What are you currently playing?

[bluegate]

Also started playing Spider-Man 2 on PS5 and I just got up to the point where you get the web line ability and I fell head over heels in love with it.

For those who don't know, it's an ability that lets you shoot out lines of webbing for you to walk over as a tightrope, allowing you to create a rudimentary web above enemies from which you can stealth assassinate them. Thinking about it it makes perfect sense for something like this to be in a Spider-Man game, it might even have been in several that I don't know of, but at the moment I just love how this tickles my stealth gameplay itch. 11 out of 10 spiders for me.



Also being a guy that likes to fill out the checklists that are Trophy lists in games, I'm a bit disappointed by the game's two "kill 100 enemies with X" trophies. That number could have easily been 50 or 25 for my liking, but thankfully there are only two of those trophies.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

Oh forgot to add, tried one level/match of that Marathon bets test of whatever cutsie name they gave it. God damn that is one ugly ass game. Got the distinct impression someone thought they were cooking with that artstyle, handing in their homework with breezy confidence as they said to the teacher "bet nobody tried this one before, eh?" And fair enough, maybe they haven't. But that's cos sticklebacks looks dumb as a dried old turd sandwich sprinkled with skittles

Also for the love of god bungie do you get off from making awful HUD/menu formats? There is no excuse after all these years. Every second looking at that sexless interchangeable mess is a disassociating stumble towards any glimmer of a alternative light source. I'd usually hold back on such pettiness but there's no charity left in this case. You had all the time in the world to do just one job lmao. Oh dear.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Resident Evil 9

I just got to what I assume is the mid-point shift, or the 2/3rd point shift maybe. I mean, if you've seen the trailers you know where you end up, and I just got there.

Gotta say, Grace isn't really doing it for me. They're really trying to pull out all the stops with her character in a way Capcom's never tried before with the characters of this franchise. Things happen that try their darndest to illicit an emotional response from me, but boy does it just not work. And considering where I am now in the game I'm starting to wonder what the point really was to her entire gameplay section. From a narrative perspective anyway - the gameplay itself was still pretty great.

Also, the way this game tries to inject a dose of Doomguy/Kratos into Leon borders on boulder punching levels of ridiculousness.

PS. Like that fucking helicopter was going anywhere! What kinda chump do you take me for Capcom?

 

[BrawlMan]

Gotta say, Grace isn't really doing it for me.

I like Grace. She's adorkable and she tries. Still better and much more interesting than Ethan.

PS. Like that fucking helicopter was going anywhere! What kinda chump do you take me for Capcom?

They knew exactly what they were doing!

 

[BrawlMan]

RE Requiem - I am at the part where you go to Racoon City, and man is this Leon's longest section, so I got my wish.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Welp, I just died three times to the exact same thing because I thought the tooltips would actually tell me what to do instead of giving me hints that aren't actually useful for the thing I died to, and not noticing the one thing in the room I was actually supposed to interact with. And then the zombies started behaving differently to before on the retries and I took a bunch of damage I shouldn't have as a result - but only down to yellow on the last attempt (after giving up and looking at a guide) , because I died enough times to fall into a lower DA bracket.

That was extremely stupid. At least it's over.

Edit:

In hindsight, the scene is not that bad. I just had a blind spot and then the game kinda reinforced it, but it was definitely on me to actually try doing something different, and my other reactions to it in the moment were overblown as well. I'm not holding the frustration I caused myself against the game.

 

[Bartholen]

Finished Bioshock 2 again. Much like the first game, it becomes laughably easy past a certain point. I played on the hardest difficulty, and the only real challenge posed were the Big Sisters, which hit like trucks and eat bullets like cake. At one point I got caught in basically a spawn killing loop with one of them because I ran out of medkits. Otherwise the standard enemies might as well be made of whipped cream, and you're so overloaded with weapons that by the end you're cleaning ammo and resources out of your ears. I wonder if a challenge run might make it more interesting in this regard, since one of the gene tonics clearly seems to hint at those possibilities. You just get it at around after the midpoint of the game, so it's a long time to wait for a challenge run to even become possible. Maybe dropping the research camera altogether might offer up a bigger challenge.

 

[Ezekiel]

What the hell? I beat Symphony of the Night. How could it just end like that? What happened to the woman?

80 percent. Barely ate any food, none during bosses, because it was inconvenient to use.

 

[meiam]

What the hell? I beat Symphony of the Night. How could it just end like that? What happened to the woman?

80 percent. Barely ate any food, none during bosses, because it was inconvenient to use.

Did you do the inverted castle?

 

[NerfedFalcon]

What the hell? I beat Symphony of the Night. How could it just end like that? What happened to the woman?

Based on your map, I know you have the Gold Ring, which has an incomplete sentence written on it. If you want to see the other half of that sentence, you'll have to check out the part of the map below Underground Cavern.

I'm fairly certain you've also already been to the room that makes the enemy appear that you need to get through a certain obstacle.

 

[Bartholen]

Having given it some more thought, the problem with Sophia Lamb as an antagonist in Bioshock 2 is the same one many others like her run into: she's written to be a genius by people without the ability to write an actual genius. She's meant to be this enlightened, charismatic, insightful cult leader rousing the masses in revolt, but instead it comes across as forced and self-satisfied. She's presented as a more cunning, more empathetic foil to Andrew Ryan, but she's mostly just smug and patronizing, like a huffy schoolteacher (and boy does she look like one too). It's the writing equivalent of the "Obama gives himself a medal" meme, the writers really thought they were cooking here. They just forgot a crucial thing: Andrew Ryan was no genius. He got to his position through wealth, charisma, drive, and the resources at his disposal. He started at the top, and basically stayed there until his death. His position was maintained through an iron fist, not by being particularly clever.

Lamb, by contrast, is meant to have risen through the ranks via subversion, manipulation, and persuading people to join her. To the point that she's having public one on one debates with Ryan and winning. It's just so corny, like a Reddit atheist wrote the dialogue. And that's before you get to her actual plan, which is just silly even by the mad science standards of Rapture. And it doesn't really fit her motivations much: through most of the game you listen to her ramble about the psyche, genes, selflessness and so on. At a certain point you find a log of her having discovered the nature of Jack from the first game, and it inspires her to try and create a similar being. But at no point did I get why exactly she then decided to make Eleanor into a vessel for a hivemind. She talks about how she wants to create a utopia, but that there must be a utopian being first, but I never understood where the ideological leap was going from that into full on mad science.

In fact the game at large is harried by writing problems like this: demanding investment or impact without the proper groundwork or earning it. Instead it's just insisted. The whole emotional crux of the game relies on a premise that's only given a very shallow founding, and even that is quite questionable: the relationship between the Little Sisters and Big Daddies isn't meant to be cute or endearing, it's supposed to be horrifying. Eleanor is barely given any characterization to get the player invested, and Delta is given literally none. So her tearful messages to you just fall flat, no matter how much the game tries to piece your relationship together retroactively. Then there's Dionysus Park where an opportunity for emotional investment is royally missed when the game focuses on Stan and Delta's relationship, when they could instead have focused on the fact that Stan flooded the entire place and probably killed dozens. It would have been so easy to create a mini-storyline with audio logs where you get to know a character, maybe even multiple, and then their life is cut short as Stan floods the park. So many bewildering choices and missed opportunities.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Having given it some more thought, the problem with Sophia Lamb as an antagonist in Bioshock 2 is the same one many others like her run into: she's written to be a genius by people without the ability to write an actual genius. She's meant to be this enlightened, charismatic, insightful cult leader rousing the masses in revolt, but instead it comes across as forced and self-satisfied. She's presented as a more cunning, more empathetic foil to Andrew Ryan, but she's mostly just smug and patronizing, like a huffy schoolteacher (and boy does she look like one too). It's the writing equivalent of the "Obama gives himself a medal" meme, the writers really thought they were cooking here. They just forgot a crucial thing: Andrew Ryan was no genius. He got to his position through wealth, charisma, drive, and the resources at his disposal. He started at the top, and basically stayed there until his death. His position was maintained through an iron fist, not by being particularly clever.

Lamb, by contrast, is meant to have risen through the ranks via subversion, manipulation, and persuading people to join her. To the point that she's having public one on one debates with Ryan and winning. It's just so corny, like a Reddit atheist wrote the dialogue. And that's before you get to her actual plan, which is just silly even by the mad science standards of Rapture. And it doesn't really fit her motivations much: through most of the game you listen to her ramble about the psyche, genes, selflessness and so on. At a certain point you find a log of her having discovered the nature of Jack from the first game, and it inspires her to try and create a similar being. But at no point did I get why exactly she then decided to make Eleanor into a vessel for a hivemind. She talks about how she wants to create a utopia, but that there must be a utopian being first, but I never understood where the ideological leap was going from that into full on mad science.

In fact the game at large is harried by writing problems like this: demanding investment or impact without the proper groundwork or earning it. Instead it's just insisted. The whole emotional crux of the game relies on a premise that's only given a very shallow founding, and even that is quite questionable: the relationship between the Little Sisters and Big Daddies isn't meant to be cute or endearing, it's supposed to be horrifying. Eleanor is barely given any characterization to get the player invested, and Delta is given literally none. So her tearful messages to you just fall flat, no matter how much the game tries to piece your relationship together retroactively. Then there's Dionysus Park where an opportunity for emotional investment is royally missed when the game focuses on Stan and Delta's relationship, when they could instead have focused on the fact that Stan flooded the entire place and probably killed dozens. It would have been so easy to create a mini-storyline with audio logs where you get to know a character, maybe even multiple, and then their life is cut short as Stan floods the park. So many bewildering choices and missed opportunities.

I agree with everything you said.

I also remember having issues with when this communist revolution was supposed to be taking place. We don't see any hint of it during the entirety of BS1, which gives the impression that it must have happened in the 8 years following the first game's ending. I can't exactly imagine anybody caring about communism in the post-breakdown society of Rapture that we see, so the whole thing just seems like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I remember finding the resolution with the antagonists extremely underwhelming as well. I think there were 3 main antagonists apart from Lamb, and all of them are killed in cutscenes. It was very anticlimactic.

 

[Worgen]

Having given it some more thought, the problem with Sophia Lamb as an antagonist in Bioshock 2 is the same one many others like her run into: she's written to be a genius by people without the ability to write an actual genius. She's meant to be this enlightened, charismatic, insightful cult leader rousing the masses in revolt, but instead it comes across as forced and self-satisfied. She's presented as a more cunning, more empathetic foil to Andrew Ryan, but she's mostly just smug and patronizing, like a huffy schoolteacher (and boy does she look like one too). It's the writing equivalent of the "Obama gives himself a medal" meme, the writers really thought they were cooking here. They just forgot a crucial thing: Andrew Ryan was no genius. He got to his position through wealth, charisma, drive, and the resources at his disposal. He started at the top, and basically stayed there until his death. His position was maintained through an iron fist, not by being particularly clever.

Lamb, by contrast, is meant to have risen through the ranks via subversion, manipulation, and persuading people to join her. To the point that she's having public one on one debates with Ryan and winning. It's just so corny, like a Reddit atheist wrote the dialogue. And that's before you get to her actual plan, which is just silly even by the mad science standards of Rapture. And it doesn't really fit her motivations much: through most of the game you listen to her ramble about the psyche, genes, selflessness and so on. At a certain point you find a log of her having discovered the nature of Jack from the first game, and it inspires her to try and create a similar being. But at no point did I get why exactly she then decided to make Eleanor into a vessel for a hivemind. She talks about how she wants to create a utopia, but that there must be a utopian being first, but I never understood where the ideological leap was going from that into full on mad science.

In fact the game at large is harried by writing problems like this: demanding investment or impact without the proper groundwork or earning it. Instead it's just insisted. The whole emotional crux of the game relies on a premise that's only given a very shallow founding, and even that is quite questionable: the relationship between the Little Sisters and Big Daddies isn't meant to be cute or endearing, it's supposed to be horrifying. Eleanor is barely given any characterization to get the player invested, and Delta is given literally none. So her tearful messages to you just fall flat, no matter how much the game tries to piece your relationship together retroactively. Then there's Dionysus Park where an opportunity for emotional investment is royally missed when the game focuses on Stan and Delta's relationship, when they could instead have focused on the fact that Stan flooded the entire place and probably killed dozens. It would have been so easy to create a mini-storyline with audio logs where you get to know a character, maybe even multiple, and then their life is cut short as Stan floods the park. So many bewildering choices and missed opportunities.

 

[BrawlMan]

Snip

View attachment 14324

Yet, I would still rather deal with all that, and it's somehow still better than Infinite.

RE9 is great! I finished it last night.

 

[Worgen]

Yet, I would still rather deal with all that.And it's somehow still better than Infinite.

Ugh Bioshock Infinite. Its got so many almost there ideas and ends up being just a massive disappointment, cause it couldn't decide to do just one or 2. It had to have everything so everything is halfbaked.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Yet, I would still rather deal with all that.And it's somehow still better than Infinite.

Disagree, Infinite was bad but at least it was trying something new instead of trying to ruin the story of the first game.

 

[BrawlMan]

Disagree, Infinite was bad but at least it was trying something new instead of trying to ruin the story of the first game.

And it fucked it up even worse, could make up its mind, ann, moore, moore's more or less, stood, backed into the first game's well to make it "good". Also, they streamline the combat and turn it into an almost COD game, with the two weapon limit no one likes. At least Bioshock 2 it is very fun on the gameplay side. Though all fall short to Dead Space Remake. The best System Shock 2 ever made.

 

[Worgen]

Disagree, Infinite was bad but at least it was trying something new instead of trying to ruin the story of the first game.

Don't forget the dlc that put Elisabeth in Rapture.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Don't forget the dlc that put Elisabeth in Rapture.

I never play DLC so it's invisible to me.

 

[Worgen]

I never play DLC so it's invisible to me.

That DLC is better then the main game so you miss out by not playing it. If I remember right.