Is it bad that I legit think that Origins is the best in the Arkham series?
Like objectively Knight is a better looking game, and Asylum is a wonderfully crafted experience. But Origins is basically a better Arkham City and has a lot to offer.
The detective segments in particular are really well done and do a good job of leaning into the investigative aspects of Batman early in his career.
No, that’s a totally respectable opinion actually. I’d say it’s tied with City for my personal favorite. It hits the themes differently than the rest of the franchise but still is a great time. It makes a clever reuse of assets too which i love. I always love seeing a reuse of assets in games
I know I’m wilding but I actually liked the launch game more than what it became. But that says more about what I look for in a game than the quality of NMS. It objectively became a better game than it was at launch, but it pivoted to become more of a crafting and building thing than an exploration game…. And I’ve been done with crafting and building for a long time
For me, I’ve kind of figured out that I love the idea of the game more than the game itself. I played for the first time when the reviews for NMS first started becoming more positive.
On one level I kind of enjoyed it but not enough to keep me coming back regularly. Theres just too much to know when it comes to the knowledge base of the game. Felt like I was spending more time searching how to do everything rather than just playing the game.
The last time I got really fucking sick and had to stay off work for two weeks I played a lot of “Sticky Business”.
You design and sell stickers. Its cute, chill, wholesome, scratches my creative itch, and is just distracting enough for all the being-sick stuff going on, but not so complicated as to trigger a headache.
On that note, there was a site called ninja something as I recall about 10 years ago or so that I liked that would review and recommend indie games. I couldn’t find it recently. Anyone maybe knows or remembers what I am talking about?
Oh you’ve got to play it! Then report back and let me know how it went. I guess the folks that made it are from Barnsley. This means nothing to me as a foreigner, but this game charmed the pants off me.
Ooh, Barnsley! That’s actually super close to where I hail from (we had a Barnsley phone number and post code, despite not technically being in Barnsley). That’s so cool, it’s not the kind of place you typically see depicted in media
All the Game Awards chatter and the current sale made me take the plunge on Clair Obscur" Expedition 33 and I’m so glad I did. Only ~8h in or so but it is such a vibrant, wild world to explore and it makes me think of the classic JRPGs I played growing up. The introduction of more active battling mechanics like parrying and dodging adds a level of complexity to the combat that I enjoy, even if I cannot for the life of me get the parry timing right.
Steam Deck took a couple minor tweaks to make it look good and the hair effects still are a bit janky (eg. Gustave’s hair will light up from a light source making it look grey). The soundtrack is phenomenal and was the first time in a long time that I’ve wanted to buy a game soundtrack (this battle track in one of the early areas cemented this as something special to me).
Super worth it and excited to dive in deep on this one.
I did see a tip about turning up the volume for sound cues when I was digging around trying to find if there was some kind of setting I could enable for a more visual cue (like you get for a Jump attack). I don’t usually play games with headphones on but I find myself doing that with this one!
The Steam Deck experience is pretty good. The issues I’ve had with the characters’ hairstyles catching the light weird seems to be more an issue of the lighting in general. I was in the Stone Wave Cliffs which has a lot of caves to explore and a lot of instances where there’s a “light at the end of a tunnel”. What I noticed was the light at the end was almost too bright/overpowering and it made it impossible to see the cave around me which, while maybe accurate to what you’d experience in real life with losing night vision and whatnot, makes it really hard to see/navigate. Similarly some of the menus are noticably darker as if I would need to turn the brightness up but not every menu is like that either. Just some weirdness there and I haven’t tried that section on my PC to see if it’s just how the game is or how the Steam Deck is handling it. Otherwise though, the Deck experience is pretty good and I’m getting into it for a couple hours a night without much issue. Definitely not the cleanest/fanciest graphics but in the “good enough” camp for me that aside from the lighting woes, I don’t notice much of a problem.
I’ll shill up for skill up’s website that spun up from his ‘This Week in Gaming’. He has some great coverage on indie games and always dedicates a segment to ‘put this on your radar’.
Paul Tassi from Forbes also has some really good takes and sources in the industry for those AAA games.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne