WaltherFeng posted:

Sam Lake is too Finnish and I don't like it

Whirling posted:

I wish there was a mod for World of Horror where you could fight that jackass that shows up when you've exhausted your funds and forces you to give him Stamina or Reason or increase your Doom. Just let me be broke, jerk!

Vookatos posted:

Aw poo poo, AW2 doesn't really work properly for me. Got myself a new PC and it runs fine, but for whatever reason every single non-playable cutscene lags a little tiny bit at the beginning which throws off sound and/or video and they become mismatched.
I liked what I've played of it, so maybe I'll lower the settings even more.

Vookatos posted:

Aw poo poo, AW2 doesn't really work properly for me. Got myself a new PC and it runs fine, but for whatever reason every single non-playable cutscene lags a little tiny bit at the beginning which throws off sound and/or video and they become mismatched.
I liked what I've played of it, so maybe I'll lower the settings even more.

A Cool Video Game Too posted:

if it makes you feel any better this is a known issue for some folks. Try playing with your settings a bit maybe? I'm not sure if there's a solution yet

Vookatos posted:

That's actually a relief knowing that it might not just be my PC. It does seem that the parts I bought are fine aside from CPU, but "can I run it" type sites do promise that both Starfield and AW2 can run at the very least on minimum, and yet both games kept making GBS threads themselves, with Starfield refusing to run without lag and music interrupting at 50% resolution with everything set to lowest.
This is a reason I'm not mainly a PC gamer, but with consoles being what they are including their prices and games' prices rising, it's hard to justify not getting a PC these days.

Vookatos posted:

Aw poo poo, AW2 doesn't really work properly for me. Got myself a new PC and it runs fine, but for whatever reason every single non-playable cutscene lags a little tiny bit at the beginning which throws off sound and/or video and they become mismatched.
I liked what I've played of it, so maybe I'll lower the settings even more.

A Cool Video Game Too posted:

if it makes you feel any better this is a known issue for some folks. Try playing with your settings a bit maybe? I'm not sure if there's a solution yet

mutantIke posted:

OK I know Sam Lake loves House of Leaves but having a sequence where someone makes a documentary using motion-activated cameras is a bit on the nose

mutantIke posted:

Just got to the rock opera sequence. Guess we can add Peacemaker to the list of things Sam Lake really likes. Game Of The Century.

Discendo Vox posted:

It's interesting to think about how Alan Wake and Control work while wearing their influences so openly, and the Bloober crap so very doesn't. The differences are stark.

FreudianSlippers posted:

His real name is Sami Järvi

Discendo Vox posted:

It's interesting to think about how Alan Wake and Control work while wearing their influences so openly, and the Bloober crap so very doesn't. The differences are stark.

CuddleCryptid posted:

There's a lot of comparisons you could draw but I think it mostly comes down to the idea that Remedy loves the things that it is influenced by whereas Bloober just sees it as a cow to milk. If the original Alan Wake dialed it's obvious fanboying by 1% then it would go from being sincere to derivative, especially when it comes to the frankly cliche "fighting darkness with light" concept. They just lean into it so hard that it becomes endearing rather than stupid. Same thing for Max Payne, if they put even one Marvel-style "well that just happened" pulled punch the whole thing would shatter into a thousand pieces.

I think a lot of Bloober's problem is also that the things that it insists on copying are other games. Remedy loves games, but also books, movies, and TV shows. gently caress does Remedy love TV shows.

It was kind of a flop in the end but I will say that I think that Bloober's strongest showing in recent years was Blair Witch, and I think that a large part of that was because they were trying to adapt a movie instead of just copying a game. There are some pretty good ideas in there. It's just that they get their heads stuck on mechanics from other games and replicating them "faithfully" and end up just making stupid sludge.

Buck Wildman posted:

just one more scrap then I'll leave I promise

Basic Chunnel posted:

Bloober games are pure hackwork, but Remedy games are very much an aging product of the late 90’s — not just in their combat mechanics, but in the way that, like most every other nerd of that time, their takeaway from the commercial and critical success of Tarantino movies was that a deep knowledge of your genre referents was not just necessary to make something good out of them, but sufficient. Tarantino made elevated genre pulp look so easy that everybody who came after him fell headlong into reverent pastiche. Alan Wake is a great example.

We’ve spent the last 20 years and change inundated by artists’ love letters to formative pulp influences. All the flavor’s chewed out of that gum, tbh. As someone who loves horror specifically I have well and truly moved on from giving anyone significant credit for expressing sincere love for the genre through the work.

It’s no longer enough to be earnest. Earnestness is now a crutch used to wave away clumsiness. But what’s clumsy is very rarely good. Quite often people are afraid that going for good work — work which challenges or surprises the audience — will fail, so instead they aim for safe work, ingratiating art, which will get points for sincerity but lacks the juice to provoke negative reaction.

What I find tedious about Remedy post-Alan Wake is that they fell in love with weird sci fi mystery, but they remain chronically incapable of the subtlety or withholding necessary to do those things well — they don’t write good X Files episodes, they write Chris Carter mythology episodes.

The metafiction angle with AW2 is a cheap trick to try and get around / integrate the obviousness of Sam Lake’s writing — now whenever somebody plainly states what’s happening, they’re “casting a spell” or whatever, instead of being expository. But unfortunately, it’s all still expository. And you can’t escape the feeling that it’s all leading up to some Remedy’s Avengers cinematic crossover bullshit.

exquisite tea posted:

Basic Chunnel posted:

Bloober games are pure hackwork, but Remedy games are very much an aging product of the late 90’s — not just in their combat mechanics, but in the way that, like most every other nerd of that time, their takeaway from the commercial and critical success of Tarantino movies was that a deep knowledge of your genre referents was not just necessary to make something good out of them, but sufficient. Tarantino made elevated genre pulp look so easy that everybody who came after him fell headlong into reverent pastiche. Alan Wake is a great example.

We’ve spent the last 20 years and change inundated by artists’ love letters to formative pulp influences. All the flavor’s chewed out of that gum, tbh. As someone who loves horror specifically I have well and truly moved on from giving anyone significant credit for expressing sincere love for the genre through the work.

It’s no longer enough to be earnest. Earnestness is now a crutch used to wave away clumsiness. But what’s clumsy is very rarely good. Quite often people are afraid that going for good work — work which challenges or surprises the audience — will fail, so instead they aim for safe work, ingratiating art, which will get points for sincerity but lacks the juice to provoke negative reaction.

What I find tedious about Remedy post-Alan Wake is that they fell in love with weird sci fi mystery, but they remain chronically incapable of the subtlety or withholding necessary to do those things well — they don’t write good X Files episodes, they write Chris Carter mythology episodes.

The metafiction angle with AW2 is a cheap trick to try and get around / integrate the obviousness of Sam Lake’s writing — now whenever somebody plainly states what’s happening, they’re “casting a spell” or whatever, instead of being expository. But unfortunately, it’s all still expository. And you can’t escape the feeling that it’s all leading up to some Remedy’s Avengers cinematic crossover bullshit.

exquisite tea posted:

exquisite tea posted:

Basic Chunnel posted:

Bloober games are pure hackwork, but Remedy games are very much an aging product of the late 90’s — not just in their combat mechanics, but in the way that, like most every other nerd of that time, their takeaway from the commercial and critical success of Tarantino movies was that a deep knowledge of your genre referents was not just necessary to make something good out of them, but sufficient. Tarantino made elevated genre pulp look so easy that everybody who came after him fell headlong into reverent pastiche. Alan Wake is a great example.

We’ve spent the last 20 years and change inundated by artists’ love letters to formative pulp influences. All the flavor’s chewed out of that gum, tbh. As someone who loves horror specifically I have well and truly moved on from giving anyone significant credit for expressing sincere love for the genre through the work.

It’s no longer enough to be earnest. Earnestness is now a crutch used to wave away clumsiness. But what’s clumsy is very rarely good. Quite often people are afraid that going for good work — work which challenges or surprises the audience — will fail, so instead they aim for safe work, ingratiating art, which will get points for sincerity but lacks the juice to provoke negative reaction.

What I find tedious about Remedy post-Alan Wake is that they fell in love with weird sci fi mystery, but they remain chronically incapable of the subtlety or withholding necessary to do those things well — they don’t write good X Files episodes, they write Chris Carter mythology episodes.

The metafiction angle with AW2 is a cheap trick to try and get around / integrate the obviousness of Sam Lake’s writing — now whenever somebody plainly states what’s happening, they’re “casting a spell” or whatever, instead of being expository. But unfortunately, it’s all still expository. And you can’t escape the feeling that it’s all leading up to some Remedy’s Avengers cinematic crossover bullshit.

exquisite tea posted:

exquisite tea posted:

exquisite tea posted:

exquisite tea posted:

CuddleCryptid posted:

There's a lot of comparisons you could draw but I think it mostly comes down to the idea that Remedy loves the things that it is influenced by whereas Bloober just sees it as a cow to milk. If the original Alan Wake dialed it's obvious fanboying by 1% then it would go from being sincere to derivative, especially when it comes to the frankly cliche "fighting darkness with light" concept. They just lean into it so hard that it becomes endearing rather than stupid. Same thing for Max Payne, if they put even one Marvel-style "well that just happened" pulled punch the whole thing would shatter into a thousand pieces.

I think a lot of Bloober's problem is also that the things that it insists on copying are other games. Remedy loves games, but also books, movies, and TV shows. gently caress does Remedy love TV shows.

It was kind of a flop in the end but I will say that I think that Bloober's strongest showing in recent years was Blair Witch, and I think that a large part of that was because they were trying to adapt a movie instead of just copying a game. There are some pretty good ideas in there. It's just that they get their heads stuck on mechanics from other games and replicating them "faithfully" and end up just making stupid sludge.

Basic Chunnel posted:

Bloober games are pure hackwork, but Remedy games are very much an aging product of the late 90’s — not just in their combat mechanics, but in the way that, like most every other nerd of that time, their takeaway from the commercial and critical success of Tarantino movies was that a deep knowledge of your genre referents was not just necessary to make something good out of them, but sufficient. Tarantino made elevated genre pulp look so easy that everybody who came after him fell headlong into reverent pastiche. Alan Wake is a great example.

We’ve spent the last 20 years and change inundated by artists’ love letters to formative pulp influences. All the flavor’s chewed out of that gum, tbh. As someone who loves horror specifically I have well and truly moved on from giving anyone significant credit for expressing sincere love for the genre through the work.

It’s no longer enough to be earnest. Earnestness is now a crutch used to wave away clumsiness. But what’s clumsy is very rarely good. Quite often people are afraid that going for good work — work which challenges or surprises the audience — will fail, so instead they aim for safe work, ingratiating art, which will get points for sincerity but lacks the juice to provoke negative reaction.

What I find tedious about Remedy post-Alan Wake is that they fell in love with weird sci fi mystery, but they remain chronically incapable of the subtlety or withholding necessary to do those things well — they don’t write good X Files episodes, they write Chris Carter mythology episodes.

The metafiction angle with AW2 is a cheap trick to try and get around / integrate the obviousness of Sam Lake’s writing — now whenever somebody plainly states what’s happening, they’re “casting a spell” or whatever, instead of being expository. But unfortunately, it’s all still expository. And you can’t escape the feeling that it’s all leading up to some Remedy’s Avengers cinematic crossover bullshit.

exquisite tea posted:

Ineffiable posted:

Yeah but Alan Wake 2 is fun as hell to play, that should be all that matters.