Yakoob on 7/2/2022 at 22:15

---

Speaking of Rougelike card games, I just beat Inscryption last night. And overall it was quite excellent for the first third, although the RNG really started to get to me. There were multiple sections (especially last act) where I'd replay the same battles over and over because I got dealt a shit hand. I'm not a pro card player, so I felt my first hand draw had more impact on my chances of success than my skill alone. A good first hand is the difference between winning in literally 1 turn, vs. crushing defeat.

And I definitely fell in the category of people who did not enjoy the big twists, sadly. Act 2 was just too far away stylistically for me. I wanted spooky moody card rougelike - chiptune pixelart just really wasn't scratching the itch. It also bothered me how many new ideas and mechanics this part introduced and how many cards it threw at you, only to throw it away after like 2hrs. I didn't even get a chance to experiment or learn the new mechanics fully, because it was over so quickly. Not that I felt I needed to - due to the RNG, I just cheesed thru on my started deck with just a few minor changes along the way.

Then Act 3 definitely goes back to the right tone and mood I wanted, but I found the world exploration super tedious without a full map and needing to re-play the same battles when you die. God, I re-played the exact same 3 battle section like 5 times at one point because I kept getting shitty draws. This is where I felt the RNG was at its worst. A lot of times if you don't "contain" the opponent in first 3 moves you will just get overwhelmed. When I realized I need to re-traverse the whoele world and re-beat all 4 bosses again like in act 2, I groaned really hard...

Some thoughts on the ending: jesus the game just wouldn't end. Just when I thought "this is it" there would be another fakeout, another section, and it definitely felt very self-indulgent. Can someone explain the murder at end? So the dude just got shot by the original Inscryption developers? I'm not sure what conclusion or emotion I am supposed to feel about that.

Although in it's defense: I felt genuine sadness when the antagonists were slowly dying, just trying to play a tad bit longer. "Just one more game" and "We don't need to keep score" felt really powerful after everything they put you through before. And the woman suddenly stopping the boss battle to say "I thought we had more time..." hit me really hard in a weird existential way. So that part was worth going thru the ending alone.

So yeah I guess TL;DR: fantastic start, middling middle, and mixed ending with some powerful lines as well as overcoming its stay. Definitely highly polished and worth a play, though.

Yakoob on 8/2/2022 at 06:46

---

English is not my first language, waaahhhh!

;) :p

scumble on 11/2/2022 at 10:25

---

Probably drowning in game pass titles.

I have had a go at Greedfall a couple of evenings - it seems to be starting off with quests that feel a bit like uninteresting chores, and I'm getting past the weird looking facial animations (realising how expensive it is to make them good). I will see if it draws me in more once I get out of the starting area.

I also tried the Gears of War remaster as I never played this at the time (2006) - feeling like it's a bit dated at this point even if it was successful at the time. It feels designed to look impressive - but the characters are such cliches of American military types they seem to have been dropped into an incongruous setting in a space opera.

Middle Earth - Shadow of War feels like assassin's creed in middle earth, but I'm interested to see what the nemesis system does to that feel over time, should I pick it up again.

The trouble with game pass is having so many possible games on top of a backlog it's a bit tricky to focus on one of them. Or I'm finding it hard to get into something that's not more casual at the moment.

henke on 20/2/2022 at 14:00

---

I've mostly been replaying Driver: Parallel Lines (2006) this weekend, the oft-forgotten 4th Driver game. It smoothed out a lot of Driv3r's rough edges but is still kinda a mixed bag. Most importantly, the driving is good, a notch above the preceding GTA trilogy, but not quite on par with GTA IV, which came out 2 years later. The story is quite engaging as well. I think perhaps the game's biggest weakness is the gameworld, which is quite frankly TOO BIG. Driving anywhere takes too long, and considering the game is also set in 2 different eras of New York, 1978 and 2006, the environment artists really were stretched thin, and the result is very bland, samey scenery. The other big negative is the on-foot action which is completely devoid of any finesse or requirement of skill. You lock on and hitscan-shoot enemies while they lock on and hitscan-shoot you. The fact that you win at the end just comes down to your ability to pick up medkits and heal yourself every now and then, which is something they can't do.

I think my favourite thing about this game is the wanted system, which is still my favourite in any GTA-alike. There are 2 wanted-meters, one for you, and one for your car. If you pick up some heat you can simply get out of the cops line of sight, hop into another car, and you're scot free. However if they spot you outside a car you'll pick up heat, then getting into a new car unseen will shield you a bit, but if cops get close enough they might still identify you, which leads to scenes like in the opening chase from Drive, where you're sitting at the oposite end of an intersection from a cop car, waiting for a green light, wondering if they're gonna spot you and being ready to floor it if that happens. It's a wonderfully stealthy and refined system that I wish more games of this style would adopt.

Aja on 20/2/2022 at 17:35

---

The further you get, the more you start to see the cramped tunnels, power stations, and laboratories, which feel more appropriately space-stationey. And once you get the ability to spacewalk between sections, it becomes clear how much of a coherent whole the station actually is.