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Zombie Samurai posted:Might be Darkwood, though part of me feels like there was another one. Perhaps, but this was definitely the one I was thinking of.
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Oct 1, 2015 15:54
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Morpheus posted:Perhaps, but this was definitely the one I was thinking of. Speaking of, is Darkwood any good? It's been on my steam wishlist for a LOOOONG time just taunting me..
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Oct 1, 2015 16:31
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Jmcrofts posted:Sounds kind of like Don't Starve maybe? don't starve does not have houses of any kind
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Oct 1, 2015 16:34
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Captain Yossarian posted:Speaking of, is Darkwood any good? It's been on my steam wishlist for a LOOOONG time just taunting me.. I really liked the visual design but found the game play pretty lacking. But I only played it for a bit so maybe I just didn't go deep enough
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Oct 1, 2015 16:57
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Acne Rain posted:don't starve does not have houses of any kind The pigmen have houses you just can't go in them
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Oct 1, 2015 17:27
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So, SOMA It's an interesting thing because while the satellite ending is supposed to represent something new, it reminds me of The Matrix movies. In them the Smiths say they had to make an imperfect world because humanity wouldn't accept paradise. I wonder if a similar thing will occur here, where eventually people will go insane because it is all fake and they know it, but they won't be allowed to die for thousands of years.
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Oct 2, 2015 00:48
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DreamShipWrecked posted:So, SOMA That already happened: When you put Wan in a simulation that is of something he doesn't expect, his mind overheats and he freaks out. He's convinced it's some sort of WAU illusion. And when Simon is captured by one of the Proxies in the depths of Theta, he briefly has an illusion of being human, back in Toronto again, and Ashley is his girlfriend; "everything you want, right? Right?" It's TOO perfect, and Simon still has his robot body so he can rip himself free of the meat moss.
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Oct 2, 2015 01:12
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Speedball posted:That already happened: When you put Wan in a simulation that is of something he doesn't expect, his mind overheats and he freaks out. He's convinced it's some sort of WAU illusion. And when Simon is captured by one of the Proxies in the depths of Theta, he briefly has an illusion of being human, back in Toronto again, and Ashley is his girlfriend; "everything you want, right? Right?" It's TOO perfect, and Simon still has his robot body so he can rip himself free of the meat moss. Right, I forgot about those. Well, I guess there is really no good end then. You have Original Suit simon, Dive Suit Simon, and Ark simon. And they are all screwed, though ark simon gets to hang with the qt scientist chick If there is only one ending, then the whole "don't use the health pods" thing doesn't really matter, eh? And also it doesn't matter if you kill yourself or other people aside from story reasons. I kinda like that
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Oct 2, 2015 02:00
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I don't know where you guys get the impression the ARK is a bad thing. The simulations you put Wan in are lovely and not meant for ARK use, and in some of them he only starts to freak out when Catherine asks him for the security cipher. And WAU is clearly not super great at the whole "create a simulation that won't gently caress your brain up" thing.
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Oct 2, 2015 02:35
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Blockhouse posted:I don't know where you guys get the impression the ARK is a bad thing. The simulations you put Wan in are lovely and not meant for ARK use, and in some of them he only starts to freak out when Catherine asks him for the security cipher. And WAU is clearly not super great at the whole "create a simulation that won't gently caress your brain up" thing. Its irrelevant anyway because the people brainscanned were aware they were having their brain scanned to appear in a simulation. They'll wake up there expecting it unlike Wan
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Oct 2, 2015 03:11
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This October I'm going far across the Pacific ocean to Japan in an all Japanese horror themed month. Given my grade school knowledge of the language I'm not doing full translations or extensive write ups. Rather I'm focusing on the visual aspect of the games and how they differ from the look and feel of Western horror titles. There's a lot of interesting looking games, many aren't very fun to play given the language barrier, but standout visuals have always been tied to Japanese horror games. I probably won't have time to get to 31 but I'll talk about whatever I find interesting. A Brief Primer on Japanese PC Games Let's go back in time to the early 1980s where the Japanese tech industry is an ocean of proprietary 8-bit microcomputers led by young, enthusiast programmers consuming media from all over the world. Japanese computers existed in their own little world impenetrable by outside influence due to the higher resolution necessary to display Kanji resulting in a focus on graphical text adventures (visual novels or VN). Arguably the earliest pioneer in Japan was Koei who released Night Life in 1982, an interactive sex "education" and relationship diary. A year later Enix published Portopia which became the blueprint for the modern menu driven VN adventure. Erotica and video games intermingled freely. Even Nihon Falcom and Enix dipped their toes with Joshi Daisei Private and Mari-chan Kiki Ippatsu respectively, traditional video games that rewarded the player with pixelated nipples. While Enix, Koei, and Falcom left behind porn rather early, their void was filled by smaller companies pumping out material directly targeted to a hungry market with plenty of disposable income. These games were sold at a premium price, about 68,00 yen ($60) compared to console games at 52,00 ($40), because the audience was insatiable. One such company was JAST which splintered off into FairyTale, two of the more prominent independent developers in their field. Think of them as Infocom vs. Magnetic Scrolls or Sierra vs. LucasArts. Erotic games (eroge) were treated as a public secret; a known and tolerated market the equivalent of the curtained back room at a family video store. You know what goes on behind the curtain across from the Sesame Street VHS tapes but out of site out of mind, right? That was until 1991 when a middle school student shoplifted a copy of FairyTale's Saori, an eroge featuring uncensored sex (and thus technically illegal) with scenes of incest and teacher-student-relations. It triggered a nationwide debate leading to the arrest of the company's president on indecency charges and the eventual creation of the Ethics Organization of Computer Software, the first industry regulated ratings system in video games. The creation of the ESRB is almost a mirror of Japan's hardships years prior. I discuss this because it's important for context. It's now the 90s: eroge were villainized, Japanese PCs are stagnating with 10+ year old technology still dominating the market, and the console market overtook arcades to become the biggest entertainment industry. As consoles entered CD territory there was a huge demand for adventure games and RPGs. You began to see erotic focused companies re-release edited versions of their games for consoles. Where eroge was unapologetic in the 80s, the 90s saw them become rather tame with nudity sprinkled about conservatively. FairyTale's Nightmare Collection is one such example, a series of Western influenced horror VNs from a company that put eroge on the map. Nightmare Collection - Dead of the Brain: Shiryou no Sakebi (Souls Cry Out)  You are Kole, a sort of bumbling Marty McFly style kid who receives a call from the eccentric Dr. Cooger who says he developed a serum that can bring the dead back to life.  So of course Kole visit the good doctor at his cemetery lab where he's forced to kill the doctor's rabid cat. A perfect opportunity for him to test his serum.  Officer Jack arrives on scene to investigate the disturbance and is killed by the now undead rabid cat. Without skipping a beat the doctor injects the cop with his serum with predictable results...     Dead of the Brain is a pretty standard menu driven adventure game. Common in the Japanese style there are no real puzzles to speak of. Progression occurs automatically after triggering all the hot spots in a scene. This can get just as frustrating as pixel hunting in Western games as you're literally locked in a scene until you read all the dialog the game wants you to read which often means hopping back and forth between unrelated items or scenes until something happens; an annoyance I think most Western gamers first experienced in the early Phoenix Wright games. Overall, though, the pacing is tightly controlled with some Hollywood worthy action scenes and the game can be completed in an afternoon. The graphics are certainly the showcase with detailed sprite art, a gritty realistic art style, and plenty of gore gore gore.   Every so often you'll encounter a timed action sequence. Although they're just as arbitrary to solve as the game's "puzzles" (click on everything until something happens!) death only sets you back to the beginning of the sequence. Minus the dialog choices, Dead of the Brain is Telltale's The Walking Dead twenty years early.  Dead of the Brain would be followed up with a direct sequel (Dead of the Brain 2) and the unrelated Nightmare Collection 2 - Marine Philt, a game that may owe Ridley Scott royalties. al-azad fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 03:30
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You kill a zombie by driving your fingers into its eyesockets? Hardcore! Especially for an adventure game!
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Oct 2, 2015 03:34
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al-azad posted:crazy Japanese zombie horror
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Oct 2, 2015 03:47
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That game had people working on an English translation patch at one point, but it was unfortunately never finished.
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Oct 2, 2015 03:50
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al-azad posted:This October I'm going far across the Pacific ocean to Japan in an all Japanese horror themed month. Given my grade school knowledge of the language I'm not doing full translations or extensive write ups. Rather I'm focusing on the visual aspect of the games and how they differ from the look and feel of Western horror titles. There's a lot of interesting looking games, many aren't very fun to play given the language barrier, but standout visuals have always been tied to Japanese horror games. I probably won't have time to get to 31 but I'll talk about whatever I find interesting. Hot drat, this is a real treat. Japanese horror really nails that whole "fundamentally wrong" feel that makes horror so effective. Even if a game or movie is flawed in other ways, they tend to have the best ambiance.
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Oct 2, 2015 04:19
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looks pretty good! Also i love that the "look" command is used to drive eyes into the zombie's eyes sockets
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Oct 2, 2015 04:21
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 RETURN OF THE 31 DAYS OF MOSTLY SPOOKY GAMES1. Knock-knock 2. CAPSULE    Immersion is a tricky thing to get right, but when it works it can take a game much further than the gameplay alone. CAPSULE is an excellent example of this, because the presentation really carries the short and simple content. You play an unnamed spaceman stuck in a titular capsule, stranded in the depths of space. You have dwindling air and power supplies, and must find your way to curious outposts to survive and uncover the mysterious circumstances unfolding in the area. Along the way you'll find numerous points of interest that must be identified with a sonar system. Some will be resources, some will be debris, and some will be alive. All of this plays out on a fuzzy, faded CRT display that looks ripped right from a Soyuz capsule. Much like with Deadnaut, you're experiencing the game through a low-fi monitor that leaves the true nature of the ships and creatures you encounter to your imagination. Some incredible sound design helps put you in the right place for it, too. Outposts buzz with static numbers and messages, satellites beep at you, and your capsule creaks and groans. Perhaps the most effective is your own breathing, which gets more choked and panicked as your oxygen runs low. With a good set of headphones in a darkened room, you can really start to convince yourself you're lost in space in a tin can. The story is plenty interesting, told through logs at the different points of interest. Honestly it's probably good that the game is only an hour long because there's not much actual exploring to do, and the gameplay gets repetitive quite fast. Once you recognize the pattern to navigating, it can start to drag. That being said, the presentation and the story more than justify the time and money spent on this one.
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Oct 2, 2015 16:22
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When the gently caress is that 80s futurism space station horror game coming out? It's been so long that I can't even remember the title. No, not Alien: Isolation, the indie one with the floppy disks and CRTs everywhere.
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Oct 2, 2015 18:46
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Silhouette posted:When the gently caress is that 80s futurism space station horror game coming out? It's been so long that I can't even remember the title. I'm tempted to call it vaporware at this point
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Oct 2, 2015 18:53
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Silhouette posted:When the gently caress is that 80s futurism space station horror game coming out? It's been so long that I can't even remember the title. Routine. No idea.
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Oct 2, 2015 18:57
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The last update to Routine was in March, where they confirmed that they were still working on the game and won't be switching to Unreal 4 because they're too deep into development to change engines. The last release date estimation I saw was February 2016.
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Oct 2, 2015 19:23
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Jesus. It's been in development for what, 4 years at this point?
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Oct 2, 2015 19:35
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IIRC there's another one called Caffeine that is similarly vapor-y.
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Oct 2, 2015 19:45
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Silhouette posted:Jesus. It's been in development for what, 4 years at this point? Yup! Their march update suggests they're far from dead, just silent to a fault. It's probably just way more ambitious than they originally thought.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:08
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Popular Human posted:IIRC there's another one called Caffeine that is similarly vapor-y. From its Steam page: "Caffeine is a quirky -" and with that I stopped reading.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:16
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It could have just been bullshit made up by people but I thought the Routine devs whined that the reason why its taking so long to come out was because Alien: Isolation "stole" their idea and now they have to change things.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:17
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Ibram Gaunt posted:It could have just been bullshit made up by people but I thought the Routine devs whined that the reason why its taking so long to come out was because Alien: Isolation "stole" their idea and now they have to change things. Which is absolutely idiotic because by doing that they basically are admitting that they are copying Alien for their entire game.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:31
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Ibram Gaunt posted:It could have just been bullshit made up by people but I thought the Routine devs whined that the reason why its taking so long to come out was because Alien: Isolation "stole" their idea and now they have to change things. I can't find any source for that.
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Oct 2, 2015 21:03
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Yeah. Like I said it could have just been total bullshit, but I remember that floating around a ton a while back.
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Oct 2, 2015 21:05
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al-azad posted:Nightmare Collection - Dead of the Brain: Shiryou no Sakebi (Souls Cry Out) I can't wait to see more of these, and the history lesson was interesting too.
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Oct 3, 2015 01:04
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Ibram Gaunt posted:It could have just been bullshit made up by people but I thought the Routine devs whined that the reason why its taking so long to come out was because Alien: Isolation "stole" their idea and now they have to change things. I ultimately really wouldn't care, because Alien had quite a few flaws that their game might do better. Speaking of which, while I got annoyed playing Alien Isolation, it is a blast to watch other people stream it and die over and over again. So many people never learn from their mistakes and wait for obscene amounts of time for the Alien to eventually find them.
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Oct 3, 2015 01:15
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I can't believe David Cameron agreed to help viral market a sequel to Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs
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Oct 3, 2015 01:23
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al-azad posted:Dead of the Brain
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Oct 3, 2015 02:15
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Niggurath posted:So out of curiosity, and because I know someone who might be able to actually translate this, but how long would you say this game is? oh man don't you tease me
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Oct 3, 2015 02:59
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Niggurath posted:So out of curiosity, and because I know someone who might be able to actually translate this, but how long would you say this game is? I'd say the resulting script would be on the upper end of novella size so 40k words.
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Oct 3, 2015 03:12
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Next up we have Dead of the Brain 2, a direct sequel. First some context on the ending of the first game. Everything is tied around a company called Razoban Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Cooger, who lost his wife prior to the game, was a bionics researcher who created the "salt of life" to eliminate cancer cells. The villain of the story is Ghul, chief of police, who lost his daughter prior to the story and apparently turned to Dr. Cooger to extend his own life. In a surprise twist straight out of The Terminator, Ghul reveals himself as an android. The game ends with his destroyed body and a "TO BE CONTINUED." And continue they would! Dead of the Brain 2 takes place two years after the original. The infestation was contained and our hero Kole and Sheila (Dr. Cooger's former assistant) are engaged. They call on two survivors from the first game to oversee their wedding. Things turn tragic when their bodies, complete with eaten brains, are found in Kole's apartment.   The new town is not a friendly place. The Bloody Fox, a biker gang, has taken over and they run a vile heroin ring. Kole tries to fight back but he and Sheila are accosted by the gang around every corner. Where Dead of the Brain started off with a bang, the sequel is a slow burn as the story from the first game is expanded upon and Kole is left investigating the gang and their drugs.   It's soon revealed that the gang's heroin is laced with Dr. Cooger's resurrection serum. As far as I can tell, the poison remains dormant in the host body and doesn't activate until death. In other words this is a true The Walking Dead scenario where everyone who took the drugs (and Kole himself ends up injected) is a walking time bomb.    As an outside observer the sequel is kind of boring. There's a lot more dialog, fewer action scenes, and even dialog choices that can alter the ending. The most frustrating aspect was an anti-piracy puzzle 1/4 into the game that required entering a password from the manual that was randomly generated. If it wasn't for a Japanese walkthrough posted on Geocities in the mid-90s I wouldn't have gotten anywhere. The engine was streamlined as a whole with all actions replaced with a highlight feature that eliminates pixel hunting. Unfortunately the few action sequences are awful with the time limit seriously reduced and arbitrary actions required to succeed. In one scenario you have to attack a zombie's left eye, then immediately attack the next zombie's right eye. Attack the other eye or any of the other hotspots and it's an instant game over.  I'd say Dead of the Brain 2 is the Terminator 2: Judgment Day to the original's The Terminator (in some ways quite literally). It's heavier on the story, not quite as tightly paced, but every action scene is a spectacle. Both games would be released on PCE-CD in 1999, marking the final game on that console. Something I forgot to mention is how intertwined Japanese media is. The art director on the first game, Ryuichi Makino, was a pretty busy animator working on high profile anime like Armitage III, Ah! My Goddess, Tenchi Muyo, To Love Ru, Crayon Shin-Chan, and SD Gundam. This game retailed at 9,240 yen, around $80. But again, the market was insatiable and the creators mini-celebrities that the high price was an easy pill to swallow for hardcore otaku.
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Oct 3, 2015 09:09
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I really wish I had chosen to play a rad J-horror game instead of this loving thing.RETURN OF THE 31 DAYS OF MOSTLY SPOOKY GAMES 1. Knock-knock 2. CAPSULE 3. DARK    What's the most important part of a stealth game? It's not the stealth, oddly enough. It's what happens when stealth fails. Great stealth games like Thief and Dishonored give you fun and creative tools to resort to when things go badly. Conversely, some of the most reviled sequences in gaming are stealth sections where getting caught is an instant game over. Imagine how horrible it would be to make an entire game like that, one that falls apart the moment you make a mistake. Now imagine why I'm bringing this up. DARK chronicles the third-person adventures of Eric Bane, a fresh vampire who is all too ready to murder a million hobos and security guards to get his memory back. He wakes up in a club so goth it still has its own LiveJournal and is immediately persuaded into breaking, entering, and exsanguinating a whole host of people he's never met. The dialogue is distractingly awkward, both in writing and delivery, and the intro sequence is very much long enough to thoroughly embarrass itself. Once the missions start, you job is to stealth around the levels and execute as many guards as possible. I mean, you need experience to unlock new powers, and you only get experience from killing people and progressing, so total genocide is the order of the day. You also get 4x the experience for stealth killing people, which turns every room into a puzzle of how to extinguish every life present in a way that alerts none of them. But even if you hit upon a clever enough plan, there's no guarantee you can execute it. The hit detection is absolutely appalling, your powers may or may not decide to work when you need them, the sticky cover does more harm than good, and your teleport is basically the one from Dishonored except it gets stuck on walls and sometimes just doesn't feel like doing anything. All of these issues mean you're going to get spotted, and when that happens you might as well give up. Guards stay on alert for whole minutes, with the timer refreshing if they notice anything suspicious. Some rooms have upwards of two dozen guards that must be picked off in specific sequence, and if you are caught and killed, enjoy doing that whole production over. You can still fight back against alert guards, but the garbage hit detection means every encounter might end up with you humping air while the guard two feet away replaces your brain matter with bullets. I don't think I've ever seen a game miss the mark as hard as DARK does. I can't even pretend to be even-handed about it, because this thing straight-up fails at everything it sets out to do. The stealth is unfairly demanding, the controls are crap, the powers are unreliable, the cutscenes are laughable, and the graphics are a mess. There is absolutely nothing DARK does that hasn't been done better by another game, and absolutely nothing that could justify time or money spent on it.
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Oct 4, 2015 02:39
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You should do Murdered: Soul Suspect
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Oct 4, 2015 05:40
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Out of curiosity, did you review System shock last year?
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Oct 4, 2015 10:44
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This thread always gets really good in October  Thanks for the writeups, guys.
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Oct 4, 2015 14:07
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