#I hate playing without a minimap.

[neverendingford]

.

[queerloquial]

anyway I've been playing morrowind lately

- by far my biggest "why..." is wrt how often attacks just. miss. like- okay brief note that I've been playing on godmode bc I got Immediately bored-frustrated by trying to maintain health and stamina while having No magicka regen- okay so I decided to test it out. got in combat with a rat, went in unarmed, just to see how long it took me to punch the rat to death. I went up twenty fucking hand-to-hand levels without landing a single hit, by which point i was bored and just re-equipped my sword for a one hit kill. the miss rate is fucking absurd

- hey speaking of godmode. what the fuck do you mean all it does is give you infinite health/magicka/stamina. why do I still have to count arrows. why do I still have to count carry weight

- I'm not hating the lack of quest markers as much as i expected to. what keeps getting me, though, is that the journal is so nonspecific even about things you-the-character definitely know. I spent fifteen minutes wandering every last layer of vivec city trying to find the damn mages guild again bc i couldn't remember what canton it was in, much less which floor, and my journal could only tell me "go back to the mage's guild in vivec :)". eventually I got frustrated and asked uesp for the answer, and I'm getting the sense that I'm going to spend a Lot of time there bc this game is. not for stupid people

- what i miss most from the other games is map markers. blease put a lil symbol on the minimap when I walk by a cave. I can't tell it's there, otherwise

- maybe the bottom left corner of the map is just comparatively empty. maybe exploration will feel more rewarding as i get further along. maybe there will be literally anything in this formless brown blob of a landscape besides me and all these fuckdamn rats

- how in the fuck do merchants magically know that i've got moon sugar in my pocket but not that i'm selling them stolen goods

- every bandit having a name makes me nervous that by exploring I am accidentally fucking myself over by killing npcs for quests i haven't reached yet

- how tf do i level mercantile. half my time is spent selling shit and yet not a single skill level has been gained

- man oblivion's acrobatics/athletics really upped the effect of leveling compared to this. by hitting 50 skill now I have unlocked the ability to... jump 1 foot in the air and to powerwalk. I miss jumping onto roofs. it's hard to feel like I'm making any progress

- also even with a font replacer i am hurting my eyes with the constant squinting. maybe i need a replacer with a more basic font

- had to turn the voice settings way down bc I can't walk two steps in vivec city without another fuckdamn ordinator telling me "KEEP MOVING" in that loudass gravelly voice. can I make a mod that just completely silences that and "wHAt do you wANt, oUTLANDer?"

- no really why tf did they go with the weirdest possible emphasis in that line

- maybe I should just reinstall oblivion. I'm starting to miss wes johnson's guard voice

[maximuswolf]

All PVP FPS games would be better without minimap spotting

All PVP FPS games would be better without minimap spotting I've never played a PVP FPS game where I was happy that it shows enemies on the minimap. I absolutely hate that the optimal way to play them is by constantly glancing at an ugly UI element instead of actually just looking at what's happening in front of you.It's completely unrewarding and immersion breaking, but using it is necessary since using it's a huge advantage. Relying on your situational awareness is so much more fun.No minimap was always my favourite thing about hardcore servers in Battlefield and why I love light milsims like Insurgency. Submitted September 01, 2024 at 04:20PM by BrunoEye https://ift.tt/hQeFjcJ via /r/gaming

[jesuscrab]

Zelda TOTK makes me miss Death Stranding - an "analisis" (but not really)

Been playing the new hit Zelda game everyone been raving about, becuse i really loved the original. Been playing it for around 15 hours and i really do like it. But it keeps remidning me of Death Stranding, a game i've played for 200 hours last year. So i wanna write a little something descrining my problems with TOTK and my love for DS mechanics.

Read more to read more!!!

So. Death Stranding. Amazing game, at least to me. Not gonna bore you with the details, but it's a game that is fully designed on walking around - that is the main mechanics and gameplay feature - walking from point a to point b in the most efficent way possible. I have never realized how much of the games many mechanics are extremly well designed and thought out until now, when im playing a game without them. DS had so many unique and interesting mechanics that greatly improved exploration and navigation, things that i personally think TOTK has issues with.

The game has a very well designed map, which is not just a 2D png. It's a 3D model which you can tilt, showing you the topograhpy like valleys and mountains. It's a feature that greatly imporves navigation, which is for me a massive problem in TOTK.

It was a problem in BOTW already, but with the addition of sky island it became much more annoying. Putting waypoints on your map sucks. I can't make the point or stamp destinguish the "layer" where is it on, so future me will have to guess what i was trying to signal there. I can't know if a certian area is , becuse there is three seperate floating islands in the way, so i have to make sure each time that im stepping off the right one, since i can't easily check it on the map.

If i put the beacon from the map, it just goes on the highest point on the map, so fuck me if i forget what it was for and starting going on the top of some mountain becuse i could not highlight a cave otherwise.

TOTK just has a problem with navigation. A controversial way to help this would be imo to put a floating - sparkling "line" to your destination, which you could highlight from the map. Death Stranding let's you put a marker basiclly anywhere and it will show you the closest way there - but you can also connect markers yourself, drawing your own path on the map and plan your travels. I really would love a similar feature in TOTK, since i keep putting markers for myself in areas and then have a lot of trouble comming back there again. I love exploring stuff in games - thats why i love the new open world zelda - but this is not fun. It's annoying. They added new things in the game and didint put stuff to accomodate them.

A different thing i miss from death stranding is the compass - in my mind, a greatest open world mechanic idea (right below the self-drawn path i described earlier)

It basiclly just shows you all your markers and mission objectives, display the current distance, and allows you to snap your view dirrectly to them. That feature makes sense in DS since there is no minimap there, but still - i think zelda would benifit from a feature like that. with it's many attractions on the map, it's easy to get extremly sidetracked and even lost. even if i can see the waypoint on my map, it's still a flat png that just tells me the direction and nothing elese, i have no idea if it's in a mountain or a cave. And yes, i could look through the binoculars, but with their limited view they are not really a great navigation tool in my opinion.

I hope this revelation won't make me hate open world games or see them as worse. Death Stranding is a very different breed of an open world game, and i dont think every game should copy it. i just think that it's mechanics of travel are really good features and the new zelda - being a game based on exploration - would grealy benifit from features that improve them, since i think there are flaws in the system.

so ya. thats it. thanks if you read it all.]

play DS. My final messege... goodbye....

(sorry for not including pics - westy e slepy)

[dogcoding]

replaying judgment in anticipation for lost judgment.. i missed this game i forgot just how good it is T_T

[chocoenvy]

"i hate that i still care for you." part 1/3

part two part three

ALL THE SUPPORT ON MY FIRST POST ALMOST KILLED ME I LOVE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YALL??? Anyways, I had wanted to explore more of what i had last time but ended up with a slightly different concept. I hope to build on both concepts seperately in the future but for now have this splurge

Warnings: suicide ideation, cult behavior, slight yandere content

Your head was heavy and swimming with an ocean of thoughts. The schools of fish were being eaten by sharks in your mind, and you were ready to be swallowed alive.

Dragonspine was cold, biting your skin. Your fingers were red and numb. They felt ready to fall off. You thought Teyvat would be different. When you had been randomly transported here out of the blue, you assumed at worst the characters wouldn't know you and how much love and care you had put into them.

But there was a much much worse option.

They hated you. The characters you adored and nurtured from level one to nintey, hated your guts. Why? You asked yourself everyday. Why did they hate you?

You tried to ask, you assumed Jean would be willing to listen to you. She was the acting grand master of the city of freedom after all, so you assumed a fair trial or something came with that. But she chased you out of Mondstat, and you escaped by the skin of your teeth.

Would she have killed me? You wonder sometimes, If I hadn't ran, would she?

Thoughts like that of your bevloved characters... it made it hard to live. The only thing keeping you alive was your own will and it was breaking. You didn't have much of a will in your own world, much less now that literally everyone even the players you had given powerful weapons and artifacts, those you had grinded days for to get them to their full potential.

Everybody you adored hated you.

A sob escaped past your lips and you shivered. Dragonspine was quiet. It wasn't welcoming but neither were the gates of Mondstat, Liyue, or Inazuma. The lack of people just made it better.

A dark part of your mind slithered it's way in the rational. Corrupted your will to live and be strong, injecting doubt into you. Wouldn't it be better to jump down from the top of Dragonspine?

You ignored the thought. Rationel took over quickly as that was it's job. You needed food and shelter. Somewhere nobody would hurt you but you also wouldn't freeze to death.

I wonder... In the corner of your eye, just like on the screen of the game, you could "see" a minimap of where you were. Is Albedo in his lab?

You had nowhere else to go, so you decided why not? The worse that could happen was...

Well the worst that could happen was that you'd die. And that's not that bad is it?

You trudged your way to Albedo's lab. It wasn't that hard considering the teleportation devices all around Teyvat still worked for you, but with your weak body it was absolutely exahausting.

Collapsing in the workshop, you found that it was empty.

Thank God. You sighed.

A fire was lit and you scurried towards it on your hands and knees. Scraping your already battered and scarred skin. You huddled in on yourself and idly watched the fire. Your body grew warmer and your brain became foggier. Eventually, your body curled in on itself and you were out like a light.

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

That was quite a while ago. Albedo had found you and warmed you up, able to recognize you without any trouble. He could feel it. The feeling of you possessing him when you were merely a force that could control characters. When you chose to play him, it was intoxicating, and touching your real body with his hands was gratifying.

With Albedo's support, he and what was left of Khaenri'ah were now your loyal acolytes. Those that had harmed you came knocking on your doorstep, begging for forgivenss. It was enough to get you drunk on power.

But paradise wasn't perfect. Far from it. You sat at a table alone, awaiting the three archons' arrival. Despite the khaenrians' and the abyss princesses' pleas, you needed to do this. You needed to face them.

The door opened, "Your grace-" The immediately began, trying to save their own skin from what they expected to be your wrath.

"Save it." You snapped, facing away from them. You took a deep breath. They'd listen to their god right? They'd listen to a merciless god... right? Your hands shook knowing they were behind you but you had to get it out, "What you did to me was unforgivable. I was- I am so scared to just walk outside! And for what? Just 'cause I look like your god? No- because I am your god! What is up with all of you, you act like children!" You snarled at your own lap, refusing to turn to look at them. You knew what would happen if you did. "I don't care if someone is actually trying to copy my looks, as long as they're not claiming to be me I don't want any harm to befall them. If they claim to be me I will handle them. You will not touch them. Nobody deserves that especially since-" Shit. You sniffled and wipped your nose with your sleeve, "Especially since I cared so much for you. I-" You inhaled shakily, this was the revenge you dreamed for. Right?

Wrong.

"If I was dead, would they all be happy?"

They didn't wait for the rest of your spiel, they shouted their protests at once.

You raised a hand and they fell silent. "I wondered that everyday. I loved you guys so much. You were the characters- the people I nurtured into unstoppable forces not even the abyss could stop." A hiccup escaped your mouth, tears fell from your eyes. You know what'll happen if you look back- You turned your head to gaze at the three archons bowing before your chair, their heads downcast, shame leaking from their eyes in the form of dewy teardrops. You smiled, a small scoff passing your lips, "And yet despite all you've put me through," Your gaze softened, "I still adore you."

[serenasolaris]

So, let’s take this back from the start.

I’ve recently revisited The Binding of Isaac: Repentance both to make sure I haven’t missed anything particularly important about the game and to inform my current viewpoints about it further. Coming back has definitely given me a lot to say about it, and I think the thoughts I formerly had on it are clearer now too. I’ll take this back from the start, and organise myself better to explain my points in an orderly manner.

First, I want to dissect the game’s most superficial gameplay qualities in their current state. I want to talk about the basic gameplay loop of the game and how it works, or more accurately, how it breaks. Then, I think I’ll delve a bit deeper into the complex series of choices that were made throughout the game’s lifespan both as a flash release and as the remake and DLCs that we have today, and finally I could talk about the story, because it’s also bad and I also hate it, but in different ways and for different reasons. For now, and to ease ourselves into the unknown depths below, let’s talk about what lurks in the basement, starting... Now.

The Binding of Isaac (and why everything about it pisses me off)  Part One: Sacrificial 

The Binding of Isaac is a rogue-like action game where you play as a child escaping from his murderous mother by jumping through a trapdoor to the basement and fighting the various evils dwelling within. The basic gameplay is fairly simple.

After picking your character, you start your run in a starting room on the basement floor, and can explore the basement further for things that may later be of use to you in your adventure further down for survival. There’s various types of rooms in the game: for starters, the treasure room, indicated by its crown symbol on the minimap and gilded entrance doorway.

Treasure rooms contain items within them. There are two kinds of items: Active (which charge by 1 per room and take varying amounts of charges to use, having various different on use effects that could prove helpful for the player), and Passive (which provide the player with various types of passive abilities that will aid them all the way through the game and provide various benefits to make life easier for them). These items are divided in 5 qualities, invisible to the player unless mods to display them are installed (as one is here): Qualities 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. The higher the quality, the better the item: Quality 0 items often have borderline useless or ocassionally potentially detrimental effects for the player, while Quality 4 items are often regarded as the best items in the entire game and getting one of them could even mean you’re set for the rest of your run. Here, I got scorpio, a quality 3 item that makes my tear attacks debuff enemies and cause them damage over time for a short period. The specifics don’t really matter, but what does matter is, I got an item that lets me do more damage to things without hitting them. This will become more important later.

Curious viewers may have noticed the strange room right below my starting room. This is a sacrifice room. Currently, we don’t really care about it, but it serves the purpose of allowing the player to take damage for various boons that could prove useful for them later.

Now, we’re going into hostile rooms, and here’s where I dawn the PHD I’ve gotten on this goddamn game for playing it for so long and obsessing over every single minute detail of it.

Wait, no, not that PHD. The other one.

Yeah, that’s more like it. Anyways!

My first few hostile rooms weren’t really great for explaining the basic workings of this game, but this one is. So, allow me to explain what’s going on here and later we’ll backtrack to explain what you guys missed.

Hostile rooms often contain obstacles and ocassionally useful pickup items, but more importantly, they contain enemies! That’s why they’re hostile rooms. Now, here’s where we start discussing terms of Isaac Theory (TM) that I myself used my very hard-working braincells to come up with, instead of having them handed to me by the game in a silver platter. Enemies have two characteristics attached to them: The chaser/clutter spectrum, and their difficulty.  The chaser/clutter spectrum tells us whether the enemy is more of a chaser, AKA an active danger that aims to be what actually harms the player by attacking them directly, or more of a clutter, AKA a more passive attacker that via long-ranged bullet attacks or by just moving in weird patterns around the room and dealing contact damage aims to make the situation harder for the player to navigate and thus make it easier for the chasers to do their work, or maybe even get some hits in by itself. Difficulty, on the other hand, is fairly straightforward: After we’ve assessed what an enemy’s job is, we just ask ourselves how good they are at their job, AKA how much difficulty they bring to the room. Let’s assess the bad guys in this room to practice!

This guy right here is a Pooter. He’s a little fly dude that doesn’t move much around the room and fires shots directly at the player. The blood splatter in the wall is actually from a shot he fired and missed when i was further down. I would say he’s more of a clutter than a chaser, because while he does aim to directly hit the player with his bullets, they’re easy to dodge and the pooter itself doesn’t pose much of a threat. He does, however, force the player to move, which could prove to make certain chasers harder to deal with. He’s not that hard, but definitely one of the guys we’re watching out for when we’re in the first few floors, so I’d say he has like, a medium difficulty for the stage he’s in and for his job. Moving on...

These two guys right here are Level 2 Flies. They’re angry fly dudes that move very frantically around the room, chasing directly at the player and doing small bounces off of walls they hit. They’re fairly fast and unpredictable, so I’d catalogue them as relatively high difficulty chasers. They have higher health and speed than most basement foes, and they’re directly out for you specifically. 

Now, we already know there’s a few somewhat difficult enemies in this room. There is, however, one saving grace for us: These guys don’t help each other a lot. The pooter’s way of cluttering, firing bullets directly at the player, isn’t going to change much when the player is already running circles to get away from the two flies chasing them, so the clutter doesn’t really put much work for the chasers in his team. This is a fairly average basement floor in my opinion; a few enemies working against you, but not really in synergistic ways that make them that difficult to deal with. So let’s deal with them.

Beating hostile rooms gives you useful pickups, and ocassionally chests. Pickups include red hearts (which keep you alive and can be used in certain places to trade with NPCs, but you can only pick up if you’ve got the heart containers to accomodate for them), coins (which you can use at shops to buy useful items exclusive to the shop pool, or at arcades to gamble or donate them to NPCs), bombs (which you can use as an emergency attack measure for some decent set damage, to get obstacles like rocks out of your way, or to discover secret rooms), and keys (which you can use to open locked chests and doors in order to maximise the amount of items and pickups that you’re able to get in your run). There’s also some other pickups, but we’ll talk about them as we see them. Here, we got an unlocked chest. Let’s open it up and see what’s inside!

Few bombs. Hm. Unimpressive, but useful. Anyways, let’s go back to see what I was talking about before.

This is a non-hostile room, because those also exist! It contained a red chest surrounded by a few campfires when I got to it, but I put out the campfires out of instinct when I saw them. Anyways, red chests are different from regular ones, having a different pool of pickups and even items or enemies that could come out when they’re opened. Opening a red chest may even teleport you to a special room we’ll talk about later! Let’s see what’s in this one.

...Looks like that was a teleport. Inconvenient, because I wanted to talk about this room later, and it also kind of hurts to see so many good items when I’m in floor one and can’t take them all, but oh well. Let me explain.

This is a devil room. That red chest was one of the ways to get here, but you can also get here by beating a floor and its boss without taking any red heart damage (starting from Basement 2; they don’t appear after the boss in Basement 1 but you can still get to them through other methods). They contain some very powerful items you can get by trading your red heart containers for them, which is a process that also has the risk of losing them all and dying. We have three, so we can probably take one of these and stay safe. I’m going for the funny laser beam.

Brimstone, the item I just got, is one of those quality 4 items that I told you beforehand were some of the best in the game, and for good reason: Brimstone replaces your basic tear attacks with a laser that can hit enemies many times, can hit many enemies at one time, and can also go straight through obstacles in the room. It makes you deal more damage and makes it easier for you to deal damage under cover, so it’s pretty easy to see why it’s quality 4, but it also has some synergies that could just win you the game right then and there. Let’s just take it for now and leave.

Oh, but before we do, I’m going to put out these campfires by attacking them. The red ones shoot at me, so it could be risky, but destroying them has a chance of giving me useful pickups, so I don’t see why not just go ahead and do it.

...I got a half heart I no longer have room for. Nice.

Anyways, on to the next special room.

This is a shop. Shops have various useful goods in stock, as well as items from their own exclusive pool that have various uses. Shops also have a donation machine (or, less frequently, a restock machine, which we didn’t get this time), which is a machine that allows you to donate your money into it. This has various uses: Donating enough (up to 999 coins) for the first time can unlock various useful items for the shop item pool and even give you useful shop upgrades that make shops better in your future runs. They’re one of this game’s many legacy systems that give you an incentive to do something in this run to get something on a later one. But I already did that and got all the unlocks, and you don’t have to *keep* the machine at 999 coins for the shops to be at their max upgrade level. So allow me to demonstrate the machine’s other function: You can also blow them up with a bomb. 

This helps make up for runs in which you see a really good shop item but you can’t afford it due to bad luck. However, in true rogue-like fashion, the donation machine explosion payouts are also random, and I got a really crappy 6 coins this time. Still enough to buy what I wanted, but oh well.

Now, remember what I said before about devil rooms only appearing if you avoid all red health damage? That’s not entirely true: there’s still a chance for them to appear even if you take red heart damage, albeit it’s significantly reduced. However, you don’t have to no-hit entire floors to avoid losing this chance. You can also buy soul hearts! They protect your red health from taking hits and can be taken while having no heart containers. They’re a sort of buffer health you can use to help make up for mistakes. However, they’re more scarse than red health, so protecting them should be a priority. 

On to the next room!

Remember how I said bombs could be used to discover secret rooms? Well, using bombs in certain walls can reveal the floor’s secret or super secret room. Each floor has one of each, although some effects make them have more, and often floors have more than one possible spot for it to spawn in, but if you do find one it usually has some pretty worthwhile goods. This one has a nickel, which counts for 5 cents, but it also has some shopkeeper mummies which I could blow up for a chance to get even more cash. It’s risky, though, because they’re not guaranteed. Again, the keeper mummies dropping money is a gamble, because this is a rogue-like where random things happen. Keep that in mind.

Next special room, then!

Wait, wait, wait. Before that, and since it helps me drive my point about randomness further in, this is a pill. It’s a consumable you can use by pressing Q. Pills are characterised by the fact that they’re re-randomised and re-shuffled every run you do: there’s just a bunch of pill colours and a bunch of pill effects, and sometimes certain pills will get certain effects. Some effects are beneficial, some effects are detrimental, and finding more than one pill of the same colour in the same run makes later ones be identified with their name and effect before you use them, but the first pill you use of that colour is, again, a gamble. Let’s see what this gamble gets us.

I tried to get a screenshot of the exact moment I used the pill, but the game ups brightness to hell for a few frames when you do that so I couldn’t get a good looking one. Anyways, that was a shot speed up pill. It makes my shot speed stat go up, which makes my tears move faster. However, since I have brimstone, which is a laser that covers its entire trajectory instantly, it doesn’t really do much for me. In fact, it does nothing. That was useless! Let’s go to the next room now.

This is a boss room. You can tell by the fancy transition and the health bar. This is where my journey for this one floor ends! 

Here we got the Duke of Flies. This guy is basically a big DVD screensaver that bounces around the screen, summoning attack flies and the ocassional pooter to actually fight the player. He’s more of a clutter boss, which is a weird exclusive role for a boss to have, but he does make up for it by summoning chasers.

The flies he summons flash grey, red, and black, and they’re the basement’s most generic enemy: attack flies. They have special behaviour in this fight: some of them stay behind with him to cover him from shots, but most of them go right after the player. They’re pathetically slow and frail, and can’t take advantage of even the most powerful of clutters. They are, I feel comfortable saying, the easiest chasers in the entire game. Their whole defense gimmick in this fight doesn’t even work either because I have an item that pierces through enemies and lets me shoot a laser straight through everything in the arena. Oh well.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have much to say here. He sometimes summons pooters as well, which we already discussed, but overall, this is literally the easiest boss in the basement and I’m confident saying the easiest in the entire game. I didn’t even expect to get this guy as my boss, because I wanted to see if I got some other one that gave me more to discuss, but I’ve got nothing to say here. I’ll just kill him and explain what happens afterwards.

After you kill a boss, you get a few things: A boss room item, which is an item pulled from, again, its own item pool, that contains various health and stat upgrades. I got marrow this time, which gives me a bone heart. Bone hearts are basically red heart containers, but they can go after your soul hearts and taking damage with them doesn’t reduce your devil chance. Also, if you take a hit while a bone heart is your foremost heart and it has no red health in it, the bone heart just breaks immediately and is lost. Anyways, the boss room also spawns a trap door to the next floor, and an openable doorway to the alternative path, which we’re not going to take because I want to keep this straightforward.

This is the floor transition. We may talk about the nightmare sequences that play in them later when I’m talking about the lore of the game, but it doesn’t really matter right now.

We’re in the Basement 2 now. Every “chapter” in the game except for some final exceptions has two floors, meaning you’ll see two basements per run if you survive the first one. There’s also some alternative floors you can unlock for every chapter and which randomly replace the regular ones: this Basement 2 or even my Basement 1 could’ve been replaced by the Cellar or Burning Basement.

New special room! This is a curse room. It deals damage when you go in and out, but some of them have special rewards inside of them, like items or red chests. Some of them are also completely useless but let’s not worry about that for now, it’s a gamble like everything else. I’ll just go in.

I could check that red chest in the middle by squeezing my hitbox through the spikes diagonally, but I don’t feel like taking that risk so I’ll just check the other two ones.

Oh great, it’s just troll bombs. These guys explode in your face and the big ones even try to chase you around before doing so. They’re also indicative of the developer’s sense of humour: there’s a few things in this game that are intended to randomly “troll” and screw over the player. That was useless! Moving on.

Welcome to the miniboss room! These rooms have no visual difference in the outside, but once you go in you will find yourself in a battle against one of the 7 Deadly Sin minibosses, one of the 7 Super Deadly Sin minibosses, or the Ultra Pride deadly sin miniboss. In this case, we got Lust! She’s a high difficulty chaser that builds up speed by running straight towards you, and which can be stifled by hiding behind the obstacles in the arena. Also, yes, lust is confirmed to be female, and to my knowledge, she’s the only deadly sin miniboss to have been. We might talk about that later...

Miniboss rooms count as hostile rooms, so we got a soul heart as reward for beating lust, but lust herself also dropped an item: The Virus! It’s a speed up, which means taking it will allow me to run faster and dodge attacks more easily (or flat out just be able to dodge certain attacks, but more on that later), and it also allows me to poison enemies by touching them.

That’s all kind of meh for me. The Virus is part of a set transformation called Spun, which means if I take it and then find other 2 items part of that transformation I’ll transform into... a hyperventilating buff Isaac with a thousand mile stare? I don’t really know what this transformation is supposed to be, honestly, although you get it by using 3 syringe items so I guess it could be alluding to steroid usage. It’s just one of the weird things this game does I guess. However, it also gives me a few stat ups and a pill, and since syringe items are fairly common boss drops, I think I’ll take it for the random chance of getting something better later on. 

Anyways, I’ll start skipping over some of the stuff we’ve already discussed. I may buy an item in the shop or get one in the treasure room but unless highlighted here it’s really not fundamentally important. I’ve already gone over most of the basics anyways.

To go back to what I said about randomness, this is a quality 0 item. It makes enemies be attracted to my tears, also known as the things I shoot from my face, which could potentially make situations spiral as everything is pulled towards me. The attraction gets stronger at further points, but that’s still not too useful for me and makes enemies unpredictable, so it’s time for be to demonstrate my active item.

By defeating a boss with a completely different character, Isaac gets the D6 as a starting item, which is a quality 4 active with a recharge of 6 rooms that allows you to re-roll item pedestals you don’t find convenient. So I can just get rid of this thing, and see what else I get!

Fast bombs. Hm. It’s not detrimental but it’s not tremendously useful either, it simply allows me to place more bombs faster. It, however, gives me 6 bombs, and since I’m low on those and would need to beat 6 hostile rooms to re-roll it again, I’ll take it. An item of quality 1 is still an upgrade over quality 0.

And here we have our first locked chest! You can use keys to open them, and they contain pickups or the ocassional item, as happened here. Since it’s in a secret room, I could re-roll it and get an item from the secret room pool which has a bunch of game breaking items, but I have nowhere to get charges for my D6 now so... I guess I’ll take it.

Oh hey, an interesting boss: The Fallen can randomly appear on any floor as the chapter boss after you’ve entered a devil room, and instead of dropping an item from the boss room pool it drops an item from the much more powerful devil room pool after being defeated. If you’re lucky to get this guy, you might get some pretty good things out of him! 

...Or you might get a low damage quality 1 familiar that follows behind you and fires shots at a lower rate than your base one. Oh well, at least this is also part of a transformation set. Let’s check the devil room now.

Ignore the NPC, he’s not really important and just allows you to gamble in exchange for red health. Anyways, one of these items guarantees you’ll get a devil room after every boss fight no matter what: you can take red health damage or have a lower change from having found a devil room on the last floor and you’ll still get one. The other allows you to... walk in a circle to create a pentagram on the floor that deals damage to enemies that step on it. 

I think I’ll take the goat head and its devil chance, and head onwards to the next floor.

And we’re onto the next chapter: The caves. Not many new things are going to happen as we keep going, so I’ll just re-cap what we’ve learnt about this game from what we’ve seen.

The Binding of Isaac is an agressively random game. Your damage, the safety of your attacks, the rate at which you attack, the speed you have to run from enemies which have their own set speeds, everything can randomly vary. Just as I got brimstone and scorpio floor 1, effectively multiplying my early damage, I could also have gotten extremely bad items and harder rooms. This is not much of an issue right now, it’s just what the game is going for: test your luck, get good items that make things easier, and utilise your skill to smooth things out if luck doesn’t really help. If you’re really unlucky, the game gives you the option to simply ignore detrimental items, or to buy soul health, or use bombs against bosses, but all these things are, again, coming at a cost: a cost of either pickups (in the case of purchasing health or using bombs for battle), or the opportunity cost of losing out on a treasure room just because the item in it could’ve made the game harder to deal with. Clutters and chasers cooperate in order to fight the player, and it is up to them to avoid them and to their luck to give them resources good enough to be able to deal with their enemies in a timely manner. The player’s fortune will be tested as they delve into the basement and this is all demonstrated by a fundamental part of the game: The R Key. That’s the name of an item in the game itself, but only because the command tied to the R key on the keyboard became so commonplace it almost turned into a community meme. R stands for Reset, and holding R at any point in one of your runs allows you to reset to test your luck on a new seed that could give you better items and more abundant resources to survive with. However, there is also one more way of maximising the resources at your disposal for survival: minmaxing.

There are various ways the player can utilise their resources in the game, from buying things at the shop or opening secret room doors to finding NPCs and machines dedicated to gambling resources in order to obtain other useful items and resources, allowing players to utilise their wit in order to gain the upper hand. Players can fight bosses for items or enemies for pickups in challenge rooms, they can gamble away in the many machines of arcades, and use sacrifice rooms to give up health for pickups, soul health, and angel room chance, which makes angel rooms able to replace devil rooms, providing an item pool with arguably better items at the cost of no health, also obtainable by skipping devil rooms altogether throughout a run or by using certain item effects. Every run, then, becomes a test of the game’s knowledge of the game and their fortune as they make their way through quick little rooms and climactic dangerous but also short boss fights, minmaxing their way into making up for where their luck didn’t pull through or just getting lucky enough to get loads of great items and gain a crushing advantage against their enemies. Pretty simple rogue-like design, but pretty effective too. The game tries not to focus too much on its fairly simple combat system because of this: it knows its strengths reside elsewhere and decides to put all of its work towards making the player feel like a powerful mastermind minmaxing themselves into godhood instead of a brave hero dancing with death every single encounter, because it realises it does not have the tools to do the latter. This is how Isaac works on a fundamental level, and this is the game I started playing and liking quite a while ago now.

Having learnt all this, allow me to speak to you directly as an author. Originally, this post was going to be longer and talk about certain bosses and how they work with the game’s design, and the one that starts breaking it. Due to... unforeseeable events relating to Tumblr saving wrong and accidentally Nuking Like 4 Paragraphs Of Text I Wrote, I lost some of my work and a screenshot I had. That’s honestly for the better, as I realise now what I was writing could fit better on the next part, and this one could serve as a mere introduction to how the game functions, but it is a significant setback relating to the things I actually wanted to say... It is what it is. I’m going to cut this part off here, then, and give you time to process it, while I go work on the follow-up about how the game utilises its own design and how it stops doing that for some ungodly reason. Thanks for sticking with me all the way through this, and I’m sorry this is more of an introduction to Isaac than a real discussion, I was originally going to go on about other things but, again, that unfortunately can’t be the case anymore.

In any case, this has been SerenaOculis, tune in next time for more insane ramblings, and until then, I’ll see you guys later.

[ff7central]

Mod Miri here! Today on the blog we have Sephy (she/her), who can be found here on Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. 

General FF7 Questions

Who is your favourite character from the FFVII setting? What do you love about them?

I love every single playable character from the main game, but my favorite is without a doubt, Cloud Strife. He's so unlike a typical RPG protagonist. He's very standoffish and rude at the beginning, but you start to grow to really like him the more you play the game. The amount of vulnerability he shows throughout the game makes him very relatable, I think. He's the party leader and he is strong when it's needed, but he can crack under pressure. I could talk all day about Cloud and what I love about him, but I actually did a dash game on my Cloud blog where I gushed about him. It's here: https://defiant-ex-soldiers.tumblr.com/post/626278527072878592/lets-start-a-chain-of-sweetness

Favourite party (three person team) idea when playing FFVII? They don’t have to actually work mechanically (or even be possible in the game), just that you like the idea of them together as a fighting party.

When I was young, my main post Disk 2 party was an odd one. It was Cloud, Yuffie, and Red XIII. Cloud had to be in my party, Red was in my party because I loved cats and he was a giant cat, how could I not? I didn't particularly care about Yuffie, but I needed a girl to replace Aerith as the main healer.

I didn't really like Tifa at the time because I shipped Cloud and Aerith (and the LTD taught me back then that if you loved that ship you must hate Tifa. I have long since gotten over that way of thinking, but I was a young impressionable kid back then.) I don't think I have an ideal team, I just love all the characters so much. Honestly I experiment with party composition a lot when I play.

Is there a headcannon or AU you want to see more of?

AUs that change the fundamentals of a story fascinate me. My first fanfiction was a Zack lives fic where the direction the story goes in is drastically changed by the way Zack ends up living. I still find myself cringing at it sometimes, but I also still adore the fic just because it was my first. A more recent one involved Zack getting his hands on some Shinra R&D special Materia and being teleported forward in time where he meets Advent Children Cloud. Any of the fics involving changing the Nibelhiem incident somehow immediately interest me. I'm a big fan of the lore the game establishes already, so reading how fic artists take that world apart and put it back together, but differently, is exciting for me.

Do you have a favourite memory associated with FF7 (any part of compilation) or something particular you did while playing (such as what you named the characters, or how you arranged your materia) that you think is unique that you'd like to share?

I have so many. I have been playing Final Fantasy VII since I was around 9 years old (even if I probably shouldn't have been playing it at that age). I don't remember much at all of my first playthrough, but there have been very many playthroughs after that. I do remember that I always named my Chocobos after the main party. My favorite was a black one named Yuffie and I made her dance on the minimap if a song I liked came on the radio. I also remember that I started playing for the first time after we had moved houses, so I didn't have the memory card for the family's PS1, so I replayed the first mission over and over again until we found it. 

Once, when I was young I got locked out of my room while playing through the wall-market section of the game. So I got embarrassed because my family could hear the Don Corneo music while they were trying to unlock the door. Another time, I tried to fall asleep with my old CRT TV on because I thought the Chocobo farm music would help me sleep better.

Cloud always had the lightning Materia and he also always had the Chocobo Lure Materia because I thought it was funny and it made sense to young me because his hair resembled chocobo tail feathers. 

One quirk I keep to this day has to be the two name changes I make whenever I start FFVII. Aeris is changed to Aerith, of course. There's also Red XIII whose name I change to Nanaki, because I didn't understand why he would want to keep the name that Hojo gave him and not his real name. FFVII has always been a constant part of my life. I remember long car rides where I would do nothing but play FFVII on my PSP. I remember back when I only had it on PS2, setting it up in a hotel room and trying to beat Carry Armor there (I didn't and I remained stuck there for a while longer). I remember playing it on my PSP during class after I'd finished my work.

I remember back when I was starting middle school, I got a teacher into FFVII and she put a special question on one of our tests, just for me. I remember making a poetry book that had really childish drawing and poems about FFVII. I remember finally beating Crisis Core, huddled in the corner of my bunk bed, unable to keep my eyes off of what was going on, and tearing up because the ending was so sad. That isn't even the half of it, but I've gone on for so long. As you can see, I have so many fond memories of Final Fantasy VII.

Creator Questions

Who has been the most difficult character to write/draw? Who has been the easiest?

Recently I started my first Turk fic and it starred Rude. I found that his muse didn't come as easy as the others. Usually I'm good at writing most of the cast of FFVII. Cloud is the easiest for me to write because I just know him so well.

What’s your ideal creating environment? Background noise/silence, indoors/outdoors, desk/couch, etc.?

At my desk with music playing! Fun fact, I haven't had an actual office chair to sit in for years. My computer was next to my bed at my old living space and now I sit on a couch when I'm at the computer in my new one.

What’s your creative process look like? Pantser/Emotive Writer/Gardener or Planner/Structured Writer/Architect? (Do you outline or just go with the flow?) If you’re an artist, do you do a lot of sketches, or just dive right in? Backgrounds first, or the main focal point? Multiple layers or all in one?

I usually just go where the fic wants to take me. A lot of the time I do jot down an outline, especially if I know I need to do it in a set amount of time, like for the Fic exchange or Whumptober.

What do you do when you get stuck on a project?

I usually set it aside and work on something else or try and brainstorm if it's something that I need to do in a certain period of time. Oftentimes I'll do something else and let my mind wander. Most of the plot of my Turkfic I came up with at work while my mind was on autopilot.

Which of your works is the most memorable to you? I don’t necessarily mean favourite or best work, it could be the work that taught you the most through making it or that holds a special reason in its creation. Drop a link.

"To Break like Time". This fic was my first ever fic for an exchange. The spring tester for Gaia Santa, "FFVII Secret Spring" to be exact. I'm not entirely sure what came over me when I was writing this fic, but I got it done in a weekend and edited a few days after, at the very beginning of the challenge. Despite how easy of a time I had writing it, I was nervous about posting it. It's that fic where Zack wakes up in post AC times with a Shinra R&D secret materia in his hands. Not exactly everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed the challenge it gave. There are several parts I would change, but overall, I enjoy the story, even if it does get kind of weird at the end.

It’s hard for me to go through everything you’ve done to pick stuff to mention. Is there a particular piece you’d like plugged, other than the one in the last question?

The Night that Nibelheim Burned is my Gaia Santa fic from last year. I really enjoyed the way everything came together. It was a harder fic to write, but it was worth it. Kunsel was the character on the docket that I was new to playing this time. This fic is another one of those fics about what Kunsel's doing while Zack is on the run. He never gave up hope, no matter how much time went by, and I think this fic really shows that.

Community/Fandom Questions

What aspects of fandom spark the most joy for you?

Just, how creative this fandom is. I've always been a fan of a lot of the art the fandom has made, and several of the fics too. It always blows my mind just how many new ideas that someone can come up with for such an old game (as well as the entries in the compilation). It inspires me to write my own fics and create my own piece of that to share with everyone.

I love seeing long rambling theory posts about the OG and the other compilation games on my dash. I also love how silly the fandom can be sometimes :3 I also love how every character is loved by someone no matter how minor.

Is there something you'd like to see more of in the community?

Can't have enough of people being nice to each other! Spread around the art you love (with the proper credits of course), Recommend that fic you love to other people! Leave Comments on people's fics, even if you don't have much to say! Those actions have the potential to make someone's day, and I think that's amazing.

Anything you’d like to say to the community?

The LTD (Love Triangle Debate) is bogus, and for a long time, I was scared that it would be revived with the release of the Remake. I was worried there would be people fighting tooth and nail over who Cloud should be with. As far as I know, that hasn't happened yet, but maybe I'm just in a different circle.

As for me, I quit the LTD when I was a kid and started playing Crisis Core because I started shipping Cloud and Zack. You can even see it in my first fanfic where I adamantly refused to admit that I liked them together as a couple, but you can see with the way I had Cloud and Zack interact with each other (Especially in the last chapter) how much they really loved each other. 

Anyway, back to the LTD. I'm a firm believer in shipping what you want. I have a million different ships with Cloud and all of them are valid in my mind. I don't ship because I want something to be canon, I ship because I like the story that could come about from having the two be together.  

Here is one of my favorite posts on the subject of shipping: https://sephyathredon.tumblr.com/post/617204499133661185/sunandrainfic-brief-note-to-new-ff7-folks

Is there a work belonging to someone else that you’d like to plug?

 "Rejoice although you will not surivive" by PUNK MENACE 

I enjoy seeing Cloud get whumped and this fic has some good whump and an interesting aftermath of that whump. Heed the warnings though, this is not a light fic.

Thanks so much for joining me, Sephy! It is great working with you during the annual events! 

Interested in participating in a FF7Central interview, or nominating someone? Check out the form here.

[kyndaris]

The Cost of Honour

What would you sacrifice to save the lives of the people you love and the home you cherish? How long would you be able to hold onto your morals when faced with an enemy that is impossible to win against? In the last exclusive for the PlayStation 4, Ghost of Tsushima from the developer Sucker Punch, asks these hard hitting questions and many more as it follows the journey of Jin Sakai in his quest to drive out the brutal Mongols from the island of Tsushima.

Considering the pedigree of Sucker Punch and chafing to dive into the world of Feudal Japan, Ghost of Tsushima was an easy buy for me. Immersed in the world of the Yakuza series and delighting occasionally in fresh new anime, it seemed imperative that I see what this game could bring to the fore. After all, the game looked very much like Assassin’s Creed. I liked Assassin’s Creed. And hadn’t the fans of the Assassin’s Creed franchise been clamouring for something in a similar vein for a very long time?

Once I booted it up, I was immediately struck by the visual representation. The colours were vibrant (though one could choose to play in black and white mode) and coupled with the particle effects, I could have sworn I had been pulled into a cinematic world. The opening scene used this to great effect and proved to be a masterful attempt of immersing me immediately with the world. As Jin raced down the beach, I thoroughly enjoyed the rush that came with swinging my katana at anyone that was foolish enough to stand in my way. Yet, it is not long before it becomes exceedingly clear that the samurai have lost the battle. Many are slain on the beach and Lord Shimura, Jin Sakai’s uncle and jito (land steward) of Tsushima is captured. Jin, having taken a couple of arrow shots in the back, is left for dead.

Enter Yuna. It isn’t clear why she singled out our protagonist as being alive and pulled him away to nurse him back to health. 

As the prologue continued, I wondered if she was questioning her choice of companion as Jin, armed with only his sword and a broken piece of armour went to confront the Khan at Castle Kaneda, in a desperate bid to rescue his uncle. This first attempt is met with failure and Jin is essentially yeeted off the bridge. Yes. I know. I used the word ‘yeeted.’ I’m basically roasting my own hands over hot coals as I type this. 

Despite plummeting what looked like several hundred metres down into the water below, Jin manages to survive. The man, it seems, is almost unkillable. You could say...he’s a ghost. Badum tss. I’ll see myself out now.

From a discouraging defeat, Jin, however, vows to avenge his fallen samurai brethren and rescue his uncle from the clutches of the evil Mongol invaders. Here, too, was when my journey to collect everything and complete all the side stories began.

Unfamiliar with the works of Kurosawa Akira, I can not rightly say if the narrative nestled in Ghost of Tsushima’s maze of collectibles plays upon the tropes of those that came before. What I did manage to glean was a story of revenge and hate, the cost of war and the values embodied by the notion of ‘samurai.’ With his back to the wall, Jin Sakai must adapt if he hopes to win. Much like Yuna’s speech at the start of the game, he and Lord Shimura have forgotten what it was like to face someone stronger and smarter than they were. If Tsushima and its people hoped to survive, instead of throwing away their lives, they needed to change their tactics.

In the early stages, Jin is shown to grapple with the idea of going in quietly and silently stabbing people in the back. But after the first mission and the first outpost, he was free of the burdens that were his old code of honour. I suppose in that sense, there is a degree of dissonance between the narrative and the play. Alas, I couldn’t have cared less as I went from camp to camp, observing the leaders and unlocking new technique points.

The end of Act 2 and the beginning of Act 3, however, is when Jin Sakai’s actions finally catch up to him. Instead of following through with his uncle’s plan of rebuilding the bridge at Castle Shimura after an explosion killed countless soldiers and allies, he poisons the Mongols drink in a bid to save the lives of his comrades. Classic war crime manoeuvre. Learning from this, however, the Mongols use this against the people of Tsushima as well.

It is this devastation that we see after Jin escapes from his uncle’s stronghold, desperate to free the people from the Mongol’s iron grip. Despite the gruesome nature of it all, it helped put Jin’s actions into a different light. By making the enemy aware of a new weapon, could he have possibly doomed his own people?

Subsequently, when the Khan is killed and Jin is about to face his father figure, it makes sense for Shimura to point out many of his misdeeds. Can the people of Tsushima really be saved if Jin’s actions undermine the authority of those in power? What of the stories that paint him as a ten foot demon with eyes that glow in the dark?

So, it came as no surprise when Lord Shimura asked for a warrior’s death. And wishing to be the dutiful son, no matter how painful it would be, I granted it. One last ‘honourable’ act.

The gameplay in Ghost of Tsushima initially proved to be a challenge, although that was mostly due to the fact that I had to readjust my understanding of my controls. Navigating without a minimap in the corner or a HUD showing me the general directions of north, south, east and west also took some time to adjust to. I don’t think I’ve ever just ‘followed the wind’ when it came to video games before. But, because of that, it allowed me to actually keep my eyes focused on the screen in front of me rather than the top right/ left corner. I could actually take in the scenery instead of being solely focused on clearing out the fog of war.

As for the actual combat, the controls were incredibly intuitive. Square for a normal attack, triangle for heavy. L1 to block and circle to dodge. Where it seemed like the developers should have stopped a little when it came to the variety of options available to the player was mapping R2 as the interactions button - but also the stance and quick throw wheel.

Traversal also proved to be fun and because the HUD wasn’t as cluttered as I was used to, it made exploration easy. Equipped with the Traveler’s Outfit as soon as the game had started also made it incredibly easy to start hunting down collectibles and feeding my urge to see every nook and cranny that was on display. What pained me, however, was the fact that it took me a while to realise that I needed to progress the story and obtain the grappling hook before I could complete a few of the shrines in the first area. And to obtain a few choice head gear.

My only other gripe with the game is that my poor Nobu was felled so swiftly at the start of the third act. And the thin brown horse that served as its replacement was not the replacement I had hoped for. Thankfully, Yuna was able to gift me with another horse - which I named Sora - but my heart still goes out to the faithful Nobu.

Why do you have to kill all of my faithful steeds, video games? I was distraught when Red Dead Redemption 2 did it. Appalled when Shimmer was caught in an explosion in The Last of Us Part II and now...this?

The side characters and side stories also proved to be entertaining distractions over the course of the long journey to free Tsushima. While Masako’s revenge plot was a hollow echo of the pain Jin faced, it was Norio’s burning of the Mongol camp that left me frightened of the legacy of the ghost. At least the ending of Sensei Ishikawa’s story felt a little more redemptive and filled wit hope.

And, after IMDBing the cast, I was gladdened by the fact that many of the voice actors chosen for the game were Asian Americans. Jin Sakai was actually voiced by a Japanese man in the English dub! Imagine that!

Ghost of Tsushima is an excellent open-world game that hews quite closely to the more recent Assassin’s Creed formula. Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed my time exploring Feudal Japan, inconsistencies and all! My favourite part of it was collecting Mongol artefacts, records and learning a little about each clan banner. The combat also provided a few surprises, although the duels were a little tedious in the latter half. With the world still unable to quite shake the virus that still threatens many of our loved ones, it’s fun to actually dive into this fantastical and historical inaccurate world that is Ghost of Tsushima. 

[vroenis]

Lost Legacy Exemplifies Naughty Dog’s Cultural Crisis

There’s a discussion about Ocean’s 8 that positions its existence around whether or not it's necessary as a counterpoint to the Ocean’s reboot - the Ocean’s Cinematic Universe - if you will (what a world we live in) - that it was only made as a gender flip of the reboot that spawned two sequels, three films in total cast almost entirely with men.

My perspective is that as much as I generally enjoyed the Ocean’s reboots for what they were, Ocean’s Eleven should have been a cast entirely with women in the first place.

The heroes we both need and deserve.

Massive spoilers for the original 1960 Lewis Milestone version and the Steven Soderbergh one in 2001 of Ocean’s Eleven - Soderbergh’s flip is of-course that they get to keep the money at the end so that they have to potentially give it back in the sequel he knew he’d be able to make, whereas I doubt Milestone knew he’d ever get a sequel back in the early 60′s so the rub for film-making back then is to burn the money at the end. Nevertheless even for the early 2000′s, the boldest of moves would have been to cast it with women, not to be progressive but also to be progressive, tho that’s still an absurd thought that to cast women is progressive - but to be smart. Ocean’s 8 is a fantastic film, deftly written, paced, acted, shot and edited. Would the world have responded to it in like-kind? I know how *I* would have responded to it, I think you can answer for yourself how societal cultures may have responded at any point from 2001 thru to now. In any case, I have Ocean’s 8 on blu-ray. I love it.

A reader asked me whether I’d played Uncharted: The Lost Legacy after kindly reading through my bludgeoning of Uncharted 4, and seeing as they were patient enough to endure that blood-letting, I felt I owed them and probably Naughty Dog the time of day to give Uncharted-And-A-Half a chance, and I’m really glad I did. Fair warning, there’s a lot I didn’t like about Lost Legacy, and there’s going to be some more pain - a lot of pain. I don’t think any of my tumblr audience is quite on the rest of my socials, but anyone who’s connected to me anywhere else on the Wire was subject to my frustrations as I played thru the game on Saturday, including the blurred image of my Google Keep notes I took while playing the game in preparation for this journal. I keep notes now.

Nevertheless, I can say that on the assumption that the Uncharted series is wrapped, or at least in the narrative arc with these characters as we know them, that Lost Legacy is easily without question my favourite Uncharted game by far.

On that assumption that Uncharted is more or less done, now’s as good a time as any to take a top-down look at the franchise as a whole. I know I already did a fair bit of that in the last piece, but some broader thoughts on what the series does and says have solidified while playing Lost Legacy, and I’ll discuss them as a lead-in to my thoughts on the game.

Again - this is going to be riddled with spoilers for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and most likely the entire Uncharted series, so if you’ve not played them and are interested in doing so, or don’t want to see them heavily critiqued, please stop here.

The first game was released in 2007 and was apparently in development for roughly three years. What was happening up to and around 2004 to 2007? September 11 had happened in 2001, the world was at war in the Middle East in Afghanistan and second invasion of Iraq had begun in 2003, Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005 - the same year the IRA ended armed conflict in Northern Ireland, 2005 saw the outbreak of H5N1 Avian Flu - topical right now. There are so many more, I can’t list them all here - lots of momentous events that in some way or another highlight community awareness in some way - that’s probably a bit of an obtuse statement but hopefully it’ll string together in a sec. What struck me and a bunch of my friends odd about the first, then the second and then somehow every Uncharted game since, is that Naughty Dog seem to choose an ethnicity for their antagonists and scratch the surface of “what if this element of their cultural violence is bad”, but then leave it so shallow that it remains a caricature and comes off as casually and carelessly racist. The first game frames the theme around Nazis, but the actual enemies are anything but. Yes, they’re intended to be mercenaries, but they’re hardly nondescript, they’re absolutely of very specific ethnicity.

From the second game onward, Naughty Dog seem to want to make use of real world settings and do some nuanced research on actual sociopolitical conflict and I always feel uneasy about how its presented. Lost Legacy begins much the same way and I worried about the tone going in. An active war-zone in India as gravitas to your setting that is then almost completely abandoned until the very end? This is my problem with how the writers treat setting in Uncharted. They use very real conflicts that have real-world consequences for people in which actual lives are lost to inject gravity into their narrative and then quickly discard it for the sake of shenanigans once the wise-cracking starts when the tone shifts gear and the characters themselves take centre-stage in the foreground.

Here’s the thing.

The character’s are enough. I *love* these characters. Their story is fantastic. Nadine’s and Chloe’s story was the best and most cohesive of the entire series. Also it only took me roughly six hours to play thru and I only feel like half of that was wasted! That’s still probably being too generous but I’m grasping for positives, here. Still - I don’t know why the senior production team has never had confidence in the core of their product which is the charm of their characters and the play dynamic - Uncharted is primarily about *seeing* and *doing* - for the most part, unfortunately, separately.

The dialogue between Chloe and Nadine is extremely interesting, it is absolutely the best thing in the game, yet it keeps getting interrupted by stupid gameplay beats due to poor timing of rolling up on level locations. Uncharted 4 was supposed to have locations hidden around levels where you could engage in dialogue between characters but I barely found them - why hide such interesting content in your game?? It’s completely absurd. Then the only few I did find were between Elena and Nathan altho I really don’t think those were meant to be hidden, and they were so poorly written and I hated them so much, I didn’t care to discover any more. Again - no disrespect at all to Nolan North and Troy Baker whom I absolutely adore and respect, but I didn’t find anything engaging or interesting *at all* about the brother narrative. I didn’t care one bit what that nonsense was about. What about Sully? Where’s Sully’s story?? I’m just so - so glad we got a story for Chloe, and that at least Nadine got some great screen time too as a part of it and that it all presented so well.

Before I continue to praise what went well, there are a few things I can’t let pass. While the driving has thankfully improved and controls quite well now, the exclusion of a minimap or GPS HUD element is interesting. I’m fairly certain it’s intentional as to not detract from the game’s clean, cinematic look, to not break immersion, but this just generates a horrific breakdown in actual player experience for me. Without any navigational assists, I constantly got lost and stopped every 20 meters to check the map, frequently driving into dead-ends, off cliffs and past where I wanted or needed to go. The game isn’t a 30 hour open-world experience with distinct and varied landmarks the player will familiarise themselves with and learn to navigate by, for the most part the level is fairly homogeneous in object geometry.

Some of the puzzles take far too long to mechanically execute, in particular the smashy-slashy statue block jumpy stupid whatever it’s called one and the sliding shadow motif. It doesn’t matter that neither actually takes too long once you know the solution, it’s that they feel long and then are actually over-long and also not interesting to mechanically execute. This is due mostly to clunky character animation and animation smoothing, and part of Naughty Dog’s overall obsession with being cinematic which is something I’ll return to towards the end of this piece, something which has been a strength but will ultimately be to their detriment. While cinematic visuals might be a benefit for traversal, it’s something that absolutely does not suit puzzle-solving. In the example of the statue-block puzzle, the hard reset each time the player is hit means laboriously jogging all the way back to the beginning and starting again - it’s just poor puzzle design having to begin again from a full reset. There’s no satisfaction in having to remember the whole thing and while I didn’t look up the solution online, I’m willing to bet many people will have just dialled up a clip on YouTube and copied it without figuring it out themselves. This is a failure of connecting what’s satisfying about moving in your game and what’s satisfying about solving puzzles, something Crystal Dynamics understood far better in the Tomb Raider reboots, in particular the second outing (Rise of) with their much more environment-centric puzzling.

The sliding shadow puzzle just simply takes way too long to jog around the space, then clip onto the hot-zone for each lever, wait for the animation to lift it, wait for the animation for the pieces to slide, rinse, repeat. Once you know what you have to do, it’s overly frustrating actually having to do it.

It brings me to a weird quirk of design where the puzzle designers perhaps don’t understand something that the environmental designers do. Maybe they didn’t get the same little notes in the Slack channel, or Trello board or Teams pin or whatever. Uncharted level-design has almost no back-tracking, less in each successive game, and it’s almost entirely absent from Lost Legacy - you’d have to look closely to realise you’re navigating the same area you came in thru and almost always moving over it in a different way that’s been modified - now it’s flooded, now there’s a bridge, now you’re swinging or leaping or climbing where you weren’t etc. I feel like this is the Hidetaka Miyazaki Souls/Borne effect of level design in which environments are designed to be both realistic and practical.

Great! Good for the level designers. Did the puzzle designers not get that note? Maybe they did. I need to stop thinking that every poor optimisation is a symptom of ignorance - that’s bad form on my part. What’s more likely is it’s a symptom of either bad leadership, poor tool implementation, lack of time or too narrow or strict an observation of representative vision - by which I mean - they can’t change the way the characters move or animate just for puzzles, because it has to be consistent with the cinematic representation of the game as a whole - and that sucks lemons. It means the overall play experience suffers for the sake of the overall cinematic experience except executing a puzzle isn’t cinematic unless it’s expansive...

Like the positive example I’ll give of the light reflector room. Shoplifted from Uncharted 2′s giant knife that has Nathan climb all over a giant knife, Lost Legacy’s light reflector room has slightly less climbing but is a much larger space, more impressive and a much better example of good puzzling in Uncharted. It’s not difficult to solve but again (I think again?) I’ll argue that you don’t come to Uncharted for difficult puzzles - you don’t come to Tomb Raider for difficult puzzles, either. 

The puzzles in these games should be mostly environmental because they feel good solving them, and solving them should be more about the doing - the playing - and the playing should be moving - running, jumping, climbing etc.

Both the giant knife and the reflector room are a joy to execute because they’re fantastically realised - large cavernous environments that aren’t annoying to navigate, that give you time to appreciate both the scale of the spaces and the details the designers and artists have put into them. Lost Legacy’s is more impressive because you do a lot more puzzling and spend much more time in its vastly larger space, culminating in combat that usually I would be ho-hum about, but I guess exhibits more animation and destruction tech which while scripted, is still impressive nonetheless given how extremely difficult it is to have interactivity still occurring.

I have a few things I want to mention before I begin to wrap up, given it’s going to be a very long wrap - I’d say I’m taking cues from Joseph Anderson but I’ve always been this verbose.

The medallion puzzles were excellent, in part perhaps because they felt like the closest thing to the Tomb Raider reboots’ challenge tombs. Some of them were silly and lazily implemented, the worst offender being you just had to shoot mans and get the medallion from the lock-box that the mans had put it in (pfft), but the best ones were integrated into the environment such that you may well have walked past or thru areas that were puzzles before you knew what they were. This brings up one of the most interesting things I’ve been turning over for quite some time now. Ben Croshaw aka Yahtzee aka Zero Punctuation may have first mentioned “chest high walls” in his first Gears of War video, but it may well have been an Uncharted game. I don’t remember but he will have thrown in mentions of all the generic cover-shooters as a catch-all for how the environments immediately telegraph that Combat™ will happen. It’s a particularly astute remark and speaks volumes of video game design - developers always seem to have very specific design language to separate traversal, combat and puzzling. While I clearly don’t care for combat most days, and yes - I do acknowledge there are some practical concerns for combat that can’t be avoided, I always envisaged design that blurred the lines between puzzle and environment so that you never quite knew what was and wasn’t a puzzle. Everything should be the puzzle. In some senses, Cyan’s old Myst games were a bit like this but in a very rudimentary and crude way - sure, they’re quite old now, but even those had very clear not puzzle areas. It’s a complex and subtle subject, but something of a study of games like Fireproof Games’ The Room would be in order. Understandably smaller scale, but the thinking behind it is definitely adjacent.

Final notes - the young Indian girl in the prologue has amazing animations that you’ll miss entirely unless you swing the camera yourself. A whole team of people or a single animator has spent hours on those animations - that a director or team leader hasn’t forced the player to see and appreciate them is a disservice.

Every section where you have to do something under pressure like run from mans shooting at you or dash through a lengthy section of crumbling cave network etc. is a horrible play experience of not knowing where to go. They’re trying to inject excitement by applying pressure but there’s no clear guidance and no dependence on player skill, so you end in bizarre fail-states due to going in completely the wrong direction that glitches cameras or scene time-outs resulting in check-points and the whole thing just doesn’t scan as a cinematic experience. I hate hate hate them - you’re subject to the same musical swell that’s supposed to be like a movie only to fail again and it comes off as b-grade and pathetic. Every game has had this problem and it is just straight bad design.

Three? Four? Games in a row, Naughty Dog have recycled; 

being pursued on foot by an armoured vehicle crashing through level geometry while you have to run and occasionally shoot/fight mans, 

driving down a shanty-town on a hill pursued by an armoured vehicle - perhaps the same one as previous scene

a big chase scene of lots of vehicles jumping from vehicle to vehicle shooting and/or punching mans that may or may not include...

a train combat sequence where you start at the back of the train and work your way to the front of it shooting mans as you go

This lacks creativity at this point. I think duplicating these once each - so you do them twice total across the franchise is fine, but they hit the same beats in the same way - exactly - every time they appear. It just strikes me as Naughty Dog just not knowing what else to do. At one point, I think it was in Uncharted 4, when driving down the shanty-town on the hill, I literally had a brain-fart not knowing which game I was playing because I swear we did it in 2 and 3. Did we do it in 3?? Look, I don’t know. But it’s getting old. At least we didn’t do it in Lost Legacy, but we did the train and I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of doing the same things in the same way. It could have been a train but it should have been in a way that just wasn’t just another Uncharted train. It hasn’t worn thin, it’s worn out.

Overall, the games look great... but playing them feels like they’re stuck in PS2 and early PS3 era philosophies, like Naughty Dog haven’t evolved and don’t realise that people’s brains function much quicker and can process more, or that the media we consume, the games we play function at a higher level and we can digest more, we’re capable of processing higher functions. I’ve been playing Ubisoft’s The Division 2 and enjoying it more the more I play, much to my surprise. I understand the intent behind the gameplay is extremely different to the single-player experience of Uncharted, however there are some parallels in what it achieves animation wise;

The Division is also a cover shooter but of-course as a multiplayer, open-world live-service game, its intent is to telegraph to the player that the entire environment is a permanent play-space in which to always be playing. It utilises an information-rich GUI that is an always-on system with button icons telling the player what button to press over what surfaces to snap to, vault over, climb up, run to (and snap to cover), open and loot, interact with etc. I don’t know if these can be turned off but I like them on. It’s a pretty amazing feat that almost every environmental object has been mapped as a snap-to-cover and/or climbable object. For this reason, the character movement in Division is pretty quick and snappy, however it still manages to have a decent degree of natural human kinetics in the character rigging which is amazing. This means if you move-off from standing still, there’s a slight delay as your “weight” shifts, same if you change direction. When I say “snap” to cover, it’s not actually instantaneous, your character makes a movement and takes time to do so, yet it’s still not sluggish. Somehow the developers have worked at fine-tuning a balance between not-instant, but not too slow.

This is something that even in Lost Legacy, I feel Naughty Dog simply can’t do. The animations are decent during play - they’re outstanding during cutscenes (we’re getting there), but character models have a really awkward relationship with the environment. They clip awkwardly with ladders and buttons and wheels - with puzzles and levers - getting the grappling hook to prompt is again better than Uncharted 4 but still not ideal. I had far fewer glitch-outs than 4 too, which was a significant improvement, but I still had to animate back and forth a few times to get into hot-zones appropriately and with character kinetics not quite right, it wasn’t exactly easy.

And again to be fair, this stuff is suuuuuper difficult. I don’t mean to talk about this stuff like it’s cooking instant ramen. It’s so freaking tough. Rigging and mapping interactive character models has to be one of the most stupendously difficult things a developer has to do - making it work with all that scripting, getting it to play nice with all those assets and lines and lines of coding for the full experience. I have so much respect for game developers and what an astronomical task it is. So when I say I prefer one development team’s product over another’s, I don’t mean to say that the other team is absolute garbage - there are so many things that might contribute to that final product and we have no idea what’s been going on at Naughty Dog. If the team leaders and producers say they’re happy or even if they don’t, and the decision is made to ship, there’s nothing more they can say or do.

If there was one thing I absolutely loved about this game, it was the two main characters and the story that was told about them. I can excuse the main text as the catalyst that brought them together - even to the point that it’s a story about Chloe ultimately deciding what’s important to her. My issue with this comes full circle with the setting being in a real world conflict. There’s a bit of white savour complex in there in that Asav might be the narrative’s antagonist, but he at least is local. It’s not clear exactly what Chloe’s ethnicity is and I’m not here to judge what her stakes are in it because clearly her character has a sense of home and place in India, but she certainly also has a complex sense of being an outsider. So the point is not to judge, but the game also is unclear on its positioning other than she’s the heroic vehicle of deliverance. See what I mean about theme? This is what I mean by you could have just as easily written almost an identical story about Nadine and Chloe, with very similar interactions, tension, redemption and resolve - even with an antagonist, conflict and a happy ending, but either treated real sociopolitical issues with better care or not set your game in them at all. I’m all for setting games in the real world, but if you’re going to do it, do it right. I’m not the person to ask.

I need to be careful not to direct that criticism at the base-level developers nor at Claudia Black who is the manifestation of Chloe’s voice because she does an amazing job of bringing her to life. The casting of Laura Bailey voicing a black South African Nadine was much more awkward given Nadine’s ethnicity wasn’t decided when she was cast - again that’s on Naughty Dog’s leadership, but I won’t knock Laura Bailey for it. It’s easy to say she should have resigned, perhaps she should have, that’s an economical question only Laura can answer and I’m sure it’s not an easy one. Suffice to say, VO work isn’t lucrative.

What a side-track.

I don’t think I ever cared about Nathan. I think I always cared about Elena, and not because WAIFU and also not because WHITE KNIGHT or whatever other bullshit reasons stupid alphagamerz will spit from their frontheads. Elena’s just more interesting, probably because Nathan is written like a design document and Elena’s written like a human being. Naughty Dog want to create a game about adventuring with lush expansive environments, shooty mcshooting and light puzzling. They want it to be cinematic and unrivalled in its quality and they have the smarts to build the tech around it, with Sony’s help. Backed by Sony money, they take VO seriously and do a great job at creating that cinematic experience, coupled with some above-par for video games narrative writing. The problem this introduces for me is Nathan’s raison d'être has to justify everything - action, tension, stupidity...

Nathan Drake really is the design document.

I feel like he’s just the unfortunate side-effect of being central to the game, and it’s typical of my character to just not dig the focus of things and get into subtexts a whole lot more. Often I get into things in the periphery, things adjacent - I don’t love or hate Shakespeare or for that matter Baz Luhrmann but Romeo + Juliet ‘96 is an amazing film and not at all because of the eponymous Romeo and Juliet and again, not for Leonardo di Caprio (spit!) or for Claire Danes (she can stay) but the absolutely divine cast of supporting characters (John Leguizamo will live in my heart forever oh baby).

That Nathan makes stupid decisions is already something that turns me off. That he makes poor decisions because... he’s an orphan? Because... he was bullied? Because... his brother left him? This is why he’s not transparent with his wife? Actually, he’s quite realistic. Except the people like him I’ve known in my life aren’t heroes - they’re pathetic or unreliable or abusive or dangerous. Elena is an adult. She’s not perfect either and that’s also great because neither am I. As a side character she has the conceit of being more nuanced, but as the contra to Nathan, she’s also mature versus his childishness. OOOOAAAAH EVERYONE LOVES A LOVEABLE MANBABY OOAAAH COMEON LIVE A LITTLE EVERYONE’S GOT A LITTLE CHILD STILL IN THEM SOMEWHERE yea fine, I get it, like I’ve said before, yes - he embodies the recklessness and playfulness in us, but that’s a confusing position for a game that frequently tries to ground itself in real world conflict to be taking. You’re reducing him to that but injecting complex and nuanced characters like Elena and now eventually both Chloe and Nadine? I’m telling you now - any male that doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to grow-up, when the time to set aside the playfulness and be TRUTHFUL AND TRANSPARENT WITH HIS PARTNER is a dangerous person and FUCK THAT NOISE. Nathan, as much as I do absolutely - make no mistake - adore Nolan North’s voicing - ends up being another Homer Simpson - as long as you laugh at his stupidity, you’ll excuse it, and you’ll excuse the hurt that’s done by it, and that shit doesn’t fly with me. His redemption was not earned. I say again - Elena should throw him into the sea.

Nadine ends up being a fantastic character, even if she’s given less narrative time, she’s a great example of her behaviour telling more story in contrast to Chloe getting to reveal her past and it’s nice to see them play off one another. I feel Nadine and Chloe as characters hit great story beats in ways Nathan didn’t get to with pretty much any of the other characters in four games - not Sully, not Elena, not his brother, not even Chloe - all told, we never actually get any back-story on Nathan and Chloe and I think we’re better off for it because I don’t care.

Having a quick squiz around tumblr reveals the obvious and rampant shipping of Nadine and Chloe and I couldn’t be happier. I think Naughty Dog knew what they were doing. There were so many moments. Those moments were for us. I think they were subtle enough that the fragile manbabies would have missed them but there’s no fooling us. Some of the babyboiz would have been seething thru their mouthbreething hairmouths and I’m sure probably took to the internet but that’s OK, they can remain unfucked incels for the rest of their lives or worse, serviced by whatever unwashed creatures want to dare fondle them in the dark. The elephant ride and that whole conversation was almost enough for me to forgive the absolute disaster that was Uncharted 4. It was given enough time to breathe, it was absolutely beautiful, and just when you thought they were going to terminate it and apologise for making things too awks, it concludes just perfectly and you get a phone picture that doesn’t have Nadine in frame, yet her presence in that picture is definite, pervasive and emotional. Again, some people may have completely missed it and maybe it chalks up to life experience, but as completely contrived as an artefact of complete fiction as that whole sequence might be, it was one of the most wonderfully tender moments ever created in a video game and I wonder if it makes the whole affair worth it.

In the Uncharted 4 piece, I threw in a few barbs about the most meaningful interactions, and in Lost Legacy, what I really loved was Chloe taking photos of things she thinks are beautiful and interesting on her phone, and feeding the elephant - these were the most meaningful interactions in the game. I love that the photos on the phone didn’t serve any gameplay utility at all, they were there because her character wanted to document her travels, because she thought what she was seeing was cool, and any time in the game, you could pull out your phone and look at what you’d seen. It was such a good and important decision to have the very first picture to be the Indian girl in the market, as that rather than the local conflict, does more to ground you and Chloe as a character in the setting. The game never forces you to look at it as a reminder, but you know it’s there.

I did steal these from the internet, sorry - so if they’re yours, let me know and I’ll be happy to take them down - this one in particular, seeing as it’s a photomode capture. I should have taken my own but I don’t do photomode caps on my first play-thru and there’s no-way I’m replaying this ever again.

It took five games for Naughty Dog to finally get some decent character writing, but a part of me still feels they couldn’t have existed without all the dross of the other games. There’s this immense amount of back-story and labour both the developers and the players had to slog thru to get to this point, and I feel as tho we get here and there’s just too little to show for it. I still really enjoyed the story that was told, the sense of character I felt, but a lot of that was contingent on the Uncharted universe in situ. Lost Legacy feels like a combining of all of Naughty Dog’s narrative motifs - the earnest redemption, the moment of tenderness and connection centred around peaceful animals - it’s a greatest hits of Naughty Dog in the best way possible because each narrative beat hits perfectly. I’m glad I played it with two characters who endeared themselves so much to me, that I truly cared about.

I’ve spend a lot of time praising the strengths of writing for at least Lost Legacy, but for each thing I’ve enjoyed about at least these two characters, there have been so many things I’ve been critical of. I feel like in order to get to the tiniest bit of enjoyment, I had to suffer thru so much. Honestly I don’t know if it really was worth it. It’s hard to know given that who I am now and where my tastes are and have developed as a consequence of my experiences, and I definitely would not replay any of those games again - so where does that leave me? I can’t go back and play The Last Of Us and I absolutely won’t play the second game, I just can’t do Naughty Dog games now, I don’t have it in me.

Naughty Dog have spent the better part of two decades developing tech for visual fidelity specifically for the Playstation hardware platforms (PS3 and 4). They’ve also been doing it by overworking their staff, many of which have left out of frustration or necessity. The problem they face is that as industry tools in general improve, there will no gap between games developed by Naughty Dog and any other contemporary studio from a visual perspective. Make no mistake - the Uncharted games are absolutely chock-full of objects, geometry and animation - somehow miraculously so on the Playstation platform in comparison to other games with the exception of other first-party and exclusive games receiving similar support from Sony such as Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn and Sucker Punch’s forthcoming Ghost of Tsushima. There are probably other similar examples for the previous generation on PS3.

Yes, there’s a certain style of game Naughty Dog create as far as narrative goes but because it’s becoming more cinematic, that style is judged more and more by cinematic standards and at best it’s barely semi-professional aside from the outstanding voice work. There are few striking visual motifs that set Naughty Dog games apart from a design perspective, and the gameplay and mechanical constructions that once distinguished them at least a little from others are ever diminishing at increasing rates - more-so as their work practices make the level of quality they set out to achieve ever more unsustainable.

Lost Legacy encapsulates a lot of what I feel about video games as a whole at the moment - as an industry and as a culture. It’s a snapshot of a culture that’s achieving wonderful, beautiful things that are in ways huge - immense, yet somehow can feel so small in comparison to some of the challenges it faces. It’s an industry and culture experiencing a period of great upheaval, where after years upon years of malpractice, terrible things somehow still endure. It’s a space where sometimes it feels like a battle to find the tiniest shred of beauty buried in the dirt and ash, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to the frustration that working thru it brings about while grass-roots labourers continue to be burned.

Like many things in life, both at my age and at the level I guess a person gets to at the exposure rate of a thing, I’ve cut back a great deal on my engagement time with video games, so I’m a lot less patient with the functions and mechanisms of a game. There’s a labour element of video games that I feel developers might think is somehow necessary and there’s a component of that which is true, just not quite in the way they think it is, and it takes a unique frame of thinking to break out of traditional design to understand it. Again I’m not saying there’s anything special about how I understand games - there’s nothing at all original in my thoughts - I’ve shoplifted them wholesale from a hundred other people back from when I used to read Gamasutra and even now when I read designers and the people I follow and talk to on Twitter etc. There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with traditions and the people that enjoy them - just because they’re not my thing any more doesn’t mean they’re bad. It just means I’ve moved to something else and I shouldn’t engage with them.

That, I think, is what I’m waiting for. Kentucky Route Zero, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a whole bunch of others - these are the games I feel are pushing past the boundaries of tradition. Then the moments Uncharted takes itself out of its traditions - Nadine and Chloe’s elephant ride, Chloe’s phone pictures, Elena and Nathan’s house tours especially as Cassie - that’s when I think now you’re running! Run with it! Look, I’m still playing The Division - I’m still moving and shooting and enjoying it.

But we can do so much more. Many developers are doing more. We as an audience need to play more All of us together need to do and play more.

(The epilogue is me figuring I talk a lot of shit about AAA games and nary a word about KRZ, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther and the rest and I get it, but oooooo howdy is it really difficult for me to talk pragmatically about games I actually love)

[entamewitchlulu]

okie dokie I had a night to sleep on it and digest it so here are my thoughts on having finished the main content of The World Ends With You!

Overall, a great experience!  I really wasn’t sure it was going to be the type of game I enjoyed, because I’m super picky, but I picked it up because I watched a bunch of my friends talk it up and thought it might be worth it.  And it was!  I had some issues here and there, but it was nothing dealbreaking - I’ll get my more negative comments out first.

The gameplay was. Not my cup of tea.  I did not like the touch screen element and didn’t know that was the way you played until I booted it up.  My finger haaated trying to differentiate the different types of swipes and presses and taps and the game often did the opposite of what I had intended my swipe to do.  A lot of the pin commands overlapped, too, and I wouldn’t realize until I was in combat and get annoyed that I was not doing the thing I actually wanted to do.  And my most important pin ended up being one where i had to rub the screen a lot and my finger pad HAATED that after just a couple of minutes.  I definitely think it probably worked a lot better as a DS game with a stylus rather than using your finger.

There were a LOT of mechanics that really overwhelmed me.  I think to add to the atmosphere of the world, they did their job, but having to balance thoughts of fashion, food, making friends with shop owners, quests, missions, pins, stats, etc etc, it was all a little too much and I had to ignore most of it, which I think was to my detriment.  I still don’t know how I was supposed to unlock my last two pin slots and went into the last battle with only four slots (or were you supposed to only have four slots??  I really don’t know.)

The map was a nightmare.  I NEVER knew where ANYTHING was.  There was no minimap and nothing to check in the main menu that gave me even a clue as to where anything was.  I had to keep asking my partner where we were supposed to go and once I got to Beat, he never, ever told me directions and just shouted about how we needed to go to X place.  Okay!! But where is that, Beat!!!  My being constantly lost became even more infuriating during the last two-three days of the game, where randomly a reaper would attack you when you tried to move to a new location - it happened way too often and it was so annoying!! It slowed me down so bad towards the end when all I really wanted was to see how it all panned out.

Ok that was a lot of negative but I promise there’s lots of positive!

The aesthetics of the game are top-notch.  I love the thick-lined style, the animatic-like cut scenes, the sharp edged sprites.  Environments are really beautifully constructed and even when I’m lost, I’m enjoying just being in this cool, hip city.  And while the mechanics overwhelmed me at times, I do think they added to the overall atmosphere of making the place feel like a real, living city.  There was a lot to do, and even the shop owners were real people.  It would have been cool (though probably tough) to actually see the fashion you put on characters on their sprites lol.  And the music was SOOO good holy shit, I could listen to those tracks forever. 

Using different pins for different abilities is really cool!  I may have hated the touch screen fighting style, but I loved finding pins that matched my partners’ style so that I could do just one maneuver for both of us to attack at once, or finding combinations that would let me do x to do y for major damage.  It was fun and engaging to figure out the best combinations of psychs.  And I liked the partner attacks!  Shiki’s was my favorite, and Beat’s was my least favorite, but I think it was the part that made the use of the touch screen the best.

The characters and story are really, really where the whole game shone the most.  Even bitchy little Joshua grew on me (not without reluctance on my part).  I resonated with a lot of the main themes, and particularly, watching Neku grow was the most satisfying part of the game.  I absolutely haaaated him when I started out, but his growing up happened so gradually that it didn’t hit me until later that I’d changed my mind on him, just as gradually as he had changed.  By the time week three was over, I was really, really invested in Neku and his well being.  Hell, even the villains became some of my faves, and without any of them doing too much self-redemption. (though, math man can shut up forever. seriously, his voice lines went off every second during my fight with him and I wanted to reach through the screen and throttle him for real. his character is cool otherwise though).  The characters were funny, quirky, and almost all of them had some real growth that made me invested in all of them making it out okay.

I feel like there’s still some questions in me about this world, but as a contained game, I think it did a good job of expressing the story it set out to tell, and I have to say I definitely enjoyed the experience.  I know there’s a little more content in there, but I think I’ll probably be saving it for later while I let it all digest a bit more.

[bubonickitten]

Hey, I saw an old post of yours about you finding a ton of dogs and bringing them home in Minecraft, and you mentioned that you were playing with mods. I was wondering if you'd be willing to recommend some good mods to me? Been playing with them for awhile but it's hard to find more good ones

I’m sorry it’s taken over a month for me to answer this – I’ve been using the mobile app way more than the browser lately and I always forget to check my inbox on mobile.

Anyway, I made a mod rec post before but it was almost two years ago and I’ve changed up my mod lineup a lot since, so here’s an updated list.

Right now I’m using Minecraft 1.12.2 and Minecraft Forge 1.12.2-14.23.5.2814. (Looks like there’s a newer edition of Forge, I just haven’t updated it yet.) Also some mods are dependent on other mods or require you to download additional resource packs/libraries/etc., so just make sure you check the requirements before downloading (probably goes without saying, but just in case).

I’m putting the list under a cut because otherwise this post will be an absolute wall of text. 

PERFORMANCE MODS

OptiFine: This one’s a performance mod that aims to boost FPS and improve the graphics.

NotEnoughIDs:This expands Minecraft’s ID limit for blocks and items, which is necessary if you’re using a ton of mods that add a lot of new content. 

CONVENIENCE MODS

Just Enough Items (JEI):This one is an item/block/recipe viewing tool with a search feature. There’s also a cheat mode that lets you just drop whatever item you want into your inventory.

Inventory Tweaks:This adds new options for managing/sorting your inventory (on your person or in storage chests) and some convenience features, like automatically replacing tools or item stacks when broken/depleted as long as you have more in your inventory (which also includes your backpacks, if you use the Backpacks mod listed below).

Multi-Hotbar:Just gives you 2-3 additional hotbars, so you aren’t just limited to nine slots and don’t have to constantly go into your inventory screen to move things around if there are more than nine tools/stacks you use regularly. 

JourneyMap: This one automatically maps your Minecraft world as you explore – there’s a minimap in the upper right corner of the screen, and it can be expanded to view the whole map if you want. It also lets you set waypoints (which you can teleport to), with an option to mark them with visible beacons that can be seen from the overworld. It also automatically creates waypoints when you die, so you can easily teleport back to where you died once you respawn.

Nature’s Compass:In-game biome finder, with teleport feature. Also works with biomes added by mods (e.g. Biomes O’ Plenty).

Find Your Way:Adds some new compasses to point you in the direction of various overworld structures (strongholds, mansions, villages, etc.). 

Backpacks: Adds recipes for backpacks. By default they’re 3x9 but by crafting and adding backpack pouches, they can be expanded. They start out brown but can be dyed. They can also be nested, so if you want a backpack within a backpack within a backpack, you can do that. Which I do. Excessively. My inventory situation is… hellishly recursive. But at least I can collect stuff forever before I have to go back home and stash it all.

Fence Jumper: A very simple convenience mod that lets players jump over fences. Doesn’t apply to mobs.

Survival Flight:This just lets you use Creative Mode’s flight mechanic in Survival Mode. Is it cheating? Probably, but it’s your Minecraft world and you can fly if you want to. 

WORLDGEN/ITEM ADDITIONS MODS 

Quark: This one adds a lot of new features – blocks, decoration, mobs, automation options, underground biomes, recipes, convenience tweaks, etc. etc. etc. Main website with descriptions of all the added features can be found here.

Roguelike Dungeons: As the description says, “a mod that generates large underground dungeon structures which have a procedurally generated layout and loot.”

Actually Additions:Adds a lot of random stuff, check the manual to see the full list.

Chisel:More decorative blocks, including many new texture variations of vanilla Minecraft blocks. 

Biomes O’ Plenty: Adds over 60 new biomes to the world, with new trees, blocks, plants, etc. Works best with the creation of a new world, but you can make it work with an existing world with some extra steps (see the installation section here). It’s pretty simple, but you need to download an NBT Editor to do it (last time I had to do it, I used NBT Explorer). 

Terraqueous:New fruit trees, flowers, mineable cloud blocks, tools, etc. 

Natura:More new worldgen stuff. 

Ferdinand’s Flowers:Literally just adds A Lot of new kinds of flowers to the overworld and makes things very, very colorful.

Pam’s HarvestCraft:More crops, food recipes, etc. 

Fairy Lights: Adds recipes for creating hanging lights, string lights, etc. for decoration and lighting options.

MrCrayfish’s Furniture Mod: Adds recipes for furniture. Mostly good for decoration, but some are also functional (e.g. cabinets and refrigerators that provide storage).

MOBS/CREATURES MODS

Mo’ Creatures: Adds a bunch of new mobs to the game (passive, neutral, hostile, and tamable).Many of the tamable mobs can be used as mounts, such as big cats, wyverns, manticores, giant scorpions, elephants, komodo dragons, dolphins, manta rays, bears, and several different kinds of horse (including unicorns, winged horses, ghost horses, and fairy horses). The config files are straightforward and easy to edit if you want to tweak the spawn rates of different mobs. Note: The Forge page says that DrZhark’s Custom Mob Spawner is required, but when I was having trouble with another mod’s custom mobs not spawning properly, Custom Mob Spawner turned out to be the culprit. I removed it, and it seems like Mo’ Creatures is still working even without Custom Mob Spawner, and it takes far less time to load a world than it did before. 

Dragon Mounts 2:Tameable dragon mounts. I love them.

Ice and Fire:Adds new mythical mobs – dragons, sirens, cockatrices, sea serpents, etc. 

Doggy Talents:Your tamed wolves can Do More Stuff.

Wolf Armor and Storage: What it says on the tin. Wolf armor is very similar to horse armor, and chests can be added to wolves like they can be added to llamas.

DIMENSIONS MODS

Twilight Forest: Adds a new dimension, the Twilight Forest. The list of added features can be found on the Wiki here. Each new biome has its own boss (usually with a corresponding dungeon) to defeat (bosses can be defeated more than once since there’s at least one per biome and, like in the overworld, there’s more than one of each kind of biome in the world). It follows a progression system, meaning certain areas (and therefore boss fights) are locked until you defeat other bosses (e.g. certain biomes having a weather effect that renders it virtually impossible to traverse until defeating the boss and getting the item that will allow you to pass through the area). It can be a bit laggy but it’s still fun.

Advent of Ascension:Adds several new dimensions with their own biomes, mobs, items, bosses, etc. It’s fun but I don’t recommend it if you hate clowns because there is an entire clown dimension and even though you can avoid that, there’s also this one clown mob that spawns in the overworld underground, you’ll just be minding your business mining and suddenly BOOM creepy murder clown in the shadows. Also, if you’re using Mo’ Creatures, don’t use the Custom Mob Spawner because it’ll prevent Ascension’s mobs from spawning properly. 

Cavern II:Adds new cavern dimensions to explore, new blocks and ores, and a miner stats/progression system. It’s the successor to the original Cavern mod. One of my favorite things is the randomite ore, which drops a random item when it’s mined (which can include items added by other mods). 

The Betweenlands:This one adds a dark, swampy dimension with its own lore and survival challenges (e.g. you can only eat what you can gather in the Betweenlands and any food from the overworld rots when entering the dimension; there are new mechanics like food sickness, player decay, and tool corrosion that occur when spending long periods of time in the Betweenlands; etc.). 

Erebus:Erebus is the “dimension of the arthropods” and is exactly what it says on the tin.

Better Nether:Some tweaks to the Nether that make it more fun to explore – new biomes, new mobs, new structures, etc. 

AbyssalCraft:New eldritch dimensions, mobs, biomes, items/blocks, etc. You do some inadvisable rituals, read some questionable tomes, collect some dubious artifacts, encounter things with lots of eyes and tentacles… oh and one time, when I was playing one of the earlier versions of the mod, Shoggoths invaded my home and killed all my horses and left a residue all over everything and I had to restore an old backup save, so. I recommend reading the wiki before you do any summoning rituals.

VoidCraft:This is an older mod no longer in development, but if you’re like me and get bored easily and download every new dimension mod you can find, have at it. 

The Aether II:This is the sequel to the old Aether mod (which also has a reboot for Minecraft 1.12, here). It’s still in development and I actually haven’t had a chance to explore the new dimension much yet myself, but it looks interesting. 

[chrismerle]

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

yeah I finished the game

and for all of my mockery, I did like it! a bit railroad-y for an RPG, but eh, that’s not necessarily a bad thing

what I mean by that is, you could make your own choices (within reason) when it came to who lived or died, but that was basically it. for plot-related decisions, you could ask all the questions in the world but there was only one option to actually proceed. even your Mesmerize level only went up at specific points, to make sure you couldn’t mesmerize and ~embrace~ a plot-critical character too soon. but that’s all okay! none of that is actually a complaint.

it’s a very talky game. which is also not a complaint. I liked the characters, I liked the hint system, I liked the fact that Jonny Boy could just barge up to people and they’d think nothing of it, and I liked the fact that you had to talk to people in order to have the broadest amount of options. however, cinematically, it sort of...lacked. most cutscenes in this game are just Jonny Boy standing and talking to someone. cutscenes feel almost entirely static. no one walks around. no one really talks with their hands. no one fidgets. even in plot-related cutscenes, it still usually just the camera focusing on someone from just behind Jonny Boy’s ear. it’s a very talky game, and no one moves when they’re talking.

the map’s a little ‘eh.’ the markers on it were huge, which made it a little hard to tell where you were, and instead of a proper minimap there was a little compass thing that was bloody fucking awful.

gameplay itself was actually pretty good, though. moving around was easy, combat was pretty intuitive, and you could pick and choose your blood abilities (personally, I had spring, claws, shadow veil, autophagy, and blood cauldron). it’s also pretty adaptable. if you want to brute force your way through, you can do that. if you want to dance in circles around your enemies and paper cut them to death, you can do that, too.

while I loved the teleportation in concept, in practice it was a little, um...overly convenient? or overly inconvenient, I guess. Jonathan Reid, powerful vampire of a near ageless lineage, is frequently stopped by locked doors, locked gates, and three foot high barriers. like, I get it, it’s not actual teleportation, he’s just moving really fast, but if Jonny Boy had bodychecked a gate at that speed, I’m willing to bet it would open. but whatever, that’s just standard invisible wall stuff. a little eye roll-worthy and a little annoying, but pretty standard.

I liked the...for lack of a better phrase, day/night cycle. nights could go one for as long as you wanted so you never had to break off halfway through a quest to avoid dawn, but you were still encouraged to actually proceed to the next night because that’s how you level up.

the writing is...clumsy. except for the really important ones, boss fights come out of nowhere with no warning, no build up, no excitement, and no real conclusion; you just walk into a room, and whoops, that’s a boss. vulkods exist just to exist, and have no purpose in the story, unlike the skals and ekons. there are werewolves wandering around and no one ever says a word about them. no one acknowledges when your appearance changes after you kill people. King Arthur was an ekon and drinking an ekon’s blood makes another vampire, but McCullum spends his boss fight drinking King Arthur’s blood and he’s fine. nothing really has an consequences after you make a decision. most important information is just dumped on you in conversations that can sometimes go on for too long. the dialogue wheel is pretty inelegant and it’s generally apparent your stitching a conversation together from other pieces. while I thought it was cute because I liked both characters, the romance was still pretty hamfisted. and even as the credits were rolling, I had no real clue what the Morrigan, Myrrdin, and the blood of hate were.

don’t get me wrong, part of it is probably my fault because I got almost none of the collectibles, but if your lore isn’t at least intelligible without dozens of side articles, then you need to do some pruning.

and let’s just acknowledge it: Mary’s plot detour is straight up a plot hole. when she first showed up after the funeral, I assumed she was a chatty skal, like Sean or Old Bridget, but then she was explicitly stated to be an ekon. and then I kinda figured ‘well, okay, maybe she was only mostly dead and another vampire conveniently found her,’ but then she was explicitly stated to be Reid’s progeny. and it was also explicitly stated that the way to make an ekon is to drink another ekon’s blood. you cannot accidentally make an ekon. Jonny Boy drained her dry in a ravening delirium and then fled. he did not her give her any blood. I’m calling bullshit on that one.

(and this is more just a ‘personal preference’ sort of gripe, but there was sort of a to-do about how it was cruel that Jonny Boy’s maker fucked off without teaching him how to be a proper vampire, but you’re free to up and fuck off into the aether on two progeny, if that’s how you play your cards, like two days after you make them. [not counting Dawson because Redgrave can deal with him.])

but it was still fun to play, which is arguably the most important thing, and you know what? I’m perfectly willing to look past the writing stumbles just for Jonny Boy. he’s a genuinely likable character and I kind of adore him. equal parts exasperated and resignedly morbidly amused, like he can’t quite decide if he’d rather go ‘fuck my life’ or ‘this may as well be my life,’ so he took both options. blunt as a sledgehammer and actively annoyed by people talking in circles. generally pretty clever and quick on the uptake. and yet, somehow, still kind of lovably blockheaded.

(and his voice is very soothing. like, I didn’t have a ‘I’m gay but I’d make an exception’ moment, but I had a ‘I’d listen to him read the phone book as ASMR’ moment.)

the rest of the cast is nothing to sneeze at either. they’re all a little stock (you have the vampire hunter, you have the nightmare fetishist, you have the noblewoman, you have dracula lite...), but they serve the plot well and none of them grated on my nerves unless they were supposed to.

and this is like eight pages long now, so I’m gonna assume I’ve made my point pretty well and be done with this.

like my nonsense here? Support Me on Ko-fi!

[downtroddendeity]

im going through your remake hate tag rn and man am i relieved i decided not to spend money on perfect chronology! i recently played radiant historia and was strongly considering buying pc, cause i loved the game + wanted to support the series. i was hesitant primarily due to the changed art style. i had no idea about all the other crap - especially the fanservice stuff. what a shame that atlus went all in on pandering to creeps. i hope one day the game will get a remake worthy of the original.

From my view having now played 95% of the goddamn thing before taking an extended mental health hiatus in the middle of the ~new~ ending, at this point the creepy fanservice and general mistreatment of the entire female cast is only about 30% of my beef with it.

The other 70% is that aside from the voice-acting and adding said fanservice, the budget for the game seems to have been about $3, and the translation budget was apparently about 25¢. It actually looks worse than the original in many places due to graphical glitches and cutscene blocking that’s awkwardly unchanged from the original despite a larger field of view, there are a number of features that are clearly only half-finished (most obviously the minimap- it literally just displays rectangles with the x,z coordinates of the exits marked), arguably the biggest balance problem of the original has actually been worsened, and I’m pretty much certain the new content was written in a rush by people who had never played the game and only read summaries of the plot.

There are a few major convenience features like left-right-arrow page scrolling on menus and allowing you to pick what node to go to from a bad end, and at least in English the voice-acting is solid. But that’s the extent of the credit I’m willing to give it, and even said VA is tarnished by a) direction that often seems to miss the point of scenes, lines, and characters, b) the vastly blander and less interesting new translation, and c) the incredibly jarring experience of a character with a portrait who talks in full voice clips having a conversation with a character without a portrait who talks in monosyllabic grunts.

It’s painfully obvious that Atlus did not care at all about this game, and slapped together just enough to say they’d remade it to wring a quick buck out of the IP before the 3DS became completely obsolete. And that’s why the fanservice: they put in anime boobs to sell it to the crowd who buy games for anime boobs, because they figured that was the biggest return on the least investment.

Anyway I’ve got half of one spitefic on my hard drive and an outline for a second and once I finish the damn thing I intend to forget it exists as thoroughly as possible.

[trustbikini]

Recount wowmatrix

#Recount wowmatrix mod#

#Recount wowmatrix Patch#

#Recount wowmatrix mods#

I wish I had a good raiding screenshot of it in action, but I haven't been raiding much since I got my new monitor and rearranged my UI accordingly.

#Recount wowmatrix mod#

I have a mod to add timestamps to my chatlog, a mod to color my buttons red when I'm out of range, and another mod that will color the whole screen red if my health gets low (because I tend to forget to heal myself otherwise :P) And of course Omen. Parrot for scrolling combat text so incoming things scroll down on the right and outgoing things scroll up on the left. nQuestLog where the party frames used to be. TipTac for my tooltips, Quartz for my casting bar, Elkano's BuffBars for my buffs/debuffs, Chinchilla for my minimap, Cartographer3 for my worldmap.

#Recount wowmatrix mods#

I have my main chat window to the left of that, and my loot/xp/rep/money frame to the right (because I hate trying to read party chat and getting spammed with who rolled what on some junk green).Īny other mods are purely for convenience and are usually dropped or replaced if they stop working. I thought constantly looking between the bottom of the screen and the upper left (on a 26" monitor) was kinda dumb. I arrange my player/target/ToT frames and casting bar right next to my action bars inside a black viewport frame on the bottom, and put my party/raid's health bars right above that. Macros also play largely into what buttons I put on my bar to save space. The AutoBar on the right edge of the screen handles any auras/totems/aspects/stances/etc, all the items in my bags, and all of my professions for me so they don't take up space on my main bars. I have two main bars for tilde-6 and F1 through F5 for all of my main abilities (I found that I'd never press 6-0 on the keyboard because they were too far away, so just got rid of them) and two extra 9-button bars for all of my miscellaneous other abilities with keybinds for my two extra mouse buttons and some nearby letter keys. My UI (as a healer, but I use the same setup on all of my characters) is largely based around Pitbull, Dominos (the replacement for Bongos3, I tried using Bartender but just didn't like it) and AutoBar. I consider UI customization to be a separate hobby within WoW. So how about you? got any crazy custom layouts, or favorite addons you can't live without? I use alot of hotkeys and macros to get the job done, but truthfully I'm still very much a clicker at heart. Here's my current standard layout, with bar placement explanations:

#Recount wowmatrix Patch#

Unfortunately, Post patch 3.0.2, almost none of my really good UI addons work/have yet to be updated, so I've have to try and replicate them using what's immediately available. So, I've found addons like Bartender4, or Bongos3(when it worked.) really useful. I like having everything within easy reach. I tend to play with my camera zoomed out as far as it will go, and I generally keep my mouse centered on my screen around my character(a habit I picked up from playing FPS's that I have never been able to break). However I'm very, very particular about bar placement. So now I just just use the standard raiding addons(DMB,Omen,Lootnazi, etc), some bar mods, and ability timers. I used to be one of those "i have 100 different addons!!" and it just got too crazy to maintain everything, WOWmatrix or no. I play a Hunter, so I use a pretty barebones addon selection, mostly because I feel too many addons clutters everything up. So after all that, it got me wondering: What types of UI's do you all use? Any helpful reccomendations? One guy used over 110 different addons(he's a priest). Others used in excess of 50 or 60 different addons to customize their UI. Some people used zero UI mods, prefering to just use the standard UI with tons of keybinds. The other night in my guild, there was a lengthy discussion on officer chat about useful UI mods for different character classes, prompted by some new recruits asking about what all mods we use.

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