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Fil5000 posted:The player character in Control arrives at the Federal Bureau of Control and is immediately made Director of the organisation, also she is psychic and was directed there by a alien. The central plot is "I must rescue my brother" but there's a ton of stuff inbetween each step of doing that. The key thing is that it's played for strangeness and absurdity. It's literally a joke that Jesse becomes Director five minutes into the game despite having barely any idea what's going on.
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Dec 19, 2023 22:54
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John Murdoch posted:The key thing is that it's played for strangeness and absurdity. It's literally a joke that Jesse becomes Director five minutes into the game despite having barely any idea what's going on. Yeah. For some reason we're not seeing these complaints about the hero of time or that game I bought where I expected to be a lowly plumber. Within the first level I'm smashing through bricks, literally turning invincible, and shooting fireballs! I wonder what the difference between Jesse Faden and those characters is. she's a ginger
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Dec 19, 2023 23:04
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Coolness Averted posted:Yeah. For some reason we're not seeing these complaints about the hero of time or that game I bought where I expected to be a lowly plumber. Within the first level I'm smashing through bricks, literally turning invincible, and shooting fireballs! The game is about a shady bureau of weird poo poo, and I would have rather had a game about that. There's really not much more to it if y'all want to factor it down because you're really invested in the telekinesis game for whatever reason.
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Dec 19, 2023 23:41
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John Murdoch posted:The key thing is that it's played for strangeness and absurdity. It's literally a joke that Jesse becomes Director five minutes into the game despite having barely any idea what's going on. I like that everyone just goes along with it without question, it's such a nice way of showing you that poo poo really has to get really really weird around here before people start worrying.
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Dec 19, 2023 23:45
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Fil5000 posted:I like that everyone just goes along with it without question, it's such a nice way of showing you that poo poo really has to get really really weird around here before people start worrying. Who cares which person's way up at the top, I've got a refrigerator to stare at!
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Dec 20, 2023 00:11
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Fil5000 posted:I like that everyone just goes along with it without question, it's such a nice way of showing you that poo poo really has to get really really weird around here before people start worrying. Same poo poo Different Dimension
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Dec 20, 2023 00:24
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Fil5000 posted:I like that everyone just goes along with it without question, it's such a nice way of showing you that poo poo really has to get really really weird around here before people start worrying. There’s a lot of stuff through the enviornment and notes that sell it as like a 2.5, maybe 3 out of 5 level disaster which is great.
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Dec 20, 2023 00:29
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Ugly In The Morning posted:There’s a lot of stuff through the enviornment and notes that sell it as like a 2.5, maybe 3 out of 5 level disaster which is great. I mean yeah, you can shoot at the problem, wear a suit that prevents you from being affected, and it's mostly localized to the Oldest House - and only parts of it. This poo poo's a Monday afternoon. Some of the things in the House, they don't give you those options.
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Dec 20, 2023 00:42
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Y'all got to play as the director? drat, it made me a janitor's assistant
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Dec 20, 2023 00:47
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mind the walrus posted:The game is about a shady bureau of weird poo poo, and I would have rather had a game about that. So did you only play the first 30 minutes of the game orrr?
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Dec 20, 2023 01:06
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John Murdoch posted:The key thing is that it's played for strangeness and absurdity. It's literally a joke that Jesse becomes Director five minutes into the game despite having barely any idea what's going on. You later get promoted to Assistant Janitor once you display some ability to get stuff done.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:06
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John Murdoch posted:So did you only play the first 30 minutes of the game orrr? The first two hours of the game has an ex director who was turned into a powerhouse because he couldn’t control the powers you use, even. And it gets weirder from there!
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Dec 20, 2023 01:07
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Literally can't imagine feeling that the Twilight Zone poo poo was not far and away the main focus of Control. That's like 80% of the plot and 99.9% of the set dressing.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:17
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Ugly In The Morning posted:The first two hours of the game has an ex director who was turned into a powerhouse because he couldn’t control the powers you use, even.  That's my favorite background thing in the game. It's so weird and terrible, and it's right there in front of you, but it's also easy to miss all the actual details if you're rushing through and not reading everything.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:20
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I think I've even complained before ITT that the main plot is kinda weak and meandering and not very satisfying outside of a few specific moments. The game is far and away more about all the weird side stories and collectibles and stuff and the main story is an excuse to send you deeper into things.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:24
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Captain Hygiene posted:
It’s some real Harlan Ellison poo poo.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:25
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John Murdoch posted:I think I've even complained before ITT that the main plot is kinda weak and meandering and not very satisfying outside of a few specific moments. The game is far and away more about all the weird side stories and collectibles and stuff and the main story is an excuse to send you deeper into things. This is my feeling about Control. Great setting to read about and explore, but I was not impressed by the actual story about the main character or the gameplay.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:41
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John Murdoch posted:I think I've even complained before ITT that the main plot is kinda weak and meandering and not very satisfying outside of a few specific moments. The game is far and away more about all the weird side stories and collectibles and stuff and the main story is an excuse to send you deeper into things. I completely agree there. But also that was Alan wake too, just Control was even better about the cool sidestories and environmental storytelling.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:43
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Control had one of my least favorite things in gaming: a shitload of micromanaging equipment drops that do stuff like +7% reload speed or +3% chance to crit.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:44
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John Murdoch posted:I think I've even complained before ITT that the main plot is kinda weak and meandering and not very satisfying outside of a few specific moments. The game is far and away more about all the weird side stories and collectibles and stuff and the main story is an excuse to send you deeper into things. I think the main 'actually disappointing' thing about the main story of Control is that it seems to REALLY expect you to care about Jesse's brother, who's so uninteresting and bland that I literally don't remember his name. It always sucks when a story tries to make something emotionally resonate and it just doesn't.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:51
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He's called Jesse's brother
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Dec 20, 2023 02:09
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Cleretic posted:I think the main 'actually disappointing' thing about the main story of Control is that it seems to REALLY expect you to care about Jesse's brother, who's so uninteresting and bland that I literally don't remember his name. It always sucks when a story tries to make something emotionally resonate and it just doesn't. I dunno, for me the game was so thoroughly oriented around Jesse that to me it's less that you, the player, are supposed to be super duper invested in her brother and more that ideally you should be at least a little invested in the fact that Jesse cares about finding Dylan. It's her primary motivation far more than it's yours. But I can see how that still wouldn't necessarily play well. For me, the cracks are more in how there's no real payoff at the end of the game. What's Dylan's deal? He was corrupted by the Hiss exactly like you thought. How did the Hiss attack the FBC? Trench did it, because he was also corrupted. But also like, he's flatout dead at the start of the game so that revelation doesn't really have a lot of weight to it. What the heck is the deal with Polaris?  What happened to Darling? Oh he's off having cosmic adventures with Polaris now, don't worry about it. Jesse remembering the name of the Shawshank Redemption is genuinely one of the most significant payoffs.This is even reflected in the map design of all things where the final showdown takes place down the unlabeled hellish inaccessible hallway of blaringly obvious importance that you can't even walk down without bleeding health you encounter almost immediately at the start of the game but can't do anything with yet. Yet the plot treats the revelation that it's the heart of the Hiss infestation or w/e as a credible plot point. Very odd.
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Dec 20, 2023 02:12
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DrBouvenstein posted:It's from years of training with knives. Correction: Will Scarlett-O’hara.  He’s from Georgia.
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Dec 20, 2023 02:16
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One of the things that really irked me about Control was part of the final sequence. It took me much longer than it should have to figure out that the game wanted me to play along with the stupid nightmare sequence until the game arbitrarily decided it was time to break out. Rather than realizing it's obviously a fake hallucination from the start.
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Dec 20, 2023 02:32
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I can't even remember the end of control lol
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Dec 20, 2023 02:47
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Also thinking on it some more, the other issue with the final couple of acts is that they seemed to be trying to build up the mystery of whether it was Trench or Darling that pulled the trigger on the Hiss and if you're paying attention it's...really not that much of a surprise. Especially when, IIRC, they literally do the ole "this evidence seems to prove that one of them was up to no good!" misdirect, at which point if you're genre savvy you go "oh so it was the other guy after all, huh".
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Dec 20, 2023 02:58
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sebmojo posted:I can't even remember the end of control lol But do you remember the end of Shawshank Redemption?
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Dec 20, 2023 02:58
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Remedy has a real habit of their endings being sequel hooks that don't usually go anywhere
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Dec 20, 2023 02:59
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sebmojo posted:I can't even remember the end of control lol I was gonna make a joke about it being Jesse looking at the camera and going "looks like I was finally able to take...Control", but then I remembered they already had an entire musical number based on that
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Dec 20, 2023 03:03
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Opopanax posted:Remedy has a real habit of their endings being sequel hooks that don't usually go anywhere the sequel, Alt, will be ok, but the third game, Delete, will crash people's minds
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Dec 20, 2023 03:14
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sebmojo posted:I can't even remember the end of control lol The protagonist realized they were never actually in control, probably
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Dec 20, 2023 03:19
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The Moon Monster posted:Control had one of my least favorite things in gaming: a shitload of micromanaging equipment drops that do stuff like +7% reload speed or +3% chance to crit. The worst part is that the mods, at least pre-DLC, largely weren't little fiddly nothing bonuses. Mind you, that doesn't change the fact that managing that stuff was indeed awful. I suspect that a non-zero number of the people who claim the guns flatout don't do anything actively avoided jumping through all the hoops that would allow them to function properly.
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Dec 20, 2023 03:34
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Another thing about Control is that 3 of the 5 guns seemed totally useless, unlike real life in which every gun is a problem solver
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Dec 20, 2023 03:39
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kazil posted:the sequel, Alt, will be ok, but the third game, Delete, will crash people's minds Sometimes its harder on the minds, but they'll just need to move past and heal
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Dec 20, 2023 04:00
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Dewgy posted:Correction: Will Scarlett-O’hara. What part of Georgia, south central?
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Dec 20, 2023 04:42
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The only game that I've played that feels like a montage is Uncharted 3, because those locations felt less connected than 1 and 2 did. Me and mind the walrus got a way different impression of what Control was going to be doing.
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Dec 20, 2023 05:19
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Fil5000 posted:I like that everyone just goes along with it without question, it's such a nice way of showing you that poo poo really has to get really really weird around here before people start worrying. i like that the service weapon chooses the next director. i cant remember if the codex spelled it out or i inferred this but i juat assumed it was mjolnir
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Dec 20, 2023 05:43
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Jezza of OZPOS posted:i like that the service weapon chooses the next director. i cant remember if the codex spelled it out or i inferred this but i juat assumed it was mjolnir There's a note talking about the Service Weapon that describes it as working essentially like Mjolnir, Excalibur, and Varunastra (a weapon in Hindu myth). It never says these are all the same weapon, but the implication is certainly there to be drawn. And by extension, the implication that the Oldest House is a place that's changed location and form in the past, and might've been Asgard or Camelot.
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Dec 20, 2023 05:52
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Deathloop was really fun and I'll possibly revisit it for another playthrough, but it has one of the most egregiously broken abilities I've ever seen in a non-modded video game. To put it simply: the game has abilities called Slabs that are functionally pretty much Plasmids from Bioshock. One slab, Nexus has the following abilities:
And most critically, whatever happens to one person in a network happens to all of them. So basically you can find the most densely populated area in a level, fire off Nexus, wait 1-2 seconds for the network to maximally expand, and then just before your power runs out, shoot a single person in the head and kill 20 guys at once while simultaneously completely filling your health bar and expending laughably small amounts of ammo for the effect you've just achieved. If you have the silenced submachinegun, you can basically stealth kill the entire level like this with minimal effort and practically no sneaking, because you just need to walk up to just outside of detection range of every group of enemies, hit them with Nexus, and then cap someone in the head. Nobody close enough to see them die will hear you kill them or know where the shot came from, so even if you didn't get absolutely everyone within line of sight they'll just rush over to where the crowd got instakilled and clump up into another juicy target. I've never seen the combat in a game be so easily trivialised by a mechanic working as intended before.
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Dec 20, 2023 11:04
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Disco Elysium has FAR more good little things than bad, but the bugginess of the MAP journal page for tracking repeatable checks is wildly annoying. It won't scroll properly, it doesn't always bring up an indicator of the location of the check, it doesn't clear checks that no longer relevant whatsoever, and I feel like it's really unclear whether "the ones on white are available to retry" means the ones on a white background but written with black text, or the ones on a dark background but written in white text. The other little thing dragging it down is the weird gross wet clacky noises that play anytime you're on the character skill tree page. Still, outstanding game.
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Dec 20, 2023 21:54
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