#are you glitching? something wrong with your framerate?

[llama-sidekick]

Noone:

Me: hey what do you think which engine is that backrooms game

My friend: I bet unity

Me: yeah unity alright

Me:

Me: its unreal what

Friend: what that doesnt look like unreal the lighting and movememt is so unity

Or how to not be scared by any horror game ever again because suddenly the monster is just another asset to analyse while two twinks scream in the background

[dwarfhorse]

Rune factory 5 Initial Thoughts

Hi! I'm a little frustrated because I already had a paragraph typed out but this site is atrocious especially on a tablet. I usually use mobile but it really fucks my phone's battery up so I'm using my tablet to write this. excuse any errors please.

So I'm about 6-7 hours in and I thought I'd give my first impression instead of waiting to do a full one and then come back when I finish and give final thoughts. I just unlocked Lucas.

I'm going to begin with cons and reminder that these are all opinions. You're entitled to your own, as well. I'll use a bulleted simplified list so people don't need to read paragraphs upon paragraphs and lose focus.

Keep in mind when reading this and playing the game that its the first in years and the first on the switch, plus the first 3d one in years. The team probably didn't have enough funding to do a lot of things that I'm sure they would have liked to do. That all being said, even with cons it's still really fun! I think a few patches would fix things up quite a bit.

Other things are just personal opinions that I have that I think would improve this or be good notes for their future games. Course I doubt anyone from xseed or marvelous will even see this, but oh well. I still recommend buying it on sale they get funding to make better future ones, plus it's still really fun!

• Some functions are flat out broke or don't work as intended. Auto camera and farm camera are almost impossible to use. Good thought not good execution. The farm camera shows the top of your character and field while you farm, thankfully you can turn both of these off. These matched with the fact that aiming is HELL doesn't pair well.

• Framerates and skidding. The game wants to go faster than it actually is running. What I mean by this is you're constantly running fast aaand then the game goes real slow. Loading screens are a bit long too. If youre running and then take something out, you slide.

• Placing and aiming are both hell. Especially trying to straighten furniture.

• Glitching happens often but I think it's as a result of frame rate.

• No transition animations so sometimes things look choppy. Ie I saw people giving characters wine and they clip straight on the ground, if they sit on a bench, they don't squat from what I've seen,they just suddenly go from stand to sit. This could be a glitch but I've seen it on multiple people's games so far.

My opinions. Again these are only my thoughts and feelings, really the whole post is just how I'm initially feeling. These also list some pros so I won't make a list for pros, because these are the rest of my thoughts.

• Dialogue is lacking. Where rf4 is charming and has so many lines, rf5 is repetitive dialogue. Don't get me wrong, the characters are still fun and charming. They just repeat, a lot. I believe it could be fixed by a patch, but it'd probably take them...a lot of time even if dialogue is randomized.

• The running animation looks wonky, this is a bit picky so not too important.

• The game is GORGEOUS, but I think different mix ups in texture and more trees would've been nice. I also think the mountain areas should've been worked on more to look more rocky than smooth.

• whyyyyyyy did the seed captain have to look like she's 10. enough dragon girls looking like kids I want milf dragons.

• Fuuka barking and growling really freaks me out too much to romance her? I have to for the sake of the blog and opinions on romance options but I'm not looking forward to it. I try to brush it off but in the end I hope she starts like. using human speak more.

• The town is huge which. I like but it makes it a little hard for me to navigate, some parts of the town and game in general don't look like they have much detail than others.

• Priscilla and Lucy are gfs no doubt. This isnt an opinion on the game but I hope they bring rival romance back.

• The game is really fun once you get used to the new controls.

• Characters are still really fun and a joy to talk to when they have a new line!

• Time going slower is a little annoying. I often get stuck waiting for a character to show up somewhere.

• I like how easy it is to know where a heart event is and who's, don't like how I accidentally triggered Lucy's trying to walk by her and find another character. I have about 6 events to do, because romance seems faster than rf4, it's just the waiting of characters to show up the next day to finish the event that irritates me.

• I just unlocked Lucas and have no idea what's going on in the main story yet, hoping that is about to change.

• LOVE that there's marriage between any gender now. Now I just wish we could get some older looking romance options!

• farming dragon is neat but I wish I could pet it

• I like how easy switching weapons is

• martin is best boy

so.. in my opinion! definitely worth a play and new games will probably improve if enough people buy it! any issues aside it's still fun! 

[casualarsonist]

I bought Mass Effect: Andromeda on PS4 for £6.49, and it’s...

Awful. Awful awful awful awful awful.

From the moment the game begins the lack of quality and polish is immediately evident: the lip-syncing is still terrible, the walking animations are still terrible, the dialogue is some of the worst I’ve ever heard in a modern AAA game - repetitive, nonsensical, frequently grammatically incorrect, and annoying - and it both looks and plays like a giant, poorly-designed, unintuitive turd. The cutscenes are unpausable and unskippable, the subtitles are either completely on or completely off and can’t be limited to dialogue, including every single gasp, scream, and breath the characters take. Lines of speech are activated but never voiced, or begin ten seconds after the subtitles pop up, or cut themselves off mid-sentence. Characters continually comment on things you can’t see, or make the same point in five different ways for no reason. I’d accuse the acting of being shit if it weren’t for the fact that, with writing like this, Lawrence Olivier couldn’t turn in a decent performance. But even then, much of the acting is shit. Textures and NPCs pop in every time you exit a menu screen, or turn too fast, or the camera switches angles in a cutscene, and people sound like they’re right next to you when they’re blips in the distance. The hair textures look like shit, some of the NPCs stand at 45 degree angles, or pop through walls and floors, and for all the supposed power of the Frostbite engine, everything - everything - looks worse than the previous games. And don’t even bother turning the motion blur off, because it becomes more than clear that it’s simply a band-aid applied over the less-than-30fps framerate in order to make the game look at least somewhat digestible. 

I can’t even cover everything that is wrong here. The button to get in your car changes to the button to leave the planet once you’re inside, meaning you have to sit through minutes of loading screens and cutscenes to get back to a checkpoint even more minutes away from where you were if you forget, like an idiot, that you can’t get in and out of a vehicle using the same button. You have to go through multiple steps to perform the most basic actions such as checking your map or changing weapons. The map itself is ugly, textureless, and nearly featureless, making it almost impossible to identify where you are in relation to your surroundings. This textureless, featureless map can also somehow glitch out. Certain events can fail to trigger and require a reload to progress. Random, unimportant doors will lock you out for no reason right up until a piece of key dialogue has been spoken. The game emphasises that you’re on inhospitable planets, and yet your teammates can run around without helmets. The enemy race is named ‘the kett’ because ‘some people in engineering started calling them that’, and no reason is ever given why. There’s no menu list of your side missions - what fucking game in this day and age doesn’t list your side missions? Furthermore, your main mission is just one long accumulating list of completed objectives that you have to scroll through to find your current objective. Your car cannot automatically go up slopes, and the game doesn’t tell you how to do it until long after you’ve figured it out for yourself, at which point you realise that the mechanic is pointless. If you die at any point, it’s a checkpoint restart. In an open-world game. You can’t change your loadout on the fly or call your vehicle to you if you’ve neglected to return to it every 5 minutes and drag it along with you - instead, you have to travel back to certain discrete waypoints spaced far and wide if you want to install the mod you just picked up, or use your new sniper rifle, or you decided that maybe you didn’t want to have to spend half your time babysitting your vehicle for once. 

This isn’t Mass Effect 2 - the levels aren’t discrete individual missions that begin and end in one go - and yet they haven’t adapted ANY of the systems to compensate for the defining design change they made for this release. Which is absurd, given that they literally had to build the game from the ground up to make it work with the god-damn Frostbite engine. But then, perhaps that’s the answer to all my complaints right there - maybe they just had to spend that much time dicking around with an engine that was notoriously unfit for this type of game because of some nonsensical EA mandate that every single thing they release from now on has to be on the Frostbite engine that they literally had no time to make a new game. Kind of seems counter-productive, doesn’t it? But then that’s what happens when you let a lizard in a suit that hasn’t touched a video game since he played Pong that one time in the 70s make pivotal decisions for your product’s design.

In any case, after all that, this exchange takes place:

Microsoft Excel text-to-speech stars as Foster Addison.

And that’s just the Cliff Notes version of some of my experiences in the first few hours of play. 

What the actual fuck were they thinking when they were developing this game? How did they stand in front of journalists and the public, knowing that they had something that performs this badly, that is written so poorly, and that looks so terrible, and speak about it as if it were something impressive? Did they genuinely believe they were making a decent product here, that this would carry the series’ legacy? Or was it more of a ‘fuck it, we’ve gone this far’ mentality, where they had no choice but to try and recoup some of the money invested? If it’s the latter, then they’re con men, because this looks and plays like the efforts of a first-time developer. 

I mean, I’m not even a series fanboy and I think this is an utter travesty. Why was this greenlit? No-one was asking for it, and in the aftermath of ME3 and the ever-worsening Dragon Age sequels, there was a rapidly diminishing pool of people who trusted or cared about Bioware enough to get it right a second time round. On top of all that, EA, with literally all the money in the world, devoted neither the resources nor the talent required to make this game resemble something of a worthy successor to the others in the series, so five minutes is all it takes before it becomes immediately apparent that we we're in amateur hour here. To my mind, the only appropriate way for it all to end was for EA to throw some dirt over it and call it buried, because if this broken, boring, incompetent diarrhea is the best effort they can muster at continuing this series, then it’s better off dead. Mass Effect: Andromeda is not the worst game in existence, but for all the resources that EA had at their disposal and with the history and experience Bioware has as a studio, this is the worst ‘AAA’ game I have ever played. Everyone involved should have known better, but then again perhaps I should have as well, because EA helmed this absolute joke of a release. Now I have to come up with a new rating - a warning, and one for which I can always include a qualifying title: 

0/10

Do not buy

[larksinging]

talk about your favorite speedrunning trick/a really memorable speedrunning moment thats your favorite to see happen

shoutout to “the weathertenko”, a trick from mariokart 64 i heard about recently, just because it has a cool name 

UMMMmmm let me think. i actually don’t watch many speedruns outside of GDQ, because i like the commentary to explain whats going on. 

i have a fondness for any trick that like.... clearly breaks the game, but only a little bit. im thinking of the punch card exploit from undertale, one of the first speedruns i watched a run of. that lets you move during cutscenes by exploiting the way a certain item pops up in the menu. 

wow im blanking on specific speedruns or tricks that i like uhhhh

on ridiculous thing i like is on superman 64 how making the game screen super tiny helps somehow??? i think that was a framerate thing to be more frame perfect, i don’t remember. wh

oh i watched something about mario 64 recently about how jumping backwards up stairs let you clip through certain doors. thats good

in general i love tricks that are clear exploits that let you manipulate events or bypass certain things, but aren’t COMPLETELY game breaking or just “going out of bounds”, or are at least out of bounds in an interesting way. theres nothing wrong with those, but i just personally find them less fun to watch. speedruns i like are ones that have a decent number of exploits and glitches and skips, and not just super glitchless (unlike pokemon >_>), but aren’t just clipping the hell past everything. like again, thats just my personal preference. if a speedrun is less than 30 minutes or more than a couple hours i can usually tell im not gonna enjoy it as much 

i like speedrunning because i find it FASCINATING how people pick apart games like this and find and land super precise tricks 

[kaboomcookie]

Sonic Forces (so far)

The most important thing to note here is that I have the Steam version of this game. That's important because, as all Steam users know, the game is an absolute trainwreck right now when it comes to loading up levels and playing cutscenes. I've managed to get up to level....4 so far? Before 3 and 4 it does crash for about a second, but then it works. The cutscenes stutter every second, even at the lowest framerate, but the actual stages run just fine. So let's talk about the actual game, or at least what I've played. The story (from what I can gather in the choppy cutscenes) seems interesting, but a little fast. There are pretty quick transitions between moments, and jumpcuts like "6 months later", which is sorta jarring but certainly not horrible. I'm down with Sonic being kidnapped, actually. It's at least partially interesting. Sometimes I wish Sonic Team would stick to some gimmicks longer, though, y'know? Like a brainwashed Tails in Sonic Colors/Lost World and Shadow's identity crisis in Heroes. I can kind of understand why they take a few steps back and stop it early, though. Too much of a good thing can be bad, after all. Now let's talk about the Avatar. Hey man. I really liked the idea from day one, and it really did deliver. I've seen people complain about it being bland, and honestly I'm not sure I understand that. While there are things that slightly frustrated me about the set designs of each species, there's still quite a bit you can do with each character in terms of customization. It is true that you start with next to nothing, but that's kind of the point. You have to play the game to get the cool stuff. Shocking, I know. In all seriousness, while I haven't collected that many items yet, I see a lot of potential with the options I've been given thus far. I personally stick to certain pieces when I find ones I like, and there aren't quite enough to mix and match yet, but I really like it. And I like that you get multiple different accessories for different parts of the body when you complete areas. That way you can get a bunch of items in one go and not have to spend 5 hours trying to find pieces that aren't JUST for the head, y'know? Anyways I like the customization. My only complaint is that the dogs don't have hair so I had to be a wolf because I REALLY wanted hair. Oh well. They're both canines, so close enough. So now for one of the biggest complaints the game has gotten from journalists; the actual gameplay. Yeah, the levels aren't very long. And to me the Modern Sonic level felt the shortest. But uh...it's Sonic. You're supposed to go fast while also finding out how to balance in branching paths and collectibles. So really I don't have a problem with the short levels, personally. There are still things you can go back and do, so why does it matter if you boost to win or not?? The Avatar stages are cool. I like the gadgets and the unique gameplay it offers. But I did notice that there's a LOT of hand-holding with the Avatars in particular. And maybe that's because I'm playing on Normal difficulty (because the only Sonic game I've ever played on PC is Mania so I really want to understand the controls first), but I wouldn't know. It's also not something that would make this game "bad" or anything; I mean, it's mostly for kids so the hand-holding is expected, especially for a completely new gameplay style. Classic Sonic's gameplay is really not as bad as I've heard people say it is. No, it's not on par with Mania, but that could be because /this game is 3D and Mania is 2D/ but hey mayBE I'M WRONG. Salt aside, the Classic stage I've played was pretty standard for a first level in that style, and really the only issues I encountered were the ones I usually have with Classic Sonic, like falling off of ledges and going a wee bit too fast. But to be honest I had that issue with the Avatar, too. And that could just be me, not knowing how to use PC Sonic game controls and trying to memorize how each character plays. If you're looking to S-rank this game, you just need to memorize play styles for each character and you're golden. I'm not quite there yet. I must say, the Hedgehog Engine 2 is beautiful. Even stuck on the lowest graphic settings so that the game will work, it's still amazing. The levels look very good, very colorful but not headache-inducingly so. The characters are also beautifully rendered, and the lack of pre-rendered CG is really...not important. The in-game renders look good enough, in my opinion. I know some people have said otherwise, but I think they may have played the Switch version, which does not run nearly as well as the other versions because it's extremely limited in graphical capabilities and framerate. So, my current complaints are as follows: •The Steam version really REALLY needs to be fixed, because the cutscenes in particular are frustrating •The characters are kind of stiff in gameplay and fall off ledges pretty easily •Dogs don't get hAIR •The story is a little fast sometimes And....that's it right now. I'll probably have some more later. But you know what? None of that is enough to deem this game "bad". The glitches on the PC version are NOT reflections on the actual product itself. They're just something that needs to be fixed, because I really want to watch these cutscenes. They look great, they just keep stuttering. Which is, again, just a bug that can be fixed. So, yeah, I enjoy this game. I find it fun and interesting, I'm eager to do more, I'm looking forward to the big fixes and playing it to its full potential. You are 100% free to 100% disagree with me. That's a-okay. Not every game is for everyone. But please, don't tell me or other people to not buy the game because you personally didn't enjoy it. Enjoyment in a game is a personal experience, and if you read this and thought the game sounded fun, go ahead and try it! If it didn't, then you probably shouldn't spend your money on it yet. Maybe watch a playthrough and see if it changes your mind, and if not just don't buy it. Definitely don't listen to the journalists, because they're biased and they can't speak for you. Just try it for yourself and make your own judgements, because that's the only way you'll really know if it's good.