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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_GimrcIt5A Rubber bullets, one imagines.
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Mar 3, 2024 10:20
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Man, that waiter was so angry at getting the free ketchup he gets for working at the restaurant ruined that he just leaped through the air and assaulted that guy behind the desk, crazy to see.
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Mar 3, 2024 11:21
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Continued my Metal Gear Solid playthrough with MGS2. What a good time, especially coming straight off the first one. Even with broadly similar mechanics, there are just so many gameplay improvements. I had a much better time than when I first played it a few years ago - I was basically pushing through it for the story then, but this time I actually enjoyed playing most of it. Not too say there weren't gripes with some of the design, but I was having enough fun to not really care. Looking forward to the next one.
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Mar 3, 2024 21:18
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All of the MGS games have the perfect thing for satisfying stealth gameplay: guards that react to a wide range of things, but do so in a highly predictable way. MGS2 is one of my favourites for how much guard-related nonsense you can pull, but that's entirely due to spending way too long playing the demo back in the day and learning all the ins and outs of the systems. Enjoy MGS3!
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Mar 3, 2024 21:52
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Japanese MGS3 gameplay videos are amazing
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Mar 3, 2024 22:33
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i just beat halo
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Mar 3, 2024 23:47
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Finally beat bg3 130 hours later, I really wanna hop back in but I’ll wait for mod support to add bigger willies and more classes I guess
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Mar 4, 2024 00:51
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WaltherFeng posted:Japanese MGS3 gameplay videos are amazing What does this mean? MGS3 in Japanese? Why are they amazing?
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Mar 4, 2024 01:46
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credburn posted:What does this mean? something like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le23bsVURds
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Mar 4, 2024 03:59
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Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth: 45 hours to complete the main storyline. Rebirth is just completely off the wall loving nuts. The world is so massive, and each region you visit is very unique. I loved how each region has different traveling mechanics, with one even giving you something different other than a chocobo. Even then the chocobos are all different and have their own unique mechanics. Just details like that which are actually huge, and keep the game feeling fresh and engaging for the entire time. And each region is gigantic, and then you have the large open ocean to explore near the end of the game. The combat takes what was great about Remake, and fine tunes it further and makes it feel even better. All of the min-games are great too, and a huge source of entertainment, some of them could easily be their own game as well. Queen's Blood is the standout, and then there is the Golden Saucer games. There are a lot a large number of one off mini-games you'll come across too for side quests, and the main story. If I had to complain about anything, it is the main storyline is weak at points. The characters are great, and their adventure, friendship, and interactions together carry the story forward. The humor, dialog, voice acting, and animation will carry you to the end of the plot. This is a new standard in cinematic cutscenes for a video game. It's only when it gets into the melodrama bits that things start to fall apart. The story relies so heavily on tropes, plot armor, and deus ex machina. There are so many fake out moments, almost none of the conflict has consequences for the main cast, or the antagonists. And then the ending I think is going to be especially controversial. It feels like Square was really scared to just commit and let players feel the weight of the events unfold, and as a result unfortunately a lot of the plot gets frustrating, and bogged down with predictable repeating outcomes in each chapter. So many small moments where something happens that doesn't make sense, or counteracts the worlds logic and rules. Or just basic common sense, why would this happen? moments that are confusing and detract from what is otherwise a pretty epic experience and one of a kind game. All that said, Rebirth is coming off of a legendary JRPG with overwhelmingly high expectations. It's a completely new retelling of the original game, just like Remake was, but even more different than that even. Square took a lot of risks, they went really hard with the open world design and side activities, and then in some cases decided to play it really safe and lazy with the writing. So Rebirth ultimately comes so close to perfection, but just misses the mark with stumbles in the plot and writing. Still putting this though as one of the top three best games of 2024 right now, and I don't see that changing for me. 9/10
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Mar 4, 2024 09:24
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I decided to download and play through Hi-Fi Rush because of a couple posters singing its praises in this thread. Holy loving poo poo those people were spot loving on. I played on Normal because I mostly wanted to rock out and see the story, and it was a breeze (I think I only died to the final boss), but I didn't care because I just had a goofy-rear end grin on my face for the entire playthrough. Everything about this game is just fun to play. Landing attacks on the beat feels great, listening to the music respond to your attacks and rock out more and more as your rating gets higher is a joy, the characters are likeable and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny... it feels like playing your favorite Saturday morning cartoon as a video game but aged up just enough to hit your adult mind in the perfect sweet spot. Play this loving game.
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Mar 4, 2024 10:19
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Just finished Days Gone, a very good game that's very difficult to sell. I don't want to throw the word "generic" at it, but it certainly is an amalgamation of every AAA open-world trope of the last decade, and the two defining features (the motorcycle you upgrade ala Mad Max and the giant hordes) aren't quite immediate enough to set the game apart from every other open-world zombie game with light crafting mechanics. It looks like the ultimate Daryl Dixon simulator about 10 years after the sell-by date, and while I guess that's not entirely inaccurate, the game as a whole works far better than that would imply. For starters, the game just feels great in the hands on all fronts, from the hefty punch of the guns to the weighty but still loose handling of the bike down to the simple inertia and movement of the main character, it's all a joy to control. It strikes a perfect balance of feeling sturdy and deliberate without being sluggish. The core gameplay loop is great too, and the crafting and scavenging mechanics are tuned just right to feel rewarding and not punitive. For me at least, the typical cycle would be to clear out a couple missions or objectives then swing by any site that looked interesting on my way to the next one (or whenever I started to get low on something specifically useful). The locations are near-universally interesting to explore, with nice little environmental storytelling vignettes and plenty of opportunities for emergent events (ambushes, survivors in trouble, etc). Which, after writing it out, still sounds exactly like every AAA game of the last 10 years, but everything actually meshes together in a cohesive way instead of feeling like a dozen separate systems loosely cobbled together. It just works real good, y'know? The power curve is smooth, there's a nice progression from struggling against a handful of zombies to manipulating giant hordes, and the motorcycle grows alongside you in a satisfying way (even if I never quite got attached to it as a character in the way the game seemed to want). The core mechanics are good enough to carry it a long way, but the game around them can be kind of hit or miss. The characters and dialogue feel natural - I especially appreciated how unpolished a lot of the dialogue is in a believable way. Deacon St. John (side note: what a Hideo Kojima-rear end name) is constantly distracted, stressed, and struggling to articulate his thoughts or even finish a sentence in a way that actually makes a lot of sense and isn't often done in games. A lot of the side characters and camp leaders feel pretty well-rounded and three dimensional as well, with understandable motivations and outlooks. The relationships especially are a highlight, and all the characters bounce off of each other in interesting ways that, again, feel surprisingly natural and believable, which makes it stand out even more when the game dumps some boring video game-rear end video game villains onto you from a seemingly different universe. The story as a whole just kinda spins its wheels, occasionally feinting in interesting directions before reverting to the mean. Without delving into spoiler territory, it feels like the game wants to be an intimate, personal story but is afraid to be too low-stakes so it throws in a generic Big Bad occasionally to ratchet up the tension, but it just ends up in an unsatisfying middle ground where the 'climactic' moments feel unearned and the personal moments feel unresolved. There are some bafflingly bad mission design choices too, with a bunch of instant-fail stealth missions and bizarrely terrible QTE boss fights. It's always a bummer when the latter levels of action games lose inspiration and just start throwing bullet sponges at you, doubly so here when the game spends a couple dozen hours teaching you how to tame hordes and bears and create all kinds of crazy emergent situations and then decides to strip all that away and turn into a corridor shooter against a bunch of walking tanks. Again, a tough game to sell, but the bones really are strong enough to overlook the weak aspects. It's a shame the underwhelming reviews (and subsequent Chud-y Twitter tantrum by the game's director) seem to have confined this to Reddit le-hidden-gem posts and killed off any chance of a sequel, because this ended up as one of my favorite open-world games in recent memory even notwithstanding the glaring issues. A sequel that irons out the rough spots could have been something really special, but either way I'm pretty curious to see what the studio is working on next.
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Mar 4, 2024 22:49
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Such a rush.
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Mar 5, 2024 01:56
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:I decided to download and play through Hi-Fi Rush because of a couple posters singing its praises in this thread. Holy loving poo poo those people were spot loving on. I played on Normal because I mostly wanted to rock out and see the story, and it was a breeze (I think I only died to the final boss), but I didn't care because I just had a goofy-rear end grin on my face for the entire playthrough. Everything about this game is just fun to play. Landing attacks on the beat feels great, listening to the music respond to your attacks and rock out more and more as your rating gets higher is a joy, the characters are likeable and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny... it feels like playing your favorite Saturday morning cartoon as a video game but aged up just enough to hit your adult mind in the perfect sweet spot. Play this loving game. It really is just a wonderful experience, the good-time fun feelings never really stop and I felt like it wrapped up exactly where it needed to (though I also love the "extra" ending so much  )
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Mar 5, 2024 04:49
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SchwarzeKrieg posted:Just finished Days Gone, a very good game that's very difficult to sell. I don't want to throw the word "generic" at it, but it certainly is an amalgamation of every AAA open-world trope of the last decade, and the two defining features (the motorcycle you upgrade ala Mad Max and the giant hordes) aren't quite immediate enough to set the game apart from every other open-world zombie game with light crafting mechanics. It looks like the ultimate Daryl Dixon simulator about 10 years after the sell-by date, and while I guess that's not entirely inaccurate, the game as a whole works far better than that would imply. For starters, the game just feels great in the hands on all fronts, from the hefty punch of the guns to the weighty but still loose handling of the bike down to the simple inertia and movement of the main character, it's all a joy to control. It strikes a perfect balance of feeling sturdy and deliberate without being sluggish. The core gameplay loop is great too, and the crafting and scavenging mechanics are tuned just right to feel rewarding and not punitive. For me at least, the typical cycle would be to clear out a couple missions or objectives then swing by any site that looked interesting on my way to the next one (or whenever I started to get low on something specifically useful). The locations are near-universally interesting to explore, with nice little environmental storytelling vignettes and plenty of opportunities for emergent events (ambushes, survivors in trouble, etc). This is an excellent write up of Days Gone. You really hit on all the points which make it a game that ends up greater than a sum of its parts. Enjoyed reading this, thanks.
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Mar 5, 2024 11:37
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My lady and I just finished Assault Android Cactus. It had a story I guess but really it was a polished and quirky twin stick shooter that was perfect for couch co-op. Highly recommend if you enjoy a challenge and adorable androids. Great music too.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:09
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SchwarzeKrieg posted:Just finished Days Gone, a very good game that's very difficult to sell. I don't want to throw the word "generic" at it, but it certainly is an amalgamation of every AAA open-world trope of the last decade, and the two defining features (the motorcycle you upgrade ala Mad Max and the giant hordes) aren't quite immediate enough to set the game apart from every other open-world zombie game with light crafting mechanics. It looks like the ultimate Daryl Dixon simulator about 10 years after the sell-by date, and while I guess that's not entirely inaccurate, the game as a whole works far better than that would imply. For starters, the game just feels great in the hands on all fronts, from the hefty punch of the guns to the weighty but still loose handling of the bike down to the simple inertia and movement of the main character, it's all a joy to control. It strikes a perfect balance of feeling sturdy and deliberate without being sluggish. The core gameplay loop is great too, and the crafting and scavenging mechanics are tuned just right to feel rewarding and not punitive. For me at least, the typical cycle would be to clear out a couple missions or objectives then swing by any site that looked interesting on my way to the next one (or whenever I started to get low on something specifically useful). The locations are near-universally interesting to explore, with nice little environmental storytelling vignettes and plenty of opportunities for emergent events (ambushes, survivors in trouble, etc). Agreed with Fridge Corn that this is a great writeup. I played and finished Days Gone when it released and wasn't honestly expecting too much but enjoyed the idea of fooling around on a bike killing zombies, and what I got was actually a really solid open world open world game that somehow was more than the sum of it parts. As you outlined here all the individual parts sound - and mostly are - rote and uninspired, but somehow they got it all tweaked and polished and fit together juuuust right and it was just a good game. Admittedly I'm always weak for a MC, but "woman foolishly romanticizes outlaw bikers on the open road, unbound but any laws by their own" is about as obvious a statement as can be made.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:21
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Captain Hygiene posted:Continued my Metal Gear Solid playthrough with MGS2. What a good time, especially coming straight off the first one. Even with broadly similar mechanics, there are just so many gameplay improvements. I had a much better time than when I first played it a few years ago - I was basically pushing through it for the story then, but this time I actually enjoyed playing most of it. Not too say there weren't gripes with some of the design, but I was having enough fun to not really care. Looking forward to the next one. I can't emphasize enough just how crazy mgs 2 was when it came out. Like it was better than a lot of end of the ps2 life cycle games. Between it and Silent Hill 2 I had crazy high expectations for that system. It was only decades later that I understood just how much work those teams put into them to make them look so good.
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Mar 6, 2024 17:02
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I ended up 100 percenting Days Gone and I can't even tell you why other than it just felt so drat good to play. I haven't played it in years now and when I think of going back I just dont really want to deal with the story at all. If it was about anything else I would probably be more into it but I can't take anything away from the gameplay. Fighting hordes is so drat fun and the bike feels amazing. I have to reiterate that was a really well done write up - great job.
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Mar 6, 2024 17:14
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Thanks for the positive feedback, y'all! Days Gone has got me in an open-world map-em-up mood and I'm tempted to give Horizon: Zero Dawn another shot. I remember it being kind of the opposite: an inspired setting and story that punches below its weight class, because the same AAA-bloat systems that work so well in DG become an incongruous mess of busywork in HZD. Curious to see if that's still how I feel about it, because that's a game I wanted to like a lot more than I did, and it seems like a good time to give it a shot ahead of Forbidden West's PC port.
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Mar 6, 2024 22:35
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SchwarzeKrieg posted:Thanks for the positive feedback, y'all! Days Gone has got me in an open-world map-em-up mood and I'm tempted to give Horizon: Zero Dawn another shot. I remember it being kind of the opposite: an inspired setting and story that punches below its weight class, because the same AAA-bloat systems that work so well in DG become an incongruous mess of busywork in HZD. Curious to see if that's still how I feel about it, because that's a game I wanted to like a lot more than I did, and it seems like a good time to give it a shot ahead of Forbidden West's PC port. beeline the main story, don't get wrapped up in any side stuff and it's a good time
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Mar 6, 2024 22:52
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I have completed Star Ocean The Second Story R, last year's HD2D remake of Star Ocean 2. Man, I hated this game. If you've read some of my past posts in this thread, you'll know that I've been on a journey into JRPGs, spurred on initially by playing Yakuza 7 way back in late 2020, and then FF7 and Octopath Traveler 2 last year. This is a genre I always just thought I hated, but now have come to really appreciate in a lot of ways. Having been surprised last month by how much I loved Etrian Odyssey - a series I'd always been fascinated by from afar but never actually touched - I wondered if maybe another recent remake of a well-known franchise would be up my alley. This game is a mess, and not really in a fun way. It has systems on top of systems, but most of those systems end up not actually doing anything. I'm going to start with the worst part, which is the combat. This is an action RPG which originally had random encounters, but now has Persona-style "walk into enemies on the map" encounters. Either way, the encounters are in instanced fights like a turn-based RPG. You've got four party members you can swap between, as well as a menu to cast spells with one of those party members without fully swapping to them. The party members have AI to do the rest, with a few settings for behavior (focus on one target, run around and try to avoid attacks, etc.). When controlling a character, you can attack with B, cast one of two selected special abilities with the shoulder buttons, or use an "Assault Ability" on the D-Pad that will use a skill from a character in your extended party (you can have up to 8 total party members, plus there's some guest characters from other Star Ocean games who can only be used as Assault Abilities). There's a shield-break mechanic on enemies where certain abilities do more shield damage, which leads to a stun/damage phase when fully broken. There's also a dodge on A you can use when an enemy flashes red to avoid their attacks. All of this loving sucks. Most fights are just mashing B on enemies until they die. The dodge sucks rear end because if you mistime it and gets hit, the punish is YOUR CHARACTER GETS STUNNED, which makes it so loving risky I cannot imagine using it. Plus, this was an addition to the remake, so the red flashes aren't tied to animations (since the original game animations weren't built to be "tells"), so it's really hard to see and nail the window. The shield mechanic sucks because enemies regain shields really fast, so if you ever encounter a moving enemy, you probably won't manage to get its shields down at all because by the time you run to catch up it will already have regained some of its shields. There's a point about 1/3 of the way through the game where my characters started to just die seemingly randomly to one hit in fights. Turns out this is from certain enemies casting magic spells way higher level than previous enemies had used, and these spells were one hit kills. You can interrupt their casts, but if there's multiple, you can't really guarantee this, and the spells don't have any kind of tell for where they're going to land. Instead, you just have to constantly run around when you see those enemies casting to try not to die. Of course, you can only do this with your currently controlled character, and the AI does not know how to dodge, so if your healer goes down you're probably hosed. The only way to deal with combat in this game is to comically overlevel/overgear for it. Thankfully, the game is built for that, I guess. This game has an entire layer of what I'm going to call "crafting skills," but has some dumb terms I've already forgotten (I think "ICs" for individuals and "special skills" for party wide things?). You gain SP as you level, and you can invest those in your crafting skills. Crafting lets you do all kinds of poo poo: fishing, create healing items, create new gear, add modifiers to gear, etc. The problem is, this is all super RNG heavy, to the point that guides for how to get the best gear in the game all start with "make a save here, because you'll only get one shot at this, and it has a 30% chance" and poo poo like that. You have very little control over what attributes your gear gets, let alone what gear you're creating in the first place. You may want new shoes for your caster, but too bad, you're going to have to throw away 10 lovely shields you've made on the way. There's a bunch of poo poo in this I never even used. There's a whole cooking system for creating food with healing and buff properties, but you can only use food out of combat, so I completely ignored it. There's a music system which I think lets you create buffs for your party? Also a "familiar" for getting items inside a dungeon that I never once remembered to use? Just a baffling set of poo poo to do. None of it is compelling, none of it is fun. Maybe this game has a really cool endgame/postgame, but I'm very doubtful. My complaints out of the way, I should say there are a few things I liked: the HD2D environments look awesome, the sprites are great, the characters are... extremely 1998 JRPG, but also pretty fun. The English VO is from the 2009 PSP port and is so dreadful that I think they genuinely should have not included it in this release (which actually got new Japanese VO, cmon Square). The story is good enough I wanted to see it through to the end, even if I think this "99 unlockable ending scenes" bit is lame as hell and I'm just going to go watch them all on Youtube. The original music is also awesome, and the arranged version is ok, though it does the thing a lot of arranged soundtracks do of turning a bunch of weird mid-90s synth leads into way-too-fancy orchestral strings that don't sound very good. When this came out, I remember a couple people saying they wished Final Fantasy 7 had gotten this remake treatment - maybe not instead of the new trilogy, but in addition to it. I could easily see it - a high-res real-time version of FF7's overworld and dungeons with new character models, plus a new UI, would be a really cool treatment of the original game. But the difference is that FF7 is fundamentally a good game. You wouldn't really need to change that much about FF7. Like, maybe add a few signposts for some of the more obscure side quests, maybe make a few of the best skills easier to get than from the skill-steal ability (and rebalance a couple of the more broken ones), but that's really it. Star Ocean 2, on the other hand, absolutely seems like a game that could have used a true rethink from the ground up. There are some good ideas in play here that are completely squandered by the lovely combat and crafting. It is easy for me to understand why this would be a compelling game if you played it at the time - there is so much going on here other games of the era didn't touch - but it is just so obviously bad that I don't get why they didn't give it a closer rethink. abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 05:22
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abraham linksys posted:I have completed Star Ocean The Second Story R, last year's HD2D remake of Star Ocean 2. Man, I hated this game. I definitely hear you on this as it echoes my experience. As much as I wanted to like Star Ocean 2, multiple times I needed to 'sanity check' with other people as to whether what was happening to me was normal. Like you say, there was loads of crazy difficulty spikes that were difficult to get past with the terribly dumb and suicidal party AI, and the game was flooded with superfluous systems that were very unorthodox. Some of it, like the mashy combat, could be explained just due to its age, but other things were very odd. A strange beast, to be sure. Didn't help that the story was a little awkward as well. However, I will say that, once I threw my usual preconceptions behind, the game started to grow on me. I was able to wrangle my party through what seemed like impossible fights by 1) forgoing the usual general-use equipment and instead crafting all manner of hard-counter accessories that I'd swap to on a per-fight basis to make them impervious to whatever element the enemies were abusing 2) swapping characters, picking formations and issuing commands to the party a lot more to keep them alive, such as forcing them to run away if they get aggro instead of leaving them on the dumb suicidal default 3) having them be such high-leveled in the first place by utilizing Training and other leveling boosts, 4) abusing the unbalanced super moves and assault actions such as to keep enemies locked down instead of using whatever is new or that I like, and so on and so forth. Yes, it felt incredibly cheesy and awkward, but in a way it was quite liberating to have an RPG really ask me to master all of its systems to win, instead of the typical RPG where you breeze through the game, never need to grind, and end with 99 elixirs that you were never pressed to use. Whether the above makes it good or bad, I don't know, but it certainly was a unique and memorable experience, and many others seem to like the whole aspect of 'breaking' the game with intentionality.
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Mar 8, 2024 07:18
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That's really interesting to me* because I had a pretty different experience, as someone who played the original way back at release, and the PSP version. Maybe it's from my knowledge of the game but I found R to be dramatically less difficult because it adds several things to the mix that make you way stronger with trivial effort, like the formation bonus thingies and assault actions (Being able to call in a healer to patch everyone up with a short cooldown is incredibly OP.) Along with the immense benefits from completing challenge missions and guild missions making you exceptionally wealth and festooned with crafting gear. I mean, some of it is absolutely my foreknowledge because I will start a fight and be like "Oh it's one of these, I gotta get interrupts in" but I definitely found myself expecting a tough fight in places only to stomp all over them. The bosses of the Hoffman Ruins and the Field of Might are the foremost example for me, both those fights always pushed my poo poo right in when I was a kid but were effortless for me in R. A few are worse though, I've never had trouble like that with the end of Minea Cave before. I've always had a huge soft spot for SO2's crafting though, but that's definitely something colored by past experience, because the OG gave you way less info and there was no in-game way to track what you could get from stuff or how many undiscovered things remained. I miss the woopy-woopy-woopy noise and morphing graphic from the old crafting. On the other hand I fully agree that the dodge thing is crap, I tried it out a bit and yeah it's nice when you succeed but failure costs way too much for it to be worth it and as you say the animations weren't designed for it, so some work just fine but some are outright deceptive. Also the new equipment properties can be very powerful but wow is the system for removing/adding them hot garbage, I straight up barely bothered with it even though the potential is enormous. Like FutureCop says the game is definitely made for breaking, like if you want levels fast you're fully intended to combine food, scouting, training, music, and an in-battle item to stack up a five-chain fight with a ton of multipliers. And then later get Bodyguard up to a good level and AFK somewhere. But at the end of the day, yeah, I'm never gonna have an unclouded view of the game because even though I can't say it's a true top-rank JRPG, there's a part of me that is always, always going to feel like I am a little bit at home when I hear The Venerable Forest. * There's no way to say that without sounding like I'm being smarmy and dismissive, but I promise I'm sincere!
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Mar 8, 2024 08:49
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Beat Chants of Sennaar, a very good puzzle game where you try and decipher a language by interpreting pictograms. It uses the same mechanism as Return of the Obra Dinn (another very good puzzle game) where you have a input several guesses before the game validates all of them. It prevents you to brute force Minor spoiler, about 2-3 hours in, but which was a pleasant surprise for me: You actually have to decipher and translate 5 languages, each one with different grammar, pictogram style and sentence structure, which is pretty good. It fits with the Babel theme, and at the end of the game you can "speak" fluently in all of them. It's very chill and the UI is very clear, "translating" sentences you see on screen with your guesses so you can change assumptions on the fly. It tends to easy in places, but the pacing and difficulty is pretty good. I've seen 2 different LPs of the game because I find mental processes fascinating, and both groups got stuck in the same word, but the rest flows very well. The ending and the secret is kind of meh, but the journey is well worth it. Recommended if you like Obra Dinn or Heaven's Vault. The puzzle aspect is worse than Obra Dinn, but not by much, and the UI and pacing is way better than Heaven's Vault.
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Mar 8, 2024 12:11
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So when the Master Chief collection went on sale about a month ago, I grabbed it because I'm a PC gamer nerd who never played Halo 'cos it was an Xbox Game. ... Ultimately, I was pretty disappointed in how mid Halo was. I only got halfway through Halo: CE and...look it didn't do anything bad but it didn't do anything right either. I bitched about it and was told "It was great for it's time!" so I looked up PC games that were released around that time. No One Lives Forever came out 1 year before Halo and that's long been one of my favourite games. I realised I hadn't played it in years. ... So I installed No Ones Lives Forever and spent 2-ish weeks playing that game. Seriously, it's gotta be one of the top 10 FPS games of all time. It feels like you're playing a spy movie. Good characters, great art style, half-decent plot, some really creative and impressive levels (falling out of a plane? Going into space? Scuba Diving, Gondala Riding chaos? gently caress yeaaah!) and some surprisingly great voice acting. It doesn't sound like they just grabbed random devs on staff and said: "Here, say this line" It's not perfect. There's a lot of redundancy with the weapons that could've been streamlined so you didn't have to scroll through your inventory so often. The enemies are inconsistent in terms of their stealth and their accuracy. Sometimes they'll be blind as a bat, other times they'll have super-human hearing and eyesight. Sometimes they'll have laser accuracy and precision, sometimes they'll never hit the broad side of the barn. So it ends up being a bit quicksave\quickloady. However, their AI in terms of how they flank you and react to your fire is surprisingly decent, especially for a game released in 2000. Not to mention the humour, listening in to the guards talk about dumb poo poo, the flavour text in the intelligence items etc.The levels are generally well designed, but there are a couple of "filler" levels which take 5-10 minutes and were just kinda transitioning from one big level to the next big level. There were a few times I said: "What did we achieve in that level?" But yeah, aside from some minor jank (which doesn't even consistently happen), I had a blast the entire goddamn time and my grumpy old rear end shakes my fist at the sky asking why they don't make games as good as NOLF anymore. ... But I also firmly believe that Halo is ridiculously overrated and there were significantly better games available at the time.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:03
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Halo was completely massive and a phenomenon because it was a capable and solid set of FPS titles with great multiplayer options available on an inexpensive console that anyone could pick up and play with their buddies in their dorm rooms or whatever. You didn’t need to deal with lan parties or the nonsense that was the early PC graphics card market or anything like that.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:50
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The platonic ideal of Halo is playing it on a couch with your best friend over a Christmas break. It's like a 100x multiplier to its mid-ness.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:58
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It's also one of the very rare FPS games that actually feels better on controller than KBM - you can't overstate how big of a leap forward it was in terms of FPS controls on a console. Plus, even though there were certainly more sophisticated shooters on PC, Halo did have a pretty unique feel with some open, sandbox-y level design and the mix of vehicles & on-foot action, in addition to either introducing or canonizing a lot of modern design tropes: regenerating health, two weapon limits, dedicated grenade & melee buttons, children screaming slurs into microphones on the internet (instead of just the weird neckbeards doing it on PC), etc.
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Mar 8, 2024 15:05
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FutureCop posted:I definitely hear you on this as it echoes my experience. As much as I wanted to like Star Ocean 2, multiple times I needed to 'sanity check' with other people as to whether what was happening to me was normal. Ms Adequate posted:That's really interesting to me* because I had a pretty different experience, as someone who played the original way back at release, and the PSP version These are both interesting perspectives! I definitely had the same problem of having to ask people "is this game broken or is this actually intentional" at times, but I also can see the idea of the game being so broken being compelling. The original version having much more opaque crafting actually makes a lot of sense to me. I imagine it's both more frustrating but also more interesting because of the less-clear possibility space - you'd feel more like you're stumbling into breaking the game, rather than it being pretty obvious from the jump that if you just alchemy up some good rocks and get blacksmithing to level 10 ASAP, you'll quickly get armor that will carry you through the rest of the game. FutureCop posted:However, I will say that, once I threw my usual preconceptions behind, the game started to grow on me. I was able to wrangle my party through what seemed like impossible fights by 1) forgoing the usual general-use equipment and instead crafting all manner of hard-counter accessories that I'd swap to on a per-fight basis to make them impervious to whatever element the enemies were abusing 2) swapping characters, picking formations and issuing commands to the party a lot more to keep them alive, such as forcing them to run away if they get aggro instead of leaving them on the dumb suicidal default 3) having them be such high-leveled in the first place by utilizing Training and other leveling boosts, 4) abusing the unbalanced super moves and assault actions such as to keep enemies locked down instead of using whatever is new or that I like, and so on and so forth. Yes, it felt incredibly cheesy and awkward, but in a way it was quite liberating to have an RPG really ask me to master all of its systems to win, instead of the typical RPG where you breeze through the game, never need to grind, and end with 99 elixirs that you were never pressed to use. I think what frustrates me is that I don't really feel like I mastered the systems - mostly I feel like I just outleveled and outgeared stuff. But I suppose considering leveling and gearing up are core systems, and the combat doesn't ultimately have that much depth, outleveling/outgearing fights really is the closest you can get to "mastering" anything. I might go peek at some videos of the endgame stuff to see what that looks like - I'm guessing a lot of elemental counter equipment like you mentioned, as well as more shield break/stun/stun-locking pressure.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:26
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I enjoyed SO2R for what it was cuz I genuinely enjoy playing old games that are a bit obtuse and mystifying and having questionable mechanics or design decisions that would have gone completely over my head as a child but I am able to grasp now with my powerful adult brain. Star Ocean 2 and SaGa Frontier are both games I owned on the ps1 but never managed to get very far in. Playing through the remastered versions of these games was a real treat.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:02
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abraham linksys posted:The original version having much more opaque crafting actually makes a lot of sense to me. I imagine it's both more frustrating but also more interesting because of the less-clear possibility space - you'd feel more like you're stumbling into breaking the game, rather than it being pretty obvious from the jump that if you just alchemy up some good rocks and get blacksmithing to level 10 ASAP, you'll quickly get armor that will carry you through the rest of the game This is a very good point, and it was further compounded because back then an awful lot of us didn't have any Internet access (I sure didn't) so this kind of knowledge was only available through tips pages and guides in magazines, or trial and error. Or talking with others who actually had the game I guess, but that wasn't a group I fell into.
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Mar 8, 2024 20:38
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SchwarzeKrieg posted:It's also one of the very rare FPS games that actually feels better on controller than KBM - you can't overstate how big of a leap forward it was in terms of FPS controls on a console. Plus, even though there were certainly more sophisticated shooters on PC, Halo did have a pretty unique feel with some open, sandbox-y level design and the mix of vehicles & on-foot action, in addition to either introducing or canonizing a lot of modern design tropes: regenerating health, two weapon limits, dedicated grenade & melee buttons, children screaming slurs into microphones on the internet (instead of just the weird neckbeards doing it on PC), etc. I think it was a proof of concept that you could make a functional FPS with a controller, but I'd never say it was better than keyboard+mouse. Aside from the vibrations, which definitely added a lot. edit: do they make vibrating mice?
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Mar 8, 2024 20:47
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credburn posted:I think it was a proof of concept that you could make a functional FPS with a controller, but I'd never say it was better than keyboard+mouse. Aside from the vibrations, which definitely added a lot. The way the movement and aiming are tuned with acceleration and auto-aim just feels right on a controller in a way that doesn't quite translate to KBM. Could definitely be bias because I played an obscene amount of Halo 1/2 in high school & college, but playing the Bungie Halo games (especially CE) with a mouse feels unnatural to me. It comes across as weirdly vague and sloppy compared to a controller and especially compared to any given PC FPS of the time. Either way, I can totally understand being underwhelmned by Halo CE playing it for the first time in 2024. Hell, I remember plenty of people being underwhelmed with it in 2001 for largely the same reasons.
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Mar 8, 2024 21:53
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SchwarzeKrieg posted:Either way, I can totally understand being underwhelmned by Halo CE playing it for the first time in 2024. Hell, I remember plenty of people being underwhelmed with it in 2001 for largely the same reasons. This is what I thought was going on. That I was too far removed from when it came out to be able to appreciate it for it's time. ... But NOLF came out earlier and it shits all over Halo. I acknowledge that NOLF would probably be awful for multiplayer, but UT came out even before NOLF and UT is still awesome. IMHO, the thing that Halo brings to the table is accessibility. Bros didn't have to be "fukkin nerds" to play FPS games anymore because anybody could play Halo. But I don't know if that's "Halo" as much as it is "Being on Xbox." AKA: Is it the game that was awesome, or was it the marketing that was awesome? For emphasis: Halo is a perfectly solid game. I do not think it is a bad game. It is an FPS and it's aggressively 7/10 fine. I just think it's the most generic, uninteresting FPS to ever develop a rabid fanbase.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:56
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H13 posted:This is what I thought was going on. That I was too far removed from when it came out to be able to appreciate it for it's time. As another late-comer to Halo, I had a very similar experience where, importance to history aside and all that yadda yadda, I was really bored and confused as to why it was such a hit. The first level really didn't make a great impression with its endless copy-paste corridors, and lord don't get me started on the The Library. I haven't had a game serve as such a powerful sleep-aid since questing in Tera. I could've sworn that there was a minority that felt similar at the time, though, not just in retrospect, and voila, here's some evidence from a 2001 Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/11/28/the-rest-of-the-story So yeah, you're not as nuts as you might think. And goddamn I really wanna play NOLF as well. Dunno how you got lucky enough to find it, and I wish there was a remaster of it but from what I understand it is stuck in hell and can't get out.
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Mar 8, 2024 23:59
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FutureCop posted:And goddamn I really wanna play NOLF as well. Dunno how you got lucky enough to find it, and I wish there was a remaster of it but from what I understand it is stuck in hell and can't get out. http://nolfrevival.tk/ Enjoy!
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Mar 9, 2024 00:23
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NOLF was solid multiplayer. Just the perfect execution of the game, with costumes. It does fun stuff like when you die near a rail your character will dramatically fall over it.
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Mar 9, 2024 01:42
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credburn posted:NOLF was solid multiplayer. Just the perfect execution of the game, with costumes. It does fun stuff like when you die near a rail your character will dramatically fall over it. Oh sweet! It doesn't shock me that they put that much detail in, but I just assumed the level design would make for poo poo arenas. Basically, I went into the Master Chief collection expecting to find that all the angry 14 year olds PC Gamers screaming: "HALO SUCKS" were just being uber-competitive, gatekeeping nerdy assholes. Turns out that they actually may have had SOMEWHAT of a point.
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Mar 9, 2024 01:56
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FutureCop posted:And goddamn I really wanna play NOLF as well. Dunno how you got lucky enough to find it, and I wish there was a remaster of it but from what I understand it is stuck in hell and can't get out. If you click the link, the current fan made remaster is a challenge to license owners to sort their poo poo out
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Mar 9, 2024 02:00
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