242 on 19/4/2024 at 15:36
Elden Ring... at last, and it has been great so far. The last few years I've been playing mostly VR games.
WingedKagouti on 19/4/2024 at 15:39
Quote Posted by Malf
If there's any through-line I can see in Bethesda's games post-Morrowind, it's a drive towards simplifying role-playing and relying more on procedural content (not procedural maps, but quests and such via Radiant.)
I was about to comment that Oblivion didn't have procedurally generated content, then I remembered the random Oblivion gates. While the maps themselves weren't procedurally generated, where they activated and the map used was. It would not surprise me to learn that they've been toning down the character skill element in favour of the player skill element as a result of feedback from Morrowind. A common complaint I see from people new to the game is "Why can't I hit enemies? My weapon hit them.", and the reply from experienced players always tells them to use a weapon they're skilled with and keep fatigue high.
henke on 21/4/2024 at 14:54
(https://little-martian.itch.io/beeps-escape) Beep's Escape - A "Dizzy on the ZX Spectrum"-alike. A very simple adventure platformer, where you go around a small base collecting items to aid in your escape. I never played Dizzy, but after playing Beep's Escape I think I see what the big whoop was about. It's a very simple game but oddly captivating. The game is part of the (
https://itch.io/b/2321/palestinian-relief-bundle) Palestinian Relief Bundle on itch.io along with hundreds of other games. Most of the games are repeats from previous itch bundles, but this was one of the cool, obscure finds in this one.
Miasma Chronicles - a post apocalyptic adventure with turn based stealth and combat, by the Mutant Year Zero devs. Honestly it's so similar to MYZ that I wonder if they just couldn't get the license for another game, so they made up their own Generic Brand Post-Apoc IP. I've only played 3 hours yet but... it's alright? Might stick with it.
Robocop: Rogue City - Remember in Oblivion when everyone kept calling you the Hero of Kvetch or whatever and everyone in the whole world kept talking about you? Or how every NPC in LA Noire keeps commenting on The Hero Cop Cole Phelps whenever you walk by? It's annoying how those games just love to make you the center of the universe. Robocop is the inverse of that. I've been stomping around the streets of Detroit and NOT ONE PERSON has spun around and gone "Hey it's Robocop!". Instead they're all just talking between themselves and wrapped up in their own little worlds. What am I, chopped liver? Anyway, good game.
Sulphur on 22/4/2024 at 02:50
I certainly was the Hero of Kvetch for Oblivion, because I might have kvetched about it more than anyone I know. Hell, I still do. Fuck Oblivion.
Robocop seems rad, though.
Malf on 22/4/2024 at 12:58
After bouncing hard off of New Vegas, I tried the original game using the Fallout Fixt mod this weekend.
And controversially, I'd say that I think it's actually aged better than New Vegas.
The sprites and animation remain excellent, and what little voice acting is in the game is all superb and delivered by the classic talking heads which still, to this day, feel a bit special.
When everyone in a game these days gets some VA and their own "talking head" via the camera zooming in to a head & shoulders shot, Fallout stands out and makes you really pay attention when you get a talking head. It's a tacit acknowledgement that this person is important and that you should pay attention to what they're saying. And the exagerrated changes of expression due to disposition serve as an excellent way to measure reactions.
It's an excellent example of "less is more."
I mean, yeah, Fallout has always been a favourite game of mine (ever since finding a minigun in the fridge while playing the excellent demo that came out months before the main game), and represented a sea-change in my expectations for CRPGs. It stands alongside games like Dungeon Master, Marathon, Doom/Quake for how it impacted my gaming habits and changed my idea of what gaming could be.
But it's nice to remember every now and again exactly why it made such an impact, and that a lot of the game has stood the test of time.
Qooper on 22/4/2024 at 13:28
(
https://armorgames.com/play/4369/multitask) Multitask - I got 162.
EDIT: Scratch that, 218. Still lousy though. 15 years ago my highscore was around 260. My strategy is to mainly look at the blue and green games on the right. The bottom left requires almost no attention, you just check every now and then if there's a wall incoming that forces you to toggle your space key input.
Fingernail on 22/4/2024 at 16:43
Quote Posted by Malf
After bouncing
hard off of New Vegas, I tried the original game using the Fallout Fixt mod this weekend.
And controversially, I'd say that I think it's actually aged
better than New Vegas.
The sprites and animation remain excellent, and what little voice acting is in the game is all superb and delivered by the classic talking heads which still, to this day, feel a bit special.
When
everyone in a game these days gets some VA and their own "talking head" via the camera zooming in to a head & shoulders shot, Fallout stands out and makes you
really pay attention when you get a talking head. It's a tacit acknowledgement that this person is important and that you should pay attention to what they're saying. And the exagerrated changes of expression due to disposition serve as an excellent way to measure reactions.
It's an excellent example of "less is more."
I mean, yeah, Fallout has
always been a favourite game of mine (ever since finding a minigun in the fridge while playing the excellent demo that came out months before the main game), and represented a sea-change in my expectations for CRPGs. It stands alongside games like Dungeon Master, Marathon, Doom/Quake for how it impacted my gaming habits and changed my idea of what gaming could be.
But it's nice to remember every now and again exactly
why it made such an impact, and that a lot of the game has stood the test of time.
I've been playing Fallout 1 as well... to begin with I thought wow, maybe I can't be bothered with this, as by modern gaming standards it's very unforgiving - many's the time I walked into a place or struck up a conversation just to lead to a combat I wasn't prepared for. A lot of saving. A lot of reloading. No map markers or dialogue index so if you miss a detail about what you're meant to do or where to go, it's either gone or you have to go back and ask again. But frankly it has sucked me in again, I started levelling up and am enjoying getting new gear. My brain actually engages when a quest is not simply "run over landscape following compass marker and get/use thing/speak to x then run back".
Managed to mess up a few quests with no way back too through dialogue choices, but whatever, I'm not a completionist. It has struck me that actually what I can't be bothered with these days is how little thought many modern games require, they literally tell you what to do at each turn for fear you'll miss any content. Fallout 1 doesn't give a shit. Conversely I think this has the effect of making me profoundly incurious, and I have struggled to complete many recent titles.
The isometric perspective also forces you to engage your imagination more I think, and does give a little more leeway in the writing too when it's not voiced. The early games are often praised for their writing but I think it's really the atmosphere that sells it, the ambient music and everything. Early on a woman near the gates of Shady Sands told me "stimpaks are a common item" and I thought, if a Bethesda character came out with this, everyone would complain about bad writing.
Tomi on 22/4/2024 at 16:49
I tried Ravenlok on Xbox because it's leaving Game Pass soon. It's a good example of how not to do storytelling in games. Most games manage to gently push the player in the right direction even if the player has no idea what they're supposed to be doing, but that's not the case in Ravenlok. Even though the story in it is linear and the "puzzles" are really simple, I often feel a bit lost in Ravenlok. And then I find out that there was a door that just automatically opened for whatever reason when I performed some task, or I had missed some area of the map altogether, because the voxel graphics can be a bit confusing at times.
The voxel graphics are also the best part of the game though. I really like the visual style of Ravenlok, but it's not enough to save this game from mediocrity. The actual gameplay is mostly quite terrible, and the story is so "inspired" by Alice in Wonderland that it feels more like a rip-off.
Malf on 22/4/2024 at 18:21
Quote Posted by Fingernail
Early on a woman near the gates of Shady Sands told me "stimpaks are a common item"
Hah, that and other early interactions like it made me realise that quite often, this kind of thing was the equivalent of a tutorial. Not exactly
exposition dumps, more like
how to play dumps!
Thirith on 22/4/2024 at 18:28
While “Stimpacks are a common item” isn't great writing, I think there's a difference between written text and writing for voice actors. (Just look at those old LucasArts point & click adventures and the voiced versions.) There's an abstraction to the written word that can carry this kind of info better, but when you hear it spoken by an actor it comes across as tremendously clunky.