I finished Splatoon 3’s single player adventure and likely taking a break from it for a while. I found it far better than Splatoon 2 which I still haven’t finished. Haven’t tried the DLC yet.
12 but only if it'll lead into how Mega Man Classic evolved into Mega Man X.
As much as I loved the X series, it had really ran itself into the ground. It was supposed to have stopped at X4 or X5 but it kept going and the results were bad.
I didn’t play any BF6 this weekend because Arc Raiders sucked me in. My first extraction shooter too, but nice to see that it isn’t crazy sweaty (at least in the first map). I’ve run into people left and right who just mind their own business, or I like to jump in and help others if I come across them.
Yeah the main thing I’ve noticed is solo queues tend to be way chiller. People are mostly just minding their own business. Group queue however is, for the most part, shoot on sight. Which at least feels a little less bad since you have people with you
I remember a lot of love for the Guild Wars franchise and for the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMOs.
But as a business model, they’re dinosaurs in every sense of the term. Very expensive to produce and maintain. You really need a critical mass of players to cover the costs. They can’t compete on graphics/gameplay relative to your Looter-Shooters or JRPGs. And once the title launches, you’ve got this vanguard of power-users/whales who demand all your attention while the bulk of your player base burns out before they even get to the endgame. So unlike a seasonal Fortnite or Minecraft, you risk a rapid fall-off in participation unless you can satisfy both the high and low ends of the market.
When there’s one or two big MMOs, they can build these enormous audiences and clean up. When there’s a million of them, they can’t kept people engaged long enough to cover their operating costs.
Been chipping away with Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (the 2023 remake).
For those not in the know, it’s Holmes vs Cthulhu puzzle/adventure game.
I played the original and the remaster ages ago, tried the remaster few weeks back and… apparently it’s the kind of jank I just don’t want to deal with in current day.
A week or two forwarnd and the remake popped up on my promotional emails and instantly picked it up. Gotta say, it feels good to me. Modernized controls, a lot more modern visuals, content has been changed quite a bit, and a DISTINCT LACK OF CREEPY WATSON - HOW DARE THEY!!! (/s)
Among the modern comfort features it seems the game is fairly easy, it allows the player clumsily dummy through the puzzles - though missing some points while doing so (points unlock essentially just clothes/glasses/hats/beards for Holmes and Watson - non-critical but neat stuff). Essentially you can just bruteforce solutions because wrong options get removed from the pool of options when used, until only correct options remain. I guess the higher difficulty levels would fix this, but… eh, sometimes I’m dense. Occasionally you can come to a solution too quickly, which then closes doors to some side-puzzles, eg.
spoilerin New Orleans, I somehow entirely skipped a step due to obtuse ui, later figured out that “the animal who ate the fingers is a raccoon”, but the story had already progressed further, can’t track the darn animal, even if I can visually see the damn nest, but can’t obtain the item anymore. argh.
But I guess I just dummied my way through. OH WELL, not like I’m aiming for 100% completion.
tech-babble about tech:
spoilerI’m playing it on linux and the game runs beautifully. It is a UE4 game, but haven’t seen a single stutter, runs all settings cranked at stable 120 fps, could probably run higher but I don’t see the point for doing so. The native 100% resolution + AA leaves horrid jaggies, but DLSS Quality (+ latest .dll with enforced transformer -model & sharpness) looks better to me. Kinda wish games offered resolution scale settings beyond 100% and/or dlaa (but the game probably pre-dates dlaa?). LOD could allow a bit more distance for the pop-in, some smaller objects switch to low-poly absurdly close (like 2 meters?), in general the lod-pop-in is fairly noticeable on trees and bigger structures. Let me know if there’s some ini-tweak/mod for this, thanks. arch, heroic-launcher, proton-ge, 5800x3d, rtx3090, kde/wayland. 1440p 120Hz.
Overall, it’s been a nice ride, with maybe some nostalgia-goggles. The vibes & visuals the game have are cool & spoopy. Voice acting in general is (imo) fine, though I must admit I do feel like I miss the original voice acting. Puzzless are idiot-passable, as proven by yours truly.
I played this one purely for Desmond’s story. I found everything about Connor’s story utterly tedious and the setting meant that the buildings were awful for traversal.
This is the game that taught me the hard way to never preorder. And yes! The Desmond stuff was like 70% of my excitement for this game after playing Revelations and boy did they fumble that story…
Fair enough, especially the traversal. I can see how it’d be bad for the traversal with how spaced apart everything is. Some of them are way too far apart
My STALKER: Anomaly playthrough is progressing at the typically languid pace. As soon as I find a scoped shotgun for Hip’s quest I can start thinking about migrating my base of operations a bit north. For a Loner run this would be prime time to setup in Rostok, but Mercenaries aren’t on friendly terms with Duty so that’s out. I’ll have to make it to Dead City probably and that will be quite a trek. I probably have to wait until I find and repair a better suit. And also hope my companions don’t die on me as I need them to haul over all my collected shit in my stash.
I’ve also been playing Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yes it’s a gacha game (don’t buy any currency to gamble) and yes the character designs are unfortunately a bit too gooneriffic, and yes the story is pretty bad and the translation is pure Google Translate level machine-translated slop. But you know what? The actual gameplay of the roguelike deckbuilder portion is actually very fun. Tons of customisation with an incredibly mutable deckbuilder that has tons of variations for every single card. Even the balance is surprisingly good, with such endless possibilities in combos and specific versions of specific cards that you can make pretty much any character shine with enough work on finding just the right decks and setups. Don’t know if it will stick, and I’ll keep an eye on balance going forward to see if they start making it more pay-to-win, but for now I’m having a surprisingly good time with it.
It’s too bad there are no private servers like Turtle, Ascension, or Epoch. It would really suck to be able to play an enhanced version of classic wow for free.
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