I have been playing Abiotic Factor with a friend. Most fun I have had since lethal company. Really cool progression and the map is just amazing. The new update has a few rough edges, but otherwise good.
As for single player, terrafirmagreg in Minecraft.
I’ve been playing Mario Galaxy 2 for the first time. It’s pretty good, but I’m wondering what the hype was about. Perhaps it’s a product of its time in a way, but overall, it’s still a lot of fun. I keep dying at stupid parts, which is really funny. You can tell the developers really pushed their skills to the limits as all of the levels seem like they’re really well done.
I’ve been streaming a playthrough of Ghost of Tsushima, and I recently got to the DLC. I think the game does so many things right, but I have a few minor gripes. Overall, I really like the atmosphere and the world design. The environments are gorgeous.
I’ve been playing Mario Galaxy 2 for the first time. It’s pretty good, but I’m wondering what the hype was about.
Does it feel like anything more than a level pack for Galaxy 1? That was the general impression that I remember. My lil bro beat Galaxy 2 but I never got around to it.
So far, that’s exactly what it feels like. Which is good! But I think it could have been better?
I haven’t seen any Rosalina yet, which is a bummer, and the hub area is less exciting. But yeah, overall, the levels are just as solid as I remember them being in Galaxy 1. The music is definitely a highlight so far. Amazing tunes. And playing the game in co-op is actually kinda fun.
Normal mode - made for the absolute lowest common denominator, every challenge is overcome in seconds before you understand what the intended solution was
And
Hard mode - the intented challenge to normal happens 1 pico second in, you now have to solve 20 combinations of different challenges. Not because it’s difficult, because the developers want you to die over and over and over until you understand all combinations enough.
Surprisingly, in COD (at least bo2 & 3) enemies get more and more “abilities” the higher you set the difficulty (this means, grenades, better accuracy, use of special equipment, higher burst rates)
Ps5 controller is Bluetooth, works for me without any special drivers. Has native support in some games for the haptic triggers and touch pad. It’s a fantastic general purpose unit. The Nintendo switch classic NES controllers are awesome for retro emulation too- also Bluetooth. They make NES/SNES/N64 variants- but really the ps5 will handle all those use cases and feel just fine for any modern gaming.
You have to beat the game first to unlock it but I love the realism mode in jedi survivor. Lightsabers actually kill like in the movies, but get shot maybe 2x and you’re dead.
This is how harder difficulties should be. You have lower HP, but so does the enemy, forcing both parties to think things through before running in guns a’blazing. If you have to make enemies bullet sponges in order to increase the difficulty, then your AI programming is bad and you should feel bad.
Modern fallout games do difficulty badly. Walked up to one of those boomer guys in fo:NV , he gave me some shit, so I shot him in the face with a revolver. He didn’t fall over dead.
I got a bunch of mods to make everyone a lot more of a glass cannon, but made power armor very effective (and other armor somewhat so). Was a lot more fun. But also there was a lot more reloading because, like, sometimes a baddie would get the drop on me and I’d be dead from two shots.
try fo4 survival mode. you can actually die from a bloatfly swarm if you arent careful, but can also eliminate an entire raider base with 1 well place molotov cocktail
I’m multitasking games right now to help clear out my backlog. I’m getting close to finishing Alan Wake 2 and I just started playing Ys IX. Not quite as good as Ys VIII, but still a lot of fun. I also got distracted by Guild Wars 2 and Loop Hero.
I totally agree. It’s one thing to just decrease the enemy health, but you can decrease their damage or aim like stormtroopers. On top of that, research, recovery, and build times can be decreased or resource costs and income adjusted. There are so many ways to make the game easier or harder.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles. Modest mid level titles from a studio between tentpole releases that would pay your bills and didn’t break the company if they didn’t sell well. It also generally related to the price you would be expected to pay. These days a AA/Indie game is $40, and a AAA title is $60/70. The rise of AAAA is a self aggrandizing to try and justify slapping a higher pricetag on products.
A great example would be an excerpt from Activision in 2004. Doom 3 in August would be AAA, then in September a bunch of AA games - cod game “united offensive”, X-Men legends, Rome:total war, and Shark Tale. Then in October a AAA title with Tony Hawks underground 2.
History Lesson enclosedNowadays it’s either AAA or Indie. Around the turn of PS3/x360 games became seen as a product and companies became more focused on individual games moneymaking, so fewer and fewer AA games got made in favor of big blockbusters. Game companies went broke trying to compete in this new market, and because so much rides on individual games that when they fail the company is in danger of going belly up - and so gets bought. This is why you heard about all those acquisitions and power consolidation in the past 20 years of the game industry. Big boys with money to spend buying up the losers tables when they lose their win streak. About the turn of the 2010s and the changeover from PS4/XOne, the Indie Scene exploded in the vacuum left behind in the wake of those buyouts. Older Millennials who had been in college for programming games graduated and came to market and began publishing through steams Greenlight and even finding publishers not bought yet to make it to market. Games that were either easier to make or play and needed word of mouth. Sometimes you would have a real break out like Minecraft, super meat boy, Celeste, that would catch the attention of big studios and get the offer of a lifetime to sell out and go big. And that brings us to today. Now because of market stagnation AAA has kind of lost meaning, because so many games are releasing in a poor state. In an effort to set a title above the others, a couple of people have tried to dub a game “AAAA” to try and reinvoke that sense of quality and polish that used to come with AAA. This started in 2020 with a Perfect Dark reboot (The Initiative) from Microsoft. The game has yet to release. It was subsequently laughed at and dismissed as silly corpo nonsense. Then Ubisoft stated Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be AAAA, this went under the radar because the game is vaporware and no one cares. And so this brings us to Skibidi Bonesacks where Yves (the CEO) called it a “truly AAAA game” to try and set it above games like assassin’s creed and call of duty. And because it’s nothing more than a buzzword to allow a ceo to stand on a stage self-felating, it released as a fucking disaster, like so many AAA games now anyway.
The meme is because Skull and bones is so bad of a fumble, to also just fumble its name. I picked it up from some review but I can’t remember who it was. Dunkey? Ah too long ago.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.
To be a bit of a pedant, “AAA” was basically the marketing term to denote a game with a larger budget. The term “AA” came around afterwards as a way to distinguish games that fell between smaller indie games, and larger budget AAA games.
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