Dragon Age Origins: The Love Scene. There is a reason this is the most mocked part of the game, and why they do the build up before and the pillow talk afterwards in all future games.
Games that are great...except for the game part.
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Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice.
So maybe not a great game, but it arguably has some really cool bits(The corruption that will "permakill" you) and some nice atmosphere, but the fact Senuas mental illness is integrated into your perception of the world is kinda of amazing.
Unfortunately, the actual gameplay is really kinda not good. The combat is fine at best, the "Avoid the Darkness" puzzles are obnoxious at times and the matching puzzles get really old after the first couple times. On the bright side, it's a short game so at least you don't have to suffer through them for too long.
So maybe not a great game, but it arguably has some really cool bits(The corruption that will "permakill" you) and some nice atmosphere, but the fact Senuas mental illness is integrated into your perception of the world is kinda of amazing.
Unfortunately, the actual gameplay is really kinda not good. The combat is fine at best, the "Avoid the Darkness" puzzles are obnoxious at times and the matching puzzles get really old after the first couple times. On the bright side, it's a short game so at least you don't have to suffer through them for too long.
The only thing I really know about Asura's Wrath is that Patrick Seitz killed his voice while recording for that game from all the screaming he had to do.
Haha I wouldn't be able to speak on that since I play with the original Jp voices when possible.
But yeah the game is a martial arts meets gods fighting meets futuristic magic-science with a Buddhist flavor to it. It's like playing an anime series. Best QTE implementation in gaming by far. Also the scale is literally insane. Whole planets get punched in the face (cause yes planets have faces in this) and get stabbed through with swords and so on. Think of like a more interpersonal gurren lagann level of over the top.
- Apr 1, 2009
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Got me. I got into warframe before it had much of a plot so I ended up missing a lot of it when it was added.....why?
DragonAge Origins as a whole plays like total shit. It’s like the original Mass Effect. Movement is janky, combat is dull and annoying and the skills layout and implementation is appalling. They’re lucky the story and characters were as compelling as they were.
Travis Strikes Again. The combat is the worst, but I do love the crossover and callbacks to all of Suda51/Grasshoppers previous titles. Honestly, I will just YouTube the story and wait for 3 to come out.
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I've been playing a lot of games with my girlfriend recently, particularly TellTale ones, but diverging into other franchises has been... difficult.
Take BioShock Infinite, for example. The game starts off with an intro sequence, which presents a lot of questions. Who is the girl? What is the debt? Why are these two boat rowers... weird? What is Columbia? Why are they worshiping the founding fathers? What is that mark, and who am I? There is this really interesting environment, that she is really interested to explore, with a story that she is really interested to uncover... and then the combat starts, and her eyes glaze over.
I like me a shooting game, and BioShock Infinite is a pretty good shooting game, but this game goes from 0 - 100 really quickly, and I cant help but feel like this was completely out of place, with the game doing something interesting, before immediately devolving into another shooting game.
We never played more Infinite after that.
Take BioShock Infinite, for example. The game starts off with an intro sequence, which presents a lot of questions. Who is the girl? What is the debt? Why are these two boat rowers... weird? What is Columbia? Why are they worshiping the founding fathers? What is that mark, and who am I? There is this really interesting environment, that she is really interested to explore, with a story that she is really interested to uncover... and then the combat starts, and her eyes glaze over.
I like me a shooting game, and BioShock Infinite is a pretty good shooting game, but this game goes from 0 - 100 really quickly, and I cant help but feel like this was completely out of place, with the game doing something interesting, before immediately devolving into another shooting game.
We never played more Infinite after that.
Infinite really just seemed like the writing team wandered off halfway through the development or something. Funnily, the first Bioshock, which was post-breakdown had more actual engagement with the people there were and a sense of general interaction.
Most of Infinite's urntime, despite the city being fully functional at the time, and theoretically you should be running into piles upon piles of non-combatants, is just arena after arena of generic mooks. And only rarely do you interact with the NPC's, its mostly audiologs backfilling.
Yeah I found Infinite to be incredibly underwhelming. I didn't find the premise or the setting terribly compelling or new. I mean, Actually Evil Utopia Hidden Behind Veil is pretty cliche, which is fine I guess, but I need more than the basic framework to keep me interested. Thinking about it, it's kind of the same thing that's wrong with Outer Worlds. They have one note in their song and it's "Corporations Bad!" and Infinite is "Religious Bigotry Bad!" and they just proceed to hammer that one point over...and over....and over. Yes, I GET IT! I've been running around your world for 3 hours now, you have firmly established the premise, can you do something else with it? No? *le sigh*
I dunno, I guess it would be more compelling if all the "american iconography anbd religious symbolism but turned evil" was somehow a novel concept to me? I already despise religion, christianity in particular, and find the jingo-esque worship of our "founding fathers" to be something that's really already going on IRL. So it's not really a "dark alternate reality" but simply "what conservatives want the world to look like" So yeah, didn't find it terribly fun to run around in it.
One of the things I liked about Infinite is that in the early game you did have a couple bits where you could just walk around and enjoy the scenery, but those almost completely disappear once everything goes to hell.
Also, Infinite went through a lot of ideas. Going back through the various trailers you can tell they were looking at a bunch of different ideas and eventually this is what the ended up settling on(Elizabeth powers were meant to be a lot more dynamic, presumably at a cost to her well being, though obviously they couldn't figure out how to make that actually work in gameplay).
Which is nice and all, but sadly the final product wasn't as cool as they were trying to make it. Ideas on the drawing board are nice, but if you can't get them in your product, ultimately they mean nothing.
- Nov 27, 2009
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I'm really surprised no one has mentioned this considering that The Escapist has always had a large amount of Obsidian fans, but Alpha Protocol, seriously though it has some of the most elaborate and dynamic systems of choice and consequences in any RPG pretty much ever, with tons of sections that only appear if you meet certain very specific conditions all wrapped in a pretty decent spy-thriller with interesting characters and some relatively OK critique of clandestine black ops operations such as the ones conducted by the CIA, to the point where you can ally yourself with literal terrorist organisations, it's honestly pretty damn good and there's nothing else like it.
The problem comes from the fact that this all comes in what's basically the buggiest most broken, cover shooter/stealth game that has ever existed and it's excruciatingly awful to play, honestly guys just cheat and give yourself all the skill you want form the beginning so that you can have the experience of the story, but I wholeheartedly believe that it's one of the best examples of a game that's great, except for the game part.
The problem comes from the fact that this all comes in what's basically the buggiest most broken, cover shooter/stealth game that has ever existed and it's excruciatingly awful to play, honestly guys just cheat and give yourself all the skill you want form the beginning so that you can have the experience of the story, but I wholeheartedly believe that it's one of the best examples of a game that's great, except for the game part.
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Yeah I really enjoyed the little details in how the game reacted to your actions. But I personally found the story incredibly un-engaging. I think AP was one of the first games I've ever bought and played...and just quit playing without finishing it. I got to the end of the game and realized I didn't really know or care about what was going on, and why the people were doing what they were doing, and just....shut it off.
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I mean I get it, the story is super convoluted and there's a million things to keep track off, it's even designed in such a way that most arcs require such a high level of engagement with minute details that if you stop playing it for a week you're likely to forget a lot of important details that can help you, but while that makes it even more niche than it already is, it does help it sell that spy thriller intrigue better than most spy thrillers, especially since they often feed you conflicting information and you have to figure shit out, they were committed to making a true spy RPG and though even the parts of it that are good are still flawed it's honestly pretty amazing what they managed to accomplish, I would really love to see them give another chance to that conversation system though, it's one of the best I've ever seen.
Yeah I agree about the conversation system, it was really nice. The moment that made me enjoy it, was after you break into that mercenary HQ to steal some data or whatever, and after you are contacted by the guy who owns the unit. And if you made it through without killing anyone, or being detected, he's REALLY impressed, and is willing to work with you right away. I was pleasantly surprised by that, and similar bits.
Most JRPGs specifically of the turn-based variety, at least for me. I know people like that sort of style of game but for me it's also like the cover based shooter, where it's at it's worst when it's only in service of itself and nothing else.
Overwatch. It should have been a single-player game with either co-op in mind and a separate multiplayer mode. Either that or a brawler similar to Anarchy Reigns.
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True. The insane amount of potential the game had continues to fascinate me and even though I like BS:I, I really wish it had been a lot closer to some of those earlier ideas.
Apparently it started out as an MMO called Titan and when that was canceled Overwatch is what they salvaged out of the remains.
Granted, I'd still love to play it as a single player campaign.
I'm gonna throw out Fallen London.
It's got a great setting and some really nice lovecraftian victorian fantasy atmosphere with a bit of light moments to keep it from getting grimdark, plus some good writing and interesting characters. The problem is that it's a browser game that is basically freemium and even if you pay you could spend a long time chugging on an objective due to the RNG. And the RNG drives so much of your progress due to things you need to progress quest lines this is a massive problem. It's also massively grindy.
Sunless Sea/Sky alleviate the RNG aspect somewhat(you can actually save scum in SS and only a few quests are really RNG depedent) and the freemium aspect in particular(you have a limited number of actions and they regenerate in hours of real time), since both are a normal pricing model(and pretty decent at that) but I'd love a version of Fallen London where you pay the $20-$30 entrance fee and can play the game normally from there.
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