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sg2tiger · 2 years

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I'm a weird person who likes archiving things. Making lists. Etc. My friends bully me for it all the time but it's simply who I am 😔 I always liked doing these little end-of-year gaming wrap ups but they never really felt right on twitter (and I had to post my rambling thoughts at an external link anyway). I thought about just coming back with 2022 and ignoring the two years I didn't post them here but the gap would bother me too much, so here's a repost of my 2020 gaming recap.

Unless otherwise noted, all text was written in December 2020. For a couple games that I’ve played more in the time since I might add some additional thoughts, but I’ll make a note of it being 2022-me talking if so.

The Sims 4

I feel like I have to preface this with the fact that I was never into the Sims franchise, and never played any of the previous games in the series. Yes, yes. I know that they were better than the Sims 4 in every way. But since this is my only Sims game and thus the only metric by which I can judge a Sims game for myself, I can still say that I’ve gotten a lot of fun and enjoyment out of it since obtaining it earlier this year.

It started because some friends of mine were playing, and I became intrigued by the building system (and the death traps one friend was constructing with said building system). I don’t think life simulator games as a whole really appeal to me, which is why I never got into the Sims before now, but I do love me a good building system. And I do think the Sims 4 has a good building system. I just love zoning out and making and decorating houses, even if I’m not exactly GOOD at it.

Still, despite all the things I hear about how inferior Sims 4 is to its predecessors, I’ve enjoyed the gameplay too. Since I play on PC I of course have access to mods to improve some of the areas where it’s lacking, but even so, ON ITS OWN without having anything to compare it to I think it can be a lot of fun if you know how you want to play it. Like, the only real ‘playthrough’ I have done so far that wasn’t just me testing mods and CC and stuff involved me trapping a full household of 8 sims inside a house and forcing them to live together reality show style. Except the house was also cursed AND haunted, and I had a mod that made fires spread faster and kill quicker. The goal was, any sim that could survive until they reached Elder on the fastest aging game speed would be set free from the house and be granted eternal youth and immortality. I had a lot of mini goals pop up as I played this save, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel — “reach elder without dying” — and that helped guide my gameplay enough that I didn’t feel completely aimless, which can be a problem for me if a game is too open-ended sometimes.

I can’t say I’d recommend spending more than $800 for the game and all its packs, but if you were to acquire it through some other means (that I absolutely definitely wouldn’t and am NOT advocating, of course) I think you could theoretically get plenty of enjoyment out of it, especially with the plethora of mods and CC out there. While there are certainly a lot of areas that have room for improvement and I have hopes for with the eventual Sims 5, I don’t think the Sims 4 is a BAD game. At least for a newcomer to the franchise like me who can’t really be disappointed because I have nothing to compare it with. To me, it’s a fun sandbox where I can zone out and enjoy building, or just throw some hapless sims into a horrible situation and play god. And sometimes it’s nice to have a game like that where you can just turn your brain off and do whatever.

Undertale

Yeah, I know. Undertale in 2020, extremely late to the party, etc. Thing is, when I first heard about Undertale, it sounded like a cute and fun game that I would probably enjoy. And then the overzealous fandom blew up and no one would shut the fuck up about it, casual spoilers were literally all over the place, and people looked at you like you had two heads if you said you hadn’t played it or didn’t want to play it. I got SO SICK of seeing people not SHUT THE FUCK UP about FUCKING UNDERTALE that I developed hype aversion and came to actively hate a game I’d never played, a game I probably WOULD LIKE if I played it, because everyone was so goddamn obsessed with it. I was actively avoiding it for years for this reason.

Anyway, after many years of consciously avoiding anything to do with Undertale as a result of the hype aversion, I ended up deciding to play it after all at the behest of good friends whose opinions I trust and who knew about my hype aversion going in. We sat down and talked it through and decided that I’d stream it to them on Discord while playing. They wouldn’t influence my gameplay or talk out of turn and spoil things for me, or give me hints I didn’t ask for, or tell me how to play the game. We’d meet once a week for a few hours for ‘Undertuesday’ and they’d just watch me play and experience things for myself (even if I sometimes very definitely annoyed them with my gameplay). And I appreciated that, so thank you guys again for being patient with me.

Now…I think I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about this game when I finally finished it, but it was back in April, and I don’t seem to have put them in writing because we were talking in voice chat. Unfortunately I can no longer remember any of the specific commentary I must have had for the game when it was fresh. But I think my general take was…I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much as I think I could have, had I TRULY been able to go in blind. But I simply had too much meta awareness of what the game was expecting of me due to how much it blew up. My awareness of things like the mere EXISTENCE of ‘pacifist’ and ‘genocide’ routes ensured that I tried to do the right thing throughout and never kill any monsters, because I knew the game didn’t ‘want’ me to. I had foreknowledge that actively changed the way I may have played had I not known. I also knew that the player character and the original lost human were not one in the same. Perhaps my feelings about the story may have changed had I been properly fooled into believing they were. And in general I had a hard time letting myself like Papyrus and Sans because of how popular they had become, and how sick I was of seeing their faces plastered all over the internet at the height of Undertale’s popularity.

Lots of things like that, mostly little things, but those little things added up to an experience that felt inherently tainted compared to being able to go in without that foreknowledge. I felt like I was just acting the way the game ‘wanted’ me to, but didn’t always expect me to, because a part of me knew that I was supposed to act that way if I wanted the best ending. Because I knew I’d be guilted and punished if I acted differently. Because I went into a game that acts as a deconstruction of the genre knowing that it was a deconstruction. I don’t know how else to put it, but I feel like I wasn’t really able to play it genuinely, and it affected my perception of the game and its themes. Perhaps also being aware that my friends, to whom this game means a great deal, were watching me with expectations and hopes of their own that I would come away loving it as much as they did, and wanted me to. And I feel like I probably let them down because that just didn’t happen for me.

Undertale is a good game. It’s cute, it’s got some cheeky little amusing moments, and you can tell a great deal of love was put into it. I understand why it’s as beloved as it is. But I think it’s also a good lesson about fandom hype and how NOT to try and get your friends to play a game you like (or watch a show, or whatever). I know that when you’re very interested in something you want more than anything to get your friends to become interested in it too — believe me, I’ve been there, and I was definitely the annoying type about it (especially about Umineko). But I think it’s also very important not to let your excitement for a thing override the experience of others, especially if you want them to love it as much as you do. Undertale feels like the kind of game that really works best when you can go in blind and not have your experienced guided — directly or indirectly — by spoilers and meta knowledge. I feel like I definitely would have been able to appreciate it more had I been able to have a natural experience with it, anyway.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

A lot of my thoughts on Odyssey are basically repeats of my thoughts on Origins from last year, so I won't rehash those here. The TL;DR of it is, I can enjoy both games on their own merits as vaguely historical open world action games, but not as what I consider to be Assassin’s Creed games. What I consider to be Assassin’s Creed has essentially ended with Syndicate, and it appears that we won’t be going back, now that Valhalla continues to follow in Odyssey’s footsteps in turning the franchise into (the very loose definition of) an RPG.

What’s NEW here from Origins is the addition of dialogue options and “choices” in how quests can complete. Except your choices aren’t real choices at all, and the player never truly has any agency in the parts of the story that actually matter in the end. (spoilers for this next part so skip to the end if you don’t want ‘em)

Phoebe always dies, for example. No matter what you do. No matter how fast you are. No matter what choices you made before this point in the story. Her character, regardless of what you do or don’t do, is destined to die. To me this would have been an IDEAL point in the story to have some actual cause and effect…like, maybe my actions earlier with her friend and the plague business could influence this, and if I choose poorly, I would have to live with the fact that I’d doomed her. Or something DURING the quest itself, as you pursue her. Maybe you could have acted in a way to get to her in time. I know they really wanted Aspasia’s reveal as the big bad to be a surprising end game affair, but it was pretty heavily foreshadowed at this point in the story (I didn’t think she was The Ghost yet but I certainly was suspicious of her being a cultist). Maybe if my character could have had the opportunity to not trust her, I could have advised Phoebe to not work for her at all, and not end up endangered as a result. There are any number of ways they could have given me the agency to either save or or TRULY end up responsible for her death by my actions. They did not. She is scripted to die no matter what you do. And this is just one example of many points in the game just like it where places that I feel like I SHOULD be able to influence the outcome with my decisions don’t do jack shit because it’s scripted. By contrast, most times that my decision CAN influence the outcome of a quest, the change is so minor (slightly different dialogue or the opportunity to pursue a bland out of the blue fade-to-black sex scene I don’t want) that it doesn’t feel worthwhile at all.

At the end of the day I’m left wondering why this even needed to be a feature at all. Just to give the illusion that this is an RPG now, and broaden the customer base? Because that’s what it feels like. The game could have played out almost exactly the same had they gone with a FULLY scripted story like all the previous games, especially since Alexios/Kassandra clearly already have a pre-written personality that comes across through the things they say and the way they say them regardless of which dialogue options you actually choose. The choices are basically tacked on for appearance’s sake, choices in name only. I felt nothing meaningful from a single one of my choices in all of my 207 hours so far (I’m still trying for 100% completion but I have finished the main questline with both Deimos and unveiling all the cult members). And that’s my biggest complaint about this game — the “choices” didn’t even need to exist because their absence wouldn’t have actually changed the game at all.

And that’s not even getting into the whole forced DLC marriage and child debacle (I don’t own it and plenty of other people have already gone on at length elsewhere on the internet about it, but I think it speaks to the exact same issue of the game promising and giving the illusion of player choice but ultimately still having a scripted story to tell and a protagonist whose personality is already set in stone regardless of your ingame decisions).

At this point I had a whole txt file with more specific examples of Quests That Did Not Actually Give Me A Choice but you get the picture, so I’m not gonna go on endlessly about each one…

Anyway. I feel like Ubisoft would be better off just making a new IP if they want to explore the RPG market so badly. Assassin’s Creed never fit this format and I don’t feel it ever will. RPGs with significant choices work best with silent protagonists (though I feel like KC:D did a serviceable job without one), not fully fleshed out characters who already have literally existed in a historical context by way of the game’s entire premise. By actively taking place in the past you are inherently limiting the things my character can do to influence the story, because that story has already concluded, and the results of it can be seen in the present day story. But they keep being so wishy-washy with the present day story that it’s like a relic at this point anyway that they’re just afraid to drop entirely to piss off the minority who still cares (me, I’m the minority). But when it clearly doesn’t MATTER anymore, why not just bite the bullet and do it already? You could always resolve the loose ends in a comic tie-in lololol

Honestly though, while I’m probably the .0001% who actually enjoys reading all of the stuff on Layla’s PC that gives more context on the lore of the modern day assassins vs. templars conflict and the overarching story that’s been running through this franchise since day 1, I think we’re at a point where they may as well just let it go. They’ve been doing it so dirty since Black Flag as it is, I’d rather just see it go than get further tarnished by being forcefully tacked on because it’s an artifact of the series. After the complete disregard for modern day that we saw in Unity and Syndicate I was genuinely excited when we got Layla, because I thought she’d step into the role of The New Desmond and have adventures that actually made the modern day story relevant again…but she’s actually LESS relevant than the nameless faceless Black Flag modern day protagonist, and that’s just sad. Just pull the plug already, Ubisoft. You’ve made it abundantly clear that you want this series to become a loosely historical sandbox RPG and the intricate and complex lore of the modern day storyline is only dragging you down. You don’t care about it anymore, so what’s it matter to people like me who DO care if you’re not giving it proper attention either way? Just let it die before it can be disgraced any more.

I’m getting off track though…honestly, it’s a fun game. Like I said, 207 hours and I’m still not done shooting for 100% completion by exploring every island and doing every sidequest that I missed my first go around. If I wasn’t having fun at all I wouldn’t still be here. I AM having fun. I think less fun than I had with Origins, if I’m being honest, but it’s definitely not a bad game. I’ll just never be happy with the idea of the series going in this direction in the first place, so I’m always gonna be here nitpicking about little things the majority of people won’t care at all about. Like the fact that haystacks and hidespots no longer exist despite being a literal staple of the franchise. Or the fact that you can’t die from fall damage anymore. Lack of true poison/berserk darts mechanic or any real ability to sow chaos in an enemy camp without breaking stealth because the game really really REALLY wants to force you into open dynamic combat because it looks cooler in the promo trailers. Feel like I had to fight the game to give my gear all the mechanics that boost Predator Shot and passive adrenaline regeneration so I can pull off multiple headshot kills without being spotted, y’know, like I want to actively do in a game where I expect to play like a proper assassin. Oil barrels also seem way weaker than they were in Origins where setting fire to camps was a risky (because it’s not exactly stealthy and quiet in the traditional sense) but very fun way of making quick work of enemies in the dead of night and then slipping away in the chaos before they could see you. The game just really wants me to be a Spartan Warrior Demigod and I’ve gotta work so hard to NOT be that and it annoys me. Can’t even blow up a grain silo from absolute and complete cover with no one around to witness SHIT and not get a mysterious bounty on my head. Are the horses and goats reporting my crimes again, like in Skyrim?

I could keep going with nitpick after nitpick but I won’t. I’m just cranky because I actually really liked both Unity (gameplay-wise, the story was a trainwreck) and Syndicate (slightly less of a trainwreck which is funny considering the presence of actual trains) and thought they did a lot to really refine that tried and true core Assassin’s Creed gameplay…and I know it’s never coming back. But Odyssey is fun I guess. If you aren’t an experienced AC fan you’ll probably enjoy it. And I guess that’s exactly how Ubisoft likes it.

Sonic Adventure 2

One day I was babysitting my 3-year old nephew and he told me he wanted to play a ‘blue game’. I didn’t know what that meant (I have since learned that this is how he refers to his parents’ Switch, which is light blue) so I looked in my Steam library for something blue. I landed on this, which I forgot I even had on PC. And that’s how I got my nephew obsessed with Sonic and also how I spent the next 2 months reliving one of my favorite games of the GameCube era.

I don’t really have a lot to say here. It’s Sonic Adventure 2. I got big into the Chao Garden, as one does, and trying to A-rank all those stages that used to give me the hardest time. I’m actually really proud to have A-ranked Crazy Gadget on all stage types, and Eternal Engine on all types except Hard (couldn’t manage more than a B). Also got all A ranks on Route 101, but I did that in the olden days too (after a great deal of frustration and one broken GameCube controller). Can’t manage to pull it off for Hard Mode Pyramid Cave though…and I know I DID finally get that one last time I replayed this game, like, 8 years ago, so I know I’m capable, but I just can't manage to pull it off.

Mostly I focus on the Hero stages though. Growing up, me and my brother used to share our save files on most games instead of having separate ones, and when he played I’d watch and vice-versa. For SA2 I always played the Hero story and he played Dark, so I’m always less familiar and more rusty when I try to do the Dark stages. I did get all A ranks on Radical Highway after many many hours of trying (fuck you, time attack)…but that’s about my sole Dark stage claim to fame. Rouge's stages in particular are exceptionally difficult for me.

I was still working on raising some Chao before I inevitably got distracted away by other games…but the good thing about having it on Steam is that my save data will be there next time I get the urge to play, whether it’s a year from now or 5+. No more hunting for old memory cards that probably got lost or thrown out when we moved houses, taking all those hard-earned A ranks and carefully-raised Chao with them. And I think it'll be satisfying to boot it back up after a long time and remind myself that I got all A ranks in Crazy Gadget (the finest achievement I'll ever attain in this lifetime and what should be engraved on my tombstone).

Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town

The original Friends of Mineral Town (back when it was still Harvest Moon) for GBA was probably my favorite Harvest Moon game, so I was excited to play the updated remake. It’s not PERFECT, and I did kinda end my playthrough on a sour note which I will explain in a moment, but looking back on it now several months later I’d say it’s a very comfy and largely casual farming sim that’s hard not to like. Fans of Stardew Valley or more modern farming sims might find it too shallow, but for people who played either the original FoMT, HM64 or Back to Nature, it’s a fun and nostalgic little game.

Of course, as with all remakes, there’s always those things you wish they didn’t change. Some of the character redesigns don’t sit as well with me as the originals, but most of them grew on me as I played (except Karen…). The removal of rival marriages is also a heavy blow, simply because a certain Japanese market didn’t like the idea that their waifus might get “stolen” if they didn’t act fast enough (and iirc you had like, 2 whole years before they WOULD in the original so like…)…I’d like to say the inclusion of same-sex marriage makes up for it, but I wish we could have had both. I always end up wooing everyone in town before I actually get married in these games, just so I can see all the events, and then I feel bad for leading everyone else on, so I like the idea that they’ll find happiness together too! I think that if the game were ever able to be hacked for mod support this would be the first thing modders would put back in.

But while these things are the main offenders you’ll hear people talk about, they’re not the worst. A lot of this is probably on the nitpick level that most players won’t care about so feel free to stop reading here. Granted that a lot of the game’s issues stem from being a little TOO faithful to the original and some of its more frustrating gimmicks (who honestly thought a 50 year wedding anniversary gift was a good idea in a game where no one will ever age?!), but there are a lot of things that were CHANGED from the original and made needlessly more difficult for some baffling reason…and then tied to achievements, to boot.

So, most of the achievements are pretty easy to get as long as you play normally and get past 3 years. Others require you to go a bit out of your way to achievement hunt for them specifically, but are absolutely doable if you set your mind to doing them. But then there are the ones that basically require you to plan your entire save file around getting them, and making no mistakes in the process unless you just really really REALLY love waiting around for entire ingame seasons before you get another chance. The main offenders here are all related to breeding farm animals, and how they needlessly changed the breeding mechanics in this game for seemingly no reason than to make things more tedious and difficult.

See, the remake introduced a convoluted friendship/happiness system to all your animals. I think the original had some hidden friendship requirements too, but the main thing in the remake is that animals you purchase have a friendship CAP, after which they cannot continue to gain more friendship, even if you’ve had them and cared for them every day lovingly for years. The only way to raise that cap is to breed your animals, and each time you breed a successive generation that heart cap goes up by one. Purchased animals cap out at 5 out of a maximum of 8 hearts. If you breed your 5 heart cow you bought, it’ll have 6 hearts. Breed that one and it’ll raise to 7. And so on down the line until you have a cow with 8 hearts…which is basically a requirement if you want to get several achievements, and if you aren’t aware of this and start doing it IN YOUR FIRST YEAR you’re going to have a very bad time.

See, you need your animals to have max hearts if you want them to produce the highest-quality animal products (milk, eggs, wool). And you need those animal products in order to cook some dishes, which you need for the achievement to cook all dishes in the game. And you need them at max hearts to win the seasonal animal festivals, which also have achievements. And the thing about those festivals is that they come once a year, and if you don’t have your maxed out adult animal by the time they roll around you have to wait a whole year to do it again. This is much worse than it sounds when you consider the aforementioned fact that the heart cap only raises by one with each successive time you breed…and it takes a full season (30 days) for a pregnant animal to give birth, and about another 20 for that baby animal to become fully grown. And then you have to actually GET that animal’s friendship maxed out up to its cap before you can breed them and pass that cap on to its baby (I think? I was playing in August so I’m a bit fuzzy but I’m pretty sure this was part of what made it so obnoxious because you couldn’t just breed the baby as soon as it hit adult stage if you wanted to do it right).

Now remember, the animal festivals come only once a year. You can’t submit a pregnant or baby animal, but you need an animal with 8 hearts or more (10 is actually the maximum but you only need 8 for everything that matters) to win the festivals. So if you time your breeding poorly, you might not have an animal that’s ready for the festival in time…there’s also holidays and the occasional typhoon/blizzard (which you can sort of cheat your way around in most cases if you’re vigilant about watching the weather channel) that can interfere in your ability to feed and brush the animals, which loses you precious days of raising that friendship.

Now let’s say you didn’t even find out about this cap system, or the 8 heart requirement for winning festivals, until well into your third year, after you’ve gotten most of the other achievements and basically done almost all you wanted to do in this game. Well too bad, because you’re basically going to need another 2 years minimum before you’ll actually have a prize-winning animal ready for the next festival! And if you’ve already befriended all the townsfolk, gotten all the romances, married, fully upgraded your farm, learned all the cooking recipes, fully explored both mines, and basically everything ELSE in the game besides these achievements…you’re going to have a lot of extremely BORING grind ahead of you where you basically just wake up, care for the animals, go back to bed and repeat. For season. After season. After season.

I was basically working like crazy to try and pull this off and I DID actually just barely not make it in time for the sheep festival one year which kinda threw me over the edge in my anger about this mechanic. And if you want to get all the products for your shipping log (thank GOD not required for an achievement, but something I was actively trying to complete before the breeding madness made me just say fuck it, achievements and then I’m done with this game) you have to do this for each type of cow as well…or at least have the sense not to buy any other type of cow besides normal until you’ve already gotten an 8-heart cow through breeding. Because whenever you buy a new animal of the same type after raising the cap, those animals will have the increased heart cap too…so if you had bred yourself a cow with 6 hearts, and bought a new cow, it’d have a 6 maximum instead of 5, and the different cow flavors all run on the same cap system as the normal cow (but only the normal cow’s milk is needed for the cooking achievement so the flavored cows are…well, frankly useless outside of the shipping log).

If this were the only frustrating system in the game I could probably suck it up and deal. It’s very obnoxious since, despite all the tutorial books in the library, I don’t think any of them mention this mechanic at all and basically require you to read about it in an online guide to know (and sucks to be you if you don’t do so early into your save so you can get started on it ASAP), and because it takes so much time to do it that it’ll take you a couple years for certain…but I’d probably sigh, complain a bit, and move past it. But the game decided that this was simply not ENOUGH of a punishingly specific seasonally timed game mechanic to tie to an achievement. No…instead they had to throw in that achievement for owning all 4 of the possible animal pets.

In the original FoMT you just started the game with a dog and you could take it to the fetch festival on the beach in summer. That was about it. The remake introduced different breeds of dog as well as cats, penguins and capybara you can get during different seasons from a special pet merchant. That merchant only shows up on the 15th of the month, and only if it’s sunny, and only if you’ve done some other stuff I forget exactly in order for him to start coming to town. And THEN, the pet he sells changes per season — cats in spring, penguins in summer, dogs in fall and capybara in winter. He won’t sell you a second pet until you’ve raised — you guessed it — your friendship hearts with your first pet, and it also has to be an adult…and you also guessed it, this takes a lot of time and daily dedication to level. And you have to do this until you’ve obtained all 4 pets from him, which you have to do EXACTLY on a sunny 15th day of each season, and only when all of your other pets are adults with maxed friendship.

Getting the idea yet? Another achievement basically tailor made to make you waste your time living through more ingame years than the game has engaging content to complete, and another element that you basically have to read about online to know exactly how it works. I wanted to get a cat. Cats are sold in spring, but it’s impossible for the merchant to come to town before the SUMMER of first year, so the earliest you can get a cat is year 2. It’s also not possible to get two pets in a row — your pet does not grow from baby to adult in time. I tried. So you CAN’T get a cat in spring of year 2, and then a penguin in summer of year 2…you have to skip over summer that year and you’ll be able to get a dog in autumn year 2. But then your dog won’t be an adult by winter of year 2, so you can’t get a capybara. But you can get a cat in year 3 spring! Oh wait, you have a cat already? Bummer. You effectively shot yourself in the foot and wasted time by not buying your pets with the maximum efficiency required to get this achievement.

I was in year 6 by the time I finally got all of the achievements. I had actually reached a point where I basically abandoned my actual save and made a second save file just to do this, neglecting my friends, family, livestock and farm for the sole purpose of waking up, playing fetch with my pet, going to bed and repeating until the time came that I could buy my next pet. The amount of time I wasted, both in real life and in the game, was just unbelievable. The unbelievably restricted mechanics in this game that can’t even be blamed on it being a remake of something so old, because they were actively INTRODUCED in the remake…by the time that last achievement finally popped I was just 1000% fucking done. I came away from a fun and jaunty little remake of a beloved game from my yesteryear feeling angry and soured on the whole experience. And I know that’s stupid, and I know you don’t have to get all achievements and I know achievements should be for things that you really SHOULD work to ACHIEVE and not be handed out like candy. But there’s a difference between achievements that make me feel like I worked hard to achieve them, and achievements that are gated behind ridiculously convoluted time-gated events that require you to actively stop playing the game normally and dedicate yourself solely to…waiting. To grinding your real actual time WAITING day after ingame day until the right time appears, and praying to God you didn’t fuck up and miss even one day in your routine. It’s bullshit, plain and simple.

And it’s not enough for me to not recommend this game, because I still had a lot of nostalgia and fun with it and this isn’t something that’s going to affect the vast, vast majority of players. I just…it’s remarkable how this game is both cutesy and casual and also so sadistic in its torments that it would make Satan himself blush. And it just kinda left a bad taste in my mouth by the time I’d finished and made me want to rant about it. And I put it in my notes, ‘rant about this thing when you write up the end of year post because I’m too angry to do it now’, and I didn’t wanna let my past self down. They put a lot of wasted time into getting those achievements, dammit, they deserve a little 10-paragraph rant as a treat.

But hey — at least I’m in the less-than-1% of (Steam) players who made it.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

Been playing this on and off at a very slow pace for a while now…I’m not finished yet so I don’t really have a whole lot to say. It’s…alright. It’s like Awakening: More Differenter Edition, except it lacks a lot of the charm that game had and copypastes some of its mechanics over seemingly just for the sake of it despite it not REALLY making sense to do so (I’m looking at you, dimension babies). The characters are less charming and memorable IMO, and while I kinda like the story plot itself more than Awakening’s, I’m not a big fan of the Pokemon-style version split between the two stories. I’m basically never going to buy or play Conquest, so I’m effectively missing out entirely on the characters and perspective of that side…a perfect scheme to engineer people into buying two copies of the same game, of course (at least with Pokemon the idea is that you’re socializing with other people to get what you don’t have…that logic doesn’t really work when it’s an entire story that you’re splitting between two games that effectively must be played by the same one person to get the full experience).

I was enjoying it well enough though, even if not loving it, until the other day when I finally got to that mission. Suffice to say I didn’t have the requisite A-rank with a certain someone, who was then Doomed To Die By Cutscene In The Stupidest Most Convoluted Way Possible, despite that person being one of my best and most-used units gameplay-wise…so I was basically punished for not having them stand next to my PC character, specifically. But I’m not going to go on another 10-paragraph rant about why I hate game mechanics that come out of the blue and give you no way of knowing about them without seeking knowledge from outside the game. Suffice to say I just sucked it up and reloaded my save, grinded out the last level of support on one of the bonus maps (we were at a B support already…just not A 🙄), and then replayed what had been one of the hardest maps to get through in the game so far the first time (it was easier the second time since I knew about the reinforcements spawning nigh endlessly from the towers if you don’t block em off). The character’s life was spared and life goes on.

Still one of the stupidest things I’ve encountered in a game though, since no other Fire Emblem has had something like that locked to a support, to my knowledge (unless the old pre-GBA ones that I never played did), and there’s really NOTHING in the game’s story to that point that suggests this character’s relationship with the protagonist is important enough to doom them to Death By Cutscene if you don’t support them to A before that point. I was angry. But I managed to overcome it so I’ve moved on.

2022 Addendum: I finished this game the following year, before moving on to play Three Houses. My final verdict was ultimately one of disappointment, hence the updated ‘Meh’ review on the page image. The writing was just plain bad (and I’ve heard that it’s arguably worse on the other two routes), and the characters were just not that memorable or likeable to me with maybe two exceptions. What I did like about it was the gameplay - and at this point I can’t even remember the specifics, but I do remember that there were a few times playing Three Houses where I kept thinking ‘man I really miss being able to do [x] like in Fates’, so I guess there’s that. I know Birthright is also the Baby Easy Mode of the Fates trilogy, but I think Conquest would probably be hard enough to piss me off (I put up with that shit in the GBA era but I don’t know if 2022 Tiger is patient enough for that anymore).

But mostly, the reason I don’t ever particularly care to play Conquest or Revelation is simply because Birthright wasn’t satisfying enough in the writing department for me to WANT to. Ideally you’d want one of your 3-part game series to hook the player into wanting to see how things go down on the other routes, right? Like, no one plays a visual novel, gets one ending, and says ‘okay that’s enough’ (r-right?). If the writing were GOOD it should make me want to see things from the other side. If the characters were compelling enough I should want to see them through another viewpoint. And if the overarching plot (which I spoiled myself on once I decided I didn’t want to ever play the other two games) actually had more hints to its presence IN Birthright’s story, enough to nag at my mind and say ‘there’s something unfinished here and I want to know what it is’...but well, it didn’t. Birthright didn’t manage to make me care about any of those things, certainly not enough to spend more money to buy both a second entire full-priced game and THEN a paid DLC on top of that.

Some people play these games entirely for the strategy gameplay, and that’s the crowd I hear praising Conquest. But other than that I get the strong sense that I’m not alone in finding Fates a pretty weak entry in the series overall. Thankfully I feel that Three Houses more than made up for all of Fates’ shortcomings, at least in the writing and character department, but I’ll talk about that more in my 2021 Three Houses review. UNthankfully...well, I’m not too excited for what I’ve seen about Engage so far, so I guess time will tell as to whether Fates redeems itself in my eyes in the future.

Skyrim Modlist: Elder Souls

I think it’s becoming a meme at this point that Skyrim, in some form, will be on these lists at the end of every year. But I can’t help it…something about it calls to me every year around the same time (late August to September) and it always manages to pull me back in 😔

Anyway, last year I gave Ultimate Skyrim a try because the last time I modded my own game I broke things in hilarious ways by trying to make my own mod compatibility patches (turns out I’m not that good at it). I thought having someone else curate the modlist experience for me would alleviate my problems. And I loved that part of it, and how integrated Ultimate Skyrim’s systems felt compared to me just slapping together whatever I liked with no thought to how those systems would interact. Unfortunately I wasn’t as big a fan of Requiem, the entire system Ultimate Skyrim is based upon…

But in the intervening year between playthroughs, Automaton (the tool used to install Ultimate Skyrim) gave way to a new tool called Wabbajack, and an entire new world of curated modlist installers opened up before me. I decided to peruse the various Wabbajack lists and see if I could find one that’d suit me a little better than Requiem…and I actually really liked the sound of Elder Souls.

As the name implies, Elder Souls is basically The Dark Souls Of Skyrim. The world is harsher, bleaker, and filled with a huge variety of new enemies and dungeons chemically balanced specifically to kick your ass. The skill and leveling system is completely overhauled — aside from the crafting skills (smithing, alchemy and enchanting), you don’t gain exp and level up by doing anymore. You gain gold with each kill, and when you sleep you spend an increasing amount of gold to raise your level in the skill of your choice. Eventually you’ll earn enough exp to level up and gain perk points to invest. As you level, the amount of gold it takes to progress increases higher and higher, from the hundreds to the several thousands…but as you grow in power, you’ll be able to kill more enemies to earn more gold to put towards leveling up further. It’s actually a really cohesive and fun gameplay loop that works surprisingly well in Skyrim, and I came to enjoy it a lot.

Of course you can also earn gold in the usual ways…loot, selling loot, crafting things and selling those…everything you do in the game basically makes you think about how much gold you have and how you want to invest it. In the early game especially, when it’s so hard to kill and loot enemies, that expensive weapon at the blacksmith can be really tempting…but that means you’ll be spending the gold you need to level up, so it’s a judgment call. It also makes you really focus your character build because your skillups are restricted to when you can sleep and afford them, and your perk points become harder and harder to earn as each level up starts to feel so far away (though you can find perk points by exploring and finding waystones in the world as well, for a little extra help). Do you want to invest that perk in alchemy or enchanting? Or is it more practical to boost your damage or defense by taking a combat perk instead? It really makes you think about how you level.

In the early game, you’re a fragile little baby. When you die, you leave behind a gravestone and all your gold with it (you don’t lose your gear) and respawn in the last inn you slept in. If you can get back to your body before dying again, you can recover your gold…but if you die on the way, it’s gone forever. It may be practical to bring a follower along for better survival, but they’re expensive to hire and share in a portion of the gold you earn…is it worth the tradeoff for the survivability? I managed to get lucky and beat Uthgerd the Unbroken in a fistfight by using the architecture of the Bannered Mare to my advantage, ducking and weaving, so I earned a ‘free’ follower to carry my burdens and tank for me in my early hours. She also came at level 11 when I was like, level 3. I had to make her essential, though, because she kept jumping in front of my arrows when I tried to shoot the enemy and I killed her/reloaded about 5 times before I’d had enough of that 😔

By the middle to the end of the game, though, if you’ve been diligent in exploring, killing and building your perks well, you come to feel like an invincible god. You can take anything alone, and followers just get in the way. I was playing an Orc warrior, with two-handed/heavy armor/archery/smithing. Orcs in Elder Souls have passive health regeneration. With the Wintersun religion mod I followed Malacath, of course, and his boon allowed me to regain health for the amount of overkill damage I dealt with each enemy kill based on my favor with him. My favor with him was constantly high because I pleased him by constantly slaying great and powerful foes. With the addition of crafting equippable Runes I furthered my health regeneration per kill and buffs to my armor rating. For completing Meridia’s daedric quest I got a spell that…well I forget what it did exactly but it buffed me even more. Using Ocato’s Recital I had it autocast whenever I entered combat. As a werewolf, I also had further buffs to my health and stamina, even outside of my beast form. By the endgame I was further buffed by Black Books and the reforged Gauldur Amulet (which in Elder Souls has the extremely OP power of letting you revive once on death with a 15 minute cooldown — but considering the Gauldur brothers are extremely formidable, it’s a reward worthy of defeating them). And with the Cleave ability in the two-handed perk tree allowing me to deal AoE damage with each attack, I became a literally unkillable, unstoppable machine of death.

I’m not even a min-maxer. Optimizing builds and gear isn’t something I find fun, so I don’t really do it. This just was mostly a case of multiple factors all aligning in just the right ways to make me feel like a literal actual god. To further illustrated exactly how broken my character became by the endgame, there’s an enemy in the Vigilant mod designed to be unkillable — as in, you’re supposed to just RUN from her if she sees you. I’m kind of a weenie about horror in games in general so I was very scared and I did run and panic when I got to that part of the dungeon but then I got cornered in a room and in my panic flailed about attacking and…killed her. And then her equally scary friend who showed up shortly thereafter. Just killed them both. They’re either meant to have stupidly high health or defense or maybe both, I read about them online and they are definitely not meant to be killable because this section of the mod is more or less supposed to be a survival horror. You can’t kill the monsters chasing you, you can only run. Unless you’re me, the most broken Skyrim character who ever lived.

Anyway. To further drive home how much I ENJOYED Elder Souls, this is the first time I actually, legitimately finished Skyrim. In all my 2,193 hours of OG Skyrim on Steam, in only 228 hours of Elder Souls (this was my first time playing Special Edition so I did have the exact hours on hand) I did what I thought I could never do because I was always so distracted adding and removing mods and generally being too busy breaking my load orders to actually play the game. I beat Alduin. Then I did the Dawnguard DLC for the first time. Then I did Dragonborn for the first time. And then I did vicn’s trilogy of GLENMORIL (I was actually doing this concurrent with Dawnguard), VIGILANT and UNSLAAD. And there were even more quest mods I’d never played included in Elder Souls…but after being able to solo VIGILANT basically effortlessly it felt like nothing in this game could be a proper challenge anymore and I officially decided to call it quits. At level 49, Ushnak the Orc retired, too powerful for Tamriel to contain.

I was still in the mood for Skyrim after that, though, so I grabbed a new modlist and started a new file. But it just…didn’t click. It was a fun enough modlist in its own right (Equanimity) but it just…didn’t feel the same, after getting used to Elder Souls. The world felt so much more empty without all the enemy variety…sure, they had QUANTITY with bandit camps absolutely overflowing with difficult foes, but it wasn’t the same feeling as wandering through the desolate mountains and stumbling upon a minotaur, armed to the teeth and blocking your path. My gold no longer felt like it had value when I couldn’t spend it on skill ups, which had kept loot meaningful throughout the entire game. I feel like Elder Souls just kinda ruined a more traditional Skyrim experience for me…it was so DIFFERENT, and definitely took some getting used to at first, but when I stopped playing I finally realized just how much I’d warmed up to it.

I do wonder how much more punishing it’d be on a different build, though. I was focusing on archery more in the early game but then focused mostly on two-handed by the end, but how would the traditional Skyrim Sneak Archer survive in Elder Souls? What about a mage? I never play mages, but still. A squishier class, a race and religion without inherent health regen abilities…it might be fun to try next year when the Skyrim urge strikes me again. Or maybe I’ll venture out and try another new modlist again. I think I just couldn’t jump RIGHT from the Elder Souls experience into something that was a little closer to normal Skyrim, but a year off might ‘reset’ that a bit. Still though, I’d like to play Elder Souls again sometime. And I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to play Skyrim for the 100th time, but also like, doesn’t want to play Skyrim for the 100th time.

2022 Addendum: Sadly Elder Souls has been discontinued, so my ‘Recommended’ rating feels a little weird now, but there’s other Soulsy inspired lists out there that can hopefully scratch a similar itch (last one I was playing before I got distracted was Ruvaak which was pretty fun). In general I still cannot recommend Wabbajack modlists enough, and since the time of this review I have not played Skyrim without it being a Wabbajack modlist (with the semi exception of me taking someone else’s Skyrim Together modlist and then kind of hacking it to pieces to fit me and my friends’ needs, but that’s a story for the 2022 game reviews).

Genshin Impact

Some friends were playing Genshin so I decided to give it a try. Especially since it was constantly being called a BoTW clone, and I figured I’d never get a switch or be able to play BoTW, so hey, why not?

I feel like I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s cute and fun and while the gacha elements are, well, gacha elements, I think the game is still very playable and enjoyable without suffering under the greedy fist of Big Gacha. The elemental interactions are really fun — I love games that take elemental play in more exciting directions than simple “water beats fire” style (one of the reasons I like Divinity a lot). Exploration is also a lot of fun, and it’s always really rewarding to solve a puzzle and see a chest pop up. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much worldbuilding and story there actually is, since I kinda figured it was gonna go more sandbox-style and just throw me out with a vague premise and have me explore the world in hopes of finding my sister.

I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far, I just haven’t played it a ton yet because I’ve also had my hands full with other things. But what’s there so far is pretty fun and I think it’s worth checking out at the very least.

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth/Shadowlands

A friend of mine usually buys me a couple months of WoW sub for every new expansion (I started playing when Pandaria was current). For reasons I no longer remember but are probably ARK-related, I didn’t end up getting a sub during the BFA period (my last sub came around the end of Legion). So about a month before Shadowlands dropped she got me a new sub, and I had to play catch-up on all the BFA stuff I’d missed out on…and THEN jump into Shadowlands.

Since I didn’t play BFA when it was current content, I think my opinions of it are pretty skewed. From what I hear, Azerite gear was wildly unpopular, but I kinda thought it was fun (granted I’m not into the endgame high tier raiding stuff where it’d really be an issue). I also liked how the Alliance and Horde stories were COMPLETELY different, and not just slightly different takes on doing the same content in the same zones. Both islands have a lot of personality and I thought the stories for both were interesting, and neither really required me to have a PHD in World Of Warcraft Lore Studies to understand them (which Legion sometimes felt like it did). I’m not SUPER thrilled with some of the changes they made to Outlaw Rogue since I was away, but I’ve gotten used to it…mostly.

Then Shadowlands came out JUST after I finished up my rep grind to get flying in BFA, where I now no longer had any reason to be and to fly (okay that’s not true, because it came in very handy when I leveled my horde main through BFA later, but it’s how I felt at the time). I kinda liked the more railroaded leveling experience for a change because of the way the story elements were able to be tied together and flow into each other, and I appreciate the fact that once you’ve gone through it that way once you don’t have to do it again on your future characters. Usually when I’m leveling I end up wandering off and picking up !s wherever I see them, getting vastly off-track from where the game actually wants me to go (I basically wandered away from like, the third story quest you get in Kul Tiras and ended up doing Every Sidequest in Tiragarde Sound before wandering back to continue the ‘main’ story there and realizing some of the places it would have taken me were places I had already gone to). For Shadowlands, since it wanted to guide me into focusing on the storyline, I decided not to do that — Bastion still had a bunch of the map unexplored by the time I finished the story there, but instead of wandering off to see it all I just headed right to Maldraxxus so I could do the story while it was all fresh in my mind. Then after finishing that, I went back to the other zones to wrap up the extra sidequests and stuff I had missed the first time around. It was a different kind of experience from how I usually play but I liked it for a change. Not sure if I’d like to see it as the new style for every expansion going forward, but I thought it worked well for Shadowlands in particular and the story it wanted to tell.

I’ve now got both my mains set up in covenants and am working on developing those. Another friend who hadn’t played WoW since WoTLK also recently came back and we have been working on leveling new characters together. As someone who’s mostly only ever played one Main Character, with a Secondary Character to occasionally experience stuff on the opposite faction, it feels weird to suddenly have all these ideas for new alts I wanna make, and having to find time to do all the things I wanna do. Thankfully my friend extended my sub as a Christmas gift, so I feel less pressured to have to do EVERYTHING I want to do by the end of the month now that I’ve got more time.

Overall I’ve been having fun though, after having been away from the game for a while. I’m kind of a casual WoW player in general, preferring the questing experience to doing stuff like Dungeons and Raids with groups of strangers that are gonna be putting pressure on me and my gear and my performance, so MY enjoyable WoW experience is not going to be EVERYONE’S enjoyable WoW experience. I get the sense that BFA was not terribly popular, but I thought it was better than Legion (and I liked Legion when it was current content). I’m also not as concerned with choosing the optimal covenant for Maximum Performance, but more based on aesthetics and style and how they fit my characters, and I’d like to see how all their little stories play out on alt characters at some point (right now my rogue is Venthyr and my hunter is Kyrian). Plus there’s still leveling my lowbie druid with my friends, and other alts I wanna make at some point…and working on stuff like pet battling and archaeology on the side. Lots of stuff to do, but hopefully now I’ve got enough time to do it in, and can relax a bit.

2022 Addendum: This was all before the whole big Blizzard scandals came about. At the time me and my friends were having a blast playing Shadowlands content together almost every night. Then basically all at once we all kind of stopped playing. For one friend, it was entirely due to the controversy. For the other I think it was a combination of conflicted feelings and general burnout. I kept going for another month or two until my sub ran out, but I was hitting the burnout around that time as well, and not having them to play with made me lose my zeal to work on my alts and other things to hold my interest, so I just let it lapse. I’m not really sure what the future holds as far as playing WoW together again, now...maybe someday. I don’t think there’s even been a new expansion since Shadowlands yet, anyway (I don’t really keep up with WoW news at all when I’m not actively playing). It’s kind of crazy how much can change in such a short amount of time. I’ll still look back at that time we were playing together and having fun, though, even if our WoW playing days might potentially be over.

Grounded

My friends came to me and basically said, “we’re obsessed with a new survival crafting game, do you wanna play”, and I said “why yes, I do love a good survival crafting game”, and the next thing I knew I had become a little ant…

Grounded hits on all the usual trappings of the genre. You have a vague premise (in this case you’ve been shrunken down to insect size and forced to brave the dangers of the backyard, Honey I Shrunk The Kids style) but otherwise are on your own to fend for yourself against things that want to kill you, while managing your own hunger, thirst, and other needs, building increasingly more advanced shelters and braving deeper into the world to get higher-level crafting materials and march ever toward advancement.

What makes it fresh is the way the ‘theme’ of being shrunk in the backyard feels really well integrated into the world. Things like finding a discarded juice box or soda can with a little (large, to you) droplet of liquid you can drink or fill your canteen with to replenish your thirst, which you can absolutely imagine finding in a backyard where children play. The giant bird who sometimes flies by and perches on a nearby bit of distant scenery, massive enough to blot out the sun from your tiny view below. The koi pond essentially acting as the ‘ocean’ biome, filled with hostile aquatic creatures and the ever-present threat of drowning. The vaguely 1980’s aesthetic of it all. It just all feels really cohesive and helps you immerse yourself in the world.

The mechanics are also a bit more…dare I say, casual? More forgiving? Than some of these games tend to be. Your only needs are really hunger and thirst, and while you CAN sleep, you don’t have to…you can just keep working through the night every night if you want to, without rest. Buildings can clip into the terrain by default, so where you build is a bit more forgiving (some games could stand to learn a thing or two from this…looking at you, ARK). When you die, your corpse basically stays there forever, so there’s not a ton of pressure to race back to where you died to recover your stuff. For that matter, anything you drop seems to stay on the ground forever. These things might change if the game gets persistent servers down the line for performance reasons, but it can be kinda nice in a multiplayer game with friends.

I think my favorite thing is how the building system is LEGITIMATELY cooperative. In games like ARK or Conan Exiles, it’s like, you basically designate one person in your tribe to be The Builder, with everyone else just being your resource gathering monkeys. One person has the plans, the ideas, the visions for how to build the base…and it can be hard to communicate that without wires getting crossed, and that can be costly when these games usually don’t return all your resources spent when you demolish a structure. But the way Grounded does it, you’re basically not placing down structures in the world right away, but blueprints for them. Everyone can see them, even as you’re trying to position them. Then anyone can get the resources and actually turn that blueprint into a structure. And if you decide you don’t like it, or change your plan, you can just destroy the blueprint without sacrificing the resources on it. It feels a lot more like I’m working with a team when I see blueprints that my tribemate made, and I can just go get the resources to build it when I’m able. Really working together, just like real ants…for queen and colony…

Another thing I love and think needs to be default in ALL these games, ASAP, is the ability to color code and add a floating icon to all your chests and containers as an easy way of saying ‘this is what we store in this box’, without requiring signs or mods or just you having to memorize/check every chest every time. Seriously, survival games? Please take note.

All that said, it’s still early access, and there’s some bugs (heh) sometimes. We’ve had some semi-frequent random disconnections kicking us back to the main menu and forcing the host to re-invite us back. There are also not yet actual servers, so the multiplayer game saves just live on the host’s computer. Latency can be an issue if their internet is better or worse than yours, and lagspikes and rubber banding is a bit more frequent than I tend to feel it in games with dedicated servers. Some hitboxes are a little wonky sometimes, for both enemies and resources. And lots of other little stuff I’ve already forgotten, but nothing I’d consider really gamebreaking.

Overall pretty fun if you don’t mind some bugs, both literal and technical (though there IS an arachnophobia slider that can make the spiders into basically cartoony blobs, which I think is a pretty cool consideration in a game like this). It seems like the devs have a lot of big plans on the roadmap as well, and a friend who was playing around in God Mode stumbled upon a few areas labeled as UNDER CONSTRUCTION, so the map might be getting some extensions at some point too. If you ever felt like you just wanna zone out and go about some farming tasks like a diligent little ant…Grounded is your game.

2022 Addendum: Grounded’s officially out of Early Access at this point and there have been a lot of changes to the game in the time since I wrote this review, and updates have continued coming out pretty regularly even post-release, which is always good to see. I think the funniest thing about my review in hindsight is that I don’t know if I’d consider it ‘casual’ as much anymore because combat has become a bit more deep and challenging...we even had to bump our difficulty down in an ongoing save at one point because we were having a rough time. I think more or less all the changes have improved the game, though, which isn’t something you see every day in a game like this (at least in the two I’m most familiar with, ARK and Conan Exiles, where every update tends to be met with a choir of angry players (usually PVP people, I don’t go there) about how the devs broke everything and suck and should issue refunds and also die). But yeah idk, go check it out, it’s pretty fun to be a little ant sometimes.

#also i'm back i guess #maybe #sg2 plays video games #sg2's game reviews

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capricxs · 4 years

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so you’ve been roleplaying for years... things change, the way the community does things shift, and sometimes there’s new skills you need to pick up and adjust to in order to make your time rping as creatively rich and fulfilling as it can be. one of those things that’s become extremely important is plotting & hcing. either in groups, in indie, or doing 1x1s, these two are the foundation to your interaction (unless you’re the type to wing it). sometimes when i interact with people, it seems they don’t really click with this process, so in the guide below, i’ll help to explain why these are so important, and how to do it in a way that not only gives you a rich plot, but helps inspire and keep your writing partner engaged with you.

disclaimer --- this is just my personal experience and opinions being shared. i am not the end-all-be-all on how to interact with writing partners. this is just here to get people to begin thinking about things they otherwise wouldn’t have thought about.

questions regarding this help post can be found here. let’s jump in!

WHY IS PLOTTING & HCING SO IMPORTANT?

firstly, rp has changed a lot since the days of launching into an rp or writing a random starter for a new follower. things are a lot more established and regardless of if you’re in a bio/skeleton rp with pre-written connections, or you’re in a new plotless group or indie and you’re coming up with them on your own, it’s a major foundation to your writing experience, so don’t treat it lightly!

secondly, regardless of format, and with the shifts in rp culture, behind the scenes plotting & hcing is crucial to the development of your plot & characters. as writers, we take more time with our replies so development on dash happens a lot slower. personally i don’t mind that, but i don’t want that to hinder my writing experience so i like taking things behind the scenes to help build up dynamics and situations so the whole relationship isn’t based off one or two threads/instances.

lastly, it helps to keep things inspiring. sound dumb? you bet, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles baby. so many times i have plotted ships, sibling relationships, best friends, or other core relationships, and wanted to sink my teeth in relationship lore and background and dynamics, only to be returned with “hahah yes! i love that!” now i understand this is never ill-intentioned, but it does suck the muse right out the situation. if you do not validate & expand on your partner’s ideas, it’s not going to make that writer’s ideas feel appreciated or loved. the way to tell them you love their ideas? sink your teeth right back and send an equally meaty response right back!

PART ONE: SO YOU WANT TO PLOT

you don’t need this post to tell you how to come up with plot ideas, that’s a whole different guide, but let’s say you’re in the brainstorming process. you’re throwing ideas back and forth based on your muse’s two backgrounds and seeing what sticks. what is SUCH a downer, is when a writing partner is just ... not contributing. yes, we are all guilty of the line “i’m open to anything!” but try and limit yourself to using that line once in a conversation. hell, i prefer it when a person doesn’t even say it at all and they’re HONEST. if i come in guns-a-blazing and i ask ‘what plots do you need filled?’ if a person responds with ‘i need someone who hurt my muse’ there’s two option, i fill that plot, or i don’t. it’s that simple. don’t be afraid to say what you want, the worst that can happen is the person says ‘eh, i don’t really think that fits my character’ and you come up with something else! but when you’re already passionate about the idea, you’re setting yourself up for such great success!

so what do you do when your one (1) braincell isn’t working and you can’t come up with any connection ideas? two options, you can either go to one of the dozens of guides for basic connection ideas and give your partner something, or you can look at the other person’s bio, and your muse, and try and find connections between them. both of these are painfully easy! i’m a personal fan of the latter as it seems a bit more grounded and juicy than the former, but those can be twisted into something great too! **if you’re in a group setting, even asking what that person’s other connections are, and piggybacking off of that. these create super spicy connections. example: you find out muse a is muse b’s ex, and your muse, muse c, is best friends w muse b, so it’s safe to assume your muse c will probably not get along with muse a.

this important thing is not to make your partner feel like they’re doing all the work. because that’s never fun, and truthfully, it doesn’t make that person want to write with you if you’re not also putting in the elbow grease. plotting is fun, not a chore! make it a party!

PART TWO: NOW YOU HAVE TO BACK IT UP

you’ve got your plot now, congrats! and you’re so excited. but now you need that plot to be fleshed out a bit. there’s some history there so you’ve got to establish it. in comes the powerhouse--- my favorite part to this whole thing: HCING. it’s the most laid back, and in my opinion, creative part of the rping process. truthfully, i enjoy it more than threads because of the absolute insanity you can dig up. but i only love it if my partner can hand it back just as i can serve it.

maybe you’ve never quite thought that this part was that important, but i can assure you, if a person is giving you 3+ sentences about the dynamic of your characters, they’re trying to hc with you, and if you don’t enrich them, your dynamic is going to wither away.

i brought up an idea in the first part of this guide that’s extremely important to how you hc with your writing partner: VALIDATE & EXPAND. it’s the idea that no matter how much or how little your rp partner gives you in terms of an hc, you respond to it with a validation, which can range anywhere from ‘i LOVE that’ to as simple as a key smash and the pleading emotion, or even repeating a fraction of what they said to show you understand their vision. but then you have to back that up with expanding on that idea. hcs could be about a situation or about your writing partner’s character, so expand on how your character feels and reacts to things. it’s beyond discouraging when i write a whole idea out, explaining how my character feels in this emotionally intense setting, and my writing partner only gives me the validation portion, and now i have no idea how my opp’s character thinks, feels, or interacts.

see, a point i mentioned above is the fact that threads don’t work like they used to. and that’s fine! but hcing is an easy and fun way to make up for the fact that we take time with our threads now. if you’re rping to find rich, in-depth, satisfying dynamics, it’s going to take many many months to get your understanding of your opp’s muse, and the relationship they have, hcing fast tracks that process. i’m writing with you, i love your muse, give me the dirty details, i promise it’s not obnoxious. the more your give back, the more you will receive. so why wait around, sitting on our thumbs for me to fully get a grasp of your character’s voice, and your character’s thoughts, when we could do that on chat and have a grand time.

but now you’re thinking to yourself: okay, but how exactly do i validate and expand? and for that, we go to EXAMPLE-BOT 3000 !! not a real bot, unfortunately, but example bot has dug up a personal interaction i’ve had hcing. for context, this is a 1x1 writing partner i’ve had for years. we have an excellent dynamic and they are perfect. they have also given me permission to use our convos as example.

here is my message [ CONTEXT: this is a sandbox-star-wars-esque verse]

Okay but I had a thot in the shower,,, where the best thoughts are had. And what if,,, after this meeting and they part ways and such and it was just another weird occurrence in their lives, blastis gets a mission and it’s either to protecc salia or like guide salia across the galaxy to do something smth and save some lives or whatever. And ofc not because she couldn’t take care of herself but he has smth she doesn’t that gives an edge or just a close loved one of her’s didn’t want to see her get hurt. So you have these two traveling across the galaxy,,, sometimes arguing bc she can manage herself but he’s just fulfilling the mission. And them both kicking but. And all the steamy tension and cliches.

let’s break this message down before we get into the response. first, hcs don’t have to be formal. they are the most fun when they’re less together and don’t rely so much on “sounding good”. you’re just rolling off the top of your brain, chatting like you would with a friend, don’t worry too much on formalities because this isn’t the place for that.

i am also presenting my idea in a way that is confident, and with plenty of ideas to work on. i am involving my partner’s character but not godmodding. i am taking things i have learned from character introductions (like salia being independent and empowered, and wanting to do good/help others) and not disrespecting them, but having her take part in the plot. there are also small bits at the end of this idea that are little nuggets to build off of.

let’s look at my partner’s response.

AAAAH okay i love the idea!!! however shes a v. freelance kinda healer and doesnt really take official things. and she doesnt have loved ones that would know if there was danger - she can telepathically communicate with her own people but if she doesnt want them to know things they cant just. force their way in its a Closed Communication line not an open invitation into her thoughts asdfghjsh. But i could imagine that some guy or family hire her to find their children maybe who were lost on their adventure/mission with friends and the last message sounded like one was hurt,,, badly. and the other cant help for some reason. and they hire blastis to both protect her and later the people shes supposed to heal??

but anYWAY the Important part is ofc. the tension. and his big ass in her ship bc why would she?? take another if hers is right there. so hes gonna take that single bed and not complain. but ooof those two?? just kicking ass and being amazing. growing on each other more and more.

right off the bat is validation. and validation doesn’t have to be as direct as it is in this message. the validation is important here specifically, my partner showed they were interested and supportive of the idea i presented, but needed the plot to fit in their character’s story better. we see them making adjustments--- this is a collaborative experience so i alone shouldn’t be the one coming up with the plot, nor would i want my idea taken just as is. instead they mold it to fit what makes sense, getting more specific than my idea with a “mission purpose”. this is where the bouncing off of each other begins.

they then take the “bait” and start building on the tension our muses will experience (this is a ship afterall). while this is the beginning of our conversation, and there’s aren’t specific moments we’re working off of, this is setting the ground for future headcanons (see: the focus on sexual tension, living in a ship together, kicking butt), we are both mutually giving each other little tethers to take hold of. this is a very good start to begin working out the dynamic and situations these two characters are found in, with multiple different launch-off points.

CONCLUSION

there’s no right or wrong way to rp. even the tips listed here might not be applicable to your style, just having the idea in the back of your mind helps. the important thing is you and the person you’re writing with are having fun. you both are respecting each other’s time and ideas and creating a beautiful dynamic or world or relationship. this is a collaborative experience, and it’s important not to leave your partner feeling like they’re doing all the heavy lifting creatively.

hope this helped! as always, you can send me any questions you have in regards to this topic HERE. you can find a tag of answered questions in relation to this topic HERE.

#rpt #rpc #rph #writing guide #rp guide #hc guide

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casualarsonist · 3 years

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Postal 2 review

Postal 2 was released right in the middle of what should have been my prime teenage-edgelord years, but while it’s had a resurgence in popularity due to nostalgia, returning to it, the game strikes me now exactly as it did then - a forgettable and borderline broken, amateurish piece of software that was crowded out of all but the most fringe playerbases by other, better, more interesting games.

Postal 2 is Hatred, if Hatred mistakenly thought it was funny - it was a try-hard attempt at outrunning South Park in a race no-one was watching. The irony is that in hindsight South Park turned out to be tedious fence-sitting ‘all sides are equally stupid’ takes from a pair of moron Gen Xers who thought that not having a strong opinion about anything was cool and were also responsible for mass-marketing anti-semitism to an entire generation. It was seen as edgy and provocative in the 2000s, and now it’s laughed at for its rigid, pointed adherence to committing nothing of value to any issue. And in trying to out-do Parker and Stone the developers of Postal 2 shackled themselves to the exact same sinking ship.

The game is…not great. It’s ugly, and poorly put-together. There are constant issues with controls and soundtrack - you can hear the audio clicking repeatedly in the opening minutes of the game because whoever did the sound design stitched together a bunch of stock sound effects and didn’t crossfade the adjoining tracks. The same 3 second soundbite of a bird repeats endlessly - noticeable because it is the only sound playing as you tour through the town. And while there is something to be said for the effort put into programming all the systems that go towards simulating the mundanity of everyday life (and towards your disruption of that mundanity with a can of gasoline and a box of matches), this was an indie game with a certain amount of ambition developed before crowdfunding could turn these games into something worth playing. It’s tedious, but not in the way the developers intended - it’s tedious mechanically, like playing in a small, ugly, sadistic sandbox. The most interesting thing you discover about it is that doing everyday tasks like shopping for milk, and burning everyone in the town alive, are actions that get boring at exactly the same rate as one another.

That said, I think there’s a certain amount of accidental Tom Green-esque avant-garde nihilism in the absurdity of this game. It’s kind of funny to watch the 'Parents For Decency’ whip out pistols and try to murder every member of the Running With Scissors development team because they don’t like their violent games. That’s genuine satire - it actually says something real, and, because the 'think of the children’ groups are usual comprised of wealthy conservatives trying to avoid caring about actual tangible suffering in the world, the commentary kicks upwards at a group that will otherwise avoid any punishment for their hypocrisy. The icing on the cake is that you can then choose to kill them in self-defence, proving that you’re exactly the thing they were protesting. Postal 2 has something to say occasionally. Very occasionally. But then give it a few hours and you’re murdering dozens of shrieking racist stereotypes of Afghanis that all look like Osama Bin Laden.

If you kill 30 people from every type of skin colour you get an achievement called 'Sheriff Arpaio would be proud’. I had to google his name because I thought he he was a mass murderer with some kind of pointedly indiscriminate political agenda. Nope - he was a white Sheriff in Arizona who specifically profile non-white people in one of the most widespread examples of open racism in American law enforcement since segregation was made ‘illegal’. And given recent history, that’s saying something. He alone cost the taxpayers of his one county $140 million dollars via lawsuits brought against him. The fucking U.S. Justice Department sued him. If I hadn’t researched that I wouldn’t have realised he was actually a massive racist asshole who specifically targeted Hispanics and black people, because Running With Scissors made a false equivalence in their throwaway gag that just happens to mislead the player about the racist crimes of the person they’re referencing. 'Sheriff Arpaio would be proud’…because it was a numbers game? Yes, that’s what he liked. Persecuting *everyone* - as many people as possible, and not one very specific demographic of people.

I’m not saying that this stupid joke intentionally whitewashes the racism of its namesake, and I’m not saying that this, coupled with the developers’ portrayal of Middle Eastern people as homogenous terrorists screaming gibberish through the singular face of a mass murderer is in any way an explicit demonstration of their edgelord racist worldview. I’m not saying that, in the same that I’m not saying that a crack-smoking, dog-kicking, wife-abusing, spree-killer living in a trailer in any way reflects their perspective towards the poor, and that this entire game is one big middle-finger to everything the developers personally dislike. I’m saying that there’s a marked difference between forcing players to kill brown people because they’re all terrorists and forcing players to kill white people because they’re vegetarians. Or have red hair. Jesus that was such a 2003 joke wasn’t it?

At the very least, the panel of people who mindmapped the ideas that came together to form the foundational commentary of Postal 2 are dumb as dogshit, and the end result of that is 'whoopsie we’re slaughtering dozens of Muslims ho ho ho the Indian food store has Afghani suicide bombers in it all these people are the same skin colour Sheriff Arpaio did a bad thing to *lots of different people!*’

Isn’t it interesting that a game touted as a free-for-all and remembered for it’s 'all sides are bad’ South Park-esque 'sick of the system’ worldview actually depicts its town exactly from the perspective of one very specific demographic of people - the single most represented demographic in the American population: middle-class straight white male Gen Xers who feel disenfranchised but are also ardently pro-America, hate the poor despite not being wealthy themselves, hate the rich for being richer than them, hate 'rednecks’ for being too uncivilised, hate 'conservatives’ for being too stuck-up, and hate liberals for not fitting into a stuck-up conservative worldview. When you think of yourself as the lone, correct singularity trapped in the centre of a world filled with people who are wrong because they care too much about things you don’t like to think about, literally every other person on the planet becomes a potential threat. Your life is given meaning by the feeling of persecution this constant target on your back brings. And it’s a lot easier to take your anger out on a toothless social group than to comprehend your own lack of identity - to make fun of 'gingers’ and vegetarians like you were born yesterday rather than do anything legitimately rebellious or anti-establishment. Particularly if your specific demographic is the one nearly all media is catered towards. Movies are telling you that you’re the hero, but your miserable job tells you that you’re just a rube. Who’s to blame? Don’t bother thinking about it, because you might end up on a crusade, and you don’t want to be like those losers who keep going on about their problems. Make a game in which you kill all those people instead. That’ll teach em.

Postal 2 is the kind of stand-up comic that gets heckled for telling an offensive joke and then threatens to shoot-up the audience if they won’t stop booing him. It was made - poorly even for the time - by a bunch of clowns playing to the easiest possible audience: white edgelords. It’s a power fantasy for people who don’t have anything meaningful to fight for, so they fight gingers. Y'know, because South Park did it. Nazis are funny, gingers are bad. Everyone is wrong, stick to the middle. The middle of a spectrum. The middle of the road. The middle of a river as it sweeps you out to sea. It’s all the same.

2/10

#postal 2 #rws #running with scissors #fps #pc #video game #review #edgelord garbage

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veeranger · 4 years

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ok here are my thoughts on SPV3.2′s rendition of Halo CE’s first level: The Pillar of Autumn, which i played last night.

please keep in mind these are my subjective opinions based on my single playthrough of the level on normal difficulty, and that i have nothing but respect for the obviously large amount of effort put into this mod by its creators.

first of all its great that this level skips the camera orientation shit even on normal difficulty, thank god.

so basically the level plays out exactly the same as it did in the original game with the exception of the weapons behaving differently, until you get to that one staircase room that was a nightmare on legendary in the original game. its clever actually because the enemies are positioned on the same side as you but above so you run up the stairs and turn around to find yourself face to face with....a brute! not an elite but a brute in the halo 2 style.

with the brute comes their signature brute shot, brute plasma rifle, a new brute plasma pistol, and a new weapon called the shredder, a brute version of the needler that lacks the projectile tracking of its sister weapon but has a much higher projectile speed making it very fun to use and extremely deadly to unshielded foes including the brutes, who all lack energy shields like the halo 2 and halo reach variants, which makes sense. gameplay wise they’re much less of damage sponges than they were in halo 2 however i did notice that theyre markedly less aggressive again compared to their halo 2 iteration. i have yet to see a brute do its signature charge, but im going to chalk this up to engine limitations and not developer oversight, for all i know these brutes are probably just reskinned elites with no shields. brute chieftains are also missing alongside their iconic gravity hammers, though i assume this is engine limitations preventing something like that from existing.

now all this said i am sorely missing the spiker as the brute’s signature weapon because way too many of these bastards are carrying brute shots which can make encounters a bit frustrating at times, while paradoxically making other encounters far too easy due to the weapon’s ability to one shot weaker enemies and carry much more ammo than its halo 2/3 counterparts. it also makes vehicle segments suck sometimes because there are 2-4 brutes with these things knocking your warthog around but thats for the next level.

anyway back to the level, it quickly takes a turn into uncharted territory with a major detour that has you going through large storage areas and a lot more hallways before you finally end up back on track in the original level. i dont hate this per say and it certainly spices the familiar levels up but i can’t say i love how long these new areas are. i think i spent at least 30 minutes on this level and most of that was the new areas. now this isnt bad per say and the areas were not explicitly poorly designed, though i wasnt the biggest fan to be honest, its more so that the level becomes a slog after a while with no end in sight. i also think this addition muddles the intended game design of a tight corridor shooter than blossoms out into a massive open sandbox in the second level but that is not relevant really so i will not actually put stock into that opinion.

after getting through the new stuff you just drop back into the original level and the rest of it plays out basically the same as it would otherwise, new sandbox notwithstanding. if this level and the second level are showing me any kind of pattern, its that i can expect every level to just suddenly branch into new content before eventually falling back on the original level path and playing out like that. more on this in other level reviews i’m sure.

all said it was not the best level ive ever played and it dragged on too much but i wouldnt say it was all bad. i had fun more or less and i will say the level ran together pretty organically even with the new additions. oh yeah theres a few extremely minor environmental manipulations you can do like turning gravity down in some areas giving you moon physics and turning on auto turrets in some battles. nothing major but still cool.

i dont think i want to speak on weapons yet because i havent gotten to use everything yet but i dont like this mod’s assault rifle. it added the smg from halo 2/3 (which i also dont like in this mod) so now the ar is the 32 round variant with a severely nerfed rate of fire which doesnt feel very good to me. the smg has way too much kick to fill the roll of the original ce assault rifle so i feel a little lost without a reliable spray and pray gun, but i suppose comparing and contrasting to the original game is a bit pointless considering this mod really wants to be a totally different experience. still i dont like the ar and im not crazy about the smg.

i will speak on grenades though, there are two new ones, a clusterbomb which is self explanatory and a gravity bomb, which pulls enemies into it and then weakly explodes, killing weaker enemies and usually dropping elite shields. interesting additions to the sandbox but i feel like the clusterbombs make frags redundant.

this mod has armor abilities now like halo reach, taking the place of your flashlight when equipped. i assume this has to be this way otherwise i would want to berate them for making me kill my flashlight for sprint or VISOR, which is basically just the detective vision mode from odst but in a really displeasing color pallet. now im nitpicking but yknow. the game is still very dark in a lot of places thanks to this mod still using halo ce’s original lighting engine or just respecting the fact that it was like that for a fucking reason unlike anniversary edition, so losing the flashlight is a real pain sometimes.

oh also this mod changed the HUD, now your shields and health are where the should be, in the top middle of the screen like in every halo game starting with 3.

anyway i think thats all i have to say about level 1, not a massively successful first impression but it was not bad and i did not hate it. pretty so-so for me. the next level i’ll have more positives to talk about i think

#Apple Post #riley plays halo: ce spv3

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musassbv674 · 4 years

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bbs-backlog-challenge · 4 years

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Games Of 2020

Bet there’s gonna be loads of very trite retrospectives this year. 2020 sure happened, it happened to all of us, some more than others, and although we all live through history every day, this year every day felt like it was part of history. Video games!!! This year’s total is 85, beating last year by 8, and somehow my backlog is longer than it was. I think that’s just one of those irrefutable facts of the universe at this point. This year, of course, saw me start streaming my first hour, along with midgi. Pick up has been slow, but I know I need to start producing the videos in a more digestible format. Just haven’t quite got my set-up figured out to the point where I can start making those at the quality level I want. It’s coming. That’s for 2021! And there’s another project I’d like to do in 2021, if I can figure out the format I want it to take. Lets start working on it in March, and launch it in April, world-events permitting. Video games!

- Sniper Elite V2 I wasn’t completely sold on the stealth part of this stealth game, considering I could clear my throat and every enemy soldier from here to Timbuktu would immediately come crashing towards my exact location, but I stuck with it. ...Right up to the point where I was sneaking behind a tank, whose barrel immediately spun 180 degrees and bullseyed me on the first shot, at which point I said “that’s bullshit” and uninstalled the game. Yes, it was a ragequit, but life is too short to put up with marksman tanks. - Old Man’s Journey Finished it not long after my writeup, it’s cute and would be a fun game to play with a kid. Very storybook. A little sad at the end, but we expected that. - Ys Seven This game has some real trouble with its signposting. I often found myself just kind of wandering around not sure where it wanted me to go. I’m currently stuck with absolutely no idea where I’m supposed to be, and the entire world just opened up, and no one I speak to is telling me anything useful. Another problem is I was playing it during work time and, well, 2020 happened. Will probably pick it back up once work starts. - Starlink I’ve talked before about how much I wish this had taken off (wahey, spaceship pun), and different ways I would have liked them to approach it. Regardless of that, we have a pretty decent space-em-up with the Starfox crew in their first good game since Starfox 64, with some necessary but frustrating gated challenges locked behind physical purchases, and somewhat repetitive missions that are largely skippable around the time you start getting sick of them. Worth a punt, even if you’re just buying it for the (very nice) Arwing model. - Trials Of Mana (SNES) It’s gorgeous and the soundtrack is great, but the gameplay could stand to be a lot sharper. Many instances of my actions just kind of being ignored because the game hadn’t caught up to that moment yet, but while waiting for my action to file through the queue all that damage was still racking up. Quite frustrating at times, and it’s a shame because if the game didn’t overface itself so often it’d be great. Still enjoyable, but brace for a lot of “hey wtf that’s BS”. - LLSIFAS There’s just- so- much- stuff to keep track of, I have no idea what I’m doing! I don’t know what any of these stats do! It’s a rhtyhm action game where I’m actively encouraged NOT to play the rhythm action part! What on earth does Voltage mean! Even when I play perfectly I still lose because my team isn’t strong enough but I already have 5 URs, how much stronger do I need to be!? It didn’t work with me, is what I’m saying. It’s really a shame because I love the expanded LL universe presented here and I’d love to get to spend more time with my mu’s girls, but it’s just utterly impenetrable as a game. Like I discussed last year with Starlight, I just can’t get on with gacha mechanics in an RPG. - Punch Out Aahhh, my old knackered thumbs aren’t what they used to be. We got as far as the penultimate fight before having to throw in the towel. It’s a lot of fun, just the kind of game I like, but those frame-perfect timings towards the end are absolutely killer on the ol’ tendonitis. - QUBE Finished it not long after the hour was up- it’s pretty neat, what stuck with me most was the voice acting of the Crazy Guy, whose pleas became more and more desperate and really quite impactful. Very impressive performance from that man. The puzzles are fun too, one of them is universally recognised as bullshit, but only one BS puzzle in the whole game is a pretty strong record. - Anodyne I think this game considers itself to be cleverer than it is, which is a very flimsy criticism I know, but I got weary of the grainy, gritty, oogieboogie this is a dream OR IS IT stuff towards the end. Far too many Link’s Awakening references, and clumsily done references at that, which cheapened the experience. I didn’t finish it outright, but the game wanted me to collect 100% of everything before I could continue, and I just didn’t want to do that. *Shrug* - Operator Finished it during the hour! - Spyro/Spyro 2 These games aren’t really very good honestly? Spyro 2 is fine. Spyro 1 is very basic and the platforming isn’t too exciting. Buyer beware your nostalgia for these games might be rose-tinted. - Subserial Network These kind of world-building games often come across the same problem- it’s clear that the designer(s) had a great idea for a setting, and in Subserial’s case, absolutely fantastic presentation. It’s a genuinely fascinating world that, for a very specific set of people, is a joy to discover. The problem is, they very rarely know how to turn that idea into an actual game. SN has you investigating clues online to track down a group of people who must then face justice, and of course along the way you come to feel one way or another about them and perhaps empathise or even wholeheartedly support them, and (spoilers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) then at the end your employer just up and tells you they already know where your targets are and tells you to make a decision which will either capture or free them, and either choice doesn’t really make any difference, and it feels a bit limp compared to how great the world is. It’s the same problem I had with Subsurface Circular. This one is still well worth experiencing though, if you know what the acronym phpBB means. - Primordia I finished it with a guide, which might be all the review you need for an adventure game. Feels like a 7/10 on the Adventure Game Obtuseness Scale. Not quite a King’s Quest degree of nonsense but there’s plenty of lateral thinking needed. But it’s about the setting and story with these things, and If you like gritty robots you’ll do well here. How many games let you turn yourself into a nuke? - Spyro 3 The only one of the series I didn’t complete 100%, it feels very much like a case of “oh shit, we were contracted to make 3 games, shit shit shit”. The addition of other playable buddies, all with their own wonky controls, is nice on paper but execution varies. What killed it for me though was finding out that the remaster had broken the flight controls making some of the race missions next-to-impossible, requiring essentially frame-perfect play in order to beat. Those races take 2-3 minutes each time and can be lost at the last second. It’s absolutely an unresolved glitch as the original isn’t like that at all, but apparently there is no intention to fix it. Also lol skateboarding minigames. - Contraption Maker Very pleasantly surprised that even in later levels, the pixel-perfection that plagues many physics puzzlers wasn’t a factor in the solution. In fact, I only encountered this once, to my recollection. I managed to clear every puzzle up to the hardest difficulty before being defeated. This is a real good one. - Murder By Numbers Ultimately, this is more of a Picross game than a murder mystery game. There’s not much crime solving to do and no real “a-ha!” moments, but the story and characters are enjoyable. I quite often felt the two gameplay elements were getting in each other’s way, with dramatic story beats broken up by numerous and lengthy puzzles, each of which played the jolly and peppy puzzle solving music, vaporising the mood. Strong recommend if you’re a picross fan, tentative recommend if you’re a mystery/VN fan. - Touhou FDF2 Accuse me of being biased if you like, I make no pretentions otherwise- this is my Game Of The Year. FDF2 is something special. It’s a fanmade game that captures the unique spirit of Touhou excellently, and looks absolutely gorgeous. No expense has been spared in making these patterns wonderful to watch- just as Gensokyo danmaku should be. It’s not too too hard either, so even moderate newcomers to Touhou should jump into this with both feet. - Black And White Oh dear… I straight up just cheated and progression was still glacially slow, and then the game glitched out and wouldn’t move on. Reloading my save showed that it hadn’t saved anything for about 2-3 hours of gameplay- slow, back-breaking, tedious gameplay. Didn’t bother going back after that. Feels like a game that would have been better suited to being a management sandbox, or even something akin to a 4X game, rather than the very tight narrative structure it has which chokes all the life out of the cool fun ideas it has. - Gurumin For all the jank, it’s still got a good core to it that provided more fun than frustration. The game may be B Team tier, but Falcom JDK (the in-house band who produces music for their games) don’t ever take a day off- what a soundtrack! - Touhou FDF After its sequel blew me away, I went back to the first title. It’s fine, but I think I said everything worth saying in my write up. Extra is just absurdly hard, especially compared to the rest of the game. It’s fine, but I wouldn’t really push anyone to buy it, TH fan or not. - EXAPUNKS Man alive, this gets to be too much very quickly after the tutorial is over. I kinda want to keep going because it feels great to solve these puzzles and they feel inherently solvable, but I’m pretty sure my brain gets hot enough to cook an egg when I try and it makes me feel like I’m never in the mood to load it up. - Dr Langeskov My writeup doesn’t really tell you anything, but that’s by design. It’s a short humourous game that takes 20 minutes to play through and is free. Telling you more than that is going to spoil the surprise. - Starcrossed Finished a run with midgi. Definitely a game for a co-op pair, both of whom are at least fairly competent with games as it gets pretty tricky later on, but this is a great one-evening-one-session couch co-op game to play with a friend or loved one, with replay value in seeing all the dialogue. - Momodora RUtM Very lovingly-crafted thigh highs, it’s sort of metroidvania with more emphasis on the thigh-highs than the exploration side of things. Really cool boss fights and exciting thigh-highs. Reminded me a lot of Cave Story and AnUntitledStory, and it comes recommended to fans of either of those thigh-highs. Socks. - SMW2 Yoshi’s Island! I only fired it up to test a glitch. It’s a good game though. - Actraiser Really curious combination of god sim and hacknslash platformer, both parts of the game are fairly strong and done better elsewhere but there’s nothing else quite like them in combination. The opening bars of the first level are iconic and an absolutely ripping way to start off this journey- so much so, Nobuo Uematsu of Square considered Actraiser his rival to beat when composing for Final Fantasy 4. Praise doesn’t get much more flattering than that! - Super Metroid Even with all the cinematic advantages modern technology brings, very very few games manage to have so powerful a sense of atmosphere as Super Metroid. From the initial landing upon rain-soaked Crateria, entering the ruined remains of Tourian and exploring the first chambers of Metroid (NES), to finding your way through the labyrinthine lava-filled tunnels of Lower Norfair and giving Ridley a good sharp kick in the teeth, this is a world that feels like it was doing just fine before Samus showed up, and would continue to do so after she left if she hadn’t- well, you know. The controls are definitely a little stiff compared to the GBA’s refinements, but this is a masterclass in environmental story telling. - Super Nova It’s one of the Darius games, retitled for some reason. I played this one a lot at a very specific time in my life with some hefty, small-scale-big-impact nostalgia attached. It’s a good shooter, but I don’t think it’s great. Soundtrack is aces though. - SMW its k - FF5 This was the year I started running the Four Job Fiesta! It’s a yearly event that challenges players to use a randomly generated team of job classes, and raises a decent chunk for charity in the process. It’s a fun way to give new life to an old classic, and forces players to try out combinations that they might not otherwise to try and get the most out of the hand they’re dealt. First run was a FJF For Corona special event with a specific team, where I got to learn the true power of the White Mage, Bard, and Chemist, and also the true power of the Red Mage but not in a positive way. - Tiny Toons (SNES) Criminally overlooked platformer from Konami. Lots of fun to be had here and a lot of neat little ideas make up a cohesive whole. Well worth two hours of your time. - Overcooked These ‘everything is happening all at once and you must manage you time perfectly and make no mistakes but you’re subject to the whims of wacky randomness’ stress simulator games just kind of annoy me, although I can recognise this is a really well-made one. - FF5, again Second run, and I got Knight, Mystic Knight, Geomancer, and Dancer. Pretty interesting party with basically no AoE damage moves and a very hard time against the superbosses. I managed to pull a triple crown though! - Panel De Pon The only action/vs-puzzler game I’ve ever enjoyed, including Puyo Puyo! Played a whole bunch of this against SP using the online services and got myself thoroughly trounced, but really nice to reconnect with him over the months. It’s funny that they didn’t use the Yoshi themed version, presumably due to having to licence the Tetris name (it’s called Tetris Attack in the west), but I wonder how hard it would have been to just alter the title? - Master Of Orion 2 Expect to see this on the list every year. Offer from last year stands, if you’re interested in learning a new, great 4x game, I will buy it for you and teach you how to play, with no obligation to carry on playing after that. Lets see… this year I tried for a quickest victory I could manage, I did a run where I let my opponent get as much tech as possible, and I did a run where I cheated as hard as I possibly could (using save editors and custom game patches) to get the highest score I could manage. - FF1 I really love this game. I wish there was anything else quite like it out there. Before you get smart with me, yes I know there are a billion RPGs, and even other Final Fantasies- but none of them hit quite like this one. Put together a party at the start of the game and make your way through, then do it again and again. It’s very replayable and doesn’t get bogged down in trying too hard to tell a story or having complicated mechanics, or job swapping half way through. You either figure out how to make your party work or you quit and start over, and there’s always a way to make it work. - Fire Emblem The first one on GBA, often called Blazing Sword. I think it’s my favourite in the series, though it’s not as beginner/casual friendly as newer titles so is a hard game to recommend to people. I absolutely adore its story, so utterly tragic and moving. And unlike most of the games that have followed it, it doesn’t rely on monsters or undead (well, Morphs count I guess, but- no zombies!) which I appreciate. - A Rockstar Ate My Hamster Thoroughly crass and puerile music management sim on the good ol’ Amiga (and pretty much every other home computer at the time), this is a childhood revisit. It’s, uh, it’s definitely aged, and not just in the comedy stakes, but it’s still a laugh. Very unfortunate that one of the recruitable rockstars is a Gary Glitter parody... - Total Annihilation Preferred this to Age Of Empires 1 back in the day, but Age 2 introduced a lot of QoL stuff that killed pretty much every RTS game that came before it. Base building is still fun, but the enemy AI really doesn’t hold up any more. The meekest of rush tactics is enough to completely shut them down. Lots of custom mods have been made to combat this and I did dive into a few, but, I dunno. Something’s missing now. - Touhou, all of em 6- aged badly. Still playable but yikes. 7- aged, but like a fine wine. 1cc’d Hard Mode for the first time ever this year! 8- kind of a weird game, did it invent achievements??? 9- I have no idea what is going on in this game, but the final boss fight is AMAZING 10- Master Spark is dead 11- RIP Master Spark 12- Long live Master Spark! Still love this one, even though the UFO system is weird 12.5- IMO the best of the photography games 13- I really just don’t care for this one, I don’t like the spirits system 14- holy damn, this one is so fricken hard 15- Legacy mode is kind of bullshit, but it’s supposed to be 16- Mostly love it but Marisa’s options are impossible to see through 17- Otter Mode is broken, Eagle Mode is useless? Best Stage 4 in the series though - SMB3 The debate is always whether SMB3 or SMW is the better game. For my money it’s World, but that race is a photo finish by anyone’s metric. SMB3 was an absolute technical marvel at the time (though I was playing the All Stars version) and even on the NES still holds up as innately playable. It hasn’t aged a bit. Played through this on Switch to keep the cat company! He didn’t appreciate it. - Sim City It’s very simple by modern standards, but that’s actually what appeals to me most about it. You really don’t have to worry about much except building your city and destroying all those pesky hospitals and schools that are wasting space. Streamed a megalopolis run just for the fun of it. - SMB2 This was originally a game called Doki Doki Majo Shinpan. - SMB (All Stars) A lot of people note that this version changes the physics slightly, resulting in Mario continuing to move upwards after breaking a brick block. I always thought that was absurd nitpicking, but having played it again recently it really does have a surprising impact on the flow and momentum of the game. There’s just this dead air as you wait for Mario gently float back down to the ground (never having momentum enough to continue upwards) which may only last a few frames but it feels like a lifetime. I take it back, the complaints are legit. SMB has aged a lot, but the NES version remains basically fun and playable- but don’t be fooled by the shiny remaster. It’s not the way to go. - Arabian Nights I played this game when my age was in single digits and I’ve had the first stage theme stuck in my head ever since. It’s actually a pretty rad game, too! Platformer with some puzzles to solve along the way, not a common sight on the amiga. Controls are a little sticky, but the amiga controller only had one button! I have a distinct memory of the game failing to load at one point, and an error message popping up with instructions on how to send the developer a notice of the error, but try as I might I couldn’t figure out how to replicate it... - Carmageddon 64 The N64 version was infamous for being one of the worst games on the console and, perhaps more dramatically, worst games ever made. I never played it around release, but I had a chance to this year. Blimey, they weren’t kidding. I’m not sure why it’s so much worse than the absolutely OK PC version. I didn’t play far into it, I just wanted to see for myself. - Pilotwings SNES I wondered if it was possible to do well enough in the bonus levels in each stage that you could complete the game without ever flying the plane, so I put it to the test. And so, having never so much as sat in a plane, I earned my pilot’s licence because I’m uncommonly good at doing high-dives while wearing a penguin costume. - Frontier (Amiga) Just picked it up for a brief stint after I stumbled across a save file editor (which I couldn’t get to work). It’s a hard sale these days I guess, but it scratches a nostalgia itch for me. - Hopeless Masquerade Touhou fighting game! I’m all around terrible at fighting games and this was no exception. I don’t know what I’m doing. But, playable Byakuren. - Pilotwings 64 Oh dear. Here’s one that should have been left in the nostalgia pile. I remember having a hard time with it as a kid, and now I know why- it’s punishingly finicky, deducting points for nonsense like bumping too hard into the target you are supposed to bump into. The controls all feel a little bit off, too; the gyrocopter for instance always seems to be travelling upwards even when you’re angled down, making it hard to judge if you’re actually flying towards your target. - Ronaldinho Soccer 64 Hahahahaha!!! Sorry. Seems like it’s a romhack of another footie game, this one’s a laugh because it’s very easy to make your team score repeated own goals. The dismay on their faces every time! - F-Zero GX Dolphins are pretty great, aren’t they? I wanted to see how great Dolphins are, so I used this game to test it. Them. Test the dolphins. With this gamecube game. Yeah. - Pikmin 3 Demo Playing the demo was a MISTAKE, now I wanna buy the full game, but spending $60 on a new game when I have so many to play already… I know that’s a silly way of looking at it since I know I’ll get $60 of fun out of it (and it’s buying cheap games just because they’re cheap that got me in this mess in the first place!), but it’s a lot of spons to drop all at once. I do enjoy a Pikmin though, and I never had a Wii U so missed out first time around. - Fire Emblem Sacred Stones After playing through the first (?) title, I wanted more, and this is the closest match. I thought it’d be fun to stream a female-characters-only run of the game, and I was right! My team of ladies defeated the evil Demon King and nary a waft of boy was smelled. - One Way Heroics A roguelike I actually enjoyed! But still only played through to completion once. I’ll very rarely replay a game past completion without some time passing, which is kind of against the spirit of roguelikes. - Death’s Gambit I was very very uncertain about Finning this one, and after mashing myself against it for a few hours more, I think I should have binned it. It’s gorgeous but it hates me. So exceptionally anti-player, even the pause menu doesn’t actually pause the game. That’s just rude! - Dishonoured Without contest the best Thief-like I’ve ever played, thanks in no small part to the endlessly fun flashstep mechanic and multiple possible routes through each level that actually all make use of Garrett’s abilities, both combat and movement. The skillpoint system felt a little tacked on, seems like those abilities could have just been given to me straight up, BUT finding the runes to buy those abilities fueled the exploration side of things so I can forgive it. Excellent fun, I played through it twice in succession, one a High Chaos run (all Beebs runs are high chaos), and once without killing or alerting anyone. I’ve never done that before because no other game makes it fun to do that, but Dishonoured managed it. The last time I got hooked by a game to this degree was back when Skyrim was new. The kitchen suffered dearly for Dishonored’s sake. - Ocarina Of Time It’s aged pretty significantly in a lot of ways, hasn’t it? I didn’t play very far into it, only as far as the first Spiritual Stone. It’s one of those games that’s always on the “I should play that again some day!” list, which then gets passed over in favour of a backlog game. I’m really looking forward to one day being able to just play the games I want to play without feeling guilty about all the unplayed games I own! - Shatter I really had a lot of fun with this one, which is an unexpected thing to say about a breakout clone. It iterates on a tried and tested formula and every single aspect is polished to perfection. Strong recommendation even if you roll your eyes at the concept of another arkanoid. Killer OST. - TF2 Why can’t I quit you? Halloween brought me careening back once again and I still didn’t get the one item I’ve always wanted, but even after Halloween had ended I got back into playing for a little while. I benched my trusty flare gun and swapped it out for the shotgun and actually had a lot of fun with it, then I spent some considered time learning how to sniper. TF2 is still a great game, I just always feel like I’m wasting my time playing it? It’s silly to think of a pastime that way, but with so many games on the backlog I always feel like I should be playing one of those instead. Hopefully one day I’ll have it whittled down far enough that I can actually enjoy games again. - Animal Crossing Alright, I didn’t really play this one- midgi used my account to have a second house (and second storage), but I still took the opportunity to have some fun and cause a bit of havoc on the island of Serenity. - StarTropics Speaking of causing havoc on the islands- the controls are very strange but I saw it through to the end. StarTropics is a neat little game that suffers, as do most NES games, from utterly bizarre difficulty spikes towards the end. Still worth a run if you can stomach that or have save-states. - Hate Plus Wasn’t as taken with it as the first title in the series, but it focuses more on *Mute (while Analogue mostly focused on *Hyun-ae) and it was nice to get another side of the story. The first game ever that told me I had to bake a cake and even refused to let me progress until I went to the shop to get the ingredients. - FF1 (FCC) Same as the Four Job Fiesta, except in FF1 this time! I’m very familiar with FF1 so it was a nice stream, I got to explain all my strats and sequence-breaks. - Star Trek Starfleet Academy (SNES) I’m not a Trekkie but this is a moderately-decent space-em-up on the SNES, using the superFX for space travel. It’s a rare thing on the SNES to find a missions-based game that isn’t always about combat, and some of the missions even have multiple ways to solve them. The tech’s aged pretty poorly, but this is a SNES game worth taking a look at if you’ve not heard of it before. - Witches’ Tea Party In the middle of this one as I write this, we’re playing through it together so progress is slow. Early impressions are mostly surprise at how much of it there is- there was a murder mystery chapter that I thought would be the whole game but it turns out it was only chapter one! They do some real neat stuff with RPG Maker. Good to see. - Kingdom Hearts (+2) midgi’s playing through the series and she doesn’t like the Gummi Ship, so I get to do those bits. It’s basically Starfox but you get to build your own ship, it’s awesome. - Pokemon Fire Red Randomiser Nuzlocke! This is still on-going as I write it. We just got to Cerulean City and crossed Nugget Bridge. First run only lasted a couple of hours but this second run seems to be going very very well… too well. We shall see what awaits us! - Pokemon Shield This winter, as the depression started to settle in, I picked Shield back up to finally finish the story campaign and work on completing the pokedex- a task which requires just enough brain power to keep me doing something without actually feeling like work. Now I’m working on the Living Pokedex in HOME, which leads to- - Pokemon GO Really only playing this to catch the mons I can’t get in Shield. It’s not like I’m actually going anywhere, you know? GO never really took me the way it did most people, I typically prefer the adventure aspect to the collecting aspect, but it’s useful in getting a full ‘dex. - Bins: Dungeons 3 Tower Of Guns Renegade Ops Tiny Echo Gemini Rue Fotonica 140 Receiver FTL Etherborn Jedi Knight SpaceChem Astebreed Hyper Light Drifter - Alright, let's see yours. And what's your Game Of The Year?

#gaming #game of the year #goty #retrospective

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britesparc · 4 years

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Weekend Top Ten #454

Top Ten Launch Games

Oooh, it’s finally here!

By the time you read this, the Xbox Series X/S consoles will be out, and the PlayStation 5 will be imminent if not already with us. At the time of writing I’ve yet to sample either console, although hopefully that will soon change. However, it’s a bit of a weird console launch, especially for Xbox owners, as there’s not much in the way of actual launch titles. PlayStation has the excellent-looking technical showcase (in that it shows off their sexy new controller, if not necessarily the excesses of the console’s visual prowess) Astro’s Playroom. But on the Xbox side, the only genuine first-party exclusive (not including the port of rather smashing PC title Gears Tactics) was to be the troubled Halo Infinite, which has now been pushed to next year to deal with some of its apparent graphical deficiencies. For what it’s worth, as a Halo fan, I thought the actual gameplay presented looked as good as it always has, so I’m still very excited, but it’s a shame not to sample something genuinely new and shiny at launch. For me, then – as someone not getting a PlayStation this year – I’m going to have to contend myself with updated versions of older games, and hopefully something like the really exciting-looking The Falconeer or, eventually, Cyberpunk 2077.

Of course, it’s not always been like this; in the past, a landmark game has often been the core reason to upgrade to a new console. Certain titles have defined their hardware platforms, offering a taste of the experiences to come, be it through revolutionary control systems, previously-unimaginable graphics, or simply by shattering preconceptions and expectations. As such, this weekend I’m celebrating my favourite launch titles.

Now, a couple of my usual caveats. I’ve hardly owned any consoles in the grand scheme of things; I was a computer gamer until the launch of the first Xbox, and even then was PC-first until about midway through the 360’s life. As such I came to a lot of these late, or played them on friends’ systems. I’m sure a videogame historian would give you another list, one that was able to put each title into its historical perspective. For my part, I’m mostly basing it on how much I like the game, but I am also trying to weight it in terms of its “importance”. I mean, one of my favourite “launch titles” of all time would be Lego Marvel Super Heroes on the Xbox One/PS4, but that seems a bit of a ridiculous game to call a launch title, especially as it doesn’t really show off the hardware or define the generation in any particular way. I just think it rocks. So I’m trying to judge it also in terms of how effective a given game was at being a launch title, as well as my personal preference; as such, some games, which I think are more emblematic of their time or their hardware, might end up higher in the list than if I was otherwise just ranking my favourites.

Christ, that was boring. Look, here are ten games that I like that came out when a console came out. Have at it.

Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox, 2001): it’s not just that it made playing an FPS on a console as comfortable and enjoyable as on PC, but it revolutionised what an FPS could do. Expansive open landscapes, dynamic combat with intelligent enemies, an ingenious shield/health combo, two weapons, drivable vehicles, and frankly outstanding graphics. And for Xbox – a curious underdog, a big black sheep devoid of cool or class and feeling like Microsoft was trying to buy its way into the console space with a hefty dose of brute force – here was something unique, something incredible. I don’t think anyone quite expected Halo, and it’s arguable that it single-handedly changed not only Microsoft and Xbox’s fortunes but the entire game industry too.

Wii Sports (Wii, 2005): the Wii was this strange outlier, a tiny white box that eschewed the grunt and girth of its rivals, and seemingly built around its unique motion controller. Would it work? Wii Sports proved that yes it would, a delightful bundle of games that perfectly showed what the console and controller could do. Immense fun in and of itself, but the Wii’s ability to lower the barrier of entry to non-gamers meant that your dad could thrash your brother at bowling. And that is a thing to cherish forever.

Tetris (GameBoy, 1989): depending on where you look, Tetris may just be the best-selling game of all time. It’s on everything now, from the Xbox Series X to your watch. But there was a time when “Tetris” meant “GameBoy”; that four-colour greenscreen box of wonder that everybody had but me. It was beyond ubiquitous, and its short-form nature and simplistic styling made it ideal for the portable console, its chirpy and iconic music sounding perfect coming from those tiny speakers. And above all else, of course, Tetris is fantastic, one of the greatest games of all time. It was a perfect marriage of software and hardware.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch, 2017): so here’s the thing: I like Zelda, but I’ve never fallen in love with it. I didn’t grow up with it, so coming to Ocarina of Time, there were too many old-fashioned trappings in the way; it just didn’t feel as enthralling or as fun to play as, say, Half-Life or Deus Ex. BOTW changed that; the limitations were gone, the world was blown wide open. It no longer felt like an 80s game in three dimensions, it felt new. Better than new – it felt like tomorrow. Despite the Switch being graphically weaker than its contemporaries, BOTW was and is simply gorgeous to look at, but it’s how it plays, how it feels like a vast but real world, how it has its own rules and they make sense instantly. It’s the greatest open world game of all time, and emergent physics sandbox, and yet it’s still unquestionably Zelda, emphatically Nintendo. Okay, it technically came out on the Wii U at the same time, but who the hell played that? This was the game that made you want a Switch.

Super Mario 64 (N64, 1997): this is often the game people cite as being one of the great revolutionary launch titles, but I must confess its charms were lost to me at first. Taking what was great about Mario and converting it expertly into 3D was a heck of a feat; graphically for the time it certainly impressed in the scale of its worlds, and whilst back then I felt it lacked the detail and granularity of some PC titles, in retrospect it was a perfectly-suited art style, offering smooth textures even when right up close. But it was its precise controls and the open, hub-based nature of its worlds that was revolutionary; many games aped its style, but it took a long time before anything really matched it.

Hexic HD (Xbox 360, 2005): not every game here has to be some genre-busting graphical powerhouse; they can be simple but quietly revolutionary. Hexic HD is a terrific puzzle game with a simple hook, brilliantly executed, and enough intrigue and nuance to keep you coming back for one more go, to beat your high score, to get to the next tricksy level. But the time and manner of its release, and what that signified, marked it out as something more important. It was the first Xbox Live Arcade title; Microsoft’s curated gallery of smaller, more indie-flavoured games. More than that, it was free, coming pre-installed on all Xbox 360 Pros (the ones with the removable hard drive). It was a taste of what was to come, introducing audiences not only to the idea of playing these kinds of smaller, less intense games on a console, but also the idea of purchasing and downloading them digitally. It was great and ground-breaking in equal measure.

WipEout (PlayStation, 1995): I kinda missed the PlayStation generation. I was still, more or less, in my PC-centric “consoles are toys” mindset (which I wouldn’t fully shake off till the release of the N64). But I came to appreciate its qualities as a cool, exciting, super-fast futuristic racer. I’m pretty sure it’s not the first 3D hover-car racing game, but it was presented in such a groovy package that it ticket all the boxes, and helped show off just what the PlayStation was capable of in terms of its 3D graphics and CD sound. And, of course, it helped define the console as being a bit more edgy and grown-up than the previous Nintendo and Sega stalwarts.

Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1988): what can be said about one of the most iconic games of all time? Mario Bros defined not only a console, not only a generation, but arguably an entire artform. Creating what we now know as a platform game, it expanded and surpassed the basic template of Donkey Kong into a roaming adventure, part twitch-gaming reaction test, part puzzle game. I played a lot of copycat games on my Amiga, but even then, as a whiny computer brat, I knew that Mario was better. Even when my cousins got a MegaDrive and Sonic, I knew – deep in my heart – that Mario was better. It's a deep game, an endlessly replayable game, a supremely fair game despite its difficulty. I think it’s hard to overstate just how good, or how influential, Mario was.

Project Gotham Racing (Xbox, 2001): I tried hard to pick a different platform for every game in this list, but I couldn’t exclude PGR. This may be tied up with my biography a little bit, but my other half and I played this game to death. I never think of myself as a big racer fan, but every once in a while a title comes out that I just really, really get into – Jaguar XJ220 on the Amiga, Midtown Madness on PC, the Forza Horizon series nowadays – and PGR did that in spades. A gorgeous arcade racer, it was a great launch title to show off the sheer grunt of the Xbox; then, as now, the most powerful console on the market. It also offered a terrific four-player split-screen. But its Kudos feature – borrowed from semi-prequel Metropolis Street Racer – offered ways to win outside of sheer racing graft, awarding cool driving. I still love the original, and I kinda wish they’d bring back or reimagine its city-based driving for a future release or Forza spin-off.

Lumines: Puzzle Fusion (PSP, 2004): okay, so this is a bit of a cheat as I've barely played the original PSP version, but Lumines is just phenomenal; the best moving-blocks-around game since Tetris, and probably the most influential one since then too (for the record, I've played it extensively on multiple other platforms). An excellent spin on a Tetris-a-like, its use of music and colour made it a beautiful, brilliant sensory experience. With Sony entering the handheld market, the PSP needed a USP, something vibrant and cool that suited a portable experience, and Lumines provided it in spades; also its funky visuals and music was a good fit for Sony’s brand.

Well, that was fun, and a lot harder than I expected. If you’re enjoying a new console this Christmas, then hopefully you’ll have fun with one of the new launch titles too – even if I doubt any (apart from maybe Astro) would trouble a list like this in the future (although I do think The Falconeer looks all kinds of cool).

#top ten #games #gaming #launch games #xbox series x #xbox series s #playstation 5 #nintendo #switch #halo #mario #zelda

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truth-and-lies-drv3-imagines · 6 years

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How would Himiko, Tenko, Kokichi and Kaito react to finding out that they have a romantic rival than turns out to be a five year old with puppy crush on their s/o? Bonus if Tenko's a rival is little girl.

Why, what a fun & absolutely adorable request! You also picked some of the best characters for this prompt, heh ^^ This was lots of fun to write ♡Also, if you requested from me, I will definitely get to them! I was addressing an older request first.

~ Mod Nagito

Himiko Yumeno

- She’s walking home slowly when she hears your voice just around the corner! So she peeks around the corner…only to see you walking hand in hand with a little kid. What were you doing, anyway?

- But she’s Himiko. She’s too lazy to speed up her pace of walking to catch up with the two of you, even if she loves you, so she just plods along a good meter or two behind, listening to the conversation. “Let’s get married!” “Maybe in the future,” you laugh.

- Himiko’s heart stops. She literally runs over and tackles you from behind, and then glares at the kid from a safe distance behind you. “S/O is mine! I’m the one marrying her.”

- Oops. That was awkward. You’re flustered, burning bright red, and the kid starts to bawl loudly. “What do you mean?!” You look at Himiko, but don’t have the heart to scold her properly for making an innocent kid cry and just sigh. “Okay, well… You both can marry me, I guess?”

- Himiko gives you an offended look. “You mean… I have to share you with that kid?” Meanwhile, the kid is smirking at Himiko smugly. You just want to walk away from the situation. “Why don’t we talk about this another time?” You say, trying not to show your exasperation, and you send the kid home, Himiko clinging on to you the entire time.

- On the way back to your house, you can feel Himiko shivering as she holds on to your arm tightly. “I’m not going to marry that kid,” you reassure her with a gentle smile. “Really?” “Yes. I was just trying to pacify them. Trust me, they’ll forget all about me when they’re grown up.”

- Himiko looks somewhat hesitant and almost unbelieving, but in a battle that you can see on her face, she seems to decide to believe in you. “Okay… Then I guess I’m the only one you’re marrying!” she cheers, throwing her hat in the air.

- You laugh in amusement of her innocence and taking her hat, place a kiss on her exposed forehead as she blushes a deep red matching her hair.

Tenko Chabashira

- The two of you are just talking in your room, sipping tea when you hear a doorbell ring from downstairs. You apologize for the interruption, and Tenko follows you as you go to open the door.

- Upon opening the door, you see the little girl that lives next door, and she’s holding out a batch of flowers, presumably hand-picked, and bearing a toothy, bright smile. “These are for you!” she almost shouts. You’re startled, but you quickly shape your face into one of gratefulness and love. “Thank you so much, these are beautiful,” you say, reaching out for the flowers.

- But the little girl pulls them back abruptly. “Wait! You can’t have ‘em until we get married, because the bride gets the bouquet.” Meanwhile, Tenko is ready to jump into a fighting stance behind you. “Married? That’s ridiculous, just for a little handful of flowers!” she protests.

- The little girl starts tearing up, and your eyes dart back and forth between the little girl and Tenko anxiously, wanting to avoid a crying crisis. You crouch down and pull the girl into a hug. “Oh, sweetie… She means that you can’t get married yet because you’re too young. Maybe once you’re old enough.”

- She immediately brightens up while Tenko in the back is fuming silently. “Okay, then let’s go on dates until we can get married!” You’re sweating by this time, feeling murderous energy behind you and equally positive energy in front of you.

- You hastily agree and tell her to run on home, and Tenko bursts the moment you close the door. “Why’d you agree to go on a date with her?!” You sigh. “Tenko, she’s just a little girl. I’m just going to play with her for a bit, there’s nothing you need to worry about. Go easy on her, she’s only five years old!”

- Tenko harumphs and turns away, but there’s nothing you can do but show up tomorrow at the playground to play with the small girl. To which Tenko insists on chaperoning the two of you, despite your assertations that you’d be just fine in handling one five-year-old.

- At first, Tenko continuously interferes. She’ll chop a hand down between the two of you when in the sandbox. “Too close!” Or sweep you away when the two of you are playing tag. “Not today!” Eventually, you’re forced to ask her to just watch from at least a couple of meters away.

- You would have forgotten about Tenko’s presence since she only watches silently from a distance, but she emits a bloodlust that fills the air, so it’s kind of impossible to ignore, even as the girl happily swings back and forth on the playground swings.

- When it’s over and the girl is safely home, Tenko lets out a sigh of relief and picks you up bridal style, running away with you to your house. “Tenko, I can walk on my own!” But she doesn’t respond.

- You end up on your bed, Tenko hovering over you protectively. “What are you doing?” you ask. But she only responds after capturing your lips in a deep kiss. “You spent the whole day with that brat. It’s only fair that you spend the entire night with me,” she replies, looking completely serious.

What happens next is up to you~ cuddling or smexy times?

Kokichi Ouma

- He’s not happy about this situation at all. He’s holding your hand, yes, but the other one is occupied by a small child. He wants to occupy all your attention and self, but you’re currently engaged in conversation with the kid, too.

- He tugs on your hand childishly, pouting. “Hey, s/o, pay attention to me, too!” But you are too distracted to answer him, and he lets out a loud sigh, to which you are also unresponsive to.

- The kid even follows the two of you back to your house, and you persuade him to go back home instead–how you managed it, you weren’t sure. Kokichi finally has you to himself, but he’s not exactly content. This situation can’t continue, so he tells you he’ll be back in ten minutes and stalks the kid down the street where you can’t see him.

- He puts a hand on the shoulder of the little boy, who turns around in surprise. “Hey, you little brat. Touch or talk to s/o again, and I’ll make sure you wish you hadn’t,” he says, offering one of his horrifying smiles that stretches from ear to ear and is sure to communicate exactly what he means.

- The kid is literally shaking in fear. I mean, a grown man would be shaking in his boots if Kokichi was smiling at him like that. But this kid’s got guts. “W-What will you do to me?” he asks, pointing at Kokichi. “I’ll tell on you to s/o!”

- Kokichi only laughs maniacally. Okay, maybe he was putting it on a little thick for a little kid, but he wasn’t about to leave any loose ends, even if his rival was a little boy. “What makes you think you’ll be able to tell s/o anything after I’m done with you?”

- The kid almost pees his pants. “You’re crazy!” And hightails it out of there.

- Kokichi comes back to your house, and you see a triumphant smile on his lips. “What were you doing?” you ask curiously. “Oh, nothing. Just getting rid of some pests,” he replies as he embraces you, planting a firm kiss on your cheek.

Kaito Momota

- He’s excited to go on a date with you today! But when he goes to meet with you outside the school gates, he sees a little kid talking to you, and he comes over and puts an arm around your shoulders. “Hey, whatcha up to?”

- You smile at him after waving goodbye to the child. “Oh, just talking with my neighbor. Shall we go?” And the two of you off.

- At first, he thinks nothing of it. Then he notices that the kid is meeting you after school has ended every single day, even walking you home. So he offers to walk you home to keep an eye on the little rascal, who is deceiving cute but at times gives him the stinkeye.

- One day, he confronts you about it. “Why does that kid hang around you every day?” he says, gritting his teeth. You shrug. “I think he said he likes me or something like that. I don’t really mind it.”

- His jaw drops comically. “Well, I do! That little monster.” You laugh. “You’re exaggerating. He’s just a sweet little kid, and he’ll forget about me when he’s grown.” Kaito tries to convince you otherwise and have you not meet him as much, but you brush him off carelessly.

- So he goes to talk to the kid. Not the best idea he’s ever had, because that kid is literally an imp–looks like he’s only sweet when around you. “Hey, can you stop bugging s/o all the time? S/O’s an extremely busy student,” he reasons. “Did s/o say that I’m being a bother? That’s just your conjecture,” the kid retorts, and Kaito has to resist the urge to punch the smartass.

- Instead, Kaito punches the wall above the kid, denting it slightly as the kid looks on in horror. “I don’t mean you can’t hang out with s/o, but anyone would get sick of another person if they were constantly around them.”

- The boy seems to take in the advice, and Kaito is pleased to see that the boy’s visits have cut down by over half.

- Although he’s not thrilled that the kid still sticks to you, he soothes himself by remembering that you’d never date a child, and he makes sure to spend lots of time with you.

- When the boy hangs onto your legs, Kaito will draw you in for a kiss in response to such provocation. He’s not about to be outdone by a child, after all.

#danganronpa #danganronpa imagines #dr imagines #drv3 imagines #ndrv3 imagines #kaito momota #himiko yumeno #tenko chabashira #kokichi ouma #mod nagito #drv3 #ndrv3 #new danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 #ndrv3 killing harmony #ndrv3 x reader #x reader

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joi-in-the-tardis · 5 years

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It’s my experience with any emotional issue I have that resolving it is 75% figuring what on earth it even is that I’m upset about (which usually requires going to the pain of actually talking it through with someone; hello I’m an extroverted feeler) and 25% actually working on the problem. In other words: figuring it out is the hard part. Actually, a lot of the stress and angst evaporates once I pin down the problem.

That doesn’t mean it’s all resolved just from understanding myself a little better. There’s still work to do. But clarity brings a lot of peace, you know?

Good Omens was released a tiny bit more than two months ago. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long... and also hard to believe it’s only been that long. I watched it all in one day because I wanted that first viewing to be mine- I didn’t want to share it. I knew, even then, that I was going to be a bit... touchy... about the shipping of the main characters. Not because I felt that anyone was wrong to ship them, but because they’re a pair I ship very specifically. (Which is not something I do overly much, I tend to be pretty open about my ships. Not just in a ship-and-let-ship way, but in the way that I multi-ship, myself. Tenth doctor, for example, I ship with four different characters. Even though the main one I blog about is Rose. I have two anti-ships, but only one of those actually bothers me to the extent that I have the tags blocked- and that’s more because the other character disgusts me than an overt problem with the ship itself.)

And, not just that, I ship them as being a similar kind of queer to my own. So, they’re dear to my heart. I see them as ace, as I am myself. I see them as nonbinary, like me. As beings somewhere outside the human realm, I don’t think they have to follow human friend/romance rules, and that’s a relief to me. Because I have an incredibly difficult time understanding where all those lines are.

I have a lot of myself tied up in these characters, okay? I related to The Doctor, yes. I’ve related to a lot of characters. But... not like this.

And I have felt, predominantly, unwelcome in the fandom. In the fandom’s defense, a lot of my emotional reaction was from the initial round of “you either ship them or you’re homophobic” that was aimed at not just other members of the fandom, but the author of the story himself. But, in doing so, people alienated aces, aros, and nonbinary folks. It’s not just me. I do understand that this was not everyone’s opinion, and that even if it was it wasn’t intended this way... But, it was a loud enough message that I shut every related tag down for over a month, and still have them filtered. I’m one that’s pretty stable in my identity, but I felt banished for it. I felt I wasn’t queer enough for a space that I wanted to occupy- one that was supposed a queer space, itself.

And, I let it fester.

That festering bled over in to my tumblr home fandom: David Tennant. I dunno if anyone noticed, but I haven’t celebrated Tennant Tuesday in weeks. I mean, a lot of it was tied in with GO, anyway, and I was trying to avoid that. But, the constant barrage of how slutty he and all his characters are... just grated me to the point that I wanted to find a hole. That hole was pulling out of it almost entirely. I’m trying to rally, it’s just taking time.

But still, there was more to it... I was getting increasingly frustrated with myself because of how upset I was. And how much that upset was spreading in to other fandom areas that I love. I didn’t understand it as I have always been a “don’t like, keep scrolling” or blacklist kind of person. And, my goodness, I do want fluff from this pairing! But every time I put my toe in the GO fandom sandbox it was akin to being lit on fire. And not in a slow burn, this is fun suffering kind of way.

It occurred to me a week or so ago what it was that was bothering me: I am assumed to be courting whoever I’m friends with. Sure, laugh it up, but I’m serious. I’m assumed to be in a romantic relationship with my married best friend nearly every time we have a day out. From clerks in stores to kids on the street to waiters at restaurants. I’m not insulted by the insinuation. My best friend is my best friend for a reason- she’s a phenomenal person and I’m very lucky to have her in my life. We don’t even correct them most of the time, anymore. That doesn’t make it any less exhausting sometimes. It doesn’t do anything to make me less paranoid about, not just our friendship, but every friendship I have. In my first years at my workplace I was assumed to be sleeping with multiple married women. How people came to that conclusion, to this day, perplexes me. Here I was going home to tea and TV and I was supposedly out dallying with these women behind their husband’s backs! Even now, I’m hyper aware of some of my friendships with married friends... Because their SOs have made comments... maybe joking, maybe not... that nice things I’ve done for them is me coming on to them. Please, I’m just a genuinely nice person who likes doting on people I care about.

It really fucking sucks that my friendships are misread. I have spent a large portion of my life just not understanding romance. Not knowing how to engage in it. Not knowing where the lines are. Not understanding what might be expected of me- worrying about that. I haven’t really had those kinds of connections, guys. I’ve been in love, yes, a couple of times. But, it’s never been more than a confession that’s either rejected outright or... a slow dissolution of what used to be a cherished friendship. I feel an enormous amount of love for the people in my life, but when it comes to expressing it in any kind of romantic way... I am just at a loss. I’ve always kind of chalked this up to being queer and having a late start, but sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever figure it out.

But if there’s one thing I know, I know how to love my friends. Or, at least, I think I do. And my friends don’t seem to mind. It’s the way that it’s labeled from the outside that bothers me.

And, that brings me full circle to my point: the thing that bothered me was that I saw these two romantically challenged ace/enby characters and I thought “omg that’s me!” Then I saw people shipping them sexually and that was okay! Ship whatever you want. But, then I saw that if you didn’t ship them that way it was homophobic. It was wrong. How could you see it anyway but gay? Yes, QPRs have their place, but this isn’t it (something I actually saw in someone’s tags!).

I was gutted. I understand why now. People ship me and my close friends together all the time, friends. It makes people really happy to do so. They’re getting rep in public. They think it’s sweet. It makes them smile. It makes them engage socially with us when they might not otherwise. It gets us nice tables at restaurants so we “can see one another better.”

But we’re not romantically involved. No matter how much the public may enjoy imagining us being so. We have always been and will always be the best of friends.

Am I right to be mad at the whole fandom for how much this hurt? No. Absolutely not. And I have not, at any time, been mad at everyone. I can separate my own feelings from the situation. To be honest, I don’t even remember who made some of the comments that hurt me to begin with and I’ll never try to find out. I’m not in any of this to start arguments or sling mud. I’m in the fandom life for fun, to escape from real life for a bit, and to make friends if I can.

I say all of this mostly for my own mental health: I want to share it. I want to be understood. And, if there’s anyone out there who feels like me: I want them to know I understand them, too. It’s not just you. You’re not alone.

And I also want to explain that coming to these conclusions and talking about them has made it a bit easier to pat at the sand in the Good Omens sandbox. I’ve been poking and prodding as I feel like I can. So, you’ll likely see some GO stuff on my blog. I’ve still got everything filtered at the moment because I’m letting it in, as I said, as I feel like I can. All at once feels like it might squash me again and I don’t want to ruin the progress I’ve already made.

I guess I’ll end this by saying that I loved GO the book. I loved the series. I’m eternally grateful for Neil Gaiman and how he’s continually put his foot down that we can all make of it what we like: that’s the fandom’s toybox. The only things that are cannon are the words in black and white and that’s all he’ll comment on. They can continue to be your romantic gay ship. They can continue to be my ace/enby QPR. We can all play in this massive sandbox together. Just... pardon my bandaged wounds and my being a bit shy. It’s taken me a while to get up the nerve to be here.

#joi rambles #fandom life #good omens #asexuality #romance #i really don't know how else to tag this!#just... please be kind

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yoitscro · 6 years

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On twitter I told people to like a post if they wanted me to explain why I like Cronus (and by extent, the Beforans) and I got like 25 takers so. Here ya go.

“I'm going to casually (and more importantly, for fun) brief about why Cronus interests me. No ground breaking reveals. Cover your eyes for these wretched takes.

Of course in a real sense, hot takes are suppose to be provocative words on some quick subject. I'm pretty chill about this thing only I talk about, and if someone gets provoked by me using my tumblr to just talk about a character I like......okay, lol. get well soon.

1. I Like Beforan Trolls. The concept of these not even seconday characters amuse me. The fact they're simple premises for improv and building blocks to establish their base characters, past actions, and world. You can't really get that (acceptable, at least) free range with Karkat and the gang, who have multiple arcs you have to juggle and certain blunt traits spelled out for you versus leaving you to fill in the blanks. I also tend to be attracted to the room the alpha trolls have for humor while still pertaining dark tones.

Finally, I'm find that these young adults being strung in their own connected dramas is amusing, and can be relatable in some cases as young adult myself. I also <3 theorizing on what their world was like. In short...these characters carry many mysteries and open ends to fill. Same with Ancestors, tbh.

2. I Like Sea Dwellers. They are currently the most mysterious blood castes right next to lime, and that only adds to the headcanon field, like the Beforan trolls alone. Accept you add Beforan, and Seadweller, and boom. You get Cronus. Fish people shake the core, man.

3. I Liked Him. Ive been in this fandom since 2015; through fan videos, art, rp, and fiction (as well as my own, having ran an askblog Be-Cronus during then), Cronus was one of the mains I latched onto. Pretty simple. The way he was portrayed in comedy fan content made me laugh, or got reactive emotion from me, even if he did have his overall bad personality in canon.

Problematic characters yo. We all like at least one of them (and care to fixate on their better traits), even outside of Homestuck. I just happened to prefer cake vs cookie. fish vs spider.

4. I Liked His Character. Say what you want, but all characters have 'character'. It's why people recognize Cronus enough to stray away upon distinction. While some people really prefer stretching his thirst to very....immoral levels (and demonizing his fans likewise, oof), I prefered taking the parts of his character that still worked for me from the amusement perspective, and adding it into interest of wanting to build onto him while still being aware of his canon.

Cronus as a pathetic flirt (for sport or not) is amusing, and having things blow back in his face is the punchline for me. Seeing how his ego (or otherwise) interacts with other characters is amusing. And if further building's wanted, then writing him like a primary character with reasons good or bad for his attitude and actions makes me invested.

Is it canon? For any of the Beforan trolls? No, but the exploration is what makes it fun while knowing that this character can exist within a band of other problematic trolls, and figuring out why they tick the way they do. Homestuck fans are always taking Hussie's characters and building in their own way even IF they aren't small, especially to satisfy wants and curiousity with their own imagination. That's not even including Cronus' LORE, which Aranea explains as being the creator of things such as LE's VESSELS.

The fact he has things I've speculated from, from how he became such a douchebag, to what his world was like when it was alive, to his connection with Meenah, Damara, Mituna, Kurloz, his connection to being a Bard of Hope, and SO ON. It's fun to speculate canon!

And in regards to his harry potter protagonist role, /IF/ it's true. Which it probably isn't, since Cronus is Cronus and Hussie wasn't going to do much ever, and that's why AU's exist. That's why my interest in characters and the routes they COULD go exist.

Sandboxes need their sandcastles. Sandcastles need their shells and decor. And really, that's what OpenBound is. One giant sandbox with castles (characters) to build on and let your mind go wild. Theyre filler that you can fill. It's just in the end, they just happened to not get as normalized in fandom like a bunch of background ponies.

TLDR I like Cronus because I like Cronus!

We solved the puzzle of..w/e it was that was the hot take away from this! I guess you guys know more how I work now versus seeing me think Cronus as some hawt seme bae.

ANYWAYS THAT'S IT! I'd like to say this isnt a defense or response post to anything; it's just a literal discussion and again, written for fun. Some people were authentically curious, and I had enough free time and interest to write up. Nothing big and bold, just fun. Fitting!

#cro txt #cronus ampora #cronus #homestuck

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waynekelton · 5 years

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Review: Egypt: Old Kingdom

Ancient Egypt has always been a popular setting for games. It is hardly surprising, as with its distinctive art and lavish customs the Land of the Pharaohs is a rich source for game designers seeking inspiration. However, a quick look at the app store reveals that the most popular Egyptian-themed games devote themselves to matching tiles, playing slots or dressing-up princesses. Thankfully, Egypt: Old Kingdom takes a more scholarly approach. As an incarnation of the god Horus, your task is to work alongside the pharaohs in order to overcome the mighty Seth. Seth is a bit of a pain and as the god of chaos, he is eager to unleash a catalogue of disasters upon the land. We begin our journey in Memphis, but this is Egypt, not Tennessee so the job is to build pyramids rather than Graceland. However, it isn’t wise to attempt to run before we can walk like an Egyptian. The Old Kingdom was around for hundreds of years and before we can even think of building mysterious pyramidical buildings we will need to first establish our tribe.

Initially, Egypt: Old Kingdom seems rather complex and intimidating; it feels like a crash course in ancient Egyptology. However, settle into the game’s steady flow, and it soon becomes clear that the game isn’t actually that daunting at all. The tutorial introduces you to the bare basics and then leaves you to discover the rest as you play, but that’s OK because the range of available options never becomes too intimidating. It turns out to be a Civilization-style game that does away with a lot of the micromanagement aspects and instead focuses on the deployment of your workers. At the beginning of the game, the map is shrouded in fog and you will want to send out workers to explore new areas. When a worker is sent to a new region their choice of actions will be limited by geographical constraints. Hills are great for constructing barracks, new homes and numerous other types of buildings. Fertile floodplains will yield a choice of extra crops. Some areas will already have resources that you can gather or packs of wild beasts that you can either hunt or worship.

Success depends on efficiently acquiring and managing supplies of the game’s six resources. Food enables you to feed and increase the size of your population; spend ten food and you will be able to place a new worker. The chief sources of food are cultivated fields and fish from regions near the Nile. Production points are mainly used for constructing new buildings; workshops will help you increase your production. Luxuries are usually acquired through trade; they keep your population happy and help pacify angry neighbours. The game’s abstract approach extends to military strength, which just like any other resource is represented by a single number. An effective way of improving your army is by building barracks. Culture points can be used to make new discoveries, with advancements following the usual technology tree approach. For instance, once you have established the local cults advancement, your people can then discover tomb building, which is a great way of improving favour with the gods. Favour points allow you to worship the various gods, each of whom will provide you with a time-limited bonus. After a few turns, your people will stumble across other tribes. Now you will have the option to forge new friendships or make new enemies. Peaceful options include setting up a simple trade agreement and maybe greasing a few palms. Once relationships get really good you will be able to assimilate the people into your society. Aggressive options include subjugating a tribe in battle or launching a raid but remember that enemies have long memories and they can unite against you. Combat is very simple, just challenge a tribe and wait for five turns, then the army levels are compared. There are no differing units or tactics, but you can call upon the favours of some gods to enhance your combat abilities.

It is odd that the version of the game available depends on your device. On Android, you can download the game for free. This lite version gives you the opportunity to dip your toe into the Nile by playing through the first 50 turns. If you want to see more then you will need to pay to open up the rest of the game. On iOS the lite version seems to have been replaced by a full version that requires a one-off payment.

In the full game, the number of options available is very impressive. Games can be set up that follow the course of history, or you can create your own history in the appropriately named sandbox mode. You can add more micromanagement elements, reduce the influence of the gods in various ways and make things even tougher by limiting your options to save progress. Conspiracy theorists may like to try a game in which the human race is enslaved by aliens, whilst B-movie buffs can create a game in which evil mummies are invading the world. The later options sound like fun additions, but they do cheapen the authenticity of the game. Otherwise, you have to admire the amount of background research that the developers have incorporated. The end result is a richly thematic game that is also educational in an entertaining way. There are even optional quizzes that test your new-found knowledge of all things Egyptian.

Egypt: Old Kingdom has simple but still very thematic graphics. The easily identifiable icons ensure that the screen remains uncluttered whilst the neat animations show at a glance what each of your workers is up to. The full game lasts 300 turns, this seems like a lot, but as there isn’t that much micromanagement to worry about, you can often burn through turns at a rapid rate. Events drive the narrative forward; some of these will be small random incidents like an attack from a pack of hyenas. Others are based on specific historical happenings and the fallout of not dealing with these can be very harsh. Some may feel that the way that these scripted events push you in a certain direction make progress feel too linear. Others may find that the random events are too frustrating; an unexpected famine can really set your plans back. Sometimes these events can be mitigated, for instance, if you have the resources, you may be able to build damns before a flood hits and so avoid the loss of key buildings. Of course, you can always use the options to play a more open-ended game at the expense of historical flavour. If you have even a passing interest in Egyptology then Egypt: Old Kingdom comes highly recommended. The streamlined civilisation building works well, although Civ veterans may find the range of control too limiting. The main choice appears to be between focusing on using military strength or diplomacy to bring the other tribes under Horus’s wing. With only six resources to worry about, it is easy to quickly assess how much you are producing and spending without the need for complicated menus. Furthermore, since the options in each region are limited by geographical constraints, the range of choices never becomes overwhelming. In fact, the exhaustive historical setting can make the game seem deeper and more complex than it actually is.

Review: Egypt: Old Kingdom published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

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casualarsonist · 6 years

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Assassin’s Creed: Origins first impressions

Yes, once again it’s time for me to play 20 hours of a game and only be able to give a ‘first impressions’ review, because in this day and age if you’re not able to play a game like a full-time job then are you even playing at all?

I must admit though, for all their flaws as a developer and as a publisher, Ubisoft have, for the last few months at least, given me some of the most consistent gaming enjoyment that I’ve experienced in a while, and it’s due in no small part to the marked increase in quality in their recent releases. It started with Far Cry 5, which I will talk about once I’ve finished it, and continues with Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is easily one of the top three games in the series.

However, (and we’re talking about Ubisoft here, so of course there’s a ‘however’) there’s something I want to talk about first, and that’s a little thing I call the ‘Ubisoft Enjoyment Curve’.

If the title isn’t self-explanatory enough, the UEC is a visual representation of my enjoyment when playing a Ubisoft game, and it’s a pattern that is consistent among most of their games in most of their franchises. If one were to do a shitty MSPaint drawing of it, it would look a little like this:

This particular mock-up pertains specifically to AC games, but generally speaking, the UEC tracks a boring tutorial followed by a sharp increase in enjoyment as the world opens up, followed by a plateau when one starts getting into the repetitive gameplay loop. This is followed by a sharp decrease in enjoyment as the loop gets tedious, ending on a low as the final battle underwhelms. My experiences with Ubisoft games tend to follow this exact same pattern every time because the company consistently manage to do certain specific things very well, and certain specific things very poorly. For example, no-one designs an open-world like Ubisoft. While the world of, say, The Witcher 3 is a stunning place filled with gorgeous visual detail, it’s still a collection of discrete zones that can only be travelled between via loading screens. Origins, however, is one enormous, stunning, and SEAMLESS representation of Hellenistic Egypt, and somehow it performs like a dream. When the game first offered me a mission to leave the starting village of Siwa and travel to a different city, I finished everything there was to be done because I was convinced that, like Assassin’s Creed 2, for example, I’d be transported to another self-contained city sandbox, cut off from the rest of the world. So imagine my surprise where I realised you could just ride from one end of the country to the other on horseback, and as soon as I was loaded into Alexandria, I could turn right around and walk straight back to Siwa if I wanted to. You can gaze across the deserts surrounding Giza and see the glorious lighthouse at Alexandria towering on the horizon miles in the distance, and if you want, you can make a beeline for it and rarely encounter stuttering and pop-in, with nary a loading screen at all. This technical sorcery is one of Ubi’s greatest strengths as a developer, and although, for example, Black Flag had attempted something like this in their open world, the fact remains that that world is a collection of islands, lacking even half the detail and landmass featured here. Even the most recent game before Origins - Syndicate - took place in the city of London alone. A large city, but much less a ‘world’ and more a ‘zone’. So once one slogs through the grind of the mandated Ubisoft tutorial (as if you’re not just playing practically the same game as you were ten years ago), the enjoyment spike that comes along with exploring the expanding world is dramatic.

But then, after a few hours of running round on an exotic virtual holiday, they hit you with the god-awful present-day missions. Now it’s not that I object to the meta-narrative - failing to adequately follow-up Desmond Miles’ storyline is actually one of the series’ greatest mistakes, in my opinion. The promise of that story, and in particular (SPOILERS) the stunning and fantastic anti-climax for Ezio Auditore at the end of his life’s search for the secrets of Eden, as the Ancients delivered their message through him and over hundreds of years of time to Desmond, was one of the main reasons I was so excited for the follow-up entries following Ezio’s retirement as a character. But it’s specifically because they’ve failed to give the player any reasonable incentive to care about the meta-narrative that these missions are so unbearable. I mean, there’s also next-to-nothing to do in them, but it’s unsurprising that a lack of compelling storytelling begets a lack of compelling gameplay. I genuinely think that they could have thrown that shit out entirely with this entry - I would have been more relieved than anything if they had - and while I can’t comment on how this particular story develops, there seems to be little, if anything, going on as far as I’ve played. It’s more engaging than the confusing, entirely cutscene-based meta-story of Syndicate, but still, the present-day portions of Origins that I’ve played so far take place in a tiny, relatively featureless environment that offer little more than an annoying distraction from the true wonders of the game.

After leaping back into the past, however, it isn’t long before the comfortable familiarity of the AC formula and the wonder of the game world begins to offer diminishing returns. Because once one has explored enough of the map, it becomes pretty clear that whatever changes Ubisoft have made for this entry are ultimately pretty superficial - Egypt may be beautiful to look at, but in many ways it’s like the pre-rendered backgrounds of old in that there’s little by way of interactivity here. At its core, this Assassin’s Creed game is fundamentally the same as that Assassin’s Creed game, and you’ve probably got another 50 hours ahead of you before you’ve finished with it. And while this plateau in enjoyment can hold out for 5, maybe 10 hours, eventually, always, the repetition of the gameplay and the lack of true content always gets the better of me, and rather than investing in what I’m doing, I start enjoying my time less and less. I stop listening to what the characters have to say and just perform side missions by rote, and I’ve noticed that, for all the talk of Origin’s side-missions being more developed than in other AC games, this is only superficially true, and it still falls into the old trap of cut-and-paste content. On the surface, it would like you to think that the old dog has learnt new tricks, but when you find yourself unlocking a cage and carrying a captive out of an enemy camp for the twelfth time you’ll see that Origins still embodies some of the longest-standing flaws of the series as a whole. And it’s all the more annoying because the repetition in the side content doesn’t necessarily have to be such an issue, but as always, the busywork still ends up taking up an enormous amount of your time in-game, vastly outweighing the time spent engaging in any kind of story-related content, and it saps away a lot of the life the game might otherwise have.

So, with that said, what does the game do right?

The story begins in media res, and it does a fairly good job of catching the player up on the history of the main character - Bayek - and why he has you doing the things you’re doing. While it might initially felt like I’d skipped past interesting parts of a bigger story, I can’t help but feel like there is so much more to be revealed that I don’t know about yet, and this parallels the journey of Bayek himself, who begins the game equally ignorant as to how deep the conspiracy he has found himself embroiled in goes. For what I’ve seen, the game takes a rather hands-off approach to telling its story, as opposed to, say AC2, which leans into its historical figures and has a lot of fun with its fictionalised version of history. Origins opts instead to spend as little time as possible explaining its story via cutscenes, and throws the player into the doing rather than holding them up with the telling, and in my opinion it could have afforded to play with its history more. But again, I’m not sure how much of the story I’ve played so I can’t comment on how this changes later on.

The time period of the setting is absolutely inspired as well, and depicts Egypt when it was the point of intersection of three diverse cultures - the Greek, Egyptian, and Romans all meeting as civil war stirs between the armies of Cleopatra and her brother/husband (yeah) Ptolemy XIII. This incredible time in history lends the game an immense diversity of both architecture and people, and the player gets to experience the joy of interacting with these, and playing the lynchpin of the political machinations of some of the most fascinating figures ever to have lived.

Another area in which Origins excels over its previous games is the interaction between its various gameplay systems, and while it isn’t anywhere as detailed as say, something like Far Cry 2 in terms of emergent gameplay, it’s still a step up over previous entries. For example, I’ve seen soldiers affected by beserk darts crack open cages holding rebel prisoners, who have then gone on to cause extended chaos amongst the soldiers protecting a stronghold, leaving me free to slip in and out unnoticed. Sleep darts thrown into fires will explode in a cloud of sedative gas and knock out handfuls of people at a time. Poisoning corpses and wandering away can result in you returning to a dozen dead bodies strewn over the place as guards investigating dead comrades have carried disease back to their living counterparts. Tense battles can and will be interrupted by crocodiles or hippos racing in and devouring your enemies. Punt boats can be set on fire and sunk from under the people standing on top of them, or rammed and tipped, leaving their pilots swimming for their lives. Oil jars can be thrown into water, broken, and the spreading oil slick ignited. On multiple occasions I’ve avoided danger because the person who spotted me dropped dead on the spot with disease, or was attacked by a predator in the process of attacking me. I wish the game had gone farther with its fire mechanics, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things it feels a little half-hearted in terms of its implementation of some of these ideas, but still, it’s better than it has ever been.

Origins also has the tidiest implementation of its climbing mechanics of any AC game yet. There’s a far more definitive use of ‘press X to climb, press O to drop’ that leaves little room for you to be unsure as to whether you need to hit one or the other to scale that small ledge. The game is also much more forgiving in terms of which surface it will let you climb and where - as a result, Origins is much less a puzzle-climber than other games in the series, and it’s rare that you’ll end up getting stuck on something because the designers have simply decided that you’re not allowed to cling to that particular thing above your head. They also removed the infuriating restriction on jumping that was a particularly frustrating part of Syndicate - the one that completely stops you from leaping from ledges above a certain height - meaning that you’re free to leap to your death if you CHOOSE to, because this is 2018 and I should be able to make my characters commit suicide if I damn well want to. These movement tweaks open the way for more free-flowing experience, and allow for instinctive and reactive control by the player: if you’re chasing someone transporting resources and they disappear inside a stronghold, you don’t have to spend the next five minutes wandering around the perimeter looking for an entry point only to find that you can’t get down from the wall you just climbed - now you can just just take it in your stride and continue hunting your prey.

These small quality-of-life improvements make a big difference to the overall feeling of ‘tracking and attacking’ (trademark, me, 2018), particularly when combined with the overhauled combat. No-longer is the combat system a poor-man’s knockoff of the Arkham series; instead you have direct control over blocking, light and heavy attacks, dodging and parrying, and characters are free-moving with the ability to lock on. It’s a bit more button-mashy, but you don’t have to spend your time waiting for the enemy to attack; instead it encourages movement and pressing the initiative. You’re even able to equip up to four weapons, including two bows that operate as a stealthy and fully-featured replacement for the pistols/throwing knives that appeared in the previous games. In response to this, enemy awareness has been ramped up, meaning that even the quietest assassinations will alert any guard close enough to you, and you can and will be spotted fairly quickly if you creep without care. That said, even on hard, the game becomes easy as soon as you level up higher than the enemies around you, but you’re offered a menu option to make enemies level up with you, and for those that want the game to keep pushing them (and I’d say it’s necessary to hold off some of the tedium of the gameplay routine) I’d recommend it.

Lastly, I’d like to go into greater detail about the world design. From the gorgeous Mediterranean waters of Alexandria, through the verdant Nile Delta areas, to the desolate sands of the southern deserts, and the immense and haunting Giza pyramids, the game’s visuals are every bit the pinnacle of Ubisoft’s efforts. It can’t be overstated how amazing Origins looks, and there’s so much joy to be taken from simply standing and looking around, or touring the backstreets and bazaars and temples and cobbled carriageways. In a game like this it’s easy to get buried by the repetition and fail to see the forest for the trees, so it’s certainly a joy to snap out of that every now and then and just go for a walk and admire the level of detail on display. More than Syndicate with it’s rows and rows of similar buildings, or Black Flag and Rogue with their giant stretches of water, Origins feels like a world designed by hand and with care. Every surface and texture feels like it was placed with intention, and it gives you that very ‘Assassin’s Creed’ feeling in which you wonder just how close to the design the reality of the place actually was.

Collectively, my first impressions are skewed quite positive, although even now I’m finding myself falling prey to a fatigue common to my experience with these games. Taking the extra year for development has certainly done it some good - it’s clear that the ambition and quality in its presentation has increased with the increase in development time, and that a few fresh ideas have managed to penetrate the wall of executives that make all the decisions for this type of thing. But one shouldn’t be misled - Assassin’s Creed: Origins is still the same old Assassin’s Creed, and if there’s any core feature of the series that you despise, chances are you’re going to run into it here. That said, it still remains one of the best games they’ve made. It’s huge, detailed, gorgeous, open-ended, with visceral and bloody combat, a number of entertaining systems that interact to hilarious effect. When it works, it works really well - it’s fun. But it does suffer from the fact that the size and scale of the game means more faffing about with relatively meaningless busywork, and it’s this repetition that dulls the shine of the world around you. In some ways it feels more of a throwback to older AC games whilst still having some new ideas of its own, but when it comes down to it, it’s the latest AC game. So...get it if you like AC games, I guess? Because it’s the latest one.

#assassin's creed: origins #egypt #bayek #cleopatra #ptolemy #julius caesar #africa #europe #rome #greek #greece #ubisoft #open world #rpg #exploration #free running #aya

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