nicked on 6/1/2024 at 15:32
Well whaddya know - changed to using a Switch Pro Controller instead of an XBox controller and now my hand is no longer cramping and seizing up. Having a lot of fun with Elden Ring, not got into a souls game like this since original Dark Souls.
henke on 6/1/2024 at 18:25
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Jesh and I played Youngblood in co-op. It's... all right. There's nothing about it that's particularly standout, and I'm including the story in that assessment. It's fun though, a decent enough romp to kill some time in, even if it gets heavily repetitive and in the end is sort of forgettable, and this is keeping in mind that co-op usually makes a dull game better. Pretty much would have left it halfway in single-player, I'd think.
Did you have much success playing stealthily? I often find that harder in co-op, even with folks who are into stealth games. There's this jittery energy added by playing with someone, making it harder to take it slow.
Dreamcore demo was a cool, unsettling experience btw.
henke on 7/1/2024 at 10:49
I've been playing my Xmas presents. I got El Paso, Elsewhere from Thirith and Shadows of Doubt from Malf. Thanks! :)
El Paso, Elsewhere
Just finished this last night. It plays like Max Payne but with mummies and werewolves and ghouls, the storytelling is poetic, the music is badass. It's all very cool. And too long, frankly. At 8 hours and 50 levels, both the gameplay and narrative outstays its welcome a bit. This is one of those games that could do with a Director's Cut or whatever to cut out the filler levels, get it down to ~35 levels and it'd be a better experience. Still an enjoyable journey tho.
Shadows of Doubt
I've only played 2 hours of the starting mission yet, haven't solved the case. It's a very impressive technical achievement, unprecedented freedom and openness. But it's also kinda... hmm... indifferent? With so much proc gen I don't feel like the game really cares much if I solve the case or not. And I don't care. All there's left to play for is for the joy of the gameplay, which there isn't much of. The game's still in EA, and it'll be interesting to see how it develops, but for now it's not really grabbing me.
Thirith on 7/1/2024 at 11:32
I suspect I'd react pretty much the same to Shadows of Doubt. In abstract terms, I like the potential of procedural generation, but in practical terms I don't enjoy it for games that aim at creating a coherent, interesting world. I can imagine a combination of proc gen and more authored (or at least curated) design working better, but on the whole proc gen worlds have felt disappointingly flat to me.
Meanwhile, I'm greatly enjoying The 7th Guest VR for its haunted house atmosphere and fun puzzles (they're unlikely to stump puzzle pros, but for me they're ideal), but I think I'll be done with it soon, as it's just turned midnight and the only unsolved room available to me is the attic. If the devs ever did a VR remake of the sequel, I'd definitely be there for that. I don't think I would play the game in non-VR, because in the end it's still a pretty standard puzzle book turned into a game, but the atmosphere and the sense of a real, coherent place are fantastic.
I'm also playing Cocoon, but while I'm enjoying it, I'm not loving it. The aesthetics of the game are great, I very much like the look and sound and feel of the world it creates, but so far I've not had any of those endorphin rushes that many of the reviews speak of. I'm a couple of hours in, and I've got three of the spheres, so perhaps I'm simply not far enough into the good bits - or perhaps I'm just not on the same frequency as the game. I don't regret buying and playing it, but I don't think it'll stay with me the way it obviously has with a couple of TTLGers.
WingedKagouti on 7/1/2024 at 11:52
Quote Posted by Thirith
I suspect I'd react pretty much the same to
Shadows of Doubt. In abstract terms, I like the potential of procedural generation, but in practical terms I don't enjoy it for games that aim at creating a coherent, interesting world. I can imagine a combination of proc gen and more authored (or at least curated) design working better, but on the whole proc gen worlds have felt disappointingly flat to me.
In my experience procedural generation works best when there's some sort of instanced loop, where the moment to moment gameplay is the focus and the proc gen is there to provide variety. And you need some sort of curation in how the procedural generation works, even if it's just "Don't place the boss in the entrance room on level 1". Without any type of curation you can easily get unsolveable instances. Some games lean much more on curation, like Torchlight which uses pregenerated rooms that are linked together with exits lining up. The disadvantage of this type of curation is the risk of shattering the illusion of random generation, once players start recognizing tiles and layout structutes, what was supposed to be constantly fresh may become as stale as if it was fixed layouts for everything.
Sulphur on 7/1/2024 at 13:43
Quote Posted by henke
Did you have much success playing stealthily? I often find that harder in co-op, even with folks who are into stealth games. There's this jittery energy added by playing with someone, making it harder to take it slow.
Well, I usually play stealthy when I'm in an isolated space. When I'm playing with other people... well, imma quote Jesh's answer to your question: 'Even disregarding [everything henke said], playing stealth with Sulphur is not a recipe for success.'
And there you have it!
PigLick on 7/1/2024 at 14:13
remember how we did a secret santa thing, once upon ago?
that was cool, but I think it wouldn't work these days as the community isn't as close knit as it once was.
Yakoob on 7/1/2024 at 20:24
I finally started playing Cyberpunk 2077. Firstly, the graphics are fantastic and the world feels lush and full of detail. I heard complaints how the game feels dead and fake but I don't see it. I think it's executed really well, even if it is a veneer. Nothing particularly exciting happened yet 4hrs in, but I appreciate the detail in interactions, meeting Jessie for lunch, sitting down on a couch to have a conversation, etc. Good job with the storytelling even if the story isn't anything special just yet.
That being said, I find combat really cumbersome so far. Mostly because I can't tell where the enemies are or what they're doing. The high level of clutter just makes it hard to tell what is a security camera, what is an enemy, what is a something else entirely. I'm constantly relying on my cyber scanner to make sense of the environment. And are my settings fucked or is it dark as hell? I just finished the mission to get the flathead with a shootout in dark warehouses and I just couldn't even tell where the enemies were without the little red triangles. Wtf?
Then on the drive back I got randomly attacked by another car and the vehicle combat felt cumboersome as hell. The tutorial prompt said the game auto-targets by default but I still had a reticle so I felt I had to aim? Do I aim at the dudes inside, or the car itself? I ended up driving forward and back in a straight line because it feels impossible to aim and drive at the same time. Then I got out and bunch of people sprinted after me including some super quick ninja dude I barely blasted with a shotgun before running out of health.
It felt kind of realistic and intense, but not in a good way...
demagogue on 7/1/2024 at 21:00
I was playing up both Shadows of Doubt and Cocoon earlier, but I'll admit the gameplay in SoD is still in disarray, and Cocoon has some cool puzzles, and they do get into really cool territory towards the endgame, but it doesn't have any of the magic that Inside had.
I played a good amount of Cyberpunk 2077 over the break as well. I'm not sure where I stand on it just yet. I think it doesn't stand well in its own field... It can't stand with GTAV on the open world side. It doesn't stand with Control as an semi-open form shooter. It doesn't stand with Pray on the RPG side. It's still pretty unique with the extended urban cyberpunk setting and characters, which I appreciate, although it's not all that extended. I like it; I wouldn't say I'm alienated from it like I worried I might be. It still functions as a working open world mission based shooter. There is something kind of clunky and forced about it, but I'm still playing it. I don't want to give too definitive of an opinion before I've gotten far into the game though.
------
I also just finished off This Bed We Made, which I really liked. I'd lump it into the field of a walking sim in the guise of an investigation game, where the investigation isn't as important or well baked as the slice of life that the procedures of the investigation walk you through. In that respect, it's like Fire Watch or True Detective season 1, which I think both had the same profile, great slice of life, anti-climactic investigation, or anyway the investigation was in service of the slice of life.
I don't know if it quite reached the high points of either of those, but the world it was bringing to life was maybe the best realized. As a slice of life game it's fantastic in putting you into the world of the 1950s, the setting, the characters, the social dynamics, etc. And the pitch, being a maid in a hotel that likes to browse through people's stuff, is such a good hook to explore the hidden nooks and crannies of that time and place. In that way, the investigation gives you a direction to go that worked, although it started to get overburdened with too many strands going in too many directions as it went on.
It could also be labeled an "agenda" game. I'm on board with the agenda and all, but I did think, just in design terms, it undermined the investigation and gameplay side of it, since I think it was orchestrating actions and evidence more in service of the point it was making than authentic human motivations and action, which made searching for evidence seem sometimes more like I was going through motions to unlock the story than how I'd logically approach a situation like that in real life. My basic philosophy is agendas are things where it's good that characters in a world have & push them them, to give color and dynamics to the game world, but it's better if the agenda isn't baked into the world itself. I still have my imm-sim bias that I like when the world doesn't care about the player or us petty humans and our need for events to make sense as a story, but that's for another post.
My basic point is that This Bed We Made is still worth playing as a slice of life game, and you should appreciate it if you go into it looking for that. I think Fire Watch is the bellwether; if you liked or didn't like that, that's a really good indication if you'll like or not like this.
Sulphur on 8/1/2024 at 01:59
Quote Posted by demagogue
I was playing up both
Shadows of Doubt and
Cocoon earlier, but I'll admit the gameplay in SoD is still in disarray, and Cocoon has some cool puzzles, and they do get into really cool territory towards the endgame, but it doesn't have any of the magic that Inside had.
Cocoon is going to live or die by how much its puzzles tickle your brain, along with its aesthetic. While it's from a former Playdead designer, it has nothing to do with Inside's bleak environmental storytelling (or Limbo for that matter), and what story there is is about as papery thin as a moth wing. I think the aesthetic and the extremely tight puzzle design combine to make it something akin to a game designer's game, a sort of pure and streamlined platonic ideal with no fluff, just constant progress - but that also means it loses out in terms of relatable personality and any sort of emotional anchor. I'll admit that for such a chill game, I was hoping there would be more in the realm of negative space, where you could just soak up the atmosphere and get a bit of world detailing in between puzzles. No such luck, but I wouldn't ding it too hard for that, personally, as its joys were worth the journey. And gosh, it's so
tactile - it's palpable stuff, your brain's more often than not going 'this feels
right' in the background, and that's a rare thing for a game's art design to accomplish.
As for Shadows of Doubt, I doubt (oh ho) that it's going to get what we'd call an interesting narrative or a consistently deep world, because its procgen nature means you're going to get templatised responses and over-arching mission design informed by its morass of interlocking systems, and you're basically a scalpel cutting through all of those to get to your goal. As far as I can tell, it's the gameplay that's going to make or break it. Either the design and the process of cracking a case gives it all the magic it's going to get, or it falls down on how much it errs on easy/obtuse for each element.