Sulphur on 5/9/2024 at 11:26
Quote Posted by henke
Yeah the demos are unique things as well that flesh out the story.
I think I'll spin up The Engima Machine as a break from wrapping up Dragon Quest XI (I finished Sunset Overdrive! It was... okay :thumb:). A short horror game sounds welcome compared to the long horror games that pain me to think about in the queue (Dead Space remake, RE4 remake, The Callisto Protocol, SIGNALIS), and if I think about it some more, the real horror is hearing the sound of a misshapen backlog scraping itself along the road behind me, covered in a grey mist of forgetting. Sometimes, I turn back, and there is something so colossal looming over me in the murk I cannot register it fully, my senses accounting only for a dread so complete and whole that if I see the thing in its entirety, my mind would snap entirely in twain and I would run, gibbering and rending at myself, into the cold arms of the night.
Speaking of mists, Silent Hill 2 PC's Enhanced Edition project just posted their final update, and it is now the
definitive way to play the game. This game is 23 years old, but it looks and sounds like a memory of a place you can feel in your bones though you've never actually been to, and a memory of a time that was so long ago that it feels like it's coming back around. What I mean is, for all its age it's still exactly as good as it was the day it released, a game heavy with dread and mystery and regret, and we've never quite had anything like it since.
Thirith on 5/9/2024 at 13:15
Yeah, that's on my list of things to play during the next couple of weeks/months. I've only played Silent Hill 3 so far, and some of the Wii game (Shattered Memories?), though I did install Silent Hill 2 and the Enhanced Edition thanks to your mention a while ago.
Sulphur on 5/9/2024 at 14:17
Did you mean SH1? The Wii game is a remake of SH1 - Shattered Memories, yeah - and I've never played it, though I hear it does some interesting things. SH2's not very easy to pin down, it exists in that intersection of early 00s strangeness and Japanese visions of America filtered through Lynch and Lyne (Eraserhead/a bit of Twin Peaks and Jacob's Ladder, respectively), and it's got the jank from then. While some of that is by design, let's just say the combat is to be tolerated, though these days I look upon its wooden-ness with an affection afforded by time and familiarity; but maybe that's not the right word. A word that describes the halfway point between liking something for its flaws and acknowledging you're slightly irritated by them nonetheless? Whatever it is, the feeling's similar to what I extend to a lot of people back home.
Thirith on 5/9/2024 at 14:54
Grmbl. I meant Silent Hill 3, the first and only Silent Hill game I've played from beginning to end.
I believe Shattered Memories is a Sam Barlow game, and I should finally play one of his games. I've got Her Story and Immortality on my iPad, but I've yet to touch either.
Yakoob on 5/9/2024 at 23:51
I've been playing.... Diablo 1. Yes, that Diablo, yes that one.
I didn't expect to find clunky outdated game in a franchise I never super got into to be so addictive, but it is. Honestly surprised how much it hooked me and how well it all fits together.
It's also surprisingly a lot more... slow and deliberate than I expected. I played Diablo 2 back in the day and remember the hordes upon hordes of enemies and bombastic spells. I am playing as a Mage and this time feel I need to be a lot more careful with managing my health/mana, picking which spell is best for the job, evaluating the loot I get, etc. Maybe I'm still too early, but so far, it's definitely hasn't been an entirely mindless experience.
I think part of me also appreciates the game's simplicity. In an age where every game has 20 different interlocking systems, skill trees upon skill trees and mirage or quest icons, as well as complex photo-realistic environments with such density it's hard to tell interactive items from backgrounds*, it's nice to have a game that only focuses on a few things at a time and just does them really well. I appreciate not having to spend the first hour of gameplay on tutorials.
* ok that kiiind of is an issue here as items do blend in with background. D2 introduced a button to highlight items that was a lifesaver and, as far as I can tell, there isn't one here sadly!
Sulphur on 6/9/2024 at 03:17
Ooh, the D1 mage tends to be... squishy. The usual pick, the warrior, has an easy go of it until you get to the later levels, while the difficulty curve is sorta kinda sorta inverted for the mage from what I recall. You start dishing out more damage soon enough, but tend to remain squishy.
For me, D1 lived and died on its atmosphere, and the simplicity helps amplify its forebodingness tenfold, while in Diablo 2 that was given short shrift in favour of microdistractions from added-on systems. True, there isn't a highlight key in D1, though my brain seems to remember one, a very palpable false memory indeed. I hear there's a mod for it, though (the game, not my brain).
Aja on 6/9/2024 at 14:13
I've wanted to play Diablo 1 ever since I learned that Legendary Tales, a VR game that only I played and cherished, was heavily inspired by it. But Diablo with a gamepad would be insane, right?
demagogue on 6/9/2024 at 20:04
I'm going by old memory, but I'd look for a game mod or mouse/gamepad system app that lets a long button press continually and quickly re-trigger the press, Vampire Survivor style, so you don't have to keep quick-clicking, which was hell for even my teenage hands at the time, never mind now (if I'm correctly remembering that that's what you have to do).
I was really into D2 at the time, even recognizing it as pretty surface-level RPG. Well I immediately got the concept that it's an action RPG, so not really fair to think of it as a deep RPG or pure action game, but something of both. I dig Grim Dawn still today, so I'm sure I'd still be into D2 today. I've go back to a lot of games from that time, from time to time, so I'm sure I'll revisit it someday.
I don't really remember D1 compared my good memories of D2, although for some reason I the vague memory that I thought D2 perfected the formula and you didn't need to go back, but who knows what I was thinking back then.
Twist on 6/9/2024 at 21:51
You'll want to play it with the (
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX) DevilutionX source port. That's the way to play it in 2024, and it features robust gamepad support.
The original Diablo wasn't anywhere near as exhaustingly clicky as its sequel or pretty much any ARPGs of its ilk released in its wake.
I only played it all the way through for the first time a few years ago. I echo Yakoob's comments, especially regarding its simplicity. It's just an atmospheric, straightforward plunge into a dungeon. It just boils down the genre to its essence.
I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, given I'm not actually all that crazy about the genre it spawned.
