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Shorty

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Posts posted by Shorty

  1. Posted

    I played this on PC for a while, was having fun... then just got soooo suddenly bored with it. Maybe its the Gamepass thing where I don't feel like there's any value behind whether I play it or not, but I just don't feel invested. Also I absolutely cannot stand the organisation of the quests. I kept being told I was still doing some championship that I didn't know I'd started, and I couldn't tell how to resume.

    Meh. Burnout Paradise is still better.

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    The hard parts of this... I just don't think they're right. I get that it's the type of game that's meant to be difficult, and I don't might a tricky fight but... it's just not balanced right, in my opinion. Everything that's "difficult" hinges on having to start again over and over, instead of having a moment to learn the right thing to do. I think this has come down to the vastly increased pace, which is a good thing, but I don't think the amount of damage you take per hit has been changed to reflect this.

    I also struggle a lot to do some of the controls, especially the things on the triggers, and hitting down when you run. Wall jumps regularly not connecting and sometimes for no apparent reason a jump not becoming a flip.... I can't really understand why it's not an option to have movement on the D-pad. This might just be because I've not played Switch for a long time and gotten used to other controllers than the Pro.

    This is a good game, and a good Metroid game, there's a lot to love about it. But I think it's got some really bad segments and I don't quite agree with the very high ratings it's getting. I'd rank it way below Super, Fusion and Zero Mission I think.

    • Like 1
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  3. Posted

    While I totally get where you're coming from, I think you can get by perfectly fine with the save/rest feature. The only time I can imagine this would be a problem, is if you regularly played a different game. For example, if you joined friends for Destiny or Overwatch most nights, it would be annoying that you couldn't save and come back.

    Updates do not interrupt rest, and crashes/other reasons I think would be so infrequent that across the course of completing the game, I would be willing to bet it would come up 0-1 times on average, at least in parts of the world with reliable power.

    The only reason I bother to contest this, is that it's a shame so many people are skipping the game for something they see as a mistake, but I see as a totally reasonable choice. I think those who talk about "taking your time in a biome" have maybe missed the point of the game altogether. It should be treated like most roguelikes IMO, don't get too invested, or you'll be frustrated when you restart. Starting again is a natural part of the process of playing the game.

  4. Posted

    I platinumed this game without ever needing any kind of save/reload feature, or it ever occuring to me to need one. The only time I can imagine it bothering me, is if I got a power cut when I was doing really well... The game regularly ends suddenly, and you start again, and that each attempt is fairly short whether it goes well or not... so I just can't really get why it bothers so many.

    Anyway, this is a game I'd love to play more of, hope it gets more content soon!

  5. Posted

    Just got the special edition of this delivered, thought it was going to be normal Switch game size in a slightly thicker steel case or something...

    Instead its the size of a fat A4 folder!! :laughing:

    Size comparison...

    Sr3egsK.jpeg

    • Like 3
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  7. Posted

    I once played the arcade game with the trackball at Sega World, Picadilly Circus. That was a memory that had been completely lost to time until you mentioned it.

    Do you have a means to play Sonic Jam? That's another game that owns a very strange corner of my memory somewhere. I dreamt of owning a Sega Saturn and playing what I assumed would be an incredible 3D sonic experience - and would go to Woolworths in the town I lived in as a kid to watch the unplayable demo loop. (Perhaps fortunately) never did own that or the console.

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    It's quite difficult to say when I haven't seen it myself. It sounds a bit like the SSL certificate is playing up, but without seeing it firsthand and debugging it as it happens, it's hard to offer more info. For what it's worth, links to anything with abode/castus.co.uk/46.37.169.131 at least aren't malicious, they're other things on the server that are somehow being defaulted to when links break.

    The big picture here really is that it's an outdated php site on a very outdated CMS and it needs a huge overhaul. And yeah it could do with better hosting, but hosting isn't cheap, and N-E weighs in at a hefty 9GB. It used to also get a crazy amount of traffic which meant only my work server - which we get hosting on for free and is a proper decent dedicated server as opposed to a big shared platform - was all that could handle it. Nowadays that might not be so true, or sites can be built in ways that are far less resource intensive, but it'll still have a cost to go anywhere else (we already pay hosting for the forum, but iirc there's no room left on that server).

    Also it doesn't make sense to start a new CMS and not redesign the site, but that's another thing I've not been able to get off the ground (not really my expertise anymore).

    Maybe what I've been doing with the redesign is wrong, maybe I should stick closer to what we have now, but just expand/modernise it a bit... browsing it now it's not as bad as I remember :p

    Otherwise - if anyone knows a designer who will work for the sheer love of Nintendo - let them know we're looking :p if I had a design, it'd probably give me the kick I needed to rebuild it.

    • Thanks 1

  10. Posted

    On 12/9/2020 at 1:08 PM, Happenstance said:

    Seems to work fine. Got to admit though, I’m not really one who notices a whole lot of difference between 30 and 60fps which is why I was happy playing it at 30 anyway.

    I thought I was the same basically til PS5 came along. Now that multiple games let you quickly switch between, it feels like night and day. The most obvious are Control and this game. When you turn off 60fps and reload something you just did (because Spidey reloads the last auto-save), it's such a surprise, to me at least. Suddenly rotating the camera is a blurry mess and everything feels like it's struggling to keep up. This one I absolutely had to play in 60fps.

    That said, a lot of the magic had waned from my first playthrough. I kinda regret buying the Ultimate Edition. I thought I would really want to re-immerse myself in that awesome feeling of this game, but it didn't actually come back. In the end I didn't even use the code for the first game :blank:

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    Nintendo doesn't dip prices, they have an image as a premium, quality product that doesn't do flash sales and cash-in bargains. The world is not as black and white as "Activision does it, why can't Nintendo?" They don't want to give the impression of "here's three old games at cheap prices" they want to say "here's a lovely, well organised, well treated collection of absolutely sublime games that you know will have been ported perfectly and look better than ever".  Activision also supplements a huge amount of their income from shifty practices like loot crates, pay to win and microtransactions, for one thing.

    If we wan't to talk bizarre decisions, it's the crazy choice to provide this in limited physical supply. Which will just lead to loads of NES-Classic style scalping.

    • Like 3
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  16. Posted

    I just had to bump this because somehow it skipped my attention until last month.

    Truly extraordinary game, wow. It landed itself straight into my top ten games ever. It's a once-in-a-lifetime type. Like Portal meets Journey.

    I played this as a kind of sofa co-op partnership with my other half, which we've only done for a couple of other games namely The Witness and The Witcher 3. It was perfect for that, take it in turns, explore a new idea each time, bounce ideas off each other, figure things out together. We were waking up in the morning still thinking about the game and itching to get back on until it was completed. I was quite proud of us for working it all out as well, and pretty quickly, too. I was having dreams about it. That music and light at the end of each cycle haunts me.

    Such a stunning game, the design of it is absolute perfection, the way it's all there right from the start but you're completely lost at first, and the pieces gradually fall into place, I can't fathom how it was created so perfectly. We platinumed it pretty quickly after beating it and I felt almost empty knowing that there was nothing to go back for.

    I never had any concern with having to translate text each time...? Not even sure I understand what that refers to. There was almost nothing you had to do, unless you were trying to get the achievement for 100% log completion.

    Really looking forward to watching that doc later!

    • Like 3

  19. Posted

    On 09/07/2020 at 8:44 AM, drahkon said:

    A friend's flatmate showed symptoms.
    His parents and sister had it (tested positive) and he spent a few days with them while they were still asymptomatic. He got tested...negative.

    Weird ::shrug:

    Other than that...I don't know anyone who was tested positive or showed symptoms.

    Could’ve been a false negative, still loads of those occurring, or he could’ve got tested too early. Or they may just not have passed it to them. We have to be careful with contact and distance but it’s not as if you automatically catch it by being near someone who has it, there has to be a direct transfer, so even a small amount of care (washing hands, not touching face) could prevent you catching it.

  20. Posted

    Man I want, want to write a load about this game. But I feel like there just isn't time. I'd almost rather have a whole podcast about it where I sit with three other people, who felt similarly or disliked but at least completed the game, and really hash it out. There's so much to say. The "ludonarrative dissonance", the disappointing lack of choice, the incredible world-building.

    I just want to spoiler tag a list of things that I liked and didn't like about the game, and thoughts I had on the way. I can't possibly gather together all my thoughts on the game so I'm just going to reel them out instead. It ended up mostly being a list of complaints, which I always find myself falling back on when I finish a game. I find it much easier to list the things that annoyed me. And it's weird in TLOU 2 because what's great is so passive, and what's bad is so aggressively prevalent, that it's much easier to bounce around the bad and hard to come away saying "but it's still... good?" Anyway...

    Spoiler

    Did anyone else find themselves just not pressing square, a few times? I felt throughout the whole game that I was robbed of choice, and I couldn't always tell if it was by design or not. Abby had disarmed Ellie, turned the knife back towards her, and the game told me to rapidly tap square because evidently right now, Ellie is the hero and Abby is meant to die. So I let go of the controller, and Abby sunk the knife into Ellie's chest instead, and I said, maybe out loud, "yep, I'm okay with that". Why shouldn't that be the ending? But no... the game just faded back in from the beginning of that QTE.

    Similarly, I tried to exhibit choice to not kill my fellow Wolves. The first time I had to run through that warehouse with Lev, I turned to my partner sitting next to me and exasperatedly said "What?? They've really fucked it up this time".

    Similarly, I tried to exhibit choice to sneak past the dogs. But the game thrives in making this nearly impossible, or at least so frustrating that you eventually won't want to try. The game suggests, even outright states in some of its hints, that avoiding combat is regularly possible. But it rarely is. And this is made clear by the way they litter areas with collectibles that you could only safely find after wiping out every enemy in the area. After any encounter you find yourself able to restock huge amounts of ammo as if the game was saying "hey, you probably just shot your way through this place in the end, here's some more bullets for next time!"

    Most of the time I found myself thinking that each encounter would've been much, much better with about 20% of the number of enemies. Make each encounter deadly, force me to be smart, but don't drag it out and out. There was a few points where my jaw dropped at the sheer number of enemies I was suddenly surrounded by. And the time I was most patient but most deadly became a ridiculous pile of bodies at the top of a staircase, as scar after scar showed up to investigate their missing friends and fell victim to the same fate as the previous one. Duck round a corner. Press triangle. Press square. Repeat. Other than that though, enemy patterns are wild and stressful and frequently encroach on you in pairs or pincer formations, if you've levelled up the right way you might manage, on your third attempt, to run and dive into the grass and crawl into a doorway but if you're fed up like I was regularly, you might just throw a molotov cocktail at someone's face and then draw your shotgun, instead.

    I'm sure many people are more patient than I am and stealthed their way through the whole thing, but at times I was exasperated. I embraced the faceless cannon fodder they had forced on me and I rolled with it because I wanted to pretend that hadn't really happened and go back to wandering through beautiful rainy Seattle instead.

    Because man, when it wasn't in violent combat, when I wasn't hating all the main characters for being miserable little serial killers, I was absorbing one incredible world. Like I can't really believe that something quite so amazing has been created. In terms of narrative, in terms of character models, in terms of leaves and moss on trees and lighting and skyboxes. In rain and snow and the movement of horses, and music. The little notes, the dusty PS3s, the reality of every building you crawl through.

    And it's only because everything else about the game is so good, that I'm so shocked when it has to settle back into combat mechanics that just feel like they belong in a lesser game. Because if this was just some other shooter, a Resident Evil or an FPS or whatever, nobody would be sitting around talking about how horrible it was that you had to shoot so many bad guys. But the more real, the more impressive and high fidelity the world and everyone in it, the more accountable the developers become. Which seems unfair in some ways, and at the same time that accountability is probably important to elevate higher tier games beyond their glaring foibles. Although cynically I find myself imagining there's a certain about of shareholder appealing, a degree of trailer appeal or streamability, a separation from being just a story walkthrough, all of which means the devs hand is regularly forced into adding in another shooting gallery.

    And it's important to say combat mechanics, not just gameplay. Because there's plenty of other gameplay that shouldn't be tarred with the same brush as the needless violence. Riding your horse, finding out which truck to climb on and get over a wall, reading a note - whether it leads to a safe key or is just some insight into what happened there. Searching for a few bolts to craft a new item is gameplay, being creeped out and crawling around a basement with the light on and choosing to run away from Shamblers or Stalkers is gameplay. Alternating between equally engaging characters and companions, trying out all the different and very well designed weapons, even occasionally approaching a well laid out bit of combat in a satisfying way... Just because it's mostly designed around absorbing the story doesn't mean it's not a game with wonderfully immersive and interactive gameplay. It's just punctuated all too often by these visceral missteps that quickly cut short any sympathy the game was trying to make you feel for the characters.

    I kinda want to say more but I'm in danger of just deleting this whole lot because I know it doesn't have a satisfying conclusion, so instead I'll just hit submit and get back to work....

    There are a lot of other things I would like to touch on, things that deserve more than a bullet point like the excellent diversity and accessibility, but there's so much to unpack. At the end of the game I couldn't believe it said I'd played for 28 hours, because it felt like hundreds (does it not count reloads? Cutscenes? Or was it really not that long?)

    Edit: Wow, I avoided any forums, reviews or journalism from this game until after I'd finished it. It's a crazy world out there. Reddit specifically seems so hate-filled about the story. I dunno, whole thing feels like too much of a minefield to debate. Also some of Naughty Dog's reactions have been pretty un-cool. But I think I'm firm in saying that I loved what I loved, and what I hated didn't stop it being what it was.

    • Like 4

  21. Posted

    Spoiler

    I think a lot of people felt the same about the ending, and even general direction, of S2.

    I said this elsewhere but the problem Dark has is basically the classic horror movie trope. It thrived so well on mystery, on the darkness and unknown. You didn't fully get what you were seeing, what was happening, where things were going. The show started as a mystery in a cave, a boy in a room on a chair with a device around his head. I knew so little about it that it could've literally been a monster that came into the woods and ate people. So you hang on every word, absorbing every new bit of info but being thrown more things to digest at the same time.

    Unfortunately as soon as that curtain lifts, you have to instead take what you've built and close out a satisfying arc with it. The best thing you can do then at least, is keep things short. And perhaps one of the worst things you can do is throw a total curveball that undoes some of the earlier stuff. A twist, sure. But anything that undermines the importance of the earlier stuff? That's messy. Like, deciding John Connor wasn't that important after all - kind of messy. And that's what new-Martha showing up did.

    Despite that, I'm still enjoying S3 so far. It could never recapture what it did in S1, but that's because it did magical things with mystery. I'm still hopeful it will close out well, as the characters and ideas are all still solid.

     

  22. Posted

    Not a bad shout at all. To be honest, uploading images is something I never even turned on for admins as image hosts were so prevalent at the time. I'll look into it!

    Edit: Should be possible now

    • Like 1
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  23. Posted

    I want to write a lot about this game, might do so tomorrow. Certainly one of those most complete and incredible games I’ve ever played, despite some kind of glaring missteps. It’s so strange, it’s as if everything they did, the amazing production values, visuals, audio, voice acting, world building... elevated the game to a point that it has to be judged on a whole new level. Things that people are unhappy with would be so minor on a lesser title, and yet the game basically forces you to hold it to a higher regard.

    I can’t wrap my head around anyone thinking the story is anything less than fantastic. But in order to really accept and appreciate it I found I really had to separate out the components, the parts that were there to make it compelling, parts that were there to show what a shitty world it is and how terrible people can be, parts that actually wanted to hint at redemption... and then parts that had to go “hey yknow this is just a video game and we really need the player to just shoot some people for five minutes so they don’t get bored”.

    Such a weird dissonance, so much to dissect. A few real moments of frustrating disappointment. And they almost detracted from an outstanding video game. Almost. But man. How much of this game did I spend not pushing the analogue stick all the way? Yknow? Just... taking it in.... What a game.

    Gonna write in more detail (and spoiler tags!) next time I’m in front of a keyboard!

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  24. Posted

    If I hadn't just put nearly 200 hours into Persona 5 Royal I'd probably be getting it just to play it on the big screen.

    If you have a PC and have never had a platform to check out P4G, I urge you to give it a look.

    • Like 1
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