Oh I thought I recognized that narrator from somewhere. At first I thought it was Gina Torrest (Zoe from Firefly fame). Was watching an LP of it after you mentioned it. Looks really neat.
What are you currently playing?
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Believe it or not, QL was a last minute decision and kinda done on a dare. It's why she was not advertise on the game. They had to get her in the recording booth a week before the game launched.
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Yeah I saw a thumbnail talking about her being last minute addition, when I googled "queen latifah video game" xD
On it. Oh wait, no, don't need to, cuz I got it last year
. Good game to just chill and get lost into tho. Also, probably has my favorite arrangement of Claire de Lune. So dreamy and contemplative, with just a dash of melancholy.
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Started the Ancient Gods DLC for Doom Eternal.
Took me a second to remember how fast the game is, and to remember the weapon order to be able to quickly swap to each weapon (accidentally wasted a BFG shot right off the bat when I swapped to what I thought was the ballista), but after that initial 10 minutes of clumsiness I'm having a really fun time.
Took me a second to remember how fast the game is, and to remember the weapon order to be able to quickly swap to each weapon (accidentally wasted a BFG shot right off the bat when I swapped to what I thought was the ballista), but after that initial 10 minutes of clumsiness I'm having a really fun time.
Beat 13 Sentinels. Wow, was that game a trip or what. The game has so many twists you never know what's gonna happen. It reveals huge things all the way up to the very end. Also there's prolly the most gorgeous art I've seen in any game in that ending. Just breathtaking.
I still gotta do the postgame giant mech fights that unlock after you beat the game but I'm super happy to finally see the conclusion to the plot. Definitely game of the year contender. The only other thing that could shake it off is Trails of Cold Steel 4 that is actually coming out in 2 days! Wow, it's like they planned their releases with me in mind.
But yeah, 13 Sentinels as a turn based strategy game mixed with an adventure game with gorgeous vanillaware artwork will prolly win the most unique game award of the generation for me. At just over 50 hours it's pretty damn long too for a game focused on narrative for a good 70% of its runtime.
People into a good classic scifi plot with futurism and romance at the forefront and so many twists you're like Crash mashing square, should dive right in.
I still gotta do the postgame giant mech fights that unlock after you beat the game but I'm super happy to finally see the conclusion to the plot. Definitely game of the year contender. The only other thing that could shake it off is Trails of Cold Steel 4 that is actually coming out in 2 days! Wow, it's like they planned their releases with me in mind.
But yeah, 13 Sentinels as a turn based strategy game mixed with an adventure game with gorgeous vanillaware artwork will prolly win the most unique game award of the generation for me. At just over 50 hours it's pretty damn long too for a game focused on narrative for a good 70% of its runtime.
People into a good classic scifi plot with futurism and romance at the forefront and so many twists you're like Crash mashing square, should dive right in.
Still plugging away at Xenoblade Chronicles X
Overall I think it the least of the Xenoblades, though it does have some really strong aspects. For example, I remember that one of the devs key concepts for the game was that if you see a place, you can go there. Sort of a prototype of what they'd later do in Breath of the Wild. You can't climb tho. But you can jump, so getting to high places often involves channeling the spirit of mountain goat. Does tie well into the overall themes of exploration and establishing your colony on a new world. So do many sidequests, which are often about solving some logistics problem like water supply, finding/recovering an essential resource, or establishing trade relations with the locals.
The downside of that is that it's basically nothing but fetch quests, sending you all over, and the world is friggin huge, and doing a sizeable portion of all that busywork is required to advance the main plot. The whole game kind of feels like a greatly expanded version of the Colony 6 sidequest from the first Xenoblade, magnifying its strenghts, but also its flaws. Tho this is mitigated by fast travel being available from the get go and by using your mech to get around. Yes, you get mechs, pretty much small gundams including beam sabers, though they don't really change the gameplay outside of being bigger, tougher and making traversal easier (especially once I unlock flight).
Overall I think it the least of the Xenoblades, though it does have some really strong aspects. For example, I remember that one of the devs key concepts for the game was that if you see a place, you can go there. Sort of a prototype of what they'd later do in Breath of the Wild. You can't climb tho. But you can jump, so getting to high places often involves channeling the spirit of mountain goat. Does tie well into the overall themes of exploration and establishing your colony on a new world. So do many sidequests, which are often about solving some logistics problem like water supply, finding/recovering an essential resource, or establishing trade relations with the locals.
The downside of that is that it's basically nothing but fetch quests, sending you all over, and the world is friggin huge, and doing a sizeable portion of all that busywork is required to advance the main plot. The whole game kind of feels like a greatly expanded version of the Colony 6 sidequest from the first Xenoblade, magnifying its strenghts, but also its flaws. Tho this is mitigated by fast travel being available from the get go and by using your mech to get around. Yes, you get mechs, pretty much small gundams including beam sabers, though they don't really change the gameplay outside of being bigger, tougher and making traversal easier (especially once I unlock flight).
Yeah, I thought so too ... and then the Spirits happened. That experience can be summed up as "No, don't you dare possess that Doomhunter, aw, god fucking dammit!" They are very charming. Mind you, I was playing on Nightmare.
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Nearly done with the first Danganronpa. It's been a little while since I played it last, and though it's definitely a bit clunky compared to the sequels, I still highly recommend it. SDR2 is the best one, and V3 is great too, but they kinda require the previous games to make a proper impact, and THH is great on its own, not just a setup for better games to come.
Song of the Deep
After the year of the Open World for me, I started a palate cleanser. Turns out it was a shiptiodvania, so hope you love backtracking. The last one I played was Hollow Knight and while it being an incredible game, the back tracking was awful and I played it after the bench fast travel patch. This wasn’t as bad, moving around felt fun about the controls were a bit clunky making some boss battle a bit of a nightmare. Story was fine but it was written for a tween. Buy this cheap and if you just want something easy. 6 Child of Lights /10
After the year of the Open World for me, I started a palate cleanser. Turns out it was a shiptiodvania, so hope you love backtracking. The last one I played was Hollow Knight and while it being an incredible game, the back tracking was awful and I played it after the bench fast travel patch. This wasn’t as bad, moving around felt fun about the controls were a bit clunky making some boss battle a bit of a nightmare. Story was fine but it was written for a tween. Buy this cheap and if you just want something easy. 6 Child of Lights /10
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice so far is a visually stunning game, and I really appreciate how they’ve managed to portray a mental health issue in a very austere light and tried to make the condition sympathetic. That said, gameplay wise, it’s fairly boring. The scant few encounters I’ve had have each been identical: I approach a door, it goes dark, and, one at a time, 3-4 big guys wearing animal skull masks emerge from the ether, and I fight them off with little to no effort. Other than that, I’m walking around listening to the ramblings in “my” head and solving fairly easy puzzles. My question: does it get better/more engaging, or is what I’ve seen so far pretty much the whole bag? I want to finish it, but with Game Pass, I’ve got my hands in so many cookie jars right now, I could be playing something else.
For me the best parts of Hellblade was the atmosphere and the mental health thing(which they spent a lot of time doing research on with real scziopheria patients). The puzzles are okay and there's like the same 4 enemy types for the entire game. I kinda liked the few boss battles(and the encouters with Hel near the end) but most of what makes the game interesting is Senua being batshit and the interface being mostly the voices in her head.
There aren't any mindblowing twists at the end and you've probably seen what the game has to offer by this point, so if it's not keeping your attention, there's no shame in putting it down.
Yes, the atmosphere is pretty intense; I do love that part so far, so I might stick with it a bit longer if only to “see” some more (if no the rest) of the game. I guess I’ve just been indoctrinated by games that throw so much at you in the way of collectibles, expositive NPCs, upgrade mechanics, etc. that something so narrowly and directly focused as Hellblade can come off a bit jarring in its relative sparsity. I’ll keep with it for now.
Yeah it's not like most games, in that sense, the collectibles and such. They really wanted to focus more on putting you inside the head of someone with a mental disorder, and give it a freaky framework for it to play out in. And since the idea that "people had mental disorders even back in ancient history" is pretty much a certainty, it's an interesting concept. Think of it more as a....I guess a walking simulator with an unreliable narrator (due to...you know, being crazy), with a little combat mixed in.
If you look at it from that framework, that you are experiencing the grief of an unstable person first, and playing a game second, you will probably get more out of it?
Yeah, it's about 7-9 hours total so that might be short enough to want to see it through. IIRC, there's very little in the way of side content, it's puzzles, some combat and character development along a fairly linear path.
There was a couple bits I got stuck trying to figure out how to proceed because the puzzles were a little more convoluted then I would have liked but I think otherwise it proceeds at a fairly good clip and 7-9 hours feels JUST long enough for what the game is trying to do.
I wonder if the "convoluted puzzles" was on purpose, to try and replicate the squirrely logic that people with schizophrenia and similar conditions have? I mean from my own personal experience with a brother who is massively schizophrenic, the various things we would see him doing, when he was totally off his meds, were....well, bizarre would be a kind way to put it.
Things like, he believed in some thing (that is apparently a "real" mythology, given I saw these very beings mentioned in a Jim Butcher Dresden File book), but that demons can enter our world from right angles....yes, you read that right...right angles. Like, ANY place where 2 planes meet at 90degrees, is a point of entry for this demons...because reasons. So he would put up little ward symbols pretty much any place he saw a right angle (corners of doorframes, lightswitch panels, power outlet panels, EVERYTHING). He also collected, at one point, a series of shot glasses, and he would put a single coin of each denomination in the shots, along with scraps of bible passages, and news clippings. Again, for what reason I have no clue, but he had 20 of them in a precise row in his closet one time. He would tear out passages from antique books my grandmother had (that were apparently very valuable until he destroyed them, include pages from current newspapers that he felt were connected in some way, and mail them, in HUGE envelopes just packed with stuff, to the president of the US (at that time I think it was G.W.Bush), he did this so frequently that the secret service actually showed up at my grandmother's house, to discuss the packages with my mom. So that was a fun day, hearing about how she had to explain away the crazy mail her son was sending the president.
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Oh man, that was the only CoD game that I couldn't beat. Not because of difficulty, but because I found the plot so bad. Like you are 100% right that its a knock off from a ton of different movies but I found it painful to even go through and ended up putting it down despite it having really good gameplay.
I didn't want to say it, but "walking simulator" did come to mind. I don't mind something different like this; that's why I posed the question as to what my expectations should be. I'm gonna keep with it now that I know I'm not waiting for it to dip its toe in the same-y waters of a hack-n-slash or RPGs.
Yeah I think that's the reason it got so much interest when it first hit, despite being a small game. People played it and were like "whoa, I was so not expecting that at all.", and they liked the experience of it.
That's all about there is to it. Despite that, it's one of Ninja Theory's better games. Their game with the best combat is still DmC (2013), but they had to get a lot of help from Capcom's in house development & Itsuno. Sucks that the sequel is an Xbox Series X exclusive & PC.
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