demagogue on 1/2/2024 at 06:53
I was never that into Bioshock, even early on. It's main inspiration was supposed to be System Shock 2, but compared to SS2 it felt really claustrophobic, not in a good way, and it was too... I don't know the right term, pastel and circus-like?, to have any of the atmosphere that SS2 oozed in every location. I liked the combat scenarios for what they were, and there were some very nice visuals. It was still a highlight of the year (although it doesn't stand all that well against the likes of Portal, Assassin's Creed, & Mass Effect), but even as a highlight, it just didn't have much of the old magic for me.
I won't say that that magic was lost after a certain period, though, because both Dishonored and Prey had a lot of the old magic for me still, even with a lot of the modern tropes that can rub me the wrong way (screen bling, etc.).
Malf on 1/2/2024 at 13:02
Having burned out a bit on big, scripted, narrative-heavy games, I reverted back to Dwarf Fortress recently.
My first attempt unfortunately fell after a couple of years thanks to a gods-be-damned actual DRAGON attack. Somewhat surprisingly, I think I've only ever seen one dragon in DF before, and that was a long time into the life of whatever fortress I was running at the time, so it quickly got smeared into raspberry jam by hardened veterans.
This dragon melted everyone. And I mean that literally. I had an alert list full of "Urist has been melted by Whatever-the-dragon's-name-was".
But this current fort at the base of a volcano is going much smoother. I've just finished equipping my first squad with steel armour & weapons, and I'm starting to set up entertainment for visitors.
I'm also not dicking around with quantum stockpiles this time, so it's a lot easier to troubleshoot when there's a general work stoppage.
DF's still the best, most creative simulation and colony management game in existence.
Aja on 1/2/2024 at 22:24
Quote Posted by Sulphur
What's wrong with the idea? I've always been fascinated with the idea of video games and the people who play them making a mutual assumption that the protagonist is the player, that a player by default embodies the character they control, and the video game reinforces that at every turn. Bioshock's a fun little turn on the idea that this provides you, the player, with anything like agency, but it does eviscerate its own point after it bashes it into Ryan's skull.
Or is it the critique of objectivism, which devolves into a very unsubtle tale of autocracy vs. collectivism when you take a step back and look at it and its sequel together?
The idea of a libertarian paradise at the bottom of the ocean is interesting, and the golf club scene is still good, but Bioshock had to make so many other compromises in service of gameplay accessibility that it's hard to take seriously as a piece of art. At every turn I could feel the design-by-committee influence, which somehow was much easier to ignore back in 2007, when everyone else complained about it and I defended it.
Why present a dramatic choice about saving or harvesting little sisters when the moral choice is also the tactical one? Why are there ammo machines next to every Circus of Value? And why did Fontaine produce cute commercials that show his customers torching the police and their neighbours? It's like a war broke out and they decided to call in the graphic design team.
Bioshock feels like a group of talented people came up with a bunch of cool ideas that made less and less sense with each iteration, as the project became more and more beholden to mass-audience appeal. And I think I'd be able to ignore all of that if the core gameplay was fun, but enemies barely react to your fire except for blood splatters, which makes the gunplay feel flimsy and tedious, real bullet-spongey, and the plasmids are mostly superfluous. So once I got past the Andrew Ryan scene, I was quite ready to call it quits. A Bioshock that hewed more closely to its RPG roots and focused on survival and exploration over flabby combat would be a lot more to my taste.
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Yeah I dunno. I liked TR 2013 when it came out, but in retrospect that was mostly the graphics razzle-dazzle. It's a muddled game and trilogy, and Lara Croft: First Blood is an interesting direction, but it's hefted with all the nuance of a sledgehammer, and the sheer amount of combat while you're supposed to be playing a vulnerable, fledgling Lara who's somehow only psychologically scarred in cutscenes... it's a schizophrenic mix. This is easier to ignore in Uncharted, because you can internalise that Drake's possibly just a psychopath underneath the quips and charisma, but also because Uncharted's tone is much breezier, and the action movie pacing makes it a fun ride. The new TR trilogy always makes me go, 'Okay, so you want me to take her seriously', but then instead of exploring Lara's frame of mind, it just piles into its mess of skill trees and crafting loops while moving its plot through a series of motions designed to funnel set pieces in and handwave any real development for her. It just doesn't hold together in the end, which is a shame because I could see the combat reinforcing the fun situated in a different context in a different game, or the story being more interesting in a game trilogy filled with actual exploration and tomb raiding.
I can't really disagree except I think the shooting parts are more fun than the tomb raids (and really are on par with Uncharted in terms of how the guns feel and enemies react), and I've been finding the story easy enough to not be bothered by but not so ignorable that I skip the cutscenes. Like I said, I'm playing it before bed, and it's pleasantly satisfying and sleepifying. I know it's a bit of a cop-out to say that I just don't care about the game's problems, but I was specifically looking for a shut-off-my-brain experience, and this turned out to be it. If it was 2013 and I was excited for the next big entry in the beloved franchise, maybe I'd have been disappointed. Anyway, got the remasters coming out this month so I can reacquaint myself with real tomb raiding.
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RE: Horizon Zero Dawn, I dunno what the itch might be, but it's definitely not the same thing a Tomb Raider does.
They're not the same genre, but they're both big-budget hand-holdey games that smack an objective marker in the middle of the screen, and you beeline it. Not usually my thing, but sometimes it's nice to unwind with. I mean, yes, HZD is open world, but so far I haven't felt compelled to explore in the same way I did for Breath of the Wild. I go where I'm told, and wherever I'm told to go there's machines to clear out, bandits to clear out, conversation trees to button through. I finally hit Meridian, so maybe it opens up after this. I really want to like this game, but it hasn't hooked me. I haven't found any really interesting environmental details, the weapons are mostly a variation on arrows, and the inventory system is so complex that I've pretty much ignored it. I like Aloy, though. I've heard people talk about the backstory being a large part of the appeal, so maybe I need to start paying closer attention to it.
Sulphur on 2/2/2024 at 05:02
Quote Posted by Aja
The idea of a libertarian paradise at the bottom of the ocean is interesting, and the golf club scene is still good, but Bioshock had to make so many other compromises in service of gameplay accessibility that it's hard to take seriously as a piece of art. At every turn I could feel the design-by-committee influence, which somehow was much easier to ignore back in 2007, when everyone else complained about it and I defended it.
I'm not sure about the design by committee thing so much as it's a wholesale lifting/refiguring of SS2 into the console space. It's a decent argument to be had: if few people in your target demo have played SS2, what do you want to bring to the table from it when you're working in a space that requires compromises at both the technical and interface level for accessibility? I'm sure we can agree that the compromises weren't great, though I see why they had to happen.
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Why present a dramatic choice about saving or harvesting little sisters when the moral choice is also the tactical one? Why are there ammo machines next to every Circus of Value? And why did Fontaine produce cute commercials that show his customers torching the police and their neighbours? It's like a war broke out and they decided to call in the graphic design team.
Not sure how that tracks. Saving the little sisters isn't a tactical choice so much as it is meaningless, because the game still gives you rewards for it in regular bursts, vs. harvesting them for an immediate payoff in power. This wasn't immediately apparent in the beginning, of course, so that meant your choice was possibly predicated on a moral reason at least initially.
As for the rest, I'm assuming it's a depiction of Ryan's initial core objectivist philosophy rotted through by his psyche, which was rapidly devolving into libertarian insanity fed by a need for control to the exclusion of individual morality. Part of libertarian free market thinking is that the public decides what thrives and doesn't in aggregate, including what's ethical and isn't, right? Any external regulation like police or governments deciding what should and shouldn't go is ideally verboten, so those cartoons are taking that to the obvious logical conclusion, which is of course serving as a parody/satire of the entire thing as the game's
subtext. Subtlety clearly doesn't exist here.
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Bioshock feels like a group of talented people came up with a bunch of cool ideas that made less and less sense with each iteration, as the project became more and more beholden to mass-audience appeal. And I think I'd be able to ignore all of that if the core gameplay was fun, but enemies barely react to your fire except for blood splatters, which makes the gunplay feel flimsy and tedious, real bullet-spongey, and the plasmids are mostly superfluous. So once I got past the Andrew Ryan scene, I was quite ready to call it quits. A Bioshock that hewed more closely to its RPG roots and focused on survival and exploration over flabby combat would be a lot more to my taste.
Yeah, I have to agree with that. The gameplay was squidgy and unfun for the most part. Interestingly enough, Bioshock 2 did better on this front, to the point where I'd say they made the shooting bits nice enough to play through.
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I can't really disagree except I think the shooting parts are more fun than the tomb raids (and really are on par with Uncharted in terms of how the guns feel and enemies react), and I've been finding the story easy enough to not be bothered by but not so ignorable that I skip the cutscenes.
TR 2013 wasn't great for any of the tomb raiding, no. You might find that when they introduced actual puzzle tombs in RotTR and slightly more involved ones in SotTR, those quickly became the more fun parts of those games. They were for me, at least.
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They're not the same genre, but they're both big-budget hand-holdey games that smack an objective marker in the middle of the screen, and you beeline it. Not usually my thing, but sometimes it's nice to unwind with. I mean, yes, HZD is open world, but so far I haven't felt compelled to explore in the same way I did for Breath of the Wild. I go where I'm told, and wherever I'm told to go there's machines to clear out, bandits to clear out, conversation trees to button through. I finally hit Meridian, so maybe it opens up after this. I really want to like this game, but it hasn't hooked me. I haven't found any really interesting environmental details, the weapons are mostly a variation on arrows, and the inventory system is so complex that I've pretty much ignored it. I like Aloy, though. I've heard people talk about the backstory being a large part of the appeal, so maybe I need to start paying closer attention to it.
Yeah, Meridian is where it opens out. Even then, for what it's worth, it's never going to be BotW, so your expectations are on the money; it's always going to be a guided experience, though if you do go collectible hunting, that's where the backstory is. While it's never particularly ingenious in terms of puzzling out how to get a collectible, I found that the reward of learning a little bit more about what happened was good enough for me. And it's written decently enough, given that John Gonzalez, who was the lead writer on FO:NV, led the writing here ('Narrative Director' was his official title).
The combat has a bunch of synergies that work well, with the rock-paper-scissors elemental weaknesses and resistances in tow, alongside your traps and other items. There's stealth-lite, environmental traps, different machine behaviours, different weak spots per machine, all of which you can bring to bear in many encounters. It's pretty accessible yet also a decent challenge as you go on (I played on Hard), and I found it a good mix of smacking shit around, progressing the story, and looking around for lore. It's a Skinner Box, like most games deploy, but a decently put together one.
Starker on 2/2/2024 at 05:43
Quote Posted by Sulphur
so those cartoons are taking that to the obvious logical conclusion, which is of course serving as a parody/satire of the entire thing as the game's
subtext. Subtlety clearly doesn't exist here.
Ah, yes, the Garth Marenghi school of writing...
[video=youtube;Yk7M2jGdnxU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk7M2jGdnxU[/video]
Thirith on 2/2/2024 at 10:08
I just finished The Last Clockwinder, a good example of what VR games can be if they're designed for the medium. It's also the VR game I've played that does throwing best... but that's not saying much. If, like me, you suck at throwing and catching, the game can be frustrating - but it's designed so that you can be at the lower end of mediocre and still get through it. (Nonetheless, on the whole I prefer puzzle games where dexterity comes second to having a good idea.)
But it never gets old to look at a team of robot clones repeating the moves you've just done in order to program them. Makes me wish you were able to play Björk's "Army of Me" while looking at your, well, army of me.
Sulphur on 3/2/2024 at 06:49
So I got to Tunic's first ending, the 'bad' one. It's been a great ride, honestly. The layers to its design are provocative enough to keep trying to suss out all the nooks and crannies you glossed over hours earlier because they seemed unimportant, and it's not hard enough in combat except for a few trouble spots (that really began to grate because they were unnecessarily punishing, but nothing pushed me to turn on damage reduction, except the final fight which made me lose patience to get past its phase 2 irritations). I think there's more than a bit of Fez in how it wants you to unravel things, and there's some Dark Souls, but really a lot of it is Zelda in the design. I enjoyed it, and yes, to reiterate what I said earlier, the core mechanic to this game is in fact information. That'll be spoiler-y, so once I'm done with the meta-puzzle good ending hunt (I'm not above walkthroughs for this one), I'll post up some final thoughts. Probably. Maybe.
Tomi on 3/2/2024 at 08:23
I'm done with Horace. What a brilliant game! The actual gameplay may be quite ordinary (the gravity boots are a lot of fun though!) but it's the story that really makes this game so special. Having finished Horace three times now, I can safely say that it's up there with my all-time favourite games.
I wanted to try something totally different next, so I started Wolfenstein: Youngblood, after someone in here recommended it not too long ago. It's alright, even when playing solo, although the game is obviously designed for co-op multiplayer. The gameplay is similar to the other new Wolfenstein games, it's very smooth and fast, but there's also less story and more action... which is a good thing in this case, I think. The NPCs are again annoying caricatures with silly exaggerated accents in true Wolfenstein fashion. I've never found the dieselpunk stuff particularly interesting - I prefer the occult nazis of The Old Blood (or Return to Castle Wolfenstein) - but I suppose it fits in the alternate 1980's timeline.
WingedKagouti on 3/2/2024 at 08:26
Quote Posted by Sulphur
That'll be spoiler-y, so once I'm done with the meta-puzzle good ending hunt (I'm not above walkthroughs for this one), I'll post up some final thoughts. Probably. Maybe.
After getting the bad ending I first looked up what had to be done for the good ending, then I looked up the actual steps, then I went to watch a video of someone doing the last couple of steps + the good ending and called it a day. Having to use the Holy Cross 50 something times in a specific pattern (with one wrong step requiring a restart of the entire pattern) was too much for me.
DuatDweller on 3/2/2024 at 10:36
Beyond Boulder Dome, a mod for Fallout New Vegas.
Do yourself a favor and avoid the NCR quest as there is a bug later in the mod, side with the BoS instead, in order to complete the game, there are more quests after the apparent ending (don't worry about your faction status, is not affected in the main game).
The start is a bit of a let down, but after that it gets really good.
I seem to be stuck in the 2010s i know.
