What are you currently playing?
- Thread starter Nick Calandra
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Started EA Sports PGA Tour: Road To The Masters today, and I must say, I'm a pretty disappointed. Firstly, I'm rusty; haven't played a golf game in nearly a decade, so there's going to be a period of adjustment. But mostly I'm disappointed at how soulless the game is.
Back in the 2000s, when the game was branded under Tiger Woods, the game was fun! You could make goofy looking characters, give them whacky swings, etc. In the early 2010s, some of that stuff fell off as they veered more towards realism, but the level of customization was top notch; they used to have a feature that used your Kinect camera to scan your face so your created golfer looked EXACTLY like you, and they had an extensive category of accessories and equipment so you could deck your self out in whatever swag suited your fancy.
Then in 2015, EA said "y'know all that cool and fun stuff that has made our golf game appealing all these years? Yeah, fuck ALL of that. Sack Tiger Woods, bring in some Irish guy with an extremely punchable face to take his place, take the barebones of our product, bleach them in the sun, and call it a day; $60 full retail. Done." 2015's game had basically nothing to it. They stepped back literally generations in terms of capability; I could do more on an OG Xbox than I could on the Xbox One.
So I took a decade off, and came back. New generation, 10 years to learn, aaaaand... we've got about 24 preset heads to choose from now, and oh, and fucking LOOT BOXES!! These consoles have the power to put a satellite into space, yet I'm relegated to pick one of four "black guys" to be "me," and the swag is tucked away in loot boxes. Great, I'm gonna be Black Guy #3 in a white polo and khakis for my entire career.
Back in the 2000s, when the game was branded under Tiger Woods, the game was fun! You could make goofy looking characters, give them whacky swings, etc. In the early 2010s, some of that stuff fell off as they veered more towards realism, but the level of customization was top notch; they used to have a feature that used your Kinect camera to scan your face so your created golfer looked EXACTLY like you, and they had an extensive category of accessories and equipment so you could deck your self out in whatever swag suited your fancy.
Then in 2015, EA said "y'know all that cool and fun stuff that has made our golf game appealing all these years? Yeah, fuck ALL of that. Sack Tiger Woods, bring in some Irish guy with an extremely punchable face to take his place, take the barebones of our product, bleach them in the sun, and call it a day; $60 full retail. Done." 2015's game had basically nothing to it. They stepped back literally generations in terms of capability; I could do more on an OG Xbox than I could on the Xbox One.
So I took a decade off, and came back. New generation, 10 years to learn, aaaaand... we've got about 24 preset heads to choose from now, and oh, and fucking LOOT BOXES!! These consoles have the power to put a satellite into space, yet I'm relegated to pick one of four "black guys" to be "me," and the swag is tucked away in loot boxes. Great, I'm gonna be Black Guy #3 in a white polo and khakis for my entire career.
Wait, really? That is one of those features that I would assume that if someone perfected it they would immediately port it to every game that had any degree of customization.
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Yeah, it was called "EA Game Face;" it was really cool. As far as I know, EA was the only one doing anything like it. Once your face was scanned, it was uploaded to EA's servers, and you could download your face into several of their sports titles that allowed for character customization. I don't know why it didn't catch on beyond a couple of years. Maybe because it required Kinect and whatever the PS3 equivalent was, and those peripherals were hanging on by a tenuous thread (that eventually snapped.) Still, it was pretty amazing how spot on we were able to make "ourselves." I found a quick screenshot of someone side-by-side with their Game Face avatar:
I finally got Super Mario WONDEEEEEERRRRRRRRRR!!!! I got it used and then added some store credit for a cheaper price. Loving it, and so much better than all of the New Super Mario games.
FInished Omega Strike. It's only about 5-6 hours but I was kinda bored with it halfway through. The game is simply too easy and too repetitive. I ended up rushing through the second half while half-assing every challenge and still I never died once and beat every boss first try. At one point it became something to merely complete.
To be fair there's nothing awful about it - I think it looks nice, has a sense of humor about itself and has tighter, more intuitive controls than much better games - but it doesn't have the meat and potatoes that makes a game engaging, like constant refreshment or a challenge/reward loop.
Having said that I'm sorry to see the game's been delisted from the PS Store since I bought it, while there's apparently always ample room for shovelware. So Omega Strike bungles a lot of what makes a game compelling, there's still a lot of passion and talent that clearly went into it. And from a solo dev too.
To be fair there's nothing awful about it - I think it looks nice, has a sense of humor about itself and has tighter, more intuitive controls than much better games - but it doesn't have the meat and potatoes that makes a game engaging, like constant refreshment or a challenge/reward loop.
Having said that I'm sorry to see the game's been delisted from the PS Store since I bought it, while there's apparently always ample room for shovelware. So Omega Strike bungles a lot of what makes a game compelling, there's still a lot of passion and talent that clearly went into it. And from a solo dev too.
Street Alpha Anthology - I picked this up earlier this week and been playing Alpha 2 Gold and 3 back-to-back. Dramatic Battle in Alpha 3 is so much better and the best out of all of them. You and your partner no longer share the same health meter, unlike Alpha and Alpha 2. It explains why I love the mode so much back on the PS1 version.
Started a roguelite survival game called The Flame in the Flood - which coincidentally has also been delisted from the PlayStation Store since I bought it on sale a couple of years ago. Between this and Omega Strike and Headlander now I'm wondering how many indies have I missed out on forever just because I wasn't looking or they never went on sale.
The game's calling card is that it was made by a group of people who worked on BioShock. And if if you're desperate to draw a connection I guess both have something to me do with parodying Americana in a post-apocalyptic setting. The game has you floating down a river in the backwaters of a decayed and/or deranged USA ala Huckleberry Finn, eking a living out of looting and crafting while tending to the Four Horsemen of survival games (hunger, thirst, warmth, exhaustion) and contending with like a hundred different status effects (what the hell is "listeria"?).
You spend your time between navigating rapids while avoiding damage and docking wherever you can to hunt for resources and do repairs. Either I'm very lucky or the game's very good at stringing you along with just enough to make it through the day. But of course you'll spend most of your time starving and eating stuff that would be put to better use if you had enough resources to craft the thing instead of eating it for like +2 nourishment.
So it's fun enough for now. Roguelikes have this honeymoon period where you figure out just how complex the game is, how everything works, and how the hell do you make ends meet with a shitty hand. But as soon as you figure out a system (or give up because some of these learning curves are brutal) then it kinda doesn't matter whether you reach the end of the campaign or not.
The game's calling card is that it was made by a group of people who worked on BioShock. And if if you're desperate to draw a connection I guess both have something to me do with parodying Americana in a post-apocalyptic setting. The game has you floating down a river in the backwaters of a decayed and/or deranged USA ala Huckleberry Finn, eking a living out of looting and crafting while tending to the Four Horsemen of survival games (hunger, thirst, warmth, exhaustion) and contending with like a hundred different status effects (what the hell is "listeria"?).
You spend your time between navigating rapids while avoiding damage and docking wherever you can to hunt for resources and do repairs. Either I'm very lucky or the game's very good at stringing you along with just enough to make it through the day. But of course you'll spend most of your time starving and eating stuff that would be put to better use if you had enough resources to craft the thing instead of eating it for like +2 nourishment.
So it's fun enough for now. Roguelikes have this honeymoon period where you figure out just how complex the game is, how everything works, and how the hell do you make ends meet with a shitty hand. But as soon as you figure out a system (or give up because some of these learning curves are brutal) then it kinda doesn't matter whether you reach the end of the campaign or not.
Give Double Dragon Gaiden a shot. It's one of the best rouglites I ever played. Free DLC update came out last month.
Made some more progress in MAFIA 2. The checkpointing doesn't seem to be as generous as it was in Mafia: Definitive edition or maybe I'm just dying more on certain missions then Mafia: Definitive edition so I'm noticing it because there's a couple bits where it feels like I have to redo large parts of a mission when I die.
Otherwise it feels like a slower burn then Mafia: DE. Tommy seemed to go from cab driver to trusted Caporegime(I think that's what he was meant to be in the Salieri family, though he got attend meetings ) pretty quickly, whereas I'm like 4+ hours in and Vito hasn't officially joined the mob yet. Rather he seems to be just doing contract jobs for the actual mobsters as a soldier, which does put a different spin on the whole thing for sure. It also seems like Tommy made out a lot better then Vito is, because Vito really doesn't seem to gain much from his life of crime. Rather, what little he gains over the early game from jobs just vanishes when he goes to prison. Maybe later Vito will live "The good life" but so far there doesn't seem to much reward for his efforts unlike a lot of other crime games.
There's also a bit where he's leaving his apartment and immediately gets arrested for a crime he pulled a few missions earlier and after a brief courtroom cutscene gets sent to federal prison on a 10 year sentence. The next chapter is about an hour of him being playable in prison, which is mostly him doing whatever the guards tell him to do and getting into fights. It drags on for what feels like forever which I guess is a pretty decent way of simulating being in prison for real in a videogame. It also reminded me of Conner getting thrown in Prison in Assassins Creed 3, though it works better here due to the crime genre, whereas AC3 just felt weirdly out of place for the game.
Also interesting the amount of casual racism the game depicts, which I guess is very accurate for the time period but most of the time that kind of thing is glossed over in media based in the 1940's and 1950's. During an early chapter you're told to go steal a nice car in a different part of the city. On the way there Joe starts going off about how awful the people are there and uses some pretty nasty archaic slurs, which probably won't be recognizable for a lot of people. Then you get there and realize it's a African American neighborhood and even when you steal the car, the police don't respond. The police apparently just do not fucking care that a white guy stole a black persons car in a black neighborhood and yeah...that sounds disturbingly accurate for the time and place.
Otherwise it feels like a slower burn then Mafia: DE. Tommy seemed to go from cab driver to trusted Caporegime(I think that's what he was meant to be in the Salieri family, though he got attend meetings ) pretty quickly, whereas I'm like 4+ hours in and Vito hasn't officially joined the mob yet. Rather he seems to be just doing contract jobs for the actual mobsters as a soldier, which does put a different spin on the whole thing for sure. It also seems like Tommy made out a lot better then Vito is, because Vito really doesn't seem to gain much from his life of crime. Rather, what little he gains over the early game from jobs just vanishes when he goes to prison. Maybe later Vito will live "The good life" but so far there doesn't seem to much reward for his efforts unlike a lot of other crime games.
There's also a bit where he's leaving his apartment and immediately gets arrested for a crime he pulled a few missions earlier and after a brief courtroom cutscene gets sent to federal prison on a 10 year sentence. The next chapter is about an hour of him being playable in prison, which is mostly him doing whatever the guards tell him to do and getting into fights. It drags on for what feels like forever which I guess is a pretty decent way of simulating being in prison for real in a videogame. It also reminded me of Conner getting thrown in Prison in Assassins Creed 3, though it works better here due to the crime genre, whereas AC3 just felt weirdly out of place for the game.
Also interesting the amount of casual racism the game depicts, which I guess is very accurate for the time period but most of the time that kind of thing is glossed over in media based in the 1940's and 1950's. During an early chapter you're told to go steal a nice car in a different part of the city. On the way there Joe starts going off about how awful the people are there and uses some pretty nasty archaic slurs, which probably won't be recognizable for a lot of people. Then you get there and realize it's a African American neighborhood and even when you steal the car, the police don't respond. The police apparently just do not fucking care that a white guy stole a black persons car in a black neighborhood and yeah...that sounds disturbingly accurate for the time and place.
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I don't believe there is or ever will be a game that can match the accuracy or realism of prison life that was depicted in the indie darling Hard Time by MDickie.
The irony is the follow up to this had some of the best examinations of racial injustices in gaming, but wisely puts the player on the receiving end. Shame the actual game part wasn’t able to cook a bit more to match its brilliant story. Funny I still enjoyed the combat part of it more than most GTA’s though.
More Elden Ring. Finally gave Maliketh the ol' college try, and for fuck's sake... I actually managed to get him down to half health and into his second phase a couple of times, but each time ended the same: his first combo just eviscerates me. Basically I'm getting one-shotted. It'd be nice if I could see what he's doing, but pretty much right after the phase transition cinematic, the screen turns black, bright red, and furry, then my health bar goes from full red to empty yellow in like two seconds.
- Apr 1, 2009
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- Apr 1, 2009
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Hes also one of the few that can beat the first form of Milania in boss VS boss combat.
I’ve seen that and it’s bs how little damage Malenia does to him vs the player lol. The same melee attacks for the player generally also take 2-3 times as much to clear her health bar even when she doesn’t heal.
Staying close to Beast/Maliketh or trying to roll behind is safer, and usually he won’t use his stronger AoE attacks in close melee range. Bloodhound’s Fang skill should help provide breathing room for dodging while attacking. Not needed though.
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Yeah, I've watched probably a half dozen "EASY Maliketh fight," or "how to cheese Maliketh" videos today, hoping I'd have some epiphany or something, but to no avail. I'll try again tomorrow; right now, I've got wounds to lick.
I tend to refer to Malekith as a sword wielding monkey on crack because that's what it feels like I'm fighting. I know he's a big wolf dude, shuddup. Yeah, he feels like one of the most difficult bosses in the game by far.
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