<Username> on 3/2/2024 at 13:59
Quote Posted by Aja
I've been playing the demo for
Dreamcore, which sounds like a TikTok shovelware game but is actually an interesting and immersive walking sim with pretty stunning visuals. I knew about liminal spaces, but I had no idea there was a whole community devoted to them, with a wiki that describes hundreds of fictional liminal locations.
Oh, nice. I enioyed watching the Return to Render backrooms videos on YouTube last year. This looks like a videogame with similar environments and less cartoony visuals.
demagogue on 3/2/2024 at 14:52
There's also a game version of Backrooms and there's Interior Worlds in this liminal space genre.
I've been playing IW recently, or I guess the demo.
Edit: Sorry, getting my wires crossed. Dreamcore is the one with the demo I played.
IW has you taking camera snapshots of liminal areas, and it's in a retro low res style.
I think I'm on Observation Duty is also going to be in this vein.
In that one you're looking at these liminal spaces through security cameras.
The genre is definitely having a moment, and it's even starting to get a little oversaturated.
I think the photorealism of Unreal Engine 5 is pushing it.
When you start building in that engine, it's almost irresistible to make a realistic space with some surreal or liminal twist to it.
Sulphur on 5/2/2024 at 03:58
Quote Posted by WingedKagouti
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.
It's not that bad exactly, since I have all but three manual pages. You have to do 10 fairy locations instead of all 20, so it's manageable, but also the actual puzzles seem somewhat obtuse, a bit more than Fez? Ah well, thank god for walkthroughs.
Aja on 5/2/2024 at 16:46
Quote Posted by Sulphur
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.
True! It felt like something initially. It's a bit of a rug-pull though, and there's no reason why they couldn't have made the evil path the easier one, only now you have to be able to live with what you've done. I think what bothered me more was just the concept of the little sisters in general. Levine at one point said that they were originally designed as slugs, which makes more sense in an underwater world but is less marketable, so okay, they juiced it up, made it controversial, but they didn't fully commit to the bit, and for me the end result feels goofy. Like, I'm embarrassed to play this game when my wife is around. "I'm ready for dream time, Mr. Bubbles!"
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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.
I SUPPOSE! I wish they would've shown more of actual daily life in Rapture, which would've made its downfall more poignant. Like, we're going to see a show at Fort Frolic, and oh, did you happen to notice a weapon shop opened on the promenade? I know Mr. Ryan wants to protect our individual rights and all, but I don't know if I'm comfortable with violence! Etc. We got a little bit of this in the Infinite DLC.
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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.
Being the silly person I am, I bought this game on PC and PS5, and I realized I can stream to Steam Deck from the Playstation using remote play. Apart from a tiny bit of lag and macroblocking, it feels way better to play it that way, at 60 FPS, versus native, where it stutters even on low settings. So I'm giving a solid go! I think it's starting to click, too. It does feel a little Skinner Boxy I guess, but it's also obvious they've put a lot of effort into story and worldbuilding, so I'm going to try to pay closer attention.
henke on 5/2/2024 at 18:10
Finished Demon's Souls Remake. At only ~30h this game feels positively slender compared to the later souls games, Elden Ring especially. It also has a few good grinding spots, which makes it easy to level up should you ever get stuck. I think it's a really good introduction to Souls games actually. As for how the remake is, afaik it plays the same as the original. On the technical side, it runs great and looks polished, but I do still prefer the more bleak, depressing look of the original.
Anarchic Fox on 6/2/2024 at 00:16
Demon's Souls is also the only Souls game where Miyazaki designed all the levels. The story goes that he had designed some of them before even getting his initial job at From Software! So for level design at least, Demon's Souls is his purest vision.
After my usual manic bouncing among a dozen games, I've settled on three. The first, Jupiter Hell, is consummately balanced. It's a classical roguelike (so, turn-and tile-based with no meta-progression) with a focus on ranged combat. As I recall, Kornel made the excellent DoomRL in response to assertions that roguelikes could not do ranged combat well. After DoomRL went through many versions, he rightly decided he'd like to make money from his game design, and made Jupiter Hell. I tried the release version a couple years ago, which felt incomplete, but eight major versions later it feels complete. Its difficulties are so well tuned that, even when you can reliably beat one difficulty level, you'll still have difficulty making it out of the first area on the difficulty next higher. I may make a thread about this if it continues to hold my attention.
Loop Hero, on the other hand... is not so well-balanced. It's a deck-building game where you lay down buildings and terrain while your character loops on a fixed road and accrues levels and treasure based on your tile placement, attempting to grow strong enough to handle the boss. Runs either die early or reach a state where they can continue indefinitely... so of course the game institutes a resource cap on each run, forcing you to start again. Meanwhile, the improvements you gain from the base-building layer are miniscule. The core idea is compelling enough for me to keep playing, but I won't be sad when my attention wanders.
Opposite to Loop Hero, there's Gunfire Reborn, a furry roguelite FPS I picked up to play with a friend. (Ah, such a golden age we live in, where all genres are adjectives rather than nouns.) You choose at each step between three upgrades, typically two or three minor ones and one major one per stage. Its balancing is gonzo, the opposite of Loop Hero's stinginess. It is entirely willing to let you create a broken character: my first victory one-shotted the final form of the final boss. Its gunplay, animations and UX are solid, with its graphics aimed at the PS2 level, not a target you usually see. The components of its levels are all hand-designed, which I consider a must for FPS games. Its biggest downside is lack of stage variety; it wants to be a long-term game, but doesn't have enough variety to do so.
It also lets you play as a foxgirl obsessed with fire, which this female vulpine plasma physicist appreciates.
Sulphur on 6/2/2024 at 04:22
Quote Posted by Aja
True! It felt like something initially. It's a bit of a rug-pull though, and there's no reason why they couldn't have made the evil path the easier one, only now you have to be able to live with what you've done. I think what bothered me more was just the concept of the little sisters in general. Levine at one point said that they were originally designed as slugs, which makes more sense in an underwater world but is less marketable, so okay, they juiced it up, made it controversial, but they didn't fully commit to the bit, and for me the end result feels goofy. Like, I'm embarrassed to play this game when my wife is around. "I'm ready for dream time, Mr. Bubbles!"
It certainly is fairly random that it had to be little girls, at least from the perspective of someone playing it. I imagine as designers they went, 'so what's going to be the quickest, most visceral way to make people feel emotionally conflicted about this resourcing choice? Aha, children!' And yeah, the design and execution is pretty kitsch. I know I didn't really care, but the idea of being responsible for something that icky made me baulk, even if it's a video game... so they won out, in the end.
I really liked the Infinite DLC, by the way, even though its smaller scope magnified the flaws in Levine's hyper-focused and narrow design-narrative philosophy.
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Being the silly person I am, I bought this game on PC and PS5, and I realized I can stream to Steam Deck from the Playstation using remote play. Apart from a tiny bit of lag and macroblocking, it feels way better to play it that way, at 60 FPS, versus native, where it stutters even on low settings. So I'm giving a solid go! I think it's starting to click, too. It does feel a little Skinner Boxy I guess, but it's also obvious they've put a lot of effort into story and worldbuilding, so I'm going to try to pay closer attention.
That's pretty smart. The PC port for HZD was no great shakes, but they fixed it eventually, though the Linux layer you'd have to force it through is probably still not doing it any favours. The PS5 version's pretty great, bested only if you have superior PC hardware.
Tomi on 7/2/2024 at 16:14
I think I'm giving up on Wolfenstein: Newblood. Seems like I'm mostly visiting the same few maps and killing the same nazis over and over again, which is fine for a multiplayer game I guess, but it's not particularly interesting when you're playing solo. The gameplay is alright, even though I dislike the bullet-sponge enemies. I doubt that I'll get back to this game.
In the meantime I played and already finished The Last Case of Benedict Fox on the Xbox. I've come to realise that metroidvanias may be my favourite genre nowadays, even though something about the word "metroidvania" irritates me. :D So, The Last Case of Benedict Fox is a metroidvania with strong Cthulhu/Lovecraftian vibes and a pretty cool Burtonesque art style. The first couple of hours in the game are the best, when everything feels so weird and exciting, and you've got lots of places to explore and mysteries to solve. Then you'll get used to all the weirdness and the mysteries don't feel that mysterious anymore. Luckily it's a fairly short game, so it's over before the boredom kicks in. Gotta say that there are some rather satisfying puzzles to solve though. The action gameplay is barely mediocre and doesn't always feel very smooth. Most enemies in the game can be defeated with just mashing the X button even in normal difficulty. Still, it's a decent game and worth checking out if the genre and the theme are your thing.
Anarchic Fox on 7/2/2024 at 19:50
Quote Posted by Tomi
In the meantime I played and already finished
The Last Case of Benedict Fox on the Xbox.
Who is not, as a matter of fact, a fox. :(
I think metroidvanias are great too, but the genre is fruitful enough that I can't keep up with it. But it's nice that, when the mood for a metroidvania arises, I can always find a good one either untouched in my library or on sale.
Also, my opinion on nomenclature is that annoying people is a good thing. Nomenclature should be chaotic, because that chaos expresses the ability of art to defy systematization. Metroid
vania. :)
WingedKagouti on 7/2/2024 at 19:53
Tekken 8. It's Tekken, if you liked any of the previous Tekken games you'll probably like 8. The new player help this time around is Special Style which gives access to a limited moveset (including a basic combo) specific to each character using simplified inputs. It's mostly useful for Story Mode and Character Stories (or just trying out a new character) though it can be used online, but good players will know how to punish the generally predictable moves.
Single player content (on top of vs CPU and practice):
Story mode - Roughly 5 hours worth, but it doesn't rush through things, nor does it waste time.
Character stories - Equivalent to Arcade mode in previous games with a CGI ending for each character.
Arcade Quest - Essentially an extended tutorial
Tekken Ball - Available against CPU, local players or online
Super Ghost Mode - Similar to Treasure Battle in 6 & 7, but using playstyle data from other players (who have agreed to share this data)
