Extremely accurate. I don’t like Borderland’s broad sense of humour (that unfortunately, punches down about as often as it punches up) and it’s very insistent that you GET EVERY JOKE. It’s anti-captialist bent was enough to get me through Borderlands 2, but I don’t think I could sit through another one of these.
There’s some genuinely good storytelling in here buried in the side stuff and the game certainly doesn’t lack for representation or capitalism jokes; it’s just the overall vibe that’s kinda blah. If they had the discipline to tell like, 10 really good jokes instead of 1000 jokes of varying quality, I bet it would be a much better game.
Oh, it sucks that this is still present. It was in the beta and was one of several reasons I was sceptical about how Weird West was going to turn out. The other major reason, and one you also mentioned, was the turret-like swivel aiming. That’s a great description and I found it felt just awful, whether I experimented with mouse+keyboard or a controller. But I somehow missed the slow-motion shootdodging you talk about and that I saw in Rob’s stream of it (that, or it just wasn’t working properly for me in the beta).
I really like westerns, and I dig horror takes on westerns (cf. Hunt: Showdown, Bone Tomahawk, etc), so I’m also hopeful that the rough state in which it has launched isn’t anything like a final state. At least it’s on Game Pass so there’s a low barrier to entry, but I’ve seen a lot of very positive reviews that don’t seem to reflect how janky it is, and I wonder how many people are going to try it and bounce straight off it.
To be fair it’s easy to gloss over the shootdodge in the full game too. I wouldn’t doubt the beta just didnt have the one tutorial popup that tells you about it. That or it wasnt there and their solution to bad aiming was ‘fall back on Max Payne shit’, which isn’t a terrible idea tbf.
And again, not a total dud, can get more interesting as it goes on and I’ve felt mid about a lot of well-received stuff in the genres this dabbles in. Though I am feeling… less overall generous after this nugget of writing made it in:
CW for, at very least, transphobia-adjacent dialogue
Bruh. Y’all hired an actual native writer for the Lost Fire stuff in the next chapter with a good big prompt about what real tribe they’re based on, clearly there’s some effort put into being more than just an Ally™, what are we doin here.
Even if this line’s supposed to be ‘haha this guys a skeeze’ we could just… not do it a way that makes me go ‘bleh… nah’ and put down the game for a while.
Makes me side-eye the creative voice behind the brothel in this chapter, too, it tried to be less cringe than videogame brothels tend to be but eeehhh still basically showed its normie ass.
…actually this whole chapters ~dark secret~ theme makes me worry abt how much of one ousted writers’ work they kept, but that’s depressing conjecture for another time.
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I’ve been playing a bunch of Japanese horror games! Specifically, Ghostwire Tokyo sandwiched between 2 short horror games by a small team called Chilla’s Art: The Closing Shift and The Night Delivery. They were all great!
Chilla’s Art is a Japanese indie studio that is surprisingly prolific. Since they started publishing on Steam in 2019, they’ve put out over a dozen games! They focus on short horror experiences that are heavy on bad vibes and light on jump scares (though each one that I’ve played has had at least one of those.) They’re really good! And I’m honestly surprised they don’t get more coverage! They have the lofi, shot-on-video aesthetic that is common in indie horror titles, but they lack both the tounge-in-cheek smarm, memeiness or exploitation that pervades so much of the genre. The results are deeply atmospheric horror games that take them selves seriously without being off-putting. Their subject matter is often steeped in the mundane. In all four that I’ve played, you are a person working in a run of the mill service job, with the sinister seeping in slowly from the margins. It’s a great combination!
In The Closing Shift you are a barista working the night shift at fake Starbucks. You are tasked with making coffee and other cafe fare for customers who are often dismissive, hostile or boundary pushing in the way that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has worked a service job. The creepiness sets in as strange stuff begins to happen in the dark parking lot just outside the windows that you can see while taking customer’s orders or preparing coffee. When you shift is coming to a close, you have to clean tables, which often has you turning your back to the windows. It’s nerve-racking in a very relatable way! It’s that same jolt of terror you while running up the stairs after turning off all the lights, or when you hear the leaves rustle when you’re taking out the trash. The Night Delivery, a game about delivering packages to the residents of an apartment building at night, hits similar notes, but with a Silent Hill-esque twist near the end. I don’t want to oversell these games. They can be clunky and hard to parse, and often shoot for social commentary that comes across as a little to pat. They are good though, and I think more people should play them!
Ghostwire Tokyo is good too! I feel like so much of the criticism around this game has come from comparisons to other games that don’t really hold that much water. You can explain the structure of this game in a way that makes it sound a lot like Far Cry, but it never really feels like Far Cry. You can pine for the bustling Tokyo of Yakuza, but that clearly isn’t what the game is going for. I dunno, it just seems more fun to play a game on its own terms. The game’s exploration of religious and mythical themes is fascinating. There’s a reverence for the metaphysics that never gets to feeling dogmatic or self-conscience, which allows the game to present you with the actual philosophies and metaphors of these myths in an inviting way. Digging into the lore of this game was really rewarding, because I was learning about real stuff!
On the gameplay side it was really cool to see that someone else in the world likes weird, mind bending walking simulators. A lot of the cool visual tricks this game pulls were in the Evil Within 2, but something about the first person perspective and the way that movement through space was as much of a narrative tool as dialogue gave me experimental walking sim vibes. While I can’t say for certain, it definitely feels like someone at Tango Gameworks played The Beginner’s Guide (or maybe even some Kitty Horrorshow) and was inspired by it! The ending in particular is basically a short, narrative heavy walking sim! My fondness for the genre probably helped the game’s story land better for me. I hope more people play this game when it hits gamepass!
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Crysis 2 apologia commences!
A considerable amount of the criticism that this game gets is because it is not a sequel to Crysis. For as much supermarket-brand sci-fi lore that the first game established (that ending, fwiw, is completely bonkers and very fun), Crysis is a summer blockbuster from the late 90s. There’s the threat from a US enemy whose market the developers feel comfortable alienating, there’s blue-skies and good times, and then there’s the third act twist that the soldiers were being lied to all along by the suits(!) and the G-men about ALIENS. It’s nothing.
Crysis 2 is also nothing, but it’s incredibly entertaining, flashy, attractive nothing. Crysis was trying to adapt the 90’s mega block-buster into a video game format just as the appetite for those kinds of stories and that kind of presentation had run out. Crysis 2 is an adaptation of enjoyable shlock like Skyline, Battle LA, and Clovefield. It looks slick, takes itself immensely seriously, and has one of the all-time great Hans Zimmer themes blaring all over it.
What I’m saying is we didn’t know how good we had it back in 2011.
Crysis 2 is much more condensed, intuitive, and better-presented than the original. Yes, it has all the over-bearing UX decisions that are co-morbid with a first-person shooter from 2011. You are always told LITERALLY by the voice in the nanosuit what to do next. BREAK THE LOCK was never something I needed growled in my ear by a knock-off Transformers vocoder. Nevertheless, this game is full of large, cordoned-off murder puzzles where you are tasked with figuring out how to slip through your enemies and accomplish multiple objectives. Even on Normal, you really need to avoid getting surrounded in the early game, and every level section really is presented like a puzzle to solve. Granted, the game also tells you that you can highlight the solutions in your HUD at every opportunity, but such is Crysis 2.
Moreover, this game is so full of ostentatious visual effects and bespoke engine showcases that we just don’t really get anymore now that big games’ prioritise looking good from every angle, in all circumstances. Crysis 2 doesn’t need to look good from every angle. It just needs to show you dropping a building on an alien from one. The reflections, the baked-in lighting effects, the use of volumetric lighting, it’s all very DX11. I won’t lie, I love how expensive this game looks in the same way I’m fucking excited to watch Ambulance. I like seeing money onscreen, especially when it means taking an extremely satisfying .50cal turret to half of Wall Street.
None of this is to say Crysis 2 does anything particularly remarkably. I have a special place in my heart for it because it feels like a game that wants to entertain you, rather than keep you engaged.
I had a friend at one of my jobs about 3 jobs ago who would go out on a Wednesday and just empty his bank account trying to make sure he and everyone around him was having a good time. He was brash, he was exhausting, and I didn’t want to split a bag with him and go to the strip club no matter how many times he suggested it. Then one day I came back from week’s holiday and heard that he’d been let go. I wasn’t surprised, he wasn’t particularly good at what he did and he didn’t make anyone else’s jobs easier in the process. But I missed the guy. He wanted to get loaded and have a good time, and playing Crysis 2 reminded me of him because you needed to be doing a lot of blow to think this was going to do Call of Duty numbers.
Crysis 2 good fuck you.
addendum: apparently half the Yerli family work in executive positions at Crytek under the CEO Cevat Yerli? Bet that’s a fun place to work. Maybe it’s time I got Hunt: Showdown-pilled.
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In a shocking twist, I’m not sure I like Breath of the Wild that much. For years I’d heard about it and knew I’d love it if I ever had access to a Switch. Honestly, though, it’s too big to be good, at least in my case. Discovering the systems was amazing for the first 5-10 hours, but once I had a hang of things the fun inevitably took a dip and while it’s still fun, it’s hard to know there’s another 80+ hours that will never reach the same heights as the opening.
Ultimately, I don’t find the combat particularly satisfying and the shrines are hit-or-miss: some are great and others just fine. The joys of exploration are still there but won’t carry me through dozens of hours if the rest of the game isn’t doing enough for me. The world is vast but mostly pretty empty, and tbh I’m not sure the tone of it all does much for me.
I think in a world where free time was abundant, I’d continue on with this and probably find joy in far more of it, moment to moment. But scouring the map for shrines sounds extremely not fun for me, and while the story hasn’t quite kicked in where I am just yet, I don’t anticipate much of anything changing to fundamentally improve my experience. I know this game gets a lot of love and I’m not trying to take away from that, but, as is inevitably the case, when you come to something like this several years later the hype you’ve heard can leave you feeling a little underwhelmed and cold.
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It took me two tries to finish Breath of the Wild. The first time (on Wii U!), I got bogged down trying to ‘do everything’ and eventually just tapered off it for kinda similar reasons to the ones you’ve described: the world between points of interest can feel empty and lifeless and there’s a whole lot of busywork, whether it’s the 120 shrines or NPCs giving out fetch quests for absurd numbers of items.
Now, this is rank hypocrisy because I’m the sort of person who will insist on powering through all that stuff regardless, but there’s definitely no need to finish every shrine or side activity or explore everything; it’s more than possible to focus on a more critical path and get through the whole thing in far, far less than 80+ hours (I believe my total played time on Switch was around 100, but that’s doing literally everything except finding all the Korok seeds, including all the side stuff added in the two DLC packs). Light mechanical spoilers for how the endgame works: you are likely already aware that you can proceed directly to the end boss at any time. The only ‘point’ to completing other things in the game is to either weaken the end boss (by doing the four divine beast dungeons) or powering up Link (by acquiring items and extra hearts from quests and shrines). By the time I went to the end boss, I was so overpowered it was a laughable cakewalk and pretty anticlimactic.
tl;dr so much of Breath of the Wild is optional that if you just want to finish it, you don’t need to force yourself to do everything
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My distant memory of Crysis 2 is being impressed that it tried something different when games were basically all ripping off Modern Warfare’s murder hallways.
Honestly the criticism of BOTW’s world as “empty” is always interesting to me. I found it really refreshing to have a lot of space given to me as the player. Modern open worlds can feel inundated with stuff whether it’s good or bad. Finding a cool nook in BOTW is thus highlighted more. The low-stakes Korok seeds and nature in between kept me fresh for the set-pieces.
I also think the game is a lot better if you turn off as much UI as possible and avoid looking at the map much. Trying to find your way through landmarks keeps you in the space and makes less dense areas more engaging.
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I was thinking similar things playing through Ghostwire Tokyo. I don’t mind the map being big and empty because it’s so atmospheric and beautiful. Exploring eerie urban spaces is 100% my shit, I don’t need skill points or collectibles as incentives. The game would actually feel better if they removed a lot of the busywork around the map and let you soak up the vibes.
(The criticisms about the so-so combat and the lack of story still stand, but that hasn’t stopped me from having a good time and taking a million screenshots.)
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Maybe “empty” isn’t the best way to convey what I mean (though it’s capturing some of it). I guess I feel that in a lot of open worlds, the space is primarily there to give you a sense of exploration and distance - a feeling that it’s a real place and you’re not just in a game. I know some people really hate how in, say, a GTA game, you have to drive to the location of a mission; they’d rather just jump right in. For me, the drive is part of the point of playing, of being in that world, and feeling like there is real distance to be travelled and everything isn’t just at the push of a button. The question then becomes what you put in that world.
If Breath of the Wild is one answer to that question, a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey very much another; when you talk about being inundated with stuff, I can’t help but think of Rob Zacny’s article where he talks about wolves being everywhere. There is definitely such a thing as too much stuff. For me, though, Breath of the Wild maybe errs too far in the other direction and ends up feeling a bit sparse and artificial. Almost everything in its Hyrule is there for a gameplay reason. If you see something unusual, it’s almost certainly a puzzle leading to a chest, shrine, or Korok seed, or somehow involved in a quest. To me there’s only a limited sense that it’s a real place with a real history. I’d compare it with GTA5 or RDR2, games that have places I just enjoy being in because I never know when I’m going to see some cool architecture or nature that is there just for the sake of atmosphere, and not because it’s hiding a collectible or tied to an Ubi-style icon to clean off the map.
All that said, I still think Breath of the Wild is very good. It’s one of those games where I’m maybe more critical of certain aspects of it because of how good it is. It’s not my favourite Zelda, but it’s near the top of the list, to the point that I have the broken Master Sword and silent princess flowers tattooed on my arm.
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I think Witcher 3 (it’s always Witcher 3!!!) did the “open space” angle the best. Crossing over no-man’s land really hits home that there’s a war going on and you immediately understand the state of the world the moment you cross that line. My gripe with BOTW’s empty vastness was that I didn’t find the world all that interesting. Some parts looked fantastic and its design was top-notch but I didn’t get much riding through it. Cyberpunk 2077 is another one that I think does a decent job too but that’s mostly because of the technical wowness of it more than anything else.
That’s what it just comes down to for me. It can be a wonderfully designed world that exposes all the prominent landmarks but if the technical fidelity or general interesting art isn’t there then I just don’t get much out of it. People can get really into the vast emptiness of stuff but every time I’m left alone with my thoughts while going through these spaces all I can think about is “why am I doing this? where’s the interesting stuff?” so I’m not the audience for that sort of thing.
Unless the whole game is based around it, like Journey and even then that game was designed with peaks and valleys in mind with every slow empty vastness stuff between some amazing set-pieces.
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Every piece of public info about Crytek’s business side has been ridiculous lmao. They’re real convinced they’re hot shit while coasting on ultra weird business choices no one cares about and never admitting they’re a niche.
On the topic of Crysis 2, I’d be a lot more surprised if someone had such an enthusiastic defense of Crysis 3. 3 had less foolhardy ambition and wasn’t really shaking things up at that point, it’s just the inoffensive Other Stealth Game w/ Bow. Not to mention the sheer malaise its Wartorn Green Overgrowth invokes in me.
I keep thinking I want 3 for a stealth shooter shoe-in on my Switch but every time I remember its environments, I just shrug and wish 2 was made a bit later so it could have QoL I’d feel better going back to.
^this. By the standards of that horrid time where we all bought military shooters just for something to do, Crysis 2 looked like a fuckin immersive sim next to its peers. You can jump on people’s heads, smack em around, throw shit at em, drive unscripted vehicles down stretches of arena cordons. Even its basic dynamic AI alert states gave firefights an extra dimension that big stupid games didn’t care to have yet.
Listening to Cevat Yerli posture about the game/series is still very funny, and I don’t think anyone’s not self-aware about liking it or the absurd company behind it, but still. I may also think Crysis 1 feels shit and boring to play, is systemically barely strung-together and overall sucks for anything but showy sandbox trickz videos.
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Elden Ring I’ve reached that point that all 'Souls games (even Elden Ring) seem to have, where I think I’m just about out of stuff to do, and I need to proceed to the really tough stuff near the end of the game. It’s a bit sad, when the game narrows like that and a straight path through tough fights is most of what’s left.
I managed to do a lot without consulting wikis, and now that I’ve poked through a few to figure out ‘what’s left’, I’m pretty happy with how many of the quest-lines I did figure out without help. And pretty satisfied with the ways I didn’t finish a few of them I apparently killed the Dung Eater too early to finish his quest? But his quest looks really horrifying, so I’m fine with that..
Once I’m really done I may reflect on how playing Elden Ring offline really helped remove some of the basic anxiety other Souls’ games tended to give me. No bloodstains, no ghosts and no memes gives the game some room to breathe.
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I’ve just sworn off my replay of BOTW. I had been idly thinking about the game last year and decided that I might enjoy it more if I can get in the right mindset, but about 10 hours in I hit the same wall as last time: the world just isn’t very interesting to me and it shows almost all of its cards immediately.
This time it was exacerbated by the truly wrongheaded Master Mode where regenerating health makes combat more grueling, but mostly just boring and pointless. The physics and chemistry systems can’t do enough damage in the few second window before enemies heal to be worth messing with, so in almost every scenario so you’re left with no choice but to keep attacking at all costs. It’s a bafflingly bad design decision.
And yet I’m still extremely interested in the sequel and bummed about the delay to next year. BOTW feels like a game that holds such potential that I can’t wait to see what 5 years of time to flesh it out might look like.
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It really is too bad that you don’t do more damage with fire/bombs/magnesis. I get not wanting the game to be broken by that, but also… Let us break it with the fun tools you’ve provided. Maybe they could’ve put something in to increase that type of damage as you progress through the game. It really stops being a big factor for most of the back half.
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Played a little bit more Elden Ring these past few days, still a blast!
A few observations:
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I really appreciate how little barriers there are to the online play now. The player-to-player interactions have always been my favorite parts of the Dark Souls games, particularly the invasions, but in Elden Ring I’m almost exclusively doing cooperative stuff since there’s basically no cost in doing it from either side. One of my favorite things to do when I run into a boss that’s giving me trouble or I finally take down such a boss, is leaving a sign and helping other people out with it! I have no use for Rune Arcs (although, I’ve still only got one Great Rune that works with them 100+ hours in) but I love two-handing a greatshield and drawing aggression or wailing on one of the many multi-boss fights to aid my fellow Tarnished!
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Despite the sheer amount of cool spells, incantations and the diverse weapons/abilities, I finally caved and went back to the most successful archetype for these games: huge shield, huge main-hand weapon and just enough armor to make sure I’m not heavy rolling. Elden Ring is definitely the longest I’ve gone without relying on that super-defensive archetype (and the most plausible its felt for me to use any other playstyles) but I think it fits my strengths a lot more. Also, the new guard counters make playing with a shield up so much more engaging than before!
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Had a moment where I was glancing over the dozens of stat values visible on the equipment screen, noticed one that didn’t immediately make sense to me and hit a button to bring up a brief explanation of what it did when I highlighted it. I know this specific thing has been a feature in these games for a bit but I feel like I’ve played so many (older) games recently where there are zero in-game explanations as to what the stats actually do. So not having to hunt down that basic information for once felt super refreshing.
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Still amazed by how huge this game is. I’ve still not made it to what I assume is the last major area on the map but have somehow made it to like 5 different areas that I’ve somehow never seen or heard about till now.
I was hoping to finish the game some time this week but I have no idea if that’ll even be possible at the pace I’m playing it at. Still ain’t tired of it yet but at this point if I haven’t gotten there already I’m not sure I ever will? We’ll see though!
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I do remember the Hans Zimmer score for Crysis 2 being great. Though I think he only did the main theme.
Equally good and sweeping is the New York theme:
To this day, never played Crysis 3… Anyway, I want to go see Hans Zimmer on one of his concert tours and I want him to play the Crysis 2 score. It may only me be applauding.
I’m chipping away at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey DLC and when I’m not doing that I’ve been playing Hunt Showdown for the current event.
Brief Hunt sicko comment: I caved and replaced the mouse I’ve been using with one that has a prominent side button, entirely so I could bind the melee attack in Hunt to it instead of trying to wrangle multiple keys at once. It’s made using the guns that have blades and knuckledusters bolted onto them way more useful and satisfying. When my partner saw the mouse though they asked, “why did you buy a new mouse? Didn’t you just get the old one?” and I said, “no, I bought that one nine years ago.” I have a specific memory of getting it posted to my office and it had to be that long ago because of where I was sitting before getting a promotion. My partner basically did the Matt Damon-Saving Private Ryan aging gif in real life.
Still, I wanted a break from nigh endless Assassin’s Creed and multiplayer stuff so I loaded up Norco. It is… very atmospheric. Retro, pixel art-ish point and click adventure in a dystopian future Louisiana, under the lights of flaring industrial refinery towers and the threat of the water the levees hold back. I’m not far enough into it yet (even though it’s pretty short) to have a complete opinion, but I can see why it’s really grabbing some people. I hope it’s going to grab me too.
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