubisoft open world stuff the whole time. I will note that some of the humor wore a little thin by the end, although the confessional scene got a genuine lol from me. Also just a heads up - the ancient relic collectible objects which feed into a postgame puzzle is not worth doing and in fact was kind of bugged for me. So don’t stress about that particular thing dont bother with it imo just look up the .0000001 second long “secret ending” on youtube
Also wanted to jump back into The Witcher 3 bc mention of it here got me re-interested. I noted some remarks that people here would like to play the game, but they don’t want to be Geralt. I don’t understand it, but I am here to listen and to learn.
To that point: guess what there’s a new mod for that and from my tinkering around it seems to work just fine!
it’s the “Custom Player Characters” mod - not going to link it on nexus bc there’s probably nudity. You can play as any NPC model in the game and if it’s a lady Witcher you want to be, all the armor and equipment as been adjusted to that model and there’s lady VO. It may take some more work to play as a POC though because CDPR somewhat infamously forgot to add any black people to the game
I do enjoy the optional missions they are rewards from. While I’m still in the first real part of the game, the ones I’ve done so far have been rewarding by seeing more of the location and little bits of dialogue. But the collectable aspect, I do it for the bits and giggles
Geralt is cool. He peaked in a time period where people overly complained about old guy main characters in games because there were like four AAA games in a five year period that designation applied too. He’s not even really like that though imo he’s got way more personality than that
The shortest answer I can give on a personal level is that I spent 35 years roleplaying a man in real life and I don’t have much interest in trying to do that again in video games, particularly in roleplaying games or immersive sims—games where “inhabiting” the protagonist is more central to the experience. I can get around this sometimes with games and franchises I played when younger or with a certain distance from the story, but not always
Much of the time, it comes down to dysphoria for me. I did try to play The Witcher 3 two or three years back, and my Playstation 5 tells me I made it about 20 minutes before I had to put the game down. The mod you linked would probably solve that issue, though, should I decide to play the game before the sequel comes out (which could very well happen, I’d guess we’re several years away yet)
I fell off a roof and died because I was trying to scroll the map. It’s definitely the worst thing so far. I think I’m where you are as of the post I’m replying to.
