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Max Payne 3 was completely off my radar when it released but I grabbed it on sale and beat it last week. It was... pretty good? The gunplay felt great, just super punchy and visceral, and the enemy reactions really sell the combat, making it feel extremely weighty and satisfying. I enjoyed the story more than I expected too - I wouldn't say there was a lot of nuance or emotional resonance, but it was just a really well executed crime story about a hosed up little man being hired specifically to play the role of a hosed up little man, slowly realizing that, and taking steps to do better and become an ever-so-slightly less hosed up little man. That said, I kind of hated the pacing and overall design. I'm sure plenty of words have been written about the cutscenes after every single encounter but it just absolutely killed the pacing and made the levels feel incredibly disjointed. I don't need a cutscene showing Max walking from one room to the next room, then seeing some guys walk in and ducking behind cover. It's okay to just let me, y'know, walk from one room to the next room, see some guys walk in, and duck behind cover myself (or don't, because it's Max Payne and I could just, like, start shooting in their general direction). I certainly don't need that kind of cutscene between every single fight. I also didn't care for the dozen or so turret-type sequences, or the equally-frequent times the game forced you into a scripted slow-motion shooting gallery sequence where you're diving onto or falling off of something - it just felt like the game was trying way too hard to be cool and shoving it in your face, instead of just creating situations where you could do those kind of things and letting it happen naturally. The "trying too hard" feeling extended into the cutscenes too, with constant chromatic aberrations and text overlays that just didn't work for me and didn't have a tenth of the charm of the older games' comic panels. That said, the gameplay was good enough to overcome a lot of the shortfalls and I could see myself replaying it. It also made me want to go back through the older games, which I've started on and may make another post about.
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Dec 1, 2023 17:07
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 06:58 |
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Recently finished Haiku, the Robot - a solid indie metroidvania with heavy Hollow Knight influences. Fun game! It's not quite a must-play, but it's solid from front to back and has a lot of heart. The art direction is great, the world is satisfying to explore, the background lore is fairly well developed and enticing enough to push you forward. I've seen some reviews complain about the short length, but I wrapped it up in about 8 hours which is the perfect length for a Metroidvania IMO. A solid time all around with nothing really holding it back, but also nothing truly unique or special to elevate it to "great" status. https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/256884570/movie480_vp9.webm?t=1651244772 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1231880/Haiku_the_Robot/
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Jan 16, 2024 17:15
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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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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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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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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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I beat(?) MyHouse.wad, the weird horror-y Doom mod that gained some traction last year. That was a trip. Just calling it a Doom mod sells the experience short, as it's really a fascinating cross-media horror thing that happens to have a Doom mod at the center of it. I'm assuming a lot of people here are familiar with it, but if you're not, the basic version is: last year, someone posted an unassuming thread on the DoomWorld forums stating that their friend had passed away, leading to the OP inheriting a simple old work-in-progress map recreating the friend's house in Doom. OP cleans up the map and releases it in the friend's honor, the forum users start posting the expected condolences before slowly realizing that there's a lot more going on in the map than initially let on, and it all turns into a community-driven egg hunt to unravel secrets and find the true ending. A lot of this is achieved by trawling through supplemental materials contained in the Google Drive folder where the mod is hosted, including a handful of odd photos and, primarily, a long cryptic journal referencing dreams, nightmares and memories that provide direction on where to go in the map. The map itself is very well done, using a lot of clever triggers and little tricks to create shifting, impossible geometry that loops, grows, and changes in neat and unsettling ways. There are YouTube videos and articles going into excruciating depth on the mechanics and the ~lore~ so I won't retread any of that, but one angle I haven't seen discussed is how it's such a perfect time capsule of horror gaming in the year 2023. Practically everything about the game (I can just call it a game, right?) is distilled from popular horror trends, not in a derogatory way but in a way that feels very of-the-time. The file-of-supernatural-origins backstory is creepypasta 101, the format of a mod for a 30 year old game fits right in with the retro aesthetic that's big now (even though I know Doom modding is its own thing that never went away), the atmosphere & level design leans heavily into liminal spaces which are a big current buzzord, the vague lore snippets feel tailor-made for YouTube It's just a very cool project all around, a hyperspecific niche creation built on years of terminally-online context that somehow loops back around to being borderline-approachable. Good luck explaining it to someone who isn't already suffering from late-stage internet brainworms, though.
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Mar 12, 2024 18:28
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Related, I didn't know anything about MyHouse beyond "it's weird and spooky!" before playing, and I'd never played Doom 2 (despite playing the original on release and across a dozen platforms since). The first time I tried MyHouse, I ran the actual MyHouse.wad instead of .pk3, which is just the normal house and punts you into the regular campaign when you exit the level. I played through to about e1m5, thinking "I mean this is fun but it just feels like Doom levels???" before I realized what was happening.Vermain posted:i think a big part of its success is that it builds a bridge between generations in a way that makes it highly approachable: older folks who played doom growing up in the era where custom WADs were all the rage can marvel at the technical complexity that's built on top of a familiar framework (which includes the whole "making your house/school/etc. in doom" trend), while zoomers who're intimately familiar with kane pixels and who otherwise know nothing about classic doom get to see a genuinely great digital representation of liminal spaces that puts its own unique spin on the whole thing instead of just copying mr. pixel's homework. i don't think power pak's video on it getting 10m views is a coincidence, but rather a confluence of two very different communities - ancient doom diehards and a new generation of horror hounds primarily raised on FNaF LPs - coming together I can attest to this. My son is firmly in the FNaF generation, loves what I'll call the YouTube Horror Universe, and thinks MyHouse is pretty neat. It definitely feels like modern online horror in conversation with The Olds™.
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Mar 12, 2024 20:01
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MyHouse.wad reminded me that, hey, Doom is fun, so I played through all of Doom (which I'm not sure I'd ever actually finished) and Doom 2 (which I'd never played). After spending about a dozen hours going through all the main episodes and a handful of .wads, I'm coming to the realization that maybe Doom is good, actually? The level design can sometimes be a little awkward, especially in Doom 2, but mechanically the game is pure, airtight, and drat near flawless. The monsters and weapons are iconic and the game just has a Nintendo-style timelessness to it, especially playing on a modern source port like GZDoom (I know vertical look can be a little contentious in the Doom community but the lack of it is the only thing that really dates the experience for me). I'm continuing to dive down the rabbit hole of mods and map packs; "Doom rules actually" is not exactly a hot take, but it's very much the correct one. Doom rules, actually.
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Mar 15, 2024 23:17
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Sway Grunt posted:I finished Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. My second time playing 1 and 2 but first seeing it through with 3. 120 hours, 30/40/50 respectively. Stuck with an Infiltrator through the whole thing and it never stopped being fun, especially since you can sorta Vanguard-it-up a bit for variety by cloaking and melee'ing enemies. It was a good time and I'm sad it's over. I also played through those a couple months ago and had pretty similar thoughts. Aside from a couple false starts with ME1 forever ago, it was my first exposure to the series and it gave me big "why didn't I play this sooner??" feels. 3 definitely felt a little disjointed at times (I also played the Citadel DLC as soon as it was available, having no idea it was DLC until after the fact) and was probably my least favorite overall, but I was surprised by how well it stuck the landing on a lot of the plot threads.
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Mar 18, 2024 02:30
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Finished Half-Life for the first time (I'd poked away at it around release but never had a chance to really dive into it). Not sure how controversial of an opinion this is but it has not aged very well at all. I can appreciate how big of a step forward it was in terms of narrative design and ~immersion~, but it's just... not fun to play. The main culprit is the combat - the guns have no oomph, the enemies don't react to getting shot at all and take about 50% more bullets than they should, which makes encounters feel deeply unsatisfying and often outright frustrating. The level design is generally interesting (even if it leans a little too hard into platforming at times) and there are some well-done set pieces but even then there are enough little issues to keep it from standing on its own without a "for the time" modifier. The gameplay fundamentals are markedly worse than pretty much all the games it was building on, and most of the innovations feel like a rough draft for what would come later. It's kind of funny to think of Valve fumbling the basics when everything from HL2-on has nailed them to a Nintendo-level degree, but the gameplay in HL1 feels like it takes a distant backseat to the world design and it really holds the game back from reaching the "timeless" status of some of its predecessors and successors. Again, I can absolutely understand why it's an important game, but divorced of its context I'm not sure I can call it a great game. Contrast with HL2, which I dove into immediately after and which still feels world-class in pretty much every aspect. The narrative and level design build on everything HL1 was doing but improve it tenfold, and the gameplay is honed to perfection and bursting with creative energy. You can barely go an hour without running into some new clever gameplay concept that is fun and refined enough to be the basis for an entire game.
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Apr 2, 2024 02:57
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 06:58 |
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Good-Natured Filth posted:Maquette is a first-person puzzle game using a "world within a world" concept. You can manipulate objects around you by placing them in or removing them from a diorama of the world you are playing inside. It gets pretty interesting but never too challenging. There are better first-person puzzle games out there, but it's on Game Pass and is relatively short. Maquette is a pleasant enough game with an interesting gimmick that feels a little underbaked. There are some clever puzzles but it never quite gels into a coherent whole, and is occasionally janky and somewhat frustrating. The story is also a little too “quirky millennial indie movie couple” for me and doesn’t really mesh with the gameplay in the way it’s clearly trying to. It’s essentially a mediocre walking sim bolted onto an okay puzzle game. I did like it enough to finish it but it doesn’t feel like it ever really figures out what to do with the core gimmick.
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Apr 11, 2024 00:25
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