Coelacanth

Coelacanth, 5 hours ago

I know it was very original and different back in the day, but is it really one of the “best game ever”?

Coelacanth, 1 hour ago

The writing, setting and concept were charming and the art direction is good which means despite being polygonally challenged I don’t mind the way it looks. Great soundtrack too. That being said I tried playing it earlier this year for the first time and it just struck me as one of those games that have aged like fine milk mechanically. It really really wants you to be a stealthy spy sneaking around and being non-lethal yet the stealth gameplay felt terrible, and going guns blazing wasn’t particularly fun either as gunplay in these old games is hard for me to enjoy having gotten used to modern FPSes. And it doesn’t help that the guns blazing approach forces you to listen to a constant soundtrack of blaring alarms, which frankly was hard for me to deal with.

I couldn’t make myself finish it despite really wanting to be able to say I’ve played it, but maybe I’ll give it another go some day. At least I don’t think it’s all that long.

Coelacanth, 40 minutes ago

For me in general I think FPS games have aged the worst. There is such a big part of the pleasure that comes from animations, gunplay, recoil implementation, enemy AI, ragdolls, hit effects… I have a much easier time playing something like Fallout 1&2 - which are even older but have mechanics that are more timeless.

But yeah it was definitely a time in gaming where technological advancements felt like they were happening at an exponentially increasing pace. Comparing games from 2000 with just a few years later is like night and day. Splinter Cell came out only two years after NOLF and that’s a stealth game that’s aged spectacularly. And even Monolith’s own F.E.A.R. came out in 2005 and feels like one of the first truly modern shooters - one that still really holds up well.

Coelacanth, 9 hours ago

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.

Coelacanth, 8 hours ago

Does the switch have Ninja Gaiden Black? 04 is good and all but Black is even better.

Coelacanth, 7 hours ago

Ah. I guess of the Sigmas it’s the least offensive version. It’s a shame still though as NGB is the perfect version. But yeah I momentarily forgot about it being an Xbox exclusive.

Great game though!

Coelacanth, 2 days ago

I want to finish it some day but I also kind of get sick of it quickly whenever I try to play it for extended periods and actually do main story missions.

Fucking around in the open world and fishing and hunting and all that is great though.

Coelacanth, 4 days ago

Thank fuck, absolutely bizarre it was granted in the first place.

Coelacanth, 6 days ago

Even better, Remedy themselves are! Rockstar are publishing it though as they own the rights to the IP. I’m super curious about how they’ll turn out, especially with James McCaffrey’s passing.

Coelacanth, 6 days ago

Remedy made some GTA slop?

Coelacanth, 16 days ago

Putting my final touches into my STALKER: Anomaly modlist and creating the last couple of compatibility patches. I think I’ll end up at 400 mods which is a nice round number. Hope I’ll get to start my playthrough this weekend.

Will also try to get through another chapter of Alan Wake 2, I was on a replay of it when I got derailed but I do want to finish it and finally start the DLCs.

Coelacanth, 17 days ago

Had this on my watch list for a long time and every new video it keeps looking better. I’m still of two minds about the black-and-white - I get the idea and it works for the theme but I can’t decide if it’s worth it or if I miss the detail color would add. But at the same time maybe it would make it too bright and cheerful for the setting and story?

Still looks super cool and I’m looking forward to playing it.

Coelacanth, 18 days ago

This year in particular has been absolutely insane. I’ve played more releases the same year they launched this year than any in recent memory and still feel like I’ve missed out.

Coelacanth, 18 days ago

Very short and sweet article. If anyone wants to read more there is a longer elaboration by the same author here: “I Told Him I Loved Him, Because I Do”. Worth a read.

Coelacanth, 19 days ago

I haven’t watched it myself yet but I’ve heard a lot of good things about Mapocolops playthrough of it and I’ve watched plenty enough of his other Let’s Plays to vouch for him in general.

Coelacanth, 18 days ago

Mapocolops is one of the best Let’s Players out there. Always engages with the story and tries to pay attention, likes reading everything and getting immersed, very genuine while still managing to be very entertaining in an authentic way instead of contrived and faked. Also regularly plays retro games, which is very refreshing and sets him apart a bit.

Coelacanth, 18 days ago

Great review, as always I love your content! You mentioned a higher price point but I don’t think you mentioned the actual price anywhere in the review. Or did I miss it? I guess it’s just a quick search away.

Coelacanth, 20 days ago

I’m glad it’s good. Probably going to try to hold off until a sale because I’ve got my backlog full already but man, I’m tempted. Reviews sound great and a part of me wants to honour Itagaki by immediately getting in over my head in NG4 on Master Ninja.

Coelacanth, 21 days ago

I think I might have relapsed. Send help. Everything was going so well, I was playing through the Final Draft of Alan Wake 2 and having the time of my life, and then I clicked on a video YouTube recommended in my feed that looked interesting and the familiar old craving kicked in. Suddenly a week had passed by and I was deep in the rabbit hole again.

So this week I’ve mostly been modding STALKER: Anomaly. There’s been so many new mods and modpacks and even engine optimization released since I played it last and I’m having a blast getting reacquainted, this time basing my modlist on the H.A.C.R. pack which seems to be a flexible and solid base. I’ve already added about 30 mods to it.

I also have to give special mention to the mod and video that kicked it all off - TALKER. It transcribes your voice talking into the mic, and uses AI to give responses from characters in game and it’s actually just so much fun to use, especially for someone like me who loves the role-play and emergent narratives and storytelling of Anomaly. Right now I haven’t even started a full playthrough yet as I’m still tweaking parameters for the AI to fine tune the prompts given to each faction as well as adding to the list of unique personalities.

If you’re an Anomaly player, I definitely recommend checking out TALKER, even though setting it up is a little annoying.

Coelacanth, 22 days ago

The upshot is that since nobody knows whether they own it or not there is nobody bothering to actively enforce copyright, so you can just download the games for free if you want on NOLFrevival.

Coelacanth, 22 days ago

Both NOLF 1&2 and Contract JACK are available on the website above, patched and fixed to work on modern machines.

YMMV but when I tried NOLF 1 for the first time earlier this year I sadly found the gameplay so poorly aged I wasn’t having enough fun to make myself finish it - despite the setting, theme and writing being quite fun.

I might give it another shot at some point though, it was a critic’s darling back in the day and I’d like to be able to say I have played it.

Coelacanth, 25 days ago

Damn I didn’t see this coming, hit unexpectedly hard. I just played through all the Ninja Gaiden games just recently as well as his Samurai Jack game and was so pumped for both his next project as well as NG4. He was a legendary character and whatever you think of him he was a colourful figure on the scene and will be missed for that if nothing else.

Coelacanth, 27 days ago

I believe the final frontier for Linux gaming - apart from some niche cases - is multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat. They are literally impossible to play on Linux, so if you’re into one of those then don’t bother.

The other edge case is modding. A lot of mods work just fine on Linux, but some just don’t and some - like those relying on Mod Managers and the like - might require more fiddling and specific tinkering. If you do a lot of modding it’s probably easier to stick to Windows as you know everything just works.

Otherwise you should be good to try.

Coelacanth, 30 days ago

I agree. That scene on the island with Celes hit me like a ton of bricks the first time.

Coelacanth, 30 days ago

Great pick, she’s up there for me too. I also only played the first one but thought it was an amazing experience.

Coelacanth, 30 days ago

I love Control, I think the gameplay and level design is amazing, the world building is phenomenal and some of the side characters are great. Jesse herself wasn’t really that memorable to me though. I get that she’s supposed to act like a foil for all the craziness that’s happening, but as a result she ended up feeling kind of bland and forgettable. I always thought this was intentional, as the main focus of the game was the world building and lore and the Oldest House. Having a protagonist with a super strong colorful personality would be too much and just end up distracting from that.

Coelacanth, 30 days ago

The games are available for free on NOLF revival if you want to play. Nobody knows who owns the IP so there is nobody enforcing the copyright.

The setting, theme and writing is really fun but the gameplay really hasn’t aged well.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

I love the concept. Not my genre and not my favourite art style, but the idea is really fun.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Viva New Vegas should be a stable base to work from in terms of mods, as already mentioned. Vanilla New Vegas is almost unplayable but with the latest slew of community patches and engine fixes and even engine rewrites plus 4GB patch and all that it should be quite stable.

I recommend trying again, I had a playthrough just two years ago I think with pretty much no stability issues. And New Vegas is an amazing game.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

I’m still hoping for a “Definitive Edition” type update eventually. There are some parts that could definitely do with a retouching or restructure, the final act in particular.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Do it like Remedy does for Alan Wake: Pattinson acts and reads out the lines in (presumably butchered) French, but then have a separate native French actor do the voice and dub over him.

Best of both worlds?

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

I’m far from a parry god myself, so I simply built around it. Stacked HP and Defense on Maelle along with the First Strike Pictos and started every fight with her using Egide, which let her absorb damage for the team. Ran Lune with constant healing through Tsunami. Reasonable investment in HP and Defense on all my characters. The only times I ran into an issue of getting one-shot through the main game was when I deliberately went into a higher level zone - and at that point I felt like I had it coming. The optional superboss is a different story of course, but that’s a whole different issue and also kind of par for the course.

Also this was on Normal mode and not Expert so YMMV.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

I did a ton of side content (basically all of it) so I probably was overpowered then in terms of levels/weapons/Pictos for the main story?

The balance of the game is all over the place, that much I agree on. Especially the final act, which is a mess quite frankly. If you do any side content at all the final boss is a complete joke you probably kill in one shot and miss a bunch of cool attacks and mid-fight cinematics.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

That clip of Jim Cummings talking to a fan and telling them “please remind Larian that I exist” still breaks my heart. I guess Matt Mercer is a cheap PR move or something to boost sales but I wish Jim got to come back to do Minsc.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Also who replaces ::: spoiler spoiler Viconia. Though the whole character assassination of Sarevok and Viconia in itself is a travesty. :::

Studios like Remedy and Sandfall have shown you can have mocap done by an actor other than the voice actor and still end up with a great product. Stuff like this is just one of the many little things that make me feel like Larian had very little regard for the original games, and only used the IP for brand recognition and marketing. Which makes me sad.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

I never really got the feeling of reverence for the originals personally, down to the references made feeling like lip service created by someone browsing a wiki who has never played them in the first place.

Choosing to set the game a 100 years later (so that they wouldn’t have to incorporate much of the original cast or story) but still shoehorning in two fan favourite characters never sat right with me either.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Slogging through Cronos: The New Dawn, probably around the 60% mark now, maybe a bit more? I’m at the Hospital area, which I think is the final main area out of three. I have a lot of things to say about this game, and not too many of them are positive sadly. I’m really on the verge of dropping it and have actually taken a break from it today playing other games.

And it’s a shame because Cronos does have its qualities. It’s beautiful to look at, both visually stunning and with environments displaying immaculate art direction. The atmosphere is on point, and both the alternate-reality Poland with its brutalist nightmare architecture and the sci-fi future tech is fantastically realized - with the caveat that the “Travellers” the protagonist belongs to might be a tad derivative of Bioshock Big Daddies.

Where the game falls flat, sadly is the gameplay. First of all it’s a survival horror with a heavy emphasis on survival and a very weak “horror”. The game is not really particularly scary, even accounting for the occasional cheap jump scare. Instead it’s an absolutely gruelling action slog where the real horror is inventory management and ammunition scarcity. And this would have been fine if the action gameplay was good, but it’s just… boring, stale and uninspired.

The enemies are just the blandest garden variety zombies you can imagine, the touted “merge” mechanic feels cosmetic at best and doesn’t factor in as much as you’d think and without a dodge button a lot of the fights are just running around kiting and waiting for a chance to charge up a shot and repeat. Most enemies are slow enough that it doesn’t even feel particularly thrilling, you’re not really in danger and are just waiting for them to go into an animation you can punish.

On top of that the ammo scarcity is so ridiculous that I often feel compelled to reload my last save if I miss more than two shots in a fight as I don’t want to risk getting soft locked. I know I’m not a god gamer and my aim isn’t the best, but it feels too harsh. And yes, I’m charging every shot to conserve ammo already.

On top of that the body-burning mechanic combined with the restrictions on flamethrower fuel dispensers leads to repeated situations of running back-and-forth between bodies and a dispenser for like 10 minutes straight, which feels like an enormously unfun waste of time and just adds to the endless tedium and frustration the game delivers constantly.

And it’s a shame because the story is actually kinda intriguing. It’s what’s kept me going this far. I do like the world building, the mysterious “Collective” you belong to has me interested still and when the story delves into some more philosophical musings occasionally I am enjoying myself. It could still all fall flat though, as this is a time travel story and those often devolve into timey-wimey messes full of plot holes that fall apart under close inspection. But so far I’m still wanting to see how it ends.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Ooh I remember hearing about that game last year. I was intrigued by the appeal of the premise of like, playing a bit part character in the universe so to speak. The idea of the “real conflict” happening between massively powerful factions and creatures in the background while you scuttle in their shadow felt very interesting.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Yeah I remember that. Definitely will keep tracking this game, sounds cool!

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

At this point I trust Fitgirl repacks more than some official publishers.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Argo Tuulik along with Martin Luiga were players in Robert Kurvitz’s Elysium TTRPG sessions, perhaps less important than Robert in the creative process and world building but still definitely participating enough to be considered co-creators of the setting. Torson and Mcclane were characters created and played by Argo and Martin during the tabletop sessions, for example.

Argo Tuulik was also a writer for Disco Elysium who was hugely important to the game, and wrote several iconic parts of it like the Hardie Boys. His involvement in trusting the people who betrayed Robert is something he personally regrets, and has talked about in his extensive interviews with the 41st Precinct YouTube channel.

EDIT: Argo Tuulik’s interview series below. Be warned it’s like 20 hours of content. Interview part 1Interview part 2Interview part 3

ZA/UM - The Inside Story Part 1ZA/UM - The Inside Story Part 2

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Yeah I agree. I never used Gamepass as I am not the target audience, but the value proposition made sense to me and I understood why some people paid for it.

This new pricing makes no sense at all, wouldn’t you rather just buy the games you want at that point? $360 a year gets you a lot of games, even accounting for a couple of AAA day one purchases every year.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

I’m not sure I understand the camera mechanic but it looks cool! Mannequins moving when you’re not looking reminds me of the weeping angels from Doctor Who.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

For me that was the first ending I got, Rogue’s path followed by the Sun. I felt like absolute shit afterwards personally. I took Johnny’s offer because I was appealed by the idea of redemption, but instead he dragged Rogue down with him one last time. And then in Path Of Glory V had learned nothing, discarded all the character growth and ignored every lesson to instead let Night City consume her like it does everyone else that fails to realize it’s a festering swamp you must leave behind at all costs. That’s why the two endings that have a positive undertone - The Star and Temperance - involve the main character leaving Night City behind.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

That formatting is what Reddit uses and Sync still has the code to process it.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

I’d probably have snapped it up already if I didn’t recently buy GRIME on an all-time low deep sale and it sort of fulfills the same niche.

I had no idea about co-op actually but I don’t have anyone to play with so it probably won’t move the needle for me.

I will get to it eventually though, it looks great.

Coelacanth, 1 month ago

Isthereanydeal.com is such a good resource for knowing if a deal is actually a rare opportunity or it’s a game that comes up for deep sale constantly.