Curious_Tongue
Larpfest
Silent Hill 1 was the only game that made me dread progressing to a new level.
I'm about 30-40% through Metroid Prime using the PrimeHack build of Dolphin and the HD texture pack. Runs like a dream and looks like a fully remastered version of the Wii classic but with all the extreme annoyances and no QoL of the era (early 2000s). Still, I'm enjoying myself despite MASSIVE backtracking and outrageous cock-blocking of fun with all those puzzles almost every step of the way. And I encountered a balls-hard boss already that made me truly feel like the incredible shrinking man if he was fighting gargantuan rock god monsters instead of adorable little house tabbies.
Nope. The weird thing is that it didn't used to happen when I was younger. This is something that has come up in the past five years or so. Maybe my body can't handle stress. I don't know, to be completely honest.k, fair enough.
Does that happen with classic titles like the original RE or Silent Hill as well?
I'm about 30-40% through Metroid Prime using the PrimeHack build of Dolphin and the HD texture pack. Runs like a dream and looks like a fully remastered version of the Wii classic but with all the extreme annoyances and no QoL of the era (early 2000s). Still, I'm enjoying myself despite MASSIVE backtracking and outrageous cock-blocking of fun with all those puzzles almost every step of the way. And I encountered a balls-hard boss already that made me truly feel like the incredible shrinking man if he was fighting gargantuan rock god monsters instead of adorable little house tabbies.
You playing the original or the Triogy version? I didn't know there was an HD texture pack for those games. I checked it out and it looks pretty good, although I don't think there's a huge difference between that and Dolphin's built-in upscaler.
The only thing that irked me about the 1st game was the feeling that the results of some choices seem to blindside you with totally unpredictable results. I think there was one in particular where I lost a character and it just felt like thinking about which choice to make didn't matter because something like that could come out of left field.Banner Saga. I bought it on release and for some reason it had just been sitting there unplayed all these years. It's surprisingly atmospheric and I like it a lot so far.
The only thing that irked me about the 1st game was the feeling that the results of some choices seem to blindside you with totally unpredictable results. I think there was one in particular where I lost a character and it just felt like thinking about which choice to make didn't matter because something like that could come out of left field.Banner Saga. I bought it on release and for some reason it had just been sitting there unplayed all these years. It's surprisingly atmospheric and I like it a lot so far.
Can't find anything I don't like yet. No long story exposition getting in the way of gameplay.
Stranger of Sword City is a turn-based blobber, i.e. a Wizardry-like, not part of the JRPG subgenre, although it is a Japanese-developed game.You mean there are post-FF6 jRPGs that don't have a minimum of 2 pages of dialogue in every new character interaction and/or 2+ hours of cut scenes of story exposition???! I didn't think such a thing existed.
Finally rolled the ending credits on FF7.
The production values are off the charts for a PS1 game: the gigantic scale, the constant setpieces, the cutscenes, the varied and detailed environments, the huge bestiary and elaborate combat visuals...
...but on the other hand the writing is trash, the combat system isn't anything to write home about, the world and dungeon design offers neither challenge nor depth (in part owing to how story-driven the game is: gameplay is a vehicle, not an end) and everything is just so fucking slow. I can't emphasize this enough, this has to be one of the most tedious games I ever played, I can't even imagine slogging through it without constantly hitting a fast-forward button.
AAA games in a nutshell: a shallow experience wrapped in ungodly amounts of production money. Had the writing and/or the gameplay been any good I would have been the ideal audience for it. Granted, I did like FF9 a lot so I'll give them that they were still in the process of figuring shit out.
37 hours into Days Gone, I never expected to like it this much.
On paper it's a generic story-driven zombie game with generic mechanics, gameplay is looting resources to craft stuff, Red Dead Redemption-ish slo-mo shooting, traditional open world structure with camps to clear, credit to earn and zombie, I mean freakers' nests to clear. The first 1/3 of the game is terrible, the way the game zigzag through 3 or 4 storylines at the same time made it difficult to follow what the hell was going on, especially a flashback cutscene so confusingly stitched together gave me an impression that there was a lot of cut playable content.
Then the Lost Lake plot begins and boy it started to get real. For once, I really appreciate a zombie game that's not too dark and inhumanly desperate, the game doesn't pretend to be a dark gritty modern age medieval shit with grey morality, it makes clear who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, and between them is a shockingly likable protagonist who's stubborn, desperate, has trust issue but also acts really real, acknowledge his flaws and is actually not as selfish as he thinks he is. Deacon reminded me of a time when I was a stupid kid dropping out of college and insisted on living alone because I didn't want to bother anyone, but time goes on and I simply accepted that I couldn't hold a grudge on everything forever. He can survive on his own, but surviving isn't living, and being desperate enough to hold out hope, in this case his wife, is still worth a reason to live.
This is easily one of the rare cases where the longer the game goes on, the better it plays. At first it played like a generic The Last of Us open world clone, sneak, one shot headshot, preserving your ammo and shit. But when you get better guns and finally get to fight the horde, shit gets real. Memorize explosive barrels, set up gas cans and mines, hoard enough resources to craft napalm molotov, then try to find high grounds, lure them into choke points, there's a particular nuance in these horde fights and it's always exhilarating when you clear one. The bike also reminds me of your car in Mad Max, there's a lot of upgrades that make traversing a flexible experience the longer you play it genuinely feels like a trusty companion. The devs cleverly designed the first map with a lot of hills to let save gas by freewheeling, so there's this "rhythm" when it comes to driving your bike.
Two things I'm not a fan of: those NERO missions where you have to infiltrate a research team, get detected and you must restart back at checkpoint, pretty boring and repetitive. Second, playing on PC definitely broke the combat, since the game relies a lot on slo-mo shooting, it's really easy to aim and headshot everyone John Wick style with pinpoint accuracy even on hardest difficulty.
Did I mention that it looks pretty? It does look pretty.