I don’t think I ever really messed around with crafting, at least that I remember, so if you hate it you’re probably safe ignoring it. That said, if you don’t want to do that but also don’t have the patience to experiment, I’d say probably the best bet would be to just look up recipes online to find the most useful stuff. I really don’t think doing either is going to hurt the overall experience, especially with just how much else is in the game.
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I second this, I’ve had a crafting wiki up today funnily enough to see what was possible and it was super helpful
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RE5 is so hilariously racist. I played exactly up to the same point I do every time when trying to finish it: when the enemies start packing assault rifles while in iso and I regularly had to pause the game to reassure my fiance that yes, I know this all very racist.
Obviously there’s the murdering legions of brown people, but then you get to the fucking swamp village and oh my god what were thinking? Parodically grotesque stuff, even for videogames. Then you realise that this is a game where you literally shoot black people who drop gems that you can then sell for money to buy more guns to shoot more black people. The holdover systems from RE4 stumble into an exact recreation of colonial extraction and create a feedback loop that rewards the player for doing the bad thing.
Just a wildly cursed product on every level. Chris does punch that boulder good though!
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Oh yes, it’s REAL bad! In the village section Chris or Sheva say something about how it’s so awful that whatever evil corporation did this to these people, followed immediately by 2-3 hours of looting their homes and tombs for everything valuable so he can upgrade their magnums. It’s even worse when you think about how these people are infected with the plagas, so they’re not really zombies and are mostly sentient. In RE4 the ganados are shown doing things other than murder, but we never see the enemies in RE5 do anything like that, which has implications about the games’ views on Africans. YIKES. I had read about the game’s racism before, but I honestly wasn’t prepared for it to be THAT racist!
I’m glad to be done with it TBH. From the first 3 or so hours Resident Evil 6 is shaping up much better! I have honestly heard almost nothing about this game, so I’m excited to see if it can stay this good.
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Just finished Observation and that game has an all time great opening - it does a cold open - you’re an AI on a space station, something’s gone wrong and it’s great and spooky and then it hits you with the first reveal, the station’s somehow jumped to Saturn and you might’ve done it, are you HAL 9000ing here?! then bam cuts to an opening credits sequence which is just a delightfully cinematic thing to do.
I found it downhill from there though - there’s some good sequences and the game looks good but the gameplay of fiddling through a thousand different lovingly created and completely obtuse interfaces and bumbling round a space station interior getting mildly motion sick while I fail to find the right hatch to go through for 10 minutes feels very at odds with the sci-fi thriller tone. The story has big ideas but doesn’t really know what to do with them. It also kind of squanders its big moments by making you play a memory game with the supposedly terrifying black hexagon. And then it makes that game really easy as well it just feels so perfunctory and unnecessary! Just let me watch these mysterious glyphs! If you must glyph. I would really have liked for it to explore more the tension of the obedient/disobedient AI instead of stumbling through a somewhat familiar and vaguely realised sci-fi plot.
I’ve also been playing Hades and wow it’s great. I often lose patience with roguelikes but Supergiant’s characters are keeping me hooked in this one thus far. Of course I haven’t beaten it yet so I suppose I could still fall off like I did Dead Cells after beating it once but the combat here is more compelling to me - in fact even though the weapons (and a bunch of enemy types) are essentially ripped straight from Bastion I’m enjoying it quite a bit more than I did Bastion. I think it’s just executed a bit better here, everything feels a bit tighter.
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Accidentally played a little BOTW again the last two days and today I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. How is it so good!
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I’ve been playing BELOW and the best and worst aspect of it is it has no walkthroughs.
I managed to get my lantern stuck in a very difficult to traverse area and I feel its going to take a really long time to retrieve it again, if I could find another shortcut maybe it would be feasible to do it without a ton of prep, but I can’t find any shortcuts that seem close enough to really have an effect.
Anyways, I totally recommend the game for those who like to pick apart systems, and like discovering secrets. It really captures the fun of preparing for a journey and the perils you encounter on the way!
But… god damn it can be borderline unfair at times. I haven’t tried explore mode though, because I was far enough in survive mode that I didn’t want to restart. There’s a chance that would be a much better experience and I might eventually try it if my current predicament is too frustrating.
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So after all the hype, I’m trying Slay the Spire. It’s fine I guess? I don’t really know what I was expecting. One of my favorite table top games is Dominion. My wife’s cousin has every expansion, and we play it all the time. I like that I can clearly see every available card, make a strategy, and stick to it. I don’t like that in StS I can’t see every available card, that I have to adapt to the cards I’m given (lol) and go from there. I don’t even think this is a problem with the game, I just don’t think I like rogue likes. I spent a lot of time on Enter the Gungeon, and I had similar complaints- the rng and unpredictability made it unfun for me.
2020 has obviously been garbage. In making this upcoming point, I want to make it clear that this is obviously a privileged complaint and I could obviously have it so much worse. But I’ve tried to get into games, just incredibly unsuccessfully. Hollow Knight made me realize I just don’t like Metroidvanias. The Pokémon Shield expansion just felt childish in a way that the older games never felt, and it hurts to feel like the series is not growing with me. The fighting game I love, UNICLR has awful netcode, and without locals I don’t really enjoy playing it. It’s just been a bad year between police turning their guns on us, the citizens, and the US government completely mishandling COVID. I haven’t been able to get into any game since the initial shutdown, and I haven’t listened to a single episode of Waypoint Radio.
This is a long way of saying I’m not really playing anything, but because of that I’m feeling really unaccomplished. Thanks for letting me type it out y’all, I hope everyone here is doing good and we can all make little improvements to the world 
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I gave Hyper Scape a try and it’s okay?
The way it starts off by just dumping you in an area to play around with all the hacks and weapons was really nice in a way that I wish more games that are strictly online shooters did.
It’s open beta so I’m hoping it changes but the weapons look cool and shooting them is fun but it sure does feel like you do next to no damage even with some upgrades. Playing solo the fact that encounters can feel like several minutes long when you run into someone as you both get shots on each other then duck into a room or building just does not feel fun.
I’m not sure what the goal was with the character design but these might be the most bland characters ever. Everything from the way they all look, their descriptions and their voice acting just feels boring. They feel like background NPC’s from a cut sci-fi game. No one doing the VO seemed to have any energy at all. Then again Ubisoft for some reason decided all the playable characters had to have the most boring sounding character bios and look like generic sci-fi NPC’s you would see in the background of a Mass Effect game.
Been in a bit of a rut lately, so I haven’t played much aside from Pokémon. Which for me is kind of just like eating or sleeping or watching sports I don’t care about, in that it’s something I can do to pass time when I don’t want to invest myself in anything.
But, over the weekend I found a youtube channel dedicated to a web game called GeoGuessr, which maybe most people already knew about? It’s been around for a while, as far as I know. If you’re not familiar, the conceit is that you choose a map category (The World, or subsets of it, or particular countries), and the game plops you somewhere in the world via Google Street View. The game part is that you have to pick your landing spot on a world map with no guidance other than what you can find in Street View.
The web version locks you to one game a day unless you pay, but the mobile app seems to be structured differently (it starts with “The World” unlocked, and you earn currency by playing games that you can use to unlock new maps — I’m sure there are microtransactions available too). So I’ve played a couple of rounds on both the browser and mobile versions an it’s… really addictive? I’ve had a couple really cool moments — one was identifying a city in Italy from an overlook because I’d seen it from overhead several years ago, and guessing within a few miles of my landing spot, and another of identifying a spot in Canada from a few miles away by the direction of the mountains and road signs. My best round was getting a perfect score (which is 5000/5000 in its scoring system) by recognizing an intersection between an interstate highway in Missouri, tracing it to two roads that connected to it, and then correctly identifying the bridge I’d been placed under. It’s very simple, but builds up and releases tension so well.
Anyway, I don’t know how religiously I’ll keep playing this, but it’s a really engaging conceit. Feels like the best kind of video game detective work.
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BELOW Update: This is the sort of game five years ago I would have described as “tough but fair” and I would have been a fucking liar.
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I have discovered the Lonely Wolf Treat series thanks to a let’s play, and immediately became way too invested in the story of these cute furries. I had previously played some visual novels made by the same writer during game jams, but hadn’t realized that they’re part of a shared universe. The games are adorable and kind of sad at the same time, which made me think of the discussion about wholesome games. There is both a fantasy racism analogy with the discrimination between species, and a real exploration of identity and gender in the characters’ lives. The writing gets more nuanced and complex as the series goes on, and the later games pack some emotional punch. Despite all that, it also is very pleasant and sweet ; I usually have some hang-ups with the RPG Maker aesthetic, but here the art is just so cute that I could get into it easily, and I am glad I did.
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I can’t articulate why but I agree with you. The stakes and motivations of the antagonists are usually shitty but gen 2 specifically everything felt and looked grimmer and more of the characters just came across as arseholes in a way the newer antagonists eventually don’t. Maybe it’s the character designs? Idk.
ETA: Maybe it’s cause in Gen 2 it’s not just the primary antags that are bad but also loads of peripheral characters like the guy trying to sell you Slowpoke Tails for a million bucks or the random shop owners in Mahogany Town causing a ruckus.
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Someone on the Chapo FYM does regular streams of this and it’s really compelling to watch a fairly small chat helping him work out whether he’s in the Czech Republic or Slovakia. No idea how people work it out at all but it’s cool.
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I think there’s an… offbeat weirdness to older Pokémon games that’s been sanded down over time, and especially so in X&Y and then in Sword/Shield. In RBY and GSC especially there was a very late-90s/early-00s Nintendo offness, like the kind you’d find in the more offbeat Zelda games, or Paper Mario or something like that. Like the suggestion that Kanto and Johto are recovering from a war that no one is willing to talk about, or like the implication that Blue’s Raticate bit the dust after you beat him on the SS Anne, and that’s why you next find him in Lavender Town. (Also… Lavender Town in general.)
There are still flashes of this? Gen 5 had it in spades, and the more I think about them the more I end up marveling at how good the Unova games were. Black and White made mistakes because they actually tried interesting things, and the sequels fixed a lot of those mistakes (like having 5 water pokemon in the entire game). Those games still sanded down the weirdness a bit, but they took all the resulting dust and dumped it into the rusty old Plot Generator that Game Freak keeps in the corner and pulls out for special occasions, and the actual plot of those games is by far the best they’ve ever put together.
I also always forget about the Delta Episode in ORAS, but that was real good too. The implication that these games take place in a multiverse is such an obvious retcon, but it also explains all the canonical differences between these games, their remakes, the growth of mechanics over time, etc. so well that it felt weirdly inspired at the time. Also it was engagingly plotted on a very basic level, which is more than I can say for most of the 3DS games.
The exception there is (specifically) Sun and Moon, which felt like they got this too. Things like Po Town and the Abandoned Megamart had that weird, offbeat vibe to them. Those games also had good character writing with a lot of subtext (and like, some actual text too) about abusive parenting and trauma and stuff that made me go “wait, this is a Pokémon game” as I was playing. And they used the “evil team” trope to deconstruct the absurd conceit at the core of all of these games — getting pushed out of your house at 10 years old onto a journey that will decide the rest of your life. I’m a broken record about Gen 7, but I felt like those games actually had grown up in an interesting way — and that’s why I was so disappointed by Sword and Shield. I liked Isle of Armor I think because I wasn’t expecting much out of it, and getting a bit place to explore was fun, but I think you’re definitely on to something.
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This is a tremendous post, I agree with all of it lol. I think the character designs play a big factor cause what you say is true. Maybe it’s also because I can almost see or understand the motives of nearly everyone in the newer games and they usually have a redemption arc whereas there’s loads of folk in Gold and Silver especially who just love money or being dastardly!
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I’m playing Ratchet and Clank Going Commando
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Finished Undertale’s pacifist route today. Uh… started AND finished I guess. Schedule was wide open.
I beat the Neutral route last year in such a way that I couldn’t return to a previous save to get a different ending, so I waited a while to go through it again. Think doing so was a great choice and I really enjoyed my time. Three things I noticed:
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The game is really funny. I’m not generally a laugh-out-loud guy, but there are a number of those moments in this game. I can’t think of anything that didn’t land off the top of my head. Forgot how good it was.
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There is a TON of dialogue - and I think a lot more in Pacifist. It really sold me on these characters being my friends in a way no other game has managed to. Didn’t meet Undyne properly on my first playthrough and now she’s probably my favorite character from the game.
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I wish it had a difficulty level that let me recommend it more to people who don’t play games. Yes, there’s a hidden item that can help, but that’s reliant on the player being willing to die over and over to get it. I would really love for some of my non-gamer friends to play it because I know they’d enjoy it as a piece of media, but I don’t think they’d be able to play through it without help.
All in all, really enjoyed the game. Pretty late to the party, but I got there eventually.
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We had very similar feelings on Sw/Sh when they came out, and even felt disillusioned around similar points iirc. I LOVED ORAS, particularly the Delta Episode. It was fun and engaging, the last battle was relatively difficult, and it actually prepared the player for future Elite 4 runs. It was the game that got me back into video games in general after taking a few years off, and trying to play X after ORAS was difficult. The game was boring, uninspired, and not difficult. Exploration wasn’t fun, and I never ended up finishing it.
I think this is a huge part of the maturity of the games. In the older games (gen 3-5 in particular) the worlds feel big. For some reason going from town to town in those old maps feels expansive and dangerous (a feeling maintained in ORAS). They are also drawn (animated?) perfectly that you as the player have enough details to know what you’re looking at, but it leaves enough to the imagination to feel like you are creating your own adventure.
The older games also guide the player less, and let them figure stuff out on their own. I remember in Pokémon Sapphire diving around and exploring and finding braille under the water. I didn’t know what it meant—it was mysterious and took me years before I knew what it meant. Those things were cool and formative for me, and they’re either nonexistent in newer games, or really obvious.
I actually want to revisit B/W, and then play B/W2 for the first time and see how they hold up. I’d be interested in playing those again for sure.
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Absolutely this. There’s a sense of scale that’s missing from most of the 3DS and Switch games (though again I think there were some areas in Sun/Moon that managed something like it, like Vast Poni Canyon). I think some of that may almost be due to designing these regions in 3D? In the GBA/DS games, they could build a complex dungeon/mountain/forest or even a full route out of a bunch of repeated textures and objects, and I would think that made it easier to make those areas a) bigger and b) more complex. Because ORAS was a remake, they already had a vast region to work with, but there’s nothing really in Kalos or Galar that resembles those spots in Hoenn — like the routes around Fortree City or the Seafloor Cavern — or that approaches the kind of puzzle that the currents near Pacifidlog Town and the whole Regi sidequest/unlocking mission/whatever you want to call it.
(Basically, they should bring back the Gen III Braille puzzles. Those were neat.)
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