I had a great time with this 1997 game. The game was easy to learn, it uses an action point system similar to the original XCom or Xenonauts, so I slid in real easy. While the opening cave serves as a check on if your built character is "viable", I did half follow a guide. The timer ticking down was my biggest apprehension going in; it's actually very generous, I wasted a ton of time reading skill books and healing with plenty of time to spare.

The #1 thing about this game is how incredibly atmospheric it is, so eeriey and mysterious. That opening cut-scene was great. I saw plenty of 50s theming with the robots and greaser jackets and such. There's also how sadistically gruesome the combat is. I vividly remember my first combats against super-mutants, with them zapping me in half and setting me on fire. But firing full auto into someone at point blank is incredibly satisfying. Crippling limbs really helped to keep the combat interesting, and the flavor text accompanying attacks was some Matt Mercer style cool.

The skill system for this game is a bit wonky. Some skills were pointless. I pickpocked half the people I met without putting any points into the Stealing skill (because I had high Agility), and it didn't effect my Karma. While Repair and Lockpicking are essential skills. First Aid was great for giving me XP and free healing, while I never received a crippled limb to use Doctor on. The way the game handles weapon progression is that Energy & Heavy Weapons represent your end-game capabilities (if you started with those skills, you'd have none to use).

I love how weapons are handled. You load and unload guns, and put in anti-personnel and armor-piercing bullets to fit the situation. I would pick up enemy guns, yank out the clip, then drop them.

The quests were fun and memorable, with variable solutions, and a lot you can talk through.

One of my favorite memories in this game is investigating The Glow, with the sense of danger, discovery, reactivity to my skills, while managing my radiation levels, and >!getting end-game equipment at the bottom just by chucking a few pulse grenades!< .

The first time I fought death claws, I was well prepared with a Plasma Rifle (despite no spare ammo for it), and a tip from some geezer on where to shoot it. That went alright. But, soon after I got my Power Armor, a gang enforcer beat me to death with his bare hands. It turned out, he was hopped up on Psycho and had spiked knuckles. Came as a real shock.

Overall, I had a great time. I would say the end-game areas were some of my most frustrating experiences: >!Force-fields in the military base, and being locked out of peacefully infiltrating the Cathedral just because I had talked to the Followers of the Apocalypse!<. Sorting through my inventory and packing loot onto companions to carry was a real chore; I can see why the guide said >!to forget the loot and gamble to buy anything you want!<. Sometimes, allies felt like herding cats, but they aren't as bad as people make it out to be (just respect lines of fire, and don't use a chaingun unless you want everything in front of you dead).

Welcome to the Daily Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here. Also a reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

Obviously skipping the VR one here as I do not have a VR set, nor am I planning in getting one.

SUPERHOT

At risk of hyping up a game that's already hyped up as a modern classic by a fair share of people, I have to say that Superhot is absolutely fantastic. Plays out like a really good mix of basic FPS gameplay and puzzles, in the sense that you actively have to figure out what's the next best move for you to do, as you clear out a room that would usually result in your death if played in real time. It's a great twist on the concept of shooters, and the result is an amazing game that is only held back by annoying button prompts and sections that are required to advance through the story.

The game was already great by itself, but it absolutely shines with the post-game challenges. No story segments to push through, just straight up gameplay, one level after the other, with different challenges that force you to see and replay the levels in a different style, to a point where you just zone out and fully focus on clearing level after level after level... at that point you're entranced, thus mimicking something the game talks about during the story.

It's simple. It's short. But you can get a lot out of it.

As for Mind Control Delete... there are ups and downs.

SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE (MCD)

The best thing about this sequel is how they improved enemy AI. Katana wielders now deflect bullets as well, and if you throw something at a guy using a bat he will use it to cancel it out. They have more erratic movement, which can be either a plus or a negative to you. Personally I like it, makes it more challenging to kill the dudes.

On top of that, you now have several power ups that you can use to spice up your gameplay. You can spawn with a katana, or a random gun. You can be faster. You can have more bullets. You can become temporarily invincible by engaging in melee combat, skip your reload if your shot kills, accumulate HP as you kill more and more enemies, slow down bullets near you even further, increase your throwing strength so now shurikens come back to you if they hit an opponent... in short the powers are a great addition!

But to me... it lost a bit of the charm. This sequel plays like an entire game was made based around one of the alternative modes in the original Superhot (and not even my favourite), so it feels like a sort of spin off, rather than a true sequel. To me, the joy of Superhot was in figuring a carefully built level out (solving the puzzle) and then tackling it in different ways without getting hit, not even once!

MCD simply throws you into a gauntlet of levels (and give you at least 2 hearts, so you can get hit at least once) and while that is certainly fun... it feels a lot like a separate mode, rather than the Superhot experience I've had with the original. Which results in a game that feels more like a shooter employing Superhot mechanics, and is still technically Superhot, but it's just not the same. It's too random. Too reliant on killing X dudes in this well-designed room. At least the original could tell a very small, self-contained story with each level. In this one you're just there.

By no means do I consider the latest entry a bad game! Far from it. It just doesn't scratch the same itch.

CONCEPT

I'm using concept here instead of plot since it fits Superhot better. I mean... there is a plot and some lore, sure, but I feel this game is more concept-driven than the other way around. Meaning that there is a theme, and there is a narrative going on, but it all circles around this idea of the game being very addicting and spreading like a virus. Both the original and the sequel play off these tones, but in different ways.

SOUND

Other than certain sections, there is no music. Just straight up beautiful, satisfying, eargasmic sound design. I also enjoyed how in certain levels you can actually hear the background if you don't stop, especially in the Disco level in MCD where the music gets less muted if you keep moving, thus sort of influencing you to play it as close to real-time as possible.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Absolutely a modern classic for sure with an idea that just works in both gameplay and in a conceptual sense. MCD is also pretty fun, but if the puzzle aspect is what captivated you the most in the first game, curb your expectations a little before playing it.

It’s so cool how your final goal can be seen in the background in certain games!

I’ve only found two games like that so far: Mad Max and Fallout:NV.

Both are open world, yet you can always see your final destination at all times. It’s so FUCKING COOL to see it become bigger the closer you get.

It’s even cooler that by the time you reach it, you are a completely different beast than when you started. That is the most natural feeling journey possible in a video game. Wish more games did that.

(Eg: I’m NV, I made sure to explore every inch along my path as I slowly went through the intended path. I started as ‘a courier’. By the time I’m at the strip I’m ‘THE courier’. )

This is such a cool way design the world. It really helps the roleplaying element. It always gives you a sense of direction.

Edit:- and ofcourse, I almost forgot, Elden Ring does the same thing. The giant tree is always visible and your ultimate goal. There’s literally no escaping it lol. It’s always in your view, intimidating you while also encouraging your natural curiosity to reach the damn tree.

As I'm typing up this submission on my second monitor, NGU Idle is running on my main screen and I'm watching a bunch of numbers go up - waiting for one of my basic attack skills to hit level 25,000 so that I can unlock the next one.

Once all of them are capped, I can move all of my leftover energy to Augmentations and boost my Attack, Defense, and HP into the Septendecillions. This will help me get over the next wall in the game: Boss #58 - Spiky Haired Guy.

But as all of these are running automatically, I shouldn't forget to pay some mind to my Adventuring screen where the loop is pretty much the same: Watch all those pretty numbers go up, get all that glorious loot and boost drops, and level up my equipment so that I can fight stronger enemies and get better loot and get more boosts and get stronger equipment so I could finally take down the first Titan of the game: Gordon Ramsay Bolton.

...look at all those pretty numbers...

...HELP. ME.

It's probably just a phase, or a mood, but I'm in a place right now where I can't really pick up anything that needs a lot of active gameplay investment. At the same time, I still love the smooth-lizard-brain dopamine hit that progression in gaming typically brings.

The idle genre provides that in spades. This particular one I'm playing, NGU Idle, is pretty packed with features that it can hold my interest quite a bit. It's layer upon layer upon layer of almost pure progression by just idling/afk'ing but it has A LOT of layers that you can continue to unlock and will make your numbers go higher and higher. It's pretty crazy, with people taking as much as 20,000 hours to reach the end of the game.

There are a bunch of other good ones on Steam like the classic Cookie Clicker, Leaf Blower Revolution, etc.... I even tried a browser based game one time called The Levelling Tree which is quite literally just you clicking on upgrades on a very basic web layout so that you can watch numbers go up / go up faster... and I played that thing longer than I would care to admit.

What a weird game. This is the sequel to Syndicate (which I never played) and it's a real-time tactics game with 3D isometric graphics where you guide a crew of 4 agents (essentially terminators) through short missions in these kind of small, open ended sandbox maps, usually involving killing a bunch of people, kidnapping a bunch of people, or blowing something up.

I feel rather conflicted on it because it's simultaneously quite cool and also quite janky and frustrating. I mentioned it's a real-time tactics game but it leans a lot closer to Cannon Fodder than it does Commandos. There's rarely any reason to break up your crew and the potential for strategy is pretty limited, it's mostly about just knowing the level and playing it like a very punishing top-down shooter. Between missions you buy new equipment and upgrades for your guys and invest money into research, though the game is a bit obtuse as far as how this system works and doesn't explain that most of the time the only way to make more money is to go out of your way to rob banks.

I love the game's style and gritty cyberpunk vibe, the map design, the big crowds and destructible environments. When it's at its best the chaos of the firefights and explosions feels great, however the fast pace of the gameplay combined with the clunky controls and unforgiving difficulty make it feel punishing in the worst kind of way. This game loves to ambush you and will murder you over even the slightest misstep, and it only gets worse as it goes on. It feels like you have to play in a very particular way and do everything in a very specific order, all while relying on a lot of luck.

This might not be as big of an issue if you could actually save during levels but you can't, if you die it's back to the beginning. Ultimately I gave up when I got to a mission where you had to kidnap a high-ranking exec and break into their walled-garden neighbourhood by high-jacking a vehicle and driving through the gate (which takes a while to get to,) only to get immediately blasted to smithereens by the turrets if you don't jump straight out and destroy them, and then the police show up and start blasting you... it was just too much. If the game simply had a pause function so you could give your dudes orders without having to do it all in real-time it might be more manageable but I feel like this was before mechanics like that were really widely adopted.

I mean yes, 60~ hours is kind of a long absurd time for a game to get good... but it also took me several retries to get to that playthrough of New Vegas where I actually finished it.

For context, up till Groundbreaker... actually heck up till Roseway, the Outer Worlds for me was a slog. The intro, Emerald Vale for all intents and purposes should have been a good intro biome, a sort-of interesting dilemma that allows you to handle it in a multitude of ways similar to Goodsprings in New Vegas... but you could exhaust and explore all of Goodsprings in around ~2~3 hours, Emerald Vale was larger and apologies to Parvati but was frankly uninteresting in hindsight that took me almost 2 days to actually go through without anything of worth coming out of it really. There's no dark sinister secret or anything controversial to uncover, I mean there is but it's honestly frankly underwhelming.

Groundbreaker was 'eh' mostly just a quest hub but nothing again that could sink your teeth in, there's some nice worldbuilding there explaining their situation as their own entity against the Board but at this point what the Board is still wasn't really that clear to me. Oh and we also meet Martin here, probably one of the more interesting NPCs you'll meet this early in the game, his is a cruel tale but being a vendor NPC, is kind of just stuck there, but what little you learn of him actually sets the tone for the strengths in writing of Outer Worlds cynical corpocracy.

Then I get sidetracked to Scylla... like Emerald Vale, barren of anything actually interesting to learn of. Filler-quest that tells you to go there, filler-experience. It's a loading screen with extra steps.

Okay, on Roseway now... this seems interesting can't wait to explore the different areas and learn about what happened here as I venture forth... aaand nvm you learn less than an hour in that this is really all about. I mean yeah there's insight you can surmise later on to provide introspection to your quest giver but so far this game has just been 90% Barren Planets that don't really offer anything interesting to learn about.

Mind you, despite me saying all of these have been bland they still do have multitudes of ways to approach the actual resolution of the quest... it's just that they seem kind of bog standard that you kind of just learn to not expect anything unexpected.

I think Monarch is the first real turning point for me on how things get interesting, because there's actually a lot of interesting memos, terminal, conversations, and logs for you to read. Learning what leads to this area being fucked up, the actual moment-of getting fucked up, guiding your hand to how the colony can sustain itself moving on.

But then, Peril on Gorgon, honestly on Monarch I was still kind of just exploring the map because that's what you were supposed to do and the interesting bits for you to learn about are all really consolidated in one area... but Gorgon? It was honestly a blast to explore, there's a lot of great worldbuilding all over the place, lots of secret audio-logs and terminals to discover.

Unfortunately from what I understand, I'm a little over more than halfway through but god if Byzantium and Eridanos holds the same quality Monarch and Gorgon has then I'm looking forward to it.

Context: I played Fallout 3, 4, and New Vegas before this. I'm not interested in putting my words into a coherent review, but more of my personal experience and emotions playing Fallout 1.

This game is old, it's so old that it needs the original PC box that came with a manual, which contained the keyboard controls, Thank god for the internet. This has no tutorial and my god has it aged visually that I wondered if my eyes were dying. I need to remember to F6 (it's not F5 to quick save here) a lot before I do something unintentionally stupid. My strength was too damn low to even hold up a hand gun??? Restarted with a new character at least 4 times before I got to the 2nd town and got my ass handed to me. How the fuck does sneaking work and pickpocketing work?

With all these complaints set aside of learning how to play an old ass game.

This game great, it doesn't hold your hand and rewards you greatly with solving problems like an old time adventure game and takes the table top style role playing game seriously. The exploration is addicting like the newer iterations where you rummage every bookshelf or locker and talking to every NPC to collect as much info as you can. The quests aren't logged and there's no direction or map pinpoint to show you where to go much like Elden Ring as a recent example.

Oh you think you can be a brain dead player following an indicator on your map? No you dumb fucker, you're gonna have to actually read carefully and remember an NPC's name and location. You missed or ignored a side quest for a few days? Guess what, those NPCs are dead cause the Super Mutants invasion plot is taking over since the plot is moving forward. That's right, there's a 100 day countdown and 100 day extension (1000 caps to send water) to save your vault. So you can't bankrupting the towns or save a settlement that needs your help (Preston cries in settlements) with this urgent plot moving forward fast.

So I built my character on speech and small guns going for a charismatic, gunslinger and thinking I'll be the talk of the town. Well the game takes your cockiness into consideration when a deathclaw hands your ass in a near beginner quest. Apparently you can sneak past it, but I don't know how that works. So I worked on getting to the brotherhood of steel to get that sweet power armor. Wait, you can't wear it cause you don't have a carrying capacity unless you get rid of a lot of the loot you collected. Killed the deathclaw, but disappointed i can't wear it like a trophy.

Talking my ass out thinking i can get out of any situation with 100 speech. Most of this is true. Then you snark in front of the Super mutant boss and he blows your ass off with a minigun. Or you join the mutants and the game ends. But wait, the mutant leader can torture you and see if you can take punches. As a result you get thrown in prison and you can't escape unless you have high sneak. Well sneak these nuts, I'm reloading to a save before I got into that predicament.

Hey look. I got a companion named Ian, cool dude, I like Ian. then Ian got blown up by a rocket launcher from a random super mutant encounter. RIP Ian and his leather jacket. No companion respawns.

I beat the game talking to The Master to death. Hell yeah, my charisma and science check saved my vault. Wait they fucking exiled me after going through the meat grinder for them? Then Ron Pearlman narrates there were side stories I missed and had some very bad endings for the side characters.

This game is merciless and a roller coaster of emotions unlike the modern games which have a more action rpg focus that let you off pretty easy with little consequences. This entire game feels like a wack a mole of consequences and I love it. I barely even talked about 1/10th of the things that happened in my play through. This is a game where you want to talk about your journey, because of how difficult and strange it can be going in blind.

As for the lore, I'm very impressed to see where the later games took the baton and grew from there including my man Harold, the mutated dude who turns into a tree in Fallout 3. I didn't know you had it so bad Harold.

I have to replay the game with a different build and take a different exploration path. But what really made this my favorite fallout game was the Bramen cows saying "Moo, I say."

further random thoughts.

• the action point system being able to shoot specific limbs must have been extremely impressive back in the day.
• Still not sure what backpack and bags do, apparently they're for organizing inventory. I thought a backpack would increase carrying capacitor.
• still can't find ammo for rocket launcher. My only shot went past the super mutant I intended to shoot and killed another further away. Beautiful happy accidents.
• They had a stacked voice cast. Jim Cummings, Tony, Ron Pearlman, Richard dean anderson, Cree Summer, David Warmer, Tony Jay, Clancy Brown, and so many others.
• The best written Fallout? Not in overall narrative, but it was very thoughtful in writing out the choices and letting them play out. Especially if intelligence is 1 point.
• There's something very special about the crude full motion videos back in the day.
• I would love to have Fallout return to the table top style game play one day.
• I will play Fallout 2 as soon as I get all the good endings and exterminate all the deathclaws.

Now here is a perfect action game that doesn’t take itself seriously while offering a superb gameplay loop that is very rare this and last generation. I wasn’t keen on playing it due to GOW comparisons assuming it would be inferior and what looked like a very arcady style but needed to try something different after a while and very happy I did.

The premise is simple Cowboys (good guys) VS Vampires (bad guys). You are Jessie one of the agents for Rentier Institute that is tasked with the ridding of the supernatural Vampire menace that threatens to transform the world as we know it.

The gameplay while simple is one of the best examples of its type. Traversing the highly linear yet beautiful and varied environments you are essentially navigating from one heavy encounter to the next. Commonly known as an “arena fighter” this game pits players up against progressively challenging blood sucking hoards with a big boss at the end. The enemies are reasonably varied both in their design and behaviour and bosses are recycled during later stages as regular foes.

To deal with the increasingly difficult scenarios you start with a base arsenal of a rifle, revolver and a gauntlet each sitting on a progression tree that adds ridiculous power ups and perks. New weapons are acquired as the game progresses, gradually turning Jessie into an unstoppable killing machine.

The action is the best of its kind. Far from a simple button mashing affair each move set has just enough variety so that you have to remember the combinations and abilities without getting lost. One minute you are unloading a full clip into the face of some haemoglobin starved vampires, the next you uppercut growth hormone infused brutes with your electrically charged gauntlet before pile driving them to dirt. As the screen fills with a large number of enemies the blood and goo is almost palpable.

The graphics are great. Well detailed characters, highly destructible encounters, much comical blood and vampire leftovers everywhere. Played on PS5 in both quality and performance mode. Quality mode is great and I got used to 30fps quickly but settled on performance mode which retains all the details at 60fps and looks great on a 49” TV.

The simple action is accompanied and elevated by a superb soundtrack and frequent cinematics of high quality. This keeps the narrative constantly moving forward and just when you think you want to take a break you’re once again knee deep in some “foul blood’s” guts.

The story is simple and with the gameplay being the main focus it doesn’t carry much in its depth. But that’s not the point of this game.

Some compare it to GOW. And while the depth of the story is nowhere close in some ways the traversal mechanics and the arena style combat are similar. Chests that need to be smashed in an all too familiar style, climbing up and down the chains. But it’s the frequency of the encounters, the music, the arsenal and quick story pacing that really do make this stand out as a different beast.

The game is short and over the 16 levels that can be completed in a few sittings you may get to the point where it starts to border on repetitive. But that’s exactly when the game ends.

In short. If you want a very entertaining game to get stuck into after work/study this is highly recommended. It doesn’t require much commitment and the endorphin returned on time invested is high.

Check it out 🤠

The sun is reflecting off of Trico's feathers. The wind is blowing by. Unsettling noises can be heard in the distance, threatening roars. Yet the boy is calmer than he has any right to be. Having the beast by his side gives him strength.

I love The Last Guardian.

I love it's art style, and the atmosphere it creates; I love it's unique and intriguing world-building; I love it's level design, and the way it simultaneously creates interesting challenges for the player to overcome, and helps immerse the player into the world through it's use of believable structures; most of all, I love Trico, and the relationship he and the boy develop throughout their journey.

And yet, citing all those things that make the game great would be an incomplete telling of this story. After all, in the years following the game's release, most of the discussion around it has not been about those elements. Instead, they often focus on it's flaws, or more specifically the one flaw that permeates most of it. The fundamental flaw of The Last Guardian.

To those unaware, The Last Guardian is a game about a boy and a giant beast making their way through ancient dilapidated ruins. With many of it's paths being now unusable, the only way to move through the world is with the help of the beast, Trico. You control the boy, and you can use him to give commands to Trico, such as jump, attack, look in a direction, etc.

However, in an effort to make Trico feel less mechanic, more like a real animal, he does not always obey your commands. Instead he will often misunderstand you, ignore you, get distracted, things of that nature. He is very much not an extention of the player. This works great to fulfill this goal, Trico does indeed feel very real, and as a consequence so does your relationship with him. You will learn tricks to get his attention, you will get mad at him when he won't do what you want, you will feel proud when he does the right thing before you tell him to. Through this process you will grow to love him.

A lot of the time, this works as intended. The ugly problem rears it's head, however, whenever the player isn't entirely sure what to do next. You see, when there's a clear platform to go to, you tell Trico to jump to it, and he doesn't, it's very clear that he just didn't understand you, or didn't see you pointing to it. But what happens when the platform is more far away than usual? What happens when the task you're trying to accomplish is more complex? What happens when you yourself is unsure if Trico could do what you're telling him to?

The Last Guardian is a puzzle game. There wouldn't be much to it if the majority of it was just a series of easy to spot objectives. Instead, you often have to experiment, to try new things, to think outside the box.

In such events, a big side effect of Trico's unreliable AI is that from the point of view of the player, it becomes impossible to distinguish cases where Trico is just being difficult, from cases where an action is flat-out impossible.

As a result, there will come countless situations where the player will insist too much on a wrong idea, blaming their lack of success on the beast's AI, or instead will give up too early on a correct idea, only to be stuck for minutes looking for other solutions when all they should've done was insisted. This taints most puzzles in the game, and the frustration from either of those cases is immense.

And that is why I called this a fundamental flaw. Both the immersive control ambiguity and the puzzle filled gameplay loop are core parts of the game, and in a vacuum, they both achieve what they set out to perfectly. However, when put together, those elements will inherently clash with each other, creating a product that is less than the sum of it's parts.

And thus is the tragedy of The Last Guardian. Without sacrificing one of those core elements of the game, the other can never achieve their full potential. At the same time, removing one of them makes their respective area that much weaker. The developers were faced with a choice to sacrifice the player's relationship with Trico for their core gameplay loop, or sacrifice their core gameplay loop for the player's relationship with Trico. They chose to sacrifice neither. They both suffered for it.

At the end of the day, it's difficult to say if that was the correct choice to make, but this is when we circle back to what I said in the beginning. I love this game. I love it's level design. I love bonding with Trico. Even if those elements are not as good as they would individually be, even if it sometimes frustrates me to no end, I'm still glad for the experience of playing it. Were one of those sacrifices to happen, would there still be much left to the game? Enough to make it as unique and engaging an experience as it is now?

And so, to close this out, I would like to recommend you give The Last Guardian a chance. It is certainly not a game for everyone, but if you're willing to try and look past this monumental flaw it has, there's certainly something worthwhile hidden underneath. In the game, an experience like no other; and in Trico, a friend.

Thank you for reading.

Welcome to the Daily Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here. Also a reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

I've recently acquired a PSP 2000 to play some handheld games. It's a nice device, but I'm not finding many games that I enjoy on it.

The closest I've got was with "Jeanne d'Arc," which I abandoned during the last boss fight, so I thought it might be worth writing a review. At the end, I'm also listing a few games I tried before but dropped quite quickly.

"Jeanne d'Arc" is a polarising game for me. On one hand, it has a beautiful visual style and fun squad-based tactical combat, on the other hand, it has a very messy story and a boring second half. Many reviews highlight it as one of the gems of the PSP, but it did not manage to win me over.

The game uses the usual low-res texture 3D of the PSP to its best extent and is really pretty to look at; each stage is like a small diorama that you enjoy exploring. The only visual downside for me is that the characters have oversized heads, which was very much immersion-breaking.

The story starts interestingly, with fully-animated cut-scenes and hinting at a bigger plot. More or less, it even delivers, with some strong expectation-shifting moments. But it is all very much undercut by incredible underwriting of the dialogue. What should be lengthy discussions about the situation, motivations, and actions are usually boiled down to incredibly short, one-line conversation exchanges, which kill any investment you might have in the story.

Now for the gameplay, which is the biggest strength and eventually a weakness. The character abilities are interesting, finding new ones, and eventually merging them to create even stronger powers—it's all fun. The squad size for a tactics game is also pleasant, with 5-ish characters in each fight; it feels varied, but not overwhelming. However, I feel the game should have been at least one-third shorter; in the second half, the encounters start feeling really repetitive and even remove many of the fun strengths of the combat (e.g., the last enemies ignore the inherent rock/paper/scissors mechanic).

I got to a point where I kept playing the game just because I wanted to finish it... But then came the next-to-last mission where I was faced with an enemy that had much higher defense stats and regeneration than anything I had faced before, and I just physically couldn't put enough damage to hurt them. At that moment, I was faced with loading a save point several missions before, grinding to make my team more efficient, and redoing it all... But I just didn't care, so I stopped there. It's a pity, but I was just not having fun.

As mentioned above, here are some of the other PSP games I dropped:

• "Split/Second": Fun racer, though with the PSP's lack of anti-aliasing it was often hard to see the road ahead. But what eventually killed my interest were the time-trial races, which are several levels more difficult than anything else and I just couldn't beat them well enough to progress.
• "Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions": The amount of characters was too high and the game seemed overwhelming, so I dropped it very quickly.
• "Half-Minute Hero": Interesting concept, but got very repetitive.
• "Auditorium": Interesting concept, but when I had to start combining several sound colours in one bar, it started to be too complex of a puzzle for my enjoyment.

I was seriously surprised by Survivor. I picked it up on a whim around Christmas as I felt like a bit of star wars over the festive period and quite enjoyed the original.

I wasn't expecting to fall in love with it and actually find a game that is the modern version of old school Zelda that I have been craving.

Survivor is a great mix of semi-open world spaces that you unlock gradually as you acquire certain tools and abilities, old school Zelda style, coupled with an absolutely killer fighting system. Oh, and the story is actually pretty engaging and there's some fun platforming chucked in as well.

The fighting system is ultra tight and hits a perfect difficulty level of needing you to engage and think about the skills you need to unlock, practicing those skills, but not becoming so Dark Souls that you need to endlessly repeat the same sections of the game over and over. When you get good, you really move and look like a Jedi. It's very fun.

Exploring the semi-open world is the biggest difference with the original and really elevates this game to something special. The world is chock full of interesting things to find and tons of secrets. It really gives you that old school Zelda feeling of empowerment as you build out your capabilities and start dominating the environment and its huge variety of enemies.

In a further nod to old school Zelda, there's a bunch of proper, in depth dungeons to find and explore. They each employ unique mechanics and have a load of really interesting puzzles. Make sure you turn off the hints system as the puzzles are all very logical and satisfying to work out on your own. The environment design of these dungeons is also excellent with lots of interlocking path design and some great surprise moments.

Finally, the story is engaging and the game excels at epic set pieces. Seriously, two of these set pieces towards the end of the game really took me by surprise as one introduced a completely new element to the game right at the end (which was also very fun and dramatic) and the other made me focus in on the fighting system in an incredibly pure way that completely aligned to the dramatic beat in the story.

Survivor was definitely my game of the year in 2023 and I highly recommend it to all. Particularly those people missing the old school Zelda type of game.

A game that prohibits you from progressing past a certain point may have a message that looks something like this: "You need the [insert ability/gadget here] to complete this task. Come back later when you have it."

This mostly applies to older platformer games like Spyro 2 and 3 but even some more modern ones like Ratchet and Clank do this. Do you like or dislike this type of game design?

On one hand, I think it can sometimes hurt pacing. If I'm returning to a world/place that has already been "completed" from a story perspective, it doesn't make sense to be back there. On the other hand, it does feel exciting to unlock a previously unreachable area once I obtain a new ability or gadget.

In Spyro 2 and 3, this happens often. In 2, there's several abilities that need to be unlocked like swimming, climbing, and head-bashing to complete a level. In 3, there's characters that have to be "released" to play their side missions in previous levels. Ratchet and Clank follows a similar formula, which for me, gave it a particularly old school feel.

I’m sure there have been a bunch of people with similar experiences to mine. I bought and tried new Vegas a while ago and bounced off of it due to there being other games that I wanted to play at the time, and because I wasn’t playing with any mods to enhance the experience. After watching and really enjoying the show, I decided to restart the game (i was really only 3 hours in on my first attempt) and was completely hooked.

Playing this game after playing a paladin in dnd convinced me to be a charisma character, which I later realized was a bit of a useless stat, but it turned me into a master of manipulation. I loved that I could talk my way out of any situation and that skills had a concrete succeed or fail effect on a check (no rng).

I loved that so many quests had me questioning if I had made the right decision and that at the end of the game the slides told me the lasting impacts of choices that I didn’t put much thought into at the time. It is incredible how much player freedom is given throughout the entire playthrough and it makes me feel the need to create a completely different character and pick another side in the battle for the dam.

It really is a special experience that makes me upset that Bethesda hasn’t incorporated any of these rpg elements into their games. I realize it is a very different approach to game design, but new Vegas forced me to genuinely think about who I felt comfortable helping and what the impacts of that help might have.

It can be a bit hard to get into, but for a game from 2010, it holds up incredibly well. There are always mods to improve the combat and graphics, but the storytelling and player freedom are worth the price of admission.

I’ve been playing Knights of the Old Republic on and off for probably close to a decade at this point. I bought it whilst at uni, my laptop could barely run it and I got as far as Dantooine, where the graphics were just too much. Since then I’ve started it a few times, getting soft locked after running past an enemy I then couldn’t run back past without dying.

A few years ago I started again, and I’ve been playing on and off since then. Recently picked it up and finished Manaan, Korriban, the Leviathan and finally the Star Forge. It’s very much an old BioWare game - I’ve played Mass Effect, and you can see the link from KOTOR to those games, albeit they’re less RPG and more action/shooter.

Gameplay was enjoyable enough - I liked exploring planets, talking to NPCs, and there were lots of different side quests and different ways to accomplish things. However, for me the end of the game really left a sour taste for the rest of the game.

Firstly - the Star Forge is just endless enemies. It made me not want to explore, and far from feeling epic with high stakes, it just felt frustrating. However, that was manageable, and it doesn’t come close to comparing with the mess that’s the final fight against Malak.

Far from being some awesome confrontation, it was a messy frustrating fight. Suddenly, I spent almost the whole fight hopping into the menu to spam healing items - not only that, but having to scroll through every single item to find what I wanted. I barely saw any of the lightsaber combat, it was just menus, and every now and then running away to spam heals and save. The frustration was added because every now and then Malak would just stun my character, which almost inevitably meant death and a reload.

TLDR: KOTOR is a really fun RPG with engaging characters and quests, which ends in a damp squib with an incredibly frustrating and tedious final level/boss fight.

Welcome to the Daily Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here. Also a reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

Granted, this may be a bit of a flaw with the German rating system, with games getting rates suitable for 0,6,12,16 and 18 year olds, but damn, Insomniac didn't really hold back with this one.

You see how people get killed, you have an on camera suicide, you have suicide bombers, you experience a hostage situation from the view of a civilian and so on. Even with Spider Man himself you often feel like you are outright killing the bad guys with how you throw them around, smack them into walls or throw heavy stuff like car doors or manhole covers at them.

And I really like this. Showing how civilians are getting killed adds more weight to a game and shows that everything isn't just sunshine and rainbows, but that the people really are in danger and that heroes like Spider Man are actually needed.

And I'm positively surprised that Insomniac was brave enough to show these moments this openly, instead of hiding or just implying them like other games do. Even Spider Man Web of Shadows, most likely the game with the highest civilian bodycount, wasn't that blatant.

It's honestly hard to explain just how addictive and fun this game is, especially given its relatively slim content. Sifu only has five levels in total that really aren't particularly long and an experienced player can reliably complete the campaign in about a couple hours, and yet I find myself coming back to it over and over again. The combat is just so dynamic and satisfying that it never seems to get old - if anything, it just gets better over time as you develop a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the moveset and how to best apply different maneuvers in different situations.

Part of what I enjoy about it is how it encourages you to play aggressively, because the enemies themselves are aggressive and your character is somewhat of a glass cannon. If you attempt to just stand in place and block, dodge and parry everything, they will quickly pile on and whoop your ass, as they have no problem attacking all at once when given the opportunity (particularly on Master difficulty.) In this way the game encourages you to push the offense, mind your positioning, use the environment to your advantage and just generally be situationally aware. Its about strategy, improvisation and tracking and managing the crowd so that you're not overwhelmed.

At least... that's how the game is most of the time. See, the one thing I really don't like is the boss fights, because during these encounters all those things I praised earlier kind of go right out the window. You're stuck in a one-on-one duel with an enemy who's moves all have priority over yours and who evades and counters all your attacks, and so now you're instead forced into a very defensive playstyle - you passively memorize and react to the boss' moveset with dodges and parries, only throwing out a few hits of your own during the very brief counterattack windows lest you be punished for overextending, rinse-and-repeat. I wind up relying almost solely on the parry and 'raining strikes' moves to deal damage during these bits and, for as thematically cool and well animated as they are, they just feel like an annoying, unavoidable chore you have to go through to finish out the otherwise very enjoyable levels.

I am glad that the game did eventually get some more content in the form of the arena challenges (though it's unfortunate that they never added an endless mode,) and with the ability to add modifiers to the campaign you can drastically alter the experience and even ratchet up the difficulty if you're a sadist. I recently managed to make it through the first level with stronger+faster enemies enabled on Master difficulty to really make every fight hectic and challenging and, while it was extremely hard, it remained fun the entire time because as I said, it's about strategy, improvisation and crowd control - each attempt felt unique and involving. Unfortunately, you still gotta fight Fajar at the end and he's always the same.

TL;DR: Infinite Space isn't for everyone. But if you have patience for a game with a steep learning curve, a lot of micromanagement, and probably too much wandering around & grinding, it offers a genuinely unique and involving 'silver age' space opera experience with you in the captain's chair.

So what happens when two relatively young developers decide to collaborate on an absurdly over-ambitious epic space opera JRPG, on hardware never intended for such a 'heavy' game, despite having never actually made an RPG before? Well, when one of them is Platinum, and they have substantial financial backing from Sega, it works out better than it probably should have.

Story and Tone

Infinite Space puts you in the shoes of Yuri, a farm kid on a backwater planet who dreams of sailing the Sea of Stars. With the help of a hired mercenary named Nia, he manages to get his own ship and sets off on an epic journey which seems him get involved in galaxy-spanning wars while fighting for the survival of the human race. Pretty standard stuff for a space opera, but these sorts of games are rare. In terms of tone, it feels like a mashup of Legend Of Galactic Heroes with the Lejiiverse, along with some Star Wars and Arthur C. Clarke influences.

You also have a wide and varied cast of potential crew members, as well as dozens and dozens of NPCs spanning a half-dozen different planetary alliances. Their portraits are all distinct, and they are given distinctive personalities that fit well with the space opera vibe, from stoic soldiers to flamboyant aristocratic privateers. My big complaint here is that there are only maybe a dozen "main" characters who get substantial development during the story. Too many potentially interesting side characters only get a couple extra scenes, when you're hanging out with your crew while planetside, and otherwise go ignored.

And to be clear, this is NOT an open-universe space life sim type of game. It's mostly linear and narrative-driven, with a ton of Visual Novel-style cutscenes. You're almost always limited in which sectors you can explore, and while there are side quests, they're typically pretty basic - such as hauling cargo from A to B or clearing out a local pirate's nest. There are numerous points where plot progression halts, until you find the right NPC to talk to, which can definitely get annoying.

OTOH, if you've ever wanted to fly alongside Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas, this is about as close as you can get.

Gameplay

Where IS gets interesting is how it feels like the developers were reinventing the wheel at every turn, probably due to their lack of experience with RPGs. Ship combat isn't quite like any other game I've ever played.

The play field is reduced to a single line - your distance to the enemy fleet. However, tactical positioning is vital because weapon ranges are a key aspect of combat. Over the course of the game, you'll be able to build a fleet of up to five ships, and you get six basic options for combat:

• Normal: Fires off all the in-range guns on your fleet once.
• Barrage: All guns fire three times in sequence for a massive hit.
• Dodge: You'll avoid all enemy barrages and special attacks, but normal attacks do more damage.
• Fighters: Launch waves of fighters, once you have them, which halt the enemy with ongoing damage.
• AA: Use Anti-Aircraft guns, if you have them, to clear out enemy fighters.
• Melee: Board the enemy ship from close-range and fight them to take over the ship.

In addition, you can move forward, back, or stop. And various combinations of officers and ship types will also provide up to three special attacks and/or support abilities.

All actions are gated by a universal regenerating power meter, with various actions requiring different amounts of power. The speed with which you regain power depends on a number of elements, including your officers, your upgrades, and your crew's fatigue levels.

Enemy fleets are governed by the exact same rules as you, which makes battles reasonably fair. However, you don't get any insight into the state of the enemy's ships, so you have to use observation and guesswork to predict their next moves. For example, has the enemy not fired in awhile? They're probably in "dodge" mode, so you should wait to use your powerful attacks until after they attack first, to increase your chances of hitting them. Some bosses even border on being puzzle bosses, demanding you make smart use of the game's systems.

This can make for surprisingly tense battles - although probably too tense, early on. One of the game's biggest problems is that neither the manual or tutorials actually give much strategic insight. This makes for a very steep learning curve, and your first 10 hours - at least - will be very sweaty, with frequent deaths as you try to figure things out. In general, the game doesn't explain many of its systems, and expects you to spend a lot of time experimenting. Nobody holds your hand in space!

The difficulty curve does flatten out after awhile, at least if you're diligent about keeping your ships intact and upgraded. It's possible to eventually build a stupidly powerful fleet which can absolutely humiliate most enemies, if you do your job right.

And doing your job right means proper preparation and fleet management, which are at least as important as your own combat prowess. Over the course of the game, you'll accumulate dozens of officers to assign to various roles, and even more modules which can be bolted onto your ships. Ship upgrades are handled like inventory management. Every ship has a certain number of upgrade spots, arranged in a grid, and upgrade modules have tetris shapes. You're free to put whatever upgrade you want onto a ship, assuming you can find space to cram it in there. There are a lot of different possibilities to explore, in terms of creating your own combat strategies.

Oh, and melee combat sucks. It's an annoying rock-paper-scissors minigame, which seems to be universally disliked among fans. It's almost guaranteed you'll ONLY do melee when the game forces you to. But don't forget to assign decent officers to your security team and install some mods to boost melee damage, or else you'll get creamed when it is required.

Presentation

Infinite Space was probably one of the most expensive NDS games made, and it shows. The production value is extremely good, at least for a console that's basically a portable 5th gen system. The graphics are about as good as you could hope for, with very distinct ship types. The developers also got creative in trying to depict their space mayhem within its graphical limitations, making for a charming low-fi aesthetic which occasionally feels like it's pushing the little DS to the limit.

They hired famous animation studio IG to do the opening anime cinematic, as well as drawing the character portraits and 'cinematic' still shots. They even got the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra to record the soundtrack, which honestly feels like overkill given how all the music samples get crushed to hell to fit on a DS cart. At least the music is good.

The game's interface is... iffy. It's not terrible, but there are some weird choices, and some actions are somewhat nonintuitive. Crew management, in particular, feels like more of a chore than it should be. Likewise, navigating the sector map involves a strange zoom-in/zoom-out 3D presentation, when they probably should have just gone with a more traditional top-down map. Again, it's like they were trying to reinvent the wheel at every turn.

Conclusion

In short, Infinite Space mostly lives up to its reputation as a cult classic forever trapped on depreciated hardware. (Aside from emulation.) It requires a high level of patience to learn its systems, and put up with its quirks. I'd actually compare it a bit to the MegaTen franchise, in terms of giving the player significant freedom to craft their own strategies, while also throwing a lot of difficult challenges at you with no mercy for people with poor builds.

But if you persevere, Infinite Space is a rewarding game, and not quite like anything else out there.

I finally dug out some old target gift cards and took the plunge on SSB Ultimate! I love the N64 original and Melee, and never actually played Brawl. Ultimate seems really cool and slick and full of thrilling characters and SO many stages. Very excited to go down this rabbit hole.

I did have one question: Am I crazy, or do the controls feel a little... mushy, maybe, compared to Melee? It may just be that the rhythm of the animation vs. timing my inputs has changed significantly and I need to get used to it... I feel like I'm twitchy enough to be executing certain movement and attacks at the right moments, but sometimes I'll need to mash the same input repeatedly to get it to happen even later than I wanted.

This is such a beloved game in a beloved fighting series that the issue must be that I'm not acclimated. Did they make it less possible to interrupt your own movement/animations? Is there some other adjustment I can keep in mind to "translate" my Melee muscle memory a little?

Thanks for reading :) Love this sub.

I’ve played just about every pokemon game up to X/Y era then lost interest in the same recycled gameplay. Somehow Arceus missed my radar and I never gave it a second look, almost did with scarlet and violet but then heard they were trash.

Arceus gameplay is great, semi open world. A lot of challenges and side quests. Freedom to roam around and do whatever you like. Seeing new pokemon is a fun new challenge, sneaking up, attack or catch. The crafting system is basic but it’s fresh compared to just going to a pokemart. It’s basically horizon zero dawn and Zelda had a baby. lol. Battling is also fun being able to run around the battle or when I know I’m gonna win I can just start running away early and let it finish.

I’m not sure if I’d like it as much playing on switch though. I’m playing on Yuzu at 4k upscaling, then moonlight to whatever device I’m using. It’s been a. Great experience.

Heart gold will always be my perfect pokemon game. I give Arceus a 8.5/10. Only negatives are the constant talking with the story and it’s a story I don’t really care about. Then the music is so repetitive, it’s better to play on mute when you are jumping into a lot of battles. Im glad to see they are making another legends game and to see how they improve it.

Welcome to the Daily Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here. Also a reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

The PS1/N64 Generation is when I came of age and started to enjoy games on a different level than before. While some games now I simply enjoy out of nostalgia, others had cool and/or interesting design & stylistic choices that I still find compelling to this day.

Galerians was an edgy survival horror game with a cool grungy aesthetic where you take copious amounts of drugs that give you various psychic powers (it's like if Akira and Resident Evil had a baby). There still aren't many games nowadays where you utilize psychic powers in combat (I also really like the idea of an entirely ranged combat system with no guns) so it stood out to me in the deluge of other Resident Evil knockoffs. Your character is basically a teenage drug addict and you are essentially managing a drug addiction in the game; if you take too many drugs you can "short out", which overclocks your abilities and essentially turns you invincible to enemies--annihilating everything in your path--but your health rapidly drains while active, so you have to use this mechanic wisely when you are desperately outnumbered and have no choice (given the limited health items and other resources characteristic of survival horror). Galerians, being a survival horror from that era, still uses those tank controls which can feel a bit dated and I don't think tank controls are particularly suited to it's more action-oriented gameplay, since you're supposed to kill enemies for the most part and not run away. What I still find compelling about Galerians is the overall vibe, which is pure late 90's edge: The story is bleak, the characters are miserable & nihilistic, the whole aesthetic is somewhere between grunge and y2k 2000's style futurism...

...And damnit there are psychic powers. We need more games with psychic powers

I enjoy the Borderlands games. I really do! But their continued insistence on talking into my ears, all the time, with zero breaks, is becoming a real problem for the series to the point where it's actively ruining them.

I recently finished Borderlands 3, including its DLC packs. An overall joyful experience. The gameplay is smooth as butter, the never ending stream of new guns and abilities keeps the game fresh throughout its (surprisingly long) runtime, and the presentation is overall great with an exciting soundtrack and beautiful maps. I'd heard plenty of complaints regarding the amount of dialogue and the quality of it (and I thus realize that much of what I say here is nothing new) and yeah... people weren't lying.

Borderlands 3 is a game that simply never shuts up! The sense of humor is one thing - I don't personally vibe with it but plenty people do and that's fine. But 3, more than any other game in the series, seems more concerned with shoving its obnoxious characters down your throat than letting you engage in the actual gameplay.

Again, the game plays wonderfully, but the sheer number of hours I must've spent merely standing and listening to insufferable dialogue almost makes me want to not bother trying another run with a different character. It's all too much!

It genuinely bothers me as, clearly, a lot of extremely talented developers worked on this game. It's genuinely baffling to me how you'd have such a great game on your hands only to seemingly do everything in your power to NOT have the player engage with it for extended periods at a time. Especially with NO way to skip it. Who thought this was a good idea?

I'm excited for where the series goes next, but Gearbox needs to understand that games are meant to be played, not just listened to. Because ultimately, Borderlands 3 is merely a good game that talks way too much, yet has nothing to say.

Welcome to the Daily Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here. Also a reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

The last of us 2

I've seen this game criticized for It's story so much that people completely miss out on the gameplay. Or probably just choose to ignore it, say that gameplay is mediocre because the story has ruined the whole experience for them.

I love these characters but if the game plays the way it plays, I couldn't give a rats ass of what happens in the story, and for me, Gameplay makes up for everything, even intrigues me in the story thoroughly.

I've seen some complaints that It's outdated, I don't know what we are comparing this to? But to me what the game does, does better than what other games do. Shooting is phenomenal and so satisfying, It does it better than Rockstar, Remedy.. Melee is fantastic too, crafting and exploration IMO does it better that those survival games that are known for it, because you will always find something interesting while exploring, a cool note, a surprise by zombies, interesting monologues, dialogues. (I'm not saying It's better than stuff like Day Z, but for a singleplayer story driven game, It is pretty phenomenal)

I didn't feel like a stealth, ninja, assassin this way since the old splinter cell games, and this is that but up by 100.

It also gives of that Resident Evil vibe with exploration, resource management and puzzles. Even though the puzzles are a bit bare boned, It's still nice that it has some inclusions here and there.

But I've caught myself dozens of times just trying to save ammo, not waste it, especially versus stuff like shamblers. And once I actually killed a shambler, It didn't feel just like another zombie kill, I actually felt pretty cool about it since I'm playing on grounded. Making it that moment " Holy shit Ellie, you just took out a shambler "

What do you guys think? Did the story ruin the overall experience for you, or did you get a kick out of the gameplay?

Edit :By the way I got a dm from someone who got upset that I liked the game and told me that I should reconsider it. Really creepy.

after playing some shooter games earlier this year, i wanted to try something more "intellectual".. i'm surely just a noob, i'm not intellectual, but i've had my eyes on this game Gray Matter for a long time..

it's a modern 3D point-and-click adventure from 2010. i'm not sure if you guys would call the game 3D, i mean the characters and some objects in the game are 3D, but most background scenery is 2D. anyway, the graphics were good for me, the gameplay is awesome, simple and helpful user interface, puzzles great too, and about puzzles, i really liked the "magic" tricks system within the game - i've almost never seen something similar, except in a remake or remaster for king's quest 3..

so in this game king's quest 3, sometimes you had to craft certain potions for special occasions iirc. it's been almost 20 years since i played that game, i'm not even sure if i've ever finished it, so i don't remember much. i just remember there was this place with a witch and her big black cauldron - so you just dropped the right ingredients in the cauldron and you got your potions. well this magic tricks system in Gray Matter reminds me of that old game, maybe Jane Jensen the developer for Gray Matter got inspiration from it, especially since she worked at sierra online, the developers of the king's quest series..

it's also good that i almost never needed to cheat in gray matter, i've figured out almost all puzzles by myself.. but at the end of chapter 2, i looked everywhere and i couldn't get the last +3 bonus points.. i thought i did everything but the problem was that i had to do 2 things in the correct order, and 1 thing was really at the end of the chapter - that's why i missed those 3 bonus points.. anyway, those points were just optional, i could have continued playing without them, but it tempted me, so i read how to do it in a walkthrough.. also, if anybody would like to play this game, for curiosity, it took me over 16 hours to finish it - the game seems to have a counter for time while game isn't paused.. so what more to say.. it was an excellent game, i'd rate it 5 / 5..

so now that i finally finished this, it means i only have 2 games left in my backlog, but they're both very hard and i don't really feel like touching them anytime soon - time to choose some new games..

I am a console gamer myself, and I have wanted to buy a Steam deck since the day it was announced cause I wanted a powerful handheld console with a bigger library, I also wanted to emulate a lot of games ln it but I kept saying to myself things like "PC gaming is complicated and complex, Linux would make it worse for me" and "I have a console, I don't need a third one" but then I decided to go adventurous and buy one for myself and it may be the best decision I ever made.

1- I started a gaming way more often than I used on my Xbox, and on a daily basis since I got my steam deck, I also noticed that I no longer have backlog complex, I managed to finish a lot of games on my deck and I even rebought games that are on my Xbox backlog, heck my Xbox have been collecting dust since I got my steam deck, I only used it to play one game since it was on gamepass.

2- The controllers were uncomfortable, and the system felt a little heavy for me. It was also painful to hold after long sessions, but over time, I started to get used to it. I also encountered an issue with X button jamming often, but now it's gone.

3- I have to say I am impressed with the battery life. almost all games I played lasted between 3-5 hours. Heck, I even emulated Mario Kart 8 deluxe, and it lasted for 4h, which isn't much shorter than on OG Nintendo Switch.

4- One of my biggest concern were the track pads, I thought they were gonna terrible, but they are doing the job great, of course, they aren't nowhere good as a mouse but they do the job just fine, I tried a lot of mouse only games and I had no issue with them at all although it took me a few hours to get used to using them.

5- Holy shit the Steam sales are that good, I knew they were good but didn't expect them to be that good, it has been 4 months since I got my steam deck but I got 37 games on my library already.

6- Yes, Linux is a nightmare to use, especially as someone who grew up on consoles and wants mod games. There are a lot of tutorials online, but most of them are outdated, and its hard to mod old games. I spend days trying to figure out how to mod some of my games.

7- I noticed that I started to enjoy genres and games I couldn't get into like fallout 4, disco eslyuim and dragon quest, I thought I hate those types of games but playing them on a handheld made the fun for me somehow.

It’s not often that a game can simultaneously interest someone who’s been gaming for over two decades as well as a complete non-gamer. While my partner and I come from vastly different backgrounds in regard to games, we were both hooked on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild from beginning to end; a journey which took over a hundred hours. It’s not a perfect game, but I think it is deserving of the title attached to it so often: a masterpiece.

Gameplay and Mechanics

Yeah, yeah. I get that Breath of the Wild is a cool subtitle, but I think The Legend of Zelda: Ooh, what’s that over there? Oh yeah, I forgot I was going to go check that out; ah fuck, I don’t have any more pins - remember to go to Damel Forest, remember to go to Damel Forest has a certain ring to it, and is a much more apt description of the actual experience of playing the game. The exploration in BotW is fantastic. The layout of the world practically ensures the player’s engagement and commitment to discovery through its visual design and clever placement of rewards (tangible or otherwise). You never know what’s behind the next hill: a fight?; a puzzle?; an NPC?; a shrine?; or something entirely new…? The variety of possible activities significantly helps to reduce the open-world-repetition-itis that comes from relying on combat to carry your game.

Speaking of, combat in BotW gets a resounding pretty good 👍 from me. Unlike many others, I thoroughly enjoyed how weapon durability was implemented; it’s an ethos that Uncharted also adheres to: make the most of what you have. Unsurprisingly, it leads to some wonderful on-the-fly decision-making and emergent narratives. I remember a moment from early on in the game where my only good weapon had just broken in the middle of a fight; I stumbled away from my enemies before spotting a rusty sword buried in the ground. Putting my two braincells together, I realised that because there was a thunderstorm, I could throw it at the advancing group of enemies and use it as a lightning rod. Did I mention how much I love how impactful the weather is in this game?

Outside of these brilliant sprinkles of game design, combat is nothing to write home about, but it’s coated in so much delicious sauce that it’s hard not to seek out fights, despite the slightly underwhelming game feel of moment-to-moment combat. Upon besting a group of adorable monsters, you are usually rewarded with some sweet, sweet loot; although, that loot seems to be a diluted, healthier version of loot, using only natural flavours and wholewheat flour as opposed to the liquid crack I’m used to from the likes of Diablo. While I did enjoy the smorgasbord of aesthetically pleasing weapons, there really wasn’t much variety in terms of gameplay: each armament basically boils down to either being big or small, strong or weak, durable or prone to damage. If weapon drops in BotW are the wholemeal doughnut of gaming, then armour is the plain white toast with a pinch of icing sugar that you found in a bag of decaying rats while searching for your long-lost twin amongst the ruins of society in a post-…

You get the point. I was initially excited by the prospect of game-changing armour pieces after finding one that allowed you to swim up waterfalls. Wow!, I thought, I wonder what other interesting traversal and combat abilities await. Oh, and you can upgrade them to unlock a special ability of certain sets? Sign me up! As it turns out, there are very few armour sets, and apart from the notable exception above, they don’t really do much other than give you more defence or allow you access to areas of the map that are at either extreme of the temperature gauge. It was a bit of a cold awakening to realise that choosing your armour was very infrequently a meaningful choice and more often a matter of administration in order to progress. And those super special set-bonus upgrades? Underwhelming is an overwhelmingly understated statement; oh wow, I’ve always dreamed of a minor stamina boost to my charged attack. To cap off the gameplay section with a few more subjective nitpicks: cooking and horses didn’t really add much to the game - but they didn’t detract from it either.

Art Direction, Sound and Music

There’s a beauty in this game that eludes screenshots. I was repeatedly and consistently awed by the visuals in BotW, and yet every single photo I took did not seem to capture what I experienced. Perhaps it’s the rough textures or the lack of movement that makes screenshots remind me that the game is indeed running on seven-year-old portable hardware; however, I can assure you that while actually playing the game, it feels magical. Each region has a distinct flavour, and, depending on the time of day and weather, can evoke a variety of moods in the player: rainy, ruin-scattered forests create an atmosphere of calming intrigue; windswept deserts under moonlight bring a feeling of isolation; and sunsets on vast plains are surprisingly nuanced in tone. The caveat here is that the designs of many of the inhabited areas feel a bit like an afterthought. Akin to my experience with armour, Zora’s Domain had me eager to experience a variety in culture and architecture that, in reality, was kind of boring: oh, here is the typical Western-European medieval village; oh, here’s the home of the lava-dwelling rock people, - there are rocks and lava; oh, here’s the home of the bird-people - look, it goes up instead of across. The most affecting moments I had were when I was in the wild - in the midst of a forest or the peak of a mountain when the music faded out, allowing the wonderfully-designed natural ambience to shine. Raindrops falling on tree leaves; (breath of the) wind whistling past; thunder in the distance. It was incredibly refreshing to see that these developers understand the power of not blasting a soundtrack at all moments - I only wish they could have leant into this further. The music was always serviceable and often catchy, but very rarely impactful; despite humming along to certain tunes, I cannot recall them days later and have no desire to listen to them outside of the game. I am definitely on team a-soundtrack-is-often-at-its-most-effective-when-you-don’t-notice-it, so this isn’t a major gripe, I just wish they could have been even more sparing with the use of song. Nonmusical sound design in general, though, is another story. Man. It’s just good. There’s such a unique identity to the calming barrage of bleeps, bloops, drips, swooshes, doos, and das that tickle your earholes upon unlocking towers. It’s clear that this was a major focus for the developers and it paid off.

Narrative and Character

Look, I know that the narrative is not a vital part of this experience. You could skip every cinematic and line of dialogue and still have a fabulous time. But it’s still there, so I’ll briefly comment on it. The structure of the game is well-suited to its foci. Having the four divine beasts as milestones effectively gives the player a measure of where they are, progress-wise, while allowing time to explore and do side quests. The story is perfectly adequate but is never moving. I found the whole ‘endless iterations of Link and Zelda’ to be a clever meta-acknowledgement of the absurdity of having recurring characters in different time periods across the series’ long history. All that is fine.

Unfortunately, the dialogue, the voice acting and the characterisation are all poor. (I should note here that I played with the default English settings; I cannot comment on the Japanese). The written dialogue is simplistic at best and grammatically incorrect at worst. The voice acting is so devoid of substance that I honestly think it would have been better with a cast of randomly selected English speakers. Also - Gerudo Town can be pretty gross: cross-dressing is played as a joke; the women-only town’s only class is basically ‘how to find a husband’; and Lady Riju’s physical presentation is a bit too sensual for a child, in my opinion. Just standard Japanese male-gaze stuff, to be honest; a missed opportunity to be more inclusive. Don’t get me wrong, though, compared to many other Japanese games, BotW actually does fairly well in this regard, but the exceptions are noticeable.

Conclusion

While I have spent a fair amount of time critiquing Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it is perhaps only because its flaws are all the more noteworthy in the vast ocean of brilliance. This is truly a magical experience that is accessible to almost any type of gamer: young, old, inexperienced, experienced. It may not be my favourite game of all time, but it definitely belongs on any list of must-plays.