Game Articles and Videos Thread
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
- Start date
Anyways, that rambling run on wall of text aside. Your statement was that Ubisoft has been making nothing but AC games (or slight deriviations) in their AAA space since IV. It wasn't a debate on the quality or their HR practices.
Your opinion of the various franchises aside, that's provably not the case.
And I've played all the Souls. Sure, DS3 had the focus arts, they weren't needed, most of them were terrible and the few that were any good were either broken OP and patched away by now or always the worse decison to use (like whichever AC it was with the bombs? Sure they wree there. You didn't ever need to use them and most of the time it was adding extra steps). Bloodborne didn't have blocking, thats about it. Blocking was always subpar anyways in a game series that gives you a gaping canyon of invincibility to avoid attacks at the push of a button.
The main deviation point was Bloodborne brought back the annoying Demons Souls healing item "grinding" should you happen to get stuck.
I know that, I was putting my own disgust to put extra emphasis why I want nothing to do with their shit.
A good amount of their games and franchise suffered, because of HR or putting too much towards crunch during the 2010s and into the 2020s.
Still doesn't change the fact that in Bloodborne, there's an emphasis on faster paced combat, a more dedicated parry/counter system, and weapons that transformed acting as second weapons. So it does more than enough different from Dark Souls and Demon Souls. Not to mention the 1800s London style gothic architecture and Cthulhu atmosphere.
‘E3 killed itself’, not competition from Summer Game Fest, says Geoff Keighley | VGC
The host and producer says it was “heartbreaking” to see the show’s decline…
www.videogameschronicle.com
Shame it's only a ludicrously elaborate diorama, and not an actual game, cuz I want
Ultimatly FF9 aged pretty well since it had a very stylized art style and was a the tail end of a console generation, where artist are more familiar with the console hardware and how to get the most out of it. You don't have to look very far for other square game that could use the face lift more.
I also really like 9 and would be very sad if they messed it up, based on FF7R, we could expect most of 9 to be Zidane going on date on with Garnet, Freya. Eiko(!) and I guess maybe Quina?
is the true kings and queens of KOF.
Yeah, largely it would depend on how the series is anchored. Is the series tied to the world, or tied to the protagonist. (or sometimes tied to the antagonist, as the case may be)
It would be very difficult (though not impossible... since it has happened a few times), to justify a Legend of Zelda without Zelda or Link. Or a Super Mario game without Mario. Lara Croft is the Tomb Raider, Metal Gear has prettymuch always anchored around Snake(s).
Elder Scrolls on the other hand, is just a world that various disassociated protagonists do things in centuries apart from each other.
Baldur's Gate, despite being location named, was entirely the story of the Bhaalspawn (which in itself was rapidly swept aside and retconned over by the actual canon), and having a protagonist outside of that is what makes BG3 just seem like its cash grabbing the branding (along with those PS2 games back in the day)
In most other cases with actual continuity, the protagonist switch is just down to decent writing. Its pretty obvious when the new protagonist is a carbon copy or a copy but "this one thing different*. The other half is just does the new protagonist keep the series gameplay identity, because its awkward if you suddenly go from being an FPS to a third person melee combat game.
Last edited:
Starfield Has Fewer Bugs Than Any Bethesda Game at Launch
Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty says Starfield would ship with fewer bugs than other Bethesda games even if it shipped today.
www.escapistmagazine.com
What is "Setting a low bar" for 2000? Alex
I also have a lower salary then Jeff Bezos. There are probably fewer snakes in my house the Western Australia, and other such sundries
Not an article or video, but found this archive of snapshots of old websites, including a section for gaming related ones
new.historiepocitacu.cz
Seeing those old layouts again hit me right in the nostalgia
All Websites - Web Design Museum
new.historiepocitacu.cz
Ah newground. I switch school in primary and introduce a bunch of kid to it and the parent complained to school about it XD. Surprised gamefaqs wasn't in, iirc it used to be one of the biggest website on the internet for a bit, before the rise of the wiki.Not an article or video, but found this archive of snapshots of old websites, including a section for gaming related ones
Seeing those old layouts again hit me right in the nostalgiaAll Websites - Web Design Museum
While I do have some nostalgia for that era, I gotta say aesthetically it didn't age well at all. I feel like the entire 90-early 2000 didn't really work aesthetically, even now I'd rather the ugly 70's brown over the 90's... I dunno... messy/busy?
Been curious on whether suspicion about the brand new hot release Crime Boss: Rockay City would be confirmed by reviews, and, well, here they be. Only PC reviews available at mo.
www.gameinformer.com
www.svg.com
fingerguns.net
www.kakuchopurei.com
www.nme.com
www.inverse.com
www.ign.com
metro.co.uk
Ok, not sure if this is officially a review, but it was a chuckle.
www.vg247.com
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review - The City That Sleeps - Game Informer
Crime Boss: Rockay City is a repetitive and boring experience with unremarkable gunplay, uninspired stealth, and lackluster action.
www.gameinformer.com
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review - A Caper Worth Skipping
There is fun to be found in "Crime Boss," but its issues bog down the experience enough to keep it from keeping you invested for very long.
www.svg.com
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review (PS5+PC) - Don't Pay The Price, Price, Baby and/or Chuck Nonsense - Finger Guns
Crime Boss: Rockay City is here and well blimey, it's a rough, rough shooter. The Finger Guns Review.
fingerguns.net
Crime Boss Rockay City Isn’t Worth Your Money Or Time
Crime Boss: Rockay City review.
www.kakuchopurei.com
‘Crime Boss: Rockay City’ review: take me down to the Rockay City
The voices ooze fame but the shooting's shitty in ‘Crime Boss: Rockay City,’ high in star power but lower on substance
www.nme.com
'Crime Boss: Rockay City' Is a GTA Wannabe Bogged Down by Too Much Cringe
Despite a solid campaign structure, 'Crime Boss: Rockay City' is bogged down by tone-deaf writing, lackluster performances, and too much cringe.
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review - IGN
Crime Boss: Rockay City's hokey charm is nowhere near strong enough to offset its bugs and repetitive design, and it totally squanders its kitsch cast.
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review | TheSixthAxis
Can Crime Boss: Rockay City fill the void of PayDay's co-op heisting with a star studded cast and roguelike single player mode?
www.thesixthaxis.com
Crime Boss: Rockay City review - the worst game of 2023
Kim Basinger and Danny Glover lead a celebrity fill cast in this gangster-themed shooter that’s desperate to be Payday 3.
metro.co.uk
Didn't realise it was a live-service shoddy payday clone too. Double yikes. They are literally depending on the 90s nostalgia-bait star power they spent most the budget on. Jingly keys being jingled!
Ok, not sure if this is officially a review, but it was a chuckle.
Crime Boss: Rockay City is tantamount to elder abuse
This tepid, try-hard crime simulator serves as a final indignity to the handful of faded stars who bothered to call back.
www.vg247.com
Crime Boss: Rockay City is a game that quite simply shouldn’t exist, for a litany of reasons. Morally, the ‘accosted in a lift’ quality of the performances from its stunt cast of washed-up has-beens carries a grotty air of elder abuse. Technically, it’s a disaster. Visually, it’s a sterile, overly-shiny migraine of cheap assets and muddy textures. Aurally, it’s like being stuck in a Superdrug queue next to a tinny radio blasting out Absolute Radio 90s. Spiritually, it feels like a cancelled Xbox 360 launch game, an awkward artefact from a time when videogames were embarrassingly desperate to be taken seriously as adult entertainment.
Crime City Boss Man is a roguelike first-person crime shooter management sim with separate co-op campaigns because nobody involved could decide what this game should actually be, assuming it wasn’t conceived as an elaborate tax write-off. You are Michael Madsen in a cowboy hat, a character you probably vaguely recall appearing in any number of middling crime movies released over the last forty years. You’re here to take over the crime-ridden Rockay City - a metropolis not so much inspired by Miami as it is inspired by several-times removed inspirations of Miami seen in other try-hard videogames and movies desperate to capture the authentic sleaze and edge of late 80s/early 90s media.
Even the trailer somehow feels like it was assembled in a linen cupboard.
Your route to domination is a series of bite-sized heist missions and more straight-forward shootouts, interspersed with some tedious book balancing and micro-management - usually via a stilted cutscene with your secretary, a tragically oblivious Kim Basinger who sounds like she’s only here under a court order. Heist missions play out like an early alpha build of Payday 2, where telegraphed stealth takedowns aren’t guaranteed not to just clip harmlessly through a guard. Before heading out to a stock warehouse or shopping mall, you can hire and equip up to four goons, each with their own particular quirks, who can be switched to on the fly or left at the mercy of a remedial bot intelligence.
All of these options in regards to planning and crew building don’t really amount to much in the game itself - within an hour I quickly realised that the absolute optimum way to play this game is by doing absolutely everything yourself. AI team members have a habit of blundering into plain view of cameras and guards. Playing it as a solo stealth game reveals just how limited the cones of vision are, and with ample visual feedback alerting you whenever someone is glancing in your direction, nine times out of ten you can successfully ace a heist by finding an easy route to the loot (usually no more involved than going a bit to the left or a bit to the right) and crouching back and forth to the escape van.
Michael Madsen here, pictured in his Iconic Hat.
Outside of these delights, most of the time you’ll be doing far more straightforward turf takeover missions, which involve watching your guys get mowed down by a bullet sponge enemy that you lob grenades at until a nice chunk of the city map turns blue. You’ll experience the entirety of what Crime Man Boss City has to offer in its opening hour. But really, all of this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to just how viscerally unpleasant the entire thing is.
Uncanny, de-aged puppets of decrepit actors sputter dialogue that sounds like it was generated by an AI forced to watch Reservoir Dogs 3000 times. Men who should be spending their retirement on the golf course plough through tortured metaphors and scattershot swearing with all the conviction of someone reading a menu. Lazy misogyny drips out of every pore. Takes featuring coughing and stutters are left in completely untouched, even subtitled, as if even the sound director couldn’t bring themselves to ask these poor people to subject themselves to the further indignity of reading any of this shit a second time. Everybody sounds like they were recorded 1000 miles apart in various “home studios” (this is Hollywood slang for “linen cupboards”). The idea of any of them understanding the broader strokes of their characters or their plot is an impossibility given how completely ill-defined and pointless every single aspect of the game’s narrative is.
The most impressive thing about Rockay City is the environmental detail of excessive amounts of discarded rubbish, in some sort of tragic metaphor for the career of Chuck Norris.
The cast is a frankly bizarre range of 80s to 90s pop culture icons. Chuck Norris is probably here because of the early-2000s memes rather than Walker, Texas Ranger. Vanilla Ice is here for reasons that simply cannot possibly be fathomed. Danny Trejo already has precedent for starring in soulless nostalgia wanks made by hacks who don’t understand the period they’re cribbing from after those two Machete movies. The completely bolted together nature of the plot is probably just a result of these being the people who called back.
You can’t help but wonder how many inquiry emails from Ingame Studios went unanswered. How many agents of forgotten movie stars have one resting forever somewhere in their junk folder. The cast is too much of a grab-bag to have been 100% deliberate, consisting solely of the people who had absolutely nothing else going on that weekend. How many conversations petered out, how many dialogues amounted to nothing? Did somebody try to explain what a roguelike is to Eric Roberts? Did Cheech Marin’s agent sit him down and try to convince him that Xbox Game Pass is the best deal in gaming? Was DJ Jazzy Jeff forwarded a PowerPoint about raytracing?
You too can partake in the hedonistic power fantasy of a Hyundai driving Gen X-er who has every Fleetwood Mac album on vinyl.
The entire endeavour is such a desperate and disparate mess of badly aged cool guy aesthetics and inspirations. It feels like something that should have NFT integration. It’s all just so embarrassing. I’d rather be caught playing some absolutely depraved hentai visual novel than this completely underbaked mood board for fifty-year-old dads with laserdisc players. And so should you. Videogames can be so much better than this. They can be funnier, smarter, sexier and sleazier than this. This has all the edge of a Will Smith track and none of the impact of a Will Smith slap.
Last edited:
We all knew something was off with that CG only trailer. I don't think much gameplay was shown afterward.Been curious on whether suspicion about the brand new hot release Crime Boss: Rockay City would be confirmed by reviews, and, well, here they be. Only PC reviews available at mo.
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review - The City That Sleeps - Game Informer
Crime Boss: Rockay City is a repetitive and boring experience with unremarkable gunplay, uninspired stealth, and lackluster action.
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review - A Caper Worth Skipping
There is fun to be found in "Crime Boss," but its issues bog down the experience enough to keep it from keeping you invested for very long.
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review (PS5+PC) - Don't Pay The Price, Price, Baby and/or Chuck Nonsense - Finger Guns
Crime Boss: Rockay City is here and well blimey, it's a rough, rough shooter. The Finger Guns Review.
Crime Boss Rockay City Isn’t Worth Your Money Or Time
Crime Boss: Rockay City review.
‘Crime Boss: Rockay City’ review: take me down to the Rockay City
The voices ooze fame but the shooting's shitty in ‘Crime Boss: Rockay City,’ high in star power but lower on substance
'Crime Boss: Rockay City' Is a GTA Wannabe Bogged Down by Too Much Cringe
Despite a solid campaign structure, 'Crime Boss: Rockay City' is bogged down by tone-deaf writing, lackluster performances, and too much cringe.
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review - IGN
Crime Boss: Rockay City's hokey charm is nowhere near strong enough to offset its bugs and repetitive design, and it totally squanders its kitsch cast.
Crime Boss: Rockay City Review | TheSixthAxis
Can Crime Boss: Rockay City fill the void of PayDay's co-op heisting with a star studded cast and roguelike single player mode?www.thesixthaxis.com
Didn't realise it was a live-service shoddy payday clone too. Double yikes. They are literally depending on the 90s nostalgia-bait star power they spent most the budget on. Jingly keys being jingled!
Last edited: