Jason Moyer on 6/11/2020 at 05:46
Having posted in a bit. I played a bunch of Eldritch, but in the end, like all the other Minor Key games, it's a game that I should love in theory but don't actually find fleshed out enough to be enjoyable. In the case of Neon Struct it was close enough to what I wish Arkane would do (a Thief-like game in a Deus Ex-like universe) that I was able to power through it despite it lacking a lot of the things that make Thief 1/2 great. In the case of Eldritch, the way difficulty spikes and how it bucks the usual roguelike tradition of giving you some benefits when you die and start over, means that you spend hours boringly gathering supplies in the early worlds and then just take it in the face from some ungodly horror anyway. The lore is fun, the gameplay is great, but the roguelike aspect is severely lacking and the reason I won't finish it.
I gave my replay of FEAR2 a shot until I finished the school level. In retrospect, I'm not sure how this wasn't a massively disappointing game for me when it came out. It's not terrible, but it feels like every other shooter of its time. It's like a latter-day Ravensoft game (Wolf09 or Singularity) where the gameplay is fairly generic for a late 2000's console shooter except there's a gimmick. The horror stuff has lost all subtlety (although it's fun realizing why Alma is "attacking" you periodically, knowing how things end) and give me a headache with all of the nasty vaseline-smeared post processing and the shooting stuff is just completely boring and generic. Dudes spawn, dudes rush you, dudes get shot. The shooting in the first game is still SO GOOD that it's baffling why they changed that aspect of the sequel. Anyway...
Right now my replay list is Borderlands GotY and Skyrim whatever-they-called-the-HD-remaster which I have only played in their original forms, so we'll see how that goes. The current game I'm playing for the first time is Signal From Tolva, which is...surprisingly awesome! When I look at indie ImSims, there's Minor Key who makes games that I should theoretically like based on their similarities to my favorite ImSims, and then Big Robot who make games that resemble the type of open world shit I typically hate. And yet both Big Robot games I've played were really really good (this and Sir, YABH).
So the deal in Signal From Tolva is that you're a robot in a ship orbiting this planet, and you can take control of Surveyor faction robots to explore/fight on the planet's surface. Respawning is handled in-fiction by clicking on a beacon or hangar and taking control of a different drone who then has access to all of the weaponry/armor/etc that you've earned thusfar. The gameplay sounds like it should be terrible, but really really works for me. Essentially it's a walking simulator with horror/atmosphere/resource elements similar to the good STALKER games (SoC and CoP), where you're going around exploring this alien planet and gathering resources, wandering through ancient structures, gathering data on what the hell is going on. Then, in addition to this, there is an aspect of the bad STALKER game (CS) where there are factions of robots on the planet that fight over hangars (i.e. bases), largely independent of what the player is doing. Your droid carries a pistol and the choice of two other firearms, one of which can be a gun that basically commands friendly Surveyor faction droids. Periodically while wandering the planet you'll find patrols of the various factions, friendly or hostile, and engage in battles with them to access new hangars/spawn points in different areas of the map. I dunno where it's leading, but so far it's pulling me into its world and story.
Malleus on 6/11/2020 at 15:44
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
It's also rather strange to be playing a game set in WW2 where they only use the word "Nazi" once. They insistently call them "fascists" throughout the game. A lot of the enemies are collaborators rather than actual Nazis, but that excuse starts to fall down once you're fighting Wehrmacht and SS troops.
I guess they wanted to avoid using the word (and, of course, the flag) for fear of censorship in Germany.
It's a Russian thing. They just don't and didn't call them nazis. For them they were fascists, during the war, and often these days too. Like if you play the Metro games, the far-right station people are called nazis in the English version, but fascists in the Russian one.
Relevant find: (
https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/20874/why-are-german-soldiers-of-wwii-commonly-referred-to-in-the-russian-language-as)
Pyrian on 6/11/2020 at 17:44
F.E.A.R. 2 really was a rather dull game enlivened by its unusual ending.
froghawk on 6/11/2020 at 21:40
Doom Eternal is growing on me a little, but boy does it give me bad Game Transfer Phenomena. I guess it's the speed/ color/ focus of the game, but every time I play it I've gotten hypnagogic visuals later - the game keeps going when I close my eyes to go to sleep. It's a hair disconcerting.
henke on 7/11/2020 at 00:11
Elon Musk was saying on twitter the other day that FEAR 2 was better than the original and everyone was like "shut up dumbass". :laff:
And yeah, The Signal From Tölva sure was... ok. Very, very.... just ok.
Right now, I can't sleep. So I'm gonna play a bit of my current I-can't-sleep game, Where The Water Flows Like Wine. It's a game where you're a skeleton walking around the USA during the great depression, collecting stories and telling them to folks you meet. It's mellow and nice.
Jason Moyer on 7/11/2020 at 05:26
There really needs to be a subgenre for those late 00's shooters that all have a similar look and feel like Wolfenstein, Singularity, FEAR 2, etc. Gimmick shooters or something. Scripted shooters from the "let's go nuts with bloom/HDR and shaders" era that all have some gimmick in the gameplay like the medallion in Wolf, the time stuff in Singularity, and the slo-mo in FEAR 2 where the combat basically consists of enemies spawning in and running straight at you with hitscan weapons. They're like someone took the Monolith/Raven shooters from 2000-2005 and turned them into Modern Warfare influenced console shooters.
Thirith on 8/11/2020 at 11:15
While I am getting into SOMA better than I feared at first, I wish it weren't so goddamn clunky. The small ways in which it tries to make interactions more physical is neither done particularly well nor coherently, so some of the time I miss interactions because they're oddly integrated (it took me a while to understand that in order to get the tram to move I had to use not the controls but the chair). And there doesn't seem to be much gameplay benefit so far. It's a constant low-key frustration that there are many objects I can grab and move, but none of them seem to matter and the game doesn't highlight particularly well when an object is something actually useful.
Neb on 8/11/2020 at 13:43
That was kind of similar to my criticism. It's less of a physical game than Penumbra or Amnesia, but it was well worth it for the story and general experience. I also appreciated how it didn't feel the need to be 'Lovecraftian'.
Harvester on 8/11/2020 at 19:52
I finished Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy yesterday. After playing Jedi Outcast a few years ago this was still on my list. I had fun with this game, though it's far from perfect. The later lightsaber fights and boss fights I could only get through by save scumming. The writing and dialogue are not that great, I mean why is she (I played as a female Jedi) friends with that insufferable douchebag Rosh again? It's got the original John Williams music but there's very little of it, only a few themes you hear all the time, which gets repetetive. Level design is pretty good with some mild puzzle elements that are fun and not too tough. Thankfully it doesn't have a poorly executed stealth level like Jedi Outcast had. During difficult fights I appreciated the Jedi sense ability which shows the health of the enemies, so I can at least see whether I'm actually doing some damage. The final boss fight (two stages) was easier than some of the fights before it, but I don't really enjoy boss fights so that was fine with me. All in all a fine experience, though not particularly memorable.
Just started Mirror's Edge now (the original, not Catalyst). I like the aesthetic and setting. But I wonder if I have the reflexes required for this game, during the training missions I had some difficulty with some of the exercises. We'll see. There was some screen tearing until I disabled PhysX (I have an AMD card), otherwise it runs fine on 1920x1080 highest detail.
Pyrian on 8/11/2020 at 20:17
Mirror's Edge training is pretty dang hard. ...The game is harder. It does not eff around. And unlike more modern games, virtually all the mechanics are in play from the get-go, there's very little on-ramp. Sometimes just figuring out what to do is a pain. I literally could not beat some of the levels until watching playthroughs of much more skilled people.
...I love it so much! :cheeky: