Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Brantly B.]

lmao that of all things that this remake series is doing, "forgetting Dirge of Cerberus ever happened" is apparently not one of them.

Well, kind of!

You see, after playing Intermission I was inspired to actually go and play Dirge of Cerberus, which trust me, was exactly as bad an idea as it sounds. Anyway this order of operations did allow me to notice something pretty hilarious going on in Intermission.

You know how the Whispers are active during Intermission? Like how if you try to enter Seventh Heaven as Yuffie, the Whispers will actively stop you, even though logically it changes absolutely nothing if Yuffie happens to have met the protagonists before she encounters them in the forest. The Whispers are just that concerned about maintaining canon.

But then Yuffie meets Nero. Yuffie fights Nero, and gets well acquainted with all his stupid dumb shadow powers. Yuffie personally, up close, watches Nero kill a close friend and maybe even love interest of hers. That's kinda something you remember.

But in Dirge of Cerberus? Not only does Yuffie not have any comment at all when she encounters Nero "again", not only does she not seem to know or care at all who he is, but the fact that she doesn't know about his dumb stupid shadow powers and isn't ready for them is a major plot point.

So there are two possibilities here:
A) Yuffie is that dumb, or
B) The literal sentient embidoments of Final Fantasy VII's canon do not give a single fuck about the plot of Dirge.

[Friday]

it's 50/50 honestly

[Friday]

there's no such thing as a "dumb genki girl" that i do not love, no matter what weird 80s schoolgirl mixed with ninja bullshit costume you put her in

[Brantly B.]

In case I never posted it, my review of Dirge of Cerberus, in its entirety:

[Friday]

[Thad]

FF7 is probably at this point Square's brobdingnagiest property. There are dozens of different titles in the world setting. The first game came out in '97. And at no point in any of those releases has there been a single on-boarding for new fans. You better start that shit at the beginning and go through everything.

And even if you have, God help you when they start throwing out references to, like, mobile games that never left Japan.

...actually I haven't played Ever Crisis but isn't it supposed to basically summarize the entire timeline in one place finally?

Course, on the plus side, the core game, FF7 the PS1 original, has been pretty much continuously available, at least for the various PlayStations.

[Niku]

InterMISSION is a pretty fun little romp overall. I wish there was more meat to the Fort Condor minigame but that is actually very in line with the original Fort Condor minigame.

That being said I don't know if I'm gonna be able to platinum the DLC or not at this point; I beat it on Hard mode, I can probably swing the super boss that unlocks for Yuffie and Sonan (though plowing through Bahamut and Ramuh every time just to get to start an attempt on the fight is tiresome as hell), but the final trophy is beating a brand new super boss unlocked IN THE GODDAMN MAIN GAME, so I don't know if I can pick up a fucking three year old save file and jump right into tackling a Weapon-level challenge.

But I've plucked away at a couple of attempts here and there and I appreciate how differently Yuffie and Sonon work together compared to the cast from the main game; I'm really looking forward to seeing how Red and Cid and Cait Sith play in Rebirth, because so far they've done a stellar job at making everyone feel interesting and unique.

On a completely different front I've also been playing through the Street Fighter 6 single player mode and that shit is a fun, stupid thing in the best way. It's like Street Fighter by way of Saint's Row.

[Büge]

So I gave up on playing [Unmodded] Oblivion a while back because I thought there was some bug that rendered the game unfixable. I'd dug through Steam Community posts, Reddit posts, and even GameFAQ forums for the answer.

I didn't find it until I was going through Frosty's Oblivion Gameplay Overhaul Tutorial on NexusMods.

I'm going to pause here for a little backstory.

As you may be aware, Oblivion's leveling system is broken to the point of stupidity. In order to cheese the system and achieve 5x multipliers in your stats, you have to find ways around it. Strength, for example, is leveled up quickly if you use a sword/mace/fist on "legal" targets, e.g. your horse, your summoned creatures, or, in this case, the catatonic followers of Peryite.



See, here's me giving Maren the Seal a left hook. It also looks like she's got a little moustache and goatee, heh heh

So anyway, I'm going through the list of mods and instructions in Frosty's Tutorial, and was reading the notes on the Unofficial Oblivion Patch, and stumbled across this:



Even though it's "legal", the game still registers punching the Peryite cultists as assault! Your assault meter is literally ticking up with every hit. Eventually the number does a stack overflow or whatever and the game can't do a stable save. And the only solution in the game, as in life, is to assault a police officer. ACAB, am I right? Or, in this case, AILAB.



My game's glitching, that's what. Now hold still.

[Upthorn]

I picked up Jusant on the recommendation of a youtube game critic or two, and I have to say that it's very pretty, and I appreciate that it took the Death Stranding approach to controls for its climbing so instead of just holding a button down you have to grab with one hand while searching for your next handhold with the other...

But... I strongly feel that, in a game about climbing a twenty mile tall shear cliff wall... it should probably be possible to fall and die. Like, I get making it hard to game over by accident, but like, if I run headlong and jump off a floor without my rope attached to anything, I know what I'm doing, and don't want to be saved by an invisible wall.

After a while it started to feel a little less like a game and more like a movie that tracks your eyes and refuses to progress if they aren't locked on the dead center of the screen...

[Thad]

Picked up the Switch version of Mario RPG and damned if this game doesn't still bring a smile to my face. I'm just past liberating the Mushroom Castle from the first Smithy Gang boss (with the Shyguys) and my initial observations are:

The Woolsey translation is mostly intact. They changed a few things (Peach, Frog Sage, Croaka Cola) but it's not a full-on retranslation, I'm recognizing most of it (though I haven't played it in close to 25 years so my memory's a little fuzzy on the details).

There are some QOL improvements. You get the accessory that detects hidden ? blocks at the beginning of the game, and the first Frog Coin is no longer an epic troll. (It's still kind of a troll, if you expect it to work like it did in the original game. I took me three reloads to get the timing right on jumping off that moving Toad to get it, only to discover later that it's no longer missable and it's easier to get later on.) The controls are objectively better, though they mess with my muscle memory. (I restored the old battle control scheme, eg Y to select Ability, Y again to select which ability, from the menu.)

Overall I'm digging the orchestral soundtrack. It's maybe less brash than the chiptune version and there are some instrumentation and arrangement choices I wouldn't have made, but the music is as catchy as ever. (And the SNES soundtrack is an option if you prefer it, which is nice.)

On the whole, it's a thoroughly enjoyable remaster, though there's some framerate stuttering in the cutscenes.

[Friday]

yeah I played through it two months ago and it's a top notch remake

[nosimpleway]

There's a page on TV Tropes called "Missing Secret". It's about something in a game that looks like it should have something to fill the last space of your inventory, something behind the door, some way to get to that distant island on the horizon... but there isn't. How do I get the last Esper on the list? What's in the box at the end of FNAF 4? Where do I use this key to Wintersand Manor? Sometimes the questions have answers, but you don't find them in-game. The blank Esper slot is for unequipping them, the locked box is cut content.

I keep thinking about that as I play through The Legend of Zegend: Tingdom of the Kingdom. For Breath of the Weath they made this giant, sweeping land of Hyrule, with shrines tucked into every corner and Koroks hiding anywhere they couldn't put a shrine. And then they made a sequel using mostly the same map, tripled: there's now a section in the skies above and in the cavernous underground below. And then they filled it all with... well, with nothing, mostly. There's a lot of wandering around monuments and landscapes that used to have something cool in them in the last game, but now there's not. The Sky is mostly empty space, as you might expect, but seriously the Depths are just... like, they put in these weird ghosts who can give you weapons with more durability than the others, for reasons that remain unclear, but apart from those and a brobdingnagian space to put a bunch of HP-bar-having miniboss fights, it's pretty clear they weren't sure what the Depths were actually for.

Between this and the issues Friday brought up about Breath of the Weath before -- in short, that loot is largely unrewarding to find -- the whole game feels weirdly empty sometimes.

[Yoji]

I think I had a problem like that with The Phantom Pain. There seems to be a fine line between an open world and a vacant lot.

[Thad]

Mad Max was probably the emptiest and most repetitive open-world game I've ever played.

I still finished it, and got most of the optional shit. Vibe counts for a lot. But of course YMMV.

[nosimpleway]

Playing a game with a repetitive visual effect can leave phantom impressions when you close your eyes hours later. Call it the Tetris Effect, or Endogenous Game Transfer Phenomena, or whatever. Play enough Tetris, and when you try to sleep that night you'll have vague impressions of falling blocks on the inside of your eyelids. Hours of Dance Dance Revolution results in arrows going up instead. A lot of Vampire Survivors gives the impression of little blue motes cascading from the outsides of your field of vision to the center.

Tingdom of the Kingdom has a whole lot of nothin' on the map. There's not a ton of impetus to explore every nook and cranny of the landscape. And as happens so often during a game, I find the main character's overland walking speed to be frustratingly slow -- this goes double for the gecko-climb up Hyrule's countless daunting mountainsides and cliffs. It was already annoying in Breath of the Weath, and this time around you're much less likely to find something interesting once you get to whatever landmark it was you wanted to investigate. (To say nothing about being interrupted by "stop what you're doing and get into this pointless random fight!" stalfos or Yiga assassins as you go.)

Enter the Airbike.

Very early on, the game teaches you to glue device parts together to make functional machines, often vehicles. You find out very shortly thereafter that devices intended to let you fly have a short- to very-short lifespan once they're activated. Rockets will flare, then immediately die. Wings -- in this case a flat glider sort of thing you stand on top of -- last for all of about thirty seconds. Hot-air balloon parts last a minute or so, and only go straight up anyway.
"So hey", says I, "is there a way to fly around that doesn't involve those parts? Wings suck anyway, can I just strap a couple of fan devices onto the bottom of a control mechanism and fly around that way?"
The internet replied "Yeah man, fandom calls it the Airbike and it's awesome."

One control stick, with a fan stuck to the front and one to the back, angled just so, allows for a very long flight time, with decent air controls, and being a machine with only three parts means it's easy on battery power. There's really no improving on the elegant simplicity, the only addition I've found that makes any sense is slapping a giant glowing flower to the front of it as a lightsource while exploring the deep deep dark dark deep dark hole underground.

Perhaps as a response to having so little to put on their empty maps, the developers went to some lengths to make landmarks that have something to do quite obvious from a distance. Skyview Towers are, y'know, towers, with lanterns and glowing runes. Shrines have a swirly green aura that rises into the sky. Every stable has a chimney belching a stream of smoke into the air. In the sky, islands in the distance are only obscured by clouds, on a clear day you can see all the way across Hyrule. In the depths, Yiga strongholds, forges, and the seeds to light up the area all glow in the dark, and like in the sky, you can see them from miles away if there's nothing blocking the view.

So just hop on an Airbike and fly over there directly. It's fast, there are fewer interruptions to worry about, and if you happen to spot something to investigate on the way you can either land or mark your map to come back to it later. As far as I can tell there is literally nothing in the Depths worth looking at that doesn't appear on the map -- there are no Shrines or Koroks down there -- so once the map is lit up you can just fly directly from one mine, Yiga stronghold, or obvious boss arena to the next.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking "This thing is kind of clunky for such a core game mechanic" and have to remind myself that in-game flight is not a core game mechanic. It's a shortcut workaround for the sheer amount of the game spent walking and climbing, but you'd otherwise be doing so much walking and climbing that building an airbike just makes the game so much breezier to play, there's no reason not to.

So yes, I'm getting the Tetris Effect from a Zelda game. Last night, in bed, my eyes closed in the dark, I got the sensation of the landscape falling away, receding into the distance as I took flight on my airbike.

[Friday]

To be clear, I still think Breath of the Wild is an excellent game, despite the flaws. It achieves something amazing and was probably the first game to really achieve it fully realized: that is, a magical world full of cool shit to explore. But as I stated in the thread, I had already played Elden Ring and Ring does it better. I sometimes wish Elden Ring wasn't a souls game so I could recommend it to everyone, because I think if you just gave it a normal difficulty it would be fun for almost anyone.

But yeah, BotW having some actual gear upgrades to find in the open world would have gone a long way. I love exploring every nook and cranny in games, not knowing what I could find. Once you realize the gameplay loop, and loot, in BotW, you just go from PoI to PoI.

[nosimpleway]

Tears of the Kingdom is a good game, too. It's just hard to believe this is a AAA game from one of the brobdingnagiest franchises in history with a six-year dev cycle, really. Breath of the Wild switched from one console generation to the next, and while it was pretty impressive, you got the impression it needed a little more scaling up to the capabilities of the new console. TotK did that! And... well, it's still kind of empty. There's stuff to do, but it has this feeling of things being missing that should be there.

And I just can't fathom why all the little annoying bits I fought against for the entirety of Breath of the Wild weren't ironed out. Like, just now I was fighting a Talus, and it drew one of its brobdingnagian rocky arms back to throw a boulder at me. So I whipped the camera around, got ready to run, and

the camera panned behind some particularly tall grass. Link took a flying boulder to the face because I couldn't see it to dodge it. Why in the fuck am I still struggling with the camera in a video game from the Year of Luigi Two Thousand Twenty-Three? Why can't Link jump forward from a standing start? Why am I still grinding for Lizalfos tails? Why do I keep getting struck by lightning despite taking all available precautions against that, just because the game has decided to tell me and fifteen of my hearts to go fuck myself?

[Brantly B.]

Yes, I know. Yes, I know that too.

[beatbandito]

Is it actually fun? I want it to be good, but Craftopia barely became anything like a game before being abandoned in early access.

[Brantly B.]

Fun enough to get me to stop watching the timer on my refund countdown. No single part of it is original (clearly), but the whole of it doesn't play entirely like anything else; once you get into the primary game loop it's mostly about exploring* to find cool people to kidnap for your base, MGS 5 style, but instead of the base management part being abstracted you're building it yourself from fairly simple components and watching your workers actually do their thing. You don't have to command them much, it basically becomes self-motivated and self-sustaining if you build the right structures/populate it with the right mons, so it's perfect for a guy like me who really doesn't take much pleasure in having to highlight a peon and say "You, go do the thing" all the time.

In fact almost every goal or feature of the game seems to exist to abstract/automate away anything you might think is rigorous or dull so you can just have fun. Don't like sitting at the campfire cooking beans all day? Get a fire Pokemon to do it for you. Do like sitting at at the campfire cooking beans all day? Well okay you can do that too. There doesn't seem to be much penalty for choosing to just waste your time instead of maximizing efficiency at everything (at least on Normal mode), and you can actually gain a bunch of character levels just choosing to bum around and do menial chores instead of grinding all day to hunt down the Legendary Fuckmammoth or whatever.

I'm sure it becomes more obnoxious when you get further in and have to deal with factions and stuff (I'm on my second character, so that 10 hours of playtime is more like 2 5-hours) but since I tend to only care about the early bootup parts of survival-type games anyway, I'm happy with this one. It feels like a video game designed by people who actually do like video games, and it's been a while since I've played one of those.

Oh and also it's already sold over 2 millions copies so I don't think the devs are going to abandon it unless they're just incredibly degenerate. Most people are speculating what kind of heavy monetization scheme they're planning to add into it later; I'm guessing lots of little new "gen" expansion packs. Whatever. Game's worth $27 in the state it's in, anyway.

(Just don't install it to a non-C drive or you will have a very bad time, I found out.)

* BotW straight up, except with keyboard+mouse controls and even worse combat. It doesn't matter though because after a point you're really supposed to be letting your mons fight for you, not because it's a rule enforced by the game world, but because the mons will just step on you if you try to take them on with your pathetic little human weapons.