This gets trickier with games, because an experienced game designer can, for instance, look at the UI design and graphics programming of a Ubisoft open world slopfest, and say those parts were masterfully done (even if the overall game isn’t so fun). And, even the best of video games have bits of them that weren’t as good.
Man, I wish I understood a single bit of this evaluation of the game after finishing every chapter (sorry - “Ending”). The whole thing felt mostly like a waste of time.
That said, I’m a fan of Spec Ops: The Line, a game that has much the same level of division among its players. Interesting how philosophical games get that reaction.
I was playing Mafia, and it’s a pretty cool game, then suddenly they drop in an F1 racing level where you need to grab first place against a bunch of AIs that never make a mistake.
The worst bit is, in the previous mission you did a lot of work to sabotage the rival’s car ahead of the race. So you shouldn’t even need to drive all that well to win against him, but it just forgets that.
I just never beat the race, so the game came to a halt for me.
I want to appreciate the additions, but…this is also not a good way of doing it.
The difficulty is often the point in Soulslikes, but quite often it feels like these games are hard in 17 different ways, and a player may only have trouble with 1 of them.
Maybe that’s navigation, and finding the next path forward. Maybe that’s working out how to put together a functioning build, and realizing what each weapon does. Maybe it’s that the parry window is just a few frames too tight because they’re playing with an input delay.
That’s why the games I’ve liked have varied accessibility options to let you change just one thing, like getting your souls back on dying, slowing down the game, slightly decreasing damage values - or increasing them on both sides.
Back 4 Blood was the game that served as the idea for this post.
I recently felt like picking up some cheap copies of it to play with a few friends, and decided to launch it once ahead of time just to test it out and see how it ran. I picked “Online” mode out of habit, feeling it would likely search for a bit before handing me 3 bots to play singleplayer. Instead, I actually got a decent group of people together several days in a row.
In B4B’s case, while the developers visibly “abandoned” the game in news headlines, the form it exists in is very playable and generally bug-free, even if its ultra-highest-difficulty “endgame” allegedly lacks some refinement. It got a lot of outlash for not matching the playstyle of Left 4 Dead; having players use a deep system of roguelike-style upgrades. Since the enemies escalate in difficulty, those upgrades are often necessary and can connect with team strategy. It’s now on PS+, and since it’s crossplay, Steam players will get a lot of queue buddies. It’s also playable with just 2 people since the other 2 characters will just be bots.
From how it sounds, especially with the actor’s permission, this seems like my preferred way of using AI-generated voices.
I’d really want to make sure any legal language around actor AI permissions is built to avoid coaxing though - like including it as an “industry standard” clause for infinite use when recording a single audition. Ideally, the voice would always “belong to” the actor it came from, and would only be licensed on specific uses, like “This NPC within this game mode, available for 8 weeks in summer of 2025”. No idea if that’s what they did here.
“Wrong direction” sums up my anger towards everything FromSoft.
Two Soulslike games I really enjoyed though, are Tunic, and Another Crab’s Treasure. Both are generally pretty rewarding of exploration, but also tightly guide you at the beginning. I honestly just don’t feel like FromSoft is very fair when it comes to early exploration. One path utterly destroys you and has no reward at the end.
My first PlayStation was a PS3, and thankfully, around then they were still releasing a number of ported “trilogies”.
Even though mine was not a backwards compatible model, I was also able to play digital versions of the Fatal Frame series, which is sadly now pretty much inaccessible.
I never played Jax, but I saw an analysis of its vector-based facial animation, where there were few enough vertices for animators to directly tweak; and it does feel like a nostalgic way to make cartoony, expressive faces.
If you have a Netflix subscription, the app lets you install many games that aren’t looking for microtransactions within.
Most of the Ace Attorney games are on smartphones.
I’ve also been having a lot of fun with Zenless Zone Zero. F2P, combat is based around swapping between a team of three, and making use of parry / dodge frame effects.
It was only recently I saw that Blue Prince did not make a PS4 release, which surprised me - quite a lot of games even in the past year have still put that out when there’s nothing in them that’s highly demanding. Usually, it just means it hovers around 25-30fps.
What most people get irked about is loss of ownership, which can be a separate topic with careful management. For instance, if you buy an ItchIO game, there’s no DRM and you can copy it anywhere - I imagine many would be fine with digital downloads if everywhere used that system, but on the corporate side they’d likely be grumbling about piracy.