Living fossil.

  • 49 Posts
  • 3.32K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I never said it was a great game. In fact I literally said:

    Genshin has a lot of other problems even gacha aside

    I just said it wasn’t garbage. There is plenty of other actual garbage out there. It looks and plays like a mobile game because it is a mobile game. It’s a mobile game you can play on your PC if you want. But it’s still a 5-year-old mobile game. Expecting it to look like AC Shadows or something is silly. Besides, the BOTW-ripoff-meets-anime art direction really seems to appeal to a lot of people, and art direction is much more important than graphical fidelity anyway.

    The soundtrack and score is genuinely very good and varied, with each area having its own feel and sound to the music. The game is huge and has lots of different areas to explore, each with its own characteristics. The world has lots of little details and puzzles, some that are extremely simple dopamine hits and some puzzles that are somewhat challenging. There is like a hundred hours or whatever of story content to go through that at least quite a lot of people seem invested and engaged in. There are new events every month or so with various things to do.

    Let be clear: I don’t like Genshin personally. I don’t play Genshin. I think there are a lot of problematic elements in it not just with monetisation but with grind, RNG, retention/addiction mechanics, unskippable cutscenes and probably more I’m forgetting off hand.

    It’s still blatantly unfair to call it “garbage”.



  • I’m still neck-deep in solving the mysteries of Blue Prince. Hopefully it’s permissible to talk about here as it’s hardly the most patient of gaming I’ve done (I bought it on release day). It did have a release week 10% sale though so technically I didn’t pay full price?

    The game is absolutely great and it’s extremely hard to talk about without spoilers, which would ruin your experience. It’s a half-roguelite/half-puzzle game and it’s so well made and so intricate. It will take you a little while to start peeling back the layers, but once you start getting into it you realise just how much depth there is under the surface.

    If you have any interest in puzzles you should play this game. Like right now. It’s cheap too, not even €30 full price. It’ll probably be a GOTY candidate and it’s definitely the best new game I’ve played in quite a while. Absolutely beautiful distinctive art style too, which meshes perfectly with the themes of the game.




  • I like the tone and feel here as of yet. People are more friendly, interactions are more pleasant and it feels easier to participate. A higher proportion of comments are worthwhile to read and/or engage with. It’s still small enough that you’ll have your post or comment seen by people instead of being immediately drowned out by one liners and karma farming injokes.

    It’s also still got that homely feeling where it’s small enough that you start recognising usernames, which makes the community feel a bit more closely knit. Sometimes even perhaps being recognised yourself, which makes you feel more like part of a community rather than a faceless Redditor screaming into the void.


  • spoiler

    Drained the fountain, now I need the basement key again. Still don’t know how to get the chests at the bottom of the reservoir as I don’t know how to drain the final bit. Maybe pump room needs to be next to boiler room to get the last tank in play? I’m starting to see I’m going to need to get through insane amounts of RNG to finish. I already basically concluded I probably need the boiler room adjacent to the lab to get the lever machine working.

    I also am tearing my hair out about the

    spoiler

    drawing room safe code. The other safes had the clue in the same room but for the life of me I can’t figure out the paintings with the steps.


  • The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.

    The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.


  • To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.

    (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).

    I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.

    Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.




  • I mean, obviously. You can’t just make a 180 degree change a fucking year before the engines are supposed to be ready. That was just never going to happen. Though if they’d have been forced to throw together something slapdash in a short timeframe maybe we’d have gotten some mechanical unreliability again which would have been fun from a viewers perspective. But no way the teams would have okayed it.

    Whether using V10s or hybrids itself I don’t really care as I see both technologies as ancient and barely road relevant anyway in terms of the future. And it’s not like the cars on track are the biggest problem environmentally with F1 anyway.


  • I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.

    I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.

    The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.

    The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.

    The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.

    The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.

    The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.

    The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.

    Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.