PigLick on 12/5/2023 at 15:22
Zelda ToK, incredible game if you liked BotW its like gaming crack.
Thirith on 14/5/2023 at 16:47
Okay, while Little Nightmares 2's second location isn't a complete gamechanger (I still find the gameplay to be perfunctory at best and frustrating at worst), it's much more interesting and moody than the first location, feeling like the Brothers Grimm's scariest material as interpreted by Junji Ito.
Mr.Duck on 22/5/2023 at 10:59
Quack, quack.
* Sifu (PS5) - Tekken meets Arkham Asylum meets HK Kung-Fu cinema. Punishing, but fun. For extra authenticity, I'm playing it with the Cantonese dub. Good times.
* TLoZ: Breath of the Wild (Switch) - 'Bout time I played this sucker AND finish it so I can jump into Tears of the Kingdom. Not gonna do the 900 Korok seeds' side quest (maybe).
* X-Com UFO Defense (PC) - I can only ever play OG X-Com with the OpenXCom mod installed. So. Many. QOL. Added. Yes! Currently in late June. Still have the one base, but I've been tearing alien ass. Should expand soon enough. Already had my first raid on my base, only lost two of my soldiers. Bring it on, E.T.!
* Tormented Souls (PC) - Just started this game that seems to be inspired by Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Should be fun!
* Cult of the Lamb (PC) - Baaaaaaaaaad sheep has gooooooood fun.
Malf on 22/5/2023 at 12:17
Having finished off Guardians of the Galaxy, I decided to give Atomic Heart a go on GamePass.
However, despite looking like a high budget game, the narrative and consistency are more in line with something decidedly B or even Z-quality. I could only put up with the edgelord protagonist for so long before quitting, no matter how odd and batshit the surrounding world was. It's like if BioShock were written by an incel.
I do have some final thoughts on GotG as well; it's a rompingly good adventure, sharing DNA with the Uncharted games, in that it has frequent, long stretches of exploration, puzzling and banter, all without combat.
Said combat is, as previously stated, somewhat underwhelming, and it feels like they implemented all sorts of systems, then only half-developed them.
The game also has some really annoying QTEs, which is really unexpected these days when most developers have moved away from them. There was one early on with quicksand featuring poor user interface design that took me multiple attempts to figure out what it was trying to tell me (in this instance, it was moving both joysticks so that two points would be inside a circle).
There's also a massive problem with another TPP game perrenial, that of walking along edges. For some reason, once you're locked in to the ledge, you can't move back, and the exit to some of these ledges can be very sticky. I had multiple instances of exiting a ledge only to get pullled back in, then having to walk all the way along the ledge befre returning, only for it to happen again. And again. AND AGAIN.
But quibbles aside, it was continually inventive in its visuals, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. The voice actors do a thoroughly good job of portraying the characters with their own spin, and I think Gamora in particular shines, partly because there's no romance between her and Peter.
I also got a better idea of exactly what role Mantis is supposed to fill thanks to this game, and she delivers some genuinely hilarious lines. Oddly, she also seems to have the most expressive face of all the characters (outside of maybe Lady Hellbender, who chews the scenery fantastically).
Needless to say, after all that, Atomic Heart was a bit of a letdown.
So instead, I jumped in to another GamePass offering in Ghostwire Tokyo, which conversely has been thoroughly enjoyable. Admittedly, it gets a bit repetitive once you're let off the leash in the open world, but there's enough here to keep me engaged. And I love how it looks, with its attention to detail, helping convey everyday Tokyo culture just through the verisimmilitude of its spaces (reminding me of Yakuza in that respect). I also find the portrayal of Japanese spirituality utterly enthralling, in much the same way I loved The Witcher's portrayal of Slavic folklore.
It also plays very nicely with all the bells and whistles turned on, including RT.
I have had to tweak my card a bit though, as it can get REALLY noisy with demanding games. But that's more down to how the card works. With the RT7900XTX, you have to throttle it somewhat, as otherwise it'll devote more resources to a title than is necessary. So you have to actively tell it to target certain resolutions and frequencies. This isn't something I'm used to, having been an nVidia user for the past 20 years and having that all handled for me in the background.
There's also an odd bug where if you're watching YouTube, non-fullscreen on a second monitor while playing a game on the first, you get all sorts of flickering artifacts in the page surrounding the view portal. I suspect this is down to a bug with the drivers and their interaction with YouTube's nifty background colour changing, where in dark mode, the area surrounding the video subtly changes colour in sync with what's playing, like a virtual version of Philips Hue.
henke on 22/5/2023 at 17:57
Ok, played that (
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/134292-myhousewad/) hot new DOOM wad that's the talk of the town. It's good.
If, like me, you haven't dabbled in this stuff in a while:
1. get (
https://zdoom.org/downloads) GZDoom
2. put the DOOM2.wad in the GZDoom folder
3. drag myhouse.pk3 onto the GZDoom.exe
Also, I suggest not playing on too high a difficulty, and remember to Quicksave.
Yakoob on 23/5/2023 at 06:07
Inline Image:
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/674140/header.jpg?t=1661402284Just beat
Bugsnax!. That was pretty neat and a good chill game. Fantastic voice acting to boot.
That being said, I feel underwhelmed. I heard the game was supposed to be 'a lot more than meets the eye' and the first steam tag is psychological horror but... eh, it really didn't deliver. It had its moments when I thought "oh shit, this is it!" but then it just went back to being cutesy. I guess the tags were just deceiving, but I wish it went full on psychological horror.
Other than that, I felt the pacing was also a bit off. The first half is nice linear progression, then you
suddenly get like 3 different new tools back to back (one of which is so powerful it overrides everything else you have 90% of the time). Then when you have everything, you still
uncover 2 new big areas, but at that point, there's barely anything new to discover anymore. Just weird pacing.
TL;DR - if you just want a chill and cozy pokemon-snap-like, it's great! but don't listen to steam tags and don't expect more
Sulphur on 23/5/2023 at 12:24
Quote Posted by Malf
Having finished off
Guardians of the Galaxy, I decided to give
Atomic Heart a go on GamePass.
However, despite
looking like a high budget game, the narrative and consistency are more in line with something decidedly B or even Z-quality. I could only put up with the edgelord protagonist for so long before quitting, no matter how odd and batshit the surrounding world was. It's like if BioShock were written by an incel.
This sounds like my opinion after playing it for all of ten minutes. While the story's tone is certainly 'light novel for teenage gopnik', the story's not just Bioshock-inflected, it's also a (mild) critique of the USSR. I can't fault anyone for being turned right off by the protatgonist (and a certain fridge), because I couldn't take it either; so I found it much more bearable when delivered through the Russian VA, though the edgelordery of course remains in full force. It was good enough to carry on though, so I did.
I can't say I'd strongly recommend Atomic Heart, but as a disposable piece of entertainment, it does the job. The combat isn't as bad as Bioshock's, even if it leans in the same direction, because it's just better at being tactile with a little bit of extra bite. Plus, there's a tangible sense of improvement as you upgrade your equipment, your powers, and your character through the various upgrade trees. It's overall quite serviceable, which was pretty surprising to me because I thought this was going to be some weird art-y game from the trailers. And it's actually... not that weird? The visual design is not only fantastic, but all of these odd visual components actually make sense in the game world instead of the usual shortcut of surreal visuals for the sake of it. I think that's the bigger achievement, actually.
There are some big cons: while the game's an enjoyable mish-mash of puzzles and combat with a really nice 'closed' open world that distinguishes it from Bioshock in a genuinely pleasant way, it gets super fucking annoying to navigate because there's cameras strewn all over the place that can raise alarms and get you dogpiled if you stick around too long (and no, stealth barely exists and is not viable 99% of the time because it's very tedious), and all the cameras and robots you smash up are repaired by flying service bots in about ten seconds or so. While there are ways to delay this, you can't completely stop them from being rebuilt in the open sections unless you use a slow and expensive late-game weapon that vaporises enemies, but it's just not worth the time or effort. The puzzle sections are fun, until my (and possibly your) mild OCD stops you from progressing the main bits because you want to find all of the testing grounds and hoover up all the weapons upgrades - and that's when you begin to note that while they're great optional challenges, if you do them all in a straight line, they're kinda samey, and the first person platforming isn't great at all because both climbing and jumping are quite unreliably handled. (Side-note: all of the upgrades are resource-dependent, so if you find yourself loot grinding and abusing respawns in the open like it's Borderlands, know that it's not necessary unless you really want every single upgrade, which, let me reiterate, you don't really
need to do.)
To complete my praise-cons-praise sandwich, the game does look really nice, as we saw from the trailers, though not as nice as whatever RT they were using (not that I have an RT card), and it runs
really well. I do believe it's one of the more well-optimised UE4 games I've played, though the standard bearer for 'well-optimised and brilliant visuals on UE4' remains Gears 5. There is
some jank, and some irritating bugs -- I had to restart a checkpoint once or twice (apart from the odd checkpoint at important bits, there's manual saves via save points only) because a door refused to open, and a few of the optional testing grounds didn't open because I hadn't progressed the main story enough and the game didn't signpost that to me at all -- but nothing really show-stopping otherwise.
It's a decent time, and I don't mind seeing it through to the end. I've been at it for upwards of 25 hours already, and I'm about ready to be done, so I might just leave the last testing ground alone. There's been some lovely sights, some decently satisfying combat, and a mildly obnoxious glove that talks down to you; I can think of worse ways to waste your time - like playing an open-world Ubisoft game, nyuk nyuk.
Sulphur on 23/5/2023 at 14:18
Quote Posted by Yakoob
That being said, I feel underwhelmed. I heard the game was supposed to be 'a lot more than meets the eye' and the first steam tag is psychological horror but... eh, it really didn't deliver. It had its moments when I thought "oh shit, this is it!" but then it just went back to being cutesy. I guess the tags were just deceiving, but I wish it went full on psychological horror.
Not a good idea to use the user-defined Steam tags to guide your expectations on games, especially on highly subjective terms like psychological horror. They usually get the broad strokes right, like whether something's an RPG or a sports game or whatever, but for the rest you have to sift through contexts to see whether it's a meme-y joke, trolling, or just plain user incompetence sometimes; so it's best to let an actual qualitative evaluation help you judge what it is, like a decent review source. I mostly look at Steam tags only to see if there's a bizarre setof tags people managed to game the system with for lulz.
Yakoob on 24/5/2023 at 00:41
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Not a good idea to use the user-defined Steam tags to guide your expectations on games, especially on highly subjective terms like psychological horror. They usually get the broad strokes right, like whether something's an RPG or a sports game or whatever, but for the rest you have to sift through contexts to see whether it's a meme-y joke, trolling, or just plain user incompetence sometimes; so it's best to let an actual qualitative evaluation help you judge what it is, like a decent review source. I mostly look at Steam tags only to see if there's a bizarre setof tags people managed to game the system with for lulz.
for sure, but I heard that from other sources (for instance there's youtube videos about that too which I didn't watch but saw analyzing the horror aspect of the game), so I thought it was going to be an actual thing
