Realistic looking games are often derided for only putting focus on realism, but Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater shows how much those games actually invest in visual design - whether it's Naughty Dog, Quantic Dream, or even Ubisoft - because it has pretty much none. I'm not even really a fan of the look of the original MGS3, but there's certainly a mood and a style there, unlike the "remake".
It seems like a big YMMV to me. I have my high respects to the original and prefer its look, but the remake ain't bad looking. I would still take this game over any crappy Quantic Dream game or TLOUS2. Looks or not.
I think i'm about done with Samurai Warriors 5 for now.
I managed to beat Battletoads & Double Dragon (NES) without cheat codes this time. I still use save states, but I don't care.
Grabbed Air Twister since it was on pretty good sale on steam and I wanted something to tide me over till Silksong, even though I have way too many games on my log. Its a fucken trip man, the music is nuts and awesome, graphics are nice and well done... and nuts, gameplay is a rear view shootemup like Space Harrier but more nuts. It does also have this big meta progression thing with new outfits and weapons and hair and a big skill/stat tree thing. I've only done the initial run so far but its pretty awesome. Not the best shootemup I've played but certainly one of the most nuts and coolest.
Tried for about fifteen minutes to get an upgrade crystal that was very high above the water. Finally I did it by making Ecco forward-flip while up in the air, which caused his tail to hit it. It looked so good.
Not sure yet but it feels big cause I’m like 15 hours in and the main conflict barely just kicked in. It feels like a story where you go from humble beginnings into ruling the continent so I’m still very much humble. I’d say 60 hours minimum, going up to the100 wouldn’t surprise me.
To add to the topic... I'm playing Lies of P and although it adds a lot of quality of life improvements over other Souls games, I wonder why developers of these games keep putting "boss runs" in the games.
On defeat by a boss, just give the player the option to restart the fight instantly, stop wasting our time by having us run back to the boss arena.
So like a regular action game. Who would have thought? This is one of the main reasons why I don't bother with Souls games. Not worth that type of frustration.
I'd post this in Hot Takes, but the conversation's here:
Dying at a boss meaning you don't start again immediately back at the boss, and have to redo a bit of the game leading up to them, isn't a new thing that Souls invented. Plenty of games of the 3rd to 6th generations did it that way, and nobody complained about them doing it then. Hell, I can hardly think of any who complain about them doing it now. But if it's bad design for a new game to do it, it should be bad design for an old game to do it too.
And if you really can't stand boss runbacks, Elden Ring has you covered; pretty much every boss that isn't right next to a bonfire has a Stake of Marika outside it that you can respawn at, so there's that.
Think FTL but you have a fleet, its actually pretty darn cool as you have to constantly watch your fuel when moving from point to point and you have a bunch of different ships in your fleet.
Unfortunately, the combat is pretty bad, first you can only use one ship at a time (but not the enemy, they use all their ship at once) and second its a strange system where your ship are essentially flying turret that move very slowly. Weapon aren't particularly interesting and the it really is just about aiming machine gun to other slow moving turret.
Wish a game like that existed but with some sort of tactics battle system or something...
It's not about gatekeeping, it's that having consequences for failure makes the game more interesting, and success more thrilling.
Let's imagine two scenarios on opposite ends of the spectrum. In the first, when your health runs out you instantly pop back to life and get to continue the fight where it left off. The players time is not wasted at all, but victory will feel meaningless as losing has no consequence. The player is not likely to feel much stress during the fight.
In the second, when you die you need to replay the entire game. Hours of the players time may be wasted in each attempt, but victory will feel momentous due to the huge consequences involved. Stress during the fight will be high knowing how much failure will set them back.
Obviously, there is a sliding scale between these two examples, and restarting the fight immediately at a boss and with a runback are not at extreme points to each other.
To some. To most others it's glorified gatekeeping. I'm always for a challenge every now and then.But I don't do stupid, strict diet lines, nor go on my way to mock people for wanting an easier game or quality life improvements with checkpoints.
The people who go on about this are usually the same who had a problem, when multiple checkpoints became a thing in seven generation games. Even though some or plenty of sixth generation games were already doing this. Yet those same people didn't complain during that generation. Why start now? Don't answer that; rhetorical question.
To some. To most others it's glorified gatekeeping. I'm always for a challenge every now and then.But I don't do stupid, strict diet lines, nor go on my way to mock people for wanting an easier game or quality life improvements with checkpoints.
The people who go on about this are usually the same who had a problem, when multiple checkpoints became a thing in seven generation games. Even though some or plenty of sixth generation games were already doing this. Yet those same people didn't complain during that generation. Why start now? Don't answer that; rhetorical question.
Man, part of the reason that Demon's Souls caught on in the first place was that it was challenging in a way that a lot of other games just weren't doing at the time. Like, if you don't remember watch the start of Yahtzee's ZP of the game.
Like, that sort of challenge was exactly what some players wanted. Of course they don't want things to slide away from their preference.
Blah, blah, I know. I was there, and I don't care. Before all of that, it was Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden (Xbox), Shinobi (PS2), Urban Reign, God Hand, and Viewtiful Joe. Before all of those it was anything Nintendo Hard, Sega Hard, Ninja Gaiden (NES Trilogy), Revenge of Shinobi, Shinobi III, Comix Zone, Donkey Kong Country, Batteltoads, etc. I was there all of those too.
Lies of P pretty much proved you don't have to copy Souls verbatim, and there is nothing wrong with having boss fight or mid-boss fight checkpoints. Nobody bitched when Bayonetta did back in 2009/2010, and nobody complains about it now. If anybody else has problem with it, how most non-Souls action games do it, then can fuck off to the moon for all I care.
Lost Soul Aside is installed and will be playing a few minutes.
I want to collection footage of Uncharted to make a point about the decline of platforming mechanics in a re-edit of my Batman critique. I realized that there's much more I wanted to say about the game and modern gaming in general. But I can't record my voice because I no longer have the privacy for it.
The script for that section:
Also largely automated is the environmental traversal. You hold the run button and Batman automatically jumps gaps, climbs onto higher platforms and mantles over obstacles. They probably put this in Arkham Asylum because people were so impressed by the Bourne Identity-inspired chases in Assassin's Creed two years before, three years if you go all the way back to the first gameplay demonstrations. So many games of that era simplified platforming or removed it altogether. [2][3] The new Lara Croft spent more of her time climbing along conspicuous linear ledges than jumping, and her jumps were now aided by gravitation. The action button that made her reach out and grab surfaces was removed so that it happened automatically. When you tried to run off a ledge, she stopped on her own or dropped down and grabbed it for you, depending on if it was one of the ledges that the developers WANTED you to interact with. It was all far less precise, more guided and stickier than in the early Tomb Raider games. As actions in games became more guided and more context-sensitive, our ability to freely move around, jump from place to place and grab things diminished. Surfaces or platforms became so detailed that it was too complicated for the developers to work out all the collisions and animations, while the players had a harder time determining what was interactive in all the visual noise of this new photorealism. Uncharted color-coded what could be leapt to and grabbed so that the player did not jump at all the objects and surfaces that could only be looked at. The climbing in Uncharted is obviously too linear and simplistic to be engaging, and with how often the characters are on the walls, hopping from grab point to grab point, they look almost more like monkeys than people, which I suppose is all that's left for these adventurers with the demise of proper jump mechanics.
Most story-driven games with jumping and climbing now follow these examples, and the more serious and cinematic a game is, the more the player is assisted. Few of us would be happy if Super Mario automatically jumped at the end of a platform and the game took care of the distance or trajectory to the next platform, yet we have to accept it in all these other games. Are the developers so afraid that failing the jump might hurt their cinematic presentation? The risk of failure makes success more satisfying.
You can't make a Batman game without a jump button, because of who he is and what he does. They easily could have put a dedicated jump in there by letting the player run without holding that button on the face of the controller. If the tilt of the analog stick covered the whole range of movement [5]. While jumping, the player could have kicked by pressing the attack button [6]. The Batman game of my dreams would have also let them slam down with the special attack (the top face button) and dive into a roll by tapping the crouch button (the right face button) during the jump.
So I downloaded and installed Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection again, with the intention of getting to some cliffs or walls with Nathan Drake. But before that, I decided to finish the Lost Legacy game that I dropped in the last arena before the train sequence in May of last year.
I feel dirty. I am so embarrassed. To think that I said before that this one manages to be good out of Naughty Dog's newer games. It's all so god damn cringey, and about that train sequence that I once found exciting -- My god, how could have said that? But what's the point of a cinematic setpiece like that if all the animations, how the characters connect between the pieces of the setpiece, look terrible. Like, Chloe Frasier swings with her rope for me but then the arc of her jump is completely redirected. She jumps onto a moving truck from the train and again her arc is redirected in a way that looks so strange. Dozens of trucks and motorcycles follow you as you chase the train and they all topple or explode at the slightest tap from your truck.
It's all feels so fake/staged.
That I couldn't crouch for cover, that the camera was so cramped while aiming the gun and that the sneaking is so brainless really bothered me too, but that always bothered me about Uncharted. Just a mediocre combat system with annoying pauses as you wait for the screen to stop being drained of color and red at the corners. Also, Nadine was in my way a few times, because we gotta have the frequent walking and talking in all these kinds of games now.
Still want footage of Nate climbing around, but I didn't even start Uncharted 4. I didn't want to before and now I really don't want to play it again. Whatever. Makes more sense to use Uncharted 1/2 footage, and the PS4 that's been in the storage unit for 14 months probably still works and I still have my finished save files.
I didn't mean the Disney version, I meant an original version that uses ideas from the fairy tale to go in its own direction. Still a love story and perhaps a tragedy about a red-haired Ariel who gives up her voice for a human. Nude like in the fairy tale, because the ability to turn human when going onto land and then mermaid again when in the water for a little while that I want in the game would not work that well with clothes. But clothes (and substitutes for clothes) would stay where you left them, at least for a while. Obviously can't have that with Disney's version. Would want a bunch of small islands, mostly desolate, and one mainland. Dangers would be the marine life, storms, fishermen and mythical monsters. Underwater levels as vast as Ecco's, or vaster. Maybe even "dungeons" of sorts. I'm most interested in discovering.
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