What are you Playing Now? - the man sez Video games are bad for you - fight the man!

[Hawke64]

Finished Signalis. A very pretty game with a lot of irritating design choices. 

The game successfully replicates everything I dislike about older console games - the unrebindable controls, the limited inventory, the severely restricted saving, and obscure ending requirements. Additionally, the most labyrinthine section misses the map. The combat system, with the combination of reviving foes (because zombies), limited ammunition, and the damage dealt depending on the time spent aiming (i.e. the longer you aim at a particular opponent, the higher the damage), is unpleasant, but this is expected and the least irritating of the design choices.

If one can tolerate it and does not care about the outcome, it might be an interesting survival horror in a sci-fi setting, with a strong critique of communism in general and the Soviets/PRC in particular. The puzzles and bosses are easy enough (on the default difficulty) to keep the pacing consistent. Arguably, for the right-handed players with the QWERTY keyboard layout, the control scheme should be comfortable enough.

The system requirements are adequate, the art and sound design are gorgeous (excluding the foes' screams upon noticing the protagonist, which get old fast), and 5-button mice are supported (the 4th and the 5th buttons are used for reloading and using the equipped item). Finally, the game is mostly VA-free (there are some spoken lines in German, but they are in the background).

[Lexx]

Finished Metal Gear Solid Delta. It feels pretty much exactly like the original game, which is good. They improved on the worst elements of the game, which was the way the moving and shooting worked. This now behaves more like in MGSV. I remember that years back, people kept saying that changing this would change the whole feeling of the game, but I disagreed... and now we have proof that it doesn't harm the rest of the game at all. 

Kinda wish they would have went a little further, because hiding in cover and the climbing / dropping down mechanics still feel super clunky (just like in the original). But eh, not the worst. 

Performance really is ass, though. Since I'm not at home right now, I have played it on medium settings on my laptop. Getting constant 30 FPS at least, which is fine. But in comparison, MGSV runs on ultra settings at 60 FPS... and Delta doesn't look *that* much better in the end. So while it's impressive that this technique works (emulating the original game and rendering via Unreal Engine), it does feel terribly bad on the performance side. 

Oh, one more thing... I know David Hayter is iconic, but his line delivery is so cringe in most scenes. Granted, the writing is cringe as well in most scenes, so it's not all on him and his acting chops. But still.. replaying MGS3 like that made me understand why Kojima picked someone else for MGSV.

Edited 16 hours ago by Lexx