Not sure… It seems that the correct^1^ word is used, but I don’t think I have ever played a game with an inventory in my native language (which luanti picked up from the system default language) so I just didn’t think of clicking that button.
1: correct, as in used in other games for the translation of “inventory”
Oh wow, so it’s kind of suffering from success, in that you might have understood it better, if it didn’t have a translation for your native language… 😅
But also, now that I think about it a little more I think that it is also a problem with the interface:
having the button to the inventory in that menu, and not even as the first item, is kind of strange. Of the options in that menu I would guesstimate that I would use it to open the inventory 99,5% percent of the times I entered the menu.
Imho the inventory should be opened by a button in the HUD, probably by an additional square with an icon in the bottom inventory row.
I agree that the default isn’t great, but from the link that @tal had posted, there is actually a way to move the inventory button to where you want: …docs.luanti.org/…/touchscreen-editor.mp4
So, they go into the menu, then press the “Exit” button.
Unfortunately, that video is already out of date again, as there’s now a general “Settings” button where the “Touchscreen Layout” button was. But in those settings, you can select the “Touchscreen” category and then that button is near the top.
Then it works like in the video again, by pressing “Add button” and so on.
I never beat the first one (I think it was the first one anyway...)
The ps2 disc had a scratch on it and the game would freeze/crash when I got to a certain part. It was the cutscene where Kratos hurls a gigantic column if anyone remembers.
I would like to eventually replay and beat that one game for some childhood redemption.
I started playing the new god of war 2018 at one point, but couldn't really get into it at the time. There was(is) an oversaturation of viking focused content at the time and I was kind of burnt out on it by that point.
I hear the new games are really good though, so I'd also like to give them an honest chance at some point.
It was the cutscene where Kratos hurls a gigantic column if anyone remembers.
I think Kratos does this in just about every game. I was playing Ragnarok 5 minutes ago and he was hurling pillars at enemies left, right and center :D.
As for 2018: it’s a game with a big focus on combat, exploration and character driven storytelling. I can understand feeling burnt out on the viking aesthetic, but the game feels way more fantastical than historical to me.
Ha, fair enough. I'm fairly sure it was the first game. I just looked up a video, I think it actually may have been the part where Aries throws a pillar at Kratos which impales him in the chest.
Again, a Let’s discuss post guided by what I am currently playing: God of War Ragnarok.
Let me start of by saying that I am a big fan of this series. I came late to the party, playing the original 2 games on my overclocked PS vita as part of the God of War Collection. I really liked the first, loved the second and actually absolutely adored the third game on my PS4 pro. Something about God of War 3 just going all the way on this mad destructive rampage really left me in awe. It has multiple incredible set pieces and Kratos truly becomes a vengeful monster in this game. The different weapons all felt amazing, it looked unreal at 60fps on PS4 pro and just was an all round epic experience.
I also played both psp games, which I thought were very impressive for the device, though a slight step down in all areas compared to the main trilogy. Still worthy entries though!
I did not play God of War Ascension yet, as this is the only one stuck on PS3.
I played God of War (2018) a few years later (a year or two ago), and while I did like it, I wasn’t as in love with it as many other people. I felt the combat was often sluggish and the storytelling slow and meandering at times. The design of the different areas was a bit hit and miss for me. There were moments of absolute brilliance (the opening scene, Kratos carrying his unconscious son to Freya, the ending and its impact on their relationship with Freya), but felt a bit too stretched out at times. Still, with respects to presentation, graphics, acting performances and music this was an all time classic.
I now started God of War Ragnarok, and I must say I am really liking it so far. The stakes seem higher, the characters are all interesting and even the combat feels better to me (I started on the hardest difficulty, just to see how long I would be able to hold out, but it actually makes me use the different systems more precisely). I am very hopeful for this one!
Fun to read your detailed thoughts on the series as whole. Literally the only GOW game I have played is the 2018 reboot, and honestly I found it to be really cool and fun! The story ended up being a bit thin by the end, but I thought that it was really engaging and fun the first time through, as you are experiencing it. There were just enough twists and turns that I felt like i never knew exactly what was going to happen next. Even though I never played the OT, the moment where
spoilerKratos goes home and takes the Blades of Chaos out of storage
was HYYYYYPE!!!
As a Dark Souls fan, I also found the slower pace of the combat to be pretty engaging. I played through all of the extra combat trials (idr what they are called) and beat all the Valkyries, so clearly I was enjoying myself. I liked all of the build options they give you with the loot and abilities. I remember beating my head against a few of the trials before realizing that a build overhaul made the trial trivial. Making builds is one of my favorite experiences in games, so I really appreciated this.
I don’t remember my exact feelings about the combat, but I remember my one major criticism was how slow Kratos turns around. They give you that input to do a fast 180, but when you are in a heated fight and you are getting surrounded by enemies, you can forget to tap it with all the other inputs you have to remember. The end result is it can feel like Kratos is resisting you as you try to spin around to hit some enemies behind you.
I had exactly this issue at times! Sometimes it felt like Kratos just wasn’t fast enough to react to my inputs, almost felt a bit over animated or something. I’ve dabbled in souls games (only finished Demon’s Souls though), but there the movement and reaction always felt instant and fair.
I only ever played GTA2 during the 2D era. I remember loving it then though. Maybe I ought to emulate the classics on my Steam Deck.
Of course I was obsessed with 3 when it came out. And Vice City and San Andreas were master pieces. I never played the PSP/DS games (those might also be good Steam Deck games for the future.)
I did beat 4 and its stand alone expansions. They were all pretty great, I even kind of liked the driving when everyone else was hating on it.
I have had GTA5 sitting in my Steam Library for a very long time with effectively 0 hours played. I’ll get around to eventually. It looks like I’ll enjoy it, though I hear its single player isn’t as good as 4’s.
That’s the 8 man (not sure about how many, but I think it was less than 10) helper team in the US which got laid off. They were only contracted and this is actually normal in the industry. Those articles are sensational. The main team in China is unaffected by this.
Pokemon emerald is my favorite. I just recently realized emerald and leaf green somehow disappeared from my collection and had to repurchase them. That was not cheap…
I recently did the opposite, I sold my Emerald and Blue for a decent price, which helped fund my second hand new 3DS. I don’t really care for the cartridges as long as I can play the games, and I feel no guilt for playing roms for games that are no longer being produced :).
I do like seeing large collections of other people, but I don’t have the same satisfaction from that compared to what it would cost. (I say quite hypocritically, as I have a larger than rational LEGO collection including tonnes of Bionicle sets that I will never let go for any price)
Haha! Hope you got at least 100 usd for the emerald.
It’s odd what we find materially important. It was such a part of my childhood I just had to have it. How stupid we were to give up each console for the next one without thinking we might want to go back one day.
If you ever want Emerald with some quality of life improvements (e.g. HMs not being necessary to actually teach; you can use them in the overworld as long as anyone in your party can learn whichever move), I’d highly suggest the Emerald Seaglass ROM hack.
I’m mainly bringing it up because the art is absolutely gorgeous. So if you ever want to dive into Emerald again, give it a shot.
You can play it on a variety of GBA emulators, so it’s pretty simple to get running. A few good Android ones, I believe there’s one called Delta on iOS, and there are several for most desktop OSes (included Linux).
Oooh, this sounds neat! I’m not who you were replying to, but I wanted to thank you for mentioning the Emerald Sea glass ROM hack! I hadn’t yet heard of it and I’m looking forward to checking it out.
Well, this has been a blast from the past. Haven’t set up all the drivers, or an internet connection, but with the turbo button it’s been the fastest Win98 install I’ve ever done 😆
lol yeah I use the Turbo button on RetroArch often. In example on boot. Love the turbo button. :D Its still Windows, so you have to figure out the drivers stuff. I researched a lot and recommend the drivers I mentioned in first paragraph (in Edit). And I never setup internet connection. I really don’t want Windows 98 to connect to internet.
alt: regular show meme, bird and baby ducks are on a party line voice call. bird says “i can’t figure it out, i think maybe everyone is scared of the belt”
I’ve been trying to work my way through them. I’ve currently finished 0, 1, and 2. I played 0 twice, though, and will likely end up playing it again, lol.
I’ve been finding it difficult to get through longer games recently. Mainly because I only play them on the weekends. They keep releasing one every year or so which is also crazy. It feels like they are just pumping them out now, so I’ll likely take another 3-5 years before I get through them all.
I really enjoyed how zero let’s you explore. It feels like they took their time to model each area as close to real life as possible. I don’t know how true that is, but from the photos I’ve seen, it seems that way. I really liked shenmue 1 and 2, and these games feel like the closest thing I’ll ever get to that experience again.
They get to reuse so many of their existing assets for each release, I think that really helps them streamline their development cycle. Like, they’re gonna be reusing the Hawaii setting from Infinite Wealth for Pirate Yakuza, which will be out in a few weeks, pretty much exactly one year after Infinite Wealth.
I’m OK with this approach. Not every game needs to take 8 years and 100 million dollars to make.
Yea totally! I actually really like when developers can do that. I think when artificial (or genuine) limitations are placed on art, projects or whatever, it can make them turn out to be better than if you had full freedom.
There’s a fine line between creativity and laziness that shouldn’t be crossed. But when it’s done really well I think it’s super cool
While I had first heard of the series decades ago, I wasn’t really interested enough to actually pick it up for the longest time, even though I actually like limited open world games that put more detail into smaller locations. A few months ago, I bought Yakuza 0 on sale and recently tried it out on the Steam Deck. I’ve played a couple of hours at this point, so these are more first impressions than an actual review.
It’s a bit of a trip, both good and bad.
Starting with the technical side of things, the best way to describe it would be that it’s highly inconsistent. It runs well on the Deck, even connected to a 1080p external display, but that’s to be expected of a PS3/PS4 cross-gen title. It still feels like a PS2 game with a thick coat of paint though, especially the clunky movement and combat animations. Characters look incredibly well-modeled and textured, equal parts stylized and realistic - but the moment they are starting to move, the illusion falls apart. At least early on, the open world is a series of corridors in a district of Tokyo, with some locations connected via taxi. There are many, but poorly animated pedestrians. It can look impressive at night, with its countless authentic neon signs, whereas the daytime segments are more dated. I was expecting it to feel more believable and less like a set filled with poorly directed background extras that bump into things and each other, but perhaps my expectations were too high.
What’s truly bizarre and off-putting though is how this game switches between several different types of cutscenes, ranging from completely fleshed out and animated (those look great) over less well-animated (but serviceable), to nearly completely static (but still voiced)= cutscenes with barely any movement. There are also segments that aren’t voiced at all. In some cases, cutscenes appear to randomly switch between two or even all three of these levels of quality right in the middle of the scene. Maybe it’s some holdover from the series early days, but to me it feels jarring and unfinished, as if the developers ran out of money and/or time and had to push out the bare minimum product that almost like a cheaply made Japanese visual novel at the worst moments. Not what I was expecting of a Sega game.
Voice acting, which is completely in Japanese, does sound excellent, the speakers clearly being masters of their art, but the script - if the English translation is accurate, which it seems to be - about a young, idealistic Yakuza that gets cast into a web of conspiracies, with it’s long and overdramatic conversations, the insane amount of pathos, even a cheesy black and white retrospective (I’m sure there will be many more of those) is a mess, taking away from the generally interesting intrigue of the overarching plot with meandering conversations that would have benefited from an editor cutting them to a small fraction of their original length (which would have also permitted those to be actually fully animated with the same budget). I have seen a few clips of this game and others that make it seems like the series is able to make fun of itself (the new pirate spin-off makes this more than obvious), but at least early on, there’s not much of that in Yakuza 0 and to me it feels like it takes itself way too seriously.
The first time I played this game, I made a mistake and didn’t save the game manually at the telephone booths. Yes, I know they are marked with an ‘S’ icon on the minimap, but since I visited a booth during a cutscene, I thought the game had saved there automatically. When I discovered that about 1.5 hours of progress had been wiped, I was more than a bit furious. Having no auto-save is anachronistic for a 2015 game to say the least. I was considering giving up on this game entirely at this point, despite some desire to find out where the plot would be going, but I decided to try it again. It was then that it truly became apparent just how much of the game, at least during the introduction, is spent on narration and how little actual gameplay there is. Skipping all of the cutscenes and “cutscenes” the game allowed me to skip, which was annoying, and running through the world to the destinations, those 1.5 hours and change shrunk down to less than ten minutes of actual gameplay, which I haven’t even touched on yet. Even compared to a game by Quantic Dream, who are making perhaps the closest Western equivalents to this series (I’m expecting angry disagreements on this), this is quite a striking ratio. I like narrative games, I enjoy games that take their time exposing their world to the player - but the best way of doing this is through ludonarrative means, not by shoving an amount of cutscenes into the player’s face that clearly exceeds both the talent of the writers and the coffers of the publisher footing the bill.
Anyhow, on to the gameplay. Since it makes up so little of the game, at least so far, and is clearly an afterthought, I won’t spend much time on it. Yakuza 0 is a basic arena beat-em-up with limited open world exploration and mid-fight quick-time events that can catch you completely off-guard (as well as other quick-time minigames, like karaoke). Solid, but unspectacular combo system that permits the player to get by with button mashing, hard to notice button prompts, slightly unfair mini-boss and boss fights, at least to the inexperienced player, terrible lock-on system, AWFUL camera (one more aspect that makes it feel 15 years older than it is), no AI to speak of and animations that are decades out of date, apart from the crunchy and satisfying finishers (unless you’re at at the receiving end). The developers tried to make up for this with a charge up system that adds particle effects to the presentation and expands the available move set, which is probably another series tradition, but feels completely out of place. This isn’t a modern fantasy game, at least not yet, so I don’t know what they were thinking. Not that I was expecting realism - one guy beating up a dozen in a single fight clearly isn’t - but this feels cheap. They could have just made the UI more readable instead of compressing important information against the edge of the screen and compensating for it with effects. I’m sure this becomes less of an issue the more experienced one has with these games, but still, it’s hardly ideal.
Overall, it’s a weird package. I’m equal parts intrigued and annoyed by this game. Yakuza is clearly its very own thing. The formula is successful and well received, both in Japan and internationally, so maybe I’m the odd-one out for not fawning over it. It’s like a dish with two dozen ingredients, some of which taste great, others do not and the overall impression is mainly that of confusion. Despite frequent claims that Yakuza 0 was a great entry point into the series, it feels like watching a random episode of an obscure TV show 25 out of its 50 seasons in that some friend has been pushing me to watch for years, telling me how great it is. It’s like a (barely) playable Japanese telenovela, if that makes any sense, even though the story isn’t actually that hard to follow. The unremarkable gameplay, dated tech, unfinished presentation and meandering narrative kind of sour an intriguing setting that is bursting with character and detail. I want to explore late 1980s bubble-era Tokyo and I want to know how this story ends, but at least the early parts of this game feel like I’m being dragged along at a pace that seems both too fast and too slow at the same time.
If you’ve read this far already (I’m truly sorry for making you suffer through this stream of consciousness - just like the writers of this game, I should probably hire an editor), are familiar with both this game and the rest of the series, would you say that it makes sense for me to continue or should I move on? Has anyone else felt similarly baffled by the whole experience?
What’s truly bizarre and off-putting though is how this game switches between several different types of cutscenes, ranging from completely fleshed out and animated (those look great) over less well-animated (but serviceable), to nearly completely static (but still voiced)= cutscenes with barely any movement.
If I remember correctly, 0 might be the only game to do this. 0 was my first game too and I remember being taken back by this (the static scene talking to some guy in a car smoking a cigarette or something is what sticks out in my memory). It’s possible other games did this too and I just forgot, but I’m not sure.
As for 0 being a good starting point, I do disagree. Having played all of them, I think 0 would land better if it was played after 1, 2, and 3. Kiryu’s and especially Majima’s stories in 0 heavily reference things that occur or are at least revealed in 1 and 3.
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