What are you currently playing?
- Thread starter Nick Calandra
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Started Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and im not really enjoying this one.
For the changes, the new setting of Arizona is a refreshing change of scenery from Washington, and the game does feel generally more refined (more responsive, clearer UI, etc). The game is faster paced too, with you being able to sprint for longer, your flashlight recharges faster, and there is also a suite of automatic weapons to choose from. And there are a couple of new enemy types.
But what isn't working for me, is mostly the mission design. If you really want to meta-analyse basically every game, most objectives do eventually boil down to just "going to a place, and doing a thing", but here, it really feels like it you are just doing busywork, and the game does a terrible job at hiding it. You get told to go out and pick something up, and bring it back. Then you get told to go out, and flip three switches, then come back. Then you get told to go out, and turn the power on, then come back. Its just menial fetch-quest tasks, with obvious padding, and a few enemy encounters on your way to/from your objective.
The voice acting has also taken a noticeable turn for the worse. The main character is still fine, but a lot of the supporting cast is really rough.
I do understand that this is a lower budget game, which shows in the lack of cutscenes, but the mission design seems to have suffered too, which makes this a bit of a drag.
I've heard its short though, so I will probably tough it out.
For the changes, the new setting of Arizona is a refreshing change of scenery from Washington, and the game does feel generally more refined (more responsive, clearer UI, etc). The game is faster paced too, with you being able to sprint for longer, your flashlight recharges faster, and there is also a suite of automatic weapons to choose from. And there are a couple of new enemy types.
But what isn't working for me, is mostly the mission design. If you really want to meta-analyse basically every game, most objectives do eventually boil down to just "going to a place, and doing a thing", but here, it really feels like it you are just doing busywork, and the game does a terrible job at hiding it. You get told to go out and pick something up, and bring it back. Then you get told to go out, and flip three switches, then come back. Then you get told to go out, and turn the power on, then come back. Its just menial fetch-quest tasks, with obvious padding, and a few enemy encounters on your way to/from your objective.
The voice acting has also taken a noticeable turn for the worse. The main character is still fine, but a lot of the supporting cast is really rough.
I do understand that this is a lower budget game, which shows in the lack of cutscenes, but the mission design seems to have suffered too, which makes this a bit of a drag.
I've heard its short though, so I will probably tough it out.
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- Apr 1, 2009
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I found that one boring and dull and just not good. It plays better, but oddly enough, I think that makes it a worse game, cause it plays more arcadey which isn't really what you want in "horror". Really felt like more of a meh fan game.
Remarkably like my impression of Mickey Mouse.
Reading that gave me flashbacks of 2011's Mortal Kombat's Shao Kahn fight.Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate is heavily discounted on the ps store, so I couldn't resist... Yeah, let's see how good the story mode turns out to be cuz I sure as hell will never be good enough to play it online
For some reason that was a major difficulty spike for me and the friend I was playing the game with back then. We were just casually cruising through its story mode, passing the controller after each fight and then this mother fucker showed up and had us stuck for a good while.
Ended up cheesing his ass with flying bicycle kicks.
He’s always been a pain, but the toughest might just be MK2. I remember in the arcade putting like $5 into the machine and finally beating him the first time with standing HK’s with Jax whenever he dashed. But then MK3 added Run and ground combos, so it was actually fairly easy to reset and stunlock him while he was recovering from a knock down.
More Boltgun. This game is feeling longer than I expected it to be, and some of the initial luster has definitely faded. This game does have some pretty serious issues.
- The Lord of Change has an attack that can easily clip off half of your health an armor in just a couple of seconds. This would otherwise be okay, but as far as I've been able to tell, there's literally zero signal for it. The only way to tell you're taking damage from it is the purple filter around the screen, and by then it's already too late because you're already taking damage. It's hitscan, it has no projectile, there's no animation tell for it, so I don't even know if there's a pattern to the LoC using it. Best I've got is it only needs to have line of sight to you. This makes fighting it often a game of peek-a-boo as you scramble around the arena looking for health and armor pickups.
- This game does one of the worst jobs of guiding the player I've ever seen. It has a venerated trope of 90s shooters, which is sprawling, non-linear maps. Except this game forgot the one crucial feature that makes those work: having an actual map. There's often zero indication where you're supposed to be going next, and when the level isn't entirely linear it's led to me looking for where to go next for minutes on end. Levels are also pretty uniform visually, so there's not a whole lot of standout elements or assets to guide the player, even color is used only very sparingly. There aren't even objectives to check, like "find x" or "go through the yellow door". But it gets even worse! The levels often have slews of health pickups that respawn, meaning the game often inadvertently misleads the player by making them think they're going through a new area. I think out of just about every level clear time, at least 5 of those minutes have been just running around the same repetitive corridors looking for the one bloody correctly colored door to put the bloody key in.
- The game's placement of booster pickups feels completely arbitrary. I literally found a melee boost pickup in a dead end in a cavern, with no enemies in sight. It's often also easy to miss them, so you can end up making fights a lot harder for no reason.
Word of advice, there is ONE secret puzzle in the game that has no actual solution to it other than random guessing. If you find one and it seems like there's no hints whatsoever after looking for them for a while, look it up online.
For myself, I finally beat Dicey Dungeons, after going on hiatus from the game for several years!
Is there genuinely no way of figuring out the puzzle within the game or is it meant to be like a AR gaming thing? Like scanning the QR code.
Legit, no way of figuring it out. There's even articles about it.
A Look Back At Fez's Unsolvable "Black Monolith" Puzzle
Vibrantly-pixelated indie darling Fez turned five years old this week, so it’s the perfect time to celebrate the game’s strangest puzzle and the community of players who devoted themselves to solving it.
kotaku.com
Note, there's a way to complete the puzzle, it's just that the answer has no hints for how to solve it.
I'm almost at the point where I have to start wrapping up my playthrough of TotK. At some point "this summer" (according to Nintendo and Bandai Namco) the Baten Kaitos remasters will drop. Considering that the visuals on the Gamecube original were particularly stunning, I can't wait to see what a remaster will look like. I want to see if they revoiced the terrible voice acting (I hope not, it was spectacularly awful and needs to be preserved.) To see if they tweaked some of the annoyances (battle music being way too repetitive.) That will probably carry me to Sept. when My Time at Sandrock's full release is scheduled. I'll probably sprinkle some indies in there somewhere, and I need to get back to finishing Hard West 2 (other games kept interrupting it.)
Getting further into WT. Currently on Chapter 9. I unlocked Ken, Jamie, E.Honda, Ryu, and Guile as masters. I have to switch night mode again to get Kimberly. I got my health to go to a 2nd life bar now.
Decided to try ender lilies, on the basis of more hollow knight plz. First impressions were not great tbh. The single jump and attack felt so cumbersome, awkward and anti-movement. Also the stance anime girls seem to always be doing with their knees held together but feet widened and separate on the ground as if to present I dunno some sort of coyness or something just annoys me. I think I actually hate it the more I see it, like who d...who fcking does that? Nobody, that's who! Only anime girls! I just want to grab the first artist who popularised this and [REDACTED] their [REDACTED] 5000 oiled [REDACTED] [REDACTED] lactating camel omelette. They don't let me near the time machine silo for good reasons.
But getting the second jump and a different attack feels a much needed improvement, so will see how far I can get before losing interest I guess. The dodge looks rather kitten like, which amuses me on an extremely basic level. And basic amusement is still an improvement over no amusement, depression and despair, so hey... we're winning here, right?
Oh also enjoying the Jurassic Park monthly PSN game where you build your own beastie park. It's all chill until they try fooling you into thinking the characters from the new movies are talking to you. They aren't. I'm sorry, they just aren't. Stop pretending they are!
But getting the second jump and a different attack feels a much needed improvement, so will see how far I can get before losing interest I guess. The dodge looks rather kitten like, which amuses me on an extremely basic level. And basic amusement is still an improvement over no amusement, depression and despair, so hey... we're winning here, right?
Oh also enjoying the Jurassic Park monthly PSN game where you build your own beastie park. It's all chill until they try fooling you into thinking the characters from the new movies are talking to you. They aren't. I'm sorry, they just aren't. Stop pretending they are!
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I played After the Fall on Meta 2 and holy moly, they made it harder. "Snowies" came at us (me n my nephew). from behind, were hiding behind doors at the very beginning of level, were throwing near boss level characters at us in multiples mid way into the level. This has not happened before. Not sure why but we won the level. Phew. Maybe they're just getting us ready for Arizona Sunshine 2 (same team that brought AZS 1 and After the Fall) and the Meta 3.
Theater scene:
Arizona Sunshine 2
Meta Quest 3
Theater scene:
Arizona Sunshine 2
Meta Quest 3
Got Kim as a Master, and been grinding away and doing a lot of fights at night. Stronger opponents = more EXP. There's a food buff you can buy that will raise your Style EXP quickly and upgrade the level of whatever fighting style you're using. I did an arcade run of Ryu, Normal, 5 Stages, No Round Losses. Freaking awesome! My first 1CC run on SFVI!
Finished Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and I did not like this one at all.
This being a budget title, obviously concessions must be made from all directions when making such a game, but the setting, tone, writing, direction, and action have all taken a significant nosedive in terms of quality, and what emerges is a game that just isn't very fun to play.
A shame.
This being a budget title, obviously concessions must be made from all directions when making such a game, but the setting, tone, writing, direction, and action have all taken a significant nosedive in terms of quality, and what emerges is a game that just isn't very fun to play.
A shame.
- Apr 1, 2009
- 14,487
- 3,436
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Beat the System Shock remake. Was really cool, but its got all the problems of the old games and the ending is rather underwhelming. You will encounter parts where you just have no idea what to do, or know what to do but don't know how to do it. Also, for as great as Shodan is as a big bad, she is weirdly quiet at the end, so much so that it makes battling her really unsatisfying. But, would still recommend it, as long as your ok with a lot of old game design like mazelike game levels and some punishing but fair combat... mostly, the combat does kinda put me in mind of the souls series, where you need to approach it smart or you will be killed.
Continuing with my Remedy binge, and i've jumped onto Quantum Break.
I read somewhere recently that Remedy never make the best games, but all of their stuff is at least interesting enough to give it a shot. This game is basically the perfect example of that.
Quantum Break is a third-person shooter about time travel/time manipulation, that features unique narrative sequences, in the form of four 25-ish minute live action episodes of a TV show, that take place alongside the events of the game, and change according to your choices.
So far these episodes are nothing particularly groundbreaking in terms of writing, action, or delivery, but it is definitely unique in the videogame world, and are executed well enough to deserve praise.
My only real concern is that these episodes appear to be streamed from some server somewhere, which raises questions as to what will happen when these servers inevitably shut off at some point in the future. Again, it isn't Oscar-worthy or anything, but there will come a day where a significant part of this game's narrative will be inaccessible outside of YouTube, and I hope Remedy has a better solution in mind for when that day comes, because this content deserves to be preserved.
Otherwise, the gameplay is definitely smoother than Remedy's previous game, but I feel like a cover-shooter is probably the most boring way they possibly could have structured this game, which makes it way more effective to just sit behind cover, headshotting enemies at a distance, than to actively engage with most of the time power shenanigans.
Technically, this game runs really well on modern hardware. Im averaging over 100+ FPS at 1440p in most scenes, and i've not encountered too many bugs, aside from one, where an NPC blocked a doorway, and forced me to revert to a previous checkpoint. The biggest gripe though, is how the game's cutscenes run at a locked 30FPS, and going from 144 FPS to 30, then back again, is one hell of a jarring experience - especially when it can take the game a few seconds to realise that it isn't a cutscene anymore, and unlock the framerate.
Its definitely an interesting one, and im so far happy to stick with it.
I read somewhere recently that Remedy never make the best games, but all of their stuff is at least interesting enough to give it a shot. This game is basically the perfect example of that.
Quantum Break is a third-person shooter about time travel/time manipulation, that features unique narrative sequences, in the form of four 25-ish minute live action episodes of a TV show, that take place alongside the events of the game, and change according to your choices.
So far these episodes are nothing particularly groundbreaking in terms of writing, action, or delivery, but it is definitely unique in the videogame world, and are executed well enough to deserve praise.
My only real concern is that these episodes appear to be streamed from some server somewhere, which raises questions as to what will happen when these servers inevitably shut off at some point in the future. Again, it isn't Oscar-worthy or anything, but there will come a day where a significant part of this game's narrative will be inaccessible outside of YouTube, and I hope Remedy has a better solution in mind for when that day comes, because this content deserves to be preserved.
Otherwise, the gameplay is definitely smoother than Remedy's previous game, but I feel like a cover-shooter is probably the most boring way they possibly could have structured this game, which makes it way more effective to just sit behind cover, headshotting enemies at a distance, than to actively engage with most of the time power shenanigans.
Technically, this game runs really well on modern hardware. Im averaging over 100+ FPS at 1440p in most scenes, and i've not encountered too many bugs, aside from one, where an NPC blocked a doorway, and forced me to revert to a previous checkpoint. The biggest gripe though, is how the game's cutscenes run at a locked 30FPS, and going from 144 FPS to 30, then back again, is one hell of a jarring experience - especially when it can take the game a few seconds to realise that it isn't a cutscene anymore, and unlock the framerate.
Its definitely an interesting one, and im so far happy to stick with it.
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It's a good thing they're skippable. All I have to say is that whenever the server shut down at some point, that you have a YouTube video up and ready of all the live action cutscenes. I suggest you download them and save them to your hard drive on your PC just in case.
Not by much. There's technically more (visual) jank in this game than Alan Wake.