qolelis on 16/10/2022 at 20:26

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I agree about Scorn. I'm seven hours in and liking it so far. When done, I might update my opinion, but, for now, I'm glad I decided to play it.

Also, the internet hate machine works in mysterious ways.

henke on 17/10/2022 at 05:15

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I think the backlash is that people expected a shooter. I certainly thought it was a shooter! But then again I don't think I've ever even seen a trailer, nor do I dig what little I've seen of its fleshy hell. I did not enjoy the fleshy hell of Prey (the first one) and this reminds me of that. I don't wanna go to FLESHY HELL! But I will. Everyone's talking about this and it's free on gamepass and apparently just 5 hours long so ok I guess I'll check it out.

PigLick on 17/10/2022 at 14:22

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there is enough FLESHY HELL with the adult games I see on steam new releases. No, I dont use filters.

Sulphur on 21/10/2022 at 05:11

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So it's kinda like life, huh. I know I wake up sometimes in strange places wielding a phallus as a symbol for a gun and there's wet pulsating knots of..

Anyway, a friend of mine who saw me through a difficult period of life (better but not recovered yet! thanks for asking!) dropped his PS5 off and told me to go ham on some games. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play games all that much as before unless I actively move around some hours in the day and displace the rest of the usual schedule, like some overly disapproving, stiffly comported and thin-haired fucking time butler, but I do this sometimes. With some complaining.

So I played the new Ratchet & Clank, which is: visually wonderful (I think), a very close approximation to a real-time Pixar movie, which as always is a sort of moving target so is always a slightly unnecessary comparison, but at least in this instance, a flattering one. Apart from that: it's still fucking Ratchet & Clank. You've played it before, I've played it before, and I've played it at least five times before by now. Goofy new weapons, same old schtick. Story's pretty okay, I wasn't very invested at any point, but it's all very competently made and the overall package is incredibly slick.

And then I moved on to Astro's Playroom: it's like a Nintendo game from the Wii era, but by Sony. It is incredibly twee and bathed in warm, sticky nostalgia, but also a pretty nice game with some heartfelt callbacks to that time in your childhood when you poured all your hopes and dreams into the concept of consumer entertainment driven by capitalism, finialled by the moment your stupid little child self had dopamine coursing through your body from the act of pressing a button on a grey, or sometimes black, electronic box that your parent plugged in to a wall socket.

Also it uses the DS5's controller's haptics really well. Neat.

Horizon: Forbidden West: or Horizon: Post-post Apocalypse Native American Appropriation Sim: Ginger Melee Hero Dino Hunter: Redux, or Horizon: Here Is More Horizon: that's pretty much it. Yeah. No? Okay.

It pretty much picks up directly from Zero Dawn by having Aloy scarper off during a celebratory party and leave her friends incensed for a few months at ghosting them. Clearly, Aloy is just a millennial out of time, which is why I like her so much. Except this time she's written as a bit more of a jerk than last time, except for when she randomly cares to save entire villages filled with people she knows nothing about. Actually, I can relate to that: the less I know about someone, the more I'm likely to help them, because blank slates are harder to judge than someone you know intimately. Anyway! The story has more peril as a leftover of dealing with Hades from last time, Sylens is back, he's still that beautiful condescending bastard we all know and love from last time, and there's some tribal hijinx going on at the same time that interferes with you trying to save the goddamned world again, because it must.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. The game has a problem of quantity, in that there's just too much stuff. Every conversation provides you with reams of context by diving into the the sub-topics on the conversation wheel, if you want. Every side quest has a semi-legitimate reason attached to it. Every plant you pick feeds back either into the crafting or cooking or dyeing economy. Every weapon and outfit you get has multiple upgrade tiers along with the coil upgrades from last time. Every time you level up there's six different skill trees to poke around in. Within those skill trees there's different special abilities and valour surges to unlock. The rest of the optional activities are an avalanche of things to do from collectibles, to chained side quests, to races, to melee gauntlets, to a full-fledged board game, to cauldrons and tallnecks and everything else from last time. It is exhausting, and probably what the much decried Ubisoft Map Game looks like in its final form.

Now you might be thinking - 'That's good, right? They're giving you lots of stuff to do, and reasons to do it.' And yes, there's usually a whole lot more motivation provided for each and every one of these things than in most Ubisoft games you can name. Except that I cannot be fucked to care about any of this. The sheen of novelty from HZD's world is gone for this sequel; we know what happened and why it happened, so the allure of mystery has been shaken from its carcass. The designers decided that the best way to deal with this is to double down on needless exposition as well as give you a raft of postapo tribal society issues to work through, which were always least interesting part of HZD. Not because the topic itself is comparatively boring to Zero Dawn's mystery, but because you need characters to carry these topics, and most of them in Horizon are uniformly just cardboard cutouts serving as vessels for exposition and objective markers. And this isn't unique to Horizon, it's a problem in just about all RPGs (and yeah, Horizon is essentially an action RPG at this point), but it's exacerbated by just how much of this bland paste you can trudge through - and if you're an obsessive content scrubber like me, you'll do it even if you don't enjoy it.

The bright spot, though, as always, is it looks absolutely stunning. At least as far as I can tell, given my vision issues. If it doesn't look all that great, uh, tell me, I guess? The PS5 version of this runs at 60 FPS, which is always welcome, and while the size of the map seems intimidating from the outset, every place has been a joy to ride through, from the fog drifting down hillsides in the distance at sunset, to the sight of a large settlement built around the bones of a solar farm, espied from atop a cliff edge. There's even small details, like a lovely coat of moss on structures that are in the wetter areas of the map.

And the combat is fairly enjoyable, as well. Playing it on Hard, a lot of encounters feel meaty and challenging, and need some amount of strategy - more than R1/R1/R2, at least. You'll want to use those traps, and bombs, and arrow types to target weaknesses more this time. It's fun to execute a strategy that ends with robots blowing apart into chunks while Aloy walks out of it almost unscathed. It's really good fun.

Anyway, yes, that overview was intended to be as long and as messy and as unnecessary as the game itself, as a sort of reflexive comment (why yes, of course I'm lying, that's just a blurch of opinion up there). Overall, H: P-p ANAAS: GMHDH: R is a mixed bag, then. I like the game, but from a distance. It's much easier to fall in love with when it's able to rein in its excess, which is about 5% of the time. Is that worth the effort? Well, is anyone anything? I guess we'll find out.

Tomi on 21/10/2022 at 11:21

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Maybe it took him a month to type all that.