I’m definitely not proud that I let my autotomatic annual renewal go through in April. At least it was before the price increase, and now that I’m determined to not renew, I’m being a lot more stingy with my months.
It was recently increased to $15 USD. Though the Plucky Squire actually looks like a solid game published by Deveolver Digital. Looks like it has gone on sale for $15 before, so it’d basically be like buying that game. And you get Grapple Dog thrown in
Split Fiction is a master class in game design. The split screen is so integrated into the experience that even online multiplayer is in split screen. The screens are a part of the story.
The gameplay is constantly changing to the point that discovering new mechanics becomes the gameplay loop.
The level designs are so clever that you’ll have several moments that feel scripted but were actually just inevitable because of how we play games.
To give a snapshot of the experience: there was one scene where my character was driving a motorcycle along the sides of skyscrapers, doing the craziest stunts imaginable, and my wife’s character was sitting on the back frantically trying to solve a series of CAPTCHAs on her phone. She was so focused on keeping a steady hand that she barely noticed the death-defying stunts happening literally out of the corner of her eye.
By the end of it I was like, “Did you see that??” and it turns out she did not. It was absurd and hilarious, and it’s the kind of storytelling that only works in a video game.
My current obsession is UFO 50, which is a collection of 50 “retro” games. In real life they’re all new, but the story of the game is that they’re from a company from the 80s called UFOsoft, and then there’s a dark meta narrative hidden in the background.
Which is all just a framing device for 50 games, most of which are good, some of which are amazing, and half of which are couch co-op multiplayer. It’s like exploring the Switch’s retro NES collection for hidden gems, except there’s a lot more gems.
There are beat 'em ups, obscure sports games, some platformers, tactics games, a little bit of everything.
I’ve enlisted my wife to help me, because a lot of these games are just begging to be grinded out in co-op.
I got the game when I saw someone describe it as “a master class in game design”, and I thought, “that’s the phrase I’ve just been using to describe Split Fiction.”
And finally, I recommend Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, because that’s the multiplayer game I’ve been recommending for almost ten years.
You each play as adorable creatures in an adorable space ship that you customize as you go. The ship has several stations that need to be manned, including the captain’s seat, navigation, a directional shield, and multiple weapons.
But you each can only man one station at a time. So if you need to stay on the shield but a new enemy is approaching from the other side, then that means the captain is going to have to jump on a weapon and leave the ship adrift.
You may have arguments over which type of weapons to add to your ship or over who’s better at piloting which kind of engine. Or maybe you’ll work together in perfect harmony, relying on each other’s strengths and covering each other’s weaknesses as you adapt to every new challenge. Both ways are fun.
Big second for Lovers In a Dangerous Spacetime. Purely co-op, very simple controls so even people who aren’t super into games can play, and a super cute aesthetic make it a great ‘We wanna play a game, but don’t want to sweat’ kinda game.
It’s insanely good. At some point I want to make a post just about UFO 50, just to spread the word, but I don’t even know where to start.
Fifty is just an insane number of games, and so many of them are so god damn good.
Even now I want to be like, Porgy would be worth the cost on its own! But then I’m like, should I say Porgy or Avianos? Or Mini and Max? Or Grimstone? No, Rail Heist! Fuck it, I’m just going to go back to playing the damn thing.
I want to be something else when I play games. I don’t understand this need to be the same thing I am every fucking day. Bring on other genders, sexes, races, species, colors, limbs, all of it. Let’s be different. It’s a fucking video game.
Looking at my game library, I seem to prefer blank slate player characters.
In Factorio, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. In Satisfactory, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. Infinifactory you play as a humanoid in a space suit. Antichamber you play as some being that can hold a gun-like tool. Buckshot Roulette you play as…something that can fire a shotgun. In all Half-Life and Portal games you play as a series of named but barely characterized people. Return of the Obra Dinn you play as an investigator, each time you start the game it randomly chooses a male or female voice for the player character. In Subnautica, you play as a stuffed wetsuit.
These days when people say roguelike they just mean a game that divides its gameplay into short, disconnected runs instead of one long, continuous save. It unfortunately has nothing to do with whether a game is anything like Rogue.
Yes, the term is often misapplied, but Balatro has the other key part of actually being a roguelike which is leveling up your build periodically from a randomly selected set of options. The bosses are also randomly selected. It very much is a roguelike
The definition of roguelike has been stretched to the point of near-uselessness, lol. Nowadays, any game with permadeath and “runs” is classified as a roguelike.
Personally, I’d prefer it if we stuck a little closer to the Berlin Interpretation definition.
No, it’s rogue-lite. Not -like. Rogue-lite games have randomized runs, permadeath, and (often tons of) meta-progression involving spending stat points, or unlocking new skills or weapons. In many games, the difficulty decreases by unlocking new skills and adding stats. Sometimes the games increase their enemy difficulty as you earn victories in order to balance the difficulty with all the new choices and skills you have. And sometimes entire game mechanics get added to more you play: new zones and new things to do.
Example rogue-lite games: Binding of Isaac, Undermine, Enter the Gungeon. Even games that have a real sense of story and progression might have tight gameplay loops that can cause people to call them rogue-lites, or say they have “rogue-lite mechanics”. Example: Dave the Diver.
Rogue-likes, on the other hand, are turn-based dungeon crawlers that have very little or no meta progression. They may have training wheels like being forced to start with a simple class and unlocking additional ones doing simple things in-game. They do this to avoid overwhelming new players with character choices, and not to make the game easier as you play. You get better by learning the game, and not by unlocking more things or adding to stats.
Examples: Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Brogue, Caves of Qud.
Mass Effect 2 kind of pisses me off, ngl. The characters are so good, but the plot is really kind of bad. Forcing Shepard to work with Cerberus makes zero sense, especially since my Shepard went out of their way to murder Cerberus employees for what they did to their squad.
Why would I watch your channel when I could watch someone else’s? A good answer to that question is how you grow an audience. I watch a lot of fighting game content on YouTube, and I can find value in Maximilian Dood for being good at explaining the legacies of old games or what makes new ones tick; I can find value in commentary and breakdown from those who win major tournaments and break down the subtleties that I might have missed. But there are hundreds of channels YouTube wants to show me of people playing those same games with no reason for me to actually click on them in the first place.
I made what people seem to think are a couple of good video tutorials to teach Skullgirls quickly. It’s got a reputation of being exceptionally hard, but I disagree, and I thought I could explain them quickly. They worked, but the more general fighting game tutorials I made after that didn’t do so well. Maybe there isn’t as much demand for them as I thought, or maybe they just weren’t as good. Still, I was making something that I felt like people couldn’t easily get elsewhere.
StarCraft and Brood War were amazing, but the writing quality took a nosedive in the sequel. StarCraft 2 felt like poorly written fanfiction that didn’t understand the existing characters or their motivations at all.
Completely agree. The whole tone and setting changed. SC:BW went for gritty realism. Obviously, there’s a suspension of disbelief when you’ve got psionic aliens, but it felt like three scrappy factions barely surviving in the endless dark of space.
SC2 went full Warcraft. Ancient gods, portals to other worlds, all the same kitschy fantasy elements that are fine in the campy context of WC but really clashed with the established character of the SC universe. I get that they wanted to raise the stakes in the sequel, but I really disagreed with how they went about it.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
Agreed 100%, how Kerrigan was handled was the worst of StarCraft 2’s many sins against prior characterization. They spent an entire expansion setting her up as an irredeemable monster and the new big bad of the setting alongside Mengsk and whatever Duran was up to, only to undo it all because NuBlizzard wanted their waifu.
And there is no way Jim Raynor as of the end of Brood War would ever ally with Kerrigan again after her betrayal, yet he goes from having sworn to get revenge for Fenix’s death to helping Kerrigan “redeem” herself with little more than a mention of past grievances.
I'm going to say The Last of Us 2. I loved the first one so much, and then 2 was not what I wanted or was expecting, which completely killed any love I had for it and any desire for a larger franchise.
I was hoping for an anthology series where each game focused on a different group of people in the same universe. I loved Joel and Ellie, but I wanted their story to be over and to get a look at how other people had dealt with things.
I travel to Combo Breaker every year and enter a whole bunch of games. This year I was able to up my travel budget for both CB and Frosty Faustings. Some of them are games I consider myself decent at, some of them are games I just hop in casually for fun. And then there's the Mystery Bracket, where every round is something you've probably never heard of and the goal is to figure out what's happening before your opponent does - it's the highlight every year. Back in 2022, I even TO'd and commentated the side tournament for Puyo Puyo Champions, and I got roped into filling in on commentary for Panel de Pon.
In a double elimination bracket, 25% of players will go 0-2. If this is your first time entering, you should expect to be one of them. And you shouldn't let that stop you from going to have a good time! Majors are basically conventions that happen to have brackets at them, and that bracket will only be a small fraction of your time all weekend. Get as many casual sets in as you can before/after bracket, check out the arcade room, buy some trinkets with your favorite characters on them from the artist alley, watch finals, go out to dinner with rivals you'd only ever spoken to online before and finally get to meet in person. Oh, and come to the mahjong tables where you'll find me promoting this strangely unexpected venn diagram intersection.
And that's just what majors are like. If you have any kind of local FGC, go to your locals! Don't just sit at home playing ranked, get out of the house and meet people!
bin.pol.social
Ważne