Keyrock

This one is for @Mamoulian War

That was my reaction too. I was like "wait, is liking Twister a controversial stance?" That movie got mildly positive reviews from critics and a lot of people liked it and still do. Gizmodo sure is brave to proclaim their love of a popular and generally well received movie. I don't doubt Twister haterz exist, but haterz exist for everything. If I looked hard enough I bet I could find someone hating on Rashomon. Now, if the article was "Suck It Haters: Why We're Proud To Love Attack of the Clones," then I'd be curious to find out if this was someone trolling or if they had suffered catastrophic brain trauma.

I reached my first ending in Zero Time Dilemma and also the first moment when the game went from simply dark and weird to flat out ****ed up. I was partially shocked and appaled and partially giddy with excitement when it happened. This isn't my first Spike Chunsoft game, so I knew they would go there, and go there they did, but even though I was expecting things to get REALLY dark I was still like "Damn, that's ****ed up!" Anyway, I have a long way to go to unravel all the mysteries, have enough info to make a judgement call on what would be the best possible outcome, and can start to plan out a route that would lead to said best possible outcome. Just to give you an idea of how much the game branches: As you can see, I'm barely scratching the surface.

Since I moved down south my favorite southernism I've picked up is "bless his/her heart." It's the kindest and at the same time most disrespectful way to call someone an idiot.

Ultimately, as with anything else, money is the bottom line. Let's say the big popular game of the day is Middle-Aged Parchment 7 and Floogle's Cloud Gaming offers it, yet almost nobody plays it on Floogle. Subscriber numbers are dropping quickly. Turns out, Byg Tiday's Floppy Nude mod is super popular on Flexus Mods. Suddenly Floogle announces that mods can be enabled on MAP7, even age-restricted mods because they get age data (along with a whole lot more) from the microchip that came with the COVID-33 vaccine that was administered during Ivanka Trump's second term as PotUS (spoiler!)

Mods could be applied server-side, but modders would need to have the game client-side to make mods in the first place. Mods could be made so long as cloud gaming wasn't the only way to play said game. Even in that case, it's still an extra hurdle to modding.

If When Stadia gets abandoned later this year, it will be the least surprising thing ever. When Stadia was announced, pretty much everybody said "it's destined to fail." Cloud gaming may happen successfully one day, but that day is not today. The internet infrastructure has to be there first and the latency problem needs to be solved, or at least reduced a lot more than it has been so far. You can't put the cart before the horse.

As an aside, I was hoping a Kaiju Squirrel would come for the giant acorn in the background.

They signed an exclusivity deal with a platform that has 6 total users?

I will use this somber occasion to post this awesome song again:

I'm slowly going through Zero Time Dilemma. The game starts off kinda dark and messed up right off the bat, but it's not full on Spike Chunsoft demented yet. That's coming eventually, I'm sure. I'm starting to get tiny glimpses into what's going on beneath the surface and the hidden subplots, but for now the surface-level story is the only one that's at all clear. I'm excited to see what dark and twisted places they will take me. The puzzles have been easy and straightforward for now, but I'm sure they'll ramp up in time.

I wonder why the Judgment games aren't on PC (yet?). All of the Yakuza games are on PC, minus the weird Japan-only spinoffs, and Judgment presumably uses most of, if not all of, the same tech. They even share maps and other assets. There's no technical reason for the lack of a PC release and it's on both Sony and Microsoft consoles, so there's no exclusivity deal. I would think they'll eventually appear on PC, there's no reason for them not to, but for now it's console only. Between this and the Shin Megami Tensei 3 remaster, I'll actually have a reason to use my PS4 for the first time in over a year, so there's that.

It takes more than one misfire to turn gamers off a company. Bioware had 2 misfires in close proximiry (ME3 and Andromeda) and there was STILL much hype for Anthem. Even after the Anthem disaster, DA4 still has some buzz. As for investors, the only thing they care about is the bottomline and the bottomline is that Cyberpunk 2077 made a bajillion dollars.

Both AMD and Intel pale in comparison to Microsoft's XBOX division when it comes to sheer stupidity of naming schemes.

The Spiders' games have long been Eurojank budget RPGs. They've always had the heart and the ambition, but never either the prowess or the budget to get there completely. GreedFall feels like the closest they've ever come to realizing what they wanted to create to its full potential. There's still some jank, but this is the least jank Spiders game and the closest to AAA production value they've ever come (still not quite there, mind you). This is the best that combat has ever felt in a Spiders' game. It's still pretty much the same combat system they've used in all their games, but it just kinda works better. It flows better, the feedback feels better, and you have a lot of tools at your disposal. I didn't go much into the magic skill trees until the very end when I had already gotten everything I wanted for my build and I just had a couple extra points to spend, but I can tell you that firearms feel great. I think it's a combination of good sound design and good feedback , both the recoil of firing a blunderbuss and the knockback on the victim. Guns just feel appropriately loud and punchy. Melee is pretty good too, dodging and parrying both work well. You have a normal attack, a secondary attack, and a special attack, which you need to build up your fury to use. These attacks change depending on your weapon type. For example, with a 1 handed sword your secondary attack is a kick, which is quick, hard to parry, does little damage, but it's great for breaking guard and unbalancing the opponent. With a 2 handed heavy weapon (hammer, axe, etc.) your secondary attack it a big overhead smash. It's slow, but it does lots of armor damage and can generate a small shockwave that does some AoE damage. I can't comment on m&kb controls, but the game felt great with a controller. I thought the default controller scheme worked really well. It lets you bind a whole bunch of actions to the limited buttons you have to work with on a gamepad via a modifier button (I could have done that anyway with my Steam Controller, but didn't feel the need to since the in-game controls were plenty good enough) and the way it's set up it works really well. I'm not the most dexterous guy in the world, but even with my fat, clumsy fingers I almost never wound up doing actions I didn't mean to do. I had no problem attacking, parrying, firing guns, setting traps, throwing bombs, and casting heals in the middle of an intense battle. Everything worked properly and consistently. If I had a criticism it's that there's too much black & white in the story. They do try a little bit in giving multiple points of view, but it's abundantly clear who's really in the right and who's really in the wrong in most cases. There is a very clear good path and a very clear evil path most of the time. I wish they muddied things a bit more. Also, while they've done a better job of disguising invisible walls than ever before, Spiders does still have them in there and I really hate invisible walls, especially when it's like a couple branches half a foot off the ground. You're telling me my character can't easily step over that?

While I'm waiting for Ace Combat 7 to download I'm going to play Zero Time Dilemma, which is the most recent Zero Escape game. It's part choose your own adventure, part escape the room, and all demented. Basically, imagine if the Saw movies were interactive... and interesting... and didn't suck.

Have you considered moving to England? You'll never have to worry about getting too much sun again!

I finished GreedFall, it took just over 50 hours. Very good RPG, easily Spiders' best effort to date. I'm sure most people here have already played the game, so I won't go into details. Suffice to say that if you've played any previous Spiders' titles then it's like that, just more open, more polished. It makes me excited to see what they develop in the future. I also finished Death Come True, it's an interactive movie where you wake up in a hotel room with amnesia, there's an unconscious and bound woman in the bathroom, and a news report on the television claims you are a wanted serial killer. The premise is simple enough at first, it's a choose your own adventure and when you die you wake up at the beginning retaining the knowledge from before and can make different choices, but then it makes a hard left turn and gets weird... then it gets really weird. It's from a new studio made up of devs that used to work at Spike Chunsoft, makers of the twisted and demented Zero Escape and Danganronpa games, so it's no surprise that the game gets really weird. It's a short game, you can finish it in a single session. I haven't gotten every one of the deaths yet, but I did get the true ending and I got one particularly twisted death that amuses me to no end. It's likely no one else here will ever play the game, I may be the only weirdo here that plays stuff like this, but on the off chance that you do play it, don't read or watch anything about it beforehand. Go in completely blind.

I'm right with them. These days everything needs to be turned into a series or cinematic universe or whatever, because money, but some things are just much much much better left as a standalone, from an artistic point of view. Spec Ops told a story, it told it well, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Story told, message delivered, it's done, finished, over.

Spec Ops is a special game. It's a prime example of the old adage "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". It's not perfect, but it captures the horror of war better than any game I've played. The fact that mechanically the game is such a bog standard, paint by numbers cover shooter works in the game's favor in lulling you into a familiar pattern, and then the weight of your actions hits you like a Mack truck.

The impact of not taking revenge at the end of a game to break the cycle is definitely undercut by the bloody trail of dozens upon dozens of dead bodies Ellie creates on the way to the final confrontation. It's similar in how at the end of Man of Steel Superman saves the one family and has to kill Zod to do it. Even if you don't think about the half dozen ways Supes could have saved the family that didn't involve snapping Zod's neck, the impact of saving that one family of 4 is severely undercut by the 25 mile radius of complete and utter destruction and the hundreds of thousands of mangled, smoldering corpses Supes and Zod caused during their 40 minute rampage. If you're going to make a game where your ultimate moral message is that the cycle of revenge and killing needs to be broken and you have to forgive, maybe, just maybe, give the player the option of proceeding through the game without murdering a whole bunch of people along the way.

The Star Wars prequels CGI has held up amazingly, though: